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.