Back To The 80s? Alleged FBI Man Inside Trump Campaign, Stephen Halper, Has Ties To Neocon Propagandists
The revelation that FBI utilised the Carter-era intelligence operative Stefan Halper to infiltrate the Trump campaign during the 2016 US presidential election is the latest development in a torrent of political and intelligence news harkening back to the early 1980s, where figures like Halper, Oliver North, Benjamin Netanyahu, Michael Ledeen, William Casey and organisations including the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies played a key role in the victory of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election and the creation of a public discourse defined by rabid hostility towards the Soviet Union, Palestinians, left-wing media outlets, and, most of all, the newly founded Islamic Republic of Iran.
Stefan Halper's return to the spotlight amid Republican allegations of a politicised FBI has created a renewed interest among left-wing and alternative media websites in his role in the so-called "October Surprise," a political operation undertaken during the 1980 election to prolong the Iran hostage crisis and turn the American public against incumbent president Jimmy Carter, then running for re-election against Ronald Reagan.
While this particular "dirty trick" has been thoroughly investigated by reporters such as Robert Parry, it was only one of many actions taken by Halper and his cohorts to disrupt the election and ultimately ensure a Reagan victory, an effort aided by the use of foreign intelligence sources.
The New York Times reported on May 24, 1984, that numerous confidential papers from the Carter campaign, including items on debate preparations and campaign strategy, were circulated by and distributed to Reagan staffers by Halper and Casey, the latter at the time Reagan's campaign manager. The scandal quickly acquired the moniker of "Briefingate," however it has been largely forgotten today.
While this particular "dirty trick" has been thoroughly investigated by reporters such as Robert Parry, it was only one of many actions taken by Halper and his cohorts to disrupt the election and ultimately ensure a Reagan victory, an effort aided by the use of foreign intelligence sources.
The New York Times reported on May 24, 1984, that numerous confidential papers from the Carter campaign, including items on debate preparations and campaign strategy, were circulated by and distributed to Reagan staffers by Halper and Casey, the latter at the time Reagan's campaign manager. The scandal quickly acquired the moniker of "Briefingate," however it has been largely forgotten today.
Another scandal that deeply embarrassed the Carter campaign was the so-called "Billygate" affair, in which Carter's brother Billy Carter was accused of consorting with and accepting money from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, at the time widely vilified in the west as an alleged sponsor of "terrorism."
This had disappeared from the headlines but was tossed into the spotlight in October 1980 by neonservative journalist Michael Ledeen (at the time on the payroll of the Italian security services, SISMI) and right-wing writer Arnaud de Borchgrave, and spiced up with allegations that Carter's brother had also met with Yasser Arafat, another leader being trashed as a "terrorist" in the media.
Halper, Ledeen and their fellow-travellers like Paul Johnson, Claire Sterling and Robert Moss were regarded by much of the alternative media at the time as "disinformationists," working to smear governments that the United States had overthrown or was planning to overthrow, including Allende's Chile and Khomeini's Iran. Many of them worked as speechwriters for Margaret Thatcher and had extensive ties to the governments of Apartheid South Africa, Israel, and Latin American dictatorships installed as part of Operation Condor, as well as their intelligence agencies.
These sources were used to build a powerful narrative in favour of the Reagan campaign and against Carter and other supporters of a détente with the Soviet Union: that the USSR was behind all international "terrorism," a word deployed to describe national liberation struggles and leftists in the Global South, as well as all "disinformation."
They went on to imply that Carter's insistence on "human rights" was allowing communists to commit successful uprisings in places like Latin America (at the time controlled by the same dictatorships, including the Argentina junta, supplying alleged "proof" for these theories to the disinformationists).
Fred Landis, a co-contributor with Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman to the magazine Covert Action Information Bulletin, explained that the Ledeen and Sterling made a heavy use of Israeli propaganda and intelligence sources to write their stories on terrorism. This was at a time when the Israeli government, in an effort spearheaded by Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time a "counterterror expert" to redefine Palestinian resistance and Arab violence more generally as "terrorism."
This hasbara, infused with a heavy anti-Muslim racism, was bundled and packaged by the disinformationists and landed on the front page of the New York Times Magazine just days before the 1980 election, as polls indicated a close race. It was later made one of the key ideological and foreign policy planks of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.
Most of the disinformationists, including Sterling and Ledeen, were members of the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, at the time a watering hole for intelligence operatives shafted by the Carter administration. Many CSIS employees wanted George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan to take back the White House so they would be allowed to return to the fold.
The Heritage Foundation was another major outlet for disseminating the anti-Carter line through syndicated columns and reports demonizing the administration as soft on terror and Iran, which since the fall of the Soviet Union has been the primary target in the gunsights of the neoconservative movement, particularly figures like John Bolton, a man radicalised by the coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, that, as we have seen, was to an extent a concoction of an earlier generation of neocon propagandists.
Today, the Trump Administration, led by Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who outlined his regime change vision at the Heritage Foundation, is firmly intent on the overthrow of the Iranian government. While Netanyahu puts on PowerPoint stage presentations on Iran's supposed guilt, entire websites, including the Drudge Report and Breitbart, are vehicles for an even more inflammatory form of Islamophobia than could be imagined by the likes of Halper or Sterling. Oh, and apparently the Trump White House is considering employing a shady Oliver North-like figure, "Uncle Jimbo," to accomplish this mission.
Is an MTV revival next?