Undercover Reporting

Front matter

hlne: ele) Bre) SN felt) NEE VISIONS OF THE AMERICAN PRESS

Undercover Reporting The Truth About Deception

Medill School of Journalism VISIONS of the AMERICAN PRESS

Introduction

Tivo

Three

Four

Five

Six Of Jack London and Upton Sinclair 77

Seven Hard Labor, Hard Luck, Part Two 93 Eight The Color Factor 103

Nine Undercover Under Fire

Ten Sinclair’s Legatees

Eleven Hard Time

171 Tivelve

Thirteen Watchdog 233 Fourteen Mirage 257

Fifteen Turkmenistan and Beyond

Notes 297 Bibliography 409 Index

FOREWORD Pete Hamill

Long ago, during the first year of my apprenticeship as a newspaperman, someone told me that a reporter is the person chosen by the tribe to enter the cave and tell them what lies within. If a furious storm is raging, the tribe might find safety and warmth. But if the reporter does not go deep enough, a dragon might await them, and all could perish.

That was, of course, a hopelessly romantic version of the reporter’s role, but I was young enough to embrace it. As a street reporter, I discovered that the dragon could have many forms, all of them human. There were caves all over the big bad city. And a reporter could see the dragons and their acts in the cold dead eyes of the hoodlum; the corpse of the mutilated girl; the ashes of lives left by arson; the killer’s smirk as he performed his perp walk. Making notes about the who of it, the what of it, the where and how and why. And what the weather was. Then rushing back to the newspaper to write it for the next day’s paper, passing the report to all the tribes of New York.

On some nights, I felt as if I were a bit player in some extraordinary film noir. There in the shadows of Brooklyn or the Bronx lay various dangers, bad guys and cops, too many guns, and too much heroin. My press card would protect me. Or so I thought. At the same time, I was adding to my sense of the reporter as witness, living a life in which no day was like any other day (or night), and absorbing the lore and legends of my craft. I listened to the tales of old reporters and photographers. I watched movies about foreign xi xii FOREWORD correspondents, and read many memoirs, biographies, novels by men and women who had worked in dangerous foreign places. In my imagination, I covered wars long before I was in one.

Then one day in the Strand bookshop in Manhattan I found a copy of a book by a man named John Roy Carlson. It was called Undercover. I began to read it and found myself in the world of prewar right-wing organizations, pro-Nazi bundists, stone racists, and gun nuts—guided there by this fellow Carlson. He had spent several years infiltrating these groups, posing as an acolyte, listening to their paranoid visions. I checked the clips in the newspaper’s morgue and discovered that his real name was Avedis Boghos Derounian, born in Greece of Armenian parents, an immigrant who had grown up in Mineola, New York. Undercover was a huge best seller, at one point topping the New York Times nonfiction lists. More important to a young reporter, it was a chronicle of time spent in the company of dragons.

I began to imagine myself changing my identity, donning a disguise, truly living in a melodrama that was about pursuing the truth. That is, I wanted to go undercover, too, and live for a while as a spy in the caves of America. While serving in the U.S. Navy in 1953 in Pensacola, I had seen what the Ku Klux Klan could do in the Southern nights. Could I pass myself off as a recruit in the country’s most enduring terrorist organization? Could I master a Southern accent? What if I was drinking with some of the hard-core white guys? Would I suddenly lapse into the accents of Brooklyn? And then, of course, reality asserted itself: I worked for a newspaper that was seventh in circulation in a town with seven newspapers. The editors could not afford to send a reporter into the undercover life for months. Or even a few days.

But I remained fascinated by the way Carlson had played his dangerous role, wondering whether the technique could still be

FOREWORD xiii used. And whether there were others in the history of journalism who had gone undercover. This was a long time before the computer, the Internet, Google, Wikipedia. The discovery of certain books depended on chance and luck, wandering through the dusty aisles of used bookstores. I did find my way to the muckrakers, to Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair. But the urgencies of the newspaper present often shoved the past off stage.

One major problem I had at the time was that there was no book that even vaguely resembled this superb account by Brooke Kroeger. Here we have the full story, with its roots in the nineteenth century. Brooke Kroeger (herself an experienced reporter) takes us from reporters posing as purchasers of other humans at pre—Civil War slave auctions all the way to the Washington Post reporters who gained access to the filthy halls of Walter Reed Hospital in 2007. She brings to the story an academic exactitude that is mercifully free of academic jargon. She understands the risks taken by most undercover reporters, both women and men.

John Roy Carlson appears in her book, of course, but his role in the larger story is a lot smaller than it once was in my youthful imagination. It is possible that even he was not aware of some of his predecessors. Good reporters named James Redpath, Albert Deane Richardson, and Henry S. Olcott took turns for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in covering the ongoing story of slavery. At the time, of course, there were no recording devices; the reporters often scribbled notes with pencils in the pages of slave catalogs.

Women, too, are part of the cast in this book. The most famous of the early group was Nellie Bly, but she was not the only female reporter (and falls into Brooke Kroeger’s category of “stunt girls”). One of the first was a long forgotten woman named Helen Stuart Campbell. Beginning in 1880, she wrote about the urban poor usxiv FOREWORD ing what she learned as a volunteer at a mission, then revealing the miseries of women employed in the needle trades and department stores. Others were to follow, freed from the banalities of writing domestic pieces about fashion and food. Women were reporting from dangerous places in the United States before they were allowed to vote. They are doing it now.

I suspect that this book will inspire young apprentice journalists who still believe in the importance of uncovering the truth, in spite of the risks. The risks may or may not be obvious. And there are other hazards to negotiate. The ethical problems of assuming another identity, of posing as someone you are not, of performing a falsehood—all are very ably covered by Brooke Kroeger. The full story has much to teach us all, both reporters and readers. I wish I’d had something like it when I was young, staring at the mouths of urban caves.