A Guided Boomerang

In the battle for bigger headlines, press officers for the military, like other Government bureaucrats, sometimes try to make a news story seem bigger than it actually is. Last week, through the snafus of its own censorship setup, the U.S. Navy got caught at the trick.

The story started when the Navy invited correspondents for United Press, Associated Press and International News Service aboard the aircraft carrier Boxer in Korean waters. They learned that they would see the first use of guided missiles in the Korean war (see INTERNATIONAL). The Navy's men had an intriguing warning to give: the project was too secret to write about.

Back in Tokyo after an interesting trip, U.P.'s Robert Gibson and A.P.'s Fred Waters wrote the story anyway of how they had seen Grumman Hellcat fighters, carrying TV transmitters, take off without pilots and be guided from "mother" planes. They thought censors might clear the story. They also mailed their home offices uncensored carbons of the stories to use in trying to get clearance from the Pentagon. The I.N.S.'s Don Dixon, taking the Navy at its word on the supersecrecy, did not even write the story.

After that, a comedy of errors and bureaucratic snafus began. While the Navy in Tokyo sat on the censor's copies of the stories for twelve days, A.P., using its uncensored copy, succeeded in getting it okayed in Washington with just three major deletions. Stricken out were the use of "TV eyes," the fact that the "missiles" were actually obsolete airplanes and carried 2,000-lb. bombs. Last week A.P. sent out the story for release to the morning papers. When U.P. got word of the release, it asked its Tokyo office why its own story was not being cleared. Since standard practice of the Tokyo war-news setup is to release all stories when one is cleared, U.P. sent out its uncensored story containing all the details which Washington had deleted from A.P.'s. U.P. was beaten by eight hours on the story by A.P., but U.P.'s additional facts gave it top Page One play in many papers. In Washington, Navy brass called in all three services to find out who had leaked secrets and why. Retorted U.P.: What secrets? Popular Science had run a story about the possibilities of equipping Hellcat "missiles" with TV as long ago as April.

Actually the Navy could not squawk very much, since the things it suppressed were already generally known. By "violating" censorship, the U.P. had scaled the stunt down to size.

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