Norman & Evan Thomas, Newsweek and the CIA Newsweek's Evan Thomas � the grandson of Norman Thomas, a '60s "Socialist" on the CIA payroll exposed by the NY Times as an agent who did the Agency's bidding (see below) � recently published a biography downplaying the significance of Robert Kennedy's career, character and political convictions. The message seems to be that Kennedy was overrated, a deeply flawed political hack with charisma and an inferiority complex whose death is of no real consequence. The following is background on Norman and Evan Thomas, pointing up some serious conflicts of interest between the CIA and the public interest in the latter's "reporting.": _____________________________________________ 1. NORMAN THOMAS and the CIA _____________________________________________ http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45b/068.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 22:48:48 -0500 (CDT) From: Steve C Zeltzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (by way of Michael Eisenscher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) Subject: The CIA, Irving Brown & The AFL-CIO Article: 67667 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ben Rathbun, The Point Man: Irving Brown and the deadly post-1945 struggle for Europe and Africa ... There is nothing new in Berman's panegyric. He sees himself as the ideological heir of the Shankerite wing of the CIA's working class collaborators. Democratic Socialists of America evolved out of the Socialist Party, known for decades for its perennial presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, and it gives out Debs-Thomas awards. However Thomas was exposed as on the take from the CIA in a 2/22/67 Times. article, "Thomas Upholds CIA-Aided Work." This was later confirmed by Sidney Hook in the July 1982 Commentary. He had been Thomas's colleague in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. "When it was unable to pay its rent...Thomas...telephoned Allen Dulles of the CIA and requested a contribution." � CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR _________________________ 2. NORMAN THOMAS & CIA Funding Book Review: Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA Author(s): Eric Thomas Chester Description: The International Rescue Committee was founded by socialists in the 1930s to aid the victims of fascism. The IRC attracted the support of prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as that of the Ford Foundation. It also became intimately entangled with the CIA during the most volatile days of the Cold War. The story of the IRC is a fascinating and little-known aspect of recent U.S. history.... [From Ralph McGehee's CIABase] CIA FUNDED THRU LATIN AMERICA, 58-65SHELL FOUNDATION KAPLAN FUND NEXT TO INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR RESEARCH (IILR) IN NEW YORK. SOCIALIST LEADER NORMAN THOMAS HEADED IILR WHO CLAIMED HE IGNORANT OF CIA ROLE. FIGUERES CREATED INTER-AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRAT MOVEMENT (INADESMO) A FRONT TO DISPERSE FUNDS DIRECTLY. AMERINGER, C.D. (1990). U.S. FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE 256-7. _____________________ NORMAN THOMAS'S PROGENY, EVAN: 3. EVAN THOMAS Interview Booknotes C-SPAN Author: Evan Thomas Title: The Very Best Men: Four Who Dare - The Early Years of the CIA Air Date: December 17, 1995 BRIAN LAMB: Evan Thomas, why the title, "The Very Best Men"? EVAN THOMAS: Well, it's slightly ironic. They were the very best men in the sense that they were bright, bold, brave men who did the very best they could to conquer communism for the CIA in the early 1950s. But things didn't turn out as well as they'd hoped. And it's a bit of a play on the best and the brightest. A lot of what they tried to do didn't turn out so well. But they were the very best in the sense that they were the smartest around and the boldest around and the most daring. LAMB: Who were they? THOMAS: They were a group of four senior officials at the CIA who ran what's called the clandestine service, the part of the CIA that carries out covert action, espionage, the sexy part of the CIA, if you will. They were the covert action specialists. Richard Bissell, who was the most famous, probably, of the group who ran the Bay of Pigs -- or ran the CIA into the Bay of Pigs; Frank Wisner, who began it all in the late 40s; Tracy Barnes, who never ran it but was assistant for all the big operations like Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs; and Desmond Fitzgerald, who ran the covert action part of the agency in the mid-'60s and was a sort of swashbuckling, glamorous figure. LAMB: Where did you get the idea for the book? THOMAS: I got it from writing "The Wise Men," which was a book that came out about 10 years ago about the old foreign policy establishment. Two of the wise men were Chip Bohlen and George Kennan. They were senior foreign policymakers after the war, and one of their friends was Frank Wisner. Frank Wisner killed himself in 1965, and I thought, "Boy, there's got to be a story in there." The man who started the CIA's clandestine service, who started the department of dirty tricks, as reporters later called it, shot himself. And I thought, "Why? What happened?" And I started pulling on that string and it led me to these four characters. LAMB: Why did Frank Wisner kill himself? THOMAS: The short answer is that he was manic-depressive. The more interesting and longer answer is that he tried to do too much. He tried to create this fantastic covert operation capability to fight the Soviet Union in the 1950s. We were up against a very tough foe: the KGB. And he had, at best, limited success and he had some tragic setbacks, particularly the Hungarian revolution in 1956. And it got to him. He went mad on the job. ______________________ 4. EVAN THOMAS BIO As assistant managing editor since April 1991, Evan Thomas has guided the magazine's overall coverage; he has also served as as a special-projects writer since Fall 1996. He is the author of "Back from the Dead: How Clinton Survived the Republican Revolution" (Grove/Atlantic January 1997), Newsweek's chronicle of the 1996 presidential campaign, which was reported by a special projects team of four reporters and published first as a 50,000-word narrative in the post-election issue of Newsweek. Thomas served as Washington bureau chief from September 1986 to January 1996, directing Newsweek's coverage of national affairs, including the White House, Pentagon and State department, before asking to step down from that position to concentrate more on his own writing. His work for Newsweek consists mainly of in-depth profiles (Unabomer Theodore Kaczynski, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and O.J. Simpson), historical accounts, (the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima blast) and news stories, such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the re-examination of the Paula Jones case against President Clinton. Thomas is a regular panelist on the syndicated political talk show "Inside Washington" which is broadcast in Washington, D.C. and several other markets, and also has appeared on PBS's "Frontline," "Charlie Rose" and "News Hour With Jim Lehrer," NBC's "Today Show" and "Meet the Press," ABC's "Good Morning America" and "Nightline," CNN's "Larry King Live" and CBS's "Face the Nation." Newsweek's political reportage was voted best in the business by readers of The American Journalism Review, who selected Newsweek for "Best Magazine Coverage of the Clinton Administration" in a 1994 survey. Accepting the award, Thomas told AJR, "Our talent pool has never been stronger." Newsweek's coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign earned top honors as well: the American Society of Magazine Editors gave the magazine two prestigious National Magazine Awards: one for General Excellence and one for "How He Won," a chronicle of the entire presidential race with exclusive details and insights published just 36 hours after the polls closed. Thomas also coordinated Newsweek's coverage of the 1988 presidential campaign, which earned a 1989 First Place National Headliner Award for outstanding coverage of a major event. Thomas is now working on a biography or Robert Kennedy. He is the author of "The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the C.I.A." (Simon & Schuster, 1995). The Washington Post called it "a jewel of a book. The Very Best Men is a road map to understanding what went on inside the CIA during the height of the Cold War...Thomas has an unerring eye for colorful and entertaining detail and the revealing quote." In 1991 Thomas published "The Man to See, a biography of Edward Bennett Williams" (Simon & Schuster). He co-wrote "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made," about the U.S. foreign policy establishment (Simon and Schuster/October 1986), which made The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. Thomas joined Newsweek from Time magazine, where he had been a correspondent, writer, and editor for nine years. The father of two daughters, Thomas is married to Oscie Thomas, a lawyer with AT&T He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the son of publisher Evan Thomas II, and the grandson of Socialist leader Norman Thomas. ____________________________________________ 5. EVAN THOMAS smears the Operation Tailwind Reporters From: 1997 "Beat the Devil," Alexander Cockburn's column appearing on The Nation Digital Edition. The Press Devours Its Own ... There is, these days, an elaborate machinery for discrediting reporters. Noticeable in the deployment of this machinery is the low priority given to assessing the actual content of stories under attack. The underminer's art consists in seizing on some supposed dereliction, then using this to discredit the story as a whole.... At an hour and not eighteen minutes, CNN's Smith and Oliver would have had, as they have repeatedly emphasized, an interesting and well-researched case suggesting that the US military used sarin in a raid in Laos. But CNN executives forced the show into eighteen minutes, removed a crucial qualifier and then attacked the producers for not providing proof. For a spirited rebuttal to their assailants, I recommend Smith and Oliver's seventy-seven-page response to CNN's lawyers. Whatever the final word may be on this story, there was something absurd about the Pentagon being treated as a credible witness. Remember, the Pentagon and the CIA conducted a "secret" airwar on Laos, which involved dropping high explosives every eight minutes on average, for many years. At the end of the war one-third of the population had become refugees. By 1971 the CIA was practicing a scorched earth policy in Hmong territory against the incoming Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with herbicides, which killed the rice and opium crops and also poisoned the Hmong. CIA-patronized journalists later spread the story that the Hmong were victims of Communist biological warfare. The Wall Street Journal made an extensive propaganda campaign out of "yellow rain" in the Reagan years. When these were finally exposed as false, no journalists lost their jobs or were hauled to court. Amid the attack on Smith and Oliver, the fact that the Pentagon had an inventory of 30 million pounds of sarin, some of it in Southeast Asia, was mentioned but never explored. On the much-discussed matter of CNN's wounded "credibility," the network has almost always whored for the Pentagon, shamelessly relaying its lies and evasions. During the Gulf War the weapons designer and military consultant Pierre Sprey was asked by Bernard Shaw to discuss the performance of high-tech weapons. The show turned out to be an ambush. Sprey said most of these were electronic junk, and was assailed by three Pentagon apologists, impugning his facts and his patriotism. (He retorted that he had two planes in the war, the A-10 and the F-16. How many had his critics?) Sprey turned out to be entirely right. CNN had been grossly inaccurate in a crucial aspect of its war reporting, but on this topic, we've seen no commissions of inquiry by Abrams, no snide jabs from the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz. This same Kurtz was one of Webb's earliest and most tendentious assailants. And when the vultures began picking over Smith and Oliver, there was Kurtz again, putting the producers in the same drawer as The New Republic's faker Stephen Glass. Kurtz is on the payroll of CNN, for which he does a show, but the issue of his own self-interest was never raised. Similar questions could be asked of the work performed by Floyd Abrams for CNN. A veteran of corporate salvage work, Abrams was paid by CNN to join David Kohler, a CNN vice president and corporate counsel, in a hasty review of Smith and Oliver's original broadcast, said review completed at the start of July and resulting in CNN's recantation. Abrams now maintains he hoped to exonerate Smith and Oliver. If this was so, why did he immediately go for help in his review to the Washington snoop firm of Kroll and hire--as Editor and Publisher disclosed in a good piece by Allan Wolper--several former career CIA officers? One of Abrams's investigators, Ted Price, was a onetime head of the CIA's clandestine services. Another, Brian Jenkins, was a former Green Beret who had briefed Kissinger several times and was quoted in Newsweek (in a despicably prejudiced and sexist piece by EVAN THOMAS and Gregory Vistica) deriding Smith and Oliver's work. Why were two corporate lawyers (Abrams works on behalf of big business at Cahill Gordon) deemed to be qualified to assess a news documentary? What Smith and Oliver have faced is an endless raising of the bar of proof, otherwise known as the demand for the "smoking gun." Gary Webb faced the same challenge. Of course, a signed order for any criminal action by the government almost never exists. And where there is such written evidence, or something remarkably like it--like Oliver North's notations on coca paste in his diaries, or a CIA memo worrying about exposure of the CIA's role in recovering $36,800 in drug money seized by the San Francisco police and returning it to drug smugglers--Webb's assailants simply passed it over. There's a whole journalistic-industrial complex dedicated to keeping newsprint, TV screens and radio waves clean of destabilizing scoops damaging to corporations or the state. Here we find people like Kurtz, or Marvin Kalb, who once promoted one of the great nonsensical stories of the Reagan years, the "Bulgarian connection" in the supposed KGB plot to kill the Pope. There are always journalists and lawyers available to make the hit on the state's behalf.
