PAGE 9
NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, AUGTEMBER 2006
SEARCHING FOR
HONEST HISTORY
M. Palmer and his 24 year old assistant J. Edgar
Hoover, conducted in 1919 what are popularly called the “Palmer
Raids” or “Red Raids," developing a data base and ordering the
smashing of labor union offices and headquarters of communist
and socialist organizations without search warrants, concentrat
ing on “foreigners.” That December, 249 of the arrested were
forced onto a ship headed for the Soviet Union. In January 1920,
another 6,000 were arrested without warrants, mostly members
of the Industrial Workers of the World ('Wobblies'). During one
raid, 4,000 “radicals" were grabbed in a single night, and all
“foreign aliens" were deported. By January 1920, Palmer and
Hoover had arrested more than 10,000 Americans.
During 1917-1918, as the United States entered World
War 1, President Woodrow Wilson created the Office of Military
Intelligence (OMI) in the War Department, to conduct whole
sale clandestine surveillance of U S. citizens suspected of
“disloyalty."
Before President Harry S. Truman established the
National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952, government cryptol-
ogists were ordered to conduct domestic spy hunts under Project
SHAMROCK. This was a super-secret operation that forced
private telegraph companies to turn over the telegraphic corres
pondence of Americans to the government. SHAMROCK began
in 1947, growing out of a World War 2 program that conducted
government censorship of international telegrams. Until the
program was shut down in 1975, the three major international
carriers (RCA Global, ITT World Communications and Western
Union International) delivered copies of messages on a daily
basis to the NSA.
The NSA kicked its large spy campaign into high gear in
the 1960s, especially under President Lyndon Johnson. The FBI
demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, Civil Rights
leaders, and drug peddlers.
The FBI's secret, illegal COINTELPRO (counterintelli
gence program) was conducted from 1956 to 1971, targeting
the Black Panthers, the American Indian and Civil Rights move
ments and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, among others.
The FBI admitted 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions, many
involving a variety of illegal operations, such as warrantless
phone taps (2,305), secret bugs against domestic targets (697),
and systematic interception of mail correspondence (57,846).
In 1967, the CIA initiated Operation CHAOS (and later
Project MERRIMAC and Project RESISTANCE), exceeding its
statutory authority in response to a Presidential request that the
agency discover ties between U.S. antiwar groups and “foreign
interests.” From 1967 to 1974, it indexed 300,000 names, kept
13,000 subject files, and intercepted voluminous letters and
cables tocompiie informaUo«-oe-domestteee<twResof~U-S'-— «►
'—
citizens.
However, there is evidence that Operation CHAOS
began much earlier — in 1959, when President Dwight Eisen
hower used the CIA to seek exiles who were fleeing Cuba after
Fidel Castro’s triumphant revolution. The CIA sought contacts
THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
John Negroponte, America's first czar of intelligence,
was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the first administration
of Ronald Reagan, from 1981 to 1985. Honduras, a “banana
republic” dominated by a coalition of the U.S. embassy, United
Fruit Company and the Honduran military, was a base of oper
ations for Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, who were more
accurately U.S. paid terrorist mercenaries hired to overthrow the
Sandinista government that had successfully revolted against the
U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.
As American ambassador, Negroponte obliquely
supervised military operations that included illegal funding of
the Nicaraguan Contras (Reagan’s “freedom fighters") and a
massive buildup of the Honduran armed forces, the construction
of bases, airfields and supply dumps. He chaperoned a 20-fold
increase in U.S. military aid to Honduras and defended the
country as a model of democracy while silencing reports of
killings and torture, and threatened dissenting Honduran officials
by accusing them of aiding communism.
A U.S. sponsored torture manual was written and
distributed to police and military in Central American countries
during the Reagan/Bush Sr. years to use against “leftist insurg
encies" — which belies current claims of only a few enlisted
“bad apples" torturing prisoners in Iraq and Guantamano.
“Negroponte would have been totally blind not to know
about human rights violations in Central America," a former
ambassador to Honduras prior to Negroponte has said, saying
that Negroponte’s claim of ignorance of torture and mass murder
by American-trained soldiers and rightwing death squads “is
inexcusable and his plea of non-culpability is a lie."
Honduras was not Negroponte’s introduction to covert
operations. He was political affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy
in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, a position that often serves as a
cover for CIA operatives, and from 1969 to 1971 was an aide
to Henry Kissinger in the Paris peace talks, reportedly criticizing
Kissinger for making too many concessions to the Vietnamese.
From 1971 to 1973 he was back in Vietnam working for the
National Security Council.
Negroponte seems to have been the quintessential fixit
man in dark circumstances, capable of countenancing torture
as well as the liquidation of political adversaries, union leaders,
student organizers and other opponents of American foreign
policy.
He didn’t have much opportunity to carry out his usual
routine as ambassador to Iraq — if the November 2004 obliter
ation of Fallujah is discounted — before President George W
Bush appointed him as chief spook of U.S. intelligence agencies
last year. His chief aide, Air Force General Michael V. Hayden,
mastermind of illegal NSA warrantless surveillance, has been
appointed CIA director.
Negroponte, dark knight and master Machiavellian
minister of the shadow world, literally has the whole world in
his hands.
-M ICHAEL McCUSKER
DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE
BY S. BRIAN WILLSON
PAUL SAHRE
in the exile community to recruit them for use against Castro
— arguably illegal, although Eisenhower ordered FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover to accept it as a legitimate CIA function. The
CIA considered this a normal extension of its authorized infil
tration of dissident groups abroad, even though the activity
was taking place within the United States. Disdain for Congress
permeated the upper echelons of the CIA. Congress could not
hinder or regulate what it did not know about, and neither the
President nor the director of the CIA told them,
~ T h e department of Defense, the Directorate for Civil
Disturbance Planning & Operations, and the U.S. Army Intelli
gence Command conducted domestic surveillance on thousands
of U.S. citizens throughout the 1960s. More than 1,500 Army
plainclothes agents worked out of 350 separate offices and
record centers to spy on ordinary U.S. residents. They operated
without authority from Congress, the President, or the Secretary
of the Army. Databanks were kept on as many as 100,000 indivi
dual entries, focusing on the feared Civil Rights movement and
the “New Left" anti-Vietnam War movement.The assumption was
that there were foreign influences in the Civil Rights and antiwar
movements. During 1967 to 1974, Presidents Johnson and
Richard Nixon repeated Wilson’s OMI activities through the Army
Security Agency, which worked with other military intelligence
units to illegally survey the communications and activities of U.S.
citizens who expressed opposition to the war. Called Operation
MINARET, It kept a watchlist of suspected Americans and
collected their phone calls and telegrams made in and out of
the country. The names were submitted to the NSA by other
agencies, because the targets were suspected of involvement
in terrorism, drug trafficking, threats to the President, and civil
disturbances.
The Department of Justice’s Internal Security Division,
established under President Nixon, worked with a vast network
of domestic intelligence agencies, including Nixon’s own ‘Huston
Plan’ (the “White House Plumbers"), acquiring information and
conducting 'dirty tricks’ on “persons and organizations not affili
ated with the Department of Defense.”
An intense debate erupted during the Gerald Ford
administration in 1975-1976 over the Presidential power to
TIMES EAGLE WORD SEARCH
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INSTRUCTIONS - CIRCLE EACH HID D EN W ORD, FOUND BELOW, IN THE
GRID ABOVE. W ORDS MAY BE HORIZONTAL, VERTICAL OR DIAGONAL,
FORWARD OR BACKWARDS. USE UNCIRCLED LETTERS - IN ORDER -
TO REVEAL A MESSAGE MEANT JUST FOR OUR READERS.
DON RUMSFELD
TORTURE
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eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence using
NSA. George H.W. Bush (director of the CIA), Donald Rumsfeld
(Ford's chief of staff) and Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld’s deputy) were
involved. Bush wanted to ensure “no unnecessary diminution of
collection of important foreign intelligence" under a proposal to
require judges to approve “terror” wiretaps. Bush complained
that some major communications companies were unwilling to
install government wiretaps without a judge’s approval, claiming
such refusal “seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence
community." President Ford supported what became the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton expanded the use of
warrantless searches to include entirely domestic situations
with no foreign intelligence value whatsoever. In a radio address
promoting a crime-fighting bill, President Clinton discussed a
new policy to conduct warrantless searches in “violent public
housing projects.”
Searching for honest history enables us to possess
a critical frame of reference in which to judge current policies,
and in which to reevaluate the authenticity of our supposed
constitutional republic.
S. Brian Willson, a longtime activist, started his war
opposition while serving in Vietnam in 1969. He lost both legs
when a train carrying nuclear materials refused to stop as he
lay across railroad tracks in protest in 1986 He is the Northern
California contact for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He
wrote this article for the Spring 2006 issue of the W A W publi
cation The Veteran.
A SHORTFALL OF CANDOR
Long before she committed suicide, Jean Seborg
claimed the FBI had destroyed her film career by spreading
false and malicious rumors about her because she supported
the Black Panthers. The FBI denied it. Finally, a week after
the actress overdosed on barbiturates, the FBI was forced to
change its story and release documents that proved she told
the truth all along.
The FBI decided to discredit her in 1970 because of
her public support of the Panthers. Agents spread the rumor
among Hollywood columnists that a Panther had made Seborg
pregnant. By many accounts she never had much of a career
(her major role was as Saint Joan in a film adaption of George
Bernard Shaw's play), but the planted rumor could not have
helped. Hollywood had never recovered from the McCarthy
era when it blacklisted its best writers and performers. And
what the FBI did to Seborg it did to thousands of others.
The FBI constantly broke the law in its mission to
destroy any organization or any individual who practiced beliefs
different than the standard orthodoxy. Its agents lied, slandered,
broke into private homes, stole from, assaulted, and even
murdered American citizens.
After conceding that it had committed high crimes
against Jean Seborg, the FBI insisted that the country take
its word nothing of the sort will happen again.
Of course we will believe the FBI that it will reform
itself, like we have countless times before We have not yet
been abused that one time too many, it seems We will raise
holy hell that our freedoms are being taken away when a city
council wants to keep cars off the beach, but when it comes
to opposing the powerful forces destroying our most vital rights
and freedoms, we bow and scrape and allow them to deceive
us again, to kick us again
-M ICHAEL McCUSKER
(NOTE 9/14/1979)