THE LAST WORD
Knoll, Erwin
THE LAST WORD Confession time Erwin Knoll The New Statesman, that excellent weekly of the British moderate Left, reaches me by a roundabout route. It is sent by some friends in London to The...
...It would be best, of course, if they could tell about their "contacts" with the CIA in the media that employ (or employed) them, so that the readers of those publications could enjoy the insights of disclosure...
...Their objective was to manipulate his magazine and use it as part of the propaganda war on Bolshevism...
...We've known about those flights for a couple of years," the editor said, "but we were asked not to write anything...
...Eventually, it noted, he "evidently came to regret his flirtation with the security services, and his increasingly heavy drinking may have been the symptom of a deep unease...
...How many other stories were my editors suppressing because they had been "asked...
...When the magazine arrives at The Progressive's office, it is carefully deposited atop the pile of other publications, clippings, memos, unsolicited manuscripts, unanswered letters, and miscellaneous pieces of paper that clutter my desk to a depth of six or eight inches...
...The article began: "Clifford Sharp, the first editor of the New Statesman, was recruited by the British security services shortly after the Russian Revolution...
...The particulars, remote in time and place, did not interest me much, but I am impressed with the New Statesman's commendable candor...
...Milton reads each issue carefully, and occasionally scrib-les a postcard calling my attention to one or another article...
...Then he sends the magazine along by the cheapest (and slowest) class of mail, being notoriously unwilling to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary on such frivolities as postage stamps...
...And who did the asking...
...Although many details remain sketchy, it does appear to constitute the first known example of the state attempting peacetime manipulation of an 'independent' press for purposes of covert propaganda...
...The article went on to give the details (or as many as could be learned) of Clifford Sharp's involvement with the Secret Intelligence Service and the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office...
...But if that should prove inconvenient, The Progressive will cheerfully make its pages available...
...New Statesman editor in pay of British security services...
...Indeed, there have been a few isolated and fragmented disclosures in the last year or two — constituting, I suspect, only the tiniest tip of the iceberg...
...That's how I got rich," he explains...
...The Cold War achievement of the CIA in funding magazines like Encounter through the Congress of Cultural Freedom remains impressive but now seems less original...
...So it was only a few days ago that I found myself thumbing through the New Statesman for December 29, 1978, and encountered an article headed "Exclusive...
...One evening in the spring of 1960, when I was a reporter on the staff of The Washington Post, I shared an elevator with one of the paper's senior editors...
...study of Public Record Office files dealing with the period immediately after the First World War...
...We should not have to wait until some musty archives are opened in another sixty years...
...There must be some reporters and editors and publishers out there who, like the late Clifford Sharp, are afflicted by "a deep unease" (not to mention "increasingly heavy drinking...
...And I wonder whether some publications on this side of the Atlantic might not wish to follow this splendid example by disclosing the "piquant facts" of their own past (though admittedly more recent) affiliations with the CIA...
...It is sent by some friends in London to The Progressive's Roving Editor, Milton Mayer, at his home in Carmel, California...
...In the brief ride from the fifth floor to street level, we talked about the day's big news story: the Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane and the capture of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers...
...It appears that this technique, like most of the others in the CIA's comprehensive bag of dirty tricks, was first patented in Britain...
...That such affiliations existed — and still exist — I have no doubt...
...This piquant fact emerges from a Erwin Knoll is the editor of The Progressive...
...In my youthful innocence, I was both astonished and dismayed...
...In due course I learned, by means of discreet inquiry, that The Post, like other major news media, maintained "contacts" with the CIA in order to receive "guidance" on "sensitive" stories...
Vol. 43 • May 1979 • No. 5
