Capitol Ideas
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas" Tom Bethell Undoubtedly the most entertaining event of recent weeks has been the publication of H.R. Haldeman's memoir, The Ends of Power. This has occasioned a good deal of comment,...
...Claude Levi-Strauss: Behemoth From The Ivory Tower...
...But things haven't quite worked out that way...
...Haldeman could possibly have hoped for from his somewhat confined quarters inside the Lompoc, California, jail...
...Put another way, this means that we are no better than savages...
...Not yet...
...14 The American Spectator April 1978...
...But there was another possibility: that he had been betrayed from within the CIA...
...Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist, and his great appeal to journalists is that years ago he travelled (briefly) to the Amazon basin, and on his return was somehow deemed qualified to inform the world that the savages are not inferior to us—merely different...
...Marine, with experience as a radar operator working at a U-2 base in Japan—to the Soviet Union in September 1959...
...Not the first time this has happened, of course, nor will it be the last...
...It appeared to James Angleton, then head of counterintelligence in the CIA, that Nosenko was playing just this supporting role...
...Epstein does not speculate on this point, but he nevertheless manages to leave the reader feeling distinctly unnerved by the following footnote, with which the book concludes: "At one point, counterintelligence had even raised some questions about Colby's own contacts with a French citizen in Saigon who was suspected of being a Soviet agent...
...Hersh now had an explosive peg for his story...
...This act, of course, did more to damage the CIA than anything the KGB could have hoped for in its wildest fantasies...
...All CIA personnel were supposed to report contacts they had with foreign nationals in Vietnam and Colby failed to report meeting this person...
...Here were David Frost, Nixon, and Haldeman, "all of them cashing in on each other—and, in the end, from us...
...Finally, after Angleton's men had been fired a new counterintelligence staff was assembled, to which "Nosenko himself was appointed a consultant...
...He only disturbs " them"— the great unwashed, the Wallace voters, the boondocks dwellers...
...and if he did not send Haynes Johnson and Nancy Collins a thank-you note, then he was an ungrateful author...
...Levi-Strauss is said to "4isturb" us...
...Of course he doesn't really...
...Scoopage dictated coverage in the Post's case...
...If so, it would not be surprising if the KGB became anxious to cover up some other connection that it may have had with Oswald, on the grounds that if this connection became public knowledge, the American public might well be irreversibly persuaded that the Soviet government had also engineered the assassination of Kennedy...
...This must have been more than H.R...
...Haynes sighed...
...Not us, the "intellectual elite...
...Epstein never establishes what this connection was, but he and almost everyone else who studied the question—including the CIA—were persuaded that Oswald's "mission" was not the assassination of the President...
...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Undoubtedly the most entertaining event of recent weeks has been the publication of H.R...
...How tiresome it is becoming to read one more worshipful write-up of Harvard's Robert Coles (the author of 25 books and 400 magazine articles in the past decade, an output which explains why most of it is so unreadable...
...The American Spectator April 1978 13 Despite this ominous possibility, Nosenko was in the end completely rehabilitated by the faction within the CIA which, seeing the explosive possibilities of the case, evidently was reluctant to face up to the huge reappraisal of the quality of CIA intelligence that such an admission would have dictated...
...The basic idea is to put a little distance between the wonderful ones and the mobs...
...Poor old Haynes Johnson, who writes a column for the Washington Post—a column noteworthy for its ritualistic support of all current shibboleths—is utterly distraught about the whole business...
...Nosenko claimed that the KGB "had developed a method of painting a chemical substance on a subject's shoe which left an invisible trail that could be followed...
...Haynes Johnson was immediately put to work to write the Post's article on the book, and he went at his task with such verve that a gigantic front-page, three-column headline story appeared the next day, and it ran over onto all six columns of page two, and then onto page three, where it covered two more columns...
...As Epstein notes: "The information provided by Nosenko deflected from the idea of a betrayal within the CIA...
...Unfortunately, they are going to have to live with it...
...or to find Claude Levi-Strauss' name staring up at one from the page, for the umpteenth time...
...Next: Nixon's memoirs...
...In an egalitarian democracy, after all, in which many truck drivers earn more than most college professors, there is precious little else that does the job...
...Nosenko was given a CIA allowance of $30,000 a year and a house in North Carolina...
...For some strange reason, this idea has had enormous appeal for intellectuals in recent years...
...There were other such leads by Nosenko, as a result of which CIA officers "became increasingly suspicious that Nosenko was painting "false tracks" away from some high level agent (or agents) inside the U.S...
...One day in February he caught sight of the dread specter of Haldeman "hype" down the road, and threw up his hands in despair...
...This has occasioned a good deal of comment, publicity, and vituperation from the press who believed most unwisely after President Nixon's resignation that complete victory lay with the media, with the enemy at last routed and the monster himself finally buried at the crossroads with a stake through his heart...
...James Angleton was fired by William Colby, "who had opposed the role of the counterintelligence staff for some years...
...You get the subliminal message...
...or to come across one more uncritical piece about Margaret Mead, a fashionable mountebank who is more readily identifiable by the forked staff which she carries everywhere than by the quality of her opinions...
...More and more of Nixon's lieutenants keep handing manuscripts out the jailhouse door, and, dammit, the books seem to be selling quite well...
...Hendrickson, in his rather embarrassing panegyric to Levi-Strauss ("one of the towering figures of French intellectual life in this century"), writes that he has "disturbed a whole range of other disciplines, from music to art to philosophy to comparative religion to comparative literature...
...If that was all there was to Nosenko, his role would be understandable, and he would not deserve to be regarded as a particularly important figure in this very complex story...
...Nosenko was important because he had worked for the KGB and claimed to have personally supervised the KGB file that was opened on Oswald after he defected—as a former U.S...
...Early in 1962 another Soviet defector, Anatoli M. Golitsin (given the code name "Stone"), who was regarded by the CIA as both a genuine defector and an important one, told the CIA that "the KGB had already planted an agent within the highest echelons of United States intelligence....This penetration agent would be assisted by 'outside' men—other Soviet-controlled agents masking themselves as defectors or double agents—who would supply pieces of disinformation designed to bolster an 'inside' man's credibility...
...But the resulting moral could hardly be plainer, and it might well have been noted at some point by such moralistic folk as our media oracles: He who lives by the media must die by the media...
...His goal, Johnson writes in Enemies of Society, is "to destroy certitudes, to infect the corpus of received civilized knowledge with doubt, and so to dislocate western man, take him away from his natural, familiar defenses, and set him up again, naked, on an empty and bewildering plain...
...The media made this Frankenstein, which now so mortifies them...
...When will it all end...
...When will it all end...
...Watch what happened next...
...He might also have gotten a chuckle from the realization that the Post and the Times emerged from the affair growling at one another like yard dogs...
...Edward Jay Epstein's remarkable book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, comes as a ray of light in the murky and highly politicized field of assasTom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...government...
...It is, you see, a "disturbing" idea...
...sination studies...
...In recent weeks I have come across several news- 1 paper articles suggesting the peculiar role that the "professoriate" plays in our society...
...Nosenko claimed that the KGB had in fact displayed minimal interest in Oswald and was glad to get rid of him (and his Soviet wife Marina) in 1962, when Oswald returned to the U.S...
...The answer may be partly found, I believe, in the key word, "disturb...
...However, Epstein presents evidence suggesting that Nosenko was additionally playing a far more sinister role, unconnected with the Oswald case...
...Thus Popov had been caught...
...It seems certain that Oswald committed this act on his own initiative...
...Witness, for example, Nosenko's explanation of how the KGB caught one Peter Popov, a lieutenant colonel in Soviet military intelligence who was arrested by the KGB in 1959 and subsequently executed as a spy for the CIA...
...The CIA, as Epstein truly says, had been "turned inside out...
...We know these fellows so well now—thanks to all the publicity they got a few years back in that wonderful televised soap opera that was conveniently dressed up as a "national crisis"—that all the latest scraps of gossip by and about them are turning out to be of absorbing interest...
...The great problem for the CIA was to decide whether Nosenko was a genuine defector or a dissembler still working for the KGB...
...However, Epstein presents persuasive evidence that Nosenko was lying all along, which, if true, meant that he had been sent over by the KGB specifically to cover up Oswald's Soviet connection...
...That was the fulsome title of an article by Paul Hendrickson that recently appeared in (of all places) the "Style" section of the Washington Post...
...There ought to be a law against it...
...It seems to me that journalists these days are inclined to be far too respectful toward academe...
...Let us take a breath of fresh air and turn to Paul Johnson, the English writer, who points out that Levi-Strauss is a good example of the pseudoscientist whose theories cannot be falsified by any conceivable method, thanks to various built-in defense mechanisms...
...According to Epstein, Colby, by now the director of the CIA, called Seymour Hersh of the New York Times into his office on December 20, 1974, and "directed Hersh's attention to the CIA's program of opening mail from the Soviet Union, which he admitted was illegal and which had been supervised by Angleton...
...If there really was a double agent working at a high level in the CIA, as "Stone" had said, who was it...
...Thus he conveniently sets us apart from them, in a kind of protective strategy which we see operating quite frequently in our age of the common man...
...The most interesting part of this prodigious piece of research—Epstein had four assistants and Reader's Digest funding—deals with Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, a Soviet citizen who either defected or "defected" to the United States early in 1964, less than two months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...A similar covert motive lies behind the studied meaninglessness of modern art, as Tom Wolfe has pointed out...
...When questioned about it, it appeared to have been merely an oversight on his part...
...The very day that Haynes Johnson's column appeared, the Post's intrepid gossip writer Nancy Collins returned to the newsroom with the bulk of Haldeman's memoir under her arm, thus putting the Post in a position to "scoop" its ancient rival, the New York Times, which had paid good money for the book...
...I think this is an accurate summation, but why, oh why, is so conspicuous a charlatan awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Johns Hopkins University, and, as though that were not enough, written up so uncritically in our "elite" press...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
