Historians, Journalists and Political Conspiracies

[John Simkin]

Q: In your testimony at the Feingold censure hearing, you said that this is the first time you’ve actually feared our government. Why is that?

Dean: Now I don’t frighten easily, but I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works behind closed doors. And I know, from little tidbits I’m picking up from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that there’s more probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-called war on terror.

Q: Do you fear for our democratic system?

Dean: I fear for the system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties.

Great post. This last passage needs to be read by every American.

[Robert Parry]

On page 3 of Lost History you argue that America’s secret history “is in danger of being lost, possibly forever”. You add that this is because that the “national news media is absorbed by tabloid journalism and disinterested in serious research.” I agree that this was the case before the emergence of the web. Are you more optimistic about the exposure of the “secret history” in 2006?

Obviously, the Internet has helped and we've been part of providing free journalistic content since 1995. But the Internet has limits. Part of the problem goes to resources. The major news outlets - newspapers and TV - still have the money to do substantial journalism when they choose to. The Internet tends to be derivative of that work. There's also a lack of professionalism, which some actually favor although I am not among them. I believe there's an important role for journalistic professionalism relating to standards of evidence, readability, fairness, etc. Amateurism raises the odds that serious mistakes will be made. So, I think the key will be to figure out how to infuse quality Internet journalism with sufficient resources so the work can be upgraded and sustained.

In Lost History you argue that the 1970s journalists had some notable successes such as Watergate and the publication of Pentagon Papers. However, is it possible that these were examples of a “limited hangout”. According to Victor Marchetti, a top CIA agent: “A limited hangout is spy jargon for a favourite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phoney cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

The two editors who take the credit for Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, Ben Bradlee (Washington Post) and Abe Rosenthal (New York Times) have a long record of covering up important political scandals and were very much under the influence of “Operation Mockingbird”. Is it possible that the truth about Watergate and the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK was never revealed during the 1960s and 1970s?

I agree that the 1970s was not some Golden Age of journalism, but it was a lot better than what preceded it and what has followed. In many ways, that era reflected the divisions in the Establishment that had opened up because of Vietnam and Watergate. There was also increasing pressure from the more leftist "underground press" which was challenging the mainstream press on credibility with large segments of the readership. These various pressures and fractures gave journalists a little more freedom to do their jobs.

The Reagan-Bush era was about reversing those trends, a process that was carried out ruthlessly and successfully. Groups were funded to attack honest mainstream journalists, a robust conservative media was created, and the "underground press" pretty much disappeared. The media's anti-Clinton-Gore aggressiveness of the Clinton era was really just a coinciding of the interests of the emerging conservative media with the "we're not liberal" mainstream media. That dynamic was made worse by woeful judgments from wealthy progressives that media was not important. So, there was no "liberal" counterweight news media to speak of (just a few under-funded magazines usually based in out-of-the-way places like San Francisco, Madison, Boston, Chicago - almost anywhere but Washington, the front lines of the media battles).

What I'm saying is that I think the process is a bit more complicated that simply seeing the disclosures of the 1970s as an orchestrated limited hang-out. Like today, it was more the result of the competing interest groups, but they were weighted in different directions. That could be interpreted as hopeful news, since I think the dynamic could be changed with a serious devotion of resources to build an honest media infrastructure. But we'll see.

[Gerald McKnight]

Why is it that most books written about political conspiracies: assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. are written by journalists rather than historians? Is it because of fear or is it something to do with the nature of being a historian?

Investigating journalists are focused on breaking news, contemporary events, etc. Good investigating journalists (like Seymour Hersh and the late Izzy Stone) do rely on history for context and, in return, historians who are studying a topic by going back to the roots of the matter and carrying it forward can and do at times cite the works of a Hersh or a Stone. Sources for the Hersh's of this world in most cases are live and associated in some way with the object of his study. For historians most of their sources are from those who have passed on or from records and documents.

I came to political consciousness during the 1960s. I believed then as I do now that the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X were defining events of that decade. That the beginning of the decline of the US to the current "Dark Ages" we find ourselves today had its roots in that decade. So I had an abiding interest in the Kennedy and King assassiantions and their impact on American politics.

[Douglas Caddy]

Why is it that most books written about political conspiracies: assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. are written by journalists rather than historians? Is it because of fear or is it something to do with the nature of being a historian?

Investigating journalists are focused on breaking news, contemporary events, etc. Good investigating journalists (like Seymour Hersh and the late Izzy Stone) do rely on history for context and, in return, historians who are studying a topic by going back to the roots of the matter and carrying it forward can and do at times cite the works of a Hersh or a Stone. Sources for the Hersh's of this world in most cases are live and associated in some way with the object of his study. For historians most of their sources are from those who have passed on or from records and documents.

I came to political consciousness during the 1960s. I believed then as I do now that the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X were defining events of that decade. That the beginning of the decline of the US to the current "Dark Ages" we find ourselves today had its roots in that decade. So I had an abiding interest in the Kennedy and King assassiantions and their impact on American politics.

National Security Department: Listening In

By Seymour M. Hersh

The New Yorker

29 May 2006 Issue

A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public's right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. "When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that 'we'll never be able to collect intelligence again,'" the former official said. "They'd whine, 'Why do we have to report to oversight committees?' " But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. "We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal."

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.'s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier's network core - the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records," the consultant said. "They're providing total access to all the data."

"This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order," a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration's goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. "The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence," the former official said.

The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person-for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"-if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.

FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. "We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. "We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others." Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because "there's no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed."

But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect's name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out. "There's a lot that needs to be looked at," he said. "We are in a technology age. We need to tweak fisa, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues."

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA "it would have got them." He told me, "The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this."

General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional staff aide said, "The concern is that the Administration says, 'We're going to do this,' and he does it - even if he knows better." Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion, after the Times exposŽ, that the N.S.A.'s wiretap program could have prevented the attacks of 9/11. "That's patently false and an indication that he's willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President," Kerrey said.

Hayden's public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive," a Pentagon consultant told me. "It's intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you're looking and what you're after."

On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, "If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying." That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. "Nobody disputes the value of the tool," the former senior intelligence official told me. "It's the unresolved tension between the operators saying, 'Here's what we can build,' and the legal people saying, 'Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can use it.' " It's a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.

[Gerald McKnight]

I think they fear being labelled a "nut." The reality is, of course, that while not all history is a conspiracy there are conspiracies in history. It is a topic that has as much validity as say the politics of railroad building or migration patterns in Missouri. The JFK thing is largely verboten among the professoriate because it has attracted so many loose canons and dishonest elements. One wonders if the CIA didn't have a central casting and set loose a lot of these nut jobs just to poison the well, so to speak. Of course even that sounds paranoid. The other factor, and it is real, is that the available documentary body of material available is overwhelming. Consider that the holdings at National Archives 2 in College Park, Maryland, is in the area of 4 to 5 million pages. Not all of it is absolutely relevant but still. . . .it intimidates.

My feeling is that unless the republic turns into a closed authoritarian state that there is going to be a strong reaction to the political radicalism of the current administration and a resurgence of interest in how we came to this state of affairs. Of course the fact is that basically what - only 5% of the population reads books. How the hell do we change this?

[Joseph Trento]

"Conspiracy theorist" is a charge the right and establishment uses as McCarthy and his henchman used "commie sympathizer." I and others have been accused of it. Sometimes you get labelled for just writing about someone else’s views, as I did about Angleton's in Secret History. Here is the deal: It takes just a couple of politicians to cook up a conspiracy. They happen all the time. The press has become fearful of being labelled. Would it be fair to say a group of neo-cons cooked up a way of getting Bush to go into Iraq? I think so. But rather then letting the public focus on getting at the truth, we call the reporters and people who dig names, "conspiracy theorists" so no one will listen to what they find. It is the oldest technique in the world and the Bush Administration and their right wing friends have made it an art form. They having talking heads actually calling people conspiracy theorists for stories that have already proven out. It really is the new McCarthyism.

[Don Bohning]

Why is it that most books written about political conspiracies: assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. are written by journalists rather than historians? Is it because of fear or is it something to do with the nature of being a historian?

I suspect there will be more books written by historians on the subjects cited above after historians have further time to digest the information available. I suspect, also, the historian is a bit more concerned about damaging his legacy and thus a bit more cautious in drawing conclusions than the journalist is, judging by some of the books that have appeared so far on the subjects above.

To me, at least, the most significant difference between a journalist - investigative and otherwise - and an historian, is that a journalist relies much more heavily on what he sees and hears than a historian, who depends largely on the written record available to him or her. There are, of courses, exceptions and variations and advantages and disadvantages to both. As the old cliche goes, the journalists provides the first draft of history. From there, it is up to the historian, and sometimes the journalists becomes the historian who writes the later drafts, which I hope is what I did. In that sense, I think I made the transition from journalist to historian with my book.

For example, The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that the “committee believes, on the basis of the available evidence, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”. However, very few historians have been willing to explore this area of American history. Lawrence E. Walsh’s Iran-Contra Report suggests that senior politicians were involved in and covered-up serious crimes. Yet very few historians have written about this case in any detail? Why do you think that historians and journalists appear to be so unwilling to investigate political conspiracies?

I have two books on my bookshelf I can see from where I am writing this. One is by Robert Blakey and Richard Billings, entitled: The Plot to Kill the President and subtitled Organized Crime Assassinated J.F.K. The other is entitled The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi. Blakey was the staff director for the House Select Committee on Assassinations; Fonzi was a committee investigator. In their books, they come to, or in the case of Fonzi, at least imply, different conclusions as to who killed JFK. Blakey says the mafia, Fonzi inplies it was rouge CIA folks and Cuban exiles. For me, they are somewhat of a metaphor as to why both historians nor journalists are reluctant to get entangled with the Kennedy Assassination. We still don't know if Lincoln's assassination was a conspiracy and we probably won't know a hundred years from now whether Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy. So why would a serious historian or investigative journalist waste time time on amorphous conspiracy theories they likely will never be answered to anyone's satisfication? As virtually every year in recent times, including 2005, there will be two, three or four new books that will come out on the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination - all with different theories purporting to identify those responsible for the assassination.

Regarding Iran/Contra, I would respectfully disagree - at least on the journalistic side - that it was not well covered. The Miami Herald, for whom I worked at the time, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Iran/Contra for which I was one of the editors. There is - as a recall although it has been sometime since I read it - an excellent book entitled Landslide, written by Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus [two journalists] that focuses heavily on Iran/Contra, a scandal for which several officials were indicted and went to jail. While it was a big deal at the time, in view of what has been going on in Washington it would now appear to be pretty small potatoes. But I suspect some enterprising historian will eventually revisit it in the not to distant future, perhaps as a doctoral thesis.

[John Simkin]

Regarding Iran/Contra, I would respectfully disagree - at least on the journalistic side - that it was not well covered. The Miami Herald, for whom I worked at the time, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Iran/Contra for which I was one of the editors. There is - as a recall although it has been sometime since I read it - an excellent book entitled Landslide, written by Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus [two journalists] that focuses heavily on Iran/Contra, a scandal for which several officials were indicted and went to jail. While it was a big deal at the time, in view of what has been going on in Washington it would now appear to be pretty small potatoes.

I cannot understand how you can describe the Iran-Contra Scandal as “pretty small potatoes”. I would have thought that senior politicians involved in illegal activities concerning arms and drugs was fairly important. Nor are you right when you suggest the major figures went to jail for their crimes.

In November, 1986, Ronald Reagan set-up a three man commission (President's Special Review Board). The three men were John Tower, Brent Scowcroft and Edmund Muskie. Richard L. Armitage was interviewed by the committee. He admitted that he had arranged a series of meetings between Menachem Meron, the director general of Israel's Ministry of Defence, with Oliver North and Richard Secord. However, he denied that he discussed the replenishment of Israeli TOW missiles with Meron.

Armitage also claimed that he first learned that Israel had shipped missiles to Iran in 1985 when he heard William Casey testify on 21st November, 1986 that the United States had replenished Israel's TOW missile stocks. According to Lawrence E. Walsh, who carried out the official investigation into the scandal (Iran-Contra: The Final Report), claims that Armitage did not tell the truth to the President's Special Review Board. "Significant evidence from a variety of sources shows that Armitage's knowledge predated Casey's testimony. For instance, a North notebook entry on November 18, 1986, documents a discussion with Armitage about Israel's 1985 arms shipments to Iran - three days before Armitage supposedly learned for the first time that such shipments has occurred."

Walsh also adds that "classified evidence obtained from the Government of Israel... and evidence from North and Secord show that during the period Meron met with Armitage, Meron was discussing arms shipments to Iran and Israel's need for replenishment. Secord and North, on separate occasions, directed Meron to discuss these issues with Armitage."

The report implicated Oliver North, John Poindexter, Casper Weinberger and several others but did not mention the role played by Bush. It also claimed that Ronald Reagan had no knowledge of what had been going on.

The House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran was also established by Congress. The most important figure on the committee was the senior Republican member, Richard Cheney. As a result George Bush was totally exonerated when the report was published on 18th November, 1987. The report did state that Reagan's administration exhibited "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law."

Oliver North and John Poindexter were indicted on multiple charges on 16th March, 1988. North, indicted on twelve counts, was found guilty by a jury of three minor counts. The convictions were vacated on appeal on the grounds that North's Fifth Amendment rights may have been violated by the indirect use of his testimony to Congress which had been given under a grant of immunity. Poindexter was also convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and altering and destroying documents pertinent to the investigation. His convictions were also overturned on appeal.

When George Bush became president he set about rewarding those who had helped him in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Bush appointed Richard L. Armitage as a negotiator and mediator in the Middle East. Donald Gregg was appointed as his ambassador to South Korea. Brent Scowcroft became his chief national security adviser and John Tower became Secretary of Defence. When the Senate refused to confirm Tower, Bush gave the job to Richard Cheney. Later, Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, Elliott Abrams and Alan D. Fiers, Jr., who had all been charged with offences related to the Iran-Contra scandal, were pardoned by Bush.

George Bush’s son continued this process by appointing Cheney as his vice president and Armitage as his Deputy Secretary of State.

[Don Bohning]

I cannot understand how you can describe the Iran-Contra Scandal as “pretty small potatoes”. I would have thought that senior politicians involved in illegal activities concerning arms and drugs was fairly important. Nor are you right when you suggest the major figures went to jail for their crimes.

In November, 1986, Ronald Reagan set-up a three man commission (President's Special Review Board). The three men were John Tower, Brent Scowcroft and Edmund Muskie. Richard L. Armitage was interviewed by the committee. He admitted that he had arranged a series of meetings between Menachem Meron, the director general of Israel's Ministry of Defence, with Oliver North and Richard Secord. However, he denied that he discussed the replenishment of Israeli TOW missiles with Meron.

Armitage also claimed that he first learned that Israel had shipped missiles to Iran in 1985 when he heard William Casey testify on 21st November, 1986 that the United States had replenished Israel's TOW missile stocks. According to Lawrence E. Walsh, who carried out the official investigation into the scandal (Iran-Contra: The Final Report), claims that Armitage did not tell the truth to the President's Special Review Board. "Significant evidence from a variety of sources shows that Armitage's knowledge predated Casey's testimony. For instance, a North notebook entry on November 18, 1986, documents a discussion with Armitage about Israel's 1985 arms shipments to Iran - three days before Armitage supposedly learned for the first time that such shipments has occurred."

Walsh also adds that "classified evidence obtained from the Government of Israel... and evidence from North and Secord show that during the period Meron met with Armitage, Meron was discussing arms shipments to Iran and Israel's need for replenishment. Secord and North, on separate occasions, directed Meron to discuss these issues with Armitage."

The report implicated Oliver North, John Poindexter, Casper Weinberger and several others but did not mention the role played by Bush. It also claimed that Ronald Reagan had no knowledge of what had been going on.

The House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran was also established by Congress. The most important figure on the committee was the senior Republican member, Richard Cheney. As a result George Bush was totally exonerated when the report was published on 18th November, 1987. The report did state that Reagan's administration exhibited "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law."

Oliver North and John Poindexter were indicted on multiple charges on 16th March, 1988. North, indicted on twelve counts, was found guilty by a jury of three minor counts. The convictions were vacated on appeal on the grounds that North's Fifth Amendment rights may have been violated by the indirect use of his testimony to Congress which had been given under a grant of immunity. Poindexter was also convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and altering and destroying documents pertinent to the investigation. His convictions were also overturned on appeal.

When George Bush became president he set about rewarding those who had helped him in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Bush appointed Richard L. Armitage as a negotiator and mediator in the Middle East. Donald Gregg was appointed as his ambassador to South Korea. Brent Scowcroft became his chief national security adviser and John Tower became Secretary of Defence. When the Senate refused to confirm Tower, Bush gave the job to Richard Cheney. Later, Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, Elliott Abrams and Alan D. Fiers, Jr., who had all been charged with offences related to the Iran-Contra scandal, were pardoned by Bush.

George Bush’s son continued this process by appointing Cheney as his vice president and Armitage as his Deputy Secretary of State.

Touché re "small potatoes" It was a bad choice of words to describe Iran/Contra although in comparison to some of the things the current Bush II administration has done during six years in office, it may wind up as being rather small potatoes historically.

I do think, however, that Iran-Contra was covered extensively and quite well journalistically and at the time but perhaps less so historically. And it certainly was covered much more extensively and aggressively than the beginnings of the Iraq war and other travesties of the current administration in Washington.

[Colin Kidd]

Is there any real difference between the role of an investigative journalist and a historian?

Yes, I think, in general, there is a considerable gulf. While investigative journalists focus largely on telling particular stories, not all historians are committed to the construction of narratives. Indeed, many historians are more intrigued by explaining contexts and backgrounds. It is this primary interest in contexts which, I believe, differentiates most historians (or at least the type of historian I am) from investigative journalists.

(4) The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that the “committee believes, on the basis of the available evidence, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”. However, very few historians have been willing to explore this area of American history. Lawrence E. Walsh’s Iran-Contra Report suggests that senior politicians were involved in and covered-up serious crimes. Yet very few historians have written about this case in any detail? Why do you think that historians and journalists appear to be so unwilling to investigate political conspiracies?

I suspect that most historians are very sceptical of the existence of conspiracies, or at least of unrevealed conspiracies. We tend to be more attuned to the roles of unfolding processes in combination with unplanned contingencies in the working out of historical events. We are also very suspicious of monocausal explanations of complex events, and similarly not so interested in simple events - such as the actual assassination of one man by another, say - which tend to be simple events in themselves which do not require complex explanations.

There is a hierarchy of evidence, and the historian is duty bound not to believe all of it - such as, for example, legal evidence from witchcraft prosecutions which speak of the real existence of supernatural practices. Generally, the historian is in debt to his sources and, but sometimes he has to reject evidence in the sources which appears suspect.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

I suspect that most historians are very sceptical of the existence of conspiracies.

Yes, but why is that? Do historians ever read history?

Would historians prefer to believe that the assassination of Napoleon was the work of some deranged lone poisoner, and if so, why is that?

We are also very suspicious of monocausal explanations of complex events,

That is most definitively NOT the impression I get from reading explanations of the JFK assassination by academic historians. In fact I get the impression that academic historians positively LOVE "monocausal explanations of complex events" like the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK.

Since the mindset of academic historians is so transparent, perhaps the actual murderers of JFK, RFK and MLK were smart enough to know that they could get away with murder, because they could count upon historians (and their poor relations in journalism) to respond in the Pavlovian manner that they actually did?

There is a hierarchy of evidence, and the historian is duty bound not to believe all of it....

It seems to me that historians place "official explanations" at the very top of their hierarchy, and then refuse to budge. When did you last hear a historian admit that he was wrong, even though we all know that only the Pope is infallible?

I can't remember where this quote comes from, (I know I have the source somewhere) but here is my best recollection:

"Too often it has been the historian's task to remember things that did not happen, and to forget the things that did"

Edited May 31, 2006 by J. Raymond Carroll

[William Turner]

(4) You tend to write about controversial subjects. Do you think this has harmed your career in any way? Have you ever come under pressure to leave these subjects alone?

Writing on controversial topics surely has harmed my career. It limits the potential print-media market. My FBI file, obtained in 1978 under FOIA, consists of 17 volumes of 200 pages each. It reveals that the Bureau waged a relentless back-door campaign to dissuade publishers from books and articles, cut me off from electronic media interviews, blacklist me in the industry, and plant rebuttal articles with media collaborators.

[Robert Parry]

On page 130 you point out after your stories on Oliver North were published by AP you were recruited by Evan Thomas to join the staff of Newsweek (February, 1987). However, soon after you arrived Evan Thomas seemed to lose interest in your research into North. For example, Newsweek did not send a member of staff to report on North’s trial in 1989. By 1990 Thomas made clear that you were no longer wanted at Newsweek and you agreed to leave the organization.

Is it possible that Evan Thomas recruited you in order to keep you off the case? I say this because it has been claimed that Newsweek was a very important part of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. See for example, Carl Bernstein’s CIA and the Media in Rolling Stone Magazine (20th October, 1977).

In her book, Katharine The Great (1979), Deborah Davis points out that Newsweek was owned by the Astor Foundation. The most dominant figure of the organization was Gates White McGarrah. His grandson was Richard McGarrah Helms, a leading figure in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans that ran Mockingbird. Helms was a childhood friend of Ben Bradlee (page 141). In the early 1950s Bradlee worked for the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE). This was an organization under the control of the CIA. In 1953 Bradlee went to work for Newsweek. Recently released documents concerning the Rosenberg case show that while employed by Newsweek, Bradlee was also working for the CIA.

In 1961 it was Ben Bradlee who told Phil Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, that Newsweek was up for sale. Bradlee told Graham that he had heard this from his good friend, Richard Helms (page 142). Phil Graham had been recruited to Operation Mockingbird by Frank Wisner soon after the CIA was created in 1947. Wisner and Graham had both been members of the OSS during the Second World War.

I suppose there are always things you don't know. As for my hiring at Newsweek, I think it resulted from how poorly the magazine had done on the scandal to that point. That said, Newsweek never liked the story and wanted it put to rest as soon as possible. Editor Maynard Parker was very sympathetic to the neoconservatives and became my nemesis. Evan felt that my presence so angered Parker that I had become an obstacle for Evan's plans for the Washington bureau. Newsweek did see itself as a centrist Establishment publication, but it was not necessarily in line with the CIA, especially when the analysts described a weakening Soviet Union. Newsweek favored a much harder line and even considered the CIA soft of the Soviets. Even in the late 1980s, Parker and other top editors pushed for an article about Soviet tanks threatening the Fulda Gap in Germany. Despite objections from Washington correspondents, I think that story was eventually done.

On page 224 you mention that the U.S. press virtually ignored the declassification the CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz’s report into the Iran Contra report. Yet the report identified “more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade” and revealed “how the Reagan administration protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations which threatened to expose the crimes in the mid-1980s”.

You point out that at the time the press was preoccupied by the Monica Lewinsky case. One would have thought that it was in Bill Clinton’s interest to highlight Hitz’s report. However, he never did so. It is possible that Clinton himself had been compromised over the Iran-Contra scandal and therefore the CIA knew that he could not afford to start talking about this scandal? For example, see Daniel Hopsicker’s book, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, for information on how Clinton was linked to Barry Seal’s drug operation in Arkansas.

As for the Clinton stuff, it's absolutely nonsense and disinformation. Clinton was not involved in the contra drug trade. That was a psy-op run by the Republican Right -- and pushed by some leftists who hated Clinton and were quietly collaborating with the Right. (I don't want to mention names but one became a prominent hawk on Iraq.) Some of those Clinton-cocaine books were just dishonest ways to make money. Other times, good people have been sucked into the disinformation.

But Mena wasn't why Clinton failed to use the Hitz material differently. The Clinton crowd had decided by late 1992 to give Bush Sr. and others a pass on the scandals of the 1980s so that would not interfere with their domestic agenda. Once that decision was made there was no reasonable way for them to go back on it, even when the Republicans began trashing Clinton. Please don't fall for these silly Clinton conspiracy theories. They have been another bane of my existence.

[William Turner]

Why is it that most books written about political conspiracies: assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. are written by journalists rather than historians? Is it because of fear or is it something to do with the nature of being a historian?

For example, The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that the “committee believes, on the basis of the available evidence, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”. However, very few historians have been willing to explore this area of American history. Lawrence E. Walsh’s Iran-Contra Report suggests that senior politicians were involved in and covered-up serious crimes. Yet very few historians have written about this case in any detail? Why do you think that historians and journalists appear to be so unwilling to investigate political conspiracies?

I think a lot of the reluctance of mainstream historians and journalists to take on conspiracies is a fear of being cut off of information by agencies and the various branches while their colleagues are fed the story. Also, the concern of being ridiculed as a "conspiracy theorist," which originated in the JFK case, has had its effect.

There is always someone who is willing to talk, whether out of vanity or a change of heart. In 1972 I interviewed Ambassador William Pawley in Miami. When I called to seek an interview he issued a flat no since he had been involved up to his ears in the CIA secret war against Castro. I appealed to his vanity by telling him how important he was in the contemporary history of the Caribbean. He said okay, come over and I'll at least shake hands with you. A non-interview went on for close to two hours, and I came away with the information I wanted. I always try to double-source key information, and also rely on what I deem the person's credibility to be. I look for inconsistencies that indicate the person is not telling the truth.

[John Hunt]

William,

If you care to, please contact me at johnhunt01@verizon.net. I have some new information on the RFK case I'd like to pass by you.

John Hunt