Watch on VIMEO/ONDEMAND now!
Unthinkable: An Airline Captain’s Story premiered at QUAD CINEMA in Greenwich Village, NYC on April 11th, 2014
“Compelling”… Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“A decent conspiracy theory film” … Neil Genzlinger, New York Times
“Provocative” – Rogue Cinema Reviews
WAYNE MADSEN – 8/27/14 – Strategic Culture Foundation
The increasing tendency of the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies to disregard previous prohibitions against the use of journalists as agents puts every legitimate reporter around the world in jeopardy. The CIA has a checkered past in the use of journalists as intelligence agents. The practice was common in the 1960s and early 70s but was banned by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. However, when President Ronald Reagan helped reignite the Cold War, the CIA again began using journalists as intelligence agents. The practice put a number of journalists in jeopardy, especially those taken captive by guerrillas groups during the Lebanese civil war. There is nothing to suggest any president since Reagan has discontinued the practice of using journalists as agents. Intelligence agents operating under journalistic cover can take a number of forms: – Journalists who openly work for media operations linked officially to past and current CIA operations. These include Radio Free Europe / Radio Free Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, Radio Sawa, Radio and TV Marti, and to some extent, the Voice of America. – Journalists who work for work for accredited news media companies who agree to work covertly for U.S. intelligence. Such journalists have been known to work for The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and President Barack Obama’s one-time employer, Business International Corporation of New York City, publisher of executive business and political newsletters. CIA director Richard Helms had previously worked as a reporter for United Press International. – Journalists who work for start-up publications linked to the CIA or CIA fronts, including the many publications started and financed by global hedge fund tycoon and political and financial manipulator George Soros and his CIA media associates. Such publications include the Kyiv Post, Cambodia Daily, Burma Daily, Kabul Weekly, and Lidove Noviny of Prague.
– Freelance journalists who become embedded with U.S. military and paramilitary forces and work for one or more media operations having very low profiles.
Journalists working for media operations financed by the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors have been known to leave legitimate media organizations, where they have already established strong journalistic credentials and high-level contacts, to join government operations like Radio Free Europe and the others to carry out assignments for U.S. intelligence. One of the CIA’s favorite nesting grounds for its journalist-agents during the Cold War was the International Herald Tribune, formerly the Paris Herald Tribune, based in Paris. The paper was eventually jointly owned by The Washington Post and New York Times. The managing editor of the Herald Tribune News Service, Nathan Kingsley, left the paper’s Paris headquarters to be the head of Radio Free Europe’s news service in Munich. Kingsley replaced Gene Mater who became the public affairs spokesman for the Free Europe Committee in New York. Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Committee were both connected to the CIA. Publisher of the International Herald Tribune John Hay Whitney, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, was involved in setting up a CIA media operation called Kern House Enterprises, a CIA proprietary firm registered in Delaware. The British branch of Kern House, not surprisingly located at Kern House in London, ran a CIA news service called Forum World Features (FWF), which, in turn, was linked to another CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in Paris. The CCF published, on behalf of the CIA, two periodicals, Encounter and Information Bulletin. FWF sold its news stories to 50 newspapers around the world, including 30 in the United States. FWF, which was established in 1965 and overseen by Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s architect of the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government in 1953, also published Conflict Studies, a scholarly journal that was among the first to hype the «threat» of global terrorism in the early 1970s. FWF could tap any of its agents as FWF journalists and send them on assignment. One such agent-journalist was assigned to the CIA station in Bangkok. For years, the CIA operated the Rome Daily American in Italy. The English-language paper’s editor was a former reporter for the Associated Press. The paper was published by the same press that printed the small Italian-language newspaper representing the views of the Italian Social Democratic Party. The Daily American folded in 1986. Another newspaper operated by the CIA was the South Pacific Mail, headquartered in Santiago, Chile and operated by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips. The English-language South Pacific Mail was distributed in Chile and several South Pacific nations and territories, from New Zealand and the Samoan isles to the New Hebrides and Tonga. Phillips, who would later be identified as a key facilitator of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, said that he and some 200 other journalists with whom he was familiar eagerly signed secrecy agreements with the CIA upon their recruitment as agents. Among those who signed such agreements was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation to influence the coverage established news media organizations gave to news events. Included in the CIA news media influence operations were Time magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Herald-Tribune, Saturday Evening Post, The Miami Herald, The Washington Star, and Copley News Service. Austin Goodrich was a freelance journalist who wrote for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Paris Herald Tribune, CBS News, and the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor has become, over the past six years, an ardent supporter of the Obama administration’s and CIA’s «Responsibility to Protect» (R2P) interventionist foreign policy. Even after Goodrich was identified as a CIA agent he continued working as a journalist in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Bangkok, and West Berlin. A manifestation of the R2P policy was the CIA’s training and arming of Syrian Islamist rebels who eventually kidnapped U.S. photo-journalist James Foley in 2012. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the group that kidnapped Foley, whose reporting experience included being embedded with U.S. military units in Afghanistan and Iraq and CIA-supported rebels in Libya and Syria, eventually executed him in a gruesome videotaped beheading. But questions remain over whether the CIA’s continued use of journalists as agents and the embedding of journalists with CIA-trained insurgents runs the risk of journalists being mistaken as CIA operatives, especially in war zones. Stuart Loory, who worked as the New York Herald-Tribune’s correspondent in Moscow in the 1960s before joining the Los Angeles Times and CNN, has said that the CIA’s use of journalists as spies calls into question the status of every journalist. He said, «If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect». Loory emphasized that «journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others». However, the caution urged by Loory has, in some cases, fallen on deaf ears. In 2012, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti forwarded an advance copy of a column written by his colleague, columnist Maureen Dowd, to the CIA’s spokesperson Marie Harf. Dowd’s column concerned a CIA leak to Hollywood that involved the production of a movie called «Zero Dark Thirty». Harf has since been promoted to deputy press secretary for the Department of State where she is undoubtedly still fronting for her old CIA colleagues in spotting willing journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, eager to cooperate with the CIA.
With a number of print publications folding their operations, there has been a mushrooming of web-based news outlets. The Global Post, based in Boston, was able to send freelancer Foley to costly assignments in Libya and Syria. A subscription-based news website, which once only had 400 subscribers, is not only able to send someone like Foley off to cover wars but is able to maintain an international correspondents’ staff of 65 in high-cost cities ranging from Moscow and Jerusalem to Tokyo and Nairobi. Some uncomfortable questions must be asked. For example, from where does Global Post actually receive its funding? And, why does it find it advantageous to embed its freelancers with U.S. military units and CIA-financed Islamist insurgent groups? Looking back over the last 65 years encompassing the CIA’s use of journalists as agents, the answers to these questions become all too apparent.
A fan of “Unthinkable: An Airline Captain’s Story” recently shared the following YouTube video with us, surprised to see Phil Marshall’s wife, Sean, on TV taking the exact opposite position from Independent Investigator Wayne Madsen regarding the recent deaths of her husband, their two teenage kids and the family dog.
Sean Marshall on gun violence.
We are all so sorry for Sean Marshall’s loss and she is obviously genuinely convinced the deaths of her children were at her husband’s hands.
We’re posting this video for all those who wonder why our film doesn’t present more compelling evidence convicting someone for the deaths or present the evidence Marshall planned to publish in his next book. We don’t because we don’t have it. And neither does the Calaveras County Sheriff.
That’s why we’re convinced our film has value. It is an honest presentation of known facts in the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Philip Marshall and his two kids. Troubling, because as much as our hearts go out to Sean Marshall, family and friends of her two kids, Alex and Macalia, there is a preponderance of evidence suggesting the Calaveras County Sheriff was either unthinkably incompetent or deliberately participated in a cover-up to protect the identity of those actually responsible for the deaths.
We believe the deaths of Phil Marshall, his two teenage kids (and the family dog) demand further independent investigation to prove who is truly to blame for these tragic deaths.
RANDALL PAUL : (Marshall Philips) – a retired airline captain with over 15,000 hours flying heavy jets who has written several books investigating where the terrorist pilots got their financing and training in order to carry out the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
DENNIS FITZPATRICK: (Madison Freeman) Best friend of Marshall Philips and an investigative journalist who travels to Murphys, CA to unearth the truth in what appears to him to be a carefully crafted cover-up.
DREW BARRIOS – (Sgt. DeWitt), the local Sheriff whose police work and apparent negligence suggests to Madison Freeman that the true facts of the Marshall “murder-suicide” are of no interest to the police.
CATHERINE JOHNSON (Helen) and MICHAEL BIESANZ (Woody), the couple who live across the street from Marshall Philips and witness the many strange operations conducted by mysterious Men In Black.
JERRY BELL JR. (Dallas) and DAN KYLE (Danko) the two “Federal Agents” who stalk Marsh Philips and later go after Madison Freeman.
SHADE STREETER (Mike)… Chris Marshall’s best friend, who becomes a person of interest in the eyes of the Two Agents.
SHANNON CHURCHWELL (Chris) and RACHELLE HENRY (Meghan), murdered by their father or innocent victims of an assassination?
DEONE JENNINGS (Sharon) – Marsh’s estranged wife, who blames her soon-to-be ex-husband for her children’s murder.
HEIDI HAWK (Barbara) – Marshall’s sister, incredulous over the many ways her brother is denigrated by law enforcement and the press.
MARCELLA LASCH: (Attny. Duerr) Can’t understand why anyone would dredge up something like 9/11 after so many years.
Written by Craig McKee
Thursday, 22 May 2014 00:32
The-Lead-With-Jake-Tapper—FrownCNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper It looked just like an infomercial, but with a lot more frowning.
In an example of Orwellian newspeak, the CNN show The Lead with Jake Tapper took on Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth over its decision to distribute information pamphlets outside the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York City. The pamphlets mimic the design of the “official” ones, but instead of the official story, they contain key scientific forensic evidence indicating that the three World Trade Center towers were brought down with explosives and incendiaries. Unlike the official version, the photo on the cover of the AE pamphlet shows the Twin Towers and Building 7.
The Tapper report is a hysterical compendium of all the empty slogans and anti-conspiracy-theory talking points that make up the mainstream media’s continuing attack on the 9/11 Truth Movement. It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds into the report to see how Tapper was going to play the story.
CNN Fake OutCNN attacksHe tells us that “the conspiracy group” AE911Truth plans to stand outside the museum and hand out fake museum pamphlets that look exactly like the real ones. The volunteers handing them out are described as “so-called truthers,” and the whole exercise is labeled an “affront to the victims’ families.”
“Can’t these people give it a rest for one day out of respect for the families?” an exasperated Tapper queries, adding that the 9/11 memorial is “sacred.” Indeed, since 9/11 itself, the grounds have been transformed from a place of truth-seeking to a pathologically sacred shrine to “not asking questions about 9/11.”
Tapper contends that truthers are using the opening of the museum as an opportunity to spread their lies about the attacks. He reads from the AE pamphlet: “Welcome to the other 9/11 story,” but then adds, “the false one.”
Of AE, he says: “Of course they don’t prove anything except for man’s capacity to believe crazy things and man’s insensitivity to, for instance, the families of the approximately 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania by Islamic terrorists with al-Qaeda, as every credible investigation has actually proven.”
CNN-brochure comparison scareBrochure comparison: Official vs UnofficialI’m not sure if he’s talking about the 9/11 Commission Report, which even commission members have called a “cover-up,” or the NIST report, which the 2,100 technical and building professionals with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth have shown to be rooted in fantasy, not science.
Tapper had on the air as his guest Emily Bazelon, a senior editor of Slate magazine, whose job it was to help Tapper figure out just what is psychologically motivating all these “truthers.”
She says, “Usually, with a conspiracy theory, you imagine that people are trying to make sense of the senseless. But with 9/11, we have a real conspiracy called al-Qaeda. And so, one has to imagine that the anti-government motivation of the 9/11 truthers is really what’s driving this. Because if you could imagine the government made up 9/11 as a hoax, then the government is completely monstrous, and there’s no reason to believe anything any federal official says, and certainly no reason to pay your taxes.”
Wow. This “journalist” does a lot of imagining.
First, she admits that her pet theory about making sense of the senseless (which we hear regularly from the official story apologists) doesn’t fit the situation. But that doesn’t deter her, as her remarks then take a turn toward the surreal. In her world, if you don’t unquestioningly swallow whole the story of Islamic terrorists with box cutters, then you must think every government official is in on it, and therefore you don’t have to continue funding that government.
Perhaps Ms. Bazelon, who seems to pluck her theories out of thin air with absolutely no basis in fact or evidence, could provide us with even one example of a 9/11 truther whose views have their genesis in an anti-government sentiment or in a desire to avoid paying taxes. I wonder if either Bazelon or Tapper could come up with anything at all to back up anything they say in this report.
Still frowning, Tapper asks, “What happens when this nonsense hits the echo chamber of the Internet?” This prompts more incoherence from Bazelon:
“You see these dark corners of the Internet where people pile on, and there’s this minute parsing of the technicalities of the supposed evidence, and more and more detail gets added and accumulated, and it kind of feeds on itself,” she responds.
HCNN Bazelon NewspeakTapper and Bazelon, still frowninguh? Is that sort of like saying that people on the Internet examine all the evidence and accumulate and discuss their findings? Perhaps if the mainstream media did some examining of evidence, then the truth about 9/11 might be clearer to everyone by now, including their viewers. But that doesn’t appear to be their role in this scenario.
Not to be outdone, Tapper risks straining himself with some political analysis.
“Historically, we see that these conspiracies come after very upsetting events like the Kennedy assassination, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – is there a pattern there?”
Could it be that people get upset by conspiracies to kill public figures for political reasons, and they get just as upset when the government and media collaborate in covering them up? And could it be that one of the reasons these events are so upsetting is that the conventional explanations for them are so transparently fraudulent?
Furthermore, these explanations are always wrapped in phony emotion so that the rational doesn’t have to be addressed. Do we all see that pattern? Our “journalist” friends would have us believe that the only appropriate way that we can and should react to an event like 9/11 is emotionally. The museum itself focuses on the heroism and the emotion of the day – whatever it takes to stay away from the facts, which overwhelmingly contradict the paper-thin official story.
Tapper attempts to clarify just what truthers are actually saying:
“And the idea here is not just that the three buildings were destroyed by explosives, but that it’s all part of this grand conspiracy where the U.S. government – and let me state, if I haven’t made it clear enough, none of this is true, this is all just crazy talk – that the U.S. government faked it, killed all these people intentionally, and it was just to start a war in Iraq and another one in Afghanistan. Is that the idea they’re going for here?”
Here’s where even Bazelon has to admit there were some problems with how the Iraq war started.
“That’s the idea, and just to state it is to show how horrifying it is. I suppose that given that the American government did put forward some false ideas to motivate going into Iraq – in particular the whole idea that there were weapons of mass destruction there – that’s the tiny, tiny kernel of truth that is in some way related to this completely crazy theory.”
“Some false ideas.” Bazelon can’t even bring herself to state that the government lied to the American people to go to war. She minimizes the importance of these “false ideas,” which have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and she makes sure to get the word “crazy” in there to counter her subtle admission that the war was started under false pretenses.
Up to this point in the report, the really big gun hasn’t been brought out, but Tapper takes care of that with his predictable accusation that truthers are motivated by anti-Semitism.
“There’s also a lot of scapegoating with the 9/11 truther stuff,” he says. “There’s anti-Semitism, anti-Israel, anti-corporations.”
Anti-corporations? Is that exclusive to 9/11 truthers? Are we to understand that being critical of corporations now pegs one as a conspiracy theorist as well? From her place in the official story echo chamber, Bazelon responds:
“Exactly. And I think you see these virulent strains that are related to each other from familiar right-wing talk, and they all get weirdly braided together in this particular theory.”
The anti-Semitism charge is a common one, and it seems to be thrown at truthers more and more often as time goes on (the theme of “contagion” with the term “virulent strains” is also a part of this). The physics of 9/11 are not anti-Semitic; neither is anything else on the popular 9/11 Truth Movement website, AE911Truth.org.
During his recent Canadian tour, AE911Truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, was interviewed by Sun News journalist Michael Coren, who accused truthers in general and Gage in particular of believing that all the Jews were told to stay away from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Coren even used the word “virulent.” Of course, Gage has never made such a comment (I covered this in two recent articles on my blog, Truth and Shadows, here and here). All the same talking points that we see in the CNN piece were there in Coren’s report.
This propaganda masquerading as news is actually a carefully crafted attack on anyone who questions what the media tell us and on anyone who is not satisfied with the official cover-up of 9/11, and it is far from the only recent example. Newsweek, for example, has just produced a cover story ominously entitled, “The plots to destroy America.” In this attack on “conspiracy theorists,” we are told that it goes beyond craziness and insensitivity – that public health and public policy are threatened by those who question the official line.
It seems that those of us who question 9/11 must be making progress if the mainstream media have to pull out this kind of propaganda against the Movement. It also seems that the purveyors of the 9/11 official story may have assumed enormous risk in deciding to enshrine their story in a museum of glass, steel, and concrete, because now they have given the Truth Movement a focal point on which to direct their efforts to expose the fraudulent events and criminal perpetrators of 9/11.
Craig McKee is a journalist and the creator of the blog Truth and Shadows
READING:
UNTHINKABLE’S airline captain, Marshall Philips was suggested by the real life retired United Airlines pilot Philip Marshall, who authored the first three of the below referenced books:
“Lakefront Airport: The Rise of a US Enterprise“ © 2013 by Philip Marshall – ISBN 978-1481859653
“False Flag 911: How Bush, Cheney and the Saudis Created the Post-911 World“ © 2008 by Philip Marshall –
ISBN 978-1-4392-026-4-8
“The Big Bamboozle” © 2012 by Philip Marshall
ISBN: 978-1468094589
“Family of Secrets” © 2009 by Russ Baker
ISBN: 978-1-59691-557-2
“Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA” © 1994 by Terry Reed and John Cummings – ISBN: 1-56171-249-3
“Forbidden Truth” © 2002 by Jean-Charles Brisard & Guillaume Dasquie – ISBN: 1-56025-414-9
“Extreme Prejudice” © 2010 by Susan Lindauer
ISBN: 1453642757
“October Surprise” © 1989 by Barbara Honegger
ISBN: 0-944276-46-6
“Mary’s Mosaic” © 2012 by Peter Janney
ISBN: 978-1-61608-708-1
“Crossing The Rubicon” © 2004 by Michael C. Ruppert
ISBN: 0-86571-540-8
“Bagman: The Secret Life of Col. Albert V. Carone”
© 2006 by Landfall Productions, Inc. – ISBN: 978-1-4116-8331-0
ADDITIONAL VIEWING:
“9/11: Explosive Evidence – The Experts Speak Out“ Produced by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and Richard Gage, AIA, Architect
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xif0jIT_ZM
9/11 Commission Chairs and Congressmen Call for Declassification
August 31, 2014
Source: Blacklisted News – Washington’s Blog
The 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs – Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean – have called for the 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report which is classified to be declassified. Kean said that 60-70% of what was classified shouldn’t have been classified in the first place:
Congressman Thomas Massie read the 28 classified pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into 9/11 (the joint Senate and House investigation into 9/11) and immediately called for them to be released to the public:
A bipartisan bill – introduced by congressmen Walter B. Jones (Republican from North Carolina) and Stephen Lynch (Democrat from Massachusetts) – would declassify the 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry which implicate the Saudi government.
Former Congressman Ron Paul is also demanding the 28 pages be declassified:
The Co-Chair of the congressional investigation into 9/11 – Bob Graham – and 9/11 Commissioner and former Senator Bob Kerrey are calling for either a “permanent 9/11 commission” or a new 9/11 investigation to get to the bottom of it.
Senator Graham has lobbied Obama for years to release the 28 pages and to reopen the investigation, but Obama has refused. The former Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 investigator has even resorted to filing Freedom of Information requests to obtain information, but the Obama administration is still stonewalling:
Graham said that like the 28 pages in the 9/11 inquiry, the Sarasota case is being “covered up” by U.S. intelligence. Graham has been fighting to get the FBI to release the details of this investigation with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation. But so far the bureau has stalled and stonewalled, he said.
And high-level former NSA official Thomas Drake provided testimony to the 9/11 investigations documenting that the “official story” of 9/11 makes little sense, as the intelligence agencies had all of the information they needed to stop it. Drake’s testimony has – for no real reason – been classified. Drake is seeking to declassify his testimony to the 9/11 Commission:
“I would argue for declassification and release because the 9/11 Commission asked for it in the public interest, my testimony was given to Congress via testimony (oral and written) to investigators as a material witness and whistleblower, because of NSA’s coverup of its accountability for 9/11, and the coverup committed by NSA to obstruct official Congressional investigations, plus declassification is timely in terms of ongoing efforts to reform NSA by Congress and the President. I do know that my testimony and evidence was fully suppressed and censored as a deep state secret – so secret that it was not included in the classified report of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry.”
Indeed, the 9/11 Commission admits that it never got all of the facts … and many officials are eager to spill the beans about what they know.
Still Urgent Today Ancient history, you say? Graham notes:
“Although it’s been more than a decade ago when this horrific event occurred, I think [the questions of who supported the attacks] have real consequences to U.S. actions today.”
WAYNE MADSEN – 8/27/14 – Strategic Culture Foundation
The increasing tendency of the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies to disregard previous prohibitions against the use of journalists as agents puts every legitimate reporter around the world in jeopardy. The CIA has a checkered past in the use of journalists as intelligence agents. The practice was common in the 1960s and early 70s but was banned by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. However, when President Ronald Reagan helped reignite the Cold War, the CIA again began using journalists as intelligence agents. The practice put a number of journalists in jeopardy, especially those taken captive by guerrillas groups during the Lebanese civil war. There is nothing to suggest any president since Reagan has discontinued the practice of using journalists as agents. Intelligence agents operating under journalistic cover can take a number of forms: – Journalists who openly work for media operations linked officially to past and current CIA operations. These include Radio Free Europe / Radio Free Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, Radio Sawa, Radio and TV Marti, and to some extent, the Voice of America. – Journalists who work for work for accredited news media companies who agree to work covertly for U.S. intelligence. Such journalists have been known to work for The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and President Barack Obama’s one-time employer, Business International Corporation of New York City, publisher of executive business and political newsletters. CIA director Richard Helms had previously worked as a reporter for United Press International. – Journalists who work for start-up publications linked to the CIA or CIA fronts, including the many publications started and financed by global hedge fund tycoon and political and financial manipulator George Soros and his CIA media associates. Such publications include the Kyiv Post, Cambodia Daily, Burma Daily, Kabul Weekly, and Lidove Noviny of Prague.
– Freelance journalists who become embedded with U.S. military and paramilitary forces and work for one or more media operations having very low profiles.
Journalists working for media operations financed by the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors have been known to leave legitimate media organizations, where they have already established strong journalistic credentials and high-level contacts, to join government operations like Radio Free Europe and the others to carry out assignments for U.S. intelligence. One of the CIA’s favorite nesting grounds for its journalist-agents during the Cold War was the International Herald Tribune, formerly the Paris Herald Tribune, based in Paris. The paper was eventually jointly owned by The Washington Post and New York Times. The managing editor of the Herald Tribune News Service, Nathan Kingsley, left the paper’s Paris headquarters to be the head of Radio Free Europe’s news service in Munich. Kingsley replaced Gene Mater who became the public affairs spokesman for the Free Europe Committee in New York. Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Committee were both connected to the CIA. Publisher of the International Herald Tribune John Hay Whitney, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, was involved in setting up a CIA media operation called Kern House Enterprises, a CIA proprietary firm registered in Delaware. The British branch of Kern House, not surprisingly located at Kern House in London, ran a CIA news service called Forum World Features (FWF), which, in turn, was linked to another CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in Paris. The CCF published, on behalf of the CIA, two periodicals, Encounter and Information Bulletin. FWF sold its news stories to 50 newspapers around the world, including 30 in the United States. FWF, which was established in 1965 and overseen by Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s architect of the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government in 1953, also published Conflict Studies, a scholarly journal that was among the first to hype the «threat» of global terrorism in the early 1970s. FWF could tap any of its agents as FWF journalists and send them on assignment. One such agent-journalist was assigned to the CIA station in Bangkok. For years, the CIA operated the Rome Daily American in Italy. The English-language paper’s editor was a former reporter for the Associated Press. The paper was published by the same press that printed the small Italian-language newspaper representing the views of the Italian Social Democratic Party. The Daily American folded in 1986. Another newspaper operated by the CIA was the South Pacific Mail, headquartered in Santiago, Chile and operated by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips. The English-language South Pacific Mail was distributed in Chile and several South Pacific nations and territories, from New Zealand and the Samoan isles to the New Hebrides and Tonga. Phillips, who would later be identified as a key facilitator of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, said that he and some 200 other journalists with whom he was familiar eagerly signed secrecy agreements with the CIA upon their recruitment as agents. Among those who signed such agreements was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation to influence the coverage established news media organizations gave to news events. Included in the CIA news media influence operations were Time magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Herald-Tribune, Saturday Evening Post, The Miami Herald, The Washington Star, and Copley News Service. Austin Goodrich was a freelance journalist who wrote for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Paris Herald Tribune, CBS News, and the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor has become, over the past six years, an ardent supporter of the Obama administration’s and CIA’s «Responsibility to Protect» (R2P) interventionist foreign policy. Even after Goodrich was identified as a CIA agent he continued working as a journalist in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Bangkok, and West Berlin. A manifestation of the R2P policy was the CIA’s training and arming of Syrian Islamist rebels who eventually kidnapped U.S. photo-journalist James Foley in 2012. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the group that kidnapped Foley, whose reporting experience included being embedded with U.S. military units in Afghanistan and Iraq and CIA-supported rebels in Libya and Syria, eventually executed him in a gruesome videotaped beheading. But questions remain over whether the CIA’s continued use of journalists as agents and the embedding of journalists with CIA-trained insurgents runs the risk of journalists being mistaken as CIA operatives, especially in war zones. Stuart Loory, who worked as the New York Herald-Tribune’s correspondent in Moscow in the 1960s before joining the Los Angeles Times and CNN, has said that the CIA’s use of journalists as spies calls into question the status of every journalist. He said, «If even one American overseas carrying a press card is a paid informer for the CIA, then all Americans with those credentials are suspect». Loory emphasized that «journalists must be willing to focus on themselves the same spotlight they so relentlessly train on others». However, the caution urged by Loory has, in some cases, fallen on deaf ears. In 2012, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti forwarded an advance copy of a column written by his colleague, columnist Maureen Dowd, to the CIA’s spokesperson Marie Harf. Dowd’s column concerned a CIA leak to Hollywood that involved the production of a movie called «Zero Dark Thirty». Harf has since been promoted to deputy press secretary for the Department of State where she is undoubtedly still fronting for her old CIA colleagues in spotting willing journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, eager to cooperate with the CIA.
With a number of print publications folding their operations, there has been a mushrooming of web-based news outlets. The Global Post, based in Boston, was able to send freelancer Foley to costly assignments in Libya and Syria. A subscription-based news website, which once only had 400 subscribers, is not only able to send someone like Foley off to cover wars but is able to maintain an international correspondents’ staff of 65 in high-cost cities ranging from Moscow and Jerusalem to Tokyo and Nairobi. Some uncomfortable questions must be asked. For example, from where does Global Post actually receive its funding? And, why does it find it advantageous to embed its freelancers with U.S. military units and CIA-financed Islamist insurgent groups? Looking back over the last 65 years encompassing the CIA’s use of journalists as agents, the answers to these questions become all too apparent.
“Unthinkable: An Airline Captain’s Story” is partially based on the investigation of the Philip Marshall “murder-suicide” by Wayne Madsen. Mr. Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and columnist. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.
Mr. Madsen is the author of The Handbook of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan, 1992), an acclaimed reference book on international data protection law; Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); co-author of America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II (Dandelion, 2003); author of Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates; Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day; The Manufacturing of a President: the CIA’s Insertion of Barack H. Obama, Jr. into the White House; L’Affaire Petraeus; and National Security Agency Surveillance: Reflections and Revelations. Madsen has been a regular contributor on RT and PressTV. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a terrorism investigation judicial inquiry of the French government. Madsen has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen was a Senior Fellow for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy public advocacy organization.
Eric Stacey (Screenwriter, Producer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor), grew up in Hollywood. Over a career spanning thirty years, Eric worked in film and television as an actor, production assistant, writer, assistant director and editor on features, series and industrials. After co-producing the six hour PBS travel series, “America’s Scenic Rail Journeys,” Eric decided to begin making his own films. In 1998, Eric’s documentary, “The Waldorf Promise,” won the prestigious CINE Golden Eagle. A number of documentaries followed, as well as Eric’s first feature, “Director’s Cut: Metalface,”
(2003) a micro-budget comedy-horror film (Best Horror/Comedy – Shriekfest). NOTE: The Philips kids watch a clip from “Metalface” the night before they are discovered murdered. In 2007, having become a permanent resident of Portland, Oregon, Eric teamed up with documentarian Jane Turville to make the acclaimed documentary, “A Passion for Sustainability,” focusing on twelve Oregon businesses following the principles of The Natural Step movement (PBS). Eric’s second feature (2011) is “Purple Mind,” about an Iraq combat veteran’s struggle adjusting to civilian life while suffering the effects of PTSD. (Ytinifni Pictures – available from WalMart, Best Buy and online) (Browse all of Eric’s films at the Landfall Productions website)
