Re: The CIA and The Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchett
Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2017 3:39 amSIX: Propaganda and Disinformation
By the mid 1960s most of the professionals in the CIA's Clandestine Services thought that the day of the balloon as an effective delivery vehicle in propaganda operations had long since passed. Years before, in the early rough-and-tumble era of the Cold War, agency operators in West Germany had often used balloons to carry anti-communist literature into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. These operations, although lacking in plausible deniability, normally a prerequisite in covert propaganda efforts, had scored high-judging from the numerous angry protests issued by the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.
Since then the propaganda game had evolved into a subtle contest of wits, and the agency's Covert Action Staff had developed far more sophisticated methods for spreading ideological messages. Thus, there was a sense of "deja vu" among the covert-action staffers when officers of the Far East Division suggested in 1967 that a new balloon operation be undertaken. The target this time was to be mainland China.
The People's Republic was at that time in the midst of the cultural revolution. Youthful Red Guards were rampaging throughout the country, shattering customs and laws alike; confusion, near chaos, engulfed the nation. But the CIA's China watchers in Hong Kong and elsewhere on the periphery of the mainland had detected that a reaction was setting in, especially in southern China around Canton and Foochow in the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. They believed that a kind of backlash to the excesses of the Red Guards was building, for increasingly groups within the military and among the workers were beginning to resist the Red Guards and to call for a return to traditional law and order.
To the agency's operators, these were conditions worth exploiting. No one really believed that communism could be eliminated from the mainland, but the short-term political objectives which might be achieved through covert propaganda were too tempting to pass up. China was an avowed enemy of the United States, and the CIA felt that each bit of additional domestic turmoil that could be stirred up made the world's most populous country-already experimenting with long-range ballistic missiles-that much less of a threat to American national security. Furthermore, if Peking could be kept preoccupied with internal problems, then the likelihood of Chinese military intervention in the Vietnamese war, in a manner similar to that so effectively employed years earlier in Korea, could be diminished. Perhaps, too, China could be forced to reduce its material support to North Vietnam and to cut back on its export of revolution to other areas of the developing world.
The operation was accordingly approved by the 303 Committee (now the 40 Committee) and the agency took its balloons out of storage, shipping them to a secret base on Taiwan. There they were loaded with a variety of carefully prepared propaganda materials -leaflets, pamphlets, newspapers-and, when the winds were right, launched to float over the mainland provinces due west of the island. The literature dropped by the balloons had been designed by the agency's propagandists to appear as similar as possible in substance and style to the few publications then being furtively distributed on a small scale by conservative groups inside China. Names of no genuine anti-revolutionary organizations were used; fictitious associations, some identified with the army, others with agricultural communes or urban industrial unions, were invented.
The main thrust of all the propaganda was essentially the same, criticizing the activities (both real and imaginary) of the Red Guards and, by implication, those leaders who inspired or permitted such excesses. It was hoped that the propaganda and its attendant disinformation would create further reactions to the cultural revolution, on one hand adding to the growing domestic confusion and on the other disrupting the internal balance of power among the leadership in Peking. The CIA calculated that when the Chinese realized they were being propagandized, the U.S. government could confidently disclaim any responsibility. The assumed culprit would most likely be Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan regime, the agency's witting and cooperative host for the operation.
Almost immediately after it began, the balloon project was a success. The CIA's China watchers soon saw evidence of increased resistance to the Red Guards in the southern provinces. Peking, apparently believing the reaction to the cultural revolution to be greater than it actually was, displayed strong concern over developments in the south. And within weeks, refugees and travelers from the mainland began arriving in Hong Kong with copies of the leaflets and pamphlets that the agency's propagandists had manufactured- a clear indication of the credence being given the false literature by the Chinese masses. It was not long, therefore, before the Clandestine Services were searching for other ways to expand their propaganda effort against the new target.
A decision was therefore made to install on Taiwan a pair of clandestine radio transmitters which would broadcast propaganda -and disinformation-of the same nature as that disseminated by the balloon drops. If the Chinese people accepted the radio broadcasts as genuine, the CIA reasoned, then they might be convinced that the countermovement to the cultural revolution was gaining strength and perhaps think that the time had come to resist the Red Guards and their supporters still more openly.
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Against a closed-society target, simply providing information and news that the government wishes to keep from its people can have a significant effect. If, in addition, some clever disinformation can be inserted, then so much the better. The listeners, realizing that much of what they are hearing is true, tend to believe that all they are told is accurate.
One source of news used by agency propagandists was the CIA's own Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which daily monitors open radio broadcasting around the world from more than a dozen listening posts located in such varied places as Hong Kong, Panama, Nigeria, Cyprus, even San Francisco. The product of the FBIS was also utilized to determine whether the broadcasts of the clandestine transmitters were reaching their target in China and creating the anticipated effect.
There was a third (and deleterious) way, however, in which the monitoring service played a role in the operation, and the Clandestine Services were slow to correct it. Unlike most of the intelligence collected by the agency, the programs monitored by the FHIS are widely disseminated within the U.S. government and to certain subscribers among the press corps and the academic community. These daily reports, verbatim transcripts translated into English, are packaged and color-coded according to major geographical area- Far East (yellow), Middle East! Africa (blue), Latin America (pink), and so on. But even though the FBIS editors are members of the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, the operators in the Clandestine Services are reluctant to reveal their propaganda operations to them. As a result, for its Far East daily report the FBIS frequently monitored and distributed the texts of programs actually originating from the agency's secret stations on Taiwan along with the transcripts of broadcasts from real counter-revolutionary organizations on the mainland.
CIA operators seemed untroubled by this development and the accompanying fact that the agency's own China analysts back at headquarters in Washington (along with their colleagues in the State and Defense departments) were being somewhat misled. Nor did they appear to mind that unwitting scholars and newsmen were publishing articles based to some extent on the phony information being reported by the FBIS. Eventually the CIA analysts at home were informed of the existence of the clandestine radios, but no steps were taken to rectify the false data passed on to the other U.S. government agencies or to the press and academia; operational security precluded such revelations. Besides, Communist China was an enemy, and the writings of recognized journalists and professors publicizing its state of near chaos and potential rebellion helped to discredit Peking in the eyes of the world-which was, after all, in keeping with the CIA's interpretation of American foreign policy at the time. The CIA's secret radios thus proved to be highly successful, even after the Chinese government discovered their origin and announced to its people that the broadcasts were false.
Meanwhile, the agency's operatives turned to outright disinformation in their effort to exploit China's internal difficulties. For example, (DELETED) began to show results. The Red Guards turned their fury on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding that Chinese diplomats, too, be cleansed of Western ways and rededicated to Mao's principles of communism.
(DELETED) To be sure, propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomena. Nations and factions within nations have long employed such techniques to enhance their own images while at the same time attempting to discredit their enemies and rivals. Yet the great advances in communications during the twentieth century have vastly changed the potential of propagandistic effort, making possible rapid, widespread distribution of propaganda material. Nazi Germany refined and made enormous use of the "big lie." The Soviet Union and other communist countries have used many of the methods invented by the Germans and have added new twists of their own. Although the United States did not actively enter the field until World War II, when the ass and the Office of War Information (OWl) started their psychological-warfare programs, its propaganda effort has grown-under the eyes of the Covert Action Staff of the CIA's Clandestine Services-to be thoroughly expert.
Working on the CA Staff are sociologists, psychologists, historians, and media specialists-all skilled at selecting "reachable" targets, such as the youth or intellectuals of a particular country, and at getting a message through to them. In planning and carrying out its activities, the branch often works closely with 6ther agency officers in the area divisions. The idea for an operation may be initiated by a field component-say, a station in Africa or Latin America-that sees a special need or a target of opportunity within its area of responsibility; it may originate at headquarters in Langley, either in the propaganda branch or in one of the area divisions; or it may come from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, or any member of the U.S. intelligence community in the form of a requirement for the CIA to take action. If it is considered to be a program of major political significance or entailing an inherent high-risk factor-that is, if its exposure would cause substantial embarrassment for the U.S. government-a project proposal developed in the Clandestine Services is submitted to the Director's office for review. Subsequently, the plan will be sent to the 40 Committee for final approval. Thenceforth, control of any propaganda operation and responsibility for its coordination within the Clandestine Services and the government may rest with either the Covert Action Staff or an area division. Certain long-standing operations, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, were traditionally under the control of the CA Staff. But responsibility for the newer and smaller operations usually is determined on an ad hoc basis, with the CA Staff serving in either an advisory or controlling capacity, depending on the circumstances of the particular undertaking.
A propaganda operation might not be anything more sinister than broadcasting straight news reports or rock music to the countries of Eastern Europe. Others are far more devious. (DELETED)
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The CIA also makes considerable use of forged documents. * During the mid-1960s, for instance, the agency learned that a certain West African country was about to recognize the People's Republic of China and that the local government intended to force the withdrawal of the diplomatic representatives of Nationalist China. This was considered to be contrary to American foreign-policy aims, so the CIA went into action. (DELETED)
The Pentagon Papers have revealed some other examples of CIA propaganda and disinformation activities. One top-secret document written in 1954 by Colonel Edward Lansdale, then an agency operator, describes an effort involving North Vietnamese astrologers hired to write predictions about the coming disasters which would befall certain Vietminh leaders and their undertakings, and the success and unity which awaited the South.
Lansdale also mentioned that personnel under his control had engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region in early October, including items about property, money reform, and a three-day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled. Two days later Vietminh took to the radio to denounce the leaflets; the leaflets were so authentic in appearance that even most of the rank and file Vietminh were sure that the radio denunciations were a French trick.
Lansdale's black propaganda also had an effect on the American press. One of his bogus leaflets came to the attention of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who was then touring South Vietnam. The leaflet, indicating that many South Vietnamese were to be sent to China to work on the railroads, seemed to have been written by the communists. Alsop naively accepted the leaflet at face value and, according to Lansdale, this "led to his sensational, gloomy articles later. ... Alsop was never told this story." Nor, of course, was the false impression left with Alsop's readers ever corrected.
CIA propaganda activities also entail the publication of books and periodicals. Over the years, the agency has provided direct subsidies to a number of magazines and publishing houses, ranging from Eastern European emigre organs to such reputable firms as Frederick A. Praeger, of New York-which admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request.
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Many other anti-communist publishing concerns in Germany, Italy, and France were also supported and encouraged by the agency during the post-World War II years. (DELETED) According to a former high-ranking agency official, (DELETED) and the Parisian newspaper, "Le Combat." This same ex-official also recalls with an ironic smile that for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, The Daily Worker. In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was indeed real.
Although the CIA inherited from the ass responsibility for covert propaganda operations, the agency has no specific authority in the open law to engage in such operations-other than the vague charge to carry out "such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." Yet since its founding in 1947 the CIA has spent over one billion dollars for propaganda activities (mainly foreign but also domestic) to further what it perceived to be the national interests of the United States.
Sometimes this means simply telling the truth to an audience (called "white" propaganda); other times a mixture of truths, half-truths, and slight distortions is used to slant the views of the audience ("gray" propaganda); and, on occasion, outright lies ("black" propaganda) are used, although usually accompanied for credibility's sake by some truths and half-truths.
"Black" propaganda on the one hand and "disinformation" on the other are virtually indistinguishable. Both refer to the spreading of false information in order to influence people's opinions or actions. Disinformation actually is a special type of "black" propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents; originally, it was something of a Soviet specialty, and the Russian word for it, dezinformatsiya, is virtually a direct analogue of our own. Within the KGB there is even a Department of Disinformation.
On June 2, 1961 (less than two months after the CIA's humiliating failure at the Bay of Pigs), Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of the Clandestine Services, briefed the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on communist forgeries. Helms discussed thirty-two fraudulent documents "packaged to look like communications to or from American officials." Twenty-two were meant to demonstrate imperialist American plans and ambitions; seventeen of these asserted U.S. interference in the affairs of several free-world countries. Of the seventeen, eleven charged U.S. intervention in private business of Asian nations. One was a fake secret agreement between the Secretary of State and Japanese Premier Kishi permitting use of Japanese troops anywhere in Asia. Another alleged that American policy in Southeast Asia called for U.S. control of the armed forces of all S.E.A.T.O. nations. Two forgeries offered proof that the Americans were plotting the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno; the remaining two were merely meant to demonstrate that the U.S. government, despite official disclaimers, was secretly supplying the anti-Sukarno rebels with military aid.
These last examples concerning Indonesia are especially interesting. A cursory examination of the documents, as submitted by Helms, indicates that they were indeed rather crude forgeries, but their message was accurate. Not only did the CIA in 1958 support efforts to overthrow the Sukarno government, but Helms himself, as second-ranking official in Clandestine Services, knew it well. And he knew that the "official disclaimers" to which be referred were deceptions and outright lies issued by U.S. government spokesmen. Helms' testimony was released to the public with the approval of the CIA, which was, in effect, targeting a propaganda operation against the American people. Not only did he lie about the communists' lying (which is not to say that they are not indeed culpable), but Helms in the process quite ably managed to avoid discussion of the pervasive lying the CIA commits in the name of the United States.
The Radios
Until 1971, the CIA's largest propaganda operations by far were Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). RFE broadcast to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while RL was aimed at the Soviet Union. These ostensibly private stations had been started by the agency in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. They operated under the cover provided by their New York-based boards of directors, which were made up principally of distinguished statesmen, retired military leaders, and corporate executives. With studios in Munich and transmitters in West Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Taiwan, the two stations broadcast thousands of hours of programs a year into the communist countries. Their combined annual budgets ranged from $30 to $35 million, and the CIA financed over 95 percent of the costs. *
In their early years, both RFE and RL quite stridently promoted the "rolling back" of the Iron Curtain. (Radio Liberty was originally named Radio Liberation.) The tone of their broadcasts softened considerably in the aftermath of the 1957 Hungarian revolt, when RFE was subjected to severe criticism for its role in seeming to incite continued, but inevitably futile, resistance by implying that American assistance would be forthcoming. During and after the Hungarian events, it became quite clear that the United States would not actively participate in freeing the captive nations, and the emphasis at both RFE and RL was changed to promote liberalization within the communist system through peaceful change. The CIA continued, however, to finance both stations, to provide them with key personnel, and to control program content.
The ostensible mission of RFE and RL was to provide accurate information to the people of Eastern Europe. In this aim they were largely successful, and their programs reached millions of listeners. While RFE and RL broadcasts contained a certain amount of distortion, they were, especially in the early years, considerably more accurate than the Eastern European media. But to many in the CIA the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe and, in the process, to weaken the communist governments. Hard-liners in the agency pointed to the social agitation in Poland which brought Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in 1956, the Hungarian uprising in 1957, and the fall of Czech Stalinist Antonin Novotny in 1967 as events which RFE helped to bring about. Others in the CIA did not specifically connect RFE or RL to such dramatic occurrences, but instead stressed the role of the two stations in the more gradual de-Stalinization and liberalization of Eastern Europe.
Like most propaganda operations, RFE's and RL's principal effect has been to contribute to existing trends in their target areas and sometimes to accentuate those trends. Even when events in Eastern Europe have worked out to the agency's satisfaction, any direct contribution by the radios would be nearly impossible to prove. In any case, whatever the success of the two stations, the CIA intended from the beginning that they play an activist role in the affairs of Eastern Europe-well beyond being simply sources of accurate news. For, in addition to transmitting information to Eastern Europe and harassing the communist governments, RFE and RL have also provided the Clandestine Services with covert assets which could be used against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The two radio stations, with their large staffs of Eastern European refugees, are a ready-made source of agents, contacts, information, and cover for operations. Among further radio-derived sources of intelligence was the comparatively large number of letters RFE and RL received from their listeners in Eastern Europe. Delivered by mail and by travelers coming to the West, these letters were considered by the agency's clandestine operators to be an intelligence-collection resource. RFE and RL emigre personnel used the letters and other information available to the stations to prepare written analyses of what was happening in the East. Much of this analysis, however, was thought to be of doubtful value back at CIA headquarters, and was held in low esteem throughout the U.S. intelligence community.
However debatable the direct effect of RFE and RL on events in Eastern Europe, the governments of the communist countries obviously were quite disturbed by the stations. Extensive efforts were made to jam their signals, and by the late 1950s the communist intelligence services were actively trying to discredit the stations and to infiltrate the radios' staffs. In many cases, they succeeded, and by the mid-1960s the general view at CIA headquarters was that the two facilities were widely penetrated by communist agents and that much of the analysis coming out of Munich was based on false information planted by opposition agents. During this same time the spirit of East-West detente was growing, and many officers in the CIA thought that RFE and RL had outlived their usefulness. Supporters of the stations were finding it increasingly difficult at budget time to justify their yearly costs. Even the Eastern European governments were showing a declining interest in the stations, and the jamming efforts fell off considerably.
The agency carried out several internal studies on the utility of RFE and RL, and the results in each case favored phasing out CIA funding. But after each study a few old-timers in the CIA, whose connections with the stations went back to their beginnings, would come up with new and dubious reasons why the radios should be continued. The emotional attachment of these veteran operators to RFE and RL was extremely strong. Also defending the stations were those influential personalities, like former N.A.T.O. chief Lucius Clay, CBS president Frank Stanton, and General Motors chairman James Roche, who made up the radios' boards of directors. All of these efforts ran counter to attempts of the CIA's own Planning, Programming and Budgeting Staff to end agency support. Additionally, the CIA's top management appeared reluctant to part with the stations because of a fear that if the $30 to $35 million in annual payments were ended, that money would be irrevocably lost to the CIA. Each internal agency study which called for the end of the CIA's involvement invariably led to nothing more than yet another study being made.
Thus, bureaucratic inertia, the unwillingness of the USIA to take over the radios' functions, and well-placed lobbying efforts by RFL and RE boards of directors combined to keep CIA funds flowing into both stations through the 1960s. Even when agency financing of the stations became widely known during the 1967 scandal surrounding the CIA's penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association, the agency did not reduce its support. In the aftermath of that scandal, President Johnson's special review group, the Katzenbach committee, recommended that the CIA not be allowed to finance "any of the nation's educational or private voluntary organizations." Still, with the approval of the White House, the agency did not let go of RFE or RL.
No change occurred until January 1971, when Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey spoke out against the CIA subsidies to the radios and proposed legislation for open funding.
Case's move attracted quite a bit of attention in the media and it became obvious that the Senator was not going to back down in the face of administration pressure. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled hearings on Case's bill and the Senator threatened to call former RFE employees as witnesses, the CIA decided that the time had come to divest itself of the two stations. Open congressional funding became a reality, and by the end of 1971 CIA financial involvement in RFE and RL was officially ended. Whether the agency has also dropped all its covert assets connected with them is not known, but, given past experience, that is not likely. For the time being, the largest threat to the future of RFE and RL would seem to be not Congress, which will prob'ably vote money indefinitely, but the West German government of Willy Brandt. Now that the stations are in the open, Bonn faces pressure from the Eastern European countries to forbid them to broadcast on German soil. (DELETED) but he still might at some point accept the argument, as part of an effort to further the East-West detente, that RFE and RL represent unnecessary obstacles to improved relations.
Other Propaganda Operations
The CIA has always been interested in reaching and encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the early days of the Cold War, the agency sent its own agents and substantial amounts of money behind the Iron Curtain to keep things stirred up, mostly with disastrous results. In more recent times, operations against Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. have become less frequent and less crude. The agency, however, has continued to maintain its contacts with emigre groups in Western Europe and the United States. These groups are sometimes well informed on what is happening in their home countries, and they often provide a conduit for the CIA in its dealings with dissidents in those countries.
(DELETED) has found the emigre group to be of only marginal usefulness.
Another organization heavily subsidized by the CIA was the Asia Foundation. Established by the agency in 1956, with a carefully chosen board of directors, the foundation was designed to promote academic and public interest in the East. It sponsored scholarly research, supported conferences and symposia, and ran academic exchange programs, with a CIA subsidy that reached $8 million dollars a year. While most of the foundation's activities were legitimate, the CIA also used it, through penetrations among the officers and members, to fund anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries, to disseminate throughout Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, and to recruit foreign agents and new case officers. Although the foundation often served as a cover for clandestine operations, its main purpose was to promote the spread of ideas which were anticommunist and pro-American-sometimes subtly and sometimes stridently.
The focus of the Asia Foundation's activities was overseas, but the organization's impact tended to be greater in the American academic community than in the Far East. Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in foundation programs, and they-usually unwittingly-contributed to the popularizing of CIA ideas about the Far East. Designed-and justified at budget time-as an overseas propaganda operation, the Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people with agency views on Asia.
The agency's connection with the Asia Foundation came to light just after the 1967 exposure of CIA subsidies to the National Student Association. The foundation clearly was one of the organizations which the CIA was banned from financing and, under the recommendations of the Katzenbach committee, the decision was made to end CIA funding. A complete cut-off after 1967, however, would have forced the foundation to shut down, so the agency made it the beneficiary of a large "severance payment" in order to give it a couple of years to develop alternative sources of funding. Assuming the CIA has not resumed covert financing, the Asia Foundation has apparently made itself self-sufficient by now.
During the 1960s the CIA developed proprietary companies of a new type for use in propaganda operations. These proprietaries are more compact and more covert than relatively unwieldy and now exposed fronts like the Asia Foundation and Radio Free Europe. (DELETED) More and more, as the United States cuts back its overt aid programs and withdraws from direct involvement in foreign countries, the agency will probably be called upon to carry out similar missions in other nations. The CIA has also used defectors from communist governments for propaganda purposes-a practice which has had more impact in this country than overseas. These defectors, without any prodding by the CIA, would have interesting stories to tell of politics and events in their homelands, but almost all are immediately taken under the CIA's control and subjected to extensive secret debriefings at a special defector reception center near Frankfurt, West Germany, or, in the cases of particularly knowledgeable ones, at agency "safe houses" in the United States. In return for the intelligence supplied about the defector's former life and work, the CIA usually takes care of his resettlement in the West, even providing a new identity if necessary. Sometimes, after the lengthy debriefing has been finished, the agency will encourage-and will help-the defector to write articles or books about his past life. As he may still be living at a CIA facility or be dependent on the agency for his livelihood, the defector would be extremely reluctant to jeopardize his future by not cooperating. The CIA does not try to alter the defector's writings drastically; it simply influences him to leave out certain information because of security considerations, or because the thrust of the information runs counter to existing American policy. The inclusion of information justifying U.S. or CIA practices is, of course, encouraged, and the CIA will provide whatever literary assistance is needed by the defector. While such books tend to show the communist intelligence services as diabolical and unprincipled organs (which they are), almost never do these books describe triumphs by the opposition services over the CIA. Although the other side does indeed win on occasion, the agency would prefer that the world did not know that. And the defector dependent on the CIA will hardly act counter to its interests.
In helping the defector with his writing, the agency often steers him toward a publisher. Even some of the public-relations aspects of promoting his book may be aided by the CIA, as in the case of Major Ladislav Bittman, a Czech intelligence officer who defected in 1968. Prior to the 1972 publication of his book, The Deception Game, Bittman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted him on U.S. intelligence's use of the disinformation techniques. "It was our opinion," the former Czech operative said, "that the Americans had more effective means than this sort of trickery-things such as economic-aid programs-that were more influential than any black propaganda operation."
While Bittman may well have been reflecting attitudes held by his former colleagues in Czech intelligence, his words must be considered suspect. The Czechs almost certainly know something about the CIA's propaganda and disinformation programs, just as the CIA knows of theirs. But Bittman's statement, taken along with his extensive descriptions of Czech and Russian disinformation programs, reflects exactly the image the CIA wants to promote to the American public-that the communists are always out to defraud the West, while the CIA, skillfully uncovering these deceits, eschews such unprincipled tactics.
To the CIA, propaganda through book publishing has long been a successful technique. In 1953 the agency backed the publication of a book called The Dynamics of Soviet Society, which was written by Walt Rostow, later President Johnson's Assistant for National Security Affairs, and other members of the staff of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center had been set up with CIA money in 1950, and this book was published in two versions, one classified (for the CIA and government policymakers) and the other unclassified (for the public). Both versions, except in some minor details, promoted the thesis that the Soviet Union is an imperialistic power bent on world conquest, and that it is the responsibility of the United States to blunt the communist menace.
Most CIA book operations, however, are more subtle and clandestine. A former CIA official who specialized in Soviet affairs recalls how one day in 1967 a CIA operator on the Covert Action Staff showed him a book called The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China by a German named Kurt Muller. The book looked interesting to the Soviet expert, and he asked to borrow it. The Covert Action man replied, "Keep it. We've got hundreds more downstairs." Muller's book was something less than an unbiased treatment of the subject; it was highly critical of communist foreign assistance to the Third World. The Soviet specialist is convinced that the agency had found out Muller was interested in communist foreign-aid programs, encouraged him to write a book which would have a strong anti-communist slant, provided him with information, and then helped to get the book published and distributed.
Financing books is a standard technique used by all intelligence services. Many writers are glad to write on subjects which will further their own careers, and with a slant that will contribute to the propaganda objectives of a friendly agency. Books of this sort, however, add only a false aura of respectability and authority to the information the intelligence agency would like to see spread -even when that information is perfectly accurate-because they are by definition restricted from presenting an objective analysis of the subject under consideration. And once exposed, both the writer and his data become suspect. (DELETED)
Spies, however, do not keep journals. They simply do not take that kind of risk, nor do they have the time to do so while they are leading double lives.
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(DELETED) Allen Dulles seemed to be rubbing salt in their wounds when he wrote in The Craft of Intelligence that the Penkovsky defection had shaken the Soviet intelligence services with the knowledge that the West had located Russian officials willing to work "in place for long periods of time," and others who "have never been 'surfaced' and [who] for their own protection must remain unknown to the public."
And, of course, the publication of The Penkovsky Papers opened the Soviets up to the embarrassment of having the world learn that the top level of their government had been penetrated by a Western spy. Furthermore, Penkovsky's success as an agent made the CIA look good, both to the American people and to the rest of the world. Failures such as the Bay of Pigs might be forgiven and forgotten if the agency could recruit agents like Penkovsky to accomplish the one task the CIA is weakest at-gathering intelligence from inside the Soviet Union or China.
The facts were otherwise, however. In the beginning, Penkovsky was not a CIA spy. He worked for British intelligence. He had tried to join the CIA in Turkey, but he had been turned down, in large part because the Soviet Bloc Division of the Clandestine Services was overly careful not to be taken in by KGB provocateurs and double agents. To the skittish CIA operators, Penkovsky seemed too good to be true, especially in the period following the Burgess-McLean catastrophe. The CIA had also suffered several recent defeats at the hands of the KGB in Europe, and it was understandably reluctant to be duped again.
Penkovsky, however, was determined to spy for the West, and in 1960 he made contact with British intelligence, which eventually recruited him. The British informed the CIA of Penkovsky's availability and offered to conduct the operation as a joint project. CIA operators in Moscow and elsewhere participated in the elaborated clandestine techniques used to receive information from Penkovsky and to debrief the Soviet spy on his visits to Western Europe. (DELETED)
The Penkovsky Papers was a best-seller around the world, and especially in the United States. Its publication certainly caused discomfort in the Soviet Union. (DELETED)
Richard Helms years later again referred to Penkovsky in this vein, although not by name, when he claimed in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors that "a number of well-placed and courageous Russians ... helped us" in uncovering the Soviet move. One person taken in by this deception was Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, who serves on the CIA oversight subcommittee. In a 1971 Senate debate on cutting the intelligence budget, the Senator said, "And if you want to read something very interesting and authoritative where intelligence is concerned, read the Penkovsky papers ... this is a very interesting story, on why the intelligence we had in Cuba was so important to us, and on what the Russians were thinking and just how far they would go."
Yet the CIA intelligence analysts who were working on the Cuban problem at the time of the missile crisis and preparing the agency's intelligence reports for the President up to and after the discovery of the Soviet missiles saw no such information from Penkovsky or any other Soviet spy. The key intelligence that led to the discovery of the missiles came from the analysis of satellite photography of the U.S.S.R., Soviet ship movements, U-2 photographs of Cuba, and information supplied by Cuban refugees. Penkovsky's technical background information, provided well before the crisis, was of some use-but not of major or critical importance.
Several scholars of the Soviet Union have independently characterized The Penkovsky Papers as being partly bogus and as not having come from Penkovsky's "journal." The respected Soviet expert and columnist for the Manchester Guardian and the Washington Post, Victor Zorza, wrote that "the book could have been compiled only by the Central Intelligence Agency." Zorza pointed out that Penkovsky had neither the time nor the opportunity to have produced such a manuscript; that the book's publisher (Doubleday and Company) and translator (Peter Deriabin, himself a KGB defector to the CIA) both refused to produce the original Russian manuscript for inspection; and that The Penkovsky Papers contained errors of style, technique, and fact that Penkovsky would not have made.
British intelligence also was not above scoring a propaganda victory of its own in the Penkovsky affair. Penkovsky's contact officer had been MI-6's Greville Wynne, who, working under the cover of being a businessman, had been arrested at the same time as Penkovsky and later exchanged for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale. When Wynne returned to Britain, MI-6 helped him write a book about his experiences, called Contact on Gorky Street. British intelligence wanted the book published in part to make some money for Wynne, who had gone through the ordeal of a year and a half in Soviet prisons, but the MI-6's main motive was to counteract the extremely unfavorable publicity that had been generated by the defection of its own senior officer, Harold "Kim" Philby, in 1963, and the subsequent publication of his memoirs prepared under the auspices of the KGB.
Interestingly, nowhere in Contact on Gorky Street does Wynne cite the help he received from the CIA. The reason for this omission could have been professional jealousy on the part of British intelligence, good British manners (i.e., not mentioning the clandestine activities of a friendly intelligence service), or most likely, an indication of the small role played by the CIA in the operation.
Another book-publishing effort in which the CIA mayor may not have been involved-to some degree-was Khrushchev Remembers, and the second volume of Khrushchev memoirs scheduled for publication this year. While these autobiographical and somewhat self-serving works unquestionably originated with the former Soviet premier himself, there are a number of curious circumstances connected with their transmission from Moscow to Time Inc. in New York, and to its book-publishing division, Little, Brown and Company. Time Inc. has been less than forthcoming about how it gained access to the 180 hours of taped reminiscences upon which the books are based, and how the tapes were taken out of the U.S.S.R. without the knowledge of the Soviet government or the ubiquitous and proficient KGB. The whole operation-especially its political implication-was simply too important to have been permitted without at least tacit approval by Soviet authorities. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev was subsequently neither denounced nor exiled by Moscow's all-powerful party chiefs.
Most of the explanations offered by Time Inc. to clarify the various mysteries involved in this episode have a slightly disingenuous air. They may be true, but a number of highly regarded American and British scholars and intelligence officers dealing with Soviet affairs find them difficult to accept in toto. Why, for example, did Time Inc. find it necessary to take the risky step of sending a copy of the bound galleys of the book to its Moscow bureau -- secretly via Helsinki-before it was published? The complete story of the Khrushchev memoirs, in short, may never be publicly known. And if it is, it may turn out to be another example of secret U.S.-Soviet cooperation, of two hostile powers giving wide circulation to information that each wants to see published, while collaborating to keep their operations away from the eyes of the general public on both sides. After all, the publication of the first volume, in 1971 had a relatively happy effect-it supported Moscow's anti-Stalinists, and in turn increased the prospects for detente.
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Notes:
* Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was questioned in 1973 about his forgery of a State Department cable directly linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. "After an," Hunt told the federal prosecutor, "I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing."
* A particularly deceptive aspect of the RFE operation was, and is, the annual fund-raising drive carried out in the United States. Under the auspices of the Advertising Council, RFE solicits funds with the clear implication that if money is not donated by the American public the station will no longer be able to function and the "truth" will not get through to Eastern Europe. Although between $12 and $20 million in free advertising time was made available in 1969, for example, less than $100,000 was raised from a not terribly alarmed public.
In psychological warfare ... the intelligence agencies of the democratic countries suffer from the grave disadvantage that in attempting to damage the adversary they must also deceive their own public.
-- VICTOR ZORZA, Washington Post, November 15, 1965
By the mid 1960s most of the professionals in the CIA's Clandestine Services thought that the day of the balloon as an effective delivery vehicle in propaganda operations had long since passed. Years before, in the early rough-and-tumble era of the Cold War, agency operators in West Germany had often used balloons to carry anti-communist literature into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. These operations, although lacking in plausible deniability, normally a prerequisite in covert propaganda efforts, had scored high-judging from the numerous angry protests issued by the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.
Since then the propaganda game had evolved into a subtle contest of wits, and the agency's Covert Action Staff had developed far more sophisticated methods for spreading ideological messages. Thus, there was a sense of "deja vu" among the covert-action staffers when officers of the Far East Division suggested in 1967 that a new balloon operation be undertaken. The target this time was to be mainland China.
The People's Republic was at that time in the midst of the cultural revolution. Youthful Red Guards were rampaging throughout the country, shattering customs and laws alike; confusion, near chaos, engulfed the nation. But the CIA's China watchers in Hong Kong and elsewhere on the periphery of the mainland had detected that a reaction was setting in, especially in southern China around Canton and Foochow in the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. They believed that a kind of backlash to the excesses of the Red Guards was building, for increasingly groups within the military and among the workers were beginning to resist the Red Guards and to call for a return to traditional law and order.
To the agency's operators, these were conditions worth exploiting. No one really believed that communism could be eliminated from the mainland, but the short-term political objectives which might be achieved through covert propaganda were too tempting to pass up. China was an avowed enemy of the United States, and the CIA felt that each bit of additional domestic turmoil that could be stirred up made the world's most populous country-already experimenting with long-range ballistic missiles-that much less of a threat to American national security. Furthermore, if Peking could be kept preoccupied with internal problems, then the likelihood of Chinese military intervention in the Vietnamese war, in a manner similar to that so effectively employed years earlier in Korea, could be diminished. Perhaps, too, China could be forced to reduce its material support to North Vietnam and to cut back on its export of revolution to other areas of the developing world.
The operation was accordingly approved by the 303 Committee (now the 40 Committee) and the agency took its balloons out of storage, shipping them to a secret base on Taiwan. There they were loaded with a variety of carefully prepared propaganda materials -leaflets, pamphlets, newspapers-and, when the winds were right, launched to float over the mainland provinces due west of the island. The literature dropped by the balloons had been designed by the agency's propagandists to appear as similar as possible in substance and style to the few publications then being furtively distributed on a small scale by conservative groups inside China. Names of no genuine anti-revolutionary organizations were used; fictitious associations, some identified with the army, others with agricultural communes or urban industrial unions, were invented.
The main thrust of all the propaganda was essentially the same, criticizing the activities (both real and imaginary) of the Red Guards and, by implication, those leaders who inspired or permitted such excesses. It was hoped that the propaganda and its attendant disinformation would create further reactions to the cultural revolution, on one hand adding to the growing domestic confusion and on the other disrupting the internal balance of power among the leadership in Peking. The CIA calculated that when the Chinese realized they were being propagandized, the U.S. government could confidently disclaim any responsibility. The assumed culprit would most likely be Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan regime, the agency's witting and cooperative host for the operation.
Almost immediately after it began, the balloon project was a success. The CIA's China watchers soon saw evidence of increased resistance to the Red Guards in the southern provinces. Peking, apparently believing the reaction to the cultural revolution to be greater than it actually was, displayed strong concern over developments in the south. And within weeks, refugees and travelers from the mainland began arriving in Hong Kong with copies of the leaflets and pamphlets that the agency's propagandists had manufactured- a clear indication of the credence being given the false literature by the Chinese masses. It was not long, therefore, before the Clandestine Services were searching for other ways to expand their propaganda effort against the new target.
A decision was therefore made to install on Taiwan a pair of clandestine radio transmitters which would broadcast propaganda -and disinformation-of the same nature as that disseminated by the balloon drops. If the Chinese people accepted the radio broadcasts as genuine, the CIA reasoned, then they might be convinced that the countermovement to the cultural revolution was gaining strength and perhaps think that the time had come to resist the Red Guards and their supporters still more openly.
(DELETED)
(DELETED)
Against a closed-society target, simply providing information and news that the government wishes to keep from its people can have a significant effect. If, in addition, some clever disinformation can be inserted, then so much the better. The listeners, realizing that much of what they are hearing is true, tend to believe that all they are told is accurate.
One source of news used by agency propagandists was the CIA's own Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which daily monitors open radio broadcasting around the world from more than a dozen listening posts located in such varied places as Hong Kong, Panama, Nigeria, Cyprus, even San Francisco. The product of the FBIS was also utilized to determine whether the broadcasts of the clandestine transmitters were reaching their target in China and creating the anticipated effect.
There was a third (and deleterious) way, however, in which the monitoring service played a role in the operation, and the Clandestine Services were slow to correct it. Unlike most of the intelligence collected by the agency, the programs monitored by the FHIS are widely disseminated within the U.S. government and to certain subscribers among the press corps and the academic community. These daily reports, verbatim transcripts translated into English, are packaged and color-coded according to major geographical area- Far East (yellow), Middle East! Africa (blue), Latin America (pink), and so on. But even though the FBIS editors are members of the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, the operators in the Clandestine Services are reluctant to reveal their propaganda operations to them. As a result, for its Far East daily report the FBIS frequently monitored and distributed the texts of programs actually originating from the agency's secret stations on Taiwan along with the transcripts of broadcasts from real counter-revolutionary organizations on the mainland.
CIA operators seemed untroubled by this development and the accompanying fact that the agency's own China analysts back at headquarters in Washington (along with their colleagues in the State and Defense departments) were being somewhat misled. Nor did they appear to mind that unwitting scholars and newsmen were publishing articles based to some extent on the phony information being reported by the FBIS. Eventually the CIA analysts at home were informed of the existence of the clandestine radios, but no steps were taken to rectify the false data passed on to the other U.S. government agencies or to the press and academia; operational security precluded such revelations. Besides, Communist China was an enemy, and the writings of recognized journalists and professors publicizing its state of near chaos and potential rebellion helped to discredit Peking in the eyes of the world-which was, after all, in keeping with the CIA's interpretation of American foreign policy at the time. The CIA's secret radios thus proved to be highly successful, even after the Chinese government discovered their origin and announced to its people that the broadcasts were false.
Meanwhile, the agency's operatives turned to outright disinformation in their effort to exploit China's internal difficulties. For example, (DELETED) began to show results. The Red Guards turned their fury on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding that Chinese diplomats, too, be cleansed of Western ways and rededicated to Mao's principles of communism.
(DELETED) To be sure, propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomena. Nations and factions within nations have long employed such techniques to enhance their own images while at the same time attempting to discredit their enemies and rivals. Yet the great advances in communications during the twentieth century have vastly changed the potential of propagandistic effort, making possible rapid, widespread distribution of propaganda material. Nazi Germany refined and made enormous use of the "big lie." The Soviet Union and other communist countries have used many of the methods invented by the Germans and have added new twists of their own. Although the United States did not actively enter the field until World War II, when the ass and the Office of War Information (OWl) started their psychological-warfare programs, its propaganda effort has grown-under the eyes of the Covert Action Staff of the CIA's Clandestine Services-to be thoroughly expert.
Working on the CA Staff are sociologists, psychologists, historians, and media specialists-all skilled at selecting "reachable" targets, such as the youth or intellectuals of a particular country, and at getting a message through to them. In planning and carrying out its activities, the branch often works closely with 6ther agency officers in the area divisions. The idea for an operation may be initiated by a field component-say, a station in Africa or Latin America-that sees a special need or a target of opportunity within its area of responsibility; it may originate at headquarters in Langley, either in the propaganda branch or in one of the area divisions; or it may come from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, or any member of the U.S. intelligence community in the form of a requirement for the CIA to take action. If it is considered to be a program of major political significance or entailing an inherent high-risk factor-that is, if its exposure would cause substantial embarrassment for the U.S. government-a project proposal developed in the Clandestine Services is submitted to the Director's office for review. Subsequently, the plan will be sent to the 40 Committee for final approval. Thenceforth, control of any propaganda operation and responsibility for its coordination within the Clandestine Services and the government may rest with either the Covert Action Staff or an area division. Certain long-standing operations, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, were traditionally under the control of the CA Staff. But responsibility for the newer and smaller operations usually is determined on an ad hoc basis, with the CA Staff serving in either an advisory or controlling capacity, depending on the circumstances of the particular undertaking.
A propaganda operation might not be anything more sinister than broadcasting straight news reports or rock music to the countries of Eastern Europe. Others are far more devious. (DELETED)
(DELETED)
The CIA also makes considerable use of forged documents. * During the mid-1960s, for instance, the agency learned that a certain West African country was about to recognize the People's Republic of China and that the local government intended to force the withdrawal of the diplomatic representatives of Nationalist China. This was considered to be contrary to American foreign-policy aims, so the CIA went into action. (DELETED)
The Pentagon Papers have revealed some other examples of CIA propaganda and disinformation activities. One top-secret document written in 1954 by Colonel Edward Lansdale, then an agency operator, describes an effort involving North Vietnamese astrologers hired to write predictions about the coming disasters which would befall certain Vietminh leaders and their undertakings, and the success and unity which awaited the South.
Lansdale also mentioned that personnel under his control had engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region in early October, including items about property, money reform, and a three-day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled. Two days later Vietminh took to the radio to denounce the leaflets; the leaflets were so authentic in appearance that even most of the rank and file Vietminh were sure that the radio denunciations were a French trick.
Lansdale's black propaganda also had an effect on the American press. One of his bogus leaflets came to the attention of syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who was then touring South Vietnam. The leaflet, indicating that many South Vietnamese were to be sent to China to work on the railroads, seemed to have been written by the communists. Alsop naively accepted the leaflet at face value and, according to Lansdale, this "led to his sensational, gloomy articles later. ... Alsop was never told this story." Nor, of course, was the false impression left with Alsop's readers ever corrected.
CIA propaganda activities also entail the publication of books and periodicals. Over the years, the agency has provided direct subsidies to a number of magazines and publishing houses, ranging from Eastern European emigre organs to such reputable firms as Frederick A. Praeger, of New York-which admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request.
(DELETED)
(DELETED)
Many other anti-communist publishing concerns in Germany, Italy, and France were also supported and encouraged by the agency during the post-World War II years. (DELETED) According to a former high-ranking agency official, (DELETED) and the Parisian newspaper, "Le Combat." This same ex-official also recalls with an ironic smile that for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, The Daily Worker. In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was indeed real.
Although the CIA inherited from the ass responsibility for covert propaganda operations, the agency has no specific authority in the open law to engage in such operations-other than the vague charge to carry out "such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." Yet since its founding in 1947 the CIA has spent over one billion dollars for propaganda activities (mainly foreign but also domestic) to further what it perceived to be the national interests of the United States.
Sometimes this means simply telling the truth to an audience (called "white" propaganda); other times a mixture of truths, half-truths, and slight distortions is used to slant the views of the audience ("gray" propaganda); and, on occasion, outright lies ("black" propaganda) are used, although usually accompanied for credibility's sake by some truths and half-truths.
"Black" propaganda on the one hand and "disinformation" on the other are virtually indistinguishable. Both refer to the spreading of false information in order to influence people's opinions or actions. Disinformation actually is a special type of "black" propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents; originally, it was something of a Soviet specialty, and the Russian word for it, dezinformatsiya, is virtually a direct analogue of our own. Within the KGB there is even a Department of Disinformation.
On June 2, 1961 (less than two months after the CIA's humiliating failure at the Bay of Pigs), Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of the Clandestine Services, briefed the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on communist forgeries. Helms discussed thirty-two fraudulent documents "packaged to look like communications to or from American officials." Twenty-two were meant to demonstrate imperialist American plans and ambitions; seventeen of these asserted U.S. interference in the affairs of several free-world countries. Of the seventeen, eleven charged U.S. intervention in private business of Asian nations. One was a fake secret agreement between the Secretary of State and Japanese Premier Kishi permitting use of Japanese troops anywhere in Asia. Another alleged that American policy in Southeast Asia called for U.S. control of the armed forces of all S.E.A.T.O. nations. Two forgeries offered proof that the Americans were plotting the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno; the remaining two were merely meant to demonstrate that the U.S. government, despite official disclaimers, was secretly supplying the anti-Sukarno rebels with military aid.
These last examples concerning Indonesia are especially interesting. A cursory examination of the documents, as submitted by Helms, indicates that they were indeed rather crude forgeries, but their message was accurate. Not only did the CIA in 1958 support efforts to overthrow the Sukarno government, but Helms himself, as second-ranking official in Clandestine Services, knew it well. And he knew that the "official disclaimers" to which be referred were deceptions and outright lies issued by U.S. government spokesmen. Helms' testimony was released to the public with the approval of the CIA, which was, in effect, targeting a propaganda operation against the American people. Not only did he lie about the communists' lying (which is not to say that they are not indeed culpable), but Helms in the process quite ably managed to avoid discussion of the pervasive lying the CIA commits in the name of the United States.
The Radios
Until 1971, the CIA's largest propaganda operations by far were Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). RFE broadcast to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while RL was aimed at the Soviet Union. These ostensibly private stations had been started by the agency in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. They operated under the cover provided by their New York-based boards of directors, which were made up principally of distinguished statesmen, retired military leaders, and corporate executives. With studios in Munich and transmitters in West Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Taiwan, the two stations broadcast thousands of hours of programs a year into the communist countries. Their combined annual budgets ranged from $30 to $35 million, and the CIA financed over 95 percent of the costs. *
In their early years, both RFE and RL quite stridently promoted the "rolling back" of the Iron Curtain. (Radio Liberty was originally named Radio Liberation.) The tone of their broadcasts softened considerably in the aftermath of the 1957 Hungarian revolt, when RFE was subjected to severe criticism for its role in seeming to incite continued, but inevitably futile, resistance by implying that American assistance would be forthcoming. During and after the Hungarian events, it became quite clear that the United States would not actively participate in freeing the captive nations, and the emphasis at both RFE and RL was changed to promote liberalization within the communist system through peaceful change. The CIA continued, however, to finance both stations, to provide them with key personnel, and to control program content.
The ostensible mission of RFE and RL was to provide accurate information to the people of Eastern Europe. In this aim they were largely successful, and their programs reached millions of listeners. While RFE and RL broadcasts contained a certain amount of distortion, they were, especially in the early years, considerably more accurate than the Eastern European media. But to many in the CIA the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe and, in the process, to weaken the communist governments. Hard-liners in the agency pointed to the social agitation in Poland which brought Wladyslaw Gomulka to power in 1956, the Hungarian uprising in 1957, and the fall of Czech Stalinist Antonin Novotny in 1967 as events which RFE helped to bring about. Others in the CIA did not specifically connect RFE or RL to such dramatic occurrences, but instead stressed the role of the two stations in the more gradual de-Stalinization and liberalization of Eastern Europe.
Like most propaganda operations, RFE's and RL's principal effect has been to contribute to existing trends in their target areas and sometimes to accentuate those trends. Even when events in Eastern Europe have worked out to the agency's satisfaction, any direct contribution by the radios would be nearly impossible to prove. In any case, whatever the success of the two stations, the CIA intended from the beginning that they play an activist role in the affairs of Eastern Europe-well beyond being simply sources of accurate news. For, in addition to transmitting information to Eastern Europe and harassing the communist governments, RFE and RL have also provided the Clandestine Services with covert assets which could be used against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The two radio stations, with their large staffs of Eastern European refugees, are a ready-made source of agents, contacts, information, and cover for operations. Among further radio-derived sources of intelligence was the comparatively large number of letters RFE and RL received from their listeners in Eastern Europe. Delivered by mail and by travelers coming to the West, these letters were considered by the agency's clandestine operators to be an intelligence-collection resource. RFE and RL emigre personnel used the letters and other information available to the stations to prepare written analyses of what was happening in the East. Much of this analysis, however, was thought to be of doubtful value back at CIA headquarters, and was held in low esteem throughout the U.S. intelligence community.
However debatable the direct effect of RFE and RL on events in Eastern Europe, the governments of the communist countries obviously were quite disturbed by the stations. Extensive efforts were made to jam their signals, and by the late 1950s the communist intelligence services were actively trying to discredit the stations and to infiltrate the radios' staffs. In many cases, they succeeded, and by the mid-1960s the general view at CIA headquarters was that the two facilities were widely penetrated by communist agents and that much of the analysis coming out of Munich was based on false information planted by opposition agents. During this same time the spirit of East-West detente was growing, and many officers in the CIA thought that RFE and RL had outlived their usefulness. Supporters of the stations were finding it increasingly difficult at budget time to justify their yearly costs. Even the Eastern European governments were showing a declining interest in the stations, and the jamming efforts fell off considerably.
The agency carried out several internal studies on the utility of RFE and RL, and the results in each case favored phasing out CIA funding. But after each study a few old-timers in the CIA, whose connections with the stations went back to their beginnings, would come up with new and dubious reasons why the radios should be continued. The emotional attachment of these veteran operators to RFE and RL was extremely strong. Also defending the stations were those influential personalities, like former N.A.T.O. chief Lucius Clay, CBS president Frank Stanton, and General Motors chairman James Roche, who made up the radios' boards of directors. All of these efforts ran counter to attempts of the CIA's own Planning, Programming and Budgeting Staff to end agency support. Additionally, the CIA's top management appeared reluctant to part with the stations because of a fear that if the $30 to $35 million in annual payments were ended, that money would be irrevocably lost to the CIA. Each internal agency study which called for the end of the CIA's involvement invariably led to nothing more than yet another study being made.
Thus, bureaucratic inertia, the unwillingness of the USIA to take over the radios' functions, and well-placed lobbying efforts by RFL and RE boards of directors combined to keep CIA funds flowing into both stations through the 1960s. Even when agency financing of the stations became widely known during the 1967 scandal surrounding the CIA's penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association, the agency did not reduce its support. In the aftermath of that scandal, President Johnson's special review group, the Katzenbach committee, recommended that the CIA not be allowed to finance "any of the nation's educational or private voluntary organizations." Still, with the approval of the White House, the agency did not let go of RFE or RL.
No change occurred until January 1971, when Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey spoke out against the CIA subsidies to the radios and proposed legislation for open funding.
Case's move attracted quite a bit of attention in the media and it became obvious that the Senator was not going to back down in the face of administration pressure. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled hearings on Case's bill and the Senator threatened to call former RFE employees as witnesses, the CIA decided that the time had come to divest itself of the two stations. Open congressional funding became a reality, and by the end of 1971 CIA financial involvement in RFE and RL was officially ended. Whether the agency has also dropped all its covert assets connected with them is not known, but, given past experience, that is not likely. For the time being, the largest threat to the future of RFE and RL would seem to be not Congress, which will prob'ably vote money indefinitely, but the West German government of Willy Brandt. Now that the stations are in the open, Bonn faces pressure from the Eastern European countries to forbid them to broadcast on German soil. (DELETED) but he still might at some point accept the argument, as part of an effort to further the East-West detente, that RFE and RL represent unnecessary obstacles to improved relations.
Other Propaganda Operations
The CIA has always been interested in reaching and encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the early days of the Cold War, the agency sent its own agents and substantial amounts of money behind the Iron Curtain to keep things stirred up, mostly with disastrous results. In more recent times, operations against Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. have become less frequent and less crude. The agency, however, has continued to maintain its contacts with emigre groups in Western Europe and the United States. These groups are sometimes well informed on what is happening in their home countries, and they often provide a conduit for the CIA in its dealings with dissidents in those countries.
(DELETED) has found the emigre group to be of only marginal usefulness.
Another organization heavily subsidized by the CIA was the Asia Foundation. Established by the agency in 1956, with a carefully chosen board of directors, the foundation was designed to promote academic and public interest in the East. It sponsored scholarly research, supported conferences and symposia, and ran academic exchange programs, with a CIA subsidy that reached $8 million dollars a year. While most of the foundation's activities were legitimate, the CIA also used it, through penetrations among the officers and members, to fund anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries, to disseminate throughout Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, and to recruit foreign agents and new case officers. Although the foundation often served as a cover for clandestine operations, its main purpose was to promote the spread of ideas which were anticommunist and pro-American-sometimes subtly and sometimes stridently.
The focus of the Asia Foundation's activities was overseas, but the organization's impact tended to be greater in the American academic community than in the Far East. Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in foundation programs, and they-usually unwittingly-contributed to the popularizing of CIA ideas about the Far East. Designed-and justified at budget time-as an overseas propaganda operation, the Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people with agency views on Asia.
The agency's connection with the Asia Foundation came to light just after the 1967 exposure of CIA subsidies to the National Student Association. The foundation clearly was one of the organizations which the CIA was banned from financing and, under the recommendations of the Katzenbach committee, the decision was made to end CIA funding. A complete cut-off after 1967, however, would have forced the foundation to shut down, so the agency made it the beneficiary of a large "severance payment" in order to give it a couple of years to develop alternative sources of funding. Assuming the CIA has not resumed covert financing, the Asia Foundation has apparently made itself self-sufficient by now.
During the 1960s the CIA developed proprietary companies of a new type for use in propaganda operations. These proprietaries are more compact and more covert than relatively unwieldy and now exposed fronts like the Asia Foundation and Radio Free Europe. (DELETED) More and more, as the United States cuts back its overt aid programs and withdraws from direct involvement in foreign countries, the agency will probably be called upon to carry out similar missions in other nations. The CIA has also used defectors from communist governments for propaganda purposes-a practice which has had more impact in this country than overseas. These defectors, without any prodding by the CIA, would have interesting stories to tell of politics and events in their homelands, but almost all are immediately taken under the CIA's control and subjected to extensive secret debriefings at a special defector reception center near Frankfurt, West Germany, or, in the cases of particularly knowledgeable ones, at agency "safe houses" in the United States. In return for the intelligence supplied about the defector's former life and work, the CIA usually takes care of his resettlement in the West, even providing a new identity if necessary. Sometimes, after the lengthy debriefing has been finished, the agency will encourage-and will help-the defector to write articles or books about his past life. As he may still be living at a CIA facility or be dependent on the agency for his livelihood, the defector would be extremely reluctant to jeopardize his future by not cooperating. The CIA does not try to alter the defector's writings drastically; it simply influences him to leave out certain information because of security considerations, or because the thrust of the information runs counter to existing American policy. The inclusion of information justifying U.S. or CIA practices is, of course, encouraged, and the CIA will provide whatever literary assistance is needed by the defector. While such books tend to show the communist intelligence services as diabolical and unprincipled organs (which they are), almost never do these books describe triumphs by the opposition services over the CIA. Although the other side does indeed win on occasion, the agency would prefer that the world did not know that. And the defector dependent on the CIA will hardly act counter to its interests.
In helping the defector with his writing, the agency often steers him toward a publisher. Even some of the public-relations aspects of promoting his book may be aided by the CIA, as in the case of Major Ladislav Bittman, a Czech intelligence officer who defected in 1968. Prior to the 1972 publication of his book, The Deception Game, Bittman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted him on U.S. intelligence's use of the disinformation techniques. "It was our opinion," the former Czech operative said, "that the Americans had more effective means than this sort of trickery-things such as economic-aid programs-that were more influential than any black propaganda operation."
While Bittman may well have been reflecting attitudes held by his former colleagues in Czech intelligence, his words must be considered suspect. The Czechs almost certainly know something about the CIA's propaganda and disinformation programs, just as the CIA knows of theirs. But Bittman's statement, taken along with his extensive descriptions of Czech and Russian disinformation programs, reflects exactly the image the CIA wants to promote to the American public-that the communists are always out to defraud the West, while the CIA, skillfully uncovering these deceits, eschews such unprincipled tactics.
To the CIA, propaganda through book publishing has long been a successful technique. In 1953 the agency backed the publication of a book called The Dynamics of Soviet Society, which was written by Walt Rostow, later President Johnson's Assistant for National Security Affairs, and other members of the staff of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center had been set up with CIA money in 1950, and this book was published in two versions, one classified (for the CIA and government policymakers) and the other unclassified (for the public). Both versions, except in some minor details, promoted the thesis that the Soviet Union is an imperialistic power bent on world conquest, and that it is the responsibility of the United States to blunt the communist menace.
Most CIA book operations, however, are more subtle and clandestine. A former CIA official who specialized in Soviet affairs recalls how one day in 1967 a CIA operator on the Covert Action Staff showed him a book called The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China by a German named Kurt Muller. The book looked interesting to the Soviet expert, and he asked to borrow it. The Covert Action man replied, "Keep it. We've got hundreds more downstairs." Muller's book was something less than an unbiased treatment of the subject; it was highly critical of communist foreign assistance to the Third World. The Soviet specialist is convinced that the agency had found out Muller was interested in communist foreign-aid programs, encouraged him to write a book which would have a strong anti-communist slant, provided him with information, and then helped to get the book published and distributed.
Financing books is a standard technique used by all intelligence services. Many writers are glad to write on subjects which will further their own careers, and with a slant that will contribute to the propaganda objectives of a friendly agency. Books of this sort, however, add only a false aura of respectability and authority to the information the intelligence agency would like to see spread -even when that information is perfectly accurate-because they are by definition restricted from presenting an objective analysis of the subject under consideration. And once exposed, both the writer and his data become suspect. (DELETED)
Spies, however, do not keep journals. They simply do not take that kind of risk, nor do they have the time to do so while they are leading double lives.
(DELETED)
(DELETED) Allen Dulles seemed to be rubbing salt in their wounds when he wrote in The Craft of Intelligence that the Penkovsky defection had shaken the Soviet intelligence services with the knowledge that the West had located Russian officials willing to work "in place for long periods of time," and others who "have never been 'surfaced' and [who] for their own protection must remain unknown to the public."
And, of course, the publication of The Penkovsky Papers opened the Soviets up to the embarrassment of having the world learn that the top level of their government had been penetrated by a Western spy. Furthermore, Penkovsky's success as an agent made the CIA look good, both to the American people and to the rest of the world. Failures such as the Bay of Pigs might be forgiven and forgotten if the agency could recruit agents like Penkovsky to accomplish the one task the CIA is weakest at-gathering intelligence from inside the Soviet Union or China.
The facts were otherwise, however. In the beginning, Penkovsky was not a CIA spy. He worked for British intelligence. He had tried to join the CIA in Turkey, but he had been turned down, in large part because the Soviet Bloc Division of the Clandestine Services was overly careful not to be taken in by KGB provocateurs and double agents. To the skittish CIA operators, Penkovsky seemed too good to be true, especially in the period following the Burgess-McLean catastrophe. The CIA had also suffered several recent defeats at the hands of the KGB in Europe, and it was understandably reluctant to be duped again.
Penkovsky, however, was determined to spy for the West, and in 1960 he made contact with British intelligence, which eventually recruited him. The British informed the CIA of Penkovsky's availability and offered to conduct the operation as a joint project. CIA operators in Moscow and elsewhere participated in the elaborated clandestine techniques used to receive information from Penkovsky and to debrief the Soviet spy on his visits to Western Europe. (DELETED)
The Penkovsky Papers was a best-seller around the world, and especially in the United States. Its publication certainly caused discomfort in the Soviet Union. (DELETED)
Richard Helms years later again referred to Penkovsky in this vein, although not by name, when he claimed in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors that "a number of well-placed and courageous Russians ... helped us" in uncovering the Soviet move. One person taken in by this deception was Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, who serves on the CIA oversight subcommittee. In a 1971 Senate debate on cutting the intelligence budget, the Senator said, "And if you want to read something very interesting and authoritative where intelligence is concerned, read the Penkovsky papers ... this is a very interesting story, on why the intelligence we had in Cuba was so important to us, and on what the Russians were thinking and just how far they would go."
Yet the CIA intelligence analysts who were working on the Cuban problem at the time of the missile crisis and preparing the agency's intelligence reports for the President up to and after the discovery of the Soviet missiles saw no such information from Penkovsky or any other Soviet spy. The key intelligence that led to the discovery of the missiles came from the analysis of satellite photography of the U.S.S.R., Soviet ship movements, U-2 photographs of Cuba, and information supplied by Cuban refugees. Penkovsky's technical background information, provided well before the crisis, was of some use-but not of major or critical importance.
Several scholars of the Soviet Union have independently characterized The Penkovsky Papers as being partly bogus and as not having come from Penkovsky's "journal." The respected Soviet expert and columnist for the Manchester Guardian and the Washington Post, Victor Zorza, wrote that "the book could have been compiled only by the Central Intelligence Agency." Zorza pointed out that Penkovsky had neither the time nor the opportunity to have produced such a manuscript; that the book's publisher (Doubleday and Company) and translator (Peter Deriabin, himself a KGB defector to the CIA) both refused to produce the original Russian manuscript for inspection; and that The Penkovsky Papers contained errors of style, technique, and fact that Penkovsky would not have made.
British intelligence also was not above scoring a propaganda victory of its own in the Penkovsky affair. Penkovsky's contact officer had been MI-6's Greville Wynne, who, working under the cover of being a businessman, had been arrested at the same time as Penkovsky and later exchanged for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale. When Wynne returned to Britain, MI-6 helped him write a book about his experiences, called Contact on Gorky Street. British intelligence wanted the book published in part to make some money for Wynne, who had gone through the ordeal of a year and a half in Soviet prisons, but the MI-6's main motive was to counteract the extremely unfavorable publicity that had been generated by the defection of its own senior officer, Harold "Kim" Philby, in 1963, and the subsequent publication of his memoirs prepared under the auspices of the KGB.
Interestingly, nowhere in Contact on Gorky Street does Wynne cite the help he received from the CIA. The reason for this omission could have been professional jealousy on the part of British intelligence, good British manners (i.e., not mentioning the clandestine activities of a friendly intelligence service), or most likely, an indication of the small role played by the CIA in the operation.
Another book-publishing effort in which the CIA mayor may not have been involved-to some degree-was Khrushchev Remembers, and the second volume of Khrushchev memoirs scheduled for publication this year. While these autobiographical and somewhat self-serving works unquestionably originated with the former Soviet premier himself, there are a number of curious circumstances connected with their transmission from Moscow to Time Inc. in New York, and to its book-publishing division, Little, Brown and Company. Time Inc. has been less than forthcoming about how it gained access to the 180 hours of taped reminiscences upon which the books are based, and how the tapes were taken out of the U.S.S.R. without the knowledge of the Soviet government or the ubiquitous and proficient KGB. The whole operation-especially its political implication-was simply too important to have been permitted without at least tacit approval by Soviet authorities. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev was subsequently neither denounced nor exiled by Moscow's all-powerful party chiefs.
Most of the explanations offered by Time Inc. to clarify the various mysteries involved in this episode have a slightly disingenuous air. They may be true, but a number of highly regarded American and British scholars and intelligence officers dealing with Soviet affairs find them difficult to accept in toto. Why, for example, did Time Inc. find it necessary to take the risky step of sending a copy of the bound galleys of the book to its Moscow bureau -- secretly via Helsinki-before it was published? The complete story of the Khrushchev memoirs, in short, may never be publicly known. And if it is, it may turn out to be another example of secret U.S.-Soviet cooperation, of two hostile powers giving wide circulation to information that each wants to see published, while collaborating to keep their operations away from the eyes of the general public on both sides. After all, the publication of the first volume, in 1971 had a relatively happy effect-it supported Moscow's anti-Stalinists, and in turn increased the prospects for detente.
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Notes:
* Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was questioned in 1973 about his forgery of a State Department cable directly linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. "After an," Hunt told the federal prosecutor, "I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing ... floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing."
* A particularly deceptive aspect of the RFE operation was, and is, the annual fund-raising drive carried out in the United States. Under the auspices of the Advertising Council, RFE solicits funds with the clear implication that if money is not donated by the American public the station will no longer be able to function and the "truth" will not get through to Eastern Europe. Although between $12 and $20 million in free advertising time was made available in 1969, for example, less than $100,000 was raised from a not terribly alarmed public.