The Word from Washington
THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON The silent treatment Jeffrey Stein The common assumption here is that news travels outward from Washington and New York. News that originates elsewhere usually doesn't...
...I record it...
...There are pitfalls when a newspaper fights a tactical battle over such documents with the entire U.S...
...The job...
...It was not his job to believe it or not, de Onis said...
...The Oakland Tribune played it as front-page news...
...Bookends...
...J.S...
...Suspecting an imminent assassination attempt, say the sources, Mozambique security forces broke up the spy ring and expelled the American officials...
...But the State Department's initial claims have remained unchallenged in any systematic, documented way...
...It would be great if an editor said, 'Look, take a couple of days and pore over that stuff,' " Wood said, "but nobody did, and I didn't do it on my own...
...And into our hands...
...Washington officials said the whole event was orchestrated by Soviet and Cuban intelligence, and swiftly cut off U.S...
...No other organization we know of," he said, "has the input of police officials," both in the United States and overseas...
...And the Washington press corps sits there, notebooks in hand, writing it all down—just for the record...
...Penned by former Newsweek correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, journalists with close ties to Western intelligence agencies, The Spike is routinely considered a thinly disguised attack on the Institute for Policy Studies, which objected to the similarity of names...
...The Reagan Administration has suffered its first little scandal with the exit of a top Department of Energy (DOE) aide...
...If you are lucky enough to live in California, there's a pretty good chance you may have read the full story...
...Back at The Washington Post, where senior editors continue to ponder how they could have served up an unchecked story to the Pulitzer Prize committee, there are still no plans to analyze the State Department White Paper point by point and unmask it as a fraud...
...food aid to Maputo...
...And The Post, in particular, has implied, as Foreign Editor Karen de Young put it, that "people don't believe" the White Paper...
...The service, headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be subsidized by corporate subscribers...
...he actually read them, and found that the numbers of Soviet bloc arms just didn't add up the way the State Department said they did...
...June briefing lint casualty...
...But Dinges took the time to go beyond the Government's summary of the documents...
...The San Francisco Examiner placed it on Page 2. The Los Angeles Times put it at the top of its oped page, and The Contra Costa Times even ran its own editorial on it...
...iet Union and its allies have been orchestrating the Salvadoran left-wing insurgency, thus justifying American military intervention...
...Private eyes...
...In their daily coverage, the newspapers here have generally displayed skepticism toward the State Department's claims about El Salvador...
...News that originates elsewhere usually doesn't matter very much...
...Juan de Onis of The New York Times recalled his own skepticism about the State Department figures...
...Sure...
...IACP official Bob Angrisane told us it will be "an exchange of information for multinational corporations on how to set up security measures" abroad...
...The article, written late last March by John Dinges for the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, examines the State Department's famous "White Paper" on El Salvador and concludes that we've been had...
...Stone looked closely was the Government's account of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, fabricated by Lyndon Johnson and his Pentagon chiefs to gain a Congressional blank check for the Vietnam war...
...The problem, he noted, is that newspapers generally don't care to devote their time and resources to that kind of analysis...
...That the intelligence material could not be divulged without compromising sources, and so forth," de Onis told me...
...Unlike the press, the people at the State Department are doing a very good job...
...It played well in Peoria, Minneapolis, Des Moines, and dozens of other cities, but The Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware is as close as it ever got to Washington...
...But Reiser had been in trouble for a number of transgressions almost since the day he arrived at DOE...
...African intrigue...
...officials had been caught developing agents in the highest military circles, as well as collecting information on Prime Minister Samora Machel's travel plans and air logistics...
...Administration witnesses continue to trot up to Capitol Hill and hammer away for American military intervention in El Salvador, citing the White Paper's discredited data...
...The International Association of Chiefs of Police has set up a Center on Terrorism in the Washington, D.C., suburbs for the benefit of multinational corporations...
...Long ago, Peter Osnos was his intern...
...embassy employes last March, charging them with trying to "destabilize" the country...
...But it didn't make it at The Washington Post, or The Washington Star, or The New York Times, nor did any of these papers assign its reporters to an in-depth follow-up on discrepancies between the documents and the State Department's summaries of them...
...One of the packets of documents at which I.F...
...Stone made a specialty out of looking closely at Government documents for many years, and did a pretty good job of it...
...Did he ask State about them...
...After Congressional investigators got wind of Reiser's prior consulting contracts with DOE, however, the form was amended to list more than $100,000 from the contracts, we found...
...He had a point...
...If the Soviet Union and Cuba were pulling the strings behind the guerrilla movement, as Secretary Haig has charged, evidence of such control is not to be found in any of the captured documents," Dinges concluded...
...Avon Books has agreed to make key changes in the paperback edition of The Spike, a fictional work purporting to show links between the Soviet KGB and a prominent Washington left-wing think tank, which in the book is called "Institute for Progressive Reform...
...To assess "attitudes" among legislators and the public toward nuclear waste disposal in seventeen states...
...David Wood wrote about the White Paper for The Washington Star and agreed it needed more analysis...
...His early exit happened to coincide with our showing him his two different sets of financial disclosure forms...
...Paradoxically, John Dinges happens to be a non-staff part-time editor there...
...intelligence community arrayed against it...
...The White Paper, released February 23, is based on a ream of "captured documents" and indicates that the SovJeffrey Stein is The Progressive's contributing editor in Washington...
...On the other hand, I.F...
...IPS demanded successfully in early April that Avon Books make the name change...
...So we are still waiting for an important story—one that has been getting rave reviews elsewhere—to attract some media attention here...
...At The Washington Post, National Editor Peter Osnos told us, "I'm not crazy about Talmudic analysis of captured documents in Washington...
...From there it goes through a gauntlet of editors, and through the printing process, and out into the streets...
...Under the "Income" section in the first version, Reiser had listed "None...
...Eventually," Angrisane added, the center will have an index of "terrorist" personalities...
...Like that big lie, the El Salvador White Paper clearly was designed to forestall questions from Congress, the press, and the public about Administration policies...
...They're getting away with murder...
...And what did the Department's representative say...
...The Reagan Administration reacted with fury when Mozambique expelled a handful of U.S...
...Now comes word from reliable Mozambique sources, however, that the U.S...
...Armand C. "Rock" Reiser left DOE late in March with the excuse that he didn't like day-to-day management duties...
...According to Jon Stewart, an editor at Pacific News Service, the article was reprinted "more than any other story we've done in recent years...
...I asked if he believed that explanation...
...Reiser also confirmed to us in his office that he had hired DOE Secretary James Edward's son as an assistant for his consulting company, which snared $450,000 worth of DOE business between October and December 1980...
Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6
