David W. Conde

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David Conde | Wikipedia

Meet a Forgotten CIA Critic Who Presciently Characterized the Agency as a Cancer in 1970 Book
In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer. 
Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals. Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”
These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.
Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.” . . .
CIA—Core of the Cancer was very strong in its analysis of political-economy, emphasizing how the CIA did the bidding of large corporations. The oil industry and CIA were essentially one and the same, Conde believed, since it was the Rockefeller Standard Oil dynasty that supported the major foundations that were used as CIA conduits. . . .
In order to transform classic imperialistic policies into moralistic ones, the CIA perfected the art of psychological warfare through a concerted propaganda campaign that enlisted leading intellectuals and journalists. . . .
During the 1950s and 1960s, whole academic departments were sponsored by the CIA, such as MIT’s Center for International Studies. . . .
Frederick Joss, an artist and political satirist who revealed U.S. propaganda operations in Hong Kong, fell under mysterious circumstances from the 25th floor of the Hong Kong Hilton Hotel, the location of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. . . .
The Asia Foundation. . .distributed money to Japanese scientists who carried out research in chemical and biological warfare and sponsored youth organizations in countries like Indonesia with the goal of steering the students toward anti-communism.
The founder of the Asia Society significantly was John D. Rockefeller III, the grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller I, and brother of David Rockefeller, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York from 1959-1973 and Vice President from 1974-1977.
Conde wrote that the Rockefellers represented “the core of American imperialism” who “created the American empire,” and “remain[ed] the most reactionary, suave and corrupting force within the U.S. and throughout the world.”John D. Rockefeller III characteristically was a hawk on Vietnam who in a 1965 speech at the Japan Society in Chicago warned about the threat of communist militancy to Asian peace and security.
Through his “philanthropic” work, Rockefeller III headed up studies designed to strengthen the capitalist world, and sponsored educational grants that, in Conde’s words, “did more to guide legions of professionals onto the path of polite anticommunism than all the works of Joseph Goebbels.” . . .
CIA-financed foundations receiving large contributions from U.S. oil companies poured money into anticommunist political parties, peasant associations and labor unions that worked to purge communists from their ranks and employed hoodlums to beat them up.
The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which had been established by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), coordinated these latter efforts. The AIFLD’s board of trustees included representatives from W.R. Grace & Co., the Rockefeller Foundation, Anaconda Copper Co. and Pan-American Airways.
In Italy, AIFLD representatives Irving Brown and Harry Goldberg opposed the socialists as well as the communists and helped to splinter the Italian labor movement. . . .
In India and Japan, Goldberg’s role was filled by Richard Deverell, a conservative Catholic trade unionist who encouraged the unions there to adopt an anti-communist stand.
In 1965, AFL-CIO leaders George Meany and Jay Lovestone came to Japan to inaugurate the conservative Japanese Confederation of Labor. A former Trotskyist and CIA agent, Lovestone said that “we have come here to flatten the communists out.”
Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson wrote that the Meany-Lovestone-AFL-CIO policy “swung its weight behind dictatorships in Latin America and used CIA funds to do so.”
In Brazil, AFL-CIO agents backed by the CIA helped overthrow social democratic President João Goulart in 1964 and then supported a military junta that arrested labor leaders. When it took over, a rightist governor, Carlos Lacenda, said that “the CIA now governed Brazil by proxy.”
The same was true for the Dominican Republic after the 1965 U.S. military invasion, which resulted in the overthrow of Juan Bosch, a social democrat like Goulart who had raised the minimum wage and adopted progressive economic policies that threatened U.S. corporate interests.
Conde understood how the CIA had been instrumental to the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam, writing that, “from [Ngo Dinh] Diem to [Nguyen] Van Thieu, all the Vietnamese strongmen were creatures and agents of the CIA.” . . .
After the Viet Minh’s victory over France at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the CIA sabotaged the prospect for fair elections and Vietnam’s unification under the provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accords and instead tried to prop up the Catholic anti-communist, Ngo Dinh Diem. . . .
Under the CIA-led anti-communist denunciation campaign, thousands of communists were converted to Diemism and forced to curse North Vietnam’s communist leader Ho Chi Minh and trample on the North Vietnamese flag. Those who did not comply were rounded up and taken to prison camps [no differently than in Nazi Germany]. . . .
The Korean War, according to Conde, was not an isolated battle but part of the U.S. power structure’s plan to supersede Great Britain as the world hegemon. The chance of an independent Korea had vanished when Franklin D. Roosevelt—who had signed the Cairo declaration proclaiming Korean independence—died on April 12, 1945.
The sale of oil and fertilizer to China by the Rockefeller interests and desire to keep its economy open to foreign business interests was a paramount consideration in the Roosevelt and Truman administration’s futile backing of Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT in China’s civil war. 
According to Conde, the Korean War resulted from the attempt to establish a military base alongside Taiwan—where Chiang and his forces fled after losing China’s civil war—from which the U.S. could destabilize and “harass” the new Chinese communist state.
The key war architect, John Foster Dulles, not coincidentally had been senior legal counsel for Rockefeller oil. His designs were thwarted by the North Koreans who achieved an “epic victory” that is not recognized as such in standard history texts. . . .
In 1961, the Kennedy administration supported a right-wing coup in South Korea led by General Park Chung-hee, whose aim was to “prevent the peaceful unification of North and South Korea.”\
David W. Conde characterized Park as a “mechanized puppet of the CIA,” whom he said was able to “exercise tremendous power over his masters in Washington through the threat to fail to repel the mythical invasion from the communists in North Korea.”
The puppet show involving Park was not a comedy, Conde wrote, “but a historical fact of corruption, degradation, and violence.” . . .
David W. Conde wrote that the “students of this generation see the CIA and Pentagon as the real enemy.”
If Conde were alive today, obviously, he would not be so optimistic. The CIA worked hard to refurbish its image and extinguish the critical and dissenting spirit of the 1960s—which it achieved largely because of the success of its propaganda (about which Conde himself knew all too well).
Since Conde’s writings were rarely published in the U.S., he was unknown to American activists in his time and forgotten about today. He was on the same level, however, as left-wing luminaries like Philip Agee, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn—and especially knowledgeable about Japan, Southeast Asia, corporate foundations and U.S. psychological warfare.
Conde was truly a rare gem: a thoughtful writer and political analyst and gifted researcher with a wealth of personal knowledge and experience who paid a heavy price for his defiance.
But that price is for the benefit of future generations who can come away with a better understanding of the nexus between corporate interests and the “deep state” from reading CIA—Core of the Cancer and other of Conde’s writings, and who can rediscover SDS’s understanding about who the real enemy of progressive movements is.