Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook.
To put this in historical context, note that during this period there was a left-wing faction in the CIA held over from the OSS, which had a liaison with British and Soviet intelligence during World War II and as a result was massively infiltrated by Soviet intelligence (for example, William Donovan's assistant Duncan Lee was later exposed as a Soviet agent). During World War II Katherine Graham's husband Philip Graham had belonged to a political espionage ring run by Felix Frankfurter which included Soviet spy Laughlin Currie, among others. Graham herself had been a Communist fellow traveller in her youth, befriending Communist labor leader Harry Bridges and joining the Communist-infiltrated American Student Union (ASU). [Source: an unpublished article I've been writing.] Thus IMO Graham and Pincus' Post ties to the CIA should be viewed as Soviet infiltration of the CIA.
East Coast Press' "Willful Ignorance" Protects Flawed Institutions by Mark Lowenthal
Pincus' bio says that he "served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, stationed in Washington," from 1955 to 1957, and went on to become "Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers" in 1959. What his bio doesn't mention is that in 1960, he was recruited by CIA employees to serve as a U.S. representative at two international conferences-his trips paid for by CIA fronts. Pincus was unapologetic when he disclosed his CIA role in a 1967 piece he wrote soon after joining the staff of the Washington Post.