From the NSC, Raymond organized inter-agency task forces to bombard the U.S. public with hyped-up propaganda about the Soviet threat in Central America and in Afghanistan. Raymond's goal was to change the way Americans viewed these dangers, a process that the Reagan administration internally called "perception management."
Scores of documents about this operation were released during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987, but Washington-based journalists never paid much attention to the evidence about how they had been manipulated by these propaganda tactics, which included rewarding cooperative reporters with government-sponsored "leaks" and punishing those who wouldn't parrot the lies with whispering campaigns in the ears of their editors and bureau chiefs.
Even after the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed in 1986 and Casey died of brain cancer in 1987, the Republicans fought to keep secret the remarkable story of this public diplomacy apparatus. As part of a deal to get three moderate Republican senators to join Democrats in signing the Iran-Contra report, Democratic leaders dropped a draft chapter on the CIA's domestic propaganda role.
Thus, the American people were spared the chapter's troubling conclusion: that a covert propaganda apparatus had existed, run by "one of the CIA's most senior specialists, sent to the NSC by Bill Casey, to create and coordinate an inter-agency public-diplomacy mechanism [which] did what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might do. [It] attempted to manipulate the media, the Congress and public opinion to support the Reagan administration's policies." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iran-Contra's Lost Chapter."]
Raping Russians
Hiding the unspeakable realities of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan was almost as high a priority as concealing the U.S.-backed slaughter in Central America. Reagan's pet "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan as in Nicaragua were tainted by the drug trade as well as by well-documented cases of torture, rape and murder.
Yet, Raymond and his propagandists were always looking for new ways to "sell" the wars to the American people, leading to a clash with CIA officer Gust Avrakotos, who was overseeing the Afghan conflict and who had developed his own close ties to Rep. Charlie Wilson.
According to author George Crile, whose book Charlie Wilson's War provided a loose framework for the movie of the same name, Avrakotos clashed with Raymond and other senior Reagan administration officials when they proposed unrealistic propaganda themes regarding Afghanistan.
One of Raymond's ideas was to get some Russian soldiers to "defect" and then fly them from Afghanistan to Washington where they would renounce communism. The problem, as Avrakotos explained, was that the Afghan mujahedeen routinely tortured and then murdered any Soviet soldier who fell into their hands, except for a few who were kept around for anal rape.
"For Avrakotos, 1985 was a year of right-wing craziness," Crile wrote...
"A band of well-placed anti-Communist enthusiasts in the administration had come up with a plan they believed would bring down the Red Army, if the CIA would only be willing to implement it. The leading advocates of this plan included Richard Perle at the Pentagon. ... [NSC aide] Oliver North also checked in briefly, but the man who set Avrakotos's teeth on edge most was Walt Raymond, another NSC staffer who had spent twenty years with the CIA as a propagandist."Their idea was to encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen. As Avrakotos derisively describes it, "The muj were supposed to set up loudspeakers in the mountains announcing such things as "Lay down your arms, there is a passage to the West and to freedom."' Once news of this program made its way through the Red Army, it was argued, there would be a flood of defectors. ...
"Avrakotos thought North and Perle were 'cuckoos of the Far Right,' and he soon felt quite certain that Raymond, the man who seemed to be the intellectual ringleader, was truly detached from reality. 'What Russian in his right mind would defect to those f*ckers all armed to the teeth,' Avrakotos said in frustration. 'To begin with, anyone defecting to the Dushman would have to be a crook, a thief or someone who wanted to get cornholed every day, because nine out of ten prisoners were dead within twenty-four hours and they were always turned into concubines by the mujahideen. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to have them all shot.'
"The meeting [with Raymond's team] went very badly indeed. Gust [Avrakotos] accused North and Perle of being idiots. ... Avrakotos said to Walt Raymond, 'You know, Walt, you're just a f*cking a**hole, you're irrelevant.'"
However, as Crile wrote, Avrakotos...
"greatly underestimated the political power and determination of the group, who went directly to [CIA Director] Bill Casey to angrily protest Avrakotos's insulting manner. The director complained to [CIA operations official] Clair George, who responded by forbidding Avrakotos to attend any more interagency meetings without a CIA nanny present..."Avrakotos arrived for one of these White House sessions armed with five huge photographic blowups. ... One of them showed two Russian sergeants being used as concubines. Another had a Russian hanging from the turret of a tank with a vital part of his anatomy removed. ... 'If you were a sane f*cking Russian, would you defect to these people?' he had demanded of Perle.
"But the issue wouldn't go away. Perle, Raymond, and the others continued to insist that the Agency find and send back to the United States the many Russian defectors they seemed to believe, despite Avrakotos's denials, the mujahideen were harboring. ...
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