Word: pelton
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Amid the furor over Ronald Pelton's betrayal, the OSS veterans gathered for a festive 25th annual banquet that provided a mite of moral support to Administration efforts to bolster the nation's intelligence apparatus. The banqueters warmly applauded when Reagan pledged to do just that, and nobody there had any trouble seconding the President's praise of CIA Director William Casey as "one of the heroes of America's fight for freedom." After all, Bill Casey was one of them; from the OSS office in London, he had helped direct the deployment of agents behind enemy lines. Still...
...strange that the Administration should begin getting tough over the Pelton espionage trial. Here a trusted Government official is accused of selling some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets to the Soviets, and the CIA gets all upset about what additional secrets might be let out in trying him. The CIA considers whether NBC should be prosecuted for its reporting. Reagan puts pressure on the Washington Post with a personal phone call to Chairman Katharine Graham. The CIA warns trial reporters not to delve beyond the testimony. No journalist would willingly jeopardize the nation's security...
...first report to rouse Casey's ire came on Monday's edition of NBC's Today show. Giving a preview of the Pelton trial, Correspondent James Polk reported that the accused spy "apparently gave away one of the NSA's most sensitive secrets--a project with the code name Ivy Bells, believed to be a top-secret underwater eavesdropping operation by American submarines inside Russian harbors...
Casey formally asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting NBC for its report. Meanwhile, the Washington Post on Wednesday published another sensitive story on the Pelton case. The front-page article, however, had been abridged after numerous discussions with Casey and other Administration officials. The published story, written by Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward and Reporter Patrick E. Tyler, provided a relatively innocuous account of Pelton's encounters with Soviet agents. Removed were any technical details of the spying techniques that Pelton allegedly betrayed...
...activities did little to clear up confusion among news editors over just what constitutes a breach of the law in Casey's book. NBC News President Lawrence Grossman said the CIA's move "caught us by surprise," since the network had aired virtually the same report last November, when Pelton was arrested. Indeed, details on similar submarine eavesdropping operations were revealed in articles in the New York Times and Washington Post as early as the mid-1970s, and the code name Ivy Bells was used by Pelton's attorney in a pretrial hearing...