Spielberg Movie ‘The Post’ Omits Newspaper’s Deep State Connections to The Georgetown Cesspool

The New Nationalist – by Russ Winter

The evolution of the movie “The Post” (2017) — a story about The Washington Post’s 1970s battles with government over its publication of classified information relating to the Vietnam War and Pentagon Papers — reportedly goes something like this: It was a screenplay authored by Jewish writers Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, who presented it to Jewish film producer Amy Pascal, who decided it would “be a great story to tell.” Pascal then procured Jewish film director Steven Spielberg to make the movie.

(Interesting footnote: Pascal’s father was an economic researcher at RAND Corporation, a military-industrial complex contractor and think tank.)  

The role of The Washington Post’s dubious editor at that time, Ben Bradlee, is played by America’s hero Tom Hanks. Meryle Streep plays the role of Katherine Meyer Graham, the  owner and chairwoman of the newspaper.

The movie is a propaganda puff piece devoid of historic reality and advertising vehicle for The Washington Post (WaPo). It packages and sells WaPo “as a beacon of hope in a time of need.” This is a far cry from what Katherine Graham herself said about WaPo’sOperation Mockingbird role.

“We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” Graham said in a 1988 speech she gave at CIA headquarters. “There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t.”

What is particularly awful about this travesty of a movie is that the nature of the principal characters — especially Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee — are well known and documented and yet totally misrepresented. We will set the record straight for readers. We will also name the names to show the connections. In many instances, the names serve as a reference for other researchers probing into the cesspool of control in the U.S. There’s a slew of rabbit holes among this group of players.

Of Graham, FAIR analyst Norman Solomon once wrote, “Her newspaper mainly functioned as a helpmate to the war-makers in the White House, State Department and Pentagon.” It accomplished this function (and continues to do so) using all the classic propaganda techniques of evasion, confusion, misdirection, targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts and selective leaks.

As for the fantasy of objectivity played out in the propaganda movie, it should be noted that a major portion of the establishment wanted Nixon out. Nixon denounced WaPo as “communist” during the 1950s. Graham offered her support to Nixon upon his election in 1968, but he snubbed her and even directed his allies to challenge the business’ TV license in Florida a few years later.

The Story of Philip (1915-1963) and Katherine (1917-2001) Graham

Katherine Meyer Graham was the daughter of Eugene Meyer (1875-1959), the Jewish chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank from 1930 to 1933, the early years of The Great Depression. Meyer was also the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, which he bought in 1933, and was the first president of the World Bank Group.

On June 5, 1940, Katherine married Philip Graham, a graduate of Harvard Law and clerk for Jewish Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. He was also a member of deep intelligence, working as an assistant to William Donovan, who was head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In 1944, Graham was recruited into the Special Branch, a super-secret part of intelligence, run by Colonel Al McCormick.

Graham was sent to China, where he worked with a cast of deep-intel operators, including future CIA Chief Richard Helms and Watergate burgler E. Howard Hunt. Hunt, on his death bed, claimed he was a backup man in the Kennedy assassination. He would also feature prominently in Watergate dirty tricks break-ins involving Operation Mockingbird (OM) and WaPo.

Philip’s background was primarily in intelligence, not journalism. Regardless his father-in-law Eugene Meyer made him publisher of WaPo in 1946, and Meyer took the position of head of World Bank. Shortly after this transition, Meyer decided to pass along full ownership of WaPo to his daughter Katherine and her husband Philip. Phil was said to have played the key role in the paper’s editorial policy, which was convenient for his deep-state masters.

As president of the Washington Post Company, he developed a media conglomerate empire. First, he acquired Washington Times-Herald. Later, he took control of radio and television stations WTOP in Washington and WJXT in Jacksonville. In 1961, Philip purchased Newsweek magazine. The following year, he took control of America’s two leading art magazines: Art News and Portfolio.

The main person involved in arranging Graham’s takeover of other media companies was globalist Fritz Beebe. Beebe was a Wall Street lawyer, a member of the board of governors of the United Nations Association and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also chairman of WaPo.

The Georgetown Cesspool

The Grahams lived in Washington, where they associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials that became known as the The Georgetown Set. Note the assortment of deep state intelligence ops among this group, including some dicey characters from JFK’s assassination. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson appointed three members of the seven-man Warren Commission from among The Georgetown Set: Allen W. Dulles, John J. McCloy and John S. Cooper.

The New Nationalist discussed the CIA’s Cord Meyer in a recent article on the controlled feminist Gloria Steinem. In particular, note James Angleton, who is discussed in more detail later in this article. Readers are advised to click through to the links and note non-stop OSS intelligence, CIA and/or Wall Street operatives. In fact, it was members of The Georgetown Set who were a key lobby for developing a new intelligence agency: the CIA. Frankly, The Georgetown Cesspool would be a more accurate name for this clique.

Members include: Frank Wisner, key founder of CIA and established Operation Mockingbird; George Kennan; Dean Acheson; Richard Bissell; Desmond Fitzgerald; Joseph Alsop; Stewart Alsop; Tracy Barnes, ran clandestine CIA ops; Thomas Braden; David Bruce; Clark Clifford; Walt Rostow; Eugene Rostow; Chip Bohlen; Cord Meyer; James Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence; William Averill Harriman; John McCloy; Felix Frankfurter; John Sherman Cooper; James Reston; Allen W. Dulles; Richard Helms; and Paul Nitze.

In his autobiography “The Good Life” (1995), Ben Bradlee recalls that he was also part of the younger members of this group — and specifically James Angleton and Cord Meyer.

Most men brought their wives to these gatherings. Members of what was later called The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club included: Katharine Meyer Graham, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Sally Reston, Polly Wisner, Joan Braden, Lorraine Cooper, Evangeline Bruce, Avis Bohlen, Janet Barnes, Tish Alsop, Cynthia Helms, Marietta FitzGerald, Phyllis Nitze and Annie Bissell. Mary Pinchot Meyer was mistress to JFK and the sister-in-law of Post editor Ben Bradlee. This is discussed later.

In her 1997 autobiography, Katherine comments several times about how close her husband was to politicians of his day (he was instrumental, for example, in getting Johnson to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1960), and how such personal closeness with politicians later became unacceptable in journalism. The Grahams were friends with the Kennedys.

Also, Katherine revealed that her husband worked overtime at WaPo during the Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputation of his friends who had organized the ill-fated venture.

The incestuous relationship between WaPo and the intelligence community even extended to its hiring practices. Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence.

In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward’s partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from.”

Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media.

Philip Graham’s ‘Suicide’

Philip was said to have been a maniac-depressive. He was having marital problems and had an open mistress. This was causing a major social and political upheaval in Washington, considering the immense power of the newspaper and its intimate ties to the CIA and plutocratic elite.

Katharine’s biographer, Deborah Davis, pointed out that Philip had also started rattling the CIA. After his second “nervous breakdown,” he began talking about the CIA’s manipulation of journalists.

Shortly before his “suicide,” Philip attended a newspaper publishers convention in Arizona during which he delivered a blistering speech attacking the CIA and exposing “insider” secrets about official Washington — even to the point of exposing his friend John Kennedy’s affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was the ex-wife of top CIA official Cord Meyer.

Following the event, Graham was put in a straitjacket, sedated, flown back to Washington and place in Chestnut Lodge psychiatric facility near D.C. During a weekend release on Aug. 3, 1963, Katherine picked him up and drove him to their country home in Virginia. Later that day, while reportedly napping in her second-floor room, Philip died of a shotgun blast in a bathtub downstairs. Philip Graham, 48, committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. Verdict: Phil was suicided for going off the reservation.

After Graham’s “suicide”, widow Katherine assumed the role of publisher at WaPo. She continued her husband’s policies of supporting the efforts of the intelligence community in advancing U.S. foreign policy and the economic agendas of the nation’s ruling elites.

WaPo was one of the last major papers to turn against the Vietnam War. Even today, it retains hues of its hard and often Zionist foreign policy line.

Royal Editor Ben Bradlee (1921-2014)

Bradlee was member of the Boston Brahmin Crowninshield family. His mother was a direct descendant of Heinrich XXIX, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, who was a lineal descendant of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, King John of Denmark, King Casimir IV of Poland and John V, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. His maternal great-grandfather was Dr. Ernst Bruno von Gersdorff, who was a third cousin of Queen Victoria of England. Through his father, Frederick Bradlee, he was also a lineal descendant of King Henry VII of England.

Ben attended Harvard College, where he was a member of a secret society called the A.D. Club.

In 1942, he joined the Office of Naval Intelligence, and worked as a communications officer in the Pacific during World War II. His duties included handling classified and coded cables.

In 1948, he started working as a reporter for WaPo, where he got to know publisher Philip Graham.

In 1951, Philip helped Ben become assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. And in 1952, Ben joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), an embassy propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the CIA throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American “cultural information” worldwide.

While at USIE, Ben helped the CIA manage European propaganda regarding the spying conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953, according to a Justice Department memo from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Rosenberg trial.

The memo, addressed to U.S. Attorney Myles Lane and dated Dec. 13, 1952, states that “[Mr. Bradlee] further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the CIA in Paris … he stated that he was supposed to have been met by a representative of the CIA at the airport but missed connections” and “he has been trying to get in touch with [CIA Director] Allen Dulles.”

While working as a reporter for Newsweek in 1957, Ben created controversy when he interviewed members of the National Liberation Front (FLN). They were Algerian guerrillas who were in rebellion against the French government at that time. According to Deborah Davis, author of the 1979 Katharine Graham biography titled “Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire” this had all the “earmarks of an intelligence operation”.

In a controversial move that drew widespread accusations of censorship, Katherine and Ben demanded and obtained a recall of the book by Davis’s publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Harcourt first disavowed the book and then recalled and shredded 20,000 copies. Ben’s CIA affiliation was never disavowed, however — even by Ben himself. This showed what fake champions of free speech the Grahams were.

In Ben’s 2014 obituary published by The Guardian, reporter Christopher Reed stated that he “spent many years undercover as a counter-espionage informant, a government propagandist and an unofficial asset of the Central Intelligence Agency,”

While based in France in 1957, Ben divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot (1924-2011). At the time of the marriage, Antoinette’s sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to CIA official Cord Meyer,a key figure in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence and control the media. Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d’Autremont Angleton, wife of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. Ben became good friends with James.

Bradlee: A Central Player in Operation Mockingbird, Deep Throat and JFK Coverup

In 1965, Ben Bradlee was promoted to managing editor of WaPo; and in 1968, was promoted to executive editor. He also functioned as Washington bureau chief for Newsweek.

For decades, Ben was one of only four publicly known people who knew the true identity of press informant “Deep Throat.” The other three were Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and the anonymous source himself. “Deep Throat” was the real key to Watergate. He was almost certainly Richard Ober, the right-hand man of James Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief and longtime liaison to Israel’s Mossad.  He was also a Harvard classmate of Ben’s.

Ober was a senior figure in the special operations branch, which “carried out wiretaps, break-ins and burglaries as authorized by their superiors.” Angus Mackenzie points out in his excellent book “Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home” (1998): “Richard Ober’s name is curiously absent from indexes of books about political spying of his era. Ober managed to keep in the shadows — a force behind the scenes, a man careful to say nothing that would reveal his true role.” Even an open-source search produces next to nothing for this incredibly scrubbed key actor.

During Watergate, Ober was in charge of a joint CIA-Israeli counterintelligence desk established by Angleton inside the White House. From this listening post, the mole Ober (at Angleton’s direction) provided inside information to WaPoabout Watergate and gathered information on Nixon’s illegal activities that helped bring down his administration. Ober likely coaxed Nixon into illegalities and ran the White House domestic political intelligence operation. Further motive: Keep in mind that President Nixon had fired the Georgetown Cesspool’s boy Richard Helms from the CIA directorship in February 1973 and instructed his replacement, James Schlesinger, to knock the agency down to size.

Ober morphed into “Deep Throat” and provided planted information to CIA assets Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward. More primary sources describing this Nixon ambush operation are listed here.

As a reporter in the 1950s, Ben became close friends with then-senator John F. Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard just two years before him and lived in the same neighborhood. In 1960, Ben toured with both the Kennedy and Nixon presidential campaigns. He later wrote a book, “Conversations With Kennedy” (W.W. Norton, 1975), in which he recounts their relationship during those years.

Murder Most Foul

Ben’s sister-in-law Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot to death on Oct. 12, 1964, while walking on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. Ben drew criticism from several quarters for perjuring himself during the 1965 trial of the man accused of her murder. Keep in mind that Pinchot-Meyer was the ex-wife of Operation Mockingbird kingpin Cord Meyer. Yes, The Georgetown Cesspool was one big incestuous club.

The most likely motive for the hit on Mary was that, as a Cesspool insider and JFK mistress, she had read the Warren Commission Report on JFK’s assassination, disbelieved its findings and was prepared to say so publicly.

Attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense (Alfred Hantman and Dovey J. Roundtree), in addition to D.C. Police Detective Bernie Crooke and along with authors Peter Janney and  Nina Burleigh, all noted the significant difference between the limited information Ben divulged under oath at the 1965 trial of Raymond Crump, the black man falsely prosecuted for her murder, and what Ben revealed 30 years later in his 1995 memoir “A Good Life.”

“Bradlee had much later excoriated Cord Meyer [Mary’s ex-husband] for his ‘derisive scorn’ for the people’s right to know in the 1960s, but the rules changed when the subject of a story was his sister-in-law,” author Burleigh wrote. “The First Amendment champion of the Watergate investigation admitted in his memoir that he gave Mary Meyer’s diary to the CIA because it was ‘a family document.’”

Not only did Ben omit the diary in the trial testimony, but there was also a revelation that CIA’s James Angleton was present in Mary Pinchot’s residence when Ben was looking for the diary. Ben explained in his 1995 memoir: “We didn’t start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary’s house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary’s diary.”

By sheer cowinkydink, Ben became editor of WaPo several months after running this mission for his friend Angleton. Many researchers believe Angleton was knee deep in the JFK hit. For more on that rabbit hole, see “James Angleton and the Warren Commission.” Additionally, in early 1951, Angleton was appointed head of the CIA’s newly created Special Operations Group. In this post, he served as the agency’s exclusive liaison for Israeli intelligence, a post he held for 20 years [source].

Although Angleton had helped develop the CIA’s central registry, he had a “habit” of keeping certain files to himself. That would prove useful to the Warren Commision and other subterfuges that he ran.

Charles J.V. Murphy argued: “Many of Angleton’s covert operations after he joined the CIA remain secret.”

After Angleton was ousted in 1974 under William Colby, it was revealed he had been quietly building an alternative CIA that subscribed only to his rules, beyond peer review or executive supervision.” Then most of the Angleton files were destroyed. At the Church hearings, Angleton declared, “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”

In a 1991 interview with the late author Leo Damore, prosecuting attorney Hantman said that having knowledge of the diary at the trial “could have changed everything.” In her 2009 autobiography “Justice Older than the Law,” defense counsel Dovey Johnson Roundtree expresses shock at learning of the diary’s significance from Ben’s memoir. She wrote, “James Angleton’s awareness of the diary’s existence and his interest in finding it, reading it, and destroying it – all of that unsettled me deeply when I read Mr. Bradlee’s 1995 account, as did his insistence that the diary was a private document … Had I been aware of it, I would have felt compelled to pursue it.”

John Newman, author of “Oswald and the CIA” (2008), gets quite close to the truth about Angleton and the JFK hit. “No one else in the agency had the access, the authority and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald’s files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president’s assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure that a national security cover up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence,” Newman wrote.

On his death bed, James Angleton was quite introspective about had transpired, according to “Secret History of the CIA” by Joseph J. Trento (2001):

“Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it … Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton slowly sipped his tea and then said, “I guess I will see them there soon.”

In 1991, Operation Mockingbird actor and rube Ben Bradlee delivered the Theodore H. White lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He didn’t come as clean as his friend and collaborator Angleton. His message was more duplicitous:

“Lying in Washington, whether in the White House or the Congress, is wrong, immoral, tearing at the fiber of our national instincts and institutions — and must stop.” He said, “Lying has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture and among our institutions in recent years, that we’ve all become immunized to it.” He went on to suggest that the deceit was degrading the respect for the truth.

The Beat Goes On

After 80 years of ownership, the Graham family in 2013 sold WaPo and all of its assets for $250 million to Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. That same year, the CIA awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon.

The New Nationalist