The Duplicitous Buckleys: Like Father, Like Son

Look beyond this anti-Trump “Fake News” story at Yahoo!News for the crucial backstory. In a crude version of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” the anti-Trump deep state regime media controllers have prompted their minions at Yahoo! News to appear to ally with the Bush CIA Neoconservative #NeverTrumpers and bring out Conservative, Inc. legacy turd-in-the-punch bowl Christopher Buckley to assail Trump.

From the time before the American government’s formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracyliberalismconservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, “responsible public policy debate” has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.

It was “former” deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James BurnhamWilmoore KendallPriscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony “conservative movement.” Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such “conservatives” for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the “Pied Piper for the Establishment.”

Christopher Buckley (Skull and Bones 1975), whose father, William F. Buckley Jr. was a student at Yale University (Skull and Bones 1950) where he served as shill and informant for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. One of Buckley’s Yale professors, former Trotskyist communist Willmoore Kendall (formerly of the OSS and later consultant to the CIA) was a recruiter of talent for the newly created Agency. Kendall recruited Buckley in 1951.

Kendall introduced him to former Trotskyist James Burnham (also formerly of the OSS). Burnham was consultant to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s covert action division. He was later to actively work on the CIA coup d’etat against Mossadegh in Iran.

Burnham first introduced Buckley to agent E. Howard Hunt in his Washington, D. C. apartment. Buckley then served with Hunt in Mexico where Hunt was chief of station and Buckley’s control officer. Hunt later figured as a principal in the Watergate Scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.

Hunt, in his memoirs, American Spy, (in which Buckley wrote the introduction) observes that prior to his stint in the CIA, Regnery published Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, an indictment of the supposed pervasive liberalism on that campus. The book launched Buckley’s career as spokesman for the emerging “Conservative movement” of the early 1950s. With what we now know about CIA covert recruiting on college campuses during this period, particularly Yale, Buckley’s initial book bears a new revisionist examination.

What is not widely known is that the whole enterprise was largely that of a “vanity press” arrangement, with the Buckley family operating covertly under the clandestine guise of the Catawba Corporation, commissioning and financing the book’s publication and publicity. The book’s ownership copyright secretly belonged to Catawba, not WFB.

Buckley was later approached by Regnery to serve on the board of directors of the publishing firm, along with that of William J. Casey. Casey was a prominent Wall Street attorney who had served in the OSS and later became CIA Director under Ronald Reagan.

Hunt pointed out that Regnery was subsidized by the CIA during its early years.

At this time James Burnham, who had maintained many of his former leftist connections, was active in the CIA sponsored front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funding left-wing, anti-Soviet scholars and publications networks. When later, at Burnham’s urging, Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier “Conservative” publication of the past sixty years, joining him in the endeavor as principal editors were Kendall, Burnham, and his sister Priscilla, all of whom had been employed by the CIA.

William J. Casey drew up the incorporation papers for National Review, and served as its long-time legal counsel.

Years later, Buckley was outted as a CIA operative by former CIA agent William Sloane Coffin (Skull and Bones 1949). Coffin was a long-time colleague of George H. W. Bush (Skull and Bones 1948) when they both attended Phillips Andover Academy and later Yale together.

Former CIA Director Bush later presented Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, something Hunt never got for his years of clandestine service. Buckley subsequently created his famous fictional character of CIA agent Blackford Oakes, as Hunt had done earlier in his own series of eight spy novels (under the pseudonym of David St. John) featuring CIA agent ‘Peter Ward.’

But it is not Hunt with whom Buckley should be compared but author Mary Shelley.

Buckley’s entire life as America’s premier “conservative” public intellectual was sheer fiction based on lies and deception. And so has been the Frankenstein movement he created for his intelligence community masters.

Share

9:47 am on July 11, 2020