Realpolitik

Along with its “humanitarian efforts” through Air America, the CIA also conducted a massive bombing campaign in Laos from 1964-1973. During that time, more than double the bombs that were dropped on the country than had been dropped on Japan and Germany during World War II. From 1964 through 1973, the United States flew 580,000 bombing runs, and dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance, over Laos, one every 9 minutes for 10 years.[1] By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, some 200,000 Laotians, both civilian and military had been killed, including at least 30,000 Hmong, with another 750,000 Laotians made homeless by the bombing.[2] Nixon and his Secretary of State, Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, went to great lengths to keep the missions secret, and even after the secret war was made public, the American people were in the dark as to the true scale of the bombing campaign.

German-born and Jewish, Kissinger was also a Frankist.[3] In addition to being a Bilderberger and attendee of meetings of Le Cercle, Kissinger was also a leading member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). During 1955 and 1956, he was also study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). David Rockefeller and Kissinger first met in 1954 through their membership in the CFR, after which Kissinger was invited to sit on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, David Rockefeller confessed the goal he and those within his network have pursued:

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.[4]

Eisenhower would later draw many Cabinet members from the CFR, such as his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Dulles gave a public address at the CFR headquarters, Harold Pratt House in New York City, in which he announced a new direction for Eisenhower’s foreign policy: “There is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.” After this speech, the council convened a session on “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” and chose Henry Kissinger to head it. Kissinger spent the following academic year working on the project at Council headquarters. The book of the same name that he published from his research in 1957 gave him national recognition, topping the national bestseller lists.[5]

The pioneers in the field of study known as “strategic studies,” which emerged as a separate and specialized scholarly discipline as a result of the development and use of atomic weapons, included advisors Kissinger and ASC founder Albert Wohlstetter, both important advisors of the RAND Corporation. RAND (“Research and development”) is an American nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the US government and private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals, including the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both known CIA fronts. The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States’ space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet.[6]

Ultimately, RAND is the core of the Military-Industrial Complex, a broad network of political influence that includes the Rockefeller-founded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission, as well as the Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, Aspen Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown, US Air Force Intelligence, MIT, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Esalen. Kissinger was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, founded in July 1973 by David Rockefeller and another Bilderberger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to foster closer cooperation among Japan, Western Europe and North America. Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University and a Rockefeller advisor who was a specialist on international affairs. Brzezinski was its first Director from 1973 to 1976.[6] Other founding members included Alexander Haig, Caspar Weinberger, George H.W. Bush, as well as Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, both later heads of the Federal Reserve.

In his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, David Rockefeller confessed the goal he and those within his network have pursued:

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.[7]

Francis P. Sempa has described that, as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the newly independent US Air Force promoted and funded nuclear policy studies by the RAND Corporation and its strategic analysts in an effort to discern how nuclear weapons would affect the nation’s military strategy and grand strategy. Kissinger released his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. The essence of Kissinger’s argument, which was highly critical of the Eisenhower administration, was that the United States’ reluctance to wage all-out nuclear war, coupled with a Soviet geographical and conventional military advantage in Eurasia, required the United States to develop a strategic doctrine to respond to aggressive Soviet moves across the spectrum of conflict. This appealed to John F. Kennedy, and when he became President in January 1961, Henry Kissinger became a valued consultant to the National Security Council. It was the beginning of Kissinger’s career in government, which reached its apex in 1973 when he served both as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under President Nixon.

As Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and as a proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with the People’s Republic of China, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending America’s proxy war against Russia in Vietnam.

For years, Kissinger has argued that promoting a greater balance of power between the US and Russia would improve global stability. In fact, according to Colonel Michal Goleniewski, a defected KGB agent and Shickshinny Knight of Malta, Kissinger had been recruited by Soviet intelligence during World War II.[8] Goleniewski defected to the United States in January 1961, after which he went to work for the CIA, until he was discredited when he claimed to be Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia, son of Nicholas II, and therefore heir apparent to the Russian throne. Nevertheless, Goleniewski was responsible for uncovering a long list of KGB and GRU agents and officers, including Gordon Lansdale, George Blake, a high-ranking member of MI6, and Heinz Felfe, one of Reinhard Gehlen’s lieutenants inside the BND.[9]

Ultimately, RAND is the core of the Military-Industrial Complex, a broad network of political influence that includes the Rockefeller-founded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission, as well as the Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, Aspen Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown, US Air Force Intelligence, MIT, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Esalen. Kissinger was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, founded in July 1973 by David Rockefeller and another Bilderberger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to foster closer cooperation among Japan, Western Europe and North America. Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University and a Rockefeller advisor who was a specialist on international affairs. Brzezinski was its first Director from 1973 to 1976.[7] Other founding members included Alexander Haig, Caspar Weinberger, George H.W. Bush, as well as Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, both later heads of the Federal Reserve. The group also included top executives of AT&T, ITT, Xerox, Mobil, Exxon, the Chase Manhattan Bank, First Chicago Corp., General Electric, TRW, Archer Daniels Midland, PepsiCo, RJR Nabisco and Goldman Sachs, as well as Nissan, Toshiba and Fuji Bank.[8]

Francis P. Sempa has described that, as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the newly independent US Air Force promoted and funded nuclear policy studies by the RAND Corporation and its strategic analysts in an effort to discern how nuclear weapons would affect the nation’s military strategy and grand strategy. Kissinger released his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. The essence of Kissinger’s argument, which was highly critical of the Eisenhower administration, was that the United States’ reluctance to wage all-out nuclear war, coupled with a Soviet geographical and conventional military advantage in Eurasia, required the United States to develop a strategic doctrine to respond to aggressive Soviet moves across the spectrum of conflict. This appealed to John F. Kennedy, and when he became President in January 1961, Henry Kissinger became a valued consultant to the National Security Council. It was the beginning of Kissinger’s career in government, which reached its apex in 1973 when he served both as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under President Nixon.

Kissinger had served as the principal foreign policy adviser for New York governor Nelson Rockefeller during his three failed bids to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964 and 1968. In the 1968 Republican primaries, Kissinger had expressed contempt for Nixon, writing of him in July 1968 that he was “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as president.”[9] However, Kissinger switched camps after Rockefeller lost to Nixon. In the leadup to the presidential elections of 1968, Kissinger worked with Anna Chennault, the wife of General Claire Chennault, founder of Air America, to sabotage the peace talks taking place in Paris to end the Vietnam War. President Johnson had had withdrawn from the election, announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and stated his willingness to open peace talks with North Vietnam on ending the war, with W. Averell Harriman heading the American delegation. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was temporarily leading, on the prospect of peace, eventually lost to Nixon when negotiations collapsed. It was through Chennault’s intercession that Republicans advised Saigon to refuse participation in the talks, promising a better deal once elected.[10]

As Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and as a proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with the People’s Republic of China, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending America’s proxy war against Russia in Vietnam. For years, Kissinger has argued that promoting a greater balance of power between the US and Russia would improve global stability. In fact, according to Colonel Michal Goleniewski, a defected KGB agent and Shickshinny Knight of Malta, Kissinger had been recruited by Soviet intelligence during World War II.[11] Goleniewski defected to the United States in January 1961, after which he went to work for the CIA, until he was discredited when he claimed to be Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia, son of Nicholas II, and therefore heir apparent to the Russian throne. Nevertheless, Goleniewski was responsible for uncovering a long list of KGB and GRU agents and officers, including Gordon Lansdale, George Blake, a high-ranking member of MI6, and Heinz Felfe, one of Reinhard Gehlen’s lieutenants inside the BND.[12]

Historian Richard A. Moss of the Naval War College recently published an authoritative book-length study titled, Nixon’s Back Channel to Moscow: Confidential Diplomacy and Détente, revealing how Kissinger established his own personal backchannel to the Soviet leadership in 1968, soon after being named Nixon’s national security adviser. Kissinger used Boris Sedov, a known KGB operative whom he met when he was visiting Harvard, and to whom he conveyed his interest in improving US-Soviet relations. Additionally, Oleg Kalugin, the head of the KGB’s station in Washington, in his own memoirs The First Directorate, boasted that the back channel with Kissinger forged a direct line between Nixon and Brezhnev. Kalugin maintains that the KGB preferred Nixon to his election rival, Hubert Humphrey, because no one would dare accuse Nixon of being soft on communism. According to Kalugin:

Again and again, in meetings with Sedov, Kissinger told us not to underestimate Nixon’s political abilities, not to overestimate his anti-Communism, and not to take Nixon’s hard-line campaign pronouncements at face value. Kissinger told Sedov that Nixon, if elected, would strive for a new era of improved relations between the two superpowers.[13]

Only after Nixon’s inauguration did Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin agree that all further communication would be through him. Nixon agreed to set up a secure phone line in the White House linking him directly to Dobrynin. According to Moss, the US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council staff and the Pentagon were kept in the dark about these conversations. According to Kalugin, Sedov later boasted to him that he had been so successful in cultivating Kissinger’s assistant Richard Allen that he wanted to try to recruit and even potentially blackmail Allen into becoming an agent. Although Kalugin rejected the proposal, Sedov and Allen continued to maintain their relationship, and Allen eventually served as national security adviser to Ronald Reagan.[14]

Bohemian Grove 

Kissinger was also a member of the Bohemian Club, which hosts a two-week-long camp at Bohemian Grove. Bohemian Club was founded in 1872 in the San Francisco Bay Area from a regular meeting of journalists, artists, and musicians, including Mark Twain and Jack London. Bohemian Grove is a restricted campground located in Monte Rio, California, which brings together members of the some of the most prominent men in the world, including corporate leaders, celebrities, and government officials for relaxation and entertainment. There are also up to a hundred professors and university administrators, most of them from Stanford University and campuses of the University of California. The motto on the insignia of the Bohemian Club, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” is a direct quote from Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which takes place on the summer solstice and features the devilish trickster Robin “Puck” Goodfellow.

The Grove is particularly famous for a Manhattan Project planning meeting that took place there in September 1942, which subsequently led to the atomic bomb. The meeting was hosted by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, and attended by the S-1 Executive Committee heads, such as the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, along with representatives of Standard Oil and General Electric as well as various military officials.[15]

Aldous Huxley’s friend, Gerald Heard, and his entourage from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), like W.C. Mullendore, Leonard Read and James Ingebretsen, all joined the Bacchanalia at the Bohemian Grove, in Northern California, converged in the mid-1950s, where they were joined by Herbert Hoover and Henry Hazlitt.[16] In 1970, according to a study, 29 percent of the top 800 corporations had at least one officer or director at the Bohemian Grove festivities.[17] Every Republican president since the early twentieth century has been a member or guest at the Grove, with Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush as members. Other notable members have included Walter Cronkite, David Rockefeller and William F. Buckley.[18]

During their stay the campers are treated to plays, symphonies, concerts, lectures, and commentaries by entertail1ers, scholars, corporate executives, and government officials. The most memorable event is an elaborate ceremonial ritual called the Cremation of Care, which is held the first Saturday night, at the base of a 40-foot owl shrine, called the Owl of Bohemia, recalling the Illuminati Owl of Minerva. The ceremony involves the poling across a lake of a small boat containing an effigy of Care. Dark, hooded figures receive from the ferryman the effigy which is placed on an altar, and, at the end of the ceremony, set on fire. The “cremation” symbolizes the members banishing the “dull cares” of conscience.[19] Music and pyrotechnics accompany the ritual for dramatic effect. One year, Cronkite provided the voice for the owl.[20] According to the club’s librarian, who is also a historian at a large university, the event “incorporates druidical ceremonies, elements of medieval Christian liturgy, sequences directly inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, traces of Shakespearean drama and the 17th century masque, and late nineteenth century American lodge rites.”[21]

The lake is also the location of the daily “Lakeside Talks,” given over the years by entertainers, professors, astronauts, business leaders, cabinet officers, CIA directors, future presidents and former presidents.[22] “The religion they consecrate,” according to Philip Weiss writing for Spy Magazine, is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun.”[23] According to Weiss, “Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove.”[24] In May 13, 1971, President Richard Nixon was recorded saying: “The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine.”[25]

Pentagon Papers

The secret history of the US involvement in Vietnam was revealed when Daniel Ellsberg smuggled reams of documents from the RAND Corporation. Known as the Pentagon Papers, they detailed the history of the US’ political-military involvement in South East Asia from 1945 to 1967. The study was begun in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had become disillusioned by the futility of the war and wanted future historians to be able to determine what had gone wrong. 35 researchers, including Ellsberg, RAND Corporation experts, civilians and uniformed Pentagon personnel, obtained Pentagon documents dating back to arguments within the Truman Administration on whether the US should help the French in their effort to put down Communist-led Viet Minh in Vietnam. One of the scholars called in early to help guide the project was Harvard’s Henry Kissinger.[26]

The Pentagon Papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. To ensure the possibility of public debate about the papers’ content, on June 29, US Senator Mike Gravel, an Alaska Democrat, entered 4,100 pages of the papers into the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds. These portions of the papers, which were edited for Gravel by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, were subsequently published by Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles. Benjamin Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, became a national figure during when he challenged Nixon over the right to publish the papers and oversaw the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s stories documenting the Watergate scandal. Bradlee was married to Antoinette Pinchot, the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the wife of Cord Meyer, a key figure in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the media.[27] Antoinette was also a close friend of Cicely d’Autremont, who was married to CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. Bradlee and Angleton became friends but the two allegedly parted ways after the murder in 1964 of Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose CIA connections and affair with President John F. Kennedy made her death the object of intense scrutiny. Bradlee and Angleton gave conflicting accounts of the events surrounding the search for and disposition of the diary in which Pinchot Meyer recorded her affair with Kennedy.[28]

Watergate

As noted by Sage Stossel in The Atlantic, “The Nixon-era White House was notoriously riddled with intrigue, behind-the-scenes machinations, and paranoia.”[29] David Rockefeller had consulted with Kissinger on numerous occasions, as in the case of Chase Manhattan’s interests in Chile and the threat of the election of socialist-leaning President Salvador Allende in 1970. Chase was one of a number of corporations doing business in Chile, along with ITT and Pepsi-Cola, who were concerned about Allende’s left-leaning policies. A coup against the democratically-elected Salvador Allende in Chile, known as Project FUBELT, was unofficially endorsed in 1970 by the CIA and President Nixon, who was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the President of Pepsi Cola.[30]

It was around that time that Kissinger famously said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”[31] Frank Snepp, a coworker in the Agency’s Saigon office, recalls that in 1971 Shackley sent a series of cables to Kissinger boasting of his CIA agents’ efforts to ensure the success of their candidate in the approaching South Vietnamese elections. The cables became known as “Shackleygrams.”[32] In 1972, Shackley transferred from Saigon back to the United States where he became head of the CIA’s “Western Hemisphere Division.” Thomas Clines became his deputy. When Shackley took over the division, one mission for him was the coup against Allende in 1973.

It was core members of Shackley’s “Secret Team,” also known as Operation 40, and JFK conspirators Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who were involved in the infamous Watergate Scandal. However, the wily Kissinger escaped investigation in the Watergate scandal, though Seymour Hersh suggested in “Kissinger and Nixon in the White House” that he was as deeply implicated as those who were convicted for the crime. “That Kissinger had lied about his role … was widely assumed in the Washington press corps, and even inside the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, but Kissinger was permitted to slide by with his half-truths and misstatements.”[33]

The team of Watergate “plumbers” had been assembled by E. Howard Hunt, who had retired from the CIA in 1970. Through the Brown University Club of Washington, Hunt met Charles Colson, who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. Charles “Chuck” Colson was an Evangelical Christian leader, a member of Vereide’s The Fellowship, and founded Prison Fellowship, Prison Fellowship International, and BreakPoint. Once known as President Nixon's “hatchet man,” Colson gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven, and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Daniel Ellsberg.

The team of Watergate “plumbers” had been assembled by E. Howard Hunt, who had retired from the CIA in 1970. Through the Brown University Club of Washington, Hunt met Charles Colson, who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. Charles “Chuck” Colson was an Evangelical Christian leader, a member of Vereide’s The Fellowship, and founded Prison Fellowship, Prison Fellowship International, and BreakPoint. Once known as President Nixon's “hatchet man,” Colson gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven, and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Daniel Ellsberg. Hunt and Colson soon developed a strong association.[34] Hunt was hired as a consultant by Colson and joined the White House Special Investigations Unit. Also in the summer of 1971, Colson authorized Hunt to travel to New England to seek potentially scandalous information on Senator Edward Kennedy, specifically pertaining to the Chappaquiddick incident and to Kennedy’s possible extramarital affairs.

When George Wallace ran as a Democratic candidate again in 1972, his campaign was brought to abrupt halt when he was shot five times by Arthur Bremer. Although Wallace survived the assassination attempt, he was left paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life, effectively ending his chances at running for president. According to Pat Buchanan, the only reason Wallace lost the nomination was because he was handicapped, and that if he hadn’t been, Carter wouldn’t have been president.[35] Nixon was immediately informed that Wallace had been shot, and suspiciously, he and Colson schemed to take advantage of the situation by sending E. Howard Hunt to Milwaukee to plant material in Bremer’s apartment from McGovern, who was likely to run against Nixon in the upcoming presidential race, to make it appear that McGovern might somehow have been behind the assassination attempt.[36] Bremer fit the stereotypical profile of the lone political assassin, being described as a pathetic misfit. Bremer later inspired the disturbed protagonist Travis Bickle character played by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver.

The Watergate “plumbers” were first assembled to gather incriminating evidence on Ellsberg. On June 28, 1971, two days before a Supreme Court ruling saying that a federal judge had ruled incorrectly about the right of The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the United States Attorney’s Office. He and Anthony Russo faced charges under the Espionage Act of 1917. However, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had been assigned by the White House to break into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. Therefore, due to this gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, the defense dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11, 1973.

In 1971, Hunt and Liddy recruited five men including Sturgis, and two other anti-Castro Cubans, Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez, as well as Bernard Barker, and Southern Baptist CIA agent James W. McCord, Jr., for the Watergate burglary. On June 17, 1972, the five were arrested while installing electronic listening devices in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington, DC. Hunt’s phone number was found in the address books of the burglars.

Reporters were able to link the break-in to the White House, leading to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by members of the Nixon administration. Those abuses included such “dirty tricks” as bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious. Nixon and his close aides also ordered investigations of activist groups and political figures, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Facing impeachment, Nixon finally resigned on August 9, 1974.

Church Committee

The crisis in confidence resulting from the quagmire in Vietnam and Watergate was then exacerbated by a series of revelations that began to appear in the media. First there were revelations of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO plan to “destroy” the Black Panther party. Then on December 22, 1974, The New York Times published a lengthy article by Seymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the “family jewels.” The Family Jewels is the informal name used to refer to a set of reports that detail activities, considered illegal or inappropriate, conducted by the CIA from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The reports were commissioned in 1973 by then agency director James Schlesinger, to identify any CIA activities that conflicted with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947—in other words, illegal.[37]

Hersh’s article also claimed that the CIA had conducted efforts to collect information on the political activities of US citizens, as well as experiments on US citizens, during the 1960s. These revelations convinced many Senators and Representatives that Congress hadn’t been vigilant enough in carrying out its oversight responsibilities. When Congress began launching investigations into these abuses, President Gerald Ford tried to control them with the creation of the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, headed by his Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, brother to David Rockefeller. The commission issued a single report in 1975, touching upon certain CIA abuses including mail opening and surveillance of domestic dissident groups, and publicized the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control project. It was replaced by the Pike Committee five months later, which investigated illegal activities by the CIA, FBI, and the NSA. The Pike Committee established important protocols for the declassification of intelligence documents, which would continue to evolve. It also created a precedent for the oversight of the Executive Branch and its agencies, leading to the creation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which now has the autonomy to declassify any of the information it receives.

But these inquiries were soon superseded by other Congressional investigations, most prominently, a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church. The Church Committee conducted a comprehensive investigation of intelligence agency abuses, including CIA-sponsored coups, illegal mail opening and wiretapping, the FBI's COINTELPRO and harassment of Martin Luther King. In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published fourteen reports on various US intelligence agencies and alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, with recommendations for reform, some of which were later put in place. Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, General René Schneider of Chile and CIA Director Allen Dulles’ plan (approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower) to use the Sicilian Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. Under recommendations and pressure by this committee, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 to ban US sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders.

Congressional investigations and reports also revealed CIA connections with journalists and the media. The most extensive of these investigations is in the Church Committee’s final report, which concluded that:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.[38]

None of these reports, however, discuss Operation Mockingbird, first mentioned in the CIA Family Jewels report. However, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, writing in an October 1977 article in Rolling Stone, claimed that more than 400 American journalists worked for the CIA from inside of leading news organizations, but that the Church Committee report “covered up” CIA relations with news media, when top officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the committee to restrict its inquiry and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report.[39]

From 1975 to 1976, Church headed the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart, which took a fresh look at the JFK assassination, with regards to how the FBI and CIA worked with the Warren Commission. “However,” explained Russ Baker, “along with subsequent investigative bodies, [the Warren Commission] failed to assemble, much less connect, even the most obvious of dots. Virtually everybody on the commission was a friend of Nixon’s or LBJ’s – or both.”[40] The Warren Commission had included among its members the least trustworthy of all American political leaders, involved in overt conflicts of interests, like John McCloy of the CFR, and Allen Dulles, CIA Director until he was forced to resign by Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The CIA was found to have destroyed or kept from investigators critical secrets connected to the assassination.[41] According to subcommittee head Richard Schweiker, upon close examination the Warren Commission had “collapsed like a house of cards,” and the Kennedy assassination investigation was “snuffed out before it began” by “senior intelligence officials who directed the coverup.”[42]

At the time of the Church Committee investigations, a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film, which had been kept from public view by Life Magazine by its owner C.D. Jackson, who coordinated Operation Mockingbird, was shown on national television for the first time. The American public was stunned to see Kennedy thrown backwards from what supposed to have been a shot from the front of the limousine. As a result, the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the following year, concluding that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The HSCA determined, based on available evidence, that the probable conspiracy did not involve the governments of the Soviet Union or Cuba. The committee also stated that the conspiracy did not involve any organized crime group, anti-Castro group, nor the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service.

On May 9, 1975, the Church Committee decided to call acting CIA director William Colby. That same day President Gerald Ford’s top advisers, Henry Kissinger and early neoconservative Donald Rumsfeld, helped draft a recommendation that Colby be authorized to only brief rather than testify, and that he would be told to discuss only the general subject, with details of specific covert actions to be avoided.[43] Of particular concern to Kissinger were the Church Committee’s revelations about covert United States involvement in Chile in the decade between 1963 and 1973.

Ramparts magazine revealed that Gloria Steinem, who became nationally recognized as the media spokeswoman for the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, was in the employ of the CIA. According to the Jewish Women's Archive, Steinem’s father was Jewish, her mother was a Scotch Presbyterian, but she was raised in Theosophy. Gloria’s paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinmen, was a reformed Jew active in women's causes who listed in Who's Who in America between 1910 and 1925, and was a leading member of the Theosophical Society in Toledo.[44] Steinem was catapulted to fame when she wrote an article titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in 1969, and then co-founded Ms Magazine, which first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine, which was also funded by the CIA, by way of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. In the Fall of 1958, Steinem spent a year and a half on a scholarship trip to India, where she met Indira Gandhi, and then received a call asking her to join a CIA operation known as the ISI, or Independent Research Service as it was later renamed. A key contact for Steinem in her ISI publicity work was C. D. Jackson.[45]

Steinem was hired to organize the attendance of non-communist American youth to disrupt a festivals being held by the communists in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. One of these was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Harvard graduate student who would later serve as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, who was described to Jackson by Steinem as “a star member of the Independent Service.” To plan their tactics, there were daily hotel-room meetings. “I remember Gloria lying in bed in a sort of frilly robe while the rest of us sat around the bed strategizing,” Brzezinski recalled, “I thought it was kind of an amusing and slightly eccentric scene.”[46] Another potential attendee, Michael Harrington, who later wrote The Other America, about the poverty of millions in the US, showed far more integrity than Steinem, refusing to participate in the CIA’s “dirty games.”[47] Rather, in 1967, when the Washington Post published interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts’ expose, she excused her participation by saying, “in my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honourable.”[48]

In May 1976, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, was attempting to publish Feminist Revolution, with a chapter titled “Agents, Opportunists and Fools,” which attempted to link the CIA and a number of corporations to individuals connected to Ms. Magazine. In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, raised “libel” claims that succeeded in pressuring Random House to remove the chapter. Nevertheless, the revelations appeared in the Village Voice on May 21, 1979.[49] One of Steinem’s CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960’s, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women’s liberation. In 1968, as publisher of New York magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Ms. Magazine´s first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti-establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the elite of corporate America. It published ads for ITT despite the fact women political prisoners were being tortured in Chile by the Pinochet regime which it helped bring about through a CIA-assisted coup against Allende in 1973.[50]

[1] Paul Wiseman. “30-year-old bombs still very deadly in Laos.” USA Today (November 12, 2003).

[2] Don North. “A Deadly Legacy: CIA’s Covert Laos War.” Consortium News (February 8, 2017).

[3] Barry Chamish. “The Deutsch Devils.”

[4] David Rockefeller. Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002).

[5] Peter Grose. Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2006), p. 39–41.

[6] “Paul Baran - Posthumous Recipient.” Internet Hall of Fame. Internet Society (2012).

[7] David Teacher. Rogue Agents: The Cercle Pinay complex 1951-1991 (2015), p. 97.

[8] David Mills. “Beware the Trilateral Commission.” Washington Post (April 25, 1992).

[9] Stanley Karnow. Vietnam A History (Viking, 1983), p. 58.

[10] Seymour M. Hersh. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books, 1983), p. 21.

[11] Frank A. Capell. “Is Kissinger a Soviet Agent?” The American Mercury (Summer 1974); Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, p. 605.

[12] Coogan. Dreamer of the Day, p. 606.

[13] Oleg Kalugin. The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 111.

[14] Ibid., p. 112.

[15] Gregg Herken. Brotherhood of the Bomb (Henry Holt and Company,  2013), Chapter 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] G. William Domhoff. Who Rules America? Power, Politics and Social Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), p. 59.

[18] Philip Weiss. “Masters of the Universe Go to Camp: Inside the Bohemian Grove.” Spy Magazine (November 1989).

[19] Peter Martin Phillips. A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club (1994).

[20] Weiss. “Masters of the Universe Go to Camp.”

[21] Bohemian Club. “Bohemian Grove 1994: Midsummer Encampment” (San Francisco: Bohemian Club, 1994).

[22] G. William Domhoff. The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A study in ruling class cohesiveness (Harper and Row, 1974).

[23] Weiss. “Masters of the Universe Go to Camp.”

[24] Ibid.

[25] James Warren. “Nixon On Tape Expounds On Welfare And Homosexuality.” Chicago Tribune (November 7, 1999).

[26] “COVER STORY: Pentagon Papers: The Secret War.” Time (June 28, 1971).

[27] Christopher Reed. “Ben Bradlee obituary.” The Guardian (October 21, 2014).

[28] Ron Rosenbaum & Phillip Nobile. “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair.” New Times (July 9, 1976).

[29] Sage Stossel. “The Craft and Craftiness of Henry Kissinger.” The Atlantic (June 2005).

[30] Gregory Palast. “A Marxist threat to cola sales? Pepsi demands a US coup. Goodbye Allende. Hello Pinochet.” The Guardian (November 8, 1998).

[31] Meeting of the “40 Committee” on covert action in Chile (June 27, 1970) quoted in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974).

[32] Phillip Frazer. “Dirty Tricks Down Under.” Mother Jones (February-March 1984).

[33] Seymour Hersh. “Kissinger and Nixon in the White House.” The Atlantic (May 1982).

[34] E. Howard Hunt. Give Us This Day: The Inside Story of the CIA and the Bay of Pigs Invasion – by One of Its Key Organizers (Arlington House, 1973), pp. 13–14

[35] George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire (Directors: Daniel McCabe, Paul Stekler, 2000).

[36] Ibid.

[37] Simon Tisdall. “CIA conspired with mafia to kill Castro.” The Guardian (June 27, 2007).

[38] Church Committee Final Report, Vol 1: Foreign and Military Intelligence, p. 455.

[39] Carl Bernstein. “CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone Magazine (October 20, 1977).

[40] Russ Baker. “Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 10: After Camelot.” Who.What.Why (November 13, 2013).

[41] Don Fulsom, “Former President Ford Admits CIA Compromised the Warren Commission’s Probe of JFK Assassination.” Crime Magazine (January 9, 2008).

[42] “The JFK Assassination,” Mary Ferrel Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/JFK_Assassination

[43] John Prados. Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 313.

[44] Patricia Cronin Marcello. Gloria Steinem: a biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004) pp. 4-5.

[45] Hugh Wilford. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 143.

[46] Ibid., p. 145.

[47] Ibid., p. 144.

[48] Ibid., p. 147.

[49] “Inside The CIA with Gloria Steinem.” Village Voice, (May 21, 1979).

[50] Henry Makow, “Gloria Steinem: How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society.” HenryMakow.com (March 18, 2002).

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio