rigorousintuition.ca

wordspeak2 wrote:Yeah, didn't Turner pirge the Agency of its most corrupt elements post-Church Committee? (only to have them restored under Reagan//Bush?)

JackRiddler wrote:Indeed, Stansfield Turner fired a reported 800 employees of the CIA's covert action ("Operations") division, in October 1977.

If I may...

JackRiddler wrote:.

In fact, Turner's move was probably the decisive step in the consolidation and subsequent dominance of what Trento calls "the Rogue CIA" and what I sometimes refer to as "the Bush mob," also the Enterprise model (privatized CIA) or extended Iran/Contra brotherhood.

Those 800 were fired, but they were not exposed. In an atmosphere of reaction and resentment with regard to the recent cultural rebellions and exposures of CIA crime, and with the late 1970s alliance of neoliberal ideologists and the cultural right wing ramping up to take open power in the imminent "Reagan Revolution," firing the men who were presumably responsible for a long series of assassinations, massacres and coups like "the Bay of Pigs thing," Chile in 1973 and the six-nation Condor atrocity initiative just prior to Carter's election amounted to an invitation and challenge to them, to collectively enter the private sector and reorganize to seize power. As their figurehead they chose Bush, who had just acted as their champion while in office at Langley, and with the October Surprise operation they stormed back into Washington as the hidden rider on the Reagan horse. (Reagan was shot six weeks after his inauguration.)

This was a metastasis of the long-running trend at CIA, which always prided itself on keeping its work hidden and deniable thanks to proprietaries and false-front corporations and contractors for dirty work, and where the operators had always rewarded themselves with side business. Now, however, the bulk of the former covert operations wing had been thrown straight into a new center in the private sector, operating with the same cover as before, understanding themselves as the permanent secret government and with their people or friends in the key positions in official government, but without need to report to the government at all; and with sufficient anger and feelings of betrayal to justify anything they chose to do. (Watch out, America haters and crypto-commies and hippie feminist druggie academics and Soviet-loving liberal reformers, it's payback time!)

The Iran-Contra revelations of the "Enterprise" exposed a small portion of the resulting new culture and metastasized structure of covert power. I believe a mere list of these 800 would turn up a lot of familiar names and tell us much about the history of the last three decades, and no doubt blaze trails to Afghanistan, 9/11 and Iraq. Of course, there's no need to overdo it as something completely new, and of course most of the systemic realities and pressures of capitalist development and of a state in perpetual low-intensity crisis would have been similar without Turner's move, which only catalyzed the particular mob who took over the upper-middle levels of a cryptocracy. This was the same generation that was forged in "the Bay of Pigs thing," but now in the post-Sixties, post-Nixon, post-Carter reaction, a time of consolidation and triumphalism...

MinM wrote:One interesting side-note to the Supreme Court Justice that Stansfield Turner had essentially dissuaded from taking the job as Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

Arthur Goldberg had been duped about a decade earlier, by a President (LBJ) from his own party, into giving up his seat on the Supreme Court.

In 1967, President Johnson nominated him to be Attorney General of the United States, he was confirmed by congress and took the oath of office on March 2. There is speculation that Johnson made the appointment on the expectation that Clark's father, Associate Justice Tom C. Clark, would resign from the Supreme Court to avoid a conflict of interest. Johnson wanted a vacancy to be created on the Court so he could appoint Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice. The elder Clark resigned from the Supreme Court on June 12, 1967, creating the vacancy Johnson desired...

In 1967, Goldberg was a key drafter of Resolution 242, which followed the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states. While interpretation of that resolution has subsequently become controversial, Goldberg was very clear that the resolution does not obligate Israel to withdraw from all of the captured territories. He stated that:

The notable omissions in language used to refer to withdrawal are the words the, all, and the June 5, 1967, lines. I refer to the English text of the resolution. The French and Soviet texts differ from the English in this respect, but the English text was voted on by the Security Council, and thus it is determinative. In other words, there is lacking a declaration requiring Israel to withdraw from the (or all the) territories occupied by it on and after June 5, 1967. Instead, the resolution stipulates withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal. And it can be inferred from the incorporation of the words secure and recognized boundaries that the territorial adjustments to be made by the parties in their peace settlements could encompass less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories [italics by Goldberg].[9]

Goldberg's role as the UN ambassador during the Six-Day War may have been the reason why Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Bobby Kennedy, also wanted to assassinate Goldberg...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Goldberg

elpuma wrote:The "Deep State" behind U.S. democracy

VoltaireNet: In the last question, you briefly invoked the important role played by Georges Bush Sr. in the demise of détente – a détente promoted by Henry Kissinger. Mr. Bush was the CIA head for a brief period though. Did the replacement of George H.W. Bush by the more moderate Admiral Stansfield Turner at the CIA increase the control of the secret operations led by different elements of the American Deep state?

Peter Dale Scott: No, it did not. It has been the contrary, because some of the key men who were squeezed out after Turner’s appointment found themselves a new home working for the so-called Safari Club, an off-the-books secret organization uniting the intelligence chiefs of several countries – including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran – to supplement CIA actions with other anti-communist operations in Africa and the Third World over which the US Congress had no control. Then in 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski – who was not part of the Safari Club – engineered an end run around Turner by organizing a special unit in the White House under Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense who was a junior CIA operative at the time. Under Brzezinski’s guidance, CIA officers contrived with the Iranian agency SAVAK to send Islamist agents to Afghanistan, destabilizing the country in a way which led to the 1980 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.

The succeeding decade of covert CIA involvement in Afghanistan was crucial in converting that country into a centre for poppy culture, heroin trafficking, and jihadist Islamism. About the narcotics, there are some very good books about the CIA written a few years ago – one by Tim Weiner and one by John Prados. But because they talked to some CIA officers who showed them only a few recently declassified CIA documents – particularly Weiner – they don’t talk about the drugs. The narcotic connection is so deep its not mentioned in released CIA documents. But the collaboration of the CIA under William Casey with the drug-dealing Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) fostered the creation of a huge Afghan narco-economy, whose destabilizing consequences help explain why NATO soldiers, Afghans and Pakistanis are dying there today.

The BCCI was a huge global drug-laundering bank. It was corrupting – with its budgets, with its resources – leading politicians, presidents, prime ministers all over the world. And some of that money – it’s not much talked about, but it is true – was reaching politicians in the United States – politicians of both parties, which is one of the main reasons why we didn’t get a congressional investigation of BCCI. There was actually a Senate report that came out, under the names of one Republican, Hank Brown, and one Democrat, John Kerry. And Brown congratulated Kerry on having the courage to write that report when so many people in his party were affected by the BCCI. The latter was a big factor in creating the connexions with people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world during the 1980’s. He also became the leading recipient of CIA largesses supplemented by an equal amount of Saudi Arabian money. There’s something terribly wrong in a situation like this!

VoltaireNet: At the outcome of the presidential campaign of 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected in part on his pleas for a decrease in military spending and expanding détente with the Soviet Union. This did not happen in the four years of his presidency. Could you explain to us why? Did Zbigniew Brzezinski – whom you mentioned in the previous question – play any role in this then-unexpected hawkish foreign policy?

Peter Dale Scott: The media presented Carter as a populist candidate, a peanut farmer from the South. But the deep reality was that Carter had been prepared for the presidency by Wall Street, and particularly by the Trilateral Commission that was funded by David Rockefeller, and directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, a passionately anti-Soviet Pole, then became Carter’s national security adviser; and from the outset overruled Secretary of State Cyrus Vance repeatedly in pursuit of a more vigorous anti-Soviet foreign policy. In this Brzezinski went against the stated goals of the Trilateral Commission, of which President Carter had been a member. The underlying idea of the Trilateral Commission was a rather attractive picture of a multipolar world in which America would mediate between the Second World, which was the Soviet block, and the Third World, which was what we used to call in those days the underdeveloped or lesser developed countries… By the way I hate that term, because I lived in Thailand: in some ways they are very much more developed than we are!

When he was elected, Carter nominated a genuine trilateralist, Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, and he had as his National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was determined to use the Deep state to inflict as much damage on the Soviet Union as he could. A lot of things which are thought of as the successes of the Reagan regime clearly had their origins under Brzezinski. And it was a total repudiation of what trilateralism stood for. Carter – the poor man – was elected promising cuts in the defence budget, and before he had left, he had committed the Defense Department to huge increases which we associate with the Reagan administration but were initiated before.

As a consequence, under the surface a massive campaign for increased defense spending, mobilized by wealthy military industrialists through the Committee on the Present Danger, brought public opinion to reinforce Brzezinski’s push for a more militant U.S. presence and policy, particularly in the Indian Ocean...

1993 congressional repudiation of the October Surprise allegations crumbled amid admissions that important evidence was hidden from investigators and that internal doubts were suppressed.

The collapse of those 1993 findings by a House task force left behind a troubling impression that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel’s Likud hardliners may have teamed up with ambitious Republicans to remove a U.S. president from office.

That scenario would mean that two of the great fears of the American republic had come true – George Washington’s warning against the dangers of “entangling alliances” and Harry Truman’s concern that the clandestine operations of the CIA had the makings of an “American Gestapo” threatening democracy.

It is far more reassuring for Americans to think that no such thing could occur, that Israel’s Likud – whatever its differences with Washington over Middle East peace policies – would never seek to subvert a U.S. president, and that CIA dissidents – no matter how frustrated by political constraints – would never sabotage their own government.

But the evidence points in that disturbing direction, and there are some points that are not in dispute. For instance, there is no doubt that CIA Old Boys and Likudniks had strong motives for seeking President Carter’s defeat in 1980.

Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran’s Shah and Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza.

As for Israel, Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious over Carter’s high-handed actions at Camp David in 1978 forcing Israel to trade the occupied Sinai to Egypt for a peace deal. Begin feared that Carter would use his second term to bully Israel into accepting a Palestinian state on West Bank lands that Likud considered part of Israel’s divinely granted territory.

Former Mossad and Foreign Ministry official David Kimche described Begin’s attitude in his 1991 book, The Last Option, saying that Israeli officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat “to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Kimche continued, “This plan – prepared behind Israel’s back and without her knowledge – must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”

However, Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote, “he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”

In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli military intelligence officer who worked with Likud, agreed that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.

“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel’s back.”

So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground” by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.

CIA Within the CIA

As for the CIA Old Boys, legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland told me in 1990 that “the CIA within the CIA” – the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood best the strategic needs of the United States – believed Carter and his naïve faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation.

“Carter really believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West,” Copeland said, shaking his mane of white hair. “As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie and the corner drug store. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else. …

“Carter, I say, was not a stupid man,” Copeland said, adding that Carter had an even worse flaw: “He was a principled man.”

These attitudes of “the CIA within the CIA” and the Likudniks appear to stem from their genuine convictions that they needed to protect what they regarded as vital interests of their respective countries. The CIA Old Boys thought they understood the true strategic needs of the United States and Likud believed fervently in a “Greater Israel.”

However, the lingering October Surprise mystery is whether these two groups followed their strongly held feelings into a treacherous bid, in league with Republicans, to prevent Carter from gaining the release of the 52 hostages then held in Iran and thus torpedoing his reelection.

Carter’s inability to resolve the hostage crisis did set the stage for Reagan’s landslide victory in November 1980 as American voters reacted to the long-running hostage humiliation by turning to a candidate they believed would be a tougher player on the international stage...

‘Blond Ghost’

Perhaps most significantly, Bush quietly enlisted Theodore Shackley, the legendary CIA covert operations specialist known as the “blond ghost.” During the Cold War, Shackley had run many of the CIA’s most controversial paramilitary operations, from Vietnam and Laos to the JMWAVE operations against Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

In those operations, Shackley had supervised the work of hundreds of CIA officers and developed powerful bonds of loyalty with many of his subordinates. For instance, Donald Gregg had served under Shackley’s command in Vietnam.

When Bush was CIA director in 1976, he appointed Shackley to a top clandestine job, associate deputy director for operations, laying the foundation for Shackley’s possible rise to director and cementing Shackley’s loyalty to Bush. When Shackley had a falling out with Carter’s CIA Director Turner in 1979, Shackley quit the agency.

Privately, Shackley believed that Turner had devastated the agency by pushing out hundreds of covert officers, many of them Shackley’s former subordinates.

By early 1980, the Republicans also were complaining that they were being kept in the dark about progress on the Iran hostage negotiations. George Cave, then a top CIA specialist on Iran, told me that the “Democrats never briefed the Republicans” on sensitive developments, creating suspicions among the Republicans.

So, the Republicans sought out their own sources of information regarding the hostage crisis. Bush’s ally Shackley began monitoring Carter’s progress on negotiations through his contacts with Iranians in Europe, Cave said.

“Ted, I know, had a couple of contacts in Germany,” said Cave. “I know he talked to them. I don’t know how far it went. … Ted was very active on that thing in the winter/spring of 1980.”

Author David Corn also got wind of the Shackley-Bush connection when he was researching his biography of Shackley, Blond Ghost.

“Within the spook world the belief spread that Shackley was close to Bush,” Corn wrote. “Rafael Quintero [an anti-Castro Cuban with close ties to the CIA] was saying that Shackley met with Bush every week. He told one associate that should Reagan and Bush triumph, Shackley was considered a potential DCI,” the abbreviation for CIA director.

Some of the legendary CIA officers from an even earlier generation, those who had helped overthrow Iran’s elected government in 1953 and put the Shah on the Peacock Throne, also injected themselves into the hostage crisis.

Carter, a ‘Utopian’

Miles Copeland, one of the agency’s old Middle East hands, claimed in his memoir, The Game Player, that he and his CIA chums pondered their own hostage rescue plan while organizing an informal support group for the Bush campaign, called “Spooks for Bush.”

In the 1990 interview, Copeland told me that “the way we saw Washington at that time was that the struggle was really not between the Left and the Right, the liberals and the conservatives, as between the Utopians and the realists, the pragmatists.

“Carter was a Utopian. He believed, honestly, that you must do the right thing and take your chance on the consequences. He told me that. He literally believed that.” Copeland’s deep Southern accent spit out the words with a mixture of amazement and disgust.

Copeland’s contacts at the time included CIA veteran Archibald Roosevelt and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – both of whom were close to David Rockefeller whose Chase Manhattan Bank handled billions of dollars in the Shah’s accounts, a fortune that the Iranian mullahs wanted to lay their hands on.

“There were many of us – myself along with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Archie Roosevelt in the CIA at the time – we believed very strongly that we were showing a kind of weakness, which people in Iran and elsewhere in the world hold in great contempt,” Copeland said.

As Copeland and his friends contemplated what to do regarding the hostage crisis, he reached out to other of his old CIA buddies.

According to The Game Player, Copeland turned to ex-CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. The famed spy hunter “brought to lunch a Mossad chap who confided that his service had identified at least half of the [hostage-holding] ‘students,’ even to the extent of having their home addresses in Tehran,” Copeland wrote. “He gave me a rundown on what sort of kids they were. Most of them, he said, were just that, kids.”

One of the young Israeli intelligence agents assigned to the task of figuring out who was who in the new Iranian power structure was Ari Ben-Menashe, who was born in Iran but emigrated to Israel as a teen-ager. Not only did he speak fluent Farsi, but he had school friends who were rising within the new revolutionary bureaucracy.

In his memoir, Profits of War, Ben-Menashe offered his own depiction of Copeland’s initiative. Though Copeland was generally regarded as a CIA “Arabist” who had opposed Israeli interests in the past, he was admired for his analytical skills, Ben-Menashe wrote.

“A meeting between Miles Copeland and Israeli intelligence officers was held at a Georgetown house in Washington, D.C.,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “The Israelis were happy to deal with any initiative but Carter’s.

“David Kimche, chief of Tevel, the foreign relations unit of Mossad, was the senior Israeli at the meeting. … The Israelis and the Copeland group came up with a two-pronged plan to use quiet diplomacy with the Iranians and to draw up a scheme for military action against Iran that would not jeopardize the lives of the hostages.”

Arms Dealing

In late February 1980, Seyeed Mehdi Kashani, an Iranian emissary, arrived in Israel to discuss Iran’s growing desperation for spare parts for its U.S.-supplied air force, Ben-Menashe wrote.

Kashani, whom Ben-Menashe had known from their school days in Tehran, also revealed that the Copeland initiative was making inroads inside Iran and that approaches from some Republican emissaries had already been received, Ben-Menashe wrote.

“Kashani said that the secret ex-CIA-Miles-Copeland group was aware that any deal cut with the Iranians would have to include the Israelis because they would have to be used as a third party to sell military equipment to Iran,” according to Ben-Menashe.

In March 1980, the following month, the Israelis made their first direct military shipment to Iran, 300 tires for Iran’s F-4 fighter jets, Ben-Menashe wrote.

Ben-Menashe’s account of these early Israeli arms shipments was corroborated by Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell and Israeli arms dealer William Northrop.

In an interview for a 1991 PBS “Frontline” documentary, Jody Powell told me that “there had been a rather tense discussion between President Carter and Prime Minister Begin in the spring of 1980 in which the President made clear that the Israelis had to stop that [arms dealing], and that we knew that they were doing it, and that we would not allow it to continue, at least not allow it to continue privately and without the knowledge of the American people.”

“And it stopped,” Powell said. At least, it stopped temporarily.

Meanwhile, Carter also was learning that Begin was siding with the Republicans.

Questioned by congressional investigators in 1992, Carter said he realized by April 1980 that “Israel cast their lot with Reagan,” according to notes I found among the unpublished documents in the files of a House task force that had looked into the October Surprise case.

Carter traced the Israeli opposition to his reelection to a “lingering concern [among] Jewish leaders that I was too friendly with Arabs.”

Closer Enemies

Carter also may have had political enemies who had penetrated his inner circle.

Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian businessman who was recruited by the CIA in January 1980 along with his brother Cyrus, said that in spring 1980, he encountered Donald Gregg, the CIA officer serving on Carter’s National Security Council staff, at Cyrus’s Manhattan office.

Jamshid Hashemi said his brother Cyrus was playing a double game, officially helping the Carter administration on the hostage crisis but privately collaborating with the Republicans. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The alleged involvement of Gregg is another highly controversial part of the October Surprise mystery. A tall man with an easy-going manner, Gregg had known George H.W. Bush since 1967 when Bush was a first-term U.S. congressman.

Gregg also briefed Bush when he was U.S. envoy to China. Gregg served, too, as the CIA’s liaison to the Pike Committee investigation of the CIA when Bush was CIA director in 1976.

“Although Gregg was uniformly regarded as a competent professional, there was a dimension to his background that was entirely unknown to his colleagues at the White House, and that was his acquaintance with one of the Republican frontrunners, George Bush,” Sick, the former Carter aide on the National Security Council, wrote in October Surprise.

As the Iran crisis dragged on, Copeland and his group of CIA Old Boys forwarded their own plan for freeing the hostages. However, to Copeland’s chagrin, his plan fell on deaf ears inside the Carter administration, which was developing its own rescue operation.

So, Copeland told me that he distributed his plan outside the administration, to leading Republicans, giving sharper focus to their contempt for Carter’s bungled Iranian strategy.

“Officially, the plan went only to people in the government and was top secret and all that,” Copeland said. “But as so often happens in government, one wants support, and when it was not being handled by the Carter administration as though it was top secret, it was handled as though it was nothing. … Yes, I sent copies to everybody who I thought would be a good ally. …

“Now I’m not at liberty to say what reaction, if any, ex-President [Richard] Nixon took, but he certainly had a copy of this. We sent one to Henry Kissinger. … So we had these informal relationships where the little closed circle of people who were, a, looking forward to a Republican President within a short while and, b, who were absolutely trustworthy and who understood all these inner workings of the international game board.”

Desert One

Encircled by a growing legion of enemies, the Carter administration put the finishing touches on its hostage-rescue operation in April. Code-named “Eagle Claw,” the assault involved a force of U.S. helicopters that would swoop down on Tehran, coordinate with some agents on the ground and extract the hostages.

Carter ordered the operation to proceed on April 24, but mechanical problems and the mysterious decision by one of the pilots to turn back forced the operation to be terminated. At a staging area called Desert One, one of the helicopters collided with a refueling plane, causing an explosion that killed eight American crewmen.

Their charred bodies were then displayed by the Iranian government, adding to the fury and humiliation of the United States. After the Desert One fiasco, the Iranians dispersed the hostages to a variety of locations, effectively shutting the door on another rescue attempt.

By summer 1980, Copeland told me, the Republicans in his circle considered a second hostage-rescue attempt not only unfeasible, but unnecessary. They were talking confidently about the hostages being freed after a Republican victory in November, the old CIA man said.

“Nixon, like everybody else, knew that all we had to do was wait until the election came, and they were going to get out,” Copeland said. “That was sort of an open secret among people in the intelligence community, that that would happen. … The intelligence community certainly had some understanding with somebody in Iran in authority, in a way that they would hardly confide in me.”

Copeland said his CIA friends had been told by contacts in Iran that the mullahs would do nothing to help Carter or his reelection.

“At that time, we had word back, because you always have informed relations with the devil,” Copeland said. “But we had word that, ‘Don’t worry.’ As long as Carter wouldn’t get credit for getting these people out, as soon as Reagan came in, the Iranians would be happy enough to wash their hands of this and move into a new era of Iranian-American relations, whatever that turned out to be.”

In the interview, Copeland declined to give more details, beyond his assurance that “the CIA within the CIA,” his term for the true protectors of U.S. national security, had an understanding with the Iranians about the hostages. (Copeland died on Jan. 14, 1991.) ...

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/05/12/ji ... se-doubts/

Not Ready to Change Baseball History?
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: July 12, 2011

“The Curious Case of Curt Flood,” a new HBO Sports documentary (Wednesday, 9 p.m.), raises a tantalizing question: what if Flood’s legal challenge to baseball’s reserve clause had had a better advocate before the United States Supreme Court than Arthur J. Goldberg, a former associate justice?


Flood lost the case by a 5-to-3 vote. Would a better argument have swayed two justices to rule against Major League Baseball? Had Flood won, free agency would probably have arrived a few years before it was achieved in arbitrators’ rulings in favor of Catfish Hunter, and for Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally.

Goldberg looked like an ideal choice to deliver an oral argument before some of his former colleagues on the court. He was a successful labor lawyer and former general counsel to the United Steelworkers of America. He was a baseball fan who carried a coffee urn as a vendor at Wrigley Field in the 1920s.

Flood needed a lawyer who could deftly argue against the reserve clause, which tied players unilaterally to their teams until they traded or discarded them. Players had no rights to sell themselves to the highest bidders in this relationship, as Flood learned when he was traded by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1969 to the Philadelphia Phillies. He refused to report to the Phillies, starting him on his legal odyssey.

To Flood, the reserve clause equaled indentured servitude. But he and Goldberg were facing a Supreme Court that in 1953 had strengthened baseball exemption from antitrust laws and gave further backbone to the reserve clause in a ruling against a Yankees farmhand, George Toolson.

The court looked to Congress to change baseball’s legal status.

Goldberg had one of the worst days of his career on that March day in 1972. He did not deliver pointed, persuasive arguments. He lost his place. He did not answer justices’ questions directly. He clumsily listed Flood’s season-by-season batting averages. He went past his allotted time. He repeated himself.

He spoke as if he did not understand baseball, citing the several “Golden Gloves competitions” Flood won for his excellent work as a center fielder. Brad Snyder, the author of “A Well-Paid Slave,” about the Flood case, wrote that Justice William Brennan cringed at watching his friend’s struggles.

David Stebenne, Goldberg’s biographer, said Goldberg admitted that he had not prepared the way he should have, incorrectly assuming that the justices who had served with him would see the error of sticking by past decisions — and not wait any longer for Congress.

“His mental picture was this was a case ripe to be overturned,” Stebenne said. “He was utterly surprised that it went the other way.”

Goldberg’s sense of kinship with friends like Brennan and William O. Douglas led him to give a half-hearted effort that stunned those watching.

“He was politely going through the motions and was aware that the colleagues he served with were aware of it,” said Stebenne, a history professor at Ohio State whose book “Arthur Goldberg: New Deal Liberal” was published in 1996. Stebenne said he had lengthy conversations with Goldberg, who told him that “the intensity of the questioning startled him; he was over his head.” Stebenne quoted Goldberg saying, “If I had understood the nature of the challenge, I would have prepared better.”

Perhaps a great oral argument would have affected the justices’ private deliberations before Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote the majority opinion against Flood. In one strange episode detailed by Snyder, Justice Potter Stewart, a Cincinnati Reds fan, made a request of Blackmun, a Minnesota Twins fan, before signing onto the majority: add Eppa Rixey, who pitched for the Reds in the 1920s and ’30s, to his opinion’s opening section on baseball’s history, with its list of more than 80 famous and obscure baseball figures who might have inspired Philip Roth’s baseball satire, “The Great American Novel.”

With Rixey’s inclusion, Stewart joined the majority, as did Chief Justice Warren Burger. In a concurring opinion, Burger voiced “grave reservations” about upholding the Toolson decision, but still wrote, “Courts are not the forum in which this tangled web ought to be unsnarled.”

As “Curious Case” shows, Flood had exiled himself to Majorca, Spain, by the time the Supreme Court ruled. The decision coincided with, or accelerated, the further unraveling of his life; he drank and smoked too much; he moved to Andorra, where he was arrested for trying to shoplift; and was shortly after treated for alcoholism in a psychiatric hospital in Barcelona. Penniless, he returned to the United States.

Eventually, he turned his life around and received belated recognition from players who profited from his efforts against the reserve clause. He could have used such backing from his contemporaries, none of whom supported him in federal court when he first sued baseball in 1970.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/sport ... eball.html

Arthur Goldberg had been duped about a decade earlier, by a President (LBJ) from his own party, into giving up his seat on the Supreme Court.

Documents detailing early spy network
released By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and RANDY HERSCHAFT,
Associated Press Writers
Wed Aug 13, 7:59 PM ET


WASHINGTON - Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather"; and Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.

The release of the OSS personnel files uncloaks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part later was folded into the CIA after President Truman disbanded it in 1945.

"I think it's terrific," said Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a former OSS agent now living in Woodbridge, Va. "They've finally, after all these years, they've gotten the names out. All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS."

The CIA had resisted releasing OSS records for decades. But former CIA Director William Casey, himself an OSS veteran, cleared the way for transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the agency in 1981. The personnel files are the latest to be made public.

Information about OSS involvement was so guarded that relatives often couldn't confirm a family member's work with the group.

Walter Mess, who handled covert OSS operations in Poland and North Africa, said he kept quiet for more than 50 years, only recently telling his wife of 62 years about his OSS activity.

"I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess, now 93 and living in Falls Church, Va.

The files will offer new information even for those most familiar with the agency. Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceeds previous estimates of 13,000.

The newly released documents will clarify these and other issues, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

"We're saying the OSS was a lot bigger than they were saying," Cunliffe said.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=13297

The Nation; 'Suicide Pact'
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: September 22, 2002

AS most everyone knows by now, the Constitution is not a suicide pact -- to use the phrase of the moment. But where does it come from and what does it mean? The answer is complicated, reflecting the nation's ever-shifting balance between liberty and security.

Supreme Court cognoscenti usually attribute the phrase to Justice Robert H. Jackson's dissent in a 1949 free-speech case, Terminiello v. Chicago. The court's majority opinion, by Justice William O. Douglas, had overturned the disorderly conduct conviction of a right-wing priest whose anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi rantings at a rally had incited a riot. Chicago's breach-of-the-peace ordinance violated the First Amendment, the court held.

Where his colleagues saw free speech, Jackson, after serving as a judge at the Nuremburg war crimes trial, saw the dangers of the mob. He countered the 4-page ruling with a 24-page dissent ending: ''The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.''

The phrase was picked up the next year in Communications Association v. Douds, an opinion by Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson. He cited Jackson and used the phrase in the same sense -- as a warning against naïvely following the civil liberties ideal off a cliff.

Then, aside from a 1950 decision in a murder case that involved an actual suicide pact, the phrase did not surface again until 1963, the heyday of the Warren court. Justice Arthur J. Goldberg borrowed it not only without attribution but for a quite different purpose.

He wrote for the majority in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, holding that the government could not automatically strip the citizenship of those who left the country to evade the draft. Goldberg deftly sharpened Jackson's image. ''The powers of Congress to require military service for the common defense are broad and far-reaching, for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact,'' he wrote. The opinion concluded that draft evaders were still entitled to the procedural protections.

The next year, another Goldberg majority opinion, Aptheker v. Secretary of State, quoted the 1963 opinion without a hint of any earlier provenance. Again, he used the phrase not in its original sense but rather as a straw man to be trumped by the constitutional right at issue.

Then a more conservative court rediscovered it and restored its original intent. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger used the phrase in a 1981 opinion. In Haig v. Agee, the court endorsed revoking the passport of a rogue C.I.A. agent. The chief justice quoted Goldberg. The Constitution ''is not a suicide pact,'' he said.

So Jackson said it first. But Goldberg said it best.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/weeki ... -pact.html

An Israeli October Surprise for Obama?
August 18, 2012

...Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran’s Shah and Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland told me in 1990 that “the CIA within the CIA” – the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood best the strategic needs of the United States – believed Carter and his naïve faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation.

“Carter really believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West,” Copeland said, shaking his mane of white hair. “As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie and the corner drug store. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else. …

“Carter, I say, was not a stupid man,” Copeland said, adding that Carter had an even worse flaw: “He was a principled man.”

Reagan’s Landslide

Carter’s inability to resolve the hostage crisis set the stage for Reagan’s landslide victory in November 1980 as American voters reacted to the long-running hostage humiliation by turning to a candidate they believed would be a tougher player on the international stage. Reagan’s macho image was reinforced when the Iranians released the hostages immediately after he was inaugurated, ending the 444-day standoff.

The coincidence of timing, which Reagan’s supporters cited as proof that foreign enemies feared the new president, gave momentum to Reagan’s larger agenda, including sweeping tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, reduced government regulation of corporations, and renewed reliance on fossil fuels. (Carter’s solar panels were later dismantled from the White House roof.)

Reagan’s victory also was great news for CIA hard-liners who were rewarded with World War II spymaster (and dedicated cold-warrior) William Casey as CIA director. Casey then purged CIA analysts who were detecting a declining Soviet Union that desired détente and replaced them with people like the young and ambitious Robert Gates, who agreed that the Soviets were on the march and that the United States needed a massive military expansion to counter them.

Casey embraced old-time CIA swashbuckling in Third World countries and took pleasure in misleading or bullying members of Congress when they insisted on the CIA oversight that had been forced on President Gerald Ford and had been accepted by President Carter. To Casey, CIA oversight became a game of hide-and-seek.

As for Israel, Begin was pleased to find the Reagan administration far less demanding about peace deals with the Arabs, giving Israel time to expand its West Bank settlements. Reagan and his team also acquiesced to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a drive north that expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization but also led to the slaughters at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

And, behind the scenes, Reagan’s administration gave a green light to Israeli weapons shipments to Iran (which was fighting a war with Israel’s greater enemy, Iraq). The weapons sales helped Israel rebuild its contacts inside Iran and to turn large profits, some of which were plowed into financing West Bank settlements.

In another important move, Reagan credentialed a new generation of pro-Israeli American ideologues known as the neoconservatives, a move that would pay big dividends for Israel in the future as these bright and articulate operatives fought for Israeli interests both inside the U.S. government and through their opinion-leading roles in the major American news media.

In other words, if the disgruntled CIA Old Boys and the determined Likudniks did participate in an October Surprise scheme to unseat Jimmy Carter, they got much of what they were after...

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/08/18/an ... for-obama/

Fowler Hamilton: the DCI who never was
Started by Paul Rigby, Aug 26 2012 02:28 PM

...AP, "Retirement of CIA Chief Announced," Washington Post, (Tuesday), 1 August 1961, p.A2: Salinger yesterday announced retirement of Allen Dulles, claiming retirement in November 1961 had been Dulles' intention when accepted JFK's offer to stay on. Salinger declined to answer questions concerning Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton, according to forthcoming issue of Newsweek (August 7), due to succeed Dulles in October "after several months of working with Dulles"...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=19433

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Turner as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The journalist, Edward Jay Epstein, has pointed out that: "Although Turner had had little previous experience in intelligence, he viewed it simply as a problem of assessing data... he assumed that he could bring the CIA, and American intelligence, to the same standard of operational efficiency he had brought the ships under his command. He quickly found, however, that the CIA was a far more complex and elusive entity than he had expected.... Not only did he view such secrecy as irrational, he began to suspect that it cloaked a wide range of unethical activities. He became especially concerned with abuses in the espionage division."

Turner discovered that President Richard Nixon and the CIA had been involved in the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the elected leader of Chile. "Complementing the CIA effort, the US government exerted economic pressure on Chile, again to no avail. A second approach, entirely under CIA auspices, encouraged a military coup. President Richard Nixon directed that neither the Departments of State and Defense nor the US Ambassador to Chile be informed of this undertaking."

(1) Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (1985)

The use of moles is a longstanding tradition in intelligence. Back in biblical days the King of Syria asked whether there was a spy inside his own camp when Elisha, using spiritual insight, was predicting his moves to the King of Israel. Moles, those who spy against their own country, like agents, have diverse motivations. Often it s money; perhaps it is an ideological sympathy with the other country's way of life and disdain of one's own. Our British and German allies have had a rash of apparently ideologically motivated moles since World War II. Several, who defected to Moscow when they became suspect, were especially damaging because they had operated at high levels for prolonged periods.

Although our record is better, it is not perfect. William H Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell were employees of the National Security Agency who became moles for the Soviets. They fled to the Soviet Union when they came under suspicion in 1960. We surmise by their willingness to flee that they were ideologically committed to spying for the Soviets. Other moles who we knew operated from inside were two U.S. Army sergeants also assigned to the National Security Agency. They committed suicide in the mid 1960s just before being arrested for spying. Whether their motivation was ideology or, more likely, simply money is not clear.

There have been two well-publicized cases of CIA officers defecting, though both had left the Agency before doing so. Philip Agee had such personal and financial problems that he was having difficulty playing his CIA undercover role adequately and resigned from the CIA in 1968. In his letter of resignation Agee expressed his admiration for the CIA and his regret at having to leave. He even hoped he might be able to come back some day But, deeper in debt and with other emotional problems, he ended up in Cuba. We assume that he was brainwashed. By 1975 Agee had published a revealing and derogatory book on the CIA and begun lashing out at his former employer, primarily by making public the names of those fellow case officers whom he could remember. We believe he also passed on to the Cubans whateverother secrets he recalled. This seems to be a case of the Cubans' taking advantage of Agee's financial and emotional vulnerabilities. Both they and the Soviets have exploited him fully. Whether he was won over ideologically or was simply taken in by the flattery of becoming a well-known figure is difficult to assess. He has skirted the fringes of existing U.S. espionage law, and because that law is antiquated, whether Agee could actually be convicted is unclear. He remains abroad so as not to bring that to a test.

(2) Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (1985)

Exactly one year after these hearings on drug experimentation, the CIA was back in the press for another error of the past. This time it was the prolonged incarceration of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, who came to the United States in 1964, a few months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Nosenko came to public attention in 1978, when a special committee was set up in the House of Representatives to study the assassination again. Nosenko had been a KGB officer during the time that Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in the Soviet Union, from 1959 to 1962. When Nosenko first arrived in the United States, he was extensively debriefed by the intelligence agencies. He was especially interrogated about any connection between Oswald and the KGB. He contended that the KGB had paid no attention to Oswald. Now, in 1978, this special House committee wanted to review Nosenko's testimony on that issue. This led to an airing of the disgraceful way the CIA had attempted to determine whether Nosenko was telling the truth.

It was the job of the counterintelligence branch under James Jesus Angleton (whom Schlesinger had mentioned to me warily) to check on whether a defector was truly defecting or pretending to defect in order to spy on the United States. Angleton concluded that since Oswald had worked on the U-2 spy plane when he was in the US Marine Corps, it was unlikely that the KGB would have overlooked him entirely when he was in the Soviet Union. There was, then, cause to be suspicious of Nosenko's story about Oswald. It appeared to Angleton that the Soviets might have sent Nosenko to plant a story that would absolve them of any complicity with Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. Angleton's suspicions were heightened by an earlier Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, who claimed he knew Nosenko was a double agent. In Nosenko's favor, if he were a genuine defector, was that his knowledge of Soviet intelligence operations would have been more current than Golitsyn's, making him more valuable to us than Golitsyn.

(3) Edward Jay Epstein, Who Killed the CIA? The Confessions of Stansfield Turner (October, 1985)

Although Turner had had little previous experience in intelligence, he viewed it simply as a problem of assessing data, or, as he described it to his son, nothing more than "bean' counting." Accepting the position of "chief bean counter," he assumed that he could bring the CIA, and American intelligence, to the same standard of operational efficiency he had brought the ships under his command. The four-year effort to achieve this goal is the subject of his book, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition.

He quickly found, however, that the CIA was a far more complex and elusive entity than he had expected. To begin with, the acting CIA Director, Henry Knoche, rather than behaving like a ship's "executive officer," surprised Turner by refusing his "captain's" first order: a request that Knoche accompany him to meetings with congressional leaders. As far as Turner was concerned, this was insubordination (and Knoche's days were numbered). When he met with other senior executives of the CIA at a series of dinners, he found "a disturbing lack of specificity and clarity" in their answers. On the other hand, he found the written CIA reports presented to him "too long and detailed to be useful." He notes that "my first encounters with the CIA did not convey either the feeling of a warm welcome or a sense of great competence." This assessment that led to the retirement of many of these senior officers.

Turner was further frustrated by the system of Secrecy that kept vital intelligence hermetically contained in bureaucratic "compartments" within the CIA. Not only did he view such secrecy as irrational, he began to suspect that it cloaked a wide range of unethical activities. He became especially concerned with abuses in the espionage division, which he discovered was heavily overstaffed with case officers-some of whom, on the pretext of seeing agents abroad, were disbursing large sums in "expenses" to themselves, keeping mistresses, and doing business with international arms dealers. Aside from such petty corruption, Turner feared that these compartmentalized espionage operations could enmesh the entire CIA in a devastating scandal. The potential for such a "disgrace," as he puts it, was made manifest to him by a single traumatic case that occurred in the 1960's, one which he harks back to throughout his book, and which he uses to justify eliminating the essential core of the CIA's espionage service.

The villain of this case, as Turner describes it, is James Jesus Angleton, who was chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974; the victim was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who began collaborating, with the CIA in 1962 and then defected to the United States in 1964, and who claimed to have read all the KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald. The crime was the imprisonment of Nosenko, which, according to Turner, was "a travesty of the rights of the individual under the law." It all began in 1964, after Nosenko arrived in the United States. Turner states that Angleton "decided that Nosenko was a double agent, and set out to force him to confess. . . . When he would not give in to normal interrogation, Angleton's team set out to break the man psychologically. A small prison was built, expressly for him."

(4) Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (1985)

Immediately following World War II, Iran had become a testing ground in the cold war struggle between the Soviet bloc and the Western democracies. Mohammed Mossadegh's accession to the prime ministership in 1951 was viewed in Washington; and London as a threat. Mossadegh was more anti-Shah than procommunist, but he became increasingly dependent on the communists. Two of the major power elements in Iran, the clergy: and the merchants of the bazaar, were still supporting the Shah.

This left Mossadegh dependent on the masses. Only the communists were able to rally them on his behalf. The more Mossadegh maneuvered against the Shah, the more isolated he became from the noncommunists. In May 1951 Mossadegh nationalized British oil interests in Iran. Later, when the British felt he was vulnerable, they urged the United States to join in an effort to topple him. We agreed.

The CIA swung into action by attempting to persuade the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh, which was his constitutional prerogative. But the Shah was uncertain whether he could survive the public protests that might result. It took some time and numerous emissaries to persuade him to adopt this course, but he did dismiss Mossadegh, early in August 1953. Mossadegh's supporters, largely from the left, took to the streets and demonstrated. The situation became so tense that the Shah briefly left the country. Meanwhile, the CIA encouraged the merchants and Muslim clergy to organize counterdemonstrations. Using both persuasion and bribery, the bazaar people brought onto the streets enough demonstrators to force Mossadegh's demonstrators to back down. As the tide turned, the CIA urged its contacts in the army to come down on the side of the Shah. When they did, the CIA helped bring together a more friendly government, which was waiting in the wings. The Shah appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi as Prime Minister, and Mossadegh was finished. During the entire operation the CIA employed very few people and not much money. The main point, though, is that conditions inside Iran were ripe for a change. The Mossadegh government's political base was weak and was susceptible to being toppled. The CIA simply gave it the final push.

The Agency pulled off still another successful political action the following year. A prototype of the Castro revolution of 1956-1959 was developing in Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz. The CIA was directed to prevent Arbenz from consolidating his communist-oriented regime. It did so by convincing the Guatemalans that a "popular rebellion" was sweeping the country in support of Carlos Castillo Armas, an anticommunist army colonel then in exile. The CIA supplied Armas with enough arms for a ragtag army of fewer than two hundred men plus a few old bomber and fighter aircraft, most of them flown by mercenaries.

On D-Day, June 18, 1954, a CIA radio station, masquerading as the rebels' station, broadcast word that Colonel Armas had invaded from Honduras. It continued to give reports of the movement of a supposed five-thousand-man force toward the capital. A bomber dropped a single bomb on a parade field in the capital, without loss of life. A day and a half later, as the nearly imaginary invasion force was reported by its own radio broadcasts to be nearing Guatemala City, Arbenz resigned. Armas and his few men were flown to the outskirts of the city and marched in triumphantly. Again, this favorable political outcome required only a small effort, and, again, the government that was overthrown was so weak that only a little push was needed.

The public inevitably learned that the CIA was behind these decisive political actions in Iran and Guatemala. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a political campaign speech in Seattle, boasted of the Iranian operation as an indication of his administration's dynamism and prowess. Such publicity began to raise concerns, especially in the Congress, about how many covert actions were being carried out and under whose control they were. And then the Congress and the public began to learn about covert efforts that were not very successful.

The most adverse exposure was a series of revelations about more than ten years of CIA interference in Chile, from 1963 to 1973. This was one of the most massive campaigns in U.S. intelligence annals. The earliest effort was an attempt to shape the outcome of the 1964 presidential election in Chile, when the CIA underwrote more than half of the expenses of the Christian Democratic Party's campaign. This support was directed at defeating the communist candidate, Salvador Allende. It was probably not known to the Christian Democratic candidate, Eduardo Frei. In

(5) Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (1985)

The most adverse exposure was a series of revelations about more than ten years of CIA interference in Chile, from 1963 to 1973. This was one of the most massive campaigns in US intelligence annals. The earliest effort was an attempt to shape the outcome of the 1964 presidential election in Chile, when the CIA underwrote more than half of the expenses of the Christian Democratic Party's campaign. This support was directed at defeating the communist candidate, Salvador Allende. It was probably not known to the Christian Democratic candidate, Eduardo Frei. In addition to funding Frei, the CIA waged an extensive anticommunist propaganda campaign, using posters, the radio, films, pamphlets, and the press, to convince the Chileans that Allende and communism would bring to their country Soviet militarism and Cuban brutality. As part of this campaign, hundreds of thousands of copies of an anticommunist pastoral letter of Pope Pius XI were distributed. Frei won handily, but allegations of CIA involvement seeped out.

As a result, the CIA was reluctant to play as large a role in the next Chilean presidential election, in 1970. Not only was its role smaller; it did not support a specific candidate. The effort was directed strictly against Allende and was based primarily on propaganda, employing virtually all Chilean media and some of the international press as well. The program failed when Allende won a plurality, though not a majority, of the popular vote.

Under Chilean electoral law, that threw the choice to a joint session of the legislature some seven weeks later. At the direction of the White House, the CIA moved to prevent the selection and inauguration of Allende. It attempted to induce his political opponents to manipulate the legislative election up to and including a political coup. Some 726 articles, broadcasts, editorials, and similar items were sponsored in the United States and Chile, and many briefings were given to the press. One of those, to Time magazine, reversed the magazine's attitude toward Allende. The overall effort failed, however, because of the unwillingness of the appropriate Chilean politicians to tamper with the constitutional process.

Complementing the CIA effort, the US government exerted economic pressure on Chile, again to no avail. A second approach, entirely under CIA auspices, encouraged a military coup.

President Richard Nixon directed that neither the Departments of State and Defense nor the US Ambassador to Chile be informed of this undertaking. During a disorganized coup attempt that took place on October 22, the Chief of Staff of the Chilean Army was murdered. The CIA had originally encouraged the group responsible, but sensing that this group was likely to get out of control, the Agency had withdrawn its support a week earlier.

Allende was installed as President on November 2. Over the next three years, until 1973, the National Security Council authorized the CIA to expend some $7 million covertly to oppose Allende with propaganda, financial support for anti-Allende media in Chile, and funding for private organizations opposed to Allende. Other agencies of the US government applied economic and political pressure. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military staged a coup in which Allende died, reportedly by suicide. The CIA did not sponsor this coup, but how much its encouragement of the 1970 coup and its continued liaison with the Chilean military encouraged the action is honestly difficult to assess. With Allende gone, the decade-long covert action program was phased out.

More was at stake, though, than covert action in Chile. The coup-related deaths in both 1970 and 1973 and the exposure of the role of the United States in helping to topple a democratically elected government, albeit a Marxist one, brought intense scrutiny to the ethics of using covert action to change the political complexion of other countries. As a result, such covert action came to a near halt by the mid 1970s.

After the Allies formally accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, OSS agent and future CIA Director Richard Helms wrote a letter to his young son Dennis on a captured sheet of Adolf Hitler's personal stationery. Dated “V-E day,” meaning Victory in Europe day (May , the note begins: "Dear Dennis, The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe -- three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins." Helms became director of the agency in 1966.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52368065/disp ... ginSlide=1