CIA LEADERS AND THE NEA - AFT MERGER PLANS

May be reprinted with attribution to the author:

Richard Gibson 300 W. College Ave. #24 State College, PA 16801


The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education
Association plan to merge. The merger involves millions of dues dollars
(about 2 1/2 million members times $400.00 yearly dues) and far more.

The essence of the merger of the AFT and the NEA is the further
intrusion of the corporate state into every level of education from
curricula development to teacher placement; an essentially fascist
agenda which furthers the stratification of education along race and
class lines and, more importantly enhances the transparent efforts to
make children the instruments of their won oppression. Nothing could
illustrate this more graphically than a recount of a presentation made
to the prestigious NEA Executive Committee on Saturday, February 8,
1992.

The Board, composed of NEA national officers and 50 state NEA
presidents welcomed to its august midst...the CIA. William Colby, CIA
Director from 1973 to 1976, the predecessor of George Bush, was the
keynote speaker. While Colby did not receive the standing ovation
customary from an audience of polite educators, nobody had the gall to
boo. Colby's  presentation to the liberal NEA is of important for
several reasons. It is remarkable in itself that a Central Intelligence
Agency boss would ever be invited to speak to the gun-shy NEA. But of
greater interest is how precisely Colby fits. Let us first examine just
who Colby is, then review the agenda he proposed to the top leaders of
the NEA.

William Colby enjoys a reputation as the most liberal of the CIA
chiefs. He fits the CIA mold as if it was made around him. The Catholic
son of a University of Minnesota professor and a Princeton graduate,
Colby is stamped with the Eastern Establishment that sneers at its
counterparts in espionage at the more blue-collar FBI. Subsequent to his
university stint, Colby enlisted in WWII and worked throughout Europe
for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central
Intelligence Agency. There Colby met "Wild Bill" Donovan, a founder of
the CIA who would later recruit Colby to his Wall Street law firm as a
consultant for the government of South Korea. More portentously, Colby
joined forces with an alcoholic OSS activist named Frank Wisner. Wisner
would set the tone for Colby's life.

Frank Wisner concluded in 1943, mid-war, that Hitler had lost and the
real battle for Americans was with the Soviet Union, starting
immediately. Wisner decided that the way to beat the Soviets was to work
with the Nazis. In 1943, Wisner recruited the head of Nazi Intelligence,
Reinhold Gehlen, to operate for the OSS. Over the next decade, Wisner
would enlist and support literally thousands of Nazis, many of them war
criminals. Wisner, for example, headed Operation Paperclip, the project
that brought dozens of war criminals to the United States under
falsified entry documents provided to them by the OSS/CIA. (See
"Blowback" by Christopher Simpson, 1988, p.90)

Colby worked immediately subordinate to Wisner and began to develop a
reputation as a cold, amoral bureaucrat. In France, at the close of the
war, Colby joined Wisner in what became a blueprint operation for the
future.

Post-war France was a deeply divided country. Many, if not most, French
people had collaborated with the German invaders, with disasterous
results. What resistance there was, as in nearly all of Europe, was led
by communists who enjoyed considerable prestige after the war, much to
the chagrin of Wisner and Colby.  The French dockworkers provided a
microcosm of this split. Led by the Communist Party, the dock workers
went on strike. The CIA determined to crush the union.

Wisner and Colby developed a multi-pronged method of attack. They
solidified the relationship of American intelligence agencies and the
AFL-CIO (which extends back to AFL support for WWI) by making payments
to "unionists" identified by AFL operatives as potential scabs. Irving
Brown, an AFL/CIA agent who died in 1991 and who was the primary link
between American labor and the intelligence community, got his start in
this French operation. Wisner and Colby recruited former Nazi thugs to
work as goon squads to attack strikers. They worked with the Mafia,
whose members had an interest in keeping the "French Connection" ports
open to guarantee the movement of heroin. With the iron fist and the
green-filled glove, Wisner and Colby defeated the dockworkers strike and
set back the prestige of international communism. But slept with the
devil to do it. (see "The Politics of Heroin" by Alfred McCoy, 1991;
also "CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" by Victor Marchetti)

Things went so swimmingly that the dangerous duo took their template
and placed it on Italy, hoping to defeat a probable national Communist
electoral victory. Colby employed the same tactics of thuggery and
bribery to make massive payments to former Nazi goons, the Sicilian mob,
and "Christian Democrats".  The Vatican, Colby's church and a major
conduit to smuggle wanted ex-Nazis in clerical disguise around the
world, lent a modest hand. The money to fund Colby's labors, known as
"black currency", came from captured Nazi assets, including money and
gold the Nazis looted from Jews. In short, the communists lost the
election. Colby's prestige leaped. The thugs later formed the nucleus of
fascist paramilitary groups, known as "Operation Gladio" ("Sword") and
funded by the CIA, which operate terrorist cells throughout Europe to
this date. (See "Blowback, p.90 and "Washington Post, World News",
11-14-90. It is reasonable to believe the Serbo-Croation conflict
ripping Yugoslavia in mid- 1992 has a good deal to do with remnants from
Sword)

In 1958, Colby went to Saigon. Over the next 13 years he moved up
through the chains of the CIA command (including a stint with the Agency
for International Development, a CIA front). Eventually he made head of
the CIA's Far East Division. Then he began Operation Phoenix. According
to Colby's own testimony to congress, Phoenix killed  "a minimum of
20,000 Vietnamese". (Washingtonian Magazine, 2/89, p. 115)

Colby, who still contends Vietnam was a "noble war", calls the Phoenix
program, "The single most effective operation".  Phoenix was, in its
press releases, designed to surgically crush the leadership of the
Vietnamese resistance. One person's surgeon is another's barber. Two
former CIA front line veterans tell quite a different story. They
describe Phoenix as a form of genocide.  Both Frank Snepp and Ralph
McGehee say Phoenix was a "shoot first and ask questions later program".
There was little effort to identify combatants, or distinguish them from
civilians. "We took a scattershot approach". (Mother Jones, May 1984)

On Colby's watch in Vietnam, the CIA also entrenched its relationship
with the drug cartels of the "Golden Triangle" covering Burma, Thailand,
Laos and Cambodia. While Colby was station chief, the CIA backed former
Chinese Goumindang drug dealers in an ostensible effort to win their
anti-communist support and to use monies laundered from the drug
operation for covert CIA activity. But, perhaps most importantly, on
Colby's watch the United States was militarily defeated in Vietnam and,
in the panic of the last hours as helicopters raced from the embassy
rooftops, dozens of indigenous CIA collaborators, and their files, were
left behind, abandoned, a lesson to future CIA partners like Manual
Noriega. Those who enter into a relationship with the CIA enter a life
of planned obsolescence.

While Colby directed the CIA, from 1973 to 1976, he had his eye on
targets well beyond Vietnam. At home, Colby did all he could to stop and
censure the publication of a book critical of "The Company" as the
agency is known to its secretive employees.  "Inside the Company--a CIA
Diary" by Philip Agee, named names and told secrets, more than Colby
could bear. He sued, harassed and annoyed to the point Agee left the
country. But the book was published. A second blemish on Colby's career.

Then there was Australia. Never one to let local people make mistakes
in voting, Colby toppled a popularly elected government.

In 1972, in Australia, a Labour Party came to power that Colby
perceived as potentially threatening to U.S. interests, three interests
in particular.

First, Australia was the home of a major CIA intelligence- gathering
station. Located at Pine Gap in mid-country, the station was uniquely
perfect for intercepting electronic communications from all over that
half of the world. Colby feared that the Labour government might
compromise the station.

Secondly, Australia's strategic location lies right next to critical
shipping lanes and air-refueling stations. Any disruption of U.S.
activity in Australia might ruin American ability to oversee commerce.

Finally there was the embarrassment of the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan Hand
was a CIA sponsored conduit and laundering agency for the drug trade.
The banks top officials included Edmund Wilson, a CIA agent now in
prison for "rogue" activity, and a prestigious list of Army and
Intelligence officers. In very brief, the bank was on the verge of
collapse when Frank Nugan, the top officer, was found dead in desolate
sheep country. William Colby's business card and a Colby trip itinerary
was in Nugan's pocket. Colby was the legal, political and tax advisor
for Nugan Hand.

Like Italy before, the CIA prejudiced Australian politics.  To protect
its considerable Australian assets, and to avoid Nugan Hand
embarrassment, the "Company" fabricated evidence against the Labour
government which sought to investigate CIA activities. Its leader was
forced to resign by the British Queen in November, 1975.  In the early
eighties, Colby's activities came to light.  The Australians, publicly
hoodwinked, developed a level of distrust for the U.S. that continues to
threaten a once congenial relationship. (Foreign Policy, Winter
1982-1983)

Colby polished his liberal sheen at the CIA through his dismissal of
one of the agency's most hard line, if least rational, top officials.
James Jesus Angleton worked with the younger Colby in the halcyon days
in France. But Angleton, once a close friend of the Soviet mole and
British chief of counter intelligence who helped design the CIA, Kim
Philby, became obsessed with the possibility of a highly placed Soviet
spy in the CIA. Angleton searched for years, at the expense of nearly
everything else, with no success. If information came to him that didn't
fit the Soviet mole pattern, he filed it in safes that were never
opened.  Angleton, in a fit of single-mindedness that remains a major
embarrassment to the agency that helped him carry it out, jailed a
legitimate Soviet defector for three years in an 8' x 8' cell in a CIA
"safe-house"in Virginia, repeatedly drugged him with LSD, and tortured
him in hopes of getting a confession that the defector was actually a
double agent. Eventually, as it became clear that the defector was bona
fide, the CIA assisted him with a name change and a modest income as an
American citizen.

Angleton was described publicly by the CIA's own psychologist as a
paranoid schizophrenic. But nothing dislodged him until Colby leaked
information about Angleton's certified madness to Seymour Hersh in 1974.
Angleton resigned.  In the classical fashion of an American bureaucrat,
by stomping down, Colby stepped up.(Washingtonian, Spring 1985)

In 1975, Colby made a lengthy presentation to the U.S. Congress about
secret CIA operations. In the words of former CIA agent John Stockwell,
"Mr. Colby gave thirty six briefings to the Senate in which he offered
false information...those statements were absolutely not true, not
correct, not accurate. Those statements were false."

Referring to the same testimony, another ex-CIA officer, Ralph Mcgehee
said, " I know the specific steps the agency took to create the
conditions that led to the massacre of at least half a million
Indonesians. While I was in the CIA I also helped prepare briefings for
Congress for Mr. Colby, and it is a fact that those briefings had
nothing to do with reality. The briefings were designed to present a
certain picture that would allow the CIA to sell covert programs to
congress. Very few of the briefings were true. They were complete
whitewash jobs". (Both, "Harpers" September 1984)

When Colby ostensibly left the CIA in 1977, the Vietnam experience
continued to haunt him. His daughter, raised in Vietnam and disturbed by
her fathers practices there, died of anorexia nervosa.

In the mid-eighties Colby again tiptoed into liberalism by joining
former hawks Macgeorge Bundy and Robert Macnamara in proposing a nuclear
freeze. He went so far as to write a Washington Post editorial calling
for a reduction in NATO arms, predating the success of Reagan's plan to
spend the USSR into oblivion. (Washington Post, 8-28-89) But not one to
keep his hand out of the pie, Colby still insists on the propriety and
legality of covert operations in general and the use of live agents in
place over technology. Indeed, Colby sees nothing wrong with the CIA
overthrow of the government of the Congo in the mid-sixties, a coup
which included the company's liquidation, murder, of the democratically
elected Patrice Lumumba. (C-Span presentation of American University
Forum interview with Fletcher Prouty, ex-CIA, on 2-1-92, see  also
"Veil" by Bob Woodward and "Harpers", September 1984)

In sum, there are several threads that weave together to form William
Colby's career. There can be no question that Colby's life revolves
around deceit, dissimilation, the corruption of unions, assassination,
drugs; all in what the Princeton grad sees as the national, if secret,
interest. Colby is an archetypal post-modern fascist, not in hob nailed
boots but wing tips, not screaming racist insults but coldly
implementing a deadly racist program. He is hardly the ideal speaker for
a liberal union of educators, people who believe in the free exchange of
ideas, or is he?

Let us now turn to exactly what it is that William Colby proposes
today.

Colby believes the war is still on. Whatever the state of the Soviet
Union, the war in Colby's mind is now, and has always been, first an
economic war, American capitalism versus the cosmos, then a bloody one.
In picking priorities, Colby is consistent, first wage economic battles,
then the physical ones.  That American workers have nothing to gain from
either war is of no interest to Colby. He is a partisan, on the wrong
side. He understands that there are sides to be taken. And he knows
whose side he is on.

The war Colby wants to wage, with NEA and AFT help, is the "Campaign
for New Priorities" (CNP). The CNP has a fairly simple, if unspecific,
agenda: Reindustrialize America with the taxes of working people. Of
course, they don't put it quite so openly. In a materials packet and a
promotional video tape that bears a striking resemblance to a military
briefing, CNP lays out its broad goals: Don't cut taxes because of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Take the tax savings that would have been
spent on defense and put the money to work in rebuilding the American
infrastructure, "promote long-term economic growth by investing in
education, infrastructure, cleaning up the environment, and assisting
industries and communities in the orderly conversion from military to
civilian production." (CNP "Generic New Priorities Resolution, 1992)

What we have here is Colby's French blueprint, slightly modified for
local culture, applied to the United States. Overall, Colby and CNP
suggest that (1) the distribution of the tax money will somehow be fair
and rational, (2) to continue a tax system that grew grotesquely more
unfair in the last decade and that is seen with contempt by most
Americans is a good idea, (3) the unjustly gotten booty should be
distributed to industries which deliberately deindustrialized in the
1980's and which simply took their capital profits and refused to invest
in new plants and machinery and (4) we are all in this together, we will
loose the new war, the economic war with Japan and Germany, if we do not
sacrifice and fight.

In every sense, this is a fascist agenda, a microcosm of the corporate
state. We are NOT all in this together, as the corporate owners who took
millions in workers' concessions and paid themselves multi-million
dollar salaries easily attest. A government in the hands of wealth will
NEVER equitably distribute the potential defense savings to poor schools
and social services. The homeless won't get a single home from this
scam.  This is a corporate bailout of the highest order. It is not the
"American Infrastructure" (schools, roads, welfare grants) which will be
rebuilt.  It's corporate profits. What will be generated is an
ideological and practical attack on Japan and Germany and, at home, with
union complicity,  American workers will be further twisted into
instruments of their own oppression.

One of the truly high-tech features of the CNP scheme is an "800"
number (800-92-action). The number is answered by a machine.  Callers,
at no cost, can cause a letter to be reproduced to all of their
congresspeople demanding support for the CNP agenda with a simple phone
call. The caller then becomes part of CNP's data base, on-line to
receive weekly high-gloss mailings and an occasional video.

In addition to deceiving working people about the need for a serious
partisan agenda to face the financial collapse of the 1990's, this plan
disarms people by implying that there is an easy, free, way out;  there
is no need to organize a mass movement with power in its own right. One
merely needs to make a free phone call and let things flow. After all,
aren't the workers' organizations participating?

Sadly, just as the AFL participated in France and Italy, they are. CNP
is now sponsored by both national teacher unions as well as a list of
liberalism that ranges from the American Association of University Women
(upper middle class white women), to the U.S. Student Association
(embarrassed by public exposure as a CIA front by "Ramparts" magazine in
1967. The same article exposed NEA officers on the CIA payroll). 52
organizations are signed on including the "City of New York" (whose
finances are run by Al Shanker's good friend, Felix Rohatyn) and the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the home base for the CIA
when it initiated its relationship with trade unions through Irving
Brown and former ILGWU President David Dubinsky. There's the
International Association of Machinists which scabbed on virtually every
airline strike in the last decade, SANE/Freeze (where Colby once kept
his desk), the Service Employees International Union, AFSCME and CWA
(both linked in the past with CIA activity: see the AFSCME biography,
"Power to the Public Worker")  and relative innocents like "Ben and
Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream".

The pecunious people who own American industry need to rebuild their
economic foundation, to create a base of production in steel, rubber,
iron, that will allow these owners to compete, both economically and
militarily. But the capital for that rebuilding is gone, blown in a
decade of excess. So they rediscover their old patsys, American workers,
and bang the old drum of nationalism and common interest. This is
precisely the fascist agenda that American workers, and especially
educators, must fear most. But it is also the program, the raison de
tat, for the merger of the AFT and the NEA.

The unity of school workers in one organization is, in the long run,
fundamental in the effort for social change. School workers are
dramatically positioned in this society to either struggle for change or
prop up that which is. So the question is: Unity with who, for what?
The economic crisis in the United States is the foundation for fascist
intrusion in the schools. Part of that intrusion will be made possible
by the merger of the NEA and the AFT. The AFT will discipline the NEA
staff, the CIA and American intelligence agencies will enjoy an
increased grip on the largest union in the country and expanded access
to the schools to press for the governing class' agenda. Rank and file
NEA and AFT members will get nothing from the merger but a dues
increase.  Besides, when teacher union staff and top governance people
making $80,000 a year call for educator unity, they mean "Unite to
protect ME!". Many corporations raise the same cry. "We're all in the
same boat, let us row together." What educators and activists must begin
to question is just who "we" are and what direction it is that we should
pull.


--richard gibson--