John Simkin's posting of this article on Tom Braden reminded me of the strange fact that Allan Dulles' Nazi officer Hans Bernard Gesivious, after testifying at Nurenberg, came to the United States on a CIA subsidy and as Dulles' guest, stayed at the home of Thomas Braden.
I thought that might have been particularly interesting to have the former Nazi Gestapo officer living with "The Braden Bunch" - and that the situation might have made a good episode of the TV show "Eight Is Enough."
From what I understand, Braden had three or four kids and his second wife had four or five so they ended up with a family of eight and lived in DC suburb near if not next door to RFK's "Hickory Hill" estate, where his big family lived, so their kids all grew up together.
I wonder what the kids thought of the German Gestapo officer who moved in with them?
John Simkin posted this:
Thomas Braden: “I'm Glad the CIA
is Immoral”
Tom Braden:
From: What’s Wrong With The CIA ?
By Tom Braden, Saturday Review, April
5, 1975
I especially like this:
“You bring a group of people together, bind them with an
oath, test their loyalty periodically with machines, spy on them to make sure
they’re not meeting secretly with someone from the Czech Embassy, cushion them
from the rest of the world with a false cover story, teach them to lie because
lying is in the national interest, and they do not behave like other men. They
do not come home from work and answer truthfully the question, ‘What did you do
today, darling?’ When they chat with their neighbors, they lie about their
jobs. In their compartmentalized, need-to-know jobs, it is perfectly excuseable
for one CIA man to lie to another if the
other doesn’t need to know.”
James Madison: “A popular government without the means to
popular information is a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”
On 20th May 1967 Thomas Braden, the former head of the
Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA
had subsidized progressive magazines such as Encounter through the
Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its
staff was a CIA agent. He also admitted that
he had paid money to trade union leaders such as Walter Reuther, Jay Lovestone,
David Dubinsky and Irving Brown. According to Frances Stonor Saunders, the
author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and
the Cultural Cold War? (1999): "The effect of Braden's article was to sink
the CIA 's covert association with the
Non-Communist Left once and for all."
Braden later admitted that the article had been commissioned
by CIA asset, Stewart Alsop.
John Hunt pointed out in a revealing interview: "Tom Braden was a company man... if he was really acting independently, would have had much to fear. My belief is that he was an instrument down the line somewhere of those who wanted to get rid of the NCL (Non-Communist Left). Don't look for a lone gunman - that's mad, just as it is with the Kennedy assassination... I do believe there was an operational decision to blow the Congress and the other programs out of the water."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbraden.htm
Thomas Wardell Braden, the son of an insurance agent was
born in Greene,Iowa, on 22nd February, 1917 . Braden graduated
in Political Science from Dartmouth College
Braden was recruited into Special Operations Executive (SOE )
and in 1944, along with Stewart Alsop he
went to work with Allen Dulles at
the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS
Braden moved to Washington where
he associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials
that became known as theGeorgetown Set.
This included Frank
Wisner, George
Kennan, Dean
Acheson, Richard
Bissell, Desmond
FitzGerald, Joseph
Alsop, Stewart
Alsop, Tracy
Barnes, Philip
Graham, David
Bruce, Clark
Clifford, Walt
Rostow, Eugene
Rostow, Chip
Bohlen, Cord
Meyer, Richard
Helms, Desmond
FitzGerald, Frank Wisner,James Angleton, William Averill
Harriman, John
McCloy, Felix
Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze. Most
men brought their wives to these gatherings. Members of what was later called
the Georgetown Ladies' Social Club included Katharine Graham, Mary Pinchot Meyer,
Sally Reston, Polly Wisner, Joan Braden, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce,
Avis Bohlen, Janet Barnes, Tish Alsop, Cynthia Helms, Marietta FitzGerald,
Phyllis Nitze and Annie Bissell.
Allen
Dulles joined the CIA as Deputy
Director of Operations in December 1950 and he brought in Braden as his
assistant. As Frances
Stonor Saunders points out in Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999):
"Allen Dulles joined the CIA in December 1950 as Deputy Director of
Operations. This was a position of immense scope, giving Dulles responsibility
for collecting intelligence, and for supervising Frank Wisner's division, the
Office of Policy Coordination. One of his first acts was to recruit Tom Braden,
one of his most dashing OSS
Assigned the codename "Homer D. Hoskins", Braden
was initially without portfolio, nominally assigned to Frank Wisner and
the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC ), but
in reality working directly for Dulles. He was given responsibility for
studying Soviet propaganda. He reported: "If the other side can use ideas
that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet supported or stimulated,
then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas".
Braden suggested to Allen Dulles that
he should be allowed to establish International Organizations Division (IOD) to
counteract Soviet propaganda. Dulles agreed and Cord Meyer was
appointed as his deputy. The IOD helped established anti-Communist front groups
in Western Europe . The IOD was dedicated to infiltrating
academic, trade and political associations. The objective was to control
potential radicals and to steer them to the right. Braden later claimed that
such measures were necessary in the early 1950s because the Soviet
Union operated "immensely powerful" front groups in Europe .
Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National
Student Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers
of America, the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational
Association. According to Braden, the CIA
was putting around $900,000 a year into the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Some
of this money was used to publish its journal, Encounter.
Braden and the IOD also worked closely with anti-Communist
leaders of the trade union movement such asGeorge Meany of
the Congress for
Industrial Organization and the American Federation of
Labor. This was used to fight Communism in their own ranks. As Braden said:
"The CIA could do exactly as it
pleased. It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was one of the first
worldwide multinationals."
The policy of funding non-communist organisations got the
IOD into trouble in 1952. Joseph McCarthydiscovered
what was happening but according to Roy Cohn, one of
his aides, he considered the CIA as granting
large subsidies to pro-Communist organisations". Frances
Stonor Saunders has argued that "this was a critical moment:
McCarthy's unofficial anti-Communism was on the verge of disrupting, perhaps
sinking, the CIA 's most elaborate and
effective network of Non-Communist Left fronts." As Kai Bird has
pointed out: "A lot of these covert operations ironically were placed at
risk because of McCarthy, who threatened at one point to blow their cover
because, from his perspective, this was an American agency, the CIA ,
going into cahoots with lefties."
In November, 1954, Braden left the CIA . Cord Meyer replaced
him as head of International Organizations Division. Braden became the new
owner of the newspaper, The Blade Tribune in California
Joan Braden with Jackie Kennedy
According to Warren Hinckle and William Turner (Deadly Secrets), in 1963 Braden advised Robert Kennedy:
"Why don't you just go on a crusade to find out about the murder of your
brother?".
Kennedy shook his head and said it was too horrible to think
about and that he decided to just accept the findings of the Warren Commission.
At the end of 1966, Desmond
FitzGerald, Directorate for Plans, discovered that Ramparts,
a left-wing publication, were planning to publish an article that the
International Organizations Division had been secretly funding the National
Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign
against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for
his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to
hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were
vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried
off."
This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing
this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was
entitled NSA and the CIA . As well as reporting CIA funding of
the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist
front organizations in Europe , Asia ,
and South America . On 20th May 1967 Thomas Braden responded
to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is
Immoral , in the Saturday Evening
Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations
Division unit of the CIA. Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA
had subsidizedEncounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom -
which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.
According to Frances
Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999):
"The effect of Braden's article was to sink the CIA's covert association
with the Non-Communist Left once and for all." Braden later admitted that
the article had been commissioned by CIA asset, Stewart Alsop.
Another CIA agent, John Hunt, pointed out: "Tom Braden was a company
man... if he was really acting independently, would have had much to fear. My
belief is that he was an instrument down the line somewhere of those who wanted
to get rid of the NCL (Non-Communist Left). Don't look for a lone gunman -
that's mad, just as it is with the Kennedy assassination... I do believe there
was an operational decision to blow the Congress and the other programs out of
the water."
Thomas Braden
Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be
kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early
1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have
approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's
approving Medicare."
On 5th April, 1975 ,
Tom Braden published an article, What's Wrong with the CIA? in The Saturday Review. Braden argued: "Power, arrogance,
and the inside-outside syndrome are what's wrong with the CIA, and to some
extent, the faults are occupational and even necessary tools for the job. But
the events of the Cold War and the coincidence of Allen Dulles' having such
enormous discretionary powers enlarged occupational risks until they became
faults, and the faults created a monstrosity. The inside-outside syndrome
withheld the truth from Adlai Stevenson so that he was forced to make a
spectacle of himself on the floor of the United Nations by denying that the United
States Cuba
Two months later Tom Braden gave a television interview to
the UK
In 1975 Braden published the autobiographical novel, Eight is Enough. The book is about a newspaper columnist,
his wife and their eight children. The book was adapted into the TV series of
the same name which ran 1977 to 1981.
Braden also co-hosted the Buchanan-Braden Program, a
three-hour daily radio show with conservative Patrick
Buchanan, and delivered daily commentary on the NBC radio network from 1978
to 1984. Later he also worked with Buchanan on the CNN program Crossfire.
Although Braden's role in the programs was promoted as
representing the political left, some critics have questioned this label. Media
critic Jeff Cohen argued in I'm Not a Leftist, But I Play One on TV:
"TakeCrossfire, started by CNN in 1982 as the only nightly forum on
national TV purporting to offer an ideological battle between co-hosts of left
and right. Crossfire's co-host "on the left" for the first seven
years was a haplessly ineffectual centrist, Tom Braden, a guy who makes Alan
Colmes look like an ultraleft firebrand. In CNN's eyes, Braden apparently
earned his leftist credentials by having been a high-level CIA
official - ironically enough, in charge of covert operations against the
political left of Western Europe ." Timothy Leary
told a reporter that watching Crossfire was
like "watching the left wing of the CIA
debating the right wing of the CIA ".
Braden left the show in 1989.
(1) Tom Braden, Saturday Evening
Post (20th May, 1967 )
On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a
creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil:
"Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000. (signed) Norris A.
Grambo."
I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers
disclosed the "scandal" of the Central Intelligence Agency's
connections with American students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search,
and when it ended, I found myself feeling sad.
For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving
Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of
the CIA , and the piece of yellow paper is
the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation whose death has been
brought about by small-minded and resentful men.
It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown. He
needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that
American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock
workers. It was also my idea to give cash, along with advice, to other labor
leaders, to students, professors and others who could help the United
States
It was my idea. For 17 years I had thought it was a good
idea. Yet here it was in the newspapers, buried under excoriation. Walter
Lippmann, Joseph Kraft. Editorials. Outrage. Shock.
"What's gone wrong?" I said to myself as I looked
at the yellow paper. "Was there something wrong with me and the others
back in 1950? Did we just think we were helping our country, when in fact we
ought to have been hauled up before Walter Lippmann?
"And what's wrong with me now? For I still think it was
and is a good idea, an imperative idea. Am I out of my mind? Or is it the
editor of The New York Times who is talking nonsense?"
And so I sat sadly amidst the dust of old papers, and after
a time I decided something. I decided that if ever I knew a truth in my life, I
knew the truth of the cold war, and I knew what the Central Intelligence Agency
did in the cold war, and never have I read such a concatenation of inane,
misinformed twaddle as I have now been reading about the CIA .
Were the undercover payments by the CIA
"immoral"? Surely it cannot be "immoral" to make certain
that your country's supplies intended for delivery to friends are not burned,
stolen or dumped into the sea.
Are CIA efforts to
collect intelligence anywhere it can "disgraceful"? Surely it is not
"disgraceful" to ask somebody whether he learned anything while he
was abroad that might help his country.
People who make these charges must be naïve. Some of them
must be worse. Some must be pretending to be naïve.
Take Victor Reuther, assistant to his brother Walter,
president of the United Automobile Workers. According to Drew Pearson, Victor
Reuther complained that the American Federation of Labor got money from the CIA
and spent it with "undercover techniques." Victor Reuther ought to be
ashamed of himself. At his request, I went to Detroit West Germany CIA ,
he spent it with less than perfect wisdom, for the German unions he chose to
help weren't seriously short of money and were already anti-Communist. The CIA
money Victor spent would have done much more good where unions were tying up
ports at the order of Communist leaders.
As for the theory advanced by the editorial writers that
there ought to have been a Government foundation devoted to helping good causes
agreed upon by Congress-this may seem sound, but it wouldn't work for a minute.
Does anyone really think that congressmen would foster a foreign tour by an
artist who has or has had left-wing connections? And imagine the scuffles that
would break out as congressmen fought over money to subsidize the organizations
in their home districts.
Back in the early 1950's, when the cold war was really hot,
the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as
likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. I remember, for example,
the time I tried to bring my old friend, Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium U.S. CIA operations.
Paul-Henri Spaak was and is a very wise man. He had served
his country as foreign minister and premier. CIA
Director Allen Dulles mentioned Spaak's projected journey to the then Senate
Majority Leader William F. Knowland of California
"Why," the senator said, "the man's a
socialist."
"Yes," Mr. Dulles replied, "and the head of
his party. But you don't know Europe the way I do, Bill.
In many European countries, a socialist is roughly equivalent to a
Republican." Knowland replied, "I don't care. We aren't going to
bring any socialists over here."
The fact, of course, is that in much of Europe
in the 1950's, socialists, people who called themselves "left"-the
very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists-were the only
people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.
But let us begin at the beginning.
When I went to Washington CIA
chief Walter Bedell Smith, the agency was three years old. It had been
organized. like the State Department, along geographical lines, with a Far
Eastern Division, a Western European Division, etc. It seemed to me that this
organization was not capable of defending the United
States
1. The International Association of Democratic Lawyers had
found "documented proof" that U.S. Korea
2. The World Peace Council had conducted a successful
operation called the Stockholm Peace Appeal, a petition signed by more than two
million Americans. Most of them, I hope, were in ignorance of the council's
program: "The peace movement... has set itself the aim to frustrate the
aggressive plans of American and English imperialists... The heroic Soviet army
is the powerful sentinel of peace."
3. The Women's International Democratic Federation was
preparing a Vienna
4. The International Union of
Students had the active participation of nearly every student organization in
the world. At an estimated cost of $50 million a year, it stressed the hopeless
future of the young under any form of society except that dedicated to peace
and freedom, as in Russia
5. The World Federation of Democratic Youth appealed to the
non- intellectual young. In 1951, 25,000 young people were brought to Berlin
6. The International Organization of Journalists was founded
in Copenhagen
7. The World Federation of Trade Unions controlled the two
most powerful labor unions in France Italy
All in all, the CIA
estimated, the Soviet Union was annually spending $250
million on its various fronts. They were worth every penny of it. Consider what
they had accomplished.
First, they had stolen the great words. Years after I left
the CIA , the late United Nations Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson told me how he had been outraged when delegates from under-
developed countries, young men who had come to maturity during the cold war,
assumed that anyone who was for "Peace" and "Freedom" and
"Justice" must also be for Communism.
Second, by constant repetition of the twin promises of the
Russian revolution-the promises of a classless society and of a transformed
mankind-the fronts had thrown a peculiar spell over some of the world's
intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, many of whom behaved like
disciplined party-liners.
Third, millions of people who would not consciously have
supported the interests of the Soviet Union had joined
organizations devoted ostensibly to good causes, but secretly owned and
operated by and for the Kremlin.
How odd, I thought to myself as I watched these
developments, that Communists, who are afraid to join anything but the
Communist Party, should gain mass allies through organizational war while we
Americans, who join everything, were sitting here tongue-tied.
And so it came about that I had a chat with Allen Dulles. It
was late in the day and his secretary had gone. I told him I thought the CIA
ought to take on the Russians by penetrating a battery of international fronts.
I told him I thought it should be a worldwide operation with a single
headquarters.
"You know," he said, leaning back in his chair and
lighting his pipe, "I think you may have something there. There's no doubt
in my mind that we're losing the cold war. Why don't you take it up down
below?"
It was nearly three months later that I came to his office
again - this time to resign. On the morning of that day there had been a
meeting for which my assistants and I had prepared ourselves carefully. We had
been studying Russian front movements, and working out a counteroffensive. We
knew that the men who ran CIA 's area
divisions were jealous of their power. But we thought we had logic on our side.
And surely logic would appeal to Frank Wisner.
Frank Wisner, in my view, was an authentic American hero. A
war hero. A cold-war hero. He died by his own hand in 1965. But he had been
crushed long before by the dangerous detail connected with cold-war operations.
At this point in my story, however, he was still gay, almost boyishly charming,
cool yet coiled, a low hurdler from Mississippi
He had one of those purposefully obscure CIA
titles: Director of Policy Co-ordination. But everyone knew that he had run CIA
since the death of the war-time OSS
And so, as we prepared for the meeting, it was decided that
I should pitch my argument to Wisner. He knew more than the others. He could
overrule them.
The others sat in front of me in straight-backed chairs,
wearing the troubled looks of responsibility. I began by assuring them that I
proposed to do nothing in any area without the approval of the chief of that
area. I thought, when I finished, that I had made a good case. Wisner gestured
at the Chief, Western Europe . "Frank," came
the response, "this is just another one of those goddamned proposals for
getting into everybody's hair."
One by one the others agreed. Only Richard G. Stilwell, the
Chief, Far East , a hard-driving soldier in civilian
clothes who now commands U.S. Thailand
Incredibly, he put his hands out, palms down.
"Well," he said, looking at me, "you heard the verdict."
Just as incredibly, he smiled.
Sadly I walked down the long hall, and sadly reported to my
staff that the day was lost. Then I went to Mr. Dulles's office and resigned.
"Oh," said Mr. Dulles, blandly, "Frank and I had talked about
his decision. I overruled him." He looked up at me from over his papers.
"He asked me to."
Thus was the International Organization Division of CIA
born, and thus began the first centralized effort to combat Communist fronts.
Perhaps "combat" does not describe the relative
strengths brought to battle. For we started with nothing but the truth. Yet
within three years we had made solid accomplishments. Few of them would have
been possible without undercover methods.
I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony
Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. Paris England CIA ,
and few outside the CIA knew about it. We
had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the
Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor
of Encounter. The agents could not only propose anti-Communist programs to
the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and
means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed
money could be obtained from "American foundations"? As the agents
knew, the CIA -financed foundations were
quite generous when it came to the national interest.
I remember with great pleasure the day an agent came in with
the news that four national student organizations had broken away from the
Communist International Union of Students and joined our student outfit
instead. I remember how Eleanor Roosevelt, glad to help our new International
Committee of Women, answered point for point the charges about germ warfare
that the Communist women's organization had put forward. I remember the
organization of seamen's unions in India
There were, of course, difficulties, sometimes unexpected.
One was the World Assembly of Youth.
We were casting about for something to compete with the Soviet
Union in its hold over young people when we discovered this
organization based in Dakar
After a careful assessment, we decided to put an agent into
the assembly. It took a minimum of six months and often a year just to get a
man into an organization. Thereafter, except for what advice and help we could
lend, he was on his own. But, in this case, - we couldn't give any help
whatsoever The agent couldn't find anybody in the organization who wanted any.
The mystery was eventually solved by the man on the spot.
WAY, as we had come to call it, was the creature of French intelligence -
the Deuxième Bureau. Two French agents held key WAY posts. The French
Communist Party seemed strong enough to win a general election. French
intelligence was waiting to see what would happen.
We didn't wait. Within a year our man brought about the
defeat of his two fellow officers in an election. After that, WAY took a
pro-Western stand. But our greatest difficulty was with labor. When I left the
agency in 1954, we were still worrying about the problem. It was personified by
Jay Lovestone, assistant to David Dubinsky in the International Ladies' Garment
Workers' Union .
Once chief of the Communist Party in the United
States Paris
Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving
Brown. With funds from Dubinsky's union, they organized Force Ouvrière, a
non-Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA .
Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy
But though Lovestone wanted our money, he didn't want to
tell us precisely how he spent it. We knew that non-Communist unions in France Italy
We countered that the unions were not growing as rapidly as
we wished and that many members were not paying dues. We wanted to be consulted
as to how to correct these weaknesses.
I appealed to a high and responsible labor leader. He kept
repeating, "Lovestone and his bunch do a good job."
And so they did. After that meeting, so did we. We cut the
subsidy down, and with the money saved we set up new networks in other
international labor organizations. Within two years the free labor movement,
still holding its own in France Italy
Looking back now, it seems to me that the argument was
largely a waste of time. The only argument that mattered was the one with the
Communists for the loyalty of millions of workers. That argument, with the help
of Lovestone and Brown, was effectively made.
By 1953 we were operating or influencing international
organizations in every field where Communist fronts had previously seized
ground, and in some where they had not even begun to operate. The money we
spent was very little by Soviet standards. But that was reflected in the first
rule of our operational plan: "Limit the money to amounts private
organizations can credibly spend." The other rules were equally obvious:
"Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American
interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to
support every aspect of official American policy."
Such was the status of the organizational weapon when I left
the CIA . No doubt it grew stronger later on,
as those who took charge gained experience. Was it a good thing to forge such a
weapon? In my opinion then-and now-it was essential.
Was it "immoral," "wrong,"
"disgraceful"? Only in the sense that war itself is immoral, wrong
and disgraceful.
For the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead
of bombs. And our country has had a clear-cut choice: Either we win the war or
lose it. This war is still going on, and I do not mean to imply that we have
won it. But we have not lost it either.
It is now 12 years since Winston Churchill accurately
defined the world as "divided intellectually and to a large extent
geographically between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual
freedom." I have heard it said that this definition is no longer accurate.
I share the hope that John Kennedy's appeal to the Russians "to help us
make the world safe for diversity" reflects the spirit of a new age.
But I am not banking on it, and neither, in my opinion, was
the late President. The choice between innocence and power involves the most
difficult of decisions. But when an adversary attacks with his weapons
disguised as good works, to choose innocence is to choose defeat. So long as
the Soviet Union attacks deviously we shall need weapons
to fight back, and a government locked in a power struggle cannot acknowledge
all the programs it must carry out to cope with its enemies. The weapons we
need now cannot, alas, be the same ones that we first used in the 1950's. But
the new weapons should be capable of the same affirmative response as the ones
we forged 17 years ago, when it seemed that the Communists, unchecked, would
win the alliance of most of the world.
(2) Tom Braden, interview included in the Granada Television
program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June,
1975)
It never had to account for the money it spent except to the
President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But
otherwise the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so
there was really no means of checking them - "unvouchered funds"
meaning expenditures that don't have to be accounted for.... If the director of
CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to
someone in Europe - a Labour leader - suppose he just thought, This man can use
fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand
it to him and never have to account to anybody... I don't mean to imply that
there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents.
They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work
well.... Politicians in Europe , particularly right after
the war, got a lot of money from the CIA ....
Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as
it wanted. It never had to say to any committee - no committee said to it -
"You can only have so many men." It could do exactly as it pleased.
It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it
could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no
limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could
decide were necessary to conduct the war - the secret war.... It was a
multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.
Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target
- that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money.
They set up a successful communist labor union in France Italy CIA .
(3) Tom Braden, interviewed by John Ranelagh (14th November, 1983 )
I did not initiate the activities of the agency with the
CIO. The guy who did that was Allen. Allen was very much interested in the
labor movement and the labor potentiality, and although I came from that corner
and was idealistically pro-labor since the days of the New Deal, I didn't have
the concept that Allen did. The first job I was given when I got to the agency,
even before the division that I headed was created, was that Allen wanted me to
stay in touch with the labor guys, which I did. I got to know the people at the
CIO better than the people at the American Federation of Labor, which in
December 1955 merged with the CIO.
There was a guy named Mike Ross that ran the CIO and Jay
Lovestone ran the AFL side. Irving Brown ran
around Europe organizing things, and Jay Lovestone sent
the money. Allen was giving Lovestone money long before I came into the agency,
and I think he was doing only what had been done before. I think the AFL /CIO
interest in protecting the docks in Marseilles AFL and CIO by the CIA
I have always thought predated the agency. I suspect it was done by the OSS
On December 10,
1948 , Matthew Woll, president of the photoengravers union and one
of the four labor leaders on the AFL 's Free
Trade Union Committee, wrote Frank Wisner, a top officer of the Central
Intelligence Agency: "This is to introduce Jay Lovestone… He is duly
authorized to cooperate with you in behalf of our organization and to arrange
for close contact and reciprocal assistance in all matters."
Thus, the AFL began a
relationship with the intelligence agency that was to endure for better than two
decades. Wisner recognized that the FTUC could be an important
intelligence-gathering asset and was willing to pay a substantial price for its
assistance, said to have amounted to many millions of dollars over the years.
From Lovestone's perspective, the additional funding would
help him expand operations in China Japan India Africa and the Arab countries. Although he chafed at
having to make reports to Wisner, he needed the agency's help. While he
supplied the CIA with intelligence reports
from his FTUC operatives, he also received information from Wisner, who
advocated "support of anti-communists in free countries."
Lovestone had no trouble cooking the FTUC's balance sheets
from the prying eyes of any dissident. In 1949, for example, AFL -affiliated
unions contributed $56,000 to the committee, but an additional $203,000 was
attributed to "individuals," actually the CIA .
In 1950, the agency funneled another $202,000 to the FTUC; in later years, the
agency's funding to the AFL was kept secret,
with the amount dependent on the size and nature of the covert operation.
Lovestone's very extensive, and expensive, anti-communist
operations in Europe were largely financed from money
siphoned off from the Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Plan), which
provided $13 billion to Western European nations between 1948 and 1950.
Under the Plan's rules, each country receiving financial aid
had to refund 5% of the total to U.S.
When Marshall Plan funds dried up, Lovestone became more
dependent on CIA funding. But the CIA 's
new director, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who had been Eisenhower's chief of
staff in Europe during World War II, was a tough administrator who started
questioning the expenditures for the AFL 's
clandestine operations.
To clarify the relationship, a "summit" meeting
was held on November 24, 1950 .
In attendance for the AFL were Meany,
Dubinsky, Woll and Lovestone. The CIA was
represented by Smith, its director, and his top assistant, Frank Wisner.
There was general agreement that the collaboration had
worked well and should continue. But Lovestone, while complimenting the CIA
for the assistance it had given the AFL in
several emergency situations, still insisted that improvements had to be made
in the relationship. He had given the CIA a
list of the funding he required for special projects, but it had been ignored.
Smith said he would review the proposals.
When Smith brought up the idea of including the CIO into the
agency's operations, the AFL group quickly
voiced their strong objections. They said he CIO was inexperienced in this kind
of activity and was riddled with communists and other undesirable elements.
Lovestone said that if the CIO were brought in, all their work would be placed
in jeopardy. The CIO could not be trusted to maintain the secrecy that was
required by both the AFL and CIA
operations.
Meany said he was worried that the CIO would get some of its
friends in the Truman administration to recommend that they share equally in
funding and participation in international labor activity. (Just a few months
earlier, the CIO had expelled eleven international unions with over one million
members for "following the Communist Party line.") Meany threatened
to withdraw from the arrangement with the CIA
if the CIO were brought into the partnership.
But to Smith and Wisner, it seemed absurd to work closely
with one wing of the labor movement while totally ignoring the other. The best
that the AFL guests could get out of them
was that enlisting the cooperation of the CIO was not imminent.
The propriety of an American labor movement becoming the
instrument or partner of a government intelligence agency was fully acceptable
to the Meany-Dubinsky-Woll trio, as long as it was in the service of an
anti-Soviet crusade and the defeat of communist-led unions. Nor did any US
It was Thomas Braden, an assistant to CIA
director Allan Dulles, who became the contact man with the CIO. Walter Reuther,
the UAW president, received $50,000 in cash from Braden, who flew to Detroit
There are no public records of how much money the CIA
gave both branches of the labor movement. There was no congressional oversight
of the agency. As Braden said: "The CIA
could do exactly as it pleased. It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was
one of the first world-wide multinationals."
(5) CIA and the
Labour Party, Radical Research Services (1974)
The launching of the Congress for Cultural Freedom by Melvin
Laskey in Berlin CIA .
They chose the latter. Thus continued 17 years of secret US funding.
When, in the early sixties, it seemed to the National
Security Council (NSC ) that the CIA 's
cover was about to be blown, funding was quietly shifted to the larger
charitable foundations whose directors were well aware of what was going on.
The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations moved into international affairs
in a big way in 1950. Ford's international director for the next 17 years was
Sheperd Stone under the NSC members Mr
George Bundy, Presidential Adviser on Security, and Robert McNamara, Defence
Secretary. Carnegie president was Joseph E. Johnson who organised the American
end of Bilderberg. Thomas Braden was a Carnegie trustee.
Rockefeller trustees included Barry Bingham - ECA
Administrator France 1949-50, chairman International Press Institute, director
Asia Foundation - and Arthur Houghton, whose Foundation for Youth and Student
Affairs channelled millions of dollars of CIA
money into the US and world students movements. For those who continue to
protest the innocence of the US
But to return to the European Movement. Thomas Braden had
been in the US Military Government in Germany. From 1949 to 1951 he was
executive director of the American Committee on United Europe - a body
resulting from a visit by Retinger and Duncan Sandys to Allen Dulles and others
in the United States in July 1948. Its aims were to fund the European Movement
and to bring about the establishment of a European army rearming the Germans
against the USSR. It also worked closely with Cord Meyer's United World
Federalists.
In a letter to Duncan Sandys, 20 January 1950, Thomas Braden
wrote that the ACUE's purpose was ''not only to influence public opinion, but
to sell the idea of the European Movement... and to justify the appeal for
important sums of money."
According to Allan Hovey, Jnr., ACUE representative in Europe ,
the vast majority of US funds for Europe and nearly all
for the European Youth Campaign (EYC) came from State Department covert funds.
This was, of course, kept very secret. ACUE was a legal covering organisation.
Braden joined the CIA as
Dulles' assistant in 1950 while continuing as ACUE executive director. Funds
were sent to the European representative in Brussels Paris Brussels
Total secret US
Thus, far from being a spontaneous expression of the desire
for unity of the people of Europe , the European movement
was launched by Retinger with secret money from the State Department and kept
afloat with massive subventions through Thomas Braden, head of the CIA 'S
International Organisation Division.
Melvin Lasky, who has died aged 84, was, as editor of the
magazine Encounter from 1958 to 1990, and of Der Monat (the Month) for 15
years, a combatant in the struggle to keep western intellectuals in the United
States' cold war camp. But in 1967, it was disclosed that both Encounter and
Der Monat had been covertly financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency and
Mel's reputation shrivelled...Mel's origins in the anti-Communist Russian-Jewish
community help explain why, at 22, he became literary editor of the New Leader,
an organ of anti-Communist Jewish liberals. He held the post from 1942 to 1943.
In 1944, Mel belatedly signed up, as a US Army combat historian in Europe .
Postwar, with the cold war, Der Monat was launched in Berlin US US Britain
Encounter's function was to combat anti-Americanism by
brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at
several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics
and intellectuals free US trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no
room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.
Enormously industrious, Mel doubled up by running publishing
houses for his masters. The premise was that they published pro-American books
knowing that the bulk of each edition would be purchased by US agencies to
donate to book-starved libraries in the third world.
Even at its peak Encounter had never claimed a circulation
above 40,000. Its spider's web began to come apart in 1966-67 with publication
of pieces in the New York Times and the radical magazine Ramparts. And Thomas
Braden, previously a CIA divisional chief,
confirmed in the Saturday Evening Post that, for more than 10 years, the CIA
had subsidised Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it
also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA
agent. (Lasky had been the CCF 's sometime
executive secretary). The magazine also covertly received British government
money.
Mel's coeditor, Professor Frank Kermode, resigned,
proclaiming he had been misled by Mel. "I was always reassured that there
was no truth in the allegations about CIA
funds."
Mel admitted breezily that "I probably should have told
him all the painful details." Spender also quit the monthly and many
contributors pulled out.
The CIA funds, had, in
fact been replaced in 1964 by Cecil King's International Publishing Corporation
- the then owners of the Daily Mirror - which bought the magazine. King's
deputy, Hugh Cudlipp, sprang to Mel's defence, insisting that "Encounter
without him [Mel] would be as interesting as Hamlet without the Prince".
(7) Richard Fletcher, How CIA Money
Took the Teeth Out of Socialism (undated)
Since the Second World War the American Government and its
espionage branch, the Central Intelligence Agency, have worked systematically
to ensure that the Socialist parties of the free world toe a line compatible
with American interests...CIA money can be
traced flowing through the Congress for Cultural Freedom to such magazines as
Encounter which have given Labour politicians like Anthony Crosland, Denis
Healy and the late Hugh Gaitskell a platform for their campaigns to move the
Labour Party away from nationalisation and CND-style pacifism. Flows of
personnel link this Labour Party pressure group with the unlikely figure of Prince
Bernhard of the Netherlands
There is no suggestion that these prominent Labour
politicians have not acted in al innocence and with complete propriety. But it
could be asked how such perspicacious men could fail to enquire about the
source of the funds that have financed the organisations and magazines which
have been so helpful to them for so long.
Nevertheless, they are certainly proud of the crucial
influence their activities had in the years following 1959 when they swung the
British Labour Party away from its pledge to nationalisation, enshrined in the
celebrated Clause IV, and back towards the commitment to NATO from which the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had deflected it. CIA
operators take the credit for helping them in this decisive intervention which
changed the course of modern British history.
The cloak and dagger operations of America CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, is used not only to aid Washington's policy-machine, but in active
political intervention overseas - shaping the policies of political parties,
making and unmaking their leaders, boosting one internal faction against
another and often establishing rival breakaway parties when other tactics fail.
In fact the CIA carries
out, at a more sophisticated level, exactly the same sort of organised
subversion as Stalin's Comintern in its heyday. One of its targets in the years
since the Second World War has been the British Labour Party.
The Labour Party emerged from the war with immense prestige.
As the sole mass working-class party in Britain Europe
had been destroyed by the dictators, while in America Europe 's
social democratic family.
But as the euphoria wore off, old differences began to
emerge with prolonged post-war austerity. The Left wanted more Socialism and an
accommodation with the Russians, while the Right wanted the battle against
Communism to take precedence over further reforms at home. And those who took
this latter view organised themselves around the journal Socialist Commentary,
formerly the organ of anti-Marxist Socialists who had fled to Britain from
Hitler's Germany. The magazine was reorganised in the autumn of 1947 with
Anthony Crosland, Allan Flanders and Rita Hinden who had worked closely with
the émigrés as leading contributors. And Socialist Commentary became the
mouthpiece of the Right wing of the Labour Party, campaigning against
Left-wingers like Aneurin Bevan, whom they denounced as dangerous extremists.
Crosland, who ended the war as a captain in the Parachute Regiment, had been
President of the Oxford Union, and a year later, in 1947, became Fellow and
lecturer in economics at Trinity College, Oxford. Flanders was a former TUC
official who became an academic specialist in industrial relations and later
joined the Prices and Incomes Board set up by the Wilson Government. Rita
Hinden, a University of London academic from South Africa, was secretary of the
Fabian Colonial Bureau - an autonomous section of the Fabian Society which she
had set up and directed since the early Forties. In this position she exercised
considerable influence with Labour Ministers and officials in the Colonial
Office, maintaining close links with many overseas politicians.
The new Socialist Commentary immediately set out to alert
the British Labour movement to the growing dangers of international Communism,
notably in a piece entitled Cominformity, written by Flanders during a
period spent in the United States studying the American trade union movement.
The journal's American connections were further extended by its U.S.
correspondent, William C. Gausmann, who was soon to enter the American
Government Service, where he rose to take charge of US propaganda in North Vietnam,
while support for the moderate stand taken by Crosland, Flanders and Hinden
came from David C. Williams, the London Correspondent of the New Leader, an
obscure New York weekly specialising in anti-Communism. Williams made it his
business to join the British Labour Party and to take an active part in the
Fabian Society.
This close American interest in Socialism on the other side
of the Atlantic was nothing new. During the war the American trade unions had
raised large sums to rescue European labour leaders from the Nazis, and this
had brought them closely in touch with American military intelligence and, in
particular, with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), whose chief in
Switzerland and Germany from 1942 to 1945 was Allen W. Dulles, later, of course,
to become famous as head of the CIA in its
heyday.
The principal union official in these secret commando
operations had been Jay Lovestone, a remarkable operator who had switched from
being the leader of the American Communist Party to working secretly for the US
Government. And as the Allied armies advanced, Lovestone's men followed the
soldiers as political commissars, trying to make sure that the liberated
workers were provided with trade union and political leaders acceptable to
Washington - many of these leaders being the émigrés of the Socialist
Commentary group. In France Germany Italy Austria
In 1953 the Congress for Cultural Freedom launched
Encounter, an English language monthly which was an immediate success under the
editorship of Irving Kristol, another of Levitas's New Leader protégés and an
ex-Lovestoneite, and soon a bewildering range of publications in several
languages had joined the CCF stable, with
Encounter becoming one of the most influential journals of liberal opinion in
the West.
As the CCF network grew
it embraced many prominent figures in the British Labour Party -among them
Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF
seminars, where he met Daniel Bell, who was at this period moving away from
journalistic red-baiting in the New Leader towards academic respectability. Bell Milan
Put at its simplest. Bell Europe - and Britain
Crosland's book, though not original in content, was a major
achievement. In over 500 pages it clothed the long-held faith of Labour's new
leader Hugh Gaitskell in the academic respectability of American political
science and was immediately adopted as the gospel of the Party leadership.
Labour's rank-and-file, however, still clung to their grassroots Socialism, and
Gaitskell's obvious preferences for the small coterie of cultured intellectuals
and visiting foreigners who met at his house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead,
alienated the Party faithful, and gave added bitterness to the internecine
quarrels that were to follow Labour's defeat in the 1959 election.
In 1957 Melvin Lasky had taken over the editorship of
Encounter which had, by then, cornered the West's intelligentsia through its
prestige and the high fees it was able to pay. Lasky was a trusted member of
Gaitskell's inner circle and was often to be seen at his parties in Hampstead,
while Gaitskell became at the same time a regular contributor to the New
Leader. Sol Levitas would drop in at his house on his periodic tours to see
world leaders and visit the CCF in Paris
It was during the Fifties furthermore, that Anthony
Crosland, Rita Hinden and the other members of the Socialist Commentary group
adopted the argument put forcibly in the New Leader that a strong united Europe
was essential to protect the Atlantic Alliance from Russian attack, and
European and Atlantic unity came to be synonymous in official thinking as
Gaitskell and his friends moved into the Party leadership. They received
transatlantic encouragement, furthermore, from a New York-based group called
the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership was openly advertised
in the New York Times as including General Donovan, wartime head of OSS US CIA ...
But early in 1967 the US journal Ramparts revealed that
since the early Fifties the National Student Association of America had, with
the active connivance of its elected officers, received massive subventions
from the CIA through dummy foundations and
that one of these was the Fund for Youth and Student Affairs which supplied most
of the budget of ISC. The International Student Conference, it appeared, had
been set up by British and American Intelligence in 1950 to counteract the
Communist peace offensive, and the CIA had
supplied over 90 per cent, of its finance. The Congress for Cultural Freedom
was similarly compromised. Michael Josselson admitted that he had been
chanelling CIA money into the organisation
ever since its foundation - latterly at the rate of about a million dollars a
year - to support some 20 journals and a world-wide programme of political and
cultural activities. Writing of Sol Levitas at the time of his death in 1961,
the editor of the New Leader, William Bohm said "the most amazing part of
the journalistic miracle was the man's gift for garnering the funds which were
necessary to keep our paper solvent from week to week and year to year. I
cannot pretend to explain how this miracle was achieved. We always worked in an
atmosphere of carefree security. We knew that the necessary money would come
from somewhere and that our cheques would be forthcoming."
The "Miracle" was resolved by the New York Times:
the American Labour Conference for International Affairs which ran the New
Leader had for many years been receiving regular subventions from the J. M.
Kaplan Fund, a CIA conduit.
The CIA had taken the
lessons taught back in the early Fifties by Burnham and the New Leader to
heart. With its army of ex-communists and willing Socialists it had for a while
beaten the Communists at their own game -but unfortunately it had not known
when to stop and now the whole structure was threatened with collapse. Rallying
to the agency's support, Thomas Braden, the official responsible for its move
into private organisations, and Executive Director of the American Committee on
United Europe, explained that Irving Brown and Lovestone had done a fine job in
cleaning up the unions in post-war Europe . When they ran
out of money, he said, he had persuaded Dulles to back them, and from this
beginning the worldwide operation mushroomed.
Another ex-CIA official,
Richard Bissell, who organised the Bay of Pigs invasion,
explained the Agency's attitude to foreign politicians: "Only by knowing
the principal players well do you have a chance of careful prediction. There is
real scope for action in this area: the technique is essentially that of
'penetration'... Many of the 'penetrations' don't take the form of 'hiring' but
of establishing friendly relationships which may or may not be furthered by the
provision of money from time to time. In some countries the CIA
representative has served as a close counsellor... of the chief of state."
After these disclosures the CCF
changed its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Michael
Josselson resigned - but was retained as a consultant - and the Ford Foundation
agreed to pick up the bills. And the Director of the new Association is none
other than Shepard Stone, the Bilderberg organiser who channelled US Government
money to Joseph Retinger in the early Fifties to build the European Movement
and then became International Director of the Ford Foundation.
We are gathered, four of us CIA
division chiefs and deputies, in the office of our agency's director, an urbane
and charming man. He is seated at his desk, puffing nervously on his pipe and
asking us questions.
Allen W. Dulles is fretting on this morning in the early
fifties, as indeed, he has fretted most mornings. You can't be in the middle of
building an enormous spy house, running agents into Russia Guatemala Italy
But on this particular morning, Dulles is due for an
appearance before Sen. Richard B. Russell's Armed Services Committee, and the
question he is pondering as he puffs on his pipe is whether to tell the senators
what is making him fret. He has just spent a lot of money on buying an
intelligence network, and the network has turned out to be worthless. In fact,
it's a little worse than worthless. All that money, Dulles now suspects, went
to the KGB.
Therefore, the questions are somber, and so are the answers.
At last, Dulles rises. "Well," he says, "I guess I'll have to
fudge the truth a little."
His eyes twinkle at the word fudge, then suddenly turn
serious. He twists his slightly stooped shoulders into the old tweed topcoat
and heads for the door. But he turns back. "I'll tell the truth to Dick
(Russell) he says. "I always do." Then the twinkle returns, and he
adds, with a chuckle, "That is, if Dick wants to know."
The reason I recall the above scene in detail is that lately
I have been asking myself what's wrong with the CIA .
Two committees of Congress and one from the executive branch are asking the
question, too. But they are asking out of concern for national policy. I am
asking for a different reason. I once worked for the CIA .
I regard the time I spent there as worthwhile duty. I look back upon the men
with whom I worked as able and honorable. So for me, the question, "What's
wrong with the CIA ?" is both personal
and poignant.
Old friends of mine have been caught in evasions or worse.
People I worked with have violated the law. Men whose ability I respected have
planned operations that ended in embarrassment or disaster. What's wrong with
these people? What's wrong with the CIA ?
Ask yourself a question often enough, and sometimes the mind
will respond with a memory. The memory my mind reported back is that scene in
Allen Dulles' office. It seemed, at first blush, a commonplace,
nonconsequential episode. But the more it fixed itself in my mind, the more it
seemed to me that it helped to answer my question about what's wrong with the
agency. Let me explain.
The first thing this scene reveals is the sheer power that
Dulles and his agency had. Only a man with extraordinary power could make a
mistake involving a great many of the taxpayers' dollars and not have to
explain it. Allen Dulles had extraordinary power.
Power flowed to him, and through him, to the CIA ,
partly because his brother was Secretary of State, partly because his
reputation as the master spy of World War II hung over him like a mysterious
halo, partly because his senior partnership in the prestigious New York law
firm of Sullivan and Cromwell impressed the small-town lawyers of Congress.
Moreover, events helped keep power flowing. The country was
fighting a shooting war in Korea and a Cold War in Western Europe, and the CIA
was sole authority on the plans and potential of the real enemy. To argue
against the CIA was to argue against
knowledge. Only Joseph McCarthy would run such a risk.
Indeed, McCarthy unwittingly added to the power of the CIA .
He attacked the agency and when, in the showdown, Dulles won, his victory
vastly increased the respectability of what people then called "the
cause" of anti-communism. "Don't join the book burners," Eisenhower
had said. That was the bad way to fight communism. The good way was the CIA .
Power was the first thing that went wrong with the CIA .
There was too much of it, and it was too easy to bring to bear – on the State
Department, on other government agencies, on the patriotic businessmen of New
York, and on the foundations whose directorships they occupied. The agency's
power overwhelmed the Congress, the press, and therefore the people.
I'm not saying that this power didn't help win the Cold War,
and I believe the Cold War was a good war to win. But the power enabled the CIA
to continue Cold War operations 10 and 15 years after the Cold War was won.
Under Allen Dulles the power was unquestioned, and after he left, the habit of
not questioning remained.
I remember the time I walked over to the State Department to
get formal approval for some CIA project
involving a few hundred thousand dollars and a publication in Europe .
The desk man at the State Department balked. Imagine. He balked – and at an
operation designed to combat what I knew for certain was a similar Soviet
operation. I was astonished. But I didn't argue. I knew what would happen. I
would report to the director, who would get his brother on the phone:
"Foster, one of your people seems to be a little less than
cooperative." That is power.
The second thing that's wrong with the CIA
is arrogance, and the scene I've mentioned above shows that, too. Allen
Dulles's private joke about "fudging" was arrogant, and so was the
suggestion that "Dick" might not want to know. An organization that
does not have to answer for mistakes is certain to become arrogant.
It is not a cardinal sin, this fault, and sometimes it
squints toward virtue. It might be argued, for example, that only arrogant men
would insist on building the U-2 spy plane within a time frame which the
military experts said could not be met. Yet in the days before satellite
surveillance, the U-2 spy plane was the most useful means of keeping the peace.
It assured this country's leaders that Russia was not planning an attack. But
if arrogance built the plane quickly, it also destroyed it. For surely it was
arrogant to keep it flying through Soviet airspace after it was suspected that
the Russians were literally zeroing in on overflying U-2s.
I wonder whether the arrogance of the CIA
may not have been battlefield-related – a holdover from World War II machismo
and derring-do. The leaders of the agency were, almost to a man, veterans of
OSS, the CIA 's wartime predecessor. Take,
for example, the men whose faces I now recall, standing there in the director's
office.
One had run a spy-and-operations network into German from
German-occupied territory. Another had volunteered to parachute into Field
Marshall Kesselring's headquarters grounds with terms for his surrender. A
third had crash-landed in Norway
But they had another quality that set them apart. For some
reason that psychologists could perhaps explain, a man who volunteers to go on
an extremely dangerous mission, alone or with two or three helpers, is likely
to be not only brave and resourceful but also somewhat vain. Relatively few men
volunteered to jump into German or Japanese territory during World War II.
Those who did volunteer were conscious that they were, in a word,
"different."
Once these men had landed behind the lines, the difference
took on outward symbols. They were alone, Americans in a country full of French
or Greek or Italian or Chinese. Often they were treated with great respect.
Sometimes, as mere lieutenants, they commanded thousands of men. At a word from
them, American or British planes came over to drop supplies to these men. They
earned the love and respect that conquered people felt for the great democracy
called America. Inevitably, they began to think of themselves individually and
collectively as representing the national honor.
Is it not possible that men who have learned to do
everything in secrecy, who are accustomed to strange assignments, and who think
of themselves as embodying their country, are peculiarly susceptible to
imperial Presidencies such as those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon? Have
they not in fact trained themselves to behave as a power elite?
To power and arrogance add the mystique of the
inside-outside syndrome. That scene in the director's office defines the
problem. Dulles was leveling with his assistants, and they were leveling with
him. An agent or a station chief or an official of the CIA
who didn't level – who departed the slightest degree from a faithful account of
what he knew or what he had done – was a danger to operations and to lives.
Such a man couldn't last a day in the CIA .
But truth was reserved for the inside. To the outsider, CIA
men learned to lie, to lie consciously and deliberately without the slightest
twinge of the guilt that most men feel when they tell a deliberate lie.
The inside-outside syndrome is unavoidable in a secret
intelligence agency. You bring a group of people together, bind them with an
oath, test their loyalty periodically with machines, spy on them to make sure
they're not meeting secretly with someone from the Czech Embassy, cushion them
from the rest of the world with a false cover story, teach them to lie because
lying is in the national interest, and they do not behave like other men.
They do not come home from work and answer truthfully the
question, "What did you do today, darling?" When they chat with their
neighbors, they lie about their jobs. In their compartmentalized, need-to-know
jobs, it is perfectly excusable for one CIA
man to like to another if the other doesn't need to know.
Thus it was ritual for Allen Dulles to "fudge,"
and often he didn't have to. Senator Russell might say, "The chairman has
conferred with the director about this question, which touches a very sensitive
matter." The question would be withdrawn.
Another technique for dealing with an outsider was the
truthful non-response. Consider the following exchange between Sen. Claiborne
Pell (D. R.I.) and Richard Helms. (The Exchange was concerned with spying on
Americans, an illegal act under the terms of the law that created the CIA .)
Senator Pell (referring to spying on antiwar
demonstrations):
"But those all occurred within the continental shores
of the Untied States and for that reason you had the justifiable reason to
decline [to] move in there because the events were outside your ambit."
Mr. Helms: "Absolutely, and I have never been lacking
in clarity in my mind since I have been director, that this is simply not
acceptable not only to Congress but to the public of the United
States
No doubt that answer was truthful. No doubt Helms did think
that domestic spying was not acceptable. But he was doing it, and he didn't say
he wasn't.
Finally, of course, there is the direct lie. Here is another
excerpt from 1973 testimony by Helms:
Senator Symington (D. Mo.): "Did you try, in the
Central Intelligence Agency, to overthrow the government of Chile?"
Helms: "No, Sir."
Symington: "Did you have any money passed to the
opponents of Allende?"
Helms: "No, Sir."
Helms was under oath. Therefore, he must have considered his
answer carefully. Obviously, he came to the insider's conclusion: that his duty
to protect the inside outweighed his outsider's oath. Or to put it another way,
the law of the inside comes first.
Allen Dulles once remarked that if necessary, he would like
to anybody about the CIA except the
President. "I never had the slightest qualms about lying to an
outsider," a CIA veteran remarked
recently. "Why does an outsider need to know?"
So much for the lessons of memory. Power, arrogance, and the
inside-outside syndrome are what's wrong with the CIA ,
and to some extent, the faults are occupational and even necessary tools for
the job.
But the events of the Cold War and the coincidence of Allen
Dulles' having such enormous discretionary powers enlarged occupational risks
until they became faults, and the faults created a monstrosity.
Power built a vast bureaucracy and a ridiculous monument in Langley ,
Va.
The inside-outside syndrome withheld the truth from Adlai
Stevenson so that he was forced to make a spectacle of himself on the floor of
the United Nations by denying that the United
States Cuba
It's a shame what happened to the CIA .
It could have consisted of a few hundred scholars to analyze intelligence, a
few hundred spies in key positions, and a few hundred operators ready to carry
out rare tasks of derring-do.
Instead, it became a gargantnan monster, owning properly all
over the world, running airplanes and newspapers and radio stations and banks
and armies and navies, offering temptation to successive Secretaries of State,
and giving at least one President a brilliant idea; Since the machinery for
deceit existed, why not use it?
Richard Helms should have said no to Richard Nixon. But as a
victim of the inside-outside syndrome, Helms could only ask Watergate's most
plaintive question: "Who would have thought that it would someday be
judged a crime to carry out the orders of the President of the United
States
A shame – and a peculiarly American shame. For this is the
only country in the world which doesn't recognize the fact that some things are
better if they are small.
We'll need intelligence in the future. And once in a while,
once in a great while, we may need cover action, too. But, at the moment, we
have nothing. The revelations of Watergate and the investigations that have
followed have done their work. The CIA 's
power is gone. Its arrogance has turned to fear. The inside-outside syndrome
has been broken. Former agents write books naming other agents. Director
William Colby goes to the Justice Department with evidence that his predecessor
violated the law. The house that Allen Dulles built is divided and torn.
The end is not in sight. Various committees now
investigating the agency will doubtless find error. They will recommend change,
they will reshuffle, they will adjust. But they will leave the monster intact,
and even if the monster never makes another mistake, never again over-reaches
itself – even, indeed, if like some other government agencies, it never does
anything at all – it will, by existing, go right on creating and perpetuating
the myths that always accompanied the presence of the monster.
We know the myths. They circulate throughout the land
wherever there are bars and bowling alleys: that the CIA
killed John Kennedy; that the CIA crippled
George Wallace; that an unexplained airplane crash, a big gold heist, were all
the work of the CIA .
These myths are ridiculous, but they will exist as long as
the monster exists.
The fact that millions believe the myths raises once again
the old question which OSS men used to argue after the war: Can a free and open
society engage in covert operations?
After nearly 30 years of trial, the evidence ought to be in.
The evidence demonstrates, it seems to me, that a free and open society cannot
engage in covert operations – not, at any rate, in the kind of large, intricate
covert operations of which the CIA has been
capable.
I don't argue solely from the box score. But let's look at
the box score. It reveals many famous failures. Too easily, they prove the
point. Consider what the CIA deems is known
successes: Does anybody remember Arbenz in Guatemala? What good was achieved by
the overthrow of Arbenz? Would it really have made any difference to this
country if we hadn't overthrown Arbenz?
And Allende? How much good did it do the American people to
overthrow Allende? How much bad?
Was it essential – even granted the sticky question of
succession – to keep those Greek colonels in power for so long?
We used to think that it was a great triumph that the CIA
kept the Shah of Iran on his throne against the onslaught of Mossadegh. Are we
grateful still?
The uprisings during the last phase of the Cold War, and
those dead bodies on the streets of Poland East Germany
But the box score does not tell the whole story. We paid a
high price for that box score. Shame and embarrassment is a high price? Doubt,
mistrust, and fear is a high price. The public myths are a high price, and so
is the guilty knowledge that we own an establishment devoted to opposing the
ideals we profess.
In our midst, we have maintained a secret instrument erected
in contradiction to James Madison's injunction: "A popular government
without the means to popular information is a farce or a tragedy, perhaps
both."
As I say, the investigating committees will prop the monster
up. I would suggest more radical action. I would shut it down. I would turn the
overt intelligence functions over to the State Department. Scholars and
scientists and people who understand how the railroads run in Sri
Lanka CIA
in order to do their valuable work well.
I would turn the paratroopers over to the Army. If, at some
time, it becomes essential to our survival to mount a secret attack upon a foe,
the army is capable of doing it, and, with some changes in command structure in
order to bypass bureaucracy, the army could do it as swiftly and secretly as
the CIA . Under the command structure of the
Department of Defense, congressional oversight would be possible. Then, if the
army got caught fielding a secret division in Laos Laos
I would turn the psychological warriors and propagandists
over to the Voice of America. Psychological warriors and propagandists probably
never did belong in a secret agency.
And, last, I would choose a very few men to run spies and such
covert operations as the passage of money to those in other lands who cannot
afford to accept American support openly. But I would limit covert operations
to passing money to "friendlies."
I would house these spy masters and money-passers in some
obscure tool shed, and I would forbid, by law, any of them from ever calling
himself "director." They would not work for the CIA .
Because I would abolish the name CIA .
As their chief, the President should chose a term of six
years some civilian who has demonstrated staunchness of character and
independence of mind. I would make him responsible to a joint committee of
Congress, as well as to the President, and I would not permit him to serve more
than one term.
Thus, we might get rid of power. Without power, arrogance
would not be dangerous. Thus, too, we could prevent the inside-outside
syndrome, so essential to secrecy, from making a mockery of representative
government.
As for the house that Allen Dulles built at Langley
For two decades, I've been preoccupied with one issue above
all others: that both ends of the political spectrum get their say in the
media. One reason (among many) that I worked so hard to retire George W. Bush
in 2004 was my nightmare that a defeated John Kerry would be hired by cable
news to represent "the left" day after day on a TV debate show.
Fox News Channel often gets blamed for the standard format
that pits forceful, articulate right-wingers against wimpy, halting liberals.
Fox's pairing of righty heart-throb Sean Hannity with back-pedaling, barely
left-of-center Alan Colmes is a prime example of this lopsided format - a
mismatch depicted in an Al Franken book as "Hannity & Colmes."
But it's wrong to blame Fox for television's center-right,
GE-to-GM spectrum. That format was firmly in place years before there was a Fox
News. The real culprits: CNN and PBS.
Take Crossfire, started by CNN in 1982 as the only
nightly forum on national TV purporting to offer an ideological battle between
co-hosts of left and right. Crossfire's co-host "on the left" for the
first seven years was a haplessly ineffectual centrist, Tom Braden, a guy who
makes Alan Colmes look like an ultraleft firebrand.
In CNN's eyes, Braden apparently earned his leftist
credentials by having been a high-level CIA
official - ironically enough, in charge of covert operations against the
political left of Western Europe . Braden was paired on
Crossfire with ultra-rightist Pat Buchanan. During the Braden-Buchanan years,
LSD guru Timothy Leary told a reporter that watching Crossfire was like
watching "the left wing" of the CIA
debating the right wing of the CIA ." It
may have been Leary's most sober observation ever.
I guested several times on Crossfire with the tired
70-something as my alleged ally. Once as I took my seat on the set, seeing
Braden totally caked up with makeup, my first impulse was to reach over to take
a pulse. My second impulse: flee the studio.
In a 1988 Crossfire appearance, when I criticized the
conservative tilt of TV punditry and debates restricted to right vs. center,
Buchanan could mount only a feeble defense of Braden: "What do you think
is sitting next to me? What do you think this is, a potted plant?"
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