I Go to Work for the "Largest PR Agency" in the World, and find myself beginning a 12-year war...

In August 1950, Angelina, my bride of two years, and I arrived in Washington, D.C., ready to take on the world of politics, demagoguery, primitive public relations, red-baiting politicians, sex scandals and globe-spanning news. The moment we stepped off the train that had taken us from Sioux City,

The heat and humidity were that bad. But of course we stayed on,

And then things got hotter.

On November 1, two Puerto Rican Nationalists attacked Blair House, the landmark building across from the White House where President Harry Truman and his family were living while the executive mansion was being renovated. Truman, watching from an upstairs window, saw it: the blazing gunfight on Pennsylvania Avenue between White House police and Puerto Rican assassins that saw one assailant slain, the other wounded, and the guard in the pillbox outside Blair House killed - the guard with whom I had exchanged waves as I passed by every morning on my way to the U.S. State Department's International Information Administration (ILA) one block away.

One of the many bullets fired that day pierced the window of the corner drugstore where I had been shopping an hour before. The hole was head-level.

Whereas I was to inhabit offices in a State Department satellite building close to the White House, Ange, a mirror image of Hollywood's Ava Gardner, found herself reporting for duty on K Street, then as now home of the capital's lobbyists and other non-government influentials. She was one of two assistants to Theodore Granik, a New York lawyer who founded and hosted two of TV's first political talk shows, America Wants to Know, and Youth Wants to Know.

Her work there brought her into daily contact with the nation's highest ranking members of Congress, government agency executives, and other opinion and law molders. All were eager for exposure on Granik's shows. (Granik couldn't lose. His contacts with the high and the mighty served him well as he represented top-money clients. A call to members of Congress eager for TV time would be answered promptly; a client's problems could be discussed at length.)

As a fledgling member of the capital's press corps, I delighted in attending press conferences. My friends back in Sioux City were not impressed when I appeared in a photo taken at a State Department media briefing. A Time photographer had caught me seated in a front row - picking my nose.

Washington in those days was a sleepy southern relic, with all the fabled charm of Dixie hospitality and the coarse remnants of a caste system that flaunted its preservation of segregation with signs that instructed blacks to use back-door entrances to theaters and with customs that barred the use of public drinking fountains by blacks and kept them out of the city's finest restaurants. I learned of the barriers to blacks the first week I was in town when I suggested to a black colleague at the State Department that he join me at lunch at a restaurant across the street. "Wes," he said, "I can't eat there. They won't let me. It's whites only. It's that way in most of the town."

This from a man who, like me, was engaged in the official duty of telling readers abroad about the freedoms Americans enjoyed and the freedoms that were denied the peoples of Russia, China and other communist nations.

A reminder of the National Capital's bleak past is seen on its streets every day. "Taxation without representation" is the unhappy slogan on District of Columbia license plates, a mobile reminder that, almost a century after the end of the Civil War, the politically handcuffed city still does not have a full-fledged, voting representative in Congress.

Equally disquieting was the fear that oozed throughout the offices of the International Information Administration. Before we left Sioux City, Ange and I had been cautioned by current-events followers to be wary of "all those communists" in Washington. There were devout believers throughout the country who were totally convinced of the legitimacy of Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges that communists or communist sympathizers infested large sections of the Departments of State and Defense.

McCarthy, in a speech in Wheeling, W. Va., in February 1950, had charged that 250 State Department employees were members of the communist party and were helping shape U.S. foreign policy. (He altered the numbers at will in other speeches.) The hunt for these alleged "reds" was now in full rage, with McCarthy focusing first on employees of the Voice of America, the radio arm of the State Department. It would end in 1957 when McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, was censured by the Senate for his base-less persecutions of hundreds of innocents in the U.S. government. For years, no one could be free of the notion that some statement uttered innocently years before might be seized upon by McCarthy and his two minions, Roy Cohn and David Schine. Cohn and Schine, totally without apparent qualifications for the task, had been rampaging through IIA offices abroad, checking for "evidence" of subversion.

Prodded in large part by the fears of communism at home and the rapid advances in Russian technology evidenced by Moscow's surprise detonation of an atomic weapon in 1949, State's International Information Administration was dedicating itself to public relations campaigns to promote every bit of positive news about the United States it could unearth or create and to expose the anti-American campaigns and the aggressive moves being undertaken by the Soviet Union and Communist China. Every means of communication available at that time were being used in the campaigns.

The Voice of America and the International Press and Publications Division (IPS) were chief units of State's information operation, which Denny Griswold, the founder of the newsletter Public Relations News, would later proclaim "the biggest public relations agency in the world."

My first assignment was as an editor for the press service's daily news operation, the Wireless Bulletin. Why that name? Because the news collected by IPS reporters was distributed to U.S. embassies and consulates around the world by the wireless system maintained by State and staffed by Navy-trained Morse Code dispatchers. No ocean-bed cable communications facilities were as yet available to countries overseas. The first cable service across - or under - the Atlantic would not be put into operation until mid-1956.

The staffs assembled to combat communism abroad were a mixed lot. Some had been transferred from the dismantled Office of War Information (OWI), others from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and others recruited, as I had been, from newspapers and radio stations around the country. The OWI and OSS veterans had been fighting a war against German fascism and Japanese imperialism. Many had no acquired knowledge of the Soviet or Chinese communist systems, and even fewer had any insights into domestic communism.

The Press Service designated a staffer as its official expert on communism. At one staff meeting, he destroyed his credentials totally by pompously declaring, "Of course, I have not read Marx in the original Russian, but..." (Marx was a German.) Not surprisingly, the result of this sort of bureaucratic fumbling was often the export by IPS of shamefully incorrect information produced in-house with the shrug, "Nobody will know if it's wrong," Reliable, accurate news was taken largely word for word from the wires of the commercial news services, the Associated Press, United Press and International News Service, and from the pages of the more prominent U.S. papers.

Guidance about communism and the communist states came basically from the still new CIA, relayed by State "policy officers" reluctant to voice opinions on their own. I considered myself well read on the topic, but I would soon learn how little I knew, and, worse, how much less the CIA knew about the machinations of the communist nations of eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. It would be the beginning of my 12-year war with the CIA. It's a story that involves repeated cover-ups and failures in and by the nation's intelligence community.

I'll tell that story in other installments. And, yes, I'll also include the successes in international public relations that actually were accomplished by this huge PR operation but could not be revealed to America's taxpayers. Under an act of Congress, the information agency could neither boast of its positives nor explain away its failures.

As members of Congress had it, "We can't have a communications agency that either party could turn to political advantage use to propagandize the American public."

I'll do my best to tell the stories that couldn't be told.