The management of Continental Press Service never told anyone which continent the name referred to, and they were a little hazy about the services they provided. If anyone had thought hard about what was going on in its twelfth-floor National Press Building Office, the operation would have seemed suspicious. The credentials and decades of experience of the journalists who ran it, however, were solid, and for over a decade Continental Press flew under the radar, unmolested and unquestioned.

While the reporters who worked at Continental Press pretended to be independent journalists, they were in fact employed by the CIA. Their jobs were to produce propaganda, provide cover for spies and facilitate illegal domestic espionage. The news service was a cog in a vast machine the CIA had created to weaponize information and to deputize reporters as undercover partisans in America's undeclared global war against communism.

The activities of Continental Press Service, a CIA “proprietary” or front company, exemplified the cozy relationships many American reporters had with the agency during the Cold War. They also provide a glimpse of the CIA's massive overseas media operations and show how it sometimes became enmeshed in domestic politics.

The CIA's role in creating and running Continental Press surfaced in the fallout from the foiled Watergate burglary. It was disclosed by E. Howard Hunt, a man who had dedicated his life to protecting secrets. The retired CIA agent had been sentenced in 1973 to a provisional thirty-five-year prison term for planning the Watergate break-in and for refusing to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation of the crime. When Judge John J. Sirica sentenced Hunt, he promised to reduce the punishment if Hunt broke his silence.

Traumatized by prison and grieving the death of his wife—she was killed in a plane crash with $10,000 in $100 bills in her bag, money intended to purchase legal assistance for and the silence of Watergate burglars—Hunt decided to talk. On the morning of December 18, 1973, he was driven by armed guards from the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania to Capitol Hill for a private meeting with Senator Howard Baker Jr. and staff members of a Senate committee that was investigating the CIA's role in the Watergate burglary. Hunt told them that his role in Watergate hadn't been an aberration. Years earlier, when he was a senior CIA officer, he had been ordered to spy on a presidential election campaign. The operation, Hunt reported, involved a front company located in the National Press Building called Continental Press.1

Hunt didn't tell the investigators much about Continental Press, and the CIA still refuses to divulge anything about the operation. Enough information is available, however, from public documents and passing references in declassified documents to assemble an outline of its history and activities.

The story starts with Fred Zusy, a jovial reporter who joined the Associated Press in 1941, covered the war in Europe, and remained overseas, serving as AP's bureau chief in Cairo in 1951 and then holding the same position in its Istanbul and Rome bureaus. With his resume and contacts, Zusy could have landed a job at a major newspaper. Instead, when he quit the AP in 1959, Zusy moved to Washington and started Continental Press, a small news service that provided stories to obscure newspapers that none of his peers would ever read.

After his death in 2010, Zusy's wife explained why his career had taken such an unusual turn. “He was,” she said, “in the clandestine service of the CIA after he left the AP.”² This was accurate but almost certainly incomplete. Zusy's relationship with the agency had probably begun long before 1959. The CIA wouldn't have trusted Zusy with a sensitive operation unless it had already developed a deep trust in him. That kind of confidence is accrued over time and earned by acquitting oneself well in difficult circumstances. Certainly his reporting from the Middle East in the early 1950s, especially about the nationalization of oil companies and efforts by communists to overthrow the Shah of Iran, would have been of great interest to the CIA.

The Press Building was the logical place to locate Continental Press. At the time, it was peppered with small news shops. Lone reporters who eked out a living from freelance assignments rented tiny offices where they slept on sofas under piles of old newspapers. In slightly larger offices entrepreneurial journalists dreamed of expanding trade publications or specialized newsletters into media empires. There was a sense of camaraderie and a roguish approach to ethics among Press Building tenants in those days. It was common for reporters to write and file stories for a colleague who was incapacitated by a night of hard drinking, and nobody batted an eye at the Press Club when they overheard a reporter dictating a story from the Washington Star into a phone to an editor halfway around the country as if he'd written it himself.3

Zusy presented Continental Press as the Washington bureau for foreign publications that couldn't afford to send a correspondent to the United States. Zusy's clients consisted of newspapers like the Globe Press of Istanbul, Tehran's El Akhbar & Akhbar El-yom, the Dawn, headquartered in Karachi, and the Ashanti Pioneer of Kumasi, Ghana. Zusy never explained how clients like this provided enough income to put food on his table, cover office rent, salary for a secretary, and after a few years support several other reporters. These were not the kinds of publications that were in the habit of paying generously for stories. In fact, they weren't in the habit of paying at all, as freelancers who have worked for newspapers in developing countries have learned through bitter experience.

The newspapers Continental Press serviced were, however, precisely the kinds of publications the CIA—and the KGB—favored as vectors for disseminating propaganda. Both intelligence services purchased, subsidized, and infiltrated hundreds of newspapers in developing countries and in Europe, coopting them as combatants in the global struggle between the superpowers. Stories planted in obscure publications were often picked up by newspapers with national or regional reach. For the CIA, the fact that they were unlikely to be read in the United States or cited by American news organizations was a benefit, as the agency tried to minimize the chance of “blowback,” as it called operations that ended up harming the United States. The agency was worried that false information it planted abroad could influence and distort American policy, or that the American public would be infuriated if it learned that its news was being contaminated by the CIA.

A second reporter, Russell Brines, joined Continental Press in 1961 as executive editor after resigning as editor of the Copley News Service, a wire service that was owned by the Copley newspaper chain. Like Zusy, Brines had been a foreign correspondent for AP. The wire service sent him to Tokyo in 1939 and transferred him to Manila in November 1941. A few weeks later, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Brines, his wife, and his daughter were interned by the Japanese. They were released in a prisoner swap after nineteen months. Brines wrote a book, Until They Eat Stones, about the brutal treatment he, and especially military prisoners, received at the hands of the Japanese.4

Brines started working for Copley in the 1950s, serving as the first editor and manager of Copley News Service. The company's owner, James S. Copley, had in 1947 offered the services of its reporters to President Eisenhower “as the eyes and ears…for our intelligence services” to fight communism.⁵ He was one of a cohort of news executives CIA director Allen Dulles turned to when he wanted stories planted in American newspapers. At one point twenty-three Copley employees were working for the CIA. The Copley News Service was particularly useful to the agency in Latin America. It is almost certain that Brines had, like Zusy, been working for the CIA for some time before he joined Continental Press.⁶

A year after Brines joined Continental Press, the CIA gave Hunt responsibility for the operation. Hunt considered the assignment a punishment. He'd been deeply involved in the CIA's disastrous attempt to depose Fidel Castro by landing a ragtag group of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Like many agency officers associated with the fiasco, Hunt was put in a kind of purgatory, assigned a desk job that lacked the excitement or career-advancement potential of foreign clandestine operations.

Hunt supervised all CIA domestic propaganda activities from 1962 to 1964. His duties included working with the US Information Agency to coordinate CIA foreign and domestic propaganda. He ran operations that had cryptonyms like WUHUSTLER, WUBONBON, and WUPUNDIT.7

WUBONBON included the CIA's work with book publishers, such as Eugene Fodor, publisher of the Fodor's travel books. It is likely that Hunt used Continental Press to launder the transfer of funds from the CIA to Fodor's.

Fodor, a Hungarian who grew up in Czechoslovakia, wrote his first travel book in 1936. He joined the US Army in 1942, was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and, after the war, worked for the CIA in Vienna and Budapest. In 1949 he founded Fodor's Modern Guides, Inc., and began producing travel books. Starting in the 1950s he hired CIA officers as writers. He was more than willing to provide cover for clandestine activities, but he insisted the CIA only send him talented writers who were willing to do their cover jobs.

Fodor's connection to the CIA, and the CIA's connection to Continental Press, were unknown outside the agency until Hunt revealed them to Senate investigators in 1973. His testimony was leaked to the New York Times, which, to the consternation of Hunt, Fodor, and the CIA, in 1975 revealed Fodor's covert activities, as well as the existence of Continental Press.⁸

As part of WUBONBON, Hunt also managed the CIA's covert relationship with another former intelligence operative turned publisher, Frederick Praeger. Praeger fled to the United States from Austria in 1938, joined the US Army in 1941, and served in Army intelligence during the war. He started Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., an academic publishing company, in 1950. While the majority of Praeger's activities had no association with the US government, the CIA provided subsidies to and other assistance for several of the company's books. The most famous CIA-Praeger collaboration was The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Djilas, a top official in Yugoslavia's Communist Party who became the most famous dissident in the Soviet bloc. Praeger took on the book, and accepted covert payments from the CIA, after several other western publishers declined to publish it. Praeger also published CIA-subsidized books promoting the US government's perspective on foreign-policy controversies such as the war in Vietnam and the 1965 US military occupation of the Dominican Republic.9

Hunt imagined himself a swashbuckling secret agent and hated working as a propagandist. Even so, his supervisors couldn't have been more pleased by the way he handled the assignment. “In the WUHUSTLER project,” the cover name for Continental Press, Hunt “vindicated his faith in a moribund clandestine asset by demonstrating, after about a year and a half under his personal direction, that is it is one of the most effective activities of its kind,” according to a glowing annual performance review he received in 1964.¹⁰

Over a six-week period in the late summer of 1964, Hunt deployed Continental Press staff to undertake a new type of project: infiltrating the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater on behalf of President Lyndon Johnson.

There is some dispute about whose idea this was. In 1975, then CIA director William Colby told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that spying on Goldwater had been the brainchild of Tracy Barnes, head of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division. According to Colby's version of events, Barnes proposed it to Chester L. Cooper, a CIA officer working in the Johnson White House on temporary assignment to the National Security Council.

A memo Colby provided to Congress stated that in 1973 Cooper told a member of the CIA Office of Inspector General that in 1964 Barnes had asked him “if he would like to have copies of [Goldwater's] speeches and would it be useful to have them before he (Cooper) read them in the newspapers.”11 Cooper said he would. The memo concluded, “There is no question that Mr. Cooper was serving the White House in the political campaign while on the CIA payroll and that he was assisted, in part, by a member of the Agency's Domestic Operations Division.” The CIA didn't say why Barnes offered to spy on Goldwater. He may have been seeking to enhance the agency's stature at a time when President Johnson had a strained relationship with its director.

In blaming Barnes and saying that he hadn't informed anyone more senior about the operation, Colby created a convenient dead end: by the time the agency pinned responsibility on Barnes, he had been dead for several years.¹²

In a memoir published in 2007, Hunt claimed the idea to spy on Goldwater originated in the White House. President Lyndon Johnson had, Hunt claimed, “become obsessed with obtaining his competitor's plans.” Having come to office through tragedy, and deeply resenting suggestions that he wasn't up to the job, Johnson yearned for a blow-out victory. Hunt reported that he had arranged for some of his “outside assets”—possibly a reference to Continental Press or employees of another CIA proprietary company—to infiltrate the Goldwater headquarters. “My subordinates volunteered inside, collected advance copies of position papers and other material, and handed them over to CIA personnel” who provided the documents to Cooper, according to Hunt.¹³

Hunt's assets included a secretary on Goldwater's campaign staff, who provided advance copies of speeches and press releases. A CIA employee who worked from the Continental Press offices picked up the material and delivered it to Cooper.

Whoever came up with the idea, Johnson was aware of the spying and wasn't squeamish about using it. He did so in a blunt fashion that must have made CIA officers cringe. Goldwater campaign staff noticed that the Johnson campaign had the unnerving habit of responding to points in their candidate's speeches before he had delivered them. Johnson didn't seem to notice or care that his actions made clear to Goldwater that he was being spied on.14

One of the most glaring incidents took place on September 9, 1964, after Cooper had received an advance copy of a speech Goldwater was slated to deliver that evening in Seattle. The Republican planned to announce formation of a Task Force on Peace and Freedom headed by Richard Nixon that would advise the campaign on foreign affairs. The idea was to calm fears that Goldwater had insufficient foreign-policy experience and that he would pursue a radical international agenda.¹⁵

Johnson swung into action and called a “flash” press conference. While Goldwater was on an airplane on the way to Seattle, LBJ announced the formation of a “panel of distinguished citizens who will consult with the President in the coming months on major international problems facing the United States.”¹⁶ Johnson's ploy worked perfectly: news of his advisory panel was widely reported, including on the front page of the New York Times, while Goldwater's task force received little attention.¹⁷

The disparity caught the attention of the journalist Arthur Krock, who in a nationally syndicated column suggested that Goldwater had “forfeited a chance to name his ‘task force’ first, and then represent the President's as another instance of ‘me too.’” Krock noted that when Johnson called the press conference, reporters in Washington had already received a copy of Goldwater's remarks but had agreed to delay reporting on it until shortly before the speech was delivered. The column didn't even hint at the possibility that LBJ had also gotten an advance peek at the speech. Instead, Krock remarked on the “incomparable” staging: “The President of the United States in the classic décor of his oval office at the White House; his helplessly scooped opponent in the modernistic carnival setting of the Coliseum that was built for the Seattle World's Fair.”¹⁸

Krock presented the situation as a triumph for Johnson and an example of the natural advantages a sitting president had in an election campaign. “Among advantages a president in a campaign to succeed himself has over his opponent is command of the channels of publicity,” he told his readers.

The truth is that by breaking a media embargo, the CIA had made it possible for Johnson to dominate the news cycle that day.

Hunt told Senate staff, and wrote in his memoir, that he'd been disturbed by the order to spy on the Goldwater campaign. This wasn't because he had any hesitation about conducting what was obviously an illegal operation. Rather, it was because Hunt was one of the few Goldwater supporters in the CIA. “However, as distasteful as I thought it was, I performed the duty, accepting White House orders without question,” Hunt recalled.19

In October 1964 Hunt took a medical leave, blaming a stomach ulcer on the CIA's “failure to assign me to an appropriate post abroad following my participation in [the Bay of Pigs operation] and the passive, non-challenging nature of the domestic work I was given.” Following a six-week convalescence, Hunt was transferred to work that he found more congenial, including recruiting agents in Spain.²⁰

When Hunt's revelations were leaked to the press, Senator Goldwater said that during the 1964 campaign, he had come to believe he was being spied on. “I just assumed it was one man or two men assigned at the direction of the President…. It never bothered me,” he said. “I guess it should have, but knowing Johnson as I did, I never got upset about it.”²¹ Goldwater did not suggest that the CIA's spying had cost him the election.

After Hunt's departure Continental Press continued to produce propaganda for foreign publications and, presumably, to provide cover for CIA operatives. In 1965, Continental Press hired Enoc Waters, one of America's leading African American reporters, to report from Africa. Waters had traveled to Uganda in 1964 to help set up an English-language newspaper. Three years later he was still working for Continental Press. There is no evidence that he was a witting CIA operative.²²

When Continental Press closed in 1970, Zusy moved two floors down to the Press Building offices of the CIA-friendly Copley News Service. That year Hunt retired from the CIA. He was hired as a security consultant by the White House in 1971, where he led a unit known as the Plumbers that was dedicated to plugging leaks within the Nixon administration, playing dirty tricks on Nixon's opponents and obtaining political intelligence. Unrestrained by the CIA bureaucrats he loathed, went on to plan a spree of illegal and ill-conceived ventures culminating in the Watergate burglary. Later, he cited the CIA's infiltration of the Goldwater campaign as a precedent for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.23 His logic was that if it was okay to use surreptitious methods to obtain political intelligence on behalf of one president, it was acceptable to do the same for another president. “Since I'd done it once before for the CIA, why wouldn't I do it again [inside Watergate in June 1972] for the White House?” Hunt explained to the New York Times in December 1974.²⁴

The Watergate scandal set in motion investigations by Congress and the media of the CIA's illegal domestic activities. The resulting revelations, combined with disillusionment with American policy in Vietnam and revulsion against Nixon's abuses of power turned journalists from willing allies of the CIA into wary adversaries. Reporters who had cooperated with the agency sought to hide or minimize their connections, while senior editors and publishers scrambled to convince staff and the public that American publications and broadcasts were untainted by association with organizations that were dedicated to deception.

Congressional investigations, and reporting by news media, revealed that hundreds, perhaps thousands of reporters in the United States and overseas had close relationships with the CIA from its creation in 1947 through the late 1970s. It paid some reporters to collect information and engaged in informal information exchanges with many more. It bought, subsidized, and manipulated newspapers, magazines, and news services around the world. Major news agencies such as CBS News and the New York Times cooperated extensively with the CIA. The agency slipped its officers into newsrooms, usually with the knowledge and consent of newspaper publishers and television network CEOs. New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA and allowed it to disguise about ten officers as Times journalists, stringers, or clerical staff in the 1950s.25

Many of the American journalists and news executives who collaborated with the CIA were motivated by patriotism. They'd seen how intelligence failures had left the United States vulnerable to sneak attack at Pearl Harbor and later witnessed the USSR's ruthless domination of Eastern Europe. Eager to help ensure that the United States wasn't blind-sided by communists at home or abroad, they failed to comprehend or chose to ignore the threat to democracy posed by secret alliances between government and the press. Joseph Alsop, one of the most influential American columnists in the ’50s and ’60s, said of his extensive cooperation with the CIA, “I'm proud they asked me and proud to have done it.”²⁶

The CIA vigorously defended its relationship with the press as a logical and necessary tool for fighting the Cold War. In 1977, a year after he resigned as CIA director, Colby told Congress that the conflict with the Soviet Union was a war of ideas that could only be fought through the news media. “We should not disarm ourselves in this contest in the hopes that the rest of the world will be gentlemen,” he said. Colby railed against criticism of the CIA's foreign propaganda, arguing that “a larger view of the cultural and intellectual battle which raged in Europe and the less developed world in the 1950's and 1960's would recognize that CIA's support of the voices of freedom in the face of the massive propaganda campaigns of the Communist world contributed effectively to the cohesion of free men during that period.” He decried the “ostrich-like tendency to pretend that journalism can be purified by a total separation from CIA.”²⁷

Colby and other former CIA officials conceded the possibility that foreign propaganda could harm US interests if false news planted overseas returned to the United States and not only misled the American public but was also taken as real by policymakers. Colby said the risk of CIA disinformation corrupting American policy was minimal, but in fact as the world became every more interconnected, it became inevitable.

Ironically, the CIA was a victim of blowback from its own disinformation during the Reagan administration. Secretary of State Alexander Haig read a prepublication galley of The Terror Network, a book by the journalist Claire Sterling, and had been impressed by its conclusion that the Soviet Union was responsible for European terrorism. CIA director William Casey was also smitten by Sterling's work. He even held it up in front of a group of CIA analysts and sneered at them that he'd learned more from a book written by a journalist based on publicly available sources than from the agency's secret reports.

When CIA analysts refuted Sterling's conclusions, Casey contracted with an independent scholar to analyze the book. The academic found something startling. Sterling had diligently dug into the archives of obscure newspapers to document her assertions, but the nuggets she'd mined turned out to be fool's gold.28 Many of the articles she cited were disinformation that had been planted by the CIA. Despite the strong objections of CIA staff, the allegations in Sterling's book were incorporated into a National Intelligence Estimate and used to justify expansion of CIA covert activities in developing countries. Tainted news seeds the agency had planted from Lahore to Lisbon had sprouted and taken root in a book that influenced the Reagan administration's intelligence policy and diplomacy.²⁹