Posted on 12/17/2016 11:48:47 AM PST by Kaslin
“Much more valuable than rural recruits for our Cuban guerrilla force were American media recruits to export our propaganda.”Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
“Propaganda is vital—propaganda is the heart of our struggle.” Fidel Castro
“The vetting procedure starts the minute the (Cuban) regime receives your visa application. When your smiling Cuban ‘guides’ greet you at the airport they know plenty about you, and from several angles.”Chris Simmons, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuban spycatcher, now retired
“The Castro regime assigns 20 security agents to follow and monitor every foreign journalist. You play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.”Vicente Botin, reporter for Madrid’s El Pais who was booted from Cuba for taking his job title seriously.
Entire books have been dedicated to thoroughly documenting the mainstream media’s long, lucrative and gleeful partnership with the Castro regime’s KGB-trained propaganda apparatchiks in spreading (genuine) fake news. Given current bandwith constraints, let’s limit ourselves to a couple of the most outrageous examples:
After strolling down the red carpet Cuba’s Stalinist regime so often throws down to welcome NBC ‘s Andrea Mitchell, this “intrepid reporter” frequently interviews a Cuba-based “health expert” named Gail Reed. Ms Mitchell always introduces Reed as “the international director of the nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation.”
Perfectly true. But let’s see if some trifling items regarding this favorite NBC (and CNN ) guest’s backgrounds just might tinge their commentary, just might make a judicious person suspect her of disseminating “fake news,” shall we:
Oh!...and CNN, another media fan of Gail Reed’s “impartial expertise”, calls her “a Medical Expert.” Fine. But it’s also interesting that:
For the past 38 years Havana resident Gail Reed has been married to an officer of Cuba’s Directorio General de Intelligencia (spy service) named Julian Torres Rizo. This KGB-trained apparatchik recruited Reed back in 1969 when she visited Cuba as a member of the (DGI-created) Venceremos Brigades of “starry-eyed” U.S. college kids. Obama’s future “neighbors” Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, by the way, served as recruiters for these Venceremos Brigades. This was an important function as leaders of the terrorist group Weather Underground.
“Your society must be destroyed!” the KGB-trained Rizo coached his eager hippie recruits in Cuba. “It is now your duty to help destroy your society!” Reed was so enchanted with Stalinist, terror-sponsoring Cuba that she moved there and became a top writer for Cuba’s Communist party press (the same one, by the way, that frequently bashes your humble servant as a “SCOUNDREL!” and a “TRAITOR!”
Not that any American viewers imbibing her reports on the marvels of Cuba’s healthcare and the wickedness of the U.S. “Blockade” of her adopted country in those “mainstream” media organs might have guessed any of Gail Reed’s background. For such illuminating disclosures it greatly helps to consult a “SCOUNDREL!” and “TRAITOR!”
Everything above thoroughly documented here.
“Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” (ABC’s Barbara Walters)
“Only minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his (Fidel Castro’s) office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro. He apologized for making me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate. Castro suggested that he personally escort us on a visit to other parts of the country, and he gave me the choice of places. I selected the Bay of Pigs and the Sierra Maestra mountains….
“On Wednesday, Castro himself came to our hotel to pick us up…Then, driving a Russian-made jeep, he took us to the Bay of Pigs, where we boarded an armed patrol boat. We thus became, according to Castro, the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs since the U.S.-supported invasion there in 1961.”
Barbara Walters’ crossing of the Bay of Pigs was probably more than a historical sight-seeing junket. On the other side and near the mouth of the bay sits Castro’s personal island-resort Cayo Piedra, that houses his luxurious get-away chateau. According to defectors, when younger, Fidel Castro often repaired to this remote but luxurious villa for spearfishing among other recreational pursuits.
Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, a Lieut. Colonel in Cuba’s Armed Forces who spent 17 years as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard/valet had just been promoted to the position when Barbara Walters visited Cuba for her first interview with the Stalinist dictator in May 1977. Sanchez defected to the U.S. in 2008 and explained to this writer how he was part of the Castroite entourage that accompanied Ms Walters and Fidel to the latter’s island chateau. Ms Walters does mention that:
“We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple. During which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was here that we taped our first but brief and candid interview with him.”2
And speaking of candidness, when in her book “Audition” Barbara Walters confessed to an adulterous affair with Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, Oprah Winfrey asked if she had been in love at the time.
"I was certainly…. I don't know…I was certainly infatuated," answered Walters.
"Infatuated?" asked Oprah.
"I was certainly involved," Walters says. "He was brilliant. He was exciting!”
“His personal magnetism is powerful. His presence is still commanding!" panted Barbara Walters about Fidel Castro during her 2002 interview with the hemisphere’s top torturer of women.
Argentinian journalist Juan Gasparini in his Spanish language book Mujeres de Dictadores (Women of Dictators) writes that, “It is widely supposed that Fidel Castro had several amorous adventures with the North American reporter Barbara Walters who twice visited Cuba to interview him. It is said that she later visited Cuba more discretely for private visits.”
This ties in with an older article, I found about CNN being tied in with foreign governments re CNN reports about those countries. The Youtube link I attached at the end of the article is an update on CNN being PR whores for evil countries.
CNN and the business of state-sponsored TV news
Glenn Greenwald, 4 Sept 2012
The network is seriously compromising its journalism in the Gulf states by blurring the line between advertising and editorial
• Report: why didn’t CNNi air its own ‘iRevolution’ documentary?
Tuesday 4 September 2012 15.02 EDT First published on Tuesday 4 September 2012
Today I reported on the refusal of CNN International (CNNi) to broadcast an award-winning documentary, “iRevolution”, that was produced in early 2011 as the Arab Spring engulfed the region and which was highly critical of the regime in Bahrain. The documentary, featuring CNN’s on-air correspondent Amber Lyon, viscerally documented the brutality and violence the regime was using against its own citizens who were peacefully protesting for democracy. Commenting on why the documentary did not air on CNNi, CNN’s spokesman cited “purely editorial reasons”.
Even so, the network’s relationships with governments must bear closer examination. CNNi has aggressively pursued a business strategy of extensive, multifaceted financial arrangements between the network and several of the most repressive regimes around the world which the network purports to cover. Its financial dealings with Bahrain are deep and longstanding.
CNNi’s pursuit of sponsorship revenue from the world’s regimes:
CNNi’s pursuit of and reliance on revenue from Middle East regimes increased significantly after the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the network to suffer significant losses in corporate sponsorships. It thus pursued all-new, journalistically dubious ways to earn revenue from governments around the world. Bahrain has been one of the most aggressive government exploiters of the opportunities presented by CNNi.
These arrangements extend far beyond standard sponsorship agreements for advertising of the type most major media outlets feature. CNNi produces those programs in an arrangement it describes as “in association with” the government of a country, and offers regimes the ability to pay for specific programs about their country. These programs are then featured as part of CNNi’s so-called “Eye on” series (”Eye on Georgia”, “Eye on the Phillipines”, “Eye on Poland”), or “Marketplace Middle East”, all of which is designed to tout the positive economic, social and political features of that country.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/04/cnn-business-state-sponsored-news
CNN Journalist ‘Governments Pay Us To Fake Stories’, Shocking Exposé
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYyngKSpRUs
Exhibit B: Sabotaging the Bay of Pigs
A year after Alsop’s article, the Times published an article by Tad Szulc exposing the CIA’s plan for an upcoming attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by inserting an invasion force into Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
During Castro’s rise to power in the 1950s he had been supported by Times reporter Herbert Matthews, who had previously given sympathetic coverage to the Communist side during the Spanish Civil War. Castro’s ascent was also supported by a left-wing faction in the State Department, which continually interfered with the CIA’s planning for the Bay of Pigs operation, advising Kennedy to make various tactically-stupid changes including calling off air strikes that were crucial to the success of the operation. One of Castro’s State Department sympathizers, Chester Bowles, decided to sabotage the Bay of Pigs operation by leaking the invasion plan to the press.
Through contacts in the Cuban exile community, the invasion plan came to the attention of Szulc. Szulc had been suspected by US intelligence of being a foreign agent since 1948, when an FBI file identified him as a Communist. In 1959 the CIA also became suspicious of him when he falsely claimed clearance in an attempt to obtain classified information. Later in the 1970s the FBI would observe him in contact with a KGB agent, and the CIA would link his daughter to Cuban spy Philip Agee.
Szulc’s article on the Bay of Pigs operation was published in the New York Times on April 7, 1961, less than two weeks before the planned invasion. Although Szulc’s supervisors forced him to delete some information on national security grounds at the request of CIA Director Allen Dulles, they allowed him to publish the story over the objections of both Dulles and the Times’ own Washington bureau chief James Reston, and they allowed the final draft of the article to include a reference to a CBS News report which mentioned the deleted information.
To keep things in perspective, it should be noted that the failure of the Bay of Pigs was ultimately more due to the State Department’s interference with the air strikes than to Szulc’s article. But Szulc and the Times certainly did their share to help keep Castro in power.
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