Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1976 the Washington Star: In an apparent violation of its charter, the CIA has secretly subsidized the publication and distribution in the United States of dozens of books on communism and other foreign political subjects. Frederick Praeger, former owner of the publishing house that bears his name, said his firm handled between 20 and 25 books subsidized by the CIA before the company's sale in 1966 to Encyclopedia Britanica. In a telephone interview, Praeger said other firms also have published books backed by the agency but he declined to supply any names. "I can assure you some of the most respected names in the publishing industry participated," he said. Praeger said E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA official who was convicted of conspiracy in the Watergate scandal, served in the late 1960s as the agency's 'case officer' dealing with book publishing firms. SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1947, THE CIA HAS BEEN PROHIBITED BY ITS CHARTER FROM ENGAGING IN ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES. IT IS SPECIFICALLY BARRED FROM SPREADING COVERT PROPAGANDA TO BE READ BY AMERICANS. Praeger said he did not consider any of the CIA-subsidized books he published to be 'propaganda.' Instead, he said, they were "legitimate research" on subjects of interest to the Agency which lacked the broad popular appeal necessary for commercial publication. "The CIA made it possible for authors to travel and we sometimes had contacts with these authors," he said. Praeger said none of the CIA-backed books carried any sort of notice to the reader concerning the financial arrangements. While the CIA's arrangements with Praeger were secret from the public, they were well known to the publisher. However, there are indications that some CIA-subsidized books found their way into print without the publisher's being aware of the author's relations with the agency. David Replogle, who served as president of the Praeger firm after its purchase by Britanica, said he sought and received assurances in 1972 that all contact between the agency and the firm had been cut. But he said some other houses apparently published CIA-backed books without realizing the relationship until the volume was in the shops. Replogle said he believes Doubleday published some CIA-backed books in the mid 1960s without being aware of the full background of the author. He was a member of the Doubleday staff at the time. Victor Marchetti, co-author of "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," said in a telephone interview that the best-seller "The Penkvsky Papers," which purported to be the journal of Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet colonel who spied for the United States, was a fake. "I know the guy who did it," Marchetti said of the author of the book. He indicated the book was based, in part, on information which Penkovsky had supplied to the CIA. But he said spies do not keep diaries because it is simply too dangerous to do so. Marchetti said the CIA distributed the book in an effort to harass Soviet intelligence agents after Penkovsky's activities had already been discovered. "There is nothing in that book that would work up the Soviets," Marchetti said. "But there was a lot of propaganda that would work up the American public." Marchetti said the outline of the book which he wrote with former State Department intelligence officer John D. Marks was leaked to the CIA within hours of its delivery to six publishers in New York. "It had to be one of the six publisher we went to," Marchetti said. "They (the CIA) obviously have very strong contacts in the book publishing world." Marchetti and Marks ultimately did publish their book although it was subjected to 168 deletions by CIA censors who obtained a court-order against its publication in the original version. Chairman Frank Church of the Senate Intelligence has said the panel plans to include in its final report a chapter on CIA relations with book publishers and with journalists. But the Idaho Democrat said the committee's investigation of the subject is not yet complete and he declined to discuss its findings. But Church recently told reporters that the committee considers it "a matter of real concern if planted stories intended to be read abroad were read here and believed here." Although Praeger and Marchetti disagreed sharply on the propriety of CIA-subsidized publishing ventures, they agreed that the agency usually preferred to back tomes on the inner workings of communism. Marchetti related that in 1967, while he was employed by the CIA, he was shown a copy of a book entitled 'The Foreign Aid Programs of the Soviet Bloc and Communist China' written by a German national named Kurt Muller. Marchetti said since he specialized in Soviet affairs, he asked to borrow the $15 book. "I was told to keep it, they had a whole room full of them," he said. Marchetti said the book "is pure, undiluted CIA propaganda." Most of the books now known to have been backed by the CIA were published before 1967. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the subject. He was asked specifically if the CIA's book program continued beyond 1967. Hunt, who wrote a long list of spy novels while working as a CIA case officer, was assigned to work with the entire book publishing industry in either 1966 or 1967. Praeger was contemptuous of Hunt's work. "He was a rather good writer," Praeger said of Hunt. "He supposedly had knowledge of the publishing industry." But, Praeger said, Hunt produced "no ideas, no projects, no books, not a single one." Praeger's relations with the CIA began long before Hunt was assigned to the publishing job.
  
• 10/2/1976 in a Justice Dept meeting, Atty Gen. Edward Levi "strongly recommended that neither Mr. Bush nor any other CIA official contact Mr. Helms" about the grand jury investigation. (Robert L. Keuch memo, 10/14/1976)
  
• 10/4-8/1976 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual meeting in Manila.
  
• 10/6/1976 Congress passes a new copyright law to replace that of 1909. It will take effect 1/1/78, and protection now lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years. In the case of films only the producer is recognized as the author.
  
• 10/6/1976 Second presidential debate. Ford makes an incredible gaffe when he says that there is "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration."
  
• 10/6/1976 a Cubana Airlines DC-8, on its way to Havana from Barbados, was blown apart over the Caribbean by Operation Condor agents Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, though Cuban exiles would publicly take the blame. But Ricardo and Lugo slipped up and were captured; they confessed, and named Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carrilles as part of the conspiracy. (Assassination on Embassy Row 245-6) In Miami calls to the media claim credit on behalf of CORU and El Condor, an FNLC satellite. Fidel Castro renounces a 1973 skyjacking treaty with the United States because , he alleges, the CIA is directly involved in the bombing.
  
• 10/6/1976 China: Mao's four closest associates--including his wife, Jiang Qing--are arrested.
  
• 10/7/1976 Fourth Soviet constitution (since 1917) is adopted.
  
• 10/10/1976 HSCA chairman Downing appoints Richard Sprague as chief counsel.
  
• 10/11/1976 Newsweek reported: "...the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier...because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime."
  
• 10/11/1976 Time reported likely CIA involvement in the past with Burmese heroin warlord Gen. Tuan Hsi-wen.
  
• 10/11/1976 US Justice Dept asked Venezuela to turn over Orlando Bosch for questioning in the Letelier case.
  
• 10/12/1976 NY Times reported that "intelligence officials said it appeared that the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency had vitually ruled out the idea that Mr. Letelier was killed by agents of the Chilean military junta..."
  
• 10/13/1976 Bush wrote Helms and McCone telling that they might be called before the grand jury, and he offered them his full support and CIA assistance. (Deadly Secrets xxxi) CIA Director George Bush, disobeying the orders of the Attorney General, notifies former directors Richard Helms and John McCone that the federal grand jury investigating CIA activities in Chile and the Caribbean might call them as witnesses and offers CIA help in preparing their testimony. [Bush saved the necks of seventy current and former CIA agents by his refusal to turn their CIA records over to the Justice Department. This loyalty was rewarded in his campaign for the Republican nomination in 1980 and in the subsequent Reagan-Bush election campaign. Some of their "dirty tricks" included the theft of President Carter's briefing book for the television debate, disinformation about Carter's brother Billy and Libya, and the insertion of spies into Carter's National Security Council.]
  
• 10/15/1976 Houston: Sens. Robert Dole and Walter Mondale engage in the first-ever televised debate between vice-presidential nominees.
  
• 10/15/1976 Kissinger told the press about the killing of Letelier, "We have seen no evidence yet as to who was behind this assassination."
  
• 10/18/1976 Venezuela: El Nacional reported that Guillermo and Ignacio Novo were the authors of the Letelier bombing.
  
• 10/22/1976 Ford and Carter have their last debate.
  
• 10/22/1976 White House Counsel Phillip Buchen wrote Ford that Bush's obstructionism could "abort the pending investigation and lead to no prosecution" and worried that it would "set a precedent for never investigating or prosecuting a confidential source of information, even though he may have committed perjury; also for not prosecuting anyone for any crime if the evidence to do so would involve disclosing confidential CIA sources or methods." Ford was unable to get Bush to cooperate. (Deadly Secrets xxxi-xxxiii)
  
• 10/25/1976 Gov. George Wallace granted a full pardon to Clarence ("Willie") Norris, the last known survivor of the nine Scottsboro Boys who were convicted in 1931 of the alleged rape of two white women on a freight train.
  
• 10/25/1976 Newsweek's cover story ("The Year of the Evangelical") quoted theologian Michael Novak: "There is a hidden power base in American culture which our secular biases prevent many of us from noticing. Jimmy Carter has found it."
  
• 10/27/1976 Ignacio Novo is brought before a grand jury to answer questions about the Letelier assassination.
  
• 10/29/1976 Guillermo Novo is brought before a grand jury to answer questions about the Letelier assassination.
  
• 11/1976 Executives of the Dalkon Corporation and the A. H. Robins Company, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the country, have made millions of dollars from the sale of the Dalkon Shield. The Shield is an intrauterine birth control device which was introduced by A. H. Robins Company in December, 1970. Altogether, it was inserted into 3.3 million women in the United States and overseas. As it turns out, the Shield. was not sufficiently studied and tested, and as a result women have suffered from pelvic inflammatory diseases, massive bleeding, incessant cramps, and other serious infections. Many of the complications have resulted in septic abortions, hysterectomies, and, as of January, 1976, seventeen women had died. By 1975, as complaints started to mount and deaths were reported, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began hearings on the Dalkon Shield. Before the FDA committee made its recommendation, Robins itself suspended sale of the Shield. Nonetheless, in November, 1976, when the Mother Jones article appeared, some 800,000 women in the U.S. and an estimated 500,000 in other countries were still wearing the Dalkon Shield. The failure of the mass media to publicize the Dalkon Shield story qualifies this for consideration as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976. SOURCE: MOTHER JONES, November 1976, p36; "A Case of Corporate Malpractice" by Mark Dowie and Tracy Johnston.
  
• 11/1976 issue of Playboy featured an interview with Jimmy Carter. He admitted that though he had remained faithful to his wife, he had "looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times…Christ says, Don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife…" Fellow Christians were dismayed; his own pastor remarked, "I do wish he would have used different words." Jerry Falwell complained, "Like many others, I am quite disillusioned. Four months ago the majority of the people I knew were pro-Carter. Today that has totally reversed." (Washington Post 9/27/1976)
  
• 11/1976 Richard Sprague called David Phillips to testify before the Assassinations Committee in November, 1976. According to Sprague, Phillips said that the CIA had monitored and tape recorded Oswald's conversations with the Soviet Embassy. The tape was then transcribed by a CIA employee who then mistakenly coupled it with a photograph of a person who was not Oswald. Phillips said that the actual recording was routinely destroyed or re-used about a week after it was received.
  
• 11/1/1976 Washington Post reported that the CIA, including director George Bush, did not believe the Chilean regime was responsible for Letelier's death.
  
• 11/2/1976 Presidential election: Carter won by 50.1%, (Ford 48%); Carter had 40 million votes (297 electoral) to Ford's 39 million (241 electoral); Eugene J. McCarthy (Independent) 756,691 votes; Roger MacBride (Libertarian) 173,011; Other 647,631. Carter was the first president elected from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor; most of the support he got in the South came from blacks. Ford actually won two more states than Carter. Democrats controlled 62 or 61 Senate seats and had 290-145 (or 292-143) seat majority in the House. Democrats pick up governors' seats, controlling three times as many governorships as the GOP. Newcomers included Sens. Richard Lugar, Daniel Moynihan, Orrin Hatch. 53% voter turnout. Nixon believed that Ford lost the election when he failed to cultivate the Italian vote in New York, thus losing that state. Media headlines after the results: "The 'Profound Inadequacy' of the GOP" (Washington Post); "Politicians Find GOP Fighting for its Survival" (NY Times); "Southern Republicans: Their Plight is Growing Worse" (Post); "Ailing GOP May Not Recover" (Wall St Journal). In November, 1976, Americans went to the polls to elect, among others, 435 members of the House Of Representatives. There was at least one piece of information that the voters did not have when they cast their ballots. It now appears that a number of these re-elected, estimated by some to be as high as 10 percent of the House, had been beneficiaries of an influence buying program conducted by the Korean CIA. The program's main objective was to gain U.S. military support for Korea through the "distribution" of gifts and dollars to U.S. congressmen and other officials. It is now known that the program of influence-buying started six years earlier, in 1970, after 20,000 American troops were pulled out of Korea. In 1972, Richard Nixon received a campaign contribution of a half million dollars from Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Tongsun Park, a Korean CIA agent, on the orders of South Korean President Park Chung Hee. The U.S. CIA, which had a bug in the Korean Blue House in Seoul since 1973, was aware of the program. Yet, it was only after the November election that any substantial information concerning the influence buying program became available to the American public. Much like Watergate, which only started to make headlines and the network news after the 1972 election, the Korean CIA influence-buying story qualifies for consideration as one of the "best censored" stories of 1976.
  
• In the election year of 1976, Jimmy Carter ran a .successful campaign for the presidency which was based on his image as an anti-establishment, peanut-farming, ex-governor of the state of Georgia. Yet, since the fall of 1973, Carter had been associated with David Rockefeller and other members of an international power elite through his association with the Trilateral Commission, one of Rockefeller's many policy-making organizations. While this side of Carter's background was almost totally ignored by the mass media, the American. public was fully informed about his peanut-farming activities, the Playboy interview, and Amy's lemonade stand. According to the Italian publication Europa, as cited in The Review of The News, Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a founding director of the Trilateral Commission (TLC), had agreed on Carter's potential as our next president as far back as 1970. Supportive of Carter's close relationship with this little-known power elite is the fact that many members of his administration have been drawn from the membership rolls of the TLC. These include: Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Brzezinski, National Security Adviser; W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury; Harold Brown, Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State; Richard N. Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and C. Fred Bergsten, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs. Carter's personal choice for vice president, Walter Mondale, is also a member of the TLC. The virtual blackout of information available to the public through the mass media concerning the relationships between Jimmy Carter, David Rockefeller, and the Trilateral Commission qualifies this story for nomination as a "best censored" story.
  
• 11/5/1976 At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an elite group of planners meet with CIA director, George Bush to reassess the official American view of Soviet strategy. The results of this study are finally encapsulated in the 1977 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE-11 3/8). This new view completely contradicts the most fundamental assumption of détente -- that both sides seek only to maintain the status quo.
  
• 11/9/1976 Haig was quoted in the Washington Post deploring the Russians' "dynamic progress" in weaponry, their "global threat to Western lifelines" and their new "imperialistic phase."
  
• 11/9/1976 George De Mohrenschildt committed himself to Parkland Hospital, underwent shock therapy for "psychotic depression," and was released 12/30/1976. On November 9, 1976, Jeanne had him committed to a mental institution in Texas for three months, and listed in a notarized affidavit four previous suicide attempts while he was in the Dallas area. In the affidavit she stated that George suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed that the FBI and the Jewish Mafia were persecuting him.
  
• 11/12/1976 Ford extended Al Haig's term in Europe for two more years.
  
• 11/13/1976 Associated Press reports: "The Justice Department reportedly has uncovered a 1964 memo by J. Edgar Hoover in which the late FBI director said he was told Lee Harvey Oswald discussed in advance with Cuban officials his plan to kill President John F. Kennedy ... quoted informed sources as saying that Hoover said in the memo that he was told of the discussions between Oswald and the Cubans by a highly reliable informant who learned about them personally from Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba." "It has previously been disclosed in documents recently released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act that Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico city less than two months before Kennedy was killed in Dallas November 22, 1963."
  
• 11/15/1976 Washington Post reported that for decades the Justice Dept had been looking the other way when it came to crimes committed by the CIA. This "dates from a 1954 agreement between the two agencies which, in effect, gave the CIA the right to block a prosecution or keep a crime secret in the name of 'national security.'"
  
• 11/17/1976 CIA Director George Bush says he does not believe newspaper reports that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo claiming Lee Harvey Oswald had contacted Cuba prior to JFK's assassination. He says other allegations against his agency have turned out to be false on investigation. Bush admits the CIA has been guilty of abuse of power, but defends the need for an intelligence gathering agency, covert operations and spying in other countries.
  
• 11/18/1976 McCone wrote Bush that he was "greatly troubled" that a CIA official had perjured himself in testimony before Congress. (Deadly Secrets xxxi)
  
• 11/20/1976 Senate Committee on Intelligence releases its Interim Report, describing circumstantial evidence of the Kennedys' approval of the anti-Castro plots.
  
• 11/26-27/1976 Washington Post reported that the WC had learned that the CIA recorded phone conversations made by Oswald while he was in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, but the Agency had destroyed these recordings before the assassination.
  
• 11/26/1976 FBI agent Robert Scherrer reported that Chile's government maintained close ties with Cuban exile groups and sometimes used them for assassinations. (Assassination on Embassy Row 264)
  
• 11/26/1976 the day before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA Chief of Cuban Operations David Phillips dropped a bombshell into the media. The AP reported, in a story headlined "Oswald Offered Soviets Data for Trip," that Phillips remembered another phone call, one not in the record [AP story of 11-27-76, at RIF #104-10400-10010, p.5]. In that call, Phillips recalled, Oswald offered the Soviets information that "might be useful to them." Ronald Kessler of the Washington Post wrote a lengthier story the same day (of which the Russ Holmes Work File contains many copies, an indication of the interest elicited at CIA) entitled "Hill Panel Probing Oswald Call" [Washington Post story of 11-27-76, by Ronald Kessler, at RIF #104-10400-10010, p.9]. Kessler reported that Oswald was trying to wrangle a free trip to the Soviet Union in exchange for information.
  
• 11/26-27/1976 Washington Post reported that the WC had learned that the CIA recorded phone conversations made by Oswald while he was in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, but the Agency had destroyed these recordings before the assassination.
  
• 11/27/1976 Committee members fly to Mexico City, where David Atlee Phillips, among the first witnesses subpoenaed by the Assassinations Committee, is questioned about his role in the CIA supplying the Warren Commission photo of man misidentified as LHO about the tape recordings and the transcripts of Oswald's visit to the Russian embassy. Phillips testifies that surveillance cameras were not working when LHO approached the embassy and that the tape recording had been routinely destroyed. Chief Counsel Sprague asks the CIA for access to its files but the Agency refuses unless Sprague signs a secrecy oath. Sprague says that would be a conflict since the CIA is one of the Committee's targets. The HSCA testimony of David Atlee Phillips is now public, held among the so-called Security Classified testimony in 9 boxes at the National Archives. Phillips was questioned by Richard Sprague, the HSCA's head at that point and for a few months more, until strange circumstances led to his ouster and replacement by Robert Blakey. In his deposition, David Phillips started out answering directly and then slowly started to dance sideways under questioning, trying to maintain his allegation without being pinned down too hard on specifics [The following is taken from the HSCA testimony of David Phillips, 11-2876, pp. 39-40]
  
• 11/27/1976 Release of the film Network, a satire about a fictional television network. Ned Beatty's character explains: "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today . . . We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since men crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."
  
• 11/30/1976 Richard Sprague's team had barely finished interviewing David Phillips when they flew down to Guadalajaro Mexico to interview the Tarasoff couple (CIA transcribers), on November 30, 1976. And in this interview, Boris Tarasoff didn't have the memory lapse he was to exhibit later, during the Blakey era. The summary of this earlier interview, included along with the transcript in the file, contains the following: The Tarasoffs claim to remember translating and transcribing at least two conversations involving Oswald. They remember that the first one was fairly short and routine. Oswald did not identify himself in this first conversation. The second one was much longer and Oswald did identify himself in this conversation. The Tarasoffs remember Oswald discussing his financial situation in this call. They deny making any editorial or marginal comments in the transcription of this call. The Tarasoffs remember nothing unusual about the first call or the circumstances surrounding its delivery or transcription. The second call was delivered to them and they were asked to transcribe the Oswald call as quickly as possible. Their contact expressed a strong interest in the identity of the caller and the substance of the call. The Tarasoffs translated and transcribed the call and returned the transcript on the same day, using an emergency contact as opposed to waiting until the next morning and using their standard contact [HSCA Tarasoff testimony, 11-30-76, summary material]. In this interview, both Tarasoffs clearly remembered an English conversation, which Anna transcribed as she typically handled English calls whereas her husband typically did the Russian ones. This may be responsible for her memory being better regarding the content of the call. But that there was such a call, in English, lengthy, and with a great deal of excitement surrounding it, both Tarasoffs were explicit.