Washington’s manipulators

Act 1 - The Committee on the Present Danger

By the end of WWII, the “stay-behind” [1] network located more than a thousand Nazi scientists and sent them to the United States during Operation Paperclip. [2] Some were experts in chemical weapons and had just made experiments with human beings at the Dachau concentration camp. Others, a hundred of them, were engineers and scientists of Peenemünde’s rocket development center. Under the direction of Wernher von Braun, the team of this center had just invented and manufactured rockets V2 that were used to bomb London from the continental territory.

These men were sent to Fort Bliss (Texas) and assigned to the Army Air Defense Command, ARADCOM). This transfer of technology encouraged American armament industrialists to design a new arsenal that would include both intercontinental missiles and spaceships, capable of transporting weapons of mass destruction (Chemical, biological or nuclear). [3]But, paradoxically, this project was useless after Germany’s defeat, unless, of course, the United States had a new enemy.

F. Kennan, the American ambassador to Moscow, described the Soviet threat in a “long cable” sent to Washington in 1946. When he returned to the capital, he published his analysis anonymously in the magazine of the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR). [4] Quickly, the American ruling class was convinced that the red danger that had been developing was more threatening than the Third Reich. Two years and a half of internal debates followed so that the Administration could assess the threat and work on a response to be popularized.

By applying the lessons learned by The United States after WWII, President Harry Truman founded the National Security Council (NSC) with the purpose of establishing coordination between diplomacy and the American military forces for both war and peace time. At the same time, he founded a permanent secret service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The developments in Europe, especially the British withdrawal from Greece, led Truman to decide it was necessary to have a permanent American presence in the old continent to counteract the communist influence. General George C. Marshall, Secretary of State, designed a vast plan that mixed economic assistance and secret actions aimed at establishing democracies and make sure they made “the right choice”. National Security Council directive NSC 10/2, essentially written by Kennan, made official the creation of an interference network: the stay-behind.

The internal heated debates of the Truman Administration on the seriousness and imminence of the Soviet threat became stronger when the Korean war begun. George F. Kennan and the Secretary of Defense were outstripped by a much more militaristic Right than themselves. Truman reorganized the team. General George C. Marshall became Secretary of Defense, supported by his friend Robert Lovett.

Dean Acheson accepted to be Secretary of State and appointed Paul H. Nitze as director of policy planning. It was him who wrote the last version of NSC directive 68, which defined the Cold War doctrine. According to this document, declassified nowadays, the purpose of the USSR was to extend communism to the whole world. It wouldn’t take the USSR more than four years to arm itself with nuclear weapons and in the medium term it wouldn’t doubt to use them to destroy its main adversary: the country of freedom, that is, the United States of America.

The two superpowers were forced to fight a duel which would end with the triumph of capitalism and the kingdom of prosperity upon Earth or the sink of mankind in the darkness of communism. NSC directive 68 had a dozen of attached documents that included response programs on the military, civil, economic fields, etc.

Unfortunately, the American people, so happy for the reestablishment of peace, was unaware of the increasing danger and it was not ready either for a new war. Truman had to convince his fellow countrymen of the threat so that they would admit the necessary sacrifices, especially in budgetary and administrative reforms terms.

Then, the Administration turned to one of the heads of the stay-behind network, Edward W. Barret, director of the Interdepartmental Psychological Strategy Board (IPSB) and director of magazine Newsweek too. Barret designed an operation to manipulate the domestic public opinion. [5] An association which was presented as a non-political group of citizens of the western coast, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) launched a media campaign in favor of the urgent reinforcement of the national defense.

Among the organizers of the Committee were Frank Altschul (Director of the Council for Foreign Relations), William Donovan (former head of the secret services during WWII) and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Committee had such an impact that a national consensus allowed Truman to dramatically triple the military budget and make public the “containment” policy, which is the creation of a cordon sanitaire to contain the USSR. Truman ordered projects to be designed to create a space arsenal (Orbiter and Jupiter). The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) was founded in Redstone (Alabama) and trusted to the former SS Wernher von Braun. A launch site was built in Cape Canaveral (Florida). It was directed by Kurt Debus, another ex-SS. The Navy and the Air Force made their contribution too and some Nazi scientists were assigned to them.

The futurist project of having a space army became the ideologues of the Cold War’s obsession. Their explicit purpose was to guarantee the American military control of the whole planet to save mankind from communism.

Act 2- The reactivation of the CPD

The CPD was dissolved in 1953, but the stay-behind kept its influence. Under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon, the armament spending was distributed according to the needs caused by the wars abroad (essentially in Viet Nam) and the prestigious space projects (especially John F. Kennedy’s desire of sending men to the moon to counteract Yuri Gagarin space flight’s success). Thus, programs Vanguard, Explorer, Mercury and Apollo were developed.

During the seventies, Kissinger, moving away from the “containment” doctrine on behalf of the realpolitik designed the détente with the USSR to withdraw his forces from Viet Nam. Kissinger did not question the Cold War doctrine but he knew the United States could not maintain a frontal war in Asia without the support of his own public opinion. Therefore, his cynical realism was opposed to Nitze’s almost mystical blindness. Thus, a treaty limiting the number of antiballistic missiles (ABM Treaty) and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) were signed in 1972 leaving the veterans of the CPD filled with dismay. After the fall of Saigon, the Congress put an end to the war measures and reduced dramatically the military budget as well as certain prestigious spending. Space programs were interrupted due to the lack of funds.

At the same time, the Watergate scandal opened a period of criticism against institutions. The Congress investigative commissions disclosed the CIA dirty maneuvers. Representative Elizabeth Holzman revealed Operation Paperclip. It was also known that stay-behind recruited Nazi scientists until the 70s picking them up in their hide-outs in Latin America. It was revealed too that in Edgewood arsenal (Maryland), the Nazi physicians continued developing the experiments on chemical weapons begun in Dachau thanks to 700 “volunteers” of the American army. [6].

In this environment in which the Cold War’s objective, methods and institutions were criticized everywhere, tensions arose between Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger. On November 3, 1975, President Gerald Ford, who was in the middle of a popularity crisis, decided to solve the conflict by giving guarantees to both the public opinion and the military and industrial lobby. He kept Kissinger as Secretary of State but not as national security adviser, a post given to General Brent Scowcroft. Schlesinger was taken out of the Department of Defense and Donald Rumsfeld, the White House Chief of Staff, replaced him, whom at the same time was replaced by Richard Cheney. Ford also fired the director of the CIA, William Colby, and appointed George H. Bush. This mass dismissal has been called the “Halloween Massacre”.

With all these changes, stay-behind took the initiative. A small conservative association, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), [7] was chosen to work on the argumentation; the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) gathered together some democrat congressmen to do the lobby and the Committee on the Present Danger was reactivated with the financial assistance of Hewlett-Packard and the AFL-CIO [8] union to manipulate the domestic public opinion.

Under the control of Paul H. Nitze, Eugene V. Rostov and William R. Van Cleave, the three associations questioned the CIA analysis and denounced the underestimation of the Soviet threat. [9]

Publicly, it was democrat senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson who directed the campaign to which some members of the Israeli lobby, such as Richard Perle, joined. In fact, with the purpose of escaping the “détente” process, the Americans in charge of the space projects had transferred part of their space projects, especially the nuclear ones, to Israel. [10].

President Gerard Ford established a double system of specialized evaluation of the Soviet power. The CIA experts formed Team A whereas the CPD experts were authorized to form Team B. Both had access to the most confidential information of the different intelligence services. Team B was formed by a dozen of personalities of the CPD, among which we can mention Nitze, Rostov and Van Cleave, and surprisingly, the new CIA director, George H. Bush, who could, thus, manage the two allegedly adversaries. Team B was supported by various technicians who did the real research and writing work, among which were Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz [11] and General Lyman Lemnitzer. [12].

Both teams’ respective reports [13] were submitted and discussed formally before the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on December 21, 1976, a few days before Jimmy Carter’s investiture as the new president. Ford’s team let everything arranged. It was quickly admitted that CIA previous estimates were wrong and the USSR was preparing itself to attack the United States. Of course, as History has shown, it was all a manipulative maneuver to confuse people on the quantity and quality of the Soviet armament.

Actually, the USSR already had economic difficulties and did not have a real capacity to launch an Eastern-Western confrontation. Despite everything, the manipulated study was effective for the Congress reactivated arms projects. Former SS Wernher von Braun’s team had already perfected the intercontinental missiles and made manned space flights, [14] consequently, sending military men to the space was adopted as a new goal (programs Challenger and Atlantis).

This new American public opinion manipulation was implemented by stay-behind at the expense of the CIA; despite the fact the network was administrative speaking linked to Langley-based agency. Thus, the hardliners of the network hoped to punish William Colby’s policy who, after Watergate, allowed the Congress to investigate the CIA actions and tried to submit stay-behind to political control.

President Carter could not eliminate budgetary decisions. Members of the CPD were taken out of his administration and, as soon as he could, he got rid of George H. Bush, who was replaced by Admiral Stanfield Turner as director of the CIA with the impossible mission of organizing the agency and eliminating the stay-behind parallel power. For four years, the veterans of the CPD were a “ghost cabinet” at the service of the future republican candidate. They harassed James Carter by accusing him of being so affected by the “Viet Nam syndrome” that he could not keep his cold blood during periods of crisis and lost Iran.

Act 3 - From Reagan to Clinton

After these hard years, the whole CPD team returned to power under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, who had been recruited by the stay-behind at the beginning of the Cold War when he was a Hollywood actor. He had acted in some advertising to collect funds for the Crusade for Freedom, an association founded by Allan Dulles -the founder of the CIA- to secretly finance the International Refugee Committee in New York. This institution, directed by William Casey, was aimed at discreetly bringing useful former Nazis to the United States to fight communism. Ronald Reagan had been used too by stay-behind during the McCarthyism in Hollywood.

Ronald Reagan appointed William Casey, a former case officer, director of the CIA. The stay-behind recovered its prerogatives and multiplied its dirty maneuvers until the [Irangate. The men of the CPD were everywhere, from the disarmament agency up to the State Department. [15] Rostov and Van Cleave were appointed as heads of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA); Richard Pipes was turned into the most important Kremlinologist of the White House, etc. Nobody was left behind: Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had worked so much for the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, was appointed American ambassador to the United Nations; Michael Novak, who had been working for the American Enterprise Institute, was appointed American representative to the Human Rights Commission, etc. Those who were working for private enterprises were also rewarded; for instance, Donald Rumsfeld, who had become the president of a multinational company, was appointed White House’s special adviser to arms control.

President Reagan referred to the USSR as the Evil Empire and got the nuclear and space programs back. Two National Security Decision Directives, NSDD-42 and NSDD-85 boosted the new research and rearmament system and established the legal foundations for the greatest military program of mankind history: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as the Star Wars.

In 1989, when his two terms in office ended, Ronald Reagan gave the presidency to George H. Bush. By limiting at first the continuation of these programs, the new President disappointed the CPD’s veterans. Bush father considered that the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union meant, in fact, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new favorable period for the opening of new markets and the plundering of natural resources. On the contrary, his old friends thought the disappearance of the only adversary with the capacity to defy the United States was the right time to finally fulfill their dreams of an exclusive military control. Even worst, in 1993, the arrival to the White House of William Clinton, a moralist democrat, reminded veterans of the Cold War the vicissitudes of Carter’s years. During H. Bush-Clinton’s years, the CPD’s veterans founded or reactivated various think-tanks and pressure groups aimed at preparing the conditions for better times. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) [16] founded the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). [17] The Washington-Tel Aviv axis was reinforced through the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP).[Official site of the CSP: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org. ]].

Act 4- The Center for Security Policy

Founded in 1988, the Center for Security Policy (CSP) considered itself the political successor of the CPD, though it did not clarified if it was also a product of the stay-behind services. Its goal was “to defend international peace through the reinforcement of the United States of America’s power”. Its founders and directors were Douglas J. Feith (current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) and Frank J. Gaffney Jr., former Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s assistant.

This new association has a limited budget (1.7 million dollars annually) which come from private donations of Richard Mellon Scaife family [18] (Gulf Oil) and arms manufacturers Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation. However, it’s quite influential due to the fact that its administrators and advisers are the most important officials of the Defense Department. The CPD’s continuity can be proved with the presence of Team B’s veterans such as William R. Van Cleave, and especially for the continuity of its actions: identification of the communist adversary (China and North Korean threats have replaced the Soviet menace), proposals to cancel the non-proliferation treaties, space militarization and militarization of internal security.

On May 12, 1996, the CPD’s men gathered 300 European and American politicians and military men in Prague to propose the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI). [19] Then, they made public NATO’s new role after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact: to unite Central and Eastern European States under the American aegis to be protected from the “Rogue States”.

The CSP established an office in Jerusalem to control an existing organization there: the Institute for Advance Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), directed by Robert J. Loewenberg and the inevitable William R. Van Cleave.

On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David and Mayrav Wurmser gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a document made by the IASPS titled: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. [20] The document advised the dissolution of Oslo agreements, Yasser Arafat’s political elimination, the annexation of Palestinian territories, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq to destabilize Syria and Lebanon at the same time, Iraq’s dismantling by creating a Palestinian State inside the Iraqi territory, and, in return, they would use the Hebrew State as a complementary base for American program “Star Wars”.

On February 19, 1998, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz published an “Open Letter to President Clinton” prepared by the CSP in which they demanded the overthrow of Baghdad’s regimen. The letter was signed by several members of the CSP, such as Elliot Abrams, [21] John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Fred Iklé, Zalmay Klalizad, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.

In 1998, thanks to the lobby, the CPS got from President Clinton the creation of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Threat whose president was Donald Rumsfeld. On July 15, only the conclusion of the report was made public. It affirmed that, again, the CIA was underestimating threats by ignoring that in five years North Korea, Iran and Iraq would have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the American territory. [22].

In year 2000, the CSP managed to found a new commission to assess, this time, the space security. Again, Donald Rumsfeld was appointed its president and, of course, the commission concluded the American space vulnerability was being greatly underestimated. When journalists asked him about the origin of this threat, Donald Rumsfeld answered in a very serious way that the threat did not come from States but mainly from private groups. According to him, international terrorist Osama Bin Laden, could have in Afghanistan a launching satellites base and an atomic bomb manufacturer center.

Since the moment the Supreme Court designated George W. Bush (son of George H. Bush) president of the United States, the CSP hasn’t stopped its work: Donald Rumsfeld was appointed Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were named his deputy secretaries; Richard Perle was appointed president of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee; John Bolton was designated deputy secretary of state for disarmament, so that he can keep an eye on too-independent Colin Powell; Zalmay Khalizad was named responsible of American policy to Afghanistan; the Department of Defense published a report especially focused on China’s military threat; [23] the unilateral retreat of the ABM treaty; the military budget was increased 40%; an embryo of a space weapon was created; the Oslo peace process in the Middle East was checked; Saddam Hussein’s regimen in Iraq was harassed, etc.

During the last years, the CSP was cautious enough to spread its influence in the civil society through the creation and maintenance of a group of associations: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), [24] the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), [25] the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) [26] and, lately, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).[Official site of the FDD: http://www.defenddemocracy.org. ]] The CSP and its satellites’ campaigns have had great impact in William Bristol’s Weekly Standard, Richard Perle’s Jerusalem Post and Arnaud Borchgrave’s Washington Times, as well as in Charles Krauthammer’s editorials published by The Washington Post.

Although times change, the actions are the same. After September 11, the associations and newspapers linked to the CSP launched a new discredit campaign against the CIA. Langley-based agency was accused of making a huge mistake by underestimating the Islamic danger, just as 22 years ago when the CDP accused it of underestimating the Soviet threat. This national psychodrama was used to justify the derogation of the CIA code of ethics, the reinstatement of former officers the Clinton Administration had retired and George W. Bush’s adoption of a plan of secret actions in 68 countries. [27] The Clash of Civilizations theory made by Samuel Huntington, replaced the primary anti-Soviet creed of the Cold War. “The Axis of Evil” represented by the furious Muslims replaced the “Evil Empire” and its aggressive mujik. To convince the domestic public opinion, stay-behind used again its old manipulative practices. Donald Rumsfeld even created an Office for the Strategic Influence (OSI) in charge of intoxicating the American press and convincing the public opinion of the need to launch a Judeo-Christian crusade against the Arabic-Muslim world. [28]. All these elements led to a consensus which has helped to meet most of CSP’s demands in budgetary and strategic terms.

In November 2001, the CSP’s award Keepers of the Flame was given to former CIA director and then Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger. The award was given by Donald Rumsfeld, his successor at the Pentagon when the "Halloween Massacre". All of them were present there: John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalizad, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, etc. In his opening words, the president of the association, Frank Gaffney said a secret: «It has taken us 13 years to be here, but here we are». [29] It was an elegant way of saying that they were all in power with Ronald Reagan, that later they were marginalized by “businessman” George H. Bush and isolated by William Clinton and, finally, they have seized power again not with George W. Bush’s designation but thanks to September 11, 2001 attacks.