THE GARY POWERS OF TOURISM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000300370013-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 30, 1998
• Sequence Number: 13
• Content Type: NSPR

BATON ROUGE (La.)
ADVOC TE Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-li~- 001R
Circ.: m. 37,955
S. 58,450
11
Front EditI Other
Page Page Page
C (A 1. {.
Date: ..
? The Gary Powers of Tourism
jzrlitaiziaL:
Russia appears. to have bagged the Gary Powers
of the tourist business. They winged him in the camera
and he told all, denying. only, that he was a spy for the
United States Government. his spying, he said, was
strictly private t enterprise. e, w traveling through
Russia with camera aryl n , pa to gather Material
for a book on Russian preparations for war.
In Cuba, a;-similar, admission would have gotten
this mail shot e Russians :must be given credit for
some restraint. Perhaps, there mined; his nptes and
photographs and decide not aoake him too seriously.
Anyway, they gave him a'~'suended sentence, asked
him to promise not to write his book, and rushed him
to the border.
There are other c ftious'features to tie case. The
tourist was traveling on a $2,000.;;grant from the North-
craft Educational Fund of Philadelphia. An attorney
for the fund refused to name its backers or to give
the address of its headquarters a.
Different readers will draw different conclusions
from that fact. But it can be said that under present
conditions of the cold war, privately financed espionage
operations, whether conducted to gather classified in-
formation or simply to gather material for a book,
promise to contribute little to our over-all counter-intel-
ligence effort. Individuals engaging in such operations
take some of the same risks Mat are taken by fili-
busterers landing on the Cuban shore. They endanger
their own lives, they may complicate the efforts of real
and skilled intelligence agents, and they may, as has
happened instance, supper Russia with new in &t prdpagandmaterial.
The Russians suspect, of course, that the "educa-
tional fund" is just.a blind for the Centr d 4,telligence
Agency and that the "tourist" invplved actually was
a rather obvious and bumbling CIA agent, his yarn
about a book }a rather transparent cover story.
A few, more, such incidents and the tourist-spy
business could get rather sticky.
CPYRGHT
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00001 R000300370013-1