Re: Disinformation, by Wikipedia
Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:09 am
Part 1 of 4
The CIA and the Media
by CovertAction Information Bulletin
Number 19
Spring-Summer 1983
© 1983 by Covert Action Publications, Inc.
Approved For Release 2010/06/09: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100180003-5
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 skepticism. The country is being run by people who lie unashamedly; 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 officials 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 seriously by a large segment of the Fourth Estate.
We do not demean the efforts of the excellent investigative 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 anything. Truly, the administration holds almost all the cards. They can manipulate through selective background briefings and orchestrated leaks in a way that very few honest journalists can combat.
Most people in the media have not spoken out. When the present government seems hellbent on pouring many millions 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 insufferably 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 every foolish bureaucratic utterance should know better; some, unfortunately, do know better. Some unwittingly spread administration disinformation; some create it. In this special issue of CAIB, we study the complex problem of disinformation from a number of perspectives. We include 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 administration 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 Lawrence's Sources and Methods column, all devoted to the media and intelligence operations. We hope that journalists are vigilant in rejecting the pressures to spread disinformation; we hope that our readers will be relentless in exposing it.
Table of Contents
• Editorial
• Disinformation and Deception
• The '''Plot'' Against the Pope
• Georgie Anne Geyer
• Grenada; Reagan's Big Lie
• The Journalist Spy
• News Notes
• Sources and Methods
Cover At by Johanna Vogelsang.
Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story
By William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray [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 Covert Action Information Bulletin.]
During World War I, 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 focused 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 exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information 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 example 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, revulsion, 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 spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public.
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 official 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 historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least inoculate 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 powers, 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," "indecent," 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 Congressional opposition.
The New York Times: Documents Prove Lenine and Trotzky Hired by Germans. Communications Between Berlin and Bolshevist Government Given Out by Creel.
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 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 everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the "barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the 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, counter-insurgency program aimed at radicals -- an authentic 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 classification of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of deception. The Committee for Public Information left a legacy of experience for later generations of disinformationists 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 delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations 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 strategies 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 propaganda 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 participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement 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 being, 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 illuminated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially a civilian organization charged with the mission of promoting an understanding of the war to the world at large, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcilable 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 opinion, 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 Information Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.) In any case, the war-related bureaucracy remained adamant about sharing information with the OWI, seriously 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 command 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 interpret 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 mechanism" by which "intelligent minorities" shaped the opinions 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 producing 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 national interest as they defined it." The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense 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 experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world-wide conquest -- the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had 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 world;'' ''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 outside 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 unwittingly 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 ... dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti-Americanism." Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (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 intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be reported 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 propaganda. disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Administration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on whom to place the blame for the corruption of communications 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. Dezinformatsiya, 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 Reagan 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 synonymous in the minds of the American public with Soviet intelligence operations.
Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclusion as the preceding sections have indicated. Disinformation has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military, and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end of World War II, an integral part of national security which has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its practitioners. 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, influencing, 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 proprietaries 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 Congress -- 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 disinformation, conservatively placing CIA covert media manipulation 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
Spreading disinformation involves four levels of activity, a complex architecture that suggests how devious, costly, and important this activity has become. It currently runs from overt propaganda of the more traditional sort through covert operators and various public, nongovernmental 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 foreign 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 originally covert U.S. intelligence operations. But when it became 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 RFE/RL after World War II should invite closer scrutiny of these propaganda tools.
Inflammatory broadcasts by RFE in the 1950s misled a small number of Hungarian people to rebel in 1956, believing 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 sophisticated 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 project of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.
This $85 million-a-year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations 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. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations are directed at influencing 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 President 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, leaving a 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 intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. 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 disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 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 MPLA 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 operations 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. Similarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: 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 behavior." 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 establishment 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 government wants spread, when they are not inventing it themselves.
Robert Moss's fascist Chilean connections were well known.
Arnaud de Borchgrave in Rhodesian army gear, one of his favorite outfits.
The greatest assistance in disinformation -- especially during the current Administration -- is always forthcoming from the Reader's 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, Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development 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 Heritage 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, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, 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 organization 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 reasons 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 intelligence 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 adversaries," whereupon he begged for more funds for VOA broadcasts. 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, particularly Marvin Kalb of NBC who narrated a "documentary" following the Sterling thesis, though Kalb was forced to admit (rather unprecedented in a prime time "documentary") 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 hysteria, 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 hampering the investigation. This "news" was apparently based on assurances from Vice-President Bush, a former Director of the CIA.
Given the absurdity of the original charge, and the consequent absence of evidence, it remains a very clever ploy of 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 influence." The litany for this sermon was, once again, an article in Reader's 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.
Two faces of a spy: John Rees undercover during demonstrations, May 1971; and in his current, rightwing, corporate get-up.
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 activist who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s infiltrating first the anti-war movement and then the anti-nuclear movement. 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 weapons 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 government 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 campaign orchestrated by President Reagan's good friend, USIA Director Charles Z. Wick, to a trial in Miami sponsored by the Justice Department. The criminal charges -- at least those purporting to show Cuban government involvement -- 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 speculated 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 Colombian 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 hemisphere, a similar campaign was being waged within the U.S. But before analyzing that propaganda geared to domestic consumption, it is well to understand the significance 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 contradictions 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 preoccupation with the Malvinas crisis. American disregard for Latin American opinion in aiding the U.K. in that war underscored the hypocrisy of the U.S. position. But the VOA's loss was the New York Post's gain. In June, the Post, Rupert Murdoch's gutter paper, ran a three-part series entitled "Castro's Secret War." by Arnaud de Borchgrave "and Robert 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" presented 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 detailed 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 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, whereupon 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 currency 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. congressional elections, Vice-President Bush made a Republican 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, 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 unindicted 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 subsequent trial. It was said the drugs were all thrown overboard when the smugglers panicked. The Estevez confession, according 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 sentence all of which was suspended.
Although the indictment describes in great detail the movements and travels of the exiled drug dealer, the references 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 backslapping 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, it just disproves" the denials of the Cuban government. And when the five were convicted, the Assistant U.S. Attorney said that the outcome "demonstrates" the involvement of Cuba.
The Cuban government indignantly denied the charges, pointing out in government statements and broadcasts and in an editorial in Granma 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, pretended to be puzzed 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 Reagan shortly after he took office.
The CIA and the Media
by CovertAction Information Bulletin
Number 19
Spring-Summer 1983
© 1983 by Covert Action Publications, Inc.
Approved For Release 2010/06/09: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100180003-5
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 skepticism. The country is being run by people who lie unashamedly; 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 officials 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 seriously by a large segment of the Fourth Estate.
We do not demean the efforts of the excellent investigative 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 anything. Truly, the administration holds almost all the cards. They can manipulate through selective background briefings and orchestrated leaks in a way that very few honest journalists can combat.
Most people in the media have not spoken out. When the present government seems hellbent on pouring many millions 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 insufferably 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 every foolish bureaucratic utterance should know better; some, unfortunately, do know better. Some unwittingly spread administration disinformation; some create it. In this special issue of CAIB, we study the complex problem of disinformation from a number of perspectives. We include 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 administration 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 Lawrence's Sources and Methods column, all devoted to the media and intelligence operations. We hope that journalists are vigilant in rejecting the pressures to spread disinformation; we hope that our readers will be relentless in exposing it.
Table of Contents
• Editorial
• Disinformation and Deception
• The '''Plot'' Against the Pope
• Georgie Anne Geyer
• Grenada; Reagan's Big Lie
• The Journalist Spy
• News Notes
• Sources and Methods
Cover At by Johanna Vogelsang.
Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story
By William Preston, Jr. and Ellen Ray [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 Covert Action Information Bulletin.]
During World War I, 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 focused 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 exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information 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 example 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, revulsion, 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 spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public.
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 official 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 historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least inoculate 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 powers, 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," "indecent," 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 Congressional opposition.
The New York Times: Documents Prove Lenine and Trotzky Hired by Germans. Communications Between Berlin and Bolshevist Government Given Out by Creel.
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 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 everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the "barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the 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, counter-insurgency program aimed at radicals -- an authentic 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 classification of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of deception. The Committee for Public Information left a legacy of experience for later generations of disinformationists 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 delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations 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 strategies 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 propaganda 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 participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement 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 being, 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 illuminated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially a civilian organization charged with the mission of promoting an understanding of the war to the world at large, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcilable 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 opinion, 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 Information Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.) In any case, the war-related bureaucracy remained adamant about sharing information with the OWI, seriously 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 command 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 interpret 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 mechanism" by which "intelligent minorities" shaped the opinions 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 producing 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 national interest as they defined it." The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense 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 experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world-wide conquest -- the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had 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 world;'' ''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 outside 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 unwittingly 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 ... dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti-Americanism." Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (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 intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be reported 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 propaganda. disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Administration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on whom to place the blame for the corruption of communications 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. Dezinformatsiya, 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 Reagan 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 synonymous in the minds of the American public with Soviet intelligence operations.
Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclusion as the preceding sections have indicated. Disinformation has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military, and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end of World War II, an integral part of national security which has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its practitioners. And as the activists of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA is its chief author.
The English word disinformation is a loan translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. Joseph Stalin coined the term, giving it a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin. Russian use began with a "special disinformation office" in 1923. Disinformation was defined in Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) as "false information with the intention to deceive public opinion". Operation INFEKTION was a Soviet disinformation campaign to influence opinion that the U.S. invented AIDS. The U.S. did not actively counter disinformation until 1980, when a fake document reported that the U.S. supported apartheid.
-- Disinformation, by Wikipedia
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, influencing, 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 proprietaries 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 Congress -- 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 disinformation, conservatively placing CIA covert media manipulation 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
Spreading disinformation involves four levels of activity, a complex architecture that suggests how devious, costly, and important this activity has become. It currently runs from overt propaganda of the more traditional sort through covert operators and various public, nongovernmental 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 foreign 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 originally covert U.S. intelligence operations. But when it became 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 RFE/RL after World War II should invite closer scrutiny of these propaganda tools.
Inflammatory broadcasts by RFE in the 1950s misled a small number of Hungarian people to rebel in 1956, believing 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 sophisticated 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 project of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.
This $85 million-a-year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations 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. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations are directed at influencing 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 President 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, leaving a 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 intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. 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 disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 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 MPLA 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 operations 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. Similarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: 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 behavior." 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 establishment 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 government wants spread, when they are not inventing it themselves.
Robert Moss's fascist Chilean connections were well known.
Arnaud de Borchgrave in Rhodesian army gear, one of his favorite outfits.
The greatest assistance in disinformation -- especially during the current Administration -- is always forthcoming from the Reader's 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, Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development 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 Heritage 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, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, 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 organization 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 reasons 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 intelligence 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 adversaries," whereupon he begged for more funds for VOA broadcasts. 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, particularly Marvin Kalb of NBC who narrated a "documentary" following the Sterling thesis, though Kalb was forced to admit (rather unprecedented in a prime time "documentary") 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 hysteria, 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 hampering the investigation. This "news" was apparently based on assurances from Vice-President Bush, a former Director of the CIA.
Given the absurdity of the original charge, and the consequent absence of evidence, it remains a very clever ploy of 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 influence." The litany for this sermon was, once again, an article in Reader's 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.
Two faces of a spy: John Rees undercover during demonstrations, May 1971; and in his current, rightwing, corporate get-up.
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 activist who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s infiltrating first the anti-war movement and then the anti-nuclear movement. 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 weapons 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 government 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 campaign orchestrated by President Reagan's good friend, USIA Director Charles Z. Wick, to a trial in Miami sponsored by the Justice Department. The criminal charges -- at least those purporting to show Cuban government involvement -- 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 speculated 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 Colombian 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 hemisphere, a similar campaign was being waged within the U.S. But before analyzing that propaganda geared to domestic consumption, it is well to understand the significance 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 contradictions 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 preoccupation with the Malvinas crisis. American disregard for Latin American opinion in aiding the U.K. in that war underscored the hypocrisy of the U.S. position. But the VOA's loss was the New York Post's gain. In June, the Post, Rupert Murdoch's gutter paper, ran a three-part series entitled "Castro's Secret War." by Arnaud de Borchgrave "and Robert 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" presented 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 detailed 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 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, whereupon 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 currency 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. congressional elections, Vice-President Bush made a Republican 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, 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.
The Ultimate Media Hype
In a carefully staged command performance, designed 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 testified 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 unwarranted 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 attention 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 questioning the screen. The following exchange took place, but was not telecast:
Q. 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. I got the cocaine from Cuba or from Colombian 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.
Q. How long did the whole process take?
A. 30 days.
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 testimony 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 sideshow 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 Marielitos 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 Senator 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 "investigative" journalists get increasingly docile, the U.S. government has unfortunately learned that the press will believe anything told them as long as it comes with the protective coloration of "national security."
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 unindicted 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 subsequent trial. It was said the drugs were all thrown overboard when the smugglers panicked. The Estevez confession, according 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 sentence all of which was suspended.
Although the indictment describes in great detail the movements and travels of the exiled drug dealer, the references 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 backslapping 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, it just disproves" the denials of the Cuban government. And when the five were convicted, the Assistant U.S. Attorney said that the outcome "demonstrates" the involvement of Cuba.
The Cuban government indignantly denied the charges, pointing out in government statements and broadcasts and in an editorial in Granma 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, pretended to be puzzed 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 Reagan shortly after he took office.