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Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
Thu Mar 11 01:23:24 2004
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Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?

This article first appeared in 1997 in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, the
American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level of
propaganda in the service of US foreign policy objectives in the Cold War. The
propaganda offensive of the government centered around its obsession with
securing the emerging US-dominated world order in the wake of the Second World
War. It was a time when Europe lay in ruins and when subservience to US
planners, in government and business, was the order of the day.

Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious threat of a
Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United States, the menace
of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying discussion of foreign policy. To
pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set out, as Arthur Vandenberg advised, to
"Scare the Hell out of the American people." A daunting task, considering the
years of pro-Soviet accolades that had been previously flowing from the
executive branch.

Nonetheless, the Soviet threat served as a useful chimera to keep the masses in
line. What were the targets singled out for demonization in the Cold War
propaganda campaign? One of the chief aims of the government was to discredit
dangerously parochial attitudes about the desirability of peace. It was also
thought necessary to inoculate the public, particularly in Europe, against the
virus of "neutralism."

Further, since the American government had successfully entrenched the military
industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life, US planners were
eager to discredit the idea of "disarmament," which meant not only a rejection
of the techniques of mass murder developed and perfected by the Allied powers
in the Second World War, but also a return to the pre-war days when the union
of government and business was more tenuous, government-connected profits were
fleeting, and market discipline provided a check on consolidation.

The degree to which the press participated as a partner in the rhetoric of the
Cold War was no accident. Media penetration was a major facet of CIA activities
in both the foreign and domestic context. At its peak, the CIA allocated 29
percent of its budget to "media and propaganda." The extent of its efforts are
difficult to measure, but some information has slipped through the shroud of
secrecy.

One report notes that the media organizations funded by the CIA in Europe
included: the West German News agency DENA (later the DPA), the writers
association PEN in Paris, a number of French newspapers, the International
Forum of Journalists, and Forum World Features. The London-based Forum World
Features provided stories to "140 newspapers around the world, including about
30 in the United States, amongst which were the Washington Post and four other
major dailies."

The US Senate’s Church committee reported that the Post was aware that the
service was "CIA-controlled." German media tycoon Axel Springer had received
the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million from the Agency to build his
press empire. His relationship with the CIA was reported to have extended
through the 1970s. The New York Times reported that the CIA owned or subsidized
more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals. The
paper reported that at least another dozen were infiltrated by the CIA; more
than 1,000 books either written directly or subsidized by the Agency were
published during this period.

The penetration of CIA propaganda into the American press was far more
extensive than an occasional distorted report from Europe. By the early 70s, it
had been revealed that the head of the Hearst bureau in London was a CIA agent.
Some suspicion was aroused among those editors not on the Company payroll, and
inquiring minds among them wanted to know if CIA men were currently in their
employ. Soon thereafter the Washington Star-News published a report claiming
that some three-dozen journalists were on the payroll of the Agency. One agent
was identified in the story as a member of the Star-News’ own staff. When the
paper went belly up in 1981, the "journalist" in question went directly to work
for the Reagan administration. Later, he joined the staff of the Washington
Times.

Though pressured, the CIA refused for some time to release information on its
tentacles in the "free press." There’s little wonder why. When George Bush
assumed the role of CIA director, he agreed to a single paragraph summary of
each of its journalists for the Church committee. When it submitted the last of
its data, the CIA had provided information on more than 400 journalists. The
final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A
subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published
in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was
frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have
been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA."
According to the watchdog group Public Information Resource, propaganda
expenses in the 70s may have exceeded $285 million a year. This was more than
"the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International, and the
Associated Press."

By the late seventies, reports emerged that the publishing house Copley Press
had for three decades served as a CIA front. Its subsidiary, Copley News
Service, provided the CIA a mouthpiece in Latin America. Propaganda in Latin
America was more or less constant, as the CIA influenced elections, organized
the torture and murder of dissidents, including priests, and backed brutal, but
pro-American patsies throughout the region.

The efforts in manipulation of opinion in Latin America were reflected in
similar campaigns at home. For instance: pro-contra public relations specialist
Edgar Chamorro served as a conduit of disinformation from 1982 to 1984,
manipulating journalists and Congressmen at the behest of the CIA. Though
domestic propaganda is a violation of the law, it was a standard Agency tactic.

The Carter administration, in an effort to soften public interest in the CIA’s
involvement with the press, issued an executive order touted in the media as a
ban on the manipulation of the American media. Belatedly, as another PIR report
notes, the Society of Professional Journalists had this to say—"An executive
order during the Carter administration was thought to have banned the practice
[of recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign
Relations task force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed
that a ‘loophole’ existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a
waiver." As a follow-up, the Reagan administration signed a law banning media
disclosure of covert operations as a felony.

If reporters were often led to compromise their integrity at the behest of the
warfare state, it was an example set at the highest levels of power in the
American media. Press ownership, already concentrated to a ludicrous degree,
shared a cozy relationship with the CIA from its start. Those chummy with the
Company included Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, former Post owner Philip Graham
and assorted New York Times owners in the Sulzberger family. Top editors of the
Post and Newsweek have also served as agents, while the Post’s intelligence
reporter was on the take from the CIA in the 60s. Katherine Graham, for decades
owner of the Washington Post, had this to say to top CIA officials as the
Berlin Wall was starting to crack. "There are some things the general public
does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the
government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can
decide whether to print what it knows."

The conservative movement that culminated in the elevation of Ronald Reagan to
the presidency was a product of those turbulent Cold War years, and perhaps
more so a product of domestic intervention by the security state than many of
its participants would care to admit. The armchair warriors in the
neoconservative camp and the inveterate interventionists at National Review can
both trace their roots straight back to the propaganda efforts of the CIA.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria
Trotskyites to apologists for the US warfare state without missing a beat, as
Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American Right. The CIA’s role
in establishing the influence of the neocons came out in the late 60s, though
the revelations were obscured by the primary actors’ denials of knowledge of
the covert funding. The premiere organization of the anti-Stalinist left, the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, provided a base of operations to launch a
left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union. The revelation that the
Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization’s credibility, and it went
belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford Foundation to keep it afloat. The
Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo notes, "the core group later came to be
known as the neoconservatives."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was perhaps the Agency’s most ambitious
attempt at control and influence of intellectual life throughout Europe and the
world. Affiliates were established in America, Europe, Australia, Japan, Latin
America, India, and Africa, although its appeal was limited in the Third World
for obvious reasons. It combined concerts, conferences, and publishing efforts,
promoting the State Department line on the Cold War. Magazines affiliated with
the Congress included, among others, the China Quarterly, the New Leader and,
of course, Encounter.

The funding of the Congress and similar fronts was organized through dozens of
charitable trusts and nonprofit foundations, some of which were invented by the
CIA. The money was made available through seemingly legitimate means to the
Congress, as well as to political parties (including the German Social
Democrats), unions and labor organizations, journalists’ unions, student
groups, and any number of other organizations that could be counted on to
support US hegemony in Europe and the world.

The most complete story of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is
found in Peter Coleman’s apologetic book, The Liberal Conspiracy. Coleman, a
former Australian barrister and editor of the Congress magazine, the Quadrant,
lets slip quite a bit of revelatory information in his analysis of the
Congress’s activities and its relationship to the CIA. The common targets of
Congress literature, as Coleman notes, are familiar: the literature was
anti-Communist, social democratic, and anti-neutralist. Other aims promoted by
the Congress were cataloged by William Blum: "a strong, well-armed, and united
Western Europe, allied to the United States....support for the Common Market
and NATO and...skepticism of disarmament [and] pacifism. Criticism of US
foreign policy took place within the framework of cold war assumptions; for
example that a particular American intervention was not the most effective way
of combating communism, not that there was anything wrong with intervention per
se...." F.A. Hayek commented that the Congress’ strategic agenda was "not to
plan the future of freedom, but to write its obituary."

Among those involved with the Congress were James Burnham, Irving Kristol,
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, and the
self-described "life-long Menshevik" Sidney Hook. After World War Two, Kristol
worked as the editor for the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine,
then served as editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1958.

The Congress was organized by Kristol’s boss and CIA man Michael Josselson, who
maintained a tight grip on the activities of the Congress as well as the
content of its publications. According to Coleman, Josselson’s criteria for his
editors was simple: they had to be reliable on the State Department line.
Later, Kristol was to deny he knew the organization was a front. This seems
unlikely for several reasons. For one, Sidney Hook stated that "like almost
everyone else," he had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the
financing of the Congress." More to the point, as Tom Braden, then head of the
CIA’s International Organizations division, wrote in a Saturday Evening Post
article, a CIA agent always served as editor of Encounter. Today, Kristol is a
kind of svengali in the modern conservative world.

Neoconservative prominence and influence owes quite a bit to the covert
activities of this government, something they forget only rarely, as with the
case of neocon Richard Perle who was caught funneling information to one of our
"reliable allies" while in the Reagan administration.

While waging the CIA’s battle, the neocons were not yet billing themselves as
conservatives. But the National Review was another matter, a journal aimed
specifically at the American right wing. The official line holds that National
Review was founded in an intellectual vacuum, and, for all intents and
purposes, created conservatism in America. But events, as are most often the
case, were not that simple. The idea for National Review originated with Willi
Schlamm, a hard-line interventionist and feature editor with the Old Right
Freeman. At odds with the isolationism of the right, Schlamm was well-known for
his belligerence, having demanded that the United States go to war over
Formosa.

One person in a position to know more details about the founding of NR was the
late classicist and right-winger Revilo Oliver. Although late in life Oliver
was associated most closely with extremist racialism, in the 50s, he was an
influential member of the Buckley inner circle, a regular contributor to
National Review and a member of Bill Buckley’s wedding party. Later, he went on
to serve as a founding board member of the John Birch Society, until his break
with the Society’s founder Robert Welch.

In his autobiography, Oliver explains that the National Review was conceived as
a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A surreptitious deal was
cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably Schlamm) to turn the magazine
over to Buckley; a last-ditch effort saved the magazine, and control was
assumed by Leonard E. Read, president of the Foundation for Economic Education.
Unfortunately, Read balked at "politics," i.e., analyzing and criticizing
government actions, and the magazine quickly slipped into irrelevance.

It’s hard to blame the editors of the Freeman for failing to see Buckley’s
treachery coming. As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the US military as
incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging from the armed forces,
Buckley argued, were brainwashed with militaristic platitudes. In his essay,
Buckley proposed a debriefing regime for all military men "solely based on the
great libertarian documents of our civilization" and study of the lives of the
world’s "great individualists." But, as they say, the times, they were a
changin’.

Buckley’s decision to launch the National Review was a watershed event on the
right by any measure. As Buckley’s admiring social-democratic biographer John
Judis notes, "Except for Chodorov, who was a Buckley family friend, none of the
right-wing isolationists were included on National Review’s masthead. While
this point of view had been welcome in the Freeman, it would not be welcome,
even as a dissenting view, in National Review."

As Judis notes, Schlamm, who envisioned himself as the guiding light behind NR,
was not even a conservative. He "had more in common with Dwight MacDonald or
Daniel Bell than with Robert McCormick; Buckley was turning his back on much of
the isolationist...Old Right that had applauded his earlier books and that his
father had been politically close to."

Buckley, by 1955, had already been in deep cover for the CI