The Nasty Side of Public Diplomacy

The Reagan administration also used national security concerns to spend public funds to create American public support for its foreign policy in Central America. The Reagan administration launched a massive campaign to persuade the American public to support the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and other right-wing movements in Central America. About $200,000,000 in public funds were used by the Reagan administration. Money from many private foundations was also employed. A precedent for this was Nixon’s “Operation Mocking Bird,” which placed CIA operatives in major journalistic positions. to assure that the press took a sufficiently anti-Communist line. The Reagan program was different in that it sold a particular approach to dealing with an alleged communist threat. While an administration certainly has the right to influence opinion, it is doubtful there is a right to use public funds for political purposes. This “perception management” campaign was called Project Truth and worked in part through the apparatus of Project Democracy, which was run by Walter Raymond, a 30 year CIA veteran who resigned from the agency to do this work. A parallel operation in the State Department was run by Otto Reich. It was a “public diplomacy” operation in which efforts were made to recruit supporters in universities and the media. Publications were used, speakers deployed, and magazines founded. Polls were taken to find arguments that would sell. It was found that claiming the Sandanistas were anti-Semitic was a strong argument, even though there was no supporting evidence. People were also alerted to the danger of millions of left-leaning people from Central America coming across the US border. It was thought that most of them would flee after leftists took over Central America and Mexico and wrecked those economies.

Psychological warfare operatives from the military and propaganda experts from the CIW were employed to use techniques once reserved for foreign countries and enemy populations to manipulate American opinion and influence Congress. The taught Republican spokesmen to stay on message, to repeat it continually, and that with skillful arguments they could create reality with words. Days after coming to power, Jean Kirkpatrick, Alexander Haig, and Bill Casey demonstrated how effective their information management techniques were in dealing with the four nuns who were raped and murdered by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador in December 1980. Kirkpatrick hinted they deserved their fate because they were leftist political activists, and others hinted they may have been packing weapons and trying to run a roadblock. Soon right wing journalists were shouting at the nun’s families that they were not raped.

The new strategy was remarkable because it was based on flat lies rather than just representing the spinning of half-truths. Eventually, they were able to reverse American opinion on Central American issues and even make massacres and the murder of tens of thousands simply fade away. The public diplomacy operation was located in the State Department and run by Otto Reich, who later became assistant secretary of state for the western hemisphere in the George W. Bush administration. The comptroller general had noted that Reich’s public diplomacy activities constituted illegal propaganda. To give the Reagan administration the benefit of the doubt, it should be noted that government has a long history of trying to influence journalists to cover foreign policy in certain ways. Moreover, the Pentagon has also engaged extensively in these activities. The difference under Reagan was scale and creating stories without any factual basis.

Many op-ed pieces were planted, especially in the Wall Street Journal. Long after these operations were over, in 1994 when Oliver North ran unsuccessfully for the Senate, another successful information-planting operation briefly but effectively planted all the blame for not reporting contra drug running on a rogue lieutenant colonel, Oliver North. Of course, he did far more than look the other way. It was a strange comeuppance for a man who was adept at coaching contra drug runners to pose as human rights advocates and speak against their opponents. Oliver North sent an underling to Congress to testify posing as a Roman Catholic priest and claiming the contras were very religions and respectful of human rights. Journalistic “enemies” were targeted and usually demoted or taken off Central America. These people were continually trashed and their journalistic integrity questioned.

An ABC reporter who survived this treatment finally volunteered to cover the Ethiopian civil war rather than remain a target of unrelenting fire. Journalists who wrote positive things about the right-wing movements were rewarded. Soon the State Department established the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America under Otto Reich. He proved to be very energetic and industrious and was particularly successful in forcing NPR and CBS to avoid reporting negative information about the right-wing movements. Reich’s operation included five people borrowed from the military who were experts in psychological warfare.

The FBI cooperated by investigating and harassing people who were critical of the contras and other right-wing operations in Central America. Two Associated Press investigative reporters were branded “Sandanista agents,” and the AP quickly decided to give as little space as possible to stories about contra corruption and drug trading. Newsweek also reluctantly printed such stories, including one about the office of Vice President Bush helping to supply the contras when funds were cut off, but its top officials were continually harassed and intimidated by government officials about this and the reporter who had been pursuing these matters was forced to resign in 1990. Once a respected liberal magazine, The New Republic became an outlet for the Reagan administration’s propaganda. The General Accounting Office eventually ruled that these government activities violated the law that made “covert propaganda” illegal. Congress cut off funding for public diplomacy in 1987, but these abuses of law could not be mentioned in committee reports without running the risk of losing the veneer of bi-partisanship. Republicans would not sign reports that discussed these matters.


Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

Covering Up Iran-Contra

By mid-November 1986, the Congressional intelligence committees were asking about the sale of weapons to Iran. Oliver North shredded all but one of the documents he thought to be incriminating. However, Justice Department lawyers found a North memorandum that clearly explained how arms were being diverted via Israel to Iran. Ed Meese briefed top White House and cabinet officials on November 24, saying of course Reagan knew nothing of all this. After the meeting, Secretary of Treasury George Schultz told his chief aide, “They may lay all this off on Bud [McFarlane] . . . They rearranging the record.'' The next day-- November 25--Meese admitted to Congressional leaders that arms had been sold to Iran, and the proceeds were used to resupply the Contras. Through the ensuing hearings, North was sure he was untouchable and told Felix Rodriguez, “These people want me, but they cannot touch me, because the old man loves my ass.” In the end he got off with a conviction overturned on a technicality. North had been fined $150,000 and given two years of probation in return for going around urging young people not to use drugs.

Bush aide Boyden Gray decided the diary was largely exculpatory and should not be revealed to the investigators. Bush destroyed the investigation by pardoning Caspar Weinberger, who had been indicted twice, as well as others involved in the matter. Much of the press treated Weinberger as a hero and was critical of Walsh’s tenaciousness. A subsequent investigation found that Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi businessman and major arms dealer, had acted as middleman for North in the deal with the mullahs. He borrowed millions from the now discredited Bank of Credit and Commerce International ( B.C.C.I.) to obtain the embargoed weapons and claims to have lost ten million dollars in the transactions. BCCI collapsed in 1991, after defrauding thousands of depositors. It was to quietly reemerge as Pinnacle Bank Group.

When Bush’s son, George W., became president, he reinterpreted legislation on the release of presidential papers to greatly delay the release of those pertaining to Iran-Contra. The scandal resulted in the jailing of an agent who had been at the center of the sale of 10,000 TOW missiles, William Herrmann. Oliver North thought him unreliable so he ended up in jail where he could be silenced if need be. He was arrested in London, on the job, while moving suitcases of counterfeit US currency. After serving some time in England, he was sent to a prison in Pennsylvania. George H.W. Bush pardoned his Iran/Contra partners at Christmas, !992: Cap Weinberger, Bud Mc Farlane, Elliot Abrams, Alan Fiers, and Clair George.

The Christic Institute first broke the story of government drug-dealing and the Iran-Contra Scheme. I t was a Jesuit-run ecumenical social justice organization that had exposed Ku Klux Klan murders, handled the Karen Silkwood case, and defended the Native Americans who demonstrated at Wounded Knee. Using the RICO statute of 1970, the institute went to court to expose what was happening. At the center of their case was the attempted bombing assassination of Contra leader Eden Pastora, Commander Zedro, who had fallen out with his colleagues and the CIA. He survived the attempted murder, but three journalists were killed. Two injured journalists were the plaintiffs. They had the testimony of one witness that Hull had said at a meeting “Pastora had to be killed.” There were 29 defendants. The National Council of Churches backed the Institute in this legal action. More than any other person or organization, the Christic Institute broke the Iran-Contra story. Its great mistake was in believing that there was a rogue “secret team” doing the illegal things it discovered. It seemed incomprehensible to these idealists, that what they found--the mere tip of a vast iceberg-- was really the policy of the Reagan administration and by the various arms of the executive branch.

In the end, the Institute lost a $1,600,000 bond and an additional fine put them out of business. Congress, with the help of moderate and conservative Democrats, in 1983 crafted these “rule 11" bonds and fines to cripple private party investigations of government. This case, Avirgan v. Hull was to be the last serious effort to probe government sponsored crime by a public interest group. President Bush’s I RS lifted their tax exemption to make sure they could not recover. The chief judge was clearly hostile to them and came on the case when his predecessor Robert S. Vance died in a bomb explosion. Vance had been connected to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in 1964. Vance was to be replaced by J.L. Edmundson, a genuine conservative, who was frightened off the case by an attempt on his life. In the end all three judges ruled for the government. The two plaintiffs had been forced to send their children into hiding, and other witnesses had been killed. A third fled to Costa Rica with his family.

When someone later asked a clerk at the eleventh circuit for the papers on the case, she replied, “Oh Lord!...Avirgan v. Hull means duck and run for cover.” Daniel Sheehan, executive director of the Christic Institute, had assumed that he was dealing with a small rogue element within the agency and the government and found his organization destroyed by a far greater force than he had imagined. Eventually, he found that his opponents had almost unlimited funds coming from the Japanese loot that the United States secretly recovered at the end of World War II. In 2001, he unsuccessfully sought to find part of the unrecovered Golden Lily treasure in order to fund progressive causes.



Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum