The Clash of Intelligence Advocates and Critics

This chapter examines the increasingly contested discourse over intelligence during the 1970s. Though the 1960s saw the emergence of a new generation of reporters that would challenge the CIA, that generation had not necessarily become the majority, and there continued to be strong advocates, both publicly and privately, for the CIA in major news organizations. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms sought to combine his predecessors’ better quality of press relations with greater conservatism in CIA activities to protect his agency. Ultimately, however, the insistence of the Nixon administration that the CIA undermine the democratically elected Salvador Allende of Chile, the crisis of Watergate, and the continuing fallout from the war in Vietnam undermined the CIA’s ability to influence the press. The New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh prompted the CIA’s greatest crisis when, at the end of 1974, he revealed the existence of an illegal CIA domestic surveillance program.