CIA agents are tight-lipped, but Steinem spoke openly about her relationship to “The Agency” in the 1950s and ’60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service.

While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

In my experience, nobody is stupid enough to think the CIA is liberal, nonviolent, and honorable and I would not want to presume that a famous feminist is stupid. That is serious “pull the other one, it’s got bells on” stuff.

Strange as it may seem, Steinem’s personal views and CIA political goals aligned. Her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America’s alternative democratic face.

Let me unpack that a bit. The accusation is that Steinem’s initial funding for Ms. Magazine came through a CIA cut-out who dropped $1.5 million in start-up cash on pretty ex-model Gloria whose opinions on feminism were aligned with a “divide and conquer” strategy that peeled white feminist women away from the broader social justice movement and student movements. What today we’d call “soccer moms” were lured off into a different set of issues, where they were less likely to be radicalized if they were arguing about whether proper feminists get face lifts, or whatever.

I have a copy of this book on order: [wc] but have not had a chance to dig into it, yet. It sounds like a wild ride. I’m going to quote a bit from the New York Times book reviews. I was interested that the NYT felt it had to preface its review of the book with some faffish hand-wringing about how tough it is to figure this stuff out because it’s so complicated.

There were indeed fronts directly established by the C.I.A. for a particular goal, and the story Wilford tells of them in “The Mighty Wurlitzer” is fascinating, involving a surprising collection of well-known figures in American life. Consider the Independent Service for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna in 1959. This was one of a series of events in which the Soviet Union promoted its versions of peace and progress, as contrasted with the cold-war policies of the capitalist United States.

A youthful Gloria Steinem had just spent a year and half in India, where, we are told, she befriended Indira Gandhi and the widow of the “revolutionary humanist” M. N. Roy, and had met a researcher who seems to have been a C.I.A. agent or contact. Attractive and progressive, Steinem was hired to run the I.S.I. and to recruit knowledgeable young Americans who could debate effectively with the Communist organizers of the festival, defending the United States against Communist criticism of segregation and other American failings.

That sure sounds like a covert influence operation, to me: let’s send some spoilers to the commies’ conference to troll them. Oh, right, the word “trolling” was not used, yet.

This remark illustrates Wilford’s somewhat cool attitude toward what many saw, with some legitimacy, as a worldwide conflict between tyranny and freedom.

Tyranny needs to lie; who, in this situation, was serving freedom?

A more direct review of Wilford is here: [grean]

Steinem’s CIA links came to mainstream media attention a second time in 1979, when the Village Voice ran an article about a chapter Random House had censored from Redstockings Collective’s 1979 book Feminist Revolution. Random House spiked the chapter, which describes Steinem’s earlier CIA work, after Steinem threatened to sue them. This deleted chapter (which you can get free by ordering an out-of-print copy of Feminist Revolution from Redstockings Collective) also suggests her CIA involvement may not have ended in 1969 when she left the International Research Associates. It details the right wing corporate funding which helped Steinem inaugurate Ms Magazine, as well as the magazine’s pivotal role in transforming American feminism from a broad multi-class, multiracial movement to one devoted to divisive male bashing and advancing career opportunities for white upper middle class women.

Then:

In 1960 Clay Felker, founder of New York Magazine, and a CIA-linked Independent Research Service staffer who accompanied Steinem to the Helsinki World Youth Festival in 1962, became the editor of Esquire magazine, where he published many of Steinem’s early feminist articles. In 1968 Felker started New York magazine, and in 1971 he hired Steinem as contributing editor. It was Felker who published the first edition of Ms Magazine as a New York magazine insert.

As the feminist magazine Off Our Backs states in a 1975 article about the Redstockings scandal, their discovery of Steinem’s earlier CIA employment raised a host of concerns about her sudden installation (mainly by corporate media) as the official leader of the US women’s movement without any previous involvement in feminist groups or campaigns.

Interestingly Ms Magazine‘s first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade route.

-10 points for gratuitous Kennedy assassination linkage.

This does not sound good:

In 1966, Steinem was still on the board of directors of International Research Service, when she co-founded National Organization for Women (NOW) with Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. A 2001 article in The American Prospect describes (quoting from The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen) how in 1975 prominent NOW members Carol Hanisch and Kathie Sarachild openly accused Steinem of working for the CIA and “directing the movement toward moderation and capitulation.” Ultimately Friedan herself became concerned “a paralysis of leadership” in the movement “could be due to the CIA” and demanded that Steinem respond.

After three months, Steinem wrote a six-page letter to various feminist publications describing her work on two student festivals in 1959 and 1962 that were funded by the CIA. Aiming to deflect the charge she was or had been a government operative, it stated, “I naively thought then that the ultimate money source didn’t matter, since in my own experience, no control or orders came with it.”

The Off Our Backs article also raises questions about a parallel organization Steinem started (in competition with NOW – starting parallel groups is a common strategy employed by US intelligence to sabotage grassroots organizations) in 1971 called Women’s Action Alliance. Located in the same building as Ms. Despite its name, the WAA wasn’t involved in “action,” as its name suggests. It engaged mainly in information gathering. It had a $20,000 grant from Rockefeller Family Fund for the establishment of a “national clearinghouse information and referral service” on the women’s movement. WAA collected information on key women leaders and their groups and activities, presumably facilitation FBI/CIA efforts to monitor them.

The argument that “the ultimate money source didn’t matter” doesn’t wash, unless you’re completely stupid. If Steinem was taking CIA money, she had to be able to assume that they were giving her the money because she was ideologically aligned with what they wanted. This is a subtle but pernicious point: they didn’t influence her, they found her a pre-formed useful idiot who thought the CIA was “liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

In the late seventies and early seventies, African American organizers became concerned about a pattern in which agents posing as black feminists infiltrated their community groups in an effort to split off women members into separate organizations. They traced this phenomenon back to 1978 when Steinem put a book called Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman on the cover of Ms Magazine.

The book was allegedly “written” by a Black “feminist” and “activist” named Michele Wallace. In her early twenties Wallace, who like Steinem came out of nowhere (she was a Newsweek book review researcher), was suddenly being touted as the “leader” of Black feminism. In the book, Wallace called abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth “ugly” and “stupid” for supporting Black men. She called Black Revolutionaries “chauvinist macho pigs” and advised Black women to “go it alone.”

Gloria Steinem maintained that Wallace’s book would “define the future of Black relationships” and she pushed hard to make sure the book received massive publicity. Gloria Steinem’s efforts triggered a flood of “Hate Black Men” books and films that continues to this day.

This stuff makes me sick to my stomach, I must say. Because, simply enough, people who believe in their country and what it’s doing don’t need to lie about it. Or, people who believe in a movement don’t need to lie about it. To me, feminism has always seemed obvious – and the connection between women’s rights, black people and natives’ rights, and the rights of some guy I’ve never met who lives in Egypt – the connection is clear: you either support equality and human rights, or you don’t. And, if you don’t, you’re on the wrong side. The CIA consistently places itself on the wrong side, trying to manipulate people for the wrong reasons (except for when it tries to kill them outright) toward the wrong ends. They’re the terrorists. Sure, organizations like Al Quaeda and ISIS are terrorists, too, but they’d be using the CIA’s methods for the same ends as the CIA, if they had the nosebleed-inducing budget of the CIA.

When I started following up on that innocent-sounding question the woman asked Betty Friedan in 1975 [pra] I began to get the sensation that someone had taken a shit in my mouth. Suddenly the taste got worse and worse; I was expecting to find a bunch of hair-on-fire conspiracy theory stuff but as soon as I saw MOCKINGBIRD my heart skipped a beat because I knew things were going to get ugly. Look at what the CIA managed to accomplish with their useful idiot, Steinem, and multiply that 50-fold or 100-fold, then ask yourself, “why does shit like FOX and Friends exist?” You’ll realize, slowly as a glacier melts, that Noam Chomsky was not fucking kidding one bit when he wrote about Manufacturing Consent.

We cannot have heroes we can believe in, because there’s a solid chance that they’re animatronic dolls placed in our path to divert us. You know how, sometimes, anti-skeptics start “JAQing” (Just Asking Questions) dishonestly about one topic or another – perhaps they stoutly maintain they are feminists, but that only applies to real women, or whatever it is TERFs say – now you can wonder if that bit of skeptical reasoning is brought to you courtesy of the world’s largest exporter of terrorism, the CIA. And how will you know? It might help explain some of Steven Pinker’s shitty argumentation, or Sam Harris’ dishonesty about Israel.

I wonder what the new compartment name is? Perhaps it’s DODOBIRD.