A Reagan Crony on the Line

By Evan Thomas

Flamboyant Charles Wick admits to making secret tapes

He travels surrounded by four bodyguards, stays in $200-a-night hotel suites and hands out $5 tips. His hosts are often given precise instructions to provide him with a telephone at all times, a bed for a nap in the afternoon, even a piano to play by night. Security guards at his Washington headquarters are supplied with his picture and told never to ask for his identification. The United States Information Agency (then called the International Communication Agency) was a neglected foreign policy backwater before Charles Z. Wick, 66, became its director in 1981, but the former Hollywood moviemaker, venture capitalist and, most important, close friend of Ronald Reagan's has brought to the agency righteous zeal and a show-biz tone. He has also earned an uncomplimentary reputation for a bumptious manner and an attention-getting lifestyle.

Last week Wick was back in the headlines, this time for covertly making tapes of his phone conversations. He at first denied that he secretly taped calls, but when the New York Times confronted him with the leaked transcripts of conversations with half a dozen notables, including Senator Mark Hatfield, Actor Kirk Douglas and former Ambassador to Great Britain Walter Annenberg, Wick admitted that he had "in haste" failed to inform a "small percentage" of his callers that they were being tape-recorded. He apologized, saying, "I can understand how some might feel that it was intrusive." Wick, who in 1981 had been advised by the USIA general counsel not to secretly record his calls, says he disconnected his machine last July.

The furor over the disclosure is indicative of the growing sensitivity to the secret taping of phone calls both inside and outside government. The practice is "an offense against good reporting, against good business and particularly against good government," declares Times Columnist William Safire, who broke the story and who is still smarting from a wiretap of his own calls ordered by the Nixon Administration in 1969. Any surreptitious use of tape recorders is "flat wrong," says St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times Editor Eugene Patterson. "Bugging is bugging, no matter what you call it." Many major press organizations, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and CBS, bar reporters from secretly taping calls. New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal reminded his staff of their paper's own strict rules the day the Times printed the Wick story. The practice is illegal in at least a dozen states, and the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility considers it unethical for lawyers to tape conversations surreptitiously. "It's not done at the White House," said Spokesman Larry Speakes. "Not since 1974." Before the Watergate scandal, however, telephone conversations were routinely transcribed at many Government agencies. And despite the policies of their employers, many journalists continue to tape calls, claiming the interests of accuracy.

Wick used the same justification. Few suggested that he had malicious motives.

From the White House, he received only a mild rebuke. Speakes shrugged, noting that the President "doesn't do it himself and I don't think he generally approves of it." One top official predicted that the controversy would "blow over pretty soon" and that Wick's job was "safe."

The White House has become accustomed to riding out storms stirred by Charles Wick. Many in Washington derided his appointment, noting that he had once arranged dance music for Tommy Dorsey and produced a movie called Snow White and the Three Stooges. In addition, he had a total lack of experience in foreign affairs.

USIA staffers feared that Wick would transform the carefully neutral Voice of America, the broadcast arm of the agency, into a propaganda organ. They were not reassured when he staged the over blown 1982 TV spectacular Let Poland Be Poland, starring a dozen Western heads of state and Frank Sinatra singing in Polish.

More worrisome to many of his subordinates was a leaked memo from a Wick aide calling on the agency to stress "propaganda" over news. Although some complain that Wick's idea for the Voice of America to broadcast editorials under mines the station's credibility, regular news broadcasts continue to be unbiased.

The career bureaucrats at USIA also began to complain less when Wick managed to boost the agency's funding from $426.9 million in 1980 to $659 million in 1984, reversing a decade-long budget decline. The added funds will permit the agency to re place obsolete equipment, including some radio transmitters captured from the Germans in World War II. Wick's major asset is his good friend. "He is tight as a tick with the President," says a top White House aide. Unlike most previous USIA chiefs, Wick attends the Secretary of State's morning staff meetings. This in side track, Wick says, enabled him to quickly prepare an audiovisual recording and translation of the voices of the Soviet fighter pilots as they moved in to destroy Korean Air Lines Flight 007 last September. The presentation was used with dramatic effect by U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations.

But Wick obscures his accomplish ments with showy Babbittry. His back-slapping camaraderie grates on foreign diplomats. Last month he astonished an audience by suggesting that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher disapproved of the Grenada invasion because "she is a woman." Within the USIA, Wick is regarded as temperamental and high-handed by much of his staff. The victims of his ego make him pay for it in time-honored Washington fashion: they leak his pecca dilloes to the press.

-- By Evan Thomas.

Reported by Jay Branegan and Christopher Redman/Washington

With reporting by Jay Branegan, Christopher Redman/Washington