Timothy Leary’s mug shot prior to his jail break and flight to Algeria.
About a year ago I came across an article titled “Timothy Leary and the CIA” by Walter H. Bowart, who wrote a book about MK ULTRA one year before John Marks did, but did so with Marks’ help. Bowart’s book, Operation Mind Control (1978), was based on personal accounts of brainwashing from people Bowart found through classified advertisements in Rolling Stone and Soldier of Fortune magazines. (Rolling Stone was the home of CIA chief William Colby’s pet literary agent David Obst.)
In “Timothy Leary and the CIA” Bowart describes an interview he conducted with Leary in prison after Leary’s stunt in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, which Playboy covered in ’71. I’ll point out that not just anybody can get access to prisoners like Leary; especially if that ‘anybody’ writes things which the US government doesn’t like. Here’s the pertinent part of Bowart’s reported interview, taken from “mindcontrolforums.com” as archived by the Wayback Machine:
“Have you ever knowingly worked for the CIA?” I [W.H. Bowart] asked.
“If I were working for the CIA,” he [Timothy Leary] said, ” I would have ten people working making a living exposing me. If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…” “Do you think CIA people were involved in your group in the sixties?” I asked. Without hesitating Leary said, “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people…
Of course, Bowart could be lying, Leary could be lying. I can’t speak to either man’s motivation, however, what Leary described is a well-known political manipulation strategy. The ‘Hegelian Dialectic’ strategy, which I last wrote about with regard to Benny Johnson, necessitates controlling all ‘sides’ of an argument– that means controlling all sources of information. When presented with a carefully chosen array of information, a rational person will be compelled to draw the desired conclusion while still believing they are forming their own opinion, which is the gold standard for behavior conditioning. The Hegelian Dialectic doesn’t work if, say, there’s only one news agency: there has to be a CNBC, a FOX, a CNN, etc. There has to be the appearance of diversity.
I can’t know if Leary was lying in the quote above, but I can do a thought experiment like the one Poul Henning-Kamp did for the intelligence community’s involvement in open-source software, which allowed him to predict HEARTBLEED. Would the CIA, an organization which barters in information, benefit from implementing the Hegelian Dialect in American media? Of course they would. What’s more, we know that the Agency did this in Europe during the Cold War… which brings me back to Playboy.
The only reason I was able to put Playboy’s selection of featured writers into context was because I had read a book called The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. Saunders introduced me to the 1960s culture-industry names which popped up so many times on Playboy covers; her book is the ‘gold standard’ exposé of the CIA’s anti-Kremlin leftist crusade in Europe after WWII.
Who is Frances Stonor Saunders? She’s the daughter of a disinherited British noblewoman and commoner Donald Robin Slomnicki Saunders; she’s a BBC radio host; and was arts editor at The New Statesman, a British magazine known for its one-time mindless support of Stalin and for being used by the KGB as late as 1994 to place “anti-American” propaganda. That’s the story.
As a person, Frances Stonor Saunders bears extreme bitterness: her writing seethes with hatred for the German people; conservatives; and all fellow lefties whose opinions don’t match her own. There are very few people for whom Frances doesn’t have contempt. However, in The Cultural Cold War Frances shows an uncharacteristic, child-like admiration for Ramparts magazine, as well as the ‘Beat writers’ including Allen Ginsberg; theater wild-child Kenneth Tynan; Norman Mailer; Indian politician Jawaharlal Nehru; John Kenneth Galbraith; and director Stanley Kubrick. These chosen people are the world’s hope in the face of blundering CIA aggression, according to Frances. In her own words:
With the rise of the New Left and the Beats, the cultural outlaws who had existed on the margins of American society now entered the mainstream, bringing with them a contempt for what William Burroughs called a ‘sniveling, mealy-mouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychiatrists and union officials… Alan Ginsberg, who in his 1956 lament Howl had mourned the wasted years– ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’– now advocated the joys of open homosexuality and hallucinogenic ‘Peyote solitudes’. Munching LSD, singing the body electric, reading poetry in the nude, navigating the world through a mist of benzedrine and dope, the Beats reclaimed Walt Whitman from stiffs like Norman Pearson Holmes, and sanctified him as the original hippy. They were scruffy rebels who sought to return chaos to order, in contrast to the obsession with formulae which characterized magazines like Encounter [CIA funded ‘non-communist left’ magazine –a.nolen]. (p. 361)
And…
It [Quest, the CCF publication in India] probably didn’t deserve J. K. Galbraith’s sneer that ‘it broke new ground in ponderous, unfocused illiteracy’. Certainly Prime Minister Nehru didn’t like it, as he always distrusted the Congress as an ‘American front’. (The Cultural Cold War, p 216)
Of course, readers will remember all those names from my analysis of Playboy’s featured authors: Spectorsky and the CCF 2.0, Part I, Part II. All Saunder’s ‘heroes’ were lauded by the CIA’s Playboy outfit, too.
Saunders agrees with the CIA on more than just Beat writers. She places the blame for CIA excesses at the feet of James Angleton and his ‘crew’ through well-chosen quotes from Allen Ginsberg’s writing:
Allen Ginsberg even fantasized that T.S. Eliot was part of a literary conspiracy mounted by his, Eliot’s, friend James Jesus Angleton. In a 1978 sketch called ‘T.S. Eliot Entered My Dreams’, Ginsberg imagined that ‘On the fantail of a boat to Europe, Eliot was reclining… “And yourself, “ I [Ginsberg] said, “What do you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA. After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend?”
In Saunder’s quote, Ginsberg goes on to opine: “The subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence… failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism”. (p 249)
By ‘Eliotic’ Saunders means ‘in the style of T.S. Eliot’. Saunders presents Ginsberg’s imaginings as though they contain fact; she goes on to support Ginsberg’s assertions by making assertions of her own: a James-Angleton-CIA-literary-conspiracy caused Ezra Pound to be awarded the Bollinger Prize. (You can read her theory in The Cultural Cold War.)
What Saunders fails to mention is that both Eliot and Pound lead their field before the OSS was a twinkle in Stephenson’s eye. Despite modern judgments about their politics, these men were stars of the last literary generation not deeply captured by the intelligence community. What’s important about Saunders’ stance on Eliot and Pound is that she knows it’s a ‘safe’ stance to take: bashing them is not going to anger her patrons. Who are Saunders’ patrons?
It may strike readers as odd that Saunders, who spent years researching how the CIA co-opted the post-WWII literary community, would put so much naive trust in the Beat writers, who were promoted by outfits like The Paris Review which Saunders herself identified as a CIA front. Experience would suggest prudence and caution when dealing with the ‘Beats’, yet the thought that Allen Ginsberg might be just corrupt as CIA literary golden-boy Peter Matthiessen never flutters across Saunders’ consciousness.
It may also seem stupid that Saunders would blame the CIA’s counterintelligence chief for ‘anti-communist left’ abuses that clearly originate from something like the CIA’s “Special Communications Programs” division. I mean really, Frances, James Jesus Angleton only had 24 hours in his day and by the time the CCF got rolling he had other things to worry about.
I say Saunders’ position ‘seems stupid’, because of course Frances Stonor Saunders is following a well-trodden CIA path when she blames Agency excesses on Angleton: every official ‘exposer’ does this, from John Marks to Tom Mangold. James Angleton’s legacy is the black hole that CIA propagandists throw their garbage into. Bill Colby started that practice in the ’70s.
In writing The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders protected the legacy of CIA assets like Allen Ginsberg at the expense of CIA assets like T. S. Eliot. Frances Stonor Saunders promoted the same ‘intellectuals’ as Playboy promoted 40 years before in response to the obvious failure of the Congress For Cultural Freedom. Why would a pornography rag care about obscure ‘Beat’ writing? Why would an American pornography rag feature an Indian politician like Jawaharlal Nehru at all– but especially as Playboy’s first ever featured politician? See A.C. Spectorsky and CCF 2.o.
It’s almost as if somebody at the CIA called Frances up and said: “Franny, here’s a list of men who Spectorsky promoted in order to deal with the CCF setback. Write a history of the CCF that justifies Spectorsky’s strategy in hindsight. Can you do that, Franny?”
Now we have The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ intellectual dishonesty puts her in ugly company; it also casts a shadow over her favored leftist publication: Ramparts magazine. But that shadow is just one of many. Ramparts magazine founder Warren Hinckle went to Hugh Hefner, the Playboy front man, for funding. (See Hinckle’s autobiography.) Playboy followed Ramparts’ lead when they published the work of Black supremacist Eldridge Cleaver; both magazines published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Paris Review crony Terry Southern, amongst others. Playboy and Ramparts traveled a very similar path… which means that Ramparts traveled a similar path to a CIA front.
Now back to Timothy Leary’s suggestion about the CIA “owning” magazines like Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone prides itself on breaking news stories which are damaging to the US government and ‘intelligence community’. Rolling Stone magazine is an off-shoot of Ramparts: it was founded by two of Warren Hinckle’s employees when Ramparts folded. Rolling Stone’s founders were Jann Wenner and his patron (perhaps better described as ‘handler’) Ralph Gleason, who prior to becoming a Jazz critic, worked for the Office of War Information during WWII. (The ‘intelligence community used Jazz as a cultural weapon abroad.) Ramparts was also the vehicle David Horowitz and Peter Collier used to place Perry Fellwock’s ‘anti-NSA’ leaks in 1972. Ramparts and Rolling Stone have a lineage.
Jann Wenner cofounded Rolling Stone, you can read about his background in this JewishCurrents.org article. Like Gawker’s Nick Denton, Wenner displays extremely narcissistic characteristics: superficially charming; ruthlessly exploitative of employees; with the emotional maturity of a two-year old, according to Salon’s David Weir. Also like Denton, and many media-oriented intelligence professionals, Wenner is homosexual.
There’s a ‘lineage’ between the magazines which are used to leak sensitive intelligence information. Adrian Chen tripped over that lineage when he tried to equate Edward Snowden with Perry Fellwock in Nick Denton’s online publication Gawker.com.
Gawker’s coverage of the ‘Snowden Saga’ was designed to encourage apathy in readers: Denton tried to accomplish this by exploiting side-shows, as well as through Adrian Chen’s dismissive coverage of the leaks.
What do I mean by ‘exploiting sideshows’? Denton’s ‘Snowden Saga’ editorial policy was to marginalize concern over the NSA leaks by associating that concern with ‘lunatic fringe’ pundits and their unnewsworthy antics. Denton employed his own Hegelian Dialect to attempt this marginalization, for example, he covered an obscure squabble between a spooky, pro-NSA Naval War College professor and a nameless blogger, who sparred over the prof’s violation of the Hatch Act by lobbying for the NSA: “unhinged spook” + “small-government wingnut” = “only crazies are concerned about Snowden issues”.
It may interest readers to know that the two protagonists from above took very different paths: the mysterious, nameless “wingnut” stopped blogging (xxtwitterwarcommittee.wordpress) and disappeared shortly before “spook” was fired from his teaching job for personal indiscretions; “spook” now writes about evil Russian and Iranian espionage in Ukraine via The Kyiv Post, Jed Sunden’s former rag, which is funded by reality t.v. freak Mohammad Zahoor.
Zhanna Kobylinska implements The Kyiv Post’s version of the American propaganda outfit Zunzuneo. She also does PR for a well-connected cult in Kiev.
Denton’s second, more subtle, strategy was to assign Adrian Chen to the ‘Snowden Saga': Chen took the establishment line of promoting Tor, while dismissing Snowden as a misguided idealist, and dismissing privacy fears as overblown. Chen shot himself in the foot with his magnum opus, a lengthy investigative piece that compared Snowden to Perry Fellwock, the first NSA whistleblower, who now thinks he was used and regrets his actions.
In the 1970s Perry Fellwock leaked his NSA information to two Ramparts journalists, David Horowitz and Peter Collier. Adrian Chen got fired because he suggested that David Horowitz was an intelligence agent, and that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras were too. Chen didn’t know what anolen.com readers know about the CIA’s ties to Playboy, and the ugly shadow they cast over Ramparts. Chen came very close to writing about the stuff I’ve been writing about for almost a year now, and that cost Chen his job because his editor, Nick Denton, is likely part of the ‘intelligence community’ too. (The pro-outsourcing wing of the ‘intelligence community’ was *best* served by Denton’s editorial policy; the public interest was not served well at all.)
Where is Adrian Chen now? Currently Adrian is a managing editor for The New Inquiry in NYC; I have no idea how he’s supporting himself.
There has been an interesting development with Chen’s old overseer at Gawker.com, John Cook. Soon after Chen was fired, Cook also left Gawker for a position as “Editor in Chief” at billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s The Intercept, which also employs Glenn Greenwald. In a weird twist, Cook quickly left The Intercept and returned to Gawker.com, which is known for notoriously low pay. Cook’s new Gawker title is “Executive Editor for Investigations”– so Denton must have forgiven Cook for letting Adrian’s Fellwock piece print.
Was Cook promoted to his level of incompetence at The Intercept, or did something else sour the beer? Your answer is as good as mine.
I’m going to wind this up by harkening back to Timothy Leary’s observation: “If I were the CIA, I’d own New Republic. I’d own The New Masses. I’d own Rolling Stone. I’d have 50 groups of people exposing the CIA…””
There has been a diverse list of publications mentioned in this post: Ramparts, Playboy, The New Statesman, Rolling Stone, The Intercept, Gawker.com, The Kyiv Post. Regular readers know that I’ve criticized most of these titles over the last few years. If Leary’s right, then I’ve just been criticizing the same thing all along.
I guess the USSR didn’t lose. ;)
