Presswatch/ Is There Intelligence at the Times?
Ledeen, Michael
"Presswatch/ Is There Intelligence at the Times?" What is the secret dream of every red-blooded American journalist? To be an intelligence agent. Consider the treatment given by the Los Angeles Times to an...
...A bulwark of strength, indeed...
...We are simple religious fanatics, not agents of satanic forces...
...I have great admiration for good journalists, but there is Michael Ledeen i.v Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...
...That campaign, he claimed, made possible a "witch-hunt," an attempt to prove that Communists were secretly controlling the destiny of this country by their access to the highest members of the government...
...He claimed that: he was the victim of an insane homosexual whom he knew as George Crosley, but who turned out to be Whittaker Chambers...
...by John Podhoretz And the film builds its case for Hiss's innocence logically and deliberately...
...We arc proud to have some of our Palestinian br~thcr,~ with us in our struggle for Allah...
...I can just imagine the conversations between the Times' correspondents and the terrorists inside the compound: Timesperson: Excuse me, we're working on a story dealing with the relations between your group and the KGB...
...Did the FBI secrete documents in which Chambers confessed his homosexuality...
...He recounted the background, and then, in the next-to-last paragraph, wrote something that I have seen nowhere else, a real breakthrough: The tight-fisted Office of Management and Budget reportedly had a major role in establishing the figures, which leaked to the press before Pakistan was informed...
...Chambers was crazy, Chambers was a homosexual, Hiss's work for Roosevelt clearly defines him as a New Dealer, Nixon hated Hiss, the FBI knew about the problem with the typewriter, the FBI did p!v the servant, and yes, oh yes, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 23...
...Policy decisions made by the Shah, and by occupants of our White House, brought on the current crises...
...Brzezinski aimed a rifle down the Khyber Pass...
...By all accounts he has been a poor chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an organization that once wielded tremendous power in Washington but which has now virtually vanished from the front lines of policymaking...
...You can be sure that if the claim of KGB involvement in the Embassy takeover had come from Seymour Hersh, or Carl Bernstein, no such skepticism would have been expressed...
...But neither Oberdorfer nor the New York Times' Bernard Gwertzman (who wrote a similar piece on March 10) bothered to remind their readers that the relations between Carter and Pakistan have been bad for some time, primarily because the Islamabad regime has decided that the United States has become the number two power in the world...
...In the Washington Post on March 8, Don Oberdorfer gave a long analysis of what had gone wrong...
...Absolutely nothing...
...and, most important, he was the John Podhoretz is a student at the University of Chicago...
...Carter to remind everyone that "superior Soviet propaganda" is not remotely responsible for our troubles in Iran and Afghanistan...
...He has reorganized the staff into a crack foreign policy team and has transformed the committee into a bulwark of strength...
...Did the FBI know that there was a problem with the serial number of the typewriter...
...Quoting an article in Der Spiegel (why do these stories come out in the European press so much more often than in our own...
...President Zia said it was "peanuts...
...These remarks are all the more remarkable because they come from a former director of the USIA, a man who appears to have forgotten that effective advocacy of our own cause in the face of a massive international disinformation campaign from the Soviets is quite different from "outlying" our enemies...
...I t is now acknowledged that Carter made a hash of tile effort to enlist Pakistan on behalf of the struggle to contain Soviet imperialism...
...Student militant: May your imperialist toes curl upward...
...Your own president referred to the Palestmians as similar to the American civil rights movement of tht- sixties...
...This dangerous individual, whose committee toppled the Italian Minister of the Interior in 1976 on by Michael Ledeen what proved to be baseless accusations, is now up for reelection and seems to be in some danger of losing...
...Moreover, Rowan views any attempt to improve America's "propaganda" capability as a mortal peril to the Republic: President Carter must impress upon his aides that even in times of crisis Americans will not, in panic, embrace totalitarianism and fascism...
...End of story...
...The movie is a series of interviews, which are separated and clarified by newsreels describing the Hiss-Chambers confrontations, by still photographs, by footage of the open session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (which was the first official encounter between accuser and accused), and by footage of a question-and-answer session held by Hiss at Johns Hopkins University in i978...
...But under Sen...
...the AP writer said that Zia called Carter's various promises "empty talk" and went on to make the basic point: "Since the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, more than two months have p a s s e d . . . What tangible has happened since then...
...Zia rejected it...
...There seemed to be no clear picture of what we were offering, aside from the total amount (the wellknown "bottom line...
...Then Senator Church dropped the issue...
...John Lowenstein, who directed it and conducted the interviews, is a firstrate documentarian with an almost inspired knack for cutting just at the point when anything gets dull...
...Did Nixon have it in for Hiss because of Hiss's obvious patrician contempt for the young Republican congressman from California...
...Was Chambers insane...
...Timesperson: But is it not true that there are people here that were trained bv the PLO...
...Christopher talked a bit...
...Thirty-two years after the astonishing accusation, Alger Hiss is still trying to clear his name, and has just been immeasurably aided by the appearance of a two-and-one-half-hour documentary called The Trials of Alger Hiss...
...Keegan had said that the "militants" were part of an "elite corps of agents trained by the Soviet Union," and he went on to suggest that millions of dollars (in gold) had been paid to Soviet agents in Iran...
...simply no excuse for that kind of arrogance...
...The complaint, according to Rowan, is that " t h e Soviets have been out-broadcasting and out-lying the Voice of America...
...Doesn't Hiss's work with the Roosevelt administration, his reputation, count for anything...
...In the midst of this story, the Times interjected its own "intelligence' ' : However, correspondents of the Times who visited the Embassy reported that though some of the militants' leaders were trained by Palestinians, the majority appear to be genuine Islamic revolutionaries motivated by religious concerns...
...If Richard Nixon wanted to bomb Cambodia in secret, there were few rumbles of protest from the committee...
...The more abstract issues are handled in the film's first half...
...The film's second half takes a long look at the evidence for Hiss...
...The unstated assumption in the Times' editorial interjection is that any good journalist is in possession of as much information as an intelli~t'nct" service...
...The interviews gracefully segue into the appropriate newsreel, the appropriate photograph, the appropriate interview...
...Did the FBI ply Hiss's former servant with beer at a county fair, in order to find out i~" the missing Woodstock typewriter was back in Hiss's possession...
...There appears to be no basis for the charge that they are Soviet agents, the correspondents have reported...
...Student mihtant: Of course, but what of it...
...Following his release in 1954, Hiss sought with ferocious determination to prove himself innocent...
...Zia's complaint was not merely that the money was not enough...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 Zbigniew Brzezinski and Warren Christopher went to Islamabad...
...It means that the story was uncovered by the governmerit (or a government), and not by the press...
...The movie's answer to all of the above questions is: Yes...
...So it seems that it was simply a dispute about money, haggling over the final price...
...Consider the treatment given by the Los Angeles Times to an Associated Press story on March 13, in which General George Keegan, former chief of Air Force Intelligence, was quoted on the relations between the Soviet KGB and the "militants" holding the American prisoners at our embassy in Teheran...
...Then the President said there was nothing to worry about...
...And finally, was Hiss the victim of a massive conspiracy involving all of the above, by the FBI and by Thomas F. Murphy, the lawyer for the prosecution in the second perjury trial...
...Last summer the Pakistani Ambassador to Washington ran all over town telling everyone who would listen (and in most undiplomatic language) that he had been transferred to Moscow...
...I should have expected Senator Fulbright to protest this attempt at deception, and as for Frank Church, Anderson does not accurately remember his most recent demonstration of strength and understanding...
...The Trials "of Alger Hiss is a compelling piece of work...
...His first trial ended in a hung jury in his second, he was found guilty, and sent to prison to serve a five-year sentence...
...As a result of the evidence Chambers then brought forward, Hiss was indicted for perjury...
...What is the meaning of the claim that "there appears to be no basis for the charge that they are Soviet agents...
...But the Baltimore Sun carried a short AP story two days later that put the matter in quite a different light...
...But the award for nincompoopery of the month goes to Carl T. Rowan for his column on "propaganda and policy" published in the Washington Star on March 3. Rowan was upset-in part, rightly--about a campaign against the current regime at USICA (the latest acronym for the old United States Information Agency) apparently directed from the National Security Council...
...Frank Church (D-Idaho) the committee is no longer the spavined thing of the past...
...Hence, if Jimmy Carter wanted Zia to help in containment, the American President had to act as if he were serious about challenging the Kremlin...
...victim of a campaign of political hysteria, begun by Harry Truman, continued by Richard Nixon and the o t h e r members of HUAC, and brought to its apex by Joseph McCarthy...
...J a c k Anderson Department: For an example of the sort of panic that can sometimesoverwhelm publicists, read Anderson's March 3 column in the Washington Post on Frank Church...
...He realized that Jimmy Carter cannot be relied upon to defend him against his enemies, so he is making his peace with the polar bear...
...This transfer, he said, was intended to signal to Carter that Pakistan considered Moscow more important than Washington...
...Can you tell me bow many Soviet agents are involved in this operation...
...So Zia, who now fears a Carter embrace (it ma.y hasten the arrival of Soviet forces in his country), called the American President a name, and sat down for some friendly conversations with the Soviets...
...It's a pity, because we will undoubtedly see many more such acts in the near future...
...President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq immediately denounced the sum as "pean u t s , " but the United States insisted that it would not be increased...
...But Anderson turns this around as well: "He quietly encouraged the president to stand firm in Cuba . . . . " In fact, the White House's complaint was that Church took the question to national television and announced the existence of the Soviet brigade before the President did...
...This analysis, widely endorsed in Washington among foreign policy experts, did not make it into the press until much later in the month, and no one to my knowledge reminded the public about the theatrical gesture of the Islamabad regime last year...
...He didn't...
...Hiss sought to clear his name, and save his career, first by testifying before HUAC and then by suing Chambers for libel...
...So what did Zia do...
...This is Rowan's peculiar way of phrasing the undeniable superiority of the USSR in the current phase of the ideological struggle...
...The facts are fairly simple: We offered some sort of mixed military and economic aid package amounting to some 400 million dollars...
...IS THERE INTELLIGENCE AT THE TIMES...
...He got in touch with the Soviet Union...
...According to the film, among those who refused to be interviewed were Esther Chambers (Whittaker's wife), Richard Nixon, and Henry Julian Wadleigh and Lee Pressman, both self-proclaimed members of the same apparatus to which Hiss and Chambers were affiliated...
...This was Church's stance on the question of the Soviet brigade in Cuba last year: First, he boisterously announced that the brigade had to g o . . . or else...
...Anderson inverts the history of the Committee: If Lyndon Johnson wanted a Bay of Tonkin resolution to legitimize a disastrous war in Vietnam, the committee provided the rubber stamp...
...We said it was not...
...And it's surprising to hear that a syndicated columnist believes that the forceful expression of one's own opinions equals "totalitarianism and fascism" (an awkward rhetorical redundancy as well as a grotesque misunderstanding of the role of ideas in our efforts to promote the democratic revolution...
...He goes on to his main theme, which is that the use of the media is irrelevant to the geopolitical conflict: . . . it is important for Mr...
...In addition t o Hiss, those interviewed in the film include Nathan Witt (a government official whom Chambers accused of being at one time the head of the Washington "apparatus" to which he and Hiss belonged), Hiss's three lawyers in the libel and perjury cases, Robert Stripling (the FBI liaison with HUAC), Ralph de Toledano (Newsweek's correspondent on the Hiss Case and a man who has an extraordinary regard for Chambers), the Catletts (Hiss's servants, one of whom found the famous typewriter on which Hiss's wife Priscilla was said to have typed the secret documents that ended up in Chambers' hands), and two people who had served on the juries of the perjury trials...
...THE TRIALS OF ALGER HISS T h i r t y - t w o years ago, a former Soviet espionage agent named Whittaker Chambers made the astonishing accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Alger Hiss, a key figure among Roosevelt's New Dealers, a participant at the Yalta Conference, and at the time President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had actually been a member, with Chambers, of the Soviet Underground in Washington in the 1930s...
...he was the victim of a massive FBI cover-up...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
