Perhaps I underestimate the joy of being given a silly nickname by the Leader of the Free World, but I’m having a hard time understanding why media big feet are so taken by the nation’s new Charmer in Chief. Leave aside the extreme right-wing agenda he’s pursuing when by any fair measure of voting he lost the election. Forget that he began his term by breaking his key campaign promises. And ignore his frequent and unapologetic lies about his commitment to bipartisan governance. What about the fact that, perhaps more than any President since Nixon, Bush holds the media and its denizens in utter contempt?
Take for example Bush’s decision to appoint Otto Reich to head the Latin American office in the State Department. As Peter Kornbluh discusses elsewhere in this issue [see “Bush’s Contra Buddies,” page 6], Reich’s job in the Reagan Administration was simply to lie to (and about) the media. He did it very well. According to Walter Raymond–the CIA propaganda specialist whom William Casey transferred to the National Security Council in order to circumvent the 1947 National Security Act, which restricted CIA involvement in domestic propaganda operations–the purpose of Reich’s Office of Public Diplomacy was to “concentrate on gluing black hats on the sandinistas and white hats on the UNO [contras].” Staffed by senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, military intelligence and psychological warfare, the OPD offered privileges to favored journalists, placed ghostwritten articles over the signatures of contra leaders in leading opinion magazines and on Op-Ed pages, and publicized nasty stories about the Sandinistas, true or not. In its first year, it sent attacks on the Sandinistas to 1,600 college libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, 107 religious organizations and countless reporters, right-wing lobbyists and members of Congress. It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk-show engagements. In just one week of March 1985, the OPD officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of the Wall Street Journal into publishing an Op-Ed about Nicaragua penned by an unknown professor, having guided an NBC news story on the contras and having written and edited Op-Ed articles to be signed by contra spokesmen, as well as having planted false stories in the media about a visiting Congressman’s experiences in Nicaragua.
Among the OPD’s lies were stories that portrayed the Sandinistas as virulent anti-Semites, that reported a Soviet shipment of MIG jets to Managua and that purported to reveal that US reporters in Nicaragua were receiving sexual favors–hetero- and homosexual–from Sandinista agents in exchange for pro-Communist reporting. That last lie, published in the July 29, 1985, New York magazine, came directly from Reich.
Perhaps OPD’s most important effort was to convince Congress and the media of the contras‘ democratic bona fides. They did this by pretending that the men handpicked by North as front men were operationally in charge of contra political and military operations. In addition to signing the names of these men to fake Op-Ed articles, Reich and company coached them on how to lie whenever they were asked about being on the US government payroll, as well as about their aims for their US-funded armies. Together with top officials of the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council, the OPD spent millions to paint civilians as the true leaders of the contras. The United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), founded in San José, Costa Rica, in June 1985, thanks in large part to the efforts of Oliver North, was designed to manufacture an acceptably “democratic” face for the contra leadership. According to a private 1985 memo by Robert Owen, North’s liaison with the contras, the UNO was entirely “a creation of the USG[overnment] to garner support from Congress.” Its leaders were “liars” and “greed and power motivated.”
Reporting on Reich’s appointment has been decidedly unsensational. The LA Times has ignored it. The New York Times and the Washington Post assigned to the story knowledgeable reporters who covered Central America, but the results reflected the strictures of journalistic objectivity as much as the outrageousness of Reich’s activities. Raymond Bonner and Christopher Marquis wrote in the Times that “a government investigation concluded that Mr. Reich’s office engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda.” (In a backhanded tribute to Bonner’s brilliant Central American reporting of the 1980s, Reich called the Times editors with a vicious personal attack on the journalist hoping to get him taken off the story.) Karen DeYoung noted in the Post that the OPD “used what critics called legally questionable means to promote favorable publicity and political support for the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua in their war against the Cuba-backed Sandinista government.” The Economist was even more generous, insisting that Reich “got marginally caught up in the Iran/contra scandal when his office was accused of engaging in covert propaganda activities to get Americans’ support for the Nicaraguan contras.” No major paper has yet addressed the issue in an editorial.
Most reports on the appointment have focused on it as payback to extremist Miami Cubans and brother Jeb for their instrumental role in helping Bush hijack Florida and hence the election. (Reich regularly likens Cuba to Auschwitz and to an antebellum slave plantation.) Perhaps it is. But Reich’s appointment ought to be recognized as an intentional kick in the teeth to the media, as well as a testament to its lack of institutional memory.
When Kornbluh and Robert Parry first revealed the activities of the OPD in Foreign Policy magazine in 1988, Reich, according to a Boston Globe report, compared the fully accurate article to Hitler’s “big lie” technique regarding the Final Solution. It’s hard to imagine a more offensive manipulation of the murder of millions than using it to slander journalists and lie to the country about an illegal war–but hell, the Bush people are just getting started.
