Walter Raymond Jr. Options

[John Simkin]

I am trying to find out more information about Walter Raymond. He joined the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s. According to Robert Parry (Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq) Raymond worked for the CIA's propoganda office.

George H. W. Bush and William Casey recruited Raymond to the National Security Council staff in April, 1982. Raymond later told an Iran-Contra committee that he resigned from the CIA so “there would be no question of any contamination of this.”

The following year President Reagan established its own propaganda campaign within the United States called "Project Truth." It later merged with a broader program that combined domestic and international propaganda under the umbrella of "Project Democracy." Raymond was placed in charge of this project.

I believe that Raymond was an important figure in Operation Mockingbird and would have been closely involved in the cover-up of the JFK assassination. It is highly significant that Raymond was chosen by Bush to do the same job for Reagan's illegal activities.

Here is a passage from John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton excellent Toxic Sludge is Good for You (2004)

The most pressing concern of all for the Reagan administration was the need to win the support of the US people for its policies in Central America. "I think the most critical special operations mission we have today is to persuade the American people that the communists are out to get us. If we can win this war of ideas, we can win everywhere else," explained Michael Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Air Force. "Psychological operations, ranging from public affairs on the one end, through black propaganda on the other end is the advertising and marketing of our product."

Public affairs" is the government's term for "public relations"- a rather pointless change in terminology adopted to get around a law which specifically enjoins federal government agencies against engaging in public relations activities. The law also forbids the White House from using ads telegrams, letters, printed matter or other media outside "official channels" to influence members of Congress regarding legislation. Rules against CIA involvement in domestic US politics are even more severe. It is against the law for the CIA to operate domestically, except in narrowly-defined circumstances such as cooperating with an FBI investigation. In 1982 however, reports of the secret CIA war in Nicaragua led Congress to pass the Boland Amendment, ending military aid to the contras and barring the Reagan administration from any further attempts to overthrow the Sandinistas.

In response, Reagan dispatched CLA Director William Casey in January 1983 to set up a "public diplomacy' machine that journalists Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh describe as "America's first peace time propaganda ministry . . . a set of domestic political operations comparable to what the CIA conducts against hostile forces abroad. Only this time they were turned against the three key institutions of American democracy: Congress, the press, and an informed electorate.... Employing the scientific methods of modern public relations and the war-tested techniques of psychological operations, the administration built an unprecedented bureaucracy in the [National Security Council] and the State Department designed to keep the news media in line and to restrict conflicting information from reaching the American public."

As head of the operation, Casey appointed Walter Raymond, Jr. a 20-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine overseas media operations-described by one US government source as the CIA's leading propaganda expert. According to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Raymond's involvement in the campaign symbolized "the wholesale integration of intelligence and PR at the National Security Council." During the Iran/Contra scandal, Congress investigated the Reagan administration's domestic propaganda operations and found that Raymond's name appeared on Oliver North's calendar more than that of any other White House staff member or government employee. A chapter detailing these domestic activities was drafted for the investigating committee's Iran/Contra report, but House and Senate Republicans successfully blocked even a paragraph of the draft from being included in the committee's final report. As a result the CIA's domestic propaganda activities in violation of its charter have received almost no public scrutiny.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKraymondW.htm