The "House of Mirrors" - 2007

A while ago, tired of the neighbor who is caught from time to time peeking in our windows, I installed one-way glass. This morning, I received suit papers informing me of a hearing on his motion for an injunction seeking to prevent me from spoiling his fun. The city council now also advises that it will consider an ordinance outlawing defenses like mine. After all, I might be doing something in my house they want to know about.

You don’t believe me? Why? You think this country isn’t that crazy?

Then how is it that when a couple of days ago, the Chinese announced that they had obliterated a satellite in orbit with a ballistic missile, the right-wing media went into a snitt concerning the “unconscionable escalation” and concomitant increase in “world tension” this represents. Our entire spying and eavesdropping assault on our planetary neighbors may one day be interdicted, by god; and, as the world’s policeman and defender of truth, justice, and the “American” Way, we have a right to know what’s going on in the other nations of the world, and that sure as hell justifies peeking through their keyholes (the name, incidentally, of the satellites they might now shoot down).

Ah, you say, but that’s different – its foreign affairs. Then how come it is that in July, the absolutely corrupt – absolute power, remember? - went to local U.S. District Court, where they obtained the courts’ (malfeasant and malevolent) blessing upon the electronic equivalent to window-peeking and keyhole watching - surveillance of telephone, computer e-mail, and internet communication. After all, the government said, we’re the people’s protector, and we have the right to know everything there is to know about everything they do. Anybody who doesn’t agree is obviously a criminal – and a traitor.

So the question is, if the satellite and computer things are believable, why don’t you believe that bit about my neighbor guy?

And while you’re dreaming up a cute response to that last, you might want to explain another example of the same kind of what psychologists call “compartmentalized thinking” (and reasoning): yesterday – or was it the day before, the government trumpeted to the world that hearsay has been made admissible in trials having to do with “terrorists.” Think about it. Hearsay!

Gossip is now evidence.

Tell me – why not make the criminal charge itself evidence of guilt? Why bother with evidence at all? Why not just make the arrest equivalent to trial and proceed to execution of sentence. Hell, why not have the sentence first, then the trial – you know, like the Queen of Hearts. Yeah, I know – I’m a traitor. Well, while you’re fulminating, explain to me this: If government by the absolutely corrupt can walk roughshod on the Constitution where the rights of one guy are concerned, what stops them from doing the same where yours are concerned? ‘Splain dat to me, Luci.

Yeah, I know – you trust them. George listens to god. Why, then, even waste time and tax money on the farce of a show trial? Isn't this all god's doing? Who are we to question god?!

Well, there you have it – what I mean to talk about today. The show trial is theater necessary for a purpose. What’s the purpose? Let’s see if I can give you some insight.

Shortly after our country’s military industrial complex seized power in the U.S. by coup d’etat, the plotters moved to – “orchestrate,” one of its leading lights liked to call it – legalize their absolute power. It’s a “nation of laws,” remember? Once the necessary legislator palms had been greased, and the necessary threats made, the new U.S. Sicherheitdienst – the German word means “security service” and it included the infamous Gestapo – not only could do anything it wanted to do so long as it said it was “in the national interest of the United States,” it could spend as much as it wanted without accounting for any of it.

If you can find a better definition of “absolute power,” I’d be curious to know what it is.

But I digress. In fact, let me digress even more – it’s probably important in order to understand. And for proof. Recently a movie, “The Good Shepherd,” resurrected in me a lot of memories (to say nothing of fears). I was, you see, “recruited” – I called it “shanghaied,” but euphemism like that one seems always singularly crucial to people like those in question here – by the CIA, specifically a man named Frank G. Wisner. Wisner was then titled the Director of what had become known as the Office of Policy Coordination. Policy. The name itself – euphemistically innocuous-sounding as it is - suggests what “the company” really was; even more, what it would become.

But even that doesn’t go deep enough into the verbal deception to which I refer, the deception that would swiftly become the hallmark of the CIA. “Deception,” said CIA Counter-Intelligence Director James J. Angleton, is a state of mind; it is also the mind of the state.” The supposed Office of Policy Coordination, you see, supposedly would have to do with counter-intelligence and espionage. What it did in fact was referred to – nothing like that was ever given anything like an actual name or title – as “executive action.”

How’s that for euphemism? “Executive Action” was, in fact, plain, old, murder - that’s with the corpus delicti-required “malice aforethought,” in case you wonder. I was told years later – decades, matter of fact – that in higher circles of the “Georgetown Set” that particular “Company” project was referred to as “Operation Ten,” or just “the ten specialists.” Even more years later, reading a book concerning the ill-fated invasion known as the Bay of Pigs, I recognized that the now apparently more numerous group was called “Operation 40.”

Which is the trouble with something like what I propose to do here. It was all a very long time ago, and I can’t remember things that didn’t seem significant then, but do now. In the U.S. Post-Truman era and things like MKULTRA and CIA Operations like Mockingbird, the public’s ability to examine data and facts and draw conclusion has been degraded to the point of almost animal-like gullibility and naiveté. One error or falsehood – supposed (on account of government argument, for instance) or otherwise – makes everything anyone says false, and a lie. The people who call themselves “Americans” despite there being thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere do not distinguish between falsehood by virtue of error and that by virtue of lie.

More, “Americans” and their spastic jurisprudence hold that the individual must remember everything about an incident or event – in total and absolute refutation and denial of scientific studies proving that untrue and impossible – or be labeled a liar. Watch an actual trial today or even its enactment for theater or television drama, should you doubt my word.

Nevertheless, I trust that historians of the future will do better, and for that reason I want to leave a record. An ardent historian, you see, I’ve come to realize how inaccurate the self-serving nature of man has made his story. Once only suspicious – that the result of a penchant for examining records, testimony, and journalism with mathematics and physics – I became certain once having taken part in events, then watched as their history was written. I’m reminded, as I was in writing “Letters,” of a quote from Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” the scientist and philosopher said, “no straight thing was ever made.” The fact is that any intensive study of history soon concludes that it is written by liars, the reason it is generally a lie. To quote an historian, H.G. Wells, “The social contract is nothing more than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug one another for the common good. Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual into the masonry of society.”

In 1967, as if to remove any doubt about that, a “CIA writer” named Thomas Braden published an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled, “I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral.” In the article, Braden wrote, “In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."

So, in other words, Congress should keep its nose out of the real government's affairs. Does that remind you of anything going on today? Maybe you ought to go back and read that part about trusting the absolutely corrupt to use their gossip only against terrorists. Think about it.

Oh, and while you're thinking about that, remember what Mr. Braden wrote about CIA morality, and about their attitude toward your elected representatives in our Constitutional democracy. On the CIA building at Langley, Virginia is the motto, “Seek ye the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Think about that, too.

The group of “specialists” – a little later, “assets” – who would one day comprise “Operation 40” were recruited for the stated purpose of assassination; specifically, that of the heads of foreign states. When in 1948, Frank G. Wisner was first appointed director of the Office of Special Projects, he was supposedly – that’s historically, meaning on the record - told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

You’ll note that that is a quote, from the record.

With all those duties, Wisner was, indeed, a very busy man, but he had two principle interests. One was everything having to do with propaganda and control of the public’s mind and opinion, things like Radio Free Europe (he referred to it as “The Mighty Wurlitzer”) and Operation Mockingbird. The other was what would soon morph from the World War Two Office of Special Services to the Tenth Special Forces. In the manner of the CIA House of Mirrors and everything it had to do with, the Special Forces served as a smoke screen for Operation Ten, men – and from what I concluded then, at least one woman – who had skills necessary to be effective assassins. The government was now in the business of murder.

And, notice, a “terrorist” then was called a “communist” (or just “commie”). To be the target for the chief executive's “executive action,” he just had to have the correct label. The language is very important, you know. It’s important because it’s the ring in the nose with which the behaviorally-conditioned “American” public - you – is led around. In the land of the free press, it’s reality.

The movie The Good Shepherd, incidentally, is singular to those with first hand knowledge in that its metaphorical mixing of events and CIA operations and inclusion of not only characters who are composites of real life principals, but the events in which they were participants, is so like both the principal character and the CIA itself. The movie, like its subject, James J. Angleton, the late Director of Counter-Intelligence I mentioned a minute ago, is a house of mirrors – and Operation Mockingbird, the operation to take over effective control of the news media in the U.S., was probably the first of the major deceits worked during its formative years.

Soon – almost immediately after he instigated Operation Mockingbird – Frank Wisner recruited a member of the fourth estate, a very prominent journalist, to run the project from inside the industry itself. In a few years, Wisner and the CIA had gained control by one means or the other of some of the most famous names in the radio, print, and television media, all journalists not only willing to promote the views of the “Briar Patch” (the private code name given it by my now deceased wife), but to write articles commissioned by the Wisner. At length, the CIA would actually employ writers, even establish a department of them, providing then with classified information to help them with their deceptive works. Never disclosed amounts of money – from its inception and by law(!), don’t forget, “the Briar Patch” had to account for nothing it spent - were used to bribe journalists and publishers.

The “nation of laws” was now in the business of bribery, too – and the objective was nothing less than to create a false, only virtual reality, in order to assure a public that would support U.S. participation in the Cold War arms race being planned and instigated.

If that weren’t enough, Frank G. Wisner and company were constantly looking for new devices by which to “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” the electorate – i.e., to convince them of the terrible dangers of communism. There seemed to be no limit or expense to which the agency would not go. In fact, it was none other than Wisner and the CIA who in 1954 arranged for the funding the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the allegorical novel written by George Orwell.

In short, so well was Operation Mockingbird and others like it prosecuted that the people of the United States, land of the free and a free press, languish under a lie made all the more insidious by its nature, one wherein the government lies to us while using our own money to conceal the fact of the lie itself. Behaviorally conditioned by massive mind and opinion control technology pioneered by none other that Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, the vast majority of people in the U.S. today are unaware that they live in a reality that is only virtual, a view of the world and their position in it prepared, constructed, and fed to them by virtual senses compromised of the news media.

Proof of the fact is all around, yet in Orwellian fashion, the U.S. public - all but invariably taught from birth that our press is free from such government control – remain unaware that our condition where awareness of the world and nation's condition and affairs is concerned is in fact even worse than that of places like Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union, nations where control of the press was overt and known to the public.

Ironically, Operation Mockingbird - the project designed to gain behavioral control of the taxpayer electorate - may well have been the most effective government program ever paid for with tax money.

Apparently, however, realization concerning the far-reaching possibilities of the Mockingbird propaganda technique came slowly even to the CIA and their military industrial complex masters. While from its inception in 1948, the CIA proceeded to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars for the sole purpose of deceiving, confusing, and keeping bewildered the public it purports to serve, the overall purposes of Mockingbird were those necessary to conduct of their newly “orchestrated” war – the so-called Cold War. The kind of behavior-warping “intelligence” that could motivate and lead the nation to send the sons and daughters of its poor and powerless into undeclared war after war was yet to come. Congress and the courts hadn't been adequately brain-washed yet, in other words.

Not that no one in government realized what was going on. Sometime in the early fifties, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover became wary – jealous, maybe - of the CIA's growing power. Describing OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdoes,” he quietly began carrying out investigations into their past, and didn’t take long to learn that some of those who had gotten his interests had been active in left-wing politics during the 1930s. Having obtained the “goods,” Hoover sought help from his friends in the Congress; the U.S. Senate, to be precise.

Pay attention, now, because there follows an object lesson – proof, even, of both what I’ve said about the “virtual reality” you live in, and the real character of the absolutely powerful. What does the term “McCarthyism” mean to you? Hold that thought while I tell you that the information obtained by Hoover and his FBI was passed to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now you know where I’m going, huh?

When McCarthy, armed – he thought – with Hoover’s irresistible ammunition, started attacking members of the Office of Policy Co-ordination, the ammunition supplied by Hoover included details of an affair Wisner once had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Caradja, Hoover claimed, was a Soviet agent known to the CIA as such. If that weren’t enough, McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA of being security risks. One of his first targets happened to be one Cord Meyer, not only hired by none other than CIA Director Allen Dulles himself, but working for Operation Mockingbird. When the Hoover and his FBI refused a security clearance for Meyer, Dulles came to his defense by refusing to permit an FBI interrogation of his man (does that sound familiar today?).

What’s crucial here is that Senator McCarthy didn’t realize what he was up against. When Wisner unleashed Operation Mockingbird on McCarthy, famous newsmen like Drew Pearson, Edward R. Murrow, and their like all lined up to go on the attack and McCarthy was permanently smeared by the press coverage “orchestrated” by the Mockingbird project people.

There has perhaps never been a more public and thunderously obvious example of how the U.S. public and history are controlled by the media and its military industrial complex federal masters than the saga of Senator Joseph McCarthy and what has become part of the language as “McCarthyism.” Remember the “Tail Gunner Joe” story, for instance? Look it up – read the award citation by none other than Admiral Chester Nimitz. “Tail Gunner Joe” was not only a real tail gunner, but one who flew at least twelve combat missions – missions he didn’t as an intelligence officer have to fly, and at least some while suffering from a broken leg.

No exactly the Joe McCarthy you think you know, huh?

Operations Mockingbird was also very active otherwise, things like during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, people like Henry Luce were not only able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz, but – while ostensibly devoid of any authority within the United States - CIA Director Allen W. Dulles was nevertheless somehow able to keep “left-wing journalists” from traveling to Guatemala. "Somehow" - illegally, in other words.

J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t the only one who could smell a rat. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower – the president whose valedictory address to the nation included both coinage of the expression “military industrial complex” and warning about the menace it represented - established a committee charged with keeping a check on the CIA and its covert activities. The 5412 Committee (also called the “Special Group” – still another "special," huh?) included the CIA director (! – does anybody wonder how that worked?), the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defense and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and “in the national interest.” It was also decided to include in the Special Group’s number a man who just happened to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Just happened to be.

However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee (I guess that’s how inclusion of the fox in the committee to watch the chicken coup worked; does that sound familiar?).

In peculiar fashion (considering the number of redundant levels of everything already evident in government of those days, maybe it wasn’t so peculiar; and maybe the old General of the Armies also had a trick or two up his sleeve), President Eisenhower in 1956 also appointed one David Bruce as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. POTUS Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA, a report that was delivered with speed uncharacteristic of such things even in those days. In it, Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today."

Ahem! – does that ring a bell? Today? Have you perhaps got an answer now for FoxNews and Bill O’Reilly’s rhetorical, “why do they hate us” question? Need I remind you that the Bruce Report was in 1955?

In his historically tremendous report, Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handling money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office?"

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Can anyone doubt that pundits of today – folks like those I’ve just mentioned - would have labeled Bruce a traitor? Or maybe you think Operation Mockingbird has just gone away – in loving concern for the freedom of the press. Sure it has.

Anyway, after a Frank G. Wisner successor, one Richard Bissell, lost his post as Director of Plans in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, a man named Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. Barnes immediately began planting editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA. In 1963 and thereafter, CIA hocus-pocus “orchestrated” a phony duel of monumental proportions between the agency and the news media. In it, journalists, publishers, and the news media ostensibly fought a successful war against CIA censorship. You bet they did.

One such book, entitled “Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross and published by Random House, “discovered” CIA links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also un-covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.

Reading the book at the time, I sat for an hour one night, staring at the wall. Holy crap, I thought, this "exposes" stuff that has to be among the worst-kept secrets in human history – what the hell is going on? I was shaking my head in wonder a couple days later when I learned in answer to my question of Operation Mockingbird’s “CIA writers” Programs - the house of mirrors, wherein the nation’s press apparently remained stalwart, an indefatigable defender of liberty. And they were winning, by god – the system worked. Jesus!

Think about it all. How likely do you think it is that an agency of government like the CIA – remind yourself of their all but absolute power, yoked with another like the Internal Revenue Service – in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “the power to destroy” – was and is unable to control the news media? Are you kidding?

Yeah. Even when further details of Operation Mockingbird were supposedly revealed during hearings by Senator Frank Church’s “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” the house of mirrors was in fact growing more effective. Nothing, perhaps, “deceives, confuses, and bewilders” the dumbed-down public like what CIA “tradecraft” has long called “limited hangout.” Spy jargon for a favored and frequently utilized gimmick, “limited hangout” is employed when a phony cover or story is in danger of being exposed, and the clandestine operative volunteers enough truth to misinform while providing a smoke and mirrors cover for the facts most key and potentially destructive to his operation.

Parenthetically, maybe you need to go back and review the chronology here. History, you know, make a lot more sense, sometimes, once you’ve done that.

To resume our story, the sucker public, of course, is so intrigued by the “exposé" – usually as smutty and tabloid-like (“shocking”) as it can be made – that it never thinks to pursue news of the matter further. In a few days, another “shocking” story emerges, and the old one is forgotten. These days, for instance, one rape, disappearance, or kidnapping of a woman, no matter how obscure, easily replaces – and hides from public view - even a war and staggering casualty figures, something we witness almost daily now.

Remember “limited hangout?” Keep it in mind.

According to the Congress report of the Church Committee investigation published in 1976, the CIA was spending (that was then; think about what they're spending now - it's your money) two hundred, sixty-five million dollars for the purpose of the "deceive, confuse, and bewilder" tactic - controlling what the public - you - thinks.

There was more - much more. Operation Mockingbird, among other things like Operation MKULTRA, was totally exposed. "Toast." The Church Committee had really gotten the goods on the CIA. You’re supposed to be – and you were – immensely impressed. “The system had worked again,” by god. What a great country! You betcha.

You didn’t know about “limited hangout.” The only trouble with it all was - is – summed up by a question. The question was - is - “So what happened?” The CIA fell from power – right? "Toast," like I said. Totally cowed by the might of the U.S. Congress, those Knights Templar of integrity and truthfulness, the House of Mirrors folks made everything right. The government went back to being the great protector of human rights everywhere, the home front included. The truth had been sought, and the truth now made us free.”

Sure - and that was 1973.

So, look around. What’s been happening? Today, January, 2007, I still love to read this damned thing (the Church Report, I mean). For instance, Senator Church’s committee comes up with this conclusion to his examination of it all: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”

Well, now – gee whiz. 1973 - remember?

Hmmmm. In 1977 - why the old news? - Carl Bernstein (Watergate, remember?) provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in Rolling Stone Magazine. In it, Bernstein asseverated that over a 25 year period, “more than 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA.”

Now, 2007, we have – just for the most mere of instance – FoxNews, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Followed by a lineup of broadcast “news media” propagandists – oops; analysts - that would have made Operation Mockingbird and the Mighty Wurlitzer creator Frank Wisner turn bright green with envy.

And - mirabile dictu (Latin - "wondrous to say") we’re in Iraq. Do you perhaps remember that upwards of sixty percent of the public said they were in favor of something so stupid both historically and otherwise that only my certain awareness of behavioral mind-bending programs by the military industrial complex, stuff like Operation Mockingbird, permitted me to believe it? And who was it that hornswoggled the nation into this Brobdingnagian sink hole for the taxpayers’ money and lives?

Well, who was it that for some, impossible-to-explain-by-any-known-rule-of-such-matters reason, got the Medal of Freedom a little while later? Can you imagine why? What was it that he did so well as to deserve a medal, the highest of its class there is?

You must have you forgotten the “limited hangout” maneuver already . . .?

My country, you’re so "easy" that it’s incredible, something “The Good Shepherd” now turns into something of an epiphany for me.

You don’t remember, for instance – there’s so much that I could fill volumes with it all – Yuri Nosenko. He’s in the movie, the guy who tells the Matt Damon’s character that the Soviet Union is really an empty shell, a straw man for our hero protectors to beat up on over the media’s Mighty Wurlitzer mind control machine. Kept in “solitary confinement,” the real Nosenko underwent 1,277 days of torture – “intense physical and psychological pressure.”

Torture. And that was 1964(?).

So, you think it’s only lately – with that eminently reasonable excuse, “terrorism” having replaced “communist” that we’ve started to torture prisoners. When “waterboarding” has joined “McCarthyism” in the “American” lexicon of “Mockingbird”-style truth, don’t you wonder what will come next? No, I don’t suppose. Nancy Grace will have diverted your attention with another of her lurid, “rape of the week” stories. The Super Bowl will be on, too. Important stuff.

The Soviet agent Nosenko, by the way, was perhaps never given LSD. No, the actual LSD scene came from a completely different episode in CIA history, one unrelated to the Matt Damon Jim Angleton. In the 1950s and early 1960s, on the other hands, the CIA gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds – the number their “limited hangout” of the time admitted - of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to determine if a person's mind could be controlled. One guy, a civilian researcher who worked for the Army, “jumped or fell” from the tenth floor of a hotel after he was secretly slipped LSD by the protectors of our freedom. That was 1953, but the CIA’s “limited hangout” didn’t admit that until 1975. The guy’s wife and kids were paid off in the process otherwise known as “settlement.”

By 1975, of course, the CIA had long since gone on to bigger and better things – “the state of the art.” And here we are, in what is probably the most incomprehensible state we’ve ever been in – “deceived, confused, and bewildered.” In the future, I’ll continue in the vein of what I’ve written here; meanwhile, tonight we’ll hear some more from Operation Mockingbird. Who knows, maybe there’ll be more of that “limited hangout” stuff.

They’ll call it the “state of the union” address.