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Conspiracy Nation Vol. 09 Num. 39
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 39
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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GLORIA IN EXCELSIS
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[CN transcript of remarks by west coast researcher Dave Emory.]
[...continued...]
From his corporate law work at Sullivan & Cromwell, the
pre-eminent foreign policy law firm in America, Dulles was
close to [Washington] Post company attorney Frederick S.
Beeb(sp?) at Kravith, Swayne & Moore(sp?), another foreign
policy firm. A quiet, thoughtful man, Beeb had been
recruited out of Yale 1938 by Kravith senior partner
Roswell Kilpatrick(sp?), later the Assistant Secretary of
Defense under Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. At
Kravith, Beeb had been assigned to handle estate planning
and other legal affairs for the Meyer family
(That's the family from which Katherine Graham came, by the way.)
and eventually became their chief corporate as well as
personal counsel, representing their interests in every
significant transaction over three decades, including the
legally complex, monopolistic acquisition of the
Times-Herald in '54. The merger was critical for Katherine
[Graham's] family, confirming their power and influence in
Washington and making the paper financially "safe enough
for her son Donny."
It was also critical to Hayes, Phil Graham, Beeb, Wisner,
and Dulles -- men who had a political interest in her
family's newspaper -- because the Times-Herald maintained a
bank of dossiers routinely made available to the FBI, the
CIA's rival in domestic Cold War intelligence. When Col.
McCormick decided to sell his nearly bankrupt Washington
newspaper, he asked Eugene Meyer the price of $8.5 million
for it, about three times its worth. John Hayes went to
Chicago in March of 1954 to make the initial payment in
cash. The merger drove up the value of the Post's stock
and made the executives richer. It also increased the
CIA's access to information, news sources, and co-operative
newsmen, to the benefit of [Operation] Mockingbird, which
Frank Wisner had been expanding throughout the Cold War.
So, reviewing that section very briefly, not only in its
acquisition of radio station WTOP, but also the McCormick
newspaper the Washington Times-Herald, basically the CIA was
intimately involved in assisting the [Washington] Post and
thereby, obviously, also assisting itself, in cementing its
relationship with one of this country's major papers.
Now the next element of the Washington Post/CIA association we're
going to be looking at concerns Washington Post editor Ben
Bradlee, his brother-in-law (a man named Cord Meyer, a CIA
counter-intelligence official operating under James Jesus
Angleton), and also, a fellow named Richard Ober.
Now Richard Ober is a close friend and old buddy of Ben Bradlee.
Richard Ober also went to work for CIA. And Richard Ober was to
become "Deep Throat" himself. We're gonna talk about that in a
minute. The point is, here, Cord Meyer is another CIA
counter-intelligence official. He is the brother-in-law of Ben
Bradlee.
In 1956, Ben and Toni Bradlee are part of a community of
Americans who have remained in Paris after having been
trained in intelligence during the war or in propaganda at
the Economic Cooperation Administration. Many have now
addressed themselves to fighting Communism, a less visible
but more insidious enemy than Nazi-ism had been. Some of
them, like Bradlee, are journalists who write from the Cold
War point of view. Some are intelligence operatives who
travel between Washington and Paris, London and Rome. In
Washington, at Phillip Graham's salon, they plan and
philosophize. In foreign cities, they do the work of
keeping European Communism in check.
Bradlee's childhood friend, Richard Helms, is part of this
group. He has written portions of the National Security
Act of 1947, a set of laws creating a Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Security Agency, the latter to
support the CIA with research into codes and electronic
communications. Helms is the Agency's chief expert on
espionage. His agents penetrate the government of the
Soviet Union and leftist political parties throughout
Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. Angleton and Ober
are counter-intelligence and run agents from Washington to
Paris who do exactly the opposite: they prevent spies from
penetrating American embassies, the State Department, the
CIA itself.
Head of the third activity, covert operations, is Phil
Graham's compatriot, Frank Wisner, the father of
[Operation] Mockingbird, whose principal operative is a man
named Cord Meyer, Jr. Meyer was a literature and philosophy
major at Yale, and is consequently well-liked by Angleton
who, when at Yale, thought of himself as a poet and edited
a literary magazine. Meyer is married to Toni Bradlee's
sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the woman who later became
[John F.] Kennedy's lover and was murdered in 1964.
Among the fascinating and glamourous Americans of Paris,
London and Rome, the Meyers are more fascinating and
glamourous than the rest. Mary was the most brilliant and
beautiful girl in her class at Vassar and is now a painter
beginning to be critically recognized. Cord is an
attractive and articulate figure whose evolution as an
anti-Communist has given him a unique understanding of
Communist trends in European trade union and Third World
liberation movements. Because of this specialized
knowledge, he is, as few men are, considered within the
Agency to be indispensable.
The point is here that, not only was Ben Bradlee, the editor of
the Washington Post, himself trained in intelligence, very close
not only to Richard Helms (who was CIA Director at the time of
Watergate), but also to Cord Meyer, his brother-in-law, a key CIA
counter-intelligence official, and also [to] a man named Richard
Ober. We're gonna talk about Richard Ober a little later.
But again, the point here is that the Washington Post is really
(like many other newspapers in this country) inextricable from
the U.S. intelligence establishment. And that very relationship
was indispensable in helping the Washington Post to grow as an
institution.
Now although Phillip Graham was one of the people who helped set
up the working relationship between the [Washington] Post (and
other news media) with the CIA, he eventually, for a reason or
reasons unknown, began to disintegrate mentally. One of the
interesting "symptoms" (if one could call it that) of his mental
disintegration is that he became very vocal and critical about
the CIA relationship with the news media. (Which, of course, he
had helped to set up in the first place.)
Again, reading from *Katherine the Great*, of Phillip Graham,
[Debra Davis] writes,
He had begun to talk, after his second breakdown, about the
CIA's manipulation of journalists. He said it disturbed
him. He said it to the CIA. His enchantment with
journalism, it seemed, was fading. "Newspapers are the
rough drafts of history," he now thought. "Media politics
do not become history until the moral judgements are in."
As he became more desperate, unable to control the forces
that controlled him (one of the manic-depressive's greatest
fears), he turned against the newsmen and politicians whose
code was mutual trust and, strangely, silence.
So it's worth noting here that, upon the eve of his death, which
in turn was a few months before President Kennedy was to be
killed (and obviously, the whole thing was very much in the
workings at that time. People can check our archive tapes for
that. [415-346-1840]). But it's interesting that Phillip Graham
had become disenchanted, and vocally so, about the very
relationship between CIA and the media that he had helped to set
up in the first place.
Now eventually, as a result of this mental disintegration,
Phillip Graham was interred in a very well-known mental
institution called "Chestnut Lodge." Many people have suggested
that Chestnut Lodge is one of the many CIA mind-control
institutions or ones that have been affiliated with it. I can't
document that. It's something I've heard said. But it is
interesting in light of the longstanding and successful effort of
the CIA to not only use mind-control techniques -- hypnosis,
psycho-surgery, and psycho-pharmacology -- to get people to
commit assassinations, but then to commit suicide themselves
later, thereby sealing their lips.
[...to be continued...]
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Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et
pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9
