(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 42)
    Winter 2001/2
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Issue 42    

Cold War Stories

US deception operation blowback

The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March.

'At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to produce more lethal chemical and biological agents. He was referring to David Wise's book, Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas. [Cassidy was a US Army sergeant who the FBI "dangled" before a Soviet naval attaché in 1959 and who then served as a double agent for the FBI for the next two decades...... During that time, in addition to it's counter-intelligence goals, the Cassidy operation was used in a strategic deception effort. Cassidy fed his Soviet handlers with false information designed make them believe the US had a large chemical weapons program and to lead their chemical weapons scientists down a dead end research path.] .........the deception ultimately worked against US interests by spurring the Soviets to develop more lethal chemical and biological agents and may also have heightened Cold War tensions by leading them to falsely believe that the US was secretly violating the Biological Weapons Convention, thus encouraging them to do so. (2)

The US and the slaughter in Indonesia

'The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be.'

So wrote the American ambassador in Indonesia to William Bundy, then assistant Secretary of State for SE Asia, in 1965. The document discussed US funding of the KAS-Gestapu movement which, as the ambassador reported, was 'still carrying burden (sic) of current repressive efforts targeted against the PKI. [Indonesian communist Party]'

That 'burden' is a reference to the killing of between 100,000 and 1 million people, though the embassy in Indonesia was uncertain about the numbers. In a message of 15 April 1966 to Washington, the embassy acknowledged:

'We frankly do not know whether the real figure' [of communists who have been killed] is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000 but believe it wiser to err on the side of the lower estimates, especially when questioned by the press.'

Wiser indeed!

This official confirmation of all the research by the likes of Peter Dale Scott (3) came in a document released as part of a State Department history that details the U.S. role in Indonesia's deadly purge of 'communists' in the 1960s. The volume concerned also points out that the US embassy supplied lists of communist leaders to the Indonesians who were trying to destroy the PKI. The embassy said the lists were

'......apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem to lack even the simplest overt information on PKI leadership.'

And they wonder why large chunks of the world hate them!

This material was posted on the Net by the National Security Archive at http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52

The American protectorate of Italy

Philip Willan, author of Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991) reported in the Guardian 26 March 2001 (4) the remarks of Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975. Maletti said that his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany. Maletti said:

'The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism...............The impression was that the Americans would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left.............Among the larger western European countries, Italy has been dealt with as a sort of protectorate. I am ashamed to think that we are still subject to special supervision.' (Emphasis added.)

Protectorate is a good 1930s word which fits rather well. Britain as another US protectorate? (5)

Garrison and Permindex again

In an article in the American journal The Wilson Quarterly of Spring 2001, Max Holland reexamined Jim Garrison's investigation of the assassination of JFK and concluded that he was at least in part inspired to do so by some Soviet disinformation about the case. Yes, we are back with the story of Clay Shaw, Permindex, CMC et al, which has been running in the margins of the JFK literature since the late 1960s. Briefly, 5,000 words boiled down into 30, the story was that an organisation called Permindex (from Permanent Industrial Exhibition), together with a partner company, CMC, were CIA fronts and they organised the assassination. The Permindex material ended up as the centre of one of the samizdats in the field, The Torbitt Memorandum. I remember getting a copy from Harry Irwin in the late 1970s and being rather taken with it: it contained lots of names, some familiar, and some putative sources; and it was 'underground' and therefore sexy. But the sources I checked in Torbitt were spurious: the citations did not support the document's allegations. (6) This Permindex/CMC material is a fake and should have been ditched long ago.

In 1983 the co-founder of this magazine, Steve Dorril, showed in an article in Lobster 2, that all the Permindex stuff came the Italian paper Paese Sera, which was known to run Soviet disinformation. (Dorril's story is now on the net.) Although he is aware of it, Holland doesn't refer to Dorril's article, but puts evidence showing that Garrison picked up the Permindex material from European sources together with a paragraph from the Metrokhin material, not included in the book, The Mitrokhin Archive, co-authored with Christopher Andrew. That paragraph, allegedly from notes made by KGB archivist Mitrokhin, reads:

'Disinformation Operations of the KGB through Paese Sera...... In 1967, Department A of the First Chief Directorate conducted a series of disinformation operations...... One such emplacement in New York was through Paese Sera.' (7)

Holland found one reference - said 'emplacement' - exactly where you would expect to find KGB disinformation in America: not in the New York Times or Washington Post but in a New York lefty magazine, the National Guardian. (8) Its Rome correspondent had simply recycled the Paese Sera story about Permindex and CMC.

As a JFK theory Permindex wasn't much cop. But as a piece of disinformation it was really terrific. Holland calls it 'the single most effective active measure undertaken by the KGB against the United States.' Which it might be; and, yes, indirectly it led to a major movie, Oliver Stone's JFK. But Holland tries to make the Garrison/Permindex material the kind of inner motor of the JFK conspiracy research activity since 1968; and this is just baloney. Holland cannot resist trying to puff up his thesis:

'Garrison's real legacy was not his investigation, but the public memory of his allegations. During a tumultuous, lurid time, he capitalized on gnawing public discontent with the Warren Report, legitimated a critique based on a hoax, and insinuated a false notion about CIA complicity that has grown in the public imagination ever since.'

He wants us to accept this syllogism:

But very few among the JFK assassination community have taken Permindex, or anything from Garrison's inquiry, seriously. One of the ironies here is that for all the CIA's attempts to penetrate and screw-up Garrison's inquiry, the Soviets did it, by accident.

Holland quotes a survey showing 20% fewer Americans accepted the Warren Commission's verdict on the Dallas shooting after the start of Garrison's inquiry than before it. But even if we accept this reported swing at face value, it hasn't been the spin-off from Garrison which kept the thing alive after 1967; it has been the CIA revelations in the context of an unpopular war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr King, and the work of other, more substantial, JFK researchers.

CIA admits overestimating Soviet weapons

Newly declassified documents in the US show that the CIA exaggerated the Soviet Unions missile programme.

'The summary of a 1989 CIA internal review said every major intelligence assessment from 1974 to 1986 - a period covering at least three presidencies - "substantially" overestimated the Kremlin's plans to modernise and expand its strategic nuclear arsenal......'

The study attributed this to a number of reasons, including the intelligence community's failure 'to correctly understand Soviet military requirements'. Intelligence analysts also relied on the rate of a massive Soviet missile buildup in the late 1960s 'as a guide for future deployment rates, but that rate of deployment was never approached again', the study said.

The report quoted Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA Soviet analyst, who said:

'the study bolstered criticism that intelligence assessments of the Soviet threat were deliberately inflated to justify increases in U.S. defence spend-ing and nuclear forces, as well as SDI.'

Goodman was one of those in the Agency who did not believe that the KGB - or its Bulgarian allies - had run Ali Agca at the Pope. (9)

Notes

1 stuff@intelforum.org - this ceased in October owing to the illness of its moderator, John McCartney.

2 See also, for example, Daily Telegraph, 12 March, Ben Fenton, 'US blunder "triggered global germ bomb race"'.

3 See Scott's essay in Lobster 20 or go to Scott's Website http://socrates.berkeley.edu/

4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,462976,00.html

5 On things Italian, there was a very interesting 'Diary' by Tobias Jones in the London Review of Books, 8 March 2001, which discussed, inter alia, the murder of left-wing journalist Mauro de Mauro in 1970. Jones tells us that the study of the covert operations in Italy in the 1970s is now described as dietrologia - literally 'behindology'.

6 I discussed Torbitt in Lobster 32, p. 45. Although the Soviet source of the Permindex material is proven, in my view, the author of 'Torbitt' remains unknown.

7 On the list intelforum on 29 August were posted some comments on Mitrokhin by the chief of the public affairs bureau of the Russian intelligence service SVR Boris Labusov. These included the following:

'.....analysis of the book makes clear..... that the material consists of fragmentary information, received from different sources. In other words, this is a compilation..... over a third of the book deals with developments which took place after 1984, when Mitrokhin had ceased working at the SVR. Andrew Christopher [sic], author of the book, has transferred whole pages to it which have earlier been published in another book, The KGB from Lenin to Gorbachev [which Andrew co-authored with Oleg Gordievsky] ......simple calculation makes clear that working through the roughly 400,000 documents which were taken from the country, was physically impossible .........If we assume that he really took notes from archive documents over a period of twelve years, from 1972 to 1984, which came to roughly 2400 working days, then we are talking about 150 documents a day! Is it possible to work through that much text?'

8 Holland calls this 'influential'. Oh, really? With whom?

9 Reported in Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, March 9, 2001 at http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/03/09/national/NUKES10.htm. On Goodman and the Agca nonsense see Wesley K. Wark (ed) Espionage, Past, Present, Future? (London:Frank Cass, 1994), pp.37/8.

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