InterestedParticipant
01-12-2010, 11:59 PM
While this piece is a little dated (published during the Reagan administration), I think most here will see the similarities of techniques of manipulation, deception and propaganda.
Disinformation and Mass Deception:
Democracy as a Cover Story
Covert Action Information Bulletin #19
http://covertaction.org//content/view/172/75/ (http://covertaction.org//content/view/172/75/)
During World War 1, the atrocity story came into its own as an instrument of foreign policy. In those simpler days, governments could turn public opinion against the enemy with tales of individual brutality: the rape of a nun, the bayonetting of a baby, or the execution of a Red Cross nurse. Such propaganda externalized the issues and focused national attention on an appropriate scapegoat. Doubters or dissenters were swept aside in the patriotic fallout, in an emotional downpour that insisted, "Once at war, to reason is treason."
This crude propaganda, however, had a temporary, war-related quality which often foundered on its own exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information in peacetime just as in war; nor had deception, secrecy, and lying come to be so much a part of the national menu as to be swallowed whole like the junk food that satiates the public appetite. Today there is no better example of the corrupted circumstances that now confront the consumer of news than the undercover campaign of official disinformation about Cuba.
Having failed to restore its hegemony over Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion or in the long, secret war waged under the code name "Operation Mongoose," the United States Central Intelligence Agency recently stepped up its 20‑year psychological warfare operations to discredit and destroy the Cuban government and any other Latin American or Caribbean government which stands in ideological unity with them. Propaganda aimed at that small, struggling country intentionally manipulates emotions of horror, revulsion, and fear in the uninformed citizen of the Yankee Colossus. Cuba is falsely pictured by the U.S. as embracing in its foreign policy the contemporary apocalyptic trio: drugs, criminality, and terrorism ‑ a far more terrible spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public.
Cuba as scapegoat and Fidel Castro as the implacable enemy of world national security interests have become easy answers for the complex realities of hemispheric change. And the sophisticated techniques with which official information about Cuba is concealed, denied, created, regulated, shaped, and planted seem to have heightened public acceptance of the Big Lie.
While a shoot‑out at credibility gap might not rescue the truth about Cuba from the hands of its abductors, a historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least innoculate some against further ravages of this advancing affliction.
The Overt Era of Information Abuse, 1898‑1945
No one with any knowledge of governments would ever insist there was a utopian past. Governments have always monitored dissent to impose their version of events on the public consciousness, to control the circulation of hostile opinion, and to manage the news. Secrecy always had a place, as had executive privilege. But the First Amendment guarantees, as well as the separation and checking of powers, seemed designed to limit the U.S. government's inherent tendency to manipulate information for its own interest. But as we shall see, this is not the case.
During and after the Civil War, while not engaging in deliberate deception, the government nevertheless insisted on "codes of press behavior" (the same which we criticize UNESCO and Third World nations for daring to put forth in the New International Information Order) and could classify information as too poisonous to circulate if judged "incendiary," "seditious," "treasonable," "immoral," "indecent," or "obscene."
The buildup of the North American Empire, then, added a new dimension of danger for information. During the Spanish‑American War, the brutal military mop‑up against the "rebels" in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba involved secret planning, undercover operations, and premeditated cover-ups in the face of public and Congressional opposition.
It was the First World War, however, that led the U.S. to move beyond censorship and overt suppression into the heady realm of disinformation itself. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, to take an active part in disseminating and propagandizing an official point of view. To unite public opinion behind the war, Creel's CPI conducted "a fight for the mind of mankind." Fake intelligence suggesting that German spies were everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the "barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the State Department used selective information to "prove" Germany was funding American pacifist organizations.
The capacity for covert conduct also gained ground as U.S. military intelligence expanded its role in domestic surveillance, laying plans in 1920 for a secret, domestic, counter‑insurgency program aimed at radicals‑an authentic progenitor of the COINTELPRO operations of the later Hoover years. Anticipating the CIA mania for cover, U.S. intelligence also dispatched agents to Europe as members of the International Red Cross.
By the end of the war, the country had acquired an institutionalized intelligence system, initiated the classification of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of deception. The Committee for Public Information left a legacy of experience for later generations of disinformationists to apply, if not to duplicate.
Public Relations Is Born As Disinformation
During two subsequent decades of peace in which the trauma of an economic collapse followed the delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations and its professional advocates.
Exemplified by Edward Bernays, a man who began his career as consultant to the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which terminated World War I and ended it as a hired hand for United Fruit Company in Latin America, public relations and its covert marketing strategies quickly seeped into the very core of American life. As Bernays cynically stated in a PR manual in 1928, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically."
The New Deal Thirties witnessed further assaults on the integrity of information. In the U.S., the realities of the depression inspired a militant labor union campaign for recognition and power, one in which the Communists participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement was vicious, projecting an image of it as the secret "red" subversion of U.S. society ‑ a mindless image which haunts the public consciousness even today. Imagined threats from front organizations and Fifth Columns brought further waves of tainted information. Thus the stage was set for the massive escalation of mistrust in any information not certified "pure" by the U.S. government. Since it could have the field to itself, all competitors were labeled un-American.
What the government would do with this power was not yet clear, but its existence and potential for abuse could not be denied‑an incredible opportunity for any proponent of the Bernays school of manipulation.
Other trends in the years immediately preceding Pearl Harbor accelerated the information counter‑revolution. The growth of classification expanded the domain of U.S. secrecy and the ability of government officials to conceal or selectively leak information on behalf of their own political agendas. Loyalty oaths and security checks came into being, designed to eliminate disclosure of this same material.
"Subversive activities" and espionage, meanwhile, became top priorities for the U.S. government, justifying generalized surveillance of a population considered suspect. Covert intelligence activity would soon come to serve the information management of successive U.S. Administrations.
World War II and the New Disinformation
On the eve of its second crusade to save the world, the U.S. was also poised on the brink of a new information era. How secret its policies would become, to what extent it would adopt the techniques of deception, and how each of these would affect democratic decision‑making began to emerge as the war progressed. These questions were illuminated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially a civilian organization charged with the mission of promoting an understanding of the war to the world at large, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcilable differences over the nature and purpose of propaganda. The OSS victory in this struggle would foreshadow the growth of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth to be used as a covert instrument of Cold War policies against a new enemy‑the Soviet Union. But all that came later.
Elmer Davis, OWI Director and ex‑newsman, began WWII believing his agency should deal in facts, not opinion, disseminating truths to friend and enemy alike - something the BBC's wartime broadcasts were attempting to accomplish. But neither President Roosevelt nor the Army, Navy, and State Departments believed that the public had a right to know what was really going on. (Documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.) In any case, the war‑related bureaucracy remainedadamant about sharing information with the OWI, seriously undermining its mission.
Colonel William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, on the other hand, had an adventurer's enthusiasm for secret operations, dirty tricks, and disinformation of the crudest sort. Psychological warfare dominated the OSS approach to the war, though neither its costs nor its benefits to the American people were evaluated. Nor was truth considered a weapon of any potential.
Psychological warfare thus sold itself to the high command and the OWI was forced to adopt the methods of its competitor, subordinating all information projects to the expedient of winning the war. Interestingly, it was hardly this capitulation which influenced the course of the war, since the same methods of manipulation were carried to the extreme by the enemy‑the Goebbels approach to information.
By the time hostilities ended, the OWI had become a converted exponent of American power, its liberal one-world ideology long since subordinated to the commitment of U.S. involvement in every region of the world. Nowhere, their propaganda now claimed, could the U.S. "renounce its moral and ideological interests ... as a powerful and righteous nation."
In the OSS similar readjustments of priorities took place. Where once psychological warfare had at least been balanced by careful intelligence analysis to secure and interpret information, covert operations with their deceptive components of subverting and transforming facts became the new intelligence obsession.
In sum, a watershed had been reached. Information thereafter became Bernays's reality‑an "unseen mechanism" by which "intelligent minorities" shaped the opinions of the masses by deceiving them.
The Intelligence Era: Information Goes Underground
During the controversy surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Leslie Gelb, in charge of producing that voluminous and revealing report for the New York Times, commented on the continuing Cold War dedication to the philosophy of Bernays. "Most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment," he confirmed, "felt they had the right‑and beyond that the obligation‑to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it." The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense Secretary McNamara's press spokesman and a group of reporters in 1962: "It's inherent in the government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself," the aide argued.
The right to manipulate and the right to lie have had other post‑war companions: the right to plausibly deny; the right to a cover story; the right to conceal; and the need to know, a standard of classification that created another right, that of privileged access, with its step‑child, the right to selectively leak.
In analyzing the period since the atom bombs leveled the Japanese will to resist, it is as if the intelligence agencies had not yet heard that the war was over, and are still hiding in caves on some Washington atoll. Yet the patterns which have unfolded are a logical outcome of the wartime experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world‑wide conquest‑the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had no qualms about enlisting the support of their former enemies‑the Gehlen intelligence network of Nazi Germany.
Documents of some of the early proposals to set up the central intelligence unit‑the present CIA‑give a flavor of the crisis atmosphere with which they viewed the future struggle against the Soviet Union: "the task of detecting ... any developments which threaten the security of the world;" "to create a system in which every U. S. citizen who travels abroad . . . is a source of political intelligence;" "maintaining a constant check on foreign intelligence and propaganda, including propagandized U.S. citizens;" and "keep ... informed on political trends inside the U.S.... because state legislatures are peculiarly vulnerable to outside influences and would be a logical objective of foreign intelligence services. . . ." It is small wonder that the CIA's fears became self‑fulfilling prophesies.
Early CIA post‑war victories over communism‑such as the Italian elections of 1948, bought and paid for unwittingly by the American people‑brought about unholy alliances as distasteful as those the intelligence agencies had made with the war criminals, dealings with the Mafia and the attendant corruption which comes with sharing a dirty secret with thugs.
Later the Korean War produced an equally important impact on the spy operatives' own psychological outlook. Korea revived the atmosphere of total war, and created an "anything goes" philosophy directed against the "enemy." It meant, as General Maxwell Taylor argued in 1961 with reference to Fidel Castro, there would be a policy of "no long‑term living with ... dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti‑Americanism." Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954‑1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) were among the targets of covert operations encouraged by this philosophy.
But the strangest outcome of all in this web of deceit and disinformation was its coming home to roost. The intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be reported back to the U. S. and the government began to make policy decisions based on its own lies.
U.S. Disinformation Today
In spite of the long history of U.S. government propaganda, disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Administration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on whom to place the blame for the corruption of communications and dialogue. None of them wants the public to find the pea under the shell in this age‑old con game. President Reagan has naturally accused the Soviets of introducing the practice. The State Department has fostered the myth that disinformation is a Russian word. Dezinformatsiya, according to one of their busy little defectors, Ladislav Bittman, is the province of "Directorate A" of the KGB. Bittman, a Czech who left his country well over ten years ago, only recently began making these widely‑reported pronouncements about disinformation. The au courant darling of the right‑wing press, he conveniently confirms their suspicions about Soviet global intentions, while Reagan warns television audiences about Soviet‑style runways and Cuban‑style army barracks. The danger is that through incessant repetition of the word, disinformation has become synonymous in the minds of the American public with Soviet intelligence operations.
Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclusion as ‑the preceding sections have indicated. Disinformation has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military, and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end of World War 11, an integral part of national security which has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its practitioners. And as the activists of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA is its chief author.
Exposing Media Operations
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), in an investigation of CIA wrongdoing, revealed just a tiny portion of the extent of CIA penetration of world media. It was patently obvious to the investigators that only U.S. intelligence agencies could practice the art of disinformation on such a grand scale, given the extraordinary expense of manipulating, influencing, and outright purchasing of news throughout the world. The number of organizations and persons who must be paid off to place fictitious stories across the globe is staggering. Almost ten years ago the Church Committee said it had found evidence of more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes owned outright by the CIA. A 1977 New York Times expose uncovered another 50 media outlets run by the CIA, inside and outside the U.S., with more than twelve publishing houses responsible for over 1000 books, some 250 of them in English. Beyond the wholly‑owned proprietaries there were countless agents and friendly insiders working in media operations around the world. These exposures are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. The mind reels at what remained hidden from Congress and the New York Times and continues so to the present.
Estimates of the portion of the U.S. intelligence budget ‑ kept secret from the American people and Congress ‑devoted to propaganda range from a few to many billions of dollars a year. An extremely conservative guess in the December 1981 Defense Electronics put the overall U.S. intelligence budget for that year at $70 billion, of which about $ 10 billion, they said, went to the CIA. Media specialists have estimated that at least one third of the CIA's budget is devoted each year to the spread of disinformation, conservatively placing CIA covert media manipulation alone for that year at almost three and a half billion dollars. None of this takes into account the myriad of income‑generating proprietaries owned by the CIA, firms which make a profit which is then poured back into more covert operations: CIA banks, holding companies, airlines, investment firms, and the like.
Anyone who has even a casual knowledge of the world hard currency situation knows that the Soviet Union does not have the kind of foreign exchange which billion dollar operations entail. Only the secret U.S. intelligence budget‑taken from unwitting American taxpayers‑can pay for inventing news on such a mammoth scale. And invent they do, as we shall see below in an examination of a few of their hysterical scenarios.
But perhaps the most chilling "overt" propaganda project of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.
This $85 million‑a‑year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations section, rivals the CIA's most ambitious media plans. It was quietly begun in January after a classified Executive Order was signed by President Reagan. This plan is discussed more fully in the conclusion below.
The second level of media activities of the U.S. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations‑are directed at influencing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December 1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by the CIA's charter and by the Executive Orders governing CIA behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the charter was systematically violated. But now under President Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the CIA can operate within the United States so long as what it does is not "intended" to influence public opinion domestically. Who or what determines CIA "intentions" is not specified, leaving a wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S. public opinion.
Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to cause "blowback," the situation wherein the U.S. media picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are false and emanate from U.S. intelligence in the first place. Blowback is very dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much CIA disinformation being spread that U. S. military intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. In other cases, the CIA itself performed as an anti‑intelligence agency in which the covert operators had to supply the information that the policy makers wanted. Government thus became the victim of its own disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGehee [Sheridan Square Publications, New York: 1983].)
One of the most graphic examples of an intentional blowback operation was cited by former CIA officer John Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies. In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the MPLA government forces in that country's war with South Africa, CIA propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire, came up with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Using an agent stringer for a wire service, the Agency had the story passed into the world media. Subsequently it was embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of several months, was a complete CIA fabrication.
Some covert media operations have been run on a very grand scale. One of the largest was Forum World Features, ostensibly a global feature‑news service based in London, but in fact a CIA operation from the beginning. When its cover was blown it was forced to suspend operations. Similarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phony documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread coverage these charges receive, the "proof" is astonishingly contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain was publicly denounced by the State Department as a Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one officer noted, "it fits the pattern of known Soviet behavior." The previous year, another document was called a Soviet forgery because it was "so good" it had to be a Soviet product. Periodically the government will call forth one of their stable of "defectors" to confirm that something is a forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question. Several short‑lived triumphs of the intelligence establishment show, however, that sometimes the people are not fooled, causing the press to reexamine their proffered themes. The State Department "White Paper" on Cuban aid to El Salvador, and the incredible Libyan "hit squad" saga are two examples. The White Paper, an unsuccessful attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin situation, was shown by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Philip Agee to have been based on government forgeries and mistranslations. The hit squad rumors which made headlines for several days disappeared‑from the country and from the news‑when Jack Anderson finally admitted he had been duped by his "intelligence sources."
Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level ‑ a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example‑will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader's Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of "exposes" by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.
These interconnections are by no means fortuitous. There is practically a revolving door policy from organization to organization, from the government, the CIA, to the "private" media, or the reversal of that process. The new director of VOA, Kenneth Tomlinson, for example, was formerly a Reader's Digest editor, who is hosted at blacktie parties by his old friend, McCarthyite Roy Cohn. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who works actively with several governments' security services, has a difficult time keeping his "journalism" and his spying separate. One of the reasons he was fired from Newsweek magazine was that he kept dossiers on the co‑workers whom he suspected of being KGB dupes. Robert Moss has also had a longtime relationship with the CIA, which financed his book on Chile. He too was "let go" from his job as editor of the London Economist's Foreign Report because his intelligence connections gave his columns a taint which could not be ignored. The Spike, a badly written novel by these two unsavory characters, presaged the disinformation era with all its ramifications.
(continued in next post)
Disinformation and Mass Deception:
Democracy as a Cover Story
Covert Action Information Bulletin #19
http://covertaction.org//content/view/172/75/ (http://covertaction.org//content/view/172/75/)
During World War 1, the atrocity story came into its own as an instrument of foreign policy. In those simpler days, governments could turn public opinion against the enemy with tales of individual brutality: the rape of a nun, the bayonetting of a baby, or the execution of a Red Cross nurse. Such propaganda externalized the issues and focused national attention on an appropriate scapegoat. Doubters or dissenters were swept aside in the patriotic fallout, in an emotional downpour that insisted, "Once at war, to reason is treason."
This crude propaganda, however, had a temporary, war-related quality which often foundered on its own exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information in peacetime just as in war; nor had deception, secrecy, and lying come to be so much a part of the national menu as to be swallowed whole like the junk food that satiates the public appetite. Today there is no better example of the corrupted circumstances that now confront the consumer of news than the undercover campaign of official disinformation about Cuba.
Having failed to restore its hegemony over Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion or in the long, secret war waged under the code name "Operation Mongoose," the United States Central Intelligence Agency recently stepped up its 20‑year psychological warfare operations to discredit and destroy the Cuban government and any other Latin American or Caribbean government which stands in ideological unity with them. Propaganda aimed at that small, struggling country intentionally manipulates emotions of horror, revulsion, and fear in the uninformed citizen of the Yankee Colossus. Cuba is falsely pictured by the U.S. as embracing in its foreign policy the contemporary apocalyptic trio: drugs, criminality, and terrorism ‑ a far more terrible spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public.
Cuba as scapegoat and Fidel Castro as the implacable enemy of world national security interests have become easy answers for the complex realities of hemispheric change. And the sophisticated techniques with which official information about Cuba is concealed, denied, created, regulated, shaped, and planted seem to have heightened public acceptance of the Big Lie.
While a shoot‑out at credibility gap might not rescue the truth about Cuba from the hands of its abductors, a historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least innoculate some against further ravages of this advancing affliction.
The Overt Era of Information Abuse, 1898‑1945
No one with any knowledge of governments would ever insist there was a utopian past. Governments have always monitored dissent to impose their version of events on the public consciousness, to control the circulation of hostile opinion, and to manage the news. Secrecy always had a place, as had executive privilege. But the First Amendment guarantees, as well as the separation and checking of powers, seemed designed to limit the U.S. government's inherent tendency to manipulate information for its own interest. But as we shall see, this is not the case.
During and after the Civil War, while not engaging in deliberate deception, the government nevertheless insisted on "codes of press behavior" (the same which we criticize UNESCO and Third World nations for daring to put forth in the New International Information Order) and could classify information as too poisonous to circulate if judged "incendiary," "seditious," "treasonable," "immoral," "indecent," or "obscene."
The buildup of the North American Empire, then, added a new dimension of danger for information. During the Spanish‑American War, the brutal military mop‑up against the "rebels" in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba involved secret planning, undercover operations, and premeditated cover-ups in the face of public and Congressional opposition.
It was the First World War, however, that led the U.S. to move beyond censorship and overt suppression into the heady realm of disinformation itself. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, to take an active part in disseminating and propagandizing an official point of view. To unite public opinion behind the war, Creel's CPI conducted "a fight for the mind of mankind." Fake intelligence suggesting that German spies were everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the "barbaric Huns." In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the State Department used selective information to "prove" Germany was funding American pacifist organizations.
The capacity for covert conduct also gained ground as U.S. military intelligence expanded its role in domestic surveillance, laying plans in 1920 for a secret, domestic, counter‑insurgency program aimed at radicals‑an authentic progenitor of the COINTELPRO operations of the later Hoover years. Anticipating the CIA mania for cover, U.S. intelligence also dispatched agents to Europe as members of the International Red Cross.
By the end of the war, the country had acquired an institutionalized intelligence system, initiated the classification of sensitive information, and bitten into the apple of deception. The Committee for Public Information left a legacy of experience for later generations of disinformationists to apply, if not to duplicate.
Public Relations Is Born As Disinformation
During two subsequent decades of peace in which the trauma of an economic collapse followed the delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations and its professional advocates.
Exemplified by Edward Bernays, a man who began his career as consultant to the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which terminated World War I and ended it as a hired hand for United Fruit Company in Latin America, public relations and its covert marketing strategies quickly seeped into the very core of American life. As Bernays cynically stated in a PR manual in 1928, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically."
The New Deal Thirties witnessed further assaults on the integrity of information. In the U.S., the realities of the depression inspired a militant labor union campaign for recognition and power, one in which the Communists participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement was vicious, projecting an image of it as the secret "red" subversion of U.S. society ‑ a mindless image which haunts the public consciousness even today. Imagined threats from front organizations and Fifth Columns brought further waves of tainted information. Thus the stage was set for the massive escalation of mistrust in any information not certified "pure" by the U.S. government. Since it could have the field to itself, all competitors were labeled un-American.
What the government would do with this power was not yet clear, but its existence and potential for abuse could not be denied‑an incredible opportunity for any proponent of the Bernays school of manipulation.
Other trends in the years immediately preceding Pearl Harbor accelerated the information counter‑revolution. The growth of classification expanded the domain of U.S. secrecy and the ability of government officials to conceal or selectively leak information on behalf of their own political agendas. Loyalty oaths and security checks came into being, designed to eliminate disclosure of this same material.
"Subversive activities" and espionage, meanwhile, became top priorities for the U.S. government, justifying generalized surveillance of a population considered suspect. Covert intelligence activity would soon come to serve the information management of successive U.S. Administrations.
World War II and the New Disinformation
On the eve of its second crusade to save the world, the U.S. was also poised on the brink of a new information era. How secret its policies would become, to what extent it would adopt the techniques of deception, and how each of these would affect democratic decision‑making began to emerge as the war progressed. These questions were illuminated in the dramatic struggle for power which occurred between the Office of War Information (OWI), essentially a civilian organization charged with the mission of promoting an understanding of the war to the world at large, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today's CIA. These two agencies had irreconcilable differences over the nature and purpose of propaganda. The OSS victory in this struggle would foreshadow the growth of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth to be used as a covert instrument of Cold War policies against a new enemy‑the Soviet Union. But all that came later.
Elmer Davis, OWI Director and ex‑newsman, began WWII believing his agency should deal in facts, not opinion, disseminating truths to friend and enemy alike - something the BBC's wartime broadcasts were attempting to accomplish. But neither President Roosevelt nor the Army, Navy, and State Departments believed that the public had a right to know what was really going on. (Documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act even suggest U.S. foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.) In any case, the war‑related bureaucracy remainedadamant about sharing information with the OWI, seriously undermining its mission.
Colonel William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, on the other hand, had an adventurer's enthusiasm for secret operations, dirty tricks, and disinformation of the crudest sort. Psychological warfare dominated the OSS approach to the war, though neither its costs nor its benefits to the American people were evaluated. Nor was truth considered a weapon of any potential.
Psychological warfare thus sold itself to the high command and the OWI was forced to adopt the methods of its competitor, subordinating all information projects to the expedient of winning the war. Interestingly, it was hardly this capitulation which influenced the course of the war, since the same methods of manipulation were carried to the extreme by the enemy‑the Goebbels approach to information.
By the time hostilities ended, the OWI had become a converted exponent of American power, its liberal one-world ideology long since subordinated to the commitment of U.S. involvement in every region of the world. Nowhere, their propaganda now claimed, could the U.S. "renounce its moral and ideological interests ... as a powerful and righteous nation."
In the OSS similar readjustments of priorities took place. Where once psychological warfare had at least been balanced by careful intelligence analysis to secure and interpret information, covert operations with their deceptive components of subverting and transforming facts became the new intelligence obsession.
In sum, a watershed had been reached. Information thereafter became Bernays's reality‑an "unseen mechanism" by which "intelligent minorities" shaped the opinions of the masses by deceiving them.
The Intelligence Era: Information Goes Underground
During the controversy surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Leslie Gelb, in charge of producing that voluminous and revealing report for the New York Times, commented on the continuing Cold War dedication to the philosophy of Bernays. "Most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment," he confirmed, "felt they had the right‑and beyond that the obligation‑to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it." The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense Secretary McNamara's press spokesman and a group of reporters in 1962: "It's inherent in the government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself," the aide argued.
The right to manipulate and the right to lie have had other post‑war companions: the right to plausibly deny; the right to a cover story; the right to conceal; and the need to know, a standard of classification that created another right, that of privileged access, with its step‑child, the right to selectively leak.
In analyzing the period since the atom bombs leveled the Japanese will to resist, it is as if the intelligence agencies had not yet heard that the war was over, and are still hiding in caves on some Washington atoll. Yet the patterns which have unfolded are a logical outcome of the wartime experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, control, or totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary. Stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world‑wide conquest‑the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had no qualms about enlisting the support of their former enemies‑the Gehlen intelligence network of Nazi Germany.
Documents of some of the early proposals to set up the central intelligence unit‑the present CIA‑give a flavor of the crisis atmosphere with which they viewed the future struggle against the Soviet Union: "the task of detecting ... any developments which threaten the security of the world;" "to create a system in which every U. S. citizen who travels abroad . . . is a source of political intelligence;" "maintaining a constant check on foreign intelligence and propaganda, including propagandized U.S. citizens;" and "keep ... informed on political trends inside the U.S.... because state legislatures are peculiarly vulnerable to outside influences and would be a logical objective of foreign intelligence services. . . ." It is small wonder that the CIA's fears became self‑fulfilling prophesies.
Early CIA post‑war victories over communism‑such as the Italian elections of 1948, bought and paid for unwittingly by the American people‑brought about unholy alliances as distasteful as those the intelligence agencies had made with the war criminals, dealings with the Mafia and the attendant corruption which comes with sharing a dirty secret with thugs.
Later the Korean War produced an equally important impact on the spy operatives' own psychological outlook. Korea revived the atmosphere of total war, and created an "anything goes" philosophy directed against the "enemy." It meant, as General Maxwell Taylor argued in 1961 with reference to Fidel Castro, there would be a policy of "no long‑term living with ... dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti‑Americanism." Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954‑1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) were among the targets of covert operations encouraged by this philosophy.
But the strangest outcome of all in this web of deceit and disinformation was its coming home to roost. The intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be reported back to the U. S. and the government began to make policy decisions based on its own lies.
U.S. Disinformation Today
In spite of the long history of U.S. government propaganda, disinformation, and lying, each succeeding Administration insists it is clean, inventing alternative sources on whom to place the blame for the corruption of communications and dialogue. None of them wants the public to find the pea under the shell in this age‑old con game. President Reagan has naturally accused the Soviets of introducing the practice. The State Department has fostered the myth that disinformation is a Russian word. Dezinformatsiya, according to one of their busy little defectors, Ladislav Bittman, is the province of "Directorate A" of the KGB. Bittman, a Czech who left his country well over ten years ago, only recently began making these widely‑reported pronouncements about disinformation. The au courant darling of the right‑wing press, he conveniently confirms their suspicions about Soviet global intentions, while Reagan warns television audiences about Soviet‑style runways and Cuban‑style army barracks. The danger is that through incessant repetition of the word, disinformation has become synonymous in the minds of the American public with Soviet intelligence operations.
Historical facts, however, point to quite another conclusion as ‑the preceding sections have indicated. Disinformation has clearly been part of the U.S. intelligence, military, and Cold War offensive waged in peacetime since the end of World War 11, an integral part of national security which has no clear relationship to truth or the beliefs of its practitioners. And as the activists of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA is its chief author.
Exposing Media Operations
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), in an investigation of CIA wrongdoing, revealed just a tiny portion of the extent of CIA penetration of world media. It was patently obvious to the investigators that only U.S. intelligence agencies could practice the art of disinformation on such a grand scale, given the extraordinary expense of manipulating, influencing, and outright purchasing of news throughout the world. The number of organizations and persons who must be paid off to place fictitious stories across the globe is staggering. Almost ten years ago the Church Committee said it had found evidence of more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes owned outright by the CIA. A 1977 New York Times expose uncovered another 50 media outlets run by the CIA, inside and outside the U.S., with more than twelve publishing houses responsible for over 1000 books, some 250 of them in English. Beyond the wholly‑owned proprietaries there were countless agents and friendly insiders working in media operations around the world. These exposures are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. The mind reels at what remained hidden from Congress and the New York Times and continues so to the present.
Estimates of the portion of the U.S. intelligence budget ‑ kept secret from the American people and Congress ‑devoted to propaganda range from a few to many billions of dollars a year. An extremely conservative guess in the December 1981 Defense Electronics put the overall U.S. intelligence budget for that year at $70 billion, of which about $ 10 billion, they said, went to the CIA. Media specialists have estimated that at least one third of the CIA's budget is devoted each year to the spread of disinformation, conservatively placing CIA covert media manipulation alone for that year at almost three and a half billion dollars. None of this takes into account the myriad of income‑generating proprietaries owned by the CIA, firms which make a profit which is then poured back into more covert operations: CIA banks, holding companies, airlines, investment firms, and the like.
Anyone who has even a casual knowledge of the world hard currency situation knows that the Soviet Union does not have the kind of foreign exchange which billion dollar operations entail. Only the secret U.S. intelligence budget‑taken from unwitting American taxpayers‑can pay for inventing news on such a mammoth scale. And invent they do, as we shall see below in an examination of a few of their hysterical scenarios.
But perhaps the most chilling "overt" propaganda project of the U.S. government to date is the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.
This $85 million‑a‑year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations section, rivals the CIA's most ambitious media plans. It was quietly begun in January after a classified Executive Order was signed by President Reagan. This plan is discussed more fully in the conclusion below.
The second level of media activities of the U.S. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations‑are directed at influencing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December 1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by the CIA's charter and by the Executive Orders governing CIA behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the charter was systematically violated. But now under President Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the CIA can operate within the United States so long as what it does is not "intended" to influence public opinion domestically. Who or what determines CIA "intentions" is not specified, leaving a wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S. public opinion.
Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to cause "blowback," the situation wherein the U.S. media picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are false and emanate from U.S. intelligence in the first place. Blowback is very dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much CIA disinformation being spread that U. S. military intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at CIA Headquarters. In other cases, the CIA itself performed as an anti‑intelligence agency in which the covert operators had to supply the information that the policy makers wanted. Government thus became the victim of its own disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGehee [Sheridan Square Publications, New York: 1983].)
One of the most graphic examples of an intentional blowback operation was cited by former CIA officer John Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies. In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the MPLA government forces in that country's war with South Africa, CIA propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire, came up with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Using an agent stringer for a wire service, the Agency had the story passed into the world media. Subsequently it was embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of several months, was a complete CIA fabrication.
Some covert media operations have been run on a very grand scale. One of the largest was Forum World Features, ostensibly a global feature‑news service based in London, but in fact a CIA operation from the beginning. When its cover was blown it was forced to suspend operations. Similarly, the CIA owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phony documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread coverage these charges receive, the "proof" is astonishingly contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain was publicly denounced by the State Department as a Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one officer noted, "it fits the pattern of known Soviet behavior." The previous year, another document was called a Soviet forgery because it was "so good" it had to be a Soviet product. Periodically the government will call forth one of their stable of "defectors" to confirm that something is a forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question. Several short‑lived triumphs of the intelligence establishment show, however, that sometimes the people are not fooled, causing the press to reexamine their proffered themes. The State Department "White Paper" on Cuban aid to El Salvador, and the incredible Libyan "hit squad" saga are two examples. The White Paper, an unsuccessful attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin situation, was shown by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Philip Agee to have been based on government forgeries and mistranslations. The hit squad rumors which made headlines for several days disappeared‑from the country and from the news‑when Jack Anderson finally admitted he had been duped by his "intelligence sources."
Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level ‑ a feature item on VOA about Cuba for example‑will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader's Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of "exposes" by Moss and de Borchgrave or Daniel James in some reactionary tabloid like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, repeating one another's allegations as "expert witnesses."
After that they are given credibility by the "respectable" Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.
These interconnections are by no means fortuitous. There is practically a revolving door policy from organization to organization, from the government, the CIA, to the "private" media, or the reversal of that process. The new director of VOA, Kenneth Tomlinson, for example, was formerly a Reader's Digest editor, who is hosted at blacktie parties by his old friend, McCarthyite Roy Cohn. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who works actively with several governments' security services, has a difficult time keeping his "journalism" and his spying separate. One of the reasons he was fired from Newsweek magazine was that he kept dossiers on the co‑workers whom he suspected of being KGB dupes. Robert Moss has also had a longtime relationship with the CIA, which financed his book on Chile. He too was "let go" from his job as editor of the London Economist's Foreign Report because his intelligence connections gave his columns a taint which could not be ignored. The Spike, a badly written novel by these two unsavory characters, presaged the disinformation era with all its ramifications.
(continued in next post)