A Stroll Down Memory Lane to 1965 Offers An Inside Look at the CIA's Press Management Strategy During the Early Days of the Vietnam War
A trio of senior agency officials coordinated a media influence op to aimed at "restoring the public’s diminishing faith in the Agency's competence,” which was detailed in an internal CIA memo.
Look at that pretty picture in the newspaper of US warplanes carpet-bombing Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Read this story and you’ll have a better idea about how it got there. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
During the early-1960s, the CIA’s public image plummeted, beginning with the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, which was the first significant agency covert operation that was widely covered in the US media. The fallout led JFK to fire the CIA Director Allen Dulles, who he blamed for the debacle, and things went steadily downhill from there over the next three years, with 1964 being a complete disaster.
That April, to cite one particularly painful experience, the CIA schemed a way to get a pre-publication copy of “The Invisible Government,” which was co-authored by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross, and were aghast by the contents. Not only did the book take a dim view of the agency overall, it disclosed a great deal of embarrassing information about its activities in Southeast Asia and Cuba that had never been reported, which set off alarm bells in the CIA’s senior ranks.
In an attempt to prevent the impending catastrophe, CIA Director John McCone called the authors in to see him at agency headquarters and demanded they cease and desist from publishing the book. When Wise and Rose refused, the agency pressured Random House to kill it and after that failed as well, the CIA mounted a preemptive campaign to discredit it, including dummying up fake reviews it planted in foreign news outlets and attempted to get published in the US, apparently without success.
One of the reviews was sent to Theodore Shackley – who’d directed Operation Mongoose, one of the agency’s early plans to overthrow Fidel Castro, and the "Phoenix Program" in South Vietnam, which ran paramilitary units that killed at least 25,000 suspected Viet Cong sympathizers and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands more, and later became the No. 2 official at the division in charge of implementing the CIA’s covert operations – to get his input. The review opened by stating that the co-authors “admit that Communist subversion and espionage pose a unique threat to the American people and their government” and accept “the necessity under certain circumstances for secret American efforts to prevent Moscow and Peking from gaining control of new territories.” Despite that, it continued:
In this work, they are not directly concerned with the nature and extent o f the Soviet and Chinese subversive apparatus. The real villain makes a very brief appearance on the stage and then vanishes. The authors profess to believe that our own government's secret attempts to meet the Communist challenge constitutes the real threat to our own freedoms and democratic processes that must be exposed in as detailed and dramatic a way as possible. If the Soviets profit from these revelations, as they will, the authors apparently think that such self-inflicted wounds must be endured in their battle against excessive secrecy.
The CIA had been paying, coopting, and cultivating reporters since it was founded in 1947, and routinely violated its charter by doing so. With the agency taking a rare PR beating in the media, though, senior officials resolved to “explore new...methods of restoring the public’s diminishing faith in the Agency's competence,” an internal agency report dated September 17, 1965 stated.
To the best of my knowledge, the only journalist who’s written about the memo is Emma North-Best, who authored a story about it that was jointly published by Muckrock and Glomar Disclosure. I recently discovered it in the course of doing related reporting, and decided to write about it because I found additional information that adds to North-Best’s excellent story.
Outgoing CIA station in Saigon Ted Shackley (far left) in 1972 photo with his replacement, Thomas Polgar (far right), and General Creighton Abrams in the middle. Shackley was the gold standard among CIA book reviewers and excelled at mass murder too. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
Deputy Director for Intelligence Ray Cline, the man at the forefront of the effort to rectify the increasingly intolerable situation, had been cultivating the media for the previous eight years, but the focus of the September 1965 report, which was partly redacted when the agency declassified nearly four decades after it was written, were his enhanced “press relations activities” during the first nine months of that year. “Without self-interest and purely in the interest of the agency, Mr. Cline has been a source of information to certain members of the press,” stated the memo, which was sent to Deputy Director Richard Helms, a former reporter himself for UPI.
The memo left clear that the official who wrote it, who was unnamed but was likely someone in the press office, as well as CIA Director Vice Admiral William Raborn, Jr., who’d succeeded McCone, and Helms, who President Lyndon Johnson appointed to replace him the following year, knew and approved of Cline’s media influence op. Cline, who also left his job at CIA in 1966 and helped establish the rabidly anti-Communist, Taiwan-based World League for Freedom and Democracy, was confident “his methods of operation...benefit the general rapport of the agency” with his list of targets,” according to the memo. “Among newsmen who have had the benefit of Mr. Cline's viewpoints,” it said, were five reporters at the New York Times, four at the Washington Post, including publisher Katherine Graham, and three at the Wall Street Journal.
Ray Cline, fourth from left, in at 1973 meeting of the US Intelligence Board. Cline was Director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department at the time. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
Cline was also busy massaging Walter Lippman, who was generally a reliable government propagandist, who uncharacteristically opposed US intervention in Vietnam, and other targets – 20 prominent media figures in all – at Time, Newsweek, where Graham was also the publisher, the Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Fortune and several other outlets.
At the New York Times, Cline was wooing Cyrus Sulzberger, who’d been covering foreign affairs since he graduated from college in 1939 and was the nephew of longtime publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who’d stepped down four years earlier, and Wallace Carroll, the newspaper’s Washington Bureau Chief. He was also working on reporters Barry Schwartz and Bill Shannon, who’d recently invited him to stop by the Times to meet Editor John Oakes.
Unfortunately, Oakes wasn’t on hand when Cline dropped by due to a death in the family, but the day hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Since he was there anyway, he took the opportunity to express his displeasure with “the manner” the Times had made use of information the CIA provided it with at an earlier press briefing, which “caused the Agency some embarrassment.”
The episode had been “well documented and I assume will not be repeated,” Cline had said. To drill home the point, he’d informed Schwartz and Shannon he would return “on a suitable occasion” and try to establish “a better understanding and cooperation between the Agency and the Times,“ and let them know that if they failed to become better stenographers, it would be “impossible for CIA to release data“ to them “as we had last year.”
In addition to Graham, Cline was buttering up Washington Post reporter Chamers Roberts, who he’d recently met for the first time when he accepted his invitation to have lunch at the newspaper with him and three of his colleagues. Roberts told Cline “he would like to have discussions from time to time on a completely discreet basis without any attribution” to him or the agency, and he’d agreed to see him “as time permitted and the subject matter was not delicate from either a security or a policy point of view.” Cline had nevertheless been annoyed with Roberts because he had been the only member of the quartet of reporters he met with that hadn’t been “extremely cordial.”
Roberts was part of the newspaper’s team that worked on the Pentagon Papers story, which the Post published in 1971 a few days after the Times. When the memo was circulating in the CIA’s upper echelons, Roberts’s work on Vietnam wasn’t as stellar.
Two years later, Noam Chomsky referenced Roberts in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” the famous article he wrote for The New York Review of Books. In the story Chomsky cited, which was published in the Boston Globe in 1965, Roberts wrote “with unconscious irony” that February “hardly seemed to Washington to be a propitious moment” for negotiating with the enemy because President Johnson “had just ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to bring Hanoi to a conference table where the bargaining chips on both sides would be more closely matched,” whereas at that moment Viet Cong leaders believed they were going to win the war.
“The date is important,” Chomsky stated caustically of the February 1965 timeframe Roberts and others in the press picked when writing about the issue, saying:
Had this statement been made six months earlier, one could attribute it to ignorance. But...it appeared after the UN, North Vietnamese, and Soviet initiatives had been front-page news for months. It was already public knowledge that these initiatives had preceded the escalation of February 1965 and, in fact, continued for several weeks after the bombing began. Correspondents in Washington [such as Roberts] tried desperately to find some explanation for the startling deception that had been revealed.
Cline had accomplished more direct success with reporters at other publications, including syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who was his only “regular official contact” in the target group. An “influential journalist and top insider in Washington who worked as a covert operative of the CIA,” as his Wikipedia page succinctly puts it, Alsop was a journalist the CIA normally didn’t have to worry about.
In times past, he’d traveled overseas to cover events at the agency’s request, such as a 1953 trip he’d made to the Philippines, which Carl Bernstein first reported in a groundbreaking 1977 story in Rolling Stone, which revealed that 400 journalists had “secretly carried out assignments” for the agency over the past 25 years. Some of Alsop’s recent reporting on Vietnam had troubled CIA officials, though, and Raburn had specifically requested Cline tend to his needs on the grounds that It “was better for him to write reasonable columns than to have misinformation published."
The tactic had been effective according to Cline, who had spoken to Alsop earlier in the year and it seemed like he was “on the verge of a public attack which might well have included some nasty references to CIA.” That “no longer seems likely,” Cline had reported to the memo’s author, “as long as we continue to maintain a discreet but generally cordial relationship with him."
The columnist’s brother, Stewart Alsop of the Saturday Evening Post, was on Cline’s list as well. He also had an extremely close relationship with the agency. "Stew Alsop was a CIA agent," an anonymous CIA source told Bernstein for his Rolling Stone story.
Unlike his brother, Stewart Alsop hadn’t caused any trouble as of late. In December of 1963, the memo recounted, then-CIA Director McCone had instructed a pair of agency officials to give Alsop a two-hour briefing “on the slow-down rate of the Soviet economy, which was the substance of a report [the CIA chief] had given to the National Security Council, and was similar to the package of information that had been provided more recently to the two New York Times reporters. Alsop had clearly been more proficient in taking dictation than they’d been, as Cline seemed satisfied the two-hours the agency devoted to Alsop was time well spent, but he was apparently keeping an eye on him anyway, just in case he unexpectedly rebelled against his lowly status as a CIA toady.
Juan Bosch, the Dominican Republic’s first democratically-elected president in photo from 1963, two years before he was replaced in a CIA-backed military coup. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.
Cline achieved particularly excellent results with United Features syndicated columnist William White, who he’d “conferred at luncheon” with a few months earlier on May 28 and was one of four reporters the agency the agency official said he spoke to most often, Following their encounter, Cline fulfilled White’s request to get a general briefing at CIA headquarters “on how we go about our business.” Cline had suggested “a little quiet cultivation with White would do the Agency no harm,” and Raburn and Helms agreed “to have a general chat with him from time to time.”
It was almost certainly not a coincidence that Cline dined with White on May 28, two days after he’d written a column that saluted President Johnson for dispatching 22,000 US troops to invade the Dominican Republic a month earlier. LBJ’s timely action – which was ordered to put an end to a popular uprising demanding the return of President Juan Bosch, the first democratically-elected leader in the country’s history, who had been deposed in a CIA-backed military coup two years earlier – “halted a morally dangerous attempt to set up another Castro type of armed Communist, lodgment“ in the Western Hemisphere, to White’s immense relief.
The columnist was particularly pleased by LBJ’s muscular response because he had defied “all the small frightful complaints of the American left-wing and all the petty pacifist carvings from abroad.” That band of ne'er-do-wells had even made the ridiculous suggestion that CIA Director Raburn played a role in orchestrating the US invasion.
All agency leaders had to endure petty gripes from the usual rabble-rousers, but it was “a little odd” in this case because he “had absolutely nothing to do with the decision and did not even know of it until after it had been made.” Raburn had taken charge of the CIA the very day of the US invasion, which made the accusation completely laughable, White wrote.
Needless to say, White’s entire account was completely false. The evidence the Johnson administration presented to justify the invasion was so flimsy that much of the US public and media didn’t fully swallow it. To take one egregious example, LBJ presented a list of suspected Dominican Communists who allegedly were responsible for the chaos in the country, which included people who were dead or had never supported local leftist movements of any type.
Even LBJ “regretted sending US troops into the Dominican Republic...telling aides less than a month later, ‘I don't want to be an intervenor," according to White House tapes from 1965 that were made public by the National Security Archives half a century later. “Johnson's public explanation for sending the Marines into Santo Domingo was to rescue Americans endangered by civil war conditions in the Dominican Republic,” said a statement the Archives released at the time. “But his main motivation, the tapes and transcripts confirm, was to prevent a Communist takeover,” which was based “largely on assertions by the CIA and others in the US government that Cuba's Fidel Castro had been behind” the uprising calling for Bosch’s restoration as the country’s president.
White’s fairy tale version of events was just the sort of “independent” reporting the CIA loved to see – and the agency had almost certainly spoon-fed the content to White if it hadn’t simple handed him a rough draft to work from – to the contrary of the dangerous pro-Communist misinformation Wise and Shannon peddled in “The Invisible Government.” Though the memo didn’t mention the column, it said Cline’s press management duties had reaped rewards across the board, with the possible exception of the Washington Post, and even there it had “been no loss.”
“Mr. Cline's efforts on behalf of better understanding on the part of the Press of CIA and its duties and responsibilities are worthy of praise,” the memo concluded with satisfaction.
"Mr. Cline's efforts on behalf of better understanding on the part of the Press of CIA and its duties and responsibilities are worthy of praise,” the memo concluded with satisfaction
Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know what I mean?...know what I mean? Oh, right, we get it, Ray.