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A partial list of the Knights of Malta reads like a Who's Who of American Catholicism:
- William Casey -- CIA Director.
- John McCone -- CIA Director.
- William Colby -- CIA Director.
- William Donovan -- OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history.
- Frank Shakespeare -- Director of such propaganda organizations as the U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Also executive vice-president of CBS-TV and vice-chairman of RKO General Inc. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.
- William Simon -- Treasury Secretary under President Nixon. In the private sector, he has become one of America's 400 richest individuals by working in international finance. Today he is the President of the John M. Olin Foundation, a major funder of right-wing think tanks.
- William F. Buckley, Jr. -- CIA agent, conservative pundit and mass media personality.
- James Buckley -- William's brother, head of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
- Clare Boothe Luce - The grand dame of the Cold War was also a Dame of Malta. She was a popular playwright and the wife of the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine.
- Francis X Stankard - CEO of the international division of Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller institution. (Nelson Rockefeller was also a major CIA figure.)
- John Farrell -- President, U.S. Steel
- Lee Iacocca -- Chairman, General Motors
- William S. Schreyer -- Chairman, Merrill Lynch.
- Richard R. Shinn -- Chairman, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
- Joseph Kennedy -- Founder of the Kennedy empire.
- Baron Hilton -- Owner, Hilton Hotel chain.
- Patrick J. Frawley Jr. -- Heir, Schick razor fortune. Frawley is a famous funder of right-wing Catholic causes, such as the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
- Ralph Abplanalp - Aerosol magnate.
- Martin F. Shea - Executive vice president of Morgan Guaranty Trust.
- Joseph Brennan - Chairman of the executive committee of the Emigrant Savings Bank of New York.
- J. Peter Grace -- President, W.R. Grace Company. He was a key figure in Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists and spies to the U.S. Many were war criminals whose atrocities were excused in their service to the CIA.
- Thomas Bolan -- Of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan, the law firm of Senator McCarthy's deceased aide Roy Cohn.
- Bowie Kuhn -- Baseball Comissioner
- Cardinal John O'Connor -- Extreme right-wing leader among American Catholics, and fervent abortion opponent.
- Cardinal Francis Spellman -- The "American Pope" was at one time the most powerful Catholic in America, an arch-conservative and a rabid anti-communist.
- Cardinal Bernard Law - One of the highest-ranking conservatives in the American church.
- Alexander Haig -- Secretary of State under President Reagan.
- Admiral James D. Watkins -- Hard-line chief of naval operations under President Reagan.
- Jeremy Denton -- Senator (R--Al).
- Pete Domenici -- Senator (R-New Mexico).
- Walter J. Hickel - Governor of Alaska and secretary of the interior.
When this group gets together, the topics are spying, business and politics.
The CIA has also used other religious and charity organizations as fronts. For example, John F. Kennedy -- another anticommunist Roman Catholic who greatly expanded covert operations -- created the U.S. Peace Corps to serve as cover for CIA operatives. The CIA has also made extensive use of missionaries, with the blessings of many right-wing, anticommunist Christian denominations.
But the World Caught On"
It was only a matter of time before other nations caught on to these front organizations. They learned that when the CIA comes to their countries to commit their crimes and atrocities, they come disguised as American journalists, businessmen, missionaries and charity volunteers. Unfortunately, foreigners are now targeting these professions as hostile. In Lebanon, terrorists held U.S. journalist Terry Anderson hostage for nearly seven years, on the not unreasonable assumption that he was a spy. Whether or not this was true is beside the point. The CIA has, by way of the endeavors just discussed, inadvertently put all Americans abroad at risk, whether they are CIA agents or not. In hearings before the Senate in 1996, many organizations urged Congress to stop using their professions as CIA cover. Don Argue of the National Association of Evangelicals testified, "Such use of missionary agents for covert activities by the CIA would be unethical and immoral."13
From the Cold War to the Class War
As noted above, academia was the first major institution to denounce the crimes of the CIA. Why the first? One reason is that scholars conduct their own extensive research into world affairs, so naturally they were the first to learn the truth. This is the main reason why protest against the Vietnam War and the CIA erupted first among students on the nation's campuses. By the end of the Vietnam War, the CIA had suffered a "brain drain" as its academic allies became its most articulate, passionate and eloquent critics.
The social revolutions of the 60s terrified the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence and a truly paranoid man, was convinced the Soviets had masterminded the entire antiwar movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared this conviction. The CIA had spied on student groups throughout the 60s, but in 1968 President Johnson dramatically stepped up the effort with Operation CHAOS. This initially called for 50 CIA agents to go undercover as student radicals, penetrate their antiwar organizations and root out the "Russian spies" who were causing the rebellion. Tellingly, they never found a single spy. The agents also began a campaign of wire-tapping, mail-opening, burglary, deception, intimidation and disruption against thousands of protesting American civilians.
By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies.14 When academia learned of this, its outrage grew.
The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate.
The CIA's Fingerprints Were All Over Watergate
First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, infuriating businessmen with statements like, "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam, and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn't stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation's elite.
As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon's dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents -- E. Howard Hunt and James McCord -- as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon's illegal campaign contributions.
The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon's crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know about them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation.
Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA's main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation's highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon's activities.
