By
John Anderson - Tony Widing - Anders Leopold |
(Leopold Report 100925)
In the first four articles, we revealed that three US citizens who appeared to the investigators of the Palme murder as three independent sources with three different stories in reality was an organized group of disinformants that from 1988 onwards attacked and sabotaged the murder investigation. The group’s most central and prominent participant was Professor Robert Harkavy, who also stayed with the Swedish Peace Research Institute SIPRI in the summer of 1985, and at several occasions later, after the Palme murder.
Further, we have shown that two of the three disinformants were professors at same university, Pennsylvania State University. Each of the three had extensive connections to the US and foreign secret services. Further, our fact-finding shows that the FBI over several years did its utmost to protect the disinformants and give them cover, even by lying to the Swedish investigators. The Swedish authorities were given the impression that this was a friendly cooperation to assist solving the murder, never understanding that in fact they were being deceived by the FBI.
We also showed that the CIA from the beginning participated on the spot in Stockholm by confusing the Swedish authorities from day one, i. a. by providing information, personnel and equipment to direct and manipulate the investigation into a Kurdish track, with the consequence of leaving overall responsibility for the murder with the former Soviet Union. All of this was pure disinformation that kept investigators working for several wasted years. (This will be significantly substantiated in a later article.) The FBI, on the other hand, was not willing to work with Palme investigators in Stockholm, but forced them to maintain a drawn-out and tedious correspondence with the FBI in Washington, in some cases via London and/or Interpol.
Command and Control
The FBI and the CIA would never have acted in this manner on their own. This was a matter of diplomatic relations between two nations. Decisions to deceive the Swedish authorities in connection with the murder of their own prime minister must have been taken at very high level.
The order to protect the disinformants, if necessary by way of lies, must formally have gone from the Justice Department to the FBI Director, and the Justice Department must have acted under orders from the White House, probably the National Security Council (NSC). The CIA reported at the time directly to the White House.
The NSC must have had a strong interest in protecting the disinformation operations in Stockholm from day one. The only possible explanation is that the NSC did not want the Palme murder solved. Why?
To answer that question, we start by investigating the connections from the disinformation group to the NSC.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (the name means Penn's Woodland) is a state in the north-eastern United States with approx. 12.6 million inhabitants (about 11.9 in 1982), making it the sixth most populous of America's 50 states. Counted as area it is #33 with approx. 119,000 km2. The capital Philadelphia and its surroundings is the nation's fourth most populous urban area (5.8 million). (Sources for this and the following paragraphs are Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipeda).
At the beginning of the American War of Independence, Pennsylvania was geographically the central state in the colonized regions, and a main centre for military, economic and political activities. In 1774, 12 colonies sent representatives to the First Continental Congress that convened in Philadelphia. The following year the Second Congress convened, also in Philadelphia. This Congress drafted the American Declaration of Independence that was signed in Philadelphia at 4 July 1776. The 4th of July is America's National Day.
In 1777, the Confederation Articles were prepared in York, Pennsylvania, by representatives of the 13 colonies that thus established the United States in rebellion against the British Crown. In 1787, Pennsylvania was the second state to sign the completed Constitution (five days after Delaware that was the first). Philadelphia was the capital of the American Confederation and the infant United States from 1783 to 1789), and continued as a temporary capital until the development of Washington was completed in 1800.
Pennsylvania was also a military centre during the American Civil War 1861-65. Unionists won one of their most important victories in the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in 1863. After the civil war, Pennsylvania grew further into a major US commercial power hub.
Pennsylvania and Philadelphia feature therefore prominently in the history of the United States, and is also today far more important politically and commercially than the perception we usually have in Scandinavia.
William Penn - New Sweden
Pennsylvania also has an interesting historical connection to Sweden.
New Sweden was a Swedish colony existing through the years 1638-1655. It was situated at both sides of the Delaware River and Bay, and covered parts of what today are the states Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1655, the area was taken over by the Dutch colony, and in 1681, everything was incorporated in the British possessions. Sweden maintained spiritual relations with New Sweden for more than a hundred years.
The Swedish colonists arrived to Pennsylvania in 1643, and were then the first European colonists. The territory was later taken over by the British Crown, which in 1681 granted it to the British Quaker William Penn. He founded the colony that later became the state of Pennsylvania. The colony built on principles of democracy, freedom and the rule of law that at the time were groundbreaking.
The shortest road from Pennsylvania to Stockholm
We have seen how short the road was from the Palme murder investigation to Pennsylvania. Now, we will show that the road is just as short back to Sweden.
There are a number of roads that can be followed from the disinformation group back to Stockholm. We choose to follow the simplest, easiest and shortest road.
Professor Robert Harkavy at Pennsylvania State University was the group's most prominent participant. It appears from his extensive CV (see part 1)that he through his entire career was working on defence, foreign and security policy, and that he did work for and had relations to most major governmental institutions in these areas.
It also appears that he at least from 1977 had a relationship with a very special institution at the "neighbour university" University of Pennsylvania, called Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He was used as a lecturer and wrote for its journal Orbis.
Foreign Policy Research Institute
In 1967, the New York Times (NYT 1967:1, 32) revealed that the FPRI had been funded directly by the CIA since the fifties.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences (1961:103-106), the FPRI was from its establishment in 1955 funded by the very right-wing Richardson Foundation, which seemed to have the funding of FPRI and its "subsidiary", the Institute for American Strategy (IAS) as its only activity of significance. In a response, the FPRI President Robert Strausz-Hupé confirmed that this had been its main funding until 1959 (Strausz-Hupé 1961).
Diamond (1990, 1991) writes with Friedman (1980) as an extra sub-source that ”the Smith-Richardson Foundation has a history of sponsoring CIA-linked media projects and leadership training programs for personnel from the CIA and the Department of Defence (DoD)”.
A Senate report (Church Committee 1976:181) found that ”until 1967, the Agency maintained covert ties to American foundations in order to pass funds secretly to private groups whose work the CIA supported”.
Other sources for the institute’s CIA ties are Bellant (1991:35), Colby and Dennett (1995:371), Ramparts (1966a:39-40), and Scott (1972:67). FPRI’s ties to the CIA and other US intelligence agencies also appear through common use of personnel and other networks; see below.
Herman and O'Sullivan (1989:100) described the FPRI as known for its extreme militaristic views. These two authors worked at the University of Pennsylvania when the book was written and hence had good knowledge of the FPRI, located at the same university.
FPRI was founded in 1955 by Robert Strausz-Hupé who through all years was its grand old man until he died in 2002. His two most important partners in the management of FPRI was from the beginning William Kintner and Stefan T. Possony. Kintner died in 1997 at the age of 81, and Possony in 1995, 82 years old.
All three were veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the CIA.
In 1955, they founded the FPRIs journal Orbis. Both the CIA and the FBI expressed strong enthusiasm for the journal (Diamond 1992:148).
The FPRI was originally established as an apparently "normal" university institute, but its ties to the University of Pennsylvania was broken in 1970 after the university administration had expressed its dissatisfaction with Strausz-Hupé’s too right-wing views and his close ties to the Nixon administration (NYT 1976 , 2002). This must of course be viewed in the context of the revelation some years earlier that the FPRI was funded by the CIA.
At least in the year 1981, the FPRI had a separate office in Washington DC (NYT 1981b). It is likely that this was established after Ronald Reagan was elected president and existed in his time, possibly also later.
Robert Strausz-Hupé - Ambassador to Sweden
Robert Strausz-Hupé was born in Vienna in Austria in 1903, came to the US in 1923, and became an American citizen in 1938. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania from 1946.
He was i. a. a foreign policy adviser for the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (who lost) and Richard Nixon (who won) during the election campaigns in 1964 and 1968, respectively (NYT, 1967, 2002).
Strausz-Hupé was then so well known as a cold warrior that he had many allies and was part of a large right-wing network in American politics. In 1969, the newly elected President Nixon nominated his close adviser as ambassador to Morocco, but the nomination was immediately blocked by the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, William J. Fulbright, who simply cancelled the regular hearing. Fulbright felt that Strausz-Hupé was ”the very epitome of a hard-line, no compromise approach to Communism” (NYT 1969b, 2002).
Nixon chose not to take up the fight against the Senate, but he got Strausz-Hupé approved as ambassador to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the Maldives from 1970 to 1972.
From 1972 to 1974, he was Ambassador to Belgium. Next, in the period 1974-76, he was Ambassador to Sweden. This was a somewhat special ambassador post after Sweden had been without American representation at ambassador level because of Palme’s statements about the Vietnam War - the so-called "years of frost” (1972-1974). The Americans criticized Sweden's attitude to the Vietnam War in several manners. For example, Sweden had received many US deserters; Palme had personally participated in a protest march in Stockholm together with the North Vietnamese ambassador in Moscow, and he had made a number of statements in which he compared the Americans’ Vietnam war to Hitler and genocide.
It also contributed to the bitter relationship that the Swedish government had taken a very hostile approach to Pinochet's government after the military coup in Chile in 1973, Sweden’s positive attitude to Fidel Castro and Cuba, as well as Sweden’s support to various liberation movements in Africa.
In interviews with Swedish radio, several American reporters said that Strausz-Hupé had been appointed "as a somewhat evil political gesture from a still annoyed President Nixon" (Leifland 1997:181).
Senator Fulbright was this time even more to the point. He described the new ambassador as one of "the US’ most prominent anti-communists and a threat to world peace" (Leifland 1997:181).
After the period in Sweden, Strausz-Hupé was the US Ambassador to NATO from 1976 to 1977, when he had to resign because Jimmy Carter and the Democrats won the presidential election.
In 1981, the Republicans again won with Ronald Reagan, and Strausz-Hupé was appointed to the very important post as Ambassador to Turkey at the age of 79 years.
We assume that there were four reasons behind the choice of Strausz-Hupé:
1) The Reagan administration wanted an ambassador who based on his own convictions could communicate easily with the new military coup regime.
2) The Reagan administration's strategy against "The Evil Empire" gave Turkey an even stronger role than previously as a border nation to the Soviet Union.
3) After the fall of the Shah and the embassy occupation in Iran, the US had lost a good partner, and instead gained a new enemy country under a mullah rule. Turkey is as a neighbouring country perfect for US operations against Iran. In this, the new military regime in Turkey had common interests with the US.
4) The US could now also support Turkey’s ambition for a military solution to the "Kurdish problem". This was extremely well aligned to the views of the American ambassador Strausz-Hupé.
The assignment also fit very well with Strausz-Hupé’s own dedication to fight communism. In his mind, he was now positioned in the middle of several important battle fields in “the War against the Evil Empire”.
In December 1985, Secretary of State George P. Schultz made an attempt to remove Strausz-Hupé, now 83, from the ambassador post in Turkey, but more powerful forces in the White House ensured that he remained until 1988, when he was 87 years old (NYT 1985).
In 1989, Strausz-Hupé returned to the FPRI as President Emeritus and Distinguished Diplomat-in-Residence (FPRI 2002).
The disinformation team from the Palme investigation is thus - via its most prominent participant - connected directly to the FPRI and its Ambassador Strausz-Hupé. In view of the fact that the so-called Kurdish lead that later proved to be a disinformation track was initiated by the CIA hours after the murder (some will argue even before!), it is worth noting that the ambassador to Turkey 1981-88 was Strausz-Hupé, and that he less than three months before the murder was allowed to stay in the job even against the Secretary of State’s will, and despite his very advanced age. What was it that the White House knew in December 1985 that the Secretary of State didn’t know? (We will investigate the entire complex Kurd track in a later article.)
Colonel William R. Kintner
Colonel William R. Kintner was one of the FPRI founders in 1955. He was Deputy Director and Strausz-Hupé’s second-in-command, and took over as Director and the Institute’s leader in 1969, when Strausz-Hupé started his ambassadorial career, until 1973 when he started his own. Later, he was the FPRIs President 1975-82. He was also editor of the FPRI journal Orbis. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania 1961-86. (PSU 2006, Sicherman 1997).
Kintner was born in 1915 in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the United States Military Academy West Point in 1940, and was an infantry officer in Europe during World War II and later in Korea during the Korean War. He was from early on an operative for the CIA's forerunner Office of Strategic Services (OSS). (Sicherman 1997).
He resigned from the Army as a colonel in 1961.
Later, he worked in the planning staff of the Minister of Defence and in the National Security Council (NSC), before he went into the academic world with the Cold War and foreign policy as his special areas. (PSU 2006, NYT 1997).
Kintner was first at the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University and later at Georgetown University. He was a formal contact person for the CIA, probably at both universities (see below about the CIA's use of the universities) (PSU 2006, NYT 1997).
In 1968, he was among the foreign policy planners in Nixon's transition team between the election and the inauguration (NYT 1997).
In 1973, Kintner was appointed as Nixon's ambassador to Thailand. At this time, Sweden and Thailand were among the most important third party countries in connection with the Vietnam War: Thailand as a base for political and military operations; Sweden as a rallying point for the European campaign against the Vietnam War, already influencing US public opinion. Nixon considered two out the three FPRI leaders as the best candidates for these ambassadorships.
The year after Kintner’s appointment, a scandalous CIA operation was revealed in Thailand. It was then discovered that Kintner personally had a relationship with the CIA. This sparked large student demonstrations and political pressure to have him removed. He returned to the US in 1975, and took over again as head of FPRI until 1982 (NYT 1974a, 1974b, 1997, PSU 2006). Kintner died in 1997.
Kintner appeared as deeply religious and belonged to the so-called Swedenborgian Church (Sicherman 1997). This movement was started by the Swede Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In the United States, it was established as a congregation in 1817, today known as the Swedenborgian Church of North America. In 1890, a faction broke out and established the General Church of New Jerusalem, with headquarters in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, which today is a suburb of Philadelphia, in an area in or near up to what at the time was "New Sweden". Wikipeda describes it as "bigger, newer and more conservative" than the other faction.
Kintner’s last book (1996) was “The Role of ancient Israel. Written with the Finger of God. A Swedenborgian perspective of the history of the israelites from Abraham to Jesus”. (PSU 2006).
Kintner was always very interested in Middle Eastern affairs. For example, he made a strong attack at the Soviet role in the Middle East in an article in the New York Times in 1983 (NYT 1983).
Stefan T Possony
Stefan T Possony (1913-1995) was - like Strausz- Hupé - born and raised in Vienna, Austria. (As a matter of fact, so was our desinformant Professor Oswald LeWinter from the neighbouring university.) He fled to Czechoslovakia after Hitler's occupation of Austria in 1938 and from there to Paris in 1939. In France, he was employed by the French Foreign Ministry as a consultant in psychological warfare. In the same period, he also was a consultant for the French Air Force. (Wikipeda, NYT 1995).
Possony was recruited by the OSS already while he was in France. In 1940, he went to the US where he was employed as a researcher at the OSS-affiliated Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was also a specialist on psychological warfare in the naval intelligence service (NI). (Weberman 1980:15 ff, NYT 1995).
From 1946, he served as special advisor on the Soviet Union and communism to the US Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, while he also was professor of international politics at Georgetown University. He was also a consultant for the Eisenhower administration. (Weberman 1980:15 ff, NYT 1995).
According to Los Angeles Times (1995), he was still working with intelligence at Pentagon when he in 1961 became Director of International Policy at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Here, he was given status of Professor Emeritus from 1985. (NYT 1995).
Apparently, he didn’t work much full-time at the FPRI after he was one of the institute's founders in 1955, but rather shared his time between the FPRI and Pentagon, later the Hoover Institution. He is always described as "member" of the FPRI. The FPRI published many of Possony’s publications and books, and he wrote several books together with Strausz-Hupé and Kintner (see below).
The current FPRI Director described Possony as one of Strausz-Hupé’s “close intellectual soul mates” (Sicherman 2003).
In 1970, Possony published the book The Strategy of Technology together with the famous science fiction writer Jerry E. Pournelle. The book described a strategy in which a country exploits its superior technological resources to develop weapons systems that force the enemy to its knees.
Possony is given credit for having introduced the original idea to deploy missile systems in space (the so-called Star Wars) while he worked at the Hoover Institution. From there he influenced President Reagan to launch the idea as the "Strategic Defense Initiative" in 1983 (Los Angeles Times 1995, Wikipeda).
In 1982. he was one of the founders of the International Strategic Studies Association in Washington, DC (Wikipeda).
FPRI Commissioned by the NSC and the JCS
The FPRI’s great importance, prominent position, and close ties to Washington is clearly shown through the cooperation that in 1958 was established between the FPRI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), that is, the military defence leadership, and the National War College (NWC) to implement a directive from the National Security Council (NSC) of the same year (Bell 1963:5-6, Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences 1961:103-106, Diamond 1995:47 ff, NYT 1961).
The FPRI was already one of the main organizers of a series of conferences called the National Military-Industrial Conference which was a meeting place for military personnel, intelligence people, and large corporations. Among these, the FPRI and its sister organization the American Security Council (ASC) were selected by the JCS and the NWC to establish the Institute for American Strategy (IAS), which later changed its name to American Security Council Foundation (ASCF). This was to become the operational agency for implementing the directive.
While the ASCF was the executive body, the FPRI provided the ideological contents. The seminar book American Strategy for the Nuclear Age was edited by Walter F. Hahn and John C. Neff of the FPRI. The “Bible”, Protracted Conflict, appeared the following year, written by Robert Strausz-Hupé personally with William M. Kintner, James E. Dougherty, and Alvin J. Cottrell (Bell 1963:6, Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences 1961:103-106).
The directive was initially secret, but became known to the public when the liberal senator William Fulbright at 2 August 1961 raised a question in the Senate about it, and inserted a memorandum about the matter in the Senate’s records (Fulbright 1961:13436-13442).
He quoted from the Directive that its purpose was:
“..to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of Communism”.
Fulbright further noted:
“The relationships between the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be re-examined from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the Administration. These relationships may give one particularly aggressive view a more direct and commanding influence upon military and civilian concepts of strategy than is desirable.”
New York Times (NYT 1961:1, 56) wrote about the Directive:
”President Eisenhower and his top policy leaders decreed that the ’cold war’ could not be fought as a series of separate and often unrelated actions, as with foreign aid and propaganda. Rather, it must be fought with a concentration of all the resources of the Government and with the full understanding and support of the civilian population. It was decided, in particular, that the military should be used to reinforce the ‘cold war’ effort. This was the substance of the still-classified ‘cold war policy’ paper of the National Security Council.
Its implementation in the Department of Defense was ordered through a series of directives and guidance papers, also classified, directed to the top civilian and uniformed authorities.”
This was therefore a highly important directive from the National Security Council, that roughly 20 years later became the central command authority for the Iran/Contra operations. In 1958, the NSC allied itself with the FPRI, its twin organization ASC and their common subsidiary IAS/ASCF, in a national effort to indoctrinate the population and the entire military apparatus in the cold war, in an operation where "all the government resources" were to be deployed.
NYT (1961) describes how the campaign developed:
”A number of officers of high and middle rank are indoctrinating their commands and the civilian population near their bases with political theories resembling those of the John Birch Society.”
John Birch Society was, as most know, one of the most extreme and militant right-wing organizations in the United States at this time.
Senator Fulbright wrote in his memo:
”In at least 11 instances of what apparently are implementations of the NSC policy, the actual programs [..] made use of extremely radical rightwing speakers and/or materials.”
One of the named speakers used as an example by Fulbright was the FPRI’s William Kintner (Diamond 1995:48).
The FPRI’s most important books
Strausz-Hupé, Kintner and Possony were all very prolific authors of books, publications, and articles. Below, we discuss the three most important books, to give an impression of the trio’s views on strategy and international politics:
Protracted Conflict (1959) was written by Strausz-Hupé, Kintner and the co-authors James E Dougherty and Alvin J Cottrell, with an appendix written by Possony. This was the "Bible" that was used in the propaganda operation commissioned by the NSC.
Here, the authors thoroughly discussed the continuing Soviet threat, and described the western world's natural tendency to hope for the best and wait until it is too late. They criticized the official policy that meant waiting for the attack and give the other party tactical flexibility, and argued for "halt and reverse". That's what in the Reagan era was called "rollback" and implies that the West should stop the communist expansion and win back lost areas.
The book pointed out that the West accepted status quo and at least officially abstained from interfering with “internal affairs” behind the Iron Curtain, while the Soviet Union was firmly committed to export the revolution. Thus, the West accepted a "war zone" on its own side and a "peace zone" behind the Iron Curtain. This way, most of the Cold War was played out at home. Further imbalance was created because our Western societies are open and diverse and easy to work in and extract information from, while the Communist societies were closed and totally controlled, and then again because the West sets moral limits on its actions, which hardly was done at the other side. We did not want to descend to the opponent's level, and thus let it have the strongest weapons. With such an imbalance, the development could in the long run go only one way.
The book had great influence in its time. Both Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger endorsed the book (Sicherman 2003).
In 1961, Strausz-Hupé, Possony, and Kintner published a new “Bible”, A Forward Strategy for America, which was a theoretical analysis of and strategy for the Cold War, an overall strategy involving the whole Free World.
The authors feared that the West was losing the Cold War, and suggested that it should meet the Soviet "protracted conflict" with the pressure along the entire perimeter of the Soviet area, while strongly supporting the neighbouring western regions. This would deprive the Soviet of tactical flexibility. By being present with superior military force, the Soviet threat could be defeated. The strategy must build on the premise that ”we cannot tolerate the survival of a political system which has both the growing capability and the ruthless will to destroy us”. Sicherman (2003) pointed out that the book argued for what was later called "regime change".
The trilogy was completed with Building the Atlantic World (1963) by Strausz-Hupé, Dougherty, and Kintner. The book i. a. recommended transforming NATO into a supranational union to avoid the western division on especially nuclear strategy and turn the balance of power permanently against the Soviet Union. This should be America's most important international goal. Otherwise, western discord would open doors for communist infiltration.
Much attention and good contracts
Already in 1958, before the first of these books had been published, and only three years after the FPRI was established, Strausz-Hupé was invited to participate in a discussion on American complacency and Soviet aggression on a Washington television station. The backdrop was that three key advisers to the government, including Robert C. Sprague of NSC, had argued that there was a risk for a sudden surprise attack by the Soviet Union, that the US was unprepared, and that US authorities kept the American people ignorant about this. (NYT 1958).
It was not long before the FPRI was granted a series of lucrative contracts from Washington.
In 1959, the FPRI was one of four institutes that got to share an appropriation of $300,000 (an enormous sum at the time) to study US foreign policy for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. The FPRI would take care of the US foreign policy towards Western Europe. (NYT 1959a).
The report was delivered in October of that year, and recommended a strong conventional and nuclear armament of NATO. (NYT 1959b).
Around the same time, the FPRI was granted a contract from the President's Committee to Study the United States' Military Aid Program. Strausz-Hupé stated that these two projects made up most of the FPRI’s funding at the time (Strausz-Hupé 1961).
An expression of how these ideas gained support is that the FPRI in 1964 was commissioned by the Planning Director of the US Air Force to conduct the study Alternative US Strategies and America's Future for $95,000, with Kintner as project manager. The next year, the same customer gave the FPRI an even larger contract, worth $163,000, for the report Evolution in Eastern Europe and its Implications for US Security (Klare 1970:54).
Later on, there were many more projects.
The FPRI, the White House, and the Republican Party
The huge NSC project in 1958 was only the beginning of a long and close relationship with the White House under Republican administrations. Here are some examples, in addition to the ambassador jobs for Strausz-Hupé and Kintner:
The New York Times reported in 1967 that Richard Nixon as part of his presidential campaign has built up his network to US universities and research institutions to establish an "energy bank" of around 100 academics. One of these was Strausz-Hupé, who was presented as the head of one of the USA's most prominent foreign policy think tanks. He was the only one personally named on this list, except for Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. Besides the FPRI and Hudson, Nixon would use the Hoover Institution, where Possony was Director of International Policy, and the Centre for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University that, as we shall see later, also was a close partner for the FPRI. (NYT 1967).
In fact, Strausz-Hupé came very close to be head of the National Security Council (NSC). Nixon was initially interested in using Strausz-Hupé because of his strategy to win the Vietnam war quickly by attacking North Vietnam directly, but he was persuaded to drop the idea, so he chose Henry Kissinger instead. (Sicherman 2003).
This was no great disappointment to the FPRI, since Kissinger, too, came from the FPRI, where he had been one of the institute’s early junior staff members - and thus one of Strausz-Hupé’s students! (Sicherman 2003). At that time, he had already been a year (1955) in the NSC as a consultant at the NSC's Operations Coordinating Board. In the period 1961-62, he was again back in the NSC. (Nobel Institute 1973, NYT 1968).
A short time before it was reported that Nixon wanted Kissinger, Nixon and some of his closest associates had a meeting with Strausz-Hupé, Kintner and Kissinger (NYT 1968). It was probably here that the final design was made - Kissinger as National Security Advisor (NSA), and his teacher Strausz-Hupé in a future, secret role.
As is well known, Kissinger later was appointed Secretary of State, but continued at the same time as head of the NSC - which was quite unusual. (This was not least because of the then ongoing operations in Chile that led to the coup against Allende.)
In April 1969, Strausz-Hupé participated in a consultation meeting with Nixon and the NSC staff. (NYT 1969a). This was shortly before Nixon's unsuccessful attempt to appoint Strausz-Hupé ambassador to Morocco, but still the beginning of his long career as ambassador.
Still another of the FPRI’s early junior staff members found his way into the Nixon administration: James Schlesinger, who became CIA Director (1973) and Defence Minister from 1973 to 1975 (Sicherman 2003).
One could almost say that the FPRI was about to get its own president when General Alexander M. Haig in 1979 decided to compete for the Republican nomination after he had completed his time as commander of NATO, since Haig at that time worked as security policy specialist at the FPRI! (NYT 1979) Haig had been Nixon's Chief of Staff, and Kissinger's deputy in the NSC. In fact, it was Haig who led the lobbying campaign against the Senate to ensure Strausz-Hupé's approval for ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives after he had been stopped as ambassador to Morocco (Sicherman 2003).
Haig withdrew from the nomination battle in December 1979, declaring his full support for Reagan, and became, as we know, Reagan's first Secretary of State. In January, 1981, the two had their first working meeting after Reagan’s inauguration. At that time, Haig had already appointed two executives to his staff. One of them was Harvey Sicherman, who was the FPRI’s Vice President for Research (since 1978) and a specialist in Middle East and national security, and today is the FPRI’s head. (NYT 1981a, FPRI 2010).
In the first part of December 1980, a very special meeting convened in the FPRI’s offices in Philadelphia. At one side of the table sat a delegation of Soviet weapons specialists headed by Georgi A. Arbatov, who was head of the Kremlin's Institute for USA and Canada and a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee. On the other side of the table sat a group of conservative Republicans with connections to the newly elected but not yet inaugurated President Reagan, under the leadership of William Kintner, who was then director of the FPRI. The meeting was described as "private", but was about the future of the draft SALT II agreement, which the year before had been negotiated by President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Leonid Brezhnev, and which Reagan supporters wanted to amend (or drop entirely). (NYT 1980).
In reality, this was negotiations between the world's two superpowers. This shows perhaps even more than all the other facts how strongly embedded the FPRI was in the Reagan community, and how important it was as part of the team of defence and security policy advisors that now set out to destroy the "evil empire", with the NSC as the central executive staff. This NSC was soon after revealed as responsible for the Iran/Contra scandal, told the FBI to keep its protective hands over the disinformation group from Pennsylvania, and instructed the CIA to launch its own disinformation operations against the Palme investigation.
No wonder the FPRI around this time established a Washington office.
A particularly piquant connection is that Arbatov was the Soviet member of the International Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, better known as the Palme Commission that Olof Palme had established in September of that year, four months before the meeting at the FPRI. (Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences 1980). We can assume that the hawks in Washington had their special opinions about Palme’s apparent alliance with the enemy.
FPRI: Disinformation and psychological warfare
In a number of ways, the FPRI represented a kind of extended arm involved in what is often called a parallel activity, that is, a kind of unofficial exercise of power in civil society with support from the official USA under the Republican presidents.
Already its early mission for the NSC through the JCS and the NWC shows that the FPRI in no way was an ordinary academic research institute that can be found at all universities. It was a main instrument for the NSC in a huge psychological propaganda and indoctrination campaign directed against the American people. Psychological propaganda is the closest relative of disinformation. We will in several forthcoming articles go into detail about the FPRI’s role and partners regarding psychological warfare, including disinformation and "low intensity conflict".
The question is whether it is a coincidence that all members of our disinformation trio from the Palme murder had connections to Pennsylvania, that two of them were professors at the neighbouring university, and that the most prominent of them was used by the FPRI as a speaker and as a writer for its journal Orbis.
The FPRI and the PSU
It is also quite possible that the FPRI (University of Pennsylvania) had a subdivision or an unofficial community at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). Besides Harkavy, we have found many personal links between the FPRI and PSU, such as professors and other academics at PSU who has been engaged by or been employed by the FPRI, PSU scholars who have lectured at the FPRI and vice versa, and PSU researchers who have written articles in Orbis or had articles published by FPRI in other ways. One of the FPRI chairs received the highest award as a former PSU student, and at least one other board member had a background from the PSU. Many of these also had further connections to Washington, military institutions, and so on.
The CIA’s use of universities
The CIA has since its beginning recruited from US academic circles. During WWII, many academics served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was later transformed into the CIA. In the late forties, Frank Wisner, director of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), recruited 500 returned US professors who were commissioned to recruit promising students from home and abroad to the CIA. (Corson, 1977:309).
In 1966, the coordinator of a major Vietnam project at the Michigan State University, Stanley K. Sheinbaum, came forward in the journal Ramparts with admissions that the university had been used as a front for the CIA until 1959. The university's own faculty members rendered services for the CIA, such as in connection with establishment of the security police in Vietnam, and the CIA had its own agents officially appointed as professors.
Some of them formed a separate operational unit that conducted intelligence operations in Vietnam. Around 200 apparent academics worked for seven years in a large building for international programs funded by the Vietnam project commissioned by the CIA. One of the professors who had initiated the program said that the initiative had come from Vice President Richard Nixon, but later corrected this so that it could have been Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or his brother, CIA chief Allen Dulles (Ramparts 1966b). In all, the university received $25,000,000 in the period 1955-59 "to provide academic cover to five CIA agents stationed in South Vietnam” (Witanec 1989:25 and Hinckle 1966:11-12).
The Rampart disclosures represented the start of many other revelations that i. a. included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and universities in Columbia, Miami and California. It also turned out that the CIA had all but taken over the National Student Association. (Penthouse 1979).
The disclosures led to Congress investigations. A Senate report (Church Committee 1976:181, 189-91 stated:
“The CIA has long-developed clandestine relationships with the American academic community, which range from academics making introductions for intelligence purposes to intelligence collection while abroad, to academic research and writing where CIA sponsorship is hidden.
The CIA is now using several hundred American academics ([including] administrators, faculty members and graduate students engaged in teaching), who in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. [..]
These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities, and related institutes.”
The report also stated that the section presenting this information had been "substantially abridged at the request of the executive agencies." Penthouse (1979) revealed that the original had contained far more details that had been removed after strong reactions from the CIA.
The Church Committee pointed out that "there are no prohibitions to prevent an increase in the operational use of academics; the size of these operations is determined by the CIA”.
After the disclosures, many academics tried to get the universities to adopt common guidelines regarding transparency etc about their relationships to the CIA, but at least as per 1979, they had not succeeded (Penthouse 1979).
According to Corson (1977:312), around 5,000 academics were in the late seventies in one way or another on the CIA’s payroll. Approximately 60% of these were quite aware of the relationship and received fixed payments as salaries or research funds.
Later, and in particular after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2001, the CIA has gained legitimacy because of perceptions of a "reformed" CIA (Gibbs 2003, Lingua Franca 2000:35-43). Professor David Gibbs of the University of Arizona wrote, however, in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times (Gibbs 2001), that the CIA had stepped up its contacts with academic communities, leaving a stronger impression that something is seriously wrong when it is acceptable that so many scientists, in particular social scientists, are permanently working for the CIA:
“The CIA has been a key party to many of the international conflicts that academics must study. If political scientists are working for the CIA, how can they function as objective and disinterested scholars?”
The Church Committee stated that:
“At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use made of academics on his campus. In addition, there are several American academics abroad who serve operational purposes, primarily the collection of intelligence.”
Thus, CIA professors can take advantage of knowledge and information that others do not have. This will win them more and more recognition and allow them to build long and impressive resumes, which in turn will make them even more useful as communicators of the CIA's own versions of history as well as the present. (This kind of use and profiling of academics is very similar to what has been disclosed about corresponding use of media people, for example Pulitzer prizes to CIA-connected journalists.)
Our disinformant #1, Professor Robert Harkavy, can boast such a resume. The CIA is of course not mentioned, but rather a wide range of other key US civilian and military institutions within security, foreign and defence policy that would not have been interested in using someone less informed than themselves. Doing jobs for these must obviously have demanded the highest security clearance.
Western European projects 1983-84
An academic CIA project that is particularly interesting for our purpose is "the European Non-State Actors Projects" at Rutgers University in New Jersey that was in operation 1983-84. This project used around 100 ignorant students to collect information about organizations, political parties, trade unions etc in Western Europe, to find out if they threatened US geopolitical and military interests. The project was led by Professor Richard Mansbach who originally came from Rutgers and later returned there, after a long period with assignments from various intelligence communities and a few years of full employment with the CIA. (CounterSpy 1984:42-44).
This was in a period with a lot of European opposition to Reagan's foreign policy, with particular focus on deployment of missiles in Europe. On the European scene, Olof Palme was one of the most profiled critics.
Fulbright scholarships
The Church Committee observed that:
“With the exception of those teachers, scholars and students who receive scholarships or grants from the Board of Foreign Scholarships, the CIA is not prohibited from the operational use of all other categories of grantee support under the Fulbright-Hays Act (artists, athletes, leaders, specialists, etc.). Nor is there any prohibition on the operational use of individuals participating in any other exchange program funded by the United States Government.
The Committee is disturbed both by the present practices of operationally using American academics and by the awareness that the restraints on expanding this practice are primarily those of sensitivity to the risks of disclosure and not an appreciation of dangers to the integrity of individuals and institutions.”
The full name of the Fulbright-Hays Act is "the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act”. It was adopted in 1961 after a proposal from the Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, in parallel with new legislation on foreign aid and the Peace Corps. The purpose was to promote peace, development and international understanding through education and cultural exchange. The Act laid the foundation for the "Fulbright Program" which i. a. consists of handing out scholarships to participants in exchange programs.
There is no reason to trust that the CIA respected its own rules about not using people with a scholarship from the Board of Foreign Scholarships (which was appointed by the President). Anyway, there were no rules against using the opening for specialists or participants in exhibitions for professors or students the CIA wanted to make use of.
One example that suggests the former point is the story about the chemistry student Marvin W. Makinen, who came from no other than the University of Pennsylvania when he in 1961 was a Fulbright exchange student at West Berlin's Free University. Makinen, who spoke fluent German and Finnish, boasted of his connection to the CIA before he went on a trip in the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison, because he had taken pictures of a military facility in Kiev. Makinen confessed that he was acting for the CIA, but this is just as unsurprising as that the CIA denied it. However, the fact that he two years later was exchanged for a Soviet spy couple indicates that he was not so uninteresting for the CIA after all. The source (Minnick 1992:145 with Ranelagh 1986 as a sub-source) writes that it was common for the CIA to recruit students at the Free University for short spying missions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
It is a historical fact and no surprise that the two superpowers spied on each other, and that many extreme means were used during the Cold War. But some went far across the line, and to sabotage the investigation of the murder of a prime minister was among them. Our point with this little story - and there are many others - is only that we have an example that the CIA's use of the universities also could include people with Fulbright scholarships to foreign countries.
Professor Robert Harkavy, later identified as a disinformant by the Swedish Government’s Investigation Commission (GK), was on a Fulbright scholarship when he stayed at the SIPRI in Sweden in 1985. We will return to the significance of this stay.
"An entire university”
The conclusion for the topic of CIA use of the universities is best expressed by quoting the CIA itself. The CIA press spokesperson Sharon Foster in 1988 said that:
”The CIA has enough professors under Agency contracts to staff a large university.” (Bennish and Mullen 1988:39).
Conclusion
We have shown that the disinformation group of three men must have been deployed for a purpose, and that the purpose must have been defined at the highest level in the White House, specifically the National Security Council (NSC), which also governed the FBI and CIA operations against the Palme investigation, at a time when the NSC had as its main responsibility to perform the illegal operations that later were called the Iran/Contra scandal. This scandal was disclosed in 1986 and the following years, but even today, many parts of it have not been brought to light.
We have linked the group to Pennsylvania, and there to a very special institute (FPRI) that had disinformation as part of its business, and that had such close ties to the White House and the NSC that personnel was recruited back and forth between the two, that it carried out direct assignments for the NSC and the CIA, and that it even virtually conducted negotiations with the Soviet Union on the President's behalf.
We have also shown that Pennsylvania and the FPRI had special points of connection to Sweden.
Another such point is that at the turn of the year 1981/82, the Swedish-American Nils H. Wessell (jr) was appointed as the FPRI’s new Manager. He was also the editor of Orbis. He held the job 1981-85, which was a very critical period for the operations against Palme.
It is possible that the FPRI has had as a special task to monitor Swedish security and foreign policy, because Sweden's geopolitical position is in the very boundary zone that was of so much concern to the FPRI. In particular, it was concerned that Soviet expansion should be halted and preferably reversed in this zone in all ways possible. It is precisely at this point that the ideas of the FPRI were in strong conflict to Palme’s. We think this also was the reason that Strausz-Hupé was appointed ambassador to Sweden.
In the next article, we will connect the FPRI, and the people in and around the institute, to some of the organizations etc. that carried out illegal activities for the NSC in this period. We will also describe further connections to a number of people who were under suspicion in the murder investigation.
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