Ed Herman: Fake News on Russia / Official Enemies, 1917-2017

[MacCruiskeen]

R.I.P. Edward S. Herman, 1925 - 2017. He was co-author (actually main author) of Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky in 1988. Wiki gives a decent account of their "propaganda model", still an indispensable tool in understanding how the media operate as channels of disinformation and misdirection.

This was Ed Herman's last published essay:

Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies

The New York Times, 1917–2017

by Edward S. Herman

Topics: Imperialism , Media , War

Monthy Review, Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

Edward S. Herman has written widely on economics, foreign policy, and the media.



It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question. This was the case with “The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down,” the title of a January 18, 1988, Times editorial referring to a propaganda claim of five years earlier that the editors had swallowed and never looked into any further. The lie—that the Soviets knew that Korean airliner 007, which they shot down on August 31, 1983, was a civilian plane—was eventually uncovered by congressman Lee Hamilton, not by the Times.

Mainstream media fake news is especially likely where a party line is quickly formed on a topic, with any deviations therefore immediately dismissed as naïve, unpatriotic, or simply wrong. In a dramatic illustration, for a book chapter entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,” Noam Chomsky and I showed that coverage by Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and the New York Times of the 1984 murder of the priest Jerzy Popieluzko in Communist Poland, a dramatic and politically useful event for the politicized Western mainstream media, exceeded all their coverage of the murders of a hundred religious figures killed in Latin America by U.S. client states in the post-Second World War years taken together.1 It was cheap and safe to focus heavily on the “worthy” victim, whereas looking closely at the deaths of those hundred would have required an expensive and sometimes dangerous research effort that would have upset the State Department. But it was in effect a form of fake news to so selectively devote coverage (and indignation) to a politically useful victim, while ignoring large numbers whose murder the political establishment sought to downplay or completely suppress.

Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution. In a classic study of the paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz found that “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all…. They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.”2 Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial bias clearly fed into news reporting. The editors’ zealous opposition to the communists led the paper to report atrocities that never happened, and to predict the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one times in three years. Journalists uncritically accepted official statements and relied on reports from unidentified “high authority.” This was standard Times practice.

This fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated often in the years that followed. The Soviet Union was an enemy target up to the Second World War, and through it all, Times coverage was consistently hostile. With the end of the war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military rival, and soon a competing nuclear power, the Cold War was on. In the United States, anti-communism became a national religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in official discourse and the news media as a global menace in urgent need of containment. With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans for its own global expansion of power established, the Communist threat would help sustain the steady growth of the military-industrial complex and repeated interventions to counter purported Soviet aggressions.3

An Early Great Crime: Guatemala

One of the most flagrant cases in which the Soviet threat was exploited to justify U.S.-sponsored violence was the overthrow of the social democratic government of Guatemala in 1954 by a small proxy army invading from U.S. ally Somoza’s Nicaragua. This action was provoked by government reforms that upset U.S. officials, including a 1947 law permitting the formation of labor unions, and plans to buy back (at tax-rate valuations) and distribute to landless peasants some of the unused property owned by United Fruit Company and other large landowners. The United States, which had been perfectly content with the earlier fourteen-year-long dictatorship of Jose Ubico, could not tolerate this democratic challenge, and the elected government, led by Jacobo Arbenz, was soon charged with assorted villainies, based on an alleged Red capture of the Guatemalan government.4

In the pre-invasion propaganda campaign, the mainstream media fell into line behind false charges of extreme government repression, threats to its neighbors, and the Communist takeover. The Times repeatedly reported these alleged abuses and threats from 1950 onward (my favorite: Sidney Gruson’s “How Communists Won Control of Guatemala,” March 1, 1953). Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo, had carefully avoided establishing any embassies with Soviet bloc countries, fearing U.S. reprisals—to no avail. Following the removal of Arbenz and the installation of a right-wing dictatorship, court historian Ronald Schneider, after studying 50,000 documents seized from Communist sources in Guatemala, found that not only did Communists never control the country, but that the Soviet Union “made no significant or even material investment in the Arbenz regime,” and was at the time too preoccupied with internal problems to concern itself with Central America.5

The coup government quickly attacked and decimated the new social groups that had formed in the democratic era, mainly peasant, worker, and teacher organizations. Arbenz had won 65 percent of the votes in a free election, but the “liberator” Castillo Armas quickly won a “plebiscite” with 99.6 percent of the vote. Although this is a result familiar in totalitarian regimes, the mainstream media had by then lost interest in Guatemala, barely mentioning this electoral outcome. The Times had claimed in 1950 that U.S. Guatemala policy “is not trying to block social and economic progress but is interested in seeing that Guatemala becomes a liberal democracy.”6 But in the aftermath, the editors failed to note that the result of U.S. policy was precisely to “block social and economic progress,” through the installation of a regime of reactionary terror.

In 2011, more than half a century after 1954, the Times reported that Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom had apologized for that “Great Crime,” the violent overthrow of the Arbenz government, “an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”7 The article mentions that, according to president Colom, the Arbenz family is “seeking an apology from the United States for its role” in the Great Crime. The Times has never made any apology or even acknowledgement of its own role in the Great Crime.

Another Great Crime: Vietnam

Fake news abounded in the Times and other mainstream publications during the Vietnam War. The common perception that the paper’s editors opposed the war is misleading and essentially false. In Without Fear or Favor, former Times reporter Harrison Salisbury acknowledged that in 1962, when U.S. intervention escalated, the Times was “deeply and consistently” supportive of the war policy.8 He contends that the paper grew steadily more oppositional from 1965, culminating in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But Salisbury fails to recognize that from 1954 to the present, the Times never abandoned the Cold War framework and vocabulary, according to which the United States was resisting another nation’s “aggression” and protecting “South Vietnam.” The paper never applied the word aggression to this country, but used it freely in referring to North Vietnamese actions and those of the National Liberation Front in the southern half of Vietnam.

The various pauses in the U.S. bombing war in 1965 and after, in the alleged interest of “giving peace a chance,” were also the basis of fake news as the Johnson administration used these temporary halts to quiet antiwar protests, while making it clear to the Vietnamese that U.S. officials demanded full surrender. The Times and its colleagues swallowed this bait without a murmur of dissent.9

Furthermore, although from 1965 onward the Times was willing to publish more reports that put the war in a less favorable light, it never broke from its heavy dependence on official sources, or from its reluctance to confront the damage wrought on Vietnam and its civilian population by the U.S. war machine. In contrast with its eager pursuit of Cambodian refugees from the Khmer Rouge after April 1975, the paper rarely sought testimony from the millions of Vietnamese refugees fleeing U.S. bombing and chemical warfare. In its opinion columns as well, the new openness was limited to commentators who accepted the premises of the war and would confine their criticisms to its tactical problems and domestic costs. From beginning to end, those who criticized the war as an immoral campaign of sheer aggression were excluded from the debate.10

The 1981 Papal Assassination Attempt

The mainstream media gave a further boost to Cold War propaganda in reporting on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981. At a time when the Reagan administration was seeking to demonize the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the shooting of the pope by Turkish fascist Ali Agca was quickly tied to Moscow, helped by Agca’s confession—after seventeen months of imprisonment, interrogations, threats, inducements, and access to the media—that the Bulgarians and Soviet KGB were behind it all. No credible evidence supported this connection, the claims were implausible, and the corruption in the process was remarkable. (Agca also periodically claimed to be Jesus Christ.) The case against the Bulgarians (and implicitly the KGB) was lost even in Italy’s extremely biased and politicized judicial framework. But the Times bought it, and gave it prolonged, intense, and completely unquestioning attention, as did most of the U.S. media.

During the 1991 Senate hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to head the CIA, former agency officer Melvin Goodman testified that the CIA knew from the start that Agca’s confessions were false, because they had “very good penetration” of the Bulgarian secret services. The Times omitted this statement in its reporting on Goodman’s testimony. During the same year, with Bulgaria now a member of the “free world,” conservative analyst Allen Weinstein obtained permission to examine Bulgarian secret service files on the assassination attempt. His mission was widely reported, including in the Times, but when he returned without having found anything implicating Bulgaria or the KGB, several papers, including the Times, found his investigations no longer newsworthy.

Missile Gap

From roughly 1975 to 1986, much of the reporting on the purported “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union was little more than fake news, with Times reporters passing along a steady stream of inflammatory official statements and baseless claims. An important case occurred in the mid-1970s, as right-wing hawks in the Ford administration were trying to escalate the Cold War and arms race. A 1975 CIA report had found that the Soviets were aiming only for nuclear parity. This was unsatisfactory, so CIA head George H. W. Bush appointed a new team of hardliners, who soon found that the Soviets were achieving nuclear superiority and preparing to fight a nuclear war. This so-called Team B report was taken at face value in a Times front page article of December 26, 1976, by David Binder, who failed to mention its political bias or purpose, and made no attempt to consult experts with differing views. The CIA finally admitted in 1983 that the Team B estimates were fabrications. But throughout this period, the Times supported the case for militarization by disseminating false information, much of it convincingly refuted by Tom Gervasi in his classic The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy, a book never reviewed in the Times.

Yugoslavia and “Humanitarian Intervention”

The 1990s wars of dismantlement in Yugoslavia succeeded in removing an independent government from power and replacing it with a broken Serbian remnant and poor and unstable failed states in Bosnia and Kosovo. It also provided unwarranted support for the concept of “humanitarian intervention,” which rested on a mass of misrepresentations and selective reporting. The demonized Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was not an ultra-nationalist seeking a “Greater Serbia,” but rather a non-aligned leader on the Western hit list who tried to help Serb minorities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo remain in Yugoslavia as the United States and the European Union supported a legally questionable exodus by several constituent Yugoslav Republics. He supported each of the proposed settlements of these conflicts, which were sabotaged by Bosnian and U.S. officials who wanted better terms or the outright military defeat of Serbia, ultimately achieving the latter. Milošević had nothing to do with the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs took revenge on Bosnian Muslim soldiers who had been ravaging nearby Bosnian Serb villages from their base in Srebrenica under NATO protection. The several thousand Serb civilian deaths were essentially unreported in the mainstream media, while the numbers of Srebrenica’s executed victims were correspondingly inflated.11

The Putin Era

The U.S. political establishment was shocked and delighted by the 1989–91 fall of the Soviet Union, and its members were similarly pleased with the policies of President Boris Yeltsin, a virtual U.S. client, under whose rule ordinary Russians suffered a calamitous fall in living standards, while a small set of oligarchs were able to loot the broken state. Yeltsin’s election victory in 1996, greatly assisted by U.S. consultants, advice, and money, was, for the editors of the Times, “A Victory for Russian Democracy.”12 They were not bothered by either the electoral corruption, the creation of a grand-larceny-based economic oligarchy, or, shortly thereafter, the new rules centralizing power in the office of president.13

Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, gradually abandoned the former’s subservience to Western interests, and was thereby perceived as a menace. His reelection in 2012, although surely less corrupt than Yeltsin’s in 1996, was castigated in the U.S. media. The lead Times article on May 5, 2012, featured “a slap in the face” from Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe observers, claims of no real competition, and “thousands of antigovernment protesters gathered in Moscow square to chant ‘Russia without Putin.'”14 There had been no “challenges to legitimacy” reported in the Times after Yeltsin’s tainted victory in 1996.

The demonization of Putin escalated with the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent Kiev warfare in Eastern Ukraine, Russian support of the East Ukraine resistance, and the Crimean referendum and absorption of Crimea by Russia. This was all declared “aggression” by the United States and its allies and clients, and sanctions were imposed on Russia, and a major U.S.-NATO military buildup was initiated on Russia’s borders. Tensions mounted further with the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over southeastern Ukraine—promptly, but almost surely falsely, blamed on the “pro-Russian” rebels and Russia itself.15

Anti-Russian hostilities were further inflamed by the country’s escalated intervention in Syria from 2015 on, in support of Bashar al-Assad and against rebel forces that had come to be dominated by ISIS and al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaeda. The United States and its NATO and Middle East allies had been committing aggression against Syria, in de facto alliance with al-Nusra and other extremist Islamic factions, for several years. Russian intervention turned the tide, frustrating the U.S. and Saudi goal of regime change against Assad, and weakening tacit U.S. allies.

The Times has covered these developments with unstinting apologetics—for the February 2014 coup in Kiev—which it has never labeled as such, for the U.S. role in the overthrow of the elected government of Victor Yanukovych, and with anger and horror at the Crimea referendum and Russian absorption, which it never allows might be a defensive response to the Kiev coup. Its calls for punishment for the casualty-free Russian “aggression” in Crimea is in marked contrast to its apologetics for the million-plus casualties caused by U.S. aggression “of choice” (not defensive) in Iraq from March 2003 on. The paper’s editors and columnists condemn Putin’s disregard for international law, while exempting their own country from criticism for its repeated violations of that same law.16

In the Times‘s reporting and opinion columns Russia is regularly assailed as expansionist and threatening its neighbors, but virtually no mention is made of NATO’s expansion up to the Russian borders and first-strike-threat placement of anti-missile weapons in Eastern Europe—the latter earlier claimed to be in response to a missile threat from Iran! Analyses by political scientist John Mearsheimer and Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen that noted this NATO advance were excluded from the opinion pages of the Times.17 In contrast, a member of the Russian band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, was given op-ed space to denounce Putin and Russia, and the punk rock group was granted a meeting with the Times editorial board.18 Between January 1 and March 31, 2014, the paper ran twenty-three articles featuring Pussy Riot and its alleged significance as a symbol of Russian limits on free speech. Pussy Riot had disrupted a church service in Moscow and only stopped after police intervened, at the request of church authorities. A two-year prison sentence followed. Meanwhile, in February 2014, eighty-four-year-old nun Sister Megan Rice was sentenced to four years in prison for having entered a U.S. nuclear weapons site in July 2012 and carried out a symbolic protest. The Times gave this news a tiny mention in its National Briefing section, under the title “Tennessee Nun is Sentenced for Peace Protest.” No op-ed columns or meeting with the Times board for Rice. There are worthy and unworthy protesters, just as there are victims.

In Syria, with Russian help, Assad’s army and allied militias were able to dislodge the rebels from Aleppo, to the dismay of Washington and the mainstream media. It has been enlightening to see the alarm expressed over civilian casualties in Aleppo, with accompanying photographs of forsaken children and stories of civilian suffering and deprivation. The Times‘s focus on those civilians and children and its indignation at Putin-Assad inhumanity stands in sharp contrast with their virtual silence on massive civilian casualties in Fallujah in 2004 and beyond, and more recently in rebel-held areas of Syria, and in the Iraqi city of Mosul, under U.S. and allied attack.19 The differential treatment of worthy and unworthy victims has been in full force in coverage of Syria.

A further phase of intensifying Russophobia may be dated from the October 2016 presidential debates, in which Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump would be a Putin “puppet” as president, a theme her campaign began to stress. This emphasis only increased after the election, with the help of the media and intelligence services, as the Clinton camp sought to explain their electoral loss, maintain party control, and possibly even have the election results overturned in the courts or electoral college by attributing Trump’s victory to Russian interference.

A major impetus for the Putin connection came with the January 2017 release of a report by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Background of Assessing Russian Activities and Intention in Recent US Elections. More than half of this short document is devoted to the Russian-sponsored RT news network, which the report treats as an illegitimate propaganda source. The organization is allegedly part of Russia’s “influence campaign…[that] aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the President-elect.” No semblance of proof is offered that there was any planned “campaign,” rather than an ongoing expression of opinion and news judgments. The same standards used to identify a Russian “influence campaign” could be applied with equal force to U.S. media and Radio Free Europe’s treatment of any Russian election—and of course, the U.S. intervention in the 1996 Russian election was overt, direct, and went far beyond any covert “influence campaign.”

Regarding more direct Russian intervention in the U.S. election, the DNI authors concede the absence of “full supporting evidence,” but in fact provide no supporting evidence at all—only speculative assertions, assumptions, and guesses. “We assess that…Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2015,” they write, designed to defeat Mrs. Clinton, and “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” but provide no proof of any such order. The report also contains no evidence that Russia hacked the communications of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the emails of Clinton and former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, or that it gave hacked information to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange and former British diplomat Craig Murray have repeatedly claimed that these sources were leaked by local insiders, not hacked from outside. Veteran intelligence experts William Binney and Ray McGovern likewise contend that the WikiLeaks evidence was leaked, not hacked.20 It is also notable that of the three intelligence agencies who signed the DNI document, the National Security Agency—the agency most likely to have proof of Russian hacking and its transmission to WikiLeaks, as well as of any “orders” from Putin—only expressed “moderate confidence” in its findings.

But as with the Reds ruling Guatemala, the Soviets outpacing U.S. missile capabilities, or the KGB plotting to assassinate the pope, the Times has taken the Russian hacking story as established fact, despite the absence of hard evidence. Times reporter David Sanger refers to the report’s “damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system,” only to then acknowledge that the published report “contains no information about how the agencies had …come to their conclusions.”21 The report itself includes the astonishing statement that “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” Furthermore, if the report was based on “intercepts of conversations” as well as on hacked computer data, as Sanger and the DNI claim, why has the DNI failed to quote a single conversation showing Putin’s alleged orders and plans?

The Times has never cited or given op-ed space to William Binney, Ray McGovern, or Craig Murray, leading dissident authorities on hacking technology, methodology, and the specifics of the DNC hacks. But room was found for Louise Mensch’s op-ed “What to Ask about Russian Hacking.” Mensch is a notorious conspiracy theorist with no relevant technical background, described by writers Nathan Robinson and Alex Nichols as best-known for “spending most of her time on Twitter issuing frenzied denunciations of imagined armies of online ‘Putinbots,'” making her “one of the least credible people on the internet.”22 But she is published in the Times because, in contrast with the informed and credible Binney and Murray, she follows the party line, taking Russian hacking of the DNC as a premise.

The CIA’s brazen intervention in the electoral process in 2016 and 2017 broke new ground in the agency’s politicization. Former CIA head Michael Morell announced in an August 2016 op-ed in the Times: “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” and former CIA boss Michael Hayden published an op-ed in the Washington Post just days before the election, entitled “Former CIA Chief: Trump is Russia’s Useful Fool.” Morell had yet another op-ed in the Times on January 6, now openly assailing the new president. These attacks were unrelievedly insulting to Trump and laudatory to Clinton, even portraying Trump as a traitor; they also made clear that Clinton’s more pugnacious stance toward Syria and Russia was preferable by far to Trump’s leanings toward negotiation and cooperation with Russia.

This was also true of the scandal surrounding former Trump Defense Intelligence nominee Michael Flynn’s telephone call with the Russian ambassador, which may have included a discussion of the incoming administration’s policy actions. The political possibilities of this interaction were quickly grasped by outgoing Obama officials, security personnel, and the mainstream media, with the FBI interrogating Flynn and with widespread expressions of horror at Flynn’s action, which could have allegedly exposed him to Russian blackmail. But such pre-inauguration meetings with Russian diplomats have been a “common practice” according to Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Reagan and Bush, and Matlock had personally arranged such a meeting for Jimmy Carter.23 Obama’s own ambassador to the country, Michael McFaul, admitted visiting Moscow for talks with officials in 2008, even before the election. Daniel Lazare has made a good case not only that the illegality and blackmail threat are implausible, but that the FBI’s interrogation of Flynn reeks of entrapment. “Yet anti-Trump liberals are trying to convince the public that it’s all ‘worse than Watergate.'”24

The political point of the DNI report thus seems to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump administration’s hands in its dealings with Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream have argued that we may have been witnessing an incipient spy or palace coup that fell short, but still had the desired effect of weakening the new administration.25 The Times has not offered a word of criticism of this politicization and intervention in the election process by intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors have been working with them and the Democratic Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un- and anti-democratic program designed to undermine or reverse the results of the 2016 election, on the pretext of alleged foreign electoral interference.

The Times and the mainstream media in general have also barely mentioned the awkward fact that the allegedly hacked disclosures of the DNC and Clinton and Podesta emails disclosed uncontested facts about real electoral manipulations on behalf of the Clinton campaign, facts that the public had a right to know and that might well have affected the election results. The focus on the evidence-free claims of a Russian hacking intrusion have helped divert attention from the real electoral abuses disclosed by the WikiLeaks material. Here again, official and mainstream media fake news helped bury real news.

Another arrow in the Russophobia quiver was a private intelligence “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent working for Orbis Business Intelligence, a private firm hired by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump. Steele’s first report, delivered in June 2016, made numerous serious accusations against Trump, most notably that Trump had been caught in a sexual escapade in Moscow, that his political advance had been supported by the Kremlin for at least five years, under Putin’s direction, in order to sow discord within the U.S. political establishment and disrupt the Western alliance. This document was based on alleged conversations by Steele with distant (Russian) officials: that is, strictly on hearsay evidence, whose assertions, where verifiable, are sometimes erroneous.26 But it said just what the Democrats, the mainstream media, and the CIA wanted to hear, and intelligence officials accordingly declared the author “credible,” and the media lapped it up. The Times hedged somewhat on its own cooperation in this tawdry campaign by calling the report “unverified,” but nevertheless reported its claims.27

The Steele dossier also became a central part of the investigation and hearings on “Russia-gate” held by the House Intelligence Committee starting in March 2017, led by Democratic Representative Adam Schiff. While basing his opening statement on the hearsay-laden dossier, Schiff expressed no interest in establishing who funded the Steele effort, the identity and exact status of the Russian officials quoted, or how much they were paid. Apparently talking to Russians with a design of influencing an American presidential election is perfectly acceptable if the candidate supported by this intrusion is anti-Russian!

The Times has played a major role in this latest wave of Russophobia, reminiscent of its 1917–20 performance in which, as Lippmann and Merz noted in 1920, “boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled” characterized the news-making process. While quoting the CIA’s admission that it had no hard evidence, relying instead on “circumstantial evidence” and “capabilities,” the Times was happy to describe these capabilities at great length and to imply that they proved something.28 Editorials and news articles have worked uniformly on the false supposition that Russian hacking was proved, and that the Russians had given these data to WikiLeaks, also unproven and strenuously denied by Assange and Murray.

The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy’s “Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,” February 20, 2017.29 But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper’s regular columnists accept as a given the CIA’s assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and “non-partisan” investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this “fake news” threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.

The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post‘s piece by Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” which featured a report by a group of anonymous “experts” entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the “experts” refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being “targeted by legions of skilled hackers.” As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, “You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put your name to your claims? Take a hike.”30 But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)

On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise. It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.) Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their own notions of fake news and propaganda.

The success of the war party’s campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration’s speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad’s guilt beyond their government’s claims.31 The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well.

But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities believe the current case is equally problematic.32 Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war.

Notes

↩Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman,Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon, 2008), chapter 2.
↩Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz,A Test of the News (New York: New Republic, 1920).
↩On the Grand Area framework, see Noam Chomsky, “The New Framework of Order,” inOn Power and Ideology (Boston: South End, 1987).
↩Edward S. Herman, “Returning Guatemala to the Fold,” in Gary Rawnsley, ed.,Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (London: Macmillan, 1999).
↩Ronald Schneider,Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (New York: Praeger, 1959), 41, 196–97, 294.
↩Editorial Board, “The Guatemala Incident,”New York Times, April 8, 1950.
↩Elisabeth Malkin, “An Apology for a Guatemalan Coup, 57 Years Later,”New York Times, October 11, 2011.
↩Harrison Salisbury,Without Fear or Favor (New York: Times Books, 1980), 486.
↩Richard Du Boff and Edward Herman,America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs, 1966).
↩See Chomsky and Herman,Manufacturing Consent, chapter 6.
↩Editorial Board, “A Victory for Russian Democracy,”New York Times, July 4, 1996.
↩Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,”Monthly Review 59, no. 5 (October 2007); Herman and Peterson, “Poor Marlise: Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking the Tribunal and Even Portraying the Serbs as Victims,” ZNet, October 30, 2008, http://zcomm.org.
↩Stephen F. Cohen,Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000).
↩Ellen Barry and Michael Schwartz, “After Election, Putin Faces Challenges to Legitimacy,”New York Times, March 5, 2012.
↩Robert Parry, “Troubling Gaps in the New MH-17 Report,” Consortium News, September 28, 2016, http://consortiumnews.com.
↩Paul Krugman says, “Mr. Putin is someone who doesn’t worry about little things like international law” (“The Siberian Candidate,”New York Times, July 22, 2016)—implying, falsely, that U.S. leaders do “worry about” such things.
↩A version of Mearsheimer’s article appeared as “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”Foreign Affairs, September 10, 2014. The paper likewise rejected Stephen Cohen’s 2012 article “The Demonization of Putin.”
↩“Sochi Under Siege,”New York Times, February 21, 2014.
↩Michael Kimmelman, “Aleppo’s Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail,”New York Times, December 15, 2016. Above this front-page article were four photographs of dead or injured children, the most prominent one in Syria. The accompanying editorial, “Aleppo’s Destroyers: Assad, Putin, Iran,” omits some key actors and killers. See also Rick Sterling, “How US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War,” Consortium News, September 23, 2016.
↩William Binney and Ray McGovern, “The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking,’” Consortium News, January 6, 2017.
↩David Sanger, “Putin Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S. Election, Report Says,”New York Times, January 6, 2017.
↩Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Nichols, “What Constitutes Reasonable Mainstream Opinion,”Current Affairs, March 22, 2017.
↩Jack Matlock, “Contacts with Russian Embassy,” Jack Matlock blog, March 4, 2017, http://jackmatlock.com.
↩Daniel Lazare, “Democrats, Liberals, Catch McCarthyistic Fever,” Consortium News, February 17, 2017.
↩Robert Parry, “A Spy Coup in America?” Consortium News, December 18, 2016; Andre Damon, “Democratic Party Floats Proposal for a Palace Coup,” Information Clearing House,” March 23, 2017, http://informationclearinghouse.info.
↩Robert Parry, “The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate,” Consortium News, March 29, 2017.
↩Scott Shane et al., “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump,”New York Times, January 11, 2017.
↩Matt Fegenheimer and Scott Shane, “Bipartisan Voices Back U.S. Agencies On Russia Hacking,”New York Times, January 6, 2017; Michael Shear and David Sanger, “Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds,”New York Times,January 7, 2017; Andrew Kramer, “How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar,”New York Times, December 30, 2016.
↩Robert Parry, “NYT’s Fake News about Fake News,” Consortium News, February 22, 2017.
↩Matt Taibbi, “The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting,”Rolling Stone, November 28, 2016.
↩Adam Johnson, “Out of 47 Media Editorials on Trump’s Syria Strikes, Only One Opposed,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 11, 2017, http://fair.org.
↩Scott Ritter, “Wag the Dog—How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump and The American Media,” Huffington Post, April 9, 2017; James Carden, “The Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria: Is There a Place for Skepticism?”Nation, April 11, 2017.

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/fa ... al-enemies

[Elvis]

Thanks—that's excellent. Herman's 1982 book The Real Terror Network really filled me in on the nature and extent of U.S.-sponsored terror. Sadly, people would rather read the NY Times.

[Grizzly]

Trump Russia Russia Trump etc...

[MacCruiskeen]

From July 2012, an interview in three parts with Ed Herman (40 mins total -- full transcripts at the link).

Pt 1: Ed Herman, Co-Author of 'Manufacturing Consent'
Ed Herman, who wrote the famous book with Noam Chomsky, looks back at his life and what formed his thinking about the world

Pt 2: Ed Herman on "Humanitarian Imperialism"
Edward Herman: The development of humanitarian intervention as a concept is essentially an overthrow of international law

Pt 3 : Ed Herman on Global Finance
Ed Herman: We've been in a period in which the power of finance extends into politics more aggressively than it ever was, so it's able to stymie any changes

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:8161:Ed ... nance-Pt-3

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News: How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers

“They drank the Kool-Aid and thought they were saving freedom."

By Robert Scheer / Truthdig
January 1, 2018

Joel Whitney’s new book, “Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers,” explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material. During the interview, Scheer and Whitney discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as the Paris Review).

Finks

Their talk comes at a particularly tense time in American politics, as accusations of fake news and Russian propaganda fly from both sides of the aisle. But the history detailed in Whitney’s book presents a valuable lesson for writers hoping to avoid similar manipulations today.

Scheer opens the discussion with the question: “Were they really tricked?”

“It could have been ‘paid,’ it could have been ‘subsidized,’ it could have been ‘used,’ it could have been ‘collaborated with,’ ” Whitney responds. “So yeah, it might have been any other verb there besides ‘tricked.’”

The two then delve into the tactics used by the CIA to influence writers. Whitney notes that the fearful political atmosphere at the time led to “secrecy being used to preside over and rule over the free press — which we’re supposed to be the champions of.”

“They drank the Kool-Aid and thought they were saving freedom,” Scheer agrees.

The discussion underscores the need for analysis of Cold War-era media as a way to avoid propagandized journalism today. Scheer says, “I look at the current situation, where we don’t even have a good communist enemy, so we’re inventing Russia as a reborn communist power enemy.”

“I call it superpolitics,” Whitney concludes, “where essentially there’s something that’s so evil and so frightening that we have to change how our democratic institutions work.”

Listen to the full interview below. Don’t have time to stream the full interview? Download it and listen on the go by clicking on the “arrow” button. You can also read a full transcript of the conversation below.



Transcript

Robert Scheer: Greetings. This is another edition of Scheer Intelligence. I’m Robert Scheer, but the intelligence comes from my guests. And in this case it’s Joel Whitney, who’s just written a really terrific book called “Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” And actually, my only disagreement with the book is a little bit with the title. So let me just begin there, and you can lay out the thesis. But it’s the story, of course, about how the CIA secretly funded the Congress [for] Cultural Freedom and lots of other organizations, and got involved right after World War II and continued right through the Cold War, basically manipulating publications and movies, everything else, to so-called “win the battle of ideas” with the Soviets, and ended up in the process adopting some of their more nefarious means. But when you say the CIA tricked the world’s best writers, you’re talking about a pretty sharp group of people, like [George] Plimpton and [William] Styron and all that. Were they really tricked?

Joel Whitney: Well, that’s a great first question. I did an event in Berkeley last week, and actually had a Paris Review magazine veteran come by and ask me essentially that same question. And his reservation was the word “finks” and the word “tricked.” More “finks,” though, which he thought was derogatory as someone who had been at the Paris Review. He, you know, he may have felt that there was some, whether well-intentioned or misinformed, idea of patriotism. And “finks,” of course, as you know when you finish the book, comes from one of my characters. “Tricked” was the word I settled on, “how the CIA tricked the world’s best writers;” it could have been “paid,” it could have been “subsidized,” it could have been “used,” it could have been “collaborated with.” And I actually envisioned at one point–I couldn’t sell this to my editor–a cover where in sort of lighter shadow behind the word “tricked” would be all those other words going up and down the front of the book. Yeah, I think a lot of the writers had different motives. And actually, some of them, throughout the book, you’ll see–you’ll remember they changed their minds. So some of them were more in favor in the early fifties; by the time the Vietnam War hits, and the CIA’s reputation is a little more tarnished, some of them were less enthralled with the agency and other kinds of anti-communist institutions. So, yeah, it might have been any other verb there besides “tricked.”

RS: What I found, and knowing some of these people, they’re a pretty sharp bunch. I mean, this really goes to, I think, more David Halberstam’s idea in “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic work on what happened in Vietnam. That these were the best products of the meritocracy; this was the creme de la creme of Harvard and Yale, and the Yale Review, and all that sort of thing; the brightest minds, the most talented people. And for whatever reason, sometimes for greed but also, you know, they bought into it–what they bought into was basically a stupefyingly simplistic and wrong-headed notion of what was going on in the world. That’s the overwhelming thought I came away with from your book, which is great in detail, great storytelling; you know, whether it’s about Pasternak or whether it’s about Sontag or anybody–I mean, they’re all in there, there’s a lot of really rich detail. But the overwhelming sense that I got from this book was how once again, using Halberstam’s idea of “The Best and the Brightest,” how did this group of people–who certainly were literate and well-traveled and tested well and got great grades at the best schools and studied under the best people–get it so wrong?

JW: Yeah, I think the idea of the oversimplification that you described in your question, I think that’s accurate. And I think the sharper ones were further, were more removed from that simplification. And then what you see are several groups in the anti-communist movements, several actual organizations that were sort of recruiting people that were representing the CIA’s slush funds, who are luring people in who have standing internationally, people who can do some soft power work but might, if they know exactly what’s going on, they might be a little too critical of it. So if you start, for instance, in Berlin after World War II, you have a group of people who were familiar with Stalinist methods to the degree that perhaps they were traumatized by them. So those people were sincere, but they weren’t necessarily nuanced in their understanding of maybe how to fight totalitarianism. They thought essentially that the best method was to fight fire with fire. So in a way, these were guys who had a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy theory went like this: Soviet Russia is penetrating organizations around the world; they had some evidence, Comintern and other organizations. But they had no sense of scale, and I think by the time you have McCarthy discredited in the middle fifties, some of these guys were probably willing to dial back some of their initial fears. But by then, they’d set this great movement in motion where it was just huge amounts of money that the CIA could offer. And so what I look at, as you remember in the book, is just I look at these little intellectual magazines that were initially recruited to do two things: one, to push back against anti-Americanism. So they wanted to tout and brag about our high culture, because in Western Europe, which was the key battleground, we were known for our pop and low culture; we were known for martial funds, we were known for our tanks. So one can sort of appreciate that. But then it comes with another idea, which is to discredit the Soviet Union as often as can be. And when you see that, how it plays out, you start to see disinformation beginning to spread. And what you see presiding over both sides of that idea is a regime of secrecy, which is problematic when you’re talking about magazines, because you’re talking about secrecy being used to preside over and rule over the free press that we’re supposed to be the champions of.

RS: The reason your book is compelling, and I think people should read it–and let me just be clear right up front, I read it straight through, [laughs], I think I had one breakfast break. But I enjoyed it enormously, because it really makes these characters come alive. And they’re not cardboard characters, whether you’re talking about Irving Kristol, or you’re talking about, you know, Irving Howe or George Plimpton or anybody–there’s whole bunches of them run through the book, and you really are introduced to the cultural life of Paris and London and New York and so forth. But again, I keep getting back to this one question, you know; there’s a thing in the newspaper business, I remember one editor telling me “too good to check.” And maybe when somebody’s writing you an actual check, and you’re getting money and you’re getting first-class airfare, and they’re funding your wonderful magazine, your little magazine, so you don’t have to go to your parents–because most of these people were super rich, and they could just go to their uncle or father or something and get some more money. But still it was now, you know, classy to get it from some secret Fleischmann’s Yeast or something [Laughs], that was a front for the CIA. You know, and so yeah, you’re involved in intrigue and all that, which I guess a lot of writers like to be involved in; but the idea that they drank the Kool-Aid and thought they were saving freedom is the part that I still don’t get.

JW: It does seem like there was a big pivot after World War II, and I think one of the organizations that normalized the idea of secrecy ruling over the media–which is eventually what you end up with in a program like this–was the OSS. A lot of the people, the founding lights of the CIA, came to see that the OSS had done some great work in, as they saw it, thwarting the Nazis during World War II. So a lot of the people who founded the CIA, they understood that if the Soviet communists were using secrecy to penetrate our organizations, instead of thinking of how do we stop the penetration, it seems like it turned into a system of let’s preemptively penetrate our own organizations, just to make sure we can watch them and keep them on the up-and-up. And of course one of the ways that they keep people in line, as you say, was through the money. So in terms of the official magazines that the CIA created and presided over, the British spy who overthrew Mosaddegh, he would have been, in June of 1953–his name was Christopher Montague Woodhouse–he would have been working on the CIA magazine for London, Encounter. He would have empowered the two editors, one American, one Brit, Stephen Spender on the British side, Irving Kristol on the American side, both working out of London; one paid through secrecy of the British state, one paid indirectly through the CIA. The spy overseeing this, Woodhouse, he would have then turned in the late summer towards overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. And then later, he’s also feeling so good about this system of, what essentially you have are coups as covert ops and then long-term soft-power propaganda, also on the covert ops side of the CIA and British secret services. So he feels so good about this that he’s later on a contributor to Encounter. So magazines like Encounter, they were created in Paris, they were created in Italy, they were created all over Europe; and then they spread to the Nordic countries, they spread to the Third World. What they did was they involved people at different levels. So the people in the know would be people who were editors and regular contributors, and it would even for them be kind of an open secret. So one person I interviewed was a guy named Nelson Aldrich, and he collaborated first–well, he worked for, I should say, first with the Paris Review. The Paris Review was not one of those magazines created by the CIA, or if it was, it was sort of indirectly used. It was used as Peter Matthiessen, the writer who was one of its founders, as his cover in Paris in the early fifties. But then he says he resigned from the CIA and there was no connection. Well, later on, George Plimpton, the famous writer and man about New York, was the public face of the Paris Review through its formative years and for many decades; he found a way to get CIA money through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its cultural propaganda front. So that’s a second tie. Later on in my research, I found a third tie through a founding managing editor. So you have such a vast network of money for culture that in one organization, one magazine that’s sort of only a tangential CIA asset or friend, you can find three big separate ties.

RS: I’m glad I got this chance to talk to you, because the book reads the way you talk. It’s not vindictive, it’s not smearing people, it’s not doing what they did, actually. What these folks did in the name of anti-communism was they were perfectly happy, thrilled, to sail out and destroy their buddies, their college classmates, to smear them, smear intellectuals that they respected. That’s really what happened. You know, you’re using your power, your clout. And there’s an analogy right now, I think, with this whole discussion of fake news. These people were actually doing fake news. They were being paid by a government agency, the CIA, cooperating, following instructions, and sometimes censoring articles, editing them and so forth, so they’re part of an official government propaganda regime that continues right up through Vietnam and everything else. And so they become a caricature of the whole, you know, democratic experiment, which is certainly not what the Founders had in mind. And they get very vindictive towards people who disagree with the narrative. And the reason I began the way I did, asking you–the irony here is the people who objected to their official narrative turned out to be, quite early on, right. So for example, you mentioned Nelson Aldrich, and you have him placed as one of those people who knew what was going on. Well, I knew Nelson Aldrich as a guy I would chat with at Elaine’s in New York for years. And by that point, of the sixties, he knew it was all bogus. He was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. And in fact he wrote a very good book about the elite and how out of touch they are, the economic elite, and so forth. And I found him quite supportive of Ramparts, you know; I couldn’t get any money from him, from his wealthy relatives, but nonetheless he seemed like a–

JW: [Laughs] Gotta try.

RS: And you mentioned another person, you know; one point where, I don’t know, I was a little unhappy with, you mentioned Frances Fitzgerald, the famous writer of “Fire In the Lake” and “Wild Blue Yonder,” great journalist; and her father was a well-known, you know, deputy head of the whole CIA, Desmond Fitzgerald. But the fact is, Frances Fitzgerald also–she’d studied with Zbigniew Brzezinski, she’d gone to the best Ivy League schools– but the fact is, very early on, she embraced an opposite view. She saw that the Vietnam War was bogus, it was a fiction, and the claims made were wrong. And she wrote a devastating book on it very early on. So it just seemed to me, the crowd you’re describing, I’m not going to minimize the damage they did, because they stifled debate; they prevented a good discussion from taking place that would have avoided Vietnam. OK? It would have avoided the confrontation with Cuba. It would have avoided the overthrow of Mossadegh, you know, and we go down the whole list. So I’m not minimizing the destructive, you know, impact that they had and the stupefying, really, the ignorance of the debate. And I’ll just give two examples of that, you know, but I want to get back to how quickly some people, at least, escaped this net, including William Styron and others. But two villains that really emerged in their world were Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. And it’s interesting, because both of those people, particularly Bertrand Russell, had impeccable anti-communist credentials. Bertrand Russell, you know, had famously attacked communism as an evil, and anti-intellectual and stifling of thought; and certainly Sartre had shown a considerable independence. But yet because they teamed up to do something called the Vietnam War Crimes Commission, and they challenged America in a very fundamental way on what it was doing, not only in Vietnam, elsewhere–this same crowd, the ones that were still influential, went out to destroy Sartre and Russell. So what I want to get across is it’s not minor what they did; your book exposes the fundamental distortion of American politics during the post-Cold War period, which is where all the stupidity came from. My only question–and it makes for a great read, and it really reveals a lot. I look at the current situation where we don’t even have a good communist enemy, because the communists that are in power are the ones we’re trading with in [China] now. So we’re inventing Russia as a reborn communist power or enemy, and we have this whole campaign now as if, you know, now Putin is the evil empire. And so there is a current echo in sort of how easy it is to manipulate people.

JW: Yeah. Well, just on the first point you made about the meanness or the lack of meanness in the book, that was something I wanted to be very conscientious about when I went through edits with my editor. There’s a great scholar and writer at UC Berkeley who said something that I saw quoted recently: “Be tough on the institutions, and be soft on the people.” And that was reinforced again and again when I saw some of the collaborators with these cultural fronts of the CIA changing their minds, learning from things like Vietnam. And seeing them change their minds actually gave me a lot of hope, because you know, you can be on the payroll; you can be someone who’s an operator; you can be someone who thinks of the world as a good side and a bad side, and therefore whatever we do represents the good side. And then you can wake up from that. You mentioned Sartre; he was absolutely attacked by one of the CIA’s magazines, and his magazine was seen as a threat, and the French magazine Preuves, based out of Paris, was in some ways an answer to Sartre’s magazine and his attempts to deal, to treat the United States the way it should be treated. When it was going against its values, he would call them out on that. Neruda, Pablo Neruda, the poet, was another one who suffered severe reputational damage by this cultural front of the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. When they found out, some of these operators found out that he was up for the Nobel in ‘63, they wrote a quiet, sort of secret white paper about him, and they made some links to Stalinism through his Stalin [Peace] Prize. And it was, of course, the year that Stalin had died that he took it. And they also made up some stuff that I think was, you know, viciously untrue, that he was in on the attempt to murder Trotsky. So this is reputational damage that then is doubled later by the CIA’s actual overthrow of his friend in Chile, Salvador Allende. So what I see is if someone’s being physically harmed by the CIA, that’s one thing that we’ve accounted for in a lot of historical books and political books; if someone’s being reputationally damaged by CIA propaganda, you see that in some of the academic books that look at the so-called cultural Cold War. But I wanted to remove the wall between those two areas and show that both of those things happened in a context where a lot of people were just made terrified by the fact that you had evil on one side and a fighting-fire-with-fire mentality on so-called, quote unquote, our side.

RS: [omission] We’re back with Joel Whitney, and the book is called “Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” So, Joel, let me ask you a question that I was about to ask when we took our break. I’m going to talk a little bit about the CIA, because the [sub]title of your book is “how the CIA tricked the world’s best writers.” And there we get into a pretty sinister cast of characters. And I just want to bring up one who shows up a lot, because I know something about him from my own Freedom of Information files, because I was the editor of Ramparts and I was involved in some of this stuff. And that’s James Jesus Angleton. And I am the proud possessor of a record in which J. Edgar Hoover, at one point after all the Ramparts stuff, exonerated me and said he’s going to close the Scheer case–I was the last, well, not the last, but I was the editor of Ramparts at a critical moment. And he had investigated me at the behest of the CIA and, largely, James Jesus Angleton. And he said, there’s no there there; this guy likes to have a good time, he wants to meet women, he wants to have good meals [Laughter], but the fact is we’ve been investigating him for, I don’t know what it was, five years around the clock and there’s no there there. OK. And James Jesus Angleton, and others in the CIA, denounced him! And said, you can’t do this. You know, and so forth; I wasn’t the only one they wanted to go after. But you know, these guys were playing hardball. And they wouldn’t mind, when you traveled to another country–because I found myself getting harassed in different countries. I was in jail briefly in Mexico and I was in jail briefly in Lithuania, you know, and other places, Algeria and so forth; I didn’t want to get paranoid about it, but they had a reach worldwide where they could make your life really rough, or end it, for that matter. So what about James Jesus Angleton? What have you learned about this guy?

JW: Well, he was part of this post-OSS group that understood how important spying and covert ops had been in World War II. And from there, he makes all kinds of terrible mistakes. He and his group believed essentially that they needed to do better propaganda than the Soviets did, and one of the ways that they thought they could do it better was to do it subtly and, you could say, secretly. So when this program is threatened with exposure in ‘64, ‘65, ‘66 and ‘67 through various sources like Ramparts and The New York Times, this privilege of secrecy that they enjoyed was not something that they were willing to give up. So you have something that is described as relatively benign, this funding of culture through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a funding of student movements through the National Student Association, the funding of labor unions that would be less communist-influenced than the communist-dominated ones that they presumed were out there. These were seen as benign answers. They were reactions to Soviet penetration. So secrecy is a key to making them work. So even if you want to make the argument that, for instance, the Congress for Cultural Freedom never censored its magazines–which I think has been severely disproved; they did censor. Even if you wanted to say that they published all sorts of great writers–which clearly they did; that was part of the subtlety of it and part of the brilliance of it, and part of the soft-power charm of it. Even if you wanted to say all that, when the secrecy is exposed by honest accounting in the media, the fourth estate, the adversarial media of American bragging around the world, they are so attached to their secrecy, and so upset, the CIA group led by people like Angleton, that they commit something that is about as anti-American as anything in our system. Which is: more secrecy, more media penetration to the point of penetrating, first, the anti-Vietnam War press; second, the student, the college student newspapers and press; the alternative, so-called, press. Which essentially is a license to do what they did later. So that first thing I described, where Ramparts was penetrated, leads to Operation CHAOS, presumably; that leads to Operation Mockingbird in the seventies. By the time we have Carl Bernstein reporting on Operation Mockingbird, and John Crewdson reporting on its international equivalent in the New York Times–Bernstein in Rolling Stone–you essentially see the CIA trying to have at least one agent at every major news and media organization it can do in the world. And Crewdson reporting in the Times at the end of 1977 essentially says that they had one agent or contract agent at a newspaper in every world capital on Earth. That’s astonishing. They could get stories killed or get stories to run that portrayed the CIA’s views in a favorable way, or kill them if they did not.

RS: Let me point out–yeah, go ahead–

JW: And so Angleton is behind a lot of this, just to sort of circle back to your question, but go ahead.

RS: No, well, but I want to get at–there’s an interesting contradiction here. Because this is not benign. But what happens is, you create an atmosphere in which–and you could have it in a contemporary moment; oh, let’s get rid of Assad in Syria, for example. That sounds like a good liberal thing to do. And yes, there are great human rights violations by this dictator; yes, he kills innocent people. So did Stalin. Yes, yes. So did Khrushchev. OK. We get that. And then you build that up into an argument of, that there’s war going on between obvious good and obvious evil, and any discussion about any gray area is some kind of moral equivalency; it means you’re insensitive, it means you’re saying the same. And the irony here is that–and Angleton was the product of an elite education; actually, he was half Mexican, so maybe that gave him a burden in those circles. But the fact is, he could drink cocktails with the best of them. And what came out of this was an arrogance. That because you were on the side of the angels, the best and the brightest of Halberstam, it was OK–Robert McNamara famously, you know, one of the Ford company geniuses and so forth–it was OK to kill three and a half million Indochinese, including and in addition to almost 59,000 Americans. Because you had figured this out, you know, and you knew who were the good guys and bad guys. Now, looking back on it, it’s just of course absurd, you know. That you’re in this country that had no way of inflicting damage on us, and that had a thousand years of hostility towards China, and had no real interest in Russia, and it didn’t fit the model at all. And you know, in terms of the specific incidents that you have a chapter on, this Michigan State project, where Stanley Sheinbaum, who you describe as a whistleblower, which he was–you know, I wrote about that before there was a Ramparts. I wrote about it in a report to Robert Hutchins’ Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Henry Luce was on the board, it was very respectable. But, because Stanley Sheinbaum, one of the few individuals that I interviewed to do that story, he had seen the horror of it and he was willing to speak out. None of the others were. By the time I got to Stanley, I had gone through almost every professor, everyone had worked for either the CIA–that I knew about–or had worked on this Michigan State project, which was foul from the beginning. You take a guy, Ngo Dinh Diem, who didn’t even share the religion of 90 percent of the people there; you find him in a Catholic monastery in New York and you decide he’s going to be the George Washington of Vietnam [Laughter], and you get into this crazy intervention, right? And then 10 years after you do that, prevent the Geneva accords and everything, in the early sixties–the only reason I knew about that story, I went to the stacks at Berkeley, I wanted to know, what’s this place Vietnam about. And one of the guys involved in this thing had died, and his widow had donated his papers. It was totally accidental. I blew the dust off the papers and I found the evidence of their engineering torture and everything else to keep this guy Diem in power, and fortunately Stanley Sheinbaum was willing to say it. The depressing thing about that, and about why we don’t have more Edward Snowdens and so forth, is none of the other folks talked about it. They all stonewalled me. And they didn’t come clean.

JW: Yeah. It feels very lonely to be a whistleblower.

RS: Well, and what’s interesting about your book is there’s denial–even, you know, Peter Matthiessen – I mean, Matthiessen’s a very good author, very interesting guy and everything. But at the end, he’s still putting down a documentary filmmaker who he had actually told his story to. And they don’t really come clean, as you point out in your book. That’s why your book is so important. Because the story is not well known.

JW: The story is not well known. It gets buried, it gets buried under other things. I mean, the beginning of your question and your comment, I see it now–in my own notes, I call it superpolitics. Where essentially there’s something that’s so evil and so frightening that we have to change how our democratic institutions work, and whether they remain democratic. And so on the first part of your question, yeah, there was this notion that since we’re on the side of the angels we can do a lot of things that we wouldn’t normally do to fight Lucifer. And what you end up with–I think anyone who uses the moral equivalency argument, you know, you can’t compare American crimes to Stalinist crimes–it starts off as true, and the more you use it, the more it’s a shield to make us more Stalin-like. I mean, I don’t compare American history or American foreign policy to anything that Stalin did, except when I do in detail. And people who talk about Vietnam, if you count all of Southeast Asia, some of them like Viet Nguyen, the current Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction for his book The Sympathizer, he talks about it in terms of six million lives lost. Which is getting up into monumental numbers.

RS: The book is “[Finks:] How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers,” by Joel Whitney. And the more I talk about the book, the more I think, yes, they were tricked. Because they–well, it’s not a bad title, because–

JW: [Laughs] I used a soft sell over you, let you talk yourself into it.

RS: Well, no, but the fact of the matter is these were–again I get back to Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest”–they were smart people. And yes, I’ve known them; I’ve known them personally, many of them. And they weren’t, you know, they didn’t want terrible things to happen, and a good number of them denounced the previous stuff. And so I guess “tricked” works. But the problem is, it’s not a game in which there are not victims. You know, you claim you’re going to make it a safer world and you make it a far more dangerous world, and you end up with a situation that Martin Luther King in his famous Riverside Church [speech] described, he said, you know, we’re talking about violence; he said my government today is “the [greatest] purveyor of violence in the world” today. And we got to that through a pattern of to stop being critical of our government, to stop thinking about it. And so I’m really happy that we have this book, [Finks:] How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers,” Joel Whitney, available–you get it from OR [Books]/Counterpoint. So thank you.

JW: Thank you.