For anyone interested in how spooks influence American culture, the career of William Egan Colby is the gift that keeps on giving. Two months before the former CIA director was found floating face down in the Wicomico River, he participated in the release of a single-player, Adventure-genre video game!
Spycraft: The Great Game was released by Activision in February 1996 and featured Colby, as well as former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin, who both appeared in the game as themselves and who both worked as consultants for the venture.
Kosta Andreadis for ign.com: “William Colby, who tragically died shortly after the game’s release, even appears as himself offering titbits of information and advice on being a covert agent working for the CIA.”
The premise of the game follows: a rookie CIA agent is tasked with keeping nuclear weapons out of a Pakistani terrorist’s hands, while installing a pro-USA president in Russia. Spycraft was released in 1996, so any parallels to the Yeltsin era and the fall of the USSR are completely coincidental. It seems that CIA honchos were thinking of uses for Islamic radicals well before 9-11-2001; when I was working think-tanks in the 2000s, there was still good money to be made scaremongering about nuclear mujahideen.
Needless to say, Colby didn’t need peanuts from entertainment consulting gigs; he was a well-established lawyer for the international drug cartel which he helped set up during his time in Vietnam. So why would he get involved with something small-fry like gaming?
To answer that question, I suggest looking at the background of the issuing company, Activision, one of the largest third-party game developers prior to its merger with Vivendi Games in 2008. Activision is famous for its Call of Duty series. Call of Duty is a first-person shooter where British/American/Red Army soldiers shoot Nazis; in subsequent releases more Allies were added and finally ultra-nationalist Russians were tagged on to the bad-guy list. So nothing to do with US government policy.
Activision also put out a less-successful James Bond series of games; and has gone into business with many big names in American media, including: LucasArts, Disney Interactive, Dreamworks SKG and MGM Interactive. Activision and Blizzard split away from Vivendi Games in 2013 and are now their own company ‘Activision Blizzard’.
Of course, readers will remember that Blizzard was outed in 2005 by none other than Greg Hoglund for running spyware– “The Warden”– through their World of Warcraft online gaming network. Blizzard was logging email addresses, cached web addresses and the names of other programs running on World of Warcraft players’ machines. Later, Hoglund would be shamed through the implosion of his company HP Gary, which was part of a well-publicized but insincere attempt by CIA-funded Palantir to discredit ‘internet activists’ like Glenn Greenwald. The NSA would go on to use World of Warcraft to spy on people with anti-government views. If you’d like to learn more about Hoglund’s work with the intelligence community, please see my post Security Theater 3000. Needless to say, Activision Blizzard’s split with Vivendi came two months after the Edward Snowden stuff came out and the NSA’s World of Warcraft fiasco hit headlines.
So Colby’s gaming firm Activision ‘found its level’ when they chose to merge with the disgraced Blizzard. It gets even better though, readers, because Activision provides an interesting link between the US intelligence community’s promotion of 1) Jazz-politics after WWII and 2) The Rolling Stones.
Activision was formed when Atari’s four best programmers were poached by a ‘venture capitalist’ named Richard Muchmore (who got rich through a spin-off from US government contractor SRI International, as in The Tor Project) and an ex-music industry executive named Jim Levy. The story goes that theses four programmers wanted Atari to treat them more like record labels treat musicians– because record labels have a great history of treating talent well. Fortunately for the quartet, Jim Levy’s previous company, GRT Corp, had just gone bankrupt so he was willing to play ‘overseer’.
Jim Levy posing with Activision merchandise.
Prior to Activision, Jim Levy was vice-president of GRT Corporation and headed their ‘Music Tapes’ division. GRT is short for ‘General Recorded Tape’, a Californian recording tape manufacturer which branched out into the music business by buying Chicago-based Chess Records in 1969. After the purchase GRT retained the heir to Chess Records, Marshall Chess, as one of their own executives.
Chess Records was founded in Chicago in 1947: the same year suspicious film distributor Cinema 16 was founded in NYC; and suspicious Richard Condon publisher Signet books was founded; and comic book publisher Magazine Management Company was first confirmed to exist. The CIA was also founded in 1947.
Chess Records was started by Evelyn Arons under the name ‘Aristocrat Records Corporation'; it was designed to produce pop and “race” records. Arons was contacted by Leonard and Phil Chess, born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyż, who were also part of Chicago’s Jewish community and wanted to be producers for some of the talent they employed in their low-rent club, The Macomba Lounge.
Phil, Leonard and Marshall Chess.
The Chess brothers were rough customers who ran exploitative businesses in depressed Black neighborhoods, such as the picturesquely named bar “Cut-Rate Liquor”. The Macomba Lounge also catered to Black customers, and while musical acts were the ‘up front’ draw, the lounge served as a market for prostitutes of all stripes and was a well-known drug dealing venue as early as 1946. Prior to the booze business, the ‘Chess’ family were small-time military contractors selling used cardboard to a local installation.
Evelyn Arons and the Chess brothers were not good businesspeople, historians of their company point out Chess management practices were far below industry standards and documentation was spotty; neither were the partners ahead of the curve on music trends. What they lacked in professionalism and expertise they made up for in 1) the sheer quantity of records recorded and 2) inexplicable advertizing patronage from an outfit called Cash Box magazine, which was founded in 1942. The Chess boys were also allowed in on a deal to sponsor a Billboard magazine column called “Rhythm and Blues Tattler”, which helped to promote the firm. 1940s data on Billboard is scarce, but the music trade magazine competed with Cash Box and was owned (prior to 2009) by The Nielsen Company, which doubled the size of its Chicago headquarters during WWII and opened a new office in the U.K. in 1939.
Eventually, the Chess boys bought Arons out and she went on to form American Distributing [a.k.a. American Record Distributors] with her second husband Art Sheridan of Vee-Jay Records, the record company which introduced The Beatles (the ‘house-trained’ version of The Rolling Stones) and their music to American audiences.
The Chess brothers had numerous successes, the most notable of which was a performer called McKinley Morganfield, who went by the stage name ‘Muddy Waters’.
Muddy Waters participated in a European tour in 1958, at the height of the US intelligence community’s Jazz offensive against the USSR. This is how David Carletta describes the offensive in his essay “Those White Guys Are Working for Me”: Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz, and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War during the Eisenhower Administration, published in the International Social Science Review:
Convinced that cultural influence was linked to political and economic power, the Eisenhower administration (1953-61) sponsored America’s premier jazz musicians’ goodwill tours abroad as part of its cultural foreign policy agenda. These tours helped the United States government in its global propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and its communist allies, who widely reported and successfully exploited the racial tension and violence that accompanied the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. These “jazz ambassadors” also helped the United States government counter claims made by communist propagandists that hyper-materialistic capitalists were “cultural barbarians” who produced commodities rather than sophisticated culture. (1) In short, they helped the Eisenhower administration combat communism during the early years of the Cold War.
Muddy Waters’ next big splash was at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. The festival just happened to be marred by violent rioting, which was attributed to 12,000 “college jazz fans” who were denied admission to the music festival. (The entire population of Newport city in 1960 was 47,000, please see my post The CIA and Race Riots.) The violence didn’t slow festival organizers down; Muddy Waters and Dizzy Gillespie would play together at the 1965 event.
Contemporary coverage of the riots, thank you the60sat50.blogspot.com.
Starting in 1947, the Chess brothers had developed a political sensibility that was at odds with their own lifestyle and previous business practices: they promoted music which challenged segregation and the ‘color barrier’. The brothers’ new-found politics curiously echoed FDR’s vision for the future and they showed a penchant for exploiting race tensions, much like Eleanor Roosevelt. (See Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records by Nadine Cohodas.) This political turn-around may be explained by Leonard Chess’ brief stint in the military, he had been drafted in ’43 and went to work at the Macomba Lounge on his release. The brothers’ interest in music production followed not long afterward.
The Macomba Lounge offered the Chess brothers access to extraordinary talent. Muddy Waters was a star in his own right, however, he wrote one particular song which would resonate across the music industry: “Rollin’ Stone”. This song’s title would later be used to name a musical act, a magazine and a recording company. Muddy Waters would end up having to sue Chess Records for back royalties in the 1970s.
Here’s where GRT Corp comes back in, readers. In 1969 Leonard’s son Marshall Chess took over management of Chess Records, which was soon bought by the GRT Corporation (just in time for the lawsuits?!); Marshall continued as Chess Records’ president after the acquisition, but he left to found Rolling Stones Records along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman in 1970. This was at the height of Kenneth Anger’s influence on the music group.
Marshall Chess and Mick Jagger.
I’ve written about The Rolling Stones and their intelligence connections ad nauseam, please see Rolling Through the Intelligence Community for a taster, but you can get a full dose here. In a nutshell, there’s not much about The Stones that doesn’t smell psy-op: from their dealings with Mau-Mau magician Robert Fraser; to spook Tom Driberg; to cult leader Kenneth Anger; to MK ULTRA child Anita Pallenberg; to intelligence-affiliated American mobster Meyer Lanksy. It just don’t look good, Mick.
Rolling Stone magazine isn’t much better. This magazine was founded by two veterans from Ramparts magazine– the magazine Warren Hinckle went to CIA asset Hugh Hefner to fund. These veterans 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. Cough, cough.
Ramparts was the vehicle David Horowitz and Peter Collier used to place Perry Fellwock’s ‘anti-NSA’ leaks in 1972; more recently Adrian Chen lost his job at Gawker because he compared Perry Fellwock to Edward Snowden… with disastrous implications for Glenn Greenwald. Don’t worry– Chen’s now scaremongering about evil Rooskie internet trolls over at The New York Times magazine, so he’s been forgiven.
Rolling Stone continues Rampart’s tradition of being a ‘safe’ place for spooks like William Colby to leak out stories that are ‘damaging’ to the intelligence community. You can find my reasoning in An American Pravda, Part III and Bergdahl’s Saga.
But what about Rolling Stones Records? RSR was founded by a band that stinks of psy-op, alongside the son of a Chicagoland sleazebag who dealt in goods that the CIA was after.
Let’s summarize: Chess Records provided politically useful material at a time when the CIA needed such material. GRT Corp, which absorbed the Chess’ brothers assets and personnel in ’69, provided ‘music industry know-how’ for Activision’s talent stable… a talent stable with whom William Egan Colby felt comfortable working.
If you told me last Friday that a video game linked Colby with US intelligence Jazz plots and The Rolling Stones, I’d have said: “Imaginative.” Just goes to show that the truth can be stranger than fiction.
