Dirty tricks against the press

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I republish this post as a complement of my post below on Luke Harding's expose of dirty tricks against the working press. Relevant links at bottom of page.

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[March 28, 2002] -- Some years ago I rounded up a sheaf of documents on, of all things, UFOs.The CIA, under Director Bill Casey, tried to blow me off when I sought documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. But eventually, the agency sent me a packet of 900 pages -- even though, unknown to me, quite a few more documents had already been released. The CIA package came damaged, with a tear in it. I realized that this gave the agency an 'out' in the event anything was missing, but I decided to accept it anyway.

The spooks knew I wasn't looking for little green men. They knew I was looking for spooks.

The mass of data compiled from government sources and elsewhere -- I looked at disreputable stuff with caution -- permitted me to write a report that strongly suggested that federal operatives had had a longstanding Cold War policy of promoting and using the flying saucer craze for psychological warfare against -- the American public. My guess is that the justification was that if the KGB plays head games against Americans, then the CIA must protect America, even if it meant counter-head games against Americans.

It appeared that my report didn't land anywhere, though I have discovered that other of my work was published without me learning of that fact until years later. Though the report seemingly wasn't published, it fell into the hands of experienced journalists and hence I suspect it may have enjoyed an underground existence. I hope so, because I no longer have a copy. (If you have one, please send it to me by email or surface mail; my address is at the first Conant page link above.)

During the research phase, I called up a colleague, Ted Morello, a longtime UN correspondent, who had covered some flying saucer nonsense early in his career. He told me he had years previously written a memoir on the entire episode and promised to bring me a copy at a newspaper office where we both worked off and on as copy readers.

But, in my presence, when Morello searched his rucksack for the memoir, he couldn't find it, though he was absolutely convinced he had brought it with him. Later, calling from home, he said he had found the report after all and would mail me a copy.

The envelope containing the report had a return address sticker on it. The name was printed as 'Ted Morrello.'

Though I had felt sure his name had one 'r' in it, I couldn't imagine anyone would be so petty as to falsify anything of that sort. Upshot: An error was introduced into my report, which served a purpose of tending to discredit me as being a sloppy journalist.

Sometime later I happened to see his name in his handwriting in the copy
desk per-diem log. One 'r.'

I rushed home and went to my files to retrieve the envelope. His report was still there, but the envelope could not be found.

Proof, of course, is missing. And this all occurred many moons back. In fact, this episode occurred just before the Irancontra affair blew up. Yet, during that scandal and in the years since I have noticed nothing but trivial changes in anti-reporter tactics by the Department of Dirty Tricks. Control of information and sandbagging is what this bunch does for a living. You can't expect them to act in any other way. From their perspective, they're being professional, no matter what the consequences to democracy.

I remember calling up a spokesman at the Reagan White House and complaining about the excessive spook activity around me. His reaction was: If there's a national security concern, these boys shouldn't be on your case. It's the FBI's responsibility. Though he sounded appalled, he didn't react as if I was a crank. As I say, this phone call predated the Irancontra explosion by only a few weeks.

It is many incidents of the sort described that make me suspicious about hit counter problems (see Conant letter above). After all, number of hits on an essay on a 'controlled subject' is political information that could sway decisions of lawmakers and others concerning various three-letter agencies.

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Some links:

Conant to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the press https://paulpages.blogspot.com/2011/11/conant-to-reporters-committee-for_10.html
Morello focuses on freedom of the press http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/1998/19980430.NOTE5501.html
On Ted Morello
https://tedmorellojournalist.wordpress.com/
Morello's skeptical report on UFOs
https://tedmorellojournalist.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/flying-saucers-over-puget-sound/
Naval air station was close to site of early UFO reports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Station_Puget_Sound

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Buchanan's last shot was heard round the world

In the final days of Richard Nixon's presidency, a White House aide fired the "smoking gun" that immediately forced Nixon from office, according to a new memoir.

In Nixon's White House Wars, the battles that made and broke a president and divided America forever (Crown 2017), Patrick J. Buchanan describes how he designed a plan that would eject Nixon right away, rather than have him cling to the White House through a protracted ordeal.

Buchanan, who calls himself "America's leading populist conservative," is a well-known press aide to Republican presidents who saw his own presidential aspirations dashed in 2000 after a weak showing. Buchanan has been a big fan of Donald Trump, who has picked up a number of Buchanan's populist pitches.

Buchanan tells of floating a White House trial balloon to have the House bypass impeachment hearings and send the matter straight to the Senate for trial, where it was hoped the Senate would find that though the accusations were serious, they were not serious enough for removal of Nixon. The longtime Nixon speechwriter was shamed by pro-Nixon newspapers and politicians that accused the aide of trying to cut and run, rather than defend the president.

Yet Buchanan, if he didn't know already, quickly discovered  that all was lost and designed a plan to push Nixon out with no further delay. He and Nixon assistant Steve Bull -- who had in his possession Nixon's calendar -- discovered that Nixon's credibility was facing irretrievable damage.

According to Buchanan:

On Aug. 4, 1974, the aide learned the content of a crucial tape recording, which Nixon had defiantly withheld from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Worse, the president had told the nation he had no involvement with the Watergate affair while knowingly sitting on proof that he was deceiving the public.

Jaworski had subpoenaed 64 tapes but Jaworski had confidentially offered to settle for 18 -- among which was a tape of a Nixon conversation with right-hand man H.R. Haldeman recorded on June 23, 1972. That tape had been checked out by Nixon on May 6, 1974. After listening to it it, Nixon quickly spurned Jaworski's offer, refusing to release any tapes at issue. From then to August, the president had "continued to speak of his non-involvement in the Watergate coverup that seemed contradicted by the tape to which he had listened on May 6."

Nixon, writes Buchanan, "had discovered what had appeared to be a smoking gun, refused to surrender it, then continued to deny that any such gun existed."

Buchanan then cooked up a "two-track strategy." Release the "smoking gun" tape and either the firestorm forces the president out immediately or, by some miracle, he survives with the worst political damage behind him.

Nixon aide Ray Price bought the idea, as did other close Nixon advisers and -- somehow -- the deed was carried out and Nixon lost all support from Republicans in media and in Congress, as Buchanan had foreseen. Buchanan was then left with the unpleasant task of convincing Nixon's daughters, Tricia and Julie, that it was time to throw in the towel. Tricia, he says, wanted to fight on but Julie seemed to accept the decision.

Other observations:

Nixon had no mandate to win the war in Vietnam, but only to extricate the United States without loss of face, Buchanan at one point notes. Yet the young Buchanan was one of Nixon's most ardent hawks and guardian of arch-conservative causes. Buchanan observes that Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war was very likely based on national security adviser Henry Kissinger's belief that one must be prepared to use great force to ensure good faith at the negotiating table. However, the North Vietnamese -- bolstered by fervent antiwar dissent -- didn't buckle, despite U.S. demonstrations of military might.

On the Cambodia incursion ordered by Nixon, Buchanan, whose health ruled out military service, says the action was justified because well-armed North Vietnamese forces were crossing into South Vietnam at will and inflicting nasty casualties on U.S. troops. Those forces were also undermining America's negotiating position. Here Buchanan shows a certain contempt for his unprincipled employer -- a theme running through his book -- when he chides Nixon for succumbing to domestic dissent and limiting what U.S. forces could do, thus vitiating the purpose of the action.

Nevertheless, Buchanan dedicates his book to Nixon with a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

--"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "Your'e worth the whole damn bunch put together."--

In fact, in 1969 Buchanan reached a personal crisis after his visit to Red China with Nixon and Kissinger, who opened the way to normal diplomatic relations with the communists. Realpolitik had taken the place of American moral leadership, helping to condone Mao's genocidal repressions -- and Buchanan decided to resign. But, after further consideration, he withdrew his resignation in order, as he says, to be a conservative voice from the inside.

The press aide then went on to shape the "silent majority" strategy that presaged Nixon's 1972 landslide. Critics concluded that "silent majority" was code for "white majority."

The campaign harshly attacked "forced busing" of white schoolchildren, Lyndon Johnson's social welfare programs and "radical liberals"  -- including Democratic candidate George McGovern -- who it was said cared nothing for peace with honor.

Such rhetoric and beliefs were, and still are, rather normal for conservatives, and it is certainly unfair to categorically brand conservatives as racists.

Yet, we learn that while serving President Gerald Ford, Buchanan, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, had sought to become ambassador to the apartheid regime of South Africa, on grounds that the white-dominated country had a strong economy and would make a natural Cold War ally. He said the same of Rhodesia, which, under the name Zimbabwe, went into an economic tailspin under the black dictator Robert Mugabe.

Buchanan also takes responsibility for youthful editorials highlighting materials that showed that communists, seeing their opportunity, had slipped into Martin Luther King's inner circle. The documents, he believes, came from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Like Hoover before him, Buchanan grew up in Washington when it was still a segregated southern town. Unlike Hoover, Buchanan is a Catholic who attended a Jesuit high school.

Buchanan's first post-college job was as an editorial writer for the truculently conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Though Missouri did not secede from the Union, it was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers, and major regions of the state retained a strong southern orientation a century or more after the Civil War.

From there, Buchanan went on in 1966 to become a political adviser to Nixon during Nixon's wilderness period at a New York law firm.

The pugnacious press aide conducted warfare against the liberal media, such as The New York Times, often using the cooperative vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, to air views that resonated with the "silent majority" before Agnew was forced to resign on corruption charges. Ironically, on leaving Ford's White House, the New York Times News Service picked up Buchanan's new Globe-Democrat column. But, unlike another Nixon speechwriter, the late William Safire, Buchanan never became a New York Times columnist.

Officials aware of security agency 'gang stalkers'

Russian security agents use what are sometimes termed "gang stalking" methods, and American and British officials know all about it but prefer to keep quiet, says a Guardian reporter in his latest book.

Luke Harding, The Guardian's Moscow correspondent booted out by the Kremlin in 2007, tells of bizarre break-ins of his family's flat that could only have been conducted by Russian security agents. In a January interview by NPR, the reporter summarized his experience with security agency gang stalkers, recapitulating passages from his book, A Very Expensive Poison, the Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West (Vintage 2016).

NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511786803/journalist-russias-interference-is-an-assault-on-the-western-liberal-order

The newsman learned from the British embassy that such clandestine harassment is very familiar to British and American diplomatic employees, and was quietly tolerated by diplomats. Harding had evidently been targeted for news reports that challenged the Russian version of events in the nuclear poisoning in London of a Russian-born British citizen who was harshly critical of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative who is now Russia's authoritarian head man.

Smile! You're on spy video!
Not only was Harding told of probable listening devices, he got another shock when gang stalkers implied that they were viewing his bedroom marital relations. Of course, intelligence agencies -- in particular Russian security -- are known for setting up rooms with hidden video cameras for watching the unwary. It is only one more step to videograph the activities of supposed adversaries in their private quarters.

(See interview excerpts below.)

Newsman harassed on Snowden story
Harding also experienced Western -- probably British -- security agency hazing as he attempted to write his book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (Vintage 2014), that related what he knew of the Snowden affair. Harding tells of watching newly minted sentences being erased from his laptop as he typed. The hazing didn't cease, he said, until high-level officials in the British government were made aware of what was going on.

In 2006, William Boyd told Guardian readers of how British spies in America had published a pamphlet on "gang stalker" methods against Americans deemed to be pro-Nazi before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor hurtled America into the world war. The gang stalking of Americans was dreamed up by BSC, or British Security Coordination, according to the book A Man Called Intrepid which describes the exploits of William Stephenson, who ran Winston Churchill's intelligence arm in the Western Hemisphere from offices in Rockefeller Center.

Boyd column
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/aug/19/military.secondworldwar

A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero whose Spy Network Changed the Course of History (Lyons Press 1976) came in for some tough criticism from some ex-spooks. It was written by William Stevenson, who styled himself a protege of the spymaster, and seemed to reflect Stephenson's point of view.

According to Boyd's account taken from Intrepid:

Brits gang-stalked antiwar Americans
BSC invented a game called "Vik," described as "a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy." Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathizers.

Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up. Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of car tires, anonymous deliveries could be made to the target's house, and so on.

And, BSC was adept at meddling in U.S. politics and media, planting all sorts of news reports and polls that were meant to counteract the prevailing public sentiment of staying out of the war, the book says. It is not clear how successful the meddling was, but BSC had a number of contacts within the U.S. press.

Fake news was fine with BSC. For example,  in 1941 a sham astrologer working for Stephenson made dire predictions about Hitler and his allies, which were widely published in the United States.

Stephenson had the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller, who became a top American spook for Latin America after America entered the war. Whether Roosevelt, who was seeking a reason to bring America into the war, knew of BSC's harassment of "pro-Nazi" American citizens is not known.

"Delusional paranoid schizophrenic" is a common brushoff for those who claim clandestine harassment. Yet, what if the person who makes such claims poses a political threat to some powerful group or other? It's bothersome that numerous psychiatrists assume such claims automatically qualify a person for the diagnosis of mental illness, without having bothered to check whether there could well be a political motive for "gang stalking" by spooks.

True, many with such beliefs are delusional paranoids. But as we are taught in elementary logic, many does not imply all.

The fact that I have not here cited gang harassment of Americans by U.S. intelligence does not mean that such bedevilment doesn't occur. The fact that the CIA prefers not to acknowledge that Russian spooks use this technique is, let us say, noteworthy. [Since this was written, American officials have accused Cuba of permitting covert audio-weapon attacks on U.S. diplomats.]

Harding told NPR:

We had a series of break-ins at our flat, where these agents would come in, obviously when we were away, and they would leave clues that any idiot could find. You didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes; it was completely obvious that they cut the central heating when it was -20 [degrees], that they deleted my screensaver showing my wife and kids.

And most chillingly, we came back ... to discover the window next to my 6-year-old son's bed, which we always double-locked, because it was a huge drop to the courtyard below, had been bust open and propped open next to the bed. And it was a sort of chilling sign, if you like, that if you carry on writing the stuff you're writing about, your son might just fall out the window.

And I took advice from the British embassy in Moscow; they told me that this kind of harassment, psychological harassment, really, was meted out to British diplomats, to American diplomats as well, to their Russian staff, and that our apartment was now bugged and there was not much we could do about it.

Perverts plant a book

On Russian surveillance tactics,  one thing puts me in mind of Donald Trump. There's a whole conversation about what he did or didn't do in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013 — about whether there was sexual activity going on or not. But one thing I can tell you is that the FSB really are obsessed with sex, because I came home after one break-in, and I discovered a sex manual left by the side of my bed, the marital bed.

Next to all of the middle-class novels that your listeners have in English, there was this bloody sex manual, and the FSB ... had bookmarked it to page 181, and it was one of the most surreal moments of my life.

I opened this thing and I'm thinking, "What are they trying to tell me? Is there a frequency issue or some other kind of technical problem they've observed on their video?" And the page was on orgasms, how to have a better orgasm, and of course we kind of wave this thing around at dinner parties and we laughed at it, but actually it wasn't so funny. It showed that the KGB has a dark sense of humor. But they were basically saying, "We're watching you."