'DISINFORMATION' FROM THE TIMES

...According to one source, only intervention from top management saved the piece...

...But an additional factor must be taken into account: It is one thing to publish Sterling or Moss, whom some people, at least, regard as credible journalists...

...I did write a long story of more than The Times has helped legitimate anew Cold War 2,000 words which was about what I called—what I quote somebody as calling—the new metaphor for subversion, which was belief in a large-scale disinformation campaign funneled through the IPS...

...The Sunday Magazine has successively published major articles by Edward Jay Epstein ("The Spy War," September 28), Moss ("Terror: a Soviet Export," November 2), Claire Sterling ("Terrorism: Tracing the International Network," March 1), and Joshua Muravchik ("The Think Tank of the Left," May 3) that John Judis is political editor of In These Times, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, and a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...Two Times stories this year have reported that de Borchgrave's and Haig's simple concept of an international terrorist network controlled by the Soviet Union has provoked dissent within the CIA...

...He asserted, for example, that an IPS study on South America "echoed Richard Barnet's view, set forth in his book, Intervention and Revolution, that 'the first imperative is that the world must be made safe for revolution.' " It takes only a glance at Barnet's book to show that Muravchik completely distorted the meaning of Barnet's statement...

...And that story did not run," Mohr said...

...But the Times Magazine seems to have taken upon itself the task of championing the de Borchgrave view...

...The journalists and the intelligence officials share three objectives: 11 To restore the CIA's domestic and foreign intelligence operations to the status they enjoyed before Colby and Turner purged the Agency—in short, to resume assassination-type covert actions and domestic spying...

...They are also closely linked to the colleagues of these ousted officers who remain in the CIA and in the French, British, and Israeli intelligence services...

...De Borchgrave and his far-right soulmates remember and resent The Times's active role in the mid-1970s exposure of CIA assassinations and domestic spying...

...Munson's apprenticeship had been served at the right-wing American Spectator...

...Muravchik rejects the charge that his article was designed to contribute to a new McCarthyism, but his explanation of its purpose is revealing nonetheless: "I wanted to be able to talk about people whose views on a number of issues are—I'm being careful about using a word—are pro-Bolshevik without getting into the old morass of hysteria, McCarthyism, and questioning people's sincerity," he says...

...The seeds of revolution now sprouting on three continents confront humanity with two seemingly contradictory imperatives," Barnet wrote...

...Ours is a time when the laughable is made to appear reasonable—both by the Administration in power and by the major news media...

...He quotes an IPS pamphlet by Alan Wolfe, for example, to show that IPS does not appreciate the Soviet threat, while ignoring a critical review of the pamphlet that appeared in In These Times, another IPS publication...

...De Borchgrave, Moss, and Sterling, along with Georgetown University's Michael Ledeen, Roy Godson, and Ray Cline, and London's Brian Crazier, are closely linked to the network of disgruntled former intelligence officers who were ousted during CIA housecleanings by William Colby and Stansfield Turner...

...To make the case that IPS, founded in 1963 by progressive Democrats Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, was "pro-Bolshevik," Muravchik assembled an array of quotations ripped out of context...

...The Reagan Administration has made the threat of a Soviet-led international terrorist conspiracy—rather than, say, poverty in the Third World or the danger of nuclear war—its chief ideological issue...

...Perhaps, The Times might even be compelled to open its columns to the ultra-conservatives of the national security lobby...

...Last year, he got to hire Steve Munson, the son-in-law of neo-conservative writer Midge Decter...

...While there was little debate within The Times about the earlier solicitations, Munson's recruitment of Muravchik is said to have sparked a staff struggle which almost resulted in a decision to kill the article...

...Not merely does he ignore the fact that Porter was not with IPS when he wrote the book and that he later changed his views...

...At a recent meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders held in Prague in August 1973," Moss wrote in The Times, "Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev paid tribute to the role of the 'national liberation' movements in changing the 'correlation of forces' in favor of socialist countries...

...While Epstein recounted Colby's view on the CIA, his article nevertheless lent credence to Angelton's charge that Soviet "moles" have burrowed into the U.S...

...But according to one source, Klein was also unhappy with the Magazine's political image, and complained to management that he was surrounded by "flaming liberals...

...Muravchik was director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was founded after George McGovern's 1972 defeat to recapture the Democratic Party for its Cold War wing...

...See "Setting the Stage for Repression," The Progressive, April 1981...

...11 To persuade Americans that "disinformation," as allegedly practiced by the liberal press and by left-wing think tanks under covert Soviet guidance, is the major internal security threat—the new Communist conspiracy...

...Angelton ("Nick Flower" in The Spike) headed the CIA's illegal domestic counterintelligence unit and, after he was fired, helped found the Association of Former Intelligence Officers...

...In The Spike, de Borchgrave and Moss insinuated that IPS and The Times were systematically "disinforming" the American people and Congress about the extent of the Soviet threat...

...Media observers and some Times employes are-focusing their apprehensions about The Times's current drift on Klein's editorship of the Magazine, but the ultra-conservative influence has made itself felt elsewhere in the newspaper...

...The second imperative for the community of nations and for the United States is to attempt the creation of a world environment in which revolution will be unnecessary...

...In the past, The Times has printed polemics and critiques in the Magazine, but it has usually identified the authors with their political assumptions...

...Kotler told the fact-checker and then Munson himself that IPS had had nothing to do with the caucus and that he was not and had never been an IPS fellow or associate...

...He is at present a graduate student at Georgetown University, and his article on IPS was also a term paper for a course with Roy Godson, an associate of the de Borchgrave clique who was a co-author of the notorious Heritage Foundation report on internal security released earlier this year...

...And it has spiked an article by a senior Washington correspondent that might have sustained a contrary view...

...The Times has printed some stories that challenge the de Borchgrave view, which is now at the height of fashion because of its support by President Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig...

...movements with the Soviet Union—a notion that lays the groundwork for American intervention...

...But Muravchik's political associations were not mentioned in the Magazine...

...The first imperative is that the world must be safe for revolution...

...Besides distorting quotations, Muravchik also selectively quotes from a wide range of diverse and autonomous IPS publications to convey the impression of a single pro-Bolshevik ideology...

...Asked what he thought the New York editors meant by "edge," Mohr declined to comment further...

...If The Times were just another newspaper, its conversion to a sinister, conspiratorial world view could be shrugged off...

...When Columbia University Professor of Engineering Seymour Melman argued against the size of the military budget, for example, the Magazine identified him as a co-chair of SANE...

...Kotler's name was dropped from the article, but the final draft still insinuated that the caucus was an IPS project...

...But Mohr said the story was true...

...But the attempt to achieve "balance," as it was described in internal Times memoranda, failed to remove the article's egregious slant...

...role in the Vietnam war...

...A survey of The Times since The Spike was published in the spring of 1980 suggests that de Borchgrave and Moss have succeeded beyond their fondest expectations...

...Or he cites Gareth Porter, who was an IPS fellow in 1976 and who in 1975 wrote a book on Cambodia that was supportive of the Cambodian government, to buttress his own charges that IPS backed Pol Pot...

...The Times has not fully accepted the Administration's version of this "conspiracy," but it has accepted the legitimacy of the issue, and it has opened its pages to those who argue that such a conspiracy exists...

...The first target was the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), dubbed the Institute for Progressive Reform...

...It is quite another to publish a Muravchik term paper, or to hire one's editors from The American Spectator...

...The final version, rewritten from earlier drafts, inserted a few favorable quotations about IPS (some simply lifted word for word from another publication) and consigned all the po-lemicizing to the article's second half...

...Muravchik is a member of Socialist Democrats U.S.A., which split from Michael Harrington's wing of the old Socialist Party over the issue of supporting the U.S...

...but second was The New York Times, which is called The New York World...

...Instead, the citation of "national liberation movements," which at the time included the Vietnamese, Angolan, Mozambican, and Zimbabwean movements, is meant to carry the weight of argument that the U.S.S.R...

...De Borchgrave and Moss could not hope to shut down The Times—even Spiro Agnew failed to do that—but they could hope to force The Times to look over its shoulder when it writes about the CIA, the Soviet Union, international terror, and internal security...

...Some Capitol Hill observers, including IPS director Robert Borosage, found Denton's letter laughable, especially since it comes hard on the heels of the same Senator's proposal for a $30 million Federal program to encourage "teen-age chastity...

...Munson, who resigned from The Times last month to become Jeane Kirkpatrick's press secretary, brought Muravchik, Sterling, and the others to the Magazine's pages...

...But Moss neither quoted nor paraphrased any Brezhnev statement to this effect...

...The Times has legitimated a concoction that is being used to justify a new era of Cold War realpolitik and red-baiting...

...On May 1, Chairman Denton sent his colleagues copies of Muravchik's article along with a letter...

...It appears that they plan to accomplish this in part by support of a network of Congressional aides described by an IPS publication as committed to "educate...

...Senior editors at The Times refuse to comment on this issue, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that The Times's management is itself drifting toward the Right—accepting and presenting as plausible what it would have dismissed, only a few years ago, as arrant nonsense...

...And they view IPS with similar rancor because of its anti-CIA role and its support for Fidel Castro's Cuban government and for movements aimed at toppling such right-wing dictators as Chile's Augusto Pinochet...

...My chief concern in bringing this article to your attention," Denton said, "is centered on IPS's systematic approach to strengthen its ties with Congress...

...Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change...

...Disinformation' from The Times A disturbing drift toward the Right John Judis Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss had two principal targets in their CIA white paper masquerading as a novel, The Spike...

...These intelligence officials have furnished much of the information—and disinformation—upon which The Spike, Sterling's The Terror Network, Crozier's National Review columns, and Ledeen's revelations in The Washington Quarterly and The New Republic are based...

...By similar leaps of logic, Moss and Sterling translate Soviet support for the Palestine Liberation Organization into Soviet support for all branches of the Palestinian movement, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and any of the terrorist groups with which the PFLP has been involved, from the Japanese Red Army to Italy's Red Brigades...

...The work of both Moss and Sterling contains some accurate and innovative reporting, the result of their intelligence connections—The Times itself has reported that Moss's 1973 book, Chile's Marxist Experiment, was funded by the CIA—but it also contains skewed interpretation and suspect detail...

...Neil Kotler, an aide to Representative John Conyers, recalls that a Times fact-checker called him the week before the article was to appear in order to confirm charges in the article that Kotler and the caucus of progressive House staff members he had helped organize were connected to IPS...

...In doing so...

...Both Moss and Sterling equate national liberation movements with international terrorism...

...Some notable alumni of the Coalition—Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, and Carl Gershman—have joined the Reagan Administration...

...Ultra-conservative influence appears elsewhere in the newspaper Muravchik is by no means a journalist...

...Of the Magazine articles, only Edward Jay Epstein's account of the dispute between former CIA head Colby and the man he fired in 1975, James Jesus Angelton, even makes a journalistic pretense of presenting both sides...

...With the publication May 3 of Joshua Muravchik's article on IPS, "The Think Tank of the Left," The New York Times Magazine joined The New York Post on the frontiers of yellow journalism...

...he also ignores the consistent and outspoken opposition of other IPS fellows to the Cambodian government...

...intelligence apparatus and have made any effective intelligence impossible...

...Muravchik's article appeared the Sunday after Denton's Subcommittee had met to hear Sterling, de Borchgrave, and Le-deen testify about the specter of international terrorism...

...The role The New York Times has played in legitimating the views of Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, and their journalistic condottieri is, on one level, wholly understandable: Even such identifiably "liberal" newspapers as The Times and The Washington Post tend to let the administration in power define their standards of what is acceptable argument...

...their bosses about left issues...

...Mohr's article on the Denton Subcommittee was published, but The Times killed—or "spiked"—his IPS article...

...De Borch-grave's testimony conveniently coincided with a publicity tour that he and Moss were initiating to plug the paperback edition of The Spike...

...Last winter, senior Washington correspondent Charles Mohr began working on two articles—one on the right-wing campaign to discredit IPS, and the other on Senator Jeremiah Denton's new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism...

...11 To spread the notion of a left-wing international terrorist network that links all seemingly anti-U.S...

...argue for the de Borchgrave-Moss view of America's internal and external threats...

...When Managing Editor Seymour Topping was asked to comment on reports that Mohr's article had been spiked, he responded, "This story is not true, and we will have no further comment on that...

...But it is also laughable to view Moss, de Borchgrave, and Sterling as serious journalists—or Ernest Lefever as a serious candidate for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights...

...The New York Times Magazines edited by Ed Klein, a former Newsweek editor who, in his brief tenure at The Times, has attempted to modify the magazine's serious image by featuring more lifestyle and entertainment pieces...

...I was told by my editors in Washington," he continued, "that New York had told them it didn't run because it was coming too close to and would take the edge off of the Magazine piece...

...His speech . . . suggested that the Soviet Union is seeking to exploit terrorism as a calculated instrument of foreign policy...

...But The Times, along with The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the major television networks, is immensely influential, helping to shape the perceptions of millions of Americans and, at times, the policies of the Government...

...I was able to combine a term paper with an article, make a few bucks, and get the prestige of being published while fulfilling school requirements," Muravchik says...

...supports "international terrorism...