Author Kent Clizbe Will Speak During Raleigh Spy Conference
Many Americans were surprised last year when 10 Russians posing as ordinary Americans were arrested. They were soon convicted of being illegal, unregistered agents of a foreign power and returned to Russia. Although the media covered the story, most attention was lavished on one of the women than the question of what she and the others were doing here.
What they were doing here was clear to Kent Clizbe, a former CIA counterintelligence officer. One of the Russians had been a writer for a Spanish-language newspaper with a far Left, anti-American bias, and others were in positions of potential influence, leading Clizbe to conclude that they were covert agents of influence. Although their activities here were minimized by the media, Clizbe viewed them as the tip of an iceberg of covert influence with the mission of subverting our culture.
Clizbe, who grew up in Northeastern North Carolina and attended East Carolina University, is scheduled to appear at this year’s Raleigh Spy Conference Aug. 24-26. For him, the 10 Russians are recent examples of covert influence operations begun soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the new communist rulers formed the Communist International and targeted America as the “main adversary” of their planned worldwide revolution. Clizbe has studied the extensiveness and effectiveness of Soviet covert influence operations in his new book Willing Accomplices, that Clizbe says is the first book to address covert influence operations and “the ultimate effect that those operations had on our country, the 21st century United States of America.”
He hypothesizes that contemporary “political correctness” and what he calls “PC-Progressivism” resulted from communist covert influence operations begun in the 1920s. To make his case, he applies his knowledge and experience gained as a CIA officer and reviews the publications of leading intelligence scholars, such as former Raleigh Spy Conference speakers Christopher Andrew, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, about communist covert espionage operations.
Unlike espionage cases, covert influence operations leave behind no known documentary evidence. And unlike some former espionage agents who confessed or defected, known covert influence agents died long ago or mysteriously disappeared during Stalin’s purges. Despite those evidentiary problems, Clizbe extrapolates a convincing case that covert influence operations were extensive and effective.
Clizbe explains that covert influence operations implant messages, or “payloads,” in a targeted society through the main transmitters of the culture — academia and education, the media and entertainment. The communist revolutionaries were experts at covert actions and early aimed them at America. Using techniques masterminded by Willi Munzenberg — and effectively implemented by Otto Katz who trained under Munzenberg in Germany in the early 1930s, communist covert influence agents infiltrated the American academy and education, the media and Hollywood.
Through a scholar’s interview with Munzenberg’s widow, the “Munzenberg creed” for covert influence is disclosed: In essence, a covert influence agent should pose as an independent-minded idealist and plant seeds of doubt and distrust in the targeted society and seek to destroy the patriotism of its citizens.
The message to be planted in America in the 1920s, what Clizbe calls the “PC code,” is that the capitalistic and free-market culture of the US is irredeemably bad, racist, sexist, unfair and cruel. Clizbe concludes that the seeds were cultivated underground into the 1950s, bloomed in the late 1960s and spread like wildflowers in the 1980s when political correctness began to dominate academia and education.
The message was also spread through related covert disinformation operations, such as the communist-planted false story — carried without fact checking by the pliant media — that the CIA developed the AIDS virus to wipe out American blacks (a blatant falsehood still being recycled in 2008 by President Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright). Other active measures include infiltrating and co-opting activist groups and movements, a method perfected from the 1920s by anti-fascist groups to create “popular fronts” that often found themselves eventually taken over completely by the communists. The agents of influence infiltrated unions and organized protests going back to the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, and culminating in the rallies against American involvement in Vietnam.
According to Clizbe, Munzenberg led a far-reaching and ingenious covert influence operation using a vast network of secret communists and their willing accomplices. Under Munzenberg’s creed, participants should always deny being a communist — and under Clizbe’s definition, the accomplices are people who knowingly cooperate with the communists to subvert the country’s social, political or economic foundations.
As exemplars of willing accomplices, Clizbe focuses on three targets: Professor George S. Counts from academia and education, Walter Duranty from the media and Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker critic and Hollywood screen writer. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, who covered Stalin’s collectivization of farming in glowing terms and minimized the resulting famine that took the lives of millions. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his stories and exerted tremendous influence in portraying Stalin as the benign Uncle Joe who was forced to break eggs to make the communist omelet.
Parker, known for her vicious wit and status in New York literary circles, worked with Katz in establishing many of the Hollywood front groups that influenced American public opinion. Like her Hollywood colleagues, she portrayed communists as just “liberals in a hurry.” Counts, a Columbia University professor in its education school, visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and returned to Columbia as its Russian “expert” with an assistant and translator whom Clizbe concludes was likely a Soviet agent. Counts infused his extensive and influential publications about education with collectivist and progressive ideas, including using the public schools to build “a new social order.”
For examples of the apparent effectiveness of covert influence operations, look no further than the curricula in schools of education and many of our high schools today. They are long on Counts-like advocacy of “change” and “social justice” and short on actual study of American civics and history. Clizbe illustrates the changes in the high school curriculum by comparing a patriotic, pro-American history text used in 1916, before the communist covert influence operations began, with a propagandistic, anti-American text popular today. The modern text was written by Howard Zinn, frequently described in the media as a “political activist” and recently revealed to have been a secret communist.
One does not have to be an American to reject Zinn’s view of America as unjust. Indeed, British historian Paul Johnson has concluded that America, despite some injustices in its history, has “a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.” Johnson adds: “No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.”
Unfortunately, our national story has been undermined by willing accomplices in our schools, media and entertainment.
— Arch T. Allen