Fooling America
a talk by Robert Parry given in
Santa Monica on March 28, 1993
www.realhistoryarchives.com/
A transcription of a talk given on March
28, 1993, by Robert Parry, former AP and Newsweek and now independent
journalist. Parry was one of the first reporters to break the
story of Iran-Contra, and one of the first to report on the drug
angle in Iran-Contra. Parry later pursued the strong evidence
that Reagan and Bush made an all-out effort to sabotage Jimmy
Carter's efforts to win the release of the Iranian-held hostages
before the November election, the episode known as the October
Surprise.
Parry is the author of several books,
including Fooling America and Trick or Treason, both published
by Sheridan Square Press. Currently, he publishes The Consortium,
a newsletter that reports on current events by showing the historical
backdrop to the events and players. He also publishes i.F. Magazine,
named in tribute to both I. F. Stone and George Seldes' newsletter
In Fact.
Well, thank you for coming out tonight.
I do want to first thank FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)
for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to leave Washington and
come to the West Coast. It's a fascinating aspect of how Washington
and Los Angeles interrelate these days. I'm not sure which city
is more used to producing fantasy than the other, but I always
think that LA's fantasy is often more entertaining.
But there is this tremendous sense of
both envy and concern between Washington and LA, but Washington
will often look down at Los Angeles as a place that produces movies,
sometimes like JFK, movies that were very upsetting to the Washington
establishment because they suggested that there was a cover-up
of the murder of the President back in the 1960s.
But you also find that people in Washington
are incredibly attuned to what's happening out here. I was talking
to a journalist friend of mine the other day who was saying that
there was, for Spike Lee's latest movie, she saw Vice President
Quayle in the line waiting to get into the movie, but he thought
it was a Roman spectacular, Malcolm 10. And then someone else
said they saw Clarence Thomas waiting to get in, but he thought
it was an X-rated film. So Washington is a place that does keep
track of what is happening out here. Of course, I'm not sure that
Los Angeles could produce entertaining shows like the McLaughlin
Group, but it does do it's best.
Tonight I'd like to talk about what I
was doing in the 1980's. I was a reporter for the Associated Press.
I started with the AP back in 1974, and worked briefly in Baltimore
and then in Providence, Rhode Island, where I covered some of
the problems of the Democratic power structure there - Freddy
St. Germaine was of course involved with the banks in a very unsavory
way. And eventually I was brought to Washington for the AP back
in 1977 and covered the Carter administration. And I was examining
some of their, what seem like today rather minor scandals, things
like the General Services Administration, the waste and fraud
that was going on there. And in 1980, after the election, I was
assigned to go work on the Special Assignment team for the Associated
Press which was there investigative unit.
In history, AP's investigative team was
actually quite impressive. Sy Hersh had been there, a number of
important stories had been broken out of that investigative unit,
which at one time was ten, fifteen, twenty people. By the time
I was there it had shrunk to about four. I was assigned to do
investigations. Other people were doing things like columns about
the State Department or about politics, and I was really the only
investigative reporter so designated at the AP's Washington Bureau
at that time.
But no one told me what to work on. And
it struck me one day, as I was sitting around, that this administration
had a thing about Central America. At the time there had been
a number of atrocities that were occurring, and the four American
churchwomen had been killed. And the explanations coming from
this transition team were quite remarkable. If you remember, Jean
Kirkpatrick suggested in one interview that these weren't really
nuns, they were more political activists, which always struck
me as an amazing suggestion that it's okay to kill political activists.
Anyway, it seemed like a very important area to them, one that
might end up driving much of what they did, at least in terms
of foreign policy and national security issues.
So I began working on it. And that experience,
in a way, shaped what I did for the rest of my time at the AP.
And it was also striking to me that that experience was beyond
anything I could have imagine, as an American citizen, watching.
It was a case of wide- spread killing - political killing - of
dissidents, torture, in the case of women often rape was involved;
and this government was not just supporting it, not just providing
the weapons and the military support, but trying to excuse it,
rationalize it and essentially hide it.
Which is where I sort of came in and I
think many people in the American press corps in Washington came
in, and the press corp in Central America. At the time the press
corps was still the Watergate press corp, if you will. We were
fairly aggressive, we were not inclined to believe what we heard
from the government, and sometimes we were probably obnoxious.
But we were doing our jobs as I think, more or less, as they were
supposed to be done. That is - to act, when necessary, in an adversarial
way.
So when we began covering this topic in
early 1981, we had some very brave people in the field in El Salvador
particularly and throughout Central America, and some of them
risked their lives to cover that story. And those of us back in
Washington who obviously were not facing that kind of risk, were
trying to get at things. Initially, and maybe we all sort of forget
this, but I remember one of my first stories about this had to
do with how the State Department was counting up the dead in El
Salvador and who they were blaming. At that time the position
was that the guerrillas were killing more than half of the people
dying in the political violence and that the government was less
responsible.
So I went over to the State Department
to review their methodology, and what I found was that the way
they got their figures was that they took the total number of
people who had presumably died within a period of a month or so,
and then each time the guerrillas would claim on a radio broadcast
that they had killed some soldiers, if there was a battle going
on and they said "We killed ten soldiers" and then the
battle kept going on and it was twenty, and then it was fifty,
and then another one of their stations would say fifty, what the
State Department did was they added up all the numbers. And so
they were able to create these false figures to suggest that the
government that the Unites States was supporting was not as culpable
as the human rights groups and particularly the Catholic church
in ES were saying.
It began a pattern of deception from the
very beginning. Even when there was something horrible happening
in those countries. Even when hundreds, thousands of human beings
were being taken out and killed, the role of the US. government
became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn't that
serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And
the main targets of that were the reporters in the field, the
human rights groups, and to a degree, those of us in Washington
who were trying to examine the policies to figure out what was
really happening and what was behind this. I remember again after
the new administration came in and of course Secretary Haig made
the remarkable comment that the four churchwomen were perhaps
running a road block, which is how they'd gotten killed. And even
people in the State Department who at that time were investigating
this fairly honestly - they had not yet been purged - were shocked
that the Secretary would say such a thing because they knew what
the circumstances were even then. They knew that they'd been stopped,
they knew that they'd been sexually assaulted, and shot at close
range. None of that, of course, fit the image of running a road
block, and exchange of fire.
But the reality became the greatest threat,
even at that stage, to what the new administration wanted to accomplish,
and what they wanted to accomplish was I think something they
felt strongly about ideologically which was their view that the
communists were on the march, that the Soviets were an expanding
power, that you had to stop every left wing movement in its tracks
and reverse it. And they were following of course the theory that
Jean Kirkpatrick had devised that the totalitarian states never
reverse and change into democratic states, only authoritarian
ones do, which as we know now is perhaps one of the most inaccurate
political theories. It's best if you're having a political theory,
not to have it disproven so quickly, you know it might be best
if you would, maybe fifty years from now you wouldn't really know
as much. But Jean Kirkpatricks's was disproven very quickly but
it was still the driving force behind the administration's approach
to a number of these conflicts, and their justifications for going
ahead and trying to conduct what became known later as the Reagan
Doctrine which was to sponsor revolutionary operations or what
am I saying, counterrevolutionary operations in many cases in
various parts of the world and in the Third World in particular.
In ES of course, which was my first focus
and the first focus of this policy, it was to protect a very brutal
government which was at that time killing literally from a thousand
to two thousand people a month. These were political murders;
they were done in the most offensive fashion. I think any American,
any average American, would have been shocked and would have opposed
what his government was doing. So it became very important to
keep that secret, or to minimize it, or rationalize it or somehow
sanitize it.
So what we saw, even at that early stage,
was the combat that was developing and the combat in terms of
the domestic situation in Washington was how do you stop the press
from telling that story. And much of what the Reagan administration
developed were techniques to keep those kinds of stories out of
the news media.
In some cases, as we saw later, in late
1981 of course there was, what is now fairly well known, the massacre
in El Mazote. And this was a case where the first American trained
battalion was sent out over Christmas time in 1981 into rebel
controlled territory and it swept through this territory and killed
everybody, everyone they could find - including the children.
When two American reporters, Ray Bonner and Alma Jimapareta (?),
went to the scene of this atrocity in January of 1982, they were
able to see some of what was left behind and they interviewed
witnesses who had survived, and came out with stories describing
what they had found. This was of course extremely upsetting to
the Reagan administration, which at that time was about to certify
that the Salvadoran military was showing respect for human rights,
and that was necessary to get further funding and weapons for
the Salvadoran military.
And I was at those hearings which occurred
afterwards, on the hill, and when Tom Enders who was then Assistant
Secretary Of State for Inter-American affairs gave his description
of how the State Department had investigated this and had found
really nothing had happened or that they had found no evidence
of any mass killing, and they argued with great cleverness that
the last census had not shown even that many people in El Mazote
- there were not the 800 or so who were alleged to have been killed
- only 200 had lived there to begin with, and many still lived
there, he said. Of course it wasn't true, but it was, I guess
in their view, necessary - it was necessary to conceal what was
going on. And, it became necessary then, to also discredit the
journalists, so Raymond Bonner, and Alma and others, who were
not accepting this story, had to be made to seem to be liars.
They had to be destroyed. And the administration began developing
their techniques, which they always were very good at - they were
extremely good at public relations, that's what's they had - many
of them had come from - the President himself had been an advertising
figure for General Electric - and they were very adept at how
to present things in the most favorable way for them.
But what we began to see was something
that was unusual I think even for Washington - certainly it was
unusual in my experience - a very nasty, often ad hominem attack
on the journalists who were not playing along. And the case of
Bonner was important because he worked for the New York Times,
and the New York Times was one of those bastions of American journalism
- this was not some small paper, it was not some insignificant
news figure. So there began an effort to discredit him and the
Wall Street editorial page was brought into play, Accuracy In
Media was brought into play, he was attacked routinely by the
State Department and White House spokespeople, there were efforts
to paint him as some kind of a communist sympathizer, the charge
would go around that he was worth a full division for the FMLN
- the Salvadoran guerrillas - he was treated as an enemy - someone
who was anti-American, in effect. And sadly, it worked. I was
in ES in October of '82, I was down there to interview Roberto
Dobesan, who was head of the death squads, and I was with a conservative
activist, and after that interview we had lunch with the head
of the political-military affairs office at the Embassy and the
officer was then head of the military group, and on the way back
to the hotel, they were boasting about how they had "gotten"
Ray Bonner. "We finally got that Son-of-a-Bitch," they
said, and at that time his removal had not yet been announced,
so it was very interesting to hear that they knew what was about
to happen, and he was, in fact, removed by early 1983, and then
he was sort of shunted aside at the New York Times and eventually
left.
So the message was quite clearly made
apparent to those of us working on this topic that when you tried
to tell the American people what was happening, you put your career
at risk, which may not seem like a lot to some people, but you
know, reporters are like everybody else I guess - they have mortgages
and families and so forth and they don't really want to lose their
jobs - I mean it's not something they aspire to. And the idea
of success is to keep one of these jobs and there are a lot of
interesting perks that go with it, a certain amount of esteem,
you know, as well as you get paid pretty well. Those jobs in Washington
- you can often be making six figures at some of the major publications,
so it's not something you readily or easily throw away, from that
working level.
But what happened in and around that same
time frame, was the development, secretly, of another part of
the Central America story, which was, of course, the covert war
in Nicaragua. And William Casey and Ronald Reagan began putting
this operation together, and it involved building up this paramilitary
group called the contras, and they were supposed to be seen as
an indigenous fighting force, the American role was supposed to
be minimized or hidden, again, and that was how it was going to
be sold to the American people. It was a classic covert operation,
and then it was a legal one at that time - it had been authorized
under the finding provisions of the National Security Act. But
there were problems with this war from very early on, and one
of the problems was that the Contra's weren't very good at fighting
- they would go into some villages in Northern Nicaragua and commit
atrocities, which began filtering back also to Washington. Congress
began hearing about them lining up people in villages and killing
them. But it wasn't a very effective group in terms of like taking
territory.
And there was one story which I did later
but goes back to this time, when the CIA, in 1982, prepared a
plan - it was written by the head of military operations, named
Rudy Enders, and Mr. Enders had this timetable, and it talked
about how the Contras were going to grow at a certain rate and
where they'd be at a certain date and they had them marching into
Managua by the end of 1983 - and so this was the plan. The plan
was to, well, officially even to Congress the White House was
saying we have no intention of overthrowing the government of
Nicaragua - we're simply trying to interdict weapons going to
El Salvador. In their own files at CIA, the policy file for the
Contra war contained this timetable to overthrow the government
of Nicaragua. So this was their plan - except that it wasn't working.
And so by early '83, it became clear even to people at CIA that
the Contras weren't what they hoped they'd be cracked up to be,
and they ended up looking at this and saying we're going to have
to do some different things.
Part of this problem though was still
that, the longer this thing dragged out, the harder it was to
keep all these secrets - plus the Contras were still going out
and killing people left and right. So Bill Casey was stuck with
a bit of a problem. And he approached it - as he was a very -
Bill Casey is often, I think, misperceived - he was a very smart
man, and he was extremely committed ideologically to what he was
doing, and he was a person who believed in making things happen
- whatever the rules might be, or whatever the red tape might
be. And so he sat down and developed some strategies in 1983 on
what to do. One thing is they would need more time to train the
Contras - they weren't going to work the way they were going.
Secondly, they had to create the impression the Contras were better
than they were, so people wouldn't get tired of supporting them
in Congress. So they decided the CIA would have to start sending
in its own people, its own specially-trained Latino assets to
begin doing attacks which the Contras could then claim credit
for, like blowing up Corinto where they blew up this oil depot
in the little town of Corinto on the coast, they sabotaged some
oil pipeline in Porto San Dino, and these were all being done
now by the CIA except that after they'd be done the agency guys
would call up the Contra spokesmen, in this case often Edgar Chimorro,
and they'd get them out of bed and say, "Now you're going
to put a news release out saying that you guys have done this."
Now the reason of course for that was to create the impression
in the United States, to fool the American public and the Congress,
to make the American public think the Contras were really quite
effective - that they were now running sea assaults on Nicaragua
- pretty sophisticated stuff for a paramilitary force.
And Casey had some other ideas. He also
began to put together what became known later as the Psychological
Operations Manual or the Assassination Manual, and he authorized
that in the Summer of 1983, to be prepared - plus they prepared
another little booklet on how if you're a Nicaraguan how you sabotage
your own government - it was a delightful comic book which I later
wrote about at AP - and it showed how you'd start off with, you
know, calling in sick was one of the strategies to sabotage, and
you'd build up to putting sponges in the toilet to make them back
up, as if any of these things work in Nicaragua to begin with,
and then they taught you how to make your own malatov cocktails,
it was sort of - you graduated - you moved up in your sabotage
- and they'd take these little comic books and the Contras were
supposed to leave them behind wherever they'd go, so the people
could then start calling in sick.
So that was one of his ideas. The other
one was to do this book - this very sophisticated book in many
ways. It made reference to ancient scholars, and how you gave
speeches, but the most interesting part was that there was a section
about how the Contras should use 'selective use of violence' to
'neutralize civilian targets' that is civilian officials, judges,
people of that sort. And the idea was, apparently, that you would
kill these people or at least, you know, incapacitate them somehow,
but what was the most remarkable thing about that point was that,
when this was finally uncovered when I did a piece on this a year
later or so, the CIA then argued, "Well, you don't understand.
We were trying to get the contras to be selective in their violence
against civilians, not indiscriminate." And that became actually
the defense that was used by the CIA to explain why they were
running this booklet.
But anyway, these things were things that
Casey put together in the summer of '83 but he had other plans,
which is one section - one of the sections of my book deals with
this most remarkable operation that he came up with at that time
which is called the Public Diplomacy Apparatus. And what the Public
Diplomacy Apparatus did was to make more systematic, to better
staff, better finance this campaign to shape the reality that
the American public would see. They had a phrase for it inside
the administration. It was called 'perception management' and,
with US. taxpayers dollars, they then went out and set up offices,
mostly at the State Department - there was this Office of Public
Diplomacy' for Latin America - but secretly it was being run out
of the National Security Council staff. And the person who was
overseeing it was a man named Walter Raymond. And Mr. Raymond
had been a thirty- year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency
and was the top propaganda expert for the agency in the world.
He shipped it over to essentially run similar programs aimed at
the American public. And overseeing all of this was the Director
of Central Intelligence, William Casey.
The documentation on this now is extremely
strong and clear, that even on matters of personnel, as well as
on matters of general strategy, Casey would be given reports,
asked to provide assistance, he would help or his people would
help arrange bringing in people to staff this office.
They even turned to psychological warfare
experts from Fort Bragg, who were brought up to handle the cable
traffic coming in from Central America. And, as they say in their
own documents, the purpose of these psychological warfare specialists
was to identify exploitable themes that could be used against
- with the American public - to excite the American public to
be more and more angry about what was happening in Central America.
The documentation is also clear that the
idea was to find our 'hot buttons' and to see what - how they
could turn, twist, spin certain information to appeal to various
special groups. They'd reached the point, and this was really
being directed by the CIA, of breaking down the American people
into subgroups, and there were people that they thought might
be, for instance the press - they developed the themes relating
to freedom of the press in La Prensa, which was the newspaper
in Nicaragua, which was opposed to the Sandinistas. They targeted
Jewish Americans - they had a special program to attack the Sandinistas
or to paint them as anti- Semitic, which of course is one of the
most, to my view, one of the most heinous things a person or any
group could be. But, the idea in Nicaragua was to create this
image, and then use it to build support among Jewish Americans
for the Contras.
They did run into a bit of a problem with
this, when they first devised it, which was that, they had not
yet purged the US. Embassy of honest foreign service officers,
so when they were preparing this, the Embassy, Ambassador Cranton
(?? couldn't hear the name), sent up a cable - couple of cables
- they were classified and I was later able to get ahold of them
- which said it isn't true! That the Sandinistas are a matter
of many things that are nasty and bad, but they're not anti-Semitic,
and he said there was no verifiable ground upon which to make
this charge. So what the White House did was they kept that classified
and went ahead with the charge anyway. It was just too good a
theme.
They also developed this - what they called
the 'feet people' theme. This was one that was based on Richard
Worthlund's polling data. Richard Worthlund who was this sort
of legendary, conservative polling strategist did polling of the
American people - they had special groups of people to sample
these things with, and they'd found out that most of the themes
about the communist menace in Central America left people cold.
They didn't really take it that seriously - it just didn't hit
the hot buttons right. But they found that one hot button that
really, they could really use, was this idea of the Hispanic immigrants
flooding into the United States. So they developed, what they
called, the 'feet people' argument, which was that unless we stopped
the communists in Nicaragua and San Salvador, 10% - they came
up with that figure somewhere - 10% of all the people in Central
America and Mexico will flood the United States.
Now, I suppose at this point already -
and this was about '83-84 - we were sort of losing any touch with
reality in Washington after we had been undergoing this stuff,
but, if anyone had sat down and really said 'okay, now does this
make any sense?', you were probably left with this opinion I think,
which is that the massive flows of immigrants at that time were
coming from El Salvador and Guatemala and of course, from Mexico
- which was mostly economic - and in Guatemala and El Salvador
it was that there were conservative governments in place, and
at that time the flow from Nicaragua wasn't very great at all,
and there was no 10% of the Nicaraguan people having fled, so
that wasn't happening. There had been some flow of the wealthier
Nicaraguans immediately after the revolution around 1979, but,
it was not until later - much later actually - '85-85, actually
'87-88, when the flow of Nicaraguans increased because as part
of our strategy we were trying to destroy their economy. And after
we destroyed their economy, people being people, they left - or
a lot of them left.
But still, the feet people argument was
considered very good because it played to the xenophobia of America,
and it gave some political clout to Reagan in making this case,
and he was able to use it with particular effect with border state
congressmen and senators who felt politically vulnerable if their
had been a sudden surge of refugees across the border.
So we had in place by this '83-84 timeframe,
this Public Diplomacy office. And what it did was escalate the
pressure on the journalists who were left, who were still trying
to look at this in a fairly honest way and tell the American people
what they could find out. You had cases, for instance at National
Public Radio, where, in sort of a classic example of this, the
Public Diplomacy team from State began harassing National Public
Radio for what they considered reporting that was not supportive
of the American position enough. And finally, NPR agreed to have
a sit-down with Otto Reich - who was head of that office - and
one of his deputies, and they were particularly irate about a
story that NPR had run about a massacre of some coffee pickers
in Nicaragua - and the story was more about their funeral, and
how this had really destroyed this little village in Nicaragua,
having lost a number of the men in the town - and the contras
had done it so it didn't look to good, and Otto Reich was furious
and he said 'We are monitoring NPR. We have a special consultant
that measures how much time is spent on things that are pro-Contra
and anti-Contra and we find you too anti-Contra and you'd better
change.'
Now, the kind of effect that has is often
subtle. In the case of NPR, one thing that happened was that the
foreign editor, named Paul Allen, saw his next evaluation be marked
down, and the use of this story was cited as one of the reasons
for his being marked down and he felt that he had no choice but
to leave NPR and he left journalism altogether. These were the
kind of prices that people were starting to pay, all across Washington.
The message was quite clear both in the region and in Washington
that you were not going to do any career advancement if you insisted
on pushing these stories. The White House is going to make it
very, very painful for your editors by harassing them and yelling
at them; having letters sent; going to your news executives -
going way above even your bureau chiefs sometimes - to put the
pressure on, to make sure if these stories were done they were
done only in the most tepid ways. And there also was, in an underreported
side of this, there were these independent organizations, who
were acting as sort of the Wurlitzer organ effect for the White
House attacks. Probably the most effective one from their side
was Accuracy In Media, which we find out, from looking at their
internal documents - the White House internal documents, was actually
being funded out of the White House. There was - in one case we
have because we have the records, the White House organized wealthy
businessmen, particularly those from the news media, from the
conservative news media, to come into the White House to the situation
room where Charlie Wick, who was then head of USIA, pitched them
to contribute a total of $200,000 to be used for public diplomacy
and the money is then directed to Accuracy In Media and to Freedom
House and a couple of other organizations which then support the
White House in its positions, and make the argument that the White
House is doing the right thing and that these reporters who are
getting in the way must be Sandinista sympathizers or must not
be very patriotic or whatever we were supposed to be at the time.
So you had this effect of what seemed
to be independent organizations raising their voice, but, the
more we kept finding out, the more we found at that these weren't
independent organizations at all. These were adjuncts of a White
House/CIA program that had at its very heart the idea of how we
reported the news in Washington and how the American people perceived
what was going on in Central America. I'm not sure this has ever
happened before - I can't think of it, but it was a remarkable
change in the way that the government, as I guess Ross Perot might
say, was coming "at" the people rather than, you know,
being "of" the people.
The overall effect as this continued over
time was cumulative. Those of us in the press who continued -
who were not smart enough to seek cover, found our work more and
more being discredited, and us personally being attacked, because
the game really became how do you destroy the investigator. And
whether it be America's watch, which was finding that the Contras
were engaged in human rights violations as well as the Sandinistas
(I should say), or if it were the Catholic Church in El Salvador
reporting upon the atrocities there, or it was some journalist
finding out about the deceptions in Washington, the best way to
deal with that was to discredit the people who were doing the
investigation. If you made them look like they were unpatriotic,
wrongheaded, somehow subversive, the overall effect was to, first
of all make it harder for them to do their job, and secondly when
they did their job, people would tend not to believe it. So it
worked, basically.
So, as we get into the mid-80's, we're
now in a situation where it's getting touchier and touchier to
do these stories, but Congress, because of the mining problems
and because of the bad publicity that followed, the disclosure
that the CIA was actually doing many of these things which the
Contras had been claiming credit for, when that was exposed in
1984 - accidentally exposed by Barry Goldwater on the floor of
the Senate - what happened on that case was that Goldwater had
gotten drunk and had gone down to the Senate and started talking
about how the US. was mining the harbors of Nicaragua. And Rob
Simmons, who was then staff director for the Senate Intelligence
Committee rushed onto the floor to grab this slightly drunken
Senator and tell him that he wasn't supposed to say that and they
- it was literally expunged from the Congressional Record, even
though - this was before C- Span so you couldn't record it - it
was expunged from the Congressional Record but a very diligent
reporter, David Rodgers for the Wall Street Journal, happened
to be in the press gallery and wrote it down so it ran in the
Wall Street Journal and it got sort of out, and that contributed
mightily to the problems that they had in continuing the war.
So Congress stopped the funding for the Contras.
Immediately, and actually even before
because they knew there was going to be a problem, the White House
had this backup plan, and it was, of course, to have Ollie North
become the point man. So North becomes, secretly, the point man.
He is also being secretly supported by the CIA, and by the NSA,
and by other US. intelligence services. That comes out much later.
But Ollie North is now the man who is supposedly running everything
but that's all secret too, at least from the American people.
And he's arranging to get weapons and raise money, and they're
doing their various things they did with Saudi Arabia and so forth,
to get the money, and so we end up with a lot of us in Washington
really sort of knowing about this. This isn't like, all that secret,
you know. I'd met Ollie North in '83 and he was actually a source
for many journalists because he would, as part of the deal he
would tell you some sexy stuff about the Achilles Laurel or something,
but you protect your source, so you wouldn't really write about
him.
But I was writing about him. And by the
summer of 85 - by June of 85, I did the first story about Oliver
North. And it was a very tepid story, I must say, looking back
at it. I had gone to the White House with it and they had flatly
denied it. They said it was completely wrong, completely opposite
from the truth - and I at that point had still not caught on to
how dishonest these people had gotten. So I sort of softened it,
but I still put it out - we had this story out for AP about Ollie
North, and how he was running this Contra support operation, and
how the White House was saying it wasn't happening, and that led
eventually over that summer to a few other stories appearing,
and of course it was all denied and the pressure on the journalists
was so intense that the other news organizations backed away -
the New York Times backed away, the Washington Post backed away,
and it was left strangely to the AP and to the Miami Herald which
was also following it with Al Charty's work to pursue this story
- and really the story of the decade, but no one wanted it. It
was an amazing story - it was a story about a really remarkable
character, with a remarkable support cast, I mean, you know it
was better than Watergate in that sense - I mean, you had Fawn
Hall as opposed to Martha Mitchell, I mean this was a much better
story! You had this secret war being fought, you had the government
lying through its teeth every time it turned around, but no one
wanted the story. The price had gotten too high.
So as much as I would like to say, like
I was really some sort of journalistic genius who'd figured this
all out, it didn't require that much. It just required sort of
following the leads. They were all over the place. But we'd learned
to sort of shield our eyes from the leads in Washington. And as
we're doing this - I was now working with Brian Barger who we
had brought on at AP - to help on this story, and we did the Contra-drug
story in December of 1985, which was really well received around
town [he said sarcastically], and we then proceeded to follow
the North network into early '86 and we wrote the first story
that there'd actually been a federal investigation in Miami, of
what we knew as the North network. It had been suppressed because
you weren't supposed to investigate this because it wasn't happening
anyway, and the US. attorney who make the mistake of trying to
investigate this, or the assistant US. attorney ended up in Thailand,
working on some heroin case, and the investigation went literally
nowhere.
So this was what was happening by the
Summer of '86, when Barger and I finally did a story - we had
24 sources by this point - it was getting silly, you know? You
know, it wasn't like two sources, or three sources, we were up
to 24, and some of them named, and we did this story in June of
'86 where we laid a lot of it out - we didn't have all of it,
I'll grant - we didn't know about Secord's flights, but we had
Rob Owen, and we had Jack Singlaub, and we had how the intermediaries
were moving the weapons and so forth. So we get to this point,
and we put this story out, and finally Congress - which had been
very afraid of touching this - the democrats were extremely timid
- finally Lee Hamilton, who was then Chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee takes our little story with the rest of the Intelligence
Committee over to the White House and they sit down with Ollie
North and they say, "Colonel North - we have this story that
says you're doing these things which are kind of illegal, uh,
what about it?" He said, "It's not true," they
said "Thank you," and they went back to Capitol Hill.
And I get a call from one of Hamilton's aides, and he told me,
he said - I'll never forget this, because it was probably my worst
moment in the whole Iran Contra Scandal - I get this call from
a Democratic aide who tells me that Lee Hamilton has looked into
my story, and he had a choice between believing these honorable
men at the White House or my sources and it wasn't a close call.
And so, at that point, we were, sort of,
done. They could have - as Ross Perot might say - they could have
stuck a fork in us. Barger was stuck on the overnight at AP and
was sort of pushed out of the company - he left. I was basically
told, more or less, well, you know, take your medicine like a
man, you got it wrong, you know, and we were wrapping up our investigation
- it was over. During that summer we tried to get a longer version
of this into any publication, virtually none would take it. None
would take it - I mean, we even went to Rolling Stone and they
turned us down.
So that's where we were. This phony, dishonest,
false reality had won out. And the reality had lost out, and anyone
who was crazy enough to actually believe in the reality was a
real loser in Washington.
And then, as it all looked like it was
pretty much over, one of the last planes of Ollie North's little
rag-tag air force, was chugging along over Nicaragua on October
5th, 1986, and just because history is like this - history is
kind of, you know, it's quirky sometimes - there was this teenager,
draftee, never filed a SAM missile in his life, didn't even know
how to fire it exactly, but he described after the fact how he
sort of aimed it at this plane that was sort of lumbering along
through the sky, and it went off! The SAM missile went off, and
it went right at the plane, which really amazed this kid. They
say it was Soviet made - I mean, what would you have thought?
So the missile goes right at the plane and hits it right under
one of the wings and the plane starts spiralling out of control.
And another little quirk of history is that - most of the guys
were kind of macho on board, and they didn't wear parachutes,
but Eugene Hasenfus had just gotten a parachute sent to him by
one of his relatives, and because he had the door open to start
kicking out these weapons to the Contras, even though the plane
spiraled out of control he could crawl to the door and pushed
himself away from the plane and parachuted down through the Sandinistas.
And so, there was literally a smoking
fuselage on the ground in Nicaragua, and the press corps in Washington
suddenly said, 'oh gee! Maybe we had missed something after all.'
But even then the White House initially - this was - it was an
interesting meeting. October 7th, at the NSC - they were in kind
of a panic. Ollie was out of the country working on the Iran project,
so Elliot Abrams was chairing this meeting, and they were trying
to figure out what to do - what was their story going to be. Later
on I talked to one of the participants at this meeting and I said,
"Gee, what did you guys think you were up to? Did you think
you shouldn't just maybe fess up at this point?" He said
"No. We had been so successful in managing the information,
we, you know, just thought we could just do anything!" So
the anything they did was that they just started lying again!
And they put out - and it wasn't just from the State Department
anymore, it was from the President of the United States, the Vice
President of the United States, and virtually every senior official
in the position to do anything about this, came out and said there
is no US. government connection to this flight. And Elliot even
sort of came up with this neat idea [sound lost for a moment]
- I know Singlaub pretty well and I happened to put a call in,
and he hadn't been told he was supposed to take the fall - they
hadn't gotten around to telling him that. So when he flies back
from Asia he lands, and he comes down off the plane and all these
reporters are up to him saying, The New York Times has just run
this story based on a senior official saying it was your plane
and he said, "I had nothing to do with that plane!"
So later on he told me that he have taken the fall if he'd only
known that he was supposed to take the fall, but they hadn't told
him he was supposed to take the fall, so, crazy enough, he told
the truth.
So they were still looking for someone
to take the blame on this, and then a very enterprising freelancer,
an American journalist, went into the Salvadoran telephone office,
and since everything's for sale down there, he bought the phone
records for the safe house. They hadn't thought to, you know,
take care of the phone records. And so he buys these phone records
and, my goodness, there are all these calls to the White House,
and to Ollie North's personal line, as well as by the way to the
Vice President's office because Felix Rodriguez who was running
the drops was calling virtually daily - well maybe, certainly
weekly - the Vice President's office to talk to then George Bush's
national security advisor Donald Greg. So they had to come up
with some new stories again. And these stories kept shifting.
But what was incredible about the whole
thing was the arrogance that pervaded the White House at this
point. They really thought they could control how everybody in
this country understood the facts. They could create the reality,
and the press would go along with it, and through the press the
American people would either be deceived or so confused that they
wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway. The perception
management wasn't going to give up.
But that began to cause problems when
the next shoe falls, which is the disclosure of the Iran initiative
in early November of '86, and that is also a problem legally,
because what they know inside the White House which we don't know
yet, is that, in 1985 the President had authorized the first shipment
of missiles to Iran through Israel without proper authorization.
He had not signed a finding; he was in violation of a felony which
is called the Arms Export Control Act.
So they had to cover that up. And what
we saw was the next remarkable stage of this. And probably this
is what changed a lot of how I saw journalism. Obviously I'd not
been really too thrilled by what I was seeing up to this point,
but the next phase was even more unbelievable. And the next phase
is the scandal was broken - there are three parts to it basically:
there's the illegal shipments of weapons to the Contras in defiance
of the law, the Boland Amendment; there is the problem of the
Arms Export Control Act, which President Reagan was violating
back in '85; and of course there's what became the focus - the
crossover - the use of residuals from the arms sales in Iran for
the Contras - the so-called 'diversion' which many people feel
was indeed a diversion of the public at least. So you had these
three elements. The White House chose to make a stand on the latter
one - the diversion, and they proceeded to lie about the other
two. They put out false chronologies on Iran to show that the
President did not know about the '85 shipment. They insisted -
even as Vice President Bush insisted until December of '86 that
he had no idea there was a Contra operation going on - even though
it had been much of the press, he just hadn't bothered to read
it.
So you had this decision to sort of deny
straightforwardly, possibly accurately that the President did
or did not know about the diversion - they said he didn't. And
that became the focus for the press and for the congress as the
investigation gears up, which is very bad enough because these
other questions are very important. Was the President involved
in a felony under the Arms Export Control Act? Was he involved
possibly in another type of crime by defying a law which he signed
into law - the Boland Amendment? Can the President just unilaterally
conduct war using third country funding? All of these are very
important questions to our democracy.
But the focus was on the diversion. And
on that they felt they could contain it as long as John Poindexter
said the buck stopped here, which of course he would do. However,
what we began to see very quickly in Washington was almost a collaboration
at this point to contain the scandal. Obviously the White House
and the Republicans had a very strong interest in containing this
scandal; they were politically in hot water. But the Democrats,
and the press, were also inclined to contain the scandal. As the
phrase went - nobody wanted another Watergate. The people may
have wanted another Watergate - but that was the view in Washington
- nobody wants other Watergate. And at this point, my last story
for AP - AP and I had really had some struggles because although
they were in a way happy with my work, but in a way I put them
in some very tough spots, and they had not always been the best,
but I must say they did put out most of our stories, eventually,
and they did the most, of any news organization, but - my last
story for them in February of '87 was - we jumped at one of the
last firebreaks. We brought the story into the CIA. And I reported
that the CIA had assisted North's operation, despite their denials;
that North was using National Security Agency highly-sensitive
secret cryptology equipment and had been passing it out like candy
to all the people who were working with him - they all had these
KL-43's as they were called which could send these secret messages
back and forth, and so we'd broken that barrier. We'd broken into
the CIA.
And then I went to Newsweek. Maybe a mistake,
I guess, in retrospect, but I went to Newsweek. And I thought
- I always think of Newsweek as what it used to be - sort of a
gutsy magazine that had changed. So anyway I get to Newsweek and
the first week I'm there, some stories about these phony chronologies
are circulating and I call a friend of mine on the National Security
Council staff and I say, "What are you doing now? You're
doing false chronologies on how the Iran sales happened?"
and he said, "Bob, you don't understand," he said "These
were orders from the Oval Office. Don Regan sent down word that
we were to protect the President and write him out of these events."
And so, I tell my new Bureau Chief at Newsweek Evan Thomas, and
he's real excited by this 'cause he gets excited, and he goes
in and Tommy DeFrank, who was the assistant Bureau Chief, calls
another source - well known person whose name I can't mention
I guess, from the NSC, and this person said yes, that's exactly
right, we were told to do it.
So Newsweek ran this - I have one copy
of this because Newsweek sort of threw it away afterwards - but
we ran a cover story called "Cover-up" and we recount
how, to protect the President, the NSC staffers were ordered to
put these phony chronologies out. And what we didn't realize at
the time was we had just broken through the last firebreak. We
were in the Oval Office with this story.
And the reaction was incredible. Many
of my colleagues in the press attacked us. The Wall Street Journal,
not just in its editorial pages but its news columns attacked
us; Newsweek - of course, Don Regan, who was one of the people
of course named here attacked us; and Newsweek decided that they
wanted to retract the story. And they sent me back to my source,
several times over the next period of time, to get him to take
it back and he wouldn't. He said, I told you what I knew, and
what do you want me to say, and I said well, we want to retract
the story is what we want to do. Anyway, so one of my friends
went around - because this was such an embarrassment to Newsweek
- that he told me he went around Newsweek and got all the copies
he could find and threw them away, so people wouldn't know - so
there wouldn't be a reminder - it was sort of a 'nice thing' he
was doing - so there wouldn't be a reminder of my big mistake.
And I found out fairly recently - as recently as a year ago, Newsweek
was going to Judge Walsh's office and asking him to give them
information so they could retract this story - in their view -
to fix the historical record. But of course Judge Walsh wouldn't
help them on it.
So anyway, here we are, and the problem
is - and, uh, it's hard to understand if you haven't lived in
Washington it may not make a lot of sense, but I'll explain it
anyway - there were three choices at this point:
Choice "A" was to tell the truth,
to say that the President had violated a variety of laws, committed
felonies, and violated our constitutional safeguards about the
way we carry out wars in our country, and impeach him. Option
A.
Then there was Option "B" -
to tell the truth and have congress sort of say well, it's okay
with us, which creates a dangerous precedent for the future, that
is, that now President's would say well hey, look at the Reagan
example, you know, if he can wage war privately, why can't I?
So that was Option "B."
And then there was Option "C"
- to pretend it didn't happen, or to pretend that, say, some Lieutenant
Colonel had done it all. So Washington, I guess understandably,
settled on Option "C."
And it didn't hit me until one evening
in March of '87, the Tower board had just come out with its report,
which basically said that the President was a little bit asleep
at the switch, but hey, you know, it was really these crazy nuts
who did it, and we had one of these Newsweek dinners - they're
fancy affairs - and it was at the Bureau Chief's house, and they're
catered, and there's a tuxedoed waiter, and he pours the wine,
there's nice food, and I was new - I came out of AP which is kind
of a working class/working man's kind of news organization so
I wasn't used to this. And we had as our guest that evening Brent
Scowcroft, who had been on the Tower Board, and Dick Cheney, who
was then - who was going to be the ranking minority figure on
the house Iran-Contra Committee, and we're going through this
little delightful dinner, and at one point Brent Scowcroft says,
he says "Well, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but if
I were advising Admirable Poindexter, and he had told the President
about the diversion, I'd advise him to say that he hadn't."
And being new to this whole, sort of game, I stopped eating, and
looked across the table and said "General! You're not suggesting
that the Admiral should commit perjury, are you?" And there
was kind of like an embarrassed little silence at the table, and
the editor of Newsweek, who was sitting next to me, says - I hope
partly jokingly but I don't know - he says, "Sometimes we
have to do what's good for the country."
So that became - I somehow realized I
was in a different place than I thought I'd been in you know?
So what happened then was that played out. It played out. And
it played out almost predictably, almost sort of with a sadness.
And even when Oliver North finally told the truth, which was that
he was ordered to do all this stuff, and that there was a cover-up
going on - you see, he even told them there was a fall guy planned
- it was the first cover-up that had been announced probably in
front of 100 million Americans and still it was believed by Congress!
So Lee Hamilton again, the same guy who had accepted North's word
and other guys' back in August of '86, he decides, as Chairman
of the Iran-Contra Committee, that we all should sort of say that
it was just these 'men of zeal' - there'd been a coup d'etat in
the White House, we'd find out - there'd been a junta of a Lt.
Col and maybe an Admiral here and there you know who were running
this policy and that somehow the CIA had missed it, the White
House had missed it, NSA had missed it - it wasn't like the Russians
were doing this, it was like, being done, like, under their nose!
But, you know, okay - it's not very believable - a lot of Americans
didn't believe it, to tell you the truth - but in Washington we
believed it. We all believed it. Not all of us, but we pretty
much had to believe it. And at Newsweek and elsewhere we were
told in the press this was not a story anymore, this was not to
be pursued, I guess because this wouldn't be good for the country
to pursue it. And again, history being kind of quirky, there was
this other element of the story, which was that these three Republican
judges who picked independent counsel, picked Lawrence Walsh to
be the independent counsel on this investigation, and Lawrence
Walsh was sort of this non-descript sort of fellow - he's not
a really sharp legal mind? But he's very honest - and maybe they
thought they could manage him. But he just kept pursuing the leads,
and despite all the lies and the cover-ups that went on, there
were other breaks because he kept pursuing the leads, that you
then had of course, with the North trial and the Poindexter trial,
these guys - basically North saying - here's more and more evidence
that these guys were running this thing, and then in the Poindexter
trial Reagan comes out and makes a complete fool of himself and
is just all over the place with his story.
But then another event happens that we
really don't know much about - and that event is that this guy
named Craig Gillan is hired to do a sort of clean-up operation
at the Independent Counsel's office - just to get the loose ends
together so they can wrap up the investigation and end this thing
- it's 1990. And Craig Gillan finds out that there are a lot of
document requests that had been sent out in the early days and
some hadn't been answered! One was from Charlie Hill, who was
an aide to George Schultz, and who was - last time I knew he was
at Hoover up at Stanford - and so they write to Charlie and they
say Charlie - you didn't give us your notes. And Charlie finally
sends his notes, and in it they find this strange reference to
Casper Weinberger taking all these notes! But of course Casper
Weinberger told them that he had no notes. Then as they follow
those leads they find that in fact there had been an Oval Office
cover-up, and that what we had seen, and what remarkably the White
House had been able to successfully maintain, in the defiance
of all the logic and reason that should have been brought to bear
- they were able to maintain for *six years* what amounted to
a felony obstruction of justice out of the White House. And they
did it under the nose of the Congress, under the nose of the Washington
press corp, and the way they were able to do it was essentially
this acceptance in Washington of an absolutely phony reality,
one which is accepted in sort of a consensus way - what you'll
hear if you listen to the McLaughlin Group or these other shows
is a general consensus - there may be disagreements on some points
- but there is a general consensus of the world that is brought
to bear, and often it is in absolute contradiction to the real
world. It is a false reality - it's a Washington reality.
And what we have seen at the end of these
twelve years, and what I guess the challenge of the moment becomes
is how that gets changed. How do the American people really get
back control of this - not just their government, but of their
history - because it's really their history that has been taken
away from them. And it's really what the Washington Press Corps
and the Democrats in Congress as well as the Republicans are culpable
of, was this failure to tell the American people their history.
And the reason they didn't was because they knew, or feared, that
if the American people knew their real history - whether it goes
back to the days of slaughters going on in El Salvador - if they
had known about El Mazote - if they had known about the little
children that were put in the house and shot to death and garroted
- that they wouldn't have gone along with that. And if they had
known that there were felony obstructions of justice being carried
out of the Oval Office they wouldn't have gone along with that
either, and there would have been a real problem - there would
have been a political problem to contain I guess, but - it is
not the role of the Washington press corp - maybe this is sounds
like an understatement, but it's not the role of the Washington
press corps to take part in that. Our job was supposed to be,
I thought, to kind of tell people what we could find out! We go
in, we act nice, we ask a lot of questions, find some things and
run out and tell you! We're sort of like spies for the people,
you know, and instead, we sort of got in there - and I guess it
was real nice, we felt like we were insiders, we felt like these
were all nice, respectable men - they dressed well - Casper Weinberger
went to every single one of these press/government functions -
the Grid Iron Club, the White House Correspondents' dinners, the
Congressional correspondents' dinners - you'd always find Casper
Weinberger there. And so when he finally gets indicted the Washington
press corps comes out and says that's a terrible thing to do,
'cause Casper Weinberger's a good man! He went to all our parties!
How could you think badly of him? And there was even a column
by liberal columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post who
said, it's a terrible thing to indict Casper Weinberger because
we shop at the same store in Georgetown! He said Casper Weinberger
even pushed his own shopping cart! And before Thanksgiving one
year, Richard Cohen saw Casper Weinberger buying his own turkey.
And so how could you think about indicting a guy for a felony
obstruction of justice when he pushes his own shopping cart? This
may seem funny out here but in Washington it's not! This is very
serious stuff!
I know I'm taking too long, but one other
thing I wanted to talk about was - well, you know life being what
it is, and history being quirky as it is - so I left Newsweek
in 1990 - I was not on the best of terms with them - because I
wouldn't go along with this. I mean, I wouldn't - I kept saying
first of all George Bush knew it and we should have told the people
about it in 1988 when he was running for president - we knew what
he knew, we knew that his stories were absolutely the most implausible,
idiotic, embarrassing cover stories imaginable and they should
not have been treated with the kind of respect they were treated
with and we should definitely have pursued that. We also knew
that there was a a cover-up going on - which I kept insisting
on even though Newsweek kept trying to retract it, and so I left.
And I was going to do this book, and this book was going to be
about how Washington sort of works or doesn't, and about how the
press behaved sort of cowardly, and then I get this phone call
one day, in August of 1990, from PBS Frontline, and they asked
me if I would do some investigative work on this project called
the October Surprise. And I'd been through a lot, and I really
didn't want to go through any more. And of all the taboos - obviously
for a long time the North network was just a 'crazy conspiracy
theory', and then the idea that Bush was involved was a 'crazy
conspiracy theory', and the idea that there was a cover-up was
a 'crazy conspiracy theory', and I'd seen all these conspiracy
theories actually turn out to be true, so I really didn't want
to discount anything without having looked at it carefully, I
thought, and anyway I thought it would be kind of wimpy, you know,
unprofessional and wimpy to say no. This was a reputable outfit
- PBS Frontline wanted me to look at something and, as much as
I had my doubts about it I thought, okay.
So, I went off on this little strange
adventure. I had a producer named Robert Ross who's a wonderful
guy who speaks Persian and has lived in the Middle East. We took
our little camera - our little high eight camera - and we went
around as cheaply as possible, and we went to Europe, we went
to the West Coast - we interviewed some arms dealer over in Santa
Monica - and we went around and put together whatever we could.
And we found, to our surprise I think, that there was more there
than we thought. We had doubts about a lot of it still, and we
did not in our - when we finally decided to go with the program
we wanted we were very I think skeptical - that we didn't feel
it was proven, but that there was enough there that merited further
attention, I guess that's a fair way to say where we ended up.
So we did this program, and it aired in April of '91. Gary Sick
the day before - Gary Sick was interviewed on our show - he was
a former national security man under Carter and a very respected
historian, and it was partly his decision to think that this had
happened that influenced us to some degree, because it wasn't
just crazy arms dealers and intelligence guys - it was also this
fairly respectable guy, and the day before our show aired he did
a piece in the New York Times describing his angst and how he
came to this conclusion. And so this story that had sort of lived
on the fringes for some time but which the government itself had
brought in on the public record in a perjury trial in the Spring
of 1990, and lost, this now moved into the mainstream much more,
and it drew - even by the comparisons to the other stuff - this
one was attacked, and continues to be attacked. Frontline commissioned
a second program - an update, which we tried to do in just a very
straightforward, honest way - because at that point the debunkers
- The New Republic and Newsweek actually leading the way - we
felt were wrong on a number of points. But we also felt that we
didn't think it was anywhere near proven and we did a show saying
basically that, and trying to track Casey's whereabouts and all
the rest of the stuff we did.
Anyway, so after the second show, there
was this Congressional investigation, which the Republicans fought,
which George Bush personally strategized to stop, and it was stopped
in the Senate with a filibuster, but the House approved an investigation
- the Senate did a little one in one of the subcommittees, and
it just has to be that Lee Hamilton was of course assigned to
head the investigation. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise -
see, Lee Hamilton was a very honorable man, in many ways, I think,
except he doesn't believe anyone else can lie, I guess. He was
chairman of the Middle East subcommittee when the Iran stuff was
happening - the Iran arms stuff and he missed it. He was then
chairman of the intelligence committee when North was going full
board - missed that. He was then rewarded by being made head of
the Iran-Contra investigation and he kind of missed that. And
so, because of his sterling record they made him head of the House
Task Force on the October Surprise! And of course then the House
Task Force found that it was just fantasy, and they put out their
report - and I must say I've read a lot of reports and I think
it's the worst one I've ever read - but it was well-received in
Washington but I'm going to tell you one little - I mean when
people talk about fantasy in Washington - there is this section
in this report, and this I think is emblematic of it, where the
House wants to put Casey somewhere, and they decide that on August
2nd, 1980, Bill Casey was on Long Island. And you look for why
they think that - this becomes important to the story and I'll
make it brief. When you look back at this, what they have is that,
on August 2nd, Richard Allen - who was then a foreign policy advisor
to candidate Reagan, wrote Casey's Long Island phone number on
the bottom of a sheet of paper. It was Bill Casey, 516, you know,
whatever, and there's no notation of a call or conversation, and
Allen when he testified he said I think I called the number, he
said, but I don't recall talking to Casey or even if the call
was answered. And there's no phone bill showing a call. So what
normally people would say, even my four year probably would say,
is that doesn't prove anything. That proves, like, zero! If someone
calls my number in 703 in Arlington hey, I'm not there! And it
doesn't matter that they call my number, or write it down. Yet
this becomes conclusive proof to the task force that Bill Casey
was on Long Island.
Now the reason that's important is because
Bill Casey was really at the Bohemian Grove in upstate California.
And what we had, was - he actually purchased their annual play
book on August 1st at the Grove, according to the Grove. We had
a contemporaneous diary entry from one of the people at the Grove
that was in the same cottage Casey was in, Matthew McGowan, who
describes meeting with Casey that weekend, and they throw out
that evidence, because Richard Allen wrote Casey's phone number
down and it was a Long Island number! And you go to them and you
say how - Larry Burcello was the counsel here - I've had these
arguments and I've said Larry, this doesn't prove anything, and
they say, it does as far as we're concerned. They put Bill Casey
- they wanted him to be there actually the week earlier, the last
week of July, because if you put him there that weekend, which
they do, that disproves one of the allegations about him meeting
with Iranians in Spain that weekend. So by putting him there the
weekend earlier, when he was actually there the first weekend
in August, you disprove an important allegation, and that means
that one of these guys was just a liar and a fabricator, and we
can all go home and feel happy about it.
Anyway, that's a bit of a long way to
explain that my last adventure was on this October Surprise thing,
and I have written a second book, which recounts that little adventure,
and it's called Trick or Treason, and it should be out, I guess
later this year. This first book is more - basically I talk about
how the "conventional wisdom" works, and I use that
to sort string along a lot of great little stories about how -
my investigative stuff and things that we found out along the
way. The second book is really like a first person kind of magical
mystery tour through strange people.
What I think is the bottom line of both
books is that we are in great danger of losing our grasp of reality
as a nation. Our history has been taken away from us in key ways.
We've been lied to so often. And important things have been blocked
from us. It was important to know that those little children were
killed in El Mazote. I have four kids, and I know what they mean
to me, and it's always been a part of my journalism that I don't
want - that if any of my sons will ever be taken off to war someplace,
I want it to be done for a real reason - not because somebody
made something up. But I also feel for people who lose their kids
anywhere. And I think that the idea that our government would
be complicit, not just in the killing, but in this very cynical
effort to lie about it, and hide about it, and pretend it didn't
happen, and attack those who find out that it did happen, is in
many ways almost worse. It is something that, as a democracy,
we can't really allow to happen.
The main problem, at this point, is that
we have a set of establishments in Washington that have failed
us, as a people. Obviously the executive branch did it because
it had its goals, and agendas, and it wanted to do these things,
and maybe in some cases they were right. But they shouldn't have
lied to us. They shouldn't have tried to create a false reality
to trick us into this. Congress failed because it didn't have
the courage to stand up and do oversight and perform its constitutional
responsibilities.
But what is perhaps most shocking to Americans
is that the press failed. The press is what people sort of expect
to be there as the watchdog, the final group to sort of warn us
of danger. And the press joined it. And the press saw itself -
in the Washington press corp I'm talking about - saw itself at
the elite levels as part of the insider community. And as that
evolved and then grew in the 1980's, the press stopped performing
its oversight responsibilities. And I think we have to figure
out some way, as a people, to change that. There've been actually
more changes I think in the political structure - whatever anyone
thinks of Mr. Clinton, at least there's a change there. And he
has different priorities. And in Congress there's even been some
change.
But the press has gone from being when
I got there '77 as a Watergate press corp, with its faults, with
being maybe a little too overly zealous in pursuing some minor
infraction, but still - it was there as the watchdog. What we
have now, and its continuing into this new era, is the Reagan-Bush
press corp. It's the press corp that they helped create - that
they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging
of those who were not going along, but it was ultimately the editors
and the news executives that did the purging. It wasn't the White
House or the State Department or the Embassy in El Salvador that
drove Ray Bonner out of the New York Times; it was the New York
Times executives who did it. And throughout that whole era it
wasn't the State Department or the White House that ruined Paul
Allen's career at NPR, it was NPR executives. And this was the
case all the way around Washington. The people who succeeded and
did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the
big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening
in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by
cowardice with the deception of the American people. And I think
that's what we all have to sort of look at to see what we can
do to change it. I think it will take a tremendous commitment
by the American people to insist on both more honest journalism,
more straightforward journalism, but also maybe even new journalism.
There has to be some other way - some other outlets. In a way,
I've grown to despair at the possibility of reforming some of
these organizations. Maybe it can happen, but I think ultimately,
we're going to have to see a new kind of media to replace this
old one.
End of talk. There followed a
question and answer session - one of which was to the point of
this newsgroup. He was asked for his opinion on the Kennedy assassination.
Parry: He's asking what I might think
about the assassination of President Kennedy. And I guess my answer
about that would be I don't know. One of the great tragedies of
losing our history which is what's been happening throughout our
lifetimes, has been that, because of this sort of 'conventional
wisdom' or 'conventional reality' that exists, certain things
are not explored. I guess in '63 the conventional wisdom was of
course that it was a lone gun acting by himself - a crazy man.
And so the Warren Commission, like many other government investigations
since, basically just reinforced - ratified that belief. They
may have been right - I mean, I don't know. [Man interjects "there've
been over 600 books on the subject written ] -I know! I've read
some of them. But - all I'm saying is that if investigations aren't
done properly within a certain period of time it's very hard to
do them. I had a friend who was at Time/LIFE during that period
and he was following up on the connections to New Orleans. But
Time/LIFE was so angry about anyone even thinking that there might
be another part of this story, that he used to have to put down
different stories on his expense accounts - like if he would to
go to New Orleans to interview some of these guys that might have
information he'd have to say he was there for the Mardi Gras or
something. He couldn't say he was there for the assassination
of President Kennedy because he would have been considered some
kind of a nut!
And in answer to a question about maybe
the people don't really want to know the truth or take responsibility
to pressure the powers that be to tell the truth:
Parry: I think probably a lot of people
don't want to know. I agree with that. I think, because, it's
hard to know. And I would hear that a lot. That would be an argument
that would be used a great deal in the 80's after Iran-Contra
was going along - it would be that people were bored, they were
tired, they didn't want to hear about it anymore. My feeling though
is that it was the responsibility of the reporter to tell the
people what he could about important events as fairly and as completely
as possible. And it was less my responsibility to decide what
they should know or shouldn't know, or even wanted to know, but
to make an honest judgment about what was historically of importance
and tell them what I could. And even if it's 10% of the public
that wants to know, they deserve to know. I don't think you should
do polls to find out what people want to hear and then tell them
what they want to hear. I think to some degree the press needs
to inform the public about stuff that's important.
In answer to "do the people know
they're being lied to":
Parry: Well basically, the American people
I think, from the polls, believe - first of all they were interested
in Iran-Contra, much more so than the press wanted to think. I
remember once at Newsweek a poll showed 1/3 of the people following
the story closely, 1/3 following them a little bit, and a 1/3
of them not following them at all, and they said - well, you see
2/3 of the people aren't following them very much at all, so therefore,
you know - there were arguments that were kind of turned and twisted
to make it appear that the public didn't really want to know.
I think the public did want to know. Ollie North's book was a
bestseller - a number have been bestsellers - that shows that
they're interested. Plus, I think, they have a tremendous distrust
of how the government's functioned and they want to know when
they've been lied to. It may not be that they care as much about
all the details, but they sure care if a man who is running for
President has lied to them in a major way, and expect the press
to try to make a good-faith effort to discover that, and not to
sort of go along and say gee, it would be too disruptive if people
knew that.
Robert
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