17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

Helms to investigate CIA,” said William Fulbright. “It would be like asking Mr. Fowler (Treasury Secretary) to investigate [the] affairs of Fort Knox.”88

Meanwhile, the CIA stepped up its investigation into Ramparts, hoping to turn up some information that would retrospectively discredit the magazine’s reporting of the NSA story and head off future exposés.89 By April 4, Richard Ober, his team now expanded to twelve, had inquired into the backgrounds of 127 Ramparts staff and contributors, as well as those of 200 other U.S. citizens associated with the publication.90 Although the FBI had never investigated Ramparts per se, it had compiled numerous dossiers on individual members of its circle with past or current ties to the American communist movement. In addition to looking for evidence of political radicalism, Ober focused on the magazine’s financial affairs, using IRS tax records to identify the angels who subsidized its considerable operating deficit and drawing up a list of advertisers who might be pressured into dropping their accounts.91 The resulting report, which was filed on April 5, has never been declassified, but former intelligence officers have since stated that it contained a number of operational recommendations for measures to counteract Ramparts, variously described as “awful things” and “heady shit,” including the planting of hostile news stories in other media.92

Such articles began appearing a few days later, in publications ranging from the daily Washington Star to the conservative weekly Human Events. 93 The latter, in a piece written by one M. M. Morton (“the pen name of an expert on internal security affairs”), documented Ramparts’

political and financial history in impressive detail.94 However, apart from the fact that Robert Scheer had visited Prague to meet officers of the communist-controlled International Union of Students around the time of

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the NSA flap, very little of the material unearthed by Ober’s research team suggested any political motive on the part of the magazine’s editors other than homegrown, New Left–style dissent.95 The section on Ramparts’ angels was particularly disappointing, listing as it did a few obviously non-communist American left-liberals. Something of the investigators’

desperation can be sensed in an unintentionally humorous attempt to red-bait the magazine by mentioning an advertisement for Inch Kenneth, a Scottish island “which afforded a sweeping view of low-lying fog” belonging to a contributing editor, émigré British aristocrat and former communist Jessica “Decca” Mitford. According to Warren Hinckle’s later recollection, the Communist Party of Great Britain had already turned down Mitford’s free offer of the island, and “Decca had to deal with any number of imbeciles and wayfarers . . . before she found a real person to buy the island—a doctor of sorts, if memory serves.”96 Despite this failure, Ober’s in-vestigatory powers were expanded in the months that followed, with the launch in August 1967 of the CIA’s domestic surveillance program, Operation MHCHAOS. Indeed, an important if ironic consequence of the Ramparts revelations about covert front operations was to increase the Agency’s tendency to spy on American citizens. (Operation MHCHAOS

would eventually be exposed too, by New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh in 1974.)

Several weeks after the appearance of the planted articles, on May 20, 1967, the Mighty Wurlitzer received another stunning blow in the shape of a brief but revelatory piece in the Saturday Evening Post by none other than Allen Dulles’s lieutenant and the man charged with carrying out the Agency’s non-communist left strategy in the early 1950s—Tom Braden.

Having left government employment in 1954, Braden had spent the intervening years publishing a newspaper in Oceanside, California, and serving as president of the State Board of Education, in which role he courted controversy as an outspoken liberal and hate-figure of the west coast right.97 His article, provocatively entitled “Why I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” was couched as a defense of the Agency’s citizen group operations, listing as it did the front organizations created by the Soviet Union after World War II and making the argument, repeated so often in later discussions of the subject, that the subsidies were secret only because of the McCarthyite political atmosphere of early Cold War America. However, it was not so much these statements that attracted attention as the

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passages in which Braden disclosed operational details of a sort that the CIA is reluctant to reveal even today. In particular, the former chief of IOD referred to the placing of “agents” in the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter, and to specific financial transactions with the Lovestoneites of the AFL and the Reuther brothers.98