-Caveat Lector-
Neoconservatism: a CIA Front
by Gregory Pavlik
Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, the
American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level of
propaganda in the service of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Cold War.
The propaganda offensive of the government centered around its obsession
with securing the emerging U.S.-dominated world order in the wake of the
Second World War. It was a time when Europe lay in ruins and when
subservience to U.S. planners, in government and business, was the order of
the day.
Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious threat
of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United States, the
menace of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying discussion of foreign
policy. To pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set out, as Arthur Vandenberg
advised, to "Scare the Hell out of the American people." A daunting task,
considering the years of pro-Soviet accolades that had previously flowing
from the executive branch.
Nonetheless, the Soviet threat served as a useful chimera to keep the masses
in line. What were the targets singled out for demonization in the Cold War
propaganda campaign? One of the chief aims of the government was to
discredit dangerously parochial attitudes about the desirability of peace.
It was also thought necessary to inoculate the public, particularly in
Europe, against the virus of "neutralism."
Further, since the American government had successfully entrenched the
military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life, U.S.
planners were eager to discredit the idea of "disarmament," which meant not
only a rejection of the techniques of mass murder developed and perfected by
the Allied powers in the Second World War, but also a return to the pre-war
days when the union of government and business was more tenuous,
government-connected profits were fleeting, and market discipline provided a
check on consolidation.
The degree to which the press participated as a partner in the rhetoric of
the Cold War was no accident. Media penetration was a major facet of CIA
activities in both the foreign and domestic context. At its peak, the CIA
allocated 29 percent of its budget to "media and propaganda." The extent of
its efforts are difficult to measure, but some information has slipped
through the shroud of secrecy.
One report notes that the media organizations funded by the CIA in Europe
included: the West German News agency DENA (later the DPA), the writers
association PEN in Paris, a number of French newspapers, the International
Forum of Journalists, and Forum World Features. The London-based Forum World
Features provided stories to "140 newspapers around the world, including
about 30 in the United States, amongst which were the Washington Post and
four other major dailies."
The U.S. Senate’s Church committee reported that the Post was aware that the
service was "CIA-controlled." German media tycoon Axel Springer had received
the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million from the Agency to build
his press empire. His relationship with the CIA was reported to have
extended through the 1970s. The New York Times reported that the CIA owned
or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and
periodicals. The paper reported that at least another dozen were infiltrated
by the CIA; more than 1,000 books either written directly or subsidized by
the Agency were published during this period.
The penetration of CIA propaganda into the American press was far more
extensive than an occasional distorted report from Europe. By the early 70s,
it had been revealed that the head of the Hearst bureau in London was a CIA
agent. Some suspicion was aroused among those editors not on the Company
payroll, and inquiring minds among them wanted to know if CIA men were
currently in their employ. Soon thereafter the Washington Star-News
published a report claiming that some three dozen journalists were on the
payroll of the Agency. One agent was identified in the story as a member of
the Star-News’ own staff. When the paper went belly up in 1981, the
"journalist" in question went directly to work for the Reagan
administration. Later, Jeremiah O’Leary joined the staff of the Washington
Times.
Though pressured, the CIA refused for some time to release information on
its tentacles in the "free press." There’s little wonder why. When George
Bush assumed the role of CIA director, he agreed to a single paragraph
summary of each of its journalists for the Church committee. When it
submitted the last of its data, the CIA had provided information on more
than 400 journalists. The final Church report was a disappointment having
been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed,
though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report
indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA
disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest
single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA." According to
the watchdog group Public Information Resource, propaganda expenses in the
70s may have exceeded $285 million a year. This was more than "the combined
budgets of Reuters, United Press International, and the Associated Press."
By the late seventies, reports emerged that the publishing house Copley
Press had for three decades served as a CIA front. Its subsidiary, Copley
News Service, provided the CIA a mouthpiece in Latin America. Propaganda in
Latin America was more or less constant, as the CIA influenced elections,
organized the torture and murder of dissidents, including priests, and
backed brutal, but pro-American patsies throughout the region.
The efforts in manipulation of opinion in Latin America were reflected in
similar campaigns at home. For instance: pro-contra public relations
specialist Edgar Chamorro served as a conduit of disinformation from 1982 to
1984, manipulating journalists and Congressmen at the behest of the CIA.
though domestic propaganda is a violation of the law, it was a standard
Agency tactic.
The Carter administration, in an effort to soften public interest in the CIA
’s involvement with the press, issued an executive order touted in the media
as a ban on the manipulation of the American media. Belatedly, as another
PIR report notes, the Society of Professional Journalists had this to
say—"An executive order during the Carter administration was thought to have
banned the practice [of recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a
Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended that the ban be
reconsidered, it was revealed that a ‘loophole’ existed allowing the CIA
director or his deputy to grant a waiver." As a follow-up, the Reagan
administration signed a law banning media disclosure of covert operations as
a felony.
If reporters were often led to compromise their integrity at the behest of
the warfare state, it was an example set at the highest levels of power in
the American media. Press ownership, already concentrated to a ludicrous
degree, shared a cozy relationship with the CIA from its start. Those chummy
with the Company included Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, former Post owner
Philip Graham and assorted New York Times owners in the Sulzberger family.
Top editors of the Post and Newsweek have also served as agents, while the
Post’s intelligence reporter was on the take from the CIA in the 60s.
Katherine Graham, for decades owner of the Washington Post, had this to say
to top CIA officials as the Berlin Wall was starting to crack. "There are
some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I
believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps
to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it
knows."
The conservative movement that culminated in the elevation of Ronald Reagan
to the presidency was a product of those turbulent Cold War years, and
perhaps more so a product of domestic intervention by the security state
than many of its participants would care to admit. The armchair warriors in
the neoconservative camp and the inveterate interventionists at National
Review can both trace their roots straight back to the propaganda efforts of
the CIA.
After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria
Leninists to apologists for the U.S. warfare state without missing a beat,
as Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American Right. The CIA’
s role in establishing the influence of the neocons came out in the late
60s, though the revelations were obscured by the primary actors’ denials of
knowledge of the covert funding. The premiere organization of the
anti-Stalinist left, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, provided a base of
operations to launch a left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union.
The revelation that the Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization’
s credibility, and it went belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford
Foundation to keep it afloat. The Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo
notes, "the core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives."
The Congress for Cultural Freedom was perhaps the Agency’s most ambitious
attempt at control and influence of intellectual life throughout Europe and
the world. Affiliates were established in America, Europe, Australia, Japan,
Latin America, India, and Africa, although its appeal was limited in the
Third World for obvious reasons. It combined concerts, conferences, and
publishing efforts, promoting the State Department line on the Cold War.
Magazines affiliated with the Congress included, among others, the China
Quarterly, the New Leader and, of course, Encounter.
The funding of the Congress and similar fronts was organized through dozens
of charitable trusts and nonprofit foundations, some of which were invented
by the CIA. The money was made available through seemingly legitimate means
to the Congress, as well as to political parties (including the German
Social Democrats), unions and labor organizations, journalists’ unions,
student groups, and any number of other organizations that could be counted
on to support U.S. hegemony in Europe and the world.
The most complete story of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is
found in Peter Coleman’s apologetic book, The Liberal Conspiracy. Coleman, a
former Australian barrister and editor of the Congress magazine, the
Quadrant, lets slip quite a bit of revelatory information in his analysis of
the Congress’s activities and its relationship to the CIA. The common
targets of Congress literature, as Coleman notes, are familiar: the
literature was anti-Communist, social democratic, and anti-neutralist. Other
aims promoted by the Congress were cataloged by William Blum: "a strong,
well-armed, and united Western Europe, allied to the United
States....support for the Common Market and NATO and...skepticism of
disarmament [and] pacifism. Criticism of U.S. foreign policy took place
within the framework of cold war assumptions; for example that a particular
American intervention was not the most effective way of combating communism,
not that there was anything wrong with intervention per se...." F.A. Hayek
commented that the Congress’ strategic agenda was "not to plan the future of
freedom, but to write its obituary."
Among those involved with the Congress were James Burnham, Irving Kristol,
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, and
the self-described "life-long Menshevik" Sidney Hook. After World War Two,
Kristol worked as the editor for the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary
magazine, then served as editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1958.
The Congress was organized by Kristol’s boss and CIA man Michael Josselson,
who maintained a tight grip on the activities of the Congress as well as the
content of its publications. According to Coleman, Josselson’s criteria for
his editors was simple: they had to be reliable on the State Department
line. Later, Kristol was to deny he knew the organization was a front. This
seems unlikely for several reasons. For one, Sidney Hook stated that "like
almost everyone else," he had heard that "the CIA was making some
contribution to the financing of the Congress." More to the point, as Tom
Braden, then head of the CIA’s International Organizations division, wrote
in a Saturday Evening Post article, a CIA agent always served as editor of
Encounter. Today, Kristol is a kind of svengali in the modern conservative
world.
Neoconservative prominence and influence owes quite a bit to the covert
activities of this government, something they forget only rarely, as with
the case of neocon Richard Perle who was caught spying for one of our
"reliable allies" while in the Reagan administration.
While waging the CIA’s battle, the neocons were not yet billing themselves
as conservatives. But the National Review was another matter, a journal
aimed specifically at the American right-wing. The official line holds that
National Review was founded in an intellectual vacuum, and, for all intents
and purposes, created conservatism in America. But events, as are most often
the case, were not that simple. The idea for National Review originated with
Willi Schlamm, a hard-line interventionist and feature editor with the Old
Right Freeman. At odds with the isolationism of the right, Schlamm was
well-known for his belligerence, having demanded that the United States go
to war over Formosa.
One person in a position to know more details about the founding of NR was
the late classicist and right winger Revilo Oliver. Although late in life
Oliver was associated most closely with extremist racialism, in the 50s, he
was an influential member of the Buckley inner circle, a regular contributor
to National Review and a member of Bill Buckley’s wedding party. Later, he
went on to serve as a founding board member of the John Birch Society, until
his break with the Society’s founder Robert Welch.
In his autobiography, Oliver explains that the National Review was conceived
as a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A surreptitious
deal was cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably Schlamm) to turn
the magazine over to Buckley; a last-ditch effort saved the magazine, and
control was assumed by Leonard E. Read, president of the Foundation for
Economic Education. Unfortunately, Read balked at "politics," i.e. analyzing
and criticizing government actions, and the magazine quickly slipped into
irrelevance.
It’s hard to blame the editors of the Freeman for failing to see Buckley’s
treachery coming. As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the U.S. military
as incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging from the armed
forces, Buckley argued, were brainwashed with militaristic platitudes. In
his essay, Buckley proposed a debriefing regime for all military men "solely
based on the great libertarian documents of our civilization" and study of
the lives of the world’s "great individualists." But, as they say, the
times, they were a changin’.
Buckley’s decision to launch the National Review was a watershed event on
the right by any measure. As Buckley’s admiring social-democratic biographer
John Judis notes, "Except for Chodorov, who was a Buckley family friend,
none of the right-wing isolationists were included on National Review’s
masthead. While this point of view had been welcome in the Freeman, it would
not be welcome, even as a dissenting view, in National Review."
As Judis notes, Schlamm, who envisioned himself as the guiding light behind
NR, was not even a conservative. He "had more in common with Dwight
MacDonald or Daniel Bell than with Robert McCormick; Buckley was turning his
back on much of the isolationist...Old Right that had applauded his earlier
books and that his father had been politically close to."
Buckley, by 1955, had already been in deep cover for the CIA. While there is
some confusion as to the actual duration of Buckley’s service as an agent,
Judis notes that he served under E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame in Mexico
City in 1951. Buckley was directed to the CIA by Yale Professor Wilmoore
Kendall, who passed Buckley along to James Burnham, then a consultant to the
Office Of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s covert-action wing.
Buckley apparently had a knack for spying: before his stint with the Agency,
he had served as an on-campus informant for the FBI, feeding God only knows
what to Hoover’s political police. In any case, it is known that Buckley
continued to participate at least indirectly in CIA covert activities
through the 60s.
The founding circle of National Review was composed largely of former agents
or men otherwise in the pay of the CIA, including Buckley, Kendall, and
Burnham. Wall Street lawyer William Casey, rooted in OSS activities and
later to be named director of the CIA, drew up the legal documents for the
new magazine. (He also helped transfer Human Events from isolationist to
interventionist hands.)
NR required nearly half a million to get off the ground; the only
substantial contribution known was from Will Buckley, Senior: $100,000. It’s
long been rumored that CIA black funds were used to start the magazine, but
no hard evidence exists to establish it. It may also be relevant that the
National Review was organized as a nonprofit venture, as covert funding was
typically channeled through foundations.
By the 70s, it was known that Buckley had been an agent. More imaginative
right wingers accused Buckley of complicity in everything from the
assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, undoubtedly owing to his
relationship with the mysterious Hunt.
But sober minds also believed that something was suspicious about the
National Review. In a syndicated column, Gary Wills wondered, "Was National
Review, with four ex-agents of the CIA on its staff, a CIA operation? If so,
the CIA was stingy, and I doubt it-but even some on the editorial board
raised the question. And the magazine supported Buckley’s old CIA boss,
Howard Hunt, and publicized a fund drive for him." In reply, Buckley
denounced Wills for being a classicist. But others close to the founding
circle of National Review nurtured similar suspicions. Libertarian
"fusionist" Frank Meyer, for example, confided privately that he believed
that the National Review was a CIA front.
If it was, then it was the federal government that finally broke the back of
the populist and isolationist right, the mass-based movement with its roots
in the America First anti-war movement. What FDR tried and failed to do when
he sought to shut down the Chicago Tribune, when his attorney general held
mass sedition trials of his critics on the right, and when he orchestrated
one of the worst smear campaigns in U.S. history against his conservative
opponents, the CIA accomplished. That in itself ought to lead conservatives
to oppose the existence of executive agencies engaged in covert operations.
Today, the war-mongering right is self-sustaining. Money flows like milk and
honey to neoconservative activists from the major conservative foundations.
Irving’s son Bill Kristol has his sugar daddy in the form of media tycoon
and alien Rupert Murdoch. National Review is boring, but in no danger of
going under financially.
But the cozy relationship with the federal government is the same. Neocons
Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan now insist on massive extensions of the
warfare state. The Weekly Standard demands a ground war to topple the head
of a foreign government unfriendly to Israel, while denouncing right-wing
isolationism, libertarianism, and Murray Rothbard.
This time, the right-wing War Hawks face a potentially insurmountable
challenge. The pro-war propaganda directed at the domestic population is
failing badly. It is ineffective for two principle reasons: mounting
intellectual opposition to the warfare state and the return of grassroots
isolationism. Both trends have come to the fore. And not only with the
collapse of communism. Wide spread public disillusionment exists over the
Gulf War of 1991. Sold to the public as a high tech "virtual" war, the
consequences have been harder to hide than the execution of the attack. With
over a million Iraqis dead, Hussein still in power,US soldiers apparently
poisoned by their own government and a not so far fetched feeling that the
public was duped into supporting an unjust slaughter, people are starting to
regard the Gulf War as an outrage. And they are right.
At the height of the Cold War, opposition to interventionism was largely
isolated to the anti-war Left. While marshaling an impressive analytic
literature on the evils of US imperialism, particularly in the context of
Viet Nam, the Left was suspect for its support of socialism and its
sometimes overt sympathies for totalitarian regimes. On the right, things
were different. Except for a noble band of libertarians lead by Murray
Rothbard, conservatives and many libertarians were front and center in
support of the security state and its nefarious activities. Now, virtually
the entire right is opposed to interventionism. Traditionalists and even
nationalist right-wingers are generally opposed to foreign military actions.
The dominant anti-war force on the right is the growing number of explicitly
isolationist libertarians, who want no truck with the warfare state on
principle. The Weekly Standard acknowledged as much and identified Murray
Rothbard as the guiding spirit behind today’s antistatist, antiwar movement.
And the nonliberal left, lead by long time noninterventionists like Noam
Chomsky, remains opposed to US global hegemony. The neocons and their
corporate liberal cronies are the only spokesman for militarism.
The grassroots are hated by the neocons for precisely that reason. The man
on the street, the movement conservative, the Perot voter, the Libertarian
Party man – they all want the troops brought home and the tyranny of the US
empire brought to a halt. When the leaders of the empire try to talk down to
normal people, they are jeered off the stage. The RRR position – no more
war – is more and more the position of the American people. That’s a strike
for peace and a strike for liberty.
Greg Pavlik is editor of Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays by John T.
Flynn. This article first appeared in 1997 in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pavlik2.html
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