SABOTAGING THE DISSIDENT PRESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000200970004-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 16, 2010
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: March 1, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/16: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200970004-6
0l PAGs .~
The untold story of
the secret offensive
waged by the U.S.
government against
antiwar publications
by ANGUS MACKENZIE
he American public has learned
in the last few years a great
deal about the government's
surveillance of the left during
the Vietnam War era. The re-
port of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence (the Church
committee) first suggested how widely
the government had been involved in
planting informants inside New Left
groups, propagating false information
about these groups, and using a variety
of tactics to disrupt their activities. That
such tactics were also used on a vast
scale against dissenting magazines and
the underground press, however, has not
been reported in a comprehensive way.
-The story has lain scattered in a hundred
places. " Now, documents obtained by
editors and writers under the Freedom of
Information Act, and interviews with
former intelligence agents, make it pos-
sible, for the first time, to put together a
coherent - though not necessarily
complete - account of the federal gov-
ernment's systematic and sustained
violation of the First Amendment during
the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The government's offensive against
the underground press primarily in-
volved three agencies - the CIA, the
FBI, and the Army. In many cases, their
? Angus Mackenzie is a free-lance writer in
northern California. Editorial assistance
was provided by Jay Peter--ell of the Center
for Notional Security Studies in Washin>;ton,
which also provided research assistance.
The article was financed in part by the Fund
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
March/April 1981
activities stemmed from what they could
claim were legitimate concerns. The
CIA's Operation CHAOS, for example,
was set up to look into the foreign con-
nections of domestic dissidents; how-
ever, it soon exceeded its mandate and
became part of the broad attack on the
left and on publications that were re-
garded as creating a climate disruptive
of the war effort. At its height, the gov-
ernment's offensive may have affected
more than 150 of the roughly 500 un-
derground publications that became the
nerve centers of the antiwar and coun-
tercultural movements.
A telling example of this offensive
was the harassment of Liberation News
Service, which, when opposition to the
Vietnam War was building, played a
key role in keeping the disparate parts of
the antiwar movement informed. By
1968, the FBI had assigned three infor-
mants to penetrate the news service,
while nine other informants regularly
reported on it from the outside. Their
reports were forwarded to the U.S. Ar-
my's Counterintelligence Branch, where
an analyst kept tabs on LNS founders
Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom, and to
the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue
Service, the Navy, the Air Force, and
the CIA. The FBI also attempted to dis-
credit and break up the news service
through various counterintelligence ac-
tivities, such as trying to make LNS ap-."
pear to be an FBI front, to create friction
among staff members, and to burn down
the LNS office in Washington while the
staff slept upstairs. Before long, the
CIA, too, joined the offensive; one of its
recruits began filing reports on the
movements of LNS staff members while
reporting for the underground press to
establish his cover as an underground
journalist. .
The CIA was apparently the first fed-
eral agency to plan actions against
rectorate of Plans (its "dirty tricks" de-
assigned to counterintelli-
partment)
gence agent Richard Ober the task of
"pulling together information on Ru,n-
parts, including any evidence of sub-
version [and] devising proposals for
counteraction." While those proposals
remain secret, several details relating to
the Ramparts operation have become
known.
n February 1, an associate of
Ober's met -with Thomas
Terry, assistant to the com-
missioner of the Internal Reve-
nue Service, to request that the
IRS review Ramparts' corpo-
rate tax returns to determine who the
magazine's backers were. Terry agreed
to do so. Subsequently, Ober's office
provided the IRS with "detailed infor-
mant information" about Ramparts
backers, whom the IRS was requested to
investigate for possible tax violations.
Ober's investigation of the magazine
uncovered no "evidence of subversion"
or ties to foreign intelligence agencies.
By August, however, it had produced a
computerized listing of several hundred
Americans, about fifty of whom were
the subject of detailed files.
domestic publications. Its Operation In August, too, Ober's mandate was
CHAOS grew out of an investigation of expanded as the CIA. responding to
Ramnarts marine which during the pressure from President Johnson. ini-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/16: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200970004-6