Did the KGB help plan America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?

By Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.com
Monday 20 February 2006

Jimmy’s Carter’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the culmination of a very successful campaign by the Washington-based Marxist-Leninist Institute of Policies Studies and the KGB to permanently cripple America’s intelligence services. To understand how this came about it is necessary to take a brief look at the institute’s America-hating founders.

The IPS was set up in 1963 by Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin and funded by the pro-Soviet Rubin Foundation. (Rubin was a crook and a member of the Soviet Comintern). In Raskin’s paranoid world the United States is an evil country that started the Cold War as part of a plan to “reach for the brass ring: world hegemony”. He also asserted that the toppling of Saddam by the US military was akin to the “Nazis’ blitzkrieg” against Europe.

In 1970 he revealed his intention to subvert America’s ability to defend herself when he publicly stated that “government agencies such as the FBI, Secret Services, intelligence services of other government agencies, and the military should be done away with in that order”.

To Raskin’s warped Marxist mentality the US is not a real democracy but a “National Security State,” meaning that this is how the “dominant and achieving groups in American society organise taxation, bureaucratic, technical, and military power to support the US imperial system” that engages in “repressing dissent on a global scale”.

Therefore, according to Raskin’s Marxist dialectic, the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq are really attempts to destroy foreign centres of opposition to US imperialism. Being a typical leftist, Raskin has a peculiar one-eyed view of what imperialism means. He claimed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was defensive and the communist crackdown of Solidarity was for the Poles own good. To suggest that these actions were imperialistic would, in his view, be evidence of a gross failure to see the progressive and defensive nature of socialist states.

Because of this line of reasoning (sensible people would call it rationalising tyranny) he supported the stationing of short-range Soviet-armed missiles in Eastern Europe but stridently opposed the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles as a counter measure. He has also supported every ‘progressive’ regime from North Korea’s horrific dystopia to Castro’s murderous gangster regime. Additionally, he and his comrades have given unstinting support to numerous leftwing terrorist groups.

Richard Barnet, his partner in infamy, practises the same putrefying hypocrisy. In 1969 he made the patently absurd claim that Mao’s China had seen the “end of massive starvation” and that the Soviet Union had “spectacular successes”. However, in the “‘Free World’ where thousands starve. . . . revolution is the only answer to the physical survival of these societies” because “the US has no alternative to offer the poor nations which is any better than revolution”. (The Economy of Death)

This was written in 1969: it is now 2006 and this moral cretin is still preaching the same garbage. One would have to be a member of a cult — or a lefty intellectual, not that there is much of a difference between that and being a cultist — to be so impervious to reality

Naturally, Barnet shares Raskin’s hatred of American intelligence agencies. According to this patriot the CIA is “a criminal enterprise that must be dismantled” and that its intelligence gathering operations are nothing but a “dirty tricks”. As the same time that he and Raskin were attacking the CIA they were helping Philip Agee, who defected to the KGB, to subvert US intelligence operations.

Unfortunately for the US this pair have been allowed to do incalculable damage to country’s national security agencies. They were responsible for the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, piece of legislation that helped cripple intelligence operations by guaranteeing they would be leaked to America’s enemies. (Things haven’t changed much, have they?) But this is exactly what really lay behind the Act.

There are two shared characteristics here: a) those who took measures to cripple intelligence gathering were all Democrats; b) they were all connected by one means or another to the pro-Soviet IPS.

The Project on National Security was an IPS front to attack the CIA. In 1974 the Project was transformed into the CNSS (Center for National Securities Studies). Morton Halperin and Anthony Lake are two influential Democrats who helped launch the CNSS. Moreover, Lake was Senator Frank Church’s legislative aid. Church was also a good friend of the America-hating Richard Barnet and and seemed to share to some degree his anti-American view that the US was the real problem in the world.

In 1975 the CNSS published Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies. This was a brazen piece of Soviet disinformation that was used to influenced the Church and Pike committees and which helped bring FISA into existence. On Barnet’s advice Church employed a number of people from the CIP (Center for International Policy) as key committee staffers.

The CIP was an IPS front that Orlando Letelier was instrumental in forming. Letelier was a KGB agent who, with the full knowledge of Raskin and Barnet, used the IPS’s offices in Washington as his base of operations.

The document was mainly the work of Wilfred Burchett (an Australian journalist and KGB agent) and the traitor Philip Agee. So how could an obvious KGB operation have any influence on a congressional committee? Simple: the Church and Pike Committees used sympathisers and even members of the Institute for Policy Studies as advisers and researchers.

Like Senator Church Pike was deeply influenced by the CNSS’s Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies document. (The influence of this document was greatly assisted by IPS agents working on these committees). The support this classic piece of KGB disinformation received from leftwing politicians and the Nixon-hating media (now the Bush-hating media) resulted in the successful crippling of US intelligence agencies.

The pro-Soviet activities of the IPS were so brazen that Brian Crozier*, co-founder of London’s prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict, could publicly state that

The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.

Yet IPS penetration was so deep in the Democratic Party that when Carter became president he appointed IPS fellow travellers to the White House staff and then more or less gave them carte blanche to further undermine his country’s intelligence structure, which is precisely what they did. Gregory Treverton and David Aaron, both IPS agents and Letelier contacts, crippled covert operations by having over 800 operatives fired. (Guess which foreign intelligence agency that pleased?)

The CNSS and the ACLU, meaning the IPS, basically drafted FISA! The CIA and the FBI were there to try and limit the damage these America-haters were doing to national security. In effect, therefore, FISA is the brainchild of the IPS who designed it to immobilise the country’s intelligence defences and so help the Soviet Union.

Never before in the annuals of intelligence history did any country knowingly allow people to set controls on its intelligence agencies who had publicly declared that “the dissolution of the nation’s vast intelligence network [was] a top priority”. (ACLU Annual Report 1970-71).

America paid a heavy price for the IPS’s treason — and yet the full bill has yet to be paid. In the meantime, the damage these traitors did, and are still doing through their fellow travellers in the media, academia and the Democratic Party, is severely sabotaging the war on terror.

Fully understanding the vital importance of intelligence to his country’s survival, General George Washington said in 1777:

The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged — all that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as Secret as possible. For upon secrecy, success depends in Most Enterprises of the Kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favorable issue.

If Washington were alive today what would he would make of the Democrats, their media allies and the America-haters at the IPS? Or is that a stupid question?

*Crozier became such a danger to Raskin and Barnet’s operations that they tried to use a British court to sue him for libel. They chose this tactic because in the UK truth is no defence in a libel case. The plan was to use their court victory to attack Crozier’s credibility. However, they withdrew the case once they realized Crozier would fight and that they would be subject to a public cross examination regarding their activities and the contents of certain IPS documents. Their unseemly retreat served to confirm Crozier’s charges against them.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor