SPOOK TURNS WRITER BUT HIS OLD BOSS, THE CIA, GOES TO COURT, SAYS HIS NEW BOOK WOULD SPILL SOME SECRETS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010040-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 24, 2000
• Sequence Number: 40
• Publication Date: May 6, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

CPYJRGHT
Says His New, Book Would Spill Some Secret
13ut I-It's Old 'Boss, the CIA, Goes to Court,
CPYRGH o y
F /ichael f, Mall From CIA: No Comment
a .Ip .avers leave baseball and write
books about what's wrong with it. Soldiers
Wave the Army and write books about
what's wrong with. that. Victor Marchetti
quirt hiss, job and sent an outline of a book
about.1?iis~ old business to. a New York pub-
. l.i~her..
`Tben; last Tuesday the roof fell in," he
aaid?between. court appearances last week.
'"Marshal Dillon and Chester came to the
door and' presented me with some legal
papei:s.. Being just an ordinary guy with
three kids living in suburbia, I didn't know
where to go for advice. I called my agent
and hollered, 'Help!' "
Mar.chetti's publishing problem Is that
he used to work for the Central Intelli-
gence Agency (CIA). The legal papers
constituted a court order requiring him to
clear anything he writes about intelligence
matters, even fiction, with his old em-
ployer. If the order holds tip in further
1court tests, it could give the Government a
iiew way to plug "leaks" of classified in-
formation. Looked at another way, how-
ever, it could give the Government a pow-
erful new tool for suppressing informed
debate of its military and foreign policies.
ACLU Answers Call
"It's no less important than the Penta-
gon Papers case," says Melvin Wulf, legal
director of the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), which immediately re-
sponded to Marchetti's call for legal
help. "If they establish this precedent,"
Marchetti contends, "it means no Govern-
ment employe who had access to classi-
fied information will be able to criticize
the actions of the Government."
The Government's action grows out of
a manuscript that Marchetti submitted to
esquire magazine and a book outline he
tent to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a publishing
house. A CIA agent obtained copies of
both, and the agency went to court con-
tending the works contained classified in-
formation whose publication would do "ir-
reparable damage" to national security.
To knowingly transmit such Informa-
tion to anyone else, including a publisher,
would seem to leave Marchetti open to
prosecution under laws that prescribe a
i0-year prison sentence for violators. But
the Government made a different case. It
Noted that Marchetti had signed a secrecy
/agreement while with the CIA, promising
to not reveal any classified information
without written permission from the
agency.
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ook . urns ? Writer
The Government said this amounted to
a legal contract. It contended that Mar-
chetti violated the contract by sending his
,writings to a publisher. On this ground it
obtained an injunction requiring him to
clear his writings with the CIA 30 days be-
fore -showing them to anyone else. If Mar-
chetti violates the injunction, he can go to
jail for contempt of court.
The Government's use of this circuitous
route to head off a possible breach of secu-
rity is unprecedented, lawyers say, with
the possible exception of an obscure case
during World War I. But it offers the Gov-
ernment a method to silence Marchetti
without a difficult and time-consuming of
fort to prove that the information in his ar-
ticles was damaging to national security.
If the CIA's case holds, up, it needs t
prove only that he violated an agreement
that he readily admits signing.
The CIA has a policy of taking its
lumps in silence, so no spokesman was
available to defend its position. But others
familiar with the security laws said the
laws paradoxically could require 'the
agency to bring its secrets into open court
in order to protect them, and that a prose-
cution could leave Marchetti free to write
and speak for months on end as courts and
juries made up their minds.
A Matter of Security
"Ex post facto action against unautho-
rized-disclosure is always difficult," says
retired Adm. Rufus L. Taylor, for whom
Marchetti was executive' assistant when
Taylor was deputy director of the CIA.
"You've always got to prove damage to
the national security and sometimes even
intent to damage national security."
To Marchetti and his-ACLU lawyers,
that ' is just the point. They say the
breach-of-contract argument makes it pos-
sible for the Government to silence its
critics without proving that they had en-
dangered national security. They say the
information in Marchetti's manuscripts
did not present such a danger, and that
the secrecy "contract" is legally unen-
forceable because it compels an employe
to sign away his freedom of speech.
"A Government agency can still use
classified information to support its poli-
cies and build its image," Marchetti
argues. "When the military budget comes
up, all this stuff about Russian missile
capabilities comes out to support its poss.
tion. It's leaked and nothing ever happens,
But if somebody took the same informa-
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L. IL V i ,cam }c I v~ k UC i
on to ac Anderson to support the opy
polite position, they'd go to jail."
Marchetti didn't start out to be a cru-
ader, and he still doesn't want to go to
all for the sake of civil liberties. He left
he CIA after 14 years in 1969, at least
artly because of the here-I-am-going-on-
0-and-what-have-I-accomplished blues. He
lid believe the intelligence apparatus
lad become too big, too expensive, and too
rozen in Cold War attitudes, but mostly,
e says, he wanted to be a novelist.
Security vs. Image
He has since published one spy novel,
he Rope Dancer, which he first showed
o the CIA, ("Pretty trashy," says Admiral
aylor.) And he wrote one highly critical
agazine article, which he didn't clear
ith the agency.
"In my opinion, this and other things
Victor Marchetti says are damaging to the'
mage of constituted authority, and it does
o good to do things of this sort," Admiral
aylor says of the article. "Put I person-
Ily perceived no outright security
reach."
Marchetti suspects that the intelligence
gency is more concerned about its image
an any security breach in his new manu-
cripts, :which Admiral Taylor hasn't seen.
The CIA have been the golden boys of
he. Federal Government, the American
rimes Bonds," Marchetti says. "Very few
eople have ever spoken out against them.
'his Is a new experience for them and I
uess they didn't like it:
"Look, I'm very reluctant to use the
1 itials of the agency where I used to
J ork," Marchetti frets, as he tries to de-
cribe his criticisms of the CIA without
iolating? the court order.
Whipping the KGB
But in abstract terms, and trying to
avoid any concrete examples that could
at him in jail, he argues that the agency
as succumbed to the mental inertia that
flirts any bureaucracy when it faces no
tside pressure to change. "It's very
hard for a bureaucracy to reform itself,"
1 says.
Marchetti would like to see an intelli-
g nce system that was smaller, cheaper,
are subject to congressional control, and
I ss influenced by the military. He be-
li ves the CIA should stick to intelligence
g thering and abandon political missions
11 'e those that helped overthrow. govern-
n ents in Iran and Guatemala, and in-
volved the United States in a secret war in
os.
"The CIA can take pride that they
w ipped the (Soviet) KGB's tail in many
places" with cloak-and-dagger operations
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