Spectator's Journal/Agents of Deception
Isaac, Rael Jean
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL AGENTS OF DECEPTION T he story has a happy ending. Soon South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV), the fourth largest producer of programs in the public television system,...
...Dr...
...Soon South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV), the fourth largest producer of programs in the public television system, will be showing and making available to other PBS stations a brilliant film on Soviet disinformation, Agents of Deception...
...There was not even a note enclosed...
...Leslie Lenkowsky of the Institute for Educational Affairs then tried to step into the breach...
...We don't do point-of-view journalism like that...
...Among his other books are The Limits of Liberty and, with Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent...
...Peace Council includes among its members congressmen, members of state legislatures, and mayors...
...How can it be called 'point of view' if in fact all the evidence is thoroughly documented and verified...
...That left public television...
...Buchanan is General Director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice and Harris University Professor at George Mason University...
...Peace Council, the WPC's American affiliate...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...Since Iselin resigned not long after this conversation, turning down Agents of Deception may well have been his last major decision...
...She reports that her reception could not have been more cordial...
...Both French journalist Pierre Charles Paths and Danish journalist Arne Petersen, for example, who provide two of the most illuminating interviews in the film, preen themselves before the camera...
...If so, they were close to the mark...
...the use of "agents of influence" (like Norway's Arne Trehold who insured that the Soviets were sitting on both sides of the table when his country negotiated a treaty on the disputed "gray zone" in the Barents Sea...
...NP101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 37...
...But of course they don't...
...dollars...
...The tools of Soviet disinformation were amazingly ready to speak for the camera, perhaps because vanity seems to be their overriding characteristic and the trait, one suspects, that first made them vulnerable to Soviet approaches...
...Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...
...But the frustrations in finding a U.S...
...It was so hard-hitting and melodramatic...
...They are not merely unrepentant...
...he would receive instructions from Moscow to make the arrangements for Chandra's visits...
...It casts an ironic light on the final tribute bestowed by Bruce Christensen, president of PBS, on Iselin's performance: "Jay's contributions to American television are many, but what remains after the programs are over is the courage and the foresight to say 'yes' to the best and the untried, 'no' to the inferior and the commonplace...
...There was no documentation on that...
...We from the beginning helped to build it, supplied staff, and went all out to build it...
...The City Council took the only measures in its power and revoked permits for Soviet citizens living on the estate to use the town's recreational facilities...
...The Soviet Union's witting agents display a charming effrontery...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPressILibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...More surprising, for its candor, is the interview with Michael Meyerson, head of the U.S...
...W by did people like Meyerson and Chandra, whom Shevchenko describes as "sleek as a snake," consent to be interviewed...
...But here you have both a film and the money...
...In the eighteen months he sought a U.S...
...Meyerson points out that the U.S...
...I know them as persons, as personal friends...
...outlet encountered by Stornoway Productions, the small Canadian company that made the- film, since it was completed in July 1985, constitute an indictment of American television and public television most especially...
...Several of the essays are published here for the first time, including "Professor Alchian on Economic Method," "Natural and Artifactual Man," "Notes on the History and Direction of Public Choice," and "Public Choice and Ideology...
...and the manufacture of "front groups," of which the World Peace Council is the jewel in the crown, to channel peace sentiment into anti-American agitation...
...Perhaps they (and others interviewed) have become so accustomed to the leftward slant of the media that they simply assumed a Canadian production company would portray them positively...
...Arkady Shevchenko, the former U.N...
...The camera pans to a 1978 photo before the U.N...
...Ten days later the film came back in the mail...
...The major networks, metro-media, the major cable outlets, all turned thumbs down...
...Deception is noteworthy not only for its extraordinary material, but for its innovative methods...
...I tell them if you have any problems with our evidence go after it...
...of a younger Shevchenko and beside him a smiling Romesh Chandra...
...Hardcover $8.00 0-913966-64-9 Paperback $3.50 0-913966-65-7 Liberty Fund edition, 1979 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...Over lunch he told the news director of WETA, Washington D.C.'s public broadcasting station, of the film, and gave him a copy for the public affairs staff to view...
...Under fire for years for purveying a stream of left-wing documentaries, its officials might have been expected to leap at the chance to prove "even-handedness," especially since Barry Chase, PBS's vice president for programming, had told Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine that PBS was eager to show competently produced material with a different perspective, if only it were available...
...their air is self-congratulatory...
...Quite frankly I don't know...
...It was independent, very independent...
...But once WNET's public affairs staff had seen the film, Iselin's tone was different...
...This in turn led the State Department to order the town to cease meddling in foreign affairs and let Soviet diplomats back on the beaches...
...292 pages...
...And sure enough, the film summons up Berkeley mayor 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 and U.S...
...He boasts that the Communist Party works within virtually every peace movement in the United States, and takes credit for a key role in organizing the huge 1982 peace demonstration in New York...
...Like the earlier KGB Connections, produced by the same team (finally shown in 1982 on New York City's Channel 11,1 that film never succeeded in surmounting the roadblocks to national distribution), Agents of 'That one showing led to Glen Cove, Long Island, achieving brief international fame...
...He assured Midge Decter that the problem did not lie in the politics of the film, but its "incompetence...
...The town's mayor, Alan Parente, learned from the film that the Soviet Union used its Glen Cove estate for sophisticated electronic espionage against local defense industries...
...Denmark's Arne Petersen, who took money from the KGB to pay for an ad in favor of a nuclear free zone which he induced 181 Danish artists and writers to sign, displays the same sense of superiority to the carping of lesser minds...
...He has no reason to speak of it...
...Asked if he might have been duped, Petersen replies: "1 have an IQ of 161...
...Vincent told me of his frustration: "I tell them I'm confused...
...The film simply didn't meet today's high standard of journalism...
...There are twenty-two people testifying in Agents of Deception, from the little old lady who was a translator for the World Peace Council for twenty years right on to the top...
...Midge Decter of the Committee for the Free World (which had disseminated the KGB Connections on college campuses) took the film to Jay Iselin, then president of WNET, the New York public television station that is the principal supplier of national programming for PBS...
...In a concluding essay written specially for this volume, the author says, "To anyone who reads the methodological urgings contained in the essays of this volume, written over almost two decades, and who simultaneously looks at what passes for 'economics' in the professional journals of 1980, there is only one evident conclusion...
...Meyerson, who is also a senior official of the U.S...
...LibertyPress LibertyClassics WHAT SHOULD ECONOMISTS DO...
...Disappointed but scarcely surprisedthat the station that gave us "The Africans" should have rejected Agents of Deception, Lenkowsky thought of Polly Kosko, director of program development at SCETV...
...It's been charged that the people 1 knew from the Soviet embassy were from the KGB...
...It is by no means...
...He admits the Soviets gave him the money to sustain his publication but declares loftily this had no impact on his publication...
...Decter had a foundation's commitment to provide the money for PBS to buy the film...
...the buying of journalists (among them the man who became managing editor of Tokyo's largest conservative paper...
...By James M. Buchanan Preface by H. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D. Tollison this 1979 Liberty Fund volume brings together sixteen essays by James M. Buchanan on the nature and methods of economists...
...Agents of Deception portrays "active measures" used by the Soviet International Department to influence public opinion in the West, including the creation of journals (the Greek tabloid Ethnos, reportedly created by the KGB in 1981, rapidly became the most widely read paper in the country...
...Paths, son of the creator of the Paths newsreel, and editor of Synthesis, a news bulletin on French national security, who was caught passing documents to a KGB officer, dismisses the charges of disinformation as "completely silly...
...They came here and brought along their wives and children...
...The U.S...
...Yet, Brennan and Tollison assert in their preface, "As a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice, as a moral and legal philosopher, as a welfare economist who has consistently and at times almost single-handedly defended the primacy of the contractarian ethic, and as a public finance theorist...
...Asked if the World Peace Council is a Soviet front, its long-time head Romesh Chandra replies easily: "It is not...
...The South Carolina station had produced a number of excellent programs on American drama and literature, and Lenkowsky suspected it would be open to a high quality public affairs program...
...Intelligence expert Roy Godson is interviewed, and points out that the themes of the publication by Rael Jean Isaac were denigration of the United States and support for the Soviet Union...
...The research that went into these films would support serious scholarly papers, and their impact derives from their meticulous accumulation of evidence...
...The town initially defied the State Department edict but eventually succumbed...
...The author of the essays is almost the only one in step or else he writes under some delusion that he is something that he is not...
...outlet for the film (it was shown on CTV in Canada in May 1986), producer Kitson Vincent found that he repeatedly encountered the objection: "That film has such a strong point of view...
...Peace Council co-chairman Gus Newport, who explains that Congressman Ron Dellums first got him involved and that New York Congressman Ted Weiss attended Peace Council conferences in Europe...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...If you say someone is doing something and this is how they do it and this is why they do it and here are the people who do it, how is that point-of-view journalism...
...Or perhaps they felt confident that whatever the motives of the film-makers, television's gatekeepers would make sure that no film critical of their statements reached a significant audience...
...Communist Party, shares the weakness for self-congratulation...
...He has no knowledge of it...
...Preface, index...
...Buchanan' s work has had worldwide recognition . " As a measure of that recognition, Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics...
...And what was that stuff about some World Conference or Council of Churches or whatever that group was—this claim it was a Communist front...
...I don't think so...
...A small self-satisfied smile comes to his lips...
...As she remembers it, Iselin told her: "People come in and talk to me and have an idea for a film and they don't even know where the financing is coming from and they take hours of my time...
...Television's gatekeepers, accustomed to documentaries where opposing talking heads provide "balance," are acutely uncomfortable with this technique, especially as applied to such unpleasant subjects as Soviet spying and disinformation...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...Peace Council-1 must confirm the FBI's intelligence—was instrumental in initiating June 12...
...The camera returns to Chandra who declares that Shevchenko knows nothing about the WPC...
...W bile the earlier KGB Connections, which focused on Soviet spying, made extensive use of hidden cameras, it is interesting that in Agents of Deception these were not needed...
...I don't know how easy 1 am to dupe...
...undersecretary general who defected to the U.S., describes how at the U.N...
...ABC, the most open of the networks to independent producers, was divided but the naysayers triumphed...
...It turns out he was right...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
