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p The United States spends enormous sums on subversion abroad—exactly how much it is impossible to say, for it is a state secret. It may be safely assumed, however, that it turns into thousands of millions of dollars yearly, with the lion’s share going to the CIA for operations against the U.S.S.R.   [242•* 

p But there is nothing to show for it. The Soviet Union is building its own life, and winning well-earned respect all over the world. The CIA is powerless to halt the march to communism. A new society, the most just in history, is emerging to take the place of capitalism.

p Capitalism does not want to yield ground. It is doing its utmost to defeat the forces of the new. In this sense the CIA is the concentrated expression of Big Business determination to achieve its ends at any cost. All the more 243 so since that cost is basically shifted to the shoulders of the people. Philip Agee, a former agent of the CIA, appalled by its inside workings, broke his ties with it, and summed up his contribution in a major expose: ’American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force—without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class’s determination to retain power and privilege.’ ^^2^^

p A veteran of the American labour movement—by no means a Communist but a believer in democracy—Ernest De Maio, now permanent representative of the World Federation of Trade Unions in the United Nations, observed in 1978: ’If we are to understand the CIA, we must first take a look at the socio-economic system that spawned it. Our society is a system based on the exploitation of the many by a few who own and control the capital goods that produce the nation’s wealth and the financial institutions that are its lifeblood. These powerful few, with their great economic resources, control the political life of the nation. They maintain a shadow government that makes the basic decisions that are relayed to the executive and legislative branches of the overt government through henchmen placed in strategic positions throughout the federal apparatus ... When we go after the CIA, we are taking on the strongarm agency of the power structure.’^^3^^

p A flawless analysis. The CIA is an instrument of the class of monopoly capitalists organized as the state. Still, in the United States the activities of the CIA and other arms of political surveillance and repression are criticized from the right. Some say that CIA & Co. is not effective enough. This view is shared also by Big Business. For instance, the millionaires and multimillionaires who hold the reins in the United States apparently feel that the state agencies which guard their class rule, do not provide enough individual protection. In the mid-seventies they employed 250,000 personal security guards, which, coupled with the latest electronic ‘watchdog’ systems and the like, cost $5 billion each year. Besides, the U.S. has 4,200 private detective agencies employing 32,000 licensed 244 operatives. Spying for private individuals has assumed gigantic dimensions; according to rough estimates, for each eavesdropping device installed by government agencies 300 are planted by private detective firms.^^4^^

p When the personal security of the ruling class is so massively ensured, some loosening of tongues about the CIA is perfectly safe. For it is further evidence of ’ democracy’ in the United States. Why not allow some margin to critics from the right if the end goal is a further strengthening of the CIA?

p In September 1978 the U.S. journal Commentary carried an article entitled ’What the CIA Knows About Russia’. It deals with the abysmal ignorance of Soviet affairs in the United States: the mass media either don’t know the facts or deliberately lie, while the academic world, judging by published studies, reveal total incomprehension of what is happening in the U.S.S.R. ’But if the media cannot be counted on and the academy cannot be counted on, whom can one count on?’ the author of the article asks, and replies: ’At this point my American friends come up with their trump card: “You may rest assured that somewhere in the intelligence community—” The sentence breaks off, and the speaker wears an enigmatic smile, evoking hidden recesses where the analytic geniuses of the Western world—backed up by the most sophisticated computers ever devised—sit poring over field reports from the depths of the Soviet infrastructure.’

p Among the many absurdities about the U.S.S.R. emanating from the CIA, the author cites this one:

p ‘It is not surprising to find the CIA in 1973 attempting to ascertain the scientific ability of the “Russians” as though these “Russians” ... were some newly discovered remote tribe whose scientific ability had to be determined by an intelligence agency. In this connection, the CIA cites the names of four Russian men of science, as familiar to every Russian schoolboy as the names Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison are to every American, and manages to get two of them wrong. The world-famous chemist Mendeleyev (who is listed in Webster’s Dictionary as the discoverer of the periodic table) becomes Mendelevich, and the 18th-century Enlightenment figure, Lomonosov, becomes Lomonosovskiy. One wonders what an American would think of intelligence experts on the United States who 245 would discover the scientific ability of Americans in 1973 by calling attention to Franklinstein and Edisoner.

p ’Much of this ignorance is spontaneous, rooted in a long-standing unwillingness to understand that Russia is not some exotic primitive tribe but a vast, mortally dangerous, highly complex civilization, more sophisticated, advanced and rational in some ways than the United States.’

p If the CIA can produce an assessment such as that cited above, the Commentary article goes on, it is understandable why people should think that ’the CIA which makes public appearances before Congress and the like is not actually the real CIA at all but a clever fake designed to mislead the Soviet regime and the American people. Somewhere,- totally concealed, there must be a real CIA, it is thought, for who could believe on the basis of such goings-on that this CIA is the real thing?’^^5^^

p In the heat of argument, however, the journal overlooked the CIA’s main occupation. It should be borne in mind that intelligence gathering is only a minor aspect of its functions. Its main concern is subversion. That is its true metier. As we noted earlier, covert action accounts for some 90 per cent of all CIA activity. American journalist David Wise wrote: ’The House intelligence committee (the Otis G. Pike committee—N. Y.) report also provided the first analysis of types of covert operations undertaken by the CIA. From 1965 to 1975, of projects approved by the Forty Committee, 32 percent were to influence foreign elections (the United States poured $65 million into Italy over twenty years, for example), 29 percent were media and propaganda projects, and 23 percent were to finance secret armies, or to transfer arms, ammunition, or military equipment.’^^6^^

p These findings refer to operations requiring the sanction of higher echelons than the CIA leadership. In addition, it is routine for the Agency to finance a multiplicity of foreign secular, religious, professional and labour organisations. Espionage proper, whose lamentable results, are an object of endless controversy, accounts for only 16 percent of CIA operations.

p The details of the covert subversive activity are, for obvious reasons, far more difficult to ascertain. The report of the Senate Select Committee headed by Frank Church contained this significant passage: ’Covert action is defined 246 as clandestine activity designed to influence foreign governments, events, organizations or persons in support of U.S. foreign policy conducted in such a way that the involvement of the U.S. government is not apparent.’

p No wonder investigators are unable to dig down to the full truth. Even the financiers of all this activity, the two chambers of U.S. Congress, are just as hopelessly in the dark. The Church committee report puts it thus: ’There is no evidence that the full Congress ... knew or understood the range of clandestine activities, including covert action.’ What the committee made public in vague scraps of information had been censored by the CIA.

p The overall guide in covert action was a National Security Council directive which empowered the CIA to

p ‘—Create and exploit problems for International Communism;

p ‘—Discredit International Communism, and reduce the strength of its parties and organization;

p ‘—Reduce International Communist control over any areas of the world.’

p To this end, the committee revealed, ’thousands of covert action projects have been undertaken’, ranging from armed action (especially in Southeast Asia) to the recruiting and use of undercover agents of a stamp quite distinct from run-of-the-mill spies. The report said: ’The Agency developed a world-wide system of standby covert action “assets” ranging from media personnel to individuals said to influence the behaviour of governments.’

p Presumably these agents are not idle, but the members of the Church committee threw up their hands, complaining that ’net judgements as to “success” or “failure” are difficult to draw’.

p The uncertainty obviously derives from the fact that it just isn’t done to publicize covert actions. More, after the report had already been passed by CIA censors, last-minute deletions were made in it. On the insistence of the CIA, two sections entitled ’Techniques of Covert Actions’ and ’Covert Action Projects: Initiation, Review and Approval’ were cut out.^^7^^ American researchers Alan W. Schaflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr., observed about the latter section in 1978 that ’the deleted section would have addressed the most vital question of all: who’s running the country?’^^8^^

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p Reviewing the work accomplished by the Church committee, N. Stone observed that ’American history can be read as a continuous struggle between democracy and property, and in that perspective there is no doubt where the secret police stand. Their true role as the janissaries of property is only implicit, of course, in these carefully manicured Church reports’.^^9^^

p The endless public discussion of the CIA has attuned Americans to the idea that there’s ethically nothing out of the ordinary about its activity. If it’s spoken about in the open, there couldn’t be anything morally wrong. Yet we’ve already had a sampling of its morality. The talk about permanent changes in the CIA has itself become permanent. Henry Kissinger, we learn, spoke of reorganizing the intelligence community to bring it in line with the changing world. What he and Nixon really had in mind was to ensure the success of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, with the intelligence community helping to carry it into effect. What is that if not a revival of OSS methods.

p Nowadays, the CIA is treated as one of the more respectable agencies of the U.S. administration. Those who asseverate the impropriety of that, are invariably defeated. The average American has been taught to think that CIA business is good, clean business. A revealing example is how Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in legalizing subversive radio stations that had been secretly financed by the CIA in the previous twenty years.

p On January 25, 1971, Republican Senator Clifford P. Case, member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, made a startling declaration to his colleagues, to the effect that in the past twenty years several hundred million dollars were spent out of the United States budget on the maintenance of Free Europe and Liberty. In the past fiscal year alone, the CIA spent 30 million dollars for this. And all that time Congress was kept in the dark.

p This mode of procedure, Case added, was at loggerheads with the solemn promises of the administration. When in 1967 the world learned of the CIA financing the National Students Association, a special presidential committee, including CIA Director Richard Helms, ruled that no government agencies would directly or indirectly render any financial support to any national educational or 248 other voluntary organisation. President Johnson extended this rule to all government institutions of the U.S.A.

p In effect, Senator Case and Ogden R. Reid, who backed him in the House of Representatives, were irated by just the legal aspect of the matter. The political side did not disturb them at all. Yet that was the side which created the many oddities in the government’s relation to the radio stations or, more bluntly, to CIA activity in the field of psychological warfare against the socialist countries, first of all the Soviet Union.

p One administration after another, whether Democratic or Republican (Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, would say some time later), allocated funds to the two radio stations, and this secret funding went hand in hand with political control. If the allocated amounts (he will add) are an indication of their significance to the government, then they are obviously a crucial U.S. operation in relation to the socialist countries.

p The White House ordered the 40 Committee, with Helms again among its members, to examine Senator Case’s proposals. Months went by. The investigation dragged out. And it is hard to tell whether it would ever have come to an end if Polish intelligence officer Andrzej Czechowics hadn’t told foreign correspondents in a Warsaw press- conference on March 10, 1971, of the impressions he brought away after working at Radio Free Europe for a number of years. A scandal erupted in the West.

p Two days after the press-conference, the Department of State was notified that hearings on the financing of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe would resume on April 28. The State Department asked for a postponement— the longer the better. The ensuing tussle between the two sides culminated in a compromise: the postponement would run to May 24.

p When the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations gathered on that day, and the witnesses arrived, Senator Case, who had cooked up the whole thing, was seen to be troubled by just one thing: the secrecy shrouding previously the channels that financed the two stations had prevented Congress from approving the size of the allocations. He suggested a sum of $30 million for FY 1972, with the reservation that if more money were needed, the sum could 249 be increased. Congressman Reid, too, said nothing of the CIA’s mode of operations. ’I am here today,’ he said, ’to support this bill, and to enhance thereby, we hope, the credibility of RFE and RL, which I consider to be useful and informational broadcasters.’^^10^^ Most of the committee members, and all the invited witnesses, spoke in the same vein.

p Committee Chairman Senator Fulbright attempted to examine the matter more closely. He came to grips with Martin J. Hillenbrand, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who was a witness, for saying that ’ perhaps this is something, the past history here, which could best be most fully discussed in an executive session ... I am not at liberty myself today to talk about the past history of these radio stations in an open session... If you are interested in going into the history of how it was developed, I would be very happy to do that as I said, in an executive session, where we can be as frank as you wish.’^^11^^

p Not until Senator Fulbright had broken down his reserve, did Hillenbrand admit that the CIA may have rendered some ’insignificant financial assistance’ to the radio stations, but this only to help in the fine cause of ’ enlightenment and education’, and certainly without in any way influencing the nature of their broadcasts.

p Fulbright, who was calling for realism in international affairs, wanted the radio stations to take their due place among the discards of the cold war. He did not stick at angry sarcasm. The CIA,’ he said, ’is authorized by special act. I think it grows out of the National Security Act of 1947. I do not recall there is any authority for an intelligence-gathering agency to undertake an additional program such as the cultural program which is authorized. I do not believe Congress, in authorizing the CIA, expected it to undertake the responsibility of educating other people on the facts of life in the educational, cultural, or artistic fields—do you? I do not think that was contemplated nor involved in the basic organization for the CIA ... Certainly, no one could doubt that the CIA is paying [for the RFE and RL] ... that they supervise what it does. Neither the CIA nor any other agency is going to put out the money like this and allow some unknown or private individual to determine a policy.’^^12^^

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p The debate collapsed after Congress granted RFE and RL 36 million dollars in FY 1972. In early 1972, Fulbright tried again to raise the question of the CIA’s ties with the radio stations, which were being obfuscated by a discussion of the technical aspects of financing them. For years, he wrote to President Nixon, people were made to believe that the radio stations were run on students’ collections. It turned out, however, that the hundreds of millions of allegedly collected dollars came from CIA coffers. This was part of a ruse to impress on the American people and the people of Eastern Europe that the stations were private organisations run exclusively on private charitable contributions. This sort of thing, Fulbright said, had the same perverse and morbid imagination behind it, the same prejudices and the same thinking divorsed from reality, that has already given rise to such ugly things as the flights of U-2 spy planes, the Bay of Pigs landing, and the Tonkin Bay incident.

p Three months later, the President set up a special study commission to look into RL and RFE financing. The CIA’s role was not mentioned. Nixon again recommended Congress to endorse his new ‘temporary’ bill for FY 1973. Congress obliged. It earmarked 38.5 million dollars, a still greater sum this time, to run Free Europe and Liberty. The special presidential commission to study ways of financing ‘private’ radio stations, known as the Study Commission on International Radio Broadcasting, began functioning in August 1972. Its members displayed zeal and energy. We see from the report submitted to the President half a year later, that they ’went to Munich, Germany, site of the studios, where we went as deeply and thoroughly as we could into the research, news gathering, monitoring, broadcasting.’ They also interviewed ’recent emigres from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.’ ^^13^^

p We take it that what they saw and heard in Munich left a good impression. Still, one tends to wonder why the honorable members of the commission found none among the defectors and top-ranking personnel of the two stations to suspect of associations with the CIA, for there were and still are many of its proved agents there. All the commission was concerned with was to devise a method of granting the radio stations financial support ’in such a way as not to impair their professional independence, 251 credibility, and effectiveness, while retaining assurance that the broadcasts will not jeopardise the objectives of United States foreign policy.’^^14^^

p An organisation was formed in 1974, named the Board for International Broadcasting, with headquarters in Washington. From this Board radio stations Liberty and Free Europe, housed in Munich under one roof, received $50 million in 1974, as much in 1975. By the eighties this financial support was. running into nearly an annual hundred or so million dollars.

p The summer 1973 hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may well be likened to a last ditch stand that Senator Fulbright put up with not the faintest hope— as friends and foes saw—of even partial victory. RFE chief of the Polish department, Jan Nowak, writing of the situation in a private letter that came to public notice, said ’as you surely know, Fulbright suffered a bad defeat in his own Committee. There is nothing now to threaten the continuation of our Radio during the next fiscal year.’^^15^^

p Little wonder, therefore, that Fulbright’s pronouncement became restrained and laconic, though again he found it necessary to stress that ’for two decades ... both radios were believed by the American people to be operating on budgets financed wholly by charitable contributions. The reality, as we now know, was that the radios were financed almost entirely by funds secretly supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency ... During that period,... the two radios received nearly $800 million of the taxpayers’ money.’^^16^^

p No one bothered to come to grip with him. Fulbright was ignored. The other members of the committee and the witnesses summoned to its hearings seemed to have agreed among themselves to extol the great cause of ‘liberty’ in which the two radios and the CIA were engaged. There were also new overtones. Priorly, it was the custom to speak of winning the whole Soviet people for ‘freedom’. Now the accent shifted on support and moral aid to the ’small but influential elite that was boldly defending its convictions’—the dissidents.

p Most enlightening on this score was the statement of one-time Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Ball. He said to the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ’I would say that perhaps the most important function that Radio Liberty perhaps has performed is to serve as a 252 kind of ancillary to this effort to assure the circulation or the availability to a very much wider audience of this samizdat material because the Radio Liberty station has the greatest collection of samizdat in the world. ... And it gives currency to this within the Soviet Union by beaming it back. The result is that there is a kind of multiplier factor. What could be achieved through circulation from person to person of type scripts is multiplied enormously by the availability of this samizdat material through the activities of Radio Liberty... We would be doing them a very cruel disservice if the service of these stations were to be discontinued.’^^17^^

p Try and visualise this consensus, and imagine the shock at the hearing when Fulbright gave the floor to a relatively obscure witness he had invited on his own, one Dewey F. Bartlett, whom the chairman introduced as an ’ independent’, that is, officially unconnected with any governmental agency or private company, a specialist in the field of communications.

p Bartlett said: ’It has long been my view that RFE and Liberty, in their present form, should be closed down and their facilities put to better use . . .

p ’As one who has spent nearly 30 years in broadcast communications of all types I strongly believe in an exchange of information among the peoples of the world. But exchanging information among nations is not the role of RFE and Liberty . . . The special and primary mission of RFE and Liberty is to give people in the eastern zones . . . what the State Department wants said by some entity it can then officially disavow ...

p ’There are hundreds of letters . . . but I have seen no hard evidence to convince me that the Soviet or other east bloc masses are reached ...

p ’Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were conceived in the State Department born to the CIA, and fed from the public treasury ...

p ’I believe the time has come ... to strip RFE and Liberty of their false facades once and for all... They should become legally what they are in fact—corporations in which the U.S. Government owns all the stock.’^^18^^

p But Bartlett’s deposition altered nothing in the general trend and tenor. None of the speakers who followed him ‘stooped’ to any direct denials of what he had said.

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p At a sitting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the end of May 1974, also devoted to the funding of RFE and RL, speakers kept mentioning Solzhenitsyn. Those present were given the monthly programs of Radio Liberty with a detailed scenario of Solzhenitsyn’s slanderous lampoons. Again and again, speakers recited Solzhenitsyn’s various pronouncements.   [253•* 

p During this last hearing (the last, because after it the financing of RFE and RL was put on a permanent basis by an act of Congress) it was made clear to one and all that the services of, say, Radio Liberty were so highly special that, say, the Voice of America could never fill the gap. It is down in the minutes of the committee that ’by contrast with the VOA and other Western official stations ... RFE and RL are unofficial stations broadcasting only to the peoples of East Europe and the U.S.S.R.; as such they provide a comprehensive picture of what is going on in the listener’s own country.’^^20^^

p True, there were those who couldn’t grasp why information, if it was true to the facts, could not be broadcast by the Voice of America. Wouldn’t that save a lot of money? To convince them, the Program Policy Manual of Radio Liberty was brought to light, with the following passage in it: ’In contrast to other outside broadcasters, who project their own “national” point of view, Radio Liberty offers in each language programming as closely equivalent as possible to that which an objective, uncensored domestic radio station would provide.’^^21^^

p The above necessarily concize description of that relatively small area of CIA subversive activity against the U.S.S.R. shows that the United States is willfully breaching the juridicial norms of U.S. relations with other countries. Washington knows that perfectly well.

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p In September 1974 the House of Representatives defeated an amendment which would have forbidden the Central Intelligence Agency to fund operations ’for the purpose of undermining or destabilizing the government of any foreign country’. A month later in the Senate the same fate befell an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which would have forbidden any agency of the United States Government to carry out ’any activity within any foreign country which violates or is intended to encourage the violation of, the laws of the United States or of such countries, except for activities “necessary” to the security of the United States and intended “solely” to gather intelligence.’ ^^22^^

p The defeat of these amendments revealed that the majority on Capitol Hill considered CIA covert action part of official U.S. policy, and blocked those who wanted normal practice to prevail in inter-state relations.

p Upon the establishment in 1933 of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, both sides, on U.S. initiative, undertook not only to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs but also to restrain all individuals and organizations under their direct or indirect control, including organizations receiving state financial aid, from overt and covert action which may be detrimental to public tranquillity and welfare, law and order, and security of the other side. Direct mention was made here of ’agitation and propaganda’. These undertakings, formalized in an exchange of letters between Maxim Litvinov and Franklin D. Roosevelt, are still in force.

p When in 1951 U.S. Congress officially allocated funds for the activation and maintenance of armed units made up of traitors to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to be used against the U.S.S.R., the Soviet government pointed put in a note handed to the U.S. charge d’ affaires on November 21, 1951: ’The enactment by the United States of this law is an act unprecedented in relations between states and represents an instance of gross interference by the United States in the internal affairs of other countries. At the same time it is an outrageous violation in international law.’

p Washington ignored the protest.

p The Basic Principles of Relations Between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, signed on May 255 29, 1972, says that the sides ’will proceed from the common determination that in the nuclear age there is no alternative to conducting their mutual relations on the basis of peaceful coexistence’.

p This was the first official Soviet-American document in which the United States officially recognized the principle of peaceful coexistence.

And there is no room in the peaceful coexistence doctrine, officially recognized by the United States, for any psychological warfare. The CIA, which is continuing its subversive activity against the Soviet Union, is prejudicing the very basis of Soviet-American relations.