The CIA vs. Joe McCarthy

In the past at LRC I have written about the covert war in the 1950s between the Central Intelligence Agency and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, particularly how the CIA mobilized its Operation Mockingbird media assets to engage in a counter-attack upon old “Tail Gunner Joe” when he was building up momentum in going after the Agency’s “family jewels” of the time after his highly-publicized campaigns against communist spies in the state department and the army.  Two interesting books of Establishment Studies (or power elite analysis) have outlined how CIA director Allen Dulles directed his counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to find a means of destroying McCarthy. Angleton chose a veteran of the OSS, James McCargar, to undertake this covert espionage/disinformation action against McCarthy. These facts are discussed in Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA; and Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.

Somehow George Clooney (CFR) missed all this in his sanitized and vetted Hollywood agitprop epic, Good Night and Good Luck, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.

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1:02 pm on December 30, 2014