CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein 10/20/77 Rolling Stone

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CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein 10/20/77 Rolling Stone

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:40 am

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html">tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Originally published in Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.<br><br> <br><br>How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up<br><br> <br><br>THE CIA AND THE MEDIA<br><br> <br><br>BY CARL BERNSTEIN<br><br> <br><br>In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.<br><br> <br><br>Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.<br><br> <br><br>The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:<br><br> <br><br>¦ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist-operatives are still posted abroad.<br><br> <br><br>¦ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.<br><br> <br><br>Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.<br><br> <br><br>By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.<br><br>The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well-known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.<br><br> <br><br>The Agency’s special relationships with the so-called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best-known correspondents in the business.<br><br> <br><br>In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments. Many signed secrecy agreements, pledging never to divulge anything about their dealings with the Agency; some signed employment contracts., some were assigned case officers and treated with. unusual deference. Others had less structured relationships with the Agency, even though they performed similar tasks: they were briefed by CIA personnel before trips abroad, debriefed afterward, and used as intermediaries with foreign agents. Appropriately, the CIA uses the term “reporting” to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. “We would ask them, ‘Will you do us a favor?’”.said a senior CIA official. “‘We understand you’re going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right .... Can you set up a meeting for is? Or relay a message?’” Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives; the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually without pay—in the national interest.<br><br> <br><br>“I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,” said Joseph Alsop who, like his late brother, columnist Stewart Alsop, undertook clandestine tasks for the Agency. “The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”<br><br> <br><br>From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community. As Stuart Loory, former Los Angeles Times correspondent, has written in the Columbia Journalism Review: ‘If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect .... If the crisis of confidence faced by the news business—along with the government—is to be overcome, journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others!’ But as Loory also noted: “When it was reported... that newsmen themselves were on the payroll of the CIA, the story caused a brief stir, and then was dropped.”<br><br> <br><br>During the 1976 investigation of the CIA by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, the dimensions of the Agency’s involvement with the press became apparent to several members of the panel, as well as to two or three investigators on the staff. But top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report. The multivolurne report contains nine pages in which the use of journalists is discussed in deliberately vague and sometimes misleading terms. It makes no mention of the actual number of journalists who undertook covert tasks for the CIA. Nor does it adequately describe the role played by newspaper and broadcast executives in cooperating with the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.<br><br> <br><br>American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against “global Communism.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the managements. They were witting.” In all, about twenty-five news organizations including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>In addition to cover capability, Dulles initiated a “debriefing” procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers. “There would be these guys from the CIA flashing ID cards and looking like they belonged at the Yale Club,” said Hugh Morrow, a former Saturday Evening Post correspondent who is now press secretary to former vice-president Nelson Rockefeller. “It got to be so routine that you felt a little miffed if you weren’t asked.”<br><br> <br><br>CIA officials almost always refuse to divulge the names of journalists who have cooperated with the Agency. They say it would be unfair to judge these individuals in a context different from the one that spawned the relationships in the first place. “There was a time when it wasn’t considered a crime to serve your government,” said one high-level CIA official who makes no secret of his bitterness. “This all has to be considered in the context of the morality of the times, rather than against latter-day standards—and hypocritical standards at that.”<br><br> <br><br>Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces—shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.”<br><br>From the outset, the use of journalists was among the CIA’s most sensitive undertakings, with full knowledge restricted to the Director of Central Intelligence and a few of his chosen deputies. Dulles and his successors were fearful of what would happen if a journalist-operative’s cover was blown, or if details of the Agency’s dealings with the press otherwise became public. As a result, contacts with the heads of news organizations were normally initiated by Dulles and succeeding Directors of Central Intelligence; by the deputy directors and division chiefs in charge of covert operations—Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer Jr., Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Thomas Karamessines and Richard Helms himself a former UPI correspondent); and, occasionally, by others in the CIA hierarchy known to have an unusually close social relationship with a particular publisher or broadcast executive.1<br><br> <br><br>James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.<br><br> <br><br>The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:<br><br> <br><br>¦ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best-known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed. Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.)<br><br> <br><br>Two of the Agency’s most valuable personal relationships in the 1960s, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America—Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami’s Cuban exile community. O’Leary was considered a valued asset in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Agency files contain lengthy reports of both men’s activities on behalf of the CIA.<br><br> <br><br>O’Leary maintains that his dealings were limited to the normal give-and-take that goes on between reporters abroad and their sources. CIA officials dispute the contention: “There’s no question Jerry reported for us,” said one. “Jerry did assessing and spotting [of prospective agents] but he was better as a reporter for us.” Referring to O’Leary’s denials, the official added: “I don’t know what in the world he’s worried about unless he’s wearing that mantle of integrity the Senate put on you journalists.”<br><br> <br><br>O’Leary attributes the difference of opinion to semantics. “I might call them up and say something like, ‘Papa Doc has the clap, did you know that?’ and they’d put it in the file. I don’t consider that reporting for them.... it’s useful to be friendly to them and, generally, I felt friendly to them. But I think they were more helpful to me than I was to them.” O’Leary took particular exception to being described in the same context as Hendrix. “Hal was really doing work for them,” said O’Leary. “I’m still with the Star. He ended up at ITT.” Hendrix could not be reached for comment. According to Agency officials, neither Hendrix nor O’Leary was paid by the CIA.<br><br> <br><br>¦ Stringers2 and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. Their journalistic credentials were often supplied by cooperating news organizations. some filed news stories; others reported only for the CIA. On some occasions, news organizations were not informed by the CIA that their stringers were also working for the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>¦ Employees of so-called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,<br><br> <br><br>¦ Editors, publishers and broadcast network executives. The CIAs relationship with most news executives differed fundamentally from those with working reporters and stringers, who were much more subject to direction from the Agency. A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—”The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,” said one source. “You don’t tell Wilharn Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t fink.”<br><br> <br><br>¦ Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects. Three of the most widely read columnists who maintained such ties with the Agency are C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, Joseph Alsop, and the late Stewart Alsop, whose column appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. CIA files contain reports of specific tasks all three undertook. Sulzberger is still regarded as an active asset by the Agency. According to a senior CIA official, “Young Cy Sulzberger had some uses.... He signed a secrecy agreement because we gave him classified information.... There was sharing, give and take. We’d say, ‘Wed like to know this; if we tell you this will it help you get access to so-and-so?’ Because of his access in Europe he had an Open Sesame. We’d ask him to just report: ‘What did so-and-so say, what did he look like, is he healthy?’ He was very eager, he loved to cooperate.” On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist’s byline in the Times. “Cy came out and said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a piece, can you give me some background?’” a CIA officer said. “We gave it to Cy as a background piece and Cy gave it to the printers and put his name on it.” Sulzberger denies that any incident occurred. “A lot of baloney,” he said.<br><br> <br><br>Sulzberger claims that he was never formally “tasked” by the Agency and that he “would never get caught near the spook business. My relations were totally informal—I had a good many friends,” he said. “I’m sure they consider me an asset. They can ask me questions. They find out you’re going to Slobovia and they say, ‘Can we talk to you when you get back?’ ... Or they’ll want to know if the head of the Ruritanian government is suffering from psoriasis. But I never took an assignment from one of those guys.... I’ve known Wisner well, and Helms and even McCone [former CIA director John McCone] I used to play golf with. But they’d have had to he awfully subtle to have used me.<br><br> <br><br>Sulzberger says he was asked to sign the secrecy agreement in the 1950s. “A guy came around and said, ‘You are a responsible newsman and we need you to sign this if we are going to show you anything classified.’ I said I didn’t want to get entangled and told them, ‘Go to my uncle [Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then publisher of the New York Times] and if he says to sign it I will.’” His uncle subsequently signed such an agreement, Sulzberger said, and he thinks he did too, though he is unsure. “I don’t know, twenty-some years is a long time.” He described the whole question as “a bubble in a bathtub.”<br><br> <br><br>Stewart Alsop’s relationship with the Agency was much more extensive than Sulzberger’s. One official who served at the highest levels in the CIA said flatly: “Stew Alsop was a CIA agent.” An equally senior official refused to define Alsop’s relationship with the Agency except to say it was a formal one. Other sources said that Alsop was particularly helpful to the Agency in discussions with, officials of foreign governments—asking questions to which the CIA was seeking answers, planting misinformation advantageous to American policy, assessing opportunities for CIA recruitment of well-placed foreigners.<br><br> <br><br>“Absolute nonsense,” said Joseph Alsop of the notion that his brother was a CIA agent. “I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close. I dare say he did perform some tasks—he just did the correct thing as an American.... The Founding Fathers [of the CIA] were close personal friends of ours. Dick Bissell [former CIA deputy director] was my oldest friend, from childhood. It was a social thing, my dear fellow. I never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’t have to.... I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.<br><br> <br><br>Alsop is willing to discuss on the record only two of the tasks he undertook: a visit to Laos in 1952 at the behest of Frank Wisner, who felt other American reporters were using anti-American sources about uprisings there; and a visit to the Phillipines in 1953 when the CIA thought his presence there might affect the outcome of an election. “Des FitzGerald urged me to go,” Alsop recalled. “It would be less likely that the election could be stolen [by the opponents of Ramon Magsaysay] if the eyes of the world were on them. I stayed with the ambassador and wrote about what happened.”<br><br> <br><br>Alsop maintains that he was never manipulated by the Agency. “You can’t get entangled so they have leverage on you,” he said. “But what I wrote was true. My view was to get the facts. If someone in the Agency was wrong, I stopped talking to them—they’d given me phony goods.” On one occasion, Alsop said, Richard Helms authorized the head of the Agency’s analytical branch to provide Alsop with information on Soviet military presence along the Chinese border. “The analytical side of the Agency had been dead wrong about the war in Vietnam—they thought it couldn’t be won,” said Alsop. “And they were wrong on the Soviet buildup. I stopped talking to them.” Today, he says, “People in our business would be outraged at the kinds of suggestions that were made to me. They shouldn’t be. The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust. Stew and I were trusted, and I’m proud of it.”<br><br> <br><br>MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDuals and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes. They include:<br><br> <br><br>¦ The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.<br><br> <br><br>Sulzberger was especially close to Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,” said a high-level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. “There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates.... The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.<br><br> <br><br>A senior CIA official who reviewed a portion of the Agency’s files on journalists for two hours on September 15th, 1977, said he found documentation of five instances in which the Times had provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962. In each instance he said, the arrangements were handled by executives of the Times; the documents all contained standard Agency language “showing that this had been checked out at higher levels of the New York Times,” said the official. The documents did not mention Sulzberger’s name, however—only those of subordinates whom the official refused to identify.<br><br> <br><br>The CIA employees who received Times credentials posed as stringers for the paper abroad and worked as members of clerical staffs in the Times’ foreign bureaus. Most were American; two or three were foreigners.<br><br> <br><br>CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.<br><br> <br><br>Sulzberger informed a number of reporters and editors of his general policy of cooperation with the Agency. “We were in touch with them—they’d talk to us and some cooperated,” said a CIA official. The cooperation usually involved passing on information and “spotting” prospective agents among foreigners.<br><br> <br><br>Arthur Hays Sulzberger signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA in the 1950s, according to CIA officials—a fact confirmed by his nephew, C.L. Sulzberger. However, there are varying interpretations of the purpose of the agreement: C.L. Sulzberger says it represented nothing more than a pledge not to disclose classified information made available to the publisher. That contention is supported by some Agency officials. Others in the Agency maintain that the agreement represented a pledge never to reveal any of the Times’ dealings with the CIA, especially those involving cover. And there are those who note that, because all cover arrangements are classified, a secrecy agreement would automatically apply to them.<br><br> <br><br>Attempts to find out which individuals in the Times organization made the actual arrangements for providing credentials to CIA personnel have been unsuccessful. In a letter to reporter Stuart Loory in 1974, Turner Cadedge, managing editor of the Times from 1951 to 1964, wrote that approaches by the CIA had been rebuffed by the newspaper. “I knew nothing about any involvement with the CIA... of any of our foreign correspondents on the New York Times. I heard many times of overtures to our men by the CIA, seeking to use their privileges, contacts, immunities and, shall we say, superior intelligence in the sordid business of spying and informing. If any one of them succumbed to the blandishments or cash offers, I was not aware of it. Repeatedly, the CIA and other hush-hush agencies sought to make arrangements for ‘cooperation’ even with Times management, especially during or soon after World War II, but we always resisted. Our motive was to protect our credibility.”<br><br> <br><br>According to Wayne Phillips, a former Times reporter, the CIA invoked Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s name when it tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952 while he was studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. Phillips said an Agency official told him that the CIA had “a working arrangement” with the publisher in which other reporters abroad had been placed on the Agency’s payroll. Phillips, who remained at the Times until 1961, later obtained CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act which show that the Agency intended to develop him as a clandestine “asset” for use abroad.<br><br> <br><br>On January 31st, 1976, the Times carried a brief story describing the ClAs attempt to recruit Phillips. It quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the present publisher, as follows: “I never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger.” The Times story, written by John M. Crewdson, also reported that Arthur Hays Sulzberger told an unnamed former correspondent that he might he approached by the CIA after arriving at a new post abroad. Sulzberger told him that he was not “under any obligation to agree,” the story said and that the publisher himself would be “happier” if he refused to cooperate. “But he left it sort of up to me,” the Times quoted its former reporter as saying. “The message was if I really wanted to do that, okay, but he didn’t think it appropriate for a Times correspondent”<br><br> <br><br>C.L. Sulzberger, in a telephone interview, said he had no knowledge of any CIA personnel using Times cover or of reporters for the paper working actively for the Agency. He was the paper’s chief of foreign service from 1944 to 1954 and expressed doubt that his uncle would have approved such arrangements. More typical of the late publisher, said Sulzberger, was a promise made to Allen Dulles’ brother, John Foster, then secretary of state, that no Times staff member would be permitted to accept an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China without John Foster Dulles’ consent. Such an invitation was extended to the publisher’s nephew in the 1950s; Arthur Sulzberger forbade him to accept it. “It was seventeen years before another Times correspondent was invited,” C.L. Sulzberger recalled.<br><br> <br><br>¦ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA3; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.<br><br> <br><br>The details of the CBS-CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.<br><br> <br><br>In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in-house investigation of the network's dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in the Los Angeles Times.) But Salant's report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s.<br><br> <br><br>Many details about the CBS-CIA relationship were found in Mickelson's files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson fromTed Koop, CBS News bureau chief in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: "Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News." The report to Salant also states: "Further investigation of Mickelson's files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News.... Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop.... The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA.... In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop4.... Notes in Mr. Mickelson's files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training... All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post-office box numbers and were paid for by individual, nor government, checks. ..." Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report.<br><br> <br><br>Salant's investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS-TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, "was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS." Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley.<br><br> <br><br>Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich's CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," Mickelson said in a recent interview. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.<br><br> <br><br>At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley's cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite tile denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant's investigators. "It wouldn't do any good," said one CBS executive. "It is the single subject about which his memory has failed."<br><br> <br><br>Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor's practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, "when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, 'Your bosses know all about it.'" According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefing by Agency officials. Said Salant: "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes. This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies."<br><br> <br><br>In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People's Republic of China. The other members of the four-man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice-president of the Washington Post Company for radio-TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.<br><br> <br><br>Salant's involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, "who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain." When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. "Its purpose," he said, "was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China." Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA-run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People's Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961-64 and 1966-present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.)<br><br> <br><br>¦ Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.<br><br> <br><br>For many years, Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time Inc., vice-president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964.While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s. Jackson, whose Time-Life service was interrupted by a one-year White House tour as an assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce's wife, Clare Boothe. Other arrangements for Time cover, according to CIA officials including those who dealt with Luce), were made with the knowledge of Hedley Donovan, now editor-in-chief of Time Inc. Donovan, who took over editorial direction of all Time Inc. publications in 1959, denied in a telephone interview that he knew of any such arrangements. "I was never approached and I'd be amazed if Luce approved such arrangements," Donovan said. "Luce had a very scrupulous regard for the difference between journalism and government."<br><br> <br><br>In the 1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine's foreign correspondents attended CIA "briefing" dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS. And Luce, according to CIA officials, made it a regular practice to brief Dulles or other high Agency officials when he returned from his frequent trips abroad. Luce and the men who ran his magazines in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their foreign correspondents to provide help to the CIA, particularly information that might be useful to the Agency for intelligence purposes or recruiting foreigners.<br><br> <br><br>At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of' several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine. Newsweek's stringer in Rome in the mid-Fifties made little secret of the fact that he worked for the CIA. Malcolm Muir, Newsweek's editor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said in a recent interview that his dealings with the CIA were limited to private briefings he gave Allen Dulles after trips abroad and arrangements he approved for regular debriefing of Newsweek correspondents by the Agency. He said that he had never provided cover for CIA operatives, but that others high in the Newsweek organization might have done so without his knowledge.<br><br> <br><br>"I would have thought there might have been stringers who were agents, but I didn't know who they were," said Muir. "I do think in those days the CIA kept pretty close touch with all responsible reporters. Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I'd call him up.... At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can't remember. I had a number of friends in Alien Dulles' organization." Muir said that Harry Kern, Newsweek's foreign editor from 1945 until 1956, and Ernest K. Lindley, the magazine's Washington bureau chief during the same period "regularly checked in with various fellows in the CIA."<br><br> <br><br>"To the best of my knowledge." said Kern, "nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. ... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side." CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive. In 1956, he left Newsweek to run Foreign Reports, a Washington-based newsletter whose subscribers Kern refuses to identify.<br><br> <br><br>Ernest Lindley, who remained at Newsweek until 1961, said in a recent interview that he regularly consulted with Dulles and other high CIA officials before going abroad and briefed them upon his return. "Allen was very helpful to me and I tried to reciprocate when I could," he said. "I'd give him my impressions of people I'd met overseas. Once or twice he asked me to brief a large group of intelligence people; when I came back from the Asian-African conference in 1955, for example; they mainly wanted to know about various people."<br><br> <br><br>As Washington bureau chief, Lindley said he learned from Malcolm Muir that the magazine's stringer in southeastern Europe was a CIA contract employee—given credentials under arrangements worked out with the management. "I remember it came up—whether it was a good idea to keep this person from the Agency; eventually it was decided to discontinue the association," Lindley said.<br><br> <br><br>When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.) Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend. But Graharn, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.<br><br> <br><br>In 1965-66, an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of $10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA officer in the Hong Kong station. Some, Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s, CIA sources said.<br><br> <br><br>Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.<br><br> <br><br>All editors-in-chief and managing editors of the Post since 1950 say they knew of no formal Agency relationship with either stringers or members of the Post staff. “If anything was done it was done by Phil without our knowledge,” said one. Agency officials, meanwhile, make no claim that Post staff members have had covert affiliations with the Agency while working for the paper.6<br><br> <br><br>Katharine Graham, Philip Graham’s widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers.<br><br> <br><br>¦ The Louisville Courier-Journal. From December 1964 until March 1965, a CIA undercover operative named Robert H. Campbell worked on the Courier-Journal. According to high-level CIA sources, Campbell was hired by the paper under arrangements the Agency made with Norman E. Isaacs, then executive editor of the Courier-Journal. Barry Bingham Sr., then publisher of the paper, also had knowledge of the arrangements, the sources said. Both Isaacs and Bingham have denied knowing that Campbell was an intelligence agent when he was hired.<br><br> <br><br>The complex saga of Campbell’s hiring was first revealed in a Courier-Journal story written by James R Herzog on March 27th, 1976, during the Senate committee’s investigation, Herzog’s account began: “When 28-year-old Robert H. Campbell was hired as a Courier-Journal reporter in December 1964, he couldn’t type and knew little about news writing.” The account then quoted the paper’s former managing editor as saying that Isaacs told him that Campbell was hired as a result of a CIA request: “Norman said, when he was in Washington [in 1964], he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [and that] he wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering.” All aspects of Campbell’s hiring were highly unusual. No effort had been made to check his credentials, and his employment records contained the following two notations: “Isaacs has files of correspondence and investigation of this man”; and, “Hired for temporary work—no reference checks completed or needed.”<br><br> <br><br>The level of Campbell’s journalistic abilities apparently remained consistent during his stint at the paper, “The stuff that Campbell turned in was almost unreadable,” said a former assistant city editor. One of Campbell’s major reportorial projects was a feature about wooden Indians. It was never published. During his tenure at the paper, Campbell frequented a bar a few steps from the office where, on occasion, he reportedly confided to fellow drinkers that he was a CIA employee.<br><br> <br><br>According to CIA sources, Campbell’s tour at the Courier-Journal was arranged to provide him with a record of journalistic experience that would enhance the plausibility of future reportorial cover and teach him something about the newspaper business. The Courier-Journal’s investigation also turned up the fact that before coming to Louisville he had worked briefly for the Hornell, New York, Evening Tribune, published by Freedom News, Inc. CIA sources said the Agency had made arrangements with that paper’s management to employ Campbell.7<br><br> <br><br>At the Courier-Journal, Campbell was hired under arrangements made with Isaacs and approved by Bingham, said CIA and Senate sources. “We paid the Courier-Journal so they could pay his salary,” said an Agency official who was involved in the transaction. Responding by letter to these assertions, Isaacs, who left Louisville to become president and publisher of the Wilmington Delaware) News & Journal, said: “All I can do is repeat the simple truth—that never, under any circumstances, or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent. I’ve also tried to dredge my memory, but Campbell’s hiring meant so little to me that nothing emerges.... None of this is to say that I couldn’t have been ‘had.’”.Barry Bingham Sr., said last year in a telephone interview that he had no specific memory of Campbell’s hiring and denied that he knew of any arrangements between the newspaper’s management and the CIA. However, CIA officials said that the Courier-Journal, through contacts with Bingham, provided other unspecified assistance to the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. The Courier-Journal’s detailed, front-page account of Campbell’s hiring was initiated by Barry Bingham Jr., who succeeded his father as editor and publisher of the paper in 1971. The article is the only major piece of self-investigation by a newspaper that has appeared on this subject.8<br><br> <br><br>¦ The American Broadcasting Company and the National Broadcasting Company. According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. One was Sam Jaffe who CIA officials said performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe has acknowledged only providing the CIA with information. In addition, another well-known network correspondent performed covert tasks for the Agency, said CIA sources. At the time of the Senate bearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC-News organization. All cover arrangements were made with the knowledge off ABC executives, the sources said.<br><br> <br><br>These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency’s relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. “It was a thing people did then,” said Richard Wald, president of NBC News since 1973. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people here—including some of the correspondents in those days—had connections with the Agency.”<br><br> <br><br>¦ The Copley Press, and its subsidiary, the Copley News Service. This relationship, first disclosed publicly by reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman in Penthouse magazine, is said by CIA officials to have been among the Agency’s most productive in terms of getting “outside” cover for its employees. Copley owns nine newspapers in California and Illinois—among them the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune. The Trento-Roman account, which was financed by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, asserted that at least twenty-three Copley News Service employees performed work for the CIA. “The Agency’s involvement with the Copley organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,” said a CIA official who was asked about the relationship late in 1976. Other Agency officials said then that James S. Copley, the chain’s owner until his death in 1973, personally made most of the cover arrangements with the CIA.<br><br> <br><br>According to Trento and Roman, Copley personally volunteered his news service to then-president Eisenhower to act as “the eyes and ears” against “the Communist threat in Latin and Central America” for “our intelligence services.” James Copley was also the guiding hand behind the Inter-American Press Association, a CIA-funded organization with heavy membership among right-wing Latin American newspaper editors.<br><br> <br><br>¦ Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news-gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday-Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former Herald-Tribune editor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. Cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.<br><br> <br><br>“And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files—a course opposed by almost all of the thirty-five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year,<br><br>COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES<br><br> <br><br> <br><br>THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRtually unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976.<br><br> <br><br>Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer-operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so-called proprietary publications—foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA—making them employees of the Agency—were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements.<br><br> <br><br>In November 1973, after many such shifts had been made, Colby told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had “some three dozen” American newsmen “on the CIA payroll,” including five who worked for “general-circulation news organizations.” Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high-level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy-five to ninety journalists of every description—executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.<br><br> <br><br>Colby, who built a reputation as one of the most skilled undercover tacticians in the CIA’s history, had himself run journalists in clandestine operations before becoming director in 1973. But even he was said by his closest associates to have been disturbed at how extensively and, in his view, indiscriminately, the Agency continued to use journalists at the time he took over. “Too prominent,” the director frequently said of some of the individuals and news organizations then working with the CIA. Others in the Agency refer to their best-known journalistic assets as “brand names.”)<br><br> <br><br>“Colby’s concern was that he might lose the resource altogether unless we became a little more careful about who we used and how we got them,” explained one of the former director’s deputies. The thrust of Colby’s subsequent actions was to move the Agency’s affiliations away from the so-called “majors” and to concentrate them instead in smaller newspaper chains, broadcasting groups and such specialized publications as trade journals and newsletters.<br><br> <br><br>After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not 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” At the time of the announcement, the Agency acknowledged that the policy would result in termination of less than half of the relationships with the 50 U.S. journalists it said were still affiliated with the Agency. The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.<br><br> <br><br>The Agency’s unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter’s job; and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.<br><br> <br><br>“It’s tough to run a secret agency in this country,” explained one high-level CIA official. “We have a curious ambivalence about intelligence. In order to serve overseas we need cover. But we have been fighting a rear-guard action to try and provide cover. The Peace Corps is off-limits, so is USIA, the foundations and voluntary organizations have been off-limits since ‘67, and there is a self-imposed prohibition on Fulbrights [Fulbright Scholars]. If you take the American community and line up who could work for the CIA and who couldn’t there is a very narrow potential. Even the Foreign Service doesn’t want us. So where the hell do you go? Business is nice, but the press is a natural. One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.”<br><br> <br><br> <br>ROLE OF THE CHURCH COMMITTEE<br><br> <br><br> <br><br>DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files.<br><br> <br><br>According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of journalists was one of two areas of inquiry which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other was the Agency’s continuing and extensive use of academics for recruitment and information gathering purposes.<br><br> <br><br>In both instances, the sources said, former directors Colby and Bush and CIA special counsel Mitchell Rogovin were able to convince key members of the committee that full inquiry or even limited public disclosure of the dimensions of the activities would do irreparable damage to the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus, as well as to the reputations of hundreds of individuals. Colby was reported to have been especially persuasive in arguing that disclosure would bring on a latter-day “witch hunt” in which the victims would be reporters, publishers and editors.<br><br> <br><br>Walter Elder, deputy to former CIA director McCone and the principal Agency liaison to the Church committee, argued that the committee lacked jurisdiction because there had been no misuse of journalists by the CIA; the relationships had been voluntary. Elder cited as an example the case of the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Church and other people on the committee were on the chandelier about the Courier-Journal,” one Agency official said, “until we pointed out that we had gone to the editor to arrange cover, and that the editor had said, ‘Fine.’”<br><br> <br><br>Some members of the Church committee and staff feared that Agency officials had gained control of the inquiry and that they were being hoodwinked. “The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands,” said one congressional source familiar with all aspects of the inquiry. “Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff—assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things that they didn’t want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it.”<br><br> <br><br>The Senate committee’s investigation into the use of journalists was supervised by William B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer who returned briefly to the Agency this year as deputy to CIA director Stansfield Turner and is now a high-level intelligence official at the Defense Department. Bader was assisted by David Aaron, who now serves as the deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser.<br><br> <br><br>According to colleagues on the staff of the Senate inquiry, both Bader and Aaron were disturbed by the information contained in CIA files about journalists; they urged that further investigation he undertaken by the Senate’s new permanent CIA oversight committee. That committee, however, has spent its first year of existence writing a new charter for the CIA, and members say there has been little interest in delving further into the CIA’s use of the press.<br><br> <br><br>Bader’s investigation was conducted under unusually difficult conditions. His first request for specific information on the use of journalists was turned down by the CIA on grounds that there had been no abuse of authority and that current intelligence operations might he compromised. Senators Walter Huddleston, Howard Baker, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and Charles Mathias—who had expressed interest in the subject of the press and the CIA—shared Bader’s distress at the CIA’s reaction. In a series of phone calls and meetings with CIA director George Bush and other Agency officials, the senators insisted that the committee staff be provided information about the scope of CIA-press activities. Finally, Bush agreed to order a search of the files and have those records pulled which deals with operations where journalists had been used. But the raw files could not he made available to Bader or the committee, Bush insisted. Instead, the director decided, his deputies would condense the material into one-paragraph summaries describing in the most general terms the activities of each individual journalist. Most important, Bush decreed, the names of journali
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Re: CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein 10/20/77 Rolling St

Postby tbdp » Thu Oct 12, 2006 12:11 pm

Wow. Good one. No surprise why we never hear from Bernstein anymore. You might be interested in reading this:<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Prelude to Terror: the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network and the Compromising of American Intelligence</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.campusi.com/isbn_0786714646.htm">www.campusi.com/isbn_0786714646.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Quick Summary:<br>"After decades of writing and research about American intelligence, Joseph Trento has written the most authoritative indictment of CIA splinter groups, two generations of Bush family involvement in illegal financial networks, and the funding of the agents of terror. Prelude to Terror reveals the history of a corrupt group of spymasters-led by Ted Shackley-who were fired when Jimmy Carter became president, but who maintained their intelligence portfolio and used it to create a private intelligence network. After this rogue group helped engineer Carter's defeat in 1980 and allied with George H.W. Bush, these former CIA men planned and conducted what became the Iran-Contra scandal and, through the Saudis, allied the U.S. with extreme elements in Islam. The CIA's number-one front man, Edwin P. Wilson, was framed by Shackley and his cohorts so that Wilson's operations could be taken over. For the first time the story of how CIA director George H. W. Bush was recruited into this network, and brought it into the bosom of the Saudi royal family, is told in detail, as well as how this group's manipulation of the CIA bureaucracy allowed Osama bin Laden's fundraising to thrive as al Qaeda flourished under Saudi and CIA protection."<br><br>--These shenanigans are another byproduct of the Church Committee and the suppression/impotence of "Operation Green Quest". Good read. He goes one step short of claiming complicity but that shouldn't differ from the importance of this book.<br><br>I admire your diligence Hugh. Keep it up! <br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=tbdp>tbdp</A> at: 10/12/06 10:12 am<br></i>
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Re: CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein 10/20/77 Rolling St

Postby judas disney » Sat Oct 14, 2006 6:04 am

Hugh has taken the time to paste this... which is now the ONLY other place on the entire Internet that you can find the ENTIRE unabridged article.<br><br>Isn't that strange for an article which is so important?<br><br>When this article appeared in 1977 and a minor tempest resulted (including the usual poo-poohing from the New York Times), why wasn't EVERY media outlet automatically and instantly under suspicion?<br><br>And since 1977, if no media outlet will bear witness to this article, no "liberal" talk-show host will bear witness to this article, no "impartial" newspaper will bear witness to this article, then shouldn't we presume "complicity until proven innocent"?<br><br>Can we presume that Operation Mockingbird is alive and well and MASSIVE, virtually comprehensive of every single media presentation that we hear and see?<br><br>Virtually everything?<br><br>In addition, with the release of information about Ben Bradlee (<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bradlee#Government_work">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben...nment_work</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> and <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.rense.com/politics5/mole.htm),">www.rense.com/politics5/mole.htm),</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> doesn't this information COMPLETELY change the nature of "The Official Narrative" about Watergate?<br><br>Doesn't it look like Watergate was a CIA coup ... or a CIA coverup of something much bigger than Watergate?<br><br>What's the current status of Operation Mockingbird?<br><br>Why WOULDN'T any media figure want to discuss Operation Mockingbird?<br><br>Really, folks, is there ANY more important topic than Operation Mockingbird? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=judasdisney@rigorousintuition>judas disney</A> at: 10/14/06 4:10 am<br></i>
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CIA Disinformation budget ca. 1982...billions.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Nov 18, 2006 1:22 am

deleted duplicate of post below.
Last edited by Hugh Manatee Wins on Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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CIA Disinformation budget ca. 1982...billions.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Nov 18, 2006 1:43 am

Source: Covert Action Quarterly, started by ex-CIA whistleblower Philip Agee and others.

This quote from the article is over 20 years old. Some things don't change.
But atleast now we know-

"It is not rhetoric to claim that "thought control" is on its way. The massive campaign to equate dissent with disinformation has ominous overtones when taken in conjunction with the Executive Order as interpreted by the Attorney General. COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS are alive and well. The government wants, on the other hand, a blank check to spread its disinformation, and on the other, vast powers to prevent anyone from accusing it of doing so."

http://covertaction.org//content/view/173/75/

Deceit and Secrecy: Cornerstones of U.S. Policy
By Bill Schaap


It is a political error to practice deceit
If deceit is carried too far.

— Frederick the Great, 1740


To dismiss unpleasant truths as lies spread by the opposition is a political reflex, but the Reagan administration has elevated this reflex to an obsession. Those who agree with the government's ideological underpinnings are telling the truth: those who disagree are lying. They are not only liars but also, as we shall explain below, foreign agents.

The current craze centers around the formerly obscure term, "disinformation." While the U.S. government takes the position that disinformation is a Soviet invention and that the Soviets are the major practitioners, in fact disinformation has been a U.S. specialty since the days of World War II OSS, which had an entire branch devoted to it.

Current estimates of the CIA's budget suggest that earlier figures were far too low. While studies of material relating to the late 1960s and early 1970s suggested an annual CIA budget of one to two billion dollars [ see CAIB Numbers 4 and 7], current conservative estimates, such as that of Defense Electronics (December 1981), indicate that a figure of ten billion dollars is more accurate for the CIA, and "in excess of $70 billion annually" represents "the overall intelligence budget." Perhaps one-fourth of the CIA's budget, nearly three billion dollars, is being devoted each year by the CIA to the spread of disinformation, through what it terms "deception operations." This is exclusive of the expenditures in this are by the State Department itself and its subsidiary, the International Communications Agency (ICA), parent of the Voice of America (VOA).

The first major disinformation operation of the Reagan administration was the El Salvador campaign, epitomized by the State Department's "White Paper." The second was the Libya campaign, exemplified by the "hit squad" story.

Early in the Reagan administration the State Department launched its campaign to "prove" that the Salvadoran revolutionary forces were creatures of external forces, most notably the Soviets and the Cubans. The flimsy "evidence" presented in the White Paper was subsequently demolished, most notably in Philip Agee's "White Paper? Whitewash!" Within a few months the establishment media joined in the attack, and despite sporadic attempts to revive it, the White Paper is no longer taken seriously. The Libya campaign is another story.


The Libyan Hit Squad

In the Spring and Summer of 1981 numerous news reports circulated suggesting various U.S. plots against the Libyan government, and its leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi. While U.S. hostility was the real point of paranoia, and while many of the reports were undoubtedly true, most perplexing was the public nature of the disclosures. In light of subsequent events, it now appears that the threats and plots were publicized in order to argue later that they formed the "justification" for Libyan actions against the United States. As early as April 6, 1981, U.S. News and World Report said that the U.S. with Egyptian logistical support, funneled arms to anti-Qaddafi forces in Chad and the Sudan. At the same time, the U.S. openly made major arms deals with Morocco, another bitter foe of Libya. In May the U.S. expelled all Libyan diplomats from the country, and stories circulated that the U.S. planned to assist Egypt in a move to overthrow Qaddafi.

On July 8 Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker testified before Congress that the U.S. would "help" any country that opposed Libya, and announced the sale of weapons to Tunisia "to defend itself" against Libya.

Then, on July 26, details were leaked of the CIA's plans to destabilized the Qaddafi government. Although this plot was denied by the U.S. administration (see article on the Seychelles in this issue) the complicated plans surely had a basis in fact. Indeed, as Don Oberdofer reported in the Washington Post (August 20, 1981): "The first interdepartmental foreign policy study ordered by the incoming Reagan administration early this year considered what the United States should do to oppose Libya and its militant, unconventional leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi. A few month later, authoritative sources reported that the administration had drawn up plans to ‘make uncomfortable,' at a minimum, for the leader of radical Libya."

Also in August, U.S. planes shot down tow Libyan aircraft in the Gulf of Sidra, after creating a deliberately provocative situation — announced two days in advance by the Newsweek magazine.

Jack Anderson elaborated in his August 25 column, noting that, despite the Mauritania-Mauritius explanation, "the CIA plotters still have Qaddafi in their sights." There have been, he said, "whispers about slipping an assassin into Libya to do away with Qaddafi. One scheme would be to have the hit man pose a s a mercenary and join a ring of mercenaries in Qaddafi's employ."

According to the Oberdorfer article, and the October 4 Parade Magazine, a Libyan group called the Free Unionist Officers responded to the revelations by issuing a statement which concluded, "we will physically liquidate anyone who may even think of harming Qaddafi, beginning with Ronald Reagan and ending with the smallest agent inside Libya or outside."

Anderson followed the Parade item with a self-described "bombshell" in his October 8 column. Col. Qaddafi, he reported, "has placed President Ronald Reagan at the top of a hit list and is plotting his death." He said that the National Security Agency and advised the White House during the summer that Reagan was the target of an assassination, and that this was why the President would not be attending the upcoming funeral of Anwar Sadat.

It took nearly two months for the bombshell to have any real repercussions, some of them instigated Anderson himself. In late November both NBC news and Newsweek reported unusual security precautions involving President Reagan and Vice-President Bush, and linked the precautions to intelligence reports that a Libyan hit squad was on its way. On November 22 the Secret Service — whose responsibilities include protection of top officials — reported that it was "aware" of the reports, and investigating them. On November 27, the FBI confirmed the heightened security measures, but said they were a "precaution, not a reaction to specific information that a band of foreign terrorists is roaming the countryside."

On November 28 the Washington Post reported that Middle East intelligence sources had provided a list of six names, comprising a hit team entering, or already inside, the U.S. On December 4 the New York Times reported that the team was made up of five people, and the same day ABC News reported that the government had "names and pictures." Shortly thereafter, Jack Anderson released the pictures — rough drawings — which were being circulated to police and immigration authorities.

Although the Libyan government vigorously denied the reports, the U.S. insisted it had detailed evidence of what was now described as a "10-man squad." The government refused, and has continued to refuse, to reveal any of the details.

The first real skepticism in the establishment media was found in a December 7 Washington Post article by Michael Getler. The reports, he said, were "a source of puzzlement." Some analysts doubted, he pointed out, that Libya would back such scheme, which, if discovered, could lead to massive retaliation by the United States. Moreover, Getler continued, "if such an assassination plan actually were in effect, it likely would be a most closely guarded secret, and the ability of an informant to obtain the kind of detailed information on each squad member, as is now circulating, is viewed by some specialists as too large, offering too great a chance for slip-ups by one or two members." It was also pointed out that the reliability of the informant, who was allegedly in CIA custody and asking for both asylum and money, was questionable.

Doubts were so widespread now that the December 8 Washington Post carried a page-one commentary by Haynes Johnson entitled, "The Believe It or Not Show." The hit squad stories, Johnson noted, " are setting a new standard of incredibility." He was most concerned about a possible U.S. military action against Libya: "It's almost as if public opinion were being prepared for dramatic action — say a strike against Libya or Qaddafi himself...the U.S. rhetoric about the threats emanating from Qaddafi's Libya has been increasing in volume and severity. It is reminiscent of the talk about Castro in the days when the United States was planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, and, in fact, commissioning assassination schemes against Castro."

Editorials varied; some applauded the precautions, some thought they were overdone; but none would dismiss the allegations, because as Haynes Johnson had put it, "we in the press are hardly capable of proving or disproving the case." The government asserted that the mysterious Carlos was a member of the hit squad. In Robert Ludlum's 1980 bestseller, "The Bourne Identity," a captured terrorist bargains for his life by promising information about Carlos. And disinformation master Robert Moss's new book includes a Libyan plan to send a hit squad into the U.S. But truth is stranger than fiction, as a December 14 Los Angeles Times story demonstrated. The initial leaks about the hit squad had not come from the administration directly, but from Mossad, Israeli intelligence. As Robert Toth and Ronald Ostrow reported, "among the possible explanations for the tips to the news media was that the Israelis wanted to intensify the U.S. public's concern about Col. Qaddafi so that Americans would support a strike at Libya."

On December 10 President Reagan invalidated U.S. passports for travel to Libya and ordered all Americans there to leave, knowing, according to Secretary of State Haig that U.S. allies would not go along with similar actions.

As late as December 17, the President insisted at a news conference that the intelligence information on the hit squad was solid — while still refusing to reveal any of it. He denied overreaction by the U.S.


Now You See Them, Now You Don't

Only one week after the President's news conference, the December 25 Washington Post carried this headline: "Libyan Hit Men Are Reported to Suspend Activity." The article said that "U.S. analysts with access to the latest top-secret intelligence now say the alleged Libyan hit squads — two of them, with five members each —have suspended their operations, at least temporarily. "Secretary of State Haig refused to comment on the report, but said that "if such reports are true, it underlines the validity of the steps taken by the President," Abracadabra!

It became fashionable to brag if you had never believed the hit squad was here at all. FBI Director William Webster told ABC News that it was "a possibility" that the entire story was a plant, and stressed that the FBI had never confirmed it. White House officials tried, unsuccessfully, to fend off further press skepticism: "This was not an artificial affair created by the White House to justify punitive action against Libya. We believed the threat was real when it first appeared, and we now believe it has receded." However, they still refused to release any evidence of the threat or of its "receding." They simply stated that the new information came from another source.

Jack Anderson, who was responsible for more of the hysteria than any other individual, was understandably miffed, and in his January 7, 1982 column described how everyone had been duped — failing, of course, to mention his own role. He gave six reasons why the credibility of the threat had diminished. The source of the allegation had demanded $500,000 for his information; he gave the names of others who also had information for the CIA and they turned out to be "hustlers who had been peddling phony documents for years:" two of the names on the list of the hit squad members were members of a Lebanese Shiite Moslem sect who were sworn enemies of Qaddafi; some of the informers had connections with Israeli intelligence "which would have its own reasons to encourage a U.S. - Libyan rift;" the original reports said that more detailed information was forthcoming and nothing materialized; and, significantly, the government's allies found the CIA findings unconvincing - in a class with the white paper on El Salvador earlier last year, which was later shown to have relied on highly questionable and probably forged documents."

But it is the close of Anderson's column which is most enlightening: "Footnote: There is a possibility that the CIA was played for a sucker by its own ‘disinformation' campaign directed at Qaddafi. The campaign, ordered by CIA Director William J. Casey last May, used foreign nationals for the dirty work. Knowing what the CIA wanted, and without proper supervision by American agents, it's possible the CIA's foreign hirelings cooked up the ‘hit squad' on their own. It fit neatly in the Reagan administration's political scheme of things, and — voila! A full-blown international incident was born."

There are rumors that the disinformation was "confirmed" by Mossad and by Frank Terpil, who is reportedly in their custody now.


Whose Disinformation?

Readers of this magazine need no elaboration of the proposition that the U.S., and particularly the CIA, have been masters of disinformation. Abundant detail is recorded in the books of Agee, Corson, Marchetti, Marks, Stockwell, and others. But the ideologues of the Reagan administration and their more wild-eyed supporters have taken to spreading the line that disinformation is a tactic exclusive to the Soviets and their allies. For example, Reed Irvine, chairman of perhaps the most falsely-labeled organization in Washington, Accuracy in Media (AIM) began a recent column: "By now a lot of Americans have heard about disinformation — the measures taken by the Soviet Union to deceive and confuse public opinion in ways that benefit Soviet foreign policy objectives." As C.T Hansen pointed out in the Columbia Journalism Review (September - October 1981): "According to AIM, virtually every story that seems to slant leftwards or is critical of the military or of business, amounts to disinformation."

The Bible of those who foster this line is "The Spike" by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave (see CAIB Numbers 10 and 12). A similar theme is found in "Target America," by James L Tyson, a "non-fiction" version of "The Spike". These works and the daily outpourings of right-wing columnists hammer the message: virtually all media workers in the U.S. are witting agents or at best unwitting dupes of the KGB. (Since hundreds of newspapers carry the syndicated columns of these right-wing journalists, the charge is a bit silly on its face.) A comment by Adam Hochschild in the New York Times (October 14 1981) noted that when de Borchgrave accuses virtually every liberal publication in the U.S. of disseminating KGB disinformation, he provides " no specific examples of facts or articles." And when he accuses "skeptical journalists of being unwitting purveyors of disinformation, the accusation is more slippery, less easy to definitely disprove, and less subject to libel law than if he were to accuse them of being conscious Communist agents."

Indeed, the accusations of the de Borchgrave, Moss, et. al., are singularly lacking in any up-to-date support. Most of the "evidence" is ten to twenty years old. De Borchgrave and AIM continually cite the testimony of Ladislav Bittman, a former Czech intelligence officer who defected many years ago. Bittman gives no specifics, simply claiming that the "Soviet Union" had many agents of influence in the Western media. "Target America" stresses the revelations of Alexander Kaznecheev, an alleged KGB officer who defected in 1959, and spoke only of trying to get articles friendly to the Soviet Union in the press. And Secretary of State Haig, in his fulminations about Soviet support for international terrorism, evidently relied on the testimony of Jan Sejna, a Czech army officer who fled to the U.S. in 1968. According to the October 18, 1981 New York Times, even the CIA criticized Haig for relying on "10-year-old testimony." "There is no substantial new evidence," an Agency official said.

Some of the ardent proponents of this thesis are the "former" CIA officers turned journalists, such as Cord Meyer and Jack Maury. One former CIA officer who did not toe the line, Harry Rositzke, had the temerity to question the message of Claire Sterling's turbid book, "The Terror Network." He did not believe that the Soviet Union was behind all the terrorism in the world. For this he was harshly attacked by Reed Irvine and Jack Maury, among others. Maury's response, in the September 23, 1981 Washington Post, contained some bold disinformation of his own. He detailed the confessions of a "defector" from the Cuban Mission to the United States: only the person about whom he spoke, Nestor Garcia, never defected and remains an official in the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

Newspapers, large and small, have been running features with headlines such as "Soviets Embark on New Campaign of Anti-American Lies" [Norwich, Connecticut Bulletin, April 14, 1981), Newsweek devoted its cover and many pages (November 23, 1981) to " The KGB in America." Both the State Department, which periodically produces reports on what it considers Soviet disinformation, most recently issued Special Report No. 88, "Soviet ‘Active Measures:' Forgery, Disinformation, and Political Operations." The Soviets, the Report pointed out, "Use the bland term ‘active measures' (aktivnyye meropriyatiya) to refer to operations intended to affect other nations' policies." (Why this is more "bland" than "special activities," the term the United States uses for covert actions, is unclear.) Among the active measures attributed to Soviet disinformation are the opposition to the NATO theater nuclear force in Europe, opposition to the neutron bomb, and opposition to "U.S. efforts to assist the Government of El Salvador." That the U.S. government views these positions, held by millions of people around the world, as Soviet disinformation would be humorous, were the stakes not so high, and the Reaganites not so serious. It was President Reagan, after all, who saw an international conspiracy to oppose U.S. policy on El Salvador because demonstrators in Canada carried "the same signs" as demonstrators in the U.S.: "U.S. out of El Salvador."

Reports of a similar nature appear periodically in the Congressional Record; right-wing legislators such as Larry McDonald, John Ashbrook, and John Porter insert copies of the more lurid columns into the pages of the Record as well as the publications on this theme from the International Communications Agency — publications which by law the ICA cannot circulate within the United States.

Tensions between the administration and Congress are also growing. On December 10 Constantine Menges, the CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America, gave a "briefing" to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which so incensed some of the members that they complained in writing to Director Casey. They called the session "a policy statement" which "seriously violated" the Agency's obligation to provide them with objective analysis. Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachussetts was so angry that he called the presentation "an insult" and walked out on the briefing.


The Voice of America and Radio Martí

A major concern of the Reagan supporters is the Voice of America. During the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Voice of America had become such a blatant propaganda machine that efforts had been undertaken to "reform" it, to make the news somewhat more impartial, and even to report, albeit gently, on matters of some embarrassment to the U.S., in the interests of establishing credibility. Although these reforms were minimal, they were clearly too much for the new administration, Reagan appointed as head to the International Communications Agency (ICA), the Voice of America's parent organization, his close friend Charles Z.Wick, a California nursing home magnate whose main qualifications appeared to be the fifteen million dollars he had raised for the Reagan presidential campaign. By mid-year, Wick moved into high gear, vowing to make the VOA a weapon in the campaign to counter Soviet propaganda. He accused the VOA of "erring on the side of imbalance against our Government."

Congress, at the urging of Senator Jess Helms, insisted that propaganda aimed at Cuba was insufficient. Although the VOA had been beaming Spanish-language broadcasts on both medium wave and short wave to Cuba for over twenty years, this was not enough for Helms and his supporter. They urged the creation of a special Cuban service, to be named "Radio Martí." (Commentators pointed out that, ironically, José Martí is venerated by the present Cuban government as an intractable foe of U.S. imperialism who coined the phrase, "the belly of the beast.")

As plans for Radio Martí developed, the ICA inaugurated, in November, "Project Truth." Project Truth is a program designed to "provide a fast reply service to posts abroad when rumors or news reports about American activity thought to be untrue begin to circulate." (New York Times, November 4, 1981.) Under the project, a monthly bulletin, "Soviet Propaganda Alert," is sent to all ICA posts overseas. Another feature of Project Truth is a "news feature service" called "Dateline America" which will be disseminated through the ICA to foreign media willing to run it. The National Security Council has directed all government agencies to "cooperate" with Project Truth.

Wick, apparently subject to emotional outbursts, created some media incidents of his own. At an October 23 meeting of the National Council of Community World Affairs Organizations Wick announced, "We are at war." This startled participants so much that Wick was later forced to explain that he only meant a "war of ideas." At the same meeting, a participant questioned the accuracy of the White Paper on El Salvador, and Wick exploded, suggesting that the questioner was spreading Soviet disinformation. When someone at the meeting asked Wick about plans to cut drastically the ICA's budget for scholarships and student exchanges while keeping all the funds for propaganda. Wick called the question a "crypto-communist remark" and refused to answer. According to the Washington Post (November 10, 1981), Wick later apologized for the outburst.

Fears that academic programs may be subject to political tests also increased. On November 7 the ICA cancelled an African lecture tour it was to sponsor because the speaker, John Seiler, had published an article critical of Reagan's policy toward South Africa.

Editorials questioned Wick's "zeal," and suggested that he has a "weakness for simplistic approaches to complicated subjects like Soviet ‘disinformation.'" Wick simply escalated the battle. On November 10 his subordinate, VOA chief James B. Conkling, announced the appointment of Philip Nicolaides as VOA coordinator for commentary and new analysis. Nicolaides was the author of a September 21 memorandum to Conkling, circulated within the VOA, which described the VOA as "a propaganda agency" which should function like an advertising agency selling soap. It called for the VOA to become more "hard-hitting" and to abandon the contention that VOA is a "journalistic enterprise." Conkling and Wick defended the appointment, praising Nicolaides as a "creative writer." They insisted that the recommendations of the memorandum — which Nicolaides said had been "stolen" from his office — had not been followed. The memorandum clearly stated that the goal of the VOA should be "to destabilize" the Soviet Union and its allies, to "portray the Soviet Union as the last great predatory empire on earth."

VOA staff were dismayed by the controversy, but those most concerned were eased out. Conkling's deputy, M.William Haratunian, was replaced, and said in his farewell memorandum that the VOA was "deeply troubled by recent personnel actions." Rumors circulated that there was a "hit list" at VOA of personnel who would not toe the Wick line. On December 21 the VOA's chief news editor, Bernard H. Kamenske, announced that he was quitting, after more than 28 years. The New York Times editorially grieved his departure and the program of "over-eager ideologues."

On December 9 Wick announced the "formation of the first of four advisory committees of private citizens to provide advice and expertise to the agency." This first group, the "New Directions Committee," is comprised of individuals who run the gamut of political persuasion from right-wing to extreme right-wing. They include Norman Podhoretz, the neo-conservative editor of Commentary magazine; Michael Novak, the rabidly right-wing columnist who most recently promoted the hoax that Cuban soldiers had blown up a bridge in El Salvador; Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and long suspected of having been a CIA agent; and Edwin J Fuelner, Jr., the president of the Heritage Foundation.


The Attorney General and the Executive Order



Two significant events in December together help explain the dangerous direction in which the administration is really heading and underscore the preoccupations with disinformation. On December 4 the President signed Executive Order 12333 on United States Intelligence Activities; and in a December 18 speech in Los Angeles Attorney General William French Smith delivered what the New York Times described as "the first comprehensive discussion" of the order.

The Executive Order itself, repealing President Carter's 1978 order on the same subject, makes profound changes in the scope of authorized intelligence activities. [See sidebar for details.] As we have noted previously (CAIB Numbers 12, 14-15), the Reagan administration always intended to replace Carter's order, which it viewed as overly restrictive. Drafts were leaked in March and again in August; Carter, the Justice Department insisted, "Had set up a burdensome array of requirements" which had to be changed.

During October and November there was an open debate, primarily through newspapers, over the most egregious aspect of the original drafts, provisions to allow the CIA to engage in "special activities" in the United States. As we suggested in our April issue, this appears to have been a tactic —quite a successful one — to deflect attention from the many other evils of the proposed Executive Order.

Congress and most commentators focused on two aspects of the proposed Executive Order. These were the provisions allowing the CIA, as well as the FBI, to infiltrate and manipulate domestic organizations, and those allowing the CIA a free hand to "collect foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information" within the United States.

Controversy raged. No less an authority than former CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote, in a November 1 Washington Post commentary: "Why should we be concerned about [authorizing the CIA to look into the activities of Americans]? Because CIA officers are not trained to operate in the domestic environment, where regard for law is a primary consideration. The ethic of intelligence is to get the job done in spite of local laws. It is unwise and unfair to force CIA operations into the domestic arena. It isn't necessary either, for that is exactly where FBI officers are trained to operate."

Turner pondered "the risks that the CIA would be overly zealous in the domestic arena," and worried that "information gained about Americans might be utilized for domestic political purposes." He feared, "the politicization of intelligence. " Critics of the CIA have worried about that, of course, since the Agency's inception, with activities such as Operation CHAOS justifying such concerns.

According to Ronal J Ostrow of the Los Angeles Times , the CIA insisted that the change would give the Agency no greater latitude than it has at present, but that it wanted only to "maintain our capabilities to do the kinds of things we do abroad." However, as Admiral Turner pointed out, what the CIA does abroad is break the law constantly.

Although Justice Department officials belittled Turner's fears, real cause for concern became apparent in late January. At that time CIA Director Casey wrote to the Attorney General asking that the federal criminal code be amended to provide complete immunity for intelligence operatives' conduct while on the job. This startling request, which was barely reported in the media, has ominous implications. As it is, there is little control over CIA operatives; if they also are given immunity from prosecution there will be no limit to the enormity of the crimes they could commit, at home as well as overseas.

The outcome of informal negotiations between Congress and the administration was minimal. The CIA cannot conduct domestic operations to collect foreign intelligence unless it is "significant foreign intelligence." "Significant" is not defined, and would seem to include anything the CIA desires. The CIA was given approval to infiltrate domestic organizations, but not, as contrasted to the FBI, the authorization to manipulate them, unless the organization is "composed primarily of individuals who are not United States persons and is reasonably believed to be acting on behalf of a foreign power." This provides little consolation to exile groups and various international solidarity organizations. Moreover, the express authority given he FBI not merely to infiltrate but also to influence domestic organizations is a frightening break with precedent. Not that it hasn't happened all along: but now it has been legitimized by the President. In addition, the distinction — that the CIA can infiltrate, but not influence — is specious. It is impossible to infiltrate an organization without influencing it to some degree. Otherwise the infiltrator would be obvious.


The Spreaders of Disinformation

But it is the gloss given the Executive Order by the Attorney General's speech which highlights the administration's focus on "disinformation." A connection with "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information" is enough to subject one to CIA domestic action. Counterintelligence is defined as "information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers." And foreign intelligence means "information relating to the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers, organizations or persons."

When the Attorney General made his speech, on December 18, he discussed the threat of foreign agents. He talked about international terrorism and he spoke of the theft of technological secrets. But then he went on: "Perhaps even more insidious is the threat posed by hostile ‘active measures' in this country, which are aimed at influencing public opinion and the political process through ‘disinformation' and ‘agents of influence'.

The implications of this remark are staggering. Spreading disinformation is tantamount to espionage; those who spread disinformation are fair game for the CIA and ,as we have noted above, the administration's ideologues believe that everyone who disagrees with U.S. foreign policy is spreading Soviet disinformation. Most critics of the Executive Order have focused on the threat to the Fourth Amendment —freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They must contemplate also the threat to the First Amendment — freedom of expression.


The Clampdown

The clampdown has already begun. In our last issue we describe "the retune to super-secrecy," and outlined a number of steps taken and proposed by the administration to make it more difficult for the American people, and of course the rest of the world, to learn of the activities of the government.

Three major developments occurred in January 1982. First, on January 6 the administration announced that it was ready to brief congress on its new proposed Executive Order on classification, versions of which had been circulating since October. Almost immediately, the briefing was cancelled, and the draft was circulated to government agencies for comment. Here too the plan is to replace, by executive fiat, a Carter Executive Order on the same subject. The move, in the words of the Associate Press, "would reverse a 25-year-old trend toward restricting the power of government officials to shelter information from public view." The new proposal reverses the presumptions of the Carter Order and specifies that when there is "reasonable doubt" about the need to classify a document, it should be done.

Moreover, while the Carter order had spoken of the need to balance government secrecy against the public's right to know, the new draft makes "national security" the sole basis for classification decisions. It may also have the of exempting completely the CIA and the entire intelligence complex from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act,, since it mandates the withholding of "information relating to intelligence source and methods. "As critics noted, the CIA can claim that virtually all of its material relates to "intelligence sources and methods." Since the FOIA itself exempts form disclosure material which has been properly classified according to law, this provision would allow the CIA and the other agencies to remove themselves from the coverage of the FOIA without specifically amending that law, something the Agency has called for, but until now been unable to obtain.

A second draft was discussed in an Associated Press bulletin January 21. The revised version, just submitted to Congress, still contains all of the objectionable provisions noted above.

On January 7 the CIA launched an unprecedented attack on the scientific community. Deputy Director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman addressed the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and demanded that scientists submit their research papers for CIA review prior to publication to curb Soviet acquisition of technological developments. If scientists would not submit to censorship voluntarily, Inman noted, they face a government crackdown, and will be "washed away by the tidal wave of public outrage."

Representatives of the scientific community called the proposal "disastrous," "a nightmare." As one university spokesman observed, if scientists do not publish, "we would lose the science ourselves. We would be the bigger loser."


Plugging leaks

Then, in mid-January, reports circulated indicating that the administration was incensed over leaks to the media, and intended to "use all legal methods" to stop the problem. The irony is that for decades the biggest leaker in this country has always been the administration in power. Leaking proposed government plans is often the best way to gauge public reaction ad allow for changes before final action is taken.

The new requirements were extremely sweeping. All government departments were told that every major interview must be cleared with the White House, and those involving national security issues would require detailed advance information on the substance of the proposed interview, and if approved, a comprehensive memorandum of the interview afterwards. Following the extensive press criticism, the administration dropped these provisions but instituted a new form for keeping track of every individual's access to all classified documents. Each reader will have to sign a cover sheet acknowledging that it is against the law for them to discuss the contents of the item with any unauthorized person.

The concept that government employees must get advance approval to leak information is of course self-contradictory, and the notion that this administration will be able to prevent leaks any better than previous ones is far-fetched. But that it is serious is clear. The Pentagon, for example, is planning to reverse a 1965 ruling that its employees could not be forced to take lie detector tests. Polygraph examinations, highly suspect by almost every agency except the CIA, are already under way. Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci, a former deputy CIA Director, was reportedly "enraged" when details of a January 7 meeting of the Defense Resources Board appeared in the press. He magnanimously took a lie detector test and "offered" one to others with knowledge of the meeting. A Defense spokesman acknowledged that no national security information was involved in the leak, but went on. "It's the principle of the thing that we strenuously object to — the expression of minority opinion via leaks to the news media designed to influence the course of events."

There have been a few other developments in this area. Last issue we noted that the CIA was "curtailing" the extent of its publication of reports and analyses. On November 10 the Agency announced that it will stop such publication completely, because "they take too much time to prepare and draw too much attention to the agency." Among publications to be discontinued are the CIA's studies of international terrorism and estimates of future Soviet oil production, two sources of extensive embarrassment to the Agency last year.

Finally there is a bizarre and little noticed provision in a proposed revision of the immigration laws submitted by the administration to Congress in October. The bill would allow the President to declare "immigration emergencies," such as uncontrollable influxes of immigrants from Cuba or Haiti, for example. These emergencies could last up to an entire year and would activate various emergency powers. Among these powers would be the right of the President to restrict the domestic travel of Americans, previously unknown in peacetime.


Conclusion



What does it all mean? There is little hope that the trends of the new administration discussed in previous issues have lost any momentum. On the contrary, the Reagan team seems bent on overreaching, overreacting, and infusing an ideological narrowness into all aspects of government. Clearly, national security has become a shibboleth by which all manner of unprecedented restrictions on the democratic rights of Americans, such as they are, will be imposed.

It is not rhetoric to claim that "thought control" is on its way. The massive campaign to equate dissent with disinformation has ominous overtones when taken in conjunction with the Executive Order as interpreted by the Attorney General. COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS are alive and well. The government wants, on the other hand, a blank check to spread its disinformation, and on the other, vast powers to prevent anyone from accusing it of doing so. Clearly, truth is the first casualty of cold wars as well as hot wars.

Massive resistance to this trend is necessary. Journalists, scientists, whistleblowers, everyone must continue to fight to expose the government's lies. People cannot accept the proposition that telling the truth is a crime. If they do, the country and the world are in big trouble.
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Disinfo and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Nov 18, 2006 2:46 am

deleted duplicate of post below.
Last edited by Hugh Manatee Wins on Wed Apr 18, 2007 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Disinfo and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Nov 18, 2006 2:51 am

source: Covert Action Quarterly online archive

More on CIA disinformation written during the early Reagan years of 'recovering from' Vietnam, Watergate, and Senate committee hearings on CIA abuses by increasing media manipulation.

Quote excerpted from this article--

"We have learned that propaganda intruded itself into the democratic process long ago.
The most important lesson of history's warnings, however, would be an understanding of what went wrong with information in the past to help people resist the inroads of further deception. The next time the government floats a story, demand in each instance to know why it is propagating this information, whose interests it is serving, and what is being concealed. Then perhaps this country can abandon the process of government by the misinformed."

http://covertaction.org//content/view/172/75/

Disinformation and Mass Deception:Democracy as a Cover Story

By William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray


During World War 1, the atrocity story came into its own as an instrument of foreign policy. In those simpler days, governments could turn public opinion against the enemy with tales of individual brutality: the rape of a nun, the bayonetting of a baby, or the execution of a Red Cross nurse. Such propaganda externalized the issues and focused national attention on an appropriate scapegoat. Doubters or dissenters were swept aside in the patriotic fallout, in an emotional downpour that insisted, "Once at war, to reason is treason."



This crude propaganda, however, had a temporary, war-related quality which often foundered on its own exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information in peacetime just as in war; nor had deception, secrecy, and lying come to be so much a part of the national menu as to be swallowed whole like the junk food that satiates the public appetite. Today there is no better example of the corrupted circumstances that now confront the consumer of news than the undercover campaign of official disinformation about Cuba.



Having failed to restore its hegemony over Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion or in the long, secret war waged under the code name "Operation Mongoose," the United States Central Intelligence Agency recently stepped up its 20‑year psychological warfare operations to discredit and destroy the Cuban government and any other Latin American or Caribbean government which stands in ideological unity with them. Propaganda aimed at that small, struggling country intentionally manipulates emotions of horror, revulsion, and fear in the uninformed citizen of the Yankee Colossus. Cuba is falsely pictured by the U.S. as embracing in its foreign policy the contemporary apocalyptic trio: drugs, criminality, and terrorism ‑ a far more terrible spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public.



Cuba as scapegoat and Fidel Castro as the implacable enemy of world national security interests have become easy answers for the complex realities of hemispheric change. And the sophisticated techniques with which official information about Cuba is concealed, denied, created, regulated, shaped, and planted seem to have heightened public acceptance of the Big Lie.



While a shoot‑out at credibility gap might not rescue the truth about Cuba from the hands of its abductors, a historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least innoculate some against further ravages of this advancing affliction.



The Overt Era of Information Abuse, 1898‑1945



No one with any knowledge of governments would ever insist there was a utopian past. Governments have always monitored dissent to impose their version of events on the public consciousness, to control the circulation of hostile opinion, and to manage the news. Secrecy always had a place, as had executive privilege. But the First Amendment guarantees, as well as the separation and checking of powers, seemed designed to limit the U.S. government's inherent tendency to manipulate information for its own interest. But as we shall see, this is not the case.



During and after the Civil War, while not engaging in deliberate deception, the government nevertheless insisted on "codes of press behavior" (the same which we criticize UNESCO and Third World nations for daring to put forth in the New International Information Order) and could classify information as too poisonous to circulate if judged "incendiary," "seditious," "treasonable," "immoral," "indecent," or "obscene."



The buildup of the North American Empire, then, added a new dimension of danger for information. During the Spanish‑American War, the brutal military mop‑up against the "rebels" in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba involved secret planning, undercover operations, and premeditated cover-ups in the face of public and Congressional opposition.



It was the First World War, however, that led the U.S. to move beyond censorship and overt suppression into the heady realm of disinformation itself. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, to take an active part in disseminating and propagandizing an official point of view. To unite public opinion behind the war, Creel's CPI conducted "a fight for the mind of mankind." Fake intelligence suggesting that German spies were everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the "barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the State Department used selective information to "prove" Germany was funding American pacifist organizations.



The capacity for covert conduct also gained ground as U.S. military intelligence expanded its role in domestic surveillance, laying plans in 1920 for a secret, domestic, counter‑insurgency program aimed at radicals‑an authentic progenitor of the COINTELPRO operations of the later Hoover years. Anticipating the CIA mania for cover, U.S. intelligence also dispatched agents to Europe as members of the International Red Cross.



By the end of the war, the country had acquired an institutionalized intelligence system, initiated the classification of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of deception. The Committee for Public Information left a legacy of experience for later generations of disinformationists to apply, if not to duplicate.



Public Relations Is Born As Disinformation



During two subsequent decades of peace in which the trauma of an economic collapse followed the delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations and its professional advocates.



Exemplified by Edward Bernays, a man who began his career as consultant to the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which terminated World War I and ended it as a hired hand for United Fruit Company in Latin America, public relations and its covert marketing strategies quickly seeped into the very core of American life. As Bernays cynically stated in a PR manual in 1928, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically."



The New Deal Thirties witnessed further assaults on the integrity of information. In the U.S., the realities of the depression inspired a militant labor union campaign for recognition and power, one in which the Communists participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement was vicious, projecting an image of it as the secret "red" subversion of U.S. society ‑ a mindless image which haunts the public consciousness even today. Imagined threats from front organizations and Fifth Columns brought further waves of tainted information. Thus the stage was set for the massive escalation of mistrust in any information not certified "pure" by the U.S. government. Since it could have the field to itself, all competitors were labeled un-American.



What the government would do with this power was not yet clear, but its existence and potential for abuse could not be denied‑an incredible opportunity for any proponent of the Bernays school of manipulation.



Other trends in the years immediately preceding Pearl Harbor accelerated the information counter‑revolution. The growth of classification expanded the domain of U.S. secrecy and the ability of government officials to conceal or selectively leak information on behalf of their own political agendas. Loyalty oaths and security checks came into being, designed to eliminate disclosure of this same material.



"Subversive activities" and espionage, meanwhile, became top priorities for the U.S. government, justifying generalized surveillance of a population considered suspect. Covert intelligence activity would soon come to serve the information management of successive U.S. Administrations.



World War II and the New Disinformation



On the eve of its second crusade to save the world, the U.S. was also poised on the brink of a new information era. How secret its policies would become, to what extent it would adopt the techniques of deception, and how each of these would affect democratic decision‑making began to emerge as the war progressed. These questions were illuminated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially a civilian organization charged with the mission of promoting an understanding of the war to the world at large, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcilable differences over the nature and purpose of propaganda. The OSS victory in this struggle would foreshadow the growth of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth to be used as a covert instrument of Cold War policies against a new enemy‑the Soviet Union. But all that came later.



Elmer Davis, OWI Director and ex‑newsman, began WWII believing his agency should deal in facts, not opinion, disseminating truths to friend and enemy alike - something the BBC's wartime broadcasts were attempting to accomplish. But neither President Roosevelt nor the Army, Navy, and State Departments believed that the public had a right to know what was really going on. (Documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.) In any case, the war‑related bureaucracy remained adamant about sharing information with the OWI, seriously undermining its mission.



Colonel William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, on the other hand, had an adventurer's enthusiasm for secret operations, dirty tricks, and disinformation of the crudest sort. Psychological warfare dominated the OSS approach to the war, though neither its costs nor its benefits to the American people were evaluated. Nor was truth considered a weapon of any potential.



Psychological warfare thus sold itself to the high command and the OWI was forced to adopt the methods of its competitor, subordinating all information projects to the expedient of winning the war. Interestingly, it was hardly this capitulation which influenced the course of the war, since the same methods of manipulation were carried to the extreme by the enemy‑the Goebbels approach to information.



By the time hostilities ended, the OWI had become a converted exponent of American power, its liberal one-world ideology long since subordinated to the commitment of U.S. involvement in every region of the world. Nowhere, their propaganda now claimed, could the U.S. "renounce its moral and ideological interests ... as a powerful and righteous nation."



In the OSS similar readjustments of priorities took place. Where once psychological warfare had at least been balanced by careful intelligence analysis to secure and interpret information, covert operations with their deceptive components of subverting and transforming facts became the new intelligence obsession.



In sum, a watershed had been reached. Information thereafter became Bernays's reality‑an "unseen mechanism" by which "intelligent minorities" shaped the opinions of the masses by deceiving them.



The Intelligence Era: Information Goes Underground



During the controversy surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Leslie Gelb, in charge of producing that voluminous and revealing report for the New York Times, commented on the continuing Cold War dedication to the philosophy of Bernays. "Most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment," he confirmed, "felt they had the right‑and beyond that the obligation‑to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it." The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense Secretary McNamara's press spokesman and a group of reporters in 1962: "It's inherent in the government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself," the aide argued.



The right to manipulate and the right to lie have had other post‑war companions: the right to plausibly deny; the right to a cover story; the right to conceal; and the need to know, a standard of classification that created another right, that of privileged access, with its step‑child, the right to selectively leak.



In analyzing the period since the atom bombs leveled the Japanese will to resist, it is as if the intelligence agencies had not yet heard that the war was over, and are still hiding in caves on some Washington atoll. Yet the patterns which have unfolded are a logical outcome of the wartime experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world‑wide conquest‑the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had no qualms about enlisting the support of their former enemies‑the Gehlen intelligence network of Nazi Germany.



Documents of some of the early proposals to set up the central intelligence unit‑the present CIA‑give a flavor of the crisis atmosphere with which they viewed the future struggle against the Soviet Union: "the task of detecting ... any developments which threaten the security of the world;" "to create a system in which every U. S. citizen who travels abroad . . . is a source of political intelligence;" "maintaining a constant check on foreign intelligence and propaganda, including propagandized U.S. citizens;" and "keep ... informed on political trends inside the U.S.... because state legislatures are peculiarly vulnerable to outside influences and would be a logical objective of foreign intelligence services. . . ." It is small wonder that the CIA's fears became self‑fulfilling prophesies.



Early CIA post‑war victories over communism‑such as the Italian elections of 1948, bought and paid for unwittingly by the American people‑brought about unholy alliances as distasteful as those the intelligence agencies had made with the war criminals, dealings with the Mafia and the attendant corruption which comes with sharing a dirty secret with thugs.



Later the Korean War produced an equally important impact on the spy operatives' own psychological outlook. Korea revived the atmosphere of total war, and created an "anything goes" philosophy directed against the "enemy." It meant, as General Maxwell Taylor argued in 1961 with reference to Fidel Castro, there would be a policy of "no long‑term living with ... dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti‑Americanism." Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954‑1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) were among the targets of covert operations encouraged by this philosophy.



But the strangest outcome of all in this web of deceit and disinformation was its coming home to roost. The intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be reported back to the U. S. and the government began to make policy decisions based on its own lies.



U.S. Disinformation Today



In spite of the long history of U.S. government propaganda, disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Administration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on whom to place the blame for the corruption of communications and dialogue. None of them wants the public to find the pea under the shell in this age‑old con game. President Reagan has naturally accused the Soviets of introducing the practice. The State Department has fostered the myth that disinformation is a Russian word. Dezinformatsiya, according to one of their busy little defectors, Ladislav Bittman, is the province of "Directorate A" of the KGB. Bittman, a Czech who left his country well over ten years ago, only recently began making these widely‑reported pronouncements about disinformation. The au courant darling of the right‑wing press, he conveniently confirms their suspicions about Soviet global intentions, while Reagan warns television audiences about Soviet‑style runways and Cuban‑style army barracks. The danger is that through incessant repetition of the word, disinformation has become synonymous in the minds of the American public with Soviet intelligence operations.



Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclusion as ‑the preceding sections have indicated. Disinformation has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military, and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end of World War 11, an integral part of national security which has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its practitioners. And as the activists of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA is its chief author.



Exposing Media Operations



In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), in an investigation of CIA wrongdoing, revealed just a tiny portion of the extent of CIA penetration of world media. It was patently obvious to the investigators that only U.S. intelligence agencies could practice the art of disinformation on such a grand scale, given the extraordinary expense of manipulating, influencing, and outright purchasing of news throughout the world. The number of organizations and persons who must be paid off to place fictitious stories across the globe is staggering. Almost ten years ago the Church Committee said it had found evidence of more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes owned outright by the CIA. A 1977 New York Times expose uncovered another 50 media outlets run by the CIA, inside and outside the U.S., with more than twelve publishing houses responsible for over 1000 books, some 250 of them in English. Beyond the wholly‑owned proprietaries there were countless agents and friendly insiders working in media operations around the world. These exposures are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. The mind reels at what remained hidden from Congress and the New York Times and continues so to the present.



Estimates of the portion of the U.S. intelligence budget ‑ kept secret from the American people and Congress ‑devoted to propaganda range from a few to many billions of dollars a year. An extremely conservative guess in the December 1981 Defense Electronics put the overall U.S. intelligence budget for that year at $70 billion, of which about $ 10 billion, they said, went to the CIA. Media specialists have estimated that at least one third of the CIA's budget is devoted each year to the spread of disinformation, conservatively placing CIA covert media manipulation alone for that year at almost three and a half billion dollars. None of this takes into account the myriad of income‑generating proprietaries owned by the CIA, firms which make a profit which is then poured back into more covert operations: CIA banks, holding companies, airlines, investment firms, and the like.



Anyone who has even a casual knowledge of the world hard currency situation knows that the Soviet Union does not have the kind of foreign exchange which billion dollar operations entail. Only the secret U.S. intelligence budget‑taken from unwitting American taxpayers‑can pay for inventing news on such a mammoth scale. And invent they do, as we shall see below in an examination of a few of their hysterical scenarios.



But perhaps the most chilling "overt" propaganda project of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.



This $85 million‑a‑year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations section, rivals the CIA's most ambitious media plans. It was quietly begun in January after a classified Executive Order was signed by President Reagan. This plan is discussed more fully in the conclusion below.



The second level of media activities of the U.S. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations‑are directed at influencing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December 1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by the CIA's charter and by the Executive Orders governing CIA behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the charter was systematically violated. But now under President Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the CIA can operate within the United States so long as what it does is not "intended" to influence public opinion domestically. Who or what determines CIA "intentions" is not specified, leaving a wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S. public opinion.



Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to cause "blowback," the situation wherein the U.S. media picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are false and emanate from U.S. intelligence in the first place. Blowback is very dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much CIA disinformation being spread that U. S. military intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. In other cases, the CIA itself performed as an anti‑intelligence agency in which the covert operators had to supply the information that the policy makers wanted. Government thus became the victim of its own disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGehee [Sheridan Square Publications, New York: 1983].)



One of the most graphic examples of an intentional blowback operation was cited by former CIA officer John Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies. In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the MPLA government forces in that country's war with South Africa, CIA propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire, came up with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Using an agent stringer for a wire service, the Agency had the story passed into the world media. Subsequently it was embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of several months, was a complete CIA fabrication.



Some covert media operations have been run on a very grand scale. One of the largest was Forum World Features, ostensibly a global feature‑news service based in London, but in fact a CIA operation from the beginning. When its cover was blown it was forced to suspend operations. Similarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.



In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phony documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread coverage these charges receive, the "proof" is astonishingly contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain was publicly denounced by the State Department as a Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one officer noted, "it fits the pattern of known Soviet behavior." The previous year, another document was called a Soviet forgery because it was "so good" it had to be a Soviet product. Periodically the government will call forth one of their stable of "defectors" to confirm that something is a forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question. Several short‑lived triumphs of the intelligence establishment show, however, that sometimes the people are not fooled, causing the press to reexamine their proffered themes. The State Department "White Paper" on Cuban aid to El Salvador, and the incredible Libyan "hit squad" saga are two examples. The White Paper, an unsuccessful attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin situation, was shown by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Philip Agee to have been based on government forgeries and mistranslations. The hit squad rumors which made headlines for several days disappeared‑from the country and from the news‑when Jack Anderson finally admitted he had been duped by his "intelligence sources."



Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level ‑ a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example‑will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader's Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of "exposes" by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."



After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.



These interconnections are by no means fortuitous. There is practically a revolving door policy from organization to organization, from the government, the CIA, to the "private" media, or the reversal of that process. The new director of VOA, Kenneth Tomlinson, for example, was formerly a Reader's Digest editor, who is hosted at blacktie parties by his old friend, McCarthyite Roy Cohn. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who works actively with several governments' security services, has a difficult time keeping his "journalism" and his spying separate. One of the reasons he was fired from Newsweek magazine was that he kept dossiers on the co‑workers whom he suspected of being KGB dupes. Robert Moss has also had a longtime relationship with the CIA, which financed his book on Chile. He too was "let go" from his job as editor of the London Economist's Foreign Report because his intelligence connections gave his columns a taint which could not be ignored. The Spike, a badly written novel by these two unsavory characters, presaged the disinformation era with all its ramifications.





Cuba and the Drug Trade



One of the most insidious of the continually unfolding disinformation themes currently propagated by the U.S. government is the attempt to implicate high Cuban government officials‑including the commander of the Cuban armed forces, Raul Castro‑in international drug trafficking. This campaign was recently escalated by the blatant covert manipulation of the U.S. judicial system on a scale hardly seen since the Rosenberg‑Sobell proceedings.



The creation of this theme can be traced to the highest levels of the Reagan Administration: from a VOA campaign orchestrated by President Reagan's good friend, USIA Director Charles Z. Wick, to a trial in Miami sponsored by the Justice Department. The criminal charges - at least those purporting to show Cuban government involvement ‑ were so ludicrous that at first only the Miami Herald (with deep ties to the Cuban exile community) saw fit to play them up. But in April, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato held "hearings" in New York and got big play in the New York Times and on national TV.



The VOA campaign began in early 1982 with a series of reports in February and March which suggested Cuba's involvement in drug traffic to the U.S. Some reports said that the purpose was to get drug smugglers to run guns to the FMLN in El Salvador or to the M‑19 in Colombia; some said it was to raise money for those guns; and some said it was to drug the American people into a stupor, presumably to facilitate a takeover. None of the reports seemed concerned that one reason was inconsistent with another.



The VOA then broadcast an interview with the Foreign Minister of Colombia, who repeated the charges and speculated that the Cubans were working with the Mafia. This was rather ironic, considering that for more than twenty years the Mafia has worked hand in glove with the CIA trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, out of bitterness for having lost their drug, gambling, and prostitution empires to the revolution in Cuba. The VOA also gave extensive coverage to similar stories from a Colombian newspaper, suggesting that Cuba and the Mafia were cooperating in the drug business. These reports came from the same Colombian news outlets which had spread the scurrilous story that Celia Sanchez, one of the heroines of the Cuban revolution who had long been suffering with cancer, had been killed in a shootout between Raul and Fidel Castro.



In March, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Enders was broadcast by VOA throughout Latin America repeating the Colombian news reports about drugs and Cuba almost verbatim.



While this disinformation was being spread in the hemisphere, a similar campaign was being waged within the U.S. But before analyzing that propaganda geared to domestic consumption, it is well to understand the significance of the campaign abroad. The goal, as with most propaganda directed against Cuba, is to isolate Cuba from the rest of Latin America, to make it appear a foreign ‑ i.e., Soviet‑entity, divorced from other Latin American or Caribbean countries. It is only by so isolating Cuba that the U.S. can encourage active measures against it‑like the breaking of diplomatic relations‑without creating contradictions in its own Monroe Doctrine pronouncements. Moreover, traditionally, both politically and culturally, Cuba has been in the mainstream of Latin American and, more recently, Caribbean thought, with an influence the U.S. has taken great pains to lessen.



During the middle of 1982, the campaign against Cuba was less intensive, because of the hemisphere's preoccupation with the Malvinas crisis. American disregard for Latin American opinion in aiding the U.K. in that war underscored the hypocrisy of the U.S. position. But the VOA's loss was the New York Post's gain. In June, the Post,



Rupert Murdoch's gutter paper, ran a three‑part series entitled "Castro's Secret War," by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss. The articles by these sleazy fabricators not only repeated the basic charge of Cuban involvement in the drug trade, but also gave minute details‑names and dates and alleged meetings. Not sourced, the "facts" presented were that several middle‑level drug smugglers had had meetings with Raul Castro and Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega. They hinted that this information might have come from a Colombian smuggler named Jaime Guillot.



Indeed Guillot starred in the next chapter of the saga, when, in July, Reader's Digest ran a five‑page article by a Nathan M. Adams based on unnamed "law‑enforcement and intelligence sources." This "expose," even more detailed than the Moss/de Borchgrave tripe, alleged that Guillot met with Rene Rodriguez, a member of the Central Committee of Cuba and the president of the Cuban Friendship Institute, and that Rodriguez "was in charge of coordinating the smuggling." It further claimed that Guillot traveled from Colombia to Cuba to Nicaragua, meeting with Raul Castro and receiving huge sums of money, that he was given $700,000 in Mexico for a flight to France, but that he was arrested by the Mexicans, whereupon he began "talking his head off," providing all the details for the article. What happened to the money - rather a large sum for a trip to France ‑ and why Guillot was never extradited to the U.S. are not explained. Later reports suggest that Guillot was released by the Mexicans and went to Europe.



In August the drug story gained further dubious currency as the Washington Times, Reverend Moon's paper, reprinted the original Post series. By November VOA was picking up the theme again, and just before the U.S. congressional elections Vice‑President Bush made a Republican campaign speech in Miami which reiterated the charges. Hot on his heels, on November 5, 1982, a Miami federal grand jury issued an indictment against Guillot, nine other drug smugglers, mostly Cuban exiles, and‑in an unprecedented move‑four Cuban officials: Rodriguez, an admiral of the Cuban Navy, and two former officials of the Cuban Embassy in Bogota, one of them the Ambassador.



Eight of the nine smugglers were arrested in Miami, and one of them, David Lorenzo Perez, testified against the others. His statements, similar to those attributed to Guillot in the earlier articles, and those of another unindicted dealer, a self‑described reformed Cuban spy, Mario Estevez Gonzalez were the only evidence against the Cuban officials.



In fact, no drugs were actually introduced at the subsequent trial. It was said the drugs were all thrown overboard when the smugglers panicked. The Estevez confession, according to his own testimony, was given in exchange for "an unspecified amount of money and a short jail sentence" in another drug case.



The payment is extraordinary, almost unheard of. Four Cuban officials were indicted on the statement of a man who was paid to make the statement! What, if anything, happened to Guillot is not known; but it was reported that his drug dealing partner, who also "cooperated" with the U.S. Justice Department, got a twenty‑five‑year jail sentence all of which was suspended.



Although the indictment describes in great detail the movements and travels of the exiled drug dealer, the references to the four Cuban officials are extremely vague. It alleges that they agreed to let Cuba be used as a "loading station and source of supplies for ships" transporting drugs. The indictment, eight counts and nineteen pages, says nothing else about the Cuban officials. It does not say when this "agreement" was made, where it was made, who met with whom nor who said what to whom.



In the February 1983 trial, five of the seven hapless defendants were found guilty, on the testimony of the alleged former spy and the indicted smuggler who turned state's evidence. The two told similar tales, of backslapping jovial meetings with the Cuban officials who, they claimed, said things like, "Now we are going to fill Miami with drugs," and , "It is important to fill the United States with drugs." (As if Miami were not already filled with drugs.) The "spy" said that he replied, "Well, if it has to be filled, let's do it."



Evidently this B‑movie dialogue was sufficient to convict five of the defendants, who presumably were involved in some kind of drug trafficking.



The use of this trial by the U.S. government was blatant; there was no concern about Miami's drug problem, only about Cuba. When Lorenzo Perez agreed to plead guilty and testify against the others, the spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration announced that "when you have people pleading guilty, it just disproves' the denials of the Cuban government. And when the five were convicted, the Assistant U.S. Attorney said that the outcome "demonstrates" the involvement of Cuba.



The Cuban government indignantly denied the charges, pointing out in government statements and broadcasts and in an editorial in Granma the idiocy of the charges. The Cubans also stressed a point which had been virtually ignored in the U.S. press‑that for more than ten years, despite all sorts of ideological disputes, Cuban authorities had been cooperating with U.S. officials in tracking and capturing drug smugglers in the Caribbean. At least 36 ships and 21 planes had been taken in this endeavor and more than 230 drug smugglers prosecuted. Because of the insulting and specious indictment the Cuban government announced that it was discontinuing its cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard.



Even Michael Ledeen, another disinformationist, pretended to be puzzled in his rehash of the Guillot story in the February 28, 1983 New Republic. He conceded that "Fidel Castro used to boast of his hatred of drug traffickers; he even cooperated with the United States by arresting some smugglers and turning them over to American authorities."

But, consistent with this season's disinformation theme, Ledeen refers to the current situation as a "turnabout," designed to provide hard currency for the Soviet Union.



There are countless other indications that it is the U.S. which is more interested in propaganda than in actually stopping drug traffic. During the aftermath of the Pope's shooting it was learned that Bulgaria had been cooperating with U.S. narcotics control officials for twelve years, but that the program had been terminated by President Reagan shortly after he took office.



"Project Democracy" and Public Diplomacy: Conclusion



On June 8, 1982 in an address to the British Parliament, President Reagan announced a new ideological offensive to turn the tide against Communism in the battle for the mind of the world's population. Designed to "foster the infrastructure of democracy" in a dozen ways, it clearly enlisted information as its top recruit. Charles Wick said there would be "a new assertive propagandistic role" to "win the war of ideas."



Elsewhere, as the democracy project unfolded, there were references to information as "a vital part of the strategic and tactical arsenal of the United States." Wick again pictured ideas as the only useful weapons that could be shot at an enemy in the absence of hostilities‑such as the Radio Marti venture aimed at Cuba. Other government officials elevated public diplomacy to the status of diplomatic and military policy in serving the needs of national security. But all spokesmen insisted that the United States at all times "must speak the truth, clearly, vigorously and persuasively."



Since truth is the first casualty in war, whether total, limited, or ideological, as Woodrow Wilson put it, how is the Reagan Administration planning to pull off this miracle? They are not planning to, in all probability. What they are doing is building a new Trojan Horse so that the covert programs of deception, fake propaganda, slanted information, and disinformation can move forward without being under the suspect auspices of the CIA, DIA, and others of that ilk. "Project Democracy" and public diplomacy are clearly a rehabilitation process for government propaganda, an attempt to restore information manipulation under new sponsorship. Will it work? Will you believe it? Or are you ready to be fooled?



First of all, the proposal was born with original sin. Conceived in secrecy as a classified executive order, Project Democracy can hardly live up to its claim of democratic openness. A CIA covert feature initially existed in the plan, but was withdrawn, or so we and the Congress are told. Still, National Security Council Decision Directive 77 placed the program under the National Security Assistant's control where it is "to support U.S. policies and interests.." Those chairing the top four committees come from agencies with long‑time commitments to secrecy and the protective cover of classification. But there are more serious problems with this deformed Reagan progeny besides the wartime psychology that gave it birth and the secrecy with which it was raised.



On its face the idea is implausible because American foreign policies and CIA operations have not evidenced any connection with an infrastructure of democratic principles, except as they are manipulated to suit the purposes of the U.S. Democracies have had empires before, from Athens on. Whatever the U.S. may call its overseas political, economic, and cultural mission, its support of client regimes, its overthrow of leftist democratic governments, its active support of "moderately authoritarian" right‑wing allies, its backing of powerful multinational corporations - none of that has ever been analyzed internally for its democratic fallout. The credibility of any government information must inevitably be tested against the deeds as well as the rhetoric of a nation.



What chance would the Democracy Institute have to gain access to the truth it insists it will disseminate? How will it know it is not part of the cover story, the way Adlai Stevenson was used at the U.N. during the Bay of Pigs? The very Administration that is increasing classification, unleashing the spy agencies, and restricting freedom of information now says it will spread the truth to the world to enhance democratic values out there. Tell that to the people of Chile.



Since the new proposals (budgeted at $85 million this year) call for a heavy reliance on non‑governmental institutions, it is interesting to examine what has already been funded. One grant helped "media officials" from rightwing governments‑including El Salvador‑learn how to handle the U.S. press. Ian MacKenzie, a slick ideologue who was a registered agent for Anastasio Somoza is directing the program, at a cost of $170,000 to the taxpayers. (See CAIB Number 12.) Another grant gave Ernest Lefever's Ethics and Public Policy Center almost $200,000 to run four seminars pushing the "ethics of nuclear arms."



As these "democratic" projects went up to Congress, many of them smacked of the CIA's old bag of dirty tricks finally getting laundered. A world‑wide book publishing venture, a center for free enterprise (is business a democratic institution?), a foundation and organizations to promote Latin American "democracy," and academic programs at two foreign universities. The announced objectives such as "leadership training," sound like recruitment for covert futures, as ‑the CIA does routinely with foreign students on American campuses. Project Democracy is the soft core version of hard core deception.



It is time the American people took a good dose of their own history to begin to understand what ails this society. One benefit might be a revival of old‑fashioned American skepticism toward authoritative pronouncements. History has rebutted the argument of disinformation's origin as a KGB plot, and traced its twentieth century development as a hidden partner of the imperial process and national security apparatus. We have learned that propaganda intruded itself into the democratic process long ago.



The most important lesson of history's warnings, however, would be an understanding of what went wrong with information in the past to help people resist the inroads of further deception. The next time the government floats a story, demand in each instance to know why it is propagating this information, whose interests it is serving, and what is being concealed. Then perhaps this country can abandon the process of government by the misinformed.
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Computer-Aided Unconsciousness And Consumer Fascism

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Nov 18, 2006 3:31 am

Douglas Rushkoff is an expert on media manipulations combining marketing and technology.
Imagine the 'feedback loop' described below applied to propaganda, disinformation, and social engineering using linguistics cues like keywords and image-conditioning. It's happening.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/5.html

America's Descent Into Computer-Aided Unconsciousness And Consumer Fascism

by Douglas Rushkoff

We have taught our machines to conduct propaganda. Web sites and other media are designed to be "sticky," using any means necessary to maintain our attention. Computers are programmed to stimulate Pavlovian responses from human beings, using techniques like one-to-one marketing, collaborative filtering, and hypnotic information architecture.

Computers then record our responses in order to refine these techniques, automatically and without the need for human intervention. The only metrics used to measure the success of banner ads and web sites is the amount of economic activity - consumption and production - they are able to stimulate in their human user/subjects. As a result, the future content and structure of media will be designed by machines with no priority other than to induce spending.

It amounts to a closed feedback loop between us and our computers, where - after their initial programming - the machines take the active role and human beings behave automatically. Programs adjust themselves in real time, based on their moment to moment success in generating the proper, mindless responses from us. In fact, computers and software are already charged with the design of their own successors. They are encouraged to evolve, while we are encouraged to devolve into impulsive, thoughtless passivity.

Those who stand a chance of resisting - people who actually think - are rewarded handsomely for their compliance, and awarded favorable media representations such as "geek chic." These monikers are reserved for intelligent people who surrender their neural power to the enhancement of the machine, by becoming vested web programmers, for example. Those who refuse to suspend active thought are labeled communist, liberal, or simply "unfashionably pessimistic." Worse, they are unfaithful enemies of NASDAQ, and the divinely ordained expansion of the US economy.

Ultimately, if such a story were actually reported, it would have to dress itself in irony, or appear as the result of an abstract intellectual exercise, so as not to alert too much attention.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, a Professor of Media Culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is an author, lecturer, and social theorist. His books include Free Rides, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, The GenX Reader (editor), Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Ecstasy Club (a novel), Playing the Future, and Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say .

Further reading on Edge: "The Think That I Call Doug: A Talk with Douglas Rushkoff".

LINK: Doug Rushkoff Home Page.
http://www.rushkoff.com/

ON EDIT: Sadly but predictably, Douglas Rushkoff has gone over to the dark side. He has been enlisted in the US government's cover-up of what really happened on 9/11/01.
Rushkoff has recently written that '9/11 truthers are just too racist to admit that 19 Arabs pulled off what happened.'
It's not suprising that someone with his expertise would be tapped by the the Powers That Be for a really important disinformation campaign.
Last edited by Hugh Manatee Wins on Thu Mar 06, 2008 1:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby Telexx » Sat Nov 18, 2006 11:15 am

Hugh great work on posting the article & follow ups also.

Thanks,

Telexx
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How the CIA Manufactures History

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Sat Dec 16, 2006 3:20 pm

(Here's a 1988 article by former high-level CIA administrator-turned-whistleblower, Victor Marchetti, in the Journal of Historical Review which, unfortunately, is a hideous publication I wouldn't suggest ever reading. But Marchetti's article is legit.
This is what happens to some material too sensitive for state-controlled media. It gets relegated to moral ghettos which take advantage of being refuges for the refused.
-HMW)

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p305_Marchetti.html

Institute for Historical Review
Journal of Historical Review

Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
VICTOR MARCHETTI

* Paper presented to the Ninth International Revisionist Conference.

In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it. The vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that vast army of clandestine personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences for them and us.

-- Malcom Muggeridge
May 1966

That, in a nutshell, sums up what the CIA has accomplished over the years through its various clandestine propaganda and disinformation programs. It has unwittingly and, often, deliberately decieved itself -- and the American taxpayer. The CIA is a master at distorting history -- even creating its own version of history to suit its institutional and operational purposes. It can do this largely because of two great advantages it possesses. One is the excessively secret environment in which it operates, and the other is that it is essentially a private instrument of the presidency.

The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing -- for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy -- so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it.

As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president -- every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial."

The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so. I first became concerned about this historical distortion in 1957, when I was a young officer in the Clandestine Services of the CIA.

One night, after work, I was walking down Constitution Avenue with a fellow officer, who previously had been a reporter for United Press.

"How are they ever going to know," he asked.

"Who? How is 'who' ever going to know what?" I asked.

"Hhow are the American people ever going to know what the truth is? How are they going to know what the truth is about what we are doing and have done over the years?" he said. "We operate in secrecy, we deal in deception and disinformation, and then we burn our files. How will the historians ever be able to learn the complete truth about what we've done in these various operations, these operations that have had such a major impact on so many important events in history?"

I couldn't answer him, then. And I can't answer him now. I don't know how the American people will ever really know the truth about the many things that the CIA has been involved in. Or how they will ever know the truth about the great historical events of our times. The government is continually writing and rewriting history -- often with the CIA's help -- to suit its own purposes. Here is a current example.

Just last month in Moscow, there was a meeting, a very strange meeting. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met with former Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and a member of the Cuban Politburo. These three men, along with lesser former officials of their governments, has all been involved in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and they had gathered intheSoviet capital to discuss what has really occurred in that monumental crisis, which almost led to World War III.

Since I, too, had been personally involved in that crisis, I took some interest in the news reports coming out of Moscow concerning the doings of this rather odd gathering of former officials. Much to my surprise, I learned that Robert McNamara was saying that neither he nor the U.S. intelligence community realized there actually had been some 40,000 Soviet troops in Cuba in the autumn of 1962. The Former defense chief of the Kennedy administration was also saying that he and the U.S. government did not realize that the few dozen medium and intermediate range missiles the Soviets had tried to sneak into Cuba were actually armed with nuclear warheads and ready to be fired at targets in the U.S.

Furthermore, he was claiming that the U.S. did not understand that this huge military build-up by the Soviets had been carried out to protect Cuba and to prevent the U.S. from attacking the island's Communist regime. He added, for good measure, that he was surprised to learn from the talks in Moscow that the Soviets and Cubans thought the U.S. had plans to bring down the government of Fidel Castro through the use of force. According to McNamara, the entire Cuban missile crisis was a dangerous misunderstanding that came about because of the lack of communication among the governments involved in the near catastrophe.

Well, when I heard what McNamara and the band were playing in Moscow, I said to myself, "Either McNamara is getting a little dotty in his old age and doesn't remember what really happened during the Cuban missile crisis -- or there's some other reason for this." Well, it soon became apparent that McNamara was not senile. What, then, is the reason for these curious -and false -- "admissions" in Moscow? The reason is that the United States and the Soviet Union have decided to become friends again, and Washington wants to set the stage for rapprochement with Castro's Cuba.

It has evidently been decided by the powers that be in the U.S. to have a little meeting in Moscow and tell the world that we were all mixed up about Cuba and we didn't know what was going on there in 1962, because we weren't communicating well with the Soviets at the time. Thus, the American people would see how close to war we had come, how we should communicate more with the Soviets, and how they weren't really very bad guys after all. For that matter neither were Fidel and his gang. Therefore, it would follow that we should in a few months from now get on with disarmament and whatever else is necessary to bring about the new internationalism that is forming between east and west. At the same time, we should begin rebuilding the bridge to Cuba, too.

But to create the proper atmosphere for the coming rapproachement with Moscow and, later, Cuba, it was necessary to scare the American public and the world into thinking that the crisis of October 1962 was worse than it really was. To do that, McNamara, Gromyko, et al. were playing a little game -- their own distorted brand of historical revisionism. They were rewriting history to suit the present purposes of their governments.

Now, I thought, what if I were a reporter. Would I be able to see through this little charade that was going on in Moscow? Probably not. I began studying the "knowlegeable" syndicated colunmists. They were writing things like, "... My God, we never did understand what the Soviets were up to in Cuba. Yes, we better do something about this." What McNamara and friends were saying in Moscow was now becoming fact. It's becoming fact that we, the U.S. government, did not really know what was going on during the missile crisis. That is a lie.

If there was ever a time when the CIA in the United States intelligence community and the United States Armed Forces really cooperated and coordinated their efforts with each other, it was during the Cuban missile crisis. The Cuban missile crisis is probably one of the few examples -- perhaps the only one -- of when intelligence really worked the way it was supposed to work in a crisis situation.

I was there at the time, and I was deeply involved in this historical event. A colleague and friend of mine, Tack, my assistant at the time, and I were the original "crate-ologists"-which was an arcane little intelligence art that we had developed. We had learned through a variety of tricks of the trade, and some of our own making, to be able to distinguish what was in certain crates on Soviet merchant ships as they went into Cuba, into Indonesia into Egypt, Syria,and other places.We could tell if a crate contained a MIG-21,or an IL-28, or a SAM-2 missile.

We did this in such an amateurish way that we dared not tell anyone our methods. While the National Photographic and Interpretation Center employed 1,200 people in its office in downtown Washington, using state-of-the-art equipment to analyze aerial and satellite photography, Tack and I would sit in our office, feet up on the desk, using a beat-up old ruler to measure photos taken from U.S. submarines. I'd measure a crate on the deck of the Soviet freighter, say about three quarters of an inch in the photograph.

"Tack, do you think they could fit a Mig-21 in there?"

He'd thumb through an old Air Force manual and say,

"Mig-21, fuselage length 25 feet."

"Well?"

"Take the tail off, and we can fit it in."

"Okay, let's call it a Mig-21."

We were pretty good at this. We had other aids to identification of course. We were able to learn when the Soviets were preparing shipments and from which ports they were sailing. We knew which personnel were involved, and the ships' destinations. Thus we could alert the navy, which sometimes conducted overflights, sometimes tracked them with a submarine.

We had an attaché in Istanbul row out in the middle of the night with a Turk whom he'd hired, looking for three things in a Soviet freighter: its deck cargo, how high it was riding in the water, and its name.

By these and other sensitive we were able to learn, in the summer of 1962, that the Soviets were carrying out an unprecendented arms build-up in Cuba. While some of the other agencies, namely the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, did'nt agree with us, CIA director John McCone was able to get president John Kennedy to authorize more intelligence overflights. The overflights revealed that the Soviets were building

SAM (Surface-to-Air Missiles) launching sites to protect the build-up. Further overflights revealed the construction of launching sites for Soviet MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) capable of carrying nuclear warheads to most cities in the United States.

We know exactly how many there were. where they were, and that they had not yet been armed, because the warheads hadn't arrived yet.

Thus McNamara is lying when he claims that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were armed and ready for launch against the United States. On the contrary, we were watching the ships which caried the warheads; American ships enforcing the blockade which President Kennedy had ordered boarded a Romanian ship (which we knew carried no arms), and the Russian ships bringing the nuclear warheads turned around in mid-ocean and went home.

It is also quite untrue that there were forty thousand Soviet troops in Cuba. We knew that there were only ten thousand of them, because we had developed a simple but effective way of counting them.

The Soviets had sent their troops over on passenger liners to disguise the military buildup. Some genius back in Moscow must have then said: "But these guys need to wear civilian clothes; let's put sport shirts on them." But someone at the department store said: We've only got two kinds." So half the troops wore one kind, half of them the other. They weren't very hard to spot.

Then, too, Soviet soldiers are a lot like our own. As soon as the first group got established, the colonel sent them out to paint some rocks white and then paint the name of the unit, 44th Field Artillery Battalion or whatever, on the rocks. All we had to do was take a picture of it from one of our U-2s. So it was easy to establish a Soviet troop strength of far below 40,000. Thus, McNamara is agreeing to a second lie.

The big lie, however, is that the Soviet Union came into Cuba to protect the Cubans. That was a secondary, or bonus, consideration. The primary reason for the build-up was that the Soviets at the time were so far behind us in nuclear strike capability that Khruschev figured he could make a quantum leap by suddenly putting in 48 missiles that could strike every city in America except Seattle, Washington.

Nor did we come as close to war as many think, because Khruschev knew he was caught. His missiles weren't armed, and he hadn't the troops to protect them. Kennedy knew this, so he was able to say: "take them out." And Khruschev had to say yes.

I must admit that at the time I was a little concerned, and so was my buddy Tack. We were manning the war room around the clock, catching four hours of sleep and then going back on duty. My wife had the station wagon loaded with blankets and provisions, and Tack's wife was standing by on alert. If either of them got a phone call with a certain word in it, they were to take our children and drive to my home town in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. We figured they'd be safe there: if you've ever seen the coal region with its strip mines you would think it had already been bombed and we were hoping the Soviets would look at it that way too.

Last month's conference in Moscow is an example of how history is being rewritten. Any historian who relies on what he reads in the newspapers, on the statements from McNamara and the Russians and the Cubans will not be learning the truth. The CIA has manufactured history in a number of ways over the years not only through its propaganda and disinformation but through the cover stories it uses for their operations, and the cover-ups when an operation falls through Then there is "plausible deniability," which protects the president.

All these techniques have one thing in common, and depend on one thing: secrecy. Secrecy is maintained not to keep the opposition - the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy -- from knowing what's going on, because the enemy usually does know. Secrecy exists to keep you, the American public, from knowing what is going on, because in many ways you are the real enemy.

If the public were aware of what the CIA is doing, it might say: "We don't like what you're doing -- stop it!," or You're not doing a good job -- stop it!" The public might ask for an accounting for the money being spent and the risks being taken.

Thus secrecy is absolutely vital to the CIA. Secrecy covers not only operations in progress, but continues after the operations, particularly if the operations have been botched. Then they have to be covered up with more lies, which the public, of course, can't recognize as lies, allowing the CIA to tell the public whatever it wishes.

Presidents love this. Every president, no matter what he has said before getting into office, has been delighted to learn that the CIA is his own private tool. The presidents have leapt at the opportunity to keep Congress and the public in the dark about their employment of the agency.

This is what was at the basis of my book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. I had come to the conclusion, as a member of the CIA, that many of our policies and practices were not in the best interests of the United States. but were in fact counterproductive, and that if the American people were aware of this they would not tolerate it.

I resigned from the CIA in 1969, at a time when we were deeply involved in Vietnam. And how did we get into Vietnam on a large scale? How did President Lyndon Johnson get a blank check from Congress? It was through the Gulf of Tonkin incident The American people were told by President Johnson that North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats had come after two American destroyers on the night of August 4, 1964. This was confirmed by the intelligence community.

The fact of the matter is that while torpedo boats came out and looked at the U.S. destroyers, which were well out in international waters, they never fired on them. They made threatening maneuvers, they snarled a bit, but they never fired. It was dark and getting darker. Our sailors thought they might have seen something, but there were no hits, no reports of anything whizzing by.

That was the way it was reported back: a bit of a scrape, but no weapons fire and no attempt to fire. Our ships had not been in danger. But with the help of the intelligence community President Johnson took that report and announced that we had been attacked. He went to Congress and asked for and received his blank check, and Congress went along. Everyone knows the rest of the story: we got into Vietnam up to our eyeballs.

Every president prizes secrecy and fights for it. And so did President Nixon, in my case. When I came to the conclusion that the American people needed to know more about the CIA and what it was up to, I decided to go to Capitol Hill and talk to the senators on the intelligence oversight subcommittee. I found out that Senator John Stennis, at that time head of the subcommittee, hadn't conducted a meeting in over a year, so the other senators were completely ignorant as to what the CIA was doing. Senators William Fulbright and Stuart Symington would tell Stennis, "Let's have a meeting," but he was ignoring them. The other senators wrote Stennis a letter urging him to at least hear what I had to say in a secret executive session, but he continued to ignore them.

Then I would meet Fulbright -- at the barber shop. He was afraid to met me in his office. I would meet with Symington at his home. I would meet with senators at cocktail parties, as if by chance. But still they couldn't get Stennis to convene the intelligence subcommittee.

Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania told me he had learned more about the workings of the intelligence community in one afternoon of conversation with me than in six years of work on the intelligence subcommittee. That didn't surprise me, because I, several years before, had done the budget for CIA director Richard Helms. It was feared that the Senate appropriations subcommittee might have some hard questions about the growing cost of technical espionage programs. Director Helms had evidently been through this before, however.

As Helms put it, he and the CIA's head of science and technology, Albert (Bud) Wheelon, staged a "magic lantern show" for the committee, complete with color slides and demonstrations of the CIA's most advance spy gadgets: a camera hidden in a tobacco pouch, a radio transmitter concealed in some false teeth, a tape recorder in a cigarette case, and so on. One or two hard questions were deflected by Senator Russell of Georgia, who chaired the committee and was a strong supporter of the agency. There were, of course, no slides or hi-tech hardware to exhibit the programs the CIA wanted to conceal from Congress, and the budget sailed through the subcommittee intact.

What I learned in my dealings with Congressmen, in the CIA and after leaving, was that the men who wanted to change the situation didn't have the power, while those who had the power didn't want any change. With Congress a hopeless case, and the White House already in the know and well satisfied to let the CIA continue to operate in secrecy, I decided to talk to the press. I gave my first interview to U.S. News and World Report, and that started the ball rolling. Soon I was in touch with publishers in New York, talking about doing a book.

I soon got a telephone call from Admiral Rufus Taylor, who had been my boss in the agency, but by that time had retired. He told me to meet him at a motel in the Virginia suburbs, across the Potomac from Washington. My suspicions aroused by the remoteness of the room from the office, I was greeted by Admiral Taylor, who had thoughtfully brought along a large supply of liquor: a bottle of scotch, a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin ... "I couldn't remember what you liked," he told me, "so I brought one of everything."

I began to make noise: flushing the toilet, washing my hands, turning on the television. Admiral Taylor was right behind me, turning everything off. I kept making noise, jingling the ice in my glass and so on, until the admiral sat down. There was a table with a lamp on it between the admiral's chair and the one which he now told me to sit down on. He looked at me with a little twinkle in his eye: the lamp was bugged, of course.

We talked, and Admiral Taylor told me the CIA was worried about what I might write in my book. He proposed a deal: I was to give no more interviews, write no more articles, and to stay away from Capitol Hill. I could write my book, and then let him and other retired senior officers look it over, and they would advise me and the agency. After that the CIA and I could resolve our differences. I told him, "Fair enough." We had a drink on it, and went out to dinner. That was our deal

What I didn't know was that a few nights later John Erlichman and Richard Nixon would be sitting in the White House discussing my book. There is a tape of their discussion, "President Nixon, John Ehrlichman, 45 minutes, subject Victor Marchetti," which is still sealed: I can't get it Ehrlichman told me through contacts that if I listened to the tape I would learn exactly what happened to me and why.

Whatever the details of their conversation were, the president of the United States had decided I should not publish my book. I was to be the first writer in American history to be served with an official censorship order served by a court of the United States, because President Nixon did not want to be embarrassed, nor did he want the CIA to be investigated and reformed: that would have hampered his ability to use it for his own purposes. A few days later, on April 18, 1972, I received a federal injunction restraining me from revealing any "intelligence information." After more than a year of court battles, CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published. The courts allowed the CIA to censor it in advance, and as a result the book appeared with more than a hundred holes for CIA-ordered deletions. Later editions show previously deleted words and lines, which the court ordered the CIA to restore in boldface or italics. The book is therefore difficult to read, indeed something of a curiosity piece. And of course all the information which was ordered cut out ended up leaking to the public anyway.

All this was done to help the CIA suppress and distort history, and to enable presidents to do the same. Presidents like Harry Truman, who claimed falsely that "I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations," but who willingly employed the agency to carry out clandestine espionage and covert intervention in the affairs of other countries. Or Dwight Eisenhower, who denied that we were attempting to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia, when we were, and was embarrassed when he tried to deny the CIA's U-2 overflights and was shown up by Khruschev at Paris in 1960. John F. Kennedy, as everyone knows by now, employed the CIA in several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We used everyone from Mafia hoods to Castro's mistress, Marita Lorenz (who was supposed to poison the dictator with pills concealed in her cold cream -- the pills melted). I have no doubt that if we could have killed Castro, the U.S. would have gone in.

There was a fairly widespread belief that one reason Kennedy was assassinated was because he was going to get us out of Vietnam. Don't you believe it He was the CIA's kind of president, rough, tough, and gung-ho. Under Kennedy we became involved in Vietnam in a serious way, not so much militarily as through covert action. It is a fact that the United States engineered the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's premier, and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his powerful brother. A cable was sent out to the ambassador which said, "If Lou Conein goofs up [Lucien Conein was a key CIA operative in Saigon], it's his responsibility." So when E. Howard Hunt faked these memos and cables when he was working for the "plumbers" on behalf of President Nixon (and against the Democrats), he knew what he was doing. That was his defense, that he wasn't really forging or inventing anything. "Stuff like that really existed, but I couldn't find it," he said. Of course Hunt couldn't find it by that time the original documents were gone. But Hunt knew what he was doing.

President Nixon's obsession with secrecy led to the end of his presidency, of course. As indicated earlier, Nixon was determined to suppress my book. On several occasions after his resignation, Nixon has been asked what he meant when he said that the CIA would help him cover up the Watergate tapes, because "they owed him one." He has responded, "I was talking about Marchetti," in other words the efforts (still secret) to prevent The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence from being published.

Another instance of the Nixon administrations' attempts to suppress history is the ongoing attempt to cover up the details of the administration's "tilt" toward Pakistan in its conflict with India in the early 1970's. Although the basic facts soon emerged, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh's account of the affair in his unflattering book on Henry Kissinger revealed that Morarji Desai, an important Indian political leader who later became Prime Minister, was a CIA agent. Kissinger spurred Desai to sue Hersh, and the case is still dragging on today, seven years later. I know what the truth is; Hersh knows as well, but as a conscientious journalist refused to reveal his sources. Here historical truth is caught between official secrecy and Hersh's loyalty to his informants; nevertheless, I have a great deal of admiration for Hersh for his firm stand.

It is a fact that a good many foreign leaders, including those often seen as "neutral" or even hostile to the United States, have been secretly on the CIA's payroll. For instance, when Jimmy Carter came into office, he claimed he was going to reform the CIA. No sooner than was he in the White House, they decided to test him: the news that Jordan's King Hussein had been paid by the CIA was leaked. President Carter was outraged, because now it was his CIA. His efforts to deny the relationship were defeated by Hussein's nonchalant frankness. He told the press, "Yes, I took the money. I used it for my intelligence service. And that's all I'm going to say on that subject."

There were a lot of other national leaders in Hussein's category. As I revealed for the first time in my book, Joseph Mobutu, a corporal in the Belgian forces in the Congo before its independence, went on the CIA payroll. That is why he rules Zaire today. The CIA paid the late Jomo Kenyatta, ruler of Kenya, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a year, which he'd spend on drink and women. Therefore we ended up paying Kenyatta twice as much, telling him: "This is for you and this is for your party."

The CIA has funded individuals and movements across the political spectrum in West Germany. A prime example is Willy Brandt, former chancellor of the Federal Republic, who received much CIA support when he was mayor of West Berlin. Axel Springer, the Christian Democratic-minded press and publishing magnate, who pointed the finger at Brandt for working with CIA, was also a CIA asset, who used his publications to spread CIA propaganda and disinformation. It was a case of the pot calling the kettle black: I knew his case officer quite welL

This is the way the CIA sees its mission, the job it was created to do. The CIA is supposed to be involved with everyone, not merely the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats. The agency is supposed to have its fingers in every pie, including the Communist one, so that they can all be manipulated in whichever way the U.S. government desires.

An obvious area of disinformation and deception exists in our relationship with a nation often represented as our closest ally, Israel. I have often been asked about the relationship between the CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad. The CIA maintains some kind of liaison with virtually every foreign intelligence agency, including the KGB. These relationships vary from case to case, but our relationship with the Mossad was always a peculiar one.

When I was in the agency, the Mossad was generally not trusted. There was an unwritten rule that no Jews could work on Israeli or near Eastern matters; it was felt that they could not be totally objective.. There was a split in the agency, however, and Israel was not included in the normal area division, the Near Eastern Division. Instead it was handled as a special account in counterintelligence. The man who handled that account, James Jesus Angleton, was extremely close to the Israelis. I believe that through Angleton the Israelis learned a lot more than they should have and exercised a lot more influence on our activities than they should have.

For his trouble, James Angleton, who died last year, was honored by the Israelis, in the way that the Israelis customarily honor their Gentile helpers. They decided to plant a whole forest for Angleton in the Judean hills, and they put up a handsome plaque in several languages, lionizing Angleton as a great friend of Israel, on a nearby rock. Israeli's intelligence chiefs, past and present, attended the dedication ceremony. Later on, a television reporter of my acquaintance sought out Angleton's memorial during an assignment in Israel. After some difficulty, he was able to locate it, but something seemed odd about it. On closer inspection, Angleton's plaque turned out to be made, not of bronze, but of cardboard. Nor was the setting particularly flattering to Israel's late benefactor: the trees and plaque were at the edge of a garbage dump. My friend's British cameraman put it best "This guy sold out his country for the bloody Israelis, and this is the way they pay him back!"

The CIA has distorted history in other ways than by outright coverups and suppression of the truth. One method was to produce its own books. For instance, one of its top agents in the Soviet Union was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky was eventually captured and executed. But the CIA was unwilling to let it go at that The agency decided to write a book, which it published in 1965, called The Penkovsky Papers. This was purported to be drawn from a diary that Penkovsky had kept, a diary in which Penkovsky revealed numerous espionage coups calculated to embarrass the Soviets and build up the CIA.

Spies do not keep diaries, of course, and the Soviets were not likely to believe the exaggerated claims made for Penkovsky and the CIA in The Penkovsky Papers. Who was taken in? The American public, of course. More than once people have come up to me after a lecture and shown me the book as if it were gospel. I've told them, "I know the man who wrote it." "You knew Penkovsky?" they invariably ask, and I tell them, "No, I didn't know Penkovsky but I know the man who wrote the book."

Not just ordinary citizens were taken in by the Penkovsky deception, either. Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, who served on the CIA oversight subcommittee, said in a 1971 Senate debate on cutting the inteligence budget:

And if you want to read something very interesting and authoritative where intelligence is concerned, read The Penkovsky Papers ... this is a very interesting story, on why the intelligence we had in Cuba was so important to us, and on what the Russians were thinking and just how far they would go.

Perhaps the most startling example ot the ClA's manipulation of the publishing world is the case of Khrushchev Remembers. Khrushchev is still widely believed to have been the author. He is supposed to have dashed it off one summer and then said to himself, "Where will I get this published? Ah! Time-Life!" The tapes reached Time-Life, we all read it, and we told ourselves, "Isn't that interesting."

A little thought should be sufficient to dispel the notion that the KGB would allow Khrushchev to sit in his dacha dictating tape after tape with no interference. He certainly dictated tapes, but the tapes were censored and edited by the KGB, and then a deal was struck between the U.S. and the USSR, after it was decided, at the highest level, that such a book would be mutually beneficial. Brezhnev could use against some of the resistance he was encountering from Stalinist hardliners, and Nixon could use it to increase support for detente.

The CIA and the KGB cooperated in carrying out the operation. The tapes were given to the Time bureau in Moscow. Strobe Talbot, who appears on television frequently today and is Time's bureau chief in Washington, brought the tapes back with him. I was present in an apartment in which he hid them for a couple of days. The tapes were then translated and a manuscript developed. During this period Time refused to let people who had known Khrushchev personally, including White House staff members, listen to the tapes.

Knowledgeable people began to tell me. "I don't believe this." "There's something mighty fishy here." When they read what Khrushchev was supposedly saying, they were even more incredulous. But the book came out, Khrushchev Remembers, accompanied by a massive publicity campaign. It was a great propaganda accomplishment for the CIA and the KGB.

I touched on Khrushchev Remembers in my book. I did not go into any great detail, merely devoting several tentative paragraphs to the affair. Just before my book was published Time was considering doing a two-page spread on me until they learned of my expressed reservations on the trustworthiness of Khrushchev Remembers. I began to get phone calls from Talbot and Jerry Schaechter, then Time's bureau chief in Washington, telling me I should take out the offending passages.

I had written, correctly, that before publication Strobe Talbot had taken the bound transcripts of the Khruschhev tapes back to Moscow, via Helsinki, so that the KGB could make one final review of them. I told Schaechter and Talbot that if they came to me, looked me in the eye, and told me I had the facts wrong, I would take out the section on Khruschhev Remembers. Neither of them ever came by, the paragraphs stayed in my book, and in any event Time went ahead with the two-page spread anyway.

As I pointed out in the preface to The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence in 1974, democratic governments fighting totalitarian enemies run the risk of imitating their methods and thereby destroying democracy. By suppressing historical fact, and by manufacturing historical fiction, the CIA, with its obsessive secrecy and its vast resources, has posed a particular threat to the right of Americans to be informed for the present and future by an objective knowledge of the past. As long as the CIA continues to manipulate history, historians of its activities must be Revisionist if we are to know the truth about the agency's activities, past and present.

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 305-320.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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TV news gives Bernstein's CIA-Media story token coverage.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Fri Feb 02, 2007 3:46 am

Two months after Carl Bernstein published 'The CIA and the Media' the New York Times finally acknowledged the story by burying it in the 12/25/77 Christmas shadow edition.

The three TV network news shows, being controlled by the CIA, barely even mentioned this bombshell which blew away the myth of a free press.

The Vanderbilt (University) Television News Archive has the proof of this brushing under the rug. And this story was never heard again.

On 12/27/77 ABC News devoted all of 20 seconds to this revelation while giving three minutes to Snow White's 40th birthday. CBS and NBC carried a bit more.

http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/tvn-month-search.pl

CIA / News Reporters
12/27/1977
05:44:50 pm-05:45:10 pm
Tuesday ABC

(Studio) Early revelations by CIA with regard to agents posing as news reporters and some legitimate reporters' filing of information with CIA noted. Former CIA director William Colby's testimony to Congress with regard to practice detailed.
REPORTER: Barbara Walters


CBS devoted an amazingly thorough two minutes-

House / CIA and American Journalism
12/27/1977 05:30:10 pm-05:32:20 pm Tuesday CBS

(Studio) Report on House Intelligence Committee's opening of hearings on relations, between CIA and American jnlism. and testimony of former CIA director William Colby.
REPORTER: Roger Mudd

(DC) Colby's statements with regard to CIA planting stories in foreign newspapers and feedback to American public because of it quoted; disagreement of committee chairperson Les Aspin noted. [ASPIN - cites reasons for disagreement.] [COLBY - says intelligence abroad becomes more difficult because of restrictions being imposed on agents; cites example of ban on use of other United States agencies as cover for CIA agents.]
REPORTER: Jim McManus


NBC did one minute and a half-

Colby / CIA / President
12/27/1977 05:40:20 pm-05:42:00 pm Tuesday NBC

(Studio) House of Representatives hearings with regard to CIA use of journalists and journalism profession in undercover work reported.
REPORTER: David Brinkley

(DC) William Colby's testimony recapped. Film shown. [Former CIA director William COLBY - speaks of difficulties of CIA doing its work.] Lack of cooperation with CIA by Peace Corps, United States Information Agency, Fulbright scholars and AID said noted by Colby.
REPORTER: Linda Ellerbee
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Bob Woodward's Naval Intelligence career.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:48 am

Bob Woodward has minimized and lied about his naval intelligence career as a top secret briefer at the White House.

Perhaps Carl Bernstein figured out how he'd been used as a human credential by the time he wrote 'The CIA and the Media' because he didn't out the Washington Post's Katherine Graham as one of the prime assets of the CIA's controlled media network.

I've read some suspicions about Bernstein but can't find any now and wonder how bad they could be with his 1977 expose lighting our way. Woodward is another story. A bad one, too.

For some insight into who Bob Woodward really is read the 1991 book by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin called 'Silent Coup: The Removal of a President.'
Image


The chapter called 'The Woodward-Haig Connection' from pages 69-90 describes his career arc from ROTC to Yale (Book and Snake fraternity) to the Navy to the 'floating Pentagon' communications ship called the USS Wright to the basement of the White House to Top Secret briefer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and especially Alexander Haig.

Woodward started working in the basement of the White House in 1969.
He was hired as a 'cub reporter' by the Washington Post on 9/14/71 and soon handled the news story that removed a president.

The myth of Watergate and a 'liberal watchdog press' was firmly established and encouraged many Americans to trust the mainstream press to warn them if anything was wrong for too many years afterwards.

And it has been Bob Woodward writing the best-selling propaganda and serving as co-editor at the Washington Post to this day.

Not 'corporate' media. Military media.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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CIA front group - "Congress for Cultural Freedom"

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Thu Mar 06, 2008 1:13 am

(After WWII the CIA created fronts to promote 'safe' not-too-leftist magazines, art, and publishing outlets under the name of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom."

This is detailed in a 1999 book called:
'Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War,' by Frances Stonor Saunders.

This covert CIA Ministry of Culture functions today on a much more widespread basis and includes TV, movies, radio, recordings, Broadway, press, publishing, academia, internet, etc.
-HMW)


A review of
'Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War,' by Frances Stonor Saunders--

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1199petr.htm

Monthly Review
Volume 51, Number 6
November 1999

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
by James Petras

Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20.

This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.

What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus.

It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404).

According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (398). By 1953, Braden wrote, "we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field" (398).

Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S. imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic positions defended by CIA intellectuals.

Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).

The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war, depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties (particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.

The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle. Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S. culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S. culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to Europe—particularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians (such as Louis Armstrong)—to neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.

The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point—particularly where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor ofEncounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths," certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West.

One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act. Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical posturing was only for left-wing consumption.

Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to this day.


While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive action.

The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare. Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.

After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll, Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.

The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics—the Washington line—defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.

The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.

The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism—"ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told.

The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Timothy Leary worked with CIA.

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Thu Mar 06, 2008 4:19 am

"That's the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA."
—Timothy Leary, discussing CNN's "Crossfire," ca. 1992
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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Carl Bernstein's own website now has 'The CIA and the Media'

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon May 12, 2008 9:39 pm

As of 2007 or 2008 Carl Bernstein finally has a website-
http://www.carlbernstein.com/home.php
... and a link to his own October 20, 1977 article, 'The CIA and the Media.'

Oddly, he's never referred back to this article since he wrote it. But he's willing to make it available to read-

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN
.....
>snip<


etc.
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
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