I smell ‘willful destruction of property’ AND ‘theft of trade secrets’! [Thank you legal.] Who has jurisdiction in space?

The episode which triggered my memory, Electric Vendetta, is all about crop circles. For me, this episode is unique because I find the plot more far-fetched and less engrossing than usual for the series. There are goofy special effects too: blue-sparks representing ‘electrocution’ not unlike those from the movie Highlander. Altogether, Electric Vendetta seems rushed and poorly written– and I’m not the only one to think so. According to Wikipedia:

“The episode is notable for the fact that one of the deaths is not adequately explained in the denouement due to a mistake in the editing process.”

Electric Vendetta is the first of two episodes written by Terry Hodgkinson, a new writer hired after the series’ first flush of success who was only intermittently engaged by the producers. Hodgkinson writes a lot about WWII and MI6.

I’m telling you this, because the tackiness of this episode reminded me of  the tacky ‘crop circle’ phenomenon, which was centered around the southern U.K., where I lived for a time during the 1990s.

I remember that time vividly: pop culture was saturated in UFOs, aliens, The X Files and crop circles. Believing in aliens was ‘fringe’ like being a hippie was ‘fringe’– an acceptable way of being eccentric. A lot of people wanted to believe.

I do not believe that aliens, cosmic rays or psychic energy creates these circles. They’re made by people; that’s obvious. I think it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

Therefore, it’s very interesting to me that so many media outlets in the 1990s were at least willing to entertain the idea that crop circles might be supernatural, or extra-terrestrial, in origin. The alien mania reached such a fever pitch at that time, that any attention to the ‘phenomenon’ of crop circles– by ‘skeptics’ or otherwise– just fanned the flames higher.

Take, for instance the ‘International Crop Circle Making Competition’ sponsored by The Guardian of  Snowden fame; the German magazine PM; the leading crop circle journal in Britain, The Cerealogist; as well as a foundation set up by CIA agent Arthur Koestler and The Observer editor David Astor, The Koestler Foundation. This competition is mentioned in most ‘crop circle’ histories as being authoritative proof that man could have made *some* of the circles.

In a fantastic twist of logic, competition organizer Rupert Sheldrake describes the results in this way:

After the competition I took part in many interviews, in which I pointed out that although the results showed that it was possible to hoax crop circles, it did not prove that all were hoaxes. The fact that it is possible to forge a £50 note does not prove that all £50 notes are forgeries.

Sheldrake, show me the last £50 note aliens gave you.

The mind games don’t stop there– Sheldrake suggests crop circle skeptics are ‘conspiracy theorists’, if their arguments are taken to a logical conclusion:

Thinking through the hoax hypothesis to its logical conclusion led into the treacherous territory of conspiracy theories. Who were all the hoaxers apart from Doug and Dave? Were they in the military or intelligence services?

Isn’t that a marvelous bit of horse-talk? What Mr. Sheldrake is doing here is tarring skeptics with the slur ‘conspiracy theorist’ while deflecting from a very real concern, that military or intelligence services were/are involved in a psychological operation aimed at the British public. It is important that Sheldrake chose to discredit this concern because there are links between the crop circle phenomenon and the intelligence services.

First of all, the county where crop circles were first reported is Wiltshire, home to the UK Ministry of Defense’s ‘Defence Evaluation and Research Agency’ (DERA), a large military research facility which included a Protection and Life Sciences Division (PLSD). I was unable to find a description of what the UK PLSD did, however the US Army Research Laboratory runs something called a Life Sciences Research Office, which contains a ‘Social and Behavior Science’ program tasked with the following:

The development of a systematic and efficient approach to collect and analyze data to describe fundamental social processes and detect changes in institutional structures combined with theories of cause and outcomes in the behavioral realm will provide military decision makers with the capability to anticipate and mitigate behaviors that impact U.S. interests and national security.

As well as…

The program encourages the collection of primary data for the development and testing of theoretical models and for the development and advancement of methodologies for data collection, statistical methods, and research designs that have the potential to help advance scientific understanding of human behavior. This includes, but is not limited to, research on physiological and/or behavioral responses to social situations at multiple levels of analysis including: population level adaptation and response to natural and human induced perturbations including, but not limited to, climate change, mass migration, war, and attempts at democratization; the role of culture, cognition, institutions and other intermediary level factors in accounting for variations in human behavior; the impact of social context on individual human decision-making under risk and uncertainty; and the search for organizing principles to describe emergent and latent properties of dynamic social systems and networks.

The emphasis is my own. Could a UK Life Sciences program have been measuring the population level effects of crop circle induced perturbations? Could they have been looking at how institutions like The Guardian or the Koestler Foundation affect public debate? Were they interested in seeing where copycat crop circle makers first appeared, and how long the phenomenon took to spread outside of the United Kingdom?

Whatever the Life Sciences program was doing, it’s *probably* now being done by a private company called QinetiQ, which was created when 75% of DERA was privatized in 2001. (Privatization is the best way to take programs out of public scrutiny!)

QinetiQ  became a public private partnership in 2002 with the purchase of a stake by US-based private equity company the Carlyle Group. — QinetiQ.com

The aliens want you to expand your mind with a pipe… like Aldous Huxley.

Nobody should be surprised that people like Rupert Sheldrake want to draw attention away from the intelligence services, seeing as he works closely with the Koestler Foundation, which was started by a guy who made his mark as a CIA asset by manipulating public opinion in favor of the ‘Non-Communist Left’. (Read all about that in Frances Stonor Saunder’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters). Koestler was also interested in things like ESP, mass propaganda and using drugs à la Timothy Leary– all things which fall squarely in line with research objectives of the CIA’s MKUltra project. So, nothing ‘intelligence services’ about the Koestler Foundation! And as far co-founder David Astor goes… intelligence has been an Astor family tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, David to Tony.

But for crop circles to have anything to do with the military or intelligence is a conspiracy theory…

Another intelligence link to crop circles comes from the man who is credited with first calling them ‘crop circles’ in the early 1980s: Colin Andrews.

Colin received a grant from Laurance Rockefeller, of the famous American Rockefeller family, to study the crop-circle ‘phenomenon’. The Rockefeller family, particularly Nelson Rockefeller, was instrumental helping British-aligned spy William Stephenson set up what would became the CIA.

So what were Andrews’ findings? It’s hard to tell from Colin Andrews’ website, but The Museum of Unnatural History characterizes them this way:

Another circle researcher, Colin Andrews, working on a grant from Laurance Rockefeller, came to the conclusion that 80% of circles made in the years 1999 and 2000 were manmade and either prompted by business and/or media interests.

So much like David Astor’s and Arthur Koestler’s foundation’s findings, Rockefeller’s findings are that *some* of the circles are man-made, thus preserving the ridiculous claim that some *aren’t* man-made. Astonishing.

Of course, the question we should all be asking is: cui bono from the crop circles? Is there any value in leading gullible members of the public down this man-made path?

Just keep watching the circle.

The crop circles, as we know them, started in the late 1970s, increased in the 1980s and by 1991 researchers like Sheldrake were counting 800 a year with some being very complex. So the ‘phenomenon’ is a modern one, with no historical precedent. We know that the program started in the late 1970s, a few years after psy-ops like the CIA’s MKUltra programs were outed. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind debuted in 1977, as did George Lucas’ Star Wars , so aliens were in the public consciousness. Was the time ripe for a social experiment?

A running theme with the crop circle ‘phenomenon’, as with the alien ‘phenomenon’, is that ‘the government denies their existence’. We’re all supposed to get some kind of ‘closure’ from the government ‘fessing up and admitting that Roswell happened and that 20% of the circles are ‘real’.

Is this crop circle thing just an experiment to see how best to sell propaganda to the public? To investigate how even a *ridiculous* claim can be gradually sold or worked into the collective consciousness? Does the crop circle phenomenon have the added benefit of increasing government prestige, because if the government ‘admits’ something, then we all know for sure that it’s true?

Thought experiment: If Washington D.C. ‘admitted’ tomorrow that it had found the Loch Ness Monster in 1948, would that mean the Loch Ness Monster really existed? Like WMD?

Think carefully before you answer. :)

Whistle-blowers died to bring you this photo.

David Robarge, the CIA’s chief ‘historian’.

I don’t envy academic gate-keepers: their job is to cover up really big lies, which is almost always impossible. In fact, in their attempt to mislead the public, they often hoist themselves on their own petard, which is exactly what CIA historian David Robarge did when he called Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior: “the most factually detailed, thoroughly researched study of Angleton.”

Cold Warrior is factually detailed, the problem for Robarge is that most of the facts run against the CIA’s official interpretation of Angleton’s career. The facts given in Cold Warrior suggest that Angleton was, in fact, on to something when he spoke about a ‘Monster Plot’ of deep Soviet penetration into the CIA. Far from showing Angleton to be a completely incompetent boob, Mangold’s book gives evidence of Angleton’s counterintelligence insights, insights which ought to look pretty damn smart to the post-Snowden CIA:

 When the computer age dawned over Langley, Anglton rejected the idea of computerizing his files. He was fearful that information technology would allow his staff’s precious secrets to be distributed to terminals throughout the CIA building.

I’ve spoken with someone who worked on installing Langley’s current computer system, and like any competent IT expert, they know computers are designed to replicate information quickly and will therefore always be a liability for spies– no matter how many system admins are fired.

But Angleton’s IT insights are not the crux of what I want to talk about today. Tom Mangold’s book is, on the surface, a hatchet-job against Angleton’s career and personality. The facts Mangold uses to back his claims do not support the conclusions he draws. As part of this deception, Mangold relies  heavily on the testimony of three men who were tasked with bringing Angleton down and burning his files: William Colby, George Kalaris and Leonard McCoy.

Burning Angleton’s files on Soviet penetration of the CIA and other American institutions was a really weird thing for the CIA to do. For an exploration of this topic, please see my post Jesus, Jimmy!, which explains why CIA leadership are still interested in shepherding the public’s perception of Angleton.

But back to Colby, Kalaris and McCoy. Mangold’s attitude towards these three men, and to post-Angleton CIA leadership, is fawning and largely uncritical. However the information Mangold gives us about the trio, when viewed dispassionately, suggests that Colby was probably a KGB asset and had a long standing feud with Angleton; it suggests McCoy had reason to hate Angleton for stymieing his career (McCoy was part of the CIA’s distrusted Soviet Division); and it also suggests that Kalaris was ignorant of Washington politics and had a stagnant career in a  South American backwater before the Angleton take-down. Colby’s three big sources have their own reasons for distorting Angleton’s legacy.

History, as Cleveland Cram well knows, is written by the victors.

I’ll let Mangold’s own words make my point that these three men are untrustworthy.  As background, William Colby served in the OSS (which was ripe with Soviet plants) in Italy alongside Angleton. Colby became chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, where he actively frustrated Angleton’s counterintelligence efforts, ostensibly to protect his own turf.

Mangold on Colby’s KGB ties:

During the Vietnam era, Angleton even went so far as to harbor doubts about Colby’s loyalty, suspicions that were raised after Colby had become the subject of an Angleton-directed security investigation.

While serving in Saigon, Colby had casually met a French medical doctor on three or four social occasions. According to the CIA’s book of rules, a station chief like Colby should have reported all substantive meetings with potentially useful foreigners, but he appears not have done so in this case. He had been unaware at the time that the Frenchman was suspected of being a Soviet GRU agent. Later, the CIA picked up some of the doctor’s incriminating radio transmissions from Vietnam. Years later, the doctor was caught in Paris by French security officials passing intelligence documents to his GRU case officer.

Colby quashed the investigation of his meetings with the French GRU agent after he became Executive Director-Comptroller of the CIA. At best, Colby was incompetent and sloppy– but you know what I think– Colby was recruited by the GRU in Saigon. Colby later became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

Mangold describes McCoy as, “a young Soviet Division reports officer who later rose to become deputy chief of the Counterintelligence Staff after Angleton.” From bête noire to deputy fox in the counterintelligence hen-house at Angleton’s expense!

Finally, Mangold on George Kalaris’ background: “George Kalaris could not have been more neutral to the Angleton controversies had he come from halfway up the Amazon– which, in effect he did.” Mangold adds this tidbit about Kalaris’ early career: “In the course of a notable career in the clandestine side of the house, he [Kalaris] became one of Colby’s trusted Far East specialists.” Kalaris may have been an ignorant castaway in Brazil, but was definitely not “neutral”!

It always amazes me how American ‘experts’ can switch regions of ‘expertise’ from one side of the globe to another at the drop of a hat. (This isn’t just a CIA-proper phenomenon, but a think-tank and academic problem too. Hmmm.) Something went wrong for Colby’s boy in the Far East: Kalaris was shunted off to Brazil before being called to Washington D.C. for Angleton’s undoing. Kalaris orchestrated the burning of Angleton’s files and oversaw the creation of Angleton’s  ‘official history’ at the CIA.

So these three men are Mangold’s primary sources,  a.nolen readers. It’s impossible for Mangold to completely sweep their biases under the rug; he tries to deflect criticism of his analysis by mentioning these biases and finding excuses why they don’t matter– a common trick that didn’t work on this reader.

While the characters of Kalaris, McCoy and Colby are fascinating, I am particularly interested in what Mangold accuses Angleton of doing, because these accusations shed light on Colby, and his superiors’, motives.

According to Mangold and his sources, Angleton was doing unprofessional work that didn’t follow acceptable business practice. Specifically, Angleton was using data from the 1920s and 1930s to try to ‘catch spies’ in the 1960s. He came up with theories that didn’t make sense to any of his superiors, THEREFORE the files which Angleton believed supported these theories had to be immediately burned, with a new, official history of Angleton’s research created to replace them. The lack of Soviet agents who were caught is evidence of Angleton’s incompetence. So says Mangold.

I don’t believe that story and I can use Mangold’s own evidence to counter it.

First of all, it wasn’t Angleton’s job to ‘catch’ spies. His job was to monitor them, as described by Mangold: “His [Angleton's] department was expected to collect information and to monitor clandestine operations aimed at disrupting and neutralizing the Soviet intelligence services.”

‘No spies being caught under Angleton’s watch,’ is only evidence of a lack of political will from his superiors, like James Schlesinger, to act on the information Angleton presented to them. It doesn’t necessarily mean Angleton was giving bad information– and we’ll never know if he was, because his files were burned by his replacement.

An anonymous source gives Mangold this description of how CIA leadership reacted when they found out about Angleton’s ‘Monster Plot’ investigations: “My God, if we had only known this was going on, we could have stopped it years ago. We just didn’t know; the seventh floor didn’t pay close attention to what Angleton was doing.”

This means, anolen.com readers, that CIA brass hired Angleton then pretty much ignored him, and everything he was doing, for twenty years. I believe ‘The Seventh Floor’ was so remiss because Angleton was hired to be a fig-leaf, someone to show Congress and to convince representatives that the sprawling CIA tumor was actually acting in the nation’s interests. ‘The Seventh Floor’ chose Angleton because they believed he wasn’t good enough to sniff out their conflicting loyalties. They didn’t see Angleton as a threat; therefore he was ignorable. You can find my reasoning here.

As a corollary to the ‘Floor Seven Didn’t Know’ story, Mangold belabors his point that Angleton’s superiors, the men Angleton reported Soviet-spy-evidence to, ‘just didn’t understand any of Angleton’s ramblings’. (Yet Angleton stayed on staff 20 years!)

For instance, Mangold quotes James Schlesinger:

“Listening to him was like looking at an Impressionist painting,” Schlesinger explains. “Jim’s mind was devious and allusive, and his conclusions were woven in a quite flimsy manner. His long briefings would wander on, and although he was attempting to convey a great deal, it was always smoke, hints, and bizarre allegations… if it had gone on much longer, and I had stayed, I would have seen there was nothing behind the curtain and I would have moved him.”

Uh, okay James, whatever you say. Colby’s press source Seymour Hersh (a Michael Hastings predecessor?) tells it this way:

“After talking to Angleton, I then called Colby up to tell him that I thought his man was totally off the reservation– that, in essence, he was totally crazy.”

If that wasn’t enough, lefty Mangold brings out the big guns: George H. Bush.

The following day, the future President of the United States telephoned George Kalaris to tell him about the meeting [with Angleton]. “Geroge, I listened very carefully to Jim Angleton yesterday, ” Bush said frankly.  “But I’m afraid I couldn’t really understand what he was talking about. It all sounded very complicated.”

And of course, Mangold’s readers are inundated by a barrage of  “Crazy! Incompetent! Nonsense!” from Kalaris, Colby and McCoy.

Personally, I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about the ‘Monster Plot':  ‘At least one CIA division, and dozens of public figures, have been infiltrated/recruited by the Soviets.’  We now know from the Venona files that the OSS, the CIA’s feeder-pool, was heavily infiltrated by Soviets. Since the 1970s, a lot of information has come out about celebrities and politicians who worked with Soviet agents; enough information to make authors like M. Stanton Evans question if McCarthy wasn’t too tame in his red hunts.

But Angleton’s insights were just too hard for Schlesinger, Bush, Colby, etc. to get their heads around. (Though they understood the Monster Plot well enough to know that Angleton’s work had to be burned!)

In reality, ‘The Seventh Floor’ understood what Angleton was on to so well that no dissent was tolerated once Angleton had been removed:

“Virtually everyone volunteered damaging appraisals of Angleton’s work. There was near unanimity that Colby had made the correct decision to fire him. Many officers said that Angleton’s retirement was the best thing that could have happened to the agency’s counterintelligence program.

Finally– this is the most interesting bit– Mangold says Angleton was incompetent in his research methods:

According to former CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, “Jim’s [Angleton's] staff spent too much time reviewing old historical cases which had little relevance to current affairs. They would go over and over old cases like ‘The Trust’ and Rote Kapelle. They spent weeks and months on it.  To me it seemed like a waste of time.”

And…

Critics of Angleton’s methodology say that both he and Rocca wasted enormous quantities of time studying the gospels of prewar Soviet intelligence operations at the very moment that the KGB had shifted the style and emphasis of its operations against the West. Leonard McCoy points out that “The Trust” was largely irrelevant to the counterintelligence work of the 1960s because it had existed in a “totally different KGB and a totally different world.” He explains: “This was a world in the 1920s and early 1930s in which there were one and a half million refuees from the Soviet Union, and it was easly enough for Soviet officials to penetrate and manipulate a large group like that. No such group existed by the 1950s…”

Kim Philby, the rogue British spy who Angleton is criticized for not seeing through, had been recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s. He wasn’t outed until the 1960s. Angleton’s historical methods were not foolish, they were smart.

Here’s the thing about the 1920s and 1930s: the political climate in the US was such that influential Soviet sympathizers could be open about their allegiance. Much publicly-available– and vetted– information on likely Soviet agents exists from this period. Investigations surrounding Rote Kappelle and ‘The Trust’ are two notable sources, HOWEVER, The Lusk Report and the Palmer Raids are two even more likely sources for Angleton to have used. (Mangold is careful not to mention these *highly probable* sources.)

The Lusk Report and the Palmer Raids were the result of the US Department of Justice’s efforts to undermine foreign spies’ political machinations through the labor movement. The Palmer Raids were dragnet raids on suspected Soviet front operations, and while some Americans’ rights were violated, the raids broke up Trotsky’s henchman Ludwig Martens’ US spy networks. Being an outspoken American, I’m glad this happened on balance, because neither Trotsky, Lenin nor Stalin had any respect for anyone’s rights and Palmer had strong reasons to suspect certain East Coast labor organizations of being Bolshevik fronts. (Not all labor organizations were raided.)

The fall out from the Palmer Raids is interesting, because many prominent people in the Woodrow Wilson administration spoke out on behalf of the socialist ‘victims’. Famous names like Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound, Ernst Freund joined forces with the newly-flegded ACLU to lambast Palmer, and even Harvard professor Zechariah Chafee jumped on the bandwagon. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freeland Post  canceled more than 2,000  of Palmer’s warrants as being illegal. In effect, The Wilson Administration came down on the side of Martens, though Palmer had disrupted operations enough to prevent a Bolshevik Revolution happening on American soil– for the time being.

The Wilson Administration’s actions are only surprising if you haven’t read Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, in which Sutton documents the close working relationship between investment bankers, mining magnates and Lenin’s regime. This collaboration was better known at the time than it is now.

The political backlash from Wilson’s administration became so vicious that Attorney General Palmer’s career was ruined; but his second-in-command, J. Edgar Hoover, had his career made. (Readers will remember that Hoover worked with Stephenson and FDR to set up what became the CIA. Hoover was an expert in manipulating Congress and undermining political opposition to the Executive Branch.)

Angleton would have gleaned a lot of useful information from reading about who opposed Palmer in Wilson’s cabinet, then looking into which other careers were fostered by these ‘broad-minded’ men.

Regular readers will know that I’m not adverse to historical revisionism. Having read Mangold’s book, this is what I think really went on with Angleton:

At some time during Angleton’s twenty-year tenure, perhaps after the Philby incident, Angleton realized there was a strong pro-Soviet current running through the Anglophile circles he was used to. This current was culturally alien to him and it didn’t sit well. The open secret of Soviet sympathies amongst some of the UK and the USA’s most well-heeled and powerful citizens looked more sinister to Angleton than it originally had back in the 1920s. Angleton’s buddies from Cambridge University had been recruited in the 1930s and were only just being outed as spies. Quietly, Angleton began to open files and pay more attention to dinner talk. He began to check the public record for powerful people who spoke out in support of known soviet agents like Ludwig Martens in the 1920s and 1930s, back when Philby was recruited.

Angleton’s inquiries lead him to suspect people close to the White House and CIA leadership. Angleton uncovered Soviet spy networks that had been in place since the OSS, and a rash of informants at the CIA’s Soviet Division. Angleton’s discoveries were so pervasive that he started to distrust the entire CIA structure, and began to segregate his files from those of the rest of the organization. None of Angleton’s activities raised red flags with CIA leadership because the leadership wasn’t paying attention to their stooge in counterintelligence.

When Angleton began to talk to his superiors, testing the water with names of 30 world leaders suspected of working with the Soviets, his superiors showed no political will to pursue Angleton’s claims. Men like James Schlesinger didn’t respect Angleton enough to take what he was doing seriously, until something happened, and they realized Angleton had information that was deadly to them. Suddenly Angleton was  ‘crazy’, his records had to be burned, and he would be sent as a sacrifice to the Church Committee. The CIA’s history would need to be rewritten by Colby and Kalaris through the Cram Report, something career-minded CIA professionals accept as gospel.

Now, I’m not claiming that everything Angleton did was smart. I’m not saying that Angleton was completely right or that he didn’t have emotional problems. I’m not saying Anatoliy Golitsyn wasn’t a troublemaker. I’m not saying that there weren’t serious cultural problems in Angleton’s counterintelligence division.

In fact, in light of all the ‘intelligence community’ pundits who have screamed “KGB!” since the beginning of Snowden’s revelations, I find this quote from Angleton about the Church Committee quite amusing:

The former Counterintelligence chief turned up at Langley sweaty, tired, and deeply distraught. As he calmed down, Angleton began to explain to Elder in quiet and measured tones that he had uncovered a “diabolical plot”.

“The Church Committee has opened up the CIA to a frontal assault by the KGB,” he said. “This is the KGB’s chance to go for the jugular. The whole plan is being masterminded by Kim Philby in Moscow. The KGB’s only object in the world is to destroy me and the agency. The committee is serving as the unwitting instrument of the KGB.”

Clearly, Angleton was capable of the same tunnel-vision as his sucessors are today.

However, if you have access to enough information, perhaps you don’t have to be very smart or balanced to realize that something is wrong at the CIA. I ask readers not to look to Angleton’s character for proof of vast Soviet infiltration, but to look to the reactions of Angleton’s enemies at the CIA. Forty years later and the CIA is still protecting traitors who feared Angleton.

Tom Mangold’s book, the CIA’s favorite Angleton book, does more to uncover the ‘Monster Plot’ than Angleton could ever have hoped to do in his lifetime. I encourage the public, and CIA employees, to read Cold Warrior and ask themselves if this is an organization they want to have access to their health records, financial records and personal communications.

P.S. Why Tom Mangold? Tom is a product of the BBC, an organization that was set up by the same people who set up the British Security Coordinate (BSC)– the BBC and BSC were both set up by Bill Stephenson and his supporters. The BSC worked with the OSS, which became the CIA. So you could say that the BBC and the CIA were birthed from the same mother.

P.P.S. If you’d like to learn more about why J. Edgar Hoover was the darling of America’s anti-democratic elite, and how he undermined ‘undesirable’ — not illegal– grass-roots political movements on the left and right, read The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, by William C Sullivan. This book explains why it’s toxic to have PRISM-like dragnet surveillance systems in a democracy: the controllers of such a system will use it to persecute their opposition, not the nation’s enemies.

Prof. Alfred McCoy during one of many CIA-related media appearances.

I woke up last night with the name ‘McCoy’ rolling around in my head. I tried to dismiss my sleeplessness as redux from the previous post about Leonard McCoy and William Colby, Dirty Jobs, but that nagging feeling just wouldn’t go away. Then I remembered that Colby was associated with another, entirely different McCoy. Alfred W. McCoy.

In 1972, Alfred W. McCoy finished writing a book titled The Politics of Heroin, which was an exposé of CIA complicity with heroin trafficking in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War (1959-75). A book on this topic should also have been an exposé of Colby, who had been heading up CIA Saigon operations on and off since 1959*. Instead, McCoy’s book mentions Colby a grand total of nine times, mostly in connection to quotes from Colby’s writing. (And I’m working from 1991 Politics of Heroin extended edition– 600 pages!)

McCoy began researching The Politics of Heroin in 1971, the year Colby returned to Washington D.C. to be Executive Director of the CIA and to begin Angleton’s unwinding. It’s *incredible*, readers, that McCoy should begin writing his magnum opus on CIA heroin connections at the same time the man ultimately responsible for those connections assumed an important Washington position. It’s even more incredible that McCoy’s CIA heroin exposé makes so little mention of the man at the heart of Far Eastern CIA operations.

CIA Director William Colby.

A little too incredible. I suggest, readers, that Alfred McCoy’s work is managed opposition to William Colby, the media-friendly CIA leader. My suspicions (mostly) stem from information McCoy provides in the preface to the 1991 edition of his book, where he names the people who lead him to his heroin research and who helped him publish the book, despite CIA ‘disapproval’.

McCoy, as a lowly graduate student, was given extraordinary access to intelligence personalities; McCoy was given inside information from at least one CIA publishing front; and during his media-friendly ‘squabble’  with the CIA prior to publication (the best type of hype), McCoy was helped by William Colby’s journalist confidante, Seymour Hersh AND Washington literary-agent-cum-fixer, David Obst. Too many friends in high places, Prof. McCoy.

I don’t think McCoy’s book is a noble exposé of the CIA’s crimes; I think the CIA director William Colby knew that some of his heroin-related activities were going to get out and The Politics of Heroin was Colby’s damage control strategy. Sort of like Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman are the NSA’s damage control strategy for the Snowden leaks.

Let me flesh out what McCoy actually says in his preface. His heroin research started when he was a second-year graduate student at Yale. Alfred McCoy had the *deucedly good luck* to score an interview with the former head of French Intelligence for Indochina, General Maurice Belleux, who just happened to let it slip that the CIA was involved in selling Golden Triangle opium. Sacrebleu! Colby had inherited the heroin businesses that funded General Belleux’s operations back in Indochine.

Why would a French general spill the beans on CIA Executive Director Colby? Belleux’s interview with McCoy happened 10 years after a major rift between the French and American intelligence services; a rift which is attributed to fallout from the search for Soviet spies in France, nick-named ‘the Sapphire Network’. In 1962 James Angleton, along with his official contact with French intelligence services Philippe de Vosjoli, and the support of the majority of men in President Kennedy’s cabinet, told French Intellegence that they had a number of high-level Soviet infiltrations based on information from Anatoliy Golitsyn. The French rebuffed the information, turned viciously on de Vosjoli and no significant Soviet spies were outed. The event set many French officials against Angleton; Angleton suspected that any serious investigation into Golitsyn’s claims had been thwarted by Soviet-friendly insiders. De Vosjoli’s career was ruined and he fled to Mexico with American assistance.

De Vosjoli had cut his teeth working for French Intelligence in Indochina prior to 1951, so he would have been either a colleague or a subordinate to General Belleux. It would be great to know what state the General’s career was in after the ‘Sapphire’ blow up, but I do know that in 1956 he headed the “French Security Services of the National Defense and Armed Forces“, and by the time the 62-year old retired general spoke to McCoy, he no longer held a position in intelligence, but was heading up a helicopter company in France. (Not hiding in Mexico.)

I suspect that General Belleux heard from old Indochina friends that Colby was going to be ‘made'; Belleux knew Colby had serious image-laundering to do (CIA drug dealing was hardly a secret in Vietnam– it’s what all head honchos do there); and Belleux knew that Colby had an axe to grind with Angleton, so the general was happy to provide a favor. Somebody put General Belleux in touch with an obscure American grad student called Alfred. Strike one, Prof. McCoy.

But it wasn’t just the upper echelons of French Intelligence that opened up to young Alfred McCoy. Allen Ginsberg, beat poet and media darling, turned up on McCoy’s doorstep with a “carton containing years’ worth of unpublished dispatches from Time Life correspondents that documented the involvement of America’s Asian allies in the opium traffic”. Time-Life is a publishing constellation owned by the husband of Clare Boothe Luce, Roald Dahl’s lover/target and black ops aficionado. Carl Bernstein, of Rolling Stone, is famous for outing the Time-Life organization’s cooperation with the CIA. The cooperation included providing working-cover for CIA agents and even funding operations. (Readers will remember that Rolling Stone is no stranger to the intelligence community either!)

Recap: McCoy started writing The Politics of Heroin when Allen Ginsberg tuned up with pre-written notes supplied by a CIA media front. Strike Two.

When McCoy’s publisher Harper & Row warned the CIA about McCoy’s immanent book, Seymour Hersh (then with The New York Times) suddenly appeared on the scene and was granted interviews with Harper & Row staff, so that he could write this article which preempted The Politics of Heroin’s publication:

C.I.A. AIDES ASSAIL ASIA DRUG CHARGE; Agency Fights Reports That It Ignored Heroin Traffic Among Allies of U.S. C.I.A. Aides Fight Reports That Agency Ignored Southeast Asian Heroin Traffic

By SEYMOUR M. HERSH Special to The New York Times July 22, 1972,

WASHINGTON, July 21 -The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a public battle against accusations that it knew of but failed to stem the heroin traffic of United States allies in Southeast Asia.

Note Hersh’s use of ‘failed to stem the heroin traffic’ rather than the more accurate ‘was complicit with’ or ‘participates in the heroin traffic’. (As of publication, I was unable to access the full article from the NYT’s rickety archives– they say it’s lost. Will update if there’s news.) Hersh was covering for his buddy William Colby at the CIA; Hersh had been tipped off to McCoy’s book by David Obst, the shadowy Washington literary agent and fixer– but more on Obst later.

Colby and Seymour Hersh buddies? Could it be true? Readers will remember that last Sunday I quoted Seymour Hersh from Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior:

 “After talking to Angleton, I then called Colby up to tell him that I thought this man was totally off the reservation– that, in essence, he was totally crazy.”

This conversation took place in 1974, two years after Seymour Hersh’s ‘breaking story’ about the CIA and heroin. Hersh was such good buddies with Colby that he felt comfortable calling the DCI up to b*tch about another CIA big-wig. In fact, Tom Mangold documents how Colby leaked damaging information about Angleton to Hersh, and how Hersh would clear stories with Colby before their publication!

The next day, December 18 [1974], Seymour Hersh, then the top investigative reporter for the New York Times, phoned Colby and told him, “I have a story bigger than My Lai.” (Hersh had earlier won a Pulizter Prize for uncovering that massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by American GIs.) Colby owed Hersh a favor because the reporter had withheld publication of a sensitive story at his request earlier that year, so the DCI agreed to meet him in his office to discuss this latest scoop.

That’s journalistic impartiality for you! The question isn’t whether Hersh was in bed with Colby, but if that cozy relationship was in place during the twelve months prior, when Hersh was beating the drum for Colby’s CYA expose of  what *the CIA as a whole* was doing in the Golden Triangle. I think it’s reasonable to assume the relationship was.

Recap: Colby’s buddy Hersh helped to promote McCoy’s book which obscured Colby’s role in the Indochina-drug-dealing. Strike three!

McCoy had a very public tussle with *the CIA as a whole* about his book in the New York Review of Books. In 1990 Colby would use the NYRB  again to defend his own writing about the Vietnam War.

Any good historian will know by now that Alfred McCoy is ‘out’. McCoy’s book is managed opposition to Colby and the CIA’s use of the East Asian drug trade. Colby was known as a media-friendly intelligence director; McCoy’s book is part of Colby’s strategy of managing the media to white-wash his corrupt– grotesque– past.

Readers will remember that the only reason any of this heroin trafficking came to light was because heroin addiction had suddenly become rampant amongst American GIs. Colby’s actions are no better than those of the Russians who sold arms to be used against their own men in Afghanistan. Colby was a twisted puppy.

There’s one more scrap of information from McCoy’s preface that I’d like to explore: David Obst. When the CIA initially threatened to quash The Politics of Heroin’s publication, David Obst appeared to give McCoy an alternative publisher:

A month later, Knowlton [Winthorp Knowlton, Harper & Row president] gave me an ultimatum: If I did not agree to a CIA review of the manuscript, Harper & Row would refuse to publish my book. I spent almost twenty-four hours struggling with the dilemma. My friend David Obst , a freelance literary agent in Washington, put me in touch with Hal Dutton of the publishing house E.P. Dutton, who was, David said, very upset by Harper’s decision to grant the CIA prior review of any manuscript. Dutton was willing to publish the book but warned that editorial work and legal batters with Harper & Row could mean a delay of six months.

Rather than slow the publication of timely material, I worked out a compromise with Harper & Row. We created a procedure fo submitting the manuscript to the CIA for prior review in a way that would preserve some semblance of editorial integrity.

Tipped off to a potential story by our mutual friend David Obst, Seymour Hersh, recently hired as an investigative reporter for the New York Times, interviewed Harper’s staff and published his expose of the CIA’s attempt to suppress the book on page 1 of the New York Times. Over the next week,  The Washington Post ran an editorial attacking the CIA’s infringement of freedom of the press and NBC’s Chronolog program televised an hour-long report by Garrick Utley on the agency’s complicity in the Laotian drug trade.

David Obst seems to be all things to all people, and right at the heart of the valuable media frenzy surrounding McCoy’s book.  Who is David Obst?

According to Luke Ford’s interview with David’s wife, Lynda:

Lynda attended Pomona College, in Claremont, California. Then she became a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University. She met literary agent David Obst who represented Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They had an affair and later married.

David got Jann Wenner to allow Lynda to put together an anthology called The Sixties for Rolling Stone Press. David next got the New York Times Magazine’s editor Ed Klein to meet her and hire her.

Obst edited a cover story in the summer of 1977 called “The New Tycoons of Hollywood.”

“I had a wonderful run as an editor of the New York Times Magazine,” Obst writes.

According to the Santa Barbara Independent in 2007:

He [David Obst] has written a book, Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that brings together his experiences as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during and after Watergate with his role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers and his assistance in bringing the My Lai massacre to light.

[Leaking The Pentagon Papers made Daniel Ellsberg famous; he now parties with Laura Poitras and other CIA assets at The Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

So, David made a habit of working with people whose job was to tell the public about Washington scandals through elite media channels.

David Obst, doing what he’s best at.

David was cozy to Rolling Stone, a magazine which I believe breaks bad news the safest way possible for the US government.  Rolling Stone is where Carl Bernstein broke the news of *other journalists’* CIA connections– wouldn’t it be funny if Berstein’s guiding-light, Obst, was working for Colby and the CIA himself? Obst’s work with McCoy was very useful to William Colby.

As an interesting side-note, while David was busy ‘outing’ notorious CIA drug deals in far-off Asia, he made a career out of promoting drug culture in the USA. From The Uncool Exclusive Interview with Cameron Crowe, author of Fast Times at Ridgemont High:

David Obst was a publisher who used to work at Rolling Stone and split off to work on book packaging. He’s the one who called me up and said, ‘Do you want to write a book about high school?’ There was a backstory, I think, between Jann Wenner and David Obst where they had discussed a series of articles for Rolling Stone based on high school.  So I was never sure if the project would be a book for Obst, or a series of articles for Jann… or both.  I just loved the idea of writing about another kind of rock and roll – the kind that happens in the lives of real people.  Real teenagers.  And I did see something fascinating almost immediately – kids were becoming adults, burdened with financial and sexual responsibilities, years earlier than their parents ever had.  It was the great vanishing adolescence.  That was the beginning of Fast Times.

Did William Colby always feel the same way about McCoy’s book? I don’t think so. The Vietnam heroin scandal broke open again in the 1990s, prompting Colby to write a letter to the editors of the New York Review of Books. In reply to Colby, Jonathan Mirsky says:

But the CIA’s involvement in this traffic was widely known in the Sixties and Seventies, and was amply documented in Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper and Row, 1972), which I cited in my article, referring in particular to the chapter on the drug trade in Laos. In his letter Colby ignores McCoy’s evidence, which led to this conclusion:

American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics traffic at three levels: (1) coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; (2) abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; (3) and active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America’s heroin plague is of its own making. [p. 14]

Perhaps after several years of being the head of the CIA Colby felt differently about pushing blame for his heroin dealing off on ‘the CIA in general’. After all, as head of the organization, the public now saw Colby as ‘the CIA’. Perhaps in 1990, Colby wished his 1972 exercise in ass-covering would just go away.

September 30th, 1974 TIME cover featuring Colby.

One year after Colby’s 1990 NYRB letter, McCoy decided to publish an expanded version of his 1972 book, which he describes as “moving beyond exposé to explanation”. McCoy’s updated book has copious information on all the other drug dealers in East Asia, not just Colby the CIA.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Perhaps none of this matters, because Colby died of a suspicious heart attack a while ago. Alfred McCoy now holds a very pleasant professorship in the sheltered college town of Madison, WI. What? Were you expecting McCoy to have  a job at the Rand Corporation, like Daniel Ellsberg?

*For those of you interested in William Colby’s Far Eastern adventures: Colby was the CIA’s deputy chief, then chief of the Saigon station from 1959-62; after that he moved to Washington D.C. to be the CIA’s Far Eastern Division Chief. In 1968 Colby was about to become chief of the Soviet Division– the division that had Angleton so worried– but President Johnson (protégé of Charles Marsh, the BSC collaborator and friend of Roald Dahl) sent him back to Vietnam, to replace Robert Komer and take over the U.S./South Vietnamese rural pacification effort. Colby stayed in Vietnam until 1971, when he was brought back to be Executive Director of the CIA (and quashed investigations into his dealings with a GRU agent in Saigon!)

In the final chapter of Prof. Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin, he gives a brief description of the Nugan Hand Bank Scandal. Nugan Hand was an Cayman Islands bank that was intimately involved in the heroin trade during the 1970s; Nugan Hand appears to have taken over as ‘the CIA’s banker’ after Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau was compromised in 1973 by an IRS investigation. (The CIA quashed the investigation for ‘national security’ reasons!! But, the damage had been done…)

Castle Bank’s successor, Nugan Hand,  was headed by ex-military types, including a smattering of men from the CIA, like retired director William Colby, who served as the bank’s legal counsel for a time and whose “calling card” was found with the body of Frank Nugan in 1980.

I’m talking about Castle Bank and Nugan Hand today because during the 1973 IRS investigation, an ‘informant’ was able to photograph Castle Bank’s client list. Along with the usual suspects, like mafia figures Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and Samuel Tucker, were two notable pornographers: Hugh Hefner of Playboy, and Robert Guccione of Penthouse.

The CIA’s Soft Porn King.

The CIA’s Hard Porn King.

Why were these two famous pornographers piggy-backing on banking interests vital to US ‘national security’? Why were they pooling their money with cash used by the CIA for “clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations”?

What are the national security implications of porn?

Before readers laugh at this question, I will remind them that in most parts of the world pornography is outlawed– or at least frowned upon– as being a social evil. Beijing banned pornography in 1949. The Soviet Union banned it also; people born in the USSR will tell you what a shock it was to see smut pour in along with the American dollars.  Sharia law prohibits porn; Christian teaching does the same. So what’s up? Are all these governments/ religious leaders just anti-free-speech? Is everybody else stupid?

To answer that, I’m going to give you a quote from the Marquis de Sade, who was not just a pornographer and psychopath, but a leading political thinker of the French Revolution who was given a judgeship after 1789.

De Sade liked to throw political philosophy in with his porn. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, de Sade explains how pornography is useful in a republic:

The transgressions we are considering in this second class of man’s duties toward his fellows include actions for whose undertaking libertinage may be the cause; among those which are pointed to as particularly incompatible with approved behavior are prostitution, incest, rape and sodomy. We surely must not for one moment doubt that all those known as moral crimes, that is to say, all acts of the sort to which those we have just cited belong, are of total inconsequence under a government whose sole duty consists in preserving, by whatever may be the means, the form essential to its continuance: there you have a republican government’s unique morality. Well, the republic being permanently menaced from the outside by the despots surrounding it, the means to its preservation cannot be imagined as moral means, for the republic will preserve itself only by war, and nothing is less moral than war. I ask how one will be able to demonstrate that in a state rendered immoral by its obligations, it is essential that the individual be moral? I will go further: it is a very good thing he is not. The Greek lawgivers perfectly appreciated the capital necessity of corrupting the member citizens in order that, their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbors.

Porn is indispensable to our ‘freedoms’, which despots ‘hate’. Sound familiar? De Sade explains further:

Lycurgus and Solon, fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged girls to exhibit themselves naked at the theater. [Footnote: It has been said the intention of these legislators was, by dulling the passion men experienced for a naked girl, to render more active the one men sometimes experience for their own sex. These sages caused to be shown that for which they wanted there to be disgust, and to be hidden what they thought inclined to inspire sweeter desires; in either case, did they not strive after the objective we have just mentioned? One sees that they sensed the need of immorality in republican matters.] Rome imitated the example: at the games of Flora they danced naked; the greater par of pagan mysteries were celebrated thus; among some peoples, nudity even passed for a virtue.

De Sade was a bit confused with his sources, the lawgiving he’s talking about comes from Philemon, who is quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XIII: Concerning Women, 25, which you can read here. Philemon does not say the same thing de Sade says; Philemon does say that women displayed naked and prostituted help the state by burning off young men’s excess energy. In other words, omnipresent sex keeps men passive.

Perhaps the CIA does feel pornography is a matter of national security: after all, we don’t want all those under- and unemployed young men thinking about government corruption…

The CIA’s Soft Porn King today.

The CIA’s Hard Porn King today. He’s dead. Freak liposuction accident?

Bearing in mind the centuries-old understanding of the political effects of pornography, let’s turn our attention to Castle Bank’s porn kings:

Hugh Hefner, whose magazine published stories by British spy Roald Dahl*, is an Army veteran; homosexual rights advocate; and a self-professed champion of  free speech. Hefner could be credited with bringing porn ‘mainstream’ in the Anglo-American world.

Hefner’s image has recently been tarnished by allegations that he is a drug-pushing control freak; that the fabled Playboy mansion is like a grubby, ‘no-tell’ motel; and that, according to former playmates Jill Ann Spaulding and Victoria Zdrok, Hefner needs to watch gay male porn to maintain his chemically-assisted erection.  In fact, the Playboy Mansion sounds a lot like Bryan Singer’s Hollywood (gay) pedophile ring.

Does the CIA feel Hefner’s enterprise is money well spent? Clearly, what Hugh sells isn’t very close to his heart; perhaps de Sade was on to something.

Robert Guccione set up Penthouse in direct ‘competition’ with Playboy; Penthouse took a more explicit ‘hard-core’ angle, going as far as to feature fetish stuff like urination and ‘facials’. The magazine has a knack for getting nude photos of women ‘before they’re famous’, such as Madonna and Vanessa Williams, and has even exploited underage girls, like Traci Lords.

Penthouse was first published in England, not America, and gave CIA asset Seymour Hersh a platform to ‘leak’ a handful of government scandals. (Presumably clearing them with William Colby first!) Guccione has been lauded by such venerable institutions as Brandeis University for his reporting through Penthouse.

Guccione also gave American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, her start in publishing– because of her innate ability? Probably not: Anna’s father was the editor of London’s Evening Standard, so Guccione’s help was likely a business favor to her old man. Never the less, Anna has given unflinching support to America’s current Commander-In-Chief. Also money well spent?

In conclusion, before anyone gets too teary-eyed about freedom of speech champions like Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione, let’s stop and think about where the money comes from.

“And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

*For readers interested in weird espionage ‘coincidences’, Hugh Hefner published Roald Dahl’s twisted story, The Last Act, which is about a vicious, misogynist womanizer who gets his high school flame to commit suicide after her husband’s untimely death. The disturbing thing about The Last Act is how much Dahl– an ‘illegal’ spy and womanizer himself– identifies with the psychopath.

One of MI5’s successes against the Soviets was the apprehension of ‘illegal’ agent Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, whose real name was Konon Trofimovich Molody. Molody had a wife and children in Russia, but he was a profligate womanizer who cultivated the image of a wealthy bon vivant. The MI5 codename for Molody was ‘Last Act’. Aren’t these guys cool?!

William Colby with this first wife, Barbara, and their children.

About a week ago, I wrote a post titled Managed Opposition which described how CIA director William Colby used Alfred McCoy and his book, The Politics of Heroin, to deflect attention away from Colby’s own heroin dealing. Colby worked with Seymour Hersh and a guy called David Obst to promote McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in the media.

Since then, I’ve read Obst’s autobiography; watched Carl Colby’s documentary on his dad The Man Nobody Knew; re-read the 2007 declassified version of the CIA’s  ‘Family Jewels‘; and done a little digging on Ambassador Sally Shelton-Colby.

I was ready to write a post with a  screaming headline, such as: “If You Didn’t Believe Colby was KGB after Angleton , Wait ‘Till You Hear This…“

I was primed to write such a post, because I’ve hit on a few more things which *suggest* Colby was helping the Russians.  These things are 1) David Obst’s KGB connection; 2) Colby’s gratuitous leaking during his CIA career; 3)  Sally Shelton-Colby’s funny pink friends; and 4) the fact that Colby’s heroin business didn’t stop with the fall of Saigon or the end of his CIA career. (Who kept supplying Colby’s network, eh?)

I didn’t write a post screaming ‘KGB’, because I realized that there’s a little more going on here than ‘Colby is a Double Agent’. To call Colby a ‘double agent’ would imply that he had loyalty to the Russians. Colby had loyalty to no one: he regularly gave information which damaged the CIA to his KGB-assisted media team so that Colby could protect himself or take down his enemies inside the CIA. Colby was an unprincipled man who did anything for power, irrespective of the consequences to his family, the CIA or the USA.

So, as I explain David Obst’s KGB ties and how Obst and Seymour Hersh were (consciously) ran as Colby’s media-spinning operation, I ask readers to recognize that Colby *probably was* a Russian agent, but also that he would have worked with Mossad, the Cubans, the Chinese… anybody who was useful to him at the time. Colby was a much, much worse type of traitor than merely a ‘double agent’.

David Obst: William Colby’s Weakest Link

David Obst first came to my attention through Alfred McCoy. In McCoy’s preface to the 1991 edition of The Politics of Heroin, he says Obst offered to find him a publisher when ‘the CIA’ started to complain about McCoy’s work. When McCoy ended up not needing another publisher, Obst leaked McCoy’s story to Seymour Hersh, who wrote a very cautious article about how ‘The CIA doesn’t want you to read this book!’. You can imagine what that did for sales.

The point is, David Obst was the midwife who birthed the CIA heroin scandal into the public consciousness. In fact, David Obst spent most of the seventies birthing CIA scandals into the public consciousness. Seymour Hersh says it best:

“Whether it be My Lai, Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, or any of the other tumultuous events of that era, Obst seems to be in the middle of it.”

Obst was the ‘manager’ who helped these scandal-stories get placed in the right newspapers and on the right television shows. In addition to being an agent for Seymour Hersh (My Lai reporter); Daniel Ellsberg (The Pentagon Papers leaker); Brit Hume (targeted journalist in the CIA ‘Family Jewels’) and Carl Berstein/Bob Woodward (Watergate Scandal reporters); Obst *makes a strong suggestion* that he was roomies with John Marks, the guy who made the CIA’s MKUltra/ LSD program famous with books like The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Obst really does have a connection with  every CIA disclosure during the tumultuous seventies.

What Obst won’t tell you, is that the information for some of his big scoops came directly from the head of the CIA himself, Bill Colby. Carl Colby, in an interview with Q&A’s Brian Lamb , says this:

LAMB: Quick clip [From Carl's documentary on his father William Colby]. Only 30 seconds with Seymour Hersh, ask you why you talked to him . VIDEO BEGINS [Hersh] I did learn from people inside the agency that there had been these documents called the family jewels and I had your father’s one number and I called him. He did see me and he didn’t lie to me. What he did was, if I said there was at least 120 cases of wire breaking, or wire tapping of American citizens in our country to the law, in America, he said my number is only 63; it was a question of numbers. He did not back away from the question of wrongdoing and so that’s one hell of a story. VIDEO ENDS

LAMB: The fellow that broke the My Lai story.

COLBY: Seymour Hersh says a little bit more than what you might even imagine by what he just said. If you trace back to what he said, he said he was pivotal to the publishing of that story. So my father was the source in some ways for that story.

LAMB: The leaker.

COLBY: The leaker at the top. Now, you might say, my God, why would he do that? I think my father was doing what he said he was going to do. Is that he was going to keep the good secrets and let out the bad secrets.

The Colby Clan are a study in self-righteousness and denial; I’m sure Carl will insist papa’s work for Nugan Hand was motivated by the greater good too. What’s important about that quote is that it shows how much discretion Bill Colby had in what he chose to release through the ‘Family Jewels’. Many intelligence-types felt Colby gave out unnecessary information– General Walters, is one example. From Carl’s documentary:

When the Church Committee got rolling, he [Colby] began to reveal things about the history of the agency that did not have to be revealed at that time. And at one of the morning sessions, General Walters, who was his deputy,  said to him, “Well Bill, I’m a Catholic too. And I believe that it is enough to go to the confessional, and to tell one’s sins in the confessional. One doesn’t have to do that before Congressional committees.” [Colby wore his Catholic faith on his sleeve. -- a.nolen]

I will come back to what and how much Colby leaked later, but for now I’d like to point out that Obst was the man who placed what Colby leaked through Hersh.

So Obst was a lucky man, wasn’t he? How does somebody get a sweet deal like Obst’s connection with William Colby?

David Obst’s book about himself, which he had Derek Shearer look over before publishing in 1998.

Obst’s career was nurtured by the Shearer family, who Obst describes as “not only a different class from everyone I’d ever known (they didn’t have milk cartons or ketchup bottles on the table at dinner), but they had a different mind-set as well”. Obst, the future-Revolutionary, was an unabashed social-climber in his teens! During his youthful trips to the Shearers’ Xanadu Obst absorbed their world-view.

The patriarch of the Shearer family, Lloyd, was a Hollywood gossip monger and influence peddler who, according to Obst, entertained “astronauts, movie stars, artists, and politicians. All tried to ingratiate themselves so they could get mentioned in the paper”. Lloyd’s son Derek became Obst’s friend, eventually introducing Obst to close pal Bill Clinton.

Lloyd Shearer’s gossip column, which he wrote under the name Walter Scott. Classy.

What help, exactly, did the Shearers provide David Obst? This is what Obst tells us:

1) Lloyd Shearer lead Obst to study in China, where he recorded testimonies from Christian missionaries who were in China during WWII. (Missionaries have always been a valuable third-party source of intel for Western powers, though Obst claims he was working for academic purposes only.)

2) Lloyd Shearer got Obst and his son Derek press passes so that Obst could cover the Yippie riots/ 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and jump-start his news career.

3) Derek Shearer provided Obst with a place to stay while Obst began his working relationship with Seymour Hersh in Washington D.C.

Whenever David Obst needed something, a Shearer was there to give it to him. Despite this, Obst never gives Derek’s last name in his autobiography, and never names Lloyd at all. Neither Shearer is listed in the autobiography’s index, even though they have their own chapter in Obst’s book! (I had to work Derek’s last name out from who his sister married.) Is Obst ashamed of his Shearer connection? If not, why obscure the men to whom he owes his career?

David Obst has one very good reason to be nervous about his connection to Derek Shearer. Derek Shearer brought a scandal to the Clinton Administration when it came out that Derek, Clinton’s Ambassador to Finland, has deep ties to the infamous Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

Derek Shearer today.

IPS is not just a think tank which promotes socialist/Marxist viewpoints; it is an organization that actively cultivates KGB contacts and is used by the KGB to recruit spies. IPS hosted ex-CIA agent and Soviet tool Philip Agee’s publication Counterspy, which outed Athens’ CIA station chief Richard L. Welch who was subsequently murdered. This information on IPS’s KGB connections is provided by Dutch journalist Emerson Vermaat here, where he also lists his sources. Vermaat’s homepage is here.

David Obst’s silence about Derek Shearer adds weight to Vermaat’s claims; Obst’s silence about Lloyd Shearer suggests the KGB connection goes even further back. (Obst does mention in his autobiography that ‘some guy in his commune’ wanted to donate Obst’s money from the Ellsberg/’Pentagon Papers’ leaks to IPS, p.186.)

What did Derek do for IPS? It’s hard to say, because after the blow-up around his Ambassadorship, he tried to distance himself from the institute. (He doesn’t mention IPS in his Occidental College bio.) However, here’s one description of his work for IPS  which I found on ProgressiveCities.org:

The Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies emerged in the 1970s when a few, then dozens and hundreds of activists who had come from the student, anti-war, civl rights and neighborhood movements began to seek office in state and local governments in the 1970s. The actual beginning came when Lee Webb, who had been national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society, began working on legislation in Vermont and found others with similar interests in other parts of the nation. Webb found grant moneys, connected with Derek Shearer and others, worked within the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and by 1975 Webb and Shearer committed to traveling the nation to collect examples of legislation, policy papers and ideas, which they eventually published in “Readers,” for national conferences, while IPS volunteer staffer Barbara Bick produced a quarterly newsletter.

Gramscian enough for you? ;) The Conference in question featured luminaries like Barney Frank. IPS was founded by Wall Street banker and FDR crony John Jay McCloy using money from Sears heir Philip Stern, banker James Warburg and the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Where’s Wondergood!?

Recap: William Colby’s crack-team of CIA leakers, Seymour Hersh and Daniel Obst, had one foot in the CIA and one foot in the KGB, thanks to Obst’s patron the Shearers. Derek Shearer was a prominent employee of a KGB feeder-pool and by 1998, Obst knew he had to distance himself from Derek. Obst’s silence about Lloyd Shearer suggests Lloyd had unsavory connections as well. Could Colby, the head of the CIA, be unaware of whose company he was keeping? I don’t think so, I think Colby just didn’t care.

David Obst is a loud, self-important ass. Luckily for me, and for anyone interested on how Colby worked with the KGB,  Obst is also fond of name-dropping: Derek’s sister– Brooke– married Strobe Talbott, who has a Wikipedia entry containing his wife’s maiden name. (Though I’m sure that wasn’t the case back when Obst published is autobiography in 1998!) Ever feel old, David?

Tune in next week when I ask “What are the CIA’s Family Jewels, and why is Lloyd Shearer one of them?” Also, “Was Colby the ultimate source of Hersh’s My Lai leak?”

In response to a  reader request, I’ve drawn a flow chart of the relations between William Colby, Seymour Hersh, David Obst and the Shearer Duo.

This is the second in a series of (what will be) three posts on William E. Colby’s cooperation with the KGB. This post will assume knowledge of a few things:

1) Colby’s role in discrediting James Jesus Angleton, and removing him from the CIA through a number of means, one of which was leaking damaging information about Angleton to Seymour Hersh. Colby had almost all of Angleton’s counterintelligence files burned. If you are unfamiliar with this, please read my post Dirty Jobs.

2) Colby’s use of Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin to deflect criticism from Colby’s involvement in the SE Asian heroin trade onto ‘the CIA in general’, and how Colby used Seymour Hersh and David Obst to promote McCoy’s book in the press. If you are unfamiliar with this, please read my post Managed Opposition.

3) David Obst’s connection with the KGB through Lloyd Shearer and his son, Derek. David Obst was the agent for most journalists who leaked CIA secrets in the 1970s, including Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Brit Hume and Rand employee Daniel Ellsberg. If you need more info: Did William Colby Help the KGB?

If you’ve read all that and are still with me, thank you.:)  I will now look at what Colby leaked during his tenure as the CIA’s Executive Director and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). (I’ll look at the information flow represented by the purple arrow on the diagram below.)

That purple arrow represents the second of four points which, I believe, point to Colby’s cooperation with the KGB: 1) David Obst’s KGB connection, 2) Colby’s gratuitous leaking during his CIA career, 3)  Sally Shelton-Colby’s funny pink friends and 4) the fact that Colby’s heroin business didn’t stop with the fall of Saigon or the end of his CIA career.

Here is a list, in chronological order, of the leaks I believe Colby made to Seymour Hersh and his manager David Obst.

1) Colby *PROBABLY* leaked details around the ‘My Lai Massacre’ in 1969.

2) Colby *PROBABLY* orchestrated the leaking of the CIA’s involvement with heroin smuggling in 1971, which ultimately resulted in Hersh’s scoop for the New York Times and McCoy’s landmark study The Politics of Heroin. (See my post Managed Opposition.)

3) Colby *DEFINITELY* confirmed (at least) Angleton’s HT LINGUAL and CHAOS programs on December 20, 1974. (Angleton thought Colby was the original leak too, see Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior.)  Colby *DEFINITELY* leaked  information on “dozens” of  other CIA ‘Family Jewels’ in 1974: Bill Colby was “the leaker at the top”, in the words of his son Carl. For an idea of what else Colby gave Hersh, read Hersh’s Dec. 22nd 1974 NYT story.

I believe, readers, that Colby was responsible for three major leaks from the CIA during the years 1969-74, all of which where leaked through the Hersh/Obst pairing. I will explain the first and last of these leaks in today’s post.

Why would Colby leak My Lai?

The 1969 My Lai scoop is what made Seymour Hersh’s name as a journalist, and according to David Obst, Hersh’s My Lai story was the first time the pair worked together. Colby’s crack media team was formed for the My Lai scoop.

How did Hersh hear about My Lai? From what I can find, Hersh is supposed to have got a ‘tip‘ in 1969 to interview U.S. Army Lieut. William L.Calley, which lead to the discovery of the ‘My Lai Massacre’. Who could have given this tip?** Consider that in 1969 Colby was the CIA’s top man in the Far East and he was just about to leave for an important D.C. post. He knew he’d have to white-wash his heroin dealings, but there was his ugly Phoenix Program too, where the CIA assisted in torture and assassinations which ended up killing something like 30,000 suspected Viet Cong.   As head of Far Eastern intel, Colby would have known about My Lai, which was already being investigated and prosecuted by the US Army when Seymour Hersh leaked it. (See David Obst’s autobiography Too Good To Be Forgotten, p.164.) Perhaps Colby thought it would be better if nasty, violent stuff was *publicly* pinned on the Army first, rather than on his own CIA ops? Today, I’d say more Americans know about My Lai than the Phoenix program, even though Phoenix killed sixty times as many people.

The My Lai incident caused widespread revulsion in the USA; imagine what it would have done to William Colby’s Washington career if it got out that something sixty times worse was directly attributable to him. Colby would have gained a lot by leaking My Lai information to Hersh/Obst at the time that it was leaked, and looking backward,  Colby’s modus operandi throughout his career was to leak through Hersh/Obst. If the shoe fits.

Not only did Colby have reason to hide the Phoenix Program, but he was acutely aware of his reasons. I can say that with certainty, because of the last, and most unusual, of William Colby’s  ‘CIA Family Jewels’ leaks five years after the Mai Lai scoop in ’69. The last of Colby’s ‘jewels’ leakage is a series of letters between Colby and Derek’s dad, Lloyd Shearer, the gossip columnist.

Why are these letters part of the ‘Family Jewels’? In 1972, Shearer wrote in his Personality Parade column that the CIA used assassinations as a political tool as part of the Phoenix Program, which upset Colby terribly. Colby wrote Lloyd a letter in an attempt to white-wash Phoenix and pressure Lloyd into writing a retraction. An *astounding* correspondence ensued… which Colby entered into his famous ‘Family Jewels’ leaks!

Colby’s 1969 My Lai leak has a direct connection with his 1974  ‘jewel’ leaks via his letters to Lloyd Shearer. Colby had to protect Phoenix in 1969, then again in 1972. I’ll look at the ‘jewel’ leaks next.

Why is Lloyd Shearer a Family Jewel…

The ‘CIA Family Jewels’ are a series of reports that DCI James Schlesinger asked the other CIA directors to prepare for him in 1973. The Jewels stank of rear-guard from day one: Schlesinger held his post for about six months, and during that short time one of his priorities was to make sure nothing with “flap potential” could be pinned to him. If Schlesinger was concerned about the agency, he would have discretely asked each director for sensitive information during face-to-face meetings. Instead, he armed a paper bomb…

… which fell into the lap of his replacement, the KGB-connected William Egan Colby. What we know as the ‘Jewels’ are a selection of heavily redacted reports that Colby chose to leak from Schlesinger’s original collection, with some ‘updates’ that Colby requested. Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ are a dishonest collection of documents designed to smear Colby’s CIA enemies, cover his own scandals and provide  some useful information to Colby’s KGB partners. A redacted set of the ‘Jewels’ wasn’t declassified until 2007.

First the small fry: there is very little information on the juicy topics that the press continually harps on, such as spying on Black radicals or political conventions, John Lennon’s political donations, mind-control, etc. There’s only enough detail on who was targeted to make newsworthy soundbites, which I think was Colby’s intention. The majority of information that is given about these juicy topics centers around in-house aspects, like  who got copies of the questionable program’s findings, or whose department was involved in the program.

What is notable about these juicy tidbits, is that they almost invariably show the CIA targeting liberals. As readers are aware, starting at the end of WWII the CIA battled with the KGB for the hearts of the political left, (read Francis Stonor Saunder’s The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.) Colby’s selected leaks played into the lie that the CIA is a conservative institution which tries to undermine the Left. Colby’s ‘jewel’ selection was a boon to his KGB buddies, because these ‘jewels’ sowed distrust between the agency and the Left, which in turned strengthened the Soviet/Communist appeal to liberals.

The CIA is not a conservative organization– far, far from it. As Carl Colby says in his interview with Q&A’s Brian Lamb:

LAMB: By the way, what was – from what you can remember, what were his [William Colby's] politics?

COLBY: You know it’s funny you say what were his politics. I would say he was an FDR liberal. He was JFK kind of incarnate. He was extremely active, obviously in World War II. He drank the milk of FDR. He believed in – he was a Democratic activist I would say, labor lawyer, truly. Conducting sort of activist rallies, and supporting down-trodden workers – seriously – and I think going into the CIA I think a lot of people were from Yale and especially all the Ivy Leaguers; they were pretty liberal. And they were liberal like JFK was liberal.

If you don’t believe Carl Colby about the CIA’s overarching political leanings, consider that the agency was set up by FDR and his cronies, or this rarely-quoted extract from the ‘jewels’ themselves:

Page 327/703 from the 2007 Family Jewels declassification, in a memo about Angleton’s CHAOS program, from Inspector General William V. Broe to William Colby. Operation CHAOS spied on student anti-war activists.

What about the documents which provide more than sound-bites? Colby’s  in-depth ‘jewels’ focused  on his CIA and political enemies. Many of these more in-depth documents were damaging to James Angleton; former DCI John McCone and the White House. Colby hated Angleton because Angleton investigated Colby’s KGB ties in Vietnam; I know that Colby was afraid of Richard Nixon; I do not know about Colby’s relationship to McCone. I suspect that Colby had a bone to pick with whoever was running the agency’s ‘aliases’ (fake ID’s) department and the program which equipped/trained domestic police too. It’s clear from some of the reports that various directors were clued into what Colby wanted them to say, and of course, *nobody* was worried that any drug trafficking connections might come out…

Interestingly, some of the ‘jewel’ reports are accompanied by special notes from Colby himself. For instance, this one about CIA cooperation with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), code-named PROJECT TWO-FOLD:

Check out paragraphs two and three.

What does Colby deign to tell us?

“Let’s stop looking for corruption, but keep staffing our guys in foreign narc ops.” – William Egan Colby

So says the SE Asian drug kingpin!

I think I’ve given you a taste of what 97% of the 703 pages that make up the ‘CIA Family Jewels’ are about. The remaining few pages, those dealing with the weird correspondence between Colby and Hollywood gossip-monger Lloyd Shearer are what I’ll end with now.

The Colby/Lloyd Shearer letters are the only instance of extended non-government correspondence in the ‘jewels’ and they even contain hand-written notes from Colby, as he frantically planned his first letter to Shearer in a desperate attempt to white-wash the Phoenix Project. Note that Colby had *probably* first tried to hide Phoenix behind My Lai three years earlier, when he began working with Lloyd Shearer’s protégé Obst. So it’s likely Lloyd Shearer knew about Colby’s arrangement with Obst when he first published the Pheonix Program comment in his column.

I’ve arranged these Colby/Shearer letters in chronological order on their own page, so that you can read the originals as they appear in the 2007 release of the ‘Jewels’. I’m including the text of the letters below.

This is the news item that freaked Colby out:

From Lloyd Shearer’s Personality Parade column.

This clip prompted Colby to write Shearer a letter, which Colby asked Angus Thuermers, George Carver, General White, CIA General Counsel and a department called DD/P to review before sending to Lloyd Shearer.

Lloyd Shearer’s reply…

Colby fires back…

To which Shearer gives this *shocking* reply…

The ‘Angus’ Shearer mentions is likely Angus Thuermer, who reviewed Colby’s first letter.

After that, Colby sends out this internal CIA note:

Isn’t it incredible that a gossip columnist could treat the executive director of the CIA with such disrespect? I suggest the reason for Lloyd’s attitude was that he knew perfectly well what the relationship was between his protégé Obst and Colby, and therefore felt he had power over Colby. By Colby’s reaction to Lloyd, I’d say Lloyd’s feelings were well-founded.

It was very aggressive for Lloyd Shearer to bring up the names of Victor Marchetti (co-author with David Obst’s *probable* roomie John Marks of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence)  and Jack Anderson (who first reported the Castro assassination attempts). Both Anderson and Marchetti were being secretly watched by the CIA at the time Shearer was writing because of their connection to leaked CIA information. Shearer is effectively saying to Colby: “Be careful, my contacts are better than you think and I’m onto you.”

What  Colby inadvertently admitted by leaking his  own correspondence is that after writing to Lloyd, Colby realized Lloyd Shearer could be dangerous to him, probably because of the Obst-Derek Shearer-KGB connection. The letters show Colby realized it was unwise to push Old Man Shearer further. I don’t think Colby intended to reveal this, I believe Colby thought that no one would give Lloyd’s letters context by talking like David Obst has, so Colby’s KGB media connection would remain secret. I think that when Colby included this *very odd* Jewel in the bunch, he thought he was giving himself the chance to white-wash the Phoenix Program more fully– to say all the little niceties his lawyers advised him not to say the first time. (That’s why he included his hand-written notes.)

When we practice to deceive… we reveal our KGB!

Tune in next week, when I talk about the witch Colby left his real family for!

P.S. To be absolutely clear, the Colby-Shearer correspondence I’ve documented above is a correspondence between the two men highlighted in purple on my flow chart:

** A kind reader just informed me that Seymour Hersh has stated that the My Lai ‘tip’ came from Geoffrey Cowan, the son of former CBS television network president Louis G. Cowan. This doesn’t change my opinion that Colby was the ultimate source of the My Lai leak, because there’s nothing in Cowan’s background which makes it natural for him to have knowledge about an on-going Army investigation… unless, of course, somebody called his dad asking for the best way to present certain information to the American public! Cowan’s involvement does provide an interesting insight into the mechanics of how, I believe, Colby covered himself on the Project Phoenix issue. Thank you!

Safety pins never looked so good.

This is the final post of three on CIA head William Egan Colby and his dealings with the KGB. The first post, which deals with Colby’s KGB-connected media ‘leak’ team, is here. The second post, about why Colby leaked the ‘Jewels’ and My Lai, is here.

New readers should also know that Colby became involved in the SE Asian heroin trade during the 1960s, and continued to be involved (as general counsel to the drug-affiliated Nugan Hand Bank) until 1980, when a founder of Nugan Hand, Francis ‘Frank’ Nugan, was found dead next to Colby’s “calling card”.  It’s not certain that Colby ever left the drug trade, but he did leave the CIA in 1976.

Today I’m not going to talk about creepy media types or bureaucratic CIA politics. I’m not going to say anything more about Colby’s KGB dealings. Today I’m going to offer a partial explanation for why Colby made the unfortunate choices that he did:  why Colby thought he could get away with cooperating with the KGB; why he thought it was okay to hide from his crimes at the expense of the CIA or the Army; why he continued the drug-dealing… Colby thought he could get away with these things because the high-level Washington operators he hung out with were just as morally bankrupt and hypocritical as he was. ‘Depraved’ was Colby’s ‘normal'; his betrayals are exceptional, but not unusual amongst the type of people Colby ran with. What are the people Colby ran with like?

Sally Shelton-Colby will serve as a.nolen’s ‘Ambassador to William Colby’s High-Level Washington D.C. Cronies and Surrounding Personalities’.

Carl Colby has called his stepmother a “coda” in his father’s life and Carl is right. Sally Shelton-Colby is a coda in William Colby’s life, but she’s an important coda. Sally was Bill’s choice of companion once he didn’t have to wear the mask of morality anymore: when his public career was done, when he didn’t need the image of a loving family, when the only thing left to him were lonely canoe trips and business meetings with criminals. You can tell a lot about people by who they choose to hang out with.

What type of person is our Ambassadress? Sally is a trusted servant of the American Empire, which means she’s a globally-minded capitalist who has *a lot* of socialist friends; friends who she uses  in whatever way will increase her power and prestige. Nothing is more important to Sally Shelton-Colby than Sally Shelton-Colby.

Bill Colby decided to risk working with his KGB media crew because he knew that many powerful people in Washington did such things and got away with it,  people like Sally Shelton, who were willing to cooperate with (or marry!) Soviet-affiliated power-brokers as long as there was something in it for them. There was no social opprobrium against such behavior amongst his set; the only problems came if the little people found out.

As I describe Sally’s connections, it’s worth bearing in mind that socialism has always been supported by America’s business elite because socialism promises vast, government-controlled riches. From Wall Street’s perspective, socialism in Washington D.C.  makes the US one big, juicy Aunt Millie. If you think Wall Street is wrong, consider what has happened to the first socialist country, Mexico.

Mexico brings us neatly back to Sally. It’s hard to find out much about her, but if you persist, you’ll be hit with this one piece of information again and again: “Sally Shelton-Colby used to be married to a Mexican Ambassador!” She tells this to everyone, every chance she gets. (I’m not kidding, google her and see for yourself!)

Although Sally tells everybody about her first hubby, she’s very, very careful to never give his name. (Don’t worry, I’ll fix that later! :) ) In 2011, she calls him “a Mexican ambassador“; in 2006, he’s just “a Mexican“; but her biggest bean-spill of all was in her 1991 interview with Charles Stuart Kennedy, where she relates the sordid story of their short relationship.

By the way, this is how Shelton-Colby starts that interview with Kennedy:

“I was born in San Antonio, Texas. My Mexican friends say I’m really Mexican, because I was born in tierra robada, stolen territory.”

So says the second wife of the man at the heart of US national security, 1973-76! That’s our problem in a nutshell, America.

But back to our main narrative– tell us more about the Mexican friend you married, Sally:

SHELTON-COLBY: During the period that I lived in Mexico, I had a very interesting experience, which really has, I would have to say, shaped the rest of my life and perhaps contributed in large part to my being named ambassador at a fairly young age. I married a Mexican politician,whom I had met at SAIS. My husband was very much involved in politics. He had worked for President Lopez Mateos.

KENNEDY: He was part of the PRI.

SHELTON-COLBY: Yes. His entire family was in politics. His father was a general in the Mexican Army. The marriage was unsuccessful, but from a professional point of view it was absolutely fascinating, because I had an experience which most foreigners don’t ever get to have, and that is, I had a bird’s eye view into the inner workings of the Mexican political system. Coming in and out of my parents-in-law’s house were many of the politicians who are in office today, as very young people at the time. We constantly had Mexican military officers in and out of the house, because of my father-in-law. And my husband’s family was a supernationalistic, anti-American family. Now this was very hard for me as a young woman who went there without speaking Spanish, although I had French and Italian, and I began to pick Spanish up very quickly. But it was very difficult.

It was really, really, really rough and perhaps contributed to the breakdown of the very brief marriage. But I learned Spanish quickly. I learned to understand the way Mexicans think about themselves and about the United States. Mexico has a very unique culture. Perhaps that could be said about most cultures, but Mexico is very special in many, many ways. And they have their hangups about the United States.

Background: PRI, the ‘Institutional Revolution Party‘,  is a member of the Socialist International; PRI has been Mexico’s ruling party for 71 years since 1929. They’re a party Wall Street can work with though, because they don’t have any trouble making room for crony capitalists. US-Mexican relations suffered under President Lopez Mateos (1958-64), who was Castro-aligned.

So what did a “supernationalistic, anti-American”, socialist Mexican princeling see in little blond Sally from Texas? I mean, it wasn’t just the hair, because he brought her home to live with his parents… This is where the story gets interesting, readers.

You see, Sally met Mr. Mexico at SAIS, that’s Johns Hopkins’  Washington D.C.-based international affairs school. However, at the time of their first meeting, their love wasn’t strong enough to do anything about. In fact, after meeting Mr. Mexico, Sally got on with her life. Shelton-Colby says she earned an “MA in international relations. And then I was offered a Fulbright to the Institut de Science, Politique, in Paris, and went off to Paris to do a project on Vietnam; as matter of fact, French-Vietnam relations since Dien Bien Phu.”

But suddenly, in the middle of her French studies,  Shelton-Colby “cut short” her Fulbright plans and left for Mexico because she *just had* to go cover for a professor there, even though she didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. In 1969 Sally left France to teach ‘Vietnam Right-Think’ to unappreciative students in Mexico City, where she *just happened* to reconnect with Mr. Mexico from SAIS and married him– a relationship that didn’t even last twelve months, but gave her inside intelligence on a *difficult* Mexican political family.

What brought these two lovebirds together? It couldn’t have been Sally’s American-ness; it couldn’t have been name-recognition; it couldn’t have been money. The one thing left that may have united our Texan and her princeling is socialism, even if only the cocktail variety. Frankly, at SAIS in the mid-Sixties, I wouldn’t be surprised if fashionable political views were what united them. Fashionable socialism was *probably* the hook, readers, but look to Shelton-Colby’s later career for the reason for her marriage.

After her fling with the princeling, Shelton-Colby says: “I left and came back to the United States, and was very fortunate to get a job, almost sight- unseen, with Senator Lloyd Bentsen.” Lloyd Bentsen is a Texas-based Clinton crony who helped push through the NAFTA trade agreement: a globalist’s dream-come-true, which has aggravated wealth disparities in the US and Mexico.

Sally quit teaching Mexicans about US Vietnam policy and returned to the US in 1971, the same year William Colby got outta Vietnam. I speculate, readers, that 1971 was the year Washington intelligentsia decided they’d gotten everything they could out of that ugly war.

I’ve canvassed some Mexican politics experts and it seems that Sally’s Mr. Mexico is probably Eduardo Jimenez Gonzalez, who was Mexico’s ambassador to Norway from 1975-77. From what I can find, he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy: he’s currently using his power and celebrity to protect his people from massive warrant-free government surveillance, thus working against his ex-wife’s masters’ desire for ‘total information awareness’. I wish more American princelings would have Mr. Gonzalez’s wisdom and bravery regarding personal privacy.

Ex-Mrs.-Gonzalez’s loyalty to Washington was repaid with the Ambassadorship of Barbados in 1979, a post Shelton-Colby held for two whole years under Carter. She was then made Vice President of Bankers Trust Co., where she was responsible for managing the bank’s political risk in developing countries during the third world debt crisis of the 1980s.

Shelton-Colby was so good at ‘managing third world debt’ that she pops up next at USAID, representing a collaborative effort with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):

USAID & SEC TO ADVISE EMERGING SECURITIES MARKETS ACROSS GLOBE UNDER NEW AGREEMENT SIGNED TODAY (Sept 2nd, 1997)
The U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have teamed-up to provide expert assistance to securities regulators in USAID countries through out the world. The program is USAID-funded and jointly administered under a five-year, $4 million inter-agency agreement signed today.

Technical assistance will be provided by SEC employees, principally to a country’s regulatory agency and its stock exchanges. USAID missions’ requests for SEC assistance will be coordinated through USAID’s Global Bureau, Office of Emerging Markets. (Press Rel. 97-71)

“Who better than the SEC and USAID to team up to export u.s. expertise in this area and protect the interests of the U.S. investor?” commented USAID Associate Administrator, Sally Shelton-Colby.

“The agreement is part of a continuing effort to use ‘in-house’ resources to support USAID’s economic growth agenda and foreign assistance objectives,” explained Russell Anderson, Director of USAID’s Office of Emerging Markets. Robert D. Strahota, Assistant Director in the SEC’s Office of International Affairs said, “This program reflects the SEC’s commitment to strengthening global securities markets and making them safer for both American and foreign investors.”
The agreement is modeled after a similar program with USAID in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Under this program, the SEC has provided U.S. and overseas training to several hundred senior capital markets officials from this region.

Regular readers know what contempt I have for USAID and their fortune-hunting around the globe; my contempt doesn’t just stem for clumsy psy-ops like ZunZuneo, but from the crime they perpetrated against Russia and the other countries of the former USSR in the 1990s, when they assisted the Harvard Institute for International Developments’ creation of the oligarch class by cheating millions of regular people out of  their shares in previously nationalized companies, leaving most of Russia starving and freezing in the 1990s. The SEC should be ashamed to be involved with Shelton-Colby and her USAID team, especially since the press statement invokes USAID’s travesty in Russia. The press release doesn’t say which other emerging markets were to be ‘helped’ by the Shelton-Colby crew.

(USAID skeptics: James Jesus Angleton’s memo from Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks includes a document about how the CIA was training USAID workers, as well as James Schlesinger’s paper on how to use aid for political ends. Here’s the full documentation. Angleton included these documents because he thought they had “flap potential”.)

It appears as though Sally was working on the aforementioned SEC/USAID swindle when William Colby died in 1996 under mysterious circumstances– which isn’t unusual for a drug lord. But don’t think Mrs. Colby II is just about the dollars and cents!

Throughout her career, Shelton- Colby has supported benevolent organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of the U.S and the Center for International Environmental Law. She’s also left her mark on academia…

What does  Shelton-Colby’s scholarly contribution look like? Take, for instance, her paper The Volcano Down Below  (June 1986 edition of Armed Forces Journal), which she co-authored with Marshall Lee Miller.  A Spanish-speaking scholar summarizes Shelton-Colby/Miller’s conclusions this way: “the threat to Mexico’s stability lies less in the prospect of a revolution of the kind that happened in Nicaragua and Iran, than the probability of a populist demagog  rising to power within the system structure dominated by the PRI, as a result of years of deteriorating economic conditions.”

You’ll remember PRI as the Gonzalez Family party.

Shelton-Colby also participated in a sensitive ‘Track Two Diplomacy” mission to Cuba during the Reagan administration: the hope was that academics would succeed where real diplomats had failed.  After leaving sensitive USAID documents in her suitcase for Cuban intelligence to pilfer, Shelton-Colby and a feminist colleague were treated to an infamous Tropicana Club floor show by their communist hosts, which flapped American sensibilities. As author Howard Wiarda describes it:

The showgirls bump and grind, kick up their legs like the Rockettes and wear bananas and pineapples on their heads as if they were in some 1930s Bing Crosby- Carmen Miranda movie (“Flying Down to Rio”). The show was so old-fashioned, so corny, so counterrevolutionary that I thought it was hysterical in a campy sort of way. But our colleague, the radical feminist Helen Safa, was so offended by the performance that she could not restrain herself, and raised her voice to express her objections. In this case, the Cuban hosts behaved far better than the visiting American.

It seems every aspect of this ‘track two’ mission was planned with great competence. I find it incredible that Shelton-Colby would bring sensitive information with her to Cuba: could someone with her employment history really be so naive? She certainly wasn’t naive about intelligence matters when she made her career in the Gonzalez household. I believe, readers, that like her second husband, Shelton-Colby was willing to make deals with the enemy if she thought she could get something out of it.

I think I’ve given readers a taste of what kind of person Sally Shelton-Colby is, and by extension, what type of person William Egan Colby was. I do not believe careers like Shelton-Colby’s are uncommon in Washington, in fact, if you’re ‘in the loop’, I believe such careers are the norm. Therefore, I’m not surprised Colby felt reasonably secure working with the KGB against his agency enemies or continuing his Golden Triangle drug trade. I mean, he did get away with it, didn’t he?

Carl Colby interviewed Sally Shelton-Colby for The Man Nobody Knew, but he edited out all her footage: “She wasn’t forthcoming about any insights into his character,” Carl said. “The narrative ended. She’s just a coda.”

Shelton-Colby’s career shows her to be  an unprincipled, disingenuous, ugly person, but she is the person who William Colby chose to spend the rest of his life with. Shelton-Colby is an important coda to the Bill Colby story, and nobody’s going to understand Colby without accepting that a woman like Sally Shelton appealed to him.

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of gaining wisdom is accepting that, sometimes,  people who we really want to be noble and good just aren’t.

UPDATE: I’ve thrown a lot of information into this post, so I’ve included a couple of ‘recap’ statements in the ‘Bye, Bye Adrian’ section. I hope this makes things clear. If not, I’m always available for questions through adotnolen (at) gmx, or via comment. Thanks for reading.

Over the course of the last week, I came across two tenuously related stories: 1) the career of Gawker founder Nick Denton and 2) the sudden unemployment of Gawker journalist Adrian Chen.

I’ve decided to post what I’ve found on these topics because I suspect the information will  mean more to some of my readers than it currently does to me. Therefore, a.nolen’s Reflections on Page Six, for your perusal…

Gossip Barons

I find it both grotesque and poetic that Lloyd Shearer, the king of 1970s gossip column Personality Parade, should also be a behind-the-scenes power-broker. Not just any power-broker either, but one on such a level that he could comfortably lob threats at his contemporary, William Egan Colby, the head of the CIA.

Perhaps I shouldn’t find the gossip/power combo surprising.  Perhaps, in order to publish gossip you’ve got to be better connected than the people you talk about. If you weren’t better connected, one of your victims would eventually take you down, legally or otherwise, in revenge.

If you view the ‘gossip column’ as a way for the biggest dog on the block to bite the necks of the smaller dogs, then Lloyd Shearer’s creepy letter exchange with Bill Colby makes a lot of sense.

In the spirit of snarling dogs, I’d like to introduce you to Nick Denton, founder, contributor and editor of Gawker.com.

Nick Denton, a modern-day Lloyd Shearer.

Who is Nick Denton?

Nick Denton was born in 1966– he was a baby when Colby, Angleton and the rest of the crew were battling it out for CIA dominance. So how did he find himself in Lloyd Shearer’s shoes?

Nick Denton was born in Hampstead, what New Yorker magazine calls a “citadel of the moneyed liberal intelligentsia,” to a Hungarian immigrant mother and her economics-professor-then-husband. New Yorker continues:

Nick found himself in a near-bespoke environment of cosmopolitan cool, where his kinds of otherness—Jewish, Hungarian—made him blend in rather than stand out. So it was with the private school he attended, University College School, which placed little value on family crests but sent yearly waves of graduates to Oxford and Cambridge. Which is what happened to Denton.

At Oxford, Nick became editor of the socialist student publication Isis. Socialism/communism has always found a good home in Oxbridge, the UK’s elite university duo. In fact, the KGB used Cambridge in particular to recruit some of its more famous British spies. In this milieu, Nick Denton befriended powerful people who Denton’s buddy and Guardian journalist Somon Kuper describes as “Young Chiefs”:

“Another characteristic of the new élite is networks. The Young Chiefs, who tend to live near each other in the centre of London, get the big breaks from old friends or people they meet at their friends’ brunches or leaving parties. On the political side, the Young Chiefs are so close-knit many of them are related. Ed Balls (Oxford, Harvard and the Financial Times , economic adviser to Gordon Brown) and David Miliband (Oxford and MIT, head of the Downing Street policy unit) studied in Boston together as Kennedy Scholars. Miliband’s younger brother, also called Ed, works with Balls.

Balls’s younger brother, Andrew (Oxford, Harvard and now the FT ) is well-placed for entry. Balls’s wife, Yvette Cooper (Oxford and Harvard, now a Labour MP), is a Young Chief too, as is her sometime tutorial partner at Oxford, Stephanie Flanders (Oxford, Harvard and the FT, senior adviser to the US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers).

The information technology entrepreneurs are more diverse. Only about half went to Oxbridge. But any hopes that the Internet revolution could smash the old éelitist networks have been dashed: the CVs of the Net tycoons are remarkably like those of the politicos. Nick Denton (Oxford and the FT, founder of Moreover.com) was a friend of Flanders at the FT and through her met the elder Balls and Miliband. Tim Jackson (Oxford and the FT) is the founder of QXL. At Oxford both read PPE, the politicos’ degree, as did Charles Cohen, founder of Beenz.

What I’d like to stress about Denton is that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he is of the privileged, post-WWII U.K. establishment. One of the characteristics of this ‘elite’, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that they like to project themselves as ‘underdogs,’ when they are anything but. Denton’s protestations of being ‘outside’ the NYC elite are both flattery to himself (See! I’m the little rich self-made kid!) and a defense mechanism, like pulling the ‘race card’. But, on with Nicky’s story…

In 1989, at the age of twenty-three, Denton left Isis to cover the fall of communism in his mother’s native Hungary for The Financial Times. This period in Hungary made his career: after the revolution, Denton began to cover the subsequent waves of Western investments, which lead to him write a book with Nick Leeson, the creepy securities trader who brought down Barings Bank. (As a former finance industry professional, I promise you that only an establishment journalist would be let near a book deal like Leeson’s.)

Denton used the contacts he made wading through investment bankers, and their political helpers in the former USSR, to become an entrepreneur himself. San Fransisco was on the horizon… and sudden riches.

Denton became a multimillionaire by selling a handful of forgettable start-ups, none of which were enough to catapult him into the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. Denton wanted to be on the inside of something, so in 2002 he weighed his options:

He [Denton] needed a new gig, and to get out of San Francisco. He whipped up a spreadsheet and did an analysis of places to live in, assigning weighted scores to such categories as “old friends,” “business opportunities,” “Hungarians,” “Jews,” “hotter guys,” and “nature.” (The last one accounted for little.) Then, rationality be damned, he tweaked the inputs until New York came out on top. He moved here in the summer of 2002.

When I read that excerpt, I feel like I’m being lied to. Whatever really happened, we can be sure that  Denton began Gawker Media in New York.

Gawker Media’s flagship company, Gawker.com, is an NYC-focused website that is dedicated to spreading gossip about celebrities and not-so-celebrities. The Guardian describes Gawker this way:

[Gawker] was initially written by a young woman called Elizabeth Spiers who, in 12 posts a day covering everything from a Tina Brown memo to the latest hiring and firings at the New York Times, perfected a gloriously sharp, nose-against-the-glass outsider take on the big wheels of Manhattan’s press and publishing worlds.

Gawker eventually branched out into sex tapes and is generally considered to be an online, smuttier version of News of the World, which is read by many people who don’t admit to reading it. Gawker is famous for forcibly outing Peter Thiel, the closet-homosexual Facebook investor and founder of Palantir Technologies– a CIA/In-Q-Tel partner. Hypocritically, reclusive Denton hid his gayness in the past and didn’t admit it to his parents until he was in his thirties.

Nick Denton and new husband Derrence Washington on display in NYC’s Natural History Museum.

Gawker is generally liberal in tone: they don’t like the Tea Party (contributor Allie Jones is obsessed with smearing it), but on the other hand, high-profile contributor Adrian Chen (before he was let go under mysterious circumstances) disparaged Snowden and Wikileaks, while he talked-up Tor– all wise career moves in The Free World. As Adrian Chen said in a 2012 article:

We’re fascinated by the Tor Network, an online anonymity technology that is often referred to by the much more sexy nickname “the dark net.”

Chen’s inconsistency is not because he’s stupid; it’s because Tor is a bona fide US spook asset, while Wikileaks is not entirely under US control and, sadly, Snowden was designed to suck up attention from somewhere else. Chen always played his cards in service of the house. That last observation is important, for reasons I’ll explore in a minute.

Gakwer Media is not just Gawker.com, it’s also Gizmodo, a tech site which played an important role smoothing over intelligence shenanigans around Spamhaus; Fleshbot, a porn site; Deadspin, a sports website; and the angry feminist tabloid Jezebel, amongst other less-well-known websites.

Although each one these websites are US-focused, Gawker Media itself is not  an American company– it’s not even British:

On October 5, 2002, Nick Denton registered the domain Gawker.com. Its administrative contact was a low-tax offshore company in Budapest, called Blogwire Hungary Szellemi Alkotast Hasznosito. The last three words translate as “Intellectual Property Exploitation.”

I would like to point out, readers, that there are much easier tax havens to work in than Hungary. (We’ve come a long way from Isis, Nick.) Offshore-Fox says it well:

Regrettably, bureaucracy and the rubber stamp still rule in Hungary, although things are increasingly getting better. The actual details are not worth going into here, but the formation of a KFT quickly requires an experienced guide.

But don’t worry about the corruption.  For men like Denton, who have contacts amongst globalist bankers and their cronies in ex-Soviet block countries, anything is possible. (To Quentin Tarantino’s dismay, Gawker’s holding company is registered in the Caymans.)

Have Denton’s riches and prestige changed his politics? In a February interview with Playboy, Denton supports permanent revolution, nationalized monopolies and union-busting. Is that program something an elitist Oxford socialist could get behind? You bet! Denton: How can the government correct income inequality by taxing monopolies if those companies hide themselves overseas?

I think I’ve given a reasonably comprehensive portrait of who’s “dishing the dirt on America”, as The Guardian so eloquently puts it. Now onto the mystery of his newest ex-employee, Adrian Chen.

Bye, bye Adrian!

Last November, Adrian Chen published his final piece for Gawker.com, ‘After 30 Years of Silence, The Original NSA Whistle Blower Looks Back’.  Ten days later, Chen’s boss John Cook suddenly announced Adrian was leaving Gawker for a freelance career.

After 30 Years of Silence is remarkable because in it Chen commits at least three sins according to Langley’s playbook: Chen suggests Horowitz has been an intelligence since his Black Panther days; Chen (accidentally) suggests Poitras, Gellman and Greenwald have a US intelligence connection like Horowitz; and finally, Chen mocks the CIA apologists’ last refuge: that agency excesses are WASPs’ fault.

Prior to these sins, Chen was a model establishment journalist, criticizing Wikileaks and promoting the US intel asset Tor. What made him commit career-seppuku?

Adrian Chen, dancing over the edge of a cliff.

My money’s on ignorance. I suggest, readers, that in Chen’s bull-rush effort to use Perry Fellwock to criticize Snowden’s leaks, Chen unwittingly got a little too close to the ugly 1970s political maneuverings of Denton’s and Horowitz’s political patrons, as well as the ugly 2010s maneuverings of Poitras/Greenwald/Gellman.

Chen’s article was okay’d-for-print by John Cook, the chief editor who has since left Gawker for Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept. Chen, an ignorant foot soldier, walked the plank. Cook’s either been rewarded or given golden handcuffs– time will tell on that one.

Recap: Adrian Chen of Gawker broke with his normal routine of pandering to US intelligence interests when he wrote ‘After 30 Years of Silence, The Original NSA Whistle Blower Looks Back’. The article exposed Horowitz as an intelligence agent and suggests that Poitras, Gellman and Greenwald are too. Since the article’s publication, both Adrian and John Cook, the editor who approved it, have left Gawker.

If I’m right about why Adrian left Gawker, it means that Gawker and Denton are patronized by the same business interests, Anglo-American business interests, that backed Colby’s career so many years ago. (Colby used journalist plants like Horowitz in the 1970s, just as Greenwald et alia are used today. Somebody important at Gawker is just as touchy about outing Horowitz today as they are about the Greenwald crew.) The longevity of these business interests is less far-fetched than it sounds, because capital pools have a remarkable persistence– as the old adage says, money begets money.

Adrian Chen’s weird career move doesn’t benefit Chen, it’s a knee-jerk protection of past and present CIA assets. The fact that Gawker moved to protect these assets (they made an example out of Chen), coupled with Denton’s ‘Cool Britannia’ roots, point to Denton being a creature of those  business interests which started the OSS and FDR-Churchill-Stephenson’s collaboration. These are the same interests that felt threatened by Angleton’s files and have pushed a decades-long disinformation campaign about the first CIA Counterintelligence Chief.

Recap: Adrien Chen’s sudden departure shows that folks who are important to Gawker were offended by Chen’s exposure of David Horowitz and Chen’s comparison of Fellwock to Snowden, which by extension suggests Greenwald is CIA like Horowitz was. Being touchy about Horowitz today suggests that Gawker’s patronage is the same group that used agent-journalists in the 1970s.

Let’s look at the article’s sins in more detail.

‘After 30 Years of Silence, The Original NSA Whistle Blower Looks Back’ strains to compare Snowden’s revelations to those of Perry Fellwock, a disillusioned NSA analyst who first spoke out in the early Seventies. Fellwock leaked NSA information to Ramparts‘ David Horowitz and Peter Collier in 1972. Fellwock’s leaks were alarmist accounts of the NSA’s capabilities against the Soviets. Ramparts itself was a Catholic-funded, Soviet-sympathizing publication, so Fellwock’s information was used to discredit US claims of Soviet aggression and paint the NSA in very dark colors.

Perry Fellwock, whose original Ramparts article contained info on NSA spying on ally nations, much like Wayne Masden’s Observer article. Masden’s article was pulled after a twitter storm from ex-intelligence types. Jacob Appelbaum repackaged the information in Der Spiegel several days later.

After Fellwock made a name for himself by outing the NSA, he began an attack on the CIA through magazine Counter Spy, which outed 225 CIA agents around the globe.

Counter Spy is the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) publication I first mentioned in my article describing Lloyd Shearer’s son’s KGB connection. That connection is so politically toxic, that David Obst didn’t even want to mention Derek or Lloyd Shearer’s name in his autobiography. So you see, Chen was playing with fire when he brought up Counter Spy.

Chen’s article focuses on Perry Fellwock’s work for Counter Spy. However, Chen doesn’t explain IPS in his article. Chen makes it sound like Counter Spy was Fellwock’s idea, along with radical-turned-capitalist Rennie Davis and Air Force Intelligence officer Jim Butz. A lot of spooks in the Anti-War movement, weren’t there!? 

Recap: Chen’s method for smearing Snowden was to compare him to Perry Fellwock, a NSA analyst who ended up working with a KGB-associated magazine, Counter Spy. According to Chen, Fellwock first joined the Dark Side by talking to David Horowitz and Peter Collier of Ramparts, another Soviet-sympathizing magazine. However, Horowitz (at least) was not a true leftist, but a CIA plant.

How does Chen tie all this old stuff onto Snowden? Adrian Chen makes the claim that Wikileaks is a modern-day Counter Spy; that Julian Assange is a modern-day Norman Mailer (Soviet sympathizer); that Horowitz and Collier were intelligence assets who undermined the Fellwock’s anti-war work;  and that one day Snowden will regret his actions just as Perry Fellwock and Peter Collier regret the Ramparts article today.

Needless to say, After 30 Years of Silence perpetuates the intelligence-community claim that what little has been revealed by Greenwald/Poitras/Gellman has ‘made the US more vulnerable to terrorists’.

On to the unmasking of David Horowitz– Chen quotes Perry Fellwock:

“Fellwock told me he believes Collier and Horowitz were never truly part of the left, and that they misused his words purposefully to cause maximum chaos in a demented quest to hurt America.

“There was an element within our movement [the Anti-War Movement] that was fundamentally anti-American and wanted to create chaos in America and really disrupt and destroy American society,” he [Fellwock] said.”

If Adrian Chen were well-informed, he would have known that qualifying Fellwock’s claim was the safest thing to do next, but instead Chen provides information supporting Fellwock’s assertion. Strike One. This is incredibly dangerous for Chen because it lifts the lid on the big secret: the 1970s scandals were the result of factional US intelligence infighting.

Fellwock approached Ramparts’ editors as colleagues who would help him refine his own story; they saw him as a source, from which to extract a juicy scoop.

Chen suggests Horowitz posed himself to Fellwock this way: he would use Fellwock’s NSA revelations to undermine anti-Communist policies and thereby harm the intel community and stop the war. In reality, what Horowitz and Collier revealed only served to harm the US, say Chen/Fellwock. Horowitz is the only participant from whom Chen does not have a quote about regretting the Ramparts article and questioning its motives!

Today, Collier echoes Fellwock’s disdain for the [Ramparts] article, with his own motivations. His doubts about the article, he said, beginning before it was even published, helped spur his first steps away from the left. About a month before the NSA story came out, Collier said, his father, a conservative who had argued heatedly with him about his radical politics, died of cancer.

“Towards the end, he was dying of cancer and here I was preparing to do this thing,” Collier said. “And he loved his country. After I did it, when I was still grieving for him, the thought came into my mind: I said, Oh, God, I betrayed my father’s country. This was really my first move out of the left, to understand what my intentions were: To hurt this country, to make it vulnerable, to make it less strong.”

How did Horowitz spin Fellwock’s message? According to Fellwock and Chen, Horowitz protected the NSA by twisting Fellwock’s message and leaving out an important point:

They [Horowitz and Collier] published this rambling interview that said some things that were true and some other things that weren’t true,” he [Fellwock] said. “They just turned it into a sensational piece of gossip as far as I was concerned.

And…

Now that Fellwock was coming forward again, even hesitantly, he wanted to do it right. He squinted at a small piece of paper on which he’d written the key points about the NSA he had wanted to get across with his Ramparts article.

“Most people in those days thought that the NSA and CIA worked for the U.S. government,” he said. “But they don’t. They’re an entity unto itself, a global entity that is comprised of the Five Eyes.” The Five Eyes is the informal name for the intelligence-sharing agreement between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “This community operates outside of the Constitution,” Fellwock said, “and from everything I’ve seen, it still does.”

In Chen’s rush to paint Fellwock as a misguided, burnt-out “crazy” man– Snowden’s future– Chen inadvertently explains David Horowitz’s place in the twisted Colby/KGB media leak network, which Colby used so effectively. Horowitz was there to turn intelligence leaks into factually-questionable, juicy scoops.

Recap: Chen paints Fellwock as a well meaning stooge, who trusted Horowitz and Collier with NSA secrets. Horowitz spun the NSA information in a way that was factually incorrect and left out important points. Horowitz turned important revelations into entertainment that protected the CIA and hurt the USA.

Does it make sense that the CIA should have an agent like Horowitz at Ramparts in 1972? Yes, it does. According to Francis Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War, Ramparts had come to the attention of the Johnson  administration six years previously (1966), when Peter Jessup explicitly told Richard Helms (CIA head) that Ramparts needed CIA attention. That’s plenty of time to place or turn an agent(s) at the publication.

Chen spends a lot of time building Fellwock into Snowden, and building Horowitz up into an unprincipled intelligence agent. To be fair, neither Fellwock nor Chen says ‘Horowitz is a CIA agent’, however, it’s pretty much an open secret that Horowitz is, at least, a CIA operative. Horowitz’s career follows the path of many ‘non-communist lefters’ who ended up working for Langley since WWII.

If Fellwock is Snowden, and Horowitz is CIA, then what does that make Laura Poitras? OOOPS! Yeah, Chen, I feel your pain!

You’ll also notice that Chen doesn’t explicitly make the connection between secret agent Horowitz and secret agents Poitras/Greenwald/Gellman. He doesn’t do that because such comparisons would undermine his argument: that Snowden is an anti-American tool like Fellwock was. Although the Horowitz/Poitras connection isn’t explicit, it’s an unavoidable conclusion from the rest of Chen’s argument. That sort of thinking is *way too dangerous* for a gossip mag like Gawker. Strike two, Adrian.

Recap: Chen trips over himself with this Snowden=Fellwock=Remorse analogy, because the analogy equates Horowitz, the untrustworthy intelligence agent, with Glenn Greenwald, Poitras, Gellman.

I’m going to wrap this one up with that nasty old racial meme:  the CIA/NSA/FBI are just a old bunch of white guys screwing over the world because of their evilocity. This meme is the hiding place of last resort for every OSS/CIA/GCHQ apologist since H. Montgomery Hyde and The Quiet Canadian.

After calling Norman Mailer out as a ridiculous drunk, Chen quotes Perry Fellwock with the following:

“What Mailer told me is that the CIA is basically a white Christian Protestant organization,” Fellwock said. “And white Christian Protestants have to find a devil in order to justify what they do. Their Christian values say they should help the poor, like the Communists were. But they were not helping the poor. They were helping the very rich. And this created a conflict inside of the white Christian Protestant mind that could only be resolved by them seeking out a devil and making that devil into an exaggerated thing. Thus, they exaggerated the threat of communism just like they’re exaggerating the threat of Islam today.”

Now Adrian, listen well. The evil WASP cabal behind the CIA is actually a very useful political tool which you shouldn’t make light of. A lot of time and money has been spent to hone that legend just right, as anyone who has read the MKUltra files well knows. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Adrian– but horse is already out, isn’t it? Strike Three!

The first time I heard the phrase ‘deconfliction team‘ was when it came out that the NSA was using online gaming forums, like those of the World of Warcraft (WoW), to identify people who hold anti-government views.

Somewhere in Maryland, circa 1989…

Apparently, the NSA has so many gamers trolling WoW, that they need an oversight team to make sure that none of the different operations interfere with each other. That oversight group is called a ‘deconfliction team’.

My post today is about what happens when deconfliction teams fail. In 2011, one such disaster occurred when Palantir Technologies collided with Glenn Greenwald.

Palantir Technologies was founded by Peter Thiel, the millionaire Facebook investor and ex-PayPal CEO whose homosexuality was forcibly outed by Nick Denton’s Gawker.com. Palantir got its start-up money from Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, as well as the CIA’s private technology investment firm In-Q-Tel. Unsurprisingly,  Palantir’s main business is data collection and analysis for the US Intelligence Community.

What that means, readers, is that Palantir does the heavy data lifting for US Intelligence clients. Palantir knows the spying methods, but not necessarily the overarching spying strategy or anything else about intelligence operations that Palantir was not hired to help with. Palantir ‘needs to know’ very little.

So… way back  in 2011, Palantir was at best on the peripheral edge of a deconfliction team’s radar.  Couple that with Palantir’s red-blooded hunger for profit anywhere, anyhow, and you have the perfect deconfliction storm.

Everything went pear-shaped the day Wikileaks claimed to have stolen data from one of Bank of America’s executives. The data was said to contain embarrassing and incriminating information on BoA. (Subsequent developments cast a lot of doubt over the meaning of this data ; it also seems that part of this data was deleted the following August by ex-Wikileaker Daniel Domsheit-Berg, whose theatrical behavior aggravated tensions amongst Wikileaks members. )

BoA responded by trying to get a jump on the Wikileaks hackers: they hired a flashy lawyer (Hunton and Williams), who in turn tried to peddle the services of Palantir Technologies/ HB Gary/Berico Technologies. According to The Tech Herald:

Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

This is where the fireworks really start, because Palantir put together a presentation on how they would “take care of”  the insider threat, which involved targeting Glenn Greenwald in particular. Let me stress that Palantir called out Glenn Greenwald by name as a fair-weather friend of Wikileaks. Here’s a slide from Palantir’s presentation to BoA:

The start of a tradition in leaked slide shows? :)

Depending on who you ask, Palantir’s proposal was either released to Crowdleaks.org or hacked free by Anonymous, and the whole ugly mess came out. HP Gary took the fall for Palantir, Berico and the lawyers: HP Gary was split in half, one half folded, the other got bought my Man Tech International.

How did Glenn Greenwald respond to the knowledge that the CIA’s data-intelligence Death Star had been trained on his chest? Glenn found it all “hard to take seriously”. You’re one cool customer, Glenn!

And did Palantir Technologies take the usual corporate route: clam up and call a crack team of lawyers? No. Palantir co-founder Alex Karp made a special, personal statement to Glenn apologizing for Palantir’s behavior and severing profitable contacts with HP Gary.

Palantir’s plot targeted other journalists too, even though Karp didn’t feel it necessary to make special apology statements to them: James Ball (The Guardian), Jennifer 8. Lee (The New York Times), Daniel Mathews (The Telegraph, Forbes, The Times). Notice any employment patterns in this list?

What I believe happened with Palantir/Greenwald is the mother of all ‘deconfliction’ FUBARs. Fortunately for Langley, the mainstream media is so complicit that nobody ‘credible’ dug too deeply.

Things start to smell even worse when you look into the background of HP Gary, the fall-guy-company. HP Gary was a data analysis firm which focused on serving the US Federal Government (through its offices in Bethesda, MD and Washington D.C.) The firm was started by Greg Hoglund, a regular Black Hat presenter, whose hobby was exploring the World of Warcraft online network. In 2005, he wrote about Blizzard’s WoW spy program, ‘The Warden’, which monitored data on gamers’ PCs: everything from emails sent to programs executed. What Blizzard was doing is similar to what the NSA can do through ‘backdoors’ in software. Back in 2005, the Electronic Freedom Foundation thought Hoglund was pretty cool.

One week before the ‘Targeting of Greenwald’ broke (and one day after Arron Barr, an HP Gary colleague who published data on Anonymous members in the FT), HP Gary was attacked by Anonymous so ferociously that Hoglund’s wife Penny had to call Anonymous and beg them stop. Hi. This is Mrs. Hoglund. Yes. I guess there’s been some trouble at school… I laugh, but Mrs. Hoglund’s outreach worked.

So, readers, Greg Hoglund was an expert on the World of Warcraft networks who was willing to work with CIA buddies. We learned later, of course, that the NSA was using WoW networks to watch possible future ‘terrorists’. Perhaps professional game trolling was Hoglund’s gig after HP Gary folded?

What about Glenn? Like any good media operative, he set about using this opportunity to his advantage, honing the same righteous indignation and factual casualness that would make him famous two years later after the Snowden Leaks:

Given my involvement in this story, I’m going to defer to others in terms of the reporting.  But — given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention.  Many of the named targets are actively considering commencing civil proceedings (which would entail compulsory discovery) as well as ethical grievances with the relevant Bar associations.  As the episode with Palantir demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted.  The DOJ ought to investigate this as well, but for reasons I detailed on Friday, that is unlikely in the extreme.  Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability.  That this was discovered through a random email hack — and that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.

This rant came on February 15th 2011, four days after Glenn got his personal apology from Alex Karp– so when Glenn wrote that screed he knew he was safe and smelt blood in the water. Fast forward a few years: Glenn’s now working for the guy who owns Thiel’s ex-employer, PayPal. Small world.

Given that part of Palantir’s strategy was to feed weak-minded journalists false information to discredit them, I’m not surprised that Glenn ignored Snowden’s emails for so long before Laura Poitras lead him by the nose back to Cinncinatus@lavabit@CryptoPartyWiki.

Find slides at The Tech Herald.

Consider Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s antics around the Bank of America information in light of point one on that slide. Bank of America is one of the major US banks, which have a long history of cooperating with US intelligence. I’ve heard these financial institutions described as “revolving doors” for organizations like the CIA, Citibank being the most notorious.

Veteran Tor watchers will note that Palantir thought Wikileaks’ servers’ position in Sweden made them more vulnerable… not surprising, seeing as the Swedes are partners to the US Department of Defense’s Tor Project.

Wrap Up: Edward Snowden, operator of one of the largest Tor exit nodes, chose Glenn Greenwald, the guy CIA-partner Palantir won’t touch, to ‘out’ his trove of leaks. A trove of leaks that you’ll never read.

You know, it’s weird, but I don’t think Ed’s cute anymore.

Greg Hoglund and his wife, Penny Leavy-Hoglund, say business at their HBGary security company has rebounded after the initial negative fallout from the widely publicized hacking episode in February. “In a weird sort of way, it has helped our business,” Leavy-Hoglund said.
Thank you, modbee.com

What follows is the incredible story of how, I believe, naive and unreliable Anonymous members were culled by the FBI and partner security firms through the creation and destruction of ‘LulzSec’. LulzSec was an Anonymous splinter group whose leader ‘Sabu’, real name Hector Xavier Monsegur, shopped his co-conspirators to the FBI allegedly after his arrest on June 7th 2011. I think Sabu’s FBI collaboration actually began a few weeks earlier.

This is important because, if I’m right, the ‘Sabu’ events suggest that elements in the FBI collaborated with influential private security companies to engineer the ‘LulzSec’ security threat and remake Anonymous in their own image.

Why would elements in the FBI and private securities firms want to control Anonymous? Anonymous is a loosely-organized hacker collective which has unclear goals. The only thing they reliably do is drum up business for security firms and provide political fodder for lawmakers itching to ‘crack down’ on the internet. If you make money from outsourcing security, Anonymous is good for you.

Our story begins when a handful of Anonymous members hacked HP Gary on Feb 7th 2011. The Anonymous hackers stole emails in retaliation for the actions of HP Gary partner and ex-Naval cryptographer Aaron Barr, who had contacted the Financial Times on Feb 5th claiming to know the real names of Anonymous members.  The article was phrased as a shout-out to the FBI. Barr said he had uncovered the names using social media like Facebook and LinkedIn. Barr also said that he had infiltrated Anonymous by pretending to be somebody else.

Anonymous members were outraged and released Aaron Barr’s ‘liberated’ emails publicly, to the great embarrassment of security firm HP Gary. Barr’s emails included his poorly-conceived research which (Anon members said) accused hundreds of innocent people of being part of Anonymous, a group which has committed criminal acts. This was the same research which Barr had summarized for the Financial Times.

Even worse for HP Gary was that Anonymous also exposed gross  security incompetence at the company, which was professionally devastating. HP Gary’s own security was so bad that Ars Technica featured a write-up of their “basic” mistakes. HP Gary’s ruling family, Greg Hogland and his wife Penny Leavy, were desperate to stop the rest of HP Gary’s email being released.

Penny Leavy was so desperate that she decided to contact Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown and beg for the leakage to stop: she spoke with him on the phone first, then the conversation moved to an IRC online chat. (!?) Anonymous member ‘url’ copied the entire 5000 line chat for public viewing here. It’s a real-time recording of, reputedly, Anonymous trying to blackmail HP Gary into doing the ethical thing by the hundreds of people Barr falsely accused.

Penny Leavy, Greg Hoglund and Aaron Barr resisted doing the ethical thing at every turn, because admitting wrongdoing would poison their business relationship with the FBI. Aaron was scheduled to meet with the FBI the next morning (Feb 8th) *probably* to pitch HP Gary services based on the Anonymous data which he knew was grossly flawed.

Back to that long IRC blackmail chat… I’ve edited the 5000 chat lines down to the core conversation here. It’s about 1/3 of the original’s length. Greg Hogland, Penny Leavy, Aaron Barr take part, as well as well as a small band of Anonymous members including ‘Sabu’ and ‘Barrett Brown’. Most important of all,  an unknown journalist called ‘Laurelai’ was also part of the blackmail chat.

‘Laurelai’ was part of the IRC chat from the very start, even though none of the Anonymous people seemed to know who ‘Laurelai’ was. ‘Laurelai’ claimed to work for the Anonymous/Wikileaks hybrid journalism project, Crowdleaks, though he/she was unfamiliar with how the Anonymous media machine works. Despite her ignorance of the situation,  ‘Laurelai’ somehow knew to be at that particular IRC chat for HB Gary information.  Was Laurelai’s presence a newbies’ astounding good luck, or something more sinister? Consider what happened next…

Four days after the blackmail chat, on Feb 11th,  ‘Laurelai’ leaked information which identified ‘Sabu’ to Backtrace Security, according to the firm. Backtrace is a “a small security consulting firm with operations in Michigan and Florida that specializes in social engineering”, says Threatpost.com. Backtrace identified Sabu as Hector Xavier Monsegur themselves, then alerted the FBI to Sabu’s real name in mid-March 2011 when they made their findings public.

By April 2011, the FBI had worked out who Sabu was through their own independent methods. (‘Cause government employees can do it without private outsourcing! ;P)

I don’t believe that the FBI waited another two months to put pressure on Sabu. I believe that they wanted to look good with a fast win against Anonymous. I believe that FBI pressure on Sabu started sometime in April 2011.

But Sabu wasn’t arrested until June 7th! I don’t believe there’s anything magical about being arrested that suddenly makes it possible for the FBI to put pressure on somebody. The FBI is not known for gentlemanly– or even legal– tactics, and I refer you to CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou’s open letter to Edward Snowden for proof. If you need more convincing, consider that even FBI fan-boy J. M. Berger admits the Bureau regularly breaks its own rules when targeting groups it doesn’t like.

I think that Sabu’s first mission for the FBI was to create LulzSec, an organization that was supposed to exist for 50 days, just long enough for everybody involved to do something illegal on record.

LulzSec’s ‘seal of office’.

If I’m correct about Sabu, the FBI and LulzSec, then ‘Laurelai’ is the key player who made the FBI’s plan possible, and knew when and where Penny Leavy was going to negotiate with her blackmailers. Penny didn’t start out on an IRC chat, she was on the phone with Barrett Brown when she then decided to continue the talk on IRC, enabling more Anonymous members to go ‘on record’. Penny said she had never used IRC before that chat. (IRC is a well-know way for Anonymous to communicate.) This IRC chat was NOT a spontaneous event; somebody told ‘Laurelai’ to be there and try to get info on Anonymous by posing as a journalist. ‘Cause everybody knows Anonymous are media whores! Just ask Palantir Technologies.

Laurelai would deliver the goods on Sabu in four days. ;)

Who is Laurelai?

Threatpost.com describes ‘Laurelai as ” Wesley Laurelai Bailey, a Davenport, Iowa based Anonymous member”. This is because ‘Laurelai’ appears to be a male-to-female transexual and transgendered rights activist, according to what I could find on the *very partial* Encyclopedia Dramatica and The Trans Advocate. ‘Laurelai’ has angered somebody, because  ED accuses ‘Laurelai’ of violence against women and other very serious things that make ‘Laurelai’ seem unstable, like a person who it would be easy for the FBI to lean on. (BTW, Laurelai claims to be the one who ‘proved’ Stuxnet was NSA too… )

According to my old buddy Adrian Chen, Laurelai (again, seems to be the same one) cooperated completely with the FBI during their ‘investigation’ into Lulzsec:

Bailey says Lulz Security [LulzSec] hackers hold a grudge against her for leaking logs from the secret chat room in which they planned the HBGary hack—which she says she did in retaliation for them harassing some of her friends. (We later published an article based on the logs.) When the interview was over, the agents carted off a couple of her hard drives, her camera and other computer equipment.

Who are these friends of Laurelai? Jennifer Emick of Backtrace Security! The firm that first outed Sabu to the FBI!

Soon, [Jennifer] Emick found herself and some online acquaintances engaged in a pitched online turf war with members of Anonymous, with each side accusing the other of offenses including “trolling” (or online harassment) and “doxing” (or publicly outing) each other.

“You had these warring groups and, in the end, you find out that a lot of what happened was manufactured by other people, and you don’t know the truth behind it,” said Gregg Housh, a self-described Internet activist and early member of Anonymous who Emick believed was behind many of the online attacks against her.

But Emick‘s early involvement with the group had given her contacts that would later prove useful. Among them, Wesley Lauelai Bailey, a Davenport, Iowa based Anonymous member who uses the handle “Laurelai.” It was Bailey who would ultimately provide Emick with the information that would lead to Sabu‘s arrest.

BackTrace Security founder Jennifer Emick used to be an Anonymous member back when Anonymous was attacking the Church of Scientology. Emick and Anonymous have a history of feuding and Backtrace has gone after Wikileaks in the past:

Brown [Barrett Brown, Anonymous spokesman] claims that BackTrace was a group that was affiliated with th3j3st3r, an online activist best known for launching a denial of service attack on Wikileaks for its publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Brown said the individuals behind BackTrace are also behind the Anonymousdown Web site and Twitter accounts like @faketopiary and @fakegregghoush that have been publishing links that claim to out, or “dox,” Anonymous members in recent days. Brown said the group was also compiling information on him and his former acquaintances, including an “ex-girlfriend’s 16-year-old daughter” as part of their research on Anonymous.

So not only does Jennifer Emick work alongside the FBI, she actively antagonizes Anonymous. Security theater!

The information Sabu gave to the FBI helped them arrest people associated with Lulzsec, a splinter group, not Anonymous proper. LulzSec was set up by Sabu in May 2011, well after the FBI knew who he was. This matters, because if LulzSec actions had been conducted under Anonymous proper, Anonymous might now be as dead as LulzSec.

It’s as though the FBI was protecting Anonymous by telling Sabu to draw away an undesirable element, which was later neutralized. (We now know that there were probably two other FBI informers involved in LulzSec too.) Since LulzSec’s destruction, Anonymous has gone on to drum-up business for security companies and provide political fodder for internet-freedom quashing lawmakers, but in a safer-feeling way, according to the FBI in August 2013.

Creation of LulzSec: The FBI got a win against famous hackers; HP Gary and friends got a more manageable way to scare up business.

Interestingly, ex-intelligence pro Quinn Norton was Anonymous’ WIRED contact for two years which, judging by WIRED’s archives of her work, spanned October 2011 through July 2012. This is what her website says:

I was Wired‘s correspondent on Anonymous and the Occupy movement in 2011 & 2012. While I wrote dozens of articles, witnessed six evictions and several major hacks/Anonymous protest actions, two pieces hold a special place in my coverage:
My Inside Anonymous for July/2012 Wired Magazine
“A Eulogy for Occupy,” Wired.com December/2012

Being involved with Anonymous in the 2011/2012 period specifically means something to the intelligence community. Consider that Sabu, a “Puerto Rican guy in the projects“, was ‘hacking’ for the Arab Spring in Tunisia  circa December 2010… how ‘Global Village’!

But how much of a win was Lulzsec for the FBI? It was only a complete win for FBI brass who benefit from working with the private sector…

A Little Background

The creation of LulzSec came at the perfect time for companies like HP Gary,  Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and their lawyer buddies Hunton & William. There was discontent in Congress about how private security firms were being used to gather dirt on critics of powerful institutions, like the US Chamber of Congress. Aaron Barr’s unethical behavior spurred a dozen congressmen to call for an inquiry a few weeks after the Anonymous email leaks on March 1st:

The plan, which called for drawing up detailed social networks of progressive critics and sought to launch malware hacks against progressive organizations, was ostensibly created by data security firm HBGary Federal.

It was revealed when protest group “Anonymous” compromised the company’s network and dumped tens of thousands of their emails onto the public Internet.

Amid the emails, details began to emerge about a shadowy world of defense contractors, where social media could be used to manipulate public opinion and bloggers are handled as mortal enemies.

HBGary Federal was just one group allegedly at work on projects related to these efforts. Together with Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies, the entire group was called “Team Themis.” They were compiling the plans as something of a sales pitch for the Chamber’s law firm, Hunton & William.

‘Team Themis’ is what Hunton & William later pitched to Bank of America, with special emphasis on pressuring Glenn Greenwald to drop his Wikileaks support. Attempting to pressure Glenn is what actually brought HP Gary down, I wrote about that in my post Deconfliction.

In a nutshell, ‘Team Themis’ were desperate to show that they’re the good guys, and LulzSec suddenly appeared to fill the void with a 50-day “reign of terror” (Thanks, Adrian!); an evil reign, during which hackers were “Laughing at your security since 2011!” and attacking the CIA, the US Senate and even an FBI affiliate… Note how the NSA and it’s legion of contractors are suspiciously absent.

Team Themis would probably have got away with it too, if it weren’t for that pesky kid from the CIA Salon magazine. Which brings me to another point…

There’s one more worrisome issue that needs airing: in this post-Snowden world, we now know that the NSA/CIA/FBI work directly with companies like Facebook to map social networks, so its unlikely that Aaron Barr was going to give the Feds anything they didn’t have already.  Was the whole HP Gary fiasco a fake conflict for fake stakes?

Was LulzSec’s ‘reign of terror’ just security theater, designed to justify outsourcing intelligence work to private companies, companies which are unpopular in Washington because they undermine *some* real spooks’ job security? How often over the past year have you heard full-time government spooks bitch about the problems with outsourcing? Hmm.

Was it full-salary spooks’ fear of being displaced by contractors that made Snowden’s leaks happen, I wonder? (That one’s for you, E. Oop. ;) )

Maybe this generation’s epic intelligence in-fight is between those who profit from government outsourcing and those who profit from keeping intelligence in-house… because if it’s all about money, that explains how Gawker.com can hate  1) Snowden AND 2) conservative intelligence pros AND 3) people who out David Horowitz’s CIA work.

Let’s Not Forget Penny and Greg

ON THE SUBJECT OF MONEY…

To understand why the USA is the way it is, you need to know something about a nasty subset of the population who make money as government contractors. Don’t get me wrong, there can be decent people who work for the Feds, but it’s a line of business that also attracts some really ugly characters.

Many of the ugly ones are two-bit millionaires who exploit connections with the military, or some other vast bureaucracy, to enrich themselves. These are the littler guys who make money off war, social crises and fear; they are modern-day carpetbaggers.

Penny Leavy and Greg Hoglund are two such carpetbaggers. Incompetent but well-connected, they’ve scraped together a small fortune from prostituted security clearances and those in Washington who are willing to outsource government functions.

From my experience, what unites these carpetbaggers is their lack of ethics or concern for how their actions affect fellow citizens. They’re mindlessly loyal to whichever bureaucracy happens to be paying them at the moment, consequences be damned. If pressed, they’re good at logical contortions in support of their greed: somehow they’re never the bad guys in their own mind. Don’t believe me? Read Penny’s IRC chat.

That IRC chat show how Penny Leavy et alia try to wriggle out of an embarrassing situation.

The IRC chat also explains why Palantir Technologies’ sales pitch to Bank of America focused on Glenn Greenwald and other media pros. The IRC blackmail chat shows that Anonymous’s only plan was to drum-up media exposure; they can’t agree on what they actually want from HP Gary.

Anonymous participants relied on these journalists (amongst others): Glenn Greenwald, Andy Greenberg (Forbes’ contact with Julian Assange), Parmy Olson (Forbes’ contact with Anonymous). Anonymous also counted heavily on CNN for media exposure– they had five different contacts there! Given that Anonymous member ‘+cOs’ claims to have given over 50 interviews to news outlets like The Guardian, NYT, AOLNews, CBS, and that Anonymous member ‘Baas’ rolls with ‘Swedish media’, it’s easy to understand why CIA-private-partnership Palantir Technologies would create a set of slides on Glenn Greenwald like the ones I wrote about in my previous post.

Back in 2011, Anonymous pundits had an awful lot of media-establishment friends who were willing to give the ‘hackers’ what they wanted: an audience. HP Gary understood those media connections and thought they could ride people like Glenn Greenwald to lifetime employment. Peeing on Glenn’s shoes a few months later is what ultimately brought HP Gary down and  *interrupted* the gravy-train for Penny and Greg– but they’re already back in the saddle! (Check out that link. If you put your cursor over the Hoglunds’ headshots the pictures swizzle. That’s carpetbagger for ‘classy’!)

Washington D.C. may be evil, but it’s also entertaining…

—

PS. To my buddy, Hubri5: Paul Roberts isn’t talking about you in this ThreatPost.com article, is he?

In an interview with Forbes.com, a spokesman for BackTrace, who used the name Hubris, said the group “aims to put an end to Anonymous ‘in its current form.’” According to the article, BackTrace’s members have become disenchanted with Anonymous’s more strident, political activism – a change from the group’s roots as an anarchic prank-oriented collective whose biggest target had been the Florida based Church of Scientology. “Anonymous has never been about revolutions. It’s not about the betterment of mankind. It’s the Internet hate machine, or that’s what it’s supposed to be,” Hubris is quoted as saying.

How did you get to be wound up with Backtrace Security and this mess?! ‘Cause, I gotta say, Backtrace smells really bad…

Benny Johnson talks about what job he’d like to have more than Political Editor @ BuzzFeed.

A couple of weeks ago Benny Johnson, the pseudo-conservative political pundit, was let go from BuzzFeed for plagiarism. Apparently Johnson has been a gratuitous plagiarizer for more than a year. Nobody seemed to care before July 24th, when Benny’s career came to screeching halt. What happened?

The story goes that on July 24th two no-name twitter dudes, @crushingbort and @blippoblappo, set up a WordPress blog, ‘Our Bad Media‘, listing instances of Benny’s obvious plagiarism. Miraculously, J.K. Trotter of Gawker found ‘Our Bad Media’ on the very day of its first post and wrote an article about Benny’s bad behavior. Trotter’s Gawker article caught BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith’s attention, resulting in Benny’s being fired.

Plagiarism is bad, but it’s not the astounding part of this story. What’s amazing is that the bloggers, @crushingbort and @blippoblappo, expect the public to believe their take-down of Johnson was: “just something two people with some spare time did on a whim after it seemed like it’d probably be more than just a shot in the dark.“

Benny Johnson’s firing seemed fishy to me from the git-go and insincere statements like the one above have prompted me to investigate the various players involved in Benny’s saga.

The anonymous bloggers, @crushingbort and @blippoblappo, say they were motivated by Johnson’s self-righteous tweets accusing IJReview of plagiarism after IJReview did plagiarize a widely-read and snarky article by Johnson, which mocked George Bush Sr.’s unfortunate sock-style. As ever with Benny Johnson, the mockery was subtle and posed as a tounge-in-cheek compliment to Bush I, no doubt why IJReview picked it up. IJReview didn’t get the joke, and pulled the article (apparently) after Johnson called them out on their plagiarism.

https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/statuses/491953975785426944

Johnson’s cutting remark to IJReview, the supposed-political-ally of ‘whiter than white’ Benny, launched @crushingbort’s and @blippoblappo’s crusade against Benny and ended Benny’s BuzzFeed career.

“@crushingbort: It [the attack blog, Our Bad Media] was definitely prompted by Johnson tweeting about the IJReview.”

@crushingbort’s and @blippoblappo’s web-chronicle of Johnson plagiarism spans a grand total of two days, 24-25th July, and the blog hasn’t been updated since. (‘Our Bad Media‘ claims to be ‘on Journalism’, but it only talks about Benny.)

Our Bad Media’s J.K. Trotter/Gawker connection smells, especially because of the timing of Trotter’s July 24th article, which outed Benny as a plagiarist. Trotter’s Gawker (NYC-based) article was published at 2:16 pm (EST) on the same day as @crushingbort’s and @blippoblappo’s first post! (That’s three hours BEFORE the first comment on the blog (time-stamped 5:24 pm) if the blog is East Coast, but five hours ahead if the blog is West Coast! By the ‘Our’ in ‘Our Bad Media’ I presume the blog is American.)

Not only was J.K. Trotter remarkably ahead of the WordPress curve, but Trotter had time 1) to contact BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith for a statement and receive a reply 2) notice that BuzzFeed articles had been altered after his initial contact with Ben Smith and 3) get his article about Benny Johnson’s plagiarism-oopsy through Gawker’s editorial process before 2:16pm on July 24th. Trotter’s a fast worker! Be careful, J.K., rushing is what got Benny into trouble…

Let’s recap the chain of events: two disinterested citizens do two days of blogging which 1) get BuzzFeed’s attention by the first day and 2) leads BuzzFeed to fire an editor on the second. Wow. That’s got to be some type of record.

Johnson’s editors, lead by Ben Smith, took less than 48 hours to fire him. Somebody on BuzzFeed’s ‘editorial’ mailing list leaked Ben Smith’s ‘We Fired Benny’ email to Gawker’s J.K. Trotter within that 48 hours:

After carefully reviewing more than 500 of Benny’s posts, we have 41 instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites. Benny is a friend, colleague and, at his best, a creative force. But we had no choice other than letting him go.

More fast workers! Smith ends the note by undermining himself:

Tonight’s decision is not a knee-jerk response to outside criticism, though we are genuinely grateful to the people who helped point out instances of plagiarism. Nor is it meant as a personal condemnation: Benny at his best is a creative force, and we wish him the best. Finally, it is not a warning that you’ll be fired for a small mistake or an isolated error. We will always have a more forgiving attitude toward bold failures, innocent errors, and misfired jokes than more skittish old media organizations.

I agree with Ben Smith, there’s nothing knee-jerk about Benny’s firing. I believe that Benny got on the Bush Clan sh*t-list with his snide mockery of this prominent American family. Benny pushed the Bushes too far when he jeered at their media project, IJReview, which despite its bluster about page views, is struggling to be taken seriously.

Jeb Bush could stand you mocking his demented father, Benny, but hitting his pocketbook took things one step too far.

https://twitter.com/PUNKSPANK/statuses/492341525699780609

The twitter quote above is the earliest reference to ‘Our Bad Media’ I could find; it’s time-stamped 10:12 am on July 24th. Notice how Benny’s attack on IJReview came just one day before. @crushingbort and @blippoblappo are fast workers too!

So, seriously folks, who’d Benny p*ss off?

Well… IJReview is a shell of a media outlet with only two staff members listed on their website: Bubba Atkinson (Editor in Chief) and Kyle Becker (managing editor). There are no current Staff Writers it seems, which makes sense, because IJReview appears to do nothing but aggregate internet content and turn it into ‘click bait’, making IJReview.com the most popular internet destination I’ve never heard of. DeathandTaxesMag.com:

The right wing has its own Upworthy knockoff. According to Quantcast, it’s [IJReview's] quickly becoming more popular than Upworthy, and even conservative sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller. It’s called Independent Journal Review, though its name is a huge steaming turd of a lie, because it’s neither a journal nor a review nor independent.

More important than it’s management, however, is that IJReview is funded by 27-year old Alex Skatell  and 42-year old Phil Musser: IJReview is just one tool in their election-molding toolkit, ominously called ‘Media Group of America’. This is how DeathAndTaxesMag.com describes IJReview’s backing:

The site is funded by Alex Skatell (former staffer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee) and Phil Musser (a former Tim Pawlenty adviser). It’s owned by Media Group of America, a conservative LLC which also runs consulting firm IMGE (which has worked with clients like Boeing and BMW) as well as Gravity, which manages technology and data for campaigns.

Alex cut his teeth working for 1) liberals in Australia “as digital director for the Liberal Party of Australia and now Prime Minister Tony Abbott”; and 2) Republicans in the USA “as Director of New Media & Technology for the Republican Governors Association (RGA)”.

Phil Musser is much more interesting: he’s a creature of US Senator Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American power-broker who ran US government department HUD (The Department of Housing and Urban Development) from 2001-2003. HUD is a nexus of cronyism, theft and scandal: HUD’s role in dubious mortgage repackaging schemes is part of what brought on the 2008 financial crisis in the USA.

Phil Musser also worked at HUD from 2001 to some time in 2004:

Phil served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. At HUD, Phil managed the development of public policy, a thirty billion dollar budget and served as a key liaison to the White House. Additionally, Phil coordinated intergovernmental relations and worked with many governors, mayors and local officials on important community housing issues.

Musser left HUD at about the same time Mel Martinez did, in order to work on Martinez’s political campaign!

In 2004, Phil served as a senior advisor to Senator Mel Martinez’s successful U.S. Senate campaign in Florida and as a deputy director of the G-8 Summit in Sea Island, GA, for the U.S. Department of State.

Mel Martinez got his start in politics by being a “pragmatic” friend of Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Jeb is the sock-loving George Bush Sr’s second son, and father of  Mexican-American political hopeful George P. Bush. Martinez is a creature of the Bush Family; Musser is a creature of Martinez; IJReview is a creature of Musser.

See where I’m going? The money that gave Mel Martinez his leg up is probably behind IJReview. That money probably got tired of Benny Johnson peeing on their socks pant-legs. So two bloggers, who’d rather not reveal their names, were paid to attack Benny Johnson (a poor-quality journalist and an easy target) for two whole days, giving BuzzFeed an excuse to fire him by the end of the second day.

@crushingbort: Jesse Eisinger made a point I strongly agree with, which is that plagiarism is far from the worst problem in journalism. But it seems to be the one of the few that editors respond to.

The ‘Our Bad Media’ blog was made-to-measure!

If you’re interested in reading what *probably* got Benny Johnson on Jeb Bush’s radar, check out How To Thank a Soldier by George W. Bush, 23 Things I Learned Spending A Day With George H. W. Bush at The George Bush Library  and BuzzFeed’s celebrated A Gentleman’s Guide to Picking Socks. That sock one was published three weeks ago, on July 22nd.

This is purely anecdotal, but I’ve heard that the Bush clan is vicious with their vendettas and has a very long memory. Benny, BuzzFeed’s pseudo-conservative jester, has been making dangerous jokes at the Bushs’ expense for one year at least. Check out:

A Gentleman’s Guide To Picking Out Socks, As Told By George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush is obsessed with socks. He is even currently judging his own sock competition, run through his foundation. So what makes a good sock?

a.nolen sees the formation of a media constellation: HuffPo, The Intercept, BuzzFeed.* Readers will remember that the Bush Family is no stranger to the intelligence community: George H. W. Bush was the CIA head who took over after William Colby and covered for Colby’s traitorous actions.

Bush Family intel connections just may explain how Jeb Bush could get BuzzFeed to defend his investment in IJReview so quickly…

It shouldn’t be forgotten that whoever @crushingbort and @blippoblappo really are, they knew to contact J.K. Trotter at Gawker, another spooky-smelling outfit. They knew that J.K. Trotter would do exactly what they wanted him to do.

I’m excited to see where Benny Johnson turns up next!

—

* BusinessInsider, the NYC news spigot founded by “a disgraced Wall Street analyst“, may also be part of this constellation. BuzzFeed and BusinessInsider published the ‘Snowden Supermarket’ pictures which, in an under-handed way, encouraged outraged intelligence personnel to take violent action against Snowden.

Knowing what I know now, I believe that when BuzzFeed and BusinessInsider  published the supermarket pictures, and when BuzzFeed pushed Benny’s snuff piece, they were bolstering Snowden’s image as a martyr to people who wanted to believe that while simultaneously showing support for anyone who feels threatened by what Snowden did and making the argument for taking spying in-house. I believe a lot of thought went into Benny Johnson’s Snowden-snuff piece: America’s Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead. Edward Snowden himself drew attention to this piece in his ARD interview in January, so we know it’s one for which US intel wanted really wide viewership.

Why? Benny’s article screams ‘Snowden isn’t US intel!’ even though we now know Snowden is. Johnson’s piece pumps the idea that what leaks have leaked did damage to US intelligence, thought Johnson gives no examples of damage. The article stress that Snowden was a contractor. Benny was presenting the intel-lifer argument.

And now Benny’s gone from BuzzFeed. Don’t tick off the Bushes!

A few weeks ago a.nolen reader Hubri5 alerted me to the sorry fate of two Tor researchers from Carnegie Mellon who didn’t ask the Department of Defense for permission to talk about their work on de-anonymizing the Tor network. These researchers, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, had their Black Hat 2014 talk cancelled at the 11th hour; the talk was titled “You don’t have to be the NSA to break Tor: de-anonymising users on a budget“.

That’s bad behavior folks– bad behavior on the part of Volynkin and McCord. Always get permission from the DoD or The Tor Project before talking about Tor vulnerabilities. Tor must maintain the trust of its users– this is a matter of national security.

I don’t want to harp on the negative, so I’m going to talk about one company who did things right by Tor, and it seems, gave up valuable digital forensic analysis business in the process. Digital Forensics Solutions LLC is a New Orleans-based company that captures digital evidence for its customers, who presumably include law enforcement.

The driving force behind Digital Forensics is– or was, cause he’s not currently listed on their website– researcher Andrew Case. Case wrote a clever add-on for open-source memory analysis toolkit Volatility, which lets users reconstruct files even when ‘criminals’ have taken security precautions by only using random access memory on their machines. Case was able to reconstruct files even after they’d been scrambled by popular ‘live cd’ operating systems like Tor’s TAILs, Ubuntu or BackTrack.

Even though Case makes a living by exploiting the technological edge of digital forensics, he chose to give up that edge by making his research known to the wider world, and in particular, The Tor Project. Why, Case?

“You know with Tor, they deal in a lot of countries where there aren’t warrants or anything, so it’s, uh, it can be hectic.”

For Andrew Case, and Digital Forensics Solutions LLC, global citizenship trumps the profit motive. Tor helps places that, uh, don’t have warrants, like we have warrants in America. Case and his employer share that same wide-eyed altruism that inspired Operation Iraqi Freedom!

I’ve embedded a video of Case giving an ‘update’ to his Black Hat 2011 talk titled De-Anonymizing Live CDs through Physical Memory Analysis. This Black Hat talk was not pulled, because as Andrew explains in the video below, he contacted the appropriate players first. [Good stuff starts after 7:40. Not Work Safe.]

Q: So what did TAILs do to mitigate forensic analysis?

Case: So this is actually pretty interesting. When the abstract went online for the Black Hat talk it had mentioned TAILs, and analyzing the TAILs live cd, and it’s something that immediately hit their developers’ list and I emailed them and they started working on some stuff.

Tor Vulnerability Researchers: All The Tor Project wants is to be given a heads-up, so they can spin the vulnerability to the media in a way that preserves the public’s trust. As a Tor Project spokesman told the Guardian regarding Volynkin/McCord’s pulled presentation:

Organisers from the Tor Project said they were working with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon, which is sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security, to release information on the problems identified by the researchers.

“We did not ask Black Hat or CERT to cancel the talk. We did (and still do) have questions for the presenter and for CERT about some aspects of the research, but we had no idea the talk would be pulled before the announcement was made,” said Tor Project president Roger Dingledine.

“We never received slides or any description of what would be presented in the talk itself beyond what was available on the Black Hat webpage. Researchers who have told us about bugs in the past have found us pretty helpful in fixing issues, and generally positive to work with.”

Gee, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, Tor is “generally positive” to work with. Just do the right thing already! Think of all those crying babies in Iran who don’t have, like, warrants. You can read more about Roger Dingledine, Tor’s president, here.

In the video interview I’ve embedded above, Andrew Case goes beyond the call of duty to plug The Tor Project’s ability to fix the vulnerability he discovered how to exploit:

“The first thing they [Tor/TAILs developers] do– as we talked about before, if you can pull the plug on the machine or just get memory wiped somehow, then there’s no evidence of what you did. So the first thing they did is like they implemented, it’s called K-exec, I’m not sure what it stands for, but what it lets you do is  move it [the data? a.nolen]  to another kernel, you know, another Linux kernel while you’re already in Linux without rebooting the machine.

So what they do at that point, when you tell it to shutdown, instead of only shutting it down and hoping that RAM clears itself, it boots into this minimal K-exec kernel, then goes back and wipes all the memory for you, that you were using. You know, overwrites it multiple times. So at that point, you know, memory is really gone, fairly instantly, as soon as you’re done using the system as opposed to hoping that the hardware is going to do that for you.

That was the first thing. And I think two weeks ago there was another TAILs release and that’s actually in there. And the second one was … I’m not sure it’s done yet, their project page was confusing… what they want want to do is whether using a CD or a USB stick, is as soon as you pull the USB stick out or hit the eject button on the CD, it boots into a separate, it uses a UDEV rule to see the device activities happening, and from there they go back and wipe all the memory again, sort of without waiting for the machine to cycle down– so if the door’s getting kicked in you just pull the USB drive out and your machine starts erasing itself and there really is no evidence of what you did.”

It’s interesting how Andrew, who makes a living by undoing the work TAILs claims to do, can go on to plug the Tor Project’s ability to undermine his own work in turn. To put this in perspective, imagine a narc glowing over Los Zetas’ ability to cover their distribution networks. The drug world can get ‘hectic’, but those Zetas deal in places where there’s no other way to become a billionaire… There’s something insincere in your Tor promotion, Andrew. Sometimes I feel like everybody’s on the same team.

On the face of it, Digital Forensics’ decision to throw away the competitive edge may appear to be a poor business decision. However, things become a little more clear when you consider who Andrew Case’s boss is: Daryl Pfeif, CEO of Digital Forensics Solutions LLC.

“Daryl Pfeif is drawn to emerging and useful technology like a moth to the flame.”

I lifted that cheeky little avatar from the ‘Board of Directors‘ page of the Digital Forensic Research Workshop or ‘DFRWS’ [no idea where the 'S' comes from- a.nolen]. This is her full blurb from the DFRWS website:

The DFRWS was started by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Defensive Information Warfare Branch. Daryl is the skirt on the board, which also includes MITRE’s Eoghan Casey  who “supports forensic R&D at the DoD’s Cyber Crime Center (DC3/DCCI)” and Wietse Venema, who writes forensic analysis software for IBM.

MITRE is a *grotesque* US government research institute/think tank, which spearheads the ‘Insider Threat Initiative‘, through which government employees are encouraged to rat on any co-worker who “expresses unhappiness with U.S. foreign policy” or shows sympathy for the “underdog“.

IBM has written a lot of social network analysis software, which a.nolen reader E. Oop alerted me to. [Thank you, E. Oop!] The jewel in IBM’s ‘Facebook’ crown is Analyst’s Notebook, which you can read about in this article comparing IBM’s product with that of their competitor, Sentinel Visualizer. Sentinel Visualizer is partly funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. The beauty of market forces + government money!

So those are Ms. Pfeif’s, er, bedfellows… suddenly it becomes clear to me why Andrew Case was so eager to give up his firm’s competitive advantage. Unfortunately, in real life the good guys don’t always win, and Digital Forensic Solutions’ website hasn’t been updated since 2012.

P.S. Wouldn’t it be ‘sooo NSA’ if the US gov could watch every file unscrambled by folks using Volatility software… #tinfoil!

Last week three prominent members of the US military put their support behind a study from The Palm Center which suggests that the US Military should lift their ban on openly transgendered service members.

I was not surprised by this development: considering the military’s 2011 decision to support openly gay soldiers, supporting openly transgendered ones seems like the logical next step.

What did surprise me was that these prominent military figures, which include a former Army acting surgeon general and a former chief of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, threw their weight behind a report that says 15,500 transgender members actively serve in the military, while 134,300 “Veteran retired Guard/Reserve” are transgendered. That means one in a hundred active US military personnel are transgendered.

Lt Col Jennifer Natalya Pritzker, of the billionaire Chicago family, ‘anonymously’ donated $1.35 million to the Palm Center to fund research on integrating the transgendered community into the US military, says Advocate.com.  Thank you, chicagophoenix.com for image.

15,500 active transgendered military personnel is a huge number; the estimate’s validity is bolstered by the fact that two distinguished military medical professionals– who ought to know about the populations they serve– authored the report in question.

These estimates come from UCLA Law Center’s Williams Institute, which also estimates that transgendered individuals are much more likely to serve in the military than the US population in general:

This is how the estimates’ creators, Gary J. Gates and Jody L. Herman, describe their findings:

By comparison, approximately 10.7% of adults in the US have served. This implies that transgender individuals are about twice as likely as adults in the US to have served their country in the armed forces. Transgender individuals assigned female at birth are nearly three times more likely than all adult women and those assigned male at birth are 1.6 times more likely than all adult men to serve.

The transgendered community’s devotion to the armed services exists despite persistent discrimination from the defense establishment: the military has banned openly transsexual people from serving. On top of that, I find it extraordinary that a persecuted minority is drawn to an organization which, at least for the past sixty years, has been used to force the will of a few people on less powerful countries around the globe.

This apparent anomaly begs the question: what is it about the US military that attracts so many transgendered individuals? Gary and Herman have provided statistical evidence that demands further research.

Are statistics for homosexual people in the military also so striking? Yes, they are. Gary Gates, the same researcher as before,  wrote a paper in 2004 for the Urban Institute, here are some select quotes:

Estimates suggest that more than 36,000 gay men and lesbians are serving in active duty, representing 2.5 percent of active duty personnel. When the guard and reserve are included,nearly 65,000 men and women in uniform are likely gay or lesbian, accounting for 2.8 percent of military personnel.

In particular, military service rates for coupled lesbians far exceed rates for other women in every military era of the later 20th century. Nearly one in 10 coupled lesbians age 63–67 report that they served in Korea, compared with less than one in 100 of other women. Even in the most recent service period from 1990 to 2000, service rates among coupled lesbians age 18–27 are more than three times higher than rates among other women

Nearly one million gay and lesbian Americans are veterans.

The District of Columbia leads all states with a rate of 10.2 gay or lesbian veterans per one thousand adults, more than double the national average.

Despite a variety of rules designed to keep gay men and lesbians out of military service, census data make clear that they are actively serving in the armed forces, in guard and reserve units, and have served in the military throughout the later part of the 20th century.

Again, homosexuals’ draw to the military– despite the organization’s historically discriminatory stance — is something that is difficult for me to understand. Are homosexuals drawn to the military for the same reasons as  transgendered service members?

Many of you know that I’m interested in ‘spooky’ things, so my next question… Is the LGBT community also overrepresented in the intelligence community? Seeing as a lot of spook talent is derived from the military, my hunch is that they are.  What’s tricky about this question is that it’s very hard to count spooks given the secretive nature of their work– you never know if you’re getting a representative sample of the intelligence community. (Unless you’re somebody like DNI James Clapper, but even he may not know about all his contractors!:) )

The best most people can do– probably the best most professional intelligence historians can do– is look to history for individuals who are now known agents and were also part of the LGBT community.

The most famous homosexual intelligence professionals  are Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, who were Soviet double agents and half of ‘The Cambridge Five’, of who only four are known conclusively. Burgess and Blunt were known homosexuals at a time it was illegal to be so; yet these two men also held sensitive positions in the UK government. (Between the known four spies, they infiltrated MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, the War Ministry and Blunt  even became an advisor to the Royal Family!). I don’t want to get hung up on their traitorous actions. What I do want to point out is that even back in the 1940s homosexuals were represented amongst the UK intelligence community’s ‘best and brightest’. Both the British and the Soviets recognized something exceptional about Burgess and Blunt.

The Soviets chose to recruit and cultivate these two highly-placed, homosexual spies  over a period of thirty years. That’s a huge investment which the Russians wouldn’t have made unless the pair showed exceptional intelligence talent. There were plenty of prominent Brits with socialist sympathies; there were plenty of well-placed Brits in the Communist Party who the Soviets could have recruited (See Secrets of the Service, by Anthony Glees); but it was a group of disproportionately gay agents who were the ‘jewel in the Soviets’ crown’– agents who were  recruited despite the obvious vulnerabilities their sexuality presented at the time.

History provides far more examples of LGBT agents than just Burgess and Blunt. Gabriel Pascal, the Hollywood movie-man who put British spy Roald Dahl in touch with FDR was homosexual; Julia Child’s husband Paul Cushing Child, who was in charge of USIA propaganda in Germany after WWII was likely bisexual; FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who left such an indelible mark on US intelligence worldwide, was likely bisexual (and is rumored to have dressed as a woman for  sex parties); Hoover’s partner both at the FBI and domestically, Clyde Anderson Tolson was also likely gay; Joan Cassidy, the famous US Navy intelligence office was homosexual; Whittaker Chambers was homosexual. These eight people are just the intel pros I can think of off the top of my head– most of them were heavy-hitters in the intelligence community. Considering that homosexuality was frowned upon amongst the general public, there are probably many more examples.

What about less well-placed spooks? Ironically, the turmoil caused by the gradual discovery of the Cambridge Five sheds light on just how many homosexual agents have contributed to the intelligence community.The ‘Lavender Scare’ of the 1950s and 60s specifically targeted homosexuals and sought to remove them from sensitive positions in the government. In the words of Tracey Ballard, an intelligence agent who came out in the 1980s:

Hundreds of gay men and women were purged from government agencies in the ’50s and ’60s. But Ballard says that charge — that gays were a blackmail risk — was always false.

“If you do research within the community over the decades, you’ll find that it really wasn’t an issue,” she says. “LGBT people were not blackmailed in any type, any way or form. That was their way of ensuring that we were not employed.”

Trudy Ring, Advocate.com reporter, wrote this in a review of a documentary about the ‘Lavender Scare‘:

Cassidy was one of thousands who either resigned or were fired because of the order, which she says initiated a “witch hunt.”

From the side of the 50s-60s persecutors, a Mr. Clevenger gives this congressional testimony on April 24th, 1950:

It is an established fact that Russia makes a practice of keeping a list of sex perverts in enemy countries and the core of Hitler’s espionage was based on the intimidation of these unfortunate people.

Despite this fact however, the Under Secretary of State recently testified that 91 sex perverts had been located and fired from the Department of State. For this the Department must be commended. But have they gone far enough? Newspaper accounts quote Senate testimony indicating there are 400 more in the State Department and 4,000 in Government…

Here we find that the Commerce Department has not located any homosexuals in their organization. Are we to believe that in the face of the testimony of the District of Columbia police that 75 percent of the 4,000 perverts in the District of Columbia are employed by the Government, that the Department of Commerce has none?

[In The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev detail Soviet penetration of the State Department; the department which Soviets codenamed 'Surrogate'. -a.nolen]

It seems experts agree that prior to 1950s, homosexuals were well represented in the US government and at the intel-sensitive State Department in particular.* This speaks well toward their representation in the intelligence community.

What about today? Any investigation into the LGBT contribution to intelligence is hard because, of course, current agents cannot identify them selves as such. Therefore, the best anybody (besides James Clapper!) can do is make an educated guess about who works with intelligence, and amongst that subset look at who identifies as LGBT or is likely part of the community.

Here are some prominent LGBT intel candidates: Peter Thiel (Palantir co-investor with CIA’s In-Q-Tel) is gay;  high-profile Tor promoter Jacob Appelbaum is homosexual/bisexual; FBI asset/Advocate.com contributor ‘Laurelai‘ and former analyst Chelsea Manning are transgendered;  intel-affliated media baron Nick Denton is homosexual; Snowden clean-up crew Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald are homosexual; the CIA’s porn king Hugh Hefner is likely bisexual; Anderson Cooper was/is a gay CIA agent. Those are nine high-profile LGBT people who are *probably* serving their country this very minute.

I have no way of knowing whether that list is a representative sample of high-profile intelligence professionals, but the fact that even I could come up with nine candidates in the time I took to type the preceding paragraph suggests that the LGBT community has an active roll in today’s intelligence ‘sphere’. I don’t think an active roll should be surprising, given exceptional LGBT participation in the military.

But what about the spook rank-and-file? Are homosexuals persecuted at government agencies today? According to Michael Barber, the CIA’s LGBT Community Outreach and Liaison program manager:

More than 200 CIA employees are members of the agency’s LGBT resource group today. The spy agency is one of the founding partners of Outserve, an organization that represents gay active military personnel, including those with the CIA.

Barber says there were always gay men and women doing important jobs at the agency, but until recently few were comfortable being out.

“Part of the reason we’re doing outreach is to change that perception in the community,” he says. “That this is no longer an issue for holding security clearance, that we want the best and the brightest regardless of your sexual orientation.”

Given intel attitudes before ‘The Cambridge Five’ and the attitude of the CIA (at least) today, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that excluding gays from intelligence work during the 50s and 60s was a deviation from the norm.

Check out this recent press release from James Clapper’s office (Director of National Intelligence), announcing an Advocate.com article about a transgendered CIA employee’s ‘transition’.

I’m not saying that every great intelligence professional is or was gay, nor even that homosexuals are overrepresented in the intelligence community as a whole. (It may be true, but don’t have access to that type of data!) However, having read a fair amount about the history of the Western world’s modern intelligence services, it strikes me how many prominent intelligence pros– people who are in the public eye and must therefore be exceptionally reliable– were and are homosexual, bisexual or transgendered. The prevalence of homosexuality amongst talented, prominent and celebrated intelligence professionals deserves academic study.

Now that the US military has taken steps to shake off the nearly global prejudice against LGBT people, I challenge the security-cleared research community to investigate just what role this exceptional minority has played in shaping the US military, and organizations like the CIA, NSA and FBI, into what they have become today.

Here are some questions to get the pros started:

1) Was homosexuality really a blackmail risk? If it was, why were so many LGBT agents employed by intelligence agencies prior to 1950? What was special about the 50s and 60s that changed intelligence leaderships’ perspective so abnormally?

2) What is it about the military lifestyle that appeals to the LGBT community despite active persecution?

3) Are LGBT professionals statistically overrepresented in high-trust intelligence positions?

—

* The D.C.’s total population in 1950 was 814,000, if at least 4000 LGBT individuals were employed by the government in D.C.’s ten square miles alone; and if Gates’ estimate of 3.5% LGBT across the population holds; and if the government accounted for 29% of D.C. employment back in the 1950s too, then the LGBT community was probably over-represented in government prior to the 50s and 60s. (4000 ‘caught’ LGBT individuals who were employed by the government makes them alone 1.7% of total government employees in D.C.) I doubt as many as one in two LGBT individuals were counted by the press or police; the 4000 figure probably represents a more vocal/outgoing segment of the LGBT population.

It seems I’ll never be short of reasons to dislike FDR’s ‘Office of Strategic Services’, the forerunner to our beloved CIA. Today I’m going to tell the sordid tale of how and why OSS/BSC heavy-weight Ernest Cuneo attacked Gen. George S. Patton in 1943.

Cuneo, a New York lawyer who represented radio personalities, used his client and BSC pet-journalist Drew Pearson to spread a story about Patton: that Patton had cruelly slapped a shell-shocked soldier during one of his hospital visits. In the original story Cuneo said that because of the attack, Patton would no longer be used in the European war theater. This is how Michael S. Sweeney explains the incident in his book Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press:

Pearson publicly defended what he had published and broadcast about Welles and Hull, but privately he fretted about some of this audience abandoning him. He conferred with Ernest Cuneo, his radio lawyer, who served the government as a liaison among British intelligence, the FBI and the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Cuneo said a big, exclusive story would make people forget the president’s criticism. And since his government job gave him access to military intelligence, he suggested Pearson broadcast a Patton story he had heard.79

Pearson apparently had no doubts about the story’s authenticity. He discussed the details with the War Department which declined to issue a denial. 80 Pearson’s radio network took the story to the Office of Censorship. On the afternoon of November 14^th, 1943, WMAL’s Neel sent Pearson’s script to the censors’ Broadcasting Division. The sixth and seventh pages included the following item:

Algiers– General George Patton, nicknamed “Blood and Guts,” will not be used in any European war theatre anymore. He was a bit too bloody for the morale of the Army. Inspecting an American hospital in Sicily, General Patton noticed several soldiers listed as “fatigue” patients. Fatigue means a cas of nerves or shell-shock. Patton ordered one man to stand up. The soldier, out of his head, told the General to duck down or the shells would hit him. Instead, Patton struck the soldier, knocking him down. The commanding doctor rushed in, told Patton that in the field Patton was in command of his troops, but in the hospital he, the doctor was in command of this patients. He ordered General Patton not to interfere. General Patton started to draw a gun, but was disarmed. He will not be used in important combat anymore.81

Sweeney, the author writing above, says Pearson’s story can’t be corroborated and is almost entirely false. Neither Pearson nor the US government appear to have taken any action against Ernest Cuneo. (It’s worth noting that the CIA is pleased with Sweeney’s depiction of US censorship efforts during WWII, because his book “focuses on the success of the program“.)

Sweeney suggests that Pearson’s story resulted in Patton being given less control over the European front, ultimately leaving more of Eastern Europe under Soviet control. Never the less, Patton continued to prove himself to be an excellent commander and by the end of the war he had immense prestige and popular appeal– a dangerous place to be under the FDR administration!

Why would a man like Cuneo attack Patton, especially in the middle of a war?

Ernest Cuneo with Margaret Watson.

Ernest Cuneo was a trusted member for FDR’s “palace guard”, perhaps more honestly named ‘traitorous spy ring’. General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, made Cuneo a liaison between the OSS, British Security Coordination (BSC), the FBI, the United States Department of State (‘Surrogate’ to the Rooskies!!), and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Prior to his spook appointment, Cuneo was a New York City lawyer/political wheeler-dealer and ‘fixer’ for the Roosevelt Administration.

General George S. Patton was the political opposite of Ernest Cuneo. Patton made a career out of the US Army: he served in the Pancho Villa Expedition, WWI and finally WWII. Patton distrusted the Soviets, Cuneo’s close-working allies. As early as 1943, one year after the OSS was officially formed, pro-Soviet OSS operatives like Cuneo were working out how to dispose of prominent Americans who didn’t support their agenda.

Gen. George Patton

What frightened Cuneo about Patton’s views? Consider that at the end of WWII, Patton suggested the USA should protect Europe by continuing to fight the Soviets. As you can imagine, this view was an anathema to the good OSS’ers who’d “drank the milk of FDR,” as Bill Colby’s boy Carl describes them. Shortly after airing his opinion, Patton died under mysterious circumstances.

It’s incredible to me that Cuneo could get away with smearing a general like Patton during WWII, especially under Washington’s pernicious ‘self-censorship’ regime. However, Cuneo’s actions are even more creepy when you compare them to what Soviet agents were trying to do in the US at the same time. There was little difference between FDR/BSC operations and Soviet operations against the American press, except maybe that FDR/BSC operations were more successful.

To flesh out that point, I’m going to describe a Soviet operation; an operation carried out and disclosed to the FBI by USSR agent Elizabeth Bentley. I’m also going to describe how Cuneo took over a huge swath of the American press on behalf of the OSS/BSC and then finally on behalf of the CIA. By the end of this you may feel that, from the perspective of the American people, there’s little difference between Moscow and Washington.

Soviet and OSS strategies were very similar with respect to the American media: they both wanted to control as much of it as possible so that they could broadcast their own messages, messages which were similar for the most part. To put Cuneo’s OSS propaganda in context, let’s look at what Elizabeth Bentley was doing for the Soviets.

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

Elizabeth Bentley was a Soviet spy working in the 1930s- early ’40s. She was managed or ‘run’ by her lover Jacob ‘Golos’ (real name ‘Gold’). Neither of the pair were very good spooks because they were sloppy about security procedures. However, Elizabeth was given at least one interesting mission from my perspective: Gold told her to infiltrate the McClure publishing concern to find out if its editor (and owner) had ‘fascist’ sympathies– which really means Elizabeth was to find out if he could be useful to the Soviets. Kathryn S. Olmsted says this in Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley:

Unlike [Whittaker] Chambers, Elizabeth succeeded in rationalizing and accepting the Stalinist purges and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Timmy’s [Jacob Gold's] argument that the Soviets remained anti-fascist at heart seemed persuasive, especially after Elizabeth received her next assignment.

Timmy directed her to try again to spy on New York fascists. He wanted her to infiltrate the staff of a right-wing newspaper publisher, Richard Waldo of the McClure syndicate, to determine if he was a fascist agent. Elizabeth obediently took a job as Waldo’s secretary, but she reported to her disappointed lover that she found no evidence that her boss had fascist connections.

This mission appears to have happened sometime between August 1939 and November 1943, when Waldo died. It strikes me that what the Soviets couldn’t achieve by manipulating Waldo, their sympathizers ultimately achieved through the resources of allies at the OSS, namely Ernest Cuneo, who bought the McClure syndicate in 1952 after Waldo’s widow has sold it to James L. Lenahan. Lenahan had struggled to meet financial demands associated with the syndicate’s stock. According to a 1952 ‘News of Yore’ article by Erwin Knoll:

Control of the syndicate passed to the new owners with the pur­chase of a 1,000-share block of capital stock for $47,250 by Mr. Cuneo at an auction Thursday, Sept. 4. Mr. Cuneo outbid James L. Lenahan, former president and editor of the syndicate, and Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, attor­neys for the estate of the late Adelaide P. Waldo.

The attorneys had held the block of shares as security for a debt, and had themselves offered them for sale at auction.

Whatever financial pressure Lenahan was under, it was being ‘overseen’ by Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, the infamous Wall Street law firm. Samuel Untermeyer, the firm’s namesake, was a Woodrow Wilson supporter and active in carving up Austro-Hungarian resources after WWI. Untermeyer was a Zionist like his contemporary Herman Bernstein, and also like Bernstein, he dabbled in espionage:

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Untermyer acted as counsel to the German and Austro-Hungarian embassies. He also assisted an agent of the German government who wished to covertly purchase newspapers to influence public opinion.[93] After America’s entry into the war, Untermyer had to temporarily suspend his sympathies with the Central Powers. After the war, however, he became counsel for an American syndicate that had acquired a one third share of the confiscated Habsburg Estates.[94] Following the resolution of a dispute between the syndicate and Archduke Frederick of Austria, Untermyer represented the Habsburg heir, who was seeking restitution of the other two-thirds of the estates.[95] He also represented eighteen of the heirs of the late Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who claimed ownership of oil fields in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).[96]

So I’m sure there were no conflicts of interest when Mr. Untermeyer’s firm took up the Waldo account!

Lenahan’s financial distress coincides with a notable period for the McClure syndicate: the later war years through 1952, when comic strips were used to promote Washington’s domestic and international agenda. Lenahan’s McClure syndicate had a special focus on distributing comic strips such as ‘Superman’, in which ‘the Man of Steel’ (who wasn’t Stalin) did fictional battle with Washington’s WWII enemies like Hitler and Emperor Hirohito.

The comic-book propaganda didn’t end inside the US border. In 1946 ‘Superman’ did battle with American domestic political opposition the Ku Klux Klan. All this government collaboration didn’t make Lenahan enough money to get out from under the debts arranged through Guggenheimer & Untermeyer, which ended up costing Lenahan the company. Shades of Disney’s ‘The Golden Touch’?

Cuneo bought McClure in 1952, after having made an initial investment in the syndicate one year earlier with his partner John F.C. Bryce. However, Cuneo’s interest in the media went back to his OSS days.

Cuneo’s OSS mission was propaganda-centered: he would manipulate a swathe of the American media, much like his boss/co-conspirator William Stephenson who used his NYC connections to pervert reporting at the Herald Tribune and other broadsheets. While working for the OSS Cuneo fed friendly journalists BRITISH propaganda. ‘Friendly journalists’ include the following: Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, Robert Ingersoll, Whitelaw Reid, Dorothy Thompson, Edmond Taylor; and very likely include Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and William Shirer. Cuneo worked alongside newspaperman (and Roald Dahl mentor) Charles Marsh, Eleanor Patterson (Washington Times Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune owner), A. H. Sulzberger (owner of the NYT), George Baker (owner of the New York Post), and Ogden Reid (owner of the Herald Tribune). Only Hearst publications declined to join the FDR/BSC propaganda campaign, according to Jennet Conant in The Irregulars. That would explain Orson Wells’ 1941 movie ‘Citizen Kane’!

Rosebud! I’ve just realized why I’m such a miserable old codger– forgive me, Franklin!

By 1952 the OSS had become the CIA and the war was over, but the intelligence services never decolonized American media. After Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce (another old OSS agent and James Bond inspiration) purchased the McClure syndicate, Bryce was made president.

According to plans announced just before E&P went to press, John Wheeler, chairman of the board of the four affiliated Bell concerns, will serve in a similar capacity at McClure. John F. C. Bryce, who with Mr. Cuneo pur­chased a substantial interest in the group in March, 1951, will be president of the new acquisition. He holds the same title in Con­solidated News Features and Associated Newspapers. Joseph B. Agnelli, executive vice-president and general manager of the four companies, will be executive vice-president of McClure.

(Joseph B. Agnelli may actually be Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat heir. I couldn’t find *anything* on ‘Joseph B. Agnelli’, but Gianni was in NYC at about the right time to be involved in the McClure purchase– his only son was born in NYC in 1953.)

The McClure syndicate wasn’t Cuneo’s only purchase. He was on something of a newspaper-buying spree in the early 1950s: Cuneo also purchased NANA (North American Newspaper Alliance). NANA was famous for having sent communist sympathizer (and future KGB agent!) Ernest Hemingway to cover the Spanish Civil War, in which he also fought alongside the Communists. Hemingway would later become a rather lack-luster OSS agent, even by their standards.*

By the mid-1950s Cuneo and John F. C. Bryce had control of four newspaper networks: McClure, NANA, Associated Newspapers (now DMG Media, publishers of UK’s Daily Mail) and Consolidated News Features. Cuneo made sure other OSS buddies had sweet jobs in his new empire– he made BSC agent and ‘James Bond’ creator Ian Flemming NANA’s European Vice President. All this spookage has naturally lead more reflective observers like Rolling Stone and Playboy contributor Jules Siegel to question if Cuneo’s NANA was a simple CIA front.

I hope I’ve shown that what happened to Gen Patton was not an isolated instance of ‘shadow government’ overstepping its bounds and interfering in the intellectual life of a nation. What happened to General Patton is a symptom of a much larger infection; I believe that what Elizabeth Bentley tried to do was no worse than what Cuneo or any of his pet-journalists did. Of course, the dark specter hanging over all of this is Patton’s sudden heart failure on Dec 21^st 1945. (What is it with spooks and heart failure?!)

I’m not an expert on the death of General Patton, however, it appears that some evidence has come to light suggesting that the General was assassinated after his initial recovery from a car accident in Germany. If you’re interested in the details, I recommend reading this article by Robert K. Wilcox. Given the vicious nature of Soviet sympathizers close to the White House– consider the case of Walt Disney and Leonid Andreyev– I can easily believe that Eisenhower worked with OSS/NKVD contacts to assassinate Patton. It certainly wouldn’t have phased the Commander in Chief!

“George, the only limit to our realization of tomorrow is your doubts today.”

—

*Hemingway’s KGB work was outed by the Venona decrypts, a selection of which were made public in the mid-1990s. Some CIA-aligned historians have a hard time accepting that Hemingway would do such a thing and bend over backwards to convince themselves that Hemingway’s heart wasn’t with the KGB by pointing to Hemingway’s uselessness to the Russians. Hemingway was so useless that the KGB soon dropped him. These historians’ rosy-lensed view of Hemingway’s KGB work ignores the fact that Hemingway was all but useless to the OSS too. Hemingway apologists may find themselves in a similar dilemma to the battered wife who insists “He loves me”!

I started to think about ‘power worship’ a couple of years ago, after having read a few essays by George Orwell on the subject. Orwell thought that an unhealthy subservience to power was infecting British cultural and political life. ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ was no longer the fundamental Western myth, instead something ugly and fawning had taken its place… the fairytale of the supreme leader.

The fairytale of the supreme leader teaches children to identify with following one leader who is ‘good’– for modern readers, think Harry Potter, He-Man etc. The story doesn’t change much when it’s repackaged for adults, except there’s more carnality thrown into the mix: consider the pantry-erotica of Nigella Lawson; the submissive longings of Fifty Shades of Grey’s Ana; or James Bond’s slavishness to the organization of his master ‘M’. Whether child or adult, the reader is encouraged to believe validation of one’s own worth comes from being accepted by a powerful master.

That’s the story. In reality, of course, both Nigella and Ana get older, less attractive and they lose whatever prestige being owned gave them. James Bond outlives his usefulness and is denied a pension because he was never officially on Her Majesty’s books, was he? If you think I’m joking, keep reading…

This post isn’t about abusive husbands or lovers, it’s about how bad organizations use people. I’m going to take my favorite group, ‘the intelligence community’, as an example because their ethical problems are aggravated by the fact that their leadership is not really held accountable to anyone. The finance community could serve as an equally good example, however.

How is an institution abusive toward a person?

Any abuser will try to convince their target that the target ‘needs’ them to be happy, that the abuser provides some special validation to the victim. In reality, the victim’s healthy needs are not being met and that’s a painful problem for them. Instead of dealing with the source of the problem– the abuser and the unhealthy need– the victim tries to deal with their pain in other ways, not all of them helpful. Consider the propensity for military drone operators to self-destruct, for example: US version and UK version.

Institutional abuse won’t be something dramatic like bodily harm: it might be working employees in a way that makes having a healthy family life impossible; or making the ‘clearance’ process such a black box that it scares employees out of political engagement; or exploiting existing mental illness. In return, the employee is told that they’re special, unique, a ‘cut above’ the rest and part of a ‘secret team’.

This type of positive reinforcement is particularly effective against people with low self-esteem, or the character weaknesses which used to be described as ‘narcissism’. (‘Narcissism’ is exceptionally prevalent in the military community, which is the community most spooks are drawn from.) Perhaps worst of all, these abusive practices can trick weak-minded people into doing things that run against their own conscience; things that poison the soul and may also trap the individual later. Ex-intelligence agents don’t exist. Welcome to human resources in the spy business!

A critical reader may look at what I’ve written and say: “That’s just a.nolen’s opinion.” It is my opinion, but I encourage you to read the opinions of a few intelligence pros who were brave enough to be candid about their profession. Consider this anecdote about Klop Ustinov, a valuable war-time spy for the British, which is taken from Peter Wright’s bestseller Spycatcher:

(Peter Wright worked in MI5 for most of his life and his father was Engineer in Chief for the Marconi Company, so intelligence was a family business- a.nolen.)

Klop Ustinov was German by descent, but he had strong connections in the Russian diplomatic community and was a frequent visitor to the Embassy… Ustinov was recruited by MI5, and began to obtain high-grade intelligence from zu Putlitz about the true state of German rearmament. It was priceless intelligence, possibly the most important human-source intelligence Britain received in the prewar period. After meeting zu Putlitz, Ustinov and he used to dine with Vansittart and Churchill, then in the wilderness, to brief them on the intelligence they had gained. Zu Putlitz became something of a second son to the urbane English diplomat. Even after the outbreak of war Ustinov continued meeing zu Putlitz, by now working in Holland as an air attaché. Finally in 1940 zu Putlitz learned that the Gestapo were closing in and he decided to defect. Once more Ustinov traveled into Holland and, at great personal risk, led zu Putlitz to safety.

I [Peter Wright] took a taxi over to Ustinov’s flat in Kensington, expecting to meet a hero of the secret world living in honorable retirement. In fact, Ustinov and his wife were sitting in a dingy flat surrounded by piles of ancient, leather-bound books. He was making ends meet by selling off his fast-diminishing library…

“I do these things, Peter, and they leave me here. My wife and I… penniless.”

“But what about your pension?” I asked.

“Pension? I have no pension,” he flashed back bitterly. “When you work for them you never think about the future, about old age. You do it for love. And when it comes time to die, they abandon you.”

Wright wrapped up the incident this way: “But I learned a lesson I never forgot: that MI5 expects its officers to remain loyal unto the grave, without necessarily offering loyalty in return.”

Peter Wright’s disappointment with ‘the intelligence community’ doesn’t end with MI5:

The profession of intelligence is a solitary one. There is camaraderie, of course, but in the end you are alone with your secrets. You live and work at a feverish pitch of excitement, dependent always on the help of your colleagues. But you always move on, whether to a new branch or department, or to a new operation. And when you move on, you inherit new secrets which subtly divorce you from those you have worked with before. Contacts, especially with the outside world, are casual, since the largest part of yourself cannot be shared. For this reason, intelligence services are great users of people.

I share Peter Wright’s opinion that to persist in the intelligence business, you need to be comfortable using and being used. Emotionally healthy people aren’t comfortable with all this using, which brings me back to ‘narcissism’.

Mental health pros no longer consider ‘narcissism’ a mental illness; the symptoms that defined it appear to have been absorbed into the definitions of other conditions. I think one could make a strong case that ‘narcissism’ was always as much about values and choices as it was about illness, but from the point of view of society, narcissism’s cause isn’t as important as identifying narcissistic characteristics. The Mayo clinic provides a list of what these characteristics were, which includes things like “fantasizing about power” and “taking advantage of others”. Other researchers reported that ‘narcissists’ had a propensity towards pathological lying. Bearing these ‘symptoms’ in mind, consider another professional spook’s opinion– that of Philippe de Vosjoli, James Angleton’s working ally and French intelligence agent. Tom Mangold reports this conversation with de Vosjoli in Cold Warrior:

It is late, and the little Frenchman climbs into his Renault Five in the old quarter of Geneva. “Listen, I’ll tell you something. In the world of intelligence you have a lot of sick people. They cannot tell the truth. Now I’m talking to you, but what do I know about you? You may be a spy yourself, you may be working for the KGB or MI6. In this business you trust no one. You know, I stayed in that job too long. Twelve years is too long.”

De Vosjoli came to the conclusion that many other spooks were pathological liars with hidden agendas who couldn’t be trusted: “sick” people. Could that ‘sickness’ be something like the condition which used to be described as ‘narcissism’? Consider this study of narcissism in the military by  J.A. Bourgeois, M.J. Hall, R.M. Crosby and K.G. Drexler of the Air Force Medical Center (SGHAE) at Wright-Patterson Air Force base:

Various studies examining the prevalence of personality disorders in civilian inpatient and outpatient populations have consistently found narcissistic personality disorder to be one of the least common. In striking contrast to this, a recently published study showed narcissistic personality features to be among the most common personality features in a military outpatient clinic population. This paper examines several possible explanations for this finding. This surprisingly high relative incidence of narcissistic personality features may be related to a self-selection bias on the part of persons choosing a military career. Narcissistic personality traits may confer adaptive advantage in certain military professional roles. Kohut’s theory of specific transference requirements in individuals with narcissistic character structure serves as a useful explanatory model for these findings.

What is Kohut’s theory of specific transference requirements? In a nutshell:

The narcissistic adult, according to Kohut’s concepts, vacillates between an irrational overestimation of the self and irrational feelings of inferiority, and relies on others to regulate his self esteem and give him a sense of value.

If Kohut’s theory is correct, then it must be very comforting for a narcissistic person to know that the best person to “give him a sense of value” is the next guy up the food chain… Of course, Bourgeois et alia don’t discuss the preponderance of military narcissists in terms of an intentional recruiting and control strategy.

Finally, I’m going to share the observations of one friend who had far more experience dealing with the intelligence community than I have had. They explained the CIA’s institutional culture to me in this way:

“Imagine that it’s 1940 and you’re a well-connected rich kid who hears that the president is starting up a secret society which is going to do exciting things to win the war. That type of opportunity appeals to people who are 1) patriotic and/or 2) want approval from the powerful and/or 3) want in on government-sponsored organized crime.”

“Once the war was over, many of the patriotic ones dropped out. The organization was left with a large group of people whose motivations were not noble. Now imagine that organization persisting over generations, each generation self-selecting for more and more recruits who think like them; for recruits who are motivated by 2) and 3). That’s what the CIA is now.”

Generations of self-selected, damaged people are how we ended up with institutions that think drag-net spying on their fellow citizens is ‘okay’ or even ‘a necessary evil’. Only generations of self-selected, damaged people could be so sheltered and brain-washed as to not understand the mortal danger in our current situation.

I find it easy to write about General Patton, Walt Disney and Leonid Andreyev because their fates make the danger of unaccountable government crystal clear. I tend to overlook the fact that organizations like the CIA, NSA, etc. are just as poisonous to their rank-and-file as they are to my country’s intellectual health. When ‘ex-intelligence agent’ Quinn Norton wrote about the intelligence community existing to preserve itself, she left out an important fact: the intelligence community doesn’t preserve itself, it preserves a small group of people ‘on floor seven’ who decide how to implement decisions which, frankly, are probably made by the people who get them appointed. Now isn’t James Bond sexy?

A lady of exploitable insecurities.

A few days ago I read an article in Haaretz about young French girls being brainwashed into 1) joining jihad in Syria or 2) working for IS/ISIS/’Islamic State’. (Branding nightmare!) According to a French politician, the brainwashers have specific reasons for targeting young, insecure women:

French senator Nathalie Goulet is leading an inquiry into the recruiting networks, and she defends the decision to treat even young girls as terrorists.

“When people return, how can you be sure that they are detoxified? And they have to be detoxified,” Goulet says. “It’s a violent word, I know. … If you’re looking at girls, you’re right to, because they are a target population, fragile in their ability to be drawn in, then very strong once they’re in the system.”

Why are girls so strong once “they’re in the system”?

This role for girls reflects the desire of jihadists in Syria to attract not just fighters but also families, says Louis Caprioli, a former official with France’s anti-terrorist services.

“The propaganda put in place is to form a union with the jihadists, to have children and to raise future fighters,” he says.

And…

“As soon as they manage to snare a girl, they do everything they can to keep her,” Foad [Foad El-Bahty, brother of a female 'jihadi'] says. “Girls aren’t there for combat, just for marriage and children. A reproduction machine.”

Two people have been charged in Nora’s case, including the young mother who sheltered her in Paris, according to a legal official and the family’s lawyer, Guy Guenoun. The travel agency has been questioned but not charged, Guenoun says.

“It is not at random that these girls are leaving. They are being guided. She was being commanded by remote control,” he says. “And now she has made a trip to the pit of hell.”

“The pit of hell” is Syria, a country which used to be one of the more successful Middle Eastern states before the US started funding Muslim fundamentalists there, fundamentalists who are now recruiting Western misfits through Facebook– that ‘social media’ company with close working ties to the American intelligence community. (Readers may also want to refresh their memory about the *likely* US-sponsored jihad al-nikah movement.)

What struck me about these jihadi girls is how similar their targeting and recruitment is to what was reported to have happened to Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Curtis B. Dall, wrote a book about his time with the family titled F.D.R. My Exploited Father-In-Law. In this book Dall described how a group of bankers and socialists befriended and manipulated Eleanor in order to control Franklin; and how once Eleanor had been recruited, she was ‘strong in the system’.

Continuing with my theme of ‘exploitation’, today I’m going to write about the similarities between these ‘jihadinas’ and Eleanor. I’ll start by letting Dall speak for himself about his in-laws:

I will devote several chapters in this book to FDR, a gentleman whom I became very fond of as my then father-in-law. This was chiefly before the time when politics again entered the scene and gradually became an overpowering force…

In many respects, FDR was clearly the highly publicized political “Lead Horse.” But he was not the “Driver” of the political conveyance, the man who held the reins and cracked the whip. He might be suitably described as the long-range “gun,” the ammunition for which was duly provided by “others”… by close advisers, including his wife, and by some Council on Foreign Relations leaders.

In the first era, I knew Franklin Roosevelt in the successive roles of acquaintance, friend, father-in-law, Governor, and then President– an exploited one. In the second era, he was President of the United States and soon became a leading figure in world political affairs, heavily influenced and guided by his advisers.

TIME magazine was originally owned by Clare Boothe Luce’s husband and was outed as a CIA asset by Rolling Stone’s Carl Bernstein. Snicker.

In his book, Dall makes careful observations about Eleanor Roosevelt’s role exploiting her own husband, an invalid who depended on her more than most men depend on their wives. Dall also points out that Eleanor’s manipulation of her husband wasn’t her own idea.  Eleanor’s political ideas were mostly formed by her friends: Louis Howe and his peer Col. E. Mandel House; Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his wife; Nancy Cook; Marian Dickerson. This is how Dall describes Eleanor’s malleability:

It is timely to mention Louis Howe’s influence upon Eleanor Roosevelt, as I view it.

Long before 1920, Louis had become a “fixture” in FDR’s family. I couldn’t quite figure it out, and I was not much interested in political maneuvering. Clearly, that was none of my business…

I was aware that he [Louis Howe] had a daily conference with FDR and that Louis spent even more time during the evening going over political and ideological matters with Mama [Eleanor Roosevelt]! Often, through her, people “got” to FDR on certain matters.

Night after night, after the dinner hour, the lengthy conversations of Mama and Louis would take place in the third floor front room. Usually, many newspaper editorials and clippings from various newspapers on political matters were under discussion or study.  Sometimes, I joined in their confab for a few minutes, but my casual and friendly “drop-in” visits appeared to be an intrusion upon Louis’ program, and so I would soon depart.

Eleanor’s indoctrination by Louis Howe was of the international socialist kind: the last time Dall remembers seeing Howe was after Dall stumbled in on a meeting between Howe and some Russian-looking visitors at the White House, a visit which Howe was trying to keep secret between himself and Eleanor.

What sort of issues were Eleanor and Franklin used over?

Years passed, during which it became obvious to me that Eleanor Roosevelt’s political ideology had steadily moved to the Left. In contrast, mine was leaning to the conservative side, moving to the Right.

The deceptive overtones of Pearl Harbor, the pro-Soviet peace terms at the close of World War II, the refusal of General Eisenhower to let General Patton conclude a proper military objective and take Berlin, Eisenhower’s cruel unheard of forced-repatriation program; the Berlin Corridor Arrangement, Harry Hopkins’ sending abroad to the Soviets our U.S. money plates, paper and ink, for them to rob and fleece us, the tragic matter of Governor Earle (not to stop World War II sooner, to be dealt with later)– all these things did not seem proper and were most disturbing to me!

If you want more information about what FDR cronies were planning for General Patton and his likely assassination, check out my post on Cuneo and General Patton. (In a week or two I’ll talk about forced repatriations and the Spiritualist movement, but that’s for later. ;) )

Prior to her political radicalization, Dall remembers Eleanor as being a kind homemaker and highly-involved mother, albeit a lady chafing under a lack of money and ‘higher purpose’. Eleanor wanted to belong to something bigger than herself; to teach the world how to be better, just as if the rest of humanity were children awaiting her instruction.

My point with this post is to show that ISIS doesn’t have a thing on Louis Howe and the Council on Foreign Relations when it comes to exploiting women who have low self-esteem and want to be part of ‘something bigger than themselves’. These users achieve their aims by identifying insecurities in their victims and exploiting those insecurities. ISIS goes after culturally displaced girls who are searching for a sense of identity. What were Eleanor Roosevelt’s soft-spots? According to Curtis Dall:

In Albany and elsewhere, Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle of influence was enlarging. The Gold Seal of the State of New York on letter paper for state correspondence by her husband was impressive! The oblique reactions thereto were not what could be described as inconsequential!! So, the misgivings of Eleanor Roosevelt during former years, the feeling that her Oyster Bay relatives had really “made it”, whereas her and her husband had not soon faded away into the background! Larger and greener pastures for the future came into view.

And…

Eleanor Roosevelt’s knowledge about “Southern” racial relations was very superficial. Her approach was chiefly a political one. It was a clever but regrettable vote-catching operation on her part, one which was loudly applauded, of course, by numerous far-flung communistic groups and left-wing newspapers.

And finally…

Outside the factor of being lucrative, I cannot comprehend why the objectives of the Internationalist-Socialist-Communist program attracted the strong support of Eleanor Roosevelt. All in all, the results achieved by her appear to be self-serving and quite unmindful of her country’s best interests.

When I think back to the women I’ve had as teachers or bosses, many (not all, but many!) have had similar characteristics to Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t think Eleanor’s needs and weaknesses are unusual amongst our sex. From my experience, women are funny creatures: we’re often an unstable mix of wanting to please while also wanting to control by indirection. ‘Taking the moral high ground’ is a great way to control by indirection. Female nature makes us very susceptible to being ‘recruited’ by ‘authority figures’ to proselytize for their agenda, because being ‘right’ and on the winning team makes us feel good about ourselves (power-worship). Women love to be crusaders, whether for socially acceptable things like equality or feminism; or not-so-acceptable things, like ‘Islamic State’.

I suspect, readers, that many women’s attraction to proselytizing is rooted in the same desires that Nigella Lawson cashed in on with her ‘kept woman’ sales pitch. Obviously, Eleanor Roosevelt could never be valuable in the same way Nigella was valuable to Saatchi when she was younger, but Eleanor could still be a valuable ‘intellectual’ or ‘spiritual’ possession to her network of ‘friends’. There’s no ‘vert like a convert.

It’s uncomfortable for modern women, and particularly feminists, to square up to the exploitable aspects of our nature because it’s tantamount to admitting weakness. Never the less, history and current events show very clearly that these weaknesses do exist. Perhaps the position of true strength is to recognize our weaknesses and be wary of  political movements that claim to ‘help’ us– whether those movements be ‘Islamic State’ jihad or “the milk of FDR“.

I believe that the best defense against “great users of people” is to know thyself.

A story that one-time Vogue editor and ‘black ops’ aficionado Clare Boothe Luce would love.

It’s been a fun day at a.nolen HQ: I’ve just found a 1974 article in which David Obst brags about being a literary agent for John Marks, author of The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate': The CIA and Mind Control. In Obst’s own words:

On the front burner right now I’ve also got books by Sam Dash, the majority Watergate counsel; the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who are writing about their parents; and then, of course, there’s the superb book on the CIA written by Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The Cult of Intelligence.

This is huge, readers, because ‘The Obst Connection’ places John Marks’ and his co-author Victor Marchetti’s motivation in question. Marchetti, a one-time CIA employee, had worked his way up from the notorious Soviet Division to Dick Helms’ special assistant, but had become ‘disillusioned’ and decided to write a ‘defamatory’ book about the agency, The Rope Dancer, which was published in 1971.

In the 1970s, Obst was the go-to literary agent for authors who’d been given ‘leaked’ information. In reality, many of these ‘leaks’ are better described as ‘placements’ of infomation by CIA big-wig William Colby. Obst had a special relationship with Colby– he would ‘place’ leaks from Colby at the appropriate media venue. These leaks were designed to distract from Colby’s criminality at the expense of the CIA in general AND give ammunition to Obst’s KGB patrons. You can read all about that in my posts Managed Opposition; Did William Colby Help the KGB?; and  Why is Lloyd Shearer a Family Jewel?

In the meantime, I’ll remind you what Seymour Hersh, another Obst client, said about his buddy David:

“Whether it be My Lai, Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, or any of the other tumultuous events of that era, Obst seems to be in the middle of it.”

In this post I’m going to explain why I suspect that John Marks and Victor Marchetti are ‘managed opposition’ to intelligence community excesses, just like Obst’s other clients Prof. Alfred McCoy (Politics of Heroin) and Seymour Hersh.  The ‘red flags’ are: 1) Obst doesn’t talk about Victor Marchetti or John Marks in his 1998 autobiography; 2) Marks/Marchetti’s book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was praised by Colby in his 1978 autobiography; 3) the CIA’s incredibly cooperative attitude towards Marks’ MK ULTRA work; and 4) Marks’ book on MK ULTRA obscured politically sensitive CIA operations *inside the United States* while showcasing relatively minor ones.

 Obst and his Autobiography

David Obst is a man who likes to talk. The article which I quoted from above appeared in The Spokesman-Review as part of Pamela Swift’s “Keeping up… With Youth” column. Below, you’ll see the charming picture of David in his tennis whites which graced the center of Swift’s gossip page. (You look a little preppy for the commune, David. Perhaps your youth wasn’t “Too Good to be Forgotten”?)

The Institute for Policy Studies groupie who likes words and money… but not in that order!

David Obst also likes ‘the good life’ and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. Despite this weakness, he never mentions John Marks nor Victor Marchetti in his  autobiography, Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s. Obst never mentions his famous client-duo even though he makes time for Leni Riefenstahl and Stan Lee. (Obst does say he lived with a ‘John Marks’ for a while, but this is a misspelling of ‘John Marx’– a mistake Obst’s editor missed 2:1!)

Why the silence, David? I know you were quiet about Derek and Lloyd Shearer because of Derek’s unsavory KGB connections, but why the reticence about Marks and Marchetti? Clearly, you were happy to talk about your relationship to them in 1974, but by 1998 your attitude had changed dramatically…

I don’t think that Obst’s caginess comes from Mark’s and Marchetti’s Colby connection specifically– many of Obst’s big-name clients have CIA/Colby connections and that doesn’t stop Obst bragging about them. Obst knows something particularly unsavory about Marks and Marchetti that makes Obst worried about associating himself with them. (Perhaps Marchetti’s later political work?) I haven’t found the reason for David’s silence, but I’m sure I’ll discover why in time  somewhere David’s already told us why.

Glowing Reviews from Bill Colby

David Obst’s reasons for silence aside, we know from his 1974 interview that he did represent Marks and Marchetti. So what were John Marks and well-connected CIA operator Victor Marchetti doing hanging around David Obst and the KGB-affiliated Shearer clan in 1974? Nothing that didn’t have the blessing of CIA director William Colby.

How were Marchetti and Marks useful to Colby? Their book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974), deflected negative attention away from Colby at a pivotal time: the first months of Colby’s tenure as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). When Cult of Intelligence came out, Colby’s one-time patron and former DCI Richard  Helms had just finished burning evidence of his own wrongdoing related to MK ULTRA. The next man in line, James Schlesinger– the guy who’d made the ‘Family Jewels’ list of every CIA activity with “flap potential”– had only held the DCI position a year before getting the hell out.  ‘DCI’ Colby probably felt  like he’d been handed a hot potato, so he did what he’d always done: protected himself with a media offensive that blamed “the CIA in general” for unethical (and illegal) behavior.

This is how Wikipedia– a popular quick-refence– summarizes The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence:

Victor Marchetti used the expression “cult of intelligence” to denounce what he viewed as a counterproductive mindset and culture of secrecy, elitism, amorality and lawlessness within and surrounding the Central Intelligence Agency in the service of American imperialism.

Colby liked Marks’/Marchetti’s book so well that he aped its conclusions about the CIA in his 1978 autobiography Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA:

Considering the importance and all-consuming nature of the work I was doing at the Agency; considering the missionary zeal [Eleanor and ISIS! -a.nolen], sense of elitism and marvelous camaraderie among my colleagues there; considering above all that I was strictly forbidden to talk about what I was doing with anyone outside the Agency and thus couldn’t share my concerns or just sit around shooting the breeze in shop talk with anyone in the outside world– considering all of this, one can see how easy it would have been for me to drop out of that world and immerse myself exclusively in the cloak-and-dagger life. And some of my colleagues at the Agency did just that. Socially as well as professionally they cliqued together, forming a sealed fraternity. They ate together at their own special favorite restaurants [this is a particular dig at Angleton- a.nolen]; they partied almost only among themselves; their families drifted to each other, so their defenses did not always have to be up. In this way they increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of the world. Their own dedicated double life became the proper norm, and they looked down on the life of the rest of the citizenry. And out of this grew what was later named– and condemned– as the “cult” of intelligence, an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held it to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution, which applied to everything and everyone else. As I saw this develop, I remembered a talk I had with Donovan several years before. I had asked him how you get young paratroopers to behave like choir boys on Saturday night after spending six days learning to be aggressive, devious and heroic. He answered that he didn’t know, but nevertheless it just had to be done. It would be many years before I would have to develop a better answer than Donovan’s.

That I didn’t fall into this “cultist” attitude– at least not to the degree I might have– I have to attribute solely to Barbara.

Always on the outside, Bill, but you still managed to claw your way to the top! I think the quote above shows readers very clearly why Colby put Helms’ old assistant Marchetti and Marks onto their first book project: C.Y.A. for Colby… at the expense of the rest of the CIA. By the way, Barbara is Colby’s first wife, who he ditched after his career at the CIA ended and he didn’t need her anymore…

The CIA Finds Dirt on Itself!

John Marks’ book with Marchetti wasn’t his only claim to fame. It’s John Marks’ post-1974 work, or rather his lawyers’ work, that got the CIA to release the MKULTRA files a few years after the Rockefeller Commission delivered rudimentary evidence of the mind-control program in the wake of Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leak. The story goes that Marks’ lawyers worked for several months to get the CIA to release 50 documents under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request; the fabled “seven boxes” of MKULTRA documentation would follow a few years later, when the CIA suddenly announced they’d found more evidence and decided to tell Marks about it!

Those seven boxes– almost 20,000 documents that each needed ‘sanitization’ and clearance for their release– were probably in preparation during that one year when George Herbert Walker Bush ruled Langley; the seven boxes were then released during the first months of DCI Stansfield Turner’s tenure. Turner worked hard to stop criticism of the CIA’s role in Vietnam and William Colby. (While Colby left the CIA in 1976, he was still a powerful figure in organized crime through the 1980s.)

Directors Colby/Bush/Turner all went out of their way to deliver 20,000 ‘incriminating’ documents to one lone little man, John Marks, and however many lawyers Marks could afford at Fried, Frank, Shriver, Harris and Kampelman. CIA cooperation like that *never* happens for independent researchers.

If readers have ever filed a FOIA request with the CIA, you’ll know what an arduous, and arbitrary, process it is. The CIA has special staff who deal with the public with regard to these requests: they have a list of files which are pre-approved for release and are (fairly) quickly mailed out on CDs to whoever asks for them. MKULTRA files are one of these ‘quick release’ files. However, if you request files on something that hasn’t been pre-approved for public consumption, the CIA will find some excuse to refuse to release information. The agency prefers not to tell you directly that the info won’t be released– that would be tantamount to admission that the CIA had a working relationship with an organization/the person in question. Instead, they’ll make impossible demands. Once, when I made an FOIA request about an academic who was *probably* a CIA asset in the 1950s, I was telephoned by the agency and told that they knew whose file I was requesting and that they’d process my request if I could find this academic’s social security number. This academic had been an American citizen for a few years during the 1950s.

“Where would you go to find a Social Security number under these circumstances?” I asked the (very polite) representative.

“It’s probably somewhere in the National Archives,” was his answer!

(That’s a joke in research circles, because the US National Archives is such a mess. The last time I visited there were notices in my particular reading room asking the public to look out for several boxes of classified documents that went missing somewhere on campus…)

My point is, readers, that  Colby wanted to release 50 MKULTRA documents to Marks shortly after the 1974 scandals and DCIs Bush and Turner were happy to continue to use Colby’s tactics through 1977.

Marks’ 1980 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate mentions William Colby three times: once in reference to the ex-Director’s bringing a neat-o dart gun to his congressional testimony; once in reference to a saccharine quote Colby made about the touchy-feely business of graduating working relations between handlers and spook-assets; and finally when Marks states that Colby said the Cuban economic sabotage programs ended around the time Colby’s own CIA directorship started. Ya don’t say, Bill.

**It’s incredible that John Marks doesn’t have more to say about the CIA’s number one narcotics dealer in a book about drugs and mind control.**

On the other hand, Marks wastes no time saying bad things about Colby’s former patron who’d destroyed any MK ULTRA evidence against himself, Richard Helms:

He [Richard Helms] would become the most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA, nurturing and promoting it throughout his steady climb to the top position in the Agency. [p.13]

Gottlieb would preside over arcane fields from handwriting analysis to stress creation, and he would rise through the Agency along with his bureaucratic patron, Richard Helms. [p.17]

Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White and many others would undertake a far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. [p. 20]

(To be fair, the MKULTRA program ran from the early 1950s-1973, under the directorship of:  Allen W. Dulles (Marks mentions him 15 times in Manchurian Candidate), John A. McCone (mentioned 5 times), William F. Raborn (never mentioned), and Richard M. Helms (mentioned 17 times). Marks claims most projects had ended by 1963, three years before Helms became DCI. )

You don’t have to get far into Search for the Manchurian Candidate to know who Marks wants to paint as the bad guys.

If the first 50 MKULTRA files were released because Colby wanted them to be released, why did Colby want them released? Probably because Colby, like Helms before him, knew something was going to come out and reasoned it would be better to control what came out rather than leave that to somebody else. What’s the safest way to spin MKULTRA? “Yeah, we did it. But we didn’t find anything.”

I think John Marks says it best:

The Kennedy [Senator Edward Kennedy, Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 1975] hearings added little to the general state of knowledge on the CIA’s behavior-control programs. CIA officials, both past and present, took the position that basically nothing of substance was learned during the 25-odd years of research, the bulk of which had ended in 1963, and they were not challenged. That proposition is, on its face, ridiculous, but neither Senator Kennedy nor any other investigator has yet to put any real pressure on the Agency to reveal the content of the research– what was actually learned– as opposed to the experimental means of carrying it out. In this book, I have tried to get at some of the substantive questions, but I have had access to neither the scientific records, which Gottlieb [Sidney Gottlieb] and Helms [Richard Helms] destroyed, nor the principal people involved.

Marks is being somewhat honest here: a careful reading of Search for the Manchurian Candidate shows that Marks holds the same opinion as the CIA– nothing of substance was discovered. In fact, Marks indirectly flatters the agency quite often. A reader could easily come away from Manchurian Candidate with the impression that the CIA is filled with brilliant, if sometimes misguided, patriots who have to make tough choices. I encourage readers to look to the end of chapters 10 “The Gittinger Assessment System”; 9 “Human Ecology”; 7 “Mushrooms to Counterculture”; 6 “Them Unwitting: The Safehouses”; and chapter 4 “LSD” for evidence of this flattery.

Historians interested in James Angleton’s career should know that at the end of chapter 11 “Hypnosis”, Marks goes out of his way to smear Angleton, with speculative allegations against the Counterintelligence division’s use of hypnosis, should hypnosis have been proved effective. It’s almost like Colby wrote that chapter himself…

Marks did such a good job planting the meme ‘nothing was discovered’, that you can find it popping up everywhere MK ULTRA is discussed. For example, I just found this quote from one-time American Psychiatric Association president Philip G. Zimbardo’s and Susan M. Andersen’s paper ‘Resisting Social Influence’, which was published in the Cultic Studies Journal, 1984, Volume 1, Number 2, pages 196-219:

John Marks’ expose of the CIA’s secret mind control program (see The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate) suggests that no foolproof way of “brainwashing” another person has ever been found. After a decade of intensive, costly research into the technology of such control, the CIA’s MKULTRA program was deemed a failure. Covert operations could claim little more than being capable of turning unsuspecting victims into “vegetables.”

‘Resisting Social Influence’ is a fascinating read and I will talk about it more in later posts. Clearly, Dr. Zimbardo and Dr. Andersen have read Marks’ book on MK ULTRA; but they haven’t read the MK ULTRA files. Marks did a *great job* of discouraging people from actually reading the MK ULTRA material.

Tweaking American “Human Ecology”

Discouraging people from actually reading these files is important, because the MK ULTRA documents do contain some pretty explosive stuff– the stuff John Marks is careful not to talk about. 

What does the MK ULTRA material really contain? A long time ago I put in an FOIA request for the MK ULTRA cd and was sent a copy by the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator. There are nearly 20,000 documents on a collection of three discs. I’m going to give you a rough run-down of what’s discussed. A great number of those documents are so heavily redacted that it’s difficult to give them context or even understand what’s being said.

– 54% of the documents relate to ‘ARTICHOKE’ and ‘BLUEBIRD’ material: the use of hypnosis, drugs, alcohol, interrogation techniques, psychiatric methods to get people to ‘confess'; or ‘brainwash’ people; or to make soldiers more effective in battle. There are disconnected tidbits about various investigations into said activities, including domestic investigations in places like Minneapolis MN and Detroit MI; scraps of evidence garnered from Soviet science and unidentified drugs in syringes/vials that had fallen into CIA hands. Also, correspondence with unnamed medical doctors and other civilian researches about the possibility of using the techniques listed above; selected instances of monies paid to these doctors/researchers but not exhaustive accounting records. There are also data on how ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD agents would be indoctrinated while working on the projects. (Of this 54%, only 4% of documents relate to the use of LSD and Swiss pharmacutical company Sandoz!)

– 8 % are summaries of subprojects to MKUltra. Some of these are quite interesting, especially the “human ecology” projects. Marks ignores or downplays the more interesting of these projects, which involved research into how different groups of people in the United States can be manipulated politically– like inner-city minorities and non-English speakers.

–4 % of documents relate to Frank Olson’s death after the CIA *allegedly* tested out mind-altering drugs on him.

–8 % of documents relate to drug addiction and useful aspects to the CIA, including the use of Codine. (This is very vague information, most of it is correspondence back and forth trying to set up an interviews with Dr. Harris Isbell at the NIMH.)

–13 % of the documents relate to behavior research in humans and animals; how drugs may affect behavior; ability of animals to manipulate electricity; Pavlovian conditioning; communication techniques of animals.

–8 % cover the use of electricity to interfere with sleep, anesthesia, ‘electronarcotics’ research, dream research, living tissue response to electricity, heart function, psychological responses to electrodermal response, electrochemical responses in living tissue, nervous system research, electric photography, research into how people respond to sound and language (including often-repeated words), light and eye research (for incapacitating), stress electroencephalographic results and biological power sources.

– 5% are “SI and H” experiments, which are also interesting and mostly unmentioned by Marks. These experiments were not conducted on a large scale: they looked at how well agents could lie or remember details of a specific situation under different conditions, for example.

I’m going to wrap this up by pointing out that there are *very concerning* projects documented in the MK ULTRA releases, particularly relating to “human ecology” inside the United States. Marks doesn’t talk about these projects, but they could throw light upon what’s happened in Ferguson, Missouri, so I’m going to talk about them in upcoming posts. I don’t understand why details of these “human ecology” projects were released.

It may be that CIA officials thought that these subprojects  wouldn’t mean much to a 1970s audience, that they would just ‘pad out’ the release and make it look more comprehensive,  but I find that hard to believe given the race riots of the 1960s.

There are other projects too, such as the CIA ‘data mining’ election results with respect to “human ecology” in order to try to understand how to get people to vote a certain way. Frankly, as an American citizen, I find these types of projects a lot more dangerous than tests of LSD’s use as a truth syrum. Why would Colby/Bush/Turner release this information when they had Marks focus on the other stuff, anyway? I don’t have an answer… yet.

In the meantime, we can throw John Marks and Victor Marchetti onto the ever-growing pile of ‘whistle blowers’ who are really just tools which members of  the ‘intelligence community’ use to manipulate the public.

Muzafer Sherif

Today I’m going to pick up where John Marks left off in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. I’m going to talk about a subproject that John Marks didn’t explore thoroughly and spread misleading information about. This subproject looks at “Human Ecology” which is the CIA’s name for studying inter-group conflict or race relations.

In the late 1950s the CIA began to profile groups of 14-17 year old inner city and non-English speaking youths who were roaming the streets. They wanted to find out what these boys’ political push buttons were and they engaged the help of a well-connected social psychologist to ‘map’ the boys’ attitudes.

This profiling work was done under the auspices of MK ULTRA; it was given the financial designation of “Subproject 102″. The declassified MK ULTRA files give these documents reference number (MORI ID#) 17358, I’ve provided photographs of all subproject documentation on this page. (So you don’t have to take my word for their existence!)

“Inner city youths of the age 14-17″ will strike anyone who’s lived in a ‘depressed’ American urban neighborhood as a very interesting demographic to target, because this is the ‘riot demographic’. If you’re looking for a group of people who are easy to ignite, this is it. 14-17 year olds are the indiscriminate crime demographic: misguided kids who are bored, have bad attitudes and often embrace a culture of criminality. These are the kids who will go around trashing cars, breaking windows or attacking weak-looking people just because they can. They’re the kids who’ll suddenly decide to rush old folks, as we saw in Milwaukee last year– but this pattern is repeated all over the USA, all the time.

There is crime amongst other age groups too, but 20-somethings and older are less likely to engage in indiscriminate crime– they shoot other criminals over drug disputes and the like. (In fact, neighborhoods where drugs are sold are often safer because the dealers keep the hooligans in check in order to avoid police attention.)

For more examples of the “riot demographic” at work, consider the youths rioting in London; or the youths rioting in Paris; and the 1994 Los Angeles riots. The same pattern olds true for urban rioting during the 1960s.

The American race riots of the 1960s have a lot in common with riots that are happening across the Western world today–  the sequence of events is strikingly similar: a cop shoots a youth under strained circumstances; rioting ‘spontaneously’ starts and destroys the local economy; the neighborhood ends up being on lock-down for the next 40, 50, 60 years. It’s a great way of spreading the police state and inciting distrust between races. This distrust is politically useful for demagogues and FBI informants like Rev. Al Sharpton.

Of course, I’m not saying all riots are caused by 14-17 year old ‘inner city’ males, nor am I saying that once a riot starts only 14-17 year olds maintain the riot– plenty of older people get in on the action. I’m saying that it’s relatively easy to start these young lads rioting and the CIA was all over them in the early 1960s. (The CIA were also all over militarizing the police, which came out in Colby’s Family Jewels leak.)

So what does John Marks have to say about Subproject 102? A lot of misinformation. I’ll let Bill Colby’s pet writer speak in his own words:

In other instances, the Society [Human Ecology Society, CIA front] put money into projects whose covert application was so unlikely that only an expert could see the possibilities. Nonetheless, in 1958 the Society gave $5,570 to social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif of the University of Oklahoma for work on the behavior of teen-age boys in gangs. The Sherifs, both ignorant of the CIA connection,* studied the group structures and attitudes in the gangs and tried to devise ways to channel antisocial behavior into more constructive paths. Their results were filtered through clandestine minds at the Agency. “With gang warfare,” says an MKULTRA source, “you tried to get some defectors-in-place who would like to modify some of the group behavior and cool it. Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivationally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one.”

*[Footnote] According to Dr. Carolyn Sherif, who says she and her husband did not share the Cold War consensus and would never have knowingly taken CIA funds, Human Ecology executive director James Monroe lied directly about the source of the Society’s money, claiming it came from rich New York doctors and Texas millionaires who gave it for tax purposes. Monroe used this standard cover story with other grantees.

– From The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, Chpt 9 ‘Human Ecology’ page 159.

Marks’ explanation of Subproject 102 is almost entirely bunk, and I’ll explain why.

To begin with, the part that isn’t bunk: The MK ULTRA documents which were released to Marks did not include the names of Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif. All names associated with subproject 102 were blacked out. However, this sentence was included in a letter from the agency scout/consultant who brought the Sherifs to the attention of MK ULTRA directors at the CIA:

In my opinion Dr [BLACK OUT]‘s project is highly significant because of its concentration on group behavior in a natural setting with a very minimum of interference or artificiality. It may not be apparent from your correspondence with Dr [BLACK OUT] that his wife will be a very active participant also. Mrs [BLACKOUT] [BLACKOUT] in the near future. The two of them represent a most able team of field investigators.

MK ULTRA MORI ID #17358 file 21.

Either Marks worked out who this couple were from his knowledge of social psychology (!? Marks’ previous career was in the US State Department) or his ‘MKULTRA source’ told him the names of the pair.

Very little in the MK ULTRA documentation supports Marks’ source’s assertion that the goal of Sherif’s work was to help inner city youths “cool” it by identifying boys who might moderate group behavior (see emboldened text in the quote from Manchurian Candidate). At most, the Sherifs suggest that ‘channeling antisocial behavior’ is one way the data they’re collecting might be used. Psst, Marks! Your insincerity is showing! Marks describes MK ULTRA on page 20 of Manchurian Candidate as an “assault on the human mind”– is it likely that such an assault would include honest inner-city charity work, John?! Naturally, Marks’ “MKULTRA source” didn’t want to disclose their name.

The CIA recruited Sherif because of his research into group psychology; work which he conducted with WWII-era propagandist Carl Hovland. (The results of their collaborative work were finally published in 1961.) Prior to Hovland’s collaboration with Sherif, Hovland’s research involved analyzing how wartime audiences would respond to messages in propaganda movies such as Why We Fight. This is how one author on social-judgment-theory.wikispaces.com describes Hovland’s contribution to the war effort: “Like many other early communications theorists, he worked with the U.S. War Department during World War II to study the effectiveness of persuasive films and audience resistance to those films.”

Sherif’s 1950s/60s work focused on group attitudes and how to change group attitudes. He and Hovland are considered fathers of social judgement theory, which offers a framework for tailoring messages to groups so that the messages will have maximum impact. In 1959 Sherif and his wife were mapping inner-city boys’ prejudices and political attitudes so that CIA messages could achieve “maximum influence”.

This is how the same CIA talent scout describes Muzafer Sherif’s cunning:

Dr. [BLACK OUT] made an unusually good impression on community workers in [BLACK OUT][BLACKOUT], where he worked last year. More than any other investigator that I have seen in recent years, he was able to obtain the confidence of [BLACK OUT] minority groups in getting their full support of his research activities. He uses relatively naive but highly motivated observers who are given special training for this purpose. As a result his data are quite fresh and most revealing of things that are often hidden from the individual in more professional observer roles.

MK ULTRA MORI ID #17358 file 21.

I’ll now provide a series of quotes from the Sherifs’ research summary as it appears in the actual MK ULTRA documentation, you can judge for yourself what’s going on:

Operation Report to the [BLACK OUT][BLACK OUT][BLACK OUT]

Description of Research Work on Natural Groups 1958-1959 [BLACK OUT][BLACK OUT]

This report describes social-psychological research on natural groups in different socio-cultural  settings in different [BLACK OUT] cities during the period of October 1958- August 15th 1959 while the writer was [BLACK OUT].

…

…three kinds of data were collected:

(1) Data related to specific settings. (e.g. living conditions, family size and stability, income, education, mobility.)

(2) Data related to group structure (organization) and to group products. (e.g. shared practices, values or norms, reactions to deviation), based on the actual behaviors of individual members during the course of their interaction.

(3) Data related to self-attitudes, aspirations and goals of age-mates of group members living in areas representing the same and different settings.

The later aspect of the study was strategic in linking ecological data mentioned under (1) and group behavior mentioned under (2).

…

Natural groups formed in socio-cultural settings undergoing differing degrees of transition are most suitable for this purpose. This consideration determined that cities be chosen that were in the process of salient and accelerated transition and that areas within them be selected whose populations are themselves in varying stages of acculturation to dominant features of American life (e.g. [BLACK OUT] rapidly growing city.)

…

While the present project is mainly concerned with theoretical and methodological issues, namely integrating conceptual tools and methods of field and laboratory studies, it is assumed that substantial advances in these respects are bound to have implications for more realistic and effective handling of (a) problems of intergroup relations in actual settings and for (b) devising measures for channeling socially undesirable modes of behavior… into more constructive modes…

…

In all cases, data were collected by persons who were perceived by group members or respondents, as the case might be, as “one of us”.

…

1. The area of study was specified to the observer. His initial task was to identify a group in that area composed of no less than 7 and no more than 12 male members within the age range of 14-17 years.

(a) Procedure for identification of groups: Observers did not identify groups by questioning of members or local adults. Groups were identified by direct observation “at a distance” through repeated inspection of possible gathering points in the area (e.g. playground, recreation center, vacant lot, drugstore). The initial criterion for selecting a group for observation was simply observed frequency and recurrence of association at specified locations in the area. At no time during this stage did the observer directly converse or question group members.

(B) Establishing contact and rapport with the group: Once a group was identified on the basis of observed frequency of association, the observer set about to establish contact and a plausible pretext for his presence in the area… For example, one observer observed a group of boys associating frequently to play basketball. After thus identifying a group for study, he appeared on the scene with a new basketball, which soon attracted their attention. His pretext for being on the scene was that he needed the exercise to lose some weight.

2. The first focus of observation being status structure of the group… Status Rankings: On the basis of repeated observations of the group the observer was able to specify at least the top three and bottom positions in the group… independent rankings of school authorities provided such a check.

3. The second focus of observation was group products such as common practices, values or norms and sanctions. The criteria for such products were observed recurrences over a period of time of common terms, common modes of apparel, common procedures in activities, and specific reactions to deviations, sanctions, from such customary behaviors on the part of a member.

One finding concerning reaction to deviation, to be expanded in the reporting of the study, is of particular interest. In the lower socio-economic area in [BLACK OUT] the group observed had considerably greater importance in the lives of its members than other aspects of the social organization in the area… Consequently, the group member suspected (as one was) of “squealing” on the group was in trouble. On the other hand, the norms of the group in the somewhat higher socio-economic area [BLACK OUT] were less comprehensive in the activities covered and observed reactions to deviation were of a milder nature.

…

III. Questionnaire Data Self-Radius-Goals Schedule… A schedule was prepared for administration in high schools, designed to be easily read and completed. The items pertained to self-conceptions, aspirations and goals of adolescents. Topically the contents can be grouped according to the content of the socio-cultural data. Thus, there were items pertaining to residence and housing conditions, language use and cultural preferences, attitudes toward educational and occupational achievement, toward parents and authority figures, conceptions of financial achievement and deprivation, and finally friendship preferences as related to intergroup affinities and rejections…

For example, the median estimate of weekly income needed to be “really well off” varies from $82.60 in the low socio-economic level [BLACK OUT]-speaking area, to $332.14 in the upper level English-speaking area. Such data, representing relatively “free” estimates of respondents, are clearly significant psychologically…

I encourage readers to read the full report for themselves, which is available here: Subproject 102 . Am I saying that every riot since 1959 has been a CIA plot? No, I’m not. I’m saying that in 1959 an agency which likes to implement regime change through civic revolt was very interested in a group of boys who happen to fit the typical riot demographic. A few years after this 1959 study, the USA experienced a rash riots which followed similar patterns; we continue to experience these riots to this day. Globally since 1959 a number of regimes which the CIA didn’t like have been toppled after sudden civilian rioting, mostly in urban centers. I’m saying that in 1959 the CIA had prepared itself– done its social psychological mapping– to be involved in some of these riots.

How did Muzafer Sherif get into bed with the CIA? Muzafer was born in 1906 to a wealthy family in Odemis, Izmir, Turkey. His given name was Muzafer Serif Basoglu, but he changed it later to ‘Muzafer Sherif’ for reasons that are unclear to this writer. Muzafer studied at Harvard and Columbia University in the 1930s and was an outspoken critic of the Nazis, which lead to him being imprisoned for a short time in Turkey. The US State Department sprung him from jail in Turkey and then gave him a fellowship at Princeton University. In 1946 Muzafer became resident fellow in psychology at Yale University, home of Rockefeller-funded professor Carl Hovland.

Carl Hovland

Carl Hovland had been a psychology professor at Yale before taking a three-year leave of absence to work for the War Department during WWII. After the fighting was done, he returned to Yale where it’s likely that Muzafer came under his patronage. Carl Hovland was often retained as a consultant to various government and corporate institutions who wanted to devise policies that involved group psychology and manipulation, according to the National Academy of Sciences:

Hovland also served as an insightful and trusted consultant to numerous governmental and educational agencies, industrial organizations, and philanthropic foundations.

So, Mufazer was plugged into government work from the earliest days of his relationship with the State Department. This strongly suggests that his wife, Carolyn, is lying about their ignorance of the Human Ecology Society’s CIA funding. She had doubts enough to ask James Monroe about the source of the Society’s funding; but she and her husband didn’t seek the advice of her husband’s seasoned patron? If I was worried about who I might be working for, Carl Hovland would be the first person I’d bounce my concerns off of…

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but when Colby et alia wanted to leak the Sherif’s work to the public in 1977, they went to another State Department boy– John Marks– to do the dirty job of ‘spinning’ Agency race-profiling. Is John Marks now living a life on the lam, having outed some of the CIA’s most precious secrets? Is he running scared that some day a MONARCH baby will shoot him with a poisoned dart gun, or drive a stake through his heart? No, he’s not. Marks spent his career running a comfortable think-tank out of Washington D.C. called ‘Search for Common Ground’. (No longer searching for ‘Manchurian candidates’!) Perhaps you’d like to donate some money to Mark’s non-profit, or take advantage of one of their limited time offers?

John Marks handing out awards at his think-tank circa 2007.

I’m writing this as the latest reincarnation of the typical American inner-city riot hits critical point: Ferguson, Missouri rioters’ cause célèbre was the death of Micheal Brown, an 18-year old with a criminal past who was shot during an altercation with a police officer. His parents are appearing before the United Nations– Earth’s Alien Ambassadors– this week suggesting that their son’s death should be on the UN Committee on Torture’s agenda.

I don’t think that the UN is going to do anything to slow the militarization of police in the United States, nor anywhere else. However, I promise this will happen: black neighborhoods in Ferguson, Missouri will be destroyed; the police force will become more ‘diverse’ and much better armed; nutballs like the FBI’s ‘New Black Panther Party‘ will infect local politics with their hate and prevent rational civic discourse, ensuring the need for even more draconian policing… citizens everywhere will lose.

I hope I’ve given readers of anolen.com a better perspective on how the USA, and the rest of Europe, lost our way. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one thought: gasoline needs a match to start it burning. Here’s a picture of aggressive protestors outside an up-scale shopping mall near Ferguson, Missouri called ‘Frontenac’. This photo was taken on Oct 13th 2014. What do you think is going on? ‘Cause I think some of those protesters were probably protesting in the 1960s too. ;)

TODAY: More on MK ULTRA subprojects that John Marks didn’t want to talk about!

MK ULTRA Subproject 127 was never mentioned by John Marks in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, the book designed to present MK ULTRA material to the American public.

In subproject 127 CIA researchers analyzed fifty years of voting records for individuals in a low-literacy, USA-friendly, developing democracy. They were trying to figure out what would make people vote different ways over time.

I’m concerned about Project 127 because I don’t see any reason why the CIA should be worried about voter behavior in a friendly nation, especially when the goal of such a study is to distill general information about voter behavior over long periods which could be used to manipulate voters in the United States. Is the CIA in the business of manipulating allies’ democratic governments in the long-term? Are they in the business of manipulating American voters?

Subproject 127 was designed “to study the open voting records of [REDACTED] registered voters over a fifty year period.” [MORI #ID 17385, page 9] From the same document:

2. This study is an attempt to do a longitudinal study of the factors that affect the voting of people over a considerable period of time. The results of the study could contribute to [REDACTED]. In addition, the data represents a unique gold mine of information to study some of the fundamental behavioral characteristics of people.

Subproject 127 analyzed voters based on “ecological patterning” (you’ll remember that’s CIA for ‘race‘), “social standing” and affiliation to established parties, which ran from “conservative” to “Communist”. In order to vote in this friendly country, you had to be male, over thirty and own a house.

The study was focused on what it takes to get voters to change who they vote for; one advisor pushed for data on “individual turnover and population succession”. This means looking at how aging, migration and “activation of non-voters” changes the political landscape. They also wanted to look at how hot-button issues and political personalities can shift the scene.

I probably don’t have to tell readers this, but “population succession” issues have been at the heart of American politics for the last fifty years; these issues got going due to 1960s immigration reform.

Subproject 127 shows the CIA ‘gearing-up’ to meddle in another democracy. This meddling might bother me less if I didn’t know that the agency was interested in manipulating politics back home in the USA, as evidenced by their interest in inner city youth and projects like MH CHAOS. I am very suspicious of an unaccountable, clandestine government agency which concerns itself with multi-generational voter behavior.

Some CIA people at the time of the study were nervous about  Project 127 too. The MK ULTRA documentation contains a letter from Project 127′s mysterious lead researcher to the CIA directors in charge of funding:

I may note that we have not asked any other foundation to support this project. So far our experience with [REDACTED] foundations has been that they react unfavorably to research in the field of political sociology. [MORI ID# 17385, page 11]

While most of the CIA grant-givers showed “unqualified enthusiasm” about the operational possibilities of the “Voting” project, one correspondent was concerned that getting an American foundation to fund such a study would raise red flags inside the target nation:

My own reaction to the project is that it might possibly be considered a little inappropriate for an American foundation to participate in a study of voting in a friendly nation. If some of the results from the study turned out to be surprising and politically important, it is conceivable to me that a question might be raised concerning the support of the study by funds coming from outside the country.

There was also *something* unsavory about the way Agency researchers got access to the voter data in question: something happened to make this data available, and correspondents made it clear that such an opportunity might not present itself again. The circumstances suggest that the data was obtained unethically.

As always, I don’t expect readers to take my word about Project 127, and have provided photographs of the 20 documents in question here. The results of the study were not included in the MK ULTRA file, so we can’t be sure that the CIA found anything useful– but we know that such uncertainty was important to Colby’s damage control strategy. Neither can we be sure that the study was conducted exactly according to the design laid out here, however page 12 tells us that the CIA did shell out around $7,500.00  for the research in 1960, so we know it went ahead in some form. We also know that money was still being given to the project in 1962 [page 5].

Whatever the researchers found or didn’t find, we can be sure the CIA was very interested in this type of voting data and we should to ask ourselves: “Why?”

Why does the CIA have to know what motivates voters’ choices over 50 years? I think it’s entirely reasonable that spooks ‘war game’ out different political situations overseas that might affect American interests, but we don’t need the Agency to become a repository of ‘tricks’ to change voters’ choices over time. The CIA can’t handle that type of power.

Bearing the limitations of this clandestine organization in mind, projects with goals such as “contributing to the general field concerning voting behaviors” really scare me. Who was helping the CIA reach this goal?

All the names in Project 127 have been blacked out except that of MK ULTRA big-wig “Sid G.”, who is ‘Sidney Gottlieb’. Who might the CIA have gone to for ‘the latest’ in voter behavior research 1959/60? A book by Pippa Norris of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior states the following:

Part I: Theories of Social Cleavages and Voting Behavior

The seminal sociological studies of voting behavior developed during 1960s by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan emphasized that social identities formed the basic building blocks of party support in Western Europe.

Seymour Martin Lipset

My guess is that the CIA’s man was Seymour Martin Lipset. My evidence follows:

1) Seymour Martin Lipset was an anti-Stalinist leftist, a political persuasion which was very popular with the CIA after WWII. (Interested? Read Francis Stonor Saunders’ Cultural Cold War.)

Lipset was also a fervent supporter of the state of Israel, whose work “explored racism, prejudice and political extremism“, and who was “one of the first intellectuals to be called a neoconservative“. You can get a full list of his accolades from the Hoover Institution.

2) Seymour Martin Lipset enjoyed prestige across American academia, which is pretty typical for somebody who can make it rain Agency money:

He occupied prestigious academic positions at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, George Mason, the Hoover Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

He was the only person to be president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. (New York Times, Jan 4th 2007)

3) Seymour Martin Lipset had the right research style to be the CIA’s mystery researcher.

There is only one working reference which hasn’t been blacked out in the MK ULTRA release [p.16]: “The Lazarsfeld-type of panel, based on interviews, is a much better tool..”

Later in his career, Seymour Martin Lipset would go on to become president of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society in Vienna. Lipset embraced the same methodological ideologies that are extolled in the CIA documentation.

4) Seymour Martin Lipset ran with the CIA crowd.

A) In the 1940s Paul F. Lazarsfeld (the same guy who formulated the paneling method used by Lipset’s CIA ‘Voting’ project and whose Viennese admiration society eventually asked Lipset to be president) worked with Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal on “anti-Semitism in American Labor” for the Jewish Labor Committee.* Herbert Marcuse had been an OSS agent since 1942 and was a CIA agent at least until 1952. Paul Lazarsfeld, Lipset’s icon, ran with a spooky set.

Paul Lazarsfeld

Leo Lowenthal, Lazarsfeld’s co-worker, wrote a book with Seymour Martin Lipset one year after the CIA’s “Voting” project began, which was titled Culture and Social Character.  (See the bibliography below.) Lowenthal was a prominent member of the exiled Frankfurt School intellectuals along with CIA-agent Herbert Marcuse.

During WWII, Leo Lowenthal worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI), the same propagandists who employed Carl Hovland, who inspired MK ULTRA project 102, which focused on mapping the politics of inner-city youth (the ‘riot’ demographic). In fact, Paul Lazarsfeld and Carl Hovland are both considered fathers of communication research in the USA and their professional relationship was cemented through their mutual OWI work.

B) Seymour Martin Lipset got money from the same private political organizations as OSS/CIA-agent Marcuse, namely, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. (See the bibliography below.) According to Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile:

As Neumann recounted to Horkheimer:

“I have just come back from a two hour conference that Graeber and I had with Dr. David Rosenblum, chairman of the public relations committee of the Anti-Defamation League and of the American Jewish Committee. The outcome is briefly this: It is likely that we shall get a grant of $10,000 for the execution of the Anti-Semitism project if this sum is matched by an equal sum supplied by the institute… I am confident that we have a very big chance of getting the $10,000 and though your presence here might not be indispensible I feel, that in this situation, every step should be done to ensure a happy conclusion of our endeavors.”

‘Horkheimer’ relates to the preeminent Frankfurt School member Max Horkheimer, ‘Neumann’ is Franz Neumann, another Frankfurt School-er to join the OSS. Seymour Martin Lipset himself would later become a consultant to the American Jewish Committee.

Seymour Martin Lipset has all the right friends to be a covert CIA asset. Here’s a taster of some of the scholarship that resulted from Lipset’s *probable* 1960 work with the CIA. I’ve highlighted Lipset’s Anti-Defamation League work, Lipset’s work with Lowenthal and works by Lipset which have a similar flavor to research done by Herbert Marcuse and his team, such as Prophets of Deceit.

Partial S. M. Lipset Bibliography:

What I’ve hope I’ve shown today is that John Marks, and ultimately Bill Colby, wanted to steer the American public away from a project that has much more importance than goofy psychic studies or LSD as a  truth-serum. I have not answered the question: “Why did Colby want this information released, only to ignore it?”

I can, however, offer a speculative guess as to ‘why’. Both subproject 127, and the ‘riot demographic’ subproject 102 which I wrote about last week, involve academic researchers who travelled in similar spheres– specifically, friends of Carl Hovland, Paul Lazarsfeld– and who shared similar political ideas. (Muzafer Sherif was just as ‘anti-Nazi’ as any of the Frankfurters.)

It may be that Colby and friends included these subprojects as ‘sleepers’ to use against CIA patrons of the aforementioned academics should they ever attack Colby et alia in the future– much like Colby outed MH CHAOS and HT LINGUAL to attack James Angleton. (See Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold.) Since these subprojects haven’t been aired in over thirty years, my guess is that Colby and that group stayed cordial until the CIA director’s untimely death.

Next week… did the CIA really not find anything through MK Ultra research?

*Paul Lazarsfeld was instrumental in resettling the Frankfurt School intellectuals in the United States. Lazarsfeld’s ‘Radio Research Project’ at Princeton University and later Columbia employed Frankfurt academic Theodor Adorno.

Philip Zimbardo, courtesy of his think tank HeroicImagination.org, which studies street gangs, amongst other things.

I’ve written about the MK ULTRA programs a lot recently; they’re an easy subject to write about because they’re so theatrical and unlikely. Magic mushrooms creating the perfect soldier? Psychokinesis undermining the Evil Empire? It all sounds made for Hollywood…

… which should be a red flag. We know that the MK ULTRA release in 1977 opened only a fraction of the program up to public scrutiny. John Marks (therefore, Bill Colby) says that Richard Helms destroyed a good deal of the MK ULTRA evidence around 1973. We don’t really know much about what MK ULTRA, the ‘mind control’ program, was investigating. We don’t really know if the CIA found out anything useful or not.

The showmanship surrounding the MK ULTRA project was designed to dazzle with ridiculous projects and then dissuade further investigation with claims of fruitless research. The point of this post is to suggest that the CIA did ‘discover’ something about ‘mind control’; something social observers have been aware of since the time of Plato. Mind-control is not a mystery: it’s an everyday occurance through social pressure, education and the arts. The most effective techniques are the most commonplace, which brings me to a paper by Susan M. Andersen and Philip G. Zimbardo titled On Resisting Social Influence.

The thesis of this essay is that “mind control” exists not in exotic gimmicks, but rather in the most mundane aspects of human experience. If this is true, it implies that people can learn to resist untoward influences, which are defined here as influences in which intentions are hidden and the subtle constraints of individual behavior are profound. When information is systematically hidden, withheld, or distorted, people may end up making biased decisions, even though they believe that they are freely “choosing” to act. These contexts may thus involve “mind control.” Although resisting cleverly crafted social influences is not easy, it is argued here that it is possible to reduce susceptibility to unwanted interpersonal controls by increasing vigilance and by utilizing certain basic strategies of analysis.

What if all those MK ULTRA files that Helms burned were about shuffling the boards of media companies; or working with the Department of Education; or buying recording studios; or employing advertizing consultants? What if  MK ULTRA was about the CIA turning itself into the best-organized political lobby ever?

Zimbardo and Andersen’s paper was first published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1984, Volume 1, Number 2. Philip Zimbardo himself was one of the National Academy of Science’s personal sources for their biography of Carl Hovland (Zimbardo was a student of Hovland’s before taking a professorship at Stanford in 1968); Zimbardo was also president of the American Psycological Association, an organization which gets a lot of (bad) play in the MK ULTRA saga. (The APA is currently involved in an ongoing CIA-torture scandal.)

On Resisting Social Influence is an abridged version of a report Zimbardo and Andersen did for the Office of Naval Research, a US military/private industry collaborative organization . (The Office of Naval Research funded Zimbardo’s famous– and creepy– ‘Prison Experiment‘ in 1971, shortly after he got his first professorship. It seems Zimbardo was well connected with the military from day one.)

I’m not saying Philip Zimbardo is necessarily a CIA asset himself, but he learned and worked in their milieu, so I think it would be prudent to carefully consider Zimbardo’s observations on ‘mind control’:

Formidable quests to gain control over the human mind have often employed exotic technology. Exquisite torture devices, electroshock therapy, mind altering drugs, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation have all been used to get targeted persons to do the bidding of various agents and agencies of control. Indeed, these methods carry enough wallop to distort and sometimes destroy the mind’s normal functioning. But they are not adequate for the task of reliably directing behavior through specific scenarios as designated by would-be manipulators.

John Marks’ expose of the CIA’s secret mind control program (see The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”) suggests that no foolproof way of “brainwashing” another person has ever been found. After a decade of intensive, costly research into the technology of such control, the CIA’s MKULTRA program was deemed a failure. Covert operations could claim little more than being capable of turning unsuspecting victims into “vegetables.”

Effective mind control exists in most mundane aspects of human existence: the inner pressures to be bonded to other people, the power of group norms to influence behavior, the force of social rewards (such as smiles, praise, a gentle touch). We influence one another, intentionally or unintentionally, using the most basic principles of social psychology, motivation, and social learning. It is people in convincing social situations and not gadgets or gimmicks that control the minds of other people. The more worried we are about being seen as ignorant, uncultured, untalented or boring, and the more ambiguous the events are that are to be evaluated, the more likely we are to take on the beliefs of those around us in order to avoid being rejected by them.

What Zimbardo appears to be saying is that social pressures like ‘political correctness’ are a form of mind control. Could it be that the CIA found obscure strands of Mexican hallucenogenic mushrooms but missed age-old knowledge of crowd psychology? I think not.

I do think that Zimbardo is in an excellent position to give us some insight into what the destroyed MK ULTRA documents might have contained. In this post I’m going to summarize Zimbardo and Andresen’s paper and offer some suggestions– not proof, but suggestions– on how these manipulative practices might be used now.

Zimbardo’s paper discusses two “basic principles of social psychology”:

1) “Basic Training in Compliance”

Etiquette and protocol are powerful inhibitors of unconventional action. When people around us behave alike and as they are expected to, it becomes difficult for us to evaluate their actions critically or to deviate from what is expected of us in the situation… It is the wiser course of action, we are taught, to go with (or around) power, not to challenge it.

Those who occupy social roles that carry prestige and credibility in our eyes can work wonders. The most potent influences are eased around to us by our buddies or by reputable “experts,” rather than by those whom we think of as “enemies.” A neighbor tells us to stop by for a chat with some interesting people, our doctor prescribes a new antibiotic, a businessman offers us exciting financial prospects, brother says he’s impressed with a new pastor. Such testimonials encourage us to take the first step along most of the paths we’ve chosen for ourselves, good and bad, because such influences are basic to being engaged in social life.

To this day in every major American university with a Philosophy department you can find ‘experts’ touting ‘critical theory’, which is mostly just the revolutionary politics espoused by the CIA-affiliated Frankfurt School intellectuals. There’s very little consistent philosophy in ‘critical theory’– its confusion is even admitted by friendly biographer Martin Jay*– yet academics still take ‘critical theory’ seriously… I propose, readers, that academics adopt this view because ‘everybody else’ appears to.

For another example of Zimbardo’s observations in practice, consider Charlotte Iserbyt’s recollections about her time as a “change agent” for the U.S. Department of Education, where she was taught how to “con the community”.

2) “Saturation and Detachment”

Unlike our response to “overtly” persuasive communicators who may beseech us to buy the latest gourmet cookware, to jog daily, to elect particular politicians, or to give to certain charities, situations with “normal appearances” (see Goffman,Relations in Public) don’t seem to require skepticism, resistance, or even our conscious attention. We often move through them “on automatic” and are thus prone to being influenced without our slightest knowledge.

Perhaps we don’t want to be wholly critical and alert at all times, but mindlessness is often promoted as a way of encouraging passive acceptance at the expense of individual discretion. The hook is that when we are faced with complex problems we often yearn for simple answers and rules of thumb for how best to proceed. Immersing ourselves in the teachings of a powerful leader, in the say-so of the dominant partner in a relationship, or in the total ideology of any highly cohesive group can be comforting.

What if Dick Helms was burning reems of paper on the CIA’s work with the Ad Council, for example.

The ‘total ideology’ of the Ad Council makes a tattered flag.

Zimbardo’s and Andresen’s paper goes on to describe some of the ways Navy personnel (and the rest of us) can resist social influences. The antedotes may tell us something about the poison:

A) “Developing a Critical Eye”

To acquire the kind of sensitive skepticism needed to detect undesirable influences when they arise, people must learn to be vigilant to discontinuities between the ideals people espouse and their concrete actions…

The biggest lies are often hidden by a compelling context and are discovered later on the basis of discontinuities that in hindsight are obvious.

Discontinuities like “neoconservative” political sociologists who want to teach others about avoiding “racism, prejudice and political extremism”.

B) “Resisting Persuasion: Confidence, Clarity, and Persistence”

The best persuaders always appear to be just like us. They understand our problems, empathize with our predicament; in fact, they were there once themselves. They speak our language, share our needs, and know the inside jokes. When someone appears to share our concerns, he or she becomes a cohort, an ally, someone we can trust and give the benefit of the doubt. The tactic is powerful because attitude change, like all socialization, is most effective when it goes unnoticed.

This persuasive tactic is, I believe, the one George Orwell picked up on in his essays on power worship and writing for children: the fairytale of the supreme leader involves a number of ‘good’ sidekicks, one of which any given child can identify with. In this way the author ‘speaks the language’ of the reader, who then becomes more receptive to indoctrination. Are you a Hermione Granger; or a Cho Chang; or one of the Weasleys; or perhaps a member of the “Order”?

See anyone here you can identify with?

Another manipulative technique is forceful communication:

Research shows that powerful people express confidence and self-assurance across all channels of communication – through body language, through words, and paralinguistically. Regardless of someone’s “real” credibility, what we end up responding to is how competent, confident, honest, and stable he or she appears to be.

An example of this would be those intelligence professionals who shouted their confidence in Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”. They’re the experts, right?

Continuing in the WMD vein, confusion is a useful manipulative tool:

Mind control typically involves coming to accept a new reality… Elaborate but inadequate justifications for recommended actions can be very confusing. Once confused, we can easily be persuaded by false analogies, semantic distortion, and convenient rhetorical labels because we will tend not to question them and to think about them creatively, but to accept them at face value.

The final prong to this psychological attack is closely paired with confusion: belittling the victim’s confidence in their own powers of judgement.

Susceptibility to control becomes greater with increased self-consciousness. When people are induced to focus attention on themselves by being made to feel awkward, deviant, or silly, and to worry excessively about what others think, they can be led to resolve opinion disparities with others in the favor of the other person’s opinion.

Consider the chilling effect of the following slurs: ‘racist’, ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘homophobic’, ‘authoritarian’, etc. These slurs are used to divert attention away from what’s being said by ‘shaming’ the speaker.

C) Resisting Manipulation by Fear

Manipulating fear is the demagogue’s favorite tactic, consider Sen. Mary Landrieu’s or Rep. Charlie Rangel’s latest spewings.

Zimbardo’s take:

By making us feel fearful or anxious, the manipulator is in a position to ease our discomfort by providing reasonable explanations and soothing solutions. Much advertising is based on this principle. So are many social interactions.

Famous graphic designer Paul Rand’s advertisement for talk show host Drew Pearson’s program “in the presence of” Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, as broadcast by ABC. Pearson’s 1946 talk show attacked the Ku Klux Klan; just like Superman was doing at the same time. Rand, born Peretz Rosenbaum, was a favorite ad designer for IBM and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which organized Walt Disney’s South American tour during WWII.

D) Resisting Manipulation through Feelings of Guilt

Gnawing feelings of guilt can also provide a powerful impetus for personal change. Feelings of self-disgust, a desire to confess, to do penance, or perhaps even to experience suffering, are all potent persuaders in their own right. Simply being in the presence of those less fortunate can often be influential, particularly if we are somehow made to feel responsible for their plight. Professional beggars make it their business to make passersby feel guilty for being well dressed and well fed.

Observers like Norman G. Finkelstein have noticed how Jewish suffering during WWII has been used to push for policies of dubious moral nature. The use of the Holocaust to further Zionist causes is interesting, considering how close Zionism was to the hearts of some intelligence operatives in the 1960s, and perhaps even as far back as the 1920s.

What the MK ULTRA documents do tell us is that the CIA was very interested in how Chinese Communists maintained their power by manipulating China’s national character. (This fascinating study is contained under subproject 108, MORI ID# 17364). The Chinese are famous for using public displays of guilt– ‘struggle sessions‘– for ‘re-education’. Why was the CIA interested in control via manipulating a nation’s character?

E) Identify False Choices

Once aware that their prey is bagged, they emphasize the victim’s freedom of choice – after tactfully constraining the alternatives…

Skillful persuaders may also deny us our freedom in order to control our behavior with the help of the reactance principle. Studies have shown that when we perceive severe limitations on our behavioral freedom we sometimes move to reassert this freedom by advocating the opposite position, which may be exactly what the opposition wants.

Finally, Zimbardo talks about “systems of control”, which touches on the ‘cult’ psychology work that he’s well known for. These observations will have particular meaning for readers who enjoyed my post Great Users of People, and I’ll be writing more about intelligence “systems of control” in the future. In the meantime…

The behavior of large numbers of people must be managed efficiently. For this reason, persuaders develop “systems of control” that rely on basic rules and roles of socialization and that impart a sense of belonging. When interaction among people is restricted to interchange between their social roles, however, it becomes easier for ethical, moral, and human concerns to take a back seat.

Perhaps those NSA employees who willingly participate in the dragnet spying against their fellow citizens are victims of such manipulation; perhaps these agents’ ethical lapses have something to do the highly-persuasive, cult-like, environment they live and work in?

When a group of people becomes more preoccupied with seeking and maintaining unanimity of thought than with carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions, raising moral issues, and critically appraising decisions, unanimous resolutions are often reached prematurely. As part of the package, members may be led to support these decisions for better or for worse. When tightly-knit groups are insulated from outside sources of information and expertise and their leaders endorse prospective policies before members have a chance to air their views, decision-making processes deteriorate.

Decision-making processes at the NSA deteriorated to the point where dragnet spying programs were approved in the first place. As much as I dislike the ‘intelligence community’ in general, I do believe that it’s leadership in previous generations was smarter and a little more restrained about ‘pushing the envelope’ with Checka-like surveillance programs.

Finally, I remind readers that the Checka had a habit of turning on their own:

The tighter a system is, the more likely that minor challenges will be met with retaliation. In prisons, mental hospitals, religious or political cults, military establishments, concentration camps, and so on, some people have virtually total control over the existence of others, and minor deviations or threats to that power are intolerable.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, I haven’t given any hard proof of  what the MK ULTRA files Helms burned contained. However, I think Zimbardo and Andersen’s observations are better informed than most. I think that some of the discontinuties in American cultural and political life suggest that researchers at the CIA were not so out of touch as Bill Colby would have us believe.

* See chapter 2 “The Genesis of Critical Theory”, page 82 of Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1973.