The Church Committee was still functioning, and was looking into journalists controlled
by the CIA, which some senators wanted to expose by name. On the same day as Ford's
press conference, Senators Huddleston and Mathias drove out to Langley to confront
Bush and demand that he divulge the names of these CIA media assets. The CIA was
"not at liberty to reveal the names," Bush told the two senators. Instead, Bush offered
documents that generally described the CIA's use of reporters and scholars over the years,
but with no names. Senators Baker, Hart, and Mondale then called Bush and urged that
the names be made public. Bush refused.
Bush pointed to his statement, made on February 12 as the first public act of his CIA
career, removing all "full-time or part-time news correspondents accredited by any US
news service, newspaper, periodicals, radio or TV network or station" from the CIA
payroll. He also claimed that there were no clergymen or missionaries on the CIA payroll
at all. As far as the journalists were concerned, in April the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence Acitivities announced that they had already caught Bush lying, and that at
least 25 journalists and reporters were still on the CIA payroll, and the CIA was
determined to keep them there. Bush had quibbled on the word "accredited." This limited
the purge to accredited correspondents issued news credentials. But this excluded free
lance reporters, editors, news executives, and foreign news organizations at all levels.
When dealing with Bush, it pays to read the fine print.
The Bush-Kissinger-Ford counteroffensive against the Congressional committtes went
forward. On March 5 the CIA leaked the story that the Pike Committee had lost more
than 232 secret documents which had been turned over from the files of the executive
branch. Pike said that this was another classic CIA provocation designed to discredit his
committee, which had ceased its activity. Bush denied that he had engineered the leak:
"The CIA did not do any such thing. Nothing of that nature at all," Bush told a reporter to
whom he had placed a call to whine out his denial. "My whole purpose was to avoid an
argument with him," said Bush, although he said that "Pike was the cause of this whole
problem under great pressure."
In March Bush had to take action in the wake of the leaking of a CIA report showing that
Israel had between 10 and 20 nuclear bombs; the report was published by Arthur Kranish,
the editor of Science Trends Magazine. Church, who had Zionist lobby ties of his own
and who was in the midst of a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, demanded
an investigation: "Can you imagine how a leak of that kind would have been treated if it
had come out of the Congress of the United States!" In retrospect, the report may have
been some timely window-dressing for Israeli prowess in a Ford regime in which Israel's
military value as an ally was hotly contested; a little later Gen. George Brown, the
chairman of the joint chiefs, was quoted to be the effect that Israeli and its armed forces
had "got to be considered a burden" for the United States.
In April, Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he was just back
from a secret visit to three countries in Europe, which he refused to name, during which
he conceded that he "might or might not" have met with Frank Sinatra. (Brother Jonathan
Bush had said in February that Sinatra had offered his services to the new CIA boss.)