Fathers Canada

Gloria Steinem: How the CIA used Feminism to Destabilze Society
By Henry Makow Ph.D.  | March 18, 2002 

 

 

 

"In the 1960's, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order."

 

 Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings.  She became a media darling due to her CIA connections.  MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.

Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970's by a radical feminist group called "Red Stockings." In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in "Feminist Revolution." Nevertheless the story appeared in the "Village Voice" on May 21, 1979.
 

Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. "When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era," she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, "and that made me a Marxist." (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: "Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job."

Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan's alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a "Chester Bowles Student Fellowship" to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.

In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA's Cord Meyers to direct an "informal group of activists" called the "Independent Research Service." This was part of Meyer's "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which created magazines like "Encounter" and "Partisan Review" to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.

One of Steinem's CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960's, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women's lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine's first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.

Steinem's personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980's, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.

Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University's secret pagan "Skull and Bones" society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.

The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was the "American Committee for Cultural Freedom." Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950's and 1960's, and I believe continues to do so today. In "The Cultural Cold War," Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.

The CIA's "Project Mockingbird" involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. "By the early 1950's," writes Deborah Davis, in her book "Katherine the Great," the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all." In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his "suicide" in 1963, boasted that "you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month."

I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent's generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60's drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950's the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.

According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment "within." In another example of the CIA's use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980's, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.

I won't attempt to analyze the CIA's motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don't realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.

Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.

Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture ("husband") and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.

Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere "stereotypes." This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O'Donnell are advanced as role models.

All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.

Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.

Women's oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950's importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father's income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.

Until Gloria Steinem and the CIA came along.

SOURCE

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[ Gloria Steinem worked full-time for the CIA during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as director of the CIA-funded Independent Research Service. In a 1967 New York Times article Steinem is quoted as saying, "I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met." This document, published by Redstockings in 1975, shows that if Steinem was telling the truth to the Times, it was only because the CIA didn't have to ask. ]

Festival Document

Director:
  GLORIA M. STEINEM
Executive Officers:
  DR. PAUL E. SIGMUND, JR.
  LEONARD N. BEBCHICK

from Report on the Vienna Youth Festival,
Independent Research Service, 1961

SUPPLEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION:
NOTES ON THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE EIGHTH FESTIVAL

This report on the Vienna Youth Festival has been compiled from information given out by the Festival's organizers, from articles in the international press, from reports of Austrian and other student and youth groups present in Vienna, and from the personal observations of Festival participants. The Independent Research Service, a privately-supported educational foundation which provides research on international subjects of interest to youth and students, has published this report in English, French, and Spanish in the hope that it will be useful both as a research document in future studies of the Communist youth movement and as an aid to groups and individuals deciding their attitude toward future festivals.

...

Thus far, the organization, aims, and techniques of the Eighth Festival seem to be identical with those of its predecessors. In the light of these developments, it is perhaps even more necessary that these individuals and groups debating attendance in Helsinki examine closely the case history of the Festival in Vienna.

September, 1961
New York, New York

APPENDIX II

The following are excerpts from a Research Release Published By International News Bureau, Vienna:

SOME BIOGRAPHICAL DATA ON FESTIVAL PERSONALITIES

A major effort has been made by the sponsors of the Seventh Youth Festival to make the event appear non-partisan. As evidence, the sponsors often have pointed to individuals outside the Soviet orbit who have endorsed the Festival, maintaining that the Festival staff is international and representative of all political tendencies.

The following list of individuals associated with the Festival's organization -- often very much in the background -- would seem to indicate a far greater communist control of this event than the sponsors wish to admit. This list has been compiled from Festival documents and careful research by those who have observed the organizers in action.

...

[deleted] -- Italy. A WFDY vice-president since March, 1958, [deleted] has worked on the PC in Vienna since April of that year. He was initially named Treasurer but later was replaced in this position by [deleted], an Italian Communist. [deleted] was also one of the leaders of the Italian delegation to the Moscow Festival. In actively working on the PC, he is ignoring the directive of the Italian (Nenni) Socialist Party of which he is a member, which requests that there be no official participation in the Vienna Festival. [deleted] PSI membership has been cited in the Festival journals as proof of the non-partisan character of the event. (Ed's note: Since the Festival, the PSI youth disaffiliated from WFDY.)

...

[deleted] -- Italy. Another PSI member who is violating the party's request against official Festival participation, [deleted] has been a member of the PC since October 1958 when he replaced Bahomonde of Chile.

...

[deleted] -- Niger. A non-communist and representative of the French West African Council of African Youth (CJA), [deleted] apparently is an individual who sees the Festival as an opportunity to contact youth in the communist countries. As a Catholic and non-communist, he often has been asked to sign Festival correspondence and act as a Festival spokesman. Through this use of his name, the communists have successfully used the reputation of the genuinely neutral CJA to imply that a major responsibility for Festival Organization rests with CJA and [deleted].

...

[deleted] -- China. Publicly active in communist youth affairs since 1949, the 35-year-old [deleted] came to Budapest in the fall of 1956 to work in WFDY headquarters, where he was to head the WFDY Asian-African Commission. He, too, participated in the organization of the PC while attending the Stockholm meeting and has lately been working with the PC in Vienna.

...

[deleted] -- Federal German Republic. A member of the Socialist Party of Western Germany (which has asked its members not to be official Festival participants), [deleted] has been working on the PC since early 1959 as a member of the publications board and as the person in charge of Western European affairs. In the latter role he has traveled in Western Germany to stimulate participation. His efforts have been largely unsuccessful on the representative youth group level, since nearly all such German groups have boycotted the Festival in solidarity with the Austrian organizations.

...

[deleted] -- Argentina. A well-known Festival personality -- perhaps because he maintains he is an anarchist rather than a communist and hence appears more respectable -- [deleted] is chairman of the Student Commission of the PC of which the Bulgarian, [deleted] is secretary. [deleted] has been active in the Festival from the start and has traveled widely in its support.

...

[deleted] -- Argentina. [deleted] is a member of the Radical Intransigent Youth of Argentina and has worked on the PC since April 1958. Festival publicity has given much attention to the fact that Argentine President Frondizi also is a member of the Radical Intransigent Party. It has not mentioned another significant fact -- that in late May the government of Frondizi closed the office of the Argentine National Festival Committee under a decree which bans all communist activity in Argentina.

...

[deleted] -- United States. As chairman of the United States Festival Committee, [deleted] has been working on the PC, both in Vienna and in the U.S., since June 1959. He has been head of the Marxist Discussion Club of the City College of New York.

...

[deleted] -- As an important functionary of the small Communist-front Union of Democratic Women of Austria she has been playing an active role in the Austrian Communist Party's preparations for the Festival.

.......................................................................................................................................................................................

The New York Times, February 21, 1967

A New York freelance writer disclosed yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency had supported a foundation that sent hundreds of Americans to World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki, Finland, in 1962.

Gloria Steinem, a 30-year-old graduate of Smith College, said the C.I.A. has been a major source of funds for the foundation, the Independence [sic -- Independent] Research Service, since its formation in 1958. Almost all of the young persons who received aid from the foundation did not know about the relationship with the intelligence agency, Miss Steinem said. Ironically, she said, many of the students who attended the festivals have been criticized as leftists. The festivals are supposed to be financed by contributions from national student unions, but are, in fact, largely supported by the Soviet Union.

Miss Steinem said she had become convinced that American students should participate in the World Youth Festivals after she spent two years in India.

"I came home in 1958 full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done," she said. "Students were not taken seriously here before the civil rights movement, and private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival."

Miss Steinem said she had talked to some former officers of the National Student Association, who told her C.I.A. money might be available to finance American participation in the seventh postwar festival scheduled for Vienna in the summer of 1959.

The former association officers had had ties with the C.I.A. while serving the association, which last week conceded it had taken money from the intelligence agency since 1952.

"Far from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days, who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival," Miss Steinem said. She noted that most Americans who had attended various festivals were sympathetic to Communist policies.

The Independence [sic] Research Service, originally called the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Festival, was organized with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. It concentrated, Miss Steinem said, on disseminating information about the festival and urging young persons who espoused flexible, but non-Communist, foreign policy views to attend.

Miss Steinem was a full-time employe of the service till following the Helsinki festival in 1962.

About 130 youths who had made contact with the foundation did attend, although few of them received significant financial help, Miss Steinem said.

Before the Helsinki festival in 1962 the foundation again recruited young teachers, lawyers, scholars, linguists and journalists -- most of whom would consider themselves very liberal Democrats -- to attend.

The Independent Service financed a newspaper, a new [sic -- news?] bureau, cultural exhibits and two jazz clubs during the festival. However, its most important work was to convince youths from Asia, Africa and Latin America that some Americans understood their aspirations for national self-determination, Miss Steinem said.

Miss Steinem insisted that the C.I.A. had never tried to alter the policy of the foundation.

"I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met," she said.

Miss Steinem noted that since the foundation was started in "the post-McCarthy era" the Federal Government could not openly finance the foundation. Overt government support would also have "alienated" youths from other countries who were suspicious of the United States, she said.

"The C.I.A.'s big mistake was not supplanting itself with private funds fast enough," she observed.

From Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-84, 727.

In the summer of 1959, just before McCloy took his family for an extended trip to Europe, C.D. Jackson wrote to remind McCloy that later that summer a World Youth Festival was scheduled to take place in Vienna. Jackson asked McCloy to contribute an article, perhaps on the "benign and constructive aspects" of the U.S. occupation of Germany. The piece would appear in a daily newspaper to be published in Vienna in conjunction with the festival. McCloy agreed, and the article was published (in five languages) in a newspaper distributed by a twenty-five-year-old Smith graduate named Gloria Steinem.¹³⁸

McCloy's connection to Steinem went beyond contributing an article to the propaganda operation of which she was an editor in Vienna. Late in 1958, he and Jackson had discussed how the United States should respond to the expected Soviet propaganda blitz in Vienna. Previous gatherings of this kind had always been held in Moscow, East Berlin, or other cities in Eastern Europe. These events were major propaganda circuses, and the CIA was determined, in the words of Cord Meyer, a career CIA officer, "to compete more effectively with this obviously successful Communist apparatus."¹³⁹

Washington expected some twenty thousand students and young scholars from all over the world to converge on Vienna that summer for the three-week festival. Consequently, the CIA wanted an organized student presence in Vienna in order to counter Soviet propaganda.

C.D. Jackson recognized the Vienna Youth Festival as "an extremely important event in the Great Game." He explained, "This is the first time commies have held one of these shindigs on our side of the iron curtain; and what goes on, how it goes on, and what the follow-up will be is, I think, extremely important."¹⁴⁰

By the time Jackson first approached McCloy, in the autumn of 1958, he and Cord Meyer, head of the CIA's International Organizations division (IO), had a plan. The Agency would provide discreet funding to an "informal group of activists" who would constitute themselves as an alternative American delegation to the festival. The CIA would not only pay their way but also assist them to distribute books and publish a newspaper in Vienna. Among other individuals, Jackson and Meyer hired Gloria Steinem to work with them. Steinem had recently returned from a two-year stint in India, where she had been a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow.

"I came home in 1958," Steinem later explained, "full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done.... Private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival."¹⁴¹ Convinced that a contingent of liberal but anticommunist American students should go to Vienna, she heard through her contacts at the National Student Association that there might be funding available to finance American participation in the festival. Working through C.D. Jackson and Cord Meyer, Steinem then set up an organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival. She obtained tax-exempt status, and Jackson helped her raise contributions from various American corporations, including the American Express Company. But most of the money came from the CIA, to be managed by Jackson in a "special account." The entire operation cost in the range of $85,000, a not inconsiderable sum in those years.¹⁴² (Steinem's organization, later renamed the Independent Research Service, continued to receive support from the CIA through 1962, when it financed an American delegation to the Helsinki Youth Festival.¹⁴³)

Steinem ended up working closely with Samuel S. Walker, Jr., vice-president of the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee. Because the Austrians did not want to be associated with the Free Europe Committee, the Agency set up a commercial front called the Publications Development Corporation (PDC). Walker was made president of this dummy corporation, funded in part by "a confidential one-year contract" worth $273,000 from the Free Europe Committee.¹⁴⁴ His job was to supervise the book-and-newspaper operation at the Youth Festival.¹⁴⁵

...

138.   C.D. Jackson to McCloy, 6/12/59, DDE [Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene KS]; Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 103.

139.   Meyer, Facing Reality, p. 102.

140.   C.D. Jackson to Frank Stanton, 7/13/59, DDE.

141.   NYT, Feb. 21, 1967.

142.   C.D. Jackson to Cord Meyer, 12/16/58; Samuel S. Walker, Jr., to C.D. Jackson, 2/2/59; Gloria Steinem to C.D. Jackson, 3/19/59, DDE.

143.   When this covert operation was revealed by Ramparts magazine in 1967, Steinem told The New York Times that she approved the Agency's role. "Far from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the Festival." (NYT, Feb. 21, 1967). Steinem's definition of a liberal then included such young men as Zbigniew Brzezinski, an assistant professor at Harvard, and Tom Garrity, a lawyer with Donovan & Leisure. She arranged though Jackson funding for both men to attend the festival. (She also tried to get Michael Harrington to attend, but he dropped out at the last minute.) Steinem's politics then appeared to be typical of many 1950s anticommunist liberals. She told the Times in 1967, "I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met." But in fact, in response to a query from C.D. Jackson, Steinem wrote Jackson in great detail on the left-wing affiliations of various Americans associated with the allegedly Soviet-backed U.S. Festival Committee. (Gloria Steinem to C.D. Jackson, 3/19/59, DDE; NYT, Feb. 21, 1967.)

144.   S.S. Walker to C.D. Jackson, "Status Report," DDE.

145.   Samuel Walker eventually made a career out of publishing, becoming president of Walker & Co., a New York City publishing firm founded in the same year as the CIA funded Publications Development Corporation. In Vienna, he and Steinem worked well together. Their organizing efforts led to a split in the official American delegation. Their propaganda machine pumped out four hundred thousand copies of a daily newspaper for three weeks with articles by McCloy, Irving Kristol, Czeslav Milosz, Hubert Humphrey, Willy Brandt, Isaac Deutscher, and a broad range of other intellectuals and politicians. They also distributed some thirty-six thousand books by such left-of-center but anti-Soviet writers as George Orwell and Milovan Djilas. In the midst of it all, Walker reported back to Jackson, "Gloria's group continues to do yeoman service, distributing books etc. to the point where the cry has gone up 'Never before have so many Young Republicans distributed so much Socialist literature with such zeal.'" Walker praised Steinem's "female intuition" and wrote, "Gloria is all you said she was, and then some. She is operating on 16 synchronized cylinders and has charmed the natives...." (C.D. Jackson to Cord Meyer, 7/14/59, with attached Walker diary; Walker to Jackson, 7/31/59, DDE.)

Addendum

In 1975, a radical feminist group called Redstockings published their research on Steinem and Ms. magazine. Four years later, Random House was preparing an edition of Redstockings' Feminist Revolution. Steinem, Clay Felker (who launched Ms. and once worked for Steinem's CIA front), Katharine Graham, Warner Communications (Graham and Warner were major Ms. stockholders), and Ford Foundation president Franklin A. Thomas complained to Random House. The offending chapters were deleted and an "Abridged Edition" was published.