Paul Rigby

Extract from David Talbot’s Brothers, p.360: “Meanwhile, McCarthy fought bitterly on. Despite his victory in Oregon – where the white suburban population responded to the former professor’s cerebral charm – even McCarthy, a quirky and diffident campaigner, knew his chances of winning the nomination were remote. Instead, he seemed increasingly intent on spoiling Kennedy’s chances. McCarthy never let go his resentment of Kennedy for entering the race, after he had taken the initial risk of challenging Johnson. As the California campaign heated up, the Humphrey and McCarthy campaigns seemed to be collaborating to drive Kennedy out of the race. The ties between the two campaigns began to grow when a former CIA official named Thomas Finney, who was close to Humphrey, took over as McCarthy’s campaign boss – and reports that Humphrey partisans had funneled $50,000 to McCarthy – drove some of the peace candidate’s staff to resign in protest. It is possible that the CIA and the Democratic Party establishment were working to split the peace vote to hand the nomination to Humphrey. But McCarthy himself was surprisingly popular in CIA circles, where Kennedy was reviled and there was growing disaffection with the war, which some officials believed was damaging the country’s national security interests. Dick Helms – who advised President Johnson in a secret 1967 memo that the CIA believed he could withdraw from Vietnam without any permanent damage to the United States – was one of the McCarthy sympathizers in the agency’s upper ranks. Over the years, Helms wrote in his memoir, he and the Minnesota senator ‘lunched occasionally and encountered one another at the usual Washington events, or as guests in owner Jack Kent Cooke’s box at Redskin football games. McCarthy was always good company, intelligent and witty.’”

Nat, Sorry about the delay in responding, but I either missed your reply first time round, or, more likely, got distracted and forgot about any intended reply. Worse, I revisited this thread merely to note with approval David Talbot’s inclusion of Starnes’ ‘Arrogant CIA in Brothers – see pp.217-218 - which arrived this morning. Talbot first describes the despatch as “a remarkable report” (p.217), then as “stunning” (p.218). Extraordinary, is it not, that Talbot could find the piece forty-plus years after the event, while Lane, Weisberg et al never once referenced it in the 60s! Let’s hope a US academic or two is sufficiently emboldened to interview Dick while the chance remains. A small quibble: Talbot erroneously claims that Richardson, the CIA station-chief in Saigon, was anti-coup at the time of his recall. The truth, of course, not least from Richardson’s own hands (see earlier in the thread), is quite contrary. And so to your questions from August last: No, I don’t agree with Dick’s characterisation of the CIA’s role in both the U-2 and Bay of Pigs “incidents” as “bumbling.” But then I suspect this was as far as he thought he could go in the contemporary discourse, certainly in the case of the BoP. Starnes couldn’t jump in at the time, as he was in Israel covering the Eichmann trial, but he did make comment on it, briefly, in The Ugly American Made Even Uglier, 28 April 1961, pp.1&7. He did return to the subject of the BoP, however, in a mid-July 1965 column: Starnes on the U-2 incident remains terra incognita: I didn’t have enough spare cash at the time to pay for the necessary copying of Dick’s 1960 columns. I hope to harvest them if I can get to Washington in the autumn. As to your second question, “Did Starnes have access to this interpretation?,” I can’t answer that, but I’ll certainly put it to him when we next speak. As a general observation, Scripps-Howard group journalists, the one US newspaper group’s to emerge with real credit from the coup’s prelude and aftermath – not that you’ll find S-H execs boasting about this – challenged the consensus chiefly on empirical, not theoretical, grounds: Kantor met Ruby at Parkland, Starnes visited Saigon as the CIA ran amok, Ruark was a hunter and thus thought the Warren Report on ballistics utter baloney, etc. Not until the publication of Sylvan Fox’s Unanswered Questions did this change. Paul

Arghhh, and I thought that was a genuine battle between Saudi/US backed Sunnis and Iranian Shia's for control of Iraq and an increased geopolitical position in the Middle East ultimately preventing a pan-Arab front against Israel etc. An Israeli arms dealer labours under the same lucrative misconception: I also saw an interesting piece from an Egyptian newspaper a few months ago detailing the arrest (?) of CIA recruiters for Iraqi insurgents. The real civil war is American: If the Iraqi paradigm had proved a success, what need the US elite of CIA? Just send in the Pentagon! Now, of course, the traditional CIA way is back in fashion.

Yup, perfect, isn't it, for CIA purposes; and, once again, a situation with south-east Asian precedence: At the time of Diem's overthrow, we have a regime installed and hitherto sustained by the CIA, under sustained attack from a CIA-backed military clique, and a National Liberation Front which turns out to be chock full of violently anti-communist sect members whose leadership was bought from the French by Langley. In other words, recent events Palestinian represent business as usual. Sad, but it needs facing. Paul

John, For a lengthy profile of Ulius Louis Amoss, see: John Kobler, “He Runs a Private OSS,” Saturday Evening Post, 21 May 1955, pp.31, 141-2, & 144: p.31: “Among Amoss’ efforts is a four-page intelligence letter called Inform, published under the aegis of the International Services of Information Foundation, Inc., of which he is founder and president. Replete with purportedly exclusive inside news and forecasts mostly concerning the USSR and her satellites, it is circulated at irregular intervals to about 1100 subscribers who pay twenty-five dollars a year for it.” p.141: “…Amoss has warm sympathisers. Among ISI trustees he numbers seven retired generals, including Brig. Gen. Thomas B. Catron, onetime editor of the The Infantry Journal (1927-31)…Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers…and Maj. Gen. Everett S. Hughes, former chief of Amy Ordnance…” p.141: “Among ISI’s subscribers [to a scheme to obtain a MIG – PR] was the former governor of Maryland, William Preston Lane, Jr., now the attorney for Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp…Lane’s law partner, Stuart Bushong, was an ISI trustee…” p.142: “Who, Amoss wondered, might be willing to invest in such a scheme? [To smuggle Stalin’s son out of the Soviet Union – PR] He found the answer through a complicated chain of contacts, beginning with Mrs. Mary Vaughan King, who runs the Baltimore public relations firm, Counsel Services, of which the colonel is a client. It led to Clendenin Ryan, a somewhat quixotic multi-millionaire, who once served as an assistant to Mayor La Guardia, ran for the New York mayoralty himself on an independent ticket and the governorship of New Jersey, published a semi-political magazine, and sent large sums abroad to break communist-inspired strikes and influence voters in favor of anti-communist candidates for high office.” p.142: “But Amoss did not leave Germany entirely empty handed. He carried with him what he calls the ‘Bluebird Papers’…Running to 150 pages, written in German, but bearing an official USSR stamp, it appeared to be nothing less than a communist master plan for world-wide sabotage.” p.142: “He was stationed in Cairo as an OSS deputy director in charge of sabotage and guerrilla warfare for Eastern Europe“ where he met his wife-to-be, Veronica Grogan, who was “an employee of the British Secret Intelligence Service, with the assignment of keeping tabs on Amoss.” p.144: “Grecian Formula 16, the product of Questers Ventures Inc., an enterprise founded by Amoss and other ISI officers with the object of earning more money with which to support the spy network.” p.144: “During World War I he landed the post of YMCA secretary for the 79th Division, stationed at Camp Meade, Maryland. After the armistice he was sent to Greece to serve in a similar capacity to the Greek Army…He organized the Greek YMCA” and was “allowed to attend a sabotage and spy school in Salonika…” p.144: “In 1926, having returned to the United States, he started an import-export business, Gramtrade, which gave him opportunities to go abroad…referred by friends to Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan, head of OSS,…Commissioned a lieutenant colonel, he wound up in charge of all OSS intelligence from Italy to India and from Poland to Ethiopia, presently taking on sabotage and guerrilla operations. In 1943 he was appointed deputy chief of staff to the 9th Air Force…He left the service a full colonel.” p.144: “It was while on terminal leave in 1945 that the colonel conceived the idea of a private OSS. He persuaded a group of Baltimore and Washington businessmen to form a corporation which would embrace both export-import trade and ISI, the profits from the former to be diverted to the latter. Some dozen investors put up $10,000 each…The export-import side of World-Trade Services, Inc. as they named it, came to nought…” In short, Amoss was a classic "alongsider," doing jobs the CIA wanted doing, but couldn't be seen to be associated with.

All new to me, and fascinating, so thanks. I've often wondered - chiefly with regard to the Lincoln assassination - if we're not collectively missing a trick or two by not having a thread dedicated to 19th century US and UK parapolitics. Paul

Dead men file no accounts. One sees the advantages from the off. Surprised Noo Labour didn't try it. Presumably "Internal Democracy" didn't quite pass muster.

Too cruel - not even a nod to MI6 and the Muslim Brotherhood? Surely an old Agency trick, not least in Laos in the late 50s and early 60s? Such cynicism: Entirely merited! Is that Pentagon betting ring still in operation? Anyone fancy a flutter?

But very recent “ex-“. Just how recent was made clear in R. Harris Smith’s paean to OSS and, admittedly besieged, CIA “liberalism,” OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Univ of California Press, 1972): “Fifty-year-old Thomas McCoy had first joined the CIA in 1951 and held top Agency posts at Rome and Madrid. He retired from the government in the spring of 1968 to become a top campaign aide to peace candidate Eugene McCarthy” (p.381). He was invited to join the campaign by the aforementioned long-retired CIA man, Thomas Finney, “who had served in Copenhagen in the early 1950s” (Ibid., p.382). So what kind of peace did McCoy mean? For that far from inessential detail, it’s over to Peter Dale Scott’s chapter, “The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment,” as contained within the Mark Selden-edited volume, “Re-making Asia: Essays on America Power (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974), p.138: “One recent opponent of the war…is Thomas Finney, a former Laos operative who resigned from the CIA in 1968 after seventeen years’ service ‘to become a top aide to peace candidate Eugene McCarthy’ [scott here quoting from Harris Smith].” Scott goes on: “Yet McCoy had not the same aversion for the CIA’s covert warfare. In 1972 he wrote a letter to the Washington Post, claiming that the job done by the CIA in Laos, ‘based on any comparison with the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, would have to be: A spectacular success” [WaPo, 11 January 1972, p.A15]. In summary, then, for McCoy – and the rest of the ’67-68 CIA peaniks, one suspects – there was no moral objection to the wars waged by America against the disparate peoples of south-east Asia. To the contrary, the real spurs to opposition were a) the wrong bureaucracy was in charge (CIA good, Pentagon bad); and the question of efficiency (ditto). Robin Ramsay, “The view from the bridge: Matthiessen and the CIA,” Lobster, June 2007, (53), p.26.

Terrific stuff - and a classic example of CIA/MI6 "black media" being used to first surface, then funnel, complete fabrications into the domestic mainstream media, the spook-dominated BBC to the fore! Mr. C, here ends any hopes of a career within the Beeb - congratulations.

Sorry to disappoint, Len, forgot to mention - Tom McCoy described as "ex-CIA" in Rowland Evans & Robert Novak, "Semi-Pros Replace Rank Amateurs As Top Strategists for McCarthy," Washington Post, 27 June 1968, p.25. In his extended obit for Lowenstein, Robert G. Kaiser describes Lowenstein as "president of the National Student Association before that organization developed ties to the CIA" ("A Complex, Frenetic Life Built on the Discovery of People," Washington Post, 16 March 1980, p.A12). This must be the parapolitical equivalent of what US evangelicals are pleased to style "the time before time." And while I'm on the subject of Lowenstein, a friend tells me that the current edition of Lobster, 53, contains vindication of another Richard Cummings claim, to wit, that Peter Matthiessen, founder of the Paris Review, was indeed Agency at the time of the magazine's creation. Citation to follow.

Thanks for the link, John, I look forward to reading the stuff on Finney in Mississippi in '64. Here's why:

Terrific research - keep it coming. Particularly looking forward to the section(s) on overview and motives. (Or do we just conclude "Oil and Gas"?) Paul

Marquis Childs, "Bobby, Bombing and the New Left," Washington Post, 3 March 1967, p.A18: "The issue of Ramparts that blew the role of the CIA with various left-of-center groups, such as the National Student Association...led off with a savage attack on Kennedy. Written by Ramparts managing editor, Robert Scheer, the article...said...'Bobby is believable and for that reason much more serious.' From the viewpoint of the New Left, dangerous could be substituted for serious. The obvious objective is to destroy any middle ground between the demand for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and the cry of the hawks for the end of all restraint and total bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Ramparts article charges that Kennedy's involvement with the Vietnam war goes back to the earliest days of the Kennedy Adminsitration, beginning in 1961 when 'he did as much as any man to get us deeply involved there.' Bobby Kennedy's vision of foreign affairs, Scheer writes, 'is standard cold war mythology.'" RFK more responsible for the US assault on Vietnam than, say, Allen Dulles? The strategy is as old as politics; and may yet be used in 2008.

Perhaps you'd be willing to open one - it won't hurt!

Some wonderful stuff on Hersh and his history of service to the CIA in James DiEugenio’s chapter, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (see pp.364-369) in James DiEugnio & Lisa Pease (Ed.). The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X (LA: Feral House, 2003). Hersh’s My Lai massacre journalism appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in November 1969; the book on the slaughter in 1970. As DiEugenio notes, quoting the Agency wordsmith, Hersh would have us believe “There was no conspiracy to destroy the village”; and that the cause was individual ambition compounded by erroneous assumptions, the consequence of “the basic incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army” (p.367). True? According to DiEugenio, citing Douglas Valentine, false: My Lai was part of the Phoenix Program. Founder of Phoenix Program? Yes, the same William Colby who feeds the anti-Angleton morsels to him in 1974. You were right, by the way. "Highly likely" didn't cut mustard. I should have written: "Overwhelmingly probable."

Absolutely, Sid. Very true. And all the more reason to look the darkness in the eye, unillusioned and undaunted. Paul

Dupe, removed.

Au contraire, Len - as we'll now see. Biographer Sandbrook would also appear – I haven’t read the book, so I here rely on the Amazon reviewers – to be exercised by the germane question of who exactly funded McCarthy’s campaign. His tentative answer? Hubert Humphrey. This is certainly an answer of sorts, and, in the absence of the book before me, I can’t comment on the quality, or otherwise, of evidence adduced. What does interest me for the moment is the fact Sandbrook alighted on the issue. The conventional version – see the above Time, March 1968 piece – is thought-provoking in and of itself. The Dreyfus Corporation, according to this link http://www.learn4good.com/jobs/language/fr.../company/18147/ , was founded in 1951, and acquired by the Mellon empire in the 1990s. Its founder and longtime CEO, was Jack Jonas Dreyfus, born in 1913 in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a candy salesman who worked for a family enterprise, The Dreyfus Brothers Candy Manufacturing Company. The following link offers the ensuing sanitised history: http://www.answers.com/topic/the-dreyfus-corporation “In 1958 Jack Dreyfus began to suffer from bouts of depression that ranged from mild to severe. In 1963, on little more than a hunch, he asked his doctor to prescribe Dilantin a drug to treat epilepsy. Dreyfus improved dramatically and although he returned to his routine at Dreyfus & Co. and the Dreyfus Fund, an increasing amount of his time and attention was devoted to researching and championing Dilantin. In 1965 he decided to retire from managing the fund in order to establish the Dreyfus Medical Foundation. He hired a recruiter who presented him four candidates, but in the end he decided that someone in his own organization was better suited to the job, Howard Stein, who would head the company for the next 30 years and propel the fund to new heights.” Omitted from this corporate PR snowjob is the curious affair of Dreyfus’ subsequent role as unofficial pharmacologist to one Richard Milhous Nixon. Let Jon Wiener, the Nation reviewer of Anthony Summers’ Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (Viking, 2000), take up the story: “The book has also made news for its reports that Nixon was seen by a psychotherapist while he was President. However, the media excitement over this has missed the more significant story about a President's search for help. The men around Nixon, Summers shows, were alarmed by Nixon's mental condition, especially when he was deciding to invade Cambodia. After meeting with Nixon to discuss a possible invasion, Henry Kissinger told an aide, ‘Our peerless leader has flipped out.’ There were disturbing reports of Nixon drinking heavily during these days. And after a Pentagon briefing on the first day of the invasion, Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland commented obliquely that "the president's unbridled ebullience...required some adjustment to reality. It was at this point that Nixon called Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a psychotherapist who had treated him during the fifties. Nixon had read Hutschnecker's bestseller, The Will to Live, written for people ‘in the grips of acute conflict.’ Since Nixon had become President, Hutschnecker had seen him only once, and then to discuss Hutschnecker's views of crime and world peace. Hutschnecker's 1970 White House visit was kept secret, but when the two met, the doctor did not realize that Nixon was seeking treatment. So Hutschnecker started pitching his world peace plans, and Nixon abruptly dismissed him. The President knew he needed help--but didn't get it. Two days later, with protests engulfing the country, Kissinger worried that the President was ‘on the edge of a nervous breakdown.’ This is the point at which the pill-popping story becomes significant. Jack Dreyfus, a Nixon friend and supporter (and founder of the Dreyfus mutual funds), had given Nixon a bottle of a thousand Dilantins--an anticonvulsant Dreyfus claimed helped overcome anxiety and depression. Dreyfus said he told Nixon they should be prescribed by a doctor, but Nixon replied, ‘To heck with the doctor.’ Dilantin had been approved by the FDA, but for the treatment of epileptic seizures. Documented side effects include ‘slurred speech...mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness.’ Instead of getting treatment from the one therapist he trusted, Nixon apparently took the Dilantin Dreyfus had given him. He later asked Dreyfus for--and received--another bottle of a thousand 100-milligram tablets. Dilantin didn't help: Summers reports that concern about Nixon's mental state in 1974 led Defense Secretary James Schlesinger to order military units not to react to orders from the White House unless they were cleared with him or the Secretary of State.” (Source: Jon Wiener, “Another ‘October Surprise’,” The Nation, posted October 19, 2000 (November 6, 2000 issue). Follow this link for the review in full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001106/wiener ) So Dreyfus, “Nixon friend and supporter,” is not merely influencing the President’s mental state at critical junctures of the Nixonian presidency, but, two years before assuming this elevated, if medically unorthodox, status, presumably sat back calmly while Stein, his handpicked successor, pumped money into the alleged peacenik campaign of Eugene McCarthy? And the CIA, Nixon’s nemesis, was uninterested in any of this? Well, perhaps not entirely. After all, Agency man Charles Colson put Howard Stein, the CEO pumping money into no-hoper Democratic presidential candidates, on Nixon’s infamous enemies list - just before CIA’s Allard Lowenstein. I don't make that point, and I agree with your dismissal of any easy connection between marital fidelity and presidential competence. What I am pointing out is the utter hypocrisy of those who have made great play of a series of wildly unreliable allegations against JFK and RFK, while remaining silent on the actual, attested infidelities of their opponents. Nothing more, or less. Paul

Delighted you've raised the subject of Ramparts. By sheerest coincidence, you understand, two of Ramparts biggest backers - the noted admirer of all things Arab/Islamic, Martin Peretz, and a lady routinely described, somewhat patronisingly I can't help feeling, as a "San Fransiscan socialite," or "heiress," June Degnan, were also two of Clean Gene's moneybags. Here's Time magazine on who ostensibly financed CG, from a piece entitled "Unforeseen Gene," published in its edition of 28 March 1968: Peretz's finances are a seeming puzzle. It was his wife's money, it would appear, that funded his purchase of The New Republic, yet he is above described as "independently wealthy." Oddly, Peretz fails to mention his significant contribution to Clean Gene's campaign in his TNR obit-cum-tribute to McCarthy, which can be found here: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060116&s=diarist011605 Peretz's piece at least has the virtue of admitting that the Kennedy-McCarthy rivalry was "old and deep," a fact sometimes overlooked by McCarthy hagiographers - see here for a classic piece of that kind http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthyE.htm - a point then more than negated by the Peretzian tripe which follows: "A few minutes after his victory statement at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian terrorist. Gene went off to a monastery to reflect. I never again heard an unkind word from him about Bobby." Eugene Thane Cesar was a Palestinian terrorist? Well I never! And that bit about the monastery - in fact, the saintly McCarthy dumped Abigail, his wife, following the 1968 campaign, as she recounts in her 1972 memoir, "Private Faces Public Place" : "He wanted to cut off everything and that is what he did …. He had to be against his party, against his home state, people — and against his wife. It was a dividing point in his life — and he had to divide from so much to do it … so many things that mattered." During the campaign itself, he had an affair with "a devout Catholic woman who had covered the campaign." As so often with JFK and RFK, scratch an inveterate opponent and you find a real adulterer. See here for more on the saintly McCarthy's marriage: http://marriage.about.com/od/politics/p/eugenemccarthy.htm And as for Clean Gene's failure to utter "an unkind word" about RFK, this tells us rather more about Peretz's hearing than CG's real attitude to RFK in particular, and the three brothers in general. One web source reveals him to have been little more than obsessive about RFK: "If you ever got to speak to McCarthy in later years, it always seemed like you were in a time machine. The conflict, the drama, the personal slights of 1968 were never far from the surface. And the conversation rarely was about Vietnam or Lyndon Johnson. It was almost always about Bobby Kennedy." http://www.legendarysurfers.com/sr/2005_12_01_archive.html From another source, we find this highly flattering description of Clean Gene's motivations and aims: "McCarthy's true motivation may have been a great deal less magnanimous than it appeared. According to one account, he told a friend, "I wanted Teddy to take it and then be beaten. It would have broken the chain." Asked about this eighteen years later, McCarthy replied, "I think I might have said, 'Well if he wins, it's fine, if he loses, why, you're going to have to run him sometime, and that this would be a test.' I think I said something like that." If that had happened, McCarthy explained, "he'd never run now," adding, "It's still going on twenty years later." http://www.orlok.com/tribe/insiders/chapter11.html Elsewhere, we find it even more disturbingly expressed. Of RFK's assassination, we are offered this Clean Gene verdict: "He brought it on himself, demagoguing to the last." The same Amazon reviewer - of Dominic Sandbrook's "Eugene McCarthy and the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism" (Anchor, 2005) - offers many other titbits ordinarily airbrushed out of the plaster saint's history, from the vigorous anti-Communism of his early political career to his long, consistent history of spite and duplicitousness. http://www.amazon.ca/Eugene-Mccarthy-Postw...m/dp/1400077907 Still, at least McCarthy's proposed cabinet would have been a sight to behold. Yarborough later characterised it as "six millionaires and about six Republicans," a coalition of "all the talents" eerily reminiscent of the post-putsch government proposed by those who sought to overthrow Harold Wilson in 1968. To be continued...

To illustrate the point - how McCarthy shifted from intelligent criticism of the Agency, give or take the appalling remark about the Agency's barbarous intervention in Guatemala - here is his Sat Eve Post piece from January 1964. By the time of his Pentagon Papers review, by contrast, we find him in lock-step with Chomsky et al, peddling the line that Langley was both prescient on Vietnam, and confined its role to intelligence gathering. It's a miserable decline.

To illustrate the point - how McCarthy shifted from intelligent criticism of the Agency, give or take the appalling remark about the Agency's barbarous intervention in Guatemala - here is his Sat Eve Post piece from January 1964. By the time of his Pentagon Papers review, by contrast, we find him in lock-step with Chomsky et al, peddling the line that Langley was both prescient on Vietnam, and confined its role to intelligence gathering. It's a miserable decline.

Another essential contribution from the Wackford Squeers of the Education Forum. My God you do have a sharp tongue Paul. At the risk of copping a dose myself, I really must stick up for Michael here. (1) His successful campaign to help Len improve the presentation of his posts has been a blessing for all concerned. (2) Even if you don't share my fondness for Michael posts, is Wackford Squeers really the appropriate literary analogy? The British Library reports that headmaster William Shaw was the model for Dickens' hateful character. In 1823, Shaw had been prosecuted for beatings and neglect that led to the blinding of two of his pupils. Wikipedia is similarly unflattering: It's a side of Michael Hogan I have yet to see on the forum. He seems a such a nice guy. Hard to imagine him sadistically whipping other members. Still, it clearly worked wonders with Len Sid, I can only apologise - to Dickens.

Another essential contribution from the Wackford Squeers of the Education Forum.

So, you've moved from "which Thomas Finney, lots of Agency bods called Thomas Finney" to Thomas D. Finney, ex-OSS, at heart of "Clean for Gene" campaign, but...what exactly? Couldn't conceivably have been CIA? Or merely I lack a signed confession? Pretty droll, no, to find Gans lecturing others about campaign dependence upon "big money" after serving in campaign utterly dependent upon, er, a small number of large contributors. Know who they were? Thought not. So how can you preclude CIA presence? But you offer a useful prompt: more work to be done on Gans' Agency ties. You have a splendidly crude notion of politics: Woolsey was anti-Vietnam in 1967-68, ergo, he must have been a progressive. I suspect a) he was talent-spotted at Yale by CIA; and he was intent upon impressing his elders and betters with his nose for the prevailing wind. The mundane truth is that powerful Washington circles turned against the war in Vietnam on grounds of cost and efficacy; and for fear of war with China. Nowt to do with morality, as Woolsey's subsequent career attests. Well done, Len, there's no pulling the wool over your eyes... You mean Colby entrusted his anti-Angleton morsels to a non-CIA journo? But I jump ahead six years. Was he working for the Agency in '68? Highly likely. Why don't you just ask him? Or isn't that permitted? Priceless! Tell you the truth, Len, I left the job of demolishing the Pentagon Papers to some obscure guy called Peter Dale Scott. McCarthy knew the Pentagon Papers were nonsense because he was alive and conscious in the period 1961-1963, and was sufficiently concerned with matters CIA to a) oppose the nomination of John McCone; and write a lengthy piece on the CIA published in early 1964. Compare and contrast "The CIA is getting out of hand" (Sat Eve Post, 4-11 Jan 1964, pp.6 &10) with his review of the Pentagon Papers. In fairness to McCarthy, his was a common sojourn. Precisely the same rowing back is found, for example, in the case of Senator Gruening. I can think of no other example, however, of a Senate or House opponent of the Agency going quite so far in actively assisting the Agency later on. I hate Clean Gene? Not as much as you hate interrogating received wisdom, or challenging authority. You should try it some time. You might even get to differentiate one Finney from another.