Manchurian Journalism - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 7/27/24

and I got in touch with Lynn Colodney. He has since passed, but he wrote a book about the Watergate affair and about Bob Woodward, and his contention was that that Woodward had some undisclosed history that might be interesting for the American public to know, that being that that Woodward, or he was a reporter with the Washington Post, had been a naval in Naval Intelligence, and he had also been a White House or had been a briefer for Alexander Haigh in the White House. I've never seen that

reported before. I talked to Glen about that, and his book, originally published by Saint Martin's Press, was I think illustrative of this kind of issue of not knowing the public, not knowing the backstory in some things he did an interview with Bob Woodward. Woodward never effectively denied that relationship

with Alexander Haig. All of that preceded water Grate. Watergate colod News contention was that that there was a concerted effort to get Richard Nixon out of White House, and that much of what we know or understand about Watergate was not as it appeared that the Washington Posts expose. A was that parts of that story are missing. So these kinds of things, I think have happened throughout history. As certain storylines are adopted, they become a part of

American history. You ask anyone I think today, for instance, who ran the Chicago Mob in the nineteen twenties, and they will tell you it was al Capone. But al Capone never ran The Chicago Mob was run by a man was run by a man named Jake Guzi, who was a Russian Jew. And the Chicago Mob always characterized as the mafia as Italian, was never Italian. It was multi ethnic. It was Irish, it was Jewish, it was Russian, it was many different ethnicities that came together. And where

do you find that information? Where do you find the truth about about what the Mob's real origin was you have to find that from within the mob itself. And that's how I know about that. It is because I developed sources in the Chicago organization and was taken inside and actually did interviews with Jake Musick's son Charles, who had been a photographer for Damon Renyon, who had been

involved in the Hollywood elite. The Mob was very active with Hollywood, as most people that are interested in that known. But but but the myth in America about al Capone explains something in a way that gives us a false impression about what that history is. And I think there are many examples of that.

In many cases. The auspice of the CIA have important work to do, and I've known individuals, but then the CIA attended the fiftieth birth birthday party of the CIA station chief in Paris back in nineteen ninety. But the idea that there are cooperative groups, foundations that that provide front funding, organizations that go into banks and into law firms that that provide literally provide cover for domestic intelligence operations. Those are things that that should be talked about, that

that should be reported on. But was that reporters don't get that opportunity.

But Claudie reminded me that after the Saint Martin's Press published his book, the New York Times threatened to stop reviewing books for Saint Martin's Press. They didn't like Silent Coup. The you know, the the relationships that we don't know about Alan Dallas and his friendships with Washington Post and with other major outlets, his his relationships with with Charles Cabell, and the Dallas situations. Those are all things that we continue to think about and speculate about and wonder about

what the assassination was concerned. But we don't see investigative reporters digging into these relationships and explaining them very often. There there are fine exceptions to that. Uh David Talitt's book on Alan Dallas. There there have been a number of really good works on these subjects. David Price, uh uh, professor in Washington State, has written about the cia is recruitment of anthropologists and and uh we we all know. I think anyone who has paid attention to this knows

about the National Student Association. Now, the CIA filtrated, uh that organization in order to influence or react to Communist youth festivals and to efforts by by the Soviet Union to attract young people to communist ideas. I think so

many things, though we we don't know. Gloria Steinem, one of our premier journalists in this country, was part of that that same effort to react to Communist influences, and she participated in programs that In fact, it was Alex Gidney's father, Frank Gidney, who recruited her into that network.

She recruited people to come to her publishing class, and I went to Harvard Library and spent more than a week going through the Publishing courses archives, and that's where I discovered a letter from the course to Frank Giveney asking him to encourage Glorious him to come and talk to the next year's class. I tracked down the woman who wrote that letter those many years ago and had a delightful lunch with her in Cambridge, and she talked to me about Ben's history and the UH in the

intelligence community and these things I never mentioned. I've never seen much reported about about Gloria Steinem's activities with with the CIA, UH and CIA programs. I did try to talk to her on several occasions about that, but we've been to that opportunity. But those things.

towards what shouldar should not be published. To go beyond that, I think there's certainly some legitimacy to the idea that ultimately some things do get reported. We've seen that happen with the Kennedy assassination as we've learned more over the years to understand more about it. But how soon does it get published or how far do we go down the road before we realize what is or isn't true?

on many occasions about concerns over these issues. There were hearings in the nineteen seventies on the use of journalists by the CIA and the use of priests and academians and others as essentially resources for the agency, and it was fairly universally the use of journalists by the CIA was condemned by major journalists at the time in testimony and these hearings, and it gave the impression at the end that whatever had been done before was not being

done afterwards. But certainly, the programs as I saw them when I researched them, involving these recruiting efforts and the efforts to line up publishers in other countries and to win frames among publishing houses in the US, it was continuing well into the eighties. I can't say definitively what's happening in it.