CBS's Historical CIA Connection

The CIA apparently utilized CBS as its tool for many years. CBS’s Chairman of the Board for many years was a Columbia University Trustee named William Paley. According to Deborah Davis’ 1979 book Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and `The Washington Post’: “Paley’s own friendship with [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry; he provided cover for CIA agents, supplied outtakes of new films, debriefed reporters, and in many ways set the standard for future cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies.”

Davis also noted in her book—which Germany’s Green Party nominated for the 1989 Alternative Nobel Prize, after the book was re-issued—that the CBS Evening News anchorman for many years, former CBS Director and former WNET/Channel 13 Trustee Walter Cronkite, was “a man who had experience with American intelligence” and that during the 1950s and early 1960s Washington Post male employees “continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles” in Washington, D.C.’s Alibi Club. Although the New York Times noted in its May 20, 1991 issue that the Alibi Club was “an elite group of 50 business executives and political officials” which “meets in a Washington townhouse that features elephant heads and tiger skulls,” Davis noted in her book that membership in the Alibi Club “is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only.” Coincidentally, former CIA Director and U.S. President George Bush I was also a member of the men-only Alibi Club.

(Downtown 6/24/92)

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