The CIA and Time Magazine

This article provides evidence for the first time of a systematic policy of direct collusion between the Time Inc. media empire and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). For the first two decades of the Cold War, both Time and Life magazines established policies that provided the CIA with access to their foreign correspondents, their dispatches and research files, and their vast photographic archive that the magazines had accumulated to accompany their stories. These were significant resources for a fledgling intelligence agency. Photographs of foreign dignitaries, rebel groups, protestors, and topography were vital pieces of intelligence, helping the Agency to map and visualize its targets. Depending upon the story, direct access to dispatches returned by foreign correspondents might provide the Agency with important clues to local political, social, and economic conditions, as well as insights into the intentions and capabilities of ruling elites in countries of concern. Likewise, access to those foreign correspondents upon their return to the United States, whose whereabouts staff from Time Inc.—the parent company of the two magazines—routinely provided to the CIA, would allow the Agency to benefit from their insight and unique access to foreign lands, peoples, and leaders.

Hugh Wilford once wrote that during the Cold War it was sometimes “difficult to tell precisely where [Time and Life’s] overseas intelligence network ended, and the CIA’s began.” As Wilford and other historians have shown, a number of high profile Time Inc. journalists, including the company’s president, Henry Luce, maintained close contact with senior CIA officials, and even helped them with their propaganda efforts abroad.² These studies have tended to emphasize the patriotic voluntarism of “Cold Warriors” in the U.S. media, like Luce, who were happy to help the U.S. government confront international communism.³ What until now has remained undocumented is the systematic cooperation between Time Inc. and the CIA for intelligence gathering purposes. When the magazines’ managers and editors became aware of a particularly interesting source, or network of sources, they would share it with the CIA. When journalists learned of major stories, their dispatches were sent directly to the CIA. When the CIA needed photographic intelligence, they often relied upon the photojournalism of Time Inc. When foreign correspondents returned to the United States, they would share what they had learned with the CIA. Indeed, it was difficult to tell apart the magazines’ sources of information from the CIA’s foreign intelligence network because, for a while at least, the former became part of the latter.

In 1977, the veteran Time Inc. journalist Herman Nickel testified before the U.S. House Sub-Committee on Intelligence on the relationship between the CIA and the media. He did not confess the past arrangement between his employer and the CIA. He was likely unaware of it, although an internal file that documented the relationship did exist after it was compiled in the late 1960s by curious senior editors.⁴ What he offered Congress instead was his strong moral condemnation of the idea that journalists should be co-opted by the CIA: “It is emphatically not the function of journalists to gather information for their government…. Anyone who allows himself or other journalists to be used in this fashion does serious damage to the cause of an independent press. If the impression were to get around that many, or even only a few, American journalists allowed themselves to be used in this fashion, it would seriously undermine the effectiveness, access, and credibility of all correspondents for American media abroad, whether they be U.S. citizens or not.”⁵

Journalistic independence and credibility were not the only core values threatened by the CIA’s arrangement with Time Inc. Source protection was also on the line. When sources spoke to Time Inc.’s journalists they did so, presumably, without the knowledge that the journalist’s dispatches would be sent directly to the CIA. With direct access to these journalists’ confidential overseas reports, the CIA obtained privileged information that, due to censorship in places like Moscow and the developing eastern bloc, would often not make it into print. The identity of the sources who provided that information could also be compromised, as fewer precautions were taken when filing internal confidential reports to Time Inc. headquarters that were not intended for publication. Would a local source be so willing to speak to a Time Inc. journalist if they knew that the information they revealed would also be shared with the CIA? The risks of sharing information with an intelligence agency, of course, were much more severe than talking to a journalist. If the KGB had discovered that dispatches from Moscow or Budapest were being sent directly to the CIA by Time Inc.’s journalists, then they might charge a journalist, not to mention that journalist’s source, with espionage.⁶ As Nickel further testified to Congress: “Already, alleged links to the CIA have been used as welcome pretexts for the Soviets to expel correspondents whose reporting they didn’t like. But even greater dangers arise in some of the countries of the third world where mere rumor that a reporter is really an intelligence agent can subject him to arrest, torture, and worse.” Nickel offered Congress the example of Michael Goldsmith, an Associated Press reporter who “was personally beaten up in Bangui by Emperor Bokassa because of unfounded rumors that he was a South African intelligence agent. It could just as easily have been a rumor that he was working for CIA.” Nickel ended his statement unequivocally, likely unaware that his colleagues at Time and Life had been involved in precisely the kind of collusion with the CIA that he so roundly condemned: “Publishers and editors who allow the CIA access to the files, or allow an intelligence service to use their news service as a cover for intelligence operations in my view do a grave disservice to our profession.”⁷

These ethical concerns over journalists cooperating with U.S. intelligence agencies became much more acute during the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1966–67, a series of high-profile newspaper stories revealed that the CIA had been secretly funding various civil society groups and organizations, including well-known media outlets such as Encounter Magazine and the Paris Review.⁸ In the decade that followed, a number of other revelations underscored the inherent controversy of CIA officers working with and influencing media outlets. In the U.S. Senate, the Church Committee—tasked with investigating the many scandals and abuses that had rocked the U.S. intelligence community in this era—concluded that the CIA maintained “covert relationships with about 50 American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.”⁹ This series of revelations culminated in 1977 when Carl Bernstein, who had previously played a major role in revealing the Watergate scandal, published an article in Rolling Stone alleging the existence of a vast network of paid and unpaid CIA contacts in the U.S. media.¹⁰ The story produced another outcry, and coupled with the conclusions of the Church Committee led to a series of congressional hearings on the matter, forcing the CIA to draw up guidelines that restricted its ability to work with journalists, and publicly renounce the practice of using U.S. journalists as paid sources.¹¹

The emergence of these scandals may partially explain why Time Inc. chose to end their arrangement with the CIA in the late 1960s, and why newsroom attitudes shifted firmly in favor of their journalists maintaining strict autonomy from the CIA. These later revelations could also be understood as part of a much broader generational shift during the late 1960s and 1970s whereby a culture of journalistic “consensus” on U.S. foreign policy was supplanted by a far more recalcitrant attitude toward the U.S. government, its foreign policy, and especially institutions like the CIA. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this conventional narrative of U.S. journalism during the Cold War. Rather than characterizing these different eras monolithically, from consensus to dissent, scholars argue that a much more complex reality existed. U.S. foreign correspondents during the 1950s were not naively patriotic nor universally supportive of their government and its Cold War policies and institutions. Nor were the great feats of investigative journalism during the later era of the 1960s and 1970s that challenged the secret government and led to the resignation of a president necessarily emblematic of all mainstream U.S. journalism of the period.¹² Kathryn McGarr’s recent history of Washington’s Cold War foreign correspondents during the so-called era of “consensus” emphasizes the importance of the many private conversations journalists had, often in the exclusively white male environments of background meetings, press club luncheons, and off-the-record chats between policymakers and journalists. In these trusted environments where “responsible” men met, and part of being considered “responsible” meant being white and male, journalists developed bonds of confidence with U.S. policymakers, but also shared their many doubts and misgivings concerning both the United States’ Cold War policies, and their coverage of them. “Negotiations behind the scenes that reveal the genuine tensions over reporting on foreign policy help complicate a story of the 1960s and 1970s as bringing with it ‘an end of innocence,’” she writes.¹³

The internal debate among Time Inc.’s senior management over their employer’s relationship with the CIA likewise reveals a more complex reality. In 1951, a group of senior staff led by one of the company’s most senior and longest-serving managing editors, Manfred Gottfried, repeatedly voiced their opposition to such close collusion with the CIA. This was at a time when the so-called era of “consensus” and good feeling between U.S. journalists and the U.S. government was supposedly in full swing. The dissent at Time Inc. supports McGarr’s thesis that the journalists of this era were not “patriotic dupes.”

If any major media organization could be accused of naïve patriotism during the Cold War, it was Henry Luce’s empire. Luce was an ardent Cold Warrior, and for the most part Time and Life echoed his view that the United States should aggressively combat communism across the globe, first supporting the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment, and later the more aggressive policy of “rollback.”¹⁴ “To Luce,” noted the historian Frances Stonor Saunders, “the Cold War was a holy war, in which Time Inc. was committed to the ‘dominant aim and purpose’ of defeating Communism throughout the world.”¹⁵ “In battling communism,” confirmed historian of U.S. Cold War propaganda Stacey Cone, “Luce may have allowed his politics to overwhelm his better news judgment. He rarely hesitated to use his magazines as forums for expounding his views, eagerly providing space for causes he supported.”¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, this outlook also translated into Time and Life supporting the CIA in their columns. David Hadley’s history of the CIA and the American press identifies Time Magazine as a consistent supporter of the CIA throughout the Cold War, always ready to defend the Agency at times of national scandal, censor stories that might reveal CIA secrets or prove damaging for the Agency, and reproduce Cold War narratives that served the purposes of the CIA, such as portraying Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz as dangerously committed to socialism.¹⁷ Partly as a result of the wide-eyed zeal with which Luce and his reporters supported U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, and especially its foreign policy, Time and Life’s correspondents were generally derided by the Washington press corps.¹⁸

Yet even at this bastion of Cold War orthodoxy, journalists took issue with the idea that they should cooperate so closely with government, and in particular the CIA. Not only did these dissenting voices exist in 1951, they were also successful. After polling his senior editorial staff in response to this internal protest, Luce decided to end the practice of sharing the dispatches of Time’s foreign correspondents directly with the CIA, although the company continued to grant the Agency access to Life’s photographic archive until the late 1960s.

One key difference that McGarr identifies between the so-called era of journalistic “consensus,” and what came after, is that U.S. foreign correspondents in the 1950s kept their misgivings about their own profession private. Only later did reporters begin to publish their retrospective critiques of the journalism of that era as naïvely patriotic and enthralled to the orthodoxies of the Cold War. The internal dissent at Time Inc. against their cooperation with the CIA remained internal during the 1950s. Perhaps more interestingly though, it stayed that way. Even when in the 1970s, the likes of Carl Bernstein, Harrison Salisbury, and the U.S. Congress began very publicly investigating accusations of collusion between journalists and the CIA, none of the still-living editors and correspondents who were privy to this relationship went public. Bernstein claimed a number of mostly unattributed links between Time and the CIA, but did not detail this relationship.¹⁹ Salisbury revealed an almost identical arrangement between the CIA and the New York Times as the one that existed between the Agency and Time Inc., but bemoaned the lack of available evidence that prevented him from conclusively proving a systematic policy of CIA-press cooperation.²⁰ The arrangement at Time Inc. clearly corroborates what Salisbury discovered at the Times, and points to a more systematic CIA policy of engagement with the U.S. press. Yet, none of the company’s editors who dissented internally in the 1950s were prepared to go public in the 1970s about this arrangement, even in an era when both the CIA and the press were airing their dirty laundry. When Herman Nickel condemned CIA-media collusion in his testimony before Congress in 1977, it appears none of his colleagues forwarded him the CIA-Time-Life file.

In emphasizing the significance of private and internal newsroom disagreement during the so-called era of consensus, McGarr arguably downplays the significance of the fact that these conversations were, and in most cases remained, private. Internally, journalists may have aired their misgivings, but what they published were the stories they chose to tell. Some of the stories that they knew about in private but did not tell the public were instances of CIA covert operations. With remarkable consistency until the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle made the problem of CIA covert operations too big to ignore, U.S. journalists deliberately turned a blind eye to CIA operations. Like McGarr, David Hadley has argued against the idea of a dramatic break in the late 1960s from a previous era of journalistic consensus on reporting the CIA, and instead argues that a “rising clamor” of press criticism about the Agency emerged during the 1950s, and gradually increased throughout the ensuing decades until it reached a fever pitch in the 1970s.²¹ True enough, some members of the press wrote critical stories about the CIA in the 1950s. These stories usually concerned accusations of intelligence failure, or calls in certain quarters for increased oversight of the Agency.²² Almost never did these stories discuss CIA operations. This was despite the fact that many journalists were well-aware of the CIA’s role in the Iranian and Guatemalan coups, along with a number of other examples of CIA interventions that were kept from the public by witting U.S. foreign correspondents.²³

What explains this refusal by numerous U.S. journalists in this period to publish state secrets, and in particular details of CIA operations? It is tempting to suggest that simple patriotism is the answer. This was, after all, a generation of journalists who had lived through the Second World War. Many had worked for the U.S. government, including a number who served in the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). When the New York Times’s Washington Bureau Chief, James “Scotty” Reston, reflected upon the reasons why the Times had buried certain stories about CIA covert operations, he said that “[s]ince we are clearly in a form of warfare with the Communist world it has not been difficult to ignore information which, if published, would have been valuable to the enemy.”²⁴ Similarly Time Inc.’s Allen Grover, who was a key advocate for continuing the company’s arrangement with the CIA, argued that his reason for wanting to maintain the relationship was “simply that it does help them, and I can’t see that it hurts us.”²⁵ Why would a patriotic citizen, even a foreign news journalist, refuse to help the CIA? Perhaps he should have asked Herman Nickel.

McGarr, however, rejects simple patriotism as an all-encompassing explanation for the social dynamics that governed the Cold War information economy among Washington elites. Certainly the internal protests at Time Inc. demonstrate that even if some of the company’s senior staff were committed patriots, many others had serious misgivings about collaborating so closely with the CIA. McGarr highlights the deliberately segregated white male environments of press club dinners and background meetings as important social mechanisms that regulated press dissent, and helped maintain a culture of secrecy and silence in matters of national security, and especially the work of the CIA. Once Washington correspondents were permitted access to this small network of white male elites, their career depended upon maintaining that access. If they were to act ‘irresponsibly’ and make public the official secrets they learned in these closed environments, they would lose access to the comfortable club luncheons that so often furnished them with copy they felt that they could print. CIA covert operations were a taboo subject, whispered about behind closed doors in often homogenously white male environments, but almost never discussed publicly.

As periodical writers for New York-based publications, Time and Life’s journalists were perhaps less susceptible to the social etiquette of the Washington elite. Indeed, the Washington press corps often distrusted Time and Life, and their reporters.²⁶ The exclusively white male spaces described by McGarr that Washington foreign correspondents frequented were in part maintained by segregation and its legacy in the capital. Washington, D.C. was a Southern city, and its hotels and restaurants where members of the press met “remained segregated until 1953, after which de facto segregation and discrimination continued for decades.”²⁷ Although the magazines’ outlook and tone “tended to reflect attitudes of well-born Yale men and the Long Island country-club set,” which sometimes translated into offhand racial slurs like “blackamoor” to describe an African American criminal or villain, it was in many respects ahead of its contemporaries in its coverage of racism in the United States. During the 1920s, the magazine frequently reported on lynchings in the South when the practice was “largely ignored by many of the major organs of journalism.”²⁸ During the 1940s and 1950s, Luce came out strongly in favor of desegregation and civil rights, and Time and Life reflected this editorial stance. Much to the dismay of some of its Southern readers, both its written and photographic journalism tended to portray African Americans with sensitivity and respect.²⁹ Certainly, the magazines’ correspondents were an elite, and a largely white male elite who had attended Ivy League universities, but compared to the segregated social circuit that often defined the outlook of the Washington press corps, their New York-based staff were often, although not uniformly, more progressive on matters of race than many other major news outlets.

Time Inc. was a male-dominated, although unlike the social circuit of the Washington, D.C. press corps that McGarr describes, not an exclusively male environment. Indeed, a number of women, including senior women, were privy to Time Inc.’s arrangement with the CIA. For example, Eleanor Welch, Time’s Deputy Chief of Foreign Correspondents, was responsible for curating a weekly file of dispatches that were sent directly to the CIA, and as such was more intimately familiar with the arrangement than anybody else on Time Inc.’s staff. Nevertheless, the culture of silence surrounding CIA operations, it seems, extended beyond the elite white male environment of Gridiron Club luncheons. Indeed, along with periodicals like Time and Life, radio and television executives, Hollywood movie studios, and many other major U.S. culture industries in the 1950s fastidiously avoided the topic of CIA covert operations.³⁰ This seems to suggest that some kind of broader consensus existed within the U.S. media when it came to discussing CIA operations, beyond the closed circuit of the Washington press corps. Until the Bay of Pigs, it was a subject that remained taboo. Why would so many elements of the U.S. media stay silent for so long?

The role of elites, including elite journalists and publishers, in the formulation of the United States’ Cold War foreign policy has been widely theorized. As Inderjeet Parmar put it, these concepts have helped us to move “beyond ideas of state power that set up the state against society and vice versa.” Instead, they allow us to understand these relationships in terms of “state-private elite networks,” including networks of journalists and intelligence officers, that helped all parties advance “shared and mutual state-private elite interests.”³¹ McGarr demonstrates how elite members of the Washington press corps actively advocated for U.S. internationalism, and opposed isolationist voices. It was not the case that these foreign correspondents passively adopted the government’s line on this. Having lived through the Second World War they felt a sense of responsibility for the peace that followed. They believed that the new international system that emerged after the Second World War, with the United States its overarching hegemon, was the most effective way to ensure that peace, and advocated for it. Few publications advocated for U.S. internationalism more than Time and Life, whose founder, Henry Luce, famously popularized the concept of the “American Century.”

Interestingly, McGarr notes that some of the only voices during the 1950s to puncture the Cold War consensus, and frame U.S. interventions during the Cold War as a form of imperialism, were journalists working for African American newspapers. Yet the predominantly white and overwhelmingly male journalists, publishers, filmmakers, and producers who oversaw the most popular media outlets of the day turned their backs on stories of CIA covert intervention that might problematize the orthodox vision of the United States in the Cold War as a defender of freedom, and cast it as an aggressive power. McGarr argues that the journalists of this era were not naïvely patriotic. Indeed, they were not naïve. Many were fully aware of a number of CIA covert interventions, but chose not to publicize them. Their silence was not born out of naivety—it was a knowing silence.

The CIA’s collusion with the U.S. media was admittedly not a story of foreign intervention, but one of domestic interference. It would become a major and well-publicized story in the 1970s. Congruent with McGarr’s claim that journalists chose not to pen public critiques of their own profession until the 1960s and 1970s, the journalists at Time Inc. felt uneasy about their employer’s relationship with the CIA, and voiced these concerns internally, but did not print them. At one point Gottfried suggested that Time should publicize its arrangement with the CIA in the “F.Y.I.” section of the magazine, which was common practice when declaring other potential conflicts of interest among Time staff. ³² The suggestion was quickly dismissed, and duly ignored by Time Inc.’s Vice-President Allen Grover.³³

These documents therefore demonstrate both the power and the limitations of newsroom dissent at Time Inc. during the early Cold War. On the one hand, the internal protest against Time Inc.’s arrangement with the CIA was partly successful. As a result of his staff’s concerns, Henry Luce ended the practice of sharing his magazines’ foreign dispatches directly with the CIA. At the same time though, other collaborations with the Agency continued. Moreover, Time Inc.’s senior editorial staff’s misgivings about the relationship remained internal, a quiet disagreement among “responsible” journalists. Thus, the company’s aborted arrangement with the CIA was kept secret, even during the 1970s when many similar relationships were alleged. Indeed Time Inc.’s senior editorial staff were not naïvely patriotic, but they were loyal. They were loyal to each other, preferring to resolve their differences internally rather than air their grievances in print. They were loyal to an idea of national security and therefore the need to protect state secrets. And they were loyal to their sources, often government officials who shared state secrets with “responsible” journalists because they understood that they would not appear in print. As a result, this arrangement between Time Inc. and the CIA remained secret, never to be disclosed, until now.

A Covert Arrangement: The CIA and Time Inc.

From 1947 until the end of the 1960s, the CIA developed a working relationship with Time Inc. Each week, Time’s Deputy Chief of Foreign Correspondents, Eleanor Welch, would forward Time’s incoming dispatches from their various offices in foreign locales to the CIA. Welch was the central node in the magazines’ vast global information network of foreign correspondents and stringers, who each maintained their own network of sources. In 1951, Time reported that Welch received “some 19,000 words of news research” every week from its thirty-one reporters in Central and Southern America alone.³⁴ Presumably its staff in Europe and elsewhere were equally prolific. The weekly file contained the latest eye-witness reports, rumors, interviews, stories, and other updates from correspondents in the field. Thanks in part to the censorship imposed in places of interest to the CIA such as Moscow and the eastern bloc, alongside the everyday excisions of Time Inc.’s editorial processes, much of this material did not make it into their weekly magazines. This was the raw feed of Time journalists’ extensive foreign information gathering efforts. The intelligence value of these dispatches, especially for an agency still in its infancy like the CIA, was clear.³⁵

This arrangement began at the behest of Charles Douglas Jackson, then a Managing Director of Time Inc. During his thirty-three years as an employee of Time Inc., Jackson “took so many leaves of absence from Time for government service that a ‘Fun and Games Committee of the C.D. Jackson Hello & Goodbye Society’ was established to arrange coming and going parties for him.”³⁶ During the Second World War, Jackson had worked for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the OSS, before rising to the position of Deputy Chief of the Allies’ Psychological Warfare Division. After the war, Jackson advised the Eisenhower administration on psychological warfare, working closely with the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), helping to shape early CIA propaganda efforts against the Soviet Union.³⁷

Jackson initiated the arrangement in late 1946, while still an employee of Time Inc., and almost a year before the CIA was formally established in the National Security Act of 1947.³⁸ Between the dissolution of the wartime OSS in late 1945, and the creation of the CIA in September 1947, an interim organization, known as the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), was established, and a clear line of continuity exists in terms of activities and personnel from OSS-CIG-CIA. Jackson’s contact at CIG was James Ramsay Hunt, who was then overseeing CIG covert activities as the Head of Operations at the CIG’s innocuously-named New York Contact Branch.³⁹ Hunt joined the CIA soon after its establishment in September 1947, and Time continued the practice of sending him a weekly file until the early 1950s. Jackson made it clear to Hunt that the CIA should not attribute Time Inc., nor its journalists who wrote the dispatches, when using the material. The arrangement, on the insistence of Jackson as well as other members of Time Inc.’s senior management, would remain a secret.⁴⁰

This CIA practice of utilizing major U.S. media organizations for intelligence gathering purposes was not unique to Time Inc. In the 1970s the New York Times’s Harrison E. Salisbury conducted an exhaustive review of its internal files in order to determine whether any systematic policy of cooperation had existed between the CIA and the Times.⁴¹ What Salisbury discovered was a relationship that was almost identical to the one documented here between the CIA and Time Inc. Taken together, the CIA’s use of both the New York Times as revealed by Salisbury, and Time and Life—as revealed in this article—for intelligence gathering purposes, indeed points to a more systematic effort on the part of the CIA to co-opt U.S. news organizations in their intelligence gathering efforts. In late 1946, at almost exactly the same time that the CIG began to cooperate with Time Inc., the head of the CIA’s predecessor organization contacted the New York Times’s publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger to ask for the Times’s cooperation in establishing its fledgling intelligence collection efforts.

The CIG’s method for securing the Times’s cooperation was almost identical to the way in which Time Inc.’s assistance was gained. As with Time Inc., the CIG’s James Ramsay Hunt oversaw the relationship with the New York Times. As with C.D. Jackson at Time Inc., Hunt utilized former OSS officers to establish an initial relationship with the Times, this time through the conduit of OSS veteran and Times reporter John Oakes. Hunt’s request for assistance from the New York Times was the same as his request to Time Inc. As Salisbury put it, the CIG wanted access to: “FYI,”—For Your Information material, private reports and letters that Times correspondents sent to their editors filling them in on situations that could not be reported: a still maturing political crisis; spicy corridor gossip; background on developing events; postmortems; memoranda to be used by New York writers in locally written stories; guidance to editors; information useful in evaluating the trend of events, particularly in countries under censorship, such as the Soviet Union and the evolving Soviet bloc.⁴² For obvious reasons, as Salisbury noted, such information “could be priceless to an intelligence organization, especially a new one with many gaps in its coverage.”⁴³ According to the experienced CIA officer John Bross, during the first decade of the CIA’s existence, many U.S. journalists were “presenting a more accurate and informed picture of conditions in eastern Europe than the Agency’s.”⁴⁴

And yet, despite Salisbury’s exhaustive research efforts scouring the New York Times’s internal files “from cupboard to cupboard, from one obscure dustbin to another… the abandoned debris of sixty years of newspaper-publishing,” he repeatedly bemoaned the lack of clear evidence and available documentation on the links between CIA and the U.S. media. “The only record of it was, in the end, a dim recollection in a few minds,” which were, Salisbury points out, often contradictory, “a bit of paper here and there—and whatever massive print-outs might someday spew forth from the Agency.”⁴⁵ We are still waiting for those “massive print-outs.” Moreover, Salisbury’s answer to the question of whether these efforts were part of a systematic policy of cooperation between the New York Times and the CIA remained inconclusive. The more that he uncovered about the relationship, Salisbury reflected, “the more it sounded like ad hoc, hit-or-miss contacts.”⁴⁶

Read alongside Salisbury’s account of CIG-New York Times cooperation during the same period, the Time Inc. documents discussed here advance our understanding of the CIA’s relationship with the U.S. media in the following ways: first, they corroborate Salisbury’s account, demonstrating that the very same CIG/CIA personnel that Salisbury identified as New York Times collaborators were doing more or less the same thing, for the same ends, at Time Inc. Second, they demonstrate that the CIG/CIA were reaching out to multiple major U.S. media organizations, pointing to a more systematic attempt by the CIA to co-opt the U.S. media in its intelligence gathering efforts than previously understood. Third, as will be discussed, these documents offer more concrete and in-depth evidence of CIA-media cooperation than even Salisbury could discover through his extensive investigations. This is perhaps as close to his fabled “massive print-out” of documentation that we are likely to find, at least on Time Inc.’s policy of cooperation with the CIA. This is certainly more than the “dim recollection[s]” and “bit[s] of paper here and there” that Salisbury openly lamented that he was forced to rely upon. Even very recently, major U.S. journalists have continued to ruminate on the untold mysteries of the extent and exact nature of the CIA’s cooperation with the U.S. media during the Cold War.⁴⁷ These files offer perhaps the most comprehensive glimpse of the CIA’s cooperation with one of those major U.S. media outlets, and provide unprecedented insight into how this relationship was negotiated and internally debated within Time Inc. itself.

Time Inc.’s relationship with the CIA did not end with the weekly delivery of dispatches. At regular intervals, Time Inc. employees sent the CIA, via an anonymous post-office box in New York City’s Grand Central Station, notifications of when correspondents, photographers, and bureau chiefs returned to the United States from foreign locales, even including the hotel addresses of where they could be found, and their temporary phone numbers.⁴⁸ The CIA would debrief these journalists upon their return to see what could be gleaned of intelligence value from the information they had picked up via their unique access to far-flung parts of the globe, foreign policymakers, officials, and other individuals who might also be of interest to the CIA. The number and frequency of these memos suggests that this practice became routine in the early 1950s. Salisbury’s account of CIA cooperation with New York Times journalists corroborates this. The practice of CIA officers debriefing New York Times journalists upon return to the United States was “so conventional,” Salisbury wrote, “so cut and dried, that after a while it came to be regarded as completely normal and bureaucratic.”⁴⁹

This access to both the dispatches of Time and Life’s foreign correspondents, and to the correspondents themselves, also potentially informed the CIA of the magazines’ confidential sources. This potentially placed sources in jeopardy, and at the very least meant that many sources were sharing information with the U.S. government without their knowledge. So close was the relationship between the CIA and Time Inc. in the early 1950s that in one instance, Time Inc. executives offered the CIA an entire network of sources and contacts in eastern Europe. In October 1950, one of Life’s European correspondents, Percy Knauth, contacted Time Inc.’s senior editorial staff with a proposal to resurrect a network of human sources in eastern Europe that had worked with U.S. intelligence during the Second World War, and had remained behind after the descent of the iron curtain. Knauth’s cousin, an exile from Romania, was in contact with this network of informers, and Knauth himself had likely encountered some of them as a foreign correspondent in Europe during the war. The network included government leaders, members of the anti-communist resistance, political party officials, career civil servants, diplomats, police officials, military officers, members of the clergy, black marketeers, and leading lights in banking and commerce behind the iron curtain. Knauth proposed that Time Inc. should “sponsor an unofficial news and intelligence gathering organization which would draw on the now inactive agents abroad and thus make available to the public a mine of information which is now, to all intents and purposes, untapped.”⁵⁰

If Time Inc. were to establish their own “intelligence gathering organization” then they would need to act like an intelligence agency as well. “The whole affair must be treated on a highly confidential basis,” Knauth urged, and “probably some kind of a cover would be required—a ‘research group’ or some such.” Knauth also raised the possibility of sharing this information with the CIA: “There is, of course, no objection to our funneling information to US intelligence services if we want to.” However, he urged discretion when sharing information with the CIA because “such a procedure would, as I was told, ‘raise a hell of a flap along the grapevine’” with a number of the sources who were part of this network. “One reason why so many of our ex-agents are sore at US official agencies is that after the war they were thoroughly and indiscriminately exposed; they don’t want that to happen again.”⁵¹ Put another way, many of these sources trusted Time Inc.’s ability to keep secrets more than the CIA’s!

Time Inc. chose not to pursue Knauth’s idea, but not before contacting the CIA about this network of sources. Allen Grover, Time Inc.’s Vice-President and occasional CIA collaborator, contacted his friend Franklin Lindsay, then at the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), to see if the Agency might be interested in Knauth’s network of sources.⁵² Lindsay replied that “we would like very much to explore this idea further with [Knauth]…. Thanks very much for passing the idea along to us.”⁵³ It is unclear from both Time Inc.’s archive, and a search of the CIA’s declassified files, whether the Agency ultimately pursued a further collaboration with Knauth and his network of human sources behind the iron curtain. But the readiness on the part of Time Inc. executives, and correspondents like Knauth, to share their sources with the CIA is telling, especially given that many of those sources had expressed to Knauth their grievances with the U.S. intelligence community. Above the wishes of their potential sources, Time Inc. secretly contacted the Agency, and shared the existence of these sources with them.

Along with the written dispatches and access to Time Inc.’s journalists and sources, photographs, especially Life’s extensive and growing photographic archive, were valuable to the CIA.⁵⁴ The Agency would often furnish images to other U.S. government departments to illustrate their reports. For example, reports written about a foreign politician could be accompanied by a photograph taken from the Time Inc. picture archive. Photographs could also have intelligence value, with Time and Life photographers able to access places that CIA cameras could not, and prior to U-2 reconnaissance flights and later satellite programs, these pictures could also help provide intelligence services with a unique understanding of topography and terrain. During the Second World War, the OSS had undertaken a similar operation in which photographs were borrowed from newspaper, magazine, and even Hollywood studio archives, to help military planners build up an understanding of strategically vital areas such as the North French and North African coastlines.⁵⁵

Beginning in 1949, and lasting for a period of almost two decades, CIA officers would pay a weekly visit to Life’s picture archive, collecting photographs of interest for a vast pictorial database they were amassing. They began by reviewing Life’s entire file, which covered roughly a fourteen-year period since its creation in 1936. During this review of the entire file, the CIA collected “an average of 300 to 500 photographs per week.” Once the CIA completed its review of all of Life’s historical files, it collected an average of eighty-nine photographs per week from current files.⁵⁶ In the early years of the arrangement roughly three-quarters of the photographs that the CIA copied were “geographic” in nature. “For instance, they began with the coastline of Europe,” and in 1951 started “taking up everything” that Life had in its picture files on Iran. The remaining quarter of the photos borrowed by the CIA were almost entirely images of personalities from Russia or behind the Iron Curtain.⁵⁷

The CIA quietly continued its work in the Life photo archives for almost two decades. However, the arrangement was not without its difficulties. One of the original reasons that Time Inc. agreed to allow the CIA into their archives on a routine basis was so that the Agency could act as a central clearing house for all pictorial requests made by other U.S. government departments. In the early days of the Cold War, Life was “greatly beset” by these requests from the military, the State Department, and other government agencies. These persistent requests became a nuisance, and the arrangement with the CIA was intended to solve this problem.⁵⁸ It did not. Suzie Eggleston, who oversaw the arrangement with the CIA for Life, noted in 1952 that the magazine continued to be besieged by an “ever-increasing number of requests from members of the Armed Forces, or State Department—all of whom seem to snicker when we mention the CIA file.” Moreover, Eggleston described the CIA’s weekly business as “a nuisance.” “They continually want pictures on foreign affairs which I hate to let out of the file even for a few days,” she complained. “[F]requently the absence of these pictures is a great handicap to us. Possibly they are building up a peachy strategic file,” she concluded, “but I take a dim view of the whole thing at this point.”⁵⁹

Seeking reassurance, Eggleston’s boss, Bernard Barnes, sent an enquiry to the CIA asking about the relative merits of their work in Life’s files. In response, a somewhat embarrassed CIA rolled out the red carpet, inviting Barnes on a tour of their pictorial department led by the CIA’s Assistant Director for Intelligence Collection and Dissemination James M. Andrews. Barnes was suitably impressed and sent a memo to Eggleston reassuring her of the immense value of the arrangement for the nation.⁶⁰ Not content with charming Barnes alone, Andrews also wrote to the President of Time Inc., Roy E. Larsen, re-iterating the importance of their cooperation. “The LIFE photographs are extremely valuable to us for a variety of intelligence purposes,” stressed Andrews, and offered an open invitation to anyone at Time Inc. who might want to visit the CIA and see “some of the many ways in which the photos are being made to serve the interests of our national security.”⁶¹

“Something Rotten in Denmark”: Protesting the Arrangement

Along with Eggleston’s belief that the CIA’s constant requests for pictures were a nuisance that hindered Life’s journalism, others at Time Inc. raised ethical concerns with the relationship. In September 1951, with red peril politics and McCarthyism in full swing, Manfred Gottfried, chief of correspondents for Time’s overseas bureau, wrote a long memo to the company’s founder and president, Henry Luce, to express his unease.⁶²

Gottfried may well have felt comfortable voicing his dissent where others might not have. Luce tolerated some dissent within his newsrooms and even allowed his journalists to develop their own editorial line. At the same time, his politics were well-known among his staff, and beyond. It was not unheard of to challenge Luce’s views within Time Inc., but it was certainly courageous. Gottfried had known Luce for a long time. He was one of Luce’s first employees. Like Luce he studied at Yale University, and was still a senior when he interviewed for the job in February 1922. A few days after the interview, Luce asked Gottfried to accompany him to his tailor, and offered him the position as he was “standing pantless in a shop stall while his trousers were being pressed.”⁶³ Gottfried joined the skeleton staff as its first paid writer, and went on to help Luce establish the Time Inc. empire. Perhaps Gottfried’s familiarity with Luce emboldened him enough to speak out. At one point he even encouraged others within the organization to speak truth to power and challenge newsroom consensus. “There are those among you who think altogether too much about ‘writing for the boss,’” he wrote in an internal memo that was circulated widely among the writing staff. “Time never did and does not now demand servility, intellectual or otherwise, from the members of its staff.”⁶⁴ Luce himself concurred: “we like dissenters,” he claimed, although they must “be the exception rather than the rule. We seek characteristic agreement leaving room for uncharacteristic dissent.”⁶⁵

Kathryn McGarr argues that the private airing among journalists of their misgivings and disagreements helped them to “smooth out dissent.”⁶⁶ Particular points of contestation were acceptable among this homogenous group of reporters, but wholesale radicalism would quickly earn a correspondent a reputation for being “irresponsible,” which in the closed circles of the press corps meant ostracization, loss of access, and ultimately career death. Perhaps this is what Luce meant by “characteristic agreement leaving room for uncharacteristic dissent.” For although Time Inc.’s managing editors like Gottfried “attempted to describe an open environment, there is no question that all the staff knew where Luce stood and realized he owned the printing press.”⁶⁷

In his memo to Luce, Gottfried articulated four principal objections to Time Inc.’s policy of sending foreign dispatches directly to the CIA. His first argument concerned the secretive nature of the relationship, indicating a fundamental clash of values between the journalistic commitment to publicity and transparency, and the logics of state secrecy. He told Luce that he was uncomfortable with the CIA’s continued reassurances that Time Inc. would never “get caught” helping the Agency. Time’s Eleanor Welch also took precautions to help anonymize the material before it was sent to the CIA. As Gottfried put it to Luce: “There’s something rotten in Denmark if we do things at which we could, even in theory, ‘get caught.’ No one ‘gets caught’ in acts of virtue.” In remedy, Gottfried proposed that Time publish its relationship with the CIA in the magazine’s F.Y.I. section, a common practice when Time had cooperated with other government agencies. “If it turns out that we do not dare publish what we are doing, then there is something really smelly about it,” Gottfried signed off at the end of the memo.⁶⁸

Tellingly, both Time Inc. and the CIA feared public exposure of the arrangement: “it would not help your overseas people to have it become generally known that there is an effective working arrangement between TIME-LIFE and the U.S. intelligence network,” Andrews stressed in a letter to Luce’s assistant, Bernard Barnes. He was right. Reflecting upon an almost identical arrangement between the CIA and the New York Times, Harrison Salisbury worried that if it were publicly known, or even suspected, that Times journalists were sharing information with the CIA, not only would they risk their reputation, but in extremis they or their sources might be confronted with a charge of espionage, which in the Soviet Union and many other countries, carried the penalty of death.⁶⁹ Although this was an extreme and perhaps unlikely scenario, it was nevertheless possible, and certainly something that concerned Salisbury during his investigations, as well as Time Inc.’s own Herman Nickel in his 1977 statement to the U.S. Congress. At the very least, exposure of this relationship would damage the reputation of Time and Life’s foreign correspondents, and could deter possible future sources from talking to them. Small wonder then that Time Inc. wished to keep the arrangement secret.

Indeed, Time Inc.’s desire for maintaining secrecy was perhaps even stronger than the CIA’s. At one point Andrews asked Time Inc. whether the pictures the CIA copied from its archives could be reclassified from “Confidential” to “Restricted.” This would allow the CIA to share the images more easily with other government departments who requested them. This time, however, it was Time Inc.’s turn to be bashful. Roy E. Larsen, Publisher of Life and second only to Henry Luce in terms of influence at the corporation, wrote to Andrews to refuse his request. Presumably to help ensure that Time Inc.’s relationship with the CIA would never be discovered, he insisted that the more restrictive “Confidential” classification of the images should remain in place.⁷⁰ It was, as Allen Grover later remarked, entirely naïve to think that Time Inc. did not “do things for which we do not want glaring publicity.”⁷¹ In this case, it was Time Inc., even more than the CIA, who demanded that their relationship be kept secret.

Gottfried’s second argument against the relationship concerned questions of power, oversight and congressional control: “The last time the CIA boys came to see me, I said ‘look here, we have no business giving you material we got for journalistic purposes, but if you have the power to tap our wires there is no way we can keep if from you.’” The CIA’s response, according to Gottfried, was that Congress would never allow them to tap the wires of a U.S. news organization. Or as Gottfried interpreted it: “the representatives of the people apparently do not think the national interest requires that CIA see our file.”⁷²

Gottfried’s third argument warned of hypocrisy on the part of Time. Three days before he sent the letter, an article appeared in Time about the Soviet Union’s official news agency: TASS (Telegraf-noye agentsvo SSSR—Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). The article denounced TASS as a den of Soviet spies, with almost no journalistic function beyond gathering intelligence for the government. The article alleged that Soviet spies were routinely using TASS as journalistic cover, which allowed them privileged access to U.S. policymakers and officials. A number of leading members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors demanded that the government ban all those affiliated with TASS from entering the Capitol press galleries. The government demurred, citing fears that it could be construed as an attack on the freedom of the press. Time’s line on this particular debate, however, was clear: “If Tassmen are Russian intelligence agents and not bona fide correspondents, then they are not entitled to the privileges of the working press.”⁷³ It was surely hypocritical, Gottfried argued, to denounce TASS-affiliated journalists for their close working relationship with Soviet intelligence while simultaneously maintaining their own close working relationship with the CIA. But unlike Time, Gottfried argued, TASS “has no journalistic morals to uphold. And unlike us Tass does not fool anybody about what it is doing.”⁷⁴

His final argument was less defined than the others, but instead stemmed from an inherent unease with secret intelligence agencies, and in particular the idea that journalists should be mixed up with them: “CIA makes a great point that it does not want secret information from us; it just wants a lot of helpful, harmless matter for its useful general research. Of course the World Almanac contains a lot of useful information for a spy, but he is still a spy and CIA is still the top U.S. spy ring. As long as we pretend to be honest journalists we ought not to be mixed up in it. As journalists we have a unique obligation to be candid with the public.”⁷⁵

During the 1950s there were plenty of things that U.S. journalists were not candid about with the public, and to the initiated, Gottfried’s complaint was naïve. “Gott is living in a world of white knighthood and crystal purity (which I do not recognize) if he thinks we don’t do things for which we do not want glaring publicity,” responded Time Inc. Vice-President Allen Grover.⁷⁶ Indeed discretion, especially on matters of national security, was considered a mark of “responsible” journalism. Those journalists who were trusted enough by foreign policymakers to be included in exclusive (and exclusively white and male) off-the-record chats and background meetings relied upon their reputations as “responsible” men who would not publicize potentially damaging state secrets that they learned from these behind-closed-doors events.⁷⁷ As a result, many CIA activities, and especially its covert operations, went almost entirely unreported by 1950s U.S. foreign correspondents. James Reston, for example, acknowledged that the Times had left a great deal of information about the CIA out of the newspapers during this period, including “what we knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases.”⁷⁸ During the Iranian coup, the New York Times’s correspondent in Tehran was Kennett Love. Despite his close relationship with CIA officers on the ground, who among other things secured him an exclusive interview with the CIA-backed coup leader, General Fazlollah Zahedi, Love did not mention the Agency in any of his Times articles that reported the coup from Tehran.⁷⁹

Back at Time Inc., Allen Grover’s condescending dismissal of Gottfried’s complaint as desperately naïve was also likely informed by personal experience. “I’m prejudiced” on the matter, he admitted.⁸⁰ An ardent Cold Warrior, Grover was already an active participant in both overt and covert U.S. government efforts to defeat the Soviet Union. In January 1951, for example, Grover attended a meeting at the exclusive River Club in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The meeting was called by the head of CIA covert operations Frank Wisner. At the meeting Grover and a number of other leading journalists and statesmen were “‘cut-in’” on a secret CIA plot to establish a front organization named “The American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia” (ACLPR).⁸¹ Ostensibly, the committee was established as a source of guidance and funding for Russian émigrés from the Soviet Union. Covertly, the committee was funded and directed by the CIA. With this covert endowment from the U.S. government, the ACLPR worked to organize émigré communities from the Soviet Union, no easy task given the in-fighting among the many different communities that had fled the USSR. It also provided the CIA with a conduit for the sponsorship of anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Most famously, the committee established Radio Liberation (later known as Radio Liberty) in 1953, which broadcast “uncensored news and information” to the Soviet Union, working closely (though not always amicably) with its CIA-funded counterpart, Radio Free Europe, which broadcast to the Eastern bloc.⁸² Allen Grover sat on Radio Liberty’s Board of Trustees, while his boss at Time Inc., Henry Luce, was intimately involved with the creation of Radio Free Europe.

Grover’s support for the CIA’s arrangement with Time Inc. and the dim view he took of Gottfried’s idealistic opposition to such a secretive relationship was therefore unsurprising. As he wrote in a clearly irritated tone to his fellow managing editor John Shaw Billings: “My case for continuing to give CIA our edited foreign file is simply that it does help them, and I can’t see that it hurts us. It hasn’t yet, and I don’t see why it ever would, if everyone kept their mouths shut and didn’t beat their brains out over something that shows no sign of happening.”⁸³

In response to Gottfried’s protest, Time Inc. initially suspended the arrangement with the CIA. Grover, however, continued to advocate for cooperation, and reinstated the arrangement over Gottfried’s protests. Undeterred, Gottfried went to see Grover and told him that he remained uneasy about it. An exasperated Grover agreed to re-suspend the arrangement pending a final decision by Henry Luce.⁸⁴ As a renowned Cold Warrior and close associate with numerous senior CIA officials, Luce may have been expected to support continued cooperation with the Agency. But Gottfried’s memo helped him to see the ethical dilemma involved in such an arrangement. Still unsure, Luce asked his Deputy Editorial Director John Shaw Billings for his opinion.⁸⁵ In response, Billings polled the opinion of the corporation’s most senior editors. They agreed with Gott. “Although each has a little different argument,” Billings relayed to Luce, “in principle they all come back to this proposition: It is wrong for journalists to be working for an intelligence agency.” Billings concurred: “I believe that the editors are right, and should tell the CIA once and for all—NO.”⁸⁶

Billings’s intervention, along with the support for Gottfried’s position by a majority of Time and Life’s senior managing editors, settled the matter for Luce. In January 1952 he ended the practice of sharing the magazines’ foreign dispatches with the CIA. Grover was disgruntled: “This weighty opinion of my peers—or perhaps this opinion of my weighty peers—doesn’t surprise me at all,” he told Luce, barely concealing his sardonic tone. “Nor does it shake my conviction that it is a wrong-headed opinion.” Grudgingly, Grover was forced to accept Luce’s decision, though he petulantly washed his hands of the matter by refusing to convey the decision to the CIA. Taking charge, Luce met personally with the CIA’s Alfred Clark, who had taken over from James Hunt as Time Inc.’s contact-person at the Agency, and told him that the company was ending the arrangement.⁸⁷

This reveals a very different reason for why the arrangement came to an end than the one offered by Harrison Salisbury in his investigations at the New York Times. He argued that the arrangement simply wound down during the 1950s as the CIA began to professionalize. “The rationale for it had begun to vanish, the Agency had its own men in the field, they talked to correspondents in the foreign capitals, they had their own liaison with the embassies, got what they needed on the spot… it just died a natural death.”⁸⁸ These files, however, demonstrate that at Time Inc. at least, it was far from a natural death. The series of arrangements that the CIA had in place with Time Inc. stopped because editors and journalists protested them, and won. Internal newsroom dissent at Time Inc. ended the arrangement abruptly, not, as Salisbury tells it, the CIA’s gradually declining appetite for the intelligence it ascertained from U.S. journalists.

Saying “No” to the CIA

This opinion of Time’s senior editorial staff ended the practice of the magazine sharing its foreign dispatches with the CIA, but it did not end Time Inc.’s relationship with the Agency completely. Life continued to allow a CIA officer to visit its picture archive every week until the summer of 1969.⁸⁹ Over almost a twenty-year period, the CIA’s weekly visits to Life helped the Agency amass a vast picture archive of over 100,000 images. These images were “extremely valuable for a variety of intelligence purposes,” CIA Assistant Director James Andrews reassured Time Inc. President Roy E. Larsen.⁹⁰ In the final six-month period in which the CIA reviewed Life’s files, from November 1968 to May 1969, an especially tumultuous period of international history, the CIA borrowed material from 106 different stories. All were overseas stories. Most were about foreign dignitaries and protocol, but the CIA also borrowed photographic material that accompanied a number of stories about student uprisings in France, Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia. Exactly what the CIA used these photographs for is unclear, but we do know that the Agency took a particular interest in the international student movement in this period, and had recently begun investigating foreign influence upon U.S. domestic protestors under the infamous MHChaos program.⁹¹ In the summer of 1969, Time Inc. executive Paul Welch discontinued the relationship, ending the CIA’s weekly visits to their photo archives. Reviewing the decision taken in the early 1950s to end CIA access to its foreign dispatches, Welch was confused that the CIA’s access to Life’s picture archives was allowed to continue: “It seems to me the same arguments that were persuasive in that case hold for photographs. After all, photographers are journalists…. At the very least, [the CIA] roaming through our picture collection is wrong.”⁹²

Ultimately, Gottfried’s sense of moral unease with Time Inc.’s relationship with the CIA, shared by many of his fellow editors, won out. But it was a position that emerged as a result of extensive internal soul-searching and debate, soul-searching that we knew was occurring in other major newsrooms at the time.⁹³ What should the CIA’s proper relationship with the U.S. press be? What limitations should journalists and media organizations impose upon this relationship? And what ethical guidelines should be in place to help guide and potentially govern this relationship? In the 1950s, the answers to these questions were not clear. The CIA was new, but engaging in profoundly influential activities across the globe, and working closely with U.S. media organizations and journalists. The nature and extent of this relationship, and the unwritten code of practice that governed it, was still evolving.

What do these documents tell us about the relationship between U.S. journalists and the CIA during the Cold War specifically, and our understanding of this so-called era of “consensus” more generally? First, they provide clear documentary evidence that Time Inc. routinely allowed the CIA access to its reporters, their dispatches, and its photographic archive. Second, they suggest that the CIA’s involvement with the U.S. media during this period was more systematic than previously understood. We now know that at least two major U.S. media outlets, Time Inc. and the New York Times, maintained an almost identical arrangement with the CIA. Were there more newspapers and publishers that so directly colluded with the Agency? We also know that at Time Inc., at least, this arrangement was always controversial among some senior editorial staff. This corroborates Kathryn McGarr’s claim that journalists of this era often expressed misgivings about the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but they tended only to air these views in private. If there was a journalistic “consensus” on the Cold War in this period, it was certainly not governed by naïve patriotism, even at Time Inc., a newsroom well-known for its advocacy of Luce’s vision of the “American Century.” What it also shows, however, is that discretion on matters of national security, and especially the CIA, was common among journalists of this era. If Carl Bernstein or Harrison Salisbury had discovered these documents in the 1970s, they would have publicized them. The rise of the “right-to-know society” would come later.⁹⁴ Yet this discretion did not mean that their private misgivings were inconsequential. Clearly, in this instance, they mattered. Luce listened to the protests and ended CIA access to Time Inc. dispatches as a result. The unwritten code of ethics that governs journalists’ relationships with intelligence agencies, and the secrets they keep, evolved piecemeal during the Cold War, and as a consequence of many internal discussions, debates, and micro-negotiations. Indeed, as McGarr argues, “the circumstances that would enable the printing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 were years in the making.”⁹⁵

This points to the contingency of newsroom ethics, and their constantly negotiated character. The investigations of Congress and the U.S. media during the 1970s into the CIA’s relationship with U.S. journalism were very public examples of those ethical boundaries being contested and shaped. Before then, however, there were many quieter conversations within newsrooms and among editors over the extent to which journalists should cooperate with intelligence agencies like the CIA, and knowingly withhold government secrets from their readers. This iterative discursive process of negotiating these newsroom ethics into existence also points to their fragility. For if those ethics were negotiated into existence, then they also might be negotiated out of existence. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Intelligence Authorization Act, allowing the 1977 ban on the CIA’s use of journalists “to be waived with notification to Congress and presidential approval.”⁹⁶ A few years later, with the War on Terror in full swing, rumors began to circulate that CIA officers were operating in Afghanistan under journalistic cover.⁹⁷ More recently, a 2022 article in the Dutch press alleged that the Dutch intelligence services, a major U.S. ally in the War on Terror, routinely recruit journalists as intelligence sources.⁹⁸ Simultaneously, successive U.S. presidential administrations since 9/11 have put significant pressure on journalists and news organizations to censor stories about the U.S. intelligence community, and reveal their sources.⁹⁹ This has led to a renewed “war on leakers,” with the Espionage Act being re-deployed against national security whistleblowers who now face hefty prison sentences.¹⁰⁰

Nothing is inevitable about the idea that journalists should be independent from secret intelligence services. This idea was brought into being by journalists who shared their experiences and opinions, and occasionally voiced their dissent. If that idea is to remain powerful, then it must be continually defended.

Author Biography

Simon Willmetts is an associate professor at the University of Leiden in the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, in The Hague, Netherlands. His research focuses primarily on the impact of secrecy and secret intelligence agencies upon popular culture and societal debates.

*Funding support for this article was provided by the Leiden University FGGA Starter Grant (FGGA/2023-0043) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) Fellowship.

Footnotes