Have you ever thought about what really goes on behind the walls of the White House or the Pentagon? Particularly in times of political upheaval, it often seems that the government and the media work together to keep the voting public confused and distracted. In Warriors of Disinformation, Alvin A. Snyder, a former director of USIA's Television and Film Service, reveals the various propaganda campaigns sent out by the United States during the Cold War, one of the most strained, uncertain times in American political history. Snyder examines the "shady" billion-dollar dealings dedicated to "an exaggerated version of the truth, " and how President Reagan deceived the Soviets with well-plotted plans of fabrication. Readers will be shocked by the lengths that our government went to in order to hide the truth, and to consistently lie to not only the Soviets, but also to the American people about what was going on in the "land of the free." Warriors of Disinformation is an incredible look inside the government from someone who was on the front line. Hear stories that were never supposed to leave confidential meeting rooms and find out firsthand what went on behind closed doors. Snyder has a story to tell you, and you'd be crazy not to listen.
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IT SEEMED SOMEHOW FITTING THAT THE MAN WHO PRODUCED A movie entitled Snow White and the Three Stooges would be put in charge of waging psychological warfare against the Communist Evil Empire during the entire Reagan Administration. The man who claimed that British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher had opposed the American invasion of Grenada because she was a woman, and who frequently sent anti-Communist jokes in the diplomatic pouch to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was no cerebral State Department diplomat. In fact, he was no diplomat at all, as became clear to everyone shortly after he arrived in Washington in 1981 to take over as America’s chief overseas propagandist—director of the United States Information Agency—as the cold war was about to head into the home stretch. Charles Z. Wick admitted he was short on diplomatic skills but promised that he would make things happen. He did. For his Soviet counterparts, Wick was their worst nightmare come true. “Charles is a man who brought our international communications agency into the twentieth century,” said Reagan. “And you know, this happens to be one of my favorite centuries.”1
Charlie Wick was a Hollywood huckster who for eight years stood U.S. foreign relations on its ear—and set the Kremlin’s teeth on edge. He grew to admire his great adversary, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “He’s a guy with a great sense of humor,” said Wick, who had acted as a press agent for such diverse clients as Rudy Vallee, Benny Goodman, and Francis Langford.
A self-made millionaire and member of Ronald Reagan’s inner circle of Hollywood cronies, Wick was a Washington neophyte and soon became fair game for Reagan bashers. “Kiddiegate” was one of his first imbroglios. The USIA, a sprawling colossus of almost 10,000 employees, was on the A-list of the hottest employment agency in town—the White House personnel office—when positions had to be found for those who had helped elect Reagan in 1980, as well as their spouses, children, and relatives. Charlie Wick was a team player, and he wanted to do his duty for his buddy the president.
Job “referrals” arrived on Wick’s desk for: the son of the secretary of defense, three daughters and a niece of two national security advisers, the nephew of the White House communications director, daughters of the secretary of state and the assistant secretary of the interior, the daughter of a former Voice of America director, and daughters of two prominent journalists. Jobs were found at the USIA for all of them. Also hired was a cashier from a Washington delicatessen down the block from USIA headquarters. The cashier was slated to become cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti.2 When the story hit the Washington Post, the nomination was subsequently withdrawn, and Kiddiegate became an issue with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most of the young relatives of administration officials were also let go. “It was a process of learning and growing for Charlie Wick,” said Senate aide Peter Galbraith.3
Wick, a younger Richard Nixon lookalike4 (which was where the similarity ended), was manic about security. He had reason to be. His friend the president had barely survived an assassination attempt in 1981, and he himself had received telephone threats against him and his family. For protection around his Washington office Wick was sworn in as a special deputy U.S. marshal so that he could pack a handgun. He had a $30,000 security system installed at his rented home in DuPont Circle (he reimbursed the government for $22,000 after a series of negative press reports). When he traveled abroad he did so with several armed State Department bodyguards. Wick also always wore a custom-made, lead-lined raincoat, under the weight of which he once fell on the sidewalk as he got out of a car.5 Wick thought the hot dog stand on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the USIA’s Washington headquarters posed a security threat to Agency employees and visiting foreign dignitaries, who had to pass by the stand on their way into the building from their limousines. The hot dog stand was real Americana, fitting in neatly with the USIA’s mission to present our way of life to others, but Wick apparently thought it was carrying things too far. He asked Woody Kingman, his director of management, to complain to Marion Barry, District of Columbia mayor, in an attempt to bar the hot dog vendor from the sidewalk. “We remain convinced that vendor operations in front of the USIA are inappropriate and harmful to the national interest,” Kingman wrote to D.C. officials in May 1987, in a feeble attempt to link the hot dog stand to potential terrorism. “Vendor tables and other equipment could be used to hide explosive devices.”6 D.C. officials were unimpressed, and Kingman’s request was denied.
The hard-charging Wick demanded attention to the smallest detail, and became irritated on his first trip to Europe as the USIA’s director, when he was stopped by a military security guard as he tried to breeze through the door at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade without first showing any identification. The marine, who was female, had not been informed in advance of Wick’s visit by his staff and bolted out from behind a thick glass door, shouting, “Stop! Don’t go any farther. Identify yourself!”
“If you don’t know who I am, that’s your problem,” Wick shouted back, irritated at his staff for not clearing his entry into the embassy in advance. The marine grabbed him by the arm and did her best to restrain the director, who became enraged, threatening to lodge a complaint of harassment with the commandant of the Marine Corps. Wick meant what he said. The guard was transferred, and word spread that she had been caught in Wick’s “potato masher.”7 During his eight years as director, Wick was never stopped again by an embassy security guard. A nervous bureaucracy marked it down as another item for payback time. Not too long after the Belgrade incident, Wick was accused in press reports leaked by his detractors of not stopping his subordinates from compiling a so-called “enemies list”—to them, reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s—which reportedly included many prominent names.
Wick’s legend and reputation grew. One disgruntled USIA employee claimed that when Wick got mad at the slow-moving bureaucracy, he underwent “a physiological transformation: his eyes bulge, his mouth starts to quiver, and his flesh just seems to disintegrate.”8 His in-house critics drew up a list of twenty-five behavioral traits that one had to know to get along with him. It was summarized in a handout entitled What to Do and What Not to Do to Behave Properly in the Presence of the Director, the contents of which were promptly leaked to the press. “Never put Wick in the position of having to explain to anybody who he is,” warned the publication. “He expects that everything is prepared so that he can pass along freely with the conviction that the proper people know who he is.”
For his part, Wick beat up on Agency department heads for being too slow. Some lasted only a matter of weeks. “One of the problems with your department is by the time we get things done, the disease has either caused the patient to die or he is hopelessly gone,” he wrote to one hapless executive he had asked to clean out his desk. “By that time the preventive inoculation is too late.”9
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, Daniel Mica (D-FL), noted to Wick that “there is a fear of the director within the Agency.” “So what!” Wick boomed in reply to Mica. “Everyone has his own management style.”10
A lawyer by training, Wick unwisely began to tape telephone conversations without telling the other parties. He wanted records of his conversations so that follow-up actions could be taken to keep things moving quickly through the bureaucracy. They were often turned into what Wick’s staff called “zingers,” or “Z Grams,” some thirty of which per day he would fire off to individuals for action and which were then tracked by Wick’s staff to be certain items were followed up. It is not illegal to tape a telephone conversation in Washington without telling the other party, but the matter was pursued by appropriate law enforcement authorities in seven states where such tapings could be considered an invasion of privacy. Wick’s lawyer was Leonard Garment, who during the Watergate years was counsel to President Richard Nixon, someone else who taped people without informing them in advance. Garment claimed Wick’s invasion of privacy was small potatoes, and compared to Nixon’s tapings it probably was.11
“There were hundreds of tapes about things like Frank Sinatra’s singing engagements,” said Garment. But Wick was forced to back down, and with hat in hand, he traveled with Garment to several states to apologize personally to district attorneys. Letters of apology were written to persons who had been taped. Wick telephoned former president Jimmy Carter, with whom he held a repentant prayer session long-distance. Despite calls for his dismissal, a remorseful Wick kept his job.12
Wick was born Charles Zwick in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 12, 1917, the son of a successful Jewish businessman. He began to play the piano as a child, and by the time he was in high school he was arranging scores for the popular Fred Waring orchestra. He formed the Charles Zwick Orchestra to pay his way through Case Western Reserve University law school. When legendary band leader Tommy Dorsey came to Cleveland to play at the Palace Theater, he stayed at the Carter Hotel, where the Charles Zwick Orchestra was playing the Rainbow Room. Dorsey was impressed with young Charlie and hired him as his business manager and music arranger.13
Wick eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he went to work at the William Morris Agency as an agent for Hollywood stars. At a friend’s house he met model Mary Jane Woods, whom he would marry. He later dropped the “Z” from his name, founded his own agency, and in addition to Reagan and Goodman, managed Eleanor Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill. Wick negotiated American film rights for the former British prime minister’s series “History of the English-Speaking Peoples.” And, of course, he also produced that classic Twentieth-Century Fox comedy, Snow White and the Three Stooges, which starred skater Carol Heiss and was based on a story Wick had written for his children. It was the only film featuring the Three Stooges that ever lost money.14
In the mid-1950s Wick and boat engine millionaire Ralph Evinrude founded United Convalescent Hospitals, a nursing home company, that grew into one of the country’s largest. Wick later formed his own investment business and retired as a millionaire at age forty.
The Wicks lived in a fashionable neighborhood, next door to motion picture star Judy Garland and her daughter, Liza Minnelli. Eleven-year-old Liza would knock on the door and ask, “Mr. Wick, can I use your pool?”15 Charles Wick, Jr., went to the same private elementary school as Reagan’s daughter, Patti. Nancy Reagan and Mary Jane Wick met and worked together on projects at the school’s Mothers’ Club. Mary Jane said she and Nancy would console each other when “Patti was a teenager and my boys went through a period of having long hair.”16
The Wicks and the Reagans became fast friends, and Wick worked as a principal fund-raiser in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. After Reagan’s victory, Wick was named co-chairman of the $8 million presidential inaugural balls and had to handle the arrival of Reagan supporters in Washington, which he described as the “Normandy invasion without water.”17 Reagan then appointed him as the director of the U.S. Information Agency.
We have already seen that Wick was no diplomat, and yet in 1981 he found himself in one of the most visible and diplomatic jobs in the U.S. government. Reagan and Wick had often discussed how the media could be used to further foreign policy objectives. When Wick arrived in Washington, Reagan gave him a New York Times article about how television might be used to undermine the Polish Communist government’s crackdown on striking labor unions. Said the article: “Imagine the reaction if the average laborer knew of the latest happenings inside Poland. Picture what an effect TV images of the Polish strikers would have!”18 Charlie Wick could imagine it. His first USIA-TV satellite show to slam the Communists would be a Polish-language musical starring Frank Sinatra and Pope Paul II, entitled “Let Poland Be Poland.”
Charlie Wick wanted “Let Poland Be Poland” to be the biggest TV spectacular in the history of the world. To direct it he brought in Marty “Chains” Pasetta from Hollywood. Pasetta’s credits included among others the annual motion picture Academy Award shows and “Paul Anka in Monte Carlo.” USIA bureaucrats winked at each other at the sight of man they soon nicknamed “Chains,” because he wore open sports shirts with heavy gold links dangling around his neck. Wick’s idea was to beam the program by TV satellite to audiences around the world in order to draw attention to the Polish government’s crackdown on striking labor unions led by Lech Walesa.
The new USIA director believed in a “big bang” theory of public relations. The size of a TV spectacular and the hoopla surrounding it were as important as the program itself. Involving Reagan and other world leaders would give it the scale he wanted. To sell the idea, Wick invited to his office White House communications director David Gergen for a late-night meeting, along with a group of neo-conservative intellectuals including Ben Wattenberg, Michael Novak, and Norman Podhoretz. On December 21, 1981, for two and a half hours, they discussed how to deal with the Soviet-backed Polish military suppression of Solidarity. Gergen characterized it as a meeting “among friends” who shared Reagan’s views on foreign policy. Wick presented his idea to the group: the program would be beamed around the world by satellite to encourage pro-democracy elements in Poland and to embarrass Communist leaders there, in the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Everyone concurred it would be a solid public relations opportunity, a golden opportunity for Reagan to establish his credentials as the leading spokesman against totalitarian threats. Gergen was convinced that Reagan could rally the forces of freedom and contribute to the breakup of the Soviet bloc. “The administration,” he said, “has been walking on eggshells, saying little, and this has added to a general sense of gloom.” Reagan’s handling of the situation in Poland could be a “make-or-break” event for his young presidency. The group agreed that Gergen should write a memorandum to the public relations troika at the White House—Ed Meese, Mike Deaver, and James Baker—strongly endorsing Wick’s idea. The TV spectacular, wrote Gergen in his White House memo, would “rouse the public, increase the sense of moral outrage, convince people both here and in Europe of the nature of the Soviets, and—hopefully—aid the cause of freedom in Eastern Europe.”19 Mike Deaver and the others loved the idea. Wick promptly called Frank Sinatra in Hollywood, who agreed to star in the production and even to sing in Polish. Wick, the former Hollywood agent, started thumbing through his dog-eared Rolodex for other celebrities.
Not everyone was so wild about the idea. “We’ve got to stop him,” said a career foreign service officer in a panic.20 And a staff member of the National Security Council, Richard Pipes, ...
