Steve Kangas and Operation Mockingbird

[John Simkin]

During my research into Operation Mockingbird I cam across the work of Steve Kangas. In the 1980s he worked for military intelligence and spent time doing covert work in Central America and Europe. His experiences made him highly critical of American foreign policy. He left military intelligence in 1986 and became a student at the University of California in Santa Cruz. This experience moved him further to the left: "There, kindly professors pointed out to me the illogic of defending life by taking it, destroying the planet for a buck and shutting down schools to build more prisons. I am now thoroughly brainwashed to believe that kindness and human decency are positive traits to be emulated and encouraged."

Kangas ran the Liberalism Resurgent website. This included several articles on the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of his online essays, The Origins of the Overclass, attempted to show "why the richest 1 percent have exploded ahead since 1975, with the help of the New Right, Corporate America and, surprisingly, the CIA."

In the essay he looked into the activities of Operation Mockingbird. He argued that a man called Richard Mellon Scaife was playing an important role in this. Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world."

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

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html

Scaife also supplied billions via his four foundations to right-wing groups. This included giving $1.8 million to the American Spectator magazine for the so-called "Arkansas Project," which sought to find evidence linking Clinton to drugs and also looked into the Foster suicide.

Scaife was very unhappy with the attack made on him and employed private detective, Rex Armistead, to carry out an investigation into Kangas.

It is believed that Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife. He had been shot in the head.

Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?"

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