Thomas Braden CIA

John Simkin · April 7, 2005

Braden used to be a regular on Crossfire. That's taking Operation Mockingbird right out in the open, isn't it?

Tom Braden, like all the leaders of the OPC, was a liberal. This was probably the reason why he resigned in 1954 (I will be writing later about why Meyer and Braden wanted to get out in 1954).

After the Ramparts article in 1967 Braden was willing to talk about how the CIA manipulated the media (article in the Staurday Evening Post, interview on UK television's World in Action, interview with John Ranelagh (The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA).

A couple of interesting Braden quotes:

"In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."

"The CIA could do exactly as it pleased. It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was one of the first world-wide multinationals."

Braden also had some interesting ideas on the assassination of JFK. More later.

John Simkin · April 7, 2005

I have now created a web page on Tom Braden.

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

Thomas Wardell Braden was born in 1918. In 1940 he joined the British Army and later saw action in North Africa and Italy. He was recruited into Special Operations Executive (SOE) and in 1944 he went to work with Allen Dulles at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In an interview he gave to John Ranelagh (The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA), Braden admits that in 1944 he introduced Kim Philby to Dulles.

After the war Braden moved to Washington. He became a member of what was known as the Georgetown Crowd. The group included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Joseph Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze.

Braden joined the Central Intelligence Agency and in 1950 became head of International Organizations Division (IOD). A unit that worked under the direction of Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). His deputy was Cord Meyer.

The IOD helped established anti-Communist front groups in Western Europe. The IOD was dedicated to infiltrating academic, trade and political associations. The objective was to control potential radicals and to steer them to the right. Braden later claimed that such measures were necessary in the early 1950s because the Soviet Union operated "immensely powerful" front groups in Europe.

Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild and the National Educational Association. According to Braden, the CIA was putting around $900,000 a year into the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Some of this money was used to publish its journal, Encounter.

Braden and the IOD also worked closely with anti-Communist leaders of the trade union movement such as George Meany of the Congress for Industrial Organization and the American Federation of Labor. This was used to fight Communism in their own ranks. As Braden said: "The CIA could do exactly as it pleased. It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was one of the first worldwide multinationals."

In November, 1954, Cord Meyer replaced Braden as head of International Organizations Division. Braden went into journalism and became a popular newspaper columnist. He also worked as a political commentator on radio and television.

Braden's wife, Joan Braden, as well as being the mother of eight children was a public relations executive, magazine writer, television interviewer and an aide to John F. Kennedy.

According to Warren Hinckle and William Turner (Deadly Secrets), in 1963 Braden advised Robert Kennedy: "Why don't you just go on a crusade to find out about the murder of your brother?". Kennedy shook his head and said it was too horrible to think about and that he decided to just accept the findings of the Warren Commission.

At the end of 1966, Desmond FitzGerald, Directorate for Plans, discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, were planning to publish an article that the International Organizations Division had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."

This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America.

In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.

Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: "In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."

In 1975 Braden published the autobiographical novel, Eight is Enough. The book is about a newspaper columnist, his wife and their eight children. The book was adapted into the TV series of the same name which ran 1977 to 1981.

Braden also co-hosted the Buchanan-Braden Program, a three-hour daily radio show with conservative Patrick Buchanan, and delivered daily commentary on the NBC radio network from 1978 to 1984. Later he also worked with Buchanan on the CNN program Crossfire.

Braden is an interesting character. He spoke several times about his covert activities. This included Operation Mockingbird (although he never used this name).

Here for example is an interview he gave for the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975)

It never had to account for the money it spent except to the President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But otherwise the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them - "unvouchered funds" meaning expenditures that don't have to be accounted for.... If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe - a Labour leader - suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... I don't mean to imply that there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents. They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work well.... Politicians in Europe, particularly right after the war, got a lot of money from the CIA....

Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee - no committee said to it - "You can only have so many men." It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war - the secret war.... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.

Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target - that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money. They set up a successful communist labor union in France right after the war. We countered it with Force Ouvriere. They set up this very successful communist labor union in Italy, and we countered it with another union.... We had a vast project targeted on the intellectuals - "the battle for Picasso's mind," if you will. The communists set up fronts which they effectively enticed a great many particularly the French intellectuals to join. We tried to set up a counterfront. (This was done through funding of social and cultural organizations such as the Pan-American Foundation, the International Marketing Institute, the International Development Foundation, the American Society of African Culture, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom.) I think the budget for the Congress of Cultural Freedom one year that I had charge of it was about $800,000, $900,000, which included, of course, the subsidy for the Congress's magazine, Encounter. That doesn't mean that everybody that worked for Encounter or everybody who wrote for Encounter knew anything about it. Most of the people who worked for Encounter and all but one of the men who ran it had no idea that it was paid for by the CIA.

John Simkin · April 13, 2005

I have discovered that when Braden left the CIA in 1954 he purchased the Blade Tribune in California.

Does anyone know if Braden is still alive? He would be 86 years old if he is still around. He has never written his memoirs (or maybe they will be published after his death).

Here is another photograph of Braden.

Tim Gratz · April 17, 2005

Spraille Braden was an ambassador to Cuba and in 1957 he warned that Fidel Castro was a "fellow traveler, if not an official member, of the Communist Party. . ."

Source, Human Events, August 17, 1957/

Does anyone know if Tom Braden was related to Spraille Braden?

John Simkin · October 17, 2005

Namebase entry for Tom Braden

http://www.namebase.org/main4/Thomas-Wardell-Braden.html

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William Kelly · October 22, 2005

Now it really gets strange!
Joan Braden's varied career included stints as a U.S. State Department officer, public relations executive, magazine writer, television interviewer and aide to John F. Kennedy and Nelson A. Rockefeller. And in the meantime, she raised eight children. Her husband, newspaper columnist Tom Braden, wrote about her and the family in the book Eight is Enough -- which was adapted into the TV series of the same name which ran 1977 to 1981. Of the eight kids, seven are still alive; the youngest, Tom, died in 1994. Mrs. Braden died August 29 from a heart attack. She was 77.

So Thomas Braden of Operation Mockingbird wrote the book "Eight is Enough" which became both a hit movie and TV series. Braden was a newspaper columnist in the movie and tv series, played by Dick Van Patten. Steve Martin played the father in the recent remake--but Martin was a football coach. I don't recall seeing the 1977 movie and there was no reference to the wife's actual background in the remake, of course.

Interesting!

One story you won't see in the TV show or in Tom Braden's book is what it was like to live in house with eight kids and a Nazi Gestapo assassin. When Braden and his wife married their large family was friends and neighbors with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, who also had a large family. Braden was one of Alan Dulles' deputies, and as a favor to Dulles Braden took in one Hans Bernd Gisevius, a Gestapo-OSS double-agent run by Dulles out of Berne, Swiss., and participant in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler at the Wolf's Lair. Gisevius, in Berlin, believed Hitler was killed and put the coup d'etat into motion. While many involved were rounded up and executed, Gisevius escaped with the help of Dulles and his assistant, Mary Banacroft. When Gisevius came to the USA, he lived with Braden's family and received a salary from the CIA.

As pointed out elsewhere, the guy who took over Tom Braden's CIA operations, Cord Meyer, Jr. was the founder of the World Federalists, whose Philadelphia fundraising banquets were organized by Michael Paine's mom, Ruth Forbes Paine.

Cord Meyer's neighbor, Priscilla Johnson McMillan and Walter Cronkite are also active World Federalists, and I suspect, part of Mockingbird as well.

I imagine it must have been pretty interesting conversations sitting around the Braden's dinner table with all those kids and a Gestapo Colonel.

Bill Kelly

bkjfk3@yahoo.com

Tim Gratz · October 22, 2005

Thanks, Mr. Kelly! Very interesting information! Eight kids and a Gestapo Colonel! Should have been on TV!!!

Thomas Graves · October 22, 2005

Thanks, Mr. Kelly! Very interesting information! Eight kids and a Gestapo Colonel! Should have been on TV!!!

Hi Tim,

Great idea! They could have called it "The Braden Bunch." (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Thomas

Tim Gratz · October 22, 2005

Great, Thomas! Maybe someone could do a mini-tv series about Braden and crew (with your title of course).

I bet only 5% of the public (at most) know taht the father on the tv series was CIA!

John Simkin · September 29, 2006

On another thread Bill Kelly has pointed out the importance of an article by Tom Braden that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (20th May, 1967). I thought it would be a good idea to post the article:

I'm Glad the CIA is 'immoral'

On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil: "Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000. (signed) Norris A. Grambo."

I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers disclosed the "scandal" of the Central Intelligence Agency's connections with American students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search, and when it ended, I found myself feeling sad.

For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the piece of yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation whose death has been brought about by small-minded and resentful men.

It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers. It was also my idea to give cash, along with advice, to other labor leaders, to students, professors and others who could help the United States in its battle with Communist fronts.

It was my idea. For 17 years I had thought it was a good idea. Yet here it was in the newspapers, buried under excoriation. Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft. Editorials. Outrage. Shock.

"What's gone wrong?" I said to myself as I looked at the yellow paper. "Was there something wrong with me and the others back in 1950? Did we just think we were helping our country, when in fact we ought to have been hauled up before Walter Lippmann?

"And what's wrong with me now? For I still think it was and is a good idea, an imperative idea. Am I out of my mind? Or is it the editor of The New York Times who is talking nonsense?"

And so I sat sadly amidst the dust of old papers, and after a time I decided something. I decided that if ever I knew a truth in my life, I knew the truth of the cold war, and I knew what the Central Intelligence Agency did in the cold war, and never have I read such a concatenation of inane, misinformed twaddle as I have now been reading about the CIA.

Were the undercover payments by the CIA "immoral"? Surely it cannot be "immoral" to make certain that your country's supplies intended for delivery to friends are not burned, stolen or dumped into the sea.

Are CIA efforts to collect intelligence anywhere it can "disgraceful"? Surely it is not "disgraceful" to ask somebody whether he learned anything while he was abroad that might help his country.

People who make these charges must be naïve. Some of them must be worse. Some must be pretending to be naïve.

Take Victor Reuther, assistant to his brother Walter, president of the United Automobile Workers. According to Drew Pearson, Victor Reuther complained that the American Federation of Labor got money from the CIA and spent it with "undercover techniques." Victor Reuther ought to be ashamed of himself. At his request, I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter $50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there. He tried "undercover techniques" to keep me from finding out how he spent it. But I had my own "undercover techniques." In my opinion and that of my peers in the CIA, he spent it with less than perfect wisdom, for the German unions he chose to help weren't seriously short of money and were already anti-Communist. The CIA money Victor spent would have done much more good where unions were tying up ports at the order of Communist leaders.

As for the theory advanced by the editorial writers that there ought to have been a Government foundation devoted to helping good causes agreed upon by Congress-this may seem sound, but it wouldn't work for a minute. Does anyone really think that congressmen would foster a foreign tour by an artist who has or has had left-wing connections? And imagine the scuffles that would break out as congressmen fought over money to subsidize the organizations in their home districts.

Back in the early 1950's, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. I remember, for example, the time I tried to bring my old friend, Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium, to the U.S. to help out in one of the CIA operations.

Paul-Henri Spaak was and is a very wise man. He had served his country as foreign minister and premier. CIA Director Allen Dulles mentioned Spaak's projected journey to the then Senate Majority Leader William F. Knowland of California. I believe that Mr. Dulles thought the senator would like to meet Mr. Spaak. I am sure he was not prepared for Knowland's reaction:

"Why," the senator said, "the man's a socialist."

"Yes," Mr. Dulles replied, "and the head of his party. But you don't know Europe the way I do, Bill. In many European countries, a socialist is roughly equivalent to a Republican." Knowland replied, "I don't care. We aren't going to bring any socialists over here."

The fact, of course, is that in much of Europe in the 1950's, socialists, people who called themselves "left"-the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists-were the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.

But let us begin at the beginning.

When I went to Washington in 1950 as assistant to Allen W. Dulles, then deputy director to CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith, the agency was three years old. It had been organized. like the State Department, along geographical lines, with a Far Eastern Division, a Western European Division, etc. It seemed to me that this organization was not capable of defending the United States against a new and extraordinarily successful weapon. The weapon was the international Communist front. There were seven of these fronts, all immensely powerful:

1. The International Association of Democratic Lawyers had found "documented proof" that U.S. forces in Korea were dropping canisters of poisoned mosquitoes on North Korean cities and were following a "systematic procedure of torturing civilians, individually and en masse."

2. The World Peace Council had conducted a successful operation called the Stockholm Peace Appeal, a petition signed by more than two million Americans. Most of them, I hope, were in ignorance of the council's program: "The peace movement. . . has set itself the aim to frustrate the aggressive plans of American and English imperialists... The heroic Soviet army is the powerful sentinel of peace."

3. The Women's International Democratic Federation was preparing a Vienna conference of delegates from 40 countries who resolved: "Our children cannot be safe until American war-mongers are silenced." The meeting cost the Russians six million dollars.

4. The International Union of Students had the active participation of nearly every student organization in the world. At an estimated cost of $50 million a year, it stressed the hopeless future of the young under any form of society except that dedicated to peace and freedom, as in Russia.

5. The World Federation of Democratic Youth appealed to the non- intellectual young. In 1951, 25,000 young people were brought to Berlin from all over the world, to be harangued (mostly about American atrocities). The estimated cost: $50 million.

6. The International Organization of Journalists was founded in Copenhagen in 1946 by a non-Communist majority. A year later the Communists took it over. By 1950 it was an active supporter of every Communist cause.

7. The World Federation of Trade Unions controlled the two most powerful labor unions in France and Italy and took its orders directly from Soviet Intelligence. Yet it was able to mask its Communist allegiance so successfully that the C.I.O. belonged to it for a time.

All in all, the CIA estimated, the Soviet Union was annually spending $250 million on its various fronts. They were worth every penny of it. Consider what they had accomplished.

First, they had stolen the great words. Years after I left the CIA, the late United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson told me how he had been outraged when delegates from under- developed countries, young men who had come to maturity during the cold war, assumed that anyone who was for "Peace" and "Freedom" and "Justice" must also be for Communism.

Second, by constant repetition of the twin promises of the Russian revolution-the promises of a classless society and of a transformed mankind-the fronts had thrown a peculiar spell over some of the world's intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, many of whom behaved like disciplined party-liners.

Third, millions of people who would not consciously have supported the interests of the Soviet Union had joined organizations devoted ostensibly to good causes, but secretly owned and operated by and for the Kremlin.

How odd, I thought to myself as I watched these developments, that Communists, who are afraid to join anything but the Communist Party, should gain mass allies through organizational war while we Americans, who join everything, were sitting here tongue-tied.

And so it came about that I had a chat with Allen Dulles. It was late in the day and his secretary had gone. I told him I thought the CIA ought to take on the Russians by penetrating a battery of international fronts. I told him I thought it should be a worldwide operation with a single headquarters.

"You know," he said, leaning back in his chair and lighting his pipe, "I think you may have something there. There's no doubt in my mind that we're losing the cold war. Why don't you take it up down below?"

It was nearly three months later that I came to his office again - this time to resign. On the morning of that day there had been a meeting for which my assistants and I had prepared ourselves carefully. We had been studying Russian front movements, and working out a counteroffensive. We knew that the men who ran CIA's area divisions were jealous of their power. But we thought we had logic on our side. And surely logic would appeal to Frank Wisner.

Frank Wisner, in my view, was an authentic American hero. A war hero. A cold-war hero. He died by his own hand in 1965. But he had been crushed long before by the dangerous detail connected with cold-war operations. At this point in my story, however, he was still gay, almost boyishly charming, cool yet coiled, a low hurdler from Mississippi constrained by a vest.

He had one of those purposefully obscure CIA titles: Director of Policy Co-ordination. But everyone knew that he had run CIA since the death of the war-time OSS, run it through a succession of rabbit warrens hidden in the bureaucracy of the State Department, run it when nobody but Frank Wisner cared whether the country had an intelligence service. Now that it was clear that Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles were really going to take over, Frank Wisner still ran it while they tried to learn what it was they were supposed to run.

And so, as we prepared for the meeting, it was decided that I should pitch my argument to Wisner. He knew more than the others. He could overrule them.

The others sat in front of me in straight-backed chairs, wearing the troubled looks of responsibility. I began by assuring them that I proposed to do nothing in any area without the approval of the chief of that area. I thought, when I finished, that I had made a good case. Wisner gestured at the Chief, Western Europe. "Frank," came the response, "this is just another one of those goddamned proposals for getting into everybody's hair."

One by one the others agreed. Only Richard G. Stilwell, the Chief, Far East, a hard-driving soldier in civilian clothes who now commands U.S. forces in Thailand, said he had no objection. We all waited to hear what Wisner would say.

Incredibly, he put his hands out, palms down. "Well," he said, looking at me, "you heard the verdict."

Just as incredibly, he smiled.

Sadly I walked down the long hall, and sadly reported to my staff that the day was lost. Then I went to Mr. Dulles's office and resigned. "Oh," said Mr. Dulles, blandly, "Frank and I had talked about his decision. I overruled him." He looked up at me from over his papers. "He asked me to."

Thus was the International Organization Division of CIA born, and thus began the first centralized effort to combat Communist fronts.

Perhaps "combat" does not describe the relative strengths brought to battle. For we started with nothing but the truth. Yet within three years we had made solid accomplishments. Few of them would have been possible without undercover methods.

I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra's tour and the magazine's publication came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter. The agents could not only propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from "American foundations"? As the agents knew, the CIA-financed foundations were quite generous when it came to the national interest.

I remember with great pleasure the day an agent came in with the news that four national student organizations had broken away from the Communist International Union of Students and joined our student outfit instead. I remember how Eleanor Roosevelt, glad to help our new International Committee of Women, answered point for point the charges about germ warfare that the Communist women's organization had put forward. I remember the organization of seamen's unions in India and in the Baltic ports.

There were, of course, difficulties, sometimes unexpected. One was the World Assembly of Youth.

We were casting about for something to compete with the Soviet Union in its hold over young people when we discovered this organization based in Dakar. It was dwindling in membership, and apparently not doing much.

After a careful assessment, we decided to put an agent into the assembly. It took a minimum of six months and often a year just to get a man into an organization. Thereafter, except for what advice and help we could lend, he was on his own. But, in this case, - we couldn't give any help whatsoever The agent couldn't find anybody in the organization who wanted any.

The mystery was eventually solved by the man on the spot. WAY, as we had come to call it, was the creature of French intelligence - the Deuxième Bureau. Two French agents held key WAY posts. The French Communist Party seemed strong enough to win a general election. French intelligence was waiting to see what would happen.

We didn't wait. Within a year our man brought about the defeat of his two fellow officers in an election. After that, WAY took a pro-Western stand. But our greatest difficulty was with labor. When I left the agency in 1954, we were still worrying about the problem. It was personified by Jay Lovestone, assistant to David Dubinsky in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Once chief of the Communist Party in the United States, Lovestone had an enormous grasp of foreign-intelligence operations. In 1947 the Communist Confèdèration Gènèrale du Travail led a strike in Paris which came very near to paralyzing the French economy. A takeover of the government was feared.

Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown. With funds from Dubinsky's union, they organized Force Ouvrière, a non-Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently.

But though Lovestone wanted our money, he didn't want to tell us precisely how he spent it. We knew that non-Communist unions in France and Italy were holding their own. We knew that he was paying them nearly two million dollars annually. In his view, what more did we need to know?

We countered that the unions were not growing as rapidly as we wished and that many members were not paying dues. We wanted to be consulted as to how to correct these weaknesses.

I appealed to a high and responsible labor leader. He kept repeating, "Lovestone and his bunch do a good job."

And so they did. After that meeting, so did we. We cut the subsidy down, and with the money saved we set up new networks in other international labor organizations. Within two years the free labor movement, still holding its own in France and Italy, was going even better elsewhere.

Looking back now, it seems to me that the argument was largely a waste of time. The only argument that mattered was the one with the Communists for the loyalty of millions of workers. That argument, with the help of Lovestone and Brown, was effectively made.

By 1953 we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field where Communist fronts had previously seized ground, and in some where they had not even begun to operate. The money we spent was very little by Soviet standards. But that was reflected in the first rule of our operational plan: "Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend." The other rules were equally obvious: "Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy."

Such was the status of the organizational weapon when I left the CIA. No doubt it grew stronger later on, as those who took charge gained experience. Was it a good thing to forge such a weapon? In my opinion then-and now-it was essential.

Was it "immoral," "wrong," "disgraceful"? Only in the sense that war itself is immoral, wrong and disgraceful.

For the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs. And our country has had a clear-cut choice: Either we win the war or lose it. This war is still going on, and I do not mean to imply that we have won it. But we have not lost it either.

It is now 12 years since Winston Churchill accurately defined the world as "divided intellectually and to a large extent geographically between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom." I have heard it said that this definition is no longer accurate. I share the hope that John Kennedy's appeal to the Russians "to help us make the world safe for diversity" reflects the spirit of a new age.

But I am not banking on it, and neither, in my opinion, was the late President. The choice between innocence and power involves the most difficult of decisions. But when an adversary attacks with his weapons disguised as good works, to choose innocence is to choose defeat. So long as the Soviet Union attacks deviously we shall need weapons to fight back, and a government locked in a power struggle cannot acknowledge all the programs it must carry out to cope with its enemies. The weapons we need now cannot, alas, be the same ones that we first used in the 1950's. But the new weapons should be capable of the same affirmative response as the ones we forged 17 years ago, when it seemed that the Communists, unchecked, would win the alliance of most of the world.

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

John Dolva · September 29, 2006

Precursor to this was the revelation of NSA member that the CIA had paid and coerced a number of NSA staff into acting as informants for over a decade. This then re ignited the Reuther issues which are the focus of this article. Later that month Johnson started to clamp down on CIA activities, Robert Kennedy spoke up and Johnson realised Kennedy was going to run against him, and the CIA came increasingly under investigation by journalists.

Three years later Kennedy was dead and the YAF was gunning for the NSA without mentioning the CIA at all, but rather attacking the tax exempt status of the NSA which the CIA had probably participated in organising in the first place.

Before the revelations about CIA-NSA links broke the NSA was a highly regarded sudent organisation, participating among other things in the Civil Rights struggle, and probably represented a meaningful portion of potential RFK support.

After the revlations, they were on the defensive. People like Braden came out batting for the CIA, not by dealing with the NSA issue but with other things. (Wiesner was instrumental in bringing in the New Jersey Nazis (ex SS death Squad members). Interesting that Braden would call him a good American.)

re Albert Schweitzer college. Are there indications Oswald used NSA services?

Edited September 29, 2006 by John Dolva

William Kelly · January 8, 2009

On another thread Bill Kelly has pointed out the importance of an article by Tom Braden that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (20th May, 1967). I thought it would be a good idea to post the article:
John, This isn't the same article published by the Church Committee,

What's Wrong With the CIA - published in the Saturday Review April, 5, 1975 - BK

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=148755

Much more incriminating, and understandable why Dulles never talked to Braden again.

I'm Glad the CIA is 'immoral'

On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil: "Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000. (signed) Norris A. Grambo."

I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers disclosed the "scandal" of the Central Intelligence Agency's connections with American students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search, and when it ended, I found myself feeling sad.

For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the piece of yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation whose death has been brought about by small-minded and resentful men.

It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers. It was also my idea to give cash, along with advice, to other labor leaders, to students, professors and others who could help the United States in its battle with Communist fronts.

It was my idea. For 17 years I had thought it was a good idea. Yet here it was in the newspapers, buried under excoriation. Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft. Editorials. Outrage. Shock.

"What's gone wrong?" I said to myself as I looked at the yellow paper. "Was there something wrong with me and the others back in 1950? Did we just think we were helping our country, when in fact we ought to have been hauled up before Walter Lippmann?

"And what's wrong with me now? For I still think it was and is a good idea, an imperative idea. Am I out of my mind? Or is it the editor of The New York Times who is talking nonsense?"

And so I sat sadly amidst the dust of old papers, and after a time I decided something. I decided that if ever I knew a truth in my life, I knew the truth of the cold war, and I knew what the Central Intelligence Agency did in the cold war, and never have I read such a concatenation of inane, misinformed twaddle as I have now been reading about the CIA.

Were the undercover payments by the CIA "immoral"? Surely it cannot be "immoral" to make certain that your country's supplies intended for delivery to friends are not burned, stolen or dumped into the sea.

Are CIA efforts to collect intelligence anywhere it can "disgraceful"? Surely it is not "disgraceful" to ask somebody whether he learned anything while he was abroad that might help his country.

People who make these charges must be naïve. Some of them must be worse. Some must be pretending to be naïve.

Take Victor Reuther, assistant to his brother Walter, president of the United Automobile Workers. According to Drew Pearson, Victor Reuther complained that the American Federation of Labor got money from the CIA and spent it with "undercover techniques." Victor Reuther ought to be ashamed of himself. At his request, I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter $50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there. He tried "undercover techniques" to keep me from finding out how he spent it. But I had my own "undercover techniques." In my opinion and that of my peers in the CIA, he spent it with less than perfect wisdom, for the German unions he chose to help weren't seriously short of money and were already anti-Communist. The CIA money Victor spent would have done much more good where unions were tying up ports at the order of Communist leaders.

As for the theory advanced by the editorial writers that there ought to have been a Government foundation devoted to helping good causes agreed upon by Congress-this may seem sound, but it wouldn't work for a minute. Does anyone really think that congressmen would foster a foreign tour by an artist who has or has had left-wing connections? And imagine the scuffles that would break out as congressmen fought over money to subsidize the organizations in their home districts.

Back in the early 1950's, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. I remember, for example, the time I tried to bring my old friend, Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium, to the U.S. to help out in one of the CIA operations.

Paul-Henri Spaak was and is a very wise man. He had served his country as foreign minister and premier. CIA Director Allen Dulles mentioned Spaak's projected journey to the then Senate Majority Leader William F. Knowland of California. I believe that Mr. Dulles thought the senator would like to meet Mr. Spaak. I am sure he was not prepared for Knowland's reaction:

"Why," the senator said, "the man's a socialist."

"Yes," Mr. Dulles replied, "and the head of his party. But you don't know Europe the way I do, Bill. In many European countries, a socialist is roughly equivalent to a Republican." Knowland replied, "I don't care. We aren't going to bring any socialists over here."

The fact, of course, is that in much of Europe in the 1950's, socialists, people who called themselves "left"-the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists-were the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.

But let us begin at the beginning.

When I went to Washington in 1950 as assistant to Allen W. Dulles, then deputy director to CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith, the agency was three years old. It had been organized. like the State Department, along geographical lines, with a Far Eastern Division, a Western European Division, etc. It seemed to me that this organization was not capable of defending the United States against a new and extraordinarily successful weapon. The weapon was the international Communist front. There were seven of these fronts, all immensely powerful:

1. The International Association of Democratic Lawyers had found "documented proof" that U.S. forces in Korea were dropping canisters of poisoned mosquitoes on North Korean cities and were following a "systematic procedure of torturing civilians, individually and en masse."

2. The World Peace Council had conducted a successful operation called the Stockholm Peace Appeal, a petition signed by more than two million Americans. Most of them, I hope, were in ignorance of the council's program: "The peace movement. . . has set itself the aim to frustrate the aggressive plans of American and English imperialists... The heroic Soviet army is the powerful sentinel of peace."

3. The Women's International Democratic Federation was preparing a Vienna conference of delegates from 40 countries who resolved: "Our children cannot be safe until American war-mongers are silenced." The meeting cost the Russians six million dollars.

4. The International Union of Students had the active participation of nearly every student organization in the world. At an estimated cost of $50 million a year, it stressed the hopeless future of the young under any form of society except that dedicated to peace and freedom, as in Russia.

5. The World Federation of Democratic Youth appealed to the non- intellectual young. In 1951, 25,000 young people were brought to Berlin from all over the world, to be harangued (mostly about American atrocities). The estimated cost: $50 million.

6. The International Organization of Journalists was founded in Copenhagen in 1946 by a non-Communist majority. A year later the Communists took it over. By 1950 it was an active supporter of every Communist cause.

7. The World Federation of Trade Unions controlled the two most powerful labor unions in France and Italy and took its orders directly from Soviet Intelligence. Yet it was able to mask its Communist allegiance so successfully that the C.I.O. belonged to it for a time.

All in all, the CIA estimated, the Soviet Union was annually spending $250 million on its various fronts. They were worth every penny of it. Consider what they had accomplished.

First, they had stolen the great words. Years after I left the CIA, the late United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson told me how he had been outraged when delegates from under- developed countries, young men who had come to maturity during the cold war, assumed that anyone who was for "Peace" and "Freedom" and "Justice" must also be for Communism.

Second, by constant repetition of the twin promises of the Russian revolution-the promises of a classless society and of a transformed mankind-the fronts had thrown a peculiar spell over some of the world's intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, many of whom behaved like disciplined party-liners.

Third, millions of people who would not consciously have supported the interests of the Soviet Union had joined organizations devoted ostensibly to good causes, but secretly owned and operated by and for the Kremlin.

How odd, I thought to myself as I watched these developments, that Communists, who are afraid to join anything but the Communist Party, should gain mass allies through organizational war while we Americans, who join everything, were sitting here tongue-tied.

And so it came about that I had a chat with Allen Dulles. It was late in the day and his secretary had gone. I told him I thought the CIA ought to take on the Russians by penetrating a battery of international fronts. I told him I thought it should be a worldwide operation with a single headquarters.

"You know," he said, leaning back in his chair and lighting his pipe, "I think you may have something there. There's no doubt in my mind that we're losing the cold war. Why don't you take it up down below?"

It was nearly three months later that I came to his office again - this time to resign. On the morning of that day there had been a meeting for which my assistants and I had prepared ourselves carefully. We had been studying Russian front movements, and working out a counteroffensive. We knew that the men who ran CIA's area divisions were jealous of their power. But we thought we had logic on our side. And surely logic would appeal to Frank Wisner.

Frank Wisner, in my view, was an authentic American hero. A war hero. A cold-war hero. He died by his own hand in 1965. But he had been crushed long before by the dangerous detail connected with cold-war operations. At this point in my story, however, he was still gay, almost boyishly charming, cool yet coiled, a low hurdler from Mississippi constrained by a vest.

He had one of those purposefully obscure CIA titles: Director of Policy Co-ordination. But everyone knew that he had run CIA since the death of the war-time OSS, run it through a succession of rabbit warrens hidden in the bureaucracy of the State Department, run it when nobody but Frank Wisner cared whether the country had an intelligence service. Now that it was clear that Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles were really going to take over, Frank Wisner still ran it while they tried to learn what it was they were supposed to run.

And so, as we prepared for the meeting, it was decided that I should pitch my argument to Wisner. He knew more than the others. He could overrule them.

The others sat in front of me in straight-backed chairs, wearing the troubled looks of responsibility. I began by assuring them that I proposed to do nothing in any area without the approval of the chief of that area. I thought, when I finished, that I had made a good case. Wisner gestured at the Chief, Western Europe. "Frank," came the response, "this is just another one of those goddamned proposals for getting into everybody's hair."

One by one the others agreed. Only Richard G. Stilwell, the Chief, Far East, a hard-driving soldier in civilian clothes who now commands U.S. forces in Thailand, said he had no objection. We all waited to hear what Wisner would say.

Incredibly, he put his hands out, palms down. "Well," he said, looking at me, "you heard the verdict."

Just as incredibly, he smiled.

Sadly I walked down the long hall, and sadly reported to my staff that the day was lost. Then I went to Mr. Dulles's office and resigned. "Oh," said Mr. Dulles, blandly, "Frank and I had talked about his decision. I overruled him." He looked up at me from over his papers. "He asked me to."

Thus was the International Organization Division of CIA born, and thus began the first centralized effort to combat Communist fronts.

Perhaps "combat" does not describe the relative strengths brought to battle. For we started with nothing but the truth. Yet within three years we had made solid accomplishments. Few of them would have been possible without undercover methods.

I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches. And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra's tour and the magazine's publication came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Another agent became an editor of Encounter. The agents could not only propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from "American foundations"? As the agents knew, the CIA-financed foundations were quite generous when it came to the national interest.

I remember with great pleasure the day an agent came in with the news that four national student organizations had broken away from the Communist International Union of Students and joined our student outfit instead. I remember how Eleanor Roosevelt, glad to help our new International Committee of Women, answered point for point the charges about germ warfare that the Communist women's organization had put forward. I remember the organization of seamen's unions in India and in the Baltic ports.

There were, of course, difficulties, sometimes unexpected. One was the World Assembly of Youth.

We were casting about for something to compete with the Soviet Union in its hold over young people when we discovered this organization based in Dakar. It was dwindling in membership, and apparently not doing much.

After a careful assessment, we decided to put an agent into the assembly. It took a minimum of six months and often a year just to get a man into an organization. Thereafter, except for what advice and help we could lend, he was on his own. But, in this case, - we couldn't give any help whatsoever The agent couldn't find anybody in the organization who wanted any.

The mystery was eventually solved by the man on the spot. WAY, as we had come to call it, was the creature of French intelligence - the Deuxième Bureau. Two French agents held key WAY posts. The French Communist Party seemed strong enough to win a general election. French intelligence was waiting to see what would happen.

We didn't wait. Within a year our man brought about the defeat of his two fellow officers in an election. After that, WAY took a pro-Western stand. But our greatest difficulty was with labor. When I left the agency in 1954, we were still worrying about the problem. It was personified by Jay Lovestone, assistant to David Dubinsky in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Once chief of the Communist Party in the United States, Lovestone had an enormous grasp of foreign-intelligence operations. In 1947 the Communist Confèdèration Gènèrale du Travail led a strike in Paris which came very near to paralyzing the French economy. A takeover of the government was feared.

Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown. With funds from Dubinsky's union, they organized Force Ouvrière, a non-Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently.

But though Lovestone wanted our money, he didn't want to tell us precisely how he spent it. We knew that non-Communist unions in France and Italy were holding their own. We knew that he was paying them nearly two million dollars annually. In his view, what more did we need to know?

We countered that the unions were not growing as rapidly as we wished and that many members were not paying dues. We wanted to be consulted as to how to correct these weaknesses.

I appealed to a high and responsible labor leader. He kept repeating, "Lovestone and his bunch do a good job."

And so they did. After that meeting, so did we. We cut the subsidy down, and with the money saved we set up new networks in other international labor organizations. Within two years the free labor movement, still holding its own in France and Italy, was going even better elsewhere.

Looking back now, it seems to me that the argument was largely a waste of time. The only argument that mattered was the one with the Communists for the loyalty of millions of workers. That argument, with the help of Lovestone and Brown, was effectively made.

By 1953 we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field where Communist fronts had previously seized ground, and in some where they had not even begun to operate. The money we spent was very little by Soviet standards. But that was reflected in the first rule of our operational plan: "Limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend." The other rules were equally obvious: "Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy."

Such was the status of the organizational weapon when I left the CIA. No doubt it grew stronger later on, as those who took charge gained experience. Was it a good thing to forge such a weapon? In my opinion then-and now-it was essential.

Was it "immoral," "wrong," "disgraceful"? Only in the sense that war itself is immoral, wrong and disgraceful.

For the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs. And our country has had a clear-cut choice: Either we win the war or lose it. This war is still going on, and I do not mean to imply that we have won it. But we have not lost it either.

It is now 12 years since Winston Churchill accurately defined the world as "divided intellectually and to a large extent geographically between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom." I have heard it said that this definition is no longer accurate. I share the hope that John Kennedy's appeal to the Russians "to help us make the world safe for diversity" reflects the spirit of a new age.

But I am not banking on it, and neither, in my opinion, was the late President. The choice between innocence and power involves the most difficult of decisions. But when an adversary attacks with his weapons disguised as good works, to choose innocence is to choose defeat. So long as the Soviet Union attacks deviously we shall need weapons to fight back, and a government locked in a power struggle cannot acknowledge all the programs it must carry out to cope with its enemies. The weapons we need now cannot, alas, be the same ones that we first used in the 1950's. But the new weapons should be capable of the same affirmative response as the ones we forged 17 years ago, when it seemed that the Communists, unchecked, would win the alliance of most of the world.

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

Edited January 8, 2009 by William Kelly

William Kelly · January 8, 2009

Other than in the hard copy of an original Saturday Review, and the Church Committee Report, can anyone tell me where this article is printed or posted elsewhere, anywhere?

Mockingbird is famous for having their assets write favorable book reviews or leaking certain information, or shaping public perceptions of events, but I think this might be a case of an article being surpressed for what it says. I think it's a remarkable article with many telling tales. This must be the arcticle that they say alienated Allen Dulles and Braden.

If this article is published elsewhere on the internet, I'd like to link to it.

Thanks, BK

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=148755

What's Wrong With The CIA? By Tom Braden [From Saturday Review, April 5, 1975]

We are gathered, four of us CIA division chiefs and deputies, in the office of our agency's director, an urbane and charming man. He is seated at his desk, puffing nervously on his pipe and asking us questions.

Allen W. Dulles is fretting on this morning in the early fifties, as indeed, he has fretted most mornings. You can't be in the middle of building an enormous spy house, running agents into Russia and elsewhere, worrying about Joseph McCarthy, planning to overthrow a government in Guatemala, and helping to elect another in Italy, without fretting.

But on this particular morning, Dulles is due for an appearance before Sen. Richard B. Russell's Armed Services Committee, and the question he is pondering as he puffs on his pipe is whether to tell the senators what is making him fret. He has just spent a lot of money on buying an intelligence network, and the network has turned out to be worthless. In fact, it's a little worse than worthless. All that money, Dulles now suspects, went to the KGB.

Therefore, the questions are somber, and so are the answers. At last, Dulles rises. "Well," he says, "I guess I'll have to fudge the truth a little."

His eyes twinkle at the word fudge, then suddenly turn serious. He twists his slightly stooped shoulders into the old tweed topcoat and heads for the door. But he turns back. "I'll tell the truth to Dick [Russell] he says. "I always do." Then the twinkle returns, and he adds, with a chuckle, "That is, if Dick wants to know."

The reason I recall the above scene in detail is that lately I have been asking myself what's wrong with the CIA. Two committees of Congress and one from the executive branch are asking the question, too. But they are asking out of concern for national policy. I am asking for a different reason. I once worked for the CIA. I regard the time I spent there as worthwhile duty. I look back upon the men with whom I worked as able and honorable. So for me, the question, "What's wrong with the CIA?" is both personal and poignant.

Old friends of mine have been caught in evasions or worse. People I worked with have violated the law. Men whose ability I respected have planned operations that ended in embarrassment or disaster. What's wrong with these people? What's wrong with the CIA?

Ask yourself a question often enough, and sometimes the mind will respond with a memory. The memory my mind reported back is that scene in Allen Dulles' office. It seemed, at first blush, a commonplace, nonconsequential episode. But the more it fixed itself in my mind, the more it seemed to me that it helped to answer my question about what's wrong with the agency. Let me explain.

The first thing this scene reveals is the sheer power that Dulles and his agency had. Only a man with extraordinary power could make a mistake involving a great many of the taxpayers' dollars and not have to explain it. Allen Dulles had extraordinary power.

Power flowed to him, and through him, to the CIA, partly because his brother was Secretary of State, partly because his reputation as the master spy of World War II hung over him like a mysterious halo, partly because his senior partnership in the prestigious New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell impressed the small-town lawyers of Congress.

Moreover, events helped keep power flowing. The country was fighting a shooting war in Korea and a Cold War in Western Europe, and the CIA was sole authority on the plans and potential of the real enemy. To argue against the CIA was to argue against knowledge. Only Joseph McCarthy would run such a risk.

Indeed, McCarthy unwittingly added to the power of the CIA. He attacked the agency and when, in the showdown, Dulles won, his victory vastly increased the respectability of what people then called "the cause" of anti-communism. "Don't join the book burners," Eisenhower had said. That was the bad way to fight communism. The good way was the CIA.

Power was the first thing that went wrong with the CIA. There was too much of it, and it was too easy to bring to bear – on the State Department, on other government agencies, on the patriotic businessmen of New York, and on the foundations whose directorships they occupied. The agency's power overwhelmed the Congress, the press, and therefore the people.

I'm not saying that this power didn't help win the Cold War, and I believe the Cold War was a good war to win. But the power enabled the CIA to continue Cold War operations 10 and 15 years after the Cold War was won. Under Allen Dulles the power was unquestioned, and after he left, the habit of not questioning remained.

I remember the time I walked over to the State Department to get formal approval for some CIA project involving a few hundred thousand dollars and a publication in Europe. The desk man at the State Department balked. Imagine. He balked – and at an operation designed to combat what I knew for certain was a similar Soviet operation. I was astonished. But I didn't argue. I knew what would happen. I would report to the director, who would get his brother on the phone: "Foster, one of your people seems to be a little less than cooperative." That is power.

The second thing that's wrong with the CIA is arrogance, and the scene I've mentioned above shows that, too. Allen Dulles's private joke about "fudging" was arrogant, and so was the suggestion that "Dick" might not want to know. An organization that does not have to answer for mistakes is certain to become arrogant.

It is not a cardinal sin, this fault, and sometimes it squints toward virtue. It might be argued, for example, that only arrogant men would insist on building the U-2 spy plane within a time frame which the military experts said could not be met. Yet in the days before satellite surveillance, the U-2 spy plane was the most useful means of keeping the peace. It assured this country's leaders that Russia was not planning an attack. But if arrogance built the plane quickly, it also destroyed it. For surely it was arrogant to keep it flying through Soviet airspace after it was suspected that the Russians were literally zeroing in on overflying U-2s.

I wonder whether the arrogance of the CIA may not have been battlefield-related – a holdover from World War II machismo and derring-do. The leaders of the agency were, almost to a man, veterans of OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor. Take, for example, the men whose faces I now recall, standing there in the director's office.

One had run a spy-and-operations network into German from German-occupied territory. Another had volunteered to parachute into Field Marshall Kesselring's headquarters grounds with terms for his surrender. A third had crash-landed in Norway and, having lost half his men, came up, nevertheless, blowing up bridges.

OSS men who became CIA men were unusual people who had volunteered to carry out unusual orders and to take unusual risks. More over, they were impressed, more than most soldiers can be impressed, with the absolute necessity for secrecy and the certainly penalty that awaited the breach of it.

But they had another quality that set them apart. For some reason that psychologists could perhaps explain, a man who volunteers to go on an extremely dangerous mission, alone or with two or three helpers, is likely to be not only brave and resourceful but also somewhat vain. Relatively few men volunteered to jump into German or Japanese territory during World War II. Those who did volunteer were conscious that they were, in a word, "different."

Once these men had landed behind the lines, the difference took on outward symbols. They were alone, Americans in a country full of French or Greek or Italian or Chinese. Often they were treated with great respect. Sometimes, as mere lieutenants, they commanded thousands of men. At a word from them, American or British planes came over to drop supplies to these men. They earned the love and respect that conquered people felt for the great democracy called America. Inevitably, they began to think of themselves individually and collectively as representing the national honor.

Is it not possible that men who have learned to do everything in secrecy, who are accustomed to strange assignments, and who think of themselves as embodying their country, are peculiarly susceptible to imperial Presidencies such as those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon? Have they not in fact trained themselves to behave as a power elite?

To power and arrogance add the mystique of the inside-outside syndrome. That scene in the director's office defines the problem. Dulles was leveling with his assistants, and they were leveling with him. An agent or a station chief or an official of the CIA who didn't level – who departed the slightest degree from a faithful account of what he knew or what he had done – was a danger to operations and to lives. Such a man couldn't last a day in the CIA.

But truth was reserved for the inside. To the outsider, CIA men learned to lie, to lie consciously and deliberately without the slightest twinge of the guilt that most men feel when they tell a deliberate lie.

The inside-outside syndrome is unavoidable in a secret intelligence agency. You bring a group of people together, bind them with an oath, test their loyalty periodically with machines, spy on them to make sure they're not meeting secretly with someone from the Czech Embassy, cushion them from the rest of the world with a false cover story, teach them to lie because lying is in the national interest, and they do not behave like other men.

They do not come home from work and answer truthfully the question, "What did you do today, darling?" When they chat with their neighbors, they lie about their jobs. In their compartmentalized, need-to-know jobs, it is perfectly excusable for one CIA man to like to another if the other doesn't need to know.

Thus it was ritual for Allen Dulles to "fudge," and often he didn't have to. Senator Russell might say, "The chairman has conferred with the director about this question, which touches a very sensitive matter." The question would be withdrawn.

Another technique for dealing with an outsider was the truthful non-response. Consider the following exchange between Sen. Claiborne Pell (D. R.I.) and Richard Helms. (The Exchange was concerned with spying on Americans, an illegal act under the terms of the law that created the CIA.)

Senator Pell (referring to spying on antiwar demonstrations):

"But those all occurred within the continental shores of the Untied States and for that reason you had the justifiable reason to decline [to] move in there because the events were outside your ambit."

Mr. Helms: "Absolutely, and I have never been lacking in clarity in my mind since I have been director, that this is simply not acceptable not only to Congress but to the public of the United States."

No doubt that answer was truthful. No doubt Helms did think that domestic spying was not acceptable. But he was doing it, and he didn't say he wasn't.

Finally, of course, there is the direct lie. Here is another excerpt from 1973 testimony by Helms:

Senator Symington (D. Mo.): "Did you try, in the Central Intelligence Agency, to overthrow the government of Chile?"

Helms: "No, Sir."

Symington: "Did you have any money passed to the opponents of Allende?"

Helms: "No, Sir."

Helms was under oath. Therefore, he must have considered his answer carefully. Obviously, he came to the insider's conclusion: that his duty to protect the inside outweighed his outsider's oath. Or to put it another way, the law of the inside comes first.

Allen Dulles once remarked that if necessary, he would like to anybody about the CIA except the President. "I never had the slightest qualms about lying to an outsider," a CIA veteran remarked recently. "Why does an outsider need to know?"

So much for the lessons of memory. Power, arrogance, and the inside-outside syndrome are what's wrong with the CIA, and to some extent, the faults are occupational and even necessary tools for the job.

But the events of the Cold War and the coincidence of Allen Dulles' having such enormous discretionary powers enlarged occupational risks until they became faults, and the faults created a monstrosity.

Power built a vast bureaucracy and a ridiculous monument in Langley, Va. Arrogance fostered the belief that a few hundred exiles could land on a beach and hold off Castro's army.

The inside-outside syndrome withheld the truth from Adlai Stevenson so that he was forced to make a spectacle of himself on the floor of the United Nations by denying that the United States had anything to do with the invasion of Cuba. The same syndrome has made a sad and worried man of Richard Helms.

It's a shame what happened to the CIA. It could have consisted of a few hundred scholars to analyze intelligence, a few hundred spies in key positions, and a few hundred operators ready to carry out rare tasks of derring-do.

Instead, it became a gargantnan monster, owning properly all over the world, running airplanes and newspapers and radio stations and banks and armies and navies, offering temptation to successive Secretaries of State, and giving at least one President a brilliant idea; Since the machinery for deceit existed, why not use it?

Richard Helms should have said no to Richard Nixon. But as a victim of the inside-outside syndrome, Helms could only ask Watergate's most plaintive question: "Who would have thought that it would someday be judged a crime to carry out the orders of the President of the United States?"

A shame – and a peculiarly American shame. For this is the only country in the world which doesn't recognize the fact that some things are better if they are small.

We'll need intelligence in the future. And once in a while, once in a great while, we may need cover action, too. But, at the moment, we have nothing. The revelations of Watergate and the investigations that have followed have done their work. The CIA's power is gone. Its arrogance has turned to fear. The inside-outside syndrome has been broken. Former agents write books naming other agents. Director William Colby goes to the Justice Department with evidence that his predecessor violated the law. The house that Allen Dulles built is divided and torn.

The end is not in sight. Various committees now investigating the agency will doubtless find error. They will recommend change, they will reshuffle, they will adjust. But they will leave the monster intact, and even if the monster never makes another mistake, never again over-reaches itself – even, indeed, if like some other government agencies, it never does anything at all – it will, by existing, go right on creating and perpetuating the myths that always accompanied the presence of the monster.

We know the myths. They circulate throughout the land wherever there are bars and bowling alleys: that the CIA killed John Kennedy; that the CIA crippled George Wallace; that an unexplained airplane crash, a big gold heist, were all the work of the CIA.

These myths are ridiculous, but they will exist as long as the monster exists.

The fact that millions believe the myths raises once again the old question which OSS men used to argue after the war: Can a free and open society engage in covert operations?

After nearly 30 years of trial, the evidence ought to be in. The evidence demonstrates, it seems to me, that a free and open society cannot engage in covert operations – not, at any rate, in the kind of large, intricate covert operations of which the CIA has been capable.

I don't argue solely from the box score. But let's look at the box score. It reveals many famous failures. Too easily, they prove the point. Consider what the CIA deems is known successes: Does anybody remember Arbenz in Guatemala? What good was achieved by the overthrow of Arbenz? Would it really have made any difference to this country if we hadn't overthrown Arbenz?

And Allende? How much good did it do the American people to overthrow Allende? How much bad?

Was it essential – even granted the sticky question of succession – to keep those Greek colonels in power for so long?

We used to think that it was a great triumph that the CIA kept the Shah of Iran on his throne against the onslaught of Mossadegh. Are we grateful still?

The uprisings during the last phase of the Cold War, and those dead bodies on the streets of Poland, East Germany, and Hungry: to what avail?

But the box score does not tell the whole story. We paid a high price for that box score. Shame and embarrassment is a high price? Doubt, mistrust, and fear is a high price. The public myths are a high price, and so is the guilty knowledge that we own an establishment devoted to opposing the ideals we profess.

In our midst, we have maintained a secret instrument erected in contradiction to James Madison's injunction: "A popular government without the means to popular information is a farce or a tragedy, perhaps both."

As I say, the investigating committees will prop the monster up. I would suggest more radical action. I would shut it down. I would turn the overt intelligence functions over to the State Department. Scholars and scientists and people who understand how the railroads run in Sri Lanka don't need to belong to the CIA in order to do their valuable work well.

I would turn the paratroopers over to the Army. If, at some time, it becomes essential to our survival to mount a secret attack upon a foe, the army is capable of doing it, and, with some changes in command structure in order to bypass bureaucracy, the army could do it as swiftly and secretly as the CIA. Under the command structure of the Department of Defense, congressional oversight would be possible. Then, if the army got caught fielding a secret division in Laos, and if the American people did not want a secret division in Laos, the American people would know where to turn.

I would turn the psychological warriors and propagandists over to the Voice of America. Psychological warriors and propagandists probably never did belong in a secret agency.

And, last, I would choose a very few men to run spies and such covert operations as the passage of money to those in other lands who cannot afford to accept American support openly. But I would limit covert operations to passing money to "friendlies."

I would house these spy masters and money-passers in some obscure tool shed, and I would forbid, by law, any of them from ever calling himself "director." They would not work for the CIA. Because I would abolish the name CIA.

As their chief, the President should chose a term of six years some civilian who has demonstrated staunchness of character and independence of mind. I would make him responsible to a joint committee of Congress, as well as to the President, and I would not permit him to serve more than one term.

Thus, we might get rid of power. Without power, arrogance would not be dangerous. Thus, too, we could prevent the inside-outside syndrome, so essential to secrecy, from making a mockery of representative government.

As for the house that Allen Dulles built at Langley, we might leave it standing empty, our only national monument to the value that democracy places upon the recognition and correction of a mistake.

Edited January 8, 2009 by William Kelly

William Kelly · January 10, 2009

I'm kinda dissapointed that nobody thinks this article What's Wrong With The CIA? is important.

It touches on Dulles, his power, his background, the OSS, the use of covert ops, how his deputies worked together and why Congress should abolish the CIA.

And then there's Halpern's statement to the Church Committee on why they should outlaw covert operations.

When somebody wants to read and discuss these two imporant, and I believed surpressed articles, please let me know.

BK

John Simkin · January 10, 2009

I'm kinda dissapointed that nobody thinks this article What's Wrong With The CIA? is important.
It touches on Dulles, his power, his background, the OSS, the use of covert ops, how his deputies worked together and why Congress should abolish the CIA.

And then there's Halpern's statement to the Church Committee on why they should outlaw covert operations.

Tom Braden is an interesting case. Up until the mid-1970s Braden gave his full support to the CIA. However, in June 1975 he gave a television interview to the UK television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA. It included the following:

It never had to account for the money it spent except to the President if the President wanted to know how much money it was spending. But otherwise the funds were not only unaccountable, they were unvouchered, so there was really no means of checking them - "unvouchered funds" meaning expenditures that don't have to be accounted for.... If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe - a Labour leader - suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... I don't mean to imply that there were a great many of them that were handed out as Christmas presents. They were handed out for work well performed or in order to perform work well.... Politicians in Europe, particularly right after the war, got a lot of money from the CIA....

Since it was unaccountable, it could hire as many people as it wanted. It never had to say to any committee - no committee said to it - "You can only have so many men." It could do exactly as it pleased. It made preparations therefore for every contingency. It could hire armies; it could buy banks. There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war - the secret war.... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first.

Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target - that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money. They set up a successful communist labor union in France right after the war. We countered it with Force Ouvriere. They set up this very successful communist labor union in Italy, and we countered it with another union.... We had a vast project targeted on the intellectuals - "the battle for Picasso's mind," if you will. The communists set up fronts which they effectively enticed a great many particularly the French intellectuals to join. We tried to set up a counterfront. (This was done through funding of social and cultural organizations such as the Pan-American Foundation, the International Marketing Institute, the International Development Foundation, the American Society of African Culture, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom.) I think the budget for the Congress of Cultural Freedom one year that I had charge of it was about $800,000, $900,000, which included, of course, the subsidy for the Congress's magazine, Encounter. That doesn't mean that everybody that worked for Encounter or everybody who wrote for Encounter knew anything about it. Most of the people who worked for Encounter and all but one of the men who ran it had no idea that it was paid for by the CIA.

This program caused a great deal of controversy as it was the first time a CIA official admitted that they had used funds to influence political elections in the UK.

This television program was followed by the Saturday Review article posted above. This gave Braden the reputation for being on the left. In 1978 Braden began co-hosting the Buchanan-Braden Program, a three-hour daily radio show with conservative Patrick Buchanan. Later he also worked with Buchanan on the CNN program Crossfire.

Although Braden's role in the programs was promoted as representing the political left, some critics have questioned this label. Media critic Jeff Cohen argued in "I'm Not a Leftist, But I Play One on TV": "Take Crossfire, started by CNN in 1982 as the only nightly forum on national TV purporting to offer an ideological battle between co-hosts of left and right. Crossfire's co-host "on the left" for the first seven years was a haplessly ineffectual centrist, Tom Braden, a guy who makes Alan Colmes look like an ultraleft firebrand. In CNN's eyes, Braden apparently earned his leftist credentials by having been a high-level CIA official - ironically enough, in charge of covert operations against the political left of Western Europe." Timothy Leary told a reporter that watching Crossfire was like "watching the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA".

Thomas Braden CIA

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