Upset at Press Complaints, Bush Vows to Cut Down on News Sessions : Media: His comments reflect charges that the Administration fosters secrecy and deception. He appears fearful of ‘overexposure.’

President Bush, upset over criticism that he fosters secrecy and deception in his Administration, vowed Thursday to reverse his policy of holding frequent press conferences.

Declaring he “hates to be secretive, to say nothing of deceptive,” Bush, flashing a tight smile, said he plans a “whole new relationship” with the news media that will include fewer sessions with the White House press corps.

“I think there are too many press conferences, it’s not good. It overdoes it. It’s overexposure,” Bush told members of a press pool aboard Air Force One during his trip to Colombia for the drug summit.

His declaration followed mounting complaints from the press and others that he and senior Administration officials have systematically concealed government activity in major public policy areas, especially in national security matters.

Bush, who has prided himself on being far more accessible to the press than President Ronald Reagan was, has been holding press conferences at the rate of about once every two weeks. He held 32 last year and has held five so far this year, including the one in Colombia Thursday.

At the same time he has presided over an Administration that, in a commonly held view in the press corps, has increasingly resorted to extraordinary restrictions--sometimes even outright deception--to impede the flow of government information to the public.

Although he later maintained that he was “not fuming” and held a press conference in Barranquilla after the drug summit, the President signaled he may be less responsive to reporters’ questions in the future. He would not comment on Colombia’s plans to cooperate in the interdiction of drugs, he declared, “because I don’t want to.”

Besides, he added, discussing the subject might tip off drug traffickers.

Many journalists and Administration critics have said that the Administration’s effort to reduce and control the flow of information about its policies and actions extends beyond the White House itself and also goes beyond the practices of past presidents.

In many cases, reporters no longer have access to officials who once routinely discussed policy issues with them. In most agencies, Cabinet officers have ordered that all telephone calls from journalists to government officials be directly referred to public affairs officers, a sharp break from past practices.

Receptionists in the offices of officials and bureaucrats now routinely refuse to connect reporters with the officials involved unless a public affairs officer has sanctioned the call and is on the line monitoring it--a practice that, many reporters find, almost invariably kills or chills an interview.

Public affairs officers now often insist on monitoring such calls--by making them three-way conference calls--before they will permit an official to be interviewed by a reporter on the phone.

Reporters have found increasingly tight press restrictions, especially at the White House and at the departments of Defense, Justice, Treasury and Commerce.

The military closely restricted the flow of information to a press pool assigned to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in December that cost the lives of 26 Americans, maimed almost 300 more and left many times that number of Panamanian casualties--how many the Defense Department has not yet officially announced.

Journalists were prevented from getting photographs or eyewitness accounts of the action that caused all the carnage and were barred from interviewing any of the thousands of Panamanian prisoners swept up by the Army.

For four days reporters were banned from seeing the American injured. Not until after the Army issued a denial of accidental casualties did reporters learn about what one doctor called “an absolute orthopedic nightmare” involving at least 86 parachutists.

Bush Administration officials also put out misleading and false information concerning last October’s failed military coup attempt against Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that “the United States is not involved in these events,” although it subsequently was disclosed that U.S. officials were involved in contingency planning and had taken some steps to support the coup once it began.

After the collapse of the coup attempt, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that the Administration had never been directly informed of the coup plan and “if we were, the President doesn’t know about it, the secretary of state doesn’t know about it and the secretary of defense doesn’t know about it.”

In fact, it turned out that they all knew of the plan at least 29 hours before the first shot was fired.

A restriction on press coverage of a military invasion is not a sudden development in Washington. When Bush was vice president, the Reagan Administration imposed a news blackout on the U.S. invasion of Grenada, a policy that was explicitly endorsed by him and then-Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, now Bush’s secretary of state.

Bush, who a month before taking office declared he went “semi-ballistic” upon learning that a newspaper had disclosed two of his pending Cabinet appointments, has been even touchier on press disclosures involving foreign affairs.

Bush is a former CIA director whose penchant for secrecy is well known in Washington. This was clearly reflected in the secret trip of Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to Beijing on the weekend of July 4 in the aftermath of the Tian An Men Square massacre.

After Scowcroft and Eagleburger made a second trip to Beijing last December that was publicized, Baker described it as the Administration’s only official mission to Beijing since the massacre. Later, after Cable News Network disclosed details of the first trip, Baker admitted that there had been an earlier mission.

Asked about Baker’s false statement at a Jan. 5 press conference, Bush declared: “Let me simply say that some things will be conducted in secrecy. And I know you don’t like it.”

It’s not just reporters, but career officials throughout the government that are kept in the dark about many of Bush’s foreign policy moves.

“This Administration is like no other Administration I’ve ever dealt with,” says one State Department official, a foreign service officer who has worked in Washington for more than a decade.

“Decisions are kept extremely close and are made by a very small group of of people. . . . In the past, we knew at least which way policy was heading and we could prepare the public or Congress for the possibility of change. Under this Administration, we are often taken by surprise ourselves.”

Under Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, the Justice Department has taken unprecedented steps to prevent any unauthorized release of government information and to tighten control over press access to any department information. Thornburgh defends his restrictive policies on grounds he is protecting the privacy of individuals and preventing the unfair release of information in criminal cases, although information unrelated to criminal cases--in areas long in the public domain--also is being restricted.

Under Thornburgh, the department also has adopted a federal policy to prosecute federal employes who leak certain kinds of information. The policy reverses departmental guidelines dating back 11 years that were designed to protect whistle-blowers in the government in the wake of revelations about the Watergate scandal and other governmental agencies.

Staff writers Jim Mann, Art Pine, Doyle McManus and David Lauter contributed to this story.