Columbia University Journalism School's Washington Post-CIA-FBI-New America Foundation Connection

Before being named by Washington Post Company board member Lee Bollinger to be the new Dean of Columbia University’s “Washington Post Journalism School" former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll spent 5 years as the president of the financially secretive New America Foundation [whose board chairman is Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt].

Coincidentally, when Columbia University School of Journalism Dean-Designate Coll was the New America Foundation president, the New America Foundation apparently hired former CIA Counterterrorist Center Deputy Director and former FBI Senior Intelligence Adviser Philip Mudd as a New America Foundation “Senior Research Fellow, Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative.” As the New America Foundation’s own website notes:

“…Philip Mudd studies issues of counterterrorism…with the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative.

“Mr. Mudd joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985 as an analyst specializing in South Asia and then the Middle East. He began work in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in 1992 and then served on the National Intelligence Council as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia (1995-98). After a tour as an executive assistant in the front office of the Agency’s analytic arm, Mr. Mudd went on to manage Iraq analysis at the CIA (1999-2001).

“He began a policy assignment at the White House in early 2001, detailed from CIA to serve as the Director for Gulf Affairs on the White House National Security Council. He left after...September 11...for a short assignment as the CIA member of the small diplomatic team that helped piece together a new government for Afghanistan, and he returned to CIA in early 2002 to become second-in-charge of counterterrorism analysis in the Counterterrorist Center. He was promoted to the position of Deputy Director of the Center in 2003 and served there until 2005.

“At the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Branch in 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller appointed Mr. Mudd to serve as the Branch’s first-ever deputy director. He received a Presidential nomination to become Undersecretary of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security in early 2009 but later withdrew his nomination, returning to the FBI as its Senior Intelligence Adviser. Mr. Mudd resigned from government service in March 2010.

“Mr. Mudd is the recipient of numerous CIA awards and commendations, including the Director’s Award; the George H.W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism; [and] the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal…”

So don’t expect the new Dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism to encourage journalism students at Columbia University to write many muckraking articles about either the Washington Post Company’s historic relationship with the CIA or the way that the CIA, the FBI, the New American Foundation and the Washington Post Company board of directors attempt to use the U.S. mainstream corporate media to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad in the 21st-century.

Columbia Students Demand End To Columbia University President Bollinger's Support for JPMorgan Chairman Dimon

The following letter to Columbia University President and Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Lee Bollinger was recently sent by some Columbia University and Barnard College students, faculty members, employees and alumni:

"Dear President Bollinger,


"As faculty, employees, alumni, and students of Columbia University, we are writing to express our deep disappointment in your recent decision to support JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon’s continued membership on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.


"As the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed, your unambiguous duty -- as stated by the Guide to Conduct –- is to maintain “the integrity, dignity, and reputation of the Federal Reserve System. . . and to avoid actions that might impair the effectiveness of System operations or in any way tend to discredit the System.”

"By supporting Dimon’s tenure you have abdicated this most basic responsibility. You denied your own responsibility to ensure the integrity of the Fed by echoing Mr. Ben Bernanke’s remarks that it is up to Congress to address this problem. You then added that Congress had more pressing issues than this one. In so doing, are you not, in essence, urging inaction by all parties capable of affecting this important change? Further, by characterizing those who wish to see Mr. Dimon resign as “foolish” and in possession of a “false understanding” of how the Fed works, you have added insult – and inaccuracy – to the original injury of encouraging this critical institution to continue in its current form.


"It is worth reminding you that JPMorgan Chase is currently under investigation for its recent $3 billion trading loss – a loss Mr. Dimon initially denied and then characterized as a ‘tempest in a teapot’. It may also bear repeating that Mr. Dimon has long campaigned aggressively against important regulatory reforms designed to prevent excessive risk taking by Too Big Too Fail institutions – institutions the Federal Reserve bailed out with trillions in taxpayer money.


"We urge you to reverse your support for Mr. Dimon and instead call for his resignation. We respectfully remind you that there is precedent for this kind of action. In April 2011, Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, stepped down from the NY Fed after it was clear that GE Capital would be regulated by the Fed as a ‘systematically important’ financial institution.


"As an educator, you have a particular responsibility to demonstrate moral and intellectual credibility, something you have failed to do in this situation. As the President of a university, you have a responsibility to ensure that students have the best possible opportunities upon graduation. Surely you must know of the unemployment crisis currently facing young people in America – a situation brought about in no small measure by the ‘Too Big to Fail’ financial institutions at the heart of the 2008 collapse. That collapse not only threatened the employment potential of millions of American students, but also risked the financial health of the parents and grandparents who co-signed their educational loans. That you would choose to uphold the interests of major financial institutions over students and their families is unimaginable. We certainly hope that the contributions made to Columbia by JPMorgan – sums north of $500,000 – had nothing to do with your decision.


"Three years after the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the country is struggling to rebuild its economy. A stable and appropriately governed financial system is a pre-requisite of our recovery. As the Chairman of the NY Fed, you can certainly take this most obvious step forward...."

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Conclusion

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

Like George W. Bush [II]’s father and grandfather, Henry Kravis’s father—a Tulsa, Oklahoma petroleum engineer and oil industry investor named Ray Kravis—was also extremely interested in Republican Party national politics (although he had worked for President Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy in the 1940s by investing Kennedy Dynasty money in southwestern oil properties). By the 1970s, Henry Kravis’s father regularly gave about $40,000 a year to the Republican Party’s national and senatorial committees.

In the 1970s, Henry Kravis’s father was also worth about $50 million [in 1970s money]. And in the 1970s, the Tulsa businessman also “began launching the next generation, working his network of New York cronies to position his son for great things to come,” according to The Money Machine.

Henry Kravis’s father had gained entry into the U.S. Establishment after he discovered a tax loophole which enabled investors in oil properties to be taxed at a greatly reduced rate; and, in addition to working for President Kennedy’s father, Ray Kravis also became friendly with Gustav Levy, the then-senior partner of Goldman Sachs & Co. and Co. and with Cy Lewis, a Bear Stearns senior partner. Coincidentally, after Henry Kravis secured his MBA from Columbia University’s Business School in 1969, his father’s friend, Cy Lewis of Bear Stearns, offered him a high-paying job at Bear Stearns.

When an older Bear Stearns partner named Jerry Kohlberg decided that money could be made quicker if he founded his own partnership to specialize in leveraged buy-outs [LBOs], Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts (who was also then a Bear Stearns partner) decided to become Kohlberg’s partners in the 1976-founded Kohlberg-Kravis-Robersts [KKR] firm. By the late 1980s, however, Jerry Kohlberg decided he wanted to leave the firm, and did so, although it still bears the Kohlberg name.

Although Henry Kravis and his cousin George Roberts each increased their individual personal wealth too over $325 million by the late 1980s as a result of KKR’s 1980s business activity, some critics of KKR held the firm responsible for breaking up U.S. companies unwisely, destroying thousands of jobs and loading up companies with irrational amounts of debt. By 1989, other critics were warning that “because Kravis and other takeover artists typically finance their deals with enormous amounts of debts…the highly leveraged financial structure of the corporations…may come crashing down at the next recession with dire consequences…for the economy at large,” according to 1989 Current Biography Yearbook. And James Ledbetter characterized Kravis in the Village Voice’s May 26, 1992 issue as “the takeover magician whose greed-driven mergers and acquisitions helped wreck the U.S. economy in the 1980s (a point that even Fortune magazine conceded in a recent issue).”

Kravis’s 1980s business activity was also criticized on ethical grounds by at least one business journalist. In her The Money Machine book, for example, Sarah Bartlett wrote:

“…Was it good public policy for [Oregon Investment Council Member] Roger Meier to be able to commit several hundred million dollars of other people’s money to KKR and then several months later move into a position where he was personally enriched by the firm?...Did it make sense for KKR to be the largest source of financial support to state treasurers or comptrollers who, after their election, were in a position to assign to KKR state employees’ money?

Ironically, despite his enormous wealth, Kravis’s first marriage apparently fell apart in the late 1970s, after he fathered three children, because “he was so preoccupied with work that he barely noticed his wife’s growing frustration” and “some times the only time she would see Henry was when he would come staggering into their bedroom very drunk, and collapse fully-clothed onto the bed” and his wife “found out that Henry was fooling around with a barmaid at a downtown restaurant,” according to Sarah Bartlett’s The Money Machine.

After divorcing his first wife, Kravis began seeing a dress designer named Carolyne Roehm, whom he married in 1985. In the early 1990s, Kravis and his second wife shared a $5.5 million duplex apartment in Manhattan, a farmhouse in Sharon, Ct., a ski house in Colorado and a home on Long Island. In addition, in the early 1990s Kravis also owned a personal jet, a personal helicopter and a $14 million painting, besides also being a member of many exclusive country clubs.

[But after divorcing his second wife in 1993, Kravis then married a politically conservative Canadian policy wonk named Marie Josee Drouin-Kravis, who currently sits on the executive committee of the right-wing Hudson Institute think-tank’s board of trustees and on the corporate board of Ford Motor Company. In addition, the wife of the billionaire who's paying for the new business school building on Columbia University's new campus construction project in West Harlem--in which Columbia hopes to train more Wall Street executives--is also currently the president of the Museum of Modern Art.].

(end of article)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 4

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

To persuade U.S. public officials to serve KKR’s special, private interests by letting KKR use public pension funds to help finance KKR’s lucrative 1980s leveraged-buyout program, Henry Kravis’s firm used a variety of techniques.

In Oregon, for example, KKR hired a member of the Oregon Investment Council named Roger Meier in 1983 to be a director of Norris Industries, a company that KKR had acquired in 1981 with the help of the Oregon Investment Council. Meier then received an annual director’s fee of $15,000 from the KKR subsidiary, and, in 1985, Meier was named by KKR to an $18,000/year position on its Fred Meyers subsidiary’s corporate board. The Money Machine by Sarah Bartlett noted that:

“…When his [Meier’s] dual role was revealed in the local newspapers many Oregonians were outraged.

“It was, and still is, a violation in Oregon for anyone to use his or her public position for private gain.”

After the outrage over his accepting board slots on newly-acquired KKR subsidiary companies—following the approval of the utilization of Oregon public pension funds to finance KKR’s acquisition of these same companies—forced him to resign his Oregon Investment Council membership post, “Meier became an investor in certain companies in KKR’s portfolio” and “was also offered stock in one KKR company at a price that led one to wonder whether it was a sweetheart deal,” according to The Money Machine. He was sold 3,000 shares of U.S. Natural Resources [USNR] by KKR in the Fall of 1986 at $100 a share and by the early 1990s a share in USNR was worth $400, giving Meier a profit on paper of around $900,000 on his 1986 stock purchase from KKR.

When Oregon State Treasurer Bill Rutherford replaced KKR subsidiary director Meier on the Oregon Investment Council, KKR continued to treat kindly an Oregon public official with the power to let KKR use Oregon public funds to serve KKR’s special interests. It invited Rutherford to a KKR sponsored conference in New York City and paid over $800 of the Oregon public official’s conference expenses. Three weeks after this conference, the Oregon Investment Council voted to commit $600 million more of Oregon’s state funds to finance more KKR acquisitions.

To insure that Oregon’s public pension funds continued to be used in support of KKR’s special private interests, KKR intervened in Oregon politics in other ways during the 1980s. It contributed $6,000 to Rutherford’s 1984 campaign for Oregon State Treasurer when he ran against a candidate who opposed investing state funds in KKR’s deal-making operation. Another $20,000 was contributed to Oregon State Treasurer Rutherford’s 1984 campaign by three KKR subsidiaries: Daw Forest Products, U.S. Natural Resources [USNR] and PacTrust, making Kravis’s KKR firm “the largest contributor to Rutherford’s campaign by far,” according to The Money Machine. Not surprisingly, the KKR-sponsored Rutherford then won the 1984 election for Oregon State Treasurer.

Henry Kravis’s KKR—and his cousin and KKR partner, George Roberts—also used their financial power to help influence the outcome of the 1986 election for Oregon’s governor, who was the public official responsible for appointing members of the Oregon Investment Council. KKR gave the Democratic candidate for Oregon governor, Neil Goldschmidt, $6,000 for his primary campaign and $10,000 for his general election campaign. KKR also gave his Republican opponent in the general election, Norma Paulus, $35,000 in campaign contributions through individual donations from George Roberts or KKR subsidiary company donations.

Kravis’s firm also attempted to use its financial clout to influence the 1986 election in New York State for state comptroller, where then-State Comptroller Edward Regan had the sole authority to invest New York’s public pension funds. KKR contributed $50,000 to New York State Comptroller Regan’s re-election campaign chest in 1985 and 1986, making KKR the second-largest contributor to Regan’s campaign. KKR also gave then-New York State Comptroller a $15,000 post-election campaign contribution. Coincidentally, in 1986 then-New York State Comptroller Regan provided KKR with $55 million in public pension fund money for its acquisition program and in 1987 Regan gave KKR another $370 million in public funds for more KKR deal-making activity.

After some economists began to argue that KKR’s way of doing business was harmful to the U.S. economy, some political pressure to limit the use of KKR’s leveraged-buy-out [LBO] method of taking-over U.S. corporations began to develop in the U.S. Congress. To counter this political pressure, KKR hired five different lobbying firms in Washington to prevent passage of legislation that might reduce merger or LBO activity and limit the tax benefits of such activity.

In addition, KKR partners Roberts and Kravis began to pump more of their surplus profits into funding other nationally-known politicians, in addition to George Bush I. After 1987, KKR partner George Roberts made campaign contributions to then-members of the Senate Finance Committee such as Lloyd Bentsen, John Danforth, Robert Dole and Bill Bradley; and he also gave $100,000 in 1988 to Team 100, which was the Republican National Committee’s group of largest contributors. The Senate Finance Committee has jurisdiction over tax issues affecting KKR and 9 of the 20 senators on the committee received campaign contributions from either Henry Kravis, George Kravis or Henry Kravis’s second wife during the late 1980s. The Money Machine reported that Henry Kravis “gave over $80,000 to an assortment of senators, congressmen, Regular PACs and the GOP’s national committee” in 1987; and he gave another $100,000 to the Republican National Committee’s Team 100 in 1988, like his cousin and KKR partner George Roberts had done.

(end of part 4)

(Downtown 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 3

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

As long ago as the late 1980s, Henry Kravis’s KKR controlled one of the largest industrial empires in the world. As The Money Machine by Sarah Bartlett noted, “Not even J.P. Morgan in his heyday tried to amass an industrial empire on the scale of KKR’s.”

To acquire this economic empire between its founding in 1976 and 1989, the KKR investment banking partnership raised $62 billion from a variety of investor sources. Among the U.S. corporations gobbled up by Kravis’s KKR prior to its purchase of New York magazine in the early 1990s (in addition to Storer Broadcasting and Golden West Broadcasters) were the following: RJR Nabisco; Duracell; Stop & Shop; Safeway; Beatrice Foods; Owens-Illinois; Jim Walter; Union Texas Petroleum and Amstar.

A large proportion of the funds that KKR utilized after 1980 to acquire its privately-controlled economic empire came from the public funds of various state governments which were controlled by U.S. public officials, as well as from “nonprofit” institutional investors in KKR’s acquisition deals (like Harvard, Yale and the Salvation Army), from banks and from the sale of high-risk “junk-bonds.” In 1981, for example, KKR acquired the Fred Meyers company for $420 million “with a large slug of public pension money, courtesy of the State of Oregon,” according to The Money Machine. By 1986, KKR was using public money provided by the state pension funds of Washington, Oregon, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, Michigan, Minnesota and Utah to secure the capital required to increase the size of its economic empire by additional “leveraged buy-outs.” One year later, public pension funds from the same 11 states provided 53 percent of the $5.6 billion which KKR used to take private control of RJR Nabisco, according to The Money Machine. The same book also noted that “Over the years…KKR and the state funds came to be more like partners.”

In the course of acquiring its economic empire during the 1980s, KKR executives made millions of dollars in super-profits in a variety of ways:

1. After going heavily into debt to acquire a company that was built up by other people’s labor, KKR usually laid off a significant number of employees of the acquired company and sold off portions of the company;

2. KKR charged an exorbitant management fee to those nonprofit institutions and state government pension funds who invested in its deal-making funds; and

3. KKR pocketed huge acquisition transaction fees. From its 1986 acquisition of Beatrice Food Companies, for example, “KKR earned $45 million in management fees alone and many times that in transaction fees and profits,” according to 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.

(end of part 3)

(Downtown 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 2

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

Henry Kravis was one of New York's leading financial sponsors of former CIA Director Bush I's 1988 presidential campaign. Kravis and Bush I "really made a connection" at the end of 1987 and "during the early days of Bush [I]'s campaign for the primary election," Kravis "agreed to co-chair a Bush [I] fund-raising luncheon at the Vista Hotel in lower Manhattan, to which many Wall Street dealmakers were invited" that raised $550,000 for Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, according to The Money Machine by Sarah Bartlett. After Bush I won the 1988 election, Kravis was named co-chairman of Bush I's inauguration dinner. And in 1990, Kravis served as the national chairman of Bush I's inaugural anniversary dinner. The Money Machine described what happened at this latter dinner:

"The gala affair, which was held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, was attended by about one thousand people, most of whom were Republican Eagles, the group that gives at least $15,000 a year to the Grand Old Party...In his remarks that fun-filled night, Bush [I] took the time to single out Henry [Kravis] as one of `those who did the heavy lifting on this.'"

Kravis told The Money Machine author Sarah Bartlett in the early 1990s that Bush I "writes me handwritten notes all the time and he calls me and stuff, and we talk" and Barlett also revealed in her book that "when Bush [I] is mulling over a financial issue, he will seek out Henry's opinion." Bush I also offered Kravis some U.S. ambassadorship posts before Kravis agreed to accept an appointment by Bush I to a national trade commission. Kravis also contributed funds to George W. Bush II's uncle, Jonathan Bush, when Bush II's uncle was the financial chairman of New York State's Republican Party organization. New York Republicans named Kravis as their "Man of the Year" and then-Republican Vice-President Quayle gave a keynote speech at a Republican Party dinner which honored Kravis in either the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Coincidentally, Kravis's father--Ray Kravis--was a friend of George W. Bush II's grandfather--Prescott Bush of the Brown Brothers Harriman investment banking partnership. According to The Money Machine, "When his son George [Bush I] graduated from Yale and was looking for a job, Prescott asked Ray if he would give George [Bush I] a job. Sure, was Ray's response."

(end of part 2)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

Columbia University's Kravis/KKR/TASC Connection--Part 1

(To help fund the construction of a new Columbia Business School on Columbia University's 21st-century landgrabbing, private university real estate development/campus expansion project in West Harlem, the co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts [KKR]--Henry Kravis--recently gave a $100 million "gift" to the Columbia Business School. Coincidentally, Kravis is also the co-chair of the Board of Overseers of Columbia Business School. And since 2009, Kravis's KKR investment firm has been a co-owner of the TASC firm which obtains 40 percent of its annual revenues from Pentagon military contracts.

The following article about Henry Kravis and KKR's pre-1992 hidden history first appeared in the July 22, 1992 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper weekly, Downtown, during the period when Kravis's KKR firm still owned New York magazine--prior to its sale to Bruce Wasserstein in 2003 for $55 million).

"Last week a partnership controlled by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, the New York financial firm famous for engineering takeovers like RJR, Nabisco's, announced it would buy most of the U.S. magazine holdings of Rupert Murdoch...The $650 million deal (which came just days after KKR announced it would back Fleet/Norstar's $625 million acquisition of the failing Bank of New England) calls for the KKR group to buy nine publications. The list includes the Daily Racing Form--the most profitable--and New York, Seventeen and Premiere." (Newsweek magazine on May 6, 1991)

"Henry R. Kravis...has...been characterized as impatient, aggressive, and hard-edged. His longtime friend Michael Douglas is said to have copied some of his mannerisms for his role as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street...An early supporter of George Bush [I], he donated $100,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and, as the candidate's New York co-chairman, raised many times that amount." (1989 Current Biography Yearbook)

In its Sept. 5, 1989 issue, New York magazine published an article on the Kohlberg-Kravis-Roberts [KKR] investment banking partnership which concluded: "KKR has been one of the most self-consciously private and publicity-shy firms on Wall Street." Coincidentally, less than two years later, KKR's K-III Holdings Corp. subsidiary purchased control of New York magazine from the then-debt-burdened Fox Television Network/TV Guide Owner Rupert Murdoch. Shortly after KKR's April 1991 purchase of New York magazine, a New York media analyst named Richard MacDonald predicted: "I bet there won't be any Henry Kravis covers on New York."

In addition to purchasing New York magazine, Seventeen, Premiere and the Daily Racing Form, in the early 1990s, the KKR firm of New York's 1988 Bush-for-President campaign co-chairman, Henry Kravis, also purchased Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, European Travel & Life, Automobile and New Woman from Murdoch in 1991. The Weekly Reader and Funk & Wagnalls encylopedia were also owned by KKR prior to 1992.

Besides owning magazines, Kravis's KKR also owned commercial television stations in the early 1990s. In 1983 it had purchased Golden West Broadcasters and in 1985 it had raised $2.4 billion to gain control of Storer Communications. Consequently, KKR owned 15 percent of Storer/SCI Television--which operated commercial television stations in such places as San Diego, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee--in 1992. That same year, New York magazine's then-parent company also "made an agreement with an upstate New York cable" commercial television company "to acquire up to $1 billion in cable systems," according to the May 26, 1992 issue of the Village Voice.

In addition to having a special interest in the world of commercial television in the early 1990s, Bush I's 1988 campaign co-chairman in New York was the chairman of the board of trustees in the late 1980s of the New York City area's publicly-funded local PBS television station--WNET/Channel 13. In The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power And Profits, Sarah Bartlett noted how Kravis reacted after gaining more control over Manhattan's "non-commercial'television station:

"Today, Henry sits in his magnificent 42nd floor office exuding the satisfaction of a man who has conquered...`Chairmanship of Channel 13,' he says, clearly savoring the sound of it. `That's going to be a kick. I can bring my business background to that, my interest in television, my interest in education, and I'm having a lot of fun.'

But prior to 1992, Kravis apparently attempted to use his special influence to censor journalists who showed too much curiosity about how his KKR firm operated. As freelance journalist Sarah Bartlett recalled in The Money Machine:

"The journalists who tried to raise questions about KKR's behavior toward its investors were met with a combination of intimidation, personal attack, and disinformation.

"In my own case, after I wrote two stories in the New York Times in August of 1989 about KKR's troubled deals and [former KKR Partner Jerry] Kohlberg's lawsuits, Henry [Kravis] called the newspaper's [then-] publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, to complain. Henry knows Sulzberger...through the Metropolitan Museum, where Sulzberger is [was] chairman. The Met, of course, is where Henry donated $10 million for the Kravis wing.

"On Friday, Sept. 15, Henry [Former WNET-Channel 13 lawyer] Dick Beattie, and another KKR partner, Paul Raether, had lunch with Sulzberger, Max Frankel, the [then-] editor of the paper, the managing editor, and an assistant managing editor who oversees the business section. I never heard afterward from any of the editors who attended the meeting."

(end of part 1)

(Downtown, 7/22/92)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 12

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 11 of article).

About 53 percent of the non-voting stock of the profit-making Reader’s Digest Association was owned by “non-profit” institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and the New York Zoological Society in the early 1990s. But the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund which Mr. & Mrs. Wallace established before their deaths in the 1980s still owned over 50 percent of the voting stock of the Reader’s Digest Association, as well as about 30 percent of its non-voting stock, in the early 1990s.

The “non-profit” DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund owned $1.1 billion in assets and was the 15th-largest U.S. foundation in terms of assets in the early 1990s. The “non-profit” Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund owned $802 million in assets and was the 20th-largest U.S. foundation in terms of assets in the early 1990s. And the same U.S. Establishment figures who directed both the “non-profit” DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund and the “non-profit” Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund also directed the then-profit-making Reader’s Digest Association Incorporated in the early 1990s. (end of part 12)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 11

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 10 of article).

As a result of their 100 percent ownership of the Reader’s Digest Association’s voting stock, both DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace became quite wealthy during their lives [before both dying in the early 1980s]. Fortune magazine estimated DeWitt Wallace’s worth at nearly $300 million [in 1960s money] in 1968 and this made the Reader’s Digest co-founder among the 31 wealthiest men in the United States at that time, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also noted that, at the time of her death in 1984 at the age of 95, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace “was the richest woman in the United States,” with a net worth of at least $250 million [in 1980s money] that was “two and a half times the size of the estate left by Henry Luce” of the Time-Life magazines media conglomerate.

As early as 1935, Mr. & Mrs. Wallace had pocketed a huge fortune from their Reader’s Digest publishing hustle and they used part of this fortune to buy 105 acres of land in Mount Kisco, New York, upon which the childless couple built a 22-room castle called “High Winds”—during the height of the Great Depression. Although Mr. & Mrs. Wallace were quite eager to spend $277,336 [of 1930s money] in the 1930s to build their “Reader’s Digest Castle,” in 1936 their Reader’s Digest Association only donated $4,418 to 13 organizations, including “a check for a mere $10” to the American National Red Cross, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The same book noted, however, that “As the Digest’s fortune grew, Wally and Lila…established trust funds for numerous members of the Wallace and Acheson families.” But over $500,000 [in 1930s money] per year from their Reader’s Digest Association’s gross income was personally taken home by Mr. & Mrs. Wallace in the form of salaries during the late 1930s.

To reduce their federal income tax bills, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace apparently utilized the “non-profit” philanthropic foundations which they established. As Theirs Was The Kingdom revealed in the early 1990s:

“Wally’s greatest vulnerability lay with his philanthropies, which he often used as a cover to pad the retirement or compensation packages of favored employees…He arranged for Digesters to serve on the boards of organizations to which he gave money. But honorariums, free travel, and other perquisites—many of them nontaxable—were often involved. Another of Wally’s tax-evading ploys was to arrange for the children of privileged Digesters to travel abroad courtesy of the Reader’s Digest Association’s Foreign Study League…”

(end of part 11)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 10

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest  was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 9 of article).

In 1950, the Reader’s Digest Association established its lucrative Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club which condenses a number of novels and/or nonfiction books into one volume and distributes these volumes around the globe to its members. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club quickly became the largest book club in the world, with over 2.5 million members by 1955.

In 1955, after its newsstand sales began to drop when many of its readers began buying TV sets, Reader’s Digest then began to sell ad space for the first time in its U.S. edition to make up for its lost revenues. Reader’s Digest has also sold ad space to U.S. corporations like Eastman Kodak, Gillette, international Harvest, Exxon, Mobil, U.S. Steel, Texaco and Lockheed in its international edition. By 1980, a full page ad in the U.S. edition of Reader’s Digest cost $65,000 (in 1980s money) per issue.

Although $1.6 million worth of Reader’s Digest equipment at its Havana, Cuba plant—that had been used to produce its Spanish-language edition for Latin America—was confiscated in June 1960, following the Cuban Revolution, the Reader’s Digest Association continued to prosper during the Vietnam War Era of the 1960s and early 1970s. A division to sell vinyl record albums around the globe, which had been set up in 1959, had also proven to be quite profitable.

By 1980, the Reader’s Digest Association was a billion dollar/year business that employed 10,000 people around the globe and earned $100 million (in 1980s money) per year in profits. But in 1981, Reader’s Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace died at the age of 91 and, in 1984, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace died at the age of 95. (end of part 10)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 9

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 8 of article).

According to the book Little Wonder by John Bainbridge, the “transformation of the Reader’s Digest into something other than a digest began in the early 1930s.” The magazine began to hire writers directly to produce articles for Reader’s Digest to reprint—after Reader’s Digest first “planted” these same articles in other magazines. Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry recalled: “The Digest…subsidized original articles in its client magazines” like Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, but “nowhere in those magazines, were readers given notice that articles purporting to be original with the respective editor of each publication were, in fact, either original with the Digest or paid for with Digest money.” According to Little Wonder:

“In the five years from 1939 through 1943, the Digest planted articles in more than 60 publications…Of 47 articles reprinted from Harper’s, eight were Digest plants; of 39 furnished by the Atlantic Monthly, eight were plants;…of eight taken from The Nation, five were plants; of 26 credited to the New Republic, eight were plants and 13 others were on the Digest’s presses before the New Republic appeared on the stands with them…The Digest gave Commonwealth credit for nine reprinted articles; all were plants…”

By 1962, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “articles planted in other magazines for reprinting later in the Digest now constituted 70 percent of every issue in the U.S. edition.” Its policy of subsidizing and planting articles in other magazines before re-printing them in Reader’s Digest “gave the Digest power to propagandize its right-wing political views across a broad spectrum of the periodical press,” according to a reference book titled The Magazine In America. (end of part 9)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 8

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 7 of article).

After Reader's Digest Founder DeWitt "Wally" Wallace started selling Reader’s Digest on U.S. newsstands in 1929, some of the editors and publishers who had been letting him reprint their magazine articles in condensed forms for free finally realized how profitable the Digest had become by that time. Some now began to view Reader’s Digest as a competing product on the newsstand. So to induce them to keep allowing Reader’s Digest to reprint articles from their magazines and to insure that imitators would not have access to a similar source of articles, Wallace signed exclusive reprint agreements with 35 other U.S. magazines in 1929, in which he agreed to now pay these magazines quite generously.

By 1934, 1.5 million copies of Reader’s Digest were being circulated in the U.S., including over 500,000 copies that were sold on U.S. newsstands. The magazine’s then-net profit exceeded $400,000 during the height of the Great Depression and by 1938 Reader’s Digest’s circulation had jumped to three million—the largest of any U.S. magazine at that time. By 1942, its U.S. circulation was five million. And by 1946, the U.S. circulation of Reader’s Digest was 9 million.

After 1939, the Reader’s Digest Association began publishing the international editions of its magazines in nine foreign languages, as well as in English, which the CIA apparently utilized as propaganda outlets following World War II. By 1947, the combined circulation of Reader’s Digest’s international editions exceeded 4.6 million. The nine foreign languages utilized were Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Arabic, Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, French and German. (end of part 8)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

Remembering Kennedy Dynasty's Historic Time-Warner/CNN Media Conglomerate Connection

Although Henry Luce’s Time Inc. [n/k/a/ Time-Warner/CNN] media conglomerate endorsed Richard Nixon during the 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential contest, Henry Luce was also a close friend of JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Luce had utilized the Time Inc. media empire during the 1950s to transform John F. Kennedy into a media-star and Democratic Party presidential nominee [in a similar way to how Time-Warner/CNN transformed the Kennedy Dynasty-backed Barack Obama into a media-star and Democratic Party presidential nominee in recent years].

According to Henry R. Luce And The Rise of The American News Media by James Baughman, in the 1930s “Joseph Kennedy began a family tradition of winning allies in the fourth estate.” Luce’s Time Inc. publications “had usually treated Joseph Kennedy and his family admiringly” and Time Inc. Founder Henry Luce wrote the introduction to John F. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept. The Henry R. Luce And The Rise of The American News Media book also noted that on “the night John Kennedy delivered his acceptance speech before the Democratic convention, his father watched the event on Luce’s television set in New York” and at JFK’s inaugural ball Henry Luce and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, “”sat in Joseph Kennedy’s box.”

The Right Places, Right Times book by former Time magazine editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan noted that “Time Inc. was in some respects closer to the Kennedy Administration than to the Eisenhower Administration.” The same book also revealed that during JFK’s Administration “the White House got a special copy of Time a day ahead of the rest of Washington” and U.S. President Kennedy would complain about “a picture caption or an unflattering photo angle.” Luce would then usually attend “to Kennedy’s complaints” personally “by mail or a visit to the Oval office.”

(Downtown 1/29/92)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 7

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 6 of article).

Reader’s Digest was first published in February 1922 by DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, after a $5,000 [in 1920s money] loan from Mrs. Wallace’s brother—Barclay Acheson—was obtained. The initial issue consisted of 31 articles which the then-32-year-old “Wally” had clipped from old magazines in the public library, and then condensed for his own magazine’s use.

The son of a Minnesota college president, DeWitt Wallace was from St. Paul, Minnesota and “belonged to an elite that had virtually nothing in common with the masses who were to be his future audience,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. But the same book also asserted that during the 1920s the Reader’s Digest publisher “packed his magazine with articles pandering to the most reactionary elements among his readers” and by 1929 the adless magazine’s circulation had reached 216,000, “thanks to relentless direct-mail solicitations.” Between 1922 and the 1990s, the corporate headquarters of Reader’s Digest was always located in the Pleasantville-Chappaqua area of Westchester County, in suburban New York.

The Magazine In America: 1741-1990 reference book attributed the Reader’s Digest’s almost immediate success in attracting subscribers in part to the fact that “Wallace was offering his customers the `best’ from the periodical press, shortened to an easy length…for a bargain price.” But, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “a critical factor in the Digest’s…prosperity was that Wally paid nothing for the articles he selected and condensed from other publications—in other words, the entire contents of his magazine” and “Wally for years limited his direct mail promotion to points beyond a 500-mile radius of New York” so “no editor or publisher was likely to…discover that it was stealing copyrighted material wholesale.”

The same book also recalled that “for the first eight years of its existence, DeWitt Wallace took great care to hide the extraordinary success of his magazine” and “since it did not carry advertising, he did not have to submit to an annual circulation audit.” Among the articles the Reader’s Digest published during the Roaring Twenties was an article in its January 1926 issue which was entitled “The Klan: Defender of Americanism” and the magazine also exhibited “an almost rabid hostility towards immigrants and Catholics” during the 1920s and 1930s, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The Reader’s Digest also was profitable enough to start publishing an edition in Braille for the visually-impaired in 1928. (end of part 7)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 6

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 5 of article).

Reader’s Digest was also connected, historically, to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—one of the giant “Big Five” insurance companies which apparently stood to benefit most from the 1990s Clinton administration’s [initial version of the Democratic Obama Administration’s] health care reform plan. During the early 1990s, the then-chairman of the board at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Robert Schwartz, also sat on the board of the Reader’s Digest Association’s corporate board and another Reader’s Digest Association board member in the 1990s, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense named Melvin Laird, also sat on Metropolitan Life’s corporate board in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the “non-profit” Metropolitan Museum of Art then owned about 11 percent of the nonvoting stock of the then-highly profitable Reader’s Digest. In 1991, for example, the net income of the Reader’s Digest Association exceeded $200 million and it was then the 209th largest corporation in the United States.

Coincidentally, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1990s—George Grune—was then the chairman of the board of the Reader’s Digest Association and he took home an annual salary of $1.2 million in the early 1990s. In addition to being Reader’s Digest’s board chairman at that time, Grune also sat on the corporate of Chemical Bank in the early 1990s.

Downtown telephoned the Communications Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art three times in the Fall of 1993 to ask a museum spokesperson to characterize the nature of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s historical connection to Reader’s Digest. But no one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Communications Department was available to communicate any comments about its historical Reader’s Digest connection in the Fall of 1993.

Sitting next to then-Reader’s Digest board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s was the then-New York Times Company Board Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. In the early 1990s, Sulzberger was the chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees and Sulzberger’s son—Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.—held the post of New York Times publisher. Another New York Times Company board member in the 1990s—former IBM corporate board chairman John Akers—also sat next to then-Reader’s Digest Association board chairman Grune on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees in the early 1990s.

The then-Reader’s Digest Association Chairman Grune also sat next to the following other “art lovers” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art board of trustees in the early 1990s: then-CBS Chairman of the Board Laurance Tisch; then-CBS Director James Houghton; then-New York magazine owner Henry Kravis; and Kissinger Associates Chairman Henry Kissinger. (end of part 6)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 5

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 20111 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 4 of article).

In addition to apparently collaborating historically with the CIA, the Reader’s Digest apparently acted, historically, as a propaganda tool of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]. As Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon recalled, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, led by J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 to 1972, had long cultivated sympathetic contacts in the media” and “these included journalists such as…Reader’s Digest editor Fulton Oursler.”

In 1973, the book Investigating The FBI also noted that “Over the years, Hoover maintained extremely close ties with several magazines—U.S. News & World Report and Reader’s Digest being perhaps the closest.” The FBI, for instance, “fed” Reader’s Digest Washington bureau editor John Barron “information on a spy case and then, during the trial, deposed him as a professional witness,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also recalled that “Hoover’s byline appeared frequently in the Digest, which was his favorite publication,” “between 1942 and 1972 at least 12 articles” by FBI Director Hoover were published by Reader’s Digest, and the magazine’s Washington bureau during the 1950s and 1960s was used by Hoover “as if it were his own personal PR firm.” (end of part 5)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 4

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 3 of article).

In a 1993 telephone interview, Downtown asked Reader’s Digest’s then-press spokesperson, Craig Lowder, what the magazine’s response is, to the criticism that it has acted as a tool of the CIA since 1948, as asserted in John Heidenry’s book Theirs Was The Kingdom.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate to respond to every allegation made in Heidenry’s book. But I can comment generally on the book. Frankly, we feel his book is full of a lot of gossip, a lot of unsubstantiated innuendos, and many factual inaccuracies,” replied Lowder. “We learned about Heidenry’s plans to write a book and were initially excited about it. But then we found out what he was doing, when we received complaints from some former employees about the kind of questions he was asking. They didn’t believe what he was doing. His book became an unfair character assassination of [Reader’s Digest co-founder] DeWitt Wallace. There’s so much in that book that’s completely false. There are some charges made in which his only alleged sources are people who are now dead.”

The Reader’s Digest then-spokesperson, however, wasn’t willing to specifically confirm or deny the specific allegations in Heidenry’s book regarding the magazine’s historic CIA ties.

Despite its history of apparently using Reader’s Digest as a secret propaganda instrument, the Central Intelligence Agency wasn’t too eager in the early 1990s to let the many readers of Reader’s Digest read about the exact nature of the CIA’s relationship to Reader’s Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace and the magazine. Theirs Was The Kingdom author Heidenry, for example, noted in 1993: “An FOIA request to the CIA for its files on DeWitt Wallace and on the Reader’s Digest was denied, as was an appeal…” (end of part 4)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 3

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and  2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was  owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 2 of article).

In Mexico, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry, an “outspoken critic of the Reader’s Digest’s cozy relationship with the CIA was Manuel Buendia,” a muckraking columnist. In his 1983 book, La CIA En Mexico, Buendia charged that the Spanish-language edition of Reader’s Digest in Mexico—Selecciones—frequently published articles by a U.S. writer named Daniel James, who, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “has only written what he has been ordered to by the CIA.” Theirs Was The Kingdom author John Heidenry also noted that “Buendia further identified Antonio Rodriguez Villar, director of Selecciones in Mexico City as a CIA agent…” and “Buendia claimed the CIA,`a longtime friend of Selecciones [had] taken over its Latin American editions, through individuals such as Rodriguez Villar.’” Shortly after Buendia’s book La CIA En Mexico, was published, the muckraking columnist was “shot four times in the back at point blank range in a parking-lot” after leaving his office on May 30, 1984, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom.

Unreliable Sources: A Guide To Detecting Bias In News Media by Martin Lee and Norman Solomon also noted that “The CIA cultivated high-level contacts within the most prestigious media in the U.S., including the three TV networks and the newspaper of record” and “more than 20 other American news organizations occasionally shared a bed with the CIA, including Reader’s Digest…” The same book also observed that “It was rather convenient that people like…Eugene Lyons of Reader’s Digest sat on the board of directors of the National Committee for a Free Europe [NCFE], which functioned as a thinly-veiled private-section cover for channeling funds to neo-Nazi émigré groups…” and “other NCFE board members included CIA director Allen Dulles…” (end of part 3)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 2

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for part 1 of article).

Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry also observed in 1993 that “in the late 60’s the Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief"—Hobert Lewis—“walked into the office of treasurer Dick Waters, accompanied by two men whom he introduced as agents of the CIA,” when the CIA wanted to put some of its agents on the Reader’s Digest payroll in Peru, and “Waters agreed to go along with the plan.” The same book also revealed that a consultant to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, which investigated CIA misconduct, “suspected that the Reader’s Digest had at least the appearance of an institutional relationship with the CIA and was involved in four areas of intelligence gathering: photography…; editorial research for articles that were never printed; market research and polls; and special projects.”

According to Theirs Was The Kingdom, Reader’s Digest was charged by some Italian critics of launching an Italian edition, Selezione del Reader’s Digest in 1948, “in direct response to widespread fears that Italy would fall to the Communists” in its 1948 elections; and of letting its Italian edition be utilized “as a conduit for anti-Communist propaganda originating from…both the American and the European intelligence communities,” under the editorial direction of a former British intelligence officer named Terrence Harmon. These same Italian critics also charged that “the 1948 Italian campaign marked the first time the Central Intelligence Agency…got involved in large-scale political propaganda,” according to the same book.

In Chile, Reader’s Digest was also apparently utilized by the CIA to help create favorable conditions for the Chilean military’s 1973 overthrow of the democratically-elected Allende regime. Theirs Was The Kingdom stated the following:

“When…Salvadore Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, according to Landis, the Digest sent a reporter to remote areas of the country to investigate industrial accidents in the country’s copper mines. Previously, a Finnish newspaper had accused a Digest employee of being a CIA agent for taking photographs of a copper mine. Though the reporter’s research never resulted in a published article, the CIA soon afterward organized a strike among Chile’s copper workers…”

(end of part 2)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 1

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and  2009 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm.)

“…The Atlantic Journal, in a series on CIA infiltration of the media, noted that in the fifties and sixties Time-Life Inc. had enjoyed an extremely close relationship with the intelligence agency. But now some CIA watchers saw the Reader’s Digest `as gradually achieving that “most favored’ status granted by the CIA’—John Heidenry in Theirs Was The Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and The Story of the `Reader’s Digest’ in 1993

“Perhaps the most important fact about the Digest is that it isn’t a digest. It buys and `plants’ articles to suit the views of its owner, in other publications, thus spreading bias and prejudice—and I believe I proved, native fascism and even pro-Nazi propaganda—throughout the magazine press of America…Being the largest circulating publication in the world, it manipulates the minds of many millions of people.

“In the course of decades all these charges have been proved and documented…”—George Seldes in Never Tire Of Protesting in 1968

In his 1957 book Of Lasting Interest, James Wood noted that “There is evidence that the Digest has more than once helped implement United States foreign policy in various parts of the world.” One way Reader’s Digest has apparently helped to “implement United States foreign policy" has been to secretly collaborate with the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. According to the Theirs Was The Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and The Story of the `Reader’s Digest’ book by John Heidenry, “The Reader’s Digest Association [RDA] enjoyed an intimate relationship with the agency perhaps unmatched by any other major American communications giant, with the exception of Time-Life” and “as the country and the world entered the Cold War era, the Digest was to become…a highly valuable propaganda outlet for both the CIA and, to a lesser extent, the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” The same book also noted that Reader’s Digest’s Washington bureau “has been serving as a primary conduit for CIA and FBI propaganda, self-promotion, and disinformation since the days of Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover” and that its roving editor in the Washington bureau—John Barron—had “close ties to the FBI and CIA.”

Barron was “the man who usually handled Soviet defectors in the media once they had been thoroughly debriefed by the CIA and were good only for propaganda purposes,” according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The same book also recalled that “over the years the Digest’s bylines on espionage-related activities amounted to a veritable Who’s Who of CIA upper management and fellow-traveling journalists…” (end of part 1)

(Downtown 10/27/93)