CBS, the CIA, and the Roving Eye

We all have the vague sense that you can't trust the mainstream media.

We often hear people exclaim " Don't believe everything you read!" Most of us, however, while keeping this adage firmly buried in the recesses of our minds, act as if everything we read was in fact true.

CBS was recently caught publishing forged documents about Bush's National Guard service. Or were they? The facts they recount are true, but the debate has been shifted through the work of Karl Rove into a discussion of CBS and not the President. Not bad work. We imagine he is well paid to do this sort of spin doctoring.

Here's how bad off the Democrats are: They're cowering behind closed doors, whispering that if it should ever turn out that Republicans are behind this, it would be so exquisitely Machiavellian, so beyond what Democrats are capable of, they should just fold and concede the election now - before the Republicans have to go to the trouble of stealing it again.

There's no evidence - it's just a preposterous, paranoid fantasy at this point. But it speaks to the jitters of the Democrats that they're consumed with speculation about whether Karl Rove, the master of dirty tricks and surrogate sleaze, could have set up CBS in a diabolical pre-emptive strike to undermine damaging revelations about Bush 43's privileged status and vanishing act in the National Guard, and his odd refusal to take his required physical when ordered.

In this vast left-wing conspiracy theory, Mr. Rove takes real evidence on W.'s shirking and transfers it to documents doomed to be exposed as phony (thereby undermining the real goods), then funnels it through third parties to Dan Rather, Bush 41's nemesis on Iran-contra. A perfect bank shot.

The secretary for W.'s squadron commander in the Texas Guard told The Times that the information in the disputed memos is correct - it's just the memos that seem fake.

"It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together,'' said a lucid 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, who was flown up to New York yesterday by beleaguered CBS News executives.

She told Mr. Rather that her boss, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, wrote a "cover-your-back file,'' a "personal journal'' to keep a record about the politically connected Bush in his charge. She said the contents of that mirrored the CBS documents, but she said those documents were not on the right forms and contained Army terms rather than Air National Guard argot. She confirmed that young Bush had disobeyed a direct order from Colonel Killian to take a physical.

"It was a big no-no to not follow orders,'' she said, adding that the Bush scion's above-the-rules attitude caused some snickers and resentment among fellow officers.

Those who suspect Mr. Rove note that when he was Bill Clements's campaign strategist in a 1986 governor's race in Texas, he was accused of bugging his own office to distract from a debate, according to James Moore and Wayne Slater, authors of "Bush's Brain.'' They said it turned the election because after that, the Democrat could not get any attention.

Was the same scenario playing out yesterday evening on CNN? After a five-minute report on the CBS memo controversy, CNN spent about 30 seconds reporting that two more marines had been killed in Iraq.

House Republicans started clamoring for a Congressional inquiry into the documents used by "60 Minutes,'' saying it might be an attempt to manipulate the election. (Isn't that what the Democrats are scared the Republicans are doing?)

These same Republicans never wanted investigations into missing W.M.D., why Congress passed a Medicare bill based on faulty figures, Abu Ghraib or even whether those Swiftie guys were lying, for Pete's sake.

The Democratic paranoia is a measure of the intimidation the West Wing is wielding in a race where John Kerry can't seem to take advantage of any of the Bush administration's increasingly calamitous blunders.

The administration has been so dazzling in misleading the public with audacious, mendacious malarkey that the Democrats fear the Bushies are capable of any level of deceit.

Iraq is a vision of hell, and the Republicans act as if it's a model kitchen. The president and vice president brag about liberating Iraqis and reassure us that they are stopping terrorist violence at its source and inspiring democracy in the region by bringing it to blood-drenched Iraq.

But what they haven't mentioned is that they have known since July that their rosy scenarios are as bogus as their W.M.D. That's when the president received a national intelligence estimate that spelled out "a dark assessment of prospects" for stability and governance in Iraq in the next 18 months, as Douglas Jehl wrote in today's Times. Worst-case estimates include civil war or anarchy.

Unlike the president, the young men and women trying to stay alive in the unraveling chaos of Iraq can't count on their daddies to get them out of the line of fire.

Regarding the "Mark of Rove," an even more insidious idea occurred to me a couple of days after the phony "forged document scandal" began. Sure, it would be super clever of Rove to fake documents that essentially contain the truth thus discrediting that truth. But it would be even more of a Grandmaster move to use actual documents to destroy the truth.

Consider this:

Back during the 2000 campaign, it was reported that Bush's TANG files in Texas were thoroughly researched by his campaign team. Of course, folks like us interpreted that as a scrub job. Why wouldn't we?

The team must have found these documents in Col. Killian's P-file. Killian was his CO; of course they checked his files. They left everything in place and immediately created a plausible story to account for the documents, i.e. -- they are forgeries. Friendly "experts" were gathered to create a full-on 24-bit true color oppo plan. They took their time and did a very good job of discrediting the documents. Everyone got their marching orders then waited. This was critical. If anyone traced a leak of the TANG files to Rove after Bush's supporters cried "forgery" then you'd have him red-handed. That was unacceptable.

Remember this was 1999-2000. Rove was preparing for Gore with this. But as we all know a landmine is a patient thing. If it doesn't get the intended victim, it will get someone else eventually.

Rove NEVER leaked the Killian memos; he didn't have to. As Election 2004 came around he set his oppo team to dig into Kerry's Vietnam record. The Swift Boat Liars did their damage to Kerry and made Vietnam an issue. There's your bait. Rove waited for a respected news source to find the files, to take the time to verify the documents and the man who wrote them, to step into the trap. 60 Minutes went public and SNAP. The trap closed. The response was IMMEDIATE and MULTIFACETED. There was a full laundry list of issues in less than a day: document experts with multiple arguments, family members of Killian's, retired TANG officers, etc. No one was ready for that. 60 Minutes never had a chance. As far as they knew, the documents were real and correct BECAUSE THEY WERE REAL AND CORRECT.

How could 60 Minutes see that they were actually playing to Rove's plan? They couldn't. This is Rove's mastery of political intrigue in action. The files that years ago were deadly to Bush transformed into a shield placed over the monster's heart. How freakin' clever is that? Every swing voter or mild Bush supporter who watched 60 Minutes that night saw the truth and was swayed by it, even if only a little bit. Hell, even strong Bushies might have felt a lapse of support.

Then, the "Rove Bomb" went off. EVERY news outlet carried the forgery rap the NEXT DAY. Why? Because the bomb had been planted in advance. All the work had been done ahead of time. A few bloggers and Drudge trotted out some lies about typewriters; some "experts" gave opinions on "breaking news" that had been prepared years ago; the 24 hour news machine rolled it all up in neat bulletins and all the Bushites and swing voters who had felt even an iota of doubt about Bush were inoculated against the truth almost immediately and became IMMUNE to further exposure. The myth of the liberal media grew stronger and Kerry and the Democrats were painted with the tar brush.

I think the scenario above was what we really saw. And if that's true, what other traps are out there? Think about it. The press has not just given these people a four year free pass on all skeletons in the Bush Closet. They have given the Bush Family Evil Empire (BFEE) time and opportunity to turn each of those liabilities into assets.

What this means is that despite the huge amount of blood, sweat, tears and time so many of us have put into researching the past of the BFEE in order to pull down the monster's mask, what we need to do is focus on NOW. The BFEE stole the past and rigged it with tripwires. The press let them do it and it is too late to get it back. Our battleground is NOW.

NOW over 1000 American kids have died for nothing in Iraq. NOW our security is a lie. NOW our friends and allies fear and loathe us. NOW our economy has been turned upside down and its pockets picked for the benefit of the few. NOW class war is being waged on the poor and working class. NOW our rights are gone. NOW Bush has violated his oath of office. NOW Bush is a war-criminal. NOW. NOW. NOW.

NOW we stop playing their game. NOW we start playing ours. We DO NOT dig up the past. WE KEEP THEM FROM BURYING THE PRESENT! [...]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CBS News faced new charges of journalistic impropriety on Tuesday, a day after the network said it regretted using questionable documents in a report challenging President Bush's military service.

At issue was a report in USA Today that the source of the documents gave them to CBS only after the network agreed to arrange a conversation between the source and the presidential campaign of Bush's opponent, Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

Experts in media ethics said if the report were true, CBS may have overstepped the boundary between journalism and politics. The network said it would investigate the matter.

"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda," CBS News said in a statement.

Comment: Sure it is - and Fox News is the most objective news outlet in the known universe...

"As to what actually happened here, it is one of many issues the independent review will be examining," the network said, referring to a probe it announced on Monday as part of a dramatic about-face over the authenticity of documents.

After two weeks of defending the documents, which served as the basis for its Sept. 8 report, CBS News publicly acknowledged that it could not prove they were authentic.

Media experts said the affair had deeply damaged the credibility of CBS News, once home to anchor Walter Cronkite -- dubbed "the most trusted man in America." [...]

Should CIA agents be allowed to pose as journalists to further the aims of their clandestine activities?

Members of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on the future of U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War world say yes, and a CIA official recently came forward to admit that the Agency already occasionally does so despite regulations barring the practice. But is this a breaking story or just the latest chapter in a spy story that traces its roots back to the 1950's? While they may act like strangers in public, the press and the CIA have a sordid past that spans more than four decades.

The CIA-Press Connection in the 1950s and 60s

The CIA-press connection traces its roots back to the early days of the Cold War, when Allen Dulles (who became CIA director in 1953) began courting the nation's most prestigious journalistic institutions for Agency operations. The mood of the day precluded the need for secretive infiltration, as Carl Bernstein points out in his 1977 expose on the topic. "American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against global Communism," he writes. "Accordingly, the line separating the American press corps was often indistinguishable."

Comment: Today, the war is not against Communism, but rather terrorism.

That's not to say that reporters acted as spies in the James Bond sense. Media outlets offered services that fell into the broad categories of providing "cover" for CIA operatives (i.e. jobs and credentials) or sharing information gathered by reporters on staff.

While the Agency ran a formal training program in the 50's that attempted to teach rank-and-file agents to be reporters, this was among the least common of the more than 400 relationships with the press described in CIA files. Most involved were journalists before their involvement with the CIA began.

Reporters, especially foreign correspondents, typically served as "eyes and ears" for the CIA. Often they were briefed by agents before a trip and debriefed when they returned; they shared their notebooks, relayed things that they had seen or overheard and offered their impressions. More complex arrangements found reporters planting misinformation for the Agency or serving as liaisons between agents and foreign contacts, often in return for information or access.

"In return for our giving them information, we'd ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn't have thought of unless we put it in their minds," one agent told Bernstein. "For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, 'I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.' We'd say, 'Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, could you put him in touch with us -- would you mind us using your apartment?'"

Another senior CIA official offered the following description of "reporting" by cooperating journalists: "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor? We understand that you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right."

It was a symbiotic relationship: reporters got the scoop and the spooks got the dirt. Correspondents with Agency ties were highly valued by their bosses for the stories they brought home. And agents saw in the press a perfect vehicle for information gathering: who else besides a reporter enjoyed such free access in a foreign country, could cultivate so many sources among foreign governments and elites and ask lots of probing questions without arousing suspicion? [...]

The Church Committee Investigation

A flurry of public attention began to cast doubts upon the ethics of a press wedded to the Central Intelligence Agency after a Washington Star-News story by Oswald Johnson reported that the CIA had three dozen American newsmen on its payroll at that time (November 1973). Then-CIA director William Colby (CFR) leaked this information to Johnson, fearing an embarrassing fallout after both the Star-News and New York Times approached him to ask if any of their staff members were receiving payments from the Agency. (A Times investigation four years later showed the number of CIA-funded journalists to be closer to 50; Bernstein's expose in Rolling Stone that same year claimed it was more like 400.)

By now, the times they had a-changed: In a 1974 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, former reporter Stuart Loory chastised fellow journalists for their history of chumming it up with the CIA and for their lax coverage of the issue once it came to light. "There is little question that if even one American overseas carrying a press card is paid by the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect," he wrote. "We automatically... consider Soviet and Chinese newsmen as mouthpieces and informants for their governments, while at the same time congratulating ourselves for our independence. Now we know that some of that independence has, with the stealth required of clandestine operations, been taken away from us -- or given away."

In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church (the Church Committee) focused its attention on the Agency's use of American news outlets. The CIA went to great lengths to curtail this part of the committee's investigation, though, and some members of the committee later admitted that the Agency was able to get the upper hand. Colby and his successor, George Bush (CFR, TC), were able to convince the Senate that a full inquiry would cripple their intelligence-gathering capabilities and would unleash a "witch-hunt" on the nation's reporters, editors and publishers.

"The Agency was extremely clever about it and the committee played right into its hands," one congressional source told Carl Bernstein. "Church and some of the other members were much more interested in making headlines than in doing serious, tough investigating. The Agency pretended to be giving up a lot whenever it was asked about the flashy stuff -- assassinations and secret weapons and James Bond operations. Then, when it came to things they didn't want to give away, that were much more important to the Agency, Colby in particular called in his chits. And the committee bought it."

Former intelligence officer William Bader (who returned to the Agency as a deputy to Stansfield Turner) and David Aaron (who later served as deputy to President Carter's national security advisor) supervised the committee's investigation of the CIA-press angle. CIA director Bush balked at all of Bader's requests for specific information about the scope of the Agency's media activities. Under pressure from the entire committee, Bush finally agreed to pull records on journalists and have his deputies condense them into one-paragraph summaries. The Agency would not make the raw files available, and neither the names of journalists nor their affiliations would be included. More than 400 summaries were compiled (a number that officials acknowledge was probably on the low side) in an attempt to give committee members "a broad, representative picture." [...]

CBS: CIA Broadcasting System?

Bernstein asserts that a good relationship between former CIA director Allen Dulles and former CBS president William Paley (CFR) made the network the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. "Over the years," Bernstein writes, "the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communications between the Washington bureau chief and the agency; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents... to be routinely monitored by the CIA."

Paley chose Sig Mickelson (CFR), president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961, as his liaison with the CIA. Mickelson (who went on to become president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) recalls complaining about having to use a pay phone to contact the CIA, and later installing a private line that bypassed the CBS switchboard for this purpose. A CBS investigation of his files revealed that he was involved in passing on CBS film and outtakes to CIA officials in exchange for payment and that he regularly forwarded copies of CBS' internal newsletter to his CIA handlers. The same investigation revealed that two CBS employees -- stringer Austin Goodrich and Frank Kearns, a network reporter from 1958-1971 -- were undercover CIA operatives.

Mickelson has discussed his CIA activities with Bernstein and others. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," he has recalled. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and the film arrangements. I assumed that this was the normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating -- though the Goodrich matter was compromising."

Mickelson's successor Richard Salant says he continued some of these practices when he took the CBS helm. "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes," he explains. "This went on for a number of years -- into the Seventies."

Sign of the Times

The New York Times was for the CIA in the realm of newspapers what CBS was to the Agency among broadcasters. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (CFR) arranged for cover for approximately 10 CIA employees between 1950 and 1966 as part of his general policy of providing assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

According to CIA officials, the Agency's ties to the Times were stronger than to any other papers because of its large foreign news operation and because of close ties between publisher Sulzberger and director Dulles (a relationship described by one staff member as "the mighty dealing with the mighty.") The output of this close relationship generally included reporting for CIA agents and "spotting" new prospective foreign operatives. Sulzberger is said to have signed a secrecy agreement with the Agency in the 1950's -- some say he did so as a pledge not to reveal the classified information he was privy to; others claim it was a pact never to reveal the Times' dealings with the CIA.

Former Times reporter Wayne Phillips said CIA agents approached and tried to recruit him as an undercover operative in 1952, advising him that the Agency has a "working relationship" with Sulzberger. A Freedom of Information Act request later revealed that agents hoped to put him to work as an "asset" abroad. The Times ran a story about the attempted recruitment in 1976, in which Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (CFR) asserted that he had "never heard of the Times being approached, either in my capacity as publisher or as the son of the late Mr. Sulzberger."

A CIA Post?

Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook.

Reporter Russell Warren Howe also has a long history of CIA service. In 1958, he once said, his "days as an asset had just begun." He worked for the CIA proprietary "Information Bulletin, Ltd." and its successor, "Forum Service" (later known as Forum World Features), in addition to the CIA-funded "Africa Report and "Survey." Howe was fully aware of his employer's CIA ties, referring once to the FWF as "the principal CIA media in the world." According to the Church Committee, the Post management was aware that one of their reporters worked for a CIA publication, and that on several occasions they knowingly reprinted propaganda from that paper in the Post.

Philip Geyelin (CFR) on the other hand was a CIA agent before taking a job as a Post reporter. Geyelin joined the Agency for 11 months during a leave from the Wall Street Journal. While at the Journal, CIA memos about Geyelin (which number in the hundreds, according to CounterSpy) described him as "a CIA resource" and a "willing collaborator." Geyelin has come to the CIA's defense in the Post: in response to a statement by Post ombudsman Charles Seib that the CIA should stick to dirty work, the press should inform the public, "and never the twain can meet," Geyelin replied that to the contrary, agents and journalists were "all searching for the same nuggets of truth about the outside world." He took this a step further when he protested Congressional efforts to regulate CIA-media ties, invoking journalists' constitutional right to be co-opted by spooks. "(I)n its zeal to restrict the freedom of the agency to subvert the press," he wrote, "Congress could wind up making a law that would in fact abridge -- or threaten to abridge -- some part of the freedom of the press that the First Amendment was intended to protect."

Publisher Katherine Graham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations with close ties to former CIA directors Dulles and William Casey (CFR). She hired CIA-linked Wackenhut Security Corporation to break up a Post union strike, and invited former Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR) to join the Post's board of directors despite his well-documented past as a CIA apologist. Katzenbach is said to have asked a past Post editorial page editor to tone down an upcoming editorial about the CIA, and he chaired a presidential panel that "investigated" CIA domestic operations (but actually served as a rubber stamp for the Agency's activities). While he asserted that both the FBI and CIA were "the most decent and effective intelligence agencies in the world," Katzenbach had first hand knowledge of the seedier side of intelligence: the Church committee produced several memos documenting his suggestions to J. Edgar Hoover that he might undertake wiretap operations as part of the Bureau's campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr.

Making Time for Spooks

Time and Life founder Henry Luce was considered one of the CIA's most cooperative sources in the media. Luce, another of Dulles' personal friends in the media, was said to freely allow staff members to work with the CIA and willingly provide credentials for agents who lacked journalistic experience. Throughout the 50's and 60's Time correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners, and Luce encouraged his foreign correspondents to meet with CIA officials after returning from trips abroad.

C.D. Jackson, a Life magazine vice president in the early 1960's, co-authored a CIA study on reorganization of the intelligence community during his tenure at Time-Life, and approved specific plans for granting cover to CIA operatives. Former Life managing editors Edward Thompson and George Hunt told Stuart Loory that they regularly allowed military intelligence agents to come to the Life office to look at photos and, since they were public domain, sometimes gave them prints. CIA agents were allowed to interview correspondents returning from overseas assignments too, Hunt said, although he did not consider this to be "working with" intelligence agencies. "We never cooperated with the CIA," Hunt claimed. "We didn't have any of that nonsense going on at Life."

Other News Outlets With Documented CIA Ties

Management at the Christian Science Monitor admitted the paper had an ongoing relationship with the CIA throughout the 1950's and early 60's. Joseph Harrison, who became editor in 1950, said he discovered that agents paid frequent visits to the news office to get information on Monitor stories. "I inherited the situation and I continued it," he said of the arrangement, which included allowing the Agency access to uncut versions of stories and letters from Monitor foreign correspondents. While Johnson characterized such activities as "helping out as an American," he drew the line at pursuing stories at the Agency's behest or allowing his employees to moonlight with the CIA. "That," according to his distinction, "would have been espionage."

CIA files show that ABC News provided cover for agents throughout the 1960's. During the Church committee hearings the Agency refused to reveal whether its relationship with the network was ongoing. As with ties to other high profile news outlets, arrangements were made at the highest level, with the full knowledge of network executives. CIA officials claim that Sam Jaffe and one other unnamed correspondent performed clandestine tasks for the Agency. Jaffe admits that he was approached by agents who offered to get him a job with CBS, who would send him on assignment in Moscow if he agreed to cooperate, but claims he never agreed to the deal. Jaffe did go on to do some work for CBS, though, and said he believed that the CIA had a hand in getting him the assignment.

One of the more unusual accounts of the CIA-press connection involves the Louisville Courier-Journal. Undercover operative Robert H. Campbell spent three months at the paper as a reporter in 1964-1965 as part of an arrangement made by the Agency and Courier-Journal executive editor Norman Issacs. The first account of Campbell's tenure at the paper appeared in a front-page story in 1976 -- in the Courier-Journal (one of the few self-investigative pieces written on this topic).

James Herzog reported that Campbell had been hired in spite of the fact that he could not type and knew little about newswriting. "Norman said that when he was in Washington, he had been called to lunch with some friend of his who was with the CIA [who] wanted to send this young fellow down to get him a little knowledge of newspapering," the paper's former managing editor recalled in the article.

CIA sources say that the Courier-Journal arrangements were made so that Johnson could amass a record of journalistic experience (he also worked briefly for the Hornell, New York Evening Tribune). The Agency even sent funds to the Courier-Journal to pay Johnson's salary. These same sources claim that the deal was made with Issacs and approved by the paper's publisher, but neither man recalls being involved. "All I can do is repeat the simple truth," Issacs said in response to Herzog's story, "that never, under any circumstances or at any time, have I ever knowingly hired a government agent." But, he added, "none of this is to say that I couldn't have been 'had.'"

But clues were there. No one looked into Johnson's credentials when he was hired, and his file included the curious notation "Hired for temporary work -- no reference checks completed or needed." Johnson's journalistic prowess (or lack thereof) should have given him away: his editors characterized his work as "unreadable" and it was never published. If that was not clue enough, his penchant for announcing to patrons at a bar a few steps from his office that he was a CIA agent should have done the trick.

Who else? Bernstein compiled the following list of additional organizations known to have provided CIA cover: the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. [...]

Sources

"The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered it Up," Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, p.55-67.

"CIA in America," CounterSpy, Spring 1980, p. 42-43.

"Washington Post -- Speaking for Whom?" CounterSpy, May-July 1981, p. 13-19.

Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 182-311.

"'Loophole Revealed in Prohibition on CIA Use of Journalistic Cover," New York Times, February 16, 1996, p. A24.

"Making Intelligence Smarter," report of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1996.

"Disinformation and Mass Deception: Democracy as a Cover Story," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Spring-Summer 1983, p. 3-12.

"The CIA's use of the press: a 'mighty Wurlitzer,'" Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1974, p. 9-18.

Introduction

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the American Press have been central features of American society since their beginnings. The CIA concerns itself with international and internal security operations, many of which remain hidden from the general United States population. The American Press works to provide the public with access and information, much of which focuses on the government and its operations. It appears that the two groups work against each other, one striving to conceal, while the other attempting to expose. Unknown to most, the two organizations actually have a long history of partnership. The two groups share personnel and have overlapping payrolls. In addition the CIA has relied on journalists for espionage purposes for over half a century. This partnership raises numerous issues regarding the credibility and bias of the information provided by the press. Many take for granted that the information provided by their daily newspapers and evening news is presented independent of government pressure and control, however the complex relationship between the CIA and the media leads one to question this separation.

This paper will first examine the founding of the CIA and its basic components, the look at the evolution of covert operations, followed by the facets of the operations themselves. Then a review the major covert operations undertaken by the CIA will be presented. An investigation concerning the mainstream press and journalists employed by the CIA will follow, and then move to a look at the relationship between the two organizations. The effects of "September 11" on this relationship will then be explored, and end with concluding thoughts regarding the effects of the CIA and media's complex relationship. [...]

The CIA and the Press: an intimate relationship?

The reason for such an exchange may involve "the revolving door between the media and government. It's considered a badge of honor for a journalist to have spent time working for the White House, whereas it should be seen as a conflict of interest" (Brandt 9). The overlap leads one to question the validity and point of view of the information and articles presented by the shared personnel.

In addition, numerous examples exist in a short examination of recent history of the overlap in payrolls. David Gergen, "has been spinning through the door so often that it makes the rest of us dizzy. Gergen flacked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and finally Clinton, and between administrations he was an editor at U.S. News & World Report and a commentator for PBS" (Brandt 9).

The list continues; John Scali was with ABC and then Nixon, returning back to ABC after Nixon's era. Robert John Myers was in CIA for twenty years and then took the position of publisher of the New Republic in 1968 (Brandt 9). "Generoso Paul Pope, Jr. was in the CIA the year before he bought the National Enquirer in 1952. Laughlin Phillips, co-founder of the Washingtonian, was in the CIA for fifteen years . . . George R. Packard and L. Bruce van Voorst were with the CIA before they joined Newsweek, and Philip Geyelin worked for the CIA while on leave from the Wall Street Journal" (Brandt 9).

In terms of the actual organizations used by the CIA, in an article by Thomas Wright he listed the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, Louisville Courier-Journal, Copley News, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, all have worked with the CIA. Furthermore, the most "valuable" associations have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc" (Wright 1).

As demonstrated above, the CIA has not only used reporters and worked with media groups, the organization and the government and media also share much of the same personnel to run their operations. One might ask why the CIA would even risk involving the media at all in its operations, the answer is quite simple: "The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA" (Brandt 9).

Lowry Mays is the Big Daddy of radio. The founder and CEO of Clear Channel, Mays oversees 1,233 radio stations with some 100 million listeners across all 50 states, and runs a company with $8 billion in revenues and a $23 billion market cap. But ask Mays about what he does for a living and you won't hear much about musicians or how to bring up ratings or who's the best DJ. Those things don't interest him much.

Truth is, Mays isn't that passionate about what goes out over the airwaves. As long as his broadcasts sell ads, he's happy. "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," says Mays, 67. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

That all-business attitude is just one of the things that infuriates Mays's detractors, for whom creative content is everything. To the musicians, small radio operators, and other radioheads who hate Clear Channel, Mays is an evil emperor intent on seizing the many charming boutiques of Radio Land and converting them into an audio Mall of America. And that's just for starters. [...]

Clear Channel, rejecting Howard Stern's claims that he was canned for slamming President Bush, says its radio network does not have a political agenda.

But new political contribution data tell a different story about Clear Channel (CCU) executives. They have given $42,200 to Bush, vs. $1,750 to likely Democratic nominee John Kerry in the 2004 race.

What's more, the executives and Clear Channel's political action committee gave 77% of their $334,501 in federal contributions to Republicans. That's a bigger share than any other entertainment company, says the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

In contrast, Viacom (VIA) executives and its political action committee gave just 30% of their $545,650 to Republican candidates. Viacom syndicates Stern's show. [...]

Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays and his sons led the campaign giving. Mays gave $12,500 to the Republican National Committee in September. He gave $2,000 to Bush in July. President Mark Mays and Chief Financial Officer Randall Mays each gave $2,000 to Bush last year, as well. Levin says these gifts reflect a fact of political life — that companies tend to favor the party in power.

Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, has grown rapidly since Lowry Mays started the company 30 years ago. It has 180 million weekly listeners and 1,200 stations, up from about 200 stations five years ago.

Critics worry that its airwave dominance will stifle diversity of broadcast views as the FCC, Congress and the courts debate restricting radio ownership. "When they are that powerful and they have a political track record, it can make one uneasy," says Andrew Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project, a watchdog group. [...]

According to the company's web pages, "Clear Channel Worldwide (Clear Channel Communications, Inc., NYSE: CCU), headquartered in San Antonio, TX, is a global leader in the out-of-home advertising industry with radio and television stations, outdoor displays, and entertainment venues in 66 countries around the world.

Including announced transactions, Clear Channel operates approximately 1,225 radio and 39 television stations in the United States and has equity interests in over 240 radio stations internationally. Clear Channel also operates approximately 776,000 outdoor advertising displays, including billboards, street furniture and transit panels around the world. Clear Channel Entertainment is a leading promoter, producer and marketer of live entertainment events and also owns leading athlete management and marketing companies."

Self-Censorship

Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Clear Channel program directors issued a list of "potentially offensive songs" that it suggested stations not play. Many reports referred to the list as a "ban" on the songs, which included all Rage Against The Machine songs, the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy" (which includes the line "Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade"), John Lennon's "Imagine," Metallica's "Seek and Destroy," AC/DC's "Safe in New York," Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire," and "The Drifters' On Broadway."

Clear Channel spokesperson Pam Taylor objected to the list being called a "ban," saying, ""This was an effort to help people be sensitive to the unthinkable environment. It's been somehow turned into some sort of evil attempt to control pop music, and that's absurd."[1] According to the New York Times, "a smaller list of questionable songs was originally generated by the corporate office, but an overzealous regional executive began contributing suggestions and circulating the list via e-mail, where it continued to grow." The program directors at individual stations were able to decide whether to play the listed songs or not.[2]

Also, in 2003, "after the Dixie Chicks criticized President Bush during a London performance ... some Clear Channel radio stations pulled the group's music from their play lists."[3] According to the New York Times (March 31, 2003), "More unified were the actions of Cumulus Media, which owns 262 stations, and has at least temporarily stopped all 42 of its country stations from playing the Dixie Chicks."

Pro-War Rallies

The Clear Channel's activities go beyond radio. In March 2003, its affiliate stations throughout the United States organized pro-war rallies, under the name of Rally for America, to coincide with the Bush administration's launch of war with Iraq. "Experienced Bushologists let out a collective 'Aha!' when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush," reported Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Although Clear Channel denied sponsoring the rallies, "they were promoted repeatedly by the company's widely syndicated radio personality, Glenn Beck."[4]

To counter negative impressions resulting from the post-9/11 playlist and "Rally for America" debacles, Clear Channel hired the crisis-management firm Brainerd Communicators. According to the New York Times (March 31, 2003), part of Clear Channel's damage control included an op/ed article by Glenn Beck in which "Mr. Beck described the [pro-war] rallies as a grassroots response to his personal broadcast call to 'Mr. and Mrs. America' to urge their local radio stations to hold rallies."

Breaking the Law

In their "Ten Worst Corporations of 2003" list, Robert Weissman and Russell Mokhiber report that Clear Channel has "compiled a record of 'repeated law-breaking' ... violating the law -- including prohibitions on deceptive advertising and on broadcasting conversations without obtaining permission of the second party to the conversation -- on 36 separate occasions over the previous three years."[5]

Bush Connections

"The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire." [6],

"In addition, Hicks steered a controversial scheme to use the University of Texas' $13 billion endowment for private investment. Among the beneficiaries were the Carlyle Group, the arms investment firm tied to both George Bush Snr and the bin Laden family, and George W Bush's controversial Harken Oil drilling project in Bahrain."[7]

Data released by the Center for Responsive Politics in early 2004 revealed that Clear Channel executives donated $42,200 to Bush compared to $1,750 to Democrat Presidental candidate John Kerry. Clear Channel's [political action committee] contributed 77% of their $334,501 in federal contributions to Republicans. [8]

Contact

Clear Channel
200 Basse Road
San Antonio, TX 78209
Phone: 1-210-822-2828
URL: http://www.clearchannel.com

The question is raised by the input and support CBS has accepted from the Central Intelligence Agency in producing its new weekly drama about the CIA, "The Agency," which premieres this month.

One wonders if CBS executives remember "The FBI," the dramatic series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that was one of the great feats in propaganda history. Week after week for nine years, it presented an unvaryingly upbeat -- and largely distorted -- portrait of a highly ethical, non-politicized institution keeping America safe from internal and external enemies. It was a portrait jointly shaped by ABC, a private network, and the FBI, a secretive government agency that had say over scripts and story lines.

Each episode displayed the FBI seal and thanked director J. Edgar Hoover for his cooperation. As far back as the newsreels of John Dillinger's capture, Hoover knew that polishing the Bureau's image through the mass media was a key to ever more power and more funding.

After "The FBI" went off the air in 1973, Congressional hearings and Freedom of Information lawsuits revealed that -- during the nine years of sanitized hero-worship on ABC -- the Bureau was systematically abusing the First Amendment rights of countless civil rights and peace advocates, from grass roots activists to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI" offered no episodes about that FBI.

Zimbalist and his TV cohorts waged war against organized crime, but in the real world, the FBI's efforts were half-hearted at best. In 1968, for example, when activist/comedian Dick Gregory made a speech denouncing the Mafia as "snakes" for importing drugs into the inner city, J. Edgar Hoover reacted by trying to provoke the mob into retaliating against the comedian. Hoover wrote that the FBI should develop "a counterintelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory's attack on LCN."

Those dozen words shed more accurate light on the character and activities of the Bureau than all the weekly ABC episodes that year.

Apparently unconcerned with this history, CBS's "The Agency" has invited the participation of the CIA, an institution with a history at least as controversial as the FBI's. The CBS project readily won the support of the CIA and its public liaison officer with Hollywood, Chase Brandon, whose job is CIA image-enhancement.

A decade after the collapse of our Soviet enemy (which the CIA largely failed to predict), positive media presentations can help sell the public on the need for the CIA and its estimated $30 billion price tag. Each week "The Agency" will glorify CIA officers who save the world from Arab terrorists, drug-runners, kidnappers and assorted cutthroats.

A new ABC spy series, "Alias," has also received some CIA assistance, but Brandon refused requests to help two forthcoming CIA-related movies -- one starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt , another starring Matt Damon -- because he deemed them insufficiently positive: "If someone wants to slander us," Brandon told the Washington Post, "it's not in our interest to cooperate." Echoes of J. Edgar.

After meeting the creator of "The Agency" and reviewing scripts, Brandon granted unprecedented CIA support for the CBS series because "it would show our spirit, patriotism and dedication." As the New York Times described, CBS was even allowed to shoot parts of its pilot at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, using off-duty CIA employees as extras. For interior sets in Los Angeles, the CIA has provided agency seals. "Much to the delight of the agency," the Times reported, "CBS clearly has become an agency booster."

Series creator Michael Beckner explained CIA involvement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "[The series] is not going to demonize them…What attracted them to cooperating with us is the fact that we want to tell stories about the lives of the people that work there."

Producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script "approval." Executive Producer Shaun Cassidy commented on the CIA's script involvement : "Their support is a strictly case-by-case basis. If they don't like the script, we won't have their support that week."

But should network TV producers be showing scripts to a government agency in hopes of getting its support? And if a series is that cozy with its subject, how much integrity can the program have?

In recent years, the CIA has worked hand-in-hand with brutal regimes and armies. It has helped overthrow elected governments. CBS knows it will abruptly lose its access and support if "The Agency" focuses on the CIA's less savory activities or blunders.

As long as CBS and the CIA remain wedded, don't expect a hard-hitting episode on the agency's alliance with the corrupt, often-brutal military in Colombia. Or on the CIA's past links to terrorists like Osama bin Laden now protected by the Afghan government. Or on the agency's role in the bombings of the Chinese embassy in Serbia and the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

In other words, expect far more fiction than fact.

WASHINGTON - The part of the CIA that's in charge of science and technology is showing off some never before-seen-devices that have been used in the cloak-and-dagger game over the years.

CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante went to CIA Headquarters to get a sneak peek at what some have called "the finest museum you'll never see."

It's a museum of top-secret spy stuff, a display of the once-classified gadgets used by CIA spies all over the world. It's for CIA employees only, but CBS News got a rare look behind the scenes from Dr. Donald Kerr, director for science and technology.

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Comment: Interesting legacy eh? The current president's sojourn in the White House was made possible, in part, by the fact that his grandfather facilitated the deaths of 65 million people during WWII and profited enormously from it.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

Comment: "Remarkably"?? We wonder in what way the authors of this article believe that a scandal of such proportions would become public knowlege? Would the scandal simply declare itself to the public? How does "Joe sixpack", preoccupied with the concerns of daily living, get his information? The blindness of the authors as to how the mainstream media actually funtions is all the more remarkable given that the authors themselves work for a mainstream press publication and must surely be aware of the editing that certain stories are subjected to. Are they really unable to make the simple deduction that, since knowledge is power, those in power control the extent of the knowledge that is made available to the public? They seem to be completely unaware of how the military-industrial complex operates and just how all-powerful it is, but then again, most people on this planet are in a similarly uneduated position.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Comment: Why is the argument hinging on whether or not Prescott Bush and his associates were sympathetic to the Nazi cause? This is about money and power, not ideals. Is the current George Bush sympathetic to the "Arab terrorist" cause? Only insofar as furthering that agenda furthers his own goals, and those goals and the goals of Prescott Bush at the time are the real i-ssue.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

In 1924, his [Prescott's] father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

Comment: Right here, the authors of this article have an opportunity to take their first step into conspiracy possibility. Why was the investigation into Bush's links with Nazi Germany dropped? Do investigations drop themselves? Sadly, the authors' abilities for independent thought and real investigative journalism are either lacking or they realise that there is a limit to the conclusions they are allowed to present. We do not blame them of course, these journalists of the world, most of them were completely unaware of the kind of industry they were getting involved in and who really controls it. As David Rockefeller made clear back in 1991 in Germany:

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." David Rockefeller... Baden-Baden, Germany 1991

For our part, and like the authors of this article, we are merely presenting our own conclusions, the difference however is that, while we do not have the ears of the masses as they do, we are thankfully unrestricted from any allegiances, other than our declared allegiance to the truth.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

Comment: Note that, in the above paragraph, the words "to ensure our interests are protected", i.e. the interest of Prescott Bush and Co, is referring to the US of "slave labour" from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Whan an honorable family history the current US president has...

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Comment: Again, how does "all concrete evidence" of the ownership of a large mulitnational company, evidence which was openly available beforehand, suddenly "disappear"? Do the documents "disappear" themselves?

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Comment: Now hang on a minute... is the above paragraph really suggesting what we think it is suggesting? An "Executive Order", that is, a high-level government-approved legislative decree, was "ignored" because it clashed with the goals of a bunch of industrialists? Where does that leave the voice of the people? Where does that leave democracy? Who really runs the government? Rather than repeating ourselves and further taxing your ability to believe a bunch of "left wing conspiracy theorists" like us, we will let a past pillar of American society, who was in a position to know, spell it out for you:

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts...newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. - John F Hylan - Mayor of New York 1918-1925

We should, however, not ignore the little detail of extreme importance that forms the subject of abovementioned executive order which was "ignored". The US government was ordered by the Roosevelt to "take all measures to rescue the European Jews", yet this was not done, and indeed, there is much evidence (some of which is detailed below) which suggests that the fact that the European Jews found themselves in a position where they needed to be rescued was also part of a carefully laid plan.

Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This wa