From the Introduction Four decades before Edward Snowden's birth, a reporter working from a Press Building office plastered the War Department's most closely held secrets across the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times Herald , giving Hitler's generals a roadmap to America's war plans. President Franklin Roosevelt, like many of his successors who faced similar leaks, considered prosecuting the reporter and his publisher for espionage--and ultimately decided to do nothing. Long before the internet made the production of fake news child's play, offices in the Press Building served as conduits for a foreign government to plant rumors and lies in American newspapers. Years before he organized the Watergate burglary as part of a program of espionage and dirty tricks supporting the campaign to reelect President Richard Nixon, a CIA officer used a front company based in the Press Building to spy on the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. WikiLeaks wasn't the first anti-secrecy group to dump huge quantities of classified data into the public domain. In the late 1970s, comrades of a rogue CIA officer published a magazine from a Press Club office that revealed intelligence secrets with the explicit goal of shutting down American covert operations. From the Epilogue [T]he history of eight decades of espionage in the Press Building provides valuable insights into the secret connections between journalists and spies that drive events today. Advances in technology have changed the tactics, but many aspects of the game endure. Governments and individuals continue to use press credentials as shields for espionage. The practice of spilling secrets in the hope that disclosures will change policies, and perhaps alter the course of history, has become routine. "Fake news," once a topic of discussion only among professional propagandists, has entered the contemporary lexicon. British intelligence's organized campaign to spread rumors during World War II could be considered a precedent for Russia's twenty-first-century troll factories. Like their British predecessors, executives at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg craft lies, inject them into news feeds, and then track them as they fly around the globe, watching rumors mutate into more potent formulations or crumble into Twitter dust. And Britain's campaign of dirty tricks against American interventionist politicians has obvious echoes in activities undertaken by Russia and other entities in the 2016 elections. There are, however, critically important differences between covert attempts to influence the American public in 1940 and 1941 and twenty-first-century intervention in American politics. Britain's intervention in the American press was effective because most people trusted newspapers and radio broadcasts. The idea was to slip a stream of plausible but fake stories, along with accurate stories that were obtained using clandestine, illegal methods, into the river of real news. The last thing British Security Coordination or its collaborators in the United States wanted was to make readers and listeners believe their newspapers were irredeemably tainted by lies and propaganda. That would have rendered the British-inspired stories useless. This principle is at work today. For example, the entities behind the release of hacked emails during the 2016 American presidential election, as well as those responsible for disclosures like the Panama and Paradise papers leaks of confidential offshore banking data, relied on the mainstream news media to provide context and credibility. Attempts by governments to manipulate mainstream news media continue unabated. At the same time, the press -- and the public who rely on it -- are facing a different threat. Vladimir Putin's government, and public actors like Donald Trump who emulate its tactics, have moved beyond adulterating the news with calibrated doses of information derived from clandestine sources and carefully prepared disinformation. Rather than use the news as a vehicle to influence the public, they have another goal. This is to undermine confidence in the news media, to create so much cacophonous noise that people believe there is no such thing as truth, or that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and lies. The Russian government's success in shaping its citizens' thinking stems in large part from its domination of domestic television networks, and America's ability to resist a similar fate will depend on the strength of its independent news media. When a bogus story can bounce from a bedroom in Montenegro, Montevideo, or Mar-a-Lago to millions of smartphones in an instant, and elected officials remain silent in the face of torrents of lies spewing out of the White House, traditional journalism may be the only defense against autocracy and nihilism. It is neither possible nor desirable to return to a time when three television networks and a handful of publications controlled what Americans saw and read. It is, however, useful to recall the successes and failures of the press in insulating America from Soviet disinformation. A handful of active measures, such as false accounts of the origins and nature of AIDS, penetrated the United States. These were exceptions. The Soviets had little success in spreading fake news in the United States. That's why the KGB, like the CIA, focused fake-news initiatives on developing countries. Another thing that has changed since World War II and the early decades of the Cold War, at least in the United States, is the attitude of journalists and editors toward intelligence services. Partnering with British intelligence in 1940 and 1941 to battle isolationists and Nazi sympathizers seemed noble and natural to principled American reporters. The transition from fighting Nazis to confronting communists was, for many, a natural progression. The cachet of the CIA in the decades before the Vietnam War, combined with the inherent allure of sharing secrets, made cooperating with the agency irresistible to many journalists. When stories emerged of ABC television reporter John Scali's secret meetings with a KGB officer during the Cuban missile crisis, Scali was hailed as a patriot and a hero. A reporter who stumbled into circumstances similar to Scali's today would probably not be celebrated. Collaboration with the FBI, CIA, or any other intelligence service has come to be considered a mark of shame. The CIA has also changed. Responding to the backlash against post-Watergate revelations of deep ties between the CIA and journalists, the agency vowed to cut its ties to the news media. Arrangements that were routine during the early decades of the Cold War, a time when the CIA could count on cooperation from senior management of newspapers and television networks in placing its officers on their payrolls, are gone. The CIA has, however, left the door open to receiving information from reporters who volunteer their assistance, and acknowledges it would use journalism as a cover in an emergency. Moreover, the CIA has made no commitments to steer clear of reporters working for foreign news media. And intelligence services of other countries have not made comparable commitments. This ambiguity creates dangers for reporters who are falsely accused of being spies, and for the public who cannot be sure that the information they receive is free of government-sponsored propaganda. There are many reasons why arm's-length dealings between journalists and spies are best for both professions, and for society. One of them is the impossibility of geographically containing propaganda. In an era when the most obscure publications in distant countries are never more than a click away, and Facebook can spread news at the speed of light, "blow back," or contamination of US government decision-making from fake news disseminated overseas, is no longer a hypothetical possibility. It is a certainty. It also seems inevitable that governments and individuals will see more of their secrets spilled into cyberspace. Responses by governments and the news media to disclosures by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden resemble those Philip Agee and CovertAction provoked more than two decades ago. The Supreme Court's 1981 decision to uphold the State Department's right to revoke Agee's passport set a precedent that facilitated the revocation of Snowden's passport in 2013. Like CovertAction 's disclosures of the identities of CIA officers, disclosures by Snowden and WikiLeaks have raised questions about what constitutes the news media and the boundaries of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. And the activities of Snowden and WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, like those of Agee, raise the specter that individuals and organizations that present themselves as whistleblowers could be manipulated by intelligence services. Revelations of secret partnerships between reporters or their employers and intelligence services would only add to the public's distrust of the media. At a time when lives are ruled, and more than occasionally ruined, by frictionless electronic exchanges of information, it is important to remember that the most advanced devices will never supplant the oldest and most important form of communication, talking face-to-face. The National Press Club remains a place where reporters and sources meet to solve humanity's problems over a beer. That, ultimately, is the National Press Building's greatest legacy, and a sign that even in dark times decency may prevail. Excerpted from Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington by Steven T. Usdin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
