The Brantford Expositor
The Calgary Herald
The Edmonton Journal
The Spectator, Hamilton
The Medicine Hat News
The Gazette, Montreal
The North Bay Nugget
The Citizen, Ottawa

The Owen Sound Sun-Times

The Citizen, Prince George

The Sault Star, Sault Ste Marie

The Province, Vancouver

Dear Mr. Chairman:

As you may already know, I have declined an invita-
tion to appear before your subcommittee Nov. 2 in
Washington, D. C. There are several reasons for my
non-appearance, including the fact I am a Canadian
citizen who feels he ought to play no direct role
in the U.S. legislative process.

In addition, my recent experience as the target of
a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation intelligence
inquiry in connection with my duties in Washington,
D.C. as
a reporter for Southam News has been capably,
accurately and fairly reported in segments of the
American, Canadian and British press.

Anything I could add now about the episode would
probably be redundant, leaving me open to criticism
that I'm a promoter for myself or worse, a re-
porter who flogs old news.

16

Moreover, any solutions to American freedom of speech
or press issues raised by my case lie in the hands
of concerned Americans, not foreign-based journalists
such as myself.

I would, however, be remiss if I did not tell you

...2

that the experience with the F.B.I. and the U.S. Justice Department caused considerable anxiety among my friends and family. Certainly, the episode darkened the final two months of my four-year assignment in Washington, and placed me under a cloud of suspicion and innuendo. It is, of course, flattering for any reporter to discover that he or she has caused unease somewhere in a government by exposing a dirty little secret or by illuminating a subject of public interest. This happens routinely in Washington, where an army of journalists works relentlessly to reveal the damning facts, often aided by courageous informants inspired by a sense of public duty.

But in my case, the flattery_accorded my work consisted of a businesslike telephone call from an F.B.I. agent who invited me in for what seemed a mandatory discussion at the Washington, D. C. Field Office, Buzzard Point. I can assure you it's no picnic when two F.B.I agents ask you to name your sources, and then ignore your request for clarification of your status in their interview room.

There is also little joy three weeks later when you hear an officiallyspread rumor that you are facing imminent indictment by a federal grand jury. Equally worrisome is the knowledge that your copy transmissions by computer and long-distance telephone can be legally intercepted and monitored by the National Security Agency. And when you catch the NSA at it one day, there is only a curt "no comment" from the agency. Forgive me, but this seems an abuse of technology that is unworthy of the United States. For 25 cents, the United States Embassy in Ottawa could obtain the same information, albeit a day or two later, when it's published by the Ottawa Citizen.

Throughout my experience, I was left to wonder whether the United States government was sending a message to me, or simply trying to frighten the sources of my information. Talk by U.S. Justice officials of possible Espionage Act or Theft-of-Government-Property Act charges has a chilling effect on the entire information process.

At one point, I suddenly wondered whether the time had come to inject a more diplomatic tone into my writings about events in Washington. Fortunately, this silly temptation lasted about 30 seconds and vanished, unfulfilled. The more general atmosphere of intimidation remained, however, until my family returned to Canada in mid-summer.

Today, I am free to consider from afar the plight of my informants who remain in the U.S. and who must try to live in that intimidating climate. I often think about public servants who are confronted by the increasing threat of polygraph tests whenever a secret tumbles out of the bureaucracy and onto a front page or a TV screen.

And when I do, I wonder what, if anything, anyone will do about it.
Yours truly,

Don Seller

Don Sellar,

Prairie Correspondent
Southam News of Canada

Thursday, September 1, 1983

FBI Quizzes Canadian Correspondent About Source of Defense Information

CHRONICLE

The FBI bears down

On a Saturday night last October, Donald Sellar, the lone Washington correspondent for Canada's biggest newspaper chain, Southam Inc., received an unusual phone call from one of his sources in the intelligence community. The source warned Sellar that a story he had written the previous day concerning negotiations between the United States and Canada for an agreement to test the cruise missile in Canada was causing quite a stir in Washington and that a hunt was on for his sources. The caller said that the story was already being circulated in defense and intelligence circles, and he quoted enough from the piece to convince Sellar that he had seen the actual article. What troubled Sellar was that the story had not been published yet and would not appear in any Canadian paper for another thirty-six hours.

Like many foreign correspondents, Sellar transmits his stories to his home bureau over international telephone lines. He soon learned these could be monitored by the National Security Agency, and the next week he wrote a story about how the NSA was apparently intercepting Southam copy. In the months that followed, Sellar continued to report on the secret cruise-missile testing negotiations a story he had broken in March 1982, which had spurred vigorous antinuclear protests in Canada and had confronted the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau with political problems.

But for more than a year, Sellar had no hint that his stories were causing any more anxiety in the Reagan administration than those of countless other Washington reporters who routinely deal in brown envelopes. Then, last June 8, he received a "very businesslike" call from FBI agent Douglas Gregory. "He said he was working on an intelligence investigation, and he wanted to talk to me," says Sellar, a native of Alberta who started his reporting career at the Calgary Herald before moving to Southam's Ottawa bureau in the early '70s. Agent Gregory refused to disclose the purpose of the interview, saying it would become "immediately obvious to me when we had our meeting." Sellar recalls. Gregory suggested that Sellar come to the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House, add

ing, "You do have a White House pass."

Sellar inferred that his coveted White House credentials might be jeopardized if he refused to cooperate. He decided to comply with the request and suggested that the agents come to his office. They refused, asking instead that Sellar come to the FBI's Washington field office. A half-hour later, Sellar recalls, he was escorted into an interview room by Gregory and a second FBI agent. After a few minutes of small talk, Sellar says, the interview went as follows: Gregory pulled out the cover sheet of a classified document, titled "Air Force 2000, concerning long-term military strategic planning. Asked if he had seen the document, Sellar replied that he had written a story about it. The agents asked if his source was a U.S. government employee, and Sellar said no. They asked who had given Sellar the document, and he refused to tell them. The agents then asked if Sellar had written anything about the cruise missile. Sellar laughed, knowing that the agents must have been well aware of his stories. The agents pressed him further on the cruise stories and then abruptly changed the subject, asking about any contacts he might have had with "a Soviet." Yes, Sellar responded: a few weeks earlier, he and two other Canadian journalists had lunched with Izvestia's Washington bureau chief. The interview then ended.

In the weeks after the interview, the Justice Department confirmed that Attorney General William French Smith had personally approved the FBI's decision to question Sellar, and other sources revealed that the investigation was aimed not just at locating Sellar's sources but also at Sellar. Nearly all previous leak investigations have focused exclusively on leakers rather than the reporters who disclosed the information. But in this case the Justice Department was considering seeking an indictment of Sellar himself under a statute dealing with theft of government property. Both the FBI and the Justice Department have repeatedly refused to comment publicly on the investigation.

Although an indictment of Sellar is now regarded as highly unlikely because of Canadian government protests and the

Columbia Journalism Revita

amount of press attention the story has received on both sides of the border the investigation continues. Why did the U.S. government single out Sellar? One theory is that the Canadian government triggered the entire episode by suggesting that it might break off the missile-testing negotiations if the Washington leaks to Sellar were not plugged. In fact, according to a Defense Department document obtained late last June by Cox Newspapers, the U.S. State Department had asked Defense to look into the leaking of certain classified/sensitive diplomatic information," and the resulting investigation began almost immediately after Sellar's first disclosure in March 1982.

The Defense Department, however, says that the 1982 leak listed in the memo does not involve Sellar. In addition, the Canadian government denies that it requested a formal investigation of the leaks or threatened to walk out of the negotiations, although it admits having expressed displeasure with Sellar's articles. "We were unhappy, and we made that known through the American embassy [in Ottawa)," says Patrick Gossage, Minister/Counsellor for Public Affairs at the

CHRONICLE