With Entry of CIA-Funded Group, US Deepens Involvement in Mindanao Conflict (2009)22 september 2017
MANILA — The engagement of The Asia Foundation in the on-and-off peace negotiations between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signals the further deepening involvement of the United States in the Mindanao conflict.
Announced in a news release dated Nov. 13, The Asia Foundation’s involvement in the GRP-MILF peace negotiations will take the form of membership in the International Contact Group (ICG), which is “tasked with supporting the next stage of peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the MILF to end conflict in Mindanao.” Asia Foundation, the news release states, “will network with stakeholders in the negotiation, coordinate with the facilitator (Malaysia) to provide research input, and give feedback and advice for the peace process.”
US involvement in the GRP-MILF peace negotiations began in 2003 through the Philippine Facilitation Project (PFP) launched by the US Institute of Peace (USIP).
The USIP is an institute governed by a “bipartisan” board of directors whose members are appointed by the US president and confirmed by the US Senate, and four ex-officio members: the secretaries of state and defense, the president of the National Defense University, and the president of the institute.
In an 2007 report, “Toward Peace in the Southern Philippines: A Summary and Assessment of the Philippine Facilitation Project, 2003-2007”, G. Eugene Martin and Astrid Tuminez – PFP’s executive director and senior research associate, respectively – wrote that the US Department of State in 2003 engaged the USIP to facilitate a peace agreement between the GRP and the MILF.
“The State Department felt that the Institute’s status as a quasi-governmental… player would allow it to engage the parties more broadly than an official government entity could,” Martin and Tuminez wrote. “To accomplish its mandate, USIP launched the Philippine Facilitation Project…”
The PFP organized and facilitated a series of workshops, for members of both the GRP and MILF peace panels, on ancestral domain, which was first discussed only in 2004 but even then was emerging as the most contentious issue in the negotiations. These initiatives by the PFP produced what became the highly contentious Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MoA-AD).
Ancestral Domain and Deadlocks in the Talks
The GRP had consistently insisted that areas to be covered by the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity, the name of the territory that the MILF wanted to create, other than the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) should be subjected to a plebiscite. This repeatedly led to an impasse in the peace negotiations with the group. The impasse was broken only in November 2007, when the GRP and the MILF reached an agreement defining the land and maritime areas to be covered by the proposed BJE. Things seemed to be looking up after that, prompting lawyer Eid Kabalu, MILF spokesman, to make media statements to the effect that they expected a final agreement to be signed by mid-2008. But all hopes for forging a peace pact between the GRP and the MILF were dashed in December that year, when the peace talks hit a snag following the government’s insistence that the ancestral domain issue be settled through “constitutional processes” – a phrase which, according to MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal, had been inserted into the agreement without their consent.
The December 2007 deadlock on ancestral domain was followed by a series of clashes between government troops and the MILF, as well as a partial pullout of the Malaysian contingent from the International Monitoring Team (IMT), which is tasked with monitoring the implementation of agreements related to the peace talks, as well as development projects in the areas of conflict.
Even as the GRP-MILF conflict showed signs of re-escalation, however, both sides were talking about the possibility of signing an agreement on ancestral domain sometime in 2008.
Eventually, the series of ancestral domain workshops organized and facilitated by the PFP produced a draft Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MoA-AD) outlining the scope of the proposed BJE. The ARMM was to serve as the core of the new administrative region. The residents of the other areas sought to be covered by the BJE were to vote in a plebiscite sometime this year.
The MoA-AD was supposed to be signed by the GRP and the MILF on Aug. 5, 2008, but the Supreme Court a day before issued a temporary restraining order on its signing following a petition by North Cotabato Vice Gov. Emmanuel Piñol, supported by another petition filed by Zamboanga City Mayor Celso Lobregat and two congressmen. The Supreme Court later ruled that the MoA-AD is unconstitutional.
The non-signing of the MoA-AD gave rise to a re-escalation of armed confrontations between government troops and the MILF in Lanao del Norte, North Cotabato, and Maguindanao –- provinces known to be strongholds of the MILF. Following the outbreak of renewed hostilities, the government ordered a manhunt for Abdurahman Macapaar a. k. a. Commander Bravo, Ameril Ombra Cato, and Alim Pangalian – who were dubbed as “rogue MILF commanders” and leaders of “lost commands”.
The re-escalated conflict led to the displacements of hundreds of thousands in Mindanao.
Enter Asia Foundation
On Sept. 15 this year, the GRP and MILF panels agreed on the formation of an ICG that will provide “critical support” to the peace negotiations in the wake of the escalating conflict. This is where The Asia Foundation comes in.
The Asia Foundation’s entry into the ICG, however, is merely a new phase in its involvement in the Mindanao conflict.
“For more than 30 years, (the) Asia Foundation has led successful programs in Mindanao and has identified peace and development there as among the highest priorities for the Philippines,” reads its Nov. 13 news release. “Through its resident office in Manila, opened in 1954, and its satellite offices in Cotabato City and Zamboanga City, the Foundation has been working with local governments, civil society organizations, and private sector partners throughout Mindanao. The Foundation’s programs address issues related to conflict and development in Mindanao and building constructive relationships between Manila and Mindanao. Joining the ICG will enable the Foundation to play a direct, landmark role in the formal GRP-MILF peace process.
“The Asia Foundation supports a variety of activities, drawing on its long-standing relationships with many actors throughout Mindanao, and utilizes its on-the-ground presence to work toward peace and development in the region.”
CIA Front
Founded in 1951 as the Committee for Free Asia, The Asia Foundation “was unquestionably a product of the Cold War,” according to Japanese-American writer and researcher Kimberly Gould Ashizawa. In her 2006 essay “The Evolving Role of American Foundations in Japan: An Institutional Perspective,” Ishikawa cites a 1983 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which states that The Asia Foundation “was an ostensibly private body… sanctioned by the National Security Council and, with the knowledge of congressional oversight committees, supported with covert indirect (Central Intelligence Agency) funding.”
“In 1954, when it became apparent that a more long-term strategy to promote democratic development was needed, the Committee reorganized itself into a public charity called (the) Asia Foundation. The CIA remained the primary source of funds, but the anticommunist rhetoric diminished and the programming began to focus on indigenous needs in Asia and initiatives on education, civil society, and international exchanges.”
Gabriel Kaplan, who helped form the Committee for Free Asia that later became The Asia Foundation, had work closely with CIA operative Edward Lansdale in the US efforts to put Ramon Magsaysay to the Philippine presidency.
The CIA in the Philippines and Elsewhere
Roland Simbulan, a professor of development studies and public management at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Manila and an expert on Philippine-US relations, is instructive in his study of the CIA’s historical role in Philippine and international politics. In his 2000 paper, “The CIA’s Hidden History in the Philippines,” Simbulan writes that:
“Doing covert action that undermines Philippine national sovereignty and genuine democracy in order to prop up the tiny pro-US oligarchical minority that has cornered most of the wealth in their poor country is what the CIA is all about and is the real reason for its existence. It is no longer just the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence which is officially its mandate under the US National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA.
“The CIA in the Philippines has engaged in countless covert operations for intervention and dirty tricks particularly in Philippine domestic politics…”
In the same paper, Simbulan mentions his 1996 interview with former CIA agent Ralph McGehee and other former CIA operatives assigned to the Manila station – the main CIA station in Southeast Asia – who, he said, confirmed to him that The Asia Foundation was among several agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), through which CIA funds were channeled ostensibly for civic projects.
US Economic Interests
Moreover, the officers and trustees of The Asia Foundation — led by its chairman, Michael Armacost, the former US ambassador to the Philippines — are a mix of leaders and individuals representing American political and economic interests.
The involvement of a group that represents US corporate and economic interests underscores the continuing attractiveness of Mindanao to foreign business interests. As it is, Mindanao is one of the key areas of US investments in the Philippines, with the US government pouring in much of its aid money, through the USAid and such initiatives as the Growth with Equity in Mindanao, to identify areas of investments in the region. (Bulatlat.com)
Alexander Martin Remollino November 14, 2009
Find this story at 14 November 2009
© 2016 Bulatlat.com
Documents describe attempts to arrange for continued support of The Asia Foundation after public claims its funding by the CIA had ended.22 september 2017
These documents are from the U.S. State Department, Johnson Administration, Foreign Relations 1964-1968, Volume X, National Security Policy, published 15 August 2002.
These describe attempts to arrange for continued support of The Asia Foundation after public claims its funding by the CIA had ended.
Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9062.htm
132. Memorandum From the Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee/1/
/1/Source: Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, Minutes of 303 Committee, 6/22/66. Secret; Eyes Only.
Washington, June 22, 1966.
SUBJECT
The Asia Foundation: Proposed Improvements in Funding Procedures
1. Summary
The Asia Foundation (TAF), a Central Intelligence Agency proprietary, was established in 1954 to undertake cultural and educational activities on behalf of the United States Government in ways not open to official U.S. agencies. Over the past twelve years TAF has accomplished its assigned mission with increasing effectiveness and has, in the process, become a widely-known institution, in Asia and the United States. TAF is now experiencing inquiries regarding its sources of funds and connections with the U.S. Government from the aggressive leftist publication, Ramparts./2/ It is conceivable that such inquiries will lead to a published revelation of TAF’s CIA connection. In the present climate of national dissent and in the wake of recent critical press comment on CIA involvement with American universities, we feel a public allegation that CIA funds and controls TAF would be seized upon, with or without proof, and magnified beyond its actual significance to embarrass the Administration and U.S. national interests at home and abroad. Some immediate defensive and remedial measures are required [2-1/2 lines of source text not declassified].
/2/Regarding a later revelation by the magazine, see footnote 2, Document 176.
[3 paragraphs (11 lines of source text) not declassified]
In the long run, we feel TAF’s vulnerability to press attack can be reduced and its viability as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy in Asia can be assured by relieving it of its total dependence upon covert funding support from this Agency. In the belief that TAF contributes substantially to U.S. national interests in Asia, and can continue to contribute if its viability is sustained, CIA requests the Committee’s study and attention to possible alternative means of supporting it.
[6 pages of source text not declassified]
Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9062.htm
134. Memorandum for the Record/1/
/1/Source: Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, Minutes of 303 Committee, 8/5/66. Secret; Eyes Only. Prepared by Jessup on July 9. Copies were sent to U. Alexis Johnson, Vance, and Helms.
Washington, July 8, 1966.
SUBJECT
Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 8 July 1966
PRESENT
Mr. Rostow, Ambassador Johnson, Mr. Vance, and Mr. Helms
Mr. Bill Moyers and Mr. Cord Meyer were present for Items 1 and 2
[Here follow a list of additional participants and discussion of agenda item 1.]
2. The Asia Foundation
a. Mr. Meyer capsuled the substantial accomplishments of The Asia Foundation and the endorsements it has received throughout the years. Ambassador Johnson supported these statements. Mr. Meyer pointed specifically to the vulnerability of The Asia Foundation cover and how a gadfly publication such as Ramparts had the capability to inflict considerable damage and apparently that was their intention.
[1 paragraph (4 lines of source text) not declassified]
c. There was some discussion of the real costs of a full endowment solution. Mr. Vance felt that the sum requested was too small. The others agreed that Mr. Meyer was instructed to arrive at a more appropriate figure which could then be checked with the principals for a telephonic vote./2/
/2/[text not declassified] (Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, Minutes of 303 Committee, 9/15/66) [text not declassified] (Memorandum to Rostow, October 6; Johnson Library, National Security File, Intelligence File, CIA Budgets & 303 Committee, Box 2) [text not declassified]
d. Mr. Meyer then went on to point out that this was only one conspicuous example of a problem which would grow larger, and he specifically mentioned the need of a new institution created by legislation and based on [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] lines which could provide general support grants to this and similar organizations whose activities are of proven value to the United States abroad.
e. He cited a speech by Eugene R. Black at the recent Wesleyan University commencement dealing with grants in aid./3/ It was emphasized that substantial private contributions and those of foundations are inhibited, if not precluded, by CIA association with such organizations as The Asia Foundation. Mr. Rostow pointed out that the CIA had many times taken up the slack when other agencies were unable to come up with funds. Mr. Meyer’s suggestion was greeted with considerable interest, and Mr. Helms suggested that any committee on this subject be headed in the White House in order to give it sufficient impetus. Mr. Moyers agreed to approach Mr. Harry McPherson/4/ and urged that talks continue between Mr. Meyer, Mr. McPherson and other interested parties./5/ It was noted that although the committee would not operate under 303 aegis, its determinations and findings might well have a bearing on future proposals before the 303 Committee.
/3/A Presidential adviser on financial matters and former president of the World Bank, Black proposed the creation of an American council for education and industrial arts to manage some of the nation’s overseas programs. (The New York Times, June 5, 1966, p. 38)
/4/Special Counsel to the President.
/5/In his October 6 memorandum (see footnote 2 above), Jessup also reported that progress among Moyers, McPherson, and Thomas L. Farmer (AID General Counsel) to create a new institution to deal with such funding “has been extremely slow with the press of other business.”
[Here follows discussion of other agenda items.]
Peter Jessup
Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9098.htm
176. Memorandum From the Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee/1/
/1/Source: Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, 303 Committee, May 27, 1967. Secret; Eyes Only. No drafting information appears on the memorandum, which forms Tab A-1 to the proposed agenda for the May 27 meeting of the 303 Committee.
Washington, April 12, 1967.
SUBJECT
Termination of Covert Funding Relationship with The Asia Foundation
1. Summary
Pursuant to the recommendations of the Katzenbach Committee, as approved by the President of the United States,/2/ the Director of Central Intelligence has ordered that covert funding of The Asia Foundation (TAF) shall be terminated at the earliest practicable opportunity. In anticipation of TAF’s disassociation from the Agency the Board of Trustees on March 21, 1967, released to the American and foreign press a carefully limited statement of admission of past CIA support./3/ In so doing the Trustees sought to delimit the effects of an anticipated exposure of Agency support by the American press and, if their statement or some future expose does not seriously impair TAF’s acceptability in Asia, to continue operating in Asia with overt private and official support. To date, the March 21 statement has produced no serious threat to TAF operations in Asia, and the Trustees are now prepared to attempt to acquire the necessary support for TAF to go on as a private institution, partially supported by overt U.S. Government grants. This will take time and TAF meanwhile faces the immediate problem of the need for funds during FY 1968.
/2/On February 15 President Johnson appointed a committee composed of Under Secretary of State Katzenbach (Chairman), Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John W. Gardner, and Director of Central Intelligence Helms to inquire into the relationships between government agencies and private organizations operating abroad. The panel was established in response to press reports, particularly Sol Stern’s article, “A Short Account of International Student Politics & the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.,” Ramparts magazine, 5 (March 1967), pp. 29-39, of CIA secret funding over the years of private organizations, which became involved in confrontations with Communist-influenced groups at international gatherings. (The New York Times, February 16, 1967, pp. 1, 26) Text of an interim report, February 22, as well as the final report of the Katzenbach Committee, March 29, are in American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1967, pp. 1214-1217. For text of the President’s statement accepting the committee’s proposed statement of policy and directing all agencies of the U.S. Government to implement it fully, see Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967, pp. 403-404.
/3/This statement is summarized and quoted in part in The New York Times, March 22, 1967, p. 15.
TAF’s present resources are sufficient to sustain operations through July 31, 1967, the end of the Foundation’s fiscal year. [4-1/2 lines of source text not declassified] To meet these obligations, and to allow TAF management to plan rationally for FY 1968, immediate firm commitments must be acquired on future levels and sources of support. This Agency is prepared to provide whatever assistance remains within its authority and competence to offer. To undertake further necessary action, however, the Agency requests that the Committee now designate the Agency or official to whom TAF management should look for future guidance and direction with respect to United States Government interests.
2. Problem
Immediate Requirements
a. With the encouragement and support of CIA, and the guidance of other elements of the United States Government, the Trustees of The Asia Foundation on March 21, 1967, publicly declared that TAF is a private organization; that its Trustees have accepted funds from CIA intermediaries in the past and, by inference, can no longer do so; and that they fully intend to continue programming in Asia with support from both private and overt official sources. It is imperative that this declaration be supported by normal or near-normal TAF operations in Asia over the months ahead. [4 lines of source text not declassified] It has further authorized the Trustees to seek pledges of support from heads of private foundations and other prospective private donors; but, as a practical matter, no immediate results can be anticipated.
[4 paragraphs (22 lines of source text) not declassified]
Long-range Requirements
c. The above immediate arrangements would insure the continuance of TAF programs at near-normal levels during the critical year ahead, during which time TAF Trustees and appropriate agencies of the U.S. Government can endeavor to arrange adequate permanent sources of support from private and official sources for FY 1969 and beyond. If by December 31, 1967, it becomes apparent that adequate support is not forthcoming, the Agency recommends that serious consideration be given to phasing down or terminating the Foundation.
[Here follow paragraphs 3. “Factors Bearing on the Problem,” and 4. “Coordination.”]
5. Recommendation
The Agency recommends that actions proposed in paragraphs one and two above be approved.
Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9098.htm
180. Memorandum for the Record/1/
/1/Source: Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, 303 Committee, May 27, 1967. Secret; Eyes Only. Drafted on May 31.
Washington, May 27, 1967.
SUBJECT
Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 27 May 1967
PRESENT
Mr. Rostow, Ambassador Kohler, Mr. Vance, and Mr. Helms
Admiral Taylor was present for all items.
Mr. Cord Meyer was present for Item 1.
Mr. Charles Schultze was present for Items 1 and 2.
Mr. Donald Jamison was present for Item 3.
1. The Asia Foundation
a. In the discussion of the future of The Asia Foundation,/2/ the following points were made: The principals and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget felt that it was wiser to transfer [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] in its entirety in a secure manner to the Foundation’s account rather than filter portions through AID or State at this time.
/2/For the CIA paper that was the basis of discussion of this issue, see Document 176.
b. Ambassador Kohler agreed that the State Department would nominate a senior official to undertake the responsibility of liaison to tide the Foundation through its difficult realignment period and set it on its path to self-sufficiency in 1969. Mr. Rostow suggested the name of Ambassador Winthrop Brown (if his new responsibilities would permit an added chore). Mr. Meyer indicated that such a person would have the full cooperation of a CIA officer thoroughly conversant with the project.
c. It was fully agreed that the Foundation was definitely in the national interest and should be protected and nurtured.
d. Mr. Schultze pointed out that in the future TAF would have to count on multifarious sources and, regardless of the results of the Rusk Committee findings, there never would be a single solution. He also indicated that, [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] a proper husbanding of resources should leave the Foundation with sufficient assets to face the future in 1969. He also wanted it emphasized that the Foundation would be competing for federal funds with other worthy causes.
[Here follow agenda items 2-5.]
Peter Jessup
Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/x/9101.htm
209. Memorandum From the Deputy Director of Coordination, Bureau of Intelligence and Research (Trueheart) to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Bundy)/1/
/1/Source: Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, 303 Committee, January-June 1968. Secret; Eyes Only.
Washington, June 27, 1968.
SUBJECT
Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 21 June 1968
The Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 21 June 1968, contained the following item:
“7. The Asia Foundation
a. Mr. Meyer called to the committee’s attention the financial predicament of The Asia Foundation, [1 line of source text not declassified]. Mr. Rostow felt that the Board of Directors contained some movers and shakers and wondered if they had done all they could to raise money in the private sector. He also felt that both State and AID should be told of the relative high priority of this project and should not be allowed to treat it as a routine item.
b. Mr. Bohlen indicated that he would discuss the matter with William Bundy and a meeting at State had been scheduled on The Asia Foundation for Thursday, 27 June 1968./2/
/2/No record of this meeting has been found.
c. [3-1/2 lines of source text not declassified] Since State and/or AID support may or may not constitute line items in their respective budgets, this is susceptible to congressional cuts. Thus, no one can accurately predict what, if any, federal monies will be allocated; this completes the vicious circle with potential Foundation support remaining in the wings until the picture is clearer.
d. If there were deep sighs for the good old days of straight covert funding, they were not audible due to the hum of the air conditioner in the White House Situation Room.”
15 August 2002
Find this document at 15 August 2002
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Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A. (1977)22 september 2017
Not long after :Cohn Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist’, arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as American Ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest that was floating around the Asian subcontinent.
The following oracle is bused on rcporting by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B.Treaster. It was written by Mr. Crewd son.
“It had a level of intellectual and political competence that was sub‐zero,” Mr. Galbraith recalled in an interview. “It would make.you yearn for the political sophistication of The National Enquirer.”
Though an English‐language publicaI ion, “it was only in some approximation to English,” he said. ‘The political damage it did was nothing compared to the literary damage.”
Then the new Ambassador discovered that Quest was being published with money from the Central Intelligence Agency. At his direction the C.I.A. closed it clown.
Continue reading the main story
Though perhaps less distinguished than most, Quest was one of dozens of English and foreign language publications around the world that have been owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A. over the past three decades.
Although the C.I.A. has employed, dozens of American journalists working abroad, a three‐month inquiry by a team of reporters and researchers for The New York Times has determined that, with a few notable exceptions, they were not used by the agency to further its worldwide propaganda campaign,
In its persistent efforts to snape world opinion, the C.I.A. has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various limes had some control.
A decade ago, when the agency’s corn
C.I.A.: Secret Shaper Of Public Opinion Second of a Series
munications empire was at its peak, embraced more than SOO news and public information organizations and individuals, According to one C.I.A. official, they ranged in importance “from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.”
Although the network was known officially as the “Propaganda Assets Inventory,” to those inside the C.I.A. it was “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.” Frank G. Wisner, who is now dead, was the first chief of the agency’s covert action staff.
Like the Mighty Wurlitzer
Almost at the push of a button, or so Mr. Wisner liked to think, the “Wur‐1 litzer” became the means for orches‐1 tracing, in almost any language anywhere in the world, whatever tune the C.I.A.; was in a mood to hear.
Much of the Wurlitzer is now dismantled. Disclosures in 1967 of some of the C.I.A.’s financial ties to academic, cultural and publishing organizations resulted in some cutbacks, and more recent disclosures of the agency’s employment of American and foreign journalists have led to a phasing out of relationships with many of the individuals and news organizations overseas.
A smaller network of foreign journalists remains, and some undercover C.I.A. men may still roam the world, disguised as correspondents for obscure trade journals or business newsletters.
The C.I.A.’s propaganda operation was first headed by Tom Braden, who is now a syndicated columnist, and was run for many years by Cord Meyer Jr., a popular campus leader at Yale before he joined. the C.I.A.
Mr. Braden said in an interview that he had never really been sure that “there was anybody in charge” of the operation and that “Frank Wisner kind of handled it off the top of his head.” Mr. Meyer declined to talk about the operation.
However, several other former C.I.A. officers said that, while the agency was wary of telling its American journalistagents what to write, it never hesitated to manipulate the output of its foreignbased “assets.” Among those were number of English‐language publications read regularly by American correspondents abroad and by reporters and editors in the United States.
Most of the former officers said they had been concerned about but helpless to avoid the potential “blow‐back’—the possibility that the C.I.A. propaganda filtered through these assets, some of it purposely misleading or downright false,’ might be picked up by American reporters overseas and included in their dispatches to their publications at home.
The thread that linked the C.I.A. and its propaganda assets was money, and the money frequently bought a measure of editorial control, often complete control. In some instances the C.I.A. simply created a newspaper or news service and paid the bills through a bogus corporation. In other instances, directly or indirectly, the agency supplied capital to an entrepreneur or appeared at the right moment to bail out a financially troubled organization.
It gave them something to do,” one C.I.A. man said. “It’s the old business of Parkinson’s Law, a question of people having too much idle time and too much idle money. There were a whole lot of people who were underemployed.”
According to an agency official, the C.I.A. preferred where possible to put its money into an existing organization rather than found one of its own. “If a concern is a going concern,” the official said, “it’s a better cover, The important thing is to have an editor or someone else who’s receptive to your copy.”
Postwar Aid for Journals
The C.I.A., which evolved from the Office of Strategic Services of World War II, became involved in the mass communications field in the early postwar years, when agency officials became conterned that influential publications in ravaged Europe might succumb to the temptation of Communist money. Among the organizations subsidized in those early years, a C.I.A. source said, was the French journal Paris Match.
No one associated with Paris Match in that period could be reached for comment.
Recalling the concerns of those early clays, one former C.I.A. man said that :here was “hardly a left‐wing newspaper in Europe that wasn’t financed directly from Moscow.” He went on: “We knew when the courier was coming, we knew how much money he was bringing.”
One of the C.I.A.’s first major ventures was broadcasting, Although long suspected, it was reported definitively only a few years ago that until 1971 the agency supported both Radio Free Europe, which continues, with private financing, to broadcast to the nations of Eastern Europe, and Radio Liberty, which is beamed at the Soviet Union itself.
The C.I.A.’s participation in those operations was shielded from public view by two front groups, the Free Europe Committee and the American Committee for Liberation, both of which also engaged in a variety of lesser‐known propaganda operations.
The American Committee for Liberation financed a Munich‐based group, the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R., a publishing and research house that, among other• things, compiles the widely used reference volume “Who’s Who in the U.S.S.R.” The Free Europe Committee published the magazine East Europe, distributed in this country as well as abroad, and also operated the Free Europe Press Service.
Far more obscure were two other C.I.A. broadcasting ventures, Radio Free Asia and a rather tenuous operation known as Free Cuba Radio. Free Cuba Radio, established in the early 1960’s, did not broadcast from its own transmitters but purchased air time from a number of commercial radio stations in Florida and Louisiana.
Its propaganda broadcasts against the Government of Prime Minister Fidel Castro were carried over radio stations WMIE and WGBS in Miami, WKWF in Key West and WWL in New Orleans. They supplemented other C.I.A. broadcasts over a short‐wave station, WRUL, with offices in New York City, and Radio Swan, on a tiny island in the Caribbean.
The managements of those stations are largely changed, and it was not possible to establish whether any of them were aware of the source of the funds that paid for the programs. But sources in the Cuban community in Miami said it was known generally at the time that funds from some Federal agency were involved.
One motive for establishing the Free Cuba radio network, a former C.I.A. official said he recalled, was to have periods of air time available in advance in case Radio Swan, meant to be the main communications link for the Bay of Pigs invasion, was destroyed by saboteurs.
Radio Swan’s cover was thin enough to warrant such concern. The powerful station, whose broadcasts could be heard over much of the Western Hemisphere, was operated by a steamship company in New York that had not owned a steamship for some time.
Radio Swan was also besieged by potential advertisers eager to take advantage of its strong, clear signal. After months of turning customers away, the C.I.A. was finally forced to begin accepting some business to preserve what cover Radio Swan had left.
Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was an arm of the Committee for Free Asia, and the C.I.A. thought of it as the beginning of an operation in the Far East that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
The Committee for Free Asia, according to former C.I.A. officials, was founded as the Eastern counterpart of the Free Europe Committee. It later changed its name to the Asia Foundation. It still exists, though its ties to the C.I.A. were severed a decade ago.
The Asia Foundation was headed for years by the ‘ late Robert Blum, who, several sources said, resigned from the C.I.A. to take it over. The foundation provided cover for at least one C.I.A. operative and carried out a variety of media‐related ventures, including a program, begun in 1955, of selecting and paying the expenses of Asian journalists for a year of study in Harvard’s prestigious Neiman Fellowship program.
Emergency Airlift Fails
It was only after Radio Free Asia’s transmitters were operating, according to sources familiar with the case, that the C.I.A. realized that there were almost no radio receivers in private hands in mainland China. An emergency plan was drawn up.
Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia’s frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait.
Radio Free Asia went off the air in 1955.
The C.I.A.’s involvement in the field of publishing extended around the world and embraced a wide variety of periodicals, some of them obscure and many of them now defunct. In some instances, sources said, there was no effort to mold editorial policy despite sizable subsidies, but in others policy was virtually dictated.
One of the C.I.A.’s ventures in this country involved the subsidization of several publications whose editors and publishers had fled from Havana to Miami after the Castro Government came to power in 1959. The subsidies — in some cases they amounted to several million dollars — were passed to the publica Lions through a C.I.A. front in New York called Foreign Publications Inc.
The dozen recipients of these subsidies reportedly included Avance, El Mundo, El Prensa Libre, Bohemia and El Diario de las Americas. In addition, the C.I.A. is said to have financed AIP, a radio news agency in Miami that produced programs sent free of charge to more than 100 small stations in Central and Latin America.
The C.I.A. intially intended to clandestinely distribute copies of the subsidized publications into Cuba, but that plan was dropped after the Cuban exiles who had agreed to take them by boat refused in the last minutes to approach the Cuban shore.
The subsidies continued anyway, and the publications were widely read in the Cuban community in Miami and, in the case of Bohemia,‐a weekly magazine that reecived more than $3 million altogether, throughout Latin America as well.
The intelligence agency’s onetime support of Encounter, the British journal, has been reported, but agency sources said that the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the Paris‐based group through which the C.I.A. channeled the funds, also supported a number of other publications, many of them now out of business.
Ties to Agency Were Cut
The congress, which was founded in 1950 as a response to a conference of Soviet writers that year in Berlin, has since cut its ties to the American agency, reconstituted itself and changed its name. But during the years when was a C.I.A. conduit, it provided financial support to the French magazine Preuves, Forum in Austria, Der Monat in West Germany, El Mundo Nuevo in Latin America and, in India, the publications Thought and Quest.
In the United States, Atlas magazine, digest of the world press, occasionally used translators employed by the C.I.A.
African Forum and Africa Report were published with C.I.A. money passed to the American Society of African Culture and the African‐American Institute. In Stockholm the publication Argumenten received C.I.A. funds through a channel so complex that even its editor was unaware of the source of the money. So did Combate, a Latin American bimonthly.
In Nairobi, Kenya, the C.I.A. set up The East African Legal Digest, less as a propaganda organ than as a cover for one of its operatives. In the United States, the Asia Foundation published newspaper, The Asian Student, that was distributed to students from the Far East who were attending American universities.
In Saigon, the Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, modeled after the American version and financed entirely by the C.I.A., published a slick, expensively produced magazine that was distributed during the Vietnam War to the offices of all senators and representatives in Washington.
Among the more unusual of the C.I.A.’s relationships was the one it shared with a Princeton, N.J., concern called the Research Council. The council, founded by Hadley Cantril, the late chairman of the Princeton University psychology department, and his associate, Lloyd Free, derived nearly all its income from the C.I.A. in the decade in which it was active.
“They were considered an asset because we paid them so much money,” a former C.I.A. man said. Mr. Free confirmed that he 2nd Dr. Cantril, an acknowledged pioneer in public opinion polling, had “just sort of run” the council for the C.I.A.
The council’s activities, Mr. Free said, consisted of extensive public opinion surveys conducted in other countries on questions of interest to the C.I.A. Some, he said, were conducted inside Eastern Europe, the Soviet bloc.
The governments of the countries, Mr. Free said, “didn’t know anything about the C.I.A.” Nor, apparently, did Rutgers University Press, which published some of the results in a 1967 volume called “Pattern of Human Concerns.”
Book Publishing Ventures
The C.I.A.’s relationship with Frederick Praeger, the book publisher, has been reported in the past. But Praeger was only one of a number of publishing concerns, including some of the most prominent in the industry, that printed or distributed more than 1,000 volumes produced or subsidized in some way by the agency over the last three decades.
Some of the publishing houses were nothing more than C.I.A. “proprietaries.” Among these were Allied Pacific Printing, of Bombay, India, and the Asia Researcn Centre, one of several agency publishing ventures in Hong Kong, which was described by an agency source as “nothing but a couple of translators.”
Other, legitimate publishers that received C.I.A. subsidies according to former and current agency officials, were Franklin Books, a New York‐based house that specializes in translations of academic works, and Walker & Co., jointly owned by Samuel Sloan Walker Jr., a onetime vice president of the Free Europe Committee, and Samuel W. Meek, a retired executive of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and a man with close ties to the C.I.A.
A spokesman at Franklin confirmed that the publisher had received grants from the Asia Foundation and “from another small foundation for an African project, both of which were exposed in 1967 as being supported by C.I.A.” The spokesman added, “Franklin was unaware of that support then.”
Mr. Walker said through a secretary that his concern had never “printed books on behalf of the C.I.A. nor published any book from any source which was not worthy of publication on its merits.”
Other publishing houses that brought out books to which the C.I.A. had made editorial contributions included Charles Scribner’s Sons, which in 1951 published “The Yenan Way,” by Eudocio Ravines, from a translation supplied by William F. Buckley Jr., who was a C.I.A. agent for several years in the early 1950’s. Also in 1951, G. P. Putnam’s Sons published “Life and Death in Soviet Russia,” by Valentin Gonzalez, the famous “El Campesino” of the Spanish Civil War.
According to executives of both houses, Putnam and Scribner’s were unaware of any agency involvement in those books, as was Doubleday & Company, which in 1965 brought out, under the title “The Penkovskiy Papers,” what purported to be a diary kept by Col. Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet double agent. The book even used C.I.A. style in the transliteration of the colonel’s name.
Also unaware of the C.I.A. connection was Ballantine Books, which published a modest volume on Finland, “Study in Sisu,” written by Austin Goodrich, an undercover C.I.A. man who posed for years in Scandinavia as a freelance author researching a book about Finland.
Authorship Used as Cover
Another C.I.A. operative who employed the cover of a freelance author in search of a book was Edward S. Hunter, who roamed Central Asia for years collecting material for a work on Afghanistan that eventually was published by the prestigious house of Hodder & Stoughton of London.
Other C.I.A. men worked abroad while writing books, including Lee White, an employee of the Middle Eastern Division who wrote a biography of General Mohammed Neguib of Egypt, and Peter Matthiessen, the writer and naturalist who began work on a novel, “Partisans,” while with the C.I.A. in Paris from 1951 until 1953, where he also helped George Plimpton found The Paris Review.
As with Mr. Hunter, Mr. White and Mr. Matthiessen used their careers as authors only as covers for their intelligence activities. There is no evidence that the C.I.A. attempted to control what they wrote or that it atempted through Mr. Matthiessen to influence the Paris Review.
Several C.I.A. efforts in book publishing were well received by critics, and a few were commercial successes. “At least once,” according to a report by the Senate intelligence committee, “a book review for an agency book which appeared in The New York Times was written by a C.I.A. writer under contract” to the agency.
The report did not identify the volume or the reviewer, but the book is said to have been “Escape from Red China,” the story of a defector from China published by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. Jack Geoghegan, president of the company, said he never knew that the book had been prepared for publication by the C.I.A.
The book was reviewed by The Times on Sunday, Nov. 11, 1962, by Richard L. Walker, who is now director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of South Carolina and is a frequent book reviewer for the newspaper. Professor Walker said in a telephone interview that he had been under contract to the C.I.A. as a consultant and lecturer before and after the review appeared, but not at the time he wrote it. Nor, he said, did he know that the book had been produced by the C.I.A.
Another successful book that intelligence sources said was published in 1962 with the assistance of the C.I.A. is “On the Tiger’s Back” by Aderogba Ajao, Nigerian who had studied at an East German University and returned home to write about his disillusionment.
A Yugoslavian Connection
The Praeger organization, which was purchased by Encyclopaedia Brittanica in 1966, first became involved with the C.I.A. in 1957 when it published “The New Class,” a landmark work by Milovan Djilas, a disillusioned official of the Yugoslav Government who wrote extensively about his personal rejection of Communism.
Mr. Djilas, who had become a source of embarrassment to his Government before the work was published, had difficulty getting the last portion of the manuscript out of Yugoslavia.
Mr. Praeger said that he had appealed to II friend in the American Government (though not in the C.I.A.) for assistance in obtaining the final pages. The manuscript was eventually carried from Belgrade to Vienna by Edgar Clark, then a correspondent for Time magazine, and his wife, Katherine.
Mr. Clark said that neither he nor his wife had ever had anything to do with the C.I.A. But the manuscript ultimately reached the hands of’ a C.I.A. officer named Arthur Macy Cox. Mr. Cox, who later worked under Praeger cover in Geneva, set in motion an effort by the agency to have the book translated into variety of languages and distributed around the world.
“It was my first contact with the 1 C.I.A.,” Mr. Praeger said, but he added that at the time he had “no idea there even was a C.I.A.”
Mr. Praeger said that he later published 20 to 25 volumes in which the C.I.A. had had an interest, either in the writing, the publication itself or the postpublication distribution.
The agency’s involvement, he said, might have been manifested in a variety of ways—reimbursing him directly for the expenses of publication or guaranteeing, perhaps through a foundation of some sort, the purchase of enough copies to make publication worthwhile.
Among the Praeger books in which the C.I.A. had a hand were “The Anthill,” a work about China by the French writer Suzanne Labin, and two books on the Soviet Union by Giinther Nollau, a member of the West German security service and later its chief. Mr. Nollau was identified in a New York Times review only as “a West German lawyer who fled some years ago from East Germany.”
Dozens of foreign- language newspapers, news services and other organizations were financed and operated by the C.I.A.—two of the most prominent were said to have been DENA, the West German news agency, and Agenda Orbe Latino American, the Latin American feature service.
The C.I.A.’s Newspapers
In addition, the C.I.A. had heavy investments in a variety of English-language news organizations. Asked why the agency had had a preference for these, a former senior official of the agency explained that it was less difficult to conceal the ownership of publications that had ostensible reasons for belonging to an American and easier to place American agents in those publications as reporters and editors.
The Rome Daily American, which the C.I.A. partly owned from 1956 to 1964, when it was purchased by Samuel W. Meek, a J. Walter Thompson executive, was only one of the agency’s “’proprietary” English‐language newspapers.
There were, it was said, such “proprietaries” in other capitals, including Athens and Rangoon. They usually served a dual role—providing cover fur intelligence operatives and at the same time publishing agency propaganda.
But the C.I.A.’s ownership of newspapers was generally viewed as costly and difficult to conceal, and all such relationships are now said to have been ended.
The Rome Daily American was taken over by the C.I.A., it was said, to keep it from failing into the hands of Italian Communists. But the agency eventually tired of trying to maintain the fiction that the newspaper was privately owned and, as soon as the perceived threat from the Communists had passed, sold it to Mr. Meek.
Even after the agency sold the newspaper, however, it was managed for several years by Robert H. Cunningham, a C.I.A. officer who had resigned from the agency and had been rehired as a contract employee.
A former C.I.A. official said that the agency passed up an opportunity to purchase another English‐language newspaper, The Brussels Times, which was being run by a C.I.A. man but had no other ties to the agency. The official said the agency responded to the offer by saying that it was “easier to buy a reporter, which we’ve done, than to buy a newspaper.”
In addition to the C.I.A.’s “proprietary” newspapers in Athens, Rangoon and Rome, agency sources said it had also had investments in The Okinawa Morning Star, used more for cover purposes than for propaganda; The Manila Times and The Bangkok World, now both defunct, and The Tokyo Evening News in the days before it was purchased by Asahi, the publishing organization.
“We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one C.I.A. man said, and those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.
Agents Placed on Staffs
In Santiago, Chile, The South Pacific Mail, though apparently never owned by the C.I.A, provided cover for two operatives: David A. Phillips, who eventually rose to become chief of the C.I.A.’s Western Hemisphere Division, and David C. Hellyer, who resigned as Latin American editor for the Copley newspaper organization to join the C.I.A.
Other newspapers on whose staffs the C.I.A. is said to have placed agents over the years included The Guyana Chronicle, The Haiti Sun, The Japan Times, The Nation of Rangoon, The Caracas Daily Journal and The Bangkok Post.
And before the 1959 revolution The Times of Havana, owned by a former C.I.A. man, contributed to the “cover” of Mr. Phillips by signing him on as columnist.
The C.I.A. reportedly had agents within a number of foreign news services, including LATIN, a Catin American agency operated by the British news agency, Reuters, and the Ritzhaus organization in Scandanavia.
Although there were C.I.A agents in the overeas bureaus of The Associated Press and United Press International, the C.I.A. is said to have had none in Reuters because that agency is British and thus a potential target of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
But sources familiar with the situation said that the C.I.A occasionally “borrowed” British “assets” inside Reuters for the purpose of planting news articles. Asked about the much‐publicized assertion by William E. Colby, the former Di‘ rector of Central Intelligence, that the agency never “manipulated” Reuters, one official replied that “it wasn’t manipulation because Reuters knew” that the stories were being planted by the C.I.A. and that some were bogus.
Desmond Manerly, Reuters’s managing editor for North America, has said that such charges were “old‐hat stuff to us.” He noted that Reuters’s managing director, for Gerald Long, had asked for evidence of such manipulation but that none had been forthcoming.
A number of news agencies were owned outright or were heavily financed by the C.I.A. One, the Foreign News Service, produced articles written by a group of journalists who had been exiled from Eastern European nations. In the early 1960’s the articles were sold to as many as 300 newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Herald Tribune.
Boleslaw Wierzbianski, a former Polish Minister of Information and the onetime head of the news service, said that as far as he knew, the C.I.A.’s only involvement was financial and the agency never tried to control the service’s output or use it as a cover.
Press Credentials Supplied
By contrast, an outright C.I.A. proprietary was the Continental Press Service, which had headquarters in Washington and was run by a C.I.A. man named Fred Zusy. One of its principal functions was to supply official — looking, laminated press credentials to agency operatives in urgent need of cover.
Editors Press Service was an established feature news service with clients throughout Latin America when, accordmg to two former C.I.A. officials and third authoritative source, it became channel of dissemination for agency-inspired propaganda. One former C.I.A. man said that the service, owned at the time by Joshua B. Powers Sr„ was an outlet for what he called “cliché stories, news stories prepared by the agency or for the agency.”
Mr. Powers acknowledged that for years he was a close friend of the late Col. J. C. King, longtime chief of the agency’s Western Hemisphere Division; that he had served as an officer of the C.I.A.financed Henry Clay foundation, and that it was he who had purchased The South Pacific Mail from David A. Phillips and owned it during the period, in the mid1960’s, when it was being used for cover by David Hellyer.
Mr. Powers could recall only a single connection, however, between Editors Press and the C.I.A. He said that in the mid‐1960’s he had used C.I.A. funds to finance the Latin American travels of one of his writers, Guillermo Martinez Marquez, the exiled editor of a Cuban newspaper. Mr. Marquez said that he had never known that the money he received from Mr. Powers had come team the C.I.A.
Perhaps the most widely circulated of the C.1.A.‐owned news services was Forum World Features, founded in 1958 as a Delaware corporation, Forum Information Service, with offices in London. Forum was ostensibly owned during much of its life by John Hay Whitney, the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, which ceased publication in 1966. According to several C.I.A. sources, Mr. Whitney was “witting” of the agency’s true role.
A secretary to Mr. Whitney said that he was too ill to respond to questions about his involvement with Forum.
Also aware of a C.I.A. role, according to former and current agency officials, was Brian Crozier, the conservative British journalist who the officials said had been a contract employee of the agency, and Robert G. Gately. Mr. Gately, Forum’s executive director in the early 1960’s, was a career C.I.A. man who went on to hold cover jobs with Newsweek, as Far Eastern business manager, and with Asia Magazine in Tokyo.
Newsweek executives, like those of nearly all the major news‐gathering organizations said to have been involved with the C.I.A., have said that while they are certain that no one presently employed has any ties to the agency, there is no way to be certain that no such connections existed in the past.
U.S. Papers Among Clients
Though the C.I.A. has insisted that never attempted directly to place its propaganda in the American press, at one time Forum World Features had 30 domestic newspapers among its clients, including The Washington Post, and tried, without success, to sell its material to The New York Times.
The sale of Forum’s material to The Washington Post and other American newspapers, one C.I.A. official said, “put us in a hell of a dilemma,” The sales, he went on, were considered necessary to preserve the organization’s cover, and they occasioned a continuing and somewhat frantic effort to insure that the domestic clients were given only legitimate news stories.
Another major foreign news organization that C.I.A. officials said they once subsidized was Vision, the weekly news magazine that is distributed throughout Europe and Latin America. However, none of those associated with the founding of Vision or its management over the years Said they had ever had any indication that the C.I.A. had put money intp the magazine.
SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMESDEC. 26, 1977
Find this story at 26 December 1977
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