Who is William Arkin, and why does it matter?

As most of you have read or seen by now, a journalist and NBC/MSNBC media consultant named William “Bill” Arkin has created quite a stir by viciously insulting American soldiers in Iraq. He wrote at his Washington Post blog, “Early Warning: William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security” column (1/30/07), that “… this NBC (Nightly News) report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer force that thinks it is doing the dirty work” re Iraq.

The “report,” according to Arkin, featured “a number of soldiers (who) expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States.”

He also wrote that “So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should, in addition, roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?”

Arkin is not telling the truth when he talks about “decent wage, take care of their families,” et cetera, since my wife and I were part of those military families whose children served in Iraq (and Afghanistan). My son got $150 per paycheck for “hostile fire” pay, and he earned every cent of it. His tents often were not air-conditioned, and he worked and fought in heat that averaged 90-120 degrees, and higher, and stood 16 hours on top of his truck to guard it during a sandstorm of biblical proportions (I’ve seen the photos of the storm that turned blood red and reduced visibility down to inches). Because of the quickness of the 3rd Infantry Division’s advances in March-April 2003, they often outran their supply convoys and ended up eating one MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) per day, though that was sufficient in calories to keep them going.

We couldn’t pay these soldiers enough to do the job that they are doing on far less than Arkin makes as a professional underminer of America’s security and morale.

Arkin is currently an NBC military analyst/writer (and for MSNBC), an on-line writer for The Washington Post, and has written for numerous liberal, leftist and pro-communist publications such as The Nation, as well as some legitimate military-oriented publications, including Airpower Journal, Marine Corps Gazette and Washington Quarterly, according to Source Watch, a project of the Center for Media & Democracy (located at www.sourcewatch.org).

The website www.codenames.org, which belongs to Steer Forth Press, Hanover, New Hampshire, which was promoting Arkin’s book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World, credited Arkin with exposing and helping to get a congressional ban on “mini-nuke” research efforts and as well as his “N.Y. Times op-ed in 1994 revealing U.S. blinding laser programs led to a Defense Department decision to agree to an International ban on such weapons.” This ban did not stop the Red Chinese from using them on U.S. military aircraft later on.

Go to this site to see how Arkin has undermined American defense system for decades. His actions border on treason, but he skirts the law by hiding behind the work of unidentified people who steal and leak classified information to him, and then he often gives it to The New York Times, especially to liberal-pacifist writer Leslie Gelb or uses it in how own columns.

Gelb was a former Carter administration high-ranking figure in the Department of State, as director of their Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (1977-79), and had served in the Johnson Administration for a few years starting in 1967, acting as deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff, “and eventually directing the Vietnam task force that produced the documents later known as the Pentagon Papers.” (See www.query.nytimes.com, news blurb, “Leslie Gelb to Rejoin The Times,” Jan. 29, 1981).

For a ridiculous piece by Gelb concerning options in Iraq, see Time magazine, Oct. 15, 2006, “Would Defeat in Iraq be So Bad?” - which reflects on his retreatism mentally which served so well when he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from the late ’70s to early 1981. Gelb will later show up below as a part of one of Arkin’s most successful projects to destroy U.S. strategic international military alliances.

Arkin was an intelligence analyst when he served in the military from 1974-1978, and advised some very high-up officers, but that was against the Soviets under Brezhnev, the invader of Czechoslovakia. When it later came to opposing the Soviet Union’s massive arms build-ups in the late ’70s, early ’80s, or Hanoi’s aggression, Cuba’s subversion, or other communist and Islamofascist regimes, he went hard left and never returned. Yet from what you have been reading in the mainstream media and from their television news networks, you would think that he was the Second Coming of Jesus instead of the enemy of America that he has been for decades.

The MSM has repeatedly failed, either through sheer incompetency or on purpose, or both, to properly identify Arkin they way he should be identified. In fact, their coverup of the groups he has been associated with, has been top-notch, as good as a job as the Soviet/Communist propaganda operations that masked their anti-Vietnam and anti-defense operations since 1965.

The Washington Post ombudsman, Deborah Howell, raised some innocuous issues about whether the Post should have read Arkin’s piece before it was run on the WP website, but she conveniently avoided discussing who he is and who he has been affiliated with in the past. (Feb. 11, 2007, Sunday Outlook section, “A Blog’s Blast Damage”).

Only Newsmax, the online news daily publication, Feb. 8, 2007, “Bill O’Reilly Skewers NBC Military ‘Expert,’” and a few other conservative websites, have done a good job of listing Arkin’s leftist past activities and affiliations, which I will highlight here (with additional commentary information you won’t find elsewhere).

As one example, see The Weekly Standard, 10/23/2003, Hugh Hewitt, “Who Is William Arkin? A Look at the Greenpeace activist cum L.A. Times military affairs columnist who’s taking after Gen. Jerry Boykin.” - www.weeklystandard.com.

* Greenpeace - the so-called “environmental” peace group, which has a really checkered past of involvement with radical leftist causes, and who once had as a staffer, the late communist sympathizer/organizer, Damu Smith. There wasn’t a major communist cause or front that he didn’t have his hands in, from the so-called “Anti-Vietnam” movement, support for the communist guerrilla movements in southern Africa (ANC, SWAPO, ZANU), to an anti-US telephone booth front operation known as “Black Voices for Peace.”

* Natural Resources Defense Council “consultant to the nuclear program” (1980) - they got into a lot of funny stuff and communist front groups over nuclear weapons and defense, and it wasn’t to help defend the U.S. either.

* Human Rights Watch, “former military consultant” - “senior military adviser” (source: www.codenames.org/bio.html” (1994). This is another leftist group that has been loaded up with veteran radicals for decades, including Joe Stork, a leader of the old SDS-founded MERIP (Middle East Reports), a very leftist publication. HRW is very anti-US and anti-Israel today.

* Los Angeles Times, “military affairs columnists” (2001-2004). The L.A. Times has always been far-left and featured as a columnist on world and political affairs Robert Scheer, one of the vilest people in America. If “hate” could be personified, his name would be at the top of the list along with Gore Vidal, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Charlie Manson.

* The Institute for Policy Studies - “where he was director of the national-security program and the Arms Race and Nuclear Weapons Research Project, 1981-1989.” (Newsmax characterized IPS as “a far left Washington-based think tank that describes itself as having ‘transformed ideas into action for peace, justice and the environment for more than four decades.”

That last self-characterization is like Julius Streicher describing the Nazi Party and movement as having “transformed ideas into action for peace, justice and the environment” in Germany.

IPS was founded by three leftists with very pronounced anti-American, pro-marxist positions, and was funded by a longtime identified Communist Party member and reported Comintern agent during the 1930s, Samuel Rubin (and his Foundation). His daughter, Cora Weiss (whom I’ve testified about to Congress), is a veteran communist sympathizer whose leadership of the pro-Hanoi New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (of which I was a covert member), its POW extortion operation known as COLIFAM (Committee of Liaison with Families of American Detainees in Vietnam, which I helped to expose), the CPUSA-dominated Women Strike for Peace, and the anti-American Riverside Church’s Disarmament Program, are just some of the groups she heads or belongs to, including far-left foundations that fund communist, socialist and anti-American causes. This is just the tip of the iceberg about the true identify of Weiss and her husband, and their baby, IPS.

Her husband, Peter Weiss, is an old-line CPUSA supporter lawyer whose affiliation with Party members and sympathizers in the legal field is legendary. He helps out the congressionally identified CPUSA legal fronts, the National Lawyers Guild (of which he has been a national officer), the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), and the NLG’s offshoot creation, the infamous Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the leading legal organization defending captured terrorists and Al Qaeda trainees held at Gitmo, and elsewhere.

The IPS was infiltrated by a very good husband-wife team of undercover operatives. They wrote about IPS operations and personalities in the Information Bulletin, as well as in reports put into the Congressional Record by the late Rep. Larry McDonald (D-Ga). Their writings were the precursor to Steven Powell’s devastating book/exposure of IPS, Covert Cadre.

But wait, there is much more about Arkin that needs to be written here. Media writer Howard Kurtz, of The Washington Post, actually hinted at Arkin’s dark past when he wrote in his column “Four Syllables, Starts with Me, Ends with Uh-Oh” (Feb. 12, 2007, Style Section), that “He has drawn fire more than once for disclosing classified information. Arkin now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.” Unfortunately, Kurtz, who is not really disposed to out communists or far-leftists, leaves us that little tidbit as though it was nothing important.

Post ombudsman Deborh Howell, in her Feb. 11th column, “A Blog’s Blast Damage,” identified Arkin as not only a Washington Post “online blogger and columnist,” but also as “a national security and human rights fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “He is a military analyst for NBC-TV and has broken national stories” (as in revealing classified information about the possible location of U.S. nuclear weapons depots, which Ms. Howell either didn’t know about, or wishes to dismiss as not important).

I consider myself a pretty good investigative researcher and reporter/journalist. Been at it a long time, and have accrued many sources and files about internal security, terrorism and related national-security issues. Therefore, the first thing I do is to look into my files, if I can find them, and then into my library books.

Voila - there he is, our very anti-American, pro-marxist William Arkin. He shows up in the following book, and not in a very flattering manner.

* S. Steven Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, Green Hill Publishers, 1987. This is the bible for researchers on IPS. It lays bare the whole marxist origins and programs of this very influential organization, an organization whose ties to the CPUSA and the Soviet Union/KGB, are exposed beyond any reasonable doubt by Powell.

Arkin is mentioned on pages, 24, 90, 98, 269, 305, 343 and 362. The first mention on pages 23-24 is very interesting, for it reads as follows:

“The (NY) Times lends IPS credibility by identifying IPS as independent or liberal rather than as leftist or radical, which IPS proudly admits to being. …”

“One of the Times’ most respected authorities on foreign-affairs and national-security issues, Leslie Gelb, asserts that IPS is “one of three preeminent centers for foreign policy perspectives.” In February 1985, Gelb accepted classified information on U.S. nuclear defense contingency plans from IPS fellow William Arkin and wrote a front-page story that severely damaged America’s relations with her NATO allies.” (pp. 23-24)

On pages 90-91, Powell laid out how William Arkin deliberately set out to damage or destroy a lot of America’s nuclear-weapons plans by exposing them to the world, with the help of the above-mentioned Leslie Gelb of The New York Times. Gelb revealed via the classified documents Arkin supplies him, that the U.S. had “drawn up contingency plans to deploy nuclear depth charges n Canada, Iceland, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Azores, the Philippines, Spain, and Diego Garcia in time of war.”

According to Powell, Arkin has also “traveled to Iceland to deliver to the prime minister … a classified 1975 nuclear weapons deployment report, which prompted angry demands for an explanation.”

“After his Icelandic junket, Arkin journeyed to Canada” where “a spate of news articles describing nuclear contingency plans followed in his wake.”

“Anti-American fallout proliferated wherever Arkin or his press releases went. Relations between the U.S. and Canada, Spain, and Portugal became increasingly strained. Dr. William Steerman (whom this writer has known and highly respected since the Vietnam days), a senior-level White House adviser, commented: “William Arkin had to know that his so-called revelations about secret plans to deploy nuclear weapons abroad would create problems for the United States in several friendly countries and would provide grist for the Soviet propaganda mill.”

Powell tells how New Zealand, under a far-left prime minister, “prohibited American warships carrying nuclear weapons from entering New Zealand’s waters. As the navy refuses to comment on which of its ships carry atomic devices, the sanction effectively excluded all U.S. ships from the harbors of New Zealand, and subsequently led to the demise of the ANZUS alliance.”

Arkin knew exactly what he was doing, because he followed a similar anti-U.S. nuclear weapons exposure in the 1970s by the Vietnam veteran fraud Al Hubbard, the leader of the leftist Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VAW), the group which gave Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) his 15 minutes of infamy in 1971.

Hubbard told Japanese leftist groups that U.S. warships carried nuclear weapons on them while in their ports, a statement that the U.S. Navy could not confirm or deny for obvious reasons.

However, Japanese communist front groups funded by the Soviet KGB, with which Hubbard had contacts, had a field day over his statements and caused a lot of trouble for U.S. - Japanese relations.

Author Powell also goes on to tell how Arkin and IPS “colleague Richard Fieldhouse” wrote a book, Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race, (June, 1985) which cataloged “in excruciating detail the location and description of what the authors believe are all American and allied nuclear weapons installations.”

Some of this information came from “conscientious officers” who had access to classified materials and gave it to Arkin/Fieldhouse, which they acknowledged. It was, according to Powell, the stated purpose of this “study” to helping in “exposing and explaining how the entire (nuclear) infrastructure works in unprecedented detail, by demonstrating how that structure is out of control, and by showing that a different concept - ‘denuclearization - is necessary to reestablish control over the system.”

“The study concludes, “Denuclearization can only be achieved by worldwide action to check the nuclear system.” Apparently the Soviet Union didn’t read this book.

According to Powell, “Besides providing a ‘boon to the KGB,’ as the Economist‘s Foreign Report put it, the details of the book aid nuclear protesters and provide the groundwork for potential nuclear terrorists.” (The last statement is extremely relevant today, especially with Al-Qaeda trying to get its hands on nuclear weapons/materials or trying to blow up a nuclear reactor).

The Soviet Union’s propaganda machines went into overtime with Arkin/Fieldhouse’s exposures (which were not necessarily accurate), and they launched many anti-American demonstrations and conferences under the auspices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - International Department and thru the KGB, both of which controlled the World Peace Council. (In the U.S., the Communist Party USA had established an American chapter, the U.S. Peace Council, in November 1979, which was supported by a number of U.S. congressmen and women, at least one of whom is still in Congress today, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich). The USPC led the fight against the MX missile, the Pershing and Cruise Missile deployments in Europe to stop any Soviet invasion threat or blackmail, against the Trident submarine, the B-1 bomber, the Neutron Bomb, et cetera, and they were joined in by people from the Workers World Party (WWP) and the Castroite propaganda groups (some of which were under CPUSA/Cuban Secret Police-control, influence and/or funding. Leaders of these groups are now the leaders of the anti-Iraq movement known as ANSWER, IAC, and United for Peace & Justice).

Something that author Powell may not have known was that Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Cal), an avowed socialist, which is just a coverup word for communist/marxist, was the subcommittee chairman of the House Armed Services Committee for military construction, thru which he would normally have been given highly classified documents telling the location of nuclear-weapons storage and basing facilities, or the need for more of them, or even of weaknesses in their security which had to be fixed.

Given Dellums’ long record of aiding communist, marxist, socialist and far-left groups, movements and governments (Grenada, Vietnam, Cuba), giving him any kind of classified information would probably have ensured it getting into Cuban or Soviet hands. Fortunately, unbeknownst to him, wiser Democratic congressmen on the HASC kept certain materials away from him so that he never saw them or even knew that they existed. That was because he was one of the three top communist/marxist security risks in Congress, the others being Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the late Rep. George Crockett Jr., (D-Mich), who was deliberately made the Democratic Party’s chairman on the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, despite his record of supporting communism.

However, it would be interesting to see if Dellums was the leaker to Arkin about U.S. nuclear-weapons depots and caches that Arkin later gave to Gelb at The New York Times.

All three of these leftists have had extensive ties to the Institute for Policy Studies, which are laid out in Powell’s book, as well as in The Revolution Lobby, Alan Brownfeld and J. Michael Waller, Council for Inter-American Security, 1985, and Powell’s study, Second Front - Advancing Latin American Revolution in Washington, Studies in Organization Trends, #1, 1986, Capital Research Center, among others.

[I have detailed the red records of both Conyers and Crockett in previous columns that have appeared here. Today, Conyers is one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, and still as hard-core left as ever].

A few other excerpts from Covert Cadre about Arkin are also illuminating, and I will comment on them below.

“Over the years, IPS activities overseas have focused on undermining NATO by working directly with opposition parties and communists. In 1985, IPS fellow William Arkin leaked classified nuclear-defense contingency plans that severely strained the NATO alliance, helped unravel the ANZUS alliance (i.e. due to a far-leftist prime minister in New Zealand), and complicated relations with Japan.” “Arkin’s book on this subject was entitled Nuclear Battlefields. (page 343).

Arkin was a speaker at the Riverside Church Disarmament Program in January 1982 on “Poverty and Militarism” (p. 305). This was a program set up by the far-left priest Father William Sloan Coffin (his record of supporting communist fronts is very long including his being an Endorser of “The Conference on Socialism and Activism, Dec. 6-8, 1985, NYC). It was led by none other than the red-diaper baby queen of IPS, Cora Weiss, one of Hanoi’s strongest supporters.

At page 269, we find a gem about Arkin, in the subsection “CDI: Blaming America First”, which described the Center for Defense Information as “another of the most respected foreign policy and special interest groups.”

“The CDI is supported by the Fund for Peace.” (During its early years, it was loaded with rich liberals who eventually lost control of its liberal, semi-pacifist orientation). Eventually its leadership took it in the same anti-defense direction as its parallel brother, IPS. “IPS fellow William Arkin, who gained notoriety after leaking classified information on U.S. nuclear defense plans, began his activist career at CDI.”

I interviewed the late, first director of CDI, Adm. Gene LaRoque (ret.) during a conference in the 1970s (my notes of May 1972), and he told me that he viewed “aircraft carriers as offensive weapons” and that he was opposed to them. Now, this is from a highly decorated destroyer commander during World War II, and a senior commander of the 6th Fleet during the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and attacking Arab nations. That was one of the reasons he was shunted off to the Inter-American Defense Board, to get him out of any command responsibility, so said a little mouse to me many years ago. (That “mouse” was a highly decorated/wounded/disabled World War II veteran who did incredible research on CDI and other anti-American groups).

Remember, Arkin was identified as a researcher for the NRDC in 1980, so his trail of work led from CDI to NDRC, Greenpeace, and IPS, all of them anti-defense organizations who were often deliberately blind to Soviet aggression (Afghanistan) and subversion (in Grenada, Syria, Cuba, Lebanon, El Salvador and Nicaragua).

LaRoque was the biggest dupe for communist propaganda I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of the biggest names in the business. It was no wonder that the reds in the Fund for Peace picked him to head their anti-military operation (one of three they funded to attack U.S. defense and foreign policies, the others being the Center for International Policies, i.e., no genocide in Cambodia) and the Center for National Security Studies (Morton Halperin and company, i.e., destroy the CIA and the FBI), all interlocked with IPS, their cousins in the “Hanoi Lobby” of the Indochina Resource Center, and with other incestuous groups that formed the “anti-defense lobby” of the 1970s such as the Coalition to Stop Funding the War/Coalition for a New Foreign Policy. Sound familiar?

Powell provided a lot tremendous amount of information about these groups in his book.

And from pages 97-98, just as a repetitious reminder, Powell wrote, “In February 1985, IPS fellow William Arkin leaked classified information on U.S. naval nuclear contingency plans to Lesie Gelb, who went public with the information on the front page of The New York Times, causing considerable fallout within the NATO alliance.”

Now, all this background about William Arkin was sadly lacking in the mainstream media’s coverage of this individual and his revolting, anti-military blog comments, but why should he be exposed for what he really is? It would go against the grain of the MSM whose own record of being anti-military, anti-defense, anti-classified information, and anti-internal security, is decades long and miles deep.

Folks, in other words, you aren’t going to get the “truth” from the mainstream media. They don’t want to know it, they don’t want to report it, and they wouldn’t know how to report it objectively and honesty if they tried to. In the scheme of things, they are just plain anti-American, often marxists or socialists, stupid, dupes, lazy and incompetent.

These are just some of the nice things I say about The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Newsweek, Time, all the Chicago papers, and most of the big papers in the major cities of America. Just for fun and the truth, let’s throw in CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC ( or as Mark Levin likes to call it, MSLSD, with Keith Overbite and Chris “The Mouth That Roared” Matthews).

I’m going to be 62 in a few weeks, and I thought that once the Cold War was over, I might see some peace in my lifetime (born in 1945 during World War II, remember the Korean War, Hungary, was in Vietnam, had friends fight in the Israeli wars of independence through the 1980s (one was killed in action), had friends in Gulf War I, and a son in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Other friends and acquaintances were killed or tortured by the Nazis, the Communists, or Islamofascists.

Yet, again, I see the American Left betraying our country, aided and abetted by a no-caring, no-seeing, know-nothing mainstream media. Bill Arkin is just the latest in a long line of anti-American journalists who have infested the profession while being given a mantle of respectability. These names range from Walter Duranty to I.F. Stone, and now to Arkin.

Communist traitors and sympathizers, and a few dupes such as Herbert Matthews, have long worked for both the print and visual media, either as full-time staffers, columnists, or stringers, including for CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, L.A. Times, now Reuters, AP (Vietnam war), Baltimore Afro-American, the old Washington Star, religious newspapers, et cetera, going as far back as Walter Duranty, Lionel Martin, Charles A. Allen Jr., Abdullah Schlieffer, Alden Whitman, Calvin Zon, George B. Murphy Jr., Marc Cooper and Robert Scheer, among many others.

No matter what happens to Arkin vis-a-vis The Washington Post on-ine blog/column, or as a consultant to NBC, he will always find a safe home at Harvard (just as so many other marxists, communists, and socialists have), or he will be hired by another far-left, tax-exempt foundation funded by other far-left tax exempt foundations, Hollywood leftists, and anti-American millionaires such as Stewart Mott, Norman Lear and George Soros.

However, the venom of hate that Arkin has spewed forth against our military may actually serve as another wake-up call to the average, loyal, and decent American as to how far the rot of marxism and hatred of America has entrenched itself in the mainstream media. Perhaps now we can start to excise this cancer of “hate” from our midst and start cleaning up the media who need it so badly.

Nice work on this article. On Pearson and Anderson, a tidbit I included in my old Kerry series:

John Kerry’s Red Roots: Richard Kerry’s Left-Wing Legacy

A 1945 FBI wiretap investigation of leaks from the Soviet ambassador to journalist Drew Pearson revealed that Frankfurter was colluding with Pearson. Follow-up wiretaps on Pearson and Brandeis-Frankfurter apparatus member Thomas Corcoran revealed that Corcoran and Rauh-Prichard-Graham Goon Squad member Laughlin Currie had conspired to protect State Department official John Stewart Service from being prosecuted in connection with the leaking of classified government documents to the pro-Communist publication Amerasia.¹¹

Theoharis and Cox, 258-269, esp. 266; John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996, 52-55; Romerstein and Breindel, 168

Anderson also had a close relationship with Johnny Rosselli and some other mob guys. What I've read leads me to believe they would leak him political dirt that he would use in his investigative reporting.

His source on JFK was Rosselli. Rosselli was trying to pressure US authorities to drop legal action against him, so he threatened to leak info on the CIA's Cuban operations if the government didn't back off. The prosecution wouldn't back down, so Rosselli started leaking to Anderson about the assassination attempts against Castro. This is discussed in Rappleye and Becker's biography of Rosselli. This indirectly ended up putting Anderson in the middle of Watergate: he started investigating Howard Hughes' employee Robert Maheu's role in the assassination operations, which led him to discover a new assassination attempt against Castro and Allende that E. Howard Hunt was helping CIA set up near the time of Watergate, using Hughes assets in Mexico. Anderson did an expose on ITT's operations in Mexico that threatened to compromise this operation, and consquently the Plumbers were considering going after him as well as Ellsberg. However Anderson also happened to be friends with Frank Sturgis, a member of the Watergate break-in team. Anderson knew about the Watergate break-ins while they were still being planned and shared this info with friends in the intelligence community before the burglars were arrested (see below). I suspect this Watergate/Hughes-related stuff is one reason his papers are of interest, though I believe some of his later reporting is also involved in that.

Woodwardgate: Deep Throat or Shallow Reporting?:

. . .in February 1972 Hughes’ security man Bill Gay called Bennett to arrange for Mullen to suppress a story by journalist Jack Anderson. Anderson was a protege of muckraker Drew Pearson, who along with Anderson had helped put together a hit piece during the 1960 campaign on a Hughes bribe to Nixon’s brother Donald. More recently Pearson and Anderson had been investigating the CIA-Mafia assassination operation against Castro, a topic involving Hughes’ disgruntled former employee Maheu. Following an alleged new assassination plot against Castro in Chile in October 1971, Anderson reported in February 1972 that the CIA/Hughes-linked company International Telephone and Telegraph had paid $400,000 towards the 1972 Republican National Convention in return for favors from John Mitchell’s Justice Department in an antitrust suit. To discourage further reporting on this subject, Gay’s request was relayed by Bennett to CRP deputy director Jeb Magruder, who sent Hunt on March 15 to intimidate the source of Anderson’s story into repudiating Anderson’s report. Hunt and Liddy also considered murdering Anderson. Hunt later told Bernard Barker that he had been in touch with Hughes throughout the preparations for Watergate and that Hughes would provide him with a flight out of the country and employment after the job was done, Barker said in a 1992 taped interview with author Charles Higham. McCord also claimed that he was promised a job by Hughes.

But word of Hughes’ plans got back to O’Brien and Anderson through the Democrats’ contacts with Maheu’s associates. A former employee of Maheu’s security organization, British intelligence agent A.J. Woolston-Smith, had gone on to form his own security company, which did work for Democratic publisher William Haddad. Woolston-Smith’s secretary was the daughter of a partner in a detective agency which worked with private investigator Lou Russell, who in turn worked for both McCord and Anderson. In December 1971 Woolston-Smith began informing Haddad about information he was overhearing from meetings of the November Group, a New York group of Nixon supporters linked to Liddy and McCord. On March 23, 1972, Haddad wrote to O’Brien that “sophisticated surveillance techniques” were being used against the Democrats. On March 30 O’Brien sent a memo DNC communications director John Stewart telling him to follow up on Haddad’s information, and on April 26 Stewart met in New York with Haddad, Woolston-Smith, and others. At the meeting, Woolston-Smith recalled, Haddad took the floor and told Stewart of a plan involving Liddy, McCord, and some Miami Cubans to burglarize and bug DNC headquarters and collect information to prove Castro was contributing to the Democrats. Towards the end of the meeting Woolston-Smith produced what appeared to be a bugging device and demonstrated how the bugging operation would work. After the meeting Haddad gave his entire file on the subject to Anderson, Haddad later testified to a Senate subcommittee. Anderson testified that he had not been able to generate any further information from Haddad’s tip and did not do anything with it, a story Senate investigators familiar with Anderson’s muckraking proclivity found suspicious. Anderson did write after Watergate that he subsequently discovered McCord had confided his bugging plans to old FBI friends and from there the information had spread throughout the investigative community.

Several things to comment on.
1. Prosecuting leakers is hard because of the difficulty in proving that someone deliberately leaked classified information to hurt the country rather than to "inform" us as to what the govt is doing in the name of national security.
In other words, our laws stink, are inadequate, outdated, and based on the wrong premises. We need a complete overhaul of our internal security laws to meet present and future threats and violations, esp. in the cybeworld. This AIN'T gonna happen under the Democrats, esp. when the House Judiciary Committee is run by a veteran red, and the Sen. Judiciary Committee is led by an idiot (Leahy), aided and abetted by Ted "Moscow" Kennedy and other excuses for human excrement and ignorance.

2. The govt has almost always failed to mount really quality prosecutions against leakers and have caved in to the ACLU and their communist counterparts in the NLG, NECLC, and CCR. Taking them on in every case where there is a good chance of winning is crucial to beating the crap out of the Left.

3. As a journalist of almost 40 years, I appreciate the confidentiality of sources, but when it comes to national security, screw it. Our country comes before anything else and our sources must understand it. I'm talking about the stealing and leaking of confidential information which undermines our morale, exposes our plans, strategies, troop movements, weapons developments/testing, etc. This does not apply to documentation about who is ripping off the govt thru fraudulent bids and payoffs.

Fedora: Thanks for providing the Jack Anderson infor. I suspect that his files will be a goldmine of journalist scandal and illegalities if they are obtained intact. Barnes and Pearson's ties to the far-left have not yet been documents enough. A book is clearly necessary to show that they often collaborated to protect the Communists, no matter what their motives might have been.

Ah, Tommy the Cork, Cochoran. met him a long time ago. Could charm the clothes off a woman in five minutes. The whole issue of the "Red China Lobby" is worth another book updating how it has worked since the 1940's thru the Clintonistas/Gore fundraising illegalities.

The failure of the mainstream media to explore any of these issues is indicative of their bias and selectivity. Thanks to www.frontpagemagazine.com, Ron Radosh, Dave Horowitz & Dave Collier, Steven Powell, Mitrokhin, Herb Romerstein/Eric Breindel, John Haynes and Harvey Khler, etc. we are beginning to get a better documented insight into how Communism operated around the world and here in the U.S. Getting the liberals to accept the truth is another herculean task, but we must try.

It is through good, documented scholarship, often from communist archives (USSR, E. Germany Stasi, Czech STB, Poland - just being released), etc), that the truth will findly come out (Sorry, Mulder, but this is a great line for our side to use).

Also, thanks to FreeRepublic for publishing so many useful articles, links, and readership posts, because they all add to our knowledge in our fight for survival.

When all is said and done, use good documentation and take no prisoners.

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