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New York Times – December 26, 1977 Article freely available in English:
The following article is based on a report by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B. Treasler. It was written by Mr. Crewdson.
Shortly after Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as U.S. ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest circulating in the Asian subcontinent.
"Its level of intellectual and political competence was less than zero," Mr. Galbraith recalled in an interview. "The political sophistication of the National Enquirer was distrusted."
Although it was an English-language publication, "it was only an approximation of English," he said. "The political damage it caused was nothing compared to the literary damage."
The new ambassador then discovered that Quest was published with CIA funding. On his orders, the CIA shut down the newspaper.
Although perhaps less well-known than most, Quest was one of dozens of English-language and foreign-language publications around the world that were owned, subsidized, or otherwise influenced by the CIA over the past three decades.
Although the CIA employed dozens of American journalists working abroad, a three-month investigation by a team of New York Times reporters and researchers determined that, with a few notable exceptions, they were not used by the agency to advance its global propaganda campaign.
In its persistent efforts to influence world opinion, the CIA was able to draw on a Senate and a much broader network of newspapers, wire services, magazines, publishing houses, radio stations, and other entities over which it had at various times some degree of control.
Ten years ago, when the agency's communications empire was at its peak, it comprised more than 800 press and public information organizations and individuals. According to one CIA official, their size ranged "from Radio Free Europe to a third-rate guy to Quite who could get something in the local paper."
Although the network was officially known as the "Propaganda Assets Inventory," to those inside the CIA, it was "Wisner's Wurlitzer." The late Frank G. Wisner was the agency's first chief of staff for covert operations.
Like the Mighty Wurlitzer
With the push of a button, or so Mr. Wisner Hiked thought, the "Wurlitzer" became the means to orchestrate, in almost any language in the world, any tune the CIA wanted to hear.
Much of the Wurlitzer is now dismantled. The 1967 revelations about some of the CIA's financial ties to academic, cultural, and publishing organizations led to budget cuts, and more recent revelations about the agency's employment of American and foreign journalists have led to a gradual severance of relationships with many individuals and news organizations abroad.
A smaller network of foreign journalists remains, and some undercover CIA agents may still travel the world, disguised as correspondents for obscure trade magazines or business newsletters.
The CIA's propaganda operation was first led by Tom Braden, now a columnist, and was run for many years by Cord Meyer Jr., a popular leader on the Yale campus before joining the CIA.
Mr. Braden said in an interview that he was never really sure "anyone was in charge" of the operation and that "Frank Wisner kind of took care of it himself." Mr. Meyer declined to discuss the operation.
However, several other former CIA agents have stated that, while the agency is wary of telling its American journalist agents what to write, it never hesitates to manipulate the output of its "agents" based abroad. These included several English-language publications regularly read by American correspondents abroad and by reporters and editors in the United States.
Most former agents said they were worried but powerless to avoid the potential "backlash" the CIA could pose. The propaganda filtered through these assets, some of which was deliberately misleading or outright false, could be picked up by American journalists abroad and included in their dispatches for publications at home.
The common thread connecting the CIA to its propaganda assets was money, and money often provided a degree of editorial control, often total control. In some cases, the CIA simply created a newspaper or news service and paid the bills through a shell company. In other cases, directly or indirectly, the agency provided capital to an entrepreneur or appeared at the right time to bail out a financially troubled organization.
"It gave them something to do," said one CIA agent. "It's the old Parkinson's Law story, a matter of people having too much free time and too much unused money." There were a lot of people who were underemployed."
According to one agency official, the CIA preferred, whenever possible, to invest its money in an existing organization rather than founding one itself. "If a company is operating," the official said, "it's better cover. The important thing is to have an editor or someone else who is receptive to your writing."
Postwar Support for Magazines
The CIA, which evolved from the World War II Office of Strategic Services, became involved in mass communications in the early postwar years, when agency officials began to fear that influential publications in a ravaged Europe might succumb to the temptation of communist money. Among the organizations subsidized during these early years, according to a CIA source, was the French newspaper Paris Match.
No one associated with Paris Match at that time could be reached for comment.
Recalling the concerns of those early days, a former CIA operative said that there was "virtually no left-wing newspaper in Europe that wasn't directly funded by Moscow." He continued, "We knew when the mail arrived, we knew how much money it brought in."
One of the CIA's first major ventures was radio broadcasting. Although long suspected, it was definitively reported only a few years ago that until 1971, the agency supported both Radio Free Europe, which continues to broadcast privately to Eastern European nations, and Radio Liberty, which broadcasts to the Soviet Union itself.
The CIA's involvement in these operations was concealed from public view by two front groups, the Free Europe Committee and the American Committee for Liberation, both of which were also engaged in a variety of lesser-known propaganda operations.
The American Committee for Liberation funded a Munich-based group, the Institute for the Study of the USSR, a publishing and research house that, among other things, compiled the widely used reference work "Who's Who in the USSR." The Committee for Free Europe published the magazine East Europe, distributed in that country and abroad, and also operated the Free Europe Press Service.
Much more obscure were two other CIA broadcasting ventures, Radio Free Asia and a rather tenuous operation known as Free Cuba Radio. Free Cuba Radio, established in the early 1960s, did not broadcast from its own transmitters but purchased airtime from several commercial radio stations in Florida and Louisiana.
Its propaganda broadcasts against the government of Prime Minister Fidel Castro aired on radio stations WMIE and WGBS in Miami, WKWF in Key West, and WWL in New Orleans. They complemented other CIA broadcasts on a shortwave station, WRUL, with bureaus in New York City, and Radio Swan, on a small Caribbean island.
The management of these stations changed hands extensively, and it has not been possible to establish whether any of them were aware of the source of the funds that financed the programs. But sources in Miami's Cuban community said it was generally known at the time that funds from a federal agency were involved.
A former CIA official stated that one of the reasons for creating the Free Cuba radio network was to have airtime available in advance in case Radio Swan, supposedly the main communications link for the Bay of Pigs invasion, was destroyed by saboteurs.
Radio Swan's coverage was thin enough to justify such concern. Powertul, whose broadcasts could be heard throughout much of the Western Hemisphere, was operated by a New York steamship company 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 away clients, the CIA decided not to broadcast any messages. The CIA was eventually forced to accept a few contracts to preserve the coverage Radio Swan had left.
Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was a branch of the Committee for a Free Asia, and the CIA believed it was the beginning of a Far Eastern operation that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
The Committee for a Free Asia, according to former CIA officials, was founded as the Eastern counterpart of the Committee for a Free Europe. It later changed its name to the Asia Foundation. It still exists, although its ties to the CIA were severed ten years ago.
The Asia Foundation was headed for years by the late Robert Blum, who, according to several sources, resigned from the CIA to take over. The foundation provided cover for at least one CIA agent and conducted various media-related ventures, including a program, launched in 1955, to select and pay the expenses of Asian journalists for a year of study at Harvard's prestigious Neiman Fellowship program.
Emergency Airlift Fails
It was only after Radio Free Asia's transmitters were operational that the CIA realized, according to sources familiar with the matter, that there were virtually no private radio receivers in mainland China. A contingency plan was developed.
Balloons carrying small radios tuned to the Radio Free Asia frequency were launched toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where Chinese Nationalists had taken refuge after the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were returned to Taiwan via the Formosa Strait.
Radio Free Asia ceased broadcasting in 1955.
The CIA's involvement in publishing extended worldwide and involved a wide variety of periodicals, some obscure and many now defunct. In some cases, according to sources, there was no effort to shape editorial policy despite substantial subsidies, but in other cases, policy was virtually dictated.
One of the CIA's operations in this country involved subsidizing several publications whose editors and publishers had fled Havana for Miami after the Castro government came to power in 1959. The subsidies, which in some cases amounted to several million dollars, were paid to the publications through a CIA front company in New York called Foreign Publications Inc.
Among the twelve recipients of these grants were Avance, El Mundo, El Prensa Libre, Bohemia, and El Diario de las Americas. In addition, the CIA reportedly funded AIP, a Miami-based radio news agency that produced programs sent free of charge to more than 100 small stations in Central and Latin America.
The CIA had initially planned to clandestinely distribute copies of the subsidized publications in Cuba, but this plan was abandoned after the Cuban exiles who had agreed to take them by boat refused to approach Cuban shores in the last few minutes.
The subsidies continued, however, and the publications were widely read in Miami's Cuban community and, in the case of Bohemia, a weekly that received more than $3 million in total, throughout Latin America as well.
The intelligence agency once supported the British newspaper Encounter, but agency sources said that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Paris-based group through which the CIA channeled the funds, also supported several other publications, many of which have now ceased operations.
Ties with the agency were severed
The congress, founded in 1950 in response to a conference of Soviet writers held that year in Berlin, has since severed its ties with the American agency, reconstituted itself, and changed its name. But during the years it served as a CIA channel, 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, to the publications Thought and Quest.
In the United States, Atlas magazine, a digest of the world's press, sometimes used translators employed by the CIA.
African Forum and Africa Report were published with CIA money transferred to the American Society of African Culture and the African-American Institute. In Stockholm, the publication Argumenten received funding from the CIA through such a complex channel that even its editor was unaware of its source. The same was true of Combate, a Latin American bimonthly.
In Nairobi, Kenya, the CIA created the East African Legal Digest, less as a propaganda outlet than as a cover for one of its agents. In the United States, the Asia Foundation published a newspaper, The Asian Student, which was distributed to students from the Far East attending American universities.
In Saigon, the Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, modeled on the American version and entirely funded by the CIA, published a polished and expensive magazine that was distributed during the Vietnam War to the offices of all senators and representatives in Washington.
Among the CIA's more unusual relationships was the one it had with a group in Princeton, New Jersey, called the Research Council. The council, founded by Hadley Cantril, the former chairman of Princeton University's psychology department, and his associate, Lloyd Free, derived almost all of its income from the CIA during the decade it was active.
"They were considered an asset because we paid them a lot of money," said a former CIA operative. Mr. Free confirmed that he and Dr. Cantril, a recognized pioneer in public opinion polling, "sort of ran" the council for the CIA.
The council's activities, Mr. Free said, consisted of extensive public opinion surveys conducted in other countries on issues of interest to the CIA. Some, he said, were conducted in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet bloc.
The governments of these countries, Mr. Free said, "knew nothing about the CIA." Apparently, Rutgers University Press didn't know this either, publishing some of the results in a 1967 book called "Pattern of Human Concerns."
Book Publishing Companies
The ties between the CIA and Frederick Praeger, the book's publisher, have been discussed in the past. But Praeger was just one of many publishing houses, some of the largest in the industry, that printed or distributed more than 1,000 volumes produced or subsidized in some way by the agency over the past three decades.
Some publishing houses were nothing more than CIA "proprietors." These included Allied Pacific Printing of Bombay, India, and the Asia Research Centre, one of the agency's many publishing companies in Hong Kong, which was described by an agency source as "nothing more than a pair of freight forwarders."
Other legitimate publishers received CIA funding. According to current and former agency officials, Franklin Books, a New York-based publishing house specializing in the translation of academic works, and Walker & Co., co-owned by Samuel Sloan Waiker Jr., a former vice president of the Free Europe Committee, and Samuel W. Meek, a retired executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and a CIA ally, received grants.
A Franklin spokesperson confirmed that the publisher had received grants from the Asia Foundation and "another small foundation for an African project, both of which were revealed in 1967 to be CIA-supported." The spokesperson added, "Franklin was not aware of this support at the time."
Mr. Walker stated through a secretary that his company had never "printed books on behalf of the CIA or published a book from a source that was not worthy of publication on its own merits."
Other publishing houses published books for which the CIA had donated funds. Among the other publications that contributed to these works was Charles Scribner's Sons, which in 1951 published "The Yenan Way" by Eudocio Ravines, based on a translation provided by William F. Buckley Jr., who was a CIA agent for several years in the early 1950s. 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 officials at both publishing houses, Putnam and Scribner's were unaware of any agency involvement in these books, as was Doubleday & Company, which in 1965 published, under the title "The Penkovskiy Papers," what purported to be a journal kept by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet double agent. The book even used CIA style in the transliteration of the colonel's name.
They were also unaware of the existence of the CIA. The connection was Ballantine Books, which published a modest volume on Finland, "Study in Sisu," written by Austin Goodrich, an undercover CIA agent who posed for years in Scandinavia as a freelance writer researching a book on Finland.
Authorship Used as Cover
Another CIA agent who used the cover of a freelance author to research a book was Edward S. Hunter, who traveled through Central Asia for years to gather material for a book on Afghanistan that was eventually published by the prestigious London publishing house Hodder & Stoughton.
Other CIA agents worked abroad while writing books, including Lee White, an employee of the Middle East 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 working for the CIA in Paris from 1951 to 1953, where he also helped George Plimpton found the Paris Review.
As with Mr. Hunter, Mr. White and Mr. Matthiessen used their writing careers only as cover for their intelligence activities. There is no evidence that the CIA attempted to control what they wrote or that it attempted, through Mr. Matthiessen, to influence the Paris Review.
Several of the CIA's publications have been well received critically, and a few have been commercial successes. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report, "on at least one occasion," a book review for an agency book in The New York Times was written by a CIA writer "under contract" with the agency.
The report does not identify the book or the reviewer, but it is said to be a book entitled Escape from Red China, the story of a defector from China published by Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan. Jack Geoghegan, the company's president, has stated that he never knew the book had been prepared for publication by the CIA.
The book was reviewed in the Times on Sunday, November 11, 1962, by Richard L. Walker, now director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of South Carolina and a regular book reviewer for the newspaper. Professor Walker stated in a telephone interview that he had been under contract with the CIA as a consultant and lecturer before and after the article appeared, but not at the time he wrote it. He also stated that he was unaware that the book had been produced by the CIA.
Another best-selling book that, according to intelligence sources, was published in 1962 with CIA assistance was "On the Tiger's Back" by Aderogba Ajao, a Nigerian who had studied at an East German university and returned home to write about his disillusionment.
A Yugoslav Connection
The Praeger organization, which was purchased by Encyclopaedia Brittanica in 1966, began its involvement with the CIA in 1957 when it published "The New Class," a seminal work by Milovan Djilas, a disillusioned Yugoslav government official who wrote extensively about his personal rejection of communism.
Mr. Djilas, who had become an embarrassment to his government before the book's publication, struggled to get the last part of the manuscript out of Yugoslavia.
Mr. Praeger said he enlisted the help of a friend in the U.S. government (but not the CIA) to help him obtain the final pages. The manuscript was eventually transported from Belgrade to Vienna by Edgar Clark, then a correspondent for Time magazine, and his wife, Katherine.
Mr. Clark said neither he nor his wife had ever had anything to do with the CIA. But the manuscript eventually ended up in the hands of a CIA agent named Arthur Macy Cox. Mr. Cox, who later worked undercover for Praeger in Geneva, spearheaded an agency effort to have the book translated into several languages and distributed worldwide.
“That was my first contact with the CIA,” Mr. Praeger said, but he added that at the time, he had “no idea there even was a CIA.”
Mr. Praeger said he went on to publish 20 to 25 volumes in which the CIA had an interest, either in the editing, the publication itself, or the post-publication distribution.
The agency’s involvement, he said, could have manifested itself in a variety of ways, from directly reimbursing him for the publication costs to guaranteeing, perhaps through some foundation, the purchase of enough copies to make the publication worthwhile.
Among Praeger's books in which the CIA played a role are "The Anthill," a work on China by French writer Suzanne Labin, and two books on the Soviet Union by Günther Nollau, a member and head of the West German security service. Mr. Nollau was identified in a New York Times review only as "a West German lawyer who fled East Germany a few years ago."
Dozens of foreign-language newspapers, wire services, and other organizations were financed and operated by the CIA, two of the most prominent of which were reportedly DENA, the West German news agency, and Agencia Orbe Latino Americano, the Latin American news agency.
The CIA Newspapers
Furthermore, the CIA had invested heavily in several English-language media outlets. When asked why the agency had a preference for these, a former senior CIA official explained that it was easier to conceal ownership of publications that had apparent reasons for being American-owned and easier to place American agents in these publications as reporters and editors.
The Rome Daily American, which the CIA partially owned from 1946 until 1964, when it was purchased by Samuel W. Meek, an executive of J. Walter Thompson, was one of the agency's only "privately owned" English-language newspapers.
Such "owners" were said to exist in other capitals, notably Athens and Rangoon. They generally played a dual role, providing cover for intelligence agents and simultaneously publishing agency propaganda.
But CIA ownership of newspapers was generally considered costly and difficult to conceal, and all such relationships were now believed to have ended.
The Rome Daily American was taken over by the CIA, it was said, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Italian Communists. But the agency eventually grew tired of trying to "maintain the fiction that the paper was privately owned" and, as soon as the perceived Communist threat had passed, turned it over to Mr. Meek.
Even after the agency's demise, the newspaper was sold, but it was managed for several years by Robert H. Cunningham, a CIA operative who had resigned from the agency and been rehired as a contractor.
A former CIA official said the agency passed up an opportunity to buy another English-language newspaper, The Brussels Times, which was edited by a CIA man but had no other connection to the agency. The official said the agency responded to the offer by saying it was "easier to buy a journalist, which we did, than to buy a newspaper."
In addition to the CIA's "proprietary" newspapers in Athens, Rangvon, and Rome, agency sources said it also invested in The Okinawa Morning Star, used more for cover than propaganda; The Manila Times and The Bangkok World, both now defunct; and The Tokyo Evening News in the days before its purchase by Asahi, the publishing organization.
"We had at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time," said one CIA official. Those the agency didn't directly own or heavily subsidize were infiltrated by paid agents or staff officers who could get stories useful to the agency published and withheld from those it found detrimental.
Agents Placed on Teams
In Santiago, Chile, the South Pacific Mail, although apparently never owned by the CIA, served as a cover for two agents: David A. Phillips, who later became chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, and David C. Hellver, who resigned as Latin America editor at the Copley Press Organization to join the CIA.
Other newspapers in which the CIA allegedly 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 CIA operative, contributed to Mr. Phillips' "cover" by hiring him as a columnist.
The CIA reportedly had agents within several foreign news services, including LATIN, a Latin American agency run by the British news agency Reuters, and the Ritzhaus organization in Scandinavia.
Although there were CIA agents in the foreign bureaus of the Associated Press and United Press International, the CIA reportedly had none at Reuters because it is British and therefore a potential target of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
However, sources close to the situation have stated that the CIA occasionally "borrowed" British "assets" from Reuters for the purpose of inserting news articles. Asked about the widely publicized claim by William E. Colby, the former CIA director, that the agency never "manipulated" Reuters, one official replied that "it was not manipulation, because Reuters knew" that the articles were being distilled by the CIA and that some were false.
Desmond Manerly, Reuters' North America editor, said these accusations were "in the past for us." He noted that Reuters CEO Gerald Long had requested evidence of such manipulation, but none had been provided.
Several news agencies were owned by or largely funded by the CIA. One of these, the Foreign News Service, published articles written by a group of exiled journalists from Eastern European countries. By the early 1960s, the articles were sold to as many as 300 newspapers worldwide, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Herald Tribune.
Bolesilaw Wierzbianski, a former Polish information minister and former director of the news service, said that, to his knowledge, the CIA's only involvement was financial and that the agency had never tried to control the service's output or use it as a cover.
Press credentials provided
In contrast, the Continental Press Service, headquartered in Washington and headed by a CIA agent named Fred Zusy, was actually owned by the CIA. One of its main functions was to provide official-looking laminated press cards to agency agents in urgent need of coverage.
The Editors Press Service was an established information service with clients throughout Latin America when, according to two former CIA officials and a third authorized source, it became a conduit for agency-inspired propaganda. A former CIA agent testified that the service, then owned by Joshua B. Powers Sr., was a vehicle for disseminating what he called "cliché stories, news articles prepared by the agency or for the agency."
Mr. Powers acknowledged that he had been a close friend for years of the late Colonel J.C. King, longtime head of the agency's Western Hemisphere division; that he had served as an agent for the CIA-funded Henry Clay Foundation; and that he had purchased and owned the South Pacific Mail from David A. Phillips in the mid-1960s, when David Hellyer was using it as a front.
Mr. Powers, however, recalled only one connection between Editors Press and the CIA. He said that in the mid-1960s, it used CIA funds to finance travel to Latin America for one of its writers, Guillermo Martinez Marquez, the exiled editor of a Cuban newspaper. Mr. Marquez said he never knew the money he received from Mr. Powers came from the CIA.
Perhaps the CIA's most widely distributed information service was Forum World Features, founded in 1958 as a Delaware company, Forum Information Service, with offices in London. Forum was apparently owned for much of its existence by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, which ceased publication in 1966. According to several CIA sources, Mr. Whitney was "in the know" about the agency's true role.
A secretary to Mr. Whitney said he was too ill to answer questions about his involvement with Forum.
Brian Crozier, the conservative British journalist who officials say had been a contract employee of the agency, and Robert G. Gately were also aware of the CIA's role. Mr. Gately, Forum's executive director in the early 1960s, was a career CIA official who later held cover positions for Newsweek, as Far East business director, and for Asia Magazine in Tokyo.
Newsweek executives, like those at nearly every major news-gathering organization believed to have been involved with the CIA, said that while they were certain none of the current employees had ties to the agency, there was no way to be certain such ties did not exist in the past.
American Newspapers Among Clients
Although the CIA claimed it never attempted to directly place its propaganda in the American press, Forum World Features once counted 30 American newspapers among its clients, including the Washington Post, and tried unsuccessfully to sell its articles to The New York Times.
The sale of Forum articles to the Washington Post and other American newspapers, a CIA official said, "put us in quite a dilemma." These sales, he continued, were considered necessary to preserve the organization's coverage, and they led to a continuous and somewhat frantic effort to ensure that domestic clients received only legitimate information.
Another major foreign news organization that CIA officials said it subsidized was Vision, the weekly news magazine distributed throughout Europe and Latin America. However, no one associated with Vision's founding or leadership over the years has said they ever had any indication that the CIA had invested money in the magazine.