Presswatch/Screamers
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH ............ ......... . ..... ........................ .... . ........ , 4, .. ..... 43, - w- - - -. ...
...So let's give the award for best debunking to David Ignatius, and thank the Post for performing this indispensable service...
...Here is the essence of it: What communists were doing in Ethiopia was far more horrible than what communists were doing in Angola or Nicaragua...
...71 ' 4 ' Ili) about this before...
...Not much of a story in the end, and it died with suitable speed...
...Right he is, and there is even more: as I noted last July, not only did the Communist regime of Ethiopia systematically murder its citizens through starvation, but at the very same time the youth and the idealists of the Western world were being gulled into thinking they were helping out through showbiz fundraisers like "Live Aid...
...In addition, he said, hundreds of ---'' .,-tion I hadn't known existed, and one -,,, 1 which certainly warrants a profile in tr .,: I ' - ii, , 4...
...and discovered that we had, in fact, 1 the perestroika news service that before glasnost...
...But the Globe found it attractive, and Foreign Policy, which is rapidly becoming the National Enquirer of foreign policy publications, found it greatly to its tastes...
...And the Outlook section of the Washington Post's Sunday edition, edited by David Ignatius, has done more of that than any other publication of which I am aware...
...I suspect that one of the prime reasons was fear of expulsion...
...So if there is disagreement about both the intention and the results of the findings, why all the noise...
...A communist regime brutally uprooted its own citizens against their will, forcibly separating hundreds of thousands from their families and killing tens of thousands through deliberate mistreatment...
...A- British professor The answer to my question of last heard about it before, back in 1970 in Soviet maps have been systematically wittily remarked that "the best street month Why had we not heard about a magazine called the Military Engifalsified since the days of the revolu- map of Moscow was produced fifteen this before?has now been partially neer The article sounds very much like tion...
...43, - w- - - -. - - - - 1 , - , 6 .1 1 m II INOOW. ' , .- , a . a tiii 0 I ----= - --- - - - 7 ..z._--.2....---_ -_....---5, )1 \ _-_,__ ________,-a...
...In fact, the CIA never received authorization to kill anyone...
...Faced with this ultimatum, the House committee eliminated most of Oliver's wilder fantasies from its document...
...Oliver tried to get this nutty view of recent history included in the final report ofthe Joint Committee, but Senate Counsel Arthur Liman, to his credit, rejected Oliver's attempt...
...They insisted that if terrorists were indeed going to be targeted, the President had to rescind the anti-assassination executive order that has been on the books since the days of President Ford...
...The Great Ethiopian Coverup Kudos to Robert D. Kaplan and to the Washington Monthly for a first-class piece of research and writing, "The African Killing Fields" (September...
...insignificant features, such as remote tribal one of our leading publications), a \ 49, fft, 'N ' ' i 1 I _ p rii ' 1 0 4, villages in Siberia, small streams and trails \ 1 \ SI i ' ^ i (- Po: were purposely displaced...
...The headline was a screamer: "CIA Given Free Hand In 1984-85...
...The latest products of this active political campaign are to be found in the fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine in an article by Robert Parry of Newsweek and Peter Kornbluh of the far-left Institute for Policy Studies, and in an October 4 front-page article in the Boston Globe by Ross Gelbspan...
...The ----,, .0-.4 tified, said strategically important cities had C _ 1 #4.(e 0 '- 11%, - -,-__, been shifted in random directions on Soviet State Department Geographer (a posi- 1 _ to , . ' 74e ' ' maps...
...A far more energetic bit of myth-making was launched by some disgruntled Democratic staffers from the House Iran-contra committee in early October...
...Everyone in sight had The author of the article, who was not idenic a profound comment to make...
...Reagan Authorization To Counter Terrorists Called `License to Kill.' " The story was rather more convoluted, trotting out bits and pieces of alleged presidential "findings" that authorized CIA action against terrorist groups overseas...
...This massive exercise in self-deception and bad music awaits its historian...
...Oliver drove one of the nastiest elements in the investigation in which, as the Minority Report of the Joint Committee observed, "Committee attorneys questioned witnesses about their political activity, religious affiliations, educational backgrounds, employment history, political lineage, roommate's political contributions, social associations, and more:' Oliver subscribed to a version of the now-discredited Christie Institute view of the world, according to which the CIA (or, alternatively, a secret group of former CIA and Pentagon officials) was responsible for almost all of the presumed wrongdoing in the world since the 1960s, including drug-running, assassinations, and subversion of progressive governments...
...Led by Spencer Oliver, an aide to Florida Congressman Dante Fascell, the staff issued a supplementary document pretending to prove the existence of a CIA plot to conduct a secret propaganda campaign on behalf of the contras from within other agencies of the executive branch (notably the NSC, the State Department, and USIA...
...fk t .4) An_ i#_ : - (Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Throughout the Iran-contra investigations and hearings, Oliver was peddling the line that Oliver North was simply the tip of an iceberg that rested on the CIA and William Casey...
...After all, travelers -, , 111, 1 ' . 1...
...Liman told his House counterpart, John Nields, that if the House committee insisted on including the nonsense in their report, the Senate would issue its own version...
...I) Michael Ledeen is the author of the new 1 i l'i;iiii to Moscow were certainly aware that ,iiI4 1' ill/ , , the Soviet street maps were wrong, and book, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's IP - .,, ...4. . . 4...
...Just as our correspondents in China during the Cultural Revolution never told us about the full horror of that period, knowing that if they did they would depart the People's Republic, so our men and women in the USSR undoubtedly realized that this particular story would send them to the nearest airport...
...in the fall of 1988 was so silly that none of the major newspapers gave much space to it (in my discussions with Washington correspondents of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I found nothing but contempt for Oliver's handiwork...
...the hundreds of American journalists Account of the Iran-Contra Affair A i -...- 4 ,,,t...
...People like Oliver, Parry, and Kornbluh didn't like the effectiveness of the Reichs and the Raymonds, and have attempted to (continued on page 53) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 41 LEDEEN (continued from page 41) smear them by claiming that the whole thing was improper and illegal...
...But Oliver does not give up easily, and he has devoted the past year to stigmatizing those persons who went all-out for the contras in the years preceding the scandal...
...A - ' - ---- in the Soviet Union since the revolution 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 had to have discovered that there were cities on those blank spaces on Soviet maps, and that the locations of other cities were misplaced...
...The story did not appear until the Soviets put it out themselves...
...But the editors had to have been in on the suppression as well, for the story could have been written out of Washington (or, for that matter, any academic center of Soviet studies...
...they have to be debunked...
...Which all goes to show that it isn't sufficient for the major publications to ignore wacko stories...
...r ......, SCREAMERS 4.^ _ - - _ ...W....1,P -...by Michael Ledeen I n early September, we learned from found throughout the Soviet Union out and admitted their distortions...
...The various documentspieces of which were evidently wafted under the noses of the Post reportersindicated this bureaucratic struggle, which was resolved by leaving the executive order intact but still encouraging more vigorous action against terrorism...
...Beneath all of the pseudo-conspiracy claims, there lies a single fact: the Reagan Administration, largely through the leadership of William Clark (at the time the national security adviser to the President), concluded that the professional bureaucracy was incompetent to conduct an effective public campaign in behalf of the President's policies, and appointed more energetic people to lead the campaign...
...While there were some people here and there in the bureaucracy who thought we ought to go after individual terrorists, the professionals at CIA violently opposed any such suggestion...
...In 1 1 ' r, ,i, ,-..-, ,111 previously unknown gentleman named , ,, , , Demko, told us that the Soviet policy I \ ' ',',, \ ' 40091 2,, 4.- But why, we are entitled to ask again, :, ,, ,:,,, , .,,, ,i'...:- 4/' ' lii f,4 i,, , was "symptomatic of the paranoia ti didn't we, the reading public, hear ;P...
...And while the Soviets made the years ago by the Central Intelligence answered by the New York Times's man it came from the darkness of spook-announcement, it was immediately evi- Agency," and went on to murmur, of the hour, Robert Pear, who inter- dom: dent that this had been no secret in the "Thank God, they have actually come viewed the State Department's Demko Western world...
...And seven paragraphs down we are told that "as far as could be determined, no one was killed as a result of the intelligence findings Reagan signed...
...The lead paragraph of the Globe piece tells it all: A wide-ranging domestic propaganda and disinformation campaign, designed to win public support for administration policies in Central America and elsewhere, was conceived by the late director of the Central Intelligence Agency and implemented by a veteran CIA propaganda specialist .. . The claim is nonsense...
...But the impact of this cataclysm on the media, a conservative White House, and the American public was minimal...
...The answer lies in paragraph nine: "White House officials have said that Vice President Bush would have been given a copy of or access to the finding...
...The supplementary report issued by Oliver et...
...But while other administration officials frequently criticized the regime in the strongest possible terms, President Reagan himself was practically silent...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 53...
...This was done in the State Department under the leadership of Ambassador Otto Reich and in the NSC under Walter Raymond, a long-time CIA professional who left the Agency to devote his energies to generating support for administration policies regarding Central America and Afghanistan...
...The Latest Lies On October 5, the Washington Post's dynamic duo, Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus (presented in "star" rather than alphabetical order), presented the usual mix of government secrets, unnamed sources, and innuendo to damage the administration...
...All the news that's fit to print" indeed...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
