(To mark the 150th anniversary of the Courier Journal, this week we offer profiles of six of our greatest journalists — and one bad one, a reporter who turned out to be a CIA agent.) Courier Journal reporter who couldn't type was actually a CIA spy Andrew Wolfson, Louisville Courier Journal Nov. 20, 2018 When 28-year-old Robert H. Campbell was hired as a Courier Journal reporter in December 1964, he couldn't type and seemed to know little about writing a newspaper story. He lived at the YMCA and was paid $125 a week, but he could afford to fly home to St. Louis every other weekend to see his wife and children. And he left the newspaper after only four months. An assistant city editor later said the stuff that Campbell turned in was "almost unreadable" and that "there was something very strange about the whole thing.” In 1976, another Courier Journal reporter discovered Campbell’s secret. “Evidence developed during a newspaper investigation strongly indicates that Campbell was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency," James Herzog wrote in a long expose. Check this out: Courier Journal reporter cursed by his Pulitzer Prize-winning story A CIA spokesman at the time refused to confirm or deny that Campbell worked for the agency. When Herzog went to Campbell’s townhouse in McLean, Virginia, about five minutes from CIA headquarters, and asked his wife if he was a CIA agent, she replied, “If he was, I wouldn't blab it to you." And the two men who had been the newspaper’s top executives in 1964, editor Barry Bingham Sr., and executive editor Norman Isaacs, insisted to Herzog they knew nothing about the CIA planting an agent in the newsroom. But Herzog, a dogged reporter, proved almost beyond certainty that Campbell had been hired with Isaacs’ knowledge to give him experience and a plausible cover if he were placed overseas by the agency in the guise of a reporter. Herzog was never able to track down Campbell, whose entire resume submitted to the newspaper turned out to be fabricated. In August 2018, though, the Courier Journal finally found evidence that seemed to confirm what Herzog had strongly suspected: an online review of a book published in 2009 about the CIA’s covert operations in Tibet in which the reviewer, Robert H. Campbell, described himself as a “27-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service.” Campbell was one of more than 400 American journalists who secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, Carl Bernstein reported in a 1977 story in Rolling Stone, which cited documents on file at CIA headquarters. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the agency were William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times and Barry Bingham Sr. The story said the agency paid Campbell’s salary in Louisville. Though Bingham Sr. and Isaacs told Herzog they had nothing to do with the hire, a former managing editor, Ben Reeves, by then a Capitol Hill staffer, told him Issacs had confided that when he was in Washington in 1964, he was invited to lunch with an old friend at the CIA who said "he wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering." Herzog looked at Campbell’s personnel file and found that no effort had been made to check his background. He’d been placed at the Courier Journal by a company called Economic News Distributors that Herzog discovered was a CIA front and had “long since disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.” The Dallas-based company said Campbell spent three years in Kenya studying the language and history of the country and had written two books, including an “Anthology of Swahili.” "We are desirous of broadening the experience of one of our junior feature writers," the company wrote, "and are interested specifically in giving him the opportunity to work for some months on a large well-known newspaper.” Herzog found Campbell had apparently been at the intelligence agency since 1959. In his short stint at the Courier, he wrote three stories, including one about an 83-year-old motorist who had an unblemished driving record stretching back to 1907. One of his projects, a feature story about carved wooden Indians, was never published but posted in the newsroom for years, an object of ridicule. Campbell was a regular at Teek's World Famous New York Bar, a newspaper watering hole in Louisville, and supposedly told drinking buddies he had a CIA connection. He left the paper suddenly, and in a Christmas card he sent to a reporter later that year, he said he was in Malaysia working as a correspondent for Life magazine. But Herzog found the company had no record of him ever working there, and no bylines with his name ever appeared in the magazine. Postscript: • Herzog left the Courier Journal in 1977 to work in Washington for the Scripps-Howard News Service. He died of cancer in 1982, at age 39. • Bingham died in 1988 and Isaacs, a nationally prominent editor who was running the Wilmington News & Record when Herzog interviewed him, died in 1998. • In 1976, CIA director George H. W. Bush announced the agency would no longer enter into any “paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." • A CIA spokeswoman said it cannot confirm or deny that anyone ever worked for the agency — no matter how long ago. • Robert H. Campbell, 82, lives in McLean, Virginia, about four miles from CIA headquarters. Responding to a letter from the Courier Journal this fall, he confirmed he worked for the agency but like a good spook, initially wouldn't say anything on the record. But in a follow-up email, he said he was placed at the newspaper by CIA Director Richard Helms, who was friends with Isaacs from their days in the late 1930s as fellow newsmen in Indianapolis. Campbell also said Helms, the spymaster who died in 2002, told him that Isaacs had talked to Bingham Sr. about the cover assignment, and he had given his approval. More than 50 years after the fact, Campbell defended his work on the wooden Indians. It was a wonderful article," he said. "It took me two weeks to write the damn thing." Campbell declined to elaborate on his career with the agency, though he said he was once national security officer for all of Africa. "I just want to keep out of trouble," he said. "The agency can generate a lot of that, particularly now, and I don't have time for it." Former Courier Journal city editor broke his own story: 'I have AIDS' Andrew Wolfson, Louisville Courier Journal Nov. 20, 2018 Bill Cox was a serious journalist but the ultimate prankster. As city editor of the Courier Journal from 1979 to 1984, he mastered the signature of newspaper company chairman Barry Bingham Sr. and sent more than one reporter a handwritten note informing them they had been fired. He collected Air Force One stationery and wrote fake memos — most of them about enemas — from President Ronald Reagan to his wife Nancy. And when he got one too many annoying directives from Executive Editor Paul Janensch to “do right” by the Kentucky State Fair, he rented a buffalo, rode it into the newsroom and into Janensch’s office, where it left a calling card on the boss’ Oriental rug. ADVERTISING You may like: Courier Journal named first woman managing editor, then dropped her But Cox was also a hell of an editor. Named to run the city desk in 1979, at age 30, he directed reporting projects that exposed dangerous doctors and nursing homes, triggering tough new state laws governing both. He sent a reporter and photographer to Cambodia, where they won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their coverage of a Kentucky doctor trying to help refugees fleeing a brutal dictatorship. And he dispatched another pair of journalists on a monthlong mission to Europe to report a project called "America's Shame" that documented how the United States had fallen behind other countries in protecting the environment. BY SUCCESS ACADEMY SCHOOLS Become A Teacher At Success Academy See more → But Bill Cox produced his most important story himself. Two years after he left the Courier to become managing editor of Hawaii's largest daily newspaper, he wrote a first-person column on Labor Day in 1986. More history: Courier Journal reporter cursed by his Pulitzer Prize-winning story "Today is my last day as managing editor of the Star-Bulletin," it began. "I am going on the disability roll because of illness.The illness is AIDS. “I have spent my career trying to shed light in dark corners,” he added. “AIDS is surely one of our darkest corners. It can use some light.” Thirteen thousand people had already died of the disease, which at the time was a death sentence, but many — like actor Rock Hudson and lawyer Roy Cohn — had gone to their deaths still in the closet. Cox, 37, who had neither broadcast nor hidden his sexual orientation from friends and colleagues, said he went public because he thought it might help people with AIDS feel less alone. Cox’s story was told in newspapers and magazines across the country. A headline in “People” magazine said, “Honolulu Editor Bill Cox Combats the Stigma of AIDS by Breaking His Own Story.” The disease also prompted him to break the news to his parents in Owensboro that he was gay.