Books
Author Kent Clizbe Will Speak During Raleigh Spy Conference
Many Americans were surprised last year when 10 Russians posing as ordinary Americans were arrested. They were soon convicted of being illegal, unregistered agents of a foreign power and returned to Russia. Although the media covered the story, most attention was lavished on one of the women than the question of what she and the others were doing here.
What they were doing here was clear to Kent Clizbe, a former CIA counterintelligence officer. One of the Russians had been a writer for a Spanish-language newspaper with a far Left, anti-American bias, and others were in positions of potential influence, leading Clizbe to conclude that they were covert agents of influence. Although their activities here were minimized by the media, Clizbe viewed them as the tip of an iceberg of covert influence with the mission of subverting our culture.
Clizbe, who grew up in Northeastern North Carolina and attended East Carolina University, is scheduled to appear at this year’s Raleigh Spy Conference Aug. 24-26. For him, the 10 Russians are recent examples of covert influence operations begun soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the new communist rulers formed the Communist International and targeted America as the “main adversary” of their planned worldwide revolution. Clizbe has studied the extensiveness and effectiveness of Soviet covert influence operations in his new book Willing Accomplices, that Clizbe says is the first book to address covert influence operations and “the ultimate effect that those operations had on our country, the 21st century United States of America.”
He hypothesizes that contemporary “political correctness” and what he calls “PC-Progressivism” resulted from communist covert influence operations begun in the 1920s. To make his case, he applies his knowledge and experience gained as a CIA officer and reviews the publications of leading intelligence scholars, such as former Raleigh Spy Conference speakers Christopher Andrew, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, about communist covert espionage operations.
Unlike espionage cases, covert influence operations leave behind no known documentary evidence. And unlike some former espionage agents who confessed or defected, known covert influence agents died long ago or mysteriously disappeared during Stalin’s purges. Despite those evidentiary problems, Clizbe extrapolates a convincing case that covert influence operations were extensive and effective.
Clizbe explains that covert influence operations implant messages, or “payloads,” in a targeted society through the main transmitters of the culture — academia and education, the media and entertainment. The communist revolutionaries were experts at covert actions and early aimed them at America. Using techniques masterminded by Willi Munzenberg — and effectively implemented by Otto Katz who trained under Munzenberg in Germany in the early 1930s, communist covert influence agents infiltrated the American academy and education, the media and Hollywood.
Through a scholar’s interview with Munzenberg’s widow, the “Munzenberg creed” for covert influence is disclosed: In essence, a covert influence agent should pose as an independent-minded idealist and plant seeds of doubt and distrust in the targeted society and seek to destroy the patriotism of its citizens.
The message to be planted in America in the 1920s, what Clizbe calls the “PC code,” is that the capitalistic and free-market culture of the US is irredeemably bad, racist, sexist, unfair and cruel. Clizbe concludes that the seeds were cultivated underground into the 1950s, bloomed in the late 1960s and spread like wildflowers in the 1980s when political correctness began to dominate academia and education.
The message was also spread through related covert disinformation operations, such as the communist-planted false story — carried without fact checking by the pliant media — that the CIA developed the AIDS virus to wipe out American blacks (a blatant falsehood still being recycled in 2008 by President Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright). Other active measures include infiltrating and co-opting activist groups and movements, a method perfected from the 1920s by anti-fascist groups to create “popular fronts” that often found themselves eventually taken over completely by the communists. The agents of influence infiltrated unions and organized protests going back to the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, and culminating in the rallies against American involvement in Vietnam.
According to Clizbe, Munzenberg led a far-reaching and ingenious covert influence operation using a vast network of secret communists and their willing accomplices. Under Munzenberg’s creed, participants should always deny being a communist — and under Clizbe’s definition, the accomplices are people who knowingly cooperate with the communists to subvert the country’s social, political or economic foundations.
As exemplars of willing accomplices, Clizbe focuses on three targets: Professor George S. Counts from academia and education, Walter Duranty from the media and Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker critic and Hollywood screen writer. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, who covered Stalin’s collectivization of farming in glowing terms and minimized the resulting famine that took the lives of millions. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his stories and exerted tremendous influence in portraying Stalin as the benign Uncle Joe who was forced to break eggs to make the communist omelet.
Parker, known for her vicious wit and status in New York literary circles, worked with Katz in establishing many of the Hollywood front groups that influenced American public opinion. Like her Hollywood colleagues, she portrayed communists as just “liberals in a hurry.” Counts, a Columbia University professor in its education school, visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and returned to Columbia as its Russian “expert” with an assistant and translator whom Clizbe concludes was likely a Soviet agent. Counts infused his extensive and influential publications about education with collectivist and progressive ideas, including using the public schools to build “a new social order.”
For examples of the apparent effectiveness of covert influence operations, look no further than the curricula in schools of education and many of our high schools today. They are long on Counts-like advocacy of “change” and “social justice” and short on actual study of American civics and history. Clizbe illustrates the changes in the high school curriculum by comparing a patriotic, pro-American history text used in 1916, before the communist covert influence operations began, with a propagandistic, anti-American text popular today. The modern text was written by Howard Zinn, frequently described in the media as a “political activist” and recently revealed to have been a secret communist.
One does not have to be an American to reject Zinn’s view of America as unjust. Indeed, British historian Paul Johnson has concluded that America, despite some injustices in its history, has “a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.” Johnson adds: “No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.”
Unfortunately, our national story
has been undermined by willing accomplices in our schools, media and entertainment.
— Arch T. Allen
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Books
Wild Bill Donovan; Chinese Espionage;
and the Effects of Soviet Cultural Propaganda
REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY
FEATURED AUTHORS TO APPEAR DURING
7TH RALEIGH SPY CONFERENCE
Douglas
Waller and David Wise have penned the two most significant books on
espionage in the last year. Waller’s exciting biography Wild Bill
Donovan, a detailed account of the founder of the era of modern
intelligence in the United States, lays the groundwork for American spy
agencies. Wise’s inside view of spy operations by China against the US
in the modern era — Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War With China —
takes us right up to today, and tomorrow, as cyberspying by China
emerges as the new frontier of the ancient art of espionage.
Both
writers will appear in an Author’s Roundtable during the 7th Raleigh
Spy Conference Aug. 24-26, joined by first-time author Kent Clizbe.
Clizbe’s new book, Willing Accomplices, is reviewed by Arch T. Allen in
this issue. Joining the discussion as a special guest is former FBI
counterintelligence special agent Les Wiser — the man who caught Aldrich
Ames — who untangled the Parlor Maid case, the centerpiece of Wise’s
Tiger Trap.
The SpyMaster Who Created Modern American
Espionage
While intelligence gathering played critical roles from
the founding years of the United States, it was not until World War I
that organized spying by governments was revealed to rather naïve
American military and diplomatic leaders. After the conflict, the US
retreated inward back into a pre-war idyllic culture where “gentlemen
did not read other people’s mail.” But entry in World War II transformed
the image of espionage from disgust to necessity as Germany and Japan —
and the USSR — unleashed horrific human behavior never imagined before.
Everything had to be done to stop psychotic criminals who endangered
decency worldwide.
By the time the US joined the conflict,
Britain had stood alone for nearly four years, emitting the last beacon
of freedom to Nazi-occupied Fortress Europe. And beyond a stiff upper
lip and a national penchant for fortitude, it was intelligence gleaned
from the Germans that kept the UK breathing. Still regarded as the most
significant intelligence coup in history, the Ultra Secret — the code
name for the deciphering of messages sent by the allegedly unbreakable
German Enigma program — is arguably the single most important reason the
British survived until American troops turned the tide of war.
William
J. Donovan, born of Irish-Catholic immigrants — became a decorated and
public hero during World War I, and after the war a powerful Wall Street
attorney. Before Europe fell to Hitler, he became an unofficial envoy
for President Franklin Roosevelt, who warmed to the Republican Donovan
due to his usefulness and insights as a globe-trotting corporate lawyer.
As the storm clouds of war darkened, Donovan was everywhere, including
the news. The hard-charging and handsome hero was welcomed by leaders
and became a close confidant to Winston Churchill. It was in these heady
days that Donovan realized the importance of intelligence and sabotage.
As
war broke out, Donovan lobbied for and was successful in creating the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He was named its director and spent
the war moving across the panorama of battlefields, from Operation
Torch to the D-Day landings, dropping in on every trouble spot in
between, including the Balkans, the Middle East, Italy, Russia, China
and North Africa. Donovan organized propaganda, espionage and guerilla
warfare teams to such success he stepped on the toes of his British
mentors and caused extreme jealousy back home, most notably the ire of
J. Edgar Hoover who worked behind the scenes to run the OSS out of
business at war’s end.
In his stint with the OSS, grippingly
related by Waller, Donovan became a larger than life hero with enormous
influence. His legend lives large today, and his legacy, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the successor to Donovan’s OSS, is a dramatic
reminder that intelligence could no longer be swept under the rug after
the cessation of hostilities. The Cold War ushered in a new era
predicted and prepared for by Donovan, although he was not tapped to
head the new spy agency he spawned. At CIA headquarters, there is an
extensive museum dedicated to Donovan for employees to visit to remind
them of their mission. And the NC Museum of History, site of the Raleigh
Spy Conference, has on display a collection of OSS paraphernalia
donated by the family of Durham banking tycoon George Watts Hill. True
to the traditions of the OSS, Hill never divulged his war time exploits.
His family learned of his service after he died.
Chinese
Espionage
Since China holds a huge portion of US debt, and relies
on the American market for its exports and imports of key technology,
it is unlikely they contemplate war. But that has not prevented
full-scale espionage operations that make China America’s number one
security threat.
Raleigh Spy Conference attendees will recall
talks by FBI agent IC Smith detailing the steamy saga of Chinese
espionage agent Katrina Leung that dramatizes the threat — and the
byzantine complications that arise dealing with an ancient and patient
culture. The attractive and wily agent provocateur managed love affairs
with JJ Smith and Bill Cleveland, two FBI foreign intelligence
investigators who thought they were handling a FBI asset. Instead, Leung
(code named Parlor Maid) was actually working for the Ministry of State
Security MSS), China’s spy agency.
The Leung saga weaves in and
out of Wise’s Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War With China, but there
is much more, including Chinese agents obtaining plans for the W88
nuclear warhead atop missiles launched by Trident submarines; the
neutron bomb; jet fighter advances; top secret “silent-running”
technology for submarines; destroyer technology; and information on the
US space shuttle program. In many cases, investigations overlap as the
same characters appear, as in Tiger Trap, the code name for the
investigation of Gwo-Bao Min, the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab
scientist. And Leung was maintaining affairs with the lead investigator
in the Gwo-Bao Min case, as well as duping her FBI handler Smith.
Leung’s
case also dramatizes the overall difficulty in dealing with
Chinese-Americans who are divided by the split between the People’s
Republic of China (PRC, the communist “mainland” regime) and the
Republic of China (ROC, or Taiwan) created on the island of Formosa in
1949 after forces of US-backed Chiang Kai-shek were driven out of
mainland China in the wake of the victory of Mao Zedong’s Soviet-backed
communists. The PRC continues to threaten the ROC today, and loyalties
of Chinese-Americans are grounded in the conflict, although some
ROC-connected citizens are sympathetic to the PRC communist regime and
vice versa. Chinese agents can claim loyalty to the ROC while working
for the PRC. Parlor Maid was tasked by her MSS handlers to donate large
sums to Republican candidates who usually support the ROC, allowing her
to operate behind another layer of false political allegiances.
Adding
to the complicated cultural and political puzzle China presents are the
myriad of Chinese languages and dialects that can trip up even the
ablest agents. And the lure of Chinese culture sometimes draws US agents
too deeply inside the mystery of China, often altering their
objectivity. Unlike Soviet espionage managers, the Chinese are subtle
and very patient and do not peddle world socialist propaganda. But they
are committed to parity with the United States in weapons and
technology.
Wise’s informative and well-crafted inquiry
perambulates this labyrinthine maze, providing useful details gleaned
from dozens of sources, and includes observations on China’s espionage
techniques to recruit ethnic Chinese spies and gullible visitors, as
explained in Wise’s book by former FBI China analyst Paul Moore: “…China
doesn’t so much try to steal secrets as to try to induce foreign
visitors to give them away by manipulating them into certain
situations,” for example that “scientific information should recognize
no political boundaries.” The pitch is that China is a poor country and
spying for them is a good cause, getting good people to do things, says
Moore.
Wise relates from his sources and examples that direct
payment for recruitment in the US is not the usual way to motivate
ethnic Chinese spies, the method employed by the KGB, although business
opportunities are offered — and an appeal to assist the home country.
And US efforts to fight back sometimes create bungled prosecutions and
investigations of innocents. What emerges is a first-class success in
indentifying the case histories and nuances of what has become America’s
number one espionage threat.
Wise concludes by identifying the
leading threat to US security — attacks on defense computer systems by
Chinese “cyberspies,” and evidence America’s electrical grids are
subject to potential cyber attacks. Mutually Assured Disruption is in
the cards, according to Wise and his sources.
(Douglas Waller and
David Wise will appear with Kent Clizbe Friday morning, Aug. 26, during
the Raleigh Spy Conference. Go to www.raleighspyconference.com for
more information and to register. Or contact cyndi@metromagazine.net.
You can also call Raleigh Metro Magazine: 919-831-0999.
— Bernie
Reeves
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