Capitol Ideas / Counter-intelligence at the Times
Bethell, Tom
I was glad to see that the Center for Ethics and Public Policy in Washington has published its study of foreign intelligence, The CIA and the Amen can Ethic, by Ernest Lefever and Roy Godson....
...In 1970, he signed a joint statement in defense of persecuted Ukrainian historian Valentyn Moroz...
...In HUAC language, they had cooperated with the inquiry...
...in recent years would not have elicited such harsh epithets...
...O4"course, the "post-Watergate morality," with its "freedom of information" and climate of "openness in government," has made it unnecessary for anyone harboring anti-American or pro-Soviet senti...
...they reappeared in the form of "Watergate," Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, and others...
...Godson has useful chapters on Congress and the so-called "pressure groups," the latter chapters including much interesting information on the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for National Security Studies, and other such outfits, primarily anti-American in nature, staffed for the most part by Soviet apologists and unavowed Marxists who find that in their personal lives they prefer the comforts of Washington to the potential rigors of Gorky...
...By 1972, of course, we were in the throqs of losing a war and beginning to conclude that the best way out of the problem was to put up the elaborate pretense that our enemy, the Soviet Union, was really our friend after all...
...Seeing a golden opportunity to exploit the gullibility that weakness had brought in its wake, the Soviets encouraged the deception mightily...
...that Persians will ignore any power that is not violent, overwhelming, and absolute...
...It must have been clear to even the drowsiest of readers in the mid-1970s that the then relentless attack on the CIA told us less about the Agency than about the leadership class that had got us into a war, lost it, and then turned on itself in self-disgust...
...That's it...
...Herbert E. Steingass Chesterland, Ohio Free Yuriy Shukhevych The life of Yuriy Shukhevych, son of the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, is in grave danger...
...Mark Weber Cleveland Heights, Ohio THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 37...
...America Last" has shown me why today [Jan...
...The New York Times, the V/ashington Post, and, therefore, the television networks preserved an indulgent silence about the KGB throughout the 1970s...
...Finish the book or don't...
...I seem to have strayed rather far from the Lefever/Godson volume, but not really, because it is, in part, a report on this dismal period...
...All to the good, of course, but it is rather depressing to consider that the gullible peanut farmer from Georgia should be the fortuitous beneficiary of this tidal change...
...Likewise, you referred to Ramsey Clark, Richard Falk, and Don Luce as "these three meatheads...
...Though reviewers have commended McPhee's ear for dialogue, in truth it all sounds like McPhee, whether it's blacks in Harlem buying vegetables or conservationists canoeing in Alaska...
...The enemy is us, in the banal and oftrepeated judgment of a cartoon character whose name escapes me...
...The words "traitor" and "treason" were unashamedly used in print, and they somehow jumped off the page when you read them...
...Thereafter a rather large army of researchers would have been needed to scrutinize, for bias, the square miles of newsprint dedicated to CIA activities, most of them of a seemingly reprehensible nature...
...Although "a score of these individuals [with CIA ties] have been identified in other articles in this series," the anonymous author wrote, "a dozen others" were not identified beTom Bethell is The American Spectator's FYashington columnist and Washington editor o f Harper's...
...Such tactics are the product of an immature mind...
...I have never met Crewdson and Treaster, and do not for a minute wish to imply that they are anything other than God-fearing, patriotic Americans who pledge allegiance to the flag every morning at the breakfast table...
...Those antagonistic to...
...After only a few years living and working in Iran, I cannot understand why my President's more experienced advisors have not told him that Persians regard his decency as a character flaw and fair play as weakness...
...The following explanation for this appeared in an unsigned article in the same series Le't us record that the New York Times here unashamedly reassumed the mantle of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the late 194Os and early 1950s...
...Please write to President Carter and urge him to intercede with Soviet authorities for the release of Yuriy Shukhevych...
...No, let's face it, the intent was to inflict the maximum damage on one's own institutions, one's own country--all in the name of the Nobility and Integrity of the Press...
...Particularly unappetizing--a journalistic nadir of sorts--was a series in the New York Times by John Crewdson in late 1977...
...His meticulous descriptions of people always fail to characterize...
...Read it backward, forward, or upside down, it makes no difference...
...Following the lead of Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone, he set out to hunt down various individuals (whose existence, but not identity, had earlier been disclosed by CIA Director William Colby) who had over the years maintained a dual role, working for newspapers while maintaining CIA connections of an unspecified nature...
...Carter's Hostages I thank you, R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . , for showing me the way to go home in your January editorial, "America L a s t " . . . . I have tramped through America and many foreign parts embarrassed by my President and government--who believe America should walk humbly in the world, ashamed of our great wealth, power, and imagination--and I found few friends...
...Others were possibly written by journalists with less admirable motives, or so I concluded after winding my way through miles of microfilm...
...point is something I am not used to seeing in the other publications I read...
...It is important that citizens of all persuasions protest this gross violation of human rights by the Soviet Union...
...It was a villainous Don Quixote tilting at vaporous windmills...
...that a 13th-century mullah cannot he treated as a 20th-century liberal...
...With detente behind us, and our old enemy back, America should reunite...
...To call such a person a "traitor," guilty of "treason," would have raised entirely too many questions as to the existence of an "enemy...
...1 mention this not because I was briefly involved with the project (the Center in the end decided, no doubt wisely, not to use my somewhat subjective and nonacademic contribution), but because in these times of renewed cold war, the role of the CIA is worth talking about...
...At that time the Times even wrote of America's "national destiny," a phrase that one would hardly have expected to find in the paper 20 years later--or today...
...In 1948, at age 15, he was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for the "crime" of being the son of a famous Ukrainian nationalist...
...With detente, there is no adversary...
...Incidentally, it was interesting to read recently the British accounts of the unmasking of Anthony BIount as the "fourth man," assistant to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Soviet spy...
...In 1950, his ~father died while in the custody of the Soviet secret police...
...Not KGB connections, mind you...
...No such doubts arose in the early years of the CIA's existence, as my perusal of the New York Times" coverage of the agency disclosed...
...He would, I think, have most likely been characterized as "an American dissident," just as Philip Agee--the renegade CIA agent whose lifework it has become to publish the names of CIA agents around the world, blowing their covers and subjecting them to the reprisals of the KGB--has on occasion been characterized...
...After you have thoroughly squelched those responsible for our foreign policy with such sophisticated jargon as "idiot," "one has to be an idiot and a drunk," and "Wonderboy," you finally treat your readers to your profound and learned conclusion: "Our government must cease rendering itself contemptible to the world and must respond decisively and punitively to those who violate our rights...
...But it would be nice to know that, in recompense for their brief lapse into McCarthyism, they are busily at work on a series dealing with KGB activities in Washington, not excluding the possibility of KGB contacts with news media personnel in recent years...
...Crewdson (with additional legwork provided by Joseph Treaster) duly tracked down some of our culprits and published their names...
...McPhee's writing slips by like a skillfully paddled canoe on a placid lake--silently, hardly causing a ripple on the water's surface...
...In 1975 in particular the Times wrote about almost nothing else for weeks on end...
...Put Up or Shut Up The editorial, "America Last" (January 1980), by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . , is an example of the kind of journalism I have come to expect since reading The American SpectaCAPITOL IDEAS (continued from page 6) tente was that Americans were encouraged to believe that they were no longer confronted by an external threat, or enemy...
...I have a good friend among the Tehran hostages...
...I have read the Spectator for over a year, each month growing more satisfied with its expression of a neoconservative philosophy...
...Name Withheld State Department Washington, D.C...
...The pages of the New York Times and many other newspapers were flung open, so that one was not obliged to defect in the flesh--merely in print...
...Well, that is over now, thanks to some rather incautious moves by the Soviets, who can be expected to move into a dynamic phase in the 1980s...
...The essential point about d6(continued on page 3 7) 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 semblance to the one you and I live in (the one in which not everybody is nice)--chews it up, digests it, and it all comes out innocuous and remarkable in its sameness...
...Perhaps they could enlist the covert support of the Soviet embassy in such a project...
...But let us say someone /sad been unmasked, in Blount fashion...
...It is worth considering the devastating effects of d6tente, not just on the CIA but on the nation and, perhaps history will conclude, on the world...
...Regardless of what one thinks of certain people, is it cricket to say of Khomeini that he is a "dyspeptic Holy Man," or to speak of his "ancient ruin of a brain," or to refer to the "buzz between his ears...
...He makes no claim on the reader, asks nothing of his intelligence, and in no way affects his feelings...
...It moves on out of sight and vanishes as easily from the mind...
...In the late 1940s and early 1950s the paper's correspondents and editorial writers described the CIA as "America's first line of defense in the Atomic Age" (1948), as a "vital security agency" (Arthur Krock, 1950) with an "enemy" (1954) and "an obvious need for secrecy regarding intelligence operations" (1955, editorial) in the "worldwide fight of democracy against Communism" (1954, editorial-page article...
...Today, Yuriy Shukhevych continues to languish in a concentration camp...
...it occurred to me that a similar exposure in the U.S...
...It is simply a way of filling empty time with empty words...
...In 1958, on the eve of his release from prison, Shukhevych was visited by KGB officials who demanded that he renounce his father and ptrblicly condemn the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists...
...He suffers from an intestinal ulcer and is denied medical attention...
...In 1972, he was sentenced to a tenyear term of confinement in a concentration camp...
...There is nothing memorable in his work, but neither is there anything troubling or disturbing, and this must explain his popularity...
...The result was a distorted view...
...ments to take the uncxm,A'ortable step of actually decamping to Moscow...
...I suggest, Tyrrell, that you either put up or shut up...
...He repeatedly refused this demand and was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for "anti-Soviet agitation among inmates...
...Born in 1933, Yuriy Shukhevych has experienced persecution at the hands of Soviet authorities for almost his entire life...
...and that if my President would free the hostages soon he had better act more like the Shah...
...Some of these newspaper stories "may welt have been written by bright, eager ymmg journalists who actually believed that by denigrating the CIA they were building a more glorious future for America by improving its moral standing in the world--the Third World in particular...
...Unfortunately, the whole concept of nation probably depends on an externally directed mistrust...
...But the names of others were not published...
...One could take a stand as an upholder of press freedom, a Jeffersonian, not so much a disliker of America as a lover of the First Amendment...
...In 1944, his mother was sent to a Siberian camp...
...In 1968, Shukhevych was set free but was denied the right to live in the Ukraine...
...20] is the 78th day of captivity for my friend--he is less a prisoner of the Persians than of a President and government who have ceased to believe in America...
...Sometimes I think that all the ballyhoo about openness was nothing more than the groundwork for such camouflage...
...I have seen the misery visited on him and on his family by the Persians and by my President...
...This is of course a comforting thing to believe...
...They will "walk and talk" with anybody because they all walk and talk the same...
...l have yet to discoverwhere that benighted place is...
...This was called d&ente...
...But it required your summary of the idiocies of our current leaders in "America Last" to convince me that I had finally found my compatriots in your band of rebels...
...the idea of nationalism--many of them bravely wielding pens inside editorial offices and almost daily quoting Dr.-Johnson to the effect that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel--therefore welcomed detente, rushed to embrace the Soviets, and soon enough found themselves denouncing a variety of "injustices" in America...
...cause they had "provided information on a confidential basis...
...In a study of television evening news, Lefever reports that in the period 1974 to 1977 "slightly less than 5 percent of the intelligence news on network TV was devoted to Soviet-bloc agencies, while slightly more than 95 percent was focused on the CIA...
...When the external enemies disappear, they "reappear" internally: In the U.S...
...My assignment was to examine media coverage of the agency by the New York Times, the Ff/ashington Post, and the television networks, which was actually relatively simple until about 1971...
...Then, to emphasize your inane rhetoric, you offer not one thing "Wonderboy" could do to respond decisively and punitively...
...The CIA appeared to be operating in a political and moral vacuum devoid of threats and adversaries...
...It is writing of this kind which is sometimes found in high-school newspapers when the staff is not closely supervised...
...I had hardly bothered to read these stories, beyond glancing at their headlines, when they first came out...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
