Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  The President felt besieged. He publicly called demonstrators “bums” and privately accused them of practicing “revolutionary terrorism.” Unable to sleep, Nixon made a bizarre impromptu middle-of-the-night visit to the Lincoln Memorial, where he baffled antiwar protesters by trying to make small talk about football. The President turned to alcohol in an attempt to relax and summoned his longtime psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, who concealed the purpose of his visits by signing in with false destinations on White House logs. To steel his resolve, Nixon repeatedly watched the movie Patton, which glorified the bellicose World War II general, and vowed to emulate his example in Vietnam: “We’re gonna level that goddamn country!”

  Nixon’s belligerent deceit forced dissenting government officials to turn to the news media to try to stop the carnage, and Jack Anderson was soon at the forefront exposing the administration’s clandestine policies. “Anderson was the most consistently bedeviling of the press corps,” Defense Secretary Melvin Laird complained; his deputy confided in his diary that military leaders braced themselves before turning to the “Merry-Go-Round” every day at breakfast. Pentagon officials even erected their own Jack Anderson dartboard.

  In early 1971, the columnist and his legman Brit Hume persuaded a disillusioned army sergeant named Stephen Linger to become a whistleblower against the war. Deeply religious, Linger had volunteered to fight communism in Vietnam and was subsequently promoted to Washington, where he handled top-secret back channel communications for the Defense Intelligence Agency. His job provided access to classified White House teletypes, which the twenty-four-year-old read with growing disenchantment. “I was stunned,” Linger later wrote. “How could my Country be so ‘two-faced’ . . . in Vietnam when men my age were dying for what they believed to be a just war? . . . What I learned and believed in as a Christian and as an American was completely contradicted by the facts I read.” Linger began gathering all the encrypted Pentagon cables that he could get his hands on. “I wanted out,” he recalled. “The more I learned and [understood], the more I wanted to do something about it.” He decided that somebody should tell the public what was really going on and contacted Anderson, whom he respected as an upright Christian, “the only guy” in Washington he trusted to tell the truth about the administration’s expansion of the war. Linger met Hume outside a car dealership near the Pentagon and poured out his story for several hours. He then “spilled my guts out” to Anderson in the columnist’s suburban house and produced a sheaf of paperwork revealing numerous administration secrets.

  That spring, based on the classified records that Linger had smuggled out of the Defense Department, Anderson began a series of eighteen columns exposing the military’s covert operations in Vietnam. On March 18, the newsman quoted “top secret” reports disclosing that a “hush-hush project” had seeded clouds to increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, interfering with North Vietnamese supply routes and washing out villages in the process. It was the first known use of weather warfare in military history and would lead to international condemnation because of its unpredictable and uncontrollable destructive potential. One admiral involved in the “very sensitive” operation warned his military colleagues that Anderson’s “article was accurate . . . but until now [the project] has never been mentioned publicly” because details were safeguarded in a “vaulted area” of the Pentagon and “protected by [a special] cypher lock system.” Anderson gloried in his breach of official secrecy. “Only those with top security clearance” knew about the operation, the muckraker boasted in his column, “until now.”

  Four days later, Anderson exposed the sham of U.S. peace talks with North Vietnam by revealing how the White House had deliberately restricted American diplomats in Paris from receiving ongoing intelligence about the war—the war whose end they were supposedly negotiating. Two days afterward, the columnist published what one author called Anderson’s “most explosive story” yet, revealing American plans to bomb Hanoi and mine its harbor in Haiphong—an eerily accurate forecast of precisely the tactics the military would use the following year. The muckraker warned that some U.S. advisors feared this “would be a dangerous escalation of the war, endangering Soviet shipping in the busy harbor,” and could “compel the Kremlin to retaliate.”

  The next week, Anderson continued to draw on his cache of classified documents to reveal repeated instances of administration duplicity: claiming minimal casualties in Laos despite a “secret” report that showed otherwise; misleading the public about the intent of a previous Cambodian invasion; and denying the existence of more recent cross-border raids, whose secret military code names Anderson published. In other columns that month, Anderson cited “intelligence reports” and “confidential communiqués from Saigon” suggesting the administration believed it could win a military victory in Vietnam, contrary to White House claims to be winding down the war.

  By the end of March, Anderson’s detailed revelations created an uproar among the President’s men. Although the columnist’s disclosures “attracted little attention from other journalists,” author Seymour Hersh wrote, they “threw the White House and [Pentagon] into a panic.” According to top-secret minutes, Defense Secretary Laird told his staff that “there must be a bad leak” from inside because “Jack Anderson seems to get back-channel messages sooner than [even] Laird does.” National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s staff culled Anderson’s columns, numbering and highlighting in yellow all classified quotes, which officials then tried to match to particular government documents, searching for patterns that could explain how Anderson got his information. At the same time, Attorney General John Mitchell ordered an “extensive investigation” by the Justice Department, including “interrogations” of all enlisted men who could have leaked the sensitive data.

  But Anderson continued publishing classified documents throughout the spring of 1971. On April 9, the columnist quoted from “intercepted enemy messages” to reveal that “Hanoi had advance knowledge of both the Cambodian and Laos invasions” by the United States. According to a “secret message to the Pentagon,” Anderson reported, “faulty” American intelligence had “caused heavy casualties.” Furthermore, the newsman wrote, North Vietnam had been “alerted in advance of B-52 raids,” thus allowing the North Vietnamese to “move their trucks off the Ho Chi Minh trails before the big bombers arrived.” Anderson disclosed that Hanoi received this valuable heads-up by bribing American GIs with marijuana and heroin.

  On April 30, yet another Anderson bombshell: the Nixon administration was secretly spying on its ally, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, intercepting his “private messages” and decoding them in a clandestine project “identified by the code name ‘Gout.’ ” According to the columnist, U.S. intelligence agents regularly rushed Thieu’s personal communiqués “by teletype to the White House marked ‘Exclusive for Dr. Henry A. Kissinger/White House.’ ” Anderson’s revelation that the United States was spying on its partner in the war was “particularly distressing” because it was “accurate and very embarrassing,” one presidential advisor warned. “Furthermore, the knowledge of this collection operation has been very tightly held.”

  A Pentagon investigator claimed that Anderson’s Vietnam disclosures “really hurt” national security, “causing the compromise of codes, code names, and operations” that were “believed to be of significant interest to our enemies abroad.” But the reality was that these leaks were more politically embarrassing than militarily dangerous, and the newsman insisted that the administration’s attempt to deceive citizens about the secret escalation of the war deserved coverage. “The price for these intelligence goofs has been paid in blood,” Anderson declared in one column. “Should those who were responsible be allowed to remain in their shadowy world safe from public exposure?”

  Not surprisingly, President Nixon held a different view. He privately railed at the “cocksuckers” in the media who are “trying to kill us” and vowed that he would “not le
t the goddamn war be decided in the press.” CIA records show that the spy agency began reviewing its old files on Anderson in an unsuccessful attempt “to show [that] JACK ANDERSON is a perjurer [about] his military obligation”—the old and discredited charge that Anderson evaded the draft during World War II. Intelligence officials “are becoming increasingly perturbed over information appearing in Jack Anderson’s column,” a White House advisor stated in a memo. “Although there are some who would like to see Anderson put to trial and hung, in either order, I believe that the sensible solution would be to identify and neutralize the source or sources of the information.” The aide suggested that “a common thread” seemed to run through Anderson’s columns, “possibly indicating a single, low level, but well placed source.”

  That conjecture was accurate, for Anderson’s source was precisely such a low-level but well-placed informant. Yet Stephen Linger was never caught, even though Pentagon investigators interviewed him—and nearly two hundred other suspects—as part of their massive effort to stop the Anderson disclosures. The Defense Department investigation was led by W. Donald Stewart, a beefy and pugnacious former FBI agent who launched eleven separate probes in pursuit of Anderson, who “just about drove us crazy with leaks,” Stewart recalled. “All doors were opened for us. If we needed planes, ships or donkeys, we had them. That was the hysteria created by the Jack Anderson columns.”

  But it still wasn’t enough to locate Anderson’s source. According to the Pentagon’s investigation, Linger (falsely) told agents that he “had no direct knowledge of Jack Anderson or his staff. He also denied having been contacted by Anderson or having knowledge of individuals who might have been.” Instead, Linger pointed blame elsewhere, telling agents about an army coworker “who seemed to ‘snoop’ into the message traffic” and another who “lived in a ‘hippie house’ and was in complete accord with Jane Fonda and her beliefs.” Linger also identified two other servicemen who were “indebted financially” and thus might have a motive to sell documents to Anderson. Investigators were so persuaded by Linger’s denial—and his helpful suggestions of other possible suspects—that they did not bother to interview him again, let alone administer a polygraph exam as they did with other, seemingly more suspicious candidates.

  In classic bureaucratic fashion, Defense Department investigators determined that blame for the Anderson disclosures lay elsewhere in the federal government. After analyzing one “Merry-Go-Round” column, Pentagon agents erroneously deduced that “Anderson’s information probably came from a State Department source because State is upset over the lack of intelligence information it is receiving” from the Defense Department. Another Anderson column, Pentagon sleuths incorrectly decided, “undoubtedly” came from the National Weather Service because one of its employees was “a fellow parishioner” in Anderson’s church. In the end, federal agents came up empty-handed. “Investigation failed to identify Jack Anderson’s source(s) for Subject articles,” a final report concluded. “Due to the lack of any productive leads to pursue relative to the Jack Anderson articles, instant investigation is hereby terminated.”

  All of it provided only further fodder for the columnist, who publicly mocked the administration’s attempt to “scare off our news sources by unleashing its bloodhounds to find out where we get our information. The bloodhounds are now loose again, searching up and down Pentagon corridors for our trail, growling menacingly at anyone who might have been seen talking to us . . . The brass would dearly like to find out who blabbed.” As agent Stewart put it, “While we were conducting our investigations, [Anderson] was writing columns making us look like Keystone Kops.”

  Paradoxically, the impact of the Anderson revelations was both dramatic and disappointing. “Anderson’s columns that spring and summer were to stagger Washington—and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon,” Seymour Hersh wrote. At the same time, however, “all were ignored by the rest of the press.” It was not that Anderson’s columns were unimportant; on the contrary, Hersh observed, “Anderson’s information was recycled by other reporters in stories years later, and invariably each was treated as major news.” But “the failure of the press to follow up on his reports tells a little about Anderson’s ambivalent status among his peers and a great deal about the Nixon Administration’s ability to control events.” Indeed, when a Democratic senator followed up on the Anderson disclosures by demanding an explanation from the Pentagon, officials refused to answer questions on the grounds that doing so would threaten national security; that was enough to make the problem go away.

  Anderson was understandably exasperated that his important Vietnam exposés were ignored by Washington’s media elite, but he was hardly surprised. After all, the capital’s journalistic establishment had been dismissing his work for decades. “We were ahead of everybody” in reporting on Nixon’s deceptions in Southeast Asia, the columnist complained. “We were frustrated all the time.” Anderson’s Vietnam scoops were some of the most important and groundbreaking of his career, based on top-secret documents that exposed in real time the administration’s mendacity in foreign policy. Yet, as was often the case, the muckraker was hobbled by his own checkered reputation for accuracy, which gave his competitors the excuse they sought to ignore even his most significant revelations. At what might have been the apogee of his career, Anderson’s remarkable disclosures remained buried on the comics pages of The Washington Post, ignored by the rest of the press and the public even as they spread panic inside the White House. Like Nixon himself, Anderson somehow always seemed unable to realize his full potential.

  At the same time, Anderson was also thwarted by a lack of tangible evidence to corroborate his reporting. Because the President’s men publicly denied the columnist’s Vietnam stories, and because Anderson’s anonymous source was so deeply buried in the bureaucracy, other members of the press corps could not confirm his information. Indeed, journalistic competitors had an incentive to minimize Anderson’s disclosures rather than acknowledge their own inability to match his scoops or cultivate comparable sources. “In retrospect,” Hersh wrote, “Linger’s leaking failed to change American policy because Linger did not take the step of actually giving Anderson top secret documents” for publication. The muckraker would soon be forced to change tactics.

  In the spring of 1971, as the Nixon administration unsuccessfully tried to catch Anderson’s informant, another whistleblower stepped forward to expose White House deceit by leaking classified material to the press. Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers—a secret seven-thousand-page Defense Department study that documented U.S. duplicity in Vietnam during three previous administrations—would lead to an unprecedented battle between the government and the news media. A year earlier, Jack Anderson had learned about the still-secret records from one of his sources on Capitol Hill but had “made no effort to get them,” he said, “because they were described to me as an historical study” and “I was interested in what’s going on in Vietnam now [not] in digging up past history.” It was, Anderson later admitted, a serious “error in news judgment.” Instead, Ellsberg approached New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, to whom he had leaked information a few years earlier when both men were in Vietnam.

  On June 13, 1971, the Times filled four entire pages in its first installment of what would become a series of extensive articles about the Pentagon Papers. At first, President Nixon dismissed the story because it uncovered misconduct only by previous, mostly Democratic administrations. Publication of the papers “doesn’t hurt us,” he told his staff, so “the key is for us to keep out of it.” But two hours later, General Alexander Haig, whom Nixon admired for his toughness, persuaded the President that the disclosures threatened national security. Nixon reversed course and decided that the leak was “unconscionable,” a “treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.” The Times story “serves the enemy,” the President declared, and “people have gotta be put to the torch for this sort of thing.”

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p; The next day, after another page-one article on the classified documents, Nixon erupted. “Neil Sheehan of the Times is a bastard,” the President growled, a “cocksucker” and “left-wing Communist son of a bitch.” Daniel Ellsberg was even worse, another Harvard-educated traitor like Alger Hiss; indeed, as in the Hiss case, Ellsberg had microfilmed the classified documents he purloined. It “gets back to the whole Hiss syndrome,” Nixon told his staff, “the intellectuals because, basically, they have no morals . . . This is a bunch of goddamn left-wingers trying to destroy” the administration.

  The President calculated how best to exploit the case to undermine his enemies. Nixon decided to “launch an attack on the Times,” White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary, and the Chief Executive instructed aides to “find out what the statute of limitations” is for bringing criminal indictments so that the administration could “subpoena all these bastards” and “charge them” in court. Nixon ordered Attorney General Mitchell to send a telegram putting the newspaper on notice that its publication of the Pentagon Papers was a violation of the Espionage Act: “As far as the Times is concerned, hell, they’re our enemies” anyway. According to White House counsel John Dean, “the old man”—the President—“wanted to know how he could put those bastards . . . at the New York Times in jail.”

  On June 15, the administration went to court to stop the Times from publishing more articles based on the classified documents. Government attorneys asserted that additional disclosures would cause “immediate and irreparable harm to the security of the United States.” This was a grotesque exaggeration; even Nixon’s own solicitor general later admitted that there was no evidence of “any trace of a threat to the national security from publication.” Nevertheless, the administration quickly obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Times from printing further excerpts from the papers. “For the first time since the very adoption of the Constitution,” one legal scholar wrote, “the U.S. government [imposed] prior restraint with respect to the freedom of the press.”