2010-07-29

How Gloria Steinem's CIA Role Was Censored

How Gloria Steinem's CIA Role Was Censored

June 17, 2010
(Like Barack Obama, Feminist Gloria Steinem is a CIA asset tasked with subverting the United States in the interests of Illuminati banker world government. This article confirms that the "women's movement" is a psy-op; and we can infer that this is also true of "gay rights."  Essentially, the Illuminati is using  psychological warfare techniques against the domestic population. Like Barack Obama, Steinem came from a dysfunctional Jewish family and saw collaboration and treason as the only path to personal advancement.)

FLASHBACK TO 1976

by Nancy Borman

Reprinted from the Village Voice May 21, 1979, pp. 117-122. Abridged by Henry Makow

At Random House on March 15, 1976, "Feminist Revolution" was just another women's book in production. It consisted of a multifaceted analysis of the women's liberation movement edited by members of Redstockings, an early radical feminist group. A self-published edition released the previous fall had stirred up controversy with its indictment of liberals, lesbian pseudo-leftists, and foundation grant feminists. 5000 copies had sold out.

Part of the book-some say the most interesting part-was titled "Agents, Opportunists and Fools." It attempted to link the CIA and the corporate establishment to several individuals and institutions connected with Ms. Magazine... Feminist Revolution had passed an initial libel reading by Random House's legal department on March 2nd, and a contract was signed in the office that March morning. 20,000 copies of the book were scheduled to hit the stores in June.

That afternoon, an unannounced visitor appeared in the citadel of the free press. A presumably angry Gloria Steinem asked to see Random House president Robert Bernstein. She was there to hand-deliver a letter from her attorney threatening to sue for libel unless the chapter on the CIA was removed from the book.

No one knows what Steinem and Bernstein said in their private meeting, and it may have been just coincidence that, within weeks Random House was blitzed with similar threats from other people and groups mentioned in the CIA chapter: Clay Felker, Women's Action AlIiance, Warner Communications, Franklin Thomas, the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, and Katherine Graham.



But, in any case, publication of Feminist Revolution was delayed nearly 3 years; the printing run was cut to 12,500, despite 13,000 advance orders; and when the book was finally released last month, the chapter on Gloria Steinem and the CIA had been deleted in its entirety. Somehow, the word "abridged" on the cover fails to answer the question: What happened?

CENSORED

On March 21st, of this year, 6 weeks after Feminist Revolution was finally published, 5 members of Redstockings held a press conference to argue that their book would be better described as "censored." Katie Sarachild, Colette Price, Carol Hanisch, Sherry Lipsky, and Jane Barry said that at first they had been astonished that Random House caved into pressure to ax the chapter.

But they also laid the blame on Steinem and her associates for using "libel" claims to stifle debate within the women's movement and to suppress embarrassing information about themselves. Price pointed out that the Zenger trial, which launched the American tradition of freedom of the press, was a libel case.

The near-total blackout on the Steinem/Random House censorship story is reminiscent of the level of enthusiasm Redstockings encountered when they first tried to get coverage for the story of Steinem and the CIA.

Their 16-page tabloid "press release" charging that Steinem had covered up a 10-year association with the CIA and that Ms. magazine, which she had founded, was endangering the women's liberation movement struck the 1975 MORE conference like a new war coming over the wire. The hotel was abuzz and people snatched up the releases, but when it came to actually writing the story, nearly everyone bowed out.

One reporter criticized the women for not obtaining Steinem's side of the story before publishing the release. Others skimmed the
material and dismissed it as old news, which was partially true. Still others
thought it was McCarthyistic both in tone and casual conclusions.

In 1967 both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts' expose of CIA funding of the National Student Association and other organizations. Steinem was the founder and director of one of those groups, Independent Research Service, for which she had solicited and obtained CIA money to carry out covert operations at Communist youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. Unlike most of the other principals in the scandal, who had repudiated their past work with the agency and turned over information to the press, Steinem defended her secret deal with the CIA, calling the undermining of the youth festivals "the CIA's finest hour."

Random House first learned of Feminist Revolution in January 1976, when Betty Friedan mentioned it to her editor James Silberman, also Random House vice president, publisher, and editor-in-chief. Random House eagerly bought the manuscript, offering the authors a $12,000 advance and a June publication date, pending the outcome of a libel reading by an outside law firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Of the lawyers' few objections, the only one that involved the chapters on the CIA was Redstockings' charge that a particular police agent had conceived of and pushed black community activists into a conspiracy to bomb the Statue of Liberty. Redstockings submitted further documentation on each point and no further issue was taken with any part of the book before the contract was signed on March 15. An editorial fact sheet was drawn up for the company's sales conference confirming the June 1976 pub date, and on March 18 the authors were paid half of their advance...


MS MAGAZINE FUNDED BY CIA

Without anyone saying how they had heard about the book, or specifically what they felt should be changed, a flurry of letters arrived at Random House from some of the city's most powerful law firms on behalf of several people and groups involved in the Steinem/CIA chapter.

*Women's Action AlIiance, a tax-exempt information-gathering organization founded by Gloria Steinem in 1971. WAA's attorney, Jeanne Drewson, of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, said in her letter that permission to reprint a WAA form letter was denied, "to preserve any rights of the Alliance or persons associated with the Alliance to pursue their legal remedies for defamation and libel arising out of the publication of Feminist Revolution."

Although Drewson was pressed for specifics by Random House general counsel Gerald Hollingsworth, there seems to be no record of any further details.

*Clay Felker then publisher of New York magazine. Felker, too, had attended the World Youth Festival in Helsinki and had edited the Independent Research Service's Helsinki Youth News, a CIA-funded daily newspaper. Felker claimed that he did not know about the CIA funding of the newspaper at the time, but as he told the Daily News, in 1975: "it was my understanding that this was an anti-Communist effort. I was an anti-Communist and I remain an anti-Communist today."

Felker's attorney, E. Douglas Hamilton of Hall, McNicol, Marett and Hamilton, wrote to Hollingsworth, warning that "the essence of the charge in the article is that Mr. Felker and his magazine [New York] were working for the CIA," and that this is "false and libelous." He says now he dropped the correspondence because he only meant to convey that the material about Felker was "exaggerated."

*Ms. magazine, founded by Steinem and others. Ms, was criticized in the Steinem/CIA chapter for having "substituted itself" for the "original,
authentic activists" of the women's liberation movement, and for pushing an
alternative to radicalism, Nancy Wechsler of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst
represented both Ms. and Steinem in their dealings with Random House.

*Warner Communications, which invested $1 million in Ms. (virtually 100% of the capital although they took only 25% of the stock). Redstockings cited the Warner deal as an example of the "curious financing" of Ms. Warner was also represented by Paul, Weiss. Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

*Franklin Thomas, a board member of Women's Action Alliance (and recently named president of the Ford Foundation). Redstockings pointed out that he was the same Franklin Thomas who participated in the prosecution of the notorious Statue of Liberty bombing conspiracy case in 1975 that sent three black activists to prison. Thomas, who is also black, now says that he had nothing to do with the investigation of the case, and that he would not have authorized the threat of suit. He also says he doesn't remember how he learned about the book, but as Steinem's frequent social escort, it would not have been difficult for him to find out.

*The Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, which conducts international seminars for women in Asia and Latin America. OEF was identified in a 1975 article in Counterspy as allegedly helping the CIA obtain dossiers on individuals and women's groups in those regions. They issued a denial at the time. Redstockings used information from the Counterspy story to show the CIA's interest in the international women's movement, without reporting in the book OEF's denial. Hollingsworth talked to Marilyn Richards in the OEF office in Washington, D.C., to try to pin down what parts of the book the fund considered libelous. According to the correspondence files released to Redstockings by Steinmetz, no libel specifics were ever made.

 *Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek, described on a cover of Ms. in 1974 as "the most powerful woman in America." Feminist Revolution brought up the $20,000 she had initially invested in Ms. to support their contention that Steinem was installed as a spokesperson of the women's movement by the "rich and powerful." Graham sent off a note to Bernstein, which was characterized by a Random House spokesperson as "personal." ....

OVERTHROW JULY 1979

It is noteworthy that at the first American Writer's Congress at the end of 1981, ex-CIA operative Gloria Steinem was prominent on the dais; that all present nodded affirmatively at her threats of libel suits against those who'd questioned the propriety of a leading feminist spokesperson having so notorious and open a CIA background; and that not a single writer present rose to speak up for the Redstockings point-of-view.

It was as if the very possibility of a critical alternative on the Left had been erased, obliterated by four years of Carter. First by enlisting the Left's acquiescence during the '76 campaign, then by offering clemency and indicting a few token FBI agents, Carter's centrist strategy concluded startling political penetration of the Left which split WUO, Prairie Fire, their entire following.

The majority were induced to 'lay down their arms,' to refrain from 'counterproductive' agitation in hope of future reforms by a visibly unsympathetic administration. Significantly, before 1977 was out, 5 members of the "R.C." (anti-'Inversion') faction of Prairie Fire/WUO (including Clayton Von Lydegraf and cadres in in Houston and L.A., were arrested during the government-sponsored Houston International Women's Conference for plotting to blow up the house of L.A. State Sen. Briggs, sponsor of the Calif. anti-gay initiative.

The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

No comments: