The Dalai Lama's Secret and Other Reporting Adventures: Stories from a Cold War Correspondent

Postscript

287 POSTSCRIPT the dark-paneled lounge of an elite men’s club in london’s pall Mall, with sherry offered by quietly discreet servants, was the classic setting in olden days for recruiting an Englishman for Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The whoops and hollers of a children’s swimming meet that I was timing on a rainy Saturday morning in August 1981 was the setting for my unexpected recruitment by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The latest owner of the Washington Star, the Time Inc. media empire, had just announced that it would close the money-losing paper in two weeks. Under other owners for a century, the Evening Star, as it was long known, had been a pillar of the Washington establishment and one of the most respected newspapers in the nation. In the 1930s and 1940s it carried more advertising than any other paper, minting money. When I started reporting for it in 1969, it was a financially troubled but still major, respected voice in the nation’s capital. Troubled by three things that caused it, as well as virtually all big-city afternoon papers across the country, to fail by the 1970s. One was the changing nature of employment. Fewer people got up early for manual or service jobs that ended by 4 or 5 p.m., when they would go home and read the day’s news. Second, worsening traffic made it harder for papers to get early afternoon news into print and delivered to suburbs by late afternoon, forcing deadlines earlier and earlier until there was little time to publish domestic news that had not already been in morning papers. And, the crowning blow, evening television news that could report up-to-the-minute developments became a more popular respite from a working day than reading. So, suddenly, I was about to be out of a job that morning when I was timing at the Arlington Forest Club pool. Neal was an AFC star in the breaststroke and freestyle. Keith was off alone that summer he turned seventeen, touring Brit- 288 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures ish and French castles by bicycle and train on a grant he’d won to study their architecture. There were opportunities for me to take a new reporting job. Among them, a major Midwestern newspaper asked me to become its Washington bureau specialist in foreign and defense affairs, but it seemed in danger of closing, too. (It survived.) The New York Times asked if I wanted to be considered for an opening as its Southeast Asia correspondent. After living for six and a half years in the Washington area, however, my desire to move abroad again was constrained. Monica had recently left teaching to become an educational media editor for the National Geographic Society, where she later won American prizes for developing materials used by millions of schoolchildren worldwide. Keith and Neal were getting excellent educations at a leading prep school, St. Albans. The CIA job offer was intriguing. With an exception in Saigon mentioned earlier, I had had little to do with the agency. It had a strict policy against employing or otherwise using American journalists to help it collect information . I had kept my distance from agency people, not making efforts to find out who they were, hidden in U.S. embassy and consular jobs in such places as New Delhi, Moscow, and Hong Kong. In this I was different from a number of correspondents, especially in Southeast Asia, who seemed to believe CIA people were the only really good sources. Some of these correspondents did not bother to develop many contacts among political and economic officers in diverse countries’ embassies, as I did, to supplement information from local officials and media, aid organizations, and other sources. Instead, they chased after CIA officers in American diplomatic missions. The swimming meet approach was surprising for another reason. I had on several occasions apparently discomforted the agency with my reporting. One mentioned earlier involved the Tibetan guerrilla force in Nepal. My challenging the U.S. government’s interpretation of Chinese politics had not sat well, either. Nor, probably, did my writing about a Cambodian group apparently run by the CIA. On another occasion, I reported on curious characters supposedly seeking investment opportunities in the Azores if those Atlantic islands should react to a Communist takeover in Portugal by declaring independence. The Maryland company...