The CIA, the Press and Black Propaganda
As soon as Kevin Drum at Mother Jones absolved the CIA of
spewing poison gas as a provocation, many on the Liberal Left cautiously
threw their weight behind Obama and the thrill of waging a punitive war on Syria.
“Perhaps regime change is a good idea,” Tom Hayden speculated in The Nation.
Left paterfamilias Noam Chomsky, who generally shows an appreciation
for the subtleties of covert action, claimed that America is not
supplying its Al Qaeda mercenary army with arms – even though Eric
Schmidt at The New York Times reported over a year ago that CIA
officers in Turkey were “helping allies decide which Syrian opposition
fighters across the border will receive arm.”
As if Hayden fomenting war and Chomsky covering for the CIA isn’t
irony enough, Drum cleared the CIA in response to allegations of a
provocation made by Rush Limbaugh. Which raises the question, what are
the facts about the CIA’s penchant for “provoked responses” like the
one in the Tonkin Gulf that started the Vietnam War?
Simply stated, black propaganda is one of many criminal but legally
deniable things the CIA does. It often involves committing a heinous
crime and blaming it on an enemy by planting false evidence, and then
getting a foreign newspaper to print the CIA’s scripted version of
events, which sympathetic journalists in America broadcast to the
gullible public.
In the case of Syria, the CIA is using cooked Israeli “intelligence”
as a catalyst – which is why, as Johnstone and Bricmont explain, the
“intelligence” is so “dubious.”
Black propaganda has other “intelligence” applications as well, and
is often used to recruit informants, and create deserters and defectors.
In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert told how he
reported for duty in 1965 in Saigon at the joint CIA-military Specials
Operations Group. The spooks asked him to join a secret psywar program.
“What they wanted me to do was to take charge of execution teams that
wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC
themselves had done the killing. The rationale was that other Vietnamese
would see that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened
away from becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be
inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side.”
As counter-terror guru David Galula explained, “Pseudo insurgents are
a way to get intelligence and sow suspicion at the same time between
the real guerrillas and the population.”
In a similar case in 1964, a famous CIA propaganda officer organized
three armed “survey teams” which operated in neighboring hamlets
simultaneously. When Vietcong propaganda teams departed from a hamlet,
his cut-throat cadre would move in and speak to one person from each
household, so the VC “would have to punish everyone after we left.”
In other words the CIA’s mercenaries (like some the CIA’s mercenaries
in Syria) were provocateurs, setting people up for recriminations, for
intelligence and publicity purposes.
Here’s another example: in 1964, CIA officer Nelson Brickham worked
in the Sino-Soviet Relations Branch, where he managed black propaganda
operations designed to cause friction between the USSR and China. At
the heart of these black ops were false flag recruitments,
in which CIA case officers posed as Soviet intelligence officers and,
using actual Soviet cipher systems and methodology, recruited Chinese
diplomats, who believed they were working for the Russians. The CIA case
officers used the Chinese dupes to create all manner of mischief.
Brickham in 1967 created the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. The
Phoenix program’s operations chief in 1970, Colonel Thomas McGrevey, had
a “penetration agent” inside COSVN – the Central Office of South
Vietnam. COSVN’s deputy finance director was the penetration agent.
The deputy alerted McGrevey when the finance director was going on
vacation, enabling McGrevey to mount a black propaganda campaign which
framed the finance director for running off with embezzled funds.
A circular about the Phoenix program issued by the revolutionary
Security Service in 1970, described how the nationalists viewed the
CIA. As stated in the circular, “the most wicked maneuvers” of the CIA
“have been to seek out every means by which to terrorize revolutionary
families and force the people to disclose the location of our agents and
join the People’s Self-Defense Force. They also spread false rumors.
Their main purpose is to jeopardize the prestige of the revolutionary
families, create dissension between them and the people, and destroy the
people’s confidence in the revolution. In addition, they also try to
bribe poor and miserable revolutionary families into working for them.”
Forged letters are a CIA specialty. Former CIA officer Philip Agee
told how he mounted a successful operation using forged letters against
Ecuadoran Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of the Communist
revolutionary movement. “By bugging Flores’ phone, we found out a lot
of what he was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip
to Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in
Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to compose a
“report” from Flores to the Cubans. It was a masterpiece. The report
implied that Flores’ group had already received funds from Cuba and was
now asking for more money in order to launch guerrilla operations in
Ecuador. My Quito station chief loved it so much he just had to get into
the act. So he dropped the report on the floor and walked on it awhile
to make it look pocket-worn. Then he folded it and stuffed it into a
toothpaste tube-from which he had spent three hours carefully squeezing
out all the toothpaste. He was like a kid with a new toy. So then I took
the tube out to the minister of the treasury, who gave it to his
customs inspector. When Flores came through customs, the inspector
pretended to go rummaging through one of his suitcases. What he really
did, of course, was slip the toothpaste tube into the bag and then
pretend to find it there. When he opened the tube, he of course
“discovered” the report. Flores was arrested and there was a tremendous
scandal. This was one of a series of sensational events that we had a
hand in during the first six months of 1963. By late July of that year,
the climate of anti-Communist fear was so great that the military seized
a pretext and took over the government, jailed all the Communists it
could find and outlawed the Communist Party.”
Likewise the catalyst for the 1973 coup in Chile was a forged
document-detailing a leftist plot to start a reign of terror – which was
discovered by the enemies of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The
result was a violent military coup, which the CIA officers (who had set
it in motion through disinformation in the Chilean press) sat back and
watched from their hammocks in the shade.
And on and on it goes.
General Ed Lansdale formalized CIA black propaganda practices in the
early 1950s in the Philippines. To vilify the Communists and win
support of Americans, one of his Filipino commando units would dress as
rebels and commit atrocities on civilians, and then another unit would
magically arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the
“terrorists” away. Cameras were the key.
The CIA also concocted lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers’
disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking
bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word
of God. Lansdale’s henchman, CIA agent-cum-journalist Joseph Alsop,
gleefully reported this black propaganda.
The American “press” is the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X in
black propaganda. When it comes to the CIA and the American press, one black hand washes the other. To gain access to CIA officials, reporters suppress or distort stories. They sell their black souls
for scoops. In return, CIA officials leak stories to them. At its
most incestuous, reporters and CIA officers are blood relatives. At one
point, The New York Times correspondent in Vietnam, James
Lemoyne, just happened to be the brother of the CIA’s counter-terror
team chief in the Delta, Navy Commander Charles Lemoyne.
In a democratic society the media ought to investigate and report
objectively on the government, which is under no obligation to inform
the public of its activities and which, when it does, puts a “spin” on
the news. As part of the Faustian Pact, when government activities are
conducted in secret, illegally, reporters look away rather than
jeopardize profitable relationships. The intended result is that the
unwitting public is robbed of its freedom of speech – for how can you
speak freely if you don’t know what’s going on?
If Lansdale hadn’t had Alsop to print his black propaganda, there
probably would have been no Vietnam War. Likewise, Judith Miller,
disgraced facilitator of the war on Iraq and rehabilitated Fox KKK-TV
correspondent, brought you the Iraq War through false documents provided
by CIA analysts.
We rarely know who the Alsops and Millers are in our midst, until
after the fact. The CIA has a strict policy of keeping its atrocities
to itself. And it is aided, in its eternal quest to deceive the
American public, by the fact that black propaganda validates the beliefs
of the Kevin Dumbs among us, as it assures their imagined security and
sense of being exceptional.
In fact, black propaganda operations, and the CIA itself, are antithetical to democratic institutions.
A big part of the CIA’s current success is its ability to deliver its
message through Left publications, and the Left’s unstated policy of
self-censorship in regard to CIA operations. Most insidious, perhaps,
are the former CIA officers who claim to be anti-war, and seek a veil of
immunity by claiming to have been “analysts.” This is akin to saying
“I was a bookkeeper for the Mafia. I never killed anyone.”
Of course it’s the bookkeepers who tell the bosses the names and
addresses of the delinquents who haven’t paid their extortion money this
week. The Phoenix Directorate in Saigon had analysts performing the
same assassination, kidnapping and torture function on an industrial
scale.
Despite the popular portrayal of the CIA as patriotic guys and girls
risking everything to do a dirty job, the typical CIA officer is a
sociopath without the guts to go it alone in the underworld. They
gravitate to the CIA because they are protected there by the
all-powerful Cult of Death that rules America.
The most dangerous facet of having former CIA officers slithering
around is their uniform message that the CIA is necessary. These are
not Phil Agees, revealing the ugly truth and calling for the CIA’s
abolition. Like all the CIA’s political and psychological warfare
experts, they are at the forefront of the war on terror, using psywar to
achieve the goals of the Cult of Death that rules America. The result
is a theatre of the absurd, a world of illusion.
Now we are told that the CIA Syrian mercenaries may launch a chemical
attack on Israel from government-controlled territories as a “major
provocation.” What you can be sure of is that some provocation will be
launched and that the press, including most of the Left, will cover it
up.
Doug Valentine is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program. See www.douglasvalentine.com or write to him at dougvalentine77@gmail.com
No comments: