Chomsky's lies about JFK and the CIA

[Len Colby]

Please cite the passages that would lead one to think these things.

Nothing could be further from the truth. CIA sought to overthrow Diem in November 1960. Attempts to assassinate him began no later than 1957. Kennedy backed Diem's peace moves with Hanoi.

Citations?

There is a really outstanding thread on this forum going by the name of "'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam." Within it, you'll find many goodies, not least the articles and citations pertaining to them, which cover all three claims advanced above. Once you've found them, intellectual scruple will, of course, compel you to acknowledge as much.

PaulI really don't have the patience to weed through a 116 post thread especially since many of your posts contain several pages of material and you frequently take quotes out of context. So if you provide the cites here I'll take a look.

Also you failed to "cite the passages [of Chomsky's book] that would lead one to think these things"

It speaks volumes for the racism and intellectual dishonesty of Chomsky that he won't let his readers see and read South Vietnamese sources who attest to both CIA involvement in the paratroopers' putsch of November 1960, and/or Kennedy's backing of Diem's negotiations with Hanoi.

Paul there is no such basis for such an assumption - PR- "who/what has been funding Chomsky's research since the 1950s? If you can't tell us, the presumption must be that his funding's ultimate sources remain much as before." - I assume this means you have no evidence he has received CIA funding in either of our lifetimes?

Len translated: I don't know who funds Chomsky, and I'm not going to find out. You have only precedent, which means less than my insistence that you have no proof.

Actually, Len, and this may come as a surprise, the reason we don't have publicly available chapter and verse on the sources of Chomsky's funding is because he is an ongoing operation. If he wasn't, it would be out there.

Getting kind of circular aren't we? You are aware that many profs, especially ones not involved in expensive but potentially lucrative med/tech etc research get no funding other than their salaries and perhaps an occasional grant. Who for example funded Fetzer and Griffin? I'll take the above as an admission you have no evidence Chomsky has gotten funding from the USG since the 1950's. Any evidence he knew the money really came from the CIA?

[Paul Rigby]

How can Chomsky's characterisation of JFK's relationship with the Agency be considered "fundamentally correct"... when he omits such "minor" details as the post-Bay of Pigs removal of Dulles, Bissell and Cabell - three of the most senior CIA figures - the transfer of responsibility for covert-ops of any size to the Joint Chiefs, and the restatement of Ambassadorial primacy overseas? And that's just within a small period of 1961.

For those reading this thread who are unfamiliar with the three National Security Action Memoranda in question, 55-57, there's a fascinating, if somewhat discursive, discussion of them at the link below:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/ch...0on%20NSAM%2055

Understanding The Secret Team, Part III: Fletcher Prouty interviewed

As a necessary follow-up to this assault on CIA prerogatives, McNamara brought the Defense Intelligence Agency into being. The resultant, and inevitable, bureaucratic struggle between the two organisations was described at some length, albeit exclusively from the CIA's point of view, by Stewart Alsop, an old Agency mouthpiece, in the Saturday Evening Post, a similarly notorious CIA mouthpiece, in its edition of July 27, 1963: "CIA: The battle for secret power" (pp.17-21). It contained this early assurance, "Nowadays the CIA is back on top of the heap" (p.18), which sat ill with the subsequent admission that "the DIA has no choice but to concentrate on the political-strategic intelligence which is the CIA's chief function" (p.21) and the bald statement that "13 issues had arisen at last report between DIA and CIA" (ditto). These were anything but trivial matters: They ranged from who controlled liaison with, for example, MI6, and "the CIA-created national photo interpretation centre" (ditto).

The CIA was under serious institutional pressure with Kennedy alive and in the White House.

[Paul Rigby]

For those reading this thread who are unfamiliar with the three National Security Action Memoranda in question, 55-57, there's a fascinating, if somewhat discursive, discussion of them at the link below:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/ch...0on%20NSAM%2055

Understanding The Secret Team, Part III: Fletcher Prouty interviewed

As a necessary follow-up to this assault on CIA prerogatives, McNamara brought the Defense Intelligence Agency into being. The resultant, and inevitable, bureaucratic struggle between the two organisations was described at some length, albeit exclusively from the CIA's point of view, by Stewart Alsop, an old Agency mouthpiece, in the Saturday Evening Post, a similarly notorious CIA mouthpiece, in its edition of July 27, 1963: "CIA: The battle for secret power" (pp.17-21). It contained this early assurance, "Nowadays the CIA is back on top of the heap" (p.18), which sat ill with the subsequent admission that "the DIA has no choice but to concentrate on the political-strategic intelligence which is the CIA's chief function" (p.21) and the bald statement that "13 issues had arisen at last report between DIA and CIA" (ditto). These were anything but trivial matters: They ranged from who controlled liaison with, for example, MI6, and "the CIA-created national photo interpretation centre" (ditto).

The CIA was under serious institutional pressure with Kennedy alive and in the White House.

For the broader perspective on Chomsky's role as a wedge between the US Left and conspiracy researchers, the following remains the outstanding piece in the field:

http://www.ctka.net/pr197-left.html

From the January-February, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 2) of Probe

The Left and the Death of Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio

In this issue we are glad to be able to excerpt parts of a new book by Dr. Martin Schotz. This new work, History Will Not Absolve Us, is an anthology of essays on varying aspects of the Kennedy case. In that regard it resembles previous anthologies like Government by Gunplay, and The Assassinations. This new collection compares favorably with those two. One of the glories of the book is that it includes Vincent Salandria’s early, epochal essays published in 1964 and 1965 on the medical and ballistics evidence. These essays were written in direct response to comments given by another Philadelphia lawyer, Arlen Specter, at the conclusion of the Warren Commission’s work. Working only from evidence available to the Commission and in the public record, Salandria shatters the case against Oswald almost as soon as it was issued. It is a shame that we have had to wait so long to see Salandria’s wonderful work collected in book form.

There is more. Schotz has included a speech made by Fidel Castro, in which, from just reading the press reports off the wire services, he 1) exposes the murder as a conspiracy, 2) shows Oswald for what he was, 3) points towards the elements in American society from where the plot emanated, and 4) indicates the reasons for the murder. All this within twenty hours of the assassination. Shotz’s opening essay furthers his ideas used in Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, dealing with concepts of belief versus knowledge and what that means for the mass psychology of American society. This fascinating, intuitive essay gives the book both its tone and its title—a play on a phrase used more than once by Castro.

There is much more to recommend the book. We choose to excerpt here two particular selections: one in whole, the other in part. They both deal with the response of the left, or as Ray Marcus terms it the “liberal establishment”, to the Kennedy assassination. The first excerpt is an analysis by Schotz of the early editorial policy of The Nation to the assassination. The second section is from Ray Marcus’ monograph Addendum B, originally published in 1995. We chose to excerpt these for three reasons. It shows both Schotz and Marcus at their best. Both the people and institutions they discuss are still around. And finally, what they deal with here is an emblematic problem that is so large and painful—the response of liberals to high-level assassination as a political tool—that no one left of center wishes to confront it.

Concerning the second point, The Nation repeated its pitiful performance when the film JFK was released by giving much space to writers like Alexander Cockburn and Max Holland. Neither of these men could find any evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy case, any value to Kennedy’s presidency, or any validity to the scholarship within the critical community. In other words, a leading “liberal” magazine was acting like Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post. As far as The Nation is concerned, their editorial policy has been quite consistent throughout a 33 year period. Their article policy, with very few exceptions, has also been uniform.

Ray Marcus extends this analysis. Marcus is one of the original, “first generation” group of researchers. In 1995 he privately published his Addendum B, which is a personal and moving chronicle of his attempts to get people in high places interested in advocating the Kennedy assassination as a cause. Ray has allowed Schotz to include sections of that important work in the book. Probe has excerpted the parts of Ray’s work which touch on the reaction of the left, both old and new, to the assassination. We feel that the section entitled “Five Professors” is especially relevant. For in this section, Ray reveals his personal encounters with some of the leading intellectuals of that ‘60’s and ‘70’s movement called the “New Left”, namely Howard Zinn, Gar Alperovitz, Martin Peretz, and Noam Chomsky. He shows how each of them rejected his plea. The instances of Peretz and Chomsky are both important and enlightening. For Peretz, in 1974, purchased The New Republic, another supposedly liberal publication. He owned it during the period of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Except for excerpting declassified executive session transcripts of the Warren Commission in the mid-seventies, I can remember no important article in that publication dealing with the JFK case during his tenure. In fact, at the end of that investigation, The New Republic let none other than Tom Bethell have the last word on that investigation. Ray shows why Peretz allowed this bizarre, irresponsible choice. Bethell’s 1979 article tried to bury Kennedy’s death. Five years later, his periodical tried to bury his life. It actually made a feature article out of a review of the tawdry Horowitz-Collier family biography The Kennedys. Who did that publication find suitable to review this National Enquirer version of the Kennedy clan? None other than Midge Decter, wife of neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, mother-in-law of Elliot Abrams. Decter, presumably with the Peretz blessing, canonized this Kitty Kelley antecedent.

Ray’s encounter with Chomsky is especially revealing and will be disturbing to adherents of the MIT professor. In his book, Looking For the Enemy, Michael Morrisey includes parts of a 1992 letter from Chomsky. In discussing a government conspiracy to murder and cover-up the assassination, the esteemed professor writes:

That would be an interesting question if there were any reason to believe that it happened. Since I see no credible evidence for that belief, I can’t accept that the issue is as you pose it. (p.6)

Apparently, Chomsky never thought that Marcus would include their three hour session over just three pieces of evidence. This exposes the above statement, and Chomsky’s public stance since Stone’s film, as a deception.

Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1) not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion.

CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their crusades—no matter how unattractive their tactics—their myopia about politics is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter—and Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right? Anyone today who was around in the ‘60’s will tell you that the Kennedys, King, and Malcolm X electrified the political debate, not so much because of their (considerable) oratorical powers, but because they were winning. On the issues of economic justice, withdrawal from Southeast Asia, civil rights, a more reasonable approach to the Third World, and a tougher approach to the power elite within the U.S., they and the left were making considerable headway. The very grounds of the debate had shifted to the center and leftward on these and other issues. As one commentator has written, today the bright young Harvard lawyers go to work on Wall Street, in the sixties they went to work for Ralph Nader.

The promise of the Kennedys or King speaking on these issues could galvanize huge crowds in the streets. But even more importantly, these men had convinced a large part of both the white middle class, and the younger generation that their shared interests were not with the wealthy and powerful elites, but with the oppressed and minorities. Today, that tendency has been pretty much reversed. Most of the general public and the media have retreated into a reactionary pose. And some of the most reactionary people are now esteemed public figures e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Howard Stern, people who would have been mocked or ridiculed in the ‘60’s. And the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, under no pressure to disguise their real sympathies, can call Limbaugh a mainstream conservative (12/2/96).

What remains of the left in this country today can be roughly epitomized by the nexus of The Nation, the Pacifica Radio network (in six major cities), and the media group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). We won’t include The New Republic in this equation since Peretz has now moved so far to the right he can’t be called a liberal anymore. The Nation has a circulation of about 98,000. Except for its New York outlet, WBAI, Pacifica is nowhere near the force it was in the sixties and seventies. The FAIR publication EXTRA has a circulation of about 17,000. To use just one comparison, the rightwing American Spectator reaches over 500,000. To use another point of comparison, the truly liberal Ramparts, which had no compunctions taking on the assassinations, reached over 300,000. As recently declassified CIA documents reveal, Ramparts became so dangerous that it was targeted by James Angleton.

One of this besieged enclave’s main support groups is the New York/Hollywood theater and film crowd, which was recently instrumental in bailing out The Nation. As more than one humorous commentator has pointed out, for them a big cause is something like animal rights. Speaking less satirically, they did recently pull in $680,000 in one night for the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Whatever the merits of that cause, and it has some, we don’t think it will galvanize youth or the middle class or provoke much of a revolution in political consciousness. On the other hand, knowing, that our last progressive president was killed in a blatant conspiracy; that a presidentially appointed inquest then consciously covered it up; that the mainstream media like the Post and the Times acquiesced in that effort; that this assassination led to the death of 58,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese; to us that’s quite a consciousness raiser. Chomsky, Cockburn and most of their acolytes don’t seem to think so.

In the ‘80’s, Bill Moyers questioned Chomsky on this point, that the political activism of the ‘60’s had receded and that Martin Luther King had been an integral part of that scene. Chomsky refused to acknowledge this obvious fact. He said it really wasn’t so. His evidence: he gets more speaking invitations today ( A World of Ideas, p. 48). The man who disingenuously avoids a conspiracy in the JFK case now tells us to ignore Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stern and the rest. It doesn’t matter. He just spoke to 300 people at NYU. Schotz and Marcus have given us a textbook case of denial.

With the help of Marty and Ray, what Probe is trying to do here is not so much explain the reaction, or non-reaction, of the Left to the death of John Kennedy. What we are really saying is that, in the face of that non-reaction, the murder of Kennedy was the first step that led to the death of the Left. That’s the terrible truth that most of these men and organizations can’t bring themselves to state. If they did, they would have to admit their complicity in that result.

[Paul Rigby]

Any evidence that he had ties to CIA AFTER the 1950's when he merely worked on a project they funded. Far more recently truthers like Barrett and Jones received funding or grants from the State Department and DoE.

By way of confirming Len's agreeably honest assessment of the source of funding:

Sydney M. Lamb (Edited by Jonathan Webster). Language and Reality (London & NY: Continuum, 2004; 524pp):

p.51: “we were informed by the man in charge of machine translation for the CIA (who was influencing the allocation of NSF* funds for MT research)…”

From context, we’re talking the period 1956-58.

*National Science Foundation

_____________________________________________________________________

US “Government” funding for machine translation at MIT, 1954-1964

Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (1966), p.108:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547&page=108

_____________________________________________________________________

Lost in translation

Efforts to design software that can translate languages fluently have encountered a problem: how do you program common sense?

by Stephen Budiansky

When the field was still in its infancy, in the early 1960s, an apocryphal tale went around about a computer that the CIA had built to translate between English and Russian: to test the machine, the programmers decided to have it translate a phrase into Russian and then translate the result back into English, to see if they'd get the same words they started with. The director of the CIA was invited to do the honors; the programmers all gathered expectantly around the console to watch as the director typed in the test words: "Out of sight, out of mind." The computer silently ground through its calculations. Hours passed. Then, suddenly, magnetic tapes whirred, lights blinked, and a printer clattered out the result: "Invisible insanity."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/computer.htm

[Len Colby]

Any evidence that he had ties to CIA AFTER the 1950's when he merely worked on a project they funded. Far more recently truthers like Barrett and Jones received funding or grants from the State Department and DoE.

By way of confirming Len's agreeably honest assessment of the source of funding:

Sydney M. Lamb (Edited by Jonathan Webster). Language and Reality (London & NY: Continuum, 2004; 524pp):

p.51: “we were informed by the man in charge of machine translation for the CIA (who was influencing the allocation of NSF* funds for MT research)…”

From context, we’re talking the period 1956-58.

*National Science Foundation

_____________________________________________________________________

US “Government” funding for machine translation at MIT, 1954-1964

Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (1966), p.108:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547&page=108

So Paul,any evidence the NSF is really a CIA front? All the guy said was they influenced the NSF's funding (in 1958)

1) was Chomsky still working on MT in the 60's 2) Even if so its a stretch to say this means he was a CIA agent even the author of the book cited gave no indication he expected to beholden to them.

Here's the link to the rest for context.

http://books.google.com/books?id=vrlPUxB2_...A%22&f=true

Edited November 15, 2009 by Len Colby

[Blair Dobson]

I'm surprised this isn't the usual "Paul Rigby Solo Post...."

If you have read any of Professor Chomsky's other work, you would realize how sad and pathetic the assertion is that he is a "CIA backed stooge".

I suggest you read any number of his books related to American Foreign Policy and then come back and explain to us why his work, (which is damning to the CIA and it's cronies to be be short about it,) would warrant a paycheck from the NSA, NSF, All Night Drive Thru BBQ, the CIA or anyone else.

Chomsky's entire body of work precludes even the remotest possibility that his bread is buttered by "Virginian spooks".

Not everyone who works at or for MIT is a CIA operative. (Any attempt at a "limited hangout" posture in regards to this is laughable.)

People seem to get up in arms when Kennedy is remembered as the womanizing, Irish mob bought "Power Hawk" that he was .

Don't let your glamorized hero worship for Kennedy get you riled when a "world renowned intellectual and his well respected scholarly work" paint a picture of Ol' Pumkinhead that you don't like.

Don't take my word for it, do your homework and read up. Chomsky isn't ,wasn't and certainly won't be the last person to see JFK for what he actually was.

History (as well as other respected writers) have painted a pretty interesting mosaic of what he and his brothers were all about in regards to politics and power.

It should be noted that Chomsky avoids discussing the book "Rethinking Camelot" because it attracts "message board lunatics" who haven't the brains, time or inclination to

digest and absorb what he was writing about ...or how that relates to volumes upon volumes of his (Chomsky's) written work specifically on the subject of Vietnam, it's "war" and the

machinations that made it all happen.

There are hundreds of books on the subject from various points of view. Chomsky's is one. A large majority of what I have read outside Chomsky also back s what he says for the most part

and from "WITHIN THE CONTEXTUAL TIME FRAMES OF THE KENNEDY ADMIN, OPINION BOTH PUBLIC AND POLITICAL, HISTORY AND VIETNAM " which he plainly states and you seem to have missed by either skimming the book or glossing over a wiki article.....

In fact, Kennedy plays a rather small part comparatively to the problems Vietnam faced before it was leveled by psychotic americans with bombs guns and napalm and after.

Kennedy was really just a hyphen of sorts.

To assume Kennedy had flowers in his hair in regards to Vietnam and that he was a peacenik Prez is naive also.

He slowed things down, but that machine was oiled and ready to roll with or without him, regardless if he had lived or not.

To summarize, your attack on Chomsky is as childish as it is uninformed.

That's why you post on the internet and he gets published .

Please feel free to read up and get back to me with sources, citations and scholarly criticism and also provide some literature other than your own internet musings that might "contrast" what the Professor has to say about Vietnam and JFK.

I have read about 90% of Chomsky's stuff and your entire "theory" here is just puerile bunk.

Where is your published book may I ask?

[Paul Rigby]

I'm surprised this isn't the usual "Paul Rigby Solo Post...."

You've been reading those very excellent threads on Starnes and Muchmore, haven't you, you little tinker? Don't blame you. I appreciate quality myself.

Now, as to your "surprise," isn't that just a tad weird expressing "surprise" at your own decision to jump into a thread? You can't seriously mean you surprised yourself, can you? Mind you, surveying the mind-numbing drivel which follows, I woudn't put it past you.

If you have read any of Professor Chomsky's other work, you would realize how sad and pathetic the assertion is that he is a "CIA backed stooge".

Your problem is that I have, he is, and, worst of all, I'm prepared to say so in public. That's not unique: what is is the detail deployed by way of confirmation.

I suggest you read any number of his books related to American Foreign Policy and then come back and explain to us why his work, (which is damning to the CIA and it's cronies to be be short about it,) would warrant a paycheck from the NSA, NSF, All Night Drive Thru BBQ, the CIA or anyone else.

So much reading - you claim - so little comprehension. I'm beginning to give credence to all those nasty little rumours about the decline in US educational standards. You don't think it's anything to do with all that money your government spends on killing and torturing foreigners, do you? I rather fear that's the case in the UK.

[Paul Rigby]

Chomsky's entire body of work precludes even the remotest possibility that his bread is buttered by "Virginian spooks".

Quite the contrary, it furnishes conclusive proof that he's a xxxx and a fraud. But then I've actually read it. It's far from clear you have.

Not everyone who works at or for MIT is a CIA operative.

I agree, which is why I've never said or written any such thing. The mystery is why you would suggest so. A straw-man erected in desperation, perhaps? Yup, that does it for me.

One interesting snippet, though, from a friend who did a PhD overseas some years ago. He met a couple of coves from MIT, who told him, among other things, that Chomsky a) employs unacknowledged researchers; and obliges them to sign secrecy agreements. Unsubstantiated, as yet, but hardly stretching plausibility.

People seem to get up in arms when Kennedy is remembered as the womanizing, Irish mob bought "Power Hawk" that he was .

Good to see that rich tradition of anti-Irish bigotry, a stream of filth tapped by Chomsky himself in Rethinking Camelot, is alive and well. It reflects great credit on you, him, and the arguments of his you regurgitate like a parrot (Norwegian blue, I fear).

Don't let your glamorized hero worship for Kennedy get you riled when a "world renowned intellectual and his well respected scholarly work" paint a picture of Ol' Pumkinhead that you don't like.

See above. It's like reading a nineteenth century copy of Punch, only with the added frisson of that interesting piece of diction: "Ol'Pumkinhead." Nice. As Executive Action tends to be.

[Paul Rigby]

Don't take my word for it...

Not much danger of that, you can rest assured...

It should be noted that Chomsky avoids discussing the book "Rethinking Camelot" because it attracts "message board lunatics" who haven't the brains, time or inclination to digest and absorb what he was writing about ...or how that relates to volumes upon volumes of his (Chomsky's) written work specifically on the subject of Vietnam, it's "war" and the machinations that made it all happen.

Come, come, we know the truth: Chomsky avoids talking about "Rethinking Camelot" because he's a coward and a xxxx who won't risk open debate for fear of being taken to the cleaners. He knows he's vulnerable because he told such brazen lies.

In fact, Kennedy plays a rather small part comparatively to the problems Vietnam faced before it was leveled by psychotic americans with bombs guns and napalm and after.Kennedy was really just a hyphen of sorts.

We now see how attentively you've read both Rethinking Camelot and this thread:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67)”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105). ”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

To summarize, your attack on Chomsky is as childish as it is uninformed.

As you've just proved...

That's why you post on the internet and he gets published.

CIA subsidies to publishers, anyone? Good God, Blair, where have you been all years? Langley?

Please feel free to read up and get back to me with sources, citations and scholarly criticism and also provide some literature other than your own internet musings that might "contrast" what the Professor has to say about Vietnam and JFK.

Do you know, I think I just might...after all, what has the good “Professor” to fear from open debate?

Plenty!

[Paul Rigby]

Chomsky’s precursor and model: M. S. Arnoni

Key Chomsky propaganda lines turn out, upon inspection, to be derived directly from the work of M.S. Arnoni, the founder of, and chief contributor to, The Minority of One, the “independent monthly…dedicated to the eradication of all restrictions on Thought” (1959-1968) – or some such guff.

Within Arnoni’s work we find the following characteristics of his successor’s work: an obsession with the New York Times, to which he confined most of his criticism of the US press even as he routinely denounced it for suppressing unwelcome truths; an enduring hatred of the Kennedys, most notably JFK and RFK, allied to a systematic mis-representation of their policies and motivations, even when subsequent events proved Arnoni’s claims to have been untrue and misleading; and a sustained censorship of CIA malfeasance and treason under – against – John F. Kennedy. Here’s a classic example of Arnoni’s fidelity to the Allen Welch Dulles line that CIA does not conduct its own independent foreign policy:

M.S.Arnoni, “…and More About the CIA,” The Minority of One, June 1966, (Vol VIII, No 6), pp.8-9

In a recent study of the CIA, the New York Times…published in five lengthy instalments (April 25-29)*…” a report which “makes a unique contribution in that it dispels the myth that the CIA has somehow escaped the U.S. Government’s control. If anything, this myth must have been encouraged by the Government itself, for it enables it to engage in some of the dirtiest practices while at least partly shedding the onus for them. Say the reporters:

“This study…found that the CIA, for all its fearsome reputation, is under far more stringent political and budgetary control than most of its critics know or concede, and that since the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba in 1961 these controls have been tightly exercised.”

Specifically,

“all CIA expenditures must be authorized in advance – first by an Administrative committee that includes some of the highest-ranking political officials and White House staff assistants, then by officials in the Bureau of the Budget, who have the power to rule out or reduce an expenditure.”

In fact,

“when critics frequently charge that CIA operations contradict and sabotage official American policy, they may not know that the CIA is often overruled in its policy judgments.” (Ibid.)

What all this means is obvious: that all the murders, coups, bribes, intrigues, provocations and other foreign interventions committed by the CIA – a whole litany of which is recited in the Times report itself – are the policies of the United States Government. Far from being at odds with the CIA, “it was [united States] policymakers who chose to make the agency the instrument of political and military intervention in other nation’s affairs…” (Op. cit., April 26)…

…With the CIA clearly established as an obedient arm rather than an uncontrollable outcast of the U.S. Government…”

Arnoni’s conclusion was more than a little unconvincing given that in the same piece, he had first pointed out that the NYT “report” – the five-part series – evidenced a “deliberate effort at presenting a ‘balanced’ picture, with every last doubt resolved in the CIA’s favor and with more good things said about the agency than any facts could justify” (p.8); and, second, that the “report” was “incomplete not in the least because it fails to expose that technique of stigmatization which caused its own editors for years to consider the now conceded facts as news that’s not ‘fit to print.” So there we have it: The “report” was biased and emanated from a newspaper with a shocking record of suppression in the service of the CIA, but was nevertheless to be trusted in its most important conclusion.

Very convincing. And thoroughly Chomsky-esque in its absurdity.

Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB counter-intelligence officer turned CIA mouthpiece, wrote of Arnoni: “A Holocaust survivor, an ardent Zionist, and one-time editor at the Encyclopaedia Britannica,…an eloquent and exuberant man. Minority of One was a highbrow magazine for the liberal American elite, and we decided to use Arnoni and his publication to further the Soviet cause in the United States…He was extremely knowledgeable about the situation in Israel – his circle of friends included such luminaries as Golda Meir and David Ben Gurion…”

Kalugin goes on to make a bunch of CIA-serving claims about KGB funding of TMO, Arnoni’s witting publication of Moscow-prepared propaganda etc., all the usual nonsense designed to a) earn an ex-Russian spook permission from the Agency to remain in the US and make money; and persuade the dim-witted reader that criticism of American mass-murder in Vietnam was, at root, a lot of Russian spook disinformation.

Yet not even Kalugin denies that Arnoni’s first loyalty was to Israel: I wonder if the link between CIA and Arnoni is Angleton, LHO's puppet-master-in-chief, and his visits to Ben Gurion and the blood-soaked US colonial state over which he presided? Just a thought.

Oleg Kalugin (with Fen Montaigne). Spymaster: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (London: Smith Gryphon, 1994), pp.53-4.

*As printed in The (London) Times under the following titles:

The Truth About the CIA – 1: Secret Weapon That Has Become A Burden,” 26 April 1966, p. 9;

“The Truth About the CIA – 2: How The Agency Is Organised To Glean Information,” 27 April 1966, p.11;

“The Truth About The CIA – 3: The Case Of The Contaminated Cuban Sugar,” 28 April 1966, p.12;

“The Truth About The CIA – 4: A Hunch That Proved To Be Correct,” 29 April 1966, p.11.

We can now add Arnoni to the list of CIA-loyalists:

Quotes:

(1) "The CIA, as the President's loyal tool - tainted to some extent by involvement in Watergate-related activities - also became vulnerable."

(2) "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool."

(3) "One thing I would mention is that when it's a CIA operation, that means it's a White House operation. It's not CIA. They don't do things on their own…If it's a CIA operation it's because they were ordered to do it…"

(4) "[T]he CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…"

(5): "While the CIA deserves no kudos for its part in the scheme [bay of Pigs], it is a misjudgement to credit it with more than an agent's share of the blame…"

(6) "The Central Intelligence Agency has never assumed the 'right to meddle in other nations' internal affairs.' The charter legislation for the CIA makes it the instrument for such special activities, but only when they are proposed by the policy agencies, directed by the President and financed by Congress after proper notification."

(7) "Let me say again flatly that CIA does not make policy, and does not operate outside or contrary to established policy."

(8) “He was disillusioned, he said, because the CIA had become ‘not an intelligence gathering organisation but a covert operations arm of the Presidency.’”

(9) "The White House knows, or is made aware of, every important step of the CIA...The CIA operates both independently and secretly, but the much circulated view that there are two governments is groundless. There is only one government in the United States and it is directed from Washington."

10) “…all the murders, coups, bribes, intrigues, provocations and other foreign interventions committed by the CIA – a whole litany of which is recited in the Times report itself – are the policies of the United States Government. Far from being at odds with the CIA, “it was [united States] policymakers who chose to make the agency the instrument of political and military intervention in other nation’s affairs…”

Sources:

(1) Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks. The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence (New York: Dell, February 1975), p. 328.

(2) Victor Marchetti, "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool," The Nation, 3 April 1972, p. 430.

(3) Noam Chomsky. Class Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 92.

(4) Philip Agee, as quoted by Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in Jean Pierre Faye (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194.

(5) Carl Marzani & Robert E. Light. Cuba v. CIA (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1961), p. 52.

(6) Gary E. Foster, (Director of Public and Agency Information, CIA), "C.I.A. Isn't Lone Wolf of Foreign Policy," New York Times, (Wednesday), 17 February 1993, p.A18.

(7) Admiral William F. Raborn, outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. New & World Report, 18 July 1966, pp.75-76.

(8) Ralph W. McGehee. Deadly Deceits (1989), as quoted, without objection, by John Pilger. Heroes (London: Pan Books, 1989), p.184.

(9) George Morris. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp.23 & 145.

10) M.S.Arnoni, “…and More About the CIA,” The Minority of One, June 1966, (Vol VIII, No 6), pp.8-9.

[Paul Rigby]

Stewart Alsop, “CIA: The battle for secret power,” Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1963, pp.17-21

Since World War II the Central Intelligence Agency has been our major covert defense- sometimes offense – against Communism. Now a Defense Department agency is challenging its supremacy.

At about 9:30 on most working mornings, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, the President’s military aide, comes into the President’s office clutching a handful of documents. The papers in Clifton’s hands are likely to include a couple of “eyes only” cables from American ambassadors, the ultra-secret “Black Book” of the code-breaking National Security Agency and intelligence summaries from State and Defense departments. But the document which Clifton almost shows the President first is a little book which has been put together in the early hours of the morning by the Central Intelligence Agency.

This neatly typed and bound booklet has on its cover the words: INTELLIGENCE CHECKLIST. FOR THE PRESIDENT. TOP SECRET. The booklet represents the quintessential end product of a major postwar industry about which even knowledgeable people know remarkably little. This is the intelligence industry, which spends upward of $2.5 billion a year and employs over 60,000 people.

Intelligence has traditionally been a peculiarly feud-ridden business, and for a simple reason. Intelligence is knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is the most valuable commodity in government. The Central Intelligence Agency has been at the very center of all the great crises of the last decade – and the CIA has actually caused several of these crises.

Where the stakes, in terms of power, are so great, rows and rivalry are inevitable, which is one of the principal reasons why it is rather widely believed within the intelligence industry that “Bob McNamara and John McCone are on a collision course.”

John McCone, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a white-haired, kindly faced man, who has been described by Georgia’s Sen. Richard Russell the second-most-powerful man in the Government. Among McCone’s many responsibilities, the most important is to make certain that the secret intelligence conveyed to the President in his little book is both adequate and accurate.

When the President opens his little book, he sees on the left-facing page a series of newspaper-type headlines – COMMUNISTS PLAN GUATEMALA RIOTS, a headline might read, or IVANOV G.R.U. AGENT IN LONDON. If the headline interests him, the President reads on the opposite page a brief factual paragraph, explaining, for example, that the Communists plan to try to topple the military junta in Guatemala by instigating mass riots; or that Evgeny Ivanov, who shared the costly favors of Christine Keeler with British War Minister Jack Profumo, was a representative of G.R.U., or Soviet military intelligence. Usually there are a dozen or so items.

Anyone with romantic ideas about the spy business might find the President’s book pretty tame stuff on most days. But the book helps to make the President, in the words of one intelligence expert, “the best-informed chief of state in the world today.” It is John McCone’s job to keep him that way.

McCone himself is known hardly at all to the American public: He grants no interviews and makes no speeches. And yet, although he may not be the second-most-powerful man in the Government, he is certainly among the half dozen most powerful. He had three distinct, vital and overlapping jobs.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, McCone is one of the handful of men who advise the President on the substance of high national policy. In his two other jobs, McCone also supplies the President with the intelligence and the estimates on which policy is based. This combination of functions is unique and, some maintain, dangerous.

As director of the Central Intelligence Agency McCone is boss of a vastly important empire that employs some 14,000 people and spends several hundred million dollars a year.

Among those 14,000 people there is an infinite variety – scholarly intelligence analysts, spies, black propagandists, scientists, U-2 pilots, specialists in everything from Urdu to assassination.

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. The CIA, for example, was principally responsible for the overthrow of Iran’s Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s pro-Communist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. CIA operatives dug the famous tunnel to tap Soviet telephone lines in East Berlin in 1954. The great U-2 crisis of 1960, which broke up the Paris summit conference, was, of course, a CIA operation. And the CIA has been at the center of the two great Cuban crises of the Kennedy Administration – the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 and last October’s great confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Running the CIA and advising the President in ExComm might seem job enough for any man. But McCone is also responsible, in the words of a letter to him from the President, “for the effective guidance of the total intelligence effort.” Members of what is known in bureaucratese as “the intelligence community” include the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission and the FBI. Departments like Commerce and Agriculture, and agencies like AID and USIA also have joined the intelligence act. But in terms of money and manpower, it is the Pentagon that owns the lion’s share of the intelligence industry.

The Pentagon’s heavily guarded National Security Agency employs more people than CIA, and its building at Fort Meade, Maryland, is even bigger than the CIA’s huge new building in Langley, Virginia. All three services have big intelligence setups of their own. So do the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, newly created by Secretary McNamara, will soon spill over from the dark depths of the Pentagon into another huge building of its own in Arlington, Virginia, for which there is a budget request for over $17 million.

McCone has his enemies

The intelligence community over which McCone is supposed to rule is thus a very big community indeed. It is not a community noted for brotherly love and happy fellowship. CIA has been feuding intermittently with the State Department for years. But the real tension nowadays is between CIA and the Pentagon. Both McCone and Secretary McNamara deny that they are “on collision course.” But it is certainly true that McCone’s CIA and McNamara’s new, rapidly expanding DIA have already had plenty of minor and some major collisions.

The place to start in trying to understand what the intelligence industry is all about is with John McCone and his CIA. There are certain facts about McCone which no one disputes. He is immensely rich. His own self-made fortune, based on wartime shipping – when added to the even bigger shipping fortune of his attractive second wife, the former Theiline Pigott – comes to what has been called “Kennedy kind of money.”

McCone is also very able. He has enemies in Washington – 15 senators voted “nay” on his appointment – and in time he is likely to have more. But not even his enemies doubt his ability. Like most able men, McCone enjoys the exercise of power, and he is a born competitor. He is a devout Catholic, a conservative Republican – Richard Nixon is a friend – and a fervent anti-Communist. In any listing of the hawks and doves among the President’s advisers, McCone certainly rates as a leading hawk.

Beneath his rather placid-seeming exterior, in fact, McCone is a passionate man, with deep and stubborn convictions. And, despite that kindly face, McCone can be very tough indeed. “Allen Dulles ran a happy ship – or at least he did before the Bay of Pigs,” says one veteran of the CIA. “John McCone runs a taut ship.”

Dulles, McCone’s predecessor as CIA chief, had devoted most of his life to the intelligence trade, and he loved it. Subordinates found him easy of access and easy to work with. “We were like a band of conspiratorial brothers,” says a CIA man, “although there was never any doubt about who was big brother.”

Dulles liked to involve himself directly in secret operations, and when an agent or station chief – head CIA man in an area abroad – returned to Washington, Dulles would call him into his office, puff his pipe and pick the CIA man’s brains. McCone runs CIA like the big industry it is, on an all-business basis. He rarely sees a returned station chief, and he holds himself aloof from operations, although he insists on being informed.

Within the CIA McCone deals almost exclusively with the five key men who really run the agency. With one exception all five are new at their jobs. The reason for this turnover can be summed up in three words, words which CIA men hate – Bay of Pigs. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, all CIA’s top officers, from Dulles down, were replaced.

“We were a sick dog in those days,” one CIA veteran recalls. “Anyone could kick us and know we couldn’t bite back.” For at least three weeks after the disaster the President himself wanted nothing to do with the sick dog – he even refused to read CIA reports. In those days the whole organization seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction.

Nowadays the CIA is back on top of the heap. The men principally responsible for its resurrection are John McCone and his five key subordinates. One of these key men –perhaps the key man, though there is much argument on this point – Lyman Kirkpatrick Jr., a smooth-faced, white-haired polio victim, confined to a wheel chair. Kirkpatrick’s title is executive director – in effect, he acts as a sort of chief of staff to McCone.

Kirkpatrick is certainly an able man, obviously intelligent, with a talent for climbing the bureaucratic ladder. He also has a talent for making enemies. When Dulles ran the agency, Kirkpatrick, who was Dulles’ special favorite, had the enemy-making job of inspector general. After McCone had been nominated but while Dulles was still director, Kirkpatrick added copiously to his roster of enemies when he wrote for McCone a long secret report harshly attacking Dulles and other colleagues for the handling of the Bay of Pigs.

Partly because he was impressed by Kirkpatrick’s ability, and no doubt partly because he wants above all no Bay of Pigs during his tenure, McCone greatly expanded Kirkpatrick’s powers. Even so, in terms of money, manpower and real responsibility Richard Helms, a dark-haired, good-looking ex-newspaperman of 49 may be the real No. 2 man after McCone.

Helms has the innocuous-sounding title of deputy director for plans –D.D.P., as he is known in the agency. A more accurate title might be chief of espionage and dirty tricks. Helms’s division is responsible for what is known in the intelligence industry as the “sexy stuff.” All the CIA’s covert operations in recent years that have come to light – and many that have not - have been the work of the D.D.P.

These operations fall into several categories. The first is traditional espionage, the gathering of secret intelligence by agents acting under one cover or another. Then there are “special ops,” designed to overthrow a hostile government, as in Guatemala or Iran, to prevent the overthrow of a friendly government or to mount a paramilitary operation as the Bay of Pigs. There are “black propaganda” and “morale operations” units, and there is the creation and support of a vast variety of “front” and “cover” organisations. Some of these organisations operate quite openly, and regularly solicit support from the citizenry, but are in fact subsidized and controlled by the D.P.P. All in all, Helms “owns” about half the people in the CIA, and at least until recently, the D.D.P. spent most of the CIA’s funds.

Like Kirkpatrick – and McCone, for that matter – Helms owes his job to the Bay of Pigs. His predecessor as D.D.P. was Richard M. Bissell Jr., chief planner of the Bay of Pigs operation and, before the Bay of Pigs, a good bet to succeed Dulles as CIA Director.

Bissell was also the chief architect of many successful intelligence and special operations, including the U-2, perhaps the most brilliant intelligence achievement of the post-war years. Without the U-2, Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt last autumn to spring a trap for the United States in Cuba might well have succeeded.

Helms is accounted both a more prudent and a less brilliant man than Bissell. “There will be no Bay of Pigs under Dick Helms,” one CIA veteran comments, adding, “but there would have been no U-2 either.” Helms is unquestionably a first-class professional clandestine operator. “He’s a real pro,” comments another CIA veteran. “He knows where all the bodies are buried.”

The chief customer for Helms’ secret intelligence is Ray Cline, deputy director for intelligence, or D.D.I., a stocky, sandy-haired man of 45 with a brilliant academic record. He, too, is accounted a more prudent but less imaginative man than his pre-Bay of Pigs predecessor, Robert Armory. Unlike Helms, Cline mounts no secret operations and “owns” no foreign agents. But Cline is a powerful man too. Allen Dulles is the authority for that less than 20 per cent of intelligence derives from espionage. Cline’s corps of analysts, who deal in the other 80 percent, includes experts on everything from “cratology” and “tentology” – the identification of the contents of a crate or tent from its external appearance – to the medical history of Nikita Khrushchev.

Cline’s main function is to see that the intelligence gets to the people who use it. Cline, for example, made the carefully worded phone call to McGeorge Bundy that first alerted the White House to “hard” evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Cline is also responsible for getting that little book to the President – his subordinates begin arriving at the CIA building at the horrid hour of three A.M. to read the late cables and put the book together. Only McNamara, McCone and Secretary of State Dean Rusk get copies of the President’s book. Cline’s shop also puts out a Daily Intelligence Bulletin with a much wider circulation, and weekly and monthly intelligence summaries as well.

The fourth key man among McCone’s subordinates is Sherman Kent, a brilliant man with a bulldog face, who chews tobacco and talks more like a stevedore than the ex-professor he is. Among the top men, Kent is the only survivor of the Bay of Pigs, in which he was in no way involved. In the bureaucratic hierarchy he is a low man on the totem pole – he ranks below the other men. But his job may be the most important of all.

His job is to interpret the intelligence, to say what it means, and saying what intelligence means is at least as important as getting it in the first place. Kent is chairman of the 12-man Board of Estimates. The Board of Estimates churns out national intelligence estimates, and, in times of crisis, “crash” estimates, known as special national intelligence estimates.

Making the national estimates is a risky business. It involves trying to put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes, and as Allen Dulles has pointed out, Nikita Khrushchev is quite capable of taking off his shoes for desk-banging.

Three examples will suggest how risky Kent’s job is. In 1958 Kent’s board produced a national estimate of Soviet capabilities in the production of strategic missiles. With an assist from the Air Force, which insisted for parochial reasons that the national estimate was too low, and from Democrats, who had parochial interests of their own, the myth of the “missile gap” was born. “Hard” intelligence later proved that the Soviets had in fact produced far fewer missiles than they had been adjudged capable of producing – and that the missile gap was thus a myth. Some of this hard intelligence came from the Soviet official Oleg Penkovsky, shot for treason in Moscow in May, who supplied “absolutely reliable” information on Soviet missile production to CIA and British intelligence. Some also came from certain top-secret technical espionage methods.

A bad guess on Cuba

Last September 19 the estimator guessed wrong. A national estimate of that date, while recommending an intelligence alert, concluded that the Soviets were unlikely to adopt the “high-risk policy” of placing missiles in Cuba. The first Soviet ships carrying missiles had actually arrived in Cuba on September 8. A CIA sub-agent, peering through his shutters on the moonlit night of September 12, spotted a missile carrying-convoy. His report was detailed and convincing enough to be rated “hard” intelligence. But, understandably, in view of Fidel Castro’s elaborate police apparatus, several days elapsed before the sub-agent could get the report to the chief agent in his area and thence to the CIA. Thus the report did not reach CIA hands until September 21, or two days after the national estimate.

Later, during the height of the Cuban crisis, a crash estimate was submitted to ExComm. Its purport was that Khrushchev might now be willing to risk nuclear war. Fortunately for civilization, this estimate also turned out to be wrong. These three examples, it should be noted, do not accurately reflect the acumen of Kent and his estimators. The Board of Estimates has done a creditable job over the years, given the inherent imponderables.

As this is written, the job of McCone’s fifth key man is open. Until mid-June, it was occupied by Herbert (Pete) Scoville, an able scientist highly regarded in the White House. Scoville was D.D.R. – deputy director for research, a post newly created by McCone. A more accurate title might be deputy director for technical espionage. Mata Hari, in fact, is rapidly giving ground to such scientific intelligence devices as the U-2, reconnaissance satellites, side-viewing radar, long-range communications intercepts and other unmentionable technical means of finding out what the other side is up to.

At the height of the Cuban crisis, the job of overflying Cuba in U-2’s was taken out of Scoville’s hands, and was assigned to the Pentagon. The deed – the fell deed in the CIA’s eyes – was done with McCone’s approval after a bloody jurisdictional hassle at Scoville’s level, although the hassle did not, contrary to published report, lead to any “surveillance gap.” Scoville is not talking, but it is a good guess that the Pentagon’s tendency to move in on him, and McCone’s tendency to remain above the resulting battle, had a lot to do with his resignation in June. The search for a successor is under way.

So much for the empire over which McCone rules as director of CIA. It is interesting to compare CIA and its main rivals in the world of secret intelligence, the Soviet K.G.B. and the British M.I.6. CIA is a direct descendant of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, built from scratch by Gen. Wild Bill Donovan. As Donovan once acknowledged, OSS was a carbon copy of the British intelligence system. Now, in some ways, the American system has more in common with the Soviet system than with the British.

The K.G.B., like C.I.A., is headed by a public figure, Vladimir Semichastny, former leader of the Konsomol and a Khrushchev man. Besides the K.G.B., there is a second Soviet secret service, the G.R.U., which is run by the military.

The K.G.B. and the G.R.U. run completely separate and bitterly competing intelligence nets. In CIA files a number of episodes are recorded in which the K.G.B. and G.R.U. cloak-and-dagger men have tripped on each other’s cloaks and stabbed each other with their daggers. In our system the equivalent of the G.R.U. is the Defense Intelligence Agency, headed by a former FBI man, Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll. The developing relationship between CIA and DIA is not unlike that between K.G.B. and G.R.U.

All important intelligence services employ “diplomatic cover” for their major operatives abroad. In this respect there is a certain honor among thieves. The Soviets, for example, are certainly aware of the identity of the CIA station chief in Moscow, and the American government knows who the K.G.B. station in Washington is – Counselor of Embassy Aleksandr Fomin.

Georgi Bolshakov, also a member of the Soviet Embassy staff until recently, is believed in the CIA to have been a major G.R.U. operative. His assignment was similar to that of his G.R.U. colleague in London, Christine Keeler’s friend, Evgeny Ivanov – to cultivate the acquaintance of powerful persons. Through his connections, Bolshakov conveyed Khrushchev’s false assurances to President Kennedy that Soviet weapons in Cuba were wholly defensive. When an article in The Post reported his role in the Cuban crisis, Bolshakov was hastily withdrawn. Bolshakov is a witty and personally agreeable man, and before he returned to Moscow certain American friends gave him a farewell dinner. His parting toast deserves to be recorded: “Soviet Union has made great concessions for peace. Has withdrawn missiles. Has withdrawn IL-28’s. Has withdrawn Bolshakov. No more concessions!”

In the British system, there is no real equivalent of DIA or G.R.U. But the most obvious contrast between the British and American intelligence systems is suggested by the difference between McCone and “C”, chief of M.I.6. Unlike McCone – or Semichastny – “C” is not a public figure. His name is never mentioned in the British press, and out of regard for British sensibilities, it will not be mentioned here. The Soviets, of course, know who “C” is. But keeping his name out of the public prints does have certain undeniable advantages.

McCone himself would prefer the anonymity of a “C.” But he cannot possibly achieve it. The director of CIA is inescapably a public figure, and there is no American equivalent of the Official Secrets Act. This creates problems. Advance publicity in the press, which would certainly have caused the Official Secrets Act to be invoked in Britain, contributed to the disaster in the Bay of Pigs.

McCone has plenty of other problems, but he also has greater latitude in dealing with them than any other leading Government figure. He can hire and fire at will, and he can spend his “unvouchered funds” as he sees fit. These powers give to the CIA a flexibility unique in the Federal bureaucracy. To cite one example, just eight months passed between December, 1954, when Allen Dulles gave Richard Bissell the green light on the U-2, and August, 1955, when the U-2 first flew. By Pentagon standards, this was a totally incredible performance – it would have taken the Pentagon bureaucracy at least two years, and more probably three, to get the U-2 into the air.

This capacity to act quickly is one of McCone’s major assets, when he is wearing his hat as “director of central intelligence,” with responsibility for “effective guidance of the total intelligence effort.” When he wears this hat, McCone needs all the assets he can find. For, although what McCone says goes in the CIA, what McCone says does not necessarily go in the rest of the nation’s intelligence community – and above all in the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense McNamara spends far more money and “owns” far more people in the intelligence industry than McCone does as CIA chief. And McCone and McNamara are very much alike on one way – they are both competitors in their every instinct. “Both Bob and John,” says one who knows both well, “like to get that fustest with the mostest.” “Thar” is the center of power – the White House.

The competition between McCone and McNamara to get thar fustest with the mostest has sometimes provided a rather entertaining spectacle. During the Cuba crisis each new crop of U-2 pictures was daily processed in the early hours of the morning at the photo-interpretation laboratory in downtown Washington. While the pictures were being developed and analyzed, McCone’s CIA man and McNamara’s Pentagon man – usually a major general – would breathe anxiously down the necks of the photo interpreters. As soon as an interesting picture appeared, McNamara’s general would grab it and drive like the wind to the Pentagon, where McNamara, a compulsive early riser, would be waiting him.

The CIA man would grab his copy, race even faster for McCone’s house in northwest Washington, rush to McCone’s bedside, and shove the picture in McCone’s sleepy face. At this instant the telephone would ring, and McCone would be able – by a split second – to say, “Yes, Bob, I have the picture right in front of me. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“All I had to do was trip on McCone’s back stoop,” one of the CIA’s couriers has been quoted as saying, “and McNamara would have won the ball game.”

In this game of one-upmanship the CIA’s relative flexibility is an important asset. More than once, doubtless to McNamara’s chagrin, McCone has beat him to the White House with operational intelligence garnered by Air Force or Navy planes. But McNamara has assets, too, above all in the Pentagon’s command of money and power.

CIA’s money troubles

“People think the CIA has more spending money than it does,” says one CIA man. “Hell, these days it’s really tough to get a measly quarter of a million for an operation – and in the Pentagon that’s not even carfare. If the Army hadn’t taken over a lot of our responsibilities in Vietnam, the agency would have had to declare in bankruptcy.”

It is no secret that McNamara and McCone have not always seen eye to eye, particularly in regard to the exceedingly sensitive subject of Cuba. McNamara recently told a congressional committee, “I do not feel [Cuba] is being used as a base for the export of Communism to any substantial degree today.” This was flatly contradictory to McCone’s publicly expressed views on the same subjects – and in this case McCone unquestionably has the best of the argument.

McNamara’s two-hour national telecast on the Cuban missile situation last February did not improve McCone-McNamara relations. On February 6 the President suddenly decided that the rumors that the Soviets had not really withdrawn their missiles from Cuba must be publicly scotched. He ordered McNamara to conduct that same day a “special Cuba briefing” on nationwide networks.

McCone was not consulted about the telecast. He was testifying in executive session on Capitol Hill that morning, and when asked by such senatorial grand dukes as Senators Richard Russell and Saltonstall about details of the Cuban intelligence operation, he was cagey in his replies. When, a few hours later, he heard those same details being broadcast to the world by McNamara, his hair is said to have turned a shade whiter.

On McCone’s orders, an analysis of the McNamara telecast was made in CIA. The report concluded that the telecast had seriously compromised certain intelligence techniques. “On the next go-round,” says one expert, “you can be damned sure they will change the shape of the crates they ship their missiles and IL-28’s in.” As the McNamara telecast made obvious, the CIA’s “cratologists” had confirmed both incoming and outgoing shipments of missiles and bombers.

McCone had a right to be unhappy about the telecast – he is charged by law with “the protection of intelligence sources and methods,” and he should certainly have been consulted in advance. For his part, McNamara has made it abundantly clear that McCone’s presidential authority to “guide” the total intelligence effort has certain well-defined limits where the Defense Department is concerned. During a House hearing McNamara was asked if he was “operating on the intelligence you get from the CIA?”

“No, sir,” McNamara replied firmly. “I receive information directly from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and that information is screened by no one outside the Pentagon.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was created by McNamara on August 1, 1961. There were good reasons for establishing the DIA. The intelligence estimates of the individual services have traditionally been intensely parochial – an example being the wildly inflated Air Force estimates of Soviet missile and bomber production. Moreover, there are some things in the intelligence industry which the Pentagon can do better than the CIA.

For example, John McCone was probably right on balance when he agreed at the height of the Cuban crisis to turn the CIA’s U-2 surveillance operation over to the Air Force. The U-2 operation was no longer covert, and in the circumstances, the sensible thing to do was to make the surveillance effort a straight military operation, as it remains today.

For another example, when the President learned of the Communist plan to instigate riots in Guatemala, he asked his military aide an obvious question. “About these riots,” he said to major General Clifton. “Can the government handle them? Find out about that.” The CIA did not have the answer to the President’s question. Through its close connections with the military men in the Guatemalan junta, the DIA did have the answer – a firm “yes” – and it delivered the answer to the White House the same day.

And yet there is one reason why the Defense Intelligence Agency should not have been created. There is really nothing very much that the DIA can do that the CIA is not doing already. The Army, Navy and Air Force must have their own order-of-battle intelligence, so the three service intelligence units will continue to exist. That being so, the DIA has no choice but to concentrate on the political-strategic intelligence which is the CIA’s chief function. Some military men have sensitive political antennae. A great many, unfortunately, do not.

Moreover, Parkinson’s Law operates with special virulence in the Pentagon. One reason is that all three services are top-heavy with high-ranking officers. This creates an intense hunger for staff “slots,” and intelligence has always been a happy hunting ground for the slot-hungry. This scrambling in turn leads to empire building, and as that budget request for a huge new building for DIA suggests, the DIA’s empire is rapidly expanding.

DIA spokesmen – not CIA – insist that all is sweetness and light between the two agencies. In fact, 13 issues had arisen at last report between DIA and CIA, on which McCone and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric have been quietly negotiating.

For example: Will DIA’s intelligence bulletins circulate outside the Pentagon in competition with CIA’s? Whom maintains liaison with friendly foreign intelligence, like MI6? Who “owns” the CIA-created national photo interpretation center? Who owns such technical devices as the U-2? Where does the CIA’s responsibility for guerrilla and anti-guerrilla operations end and the Pentagon’s begin?

Above all, who runs covert operations and where? This is the most sensitive issue of all. It is in this area that CIA and DIA, like K.G.B. and G.R.U., are likely to begin tripping over each other’s cloaks and stabbing each other with their daggers. Recently reports reached CIA that DIA was planning a major clandestine operation in an area that was previously an exclusive CIA bailiwick. “If they move in on us there,” says one CIA man, “we’ll really have to pick up the gauntlet.”

Meanwhile, much depends on the answer to the question: How good is the CIA? For DIA and the military can make a case for moving in on the CIA only if they can provide better intelligence more quickly to the President and the other major intelligence consumers.

“Intelligence,” says John McCone, “is not a measurable commodity. You can’t put a price tag on it.” That is true enough. But there are certain measures which can be used all the same. One is the opinion of old hands in the intelligence industry. This reporter has asked many old hands for their opinions of CIA. Their answers in most cases are remarkably similar. They boil down as follows:

Dick Helms’s Department of Espionage and Dirty Tricks – a solid C-plus. This moderate rating must be read in the light of the fact that this is the toughest course in all the intelligence curriculum.

Ray Cline’s analysis section – B-plus.

Sherman Kent’s estimators – a B or, given the trickiness of making the national estimates, perhaps even a B-plus.

The newly vacated department of technical espionage- a B-plus.

There are other ways to assess the effectiveness of an intelligence organization. The grand prize in the game is the “penetration of the opposition.” If you can insert an agent or agents into the other side’s intelligence organization, you are in the happy position of a player without a blindfold in a game of blindman’s buff.

M.I.6 has been penetrated to a fare-the-well, as was proved by the celebrated case of George Blake, one of a seemingly endless succession of Soviet agents who have penetrated the British government. “The British suffer from the old-school-tie complex,” says one security expert. “You know – ‘What, old Guy a turncoat? Why, I went to school with him.’ They regarded the polygraph as ungentlemanly and our security techniques as boorish. But they’re beginning to learn.”

Penetration by spies

K.G.B., it can be stated on high authority, has been penetrated by CIA, although the hows and wheres are, of course, the toppest of top secrets. Has CIA been penetrated by K.G.B.?

There is no way to prove that it has not. As Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles’s predecessor, once testified – thus creating a furor in the McCarthy era – an intelligence chief must operate on the assumption that the opposition has penetrated his organization. At least two men who might have been Soviet agents have been fired from the CIA. But those in the best position to judge believe that the odds are high that CIA has not been penetrated. If so, CIA must be given a higher score in this vital area than its rivals.

Odious comparison, in fact, suggests that the CIA has done reasonably well in total effort over the years. The Soviets have overflown American territory more frequently than is generally known, but they have nothing to match the U-2 operation. Although we have had our Bay of Pigs, they have had theirs – Khrushchev’s missile adventure in Cuba. The outcome of that adventure proved a total Soviet intelligence failure, in regard to both American intelligence capabilities and the probable American reaction to Khrushchev’s challenge.

The K.G.B. has had plenty of other failures. A recent, less obvious example, was the flop in Iraq. According to CIA estimates, the Soviets invested the equivalent of half a billion dollars in General Kassim’s Communist-infested dictatorship, hoping to turn Iraq into a Middle Eastern Cuba. Yet K.G.B. had no advance warning of the coup that led to Kassim’s assassination in February, and the destruction of the Communist apparatus in Iraq. Neither did the British, Israeli or Egyptian intelligence services. The CIA was “thoroughly clued in.”

There is no doubt, furthermore, that CIA has succeeded in attracting and holding many remarkably able analysts and operatives. John McCone himself has clearly been impressed – and, perhaps, surprised – by the quality of people he found in the CIA. “This is the most competent and effective organization I have had anything to do with in private or public life,” he says.

There are some veteran CIA men, perhaps suffering from nostalgia, who sense stodginess creeping in, who regret the days when such brilliant if sometimes overdaring men as Dulles, Bissell and Amory ran the show.

“The real trouble with this new building,” says one CIA man, “is that it tends to make an honest woman of the old madam – you know, no spittoons, keep the antimacassars clean and no champagne in the morning. We ought to be lurking in scrabby old hideouts, with the plaster peeling and stopped-up toilets. There’s something about the atmosphere of this building that leads to too many memos, too many meetings and not enough dirty work.”

There are those who resent John McCone’s tendency to run the organization like a big corporation rather than a band of conspiratorial brothers. “Maybe Allen was a bit of a romantic. But it was fun working for him. Dammit, a man who’s been abroad for a couple of years on a rough assignment wants to see the boss, if only for half an hour.”

Despite these rather nebulous strictures, those in a good position to judge give both the CIA and McCone himself high marks. One thing is certain. Our intelligence industry is here to stay. There are a lot of things wrong with it: it costs too much, employs too many people and involves too much rivalry and duplication. But we can never go back to the dear old days before World War II, when American intelligence was in the hands of a few elderly female civil servants with pince-nez glasses, who tended the attaché files in the War Department. John McCone himself has summed up the best reason why we can’t go back:

“Every war of this century, including World War I, has started because of inadequate intelligence and incorrect intelligence estimates and evaluations. This was true of Pearl Harbor, for example, and it was true in Korea. The Cuban crisis in October could have generated a war, some think a nuclear war. But war over Cuba was avoided because of intelligence success. Every threat to our security, every weapons system, was correctly identified in time to give the President and his policy advisers time to think, to make a rational estimate of the situation, and to devise a means of dealing with it with a maximum chance of success and a minimum risk of global war. I consider this an intelligence success. Although intelligence is not a measurable commodity, that is at least a partial measure of its value.”

If good intelligence can help us to avoid a war which might destroy us all, the enormous American investment in the intelligence industry will surely have paid off rather handsomely.”

[Len Colby]

We now see how attentively you've read both Rethinking Camelot and this thread:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67)”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105). ”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

Funny Paul normally when you post the snippet above it's to complain about Chomsky resorting to "mindless repetition" but this is the 6th or7th time you've posted it here.And as I keep pointing out to you it's factually correct JFK escalated the US's involvement there more than his predecessors. IIRC there were only 180 US advisers when he took office, none in front-line positions and about 16,000 when he was killed with many near the front.Though Blair's characterisation was overly harsh JFK was hardly the 'leftist' was in the assassination community believe.

Chomsky’s precursor and model: M. S. Arnoni

Key Chomsky propaganda lines turn out, upon inspection, to be derived directly from the work of M.S. Arnoni, the founder of, and chief contributor to, The Minority of One, the “independent monthly…dedicated to the eradication of all restrictions on Thought” (1959-1968) – or some such guff.

Your rhetorical technique is akin to filling a 20-gauge shotgun shells with BS and shooting then (double barrel) against a wall to seem what sticks.

[Paul Rigby]

Prior to November 22, Arnoni and The Minority of One seized every opportunity to denounce JFK as a right-wing Cold Warrior. Immediately upon his death, it began publishing critiques of the absurd – and frequently conflicting – official accounts of his death. And renewed the anti-Kennedy drive against the next flag bearer, RFK.

In the January 1967 edition, Arnoni authored a particularly savage attack, as the title left no doubt: “A Dead Brother is No Brother” (TMO, January 1967, p.6). Note how Arnoni runs some classic CIA lines, from the Kennedy family suppressing vital autopsy evidence, to William Manchester being the family’s mouthpiece in its on-off war with LBJ:

With all the material by now published about the Warren Report, there remain few knowledgeable people who accept the Warren Fairytale as a genuine account of how and why the United States lost its President on November 22, 1963. The remaining division is into two groups of disbelievers: those who publicize their disbelief; and those who, for reasons of their own, think it wise not to publicize it and even to pretend to naivete. So undermined is public confidence that the Administration found it necessary to launch a counter-offensive inspiring everyone it can to endorse the Warren Fiction publicly. The one thing it would not risk, however, is a new investigation now to be conducted for a purpose more genuine than to produce a “political truth” (to use a cute euphemism coined by Edward J. Epstein, author of Inquest). For this, officials seem to hold the American public 75 years too juvenile.

In the meantime a whole new elections politics is evolving around the Warren Report. It has little to do with the facts of the assassination, and it is merely part of the comprehensive science of getting oneself into positions of power. Cynical as this may make Robert F. Kennedy look, it is nonetheless a fact that as far as he is concerned what should or should not be known about his brother’s death need be determined by his own political ambitions. Men driven to power as single-mindedly as Robert Kennedy would not be caught in romantic sentimentality; as “realists,” they are totally disciplined. Such men will do anything for a brother with whom they share the chariot, but they would not make themselves guilty of doing anything futile. What can one do for a dead brother? Why, a dead brother is no brother.

There is much to suggest that for a long time Mr. Robert Kennedy has indirectly encouraged some critics of the Warren Report. Mark Lane, the author of Rush to Judgment, may have overstated a case when he claimed the Senator had sent a direct message of encouragement to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent British historian who wrote an introduction to Lane’s book, but the claim is not likely to be entirely baseless. Other Warren Commission critics, including this publication, have received encouragement from individuals likely to have acted on Mr. Kennedy’s behalf. And the main anti-Administration Kennedy salvo was yet to come from the pages of William Manchester’s book The Death of a President.

Then everything went topsy-turvy. The autopsy photographs and X-rays of the late President were entrusted to the National Archives but access to them remains blocked by the Kennedys, a restriction likely to have been calculated not to embarrass the Administration. People on the fringes of Bobby Kennedy’s political entourage suddenly began “proving” the Warren critics wrong; Edward Kennedy very belatedly endorsed the Warren Report while keeping an option on reversal by claiming not to have read the document; and, most surprisingly, there came concerted attempts by the Kennedys to suppress the Manchester book they themselves had commissioned.

While encouraging and then discouraging distrust of the Warren Report, Robert Kennedy throughout kept himself at a non-attribution distance using intermediaries expendable in the event of political embarrassment. He thus left himself complete maneuverability to negotiate, re-negotiate or negotiate away his role in pressing for public knowledge of the assassination truth. That he suddenly halted his opposition strongly suggests that he may have reconciled his political ambitions with those of Lyndon B. Johnson. Such reconciliation could pertain to either 1968 or 1972 or merely amount to a time-limited truce between two rivals tired of off-season undermining of each other.

Robert Kennedy’s drive for power is legendary. So are his ruthlessness and lack of scruples in climbing the political ladder. Whatever public image of himself he now labors to project is to no degree an indication of how he would actually discharge power; it merely reflects his ideas on how to get it. He must feel that he had done so much for this brother when alive that now he may use the latter’s ghost to promote his own ambitions.

Needless to say that this cynicism has nothing in common with that which drives so many honest people to insistence on the exposure of the real assassination facts. They should steer clear of anyone who turns his position on a new investigation into a negotiable of personal career seeking. And if among the independent assassination investigators there are some who, by compromises of integrity, propose to jump on the prospective Kennedy bandwagon, the loss of opportunistic renegades is the gain of the betrayed cause.

In a recent thread on this forum (and elsewhere), Daniel Gallup wondered what motivated long-standing opponents of Warren Commission fiction to suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, swop sides. In an inspired choice, he termed these turncoats “neo-cons.” The hard, and for many, unpalatable truth is that the alliance we today know as “Neoconservative” formed the bedrock of the coalition which drove the assassination literature and investigations of the 1960s: Zionists and other assorted US right-wingers. Members of this alliance have always constituted a reserve army of chips ready for the cashing; or merely as conduits for disinformation.

Somewhere or other on the web is a talk by Frank Gaffney in which he described Saudi Arabia as simultaneously a deadly enemy and best regional friend. That duality represents how we should see many of the shining lights of the 1960s assassination research community, as our guides - and betrayers. It's Chomsky, too.

[Paul Rigby]

Chomsky takes a break from urging the isolation of the unvaxed to...refuse to answer questions about his meetings with Epstein. Funding is such a private matter, after all.

Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship

Recent revelations that the renowned linguist and political activist met with Jeffrey Epstein several times have surprised and confused many. Why was Epstein interested in meeting with Noam Chomsky? And why did Chomsky agree to meet him despite his past? The answer may surprise you.

BY WHITNEY WEBB, MAY 3, 2023

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/05/investigative-reports/unraveling-the-epstein-chomsky-relationship/

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal published a report detailing information contained within a “trove” of previously unreported documents of the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Those documents, which have not been publicly released and appear to have been passed solely to the Journal, included Epstein’s private calendar and meeting schedules. The documents, per the Journal, contain “thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017” and – as the report notes – detail Epstein’s dealings with several prominent individuals whose names were not on his flight logs or his infamous “little black book” of contacts. One of these individuals is the renowned linguist, political commentator and critic of capitalism and empire, Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky, who has previously discussed the Epstein case in interviews and who has maintained that Epstein’s ties to intelligence agencies should be considered a “conspiracy theory,” had not previously disclosed these meetings. Chomsky, when confronted by Journal reporters, was evasive, but ultimately admitted to meeting and knowing Jeffrey Epstein.

Many, largely on the left, have expressed dismay and confusion as to why someone with the political views of Chomsky would willingly meet, not once but several times, with someone like Jeffrey Epstein, particularly well after Epstein’s notoriety as a sex trafficker and pedophile. As this report will show, Epstein appeared to view Chomsky as another intellectual who could help guide his decisions when it came to his scientific obsessions – namely, transhumanism and eugenics. What Chomsky gained in return from meeting with Epstein isn’t as clear.

Why Did Chomsky Meet with Epstein?

According to the Journal, Chomsky’s meetings with Epstein took place during the years 2015 and 2016, while Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Chomsky told the Journal that he met with Epstein to discuss topics like neuroscience with other academics, like Harvard’s Martin Nowak (who was heavily funded by Epstein). On a separate occasion, Chomsky again met with Epstein alongside former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, allegedly to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.” A separate date saw Chomsky and his wife invited by Epstein to have dinner with him, Woody Allen and Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn. When asked about the dinner date with Woody Allen and Epstein, Chomsky referred to the occasion as “an evening spent with a great artist.”

When confronted with this evidence, Chomsky initially told the Journal that his meetings and relationship with Epstein were “none of your business. Or anyone’s.” He then added that “I knew him [Epstein] and we met occasionally.”

Before continuing further, it is important to note that aside from Epstein, both Ehud Barak and Woody Allen have been accused of having inappropriate sexual relationships with minors. For instance, Barak was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s residences in New York, so often that The Daily Beast reported that numerous residents of an apartment building linked to Epstein “had seen Barak in the building multiple times over the last few years, and nearly half a dozen more described running into his security detail,” adding that “the building is majority-owned by Epstein’s younger brother, Mark, and has been tied to the financier’s alleged New York trafficking ring.”

Specifically, several apartments in the building were “being used to house underage girls from South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union,” according to a former bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein’s main procurers of underage girls, Jean Luc Brunel. Barak is also known to have spent the night at one of Epstein’s residences at least once, was photographed leaving Epstein’s residence as recently as 2016, and has admitted to visiting Epstein’s island, which has sported nicknames including “Pedo Island,” “Lolita Island” and “Orgy Island.” In 2004, Barak received $2.5 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where Epstein was a trustee as well as one of the foundation’s top donors, officially for unspecified “consulting services” and “research” on the foundation’s behalf. Several years later, Barak put Harvey Weinstein in contact with the Israeli private intelligence outfit Black Cube, which employs former Mossad agents and Israeli military intelligence operatives, as Weinstein sought to intimidate the women who had accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

In addition, Barak previously chaired and invested in Carbyne911, a controversial Israeli emergency services start-up that has expanded around the world and has become particularly entrenched in the United States. Barak had directed Epstein to invest $1 million into that company, which has been criticized as a potential tool for warrantless mass surveillance. Leslie Wexner also invested millions in the company.

In Woody Allen’s case, he has been accused of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was 7 years old. That abuse claim has been corroborated by witnesses and other evidence. Furthermore, Allen refused to take a polygraph administered by state police in connection with the investigation and lost four exhaustive court battles related to child custody and his abuse of Dylan Farrow. One of the judge’s in the case described Allen’s behavior towards Dylan as “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.” Actress Mia Farrow, Dylan’s mother, alleged in court that Allen took a sexual interest in her adopted daughter when she was between the ages of two and three years old.

Allen subsequently “seduced” and later married another adopted daughter of Farrow’s, Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen first met when Previn was a child. However, Previn has stated that her first “friendly” interaction with Allen took place when she was a teenager. In 1992, Mia Farrow found nude photos of Previn in Allen’s home and has stated that this was her motive for ending her relationship with Allen.

In the case of Allen and Epstein, and potentially Barak as well, their sexual proclivities and scandals were well known by the time Chomsky met with these men, making a strong suggestion that this type of behavior was not seen by Chomsky as taboo or as a barrier to socialization. It is more likely than not that there was some other major draw that led Chomsky to overlook this type of horrendous behavior toward vulnerable minors.

In terms of reaching a deeper understanding about why Epstein would have been interested in Chomsky – and vice versa, it is important to review – not just the information recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, but also what Epstein himself said of Chomsky before his 2019 death. According to an interview conducted in 2017, but later published in 2019 when Epstein was a major news topic, Epstein openly stated that he had invited Chomsky to his townhouse and he also explicitly stated why he had done so. Oddly, this early acknowledgement of Epstein’s regarding his relationship with Chomsky was left out of the Journal’s recent report.

In that interview, which was conducted by Jeffrey Mervis and later published in Science, Epstein stated that following about Chomsky:

[…] Epstein readily admitted to asking prominent members of the scientific establishment to assess the potential contribution of these so-called outcasts [i.e. MIT students Epstein described as being “on the spectrum”].

“So, I had Jim Watson to the house, and I asked Watson, what does he think about this idea,” a proposal to study how the cellular mechanisms of plants might be relevant to human cancer. Watson is a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. “Likewise with [Noam] Chomsky on artificial intelligence,” he said, referring to one of the pioneers in the field.

In fact, Epstein expressed great respect for the opinions of these elder statesmen. “It’s funny to watch Noam Chomsky rip apart these young boys who talk about having a thinking machine,” Epstein noted. “He takes out a dagger and slices them, very kindly, into little shreds.”

Thus, per Epstein, his interest in inviting Chomsky to his house was explicitly related to the “artificial intelligence,” which was a major scientific interest of Epstein’s. This also provides a major clue as to how Chomsky and Epstein might have first been introduced.

Chomsky, Epstein and MIT

Chomsky is most widely viewed as a famous linguist, political commentator and critic of modern capitalism and imperialism. So, why did Epstein seek to meet with him instead on Artificial Intelligence matters?

Well, an admitted “friend” of both Chomsky’s and Epstein’s was the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Like Chomsky, Minsky was a long-time professor and academic at MIT. It is very possible that Minsky connected the two men, especially considering the fact that Epstein was a major donor to MIT. Epstein described himself as being “very close” to Minsky, who died in 2016, roughly a year after Epstein began meeting with Chomsky. Epstein also financed some of Minsky’s projects and Minsky, like Ehud Barak, was accused of sexually abusing the minors Epstein trafficked.

Chomsky’s views on linguistics and cognition, for those who don’t know, is based very much on evolutionary biology. Chomsky was also a pioneer in cognitive science, described as “a field aimed at uncovering the mental representations and rules that underlie our perceptual and cognitive abilities.” Some have described Chomsky’s concept of language as based on “the complexity of internal representation, encoded in the genome, and their maturation in light of the right data into a sophisticated computational system, one that cannot be usefully broken down into a set of associations.” A person’s “language faculty,” per Chomsky, should be seen as “part of the organism’s genetic endowment, much like the visual system, the immune system and the circulatory system, and we ought to approach it just as we approach these other more down-to-earth biological systems.”

Despite their friendship, Minsky greatly diverged with Chomsky in this view, with Minsky describing Chomsky’s views on linguistics and cognition as largely superficial and irrelevant. Chomsky later criticized the widely used approach with AI that focuses on statistical learning techniques to mine and predict data, which Chomsky argued was “unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.”

However, Chomsky’s views linking evolutionary biology/genetics with linguistics/cognition were notably praised by the aforementioned Martin Nowak, who had attended one of the meetings Epstein had with Chomsky. Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and head of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, later stated that he had “once broke out a blackboard during dinner with Epstein and, for two hours, gave a mathematical description of how language works,” further revealing that Epstein was interested in aspects of linguistics. It is unclear if this particular meeting was the same that Chomsky had attended alongside Nowak to discuss “neuroscience” and other topics.

However, given the importance of evolutionary biology and genetics to Chomsky’s theories, it is hardly surprising that Jeffrey Epstein would have gravitated more towards his views on AI than those of Minsky. Epstein was fascinated by genetics and, even per mainstream sources, was also deeply interested eugenics. Take for example the following from an article published in The Guardian in 2019:

Epstein was apparently fixated on “transhumanism,” the belief that the human species can be deliberately advanced through technological breakthroughs, such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.

At its most benign, transhumanism is a belief that humanity’s problems can be improved, upgraded even, through such technology as cybernetics and artificial intelligence – at its most malignant though, transhumanism lines up uncomfortably well with eugenics.

Thus, Epstein’s interest in AI, genetics, and more was tied into his documented obsession with “transhumanism,” which – as several Unlimited Hangout reports have noted – is essentially a rebranding of eugenics. Indeed, the term transhumanism itself was first coined by Julian Huxley, the former president of the British Eugenics Society and the first head of UNESCO who called to make “the unthinkable thinkable again” with regards to eugenics.

Aside from transhumanism, Epstein also had an avowed interest in “strengthening” the human gene pool, in part by impregnating as many women as possible with his “seed” in order to widely disperse his genes. These views may also explain Epstein’s interest in associating himself with people like James (Jim) Watson. As noted earlier in this article, Epstein stated in 2017 that he had invited both Watson and Chomsky to his home on separate occasions.

Watson has been a controversial figures for years, particularly after he openly stated that people of African descent are genetically inferior and less intelligent than their European counterparts. He also previously promoted the idea that women should abort babies that carried a “gay gene,” were such a gene ever discovered. He also felt that gene editing should be used to make all women “prettier” and to eradicate “stupidity.” Notably, Watson made all of these comments well before Epstein invited him to his home.

Watson was also praised, controversially, after these same comments by another Epstein-funded scientist, Eric Lander. Lander, who was recently Biden’s top science advisor, was forced to resign from that post last year after being accused of harassing those who worked under him in the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Prior to joining the Biden administration, Lander had collaborated with Watson on the Human Genome Project and later ran the Broad Institute, a non-profit born out of collaboration between MIT and Harvard.

Returning to Chomsky, though he may not have been aware of Epstein’s interests in eugenics and transhumanism, it has since become clear that Epstein’s main interest in Artificial Intelligence – his stated purpose for courting Chomsky – was intimately tied to these controversial disciplines. However, Chomsky did know of Epstein’s past, and likely also knew of Woody Allen’s similar past before meeting him as well. He turned a blind eye on those matters, telling the Journal that Epstein had “served his sentence” and, as a result, had been granted a “clean slate.” In saying this, Chomsky is apparently unaware of Epstein’s controversial “sweetheart deal” that resulted in an extremely lenient sentence and non-prosecution agreement. That “deal” was signed off on by then-US Attorney Alex Acosta because Acosta was told to “back off” Epstein because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Chomsky had previously told several people, including an Unlimited Hangout reader, that an Epstein-intelligence agency connection is a “conspiracy theory.”

Given Chomsky’s odd views on Epstein’s past and the fact that Epstein frequently discussed transhumanism and eugenics around other prominent scientists, it is possible, though unproven, that Chomsky may have known more about Epstein’s true interests in AI and genetics.

Would Chomsky have been willing to overlook these ethical conundrums? Given his political views on capitalism and foreign policy, many would likely say that he would not. However, finding ways to circumvent these ethical conundrums with respect to AI may have been one of Epstein’s main reasons for heavily funding MIT, particularly its Media Lab. Epstein, in addition to his own donations, also funneled millions of dollars from Bill Gates and Leon Black to the Media Lab.

According to former Media Lab employee Rodrigo Ochigame, writing in The Intercept, Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab – who took lots of donations from Epstein and attempted to hide Epstein’s name on official records – was focused on developing “ethics” for AI that were “aligned strategically with a Silicon Valley effort seeking to avoid legally enforceable restrictions of controversial technologies.” Ito later resigned his post at the Media Lab due to fallout from the Epstein scandal.

Ochigame writes:

A key group behind this effort, with the lab as a member, made policy recommendations in California that contradicted the conclusions of research I conducted with several lab colleagues, research that led us to oppose the use of computer algorithms in deciding whether to jail people pending trial. Ito himself would eventually complain, in private meetings with financial and tech executives, that the group’s recommendations amounted to “whitewashing” a thorny ethical issue. “They water down stuff we try to say to prevent the use of algorithms that don’t seem to work well” in detention decisions, he confided to one billionaire.

I also watched MIT help the U.S. military brush aside the moral complexities of drone warfare, hosting a superficial talk on AI and ethics by Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and notorious war criminal, and giving input on the U.S. Department of Defense’s “AI Ethics Principles” for warfare, which embraced “permissibly biased” algorithms and which avoided using the word “fairness” because the Pentagon believes “that fights should not be fair.”

Ochigame also cites Media Lab colleagues who say that Marvin Minsky, who worked with the Lab before his death, was known to say that “an ethicist is someone who has a problem with whatever you have in your mind.” Also troubling is the fact that Ito, and by extension the Media Lab, played a role in shaping White House policy with respect to AI. For instance, Obama called Ito an “expert” on AI and ethics during an interview with him in 2016. Ito, on his conversation with Obama, said the following: “[…] the role of the Media Lab is to be a connective tissue between computer science, and the social sciences, and the lawyers, and the philosophers […] What’s cool is that President Obama gets that.”

If you are Jeffrey Epstein, with a history of illegal and criminal activity, and interested in avoiding the regulation of controversial technologies you feel are necessary to advance your vision of transhumanism/eugenics, financing groups that greatly influence “ethics” policies that helps limit the regulation of those technologies would obviously benefit you.

Ochigame goes on to write:

Thus, Silicon Valley’s vigorous promotion of “ethical AI” has constituted a strategic lobbying effort, one that has enrolled academia to legitimize itself. Ito played a key role in this corporate-academic fraternizing, meeting regularly with tech executives. The MIT-Harvard fund’s initial director was the former “global public policy lead” for AI at Google. Through the fund, Ito and his associates sponsored many projects, including the creation of a prominent conference on “Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency” in computer science; other sponsors of the conference included Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Notably, Epstein was tied into these same circles. He was very, very close, not just with Bill Gates, but with several other top Microsoft executives and was also known to have a close relationship with Google’s Sergey Brin, who has recently been subpoenaed in the Epstein-JPMorgan case, as well as Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Notably, many of these same companies are currently pioneering transhumanist technologies, particularly in healthcare, and are deeply tied to either the military or intelligence, if not both.

The MIT-AI-Military Connection

Chomsky is just one of several prominent academics and intellectuals who were courted by Epstein in an attempt to supercharge the development of technologies that could help bring his controversial obsessions to fruition. Notably, many of these characters, including Chomsky, have had their work – at one point or another – funded by the U.S. military, which has itself long been a major driver of AI research.

For example, Minsky and Danny Hillis, a close associate of Epstein’s in his own right, co-created a DARPA contractor and supercomputer firm called Thinking Machines, which was aimed at creating a “truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us,” according to one company brochure. Minsky was Hillis’ mentor at MIT and the pair sought out Sheryl Handler, who worked for a genetic-engineering start-up at Harvard called the Genetics Institute, to help them create their supercomputer firm.

Thinking Machines, which made poor business decisions routinely from the beginning, was only able to function for as long as it did due to multi-million dollar contracts it had secured from the Pentagon’s DARPA. With the close of Cold War, DARPA sought to use its clout with Thinking Machines to push the company to develop a product that could deal with things like modeling the global climate, mapping the human genome and predicting earthquakes. Subsequent reporting from the Wall Street Journal showed that the agency had been “playing favorites” and Thinking Machine’s “gravy train” abruptly ended due to the bad publicity, subsequently leading to the collapse of the company.

Hillis, around this time, met Jeffrey Epstein. The introduction may have been brokered by former Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, a friend of Hillis’ who grew close to Epstein in the 1990s and even took Epstein on an official Microsoft trip to Russia. Myhrvold, who was also named as an abuser of the minors Epstein trafficked, was one of the other top Microsoft officials who was close to Epstein beginning in the 1990s. Another was Linda Stone, who later connected Jeffrey Epstein to Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab. As previously mentioned, Epstein would later direct the long-time head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, to donate millions to the Media Lab.

Chomsky’s own history at MIT brought him into contact with the military. For instance, during the early 1960s, Chomsky received funding from the Air Force, which aimed to program a computer with Chomsky’s insights about grammar in an attempt to endow it “with the ability to recognize instructions imparted to it in perfectly ordinary English, thereby eliminating a necessity for highly specialized languages that intervene between a man and a computer.” Chomsky later stated of the military funding of his early career that “I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics.”

Chomsky has since denied that military funding shaped his linguistics work in any significant way and has claimed that the military is used by the government “as a kind of a funnel by which taxpayer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future.” However, reports have noted that this particular project was very much tied to military applications. In addition, the man who first recruited Chomsky to MIT in the mid-1950s, Jerome Wiesner, went on to be Chomsky’s boss at MIT for over 20 years as well as “America’s most powerful military scientist.”

To Chomsky’s credit, after this program ended, he became fully, and publicly, committed to anti-war activism. This activism led him, at one point, to consider resigning from MIT, which he declined to do – likely because he was rather quickly granted professorship. As Chris Knight writes, “this meant that instead of resigning, Chomsky’s choice was to launch himself as an outspoken anti-militarist activist even while remaining in one of the US’s most prestigious military labs.”

By staying at MIT, Chomsky chose to maintain his career, in relative proximity to the centers of power he would later become an icon for denouncing. However, it shows that Chomsky, from this time onward, began to make some choices that undermined his radicalism to an extent. Chomsky may have rationalized his decision to stay at MIT in the 1960s because it gave him a better platform from which to espouse his political and anti-war views. It is not unheard of for prominent public figures to make such compromises. However, in light of the recent Epstein revelations and what they appear to signal, it seems that Chomsky, particularly in his later years, may have become too comfortable and too willing to make these types of compromises – ones that a much younger Chomsky would have surely rejected.

More on Chomsky and his CIA funding here: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/12903-cracking-the-chomsky-code/

 

 

[Anthony Thorne]

Interesting thread. UNZ writer Kevin Barrett (who's overall writing career won't be to everyone's taste - he's appeared at conferences with Fetzer) has a new piece up about Chomsky. It's the third piece below - the first, an earlier transcript of a Barrett lecture on Chomsky. The second, correspondence between Chomsky and Barrett from years back that eventually went off the rails. The third, Barrett's new article on Chomsky from this week.

 

Why Chomsky is wrong about 9/11.   (Side note - keep your BS detector going while reading this article. Susan Lindauer, mentioned in one paragraph in Barrett's piece, is generally regarded as a Judith Baker-style opportunist who made stuff up to sell books. The 'document the event' quote Barrett makes about the dancing Israelis admitting as much on Israeli TV has never been sufficiently verified to my eyes - the only source out there for it is a Youtube clip of the guys talking from a show, and a subtitle pops up telling us they said it - no transcript or translation or additional evidence is provided, so I think that's always been another attention-grabbing tidbit dangled to trip researchers up. And Judy Wood, noted by Barrett as an AE9/11Truth style demolition expert, is another crank. But after stepping over those - and you have to do this sort of dodging-the-nonsense exercise with almost everything Barrett writes - he makes some interesting points here and there.)

https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/why-chomsky-is-wrong-about-911

 

Gulity Demeanour - The Private 9/11 emails of Noam Chomsky.

https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2013/11/05/chomsky-emails/

 

Chomsky's ties to Jeffrey Epstein exposed.

https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/chomskys-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein-and-suspected-9-11-mastermind-ehud-barak-exposed/

 

Whitney Webb is great but she goes off the rails just a little with her comments about Allen, see at great length here - 

 

Edited May 6, 2023 by Anthony Thorne