Hillary Clinton's "Yucaipagate" Connection

One of the best friends of 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s husband is a billionaire named Ron Burkle. Besides contributing a lot of money to Democratic Party political campaigns, Burkle is a founder and managing partner of Yucaipa Companies and also sits on the board of directors of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation.

Coincidentally, after he was unable to run for a third-term as U.S. President because of the 22nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Hillary Clinton’s husband was given a multi-million dollar per year job as a “consultant” at Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies. And by September 26, 2007, Hillary’s husband was a partner and senior advisor at Burkle’s Los Angeles-based investment and money management firm.

Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies manages about $3 billion for clients like the State of California’s Public Employees Pension System. As a counselor, partner and senior advisor at Burkle’s firm since he moved out of the White House, Hillary’s husband may have used his special political influence to help Yucaipa Companies secure more local and state pension funds as clients for Burkle’s for-profit investment/money management firm. As the New York Times observed in a March 21, 2004 article:

“A small but growing part of the $2 trillion in state and local pension funds is being steered into high-risk investments by pension consultants and others who often have business dealings with the very money managers they recommend…Former President Bill Clinton meets with pension trustees on behalf of the Yucaipa Companies…”

Besides being cozy with Yucaipa Companies founder and Occidental Petroleum corporate board member Burkle [whose Yucaipa firm was the largest shareholder in the Wild Oats grocery store chain before Wild Oats was recently purchased by the Whole Foods grocery store chain), Bill “Yucaipagate” Clinton apparently still exercises a special political influence over Hillary Clinton. As Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodhan Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. observed:

“Since leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton has earned more than $40 million giving speeches—and has entered into business relationship with Mr. Burkle…

“…On…February 15, 2006, the most ambitious money-raising effort for a presidential candidate would be launched in a sumptuous Georgetown home. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the guest of honor. The host was Elizabeth Bagley, President Clinton’s ambassador to Portugal, a friend and confidant of Hillary’s, and an aggressive fund-raiser who had brought in millions for the Clintons and the Democratic Party…

“Even before Hillary announced, Bill served as her advisor, chief strategist, cheerleader and coach.”

Next: Law School protest folk song lyrics

Interviewing CBS News' Director of Communications In 1992

On April 8, 1976, Rolling Stone magazine reported that “the Washington Post revealed secret meetings of the executives of the Times and CBS with CIA Director George Bush about CIA infiltration of their companies.” So in a 1992 telephone interview, Downtown asked CBS News’ Director of Communications Tom Goodman, what was CBS’s response to criticism that it had acted as an instrument of the CIA since 1948?

“I’ve never heard any criticism of CBS like that. It’s absurd. It’s hard to respond to criticism that I’m not aware has ever been made by anyone. Who ever made such a criticism?” Goodman replied.

When Downtown mentioned that such criticism was made in former CBS News Correspondent Daniel Schorr’s Clearing The Air book of 1977, Goodman said: “That’s 20 years ago. What has that got to do with today? I’ve only been here 6 years and I don’t know anything about what was written 20 years ago. The CIA doesn’t have anything to do with CBS.”

The CBS News Director of Communications adamantly and “flatly denied” that CBS News has ever been connected to the CIA in either the present or the past. “There is no connection between CBS and the CIA and there never has been any connection between CBS and the CIA,” Goodman insisted.

Asked by Downtown if CBS News also denied that it had ever hired CIA employees in the past, or the present, Goodman answered: “We’ve never hired any CIA employees in the present or the past. I’m not familiar with any charge that we have.”

When Downtown mentioned that a Rolling Stone article of the 1970s had indicated that at least one CIA employee had been hired by CBS News and that former CBS Chairman of the Board William Paley had been connected to the CIA in the past, the CBS News spokesperson replied: “That’s a preposterous and off-base charge. There has never been any connection between CBS News and the CIA, regardless of what’s been printed in some book or article years ago.”

Yet the former Washington Post investigative reporter who helped uncover the 1970s Watergate Scandal, Carl Bernstein, revealed in an article, “The CIA and The Media” (http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php ) which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine on Oct. 20, 1977, that “CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the management of America’s leading news organizations” and “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”

(Downtown 6/24/92)

Next: Hillary Clinton’s “Yucaipagate” Connection

CBS's Secret 1976 Luncheon With Former President Bush I

1970s CIA Director Bush's official Company portrait

Shortly after [now-deceased] former Warren Commission member and U.S. President Gerald Ford named U.S. President George W. Bush II’s father (former U.S. President Bush I) as CIA director in 1976, former President Bush I secretly met with former CBS board chairman and former Columbia University Trustee William Paley, former CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite, former 60 Minutes Correspondent Mike Wallace and the now-deceased former CBS News Correspondent Eric Sevareid at a luncheon in Paley's private dining room on the 35th floor of the CBS Building in Manhattan, according to former CBS News Correspondent Daniel Schorr’s Clearing The Air book. Although Schorr had been assigned by CBS News to report on CIA activities, he wasn’t invited to attend CBS’s luncheon for Bush. In Schorr’s view, “…Paley’s lunch for Bush assumed larger proportions in my mind as a symbol of alienation—CBS socializing with the CIA inside while it kept its own CIA reporter outside.”

Schorr later found out what was talked about at former CIA Director Bush I’s secret meeting with Paley, Cronkite, Wallace and Sevareid. According to Clearing The Air, the CBS luncheon for Bush “did not go as” Paley “had hoped” and “What was to be a sociable welcome for the son of the late Senator Prescott Bush, warmly remembered as an early CBS board member, turned, after dessert, into an argument about CIA agents posing as reporters…” According to Clearing The Air:

“Cronkite demanded that Bush disclose the list of news people who actually had been CIA agents. Bush…flatly refused to uncover those who had served the CIA in the past under a promise of eternal confidentiality. At the height of the argument, Paley stepped in graciously supporting his guest and suggesting that it would be best to bury the past.”

On Feb. 17, 1976, the Washington Post also reported that “at the luncheon with CBS, Bush had found support for his idea of burying the past and not trying to expose journalists who had worked for the CIA.”

Although CBS News’ Director of Communications Tom Goodman told Downtown in 1992 that “We’ve never hired any CIA employees in the present or the past,” in Clearing The Air former CBS News Correspondent Schorr noted that in 1976:

“Sig Mickelson, former president of CBS News, was prepared to state that two former CBS stringers had worked for the CIA. On the telephone, Mickelson…told me he had learned from CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1956 that Frank Kearns, stringer in Cairo, was actually in the agency’s employ. So was Austin Goodrich, one-time stringer in Stockholm, about whom Mickelson said he had learned, of all places, in Paley’s office. In October 1954, just back from his introductory tour of European bureaus as head of CBS News, Mickelson said he was called in by Paley and introduced to two CIA officials. They wanted to know why he had not met with Goodrich while in Stockholm, which would have been useful to Goodrich’s cover.”

Although Schorr was originally asked by the CBS Morning News producer at that time, Charles Thompson, to arrange a live interview with Mickelson to talk about CBS’s hiring of CIA employees, the midnight before the interview was to take place the CBS Morning News producer “called in distress to say that he had been ordered by `higher authority’ to cancel the Mickelson interview for the Morning News,” according to Clearing The Air.

(Downtown 6/24/92)

Next: Interviewing CBS News’ Director of Communications In 1992

CBS's Historical CIA Connection

The CIA apparently utilized CBS as its tool for many years. CBS’s Chairman of the Board for many years was a Columbia University Trustee named William Paley. According to Deborah Davis’ 1979 book Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and `The Washington Post’: “Paley’s own friendship with [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry; he provided cover for CIA agents, supplied outtakes of new films, debriefed reporters, and in many ways set the standard for future cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies.”

Davis also noted in her book—which Germany’s Green Party nominated for the 1989 Alternative Nobel Prize, after the book was re-issued—that the CBS Evening News anchorman for many years, former CBS Director and former WNET/Channel 13 Trustee Walter Cronkite, was “a man who had experience with American intelligence” and that during the 1950s and early 1960s Washington Post male employees “continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles” in Washington, D.C.’s Alibi Club. Although the New York Times noted in its May 20, 1991 issue that the Alibi Club was “an elite group of 50 business executives and political officials” which “meets in a Washington townhouse that features elephant heads and tiger skulls,” Davis noted in her book that membership in the Alibi Club “is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only.” Coincidentally, former CIA Director and U.S. President George Bush I was also a member of the men-only Alibi Club.

(Downtown 6/24/92)

Next: CBS’s Secret 1976 Luncheon With Former President Bush I

The `New York Times' ' Historical CIA Connection

At the New York Times, according to Carl Bernstein’s Oct. 20, 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article (“The CIA And The Media” http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php), the “major” individual in top management whom former CIA Director Allen Dulles dealt with in the 1950s was its then-publisher, former Columbia University Trustee Arthur Hays Sulzberger--who actually signed a “secrecy agreement” with the CIA, vowing to keep the Times’ collaborative relationship to the CIA a secret. Bernstein was told by “a high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory” that “the New York Times provided cover for about 10 CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.”

The now-deceased former Columbia University Trustee Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the Times’ publisher from 1935 to 1961 and he also served as a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation between 1948 and 1967. The Dec. 8, 1990 issue of the Irish People weekly newspaper also reported that “the senior Sulzberger allowed members of the Times staff to be used for covert CIA operations in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s nephew, Cyrus Sulzberger, also was reported to have ties to the CIA while he worked as the Times’ chief European reporter in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and as a columnist in the 1960s. According to the Dec. 8, 1990 issue of the Irish People: “Cy owned a villa on the Greek Island of Spatsais, and his connections with the CIA—he was a close friend of [now-deceased former CIA Director] Richard Helms—caused many to believe that he himself was an asset of the covert group.” The same newspaper also noted that former Times columnist Cyrus Sulzberger “was also a close friend of Frank Wisner, CIA chief of clandestine operations” and that “there were many persons who publicly and privately said Cy was a CIA man using the Times as a cover.”

From the late 1940s until 1979, according to the Irish People, “Times reporters were routinely debriefed by the CIA after coming back from European assignments” and this policy “may very well continue today [in 1990], if not with the approval of the present publisher, then less formally by agreement of the reporter and his CIA handler.”

Coincidentally, the Times published an article about CIA Operations in 1966. But, according to the Irish People, “the article did not touch on any relationship of the CIA and the media despite the many questions already raised about the Times’ own connection to the Agency.”

(Downtown 6/24/92)

Next: CBS’s Historical CIA Connection

U.S. Mass Media Collaboration With The CIA Historically

In his Oct. 20, 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA And The Media,” ( http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php ) Carl Bernstein wrote that “More than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” Bernstein reported that for at least 25 years U.S. Establishment “journalists provided a full-range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies.” According to Bernstein, “reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA,” “Editors shared their staffs,” and “some of the journalists” who collaborated with the CIA prior to 1977 “were Pulitzer Prize winners.” Bernstein also revealed in his unpublicized 1977 article that:

“Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System [CBS], Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], The National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald…”

The U.S. Establishment mass media’s policy of collaboration with the CIA proved to be of great use to the CIA in its spying activity, as well as in its public opinion manipulation activities. According to Bernstein, “the use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA.” Bernstein also reported in 1977 that:

“The Agency’s special relationships with the so-called `majors’ in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades…Agency files show officials at the highest levels of the CIA (usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials…for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best-known correspondents in the business.”

Bernstein also indicated that “The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed session with members of Congress." And according to the Clearing The Air book by former CBS News Correspondent Daniel Schorr:

“The congressional investigations failed to get to the bottom of the CIA infiltration of the news media…[the now-deceased former CIA Director] Colby said that during 1975, the CIA was using `media cover’ for 11 agents…but no amount of questioning would persuade him to talk about the publishers and network chieftains who had cooperated at the top.”

(Downtown 6/24/92)

Next: The New York Times ' Historical CIA Connection

Vice-President Dick Cheney's Pre-1991 Rise To Power

The current U.S. Vice-President, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, gained experience representing Chevron’s special Wyoming interests when he served as Wyoming’s Republican Congressional Representative between 1979 and 1989 and voted for limiting the size of the windfall profit taxes on Chevron’s profits. As Wyoming’s only representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, Vice-President Cheney also voted against the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights for women, opposed busing to achieve racial desegregation in the public schools and voted in favor of draft registration, continued military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and prayer in the public schools.

In addition, Cheney voted against a nuclear moratorium, against a nuclear arms freeze and against a proposal requiring the U.S. president to notify Congress within 48 hours of the start of any secret intelligence operation. In 1989, Current Biography noted that then-Secretary of Defense Cheney believed “that the president’s ability to implement foreign policy had been hampered by repeated congressional attempts to impose restrictions on the White House” and that Cheney “sided with the House’s so-called conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats on every one of the 50 votes in which the two groups joined forces.”

Cheney first acquired the political power to serve transnational oil company interests during the Nixon-Watergate era. And by 1990 the power of then-Pentagon Czar Cheney included the power to influence the allocation of public funds to U.S. cultural institutions and artistic and literary individuals. Former Secretary of Defense Cheney’s wife, Lynne Vincent-Cheney, was the chairperson of the national Endowment for the Humanities (which dishes out public grant money each year in the U.S. cultural world) in the early 1990s, for instance.

The husband of former National Endowment for the Humanities Chairperson Lynne Vincent-Cheney was quick to order huge numbers of U.S. military forces to mass both in Panama and near the borders of Kuwait and Iraq, after George W. Bush’s father (former U.S. President Bush I) named him Secretary of Defense in March 1989. Yet during the Vietnam War era the staunchly pro-war and politically conservative Dick Cheney did not risk his own life on the battlefield. After graduating from the University of Wyoming at the age of 24, Cheney went into Republican Party politics instead of the U.S. military and did not personally fight in the Indochina War that he helped prolong, by serving as former President Nixon’s Deputy White House press counselor. Unlike many 1990s [and 21st-century] antiwar activists like Ron Kovic, former Secretary of Defense and current U.S. Vice-President Cheney lacks any kind of military combat experience.

The U.S. civilian responsible for coordinating the 1991 U.S. military attack on Iraq was born in Nebraska in 1941, grew up in Wyoming, attended Yale University for three semesters before dropping out and graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1965. After receiving academic recognition and an internship recommendation from NYU’s Center for Education in Politics, Cheney secured the job in 1969 which enabled him to quickly jump into Washington D.C. Establishment circles. He was hired as a special assistant to President Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity Director Donald Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld, a former Republican Congressional Representative from Illinois, became Nixon’s White House press counselor in 1970, Cheney followed Rumsfeld into the White House as Rumsfeld’s deputy. When Rumsfeld became Nixon’s Cost-of-Living Council director in 1971, Cheney was named Rumsfeld’s Assistant Director for Operations. In 1973, however, Cheney gave up his government job to become a 32-year-old vice-president of Bradley Woods & Co., which is, according to Current Biography, “a Washington-based investment firm that advises private industry on legislative issues.”

After Nixon was forced to resign because of his Watergate affair crimes in August 1974, however, Cheney’s “Godfather-Rabbi” called upon the 33-year-old to again become his “deputy” when President Gerald Ford appointed Rumsfeld to head his presidential transition team. When Rumsfeld was named by Ford to become the new U.S. President’s special assistant, Rumsfeld again brought Cheney along with him as “deputy” to the President’s special assistant. According to Current Biography, during the first year of the Ford Presidency “in all but title, Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and Cheney was his alter ego.” When Rumsfeld was named Ford’s Secretary of Defense in November 1975, Cheney succeeded him as White House Chief of Staff. Nearly 14 years later, Cheney, himself, was named U.S. Defense Secretary—despite his health problem of having had three heart attacks before reaching the age of 50. Cheney’s “Godfather-Rabbi,” Rumsfeld, meanwhile, sat on the board of directors of Sears Roebuck, Kellogg Company, Union Camp, Vulcan Materials and the RAND Corporation military research think-tank during the 1990s (after sitting on the board of directors of G.D. Searle & Co., Eastern Airlines, Bendix Corporation and the People’s Energy Corporation in the 1980s).

(Downtown 12/12/90)

[And when Rumsfeld’s “alter ego” became U.S. Vice-President in 2001, Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon as U.S. Secretary of Defense again during the early years of the administration of former President Bush I’s son, George W. Bush.]

Next: U.S. Mass Media Collaboration With The CIA Historically