THE C.I.A.'S MASTER PLAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000505100042-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 42
• Publication Date: August 24, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

j STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/23 :CIA-RDP90-005528000505100042-6
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ARTICLE AP R
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17/24 August 1985
BEST TI3E DEVIL.
The C.LA.'s Masher Plan
June was a bad month for Reaganite disinformation
because-.the Colombians made thew embarrassing claims
while the trial of Mehmet Ali Agra and the accompanying
commotion in Italy were raising unwelcome suspicions
about Agca's coaching by agents from Italian military in-
telligence, themselves associated with Michael Ledeen and
kindred- artificers of the Reaganite view of terrorism. That
view is best expressed in Claire Sterling's book The Terror
Network and Arnaud de Borcbgrave and Robert Moss's
novel, .The Spikt.
It would not be unfair to say that these two volumes
'prompted the vision of the Soviet Union espoused by
Reagan .and his first Secreau' of State, Alexander Haig.
The central proposition was that the Soviet Union, through
the Fifth Directorate of the K.G.B., was coordinating all
terror and subversion against the Free World and, through
agents-in-plea in the media of the advancxd capitalist coun-
tries, was successfully waging a disinformation war, whose
? chief victims were the newspaper?reading and television-
watching citizens of the United States.
The origin of this fantasy is instructive, because it neatly
illustrates the essence of successful disinformation (and of
Nall successful rumor), which is that it is self-perpetuating and
.closed-endal, immune to all rules of evidence and refutation.
Among those who fled Czechoslovakia during the Prague
Spring of 1968 was shard-line officer named Maj. Gen. Jan
Sejna. Sejna went west in March 1968 and was soon in
America earning a living by being debriefed by the C.I.A.
After a few years of disclosures from Sejna, agency case of-
ficers began to surmise that he was telling more than he
knew. Their suspicions were aroused when Sejna claimed
that the K.G.B. had sleeper saboteurs all over Europe and
were capable of detonating infernal devices in the London
underground at any moment. The C.I.A. men then pre-
pared atest. They showed Sejna a document outlining -the
Fifth Directorate's master plan for world domination and
disinformation (which I will hereafter refer to as
M.P.W.D.D.) and asked Sejna to verify its authenticity.
Sejna said, Yes, indeed, it's all true, how funny that it
slipped my mind, etc. The C.I.A. men didn't say anything,
butsince they had concocted the document, they soon eased
Sejna off the payroll.
This was by no means the end of the
master plan; indeed, its active service
was only just beginning. Sejna went to
Europe and started to talk to intelli-
gence services and other interested parties
about the plan the C.I.A. men had
shown him, saying that the agency had
evidence that the K.G.B. was linked to
the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the
Japanese Red Army and so forth. The French and Italian in-
telligence agencies further disseminated the C.I.A. fantasy,.
and in the course of its peregrinations it reached Claire Ster-
ling. Blended in with disinformation from the Mossad and
other agencies it seems to have reached Arnaud de Borch-
grave too.
In the climactic chapter of his career at Newsweek in
1978, de Borchgrave rushed back to New York from Europe
on the Concorde and brandished under the nose of the
magazine's editor, Ed Kosher, his great scoop about the
K.G.B.'s M.P.W.D.D. Kosher brooded over the story for a
while and then asked de Borchgrave to refund the price
of the Concorde ticket. De Borchgrave departed from
Newsweek not long thereafter, following negotiations
which, it was hoped, would deter him from claiming that by
its act of suppression Newsweek had revealed itself as an ac-
tive component in the M.P.W.D.D. Last January, respond-
ing in The Washington Times to a critical review of a novel
by his friend Robert Moss (by John Podhoretz of all
people), de Borchgrave wrote:
As Newswaek's chief foreign correspondent I had a number
of major exclusive stories about Soviet activities that were
spiked by ideologically-motivated editors. The most impor-
tant of these was a secret French intelligence report dated
May 11, 1978, documenting in great detail links between the
K.G.B. and its proxy servicxs, on the one hand, and interna-
tional terrorist groups on the other.
When Alexander Haig became Secretary of State he re-
marked to his subordinates that the reports of K.G.B.. ac-
tivities he was reading from the C.I.A. -anti State. Depart-
ment intelligence were markedly inferior to the revelations
. of Sterling. With a certain amount of hemming and hawing,
the intelligence officials told .Haig that it seemed likely that
The Terror Network may have owed something to a docu-
ment concocted by the C.LA. to test the veracity of General
Sejna.
While de Borchgrave and Moss were busily turning an
M,p,W.D.D. to profitable account in The Spike, and Ster-
ling was promulgating her Network, Ledeen, another high
roller of the Reagan years, was commissioned by SISMI,
Italian military intelligence, to do some papers on interna-
tional terrorism [see "Beat the Devil," July 6/13J.
In the July 10-23 issue of In These Times, that
newspaper's European correspondent, Diana Johnstone,
using testimony given to the commission investigating the
Italian P-2 scandal, described how SISMI's head, Gen.
Guiseppe Santovito, had bought two Ledeen papers on "in-
ternational terrorism" and passed them along to the Italian
government as the fruits of SISMI's own investigations.
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Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/23 :CIA-RDP90-005528000505100042-6