VOICES OF EMPIRE:FROM CIA’s CULTURAL GREAT GAME TO GLOBAL GREAT GAME TODAY

worked during the Second World War at the Research and Analysis department of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was acquainted with Allen Dulles-America’s chief of espionage in Europe during the World War II, since 1951 CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations, “the inspiration” behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the brother of John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State, 1953-59). In May 1949, Allen Dulles conducted the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), which was “one of the CIA’s most ambitious fronts.” (Saunders, p. 130).  He proposed to Schlesinger in 1950 to “sit on” the Executive Committee of Radio Free Europe, which was launched that year by the CIA. Radio Free Europe began broadcasting in 1951. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a broadcast organization which was founded as an anti-communist source of news and information during the Cold War. Its current official “mission is to promote democratic values and institutions by reporting the news in countries where free press is banned by the government or not fully established.” (rferl.org, visited on Feb. 8, 2010). From its current headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, RFE/RL broadcasts in 28 languages (including Pashto, Dari/ Farsi [Persian] and Arabic) to 20 countries (including Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, and Iraq). The author and writer William Blum, a former U.S. State Department employee until 1967, who resigned from his job because of his disillusionment with American foreign policy, writes: “In actuality, the CIA covertly funded almost all of the cost [of RFE/RL] until 1971; exposure of the [Central Intelligence] Agency’s role in 1967…led to Congress eventually instituting open governmental financing of the stations.” Blum criticizes the broadcast stations that although they  “served the purpose of filling in some of the gaps and correcting the falsehoods of the Communist media”, they “could not escape presenting a picture of the world, both East and West, shot through with their own omissions and distortions.”  Blum adds that their “mission in life was to emphasize was whatever could make the Communist regimes look bad.” Blum quotes Victor Marchetti, former senior official of CIA, “the primary value of the radios was to sow discontent in Eastern Europe, and in the process, to weaken the communist governments.”[Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, 1975, pp. 204-206].  Blum observes that “many”  of the Russians hired by various  radio stations, “which broadcast  at length  about freedom, democracy and other humanitarian concerns, were later identified by the U.S. Justice Department as Hitler’s notorious Einsatztruppen [Operation Forces].” Also, Blum points to German war criminals, who “were employed by the CIA in a variety of anti-Soviet operations.” (William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, updated ed., 2004, pp.118, 59-61).

Arthur Schlesinger was falsely accused of as “Harvard Communist” by reporter John Fox in 1954. Schlesinger, “the Cold War theologian” Reinhold Niebuhr, James T. Farrell, Richard Revere of the New Yorker, former Socialist Party chairman and six times candidate for U.S. president, Norman Thomas, and Partisan Review  editor Philip Rahv belonged to the moderate camp of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom ( ACCF), which was founded in New York in 1951.  This organization’s first chairman was Sidney Hook( a “contract consultant” for the CIA), as well as it was “the official American affiliate” of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.  Through its front organizations, the CIA could conceal its involvement from public view. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom, the  Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the National Committee for a Free Europe were front organizations of CIA, which “had a power of veto” over front activities (Saunders, pp. 57-59, 203).

Three seminal books served as an effective weapon in the psychological warfare: The Vital Center by a leader of anti-communist liberals Arthur Schlesinger (1949); The God That Failed by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler (1949); and British novelist George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).  All these three books were designed to convert the disillusioned non-communist Left to the Western liberal democracy. Recapturing  overseas opinion leaders (such as journalists, commentators, artists, professors and scientists) to the cause of ‘liberty and freedom’ necessitated  a program for  “ ‘learned operations like seminars, symposia, special tomes, learned journals, libraries, exchange of persons, endowed  professorships etc.’” (Saunders, p.151). U.S. Professor of History Howard Zinn wrote about the fade of anti-communist films: “Between 1948 and 1954, more than forty anti-Communist films came out of Hollywood.” (A People’s History of the United States, op.cit., p. 428).

In Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the “Cultural Scientific Conference for World Peace” was organized (March 1949) by leftists including Soviet delegates.  To marginalize the communist propaganda, an international counter-committee was established, which was comprised of  the following prominent intellectuals:  Benedetto Croce ( 1866-1952: Italian critic, politician, cultural historian, and philosopher who rejected Karl Marx’s determinism); T.S. Elliot( 1888-1965: American-born English poet, playwright with religious orientation, and literary critic-arguably  one of “the most daring innovators” of the twentieth-century poetry); Karl Jaspers (1883-1969: German philosopher and psychiatrist, who was one of the originators of existentialism and had influenced theology, psychiatry and philosophy) ; Andre` Malraux (1901-1976: French novelist, art historian, and statesman for many years as Frances’s minister of information and minister of cultural affairs) ; Jacques Maritain (1882-1973: converted to Catholicism, he was French philosopher, political thinker, and a prominent interpreter of the theology of the thirteenth-century influential Italian philosopher and Roman Catholic theologian  Saint Thomas Aquinas-he considered philosophy as ancilla theologiae[handmaid of theology]) ; Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) a British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic-most known for his work in analytic philosophy and mathematical logic.  Also, he was noted for significant contribution to education, history, political theory, religious studies, as well as for his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests. Russell was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.  He criticized Stalinism/Soviet totalitarianism and U.S. war in Vietnam); Igor F. Stravinsky (1882-1971: Russian-born pianist and conductor, major composer of the 20^th century, and since 1946 naturalized U.S. citizen); and Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965: Alsasian-German theologian, humanitarian, philosopher and medical doctor; he obtained Ph.D. dissertation on the religious philosophy of Emanuel Kant in 1889 and M.D. degree in 1913. He was doctor and surgeon in the hospital he founded at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa where he died and  was buried. He was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life”[Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben]. From 1952 until his death, Dr. Schweitzer was engaged in protest against nuclear tests and nuclear weapons with the father of modern physics, German-born American Dr. Albert Einstein[1879-1955] and British philosopher Bertrand Russell)-see Saunders, pp. 45-48, and other electronic sources.

“The Farthfield Foundation was a CIA foundation and there were many such foundations,” said CIA agent  Tom Braden. He was working for Allen Dulles, CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations, as “one of his most dashing” OSS officers. (Saunders, pp. 127, 95). Maintaining cultural freedom was an expensive project.  From 1950-1967, CIA has to spend tens of million dollars on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and connected projects.  With such a pledge, the CIA was the de facto U.S. “Ministry of Culture.” (ibid, p.129). U.S. diplomat and strategist George Kennan “never felt the slightest pangs of conscience” about the fuss regarding CIA money. The United States did not have “Ministry of Culture”, and the CIA just “filled] the gape”, Kennan concluded(ibid., p.408). CIA had a “cover branch” for supplying funding cover, namely foundations of private citizens, such as Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Farthfield Foundation, etc. “Over 170” foundations are reported to have willfully promoted CIA funding ‘passes’.” There was a joke about the words or used in connection with foundations: “if any American philanthropic or cultural organization carried the words or in its literature, it must  be a CIA front.” (ibid., pp. 135-136).  One and the same, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation were “an integral component of America’s Cold War machinery.”

Nelson Rockefeller’s brother David was an important multi-functional man:  He was a trustee of the Council of Foreign Relations, Chairman of the Executive Committee for International House, and “close friend” of  Allen Dulles and Tom Braden. With Dulles permission, Braden “often briefed” David Rockefeller on what they were doing. Sometimes David would provide Braden with money for doing things that were not covered by CIA budget.  This way, CIA “never came to the equation”, recalled Braden in an interview, Virginia, August 1996.  “These freelance transactions” , continues the author Frances Stoner Saunders, “gave new meaning to the governmental buccaneering, and were an inevitable bi-product of the semi-privatization of American foreign policy during these Cold War years.” (pp. 144-145).  The President Eisenhower (1953-1961) “splurge” was continued by the desire of President Kennedy administration’s “productive relationship” with artists. “156 of the more famous of them” were present at his inaugural ceremonies.  Many Cold Warriors enjoyed the imperial-inspirational aura, as one admirer reminded Kennedy just ten days after his inauguration: Similar to the pride of Romans expressed in the phrase , now once again Americans can enjoy “civis Americanus sum” (I am an American citizen).  This was, in a way, indicating membership in Roman civilization.  Lord Palmerston (June 25, 1850), was proud to announce that every British citizen in the world “should  be protected by the British Empire.” This proud boast was repeated by President Kennedy in his speech in West Berlin (June 26, 1963) in this form:  “Ich  Bin ein Berliner”(I am a Berliner). After the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided, and 96-mile (155 km) long and nearly 12-foot high wall separated West and East Berlin. In his speech, President Kennedy used the construction of the Berlin Wall as an example of the incompetence of communist regime: “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”  Twenty-four years later in 1987, President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev  to “tear down this wall!” From the western perspective, the wall was designed to prevent East Berliners escaping to the West and freedom. William Blum was a U.S. State Department employee until 1967. He resigned from his job because of his disillusionment and opposition to American foreign policy. He is the  founder of Washington Free Press, author and writer.  To William Blum, the wall was constructed for two reasons: First, “The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers….This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East.  As one indication of this, the New York Times reported [June 27, 1963, p.12]: .”  Second, “during the 1950s, American coldwarriors” in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) launched “a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany [the Democratic Republic of Germany] designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear.” Blum describes the CIA and other US intelligence and military services operations as follows:  They “recruited, equipped, trained and financed” East and West German “activist groups and individuals, … to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies[communists] look bad.” (William Blum, “Another Cold War Myth: The Fall of the Berlin Wall”, Counterpunch, October 2-4, 2009). Professor Huntington’s book (Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of  the World Order, 1996) has attracted not only the attention of the world’s intellectual community, but also his thesis “was dominating the U.S. political scene” since the 911 attacks ( September 11, 2001; see bellow).

THE COLD WAR  IS OVER, LONG  LIVE  THE  “CLASH OF CIVILIZAIONS”?

The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989. Twenty years later, on November 9, 2009, the fall of the Berlin Wall was commemorated in Berlin, which welcomed many heads of states and governments. How can you celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall without even saluting to the Afghan nation that tore the “Iron Curtain” and broke down the Berlin Wall?! After the end of  World War II, former allies went from  cooperation to confrontation, and the Cold War started.  After the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991, the “clash of civilizations” started. We cannot get away from the fact that without an “enemy” there will be a vacuum in news coverage as in politics.  The alliance of Christian-Western and Islamic-Eastern civilizations defeated the Soviet aggression against Afghanistan (1979-1989).  Both allied civilizations enjoyed their victory over the “Godless Communism” of the Cold War.  Listen to Huntington:  “To Americans and Westerners generally Afghanistan was the final, decisive victory, the Waterloo, of the Cold War….What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam[emphasis added]” (Clash of Civilizations, 1996,pp.246-247).  Soon after the demise of the Soviet Communism, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”(Atlantic Magazine, 1990) by the veteran Orientalist  Professor Bernard Lewis, The End of History and the Last Man by Professor Francis Fukuyama(Free Press 1992), and “The Clash of Civilizations?” by Professor Huntington (Foreign Affairs, summer 1993-expanded to a book in 1996) emerged.  Generally, the West discovered Islam (officially radical Islam) as the “New Communism”. Thus, a dangerous adversary was identified, and so a vacuum no more existed.  The three professors (Lewis, Fukuyama and Huntington) are more or less clamoring for a religious-civilizational war, a global equivalent of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648 in Europe. (See Rahmat Zirakyar, “Relocate United Nations to Jerusalem to Harmonize Civilizations”, January 2008, pp. 13-14; electronic version).                                                                                                              Internationally renowned U.S. scholar Professor Noam Chomsky comments on Blum’s book (Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 2004,):  “Far and away the best book on the topic.”  A major U.S. intellectual, author and speaker Gore Vidal “enjoyed it immensely.” Blum writes: “The Cold Wars is Over. Long Live the Cold War.”  After the end of the Cold War, the death of International Communist Conspiracy, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact,“There was none of the ” for anyone. “Nothing changed in American foreign policy” and  even NATO, which was created for the protection of Western Europe against Soviet invasion, “remained, ever increasing in size and military power, a treaty on wheels which could be rolled in any direction to suit” U.S. current foreign policy. Blum comes to the conclusion that  “the whole thing had been a con game. The Soviet Union and something called communism pr se had not been the object of Washington’s global attack. There had never been an International Communist Conspiracy.  The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire;” continues Blum, “by whatever names the U.S. gives to the enemy: communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist…”  Blum compares attack on “symbolic buildings” to the retaliation of a “symbolic country”:  “The 11 September terrorists had chosen symbolic buildings to attack and the United States then chose a symbolic country to retaliate against.”

CONCLUSIONS

“The illusion of dissent [in democracy]” was carried on:  The CIA backed up “socialist and cold warriors, black and white warriors”.  In his article “CIA: The Great Corrupter” (Feb. 1967), Andrew Kopkind stated that the “sham pluralism…was utterly corrupting.” Two other intellectuals Jason Epstein in 1967 and Connor Cruise O’Brien in 1966 criticized that “second-class passengers were travelling first class.”(Saunders, pp 409 & 473, footnote 9 to chapter 26). Robert Lowell (1917-1977), the son of U.S. Navy Commander T.T.S. Lowell, was one of the distinguished U.S. poets of the day, and a friend of Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. He became skeptical after participating in a White House dinner (May 11, 1962) in honor of the  French author and Minister of Culture Andre` Malraux, a player in the CIA’s cultural Great Game: “Then the next morning you read that the Seventh Fleet had been sent somewhere in Asia.”  He believed that “the real government was somewhere else”, namely, “something much closer to the Pentagon [Defense Department] was really running the country.”(This sounds something like Military-Industrial Complex). Robert Lowell “feels[s] we intellectuals play a very pompous and frivolous role-we should be windows, not window-dressing.” (Quoted in Saunders, pp. 344-45).  Frances S. Saunders  finishes her book with this fascinating paragraph: “Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia’ for the ‘Golden Days’ of American intelligence, lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante…went to Yale [University] and were educated in civic virtue,  recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections , gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew [foreign] governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster[ failed U.S. invasion of Cuba during the early months of John F. Kennedy administration]. ‘In the name of what?,’ asked one critic ‘Not civic virtue, but empire’.” (p. 427).   Listen to the voices of the empire now: In the aftermath of  the Cold War end, the empire declared in 1992:  “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union….we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging  our leadership or seeking to overrun the established political and economic order….we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” (Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999, as quoted from New York Times, March 8, 1992 by Blum). The Project of New American Century (PNAC) is a neoconservative think tank created in 1997. Its goal is “to promote American global leadership”.  PNAC’s statement of principles was signed by 25 Americans, including: William Benet, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. William Kristol, who was the son of Irving Kristol (an important figure during the CIA’s cultural Cold War), was the chairman of PNAC.  In its report we can read: “Our military requires a dramatic transformation, lest we lose our ability to fight the future unconventional wars…some may be fought in cyber space, others under water or in outer space. And some even within our bodies.”(PANAC-“Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, 2000) As the empire expands, a base in every neighborhood is needed to quell any challenge to imperial rule:  Subsequent to “ its bombing” of Iraq in 1991, the United States “wound up with military bases” in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.  Subsequent to its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the empire “wound up with military bases” in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia. Next to “its bombing” of Afghanistan in 2001-2002, the empire “wound up with military bases” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzistan, Georgia, Yemen and Djibouti. “Following its bombing” of Iraq in 2003, the empire “wound up with Iraq.” In the aftermath of 911 catastrophe, President George W. Bush (2001-2009) said: “we will smoke them [Bin Laden and his warriors] out of their holes.”(This sounds like exorcism. See: Joshua Gunny, “The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology”, 2004, in quistia.com; [Feb. 15, 2010]).  U.S. Secretary of State Collin Powell declared in February 2002 that “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before.” Also, later that year, the U.S. Defense Department announced that  the U.S. military “is currently deployed to more locations then [than] it has been throughout history.”  U.S. Army Major General Franklin Hagenbeck speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shahikot Valley in Afghanistan (March 2002): “We leveled it. There was nobody left, just dirt and dust.” (For above quotations, see William Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 382-391). If history and the physical world exists “only in mind”, and if the mind itself is manageable-what then?! Following the war of “dirt and dust” in the Pashtun areas, the “war of perception” was launched on February13, 2010 on Marja town in Afghanistan.  If war is “a brutal and ugly enterprise”, then the war on Marja might be less brutal and ugly: a real war sprinkled with mind control plus the use of battle tanks with missiles, rocket launchers…, helicopter gunships, and probably some physical nations building with ugly scars on the mind of Afghans who have a culture of resistance. And here, it goes again: Marja (Afghanistan, 2010) = Fallujah (Iraq, 2004). For war on Marja, see: Christian Science Monitor, February 14, 2010; electronic version. Global Research’s frequent contributor  Bill Van Auken quotes Stratfor, a global intelligence website “with close ties” to the U.S. administration, as follows: “the assault is likely to include the cordoning off of the area, so many of the fighters dedicated to its defense will probably be forced to fight to the death or surrender.”(“US to Launch Fallujah-style Attack in Afghanistan”, in Global Research.ca [Feb. 14, 2010]. Van Auken continues to explain that US military command wants to set an “example of a population center known as a center of resistance” to empire. President Obama should know that the city of Marja cannot be rebuilt once your military poisons it (like Tora Bora in 2001-2002) and its environs with depleted uranium, tungsten (chemical element W[olframium]) and other toxins?  Depleted uranium contaminates food, water, air and land for ever, and it is the ultimate “dirty bomb.”(See: “Current Issues-Depleted Uranium Weapons in Afghanistan”; last updated July 22, 2009; in wise-uranium.org [Feb. 14,  2010] ). German Federal Defense Force (Bundeswehr) manual disputed U.S. and U.K. denial  over depleted uranium use in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora area:  “During the operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ in support of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban-Regime, US-aircraft used, amongst others, armour-piercing incendiary munitions  with a DU-core [DU: Depleted Uranium].” (Translated from German), Zentrum fuer Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr: Leitfaden fuer Bundeswehrkontingente in Afghanistan, Stand: 11/2005, pp. 1-11 (written by German “Federal Defense Force’s Center for Communication). Prof. of Medicine at Georgetown University Dr. Asef Durankovic writes that Natural uranium was “found in drinking water and in urine of civilians in Eastern Afghanistan.” (Military Medicine, vol. 170, No 4 (April, 2005), pp. 277-284; electronic version [Feb. 14, 2010]. Reports point to “spontaneous abortion among women and animals” in Tora Bora area of Eastern Afghanistan. (For more information, see: Afghanistan after ‘Democracy’: The Untold Story through Photographic Images” by Dr. Mohammed Daud Miraki; electronic version; and “Silent WMDs-Effects of Depleted Uranium” by Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, former chief of the Naval Staff, India, February 29, 2004/Conference Hosted by the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development, February 29, March 1-2, 2004; electronic version [February 15, 2010]).   End: February 15, 2010