Publication Spotlight: Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.

Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.

Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.

Reviews

“Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War’s shadows. Riveting.” —Kirkus, Starred Review

“Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced.”—John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize

“It may be difficult today to believe that the American intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA’s Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation’s spymasters.” —James Risen, author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War

“A deep look at that scoundrel time when America’s most sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral reckoning—one that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves—namely, what, if anything, have they done to resist the subversion of free thought?” —David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

“At the height of the cold war, the CIA set out to influence Americans by infiltrating our country’s literary and artistic establishment. Finks is a devastating work of investigative history that unearths the shocking reach of the Agency’s tentacles—from Baldwin and Hemingway to The Paris Review and the renowned American Studies department at Yale. Today, when cultural and literary icons seem closer than ever to elite interests, Finks is a timely reckoning of how we got here. You will never look at American literary culture the same way again.” —Anand Gopal, Pulitzer- and National Book Award-nominated author of No Good Men Among the Living

“The CIA’s covert financial support of highbrow art and fiction may seem like a quaint, even endearing, chapter in its otherwise grim history of coups, assassinations, and torture. In Finks, Joel Whitney argues otherwise and shines a discomfiting spotlight on this obscure corner of the cultural Cold War. The result is both an illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential costs—political and artistic—of accommodating power.” —Ben Wizner, Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project

About the Author

Joel Whitney is a cofounder and editor at large of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Boston Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, Salon, NPR, New York Magazine and The Sun. With photographer Brett Van Ort, he co-wrote the 2013 TED Talks ebook on landmine eradication, Minescape. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni. His Salon essay on The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays.

PURCHASE FINKS: HOW THE CIA TRICKED THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

Publication Spotlight: THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

Author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine’s research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam. While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA’s relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ. Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, and John Jay College. This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA’s ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA’s activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States. A common theme is the CIA’s ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability. Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Editorial Reviews

“…courageously takes us inside the CIA’s most shameful extralegal operations, exposing an intelligence service gone rogue. He is a sentinel of the public interest, and his book is a public service.” — John Kiriakou, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.

“Valentine’s two books on the FBN/DEA are a major achievement.” — Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State

“Doug Valentine was examining the dark underbelly of American foreign policy years before people recognized the ‘Dark Side’ of torture camps and secret wars.” Robert Parry, Consortium News

AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW * * * * *

Of the extraordinary, valuable and informative works for which Mr. Valentine is responsible, his latest, CIA As Organized Crime, may prove to be the best choice as an introduction to the dark realm of America’s hidden corruptions and their consequences at home and around the world. This new volume begins with the unlikely but irrevocable framework by which Mr. Valentine’s path led to unprecedented access to key Agency personnel whose witting participation is summarized by the chapter title: “How William Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom.”

By illuminating CIA programs and systems of surveillance, control, and assassination utilized against the civilian population of South Vietnam, we are presented with parallels with operations and practices at work today in America’s seemingly perpetual war against terror.

Through the policies of covert infiltration and manipulations, illegal alliances, and “brute force” interventions that wreak havoc on designated enemy states, destroy progress and infrastructure under the claim of liberation, degrade the standards of living for people in the perceived hostile nations, “…America’s ruling elite empowers itself while claiming it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are ‘humanitarian’ and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys.”

Mr. Valentine has presented us with a major body of work which includes: The Strength of the Wolf; The Strength of the Pack; The Pheonix Program, to which we may now add The CIA as Organized Crime, and for which we are profoundly indebted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Valentine is an American journalist and author of four
works of historical non-fiction: The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix
Program, The Strength of the Wolf (winner of the Choice
Academic Library Award), and The Strength of the Pack. His
articles have appeared regularly in CounterPunch,
ConsortiumNews, and elsewhere.

PURCHASE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME

Two Views of Twenty-Six Seconds by Alexandra Zapruder

New book ‘Twenty-Six Seconds’ details how famed Zapruder film haunts family

Matt Damsker , Special for USA TODAY 2 p.m. EST November 19, 2016

As artifacts of the 1960s go, one of them towers, tragically, above all others — above Andy Warhol’s silk-screen masterworks, above The Beatles’ first recordings, above the high and low iconography of the decade.

A 26-second home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, filmed by a Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder, who found the perfect vantage point along the presidential motorcade route of Nov. 22, 1963, is more than historical document.

It’s a singular window on what, arguably, ended America’s overextended, post-war innocence. JFK’s murder was a national trauma that still haunts modernity; the Zapruder film is its real-time ghost.

Relied upon by the government for investigative purposes, its ownership controversially acquired by Life magazine, even parodied in a famous episode of Seinfeld, Zapruder’s chance creation took on mythic status and, inevitably, burdened the family whose name it bears.

The morbid fascination it sparked, and still sparks, make it impossible for the children and relatives of Abraham Zapruder to take public pride in his legacy, and so it’s fitting that his granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, has chosen to tell the story of the film through a familial lens. The result, Twenty-Six Seconds (Twelve, 421 pp., **** out of four stars), is a first-rate work of biography and history, addressing the film and the family in all their complexity and character.

Twenty-six seconds of the JFK assassination — and a lifetime of family anguish

By Joyce Carol Oates November 17

For millions of us, whenever we think of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 53 years ago this coming week — we immediately recall the horrific images: the open presidential car, the stricken young president and his wife (in pink, with a pink pillbox hat on her head) beside him. The film has been shown so many times, seen by so many millions of people, it has entered the realm of myth: 486 frames of silent (but color) home-movie footage shot in bright sunshine at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on that day, by a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder. It is surely the most famous home movie ever filmed.

Now, Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of the videographer and a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has written a moving and enlightening account that is part memoir; part detailed history of the film and its (inestimable) role in the nation’s understanding of the assassination; and part overview of the film as an inspiration for countless, often bizarre conspiracy theories, as well as for works of art as disparate as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and “Underworld,” and a particularly inventive episode of “Seinfeld.” So much history, embodied in a mere 26 seconds of footage! Not least, this film would one day be sold by the Zapruder heirs to the U.S. government for $16 million, the highest price ever paid for “an American historical artifact,” to be stored in the National Film Registry for scholars and historians to study.

Alexandra Zapruder writes with passion and clarity about the vicissitudes of bearing a famous name without having been involved with its celebrity or notoriety. (“I could not get over my astonishment at seeing [Zapruder] in print so often.”) She is very good at communicating a child’s confused sense of being special and yet being admonished not to think of herself as special. Growing up in Dallas in the 1960s, after her grandfather’s death, Alexandra knew virtually nothing about “the film” — it was never discussed within the family, though as a child she was often told that her beloved grandfather “should have been famous for who he was . . . and not for the film.” In time, Alexandra came to wonder “about this thing called the Zapruder film: Why did people keep bringing it up . . . and what did other people know about it that I didn’t?”

Gradually she came to assimilate unspoken Zapruder family assumptions: “We don’t brag about the film. It is a gruesome, horrible record of President Kennedy’s assassination, which was a tragic event for the country and the Kennedy family. It is nothing to be proud of. . . . We are tied to the film by chance and coincidence. It is an accident of fate. It happened to be taken by our grandfather and it happened to be called by our name. Apart from that, it has nothing to do with us.”

And yet, ironically, the film does have much to do with the Zapruders, who would inherit the perishable artifact after Abraham’s death and be forced to deal with its ambiguous presence in our cultural history. If there is one predominant theme of “Twenty-Six Seconds,” it is that an individual cannot easily escape “the inheritance of names, and how it shapes identity and life experiences.”

Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film by Alexandra Zapruder at Amazon

CIA Releases Controversial Bay of Pigs History

Washington, D.C., October 31, 2016 – The CIA today released the long-contested Volume V of its official history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which it had successfully concealed until now by claiming that it was a “draft” and could be withheld from the public under the FOIA’s “deliberative process” privilege. The National Security Archive fought the agency for years in court to release the historically significant volume, only to have the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2014 uphold the CIA’s overly-broad interpretation of the “deliberative process” privilege. Special credit for today’s release goes to the champions of the 2016 FOIA amendments, which set a 25-year sunset for the exemption: Senators John Cornyn, Patrick Leahy, and Chuck Grassley, and Representatives Jason Chaffetz, Elijah Cummings, and Darrell Issa.

Chief CIA Historian David Robarge states in the cover letter announcing the document’s release that the agency is “releasing this draft volume today because recent 2016 changes in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires us to release some drafts that are responsive to FOIA requests if they are more than 25 years old.” This improvement – codified by the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 – came directly from the National Security Archive’s years of litigation.

The CIA argued in court for years – backed by Department of Justice lawyers – that the release of this volume, written by Agency historian Jack B. Pfeiffer, would “confuse the public.” National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton says, “Now the public gets to decide for itself how confusing the CIA can be. How many thousands of taxpayer dollars were wasted trying to hide a CIA historian’s opinion that the Bay of Pigs aftermath degenerated into a nasty internal power struggle?” Archive senior analyst and Cuba Project Director Peter Kornbluh notes, “We know now why the CIA attempted to cover up this document for so long. It is a vivid historical example of what Pfeiffer called ‘the Agency’s dirty linen’ that CIA officials never wanted to air in public.”

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 564

Compiled and edited by Lauren Harper and Thomas Blanton

bay-of-pigs-volume-v

Read more at the National Security Archive

‘This was not an accident. This was a bomb.’

Secret police, hired killers and a former Chilean diplomat’s brazen murder in the streets of D.C.:

The assassination of Orlando Letelier, as told by those who knew him and found his killers

Story by Karen DeYoung, David Montgomery, Missy Ryan, Ishaan Tharoor, Jia Lynn Yang

On a muggy autumn morning four decades ago, a car exploded in Washington. It had motored along Massachusetts Avenue NW, rounding the bend at Sheridan Circle, when a remote-controlled bomb taped beneath the vehicle was triggered.

A driver in a car nearby would later describe the fiery impact of the blast: “I saw an automobile actually coming down out of the air.”

The smoldering wreck lurched to a halt in front of the Romanian Embassy, its windows blown open and entire floor panel gone. A police officer who arrived on the scene remembered welling up with nausea. There was blood and debris everywhere and a human foot in the roadway. A fatally wounded man lay on the pavement; his legs were missing from above the knees.

This was Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old former Chilean diplomat who had been driving to work at a D.C. think tank along with his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, 25, and her husband, Michael.

Letelier died within minutes. Shrapnel had pierced Ronni Moffitt’s throat, and she drowned in her own blood a half-hour later. Michael, who had been sitting in the back seat, tumbled out largely unscathed. He was beside himself in grief and shock.

“Assassins, fascists!” he exclaimed amid the carnage.

They were victims of a brazen, perhaps unprecedented plot, the target of a foreign regime that had sent agents into the United States to kill Letelier. Here was a case of state-sponsored terrorism in the heart of the American capital. Only in this instance, the state was a close Washington ally in the Cold War.

CONTINUE READING AT THE WASHINGTON POST

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