General Discussion

The Real McCloy

THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. McCLOY; The Making of the American Establishment,
By Kai Bird (Simon & Schuster: $30; 800 pp.)

By ROBERT SHERRILL
APRIL 19, 1992, The Los Angeles Times

EXCERPT...

When McCloy took over as high commissioner of defeated Germany, he talked a tough line about crushing the many still- active Nazis. But he promptly turned to mush, permitting Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to fill his cabinet with notorious antisemites and Nazi war criminals (some of whom became McCloy’s personal friends). McCloy also vastly expanded the shameful programs begun before he got to Germany, of letting some of the worst war criminals off the hook.

He commuted two-thirds of the death sentences of mass murderers (such as the SS officer who personally executed 1,500 Jews) and radically reduced the prison sentences of doctors who had conducted experiments on death-camp inmates, of high-ranking Nazi Judges who had administered Gestapo justice, and of industrialists who had built the Nazi war machine.

McCloy freed some immediately, including Alfred Krupp, whose munitions factories had worked thousands of slave laborers to death. Krupp’s original sentence had included loss of all property; McCloy canceled that punishment and within a few years Krupp was again one of the richest industrialists in the world. Obviously McCloy’s obsequiousness toward money and power made him the wrong man to reform Nazi Germany. “Though he could understand the special culpability of the ‘big Nazis,’ ” Bird writes, “when it came to a wealthy and politically well-connected man like Krupp, he suspended his good judgment.”

As high commissioner, McCloy dabbled disastrously in the intelligence business, setting up a network of agents in Germany that included the likes of Klaus Barbie, who had shipped 78,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had been responsible for some of the “grisliest mass killings on the Eastern Front.” Not surprisingly, many of the intelligence operations carried out under McCloy were, says Bird, “fiascos.”

CONTINUES...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-19-bk-588-story.html

CIA Chief Bush Suppresses the News

By Robert Gardner
FAIR Exclusive
May/June 1999

Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms.

The story, broken on Oct. 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon correspondent, then with Associated Press), revealed that Helms had given misleading testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Helms testified that the CIA had not "even contemplated" making contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. Through the FOIA, Martin obtained CIA memos showing that in 1960 the agency "showed intelligence interest" in Oswald and "discussed...the laying on of interviews" with him.

When Bush saw the AP story in the Washington Star, he asked for an internal CIA review to see if the story was true (it was) and if it would "cause problems for Helms." (Helms had lied to a Senate committee about the CIA's role in subverting Chilean democracy and would later be convicted of contempt of Congress.)

After investigating, Bush assistant Seymour Bolten reported back that the exposure of Helms' false testimony to the Warren Commission would probably cause Helms "some anxious moments," though not "any additional legal problems." But Bush was assured that a "slightly better" story had resulted from an Agency phone call to AP protesting that Martin's story was "sloppy." Additionally, Bush was told that an unnamed journalist had "advised his editors . . . not to run the AP story."

Bolten complained to Bush: "This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines." One might more accurately describe it as an occasion where George Bush's CIA pressured one news outlet to back away from an accurate story while using an asset in the press corps to suppress it in another.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1491