Paul Rigby

So Ramparts was part of the Empire too?

Absolutely, Sid.

How much more of the 'left' in recent generations, I wonder?

The story of our times gets murkier every day.

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

Paul

Dupe, removed.

So Paul are we to gather from your last post that you are abandoning your ‘McCarthy was backed [probably knowingly] by the CIA’ theory?

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.

Len Colby: As I’ve previously noted when facts don’t go someone’s way in a ‘debate’ like this they often change the subject, which you apparently have done. Your new point seems to be ‘[he might not have been a pawn of the CIA but]he sure was a screwed-up @$$hole! That might well be the case. I never disputed that. However I still take issue with one of your major points, which seems to have been ‘he was a bad husband, therefore he was a bad person’ couldn’t the same ‘logic’ be applied to JFK, RFK, MLK jr, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton? Politicians shouldn’t be judged by their private lives.

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

The Pentagon Papers CIA propaganda? Obviously the people who ran Ramparts magazine didn’t think so because they published stuff by Anthony Russo who helped Ellsberg leak them http://www.gusbooks.com/si/015754.html

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:

“Key moneymen: Dreyfus Fund President Howard Stein, who is said to have raised some $100,000; Arnold Hiatt, executive vice president of Boston's Green Shoe Manufacturing Co.; independently wealthy Harvard Social Scientist Martin Peretz; and San Francisco Heiress June Degnan.”

Source:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,828460,00.html

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...

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.

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.

Saturday Evening Post, 4-11 January 1964, pp.6 & 10

The CIA is getting out of hand

By Senator Eugene McCarthy

A senator charges that the Central Intelligence Agency, a law unto itself, meddles in the framing of US foreign policy.

Wrapped in its cloak of secrecy, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency modestly hints it has overthrown foreign governments, admits that it violates the international law and doesn’t deny that one of its exploits wrecked a summit conference. The CIA, in short, is making foreign policy and, in doing so, is assuming the roles of the President and the Congress. It has taken on the character of an invisible government answering only to itself. This must stop. The CIA must be made accountable for its activities, not only to the President but also to Congress through a responsible committee.

Recent events in South Vietnam raise the questions as to how CIA actions may critically affect U.S. foreign affairs. In early September it was reported that the CIA was giving money – some three million dollars a year in “direct, under-the-table aid” – to the Diem regime’s special corps that raided Buddhist pagodas in Saigon. The CIA payments were made even though the U.S. Government publicly deplored the raids, part of the repression of the Buddhists which helped bring about the downfall of the Diem regime.

In Laos, too, the CIA pursued policies that conflicted with official and public policies of the State Department. In 1958 a highly volatile Laos was governed by a loose coalition headed by neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma. The situation was hardly ideal, but to Ambassador Horace Smith and the U.S. State Department this coalition government seemed to offer the best hope for a stable Laos. According to Smith, the CIA, with the backing of the Pentagon, threw its support behind right-wing leader Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. In August, 1960, Souvanna Phouma was overthrown, and Phoumi Nosavan installed Prince Boun Oum, an ineffectual leader, as titular head of the government. The Communists then sought to take over the country. Gen. Phoumi Nosavan’s troops proved unwilling to fight. All of Laos appeared on the verge of going Communist. Frantic diplomatic maneuvers restored a coalition government under neutralist Souvanna Phouma in June, 1962, but in the meantime millions of dollars of U.S. aid had been wasted and vast confusion spread about U.S. aims in Laos.

Ambassador Smith is not the only member of the U.S. diplomatic corps to complain about CIA “spooks” who flit through U.S. embassies while pursuing their own brand of foreign policy. Nor is Laos the only country where the CIA has helped engineer a coup. In 1953 the government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran fell because of CIA efforts, says the CIA. Who, if anyone, authorized the agency to overthrow Mossadegh is unknown. Actually, many authorities dispute the CIA’s role in the Iranian coup, but since the agency hides behind its cloak of secrecy, its claims cannot be effectively challenged.

The CIA also claims to have masterminded the overthrow of the Communist-influenced government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in 1954. In this instance the result undoubtedly benefited the United States, but the question remains as to whether the CIA is the proper tool for such endeavors.

Possibly the mightiest achievement of the CIA was the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Surveillance through the U-2 has provided U.S. intelligence with an enormous amount of useful information, and the CIA deserves a great deal of credit for the development of the U-2 as an information tool. But the CIA’s usage of the U-2 is something else again. Shortly before a summit conference between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev in 1960, a U-2 was shot down 1,200 miles inside Soviet territory. At first we denied any plane was missing; then an official statement said a weather plane must have strayed off course; and finally we admitted aerial surveillance and justified it as necessary to defend our country. Apparently nobody in the CIA ever fully evaluated the consequences of a U-2 failure over Soviet soil. We had no cover story, and our President arrived at the Paris summit conference with egg all over his face.

The U-2 failure over Sverdlosk involved far more than a daring gamble to obtain intelligence. Because the flight was scheduled on the eve of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting, the CIA mission became an uncalculated risk jeopardizing the immediate foreign policy of the United States and trespassing upon the prerogatives of the White House, the State Department and the Congress. The CIA in effect made foreign policy, and we in Congress who are charged with advice and consent for foreign affairs stood by helplessly because we knew nothing of the U-2 activities.

Again, the CIA overplayed its legitimate role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Those who condemn the CIA for the tactical failures of this fiasco blame the agency for the wrong errors. Its first mistake was to assume the authority to raise an army on U.S. soil, even though the troops were Cuban refugees, without both presidential and congressional approval. The responsibility for organizing and sustaining armed forces lies with Congress, not a supersecret intelligence agency. Second, the CIA was engaged in an invasion which might possibly be construed as an act of war; only Congress has the right to declare war. Because the CIA operates in the way it does, very few of us in Congress had advance knowledge of the invasion plans or were consulted as to the wisdom of such a venture.

When Congress created the CIA in 1947, it gave the agency no power to make foreign policy. The purpose of the CIA was to centralize the collection and evaluation of intelligence. Less than 20 years later – with 14,000 employees, including specialists in intelligence analysis and espionage, U-2 pilots and assassins – the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is rated one of the half dozen most powerful men in Washington. And as Stewart Alsop reported [CIA, THE BATTLE FOR SECRET POWER, The Saturday Evening Post, July 27-Aug. 3, 1963], “The CIA spends a lot more money than the State Department, and at times it has had more real power and influence on high policy.”

Defenders of the activities of the CIA say we can no longer afford the luxury of foreign policy conducted according to the rules of the U.S. Constitution. Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare war and the responsibility to give advice and consent to the President in making treaties with foreign nations. Congress is also the source of all foreign-policy legislation, including all appropriations for foreign affairs.

The authors of the Constitution, admittedly lived in a different era. The Cold War, with its highly developed tactics of espionage, counterespionage and subversion, presents problems which go far beyond the imaginings of the men who wrote the Constitution. A new clandestine organization devoted to the gathering and evaluating of intelligence must impinge somewhat upon the functions of some of the traditional agencies.

This information center, however, has no business taking over the roles of the State Department, Defense Department and Congress as well as carrying the nation to the edge of war. In any event, if we must revise the functions of the recognized government agencies, then let us do it through proper legislative channels, not by covert acts of the CIA.

In theory the President, with the help of his cabinet and the National Security Counsel, controls and directs the CIA. But the President is the nominal head of hundreds of agencies and cannot be kept fully informed at all times of the activities of an agency as large and powerful as the CIA. Even if the CIA were fully under presidential control, the basic question of the right and duty of Congress to participate in decisions regarding the many Central Intelligence Agency activities would remain unanswered. The issue is not one of executive control or of efficient administration of the CIA. It is the fundamental question of congressional responsibility. Do or do not the elected representatives of the people have the right to know what a critically important agency is doing?

I believe the only means of keeping the CIA within its proper limits without jeopardizing its need for secrecy is a congressional watchdog committee. Procedures should be established to insure that the judgment and will of Congress are reflected in the major decisions and actions of the CIA. Such controls would also end conflicts between the CIA and other U.S. operations abroad. We who must appropriate funds for the CIA would be provided with enough information to determine whether effective use is made of the money. If the United States should suffer foreign policy reverses, it would be possible to assess the damage, determine who was to blame and take steps to prevent future mistakes.

A watchdog committee would also stop some of the irresponsible talk concerning U.S. activities abroad. The presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba 18 months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, loosed a torrent of oratory on the magnitude of the Soviet threat in Cuba. If the CIA had briefed a watchdog committee, certain inaccurate statements which stemmed from ignorance of the facts would never have been uttered.

Opponents of the watchdog proposal argue that the CIA already reports to subcommittees of the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services committees. At best such reports are superficial. The CIA decides for itself just how much or how little Congress ought to know.

In April, 1956, during the course of a discussion on the Senate floor of the advisability of establishing a joint watchdog committee, Sen. Mike Mansfield raised the question, “How many times does the CIA request a meeting with the particular subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee and the Armed Services Committee?” Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, a member of both committees, replied, “…at least twice a year that happens in the Armed Services Committee and at least once a year it happens in the Appropriations Committee. I speak from knowledge during the last year or so…”

After the U-2 episode Sen. Willis Robertson, a member of the Appropriations Committee, said on the floor of the Senate, “I have been hearing testimony presented before the Committee on Appropriations by the Central Intelligence Agency for thirteen years. Never were we told during that time what the money was to be used for. It was a deep, dark secret. I did not know, and today I asked a number of members of our defense subcommittee if they knew that the Central Intelligence Agency owned and operated planes, and they said that they did not.” We do not permit other government operations, no matter how sensitive, to feed us only the information they think is good for us. The Central Intelligence Agency ought not to be privileged to do so.

How might such a watchdog committee function? In the early years of the Eisenhower Administration, a task force headed by Gen. Mark W. Clark conducted a thorough study of the CIA for the Hoover Commission. The task force recommended that “a small permanent bipartisan commission, composed of members of both houses of Congress and other public-spirited citizens commanding the utmost national respect and confidence, be established by act of Congress to make periodic surveys of the organizations, functions, policies, and results of the government agencies handling foreign-intelligence operations; and to report, under adequate security safeguards…The proposed ‘watchdog commission’ should be empowered by law to demand and receive by law to demand and receive any information it needed for its own use.”

The Hoover Commission itself differed somewhat from the recommendations of the Clark task force. It recommended the establishment of two agencies: a committee charged with reporting to the President periodically and a permanent “watchdog” joint committee of the House and the Senate. Incidentally, among those who at the time supported such control over the CIA was Sen. John F. Kennedy.

Congress has never adopted the watchdog-committee recommendation, largely because some of its members fear that the security of the CIA inevitably would be compromised by such a committee. Such fears are, I believe, unwarranted. The watchdog-committee arrangement has worked well in the case of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which handles highly sensitive and secret information. That committee has an excellent security record. Its 18 members have proved to be fully as reliable as the hundreds of civil-service personnel, military personnel and presidential appointees who have knowledge in this highly sensitive field.

A small, select joint committee on intelligence would provide the necessary safeguards against abuses of power by the CIA. It would enable Congress to acquire the knowledge needed for an evaluation of our intelligence activities. More than that, it would, in keeping with our constitutional system, insure that Congress is included in the making of decisions vital to the security and well-being of the United States.

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.

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.

Saturday Evening Post, 4-11 January 1964, pp.6 & 10

The CIA is getting out of hand

By Senator Eugene McCarthy

A senator charges that the Central Intelligence Agency, a law unto itself, meddles in the framing of US foreign policy.

Wrapped in its cloak of secrecy, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency modestly hints it has overthrown foreign governments, admits that it violates the international law and doesn’t deny that one of its exploits wrecked a summit conference. The CIA, in short, is making foreign policy and, in doing so, is assuming the roles of the President and the Congress. It has taken on the character of an invisible government answering only to itself. This must stop. The CIA must be made accountable for its activities, not only to the President but also to Congress through a responsible committee.

Recent events in South Vietnam raise the questions as to how CIA actions may critically affect U.S. foreign affairs. In early September it was reported that the CIA was giving money – some three million dollars a year in “direct, under-the-table aid” – to the Diem regime’s special corps that raided Buddhist pagodas in Saigon. The CIA payments were made even though the U.S. Government publicly deplored the raids, part of the repression of the Buddhists which helped bring about the downfall of the Diem regime.

In Laos, too, the CIA pursued policies that conflicted with official and public policies of the State Department. In 1958 a highly volatile Laos was governed by a loose coalition headed by neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma. The situation was hardly ideal, but to Ambassador Horace Smith and the U.S. State Department this coalition government seemed to offer the best hope for a stable Laos. According to Smith, the CIA, with the backing of the Pentagon, threw its support behind right-wing leader Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. In August, 1960, Souvanna Phouma was overthrown, and Phoumi Nosavan installed Prince Boun Oum, an ineffectual leader, as titular head of the government. The Communists then sought to take over the country. Gen. Phoumi Nosavan’s troops proved unwilling to fight. All of Laos appeared on the verge of going Communist. Frantic diplomatic maneuvers restored a coalition government under neutralist Souvanna Phouma in June, 1962, but in the meantime millions of dollars of U.S. aid had been wasted and vast confusion spread about U.S. aims in Laos.

Ambassador Smith is not the only member of the U.S. diplomatic corps to complain about CIA “spooks” who flit through U.S. embassies while pursuing their own brand of foreign policy. Nor is Laos the only country where the CIA has helped engineer a coup. In 1953 the government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran fell because of CIA efforts, says the CIA. Who, if anyone, authorized the agency to overthrow Mossadegh is unknown. Actually, many authorities dispute the CIA’s role in the Iranian coup, but since the agency hides behind its cloak of secrecy, its claims cannot be effectively challenged.

The CIA also claims to have masterminded the overthrow of the Communist-influenced government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in 1954. In this instance the result undoubtedly benefited the United States, but the question remains as to whether the CIA is the proper tool for such endeavors.

Possibly the mightiest achievement of the CIA was the development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Surveillance through the U-2 has provided U.S. intelligence with an enormous amount of useful information, and the CIA deserves a great deal of credit for the development of the U-2 as an information tool. But the CIA’s usage of the U-2 is something else again. Shortly before a summit conference between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev in 1960, a U-2 was shot down 1,200 miles inside Soviet territory. At first we denied any plane was missing; then an official statement said a weather plane must have strayed off course; and finally we admitted aerial surveillance and justified it as necessary to defend our country. Apparently nobody in the CIA ever fully evaluated the consequences of a U-2 failure over Soviet soil. We had no cover story, and our President arrived at the Paris summit conference with egg all over his face.

The U-2 failure over Sverdlosk involved far more than a daring gamble to obtain intelligence. Because the flight was scheduled on the eve of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting, the CIA mission became an uncalculated risk jeopardizing the immediate foreign policy of the United States and trespassing upon the prerogatives of the White House, the State Department and the Congress. The CIA in effect made foreign policy, and we in Congress who are charged with advice and consent for foreign affairs stood by helplessly because we knew nothing of the U-2 activities.

Again, the CIA overplayed its legitimate role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Those who condemn the CIA for the tactical failures of this fiasco blame the agency for the wrong errors. Its first mistake was to assume the authority to raise an army on U.S. soil, even though the troops were Cuban refugees, without both presidential and congressional approval. The responsibility for organizing and sustaining armed forces lies with Congress, not a supersecret intelligence agency. Second, the CIA was engaged in an invasion which might possibly be construed as an act of war; only Congress has the right to declare war. Because the CIA operates in the way it does, very few of us in Congress had advance knowledge of the invasion plans or were consulted as to the wisdom of such a venture.

When Congress created the CIA in 1947, it gave the agency no power to make foreign policy. The purpose of the CIA was to centralize the collection and evaluation of intelligence. Less than 20 years later – with 14,000 employees, including specialists in intelligence analysis and espionage, U-2 pilots and assassins – the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is rated one of the half dozen most powerful men in Washington. And as Stewart Alsop reported [CIA, THE BATTLE FOR SECRET POWER, The Saturday Evening Post, July 27-Aug. 3, 1963], “The CIA spends a lot more money than the State Department, and at times it has had more real power and influence on high policy.”

Defenders of the activities of the CIA say we can no longer afford the luxury of foreign policy conducted according to the rules of the U.S. Constitution. Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare war and the responsibility to give advice and consent to the President in making treaties with foreign nations. Congress is also the source of all foreign-policy legislation, including all appropriations for foreign affairs.

The authors of the Constitution, admittedly lived in a different era. The Cold War, with its highly developed tactics of espionage, counterespionage and subversion, presents problems which go far beyond the imaginings of the men who wrote the Constitution. A new clandestine organization devoted to the gathering and evaluating of intelligence must impinge somewhat upon the functions of some of the traditional agencies.

This information center, however, has no business taking over the roles of the State Department, Defense Department and Congress as well as carrying the nation to the edge of war. In any event, if we must revise the functions of the recognized government agencies, then let us do it through proper legislative channels, not by covert acts of the CIA.

In theory the President, with the help of his cabinet and the National Security Counsel, controls and directs the CIA. But the President is the nominal head of hundreds of agencies and cannot be kept fully informed at all times of the activities of an agency as large and powerful as the CIA. Even if the CIA were fully under presidential control, the basic question of the right and duty of Congress to participate in decisions regarding the many Central Intelligence Agency activities would remain unanswered. The issue is not one of executive control or of efficient administration of the CIA. It is the fundamental question of congressional responsibility. Do or do not the elected representatives of the people have the right to know what a critically important agency is doing?

I believe the only means of keeping the CIA within its proper limits without jeopardizing its need for secrecy is a congressional watchdog committee. Procedures should be established to insure that the judgment and will of Congress are reflected in the major decisions and actions of the CIA. Such controls would also end conflicts between the CIA and other U.S. operations abroad. We who must appropriate funds for the CIA would be provided with enough information to determine whether effective use is made of the money. If the United States should suffer foreign policy reverses, it would be possible to assess the damage, determine who was to blame and take steps to prevent future mistakes.

A watchdog committee would also stop some of the irresponsible talk concerning U.S. activities abroad. The presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba 18 months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, loosed a torrent of oratory on the magnitude of the Soviet threat in Cuba. If the CIA had briefed a watchdog committee, certain inaccurate statements which stemmed from ignorance of the facts would never have been uttered.

Opponents of the watchdog proposal argue that the CIA already reports to subcommittees of the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services committees. At best such reports are superficial. The CIA decides for itself just how much or how little Congress ought to know.

In April, 1956, during the course of a discussion on the Senate floor of the advisability of establishing a joint watchdog committee, Sen. Mike Mansfield raised the question, “How many times does the CIA request a meeting with the particular subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee and the Armed Services Committee?” Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, a member of both committees, replied, “…at least twice a year that happens in the Armed Services Committee and at least once a year it happens in the Appropriations Committee. I speak from knowledge during the last year or so…”

After the U-2 episode Sen. Willis Robertson, a member of the Appropriations Committee, said on the floor of the Senate, “I have been hearing testimony presented before the Committee on Appropriations by the Central Intelligence Agency for thirteen years. Never were we told during that time what the money was to be used for. It was a deep, dark secret. I did not know, and today I asked a number of members of our defense subcommittee if they knew that the Central Intelligence Agency owned and operated planes, and they said that they did not.” We do not permit other government operations, no matter how sensitive, to feed us only the information they think is good for us. The Central Intelligence Agency ought not to be privileged to do so.

How might such a watchdog committee function? In the early years of the Eisenhower Administration, a task force headed by Gen. Mark W. Clark conducted a thorough study of the CIA for the Hoover Commission. The task force recommended that “a small permanent bipartisan commission, composed of members of both houses of Congress and other public-spirited citizens commanding the utmost national respect and confidence, be established by act of Congress to make periodic surveys of the organizations, functions, policies, and results of the government agencies handling foreign-intelligence operations; and to report, under adequate security safeguards…The proposed ‘watchdog commission’ should be empowered by law to demand and receive by law to demand and receive any information it needed for its own use.”

The Hoover Commission itself differed somewhat from the recommendations of the Clark task force. It recommended the establishment of two agencies: a committee charged with reporting to the President periodically and a permanent “watchdog” joint committee of the House and the Senate. Incidentally, among those who at the time supported such control over the CIA was Sen. John F. Kennedy.

Congress has never adopted the watchdog-committee recommendation, largely because some of its members fear that the security of the CIA inevitably would be compromised by such a committee. Such fears are, I believe, unwarranted. The watchdog-committee arrangement has worked well in the case of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which handles highly sensitive and secret information. That committee has an excellent security record. Its 18 members have proved to be fully as reliable as the hundreds of civil-service personnel, military personnel and presidential appointees who have knowledge in this highly sensitive field.

A small, select joint committee on intelligence would provide the necessary safeguards against abuses of power by the CIA. It would enable Congress to acquire the knowledge needed for an evaluation of our intelligence activities. More than that, it would, in keeping with our constitutional system, insure that Congress is included in the making of decisions vital to the security and well-being of the United States.

Len, you and I have had our differences in the past, but I do want to compliment you on the improved format and readability of your posts. Much simpler to follow and easier on the eyes.

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:

A cruel, one-eyed, Yorkshire schoolmaster. He runs “Dotheboys Hall”, a place where unwanted children can be sent away. He mistreats the boys horribly, whipping them regularly. He gets his comeuppance at the hands of Nicholas when he is beaten in retaliation for the whipping of Smike. He travels to London after he recovers and partakes in more bad business, fulfilling his grudge against Nicholas by becoming a close partner in Ralph’s schemes to fake Smike’s parentage and later to hide the will of Madeline Brey. He is arrested during the last of these tasks and sentenced to transportation to Australia.

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.

Len, you and I have had our differences in the past, but I do want to compliment you on the improved format and readability of your posts. Much simpler to follow and easier on the eyes.

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

Paul Rigby:

Thomas D. Finney:

Nothing in there about him being in the CIA, only that he was mentioned in 2 consecutive pages of a 400+ page book about the OSS. So maybe he worked for that agency.

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?

"Post-McCarthy, Curtis Gans later became the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (!)."[/b]

Irrelevant unless you can show the group was tied to the CIA. And that he was part of it well before 1983

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.

"McCarthy supporters in 1968:

James Woolsey, ex-DCI : the founder and chairman of the Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy in 1967-68…

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/internation..._role_1-10.html"

Interesting bit of trivia, good for him. Like many current conservatives he was more progressive in his youth. Got any evidence of his ties to the agency before he was appointed DCI by a democrat 25 years later?

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.

"Seymour Hersh, CIA mouthpiece:

http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/01...rsh/index1.html"

I have my doubts about his Kennedy book...

Well done, Len, there's no pulling the wool over your eyes...

...but I think it highly unlikely that Hersh is a “CIA mouthpiece”. Got any evidence? Was already working for them in ’68?

"That year, Sen. Gene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party’s equilibrium by mounting a serious challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do that only because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions."

http://johnstodderinexile.wordpress.com/20...rverse-effects/

So claims an obscure blogger who provides no documentation to back his claim. There were a good number of wealthy liberal back then

A retired CIA official who knew my father asked me to consider an intelligence analysis career during my senior year in college in spring 1971. I knew why he had retired when he did (December 1967) and why he became the Washington D.C. director of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign two months later.

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001592.html

Can you do any better than a reply to a blog entry? If true it should he verifiable who was “the Washington D.C. director of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign” IF true you got one confirmed ex-CIA guy working for McCarthy.

Why don't you just ask him? Or isn't that permitted?

McCarthy puff piece in the New Republic for the CIA-scripted Pentagon Papers:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=19710710&s=mccarthy071071

The Pentagon Papers were CIA propaganda? I suppose you have real evidence to back that claim?

Even if true you would have to show that he knew this when he wrote the article and that it furthered their aims.

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.

You said that “McCarthy appears to have harboured a Lasky-like hatred of the Kennedys” but you provided no evidence to back this claim. I suggest that this could well be a case of projection and that you ‘appear to harbor a Lasky-like hatred of McCarthy’.

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.

A brief truce would be a great idea for both sides of the WoT.

I propose that Bush relaxes the $25-million-reward-we-want-Bin-Laden-dead-or-alive policy, just for a couple of days, to allow The Evil One an appearance on the prime-time TV chat show of his choice (Larry King Live?)

He could re-affirm his existence and re-commit to attacking Crusaders everywhere. Perhaps a head to head debate with with Alan Dershovitz could be arranged?

Sorry to appear pedantic on this one, Sid, but just how does one go about animating a corpse?

And then there's the tricky problem of Bin Laden...

. Interestingly even the publisher of the book that made the accusation admitted “Perhaps we'll never know for sure whether Lowenstein served as a CIA agent until the CIA opens its files to the public”

Over to you, CIA - open the files!

And how about all those others you've been refusing to release?

I actually meant CIA Charles, in the sense that the article is a big sob story about how the poor CIA is covert so can't defend themselves against the spurious charges of the mean president. So Krock is defending them to the public. I think it's possible that the overall "defense of CIA" article, however, is an excuse to plant that little blurb about a possible CIA coup. And it may be misdirection from the pentagon.

In other words, should this article be taken at face value or not?

Interestingly line of thought. Problems:

1. Time - Krock was tasked by the Agency with producing an instant rebuttal that had to be ready for next day's edition. I'm very doubtful anything else impinged - or, indeed, had time to.

2. Unavoidable constraints - Krock couldn't very well say "Richard Starnes has said something nasty about the CIA, but I can't tell you what, dear reader!" He had to quote from Starnes' piece in order to render a rebuttal possible. Note, though, how he turns Starnes' alarming quotes to CIA purposes: JFK presides over a disorderly administration. This was a theme first taken up by Krock and Joe Alsop post-Bay of Pigs.

3. Connections - Krock's friendships appear to have been with senior CIA rather than military. See Harrison Salisbury's footnote to p.490, Without Fear or Favor: "Allen Dulles' correspondence at Prineton University's Firestone Library does not suggest intimacy between himself and Arthur Sulzberger nor between himself and Cyrus Sulzberger. Letters exchanged Arthur Krock and Dulles, Arthur Krock and John McCone, Arthur Krock and Frank Wisner, held at Firestone, indicate a considerably closer friendship."

4. Precedent - Krock had a record as a spook mouthpiece, one derived from his service to certain Wall St circles, going back to 1941 at least. In a future posting, I'll illustrate the point.

Paul

Not very convincing all the links refer to the claims of a single author who claims that Lowenstein worked for the CIA that claim has been disputed as can be seen on the NY Review of books page you linked. Interestingly even the publisher of the book that made the accusation admitted “Perhaps we'll never know for sure whether Lowenstein served as a CIA agent until the CIA opens its files to the public” but not surprisingly went on to say the evidence compiled by the author made “an extraordinarily convincing case”.

So perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t. The author seems at best to show that he like many other liberals of the era, such as the Kennedys, was ardently anti-Comunist and belonged to anti-Communist organizations and associated with anti-Communist people. He also did thing that presumably the CIA wouldn’t have approved of like campaign for civil rights and against apartheid and the Vietnam War. Even if he had at sometime knowingly had some sort of association with the agency that doesn’t mean he was acting on the CIA’s behalf when he backed McCarthy. But if that were the case, by your logic the CIA backed Robert Kennedy too:

“At first, Lowenstein had attempted to recruit Robert F. Kennedy to lead the charge, then persuaded Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to serve as the antiwar challenger.”

http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lih...tory-navigation

“In private discussions he repeatedly told us that McCarthy was a possibility, and that despite the denials by Bobby Kennedy, the New York Senator could be induced to run… When Bobby Kennedy belatedly entered the race four days after McCarthy nearly won the New Hampshire primary, Lowenstein stayed with McCarthy but his heart was with Kennedy.”

http://www.waxingamerica.com/2005/12/eugene_mccarthy.html

In 1967, he organized the New York Coalition for a Democratic Alternative, later to be dubbed the "Dump Johnson" movement. Colleagues warned him that Johnson was not vulnerable to intra-party attack, but Lowenstein thought otherwise. He started the movement before he even had a candidate lined up for 1968. First he asked his old friend Robert Kennedy to oppose the President Kennedy asked for time to think it over.

Most liberal activists wanted for the Senator to make a move. If he chose to run, they would support him. If he chose not to enter the face, they would forgo the attempt to unseat the President. But "here Lowenstein differed" writes Halberstam. "He was determined to go ahead whether or not Kennedy made the race." After an unsuccessful appeal to George McGovern, Lowenstein approached Eugene McCarthy a liberal Senator from Minnesota. McCarthy agreed to head the alternative ticket, and Lowenstein threw his energy into the campaign.

LATER when Robert Kennedy decided to join the fray, he would ask Lowenstein to shift to his camp. Torn between friendship and respect for Kennedy and his commitment to back McCarthy, Lowenstein said no Kennedy retreated to the back of the bus on which the group was riding, and scribbled Lowenstein a note. "For A1, who knew the lesson of Emerson and taught it to the rest of us," it read. "They did not yet see ... that if a single man plant himself on his convictions and then abide, the huge world will come round to him. From his friend, Bob Kennedy."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=231158

September 23: Allard Lowenstein meets with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy declines to run as the candidate of the anti-Johnson movement. (In his search for a candidate, Lowenstein will ask California Congressman Don Edwards, Idaho Senator Frank Church, Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, General James M. Gavin, and South Dakota Senator George S. McGovern; no one accepts the role.)

October 20: Lowenstein meets with Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. McCarthy agrees to be the movement's candidate.

http://www.geocities.com/athens/delphi/1553/c68chron.html

"Lowenstein asked New York Sen. Robert Kennedy to challenge President Johnson in the Democratic primaries in 1968. But Kennedy declined, and Lowenstein instead recruited Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy"

http://www.slate.com/id/2147877/

Allard Lowenstein, a liberal Congressman from New York, was among those searching for a liberal candidate to oppose Johnson in the primaries.

In September 1967, Lowenstein went to Robert Kennedy, to attempt to

convince Kennedy to run…But Kennedy declined to run. “People would say I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy. No one would believe that I was doing it because of how I felt about Vietnam and poor people. I think that Al is doing the right thing, but I think that someone else will have to be the first one to run. It can’t be me because of my relationship to Johnson.”3

Representatives of the Peace and Freedom Party asked John Kenneth Galbraith to run as an anti-war candidate… Galbraith described the course his anti-war work took:

“In late October 1967...I went to see Kennedy. Be said flatly that he would not

be a candidate. That same day I talked with Gene McCarthy at Kennedy’s

suggestion. And McCarthy told me what I .knew from many others, that he

was considering it.”

Kennedy won in California…That night, McCarthy workers Allard Lowenstein and John Kenneth Galbraith agreed that the time had come for anti-war activists to unite around Robert Kennedy.34

From - THE HIGHBROW IN AMERICAN POLITICS: ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER AND THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUAL IN POLITICS. BY DAVID B. KOPEL.

http://davekopel.com/Schlesinger/Schlesinger-chapter-12.pdf

His priority was getting rid of Johnson and he approached various people including Bobby Kennedy before McCarthy and was going to back Kennedy after he one in California. According to Galbraith approaching McCarthy was Kennedy’s idea. Are we to assume the CIA also backed all the other people Lowenstein approached?

Interesting stuff, which I'll have a look at before replying. In the meantime, a few links by way of return. All a bit disorganised, but germane, nonetheless:

Namebase on Thomas D. Finney:

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01?Na=Finney%2C+Thomas+D

CIA in Denmark, 1952

Post-McCarthy, Curtis Gans later became the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (!).

Gans in 1983: "I didn't need demagogic television. All I needed was the war in Vietnam to be going on, and Lyndon Johnson to appear on the tube. . . . Where there is real dissatisfaction with the incumbent, the incumbent can get ousted without these devices. And where it is created dissatisfaction, he probably shouldn't be ousted.”*

* Testimony before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, September 29, 1983 (available from Committee for the Study of the American Electorate);

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa112.html

By Curtis B. Gans:

"How to Take the Big Money Out of Politics," Washington Monthly, April 1979, pp. 40-42.

“Table for One, Please,” Washington Monthly, July/August 2000:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/books/2000/0007.gans.html

Try good old Namebase for the following:

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01?Na=Gans%2C+Curtis

Quotable Gans:

"Paranoia is killing this country. It is essentially reducing cohesion in our society and creating fear in the minds of citizens.”

McCarthy supporters in 1968:

James Woolsey, ex-DCI : the founder and chairman of the Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy in 1967-68…

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/internation..._role_1-10.html

Seymour Hersh, CIA mouthpiece:

http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/01...rsh/index1.html

“After stints at United Press International and the Associated Press, he made a brief detour as a press secretary to antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy”

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/arch...5/21/2003156358

"That year, Sen. Gene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party’s equilibrium by mounting a serious challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do that only because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions."

http://johnstodderinexile.wordpress.com/20...rverse-effects/

A retired CIA official who knew my father asked me to consider an intelligence analysis career during my senior year in college in spring 1971. I knew why he had retired when he did (December 1967) and why he became the Washington D.C. director of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign two months later.

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001592.html

McCarthy puff piece in the New Republic for the CIA-scripted Pentagon Papers:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=19710710&s=mccarthy071071

... do you have any evidence the video was faked?

Len,

I propose a swop in the best traditions of Cold War trading - you produce Bin Laden, and we'll produce hard evidence the video is faked. Now what could be fairer or more decisive?

PS He has to be in something other than an advanced state of decomposition. Cryogenic suspension is also a no-no. I realise how unfair these conditions are, but that's, er, life.

Where’s the beef? I.E. what evidence do you have to back your claims?

“…when a dove of more conservative cast, Gene McCarthy, decided to oppose Johnson for the nomination, the CIA promptly infiltrated his campaign.

Names to conjure with: Allard Lowenstein...

Fair point, Len, and had time and access permitted – I can’t get at some of my more interesting bits and pieces: they’re in Ramsay Clark’s draw – I’d like to have offered more supporting detail.

The most important of the CIA men under discussion was Allard K. Lowenstein. His case also happens to be the most publicly discussed, so let’s begin with him.

You’re normally an indefatigable searcher of the internet, so I’m a little surprised you didn’t turn up Richard Cummings’ book on him, or, indeed, the NYRB spat between said Cummings and his detractor-in-chief, Hendrik Hertzberg. Still, I’m sure that for you, like me, time is frequently short, so I’ll lend you a hand.

The following link takes you straight to the 1986 NYRB argument between Hertzberg and Cummings following the publication of the latter’s The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (Grove Press, 1985). Hertzberg’s attempt to preserve the façade of Lowenstein’s philanthropic sponsorship is a hoot.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5226

For more on the strength of Lowenstein’s link with Fran Carlucci, see this Lew Rockwell site contribution from Cummings, wherein we find other fascinating bits and pieces of Agency business, not least in the literary world:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html

For an African perspective on Lowenstein’s African imposture – as dedicated anti-colonialist, while not, of course, working for the Central Intelligence Agency – try this link:

http://www.nshr.org.na/modules.php?op=modl...cle&sid=674

For Lowenstein’s connection with CIA’s Gloria Steinem, try this:

http://www.theconspiracy.us/vol9/cn9-47.html

Finally, for the moment, William, you appear pained at the mis-spelling of the surnames in the JKF Assassination Forum newsletter. I suspect the solution lies in the original source for the piece, Private Eye, which has from its inception played fast and loose with names for comic effect: in the Assassination Forum edition from which I quoted, Raborn is thus spelt “Rayburn.” If I manage to get hold of the 1968 PE edition in question, will confirm or refute.

Pip-pip!

Joan Mellen, in the thread David Talbot : Walter Sheridan and Jim Garrison Yesterday, 06:26 AM Post #15

A very close friend of mine was a friend of John F. Kennedy's, and a Harvard classmate. (He is interviewed in many of the biographies of President Kennedy). He liked "Jack" and Kennedy appointed him to be Ambassador to Morocco, a position he ultimately rejected, on the (bad) advice of David K. E. Bruce. My friend, along with his friends, thought Bobby was ruthless (the cliche that was true) and untrustworthy, and this was before my friend became campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy. The year, yes, was 1968.

Ah, yes, good old Gene McCarthy and his children’s crusade. So pure it hurts:

Objections general…

M.S. Arnoni, “Your Peace Candidates,” The Minority of One, June 1968, p.3:

“In the not so remote past, when one questioned the sincerity of a peace group’s given position or of its representatives’ role in international gatherings, one was inviting accusations of paranoia, but in the light of now documented CIA-penetration and subversion, it is no longer possible in good faith to dismiss such suspicions out of hand. Not only must the possibility not be dismissed that peace forces in this country are being manipulated in effect to support the next phase of the warfare state, but there is even evidence that this, precisely, is happening.”

And objections specific…

“A Tale of Two Doves,” JFK Assassination Forum, No.7, (April 1975), p.2:

“…when a dove of more conservative cast, Gene McCarthy, decided to oppose Johnson for the nomination, the CIA promptly infiltrated his campaign.

Names to conjure with: Allard Lowenstein, Curtis Gans and Sam Brown. Ostensibly these men were concerned with ‘containing’ the student anti-war movement. The motto of McCarthy’s student supporters was ‘Keep clean for Gene’ – none of your Hoffmans or Rubins, please.

In early 1968, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed dangerously short of funds, help was forthcoming from West Coast industrialist Sam Kimball, chairman of Aerojet-General Corp. whose representative in Washington was Admiral Raborn, a former CIA chief.

When Robert Kennedy…entered the nomination stakes, two more ‘former’ CIA men, Thomas Finney and Thomas McCoy joined McCarthy’s campaign. (For fuller information, see Private Eye 169.)”

According to Time (“The Nonconsensus,” Friday, Jul. 05, 1968 – see this link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,941595,00.html ),Thomas Finney was “the Senator's organization chief.”

In 1980, William Blum notes, good old Gene, the eternal splitter of the anti-Republican vote, backed Reagan:

The Anti-Empire Report, No. 12, August 21, 2004

It's a painfully old story. Democrats can not be trusted ideologically, not even to be consistently liberal, never mind progressive or radical, no matter how much we wish we could trust them, no matter how awful the Republicans may be. In the 1968 election, Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin was the darling of the left. He ran in the Democratic primaries on an anti-war platform that excited a whole generation of protestors. Peaceniks and hippies, the story goes, were getting haircuts, dressing like decent Americans, and forsaking dope, all to be "clean for Gene" and work in his campaign. Yet, in 1980, Gene McCarthy came out in support of Ronald Reagan (2).

(2) San Francisco Chronicle, October 24, 1980, p.7

See this link: http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer12.htm

For a further peak into the netherworld of Simon Pure's conduct in 1968, see this 2004 book review in The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/0...?printable=true

For those short of time, the germane paragraphs:

Sandbrook’s book is distinguished by extensive research—notably, many interviews with people who knew and worked with McCarthy, including his estranged wife, Abigail (she died in 2001), along with interviews and correspondence with the subject himself. Sandbrook has discovered evidence that the Humphrey campaign secretly helped McCarthy in the 1968 primaries in order to deny delegates to Kennedy, a man Humphrey feared and McCarthy disliked. Sandbrook reports that after Kennedy was assassinated an exhausted and depressed McCarthy met with Humphrey and, according to Humphrey’s notes, begged him not to put Teddy Kennedy on the ticket.

Sandbrook’s book is also intelligent, well written, and unremittingly unsympathetic. Sandbrook doesn’t simply disagree with many of McCarthy’s positions and deplore many of McCarthy’s choices. He finds McCarthy sour, aloof, unfeeling, and inconstant, and he comes very close to blaming him personally for the election of Richard Nixon and the rise of the Republican right. He concludes his discussion of the 1968 election by remarking, “Had it not been for McCarthy’s campaign, it is possible that Johnson or Humphrey might have been elected. . . . Voters did not in fact treat the election in November as a referendum on Vietnam, and given that they chose Nixon as their next president, it can easily be argued that McCarthy ultimately failed.” And he concludes his book with the comment “There is not always honor in failure.”

McCarthy appears to have harboured a Lasky-like hatred of the Kennedys.

Joan Mellen, in the thread David Talbot : Walter Sheridan and Jim Garrison Yesterday, 06:26 AM Post #15

A very close friend of mine was a friend of John F. Kennedy's, and a Harvard classmate. (He is interviewed in many of the biographies of President Kennedy). He liked "Jack" and Kennedy appointed him to be Ambassador to Morocco, a position he ultimately rejected, on the (bad) advice of David K. E. Bruce. My friend, along with his friends, thought Bobby was ruthless (the cliche that was true) and untrustworthy, and this was before my friend became campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy. The year, yes, was 1968.

Objections general…

M.S. Arnoni, “Your Peace Candidates,” The Minority of One, June 1968, p.3:

“In the not so remote past, when one questioned the sincerity of a peace group’s given position or of its representatives’ role in international gatherings, one was inviting accusations of paranoia, but in the light of now documented CIA-penetration and subversion, it is no longer possible in good faith to dismiss such suspicions out of hand. Not only must the possibility not be dismissed that peace forces in this country are being manipulated in effect to support the next phase of the warfare state, but there is even evidence that this, precisely, is happening.”

And objections specific…

“A Tale of Two Doves,” JFK Assassination Forum, No.7, (April 1975), p.2:

“…when a dove of more conservative cast, Gene McCarthy, decided to oppose Johnson for the nomination, the CIA promptly infiltrated his campaign.

Names to conjure with: Allard Lowenstein, Curtis Gans and Sam Brown. Ostensibly these men were concerned with ‘containing’ the student anti-war movement. The motto of McCarthy’s student supporters was ‘Keep clean for Gene’ – none of your Hoffmans or Rubins, please.

In early 1968, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed dangerously short of funds, help was forthcoming from West Coast industrialist Sam Kimball, chairman of Aerojet-General Corp. whose representative in Washington was Admiral Raborn, a former CIA chief.

When Robert Kennedy…entered the nomination stakes, two more ‘former’ CIA men, Thomas Finney and Thomas McCoy joined McCarthy’s campaign. (For fuller information, see Private Eye 169.)”

According to Time (“The Nonconsensus,” Friday, Jul. 05, 1968 – see this link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,941595,00.html ),Thomas Finney was “the Senator's organization chief.”

In 1980, William Blum notes, good old Gene, the eternal splitter of the anti-Republican vote, backed Reagan:

The Anti-Empire Report, No. 12, August 21, 2004

It's a painfully old story. Democrats can not be trusted ideologically, not even to be consistently liberal, never mind progressive or radical, no matter how much we wish we could trust them, no matter how awful the Republicans may be. In the 1968 election, Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin was the darling of the left. He ran in the Democratic primaries on an anti-war platform that excited a whole generation of protestors. Peaceniks and hippies, the story goes, were getting haircuts, dressing like decent Americans, and forsaking dope, all to be "clean for Gene" and work in his campaign. Yet, in 1980, Gene McCarthy came out in support of Ronald Reagan (2).

(2) San Francisco Chronicle, October 24, 1980, p.7

See this link: http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer12.htm

What sounded alarms, Mr. Otepka told me, what drove Robert Kennedy to cast him into oblivion, was that he had requested of the CIA that it look into the defectors to the Soviet Union whose names sat in his office safe. It had been a routine request, he said, whenever a name elicited questions.

Most likely despatcher of bogus defectors to Russia? Ah, yes, the CIA - so trusting old Otto, bureaucratic naif, sends request to, er, yes, Langley, for...well, what exactly, an honest response?

Forsooth, she must think us all stupid.

Goodness, you couldn't make this woman up.

I'm still leaning towards Chuckie being an MKUltra project to drive the nail in the coffin of the peace and love generation.

Bang on the money, Myra.

California violences (copyright Mae Brussell) = America's strategy of tension (part thereof) = the U.S. equivalent of Gladio

Maybe the US can spread some life back into Cuba. Kathy

What, and reverse forty+ years of CIA policy? A truly shocking suggestion! You should be ashamed.

How much longer are we expected to believe in the existence of this Ziocon arch-boogieman, absent even a cameo appearance in one of his many atrocities? (Pre-recorded videos don't count!)

Sid,

Bin Lid isn't dead, merely, like all good thespians, "resting" between cameos, albeit in a non-conscious state.

I thought I saw him yesterday in Haldon Street, Lakemba.

Shares in the terrorism industry's major players have risen accordingly. Good news for the world.

How much longer are we expected to believe in the existence of this Ziocon arch-boogieman, absent even a cameo appearance in one of his many atrocities? (Pre-recorded videos don't count!)

Sid,

Bin Lid isn't dead, merely, like all good thespians, "resting" between cameos, albeit in a non-conscious state.

I will strongly forever maintain that a leader trained for a combat situation, would not direct his force to charge full speed ahead, at an enemy of unknown strength, that appeared to be not only directly ahead of him, but one who also occupied the "high ground".

Any doubt of this shows an unbelievable lack of knowlege of military tactics. Excuse my apparent arrogance, but many of you are traversing "unknown territory" and have become lost in decades old innuendo bordering on "old wives tales".

I suggest you quit pointing fingers at the "driver"

So remind me, Charlie, in which direction did Greer eventually drive?

Hi Paul,

Title edited, correctly I hope!!!

Gary

If we ever meet, the first round's on me!

Thanks,

Paul

From the Times (London):

1. "Man in the News: Driving force behind Italy's State Oil Corporation," Thursday, 22 December 1960, p.11

2. Editorial, "Oil from Russia," Saturday, 23 February 1963, p.9

3. "E.N.I. Oil Pact with Russia," Tuesday, 19 November 1963, p.17

Mattei described by CIA-asset C.L. Sulzberger:

"Foreign Affairs: The Specter Behind the Jugglers," NYT, 11 April 1962, p.42:

The Italian supporters of Kennedy's "opening to the left," launched in June 1961: PM Fanfani, Florence's Mayor La Pira, and Enrico Mattei, here described as "an intimate of Fanfani's," who is "anti-NATO and ardently neutralist."

Articles from 1997 in British press on Mattei's murder:

1. John Hooper, "Italian oil mogul 'was murdered by Mafia bomb,'" The Guardian, Friday, 29 August 1997, p.12

2. Andrew Gumbel, "Autopsy may solve deadly mystery of the Mattei Affair," The Independent, Friday, 29 August 1997, p.11

From the latter comes the following paragraph: "The U.S. National Security Council described him as an irritation and an obstacle in a classified report from 1958." Anyone seen this ?

Please add any germane bits and pieces you have. Italian contributors particulary welcome.

Paul

PS Anyone know how to edit the topic title? "Bibliography" and "assassination"!