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 former Village 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)
Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times)
Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find 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 that,
“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 Bleucher, 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 Dusseldorf, West Germany, and established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical warfare agents for the government.
At the Industrie Club in Dusseldorf in 1982, von Bleucher 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 totaling 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.
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 cover-up 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 [for World 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 exposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace.” (*22).
The Bush Administration cover-up 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 cover-ups…[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. taxpayers 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 problems relating 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 willful 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 Nixon and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic cover-ups 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.
The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)
CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment.
So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal:
“We’ll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us.”
The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator.
The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be “communists,” but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an “American Holocaust.”
The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.
The ironic thing about all this intervention is that it frequently fails to achieve American objectives. Often the newly installed dictator grows comfortable with the security apparatus the CIA has built for him. He becomes an expert at running a police state. And because the dictator knows he cannot be overthrown, he becomes independent and defiant of Washington’s will.
The CIA then finds it cannot overthrow him, because the police and military are under the dictator’s control, afraid to cooperate with American spies for fear of torture and execution. The only two options for the U.S at this point are impotence or war. Examples of this “boomerang effect” include the Shah of Iran, General Noriega and Saddam Hussein.
The boomerang effect also explains why the CIA has proven highly successful at overthrowing democracies, but a wretched failure at overthrowing dictatorships.
The following timeline should confirm that the CIA as we know it should be abolished and replaced by a true information-gathering and analysis organization.
The CIA cannot be reformed — it is institutionally and culturally corrupt.
1929 The culture we lost — Secretary of State Henry Stimson refuses to endorse a code-breaking operation, saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
1941 COI created — In preparation for World War II, President Roosevelt creates the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI). General William “Wild Bill” Donovan heads the new intelligence service.
1942 OSS created — Roosevelt restructures COI into something more suitable for covert action, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan recruits so many of the nation’s rich and powerful that eventually people joke that “OSS” stands for “Oh, so social!” or “Oh, such snobs!”
1943 Italy — Donovan recruits the Catholic Church in Rome to be the center of Anglo-American spy operations in Fascist Italy. This would prove to be one of America’s most enduring intelligence alliances in the Cold War.
1945 OSS is abolished — The remaining American information agencies cease covert actions and return to harmless information gathering and analysis.
Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union.
With full U.S. blessing, he creates the “Gehlen Organization,” a band of refugee Nazi spies who reactivate their networks in Russia. These include SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s).
The Gehlen Organization supplies the U.S. with its only intelligence on the Soviet Union for the next ten years, serving as a bridge between the abolishment of the OSS and the creation of the CIA. However, much of the “intelligence” the former Nazis provide is bogus.
Gehlen inflates Soviet military capabilities at a time when Russia is still rebuilding its devastated society, in order to inflate his own importance to the Americans (who might otherwise punish him). In 1948, Gehlen almost convinces the Americans that war is imminent, and the West should make a preemptive strike. In the 50s he produces a fictitious “missile gap.”
To make matters worse, the Russians have thoroughly penetrated the Gehlen Organization with double agents, undermining the very American security that Gehlen was supposed to protect.
1947 Greece — President Truman requests military aid to Greece to support right-wing forces fighting communist rebels. For the rest of the Cold War, Washington and the CIA will back notorious Greek leaders with deplorable human rights records.
CIA created — President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC — there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties… as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks.
1948 Covert-action wing created — The CIA recreates a covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination, led by Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
Italy — The CIA corrupts democratic elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. It works — the communists are defeated.
1949 Radio Free Europe — The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.
Late 40s Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player.
Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.
1953 Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.
Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide.
However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.
1954 Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.
1954-1958 North Vietnam — CIA officer Edward Lansdale spends four years trying to overthrow the communist government of North Vietnam, using all the usual dirty tricks. The CIA also attempts to legitimize a tyrannical puppet regime in South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem.
These efforts fail to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese because the Diem government is opposed to true democracy, land reform and poverty reduction measures. The CIA’s continuing failure results in escalating American intervention, culminating in the Vietnam War.
1956 Hungary — Radio Free Europe incites Hungary to revolt by broadcasting Khruschev’s Secret Speech, in which he denounced Stalin. It also hints that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. This aid fails to materialize as Hungarians launch a doomed armed revolt, which only invites a major Soviet invasion. The conflict kills 7,000 Soviets and 30,000 Hungarians.
1957-1973 Laos — The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections. The problem is the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an “Armee Clandestine” of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao.
After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. starts bombing, dropping more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves.
1959 Haiti — The U.S. military helps “Papa Doc” Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the “Tonton Macoutes,” who terrorize the population with machetes. They will kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.
1961 The Bay of Pigs — The CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba. But “Operation Mongoose” fails, due to poor planning, security and backing. The planners had imagined that the invasion will spark a popular uprising against Castro -– which never happens. A promised American air strike also never occurs. This is the CIA’s first public setback, causing President Kennedy to fire CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Dominican Republic — The CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator Washington has supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests have grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they have begun competing with American business interests.
Ecuador — The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man.
Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.
1963 Dominican Republic — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta.
Ecuador — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command, cancels the 1964 elections, and begins abusing human rights.
1964 Brazil — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco will create Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down “communists” for torture, interrogation and murder.
Often these “communists” are no more than Branco’s political opponents. Later it is revealed that the CIA trains the death squads.
1965 Indonesia — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA has been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, will massacre between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being “communist.” The CIA supplies the names of countless suspects.
Dominican Republic — A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country’s elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes.
Greece — With the CIA’s backing, the king removes George Papandreous as prime minister. Papandreous has failed to vigorously support U.S. interests in Greece.
Congo (Zaire) — A CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko as dictator. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.
1966 The Ramparts Affair — The radical magazine Ramparts begins a series of unprecedented anti-CIA articles. Among their scoops: the CIA has paid the University of Michigan $25 million dollars to hire “professors” to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods.
MIT and other universities have received similar payments. Ramparts also reveals that the National Students’ Association is a CIA front. Students are sometimes recruited through blackmail and bribery, including draft deferments.
1967 Greece — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government two days before the elections. The favorite to win was George Papandreous, the liberal candidate. During the next six years, the “reign of the colonels” — backed by the CIA — will usher in the widespread use of torture and murder against political opponents.
When a Greek ambassador objects to President Johnson about U.S. plans for Cypress, Johnson tells him: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution.”
Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 “Viet Cong.”
1968 Operation CHAOS — The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.
Bolivia — A CIA-organized military operation captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara. The CIA wants to keep him alive for interrogation, but the Bolivian government executes him to prevent worldwide calls for clemency.
1969 Uruguay — The notorious CIA torturer Dan Mitrione arrives in Uruguay, a country torn with political strife. Whereas right-wing forces previously used torture only as a last resort, Mitrione convinces them to use it as a routine, widespread practice.
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect,” is his motto. The torture techniques he teaches to the death squads rival the Nazis’. He eventually becomes so feared that revolutionaries will kidnap and murder him a year later.
1970 Cambodia — The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, who immediately throws Cambodian troops into battle. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in 1975 and massacres millions of its own people.
1971 Bolivia — After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed.
Haiti — “Papa Doc” Duvalier dies, leaving his 19-year old son “Baby Doc” Duvalier the dictator of Haiti. His son continues his bloody reign with full knowledge of the CIA.
1972 The Case-Zablocki Act — Congress passes an act requiring congressional review of executive agreements. In theory, this should make CIA operations more accountable. In fact, it is only marginally effective.
Cambodia — Congress votes to cut off CIA funds for its secret war in Cambodia.
Wagergate Break-in — President Nixon sends in a team of burglars to wiretap Democratic offices at Watergate. The team members have extensive CIA histories, including James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and five of the Cuban burglars. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), which does dirty work like disrupting Democratic campaigns and laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions. CREEP’s activities are funded and organized by another CIA front, the Mullen Company.
1973 Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left.
CIA begins internal investigations — William Colby, the Deputy Director for Operations, orders all CIA personnel to report any and all illegal activities they know about. This information is later reported to Congress.
Watergate Scandal — The CIA’s main collaborating newspaper in America, The Washington Post, reports Nixon’s crimes long before any other newspaper takes up the subject. The two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, make almost no mention of the CIA’s many fingerprints all over the scandal. It is later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House, and knows many important intelligence figures, including General Alexander Haig. His main source, “Deep Throat,” is probably one of those.
CIA Director Helms Fired — President Nixon fires CIA Director Richard Helms for failing to help cover up the Watergate scandal. Helms and Nixon have always disliked each other. The new CIA director is William Colby, who is relatively more open to CIA reform.
1974 CHAOS exposed — Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh publishes a story about Operation CHAOS, the domestic surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and civil rights groups in the U.S. The story sparks national outrage.
Angleton fired — Congress holds hearings on the illegal domestic spying efforts of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. His efforts included mail-opening campaigns and secret surveillance of war protesters. The hearings result in his dismissal from the CIA.
House clears CIA in Watergate — The House of Representatives clears the CIA of any complicity in Nixon’s Watergate break-in.
The Hughes Ryan Act — Congress passes an amendment requiring the president to report nonintelligence CIA operations to the relevant congressional committees in a timely fashion.
1975 Australia — The CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam. The CIA does this by giving an ultimatum to its Governor-General, John Kerr. Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, exercises his constitutional right to dissolve the Whitlam government. The Governor-General is a largely ceremonial position appointed by the Queen; the Prime Minister is democratically elected. The use of this archaic and never-used law stuns the nation.
Angola — Eager to demonstrate American military resolve after its defeat in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola. Contrary to Kissinger’s assertions, Angola is a country of little strategic importance and not seriously threatened by communism.
The CIA backs the brutal leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi. This polarizes Angolan politics and drives his opponents into the arms of Cuba and the Soviet Union for survival. Congress will cut off funds in 1976, but the CIA is able to run the war off the books until 1984, when funding is legalized again. This entirely pointless war kills over 300,000 Angolans.
“The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” — Victor Marchetti and John Marks publish this whistle-blowing history of CIA crimes and abuses. Marchetti has spent 14 years in the CIA, eventually becoming an executive assistant to the Deputy Director of Intelligence. Marks has spent five years as an intelligence official in the State Department.
“Inside the Company” — Philip Agee publishes a diary of his life inside the CIA. Agee has worked in covert operations in Latin America during the 60s, and details the crimes in which he took part.
Congress investigates CIA wrong-doing — Public outrage compels Congress to hold hearings on CIA crimes. Senator Frank Church heads the Senate investigation (“The Church Committee”), and Representative Otis Pike heads the House investigation. (Despite a 98 percent incumbency reelection rate, both Church and Pike are defeated in the next elections.)
The investigations lead to a number of reforms intended to increase the CIA’s accountability to Congress, including the creation of a standing Senate committee on intelligence. However, the reforms prove ineffective, as the Iran/Contra scandal will show. It turns out the CIA can control, deal with or sidestep Congress with ease.
The Rockefeller Commission — In an attempt to reduce the damage done by the Church Committee, President Ford creates the “Rockefeller Commission” to whitewash CIA history and propose toothless reforms. The commission’s namesake, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, is himself a major CIA figure. Five of the commission’s eight members are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a CIA-dominated organization.
1979 Iran — The CIA fails to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, a longtime CIA puppet, and the rise of Muslim fundamentalists who are furious at the CIA’s backing of SAVAK, the Shah’s bloodthirsty secret police. In revenge, the Muslims take 52 Americans hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Afghanistan — The Soviets invade Afghanistan. The CIA immediately begins supplying arms to any faction willing to fight the occupying Soviets. Such indiscriminate arming means that when the Soviets leave Afghanistan, civil war will erupt. Also, fanatical Muslim extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry. One of these is Sheik Abdel Rahman, who will become involved in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.
El Salvador — An idealistic group of young military officers, repulsed by the massacre of the poor, overthrows the right-wing government. However, the U.S. compels the inexperienced officers to include many of the old guard in key positions in their new government. Soon, things are back to “normal” — the military government is repressing and killing poor civilian protesters. Many of the young military and civilian reformers, finding themselves powerless, resign in disgust.
Nicaragua — Anastasio Somoza II, the CIA-backed dictator, falls. The Marxist Sandinistas take over government, and they are initially popular because of their commitment to land and anti-poverty reform. Samoza had a murderous and hated personal army called the National Guard. Remnants of the Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s.
1980 El Salvador — The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter “Christian to Christian” to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Shortly afterwards, right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government.
The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority. CIA-trained death squads roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mazote in 1982, where they massacre between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be killed.
1981 Iran/Contra Begins — The CIA begins selling arms to Iran at high prices, using the profits to arm the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. President Reagan vows that the Sandinistas will be “pressured” until “they say ‘uncle.’”
The CIA’s Freedom Fighter’s Manual disbursed to the Contras includes instruction on economic sabotage, propaganda, extortion, bribery, blackmail, interrogation, torture, murder and political assassination.
1983 Honduras — The CIA gives Honduran military officers the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983, which teaches how to torture people. Honduras’ notorious “Battalion 316” then uses these techniques, with the CIA’s full knowledge, on thousands of leftist dissidents. At least 184 are murdered.
1984 The Boland Amendment — The last of a series of Boland Amendments is passed. These amendments have reduced CIA aid to the Contras; the last one cuts it off completely. However, CIA Director William Casey is already prepared to “hand off” the operation to Colonel Oliver North, who illegally continues supplying the Contras through the CIA’s informal, secret, and self-financing network.
This includes “humanitarian aid” donated by Adolph Coors and William Simon, and military aid funded by Iranian arms sales.
1986 Eugene Hasenfus — Nicaragua shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying military supplies to the Contras. The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, turns out to be a CIA employee, as are the two dead pilots. The airplane belongs to Southern Air Transport, a CIA front. The incident makes a mockery of President Reagan’s claims that the CIA is not illegally arming the Contras.
Iran/Contra Scandal — Although the details have long been known, the Iran/Contra scandal finally captures the media’s attention in 1986. Congress holds hearings, and several key figures (like Oliver North) lie under oath to protect the intelligence community. CIA Director William Casey dies of brain cancer before Congress can question him. All reforms enacted by Congress after the scandal are purely cosmetic.
Haiti — Rising popular revolt in Haiti means that “Baby Doc” Duvalier will remain “President for Life” only if he has a short one. The U.S., which hates instability in a puppet country, flies the despotic Duvalier to the South of France for a comfortable retirement.
The CIA then rigs the upcoming elections in favor of another right-wing military strongman. However, violence keeps the country in political turmoil for another four years. The CIA tries to strengthen the military by creating the National Intelligence Service (SIN), which suppresses popular revolt through torture and assassination.
1989 Panama — The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega has been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, and has been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence have angered Washington… so out he goes.
1990 Haiti — Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed military deposes him. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats.
As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.
1991 The Gulf War — The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq. But Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, is another creature of the CIA. With U.S. encouragement, Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing.
This cemented Hussein’s power at home, allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. It also gave him all the military might he needed to conduct further adventurism — in Kuwait, for example.
The Fall of the Soviet Union — The CIA fails to predict this most important event of the Cold War. This suggests that it has been so busy undermining governments that it hasn’t been doing its primary job: gathering and analyzing information.
The fall of the Soviet Union also robs the CIA of its reason for existence: fighting communism. This leads some to accuse the CIA of intentionally failing to predict the downfall of the Soviet Union. Curiously, the intelligence community’s budget is not significantly reduced after the demise of communism.
1992 Economic Espionage — In the years following the end of the Cold War, the CIA is increasingly used for economic espionage. This involves stealing the technological secrets of competing foreign companies and giving them to American ones.
Given the CIA’s clear preference for dirty tricks over mere information gathering, the possibility of serious criminal behavior is very great indeed.
1993 Haiti — The chaos in Haiti grows so bad that President Clinton has no choice but to remove the Haitian military dictator, Raoul Cedras, on threat of U.S. invasion. The U.S. occupiers do not arrest Haiti’s military leaders for crimes against humanity, but instead ensure their safety and rich retirements.
Aristide is returned to power only after being forced to accept an agenda favorable to the country’s ruling class.
EPILOGUE
In a speech before the CIA celebrating its 50th anniversary, President Clinton said:
“By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage.”
Clinton’s is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing the CIA because they don’t know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform. Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked.
Furthermore, Clinton’s statement is simply untrue. The history of the agency is growing painfully clear, especially with the declassification of historical CIA documents. We may not know the details of specific operations, but we do know, quite well, the general behavior of the CIA. These facts began emerging nearly two decades ago at an ever-quickening pace. Today we have a remarkably accurate and consistent picture, repeated in country after country, and verified from countless different directions.
The CIA’s response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern. (Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church’s fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA’s criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. (See Philip Agee’s On the Run for an example of early harassment.)
However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics. Clinton’s “Americans will never know” defense is a prime example.
Another common apologetic is that,
“the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all.”
There are two things wrong with this.
First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.
Second, this argument begs several questions.
The first is:
“Which American interests?”
The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama.
The second begged question is:
“Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples’ human rights?”
The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity. Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting and analyzing information. As for covert action, there are two moral options. The first one is to eliminate covert action completely. But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world.
So a second option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote. Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear: like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs they are.
Endnotes:
1. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997).
2. Coleman McCarthy, “The Consequences of Covert Tactics” Washington Post, December 13, 1987.
1 . For a discussion of the development of the Common Rule, see chapter 14.
2 . We relied particularly on Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Other excellent sources include Jay Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972), and Robert Levine, Ethics and Regulation of Clinical Research (Baltimore: Urban and Schwarzenberg, 1981).
3 . U.S. Congress, The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence [Church Committee report], report no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976). Also, U.S. Army Inspector General, Use of Volunteers in Chemical Agent Research [Army IG report] (Washington, D.C.: 1975).
4 . In dissenting opinions, four justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (Brennan, Marshall, Stevens, and O’Connor) cited the Nuremberg Code. United States et al. v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, 687, 710 (1987).
5 . Thalidomide was only available in clinical trials in the United States at that time, but was approved for use in a number of other countries.
6 . Louis Lasagna, interview by Susan White-Junod and Jon Harkness (ACHRE), transcript of audio recording, 13 December 1994 (ACHRE Research Project Series, Interview Program Files, Ethics Oral History Project), 37-38. See also, Louis Lasagna, “1938-1968: The FDA, the Drug Industry, the Medical Profession, and the Public,” in Safeguarding the Public: Historical Aspects of Medicinal Drug Control, ed. John B. Blake (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 173.
8 . Congressional Record, 87th Cong, 2d Sess., 22042, as cited in an attached memorandum, C. Joseph Stetler, Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, to James L. Goddard, M.D., Commissioner of Food and Drugs, DHEW, 11 October 1966 (“Regarding Statement Appearing in August 30, 1966 Federal Register Concerning Clinical Investigation of Drugs”) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A).
9 . Keith Reemtsma et al., “Reversal of Early Graft Rejection after Renal Heterotransplantation in Man,” Journal of the American Medical Association 187 (1964): 691-696.
10 . This research, conducted by Dr. Chester Southam of Sloan-Kettering Institute and Dr. Emmanuel Mandel of the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in 1963 and funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Cancer Society, raised concern within PHS and brought about an investigation by the hospital. Drs. Mandel and Southam were subject to a disciplinary hearing before the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York. The hospital’s internal review and a suit against the hospital prompted concern and debate at the NIH. Edward J. Rourke, Assistant General Counsel, NIH, to Dr. Luther L. Terry, Surgeon General, 16 September 1965 (“Research Grants—Clinical—PHS responsibility—Fink v. Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital [New York Supreme Court, Kings County]”) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A).
For a more thorough discussion of this case, see Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings, 9-65.
11 . In 1967 Dr. Southam was elected vice president of the American Association for Cancer Research and became president the following year. Katz, Experimentation with Human Beings, 63 and 65.
12 . For a fuller discussion of the Law-Medicine Research Institute, see chapter 2.
13 . The development of the Declaration of Helsinki is discussed briefly in chapter 2.
14 . Robert B. Livingston, Associate Chief for Program Development, Memorandum to the Director, NIH, 4 November 1964 (“Progress Report on Survey of Moral and Ethical Aspects of Clinical Investigation” [the Livingston report]) (ACHRE No. HHS-090795-A), 3.
17 . Mark S. Frankel, “Public Policymaking for Biomedical Research: The Case of Human Experimentation” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 9 May 1976), 50-51.
18 . The NAHC discussed the “general question of the ethical, moral, and legal aspects of clinical investigation” at its meetings of September and December 1965. Terry’s interest in this was motivated in part by the concern of Senator Jacob K. Javits that the informed consent provisions of the 1962 Drug Amendments were not applicable to nondrug-related research. See (a) draft letter to Senator Javits from the Surgeon General, 15 October 1965; (b) Senator Javits to Luther L. Terry, Surgeon General, 15 June 1965; and (c) Edward J. Rourke, Assistant General Counsel, to William H. Stewart, Surgeon General, 26 October 1965. All in ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A.
19 . Transcript of the NAHC meeting, Washington, D.C., 28 September 1965. See Faden and Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent, 208.
21 . Dr. S. John Reisman, the Executive Secretary, NAHC, to Dr. James A. Shannon, 6 December 1965 (“Resolution of Council”) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A).
22 . Surgeon General, Public Health Service to the Heads of the Institutions Conducting Research with Public Health Service Grants, 8 February 1966 (“Clinical research and investigation involving human beings”) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A). This policy was distributed through Bureau of Medical Services Circular no. 38, 23 June 1966 (“Clinical Investigations Using Human Beings As Subjects”) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A).
23 . In December 1966 the policy was expanded to include behavioral as well as medical research. William H. Stewart, Surgeon General, Public Health Service, to Heads of Institutions Receiving Public Health Service Grants, 12 December 1966 (“Clarification of procedure on clinical research and investigation involving human subjects”) (ACHRE No. HHS-072894-B), 2.
In 1967 the Public Health Service required that intramural research, including that conducted at NIH, abide by similar requirements. William H. Stewart, Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, to List, 30 October 1967 (“PHS policy for intramural programs and for contracts when investigations involving human subjects are included”) (ACHRE No. HHS-072894-B), 2.
24 . Frankel, “Public Policymaking for Biomedical Research: The Case of Human Experimentation,” 161.
26 . U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, The Institutional Guide to DHEW Policy on Protection of Human Subjects (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971) (ACHRE No. HHS-090794-A).
28 . Beecher’s criticism involved many aspects of the research, including the risk assessment, usefulness of the research, and the question of informed consent. On this last point, Beecher argued that while consent was important, he disputed the belief that it was easily obtainable. In his talk at Brook Lodge, Beecher questioned the “naive assumption implicit in the Nuremberg Code,” that consent was readily obtainable. Beecher indicated the difficulty of obtaining truly informed consent may have led many researchers to treat the provision cavalierly and often to ignore it. Henry K. Beecher, “Ethics and the Explosion of Human Experimentation,” unpublished manuscript of paper presented 22 March 1965, “a,” Beecher Papers, Countway Library (ACHRE No. IND-072595-A).
32 . H. K. Beecher, “Ethics and Clinical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 274 (1966): 1354-1360.
33 . W. Goodman, “Doctors Must Experiment on Humans—But What are Patients Rights?” New York Times Magazine, 2 July 1965, 12-13, 29-33, as cited in Faden and Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent, 188.
34 . J. Lear, “Do We Need New Rules for Experimentation on People?” Saturday Review, 5 February 1966, 61-70.
35 . Henry K. Beecher, “Consent in Clinical Experimentation: Myth and Reality,” Journal of the American Medical Association 195 (1966): 34-35.
36 . J. Lear, “Experiments on People—The Growing Debate,” Saturday Review, 2 July 1966, 41-43.
37 . Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ran stories on 24 March 1971. See Medical World News, 15 October 1971, “Was Dr. Krugman Justified in Giving Children Hepatitis?”
38 . Beecher, Research and the Individual: Human Studies (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970), 122-127.
39 . Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 51-55.
40 . In a letter to the Lancet, Dr. Stephen Goldby called the work “unjustifiable” and asked, “Is it right to perform an experiment on a normal or mentally retarded child when no benefit can result to the individual?” (S. Goldby, “Letters to the Editor,” Lancet 7702 [1971]: 749). The Lancet editors agreed with Goldby. On this side of the Atlantic, however, the editors of NEJM and JAMA, among others, defended Krugman’s work.
41 . Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, minutes of 24 May 1957 (ACHRE No. NARA-032495-B).
42 . S. Krugman, “Ethical Practices in Human Experimentation,” text of lecture presented at the Fifth Annual Midwest Student Medical Research Forum, 1 March 1974 (ACHRE No. IND-072895-A).
44 . Louis Goldman, “The Willowbrook Debate,” World Medicine (September 1971 and November 1971): 23, 25.
45 . James H. Jones, Bad Blood (New York: Free Press, 1993 edition), 114.
46 . Jones, Bad Blood (1981), 69-71; Levine, Ethics and Regulation of Clinical Research, 70.
47 . Charles J. McDonald, “The Contribution of the Tuskegee Study to Medical Knowledge,” Journal of the National Medical Association (January 1974): 1-11, as cited in Faden and Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent, 194-195.
48 . Jean Heller, “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years,” New York Times (26 July 1972) 1, 8, as cited in Faden and Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent, 195.
49 . U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Panel (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1973), Jay Katz Concurring Opinion, 14.
53 . Senator Jacob Javits introduced legislation that would have made the DHEW policy a regulation backed by federal law. S. 878 and S. 974, 93d Cong., 1st Sess. (1973).
Senator Hubert Humphrey introduced a bill to create a National Human Experimentation Standards Board—a separate federal agency with authority over research similar to the Security and Exchange Commission’s authority over securities transactions. S. 934, 93d Cong., 1st Sess. (1973).
Also, Senator Walter Mondale introduced a resolution to provide for a “study and evaluation of the ethical, social, and legal” aspects of biomedical research. S.J. Res. 71, 93d Cong., 1st Sess. (1973).
54 . It is worth noting here that Senator Kennedy had convened similar hearings two years previously, in 1971, to consider the establishment of a national commission to examine “ethical, social, and legal implications of advances in biomedical research.” Among the topics mentioned in this hearing was the total-body irradiation research sponsored by the Department of Defense at the University of Cincinnati, which we discuss in chapter 8.
55 . Jay Katz, “Human Experimentation: A Personal Odyssey,” IRB 9, no. 1 (January/February 1987): 1-6.
56 . Protection of Human Subjects, 39 Fed. Reg. 105, 18914-18920 (1974) (to be codified at 45 C.F.R. [[section]] 46).
57 . National Research Act of 1974. P.L. 348, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. (12 July 1974).
58 . U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office for Protection from Research Risks, 18 April 1979, OPPR Reports [The Belmont Report] (ACHRE No. HHS-011795-A-2), 4-20.
59 . Interestingly, this committee included Henry Beecher, who, as was discussed in part I, chapter 3, had objected to the imposition of these requirements to contract research in 1961. Beecher’s presence on the committee testifies to the common relationship between military and private research during this time. Like many of the
60 . Department of the Army, Army Regulation 40-37, 12 August 1963 (“Radioisotope License Program [Human Use]”).
61 . Department of the Army, AR 40-38, 23 February 1973 (“Medical Services—Clinical Investigation Program”).
64 . Commanding Officer, Naval Medical Research Institute, National Naval Medical Center, to Secretary of the Navy, 30 November 1964 (“Authorization to use human volunteers as subjects for study of effects of hypoxia on the visual field; request for”) (ACHRE No. DOD-091494-A), 2.
65 . Department of the Navy, “Manual of the Medical Department,” 20-8, Change 36, 7 March 1967 (“Use of Volunteers in Medical or Other Hazardous Experiments”) (ACHRE No. DOD-091494-A).
66 . Department of the Navy, SecNav Instruction 3900.39, 28 April 1969 (“Use of volunteers as subjects of research, development, tests, and evaluation”).
67 . Department of the Air Force, AFR 169-8, 8 October 1965 (“Medical Education and Research—Use of Volunteers in Aerospace Research”).
70 . National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Manned Spacecraft Center, MSCI 1860.2, 12 May 1966 (“Establishment of MSC Radiological Control Manual and Radiological Control Committee”) (ACHRE No. NASA-022895-A), 3.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Ames Management Manual 7170-1,” 15 January 1968 (“Human Research Planning and Approval”) (ACHRE No. NASA-120894-A), 3.
71 . Ames required the voluntary, written informed consent of the subject and stipulated that consent be informed by an
explanation to the subject in language understandable to him … [including] the nature, duration, and purpose of the human research; the manner in which it will be conducted; and all foreseeable risks, inconveniences and discomforts.
“Ames Management Manual 7170-1,” 15 January 1968, 3.
72 . The Ames director was authorized to waive the consent requirements (a) when the requirements would “not be necessary to protect the subject”; (b) when the research uses “classes of trained persons who knowingly follow a specialized calling or occupation which is generally recognized as hazardous,” including “test pilots and astronauts”; and (c) when the research “would be seriously hampered” by compliance. “Ames Management Manual 7170-1,” 15 January 1968, 3.
73 . For example, one review from this group recommended changes in a consent form to include
[T]he part of the procedure you are consenting to which principally benefits the research program and is not part of your treatment is known as arterial puncture… . These risks will be explained to you in detail if you so desire. The entire procedure, including the diagnostic radioscan, takes about an hour.
Although this proposed consent form does not delineate the medical risks posed by the procedure, its statement that the patient’s participation is incidental to treatment may provide a greater opportunity for the patient to make an informed decision about participation. George A. Rathert, Jr., Chairman, Human Research Experiments Review Board, ARC, to Director, 20 January 1969 (“Proposed Investigation entitled ‘Measurement of Cerebral Blood Flow in Man by an Isotopic Technique Employing External Counting,’ by Dr. Leo Sapierstein, Stanford University”) (ACHRE No. NASA-022895-A), 4.
At MSC, the instruction establishing the Medical Uses Subcommittee was rescinded in 1968. In 1969, formal combination of the medical operations and medical research functions at MSC led to the reestablishment of the instruction as the Medical Isotopes Subcommittee at MSC. No evidence suggests what factors, other than risk, were considered in this form of prior review is available currently. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Manned Spacecraft Center, MSCI 1860.2, 12 May 1966 (“Establishment of MSC Radiological Control Manual and Radiological Control Committee”); and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NMI 1156.19, 28 August 1969 (“Medical Isotopes Subcommittee of the MSC Radiation Safety Committee”) (ACHRE No. NASA-022895-A).
74 . National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NMI 71008.9, 2 February 1972 (“Human Research Policy and Procedures”) (ACHRE No. NASA-022895-A). See also, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NMI 7100.9 (“Power and Authority — To Authorize Human Research and to Grant Certain Related Exceptions and Waivers”) (ACHRE No. NASA-022895-A).
75 . Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, Report to the President, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975).
76 . U.S. Congress, The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence [Church Committee report], report no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976), 394.
77 . For general information on the CIA program, see the Church Committee report, 385-422, and J. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times Books, 1978).
79 . Church Committee report, book 1, 400, 402. In 1963 the CIA inspector general (IG) recommended that unwitting testing be terminated, but Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms (who later became director of Central Intelligence) continued to advocate covert testing on the ground that “positive operational capability to use drugs is diminishing, owing to a lack of realistic testing. With increasing knowledge of the state of the art, we are less capable of staying up with the Soviet advances in this field.” The Church Committee noted that “Helms attributed the cessation of the unwitting testing to the high risk of embarrassment to the Agency as well as the ‘moral problem.’ He noted that no better covert situation had been devised than that which had been used, and that
82 . Executive Order 12036, section 2-301 (26 January 1978) and Executive Order 12333, section 2.10 (4 December 1981).
83 . U.S. Army Inspector General, Use of Volunteers in Chemical Agent Research [Army IG report] (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 2.
84 . One noted exception involved using LSD as an interrogation devise on ten foreign intelligence agents, and one U.S. citizen suspected of stealing classified documents. Army IG report, 143.
87 . The CIA paid death benefits to the Olson family after Frank Olson’s death, and the Army secretly paid half of an $18,000 settlement that the Blauer family negotiated with the state of New York in 1955. The state ran the psychiatric institute that administered the drugs, but which never disclosed the Army’s involvement. Both agencies feared that the resulting embarrassment and adverse publicity might undermine their ability to continue their secret research programs. Barrett v. United States, 6660 F. Supp. 1291 (E. D. N.Y., 1987).
93 . George Annas, a scholar of human experimentation and biomedical ethics, has traced the history of the Nuremberg Code in the U.S. courts. The first express reference in a majority opinion, Annas found, was in a 1973 decision in the Circuit Court in Wayne County, Michigan. The decisions in which the Code has since been cited, Annas concluded, reflect the proposition that the Nuremberg Code is a “document fundamentally about nontherapeutic experimentation.” Thus, the “types of experiments that U.S. judges have found the Nuremberg Code useful for setting standards have involved nontherapeutic experiments often conducted without consent… . Many of these experiments were justified by national security considerations and the cold war.” George J. Annas, “The Nuremberg Code in U.S. Courts: Ethics versus Expediency,” in George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, eds., The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 218.
Chapter 3: Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals
As we have seen, the development of federal legislation for government-sponsored research with human subjects arose in part because of institutional and governmental concern and public reaction to perceived abuses and failures by the government. Around the same time that the 1974 National Research Act was enacted, a scandal arose surrounding the discovery of secret Cold War chemical experiments conducted by the CIA and DOD. The review of these experiments led to the rediscovery of the previously secret 1953 Wilson memorandum and later to the first Supreme Court decision in which comment was made, in dissent, on the application of the Nuremberg Code to the conduct of the U.S. government.
In December 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by both Congress (in the form of the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission) into the domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military. In the summer of 1975, congressional hearings and the Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the DOD had conducted experiments on both cognizant and unwitting human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs (such as LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Frank Olson, an Army scientist, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in 1953 as part of a CIA experiment and apparently committed suicide a week later.[75] Subsequent reports would show that another person, Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player in New York City, died as a result of a secret Army experiment involving mescaline.[76]
The CIA program, known principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. Because most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, it is impossible to have a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research projects sponsored by MKULTRA and the related CIA programs.[77] Central Intelligence Agency documents suggest that radiation was part of the MKULTRA program and that the agency considered and explored uses of radiation for these purposes.[78] However, the documents that remain from MKULTRA, at least as currently brought to light, do not show that the CIA itself carried out any of these proposals on human subjects.
The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that “[p]rior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects.”[79]‘we have no answer to the moral issue.’” The committee noted that the “experiments sponsored by these researchers … call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments.”[80] (Documents show that the CIA participated in at least two of the DOD committees whose discussions, in 1952, led up to the issuance of the Wilson memorandum.) Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities, which, among other things, prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject” and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission.[81] Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.[82]
Following on the heels of the revelations about CIA experiments were similar stories about the Army. In response, in 1975 the secretary of the Army instructed the Army inspector general to conduct an investigation.[83] Among the findings of the inspector general was the existence of the then-still-classified 1953 Secretary of Defense Wilson memorandum. In response to the inspector general’s investigation, the Wilson memorandum was declassified in August 1975. The inspector general also found that the requirements of the 1953 memorandum had, at least in regard to Army drug testing, been essentially followed as written. The Army used only “volunteers” for its drug-testing program, with one or two exceptions.[84] However, the inspector general concluded that the “volunteers were not fully informed, as required, prior to their participation; and the methods of procuring their services, in many cases, appeared not to have been in accord with the intent of Department of the Army policies governing use of volunteers in research.”[85] The inspector general also noted that “the evidence clearly reflected that every possible medical consideration was observed by the professional investigators at the Medical Research Laboratories.”[86] This conclusion, if accurate, is in striking contrast to what took place at the CIA.
The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting illegal experiments. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively, and successfully, sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families.[87] One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing it under a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted “incident to service.”[88]
In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5-4 decision that dismissed Stanley’s case.[89] The majority argued that “a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters.”[90] In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:
The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects… . [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials … began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.[91]
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the ‘voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential … to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.’ If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.[92]
This is the only Supreme Court case to address the application of the Nuremberg Code to experimentation sponsored by the U.S. government.[93] And while the suit was unsuccessful, dissenting opinions put the Army—and by association the entire government—on notice that use of individuals without their consent is unacceptable. The limited application of the Nuremberg Code in U.S. courts does not detract from the power of the principles it espouses, especially in light of stories of failure to follow these principles that appeared in the media and professional literature during the 1960s and 1970s and the policies eventually adopted in the mid-1970s.
Update: On October 31, 2011, Joseph K. Black was arrested by Nebraska police officers after a 35 minute car chase spanning four counties, during what was described as one of his psychotic episodes. For more details and the police reports, read all about it. In addition, a full criminal history on Black is available.
Given the inane amount of babble to come from Joseph K. Black via Facebook and Twitter in late January of 2011, we’ll spare everyone a lot of the gory details and just post a few short examples of why Black will not only never obtain his dream job of National Cybersecurity Advisor, but will likely end up working the counter at a Runza near you some time in the near future, provided he doesn’t end up in prison.
Simply put, Black has designs on being appointed “National Cybersecurity Advisor” by the Obama administration. While that in itself may be an admirable goal, Black seems to think that self-promotion, being top 10 on search results and outlandish claims through social media outlets will help his cause more than, say, actual experience and contributions to the security industry (“cyber” or otherwise). Moving into February, his big thing became some fictional “megacommunity” (“Google it!” he says) with imaginary ties to every government agency, big service provider and anything else that he fancies.
The @Gregory_D_Evans Twitter account summed it all up very nicely in one tweet:
It should be noted that before Black “went full retard” as mentioned above, Lyger did try to personally and privately contact Black twice via email to open a dialogue. Neither email was answered:
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:56:38 -0600 (CST) From: lyger (lyger@attrition.org) To: j.black@blackbergsecurity.us Subject: Black & Berg intent Hi Joe, I've noticed over the past few days that you've mentioned Black & Berg over a few different social media outlets (most noticeably Twitter and Facebook). Some of the posts have been somewhat curious to say the least: http://www.facebook.com/cyberweapons/posts/149401075115575http://twitter.com/JosephKBlack/statuses/29056293369020416 Since you apparently have various security industry certifications, I'm curious about your reasoning behind some of the comments I (as well as other professionals in the security industry) have seen. This isn't intended to be a criticism, just reaching out to see if your messages are intended to be serious, a marketing ploy, a mixture of both, or something else we haven't quite figured out yet.
Whether he’s just overzealous, delusional, a net-kook, or a simple troll, we’re done with him. Desperate and irrelevant, Black has had his 15 minutes of notoriety (not “fame”, as he probably thinks) and like all good trolls, his time too has passed. He isn’t relevant enough to include on Errata: Charlatan, so he ended up here, on Postal: Asshats.
A while back, I ran across ElyssaD and her whack ass site which was scraping my content from Infosecisland. I later read Jaded Security’s post filling in the gaps that I had given up on in my searches on her digital rats warren of sites and chalked it up to fucktards at play. However, since then, she has failed to remove my content from her sites, her ersatz ‘employer’ Joe Black, has called me out as a supporter of Anonymous and LulzSec, and still, my content is on her frantically moronic sites.
babble to come from Joseph K. Black via Facebook and Twitter in late January of 2011, we’ll spare everyone a lot of the gory details and just post a few short examples of why Black will not only never obtain his dream job of National Cybersecurity Advisor, but will likely end up working the counter at a Runza near you some time in the near future, provided he doesn’t end up in prison.
LizzieDizzie 
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