Dan Schorr: The Secret Sharer
lgnatius, David
Dan Schorr: The Secret Sharer by David lgnatius It was a nasty business, from beginning to end, and people got hurt. Dan Schorr, a CBS reporter who wanted to fix a spotlight on the CIA,...
...He was getting nowhere with book publishers...
...The next day, Barth called back...
...I’ve got to think about that...
...But it was difficult to confirm that Schorr had made it available to Felker...
...He may in fact have helped Felker most...
...It appears to have been an extraordinary, multiple conflict of interest...
...Rosenfeld said he thought Bradlee was wrong, but that those were his orders...
...Dan Schorr was the immediate victim, but we were all likely to pay a price...
...And then, on Friday afternoon, Tufo left New York for the weekend...
...Rogovin parceled out the draft to the State Department and the CIA for comment, collected the comments, and passed them back to the committee...
...If Schorr made the Report public, he could be accused of flaunting the will of Congress...
...On Friday afternoon, Felker discussed the “one-shot” with Latham, hew York editorial director Shelly Zalaznick, the circulation director, and the distributor...
...They were angry: most of all at Dan Schorr, whose decision not to take credit in the Voice had given the whole arrangement a clandestine, guilty-handed aura...
...Any other journalist who wanted a Schorr-and that was just what Harry Rosenfeld, national editor of The Washington Post, did on the night of January 29, just after the House voted against publication...
...And until the Big Leak, this view seemed widely accepted...
...It was a reasonable discussion among reasonable men...
...It was already clear that Schorr was in trouble at CBS (he would soon be taken off the intelligence beat, then suspended altogether from reporting), and the trustees hoped that by separating the Reporters committee from Schorr, they could help protect Graham...
...The staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, who wanted to expose the intelligence blunders that had surrounded Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, ended up waiting nervously to be interviewed by House Ethics Committee investigators assigned to track down Schorr’s source...
...The Dan Schorrs would have a role, too: bringing before the public as much information as they could discover...
...But the document itself was being kept from the public by a decision of Congress...
...Stern, who felt that Schorr wanted “plausible deniability” on the record, made it as clear as he could “without being insulting” that he knew Schorr had given the Voice its copy...
...One young writer would recall that Felker had used a similar hurry-up style in offering him a job as an editor-saying in one machine-gun sentence: “You wanna job...
...Felker has to have the document tomorrow afternoon...
...If the Dan Schorrs ever got into trouble on First Amendment questions, the Reporters Committee would be there to defend them...
...The discussion was civilized...
...Later that day, Felker agreed...
...Would its publication add to the perception abroad that journalists were running the country, and thus hamper our diplomatic relations, as Kissinger claimed...
...And why not...
...The next month, Felker published another Schorr profile, which Schorr also disliked, in New York...
...In mid-January the first draft was submitted to the executive branch...
...The two met at a reception at the Shoreham Hotel given by visiting Israeli Prime Minister Rabin...
...Finally, and most important, Tufo was a friend of Clay Felker, editor of New York and The Village Voice...
...He had done what he felt he had to and he was paying the price...
...it would soon be on the way to the printer...
...Dan Schorr, more than most, should have learned to be thick-skinned about such criticism as he had received in Felker’s publications...
...Stern himself would later explain that he had first learned about the story almost by accident and that he felt he had a responsibility to publish the information he had accumulated...
...Meanwhile, as the journalists were behaving like a league of frightened men, others in Washington moved to take what advantage they could from the disclosure...
...But there had been discussion with Schorr about the publication of a special 64-page “one-shot”-a copy of the Report which could be sold with the Voice and sold separately, too...
...But Schorr’s situation had so many ambiguities...
...Samuel Stratton, in the meantime, introduced a successful resolution to investigate whether Dan Schorr should be held in contempt of Congress...
...This explanation-it could not be confirmed-would place Schorr’s behavior in a more favorable light...
...Later, Schorr came across Colonel Fletcher Prouty, a man whose experience with the CIA dated from the early 1960s, and put him on the CBS Morning News, where he inaccurately named Alexander Butterfield as a CIA contact in the White House...
...The delicate irony was that Schorr’s personal act of conscience seemed to have gone in vain...
...Yet Schorr was, by most accounts, a dedicated and highly competent reporter...
...Felker decided that there had already been so many price rises (the newsstand price had increased from 25 to 35 to 50 cents during Felker’s short tenure) that regular Voice readers would get angry...
...Written in non-bureaucratic prose (one person who read the first draft cded it “anecdotal, one-sided, over-dramatized and childishly written”), the report chronicled every devious move of the present Secretary of State, and every intelligence-gathering failure of the CIA...
...Schorr could rightly claim that he had only been doing his job...
...Stern had broken the unwritten rule in this case...
...Key committee staffers began to see themselves locked in a struggle with one manSecretary of State Henry Kissingerwho to them personified the antidemocratic impulse that had gotten America into so much trouble in the past decade...
...Felker, it seemed, had forbidden partitions, on the theory that people performed better with other people looking over their shoulders...
...The Homestead conferees met for round-table discussions of three case studies, but the most interesting was the first...
...Or would it instead encourage an invigorating debate on the role of intelligence in a democracy...
...The Report would come out , in abbreviated form, as a 24-page insert in the regular edition of the Voice, folded into the usual jumble of Voice ads for massage parlors and dirty movies...
...On Sunday morning, on his way to get a cup of coffee, Latham met Shelly Zalaznick, who was on his way to the Sterling Graphics office...
...As Schorr was leaving the party, Rosenfeld approached him...
...Schorr explained to Tufo that he wanted to have the report published quickly, with an introduction...
...He told Barth that he felt some responsibility to make the Report available, but that he would do it only if he could find some way where there would be no profit for him...
...We would want to talk about this with a partner,” Dystel said...
...Pike was suddenly the martyr, a role he rather liked aCter so many months of appearing as a combative bully...
...But (as Schorr could have told him) all the headlines had already been printed...
...In this sense, something had changed...
...But now, apparently, recalling past indignitiesand thinking more about the form of publication than about contenthe was asking for anonymity...
...He was apparently afraid that such a relationship would disturb CBS...
...He thought by this point that he had the only copy, but he was uncertain enough to warn Tufo not to contact Quadrangle, The New York Times’ book company, on the chance that Crewdson did have a copy which he might then release...
...What was the Report doing in the Voice...
...It was a comic opera finale to the great era of investigation that had begun in 1973...
...he asked...
...The secretary would later have a bitter argument with her husband about whether she did the right thing in helping transmit the document...
...Stern protested this favoritism to the committee staff...
...Clay had a crush on Aaron,” obseded Sally Quinn, who had reason to dislike them both after Latham wrote a savage profile of Quinn for New York...
...Stern is one of the few reporters who doesn’t have a vindictive streak,” Leslie Gelb of the Times observed...
...Was a decision of Congress to withhold a document binding on a reporter who had prior access to it...
...The committee had no use for Kissinger’s arguments about stability and prestige...
...Now Congress was attacking the Congress, the press attacking the press, the Administration (and those charged with committing illegal acts) gloating, ever so slightly, from the sidelines...
...By Tuesday, the Voice’s presses were rolling...
...As always, the House was an accurate barometer of public sentiment, and as the January 29 House vote on final publication of the report approached, the “safe” political position for an incumbent facing reelection appeared to be against disclosure...
...Doesn’t the Times have a copy...
...Was he even the source...
...A League of Frightened Men After making some calls, Stern contacted Dan Schorr, and there ensued an extraordinary cat-and-mouse conversation, weaving back and forth, on and off the record...
...On Friday, January 23, the committee voted 9 to 4 to approve the report for publication...
...Schorr, meanwhile, continued to report on the committee, and in the days immediately after the vote, he must have felt somewhat peculiar, making his rounds in the Rayburn Building...
...The Report would be inserted in The ViZZuge Voice-that much was fairly clear...
...You never got Kay Graham’ ” Latham went home to 72nd Street to read his copy...
...Word came back that the Times wanted the Report but would insist on using “editorial discretion” in choosing what to print...
...Women’s Wear Daily called him a “walker”-their gossip term for someone who escorts prominent socialites about town...
...Should it make any difference to anyone how he obtained his documents...
...His problems were, for the most part, created by his friends-other journalists, other liberals, others who shared his anger at the CIA...
...It was an appalling situation, and Schorr wanted to get the document out, with an introduction, setting forth the background of Pike’s investigation and explaining the national security issues implicit in the text...
...President Ford offered “the full resources and services of the executive branch” to track down the person who had leaked the document to Schorr...
...The government should protect only the secrets whose exposure would truly jeopardize national security-the sailing orders of the Polaris fleet, for example...
...In its second draft, the committee made some of the requested changes...
...Conversations with people who had knowledge of the matter led Stern to suspect strongly that Schorr was the source...
...As the papers made their way across the spider web of the journalistic/social elite of Washington and New York, a little of Dan Schorr stuck at each point of contact, and finally he was caught...
...in which the lassitude of the Congress had, for a moment, been dispelled-seemed to have come to an end...
...Barth said he would think about it...
...He had been looking for the major news story, the new scandal, the scoop, which the Voice could banner...
...But I do have one firm offer,” he said, “Clay Felker...
...who had benefited...
...Old friendships exploded that Thursday, as reporters began telling tales on other reportersto reporters covering the story of the story...
...Latham stayed up all night Sunday writing the introduction...
...CIA Director William Colby led a group of prominen t government officials...
...It was an act of conscience-by one of the country's most dedicated broadcast journalists-but it suggested the limits of the press's role...
...But in this case, Felker had a special reason for hustling a potential contributor...
...Pincus had questioned Schorr’s professionalism, and that, to Schorr, was unforgivable...
...Where there were grey areas, editors should intervene and make the hard decision...
...But Pike persisted...
...Schorr, with Barth’s help, had made his decision...
...This kind of reporting on the CIA had led Colby’s predecessor, Richard Helms, normally a gentleman, to call Schorr a “cocksucker” at a press conference...
...The members and staff had been guarded...
...But several sources have confirmed that there were such discussions, and that CBS executives decided against any Popular Library involvement...
...The Reporters Committee Closed out of in-house publication, Schorr had to make other arrangements...
...Pat O’Connor, the editor of Popular Library, has refused to comment on whether such a quickie was ever discussed, reflecting an order from CBS management not to discuss any aspect of the Schorr affair with reporters...
...This reaction was especially unfortunate in the case of the Pike Report, which provided citizens with genuinely useful information...
...Safire, still carrying the special resentment ’of Henry Kissinger peculiar to those who worked in the Nixon White House, said that he was doing a piece on Kissinger’s dealings with the Kurdish rebels in Iraq...
...Latham explained his worry that there was not much sensational news in the Report...
...It is conceivable that whoever had given Schorr the Report in the first place learned that he was about to release it and insisted that Schorr provide a buffer of protection by not identifying himself in any way with publica-‘ tion...
...Instead, it was given to the committee members for final approval...
...It took courage for him to break the usual taboo on writing about other reporters...
...It was, instead, an attempt to analyze the consistently poor performance of our intelligence network abroad...
...Such arguments were undemocratic, pure and simple...
...On Thursday, February 12, Dan Schorr issued a statement admitting he had provided the Report to the Voice and denouncing the Reporters Committee for “leaks...
...Apparently the memo had been purloined-carried out in a pocketbook-by somebody on the committee staff who might have wanted to make political trouble for Senator Jackson...
...He called a friend on the Pike Committee, who confirmed that most of the findingsperhaps 70 per cent-had indeed already been reported...
...With the Pike Papers stuffed inside, it would probably sell out nationwide, attracting notoriety and new revenues for the financially ailing paper...
...In truth the woman was just a CIA “detailee,” working in the White House but paid by another agency for cosmetic budgetary reasons...
...We were all bureaucrats now, more concerned about the threat of leaks than with understanding the vital information they conveyed...
...But the offer is valid only until tomorrow...
...Field would later explain, “You’re dealing here with propaganda experts, whose stock-in-trade is to turn issues to their advantage...
...Led by combative Chairman Otis Pike, the House Intelligence Committee disdained “balance...
...William Safire (among others) called to congratulate him...
...John Marks, a former foreign service officer who had gone to work for the leftish Center for National Security Studies exposing CIA misdeeds, had learned that Schorr wanted to release the Report...
...Up to this point, reporters had been unable to wheedle much of the report out of the Pike committee...
...But the committee, or at least one of its trustees, gave a more active sort of help: Fred Graham supplied Schorr with the name of a New York lawyer who knew the publishing world...
...By most accounts, Tufo was a charming, intelligent man, who had left his Midwestern background far behind and made it big in New York, winning the trust of the New York business and political elite...
...Here he had embarked on a First Amendment crusade, but the one fm offer of publication had come from a publication he had reason to dislike...
...The discussion was inconclusive...
...What would CBS do...
...national security from the CIA...
...It’s just too awful...
...What was more, he had only 24 hours to make a decision...
...The congressional committees would soon be examining this material and drafting new legislation to prevent future abuses...
...The Cutting Edge In the months after the conference at The Homestead, the House Intelli- gence Committee became the cutting edge of the drive to expose intelligence agency abuses...
...For it is a truly dismal chain of events, in which each participant seems to be wearing blinders, hurting those closest to him as he stumbles forward...
...He called his friend Alan Barth, a former editorial writer at the Post and a sensitive student of First Amendment issues...
...in which the scourge of CIA dirty tricks had, for a moment, been lifted...
...But the other CBS publishing subsidiary, Popular Library, could-in fact, it would have been able to produce a Pike Report quickie in about ten days...
...For when he let an old resentment against Clay Felker and The ViZZage Voice overrule his proper instinct to release the Pike Report openly, he plunged himself into the very world of secrecy, backstabbing, and betrayal which he had spent his career exposing...
...Laurence Stern of The Washington Post knew that there was a story here...
...Although he was one of the most respected reporters on intelligence matters, Stern had been having difficulty establishing good sources on the House committee beat-so much so that he asked George Lardner, another Post reporter who had been covering intelligence, to help him make contacts...
...He would see that the Report got out...
...Would the trustees agree to accept the money and vouch for Schorr’s state ment in the introduction of the book that he was turning over the money to charity...
...Not only was the report supposedly still secret, but the memo in question seemed to have been smuggled out of a room at the CIA headquarters in Langley, where Pike’s staff had been allowed to read and make notes on documents undisturbed...
...A year ago, in March 1975, when the game was still fun, many of the principals spent a weekend together at The Homestead in Virginia, attending one of those pleasant, foundationsponsored conferences where members of the elite meet to discuss common problems...
...In the hours after Schorr’s first discussion with Fred Graham, the telephones began ringing in a number of newspaper, legal, and foundation offices, as the small net of people with an intense interest in intelligence affairs began to hear that Dan Schorr wanted to unload the hot document...
...The necessary demolition had been accomplished, and the country was like a wounded animal, leaderless and confused...
...CBS, which would later suspend Schorr, had not protested when he used the Report to scoop the other networks and win prestige for the corporation...
...Later that year, chasing down a tip about CIA infiltration of the White House, Schorr would persistently question a National Security Council secretary who was at home recovering from major surgery, complicated by hepatitis, until she admitted that she worked for the CIA...
...Tufo was a personal friend of Fred Graham (they had known each other for ten years) and Graham’s personal lawyer...
...Here were all the embarrassing moments: Tet, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Iraq, Cyprus, and Italy...
...In the days after the Report was published there was not a single major analysis of its contents...
...The next day, Wednesday, February 11, the Voice was heading toward newsstands across the country...
...there were only two houses specializing in quickie paperbacks, Bantam and Dell...
...On Tuesday, February 3, Schorr’s suspicion that he was the sole possessor was confirmed by a call from William Safire, The New Yovk Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter...
...Field may indeed have aided Schorr’s attempts to get the report...
...Schorr’s aggressiveness intimidated even his own colleagues, who sometimes grumbled that CBS reporters had three competitors: NBC, ABC, and Dan Schorr...
...there was little real disagreement...
...Kissinger believed Pike and the others were reckless madmen: he saw them undermining necessary institutions and, perhaps worse, fostering the illusion that a superpower could ever conduct its diplomacy by pristine moral rules...
...Felker had chosen Aaron Latham to write the introduction...
...Holt, Rinehart produces hardback books and couldn’t possibly do a quickie paperback of the sort Schorr wanted...
...But he would do no more...
...The report was going to come out...
...He turned first to his colleague Fred Graham, CBS’s Supreme Court reporter...
...The situation began to get vicious...
...As if to stress how seriously the network took First Amendment rights, CBS President Arthur Taylor, warning of “cumulative erosion of press freedom,” had pledged in May 1975 to help organize a $Zmillion fund-raising drive for the committee...
...Schorr must have begun to wonder whether he ws, in fact, the sole possessor of the Pike Report and begun wondering, too, whether he had a responsibility to see that somebody published it in full...
...Those noble sentiments faded in February 1976, as after three bruising years, Washington's great experiment in democracy began to seem too dangerous, too raucous, too free...
...So, in going to the Reporters Committee, Schorr had prudently chosen the boss’s favorite charity...
...Felker wanted to get his hands on the Report immediately, so he dispatched his secretary, who took the air shuttle down and back, picking up the document from Schorr’s housekeeper...
...The obvious course of action was to get a CBS subsidiary to publish it, so that any monetary gain or notoriety would go to CBS, much as it already had from Schorr’s use of the Report on CBS News, The question of what discussions Schorr had about this with CBS is a touchy subject...
...These people surrounded Schorr as soon as it was known that he had the hot item, wanting to make themselves useful, offering help, reinforce ment-and then calling up other friends to chat about the matter...
...But in the days after the January 29 vote, the Times was mum...
...We have to get used to the idea that we’ll never be as effective as the Soviets,” the staff member said...
...Latham said he would divulge the name if Woodward would tell him who “Deep Throat” was...
...But those who knew Stern found this implausible...
...And the Congress, which now, facing reelection, wanted to disown the Report, had commissioned it in the first place in a flush of democratic sentiment, believing that the anarchic process of debate in an open society, with Congress always at the throat of the executive, and the press always at the throats of both, was preferable to the imperial presidency, the cult of intelligence, and the rest...
...Schon’s Mistake Schorr must have felt wretched...
...He explained the situation to Graham: he wanted the Report published as a quickie paperback, the way the Pentagon Papers were, with an introduction...
...Under Felker’s tutelage, he had become a master of the “reconstruction” story -recreating in loving detail the events of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, for example, and two years later, recreating in similar fashion Ford’s firing of James Schlesinger and William Colby...
...Schorr groaned: “Oh, no...
...The irony was not lost on the staff, several of whom jocularly told Schorr that the Report would never come out unless Dan Schorr released it...
...Such an ultimatum was typical of Felker, dubbed “New York’s Budding Beaverbrook” by [MORE] in 1975...
...It was suppressed-therefore a hot property...
...Borosage then called his friend Chuck Morgan, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, and said that although Schorr apparently didn’t want the Center’s help (the group was too much identified as an antagonist of the CIA), he might be willing to release the Report through the ACLU...
...Should he, or his editors, have to consider the effects of publication on the prestige and effectiveness of the intelligence agencies...
...It described a hypothetical situation: Harlow Mason, an investigative reporter for The Federal City News, has come into possession of two documents about the CIA “which he believes highly newsworthy...
...For if there was one publisher Dan Schorr would not have wanted to entrust with the Pike Report, introduced by Dan Schorr, it was Clay Felker...
...Stern’s motivations for writing the story bear examination...
...In May 1975 Felker had published a very critical piece on Schorr in the Voice, written by Ann Pincus, a Washington free-lance and the wife of Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus...
...For it seems clear, with hindsight, that open publication, with Dan Schorr’s by-line on the introduction, would have spared Schorr most of his later problems with Congress, the Reporters Committee, and CBS...
...CIA Director Colby was, at the time, completing his internal investigation of CIA abuses...
...But at the outset, he was probably just doing a favor for his friend Fred Graham...
...When a desperate Spiro Agnew threatened, in the final days of his Vice Presidency, to subpoena some of Graham’s notes on the Agnew case, Tufo immediately flew to Washington...
...One of the trustees, Fred Graham, was deeply involved in the publication arrangement...
...Schorr himself hadn’t purloined any documents, and he had a good scoop, an exclusive...
...It was suddenly gangland war among the journalists, friends, and friends of friends who had hovered around the project...
...Schorr called Tufo Friday morning and told him that Felker could have the Report but would have to write his own introduction...
...The laws of supply and demand, not the Report’s contents, made the document valuable...
...Fred Graham of CBS was there, along with the other trustees of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press...
...The Democratic Congress, which only months before had been loudly asserting its independence of the White House, was now refusing, on the advice of the President, to sign its name to the report of one of its own committeesand then instructing another committee to investigate the first...
...Latham was a careful reporter, who had made a name at The Washington Post before coming to New York...
...That same morning, The New York Times ran Crewdson’s comprehensive account of the highlights of the Report...
...Harry Rosenfeld could confirm that Schorr had had a copy...
...His f i t national issue of The Village Voice, planned for months, was coming out the next week...
...One was John Crewdson of The New York Times...
...But Dan Schorr-ever the reporter-was still battering away...
...Operation Swordfish When Latham walked into the New York offices that Friday afternoon, Felker took him aside...
...Dan Schorr was there too, and he, perhaps more than any of the other journalists, symbolized the determination to press the First Amendment to its limits...
...As one committee staff member observed in the waning days of the investigation, what the Kissingers failed to grasp was that an open, democratic society could never use clandestine operations as effectively as a closed, totalitarian one...
...Schorr offered to write a series of articles himself...
...The Reporters Committee, for all its recriminations, had done no more than what it had always done in the past-help reporters who believed that the First Amendment right to publish outweighed any other consideration...
...Meticulous in his writing and attentive to his editor’s advice, Latham was Clay Felker’s star...
...There was no great debate over intelligence...
...The Big Leak In several weeks the hunt for the source of Schorr’s copy would begin...
...He hadn’t, and he would pay a severe price...
...Tufo called Schorr Thursday night, February 5, with an important message...
...Some basic facts caq be inferred: Publication by the principal CBSowned publishing house, Holt, Rinehart, &Winston, was impossible...
...He had believed that release of the document would stimulate public discussion of the role of intelligence in a democracy, but he was in error...
...The other was Dan Schorr of CBS...
...But that afternoon Latham had to copy the entire 338-page draft in the crowded New York office...
...The most emphatic CIA defender was, in-fact, the Secretary of State...
...Somebody else would have to write the introduction...
...There was, in the meantime, a pained silence from most of Schorr's colleagues (Tom Wicker was a notable exception...
...Ever since the assassination of CIA agent Richard Welch, following publication of his name by the American magazine Counter-Spy , observers could not help but feel uneasy about the effects of press disclosure of intelligence information...
...The CIA, they reasoned, would not lack defenders in high places...
...Since all congressional copies of the Report had been impounded, any committee staffer who wanted to see what he had written would have had to ask Dan Schorr...
...But that was what life in a democracy was all about, wasn’t it...
...There was some discussion about raising the price for this issue...
...Rosenfeld’s keen interest might have been motivated by a fear that The New York Times had a full copy and was working up analysis stories of its own...
...If informa tion came into his pOSsession, his only responsibility, his only choice, was to make it available to the public...
...in the silence, one could sense a dawning recognition that although Dan Schorr had done no more than what a good reporter is supposed to do-get out the facts-he had misjudged the public temper...
...There were some jokes about the risks everybody was taking...
...Schorr made a Xerox copy of the report before returning it, doubtlessly hoping to stretch out his scoop, doing a story a day until the report was actually published...
...and a record of Kissinger’s attempts to suppress the truth about them...
...It was one of those bizarre situations, all too frequent of late, where despite the wide dissemination of a set of facts, formal admission of them-in the form of a book, sitting on library shelves where it could be thumbed through by any citizen-was deemed harmful to the national interest...
...The question of whom Tufo was representing would later cause enormous confusion...
...Ironies Gross and Delicate As Larry Stern would later observe, “Evelyn Waugh, at his bitterest, could not have written a more depressing story...
...There was also some editing to be done, since even in agate type, the Report would never fit into the 24page format...
...Unlike the first, however, this one was not sent out for executive branch comments...
...Meanwhile, the report was being typeset, with the slug “Swordfish,” and proofread...
...Trustee Jack Nelson told a reporter that Schorr was “just a no-good shit trying to transfer blame to the committee in case his source gets burned...
...It was a reporters’ thing, Schorr said, and he had already contacted the Reporters Committee...
...The goal of the Report was, ultimately, to strengthen the CIA, not weaken it, and it provided the kind of facts about intelligence that informed citizens do need to know...
...The Reporters Committee trustees were feeling more chagrined than they needed to, and their sense of being caught unwittingly in the act of something sly, involving money, led them to suppress much of the true story of their dealings with Schorr...
...This was not the Pentagon Papers and he was not Daniel Ellsberg, and this was not e"en the same country, anymore, that had needed the press to batter its corrupted institutions, force a lying President out of office, strip the cover of...
...But there was informed speculation that the actual leaker was not Field, but the administrative assistant of one of the committee members...
...Schorr was still thinking like a journalist...
...Schorr did not want to make the decision alone...
...Tufo called Oscar Dystel at Bantam and told him that the Report had “gone elsewhere...
...I’d like to get a copy of that report,” Rosenfeld said...
...Dystel returned the call the next day, and Tufo outlined the proposal-in imprecise terms, but clear enough that Dystel understood what was being offered...
...Would Schorr be willing to let Safire have the chapter on the Kurds...
...Tufo did not say which of Felker’s publications was the potential publisher (although that could easily have been inferred: it would be impossible for a magazine like New York to publish the entire report in one issue...
...The counterculture magazine, Crawdaddy, assuming that Field must be right (after all...
...Created in 1970, when the Mitchell Justice Department was attempting to subpoena reporters’ notes and jail those who refused to supply them, the committee had survived into the new, post-Nixon era, when reporters were triumphant culture heroes and government officials were in ragged retreat...
...Schorr could be aggressive, almost beyond reason, in pursuing stories about intelligence abuses...
...no spontaneous court of public opinion...
...Schorr, who knew that most of the big stories in the Report were already out, asked Rosenfeld why he wanted it...
...It is a story in which everyone looks bad-though, as it turns out, Dan Schorr better than most-and it left many people with a queasy sense that the game-whatever game it was that the press, the Con-gress, and the Administration had been playing since Nixon left the White House-was over...
...Schorr insisted on the record that he was not the source, but explained off the record some of what had happened...
...But if anything, it increased the sex appeal of Felker’s big scoop...
...He reasoned that “when the press gets involved in clammy affairs, we’ve got to be ready to report on them” The recriminations were already beginning at the Reporters Committee, whose trustees were seeing the project to which they had devoted hundreds of hours of spare time ensnarled in controversy over exchange of a classified document for money...
...Having already decided against piecemeal publication, Schorr turned the offer down...
...A lawyer himself, Graham refused repeatedly to discuss any facet of the story with reporters-saying that he was “deferring to the wishes of the lawyers” and that “we’ve got to protect ourselves now...
...In addition to Graham, Walter Cronkite was on the steering committee...
...In a preface to a book published later, an observer wrote that the assembled journalists, jurists, lawyers, and government Officials “struggled with the most troublesome First Amendment problems, argued, tested the high ground of principle against the erosive force of real world legal and journalistic practice, agreed to disagree, sometimes even agreed, and learned more about each other than most had ever known before...
...Once I realized that not everyone had it, I knew we were on to something,” Latham would recall...
...But there was another reason for their anxiety and obfuscation...
...But the CIA insists privately that publication of the documents would do “irreparable damage to national security...
...David Ignatius is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...their job was to attack, attack, attack...
...The story of how it all happened, reconstructed from scores of interviews, is a narrative of small details, of conflicts of interest among friends, of elite backstabbing, of ill-considered judgments, of ironies gross and delicate...
...And where was Dan Schorr’s introduction...
...and when Kissinger tried to withhold information from the committee on grounds that it would cause grave harm, Pike threatened to cite him for contempt...
...The exact form which publication would take was still in question...
...It would later be said that this windmill telephoning had made identification of Schorr as the Voice’s source inevitable...
...Several of the trustees believed that the group was to play a merely “passive” rolereceiving, and publicly acknowledging, a contribution from Schorr in the amount he received from a publisher...
...And over the weekend of January 23-24, two reporters did get access to the second draft...
...It] believes that every major challenge to press freedom requires an early and effective response on the part of the working press...
...And, to spare himself personal embarrassment, Schorr would ask that his role in the transaction be kept quiet...
...Something had changed in Washington...
...Tufo was also a director of the parent company whichowned the two publications...
...Tufo did not mention his business relationship and friendship with Felker, either...
...The House Intelligence Committee had been established to investigate the illegal, covert operations of the CIA...
...We have to be willing to take the risk of less than perfect intelligence...
...Indeed, it would be said that when Schorr admitted giving the report to The Village Voice, he came dangerously close to pinpointing his source, since it was widely known that Schorr and Field had been friendly since the Watergate days, when Field worked for Senator Lowell Weicker and Schorr covered the Watergate Committee...
...He gave Latham the Report and asked him to make three copies: one for Felker, one for the typesetters, one for Latham to use in preparing his introduction...
...Felker hypothesized his own arrest: “I’m going to go down screaming-‘You never got the higher-ups...
...That much was obvious...
...Meaning to be helpful, Morgan then called his friend Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times and told him that Schorr had the Report...
...Steering Committee member Ken Auchincloss, managing editor of Newsweek, resigned from the committee in protest...
...But the exclusive was short-lived...
...In a sense, he had no choice: he would give Felker the Pike Report, fulfdling the promise he had made to himself...
...Angry at the discle sure, and the apparent larceny, the Administration increased its efforts to have the Pike report withheld from publication until it could be fully reviewed by the White House...
...Pike Committee staff members, however, would be despondent when they read the Voice edition and saw the cuts, since they felt that much of their case was developed in the careful documentation of the footnotes...
...immediately assigned a reporter to expose the conspiracy...
...On January 28, the day before the vote, Schorr reported the House situation on the Cronkite show, displaying his copy of the Report and saying that the document he was holding in his hand might never be published...
...Since publication was a First Amendment fight, he wanted any proceeds of the book sale to go to the Reporters Committee, where they could be used to help other reporters...
...Leaks seemed to be killing CIA agents-and there developed a subtle shift of public opinion on the disclosure question...
...But top staff members, including Searle Field, had been unwilling to discuss the Report, even on “background...
...Schorr’s Decision to Publish Dan Schorr was in a bind...
...Rosenfeld said that the Post had experts who could go over the document in detail and analyze its findings...
...Just what that arrangement was is still a matter of dispute within the Reporters Committee...
...Stem had just returned to the Post after a leave of absence...
...Moreover, the Voice had been critical of CBS in recent months (so much so that CBS people were joking that Felker had a secret alliance with NBC), and Schorr was enough of a company man to be offended by that, too...
...In addition, about two thirds of the footnotes in Part I1 were cut-with the editors trying to preserve only those quoting classified CIA or State Department cables...
...In this sudden change of plans, Schorr made his only major mistake in the Pike Papers affair...
...Rightly or wrongly, reporters usually avoid naming sources-their own or other people’s...
...Apparently not, Safire said...
...As a brochure said of the committee’s work: “The Reporters Committee Fights Back...
...Think about it,” Tufo said...
...Now two journalistic rivals seemed to have their own copies...
...The Times might be able to get a copy, Morgan said, if it were willing to print the full text...
...The committee staff drafted its final report in January, and it reflected the streetfighter style...
...The next day the House voted 246 to 124 to suppress the Pike Report pending White House clearance...
...In his spare time, Graham served as a trustee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Washington group specializing in First Amendment problems...
...I’ll pay’ya more...
...The committee was also something of a pet project of CBS...
...He choose to open with one especially juicy item-a memorandum detailing Senator Henry Jackson’s efforts to protect former CIA Director Richard Helms from a Senate Foreign Rela- tions Committee hearing into possible perjury by Helms in earlier testimony on the CIA’S role in Chile...
...Latham had to tell passersby that he had written a novel...
...Schorr had been stung, especially by the Voice piece...
...Months later, he still refused to talk to the author, Ann Pincus, even when the two found themselves together in Aspen during the summer of 1975...
...Schorr must have assumed, regretfully, that the Times, too, had a copy...
...During the final drafting process, staff members had been up late most nights, typing in the office or at home, catching a few hours of sleep when they could...
...The public’s anger at Counter-Spy was to some extent misplaced, as James Fallows explains in another article in this issue...
...On Capitol Hill, House Intelligence Committee chairman Pike and staff director Field opined that they suspected the leak had come from the executive branch, as part of an effort to discredit the committee...
...Suffering the indignities, and the risks, of living in an open society...
...Fred Graham was the person on whom Schorr was actually depending, and Graham reported back that the Reporters Committee trustees had unanimously approved the arrangement...
...His reaction when it first came out, a friend recalled, was “hysterical,” and he threatened to sue for libel...
...He just said that Felker was willing to publish the full text, and that he would make a “substantial” contribution to the Reporters Committee...
...Morgan then called his friend Dan Schorr, saying that the ACLU would like to be helpful in any way it could...
...Part I, detailing the Pike Committee’s frustrations in trying to get information from Henry Kissinger, was dropped entirely on the grounds that it was “boring...
...It would be, in effect, The Pike Papers-the Dan Schorr Edition...
...The prospect of publication in the Voice had obviously agitated Schorr...
...Any reporter who had been following the committee carefully would have known that it would now be considerably easier to lay hands on a copy of the report than it had been before...
...But how...
...Where the Senate Intelligence Committee took a judicious posture, the House committee was a streetfighter...
...Graham said he would poll the trustees...
...Harry Rosenfeld, national editor of The Washington Post was there, with his colleagues Ben Bradlee and Howard Simons...
...Nelson was interested, and made inquiries with his editors in Los Angeles...
...On Wednesday, February 4, Tufo called Oscar Dystel, publisher of Bantam Books...
...Whad’dya make...
...He had made inquiries at the Times, and Crewdson, it seemed, had only made notes...
...Schorr was startled...
...Latham realized that the headline would have to be, in effect, “The Village Voice Publishes Pike Report...
...And Clay Felker had it...
...I can have any penis I want,” was one memorable, but according to Quinn, innaccurately quoted, line...
...There is one other plausible speculation: that Schorr had last-minute source problems of his own...
...Meanwhile, Schorr’s business agent, Richard Leibner, was also making calls to Bantam and Dell...
...For the staff, it was the culmination of months of exhausting work...
...As David Halberstam would note, he was an “old fashioned print journalist -too serious, too subtle, too talented, too aggressive for television...
...By Saturday Latham was the only one who had read the report through, and he was distressed...
...You have to do it,” he said...
...The last-minute transformation of the project into a surreptitious, hushed-up deal would prove ruinous for Dan Schorr...
...or more precisely, to Mitch Rogovin, an Arnold and Porter lawyer who had been retained by the CIA and was acting as chief contact between the agency and the committee...
...If exposure of illegal or incompetent activities made the continuation of such activities impossible, so much the better...
...CBS had already used most of the hot items in the Pike Report...
...At this writing, the House Ethics Committee has appropriated $350,000 towards its effort to identify Schorr’s source, and the matter seems best left to them.Wherever he got it, Schorr had his copy, and he used it for the first time on the night of Sunday, January 25...
...That was the way it seemed a year ago, when the process of exposing and correcting CIA misconduct was beginning...
...Somewhat taken aback, Schorr said that while he was grateful for the ACLVs interest, he didn’t want publication to be an ACLU project...
...Meanwhile, in Washington, all hell was breaking loose...
...The next morning, Rosenfeld called Schorr and said that Post executive editor Ben Bradlee had told him to withdraw the request, on grounds that the Post would not be willing to give CBS a similar document if the situation were reversed...
...The public reaction was unfortunate, but it was real nonetheless...
...Tufo now says he thought he was representing the Reporters Committee...
...The Post’s Bob Woodward called his friend Latham that Wednesday afternoon and asked who the Voice’s source was...
...But he expressed anxiety about several points: What about the potential contempt of Congress problem...
...Rosenfeld said no, that the Post wanted to assign its own reporters...
...This conference, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and The Washington Post, concerned “The Media and the Law...
...Secretary of State Kissinger, in what was described as “an unusually hoarse and tense voice,” told a press conference that the Schorr leak was “a new version of McCarthyism,” which had “done damage to the foreign policy of the United States” in some way that he was too mortified to explain to the churls of the press...
...What should Harlow Mason do...
...The operation, codenamed “Swordfish” by Felker, would soon be moved to a secret headquarters at the offices of the Voice’s typesetters, Sterling Graphics...
...The Report would be waiting at Schorr’s house in Cleveland Park...
...And it was...
...The trustees of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who had helped Schorr find a publisher and agreed to accept the royalties, ended up apologizing for “crimes against journalism” ( The Chicago Tribune) and “selling secrets” (The New York Times), and bickering among themselves over how to divide the blame...
...What about the source...
...The network had gotten its scoops, and if there was anything in the Report damaging to national security, it had already come out...
...Marks told this to his friend Robert Borosage, the Center’s young director...
...Richard Salant, CBS News president, has refused to comment on reports that he talked personally with Schorr about possible publication through a CBS subsidiary...
...He was also making his way in cafe society, photographed often by Women’s Wear Daily escorting Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill to the movies, to society dances, and the like...
...Schorr-deserted by most of his colleagues, threatened with a contempt citation, in danger of losing his job-was the only one who seemed to have a clear understanding of what had happened...
...The prospect seemed painful, even risky, to some...
...The Administration was jolted by Schorr’s Sunday night story...
...This was perhaps the most damaging material about Kissinger in the Report...
...Schorr said he would think about it...
...A year later, he would be acting as Dan Schorr’s lawyer, trying to help Schorr beat a contempt of Congress charge and save his job-after Schorr pressed the First Amendment farther than the House of Representatives or his employers deemed appropriate...
...Laurence Stern, The washington Post reporter covering the Pike Committee, was considerably more upset than Schorr...
...The Reporters Committee now says he was representing Schorr...
...It was a gala premier for Felker’s first national issue-with a New York Daily News-style full-cover headline in red type: “The CIA Re port the President Doesn’t Want You to Read...
...But the staff member also made it clear that the Schorr copy, now in possession of Clay Felker, was probably the only one extant...
...That was the news-the act of publication...
...Quinn’s comments may have been excessive, but Latham was close to Felker, and the ideal trusted aide to execute the Pike Papers project...
...no apparent need, or even desire, to know-no sign whatsoever, in fact, of the vibrant democratic consciousness that journalists like to invoke when ferreting out secrets...
...The two agreed, tentatively, that the one-shot (which had been Dan Schorr’s last hope for respectable publication of the full text) was a loser...
...Unlike earlier examinations of the CIA, this was not a collection of sensational revelations and blown covers...
...For a long time, no one knew what Crewdson had done with his copy...
...Dystel said that Bantam, which had published the Pentagon Papers, would be interested, but would probably want to publish in a joint venture with a newspaper like the Post or the Times...
...And CBS itself had been the largest contributor, giving $50,000 in 1975, more than double the amount of the next largest contributor...
...There have already been a number of partial accounts-too many perhaps-but the story deserves a few words more...
...The New York Intermediary The New York lawyer was named Peter Tufo, and his role in the story is intriguing...
...Schorr himself was a part of this spider-web world, and it must be said that he played a major role in his own entrapment...
...Instead, the public seemed to be angry at Dan Schorr and desirous to protect the fragile institutions of government from the assaults of people like him-people who, in the public mind, were weakening the country, exposing its foreign agents to assassination, divulging its secrets...
...Barth said that if Schorr was willing to face the problems that would surely arise, he should release the Report...
...But he needed help...
...Latham was also worried that other publications might be preparing to run verbatim excerpts of their own...
...Now, after the committee vote, everybody relaxed...
...It would be published the next week after requests from reporters and others...
...He had, commendably, wanted to take credit for releasing the Report, and to help explain its meaning to the public...
...In many respects the Reporters Committee was a stepchild of the Nixon years...
...Dan Schorr, a CBS reporter who wanted to fix a spotlight on the CIA, found himself muzzled off the air by his employers...
...Suppression of the Report The leaks from the Report were paradoxically, helpful to the Administration in its effort to delay release...
...But if he joined in the suppression, he might be violating the ethics of his profession...
...We have a Pentagon Papers situation here,” he said...
...Trustee Bob Maynard, a Post editorial writer, retorted that Schorr was “trying to make us a partner in his calumny...
...But Quadrangle was an unlikely bet anyway...
...Schorr showed on the television screen the actual memo describing Jackson’s role...
...Some would later question whether Stern’s resentment at failing to get the Report himself when two other colleagues had it might have been a subtle motivation...
...The press should do its job, namely, to make public everything it could find out about the government...
...And so an extraordinary period in our nation's history-in which the power and secrecy of the executive branch had, for a moment, been challenged...
...But by the end, the committee’s own security lapses had become the focus of public attention, and it appeared that an official secrets act, far more repressive than anything which had come before, might result...
...The rest were really boilerplate,” Latham recalled...
...Joe Califano, of Williams, Connolly & Califano, was at the media conference, too...
...Beyond his basic conviction that the Report should be released, Schorr wanted to release it first...
...Dystel expected to see a copy of the Report the next day, but when Tufo relayed the conversation, Schorr balked at the “joint venture” aspect...
...The gross irony of the matter was that Schorr’s victimization came not at the hands of the government, but from the world in which he lived, worked, went to parties...
...The line between off and on became blurred, and Schorr felt he had been betrayed the next morning when Stern’s story on the “Journalistic Morality Play” appeared, naming Schorr as the source...
...When asked whether his name could be used on the record for this account, Barth considered the question for some time and then responded simply: “I want my name to be associated with Dan Schorr...
...He prepared a second story for the Monday CBS Morning News, this time showing the cover of the Report...
...The nearly universal assumption within the Washington press corps would be that Schorr’s source had been A. Searle Field, the committee staff director...
Vol. 8 • April 1976 • No. 2
