Expose The Enemy

Mellon Scaife Portal

SCAIFE FAMILY FOUNDATIONS

BACKGROUND

The Scaife family foundations are made up of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Scaife Family Foundation. Originally, the foundations were managed by Sarah Mellon Scaife. Effective January 1, 2015, The Carthage Foundation merged with and into the Sarah Scaife Foundation Incorporated and no longer provides donations.

The foundations are financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune. In 1869, the Mellon family created T. Mellon & Sons Bank. Later, the bank would be renamed Mellon Bank and become the largest bank in the state of Pennsylvania. The fortune of the Mellon family was also increased through significant investments in the Gulf Oil Corporation and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA).

In 1957, when Fortune created its first list of the wealthiest Americans it estimated that Sarah Mellon Scaife, her brother, and two of her cousins, were all amongst the eight richest people in the United States—each with a fortune valued between $400-$700 million.

Richard Mellon Scaife, the son of Sarah Mellon Scaife, runs the Scaife Foundations. According to Forbes magazine, in 2008 Richard Mellon Scaife was worth $1.3 billion. Richard took charge of the Foundations in 1973. Currently, Richard runs the Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage, and Allegheny Foundations. His daughter and son control the Scaife Family Foundation. [1]

The National Journal has stated that the growth of the conservative movement was possible because a “handful of deep-pocketed, committed, and unusually patient wealthy benefactors such as Richard Scaife were willing to underwrite the broad ideological movement.” [2]

ThinkProgress reported on how Richard Scaife was also a major funder of the “Islamophobia Network,” and by “serving as the vice chairman of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank (Heritage president Edwin Feulner serves as a trustee for the Sarah Scaife Foundation), Scaife has positioned himself as a central figure in conservative politics. [3]

The Scaife Family Foundation started to provide major funding to conservative organizations when Richard Scaife took control in 1973. According to Media Transparency, the Sarah Scaife Foundation is considered to be one of the top four conservative foundations. [4]

The Washington Post estimates that Scaife gave about $200 million to conservative causes and organizations from 1974 to 1992. [5]

One of Scaife's beneficiaries is the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, which received $18,237,000 in funding from 1986 to 2012 according to data from the Conservative Transparency project. [6] The Free Congress Research and Education Foundation's mission is to apply “conservative solutions to the challenges facing all Americans regardless of race, age or gender.”

According to SourceWatch, their original mission statement read that the “Free Congress Foundation is politically conservative, but it is more than that: it is also culturally conservative. Most think tanks talk about tax rates or the environment or welfare policy and occasionally we do also. But our main focus is on the Culture War. Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture? Or will we continue the long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness? If we do, America, once the greatest nation on earth, will become no less than a third world country.” [7]

Stance on Climate Change

Scaife Foundations finance several organizations that actively dispute the scientific evidence produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These organizations include the Heartland Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

Heartland Institute Conferences on Climate Change

Sponsors behind the Heartland Institute's International Conferences on Climate Change have themselves received significant funding from Scaife Foundations over the years. Examples below:

Second International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC2): DeSmogBlog found that collectively Scaife foundations gave $36,868,640 in funding to the sponsors of the Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change.

Fourth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC4): Sponsors had collectively received $16,352,000 between 1985 and 2008 from Scaife foundations.

Sixth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC6): $28,557,000

Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC7): $45,337,640

Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation (EIN 25-1113452)

According to the Scaife Foundations website, the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s grant program is primarily directed toward public policy programs that address major domestic and international issues. There are no geographical restrictions. The Foundation does not make grants to individuals for any purpose or to nationally-organized fundraising groups

RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE

Richard Mellon Scaife is hardly a household name, but in the past 50 years (died 2014), he was one the most powerful behind-the-scenes operators in the United States. His power came purely from his wealth, and specifically, from the way that he has deployed that wealth at the instruction of the banking families that he represents.

Richard Mellon Scaife came to public prominence, as a result of the disclosure that he bankrolled of a cushy "retirement" position for Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr at Pepperdine University. That raised eyebrows, to put it mildly, because Scaife was the principal funder of a news media propaganda campaign aimed at defaming and discrediting Starr's main target, then-President William Clinton. Scaife has also bankrolled a nationwide crusade charging that White House aide Vincent Foster did not commit suicide, but was murdered; something which was also the subject of official investigation by the recipient of Scaife's largesse, Kenneth Starr. Nevertheless, the investigation headed by Starr came to the same conclusions as the original investigation - Foster committed suicide.

That wasn't the end of Starr's activities involving Clinton - he played a major role in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal / Paula Jones lawsuit. In his deposition for the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky. On the basis of the evidence provided by Monica Lewinsky, a blue dress with Clinton's semen, Ken Starr concluded that this sworn testimony was false and perjurous. This led to the impeachment of Clinton.

Scaife has coordinated and financed similar campaign of media defamation using his own newspapers to smear his adversaries.

What Scaife did to President Clinton is what he was trained and deployed to do. Scaife is not simply a "multimillionaire supporter of conservative groups," as he is portrayed in the news media; nor is he simply an eccentric rich man who has an obsession against President Clinton.

To understand what is being done to President Clinton today, and to understand what lies behind the campaigns of defamation run by the news media against figures such as Clinton or Obama, it is necessary to know who and what, someone like Richard Mellon Scaife actually is.

OSS

Scaife is what one might call a second-generation "OSS brat". During World War II, Richard's father, as well as a number of his father's close business and familial associates, occupied high positions in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--America's wartime intelligence service. Alan Scaife, his father, was a lieutenant colonel in the OSS. A number of cousins of Richard's mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, also had very high positions in the OSS.

For example: Paul Mellon was recruited in London to the OSS by his brother-in-law, David Bruce. Paul trained with British troops, became a major in the OSS, worked under Allen Dulles in Berne, Switzerland, and commanded a unit responsible for conducting propaganda operations behind disintegrating German lines.

David Bruce, husband of Paul Mellon's sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, was designated by OSS head William Donovan to oversee all OSS operations in Europe from his base in London. (Although some say, with justification, that it was Bruce who was designated by the U.S. banking-establishment families to oversee Donovan.) Another OSS cousin was Larimer Mellon, who likewise worked on Allen Dulles's staff in Berne.

David Bruce (a direct descendant of the Scottish Bruce dynasty) later divorced Ailsa and married his second wife, Evangeline, an OSS secretary whose father had been a special liaison to British intelligence from the U.S. State Department.

It is reliably reported that these OSS circles around Scaife's father were the crucial influence on steering Scaife into intelligence-related ``philanthropy''--i.e., the private funding of joint British-U.S. intelligence projects which were commonly mis-identified as "CIA" projects or fronts.

It is more accurate to describe the CIA as a "front" for banking families. But even that would be too simple. The CIA is an agency of government, and is thus subject to the institutional and bureaucratic pressures to which any agency of government must respond. The "families" attempt to control the CIA, as they do with the State Department and other agencies. The principal means of control is through the private financing of think tanks, conferences, publications, etc., which attempt to train the personnel, and set the agenda, for the institutions of government. This is precisely what Scaife and his family money did when the Reagan-Bush administration came into office in 1981.

The "Focal Point" and First Boston

Another element of this bankers-intelligence apparatus is what is called the Focal Point system. The public may misconceive of this apparatus as "CIA" - but the CIA is simply a secondary component of this operation, which encompasses the old families, military intelligence capabilities, and private intelligence operations. One intelligence source, familiar with this system, said recently that "CIA" is simply a "cover story" for activities that the banking families and other institutions and agencies carry out in the name of the CIA.

The Focal Point system, within the official government apparatus, was originally created in the mid-1950s by then-CIA Director Allen Dulles. It functioned as a capability extending into other agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, for conducting covert operations and paramilitary ``special operations.'' A particular emphasis was counterinsurgency and ``civil affairs''; an included feature of this was psychological warfare and propaganda.

Within the military, the Focal Point system was centered in the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and remnants of this system still exist to this day, in the Support Activities Branch of the J-3 Special Operations Division.

There was also a substantial "private" component to the Focal Point system, the precursor of the privatized intelligence operations authorized under the Reagan-Bush Executive Order 12333. But this privatized intelligence system was already active in the 1950s, according to knowledgeable sources, with the First Boston Corp., the First National Bank of Boston (now BankBoston), and other banking houses playing a leading financial role.

Of particular interest here, among the many families which played key roles in this Anglo-American bankers' intelligence network (such as the Astors, Rockefellers, and the du Ponts), are three families: the Roosevelts, the Mellons, and the Welds.

Mellon Securities had merged into First Boston in 1946, and as of about 1980, the Scaife family held about 6% of First Boston, and the combined Mellon and Scaife families about 13%. First Boston's principal law firm was Sullivan and Cromwell, out of which Allen Dulles ran U.S. intelligence after the termination of the OSS and until the creation of the CIA. This was also Paul Mellon's law firm; his and much of the Mellon family's financial affairs were run by Stoddard Stevens of Sullivan and Cromwell, who has been described as Paul's "father figure."

Scaife was brought into this system by his OSS relatives no later than 1973, and in 1979 he was placed on the board of directors of First Boston, where he remained until 1987. At that time, 40% of First Boston was owned by Crédit Suisse-White Weld (of the dope-running family of former Justice Department official William Weld). In 1988, First Boston became CS First Boston, and the size of the board was apparently considerably reduced.

Already in 1929, a White Weld banker, John A. Gade, had proposed the creation of an American central intelligence agency, to be modeled explicitly on British intelligence. The current, most public, standard-bearer of the Weld family, is William Weld, the U.S. Attorney in Boston and former head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. William Weld is married to a Roosevelt, Susan, the daughter of another OSS veteran, Quentin Roosevelt.

The Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family have been deeply enmeshed in this OSS-Wall Street intelligence apparatus, and they were especially close to Cord Meyer, a key operative of this network who shows up again and again as a top operative responsible for handling "CIA" front organizations. It was Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, who had proposed the creation of a "propaganda and intelligence agency" to Wall Street lawyer William Donovan during World War II. Kermit subsequently worked with British intelligence to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, an action which worked to the financial benefit of not only British Petroleum, but also of Gulf Oil, a Mellon family enterprise which was closely tied to First Boston after the 1946 Mellon Securities merger. In 1958, Kermit "retired" to take the strategic position of vice president for government relations with Gulf Oil.

Scaife gets his assignment

When he was 40 years old, Scaife was formally inducted into the top levels of the this intelligence apparatus. In 1973, he took control of the Scaife family foundations, which he had previously run jointly with his sister Cordelia. He dramatically changed the focus of foundation grants, to emphasize "right-wing" think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, or the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. This was not something totally new; funding from the Scaife family foundations for some of these institutions, such as the National Strategy Information Center, goes back into the early 1960s.

Of singular importance is the position Scaife was given in early 1973, when he was allowed to take over ownership of Forum World Features, a joint British intelligence-CIA news media operation based in London. This is probably the most important career advancement for Scaife, for it defines the track he has pursued since: the use and the manipulation of the news media to promote favored causes, and to attack and defame adversaries. There is a direct path from Forum World Features, to the Bush ``secret government's'' Public Diplomacy operation created in 1983, which in turn spawned the anti-Clinton propaganda machine which Scaife directs and finances today.

The background of Forum World Features (FWF) is instructive. Although accounts of its creation vary, it appears that it was a division of Kern House Enterprises, created by Kermit Roosevelt in the 1960s; one account says that Kermit "was entrusted with creating the CIA's publishing empire." Kern House was set up by Roosevelt with Mellon money; in turn, it set up a London subsidiary, Kern House Enterprises, Ltd. Kern House begat Forum World Features, financed with funds from the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), based in New York. FWF's major purpose was to supply feature material to newspapers around the world, including at least 30 in the United States. It also commissioned a number of books.

One of the premier private intelligence think tanks, NSIC was formed in 1962, primarily with Mellon family money; on the board was Prescott Bush (of the Harriman-linked Bush family, and George's brother), John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia (one of the authors of Bush's EO 12333), and various representatives of the corporate and intelligence world, as well as personnel associated directly with Scaife.

From 1966 to 1973, FWF was headed by John Hay Whitney, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1973, Scaife purchased Kern/FWF, and headed it until its demise in 1975-76, following its exposure as a "CIA" front. At the time of its dissolution in 1976, its three directors were Scaife, Scaife's top operative Daniel McMichael (former president of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council), and Lewis Preston, the chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust (and later head of the World Bank).

In 1975, a British weekly, Time Out, and the Washington Post, published a 1968 memorandum from the CIA station chief in London to then-director Richard Helms, describing FWF as an agency-sponsored operation providing "a significant means to counter Communist propaganda." The memorandum portrayed FWF as a CIA proprietary, which was "run with the knowledge and cooperation of British intelligence." The overseer of FWF in the United States was Cord Meyer.

(Cord Meyer, incidentally, not only promoted the publication of material favorable to the Anglo-American banking-intelligence establishment, but attempted to block publication of disfavored material. Author and former CIA officer Victor Marchetti reports that in 1972, Meyer, whom he describes as the number-two man in the CIA Clandestine Services, visited the New York offices of Harper and Row to attempt to stop the publication of Alfred McCoy's first edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. As a result, the publisher insisted that McCoy submit the manuscript to the CIA before it would be published.)

Although FWF was dissolved, its operations were not. Its day-to-day operations in London were managed by Brian Crozier, a British writer long associated with both U.K. and U.S. intelligence. In 1970, Crozier had also become the head of another FWF-created organization in London, which was renamed the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Between 1973 and 1979 alone, Scaife's private trusts gave over a million dollars to Crozier's ISC.

In a 1980 proposal, Scaife's aide Daniel McMichael described ISC as doing "a first-rate job in conducting research on 'low-level conflict,' i.e., political and psychological warfare, revolutionary activities, insurgency operations and terrorism." McDaniel boasted that ISC work "is consistently used by the Thatcher government," and that the ISC had "solid working relationships with the Heritage Foundation, the National Strategy Information Center, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis [associated with Tufts University and its Fletcher School] and a number of other Scaife-supported organizations." On ISC's board of directors at that time were a number of top, easily identified British intelligence and counterinsurgency officials.

After FWF was dumped, its book publishing operations were taken over by Rossiter Publications, later renamed Craven House. Crozier was also its managing director. Among authors published by Crozier's shop was Robert Moss, a British intelligence operative who floats between the ISC, the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.

Heritage Foundation

Scaife Foundations are one of the biggest financiers of British-linked think tanks in the United States promoting ``conservative'' social and economic policies -prototypical of which is the Heritage Foundation. Although beer magnate Joseph Coors is more publicly identified with Heritage, the fact is, that Scaife Foundations have provided more funding for Heritage than Coors. From 1974 up through the end of the 1970s, Scaife provided about $200,000 a year to Heritage; after a shakeup in the late 1970s -which transformed it into what one Heritage staff member termed "an outpost for British intelligence in the United States''- Scaife's support jumped to the range of $1 million a year.

(In November 1994, just after the commencement of the short-lived "Gingrich revolution" of the 1994 elections, Newt opened a speech at the Heritage Foundation President's Club by praising two people ``who have really created modern conservativism -Dick Scaife and Ed Feulner.'' Gingrich went on: ``Dick Scaife is a remarkable citizen who has spent many years as a key force in sustaining conservative ideas and who has played a major, major role on the Heritage Foundation's board, and he's been a good friend and a good ally for a very long time, and I remember working with him starting in the late '70s.'')

In fact, Scaife's role at Heritage increased after the 1976-77 shakeup, when he personally brought in Edwin Feulner to head it up. Feulner (a board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation) placed many Brits into key policy positions at Heritage, among whom was Stuart Butler, a member of Brookings Institute. Interestingly, Butler has played a prominent role in the debate over health care reform, arguing for market-based solutions to high numbers of uninsured individuals and high health care costs. The health insurance mandate in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is an idea hatched in 1989 by Butler at the Heritage Foundation.

Feulner himself is linked to the British establishment, he was installed by Scaife as the head of the Mont Perelin Society, a Friedrich von Hayek created think tank financed by Scaife's generous donations. One of the key parts linking these think tanks is the Atlas Network founded by Sir Antony Fisher, a British devotee of von Hayek. Fisher was inspired by von Hayek to pursue the think tank route after he sought him out at the London School of Economics. The London School of Economics became the home of von Hayek where he moved his "Austrian School" of economics in the 1930s.

The so-called "Reagan Revolution"

On virtually every level the "Reagan Revolution" was run by operatives associated and financed by Mellon Scaife, along with four other foundations which make up the ``Philanthropic Roundtable.'' The Roundtable includes the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (these four are known as the "Four Sisters" because they finance almost all of their projects in common), plus the J.M. Foundation.

Even more important, was the reorganization of intelligence operations in the Reagan administration, and the creation of what became known as the "secret government" run under the personal direction of Vice President George Bush in the 1980s. This "secret and parallel government" was simply the Scaife Mellon network of think tanks and and academic retainers, brought into the government, and made "official".

"Secret Government"

In reality there were two governments in the Reagan-Bush administration--the official, public government, and the "secret government" run by Vice President George Bush. The official government, particularly the National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence community, were riddled with Scaife's grantees and beneficiaries. But behind the official government lay what became known as the "secret government" - and Scaife's network of think tanks and foundations provided the intellectual rationalization which justified its creation, including the infamous Executive Order 12333. As far as is known, most of Scaife's hirelings didn't dirty their hands with actual drug-running or assassinations, but they did provide key funding and staff for the entire so-called "Project Democracy" apparatus, and also for the semi-official "public diplomacy" propaganda machine which ran cover for Bush's Contra drug-runners and Afghan terrorists.

Then and now, Scaife does not limit his largesse to strategic and foreign policy matters, but he is also a primary funder of a burgeoning network of think tanks and propaganda mills promoting the feudal economic policies coming out of the Mont Pelerin Society. Under the guise of "Thatcherism", these groups provided the social and economic policies, and much of the staffing, for the so-called "Reagan Revolution", and then the Gingrich-Gramm gang in the wake of the Republican Party takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. One could say that the earnest money for the "Contract with America" was paid by Scaife.

Here, we will look more closely at the intelligence and foreign policy think tanks which virtually took over the Reagan administration in 1981, and which provided the underpinning for George H.W. Bush's "secret government'' built up in 1981-86.

Origins of the secret government

As the Iran-Contra scandals played out in televised Congressional hearings in 1987, many Americans began to get a glimpse of what some Congressmen called the "parallel" government, and others simply called the "secret government." What most Americans didn't know, is the intellectual foundations were developed by Richard Mellon Scaife's hirelings.

Two Scaife-funded operations played central roles in preparing the way for the creation of this "secret government" machinery. The first was a series of national security seminars held during 1973-79 by the International Security Studies Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University--organized by Prof. Uri Ra'anan. The second was a series of seven conferences held during 1979-84 by the "Consortium for the Study of Intelligence", organized by Roy Godson.

Both Godson and Ra'anan were subsequently deeply involved in what became known as the "Iran-Contra" scandals.

Ra'anan and the Fletcher School

The Fletcher School is the oldest graduate school of diplomacy in the United States. Its students are tracked into careers in the foreign service, the CIA, and the military. From its founding, the International Security Studies Program within the Fletcher School was financed almost exclusively through grants from the Scaife family foundations and trusts. On its Advisory Council in the 1980s were R. Daniel McMichael and Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, both trustees of Scaife family foundations.

After the arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in November 1985, Ra'anan, the chairman of Fletcher's International Security Studies Program, was quoted praising his former student Pollard in the New York Times as "bright and articulate". Upon Pollard's graduation from the Fletcher School in 1978, he had gone to work for U.S. Naval Intelligence. One of his classmates, Mira Lansky Boland, went to work for the CIA for two years, and then for the Pentagon; in 1984, Boland transferred to the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Pollard was no accident, nor was Boland. Ra'anan (born Heinz Felix Frischwasser in Central Europe in 1926) spent the war years in London, and then emigrated to Israel. He came to the United States in the early 1960s, and, working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, set up an Israeli spy-recruiting unit. In 1967, he joined the faculty at the Fletcher School.

In 1973, the International Security Studies Program initiated a series of annual conferences, funded by Scaife, on a wide range of strategic topics. Dozens of senior figures in the U.S. military-intelligence community were brought in to participate. The last seminar, in April 1979, was on ``Intelligence Policy and National Security.'' Ra'anan himself was named to an advisory committee in 1980 to help shape Reagan's foreign policy and defense platform.

Godson and the Consortium

Roy Godson, a wholly-owned asset of Scaife, Inc., is the son of a longtime Lovestonite State Department official, Joe Godson, who served principally in London and Belgrade, Yugoslavia after the war, and who founded the London branch of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Roy Godson, after getting his master's degree at Columbia University (where he was already known as a ``CIA watcher of left-wing groups''), was immediately sent to Pittsburgh, where he was given his first teaching post at Carnegie-Mellon University (1967-69), and where he was also hired as a program director of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council (where Scaife's aide R. Daniel McMichael was president). Godson's first book, American Labor and European Politics (1976), was financed by a grant that McMichael arranged; his next book was published by the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC).

From Pittsburgh, Godson went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and by the late 1970s, was regarded as an ``expert'' on Soviet methods. In 1979, Scaife money enabled Godson to launch the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), a direct extension of the 1970s Fletcher conference series, reflecting the expectation that the Republicans would be victorious in the 1980 elections, which would present an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of re-organizing U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.

The Scaife funded effort by the American Tories to take over and subvert the country's intelligence reorganization had an important, if unwitting, ally - Director of Central Intelligence William Casey who would go on to found the Scaife funded Manhattan Institute with along with think tank network builder Sir Antony Fisher.

Although Casey wasn't known as a great fan of George Bush, he was an enthusiast of ``off-the-books'' covert operations, and he often preferred using non-CIA personnel to run such operations--usually drawing on Pentagon personnel requisitioned through the NSC--which effectively put Vice President Bush in charge of such operations.

The "charter" of the secret government and privatized intelligence operations was Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981, along with EO 12331 (signed Oct. 20, 1981, which reconstituted the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB), and EO 12334 (also signed Dec. 4, 1981, which created the three-member Intelligence Oversight Board). The relationship between the three orders, was that PFIAB would identify areas where intelligence ``active measures'' or covert operations were desired; the Oversight Board then reviewed covert actions and provided the legal justification for them.

EO 12333 and its sister orders were the product of the Godson CSI Consortium process, along with a workshop on ``Law, Intelligence and National Security'' sponsored by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security held in Washington in December 1979. All of this was funded by Scaife, and naturally, almost everyone who played a major role in the creation of EO 12333 was involved with the Sciafe funded think tank network. It was reportedly drafted by two regulars at the Godson Consortium -Angelo Codevilla, from the Hoover Institution and a senior staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Kenneth deGraffenreid, also a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and a Reagan-Bush NSC official -and then run through the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

Others reportedly involved in the drafting were Paul Seabury and Anne Armstrong of PFIAB, and Prof. John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia, who became the chief legal consultant to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

EO 12333 was touted as "unleashing" the intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Carter years, much of which stemmed from the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of the intelligence agencies in 1975-76.

Among significant changes from the previous 1978 Executive Order 12036, was that the President could designate agencies other than the CIA to conduct "special activities" (covert operations), and that CIA was permitted to conduct "special activities" inside the United States. Although private contracting had been permitted under the earlier EO, it could only be done covertly with the approval of the Attorney General; EO 12333 allowed concealment of private contracting without any approval by the U.S. Attorney General. According to one source who was involved in the process, deGraffenreid had sought an even broader privatization charter; this was beaten back, but the loophole was still big enough to permit almost anything that the dirty deGraffenreid faction wanted. This also opened the door even wider for the Bush networks to bring British and Israeli intelligence operatives into official U.S. intelligence operations.

EO 12333 also designated the NSC as "the highest Executive branch entity" for review and guidance of all foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and "special activities." Under the committee structures being set up within the NSC, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was then effectively put in charge of all intelligence activities.

Theodore Shackley and covert operations

The role of Theodore Shackley requires special mention -for it was critical to the creation of the Bush "secret government." When Bush was CIA director in 1976-77, Shackley was his deputy director for plans (covert operations). Shackley was forced to resign from the CIA in 1978, but he had already built up a vast financial and intelligence network in Asia and the Middle East, which he put at Bush's disposal during the Reagan administration. Vice President Bush's national security adviser, Don Gregg, was a Shackley protegé; it was Gregg who brought his longtime associate Felix Rodriguez on board for the Contra gun-running and drug-running operation.

At the December 1980 Consortium event on "Intelligence Requirements for the '80s: Covert Action", in Washington, Shackley's presentation laid out a detailed proposal for ``rebuilding'' America's covert paramilitary capabilities. The Shackley speech was a recipe for the subsequent Contra and related efforts, complete with the "offline" funding. According to one intelligence source, Shackley gave a similar presentation to the Reagan Presidential transition team on intelligence. Attending the briefing, according to the source, were Casey, Bush, and Max Hugel, Casey's first deputy for covert operations.

Shackley reportedly urged that the rebuilt covert intelligence and paramilitary apparatus be run "offline" -which meant using the band of intelligence community "asteroids" who had gathered around him from his days as CIA station chief in Miami and later in Laos, such as Felix Rodriguez and the operatives who staffed the Oliver North-Richard Secord Contra supply operation and their international arms ring. Shackley also reportedly urged that the new special teams be run directly out of the White House: What this meant in practice, was through the NSC staff apparatus that functioned under Vice President Bush's direction under the authority of EO|12333, and National Security Decision Directives 2 and 3.

All of Shackley's proposals were enthusiastically promoted by Godson in the seven-volume proceedings of the CSI. The proceedings were published by the Scaife-funded NSIC, which appointed Roy Godson to head up its expanded Reagan-era Washington office.

Caught!

Scaife's network did not just provide the "intellectual" underpinnings for the ``secret government'' and offline intelligence operations. In a couple of instances, his operatives were caught directly laundering money for the drug-running Contras, and they almost found themselves indicted as a result of the Iran-Contra investigation. Two of these were Godson and the aptly named Clyde (``Terry'') Sleaze, who described himself, during his Iran-Contra deposition in 1987, as having been ``general counsel for Richard M. Scaife and his family and entities'' during 1974-86. Sleaze testified that he had met Godson while the latter was working for the NSIC, and Sleaze said that he had attended some of the NSIC seminars, as well as having often visited the NSIC to check up on what they were doing with Scaife's money.

Sleaze testified that Godson had asked him for a contribution involving Nicaragua, and that as a result, he had then met personally with Oliver North, then-National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, and Roy Godson in the White House Situation Room, where they asked Sleaze to raise $400,000 for a Contra organization. However, Sleaze testified that he raised only $5,000 from another individual, which he sent to Godson to be deposited with an offshore entity called ``I.C. Inc.'' Sleaze also said that he had arranged a substantial contribution (actually, $60,000) to Godson from a Goldman Sachs stockbroker, and that then there was another $100,000 donated to the Heritage Foundation, arranged through Ed Feulner, for Central America.

The money was laundered through Heritage, then through another non-profit organization controlled by Richard Miller and Frank Gomez, and then into I.C., Inc. The $60,000 contribution ended up in one of the North-Secord "Enterprise" bank accounts (that of Lake Resources) in Switzerland.

Miller was subsequently indicted and pled guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States by using tax-exempt organizations for improper purposes. Gomez was given immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation with the independent counsel. Godson, Sleaze, and Feulner managed to escape indictment.

Footnote

Following is a partial listing of grants from 1973 through about 1993, made by the three Scaife family foundations run by Richard Mellon Scaife that publicly report their grants. The three are the Sarah [Mellon] Scaife Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation. The complete list of grantees is much longer. There are also three private family trusts that do not report their activities publicly; it is reported that some of the most sensitive, intelligence-related grants made by Scaife are handled through the private trusts. These are the Richard Mellon Scaife Family Trust No.|1 and No.|2, and the Trust for the Grandchildren of Sarah Scaife.

Intelligence and foreign policy think tanks

National Strategy Information Center (NSIC)

Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Georgetown University, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

Stanford University, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

American Bar Association, Standing Committee on Law and National Security

The Committee for the Free World

Committee on the Present Danger

Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Massachusetts

American Security Council Foundation

U.S. Global Strategy Council

Jamestown Foundation

University of Virginia Law School, Center for Law and National Security

New York University, National Security Education Program of the Graduate School of Public Administration

Freedom House, New York

Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America)

National Endowment for Democracy

Institute for the Study of Conflict, London, U.K.

Center for European and Strategic Studies, London, U.K.

World Affairs Council, Pittsburgh

Social-economic policy think tanks

Mont Pelerin Society

American Enterprise Institute

Heritage Foundation

Cato Institute

Reason Foundation

Free Congress Foundation

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

American Legislative Exchange Council

National Taxpayers Union

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

Manhattan Institute, New York

Citizens for a Sound Economy

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

National Center for Policy Analysis

Rockford Institute

Institute on Religion and Democracy

Population control

Planned Parenthood

Population Action International

Population Crisis Center

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)

News media propaganda

Accuracy in Media

American Spectator

American Spectator Educational Foundation

Center for the Study of Popular Culture

Foundation for American Communications, Los Angeles

Foundation for Cultural Review

Media Institute

Western Journalism Center, Sacramento

Legal foundations

National Legal Center for the Public Interest, Washington

Washington Legal Foundation, Washington

Pacific Legal Foundation, Sacramento

Landmark Legal Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri

Atlantic Legal Foundation, New York

Mid-Atlantic Legal Foundation, Philadelphia

Southeastern Legal Foundation, Atlanta

New England Legal Foundation, Boston

Mid-American Legal Foundation, Chicago

Capital Legal Foundation, Washington

The Mountain States Legal Foundation, Denver

The Reagan Administration

From the very beginning, the Reagan administration was packed with officials who had come from Scaife-backed and -financed private institutions. Some of these were:

Martin Anderson: Assistant to the President for Policy Development; Hoover Institution, Committee on the Present Danger (CPD).

Richard Allen: Reagan's first national security adviser; a founder of Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); then senior staffer at Hoover Institution.

Richard Pipes: National Security Council (NSC) Soviet specialist; attended five of seven CSI seminars; CPD.

Geoffrey Kemp: NSC Middle East specialist; from Fletcher School; CSIS.

Roger Fontaine: NSC Latin America specialist; CSIS, American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Roy Godson: NSC consultant; National Strategy Information Center (NSIC); entire career was Scaife-financed and -sponsored.

Kenneth deGraffenreid: NSC director of intelligence programs; attended six of seven CSI seminars.

David Abshire: head of national security transition team, chairman of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB); CSIS.

Leo Cherne: PFIAB; Freedom House, CSI seminars.

Paul Seabury: PFIAB; all seven CSI seminars.

Glenn Campbell: transition team; chaired Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB); Hoover Institution.

John Norton Moore: chief legal consultant to IOB; University of Virginia Center for Law and National Security.

William Casey: Director of Central Intelligence

William Van Cleave: Reagan's transition team on defense; financed by Scaife grant at University of Southern California.

Jack Marsh: Secretary of the Army; NSIC; worked directly for Scaife.

John Lehman: Secretary of the Navy; Foreign Policy Reseach Institute (Philadelphia).

Fred Iklé: Undersecretary of Defense; CSIS, CSI seminar.

Alexander Haig: Reagan's first Secretary of State; board of Foreign Policy Reseach Institute (Philadelphia).

Jeane Kirkpatrick: Ambassador to United Nations; AEI.

Edwin Meese: Counsel to President, then Attorney General; Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management, University of San Diego; Pacific Legal Foundation.

The American System and irony of Scaife

A certain irony exists, in the fact of Richard Mellon Scaife's bankrolling of a network consisting of think tanks in the U.S such as the Mont Pelerin Society. The Mont Pelerin Society - the modern-day embodiment of the feudal, aristocratic "Austrian School" of monetarist economics - opposing fundamental industrial capitalism and any form of centralized, dirigible measures through which a nation-state can build up its own industrial-technological base, while restricting access to predatory international financial looters.

The fact of the matter is that the Pittsburgh Scaife family was a pioneering U.S. industrial family, especially in the 19th century. At one time, the family was wont to boast that the Scaife Company (formerly William B. Scaife & Sons) was "the oldest manufacturing company west of the Alleghenies." It was undoubtedly a beneficiary of the "American System" of economics--national banking, protective tariffs, and internal improvements -as was practiced off-and-on through the 19th century.

The company grew out of a tin-plating enterprise begun in 1802; it produced ordnance for the War of 1812 against the British, and also during the Civil War against the British-sponsored Southern secession. Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the Scaife metal-working company continually invented new products; it built boilers for steamboats and for railroad steam engines; it invented "range boilers" - the forerunners of today's hot-water heaters for households and high-pressure vessels, and provided corrugated iron roofing and structural iron for factories and warehouses.

But Richard's father Alan Scaife preferred the financier-oligarchy milieu of the Mellon family to his own family's industrial tradition. He joined the Mellons for boozing, steeple-chasing, and fox-hunting, and married into the Mellon family in 1927. In 1940, he joined the Mellons' Gulf Oil, and within two years he had been brought into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which shipped him off to London. After the war, he served as the Mellon family representative on Gulf's executive committee, and was made a Vice President of T. Mellon & Sons--the newly created non-profit family forum and trust, which was explicitly based upon a British model. Despite all this, Alan Scaife was never treated as a full-fledged Mellon. Scaife would later describe his father as "sucking hind tit" to the Mellons.

As he grew older, young Scaife became resentful of the treatment that his father had gotten at the hands of the Mellons, and he often made his animosity known, particularly toward his uncle, Richard King Mellon. Scaife became known as a ``bull in a china shop.'' Some attributed his impetuousness to his being thrown by a horse at age 9; his skull was partially crushed, and was repaired with an aluminum plate and much plastic surgery.

As soon as his father died in 1952, Scaife sold off the Scaife Company for one dollar.

Politically, Scaife became a Goldwaterite, when the Mellons were mainstream Republicans. In the 1960s, the Pennsylvania GOP split between the Rockefeller and Goldwater wings; Scaife bankrolled many of the right-wingers.

Nevertheless, by 1973, he was tamed and house-broken. The method by which this was accomplished is illustrative, and became the model which Scaife would go on to use against his targeted adversaries.. This may also, by the way, shed some light on Scaife's obsession with the death of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, and his fanatical backing of the effort to "prove" that Foster did not really commit suicide.

The taming of Scaife

In the 1950s, Scaife began to hang around his sister Cordelia's boyfriend Robert Duggan, who took young Scaife under his wing. In 1963, Scaife helped Duggan get elected as district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, on the GOP ticket. But Duggan was an Irish Catholic from the wrong side of the tracks, and Scaife's besotted mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, would never let Cordelia's boyfriend into her house. Duggan's ambitions grew large, and Scaife wanted to make him governor of Pennsylvania, something which the Republican establishment, controlled by the Mellons, George H. W. Bush's cousin Elsie Hillman, and U.S. Sen. Hugh Scott, were not going to tolerate.

After Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968 with the help of Scaife money, Duggan tried to block the appointment of Rockefeller man Dick Thornburgh as U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania; Duggan lost the fight. The victorious Thornburgh came into office with an agenda for what many regarded as "a political vendetta." Thornburgh changed the priorities of the federal prosecutor's office to focus on "political corruption" and "white-collar crime," and before long, rumors began circulating about DA Duggan's alleged ties to the mob. The Internal Revenue Service got in on the case, and Scaife and Duggan attempted to use their contacts in the Nixon Justice Department to squelch the investigation. After all, Scaife had chaired the finance committee for Nixon-Agnew in 1968, and would go on to give over $1 million (broken up into 334 separate checks to avoid gift taxes) to Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1971.

But Thornburgh persisted, subpoenaing four detectives from Duggan's district attorney's office, giving them immunity, and forcing them to give evidence against their boss. In the fall of 1971, Scaife was "turned": He crawled to Thornburgh's office to join in the destruction of his erstwhile political mentor and his sister's boyfriend. Scaife began to target Duggan in the newspaper he had purchased, the Greensburg Tribune-Review. As a book about the Mellon family puts it: "Shorn of Scaife's influence, Duggan became easy pickings."

Thornburgh was preparing a tax-evasion case against Duggan, and made preparations to interview Cordelia Scaife, to squeeze her for information about Duggan. She and Duggan quickly got married, meaning that she could not be compelled to provide evidence against her husband. Scaife, according to one account, "was intensely upset. He went into orbit." Shortly after that, Scaife and Cordelia stopped speaking with each other; by all accounts, they have not spoken since.

On March 5, 1974, Thornburgh got a federal grand jury to hand down a six-count indictment for tax fraud against Duggan. But, a few hours before the indictment came down, Duggan was found dead, apparently of a blast from a shotgun which was found nearby without any fingerprints on it. Duggan's death was officially ruled a suicide--although, according to a number of sources, Cordelia has always believed Duggan was murdered, as has Duggan's family.

By 1975, Scaife had publicly reconciled with the mainstream Republicans in Pennsylvania, declaring himself a "middle-of-the-roader," and proclaiming: "I'm now enthusiastic about Rockefeller." But by 1974, as described earlier, Scaife had been inducted into the old OSS intelligence circles of the Anglo-American bankers, and from that point on, all of his "philanthropy" went in whatever direction they dictated. Scaife had learned to follow orders: His betrayal of Robert Duggan was his rite of passage.

Scaife became notorious for using the Tribune-Review to target opponents. Two cases in the 1970s were particularly flagrant: that of Dr. Murdoch Head, and that of Dr. William Mansour. (These two cases were described in detail in an April 1981 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series on Scaife, which was recently confirmed to the author to have been very accurate, by a knowledgeable source.)

The Murdoch Head case

Dr. Murdoch Head ran the Airlie Foundation near Warrenton, Virginia, which included a conference center and a film-making operation. Scaife was introduced to Airlie officials by executives of the Smith-Richardson Foundation (a CIA- and Bush-linked operation which, to this day, works in tandem with Scaife's foundations). Also involved was then-U.S. Rep. Jack Marsh, who progressed from being a board member of Airlie, to a Scaife staff member, and then secretary of the Army in the Reagan-Bush administration.

Beginning in 1968, money from the Scaife foundations, at that time jointly run by Scaife and sister Cordelia, financed many Airlie conferences and films. By 1972, Scaife Scaife and the Airlie crowd were at odds, with Scaife pushing a heavy anti-Communist theme for Airlie films, which Dr. Head's associates resisted. (During this time, his estranged sister Cordelia continued to maintain close relations with Dr. Head and Airlie.)

Airlie found itself subjected to IRS audits in 1974 and again in 1976, for which it blamed Scaife. In 1978, Airlie tax documents and records were leaked to the Warrenton-based local weekly, Fauquier Democrat, and were also sent to the Virginia State Corporation Counsel and Attorney General. In 1979, Head was indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, on charges of tax evasion, conspiracy, and attempting to bribe Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel Flood and others. Head was not convicted on the substantive tax or bribery charges, but was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the IRS. (The parallels to the LaRouche case, which likewise involved the Alexandria U.S. Attorney's Office, the Virginia Attorney General, leaks to the Loudoun Times-Mirror--a sister paper of the Fauquier Democrat in Northern Virginia's oligarchical Hunt Country--and a tax-conspiracy case, are striking.)

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, Scaife's Tribune-Review was devoting so much coverage to the Airlie case and Dr. Head's trial in Alexandria, that reporters, in both states, were dumbfounded.

The William Mansour case

In reporting on the case of Dr. William Mansour in 1981, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that ``some people believe that once you run afoul of the forces of Scaife, you also run afoul of the forces of the federal government, that he is, in some way, able to get federal agencies like the Justice Department to look closely at those he does not like.''

Mansour was a local physician in Westmoreland County, Pa., who owned a local hospital, as well as a competing newspaper to Scaife's Greensburg Tribune-Review. He also held liberal political views, hence doubly drawing Scaife's intense dislike. Scaife went after Mansour in 1973, and, using the local U.S. Attorney's Office under Dick Thornburgh and the FBI, was able to instigate an FBI investigation. In fact, Scaife was able to arrange to have an FBI agent visit one of Mansour's former sisters-in-law at her Detroit home in September 1973 to interrogate her about Mansour's alleged ties to the Middle East, and whether he had given $500,000 to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Mansour denied.

Scaife himself had long-standing connections into the FBI, and has been described as "a friend from an early age of J. Edgar Hoover." (Perhaps not so coincidentally, the FBI agent who was deployed in Detroit at Scaife's request was a 22-year veteran of the bureau, Phil Mercado, who, during 1974, became the case agent and handler for informant Vernon Higgins. Higgins had been infiltrated the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the philosophical association founded by Lyndon LaRouche, and its 1970s political wing, the U.S. Labor Party. Higgins provided a pretext for armed FBI agents to raid the Detroit offices of the NCLC and USLP in June 1974. When Mercado's deposition was taken by NCLC and USLP's lawyers in 1975, the authorization for his testimony, and the restrictions upon it, was signed by then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.)

In 1977, the Justice Department officially opened an investigation of Mansour. Scaife's lawyer Clyde Sleaze (whom we met in last week's installment) was kept abreast of the grand jury investigation, which resulted in Mansour's indictment in 1980. As with the Airlie/Head case, Scaife's Tribune-Review devoted an inordinate amount of coverage to Mansour all of it negative which resulted in a drop in business for Mansour's medical practice. Justifiably, Mansour publicly accused Scaife of being behind his problems with the Justice Department.

"Get LaRouche!"

One of the earliest and most persistent of the "LaRouche-watchers" was Roy Godson - who went to Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute, and was executive director of the Scaife-financed and -run Pittsburgh World Affairs Council; later, Godson's position at the National Strategy Information Center and his creation of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was also bankrolled by Scaife.

As early as 1967-68 at Columbia University, in New York City, Godson was already known to be watching the new political movement founded by Lyndon LaRouche, whose activities there were targeted by the FBI. Bureau documents further show that, in January 1976, Godson, accompanied by Tom Kahn of the AFL-CIO, went to FBI headquarters and briefed the head of the FBI's Internal Security Section on his pet theories about LaRouche and the NCLC. Godson was particularly fixated on speculating about the source of funds for the NCLC: According an FBI memorandum, he suggested that the NCLC was getting money from Iraq and from the Soviets, and he offered his intelligence reading on relations between LaRouche and various European communist parties. About two weeks after this, Godson called the FBI to offer his observations about alleged Greek communist influence on the NCLC during 1968-69.

In the Reagan administration, Godson was one of the most vocal against LaRouche. During the early part of the Reagan administration, LaRouche and his associates often met with officials of the NSC and other federal agencies, particularly during the 1982-83 tenure of William Clark as national security adviser. Clark's executive assistant, Richard Morris, a witness for the defense at LaRouche's federal trial in 1988 and in a Virginia state trial of an associate of LaRouche in 1990, testified about a grouping within the NSC staff who were sharply opposed to LaRouche; Morris testified that the most vocal opponents of LaRouche were Kenneth deGraffenreid, Walter Raymond, and Roy Godson. Morris reported that Godson characterized Lyndon LaRouche as ``as a socialist, as a communist, as a member of the KGB, as a fascist, and always he was an extremist,'' adding that Godson insisted that Morris stop meeting with LaRouche and his representatives.

In January 1983, the demand for an investigation of LaRouche was brought into the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by the circle associated with Scaife and Godson - the latter being a consultant to PFIAB at the time. According to an FBI document, a complaint by Henry Kissinger was raised at a PFIAB meeting of Jan. 12, 1983, by fellow PFIAB member David Abshire of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) -a Scaife funded think tank. The vice chairman of PFIAB at the time was Leo Cherne, the founder of Freedom House, also a Scaife funded institution. The PFIAB discussion did succeed in triggering an FBI investigation of LaRouche; the FBI responded with a memorandum repeating the Godson -Jamieson line, that activities of the NCLC and EIR ``dovetail nicely with Soviet propaganda and disinformation objectives.''

However, the FBI stated that, officially, it did not have an investigation of the NCLC going at that time under either domestic security or foreign counterintelligence guidelines. In order to remedy this, a campaign of news media defamation of LaRouche was organized, starting in early 1983 by the Bush-Scaife-Godson crowd. This was a joint public-private effort growing out of the ``Public Diplomacy'' operation, which we detailed in our October 1996 EIR Special Report on "George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring."

Public Diplomacy was headed at the NSC by Walter Raymond, a long-time CIA propaganda specialist who worked with Cord Meyer, and who intersected the London-centered Forum World Features operation headed by Scaife in the 1970s. In mid-1982, Raymond was posted to the NSC at the recommendation of Vice President George Bush's national security adviser Don Gregg. DeGraffenried became a deputy to Raymond. On Jan. 25, 1983--less than two weeks after the PFIAB meeting where the demand to get LaRouche was raised -Raymond drafted a memorandum proposing the creation of a private-donor group to fund Public Diplomacy propaganda programs supporting administration policies in areas such as Afghanistan, Central America, and Western Europe. "We can not, forever, rely on one or two good souls, such as Smith-Richardson or Mellon-Scaife," Raymond wrote. (The Smith-Richardson Foundation, along with the John M. Olin Foundation and Scaife's foundations, comprise a cluster of intelligence-connected foundations which fund almost all the same institutions and programs listed above.

In March, Raymond sent another memo to National Security Adviser Clark, describing efforts to pull together the private-donors group: ``The group was largely pulled together by Frank Barnett, Dan McMichael (Richard Scaife's man), Mike Joyce (Olin Foundation), Les Lenkowsky (Smith-Richardson Foundation) plus Leonard Sussman and Leo Cherne of Freedom House. A number of others including Roy Godson have also participated.'' Frank Barnett was from the NSIC--funded by Scaife as well as the other cited foundations.

In the spring of 1983, the same group convened a meeting at the New York apartment of Wall Street financier John Train--known as ``the last of the OSS "old boys" on Wall Street.'' Scaife personally attended that meeting, as did about two dozen news media representatives. There were at least two followup meetings in 1983-84. Mira Lansky Boland, a graduate of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy, and the Washington, D.C. Fact-Finding Director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), later testified that she attended a meeting at Train's residence in 1984, at which Roy Godson was also present.

The Train meetings were devoted to the coordination of planted articles and features hostile to LaRouche in the news media, and they directly resulted in attacks on LaRouche during the 1984-86 period on NBC-TV, in the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Reader's Digest, and thousands of others. It also ultimately resulted in a book-length attack on LaRouche published in 1989 with funding from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.

The campaign of news-media defamation of LaRouche was a precondition for the judicial frame-up of LaRouche and his associates. The first indictment against LaRouche was brought in Boston--where the Weld and Mellon families' First Boston Corp. wielded enormous power. When the Boston federal case against LaRouche flopped, a second indictment was brought in Alexandria, Virginia--the intelligence agencies' favorite U.S. court district--under the overall direction of U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

"Get Clinton!"

As should be clear to the reader by now, Scaife's financing and coordination of the news-media attack on President Clinton, is exactly of the same form as what Scaife has been deployed to do since the early 1970s, when he was assigned to take over Forum World Features/Kern House by the Anglophile bankers' intelligence network. Forum World Feature's specific purpose was to finance and circulate selected features and articles for the news media internationally. The "Public Diplomacy" operation in the 1980s which Scaife financed did exactly the same thing as FWF, including orchestrating news media attacks on targeted adversaries.

The Columbia Journalism Review put it slightly more politely in a 1981 profile of Scaife: It said that he "has made the formation of public opinion both his business and his avocation.... Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world."

During the Clinton presidency, on a weekly basis, one you could pick up a newspaper and find full-page ads on the Vincent Foster death, reprinting articles written by Christopher Ruddy for Scaife's Greensburg (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review. The ads were paid for by Scaife, with funds laundered through the Western Journalism Center (WJC). WJC also occasionally reprinted articles by the British Intelligence stringer and London Sunday Telegraph Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - who also writes directly for the Tribune Review.

Other ads promoting theories about the alleged coverup of the Vincent Foster death can also be found, produced by Accuracy in Media (AIM), another group bankrolled by Scaife since the 1970s, and long known for its defense of the CIA against any attacks, not to mention its protection of George Bush's drug-running Contras in the 1980s. Currently, Scaife's foundations are AIM's largest contributors, having given them $630,000 from 1989-93.

The WJC and AIM also produce features on the Foster case for newspapers and television programs. AIM's Reed Irvine has a weekly broadcast on National Empowerment Television (NET), a cable channel founded by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, to which Scaife gives about $1 million a year.

At the end of 1993, the Whitewater scandals against President Clinton, which had been dormant since the 1992 primaries, were revved up again with the publication of the "Troopergate" story in the British-linked American Spectator. Already in the 1970s, Scaife had given over $1 million to the American Spectator's publishers, and this has continued to the present day; between 1989 and 1993, Scaife gave $1.3 million to the American Spectator Educational Fund for ``research'' and other purposes.

Another top purveyor of Vincent Foster conspiracy theories is Strategic Investment newsletter, run by former Times of London editor Lord William Rees-Mogg, and James Dale Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, also Scaife funded. Davidson has produced a video jointly with the Western Journalism Center called ``Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.''

What does Scaife himself say about all this? Very little publicly, but, in a rare interview he gave to the New York Times in 1995, he proclaimed, ``The death of Vincent Foster: I think it's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton administration,'' adding that Foster's death had the potential to become the political story of the century.

The other major means by which Scaife financed attacks on the President--apart from his funding of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's GOPAC and right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation--was through the cluster of right-wing legal foundations and litigation centers. Prominent among these was the Landmark Legal Foundation, which offered advice and assistance to Paula Jones in her sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and which ensconced itself in other Whitewater-related matters.

Another, similar Scaife-financed organization is the Washington Legal Foundation, previously known as the Capital Legal Foundation. On its Legal Policy Advisory Board are Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia Law School, and Massachusetts governor and former LaRouche prosecutor William Weld. On its National Board of Advisers are Senators Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah)--both involved in Senate investigations of the Clintons - and Jesse Helms, who played a role in the dumping of the first Whitewater independent counsel and his replacement with Kenneth Starr.

The work of Scaife's network of conservative legal foundations is overseen by the Washington-based National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI), which he, of course, financed. One of the directors of NLCPI David Davenport, president of Pepperdine University; Scaife was on Pepperdine's board of trustees. Davenport and Scaife also sit together on the advisory board of the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto, California.

It is David Davenport who has offered Kenneth Starr a cushy position at Pepperdine University, financed in large part by Scaife.

Digital "Dickie"

As the way in which the public consumed media began to change, Scaife created new operations online deploying fake news operatives across multiple operations. Operatives would cross promote and work for each other across these new media platforms that made this new digital apparatus.

One of these platforms is News Max founded by Christopher Ruddy, a long time Scaife operative at Greensburg (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review. Another noteworthy connection comes via Western Journalism Center, the Scaife financed body. WJC provided expense money, funding for FOIA requests, legal support and publicity during his investigation of the death of Vince Foster.

Even more interestingly WJC was co-founded by Joseph Farah who is also the founder of WorldNetDaily which started in May 1997 as a project of the Western Journalism Center. Farah previously worked as an editor at The Sacramento Sun, a newspaper previously owned by Scaife. Under Scaife's direction the paper lost millions annually, although making money wasn't the main goal is effectively pushing the agenda of the powers behind the operation. After Scaife sold the operation on Farah's direction as an editor was effective and didn't go unnoticed. Farah would go on to be a key nexus operative in the Scaife financed Council for National Policy network along with Ruddy.

CONRAD BLACK

CHAIRMAN, COO

Conrad M. Black was Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Operating Officer of Hollinger International Inc..

In July 2007 Black was convicted by a Chicago jury of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. In December 2007, Black was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.

Following his fall from grace with Hollinger in late 2003, Christopher Grimes and John Lloyd wrote in the London Financial Times that Black was more effective as a conservative political advocate than a businessman. "Yet Conrad Black's business ambitions probably always ran second to his urge to be an intellectual force of conservatism. He did not want to simply own newspapers. He wanted to use them to help to reshape the political culture of his native Canada, and to influence that of the United States, Britain and Israel", they wrote.

Matthew Fraser, the current editor-in-chief of Canada's National Post - a Hollinger publication - defends Black as having made a significant impact on Canadian policies. "He (Fraser) says its push for lower corporate taxes has made the issue 'legitimate'. Its criticism of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation forced the public broadcaster to be less "biased and left-wing". And its support for the invasion of Iraq, free trade and general pro-Americanism have added much-needed debate," Grimes and Lloyd wrote. However, Black became known for taking over newspapers and restructuring the different departments, resulting in job losses.

He is known politically for his staunch criticism of the Liberal Party of Canada.

In 1999, the British Labour government decided to give Black a peerage. This resulted in strong opposition in Canada and particularly from Prime Minister Jean Chretien. The Nickle Resolution of 1919, ruled that foreign governments could not grant honours to Canadians that carry a title or privilege. Black challenged the ruling unsuccessfully in court. However Black gave up his Canadian citizenship and was subsequently inducted into the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour on October 31, 2001.

Black as a Media Mogul

The National Post, was first published in late October 1998 to compete with The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun. On July 31, 2000 Hollinger sold half of the National Post, 13 major Canadian newspapers, 126 community newspapers and internet sites to CanWest for $3.2 billion. Hollinger's remaining share was sold in the latter half of 2001.

Maude Barlow, the chair of the Council of Canadians, is cited by Leiterman stating Black is known to "routinely intervene in editorial policy-making".

Leiterman also cites Radler, Hollinger's president, as telling Maclean's (2/3/92): "If editors disagree with us they should disagree with us when they're no longer in our employ. The buck stops with ownership. I am responsible for meeting the payroll; therefore I will ultimately determine what the papers say and how they're going to be run."

Hollinger also owned the Jerusalem Post. John O'Sullivan, a friend of Black and the editor of the US journal, the National Interest, told the Financial Times in early 2004 that the Jerusalem Post "supports the policies of the right and broadcasts them to the world - something which people weren't used to, because it had always been the Israeli left which commanded the stage". (Later that year Hollinger sold the Jerusalem Post to the Israeli publisher Mirkaei Tikshore.

In September 2003 that newspaper advocated killing Yasser Arafat. This was quickly raised by the Israeli Cabinet, but described by Colin L. Powell, Condoleeza Rice as "unhelpful" and by The Economist as "wrong".

In 2002, Black was among the investors who contributed $20 million to start up The New York Sun.

In May 2004, Hollinger International, now free of Black's control, filed a $1.25 billion racketeering lawsuit against Black and other former corporate insiders, accusing them of pillaging the company of more than $400 million. In October, a judge dismissed the racketeering claims, and Hollinger refiled without them, adding Richard N. Perle as a defendant.

On November 15, 2004, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Black and Radler, alleging that they improperly diverted $85 million to their own use. In March 2005, the US revealed that it was also conducting a criminal investigation of Black and Radler.

In November 2005 federal prosecutors charged Black with eight counts of mail and wire fraud and accused of diverting $51.8 million of Hollinger shareholders money to himself and associates. Black rejects the charges.

On March 30, 2006, Black lost his battle to keep important documents away from US prosecutors in his fraud trial. U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve, denied Black's motion to quash a subpoena to access 13 boxes of documents that Black removed from his Toronto office after he was notified that he was being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Incriminating evidence showed a security video tape showing Black loading the boxes into his limousine on May 20, 2005, which was only hours after he was served a request for documents by the SEC which was investigating allegation that Black and other executives looted Hollinger International Inc. of more than $80 million dollars.

Also on March 30, 2006, a report in the Globe and Mail claimed that the Internal Revenue Service wants banking records for a Barbados company that Black allegedly used to stash cash offshore. In 2004, a report from a special directors committee of Hollinger International alleged that Black used the Barbados company, Argent News Inc., "to avoid taxes on some of the millions he is accused of skimming when he was the company's chairman".

On April 13, 2006, The Guardian published a story in which it claims that Hollinger International Inc. has agreed to pay the majority of Black's legal bills. Black had argued that the company should provide 100% of his legal fees and filed a law suit demanding advances to cover his costs in March 2004. Interestingly under the settlement, Black would be forced to repay the money if it is determined that he is not indemnified by the company's insurance policy.

Black's father, George Montegu Black, Jr., a chartered accountant, became the president of Canadian Breweries Limited, an international brewing conglomerate that had earlier absorbed Winnipeg Breweries. Conrad Black's mother was the former Jean Elizabeth Riley, a daughter of Conrad Stephenson Riley, whose father founded The Great-West Life Assurance Company, and a great-granddaughter of an early co-owner of The Daily Telegraph. His father was a shareholder in The Daily Telegraph.

On 15 May 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump granted Black a full pardon. Trump noted "broad support from many high-profile individuals who have vigorously vouched for his exceptional character". Black is a friend of Trump and has written flatteringly about him in opinion articles and in the 2018 book Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. Many news sources linked Black's recent book and his long friendship with Trump to the pardon. The Washington Post noted, "In addition to his book, Black frequently writes columns praising Trump and considers the president a friend". Black had been deported to Canada and barred from entering the U.S. for 30 years; the pardon allows him to travel in the U.S.

In 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair advised Queen Elizabeth II to confer on Black a life peerage in the Peerage of the United Kingdom with the title of The Baron Black of Crossharbour. He would sit as a Conservative peer, and his name had been put forward by the then-Conservative leader William Hague.

Black is listed in Jeffrey Epstein's black book of contacts.

Black is a former Steering Committee member of the Bilderberg Group.

Black is a board member of the Center for the National Interest (CNI)

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