The CIA and Covert Action Information Bulletin
Our Hidden History Interviews
mp3 embed from archive.org
OHH: I'm very happy to be here today with Lou Wolf. He's one of the founders of Covert Action Information Bulletin. CAIB, as it was also known, was a seminal alternative media magazine. It was famous for covering and countering CIA covert actions across the globe. It was originally published between 1978 and 2005 both as Covert Action Information Bulletin and Covert Action Quarterly, and is about to be relaunched online as Covert Action Magazine at covertactionmagazine.com.
Thank you, Lou, very much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it. This is very exciting.
Lou Wolf: Thank you, Dave, so much. It's my privilege and honor. Thank you.
OHH: Before we get into the history of Covert Action Magazine, will you tell us about the relaunch? Who's involved? What's the hopes for it this time around? What are your plans for it?
Lou Wolf: Absolutely. It's actually, you put it in the future tense, actually we have now relaunched the magazine after a lapse of some 13 years, since 2005 until today. That was necessitated by the fact that my first wife was dying of kidney cancer and then I lost my leg to amputation quite suddenly, and so we had to put it on hold. But even at that time, we envisioned possibly coming back, returning to publication, and that's exactly what we're doing today.
One of co-founders is the son of Philip Agee, Chris Agee, Christopher Agee, an extraordinary man, a professor in New York who teaches now 11 courses as an adjunct professor loathe with starvation pay, which he gets. But he is a master just like his father of understanding what all this is about. I consider him my ... I'm an apostle of Chris Agee, like his father. Then the other people that are organizing this are Immanuel Ness, who's a professor also, and Mike Locker, who's one of the founders of North American Congress of Latin America, Mark Cook, another professor and academic and a researcher, Josh Klein, who's a professor. I'm sorry I'm unable to give you the details right now because I'm sitting in a chair and I didn't write it down ahead, but-
OHH: No, no of course.
Lou Wolf: All very qualified people. And Sam Alcoff, who's one of the co-founders of Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman. Then we have some other folks as well on board, and it's growing. We now have an advisory board of several, almost 17 people now. We're making it a very serious effort. This is not a hobby or a part time issue for us. It's a full time project which will necessitate serious attention to detail, to historic detail, to academic detail, and to facts, and not what the clown in the White House talks about, fake news. This is the real story. That's what we're gonna do. Thank you.
OHH: No, very good. Am I right, you guys are gonna publish online at covertactionmagazine.com, and then you're going to put out one issue a year for subscribers? That's correct, right?
Lou Wolf: That's correct. Actually this is our 40th anniversary in 2018. We started in 1978, so our effort and our vision is to have a 40th anniversary print issue. But we're already, if you go to our website, there are articles up there, interviews, and breaking news and so forth, which is not likely to find its way into the mainstream media. And it's not only about better known things. It's about the lesser known, the hidden history, like is just so wonderfully represented in your publication, or in your website, Dave. Most of the history of these kinds of operations are hidden from sight.
Obviously when we talk about the CIA, we talk about any, all manner of operations which actually beg your disbelief in knowing what they will do. It never ceases to amaze us who study these issues and study that particular agency, and its allied agencies as well, what they will stoop to, what they will conceive of, what they will raise as their objectives and as their priorities. It's not exaggeration. Over the years we've highlighted a whole range of different aspects of these things, but I wanna stress here, it's not just the CIA.
The CIA works in alliance with other agencies of this government, has done so since its inception, since its founding in 1947, which of course chief among them includes the Pentagon. It also includes other agencies such as the US Information Agency, or USIA. It includes AID, the Agency for International Development. It includes a whole host of not just contractors but so called NGOs, non-governmental organizations. And they are among the most, the NGOs are among the most vigorous advocates of these kinds of operations.
OHH: And when you refer to those, are you talking about the National Endowment for Democracy?
Lou Wolf: NED, which I always have said is the most misnamed agency or organization that you can imagine to call something the National Endowment for Democracy. When you go to even their own website or to their national reports, their yearly annual reports, it's like a roadmap to what the CIA is doing without it being officially the CIA. In fact the founder of the NED was once quoted in The Washington Post, "We do today what the CIA was not allowed to do, was outlawed from doing before, we do it publicly." And he was proud of that, and he never denied saying that.
And NED, my gosh, and I invite your listeners to know better what NED is doing. They're involved in over 75 countries, both allies and enemies of the United States, in destabilization, in being involved in elections and in some cases throwing those elections, as they did in Nicaragua, as they have tried recently again to do in Venezuela, and as they've done in many other places. But the fact is that what NED does is a cross government operation, and they get their funding from Congress, and it's a massive operation, one which people have to understand is intricately involved in covert activities as well.
OHH: Let's go back and look to 1978, and even a little before, when you guys began. I wonder if we can, before we even talk about the magazine itself, can you give us a feel of the mood of the late 70s when, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and things like the Church Committee, where there was kind of dissent not just on the streets, there was even dissent inside the halls of Congress and the Senate to some degree. Do you feel that that feeling in a sense gave birth to something like Covert Action? And then from there, how did you guys, who were the founders and how did you guys all come to find each other and decide to do this huge project that turned into a multi decade magazine like that?
Lou Wolf: Well you know, Dave, it's beautiful to look back as I'm trying to do here 40 years later, to understand that we were inspired by the extraordinary example of Philip Agee when he became, not the only first whistleblower against the CIA, but one of them, when he had just spent 12 years in Latin America, in Uruguay and Brazil and Ecuador, and he acknowledged publicly and in his books, Inside the Company and two later books, On the Run, and the other one I'm blanking right now.
And so he acknowledged that he really woke up when he was sitting in the office of the police chief in Montevideo, Uruguay, and he said, "I heard this screaming going on, a man's voice, and he was screaming, obviously in pain." And so he asked, "Hey Jefe," the police chief, "Jefe, what's going on?" He said, "Oh, Philip," the chief said, "don't you remember you turned him over to us last week."
And suddenly this wave of horrible feeling came over Phil and he realized that yes, he was directly implicated in that man behind that wall being tortured at that moment. And he said that was the moment, although he had been thinking of quitting the CIA before that, but quitting the CIA is not an easy thing to do, and he realized at that point in time he had to work actively to plan this exit from the CIA.
Then two other people, co-founders with us, was Jim and Elsie Wilcott. Jim and Elsie were in the CIA. Elsie was a secretary and Jim was a finance officer. Jim's job was to sit in a cage and dole out currencies of dozens of different countries, and he told us, and in fact with some of those currencies, were in fact, were actually counterfeited by the CIA. They were actually counterfeiting currencies of different countries in order to destabilize the economies in those countries.
So he was sitting in his cage, and it was a very threatening and scary job because he was surrounded by some pretty scary and demented and self believing people working for the CIA, operations officers. One day, he used to go up in a Piper Cub, 'cause that was his release, that was his recreation. This was, when he and Elsie were based in Japan, and so he went up to the plane, was flying around. All of a sudden, he gets an urgent message from the base, which in fact was a US military base in Tokyo. Unlike in most places, in Tokyo at that time, the embassy was not a direct base for the CIA.
And so he got this message, "Return to base, return to base immediately." So he landed the plane, walked into the station as it's called, the CIA station, and there's a big party going on. He said, "Hey, what's going on here?" There were champagne bottles popping and people dancing and a lot of hoopla and toasting champagne and everything. And he said, "What's going on? Nobody told me there was a party." "Oh Jim, didn't you know?" And they leaned down and turned on Armed Forces TV. Kennedy had just been shot, and they were celebrating.
OHH: Wow.
Lou Wolf: And he testified to this before the Senate Committee, under oath, that that had happened. In fact he even gave the name of a very high ranking CIA man who was identified in one of our books as coming up to his cage one day, where he gave out all this money, and Jim was still in shock about the assassination, and the guy says, "What's wrong, Jim? Why are you so down? What's going on?" Jim said, "I still can't believe our president is dead." "Oh Jim, don't you remember giving money for the Oswald project out of that cage?" "I did what?" he said. So that's part of the story. Jim and Elsie Wilcott co-founded with us.
And then Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap. Ellen had worked as a researcher with the DA in New Orleans [Jim Garrison], and in the assassination of Kennedy, the investigation. And then Bill Schaap was a military, a defense lawyer for GIs, so helping the people in that regard. Helping GIs get justice out of coming back from Vietnam and other wars as well. That was the group that founded the magazine. And then we went on to integrate other people, writers from all over the country and all over the world. Actually in the span of our 27 years, from 1978 to 2005, I've counted we had over 280 different authors wrote for us during that time.
We are now hoping that we can include a number of them, those who are still living. Unfortunately a number of them have passed in the interim. It's very sad for me to realize that I'm the only co-founder still living. The others, Michael Rattner, the co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Bill Kunstler, the great international lawyer who was one of the most amazing people who we ever knew. He was also a comedian, so he managed to mix comedy into the life that he was trying to live in defending people. So that's sort of the beginning.
OHH: It's an incredible list of people and an incredible history to it. Do you wanna talk about some of the early work you did? I definitely would like you to tell the story of the law that eventually was passed to sort of stymie your work by the Congress. Do you wanna talk about some of what you were doing to counter some of the CIA operations, and then how that law came to affect you?
Lou Wolf: One of the things we realized very early on back in 1978 was that the people that do the CIA's dirty work, most times, not every time, but most times they're working undercover in what is known as diplomatic cover, where they have offices at the various embassies around the world. This follows on from 1948, the year after the CIA was created, with an agreement, a secret agreement for many years, between the State Department and the CIA which permitted the CIA to have slots, as they were known, or positions undercover and inside the diplomatic service, people working for the State Department as legitimate diplomats. These people were not legitimate diplomats. They're working under various forms of cover, as economic officers, as political officers, as analysts and so forth. Under deep cover. Or I'm sorry, under diplomatic cover.
There is also a category as I just mentioned, deep cover, people who do not work in the embassies, they never actually even are allowed to go near the embassy. They are called deep cover people. We once got hold of a document which was the manual of the CIA, a training manual for people under deep cover. What they do sometimes for years is pretend to be all manner of people, whether tourists or whether religious people, as missionaries or as academics of one kind or another. It's a very difficult and dangerous job, and very demanding job because they have to work a day job, which is that job they're trying to pretend is what they do as a day job, and then at night, for the most part their job is to carry on deep cover activities for the CIA. And so that manual created some waves when we published it. It's kind of boring to read, and actually is a very valuable insight to how the CIA is constructed.
For years the US pretended that it was opposed to apartheid in South Africa when in fact the CIA and the Congress were secretly supporting apartheid and violating the laws that prevented trading with South Africa.
Then we did more and more research and articles about the whole range of CIA activities, whether it's in Africa, in southern Africa, certainly in Angola and Mozambique and South Africa. For years the US pretended that it was opposed to apartheid in South Africa when in fact the CIA on one hand and the Congress was secretly supporting apartheid and violating the laws that prevented trading with South Africa, and had secret exports to the apartheid regime. And then we wrote about the Caribbean. We wrote a lot about Cuba. And CIA, a whole, many dozens of years of operations against Cuba, including over 700 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. That's documented. Not one of them succeeded. He did end up dying a natural death, but he did not die from the efforts by the CIA to either plant a poison diving suit on him, 'cause he used to love to go underwater and look at the coral, or an exploding cigar that they tried to put on him, and so forth and so on.
We wrote about Grenada, the US invasion of Grenada. Actually had occasion to visit Grenada before overthrow of Maurice Bishop, who was an extraordinary man. Actually Ellen and Bill introduced me to Maurice Bishop, and no less at the UN, because his education was first at Howard University here in Washington. And so when he came to the UN as the prime minister and he was received by a massive crowd in New York, in Brooklyn, as well as at the UN, he was applauded there. But before he got up to speak, he invited us into his hotel room and he's still standing there in his jockey shorts, and he says, "What's going on here?" And we're talking about efforts to destabilize Grenada, which was already well advanced. And finally his colleague came in and said, "Maurice, come on. You gotta give a talk to the UN in a half an hour. Get ready." And so it was an amazing experience.
In the end, Maurice Bishop was set up. He and his entire cabinet of seven people were stripped naked and lined up against a wall and mowed down by machine guns. That's another expression of how the CIA operates.
But in the end, Maurice Bishop was set up by a so called self described scientific socialist who then ended up being involved in a plan to assassinate him, and in fact that's what happened. He and his entire cabinet, who was seven people, including the Minister of Education, Jacqueline Creft and Bishop and the five others were stripped naked and lined up against a wall and mowed down by machine guns. That's another expression of how the CIA operates.
We wrote also a lot about western Europe, about CIA operations in Europe, where Phil had lived, Phil Agee had lived for a number of years, including the UK, including in Germany. In fact he was driven out of about six different western European countries by the CIA. He's only the second person to have his US passport seized by the United States. The first and only other person was the great Paul Robeson. And so they took Phil's passport, claiming that he was a subversive and he was going all over the world, which he was, giving lectures about the CIA.
And that's where I first met him in the UK and in Amsterdam, and I'll never forget, both in Amsterdam and in Germany, the heavy, heavy, heavy blanket of surveillance on Phil and his family and myself while we were there. In fact, we uncovered a document which proved that the CIA was plotting to kill Phil. The only reason they didn't was because they decided, according to the document, that the finger would point right back at them. And so not for lack of wanting to kill him, but they ended up letting him live.
Let's see. We wrote about COINTELPRO, the FBI's operations, massive operations against the left and the Black movement here in the United States. It's a strange irony, a very chilling irony that the FBI has now re-founded something called the "Black Identity Extremists" section. So now it's a very similar, in fact almost identical to COINTELPRO, except it's aimed again at people of color who are struggling against police killings across the board in this country of Black people. And then there has, some things come up called the Blue Lives Matter Movement, which is the police and police union and others, of saying blue lives matter more than Black lives. Effectively that's what they're saying. The gun culture is very active in this country as we know, the NRA and its allies. We hope to analyze further the role of the NRA's support from the US government, not least of which by the intelligence agencies.
OHH: It is fascinating when you go back and look at your magazine, a lot of the issues, the great majority of the issues that appeared in your magazine are still issues that we're dealing with today, whether it's environment and some climate change, whether it is things like US interventions around the world, whether it's things like mass surveillance or domestic repression. The tactics may have changed but all those issues are the same. That's why I'm so excited to see your magazine come back, because you all have a 40 year history of knowing about these same things, and you've seen them over the years, so that's why I'm really excited and I hope that everybody gets a chance to look.
Lou Wolf: Thank you, Dave, for those words, and I know you're very sincere and mean them. I forgot to mention what you were alluding to earlier was the law that they ended up writing to prevent, and they in this case was the CIA, they acknowledged when we were identifying CIA personnel wholly from public sources, not a single classified document, but from public sources, particularly the State Department Biographic Register, which was published in 1878.
And so in the early part of the decade when they made it classified, and even though my understanding is it's not highly classified, it's just official use only, which is the lowest level of classification, but it is a classified document. That is where you find the biographies of real State Department people, and then mixed in that document, that volume which is several hundred pages, are the biographies of CIA personnel under diplomatic cover. We developed a methodology, a very scientific methodology to winnow out the CIA people from the legitimate State Department biographies.
We had a column in the magazine called "Naming Names." Let me stress here that it was not because we wanted to see them killed. Hardly. And in fact we took the position that a CIA person being assassinated is gonna win them friends, except maybe from the people who suffer under their covert activities.
And then we had a column in the magazine called "Naming Names." Let me stress here that it was not because we wanted to see them killed. Hardly. And in fact we took the position that a CIA person being assassinated is gonna win them friends, except maybe from the people who suffer under their covert activities. Well, one of them was assassinated. Richard Welch was the CIA station chief in Athens, and he had been warned before moving to Athens, actually his predecessor was being tailed closely, even sitting behind him in the movie theater, in the row right behind him. So they knew who he was. This was a Greek underground guerrilla group. They were planning to assassinate him.
Then the next week, suddenly he was gone, had been transferred to Canada of all, as chief of station there. And there was Richard Welch. Welch and his wife had said, "We wanna move into this house," which was well known as the station chief's house. How well known? All the tourist buses used to be driven by the house and the driver would point over and say, "That's the house of the head of the CIA here." That's how well known it was. It was known. And then he was assassinated.
We wrote the full story. The official story about his death was that he had been set up by us and by Philip Agee, when in fact he had been named no less than five times before his assassination, being in Peru in one time and another time in Europe, before then finally he was assassinated. But he was allied very, very closely with the military dictatorship, a very brutal dictatorship and the generals in the 70s in Greece, actively supported by the CIA. It was not like he was blameless, and that's the man who was assassinated. We never tried to claim that he should have been assassinated, no. But the fact is that it happened because he decided he wanted to live in his house. Come hell or high water, I'm gonna stay there, and my wife likes the curtains and so forth and so on. It was a couple blocks from the embassy, and you can imagine the mind, the choice that he made there.
OHH: Right. That sounds like hubris.
Lou Wolf: And then later, I should add here, Congress wrote a law which was called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which outlawed anybody, any journalist, anybody from identifying any CIA personnel, whether it was from public sources or secret documents or anything else. This was a bill of attainder, actually aimed at yours truly, 'cause I was doing the research, and I would sit in the Library of Congress and the National Archives doing methodical research, very precise, not guesswork, nothing like that. It was the real ... We actually eliminated some dozens of people from our column 'cause we weren't absolutely sure that they were CIA. And so they wrote this law, and that's what, it became law, which is still law today.
OHH: Why don't we start to talk about some of the things that have passed since you all stopped publication? Do you wanna talk about some of the events that have happened today? I guess you all stopped publication in 2005. We were, the United States was in the middle of the Iraq occupation, and at that point-
Lou Wolf: That's right.
OHH: It was turning into a complete civil war. Do you want-
Lou Wolf: Really a war without end, not just a civil war. I mean this is what the US does. It's now literally a war without end. That's the objective and that is what's going on before our very eyes.
OHH: And spreading into other countries.
Lou Wolf: That's correct.
OHH: Do you wanna talk a little bit about what you made of the Obama Administration's foreign policy? Maybe what the "Arab Spring" meant, and some of his other policies, such as what happened in the Ukraine and things like that?
Lou Wolf: Well, sure. There came about during the Obama Administration, they were called "color revolutions". I have to point out that the Obama Administration, we have to call him out on what he did, he set the tone for what we're watching now in terms of, he and his administration, not just he alone, for massive violence, use of drones, the use of highly technological means of war, including I would add the here biological war and chemical war as well as drones and the Air Force bombing and so forth.
And let's not forget that the US overthrew Gaddafi, and now it's being talked about quite openly as the model for bringing down Kim Jung Un in North Korea as if that's a model, that is how Gaddafi was first, his government in Libya was destabilized through all manner of operations, economic warfare, and denial of food and medicine. And finally, there was a, it wasn't a popular revolution, it was use of CIA and Pentagon paid guerrillas in the streets, and they ended up capturing him and beating him to death. And in fact if you go back and see the video of it, he was actually disemboweled on film. You can see it, watch it happen. And then for Donald Trump and, what's his name now? His National Security Advisor-
OHH: Oh, Bolton?
If you analyze the definitions of fascism, I would say that we are moving headlong towards fascism. We're not quite there yet, but I do believe that's where it's headed.
Lou Wolf: Yeah, John Bolton, who's literally like a caveman in an official position such as National Security Advisor, his policies are really, truly bizarre, and they're gaining credence thanks to him. By the way, Bolton is there without any Senate confirmation. He's put in place, and then just like the king of the this country now, he thinks he's royalty and can do what he wants. Let's be clear here, that the United States is no longer, if it ever really was in recent history, a democracy. It is really becoming a dictatorship. If you analyze the definitions of fascism, I would say that we are moving headlong towards fascism. We're not quite there yet, but I do believe that's where it's headed. And whatever happens with this administration, I'm not very confident of the impeachment option because I think, what do we get then, we get Mike Pence, who's even more ominous and more dangerous than Trump.
But the very fact that one of his best friends is Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who's engaged in a massive killing operation under the guise of fighting drugs. Trump met with him in Manila and then also in the White House, and they were big pals there. So it's no surprise that this is the kind of people that he cultivates and that he gets along with. But you cannot believe a single word that comes out of the man's mouth. I mean he changes from day to day, certainly in the case of North Korea. He's done it just in the past three or four days. He does it vis-a-vis Mexico, the border, wanting to build the wall.
Everywhere you turn, US policy, which by the way is without him naming ambassadors or undersecretaries of state. The rudimentary requirements for government is that you have people in place in different positions, and there are dozens of countries where there is either no ambassador been named, several of his nominees for ambassadors were rejected by the Senate, and yet he plows forward thinking that he can live by fiat, he can rule by fiat, that he can rule by dictating and tweeting every other hour almost, including the middle of the night. I don't know what he does in his bed, but I can only guess. But the point is that the man rules in a bizarre way, let's be clear.
And he has an approval rating. Why did people vote for him? Particularly women, after hearing what he said on that bus. How is it that he was allowed into the White House? I would say that, and it's a long story, but I think part of the blame falls on the Democratic Party, we have one party with two names, and they're almost mirror images of each other. Maybe some differences, yes, but not very real. And so the pretense of democracy in this country is fading fast.
OHH: What do you see as coming up that looks very important and that you're planning to cover in the next say, six months?
Lou Wolf: Certainly high among them is torture. Torture has become a cornerstone of US policy, very publicly so. It's still going on, even if there are public statements saying we don't do that anymore, and I'm using air quotes, we don't do that anymore. All you have to do is go to the record and see what they were capable of doing, and a lot of it is still going on inside of the whole range of CIA bases and so called black sites. How racist is that [term] alone?
Gina Haspel, who is now the Director of Central Intelligence, was proud to say at her confirmation when they asked her, is torture immoral? She kind of stammered and finally said, "I believe in law and whatever the US does is lawful." That was thanks to Bush era lawyers who fashioned into legal language similar to Adolf Hitler. A lot of what Hitler did was also legal. And so we intend to follow through on this kind of work and revelation as best we can. We have a number of people who know a lot about the historic role that torture has played in CIA operations in the world.
There is a military code, and supposedly of interrogations. That code at least is somewhere this side of being still civilized. But Gina Haspel I believe is going to take this country, now that she's confirmed by only six votes, that's hardly a ringing endorsement of her candidacy. It took six Democrats to vote for her, to enable her to be confirmed. So thank you, Democratic Party, for that. So that will be a lot of what we're gonna do. We're also very clear that her confirmation hearing was nothing short of a psychological operation, because if you read in the mainstream media the day before, in The Washington Post and in other places, that she was actively coached by CIA personnel on what to say, how to answer questions and so forth. And in a couple occasions, they were whispering in her ear during the hearing.
So under official law, it's prohibited for the CIA to carry out propaganda in the United States. A friend of mine just pointed out at a talk I gave this week that there was an act called the Smith Mundt Act. Carl Mundt was a senator in 1946, and he and another senator fashioned a law which prohibited propaganda by the US government in the United States. Well, it's no surprise to say that there's been propaganda forever in this country, but now when you watch that hearing of Gina Haspel, it was propaganda. It was a whole, very skillful and very classy, I shouldn't say classy, very the opposite of classy, a psychological operation.
We will also make sure that we continue to focus on having writers from the Global South who will write about the impacts of our US policy. Let me just remind your listeners that every president in our lifetimes has said the magic words, "The United States is the greatest nation on the face of the earth." That is what is probably known as exceptionalism, American exceptionalism. Obama himself was proud to say, "We are exceptional." His words. Well, that kind of leaves out all the 196 other countries in the world, if you say we're exceptional, we are the greatest nation on the face of the earth. So we will be writing and reporting a lot about exceptionalism and what it really translates to in the daily lives of people around this globe. And that's what we feel is our duty, to come down very clearly on this issue.
OHH: Very good.
Lou Wolf: Thank you.
OHH: Is there anything else you wanna add before we go? I do wanna add, you got, you and Chris, and I don't know anybody else, are you gonna be at Left Forum next weekend?
Lou Wolf: Yes, we're gonna have a panel there, and we invite people in New York to come. It's at the ... I'm sorry, the...
OHH: Oh yeah, no. It's at John J-
Lou Wolf: John J. College of Criminal History, which is on its own one of the great institutions of learning. I have given talks there in the past, and it's very impressive what they are trying to do with their student body and their faculty. It's on Saturday, June 2nd, starting at 2 o'clock. I don't know the room number, but as easily you can check it on the Left Forum website.
OHH: Sure, I'll put a little link on the-
Lou Wolf: Thank you.
OHH: On here. But yeah, so that'll be exciting. You guys, you're gonna talk about relaunching the magazine?
Lou Wolf: Relaunching the magazine, what our vision is, which is now we've already done, relaunched the magazine, and as well have several board members, two or three of our board members will be speaking there, and then we're gonna open up to questions and discussion, 'cause that's really the best part of it. We will also have a table there where we'll have full sets of the magazine available for purchase there. One of our speakers I should not fail to mention is the great William Blum-
OHH: Oh wow.
Lou Wolf: Who is the foremost historian on the CIA. He wrote several books, including Killing Hope. The other one is called Rogue State. Which rogue state is he writing about? The United States is the rogue state. So he's gonna give a talk. But we only have an hour and 50 minutes, so we have to do it, each be concise, and then we wanna allow maximum time for people, for us to share views on this, and discussion. Questions and discussion.
OHH: That sounds fantastic. People should be really excited for that, and if they're going to Left Forum should definitely put that on their schedule of things to check out.
Lou Wolf: They can also visit our website, which is covertactionmagazine.com, and then you can look up our history, look up who we are, our board of advisors and editors. And if anybody out there is interested in a job, we're looking for a marquee editor, somebody who would wanna be our editor. Please let us know. There's a way to reach us through the website.
OHH: Great. And you guys, I also wanna mention you guys also have a, for people who are on Twitter, you guys have a Twitter account, @covertactionmag on Twitter. There's a lot there, and the website is great. There's already tons to read and look at. It's well worth a visit.
Lou Wolf: I have to admit to you, Dave, that Twitter and Facebook are not only over my head, but I have chosen, particularly in the case of Facebook, to stay away from Facebook now that we know a whole lot more about it and what it represents and how it was expressly used with connivance with the US intelligence apparatus to spread people's private information all over the world. Let me just lastly point out who created Facebook. It's a company called In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel, and you can check this any way you want, In-Q-Tel is a wholly owned CIA proprietary, which is a company which is conceived to make money for the CIA, but it's also a perfect platform. Facebook is for ... People hand on a silver platter everything personal and very private right over to them, or anyone who wants to know. I don't use Facebook, but.... That's where it's at.
OHH: It's an intelligence agency's dream really. I think that's probably one of the biggest changes since you guys had ceased publishing, was the rise of the internet and all of this kind of thing.
Lou Wolf: There was no such thing when we started. Even computers didn't hardly exist.
OHH: Not to go too far back in time, but how did you guys, where was your magazine sold? Was it in kind of alternative bookstores and newsstands all over?
Lou Wolf: That's right, yes. We tried to put it out anywhere and everywhere we could, in alternative bookstores, but also in mainstream bookstores. There was a bookstore on K Street here in Washington DC, and it was the largest selling magazine. He always put it in the front window, and he sold out every issue. We had to resupply him. And then one of the bookstores here in Washington, they told me once that every time the new magazine came out, there's this guy in beautiful silk suit used to walk in and buy every issue. And why was that? He was clearly an intelligence operative. Well, they could take them back to the CIA, and then we resupplied. In fact they sent us a check once to subscribe. So what did we do? We printed the check right on the front page. I will admit to people, we did take $17 once from the CIA, yes.
OHH: Oh, that's great. When the CIA finally put their CREST Archive online, I don't know, that was maybe 12 issues that they had tucked away in there, 12 full issues that people had found in there, so that's something.
Lou Wolf: That's the truth. It's an ugly truth, but it is the truth.
OHH: Definitely. Well great, Lou. I really appreciate you taking the time out to talk.
Lou Wolf: Thank you.
OHH: And I really look forward to seeing what you guys do, and yeah, I urge everybody to go check out the website and support your project. I think a lot of really good can come out of this, so thank you very much, Lou.
Lou Wolf: Thanks a lot.