Does the WASHINGTON POST protect wrongdoings committed by American intelligence services by not publishing verified information? How close are the ties between the POST and American intelligence? Consider the following: Excerpt from: "America's top newspaper has pointed the finger at our man in Washington. Now it's his turn Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been accused of 'conspiracy theorism' over the death of the White House aide, Vincent Foster. Keeping silent, he says, is even worse Whitewater plot theory over death of aide 'a fantasy'" The Electronic Telegraph By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard July 10, 1995 But what about the story of gun-running and drug-smuggling through the Mena airport in Arkansas in the 1980s? As reported by The Sunday Telegraph in January, the managing editor, Robert Kaiser, intervened at the last moment to spike a story by Sally Denton and Roger Morris that was backed by an archive of 2,000 documents. The story had been cleared by the lawyers. It was typeset and ready to go to the printers. Since then there have been fresh developments in this story. Sworn testimony taken from a court case in Arkansas has linked Bill Clinton directly to this cloak-and-dagger operation, which has possible ties to US intelligence. Not a word about these depositions has been written in the Washington Post. But failure to report the news is one thing. Active disinformation is another. Last week's article in the Post insinuated that The Telegraph had fabricated a story about clandestine trips to Switzerland by Vince Foster. The author, Susan Schmidt, who is the Post's full-time reporter on Whitewater, said that sources "with access to Foster's American Express receipts say they show no purchase of airline tickets to Switzerland". But when confronted, she admitted that her sources did not in fact have access to information - that The Telegraph did have - about the two flights Foster made to Geneva in 1991 and 1992. Furthermore, she had no credit card numbers and she did not know which of Foster's American Express cards may have been involved. Nor did she have any records from the airlines. "These records are closely guarded," she said, by way of explanation. You bet they are, and Ms Schmidt failed to get them. The only information she had, it turns out, referred to a single purchase in July 1993 conducted through the White House travel office. We would surmise that her "sources" (plural) are in the Clinton White House. We rest our case. Is the newspaper that broke Watergate now, intentionally or not, aiding and abetting a cover-up a generation later? ______________________ Excerpt from: UNRELIABLE SOURCES Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon New York, Carol Publishing Group, 1990 ISBN 0-8184-0561-9 pg. 116 Relationships between CIA officials and media execs were often social, dating back many years. For instance, Washington Post owners Philip and Katharine Graham were best friends with Frank Wisner, a pivotal figure in the Agency's worldwide propaganda apparatus. Wisner ran CIA covert operations from the early days of the Cold War until shortly before he committed suicide in 1961. The CIA's global propaganda operation was headed initially by Tom Braden. After leaving the Agency, Braden worked as a syndicated columnist and co-host of CNN CROSSFIRE (representing"the left"). Braden once wrote a piece in the SATURDAY EVENING POST called "Why I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral." One of Braden's CIA proteges, Philip L. Geyelin, eventually became editor of the WASHINGTON POST editorial page. At times critical of the Reagan administration for squandering its credibility because it lied so much about Central America, Geyelin nonetheless affirmed the virtue of official deception: "We will get nowhere without first stipulating that, while circumstances alter almost any case you can think of, the President has an inherent right -- almost an obligation in particular situations -- to deceive." Oftentimes the lie is in the omission -- and the POST has been a willing participant in keeping the lid on touchy disclosures. "There have been instances," admitted publisher Katharine Graham, "in which secrets have been leaked to us which we thought were so dangerous that we went to them (U.S. officials) and told them that they had been leaked to us and did not print them." _____________________ The CIA's Web site promotes Cord Meyer's book, FACING REALITY: FROM WORLD FEDERALISM TO THE CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980.) The Agency describes it as "The story of the career of a Yale graduate and World War II Marine hero whose postwar idealism finally brought him to CIA, where he became a senior operations officer." It is interesting that it was Cord Meyer, Jr. who in 1972 visited Harper & Row to ask that it not publish Alfred McCoy's THE POLITICS OF HEROIN because it represented a threat to National Security. Historian McCoy had chronicled CIA involvement in heroin trafficking out of Southeast Asia. Excerpt from: WEDGE: THE SECRET WAR BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA by Mark Riebling Alfred A Knopf, Inc. 1994 ISBN 0-679-41471-1 (page 302) (Speculation that Cord Meyer was Deep Throat of Watergate fame) But perhaps more important, Meyer had extremely intimate connections with Ben Bradlee, Woodward's boss at the (WASHINGTON) POST. Indeed, they were in-laws, having both married sisters from the socially prominent Pinchot family. Meyer's interface with Bradlee could have had a close professional aspect as well, since Meyer's main duty at CIA was to penetrate and influence leftist but anticommunist organs of opinion. ------------------------------------- Unfortunately I do not have the following book to quote from. If anyone has it, please post excerpts. ( found at http://www.crl.com/~dbrandt/books.37 ) Davis, Deborah. Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. 2nd edition. Bethesda MD: National Press, 1987. 320 pages. (A 3rd updated edition was published in 1991 by Sheridan Square Press, 145 West 4th Street, New York NY 10012.) There are plenty of books written about the Washington Post and its publisher Katharine Graham, one of the world's richest women. But only this one can brag that it was first published in 1979 by William Jovanovich, who then promptly shredded 20,000 copies because Ben Bradlee didn't like it. The Washington Post is usually thought of as a newspaper that's keen on investigative journalism, but this is a con. For one thing, the Post has too many old-boy intelligence connections, starting with Philip Graham himself and continuing through Bob Woodward. For example, when Bradlee was working in the U.S. embassy in Paris from 1951-1953, documents printed by Davis show him following the orders of the CIA station chief to place propaganda in the European press. Another item from our files: In a 1988 speech to senior CIA employees at Agency headquarters, CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham had this to say: "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." Small wonder that when reading the Post, many folks cannot shake the suspicion that an agenda lurks behind the headlines. __________________________ Excerpt from: SILENT COUP: THE REMOVAL OF A PRESIDENT by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin New York, St. Martin's Press, 1991 ISBN 0-312-05156-5 pg. 70-71 The Navy brought (Bob) Woodward to the Pentagon ostensibly as a communications watch officer responsible for overseeing approximately thirty sailors who manned the terminals, teletypes, andclassified coding machines at the naval communications center through which all Navy traffic flowed, from routine orders to top-secret messages. It was a sensitive position that afforded Woodward access to more than a hundred communications channels, among them, according to Admiral Fitzpatrick, the top-secret SR-1 channel through which the Navy sent and received its most important messages, for instance, those which served to operate its covert global spy unit known as Task Force 157. SR-1 was the channel that (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral) Moorer provided to the White House when Kissinger and Nixon pushed him for backchannel communications capability. When Kissinger conducted his delicate and highly secret negotiations with China during 1971, SR-1 carried Kissinger's message back to deputy Al Haig that the Peking mission has succeeded. In addition to being one of the officers charged with managing the communications center, Woodward had another job. The young lieutenant was one of Moorer's specially selected briefing officers. A briefer is an officer who sees, hears, reads, and assimilates information from one or a variety of sources, and who conveys it succinctly and intelligibly to more senior officers. This was not only ahighly prized assignment, since it often entailed close contact with very senior men who could advance a junior officer's career, but was also an enormously sensitive one, because the information conveyed was frequently top secret. On his briefing assignment from Admiral Moorer, Woodward was often sent across the river from the Pentagon to the basement of the White House, where he would enter the offices of the National Security Council. There, Woodward would act as briefer to Alexander Haig. The Woodward-Haig connection, that of the briefer and the officer he briefed, is one that Woodward has labored to keep secret, for reasons that will become clearer as this book unfolds. Over theintervening years, Woodward has vehemently denied the existence of the relationship. When we informed Woodward that we had information linking him to Haig, he issued his denial, saying, "Now what the hell are my ties to Haig?" He has even gone so far as to deny to us that he was a briefer at all and issued to us the following challenge: "I defy you to produce somebody who says I did a briefing." However, that Woodward was a briefer and that some of those briefings were to Alexander Haig can no longer be in doubt. Admiral Moorer has confirmed to us what other sources had told us, that Woodward had been a briefer and that his duties included briefing Haig. _______________________ THE INSPECTOR GENERAL'S REPORT: AN INTRODUCTION by Peter Dale Scott English Dept., University of California, Berkeley 94720 (510) 642-2762; Fax 642-8738 DRAFT DATE: DECEMBER 20, 1994 The Inspector General's Report of 1967 on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro is probably the most important CIA document ever released by the Agency. The document that neither Johnson nor (apparently) Nixon was allowed to see in its entirety, despite their asserted interest, the document so tightly held that only a single ribbon copy was retained even within the CIA, is now available to everyone. The IG Report was the result of an investigation ordered in 1967 by President Johnson, after a Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column of March 7, 1967, had published for the first time details of "a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro." However Johnson never got to see the actual report: Helms merely spoke to him from a set of notes which excluded the key events of late 1963. President Nixon never got to see it either, although it would appear that he had his aide John Ehrlichman try over many months to pry it out of CIA Director Richard Helms. The Report's story of CIA-underworld assassination murder plots will startle no one in the 1990s. In 1967 it was so explosive as to be virtually unmentionable in the public arena for another eight years. Even the Anderson column. Which told only a small part of what Anderson would eventually reveal, was published *four days late* by the *Washington Post,* ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ by which time the column's references to the recruitment of "underworld figures" had been *edited out, presumably after checking with the CIA.* ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ We shall see that a follow-up column by Jack Anderson in 1971 was likewise edited. Not until the 1975 reports from the Rockefeller Commission and the Senate Church Committee did the press treat the story of CIA-Mafia murder plots as more than a wild left-wing allegation. _______________________ These tidbits of evidence connecting the WASHINGTON POST with the Central Intelligence Agency are only the tip of the iceberg. Until the CIA's strong influence over the media is ended, then CIA drug smuggling such as at Mena will continue on with impunity. Larry ************************************************************************* These sites are filled with facts about CIA covert operations and how they work against the best interests of the citizens of the United States. David Feustel's great archive on CIA cocaine smuggling: http://www.mixi.net/~feustel/ Lisa Pease's Real History Archives: http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/ Bob Parry's The Consortium is filled with important investigative reporting that the mainstream media won't touch: http://www.delve.com/consort.html Whitewater & Vince Foster site: http://www.cris.com/~dwheeler/n/whitewater/whitewater-index.html Covert Action Quarterly home page: http://www.worldmedia.com/caq/ Federation of American Scientists' library of U.S. intelligence documents http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/ *************************************************************************