Redirecting Enthusiasm: A CIA Primer on Information Control

The skills of a grifter are also ideally suited to intelligence work and often the line between con man and company man is a very thin one indeed. I imagine that the CIA itself often gets double-crossed and just have to build such expectations into their schemes.

Now, we know for a fact that the CIA utilizes media assets to promote stories they want promoted (whether fictional or no) and to kill stories they don’t like so much. Back in 1977 Rolling Stone outed much of that network which was called “Operation Mockingbird.” Don’t know what they call it now.

And that’s a handy little network to have, but sometimes pesky writers, journalists and researchers are still nosing around in places they really oughtn’t. You can’t suicide ALL of them, so what’s a poor intelligence agency to do?

Send in the grifters.

Salon.com has a fascinating piece by Jeff Stein on how two CIA men dealt with one such journalist. The topic she was covering has no ostensible government connection and the men appear to have been freelancing, though there are hints here and there of why more official agency folks might have been a little concerned.

But it’s not the WHY that interests me in this article. It’s the HOW. Watch mesmerized with me as we see a process that I think has been repeated many times with researchers and writers in a variety of fields. You can’t blame this poor woman when she, too, lost track of the red queen.

The article lays all of this out very clearly and I encourage you to read the entirety of both parts. I’m just going to summarize here as I certainly don’t want to take credit for Stein’s nice bit of journalism. However, I’m also going to suggest that our intelligence agencies play this sort of game with great frequency, sidetracking authors, researchers and even entire social movements into dead ends, disinformation and wasted time.

Janice Pottker is a journalist who’d written an 11,000 word article about the Feld family who operate the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Much of the article was positive and even inspiring in places, but certain allegations about Irvin Feld, the man who “saved the circus,” as well as allegations of child labor violations and animal cruelty would likely put a PR dent in the image of the “family” oriented circus biz. So when Pottker started shopping for a book deal, Ken Feld, who’d inherited the circus, turned to an ex-CIA man now in his employ to make sure the book never saw print.

The CIA man was Clair George, who had been deputy director of operations at the Agency from 1984 – 1987. Then, when Iran-Contra blew up and some people were picked to fall on their swords, George moved on. (Don’t worry, just as with Scooter Libby, George got the pardon I’m sure he knew was coming. )

But still, a man’s gotta eat. So George took a job as a consultant for the circus to help Feld out by spying on Pottker and making sure she didn’t get a book deal.

And to do that, he brought in a grifter of the highest order. A man with almost no traceable past and a present that’s not so crystal clear either. His name was Robert Eringer, and if it weren’t for the pain he caused Pottker, I’d say it is a privilege to watch him work.

What Eringer’s connections are to the CIA are not exactly clear. He’s written a variety of books, both fiction and nonfiction and some of his spy novels, though obscure, have laudatory blurbs on their cover from very high level CIA officials, including William Colby. And yet some of his nonfiction purports to expose the shadowy underworld of elite power, such as his “The Global Manipulators” about the Bilderberg group. There is what appears to be an excerpt from the introduction here. And, yet he’s ALSO written a book on conspiracy theorists themselves. And just to make sure you don’t question the CIA connection, he has a book on the Polish Solidarity movement in the eighties. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the CIA had a small role in that little saga.

Finally, according to Stein in the Salon article, despite his rather modest author revenues, Eringer didn’t do too badly for himself and at one point had a 1.5 million dollar house in DC.

So if you put all that together, you get a man who has some sort of relationship with CIA. As Clair George put it on his blurb for one of Eringer’s novels: “It is clear that he understands espionage …”

Eringer didn’t just call up Pottker on the phone. Instead, he attended a lecture she gave on “family dynasties” and it seems from the article that investigating those who investigate the elites in our country is part of Eringer’s job description. He approached Pottker afterward and, though we don’t know how he described his own qualifications to her, convinced her he could help make the book happen.

I want to pause here and underline this point. He didn’t warn her not to print the book or threaten her family. He offered to HELP. There are just SO many people out there who I wish could understand the importance of that point. He pretended he was on her side.

She bought it. And the games began. Eringer was very satisfied with the amount of information he was getting about the book and also some planned articles Pottker had in mind on some of the subjects the article had raised such as child labor. But that wasn’t enough. They needed to keep divert her attention to other projects so she’d let the circus idea die.

Their plan was devious, brilliant and, likely not the first time it had been employed. They created an “opportunity” for her to work on ANOTHER book topic, even providing her a monetary advance. At first the project was to be the Rockefellers, which I personally found to be almost like an inside joke. For unstated reasons, that didn’t work out but they did get Pottker involved in a biography of the Mars family of candy bar fame. The book was written, published by a very small press, and pretty much disappeared.

Even the publication was not straightforward. Though the publisher was real, the money to pay Pottker was funneled to the publisher from the Feld family, with all the machinations that money transactions go through in intelligence operations:

As George admitted in his deposition, the checks “came from … a Ringling Bros. bank in Texas or Oklahoma or … North Carolina or someplace,” addressed to various mailboxes he and Eringer had rented. In espionage parlance, these are called an “accommodation address,” as Eringer put it in his own deposition; they’re used to obscure connections between spymasters and their agents. After depositing the money in accounts at the Chevy Chase Bank and Madison National Bank, they issued their own checks to National Press Books, which in turn made out its own checks to Pottker, according to the testimony of Eringer and George and evidence on file in the court.

And while the Salon piece says there is no evidence that Eringer or George were directly responsible for the series of rejections Pottker received for her spin-off articles on child labor and animal abuse at the circus, it seems reasonable to assume they had a hand in it. For example, the magazine Mirabella suddenly insisted on additional material and interviews for the article which would take months to provide. And at one point, when she shopped the article to people, George told Eringer that the magazine would not be accepting the article before Pottker had received a reply.

Meanwhile, even the Mars book was sabotaged as the publisher, National Press Books, refused to pay a small, $300 invoice owed to the photographer who provided pictures for the book. By the time Pottker paid the bill herself, it was too late and the photographer sued, resulting in the publisher’s pulling the book from distribution without putting up any kind of fight. Although the article doesn’t speculate on this, it seems clear to me that this was also a part of the plan. Even though the Mars book was unrelated, it had gotten some good press and would bring notoriety and, therefore, more marketability to Pottker and her work.

In addition to all the behind the scenes deal-cutting, as well as good old fashioned wiretapping and surveillance of various parties in this story, Eringer also was a master at insinuating himself into someone’s life. Described as “charismatic” in the article, part of Eringer’s success was his ability to gain the trust of his victims. She and Eringer talked on the phone and over lunch every day. He was her confident, mentor and friend. In a scene dripping with irony, we see Eringer consoling Pottker:

Meanwhile, the plan to redirect her energies was starting to work. “Pottker has refocused time and energy into projects I have given her,” Eringer reported. “Her enthusiasm for exposing Ringling Bros has been redirected to exposing others.” Meanwhile, Eringer offered her a shoulder to cry on. He listened sympathetically when she castigated herself for clinging to an exposé of the circus.

“Pottker and I have discussed other authors and how tragic it is when they become obsessed by their stories and cannot move on,” he reported in Memo No. 11. “We agreed that there are more good stories in the world and that if one doesn’t work, an author should let it go and tackle other stories.”

Masterfully done.

I wanted to highlight this story because there are many “Eringers” out there, especially in the activist and “conspiracy” communities. Eringer, as we’ve already seen, has both written a book on a conspiracy related topic but also written a book on other people who write such books. I’m expecting my own book deal offer from Eringer any day now. And don’t tell him but I’m going to accept and pretend to follow his lead while continuing to write what I want. He’ll never catch on.

And Eringer ALSO ties in with at least one person of interest to this blog, Ira Einhorn. Though I haven’t written much about him yet, Einhorn, known as “the unicorn”, was central to all kinds of activist and “new thought” networks back in the seventies. Working informally with the Bell Corporation, Einhorn was the hub of an information distribution network of his own making, sending out articles and information on the general theme of “new paradigms” in various related fields. In 1977, Einhorn was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, whose decomposed body was found in a trunk in a storage closet on the porch outside his apartment. Einhorn claims he was framed, but fled the country and was only finally expedited back from Europe in 2002 to face a new trial which resulted in a guilty verdict.

We won’t linger on Einhorn in this article. We’ll want to finish our look at SRI and the Changing Images material first. But when looking up Eringer, I was interested to find that he had contacted Einhorn in 1998 offering to help him get HIS books published. And, as is clear from Einhorn’s account, Eringer had an agenda of his own in this case as well.

He said that he had connections with Polish Solidarity and would provide us both with a place to live and money to live with if we would go underground. In fact, he said that he would publish the book only if I agreed to go underground.

Despite this condition for publication, to which Einhorn emphatically did not agree, Eringer still ended up leaving with the manuscript of the book in question. Once he had it, no money was forthcoming and the pressure for Einhorn to go underground continued.

What Eringer’s agenda was is not clear. Given his history with Pottker, I’d say diverting Einhorn’s enthusiasm for writing books, or perhaps a particular book, might have been one motivation. Or maybe, given that Einhorn claimed at trial that the Maddux murder was a frame-up by the CIA, Eringer was tasked with getting rid of Einhorn in as quiet a way as possible so as not to draw attention to Einhorn’s theories, whether true or no.

As Einhorn put it:

Now why would people like that mount a complex operation against “a bum who xeroxes things?”

It is a question that honest folks ought to ask as they think about my situation.

And that’s great advice, though, as I mentioned at the top, this article is not so much about WHY but about HOW. So rather than spend time naming names and speculating on ultimate motives, for the moment I just want to recap the traits of this particular breed of intel confidence man:
1. He is charismatic, or at least charming.

2. He often has insider connections of some kind, offering in many cases access to privileged information.

3. He insinuates himself into the personal life of the subject, or into a place of leadership or notoriety in the organization.

4. He seems to fully support the agenda of the person or group.

5. He subtly steers the person or group into a different direction.

6. Things mysteriously begin to fall apart. New enmities are formed. Opportunities go bad. The person or organization ends up in situations which put them in a bad light.

7. The work of the individual or group is ultimately damaged and discredited.

I wonder if this sounds familiar to any readers? I would add that in many cases I can think of, the operative does not seek to derail the work altogether. Rather, he seeks to subtly steer the direction of the work in a way that is ultimately discrediting. New and spurious ideas are injected into the mix. Questionable folks are brought into the picture. And unflattering information gets leaked to a lazy press, eager to find a way to discredit the original stories they’ve failed to cover for so long.

Oh, and especially if the victim is a female, as an added bonus, the agent will often fuck her and take her money.

All jobs have perqs, you know.