Covert Cadre

...Their legitimate political activities were merely ruses to camouflage the real tasks of their political commitment, which they could discuss only with other "secret agents" like themselves...

...110 G ti ORDER FORM INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL of INTELLIGENCE and COUNTERINTELLIGENCE (ISSN 0885-0607) Please enter my subscription for: 1986-1987 VOL...

...he sees the interrelationships of issues, people, money, and votes, and he marshals his own forces extremely well...

...HEDRICK SMITH: I'm not...

...Here's how Rick describes Jim Baker: "Baker is smart, cautious, patient and decisive...

...Recognizing that no analysis of IPS is complete without an account of the institute's spinoffs (sometimes referred to by IPS as "social inventions"), Powell not only describes them in detail but, in a series of helpful appendices, lays out their relationships to IPS and a number of sister ideological groups...

...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Whines, wasn't it extremely controversial and daring for Rick to suggest that Jim Baker is the single most.effective person in the Reagan Administration...

...Whew...

...HELEN WAN: Is he married...

...Really...

...Box 188, Stroudsburg, PA 18360 USA AS ------------------------------------ ---and purge the movement of its undesirables, whom Judis has catalogued with care...

...And he takes 793 pages to say it...

...John B. Judis's biography of William F Buckley, Jr...

...PERGAMON-BRASSEY'S Distributed by Kampmann & Co., Inc...

...hat the success of IPS chiefly il lustrates is the failure of our elites...

...Thanks for joining us...

...In Horowitz's view, IPS provides the perfect institutional base for those still functioning as "secret agents...

...Like Cora Weiss of the Rubin Foundation and Saul Landau, a long-time IPS fellow (and sometime Transnational Institute head), Horowitz was the son of Communist parents, who in their own mind functioned as what Horowitz calls "secret agents...

...to target specific countries...

...IPS's Michael Parenti explains the lines at stores in the Soviet Union by the large discretionary income enjoyed by the consumer there...

...Why's that...

...PAUL DUKE: Well, that's about as much time as we have for this edition of "Washington Week in Review...

...And so on...

...El Scott Powell has written the first book-length study of the Institute for Policy Studies, often described as the chief institutional survivor of the 1960s counterculture...

...2 (4 issues) O Personal $35.00 O Institutional $55.00 Check enclosed-111 Please charge my VISAL MasterCardC NOTE: All subscriptions payable in advance...

...HEDRICK SMITH: But on page 345 I say "Ideas do matter in politics...

...Yet IPS's influence on Capitol Hill has clearly grown, despite The Spike, despite all the scrupulously documented attacks on the organization...

...The significance of this book, then, is not so much in providing a wealth of hitherto undiscovered facets of IPS activity (although, to my knowledge, Powell, who was able to get "inside" IPS by posing as a hanger-on, is the first to focus on the extent to which Soviet officials frequent IPS...

...IPS obtained the Pentagon Papers more than a year before they were published by the New York Times, and their availability at the institute seems to have been widely known...

...Now, not only do I and all my colleagues on this panel and in the Washington press corps believe that's true, but it has the added advantage of being so easy to understand and follow...

...CHARLES MacTROWEL: Want a cracker, Rick...

...HEDRICK SMITH: That would be just fine with me...

...Much of the material in this volume has been detailed elsewhere: for example, by John Rees whose Information Digest has faithfully tracked IPS since 1968...

...That the devil's day has largely passed is credited to Mr...

...All you get is the sense that manipulators and maneuverers run politics, policy, and set the national agenda...

...As Raskin said when he founded IPS, "this country and modern nations run on ideas to a large extent" and "on the political level, you have to develop a sense that there are groups within the organized political structure-Congress or the Executive-who are interested in such ideas...

...There are chapters on IPS campaigns against our intelligence agencies, system of alli ances, defense establishment, and corporations...

...All in all, we are out to spread light, not darkness...

...1 (4 issues) O Personal $35.00 0 Institutional $55.00 1988 VOL...

...In the last section of the book Powell (like Horowitz in the introduction) zeroes in on the crucial question IPS forces us to address: What is the nature of treason...

...The next spring National Review published Eugene Lyons's attack on Welch and his American Opinion magazine, a brave move for many reasons, including the fact that a chief NR financial supporter was a Birch Society member...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...

...As Horowitz says: "IPS defined itself in terms that were characteristic not of the New Left, but of the old left...

...there is also extensive description of the ways IPS has sought to mold public opinion, both through influencing established organizations (major newspapers, the churches) and by shaping alternatives (its own newspapers, wire service, radio programs, and operations within established churches like World Peacemakers and Riverside Church Disarmament Program...

...Anything that happens successfully in this book, Baker did it...

...That's why I was able to keep myself from losing the track of my argument while I was cranking out all 793 pages...

...Perhaps...

...Has IPS discovered a new mode of treason, not punishable in a court of law...

...by Joshua Muravchik...

...Signs...

...No hint of Landau's thirty-year commitment as an apologist for Castro, for whom he made a celebratory "documentary, "Fidel-, no mention of his propaganda film for the Sandinistas, made with the cooperation of their security police...

...But nothing we do will serve much purpose if our leaders lack confidence in their values and traditions...

...Powell makes us appreciate the fact that no single group has done so much to move our political culture to the left...

...One cannot adequately discuss the impact of IPS without addressing the ease with which the organization has surmounted its critics...

...We may say love your brother, but never bugger him...

...All subscriptions begin with the first issue of the Volume ordered...

...To sum up: Hedrick Smith's The Power Game says that Watergate-era party and congressional reforms have forever changed the way politics operates in Washington, that Congress and the President fight for power, and that ideas have no importance whatever in the making, fashioning, or discussing of public or foreign policy...

...In the last paragraph of this volume Powell writes: In a free society fringe groups and extreme ideologies of all sorts can and do appear, and democracy has sufficient power of assimilation to withstand most contradictions and absurdities...

...For this reason, and no other, at the end of the decade, when the battalions of the New Left disintegrated in exhaustion and defeat, the Institute for Policy Studies survived...

...The logic is as ludicrous as the rhetoric...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 47 kin's exercise in Deep Thinking, Being and Doing...

...Was that hard...

...With this agenda and funding, IPS set out on what has been a remarkably successful effort to change the direction of the political culture...

...For example, he devotes sixty pages to budgeting and procurement problems at the Pentagon, and gives congressional aides most of the credit for cracking down on them...

...We may hope Fidel Castro is sentenced to an eternity of shucking mountain oysters in the hot place...

...The award-winning international journal covering intelligence, counterintelligence and related aspects of international afffairs, business and law enforcement...

...He must be making a lot of enemies...

...Instead, Powell answers such practical questions as, "What are IPS targets...

...HEDRICK SMITH: You're sure right about that, Whines...

...You do not get the sense from this book that Ronald Reagan was elected by the American people to do anything...

...WHINES JOHNSON: It certainly was, Charlie, particularly because Jim Baker is the person most hated by the New Right...

...It is rather in bringing together all that is known about IPS into one volume...

...WHINES JOHNSON: I believe that by refusing to submit to the "buy guns, guns, guns, and more guns" drumbeating, Rick is nobly resisting the siren call and political imprecations of the New Right...

...PAUL DUKE: Whines Johnson, as the conscience of us all HEDRICK SMITH: You bet he is, Paul...

...WHINES JOHNSON: When they're done by former White House chief of staff and current Treasury secretary Jim Baker...

...A best-selling roman a these, The Spike, was a thinly disguised expose of IPS...

...As Arthur Waskow, an early IPS fellow, admitted, its peculiar blend of research and street activism placed it "on the bare edge of custom in the United States as to what an educational research institution is, as against what a political institution is...

...If you sell defense secrets to the Soviet Union, you are guilty of treason...

...And in times of fundamental faith, an organization like IPS-which openly states that its goal is the dismantling of all economic, political, social and cultural institutions in the United Stateswould hardly be taken seriously, let alone have any influence on the country's domestic and foreign policies...

...Had he owned up to his political commitments, Landau would have damaged his credibility-and cause...

...Law makers of an earlier generation would have held their sides laughing had they read Marcus Ras "A fascinating spy story that demonstrates that real life can be as exciting as fiction...

...These burgeoned after World War II and were valued in Washington for their role in providing the long-range perspectives government officials simply did not have the freedom to consider, pressed as they were to deal with immediate problems...

...The New York Times Magazine published Joshua Muravchik's withering expose of the institute-and the New York Times oped page continued as before to provide IPS writers with a platform, labeling IPS only as "a liberal think tank...

...Those at IPS claim a role as progressive participants in the democratic process...

...His impression seems to be that while the current conservative corpus is an imperfect beauty-a Lollobrigida minus an eye and a couple of teeththe old model also had numerous boils and the temper of a piss-guzzling snake...

...IPS engages in policy analysis by advertising catch-words...

...The research was put in service of the activism...

...Perhaps Powell's book, and the immense research effort it represents, will close the chapter on IPS's charmed existence...

...by Emerson Vermaat, a Dutch journalist who has investigated IPS's Transnational Institute, which attacks multinational corporations and links revolutionary Marxist intellectuals worldwide...

...system whose demise it sought...

...Arthur Waskow alone could provide material for a whole series of skits on "Saturday Night Live," not to mention the cohort of the undisciplined left that departed IPS with him in 1977 in a salary dispute, depriving the institute of credit for further pearls from the author of Lesbians in Revolt and The Seven Days of Creation from a Buberian Feminist Perspective...

...The panel applauds politely, then smiles and nods at the camera...

...It is unfortunate that Powell ignores much of the work done by his forerunners (there is no reference to John Rees or Information Digest in the text or 1300 footnotes...

...PROFESSOR ROY S. GODSON "A chilling book:'-RICHARD HELMS, former director of the CIA `A spy thriller that is even more dramatic because the events really happened.' -SENATOR JOHN G. TOWER fff L NOE I N THE KGB Stan avLeudienko $18.95, now at your bookstore...

...Landau argued the money would not be used for its intended purpose but be diverted to the pockets of greedy contra leaders...

...If there is an important omission in this book, it is Powell's failure to focus on the absurdity of the institute's nostrums...

...The Violence Colony...

...What of the question of intent...

...PAUL DUKE: How does Rick treat the question of ideological battles between the Republicans and Democrats...

...You, on the other hand, will probably just buy it and never crack the binding...

...No wonder all of us here at "Washington Week in Review" think it's such a stunning and original book...

...Judis's description of the Birch affair is a particularly revealing part of his book...

...Yet this book, according to First Harvest, IPS's twentieth anniversary anthology, best expresses the philosophy "that has most strongly shaped the Institute for Policy Studies...

...HELEN WAN: Paul, I wanted to know if Jim Baker was married, and you didn't answer my question...

...By the time he was in boarding school he was a strong debater and quick to argue political and religious issues...

...HEDRICK SMITH: That too...

...You're all great...

...explains the nature of the devil many liberals still see in conservatives...

...and he is probably right to resist such tempting diversions...

...by this writer...

...It was able to trade on the trust policy makers automatically placed in think tanks...

...NR writer (and American Opinion editorial board member) Medford Evans put it this way: "My view on the subject is that National Review should refrain from making any criticisms of other periodi Cl,- Cmd Nc E.crtm...

...He was also a bit aloof and high-nosed as a lad, but after the army was a regular enough guy and ready to put the world on track...

...In times of dire peril to the republic, people will at last take heed of a Cassandra...

...by Brian Crozier in England (a libel suit against him by IPS was recently settled on terms favorable to Crozier...

...Apparently deciding the papers were legally too risky for the institute to publish, IPS played a major role in arranging for their ultimate disposition...

...Inevitably one's laughter is tempered by the realization of the influence IPS exerts on our decision-makers...

...The National Security State...

...Here are the ideas, here is the style of the lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated, half-successful provincials...

...God and Man at Yale was his Big Bang...

...in U.S...

...NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP CODE COUNTRY PLEASE MAIL TO: IJIC, P.O...

...to help revolutionary groups in the field..IPS's Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, for example, played host to "liberation movements" which provided a shopping list of research needs...

...TOM CLANCY "The steadily interesting and persuasive autobiography of the highest-level Russian ever to defect from the KGB:" -Kirkus Reviews "Levchenko gives an unusual look at the rarely seen private life of a Soviet intelligence officer, as well as new insights into the politics and modus operandi of the KGB...

...But, as Horowitz observes, "like the leftist progressives of the past, their liberalism and pacifism are not political commitments...

...Dwight Macdonald, in a Commentary review entitled "Scrambled Eggheads On The Right," said: "The McCarthy nationaliststhey call themselves conservatives, but that is surely a misnomer-have never made so heroic an effort to be articulate...

...As Horowitz points out, Rubin was "a Communist Party member of the Stalin epoch...

...Buckley...

...Not everyone supported this beautification project...

...PAUL DUKE: And how is that, Whines...

...To throw light on this question, Horowitz turns to his own background, one shared with several of the leading figures in IPS...

...For he thereby forgoes examining why all earlier revelations of IPS misdeeds have been almost totally ineffective...

...Otherwise no real political transformation can occur...

...She first wrote about the Institute for Policy Studies in 1980 for Midstream magazine...

...Powell describes how, in the aftermath of a clumsy FBI investigation of the institute, IPS sued, and was able to obtain a settlement exempting itself from any future FBI scrutiny...

...Like snap estimates of the weight of Manhattan, however, these appraisals are usually a little off and if you haven't got anything else to do you can spend the evening in rebuttal...

...What's more, we're sure that the entire Washington press corps agrees with us...

...But what if you obtain classified information and publish it for all to read...

...Scott Powell provides an exhaustive nuts and bolts account of IPS activities and influence, both direct and indirect...

...After all, Rick's entire book explains how things really get done in Washington...

...Birch Society founder Robert Welch pledged $1,000 to National Review in 1955 and another $1,000 two years later, though not without informing Buckley that Ike "was on the wrong side...

...If, in the eighth year of Reagan's presidency, the Congress can correctly be identified by Paul Hollander as a bastion of the adversary culture, it is thanks primarily to the efforts of IPS, which never forgot that its major target was the policy-making establishment...

...Needless to say, it paid no penalty for its role...

...The ideas of IPS are silly...

...Lyons's article drew flak from conservatives who felt the movement had few enough friends as it was without shooting one of them...

...The value of this transcends the obvious convenience...

...Please add $7.00 per volume for orders outside the U.S...

...He is savvy...

...Yes, all the capital letters are in the original, and what we are talking about is the way the ordinary citizen is oppressed by police, the workplace, TV, and the schools...

...Yet our adversaries look into our eyes and see a skullful of gremlins...

...But those of us who came to Washington to promote freedom and harmony cannot help but be taken aback by these slanders...

...The magazine was necessary for several purposes: sway opinion leaders, recruit and lead the conservative army, Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia...

...To be sure, Powell gives us this gem, but he nowhere mines the rich lode of foolishness offered by the entire array of IPS fellows...

...Not everyone on the right was supportive of the man whom Judis has dubbed the "patron saint of the conservatives...

...We may bash the commies-and their spouses...

...Really...

...It was used to wage economic war against corporations...

...Harper's editor John Fischer noted its "conspiracy theory of liberal control" and its "grave doubts about freedom...

...And, by the way, thanks, you guys...

...Actually, as David Horowitz points out in his splendid introduction, IPS was never really part of the New Left revolution, though it served as a haven for many New Left activists...

...HEDRICK SMITH: Jim Baker was just terrific...

...I WON'T BE IGNORED, PAUL...

...From the left, Murray Kempton called the magazine a "national bore...

...This time, the panel doesn't do anything but smile and nod at the camera...

...Bloomingdale's is less crowded than GUM because millions of persons in the New York metropolitan area who might otherwise choose to shop there cannot afford to-either because they are unemployed or because they expend the bulk of their income on food, housing, fuel, medical care, tuition and transportation...

...In the end, the story told here may reveal as much about the leadership and judgment of the elites in the United States as about the Institute for Policy Studies itself...

...Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the founders of IPS, were former government bureaucrats, New Frontier Democrats, a type viewed with contempt by the New Left...

...In it the United States is labelled a Colonized Society, with the oppressing Colonies duly dubbed the Violence Colony, the Plantation Colony, the Dream Colony, and the Channeling Colony...

...by Cliff Kincaid, who produced a special supplement for Human Events on IPS and the media in 1983...

...They are deadly weapons with which to lay siege to W democracy's defenses, to cripple its resistance to the totalitarian advance...

...Racist, pro-Franco, pro-smokestack, pro-greed, anti-Semitic, anti-fag, antiheliocentric universe-the denunciations come like hornets and don't stop until the nest empties...

...The Warfare State...

...IPS passed itself off as a think tank devoted to liberal values, i.e., to upholding the very Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery Gateway...

...0 WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.: PATRON SAINT OF THE CONSERVATIVES John B. Judis/Simon and Schuster/$22.95 Dave Shiflett N ewcomers to politics, especially those of us who strayed in during the Reagan years, have been entertained when complete strangers walk up at parties and list our every flaw...

...He was seven when he wrote the King of England and told him to repay his war debt, an early indication that WFB would not let knuckleheads off easy...

...The funding base, like the agenda, has been provided by the old left-by the Samuel Rubin Foundation...

...In all that space, he devotes perhaps three paragraphs to charges that the forty-four committees and subcommittees that perform some kind of oversight function of the Pentagon might be contributing to the problem...

...Certainly IPS has run rings around the political establishment...

...and "How does it go COVERT CADRE: INSIDE THE INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES S. Steven Powell/Green Hill Publishers (Ottawa, IL)/$29.95 Rael Jean Isaac 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 about achieving its goals...

...We are not storm troopers...

...He makes no effort to answer the question "Why...

...We are not Klansmen...

...Do we need to lift the taboo on discussions of disloyalty, so that the cry of Red-baiting no longer forestalls debate...

...Over the years, the chaotic, untidy, flexible, apparently spontaneous surface of IPS has reassured outsiders, deflecting attention from its substantive purposes...

...dollars...

...HELEN WAN: Paul, Rick seems to think oversight is a very good thing...

...In that happy if unlikely event, the Astonishing Works of IPS could then be savored with unalloyed enjoyment...

...WHINES JOHNSON: In addition, manipulators and maneuverers are shown in their rightful light: as kind of sexy...

...who responded to Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Senator McCarthy...

...WHINES JOHNSON: Maybe people decided that the things Rick is saying, Charlie, needed to be heard...

...We do have our beliefs...

...The range of IPS activities and the extent of its influence can only be appreciated once the threads are drawn together...

...Everybody's been just terrific...

...IPS defined its goal as nothing less than the "dismantling" of all our institutions, political, economic, and cultural...

...that he stood for anything...

...that his election, or any election, means anything...

...PAUL DUKE: Helen, where does Rick's book come down on the question of congressional oversight of executive authority...

...These are not unreasonable positions...

...Buckley was more interested in burying cranks, not praising them, and as the movement's Martin Luther he sailed his inkwell at the isolationists, anti-Semites, incurable racists, and John Birchers...

...We are about great things...

...For example, Horowitz notes that Landau published an article on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page opposing aid to the contras in such a way as to appeal to anti-Communists...

...As I interviewed Baker or watched him in action, the one word that kept coming to mind was control: self-control, control of the situation, control of others...

...Powell also provides chapters on the extensive IPS lobbying network in Congress, with special attention to its links with organizations lobbying on behalf of revolutionary Marxist groups in Latin America...

...WHINES JOHNSON: Paul, what Rick understands-and what this program, if it does anything, proves week after week-is that ideas are extremely unimportant in politics...

...WHINES JOHNSON: Yes, you do, but thank God, you don't believe it...

...PAUL DUKE: Next week, we'll be discussing Henry Adams's Democracy...

...the modulations of its echo can be read fortnightly in National Review...