COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN: THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

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?
INFORMATION BXJLT TIN
Number 19 Spring-Summer 1983 $3.00
The CIA and the Media
Who Is
Yuri Andropovi
HUIIMII Evi
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Moscow Plotted Assassinations
is each Castros -nner circle
Admits Drug Smugghn
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Washington
Inquirer
CIA - Sato `' 7 --
new of
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a
certain Bulgar
plan to kill Pope
Did Andropov
lot Pope's
Murder?
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Editorial
Three years have passed since we last devoted an issue to
the ties between the media and the intelligence complex.
The need for such scrutiny now, we believe, is greater than
ever, and this entire special issue deals with the subject.
As the U.S. government sinks deeper into an ideological
morass, the watchdog role of the press becomes that much
more important. Yet we see complacency rather than skep-
ticism. The country is being run by people who lie un-
ashamedly; yet most of the media wag their tails and accept
everything. Cabinet officers who assert that Grenada is a
threat to the national security of the United States should
be laughed off the podium; senior military and CIA offi-
cials who fear an imminent invasion from the Peoples
Republic of Mexico should be retired. Yet it seems that the
administration can say almost anything and be taken se-
riously by a large segment of the Fourth Estate.
We do not demean the efforts of the excellent investiga-
tive journalists of both the print and electronic media
who have helped to expose some of the more outrageous
abuses of this government, especially the illegal war against
Nicaragua. Indeed it is amazing, considering the way the
deck is stacked against them, that they can expose any-
thing. Truly, the administration holds almost all the cards.
They can manipulate through selective background brief-
ings and orchestrated leaks in a way that very few honest
journalists can combat.
Mo;t people in the media have not spoken out. When the
present government seems hellbent on pouring many mil-
lions into the coffers of every fascist dictator in the world,
on arming and financing regimes responsible for torture,
disappearances, and thousands of deaths, on flagrantly
breaking both U.S. and international law as a matter of
course, the media must be intensely critical, not insuffera-
bly fawning. When someone lies outrageously, you have to
say so, whether the speaker is the President or a famous
foreign correspondent. Many journalists who accept ev-
ery foolish bureaucratic utterance should know better;
some, unfortunately, do know beter. Some unwittingly
spread administration disinformation; some create it. In
this special issue of CA/B, we study the complex problem
of disinformation from a number of perspectives. We in-
clude a comprehensive historical overview by William
Preston and Ellen Ray and several current examples. We
are especially pleased to present the devastating analysis by
Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead of the "plot" to kill
the Pope, exposing in meticulous detail a major current
disinformation operation. We also review the new book by
Georgie Anne Geyer, a leading disinformationist, and we
dissect the media operation which the Reagan administra-
tion is mounting against Grenada. We present, after a
long absence from these pages, Philip Agee's detective
work which led to the exposure of a CIA wolf in journalist's
clothing. And we conclude with news notes and Ken Law-
rence's Sources and Methods column, all devoted to the
media and intelligence operations. We hope that journal-
ists are vigilant in rejecting the pressures to spread disin-
formation; we hope that our readers will be relentless in
exposing it. 0
Table of Contents
Editorial
2
Grenada; Reagan's Big Lie
29
Disinformation and Deception
3
The Journalist Spy
33
The "'Plot" Against the Pope
13
News Notes
35
Georgie Anne Geyer
25
Sources and Methods
40
Cover Art by Johanna Vogelsang.
Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 19, Spring-Summer 1983, published by Covert Action Publications. Inc., a District of Columbia
Nonprofit Corporation, P.O. Box 50272, Washington, DC 20004; telephone [phone]. All rights reserved; copyright ?1983 by Covert Action
Publications, Inc. Typography by Art for People, Washington, DC; printing by Faculty Press, Brooklyn, NY. Washington staff: Clarence Lusane, Ellen
Ray, William Schaap, Louis Wolf. Board of Advisers: Philip Agee, Ken Lawrence, Elsie Wilcott, Jim Wilcott. Indexed in the Alternative Press Index.
ISSN 0275-309X.
2 CovertAction Number 19 (Spring-Summer 1983)
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Disinformation and Mass Deception:
Democracy as a Cover Story
By William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray*
During World War 1, the atrocity story came into its own
as an instrument of foreign policy. In those simpler days,
governments could turn public opinion against the enemy
with tales of individual brutality: the rape of a nun, the
bayonetting of a baby, or the execution of a Red Cross
nurse. Such propaganda externalized the issues and fo-
cused national attention on an appropriate scapegoat.
Doubters or dissenters were swept aside in the patriotic
fallout, in an emotional downpour that insisted, "Once at
war, to reason is treason."
This crude propaganda, however, had a temporary, war-
related quality which often foundered on its own exaggera-
tions. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been
obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of in-
formation in peacetime just as in war; nor had deception,
secrecy, and lying come to be so much a part of the national
menu as to be swallowed whole like the junk food that
satiates the public appetite. Today there is no better exam-
ple of the corrupted circumstances that now confront the
consumer of news than the undercover campaign of official
disinformation about Cuba.
Having failed to restore its hegemony over Cuba in the
Bay of Pigs invasion or in the long, secret war waged under
the code name "Operation Mongoose," the United States
Central Intelligence Agency recently stepped up its 20-year
psychological warfare operations to discredit and destroy
the Cuban government and any other Latin American or
Caribbean government which stands in ideological unity
with them. Propaganda aimed at that small, struggling
country intentionally manipulates emotions of horror, re-
vulsion, and fear in the uninformed citizen of the Yankee
Colossus. Cuba is falsely pictured by the U.S. as embracing
in its foreign policy the contemporary apocalyptic trio:
drugs, criminality, and terrorism-a far more terrible spec-
tre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I
propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gang-
sterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba
throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the
American public.
*William Preston, Jr. is President of the Fund for Open Information and
Accountability, Inc. (FOIA, Inc.) and Chair of the History Department of
John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City: Ellen Ray is
editor of the FOIA, Inc. newsletter, Our Right to Know, and co-editor of
CovertAetion Information Bulletin.
Number 19 (Spring-Summer 1983)
Cuba as scapegoat and Fidel Castro as the implacable
enemy of world national security interests have become
easy answers for the complex realities of hemispheric
change. And the sophisticated techniques with which offi-
cial information about Cuba is concealed, denied, created,
regulated, shaped, and planted seem to have heightened
public acceptance of the Big Lie.
While a shoot-out at credibility gap might not rescue the
truth about Cuba from the hands of its abductors, a histor-
ical perspective of official U.S. deception operations
against its own people might at least innoculate some
against further ravages of this advancing affliction.
The Overt Era of Information Abuse, 1898-1945
No one with any knowledge of governments would ever
insist there was a utopian past. Governments have always
monitored dissent to impose their version of events on the
public consciousness, to control the circulation of hostile
opinion, and to manage the news. Secrecy always had a
place, as had executive privilege. But the First Amendment
guarantees, as well as the separation and checking of pow-
ers, seemed designed to limit the U.S. government's inherent
tendency to manipulate information for its own interest.
But as we shall see, this is not the case.
During and after the Civil War, while not engaging in
deliberate deception, the government nevertheless insisted
on "codes of press behavior" (the same which we criticize
UNESCO and Third World nations for daring to put forth
in the New International Information Order) and could
classify information as too poisonous to circulate if judged
"incendiary," "seditious," "treasonable," "immoral," "in-
decent," or "obscene."
The buildup of the North American Empire, then, added
a new dimension of danger for information. During the
Spanish-American War, the brutal military mop-up
against the "rebels" in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and
Cuba involved secret planning, undercover operations,
and premeditated coverups in the face of public and Con-
gressional opposition.
It was the first World War, however, that led the U.S. to
move beyond censorship and overt suppression into the
heady realm of disinformation itself. In April 1917,
President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee on
Public Information, headed by George Creel, to take an
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active part in disseminating and propagandizing an official
point of view. To unite public opinion behind the war,
Creel's CPI conducted "a fight for the mind of mankind."
Fake intelligence suggesting that German spies were every-
where generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the
"barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of
-fhr hem Ifo:k a7.~a
DOCUEKS PROVE
LNII(E AND TROTZKY
HIRED BY GERMANS
Communications Between Ber-
lin and Bolshevist Govern-
ment Given Out by Creel.-
today, he State Department used selective information to
"prove" Germany was funding American pacifist
organizations.
The capacity for covert conduct also gained ground as
U.S. military intelligence expanded its role in domestic
surveillance, laying plans in 1920 for a secret, domestic,
counte--insurgency program aimed at radicals-an au-
thentic progenitor of the COINTELPRO operations of the
later Hoover years. Anticipating the CIA mania for cover,
U.S. intelligence also dispatched agents to Europe as
members of the International Red Cross.
By the end of the war, the country had acquired an
institutionalized intelligence system, initiated the classifi-
cation of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of
deception. The Committee for Public Information left a
legacy of experience for later generations of disinforma-
tionists to apply, if not to duplicate.
Public Relations Is Born As Disinformation
During two subsequent decades of peace in which the
trauma of an economic collapse followed the delerium of a
perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development
shaped the future of information: the rise of public rela-
tions and its professional advocates.
Exemplified by Edward Bernays, a man who began his
career as consultant to the U.S. delegation to the Versailles
Peace Conference which terminated World War I and
ended it as a hired hand for United Fruit Company in Latin
America, public relations and its covert marketing strate-
gies quickly seeped into the very core of American life. As
Bernays cynically stated in a PR manual in 1928, "The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important element
in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country ... it is the
intelligent minorities which need to make use of propagan-
da continuously and systematically."
The New Deal Thirties witnessed further assaults on the
integrity of information. In the U.S., the realities of the
depression inspired a militant labor union campaign for
recognition and power, one in which the Communists par-
ticipated as allies. The conservative reaction to this move-
ment was vicious, projecting an image of it as the secret
"red" subversion of U.S. society-a mindless image which
haunts the public consciousness even today. Imagined
threats from front organizations and Fifth Columns
brought further waves of tainted information. Thus the
stage was set for the massive escalation of mistrust in any
information not certified "pure" by the U.S. government.
Since it could have the field to itself, all competitors were
labeled un-American.
What the government would do with this power was not
yet clear, but its existence and potential for abuse could not
be denied-an incredible opportunity for any proponent of
the Bernays school of manipulation.
Other trends in the years immediately preceding Pearl
Harbor accelerated the information counter-revolution.
The growth of classification expanded the domain of U.S.
secrecy and the ability of government officials to conceal or
selectively leak information on behalf of their own political
agendas. Loyalty oaths and security checks came into be-
ing, designed to eliminate disclosure of this same material.
"Subversive activities" and espionage, meanwhile,
became top priorities for the U.S. government, justifying
generalized surveillance of a population considered
suspect. Covert intelligence activity would soon come to
serve the information management of successive U.S.
Administrations.
World War II and the New Disinformation
On the eve of its second crusade to save the world, the
U.S. was also poised on the brink of a new information era.
How secret its policies would become, to what extent it
would adopt the techniques of deception, and how each of
these would affect democratic decision-making began to
emerge as the war progressed. These questions were illumi-
nated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred
between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially
a civilian organization charged with the mission of promot-
ing an understanding of the war to the world at large, and
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime prede-
cessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcila-
ble differences over the nature and purpose of propaganda.
The OSS victory in this struggle would foreshadow the
growth of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth to be used as a
covert instrument of Cold War policies against a new
enemy-the Soviet Union. But all that came later.
Elmer Davis, OWI Director and ex-newsman, began
WWII believing his agency should deal in facts, not opin-
ion, disseminating truths to friend and enemy alike-
something the BBC's wartime broadcasts were attempting
to accomplish. But neither President Roosevelt nor the
Army, Navy, and State Departments believed that the
public had a right to know what was really going on.
(Documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Har-
bor.) In any case, the war-related bureaucracy remained
adamant about sharing information with the OWI, se-
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riously undermining its mission.
Colonel William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, on the
other hand, had an adventurer's enthusiasm for secret
operations, dirty tricks, and disinformation of the crudest
sort. Psychological warfare dominated the OSS approach
to the war, though neither its costs nor its benefits to the
American people were evaluated. Nor was truth considered
a weapon of any potential.
Psychological warfare thus sold itself to the high com-
mand and the OWI was forced to adopt the methods of its
competitor, subordinating all information projects to the
expedient of winning the war. Interestingly, it was hardly
this capitulation which influenced the course of the war,
since the same methods of manipulation were carried to the
extreme by the enemy the Goebbels approach to
information.
By the time hostilities ended, the OWI had become a
converted exponent of American power, its liberal one-
world ideology long since subordinated to the commitment
of U.S. involvement in every region of the world. Nowhere,
their propaganda now claimed, could the U.S. "renounce
its moral and ideological interests ... as a powerful and
righteous nation."
In the OSS similar readjustments of priorities took
place. Where once psychological warfare had at least been
balanced by careful intelligence analysis to secure and in-
terpret information, covert operations with their deceptive
components of subverting and transforming facts became
the new intelligence obsession.
In sum, a watershed had been reached. Information
thereafter became Bernays's reality an "unseen mecha-
nism" by which "intelligent minoriites" shaped the opin-
ions of the masses by deceiving them.
The Intelligence Era: Information Goes Underground
During the controversy surrounding publication of the
Pentagon Papers in 1971, Leslie Gelb, in charge of produc-
ing that voluminous and revealing report for the New York
Times, commented on the continuing Cold War dedication
to the philosophy of Bernays. "Most of our elected and
appointed leaders in the national security establishment,"
he confirmed, "felt they had the right and beyond that the
obligation-- to manipulate the American public in the na-
tional interest as they defined it." The same notion in
abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between De-
fense Secretary McNamara's press spokesman and a group
of reporters in 1962: "It's inherent in the government's
right, if necessary, to lie to save itself," the aide argued.
The right to manipulate and the right to lie have had
other post-war companions: the right to plausibly deny;
the right to a cover story; the right to conceal; and the need
to know, a standard of classification that created another
right, that of privileged access, with its step-child, the right
to selectively leak.
In analyzing the period since the atom bombs leveled the
Japanese will to resist, it is as if the intelligence agencies
had not yet heard that the war was over, and are still hiding
in caves on some Washington atoll. Yet the patterns which
have unfolded are a logical outcome of the wartime expe-
rience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or
totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was
created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping inter-
national communism provided the rationale for the even
broader mandate for world-wide conquest-the neo-
colonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to
help in those operations, the U. S. intelligence agencies had
Number 19 (Spring-Summer 1983)
no qualms about enlisting the support of their former
enemies the Gehlen intelligence network of Nazi
Germany.
Documents of some of the early proposals to set up the
central intelligence unit the present CIA give a flavor of
the crisis atmosphere with which they viewed the future
struggle against the Soviet Union: "the task of detecting .. .
any developments which threaten the security of the
wor/d;""to create a system in which every U.S. citizen who
travels abroad . . . is a source of political intelligence:"
"maintaining a constant check on foreign intelligence and
propaganda, including propagandized U.S. citizens;" and
"keep ... informed on political trends inside the U.S....
because state legislatures are peculiarly vulnerable to out-
side influences and would be a logical objective of foreign
intelligence services...." It is small wonder that the CIA's
fears became self-fulfilling prophesies.
Early CIA post-war victories over communism such as
the Italian elections of 1948, bought and paid for unwit-
tingly by the American people-brought about unholy
alliances as distasteful as those the intelligence agencies
had made with the war criminals, dealings with the Mafia
and the attendant corruption which comes with sharing a
dirty secret with thugs.
Later the Korean War produced an equally important
impact on the spy operatives' own psychological outlook.
Korea revived the atmosphere of total war, and created an
"anything goes" philosophy directed against the "enemy."
It meant, as General Maxwell Taylor argued in 1961 with
reference to Fidel Castro, there would be a policy of "no
long-term living with ... dangeorusly effective exponents
of communism and anti-Americanism." Iran (1953), Gua-
temala (1954), Vietnam (1954-1973), Brazil (1962), Indo-
nesia (1965), and Chile (1973) were among the targets of
covert operations encouraged by this philosophy.
But the strangest outcome of all in this web of deceit and
disinformation was its coming home to roost. The intelli-
gence establishment actually began to cat its own vomit.
False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be re-
ported back to the U.S. and the government began to make
policy decisions based on its own lies.
U.S. Disinformation Today
In spite of the long history of U.S. government propa-
ganda, disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Admin-
istration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on
whom to place the blame for the corruption of communica-
tions and dialogue. None of them wants the public to find
the pea under the shell in this age-old con game. President
Reagan has naturally accused the Soviets of introducing
the practice. The State Department has fostered the myth
that disinformation is a Russian word. De:inti~rmatsir'a,
according to one of their busy little defectors, Ladislav
Bittman, is the province of "Directorate A" of the KGB.
Bittman, a Czech who left his country well over ten years
ago, only recently began making these widely-reported
pronouncements about disinformation. The au courant
darling of the right-wing press, he conveniently confirms
their suspicions about Soviet global intentions, while Rea-
gan warns television audiences about Soviet-style runways
and Cuban-style army barracks. The danger is that
through incessant repetition of the word, disinformation
has become synonomous in the minds of the American
public with Soviet intelligence operations.
Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclu-
sion as -the preceding sections have indicated. Disinforma-
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tion has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military,
and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end
of World War 11, an integral part of national security which
has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its prac-
titioners. And as the activists of U.S. foreign policy, the
CIA is its chief author.
Exposing Media Operations
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(the Church Committee), in an investigation of CIA
wrongdoing, revealed just a tiny portion of the extent of
CIA penetration of world media. It was patently obvious to
the investigators that only U.S. intelligence agencies could
practice the art of disinformation on such a grand scale,
given the extraordinary expense of manipulating, influ-
encing, and outright purchasing of news throughout the
world. The number of organizations and persons who must
be paid off to place fictitious stories across the globe is
staggering. Almost ten years ago the Church Committee
said it had found evidence of more than 200 wire services,
newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes
owned outright by the CIA. A 1977 New York Times
expose uncovered another 50 media outlets run by the
CIA, inside and outside the U.S., with more than twelve
publishing houses responsible for over 1000 books, some
250 of them in English. Beyond the wholly-owned proprie-
taries there were countless agents and friendly insiders
working in media operations around the world. These
exposures are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. The
mind reels at what remained hidden from Congress and the
New York Times and continues so to the present.
Estimates of the portion of the U.S. intelligence
budget- kept secret from the American people and Con-
gress--devoted to propaganda range from a few to many
billions of dollars a year. An extremely conservative guess
in the December 1981 Defense Electronics put the overall
U.S. intelligence budget for that year at $70 billion, of
which about $ 10 billion, they said, went to the CIA. Media
specialists have estimated that at least one third of the
CIA's budget is devoted each year to the spread of dis-
information, conservatively placing CIA covert media ma-
nipulation alone for that year at almost three and a half
billion dollars. None of this takes into account the myriad
of income-generating proprietaries owned by the CIA,
firms which make a profit which is then poured back into
more covert operations: CIA banks, holding companies,
airlines, investment firms, and the like.
Anyone who has even a casual knowledge of the world
hard currency situation knows that the Soviet Union does
not have the kind of foreign exchange which billion dollar
operations entail. Only the secret U.S. intelligence
budget-taken from unwitting American taxpayers-can
pay for inventing news on such a mammoth scale. And
invent they do, as we shall see below in an examination of a
few of their hysterical scenarios.
The Levels of Disinformation
Spr,cading disinformation involves four levels of activi-
ty, a complex architecture that suggests how devious, cost-
ly, and important this activity has become. It currently runs
from overt propaganda of the more traditional sort
through covert operators and various public, non-
governmental disinformation peddlers to the deliberate
scapegoating of the enemy as the source of documents and
events which have been manufactured domestically.
The most well-known overt propaganda outlet for for-
eign consumption available to the U.S. is the Voice of
America (VOA) and other projects of the United States
Information Agency (USIA). Radio Free Europe (RFE)
and Radio Liberty (RL), propaganda operations directed
against Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, were origi-
nally covert U.S. intelligence operations. But when it be-
came an open secret that they were financed by the CIA,
they were taken out of the closet for direct Congressional
funding in 1971. Though the government claims they are
"private corporations," their employees must still go
through extensive security clearances. Recent revelations
about ex-Nazis who were absorbed into R FE I RL. after
World War 11 should invite closer scrutiny of these propa-
ganda tools.
Inflamatory broadcasts by RFE in the 1950s misled a
small number of Hungarian people to rebel in 1956, believ-
ing the U.S. was ready to intervene on their behalf. The
ensuing uproar forced RFE to modify its broadcasting
methods, though its recent diatribes against Poland are
reminiscent of the Hungarian fare but on a more sophis-
ticated plane. Similarly, broadcast propaganda by the
CIA's Radio Swan played a part in inducing the Bay of
Pigs invaders of Cuba in 1961 to believe, quite incorrectly,
that the Cuban population would support them. And, as
the U.S. seldom learns from its mistakes, the energy the
Reagan Administration has spent attempting to blackmail
Congress into establishing Radio Marti against Cuba will
surely backfire again.
In addition to its broadcasts, RFE/ RL openly operate
the largest "private" research facility in the west which
concentrates on information gathering-or spying-on
Soviet and Eastern European nations, and on communist
and socialist affairs.
But perhaps the most chilling "overt" propaganda pro-
ject of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled
Democracy Institute.
This $85 million-a-year panorama of intelligence collec-
tion, recruitment, and training complete with a covert op-
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erations section, rivals the CIA's most ambitious media
plans. It was quietly begun in January after a classified
Executive Order was signed by President Reagan. This
plan is discussed more fully in the conclusion below.
The second level of media activities of the U.S. govern-
ment are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In
theory, these deception operations are directed at influ-
encing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December
1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by
the CIA's charter and by the Executive Orders governing
CIA behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the
charter was systematically violated. But now under Presi-
dent Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the CIA can operate
within the United States so long as what it does is not
,,intended" to influence public opinion domestically. Who
or what determines CIA "intentions" is not specified, leav-
inga wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S.
public opinion.
Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to
cause "blowback," the situation wherein the U.S. media
picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at
home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are
false and emanate from U.S. intelligence in the first place.
Blowback is very dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much
CIA disinformation being spread that U.S. military intelli-
gence reports were often unwittingly based on complete
fabrications which had been produced at CIA Head-
quarters. In other cases, the CIA itself performed as an
anti-intelligence agency in which the covert operators had
to supply the information that the policy makers wanted.
Government thus became the victim of its own disinforma-
tion line, compounding the original damage and leading
officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous
examples of this are documented in Dead/I, Deceits: M1? 25
Years in the CIA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGehee
[Sheridan Square Publications, New York: 1983].)
One of the most graphic examples of an intentional
blowback operation was cited by former CIA officer John
Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies.
In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the
M PLA government forces in that country's war with South
Africa, CIA propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire, came up
with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women.
Using an agent/ stringer for a wire service, the Agency had
the story passed into the world media. Subsequently it was
embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of
some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their
trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The
entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of
several months, was a complete CIA fabrication.
Some covert media operatons have been run on a very
grand scale. One of the largest was Forum World Features,
ostensibly a global feature-news service based in London,
but in fact a CIA operation from the beginning. When its
cover was blown it was forced to suspend operations. Sim-
ilarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the
Rome Daily American, for decades the only English lan-
guage paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S.
disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double wham-
my: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phoney
documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread
coverage these charges receive, the "proof" is astonishingly
contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus
letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain
was publicly denounced by the State Department as a
Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one
officer noted, "it fits the pattern of known Soviet behav-
ior." The previous year, another document was called a
Soviet forgery because it was "so good" it had to be a Soviet
product. Periodically the government will call forth one of
their stable of "defectors" to confirm that something is a
forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question.
Several short-lived triumphs of the intelligence establish-
ment show, however, that sometimes the people are not
fooled, causing the press to reexamine their proffered
themes. The State Department "White Paper" on Cuban
aid to El Salvador, and the incredible Libyan "hit squad"
saga are two examples. The White Paper, an unsuccessful
attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin situation, was shown
by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and
Philip Agee to have been based on government forgeries
and mistranslations. The hit squad rumors which made
headlines for several days disappeared from the country
and from the news--when Jack Anderson finally admitted
he had been duped by his "intelligence sources."
The Disinformation Agents
Finally there are the disinformation peddlers- people
who may or may not at a given moment be in the direct
employ of the CIA or other intelligence agencies, but who
can be counted on to repeat, embellish, or pass on whatever
their disinformation masters in Washington decree. Here
ideology is often as important as salary. Organizations like
the Heritage Foundation and Accuracy in Media can be
counted on to run with whatever balderdash the govern-
ment wants spread, when they are not inventing it
themselves.
The greatest assistance in disinformation especially
during the current Administration is always forthcoming
from the Readers Digest. In 1977 the Times series exposed
Digest editor John Barron as having worked hand in glove
with the CIA on a book about the KGB. Other fraudulent
journalists like Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave,
Robert Moss's fascist Chilean connections were well
known.
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Arnaud de Borchgrave in Rhodesian army gear, one of
his favorite outfits.
Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among
others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost au-
tomatically. In fact, coordination between the develop-
ment of propaganda and disinformation themes by the
covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and
the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme
which is floated on one level-a feature item on VOA
about Cuba for example-will appear within record time
as a lead article in Reader's Digest, or a feature in a Heri-
tage Foundation report, or a series of "exposes" by Moss
and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary
tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or
Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator
Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, re-
peating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable"
Cold War publications like the National Review, Com-
mentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they
have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they
are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New
York Times or the Washington Post.
These interconnections are by no means fortuitous.
There is practically a revolving door policy from organiza-
tion to organization, from the government, the CIA, to the
"private" media, or the reversal of that process. The new
director of VOA, Kenneth Tomlinson, for example, was
formerly a Reader's Digest editor, who is hosted at black-
tie parties by his old friend, McCarthyite Roy Cohn.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, who works actively with several
governments' security services, has a difficult time keeping
his "journalism" and his spying separate. One of the rea-
sons he was fired from Newsweek magazine was that he
kept dossiers on the co-workers whom he suspected of
being KGB dupes. Robert Moss has also had a longtime
relationship with the CIA, which financed his book on
Chile. He too was "let go" from his job as editor of the
London Economist's Foreign Report because his intelli-
gence connections gave his columns a taint which could not
be ignored. The Spike, a badly written novel by these two
unsavory characters, presaged the disinformation era with
all its ramifications.
The Plot Against the Pope
A year ago, USIA Director Charles Z. Wick commented
that the U.S. is "waging a war of ideas with our adversar-
ies," whereupon he begged for more funds for VOA broad-
casts. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Wick said "we are refuting the massive Soviet
campaign of disinformation and misinformation about us
and our intentions in the world." In particular, according
to Wick, the Soviets are guilty of spreading "rumors and
lies" such as the contention that the United States was
involved in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul
II. While no documentation was presented to Congress, it
is now apparent that Wick and the Reagan government
believe in the adage that the best defense is a good offense.
At the same time he was testifying, the VOA had already
prepared a major campaign to assert the contrary, that the
KGB through its Bulgarian "surrogates" was behind the
plot to kill the Pope.
All the disinformationists have now joined in. Claire
Sterling wrote the first major article which espoused this
argument, replete with "confirmations" from unidentified
"confidential" sources. (Sterling's disinformation efforts
go back to postwar Italy when she worked with William
Colby to ensure the defeat of the Italian Communist Party,
spreading propaganda in the Rome Daily American, a CIA
proprietary.)
Reader's Digest ran the Sterling piece on the Pope, and
variations on the theme soon appeared throughout the
right-wing press. Then the TV networks picked it up, par-
ticularly Marvin Kalb of NBC who narrated a "documen-
tary" following the Sterling thesis, though Kalb was forced
to admit (rather unprecedented in a prime time "documen-
tary") that there was no proof whatsoever for the claim
being advanced at that time. No matter; "proof" would
soon be forthcoming.
The situation became even more complicated when, in
the absence of any resounding denouement to the hyste-
ria, conservative legislators, led by New York Senator
Alfonse D'Amato, blamed the CIA for hampering efforts
to prove the KGB guilty. The logic of this argument is
missing. Nevertheless, Wick took to the air in February
1983 to say that the VOA believed the CIA was not ham-
pering the investigation. This "news" was apparently based
on assurances from Vice-President Bush, a former Direc-
tor of the CIA.
Given the absurdity of the original charge, and the con-
sequent absence of evidence, it remains a very clever ploy of
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the right wing to assert a cover-up, keeping the whole story
playing in the news.
The Nuclear Freeze Plot
Nearly all the cast of characters discussed above are
involved actively in pursuing another major theme which
strains credulity: that the nuclear freeze movement in part,
and the disarmament movement in general, is also a KGB
plot, and its proponents Soviet dupes or "agents of influ-
ence."The litany for this sermon was, once again, an article
in Readers Digest, cited by no less avid a reader than
President Reagan. The President, however, was not eager
to give his source. Having referred to "proof positive" at a
press conference, he left it to aides later to reveal that his
"intelligence source" was, in fact, Reader's Digest.
Some of the covert media experts who have pushed the
nuclear freeze plot include self-described police agents and
informants such as John Rees, a fanatical right-wing acti-
vist who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s infiltrating first
the anti-war movement and then the anti-nuclear move-
Two faces of a spy: John Rees undercover during
demonstrations, May 1971; and in his current, right-
wing, corporate get-up.
ment. He is now a writer for the John Birch Society's
Review of the News, editor of a police intelligence report
on the left called Information Digest and the editor of
Western Goals Reports, a far right organization connected
with Rep. Larry McDonald. Rees is the author of a book
entitled "The War Called Peace," which advances the
theory that Soviet disarmament proposals are in reality
warmongering that must be countered with massive weap-
ons buildups in the name of peace. This is the level of logic
surrounding the entire anti-freeze movement, recently
adopted even by the lunatic fringe of rightists, Lyndon
LaRouche and his "National Democratic Policy
Committee."
Cuba and the Drug Trade
One of the most insidious of the continually unfolding
disinformation themes currently propagated by the U.S.
government is the attempt to implicate high Cuban gov-
ernment officials including the commander of the Cuban
armed forces, Raul Castro-in international drug-
trafficking. This campaign was recently escalated by the
blatant covert manipulation of the U.S. judicial system on
a scale hardly seen since the Rosenberg-Sobell proceedings.
The creation of this theme can be traced to the highest
levels of the Reagan Administration: from a VOA cam-
paign orchestrated by President Reagan's good friend,
USIA Director Charles Z. Wick, to a trial in Miami spon-
sored by the Justice Department. The criminal charges at
least those purporting to show Cuban government involve-
ment were so ludicrous that at first only the Miami
Herald (with deep ties to the Cuban exile community) saw
fit to play them up. But in April, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato
held "hearings" in New York and got big play in the New
York Times and on national TV (see sidebar).
The VOA campaign began in early 1982 with a series of
reports in February and March which suggested Cuba's
involvement in drug traffic to the U.S. Some reports said
that the purpose was to get drug smugglers to run guns to
the FMLN in El Salvador or to the M-19 in Colombia;
some said it was to raise money for those guns; and some
said it was to drug the American people into a stupor,
presumably to facilitate a takeover. None of the reports
seemed concerned that one reason was inconsistent with
another.
The VOA then broadcast an interview with the Foreign
Minister of Colombia, who repeated the charges and spec-
ulated that the Cubans were working with the Mafia. This
was rather ironic, considering that for more than twenty
years the Mafia has worked hand in glove with the CIA
trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, out of bitterness for
having lost their drug, gambling, and prostitution empires
to the revolution in Cuba. The VOA also gave extensive
coverage to similar stories from a Colombian newspaper,
suggesting that Cuba and the Mafia were cooperating in
the drug business. These reports came from the same Co-
lombian news outlets which had spread the scurrilous story
that Celia Sanchez, one of the heroines of the Cuban
revolution who had long been suffering with cancer, had
been killed in a shootout between Raul and Fidel Castro.
In March, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Enders was
broadcast by VOA throughout Latin America repeating
the Colombian news reports about drugs and Cuba almost
verbatim.
While this disinformation was being spread in the hemi-
sphere, a similar campaign was being waged within the
U.S. But before analyzing that propaganda geared to do-
mestic consumption, it is well to understand the signifi-
cance of the campaign abroad. The goal, as with most
propaganda directed against Cuba, is to isolate Cuba from
the rest of Latin America, to make it appear a foreign i.e.,
Soviet-entity, divorced from other Latin American or
Caribbean countries. It is only by so isolating Cuba that the
U.S. can encourage active measures against it---like the
breaking of diplomatic relations without creating con-
tradictions in its own Monroe Doctrine pronouncements.
Moreover, traditionally, both politically and culturally,
Cuba has been in the mainstream of Latin American and,
more recently, Caribbean thought, with an influence the
U.S. has taken great pains to lessen.
During the middle of 1982, the campaign against Cuba
was less intensive, because of the hemisphere's preoccupa-
tion with the Malvinas crisis. American disregard for Latin
American opinion in aiding the U.K. in that war under-
scored the hypocrisy of the U.S. position. But the VOA's
loss was the New York Post's gain. In June, the Post,
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Rupert Murdoch's gutter paper, ran a three-part series
entitled "Castro's Secret War," by Arnaud de Borchgrave
and Rcbert Moss. The articles by these sleazy fabricators
not only repeated the basic charge of Cuban involvement in
the drug trade, but also gave minute details- names and
dates and alleged meetings. Not sourced, the "facts" pre-
sented were that several middle-level drug smugglers had
had meetings with Raul Castro and Nicaraguan leader
Daniel Ortega. They hinted that this information might
have come from a Colombian smuggler named Jaime
Guillot
Indeed Guillot starred in the next chapter of the saga,
when, in July, Reader's Digest ran a five-page article by a
Nathan M. Adams based on unnamed "law-enforcement
and intelligence sources." This "expose," even more de-
tailed than the Moss/de Borchgrave tripe, alleged that
Guillot met with Rene Rodriguez, a member of the Central
Committee of Cuba and the president of the Cuban
Friendship Institute, and that Rodriguez "was in charge of
The Ultimate Media Hype
In a carefully staged command performance, de-
signed to keep the network cameras rolling, Sen.
D'Amato (R-N.Y.) and the FBI, CIA, DEA, and other
federal, state and local narcotics and investigative
agents introduced a self-confessed Cuban "spy" to an
audience of credulous New York journalists in early
April-but this time Mario Estevez Gonzalez, who had
testif;ed in open court in Miami only two months before,
was melodramatically hidden behind a guarded screen
"for his own protection." The same federal informer
who was described by the Miami Herald as a "short,
stocky Mariel refugee" and a "chubby, balding witness"
who stuttered, who was seen by millions, including those
in Cuba who wished to watch Miami TV, was now
tantalizingly secreted from New York cameras in a
downtown Federal building, thus exciting the unwar-
ranted interest of the media and moving the "Cuba Drug
Connection" to a new low in disinformation.
Few of the journalists knew or cared that this was old
news. Apparently unaware of the Miami trial and
Estevez's previous charade, they stood at hushed atten-
tion Filming a screen as the Spanish and then English
translation wafted across. That night TV audiences
across America were treated to clips of D'Amato ques-
tionirg the screen. The following exchange took place,
but
Q.
was not telecast:
How much money did you make for Cuba by selling
cocaine?
A. Approximately $7 million in one year.
Q. How did the process work?
A. 1 got the cocaine from Cuba or from Colombian
Q.
A.
ships in Cuban waters, took it by "cigarette boat"(a
long, narrow speed boat which goes 70 mph) from
Cuba to Miami and then sold it and took the money
back to Cuba by cigarette boat.
How long did the whole process take?
30 days.
coordinating the smuggling." It further claimed that
Guillot traveled from Colombia to Cuba to Nicaragua,
meeting with Raul Castro and receiving huge sums of
money: that he was given $700,000 in Mexico for a flight to
France, but that he was arrested by the Mexicans, where-
upon he began "talking his head off," providing all the
details for the article. What happened to the money
rather a large sum for a trip to France and why Guillot
was never extradited to the U.S. are not explained. Later
reports suggest that Guillot was released by the Mexicans
and went to Europe.
In August the drug story gained further dubious cur-
rency as the Washington Times, Reverend Moon's paper,
reprinted the original Post series. By November VOA was
picking up the theme again, and just before the U.S. con-
gressional elections Vice-President Bush made a Republi-
can campaign speech in Miami which reiterated the
charges. Hot on his heels, on November 5, 1982, a Miami
federal grand jury issued an indictment against Guillot,
Q. How many trips did you make?
A. I went 2-3 times a month.
No wonder D'Amato and the Feds are hiding Estevez
from enquiring eyes. Anyone who can make a 30-day
trip three times a month is really worth questioning a bit
more closely. Though similar contradictions in his tes-
timony were pointed out by defense lawyers in Miami to
no avail, the press still failed to pick up the grossest of
inconsistencies. But at one point in the New York side-
show even the gullible had to chuckle. Estevez claimed
that although most of his cocaine was bound for New
York, he had made only one delivery there personally: to
Studio 54. (The specter of a dumpy little drug dealer
slipping into a New York disco with his baggies wouldn't
have cut ice with the journalists, but then they couldn't
see him anyway.)
Another major flaw in the federal scenario is that
Estevez was arrested with marijuana, and not even in the
same case as those he was paid to testify against. In
addition, cocaine was never mentioned in the Miami
trial.
The charge of Estevez that among the 125,000 Mariel-
itos invited into the U.S. by then-President Carter were
3,000 Cuban undercover agents, at least 400 of whom
were dealing drugs like himself, practically brought
D'Amato to his feet. "These 300-400 Cuban agents show
there is a pervasive, systematic movement by Cuba to
destabilize our cities," he said. Furthermore, the Sena-
tor mused, if Estevez was delivering $7 million a year to
Cuba, then "Cuba is making $2 billion, 800 million on
these agents." News to Cuba, of course.
As the stories get wilder and wilder, and "investiga-
tive" journalists get increasingly docile, the U.S. gov-
ernment has unfortunately learned that the press will
believe anything told them as long as it comes with the
protective coloration of "national security."
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nine other drug smugglers, mostly Cuban exiles, and -in
an unprecedented move four Cuban officials: Rodriguez,
an admiral of the Cuban Navy, and two former officials of
the Cuban Embassy in Bogota, one of them the
Ambassador.
Eight of the nine smugglers were arrested in Miami, and
one of them, David Lorenzo Perez, testified against the
others. His statements, similar to those attributed to
Guillot in the earlier articles, and those of another unin-
dicted dealer, a self-described reformed Cuban spy, Mario
Estevez Gonzalez (see sidebar) were the only evidence
against the Cuban officials.
In fact, no drugs were actually introduced at the subse-
quent trial. It was said the drugs were all thrown overboard
when the smugglers panicked. The Estevez confession, ac-
cording to his own testimony, was given in exchange for
"an unspecified amount of money and a short jail sentence"
in another drug case.
The payment is extraordinary, almost unheard of. Four
Cuban officials were indicted on the statement of a man
who was paid to make the statement! What, if anything,
happened to Guillot is not known: but it was reported that
his drug dealing partner, who also "cooperated" with the
U.S. Justice Department, got a twenty-five-year jail sen-
tence all of which was suspended.
Although the indictment describes in great detail the
movements and travels of the exiled drug dealer, the refer-
ences to the four Cuban officials are extremely vague. It
alleges that they agreed to let Cuba be used as a "loading
station and source of supplies for ships" transporting
drugs. The indictment, eight counts and nineteen pages,
says nothing else about the Cuban officials. It does not say
when this "agreement" was made, where it was made, who
met with whom nor who said what to whom.
In the February 1983 trial, five of the seven hapless
defendants were found guilty, on the testimony of the
alleged former spy and the indicted smuggler who turned
state's evidence. The two told similar tales, of backslap-
ping jovial meetings with the Cuban officials who, they
claimed, said things like, "Now we are going to fill Miami
with drugs," and , "It is important to fill the United States
with drugs." (As if Miami were not already filled with
drugs.) The "spy" said that he replied, "Well, if it has to be
filled, let's do it."
Evidently this B-movie dialogue was sufficient to convict
five of the defendants, who presumably were involved in
some kind of drug trafficking.
The use of this trial by the U.S. government was blatant;
there was no concern about Miami's drug problem, only
about Cuba. When Lorenzo Perez agreed to plead guilty
and testify against the others, the spokesman for the Drug
Enforcement Administration announced that "when you
have people pleading guilty, itjust disproves-"the denials of
the Cuban government. And when the five were convicted,
the Assistant U.S. Attorney said that the outcome "demon-
strates" the involvement of Cuba.
The Cuban government indignantly denied the charges,
pointing out in government statements and broadcasts and
in an editorial in Grantna the idiocy of the charges. The
Cubans also stressed a point which had been virtually
ignored in the U.S. press that for more than ten years,
despite all sorts of ideological disputes, Cuban authorities
had been cooperating with U.S. officials in tracking and
capturing drug smugglers in the Caribbean. At least 36
ships and 21 planes had been taken in this endeavor and
more than 230 drug smugglers prosecuted. Because of the
insulting and specious indictment the Cuban government
announced that it was discontinuing its cooperation with
the U.S. Coast Guard.
Even Michael Ledeen, another disinformationist, pre-
tended to be puzzled in his rehash of the Guillot story in the
February 28, 1983 New Republic. He conceded that "Fidel
Castro used to boast of his hatred of drug traffickers: he
even cooperated with the United States by arresting some
smugglers and turning them over to American authorities."
But, consistent with this season's disinformation theme,
Ledeen refers to the current situation as a "turnabout,"
designed to provide hard currency for the Soviet Union.
There are countless other indications that it is the U.S.
which is more interested in propaganda than in actually
stopping drug traffic. During the aftermath of the Pope's
shooting it was learned that Bulgaria had been cooperating
with U.S. narcotics control officials for twelve years, but
that the program had been terminated by President Rea-
gan shortly after he took office.
"Project Democracy" and Public Diplomacy: Conclusion
On June 8, 1982 in an address to the British Parliament,
President Reagan announced a new ideological offensive
to turn the tide against Communism in the battle for the
mind of the world's population. Designed to "foster the
infrastructure of democracy" in a dozen ways, it clearly
enlisted information as its top recruit. Charles Wick said
there would be "a new assertive propagandistic role" to
"win the war of ideas."
Spy Budget Increase
The raison d'ctre for the Cuban drug disinforma-
tion story becomes appallingly clear if one reads the
newspapers in which the spy agencies selectively dis-
play their dirty linen. According to the New York
Post of April 5, 1983- the same day as D'Amato's
coordinated sideshow- the tawdry daily reported
that "President Reagan is planning to give U.S. intel-
ligence agencies millions in new funds to crack Cuban
spy and drug rings operating in the U.S." The Post
went on to say that Reagan made the request in the
Administration's secret 1984 budget for intelligence
agencies, and that Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.)
said that news of Reagan's request "comes as a
former Cuban intelligence agent testifies today in
Manhattan about how he raised $3 million [sic the
testimony was $7 million] for Cuba by smuggling
drugs into the U.S."
Now how, we ask, is a request for more funds for
the CIA, FBI, etc. made in a secret budget? Secondly,
unless we're missing something, the CIA is still for-
bidden by the National Security Act to work against
Cuba or any other country, inside the U.S. Perhaps
Reagan believes his Executive Order 12333 unilater-
ally repeals the Act. And finally, how come Reagan is
already leaking 1984 Orwellian plans. Isn't 1983 bad
enough?
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Elsewhere, as the democracy project unfolded, there
were references to information as "a vital part of the stra-
tegic and tactical arsenal of the United States." Wick again
pictured ideas as the only useful weapons that could be shot
at an enemy in the absence of hostilities-such as the Radio
Marti venture aimed at Cuba. Other government officials
elevated public diplomacy to the status of diplomatic and
military policy in serving the needs of national security. But
all spo