Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio, Dan.
Speaker 2: You were about to get into the Washington Post and
Speaker 2: how it covered Watergate with a particular bias or agenda.
Speaker 2: Perhaps do you want to expand on that a little bit?
Speaker 3: I would the There was a book written by Lynn
Speaker 3: Colodney called Silent Coup, and I ran across this book
Speaker 3: as I was doing my research for The Mantarin Journalist,
Speaker 3: and I got in touch with Lynn Colodney. He has
Speaker 3: since passed, but he wrote a book about the Watergate
Speaker 3: affair and about Bob Woodward, and his contention was that
Speaker 3: that Woodward had some undisclosed history that might be interesting
Speaker 3: for the American public to know, that being that that Woodward,
Speaker 3: or he was a reporter with the Washington Post, had
Speaker 3: been a naval in Naval Intelligence, and he had also
Speaker 3: been a White House or had been a briefer for
Speaker 3: Alexander Haigh in the White House. I've never seen that
Speaker 3: reported before. I talked to Glen about that, and his book,
Speaker 3: originally published by Saint Martin's Press, was I think illustrative
Speaker 3: of this kind of issue of not knowing the public,
Speaker 3: not knowing the backstory in some things he did an
Speaker 3: interview with Bob Woodward. Woodward never effectively denied that relationship
Speaker 3: with Alexander Haig. All of that preceded water Grate. Watergate
Speaker 3: colod News contention was that that there was a concerted
Speaker 3: effort to get Richard Nixon out of White House, and
Speaker 3: that much of what we know or understand about Watergate
Speaker 3: was not as it appeared that the Washington Posts expose.
Speaker 3: A was that parts of that story are missing. So
Speaker 3: these kinds of things, I think have happened throughout history.
Speaker 3: As certain storylines are adopted, they become a part of
Speaker 3: American history. You ask anyone I think today, for instance,
Speaker 3: who ran the Chicago Mob in the nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 3: they will tell you it was al Capone. But al
Speaker 3: Capone never ran The Chicago Mob was run by a
Speaker 3: man was run by a man named Jake Guzi, who
Speaker 3: was a Russian Jew. And the Chicago Mob always characterized
Speaker 3: as the mafia as Italian, was never Italian. It was
Speaker 3: multi ethnic. It was Irish, it was Jewish, it was Russian,
Speaker 3: it was many different ethnicities that came together. And where
Speaker 3: do you find that information? Where do you find the
Speaker 3: truth about about what the Mob's real origin was you
Speaker 3: have to find that from within the mob itself. And
Speaker 3: that's how I know about that. It is because I
Speaker 3: developed sources in the Chicago organization and was taken inside
Speaker 3: and actually did interviews with Jake Musick's son Charles, who
Speaker 3: had been a photographer for Damon Renyon, who had been
Speaker 3: involved in the Hollywood elite. The Mob was very active
Speaker 3: with Hollywood, as most people that are interested in that known.
Speaker 3: But but but the myth in America about al Capone
Speaker 3: explains something in a way that gives us a false
Speaker 3: impression about what that history is. And I think there
Speaker 3: are many examples of that.
Speaker 2: Just getting back to the to the Washington Post here
Speaker 2: for a moment, and the editor of the Post, Ben Bradley,
Speaker 2: I mean, the kind of an interesting period in history.
Speaker 2: I don't know if this still exists now, where you
Speaker 2: had the the editor of the paper who reported on
Speaker 2: the presidents and also advised the presidents.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And then you had Ben Bradley's rather unique alliances or
Speaker 2: friendships with people in the c I A. Uh, James
Speaker 2: Jesus Angleton and and Cord Meyer were friends. Was court Meyer,
Speaker 2: brother in law of Ben Bradley's I'm trying to remember her.
Speaker 3: I can't remember off the top of my head.
Speaker 2: But he had friends that were CIA.
Speaker 3: Right, and those close associations don't get talked about who
Speaker 3: is reporting on them, who gets to report on them.
Speaker 3: That's one of the things that the book discusses. Because
Speaker 3: the book is early about journalism. Lawrence Wright is an example,
Speaker 3: and the Church of Scientology coverage as an example. But
Speaker 3: it's really about how journalism works in this country and
Speaker 3: how it has worked and how it's failed to work
Speaker 3: In many cases. The auspice of the CIA have important
Speaker 3: work to do, and I've known individuals, but then the
Speaker 3: CIA attended the fiftieth birth birthday party of the CIA
Speaker 3: station chief in Paris back in nineteen ninety. But the
Speaker 3: idea that there are cooperative groups, foundations that that provide
Speaker 3: front funding, organizations that go into banks and into law
Speaker 3: firms that that provide literally provide cover for domestic intelligence operations.
Speaker 3: Those are things that that should be talked about, that
Speaker 3: that should be reported on. But was that reporters don't
Speaker 3: get that opportunity.
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Are we talking about uh? Project Mockingbird here?
Speaker 3: Mockingbird was was one of the projects. The you know,
Speaker 3: Carl Bernstein wrote about Operation Mockingbird and Rolling Stone Magazine
Speaker 3: and identified not by name, but by number some foreigner
Speaker 3: journalists I supposely had been either on the payroll wittingly
Speaker 3: or unwinningly, have been influenced by intelligence operations. It's never
Speaker 3: been well described, but we do know of influences that
Speaker 3: have affected what gets published or what what doesn't get published, Lonladny.
Speaker 3: But Claudie reminded me that after the Saint Martin's Press
Speaker 3: published his book, the New York Times threatened to stop
Speaker 3: reviewing books for Saint Martin's Press. They didn't like Silent Coup.
Speaker 3: The you know, the the relationships that we don't know
Speaker 3: about Alan Dallas and his friendships with Washington Post and
Speaker 3: with other major outlets, his his relationships with with Charles Cabell,
Speaker 3: and the Dallas situations. Those are all things that we
Speaker 3: continue to think about and speculate about and wonder about
Speaker 3: what the assassination was concerned. But we don't see investigative
Speaker 3: reporters digging into these relationships and explaining them very often.
Speaker 3: There there are fine exceptions to that. Uh David Talitt's
Speaker 3: book on Alan Dallas. There there have been a number
Speaker 3: of really good works on these subjects. David Price, uh uh,
Speaker 3: professor in Washington State, has written about the cia is
Speaker 3: recruitment of anthropologists and and uh we we all know.
Speaker 3: I think anyone who has paid attention to this knows
Speaker 3: about the National Student Association. Now, the CIA filtrated, uh
Speaker 3: that organization in order to influence or react to Communist
Speaker 3: youth festivals and to efforts by by the Soviet Union
Speaker 3: to attract young people to communist ideas. I think so
Speaker 3: many things, though we we don't know. Gloria Steinem, one
Speaker 3: of our premier journalists in this country, was part of
Speaker 3: that that same effort to react to Communist influences, and
Speaker 3: she participated in programs that In fact, it was Alex
Speaker 3: Gidney's father, Frank Gidney, who recruited her into that network.
Speaker 2: Was MSS magazine a CIA front.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think so. The show magazine, which was
Speaker 3: run by Frank give me was, if I'm remembering correctly,
Speaker 3: was where Steinhem published at first and mentioned the Radcliffe
Speaker 3: Publishing Procedures course, which is a six week summer course
Speaker 3: each year run by Helen Ben. She brought in some
Speaker 3: of the literary lights to talk to members of her class.
Speaker 3: There were some seventy students each year. Her placement rate
Speaker 3: in the publishing industry from this class was ninety seven percent.
Speaker 3: She recruited people to come to her publishing class, and
Speaker 3: I went to Harvard Library and spent more than a
Speaker 3: week going through the Publishing courses archives, and that's where
Speaker 3: I discovered a letter from the course to Frank Giveney
Speaker 3: asking him to encourage Glorious him to come and talk
Speaker 3: to the next year's class. I tracked down the woman
Speaker 3: who wrote that letter those many years ago and had
Speaker 3: a delightful lunch with her in Cambridge, and she talked
Speaker 3: to me about Ben's history and the UH in the
Speaker 3: intelligence community and these things I never mentioned. I've never
Speaker 3: seen much reported about about Gloria Steinem's activities with with
Speaker 3: the CIA, UH and CIA programs. I did try to
Speaker 3: talk to her on several occasions about that, but we've
Speaker 3: been to that opportunity. But those things.
Speaker 2: Is the fact, though, that Dan, that you're able to
Speaker 2: write about it and and talk about it and talk
Speaker 2: about it on this you know program, which has a
Speaker 2: pretty big audience, doesn't It kind of show, though that
Speaker 2: the system works. Yes, there are you know, there are
Speaker 2: perhaps organizations that are controlled and influenced in publishing houses.
Speaker 2: But then there's the counter the countervailing forces, where ultimately
Speaker 2: the truth gets told and reported.
Speaker 3: Well, if it does ultimately, I'm not sure that it
Speaker 3: ultimately does. You know, this book is published by a
Speaker 3: small publisher. It went out to major publishers was not
Speaker 3: picked up, and I don't know that that means anything
Speaker 3: other than that it wasn't attractive to those publishers. But
Speaker 3: I think some of these ideas don't get the attention
Speaker 3: that they should get because publishing houses have certain perspectives
Speaker 3: towards what shouldar should not be published. To go beyond that,
Speaker 3: I think there's certainly some legitimacy to the idea that
Speaker 3: ultimately some things do get reported. We've seen that happen
Speaker 3: with the Kennedy assassination as we've learned more over the
Speaker 3: years to understand more about it. But how soon does
Speaker 3: it get published or how far do we go down
Speaker 3: the road before we realize what is or isn't true?
Speaker 2: Is the CIA still actively recruiting journalists?
Speaker 3: I can't say definitively. The book does raise questions about
Speaker 3: Lawrence Wright's work and or and Terror, and whether or
Speaker 3: not his access to information was beyond that that a
Speaker 3: journalist might expect to have. You know, I can't define
Speaker 3: that in the book notes that at the end there's
Speaker 3: a lot more work to do on this subject. This
Speaker 3: is not the definitive book on what has occurred in
Speaker 3: history as far as these efforts to propagandize within the
Speaker 3: American borders. But the certainly history has spoken to us
Speaker 3: on many occasions about concerns over these issues. There were
Speaker 3: hearings in the nineteen seventies on the use of journalists
Speaker 3: by the CIA and the use of priests and academians
Speaker 3: and others as essentially resources for the agency, and it
Speaker 3: was fairly universally the use of journalists by the CIA
Speaker 3: was condemned by major journalists at the time in testimony
Speaker 3: and these hearings, and it gave the impression at the
Speaker 3: end that whatever had been done before was not being
Speaker 3: done afterwards. But certainly, the programs as I saw them
Speaker 3: when I researched them, involving these recruiting efforts and the
Speaker 3: efforts to line up publishers in other countries and to
Speaker 3: win frames among publishing houses in the US, it was
Speaker 3: continuing well into the eighties. I can't say definitively what's
Speaker 3: happening in it.
Speaker 2: And that you mentioned Carl Bernstein in the and the
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone magazine expose a on the CIA's infiltration into
Speaker 2: the media. What was the number four hundred reporters.
Speaker 3: Some four hundred reporters I think is reported, Yeah, and
Speaker 3: he identified a few major names that story also, and
Speaker 3: some others said we still recognize.
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