Posted on 04/13/2004 6:04:07 AM PDT by Peach
S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre, 57:
CNSS [the Center for National Security Studies] launched its activities with a two-day conference on September 12 and 13, 1974. . .Sens. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), Philip Hart (D-Mich.), and James Abourezk (D-S. Dak.) and Rep. Michael Harrington (D-Mass.) lent credibility. . .The proceedings amounted to a trial of the CIA, which was assumed guilty of various crimes. . .The first day's panel discussions were chaired by people almost entirely hostile to the CIA: . . .Victor Marchetti and John Marks. . .David Wise. . .David Ross. . .and "The CIA and Watergate" by Walter Pincus. The next day's offerings were [by]. . .Morton Halperin and Anthony Lake, Sen. Frank Church's legislative aide. . .Herbert Scoville. . .Jeremy Stone. . .Nancy Stein. . .Robert Borosage, director of CNSS, and Melvin Wulf, general counsel to the ACLU.
The hostility of the conference reached its height that afternoon when William Colby was subjected to a twenty-five minute harangue by Pentagon Papers thief Daniel Ellsberg. The conference ended with a panel. . .chaired by Richard Barnet, Paul Warnke, and Neil Sheehan, the New York Times Pentagon Papers reporter.
During the Clinton years Walter Pincus was consider to a mouthpiece for NSA adviser Sandy Berger who was also a former China lobbyist. Pincus' was wife also a Clinton Administration official. On two occasions Pincus was given time off by the Washington Post to work for J. W. Fulbright. These facts certainly help explain why Pincus savaged the Cox Committee intelligence report on Chinese espionage, whose conclusions he called "unwarranted" and whose language he falsely described as "inflammatory". This is the same Pincus who maliciously described as a "Killer Warhead" missiles designed to protect Americans against nuclear attack. . .What is particularly interesting is that Pincus is tied in with the America-hating Marxist Institute for Policy Studies which from its inception in 1963 acted as a front for the KGB, even hosting KGB officers, until the collapse of the Soviet empire. In September 1974 Pincus attended an IPS sponsored conference during which he and others present savaged the CIA, basically accusing it of being a criminal organisation. I have no idea at the stage whether any of the IPS' KGB friends were present. (Incidentally, Anthony Lake was also attended the conference. Readers might recall that Clinton nominated Lake for director of the CIA. The nomination faced a barrage of outraged criticism and was withdrawn. Americans have no idea what a narrow escape they had). The America-hating Richard Barnet, one of the founders of the IPS and conference sponsor, called for the destruction of the CIA, and even demanded that it cease monitoring international terrorist groups because it violated their civil liberties. . .So what does Pincus do at the Washington Post? He writes on national security matters. This is a man who associates with America-haters, attacks national defence, maligned an intelligence committee when it produced unfavourable findings about Chinese espionage, and who now lies about Richard Clarke's statements. Now what does that tell us about the Washington Post?
Here are a couple other good resources on Pincus--the first in particular is a potential goldmine of info on Pincus' sources:
Walter Pincus: Table of Contents (archive of articles by Pincus)
Here's an article where Pincus recalls his relationship with Katherine Graham:
Here's something of related interest about Pincus' relationship to Bob Woodward who of course also worked for Graham during Watergate:
It is here that the story of illegal dealings with Khomeini intermediaries by Reagan campaign officials begins. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post were the first to report that one such meeting took place in Washington, DC.
Yet another Watergate link, with Iran-Contra thrown in for good measure. . .
Ari Berman, "The Postwar Post", The Nation, September 29, 2003 (web), Posted September 17, 2003
On February 7, two days after Colin Powell's much-lauded presentation before the United Nations Security Council, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus described how foreign government officials, terrorism experts and members of Congress disputed a key claim: the supposed link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Despite the article's relevance, the Post buried it in journalistic no man's land--page A21--where it had little effect. An article a week later by Pincus and military correspondent Dana Priest, "Bin Laden-Hussein Link Hazy," got a similar A20 placement.
On March 16 another Pincus article, "U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms," explained that US intelligence agencies believed the Bush Administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam's purported stocks of WMD. Its placement: A17. Two days later, Pincus and White House correspondent Dana Milbank wrote a strenuous indictment of the Administration's rationales for war: "As the Bush Administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged--and in some cases disproved--by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports." That one managed to vault only up to A13.
It wasn't until May 29, almost a month after Bush declared an end to major combat operations, that Pincus, along with co-writer Karen DeYoung, broke onto the front page with a story headlined "U.S. Hedges on Finding Iraqi Weapons; Officials Cite the Possibilities of Long or Fruitless Search for Banned Arms." At that point, with guerrilla attacks rising, postwar planning in disarray and the weapons highlighted by the Bush Administration nowhere to be found, experts and politicians on Pincus's intelligence beat--and, more important, his own editors--began to stir. In June and July, stories about Iraq-related intelligence controversies written or co-written by Pincus, Priest and Milbank appeared on the front page twenty-one times. Between July 15 and July 21, their breaking news stories were on page one seven days in a row.
[SNIP]
Pincus, 70, who honed his skills and skepticism during his years reporting on Watergate and Iran/contra, blames a pack mentality and desire to please for the decision to bury his stories before the war began. "The Post was scared," Pincus says. "I believe papers ought to crusade when we're on to something." Later, he says, when things started going badly, editors were more willing to print pieces critical of the Administration. "This is a country in which it doesn't matter what you say if you succeed," he says. "But if you fail, people go back and look at why."
On August 10, Pincus and reporter Barton Gellman wrote a 5,663-word front-page report that will likely be considered the magnum opus of the intelligence fiasco, "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence." In painstaking detail they summarized and revealed how Bush, Cheney et al. "made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support." Pincus says the attention focused on the article, and the dozens preceding it, show the impact a Post story can have once it hits the front page.
While Pincus thinks his investigative reporting could cause the Bush Administration to choose its words and actions more carefully in the future, he sees journalism as limited in terms of what it can do now with regard to Iraq. "The problem with writing is that it doesn't do any good for the mess we're in," he says.
Davis could have remarked on the current New Right editorial line in the Post, or added the fact that former editorial page editor (1968-79) Philip Geyelin joined the CIA for a year in 1950, while on leave from the Wall Street Journal, but found the work boring and went back to the Journal. And she also doesn't mention that Walter Pincus, a Post reporter who still covers intelligence issues, took two CIA-financed trips overseas to international student conferences in 1960, and waited to write about them until 1967 when reporters everywhere were exposing CIA conduits.
It was another three months before news of the murder of Jerry Luther Parks reached me in Washington. The U.S. national media were largely unaware of the story, which surprised me because Parks had been in charge of security at the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock. On my next trip to the state I decided to drop by at the archives of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to see if they had covered the death. There were two routine homicide stories by reporter Ward Pincus, mostly focusing on disputes that Parks had had with a former partner. I contacted the writer, who had since moved to New York. To my surprise he turned out to be the son of Walter Pincus, the intelligence correspondent for The Washington Post and a friend of Vincent Foster. In fact, Walter Pincus had lunched with Foster at the Federal City Club on July 9, eleven days before the death. Afterward Pincus had written an "op-ed" piece in The Post saying that Foster was visibly cracking under the strain of Washington life. It was a persuasive article, the suicide clincher. I remember reading it at the time and thinking: "Well, that's it, then, case closed." What his son told me was astounding. When he spoke to Jane Parks the day after the death she said that her husband had been involved with Vince Foster and she seemed to think there was a political dimension to the murder. She was distraught, almost hysterical. Ward Pincus did not know what to make of it, so he consulted his editors at The Democrat-Gazette. Should he go out to visit the widow and try to find out what on earth she was talking about? No, they said, don't bother. Soon afterward, Jane Parks withdrew into her shell and refused to give any interviews to the press.
The odd cozy relationship they had reminds me of the cozy relationship between the Washington Post's CIA-beat reporter, Walter Pincus, and the late Vincent Foster. Pincus' revelations about Foster, as I point out in part 1 of my "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster," represented "the first instance of anyone publicly saying that he noticed any behavior in Foster that one might describe as, at most, agitated." As such, it played a very large role in planting in the public mind the notion that Foster had been "depressed" enough to commit suicide.
Another Post reporter stepped out of character into the columnist's role four days later, on August 5. This time it was Walter Pincus from the regular CIA beat who produced an article entitled "Vincent Foster: Out of His Element". The title strongly conveys the column's flavor, which is actually pretty much all it had. Hard facts were noticeably absent. The article is particularly significant because it was the first instance of anyone publicly saying that he noticed any behavior in Foster that one might describe as, at most, agitated. He does not go so far as to use the word "depressed". Pincus claims to have had breakfast with Foster several times since his arrival from Washington, having gotten to know him since both of their wives were from Little Rock. He begins his article on the premise that, of course, Foster took his own life. . .He doesn't take long to get to his purely speculative answer to his question, though he doesn't label it as such. . .Pincus's theme of Foster as fragile victim of the merciless press was picked up on by Sidney Blumenthal in his August 9 New Yorker article. . .We return to the Pincus narrative for his conclusion. . .What he is telling us is that he was at the Foster home the night of the death talking with the White House crowd ("Arkansas friends"). In so doing, he inadvertently reveals his cozy relationship with the people that the public expects him to report upon objectively. He also could not have failed to know that the police had come and spent more than an hour questioning the family. Yet his newspaper had reported on July 30 that the police had been turned away, and it left the country with that false impression for almost a year. And if he and the Arkansas crowd were so perceptive in noticing "the little ways the pressures on him had shown through," why would the police conclude from their family interviews that night that no one present could think of any reason why he would take his own life? Perhaps the best question to be asked is if this man and his newspaper have given you sufficient reason to believe that they would tell you the truth in this matter.
Bernstein's former employers at the Washington Post escaped his expose unscathed, but other investigators have documented extensive CIA ties at the paper. According to John Kelly of CounterSpy magazine, Post reporter Walter Pincus (CFR) worked for the CIA in 1959 as an Agency trained and funded delegate sent to the International Youth Festival in Vienna to disrupt the festival and spy on fellow Americans. After briefing agents on his activities and taking a pledge of secrecy, he went on attend youth conferences in Ghana and Guinea. Pincus claims that he was offered, but turned down, a permanent CIA position, although he did attend a political meeting in New Delhi at the Agency's request before going on to bigger and better things at the Post. Pincus has written several pieces sympathetic to CIA operations. He published an article just prior to the release of Bernstein's Rolling Stone expose downplaying the article's claims, even though his report essentially let Post publisher Katherine Graham off the hook.
To put this in historical context, note that during this period there was a left-wing faction in the CIA held over from the OSS, which had a liaison with British and Soviet intelligence during World War II and as a result was massively infiltrated by Soviet intelligence (for example, William Donovan's assistant Duncan Lee was later exposed as a Soviet agent). During World War II Katherine Graham's husband Philip Graham had belonged to a political espionage ring run by Felix Frankfurter which included Soviet spy Laughlin Currie, among others. Graham herself had been a Communist fellow traveller in her youth, befriending Communist labor leader Harry Bridges and joining the Communist-infiltrated American Student Union (ASU). [Source: an unpublished article I've been writing.] Thus IMO Graham and Pincus' Post ties to the CIA should be viewed as Soviet infiltration of the CIA.
East Coast Press' "Willful Ignorance" Protects Flawed Institutions by Mark Lowenthal
Pincus' bio says that he "served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, stationed in Washington," from 1955 to 1957, and went on to become "Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers" in 1959. What his bio doesn't mention is that in 1960, he was recruited by CIA employees to serve as a U.S. representative at two international conferences-his trips paid for by CIA fronts. Pincus was unapologetic when he disclosed his CIA role in a 1967 piece he wrote soon after joining the staff of the Washington Post.
BTW, here is something interesting Pincus mentions about Lake:
One advantage Lake will have is the help of CIA deputy director George J. Tenet, a former NSC assistant of Lake's who is expected to remain in the job and has spent most of his time at the CIA with the clandestine operatives. Another asset Lake brings to the job is loyalty to the president and a history with Clinton that goes back to his days as a senior foreign policy adviser to the 1992 presidential campaign. . .In the early days of the Clinton administration, when then-Director Woolsey had trouble getting to see the president, senior CIA officials labeled Lake the roadblock, calling him a State Department figure who did not trust the agency's analysis.
!!! Is this the same Gelman who wrote the fiction on Dr. David Kay and General Meekin- the article in the Wash Post that those two individuals wrote back immediately on and trashed him for all his errors?
Yep- it's the same Gelman. Gelman wrote an article entitled "Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat," and it was used by the antiwar spin machine immediately.
Here are Dr. Kay and General Meekin's replies to his article - but I do not know if the Wash Post edited their letters or printed them in their entirety:
From the Wash post "letters to the editor section" here : [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49199-2003Oct31.html]
The Hunt for Iraq's Weapons
Saturday, November 1, 2003; Page A21
The Oct. 26 front-page article "Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat" is wildly off the mark. Your reporter, Barton Gellman, bases much of his analysis on what he says was told to him by an Australian brigadier, Stephen D. Meekin. Gellman describes Meekin as someone "who commands the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to [David] Kay." Meekin does not report, nor has he ever reported, to me in any individual capacity or as commander of the exploitation center. The work of the center did not form a part of my first interim report, which was delivered last month, nor do I direct what Meekin's organization does. The center's mission has never involved weapons of mass destruction, nor does it have any WMD expertise.
Gellman's description of information provided by Mahdi Obeidi, chief of Iraq's pre-1991 centrifuge program, relies on an unnamed "U.S. official" who, by the reporter's own admission, read only one reporting cable. How Gellman's source was able to describe reporting that covered four months is a mystery to me. Furthermore, the source mischaracterized our views on the reliability of Obeidi's information.
With regard to Obeidi's move to the United States, Gellman writes, "By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States." The reader is left with the impression that this move involved something manipulative or sinister. The "unknown circumstances" are called Public Law 110. This mechanism was created during the Cold War to give the director of central intelligence the authority to resettle those who help provide valuable intelligence information. Nothing unusual or mysterious here.
When the article moves to describe the actual work of the nuclear team, Gellman states that "frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the 'book of the month club.' " But he fails to note that this was before the establishment of the Iraq Survey Group. In fact, the team's frustration with the pace of the work is what led President Bush to shift the responsibility for the WMD search to the director of central intelligence and to send me to Baghdad.
One would believe from what Gellman writes that I have sent home the two leaders of my nuclear team, William Domke and Jeffrey Bedell, and abandoned all attempts to determine the state of Iraq's nuclear activities. Wrong again. Domke's assignment had been twice extended well beyond what the Department of Energy had agreed to. He and Bedell were replaced with a much larger contingent of experts from DOE's National Labs.
Finally, with regard to the aluminum tubes, the tubes were certainly being imported and were being used for rockets. The question that continues to occupy us is whether similar tubes, with higher specifications, had other uses, specifically in nuclear centrifuges. Why anyone would think that we should want to confiscate the thousands of aluminum tubes of the lower specification is unclear. Our investigation is focused on whether a nuclear centrifuge program was either underway or in the planning stages, what design and components were being contemplated or used in such a program if it existed and the reason for the constant raising of the specifications of the tubes the Iraqis were importing clandestinely.
We have much work left to do before any conclusions can be reached on the state of possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program efforts. Your story gives the false impression that conclusions can already be drawn.
-- David Kay
Baghdad
The writer is special adviser to the director of central intelligence.
*******
When Barton Gellman interviewed me last month I stressed on a number of occasions that my remarks related to Iraqi's conventional weapons program. I am responsible for aspects of that program as the commander of the coalition Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center. I did not provide assessments or views on Iraq's nuclear program or the status of investigations being conducted by the Iraq Survey Group.
On the issue of Iraq's use of aluminum tubes, I did confirm, in response to a question by Gellman, that aluminum tubes form the body of Iraqi 81mm battlefield rockets and that my teams had recovered some of these rockets for technical examination. Further, I stated that the empty tubes were innocuous in view of the large quantities of lethal Iraqi conventional weapons such as small arms, explosive ordnance and man-portable air defense systems in this country. I did not make any judgment on the suitability of the 81mm aluminum tubes as components in a nuclear program.
In discussing the disbanding of the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center, I told your reporter that the center's work was largely complete, and I made clear that its role was in the realm of Iraq's conventional weapons and technologies.
Gellman attributed to me comments about the effect of U.N.-imposed sanctions. Again, I referred to Iraqi efforts to acquire conventional military equipment. I made no assessment about the effect of U.N. sanctions on Iraq's nuclear program.
-- Stephen D. Meekin
Baghdad
The writer, a brigadier in the Australian Army, is commander of the coalition's Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center in Iraq.
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