Richard Mellon Scaife: Who Is He Really?
by Edward Spannaus
Printed in The Executive Intelligence Review -- a Series,
Beginning March 21, 1997.
Part I
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.
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.''
Part II
Part 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
And 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.
Among significant changes from the previous 1978
Executive Order 12036, was that the President could
designate agencies other than the CIA to conduct ``special
activities'' (covert operations), and that CIA was
permitted to conduct ``special activities'' inside the
United States. Although private contracting had been
permitted under the earlier EO, it could only be done
covertly with the approval of the Attorney General; EO
12333 allowed concealment of private contracting without
any approval by the U.S. Attorney General. According to
one source who was involved in the process, deGraffenreid
had sought an even broader privatization charter; this was
beaten back, but the loophole was still big enough to
permit almost anything that the dirty deGraffenreid
faction wanted. This also opened the door even wider for
the Bush networks to bring British and Israeli
intelligence operatives into official U.S. intelligence
operations.
EO 12333 also designated the NSC as ``the highest
Executive branch entity'' for review and guidance of all
foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and ``special
activities.'' Under the committee structures being set up
within the NSC, Vice President Bush was then effectively
put in charge of all intelligence activities.
Theodore Shackley and covert operations
The role of Theodore Shackley requires special
mention--for it was critical to the creation of the Bush
``secret government.'' When Bush was CIA director in
1976-77, Shackley was his deputy director for plans
(covert operations). Shackley was forced to resign from the CIA
in 1978, but he had already built up a vast financial and
intelligence network in Asia and the Middle East, which he
put at Bush's disposal during the Reagan administration.
Vice President Bush's national security adviser, Don
Gregg, was a Shackley protégé; it was Gregg who
brought his longtime associate Felix Rodriguez on board
for the Contra gun- and drug-running operation.
At the December 1980 Consortium event on
``Intelligence Requirements for the '80s: Covert Action,''
in Washington, Shackley's presentation laid out a
detailed proposal for ``rebuilding'' America's covert
paramilitary capabilities. The Shackley speech was a
recipe for the subsequent Contra and related efforts,
complete with the ``offline'' funding. According to one
intelligence source, Shackley gave a similar presentation
to the Reagan Presidential transition team on
intelligence. Attending the briefing, according to the
source, were Casey, Bush, and Max Hugel, Casey's first
deputy for covert operations.
Shackley reportedly urged that the rebuilt covert
intelligence and paramilitary apparatus be run
``offline''--which meant using the band of intelligence
community ``asteroids'' who had gathered around him from
his days as CIA station chief in Miami and later in Laos,
such as Felix Rodriguez and the operatives who staffed the
Oliver North-Richard Secord Contra supply operation and
their international arms ring. Shackley also reportedly
urged that the new special teams be run directly out of
the White House: What this meant in practice, was through
the NSC staff apparatus that functioned under Vice
President Bush's direction under the authority of
EO|12333, and National Security Decision Directives 2 and
3.
All of Shackley's proposals were enthusiastically
promoted by Godson in the seven-volume proceedings of the
CSI. The proceedings were published by the Scaife-funded
NSIC, which appointed Roy Godson to head up its expanded
Reagan-era Washington office.
Caught!
Scaife's network did not just provide the
``intellectual'' underpinnings for the ``secret
government'' and offline intelligence operations. In a
couple of instances, his operatives were caught directly
laundering money for the drug-running Contras, and they
almost found themselves indicted as a result of the
Iran-Contra investigation. Two of these were Godson and
the aptly named Clyde (``Terry'') Sleaze, who described
himself, during his Iran-Contra deposition in 1987, as
having been ``general counsel for Richard M. Scaife and
his family and entities'' during 1974-86. Sleaze testified
that he had met Godson while the latter was working for the
NSIC, and Sleaze said that he had attended some of the
NSIC seminars, as well as having often visited the NSIC to
check up on what they were doing with Scaife's money.
Sleaze testified that Godson had asked him for a
contribution involving Nicaragua, and that as a result, he
had then met personally with Oliver North, then-National
Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, and Roy Godson in the
White House Situation Room, where they asked Sleaze to
raise $400,000 for a Contra organization. However, Sleaze
testified that he raised only $5,000 from another
individual, which he sent to Godson to be deposited with
an offshore entity called ``I.C. Inc.'' Sleaze also said
that he had arranged a substantial contribution (actually,
$60,000) to Godson from a Goldman Sachs stockbroker, and
that then there was another $100,000 donated to the
Heritage Foundation, arranged through Ed Feulner, for
Central America.
The money was laundered through Heritage, then
through another non-profit organization controlled by
Richard Miller and Frank Gomez, and then into I.C., Inc.
The $60,000 contribution ended up in one of the
North-Secord ``Enterprise'' bank accounts (that of Lake
Resources) in Switzerland.
Miller was subsequently indicted and pled guilty to a
charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States by using
tax-exempt organizations for improper purposes. Gomez was
given immunity from prosecution in exchange for
cooperation with the independent counsel. Godson, Sleaze,
and Feulner managed to escape indictment.
Footnote
For a thorough description of Bush's
``secret government'' apparatus and Public Diplomacy, see
EIR Special Report ``George Bush and the 12333 Serial
Murder Ring,'' October 1996, Chapter 2.
Documentation:
Richard M. Scaife's private government
Following is a partial listing of grants from 1973
through about 1993, made by the three Scaife family
foundations run by Richard Mellon Scaife that publicly
report their grants. The three are the Sarah [Mellon]
Scaife Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the
Carthage Foundation. The complete list of grantees is much
longer. There are also three private family trusts that do
not report their activities publicly; it is reported that
some of the most sensitive, intelligence-related grants
made by Dick Scaife are handled through the private
trusts. These are the Richard Mellon Scaife Family Trust
No.|1 and No.|2, and the Trust for the Grandchildren of
Sarah Scaife.
Intelligence and foreign policy think-tanks
National Strategy Information Center (NSIC)
Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy
Georgetown University, Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS)
Stanford University, Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution and Peace
American Bar Association, Standing Committee on Law
and National Security
The Committee for the Free World
Committee on the Present Danger
Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
American Security Council Foundation
U.S. Global Strategy Council
Jamestown Foundation
University of Virginia Law School, Center for Law and
National Security
New York University, National Security Education
Program of the Graduate School of Public Administration
Freedom House, New York
Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central
America)
National Endowment for Democracy
Institute for the Study of Conflict, London, U.K.
Center for European and Strategic Studies, London,
U.K.
World Affairs Council, Pittsburgh
Social-economic policy think-tanks
Mont Pelerin Society
American Enterprise Institute
Heritage Foundation
Cato Institute
Reason Foundation
Free Congress Foundation
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
American Legislative Exchange Council
National Taxpayers Union
Foundation for Economic Education,
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York
Manhattan Institute, New York
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
National Center for Policy Analysis
Rockford Institute
Institute on Religion and Democracy
Population control
Planned Parenthood
Population Action International
Population Crisis Center
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
News media propaganda
Accuracy in Media
American Spectator
American Spectator Educational Foundation
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
Foundation for American Communications, Los Angeles
Foundation for Cultural Review
Media Institute
Western Journalism Center, Sacramento
Legal foundations
National Legal Center for the Public Interest,
Washington
Washington Legal Foundation, Washington
Pacific Legal Foundation, Sacramento
Landmark Legal Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri
Atlantic Legal Foundation, New York
Mid-Atlantic Legal Foundation, Philadelphia
Southeastern Legal Foundation, Atlanta
New England Legal Foundation, Boston
Mid-American Legal Foundation, Chicago
Capital Legal Foundation, Washington
The Mountain States Legal Foundation, Denver
The new administration
From the very beginning, the Reagan administration was
packed with officials who had come from Scaife-backed
and -financed private institutions. Some of these
were:
- Martin Anderson: Assistant to the President
for Policy Development; Hoover Institution, Committee
on the Present Danger (CPD).
- Richard Allen: Reagan's first national
security adviser; a founder of Georgetown Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); then
senior staffer at Hoover Institution.
- Richard Pipes: National Security Council
(NSC) Soviet specialist; attended five of seven CSI
seminars; CPD.
- Geoffrey Kemp: NSC Middle East specialist;
from Fletcher School; CSIS.
- Roger Fontaine: NSC Latin America specialist;
CSIS, American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
- Roy Godson: NSC consultant; National Strategy
Information Center (NSIC); entire
career was Scaife-financed and -sponsored.
- Kenneth deGraffenreid: NSC director of
intelligence programs; attended six of seven CSI
seminars.
- David Abshire: head of national security
transition team, chairman of President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB); CSIS.
- Leo Cherne: PFIAB; Freedom House, CSI
seminars.
- Paul Seabury: PFIAB; all seven CSI seminars.
- Glenn Campbell: transition team; chaired
Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB); Hoover
Institution.
- John Norton Moore: chief legal consultant to
IOB; University of Virginia Center for Law and
National Security.
- William Casey: Director of Central
Intelligence
- William Van Cleave: Reagan's transition team
on defense; financed by Scaife grant at University of
Southern California.
- Jack Marsh: Secretary of the Army; NSIC;
worked directly for Scaife.
- John Lehman: Secretary of the Navy; Foreign
Policy Reseach Institute (Philadelphia).
- Fred Iklé: Undersecretary of Defense;
CSIS, CSI seminar.
- Alexander Haig: Reagan's first Secretary of State;
board of Foreign Policy Reseach Institute
(Philadelphia).
- Jeane Kirkpatrick: Ambassador to United
Nations; AEI.
- Edwin Meese: Counsel to President, then
Attorney General; Center for Criminal Justice Policy
and Management, University of San Diego; Pacific Legal
Foundation.
Part III
Part 3 of our exposé on the moneybags behind the media
assault against President Clinton and Lyndon LaRouche.
Edward Spannaus reports.
A certain irony exists, in the fact of
Richard Mellon Scaife's bankrolling of a network of
anti-capitalist Mont Pelerin Society think-tanks in the
U.S. The Mont Pelerin Society--the modern-day embodiment
of the feudal, aristocratic ``Austrian School'' of
monetarist economics--bitterly hates industrial capitalism
and any form of centralized, dirigist measures through
which a nation-state can build up its own
industrial-technological base, while restricting access to
predatory international financial looters.
The fact of the matter is that the Pittsburgh Scaife
family was a pioneering U.S. industrial family,
especially in the 19th century. At one time, the family
was wont to boast that the Scaife Company (formerly
William B. Scaife & Sons) was ``the oldest manufacturing
company west of the Alleghenies.'' It was undoubtedly a
beneficiary of the ``American System'' of
economics--national banking, protective tariffs, and
internal improvements--as was practiced off-and-on
through the 19th century.
The company grew out of a tin-plating enterprise
begun in 1802; it produced ordnance for the War of 1812
against the British, and also during the Civil War against
the British-sponsored Southern secession. Throughout the
19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the
Scaife metal-working company continually invented new
products; it built boilers for steamboats and for railroad
steam engines; it invented ``range boilers''--the
forerunners of today's hot-water heaters for
households--and high-pressure vessels, and provided
corrugated iron roofing and structural iron for factories
and warehouses.
But Dickie's father Alan Scaife preferred the
financier-oligarchy milieu of the Mellon family to his own
family's industrial tradition. He joined the Mellons for
boozing, steeple-chasing, and fox-hunting, and married
into the Mellon family in 1927. In 1940, he joined the
Mellons' Gulf Oil, and within two years he had been
brought into the ``Oh So Social'' Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) which shipped him off to London. After the
war, he served as the Mellon family representative on
Gulf's executive committee, and was made a Vice President
of T. Mellon & Sons--the newly created non-profit family
forum and trust, which was explicitly based upon a British
model. Despite all this, Alan Scaife was never treated as
a full-fledged Mellon. Dickie would later describe his
father as ``sucking hind tit'' to the Mellons.
As he grew older, young Dickie became resentful of
the treatment that his father had gotten at the hands of
the Mellons, and he often made his animosity known,
particularly toward his uncle, Richard King Mellon. Dickie
became known as a ``bull in a china shop.'' Some
attributed his impetuousness to his being thrown by a
horse at age 9; his skull was partially crushed, and was
repaired with an aluminum plate and much plastic surgery.
As soon as his father died in 1952, Dickie sold off
the Scaife Company for one dollar.
Politically, Dickie became a Goldwaterite, when the
Mellons were mainstream Republicans. In the 1960s, the
Pennsylvania GOP split between the Rockefeller and
Goldwater wings; Dickie bankrolled many of the
right-wingers.
Nevertheless, by 1973, he was tamed and house-broken.
The method by which this was accomplished is illustrative,
and became the model which Dickie would go on to use
against his targetted adversaries and enemies--including
Lyndon H. LaRouche and, now, President Clinton. This may
also, by the way, shed some light on Scaife's obsession
with the death of White House deputy counsel Vincent
Foster, and his fanatical backing of the effort to
``prove'' that Foster did not really commit suicide.
The taming of Dickie
In the 1950s, Scaife began to hang around his sister
Cordelia's boyfriend Robert Duggan, who took young Dickie
under his wing. In 1963, Dickie helped Duggan get elected
as district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, on
the GOP ticket. But Duggan was an Irish Catholic from the
wrong side of the tracks, and Dickie's besotted mother,
Sarah Mellon Scaife, would never let Cordelia's boyfriend
into her house. Duggan's ambitions grew large, and Dickie
wanted to make him governor of Pennsylvania, something
which the Republican establishment, controlled by the
Mellons, George Bush's cousin Elsie Hillman, and U.S. Sen.
Hugh Scott, were not going tolerate.
After Richard Nixon was elected President in
1968--with the help of Scaife money--Duggan tried to block
the appointment of Rockefeller man Dick Thornburgh as U.S.
Attorney in Pennsylvania; Duggan lost the fight. The
victorious Thornburgh came into office with an agenda for
what many regarded as ``a political vendetta.'' Thornburgh
changed the priorities of the federal prosecutor's office
to focus on ``political corruption'' and ``white-collar
crime,'' and before long, rumors began circulating about
DA Duggan's alleged ties to the mob. The Internal Revenue
Service got in on the case, and Scaife and Duggan
attempted to use their contacts in the Nixon Justice
Department to squelch the investigation--after all, Dickie
had chaired the finance committee for Nixon-Agnew in 1968,
and would go on to give over $1 million (broken up into
334 separate checks to avoid gift taxes) to Nixon's
Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1971.
But Thornburgh persisted, subpoenaing four detectives
from Duggan's district attorney's office, giving them
immunity, and forcing them to give evidence against their
boss. In the fall of 1971, Dickie was ``turned'': He
crawled to Thornburgh's office to join in the destruction
of his erstwhile political mentor and his sister's
boyfriend. Dickie began to target Duggan in the newspaper
he had purchased, the Greensburg Tribune-Review. As a
book about the Mellon family puts it: ``Shorn of Scaife's
influence, Duggan became easy pickings.''
Thornburgh was preparing a tax-evasion case against
Duggan, and made preparations to interview Cordelia
Scaife, to squeeze her for information about Duggan. She
and Duggan quickly got married, meaning that she could not
be compelled to provide evidence against her husband.
Dickie, according to one account, ``was intensely upset.
He went into orbit.'' Shortly after that, Dickie and
Cordelia stopped speaking with each other; by all
accounts, they have not spoken since.
On March 5, 1974, Thornburgh got a federal grand jury
to hand down a six-count indictment for tax fraud against
Duggan. But, a few hours before the indictment came down,
Duggan was found dead, apparently of a blast from a
shotgun which was found nearby without any fingerprints on
it. Duggan's death was officially ruled a
suicide--although, according to a number of sources,
Cordelia has always believed Duggan was murdered, as has
Duggan's family.
By 1975, Dickie Scaife had publicly reconciled with
the mainstream Republicans in Pennsylvania, declaring
himself a ``middle-of-the-roader,'' and proclaiming: ``I'm
now enthusiastic about Rockefeller.'' But by 1974, as we
described in Part 1 (see EIR, March 21, 1997), Dickie
had been inducted into the old OSS intelligence circles of
the Anglo-American bankers, and from that point on, all of
his ``philanthropy'' went in whatever direction they
dictated. Dickie had learned to follow orders: His
betrayal of Robert Duggan was his rite of passage.
Scaife became notorious for using the
Tribune-Review to target opponents. Two cases in the
1970s were particularly flagrant: that of Dr. Murdoch
Head, and that of Dr. William Mansour. (These two cases
were described in detail in an April 1981 Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette series on Scaife, which was recently
confirmed to the author to have been very accurate, by a
knowledgeable source.)
The Murdoch Head case
Dr. Murdoch Head ran the Airlie Foundation near
Warrenton, Virginia, which included a conference center
and a film-making operation. Scaife was introduced to
Airlie officials by executives of the Smith-Richardson
Foundation (a CIA- and Bush-linked operation which, to this
day, works in tandem with Scaife's foundations). Also
involved was then-U.S. Rep. Jack Marsh, who progressed
from being a board member of Airlie, to a Scaife staff
member, and then secretary of the Army in the Reagan-Bush
administration.
Beginning in 1968, money from the Scaife foundations,
at that time jointly run by Dickie and sister Cordelia,
financed many Airlie conferences and films. By 1972,
Dickie Scaife and the Airlie crowd were at odds, with
Scaife pushing a heavy anti-Communist theme for Airlie
films, which Dr. Head's associates resisted. (During this
time, his estranged sister Cordelia continued to maintain
close relations with Dr. Head and Airlie.)
Airlie found itself subjected to IRS audits in 1974
and again in 1976, for which it blamed Scaife. In 1978,
Airlie tax documents and records were leaked to the
Warrenton-based local weekly, Fauquier Democrat, and
were also sent to the Virginia State Corporation Counsel
and Attorney General. In 1979, Head was indicted by the
U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, on charges of tax
evasion, conspiracy, and attempting to bribe Pennsylvania
Congressman Daniel Flood and others. Head was not
convicted on the substantive tax or bribery charges, but
was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the IRS. (The
parallels to the LaRouche case, which likewise involved
the Alexandria U.S. Attorney's Office, the Virginia
Attorney General, leaks to the Loudoun
Times-Mirror--a sister paper of the Fauquier Democrat
in Northern Virginia's oligarchical Hunt Country--and a
tax-conspiracy case, are striking.)
Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, Scaife's
Tribune-Review was devoting so much coverage to the
Airlie case and Dr. Head's trial in Alexandria, that
reporters, in both states, were dumbfounded.
The William Mansour case
In reporting on the case of Dr. William Mansour in
1981, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that ``some
people believe that once you run afoul of the forces of
Scaife, you also run afoul of the forces of the federal
government, that he is, in some way, able to get federal
agencies like the Justice Department to look closely at
those he does not like.''
Mansour was a local physician in Westmoreland County,
Pa., who owned a local hospital, as well as a competing
newspaper to Scaife's Greensburg Tribune-Review. He also
held liberal political views, hence doubly drawing
Scaife's intense dislike. Scaife went after Mansour in
1973, and, using the local U.S. Attorney's Office under
Dick Thornburgh and the FBI, was able to instigate
an FBI investigation. In fact, Scaife was able to arrange
to have an FBI agent visit one of Mansour's former
sisters-in-law at her Detroit home in September 1973 to
interrogate her about Mansour's alleged ties to the Middle
East, and whether he had given $500,000 to the Palestine
Liberation Organization, which Mansour denied.
Scaife himself had long-standing connections into the
FBI, and has been described as ``a friend from an early
age of J. Edgar Hoover.'' (Perhaps not so coincidentally,
the FBI agent who was deployed in Detroit at Scaife's
request was a 22-year veteran of the bureau, Phil Mercado,
who, during 1974, became the case agent and handler for
informant Vernon Higgins. Higgins had been
infiltrated the National Caucus of Labor Committees,
the philosophical association founded by Lyndon LaRouche,
and its 1970s political wing, the U.S. Labor Party. Higgins
provided a pretext for armed FBI agents to raid the
Detroit offices of the NCLC and USLP in June 1974. When
Mercado's deposition was taken by NCLC and USLP's lawyers
in 1975, the authorization for his testimony, and the
restrictions upon it, was signed by then-Assistant U.S.
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.)
In 1977, the Justice Department officially opened an
investigation of Mansour. Scaife's lawyer Clyde Sleaze
(whom we met in last week's installment) was kept abreast
of the grand jury investigation, which resulted in
Mansour's indictment in 1980. As with the Airlie/Head
case, Scaife's Tribune-Review devoted an inordinate
amount of coverage to Mansour--all of it negative--which
resulted in a drop in business for Mansour's medical
practice. Justifiably, Mansour publicly accused Scaife of
being behind his problems with the Justice Department.
"Get LaRouche!"
One of the earliest and most persistent of the
``LaRouche-watchers'' was Roy Godson--who, as we noted in
Part 2 last week, went to Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach at
the Carnegie-Mellon Institute, and was executive director
of the Scaife-financed and -run Pittsburgh World Affairs
Council; later, Godson's position at the National Strategy
Information Center and his creation of the Consortium for
the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was also bankrolled by
Scaife.
As early as 1967-68 at Columbia University, in New
York City, Godson was already known to be watching the new
political movement founded by Lyndon LaRouche, whose
activities there were targetted by the FBI. Bureau
documents further show that, in January 1976, Godson,
accompanied by Tom Kahn of the AFL-CIO, went to FBI
headquarters and briefed the head of the FBI's Internal
Security Section on his pet theories about LaRouche and
the NCLC. Godson was particularly fixated on speculating
about the source of funds for the NCLC: According an
FBI memorandum, he suggested that the NCLC was getting
money from Iraq and from the Soviets, and he offered his
intelligence reading on relations between LaRouche and
various European communist parties. About two weeks after
this, Godson called the FBI to offer his observations
about alleged Greek communist influence on the NCLC during
1968-69.
In the course of one of the Godson-organized CSI
seminars in the early 1980s, described in our last
installment, EIR was explicitly attacked as being a
vehicle for Soviet disinformation by former CIA
counterintelligence official Donald Jamieson, and by
Herbert Romerstein, a consultant to the U.S. Information
Agency.
In the Reagan administration, Godson was one of the
most vocal against LaRouche. During the early part of the
Reagan administration, LaRouche and his associates often
met with officials of the NSC and other federal agencies,
particularly during the 1982-83 tenure of William Clark as
national security adviser. Clark's executive assistant,
Richard Morris, a witness for the defense at LaRouche's
federal trial in 1988 and in a Virginia state trial of an
associate of LaRouche in 1990, testified about a grouping
within the NSC staff who were sharply opposed to LaRouche;
Morris testified that the most vocal opponents of LaRouche
were Kenneth deGraffenreid, Walter Raymond, and Roy
Godson. Morris reported that Godson characterized Lyndon
LaRouche as ``as a socialist, as a communist, as a member
of the KGB, as a fascist, and always he was an
extremist,'' adding that Godson insisted that Morris stop
meeting with LaRouche and his representatives.
In January 1983, the demand for an investigation of
LaRouche was brought into the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by the circle
associated with Scaife and Godson--the latter being a
consultant to PFIAB at the time. According to an FBI
document, a complaint by Henry Kissinger was raised at a
PFIAB meeting of Jan. 12, 1983, by fellow PFIAB member
David Abshire of Georgetown University's Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)--a
Scaife-funded think-tank. The vice chairman of PFIAB at
the time was Leo Cherne, the founder of Freedom House,
also a Scaife-funded institution. The PFIAB discussion did
succeed in triggering an FBI investigation of LaRouche;
the FBI responded with a memorandum repeating the
Godson-Jamieson line, that activities of the NCLC and
EIR ``dovetail nicely with Soviet propaganda and
disinformation objectives.''
However, the FBI stated that, officially, it did not
have an investigation of the NCLC going at that time under
either domestic security or foreign counterintelligence
guidelines. In order to remedy this, a campaign of news
media defamation of LaRouche was organized, starting in
early 1983 by the Bush-Scaife-Godson crowd. This was a
joint public-private effort growing out of the ``Public
Diplomacy'' operation, which we detailed in our October
1996 EIR Special Report on ``George Bush and the 12333
Serial Murder Ring.''
Public Diplomacy was headed at the NSC by Walter
Raymond, a long-time CIA propaganda specialist who worked
with Cord Meyer, and who intersected the London-centered
Forum World Features operation headed by Dickie Scaife in
the 1970s. In mid-1982, Raymond was posted to the NSC at
the recommendation of Vice President George Bush's
national security adviser Don Gregg. DeGraffenried became
a deputy to Raymond. On Jan. 25, 1983--less than two weeks
after the PFIAB meeting where the demand to get LaRouche
was raised--Raymond drafted a memorandum proposing the
creation of a private-donor group to fund Public Diplomacy
propaganda programs supporting administration policies in
areas such as Afghanistan, Central America, and Western
Europe. ``We can not, forever, rely on one or two good
souls, such as Smith-Richardson or Mellon-Scaife,''
Raymond wrote. (The Smith-Richardson Foundation, along
with the John M. Olin Foundation and Scaife's foundations,
comprise a cluster of intelligence-connected foundations
which fund almost all the same institutions and programs
as those we listed in Documentation last week, on
p.|67.)
In March, Raymond sent another memo to National
Security Adviser Clark, describing efforts to pull
together the private-donors group: ``The group was largely
pulled together by Frank Barnett, Dan McMichael (Dick
Scaife's man), Mike Joyce (Olin Foundation), Les Lenkowsky
(Smith-Richardson Foundation) plus Leonard Sussman and Leo
Cherne of Freedom House. A number of others including Roy
Godson have also participated.'' Frank Barnett was from
the NSIC--funded by Scaife as well as the other cited
foundations.
In the spring of 1983, the same group convened a
meeting at the New York apartment of Wall Street financier
John Train--known as ``the last of the OSS `old boys' on
Wall Street.'' Dickie Scaife personally attended that
meeting, as did about two dozen news media
representatives. There were at least two followup meetings
in 1983-84. Mira Lansky Boland, a graduate of Tufts
University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy, and the
Washington, D.C. Fact-Finding Director for the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), later testified that she
attended a meeting at Train's residence in 1984, at which
Roy Godson was also present.
The Train meetings were devoted to the coordination
of planted articles and features hostile to LaRouche in
the news media, and they directly resulted in attacks on
LaRouche during the 1984-86 period on NBC-TV, in the Wall
Street Journal, the New Republic, Reader's Digest, and
thousands of others. It also ultimately resulted in a
book-length attack on LaRouche published in 1989 with
funding from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.
The campaign of news-media defamation of LaRouche was
a precondition for the judicial frame-up of LaRouche and
his associates. The first indictment against LaRouche was
brought in Boston--where the Weld and Mellon families'
First Boston Corp. wielded enormous power. When the Boston
federal case against LaRouche flopped, a second indictment
was brought in Alexandria, Virginia--the intelligence
agencies' favorite U.S. court district--under the overall
direction of U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.
"Get Clinton!"
As should be clear to the reader by now, Dickie Scaife's
current financing and coordination of the news-media
attack on President Clinton, is exactly of the same form
as what Scaife
has been deployed to do since the early 1970s, when he was
assigned to take over Forum World Features/Kern House by
the Anglophile bankers' intelligence network. Forum World
Feature's specific purpose was to finance and circulate
selected features and articles for the news media
internationally. The ``Public Diplomacy'' operation in the
1980s which Scaife financed did exactly the same thing as
FWF, including orchestrating news media attacks on
targetted adversaries.
The Columbia Journalism Review put it slightly more
politely in a 1981 profile of Scaife: It said that he
``has made the formation of public opinion both his
business and his avocation.... Scaife could claim to have
done more than any other individual in the past five or
six years to influence the way in which Americans think
about their country and the world.''
Today, almost on a weekly basis, one can pick up a
newspaper and find full-page ads on the Vincent Foster
death, reprinting articles written by Christopher Ruddy
for Scaife's Greensburg (now ``Pittsburgh'')
Tribune-Review. The ads are paid for by Scaife, with
funds
laundered through the Western Journalism Center (WJC). WJC
also occasionally reprints articles by the British
Intelligence stringer and London Sunday Telegraph
Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard--who also
writes directly for the Tribune Review.
Other ads promoting theories about the alleged
coverup of the Vincent Foster death can also be found,
produced by Accuracy in Media (AIM), another group
bankrolled by Scaife since the 1970s, and long known for
its defense of the CIA against any attacks, not to mention
its protection of George Bush's drug-running Contras in
the 1980s. Currently, Scaife's foundations are AIM's
largest contributors, having given them $630,000 from
1989-93.
The WJC and AIM also produce features on the Foster case for newspapers
and television programs. AIM's Reed
Irvine has a weekly broadcast on National Empowerment
Television (NET), a cable channel founded by Paul
Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, to which Scaife gives
about $1 million a year.
At the end of 1993, the Whitewater scandals against
President Clinton, which had been dormant since the 1992
primaries, were revved up again with the publication of
the ``Troopergate'' story in the British-linked American
Spectator. Already in the 1970s, Scaife had given over $1
million to the American Spectator's publishers, and this
has continued to the present day; between 1989 and 1993,
Scaife gave $1.3 million to the American Spectator
Educational Fund for ``research'' and other purposes.
Another top purveyor of Vincent Foster conspiracy
theories is Strategic Investment newsletter, run by
former Times of London editor Lord William Rees-Mogg,
and James Dale Davidson, chairman of the National
Taxpayers Union, also Scaife-funded. Davidson has produced
a video jointly with the Western Journalism Center called
``Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.''
What does Scaife himself say about all this? Very
little publicly, but, in a rare interview he gave to the
New York Times in 1995, he proclaimed, ``The death of
Vincent Foster: I think it's the Rosetta Stone to the
whole Clinton administration,'' adding that Foster's
death had the potential to become the political story of
the century.
The other major means by which Scaife finances
attacks on the President--apart from his funding of House
Speaker Newt Gingrich's GOPAC and right-wing think-tanks
such as the Heritage Foundation--is through the cluster of
right-wing legal foundations and litigation centers.
Prominent among these (see Documentation, p.|67 in our
previous issue's installment) is the Landmark Legal Foundation,
which has offered advice and assistance to Paula Jones in
her sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and which has
ensconced itself in other Whitewater-related matters.
Another, similar Scaife-financed organization is the
Washington Legal Foundation, previously known as the
Capital Legal Foundation. On its Legal Policy Advisory
Board are Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr,
John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia Law
School, and Massachusetts governor and former LaRouche
prosecutor William Weld. On its National Board of Advisers
are Senators Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and Orrin Hatch
(Utah)--both involved in Senate investigations of the
Clintons--and Jesse Helms, who played a role in the
dumping of the first Whitewater independent counsel and
his replacement with Kenneth Starr.
The work of Scaife's network of conservative legal
foundations is overseen by the Washington-based National
Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI), which he, of
course, also funds. One of the directors of NLCPI is David
Davenport, president of Pepperdine University; Scaife is
on Pepperdine's board of trustees. Davenport and Scaife
also sit together on the advisory board of the Hoover
Institution for War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto,
California.
It is David Davenport who has offered Bush-leaguer
Kenneth Starr a cushy position at Pepperdine University,
financed in large part by Scaife, when Starr wraps up his
investigation and legal assault on President Clinton as
the Whitewater independent counsel. Starr may be
``independent'' of the administration, but he is certainly not
independent of Dickie Scaife.