Presswatch: Deutch Treatment
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Deutch Treatment" by John Corry Deutch Treatment The CIA is an inviting target. It works in the dark, and does business with disreputable people. It attracts favorable comment in our best media...
...Silence fell then over most of the press...
...The speculation, however, was uninformed...
...As Time said, he "changed the center of gravity" in government...
...Mary McGrory said we still might be spending billions on "hapless hardware that the Russians would like to see us squander our money on...
...But the paradox, according to Time, anyway, was that even though he was Man of the Year, he was moribund politically...
...Deutch said that by passing on information from suspect sources, the CIA had created problems that would be felt "for years and years...
...On the other hand, when the Environmental Protection Agency told Congress in 1993 that second-hand smoke caused cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, the press was all over the story...
...Gingrich can do dumb things, but it takes a great stretch to see him as a liability to his party...
...Then it noted that in the election for a vacant House seat in California the previous week, Republican Tom Campbell, whom the Democrats had portrayed "as a stand-in for Newt," had won by a landslide...
...Deep in the thirty-three pages Time devoted to the Speaker and all his works—the Pope got only nineteen pages last year —a single short paragraph said that "attempts to demonize Gingrich are of limited efficacy to the Democrats...
...The Washington Times ran a piece on the study, and so did Investor's Business Daily, but that was about it...
...An agent will be off the payroll if he owns, say, a noxious waste dump...
...A shocked Ed Bradley said that Constant "scuttled the president's plan to return Aristide to power...
...People who pass on information about terrorist groups, drug syndicates, and foreign military establishments are often unsavory...
...He began his speeches with: "Do you want to continue what Newt Gingrich has been doing in Congress...
...In a stunning display of misplaced priorities, the press still refuses to abandon the anti-smoking crusade...
...His House subcommittee approved legislation that would require all buildings entered by ten or more people each day to be smoke free...
...Virtually every major news organization, including Time, had reported on the California campaign...
...Other publications then picked up the story...
...The CIA officials whom Deutch dismissed had no connection to the killing, and it was widely believed in the agency that Deutch had dismissed them for politically correct and media-sensitive reasons...
...Gingrich does get bruised, but that doesn't make him a liability...
...Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt came in to help...
...CIA laxity was inexcusable, and its reputation went into decline...
...More or less, it says that it could find none...
...The accompanying story, of course, was about "6o Minutes...
...Naturally, politicians enlisted, too...
...The guerrilla's wife, an American lawyer, made a bravura appearance on "6o Minutes," and was the subject of an extraordinarily romantic story in the Times...
...Time might have said more...
...Maureen Dowd wondered whether we spent "a trillion or so too many dollars winning the Cold War...
...48 February 1996 The American Spectator...
...Waxman, a media favorite, once summoned the CEOs of the tobacco companies to a hearing, and then had a little girl with asthma confront them...
...That the editorial writers—and prominent columnists — could speculate as they did indicated how little they had understood the realities of the Cold War, or even knew which side had won...
...military weapon systems or research was made as a result of tainted intelligence supplied by double agents...
...Editorial writers at the Washington Post and the New York Times, for example, have long regarded the agency as something like a necessary evil—useful at times, but otherwise a menace to democratic institutions...
...The picture on Time's cover was awful—stubble on Gingrich's face stood out likewire bristle—but the main story inside, by Nancy Gibbs and Karen Tumulty, was sophisticated and smart...
...The agency's use of paid informants is particularly contentious...
...Waxman, however, did make a tactical mistake...
...The failure had been overstated...
...It was pleasant to see him named Man of the Year...
...It expressed all the usual media caveats about Gingrich, of course—he is arrogant, driven, a little squirrelly, and soon—but it was actually knowledgeable about congressional procedure...
...The Congressional Research Service, nonpartisan and objective, has released the results of its 20-month study of the health risks from second-hand smoke...
...The Democratic candidate seldom mentioned Republican Campbell by name...
...According to Newsweek, one type of conduct that will no longer be tolerated is "environmental abuse...
...Shortly after becoming director, he dismissed two CIA officials and disciplined several others for failing to pass on to Congress information about a Guatemalan colonel on the agency payroll...
...At least nine agents were executed...
...As usual, though, the CIA, or at least the pre-Deutch CIA, is not doing well...
...She asked why they wanted to clog her poor lungs with smoke...
...The CIA is now more vulnerable to criticism than ever before, and our best media circles are making the most of it...
...It attempted to prove that the CIA, using Constant and his thugs as its tool, tried to wreck White House policy on Haiti...
...The agency is a bureaucracy, and its failures are bureaucratic in nature...
...Time magazine did the right thing, and chose Newt Gingrich as its Man of the Year...
...They have had it in for the agency ever since it fought the Cold War...
...It was because their "brand of politics is defeated, and won't be revived in their lifetimes...
...A few pages later, Gibbs and Tumulty said Gingrich had "become the greatest liability to the revolution he launched...
...Meanwhile, news stories suggested that by planting the double agents, the KGB had conned the Reagan and Bush administrations into unnecessarily spending billions...
...In the beginning, the agency brought the criticism on itself...
...The Post speculated about a KGB plot to force the United States to spend itself into bankruptcy...
...Members of our best media circles corroborate one another...
...When the Defense Department reported that it had been unable to find any decision that "in and of itself" had been shaped by tainted intelligence, that also passed almost unnoticed...
...It attracts favorable comment in our best media circles only when it announces that it will reform itself...
...As E. Bruce Hal-let, the president of Time, wrote in "To Our Readers," Gingrich had "become a liability to the party he helped transform...
...Or do you want to say 'no' to Newt Gingrich's agenda...
...editorial charged that the Pentagon had relied on "dubious information to make major weapons purchases...
...and if Deutch is influenced by what they write, and it seems that he is, it will be lost on him as well...
...When John Deutch, the new reform-minded CIA director, told Congress in October that the agency also had passed on intelligence reports to the White House that it suspected were from double agents, the agency's fall from grace seemed complete...
...What unites much of the coverage, as well as most of the commentary, though, is a distaste for the CIA...
...When the "6o Minutes" version was aired, some of them picked it up again...
...It was not just because government was no fun for them anymore...
...More important, it was unflinching in explaining why so many Democrats had jumped ship or retired...
...Constant, "6o Minutes" insisted, single-handedly turned back the troopship Harlan County...
...And for the most part, that was Newt's doing...
...Putnam's Sons...
...The idea that the KGB wanted America to spend more, not less, on weapons was preposterous...
...This should have been big news, but it wasn't...
...The CIA does not come off well...
...A "6o Minutes" piece in December—on Toto Constant, once a CIA informer in Haiti and now a jailbird in Maryland —was a model of disingenuousness...
...They did, and said it was pretty lousy...
...Nice people are unlikely to get close to Hezbollah, say, or the Cali cartel, or the Republican Guard in the Iraqi army...
...This would be enforced by fines of up to $5,000 a day...
...It revealed that Aldrich Ames had sold the names of CIA agents in the Soviet Union to the KGB...
...If the anti-Gingrich campaign had worked it would have been a big story, but it was hard to find even the results of the election in prominent newspapers the next day...
...The quality of the reporting on intelligence matters is not very high...
...The allegations on "6o Minutes" were fatuous...
...Morphing" ads turned Campbell into Gingrich...
...But he wasn't...
...The Times headline the first time around had said: "Leader of Haitian Paramilitary Group Was a CIA Informer...
...PR ES SWATCH by John Corry Deutch Treatment The CIA is an inviting target...
...A Times JOHN CORRY, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Even the terminology gets confused...
...It also indicated, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, that they were still clinging to a discredited idea: "that, as liberals wailed at the time, the famous Reagan-Weinberger defense build-up was `unnecessary.'") And, as it happened, the supposed CIA failure in passing on the reports was not what it had seemed...
...Indeed, according to "6o Minutes," it almost succeeded...
...The Nation had reported Constant's ties to the CIA—he was paid $700 a month—more than a year ago...
...Shortly after Deutch testified on the harm that would be felt for "years and years," the authoritative Defense News weekly interviewed a "host of current and former military intelligence officials" and concluded that "virtually no significant investment in U.S...
...The colonel had condoned the 1990 murder of an American in Guatemala, and the later killing of a Marxist guerrilla...
...He asked the Congressional Research Service and its professional analysts to check out the EPA report...
...Also, they were musty...
...he was gaining, and on election day he won by twenty-three percentage points...
...There seems to have been some wishful thinking by Time here...
...This made wonderful theater for the evening news...
...Recently he ordered the operations directorate of the CIA to rid itself of any assets whose conduct might embarrass the agency...
...The old order died, and a new one was born, and Gingrich was responsible...
...Deutch, after all, is a Clinton White 46 February 1996 • The American Spectator 800-447MO BUIL P. 0. Box 399, Morto © 1995 Morton Buil House appointee...
...Waxman has issued no comment on this, and probably no reporter has bothered to request one...
...It happily enlisted in the anti-smoking crusade...
...The media, however, see them in terms of moral collapse...
...Apparently, everyone hates him...
...He had taken a broken political system and fixed it...
...This was because he grates on people, and his poll ratings are down...
...Neither the Times nor the Post mentioned that finding...
...This is a point lost on the editorial writers...
...A year later a Times headline said: "Haitian Ex-Paramilitary Leader Confirms CIA Relationship...
...Tainted sources," for example, do not necessarily produce "tainted information," and an "agent" is not necessarily a "case officer," although in news stories the terms are used interchangeably...
...Generic" television ads said Gingrich was mean-spirited...
...On one occasion, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents fifteen to twenty feet high...
...Coincidentally, perhaps, Deutch has received favorable treatment in the press—admiring profiles in, among other places, Parade and the Washingtonian and Sunday New York Times magazines...
...The press reported that Campbell, once heavily favored, was losing ground...
...The newsmagazine was recycling old stories...
...It was supposed to be a test case...
...The network news shows ignored it, too...
...The most zealous was California Democrat Henry Waxman...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
