CIA: OK To Use Foreign Journalists p.22

By: Debra Gersh Hernandez In LATE 1977, in a follow-up to the rule regarding the CIA's use of U.S. media, the American Society of Newspaper Editors passed a resolution calling upon the agency to include prohibiting the use of foreign journalists (E&P, Jan. 14, 1978, p. 14)
In his reply to then-ASNE president and St. Petersburg Times editor Eugene C. Patterson, then CIA director Stansfield Turner explained that the agency was willing to restrict its operations by not using U.S. journalists because it respected their special constitutional status.
As to foreign journalists, Turner noted that the agency found no legal barriers to justify hampering its operation by not working with foreign media.
Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in early January 1978, Patterson had criticized the policy.
"On the one hand, our government and our press stand for a belief in expression free of government influence everywhere,"" Patterson testified.
"On the other, the intelligence agency of the United States government reserves the right to subvert journalists anywhere abroad, and its former agents express pride at having done so.
"If that is not unilateral disarmament in the war of ideas, the American eagle flies backward,"" Patterson stated.