The CIA's interactions with American journalists, especially those who have revealed its secrets, have not all been cordial. Project Mockingbird, which was undertaken in 1962, shows that the agency was willing to go to great lengths, including illegal wiretapping, to shut down leaks. Presidents from both parties have leaned on the CIA to tap the phones of American reporters as part of largely futile efforts to identify their sources.

Mockingbird was the first operation conducted by a CIA team formed at President John Kennedy's request that was dedicated to finding and plugging national-security leaks. The team reflected his intense interest in the media, as well as his willingness to use the CIA to tame it.

Kennedy had briefly worked as a reporter after World War II, knew many reporters and publishers personally, and, as president, devoted a great deal of attention to burnishing his public image. Intimate awareness of how the game was played may explain why Kennedy was infuriated by unauthorized leaks. Disclosures of classified information that he hadn't initiated or authorized sometimes helped America's adversaries—but almost always diminished his authority and power.

Throughout his presidency Kennedy trusted journalists to keep secrets that, had they been revealed, could have had dire consequences for both national security and his reputation. He was the first president to routinely grant exclusive interviews to favored reporters, pleasing the few who toed the White House line and angering many more who were excluded. Still, JFK's trust in a handful of reporters and editors didn't reflect confidence in the entire profession, his cultivation of the press didn't immunize him from criticism, and his understanding of the news industry's penchant for exaggeration and controversy didn't thicken his skin.

Kennedy read newspapers as voraciously as he chased women, noting and taking offense at the smallest slights. He also considered himself a master of the art of the leak and the trial balloon. His administration made no apologies for lying to reporters to protect national security. For example, Kennedy's Pentagon spokesman, Arthur Sylvester, told reporters that it was the government's inherent right “to lie to save itself.”1 And Kennedy approved unprecedented steps to prevent unauthorized releases of information. His administration was the first to require that government employees keep track of and systematically report on their interactions with journalists. It was also the first to allow television cameras to cover press briefings, creating new opportunities for the White House to bypass print reporters and to shape the daily news cycle.

The press was incensed by Kennedy's attempts to manipulate news coverage and plug leaks. Arthur Krock, the eminence grise of American news, wrote in March 1963 that the administration was managing the news “more cynically and boldly” than had previously been attempted in peacetime. “President Kennedy reads more newspapers regularly than any predecessor appears to have done,” reported Krock, who had headed the New York Times Washington bureau from 1932 to 1953 and once considered himself a friend of the Kennedy clan. “And his bristling sensitiveness to critical analysis has not been exceeded by that of any previous occupant of the White House.”²

More ominously, Krock wrote that it was “well known…that President Kennedy was prone to turn loose the FBI in a search for the official source of any published information that appeared in a form displeasing to him for one reason or another, especially when the publication was in the nature of an unmanaged ‘leak.’” This was a reference to the FBI's heavy-handed investigation of a New York Times reporter, Hanson Baldwin, who in a July 1962 scoop had reported classified information about US satellite surveillance of Soviet missiles. Baldwin described details about the construction of Soviet missile silos, and in the process revealed the capabilities of American satellites. This allowed the Red Army to camouflage sensitive military activities or take evasive measures when it knew satellites would be overhead.3

Krock didn't know that J. Edgar Hoover had agreed only reluctantly to White House requests to spy on Baldwin and other journalists, or that the president had turned to the CIA to plug leaks. As the FBI's actions against peace activists a decade later demonstrated, Hoover wasn't squeamish about conducting illegal surveillance. He did, however, drag his feet when he felt there was a risk that the FBI's unlawful activities could be exposed.

Kennedy agreed to assign the CIA the task of investigating unauthorized national-security disclosures at an August 1, 1962, meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Details of the meeting are known because in the spring of 1962 Kennedy had secretly ordered installation of a taping system in his office. The president could secretly start and stop the tape recorder, which was located in the White House basement, by activating switches concealed in a pen socket on his desk, in a bookend, or in a coffee table. Beyond the president, the only people who knew about the taping system were Kennedy's private secretary, the Secret Service agents who installed and maintained it, and Robert Kennedy.⁴

Members of the PFIAB told Kennedy that Baldwin's story would cause grave damage to national security. The FBI was trying to find his sources, but based on the bureau's past performance, it was unlikely to succeed, the president was told. The PFIAB had discussed the situation prior to the meeting and decided that the “FBI may not be the best agency to conduct investigations of leaks of this kind,” its chairman, James Killian, reported.⁵

The bureau had “never been enthusiastic or successful in dealing with serious security breaches,” Killian told Kennedy. “As I am sure you are fully aware, Mr. Hoover apparently doesn't like to get into this field. He feels it is an administrative responsibility rather than an FBI type of responsibility.”6 Furthermore, starting an investigation was a painfully slow process because FBI agents first had to be cleared to receive highly classified information and then educated so they could distinguish between facts that were in public domain and those that were supposed to be secret.

“We would suggest, therefore, that the Director of Central Intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks,” Killian said.⁷

Clark Clifford, an advisor to the president, chimed in, endorsing the recommendation to create a unit at the CIA dedicated to monitoring journalists, establishing who was supplying them national-security information and plugging the leaks. “Times have changed,” Clifford said. “You can't do this anymore on a hit-or-miss basis like we've done in the past because now incidents of this kind are infinitely more important and more damaging than they've ever been.”⁸ General Maxwell Taylor, at the time an advisor to the president and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke in favor of the idea.

Kennedy was convinced. “That's a very good idea,” he said. “We'll do that.”

Although Clifford had helped write the CIA charter, which prohibited the agency from undertaking operations inside the United States, he didn't express any concern about investigating journalists working in the United States for American newspapers. The attorney general, Robert Kennedy, failed even to suggest that the government should obtain warrants before investigating American citizens.

CIA director John A. McCone told Kennedy three weeks later that he had formed a group to investigate leaks.⁹

The first reporters targeted for warrantless surveillance by the CIA were Robert S. Allen and his partner, Paul Scott. This was the same Robert S. Allen who had briefly spied for the Soviet Union in 1932 while launching the Washington Merry-Go-Round column with Drew Pearson.

Allen had taken a break from journalism in 1942 to join the Army. In 1945, while serving on General George Patton's staff as an intelligence officer, Colonel Allen was wounded and captured. His right forearm was amputated in a German field hospital. Four days later he was liberated by American forces, and less than three weeks after the surgery was back working on Patton's staff. His wounds had not healed, however, and when the war in Europe was over, Allen spent a year recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington.

Allen learned to type with his left hand. Rather than rejoin Pearson, who had reneged on a promise to pay him a royalty on the Merry-Go-Round column's revenues while he served, he started a new syndicated column with Scott. They specialized in military and intelligence scoops.

Allen came to believe that, like in the ’30s, the United States and other democracies were sleepwalking into a confrontation with evil. This time the enemy was the USSR. Allen's distrust of the Soviet Union may have been accentuated by personal experience of the ways its intelligence services had infiltrated Washington, or by a sense of guilt over his secret assistance to Stalin.

Allen was convinced that Kennedy's policies toward the Soviet Union amounted to appeasement. He and Scott developed sources in the Pentagon, CIA, Congress, and even the White House who provided a constant stream of classified information that the two reporters fashioned into darts aimed at piercing American complacency. They focused a spotlight on the CIA. Ironically, while their column was shunned by the New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading American newspapers, TASS, Izvestia, and Radio Moscow frequently repeated its allegations of CIA impropriety and incompetence.

An Izvestia story in December 1961 quoted “the Washington observer Robert Allen” as revealing that the CIA's $400 million budget included extensive funding of front groups and propaganda. “Allen notes in particular that in West Europe ‘the Central Intelligence Agency organized or financed almost all major international conferences of socialists which took place on the continent during the past ten years,’” the Soviet paper reported. It added that the Allen-Scott column “unmasks the faces of the traitor-socialists who have sunk to the role of agents in the pay of the American intelligence service.”10

Most of the Allen-Scott story about the CIA budget was both true and classified. CIA director McCone wrote a line-by-line analysis of the column as part of an unsuccessful investigation the agency conducted to try to figure out how the columnists had gotten their hands on secret budget documents. CIA security staff's analysis of the story led them to believe that an agency employee was leaking to Allen and Scott as part of a sophisticated attempt to influence policy. Most of the column was an attack on a top CIA official, Cord Meyer Jr. The column included information about Meyer that McCone told CIA security personnel he had no prior knowledge of, such as the fact that before joining the CIA Meyer had been a strong advocate of world government and had led an organization dedicated to creating a global government. These beliefs were an abomination to anti-communists who viewed the United Nations as a plot to subjugate the United States. CIA security staff surmised that the employee who leaked to Scott was “playing a clever game, [by] endeavoring to bring to Mr. McCone's attention these facts or statements through the medium of this column with the possible belief or supposition that some form of inquiry into these matters would be made by Mr. McCone.”¹¹

In January 1962 Allen and Scott reported about American satellites that had been launched and others that would be deployed over the coming year to keep an eye on Soviet and Chinese military activities.¹² In February, citing a leak from the Defense Intelligence Agency, they told their readers that “an intelligence estimate that Russia has shipped poison gas to Cuba has spread an almost visible chill through the Kennedy administration.”¹³

In addition to causing concern about national-security leaks, Allen and Scott irritated the CIA by providing ammunition to the agency's critics in Congress. For example, under the heading “Another CIA blooper,” they wrote in July 1961 that the CIA had “chalked up another in its long line of busts” by failing to anticipate a military coup in South Korea.14

A CIA memo describing the reasons for targeting Allen and Scott for surveillance mentioned that the agency was puzzled about how they obtained and reported on classified information. “Although much of the information contained in the columns was garbled, it was apparent that key points were frequently direct quotes from classified reports and summaries of recent vintage.”¹⁵

Everyone involved in arranging for the CIA to tap the telephones at Allen and Scott's National Press Building office and at their homes knew that by involving the agency in a purely domestic operation they were crossing a line, and very likely violating the law. Reflecting concerns about possible legal jeopardy and the certainty of negative publicity should the operation be disclosed, the CIA minimized the Project Mockingbird paper trail. Staff who handled the wiretapping received their instructions verbally. Knowledge of the operation was limited to a small group. Only Robert Kennedy, who had requested the wiretaps, McNamara, McCone, and a handful of other intelligence officials were aware of Mockingbird.¹⁶

The surveillance started on March 12, 1962, and was halted three months later, on June 15, upon the retirement of the CIA's head of security. It isn't clear why the CIA cut off the project early; internal CIA documents express disappointment that the wiretaps were discontinued prematurely. It is possible that the agency believed its operation had been exposed.

Even in this limited time the CIA learned a lot. The two reporters gathered more secrets in a few months than a pair of KGB officers could have dreamed of collecting in decades of spying in Washington. “Monitors of MOCKINGBIRD were frequently amazed at the sheer bulk of information [Scott] would acquire in the course of a day,” according to a CIA memo. “The intercept activity was particularly productive in identifying contacts of the newsmen, their method of operation and many of their sources.”¹⁷

The wiretaps revealed that Allen and Scott were receiving confidential and classified information from a dozen senators and six US representatives, including House Speaker John McCormack, as well as twenty-one congressional staff members. In the executive branch they received classified information from a White House staffer, more than one member of the vice president's staff, an assistant attorney general, and employees of the State Department and NASA.

The CIA was most anxious to determine which of its own employees were leaking to Allen and Scott. Some of the disclosures, a CIA internal report noted, came from a CIA employee “who feels that the policy of the Agency should be shifted to one which would not be harmful to US interests.” The report doesn't describe the policy, and although CIA leadership had a suspect, it wasn't able to confirm that he was the leaker.18

While it never identified Scott's CIA source, the wiretaps did uncover a White House leaker. It was a clerk who habitually brought documents home, and sometimes shared them with Scott, a neighbor and friend. The clerk's wife once joked on a telephone conversation, which the CIA had intercepted, that if her husband “kept all the papers he brought home from the White House, the home would look like the White House trash room.”¹⁹

This clerk, who is not identified in the CIA documents that have been declassified, once gave Scott a copy of a secret speech that Walt Rostow, Kennedy's deputy national security advisor, had delivered at the Army's Special Warfare School.²⁰ Rostow outlined a proposal to create an international organization under UN control to combat communist insurgencies in developing countries. According to a story Allen and Scott wrote about the speech, Rostow enlisted Sen. William Fulbright and liberal foundations to support his idea. The proposal “hit the Pentagon like one of Mr. Khrushchev's megaton bombs,” Allen and Scott reported. The reporters detailed classified plans the military had crafted for a completely different approach. The idea, which was later implemented, was to set up training schools around the world to give representatives of trusted governments military and propaganda tools to fight communism.²¹

The CIA was surprised to discover that Allen and Scott received several warnings that they were being investigated. Although they weren't specifically informed about Mockingbird, both were told that the Defense Department and CIA had launched investigations into their sources of classified information.22

The surveillance solved a riddle that had been puzzling the CIA: although the Allen/Scott columns contained nuggets extracted from sensitive intelligence reports, the accompanying explanations were often inaccurate. “At first it was believed that the garbling was a by-product of [Allen's] regular state of intoxication; however, later it became apparent that the garbling was used to disguise the source.”²³

The CIA learned through its wiretaps that Scott was planning to write a story claiming the agency had contributed money to a political campaign to defeat a congressman; that it had funded a foreign trip to Outer Mongolia by one of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's favorite targets, the scholar Owen Lattimore; and that a dozen communists worked at the CIA. The declassified files do not identify the member of Congress or reveal whether the CIA had actually worked to defeat him. In any case, Allen and Scott never reported this information, nor did they write about Lattimore or reputed communists at the CIA.²⁴

The CIA may have exploited its early warning to give Allen and Scott information that cast doubt on the veracity of the leaks. Or the columnists may have decided they couldn't publish them without inadvertently disclosing their sources. Only a small fraction of the information provided to Allen and Scott ever made it into their columns. Some was set aside to protect the identity of a source. Even after sequestering these secrets, they received far more classified information than they could use, so they passed some of it on to other reporters and correspondents, who published the leaks under their own bylines.

Allen continued to be a thorn in the CIA's flesh until illness forced him to stop working in 1980. He committed suicide in 1981 at age 80.²⁵

Having been both a Soviet spy and the object of White House–ordered surveillance in the 1930s and 1960s put Allen in a class by himself, but he was far from being the first or last reporter to have his or her phones tapped. Illegal electronic surveillance of reporters, including those with Press Building offices, didn't start or end with the Kennedy administration, and while Hoover dragged his feet in response to requests from John Kennedy to wiretap reporters, he was more accommodating to other presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower.

In May 1955, the White House requested that the FBI find the source of a leak as soon as possible, and made it clear it didn't care how it did it. A two-man newsletter, Petty's Oil Letter, had revealed a confidential discussion between President Eisenhower and the head of the Office of Defense Mobilization about plans to create an oil pipeline from Texas to the Northeast. The pipeline was intended to ensure that an atomic attack wouldn't cut oil supplies to the East Coast.

The head of FBI counterintelligence assembled a team and told them they were “free to do whatever was necessary” to find out who was leaking. It was necessary, the agents decided, to break into Petty's Oil Letter's National Press Building Office and plant a microphone. The head of maintenance for the Press Building, who was already helping the FBI keep tabs on TASS, was happy to assist with the job. The bug caught Milburn Petty and his partner Jim Collins discussing the source of the leak. The FBI confronted the leaker and persuaded him to confess.26

Hoover was so concerned about Congress or the public discovering that the agency used illegal bugs and wiretaps that he ordered the bureau to employ euphemisms in all official communications. The agents who handled the Petty's Oil Letter operation received commendations from Hoover praising their “very effective utilization of a certain special technique,” and internal FBI documents about the operation referred to the bug as a “special technical installation.”²⁷

National security was used again as a justification for FBI electronic surveillance of reporters during the Nixon administration. Acting on orders from the White House, starting in 1969 the FBI tapped a number of reporters, including Marvin Kalb of CBS television and two New York Times reporters, William Beecher and Hedrick Smith. The bureau didn't seek warrants for the taps.28

Henry Brandon, the Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Times, was also tapped. Brandon, who worked from a Press Building office, was the consummate Washington insider, known and respected by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, and the object of envy by rival journalists who lacked his access. The reasons for tapping Brandon are murky and explanations are contradictory. Nixon said on several occasions that he hadn't initiated the tap. Hoover had started listening to Brandon's telephone calls during the Johnson administration and he had simply agreed to continue the practice, Nixon claimed.²⁹

In an interview recorded after his resignation, Nixon said that on his first day as president a thick envelope was waiting on his desk marked “Top Secret—Eyes Only—for the President.” It was an intelligence report about Brandon. Nixon recalled, “I called Hoover, and I says, ‘What the hell is this?’ He says, ‘Oh, Henry Brandon, he's a British agent.’” Nixon said he threw the envelope in the “out” box with a note asking Kissinger to look into it, and that he never heard another word about it. “I'm sure Brandon thinks I put the tap on, but apparently Johnson had it on all the time.”³⁰ In 1973 Nixon told a White House aide, “Brandon's been zapped for years. That's what Hoover told me.”³¹

Justice Department officials denied that Brandon had been tapped during the Johnson administration, and no evidence of a tap prior to 1969 has surfaced. If Hoover had proof that Brandon was a British intelligence officer, he took it to his grave. What is incontrovertible is that Brandon's privacy, along with the privacy of anyone he spoke with on the telephone, was violated for more than two years, and there was no discernable national security justification.³²