What happens when the line between spies and journalists gets blurred? Long before “fake news” became a household phrase, intelligence operatives were skilled practitioners in the art of subverting the media, often without the public ever knowing what was going on behind the scenes.
Steven T. Usdin chronicles the covert exploits of “spies who pretended to be reporters and reporters who dabbled as spies”—many of them operating out of the National Press Building, four blocks from the White House—in his forthcoming book, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington.
Usdin, a senior editor at BioCentury Publications who has authored previous books on national security issues, examined declassified archives about the activities of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies in the nation’s capital during World War 2 and the Cold War. In a conversation with TCR’s Dane Stallone, he reveals the disturbing origins of the “America First” approach that has become a meme of the current administration, and explores the parallels with Russia’s modern attempts to influence US politics.
The Crime Report: What led you to write “Bureau of Spies”?
Steven T. Usdin: I’ve been a journalist for about 30 years or so, and my journalism is about the intersection of public policy and life sciences. That’s my day job, but what I also do is write about the history of espionage. The first book that I wrote was called “Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley.” When I finished that, the first idea I got was to write about spy sites in Washington. I walk around the city and I see sites and say, “Well, that happened there, and this happened there.” I started working on it, and very quickly decided there wasn’t much point in saying what and where this happened if there wasn’t any context for it.
The Crime Report: Where did your source material come from?
Usdin: There are a lot of sources. For the parts that are about the Cold War, [I used] declassified documents from the CIA and FBI, but there’s also a lot of material that has become available, one way or another, from the KGB archives. The main sources for that are the Venona Decrypts, a secret program that started during World War 2 to decrypt Soviet intelligence cables. They managed to decrypt a large number of KGB and some military intelligence, and other Soviet Intelligence cables that were sent from 1941 to 1945.
There’s another source called the Vassiliev notebooks. It’s a long story but basically there was a former KGB officer who, in cooperation with an American historian, was granted access to KGB archives and took extensive notes. Some he was allowed to use, some he wasn’t but he smuggled all of them out and they provide a lot of information. Another source are the so-called Mitrokhin files. Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB officer who had been assigned to work in the KGB archives, spent a tremendous amount of time secretly taking notes from case files and hid them, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, he smuggled them out. I also found a great deal of records in the British archives about British intelligence activities in the US just before and during the Second World War. There are many other sources I use in the book, but those sources provided a lot of information.
The Crime Report: Do you see a pattern in what drove the people you cover in the book?
Usdin: I think they shifted over time. There are the American journalists who spied on behalf of the US or allies, and then there were professional spies for the US, and for America’s adversaries, who pretended to be journalists. Their motivations were very different.
To start with the Americans, they were professional journalists who dabbled in espionage, before World War 2, especially in 1940-1941. A large group of Americans were convinced that it was critical for the fate of Western civilization, and that’s not too dramatic a way to put it, for the US to intervene and end the war in Europe as quickly as possible. They felt it was legitimate and patriotic and the right thing to do to cooperate with British intelligence to try to do everything they could to push the US to enter the war as quickly as possible and to provide assistance to Britain. After the war there was a large group of Americans, including journalists who believed the US had been blindsided in the run up to World War 2—Pearl Harbor being the most obvious example of that, and who believed a new conflict that was coming. That conflict would be with the Soviet Union, and it was essential the US not walk into another conflict blind.
Many either cooperated with British intelligence before the war or were aware of others who had, so it seemed natural to them to cooperate with the CIA when it was first created and continuing into the Cold War. Those views changed dramatically as a result, first, of the Vietnam war, and then the revelations of Watergate and the immediate post-Watergate era. It no longer became acceptable to the vast majority of American journalist to cooperate secretly with intelligence agencies.
Then you have the professionals, probably hundreds of KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) officers who were posted in the National Press Building under cover of being reporters for TASS, the official Soviet news agency. The majority of them considered themselves to be patriots as well, and considered nuclear war with the US a high probability, and their job was to ensure the Soviet Union won that conflict.
The Crime Report: One interesting character in your book is Robert F. Allen, who shows up in multiple places in Bureau of Spies spanning three decades.
Usdin: He starts out in 1933, and was the first person that I could document who was a spy in the National Press Building. He was a journalist at that time, and had a partnership with Drew Pearson. They produced a column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” and two books based on the same name. They were some of the first reporters to give an inside view of what was going on in Washington. Before them, a lot of the news had been sanitized.
They told gossip, stories they picked up at the bar at the National Press Club, and for a time in 1933 Allen was a spy for the Soviet Union. Allen provided intelligence to the Soviets about the Roosevelt Administration’s plans for recognizing the Soviet Union starting even before the inaugurations. He gave them intelligence about American military intelligence we collected in the Pacific about what the Japanese were up to. We don’t know what provoked him to start or stop doing it in that brief period. In any case, he didn’t spy for a very long time, then during World War 2, he enlisted in the army and served in military intelligence on General Patton’s staff. He lost his arm during the war, and actually had it amputated in a German field hospital. He learned to type with his left hand and resumed his work as a journalist.
Fast forward to the early 1960s: He found a new partner, and started a syndicated column that specialized in getting leaks about the CIA and the American military. He was absolutely convinced that the US was sleepwalking into a war with the Soviet Union and that it was his job to wake the country up to the dangers it was facing.
He developed amazing sources in the White House, Congress and the CIA itself, and that actually provoked the president to order the CIA to find out where he was getting the information, and shut it down, and that was the origin of Project Mockingbird. The CIA tapped him and his partner’s phone, and found out he was getting a flood of information from within the administration.
The Crime Report: Did you intentionally try to draw comparisons with today’s media landscape? One chapter is called “Fake News” for example, and you talk about the slogan “America First,” which was used by a particular journalist in the years leading up to World War 2.
Usdin: I think people who use the term now should know what its origins are. I doubt that Donald Trump knows that, but it would give great pause anyone who’s educated about history to use a term like that. The term “America First” was first coined by an American propagandist, who called himself a journalist but he was a fascist propagandist, and his name was James True. He had an office at the National Press Building, and he was just a straight up, flat-out fascist. He published vile racist propaganda against African Americans and Jews, and advocated violence and bigotry. He was just a horrible person and didn’t pull any punches about it.
He created a company called America First, and he was the first person to use that term. Later that term was picked up by American isolationists, who wanted to keep the US out of World War 2. Some of them were fascist, like True, and racist; but many of them weren’t. Many believed the US had been fooled into participating in the First World War, and that World War 2 was no business of the U.S [Some argued that] the US should wait until if and when it was attacked in order to go to war. Many of them believed that the US couldn’t win a war against Germany. That’s the origins of America First, and to see it revived in the 21st century is surprising and appalling.
The Crime Report: How much support do you think True had in the U.S.?
Usdin: I don’t know how much support he had in terms of numbers, but he certainly had influential support. There were members of Congress who reprinted his fascist propaganda in the Congressional Record, and tried to disseminate it widely. There were very powerful and prominent business men who secretly gave him money. There was also a feeling at that time, due to The Great Depression, that the US was faced with a choice between capitalism and communism. While I wouldn’t say a majority of Americans believed that, certainly a very influential minority of Americans believed that was the choice, and many of them picked communism and a sizable number of them supported fascism, also.
It was also more than just economic pressure and hard times; there was really a sense that the system had collapsed. The Dust Bowl was pushing people off of farms, there was the collapse of the banking system, massive unemployment, and a loss of hope.
The Crime Report: Certain news agencies in your book claimed to be unbiased, while they were committing some form of espionage behind the scenes. Is that a red flag to you when you see a news agency today claiming to be unbiased?
Usdin: Well, you do have to wonder if somebody has to tell you that they’re unbiased, whether it’s untrue or not, but the difference between bias and being controlled or influenced by foreign or American intelligence services is an important distinction.
In the past, there certainly have been press or newspapers that were influenced or controlled by intelligence agencies, both foreign and American. It’s certainly not inconceivable that that could be going on today. It’s something to think about and it’s something to be worried about. At the same time, though, one of the messages I’m trying to convey in the book is the importance of the institution of journalism, and of the role journalism plays in how people ascertain the truth.
Weaponizing Information
The Crime Report: Your book shows the power of information, or disinformation, and the fact that it can be weaponized. It gives credence to the old adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Usdin: There are instances in the book when information was weaponized. There was a sense by governments that journalism and information were critical tools in conflicts. The Cold War is an obvious example. It was perceived as a conflict between ideologies and a lot was played out in newspapers, television and radio. In the run-up to Word War 2, there was a feeling, which was accurate, that American policy makers and the public decided what the US should and would do, and that public opinion, shaped through the media, would play a big role in determining what was going to happen.
The Crime Report: An interesting dynamic throughout Bureau of Spies turns on the competing forces of communism, capitalism, democracy, and fascism here in the US. Do you think that’s almost a testament to the freedoms the public and the press enjoyed during that time, that these ideas could compete with each other, compared to the Soviet Union, where the media landscape was much more controlled?
Usdin: Certainly Soviet intelligence saw opportunities in the US and its press freedom to disseminate propaganda, to engage in what they called “active measures” or efforts to influence American foreign policy. The goal was to disrupt American democracy and erode faith in the integrity of the democratic system, but I would argue that ultimately press freedom in the US during the Cold War was greatly to the US advantage.
It was partly due to the brittleness of the Soviet system, which eroded confidence in Soviet leadership. There was hunger for real information from the outside, and the government’s attempts to suppress that information only made it seem more credible to those people in the Soviet Union who could get hold of it.
In the epilogue, I write that ironically a lot of the Soviet propaganda efforts in the US during the Cold War, which weren’t very successful, were predicated on the idea that Americans believed the media. If the Soviets could get a story into an American newspaper, or TV, or radio, it was a tremendous accomplishment to them, because they thought correctly that large numbers of Americans would believe it. Now we’ve got a different situation, where Russian government and intelligence services are acting on the notion that it’s possible to undermine confidence in the media and institutions and the truth itself. That goal is being advanced by the president and by people who know better and stay quiet.
The Crime Report: Can you talk about the Rainbow Five Report?
Usdin: It was a series of five contingency plans for the American military which included the invasion of Europe. They were put into effect very close to the plans that Chesly Manly reported in the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 4, 1941. The report was leaked to a US Senator, Burton Wheeler, an ardent isolationist who was adamantly opposed to the US supporting Britain or getting involved in the war, and it still isn’t known who gave him the information. Wheeler said it was a captain in the army, but he also believed it must have been someone much higher up who authorized the captain to give him the information. Wheeler speculated, but he didn’t have any evidence, and I don’t think he was correct. So we’ll probably never know who the captain was or if it was someone higher up.
The Crime Report: Wheeler is quoted in your book as saying that the unknown captain justified giving him the information by saying Congress is a branch of the government, and that it deserves to know what the executive branch is doing when it concerns human lives. This sentiment seems to contrast what we see today with more and more acts of war ordered by the executive branch without congressional oversight. Would you agree?
Usdin: It was also an example of the dangers of giving information to Congress because they leak it. Here’s a congressman who was given some of the most sensitive information that the American military has—information critical to American success and the lives of American soldiers, and what is the very first thing he decides to do with it? He calls a reporter and invites him over his house and says “look at this!” with the intention of getting it in the newspapers. That’s not an action that inspires confidence in the military and intelligence agencies that it’s a good idea to share information with Congress.
I agree with you that there’s been an erosion of the congressional role in oversight of the military. They have almost no oversight of intelligence agencies, and that is a bad thing. But on the other hand, a leak like that gives ammunition to people in the military and intelligence services who want to avoid and go around legitimate oversight of congress.
The Crime Report: You talk briefly toward the end of the book about leakers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, how do you view them in light of leaks and other activity you cover in Bureau of Spies?
Usdin: I think it helps to look at the activities of Philip Agee and a magazine called Covert Action. It’s something a lot of people have either forgotten or never knew about. Agee was a CIA officer who basically defected, and dedicated the last decades of his life to trying to destroy the CIA. He wasn’t a whistleblower, he really wanted to destroy the CIA and he also wanted the Soviet Union to prevail over the US.
The technique Agee used to try to advance his goals was to leak massive amounts of information about the CIA and their operations. He specialized in what he called “Naming Names” (a column in Covert Action), and producing lists of covert CIA operatives around the world. [The magazine] was published from the National Press Building, and what we’ve subsequently learned, which was suspected at the time, although he may have denied it, was that he was in close contact with the KGB and Cuban intelligence, and some portion of the information he was disseminating actually came from the KGB. The KGB certainly felt that he was under their control and was one of their operatives.
I’m certainly not saying that’s the case with Snowden or the other leakers today, but the pushback that Congress had against Agee was based not on the fact he was opposing CIA policies, which most people would’ve found abhorrent if they found out about them. It was that he was indiscriminate and he was acting with an intent to destroy the CIA and hurt US national security, rather than trying to expose abuses and injustices with the hope they’d be corrected.
So I think that in judging Snowden, Assange and WikiLeaks, that might be one of the filters to apply and look at what they’re doing. Are they exposing injustices and abuses and in doing so actually strengthening democracy and human rights? Or have they crossed over a line either inadvertently or intentionally to a place where they’re advancing the interests of individuals and governments that are adversaries of democracy and human rights?
With what I call industrial-scale leakers, I think it’s worth thinking about the framework for assessing what they’re doing and then people can make their own judgements.
Dane Stallone is a news intern for TCR. He welcomes comments from readers.