Thursday, October 23, 2025

my dad was secretly part of the National Committee for a Free Europe (?!): NCFE, A Nazi CIA collaboration propaganda effort....

 "I occupy a curious relation to him, of a confidential nature. It must suffice to say he is interested in my professional development..."

My dad referring to DeWitt Wallace, in my dad's letter to the Dean of NYU Law School, dated June 30, 1958

From the beginning the National Committee for a Free Europe depended upon the voluntary silence of powerful media personalities in the United States to cloak its true operations in secrecy. "Representatives of some of the nation's most influential media giants were involved early on as members of the corporation [NCFE]," Mickelson notes in a relatively frank history of its activities. This board included "magazine publishers Henry Luce [of Time-Life] and DeWitt Wallace [of Reader's Digest]," he writes, "but not a word of the government involvement appeared in print or on the air."

 https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/BareFists_B_CS.html

My Dad, in 1958, wrote to the dean of the NYU Law School that someone who had funded his alma mater college, half a million dollars in the previous year, could be persuaded to fund NYU if invited to speak or attend a seminar or something. Dad said that he had a "relationship of a confidential nature" with this person who "took a keen interest in the progress of" his career.

So my dad wrote this letter to the NYU Law School specifically to increase his own school funding for his studies in Europe. My dad ended up traveling into the Soviet Union and then my dad wrote a paper on "administrative law in the Soviet Union."

Their work was, as National Committee for a Free Europe President Dewitt Poole noted in one 1950 directive, "to take up the individual Bolshevik rulers and their quislings and tear them apart, exposing their motivations, laying bare their private lives, pointing at their meannesses, pillorying their evil deeds, holding them up to ridicule and contumely."

 DeWitt Clinton Poole was an American intelligence officerHe served as U.S. Consul General in Moscow, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v05/d176

 Members of the Committee, as of June 1, 1949 were: Frank Altschul (Treasurer), Hamilton Fish Armstrong, A. A. Berle, Francis Biddle, Robert Woods Bliss, Hugh A. Drum, Allen W. Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mark Ethridge, James A. Farley, William Green, Joseph C. Grew (Chairman), Charles R. Hook, Arthur Bliss Lane, Henry R. Luce, Arthur W. Page, DeWitt C. Poole (Executive Secretary), Charles M. Spofford, Charles P. Taft, DeWitt Wallace, Mathew Woll.....

In fact, however, the "Document" was a forgery, whose origins can be traced to the wartime Nazi intelligence service. The true source of the "Document" was, according to American psychological warfare expert Paul Blackstock, "one of the Nazi secret police or related terrorist organizations such as the Sicherheitsdienst or one of the notorious SD or SS 'action groups' "

 wow!!!

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R004100040001-4.pdf

 

 

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01314R000100490006-6.pdf

 

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-00915R000700130006-4.pdf

Wow so the study of "administrative law in the Soviet Union" was known to be a front group for soviet propaganda! That is precisely what my dad wrote a paper on... that is not in any of his files....

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-00915R001300070003-7.pdf

 So my dad was also corresponding with Columbia University law professor Harry W. Jones about my dad's Ph.D. in law thesis....https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/664

That is the source of my Dad's Hayek book then... 

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R001300130012-5.pdf 

 So Allen Dulles requested a meeting with Reader's Digest in lieu of their great success abroad.... wow.

1952...

 conquest by Terror by Leland Stowe

that's the archive version - it was published by Reader's Digest after first having the CIA approve....

 

 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP74-00115R000300020033-5.pdf

wow.....

 Birth of Psychological Warfare 2023

 book

 The Kaplan Fund is what funds the Nation Magazine...

following revelations in 1964 when some of these CIA fronts were first accidentally exposed by Congressman Wright Patman during congressional hearings searching for communist infiltrations of American foundations. In these hearings Patman questioned an IRS employee about irregularities in several foundations, and his sworn public testimony was that the Kaplan Fund was being used by the CIA to fund projects and individuals of interest to the Agency. Patman learned from the CIA the names of eight nonprofits that funded the Kaplan Fund: The Gotham Foundation, Michigan Fund, Andrew Hamilton Fund, Borden Trust, The Price Fund, The Edsel Fund, The Beacon Fund, The Kentfield Fund. Though there was some brief news coverage of these disclosures, there was no real effort to trace what happened to the CIA funds passing through these CIA fronts and pass-throughs until Stern’s Ramparts exposé.

It was during Ramparts 1967 revelatory aftermath that the world first learned that the CIA covertly funded the publication of books, when a February 1967 New York Times story revealed that Praeger Press had published an unidentified number of books “at the CIA’s suggestion.” News reports soon revealed the CIA had secretly published other books with other presses.

 With most of these publications the CIA sought to strengthen the moderate left, bolstering liberal ideology as a way of keeping thinking people from pursuing socialism or communism.

 Chaneles used the example of Random House’s 1951 publication of Reader’s Digest author, Leland Stowe’s book, The Story of Satellite Europe: Conquest by Terror to show how the CIA bypassed the usual market forces governing books publications to guarantee sales and distribution of a book that likely would not have found a market to support its survival. He argued that “many thousands of copies of the book were purchased by CIA coordinated agencies for low cost and free distribution in the US and in those areas of the English-speaking world subject to the conspiracies in violation of the Sherman Act.”

.................. 

 As Sharp (2001) has shown, the American journal Reader’s Digest was an
important medium for narrating the Cold War to American audiences, but the
OWI’s use of the digest format presaged its Cold War use, including the digest
Choix (Choice) in France and Il Mese (The month) in Italy. The digests in particular
were part of a larger Anglo-American project – the International Review Digest
(Koutsopanagou 2017) – which originated with a British editorial unit working
with the OWI’s Publications Division. The digests were edited jointly by Americans,
British, and in most cases representatives of the targeted nation. In the OWI’s own
estimation, the value of these publications was in ‘impressing their readers with the
global nature of the war, stressing the harmony of the United Nations toward victory,
and acquainting the European peoples to the customs, culture and basic democratic
principles of the United States’ (OWI 1944, 16). The promotional language was a pre-
view of US public diplomacy during the Cold War, including what it omitted, namely
issues surrounding race and class conflict in the United States.

 Sharp, J. (2001). Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American identity.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

  First, and most obviously, the unitary communist threat of
world domination was delivered a significant blow with the breakdown
in Sino-Soviet relations. As tensions mounted along the Chinese-Soviet
border, the specter of communism clearly fractured and visibly weak-
ened. Second, and more subtly, the Digest faced a more insidious threat
to its binary scripting of international political praxis: the threat of
détente. The “weakening” of American opposition to communism—
backing down from the threat of “total war” to accept the possibility of
peaceful coexistence—represented a movement of great significance to
the magazine. The dis-order that communism had inflicted on interna-
tional society was not to be eliminated, but to be allowed to exist, albeit
in a contained state. The triumphalism of American Manifest Destiny
overcoming the Soviet threat to the onward march of freedom and
democracy was seen to weaken into an acknowledgment of communism,
contained within the sphere of influence of the Soviet state. Both of these
themes are central to the narrative of international politics during the
period of détente from the mid-1960s to 1979.

Birth of Psychological warfare 

 , the Crusade was launched in a national radio address by presi-
dential hopeful Dwight Eisenhower, then-president of Columbia University. The
context of Labor Day was significant, as Eisenhower again stressed that under
Communism ‘one third of the human race works in virtual bondage’ (New York
Times, 5 September 1950a). On its surface, the Crusade for Freedom’s debut there-
fore appeared as a campaign to publicise the NCFE and its effort to fund and
operate Radio Free Europe in Eastern Europe.
Within the framework of funding Radio Free Europe, however, the NCFE
advanced a geopolitical imaginary in which ordinary Americans could partici-
pate in a kind of ‘spiritual warfare’ against the Soviet Union, what the New York
Times supportively called a ‘world-wide battle for men’s minds’ (New York Times,
4 July 1950). The Times barely altered NCFE press releases in framing the Crusade
as filling ‘the need for a large-scale democratic truth offensive … in the most
important battle of all, the battle of ideas’ (New York Times, 28 July 1950).

  I started digging through my dad's NYU law school file (from 1956-1960) - as my dad got a Ford Foundation grant to study in Sweden as the 2nd half of a Ph.D. in Law. My dad wrote a letter to the Dean of NYU Law saying my dad had a "confidential occupational relationship" with DeWitt Wallace (on the board of the Committee for a Free Europe and founder of Reader's Digest)... see the above link for the precise quote... 

In 1956, the Ford Foundation awarded a grant of $375,000 to New York University (NYU) Law School for a program in international legal studies
....

A US Congressional investigation in 1976 revealed that nearly 50% of the 700 grants in the field of international activities by the principal foundations were funded by the CIA (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books, 1999, pp. 134-135).”

The CIA considers foundations such as Ford “The best and most plausible kind of funding cover” (Ibid, p. 135).... by the late 1950s the Ford Foundation possessed over $3 billion in assets. The leaders of the Foundation were in total agreement with Washington’s post-WWII projection of world power. A noted scholar of the period writes: “At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects” (Ibid, p.139). This is graphically illustrated by the naming of Richard Bissell as President of the Foundation in 1952. In his two years in office Bissell met often with the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and other CIA officials in a “mutual search” for new ideas. In 1954 Bissell left Ford to become a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954 (Ibid, p. 139). Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation was the “vanguard of Cold War thinking”...

In 1954 the new president of the Ford Foundation was John McCloy. He epitomized imperial power. Prior to becoming president of the Ford Foundation he had been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank, High Commissioner of occupied Germany, chairman of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, Wall Street attorney for the big seven oil companies and director of numerous corporations. As High Commissioner in Germany, McCloy had provided cover for scores of CIA agents (Ibid, p. 141).

McCloy integrated the Ford Foundation with CIA operations. He created an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. McCloy headed a three person consultation committee with the CIA to facilitate the use of the Ford Foundation for a cover and conduit of funds.

https://bharatabharati.in/2015/04/26/ford-foundation-and-its-cia-connections-d-p-satish/ 

and DeWitt Wallace (founder/owner of Reader's Digest) was "interested in" my dad's career. My dad had graduated from Macalester College as a leader in the Republican cause and DeWitt Wallace was a big Macalester College funder...
So I know from Prof. Christopher Simpson that any international Ford Foundation grant was screened through the CIA Russia Institute at Columbia University. My dad corresponded with a Columbia University law professor who was promoting Hayek (freedom from serfdom, etc.) to be my dad's Ph.D. advisor. My dad did the course work but he never wrote his thesis since his mother-in-law came over to Sweden and then got her daughter to divorce my dad back in the U.S. (that was his first wife).
So then my dad traveled into the Soviet Union to study "administrative law" and then I found a CIA document listing the Soviet Union sponsoring "administrative law" conferences in English as Communist front groups... Also my dad corresponded heavily with NYU law professor Edmond Cahn who was listed by the McCarthy UnAmerican committee as a "member" or "sponsor" of the USA Communist Party....

My dad, as a lawyer in the MN Bar, also administered trusts back in Minnesota where DeWitt Wallace had recently given $500,000 to Macalester College (in 1957 dollars). So my dad was recommending the Dean of NYU invite DeWitt Wallace to entice Wallace to fund NYU Law so that my dad could supplement his Ford Foundation grant monies. My dad did end up taking a summer course at UC-London and also he studied in Paris privately - on law....
My dad was an alumni of Macalester but also was the chairman of their alumni association - working closely with their "director of development." So then around 1967 the Macalester College "director of development" (who obviously was close to DeWitt Wallace since he continued to fund Macalester College) had my dad host a "discussion on the Vietnam War" at my house. I was not born yet but my mom told me the event was held at our house to ensure the students would not get riled up and take action - like occupy a building, etc.  That same "director of development" at Macalester also did "interior design" work on our house - doing our kitchen, breakfast room, basement, etc. So I'm pretty sure there was some Quid Pro Quo going on... via DeWitt Wallace. 

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