Eric Fettmann. Wednesday, March 28,2001.
New York Post.
THE New York Times on Saturday published an interesting story out of Havana,
where Fidel Castro was hosting a conference on the 40th anniversary of the
disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Presented at the conference was a newly
declassified internal CIA document that claims the agency "had a secret
weapon at the Bay of Pigs - the ability to plant propaganda directly on
international news wire services."
Oliver Stones of the world, unite! A smoking gun at last!
Never mind that the document, obtained by author Jon Ellison, offers no
proof for its boast that the spy agency could "place specific messages and
propaganda lines" on the AP and UPI wires during and after the invasion
that would be key to "stimulating sympathetic support . . . from other
countries."
History would suggest otherwise. The CIA-backed misadventure, intended to
overthrow Castro, was a military and political disaster for the new JFK
administration.
And to those who nod knowingly at suggestions that the CIA manipulated the
news, consider that Castro and his Communist predecessors enjoyed far more
effective journalistic assets.
Indeed, Castro himself would never have come to power were it not for
Herbert Matthews, The New York Times' Cuba correspondent in the '50s and early
'60s. As the paper's former executive editor, Max Frankel, has written, Matthews
"practically invented Fidel Castro for the American people."
A fervent admirer of Fidel's revolution, Matthews "shielded Castro from
the left" and "vouched for Castro's idealism." He insisted Castro
had no Communist leanings, "even after radical Fidelistas had been
displaced by Communists or jailed." The journalist and the dictator grew so
close that when Frankel was allowed to interview Castro, he was reassured that "any
friend of Herbert's was also his friend."
Decades earlier, Matthews had preached the gospel of the Soviet-backed
forces in the Spanish Civil War. The pro-Communist magazine New Masses promoted
Matthews for a Pulitzer Prize, arguing that his "dramatic and fearless
reporting has set a new high in foreign correspondence."
Also in the '30s, The Times' Walter Duranty had functioned as a blatant
apologist for Joseph Stalin, writing knowingly false articles denying his brutal
collectivization policies that killed 7 million people and rationalizing his
murderous purge trials. Writes Frankel of Duranty's Pulitzer Prize: "He was
probably unworthy of the honor."
Nor were they alone in trying to influence news dispatches from the left. In
the mid '30s, there were so many Communists working for the Times that they were
organized in a cell that published its own monthly newsletter. Meanwhile, Joseph
Barnes, foreign editor of the New York Herald-Tribune, was likely funnelling
information to the Soviet GRU. And CBS News reporter Winston Burdett later
confessed that, in the early part of his career, he had also been a Soviet
espionage agent.
During World War II, Soviet intelligence "sucessfully used Communist
journalists in the West to carry out its subversive tasks," write Herbert
Romerstein and Eric Breindel - even to the point of planting an agent in the
office of leading columnist Walter Lippman.
Ironically, the Havana conference comes on the eve of the 100th birthday of
another onetime Communist journalist, Whittaker Chambers, who actually served as
an espionage agent. But Chambers abandoned Communism and worked to destroy it:
It was his evidence that unmasked and brought about the conviction of Soviet
agent Alger Hiss.
The Left still vilifies Chambers today - while Hiss, who died four years
ago, enjoys an endowed chair in his name at Bard College and a new Web site,
sponsored by NYU, dedicated to promoting the now-discredited case for his
innocence.
Hiss also benefitted from the aid of left-wing journalists - most notably
A.J. Liebling, the revered New Yorker writer who wrote ostensibly objective
pieces about the case even as he was working as an unofficial, and undisclosed,
investigator for the Hiss defense.
And at Time magazine, where Chambers worked as a senior editor (until he was
forced out), at least three senior journalists - Richard Lauterbach, John Scott
and Stephen Laird - were Communists working with the KGB.
Alger Hiss' resolute defenders and sympathizers may continue to believe that
the CIA-controlled "kept press" hastened the end of the Soviet Union.
History, however, teaches that Communism long flourished, thanks in large
measure to the efforts of Moscow's many active friends in the journalism
fraternity.
Copyright 2001 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
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