[118634] in Cypherpunks
Philip Agee *was* a KGB shill...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Mon Oct 4 15:45:32 1999
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Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:09:11 -0400
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From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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From: believer@telepath.com
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 06:42:09 -0500
To: ignition-point@precision-d.com
Subject: IP: Disinformation documentation
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Source: Washington Times
http://www.WashTimes.com/opinion/ed3.html
Disinformation documentation
----------
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
----------
Almost 20 years ago, this writer and Robert Moss co-authored a novel about
Soviet disinformation operations in the Western media that was immediately
dismissed by the mainstream media as loony lucubrations from the far right.
Hollywood directors who were interested in turning "he Spike" into a movie
were threatened with blacklisting. A $250,000 option remained on the shelf
-- to this day. It was a classic case of reverse McCarthyism, or
anti-anti-communism.
Top editors, both print and media, scoffed at the book's central
premise by arguing that editorial gatekeepers were far too savvy to let
something as crude as Soviet disinformation slip through their adroit and
ever-vigilant blue pencils (before the computer "kill" button).
Whenever a defector from the KGB or its proxy services in Eastern
Europe and Cuba confirmed that the Soviet intelligence agency's Service A
(for "Active Measures") was in charge of "dezinformatsiya" (disinformation)
in the Western media, mainstream media adopted the ungainly posture of the
proverbial ostrich. Now we have a new book, "The Sword and the Shield: The
Mitrokhin Archive," the most complete picture of the KGB and its operations
in the United States and Europe, courtesy of Vasili Mit- rokhin, who toiled
for three decades in the KGB's archives, and co-author Christopher Andrew,
chair of the History Department at Cambridge University and a former
visiting professor of national security at Harvard.
After the Soviet collapse, Mr. Mitrokhin took to Britain a massive
secret collection of Cold War material about the KGB's activities in
Western countries.
The scope of the KGB's disinformation operations in the West during
the Cold War was breathtaking. Philip Agee, the CIA's first ideological
defector who specialized in burning CIA operatives, rapidly became a
liberal left icon in the U.S. and Western Europe. Now we have confirmation
that Agee's book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," published in 1975, that
identified 250 Agency officers and agents, and claimed that "millions of
people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by
the CIA and the institutions it supports," was the work of the KGB and the
DGI, the Cuban proxy of the KGB.
Agee (KGB code name: Pont) became the darling of the liberal left in
the U.S. and Europe. But his activities on behalf of the intelligence
services of Cold War enemies became too much for Britain's Labor
government. And in November 1976, a deportation order was served. The far
left sprang into action, aided and abetted by the KGB's Service A. Among
traitor Agee's character witnesses: Morton Halperin, a former Kissinger
aide and now head of policy planning at the State Department; former U.S.
Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has flacked for anti-American causes the
world over; Melvin Wolf, a hard-left lawyer from the American Civil
Liberties Union.
In 1993, President Clinton nominated Mr. Halperin to the new position
of assistant secretary of defense for democracy and peacekeeping. But Mr.
Halperin withdrew at the last moment. His backers were fearful he would be
grilled about his relationship with Agee.
Agee lost his appeals against deportation from Britain and moved to
the Netherlands where he was expelled again. He finally landed in Germany,
married a German dancer, and could no longer be kicked out. In 1978, Agee,
again with the covert assistance of the KGB and the DGI, began publishing
the Covert Action Information Bulletin that was designed to promote "a
worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its
operations and personnel."
KGB files note that Agee's Bulletin was "the initiative of the KGB."
The Soviet Agency thus gave Agee the names of 2,000 CIA agents to expose
publicly.
Agee's mill was kept supplied by a KGB Task Force headed by V.N.
Kosterin, deputy head of the service in charge of Actives Measures in the
Western media. Thus the KGB planted numerous stories that were picked up as
news by the mainstream media -- e.g., extreme right-wingers and CIA rogues
were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. It forged a letter from
Lee Harvey Oswald, dated two weeks before Kennedy was killed, to CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt asking for information "before any steps are taken
by me or anyone else." The letter was created 12 years after the
assassination and passed on anonymously to conspiracy buffs.
In 1971, according to the Mitrokhin archives, KGB chief Yuri Andropov
personally approved the fabrication of pamphlets full of racist insults
purporting to come from the extremist Jewish Defense League (JDL) and
calling for a campaign against "black mongrels" who, it was claimed, were
looting Jewish shops. At the same time forged letters were sent to 60 black
organizations giving fictitious details of atrocities committed by JDL
against blacks. They called for revenge against JDL leader Meir Kahane. He
was assassinated some years later, not by a black extremist, but by an Arab.
Throughout the Cold War, KGB disinformation was under orders to stir
up racial tensions in the United States. Before the 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics, KGB operatives in the Washington residency mailed forgeries from
the Ku Klux Klan to the Olympic Committees of African and Asian nations.
These are among hundreds of examples of KGB operations that wound up
in various media as fact. When Washington de- nounced them as forgeries,
Moscow indignantly responded "anti-Soviet slanders." Both sides were
dutifully reported.
The KGB's Service A also helped Agee craft his next book, "Dirty Work:
The CIA in Western Europe." Mr. Agee then met with Service A operatives in
Cuba who went to work on yet another tome, "Dirty Work II: The CIA in
Africa." But Agee, fearful of being expelled from Germany, decided to drop
his name from the title. The director of the Cuban DGI and the KGB then
decided to release the book for the opening of the summit of 92 non-aligned
nations in Havana, presided over by Fidel Castro, in September 1979.
"The Sword and the Shield" also tells about the recruitment of 10
French journalists whose job was to put across a positive image of
communist countries and a negative image of their enemies. This writer knew
one of them. He was the Renard character in "The Spike." He had been
blackmailed by the KGB into doing the Soviet Union's dirty work in the
French media --and now works as a legitimate journalist.
The disinformation themes these journalists were fed by the KGB always
contained a kernel of truth that became the lead to a story followed by a
tissue of falsehoods. Apologists for the Soviet Union in the U.S. would
then quote them when interviewed for their reactions to major events
abroad. The falsehoods quickly became conventional wisdom. So far, 10 years
after the implosion of the Soviet empire, no one has come forward to say
they were victims of KGB disinformation operations.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times.
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
