FOR REPORTERS, NOTHING'S MORE HAZARDOUS THAN BEING THOUGHT A SPY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000600400021-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 12, 2005
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: September 13, 1986
• Content Type: TRANS

ASSOCIATED PRESS J:111
Approved For Release 4(0%/ JgJ6PAr 91-00901 R000600400021-8 FILE U
FOR REPORTERS, NOTHING'S MORE HAZARDOUS THAN BEING THOUGHT A SPY C
By JOAN MOWER
WASHINGTON
The case of American newsman Nicholas Daniloff recalls a controversy 10 years
ago that centered on the question of the relationship between U.S. reporters and
the Central Intelligence- Agency.
A Senate committee had revealed that 50 American journalists had been on the
CIA payroll during the coldest of the Cold War years, in the 1950s, the 1960s
and later.
In the resulting uproar, the CIA laid down rules that forbade the hiring of
journalists for espionage.
The Senate committee, chaired by the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, did not
name any individuals who had worked as spies or any news organizations which
employed them, knowingly or otherwise.
It said the largest category it found of CIA relationships with U.S. media
"includes free-lance journalists; 'stringers' for newspapers, news magazines and
news services; itinerant authors; propaganda writers; and agents working under
cover as employees of U.S. publishing houses abroad."No one except the KGB has
come forth to claim that Daniloff was a spy. His case remains to be resolved.
Seized by KGB agents in Moscow an Aug. 30 after a Soviet acquaintance handed him
a package, he was jailed and questioned daily.
On Friday, he won release from his KGB prison cell but he must stay in the
U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The United States simultaneously allowed the release to
the custody of the Soviet ambassador of Gennadiy Zakharov, a Soviet citizen
arrested a few days earlier and accused of paying $1,000 to an informant who
turned out to be working for the FBI.
Daniloff, who has served two tours of duty as a Moscow reporter, first for
United Press International and most recently for U.S. News & World Report, is no
stranger to the peril that faces an American reporter assigned to gather
information in a foreign land.
Testifying in 1978 before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Daniloff insisted that a democratic society damages itself when it sends spies
out under the cover of news gatherers.
He said: "The press, admittedly, is not a perfect institution, and its news
gathering and news distributing processes are not without fault, but on the
whole, the press tends to be self-correcting. I do not believe it would help the
press in its essential purpose to be charged, in some covert manner, with
ferreting out secrets for the benefit of intelligence agencies. Indeed, the
notion of a secret assignment is quite antithetical to the openness and the
truthfulness for which, I believe, the American press strives.""As a Moscow
correspondent I was occasionally arrested by vigilant citizens or authorities
for activities which I consider to be relatively innocuous, such as
investigating a train wreck, photographing the Kremlin Hospital, or taking notes
of an evening rehearsal of the Nov. 7 military parade.
Continue
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 "The nextA MvbdjFSorthRp ,2006Y02A07taIMA4M@9131QV17t1F OPP2i1-fan
immediately argue that it is well known the United States does not hire
journalists to be spies."Daniloff's editor, his colleagues and the U.S.
government have energetically denied the Kremlin's charge that Daniloff, the
U.S. News.bureau chief in Moscow, was a spy.
"Nick Daniloff is no more a spy than John Wayne, and he's no more involved in
espionage than Gidget," said Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and editor-in-chief of
U.S. News.
President Reagan in a personal letter assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
that Daniloff was not involved in espionage, and well-known colleagues like Jack
Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, consider the charges
against Daniloff to be blatantly false.
Such protestations, however, may not hold much weight with Soviet bloc
countries where journalists are routinely employed as spies, says Dana Bullen,
executive director of the World Press Freedom Center in Reston, Va.
"I just take it for granted that these people (Soviet-bloc journalists) are
agents," he said. "Because their journalists are spies, they assume all
journalists are spies and it's not true."When he testified in 1978, Daniloff was
supporting enactment of a bill to prohibit paid or contractual relationships
between intelligence agencies and journalists.
Daniloff criticized any covert government use of the press.
"To carry on a covert intelligence assignment as a journalist, or to
masquerade as a journalist when one is actually a spy, can only promote the
impression that journalists are not what they say they are," he said.
But like other reporters, Daniloff drew a clear distinction between a
reporter being used by an intelligence agency, on the one hand, and a reporter
using intelligence officials as sources of information in the normal course of
news gathering.
"I believe ... journalists may benefit by seeking out intelligence officials
for the purpose of eliciting information which is to be made public through
newspaper articles, magazine dispatches and broadcasts," Daniloff said.
Congress never passed the 1978 bill, but the CIA issued internal
regulations in Febuary 1976 and in December 1977 barring such arrangements
between reporters and intelligence agencies.
The 1977 regulation is still in effect, according to CIA spokeswoman Kathy
Pherson, who said it prohibits the CIA from hiring part-time and full-time
journalists accredited to U.S. news organizations and from using journalism as a
cover for intelligence agents.
But the regulation does not prevent anyone from furnishing information which
may be useful to the government. Thus, the CIA is still permitted to have
unpaid relationships with journalists.
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, head of the agency durin
th
C
g
e
arter
administration, said he waived the 1977 rule twice.
"There were two instances when media help was needed during my tenure and I
gave my approval," he wrote in his book, "Secrecy and Democracy." In one case
involving the Iran hostage crisis, Turner said he never used the individual.
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 Neither Phers r at th
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said t he p e
l~ an in rma ion on whether CIA Director William Casey has sought
waivers since President Reagan took office in January 1981.
MORE Daniel Schorr, a senior analyst for National Public Radio and a
long-time national security reporter, said it would be disastrous for the CIA
to use reporters. "I do clearly hope they abide by the regulation" in the
"current gung-ho" administration;.Scharr said.
He noted that the 1977 CIA regulation has loopholes. For instance, it does
not apply to administrative and technical employees of American organizations.
Unaccredited free-lance writers are not covered.
Nelson, at the Los Angeles Times, said he had no reason to think the CIA
has ignored its guidelines on journalists. Both parties are so touchy that he
said he doubts they would enter into a relationship.
Reed Irvine, the head of Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group,
said it "would be pretty dangerous" for the CIA to recruit journalists. "They
are such untrustworthy people, they would probably write a story about it," he
said.
So sensitized was Daniloff to the issue that once, while he was working in
this country, when an FBI agent approached him, and asked him to pose a specific
question to a Soviet diplomat, he wouldn't. "I refused because I thought that
was being an agent of the FBI," he said.
In 1976, the Church investigation concluded that about half the 50 American
newspeople who had served on the CIA payroll had "paid relationships, ranging
from salaried operatives working under journalistic cover, to U.S. journalists
serving as 'independent contractors' for the CIA and being paid regularly for
their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements
from the CIA. "Wilbur Landrey, a veteran foreign correspondent who is now the
foreign editor of the St. Petersburg Times, said he saw no evidence of CIA
involvement with the media overseas.
"There were rumors, but that was all," said Landrey, who spent 23 years
abroad and said he was never approached by an agent and didn't know anyone who
was.
Still, revelations about the CIA's past use of journalists cast a
"tremendous cloud" over foreign correspondents, Bullen said.
The lingering effects of the CIA's actions have been felt personally by
some reporters.
Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Toth was accused by the Soviets in 1977 of
spying for the United States and was detained by Soviet authorities in Moscow
for a week.
Toth "felt very burned by it," said Nelson, his boss. "It was a very
unpleasant experience." Toth was traveling in Asia and could not be reached for
comment.
And Sam Jaffe, a former news correspondent in Moscow, Hong Kong and
Washington, spent 15 years clearing his name of allegations that he was either a
KG8 agent or a CIA agent. He died last year at age 55.
"It ruined his career," said Jeune Jaffe, his widow of Bethesda, Md. "He
spent the last 10 years of his life fighting the rumors and then he died."Former
CIA Director William Colby sent Jaffe a letter saying the agency had no
infrmation that Jaffe was ever an agent of the CIA or a foreign intelligence
operation.
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