Meet Gloria Steinem, CIA Whore

Gloria Steinem managed to carve out for herself, or more accurately was assigned by her sponsors, the role of pre-eminent feminist spokeswoman for the women’s liberation movement. Her sponsors were the Central Intelligence Agency, but her movement wasn’t liberating.

 

A few of our political junkies may recall the brouhaha which the obscure group The Red Stockings raised in 1975 about Ms Steinem’s intelligence affiliations, associations which Steinem vaguely and non-persuasively denied. The evidence shows that she has long and deep ties with one of the most sinister organizations on the planet. The Red Stockings were not persuaded by her characterization of the CIA as “liberal.”

 

Who could blame them? The organization which murdered John Kennedy, instigated the Vietnam War, and gave us 9/11 cannot be described as liberal, even by Adolf Hitler.

 

Steinem first got into bed with the CIA no later than 1959 about which time she co-founded the Independent Research Service with CIA funds. She had spent 1956-58 in India as a fellow of the Chester Bowles Asian Fellowship to the Universities of New Delhi and Calcutta. We do not know if her trip to India was actually under CIA tutelage but it would not be out of the question.

 

The funding was byzantine as is typical of the Agency's front organizations, with 5 layers passing through Borden Trust, the Price Fund, the Beacon Fund, the Edsel Fund, and the Kentfield Fund before landing at the steps of the Independent Research Service. The CIA front was created to disrupt the Communist World Youth festivals which were held periodically, usually in Europe during the 1950s and 60s.

 

Steinem’s associations were well known in the 1960s as a New York Times article in 1967 makes clear. An excellent article in Ramparts of the same year exposed the intricate financing circuits which we noted above. Her affiliation as director of the Independent Research Service (notice how it would be dangerous to abbreviate it IRS?) was noted as late as 1968 in Who’s Who.

 

While co-director, she wrote in 1959 an interesting pamphlet, A Review of Negro Segregation in the United States, in which she states that while some discrimination still exists, it is largely in the minds of the oppressed. I guess she thought that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was an overreaction to misperceptions. She may have changed her mind on the subject since she was, years later, famously arrested for protesting apartheid. But that too could have been acted with deeper motives.

 

Around 1968 she came under the wing of Clay Felker who was variously editor at Esquire, publisher of New York Magazine, and owner of the Village Voice. He provided some of the start-up money for Ms. magazine's preview edition of January 1972, but his interest in Steinem was not all of a sudden. The two had met at the Helsinki Youth Festival where Felker published the CIA propaganda and she oversaw disruption of the communist activities while seducing the kids into the American orbit and writing dossiers on them for the CIA.

 

In addition to Felker’s relatively modest contributions, Ms. received heavy support from Katherine Graham’s Washington Post as well as from Warner Communications, Inc. Newsweek was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Independent Research Service and of Steinem. But Katherine Graham’s and editor Ben Bradlee’s CIA roots ran deep and broad.

 

Ms was noted for its pro corporate stance, taking in advertising from such CIA stalwarts as ITT, the firm famously associated with the bloody coup in Chile in 1973. It is also worth noting that she dated Henry Kissinger who was perhaps the power behind the coup which brutally removed the democratically elected Salvador Allende.

 

But that is not all of Steinem’s CIA associations. She dated for many years Washington attorney Stanley Pottinger who was Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights from 1973-77 under Nixon and Ford. Pottinger worked overtime to prevent any investigation into the Martin Luther King assassination when it became clear that evidence implicated the FBI in the crime, a fact which we explore in detail in other blog postings.

 

While busily burying investigations into the King murder, Pottinger was working feverishly to cover-up the CIA’s murder of Chile’s envoy to the United States, Orlando Letelier who was a strong critic of the brutal right winged Chilean government established by the CIA. This is affair, about which we previously reported, was sponsored by James and William Buckley.

 

Later Pottinger would come under investigation for smuggling arms into Iran, an activity which placed him squarely in the CIA orbit.

 

If these CIA associations were not enough, then we should move on to Elisabeth Forsling Harris who was Ms’s first publisher. Sherman Skolnick reports that she, along with Jack Pewterbaugh at the Saul Bloom Advertising Agency, was heavily involved in planning the motorcade of President John Kennedy when he visited Dallas on November 22, 1963, and places her firmly among the murderers who conspired to overthrow the US government.

 

Now it is understandable why Steinem and Felker were ruthless in suppressing any publications which mentioned her association with the Agency as they did around 1975 when Random House was about to publish a book by The Red Stockings titled the Femnist Revolution which contained chapters about Steinem’s CIA associations.

 

Steinem, Felker, and Ford Foundation president Franklin Thomas, all threatened to sue Random House for libel if they published the chapters on Steinem’s CIA activities. They applied the same pressure to the Village Voice which also produced a series on her domestic espionage activities.

 

This is the same Steinem who declared that the CIA was “liberal and forward thinking” in a 1967 interview with the New York Times. Only in a Nazi state is the truth libel.

 

Although we wish to avoid the genetic fallacy of guilt by association, we believe that one’s associations reflect something about the nature of the individual, which in this case is Steinem’s long string of CIA associations. In denying or downplaying them, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

Reference
Sherman Skolnick, Gloria in Excelsis (transcripts), Conspiracy Nation, Vol 9 Num 28ff
 
Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.