BEAT THE DEVIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: August 13, 1990
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S1 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
BEAT THE DEVIL.
Fathers and Sons
I'd just been reading an interview with Justice Brennan
in Irish America when news came that he was hanging up
his robes. Brennan's reminiscences are laced with a sense
of history, a sympathy for the travails of ordinary humans.
The younger crowd on the Court doesn't look as if it spends
much time thinking about how life looks from the bottom of
the barrel.
Brennan described how his father, an Irish immigrant, got
a job shoveling coal at Ballantine's brewery in Newark. He
soon found that conditions were very bad for the workers
there, so "he started organizing within Ballantine's and then
spread around to the other breweries around the city. Remem-
ber, there were no trade laws to help you in those days. You
just had to fight your way through."
Brennan's father did well enough in this strike that he began
to rise in the ranks of organized labor around Newark. Then
came a statewide trolley strike, eventually broken because the
police moved at the behest of the McCarter family who, as
Brennan recalls, "really ran the state." In an effort to head
off a more sweeping onslaught on their power the city bigwigs
named Brennan's father a police commissioner, but "he
promptly showed where he stood in the labor disputes and
then that led to one fight after another." In the end he and his
comrades "swept away the whole government," and he wound
up running the Department of Public Safety. This paradigm,
that justice exists to serve everyone, has stuck with Brennan
all his life.
Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun all turned 21 around the
time of the stock market crash of 1929 and spent their early
professional years watching the Depression gnaw through the
country. Marshall's father, William, the grandson of a slave,
was a yacht club steward. Blackmun's father ran a grocery and
hardware store in St. Paul. His son has recalled that they lived
in a blue-collar neighborhood and "because I grew up in poor
surroundings, I know there's another world out there that we
sometimes forget about:' (Goldberg and Fortas, two liberal
Justices who left the Court, were also in this age bracket.
Goldberg, one of eleven children, was the son of a Russian
Jewish immigrant who sold vegetables from the back of a
wagon. Fortas was an English cabinetmaker's son.)
The next cohort of Justices are White, Stevens and Rehn-
quist, born respectively in 1917, 1920 and 1924. White, a law-
and-order judge, had a dad in the notoriously antiunion
lumber business. Alpha White also served as Mayor of Wel-
lington, Colorado. Stevens, somewhat of a liberal individual-
ist, was the son of a wealthy businessman in Chicago. Chief
Justice Rehnquist spent his childhood in a well-to-do suburb
of Milwaukee (which had a socialist mayor in the 1930s). His
father was a wholesale paper salesman who never attended
college. His mother had a bachelor's degree and together with
her husband instilled in the children reverence for the views
of Alf Landon and Herbert Hoover.
Reagan's appointees-O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy-
all came of age in the swell of the Eisenhower fifties, when
the tide still purported to lift all boats. O'Connor's father
The Washington Post
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Wail Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
'(he 1-lAioal p.l:Stl
Date "s} 1 0
was a rancher in the Southwest. (The head on this item is
intended to evoke Turgenev's great novel, though proper-
ly, as I'm sure many are eager to point out, it should be Fa-
thers and Sons and Daughter.) Scalia's father, Eugene, was
a professor of romance languages who had immigrated from
Italy, and Kennedy's old man was a Catholic Republican
lawyer and lobbyist well known in Sacramento.
Souter? He reached maturity in the year that Nixon lost to
Kennedy, and his father was a banker. The family moved from
Massachusetts to Republican New Hampshire. For liberals
it doesn't look good, unless Souter despised his father as
a Nixon man and, if confirmed, will spend the next half-
century getting his own back. He seems profoundly repressed
and, who knows, could explode into judicial activism. In my
view the great loss to the Court was Douglas
Ginsburg, that child of the sixties who left col-
lege to run a dating service and smoked at
least one joint at Harvard. His father, Mau-
rice, was a mortgage financier, which always
gives one insight into the human condition.
Guiltlessly Guilty
On Friday, June 29, The New York limes ran a photograph
with its lead editorial: a jubilant contra bathed in the smiles
of Obando y Bravo and Violeta Chamorro. The headline
announced, "The Contra War, 1981-1990." Two weeks later
contras were battling Sandinista strikers.
The editorial said Washington had been "ensnared in hor-
rors like assassination manuals, the clandestine mining of
Nicaraguan harbors and the still-reverberating Iran-contra
scandal" This is like some old Nazi editorialist on Goebbels's
Das Reich saying that Germany was "ensnared" in World
War II and accompanying war crimes.
Guilt is not part of the imperial character profile. Moscow
News for June 3 had a pleasant interview with William Colby,
who was in Moscow at a press seminar organized by New York
University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media, a
dreadful gaggle of self-seekers. In its introduction to the
interview, conducted by Andrei Bezruchenko and Wendy
Sloane. Moscow News says of Colby that "his tenure with the
CIA was marked by tension over Vietnam" The questioning
is equally fiery:
MN: Were there times when you felt any personal conflict
between what the government told you to do and what you
wanted to do?
Colby: No, I could work it out.
CONTINUED
Pans 12
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
IQ.
At least he didn't say he was "ensnared" into running the
Phoenix program, by which at least 20,000 Vietnamese were
assassinated.
MN: So the Vietnam war as an idea was correct?
Colby: Yeah. We did it wrong, we did it wrong. I think we
should have been supporting the people in the villages against
the so-called people's war and we really insisted on fighting
a soldier's war.
If I had a rocket launcher ...
Fathers and Guardians
In the same year, 1948, that the young Colby was helping
his boss, C.I.A. founder William Donovan, protect the mur-
derers of CBS reporter George Polk, three left journalists,
Cedric Belfrage, James Aronson and John T McManus were
founding the National Guardian. Belfrage and Aronson had
met in Germany, where they were trying to carry out Eisen-
hower's orders to set up a post-Nazi German press with peo-
ple who had resisted fascism. Of course such resisters included
German Communists.
Since the actual purpose of postwar U.S. policy, set by
George Kennan and other such heroes of Moscow News and
the N.Y.U. center, was to make sure that West Germany was
not de-Nazified in any meaningful sense of the word, Belfrage
and Aronson's efforts later counted against them, as did the
existence of the National Guardian, which along with Month-
ly Review (begun in 1949) was a lonely voice in those days.
At the high crest of McCarthyism, Belfrage, a British citizen,
was deported. He eventually settled in Cuernavaca, where he
died on June 21 at the age of 85.
1 never had the good fortune to meet him. To a fundraiser
for The Guardian in San Francisco in 1988 at which I was a
speaker, he sent this message: "Your celebration means a lot
to me as the first editor of The Guardian. I was particularly
glad to hear from John [Trinklj that your speaker tonight is
Alexander Cockburn ... because he is the son of my old
friend Claud, who can also take some credit for tonight's
affair. For in the early Hitler years before World War II, when
I was a respectably non-political movie critic in London, I was
one of many journalists and others influenced toward the left
by Claud. I truly believe that had I not got to know Claud at
that time, the Guardian might never have been launched-
at least not by me as one of the founding trio:'
Something else to blame the old dad for. In Britain, which
remains obsessed with spies to the exclusion of all else, there
is a vigorous industry of parahistorians trying to prove that
Comrade C was the Comintern "control" for Roger Hollis,
head of British counterintelligence. Peter Wright's book, Spy-
catcher, is mostly about the efforts of a particularly crazed
faction inside the British security establishment to prove
Hollis's treachery.
Wright thought it enough to point out that Hollis and
Cockburn had attended Oxford at about the same time in
the early 1920s, as if that were conclusive evidence of some
later partnership in remitting secrets to Moscow. Another of
Wright's suspects, also at Oxford in the early 1920s, was Mau-
rice Richardson, a longtime TV critic for The Observer. A
great comic writer. I still steal his jokes occasionally. Some-
one here should reissue his Exploits of Engelbrecht the Dwarf,
a masterpiece of the comic surreal. One of the stories has
Earth fielding its all-star team in a rugby game against Mars.
Marx is at scrum half, shouting "Heel you Tex els, heel in the
name of History!"
So at the age of 19 or so Richardson and Cockburn were
supposedly already carrying forward Moscow's fell program.
When the stuff about Hollis began to come up publicly in
1981, shortly before my father died, he tried to explain to ex-
cited journalists phoning Ardmore from London that, unlike
his schoolfriend Graham Greene, who had joined the party
briefly at some amazingly young age, at Oxford he himself
was still of soundly conventional views and was, indeed to his
shame, on the wrong side of the barricades in the Great Strike
of 1926. He did know Hollis's brother Chris very well, but
not Roger, who came up to Oxford three years after him-
an immense gulf given the rigid cohorts of that time.
None of this did him much good, since in these matters
crazed spy-hunters merely say that scabbing in 1926 was
"cover," thus confirming their suspicions. But if indeed my
father was Roger Hollis's "contact" in the postwar period the
men in Moscow chose a complicated way of getting in touch
with their supposed creature Hollis. We lived in rural Ireland
without a phone and he would have had to receive and relay
Moscow's commands from the call box of one of the pubs
in town where, as always in Ireland, people are under close
surveillance. There was a Catholic zealot who used to drink
in The Nook, at the bottom of Church Street in Youghal, who
believed that my father and Willie French, the sexton at the
Protestant church up the hill, were adepts in Freemasonry
and used The Nook to advance conspiracy. One time he saw
Willie slip a paper into my father's overcoat pocket and
promptly called the Gardai, who came and said that maybe
things would quiet down if my father showed what exactly it
was that Willie had given him. My father dragged out the
paper from his pocket, a bit awkwardly because Willie was
not only the sexton but the local process server, and the imag-
ined agenda of Freemasonry was actually a writ to appear in
court for nonpayment of bills.
I gather that now the same gang boosting the Cockburn-
Hollis connection are saying that Belfrage was similarly Mos-
cow's pawn in espionage. Since the man is dead it's easy to
say it. In my father's case, when the war was over he left the
Daily Worker without undue fuss and headed to Ireland to
begin a new phase of his life writing fiction. Stalin was busy
shooting his close friends like Mikhail Koltzov, and another
buddy, Otto Katz, was hanged in Prague, saying before his
death that he had been led into the path of counterrevolution
by Colonel Claud Cockburn of the M.I.S. My father said he
reckoned Katz had been asked to denounce someone and
thought that Claud was unlikely to suffer painful conse-
quences if Katz gave his name to the executioners.
CONTINUED
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
When Belfrage was battling deportation he addressed a
rally in the following terms:
Let us not be blind to the fact that the majority of Americans
are under the spell of a few men who rule their destinies and
mold their minds-and these rulers and molders can only be
properly described as know-nothings who make glory out of
knowing nothing, because to know is to shatter the entire edi-
fice of fraud that has been built up.
Belfrage tried to let people know. These days I think that
mostly they do know. They know it's all an edifice of fraud
and are just awaiting some good ideas on what to do about it.
^ A Nod's as Good as a Wink
"We want to emphasize once again in the strongest possi
ble terms that the CIA neither engages in nor condones drug
trafficking" Joseph DeTrani, director of public affairs for
the C.I.A., was compelled to release that statement after re-
cent developments in the Los Angeles trial of four men ac-
cused of involvement in the 1985 murder of drug agent
Enrique Camarena.
Defense lawyers forced the U.S. government to hand over
brutg Enforcement Administration reports regarding Law-
rence Victor Harrison, a witness who worked for major
Mexican drug traffickers. Harrison had told the D.E.A. he
had heard that in the early 1980s guerrillas-presumably
contras-were trained at a ranch in Mexico owned by drug
lord Rafael Caro Quintero, now imprisoned in Mexico for
participating in the Camarena murder. Harrison further
said the camp was watched over by Mexico's corrupt and
powerful Federal Security Directorate and sponso
the C.I.A.
Harrison's information is secondhand and he's not a model
citizen, so DeTrani can get away with denying that the
agency used Mexico as a training site for contras and col-
luded with drug traffickers there. But the general thrust of
his denial-that the C.I.A. would not involve itself with drug
smugglers-is contradicted by the public record. Leaving aside
the well-hashed Noriega connection, let's review some old
evidence.
In February 1986, Robert Owen, Oliver North's courier to
the contras, wrote North: "No doubt you know the DC-4
Foley got was used at one time to run drugs, and part of the
crew had criminal records. Nice group the Boys choose."
Owen later testified that he was referring to a plane used to
fly supplies to the contras, that Foley was someone with "con-
nections with a cover ment aencv" and that "the Bovs"
meant the C.I.A.
During hearings conducted by Senator John Kerry in 1988
former C.I.A.-assisted contras testified that they had a symbi-
otic relationship with traffickers. Karol Prado said the rebels
in the Southern Front provided fuel to drug-ferrying pilots
who used contra airstrips. Octaviano Cesar maintained that
C.I.A. and U.S. military officials told him it was O.K. to ac-
cent auistance from a known drug trafficker "as long as we
don't deal with the powder."
3.
Then there's the testimony of the C.I.A: s own Joseph Fer-
nandez, who served as chief of station in Costa Rica and
waked on the contra progtam. He told the Iran/contra com-
mitteei that Company policy was to stay away from drug-
taimed individuals. But, he added, there was "one exception
to that, and that was a matter of higher authority over me."
In that instance the "higher authority" ordered Fernandez to
keep working with persons who he believed were involved in
the drug trade.
DeTrani's statement could well be truthful, in a crafty fash-
ion. C.I.A. officials probably don't engage in drug dealing
themselves. But the evidence clearly suggests some have an
uncommon ability to work or, at the least, coexist with
drugrunners-in pursuit, of course, of larger interests.
^ In for a Penny, in for a Billion
The Air Force recently engaged in some fancy rhetorical
footwork of its own. In response to a report from the Union
of Concerned Scientists criticizing the B-2 Stealth bomber for
having "no compelling mission" and being "unaffordable,"
the Air Force fired back a rebuttal, which it sent to every mem-
ber of Congress. The Air Force's argument-and the fact that
it responded-signal its desperation:
Certainly it is not hard to understand why some deem the B-2
as unaffordable because its cost is high and easily measured.
The best way to think about cost, however, is to focus on what
we can affect from today forward.
Why is that the best? Because more than one-half of the
S62 billion total estimated cost of the B-2 program has already
been "jxrvested:' If B-2 production funds are eliminated after
1990 the Air Force will be left, after an "investment" of $35.4
billion, with a measly fifteen aircraft, sixty short of what cur-
rent plans call for-"almost no combat capability." The next
sixty, the Air Force notes, will cost only $25.7 billion (that is,
if there are no cost overruns). Don't cry over spilled billions,
the service suggests. At less than $500 million a bird, the B-2
program is now a steal, and no longer the most expensive
weapons program.
^ Good Point-Now Torn Over All Your Records
In May the National Agenda for Peace in El Salvador, a
Washington-based group of U.S. activists and church groups,
ran an ad in The Washington Pbst calling for a suspension
of aid to El Salvador. Sixty-eight prominent Americans signed
the ad, including eighteen Episcopal, Lutheran and Catho-
lic bishops, Coretta Scott King and former New Mexico
Governor Toney Anaya. A month later, the group heard back
from the Bush Administration, via a letter from the Justice
Department's criminal division. The letter stated that the ad
"indicates that you are engaged in publicity activities on be-
half of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front," the
Marxist guerrillas, and therefore the group might have to
register as a foreign agent. The letter asked that National
Agenda provide the Justice Department with information on
CONTINUED
5v
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0
Y.
its activities and declare whether it is "directed, controlled,
financed or subsidized" by a foreign entity. The apparent
reasoning underlying the letter: Americans who oppose the
Administration must be fronting for a foreign group. National
Agenda says it has no financial or organizational ties with the
F.M.L.N., and the Justice Department doesn't suggest it
possesses evidence to the contrary. The American Civil Lib-
erties Union, which believes the government's action is un-
precedented, has asked the department to rescind its request,
arguing that demanding such information in response to an
act of political speech violates the First Amendment. A Jus-
tire Department spokesperson said the request was "fairly
routine:'
5,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/15: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150006-0