Richard V. Allen
“The reality is that we are a country like any other, with good and evil people, the strong and the weak, noble and criminal acts, with truth often hidden under deception and propaganda.”
James K. Galbraith
Richard V. Allen was a member of the US National Security Council (NSC), appointed to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB) Advisory Committee November 2001; a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution 1983-present (although his involvement with the Institution predates that); a founding member of Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and still with the Advisory Board; one of the key members of the Project for the New American Century; a member of the Heritage Foundation; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; The Nixon Center Advisory Council (he was Nixon’s foreign policy coordinator in 1968), a member of the International Crisis Group, on the Board of Trustees U.S. National Committee for Pacific Basin Economic Cooperation, Founding Member; German-American Tricentennial Foundation, Chairman; Republican National Committee, Senior Counselor; American Alternative Foundation, Board of Directors; Vice President U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea; Board of Directors Freedom House; American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus; Senior Counselor for Foreign Policy and National Security; Republican Platform Committee Senior Policy Adviser in 1984, 1980, and 1976; Former Member, Advisory Council on National Security and International Affairs and Chairman of its Subcommittee on Intelligence and of course an adviser of the Committee on the Present Danger.
Allen’s government service includes the Defense Policy Board, 2001-present. During the Reagan Administration (when he was with the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies) he was Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 1981-1982; Chief Foreign and Defense Policy Adviser to Reagan Campaign, 1977-1980. In the Nixon Administration he was Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs and Deputy Executive Director of the Council on International Economic Policy, 1971-1972; Member, President’s Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy (Williams Commission), Early 1970s; National Security Council Senior Staff Member, 1968; Director of Foreign Policy Research for Nixon Presidential Campaign, 1968.
On the business side of things there is the Richard V. Allen Company, AEA International Trade and Management Consultants: Former Chairman, Mid-1990s, Credit International Bank: Chairman, 1988-1991, Allen also works as a financial consultant Potomac International Corporation of which he was the Co-founder and President, 1972-1980.
Our study of him also focuses on his involvement with the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, which is a somewhat neglected area of his career—why was such a right-wing American anti-communist propagandist devoting his attention to the minor backwater of the UK in the 80s? Well despite all the organisations outlined above he had some time on his hands.
According to Right Web:
“Allen came into possession of a $1,000 gratuity paid in cash from a Japanese magazine, intended for Nancy Reagan in exchange for an interview she had given, which money he placed in a White House safe and then reportedly forgot. Also, it was belatedly discovered that around the same time, Allen had accepted three expensive watches as personal gifts from Japanese friends who were high-level governmental consultants. As a result of these disclosures, Allen was forced to leave his NSC post in early 1982.”
Allen is still very active today, despite his expertise on the cold war being redundant, and is part of the Washington, D.C. staff of global communication consultancy APCO and is cited by the Council of Public Relations Firms as part of their team who are:
“… well positioned to help identify contract opportunities, navigate the complex award process both in Washington and in Baghdad, and position clients with major contracting parties and the U.S. government’s key appointees in Baghdad.”
Allen is also a Counsellor of Layalina Productions, Inc. (a US public diplomacy operation) which produces “informative and entertaining Arabic-language programming for licensing to satellite and cable television networks throughout the Arab Middle East and North Africa.” Fellow members are a ‘Who’s Who’ of US political luminaries such as James A. Baker, III, Samuel R. Berger, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn, George P. Shultz. Given what these men have been involved in over the past decades, Layalina Productions has set itself the challenging goal of addressing “the negative stereotypes about the United States by providing Arabic-speaking television viewers with programming that is honest, positive, and entertaining.” President George H.W. Bush is Honorary Chairman of the Board. According to a Washington Post report of March 14, 2008, Allen runs the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and his consultancy work, in opening up business opportunities, have long entailed a certain sailing close to the wind — and several scandals, resignations forming a familiar pattern according to a Right Web profile.
National Insecurity
NSDD-32 proclaimed that it was U.S. policy to “neutralize” Soviet control of Eastern Europe by supporting underground movements and psychological operations against the communist regimes; NSDD-66 outlined a strategy of economic warfare against the soviet regime; and NSDD-75 declared roll-back of Soviet influence around the world, and ultimately a change in the Soviet system itself, to be a key U.S. policy objective.
It is in this context that Reagan (to a group of evalgelicals) stated that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” (Busch also notes that as the point of resurgence of the United States Information Agency) and the use of religious propaganda is discussed below.
In the New York Times, December 16, 2006, “Jeane Kirkpatrick and the Great Democratic Defection,” Allen talked of the formation (with the late Jeane Kirkpatrick) of an organization called the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), of which both were among the founders in late 1976: “The aim of the group was to make Americans aware of the growth of Soviet military power and the risks posed by the SALT II treaty,” I would argue that this fed into the ‘Project Democracy’ public diplomacy operation of which the IEDSS would also become part of, particularly in relation to nuclear weapons.
Allen adds that over the course of the campaign, many Democrats on the CPD met with Reagan, which provided off-the-record briefings in California and Washington.
Mr. Reagan went into the sessions with an open mind, speaking with members of another political party just as he would with his own circle of advisers. The meetings did much to sharpen his thinking and help him find effective ways to present his views —as his position was not well understood by his opponents or by the press, and was often depicted as uninformed right-wing opposition to arms control agreements of any type. It soon became apparent that Democratic foreign policy experts like Ms. Kirkpatrick, Paul Nitze, Eugene V. Rostow, Henry Fowler and Charles Tyroler (the committee’s director) — individuals deeply dissatisfied with the soft approach Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and now Jimmy Carter had taken toward the Soviets—found in Mr. Reagan a willing listener and a suitable discussion partner. They preferred anonymity, which we provided. And Mr. Reagan was happy to have them; not just for their wisdom but because their presence likely meant that they would not be talking with Mr. Carter’s team. (Presuming Mr. Carter’s team would have wanted to talk to them.) In this, the Carter campaign squandered a huge potential asset that became Mr. Reagan’s for the taking.
The New York Times of December 9, 2006 stated that Allen introduced Kirkpatrick to Reagan:
President Reagan brought her into his innermost foreign policy circle, the National Security Planning Group. There she weighed the risks and rewards of clandestine warfare in Central America, covert operations against Libya, the disastrous deployment of American marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada and support for rebel forces in Afghanistan. [...] At the United Nations, she defended Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. She argued for El Salvador’s right-wing junta and against Nicaragua’s left-wing ruling council, the Sandinistas. In private, she supported American efforts to sustain the contras, the rebel group that tried to overthrow the Sandinistas with help from the Central Intelligence Agency She was a crucial participant in a March 1981 National Security Planning Group meeting that produced a $19 million covert action plan to make the contras a fighting force.
The report also states that in 1982, the KGB “forged a letter to discredit her and fobbed it off on the Washington correspondent for The New Statesman, a leftist British weekly, which reprinted it.” The phony letter was a note of ”best regards and gratitude” from the “intelligence chief of the apartheid South African government.” When Kirkpatrick left in 1985 she was succeeded by Vernon A. Walters, the next year, as the Iran-contra story began unfolding.
This is an interesting point—given that organisations such as the IEDSS produced somewhat paranoid and feverish versions of it what was the real nature of Soviet propaganda? Where does our knowledge of this come from?
In their (1991) Instructions From the Centre, former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew (who has a close connection to the intelligence services) described measures taken by the KGB from 1982-1985, when Gordievsky was in London. These included supposed disinformation and alarmist arguments spread on the issue of cruise missiles, Gordievsky and Andrew are quoted in (retired CIA officer) J. Ransom Clark’s (1991) Intelligence and National Security: A Reference Handbook stating:
Among the Residency’s most important active measures campaigns was that to oppose the deployment of Cruise Missiles. At the end of September 1982 the Centre sent a telegram to London (noted but not copied by Gordievsky), listing four main active measures ‘theses’:
- Cruise missiles were offensive, not defensive, weapons.
- The Americans insisted on their deployment and refused serious negotiations about them.
- The Soviet Union would detect their dispersal from British bases during an East-West crisis, interpret this as a signal of impending nuclear attack, and be likely to respond with a nuclear strike of its own.
- U.S. deployment of Cruise missiles in Britain thus risked involving Britain in a nuclear war begun, against its wishes, by the United States.
The Residency was instructed to use these theses in meetings with all its contacts, both ‘confidential’ and otherwise. (p. 137)
Citing the March 12, 1992 issue of the The Independent, this also asserts that Kim Philby assisted in KGB forgery operations by inserting a couple of sentences into genuine CIA or Pentagon documents to make them seem enthusiastic about the Third World War, and then to see that these gained the widest possible circulation in Europe. One wonders why Philby did not simply quote from genuine sources from the US military (Curtis LeMay for example) who were enthusiastic about the Third World War. In relation to the subject of a forgery concerning Kirkpatrick, Oleg Gordievsky’s book KGB: The Inside Story, seems the provenance. This described a forgery planned by the KGB in the US in 1982 part of “Operation Golf”, designed to plant fabricated material discrediting Kirkpatrick, then US ambassador to the United Nations, via the American correspondent of the New Statesman in article entitled “A Girl’s Best Friend,” imputing some connection to South Africa. Why such a connection (in terms of realpolitik) would perturb anyone in any position of power in the UK at that period is not explained, nor is it reasonable to suppose that it would given the extensive financial, business and political links between the UK and South Africa and the support and apologists for South Africa so numerous in UK think tanks which had the ear of the Thatcher administration, such as The Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism. Here the South Africa administration were conducting a brave fight against the wave of Communist subversion represented by the ANC. If anything it would seem some kind of indictment of the New Statesman that ignores and does not take into account all manner of similar gaffs and factual inaccuracies easily found in many of the more ‘trusted’ right-wing publications — themselves often the vehicle of the propaganda of the UK government’s covert agencies.
On examination, what the New Statesman article focussed on was the equally cloudy and mysterious realm of undeclared gifts received by members of the Reagan administration, including Richard V. Allen who it names “because he lost his job because of a Japanese watch and honorarium.” The article outlines previous meetings between Kirkpatrick and South African officials (which were supposedly banned by the US) which were denied by the US, then admitted by Kirkpatrick who “lied about her knowledge of van der Westhuizen’s identity. The then Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, intervened to tell the press that Kirkpatrick’s meeting with van der Westhuizen had his personal authorization.” The report then outlines three other meetings and quotes an unnamed State Department official:
…she is one of several members of ‘President Reagan’s entourage (whose) furtive association… with some foreign governments, the south African regime in particular… will inflict serious damage to the long-term interests of my country.’
The article also quotes from Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB) on further connections between the US and South Africa based around tackling Soviet ‘encroachment’. CAIB was set up by Philip Agee the former CIA agent and author of the (1975) Inside the Company, which expresses his disillusionment with the CIA and its support for authoritarian governments across Latin America—some speculation does exist (including that by Gordievsky and Andrew) as to whether he was a KGB agent and CAIB has been the subject of several rumours from ‘defectors’ of publishing forgeries inspired by the KGB, such as those surrounding the “US Army Field Manual 30-31B” which purported to describe counter insurgency tactics including “a strategy of tension” involving manipulating and blaming radical left-wing groups towards violence in order to convince allied governments of the need for authoritarian counter-action.
Latterly the Telegraph and several other sources stated that a State Department hostage negotiator (and novelist) Steve Pieczenik has written “We Killed Aldo Moro”, about his role in a leaked false statement that Moro was dead a month before his murder with the intention to test what Italian public opinion would be to Moro’s death. We will not explore them in any depth at this point but the “strategy of tension,” in terms of its component of suppression of dissent and attempts to discredit and taint the work of publications such as CAIB (particularly around the ‘ABC’ trial) which express dissent are evident in the work of the IEDSS (for which Kirkpatrick wrote as we shall examine below).
But the point here is that we should view allegations of Soviet propaganda within a context of response and counter-response and that the statements of defectors is rarely taken as entirely credible. One other point could be that the IEDSS, given that almost all of its board were connected with either the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Information Research Department (or both) and many of the others with intelligence agencies (either covertly or overtly) are themselves part of a state and private sector groupings who have themselves insinuated disinformation and propaganda in all its shades into the mainstream media and contemporary mass persuasion practices.
Center for Strategic and International Studies and Heritage
Allen’s presence on the IEDSS should be see in the context of his work as a co-founder of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and his involvement with the Heritage Foundation and groupings such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) the latter according to a historycommons.org profile provided 33 appointees to the Reagan administration, 20 of them in national security positions. Reagan himself was a member, as was: Kenneth Adelman, the US’s deputy representative to the UN; William Casey, director of the CIA; John Connally, a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Jeane Kirkpatrick, US ambassador to the UN; John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy; Michael Novak, the US representative on the UN’s Human Rights Commission; Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy; Eugene Rostow, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and George Shultz, Secretary of State.
The CPD was noted for the blatant politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union, particularly with exaggerated estimates of the Soviet Union’s military strength which:
“meant that the policy community was completely surprised by the Soviet collapse, and missed numerous negotiating opportunities with Moscow.” An extensive study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) will show that military officials consistently exaggerate the Soviet threat in order to get Congress to fund the largest defense buildup in the nation’s history.
Allen, together with David Abshire edited the (1963) National Security: Political, Military, and Economic Strategies in the Decade Ahead, promoted and published by the Hoover Institution as the CSIS came into being. Emily S. Rosenberg’s (2007) Commentary: The Cold War and the Discourse of National Security, notes that:
Before World War II the term “national security” scarcely existed; only in the late 1940s did it begin to become a centerpiece of foreign policy discussions. The meanings (symbolic systems set within historical contexts) of “national security” emerged only within the context of the Cold War…
Drawing on the work of Charles Beard’s study of The Idea of National Interest, who argued that special interests had captured the national interest for their own profit, and was the vehicle by which self-serving sub-national groups pursued special advantages: giving the term negative connotations. Rosenberg argues that this was offset with Hans Morgenthau defensive formulation and thus policymakers and scholars who identified with the realist tradition increasingly embraced a new formulation: “national security.”
The most important institutional embodiment of the term, of course, was the National Security Act of 1947, which revolutionized the structure of foreign policymaking. Leffler points out that the National Security Council (NSC), which became the central institution for coordinating Cold War foreign policy, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), both created by the act, used the basic correlations of geopolitics to shape their operational definitions of national security.
Rosenberg argues that “National security” became the discursive vehicle that accompanied the Cold War’s restructuring of the nation’s political economy and govemance and in the late 1970s use of the term, like the Cold War itself, accelerated as a “a preeminent catchphrase”. In the 1980s:
…its meanings became even more diffuse. Scholars and politicians pushed the boundaries of traditional national security concepts, which had emphasized geopolitical considerations and the role of nation-states. in all directions. New formulations of national security stressed a broad concept that extended, as one scholar put it, “both above the nation-state, to something called international security, and below it, to individual security. It also spread far beyond geopolitical discourses, becoming more prevalent within a wide variety of military, foreign policy, and domestic discussions and linked to a remarkable array of policy prescriptions. Sprinkled liberally in text and pronouncement, the term seemed to bolster the authority of the policymakers and academics who invoked it.
Jack Salzman’s (1990) American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography, 1984-1988, states that Allen and Abshire’s work (which contains three essays) was first presented at a conference sponsored by the CSIS and focus on US foreign policy towards China and the Soviet Union (and the relationship between the two countries); US foreign policy towards Europe and the Third World ; and the build up of nuclear arms — all within the framework of how “US foreign policy can be linked to US military policy.”
David Abshire in (1982) Twenty Years in the Strategic Labyrinth, The Washington Quarterly, spoke of the origins of CSIS, stating that it was largely a response to Marshal Sokolovskii’s 1962 book, Military Strategy, which reflected the Soviet military’s concern with the operational problems of warfare in the nuclear age. It was also influenced by the awareness that for “40 years the Council on Foreign Relations dominated foreign policy thought in the United States” and that:
At its beginning the Center was outside this establishment, clearly determined to make its deliberations national and balanced, but equally determined to draw on the better known figures in strategic discussion including theorists at places such as the Hoover Institution and economists from the American Enterprise Institute. The study of strategy and economics was to be as important as that of diplomacy. If the Center was an idea that I developed, the idea became a reality only through the essential support of William Baroody Sr., head of the American Enterprise Institute.
His account also describes the first gathering:
In January 1963 the Center’s first conference in the Hall of Nations at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service brought together the full range of America’s strategic and economic thinkers. (Richard Ware of the Relm Foundation, which funded the conference, had always hoped to see some of the market-oriented economists better confront the problems of strategy.) Our first research associate, Richard V. Allen, and I had brought together persons already well known at that time— and some much better known now: Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Robert Strausz-Hupe, Herman Kahn, Murray Weidenbaum, Otto Eckstein, Thomas Schelling, and Arnold Wolfers were among the 30 participants. Characteristic of the scope of CSIS strategic discussion since then, half the conference was devoted to political-military issues and the remainder to economic issues — first, the role of economic strategy, with Oscar Morgenstein, James Schlesinger, Karl Brandt, and Vergil Salera, and second, the role of the market economy in supporting defense requirements, with Otto Eckstein, Murray Weidenbaum, Edward Mason, Norman Ture, Irving Seigel, and Glenn Campbell debating tax and fiscal policies, the costs of alternative military strategies, and domestic U.S. defense costs.
Abshire blames the social forces which arose in reaction to the Veitnam war as inhibiting the development of the field: the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other student radical insurgent groups “went on the rampage”, the Center for International Studies was ransacked, and “certain scholars such as Thomas Schelling moved into new fields”. He also notes that the disclosure of CIA support for some strategic and international studies centers “reinforced the suspicion of such centers in the academic world”:
The research centers responded to this climate in different ways. The Foreign Policy Research Institute broke away from the University of Pennsylvania. At Georgetown, the SDS drove the ROTC off campus and attacked the center as a CIA-funded front, only to learn that no CIA money or even government money had ever been accepted. McGeorge Bundy, by then head of the Ford Foundation, redirected his institution away from international studies primarily and toward urban problems. Even the Rand Corporation diversified and initiated urban and social welfare studies. Virtually the entire foundation community followed suit, except for the Scaife and Relm foundations. Interestingly, the Scaife foundation vastly expanded its funding for international security studies and fledgling centers at a time when the strategic studies community was at its lowest ebb.
He notes something of a sea change with Albert Wohlstetter’s 1976 analysis of Soviet military spending as a refutation of the official predications of Robert McNamara, arguing that Wohlstetter found that, since the early 1960s, the US had “systematically underestimated Soviet increases in their offensive forces”. This also represented Wohlstetter’s challenge to the traditional notions of the existence of an arms race that argued that “the United States has not been running a quantitative strategic race.” Wohlstetter’s article was supported by Richard Pipes study of Soviet strategy in Europe (sponsored by the Stanford Research Institute) which was critical of detente as a one-sided phenomemon, noting that it “dovetailed with the Soviet strategy of trying to detach Western Europe from the United States”. The third individual cited is Ray Cline’s (also at CSIS) World Power Assessment, that stressed the factor of “will” as the key to the strategic equation and again attacking detente for its role in eroding Western will. This was also reinforced by John Collins’ (Congressional Research Service) ‘American and Soviet Military Trends’, that aimed to demonstrate a distinct advantage for Moscow in most areas of military capability.
According to Abshire:
“Truthful indelicacy” remains a perennial problem for public officials. How can the real issues of European defense be discussed candidly, for example, without encouraging neutralism or Gaullism in Europe and possibly in this country as well? Officials in all the NATO countries have become increasingly circumspect in their public statements as the reactions to recent statements by President Reagan on limited nuclear war and Secretary Haig on nuclear weapons demonstrate. Increasingly the job of reassessment and strategic reconstruction is being left to the policy journals and private strategic studies centers on both sides of the Atlantic, “safe houses” where honest debate and controversial proposals on the alliance can still occur.
It should also be noted that as early as 1972, Edward Luttwak warned in a CSIS Washington Paper (The Strategic Balance 1972) that an asymmetry in U.S.-Soviet strategic doctrine could well undermine U.S. arms control efforts. By then, partly for holding similar views, James Schlesinger had resigned as secretary of defense after differing with the president over the defense budget. Out of government, Schlesinger emerged as a critic of detente and U.S. preparedness levels, becoming both a fellow at CSIS and at Johns Hopkins’s SAIS.
The CSIS prospered with the Reagan Administration as the need for a high-profile intensive research group in the capital increased, gradually taking over from the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, an older research center at Stanford University, where Allen had previously worked. This promotion came at a price, a New York Times article of November 28, 1987, notes that Trustees at Georgetown University voted to sever ties with the CSIS in 1986, denying the center the use of its name, after a committee appointed by the university’s president concluded that the center was not adequately committed to traditional academic scholarship. Similarly in 1985 Stanford University contemplated severing its ties, largely financial, with the Hoover Institution, founded by Herbert Hoover, the institution has the stated mandate, to ”demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx.” Among the scholars attached to CSIS were conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts, military scholar Edward Luttwak and Walter Laqueur.
By 1984, as this expansion grew pace, Allen was also part of the advisory board of the Jamestown Foundation which was set up to propagandize the US against the Soviet Union. Jamestown specifically used defectors for its material initially Arkady Shevchenko. According to Rightweb.com Directors included Dick Cheney, Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and R. James Woolsey with Advisors including Allen, Zbigniew Brzezinski (then also with the CSIS), Tom Clancy, Midge Decter, John McCain, Sam Nunn and Donald Rumsfeld. One commonality as regards funding of the CSIS was the Scaife Family Charitable Trust.
Propaganda and religious toothpaste
Allen is a member of a secretive religious right-wing association the Council for National Policy (CNP), although this is the usual crowd — some writers in exploring the continuities of these right-wing cabals are surprised, but what would be surprising would be if they were not. Formed in 1981 as a counter-propaganda organisation (in this world the Council on Foreign Relations are dangerous liberals). According to Right Web:
A 2004 New York Times report about CNP highlighted its secrecy. “Three times a year for 23 years, a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country have met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference, the Council for National Policy, to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.” Added the Times, “‘The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting,’ a list of rules obtained by the New York Times advises the attendees. The membership list is ‘strictly confidential.’ Guests may attend ‘only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.’ In e-mail messages to one another, members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name, to protect against leaks.
Richard Viguerie—Moral Majority co-founder, was a founding CNP member, other founding members included Tim LaHaye, a leader of the Christian Right who coauthored the ‘Left Behind’ novels about the ‘rapture’, Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation; Joseph Coors, founder of the Coors beer empire and an important early funder of the Heritage Foundation. Speakers have included the arch anti-communist Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub , USA (Ret.) Chairman The Jedburgh Group, Inc. and the World League for Freedom and Democracy (formerly the World Anti-Communist League), Jerry Falwell, Pat Boone from the world of showbiz religion; from the British side of things speakers have included Lord Malcolm Pearson (Rannoch Charitable Trust, which funded refugees from Communism who fled to Europe and along with Lord Stoddart of Swindon and Lord Harris of High Cross, he founded Global Britain); Julian Lewis billed as “former leader, anti-CND Campaigns.” For our purposes here the point should be made that Allen, and many of the others associated with the IEDSS are part of numerous groups devoted to attacks on the left (or any position that deviates from their conception of right-wing politics) in many formations. In their propaganda model excerpted from their (1988) Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that this process of creating a ‘needed body of experts’ has been carried out on a deliberate basis and a massive scale and specifically mention Edwin Feulner and the CSIS.
Back in 1972, Judge Lewis Powell (later elevated to the Supreme Court) wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging business “to buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses.” One buys them, and assures that—in the words of Dr. Edwin Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation—the public-policy area “is awash with in-depth academic studies” that have the proper conclusions. Using the analogy of Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste, Feulner explained that “They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind.” By the sales effort, including the dissemination of the correct ideas to “thousands of newspapers,” it is possible to keep debate “within its proper perspective.”
They also provide an illustration of how the ‘funded experts’ preempt independent opinion by occupying space in the mainstream media, in their analysis and tabulation of this the largest number of appearances was by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which they describe as providing “a revolving door between the State Department and CIA and a nominally private organization”. They also note the use of defectors such as Arkady Shevchenko became an expert on Soviet arms and intelligence because Time, ABC-TV, and the New York Times chose to feature him (despite his badly tarnished credentials). Furthermore they define another related class of experts “whose prominence is largely a function of serviceability to power” in the form of former radicals who have come to “see the light.”
In a country whose citizenry values acknowledgement of sin and repentance, the turncoats are an important class of repentant sinners. It is interesting to observe how the former sinners, whose previous work was of little interest or an object of ridicule to the mass media, are suddenly elevated to prominence and become authentic experts. We may recall how, during the McCarthy era, defectors and ex-Communists vied with one another in tales of the imminence of a Soviet invasion and other lurid stories. They found that news coverage was a function of their trimming their accounts to the prevailing demand. The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.
Stanley B. Cunningham’s (2002) The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction, is described (propagandized one might say) as a move beyond the conventional, largely descriptive treatments of propaganda that are usually found in academic discourse, indeed attempts to eschew “the methodology of social science” (as if that is inscribed in stone tablets and stored in the Ark of the Covenant) Richard V. Allen.
*Back to the The Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies
