What became WSI was originally the project of a group allied with the VVAW, the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into War Crimes in Indochina (CCI). The CCI in turn had initiated its inquiry in November 1969 in response to a call from the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, founded in 1963 by British antiwar leader Bertrand Russell. Russell and his wife Dora had worked with various antiwar groups since World War I, many of which were linked to the Communist movement in Britain and America. During the Cold War Russell came to sympathize with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Vietnam. In 1963 he began opposing the US in the Vietnam War in direct alliance with the North Vietnamese, using his Foundation to attempt to obtain passports for North Vietnamese and broadcasting propaganda over North Vietnamese radio. In 1966 he called for an International War Crimes Tribunal which would apply the principles of the Nuremberg Trials to investigations of alleged war crimes by US troops in Vietnam. The International War Crimes Tribunal began meeting in Sweden and Denmark in 1967 and became independent of Russell’s Foundation.111 It was supported by leading Marxist intellectuals from Europe and America, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, a leading French philosopher who was a periodic member of the French Communist Party and had worked with the Soviet-linked World Peace Council;112 and Noam Chomsky, an American linguist who travelled in 1971 to North Vietnam, where among other things he “negotiated” POW releases as a propaganda ploy to show the “benefits” of cooperating with the North Vietnamese.113 Also participating in the Tribunal were Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and the Black Panthers;114; Carl Oglseby, president of Students for a Democratic Society;115 Peter Weiss, prominent member of the Communist front group the National Lawyers Guild, chairman of the board of the KGB-linked Institute for Policy Studies, and husband of Cora Rubin Weiss (daughter of Communist Party financier Samuel Rubin), who collaborated with the North Vietnamese to extort POW families through the group Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM);116 and Wilfred Burchett, a KGB agent working for the pro-Vietnamese propaganda outlet Dispatch News Service.117 Dispatch News Service provided Seymour Hersh’s story on American war crimes at My Lai to The New York Times in November 1969,118 which stimulated Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal to launch an American branch of its investigation.119 The same month Hersh’s story broke, Russell’s secretary Ralph Schoenman placed an ad to promote the American investigation. He received a response from Tod Ensign of the New Mobe and Black Panthers and his associate Jeremy Rifkin, who had been working with Larry Rottmann of VVAW. Ensign and Rifkin founded the CCI and began forming a coalition with other antiwar leaders and groups, including Chomsky, who had participated in the International War Crimes Tribunal; Richard Fernandez of the Communist-infiltrated group Clergy and Laity Concerned and the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, who travelled to North Vietnam with Chomsky in 1971; Phil Spiro of the Communist Party; participants in an unofficial Congressional war crimes panel which included testimony from psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, a coauthor of Richard Falk, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies, who had previously travelled to North Vietnam with Cora Weiss and was then assisting government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in preparing the Pentagon Papers for publication; and antiwar Senator Charles Goodell.120
Rifkin and Ensign had their office across the street from VVAW headquarters, and in January 1970 they invited the VVAW to join the CCI’s coalition. At first the VVAW could only afford to share their mailing list with the CCI, but in August 1970 the VVAW decided to launch its own supplementary investigation after picking up funding from Jane Fonda.121
SNIP to note on Weiss further down the page:
VVAW lawyer, Peter Weiss