The President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) is an advisor to the Executive Office of the President of the United States.
According to its self-description, it
"...provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence activities."
The PIAB, through its Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), also advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities.
Or, as Bro. Steve Cokely describes it: "That's the outside intelligence community on the inside of the government."; Edward Bennett-Williams was one of its giants.
Richard Mellon Scaife: Who Is He Really?
by Edward Spannaus
Printed in The Executive Intelligence Review -- a Series, Beginning March 21, 1997.
Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?
Part I
Return to ContentsThe following article will be continued in a forthcoming issue.He's considered the stupidest member of his extended family, and was kicked out of Yale, not once, but twice. He's a (supposedly recovered) alcoholic, as have been most members of the family. The kindest description of his personality is ``dark and mysterious.'' He is known for never looking his own employees straight in the eye.
He has a long history of using the U.S. Justice Department to target his enemies. He got his own sister's fiancé indicted; after his sister married the poor chap, the man ended up dead within a year--some say suicide, some say murder.
He owns a network of newspapers, but he himself refuses to be interviewed by reporters from other publications. On one occasion, when a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review tried to question him, he berated her as a ``f--king Communist c--nt.''
He gave a million dollars to Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), and he is the biggest funder of right-wing think-tanks in the United States today.
Meet ... Richard Mellon Scaife.
His name is hardly a household word, but in the past quarter-century, ``Dickie'' Scaife has been one the most powerful behind-the-scenes operators in the United States. His power comes purely from his wealth, and specifically, from the way that he has deployed that wealth at the instruction of the Anglo-American banking families that he represents. Dickie is not known for his brains--in fact, he was kicked out of college twice, first expelled as the result of a drunken brawl, and flunked out the second time. His family made him go ``local,'' to Pittsburgh University, which he tried to make up for, by majoring in British history.
Only recently has Richard Mellon Scaife come into public prominence, as a result of the disclosure that he is the bankroller of a cushy ``retirement'' position for Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr at Pepperdine University. This raised eyebrows, to put it mildly, because Scaife is the principal funder of a news media propaganda campaign aimed at defaming and discrediting Starr's main target, President William Clinton. Scaife has also bankrolled a nationwide crusade charging that White House aide Vincent Foster did not commit suicide, but was murdered; something which is also the subject of official investigation by the recipient of Scaife's largesse, Kenneth Starr.
In the 1980s, Scaife also coordinated and financed a similar campaign of media defamation against Lyndon LaRouche, a Presidential candidate and founder of EIR, and Scaife has a long history of using his own newspapers to smear others who have drawn his ire.
But this is nothing new for Scaife. What he is now doing to President Clinton, and what he did to Lyndon LaRouche, is what he was trained and deployed to do. Scaife is not simply a ``multimillionaire supporter of conservative groups,'' as he is portrayed in the news media; nor is he simply an eccentric rich man who has an obsession against President Clinton.
To understand what is being done to President Clinton today, and to understand what lies behind the campaigns of defamation run by the news media against figures such as Clinton or LaRouche, it is necessary to know who and what, someone like Richard Mellon Scaife actually is.
That story, naturally enough, starts in London.
The Anglo-American OSS
Dickie Scaife is what one might call a second-generation ``OSS brat.'' During World War II, Dickie's father, as well as a number of his father's close business and familial associates, occupied high positions in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--America's wartime intelligence service. Alan Scaife, his father, was a lieutenant colonel in the OSS. A number of cousins of Dickie's mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, also had very high positions in the OSS.For example: Paul Mellon (a cousin of Dickie's mother and a rabid Anglophile) was recruited in London to the OSS by his brother-in-law, David Bruce. Paul trained with British troops, became a major in the OSS, worked under Allen Dulles in Berne, Switzerland, and commanded a unit responsible for conducting propaganda operations behind disintegrating German lines.David Bruce, husband of Paul Mellon's sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, was designated by OSS head William Donovan to oversee all OSS operations in Europe from his base in London. (Although some say, with justification, that it was Bruce who was designated by the U.S. banking-establishment families to oversee Donovan.) Another OSS cousin was Larimer Mellon, who likewise worked on Allen Dulles's staff in Berne.
David Bruce (a direct descendant of the Scottish Bruce dynasty) later divorced Ailsa and married his second wife, Evangeline, an OSS secretary whose father had been a special liaison to British intelligence from the U.S. State Department.
It is reliably reported that these Anglophilic OSS circles around Scaife's father were the crucial influence on steering Dickie into intelligence-related ``philanthropy''--i.e., the private funding of joint British-U.S. intelligence projects which were commonly mis-identified as ``CIA'' projects or fronts.
It is more accurate to describe the CIA as a ``front'' for these Anglo-American banking families. But even that would be too simple. The CIA is an agency of government, and is thus subject to the institutional and bureaucratic pressures to which any agency of government must respond. The ``families'' attempt to control the CIA, as they do with the State Department and other agencies. The principal means of control is through the private financing of think-tanks, conferences, publications, etc., which attempt to train the personnel, and set the agenda, for the institutions of government. This is precisely what Dickie Scaife and his family money did when the Reagan-Bush administration came into office in 1981.
The "Focal Point" and First Boston
Another element of this bankers-intelligence apparatus is what is called the Focal Point system. The public may misconceive of this apparatus as ``CIA''--but the CIA is simply a secondary component of this operation, which encompasses the old families, military intelligence capabilities, and private intelligence operations.One intelligence source, familiar with this system, said recently that ``CIA'' is simply a ``cover story'' for activities that the banking families and other institutions and agencies carry out in the name of the CIA.The Focal Point system, within the official government apparatus, was originally created in the mid-1950s by then-CIA Director Allen Dulles. It functioned as a capability extending into other agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, for conducting covert operations and paramilitary ``special operations.'' A particular emphasis was counterinsurgency and ``civil affairs'' (as taken over from the British); an included feature of this was psychological warfare and propaganda.
Within the military, the Focal Point system was centered in the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and remnants of this system still exist to this day, in the Support Activities Branch of the J-3 Special Operations Division.
There was also a substantial ``private'' component to the Focal Point system, the precursor of the privatized intelligence operations authorized under the Reagan-Bush Executive Order 12333. But this privatized intelligence system was already active in the 1950s, according to knowledgeable sources, with the First Boston Corp., the First National Bank of Boston (now Bank of Boston), and other banking houses playing a leading financial role.
Of particular interest here, among the many families which played key roles in this Anglo-American bankers' intelligence network (such as the Astors, Rockefellers, and the du Ponts), are three families: the Roosevelts, the Mellons, and the Welds.
Mellon Securities had merged into First Boston in 1946, and as of about 1980, the Scaife family held about 6% of First Boston, and the combined Mellon and Scaife families about 13%. First Boston's principal law firm was Sullivan and Cromwell, out of which Allen Dulles ran U.S. intelligence after the termination of the OSS and until the creation of the CIA. This is also Paul Mellon's law firm; his and much of the Mellon family's financial affairs were run by Stoddard Stevens of Sullivan and Cromwell, who has been described as Paul's ``father figure.''
Dickie Scaife was brought into this system by his OSS relatives no later than 1973, and in 1979 he was placed on the board of directors of First Boston, where he remained until 1987. At that time, 40% of First Boston was owned by Crédit Suisse-White Weld (of the dope-running family of former Justice Department official William Weld). In 1988, First Boston became CS First Boston, and the size of the board was apparently considerably reduced.
Already in 1929, a White Weld banker, John A. Gade, had proposed the creation of an American central intelligence agency, to be modelled explicitly on British intelligence. The current, most public, standard-bearer of the Weld family, is William Weld, who organized the judicial frameup of Lyndon LaRouche from his positions as U.S. Attorney in Boston and, then, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. William Weld is married to a Roosevelt, Susan, the daughter of another OSS veteran, Quentin Roosevelt.
The Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family is deeply enmeshed in this OSS-Wall Street intelligence apparatus, and they are especially close to Cord Meyer, a key operative of this network who shows up again and again as a top operative with responsibility for handling ``CIA'' front organizations. It was Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit (``Kim'') Roosevelt, who had proposed the creation of a ``propaganda and intelligence agency'' to Wall Street lawyer William Donovan during World War II.
The background of Forum World Features (FWF) is instructive. Although accounts of its creation vary, it appears that it was a division of Kern House Enterprises, created by Kermit Roosevelt in the 1960s; one account says that Kermit ``was entrusted with creating the CIA's publishing empire.''
One of the premier private intelligence think-tanks, NSIC was formed in 1962, primarily with Mellon family money; on the board was Prescott Bush (of the Harriman-linked Bush family, and George's brother), John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia (one of the authors of Bush's EO 12333), and various representatives of the corporate and intelligence world, as well as personnel associated directly with Scaife.
From 1966 to 1973, FWF was headed by John Hay Whitney, a raving Anglophile who had been U.S. ambassador to Britain, and who was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1973, Dickie Scaife purchased Kern/FWF, and headed it until its demise in 1975-76, following its exposure as a ``CIA'' front. At the time of its dissolution in 1976, its three directors were Scaife, Scaife's top operative Daniel McMichael (former president of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council), and Lewis Preston, the chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust (and later head of the World Bank).
In 1975, a British weekly, Time Out, and the Washington Post, published a 1968 memorandum from the CIA station chief in London to then-director Richard Helms, describing FWF as an agency-sponsored operation providing ``a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.'' The memorandum portrayed FWF as a CIA proprietary, which was ``run with the knowledge and cooperation of British intelligence.'' The overseer of FWF in the United States was Cord Meyer.
Although FWF was dissolved, its operations were not. Its day-to-day operations in London were managed by Brian Crozier, a British writer long associated with both U.K. and U.S. intelligence. In 1970, Crozier had also become the head of another FWF-created organization in London, which was renamed the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Between 1973 and 1979 alone, Dickie Scaife's private trusts gave over a million dollars to Crozier's ISC.
In a 1980 proposal, Scaife's aide Daniel McMichael described ISC as doing ``a first-rate job in conducting research on `low-level conflict,' i.e., political and psychological warfare, revolutionary activities, insurgency operations and terrorism.'' McDaniel boasted that ISC work ``is consistently used by the Thatcher government,'' and that the ISC had ``solid working relationships with the Heritage Foundation, the National Strategy Information Center, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis [associated with Tufts University and its Fletcher School] and a number of other Scaife-supported organizations.'' On ISC's board of directors at that time were a number of top, easily identified British intelligence and counterinsurgency officials.
After FWF was dumped, its book publishing operations were taken over by Rossiter Publications, later renamed Craven House. Crozier was also its managing director. Among authors published by Crozier's shop was Robert Moss, a British intelligence operative who floats between the ISC, the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.
In fact, Scaife's role at Heritage increased after the 1976-77 shakeup, when he personally brought in Edwin Feulner to head it up. Feulner (a board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation) placed many Brits into key policy positions at Heritage, among whom was Stuart Butler, a member of the British Fabian Society. A socialist at the ``conservative'' Heritage Foundation? Not so strange. Both are motivated by a deep-seated, bitter hatred of industrial capitalism. It was, after all, the ``Fabian'' London School of Economics to which Friedrich von Hayek, later the founder and head of the Mont Pelerin Society, had moved his ``Austrian School'' of economics in the 1930s.
In a 1981 interview with EIR, Butler explained it as follows: ``In the case of the Reagan government, we are using a conservative government to impose a quite radical, left-wing program--all based upon solid, liberal economic principles. There really isn't so much difference between the people in the Fabian Society, people like myself, and Milton Friedman. We really overlap in the middle of things on such ideas as local control.''
What Butler said then, goes many-fold for Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America.
But that gets ahead of the story. First came the so-called ``Reagan Revolution,'' which on virtually every level was run by operatives associated and financed by Mellon Scaife, along with four other foundations which make up the ``Philanthropic Roundtable.'' The Roundtable includes the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (these four are known as the ``Four Sisters'' because they finance almost all of their projects in common), plus the J.M. Foundation.
Even more important, was the reorganization of intelligence operations in the Reagan administration, and the creation of what became known as the ``secret government'' run under the personal direction of Vice President George Bush in the 1980s. This ``secret and parallel government'' was simply the Scaife Mellon network of think-tanks and and academic retainers, brought into the government, and made ``official.''
Who is Richard Mellon Scaife?
Return to ContentsPart 2 of our exposé on the moneybags behind the media campaign against the President. Edward Spannaus reports on Scaife and the Bush ``secret government.''
Then and now, Scaife does not limit his largesse to strategic and foreign policy matters, but he is also a primary funder of a burgeoning network of think-tanks and propaganda mills promoting the feudal economic policies coming out of the Mont Pelerin Society. Under the guise of ``Thatcherism,'' these groups provided the social and economic policies, and much of the staffing, for the so-called ``Reagan Revolution,'' and more recently, for the Gingrich-Gramm gang in the wake of the Republican Party takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. One could say that the earnest money for the ``Contract with America'' was paid by Dickie Scaife.
A third distinctive cluster of organizations funded by Scaife are the right-wing legal foundations and litigation groups; originally founded to counter civil libertarians and environmentalists, they have increasingly become pro-environmentalist and libertarian in their outlook--as well as financing legal attacks on President Clinton and the Clinton administration.
Here, we will look more closely at the intelligence and foreign policy think-tanks which virtually took over the Reagan administration in 1981, and which provided the underpinning for Bush's ``secret government'' built up in 1981-86.
Both Godson and Ra'anan were subsequently deeply involved in what became known as the ``Iran-Contra'' scandals; and--not surprisingly--both were personally and heavily involved in dirty operations against Lyndon LaRouche.
Pollard was no accident, nor was Boland. Ra'anan (born Heinz Felix Frischwasser in Central Europe in 1926) spent the war years in London, and then emigrated to Israel. He came to the United States in the early 1960s, and, working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, set up an Israeli spy-recruiting unit. In 1967, he joined the faculty at the Fletcher School.
In 1973, the International Security Studies Program initiated a series of annual conferences, funded by Scaife, on a wide range of strategic topics. Dozens of senior figures in the U.S. military-intelligence community were brought in to participate. The last seminar, in April 1979, was on ``Intelligence Policy and National Security.'' Ra'anan himself was named to an advisory committee in 1980 to help shape Reagan's foreign policy and defense platform.
From Pittsburgh, Godson went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and by the late 1970s, was regarded as an ``expert'' on Soviet methods. In 1979, Scaife money enabled Godson to launch the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), a direct extension of the 1970s Fletcher conference series, reflecting the expectation that the Republicans would be victorious in the 1980 elections, which would present an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of re-organizing U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.
The Scaife-funded effort by the American Tories to take over and subvert the country's intelligence reorganization had an important, if unwitting, ally in the new Director of Central IntelligenceAnd although Casey was not a great fan of George Bush, he was an enthusiast of ``off-the-books'' covert operations, and he often preferred using non-CIA personnel to run such operations--usually drawing on Pentagon personnel requisitioned through the NSC--which effectively put Vice President Bush in charge of such operations.
The ``charter'' of the secret government and privatized intelligence operations was Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981, along with EO 12331 (signed Oct. 20, 1981, which reconstituted the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB), and EO 12334 (also signed Dec. 4, 1981, which created the three-member Intelligence Oversight Board). The relationship between the three orders, was that PFIAB would identify areas where intelligence ``active measures'' or covert operations were desired; the Oversight Board then reviewed covert actions and provided the legal justification for them.
EO 12333 and its sister orders were the product of the Godson CSI Consortium process, along with a workshop on ``Law, Intelligence and National Security'' sponsored by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security held in Washington in December 1979. All of this was funded by Scaife, and naturally, almost everyone who played a major role in the creation of EO 12333 was involved with the Sciafe-funded think-tank network. It was reportedly drafted by two regulars at the Godson Consortium--Angelo Codevilla, from the Hoover Institution and a senior staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Kenneth deGraffenreid, also a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and a Reagan-Bush NSC official--and then run through the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.
Others reportedly involved in the drafting were Paul Seabury and Anne Armstrong of PFIAB, and Prof. John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia, who became the chief legal consultant to the Intelligence Oversight Board.
EO 12333 was touted as ``unleashing'' the intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Carter years, much of which stemmed from the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of the intelligence agencies in 1975-76.
Within the military, the Focal Point system was centered in the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and remnants of this system still exist to this day, in the Support Activities Branch of the J-3 Special Operations Division.
There was also a substantial ``private'' component to the Focal Point system, the precursor of the privatized intelligence operations authorized under the Reagan-Bush Executive Order 12333. But this privatized intelligence system was already active in the 1950s, according to knowledgeable sources, with the First Boston Corp., the First National Bank of Boston (now Bank of Boston), and other banking houses playing a leading financial role.
Of particular interest here, among the many families which played key roles in this Anglo-American bankers' intelligence network (such as the Astors, Rockefellers, and the du Ponts), are three families: the Roosevelts, the Mellons, and the Welds.
Mellon Securities had merged into First Boston in 1946, and as of about 1980, the Scaife family held about 6% of First Boston, and the combined Mellon and Scaife families about 13%. First Boston's principal law firm was Sullivan and Cromwell, out of which Allen Dulles ran U.S. intelligence after the termination of the OSS and until the creation of the CIA. This is also Paul Mellon's law firm; his and much of the Mellon family's financial affairs were run by Stoddard Stevens of Sullivan and Cromwell, who has been described as Paul's ``father figure.''
Dickie Scaife was brought into this system by his OSS relatives no later than 1973, and in 1979 he was placed on the board of directors of First Boston, where he remained until 1987. At that time, 40% of First Boston was owned by Crédit Suisse-White Weld (of the dope-running family of former Justice Department official William Weld). In 1988, First Boston became CS First Boston, and the size of the board was apparently considerably reduced.
Already in 1929, a White Weld banker, John A. Gade, had proposed the creation of an American central intelligence agency, to be modelled explicitly on British intelligence. The current, most public, standard-bearer of the Weld family, is William Weld, who organized the judicial frameup of Lyndon LaRouche from his positions as U.S. Attorney in Boston and, then, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. William Weld is married to a Roosevelt, Susan, the daughter of another OSS veteran, Quentin Roosevelt.
The Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family is deeply enmeshed in this OSS-Wall Street intelligence apparatus, and they are especially close to Cord Meyer, a key operative of this network who shows up again and again as a top operative with responsibility for handling ``CIA'' front organizations. It was Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit (``Kim'') Roosevelt, who had proposed the creation of a ``propaganda and intelligence agency'' to Wall Street lawyer William Donovan during World War II.
Kermit subsequently worked with British intelligence to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, an action which worked to the financial benefit of not only British Petroleum, but also of Gulf Oil, a Mellon family enterprise which was closely tied to First Boston after the 1946 Mellon Securities merger. In 1958, Kermit ``retired'' to take the strategic position of vice president for government relations with Gulf Oil.
Dickie gets his assignment
When he was 40 years old, having been trained and disciplined through some particularly nasty operations to be described in our next installment, Dickie Scaife was formally inducted into the top levels of the Anglo-American bankers' intelligence apparatus. In 1973, he took control of the Scaife family foundations, which he had previously run jointly with his sister Cordelia.He dramatically changed the focus of foundation grants, to emphasize British-intelligence-oriented ``right-wing'' think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, or the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. This was not something totally new; funding from the Scaife family foundations for some of these institutions, such as the National Strategy Information Center, goes back into the early 1960s.
Of singular importance is the position Dickie was given in early 1973, when he was allowed to take over ownership of Forum World Features, a joint British intelligence-CIA news media operation based in London. This is probably the most important career advancement for Dickie, for it defines the track he has pursued since: the use and the manipulation of the news media to promote favored causes, and to attack and defame adversaries. There is a direct path from Forum World Features, to the Bush ``secret government's'' Public Diplomacy operation created in 1983, which in turn spawned the ``Get LaRouche'' task force, all the way through to the anti-Clinton propaganda machine which Scaife directs and finances today.
The background of Forum World Features (FWF) is instructive. Although accounts of its creation vary, it appears that it was a division of Kern House Enterprises, created by Kermit Roosevelt in the 1960s; one account says that Kermit ``was entrusted with creating the CIA's publishing empire.''
Kern House was set up by Roosevelt with Mellon money; in turn, it set up a London subsidiary, Kern House Enterprises, Ltd. Kern House begat Forum World Features, financed with funds from the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), based in New York. FWF's major purpose was to supply feature material to newspapers around the world, including at least 30 in the United States. It also commissioned a number of books.
One of the premier private intelligence think-tanks, NSIC was formed in 1962, primarily with Mellon family money; on the board was Prescott Bush (of the Harriman-linked Bush family, and George's brother), John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia (one of the authors of Bush's EO 12333), and various representatives of the corporate and intelligence world, as well as personnel associated directly with Scaife.
From 1966 to 1973, FWF was headed by John Hay Whitney, a raving Anglophile who had been U.S. ambassador to Britain, and who was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1973, Dickie Scaife purchased Kern/FWF, and headed it until its demise in 1975-76, following its exposure as a ``CIA'' front. At the time of its dissolution in 1976, its three directors were Scaife, Scaife's top operative Daniel McMichael (former president of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council), and Lewis Preston, the chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust (and later head of the World Bank).
In 1975, a British weekly, Time Out, and the Washington Post, published a 1968 memorandum from the CIA station chief in London to then-director Richard Helms, describing FWF as an agency-sponsored operation providing ``a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.'' The memorandum portrayed FWF as a CIA proprietary, which was ``run with the knowledge and cooperation of British intelligence.'' The overseer of FWF in the United States was Cord Meyer.
(Cord Meyer, incidentally, not only promoted the publication of material favorable to the Anglo-American banking-intelligence establishment, but attempted to block publication of disfavored material. Author and former CIA officer Victor Marchetti reports that in 1972, Meyer, whom he describes as the number-two man in the CIA Clandestine Services, visited the New York offices of Harper and Row to attempt to stop the publication of Alfred McCoy's first edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. As a result, the publisher insisted that McCoy submit the manuscript to the CIA before it would be published.)
Although FWF was dissolved, its operations were not. Its day-to-day operations in London were managed by Brian Crozier, a British writer long associated with both U.K. and U.S. intelligence. In 1970, Crozier had also become the head of another FWF-created organization in London, which was renamed the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Between 1973 and 1979 alone, Dickie Scaife's private trusts gave over a million dollars to Crozier's ISC.
In a 1980 proposal, Scaife's aide Daniel McMichael described ISC as doing ``a first-rate job in conducting research on `low-level conflict,' i.e., political and psychological warfare, revolutionary activities, insurgency operations and terrorism.'' McDaniel boasted that ISC work ``is consistently used by the Thatcher government,'' and that the ISC had ``solid working relationships with the Heritage Foundation, the National Strategy Information Center, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis [associated with Tufts University and its Fletcher School] and a number of other Scaife-supported organizations.'' On ISC's board of directors at that time were a number of top, easily identified British intelligence and counterinsurgency officials.
After FWF was dumped, its book publishing operations were taken over by Rossiter Publications, later renamed Craven House. Crozier was also its managing director. Among authors published by Crozier's shop was Robert Moss, a British intelligence operative who floats between the ISC, the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.
Promoting his British "Heritage"
Scaife is also one of the biggest financiers of British-linked think-tanks in the United States promoting ``conservative'' social and economic policies--prototypical of which is the Heritage Foundation. Although beer magnate Joseph Coors is more publicly identified with Heritage, the fact is, that Scaife has provided more funding for Heritage than has Coors.From 1974 up through the end of the 1970s, Scaife provided about $200,000 a year to Heritage; after a shakeup in the late 1970s--which transformed it into what one Heritage staff member termed ``an outpost for British intelligence in the United States''--Scaife's support jumped to the range of $1 million a year.
(In November 1994, just after the commencement of the short-lived ``Gingrich revolution'' of the 1994 elections, Newt opened a speech at the Heritage Foundation President's Club by praising two people ``who have really created modern conservativism--Dick Scaife and Ed Feulner.'' Gingrich went on: ``Dick Scaife is a remarkable citizen who has spent many years as a key force in sustaining conservative ideas and who has played a major, major role on the Heritage Foundation's board, and he's been a good friend and a good ally for a very long time, and I remember working with him starting in the late '70s.'')
In fact, Scaife's role at Heritage increased after the 1976-77 shakeup, when he personally brought in Edwin Feulner to head it up. Feulner (a board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation) placed many Brits into key policy positions at Heritage, among whom was Stuart Butler, a member of the British Fabian Society. A socialist at the ``conservative'' Heritage Foundation? Not so strange. Both are motivated by a deep-seated, bitter hatred of industrial capitalism. It was, after all, the ``Fabian'' London School of Economics to which Friedrich von Hayek, later the founder and head of the Mont Pelerin Society, had moved his ``Austrian School'' of economics in the 1930s.
In a 1981 interview with EIR, Butler explained it as follows: ``In the case of the Reagan government, we are using a conservative government to impose a quite radical, left-wing program--all based upon solid, liberal economic principles. There really isn't so much difference between the people in the Fabian Society, people like myself, and Milton Friedman. We really overlap in the middle of things on such ideas as local control.''
What Butler said then, goes many-fold for Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America.
But that gets ahead of the story. First came the so-called ``Reagan Revolution,'' which on virtually every level was run by operatives associated and financed by Mellon Scaife, along with four other foundations which make up the ``Philanthropic Roundtable.'' The Roundtable includes the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (these four are known as the ``Four Sisters'' because they finance almost all of their projects in common), plus the J.M. Foundation.
Even more important, was the reorganization of intelligence operations in the Reagan administration, and the creation of what became known as the ``secret government'' run under the personal direction of Vice President George Bush in the 1980s. This ``secret and parallel government'' was simply the Scaife Mellon network of think-tanks and and academic retainers, brought into the government, and made ``official.''
Who is Richard Mellon Scaife?
Part II
Return to ContentsPart 2 of our exposé on the moneybags behind the media campaign against the President. Edward Spannaus reports on Scaife and the Bush ``secret government.''Richard Mellon Scaife has recently come into prominence as the bankroller of a news-media campaign aimed at President Clinton, while he is sponsoring a cushy ``retirement'' position for Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. In Part 1 (EIR, March 21), we showed that ``Dickie'' Scaife has been deployed for almost 25 years by the old Office of Strategic Services Anglo-American financier-intelligence circles, to do exactly this sort of thing.Since Dickie Scaife was allowed to take over the Scaife family foundations and trusts in 1973, he has been a principal funder of that network of nominally ``conservative'' foreign policy think-tanks which operates as a training ground and as the agenda-setter for the foreign service and intelligence communities. During the Reagan-Bush administrations, this cluster of conservative think-tanks virtually became the government.In reality there were two governments in the Reagan-Bush administration--the official, public government, and the ``secret government'' run by Vice President George Bush.
The official government, particularly the National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence community, were riddled with Scaife's grantees and beneficiaries. But behind the official government lay what became known as the ``secret government''--and Scaife's network of think-tanks and foundations provided the intellectual rationalization which justified its creation, including the infamous Executive Order 12333.
As far as is known, most of Scaife's hirelings didn't dirty their hands with actual drug-running or assassinations, but they did provide key funding and staff for the entire so-called ``Project Democracy'' apparatus, and also for the semi-official ``public diplomacy'' propaganda machine which ran cover for Bush's Contra drug-runners and Afghansi terrorists. [fn1]
Then and now, Scaife does not limit his largesse to strategic and foreign policy matters, but he is also a primary funder of a burgeoning network of think-tanks and propaganda mills promoting the feudal economic policies coming out of the Mont Pelerin Society. Under the guise of ``Thatcherism,'' these groups provided the social and economic policies, and much of the staffing, for the so-called ``Reagan Revolution,'' and more recently, for the Gingrich-Gramm gang in the wake of the Republican Party takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. One could say that the earnest money for the ``Contract with America'' was paid by Dickie Scaife.
A third distinctive cluster of organizations funded by Scaife are the right-wing legal foundations and litigation groups; originally founded to counter civil libertarians and environmentalists, they have increasingly become pro-environmentalist and libertarian in their outlook--as well as financing legal attacks on President Clinton and the Clinton administration.
Here, we will look more closely at the intelligence and foreign policy think-tanks which virtually took over the Reagan administration in 1981, and which provided the underpinning for Bush's ``secret government'' built up in 1981-86.
Origins of the secret government
As the Iran-Contra scandals played out in televised Congressional hearings in 1987, many Americans began to get a glimpse of what some Congressmen called the ``parallel'' government, and others simply called the ``secret government.'' What most Americans didn't know, is the intellectual foundations were developed by Richard Mellon Scaife's hirelings.Two Scaife-funded operations played central roles in preparing the way for the creation of this ``secret government'' machinery. The first was a series of national security seminars held during 1973-79 by the International Security Studies Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University--organized by Prof. Uri Ra'anan. The second was a series of seven conferences held during 1979-84 by the ``Consortium for the Study of Intelligence,'' organized by Roy Godson.Both Godson and Ra'anan were subsequently deeply involved in what became known as the ``Iran-Contra'' scandals; and--not surprisingly--both were personally and heavily involved in dirty operations against Lyndon LaRouche.
Ra'anan and the Fletcher School
The Fletcher School is the oldest graduate school of diplomacy in the United States. Its students are tracked into careers in the foreign service, the CIA, and the military. From its founding, the International Security Studies Program within the Fletcher School was financed almost exclusively through grants from the Scaife family foundations and trusts. On its Advisory Council in the 1980s were R. Daniel McMichael and Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, both trustees of Scaife family foundations.After the arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in November 1985, Ra'anan, the chairman of Fletcher's International Security Studies Program, was quoted praising his former student Pollard in the New York Times as ``bright and articulate.''Upon Pollard's graduation from the Fletcher School in 1978, he had gone to work for U.S. Naval Intelligence. One of his classmates, Mira Lansky Boland, went to work for the CIA for two years, and then for the Pentagon; in 1984, Boland transferred to the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where she soon became devoted full-time to the ``Get LaRouche'' task force.
Pollard was no accident, nor was Boland. Ra'anan (born Heinz Felix Frischwasser in Central Europe in 1926) spent the war years in London, and then emigrated to Israel. He came to the United States in the early 1960s, and, working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, set up an Israeli spy-recruiting unit. In 1967, he joined the faculty at the Fletcher School.
In 1973, the International Security Studies Program initiated a series of annual conferences, funded by Scaife, on a wide range of strategic topics. Dozens of senior figures in the U.S. military-intelligence community were brought in to participate. The last seminar, in April 1979, was on ``Intelligence Policy and National Security.'' Ra'anan himself was named to an advisory committee in 1980 to help shape Reagan's foreign policy and defense platform.
Godson and the Consortium
Roy Godson, a wholly-owned asset of Scaife, Inc., is the son of a longtime Lovestonite State Department official, Joe Godson, who served principally in London and Belgrade, Yugoslavia after the war, and who founded the London branch of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).Roy Godson, after getting his master's degree at Columbia University (where he was already known as a ``CIA watcher of left-wing groups''), was immediately sent to Pittsburgh, where he was given his first teaching post at Carnegie-Mellon University (1967-69), and where he was also hired as a program director of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council (where Scaife's aide R. Daniel McMichael was president). Godson's first book, American Labor and European Politics (1976), was financed by a grant that McMichael arranged; his next book was published by the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC).From Pittsburgh, Godson went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and by the late 1970s, was regarded as an ``expert'' on Soviet methods. In 1979, Scaife money enabled Godson to launch the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), a direct extension of the 1970s Fletcher conference series, reflecting the expectation that the Republicans would be victorious in the 1980 elections, which would present an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of re-organizing U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.
The Scaife-funded effort by the American Tories to take over and subvert the country's intelligence reorganization had an important, if unwitting, ally in the new Director of Central Intelligence
The ``charter'' of the secret government and privatized intelligence operations was Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981, along with EO 12331 (signed Oct. 20, 1981, which reconstituted the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB), and EO 12334 (also signed Dec. 4, 1981, which created the three-member Intelligence Oversight Board). The relationship between the three orders, was that PFIAB would identify areas where intelligence ``active measures'' or covert operations were desired; the Oversight Board then reviewed covert actions and provided the legal justification for them.
EO 12333 and its sister orders were the product of the Godson CSI Consortium process, along with a workshop on ``Law, Intelligence and National Security'' sponsored by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security held in Washington in December 1979. All of this was funded by Scaife, and naturally, almost everyone who played a major role in the creation of EO 12333 was involved with the Sciafe-funded think-tank network. It was reportedly drafted by two regulars at the Godson Consortium--Angelo Codevilla, from the Hoover Institution and a senior staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Kenneth deGraffenreid, also a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and a Reagan-Bush NSC official--and then run through the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.
Others reportedly involved in the drafting were Paul Seabury and Anne Armstrong of PFIAB, and Prof. John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia, who became the chief legal consultant to the Intelligence Oversight Board.
EO 12333 was touted as ``unleashing'' the intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Carter years, much of which stemmed from the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of the intelligence agencies in 1975-76.
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