Bakanization!
-Breaking Up the Opposition-
GLORIA IN EXCELSIS
Part 2
Continued from: Part 1
A few subjects covered:
JFK Assassination - Katharine
Graham - Operation Mockingbird
- Watergate
This document is assembled from several issues
of Conspiracy
Nation
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 34
with added notes and links by risephoenix
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
We're talking about Gloria Steinem, her association with the
Central Intelligence Agency, with Ms. magazine (of course), with
people like Katherine Graham, with men like J. Stanley Pottinger.
We just took a look at Pottinger's possible role in an arms smuggling
scam and his definite role in covering up the assassinations of
Orlando Letelier and Martin Luther King.
[These subjects are covered in part 1
--risephoenix]
Now we're going to take a look at the interesting
"extra-curricular activities," I guess you could say,
of the woman who was the *first* publisher of Ms. magazine. Sometime
in the early '70s, a woman by the name of Pat Carbine ("Carbine,"
sort of ironic in light of Pottinger's role in these assassinations)
was, she became the publisher of Ms. Before that, the publisher
of Ms. magazine was a woman named Elizabeth Forsling Harris (sp?).
And it appears that Elizabeth Forsling Harris played a primary
role in the assassination of John Kennedy.
Reading from Volume IV of one of the best series of books on
the Kennedy assassination... It's called, Forgive My Grief[1].
It occurs in 4 volumes. It's authored by Penn Jones, Jr.
Now Penn is the editor of the Midlothian Mirror (Midlothian is
a suburb of Dallas), and he's one of the foremost researchers,
and a man who began investigating the Kennedy assassination *on*
11/22/63 and stuck with it for a long time. Far, far longer than
most. And he published Forgive My Grief, Volume IV, in
1974. Copyright 1974, privately published by Penn Jones, Jr.,
in softcover.
By the way, the title comes from a poem: "In Memoriam,"
by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It says,
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in Thee,
And there I find him worthier to be loved.
(A lot of people have wondered where that reference comes from.)
But anyway, far more important than that reference, is the association
of Gloria Steinem and Ms.'s first publisher, Elizabeth Forsling
Harris. And it appears that Elizabeth Forsling Harris was involved
in planning the assassination of John Kennedy. (Interesting, in
light of Steinem's paramour, J. Stanley Pottinger, and his connections
not only to the assassination of Martin Luther King, but also
his association with people like Michael Vernon Townley, Frank
Turpel, Edwin Wilson -- and not to mention George Bush -- in the
assassination of Orlando Letelier.)
Reading now from Forgive My Grief, Volume IV.
(And by the way, most of the articles in Penn's book are actually
editorials or investigative columns done by Penn in the Midlothian
Mirror. And this is one of them.)
Infiltrating Again
The Women's Liberation Movement, as well as the Youth Movement,
must constantly be aware of the problem of infiltration by enemies.
In fact, the [Women's] Liberation group may very well have been
taken over already by the Ms. publisher, Elizabeth Forsling
Harris. According to the Dallas papers, Mrs. Harris accompanied
Liberation leader Gloria Steinem during the Steinem appearances
in Dallas.
Since reading Coup
d'Etat by Edward Luttwak, it is easier to understand the
enormous planning, and checking and double-checking, necessary
before the killing of President John Kennedy could be successfully
accomplished. Taking over the most powerful country in the world
is not a small task. Having constant surveillance on the opinion
makers in Dallas was only one of the necessary requisites in
the planning stages. Betty Forsling Harris appears to have been
one of the high-level observers moved here from Washington.
She left Dallas shortly after the assassination.
Elizabeth Forsling came to Dallas a few years before the assassination.
She was a great and good friend of Stanley Marcus of Nieman-Marcus
[department store]. She married and divorced Leon Harris of
the A. Harris firm. Elizabeth Forsling Harris worked for the
Saul Bloom Advertising Agency and was referred to by Washington
planners as "our Dallas contact." She attended the
important planning sessions for the coming visit of the President.
The Bloom Agency handled the public relations for the visit,
then also handled public relations for the Jack Ruby trial.
This was a first for any court, to have a public relations firm
employed in a court case.
Elizabeth Forsling Harris was a very close co-worker, with
Jack Pewterbaugh (sp?), on the Dallas trip which cost the life
of President John Kennedy. Pewterbaugh came to Washington from
Minnesota, with Orville Freeman (sp?). In the Agriculture Department,
Pewterbaugh was working closely with Billy Sol Estes, later
convicted and sent to prison. It was Pewterbaugh who made the
decision to hold the lunch in the Trade Mart, "because
of the proximity to Love Field." And it was Pewterbaugh
who made the decision to take the unauthorized and unnecessary
detour in Dealey Plaza.
The two decisions make Pewterbaugh up to his hips in the assassination.
Neither he, nor Betty Harris, were ever questioned by the Warren
Commission.
And again, the Bloom Agency handled the P.R. not only for President
Kennedy's visit to Dallas, but also handled the public relations
for Jack Ruby's trial. This was the first time any court had had
a public relations firm employed in such a capacity. (Although
my understanding is that now that is sort of standard operating
procedure, where anyone can afford it. So this was sort of a ground-breaking
event.)
One thing that is *not* included in that particular article about
the Bloom Agency (and recall that's with whom Elizabeth Forsling
Harris was working) is that Oswald had visited the Bloom Agency
a number of times before his alleged (and obviously non-existent)
role in the assassination of Kennedy.
The important thing in examining Oswald, by the way (as we looked
at not only in "The Guns of November," but in a number
of Radio Free America shows -- the "Aryan Nation" series
and "World Anti-Communist" series in particular [CN:
Tapes of past broadcasts may still be available; phone 415-346-1840,
or contact Conspiracy Nation for more info]), but the important
thing about examining Oswald is to find out *who* manipulated
him in such a way as to take the fall for the Kennedy assassination.
Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill anyone.
The point here is that Elizabeth Forsling Harris appears to have
been a primary planner in the Kennedy assassination. She was never
questioned by the Warren Commission, she worked for the Bloom
Agency, which had some curious roles throughout the [Ruby] trial.
And beyond that, she was heavily involved, along with Jack Pewterbaugh,
in planning the motorcade route for John Kennedy. (That, of necessity
-- for those who've studied the details of the assassination --
has to have placed her, as Penn Jones indicated, in the very center
of the conspiracy itself. And as we've looked at in our "Aryan
Nation" series as well as "The Guns of November,"
the Kennedy assassination was, for all intents and purposes, a
military coup.)
Now again, perhaps the Steinem association with Elizabeth Forsling
Harris in and of itself wouldn't be too damning. But in light
of all the other information -- the Independent Research Service
connections, in light of her association with J. Stanley Pottinger
and some of the things Pottinger's been involved in -- it's one
more very interesting detail concerning Steinem and her involvement
in a very deep intelligence mileau.
And again, Elizabeth Forsling Harris replaced (ironically enough)
by Pat Carbine, as publisher of Ms. magazine.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 35
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
Katherine Graham
The last person that we're gonna take a look at (well, the next-to-last
person, actually) in considerable detail is the aforementioned
Katherine Graham. A principle stockholder in Ms. [magazine], one
of the people who helped lean on Random House for the deletions
in the book, Feminist Revolution [out of print, can be
searched for: hardback
or paperback],
Katherine Graham is, as mentioned, one of the key people who,
not only is one of the key stockholders, but one of the key people
who helped found Ms. magazine in the first place.
Katherine Graham, as well as the entire Washington Post mileau,
have a long-standing relationship with the Central Intelligence
Agency. That information came to light in a book called Katharine
the Great, subtitled,
Katharine Graham and her Washington Post. Published
in hardcover by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Authored by Debra
Davis. It's copyrighted 1979, by Debra Davis. And I would point
out that this book is very difficult to find because it was suppressed,
almost certainly because of the CIA connections revealed in it.
[this book is available again from a different publisher: click
here
or above --risephoenix]
What we're going to be looking at here (and again, this is, in
a sense, placing the whole Ms. magazine situation in a much larger
framework) is basically that the Washington Post is part of a,
well, I guess you'd have to say (ironically enough here) an "old
boy network" which is one of the major axes of the CIA's
involvement with the news media.
We're going to be taking a look at the evolution of the Washington
Post in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency. And
then we're going to take a look at Katherine Graham's role as
head of the Washington Post, and the Washington Post's role in
getting rid of Richard Nixon on behalf of the U.S. National Security
Establishment. As I indicated, Watergate was much deeper (I guess
one could say, extending the metaphor) than the popular imagination
has generally conceived.
But we're going to take a look at "Katherine the Great"
and her involvement with the CIA and Watergate a little later.
But beyond that, we're going to take a look at Washington Post
as basically part of a long-standing CIA intelligence/media mileau.
Operation Mockingbird
[for more on Operation Mockingbird, click here
--risephoenix]
First thing we're going to look at here is the establishment
of an operation called "Operation Mockingbird." This
was set up, not only by Washington Post publisher Phil Graham
(the former husband of Katherine Graham), but also [by] a CIA
official named Frank Wisner (sp?). We've taken a look at Frank
Wisner's role in importing the Ukranian fascists and SS units,
in Radio Free America #1 and #2. And in Radio Free America show
#15, we looked at the role of these same elements in the assassination
of John Kennedy in setting up a "left" cover for the
assassination. We also took a look at the role of Wesley Liebler
(sp?), a law partner of Frank Wisner's, in covering up the White
Russian, Czarist, and Russian fascist connections to the assassination
of John Kennedy. That, in Radio Free America #15.
Now Frank Wisner and Phil Graham were two of the people who helped
set up Operation Mockingbird, which was a CIA/media propaganda
effort. Debra Davis writes about this in Katharine
the Great as follows.
Frank Wisner, like Phil Graham, had been born a southerner
and had made his own way in the Northeastern legal establishment.
During the war [WWII], he had been recruited into the OSS by
William Donovan (whose house the Grahams had bought) and had
been sent to the Balkans where he conceived of and executed
operations that became models for future psychological warfare.
He had been excluded from postwar intelligence because of bureaucratic
infighting, had been asked to return as Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for Occupied Countries, an intelligence post, and by
September of 1948 he was named Director of the Office of Policy
Coordination [OPC], the covert operations arm of the CIA. OPC
and CIA were officially merged in 1952. At OPC, Wisner developed
a vision that the war against Communism would be fought not
as another large war, but as a series of "guerrilla-like
skirmishes," a situation that he sought to control.
Sometimes in co-operation with embassies or the Marshall Plan
outposts, and sometimes not, Wisner had already begun wide-scale
recruitment of foreign students and infiltration of labor unions.
But he wanted something more, a way not only to subvert and
disrupt but to give foreign peoples a sense of America, to "alter
their perceptions" against Communism without violence.
And thus Wisner, his deputy Richard Helms, and Phillip Graham,
conceived of a formal program to recruit and use journalists.
A haphazard practice until then, it was said to have had the
code name, "Operation Mockingbird."
And Philip Graham here, again, one of the people working with
Richard Helms, later Director of Central Intelligence, and CIA
official Frank Wisner, was one of the people who helped develop
this Operation Mockingbird: the first, and most long-running and
successful, of the many CIA programs infiltrating and manipulating
the news media.
The next thing we're going to look at is the primary role that
the CIA has played in building the Washington Post over the years
and the Washington Post Corporation. Again, returning to Katharine
the Great by Debra Davis:
But the Post was also unique among news companies in that its
managers, living and working in Washington, thought of themselves
simultaneously as journalists, businessmen, and patriots, a
state of mind that made them singularly able to expand the company
while promoting the national interest. Their individual relations
with intelligence had, in fact, been the reason that the Post
company had grown as fast as it did after the war. Their secrets
were its corporate secrets, beginning with Mockingbird. Phillip
Graham's committment to intelligence gave his friend Frank Wisner
and Allen Dulles an interest in making the Washington Post the
dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they did by assisting
its two most crucial acquisitions, the Times-Herald and WTOP
[radio].
The Post-men most essential to these transactions (other than
Phil) were Wayne Coy, the Post executive who had been Phil's
former New Deal boss, and John S. Hayes (sp?), who replaced
Coy in 1947 when Coy was appointed chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission. It worked like this: Hayes had been commander of
the Armed Forces Radio Network, ETO (European Theater of Operations),
and in that capacity had made intelligence connections all over
Europe. He came to the Post, after turning the network to the
service of the Marshall Plan, with the title of Vice President
for Radio and Television. In Washington, he became friendly
with Frank Wisner, father of [Operation] Mockingbird, and with
Allen Dulles, an OSS man who became the second Director of the
new CIA in 1953.
(I would interrupt, of course you look at Dulles' role in the
Bay of Pigs and the importation and manipulation of the [Nazi]
Gehlen organization as well as the assassination of Kennedy.)
The relationship with Dulles was particularly important because
of Dulles' ties to Wall Street, from which intelligence, industry,
and government all draw their leaders -- the men who form this
country's ruling clique.
Between 1937 and 1943, when he joined the OSS, Dulles had been
a director of the Schroeder (sp?) Bank, which in Germany had
mis-judged the oneness of corporate and national interests to
the extent of helping to finance Hitler because he promised
to stabilize the German economy. From his membership in the
tiny merchant banking community, which includes at any time
only about 100 active partners distributed among the Morgan,
Lazar (sp?), Rothschild, Hambros, and Baring Houses, Dulles
knew and respected former Lazar associate Eugene Meyer.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 39
CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
From his corporate law work at Sullivan & Cromwell, the
pre-eminent foreign policy law firm in America, Dulles was close
to [Washington] Post company attorney Frederick S. Beeb (sp?)
at Kravith, Swayne & Moore (sp?), another foreign policy
firm. A quiet, thoughtful man, Beeb had been recruited out of
Yale 1938 by Kravith senior partner Roswell Kilpatrick (sp?),
later the Assistant Secretary of Defense under Robert McNamara
during the Vietnam War. At Kravith, Beeb had been assigned to
handle estate planning and other legal affairs for the Meyer
family
(That's the family from which Katherine Graham came, by the way.)
and eventually became their chief corporate as well as personal
counsel, representing their interests in every significant transaction
over three decades, including the legally complex, monopolistic
acquisition of the Times-Herald in '54. The merger was critical
for Katherine [Graham's] family, confirming their power and
influence in Washington and making the paper financially "safe
enough for her son Donny."
It was also critical to Hayes, Phil Graham, Beeb, Wisner, and
Dulles -- men who had a political interest in her family's newspaper
-- because the Times-Herald maintained a bank of dossiers routinely
made available to the FBI, the CIA's rival in domestic Cold
War intelligence. When Col. McCormick decided to sell his nearly
bankrupt Washington newspaper, he asked Eugene Meyer the price
of $8.5 million for it, about three times its worth. John Hayes
went to Chicago in March of 1954 to make the initial payment
in cash. The merger drove up the value of the Post's stock and
made the executives richer. It also increased the CIA's access
to information, news sources, and co-operative newsmen, to the
benefit of [Operation] Mockingbird, which Frank Wisner had been
expanding throughout the Cold War.
So, reviewing that section very briefly, not only in its acquisition
of radio station WTOP, but also the McCormick newspaper the Washington
Times-Herald, basically the CIA was intimately involved in assisting
the [Washington] Post and thereby, obviously, also assisting itself,
in cementing its relationship with one of this country's major
papers.
Now the next element of the Washington Post/CIA association we're
going to be looking at concerns Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,
his brother-in-law (a man named Cord Meyer, a CIA counter-intelligence
official operating under James Jesus Angleton), and also, a fellow
named Richard Ober.
Now Richard Ober is a close friend and old buddy of Ben Bradlee.
Richard Ober also went to work for CIA. And Richard Ober was to
become "Deep Throat" himself. We're gonna talk about
that in a minute. The point is, here, Cord Meyer is another CIA
counter-intelligence official. He is the brother-in-law of Ben
Bradlee.
In 1956, Ben and Toni Bradlee are part of a community of Americans
who have remained in Paris after having been trained in intelligence
during the war or in propaganda at the Economic Cooperation Administration.
Many have now addressed themselves to fighting Communism, a less
visible but more insidious enemy than Nazi-ism had been. Some
of them, like Bradlee, are journalists who write from the Cold
War point of view. Some are intelligence operatives who travel
between Washington and Paris, London and Rome. In Washington,
at Phillip Graham's salon, they plan and philosophize. In foreign
cities, they do the work of keeping European Communism in check.
Bradlee's childhood friend, Richard Helms, is part of this group.
He has written portions of the National Security Act of 1947,
a set of laws creating a Central Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Agency, the latter to support the CIA with research into
codes and electronic communications. Helms is the Agency's chief
expert on espionage. His agents penetrate the government of the
Soviet Union and leftist political parties throughout Europe,
South America, Africa and Asia. Angleton and Ober are counter-intelligence
and run agents from Washington to Paris who do exactly the opposite:
they prevent spies from penetrating American embassies, the State
Department, the CIA itself.
Head of the third activity, covert operations, is Phil Graham's
compatriot, Frank Wisner, the father of [Operation] Mockingbird,
whose principal operative is a man named Cord Meyer, Jr. Meyer
was a literature and philosophy major at Yale, and is consequently
well-liked by Angleton who, when at Yale, thought of himself as
a poet and edited a literary magazine. Meyer is married to Toni
Bradlee's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the woman who later became
[John F.] Kennedy's lover and was murdered in 1964.
Among the fascinating and glamourous Americans of Paris, London
and Rome, the Meyers are more fascinating and glamourous than
the rest. Mary was the most brilliant and beautiful girl in her
class at Vassar and is now a painter beginning to be critically
recognized. Cord is an attractive and articulate figure whose
evolution as an anti-Communist has given him a unique understanding
of Communist trends in European trade union and Third World liberation
movements. Because of this specialized knowledge, he is, as few
men are, considered within the Agency to be indispensable.
The point is here that, not only was Ben Bradlee, the editor
of the Washington Post, himself trained in intelligence, very
close not only to Richard Helms (who was CIA Director at the time
of Watergate), but also to Cord Meyer, his brother-in-law, a key
CIA counter-intelligence official, and also [to] a man named Richard
Ober. We're gonna talk about Richard Ober a little later.
But again, the point here is that the Washington Post is really
(like many other newspapers in this country) inextricable from
the U.S. intelligence establishment. And that very relationship
was indispensable in helping the Washington Post to grow as an
institution.
Now although Phillip Graham was one of the people who helped
set up the working relationship between the [Washington] Post
(and other news media) with the CIA, he eventually, for a reason
or reasons unknown, began to disintegrate mentally. One of the
interesting "symptoms" (if one could call it that) of
his mental disintegration is that he became very vocal and critical
about the CIA relationship with the news media. (Which, of course,
he had helped to set up in the first place.)
Again, reading from Katharine the Great, of Phillip Graham,
[Debra Davis] writes,
He had begun to talk, after his second breakdown, about the
CIA's manipulation of journalists. He said it disturbed him.
He said it to the CIA. His enchantment with journalism, it seemed,
was fading. "Newspapers are the rough drafts of history,"
he now thought. "Media politics do not become history until
the moral judgements are in."
As he became more desperate, unable to control the forces that
controlled him (one of the manic-depressive's greatest fears),
he turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was
mutual trust and, strangely, silence.
So it's worth noting here that, upon the eve of his death, which
in turn was a few months before President Kennedy was to be killed
(and obviously, the whole thing was very much in the workings
at that time. People can check our archive tapes for that. [415-346-1840]).
But it's interesting that Phillip Graham had become disenchanted,
and vocally so, about the very relationship between CIA and the
media that he had helped to set up in the first place.
Now eventually, as a result of this mental disintegration, Phillip
Graham was interred in a very well-known mental institution called
"Chestnut Lodge." Many people have suggested that Chestnut
Lodge is one of the many CIA mind-control institutions or ones
that have been affiliated with it. I can't document that. It's
something I've heard said. But it is interesting in light of the
longstanding and successful effort of the CIA to not only use
mind-control techniques -- hypnosis, psycho-surgery, and psycho-pharmacology
-- to get people to commit assassinations, but then to commit
suicide themselves later, thereby sealing their lips.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 40
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
It's worth noting here because, upon leave from Chestnut Lodge,
Phil Graham blew his own brains out, in August of 1963.
Reading again from Katharine the Great:
Death preoccupied Phil all that Spring. Three times, with permission
to leave Chestnut Lodge, he visited Edward Bennett Williams
to re-write his will, each time reducing Katherine's share of
his estate. On the second visit, he demanded that Williams burn
the first will. On the third, he had him burn the second. These
wills rescinded and superseded the carefully thought out document
of longstanding, one that provided trust funds for his children
and gave the bulk of his estate to his wife. After he died,
during probate, Katherine's lawyer challenged the legality of
the last will. The probate proceeding enabled Katherine to take
control of the [Washington] Post with no significant legal problem.
Although with the discredited will not on the public record,
it is not known who Phil might have designated in her place.
Manic-depressives frequently plan their deaths on the anniversary
of a significant event. Saturday, August 3rd, 1963, was the
15th anniversary of the formation of the Washington Post Company,
the umbrella corporation for the Post and other property in
which Katherine and Phil Graham were sole partners. On the morning
of August 3rd, Phil telephoned Katherine from Chestnut Lodge
and said that he was feeling much better. He asked if he could
spend the weekend with her on their farm. Katherine called Joe
Rowe (sp?) and told him happily, "Phil is better! He's
coming home. Why don't you come over and see him on Tuesday?"
On Monday he would spend the day with the children. She picked
him up at Chestnut Lodge that morning. They drove to a small
Virginia town called Warrenton, in Fochier (sp?) County, 42
miles southwest of Washington, in the Virginia Hunt country.
The farm, Glen Welby (sp?), was that of a gentleman and weekend
hunter, equipped with television and telephones, books and paintings,
shotguns for hunting deer and rifles for quail hunting parties,
horses, servants, a large, well-stocked kitchen and bar. Katherine
and Phil spent some time together, and then Katherine took a
nap. Phil went downstairs, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and
shot himself in the head.
Again, he may very well have been disturbed here. However one
of the x-factors that's missing here from Debra Davis's ruminations
on the death of Phil Graham is his long standing with intelligence
and, in turn, the longstanding, ongoing, and highly successful
attempts by the CIA to institute mind control, including training
mind-control assassins and consequently (as we looked at in our
Radio Free America series on mind control) to get some of those
assassins (or apparent assassins: they're often used as decoys)
to commit suicide. So whether or not the death of Phillip Graham
here, who had become disenchanted with the pattern of CIA co-operation
with the media, had anything at all to do with CIA mind control,
remains to be seen. As we like to say here, "Food for thought,
and grounds for further research." It is worth noting, though,
that this happened just about 3 months before the assassination
of President Kennedy. It's also worth noting that Phillip Graham's
discredited wills *might* have invested the Washington Post (at
least to a certain extent) away from the CIA which had been so
inextricably involved with it from the very beginning.
And of course, one of the main names to take note of here --
again, by way of noting how the Washington Post really is part
of a sort of old intelligence, old boy network here -- is the
name of Edward Bennett Williams, the owner of the Washington Redskins
for awhile, and now the Baltimore Orioles. Edward Bennett Williams
is one of the prime, intelligence-related attorneys in the United
States. His clients not only include Richard Helms, whose association
with Ben Bradlee we looked at awhile ago (Helms, of course, CIA
Director; CIA Director at the time of the overthrow of the Allende
government, worked with Henry Kissinger, [Gloria] Steinem's old
[boyfriend], among others.) But Edward Bennett Williams has represented
John Connally, Jimmy Hoffa, Robert Vesco. And interestingly enough,
it was while working as an investigator for Edward Bennett Williams's
law firm, that Robert Maheu, formerly of the [Howard] Hughes organization,
helped set up the organized crime assassination teams which were
allegedly to be used against Castro, but there's some indication
that they were used against John Kennedy instead. [CN: See, for
example, "Alpha-66," CN
8.43] Again, documentation on that, on "Guns of November,"
program #1, the first of our 4 programs on the assassination of
John Kennedy.
It's worth noting here now too, that surrounding the death of
John Kennedy, we have an interesting situation that, not only
does Phillip Graham "bow out" in sort of a grisly fashion,
but also *after* John Kennedy was killed, in October of 1964,
Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, the brother-in-law of Ben
Bradlee (who himself had intelligence connections) -- Cord Meyer,
a key CIA counter-intelligence official -- Mary Meyer was murdered,
her diary then appropriated by CIA counter-intelligence chief
James Angleton.
Reading again from Katharine the Great:
Ben Bradlee was considered by some members of the Washington
press to be insensitive and ruthless, professionally and socially.
He was indiscrete about having been on intimate terms with Kennedy,
one aspect of which was that his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot
Meyer, who had lived in Bradlee's renovated garage, had been
Kennedy's lover. Mary Meyer had been murdered in October of
1964. She was killed near her house, or by the C&O Canal
in Georgetown, shot or stabbed. The location, even the manner
of her death, varies with each account. Immediately after she
died, James Angleton, the CIA's Chief of Counter-Intelligence,
searched her apartment for a diary she had kept about Kennedy
and took it to CIA headquarters. Supposedly to burn it, although
because of his training he never destroyed any document. A year
later, when Bradlee went to the [Washington] Post, the slaying
was still unsolved. (It has never been solved. Bradlee was uncharacteristically
silent about it.)
So the point here again is, right around the time John Kennedy
was leaving this world, a lot of the people within the whole Washington
Post axis (and again, I use that term ["axis"] advisedly)
were also "bowing out" in grisly fashion: Phil Graham,
and the late, unfortunate, Mary Pinchot Meyer, being a couple
of them here.
Watergate
Now the last two details that we're gonna look at here are, in
a sense, a sort of an abbreviated look at the Washington Post
involvement with CIA in the Watergate case. Now one of the aspects
of Watergate that has not received enough publicity is the fact
that it appears almost probable that the CIA, as well as other
elements of the National Security establishment, wanted Richard
Nixon out for a reason or reasons which are debatable. Debra Davis
here gives some reasons; we're gonna entertain those. I'm gonna
suggest a couple of others here in a couple of minutes.
Now we could go into the indications of CIA involvement in Watergate
all day. Unfortunately, due to time limitations here, we're not
gonna be able to do it. Suffice it to say that James McCord, who
was a very high-ranking intelligence official, head of the security
organization for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, led
the Watergate burglars into the Watergate Hotel. Now one of the
things that McCord did is, after placing a piece of tape on the
door to alert him as to whether or not the "Plumbers'"
presence had been discovered in the Watergate -- when he discovered
that tape missing, he then replaced the tape *without* notifying
the other Plumbers. For a man of McCord's very longstanding and
sophisticated involvement with the intelligence community, that
is frankly incredible, if one is to accept that James McCord was
not a double agent placed within the Plumbers organization to
get rid of Richard Nixon on behalf of CIA and others. That is
the general view of most researchers, simply because as soon as
McCord saw that tape missing he has to have known that their presence
in the Watergate Hotel was discovered. There's no other conclusion.
He placed the tape to alert him to a discovery. When he saw it
was missing -- not just knocked off, but missing -- he has to
have known that their presence was discovered. Despite that, he
replaced the tape again; didn't alert the other Plumbers. And
when the security guard at the Watergate Hotel saw that the tape
was replaced again, he notified authorities. Because obviously
he knew someone was in there. So again, that's just one of the
many indicators that, in fact, Nixon's Plumbers unit was deep-sixed
by CIA from the inside. The motives for doing so remain a matter
of debate.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 42
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
Now obviously, people are aware of the role of the Washington
Post, Woodward and Bernstein in particular, in breaking the Watergate
case. It appears that Woodward and Bernstein, through Katherine
Graham the publisher and Ben Bradlee, were manipulated by CIA
-- and specifically, Richard Ober, an associate of Bradlee's and
himself a key CIA counter-intelligence official, along with Cord
Meyer, Bradlee's brother-in-law. Richard Ober was indeed the "Deep
Throat" who alerted Woodward and Bernstein. Interestingly
enough, Richard Ober was also head of "Operation Chaos,"
a CIA domestic counter-intelligence operation which involved setting
up provocations as well as infiltrating radical groups.
Of the Washington Post's role in removing Richard Nixon and in
the Watergate case, Debra Davis writes as follows. (You'll see
some references here to the book, All
The President's Men, by Woodward and Bernstein.)
Watergate was, according to this scenario, a counter-intelligence
operation of the highest order, carried out for patriotic as
well as bureaucratic reasons which were, in the minds of the
intelligence directors, one and the same. It is clear what their
motives must have been. Kissinger was pursuing a disastrous
policy in Cambodia, disregarding the CIA's advice and blaming
the CIA when he failed -- all the time adding fuel to the anti-war
movement. Nixon's harsh and stupid attempts to "get political
control over the CIA," as Watergate burglar James McCord
later told the Senate Watergate Committee, his intention to
have the Agency's judgements conform to rather than inform his
policies, "smacked of the situation which Hitler's intelligence
chiefs found themselves in" before the fall of Germany.
But primarily because Nixon seemed at times to be insane, a
terrible and a dangerous head of state, double-agent Ober, by
this logic, arranged for double-agent McCord to be arrested
during the Watergate break-in. And then Richard Ober, the head
of Operation Chaos, the only man in the nation with access to
classified information at the White House, the FBI, the CIA,
and CRP [Committee to Re-Elect the President], became Deep Throat,
a favor to Ben Bradlee, an old Harvard chum. Ober's boss, James
Angleton, finally had achieved the ultimate dirty trick. Bradlee
would take all the risks, and either Bradlee would succeed in
getting rid of Nixon, or Katherine Graham would have to salvage
her newspaper by getting rid of Bradlee.
That, basically, is the view of Richard Ober, the counter-intelligence
official of CIA. The further information that Richard Ober was,
in fact, Deep Throat, and that the CIA and Washington Post were
involved in removing Nixon, is added here by Debra Davis. (It
doesn't really matter the order here, but I read that a little
out of order.)
But again, reading more about the use of Washington Post by CIA
and CIA counter-intelligence to remove Nixon, Debra Davis writes
as follows.
(That book, of course: All The President's Men.)
Bradlee knew him; had known him for longer than Woodward. There
is a possibility that Woodward had met him while working as
an intelligence liaison between the Pentagon and the White House,
where Deep Throat spent a lot of time, and that he considered
Woodward trustworthy or useful and began talking to him when
the time was right. It is equally likely, though, that Bradlee,
who had given Woodward other sources on other stories, put them
in touch after Woodward's first day on the story, when Watergate
burglar James McCord said at his arraignment hearing that he
had once worked for the CIA. Whether or not Bradlee provided
the source, he recognized McCord's statement to the court as
highly unusual. CIA employees, when caught in an illegal act,
do not admit that they work for the CIA unless that is part
of the plan. McCord had no good reasons to mention the CIA at
all, except apparently to direct wide attention to the burglary,
because he had been asked to state only his present occupation
and he had not worked for the CIA for several years.
(I think that last statement is open to question. That last statement
of Debra Davis is open to question.)
What matters is not how the connection with Deep Throat was made,
but why. Why did Bradlee allow Woodward to rely so heavily upon
it? And ultimately, why did the leaders of the intelligence community,
for whom Deep Throat spoke, want the President of the United States
to fall?
All of that, really, highlights the ongoing association of not
only the Washington Post, but Katherine Graham, a key partner
in the Ms. [magazine] axis, in working with CIA.
Now one scenario that is not discussed by Debra Davis concerns
the possibility that Richard Nixon was not only removed because
he was a dangerous leader, but there are a lot of indications
that he was removed, basically, because the military and the "far
right" were upset with his policies of detente towards the
Soviet Union and China. The China lobby in particular (and we've
looked at that in great detail in Radio Free America shows #11,
#14, and #15, the second of our "Aryan Nations" programs
and our two "Anti-Communist League" programs), the China
lobby is a dominant and extremely reactionary force in American
politics. Nixon was very close to them and many researchers feel
(and there's indications that they felt betrayed by Richard Nixon)
that they wanted a harder "Cold Warrior" than Nixon
turned out to be -- even though he was a lifelong anti-Communist
-- and that as a result they had him removed. That's another interpretation
that many researchers have.
I also think... (I think that is correct.) I also think, to a
certain extent, Debra Davis's analysis is correct. In a sense,
Nixon wanted to become larger than the system. As of 11/22/63,
the intelligence services and military were giving orders to the
President, not the other way around. Nixon (although he was involved
in the Kennedy assassination himself, as we looked at in the "Guns
of November," program #3, about Watergate connections to
the assassination), Nixon wanted to basically gain control of
the whole show. He didn't want to be a servant; he wished to be
a master. I think Davis's analysis in that respect is correct,
and that that was one of the reasons why he was ousted.
Many people feel that the Kennedy assassination and Nixon's involvement
in it was the lever used to oust Richard Nixon. The fact that
Kennedy's assassination and discussion of it appears to have been
involved *with* the Watergate tapes themselves we went into in
great length in "Guns of November" #3. Also, there's
some interesting information in an interview that I had with Gordon
Novel (sp?), one of the principal figures in Jim Garrison's investigation
in New Orleans. The full tape is available from Dav-Cor (sp?),
and a little blurb of that is something that you hear on our little
promotional part that I'm going to play in just a couple minutes.
Again, this discussion of Katharine Graham and the Washington
Post, and their mutual association with CIA, is being included
here not only for the information about Watergate, the fact that
CIA official Richard Ober, in charge of Operation Chaos, appears
to have been Deep Throat, but primarily because, in connection
with all the other associations -- Clay Felker and Gloria Steinem,
Elizabeth Forsling Harris -- it paints a rather damning picture
not only of Gloria Steinem herself, and her association with people
like Pottinger and so forth, but that it shows a larger pattern
of CIA co-operation with and manipulation of the media.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 43
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
One last item here that I'm gonna talk about (actually, review;
we read this last week) concerns the curious associations of Geraldine
Ferraro. Again, by way of taking a look at reactionary and intelligence
infiltration of the women's movement and perhaps, at this point,
control of the same. Research credit for this article goes to
Ted Rubinstein, and it's from a Betty Beale (sp?) column. She's
a society columnist. And it was carried in the Cleveland Plain
Dealer on October 14th, 1984. It's featured by the News America
Syndicate.
Political Opponents Make Strange Playmates
You'd never guess it, but ultra-liberal Geraldine Ferraro and
super-conservative Roy Cohn are friends. In fact, Cohn, the
brash young investigator of the Joe McCarthy days, may have
been the first to plug Ferraro for the Democratic vice-presidential
nomination.
It happened at Cohn's birthday party last February at Regine's
in the "Big Apple" [New York City]. It was "quite
a do," says Victor Laskey (sp?), author of It
Didn't Start With Watergate. "Our Ambassador to
Austria, Helena von Dame (sp?) was there, as was prominent New
Yorker hostess C.Z. Guest (sp?), Barbara Walters, the Rupert
Murdochs, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, the Charles Wickes (sp?),
Baron and Baroness Ricky DePortnova (sp?), and Heaven knows
who else, and the John Zacaros (sp?)." In fact, the Zacaros
had been at previous Cohn birthday celebrations. [CN: As I recollect,
Zacaro was/is Ferraro's husband.]
It was at the last one, however, that the lawyer/host [Cohn]
introduced Ferraro as the possible next vice-presidential candidate
of the Democratic Party. Playmates make strange politics.
Now a couple of the interesting points about the Roy Cohn/Geraldine
Ferraro association and the fact that Roy Cohn appears to have
been the first person to promote Geraldine Ferraro as the Democratic
vice-presidential candidate: Roy Cohn, although a luminary in
New York society until his death, he was nominally a Democrat.
But he was a loyal supporter of Ronald Reagan and obviously one
of the guiding figures of the "far right" for a long
time. Also, as we've looked at from the book Farewell, America,
he himself was a participant in the assassination of President
Kennedy.
Now the fact that the Geraldine Ferraro financial scandals, as
well as her husband's questionable deals with mafiosi possibly,
and real estate manipulations, were a couple of the things that
really damaged the Democratic campaign in 1984. It's questionable
whether Walter Mondale would have been able to win at all. But
when the Democratic campaign got off on such a low note, it was
basically dead almost from the word go. Mondale never really had
a chance, and Geraldine Ferraro is one of the reasons why.
Now the reason, again, that I bring up the Roy Cohn association
with Ferraro... And note, also, that Helena von Dame is a close
friend of Roy Cohn's -- of course, her association not only with
Ronald Reagan, but Nazi war criminal Otto von Bolsing (sp?) we've
dealt with in Radio Free America show #3. Helena von Dame was
Reagan's appointments secretary, drew up the lists of people from
whom his gubernatorial appointments were made when he was Governor
of California, and moved into the White House and became Special
White House Executive Director for Personnel. She chose also,
basically, the lists of people to be selected as cabinet appointees
in this [Reagan's] administration.
The question, I think, that has to be asked here is whether or
not, perhaps, Geraldine Ferraro's alleged shady dealings and those
of her husband were known to Roy Cohn. And again, the possibility
of a Watergate-type counter-intelligence operation has to be thought
of here.
Now a couple of other interesting associations of Geraldine Ferraro,
both of which can be gleaned from the major news media (I don't
have them with me at this time, because we're sort of running
out of time)... But Geraldine Ferraro first got her biggest boost
as a congresswoman from a fellow named Joseph Califano. Joseph
Califano was a former Pentagon official, a good friend of Alexander
Haig, participant in the Bay of Pigs. And Califano was dismissed,
basically, as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under
Jimmy Carter, because of his sort of reactionary stands on abortion
and other aspects of women's rights. The fact that when Geraldine
Ferraro's badly under-financed congressional campaign took off,
the fact that it took off with money secured for her by Joseph
Califano from the Carter campaign is intriguing. (By the way,
you can read about that in wire service accounts of the Ferraro
rise in politics right about the time of her nomination as [candidate
for] Vice-President.)
Beyond that, Geraldine Ferraro's first press secretary was the
widow of Santo Barrio. Santo Barrio was a DEA agent who, like
so many of the DEA agents, appears to have worked both sides of
the narcotics question. Barrio, by the way, died, and appears
to have been poisoned, in investigation of a case (or perhaps
co-operation of a case) called, "The Company," that
we're gonna be dealing with when we discuss the inter-relationship
of organized crime, intelligence and narcotics.
So again, none of those associations are conclusive in and of
themselves. Together, it's an intriguing picture of some of the
background of Geraldine Ferraro. And in light of Roy Cohn's devotion
to Ronald Reagan, one has to ask whether perhaps the Reagan camp,
and Cohn in particular, were aware of just what Geraldine Ferraro
and John Zacaro had to hide. Perhaps that was the reason they
manipulated them into that position in the first place. Again,
bear in mind the whole Watergate scenario where dirty tricks were
used to help deep-six the McGovern candidacy.
That more or less winds things up for the prepared portion of
the broadcast. I'm gonna review very briefly what we've looked
at, because it's been a long section here.
We began by taking a look at Gloria Steinem, her association
with a CIA front called "The Independent Research Service,"
and efforts on the part of Steinem and associates to block publication
of that information -- first of all by Random House in a book
called Feminist Revolution, then by the Village Voice,
and finally by the Heights and Valley News, a New York community
newspaper.
Then we took a look at further information confirming CIA association
with the Independent Research Service, that from The
Espionage Establishment by Wise and Ross.
Then we next took a look at a more detailed account of the Independent
Research Service's work in breaking up Socialist youth conferences
abroad. And in particular, we took a look at the fact that Clay
Felker, who played a key role in setting up Steinem at Ms. [magazine],
was an associate of Steinem's with the Independent Research Service.
We also looked at the fact that Katherine Graham was a principal
figure in helping to get Ms. [magazine] started and also a major
stockholder.
We then looked at the fact that Gloria Steinem's paramour for
the last 9 years, at least as of 1984, was a man named J. Stanley
Pottinger, implicated in an arms smuggling scam and, more importantly,
J. Stanley Pottinger helped block the investigations into the
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Orlando Letelier.
After that we took a look at the fact that Ms. [magazine's] first
publisher, Elizabeth Forsling Harris, appears to have been a key
figure involved in setting up the assassination of President Kennedy.
After that, we took a look at the background of Katherine Graham,
a principal figure in the whole Ms. axis. Katherine Graham, first
of all, was part of an "old boy" intelligence network
inextricably involved with the Washington Post. Her husband, Phillip
Graham, had worked with CIA official Frank Wisner in setting up
one of the first CIA/media operations, called "Operation
Mockingbird."
We then looked at how the Washington Post grew, largely as a
result of assistance from the CIA.
We took a look at the intelligence background of Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee, and in turn his associations with old chums
Richard Helms, CIA Director at the time of Watergate, and also
a guy named Cord Meyer, his brother-in-law and a key CIA counter-intelligence
official himself.
We then looked at the fact that Phillip Graham, just before his
untimely death, became very disenchanted with the CIA's relationship
to the news media -- perhaps more importantly, began vocalizing
this disenchantment. We then took a look at the fact that this
vocalizing didn't last too long because he blew his brains out
in August of '63, three months before John Kennedy had *his* brains
blown out.
We also took a look at how [Phillip Graham's] attorney was key
intelligence-related attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who himself
has possible connections to the assassination of Kennedy.
Following that, we took a look at the fact that Mary Meyer, the
former wife of Bradlee brother-in-law Cord Meyer, who [Mary Pinchot
Meyer] was Kennedy's lover, was murdered in the aftermath of the
Kennedy assassination, and her diary was appropriated by James
Angleton, CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence.
We then looked at the proposed scenario by Debra Davis that the
CIA manipulated the Washington Post and used it as a vehicle for
removing Richard Nixon because, basically, Nixon wanted to be
too big for the system.
And we then also took a look at the fact that "Deep Throat"
appears to have been CIA counter-intelligence official Richard
Ober, again, a long-standing friend of Ben Bradlee at the Washington
Post.
Finally, we took a look at the close political association between
reactionary attorney Roy Cohn and unsuccessful Democratic vice-presidential
candidate Geraldine Ferraro.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 46
[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
It's time now to formally begin the prepared portion of tonight's
broadcast. And we're going to begin by taking a look at a column
that appeared... (By the way, today is Sunday, July 14th, of 1991.)
We're gonna begin by taking a look at a column that appeared in
the San Jose Mercury News this past Wednesday -- this past Wednesday
was July 10th of 1991. This is a column by Diane Mason, a correspondent
for the St. Petersburg Times. The San Jose Mercury News entitled
this particular column, "Like 'Thelma,' NOW's Ready To Kick
Some." (And you know what 'some' is.) This particular column
reads, in part,
There's a scene in the movie "Thelma and Louise"
where Louise (Susan Sarandon) tells Thelma (Gina Davis) that
she has really changed. "You used to be so sedate,"
Louise says. "No more," answers the now armed and
dangerous Thelma. "I've had it up to my (expletive deleted)
with 'sedate.'"
At the annual convention of the National Organization for Women
[NOW] held in New York this past weekend, "Thelma and Louise"
kept popping up -- not in person, nor as an official theme,
but from the heart. It's not that NOW has ever been all that
sedate, but this convention unharnessed more "we've had
it up to here; let's kick butt" spirit than I've seen in
a long time, maybe ever.
Hot items on sale are buttons that say, "Thelma and Louise
Live," and t-shirts that read "Graduate of the Thelma
and Louise Finishing School." Keynote speakers Gloria Steinem
and activist lawyer Flo Kennedy talked about their travels and
speeches together in the early days of the modern women's movement,
calling themselves "the Thelma and Louise of the 1970s."
"Raising Hell and kicking (expletive deleted) is such
fun," said Kennedy, 75. In a wheelchair, Kennedy jokes
that what she does "besides being on my deathbed"
is to be outrageous. She is the person who coined the oft-quoted
proverb, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be
a sacrament." Claiming all the privileges of growing older
and unashamed to be outspoken, Kennedy said that "Women
have been reasonable too long."
(Skipping down......)
Steinem, with her matchless zing and clarity, nearly brought
down the house when she speculated on why the military doesn't
want women in combat. "Can you imagine what would happen
if every welfare mother, every underpaid waitress, every sexually
harassed secretary, had two years of military training?"
she asked.
Well it would be, indeed, interesting to speculate about what
might happen, under the circumstances. However I think there
are other things to ruminate about in connection with this particular
development of this attitude on the part of elements of the
women's movement.
Always a firm believer in women's rights myself, I am at the
same time very critical of many of the directions that the women's
movement has taken. And it is my belief and fear that considerable
elements of the women's movement are allowing themselves to
be manipulated by elements of the "far right," and
specifically, are allowing themselves to be manipulated in the
direction of one of the oldest techniques for subduing a given
enemy population, namely, "divide and conquer."
There would be no more profound division that one could effect
in American society or in any other society than to divide up
men and women. You split up the male and female halves of the
species, and you have effected as fundamental a division as
you can possibly effect. For one thing, that will have a profound
effect on the family unit, the basic element of socialization.
And the more you weaken the family, the more you strengthen
fascism. Because once the family itself is weakened, the main
element of socialization is gonna be the television set. And
children who have basically had their ideas concerning conflict
resolution shaped by Saturday morning cartoon shows, Nintendo
games, and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, well that is a society
which when faced with a bind is going to resort to violence
in order to resolve the conflict.
I do not think that dividing men and women is a good idea at
all. Certainly no one should have to sacrifice basic human liberties
for the sake of fitting any particular stereotype concerning
sexual activity or sex-typing. However, it should be noted in
this context that most people's feelings concerning the opposite
sex are among the most conflicted emotional feelings and emotional
complexes that they have. People's feelings concerning the parent
of the opposite sex, siblings of the opposite sex, lovers and/or
spouses of the opposite sex -- these are things which often
have a very profound effect on people's personalities. And many
people carry the scars and wounds of some of the things they
have suffered during the socialization process forward, into
life.
It is my fear that an over-emphasis by anyone -- be it the
women's movement or some of the forces ranged in reaction to
the women's movement -- an over-emphasis on male/female conflicts
and differences is very likely to wind up exacerbating the differences
and divisions between men and women. Also, [it is] likely to
further mobilize some of the deep psychological conflicts many
people of *both* sexes feel towards members of the opposite
sex. And my fear, once again, is that not only elements ranged
opposite the women's movement, but also elements of the women's
movement itself, have, knowingly or otherwise, allowed themselves
to be manipulated in such a direction that they are actively
promoting an unnecessary and counterproductive division between
the sexes.
Ultimately (obviously), men and women are dependent upon one
another for the continued survival of the species. And as I've
said before, there could be no more effective way of dividing
and conquering than splitting up men and women.
So at a psycho-social level, I think the extent of identification
of elements of the women's movement with what looks to me to be
a contemporary feminist adaptation of the old Rambo, shoot-'em-up
and crack their skull theme -- namely, this movie "Thelma
and Louise" -- this does not look to me to be a particularly
constructive attitude for elements of the women's movement to
take. And I'm afraid it is likely to sow unnecessary division
and further weaken progressive forces as we head into 1992, a
very important election year.
I would also note that there is a searing irony here, to have
Gloria Steinem ruminating as she has here:
Steinem, with her matchless zing and clarity, nearly brought
down the house when she speculated on why the military doesn't
want women in combat. "Can you imagine what would happen
if every welfare mother, every underpaid waitress, every sexually
harassed secretary, had two years of military training?"
she asked.
Well I would ask in connection with that, Can you imagine what
would happen if the most visible and (at least so far) effective
feminist spokesperson in the United States, namely Gloria Steinem
(regarded by many as the doyen of American feminism), can you
imagine what would happen if she had a background in the Central
Intelligence Agency?
Well you don't have to imagine what would happen. Because, in
fact, Gloria Steinem has an extensive background in the intelligence
agencies -- namely, the CIA -- and a number of the people in her
mileau have very obvious intersections with the National Security
establishment, going up to the present time. Who knows? Perhaps
Gloria Steinem's CIA past is not *quite* as far behind her as
she might like to have some of us think.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 47 [CN transcript of remarks
by west coast researcher Dave Emory.] [...continued...]
In a miscellaneous archive show entitled "Gloria in Excelsis"
(subtitled "The CIA, the Women's Movement, and the News Media"),
Gloria Steinem's many intelligence contacts were described in
considerable depth. The main intersection between Steinem and
the CIA is Steinem's role as co-founder, and at one point director,
of an organization called the Independent Research Service: this
is a CIA-financed student organization which has been used in
a number of different capacities. We also noted that Ms. magazine
itself, which had Steinem as editor, has as a principal stockholder
Katherine Graham of the Washington Post. The Graham publishing
empire, and the Washington Post in particular, [are] inextricably
linked with the Central Intelligence Agency, as we looked at in
the book Katharine the Great by Debra Davis. It should
also be noted that the first publisher of Ms. magazine was a woman
named Elizabeth Forsling Harris, who arranged many of the key
Dallas details for President Kennedy's motorcade route.
By way of further exploring Gloria Steinem's CIA background --
specifically, her role with the Independent Research Service --
we're gonna take a look at some information now which comes from
a book entitled The
Pied Piper (subtitled Allard
K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream.) This was authored
by Richard Cummings. The book was published in hardcover by Grove
Press, Inc., in New York. And it's copyright 1985.
Of Gloria Steinem and her involvement with the Independent Research
Service, and in turn the Independent Research Service's involvement
with disrupting the Vienna Youth Festival (which had very strong
Socialist and Communist participation), author Cummings writes
as follows:
The Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth
Festival, which was technically founded by Gloria Steinem and
Paul Sigmund, and which came to be known as the Independent
Research Service, was funded by the Independence Foundation,
one of the conduits of CIA funds into the National Students
Association [NSA]. In 1965, it was the Independence Foundation
which leased its posh offices in Washington to the NSA [National
Students Association], signing a 15-year rent-free agreement.
The Independent Service diligently recruited hundreds of American
students to attend the 1959 Vienna festival and later, the 1962
Communist-backed Helsinki festival, to oppose the Communists
as vigorously as possible. According to Eugene Theroux, who
served as chairman of the metropolitan New York region chapter
of NSA in 1958, the Americans went "to cause trouble."
I would note here also, more about the activities of the Independent
Research Service, the CIA-financed student organization, co-founded
by Gloria Steinem. And we're gonna look at, in addition to the
glance we just took at the Independent Research Service's work
in disrupting not only the 1959 Vienna festival but also the 1962
Helsinki festival, we're gonna look at plans of some of these
same elements and individuals to disrupt a conference that had
been scheduled for Algeria in 1965. This conference was cancelled.
But had it not been cancelled it might very well have been disrupted
by the aforementioned Eugene Theroux. And one of the people who
is aiding Theroux was the aforementioned Allard Lowenstein, a
former Dean of Students for Stanford University, and Gloria Steinem
presiding over the same mileau once again.
Turning again to Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard
Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, we find,
Another Communist-backed youth festival was planned by the
IUS for the summer of 1965 in Algiers, and Lowenstein made preparations
to go there in order to disrupt it. Planning to join him this
time was Paul Theroux's brother, Eugene, who as a NSA leader
in 1958 had met Lowenstein and been inspired by him to work
on behalf of southwest Africa and black students in the south.
Eugene Theroux had been recruited in 1965 by Gloria Steinem
to work for the CIA front, Independent Research Service. They
were to be part of a delegation to "cause trouble,"
as Theroux puts it, or to "engage people in debate,"
as he corrects himself.
And again, as noted, the 1965 conference never came off. But
we find some of the same elements: Lowenstein, Steinem, Theroux,
et al., planning to disrupt this conference as they had the 1962
Helsinki conference and the 1959 conference in Vienna as well.
It should be noted that a number of other prominent liberals
have intersected with this same mileau, this CIA mileau which
involves Gloria Steinem. Among those are William Sloan Coffin
(sp?), one of the leaders of the anti-war movement, himself a
chaplain from Yale University, himself also, for several years,
a CIA agent. We took a look at William Sloan Coffin and his intersection
with the CIA in discussions from the book, The
Man Who Kept the Secrets (about Richard Helms.) That's
authored by Thomas Powers. William Sloan Coffin's CIA background
is described there. As we shall see, William Sloan Coffin intersecting
with the mileau involving people like Allard Lowenstein and Gloria
Steinem and, as we shall see, current Massachusetts congressman
Barney Frank, who also worked with Gloria Steinem and the CIA-sponsored
Independent Research Service.
[For more on some of the above people and their connections, see
the article on Skull and Bones --risephoenix]
Returning once again to The Pied Piper, by Richard Cummings.
It is known that the CIA had established centers on the campuses
of many American universities. In his recruiting efforts at
some of these universities, Lowenstein was working with people
who had been affiliated with the CIA or had participated in
CIA-sponsored projects. William Sloan Coffin at Yale, whom Lowenstein
wanted to head the summer project, had worked for the CIA. Barney
Frank at Harvard had been with the Independent Research Service
delegation to Helsinki, an operation which, by Frank's own admission,
he clearly understood was CIA-backed. Frank jokes about the
role of fellow delegate Gloria Steinem, whom he describes as
running around at nightclubs set up by the CIA in Helsinki,
helping to win over Africans from the Communists.
And again, this little section here is going to go into the aforementioned
miscellaneous archive show, "Gloria in Excelsis: CIA, the
Women's Movement, and the News Media." That is already on
file with Archives on Audio [PO Box 170023, San Francisco, CA
94117-0023; phone: 415-346-1840]. And this particular section
of the program is going to go in as an addendum to that particular
broadcast.
Notes --added by risephoenix:
1. Louise Jones Box 1140 Midlothian, Texas
76065
As of about three years ago, Ms. Jones was still marketing,
via mail order, the "Forgive My Grief" series of books
written by her ex-husband, although volume two is no longer
available
Penn Jones, Jr. Route 6 Box 356 Waxahachie, TX 75165
As far as we know, Mr. Jones still markets his "Forgive
My Grief" series and has some copies available. However,
as he wrote in 1993, "Volume 2 was gone long ago. About
the only place they can be found is in old and used book stores.
People tell me they find them sometimes." Other sources
listed on this page would also be good for tracking down copies
of each of the four FMG volumes -- from Fair
Play
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