The Indian Bolshevik

  After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship between the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. This post is excerpted from his 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977. In 1953, Joseph Alsop, one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. Alsop did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA! Alsop is one of more than 400+ American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to declassified documents of CIA. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were underground; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Soc...

The beginning: In 1978, a leading Parcham official fell to an assassin's bullet. Massive demonstrations erupted against Daoud and the CIA, which Parcham blamed for the killing. Daoud responded by arresting the PDPA leadership, spurring military officers sympathetic to the PDPA to move against his government. On April 27, 1978, they seized power in a bloody coup. On April 30, a Revolutionary Council declared Afghanistan to be the Democratic Republic. Initially, the CIA refused to provide American arms to the resistance, seeking to maintain plausible deniability. The State Department, too, also opposed providing American-made weapons for fear of antagonizing the Soviet Union. To keep the covert assistance program small and inconspicuous, the millions were appropriated by the CIA to purchase Chinese, Warsaw Pact, and Israeli weaponry. Operation Cyclone Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert program to arm and finance the Jih...