Legal Confrontations between Press, Ex-CIA Agents and the Government

Abstract

Journalists have better chance in secrecy disputes when one branch of government is on their side. During the past two decades the CIA and Defense Department have tried to discourage various authors from publishing sensitive information. In some cases the CIA quietly tried to persuade publishers to make certain changes, but in the 1970s, the CIA and Defense Department turned to the courts to obtain injunctions against newspaper, magazine -or book publishers to prevent them from publishing classified or restricted information. In two cases the government tried simply to invoke prior restraint: these were the cases of the Pentagon Papers' and U.S. v. Progressive, Inc.2 In three cases, U.S. v. Marchetti, Knopfv. Colby4 and Snepp v. U.S.S the government attempted to hold former CIA employees to the contracts they had signed authorizing by the CIA. present discussion will touch on the CIA's behindthe-scenes attempt to dissuade Random House from publishing Invisible Government,6 followed by the cases involving prior restraint and prepublication review and concluding with the restraint of the press during the Grenada invasion, the CIA's threats of prosecution of various news media under the Espionage Act in 1986, and most recently, press coverage of the Pentagon bribery scandal which broke in June 1988. Behind-the Scenes Persuasion In 1964 David Wise and Thomas Ross wrote Invisible Government, which dealt with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CI A's coups in Guatemala and Iran, and its attempt to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia. David Wise recently told Fresh Air interviewer Terry Gross about the CIA's attempt to prevent publication of his book: WISE: CIA tried to stop that book, or failing that, to make certain changes in that book-now, they didn't stop it, and didn't bring about any changes, but I think it was an abuse [of power] that they were considering . .. buying up all the copies to keep them off the market. But they went to Bennett Cerf, who was my publisher (Random House was the publisher of this book, and at that time, he was head of Random House), and they said, Will you sell us the first printing? And Bennett, who . . . had a great sense of humor, said, Yes, we will, but there's something I should tell you, he said in that nasal voice, We're going to go back to press and do another printing and another printing and another printing, so the CIA didn't buy up my book. GROSS: It would have been a heck of a way to make the bestseller list. WISE: I would have retired.7 Three years after publishing Invisible Government, Random House published Broken Seal,8 which revealed that two American cryptologists let the Japanese know that the United States was cracking their codes, and that the decoded messages pinpointing Pearl Harbor as the target for Japan's attack were ignored until it was too late. book's author Ladislas Farago was neither helped nor hindered by any government agency in writing the book,9 perhaps because the book's thesis actually shoots holes in the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor to maneuver us into World War II. Prior Restraint Pentagon Papers case began when former Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg became disillusioned with the Vietnam War he had once believed in. Without permission he photocopied a top secret Defense Department study of U.S. involvement in the war from 1945 to 1967 titled History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy and the Command and Control Study of the Tonkin Gulf Incident and gave them to the New York Times, Washington Post, Beacon Press and a few other newspapers. New York Times was the first paper to publish parts of the text of the two studies which came to be called The Pentagon Papers. Attorney General John Mitchell obtained a temporary restraining order from the U. …