The report of the (US) Council of Foreign Relations in 1996 took a step backward with its implicit endorsement of expanded use of CIA cover to include journalists, clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers
Macedonia and the Western press
PressInfo # 121
May 21, 2001
By Jan Oberg, TFF director
Will future historians - - like Chalmers Johnson today in "Blowback" - - reveal to us that journalists, NGOs, clergy and Peace Corps volunteers have functioned as cover for CIA and possibly other intelligence agencies and their cloak-and-dagger covert operations, that citizens around the world are targets of psychological warfare?
If you think this is to carry it too far, this is what a former CIA analyst, Melvin Goodman, says in a recent study from the Center for International Policy in Washington:
"The report of the (US) Council of Foreign Relations in 1996 took a step backward with its implicit endorsement of expanded use of CIA cover to include journalists, clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers. This suggested misuse of the Peace Corps would destroy its integrity as a "non political" humanitarian organization, and would greatly increase the danger to its volunteers. The House Intelligence Committee, in its 1996 report, also recommended that the clandestine services apply journalistic cover to their operators abroad.
There is no justification for the use of spies posing as reporters or the employment of bona fide reporters for intelligence missions, practices that developed during the Cold War. Both practices should be banned. The press has constitutional protection because it is the chronicler of and check on the government, not its instrument. Unfortunately, recent CIA directors have insisted that the Agency have the option of using journalists in sensitive clandestine operations."
Ed. Craig Eisendrath, National Insecurity. U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2000, p36.
Given their history and purposes, there is no reason to be surprised at the presence of CIA and similar agencies in a place like the Balkans. You may have wondered why your media does not cover their role or other darker aspects such as those you find in some TFF PressInfos (and the critical, dissident press). One reason may be that there is a politico-military-media-intelligence complex that does not see it fit to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Media manipulation and psychological warfare is nothing new as we know from the writings of intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum, and John Pilger to mention a few. It does not prevent the United States and other Western nations from teaching the virtues of the free press wherever they can.
