Reply #158: Very interesting. Thanks. I remember the pike incident clearly,

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like it was yesterday.

CBS took Daniel Schorr off the air after he leaked the Pike committee report. This was most likely a convenient opportunity for William Paley, chairman of CBS, who didn't approve of Schorr's interest in the network's own CIA connection. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson, who by 1976 was president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, said that in October 1954, Paley called him into his office for a friendly discussion with two CIA officials. Schorr mentioned this on Walter Cronkite's show, and in an op-ed piece for the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the late publisher of the Times, had been cozy with the CIA also). "There are executives and retired executives," Schorr wrote, "who could help dispel the cloud hanging over the press by coming forward to tell the arrangements they made with the CIA."

Today the CIA, which once issued an automatic "no comment" when asked anything by reporters, is playing an adept game of "soft cop, hard cop" public relations. In 1991 an internal CIA task force recommended a more active posture by the public affairs office when responding to requests for assistance (that year they handled 3,369 telephone inquires from reporters, provided 174 unclassified background briefings for them at Headquarters, and arranged 164 interviews with senior Agency officials).<11> The "hard cop" was discovered by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. In 1995 she was telephoned by Vin Swasey, CIA deputy director of public affairs, who strongly objected to an editorial because it included the names of nine former station chiefs in Guatemala.<12> Reuters was persuaded by Swasey's colleagues to run the story without the names.

Note: On 22nd December, 1974, Seymour Hersh published an article in the New York Times where he claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had been involved in domestic spying activities. President Gerald Ford responded by asking Nelson Rockefeller to head a commission to investigate CIA activities in the United States.

Congress also reacted to this information and decided to investigate the entire intelligence community. On 27th January, 1975, the US Senate established the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Frank Church.