CIA DIRECTOR CASEY AND THE PRESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706610003-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 31, 1986
• Content Type: REPORT

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM Agronsky & Company STATION WDVM-TV
Syndicated
DATE May 31, 1986 7:00 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT CIA Director Casey and the Press
MARTIN AGRONKSY: Jack, the CIA Director, Mr. Casey,
continues to pressure the press, and he now says that the media
reaction has been very hysterical, that he really has no
intention of scuttling the freedom of the press.
Now, are you feeling hysterical about Mr. Casey's words
or his deeds?
JAMES J. KILPATRICK: Not I, Martin. But I will say
this: that as a breed, we of the press are the most sensitive,
think-skinned people that ever were. And yes, we're a bunch of
Chicken Littles, and some of my brothers and sisters have been
hysterical.
STROBE TALBOTT: Well, by saying that we're hysterical,
he's accusing us, of course, of overreacting. He's the one
that overreacted, and he overreacted in a way that did have some
ominous implications for the First Amendment. But fortunately,
he's not getting away with it and he's backing down.
CARL ROWAN: Well, I'm suffering now from hysteria, but
a very good memory of a dozen years ago when the CIA was
trampling on the rights of the American people, carrying out
illegal drug tests on unsuspecting people. And I also know that
one of the things these guys like to do is to hide their
inefficiency and their mistakes. And one of the ways to do that
is to keep the pressure on the press.
OFFICES IN WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DFTPC )IT ? ANn (-)TI-IFD PDWriPOi ('TI
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AGRONSKY: Charles?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I don't think this is a case
of the NSA or the CIA trampling on rights. I think it is
national security.
Mr. Casey is not known for his way with words. What he
should have said is that there are many in the press who have a
lot of information on the NSA and who have withheld it because
they put country over circulation, and there's going to be a
temptation now to use the Pelton trial as a way to get this
stuff out.
And he was simply -- I would like to think that he was
saying, "Try to restrain yourselves, and keep the materials
secret if you can."
AGRONSKY: Well, a further discussion of some of these
observations in a minute.
AGRONSKY: Jack, I would join with the rest of our
colleagues here in feeling that Mr....
KILPATRICK: I thought you would.
AGRONSKY: Yes -- that Mr. Casey does pressure the press
wrongly and that his concerns are not at all justified.
Now, you are in a minority. Why?
KILPATRICK: Bah, humbug, and all that.
I've been in this news business 45 years. You've been
in it 50 years. Carl's been in it God knows how long. And so
has Charles. For the past 45 years people in public life have
been trying to get me not to write something. And you just don't
pay any attention to this, Martin, after you've been in the
business long enough. And a mature press would pay no attention
to Bill Casey's statement at all. They will do what they want to
do.
TALBOTT: Wait a minute, Jack.
KILPATRICK: Not chilled.
TALBOTT: How many times in your 45 years has somebody
threatened to put you in jail for publishing something?
KILPATRICK: Oh, that wasn't a threat. Great day in the
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morning. They're not going to pay anybody in jail. Why do you
take this stuff seriously?
ROWAN: Wait a minute, Jack. He asked Justice to
prosecute NBC.
KILPATRICK: Oh, consider it, or something or other.
That's a scare tactic.
ROWAN: Well, let me tell you where we differ. Now, you
say that you would pay no attention to it. I say the reason we
have the freest press in the world is that we always pay
attention to it.
KILPATRICK: Who's chilled?
ROWAN: And every time somebody comes up talking about
an Official Secrets Act, we jump all over them. And we ought to
or we wouldn't be as free as we are today.
KILPATRICK: Every time they say the free press is being
chilled, I go around and I ask my brothers, "Do you feel
chilled?"
"Not me. Nobody feels chilled."
TALBOTT: But, see, that's just the problem. Charles
makes the best defense of Casey that could be made, and that is
that Casey is not threatening to send us to jail. He's simply
trying to get us to exercise some self-restraint.
The effect of this kind of tactic is going to be just
the opposite because he's throwing down the guantlet to the press
and he's in some ways giving the press a bigger incentive to go
ahead and publish...
KILPATRICK: Then we're even more childish than I think
we sometimes are.
KRAUTHAMMER: I don't think that's so. I don't think
this is a challenge. I think he did overstate his case when he
said the press shouldn't speculate. But if what they're
intending to say is the stuff that you already had on the NSA,
which everyone knows is extremely sensitive and which a lot of
the people in the press have withheld, if you have that, don't
try to sneak it in under the guise of explaining certain
references in the Pelton trial.
That seems to be an eminently reasonable request.
KILPATRICK: What's so unreasonable about that? Does
that chill you?
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Thank you, Charles. I mean you said it so much better
ROWAN: Let me make the point, though, the most
egregious damage to U.S. national security in these last few
years were not done by anybody in the press. They were done by a
man who worked for NSA, a man who worked for CIA, guys they
didn't handle properly, guys who probably should not have been
where they were in the first place. And it is a smokescreen to
try to say the press is to blame when it's Casey and Odom and
these guys who are guilty of misfeasance and malfeasance.
KILPATRICK: You can dish it out but you can't take it,
ROWAN: I take it.
KRAUTHAMMER: The press isn't to blame. But the fact
that other people have betrayed their country in the CIA or have
acted loosely with secrets is no excuse for saying it's okay for
journalists to publish secrets which they know are going to harm
the national security.
KILPATRICK: Right on, Charles.
TALBOTT: Journalists who know something is going to
harm the national interest aren't going to publish it.
KRAUTHAMMER: And they haven't. And I think that's
commendable.
AGRONSKY: Well, if it's commendable and they haven't,
what is all the fuss all about?
KILPATRICK: Exactly. Why are we talking about this?
KRAUTHAMMER: Because in the Pelton trial right now
there are all kinds of references to botched operations early in
1980 which apparently people have known about but are now being
very discreet in describing.
TALBOTT: No, that's not it. But what's new about this
and what all the fuss is about is that the Administration, and
particularly the Director of Central Intelligence, are using the
threat of criminal prosecution against the press for the first
time.
ROWAN: Let me just make one point. I have always
argued that there are things the public has a right not to know.
And I know that there are things newsmen will withhold. My
argument is that it's the newsmen who make that final decision,
and not Casey, the head of the CIA.
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KILPATRICK: Casey can't make the final decision.
ROWAN: Well, he's trying to make it by pre-publication
KILPATRICK: And you're scared to death.
TALBOTT: He's trying to get us to use our judgment and
make decisions not to publish things not on the basis of our own
feelings about whether it's in the national interest, but on the
basis of our fears of whether we're going to end up in jail.
AGRONSKY: May I ask us to look at another aspect of Mr.
Casey and the CIA? And I would regard it -- and what I would
urge you to look at, Jack, is I think the utterly miserable kind
of security that they maintain themselves in that organization.
KILPATRICK: Not bad. It's a big organization, Martin.
AGRONSKY: All right. Well, let's take the case of the
gentleman named Howard, now missing, whom the CIA knew was a
Soviet agent. And the FBI apparently was involved with the CIA
in running this gentleman down. Right? They do run him down.
They discover all of it. And he says, "Listen. Give me a couple
of days, fellas, while I try to get accustomed to the situation
which I'm in and so that I can now deal with this problem." They
say, "Fine." They give him two days, and he disappears, and he's
still disappeared.
Now, let's remember Yevchenko [sic], the Soviet defector
who apparently gave us some excellent information. They took him
to dinner and let him walk away.
How about an investigation of the way the CIA conducts
its own operations? Don't you think that's a good idea?
KILPATRICK: Who's going to do the investigation?
AGRONSKY: Well, who investigates the investigator?
TALBOTT: The press is going to do the investigation, is
the answer to that question.
ROWAN: Whether Casey likes it or not, the press will do
KILPATRICK: Look, the CIA messes something up. That's
fair game. Sure. They mess a lot of things up. But once 30
years ago I made a mistake. I misspelled a word. That's the
only error I can ever remember making, Martin. Otherwise my
record is pretty flawless.
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So the CIA has had a series of flubs. Okay. It's a
tremendous operation.
AGRONSKY: Well, they're pretty significant flubs.
KILPATRICK: But it's a tremendous operation. And they
can't tell you about the good things they do. The things that
come off right, they never publicize. It's when something like
this Howard thing comes out.
TALBOTT: Almost by definition, we're only going to
know about the ones that go wrong.
AGRONSKY: Twenty years ago we had this organization
committed to some kind of powder that would cause Castro's beard
to fall out?
KILPATRICK: Yeah, his beard was going to fall out.
AGRONSKY: I think that often they function like a bunch
of clowns over there, and I think we ought to take a look at it.
KILPATRICK: How often?
AGRONSKY: Well, here are two very recent cases.
KRAUTHAMMER: There's a difference between taking a look
at and talking about how we encode and encrypt data in listening
devices off the Soviet Union.
It seems to me that what Casey has done wrong, of
course, is to talk about jail and criminal activity. I think
that's absolutely wrong. But it's not wrong for him to urge
people and persuade them. Because it seems to me that the press
does have kind of an internal policing mechanism. NBC was hit
very hard for its Abbas interview, and just the other night on
the NBC news they spoke about a Sakharov tape which they wouldn't
take because it was a KGB tape. I think it's an example that
even the networks are educable on these issues.
KILPATRICK: Some sense of self-restraint there.
AGRONSKY: Well, let's end this discussion with those
few kind words for the press and the media.
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