17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

the immediate wake of Ramparts’ NSA story, noted that “the UAW boys are getting set to unload a chapter and verse indictment of Jay Lovestone’s various operations.”)106 Certainly the Saturday Evening Post article, with its details about Braden’s contacts with the Reuthers, was interpreted by Walter Reuther “as a warning shot over the bow,” and the UAW boss again reprimanded his younger brother for putting them so far out on a political limb.107 Even Braden himself, while still denying that he was put up to writing the piece, later told an interviewer that there were “those in the Agency who wanted to get rid of things like this that were virtually blown already. . . . I always had it in the back of my mind that they wanted it killed, but I can’t prove it.”108

While Braden helped wreck the CIA’s front operations on the noncommunist left, the Agency’s leaders fought to retain the right to subsidize voluntary organizations. The Katzenbach Commission had acknowledged the possibility of the federal government’s creating a new, semiautonomous agency that would openly administer public funding to deserving private groups—the example of the British Council was cited on several occasions—and an interim report, issued on March 17, hinted at genuine internal debate, with Gardner (who already nursed misgivings about CIA activities in the academic world) urging a complete ban on all covert funding, and Helms opposing him.109 The final report, issued on March 29, represented a compromise brokered by Katzenbach, recommending that all secret subsidies cease, yet acknowledging in a footnote that “overriding national security interests” might sometimes necessitate such an arrangement. As Katzenbach explained to LBJ, “we ought to try to achieve a flat ban, but without handcuffing the Administration or the United States Government, whatever the future danger.”110 Hence, although the report set December 31, 1967, as the final date by which all funding to private organizations should end, in fact covert subsidies for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty carried on, leading to a fresh round of revelations in 1972.111 Meanwhile, a follow-up committee created to examine possible mechanisms for overt government funding and chaired by Secretary of State Dean Rusk failed to make any concrete practical recommendations. “It seems to me far better to let the CIA matter wither away and let a new Administration take a fresh look at the possibilities,”

Rusk told President Johnson in June 1968.112

For all the obvious limitations of LBJ’s response to the Ramparts revela-

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tions, the events of 1967 did represent a turning point of sorts. The exposure of the Mighty Wurlitzer constituted “one of the worst operational ca-tastrophes in CIA history,” reckons a historian on the Agency’s own staff.

“Officials were forced to dismantle dozens of compromised operations with a combined budget of millions of dollars.”113 Moreover, while the Katzenbach Commission’s main purpose was clearly to deflect further hostile publicity, its report, by recognizing the principle of restraint on the CIA’s field of operation, established a precedent for the far more thoroughgoing congressional investigations of the Agency that would follow in the 1970s, including the famous Pike and Church Committees. Most importantly, the investigations of the Ramparts reporters symbolized the disintegration of the Cold War consensus on which the Mighty Wurlitzer had been built. Without that foundation, the edifice, a teetering, haphaz-ard construction at best, was bound to come crashing down.

Conclusion

The CIA’s relationship with its front organizations has often been depicted in the imagery of musical recitation or theatrical performance. The Agency has variously been portrayed as playing the keys of a giant organ, pulling the strings of marionettes, or calling the tune of a piper. Whatever the metaphor, the implication is the same: from behind the scenes, the spies exercised complete control over the recipients of their covert largesse.

The group-by-group analysis undertaken here suggests a more complex reality. To be sure, the CIA tried its utmost to dictate the terms of the patronage relationship, keeping the circle of knowledgeability in front organizations as small as possible, disciplining the witting with secrecy oaths, and gradually excluding those likely to make trouble (hence the common pattern of doctrinaire anticommunists losing influence to more subtle, tactically adept Cold Warriors). However, this was not the whole story.