‘Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship’

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. “Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship,” by Kyle Shideler. 

It’s hard to understate the irony of [Carl] Bernstein’s complaining about journalists collaborating with intelligence officials when he had served as the unquestioning recipient of leaks by Mark Felt, the onetime head of FBI counterintelligence, motivated by Felt’s bureaucratic beef against the elected president of the United States. Bernstein’s relationship with Felt can be thought of as the alternative model of intelligence-journalist cooperation, where the eyes of the intelligence services are not on foreign foes, but domestic political and bureaucratic opponents.

Even in exposing the CIA’s relationship with journalists, Bernstein was likely little more than a patsy. As the late Angelo Codevilla observed from his time as a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a leftwing faction of the intelligence services used the Church Committee and other revelations of bad behavior, not to clean up shop but to target internal opponents—and to establish a dominance over the security organs which has never since been challenged. Instead of journalists being the eyes and ears of American spies, it’s now the spies who observe and report to their journalist assets, not to relay facts, but to spread narratives that serve the opaque purposes of the government mandarins.

Journalists seeking to remain in the good graces of the intelligence community have returned the favor by pre-emptively tailoring their reporting to the needs of the spies. The Intercept has reported how CIA favorite Ken Dilanian, first of the Los Angeles Times and later of the Associated Press, was one of several journalists who routinely gave the Agency preclearance of stories to ensure that the coverage portrayed the CIA in a positive light.

Coziness between spies and journalists has grown exponentially worse as society has progressed further into the digital era. Media outlets have closed foreign news bureaus and sent veteran foreign correspondents into retirement. In their place have settled swarms of young, eager J-school grads, some responsible for writing as many as a half dozen articles a day, with no requirement for multiple sources and no fact checking, posted to news websites where the ability to stealth-edit an error has replaced pro-active high-quality and knowledgeable editors. Eventually even writing articles became too time consuming, and journalists now rush to scoop each other on  social media, hammering out 140-character pieces for the benefit of their Twitter (now X) followers, who sometimes outnumber the total official subscribers of the outlets where they are employed.

These are the twenty-seven-year-olds who “literally know nothing” as former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes once pointed out. Rhodes was describing the method by which, as an official in the Obama administration, he built a foreign policy “echo chamber” that would successfully spin a narrative to justify a nuclear deal with Iran. Rhodes’s partner in the scheme was a CIA officer seconded to the National Security Council, Ned Price. Price and Rhodes realized that reporters who lacked worldly experience or access to foreign correspondents of their own were completely reliant on intelligence officials in Washington to tell them what’s really going on.

What little HUMINT capability the intelligence agencies had was decimated in the 1970s, thanks in part to Bernstein and company. So today the intelligence doyens of D.C. don’t really have any better understanding of the ways of the wider world than do the know-nothing journalists to whom they leak. But what the intelligence services do have is extensive electronic surveillance. And this tool also has been turned inward, in attempts to produce more goodies to leak to their aligned journalists.

Accompanying Rhodes’s narrative-shaping was the tactic of unmasking identities of Americans caught in electronic surveillance, which began with congressional opponents of the Iran nuclear deal who were surveilled while they spoke with Israeli officials also opposed to the deal. As Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President has pointed out, the Iran deal surveillance was a dry run for the “Russian collusion” hoax launched against Donald Trump. The plot contained all the same elements: eavesdropping on political opponents engaged in conversations with foreigners—whether those conversations were legitimate, or the result of foreign assets being introduced by the services to justify surveillance—and using targeted leaks to favored reporters to create a false but prevalent narrative which in turn justified more extensive surveillance.

Ironically, central to the scheme was the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which had been instituted as a post-Church Committee reform, sold as an effort to rein in the intelligence community. Instead, provided they can sell their story to the court, the spies have carte blanche to indulge in bad behavior with a judicially clear conscience. Exactly as Codevilla had repeatedly warned would happen. Like Bernstein with Felt, journalists are perfectly comfortable being the patsies of deep-throated spies if the target is a Republican, and not some foreign foe.