Joe Trento has a hot tip. Yet the 48-year-old chief reporter for the Washington-based National Security News Service seems strangely nonchalant as he lays out what could be the story of the decade: Bill Clinton was a CIA agent. As Trento tells it, the future president did a lot more than protest the war during his days at Oxford. In his spare time, Clinton also couriered ” documents on several trips on behalf of the U.S. government.” These trips for the Agency — which, Trento points out, Clinton undertook “at some risk to himself” — extended as far as Moscow and presumably included meetings with other undercover intelligence operatives. One of those operatives may have been longtime Clinton friend and current State Department official Strobe Talbott. According to Trento, Talbott worked for the CIA, too.
Scoops like this should be making Joe Trento famous, if not as a journalist, then at least as an imaginative storyteller. But they aren’t. Instead, Trento and the National Security News Service have gained notoriety for the reporting they have done on impropriety in the military, most recently for providing Newsweek with the tip that apparently led to Admiral Jeremy ” Mike” Boorda’s suicide in mid-May. Although it produces no publications of its own, Trento’s organization has since 1990 assembled and disseminated scores of pre-packaged news stories to reporters and producers at nearly every major media outlet in the country, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and numerous television newsmagazines. Indeed, the juiciest military-related scandals in recent memory — the general who used a military plane to fly his cat home; the drunken chief petty officer who sexually assaulted his subordinate on a chartered flight — seem to have originated with the nonprofit news service. Over the past four years, a single ABC news program, 20/20, has aired no fewer than six of the news service’s stories. “They are just a terrific resource that a lot of us in Washington use,” Donald Thrasher, 20/20‘s producer, recently told the Boston Globe.
The National Security News Service, in other words, has become a favored resource for many investigative reporters and so has played an important role in shaping media coverage of the armed services. And yet nobody in the press appears to have noticed one key fact: Joe Trento, the three-man news service’s self-described “bureau chief,” is a full-blown conspiracy theorist with a lifelong habit of throwing out wild claims about public figures. It seems an odd detail for investigative reporters to miss.
Not that Trento tries to hide it. Indeed, Trento, who says he came to the news service after being “technically” fired from CNN, seems proud as he explains how a secret cabal of CIA officials controls the American political process, if not the entire world. “I think this town has a total lack of knowledge of the extent the intelligence community plays in the way Washington operates,” he says. “You can’t be anybody in this town successfully in terms of official position without their approval.” Take the approaching presidential race: “You look at Clinton, you look at Dole in terms of their politics, there is no difference.” Trento’s voice drops to a whisper. “But the reality is, either candidate is more than acceptable to the intelligence community.” And it’s a good thing, says Trento, because “if you do something they don’t like, you’re going to end up in trouble. And if you’re arrogant and do something stupid, you’ll end up in serious trouble.”
Just ask President Kennedy. “Jack Kennedy wanted to close down the Agency,” Trento explains. “This was in 1963. In 1964, of course, there is no Jack Kennedy and all those plans go down the drain.” He pauses dramatically, his voice again lowering. “What I’m telling you is, the Agency has had a unique ability to adapt to any political environment.” So to speak.
Some may be surprised to learn that the CIA installs, and sometimes murders, American presidents. Not Trento. He’s lived with the news for years. “I’ve been there, baby. I’ve been out in front on more intelligence stories than anyone, and I want to tell you, it’s the loneliest place in the world when you do intelligence stories.”
In many cases, Trento has been so far out in front on intelligence stories that the rest of the world still has not managed to catch up. In 1977, for instance, he co-authored an article for Penthouse magazine in which he charged that the Copley News Service had for 22 years existed as a CIA front group. At a news conference, Trento announced that he possessed the names of at least 23 Copley reporters who had once secretly worked as salaried employees of the CIA. Dramatic as the allegations were, Trento offered essentially no evidence to support them. Nor did he disclose the accused reporters’ names — an omission, as he explains it now, that he was forced to make “because I didn’t want to get them killed.” At one point, Trento even publicly accused retired Marine general Victor “Brute” Krulak, then the president of Copley, of having been a “CIA liaison officer.” Krulak vigorously denied the charge and decades later still seems angry about it. Reached at his office in San Diego, Krulak dismisses the allegation as ” wholly untrue” and Trento as “pretty sleazy.”
But Trento’s allegations did not end with the Copley News Service. Other journalists Trento has accused of working for the CIA include former Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave (to whom he refers, inexplicably, as “Arnold”), the editor of the San Diego Union, and a large number of unnamed employees of the Washington Post.
All this reporting on the secrets of international intelligence, Trento says, has not come without personal risk. In the late 1970s, while working as a reporter at the Wilmington, Del., News-Journal, Trento did a series of stories on American policy in Chile — stories, Trento intones, that “didn’t make anyone very happy.” As a result of these hard-hitting pieces, he says, the government of Augusto Pinochet dispatched a hit man to the United States to silence him. The killer, a Hungarian posing as a Chilean journalist under the code name “Antonio Llamas,” was unmasked when he was found in the possession of a detailed map of downtown Wilmington that included the garage where Trento parked his car each morning. “The plan was, the damn Chileans were going to kill a number of what they perceived to be enemies of the regime,” says Trento. The killing, of course, never took place, although, Trento claims, years later he did run into the assassin in Vienna, Austria, where they got to know each other and became friendly. “I never thought of him as a terrorist,” Trento remembers. “I thought of him as just a guy who was carrying out a mission of some sort.”
It’s not clear how much of these stories Trento actually believes, though there is evidence that he has glossed facts about himself and others in the past. Trento was first publicly held accountable for his storytelling in 1975, when as editor of The Death Report (described at the time as “a trade publication of the funeral industry” with “approximately 49 paid subscribers”) he lost a $ 40,000 suit brought by a man who proved Trento had libeled him. A year later, during an unsuccessful bid for Congress in San Diego, Trento again ran into trouble when he told reporters about his previous job at the Washington Post, strongly implying that he covered such stories as the ” abdication of Lyndon Johnson,” “the murder of Martin Luther King, the Washington riots,” and “the presidential campaign and murder of Robert F. Kennedy.” Subsequent inquiries determined that Trento had been a copy boy at the newspaper for about six months in 1968. Around the same time, Trento also claimed he had attended UCLA. Yet the registrar’s office found no record that he had ever even enrolled at the school. Over the years, Trento has revised his self-description. He now calls himself”a classic college dropout.”
These days, nobody seems to be questioning the details of Trento’s stories, though since the story on Admiral Boorda broke, the National Security News Service has received more requests for interviews than ever before. Despite the attention, however, Trento doesn’t seem very interested in talking about Boorda. “That was a minor story for us,” he says. What interests Trento a lot more is what he describes as “Japan’s nuclear weapons industry,” his latest scoop. “They’re 30 days from assembling it,” Trento says breathlessly. “They haven’t put it together, but they can anytime they want.” Which, needless to say, explains a lot. “This is what Clinton is up against when he negotiates with them,” says Trento. “Clinton goes in for trade negotiations and says, ‘We want you to do this, this, this, and this.'” And yet, “if we push them too hard, they’ll build the f g bomb.”
Will anybody print a story like this? It won’t be easy, says Trento, whose staff has prepared a four-page, evidence-free memo on the subject that he plans to distribute to journalists. “To sell hard news like we do is tough.” Plus, he says, “nobody wants to offend Japan.” On the other hand, Trento believes he does have some things going for him. For starters, he says, “I’m a very good reporter.” ,
By Tucker Carlson
