New book depicts National Press Building as hotbed of espionage

Since it was built in 1927, the National Press Building has been a hotbed of espionage, housing some professional spies pretending to be journalists as well as some journalists who dabbled in espionage by cooperating with intelligence services, author Steven Usdin said at a Sept. 28 National Press Club Headliners book event.

The Press Building has been the home of many foreign newspapers, many of whom employed intelligence officers, Usdin said during a discussion of his new book, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington.

In 1940 and 1941, the Club bar was “a little bit like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.” There were people from British intelligence, Nazis, American fascists, and reporters working for Imperial Japan in a quasi intelligence role, Usdin said. He added there was a professional camaraderie between the American reporters and foreign reporters/intelligence agents.

Usdin told a number of stories from the book, which covers events through the 1960s, that detailed efforts to spread “fake news” and engage in opposition research and “dirty tricks,” much like today.

One such story involved John Franklin Carter, a columnist who worked out of the Press Building in the early 1940s. At Carter’s suggestion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a “private intelligence service” reporting directly to the president. Headed by Carter, the service, which had 20 operatives, engaged in both domestic and foreign intelligence, with a great deal of their work dedicated to “opposition research.”

The concept of fake news dates back to the 1940s, when Britain launched a vast covert foreign intelligence operation aimed at getting the United States to intervene in World War II, according to Usdin.

They created a “fake news operation” in which a committee met twice a week in London and approved rumors and fake stories that they were able to get into American newspapers through the Overseas News Agency, which was in the Press Building and subsidized by British intelligence. In addition, they created fake public opinion polls to try to convince politicians that their constituents wanted the United States to intervene in the war, he said.

Two past Club presidents played high-profile roles in the Cuban missile crisis, according to Usdin. One befriended a reporter/Soviet intelligence officer at Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), and helped pass messages back and forth between the White House and the Kremlin.

The other was overheard by the Russian bartender at the Club bar telling his boss that American troops were being amassed in Florida for a possible invasion of Cuba. The bartender relayed the conversation to another TASS reporter/KGB officer who informed the Kremlin. This was instrumental in helping persuade Nikita Khrushchev to turn the ships carrying the missiles back and diffuse the crisis, Usdin said.

Usdin is a spy historian and the Washington editor of “BioCentury.”

Mark Stout, a former historian with the International Spy Museum, which cosponsored the event, and a former CIA officer, led the discussion with Usdin.