UNbelievable! Q. Before we get into the specifics of media operations related to the Martin Luther King case and James Earl Ray, can you give us -- just to finish the background, can you give us some idea of the influence that the CIA and the FBI have had over the media. A. Yes. Again, this was something that very specific figures came out in the 70s and 80s, and we dont know the precise figures. Today we have no reason to think that they are significantly less than when they came out. But when the Church Committee reported on the CIA media operations, for example, beyond friends in the press, beyond having people who were just generally -- thought along similar lines, it turned out that they had thousands of journalists in their employ. Not merely friendly, not merely agents, not merely someone you could pass a story to, but people who might have appeared to the outside world to be a reporter for CBS was in fact a CIA employee getting a salary from the CIA. And that was repeated thousands of times all around the world. They also owned outright, the CIA -- about that time 250 or more media organizations. Thats wire services, newspapers, magazines, radio, TV stations -- all around the world that they owned outright. The actual shareholder of the company turned out to be some CIA front. The Church Committee, unfortunately, did not name very many of these organizations because those that got named, of course, had to close down immediately. But it was learned that -- even things like the Rome Daily American, which was a major English language newspaper in Rome, for 20 or 30 years had been owned by the CIA. This was published and, of course, the paper closed the next day. But most people didnt realize the extent of the intelligence media organization. Its fairly incredible. They sort of brag about it. When you read the books about the history of the CIA, one of the heroes was the first man in charge of media operations, a man named Frank Wisner. And they referred to his organization as the Mighty Wurlitzer. And theres this image of this guy sitting at one of those giant organs, you know, with seventeen keyboards and youre playing this -- sort of like The Phantom of the Opera in that scene, and there was the guy running the CIA media operations all around the world. And he really was because every single city of any size on earth, he had some employee who was -- supposedly worked for a newspaper or a magazine or a radio station or a wire service, and they could get stories anywhere. Q. Can you give just one or two more specific examples. A. Yes. There was one -- actually in an article that was published written by a former CIA officer named James Willcot, who was not in the propaganda division, he was in finance. But he was so amazed he wrote a little article about this. And he was stationed in Japan one time when there was a big debate raging there over whether nuclear power ships should be able to dock in Japanese ports. Its been a very touchy issue -- at least since Hiroshima its been a very touchy issue in Japan -- even peaceful uses of nuclear power. And the U.S. line was to promote the docking of nuclear power ships because the U.S. had more and more of them. So they wanted the Japanese papers to editorialize in favor of this in the debate that was going on. And Jim said he looked and he saw this guy at a nearby desk sit down and type -- this is a CIA officer, an employee of the U.S. Government -- type an editorial and then wave goodbye to everybody, left the office. The next morning that appeared as the editorial -- the lead editorial in the largest newspaper in Japan. Now, that level -- they didnt go to a friendly publisher and say, gee, we would sort of like it if you could maybe do something a little bit favorable to this issue. They wrote the editorial, they handed it to the guy. And the next day in Japanese it appears in the paper. Another thing showing the influence here in this country was during the Vietnam War. I dont know if -- well, some people might. People my age will remember it. There was -- Life magazine that had a cover picture of a North Vietnamese stamp that showed the Vietnamese shooting down American planes. And it showed U.S. planes with U.S. markings being burst into flames and crashing and U.S. pilots being killed. And it was a pretty bizarre and gruesome set of postage stamps. And there was a whole story in there basically trying to give the line that the Vietnamese were glorifying the killing of Americans. And they thought it was so great to kill Americans that they were putting it on their postage stamps. The only thing that was later learned is that these were not North Vietnamese stamps. They were CIA forgeries. Had never been real stamps. And the CIA was able to have them appear on the cover of Life magazine as if they were the real thing. That level of influence is something that many people dont realize. And when you read the congressional reports, page after page after page, its absolutely astonishing how, given the urgency and given that they have hundreds of millions of dollars at their command, they could get almost anything to appear almost anywhere. *The above text comes from the Martin Luther King civil trial transcript. Here is a link only to this mans (William Schaap) testimony: ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKv9Schaap.html
Posted on: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 01:41:17 +0000
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