BUCKLEY SETS PRECEDENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000200920010-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: July 29, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000200920010-1
ARTICLE AWEA SPOTLIGHT
ON PAGE
29 July 1985
Buckley Sets Precedent
Persuasive evidence that the Soviet renegade Arkady Shevchenko's "auto-
biography" is a CIA concoction is raising new questions about collusion between
the espionage services and the publishing business to delude the American public
with such apocryphal narratives.
According to SPOTLIGHT sources the CIA practice of secretly sponsoring
such works goes back several decades. The effect of this disinformation program,
aimed primarily at Americans, has been to poison the mainstream of history.
Said one experienced diplomat: "We live in a society wherein we can no longer
tell truth from falsehood. Monstrous and massive falsifications of the past are
becoming commonplace. It's an Orwellian world."
According to this highly placed source (who agreed to a candid discussion of
this sensitive issue on condition that his identity remain protected) it was the now-
famous TV chat-show host and spy novelist William Buckley Jr. who inaugurated
this era of CIA potboilers, which are given respectable fronts with the imprints of
major publishers.
In 1952 or '53, this seasoned observer related, the late Allen Dulles, then serv-
ing as director of the CIA, developed a personal interest in a well-known Chilean
defector, Eudocio Ravines, who had led an interesting life, in both the Soviet
Union and Red China, before he broke with communism in 1950.
From Paris, where Ravines was hiding from the KGB's hit squads, the CIA
secretly flew him to a more accessible location in Mexico City, where he was
lodged in a safehouse. Buckley, then working as a Clandestine Services operative,
was assigned to work with Ravines in revising and editing a manuscript the ex-
communist had already partly compiled.
When Buckley was finished adapting the Chilean's jottings to the C.4's re-
quirements, the work was published, not as a product of the Clandestine Ser ,ices
(which it was) but as an authentic Ravines autobiography, by Charles Scribner &
Sons, then one of the foremost New York publishing houses.
"Under the title `The Yenan Way' the Ravines book sold well," recalled this
source. "It proved a success: It spread the CIA gospel and it made money for
Scribner's. The trouble is that Buckley's CIA potboiler set a precedent; many
more such doctored works followed, and the end result has been massive disinfor-
mation."'
According to this foreign affairs expert (whose account has been extensively
confirmed by other sources) the Clandestine Services officer who supervised
Buckley's "potboiler project" was E. Howard Hunt, then a senior official in the
CIA's Mexico City Clandestine Services station.
"Hunt went on to become an outright counterfeiter, 'document doctor' and
disinformation agent," recounted another source, a former CIA analyst. "Yet
the distortions of history he perpetrated with Bill Buckley may prove, ultimately.
his most damaging and pernicious forgeries."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000200920010-1