National Secrets

"Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau is having a hard time in the Reagan era. Reality keeps outstripping his wildest flights of satire. By the time Trudeau wrapped up a series depicting the late CIA director William Casey's posthumous sojourn among the undead in Haiti, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (the one played by Robert Redford in All the President's Men) was going public with an equally shadowy tale of receiving Casey's deathbed confession to all counts in the Iran-contra scandal. The plot thickened with denials from Casey's widow and his Secret Service guards that Woodward ever made it to Casey's hospital room.

The echoes grew more ghostly with the entry of Charles Colson, a rehabilitated veteran of Washington scandals past. By coincidence, Colson happened also to be a patient in Georgetown Hospital during Casey's last days. In the Post letters column, Colson weighed in with the assertion that hospital security officials told him of Woodward's failed attempt to visit Casey. Furthermore, Colson says he visited his fellow patient during the period in question and found him unable to speak a word. The answer to this puzzle, as with so much else about the Reagan administration, was apparently interred with Casey's bones.

Woodward's midnight confession story comprises only the most melodramatic of several potboiling exposes in his new book, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. In addition to fleshing out Casey's central role in the Iran-contra scandal, Woodward brings forth new details on the covert war in Nicaragua, anti-Gadhafi operations, and the straight dope (at last) on a CIA "counterterrorist" car-bomb that left 80 dead passers-by in the streets of Beirut.

All these stories and more are recounted in considerable detail, complete with reconstructed dialogue from closed meetings at the highest levels of government. And, no less than with the elusive deathbed visit, the question must arise, "Where do these stories come from?" The answer, of course, is that they come from powerful people on the inside who want the secrets told for reasons of their own.

This leaves the "objective" reporter, whose only apparent agenda involves Pulitzer Prizes, hefty book contracts, and perhaps another movie deal, at the service of his sources' secret political agenda. So it is that exposes of official wrongdoing, in which we dissidents so delight, are usually part of the process through which the institutions of permanent government (i.e. the defense and intelligence establishments) steer the ship of state and shape a national consensus.

IN THE CASE OF VEIL, one major source is identified, that being William Casey himself. Once Woodward's book plans became known, Casey apparently took him aside for hours of fatherly, Scotch-fueled chitchat designed, as the widow Casey explains, "to shape the story." But clearly other voices were whispering in Woodward's other ear. One of those voices must have belonged to Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, the master spy who in the course of the 1970s served as director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and director of the supersecret National Security Agency.

In early 1981 Inman came to perch at the right hand of Bill Casey as deputy director of the CIA. In VEIL, Inman, whose 1982 resignation was supposedly spurred by his doubts about the Casey-Reagan Nicaragua policy, emerges as something of a hero. A paragon of straight dealing with the Congress at home and good old honest, efficient espionage abroad, Inman sounds for all the world like someone's candidate for CIA director in the post-1988 world of a restored national security consensus.

Interestingly enough, Inman has turned up in the vicinity of Woodward scoops before. The roots of their simpatico relationship may even go back to the young Woodward's pre-Watergate service in an extremely sensitive naval intelligence post that had him monitoring supersecret communications channels and preparing summary briefings for his military-political superiors. In fact, some students of the Watergate scandal have nominated Inman as a leading candidate for the real-life role of Deep Throat (played by Hal Holbrook in the movie), Woodward's inside source who guided the Post investigation and, critics say, steered it away from the deeper-covered doings of the so-called intelligence community.

All of this is not to say that Bob Woodward is a running-dog lackey and his book a pile of disinformation. It is simply to point out that the adversarial watchdog role of the American free press exists mostly in its own self-congratulatory editorials. Even the great Washington Post is more an inside player in the management of the empire than it is an independent critic.

A detailed picture of the Post's longstanding ties with the secret government can be found in Deborah Davis' Katharine the Great, a biography of Post publisher Katharine Graham. The book was first published in 1979 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, but that publisher quickly withdrew the book from the market and shredded all its copies under protests from Graham and Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (immortalized on film by Jason Robards).

The book was reprinted this spring by a fledgling Washington press with an appendix containing newly released information on Bradlee's propaganda work for the CIA on the Rosenberg "atom spy" case of the early 1950s, one of the charges Bradlee vehemently denied in 1979.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.