American Friends: the Anti-CND Groups
Steve Dorril
In a memo leaked to the Washington Post (9th May 1982) on opposition to President Reagan’s defence policy, Eugene V. Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, stated
“there is participation on an increasing scale in the US of three groups whose potential impact should be cause for concern. They are the churches, the ‘loyalist opposition’ and, perhaps most important, the unpoliticised public”.
He followed this by organising the propaganda campaign against the American Peace Movement’s ‘Ground Zero Week’. (1)
Rostow was equally concerned about the growing unilateralist movement and so helped initiate a similar propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND. It would take three forms: mobilising public opinion, working within the Churches, and a ‘dirty tricks’ operation against the peace groups.
William J. Casey, head of the CIA, met with US Information Agency (USIA) (2) to organise the propaganda campaign in Europe. A direct mailing campaign was organised with Richard Viguerie and the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Peter Dailey. At the same time, Ernest Lefever, Director of the ‘Ethics and Public Policy Programme’ at Georgetown University, received $200,000 to organise the Church groups.(World in Action 24/10/83). Casey has claimed that the CIA weren’t involved – and maybe he is right, for in the main the whole exercise was privately operated. What united the various participants is membership of or links to the ‘Committee On The Present Danger’ (CPD). The CPD is a Second Cold War pressure group populated by Reagan’s political backers. It has a stranglehold on his defence and foreign policy and, as many commentators have noted, it is the present danger.
* * *
In an attempt to mobilise public opinion, a number of surveys were undertaken in Europe. In 1981 Kane Parsons Associates Inc of New York organised an opinion poll in London on American foreign policy. It was fronted by Prof. Donald J. Puchala, Director of the Institute on Western Europe, at Columbia University, but was funded to the tune of $100,000 by the U.S. International Communications Agency (USICA). The ICA was set up in 1978 as an independent agency of the executive branch of the American Government. It took over from the USIA which had been criticized for its joint involvement with the CIA in a number of publishing and propaganda activities. ICA’s acting Associate Director, W. Scott Thompson, is also a member of the CPD and the son-in-law of Chief Salt 2 negotiator and CPD member, Paul Nitze.
The Rand Corporation, a Californian military research body with links to the government and the CIA, sponsored a week’s study on ‘the Successor Generation’ and its implications for Nato. ‘The Successor Generation’ is another name for anti-Americanism in Europe. Peter Dailey, US Ambassador to Ireland, noting the trend of antipathy to American policies, reported to the White House on ways of strengthening support for Cruise and Pershing, recommending that Reagan appoint an ‘Arms Reduction Ombudsman’ – not to help with arms reduction, but to do public relations work for Reagan’s policies. (Peace News 29/9/83)
* * *
Richard Viguerie, who was responsible for the European direct mailing campaign, is regarded as the Godfather of the New Right. He is the former fund-raiser for George Wallace and was the editor of the rabid Conservative Digest. His direct mail organisation dispatched anywhere between 7 and 9 million letters and raised three million dollars in an almost successful attempt to block Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty. The umbrella grouping used then would be employed later against the Salt agreement under the auspices of the Coalition For Peace Through Strength (CPS-US).
Viguerie’s Fall Church Centre in Virginia, has computerised access to millions of names and expertise in mobilising a vast network. The complex was a key institutional link in getting the Right behind the ‘Soviet Threat’ campaign with the same fervour shown for the so-called pro-family, anti Equal Rights Amendment, anti-gay, anti-abortion movements that arose in reaction to the 1960s.
In March 1982 the British Coalition For Peace Through Security (CPS), based on its American counterpart (CPS-US), staged an Anglo-American conference which brought the new (to Britain) propaganda techniques of Viguerie to Britain. The speakers were Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right and Director of the Committee For Survival Of A Free Congress (CSFC). CSFC used direct mailing – in one campaign 600,000 letters were sent out urging voters to lobby their Senators against President Carter’s Chief Arms Negotiator, Paul Warnke. Weyrich had previously been with the Heritage Foundation, an influential New Right think tank and publishing house established with money from Beer Baron Joe Coors.
Weyrich was also on the steering committee of the Emergency Coalition Against Unilateral Disarmament (ECUD). ECUD is an adhoc organisation, a growing alliance between old Cold War warriors like the late Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Paul Nitze (Coalition for a Democratic Majority) (CDM); ideologues like Rostow and Podhoretz (the latter editor of the ‘neo-conservative’ Commentary); hardline dissenters in the intelligence community such as Daniel Graham (ex head DIA) who is ECUD Chairman; and the grass roots New Right symbolised by Weyrich.
The CSFC and CDM worked out of the same offices in Washington, joining together to form the previously mentioned Coalition For Peace Through Strength. (CPS-US)
Also speaking at the March 1982 British meeting were Morton Blackwell and Dick Minard. Blackwell was chief advisor to Senator Gordon Humphrey and Exec. Director of ECUD. He led the day-to-day assault on Warnke and represented, perhaps,’ the heart and soul of the ultra-conservative arm of the burgeoning cold war coalition’. He is contributing editor of Conservative Digest, and The Right Report, of which he is also assistant publisher. Minard is advisor to right-wing Congressman Larry Craig.
* * *
The Coalition For Peace Through Security (CPS) was formed in the autumn of 1981, its main activists being Dr. Julian Lewis, its ‘Research Director’, a Conservative who spent a brief time in the Labour Party defending Reg. Prentice in his dispute with the Newham Northeast Constituency; Edward Leigh M.P. (3), now M.P. for Gainsborough, who was principal correspondence secretary for Mrs Thatcher when she was leader of the opposition; and Francis Holihan, an American roller-skate businessman (4). The CPS has close relations with the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), which has a known intelligence pedigree, links with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies,(5) set up by Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph when in opposition.
The CPS’s most important link is to the Campaign For Defence and Multilateral Disarmament (CDMD) which is run and funded by Tory Central Office, and helps distribute CPS literature. Harvey Thomas, Tory Central Office official on the CDMD committee said “We keep in touch with the Coalition. There is a friendly relationship between us”. (Guardian 30th April 1983)
In reality both committees are fronts with little or no membership. They are both conveniently ‘private’, which allows the Conservative Government to keep at arms length the ‘dirty tricks’ of the CPS and the smear tactics of MP Winston Churchill in CDMD.
CDMD is actually a tightly organised group of the Conservative Party hierarchy. It includes Winston Churchill, who chaired the co-ordinating (anti-CND groups) Committee For Peace With Freedom (CPF); John Selwyn Gummer, Party Chairman, and the man responsible for the anti-unilateralist campaign in the Churches; Peter Blaker, Minister of State for Defence; Ray Whitney, MOD spokesman and formerly of the Cold War propaganda unit IRD (and also of the Institute for European and Strategic Studies (IESS) and the Council for Arms Control; Michael Heseltine (6) Secretary of State for Defence and Head of the Defence Secretariat 19; and, finally, Cecil Parkinson, ex Party Chairman and member of CPS.
Shortly after the March 1982 meeting, the CPS obtained the list of Conservative Party agents from Cecil Parkinson and access to the new ICL computer at Central Office, which provided the mail-out facilities that they required. Churchill was appointed by the Prime Minister as co-ordinator of the Government’s campaign against CND (Guardian 14th Feb,1983), the loose grouping CPF meeting at his London flat. The CPS joined the CPF and attended the monthly meetings. Its members specifically discussed anti-CND tactics with Churchill and Blaker. It was Blaker who arranged the informal meetings – sometimes with the Prime Minister, sometimes with civil servants, sometimes with Tory politicians – to prepare and co-ordinate policy against the anti-nuclear movement. It was decided at one of these meetings that Gummer should lobby the General Synod of the C. of E. Gummer is a member of the joint Parliamentary Ecclesiastical Committee. He was due to attend the ‘Ethics and Nuclear War Meeting’ (discussed below) but was unable to make it.
* * *
In May 1983 the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio, Mgr.Bruno Heim, accused CND of being “useful idiots” and of “consciously sharing the Soviet aggressiveness and ideology”.
It was later admitted that Heim had been in correspondence with Edward Leigh, and that Francis Holihan had sent him and other Vatican envoys around the world material on Mgr Bruce Kent. (Guardian 3rd May 1983) The action backfired though, as Cardinal Hume disliked the ‘smear’ tactics and was particularly annoyed because Heim had been instrumental in obtaining Hume’s appointment. Holihan left CPS and formed Catholics Against The Freeze.
It was also admitted that Holihan had organised aerial propaganda, had entered CND offices under false pretences, and that CPS workers had joined CND in order to gain access to the Campaign’s 1982 Annual Conference. When Bruce Kent went on a speaking tour of America, Holihan followed him around. Offensive material on Kent was sent to newspapers and radio stations, and demonstrations were organised against him with support from the College Republican Committee.
In October 1983 CPS organised and paid for a Gallup poll on unilateral disarmament. In November it paid Aerofilm, part of the Hunter Group, £900 for a photoanalysis of the massive CND march, claiming that the figures given in the media were greatly exaggerated. For Christmas it sent out 50,000 greetings cards and accused the well respected IVS (International Voluntary Service) of subsidising ‘peace camps’.
CPS has its offices in Arrow House, owned by Land Securities Ltd and rented by Jeffrey Archer millionaire novelist and ex- Tory MP. He sublets to CPS and other right-wing propaganda organisations, including The Committee for The Free World (CFW) and the Committee To Stop Chemical Atrocities, whose leaflets are produced by the Heritage Foundation (see above). (Peace News 7th January 1983).
* * *
The well known group ‘Foreign Affairs Research Institute’ (FARI – see Lobster 1 item 7) also shares the same offices as CPS. FARI campaigns not only against CND but also for a new nuclear fighting military strategy for Nato and Britain. In 1981 FARI published an absurd booklet by their chairman Sir Frederick Bennett MP claiming Russian money was being used by CND. ‘Freedom Communications News Agency’, in the same office as FARI, distributes commentaries written by FARI staff. (Sanity August 1983)
* * *
The Committee for the Free World announced itself to the public in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times (6th April 1981). It was to lead the “struggle for freedom against Soviet efforts to take over democratic societies”. It supported American action in Central America and supported Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s thesis that the end result of a revolution in El Salvador would not bring progressive change but totalitarianism.
The executive director was Midge Decter, a friend of Kirkpatrick’s and wife of Norman Podhoretz, who was also a member. It included CPD heavies like Rostow Zumwalt, General Rowney, Scott Thompson and Decter’s nephew, Joshua Maranchik, who ran the ‘dirty tricks’ against Paul Warnke. Seed money came from the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, long time banker of the National Strategic Information Council (NSIC), and the Heritage Foundation, and the Scaife Family charitable trusts. Both foundations have been identified as having extensive ties to the CIA. Richard Scaife, for example, owned the CIA newsfront, Forum World Features, for which Robert Moss was a regular contributor.
Many of the CFW founders were involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a propaganda cabal operating from 1950 until 1966 when it was exposed as a CIA front. Decter has said that the impetus for forming the group was a meeting held in Jerusalem 4 years ago. (New York Times 19th February 1981) According to the Wall Street Journal (26th July 1979) participants at that conference included former CIA Director Bush, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, Robert Moss and Brian Crozier – the latter two being paid propagandists for the CIA, French and British Intelligence. The Jerusalem Foundation that sponsored the ’79 conference is an Israeli Intelligence front, established in the memory of one of the fallen commandos at Entebbe. (Parapolitics No 1, 1981)
* * *
Ernest Lefever used the $200,000 given by USIA to help ” highly placed and influential leaders in Western Europe to gain a solid understanding of US defence and arms control policies, with special reference to their religious and moral implications.” One conference was organised in Britain in May (New Statesman 20th May 1983) with church leaders in attendance. It was sponsored by the British Atlantic Committee (BAC) and the IEDSS.
Lefever was refused a position in Reagan’s administration because his views on human rights were to the right of Kirkpatrick’s distinction between ‘friendly authoritarianism’ and ‘hostile totalitarianism’. Lefever’s Centre for Ethics and Public Policy received $250,000 in 1983 and is linked to the Heritage Foundation. He is co-author (with Roy Godson) of the apologist ‘The CIA and The American Ethic’. Godson is a member of the Consortium for The Study of Intelligence (CSI) which includes 8 serving or former CIA officers. He is also a staff member of the National Strategic Information Centre (NSIC), Director of Georgetown University’s International Labour Programme and a prominent member of CDM.
Sven Kraemer, Programme Director of the NSIC was at the May meeting. He is also a member of the CSI and a close family friend of General Rowney.
NSIC is a lobbying organisation dedicated to the preservation of ‘containment militarism’; its stated goal to ‘train young American Labour leaders in the critical issues that divide the Free World from the Communist states’. It received $6,000,000 from Richard Scaife, an ultra-right millionaire who “has made the formation of public opinion both his business and his vocation”. He also gave $250,000 to the CPD, $3,800,000 to the Heritage Foundation and $5,300,000 to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS).
IEDSS which also backed the May meeting, also has links to the hardliners. Headed by Gerald Frost, former head of the Conservative Think Tank, Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), its chairman is J. Edwin Fuelner, who played a major part in the election of President Reagan and is President of the Heritage Foundation. He also sits on the study group on US Grand Strategy on which the CIA is represented via CSIS. IEDSS is based in the offices of the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) whose board of management member Vice-Admiral Louis Le Bailley also attended.
* * *
Groups mentioned in this article
- BAC – British Atlantic Committee
- CDM – Coalition for a Democratic Majority
- CDMD – Campaign for Defence and Multilateral Disarmament.
- CFW – Committee for a Free World
- CPS – Centre for Policy Studies
- CPS-US – Coalition for Peace Through Strength
- CPS-UK – Coalition for Peace Through Security
- CPD – Committee on the Present Danger
- CPF – Committee for Peace and Freedom
- CSI – Coalition for the Study of Intelligence
- CSIS – Centre for Strategic and International Studies
- CSFC – Committee for Survival of a Free Congress
- ECUD – Emergency Coalition against Unilateral Disarmament
- ISC – Institute for the Study of Conflict
- IEDSS – Institute for European and Defence Strategic Studies.
- NSIC – National Strategic Information Council
- USIA – United States Information Agency
- USICA – United States International Communications Agency
Notes
- The American material in this article is based on the excellent Peddlers of Crisis: the CPD and the Politics of Containment by Jerry W. Sanders (Pluto Press, 1983), and the goodish With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War by Robert Scheer (Secker and Warburg, 1983)
- Mr Charles Wick, the accident-prone Director of the USIA was recently discovered to have tape-recorded his telephone calls with government officials, his staff and friends. Wick, a longtime show-business friend of Reagan, was appointed only a year ago and has obviously learned little of the lessons of the Nixon era. The tapes have been handed over to a Congressional committee.
- In June 1980 Leigh wrote an article for the Liverpool Newsletter, a paper which adopts an anti-semitic tone and carries advertisements for extreme right-wing literature (Guardian 3rd June 1983). Leigh was also mentioned in the recent Young Conservative report on extreme right-wing infiltration of the Conservative Party.
- CPS backed the Protect and Survive Monthly, a pro-civil defense magazine edited by Bruce Sibley. Peter Fry MP was a director of PSM’s publishing company when it collapsed amid much acrimony at the end of 1982.
- It’s strange that nothing was made of a report in the Sunday Times (21st August 1983) that the Centre receives – “unofficially and in breach of Whitehall rules -copies of confidential government documents”. The Centre has a Defence Study Group with a secret and high-powered membership, and a group studying the direction and control of British foreign policy .Does anyone have anything on Natalia Brooke, Centre Secretary, whose grandfather was Count Beckendorff, the last White Russian Ambassador to London; and on Martin Bendelow, still in prison on drugs charges?
- Heseltine chaired the Defence Secretariat 19. It included Home Office and Foreign Office Ministers, senior officials and Mr Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary. A strange grouping – what are the other 18? – designed to combat CND. Much publicity was given to its supposed disbandment, a sign that the CND threat had diminished.
- The Administrator of the Ethics and Nuclear Arms Conference was Ken Aldred, General Secretary of the British Atlantic Committee’s ‘Peace Through Nato’ campaign. Many of the Labour right-wing are members and are linked to the similar American right at Georgetown. This has been covered in CIA Infiltration of The Labour Movement by Militant (1982), and also in State Research No 16, 1980.