Reed Irvine - Editor
What left-wing tax-exempt organization based in Washington has been spreading the idea that a team of secret warriors, operating outside the law, has been manipulating U.S. foreign policy, subverting the constitution and threatening the very existence of our democratic system?
You would be correct if you said either the Christic Institute or the Public Broadcasting Service. The Christic Institute has raised millions to fund its smear campaign and legal case against 29 individuals whom it alleges constitute a "secret team" that has run U.S. foreign policy and carried out covert operations dating back to the Vietnam War. The alleged members of the "secret team" are mainly Americans and Nicaraguans with intelligence backgrounds or involvement in the battle to resist communism. They include Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, a leading mobilizer of private aid for the Nicaraguan Resistance, Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, who collaborated with Col. Oliver North in the Iran arms deals, and Adolfo Calero, a leader of the Nicaraguan Resistance. The Christic Institute filed suit against these individuals and 25 others under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. It charged, among other things, that the defendants had financed their activities with drug trafficking and arms smuggling.
Judge James Lawrence King threw the suit out of court last June, saying that the plaintiffs had failed to produce any evidence to support their charges. On February 2, the judge dealt the Christic Institute an even more devastating blow. He ruled that the suit had been based entirely on "unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first- hand knowledge." He ordered that the Christic Institute pay the leading defendants' legal fees and costs totaling in excess of a million dollars.
The Public Broadcasting Service had helped spread the wild Christic charges in two programs aired in its "Frontline" series last year. But it has done far more than that in an effort to convince the public that our democratic institutions have long been under assault by intelligence operatives who have regarded themselves as above the law and who have subverted the Constitution with impunity.
In 1980, PBS aired On Company Business, a three-hour, three-part series on the Central Intelligence Agency and its covert operations from the point of view of Philip Agee, a former CLA agent who had developed pro-communist sympathies. This anti-CIA diatribe was described by its producers as "the story of 30 years of CIA subversion, murder, bribery and torture" that would "make it clear that the CIA's policies have resulted in the subversion and overthrow of legally constituted governments and in the slander, arrest, torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of people who have dared struggle for a better life." Barry Chase, the director of public affairs programming for PBS described it as "a highly responsible overview of the CIA's history."
In November 1987, PBS gave us Meyers: The Secret Government...The Constitution in Crisis. This 90-minute documentary was advertised as tracing "the relentless march of covert action--from its Cold War origins to Iran/ Contra to Casey and the CIA--a secret government that tramples on the law of the land in the name of national security." Bill Meyers supported his thesis with inaccurate and misleading accounts of the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1953 and the usual distortions about what the U.S. did in Vietnam.
With the Christie Institute case reduced to rubble by Judge King, PBS decided the time was ripe for another rehash of the theme that any covert intelligence activity, whether official or private, is evil and a threat to our system of government. Beginning in January, it aired four one-hour programs titled Secret Intelligence, narrated by Bill Kurtis, former co-host of the CBS Morning News. Kurtis's greatest contribution to misinforming the public up to this point was a documentary he did for WBBM.TV in Chicago in 1978, which spread the false impression that thousands of Vietnam veterans were suffering serious health problems as a result of having been sprayed with Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Like Philip Agee and Bill Meyers, Bill Kurtis found little good to say about the role that intelligence has played in our history beginning with World War I. Nor did he find time to dwell on the need to employ counterintelligence to combat the activities of our enemies. Indeed, it is far from clear that the producers of this program believe that America faced any serious enemies in the world once we had disposed of the Germans and the Japanese in World War II.
Kurtis found fault with most American intervention abroad beginning with the dispatch of 11,000 troops to eastern Siberia following the seizure of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks. Kurtis attributed this to a plan "to strangle the infant state in its crib." That has been a recurring theme of Soviet propaganda for 70 years. It is used by Soviet sympathizers to explain that country's hostility toward the West and its maintenance of outsized military forces. The fact is that President Woodrow Wilson sent the troops to Siberia not to overthrow the Bolsheviks, but mainly to provide a check on the Japanese. He justified the action to Cong. Meyer London, who was opposed to it, saying that he feared that if the Japanese went in alone, it would be impossible to make them withdraw. He also wanted to keep Russian arms from falling to the Germans. On August 3, 1918, Wilson said the U.S. "contemplates no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs, not even the local affairs of the limited areas which her military forces may be obliged to occupy, and no impairment of her territorial integrity."
This same disdain for historical accuracy crops up in the PBS treatment of the so-called "red scare" of 1919- 20, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered mass arrests of radicals, subversives and illegal immigrants. These are known as the "Palmer raids," but in the PBS rendition they become "the Hoover raids," with primary responsibility being assigned to J. Edgar Hoover, then a 24-year-old bureaucrat at the Justice Department. PBS distorts both the reasons for the arrests and the role of Hoover.
In the spring of 1919 radicals threatened to bring down America by bomb and by fire, in concert with the Bolshevik revolution that had swept Russia and was threatening other European nations in the turbulent aftermath of the war. In late April 1919, no fewer than three dozen bombs were mailed to prominent citizens, one damaging the home of Attorney General Palmer himself.
Alarmed by the violence and goaded by the press, palmer understandably decided something had to be done m fight this rash of terrorism. He named William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, director of the Bureau of Investigation and put young J. Edgar Hoover in charge of a new General Intelligence Division. Hoover's role was research, not operations. Mass arrests of suspected anarchists and communists were carried out in November 1919 and January 1920. The idea was to crush the communist movement, but there were many mistakes made, and Hoover was critical of both the errors and the rough treatment of those arrested. In the extensive Senate hearings held to investigate the raids, there was no suggestion that Hoover had anything to do with the planning of the raids or the abuses.Having established a bogus backdrop for Hoover's villainy, Kurtis turned to FDR's son, Elliott, who recalled his parents' "dislike" and "distrust" of the FBI director. The author of a critical biography of Hoover, Richard Gid Powers, was shown telling how President Truman "bated Hoover." Perhaps, but Roosevelt served as president for over 12 years and Truman for seven. Neither made a move to fire Hoover, who served eight presidents and 16 attorneys general and who died in office at age 77, a fact Kurtis neglected to mention.
But it was not just Hoover that the producers of this documentary dislike. It's the FBI itself. In his closing remarks at the end of the fourth hour, Bill Kurtis spoke of "the continuing struggle between American democracy and the secret intelligence empire it has created." He said, "A disdain for the law, impatience for results, and a conviction that it can't be wrong if nobody knows: these were the mark of the CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs, the FBI's long history of illegal surveillance of American dissidents and the National Security Agency's unauthorized monitoring of private communications. Who is there to protect us from America's secret warriors? Who will watch the watchers?"
The "FBI's long history" of illegal surveillance was "proven" by one recently reported case---the investigation of the Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). The history could not have been very long, since the bureau was not restricted in its surveillance of possible subversives until the Levi guidelines were imposed upon it in 1976. These guidelines severely curtailed the FBI's intelligence gathering capabilities by making it illegal to gather information on anyone not suspected of engaging in criminal activity.
In the case of CISPES, the FBI opened the investigation with good reason. It was known that CISPES had been organized in 1980 at the instigation of Farid Hundal, the brother of the head of the Communist Party of El Salvador, and with the help of the Communist Party, USA. An informant had told the bureau that CISPES leaders and members were involved in supplying funds to a foreign terrorist organization, the FMLN of El Salvador. The organization was promoting the cause of the communist-led rebels in El Salvador, but Kurtis described it only as "an activist peace and human rights group," mentioning nothing about its origins or its programs. In the end, the FBI's informant was discredited, and no action was taken against CISPES. That doesn't mean that the investigation should never have been undertaken.
Secret Intelligence blames "intelligence failures" for two military disasters, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs, ignoring or downplaying the importance of White House political decisions. In the case of Pearl Harbor, intercepted Japanese military and diplomatic messages provided clear indications that Pearl Harbor was a possible, even probable, target for a surprise attack. One intercepted message told the Japanese embassy in Washington to destroy code books and machines and break relations with the U.S. by 1:00 P.M. December 7, 1941 (8:00 A.M. Hawaiian time), a message that reportedly caused President Roosevelt to exclaim, "This means war!" This crucial message to Pearl Harbor was not rushed by military radio, it was sent by slower RCA commercial lines, and Japanese bombs beat the warning to its destination.
Some historians do not believe that this was accidental. Eager to enter the war against Hitler, Roosevelt was restrained by his campaign promises and strong isolationist sentiment. Historians are divided on whether or not he deliberately risked the Pearl Harbor attack to overwhelm the isolationist opposition. No better explanation of the ludicrous handling of the Japanese radio intercepts has been advanced. The fact that the blame was placed on the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii, not on their superiors in Washington who failed to transmit the warning signals, lends credence to this theory. The truth remains elusive, but there was no hint of any uncertainty in the PBS program. It blamed Pearl Harbor on the lack of a centralized intelligence organization (oddly, the very thing attacked throughout the program as a threat to democracy).
The same tendency to blame intelligence instead of poetical decisions is seen in the program's treatment of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Here a small paramilitary operation blossomed into a full-blown military invasion, an enterprise some in the CIA felt should have been turned over to the military. The invading Cuban exiles counted on U.S. air strikes to destroy Castro's small air force and deny him control of the skies. President Kennedy lost his nerve and scaled down the air support. Enough Cuban planes survived to wreak havoc on the invaders and their supply ships.
Hopes that the Cuban people would support the invasion were dashed when Castro ordered mass arrests two days before the landing. The police rounded up as many as 300,000 persons, and hundreds of suspected underground members were summarily shot. Armando Valladares in his book, Against All Hope, tells how the huge prison in which he was incarcerated was packed with explosives. The plan was to blow it up and kill all the inmates if the invasion succeeded. The PBS program pointed out the absence of any popular uprising but said nothing about Castro's Draconian preventive measures. It acknowledged Kennedy's fateful decision to scale down the air strikes, but it spoke of "the CIA disaster at the Bay of Pigs," exculpating JFK as it had earlier exculpated FDR.
The treatment of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence operation conceived and led by the legendary "Wild Bill" Donevan during World War II, shows how a skilled TV producer can manipulate the truth to make a propagandistic point. The segment is technically accurate but contextually misleading. To Bill Kurtis, the question was the morality of covert operations, a question that didn't arise during World War II, but one, which bedeviled the OSS's peacetime successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Kurtis declared that skills learned by OSS operatives who later joined the CIA would be used "without accountability throughout the world." Dr. Ray S. Cline, who served with the OSS and went on to become a deputy director of the CLA, was shown seemingly deprecating the OSS mentality, saying that "cowboy type" operations had "marginal" impact and achieved only "limited goals." Cline told AIM that he had actually stressed that in time of war we should use such unconventional methods because they can shorten the fighting and save lives. He did not accept the PBS suggestion that the OSS "boom-and-bang" operations were worthless. Cline, who read draft scripts of the PBS series, was also critical of the overall theme of the program. In a letter to the producer, Blaine Baggett of KCET-TV, Los Angeles, Cline said: "Despite the opinions of many former presidents elected by the majority of the people, your program made it seem indisputable that foreign 'intervention' by U.S. secret agencies pursuing legitimate foreign policy goals is morally and politically wrong. I disagree..."
Cline was taking issue with a view articulated by a former CIA station chief, Joseph B. Smith, who acknowledges in a book he wrote, but not on the air, that he retired from the agency after being passed over for promotion four times. This disgruntled former agent, who proclaims his sympathies for the "non-communist left," gave the impression that the CIA sought out intervention targets with the zeal of a yuppie broker looking for takeover targets. Kurtis did explain that the CIA was transformed from a passive collector of intelligence into an activist agency at the insistence of President Truman, who wanted something stronger than conventional diplomacy to use against Soviet expansionism during the Cold War. Hence Kurtis's description of the agency as an "army of intervention." The implication was that the CIA restlessly roamed the world like a hyperactive huckster of wars, looking for places to relive the gung-ho years and using flimsy pretexts to topple governments.
As its examples of unwarranted, immoral interventions, Kurtis cites actions taken by the CIA to overturn the Mossadegh regime in Iran and the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1953. Both were treated at length and inaccurately in the documentary Meyers: The Secret Government...The Constitution in Crisis. PBS is consistent. It botched the historical record then and it has done so again in Secret Intelligence. Both Meyers and Kurtis are blind to historical evidence that the Communists were moving to seize control of both countries, using the same boring-from-within methods that succeeded in Eastern Europe. (See the AIM Report for November-B 1987 for a detailed discussion of the facts Meyers ignored). Kurtis adds nothing new to the discussion. His main source for comment on the successful operation to overthrow Arbenz is a retired Marine officer, Philip Roettinger, who played a minor role in that operation.
In his retirement, Roettinger has found some interesting political bedfellows. On February 2, be appeared on a panel at the Key Theater in Washington, D.C. where a benefit featuring the film Coverup was being held. This film is a cinematic account of the Christic Institute's fantasies about a "secret team" that manipulates U.S. foreign policy, narrated by chief fantasizer, Christic general counsel Daniel Sheehan. In addition to the Christic Institute, the sponsors of this event included CISPES and the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a publication closely linked with the avowedly pro-communist CIA turncoat, Philip Agee.
In a speech to a student group at the University of Texas on October 25, 1988, Roettinger claimed that the CIA had killed two million people in its covert operations. Challenged by AIM member Dr. Lawrence Cranberg to substantiate this charge, Roettinger cited "State Department documents," but would not be more specific. He described himself as an "artist resident in Mexico" and president of The Association for Responsible Dissent, which he said included a dozen former CIA officers, including Philip Agee.
Agee himself appears in Secret Intelligence as an authority on the CIA on a par with such figures as former directors of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms and William Colby. He is described only as a former CIA officer. Nothing is said about the fact that he, in effect, went over to the communist side, using the help of their intelligence services to write his first book identifying American intelligence agents abroad with the intent of making it difficult for them to carry out their jobs and exposing them to assassination attempts. Former intelligence officers have expressed anger that a PBS documentary did not properly identify Agee and put him on the same level as officers who have served their country honorably. Mitchell Koss, one of the producers of Secret Intelligence, said he was familiar with Agee's book, but he didn't know that it had been admittedly written with the help of Cuban intelligence. That didn't bother him. He felt that Agee was entitled to the same treatment extended to "CIA apologists" like former director William Colby.
The ultimate insult of Secret Intelligence comes in the closing moments, when the hearse bearing the body of William J. Casey is shown wending its way through the cemetery. The voice-over is that of Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, arguably the most discredited "serious" journalist in America because of his fictionalized biography of the late DCI and his other peculiar writings. "The tragic part to Casey," Woodward solemnly intones, "is that he ultimately did not realize what this country is all about..." that "war cannot be done in secrecy..." An irony lost on PBS: this slur on Casey was aired during the climactic days of the most successful CIA operation in history--the forced withdrawal of 150,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan as a direct result of CIA aid to the mujaheddin. Here "America's secret army of intervention," as Kurtis prefers to call the CIA, struck a major blow on behalf of people who did not wish to live under Soviet domination.
Like the now discredited Christie Institute suit, the PBS series appears to have been designed to influence public opinion against any renewed effort by the United States to defeat the efforts of the communists to consolidate their control over Nicaragua and to take over El Salvador and other Central American countries.
Secret Intelligence cost $1.2 million, of which $200,000 came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from appropriated funds. United Airlines contributed approximately $300,000 according to a KCET-TV spokesman. United Airlines refuses to say us exactly how much they contributed. PBS and a consortium of public broadcasting stations provided other funding. Enclosed are cards addressed to United Airlines, CPB and Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Please sign and mail these cards, or better, writes your own letters to the addressees.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1275 K Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $20 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non- members subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
YOU WILL NOTE THAT THIS AIM REPORT STARTS OFF WITH SOME GOOD NEWS WHICH YOU MAY have missed. Judge James Lawrence King, who has been in charge of the $24 million RICO suit filed by the Christic Institute against Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, Adolfo Calero and 26 others, has ordered the Christic Institute to pay over a million dollars to the defendants to cover the legal fees and other costs they incurred to defend themselves. This is by far the largest award of attorney fees and costs ever awarded under Rule 11, which provides for sanctions against those who abuse the legal process by filing frivolous suits. This should have been treated as important news for that reason alone, not to mention the stunning rebuke the judge gave the Christic Institute. But if you didn't read or hear about it, you are in good company. I have given three speeches since the judge handed down that ruling on February 2, and I have asked each time for a show of hands on how many had heard of the ruling. Very few had. The highest number was six out of 70 at an American Legion Post in Washington, D.C. We plan to discuss the abysmal media coverage of this landmark ruling in the next issue of the AIM Report.
THE BAD NEWS IN THIS REPORT IS THAT OUR PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE, WHICH IS heavily subsidized by your tax dollars, has again been beating up on our intelligence services, this time in a four-hour series that cost $1.2 million to produce and air. Covert action has had its failures, to be sure, but it has also had some very import- ant successes. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, which was underway while PBS was bewailing our failures and the great danger posed by "secret intelligence" to our system, was probably brought about in large measure because our covert support of the Afghan freedom fighters made it possible for them to stand up against the invaders for nine long years. The stinger missiles we provided the freedom fighters caused enormous difficulties for the Soviets.
THE PBS PROGRAM STEERED CLEAR OF THE SUCCESS IN AFGHANISTAN. IT PREFERRED TO FOCUS its fire on our failure in Central America. And indeed what is happening before our eyes in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador is heartbreaking. Once again we are pulling the rug from under the brave men and women that we encouraged to rise up and risk their lives to fight an oppressor. While we stand silently by, we see the myopic Central American leaders preparing to drive the Nicaraguan freedom fighters back into Nicaragua, to face whatever fate Daniel Ortega decides to subject them to, or to ship them to Miami or other places of refuge in this country.
BUT WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THIS FAILURE? CONGRESS IN ITS INFINITE WISDOM FORBADE THE CIA or any other intelligence agency to give the Nicaraguan freedom fighters the kind of support that proved so successful in Afghanistan. Congress was evidently much more worried about Soviet domination of a country bordering on the Soviet Union than it was about Soviet domination of countries on or near our own borders. If we had anyone in TV-land who was really interested in doing a serious program about covert action and Central America, they could do a terrific story about how the political leadership of this country over the last ten years has compromised our vital national security interests in Panama and Central America by failing to make effective use of our intelligence capabilities. Those in the White House in the Reagan years who were personally deter- mined to see that we did not betray our friends in Nicaragua, as we had in Vietnam, are now standing trial or will be standing trial for their efforts. Their defenders are demoralized, and our tax dollars are squandered on programs like "Secret Intelligence," that revile those who tried to defend freedom in Central America.
MAJ. GEN. RICHARD V. SECORD IS ONE OF THOSE WHO IS FACED WITH THE ORDEAL OF standing trial for having collaborated with Oliver North and Adm. John Poindexter in their effort to circumvent the efforts of Congress to pull the rug from under the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. You may recall that Gen. Secord was one of the few witnesses who testified before the Congressional committees in the summer of 1987 without insisting that his testimony be immunized. He was also named as one of the defendants in the Christic Institute's discredited suit, and he may eventually be reimbursed for the large legal expenses incurred in defending against that. Gen. Secord is a gutsy fighter, and he has filed a $38 million libel suit against Leslie Cockburn, her husband Andrew Cockburn, and a publisher, Atlantic Press Monthly, over the Cockburns' book titled Out of Control. The book makes many of the charges that were included in the Christic suit, and Judge King's latest ruling in that case should increase Secord's chances of winning this libel suit. Leslie Cockburn used to be a producer on the CBS program "West 57th," and she was instrumental in getting that program to publicize some of the Christic Institute charges. Some of you have contributed to our legal aid fund to assist Gen. Secord in pursuing his libel suit. We think he has a good case, and an attorney, Michael Kramer, who is well versed in libel law, represents him. He was one of the plaintiffs in a libel suit against The Wall Street Journal a few years ago. The Journal settled out of court for $800,000.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE TO HELP GEN. SECORD AND MICHAEL KRAMER FIGHT THIS important suit, you may use the coupon at the bottom of this page. Make the contribution to AIM and earmark it for the Legal Aid Fund.
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY RESPONDED TO ALL THE AIM MEMBERS WHO SENT IN cards or letters protesting the cocaine article in the January National Geographic Magazine with printed cards which said that I had not seen "the article in the magazine" when I commented on it in our December-B AIM Report. Joseph R. Judge, senior editor of the magazine, said this was "a classic case of inaccuracy." Mr. Judge's statement is a classic case of using a technically accurate statement to mislead. I had seen the proofs of the article that was scheduled to be published, not "the article in the magazine." We have gone over the article as published and compared it with the proofs line by line. We found only minor changes, none of which affected our criticisms of the cocaine-tolerant tone of the article. Wilbur Garrett, editor of the magazine, wrote to me saying that our comments were "far off the mark and inaccurate," but he has yet to specify a single comment that is either.
WE HAVE RECEIVED A NUMBER OF LETTERS FROM AIM MEMBERS WHO HAVE READ THE PUBLISHED article. Some disagreed with our criticisms and others strongly supported them. I don't know whether those who disagreed went to the trouble of comparing what I wrote about the article with the article itself, because they didn't take issue with any of my specific criticisms, which were: (1) positive and negative statements about cocaine use were almost equal measured by word count; (2) the article concluded with a statement by a middle-class man who said he had used cocaine for 27 years with no problems, a rather enticing argument for those tempted to experiment with this highly addictive drug; (3) it came close to advocating legalization of cocaine; and (4) it said very little about the scientific studies on the physiological effects of the drug. Cresson Kearny, a geologist, sent one of the best letters to the Geographic and engineer, who described the effect of chewing coca leaves on Peruvian Indians from his personal observation. That had been ignored in the Geographic article, and Mr. Kearney suggested they under- write some research "and help many of your misinformed readers get a better understanding of the damage done by even small repeated doses of cocaine."
TO: AIM, 1275 K St., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20005 Enclosed is a tax-deductible contribution of
$________________ for the Legal Aid Fund
to help Gen. Secord fight his libel suit.
NAME___________________________________________________________________ Phone____________
Address__________________________________________________________________________________ City, state,
zip_________________________________________________________________________