For the first time, a major U.S. military operation is blacked out
No sooner had President Reagan taken to television with the announcement that the U.S. had joined forces with six small Caribbean countries to invade Grenada than the press scrambled to do its job. Within hours, the first wave of more than 300 newspaper, magazine, wire-service, radio and television journalists were arriving on the island of Barbados, which, though some 160 miles northeast of the action, was the closest they could get. But there were no pictures of the combat on television screens that night or the next night, nor any dispatches from newspaper reporters on the ground. Members of the press were not allowed any nearer.
At an extraordinary Pentagon press conference eight hours after the President's Tuesday announcement, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and General John Vessey Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters in Washington on the progress of the fighting while attempting to explain why journalists were not being allowed to observe it. The reasons: the necessity for complete secrecy to ensure the success of the surprise attack, and concerns over correspondents' safety. When would the press be allowed in? "I hope as soon as tomorrow," said Weinberger, adding, "I wouldn't ever dream of overriding the commander's decision that he was not able to guarantee any kind of safety for anyone."
That justification for an unprecedented news blackout instantly raised a furor. Major news organizations fired off stiff protests. The American Society of Newspaper Editors formally complained that the exclusion went "beyond the normal limits of military censorship." Two more days passed before the first handful of reporters were escorted to Grenada.
Despite this news blockade, six reporters and one photographer, including TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, had managed to get to Grenada in a small fishing boat as the invasion was starting. On Day 2 of the invasion, having learned that telex and telephone lines had been knocked out in the fighting, four of the reporters—Don Bohning of the Miami Herald, Edward Cody of the Washington Post, Morris Thompson of Newsday and Greg Chamberlain of Britain's Guardian—accepted a U.S. military offer to be airlifted to the U.S.S. Guam, a helicopter carrier, in the belief that they could file their dispatches back to the U.S. from there. Instead, the reporters found themselves, as Bohning later put it, "more or less captives of the U.S. Navy," forbidden to send their stories. Not until Thursday did they get back to Grenada.