I Set Up My Own 'Crisis Monitoring' Operation and Gain a Vital 'Deep Throat' Source in the Process

Public Relations Quarterly, 2008 by Pedersen, Wes

It was spring, 1958, and I had just arrived at CIA headquarters via one of the blue, unmarked buses the intelligence agency was using to transport employees and "cleared" visitors to the 37 buildings scattered around Washington. The agency was yet to establish headquarters across the Potomac in Langley, Va. Until that compound could be built, its main operations were housed in this huge, former brewery close to the Potomac's edge. The Watergate hotel and the Kennedy entertainment center would fill in the area later.

As I stood in the lobby looking down into the amphitheater where the beer makers' craft had once been plied, I asked myself, "All these people, mulling around, desk by desk - how can so many people get so many things so wrong so often?"

It was a legitimate question. As a reporter for the Sioux City (Iowa) Journal in 1948, I had been with that state's senior U.S. senator, Bourke Hickenlooper, the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, when he got the word that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb. "Damn it," he shouted, slamming down the phone, "the CIA said they wouldn't have the bomb for years."

Throughout the 1950s, as a foreign affairs analyst for the PR operations of the Department of State and then the U.S. Information Agency, I had been operating my own "crisis management" tracking system, monitoring media reports on political and military developments behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. It - and a "Deep Throat" source of information - made it possible for me to predict a majority of the major crises of a crisis-riddled decade.

Amazingly, the CIA was wrong in each instance.

In January 1953, for example, Tass, the Soviet Union's official press service, announced the arrest of nine Moscow-area doctors, six of them Jews. They were accused of plotting to kill government officials. U.S. and other reporters in Moscow speculated that the arrests might signal the beginning of a pogrom - an out-of-control campaign of persecution of Jews throughout the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I didn't buy it. I knew the Soviet press had been remarkably silent of late about the activities of The Man of Steel, the tyrannical Josef Stalin. I suspected that he was ill, and that the men around him were setting up scapegoats who could be accused of causing his death should it occur. This, remember, was in an era when charges of conspiracy were claiming the lives of high-ranking officials.

Because one of the United States' announced goals in this rapidly heating Cold War was to destabilize communist governments when possible, I had no qualms about suggesting a column in which I would examine the likelihood that Stalin was desperately ill. After all, not many years earlier, Stalin had told the then secretary of State, James Byrnes, that he was seriously ill.

The suggestion died aborning. A State Department "policy officer" ran it past the CIA. The answer came back: "Stalin could not possibly be ill without our knowing it." The CIA's reputation, and that of State, would be impaired if an inaccurate assessment on Stalin were issued to the foreign press.

Stalin died on March 3. Official Washington was stunned by the demise of the world's most feared despots. So again, the question in the White House and on Capitol Hill was, "Why didn't the CIA know?"

Next day I sent a memo to Charles Arnot, then director of State's International Press Service (IPS). It began:

"Never since I joined the Department (in 1950) have I been more angry." Outlining the veto of my commentary, I added: "To me this is another and perhaps the most glaring example to do of the negative thinking that impedes (our) operation... I must protest again the type of thinking that seeks reasons why we should not act rather than why we should."

I had built a full head of steam the year before in Paris, while gathering materials for my columns, written under the bylines of Benjamin E. West and Paul L. Ford. Before my departure from Washington, I had pulled together a dossier on the internal squabbles of the French Communist Party. In the French capital, I talked with reporters familiar with the situation and had reached conclusion that two of the most prominent French party leaders, Andrei Marty and Charles Tillon, were likely to be purged.

I wrote a Paul Ford column suggesting that "a storm" was about to break in the French party. Following mandated protocol, I submitted the column to the Embassy's CIA "expert" on communism in France. He insisted everything was fine in the party, and that I must kill the column.

Next week, in Rome, I picked up a paper: "Marty, Tillon Purged."

As I told Arnot, "Had the pieces on Stalin and Marty-Tillon appeared, they would have done much to establish Paul L. Ford further as a writer with insight and foresight."

He knew what I meant: Bureaucratic knownothings had cost me two scoops that would have made the reputation of any journalist.

Soon, I would discover that the culture of negativity that permeated the U.S. propaganda operations in the 1950s was far more dangerous that I had imagined.