CIA Spies Won't Be Cultural Attaches: Longtime Policy Remains in Place

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U.S. government press and cultural posts overseas will remain off limits as cover for CIA agents after the State Department takes over the U.S. Information Agency in October, a senior department official said yesterday.

For more than two decades, the CIA has been barred from hundreds of these diplomatic positions at U.S. embassies and consulates under a secret understanding acknowledged publicly for the first time yesterday in The Washington Times by former CIA directors Robert Gates and William Webster.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said yesterday that the ban on using these positions as cover for spies would survive the consolidation of USIA within …