The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

192 THOMAS A. BASS
and other CIA black operations. The Church Committee’s findings,
published in a multivolume report in 1976, revealed that
one third of the CIA’s budget for covert operations was spent on
global propaganda. Some three thousand salaried and contract
CIA employees worked on this enterprise, which at the time
cost two hundred and sixty-five million dollars a year, making
“the CIA propaganda budget as large as the combined budgets
of Reuters, United Press International, and the Associated Press.”
In the 1950s, the CIA ran a formal program for turning
agents into journalists. Spies were “taught to make noises like
reporters,” one official explained, before being placed in a wide
variety of media. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, wrote in
1977 that “more than four hundred American journalists . . .
in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments
for the Central Intelligence Agency.” The New York
Times followed up Bernstein’s article with an investigation of its
own, which doubled the number of journalist-spies to eight
hundred, including Times reporter James Reston and syndicated
columnist Joseph Alsop, whose articles ran in three hundred
newspapers. The Agency also financed the publication of
as many as a thousand books a year.
The media outlets which harbored these covert agentscum-journalists
included most of the major newspapers and
television networks in the United States. Support was provided
by William Paley at CBS (whose news president had a direct
telephone line to the CIA) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger at
the New York Times (who signed a secrecy agreement with the
Agency and provided cover to at least ten CIA officers). Bernstein
wrote that CIA director Allen Dulles “often interceded
with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time
and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his
staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and
credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic
experience.”