Maria and I would often meet on the train to New York,
I, traipsing in to meet with agents, editors and
others in the book world, in pursuit of a literary
career, she to her 'Japanese tea ceremony' lessons, as
she explained it to me, which, in actuality, were her
trysts with Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen was
ruggedly handsome, a mythic literary figure, who,
accord-ing to legend, had 'founded' the PR in the
early Fifties but who had given up his glamorous life
as an expatriate literary lion, to become a fisherman
on eastern Long Island.

I also had migrated to the Hamptons after living in
Ethiopia (I had taught at the law school of the Haile
Sellassie I University), and had given up my life as a
law professor to write. Because of the horrors of the
Vietnam War, I got sucked into politics, working for
the nomination of anti-war candidate George McGovern.
At the home of wealthy liberal activist and French
scholar, Domna Stanton, where I had gone to attend a
planning session for the McGovern campaign, I met
George Plimpton for the first time. I have a
photograph of that session, that shows all of us
sitting around a table, with me between Plimpton and
actress Tammy Grimes. Plimpton was the editor of the
PR, a charming and attractive man who exuded warmth
and good humor. He became famous trying his hand at
pro football and boxing with Archie Moore. His books
were best sellers. I told him how I had met his
father, Francis Plimpton, at a similar gathering at
Marietta Tree's town house, to support the senate
campaign of Adlai Stevenson III. We hit it off and he
volunteered to work for me, carrying petitions for the
McGovern delegates running in the First Congressional
District on Long Island. He was against the Vietnam
War and was for McGovern and I needed all the help I
could get. Getting the McGovern slate on the ballot,
which included me as a delegate, and withstanding the
inevitable challenges from the regular Democratic
organization, which viewed us as dangerous insurgents,
was going to be no easy task.

Plimpton did a great job. His petitions were perfect.
He arrived at my house in Bridgehampton one afternoon,
pulling up in his station wagon and waving them like a
delighted child. 'Great, George,' I said. 'This is a
huge help.' He was genuinely happy. But after the
Eagleton affair it was revealed McGovern's choice for
vice president, Thomas Eagleton, had received shock
treatments for depression and resigned from the ticket
and McGovern's disastrous defeat at the hands of
Richard Nixon, I took my family and escaped to
Barbados, to teach at the University of the West
Indies. While there, I wrote an Op Ed piece called
'Hailu and the Very Old Lion', about an Ethiopian
laborer who had moved all my furniture himself, and
who had stood in front of Haile Sellassie's pet lion
as it sat on a stone fence, and laughed at it. I said
the lion was old and toothless, like the Emperor
himself, implying that he would not remain in power
much longer, now that famine had come to Ethiopia.
Charlotte Curtis, one of the last of the greats at The
New York Times, accepted it and the Times published it
in April of 1974, while I was still in Barbados.

James Jesus Angleton

To my amazement and delight, I was contacted by George
Braziller, of the eponymous publishing house, and by
Ned Chase, (father of Chevy) who was editor in chief
at Putnam's, and asked by both of them do a book. My
agent was the gentle-manly John Schaffner, whose
eccentric family reminded every-one of the Sitwells.
His wife, Perdita, had, it turned out, been secretary
to James Jesus Angleton, literary scholar and chief of
counterintelligence at the CIA. (His deputy was the
novelist, William Hood.) Ned Chase took me to the
legendary Billy's, watering hole to the literary
world, and told me he was going to give me a five book
contract and that I was the 'voice of your
generation'. I floated back to the train and came home
with the news. Braziller came to my house and sipped
iced tea as he went through my book proposal, 'Eagles
Among the Lions'. He seemed genuinely pleased, even if
he did drop the manuscript. I watched with horror as
the pages slipped to the floor, but he quickly
gathered them up with a broad smile, shook my hand
vigorously and departed. This was it. I was in. Or so
I thought.

A friend in the Hamptons who had read the Op Ed piece
told me I should meet Peter Matthiessen, who wrote
about the same sort of things. She got me together
with him and a few other writers, but he was aloof and
didn't say anything to me. I shrugged it off and
concentrated on doing a book proposal for Braziller
and Chase.

My proposal described how, while travelling in the
north of Ethiopia, I had witnessed American troops in
combat in Axum, where I had gone to see the famous
obelisks. At the airport, American troops in combat
fatigues swarmed all over the place, with American
helicopters landing and taking off. I could make out
the voice of an American pilot through the static on
the airport radio saying, 'I've gotta come in for more
ammu-nition. I can't fly around here without more
ammunition.'

Secret war in Ethiopia

What I had witnessed was Nixon's secret war in
Ethiopia to defend Hails Sellassie from the Tigre
Liberation Front and the Eritrean Liberation Front, as
they both sought to overthrow the backward, feudal
regime and to secede. Most of my students at the
university were in the revolution, but the Americans
were still behind Haile Sellassie, an important ally
in the Cold War. The Horn of Africa was of
considerable strategic importance, with Cold Warriors
such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believing
the outcome of the struggle with the Soviet Union
would be decided in the Ogaden. The insurgents were
largely pro-Soviet, and if Ethiopia fell to the
U.S.S.R., it would have a dagger at the heart of Saudi
Arabia, just across the Red Sea. As an Air Force
officer told me in confidence one night after a few
too many beers, there had already been an uprising led
by young Saudi air force officers against the Saudi
royal family that American forces stationed at
important bases in Ethiopia had put down.

Then, John Schaffner phoned to tell me that something
strange had happened. George Braziller had rushed into
his office, waving the proposal. He threw it at
Schaffner, shouting, 'I can't do this', and bolted out
the door. Ned Chase then phoned him to tell him the
deal was off, giving no reason. I paid a visit to
Chase at his office to find out what had happened. He
was extremely nervous and fidgeted with papers on his
desk. 'I can't find the proposal', he explained. 'I
think I've lost it. Anyway, it's too late to do
anything. I'm sorry.'

It hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. Schaffner
was perplexed and found it unfathomable. He said that
nothing like it had ever happened to him before in his
career as an agent. 'I don't know what it is,' he said
to me. 'It's highly unusual.' I had gambled a lot on
my writing career, and now it lay in ruins. But then,
Congress voted to impeach Nixon and the revolution
came to Ethiopia on the night the Americans were
staging a fashion show in Addis Ababa. Such was their
obliviousness. Or their denial. Someone had
photographed Haile Sellassie throwing meat to his pet
lion, while millions of Ethiopians were starving to
death. It was the 'tipping point' of the revo-lution.
As the country went through the torture of Nixon's
downfall, Senator Fulbright uncovered a secret
agreement between Nixon and Haile Sellassie, in which
America pledged to come to his rescue if he were
threatened by an internal insur-gency. It was
completely beyond the scope of Nixon's author-ity. But
when did that ever matter to him? He had already
authorized the mass, illegal spying by the CIA on
Americans as the anti-war protests grew in size and
force. Years later, Angus McKenzie would posthumously
reveal in his book, Secrets, with knowledge obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act, how the CIA
had penetrated counterculture anti-war publications
and shut them down. But Nixon was forced to resign,
and his plans for a new Vietnam in Ethiopia were
scratched, as was the infamous Huston plan, which
would have effectively turned America into a police
state. John Erlichman acknowledged as much. He asked
me what I was doing during the Vietnam war. I told him
I was working for McGovern. He looked straight at me
and said, 'You did the absolutely right thing.'
Nixon's right-hand man, Erlichman had done time in
prison, and was a sick and broken man when I met him
in Atlanta. He died not long after I met him.

But with a revolutionary government in place in Addis
Ababa, America abruptly did a turn around and began
supporting the Eritrean secessionists, backing a new
group, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front, the
EPLF, to displace the Marx-ist ELF. Professor
Tesfatsion Medhane, an Eritrean who teaches at the
University of Bremen, has documented this in his
numerous publications. He was also my Amharic teacher
and one of my students when I was teaching at the
Haile Sellassie I University. And with my book safely
out of the way, Thomas Kenneally surfaced with his To
Asmara, extolling the great virtues of the Eritreans
as they struggled for their independence from
tyrannical Ethiopia. (Eritrea is today a totalitarian
state, while Ethiopia is, more or less, a democracy.)
When asked about this switch in American policy, Henry
Kissinger famously remarked, 'America has no permanent
allies, only permanent interests'. America also seemed
to have a convenient way of manipulating the American
publishing industry.

Fast forward a few years later, at a Christmas party
at the home of Swedish artist Hans Hokanson and his
wife, Barbara. With a tall Christmas tree lit with
real candles, a huge roast pig, endless amounts of
glug and a crowd of artists and writers, including
James Rosenquist, The New Yorker cartoonist
Stein-berg, and Peter Matthiessen, the place was
throbbing to Jimmy Cliff. From across the room, I saw
Matthiessen glaring at me. Barbara Hokanson made her
way towards me, stopping in front of where I was
sitting. She leaned over and in a whisper, said,
'Peter wants me to tell you that you should feel lucky
that he doesn't let you get close to him, because he
could really hurt you.' I looked up and saw
Matthiessen, still glaring at me malevolently. 'Why
would he want to hurt me?' I asked, but Barbara had
already turned and walked away. I shrugged off the
incident, but filed it away in my subconscious.

Peter Matthiessen

After she started living with Matthiessen, Maria
invited me to have lunch with her at Bobby Van's to
meet James Jones. Matthiessen was there, as well.
Jones, who was gracious and cordial, was drinking
grapefruit juice, on the wagon because of a heart
condition. Throughout the lunch, Matthiessen sat
sil-ently, occasionally giving me a strange glance.
Maria was her usual gregarious self. I kept thinking
how stunning she had looked at the Benson Gallery that
summer, when she appeared barefoot, her hair wild, and
she announced to me that she had left Julian and moved
in with Peter.

After she married Matthiessen, we met on the train.
She seemed different, somewhat subdued. Rather
gratuitously, she said, 'Everything is a hoax.'
'Everything?' I asked, incredu-lously. 'Everything',
she answered.

Matthiessen was CIA

My memory was jogged when, sometime later, still in
the Seventies, The New York Times disclosed, without
citing sources, that Matthiessen had been in the CIA
and that his literary activities had been a cover for
his intelligence work. 'Was that the hoax?' I
wondered. Did his comment to Barbara Hokanson that he
could really hurt me have anything to do with his
institutional affiliation? Matthiessen told friends
that he had left the Agency in the Fifties, but did
one every really leave it? I had been active in the
anti-war movement. In the days of Richard Nixon, that
could spell trouble. There was the coup in Chile and
the murder of Allende. After Nixon's fall, the
national security state perpetuated itself under Henry
Kissinger, who stayed on under Gerald Ford as
secretary of state. William Colby still headed the
CIA. Nothing had really changed.

I pondered Matthiessen's literary output. Partisans
struck me as superficial and cynical and not
particularly well written. At Play In The Fields of
the Lord I found to be a wooden and tedious book. Far
Tortuga, written in a West Indian dialect, was
impossible to get through and condescending, yet it
ended up on The New York Times best-seller list. The
Snow Leopard I found to be pompous and utterly
pretentious, but it, too, found its way onto the list.
But his publisher was Farrar, Strauss and Giroux and
Peter Matthiessen was a great writer, the mantra went,
and the item in The New York Times faded from memory.
His nature writing assignments took him to exotic
places around the globe, he took up the cause, first
of Caesar Chavez and then of the American Indians, and
became a Buddhist monk.

The Pied Piper

It was after the publication in 1985 by Grove Press of
The Pied Piper, my biography of Allard Lowenstein,
that I found myself sitting next to Matthiessen's
ex-wife, Patsy Southgate, at a dinner party at the
home of Gaby Lieber Rodgers, ex-wife of Jerry Lieber,
half of the rock and roll team of Lieber and Stoller.
Barney Rosset of the Grove Press and I had been duly
vilified by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New York Review
of Books, Ronald Radosh in The New York Times Book
Review, and Myra McPherson, Ben Bradlee's pit bull, in
the Styles section of The Washington Post, because I
had outed Lowenstein, a civil rights and anti-war
activist who had served one term in Congress and had
been assassinated by Dennis Sweeney in 1980, as a CIA
operative and a closet gay. McPherson, after belting
down three martinis in the restaurant of the Jefferson
Hotel in Washington, said, 'Richard, you can't say
these things. I am going to have to trash you. You
should have put this in a novel.' Martin Garbus, one
of America's leading civil liberties lawyers and
attorney for Grove Press, asserted that the reviews
had been 'planted' by those who wanted Lowenstein's
CIA background kept secret and were not real reviews.

Patsy Southgate (pictured with Frank O’Hara and John
Ashbery) spilled her guts to Richard Cummings

Patsy Southgate had been one of the most beautiful
women of her generation. A Smith student, she was a
fine writer and French translator who became engaged
to Peter Matthiessen, who was at Yale. After a few
vodkas and glasses of wine, she opened up to me and
started talking about the CIA, something people did
after the publication of The Pied Piper. She told me
how Matthiessen had been recruited to the CIA at Yale
to serve as an intelligence officer. After she and
Matthiessen were married, they first went to CIA
orientation and then to Paris, where Matthiessen's
assignment was to 'found a literary magazine'. But
founding a magazine was not within Matthiessen's ken,
so he befriended expatriate Harold Humes, who had
attended MIT and who was starting a new literary
publication that would feature interviews with
writers, fiction and reviews of restaurants and clubs.
Matthiessen provided funding from Sadruddin Aga Khan,
the son of the Aga Khan, who had been [the Wall Street
Journal 's and CIA's] John Train's roommate at
Harvard, and who agreed to serve as the magazine's
publisher. Train became managing editor. Then
Matthiessen got rid of Humes and brought in his old
friend from New York, George Plimpton, who had been
studying English literature at King's College,
Cambridge, to replace him. Plimpton, who had gone to
Exeter and Harvard, was the son of Francis Plimpton,
founder of the white shoe law firm of Debevoise,
Plimpton (his partner was Eli Whitney Debevoise) who
also served as counsel to the Democratic Party.

Humes was furious. After the first edition came out,
he boarded the ship carrying the magazines, found them
in the hold, and with a stamp he had made up, stamped
them all 'Harold Humes, Editor'. Humes, who never
found out why he had lost his magazine, later went
mad. Southgate, who dis-approved of what Matthiessen
was doing, gave him an ultimatum. She told him that he
either left the Agency, or she would leave him. He
didn't, so she did. Matthiessen's personal behaviour
didn't endear him to her, either. She, as well as
friends from Southgates's and Matthiessen's Paris
days, took note of his dark side, and his occasional
gratuitous acts of cruelty, that astonished them.
Carol Southern, who was married to Terry Southern and
knew Matthiesssen and Southgate in Paris, relates how
Matthiessen made Southgate carry a case of wine up the
stairs to their apartment while she was pregnant. On
another occasion, while out driving, he deliberately
drove over a turtle as it was trying to across the
road. He was also stingy, as Maria Matthiessen would
find out. Having given up what she described as her
'cushy deal' married to Julian Koenig, who with Fred
Papert, had founded Koenig, Papert, the hottest
advertising firm in New York in the Sixties and early
Seventies, with her posh house on Ocean Road in
Bridgehampton, her lavish parties and a full-time West
Indian housekeeper, she had to deal with Matthiessen's
austere lifestyle in his cottage in Sagaponack, as he
doled out the pennies. Eventually, she was forced to
take a job working as a gofer for Carol Phillips, who
had founded Clinique and who had been married to Benny
Goodman.

Meanwhile, Freddy Plimpton divorced George, took up
yoga and became a full-time resident of the Hamptons.
It happened suddenly, with George at a loss for why
she dumped him. Was it for Patsy Southgate reasons?
Freddy wasn't saying. She was a stunningly attractive
woman with enormous sex appeal but unlike Plimpton,
was totally averse to the socialite mentality that
consumed him. It was as though he could never
reconcile his liberal political beliefs and his
membership in the Racquet Club. Like many upper class
liberal Democrats, he seemed to lack an integrated
personality. He could rail against inequality and
then, participate in it without the slightest
embarrassment, failing miserably to conflate his
aristocratic predilections with his longing to be a
bone fide member of the left.

George Plimpton

After a period in which he was in a funk, Plimpton
married Sarah, an heiress to a Minnesota mining
fortune, who resembled his mother, at least
physically. They also had in common that they were
both from Cold Spring Harbor. Plimpton's mother was
one of the last of the great American grandes dames, a
nonconformist whose social position was so secure, she
was at complete ease in any situation. In this
respect, she was the exact opposite of Francis
Plimpton, a stiff and dour man with little or no sense
of humor. At Marietta Tree's legendary town house,
where I met him, I found myself in a debate with him
over Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of
Independence for Rhodesia, which violated the rights
of the black majority. To my astonishment, Francis
Plimpton, a supposedly liberal Democrat, who had
served as an ambassador to the United Nations,
supported the white racist Ian Smith and opposed the
embargo placed on Rhodesia. I, on the other hand, had
been commissioned by the U.C.L.A. Law Review to write
an article on the illegality of the UDI, which I did,
with complete conviction. After I submitted it and it
was accepted, I was notified by the new
editor-in-chief that it was being lifted from typeset
and would not be published. America was violating the
embargo because it needed the chrome for military
reasons in Vietnam. But the U.C.L.A. Law Review? I had
been asked to teach at U.C.L.A. Law School when I was
in Ethiopia. Surely they were not part of the national
security state. In any event, I got it published by
the N.Y.U. Journal of International Law and Politics.

There was no arguing with Francis Plimpton, so I
switched the topic to his daughter's psychological
novel she told me she was working on. But George's
mother was another matter entirely. At a party in
honor of James Merrill at his glamorous duplex
apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the
Hudson, she objected to the fact that there was
'nothing to nosh on' with the drinks. 'George, don't
you have any pea-nuts, at least?' she scolded him. He
sheepishly confessed that he didn't have any. At that,
she grabbed my arm and we raced to the elevator, down
and out onto the street. Storming along looking for a
store, she finally spotted a bodega. The Puerto Rican
proprietor was bewildered by her sense of urgency
about the peanuts, scurrying around until he located
two jars of Planters. Back in the apartment, she tore
into the kitchen and reappeared with a bunch of small
dishes and poured the pea-nuts into them, placing the
dishes on tables in various locations. Helping herself
to a fistful, she began downing them as she gulped her
martini, listening benignly to Sarah complain about a
new apartment building that was going up that
threatened their view. Then, before we began dinner,
Plimpton introduced James Merrill and Richard Howard,
who was the poetry editor of the PR, and lauded
Sadruddin Aga Khan as the benefactor whose generosity,
as publisher, had made the PR possible. I noticed
Plimpton's mother with a wry grin on her face. Did she
know something I didn't?

What puzzles me is that when Plimpton's memory is
honored, there are accolades to his father, but never
any mention of his unpretentious mother, who was
clearly responsible for his buoyant and exuberant
side. Louis Begley was guilty of this omission in an
event at Guild Hall in East Hampton, at which Peter
Matthiessen also spoke. Begley, a successful novelist
and corporate lawyer, had been Francis Plimpton's law
partner, so his gratitude to the father is
understandable; but George's mother probably made him
uncomfortable. Candor has a way of doing that to
people.

40th anniversary

As I was leaving the party, Plimpton asked me if I was
going to attend the 40th anniversary celebration of
the PR in Paris, Mississippi, that he was planning,
with events and parties in nearby Oxford, and, of
course, fireworks. 'Gosh, that's a long way to go', I
said. 'It will be worth it', Plimpton winked. It would
be, but not for the reasons Plimpton probably
imagined. But PR celebrations were always major
events. The one at Tony Duke's Boys Harbor featured an
array of American literary celebrities, including the
two Normans, Mailer and Rush, with lavish food and
drink. For a small literary magazine, it had a way of
generating a considerable amount of attention. I was
definitely going to Oxford, Mississippi, home to
William Faulkner and Ole Miss.

I checked into the guest lodge on the campus of Ole
Miss. On the walls were photographs of legendary
athletes as well as the beauties who had won Miss
America titles. Ole Miss had more Miss America winners
than any other institution in the country and a stroll
on the campus showed me why. Gorgeous, beautifully
dressed and groomed young women were every-where,
smiling and greeting me graciously with a polite,
'Hello, sir', in languid southern accents. Not for
nothing had Plimpton picked this place. I caught the
exhibit of PR covers by famous artists that were on
display at the museum and headed over to downtown
Oxford for dinner.

I found a restaurant in a hotel on the square and
after a dinner of New Southern Cuisine (shrimp with
grits), I sat down on a sofa in the lobby. In walked
Plimpton, resplendent in a blue blazer, his white mane
glorious in its disarray. He gave me a huge smile and
invited me top join him and some friends for drinks
later that night at a bar in Oxford.

It was the night of the Ole Miss-Tulane basketball
game and the place was packed with undergraduates
partying in the manic manner of the southern elite.
Smoke filled the room and a zydeko band blasted away
in the background. George was sitting at a table with
William Styron, Willie Morris, whom I knew from
Bridgehampton and his Bobby Van's days, George's new
wife, Sarah, and the then managing editor of the PR,
James Linville, whom everyone called Jamie. I sat down
at the end of the table next to Linville, with
Plimpton opposite me. Waiters kept bringing huge
pitchers of beer. I knew that Styron was supposed to
be on the wagon, but he was drinking also.

Gratuitously, Linville told me that he had read The
Pied Piper. 'The stuff about the CIA is fascinating',
he said. Then, without skipping a beat, he added.
'Peter Matthiessen was in the CIA. The Paris Review
was his cover. Peter is haunted by the CIA.' I looked
up and saw George, who was leaning over so far his
chin was practically in my beer mug. He had heard
every word but said nothing. Why Linville had
volunteered this to me in these circumstances puzzled
me. I thanked him for read-ing my book but said
nothing further about the CIA. There was a forced
conviviality that I found unnerving. Plimpton was
somewhat cooler towards me and eyes narrowed a bit as
he looked at Linville, but otherwise, he gave no
indication that there was anything wrong in the
slightest. We all drank and talked until it was quite
late and departed.

Newsweek and the CIA

At a reception at a famous bookstore in Oxford,
Plimpton recited the usual history of the PR,
including the part about how, running with the bulls
in Pamplona, with Sadruddin Aga Khan, he made the
prince an offer he could not refuse to be the
publisher. On the last night, we all gathered at a
restaurant in Paris for catfish and fireworks.
Plimpton avoided me, but I put that down to the fact
that he was absorbed in hosting the event. I filed
away in the recesses of my mind what Linville had said
with the Patsy Southgate revelations and thought no
more about it. I did wonder why they had told me these
things. After my experience with the Lowenstein book,
I had no intention of digging into people's CIA
affiliations any longer. I remem-bered how the writer
Robert Sam Anson, who had worked for Newsweek, had
come up to me at the John Steinbeck Book Fair at the
Benson Gallery one summer after the publication of The
Pied Piper and excoriated me. 'I knew Allard
Lowenstein', he shouted as I sat at a table with
copies of the book in front of me, a rather boisterous
Blanche Weisen Cook directly to my left. 'I was in the
CIA. He would have told me if he had been in the CIA.'
Blanche recounted to me how she had been vilified for
her Declassified Eisenhower in which she disclosed
Eisenhower's role in the CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh
in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, and the part played
by former Luce publication executive, C. D. Jackson.
as Eisenhower's director of psychological warfare
Sometime later, I was having lunch with Shana
Alexander at Bobby Van's when Anson came over to say
hello to her, avoiding eye contact with me. After he
left, I asked Shana if she knew that Robert Sam Anson
was in the CIA. Between swallows, she casually said,
'Robert Sam Anson was in the CIA. Lots of people at
Newsweek were.'

Stephen Spender

But I did see George socially, on and off. A
particularly glittering New York event at which I
encountered him, was the lavish reception at the
Morgan for Stephen Spender, sponsored by the American
Academy of Poets. In his eighties, Spender was still
leonine and handsome. After he concluded his reading,
we all adjourned to a champagne reception in a
spacious, candle-lit hall, where Spender held court.
Plimpton, the de facto host, was effusive. He managed
to be both gregarious and distant to me. It was a
perfect venue for Plimpton. Spender had been the
editor of Encounter, which like The PR, had been a
beneficiary of CIA largesse. It was a sort of old home
week.

A few years after the Linville incident, I was at an
authors' party at the home of Martin and Judy Shepard,
publishers of the Permanent Press, which had published
my secessionist book, Proposition 14. The novelist and
playwright John Sherry, who was probably Peter
Matthiessen's closest friend and who had published
Maggie's Farm with Permanent Press, came over to me. I
knew Sherry well. He was a gregarious and exuberant
man, but now he was deadly serious. He told me he
needed to speak with me out of earshot of the other
guests, and led me to a corner of another, empty room.
He informed me in hushed tones that Peter Matthiessen
had confessed to him that Sadruddin Aga Khan and his
foundation had never put up a penny for the PR and
that all the money had come from the CIA. Sherry went
on to say that, in his mind, Matthiessen, who wanted
to be remembered as a novelist, was not a good one and
never would be. Sherry lambasted At Play In The Fields
Of The Lord, insisting that Matthiessen had no talent
for writing novels, and that his good work was his
nature writing. I took all of this in, knowing as I
did about how the Congress for Cultural Freedom had
funded publications such as the PR and Encounter, all
of which Frances Stone Saunders would recount in her
groundbreaking work, Who Paid The Piper?. But, while
she stated that Matthiessen had been in the CIA, she
had not gotten the goods on the PR. I learned later
that she had gotten a letter from Matthiessen about
the CIA and the PR, in which he said that the 'CIA
dumped the job on me'. I also learned later from a
British scholar that the CIA had originally intended
to set up art critic Clement Greenberg in Paris as the
editor of a Paris edition of The Partisan Review, but
dropped this option to go with Matthiessen and the PR.

Shepherd Stone, who headed the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, was a snob and insisted that those who worked
for him be graduates of elite American colleges and
universities. Stone might well have disdained
Greenberg, who was a graduate of Syracuse University
and who had been an itinerant neck-tie salesman before
becoming the leading booster of abstract expressionism
and Jackson Pollock. Along with Barnet Newman,
Greenberg had become the CIA's favorite huckster of
the avant guard, which he did as well for the benefit
of the value of his own art collection. Quel fumiste,
the Parisians might have said. No, Matthiessen, with
his WASPy good looks and his literary pedigree (his
uncle was F. O. Matthiessen, the brilliant, socially
prominent left-wing literary critic at Harvard, who
committed suicide before being outed as gay) was the
better choice. Besides, Greenberg was Jewish (Stone, a
Dartmouth graduate, was also, but he had changed his
name and assimilated) and the CIA was imbued in the
Fifties with the kind of anti-Semitism that was
rampant at Yale, where much of the CIA recruiting had
gone on.

George Plimpton was witting

Was this the end of it? What more was there to know
about the PR? I wondered why Sherry had chosen to tell
this to me with such a sense of urgency. Our
conversation ended, we joined the other guests. But it
didn't add up. If all this were true, and I had no
doubt that it was, surely George Plimpton wasn't in
the dark. He must have been 'witting' all along, as
they say in Agency parlance. As I would find out, it
was more than that.

In the fall of 2003 I received some e-mails from
Daniel Gallagher, an America graduate student in Paris
researching American writers who wrote novels in
Paris. He had read some articles by me on the Internet
(I am a columnist for Lewrockwell.com,) at least one
of which which made reference to Peter Matthiessen and
the PR. Becoming intrigued with my thesis that the
magazine was a CIA front, he read The New York Times
article from 1977 that outed Matthiessen as CIA, using
his career as an author only as cover for his
intelligence activities. Gallagher commented: 'It is
true. The Paris Review was a hoax, part of the CIA
world-wide propaganda effort.'

Through a friend, Gallagher located James Rentchler,
who at first was identified only as a retired Foreign
Service officer. Gallagher agreed to approach him on
my behalf with questions I had suggested. Rentchler,
it turned out was extremely rich, living in Paris and
writing his memoirs. The Rentchler family is from
Cincinnati, heirs to a giant railroad fortune. They
all went to Princeton. George Rentchler was in my
class there and was a friend. James Rentchler worked
in the White House for both Presidents Carter and
Reagan in the National Security Council on European
affairs and served as Ambassador to both Guinea and
Malta. His flat, as Gallagher described it, was filled
with photos of American presidents and government
officials. There were 'hundreds' of them, according to
Gallagher, who noted the presence of an official
looking American flag.

Rentchler told him that he worked in the 'cultural
section organizing cultural events all over the
world'. Rentchler himself brought up George Plimpton
and the CIA, so Gallagher's question about Plimpton
and the CIA 'dove-tailed so beauti-fully that his
response just flowed out'. Gallagher wrote:

'When asked if George Plimpton's father was CIA, he
said "absolutely", he was very well connected. I then
asked him about George, saying that I had not found
any trace whatsoever linking him to the Agency and he
smiled and said that George was "an agent of
influence", and that he travelled here, there, did
this, did that, etc. "Those guys at the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, George was in with all of them, he
knew all those guys." That's what he said.'

When Gallagher asked him who else he should speak to,
he referred him to Frances Stoner Saunders. Gallagher
was be-mused. He wrote, 'The Review was a total CIA
propaganda machine, from 1953 right up to the last
issue.'

Agents of influence for the CIA, as Tom Braden pointed
out in a number of articles, were writers, editors and
publishers who penetrated the culture on behalf of the
CIA. They were invariably paid. That George Plimpton
never took a salary from the PR was undoubtedly true.
He didn't have to.

A change of publisher

The PR was soon to have a change in publishers.
Following the death of Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan,
Plimpton persuaded Dru Heinz to become the PR
publisher. She also funds a major literary prize
through the Dru Heinz Trust. At the same time, it
reopened its Paris office, staffing it with novelist
Harry Matth-ews, naming two editors for a new London
office, this all at a time when anti-American
sentiment was escalating in Europe because of the
invasion of Iraq. Leading vocal critics of American
policy were John LeCarré and Harold Pinter.
Coincidentally, James Linville took up residence in
London, sub-letting Perry Anderson's flat. Soon after,
the influential, virulently anti-war London Review of
Books published Anderson's pro-war article, 'The
Casuistries of War.' Linville vehemently denies that
this coincidence had anything to do with a change of
policy at the LRB, but he acknowledges that 'at dinner
parties, and such', he did argue against the
anti-American position of British writers and
intellectuals, in what he described as 'informal
debates'. While acknowledging that the CIA sought to
recruit him, he insists that he rebuffed their
efforts. In addition to this, an 'anonymous donor'
purchased the PR archives for $500,000 and donated all
it to the Morgan Library in New York, while Charles
Ryskamp was still the director.

With all of this information at hand, I sent several
e-mails to The New York Times to suggest corrections
in articles it had published on the PR. After George
Plimpton died, Bill Borders e-mailed me with
Plimpton's obituary, asking me what, if anything was
wrong with it. I told him that Peter Matthiessen was
not a founder of the PR, that Harold Humes had founded
it and that Matthiessen had taken it over it at the
behest of the CIA, getting rid of Humes. 'To write
about Matthiessen and The Paris Review without
mentioning that it was his CIA cover is bad
journalism', I argued. 'It omits this important aspect
of The Paris Review that it was part of the propaganda
effort against the Communist and Soviet influence in
Europe during the Cold War.' I went on to explain what
I had learned about Plimpton. There was no response.
In a recent article in The Times that the the PR had
not renewed Brigid Hughes contract, the reporter
described Plimpton as 'the founding editor' of the PR.
I e-mailed Dan Okrent, the ombudsmen, to correct this
error and to, once again, set out the facts of the PR.
A brief correction appeared, saying only that Plimpton
was not the 'founding editor' but rather 'one of the
founding editors'.

A deafening silence

In late fall of 2003, I went into New York to have a
dinner meeting with Taki and Scott McConnell of The
American Conservative to discuss my proposed article
on Plimpton and the PR, to be titled, 'An American In
Paris'. The article, a lean and to the point (two
pages) piece that stated all the facts, appeared in
February of 2004 and produced a deafening silence. I
did send it to my former agent, Tim Seldes, who had
been Plimpton's agent, and he said he found it
'fascinating' and that he would show it to Sarah
Plimpton. She never responded, at least not directly
to me. But on the way back on the Hampton Jitney to
Bridgehampton from the dinner with Taki and Scott
McConnell, I happened to pick up a copy of The New
York Post and came across a very small article, just a
couple of para-graphs, that said the Nixon
administration, during the 1970s, had notified
publishers that it didn't want any books to be
published on Ethiopia. It was for national security
reasons. Did America have the D-notice system that
prevailed in Britain, so the government could
effectively censor by 'request' in the interests of
national security? Some time later, I phoned Ned
Chase, one of the editors who had asked me to do an
Ethiopian book and then reneged. His wife told me he
had Alzheimer's. She was horrified by what I told her.
I then wrote a letter to George Braziller telling him
that I knew what had happened to the Ethiopian
proposal, but that I forgave him because I didn't know
what I would have done under similar circumstances. He
rang me up, suggesting that we get together for lunch.

We had lunch at Le Café Crème on Madison Avenue, a
small French brasserie that was so Parisian, I thought
Braziller and I should have been speaking French, as
though we were in a Chabrol film. He asked after
Barney Rosset. I brought up the article and George
laughed. But a bit later, he said could not recall the
circumstances surrounding his return of the 'Eagles
Among The Lions' proposal to John Schaffner. He did
relate that his book club, The Book Find Club, had
been the victim of McCarthyism and that he 'got wise
and went into literature instead'. It was all very
congenial. Afterwards, George gave me copy of a new
book of his, a handsome edition of Langston Hughes'
great poem 'Let America Be America Again', with
woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi.

The poem ends:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!
An ever-living seed,
Its dream.
Lies deep in the heart of me.
We the people must redeem
Our land, the mines, the plants,
the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the strength of these
Great green states
And make America again!

It was Braziller's way of telling me that he had made
compromises he didn't want to, so he could survive,
but that somehow, a better country was still possible.

Did the CIA firebomb Grove Press?

But did he know about the spying by the CIA on Grove
Press, Evergreen Review and Barney Rosset and the
effort it made to close down Grove? After the issue of
Evergreen appeared with Paul Davis' legendary
depiction of Che Guevara on the cover, Cuban exiles
firebombed the offices of Grove. Rosset insists it was
done at the behest of the CIA. His CIA file would
appear to bear him out. I saw Rosset's CIA file and is
gave me a chill. The boxes lined the walls of his
loft. They knew all about his finances, what he was
publishing, and they knew what they hated. When the
strike broke out that crippled Grove Press in the
early Seventies, it was organized by small unions
unrelated to the publishing industry, the Furriers,
Meatpackers, organizations like that. Why did they
pick Grove, when it was a small, independent house
with few employees? If they were starting to organize
the publishing industry, it would have made more sense
to do it at Random House or some other large
organization with many editors. But if you thought
about it, it made sense.

The unions involved in trying to break Grove were part
of the AFL-CIO, and Jay Lovestone, who founded the
American Communist Party but was expelled personally
by Joseph Stalin, headed its international division.
Barely escaping from Moscow with his life, Lovestone
became a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union. Recruited
to the CIA, as Ted Morgan has documented in A Covert
Life, his biography of Lovestone, he took over the
unions' international office dispensing funds all over
the world for anti-Soviet activities. Grove Press and
Evergreen Review were under suspicion. Grove published
radical books and Evergreen Review was a leading
anti-Vietnam war publi-cation. It was a natural target
for Lovestone, whose case officer was James Jesus
Angleton. Grove survived the strike, but in a
truncated version. By the time it published The Pied
Piper, it needed an influx of cash, which is why
Barney Rosset was finally forced to sell it to Lord
Weidenfeld and Ann Getty. Evergreen Review folded
entirely, so the CIA got its wish.

But I wondered how the CIA had managed to get to the
publishers to tell them not to do books on Ethiopia.
And then, I remembered Robie Macauley. Macauley, who
had once worked for the Congress of Cultural Freedom,
and allegedly was let go, became, after doing a column
for Playboy, Senior Literary Editor at Houghton
Mifflin. He was known for developing new fiction
writers and for having a passion for fine literature.
A modest, soft-spoken man, he could have passed for a
vacuum cleaner salesmen, the way many CIA intelligence
officers could. Because that was, in fact, what he
was. At lunch with me sometime before he died, Robie
quietly volunteered that all the time he had been
Senior Literary Editor at Houghton Mifflin, he had run
the entire CIA program in sub-Saharan Africa. That, of
course, included Ethiopia. So, it was Robie who had
stuck it to me. After his obituary appeared in The New
York Times, listing all his literary honors, I phoned
up the reporter who had written it to tell him he had
left out Robie's CIA career. There was a brief
silence, after which he said, 'We can't put everything
into an obituary.' They had known. They were just
keeping it out.

In the case of Roger Strauss, The New Yorker and
Salon.com didn't keep it out. Strauss, the founder of
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, worked for the CIA, with a
secret phone in a special desk drawer to which only he
had the key. With that phone he could reach his case
officer in Langley. All his European acquisition
editors were CIA agents. Strauss was also, rather
conveniently, Peter Matthiessen's publisher.

Before the publication of his God And Man At Yale,
William Buckley wrote an article for Commonweal, in
which he argued for the creation of a 'totalitarian
bureaucracy'. Buckley had been recruited to the CIA
out of Yale. His case officer at the Agency was E.
Howard Hunt, novelist and Watergate conspirator.
Buckley co-founded The National Review with former
Trotskyite, James Burnham, who also worked for the
CIA. Buckley got his wish for a bureaucratic
dictatorship when the National Security Act was
amended in 1949. Under the direction of George Kennan,
the CIA developed its covert action capability, all of
which Kennan later regretted as 'the biggest mistake
of my life', as he put it. Still, that power was
abused, as the CIA engaged in illegal acts against
David Ellsberg, Barney Rosset, Angus McKenzie and many
others, including me, because the censoring of
unwritten books is a form of unconstitutional prior
restraint. This has had a power-ful effect on free
expression in America, engendering timidity in the
publishing world from which it has never recovered.

Now, with the enactment of the Patriot Act, these
illegal activities are legal, including protective
detention, with the privilege of the writ of habeas
corpus suspended by impli-cation. Writing under these
conditions becomes the supreme challenge in a society
that George Orwell would easily have recognized. The
national security state has been transformed into the
police state, not unlike life under Franco in Spain,
which I personally experienced. You are free to go to
the beach when you want, to go shopping when you want,
but the closer you get to the Third Rail of power, the
greater the peril. The bloody crossroads, as Cyril
Connolly called them, of literature and politics has
become increasingly bloody, with the result that
literary life in America has become impenetrably
bland: The Lovely Bones, The Five People You Meet In
Heaven, on it goes. Get with the team or shut up. Even
the 9/11 novels all seem contrived and banal. An
anti-Bush book by a former government employee did
appear during the election, and a CIA analyst wrote a
book criticizing the 'imperial hubris' of the
administration. But after the election, Bush appointed
Porter Goss to head the Agency, and he quickly purged
all dissenters. Since then, it is as though an iron
curtain has descended on American publishing.

Why the silence?

But why the total silence about the revelations about
the PR, given that Matthiessen has told the truth to a
number of people? 'The true division of humanity',
Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, 'is between those
who live in light and those who live in darkness'. And
Solzhenitsyn said that the first obligation of the
writer was 'not to be part of the lie'. But, alas,
much of the literary world and the media that reports
on it, choose to remain in the darkness and be part of
the lie because that's what it takes to make a living
in a culture of lies. And maybe, it all has to do with
the PR still being a CIA operation, which is why no
one will write about it as an ongoing operation,
according to CIA policy. There is, in sum,
considerable denial in the world of American letters,
and as they say at A.A., I'm told, 'denial is not a
river in Egypt'.

George Plimpton ultimately knew the difference between
the light and the darkness, which is why, before he
died, he named Barney Rosset of Grove Press, as the
first recipient of the Paris Review Hadada, a bronze
statuette of a bird, as 'an editor, pub-lisher or
writer who has distinguished themselves in furthering
the cause of contemporary literature'. But just before
the 50th anniversary celebration of the PR to be held
at Cipriani's, George Plimpton died. The celebration
went on any way, with an indoor fireworks display in
honor of Plimpton's honorary title of Fireworks
Commissioner of New York. Garrison Keillor hosted the
event. Guests were seated with literary table hosts,
including Paul Auster, Rick Moody, Michael Cunningham,
Lorrie Moore, John Ashbery, James Alter, Francine
Prose and Kurt Vonnegut. There were readings from the
PR by poet Robert Pinsky and music by David Amram,
Israela Margaliat, Ilann Maazel, and the Bethune Big
Band.

But the bronze statuette was not presented to Barney
Rosset before the other guests. Rather, as he related
it to me, he was shuffled off to a hallway, where it
was quickly presented to him out of sight of everyone
else. He was not even invited to the dinner. Was
Robert Silvers still furious over The Pied Piper?
'George's last joke', Barney quipped. Barney
remembered a literary conference in Puerto Rico, where
he ran into George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and
William Styron. Everyone was convivial, with the three
inviting Rosset to drive with them away from the hotel
to a bar where they could 'drink in private'. But once
in the car with Barney, they began pressuring him to
allow Grove to be used for the publication of the
works of Latin American anti-Communist writers, the
way the CIA had published Ignazio Silone, Richard
Wright and others in The God That Failed. Barney
refused to join the secret team and they put him out
of the car, obliging him to trudge the three miles in
the dark back to the hotel.

Matthiessen gave evidence of being remorseful. After
the disastrous legal fight with then governor of South
Dakota, Bill Janklow, involving allegations in
Matthiessen's book on the American Indian Movement, In
The Spirit of Crazy Horse, he almost lost his house.
He developed a serious melanoma, but survived. Then he
completed his Everglades trilogy, Killing Mister
Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone, a morality
tale on the evils of racism and the excesses of
capitalism. The books contain some passages of
exquisite prose, as if it took his confession to John
Sherry for this to finally happen. As Virginia Woolfe
observed about writing novels, you can't be honest
about other people unless you are honest about
yourself. Matthiessen is working hard at being a
different man, as if trying to honor James Baldwin's
professed goal in life: 'To be a good writer and a
decent person.'

As for myself, I still remember seeing George for the
last time. I was coming back from a play, walking east
on West 43rd Street, until I got to Fifth Avenue,
heading for the Jitney. It was late, and the streets
were dark. Then, I caught sight of him on his bike,
going against the traffic, his trademark white hair in
stark contrast to the shadows. I saw him raise his arm
and wave to me, and I shouted into the night, 'Hey,
George!' and waved back. He was gone.

http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/the_fiction_of_the_state.html
••••••
----> ON MEDIABISTRO'S DANIEL KUNITZ ALSO AT THE
NEO-CONSERVATIVE NEW YORK SUN

The Sun was founded by a group of investors including
CONRAD BLACK .... The Sun's managing editor Ira Stoll
had been a longtime critic of this policy of the
Times, as well as what he considered to be liberal
bias in Times reporting, in his media watchdog blog
smartertimes.com. When smartertimes.com became
defunct, its Web traffic was redirected to the Sun
website.

Stoll has characterized the Sun's political
orientation as "right-of-center," and an associate of
Conrad Black predicted in 2002 that the paper would be
"certainly NEOCONSERVATIVE in its views."
Editor-in-chief Lipsky describes the agenda of the
paper's prominent op-ed page as "limited government,
individual liberty, constitutional fundamentals,
equality under the law, economic growth ... standards
in literature and culture, education."[5] The Sun's
roster of columnists includes many prominent
conservative writers, including William F. Buckley,
Jr., Michael Barone, Daniel Pipes, and Mark Steyn. ...
The paper courted controversy in 2003 with an unsigned
February 6 editorial arguing that protestors against
the Iraq war should be prosecuted for treason.
According to Scott Sherman, writing in the left-wing
magazine The Nation (4/30/07), the Sun is "a
broadsheet that injects conservative ideology into the
country's most influential philanthropic, intellectual
and media hub; a paper whose day-to-day coverage of
New York City emphasizes lower taxes, school vouchers
and free-market solutions to urban problems; a paper
whose elegant culture pages hold their own against the
Times in quality and sophistication; a paper that
breaks news and crusades on a single issue; a paper
that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against
individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel
and Jews; and a paper that unapologetically displays
the scalps of its victims."[9]

In the same article, Mark Malloch Brown, Kofi Annan's
chief of staff at the United Nations, describes the
Sun as "a pimple on the backside of American
journalism." ... While the Sun claims "150,000 of New
York City's Most Influential Readers Every Day,"
according to April 2007 article in The Nation, its
[the Sun's] own audit indicates that "the Sun is
selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more
than 85,000. (By contrast, the Daily News sells about
700,000 copies a day.) In an attempt to lasso
subscribers in certain New York ZIP codes, the Sun
recently offered free subscriptions for a full year,
an unusual way for a newspaper to build circulation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Sun

----> BACK TO THE NEW REPUBLIC: " ... the Sun and of
the New Republic, both of which are owned in part by
ROGER HERTOG (“neoconservative”) and Michael
Steinhardt (“liberal”) ... Canadian media magnate
Conrad Black is another major financial backer of the
Sun. Black also owns the UK Spectator. ... "
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy30.html

----> Sun Chairman Roger Hertog also chairs the
Manhattan Institute, a trustee of the American
Enterprise Institute, and was an anonymous funder of
Commentary, the CIA's cold war propaganda sheet: " ...
most of the contributors to the Commentary Fund have
chosen to remain anonymous, especially Roger Hertog.
... "
http://republicandan.blogspot.com/2005/05/evening-in-commentary.html

A Sun rises
in New York

But will we need a flashlight to find it? Read on.
By Jeff Bercovici

But the vice chairman of Hollinger International,
Conrad Black’s company, told The New York Times that
the Sun will be "certainly neoconservative in its
ideological views."

Neoconservatism is a strain of political thought first
articulated in the 1960s and 1970s that places
particular emphasis on limited government and free
markets.

Through Hollinger, Black owns the Chicago Sun-Times,
the London Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post.

He will own 12.5 percent of the New York Sun.
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2001/nov01/nov26/5_fri/news3friday.html

----> FOLLOW THE MONEY ... WHOSE MONEY? ... "Daniel
Kunitz, who was managing editor from 1995 to 2000,
explained, "The Paris Review does not run on a lot of
money. There are no large salaries, and a million in
the bank is a lot more than it's ever had before."
Before it became a nonprofit, he recalled, it had an
operating budget of about $300,000 and required added
revenues of about $100,000 a year. Plimpton never took
a salary from the magazine, which McDonell has called
his "spiritual hideout." Now that the publication is
being run as a nonprofit, it's easier to attract money
from other foundations ... "
by Cynthia Cotts
October 21st, 2003 12:00 AM
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0343,cotts,48043,6.html

----> Paris Review co-founder Harold Humes, squeezed
out by the CIA, heard voices and was a probable mind
control case:

Puttin’ On The Ritz
by Richard Cummings

" ... Matthiessen told Sherry that he had not
“founded” The Paris Review from scratch, as legend has
it, but that he had established it at the behest of
the CIA ... "

Paris Review co-founder Harold L. Humes's novels
resurface ...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/cummings1.html
By Celia McGee
Published: January 17, 2007

The renewed attention to Harold Humes is no doubt
aided by the growing interest in American writing of
the 1940s and '50s, and a better understanding of the
mental instabilities that can stall a creative career.
(Humes suffered from some of the same sort of manias
that also afflicted John Nash, the math genius
chronicled in "A Beautiful Mind.") Humes, moreover,
was the campaign manager on Norman Mailer's run for
mayor of New York City in 1969, and present at the
infamous party where Mailer stabbed his wife Adele.

" ... But also intriguing to many is the documentary's
revelation of a CIA connection to the history of The
Paris Review. In the film, Matthiessen, best known as
a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of
American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first
time that he was a young CIA recruit at the time he
helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.
... "

"Immy cajoled me into talking about it," Matthiessen
said.

Humes, who tussled with Matthiessen and Plimpton about
this secret after Matthiessen confided in him in the
mid-'60s, died in 1992 in St. Rose's Home, the New
York City cancer hospice founded by Nathaniel
Hawthorne's daughter. Immy Humes found correspondence
between the three co-founders about Matthiessen's
clandestine affiliation in a suitcase of papers sent
to Harold Humes's wife and four daughters in New York
after he had to be institutionalized in Britain for
several months after a psychotic break.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/17/features/counter.php

Yale was, as Robin Winks documented so brilliantly in
Cloak & Gown, under the aegis of Sherman Kent, one of
the prime theorists of American intelligence, the
major recruiting ground for the CIA. William Buckley
was one of those the CIA recruited, along with another
Yalie, who would become famous as the architect of
American counterintelligence, James Angleton.
Angleton, who went from the OSS to the CIA and who was
regarded, along with Allen Dulles and Kent as one of
the three leading American theorists of intelligence,
stayed close to Yale’s intellectual circles that
participated in the CIA’s recruitment efforts. Another
of its prizes at Yale was Peter Matthiessen, nephew of
Harvard literary critic F.O. Matthiessen. Patsy
Southgate, Matthiessen’s ex-wife, told me before her
death that she and Peter were "swept off" by the CIA
to Paris to engage in literary covert action. ...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings19.html

••••••••
PART SIX: NRO's Cathy Seipp, the Internet Mentor of
Theresa Duncan's Loudest Detractor, KATE COE

Right-wingers love-bombed Cathy Seipp in her lifetime,
and still write of her as a passing saint of
"conservatism" - why not? She was a female David
Horowtiz, a fascist liar on the take from the CIA, Ann
Coulter's ideological clone (and there was even a
physical resemblance). She despised liberals like a
good little Nazi. Seipp considered Hollywood's
Writers' Guild a surviving bastion of old guard,
Stalin-style "Communism."

It was all for show, of course, blatant dishonesty.
But lies are the staple of "conservatism," and no one
held her anti-liberal "principles" against her -
except her victims, of course, but they didn't have
the media connections ...

MediaBistro's Kate Coe

Cathy Siepp was the Internet mentor of Kate Coe

Coe's friend Anne Thompson: "COE is a sharp-witted
industry pro who produces for TV. Mediabistro, the
journalists' website, pays her by the post to blog,
which she happily does, obsessively. (We met through
our mutual blogging MENTOR, the late great CATHY
SEIPP.) ... "
http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/06/bloggers-chat-p.html

----> CATHERINE SEIPP? The conspiratorial right-winger
(whose protegé Ms. Coe denounces "conspiracy
theorists" Duncan and Blake). Cathy's dead, but much
bereaved by her neo-con friends at Fox News, and the
like. She wrote the weekly 'From the Left Coast'
(opinion formation) column for NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE.

----> THE NATIONAL REVIEW AND THE CIA - That is,
National Review Online, a crooked little house built
by a crooked little intelligence agency ...

For the Review's indebtedness to the CIA, see
"Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?":
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3700.htm


Also: "The National Review: A CIA Front?"
http://wconger.blogspot.com/2007/09/national-review-cia-front.html

A little background on National Review - WILLIAM CASEY
Drew up National Review's papers of incorporation ...

Hunt (and Buckley) Fail to Come Clean About the CIA
and the Conservative Movement, March 4, 2007: " ... at
[the CIA's James] Burnham's urging, [William F.]
Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier
"Conservative" publication of the past fifty years,
joining him in the endeavor as principal editors were
Kendall, Burnham, and his sister Priscilla, all of
whom had been employed by the CIA. William J. Casey
drew up the incorporation papers for National Review,
and served as its long-time legal counsel. The
mysterious early funding of this "non-profit"
publication has long been an enigma to researchers.
One hoped that Hunt (and Buckley) would finally shed
light on this subject, for in one of the most
fascinating, if incomplete, chapters in the book, The
Great Propaganda Machine, Hunt describes some of his
activities in the CIA's on-going efforts to
manipulate, subsidize and influence the news media and
through it, American public opinion. The great
unanswered question of this book therefore, is: What
was Hunt's role in assisting his old colleague in
creating the CIA's synthetic "Conservative Movement?"
Buckley's National Review editorial colleague Frank
Meyer (and his good friend, National Review
contributor Murray Rothbard) believed that the
magazine was a CIA operation run by Burnham as
Buckley's control. And Hunt does detail in the book
how the CIA was engaged in many clandestine operations
of covert front groups and foundations using media
manipulation and propaganda to project American
imperial power and hegemony throughout the world. Why
not come clean about National Review? Buckley remained
close to Hunt and, as he relates in this book, helping
him through some trying post-Watergate legal
difficulties after the mysterious airline death of his
wife Dorothy. Years later, Buckley was outted as a CIA
operative by former CIA agent William Sloan Coffin ...
"
http://www.amazon.com/review/RM8YBB3V6BWQ2

----> A FAIR ENOUGH SUMMATION OF MS. SEIPP'S
CIA-FASCIST PROPAGANDA ROLE: " ... Like [Dennis]
Miller, Ron Silver, Rob Long, Ben Stein, and a few
celery-stick munchers, [Cathy] Seipp works the angle
of being a rare, beleagured conservative in heathen
Hollywood. You know, the type of writer/personality
who peddles tales about saying something positive
about George Bush at a party and everybody falling
down in a dead faint; that sort of thing."
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2005/12/index.html

----> CATHY SEIPP "GOES TO BAT FOR JOE MCCARTHY and
attacks the Hollywood Left:
http://www.plugnickeltimes.com/archives/S_0704a.html

----> DENNIS SEIPP, HER HUSBAND, WORKS FOR WASHINGTON
GROUP INTERNATIONAL, INC. (WGI), formerly
Morrison-Knudsen Corporation, which intersected with
the CIA: " ... Brown & Platt is a rather prestigious
Chicago law firm with a history dating back to 1881.
It has become international in scope and has offices
all across this country and around the world. Why
would this legal giant have an interest in my little,
obscure blog? One word and that is Seipp! The real
kicker is that their interests do not revolve around
the recently departed Cathy Seipp, but rather Dennis
Seipp, associated with Washington Group International,
Inc. ... "
http://mike-connectingthedots.blogspot.com/2007/03/cathy-seipp-story.html

----> THIS RETURNS US DIRECTLY TO WARREN BUFFETT'S
CHARITY GOLF OUTING AT OFFUTT ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
WGI IS THE FORMER MORRISON-KNUDSON CORP., WHICH BRINGS
US TO: "Peter S. Lynch - Manager o/t Fidelity Magellan
Fund; FIDELITY MUTUAL FUND Whiz; Director of Morrison
Knudsen and W. R. Grace & Company; Wall Street Stock
Investor; Advisory Committee AmeriCares."

----> Re Lynch: He is a Knight of Malta, a distinction
he shares with WR Grace and son. AmeriCares, of
course, is a CIA front. On and on ...
http://letsrollforums.com/movers-and-shakers-sovereign-t16438p10.html

But more importantly, ANNE TATLOCK (see part four),
who was with Warren Buffett when her Fidelity Savings
office was destroyed at the World Trade Center on
9/11, is also a principal of the FIDELITY MUTUAL FUND.
SEC Filing - http://www.secinfo.com/dwvdh.z22.htm


----> Let's Draw the Buffett-Tatlock-Lynch-9/11 Loop
even Tighter: Recall that Anne Tatlock was an
executive at FIDELITY INVESTMENTS. AND: "Peter Lynch
(born January 19, 1944) is a Wall Street stock
investor. He is currently a research consultant at
FIDELITY INVESTMENTS."

----> Today, PETER S. LYNCH IS VICE CHAIRMAN OF
FIDELITY INVESTMENTS.
http://www.zoominfo.com/search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=1389647

Knight of Malta Peter S. Lynch has been at Fidelity
Investments - a corporate casualty of 9/11 - for 42
years.

He's been there for some time: " ... Lynch was hired
as an intern with Fidelity Investments in 1966 partly
because he had been caddying for Fidelity's president
(among others) at Brae Burn Country Club in Newton,
Massachusetts. ... When he returned after a two year
Army stint he was hired permanently in 1969."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lynch

----> RE: Washington Group International, Inc.

WGI'S Defense Services Program, from the company web
site:

" ... The Department of Defense, CLASSIFIED
INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES and military installations face
considerable challenges in responding to multiple
world events. The transformation of the military
structure, base closures and natural disasters has
increased the demand for a highly qualified pool of
contractors that quickly engage and mobilize to
provide affordable, timely response. From new
construction to refurbishment of existing facilities,
we add value and cost savings to military projects and
government-related agency life cycle programs. Our
core strength lies in complex operations management in
government facilities, backed by 70 years of military
service in engineering, procurement, construction,
operations, maintenance and management:

Global Military Base Operations, Maintenance, Closure
and Realignment
Classified Engineering and Construction
Global Infrastructure and Privatization
http://www.wgint.com/markets/defense/defense_services/

----> WGI is owned by the URS Corporation. Let's take
a look at the URS Board of Directors, where we find
representatives from Rand Corp., Lockheed (Cohen Group
is its lobbying arm), Textron, some CIA fronts
(Agilent, VeriSign), and other sinister corporations:

H. Jesse Arnelle - ... a director of Textron
Corporation since 1993 ... a director of Gannett
Company [owned in part by BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY] ... a
director of Union Pacific and Resources, Inc.; as a
director of Wells Fargo and Company; and as a director
of Waste Management, Inc. ...

Armen Der Marderosian - ... Mr. Der Marderosian served
as President and Chief Executive Officer of GTE
Government Systems Corporation from 1995 to 1999 ...

Lydia H. Kennard - ... served on the Board of Trustees
of Rand Corporation since 2002 ...

General Joseph W. Ralston - ... Vice Chairman of The
Cohen Group since 2003 ... a director of Lockheed
Martin since 2003 ... General Ralston's military
career began in 1965 and concluded in 2003 when he
retired from active duty. General Ralston's military
career was highlighted by his service as Vice Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. from
1996 to 2000 and Commander, U.S. European Command and
Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO from 2000 to
2003.

John D. Roach - ... a director of VeriSign, Inc.
(since July 2007) ...

William P. Sullivan - ... the President and Chief
Executive Officer of Agilent Technologies, Inc. ... He
served as Agilent's Executive Vice President and Chief
Operating Officer from March 2002 until March 2005 ...
a Director of Agilent since March 2005..

William D. Walsh - Mr. Walsh has served as Chairman of
Sequoia Associates LLC, a private investment firm,
since 1982
••••••
----> Re: Cathy Seipp

Fox News mourned her passing after a long bout with
lung cancer: " ... Cathy was a conservative by choice,
not by upbringing, and she delighted in exposing
liberals for their elitism and insensitivity. ... "
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,260268,00.html

MEMORABLE QUOTES BY CATHY SEIPP

"The WGA West remains filled with unreconstructed
apologists for American Communists."

" ... People on the left [who in America push for
affirmative action for women and gay marriage] are
making common cause with political Islam, which
regards women as chattel and think homosexuals should
be crushed in walls. ... "
http://www.lukeford.net/essays/contents/mediabias.htm

"The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times are
liberally-biased and will not admit it... "
http://www.lukeford.net/essays/contents/mediabias.htm

"A disapproving phrase you get called a lot here if
you’re conservative is 'mean-spirited.'"

BLATANT DISHONESTY: AL FRANKEN RESPONDS TO CATHY
SEIPP'S LIES AT NRO

August 25, 2006 11:51 AM
Being Franken

To the Editor
Dear Right-Wing People,

On Monday, August 21 Catherine Seipp wrote a piece on
your website that perpetrates a nasty myth about my
record as an employer. Ms. Seipp wrote as follows:
"Another friend of mine, for instance, visited Borders
not long ago looking for a book she’d heard of that
had a funny anecdote about how Al Franken rails
against audiences for not employing more minorities,
and yet apparently couldn’t find any non-white
research assistants for his book Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them... or writers for Saturday Night
Live when he was an executive producer there... or
researchers and producers for Air America. But she
couldn’t remember the name of the book and asked at
the information desk for help. “Really? Al Franken?”
the Borders clerk asked dubiously. “It must be some
self-published thing.” My friend added that she
remembered there was something about liberal hypocrisy
in the book’s title, but the clerk said he’d never
heard of it and couldn’t find it.

The book, Do As I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in
Liberal Hypocrisy, is actually a very clever and
well-researched polemic by the Hoover Institution’s
Peter Schweizer, who jokes that “Al Franken’s staff is
whiter than Bob Jones University.” Schweizer’s
publisher is not a vanity press but Doubleday, but
it’s easy to understand why those on the Left wish
people who point out the hypocrisy of their icons
would just shut up and disappear.

Ms. Seipp is correct on one point. The misinformation
she disseminates is from Peter Schweizer’s book. But
let’s take these one-by-one. I do not rail against
audiences for not employing more minorities. What
Schweizer was referring to is a joke I tell when I
give speeches at a lot of corporate events. The joke
is: “First of all I want to congratulate (name of
company) for not giving into that whole affirmative
action nonsense.”

There was a “non-white” student who helped research
Lies and the Lying Liars. I was never executive
producer of SNL, but when I served as producer for the
1985-6 season, we hired Danitra Vance, who was both a
writer and a cast member and was African American.
(Danitra has since passed, although National Review
did not give it the attention it gave to Belushi’s
death, because, I assume, she was black.)

One of my researcher/producers on my Air America show
is black. When we first started, the second researcher
I hired was black. He left to finish Yale Law School.
Our archivist is black.

In his book Schweizer makes up some statistic that
I’ve hired something like a 107 people during my
career and only one has been black. First of all, it
appears that Schweizer came up with his number by
rather creatively manipulating the definition of who
I’ve hired. For example, he counts the writers of my
projects. Well, I am a writer, often the sole writer,
on all my projects. So he counts me several times.
And, yes, I admit it. I am always white.

Also, he includes the producers of my projects, almost
all of which I produce. Since the projects I produce
are those for which I am a writer, he counts me twice
for each of those. And again, when I produce, I am
always white.

For some reason, Schweizer doesn’t include Sanaa
Lathan, a cast member of my sit com Lateline, nor
Lenny Garner who directed an episode of that show.
Sanaa is now a movie star, but not because of
Lateline. Schweizer doesn’t include any of the skilled
crew of that show or any of the other projects that
I’ve been involved in.

I thank you for the opportunity to correct the record,
particularly since Doubleday refuses to do so for the
paperback version of Schweizer’s book.

Your pal,

Al Franken
Minneapolis, Minnesota
http://www.propeller.com/viewstory/2006/08/28/al-franken-to-national-review-dear-right-wing-people/?url=http%3A%2F%2Farticle.nationalreview.com%2F%3Fq%3DZGNmZGEwYTM0YTE2MWRlODIxNmI0ZTUwZmQ3YjU5MzY%3D&frame=true

Section B

PART SEVEN: THE OMAHA/DES MOINES CHILD PROSTITUTION
NETWORK ALLEGATIONS - PICKING UP THERESA DUNCAN'S
INVESTIGATION ... THIS TIME, WITH MEDIABISTRO.COM AS
THE STARTING POINT

Now it gets really interesting ...

A black cat

Names to keep an eye out for in this entry are in
caps: We recall that Theresa Duncan was about to tie
Jim Cownie to the OMAHA scandal, which revolved around
one LARRY KING, a high-profile CIA-Republican and
pedophile, when she decided to "suicide." Cownie
founded Iowa's Heritage Communications at the behest
of the CIA's Tom Murphy (CapCities' founder), the
company that went on to become TCI, bought out by
Rupert Murdoch and in turn acquired by AT&T. See:
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/08/murder-of-theresa-duncan-jim-cownie.html)

(It's the same patriotic-pedophilic milieu that most
recently gave us this little suppressed outrage.)

King's stolen millions were channeled through FIRSTIER
BANK. (Stephen PIzzo's Inside Job: The Looting of
America's Saving & Loans details the multitude of
CIA-Mafia hands behind the S&L heists of the '80s, the
context for Franklin.)

Click to enlarge.

The following connections alone constitute the motive
for MediaBistro's continuous defamations of the late
Theresa Duncan - protecting other CIA-Republicans (and
a smattering of political mongrels from the
upper-tiers of the Democratic Party), not just Cownie,
from exposure in the Omaha case, especially DAVID E.
WIT OF CECI (CAL ENERGY)/LOGICAT:

MediaBistro.com -> Logicat -> CECI/AT&T -> FirsTier ->
Larry King.

MediaBistro's Kate Coe, a producer at Murdoch's
NewsCorp., the approved state propaganda network,
snickers at Theresa's Omaha allegations - even
concerning missing children and child prostitution
nets, credit union heists, etc. - a comprehensive job
of defamation drawing on tried-and-true tactics of
misrepresentation and ridicule ... and the web site
that she writes for is but a couple of short steps
from the Franklin Credit Union scandal ...

There is severe conflict-of-interest in MediaBistro's
reporting on the "suicide" of Theresa Duncan.

We turn to ...

----> OMER ALGAR, Chief Technology Officer & Chief
Operating Officer at MediaBistro.Com.


Mr. Algar Hails from LOGICAT, Inc.

"Omer, our chief technologist and our chief operating
officer, is responsible for maintaining and growing
mediabistro.com. ... Formerly at LOGICAT, INC., he
managed the development and operations of educational
data services, including the College Board's
Enrollment Planning Service and Predictor Plus. He
grew up in lovely Istanbul, finished high school at
Robert College, and then came to the U.S. to earn a
B.A. degree in computer science and economics from
Hamilton College."
http://www.interbiznet.com/ern/archives/070718.html

----> Logicat was Founded by DAVID WIT

----> ANOTHER AT&T CONNECTION (We've seen AT&T ties
earlier, and I will group them in an upcoming
section): Mr. Wit's stepdad is Michael I. Sovern,
president of Columbia U. and a director of AT&T since
1995 - " ... Michael I. Sovern, director since 1984,
the former president of Columbia University who
established Joseph Califano's CASA at Columbia. ... "
http://www.smokershistory.com/cummins.htm



Herbert A. Allen

" ... Mr. Wit, a summa cum laude graduate of Hamilton
(note that Mr. Algar graduated from Hamilton, too),
where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, is a
co-founder and the managing partner at Logicat Inc., a
software and test development company in New York. His
mother is a sculptor. His father is a managing
director at Allen & Company, investment bankers in New
York (named for Herbert A. Allen, a director of The
Coca-Cola Company since 1982). His stepfather, Michael
I. Sovern, is the president of Columbia University.
... "
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DA113CF933A05754C0A96F948260

----> "David E. Wit 32. Mr. Wit has been a director of
CECI since April 1987. He is co-founder and Co-Chief
Executive Officer of Logicat, Inc., a software
development/publishing firm. Prior to working at
Logicat, Inc. Mr. Wit worked at E.M. Warburg, Pincus &
Company, where he analyzed seed-stage financing and
technology investments."

OMAHA CONNECTION

----> The principal executive offices of CECI and CE
Sub [CALENERGY] are located at 10831 Old Mill Road,
Omaha, Nebraska. [THIS IS ALSO THE ADDRESS OF THE
MIDLAND BIG BROTHERS, BIG SISTERS CHAPTER -
https://www.kintera.org/site/apps/ka/sd/donor.asp?c=khLOKXPFLqF&b=3599395&en=oiJPJVMEIbIIKTPyFbKYIfNLKfJPKWNDJjISL0OKInJ7G
- chilling in light of King & Co.'s pedophilic
interactions with children from Boystown, as described
by John DeCamp in The Franklin Cover-Up]

David E. Wit 32 Director.
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/archive7,24,00,7,29,00.htm

DAVID E. WIT, Director. Mr. Wit has been a director of
CalEnergy since
April 1987.
http://www.secinfo.com/dsvrn.8sh.d.htm

----> THE NEBRASKA CONNECTION - AN EXPLOSIVE IMBROGLIO
SHARED BY DICK CHENEY AND THE BUSH FAMILY
by Linda Minor

... According to John DeCamp, FirsTier Bank "was the
bank Larry King's pilfered $40 million passed through,
without anybody batting an eye." In 1987-88, at the
time of the Franklin Credit Union scandal was
revealed, there were two men serving on the board of
FirsTier Financial, Inc. who were also directors of a
company called Valmont Industries--Robert H. Daugherty
and William F. Welsh II.

Note below that Thomas F. Madison is also on the board
of US West Communications - a board on which Cheney
sits. Also interesting is the fact that Lloyd P.
Johnson serves on the board of Cargill and Norwest.
Charles M. Harper is on the ConAgra board, as is
Walter Scott, Jr., who also serves on the board of
Berkshire Hathaway and Burlington Resources. A recent
makeup of Valmont's board is shown below.

Burlington Resources is a company affiliated with the
Burlington Railroad, formerly the Atchison, Topeka and
Santa Fe in St. Louis. The Bush and Walker families
have been closely connected to this company. Walter
Scott, Jr. was on the FirsTier board in 1987 and has
been on Valmont since 198, as well as on Burlington
Resources and other boards. [Click. Note 2] He
currently is on the board of Mid American Energy,
sitting alongside a man with a fascinating resume,
named Sir Neville G. Trotter, JP., DL., FCA, FRAeS,
67. [Click. Note 3]

Another thing that stands out is the obvious
connection between the FirsTier Financial and Peter
Kiewit Sons, Inc. The latter company controls the
Kiewit Royalty Trust, which was created under a Trust
Indenture dated May 17, 1982 by Peter Kiewit Sons',
Inc., a Delaware corporation to provide "an efficient,
orderly and practical means for the administration of
income received from certain royalty and overriding
royalty interests in certain coal leases." The Trust
has no active plan of business operation and was set
up to distribute income to holders of Units. (The
trustee of the Trust is First Bank, National
Association ("Trustee"), Omaha, Nebraska, which is a
wholly owned subsidiary of First Bank System, Inc., a
registered bank holding company. First Bank, National
Association is a successor to FirsTier Bank N.A.
Omaha, as a result of the merger of FirsTier Financial
Inc., the parent holding company of the former
trustee, with and into First Bank System, Inc.

FirsTier was also closely tied to California Energy
and Magma Power Co. (a Nevada corporation). In a 1995
proxy statement for MAGMA POWER COMPANY, 4365
Executive Drive, Suite 900, San Diego, California
92121 a meeting to be held in Omaha, Nebraska, was
announced by chairman David Sokol at which Magma
stockholders would consider and vote upon a proposal
to approve the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as
of December 5, among Magma, California Energy Company,
Inc. ("CECI") and CE Acquisition Company, Inc., a
wholly owned subsidiary of CECI ("CE Sub"), pursuant
to which CE Sub will be merged with and into Magma
(the "Merger"). The statement also contained the
following information: Kiewit Energy Company ("Kiewit
Energy"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Peter Kiewit
Sons', Inc. ("PKS"), is an approximate 43% stockholder
(on a fully diluted basis) in CECI.

PKS, a Delaware corporation, is a large employee-owned
company which had approximately $2.2 billion in
revenues in 1993 from its interests in construction,
mining, energy and telecommunications. PKS is one of
the largest construction companies in North America
and has been in the construction business since 1884.
PKS is a joint venture participant in a number of
CECI's international private power projects.

The principal executive offices of CECI and CE Sub are
located at 10831 Old Mill Road, Omaha, Nebraska 68154
and their telephone number is (402)330-8900. CE Sub is
a wholly owned subsidiary of CECI and has not
conducted any business except in connection with the
Offer. CECI and CE Sub were incorporated in 1971 and
1994, respectively, under the laws of the State of
Delaware. The principal executive offices of PKS are
located at 1000 Kiewit Plaza, Omaha, Nebraska 68131,
and its telephone number is (402) 342-2052. PKS was
incorporated in 1941 under the laws of the State of
Delaware. The board of directors of Magma are as
follows ... Director Walter Scott, Jr. 62 Director
Barton W. Shackelford 73 Director DAVID E. WIT 32
Director. ...
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lmnebraskaconnection.htm

----> Related - FirsTier and the Iran contra scandal,
see: CIA AND ORGANIZED CRIME FRONTS DURING THE
IRAN-CONTRA ERA AND CONTINUING (D. Wit mention)
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg49545.html

••••••
PART EIGHT: Allen & Co. LLC, the
CIA-Mafia-Omaha-MediaBistro.Com Nexus

" ... Media Leviathan, U.S. Intelligence Form Secret
Cabal ... "

Very little in the way of editorial content this time.
We are external observers of the research, which takes
us to ...

THE KEY CIA-MAFIA CONNECTION TO MEDIABISTRO.COM (see
the Cliff Robertson interview below), THE CENTRAL LINK
BETWEEN MEDIABISTRO.COM AND OMAHA'S FRANKLIN COVER-UP
...

HERBERT A. ALLEN, a mobbed-up director and a key MB
connection to the CIA-Mafia-RNC-sponsored Omaha
scandal that Theresa Duncan wrote about before her
"suicide." It's my contention that Jim Cownie, founder
of the company that is now AT&T Cable, whom she named
in connection with Larry King of Omaha and associated
child prostitution network, wasn't the only one who
dreaded an exposé ...



Few subjective opinions are offered here - these news
reports, press releases, interviews and miscellaneous
scraps of information speak tomes for themselves - all
of this begins to explain the deaths of Theresa Duncan
and Jeremy Blake - and MediaBistro.Com, with ties to
Herbert Allen's investment firm - has expended so much
energy defaming and discrediting Duncan's research -
the cover-up proves the crime ...

Back to that sale of MB to JupiterMedia:

----> MediaBistro founder Laurel Touby thanks her
Internet advisor NATE ZELNICK:

JUL 18, 2007

MediaBistro.com Merges With Jupitermedia: a Marriage
of Minds & Media Resources

MB founder Laurel Touby: "Today is probably the
happiest day of my life. (Okay, second happiest.
Getting married to Jon [Wise] was pretty excellent.)
When I put up my first web site in 1996 -- or was it
1997? the records are gone -- it was a humble little
directory on someone else's web site.

No announcement would be complete without a long list
of thank-yous. Here are the people who I am grateful
to [list] ... Nate Zelnick and the other tech gurus,
who escorted me through the vagaries of PERL script
and Cold Fusion. ...
http://www.mediabistro.com/news/breaking/mediabistrocom_merges_with_jupitermedia_a_marriage_of_minds_media_resources_63233.asp

----> NATE ZELNICK HAILS FROM ALLAIRE CORP.

The Web Standards Project: Members
archive.webstandards.org/member - [Cached]
Published on: 4/14/2006

Nate Zelnick, Freelance Writer, Boston

"Zelnick has been a reporter covering technology
(among other things) since 1990. He also writes the
bi-weekly columns "Under Development" for Internet
World and "The XML Files" for the Web magazine
Webdeveloper.com. He has worked at PC Magazine, edited
a number of newsletters related to the Internet and
the electronic information industry, and was Technical
Editor of Webweek/Internet World. He has also worked
for public radio in Philadelphia, The New York Times,
States News Service, and he ran the conference program
for the Internet World trade show. Zelnick was
recently Project Manager for Industry Relations for
ALLAIRE CORP. in Cambridge, MA, and represented the
Internet tools company at the World Wide Web
Consortium."
http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=20305591

---> THE ALLAIRE CORPORATION - BUT, MORE IMPORTANTLY,
BRIGHTCOVE, "THE GOOGLE OF VIDEO" - WERE INCORPORATED
BY JEREMY ALLAIRE, WHO EMPLOYS LAUREL TOUBY'S INTERNET
TRAINER, NATE ZELNICK:

Jeremy Allaire

" ... Jeremy founded BRIGHTCOVE in early 2004 with a
vision for the transformation of television with the
Internet. ... Jeremy joined Macromedia with its merger
with ALLAIRE Corporation, where Jeremy was a
co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. Founded in
1995, Allaire Corporation was a pioneer in using the
web as an application platform ... "
http://www.brightcove.com/about_brightcove/brightcove_board_of_directors.cfm

----> THE RISE OF BRIGHTCOVE

From: Brightcove's Ad Guru Adam Gerber Departs, by
Gavin O'Malley, Jul 23, 200

"... Jeremy Allaire founded Brightcove in 2004 and
immediately began recruiting from established
companies--including News Corp., Comcast, Macromedia,
Lycos, and ATG. Since then, the company has racked up
a number of victories, most recently winning
video-distribution duties for Fox Entertainment Group
last month. Other top-tier publisher partners include
Dow Jones, The New York Times Company and CBS News.
... "
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=64392
Brightcove

WHAT IS BRIGHTCOVE? - "Brightcove is an Internet TV
platform/network that allows content makers to
monetize their content with ad revenues. The site has
two different content makers in mind, independents and
established media entities. Brightcove provides
different distribution and monetization solutions that
work for both.

"Brightcove offers two main kinds of distribution to
its content makers. Content makers can allow their
content to be placed on blogs and websites free of
charge, which increases their reach and drives
traffic, or they can license their content to be used
how the buyer sees fit. Both CBS News and Fox have
made deals with Brightcove."
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/brightcove

----> BRIGHTCOVE SIGNS THE "MAINSTREAM" (CIA-MAFIA)
MEDIA

June 17, 2007, "Television Syndication will Never Be
the Same: Fox Video is Sharable with Brightcove
Player" - "Brightcove's JOSH HAWKINS tells me: ...
Monday's announcement comes on the heels of a deal
with CBS Corporation where Brightcove was chosen as
the Internet video syndication platform for all CBS
News properties - e.g., the Evening News with Katie
Couric, The Early Show, etc. (This is not part of the
CBS Audience Network, which we are also part of).
Other Brightcove customers in the broadcast/cable
category include Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting
(e.g., Sky Sports, Sky News), Discovery (e.g., Animal
Planet, TLC, Travel, Discovery), National Geographic
Channel, MTV Networks, Rainbow Media (e.g., IFC, WE
TV, AMC, Fuse), Disney Buena Vista Television (e.g.,
Live with Regis and Kelly, Scrubs, Who Wants to be a
Millionaire?, Ebert & Roeper), TV Guide.

"Congrats to JEREMY ALLAIRE and the team for making
such extraordinary progress with the broadcast world."
- Andy Plesser
http://www.beet.tv/2007/06/fox_video_is_sh.html

----> BRIGHTCOVE'S JOSH HAWKINS BEGAN IN THE CORPORATE
SECTOR AS A POLITICAL FUNDRAISER VIA THE INTERNET - "
... Josh has also directed Web, email and fundraising
programs for a variety of FEDERAL POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
and national public affairs initiatives.
http://splinteredchannels.blogs.com/about.html

----> BARRY DILLER IS ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AT
BRIGHTCOVE:

BARRY DILLER is the Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Chairman of
Expedia, Inc.

Since December 1992, beginning with QVC, Mr. Diller
has served as chief executive for a number of
predecessor companies engaged in media and
interactivity prior to the formation of IAC.

>From October 1984 to April 1992, Mr. Diller served as
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fox, Inc. and
was responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting
Company in addition to Fox's motion picture
operations.

Before joining Fox, Mr. Diller served for ten years as
the Chairman and Chief Executive of Paramount Pictures
Corporation. In March 1983, in addition to Paramount,
Mr. Diller became President of the conglomerate's
newly formed Entertainment and Communications Group,
which included Simon & Schuster, Inc., Madison Square
Garden Corporation and SEGA Enterprises, Inc. Prior to
joining Paramount, Mr. Diller served as Vice President
of Prime Time Television for ABC Entertainment
(Another CapCities exec).

Mr. Diller was born in San Francisco and raised in
Beverly Hills. He serves on the boards of The
Washington Post Company and the COCA-COLA Company. He
is also a trustee of New York University and serves on
the Executive Board for the Medical Sciences at UCLA
... Channel 13/WNET ...

---->Diller entered the Brightcove picture with
investment partner ALLEN & CO.; Diller and HERBERT
ALLEN are both are on the COCA-COLA BOARD OF DIRECTORS
(Diller since 2002):

Diller's IAC, AOL to Invest In Web-TV Company, WALL
STREET JOURNAL

"Some of the biggest names in the Internet business,
including Time Warner Inc.'s America Online and
IAC/InterActiveCorp, are lining up behind Brightcove,
a start-up firm that is developing technology that
could accelerate the growth of television on the
Internet.

"Barry Diller, IAC's chairman, is joining the
Brightcove board as part of a $16.2 million round of
funding announced today. Other participants in the
funding group include Hearst Corp. and ALLEN & CO LLC,
an investment-banking firm that specializes in media
investments. AOL, which is making Internet TV a
priority, is leading the investment group and is the
largest investor."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113261996520303641.html

(Other noteables on the board at Brightcove, which has
been transformed into one of the most promising
corporations on the Internet. Jim Breyer: ... Jim is
currently on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart Stores
... Scott Kurnit: ... started the first Pay Per View
cable network .... He was also the youngest program
director in the PBS SYSTEM and served as program
director for Qube, the world's first fully interactive
cable system. Mr. Kurnit was president of Showtime
Event Television ... Employed directly or through
joint ventures, Mr. Kurnit has worked at the highest
levels of Warner, Viacom, News Corp., PBS, IBM, and
MCI. David Orfao: ... David led ALLAIRE Corporation
from 1997 to 2000 as President/CEO/Board Member.
http://www.brightcove.com/about_brightcove/brightcove_board_of_directors.cfm)

---->No, he's not the Smoking Man (HERBERT A. ALLEN's
connection with MEDIABISTRO'S OMER ALGAR, LOGICAT, and
its co-founder, DAVID WIT, formerly of FIRSTIER BANK,
which laundered the some $38-million pilfered from the
FRANKLIN CREDIT UNION by OMAHA'S pedophilic Republican
embezzler, LAWRENCE KING, who had ties to the elite of
the city, the CIA, Oliver North, Warren Buffett,
newspaper publisher Harold Anderson, and an infamous
child prostitution network, will be the topic of the
Theresa Duncan "suicide" discussion.)

David E. Wit is of particular interest here:

" ... Mr. Wit [eerie coincidence, Theresa Duncan's
references to Jeremy Blake as "Mr. Wit"] is a
co-founder and the managing partner at LOGICAT INC., a
software and test development company in New York.
.... His father is a managing director at ALLEN &
COMPANY, investment bankers in New York (named for the
family of HERBERT A. ALLEN, a director of Coca-Cola
Company since 1982). His stepfather, Michael I.
Sovern, is the [former] president of Columbia
University. ... "
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DA113CF933A05754C0A96F948260

(David E. Wit has been a director of CECI since April
1987. He is co-founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer
of Logicat. Wit worked at E.M. Warburg, Pincus &
Company, where he analyzed technology investments.

Michael I. Sovern Wikipedia entry: "Outside of law and
academia, Sovern is Chairman of Sotheby's Holdings,
Inc. and sits on numerous boards of directors,
including Comcast Communications. Mr. Sovern has
served on the board of trustees of the Asian Cultural
Council, formerly the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund,
based in New York and in Asia. He also served as a
board member and juror for the Pulitzer Prizes.")

---->FOX SIGNS WITH BRIGHTCOVE:

"Fox Picks BrightCove For Online Video"
Duncan Riley

" ... Fox Entertainment Group have announced the
selection of online video provider Brightcove as the
single online distributor of Fox network television
programs. Starting immediately, Fox Broadcast Net, FX
and Speed is available via ad-supported Internet video
channels using Brightcove technology with more content
to follow. ... "
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/18/fox-picks-brightcove-for-online-video/

What Is Brightcove Doing With A Total of $81.2 Million
Funding?
January 17th, 2007

"The return on investment made on YouTube’s funding
through the acquisition definitely has whetted the
appetite of investors. YouTube took in two rounds of
funding from SEQUOIA (see parts six and ten) Capital
for a total of $11.5 million. ..."

---> ANOTHER COMPANY THAT RINGS A BELL - AND ANOTHER
TIE TO MEDIABRISTO - ONE William D. Walsh (in Part Six
of this series) is chairman of Washington Group
Investments (WGI) (part six) which employed Dennis
Seipp last time we looked - the husband of Cathy
Seipp, Kate "FishBowl LA" Coe's Internet mentor.
YouTube, of course, is owned by RUPERT MURDOCH, whose
company employs Ms. Coe.

---->The article continues: " ... So how come
Brightcove, a lesser known Internet TV website is
receiving such substantial funding? Brightcove started
with $5.5 million and then received $16.2 million.
Today, it was announced that Brightcove raised $59.5
million. This comes to a total of $81.2 million of
total funding. The investors include Maverick Capital,
The New York Times Company, Transcosmos Investments,
Accel Partners, ALLEN & COMPANY, America Online,
General Catalyst Partners, The Hearst Corporation, IAC
(InterActivCorp), and Brookside Capital."
http://pulse2.com/2007/01/17/what-is-brightcove-doing-with-a-total-of-825-million-funding/

----> Allen is on the Board of Coca-Cola See: Re Coke
and the Nazis
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2007/07/coca-cola-nazisbritish-comedian.html

Herbert A. Allen
President and Chief Executive Officer
Allen & Company Incorporated (a privately held
investment firm)

"Herbert A. Allen has been a director of The Coca-Cola
Company since 1982. Mr. Allen is president and chief
executive officer and a director of Allen & Company
Incorporated, a privately held investment firm, and
has held these positions for more than the past five
years. Mr. Allen was a managing director of Allen &
Company LLC, a privately held investment banking firm,
from September 2002 to February 2003. He is a director
of Convera Corporation."
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/ourcompany/bios/bio_20.html

---->ON HERBERT A. ALLEN, THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

Media Leviathan, U.S. Intelligence Form Secret Cabal

A quiet gathering of the media’s top elites to discuss
mergers, with a keynote address by the head of the
CIA, escaped mention in the mainstream press.

Exclusive to American Free Press
By M. Raphael Johnson

Each year, at the posh ranch of investment banker
Herbert Allen Jr., the world’s media elites meet to
discuss strategy, possible mergers and editorial
policy. It can only be called a media version of
Bilderberg as government, corporate and media
officials are meeting in secret, behind the usual wall
of security.

As always, for all of these meetings that actually
matter, leftist protests are strangely nonexistent,
even though it is summertime and colleges are largely
empty.

This year is a bit different, given that the key note
speaker is none other than CIA Director George Tenet.
[Tenet is a director of Allen & Co. - AC]

Tenet’s attendance has been likened to the “smoking
gun” that researchers have been looking for, proving
the institutional link between finance, media,
government and business.

Like all meetings of this type, it is off limits to
reporters, however ironic it might be for a media
confab.

The world’s media, whose bosses are attending the
gathering, have not bothered to mention the CIA
connection this year, likely the first time the
world’s premier intelligence gathering service has
been invited to this media gathering.

One of the main issues this year is the buying up of
French media giant Vivendi, currently run by Jean
Bernard Levy (aka Jean Marie Fourtou, among other
names), which controls Universal Studios, according to
The New York Post.

Making bids are Edgar Bronfman, Jr. and Sumner
Redstone. Redstone also has made noises that he is
interested in buying CNN.

Bronfman and Barry Diller have held high executive
posts in the French conglomerate in the past, but are
now using their connections to buy up the majority of
shares, though some media reports deny that Diller is
interested.

Some have speculated that the “French” corporation is
merely another front for Bronfman and Zionist
interests.

Bronfman is the founder of the World Jewish Congress,
an organization that also includes Vladimir Guzinsky
who owns the media MOST corporation in Russia, with
major shares being owned by a CIA-conduit, The
Washington Post.

CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner, strangely, was
not present, though it might be noted that in 2002,
Turner, in an interview with the British Guardian
newspaper, said “Israel practices terrorism” and the
“bombers are all they [the Palestinians] have.”

Major corporate sponsors included Starbucks coffee
(with several others remaining secret) and the
Wednesday arrival of Tom Hanks, Candace Bergen and New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proves that this is not
merely a secretive place to make deals, but is the
very canvas where the American anti-culture is
painted.

Bloomberg’s presence is important, for, as mayor of
the most powerful city in the world, he brought in
ex-CIA spy David Cohen to become his deputy
commissioner of intelligence, creating a link between
the CIA, Bloomberg and this media conference.

What makes this year different is that the mergers, as
mentioned by Redstone in a recent speech at the
confab, is that the FCC has relaxed its acquisitions
laws, as well as the presence of U.S. intelligence.

Of course, Tenet would not have attended unless there
is an extant link between the CIA, mass media and
corporate America.

Tenet’s presence is not mentioned in any CIA document
or press release, nor is any newspaper reporting it
except American Free Press. The only major mention of
Tenet’s presence was a brief July 9 statement on
Headline News, a CNN/Bronfman property found on most
cable providers.

The same is said for Starbucks and as yet unnamed
other corporate sponsors of the event. Only in that
brief report were they mentioned, dropping out of
sight thereafter.

In 1998, when CNN did a story on the United States
using nerve gas on antiwar GIs during Vietnam, CIA
operatives made them pull the story.

CNN had turned the story over to several long-time
clandestine operatives, including former head of
operations Ted Price. Price’s successor was David
Cohen.

On Nov. 11, 2001, The New York Times uncovered a ploy
by the Bush administration to set up “round the clock”
“news bureaus” to control the “message of the day.”

Additionally, the same article reported that several
dozen major Hollywood executives met with Karl Rove,
President Bush’s senior adviser, to find “common
ground on how the entertainment industry can
contribute to the war effort, replicating in spirit if
not in scope the partnership formed between filmmakers
and war planners in the 1940s.”

Gen. Tommy Franks stated at a press conference on
March 25, 2003, that “the media is a weapon of war.”

For many who have never heard of Allen’s gatherings,
the full institutional formation of intelligence,
business, banking, media and government links is to
control the information that reaches the global
public.

Allen’s conferences remove such linkages from the
realm of “conspiracy theory” into the realm of real
journalism. Not surprisingly, such reports have yet to
surface in the mainstream media.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/07_11_03/Media_Leviathan/media_leviathan.html
Also:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Herbert_Allen

Allen & Co.'s Directors

• Donald R. Keough "has been a director of The
COCA-COLA Company since 2004. Mr. Keough is chairman
of the board of Allen & Company Incorporated, a
privately held investment firm, and has held this
position for more than the past five years. Mr. Keough
retired as president, chief operating officer and a
director of the Company in April 1993. He is also a
director of IAC/InterActiveCorp, Convera Corporation
and BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY Inc." [1]

• Herbert A. Allen, President and CEO

• George Tenet, Managing Director, former CIA director

• Kim M. Wieland, CFO (Former Managing Director)

• Stanley S. Shuman, [Former?]Executive Vice President
& Managing Director; Board Member, NEWS CORPORATION
[MURDOCH] - Stanley S. Shuman graduated from with a
B.A. from Harvard University, J.D. from the Harvard
Law School, and an M.B.A from the Harvard Business
School.

Shuman has been a Managing Director of Allen &
Company, Inc. since 1970, Non-Executive Director of
News Corporation since 1982, Director of News America
since 1985, and Director of Carnegie Hall. He was
appointed by President Clinton to the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and is also on the
Board of Visitors of the Institute of Public Policy
Science and Public Affairs at Duke University, where
he was Chairman from 1992 to 1996. Mr. Shuman is also
a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Director
of the Markle Foundation, member of the Bar of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Bar of the
State of New York
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Stanley_S._Shuman

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Allen_%26_Company%2C_Inc.

Camp Allen

---->MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE CIA-MEDIA
MEETINGS HOSTED BY HERBERT ALLEN, KINGPIN OF THE CIA'S
MEDIA MAFIA

MOGULS WILL BE MOGULS AT CAMP ALLEN
Shareholders get burned around the Big Media campfire
BY NIKKI FINKE, July 5, 2006

Gas up the Gulfstream G550, Jeeves, it’s time for your
Master of the Media to attend Camp Allen, that annual
summer sleep away in Sun Valley, Idaho, for
entertainment, communications, high-tech, Internet and
other corporate plutocrats. (These guys may be the
only Americans who can afford to “fill ’er up.”) This
year’s confab for monied moguls — think white men
frolicking a la Bohemian Grove (only with families and
clothing) — is from July 10 to 16. I’ve managed to get
my hands on the preliminary speakers schedule, and the
highlight (or is it lowlight?) has to be Barry Diller,
Rupert Murdoch and Sir Howard Stringer interviewed by
Michael Eisner. Oh, to be a fly on the wall, if only
to hear whether FrankenEisner will let someone else
gets a word in edgewise.

EBay and Amgen are giving presentations to answer
softball questions like, “Why is your company so
fabulous?” The Oracle from Omaha, Berkshire Hathaway
honcho Warren Buffett, will be interviewed by Charlie
Rose. And, to fuel those Trilateral Commission
conspiracy theorists, Friday’s seminar on “The
Improvised Explosive Device Challenge and How We Are
Countering It” will be given by General (Ret.)
Montgomery C. Meigs, who was commander of U.S. Army
forces in Europe and of NATO’s peacekeeping force in
Bosnia. (In 2003, CIA Director George Tenet wouldn’t
talk to the Senate Intelligence Committee after
allowing Dubya to wrongly assert that Saddam Hussein
had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, but he did
give a private intelligence briefing to Camp
Allen.)...

And the gathering still brings together the likes of
Sumner Redstone (Viacom), John Malone (Liberty Media),
Richard Parsons (AOL/Time Warner), Brian Roberts
(Comcast), Barry Diller (IAC/InterActiveCorp), Les
Moonves (CBS), Peter Chernin (News Corp.), Bill Gates
(Microsoft), Mario Gabelli (major shareholder in
Cablevision), Richard Lovett (CAA), Jeff Berg (ICM),
Terry Semel (Yahoo), Bob Iger (Disney), Tom Freston
(Viacom), Bob Wright (NBC Universal/GE), Ron Meyer
(Universal), David Geffen (Dreamworks), Jeffrey
Katzenberg (Dreamworks), Edgar Bronfman Jr. (formerly
Seagrams, now Warner Music) and Michael Ovitz
(unemployed). But, to be honest, nobody talks about it
anymore, nobody cares about it anymore and nobody
wants it anymore. Attending it now is a chore.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/deadline-hollywood/moguls-will-be-moguls-at-camp-allen/13926/

----> BIRDS OF A FEATHER - HERBERT ALLEN IS SOLIDLY IN
THE CIA MOCKINGBIRD MILIEU (that's why he looks like
the Smoking Man on X-Files)-Warren Buffett Agan:

Death of Katharine Graham

... Her funeral was attended by a group of nationally
recognized business, political and media celebrities,
including Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Case,
Lawrence Eagleburger, Herbert Allen, Oscar de la
Renta, Barbara Walters, Vernon Jordan, Barry Diller,
Robert McNamara, Dick and Lynne Cheney, Rudy Giuliani.
They were all present to bid farewell at the National
Cathedral, as former Senator John Danforth delivered
the homily and Yo-Yo Ma played.

Even Henry Kissinger was there to offer a eulogy.
Kissinger, the public official who practiced best in
secret, Kissinger, a practitioner of death – the man
who is yet to be held accountable. Kissinger praised
Graham for having "fiercely defended...freedom of
expressions" and for being "a seminal figure in the
battle to submit even the highest officials to ethical
and judicial norms."
http://www.chicagomediawatch.org/01_3_graham.shtml

COMPANIES THE AMERICAS: Last stand of Coke's old guard
By Andrew Ward, Financial Times

Apr 19, 2006

"Cut Don Keough, it is said, and he would bleed a
fizzy brown liquid. The Coca-Cola
president-turned-director has been at the heart of the
soft drink company's leadership for more than three
decades.

"He will seek to extend the relationship for at least
one more year today when he stands for re-election to
the board at Coke's annual shareholder meeting in
Wilmington, Delaware.

"But as Mr Keough approaches his 80th birthday in
September, the charismatic Irish-American admits there
is a limit to how much longer he will serve.

"'Is there a day when I will decide to call it a day?'
he asks. 'Of course. I hope to serve on the board for
another year but not much longer after that.'

"Mr Keough's plan for life after Coke adds to signs of
change in the company's famously entrenched boardroom.
Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and Coke's
largest shareholder, will step down from the board
after today's meeting, ending his 17 years as a
director.

"Both Mr Keough and Mr Buffett - friends since their
days as neighbours in Omaha, Nebraska - are part of a
close-knit boardroom club that has presided over the
world's largest beverage producer since the 1980s.

"Another veteran director is Herbert Allen, the
billionaire financier whose investment banking firm,
Allen & Co, is chaired by Mr Keough.

"Critics have long called for a shake-up of the Coke
board, arguing it has grown too cosy and incestuous to
lead the company out of a long period of sluggish
growth.

"The board's radical decision this month to go without
annual pay unless earnings targets are met reflects
the pressure on directors to become more accountable.

"Mr Keough, however, rejects criticism that the board
lacks independence.
'I've never lost an ounce of sleep over someone
criticising the board,' he says in a rare interview.
'Warren Buffett once said the most independent
director would be a man off the street of New York who
does not know anybody because he could not possibly
have any conflicts of interest. But he would probably
make a lousy director.'

"Mr Keough first joined the board in 1981, when he was
appointed president and chief operating officer after
17 years with the company. For the next decade, he
served as loyal deputy to Roberto Goizueta, Coke's
legendary former chief executive, during one of the
most successful eras in the company's history. "I was
the best paid janitor in America," he jokes, playing
down his role in the success.

"Mr Keough retired in 1993 but remained an influential
adviser to his former colleagues. He rejoined the
board two years ago after the company removed age
limits on its directors.

"Some critics have cited Mr Keough's enduring presence
as an example of how Coke remains fixated on past
glories instead of embracing new opportunities in the
beverage market.

" ... Last year, PepsiCo's market capitalisation
overtook Coke's for the first time after several years
of superior growth. Mr Keough, however, rejects the
notion that Coke is in terminal decline. ... "
http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=%22Herbert+Allen%22&aje=false&id=060419000564&ct=0