Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Planetary Rescue Corps
By Mary Louise
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of
control are all done under the pretense and protection of national
security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds.
Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think,
say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture.
The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue
to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority,
to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping
each other for favors outside the halls of government made it
inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies,
thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
Under the guise of 'American' objectives and lack of congressional
oversight, the CIA accomplish their exploits by using every trick
in the book (and they know quite a few) that they actually teach
in the notorious "School of the Americas", nicknamed the "School
of Dictators" and "School of Assassins" by critics. The Association
for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died
by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations, called an "American
Holocaust" by former State Department official William Blum. In
1948, the CIA recreated its covert action wing called the Office
of Policy Coordination with Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner as its
first director. Another early elitist who served as Director of the
CIA from 1953 to 1961 was Allen Dulles, a senior partner at the
Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the
Rockefeller empire and other trusts, corporations, and cartels.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War (late 40's), the CIA
began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent
of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and
putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a
stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news
organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of
propaganda, was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard
Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post). Wisner
had taken Graham under his wing to direct the program code-named
Operation Mockingbird and both have presumably committed suicide.
Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek,
Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst
Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400
journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according
to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering
to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation's
businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call
operatives by the 1950's. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA
almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale
with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the "Skull and
Crossbones" Society.
Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a
free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled
television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to
serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media
owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major
government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories
about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored
by the press and congress, then moving to Newsweek he witnessed a
retraction of a true story for political reasons. In 'Fooling
America: A Talk by Robert Parry' he said, "The people who succeeded
and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the
big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening
in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by
cowardice with the deception of the American people."
Major networks are primarily controlled by giant corporations that
are obligated by law, to put the profits of their investors ahead
of all other considerations which are often in conflict with the
practice of responsible journalism. There were around 50 corporations
a couple of decades ago, which was considered monopolistic by many
and yet today, these companies have become larger and fewer in
number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration
of ownership and power reduces the diversity of media voices, as
news falls into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in
many industries that interferes in newsgathering, because of conflicts
of interest. Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with
funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural
Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN's
Crossfire.
Media corporations share members of the board of directors with a
variety of other large corporations including banks, investment
companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology
companies. Until the 1980's, media systems were generally domestically
owned, regulated, and national in scope. However, pressure from the
IMF, World Bank, and US government to deregulate and privatize, the
media, communication, and new technology resulted in a global
commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful
transnational media corporations (mostly US based), working to
advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.
The first tier of the nine giant firms that dominate the world are
Time Warner/AOL, Disney/ABC, Bertelsmann, Viacom/CBS, Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation/Fox, General Electric/NBC, Sony, Universal/Seagram,
Tele-Communications, Inc. or TCI and AT&T. This is just the head
of the octopus which has its second and third tier tentacles working
together in unison or feigned division. This would include The
Washington Post/Newsweek, The New York Times/Weekly Standard, Tribune
Co., US News, Gannett/USA Today, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal,
Washington Times, Knight-Ridder, etcetera. A good site to visit for
more information is Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a public
interest media watchdog group, at www.fair.org/index.html,
www.fair.org/mediafiles/index.html and www.fair.org/extra/9711/gmg.html.
Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert
opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular
opinions, mass entertainment distractions, and Hobson's Choice (the
media presents the so-called conservative and liberal positions).
"Who Controls the Media? The Subversion of the Free Press by the
CIA, The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird",
"The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization",
and "Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America"
by Alex Constantine are an excellent source of information on this
topic: www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html and
www.alexconstantine.50megs.com. David Guyatt has written books and
many articles including one entitled "Subverting the Media" at
www.deepblacklies.co.uk/subverting_the_media.htm. Then there are
two articles called "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" and "The Origins
of the Overclass" by Steve Kangas that are very informative although
from a more liberal perspective. Steve will not be writing anymore
articles as he is no longer with us, having unfortunately met his
untimely death that was 'apparently' from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound. If you read about him on his web page that is still available,
you will see that he did not seem like a person who was suffering
from deep depression. In his memory, please take the time to read
what he wrote at www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html,
www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html, and
www.korpios.org/resurgent/index.html.
CNN aired "Valley of Death" in June of 1998 and Time magazine (both
owned by Time-Warner) ran a story about a secret mission called
Operation Tailwind and the activities of SOG, Studies and Observations
Group, a secret elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces
that used lethal nerve gas (sarin), on a mission to Laos designed
to kill American defectors. Suddenly the network was awash in denials
and the story was hushed up, as usual. Acknowledged use of this gas
coming at a time when the U.S. government was trying to get Saddam
to comply with weapons inspections, was an embarrassment to say the
least. What hypocrisy! Having actually used the weapons on our own
troops, then complaining and accusing Saddam of potential use of
stored similar weapons, of which some were manufactured in and
supplied by the U.S. The broadcast was prepared after exhaustive
research and rooted in considerable supportive data. To decide for
yourself what the truth is read Floyd Abrams' report on the CNN
site at www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html.
Journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the stories on
Watergate (late 70's) in the Washington Post, having gained access
to what the CIA was trying to keep from congress about its program
of using journalists at home and abroad, in deliberate propaganda
campaigns. It was later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence
briefer to the White House and knew many insiders including General
Alexander Haig. A high-level source told Bernstein, "One journalist
is worth twenty agents." CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham, in a
1988 speech given to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters
said, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things
the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps
to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print
what it knows." Maybe that's another reason why folks get the
impression that a suspicious agenda lurks behind the headlines. "25
Ways to Suppress Truth: Rules of Disinformation" and "8 Traits of
the Disinformationalist" at www.proparanoid.com/truth.htm, sums it
up very well.
Ralph McGehee was a CIA agent for 25 years, mainly in South-East
Asia where he witnessed bombing and napalming of villages, which
caused him to examine closely what the CIA was really all about.
He has written about Vietnam's Phoenix Program
www.vwip.org/articles/m/McGeheeRalph_VietnamsPhoenixProgram.htm and
after a long battle with CIA censors, he published the book "Deadly
Deceits" in 1983. Ralph has been harassed by the CIA and FBI,
involving bodily injury, and his CIABASE website was shut down on
Spring of 2000. He copied some reports that can be found at
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/ciabase_report_1.htm (and 2.htm),
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/death_squads.htm, and
www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Deadly_Deceits.html. He concluded
that the CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence
agency but rather the covert action arm of the President's foreign
policy advisors, of which disinformation is a large part of its
responsibility and the American people are the primary target of
its lies.
One of the primary reasons John F. Kennedy was assassinated had to
do with the fact he dared to interfere in the framework of power.
Kennedy was intent on exercising his ELECTED powers and not allowing
them to be usurped by power-crazed individuals in the intelligence
community, threatening to "splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces
and scatter it to the wind." There were four things that filled the
CIA with rage and sealed his fate; JFK fired Allen Dulles, was in
the process of founding a panel to investigate the CIA's numerous
crimes, put a damper on the breadth and scope of the CIA, and limited
their ability to act under National Security Memoranda 55.
There is such an overwhelming amount of information pertaining to
the CIA that it is impossible to cover it all in one book, much
less an article. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the
media is not only influenced by the CIA.....the media is the CIA.
Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog
on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes
that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population
is to control all sources of information the population receives
and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird,
the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national
corporate/government megaphone. They are up to their eyeballs in
dirty deeds and there will never be an end to the corruption that
prevails unless the CIA is abolished. Otherwise, the CIA will just
keep on using their tricks of propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes,
purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking, sexual
intrigue, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic
sabotage, false stories about opponents in the local media,
infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, demolition
and evacuation procedures, death squads, and politically motivated
assassinations. The CIA is the epitome of organized crime run amuck!
http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis.html
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Central Intelligence Agency ::: Official Media Relations Site
In an effort to provide the American people with accurate information
about the CIA, its mission, and the contributions Agency employees
make to national security, the Media Relations Division staff works
with print and broadcast journalists on a daily basis. The Office
of Public Affairs believes that accurate media coverage of aspects
of the Agencys work will build better public understanding of our
efforts. The Division's objective is to be as helpful and responsive
to the media as possible while still protecting classified information,
including intelligence sources and methods. To accomplish this goal,
the Media Relations Division staff establishes professional
relationships with print and broadcast reporters, responds to press
inquiries on a wide range of issues, develops media strategies in
advance of newsworthy events or announcements, prepares press
releases, and arranges for Agency experts to provide background
briefings for U.S. media.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/media.html
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A Short Peek into the Future - Part 1
By Wade Inganamort
Click. Click. Click. The familiar sound violently awoke Sam, sending
shockwaves down his spine. Click. Click. Click. His first voluntary
reaction was to think - Is it me? Do they know? Wondering how far
away they were, he threw back the standard issue gray bedding and
planted his feet firmly on the cold cement floor. His mind was
racing in one consistent direction: escape.
Grabbing his overcoat, he stumbled to the door, while checking the
pockets to ensure that he still had the document. I must get rid
of it, he thought. Why did I have to be so damn curious? Click.
Click. Click. The sound was getting closer.
How he wished that he didn't have this chip in his arm, then he
could've just slipped away weeks ago. It's now or never, he whispered
to himself. His left hand was cleching the document in his pocket
as he turned the doorknob.
Swoosh. A dart flew by his right temple. It was too late. Click.
Click. Click. There they were, his worse nightmare come true; a
fleet of ten six-legged Lynxmotion Hexapod II walking robots were
approaching from the end of the hallway. They were increasing speed,
but from hearing so many rumors, the Haxapods were not what he
feared. They were but mere slaves, doing reconnaissance as part of
a distributed sensor network, relaying the triangulated information
back to their master, ROBART.
ROBART he knew, was rather slow with his dual treads powered by
12-volt electric wheelchair motors. Escape was a matter of evading
the Hexapods before he was remotely located by GPS from the signals
that his subdermal microchip - Digital Angel was emitting. But where
would he go? This sector's grid monitor prevented any free-roaming,
unless a travel plan was first logged from a public Digital Angel
uplink terminal. Click. Click. Click.
He made a dash to the right, hoping to get a small head start and
immediately felt the first of six steel tipped darts enter his neck.
Consciousness began to fade away. His left hand was still tightly
gripping the illegal document. ROBART's remote camera zooms in on
the torn Xeroxed paper as the puppetmasters 3,000 miles away can
just barely read a portion of the title: The Constitution of the
United Sta......
"We have money to blow up bridges over the Tigress and Euphrates
and we don't have money to build bridges in our major cities. We
have money to destroy the health of the Iraqi people and we don't
have enough money to repair the health of our own people in this
country. There is something fundamentally wrong with the direction
this administration is taking its foreign policy, and I intend to
change that if I am elected president of the United States."
Dennis Kucinich on CNN's Crossfire: Friday February 21, 2003
They hang the man and flog the woman who steal the goose from the
Common But the other man they let go loose who steal the Common
from the goose Olde English Nursery Rhyme
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The Origins of the Overclass
By Steve Kangas
The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but
it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a
superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it
became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization
of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations,
and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.
The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced
back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA
operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although
such evidence may yet surface and previously unthinkable domestic
operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be
a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the
CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol,
Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare,
William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost
all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.
During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational
techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the
Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version
of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions
designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive
organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest
dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of Americas
wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent the
highest level of inequality in the 20th century.
How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nations
elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the
national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II,
General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so
exclusively from the nations rich and powerful that members eventually
came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"
Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the
CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall
Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller
empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was
also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices
in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests
across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became
head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from
societys elite.
By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nations businesses, media and
universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives.
Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which
included:
Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official
capacity. Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for
CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time,
or on-call. Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along
information useful to the CIA.
Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between
the agency and the business world.
Historically, the CIA and societys elite have been one and the same
people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the
same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence
community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk
shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside
the formal halls of government.
Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate
America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of
democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic
regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either
hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them
to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position
to help each other.
How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding,
top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In
return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts
(for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen
also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations.
The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and
privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise
of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations
remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments
hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes
whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their
people.
The CIAs alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one.
Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of
the CIAs history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can
reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before
reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIAs
history of atrocity first.
The Crimes of the CIA
During World War II, the OSS actively engaged in propaganda, sabotage
and countless other dirty tricks. After the war, and even after the
CIA was created in 1947, the American intelligence community reverted
to harmless information gathering and analysis, thinking that the
danger to national security had passed. That changed in 1948 with
the emergence of the Cold War. In that year, the CIA recreated its
covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy
Coordination. Its first director was Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner.
According to its secret charter, its responsibilities included
propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including
sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures;
subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground
resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements
in threatened countries of the free world.
By 1953, the dirty tricks department of the CIA had grown to 7,200
personnel and commanded 74 percent of the CIAs total budget. The
following quotes describe the culture of lawlessness that pervaded
the CIA:
Stanley Lovell, a CIA recruiter for "Wild Bill" Donovan: "What I
have to do is to stimulate the Peck's Bad Boy beneath the surface
of every American scientist and say to him, 'Throw all your normal
law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry
hell. Come help me raise it.'" (1)
George Hunter White, writing of his CIA escapades: "I toiled
wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun...
Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal,
rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"
(2)
A retired CIA agency caseworker with twenty years experience: "I
never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what
worked."
Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA
operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda
stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt
justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts
were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish
transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful
organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing
the powers it had helped itself to.
During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the
CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good
fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not
keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans
began learning about the agencys crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns
out the CIA has:
Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other
nations;
Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots
against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders.
Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders
like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo);
also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic)
and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders
like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to
Charles De Gaulle.
Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments,
replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of
overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953),
Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961,
1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964),
Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende
(Chile, 1973), and dozens of others.
Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica
and more;
Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the
Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby
Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko
(Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more;
Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces
that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians,
leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador,
Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;
Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia,
which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow
democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture,
interrogation and murder;
Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diems secret police in
torture;
Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting
industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages;
Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000
in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia;
Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua,
Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina;
Planted false stories in the local media;
Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political
statements and embarrassments that they did not commit;
Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional
law;
Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S.,
unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;
Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which
became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists,
Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad
leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants;
Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave
LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their
knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;
Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations;
Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;
Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund
its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the
iceberg - other notorious examples include Southeast Asias Golden
Triangle and Noreigas Panama.
Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F.
Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X.
Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer
amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers;
And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6
million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4)
Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this
an "American Holocaust."
We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not
accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip
Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior
to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all
the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIAs
activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about
public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings,
Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but
this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional
oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives,
businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
The Business Origins of CIA Crimes
Although many people think that the CIAs primary mission during the
Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points
out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting
elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating
elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has
virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didnt
help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards
democracy is legendary. The reason they overthrew so many democracies
is because the people usually voted for policies that multi-national
corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions,
nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting
workers, consumers and the environment.
So the CIAs greatest "successes" were usually more pro-corporate
than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped
overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mussadegh government
in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat the Soviets
stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was
that Mussadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil
companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled Mussadegh
and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of
Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. The reason why the
Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage
in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and
murder their people.
Another "success" was the CIAs overthrow of the democratically
elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again,
there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemalas
United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders
included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize
the company, albeit with generous compensation. In response, the
CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous
dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dicatators
would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union
members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution
of the countrys resources.
Another "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the countrys democratically
elected leader, Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned
interests, like Chiles lucrative copper mines and telephone system.
International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million
to overthrow Allende which the CIA allegedly refused but paid
$350,000 to his political opponents. The CIA responded with a coup
that murdered Allende and replaced him with a brutal tyrant, General
Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of
leftists, union members and political opponents as economists trained
at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free
market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher
in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America.
Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost
took care of the elite. In testimony before Congress in the early
50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. A
notorious example was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be
grossly exaggerated. Another was "Team B," a group of hawkish CIA
analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. These scare
tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the
U.S. military-industrial complex.
And not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American
defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite.
Journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk
about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism,
economic espionage simply means that American spies would target
foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then
covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate
executives. (5)
If this isnt bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA
doesnt hand over this technology to every American auto-related
company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal
observations of the agency:
To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The
Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance,
are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is
said to have the "U.K. account" American multinational corporations
have built up colossal interests all over the world, and you can
bet your ass that wherever you find U. S. business interests, you
also find the CIA The multinational corporations want a peaceful
status quo in countries where they have investments, because that
gives them undisturbed access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor
and stable markets for their finished goods. The status quo suits
bankers, because their money remains secure and multiplies. And,
of course, the status quo suits the small ruling groups the CIA
supports abroad, because all they want is to keep themselves on top
of the socioeconomic pyramid and the majority of their people on
the bottom. But do you realize what being on the bottom means in
most parts of the world? Ignorance, poverty, often early death by
starvation or disease
Remember, the CIA is an instrument of the President; it only carries
out policy. And, like everyone else, the President has to respond
to forces in the society he's trying to lead, right? In America,
the most powerful force is Big Business, and American Big Business
has a vested interest in the Cold War. (6)
Domestic Recruitment
The CIA had no trouble recruiting elites who sought a more exciting
life. Between 1948 and 1959, more than 40,000 American individuals
and companies acted as sources for the U.S. intelligence community.
(7) Lets look at each area of recruitment, and see how they enabled
the CIA to conduct its crimes:
Big Business
The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with
the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had
inherited his fathers million-dollar tool and die company at age
19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision
"to go where the money is" namely, government. With a few well-placed
bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes.
The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also
acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His
government connections and international airline soon caught the
attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship.
Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agencys
largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business
firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps
the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed
attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine.
Hughes right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who
at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to
assassinate Fidel Castro.
The CIAs contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency
showed a preference for international companies, public relations
firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers.
The CIA didnt limit its activities to recruiting businessmen;
sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One
benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to
create a secret source of funds other than from government. With
stock portfolios multiplying their profits, its impossible now to
say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for
a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either
by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target
country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the
Iran/Contra scandal.
By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the
funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.
The Media
Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely
to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively
searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence
and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late
1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission
it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists
not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but
also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.
The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles,
Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine
Graham, todays publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was
the Posts ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after
the war, both in readership and influence. (8)
MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency
had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA
propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA
payroll, according to the CIAs testimony before a stunned Church
Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably
higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of
journalism:
Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post) William
Paley (President, CBS) Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times) Jerry O'Leary
(Washington Star) Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal) James Copley (Copley
News Services) Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
C.D. Jackson (Fortune) Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
ABC NBC Associated Press United Press International Reuters Hearst
Newspapers Scripps-Howard Newsweek magazine Mutual Broadcasting
System Miami Herald Old Saturday Evening Post New York Herald-Tribune
Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington
Post, one of the nations most right-wing dailies. Its location in
the nations capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal
contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures.
Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around
the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip
Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and
later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen
Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post
by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.
After Philips suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post.
Seduced by her husbands world of government and espionage, she
expanded her newspapers relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech
before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated:
We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that
the general public does not need to know and shouldnt. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps
to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print
what it knows.
This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its
belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political
agenda behind the Posts headlines.
Ben Bradlee was the Posts managing editor during most of the Cold
War. He worked in the U.S. Paris embassy from 1951 to 1953, where
he followed orders by the CIA station chief to place propaganda in
the European press. (9) Most Americans incorrectly believe that
Bradlee personifies the liberal slant of the Post, given his role
in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations.
But neither of these two incidents are what they seem. The Post
merely published the Pentagon Papers after The New York Times already
had, because it wanted to appear competitive. As for Watergate,
well examine the CIAs reasons for wanting to bring down Nixon in a
moment. Someone once asked Bradlee: "Does it irk you when The
Washington Post is made out to be a bastion of slanted liberal
thinkers instead of champion journalists just because of Watergate?"
Bradlee responded: "Damn right it does!" (10)
It would be impossible to elaborate in this short space even the
most important examples of the CIA/media alliance. Sig Mickelson
was a CIA asset the entire time he was president of CBS News from
1954 to 1961. Later he went on to become president of Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty, two major outlets of CIA propaganda.
The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies.
It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when
communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse,
the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example
is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey
(who would later become Reagans CIA director). Another founder was
Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director
Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By
1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy
an entire TV network: ABC.
For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very
idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media
is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes
in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with
the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be
an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media.
Here is but one example:
In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report
suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the
Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIAs
most important media allies The Washington Post, The New York Times
and The Los Angeles Times immediately leveled their guns at the
Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who
wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The
dangers here are obvious.
Academia
By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA
almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale.
(A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come
from Yales "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also
approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their
universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at
recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several
departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian
Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT.
Although most academics were supportive of the CIA in the 50s, most
were unaware of its abuses. In the 60s, academia would become
outraged to learn that anti-communist organizations like the National
Student Association were actually creations of the CIA. The most
audacious CIA front was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an
organization that attracted liberal, freethinking artists and
intellectuals who nonetheless deplored communism.
By the late 60s and 70s, growing reports of CIA crimes and atrocities
had deeply alienated academia. Scholars were further troubled to
learn that the CIA had penetrated and disrupted student antiwar
groups. Unlike business and the media, academia overwhelmingly
denounced the CIA after the Vietnam era. This eventually forced the
CIA to turn to new places to find their analysts and scholars. The
most important source was the conservative think-tank movement,
which it helped to create. More on this later.
The Roman Catholic Church
Although the CIA began as a mostly Protestant organization, Roman
Catholics quickly came to dominate the new covert-action wing in
1948. All were staunchly conservative, fiercely anti-communist and
socially elite. Just a few of the many Catholic operatives included
future CIA directors William Colby, William Casey, and John McCone.
Another well-known personality from this period was William F.
Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review and gadfly host of TVs
Firing Line. Buckley, it turns out, served as a CIA agent in Mexico
City, and his experiences there served as fodder for his Blackford
Oakes spy novels.
There were several reasons for this influx of Catholic elites.
First, Wisner (himself a Wall Street lawyer) had an extensive and
glamorous circle of friends to recruit from. Second, Italy was in
constant crisis in the 1940s, both during World War II and after.
Throughout this troubled period, the American intelligence communitys
greatest ally in Italy was the Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church, of course, is one of the most anti-communist
organizations in the world. The Marxist doctrine of atheism threatens
Catholic theology, and its equality threatens the Churchs strict
tradition of hierarchy and authoritarianism. When Hitler invaded
Communist Russia, the Vatican openly approved. Jesuit Michael
Serafian wrote: "It cannot be denied that [Pope] Pius XII's closest
advisors for some time regarded Hitler's armoured divisions as the
right hand of God." (11)
But Hitler persecuted Catholics as well, and ultimately drove the
Church to the Americans. In 1943, the Vatican reached a secret
agreement with OSS Chief Donovan himself a devout Catholic to let
the Holy See become the center of Allied spy operations in Italy.
Donovan considered the Church to be one of his prize intelligence
assets, given its global power, membership and contacts. He cultivated
this alliance by sending Americas most prestigious Catholics to the
Vatican to establish rapport and forge an alliance.
After the war, half of Europe lay under Communist control, and the
Italian communist party threatened to win the 1948 elections. The
prospect of communism ruling over the heart of Catholicism terrified
the Vatican. Once again, American intelligence gathered their most
prestigious Catholics to strengthen ties with the Vatican. Because
this was the first mission of the new covert action division, the
American Catholic agents acquired positions of power early on, and
would dominate covert operations for the rest of the Cold War.
At a public level, the U.S. government sunk $350 million in social
and military aid into Italy to sway the vote. On a secret level,
Wisner spent $10 million in black budget funds to steal the elections.
This included disseminating propaganda, beating up left-wing
politicians, intimidating voters and disrupting leftist parties.
The dirty tricks worked the Communists lost, and the Catholic
Americans success permanently secured their power within the CIA.
The Knights of Malta (12)
The Roman Catholic Church did not forget the American agents who
had saved them from both Nazism and Communism. It rewarded them by
making them Knights of Malta, or members of the Sovereign Military
Order of Malta (SMOM).
SMOM is one of the oldest and most elite religious orders in the
Catholic Church. Until recently, it limited its membership to
Italians and foreign heads of state. In 1927, however, an exception
was made for the United States, given its emerging status as a world
power. SMOM opened an American branch, awarding knighthood or
damehood to several American Catholic business tycoons. This group
was so conservative that one, John Raskob, the Chairman of General
Motors, actually became involved in an aborted military plot to
remove Franklin Roosevelt from the White House. SMOM has also been
embarrassed by knighting or giving awards to countless people who
later turned out to be Nazi war criminals. This is the sort of
culture that thrives within the leadership of SMOM.
Officially, the Knights of Malta are a global charity organization.
But beginning in the 1940s, knighthood was granted to countless CIA
agents, and the organization has become a front for intelligence
operations. SMOM is ideal for this kind of activity, because it is
recognized as the worlds only landless sovereignty, and members
enjoy diplomatic immunity. This allows agents and supplies to pass
through customs without interference from the host country. Such
privileges enabled the Knights of Malta to become a major supplier
of "humanitarian aid" to the Contras during their war in the 1980s.
A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Whos
Who of American Catholicism:
William Casey CIA Director. John McCone CIA Director. William
Colby CIA Director. William Donovan OSS Director. Donovan was
given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only
been given to a hundred other men in history. Frank Shakespeare
Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information
Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive
vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He
is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage
Foundation, a right-wing think tank. William Simon Treasury Secretary
under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of
Americas 400 richest individuals by working in international finance.
Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major
funder of right-wing think tanks. William F. Buckley, Jr. CIA
agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality. James Buckley
Williams brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Clare
Boothe Luce - The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of
Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing
tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine. Francis X Stankard
- CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a
Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA
figure.) John Farrell President, U.S. Steel Lee Iacocca Chairman,
General Motors William S. Schreyer Chairman, Merrill Lynch. Richard
R. Shinn Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Joseph
Kennedy Founder of the Kennedy empire. Baron Hilton Owner, Hilton
Hotel chain. Patrick J. Frawley Jr. Heir, Schick razor fortune.
Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as
the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol
magnate. Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty
Trust. Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the
Emigrant Savings Bank of New York. J. Peter Grace President, W.R.
Grace Company. He was a key figure in!
Operati on Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to
the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in
their service to the CIA. Thomas Bolan Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan,
the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn. Bowie
Kuhn Baseball Comissioner Cardinal John O'Connor Extreme right-wing
leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent.
Cardinal Francis Spellman The "American Pope" was at one time the
most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid
anti-communist. Cardinal Bernard Law - One of the highest-ranking
conservatives in the American church. Alexander Haig Secretary of
State under President Reagan. Admiral James D. Watkins Hard-line
chief of naval operations under President Reagan.
Jeremy Denton Senator (RAl). Pete Domenici Senator (R-New Mexico).
Walter J. Hickel - Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior.
When this group gets together, obviously, the topics are spying,
business and politics.
The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as
fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman
Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -- created the U.S.
Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also
made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many
right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations.
But the World Grows Wise
It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these
fronts. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to
commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American
journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers.
Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as
hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson
hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption
that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point.
The CIA has put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA
agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations
urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don
Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified: "Such
use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be
unethical and immoral." (13)
From the Cold War to the Class War
As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce
the crimes of the CIA. Why? One reason is that scholars conduct
their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they
were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why
protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among
students on the nations campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War,
the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became
its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics.
The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus
Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man,
was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar
movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared his conviction. The
CIA had always spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in
1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with
Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go
undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations
and root out the Russian spies who were causing the rebellion.
Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a
campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception,
intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American
civilians.
By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied
on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on
more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. (14) When
academia learned of this, its outrage grew.
The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other
disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying
desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first
was Watergate.
The CIAs fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should
note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the
ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling
bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon,
for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic
issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all
Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate
business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and
Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic
emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took
the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened
affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist,
like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality
during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixons
withdrawal from Vietnam and Ditente with China and the Soviet Union.
Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only
tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had
also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not
surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldnt
stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for
Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the
CIA and the nations elite.
As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixons dirty work.
Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to
Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP.
The team consisted of two CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James
McCord as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also
employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front
called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged
from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixons illegal
campaign contributions. The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of
Nixons crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to
know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried
using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly
complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA
operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green
light again to proceed again with their investigation.
Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIAs main newspaper in
America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who
investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become
a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence
liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nations highest
secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director
Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It
was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the
unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixons activities.
Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodwards old intelligence
contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. (15)
Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein
made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting.
Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed
to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the
CIA of any involvement in Watergate.
The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on
James Jesus Angletons illegal surveillance of American citizens.
These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing
compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation
looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination
to secret war to manipulating the domestic media. The "reforms"
that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the
details that emerged shattered the CIAs reputation forever.
Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings
Frank Church and Otis Pike were both defeated for reelection,
despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents. The CIA wasnt
the only conservative institution that found itself embattled in
the early 70s. This was a bad time for conservatives everywhere.
America had lost the war in Vietnam. U.S. corporations had to cope
with the rise of OPEC. The anti-poverty programs of Roosevelts New
Deal and Johnsons Great Society were causing a major redistribution
of wealth. And Nixon was making things worse with his own anti-poverty
and regulatory programs. Between 1960 and 1973, these efforts cut
poverty in half, from 22 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, between 1965 and
1976, the richest 1 percent had gone from owning 37 percent of
Americas wealth to only 22 percent. (16)
At a 1973 Conference Board meeting of top American business leaders,
executives declared: "We are fighting for our lives," "We are
fighting a delaying action," and "If we dont take action now, we
will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy."
(17)
The CIA to the rescue
In the mid-1970s, at this historic low point in American conservatism,
the CIA began a major campaign to turn corporate fortunes around.
They did this in several ways. First, they helped create numerous
foundations to finance their domestic operations. Even before 1973,
the CIA had co-opted the most famous ones, like the Ford, Rockefeller
and Carnegie Foundations. But after 1973, they created more. One
of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon
Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the
forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents
had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the
Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family
Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife
was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his
fortune to fight the "Soviet menace." (18) From 1973 to 1975, Scaife
ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front
to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards
he began donating millions to fund the New Right.
Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative
foundations. By 1994 the most active were: Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation Carthage Foundation Earhart Foundation Charles G. Koch
David H. Koch Claude R. Lambe Philip M. McKenna J.M. Foundation
John M. Olin Foundation Henry Salvatori Foundation Sarah Scaife
Foundation Smith Richardson Foundation
Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to
conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations: $88.9
million for conservative scholarships; $79.2 million to enhance a
national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups; $16.3
million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups; $10.5
million for conservative pro-market law firms; $9.3 million for
regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups; $5.4 million
to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and
giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders."
(19)
The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering
every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments
and chairs in the nations top universities, think tanks, public
relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations
that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements),
"Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist
organizations, economic seminars for the nations judges, and more.
And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their
greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats.
Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business
community. There have always been special interest groups representing
business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National
Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved
with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would
come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral
Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in
promoting the business agenda.
Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision,
corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political
Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our
government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs,
and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political
parties. (20) In two landmark elections 1980 and 1994 corporations
gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both
houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were
shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so
they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though
they continued a public fagade of liberalism. Corporations went
ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections,
but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers,
consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate
Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the
amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent
soared from 22 to 42 percent. (21)
The CIA also helped create the conservative think tank movement.
Prior to the 70s, think tanks spanned the political spectrum, with
moderate think tanks receiving three times as much funding as
conservative ones. At these early think tanks, scholars typically
brainstormed for creative solutions to policy problems. This would
all change after the rise of conservative foundations in the early
70s. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973, the recipient
of $250,000 in seed money from the Coors Foundation. A flood of
conservative think tanks followed shortly thereafter, and by 1980
they overwhelmed the scene. The new think tanks turned out to be
little more than propaganda mills, rigging studies to "prove" that
their corporate sponsors needed tax breaks, deregulation and other
favors from government.
Of course, think-tank studies are useless without publicity, and
here the CIA proved especially valuable. Using propaganda techniques
it had perfected at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the
CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for
conservative talk show hosts. Yes Rush Limbaugh uses the same
propaganda techniques that Muscovites once heard from Voice of
America. The CIA has also developed countless other media outlets,
like Capital Cities (which eventually bought ABC), major PR firms
like Hill & Knowlton, and of course, all the Agencys connections
in the national news media. (22)
The following is a typical example of how the "New Media" operates.
As most political observers know, the Republicans suffer from a
"gender gap," in which women prefer Democrats by huge majorities.
This is, in fact, why Clinton has twice won the presidency. But,
curiously enough, as the 90s progressed, conservative female pundits
began popping up everywhere in the media. Hard-right pundits like
Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson,
Melinda Sidak, Anita Blair and Whitney Adams conditioned us to the
idea of the conservative woman. This phenomenon was no accident.
It turns out that Richard Mellon Scaife donated $450,000 over three
years to the Independent Women's Forum, a booking agency that heavily
seeds such female conservative pundits into the media. (23)
Conclusion
The most obvious criticism of the New Overclass is that their
political machine is undemocratic. Using subversive techniques once
aimed at communists, and with all the money they ever need to
succeed, the Overclass undemocratically controls our government,
our media, and even a growing part of academia. These institutions
in turn allow the Overclass to control the supposedly "free" market.
It doesn't win all the time, of course witness Bill Clinton's
impeachment trial but it does score an endless string of other
victories elsewhere, all to the detriment of workers, consumers,
women, minorities and the poor. We need to fight it with everything
we've got.
Endnotes:
1. Mind Manipulators, Scheflin and Opton. p.241. 2. Captain George
White in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.
3. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is
summarized from William Blums encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S.
Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine:
Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations
come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalens The 60 Greatest Conspiracies
of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997). Information about
CIA drug running can be found at
http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/cia/blum1.html and
http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/index.html.
4. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington
Post, December 13, 1987.
5. Robert Dreyfuss, "Company Spies," Mother Jones. Website:
http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/MJ94/dreyfuss.html 6. Philip
Agee: The Playboy Interview. Website: http://www.connix.com/~harry/agee.htm
7. Lara Shohet, "Intelligence, Academia and Industry," The Final
Report of the Snyder Commission, Edward Cheng and Diane C. Snyder,
eds., (Princeton Unversity: The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, January 1997). Website:
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/academia.htm.
8. Website: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn9-35.
9. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great and the Washington Post, 2nd
ed. (Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987) 10. "Forum for Ben Bradlee,"
Watergate 25. Website:
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/97/bradlee.htm.
11. Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (London and
New York, 1964), pp. 249-250.
12. National Catholic Reporter, Jan 89, Mar 89, Apr 89, May 89,
"Nazis, the Vatican and the CIA," Covert Action Information Bulletin,
Winter 1986, Number 25 Website:
http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/knightsofmaltalist.html.
13. Anthony Collings, "Journalists tell Senate they want no CIA
ties," CNN, July 18, 1996. Website:
http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/18/spies.journalists/.
14. Morton Halperin, et al, eds., The Lawless State (New York:
Penguin, 1976), p. 153.
15. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA.
16. Edward N. Wolff, "How the Pie is Sliced" The American Prospect
no. 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 58-64. Website:
http://epn.org/prospect/22/22wolf.html.
17. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 44-47.
18. Karen Rothmyer, "The man behind the mask," Salon, April 7, 1998.
19. Study conducted by National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy,
July 1997, as reported by the National Education Association.
Website: http://www.nea.org/publiced/paycheck/paychkf.html.
20. Center for Responsive Politics, Washington D.C., 1993.
21. Wolff.
22. For CIA involvement in Capital Cities/ABC, see Dennis Mazzocco,
Networks of Power (Boston: South End Press, 1994). For CIA involvement
in the PR industry, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic
Sludge is Good for You! (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995),
pp. 49-51,153,157,160-63.
23. Jonathon Broder and Murray Waas, [Untitled] Salon, April 20,
1998. Website: http://www.salonmag.com/news/1998/04/20news.html
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-overclass.html
."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'.
The CIA and the Media
Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article
entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone
with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly
breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint!
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.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past
25 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.
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:
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 journalists are still
posted abroad.
Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would
inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the
1950's and 1960's with some of the most powerful organizations and
individuals in American journalism. Among the executives who lent
their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia
Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger
of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville
Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services. 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.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA
officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/media/ciamedia.htm
."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'."'.
Author: Ashley Overbeck
Title: A Report on CIA Infiltration and Manipulation of the Mass
Media
original source: www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm
Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the
aims of their clandestine activities?
Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future
of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA
official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already
occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But
is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story
that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like
strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that
spans more than four decades.
The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s
The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days
of the Cold War, when Allen Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953)
began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions
for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for
secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977
expose on the topic. "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," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the
American press corps was often indistinguishable."
That's not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond
sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad
categories of providing "cover" for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and
credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff.
While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50's that
attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was
among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the
press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before
their involvement with the CIA began. Reporters, especially foreign
correspondents, typically served as "eyes and ears" for the CIA.
Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when
they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that
they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More
complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for
the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts,
often in return for information or access.
"In return for our giving them information, we'd ask them to do
things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn't
have thought of unless we put it in their minds," one agent told
Bernstein. "For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our
man, 'I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.'
We'd say, 'Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him,
can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us
-- would you mind us using your apartment?'"
Another senior CIA official offered the following description of
"reporting" by cooperating journalists: "We would ask them, 'Will
you do us a favor? We understand that you're going to be in Yugoslavia.
Have they paved 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."
It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the
spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly
valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents
saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who
else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign
country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments
and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing
suspicion?
CIA-press operations in the 50's and 60's relied heavily on journalists
working in Latin America and Western Europe. Members of the press
were used as go-betweens to deliver messages and money to European
Christian Democrats and also helped the Agency track the movements
of people coming from Eastern Europe. Additionally, the CIA owned
40 percent of the Rome Daily American, a now-defunct English-language
newspaper in Italy.
Reporters funneled CIA dollars to opponents of Salvador Allende in
Chile and wrote anti-Allende propaganda stories for CIA proprietary
publications in that country. By Bernstein's account, two of the
Agency's most valuable relationships in the 60's were with reporters
who covered Latin America: Hal Hendrix, a Pulitzer Prize winner
from the Miami News, and Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star. CIA
files on Hendrix (who went on to become a high-ranking official at
ITT) detail information that he provided agents about Cuban exiles
in Miami. O'Leary's file lists him as a valued asset in both Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, although he denies having a formal
relationship with the Agency. "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," O'Leary told Bernstein. "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 that they were more helpful to me
than I was to them."
Doing the "Right Thing"
To greater and lesser degrees, many journalists at the time shared
the belief that relationships with the intelligence community were
useful and that lending aid was the right thing to do. "Many
(journalists working with the CIA) had gone to the same schools as
their CIA handlers, moved in the same circles, shared fashionably
liberal, anti-Communist political values, and were part of the 'old
boy' network that constituted something of an establishment elite
in the media, politics and academia of postwar America," Bernstein
writes. "The most valued lent themselves for reasons of national
service, not money."
This was true of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who is open and
unapologetic about his extensive CIA ties. Alsop's tasks in the
50's included a trip to Laos to investigate whether American reporters
there were using anti-American sources and a visit to the Philippines
at the behest of the CIA, who believed that his presence there might
influence the outcome of an election. "I'm proud they asked me and
proud to have done it," Alsop said of his involvement. "The notion
that a newspaperman doesn't have a duty to his country is perfect
balls."
According to one high-ranking official, Alsop's brother Stewart,
also a columnist, was a CIA agent. He was rumored to have been
particularly useful in obtaining information from foreign governments,
planting misinformation and tipping off the Agency about potential
foreign recruits, although his brother denies this. "I was closer
to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close," Joseph
Alsop once said. "I dare say he did perform some tasks -- he just
did the correct thing as an American."
Also notable is New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger (CFR), who
the CIA lists as a valuable source of information throughout the
50's. Sulzberger claims that he "would never get near the spook
business," but admits to sharing information with agents, many of
whom were close personal friends: "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." However, Sulzberger does "think" that he signed a
secrecy agreement with the CIA (as did his uncle, Times publisher
Arthur Hays Sulzberger [CFR]), though.
Many CIA officials long for the days when there were more journalists
like Sulzberger and the Alsops. "There was a time when it wasn't
considered a crime to serve your government," one official bitterly
told Bernstein. "This all has to be considered in the context of
the morality of the times, rather than the against latter-day
standards -- and hypocritical standards at that."
"(I)n 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."
But another agent remarked in Bernstein's expose, "there was a point
when the ethical issues which most people submerged finally surfaced.
Today a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any
relationship with the Agency."
The Church Committee Investigation
A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics
of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a
Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA
had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November
1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information
to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News
and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff
members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation
four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be
closer to 50; Bernstein's expose in Rolling Stone that same year
claimed it was more like 400.)
By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the
Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised
fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA
and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light.
"There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying
a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those
credentials are suspect," he wrote. "We automatically... consider
Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their
governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for
our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has,
with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken
away from us -- or given away."
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank
Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency's
use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to
curtail this part of the committee's investigation, though, and
some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was
able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush
(CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry
would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would
unleash a "witch-hunt" on the nation's reporters, editors and
publishers.
"The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played
right into its hands," one congressional source told Carl Bernstein.
"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 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."
Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the
Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later
served as deputy to President Carter's national security advisor)
supervised the committee's investigation of the CIA-press angle.
CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader's requests for specific
information about the scope of the Agency's media activities. Under
pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull
records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into
one-paragraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files
available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations
would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number
that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an
attempt to give committee members "a broad, representative picture."
"We never pretended it was a total description of the range of
activities over 25 years, or the number of journalists that have
done things for us," one official conceded. Still, even these sketchy
details were enough for the committee to conclude that the CIA's
relationships with the press were of a far greater magnitude than
they had expected -- and that they needed to know more.
But Bush was intransigent. Heated confrontations produced a bizarre
agreement: Bader and director of the committee staff William Miller
(CFR) could have access to 25 "sanitized" files from among the 400
(still without journalists' identities). Church and committee
vice-chairman John Tower would see five unsanitized files to verify
that the CIA had included all but the names. No information on
current CIA-press relationships would be divulged, and the whole
deal was contingent upon Bader, Miller, Church and Tower's promises
not to reveal the files' contents to the other committee members.
In the end, with time running out on the committee, the senators
decided to drop the matter and leave a more detailed investigation
to the CIA oversight committee that would succeed them. The committee
interviewed none of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast
executives detailed in the files. And although members concluded
that "from the CIA point of view this was the highest, most sensitive
covert program of all," and "a much larger part of the operational
system than had been indicated," this was hardly part of the official
findings when they were made public. The tcommittee dedicated a
scant en pages of its final report to covert relationships with the
media. The information included in the report was vague and misleading
and, according to committee member Gary Hart, "hardly reflected
what we found."
Bernstein offered the following commentary on the Church committee's
output: "No mention was made of the 400 summaries or what they
showed. Instead the report noted blandly that some fifty recent
contacts had been studied by the committee staff -- thus conveying
the impression that the Agency's dealings with the press had been
limited to those instances. Colby's misleading public statements
about the use of journalists were repeated without serious contradiction
or elaboration. The role of cooperating news executives was given
short shrift. The fact that the Agency had concentrated its
relationships in the most prominent sectors of the press went
unmentioned. That the CIA continued to regard the press as up for
grabs was not even suggested."
Prominent CIA-Press Relationships
A source close to the Church committee remarked on the investigation
that, "if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism
would get smeared." So just who was involved, and what was the
nature of their relationships with the intelligence community? The
following is a sampling of prominent organizations identified by
Carl Bernstein and other researchers as high profile news outlets
with low profile ties to the CIA.
CBS: CIA Broadcasting System?
Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA
director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR)
made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. "Over
the years," Bernstein writes, "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 CIA;
established a formal channel of communications between the Washington
bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents...
to be routinely monitored by the CIA."
Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954
to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to
become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls
complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and
later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard
for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that
he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials
in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of
CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation
revealed that two CBS employees -- stringer Austin Goodrich and
Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover
CIA operatives.
Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others.
"When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an
ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced
me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed
the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that
this was the 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."
Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these
practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the
reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he
explains. "This went on for a number of years -- into the Seventies."
Sign of the Times
The New York Times was for the CIA in the realm of newspapers what
CBS was to the Agency among broadcasters. Publisher Arthur Hays
Sulzberger (CFR) arranged for cover for approximately 10 CIA employees
between 1950 and 1966 as part of his general policy of providing
assistance to the CIA whenever possible.
According to CIA officials, the Agency's ties to the Times were
stronger than to any other papers because of its large foreign news
operation and because of close ties between publisher Sulzberger
and director Dulles (a relationship described by one staff member
as "the mighty dealing with the mighty.") The output of this close
relationship generally included reporting for CIA agents and
"spotting" new prospective foreign operatives. Sulzberger is said
to have signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency in the 1950's
-- some say he did so as a pledge not to reveal the classified
information he was privy to; others claim it was a pact never to
reveal the Times' dealings with the CIA.
Former Times reporter Wayne Phillips said CIA agents approached and
tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952, advising
him that the Agency has a "working relationship" with Sulzberger.
A Freedom of Information Act request later revealed that agents
hoped to put him to work as an "asset" abroad. The Times ran a story
about the attempted recruitment in 1976, in which Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger (CFR) asserted that he had "never heard of the Times
being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son
of the late Mr. Sulzberger."
A CIA Post?
Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his
expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive
CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine,
Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an
Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth
Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow
Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a
pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and
Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a
permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting
in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and
better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces
sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior
to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the
article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post
publisher Katherine Graham off the hook. Reporter Russell Warren
Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said,
his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA
proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum
Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the
CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his
employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal
CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the
Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a
CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly
reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post.
Philip Geyelin (CFR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking
a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the Agency for 11 months
during a leave from the Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal,
CIA memos about Geyelin (which number in the hundreds, according
to CounterSpy) described him as "a CIA resource" and a "willing
collaborator." Geyelin has come to the CIA's defense in the Post:
in response to a statement by Post ombudsman Charles Seib that the
CIA should stick to dirty work, the press should inform the public,
"and never the twain can meet," Geyelin replied that to the contrary,
agents and journalists were "all searching for the same nuggets of
truth about the outside world." He took this a step further when
he protested Congressional efforts to regulate CIA-media ties,
invoking journalists' constitutional right to be co-opted by spooks.
"(I)n its zeal to restrict the freedom of the agency to subvert the
press," he wrote, "Congress could wind up making a law that would
in fact abridge -- or threaten to abridge -- some part of the freedom
of the press that the First Amendment was intended to protect."
Publisher Katherine Graham is a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations with close ties to former CIA directors Dulles and William
Casey (CFR). She hired CIA-linked Wackenhut Security Corporation
to break up a Post union strike, and invited former Deputy Attorney
General Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR) to join the Post's board of
directors despite his well-documented past as a CIA apologist.
Katzenbach is said to have asked a past Post editorial page editor
to tone down an upcoming editorial about the CIA, and he chaired a
presidential panel that "investigated" CIA domestic operations (but
actually served as a rubber stamp for the Agency's activities).
While he asserted that both the FBI and CIA were "the most decent
and effective intelligence agencies in the world," Katzenbach had
first hand knowledge of the seedier side of intelligence: the Church
committee produced several memos documenting his suggestions to J.
Edgar Hoover that he might undertake wiretap operations as part of
the Bureau's campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.
Making Time for Spooks
Time and Life founder Henry Luce was considered one of the CIA's
most cooperative sources in the media. Luce, another of Dulles'
personal friends in the media, was said to freely allow staff members
to work with the CIA and willingly provide credentials for agents
who lacked journalistic experience. Throughout the 50's and 60's
Time correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners, and Luce encouraged
his foreign correspondents to meet with CIA officials after returning
from trips abroad.
C.D. Jackson, a Life magazine vice president in the early 1960's,
co-authored a CIA study on reorganization of the intelligence
community during his tenure at Time-Life, and approved specific
plans for granting cover to CIA operatives. Former Life managing
editors Edward Thompson and George Hunt told Stuart Loory that they
regularly allowed military intelligence agents to come to the Life
office to look at photos and, since they were public domain, sometimes
gave them prints. CIA agents were allowed to interview correspondents
returning from overseas assignments too, Hunt said, although he did
not consider this to be "working with" intelligence agencies. "We
never cooperated with the CIA," Hunt claimed. "We didn't have any
of that nonsense going on at Life."
Other News Outlets With Documented CIA Ties
Management at the Christian Science Monitor admitted the paper had
an ongoing relationship with the CIA throughout the 1950's and early
60's. Joseph Harrison, who became editor in 1950, said he discovered
that agents paid frequent visits to the news office to get information
on Monitor stories. "I inherited the situation and I continued it,"
he said of the arrangement, which included allowing the Agency
access to uncut versions of stories and letters from Monitor foreign
correspondents. While Johnson characterized such activities as
"helping out as an American," he drew the line at pursuing stories
at the Agency's behest or allowing his employees to moonlight with
the CIA. "That," according to his distinction, "would have been
espionage."
CIA files show that ABC News provided cover for agents throughout
the 1960's. During the Church committee hearings the Agency refused
to reveal whether its relationship with the network was ongoing.
As with ties to other high profile news outlets, arrangements were
made at the highest level, with the full knowledge of network
executives. CIA officials claim that Sam Jaffe and one other unnamed
correspondent performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe
admits that he was approached by agents who offered to get him a
job with CBS, who would send him on assignment in Moscow if he
agreed to cooperate, but claims he never agreed to the deal. Jaffe
did go on to do some work for CBS, though, and said he believed
that the CIA had a hand in getting him the assignment.
One of the more unusual accounts of the CIA-press connection involves
the Louisville Courier-Journal. Undercover operative Robert H.
Campbell spent three months at the paper as a reporter in 1964-1965
as part of an arrangement made by the Agency and Courier-Journal
executive editor Norman Issacs. The first account of Campbell's
tenure at the paper appeared in a front-page story in 1976 -- in
the Courier-Journal (one of the few self-investigative pieces written
on this topic).
James Herzog reported that Campbell had been hired in spite of the
fact that he could not type and knew little about newswriting.
"Norman said that when he was in Washington, he had been called to
lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [who] wanted to
send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of
newspapering," the paper's former managing editor recalled in the
article. CIA sources say that the Courier-Journal arrangements were
made so that Johnson could amass a record of journalistic experience
(he also worked briefly for the Hornell, New York Evening Tribune).
The Agency even sent funds to the Courier-Journal to pay Johnson's
salary. These same sources claim that the deal was made with Issacs
and approved by the paper's publisher, but neither man recalls being
involved. "All I can do is repeat the simple truth," Issacs said
in response to Herzog's story, "that never, under any circumstances
or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent."
But, he added, "none of this is to say that I couldn't have been
'had.'"
But clues were there. No one looked into Johnson's credentials when
he was hired, and his file included the curious notation "Hired for
temporary work -- no reference checks completed or needed." Johnson's
journalistic prowess (or lack thereof) should have given him away:
his editors characterized his work as "unreadable" and it was never
published. If that was not clue enough, his penchant for announcing
to patrons at a bar a few steps from his office that he was a CIA
agent should have done the trick.
Who else? Bernstein compiled the following list of additional
organizations known to have provided CIA cover: the New York
Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers,
Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International,
the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald.
The CFR Report on "Making Intelligence Smarter"
A Council on Foreign Relations task force thrust the CIA-media
connection back into the spotlight this year with the release of
their report on post-Cold War intelligence. "Making Intelligence
Smarter," released in February 1996, stresses the importance of
"human intelligence" in successful clandestine operations. But many
of the "innovations" the CFR suggests for cases when "the targeted
activity is not easily captured by reconnaissance or eavesdropping,"
are all too familiar. "Clandestine operations for whatever purpose
currently are circumscribed by a number of legal and policy
constraints," the report states. "These deserve review to avoid
diminishing the potential contribution of this instrument. At a
minimum, the Task Force recommended that a fresh look be taken at
limits on the use of nonofficial 'covers' for hiding and protecting
those involved in clandestine activities."
Though the task force doesn't explicitly address the use of the
press as cover, the implication is obvious. If nothing else, the
Church committee investigation showed CIA-press relationships to
be among the Agency's most secret -- and most valuable -- operations
for nearly two decades. And congressional scrutiny, however
ineffectual, led the Agency to codify the constraints alluded to
in the report.
Former CIA director William Colby claimed in 1973 to have scaled
back covert media operations in response to mounting criticism of
the practice. His successor, George Bush, issued a statement pledging
that the Agency would not enter into "paid or contractual relationships
with full- or part-time news correspondents from accredited news
organizations" when he took the Agency helm in 1976. (The statement
was ambiguous on stringers and other news staffers, and included a
statement that the Agency would "welcome" journalists' voluntary,
unpaid cooperation. Stansfield Turner, Bush's replacement, put these
assurances in writing the following year.
Contrary to the report's implication that all "nonofficial" covers
are currently off limits, there is a loophole in the policy Turner
drafted in 1977 allowing for exceptions "with the specific approval"
of the Director of Central Intelligence. An unnamed source brought
the loophole to attention of the Washington Post last month,
indicating that such exceptions had been made "in extraordinarily
rare circumstances" in the past 19 years. At least one such exception
was granted for a CIA agent posing as a reporter during the Iranian
hostage crisis.
Spies R Not Us?
Reaction from the press to the CFR report has been mixed. Many have
invoked the First Amendment and uttered platitudes about the
separation of press and state, while remaining silent about the two
institutions' sordid pasts. Notably absent from both the CFR's
report and the media's reaction is any historical frame of reference:
the issue is presented as a stand-alone current event, taken out
of its context as a legacy of CIA meddling and media complicity.
Evan Thomas, an assistant editor at Newsweek told the Post that
while there were "inherent conflicts" in using the press as cover,
"You would not want to rule out forever an opportunity in which a
journalist might be the only one who could help in a desperate
situation."
But Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's
journal Extra!, seemed to have a better appreciation of the underlying
implications. "Under no circumstance should CIA agents pose as
journalists," he said. "Given the CIA's record in setting up fake
press organs and manipulating the press, they have really lost the
right to get involved with journalists. You can't combine their
work with journalism, which is about the free and open exchange of
ideas."
Washington Times columnist Ken Adelman charged that the uproar was
much ado about nothing. "That such verbal waffling aroused such a
ruckus says a great deal," he wrote in his March 6, 1996 column.
"Not so much about the Council or the CIA -- but about the narcissism
of today's journalists."
Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Post executive editor
Leonard Downie, Jr. said he was disturbed by the possibility that
the CIA had either used journalistic organizations for cover or
recruited journalists. Independence from the government, he said,
was essential for both credibility and the safety of correspondents.
The CFR, the CIA, the Media and the New World Order
Will economic warfare replace the Cold War in the New World Order?
In the wake of the Cold War, debate has erupted over the future use
of intelligence agencies by the U.S. government. Many of America's
political and business elite want to see a shift towards economic
intelligence, to counter other nations' economic intelligence ops,
as well as to further the goals of international capitalism.
It is therefore especially noteworthy that the CFR issued the report
on "Making Intelligence Smarter." The roster of the Council on
Foreign Relations is a Who's Who directory of the political, military,
and economic elite in the United States. President Clinton's
administration is staffed by nearly 100 of the CFR's 3,000 members.
It has been said by political commentators on both the left and the
right that if you want to find out what U.S. foreign policy will
be next year, you should read the CFR's periodical Foreign Affairs
this year.
Members of the CFR exert influence over a gigantic portion of the
media in America. Many of the newspeople who operated with the CIA
in the past were or are CFR members. The chief directors and news
anchors of CBS, ABC, NBC, Time Inc., Public Broadcast Service, CNN,
Newsweek, and many other major media outlets are CFR members. So
are many CEOs and board members at Chase Manhattan Corp., Chemical
Bank, Citicorp, Shell Oil, AT&T, General Motors, General Electric,
and other multinational corporations.
It is also worth noting that three of the Task Force panel members
who wrote the "Making Intelligence Smarter" report included past
or present journalists. Leslie Gelb, CFR president, is a former
foreign affairs columnist and Op-Ed page editor for The New York
Times. Henry Grunwald is former Editor-in-Chief of Time magazine,
and Jessica Mathews is a Post columnist.
Critics of the CFR on both sides of the political spectrum voice
strong opposition to the Council's agenda of expansion of multinational
capitalism and world government -- what has become known as the New
World Order. A report from the CFR such as "Making Intelligence
Smarter" will therefore make plenty of waves. The fact that the
report was composed in part by members of the working press who are
also CFR members is a brazen conflict of interest, in light of the
CFR's history.
Will there be a shift in CIA/media operations towards global economic
intelligence and propaganda? Only time will tell as the debate rages
on. But if history serves as any sort of lesson, we could be standing
on the threshold of a new flap of covert media manipulation.
Sources
"The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media
Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why
the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20,
1977, p.55-67. "CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43.
"Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981,
p. 13-19. Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a
Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.
182-311. "'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic
Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24. "Making Intelligence
Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations,
1996. "Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover
Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p.
3-12. "The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia
Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18.
http://www.911-strike.com/CIAinmedia.htm
O'Reilly's Information Tech CIA Connection ::: Download Presentation
In-Q-Tel, Inc. is a private, venture capital firm chartered by the
CIA. In-Q-Tel strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT
companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority
problems. In-Q-Tel invests in technologies that addresses critical
CIA needs, and that can also become commercially viable.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2002/view/e_sess/2282
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The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a
couple hundred dollars a month." CIA operative discussing with
Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and
prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover
stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan
Square Press, 1991)
As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known
to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage
of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United
States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free
from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the
very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows
the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie
itself.
The Alex Constantine Article
Tales from the Crypt The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's
Operation MOCKINGBIRD by Alex Constantine Who Controls the Media?
Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning,
double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles
and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney.
Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The
Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser
.
It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen
that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one
that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations,
CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal
agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place
overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their
best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction
an official can commit __is a the employment of a domestic servant
with (shudder) no residency status.
This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the
cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the
corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of
major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services competed with
communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With
or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an
undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service,
rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of
covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination.
Philip Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in
Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken
under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation
MOCKINGBIRD.
"By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah
Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of
the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles,
plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former
CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar
for German and American corporations who wanted their points of
view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced
25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA
propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary
views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry
Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times). Activists
curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled
to f__ind in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos
of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every
major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that
the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have
acted as case officers to agents in the field.
"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March,
1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue
featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the
creation of an "American Empire," "world-dominating in political
power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including
war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of
people
... would hold more than its equal share of power."
George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on
Luce in 1947, explaining tha__t "although avoiding typical Hitlerian
phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the
world and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the
organs of Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine
inevitably leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets
under the American flag."
On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between
the CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of
CBS. A firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty
to the Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the
behest of his close friend, the busy grey eminence of the nation's
media, Allen Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings
with the CIA was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to
1961.
The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the
Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly
an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant
for Cold War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller,
who quit a year later, disgusted at the administration's political
infighting.
Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war
strategist.
"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's
delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden
microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his
visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special
forces" drilling at covert operations.
One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence underground
was heroin smuggler Hubert von Bl|cher, the son of A German ambassador.
Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by the Abwehr, the
German military intelligence division, while still a civilian in
his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army until
forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime
records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film
on a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying
with the Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was
the smuggling of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were,
in part, the subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account
of the knockover of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.
In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer
named Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva
Peron, presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection
from the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's
Jews?).
Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver
German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the
National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi
revival.
In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color
Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing
scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on
a film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later
he returned to Buenos Aires, then D|sseldorf, West Germany, and
established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical
warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in D|sseldorf
in 1982, von Bl|cher boasted to journalists, "I am chief shareholder
of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The
Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus
the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales
dreamed up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."
Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken
dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg,
publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the
CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American
high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was
a scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in
1939 for tax evasions totalling many millions of dollars - the
biggest case in the history of the Justice Department. Moses pled
guilty and agreed to pay the government $8 million and settle $9
million in assorted tax claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses
received a three-year sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.
Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On
the campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles
to woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake,"
Bush's regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The
Bush team met at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands,
California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet
was chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers built
over a quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan,
whose acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's
recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the
intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda
and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed
the possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance
technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition
published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according
to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program
that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter.
Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the
equipment as far as 25 miles away.
Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his
disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.
In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen
idol recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds
for the resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus -
signed a secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the
mob-controlled studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on
early television programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part
owner. Furthermore, historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New
York Times, in 1987, reported that Reagan had "fed the names of
suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly
enough to be assigned 'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI
file indicates intense collaboration with producers to 'purge' the
industry of subversives."
No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former
intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's
Moscow correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation
MOCKINGBIRD's Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.
Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film
simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other organized-crime
Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell Thomas threw in
to launch the infamous Resorts International, the corporate front
for Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob family and the
corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the investors was
James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated $100,000 to Nixon's
1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that Resorts bought
into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New jersey attempted,
with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling license to the
company, citing Mafia ties.
In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the
broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general
spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William
Casey, who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust
even after he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.
"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The
Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests
in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who
took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West beam hundreds of
propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of
competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor
has given the hidden war a new importance," enthused one foreign
correspondent.
A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda
push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR),
received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through
private foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a
television series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in
1964, Of People and Politics, a "study" of the American political
system in 21 weekly installments.
In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia
combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film
studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the
Army during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters
in the film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated
by the CIA, played sidekick to Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures
mogul who visited Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his
return to Hollywood remodeled his office after the dictator's. The
only honest job Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent
(and a secret investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by Bryan
Foy, a former producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone's
representative on the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia
investments to Cohn.
Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson,
publisher of the Hollywood Reporter. In the 1950s, outlays
for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert
operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract CIA employees
were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming
the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year
by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters,
UPI and the AP news syndicates.
In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely
with the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time
employees of the Agency.
Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of
the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own
beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an
instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He
is a creature from the national security sector's chamber of horrors.
For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to
examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel
universe of these United States.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and
causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of
the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption
in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will
endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the
people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic
is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
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FCC and Media Deregulation sites:
*****************************
Below are sites which contain more information about the issue of
media deregulation and ways to take action on either side of the
issue. The FCC site provides an area to make views on deregulation
known, and provides contact information for the agency.
Center for Digital Democracy The Web site of the Center for Digital
Democracy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving media
diversity, provides information regarding the issue of media
concentration. The Center highlights the 1945 Supreme Court decision
(Associated Press v. United States) which maintains that mergers
that narrow the dissemination of information are unconstitutional.
Other features include press headlines, articles, and resource
links.
FRONTLINE: The Merchants of Cool - Media Giants On PBS.org, the
FRONTLINE Web site features a diagram of the seven largest media
conglomerates and their numerous holdings. This information is
provided within a larger context, asking how media mega-mergers and
the products they sell affect children's psychological development.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/giants/
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Crispin Miller of THE NATION magazine describes and analyzes the
media cartel that has integrated all cultural industries into a few
large corporations. Miller fears that American culture will become
more homogenous with less dissent and fewer independent voices..
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=miller
FCC and Media Deregulation sites:
http://www.pbs.org/now/resources/fcc.html
And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to
betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest
would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA
and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our
protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered
to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media
report on all the current threats to our security--including those
far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting
bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like
John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this
government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret
evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client
privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree,
the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits
from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not
parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such
prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us in our fatal
ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our
borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of
the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between
the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans
in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were
not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest.
In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work
against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their
advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely
un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the
state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy,
we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is
happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such
knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take
steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the
government our own.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&c=2&s=miller
Media Access Project is a non-profit, public interest law firm which
promotes the public's First Amendment right to hear and be heard
on the electronic media of today and tomorrow.
ACT NOW.... TOP ISSUES:
http://www.mediaaccess.org/programs/
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"If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have
to use it."
-- Anton Chekov
"Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it."
-- Robert F. Kennedy
"A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a
philosophical battle is a nuclear war."
-- Ayn Rand
"What distinguishes the New Right from other American reactionary
movements and what it shares with the early phase of German fascism,
is its incorporation of conservative impulses into a system of
representation consisting largely of media techniques and media
images." Philip Bishop: "The New Right and the Media"
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military
service as a member of this country's most agile military force,
the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second
Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most
of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall
Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for capitalism."
-- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
MetaMagic MediaMinistry @ Abracadabra Communications http://metamagic.org
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