MOCKINGBIRD
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 insidious 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.
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 Blücher, 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 Düsseldorf, West Germany, and
established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical
warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf
in 1982, von Blücher 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.
How the Washington Post Censors the News
[Note the highlighted paragraph]
How the Washington Post Censors the News
A Letter to the Washington Post
by Julian C. Holmes
_____________
April 25, 1992
Richard Harwood, Ombudsman
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Mr. Harwood,
Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit
of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government
"conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused
from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various
other political and social sports events, editors and reporters
scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest
single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government
stability — the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!!
It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted
by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to
Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs
spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS".
Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.
Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule
the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had
conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack
Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the
Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring
the Anderson column before printing it (*2).
But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra
conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for
law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S.
arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the
CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets
(*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work
on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post
contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of
conspiracy and by publishing false information about the
drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on
Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman
Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only
a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from
Rangel (*5).
Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism,
Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government
complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug
conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and
retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat
to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But
close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and
then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with
the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the
Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick,
professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the
staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter,
and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published
their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to
Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages
until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was
to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October
surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for
President Carter.
Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In
October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held
Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a
conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former
hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial
investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported
the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself
which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10).
On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives
begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task
force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired
the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named
as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI
when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).
Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing
the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver
North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he
derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to
answer questions about Contra support activities of government
officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John
Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with
"international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's
security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to
intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling
Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican
relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the
Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands
as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all
citizens" (*15).
Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy
theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves
government or corporate conspiracies:
In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery,
surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass
U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16).
The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying
crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and
conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other
leaders" (*17).
"Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of
the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben…of
Germany. …By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the
United States was effectively prevented from developing or
producing [fo rWorld War-II] any substantial amount of
synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin
(*18).
U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about
dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid
abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near
the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).
Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in
getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear
weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the
nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21).
"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some
twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused
the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning
the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has
continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates
which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat,
while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable
eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and
the workplace." (*22).
The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq
"is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to
keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23).
If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of
doing business in this country.
Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf
War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).
Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend
$100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated
history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the
Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds", (*26).
rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish
invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27).
Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from
the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer
software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy
implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of
INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot
Richardson (*28).
Or Watergate.
Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where
the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of
Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S.
intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where
bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of
doing business" (*32).
Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of
California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for
criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with
gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of
buses and related products to transportation companies
throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake
City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT).
and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety
defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by
General Motors in the early 60's (*34).
Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield
intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings
of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived,
covered up, and
covered up the coverups…[thus inflicting] on women a
worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35).
Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and
the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding
the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all
364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974
(*36).
Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug
Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who
ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who
acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing
of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37).
Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the
cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of
their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House,
Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of
the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds of
billions of dollars (*38).
Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General
Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to
fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial
equipment (*39).
Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT).
officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs
(*40).
Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of
medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41).
Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed
not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to
cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people
of Nicaragua
a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government
applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into
a more repressive force (*43).
Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in
the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions,
and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of
the legitimately elected government and the assassination of
President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance
terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's
plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about
these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA
Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this
U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).
Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade
Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the
United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the
Panama Canal Treaties (*47).
Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of
American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to
strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the
British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the
subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime
Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).
Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice
Lumumba (*50).
Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush,
Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S.
Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress
to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the
presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).
Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to
head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates
lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52).
Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity
Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53).
Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban
the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of
birth control or abortion" (*54).
Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common
purpose in Central America" (*55).
Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer
Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build
civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the
Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine
soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are
graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel
(*56).
Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration
to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter
who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility
(*57).
Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of
South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the
1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59).
Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).
Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish The
Satanic Verses in paperback (*61).
Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post
offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a
really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big
government.
Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of
the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our
illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the
Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates
corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the
camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in
the conspiring officials can erode — depending on how seriously the
citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust.
Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to
see as a real threat to its corporate security.
Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on
Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's
official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting
alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story
of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful
prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection
with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy
assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not
be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us
from our war against Vietnam.
The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along
lines suggested by "JFK". Senior Post journalists like Charles
Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael
Isikoff, have been called up to man the bulwarks against public
sentiment which has never supported the government's
non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that
the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both
the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63)
and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a
result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post
stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another
conspiracy (*65).
Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen
Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George
Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had
second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that
there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned
journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L.
Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have
each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not
enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just
continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level
assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its
arguments.
An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable
behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign
against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie
was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months
before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft
of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the
Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this
article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile
statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner
does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a
U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government
witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted
under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television
reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case
against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the
Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently
asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered
it (*71).
Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way
through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early
draft ofthe movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing
Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction".
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73).
He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy
assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to
de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by
Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was
written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of
Kennedy's policy". In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before
the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National
Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it.
Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version
provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) — facts that
Lardner avoided.
The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest:
The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for
the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post
(*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful
discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI
and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing
co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books
and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings…[and]
conspiracy theories …[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our
organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and
friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to
"employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the
critics. …Book reviews and feature articles are particularly
appropriate for this purpose. …The aim of this dispatch is to
provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the
conspiracy theorists…" (*77).
In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great,
the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties
with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.
Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim
that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably
sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,"Miss Davis is lying …I never produced
CIA material …what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to
put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't
give a shit for the truth". The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the
book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of
contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis
published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated
Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA
propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his
association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently
taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by
Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).
And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.
Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced …for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83).
Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the
availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA
man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call
girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to
consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement
from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the
Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs.
Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent
terrorists from using the media as a platform fortheir views. … The
point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and
we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the
decisions are often difficult" (*85).
Today, the Post and its world of big business are apparently terrified
that our elite and our high-level public officials may be exposed as
conspirators behind Contra drug-smuggling, October Surprise, or the
assassination of President Kennedy. This fear is truly remarkable in
that, like most of us and like most institutions, the Post runs its
business as a conspiracy of like-minded entrepreneurs — a conspiracy
"to act or work together toward the same result or goal" (*86). But
where the Post really parts company from just plain people is when it
pretends that conspiracies associated with big business or government
are "coincidence". Post reporter Lardner vents the frustration
inherent in having to maintain this dichotomy. He lashes out at Oliver
Stone and suggests that Stone may actually believe that the Post's
opposition to Stone's movie is a "conspiracy". Lardner assures us that
Stone's complaints are "groundless and paranoid and smack of
McCarthyism" (*87).
So how does the Post justify devoting so much energy to ridiculing those who
investigate conspiracies?
The Post has answers: people revert to conspiracy theories because
they need something "neat and tidy" (*88) that "plugs a gap no other
generally accepted theory fills', (*89. and "coincidence …is always
the safest and most likely explanation for any conjunction of curious
circumstances …" (*90).
And what does this response mean? It means that "coincidence theory"
is what the Post espouses when it would prefer not to admit to a
conspiracy. In other words, some things just "happen". And, besides,
conspiracy to do certain things would be a crime; "coincidence" is a
safer bet.
Post Ombudsman Richard Harwood, who, it is rumored, serves as
Executive Director of the Benevolent Protective Order of Coincidence
Theorists, (*91) recently issued a warning about presidential
candidates "who have begun to mutter about a press conspiracy".
Ordinarily, Harwood would simply dismiss these charges as "symptoms of
the media paranoia that quadrennially engulfs members of the American
political class" (*92). But a fatal mistake was made by the mutterers;
they used the "C" word against the PRESS! And Harwood exploded his
off-the-cuff comment into an entire column — ending it with:"We are
the new journalists, immersed too long, perhaps, in the cleansing
waters of political conformity. But conspirators we ain't".
Distinguished investigative journalist Morton Mintz, a 29-year veteran
of the Washington Post, now chairs the Fund for Investigative
Journalism. In the December issue of The Progressive, Mintz wrote "A
Reporter Looks Back in Anger — Why the Media Cover Up Corporate
Crime". Therein he discussed the difficulties in convincing editors to
accept important news stories. He illustrated the article with his own
experiences at the Post, where he says he was known as "the biggest
pain in the ass in the office" (*93).
Would Harwood argue that grief endured by journalists at the hands of editors
is a matter of random coincidence?
And that such policy as Mintz described is made independently by
editors without influence from fellow editors or from management?
Would Harwood have us believe that at the countless office "meetings"
in which news people are ever in attendance, there is no discussion of
which stories will run and which ones will find inadequate space? That
there is no advanced planning for stories or that there are no
cooperative efforts among the staff? Or that in the face of our
news-media "grayout" of presidential candidate Larry Agran, (*94) a
Post journalist would be free to give news space to candidate Agran
equal to that the Post lavishes on candidate Clinton? Let's face it:
these possibilities are about as likely as Barbara Bush entertaining
guests at a soup kitchen.
Would Harwood have us believe that media critic and former Post
Ombudsman Ben Bagdikian is telling less than the truth in his account
of wire-service control over news: "The largely anonymous men who
control the syndicate and wire service copy desks and the central wire
photo machines determine at a single decision what millions will see
and hear. …there seems to be little doubt that these gatekeepers
preside over an operation in which an appalling amount of press
agentry sneaks in the back door of American journalism and marches
untouched out the front door as 'news'" (*95).
When he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, Judge
Clarence Thomas violated U.S. law when he failed to remove himself
from a case in which he then proceeded to reverse a $10 million
judgment against the Ralston Purina Company (*96). Ralston Purina, the
animal feed empire, is the family fortune of Thomas' mentor, Senator
John Danforth. The Post limited its coverage of the Thomas malfeasance
to 56 words buried in the middle of a 1200-word article (*97). Would
Harwood have us believe that the almost complete blackout on this
matter by the major news media and the U.S. Senate was a matter of
coincidence? Could a Post reporter have written a story about Ralston
Purina if she had wanted to? Can a brick swim?
Or take the fine report produced last September by Ralph Nader's
Public Citizen. Titled All the Vice President's Men, it documents "How
the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health,
Safety, and Environmental Programs". Three months later, Post
journalists David Broder and Bob Woodward published "The President's
Understudy", a seven-part series on Vice President Quayle. Although
this series does address Quayle's role with the Competitiveness
Council, its handling of the Council's disastrous impact on America is
inadequate. It is 40,000 words of mostly aimless chatter about Quayle
memorabilia: youth, family, college record, Christianity, political
aspirations, intellectual aspirations, wealthy friends, government
associates, golf, travels, wife Marilyn, and net worth — revealing
little about Quayle's abilities, his understanding of society's
problems, or his thoughts about justice and freedom, and never
mentioning the comprehensive Nader study of Quayle's record in the
Bush Administration (*98).
Now, did Broder or did Woodward forget about the Nader study? Or did
both of them forget? Or did one, or the other, or both decide not to
mention it? Did these two celebrated, seasoned Post reporters ever
discuss together their jointly authored stories? Did they decide to
publish such a barren set of articles because it would enhance their
reputations? How did management feel about the use of precious news
space for such frivolity? Is it possible that so many pages were
dedicated to this twaddle without people "acting or working together
toward the same result or goal"? (*99) Do crocodiles fly?
On March 20, front-page headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New
York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post read respectively:
TSONGAS DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE CLEARING CLINTON'S PATH
TSONGAS ABANDONS CAMPAIGN LEAVING CLINTON CLEAR PATH TOWARD SHOWDOWN
WITH BUSH
TSONGAS CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
TSONGAS EXIT CLEARS WAY FOR CLINTON
This display of editorial independence should at least raise questions
of whether the news media collective mindset is really different from
that of any other cartel — like oil, diamond, energy, (*100) or
manufacturing cartels, a cartel being "a combination of independent
commercial enterprises designed to limit competition" (*101).
The Washington Post editorial page carries the heading:
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Is it? Of course not. There probably is no such thing. Does the Post
"conspire" to keep its staff and its newspaper from wandering too far
from the safety of mediocrity? The Post would respond that the
question is absurd. In that I am not privy to the Post's telephone
conversations, I can only speculate on how closely the media elite
must monitor the staff. But we all know how few micro-seconds it takes
a new reporter to learn what subjects are taboo and what are "safe",
and that experienced reporters don't have to ask.
What is more important, however, than speculating about how the Post
communicates within its own corporate structure and with other members
of the cartel, is to document and publicize what the Post does in
public, namely, how it shapes and censors the news.
Sincerely,
Julian C. Holmes
Copies to: Public-spirited citizens, both inside and outside the news
media, And - maybe a few others.
Notes to Letter of April 25, 1992:
1. Mark Hosenball, "The Ultimate Conspiracy", Washington Post,
September 11, 1988, p.C1
2a. Julian Holmes, Letter to Washington Post Ombudsman Richard
Harwood, June 4,1991. Notes that the Post censored, from the
Anderson/Van Atta column, references to the Christic Institute and to
Robert Gates.
2b. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Iran-Contra Figure Dodges
Extradition", Washington Merry-Go-Round, United Feature Syndicate, May
26, 1991. This is the column submitted to the Post (see note 2a)..
2c. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "The Man Washington Doesn't Want
to Extradite", Washington Post, May 26, 1991. The column (see note
2b). as it appeared in the Post (see note 2a)..
3a. Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint for RICO Conspiracy,
etc., United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, Tony
Avirgan and Martha Honey v. John Hull et al., October 3, 1986.
3b. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, "Reports: Contras Send Drugs
to U.S.", Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 1986.
3c. Neal Matthews, "I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam" (based on interviews
with Robert Plumlee, contra resupply pilot)., San Diego Reader, April
5, 1990.
4. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1987.
5a. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics,
University ofCalifornia Press, 1991, p.179-181.
5b. David S. Hilzenrath, "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras
to Drug Smuggling", Washington Post, July 22, 1987, p.A07.
5c. Partial correction to the Washington Post of July 22, Washington
Post, July 24,1987, p.A3.
5d. The Washington Post declined to publish SubCommittee Chairman
Rangel's Letter- to-the-Editor of July 22, 1987. It was printed in the
Congressional Record on August 6, 1987, p.E3296-7.
6a. Michael Kranish, "Kerry Says US Turned Blind Eye to Contra-Drug
Trail", Boston Globe, April 10, 1988.
6b. Mary McGrory, "The Contra-Drug Stink", Washington Post, April 10,
1988, p.B1. 6c. Robert Parry with Rod Nordland, "Guns for Drugs?
Senate Probers Trace an Old Contra Connection to George Bush's
Office", Newsweek, May 23, 1988, p.22.
6d. Dennis Bernstein, "Iran-Contra — The Coverup Continues", The
Progressive, November 1988, p.24.
6e. "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy", A Report Prepared by
the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations
of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December
1988.
7a. Mark Hosenball, "If It's October … Then It's Time for an Iranian
Conspiracy Theory", Washington Post, October 9, 1988, p.D1.
7b. Mark Hosenball, "October Surprise! Redux! The Latest Version of
the 1980 'Hostage- Deal' Story Is Still Full of Holes", Washington
Post, April 21, 1991,p.B2.
8a. Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, New York: Tudor, 1989.
8b. Gary Sick, October Surprise, New York: Times Books, Random House,
1991.
9a. Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, "An Election Held Hostage",
Playboy, October 1988, p.73.
9b. Robert Parry and Robert Ross, "The Election Held Hostage",
FRONTLINE, WGBH-TV,April 16, 1991.
10a. Reuter, "Ex-Hostages Seek Probe By Congress", Washington Post,
June 14,1991,p.A4.
10b. "An Election Held Hostage?", Conference, Dirksen Senate Office
Building Auditorium, Washington DC, June 13, 1991; Sponsored by The
Fund For New Priorities in America, 171 Madison Avenue, New York, NY,
10016.
11a. David Brown and Guy Gugliotta, "House Approves Inquiry Into
'OctoberSurprise'", Washington Post, February 6, 1992, p.A11.
11b. Jack Colhoun, "Lawmakers Lose Nerve on October Surprise", The
Guardian, December 11, 1991, p.7.
11c. Jack Colhoun, "October Surprise Probe Taps BCCI Lawyer", The
Guardian, February 26, 1992, p.3.
12. See note 5a, p.180-1.
13a. See note 4, p.229, 240-1.
13b. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the
Iran-Contra Affair, Senate Report No. 100-216, House Report No.
100-433, November 1987, p.139-141.
14a. Letter to His Excellency Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of the
Republic of Costa Rica; from Members of the U.S. Congress David
Dreier, Lee Hamilton, Dave McCurdy, Dan Burton, Mary Rose Oakar, Jim
Bunning, Frank McCloskey, Cass Ballenger, Peter Kostmayer, Jim Bates,
Douglas Bosco, James Inhofe, Thomas Foglietta, Rod Chandler, Ike
Skelton, Howard Wolpe, Gary Ackerman, Robert Lagomarsino, and Bob
McEwen; January 26, 1989.
14b. Peter Brennan, "Costa Rica Considers Seeking Contra Backer in
U.S. — Indiana Native Wanted on Murder Charge in 1984 Bomb Attack in
Nicaragua", WashingtonPost, February 1, 1990.
14c. "Costa Rica Seeks Extradition of Indiana Farmer", Scripps-Howard
News Service,April 25, 1991.
15. Press Release from the Costa Rican Embassy, Washington DC, On the
Case of the Imprisonment of Costa Rican Citizen John Hull", February
6, 1989.
16. Brian Glick, War at Home, Boston: South End Press, 1989.
17. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard— The U.S. Role in the New
World Order, Boston: South End Press, 1991, p.121.
18. Hearings Before the Committee on Patents, United States Senate,
77th Cong., 2nd Session (1942)., part I, as cited in Joseph Borkin,
The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press,
Macmillan, 1978, p.93.
19. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Study of A-Plant Neighbors' Health Urged",
Washington Post, July 13, 1990, p.A6.
20. Tom Horton, "A Cost Higher Than the Peace Dividend — Price Tag
Mounts to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Sites", Baltimore Sun, February 23,
1992, p.1K.
21. "The Nuclear Industry's Secret PR Strategy", EXTRA!, March 1992,
p.15.
22a. Samuel S. Epstein, MD et al, Losing the War Against Cancer: Need
for PublicPolicy Reform", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,
p.E947-9.
22b. Samuel S. Epstein, "The Cancer Establishment", Washington Post,
March 10, 1992.
23a. Hon. Henry B. Gonzalez, "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the
BNL Scandal", Congressional Record, March 30, 1992, p.H2005-2014.
23b. Hon. David E. Skaggs (CO)., White House Spin Control on Pre-War
Iraq Policy", Congressional Record, April 2, 1992, p.H2285.
23c. Nicholas Rostow, Special Assistant to the President and Legal
Adviser, Memorandum to Jeanne S. Archibald et al, "Meeting on
congressional requests for information and documents", April 8, 1991;
Congressional Record, April 2, 1992,p.H2285.
24a. Michio Kaku, "Operation Desert Lie: Pentagon Confesses", The
Guardian, March11, 1992, p.4.
24b. J. Max Robins, "NBC's Unaired Iraq Tapes Not a Black and White
Case", Variety Magazine, March 4, 1991, p.25.
25. Emory R. Searcy Jr., Clergy and Laity Concerned, Spring 1991
Letter to"Friends", p.1.
26. Jean Dimeo, "Selling Hispanics on Columbus — Luis Vasquez-Ajmac
Is Hired to Promote Smithsonian Project", Washington Post, November
18, 1991, p.Bus.8.
27. Hans Koning, "Teach the Truth About Columbus", Washington Post,
September 3,1991, p.A19.
28a. James Kilpatrick, "Software-Piracy Case Emitting Big Stench", St.
Louis Post/Dispatch, March 18, 1991, p.3B. Elliot L. Richardson, "A
High-Tech Watergate", New York Times, October 21,1991.
29. "BCCI — NBC Sunday Today", February 23, 1992, p.12; transcript
prepared by Burrelle's Information Services. The quote is from New
York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who is running his own
independent investigation of BCCI.
30. Norman Bailey, former Reagan White House intelligence analyst;
from an interview with Mark Rosenthal of NBC News. See note 29, p.5.
31. Jack Colhoun, "BCCI Skeletons Haunting Bush's Closet", The
Guardian, September 18, 1991, p.9.
32. Robert Morgenthau. See note 29, p.10.
33. Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime and Violence, San Francisco:
Sierra ClubBooks, 1989 paperback edition, p.227.
34. See note 33, p.136-7.
35. Morton Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon
Shield, NewYork: Pantheon, 1985. As cited in Mokhiber, see note 33,
p.157.
36. See note 33, p.164-171.
37. See note 33, p.172-180.
38. Michael Waldman, Who Robbed America?, New York: Random House,
1990. The quote is from Ralph Nader's Introduction, p.iii.
39. See note 33, p.217.
40. See note 33, p.235.
41. See note 33, p.277-288.
42. See note 33, p.323.
43. Katherine Hoyt Gonzalez, Nicaragua Network Education Fund
Newsletter, March1992, p.1.
44. William Blum, The CIA — A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books
Ltd., 1986,p.232-243.
45a. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, New York: Norton, 1978.
45b. See note 44, p.284-291.
46. See note 17, p.18.
47a. Letter to President George Bush from The Ad Hoc Committee for
Panama (James Abourezk et al)., January 10, 1990; published in The
Nation, February 5, 1990, p.163.
47b. Philip E. Wheaton, Panama, Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1992,
p.145-7.
48a. Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, Power, Inc., New York: Bantam
Books, 1977,p.521.
48b. "The International Oil Cartel", Federal Trade Commission,
December 2, 1949. Cited in 48a, p.521.
49a. See note 44, p.67-76.
49b. See note 48a, p.530-1.
50. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits, New York: Sheridan Square
Publications, 1983,p.60.
51. HR-3385, "An Act to Provide Assistance for Free and Fair Elections
in Nicaragua". Passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 4,
1989 by avote of 263 to 136, and the Senate on October 17 by a vote of
64 to 35.
52. Jack Colhoun, "Gates Oozing Trail of Lies, Gets Top CIA Post", The
Guardian,November 20, 1991, p.6.
53. Carl Bernstein, Time, February 24, 1992, Cover Story p.28-35.
54. "The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control", Time, February 24,
1992, p.35.
55. "Time's Missing Link: Poland to Latin America", National Catholic
Reporter,February 28, 1992, p.24.
56a. Jim Lynn, "School of Americas Commander Hopes to Expand Mission",
Benning Patriot, February 21, 1992, p.12.
56b. Vicky Imerman, "U.S. Army School of the Americas Plans
Expansion", News Release from S.O.A. Watch, P.O. Bo 3330, Columbus,
Georgia 31903.
57. 60 MINUTES, CBS, March 8, 1992.
58. Jack Colhoun, "Tricky Dick's Quick Election Fix", The Guardian,
January 29,1992, p.18.
59a. Sean P. Murphy, "Several Probes May Have Ignored Evidence Against
Police", Boston Globe, July 28, 1991, p.1.
59b. Christopher B. Daly, "Pattern of Police Abuses Reported in Boston
Case", Washington Post, July 12, 1991, p.A3.
59c. Associated Press, "Dayton Police Probing Erasure of Arrest
Video", WashingtonPost, May 26, 1991, p.A20.
59d. Gabriel Escobar, "Deaf Man's Death In Police Scuffle Called
Homicide", Washington Post, May 18, 1991, p.B1.
59e. Jay Mathews, "L.A. Police Laughed at Beating", Washington Post,
March 19, 1991, p.A1.
59f. David Maraniss, "One Cop's View of Police Violence", Washington
Post, April 12,1991, p.A1.
59g. From News Services, "Police Abuse Detailed", Washington Post,
February 8, 1992,p.A8.
60. Michael Dobbs, "Panhandling the Kremlin: How Gus Hall Got
Millions", Washington Post, March 1, 1992, p.A1.
61. David Streitfeld, "Secret Consortium To Publish Rushdie In
Paperback", Washington Post, March 14, 1992, p.D1.
62a. See notes 48 and 49.
62b. See note 47b, p.63-76.
62c. "Fairness In Broadcasting Act of 1987", U.S. Senate Bill S742.
62d. "Now Let That 'Fairness' Bill Die", Editorial, Washington Post,
June 24, 1987. The Post opposed the Fairness in Broadcasting Act.
63. David E. Scheim, Contract on America — The Mafia Murder of
President John F.Kennedy, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988,
p.viii.
64. See note 63, p.28.
65a. Chuck Conconi, "Out and About", Washington Post, February 26,
1991, p.B3.
65b. George Lardner Jr., "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland",
Washington Post, May19, 1991, p.D1.
65c. George Lardner, "…Or Just a Sloppy Mess", Washington Post, June
2, 1991,p.D3.
65d. Charles Krauthammer, "A Rash of Conspiracy Theories — When Do We
Dig Up BillCasey?", Washington Post, July 5, 1991, p.A19.
65e. Eric Brace, "Personalities", Washington Post, October 31, 1991,
p.C3.
65f. Associated Press, "'JFK' Director Condemned — Warren Commission
Attorney Calls Stone Film 'A Big Lie'", Washington Post, December 16,
1991, p.D14.
65g. Gerald R. Ford and David W. Belin, "Kennedy Assassination: How
About the Truth?", Washington Post, December 17, 1991, p.A21.
65h. Rita Kemply, "'JFK': History Through A Prism", Washington Post,
December 20,1991, p.D1.
65i. George Lardner Jr., "The Way it Wasn't — In 'JFK', Stone
Assassinates the Truth", Washington Post, December 20, 1991, p.D2.
65j. Desson Howe, "Dallas Mystery: Who Shot JFK?", Washington Post,
December 20,1991, p.55.
65k. Phil McCombs, "Oliver Stone, Returning the Fire — In Defending
His 'JFK' Conspiracy Film, the Director Reveals His Rage and
Reasoning", Washington Post, December 21, 1991, p.F1.
65l. George F. Will, "'JFK': Paranoid History", Washington Post,
December 26, 1991,p.A23.
65m. "On Screen", 'JFK' movie review, Washington Post, Weekend,
December 27, 1991.
65n. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "Shadow Play", Washington Post, December
27, 1991, p.A21.
65o. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style", Washington Post,
December 29,1991, p.C7.
65p. Michael Isikoff, "H-e-e-e-e-r-e's Conspiracy! — Why Did Oliver
Stone Omit (Or Suppress!). the Role of Johnny Carson?", Washington
Post, December 29, 1991,p.C2.
65q. Robert O'Harrow Jr., "Conspiracy Theory Wins Converts —
Moviegoers Say 'JFK' Nourishes Doubts That Oswald Acted Alone",
Washington Post, January 2, 1992, p.B1.
65r. Michael R. Beschloss, "Assassination and Obsession", Washington
Post, January 5, 1992, p.C1.
65s. Charles Krauthammer, "'JFK': A Lie, But Harmless", Washington
Post, January 10,1992, p.A19.
65t. Art Buchwald, "Bugged: The Flu Conspiracy", Washington Post,
January 14, 1992,p.E1.
65u. Ken Ringle, "The Fallacy of Conspiracy Theories — Good on Film,
But the Motivation Is All Wrong", Washington Post, January 19, 1992,
p.G1.
65v. Charles Paul Freund, "If History Is a Lie — America's Resort to
Conspiracy Thinking", Washington Post, January 19, 1992, p.C1.
65w. Richard Cohen, "Oliver's Twist", Washington Post Magazine,
January 19, 1992, p.5.
65. Michael Isikoff, "Seeking JFK's Missing Brain", Washington Post,
January 21,1992, p.A17.
65y. Don Oldenburg, "The Plots Thicken — Conspiracy Theorists Are
Everywhere", Washington Post, January 28, 1992, p.E5.
65z. Joel Achenbach, "JFK Conspiracy: Myth vs. the Facts", Washington
Post, February 28, 1992, p.C5.
65A. List of books on the best-seller list: On the Trail of the
Assassins is characterized as "conspiracy plot theories", Washington
Post, March 8, 1992,Bookworld, p.12
66. See notes 65n, 65w, 65l, 65b, 65c, and 65i.
67a. Peter Dale Scott, "Vietnamization and the Drama of the Pentagon
Papers". Published in The Senator Gravel Edition of The Pentagon
Papers, Volume V,p.211-247.
67b. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy — The Secret Road to the
Second Indochina War, Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p.
215-224.
67c. L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, Copyright 1973. New
printing, Costa Mesa CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990,
p.402-416.
67d. See note 63, p.58, 183, 187, 194, 273-4.
67e. John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992.
67f. Peter Dale Scott, Letter to the Editor, The Nation, March 9,
1992, p.290.
68a. See note 65b.
68b. Oliver Stone, "The Post, George Lardner, and My Version of the
JFK Assassination", Washington Post, June 2, 1991, p.D3.
69. See note 65b.
70. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of The Assassins, New York: Warner
Books, 1988, 315/318.
71. Associated Press, "Garrison, 2 Others, Found Not Guilty Of Bribery
Charge", Washington Post, September 28, 1973, p.A3.
72. See note 65c.
73. See note 65i.
74. See note 67e, p.438-450.
75. John G. Leyden, "Historians, Buffs, and Crackpots", Washington
Post, Bookworld, January 26, 1992, p.8.
76a. Tad Szulc, "New Doubts, Fears in JFK Assassination Probe",
Washington Star,September 19, 1975, p.A1.
76b. Tad Szulc, "Warren Commission's Self-Doubts Grew Day by Day —
'This Bullet Business Leaves Me Confused'", Washington Star, September
20, 1975, p.A1.
76c. Tad Szulc, "Urgent and Secret Meeting of the Warren Commission —
Dulles Proposed that the Minutes be Destroyed", Washington Star,
September 21, 1975,p.A1.
77. "Cable Sought to Discredit Critics of Warren Report", New York
Times, December 26, 1977, p.A37.
78. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1979,p.141-2.
79a. Eve Pell, "Private Censorship — Killing 'Katharine The Great'",
The Nation, November 12, 1983.
79b. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, Bethesda MD: National Press,
1987. Davis says, "…corporate documents that became available during
my subsequent lawsuit against him [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich chairman,
William Jovanovich] showed that 20,000 copies [of Katharine the Great]
had been "processed and converted into waste paper"".
79c. Daniel Brandt, "All the Publisher's Men — A Suppressed Book
About Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham Is On Sale Again"
National Reporter, Fall 1987, p.60.
79d. Deborah Davis, Katharine The Great, New York: Sheridan Square
Press, 1991. "…publishers who don't give a shit", p.iv-v; bullying
HBJ into recalling the book, p.iv-vi; lawsuit and settlement, p..
80. Benjamin C. Bradlee, Letter to Deborah Davis, April 1, 1987. See
note 79d, p.304.
81. See note 79d, p.119-132.
82. Carl Bernstein, "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.63.
83a. Daniel Brandt, Letter to Richard L. Harwood of The Washington
Post, September 15, 1988. The letter asks for the Post's rationale for
its policy of protecting government covert actions, and whether this
policy is still in effect.
83b. Daniel Brandt, "Little Magazines May Come and Go", The National
Reporter, Fall 1988, p.4. Notes the Post's protection of the identity
of CIA agent Joseph F.Fernandez. Brandt says, "America needs to
confront its own recent history as well as protect the interests of
its citizens, and both can be accomplished by outlawing peacetime
covert activity. This would contribute more to thesecurity of
Americans than all the counterterrorist proposals and elite strike
forces that ever found their way onto Pentagon wish-lists."
83c. Richard L. Harwood, Letter to Daniel Brandt, September 28, 1988.
Harwood's two- sentence letter reads, "We have a long-standing policy
of not naming covert agents of the C.I.A., except in unusual
circumstances. We applied that policy to Fernandez."
84. See note 79d, p.131.
85. Katharine Graham, "Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist
Acts", Washington Post, April 20, 1986, p.C1.
86. "conspire", ß4ßRandom House Dictionary of the English Language,
Second Edition Unabridged, 1987.
87. Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes", Washington Post, June 18, 1991, p.D1.
88. See note 65y.
89. See note 65n.
90. See note 65d.
91. William Casey, Private Communications with JCH, March 1992.
Richard Harwood, "What Conspiracy?", Washington Post, March 1, 1992,
p.C6.
93. p. 29-32.
94a. Washington Post Electronic Data Base, Dialog Information Services
Inc., April 25, 1992. In 1991 and 1992, the name Bill Clinton appeared
in 878 Washington Post stories, columns, letters, or editorials;
"Jerry" Brown in 485, Pat Buchanan in 303, and Larry Agran in 28. In
those 28, Agran's name appeared 76 times, Clinton's 151, and Brown
105. In only 1 of those 28 did Agran's name appear in a headline.
94b. Colman McCarthy, "What's 'Minor' About This Candidate?",
Washington Post, February 1, 1992. Washington Post columnist McCarthy
tells how television and party officials have kept presidential
candidate Larry Agran out of sight. The Post's own daily news-blackout
of Agran is not discussed.
94c. Scot Lehigh, "Larry Agran: 'Winner' in Debate With Little Chance
For the Big Prize", Boston Globe, February 25, 1992.
94d. Joshua Meyrowitz, "The Press Rejects a Candidate", Columbia
Journalism Review,March/April, 1992.
95. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy And Other Crimes By The
Press, NewYork: Harper and Row, 1972, p.36-7.
96a. 28 USC Section 455. "Any justice, judge, or magistrate of the
United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his
impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [emphasis added]
96b. Alpo Petfoods, Inc. v. Ralston Purina Co., 913 F2d 958 (CA DC
1990)..
96c. Monroe Freedman, "Thomas' Ethics and the Court — Nominee 'Unfit
to Sit' For Failing to Recuse In Ralston Purina Case", Legal Times,
August 26, 1991.
96d. Paul D. Wilcher, "Opposition to the Confirmation of Judge
Clarence Thomas to become a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on the
grounds of his JUDICIAL MISCONDUCT", Letter to U.S. Senator Joseph R.
Biden, October 15, 1991.
97. Al Kamen and Michael Isikoff, "'A Distressing Turn', Activists
Decry What Process Has Become", Washington Post, October 12, 1991,
p.A1.
98. January 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 1992, p.A1 each day.
99. See note 86.
100. Thomas W. Lippman, "Energy Lobby Fights Unseen 'Killers'",
Washington Post,April 1, 1992, p.A21. This article explains that
"representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers and the coal, oil, natural gas, offshore
drilling and nuclear power industries, whose interests often conflict,
pledged to work together to oppose amendments limiting offshore oil
drilling, nuclear power and carbon dioxide emissions soon to be
offered by key House members".
101. "cartel", Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977.
NOTES
A good source on the Washington Post and Katharine Graham's attempt to suppress the Davis book,"Katherine The Great,", which was largely successful, is Carol Felsenthal's, "Power and Privilege at the Post, the Katharine Graham Story."
For more information on Johnny Rosselli and Moses and Walter Annenberg, an excellent source is "All American Mafioso, the Johnny Rosselli Story," by Ed Becker and Charles Rappelye.
An additional good short reference is "The CIA's Greatest Hits" by Mark Zepezauer. There you will find the reference to Carl Bernstein's classic "The CIA and the Media" which appeared in Rolling Stone on Oct. 20, 1977.
Still another recent example of the CIA's control of the media is the spiking of Sally Denton's & Roger Morris' story,"THE CRIMES OF MENA" by Washington Post managing editor Bob Kaiser even though the story had been legally vetted and cleared for publication. Indeed the story, which details the CIA's involvement in drug trafficing, was already typeset and ready to go when it was killed withouty explanation.
Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Daniel Brandt
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997Alongside those Greek morality plays and Biblical injunctions, we are also reminded by history itself that the use of unethical means to achieve a worthy end can be self-destructive. Power, by definition, is isolated from the correcting signals of external criticism. Or perhaps the feeling of fighting evil fits so comfortably, that it's difficult to shed even after objective circumstances change.
The history of U.S. intelligence since World War II follows both patterns. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, had jurisdiction over wartime covert operations and propaganda in the fight against fascism. OSS chief William Donovan recruited heavily among social and academic elites. When the CIA was launched in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War, these pioneers felt that they had both the right and the duty to secretly manipulate the masses for the greater good.
OSS veteran Frank Wisner ran most of the early peacetime covert operations as head of the Office of Policy Coordination. Although funded by the CIA, OPC wasn't integrated into the CIA's Directorate of Plans until 1952, under OSS veteran Allen Dulles. Both Wisner and Dulles were enthusiastic about covert operations. By mid-1953 the department was operating with 7,200 personnel and 74 percent of the CIA's total budget.
Wisner created the first "information superhighway." But this was the age of vacuum tubes, not computers, so he called it his "Mighty Wurlitzer." The CIA's global network funded the Italian elections in 1948, sent paramilitary teams into Albania, trained Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, and pumped money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the National Student Association, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Key leaders and labor unions in western Europe received subsidies, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were launched. The Wurlitzer, an organ designed for film productions, could imitate sounds such as rain, thunder, or an auto horn. Wisner and Dulles were at the keyboard, directing history.
The ethos of the fight against fascism carried over into the fight against godless communism; for these warriors, the Cold War was still a war. OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such).[1]
After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in U.S. psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using U.S. public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3]
The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis — the capacity to see and understand the world around them — entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.
Troublesome notes were heard from the Wurlitzer in the 1960s — but not from American journalism, which had already sold its soul to the empire. Instead, the announcement that the emperor had no clothes was made by a new generation. Much that was dear to this counterculture was stylistic and superficial, and there were many within this culture itself, and certainly within the straight media, who mistook this excess baggage for its essence. Nevertheless, the youth culture's rumpled opposition was sufficient to slow down the machine and let in some light.
The ruling class failed to see the naked contradiction that they had created. They expected that the most-privileged, best-educated generation in history could be forcibly drafted to fight a dirty war against popular self-determination some 8,000 miles away — a war that clearly had more to do with anticommunist ideology and corporate greed than it did with the defense of America. The elites didn't have a clue that this was even a problem; President Johnson's knee-jerk response to the student antiwar movement, for example, was to pressure the CIA into uncovering the nefarious (and nonexistent) foreign influences behind it.
Thus the crack in the culture that eventually encouraged American media to take a look at themselves. With rare exceptions,[4] it was the alternative press that began to question racism, police brutality, Vietnam, the defense establishment, and the JFK assassination. In 1967 Ramparts magazine exposed a portion of the CIA's covert funding network, whereupon the New York Times and Washington Post began naming more names. By then the Wurlitzer would never sound the same, particularly after the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy invited further suspicions.
The counterculture burned out once the war wound down, but it had already dented the lemming-like consensus that typified an earlier period. For roughly ten years, between 1967 and 1977, Americans learned something of their secret history. From the perspective of twenty additional years, the results were mixed and much remains secret. But it's scary to think of where we might be now if the counterculture had never happened.
During the last half of those ten years, sandwiched between Watergate coverage on one end, and Congressional investigations of the CIA on the other, the media showed some interest in examining their own intelligence connections. The first shoe was dropped by Jack Anderson in late August, 1973, when he revealed that Seymour Freidin, head of the Hearst bureau in London, was a CIA agent. Freidin, already in the news because the Republicans paid him $10,000 in 1972 to spy on the Democrats, confirmed Anderson's story. At that point William Colby, the new CIA director, was asked by the New York Times and the Washington Star-News if any of their staff were on the CIA payroll.
James (Scotty) Reston of the NYT was satisfied with an evasive answer, but when the Star-News editorial board met with Colby, they made some progress. The other shoe dropped with an article by Oswald Johnston on November 30: the Star-News learned from an "authoritative source" (Colby) that the CIA had some three dozen American journalists on its payroll. Johnston named only one — Jeremiah O'Leary — who was one of their own diplomatic correspondents. (The Star-News stopped publishing in 1981, at which point O'Leary joined Reagan's national security staff. From 1982 until his death in 1993, he was with the Washington Times.)
That was the first and last time that Colby was helpful on this topic. Some believe that the new director was under pressure from the "young Turks" (junior staffers) at the Agency, who were granted a mandate by Colby's predecessor to cough up the "family jewels" — a list of illegal exploits that could be culled from the CIA's files. Already there were rumors that the CIA was guilty of illegal spying on the antiwar movement — rumors that were confirmed a year later by Seymour Hersh, whose sources were some of these same "young Turks."
Why was Colby initially forthcoming on the issue of the CIA and the media, and why did he then start stonewalling? Some believe that he was attempting a "limited hangout" as the best way out of a position that made him nervous, while others feel that he was implicitly threatening to provide additional names in order to scare off the media. Colby had reason to be worried: by late 1973, investigative journalism was in the air because of Watergate — an issue that had more than the usual share of CIA connections.
Colby's stonewalling continued for the remainder of his tenure, even as a Senate committee led by Frank Church desperately tried to squeeze more names out of him. George Bush replaced Colby in January, 1976, and eventually agreed to a one-paragraph summary of each file of a CIA journalist, with names deleted. When the CIA said it was finished, the Church committee had over 400 summaries.
The committee staff was shocked at the extent of the CIA's activity in this area, and felt that they still didn't have the story. But they were running out of time, and expected that the Senate's new permanent oversight committee would continue their work. The Church committee's final report contained only a handful of vague and misleading pages on the CIA and the media. "It hardly reflects what was found," stated Senator Gary Hart. "There was a prolonged and elaborate negotiation [with the CIA] over what would be said."[5]
The House investigation of the CIA, under Otis Pike, had more problems than the Senate investigation. The full House voted to suppress its committee's final report under pressure from the executive branch, at which point Daniel Schorr of CBS leaked a copy to the Village Voice. This report contained just twelve paragraphs on the topic of the CIA and the media, including the tidbit about the CIA's "frequent manipulation of Reuters wire service dispatches."[6] Another paragraph gave some idea of the scope of the CIA's efforts in this area:
Some 29 percent of Forty Committee-approved covert actions were for media and propaganda projects. This number is probably not representative. Staff has determined the existence of a large number of CIA internally-approved operations of this type, apparently deemed not politically sensitive. It is believed that if the correct number of all media and propaganda projects could be determined, it would exceed Election Support as the largest single category of covert action projects undertaken by the CIA.[7]
One enterprising researcher took this 29 percent figure, and extrapolating from figures on CIA expenditures for covert operations, found that the cost of propaganda in 1978 was around $265 million and involved 2,000 personnel. Comparing this to figures for other news agencies, he concluded that the CIA "uses far more resources in its propaganda operations than any single news agency…. In fact, the CIA propaganda budget is as large as the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International and the Associated Press."[8]
CBS took Daniel Schorr off the air after he leaked the Pike committee report. This was most likely a convenient opportunity for William Paley, chairman of CBS, who didn't approve of Schorr's interest in the network's own CIA connection. Former CBS News president Sig Mickelson, who by 1976 was president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, said that in October 1954, Paley called him into his office for a friendly discussion with two CIA officials. Schorr mentioned this on Walter Cronkite's show, and in an op-ed piece for the New York Times (Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the late publisher of the Times, had been cozy with the CIA also). "There are executives and retired executives," Schorr wrote, "who could help dispel the cloud hanging over the press by coming forward to tell the arrangements they made with the CIA."[9]
Little had changed since 1974, when Michael J. Harrington, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, leaked Colby's closed-door testimony about CIA involvement in the 1973 coup in Chile. Harrington soon found himself the target of a formal Ethics Committee investigation; now Schorr was also their target. Apparently Congress was fearful that the executive branch might paint them as bungling and irresponsible when it came to keeping secrets, and then use this as a club to deprive them of access to information.
If Congress felt this way, it was more than simple paranoia. In 1976 the CIA began cranking up their Wurlitzer on the matter of Richard Welch, a station chief in Athens who was assassinated by urban guerrillas at the end of 1975. The CIA's exploitation of this timely tragedy had both an immediate target and a general target. Ostensibly the CIA was complaining about an obscure Washington magazine called CounterSpy, which had been printing CIA names. In the same spirit, Philip Agee's just-published diary of CIA tricks in Latin America was loaded with names, and was already an international sensation. But the general target of this campaign was more important — the CIA managed to change the nature of the debate. Suddenly it was no longer a question of what dirty work the CIA might be doing, but rather a question of what happens when the press recklessly endangers the lives of our brave boys overseas.
The fact that Welch's name had been published by the East Germans five years earlier, and that he could be identified as a CIA officer from his listing in the unclassified 1973 State Department Biographic Register, were both ignored. In any case, it was hardly a secret in Athens — the group that killed Welch had been stalking his predecessor, Stacy Hulse, until Welch moved into the Hulse residence five months earlier. Colby eventually admitted to a House subcommittee that Welch's cover was inexcusably weak, and that the publication of his name in an Athens newspaper had only an indirect effect on his assassination.[10]
Colby could say this two years later because by then his comments were destined for a back page. The battle to rein in the CIA was already lost. In 1982 Congress passed a controversial new law that made publication of CIA names a felony under certain conditions. Although these conditions rarely applied to journalists, the wide coverage on this issue served to intimidate most publishers and editors.
Today the CIA, which once issued an automatic "no comment" when asked anything by reporters, is playing an adept game of "soft cop, hard cop" public relations. In 1991 an internal CIA task force recommended a more active posture by the public affairs office when responding to requests for assistance (that year they handled 3,369 telephone inquires from reporters, provided 174 unclassified background briefings for them at Headquarters, and arranged 164 interviews with senior Agency officials).[11] The "hard cop" was discovered by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. In 1995 she was telephoned by Vin Swasey, CIA deputy director of public affairs, who strongly objected to an editorial because it included the names of nine former station chiefs in Guatemala.[12] Reuters was persuaded by Swasey's colleagues to run the story without the names.
The final months of 1977 produced three significant pieces of journalism on the CIA and the media, just before the issue was abandoned altogether. The first, by Joe Trento and Dave Roman, reported the connections between Copley Press and the CIA. Owner James S. Copley cooperated with the CIA for three decades. A subsidiary, Copley News Service, was used as a CIA front in Latin America, while reporters at the Copley-owned San Diego Union and Evening News were instructed to spy on antiwar protesters for the FBI. No less than 23 news service employees were simultaneously working for the CIA. James Copley, who died in 1973, was also a leading figure behind the CIA-funded Inter-American Press Association.[13]
The next article was by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. In a long piece in Rolling Stone, he came up with the figure of 400 American journalists over the past 25 years, based primarily on interviews with Church committee staffers. This figure included stringers and freelancers who had an understanding that they were expected to help the CIA, as well as a small number of full-time CIA employees using journalism as a cover. It did not include foreigners, nor did it include numerous Americans who traded favors with the CIA in the normal give-and-take between a journalist and his sources. In addition to some of the names already mentioned above, Bernstein supplied details on Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Henry Luce, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Hal Hendrix of the Miami News, columnist C.L. Sulzberger, Richard Salant of CBS, and Philip Graham and John Hayes of the Washington Post.
Bernstein concentrated more on the owners, executives, and editors of news organizations than on individual reporters. "Lets's not pick on some poor reporters, for God's sake," William Colby said at one point to the Church committee's investigators. "Let's go to the management. They were witting." Bernstein noted that Colby had specific definitions for words such as "contract employee," "agent," "asset," "accredited correspondent," "editorial employee," "freelance," "stringer," and even "reporter," and through careful use of these words, the CIA "managed to obscure the most elemental fact about the relationships detailed in its files: i.e., that there was recognition by all parties involved that the cooperating journalists were working for the CIA — whether or not they were paid or had signed employment contracts."[14]
The reaction to Bernstein's piece among mainstream media was to ignore it, or to suggest that it was sloppy and exaggerated. Then two months later, the New York Times published the results of their "three- month inquiry by a team of Times reporters and researchers." This three-part series not only confirmed Bernstein, but added a wealth of far-ranging details and contained twice as many names. Now almost everyone pretended not to notice.
The Times reported that over the last twenty years, the CIA owned or subsidized more than fifty newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. These were used for propaganda efforts, or even as cover for operations. Another dozen foreign news organizations were infiltrated by paid CIA agents. At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, "Oh, sure, all the time."
Since domestic propaganda was a violation of the their charter, the CIA defined the predictable effects of their foreign publications as "blowback" or "domestic fallout," which they considered to be "inevitable and consequently permissible." But former CIA employees told the Times that apart from this unintended blowback, "some CIA propaganda efforts, especially during the Vietnam War, had been carried out with a view toward their eventual impact in the United States." The Times series concluded that at its peak, the CIA's network "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals."[15]
By the time the Times series appeared, Congress was looking for a way out of the issue. Obligingly, Stansfield Turner promised that the CIA would avoid journalists "accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." There were at least three problems with this that most press coverage overlooked: many stringers and freelancers are not accredited; it didn't cover any foreign-owned media; and as Gary Hart complained at the time, the new policy included a provision that allowed the CIA to unilaterally make exceptions whenever it wished.[16]
Within several years of this alleged policy, the new Reagan administration ignored it in favor of a shooting war in Central America, one component of which was an illegal CIA-administered propaganda war at home. Edgar Chamorro, a contra sympathizer in Miami with a background in public relations, was recruited by the CIA in late 1982. After two years of following the CIA's instructions regarding the manipulation of U.S. journalists and even members of Congress, Chamorro went public with his story.[17] By now Congress was clearly out-maneuvered, even though it alone held the purse strings that controlled funding for the war.
The inability of Congress to address the CIA-media problem in the 1970s meant that more powerful forces were at work. In fact, while Congress was wringing its left hand over illegal CIA activities, its right hand was helping the CIA overhaul its Wurlitzer. Ever since 1967, when the Katzenbach committee was tasked by Lyndon Johnson to study the problem of the CIA's use of domestic organizations, the agenda at the highest levels had been to remove such activities from the CIA's payroll and continue them under a new umbrella. In the unclassified portion of their report, this committee recommended giving money openly through a "public-private mechanism." "The CIA's big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough," observed Gloria Steinem, who had been part of the CIA's global network.[18]
The Asia Foundation was given a large "severance payment" so that they could find private funding,[19] and the Congress for Cultural Freedom got over $4 million from the Ford Foundation.[20] In 1971, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were spun off and funded separately by new legislation. While this hardly diminished the CIA's control of these radio stations, it did help public relations by facilitating "deniability."[21] Then in 1983, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, with funding to carry on many of the activities that the CIA once carried out covertly within its own budget.
Bits and pieces of the old Wurlitzer were still evident everywhere: John Richardson, Jr., the new chairman of NED, had been president and CEO of Radio Free Europe during the 1960s, and some of the NED's dozens of grants were issued to groups that solicited aid for the contras.[22] "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach," commented Colby in regard to the NED program. "Many of the programs which … were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy."[23] As if to prove his point, Colby's wife was soon a member of NED's board of directors.
Two major changes since the 1980s — the collapse of socialism and the centralization of domestic and transnational media, suggest that the CIA now has everything well in hand. But it is far too early to tell. The pressure to stay competitive in the global marketplace could provoke economic nationalism in places where the CIA was once free to roam. France and Germany, for example, have recently expelled CIA agents. At the same time, the Soviet people are having second thoughts about all those benefits of U.S.-imposed capitalism. China remains aggressive and uncompromising; they may even tolerate less interference from us in their political process than we do from them.
It's a different world, and it's unfamiliar. A blue-ribbon panel of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested last year that the CIA be freed from some policy constraints on covert operations, such as the use of journalists and clergy as cover. This is alarming. Unlike the typical corporate-funded think tank, filled with pro-Pentagon pundits, the folks at CFR are either running the world or they know who does. For 70 years they've rarely recommended anything that has not become policy. Furthermore, they've thoroughly co-opted the major media (see sidebar).
There have also been official announcements that the CIA is mission-creeping into economic intelligence and computer-age information warfare. This might reflect a bit of nostalgia for the job security and moral clarity of the Cold War, or it could be a premonition that the American Century is over and the masses are expected to get uppity. Perhaps the First Amendment has always been something of a con — a matter of "freedom," but only for those who own the presses, or for those who lived in an earlier century, before psywar and public relations experts.
Then again, stay tuned — the credibility gap is back. A recent poll shows that Americans are fed up with mainstream news media. "Very favorable" ratings for television network news fell from 30 percent in 1985 to just 15 percent this year, and for large national newspapers it dropped 12 percent. A majority now believe that news stories are often inaccurate.[24]
After factoring in the new global economics and recalculating the prospects for the middle class, all bets are off. The poor performance of Congress and the press on the issue of journalists and the CIA may mean that the next time around, the elites will lack even the credibility to stage another co-opting charade of "oversight." That could prove beneficial, particularly if next the time threatens to be as inconsequential and diversionary as the last time.
1. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 70-71.
2. Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 111-114; Thomas P. McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976), pp. 45-48.
3. Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA (Armonk NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 160-183.
4. The first anti-CIA book appeared in 1964: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House). CIA director John McCone, and other officials acting under his direction, contacted the publisher in an effort to stop it.
5. Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media," Rolling Stone, 20 October 1977, pp. 65-67.
6. "The CIA Report the President Doesn't Want You to Read," Village Voice, 20 February 1976, p. 40.
7. Ibid, p. 36.
8. Sean Gervasi, "CIA Covert Propaganda Capability," Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 7, December 1979 - January 1980, pp. 18-20.
9. Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1978), pp. 204-206, 275-277.
10. Norman Kempster, "Identity of U.S. Spies Harder to Hide, Colby Says," Los Angeles Times, 28 December 1977, pp. 1, 8.
11. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence from the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, 20 December 1991, 15 pages.
12. Allan Nairn, "The Country Team," The Nation, 5 June 1995, p. 780.
13. Joe Trento and Dave Roman, "The Spies Who Came In From the Newsroom," Penthouse, August 1977, pp. 44-46, 50.
14. Bernstein, p. 58.
15. John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treaster, "The CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views," New York Times, 25 December 1977, pp. 1, 12; Terrence Smith, "CIA Contacts With Reporters," New York Times, p. 13; Crewdson and Treaster, "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA," New York Times, 26 December 1977, pp. 1, 37; Crewdson and Treaster, "CIA Established Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad," New York Times, 27 December 1977, pp. 1, 40-41.
16. While it's true that Gary Hart's complaint was not widely covered (there's one paragraph in the Los Angeles Times on 16 December 1977, p. 2), it is still amazing that when this clause was rediscovered in early 1996, indignant columnists pretended that it had been a secret all along. The truth is, journalists haven't been doing their homework for the last 18 years. This led the Society of Professional Journalists to earn a flunking grade for their 23 February 1996 press release: "An executive order during the Carter administration was thought to have banned the practice [of the recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed that a 'loophole' existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a waiver. After protests, Deutch refused to rule out the practice, saying in some cases it might be necessary." To rephrase this politely, it took 18 years for the SPJ to become aware of the fine print in the CIA's policy. This is probably due to poor reporting from newspapers such as the Washington Post, which the innocents at SPJ must think of as not only "liberal," but also competent. So why, when the Post's intelligence reporter, Walter Pincus, was told about the waiver last year, did he write it up as a scoop in the 22 February 1996 Washington Post??? Perhaps Pincus really didn't know. Or perhaps ever since Pincus took money from the CIA in the early 1960s, it has affected his reporting on this issue.
17. Edgar Chamorro, Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987), 78 pages; Jacqueline Sharkey, "Back in Control," Common Cause Magazine, September/October 1986, pp. 28-40.
18. "CIA Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings," New York Times, 21 February 1967.
19. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell Publishing, 1975), p. 179.
20. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989), pp. 224-225.
21. Marchetti and Marks, pp. 174-178.
22. John Kelly, "National Endowment for Reagan's Democracies," The National Reporter, Summer 1986, pp. 22-26; Council on Hemispheric Affairs and Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy (NED): A Foreign Policy Branch Gone Awry (Resource Center, Box 4506, Albuquerque NM 87196), 1990, 93 pages.
23. William Colby, "Political Action — In the Open," Washington Post, 14 March 1982, p. D8.
24. Jack Nelson, "Major News Media Trusted Less, Poll Says," Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1997.
Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997:
Journalists at Work: Who's Watching the Watchdogs?
In the handful of self-critical articles about the media that appeared twenty years ago, the matter of CIA connections with executives, editors, and reporters was emphasized. While this makes for good copy and is certainly worth repeating, it also fails to challenge American journalism at it weakest point: the corrupting influence of fame and fortune. Someone who has looked at this issue recently is James Fallows, formerly of Atlantic Monthly. Fallows argues in his recent book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, that his profession is becoming seriously compromised.
The name recognition that comes from flaccid punditry can be lucrative on the lecture circuit. Or if you have a name already, perhaps by doing something useless or naughty at the White House, you can acquire pundit status by writing a kiss-and-tell book. Big stars such as Cokie Roberts can collect five figures simply by offering up flattering platitudes at a corporate convention.
Another problem is the revolving door between the media and government. It's considered a badge of honor for a journalist to have spent time working for the White House, whereas it should be seen as a conflict of interest. Some suggest that it's okay to make the switch once — Bill Moyers can call himself a journalist after working for Lyndon Johnson, but David Gergen has been spinning through the door so often that it makes the rest of us dizzy. Gergen flacked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and finally Clinton, and between administrations he was an editor at U.S. News & World Report and a commentator for PBS. Come to think of it, James Fallows himself, the new editor at U.S. News & World Report, was the chief speech writer for Jimmy Carter.
Pundits and superstars aside, the larger problem is that the media is owned by the ruling class. With the increased media centralization of the last twenty years, their lock on the masses is now so complete that when they maintain an appearance of objectivity, it's only out of habit. (Sentences containing the words "ruling class" are scribbled self- consciously these days — a measure of how well they have cornered the market on perception, and perverted what class consciousness we once had into a mass-consumer consciousness.)
How can one distinguish between news and propaganda when the overlaps and interlocks are so pervasive? John Chancellor was with NBC, then with Voice of America, and then again with NBC. John Scali was with ABC, and then with Nixon, and then again with ABC. Ben Bradlee, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was once a propagandist in Paris, taking orders from the CIA station chief, and was friends with James Angleton. Bradley's sister-in-law was Mary Meyer, divorced from Cord Meyer. She was JFK's lover, and her 1964 murder was never solved. Robert John Myers was in the CIA for twenty years, at one time as an assistant to William Colby, and became publisher of the New Republic in 1968. Generoso Paul Pope, Jr. was in the CIA the year before he bought the National Enquirer in 1952. Laughlin Phillips, co-founder of the Washingtonian, was in the CIA for fifteen years. Former top CIA officials Cord Meyer, Jr. and Tom Braden became columnists (unlike Braden, Meyer rarely talks about his CIA career). George R. Packard and L. Bruce van Voorst were with the CIA before they joined Newsweek, and Philip Geyelin worked for the CIA while on leave from the Wall Street Journal.
There's always Katharine Graham, one of the world's richest women, who is now recognized as a victim of the male-dominated culture because her new autobiography says it's so. In a 1988 speech at CIA headquarters, Graham warmed to her audience: "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."
Over 100 pundits, news anchors, columnists, commentators, reporters, editors, executives, owners, and publishers can be found by scanning the 1995 membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations — the same CFR that issued a report in early 1996 bemoaning the constraints on our poor, beleaguered CIA. By the way, first William Bundy and then William G. Hyland edited CFR's flagship journal Foreign Affairs between the years 1972-1992. Bundy was with the CIA from 1951-1961, and Hyland from 1954-1969.
