On 17 January the Washington Post reported under the headline 'CIA Morale Overseas Plummets' that the year-long investigation of the US Congress and the widespread naming of CIA employees was causing 'a dramatic drop in morale in recent weeks that is not only affecting the agency's ability to gather intelligence but......causing severe personal strain as well.
Such news, if true, is welcome. In Britain we know that Forum World Features Limited, a news agency secretly run by the CIA, beat a very hasty retreat last May after the leaking of a top secret CIA report. Forum closed down a matter of days after a copy of the incriminating report arrived in Britain.
Started in the early 1950s, it was for a long time an offshoot of the ClA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom.
In 1965 it apparently changed its basis to that of a commercial firm - a change marked by the emergence of Brian Crozier as Forum's top man in London - selling THE CIA IN LONDON:
1) THE TOP SPIES The most important CIA unit located in the American Embassy is the Political Liaison' Section. It pretends to be a legitimate political reporting office, but none of its personnel are regular State Department diplomats.
This is the department directly under Cord Meyer Jnr. Shifted over here in early 1973 in the wake of the miners' strike, he is well known as the CIA's station chief in London. Adverse publicity about his exploits in the CIA's dirty tricks department nearly forced his departure at one time, but he is still here.
Changes have been taking place in the department under him, however. Two of the three senior officers, Sidney Bearman and Joseph P.
Sherman, have been shifted out since their exposure last year and replaced by John F Pereira and Thomas Russell Blackshear. US State Department records yield no information on Pereira, but Blackshear - who is listed as an accredited diplomat by the October 1975 London Diplomatic List published by the Foreign Office - has been at it for years.
According to the State Department's 1974 Biographic Register, Blackshear served as an unspecified economic 'analyst' with the US Army from 1952-59. From there he went to the State Department as a so-called 'economic officer' shifting rapidly from Frankfurt to Berlin to Sofia, where he stayed from 1961 to the summer of 1966. In all these places Blackshear is listed as a Foreign Service Reserve Officer - a sure sign of CIA activity. Genuine diplomats are listed as Foreign Service buncers.
But Blackshear's travels were far from over. In 1966 he surfaced in New Delhi as a 'political officer' just as Mrs Gandhi was assuming office in the wake of the IndoPakistan war and when rural revolt stories far and wide, including to the Sunday Times.
Unfortunately its closure didn't put Crozier out of work. Forum had been instrumental in establishing the 'we counter insurgency anytime, anywhere' Institute for the Study of Conflict in 1970. Crozier is its boss.
Nevertheless, the closure of Forum World Features was a small but important part of the continuing disruption of the CIA's black propaganda activities.
It is to further disrupt the work of its British base that Red Weekly is publishing this list of CIA employ ees at the American Embassy. to the labour movement both here and internationally. and in particularly in solidarity with those who have suffered most as a result of the ClA's activities: the people of Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Indochina, Chile, Angola and many other countries.
Cache Department.
We do this as a service was simmering. Back to the State Department in 1969, promotion, a brief spell at the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and then Blackshear disappears. Nothing is officially recorded of his activities between the middle of 1970 and the time that he surfaced on the London Diplomatic List George T Walsh, who was CIA station chief in Bangladesh in 1972 before com ing to Britain, has gone home. Walsh was named last April by Time Out as a CIA man attending the Royal College of Defence Studies in Belgrave Square on an 'educational' exchange programme.
Although Embassy sources inform us he was here until late last year, he left us his forwarding address: 22 Fresh Holes Road, Hyannis, Massachusetts, USA.
last October as an accredited attHe is now working alongside John T Kirby, the only one of the three senior political liaison officers remaining from last May. In 25 or more years with the CIA Kirby has travelled the familiar Manila (Philippines) - Saigon( Vietnam) - Bangkok circuit. More often than not listed as an 'attache, he surfaced in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1966 before a further spell back at the State Amongst the political liaison staff A Spencer Braham has gone and Edward P Dunn arrived. According to State Department records Mr Dunn appears not to have existed between the late 1950s and his arrival in London last year. He is last listed in a Biographic Register in 1959.
He'll be working alongside some familiar faces. Amongst others, George W Ford II, a Middle East operative for a decade prior to coming to London; and Joseph L Then, who spent years in Bogota Colombia and is remembered by Philip Agee as a CIA employee.
Another new top man in the Political Liaison Section with a new office is Richard A Kahane. He
March 1976 * * * *