INSTITUTE for POLICY STUDIES [IPS]

"The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.".........Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1978


The current financial & political turmoil in Mexico is giving the Zapatista Army of National Liberation(EZLN) the dreamed-of opportunity to foment revolution culminating in the communist takeover of our southern neighbor. The fires of terrorism in Chiapas are being fanned by assorted American leftists, communist-front organizations, academics and clergy. In the forefront of this agitation is the Institute of Policy Studies(IPS). As this group is being cited as a "source" of "information" it's best to know just what is the IPS?

Scandals have repeatedly exploded around the very foundations of the Institute for Policy Studies. But it has so penetrated Washington's circles of radical legislators, congressional aides, government agencies, academics, and the media that the IPS not only continues to function but also to attract fresh recruits.

The scandals include federal domestic security investigations during the late 1960s and early 1970s revealing IPS's more than passing involvement with leaders of the violently revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the race hatred of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee(they always have such nice-sounding names, don't they?). The latter included Ralph Featherstone, who left this world rapidly one evening when the bomb he was holding in his lap exploded before he could plant it at the Maryland courthouse where H. Rap Brown faced charges of incitement to riot. Then there were the investigations of the intimate connections of key IPS members with such hostile foreign powers as Cuba and North Vietnam. There were the investigations of the relationship between prominent IPS associates, the terrorist Weathermen, and Cuba. There was a federal indictment of IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin for draft-evasion conspiracy. And there was the direct involvement of IPS members including Leonard Rodberg in dissemination of the Pentagon Papers stolen by Daniel Ellsberg from the Rand Corporation.

Added to all this were the embarrassing facts made public after the assassination of IPS official Orlando Letelier that the Chilean Marxist-Leninist had for years been spying for the Soviets and working for the Cuban intelligence service, Direccion General de Inteligencia(DGI), as an "agent of influence."

The IPS was thirty-three years old this April. Among those serving on the Twentieth Anniversary Committee, chaired by disarmament-agitator, Paul Warnke, were Senator Christopher Dodd(D-CT) and Democratic Presidential hopeful Gary Hart of Colorado. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon provided anendorsement which said: "I respect the often thoughtful and scholarly work of these individuals. I have no doubt that theirs is a legitimate and useful role in the formulation of national policy."

Many of the IPS's best friends in the Senate and House have been turned out of office, but they have included the following: James Abourezk, Frank Church, J.William Fulbright, Birch Bayh, Eugene McCarthy, and Gaylord Nelson.

Congressional supporters of the IPS have included many of those who biennially commissioned IPS to produce an "Alternative" Budget that dramatically cuts defense spending while increasing spending for social welfare to levels only dreamed of by Karl Marx. In this pack of IPS intimates have been such luminaries as:

The IPS and its international subsidiaries, the Transnational Institute, and affiliated Transnational Information Exchange(TIE) are big-time stuff. They operate to bring together radical organizers; leaders of support networks revolutionary terrorist groups; leaders of the disarmament, "nuclear freeze" movements, "greens" and environmental groups; radical and "Liberal" academicians and journalists; foreign officials, politicians, and diplomats(including some identified as intelligence agents from Communist and pro-Communist states and political parties); and, Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, their staff aides. The operators at IPS know what they are doing and they do it very well.

The IPS was organized in 1963 by two ex-government officials. One was Richard Barnet, a graduate of Harvard University(summa cum laude), Harvard Law School, and Harvard's Russian Research Center. He was once in the Kennedy State Department as a Soviet specialist in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The other organizer was Marcus Raskin, University of Chicago graduate who came to Washington in 1959 as legislative assistant to radical US House Representative Robert Kastenmeier(D-WI). Raskin had promptly set about organizing the Liberal Project, a mini-caucus of twelve Leftist Congressmen who wished to institute some utopian, if not radical, changes in US defense policies.

By 1965, Raskin and Barnet had greatly intensified IPS's organizing against US defense and foreign policies. From that point on, IPS leaders increasingly dropped the pretense of scholarship for the production of blatant propaganda. This did not of course antagonize those "Liberals" and radicals who already hated America's strength and prosperity for assorted political reasons of their own. They were happy to work with IPS in supporting the goals and causes of virtually every revolutionary terrorist movement backed by Havana, Hanoi, and Moscow.

But the Vietcong and the Hanoi regime were far from the only Communist movements backed by the Institute for Policy Studies. It also has carried out major efforts to present a favorable image of the vicious terrorists of the PLO; the Soviet-dominated Popular Liberation Movement of Angola, the ANC of South Africa, the FMLN, the FALN, and now the EZLN. Castroite terrorist movements in many Latin American countries have found IPS's support in the political and journalistic circles of Washington to be of great value.

The IPS claims it is a "source of radical scholarship." Former Director Robert L. Borosage, a Yale-trained lawyer who has served as president of the D.C. chapter of the National Lawyers Guild(Communist Front). But even Borosage admitted that IPS's "scholarship" is "not academic" and "does not adhere to academic disciplines." Instead, IPS members are expected to "teach...through books, films and articles,...projects and...organized experiments" that put into operation the radical "alternative" programs devised by IPS's pro-communist fellows and associates.

In other words, IPS acknowledges that it operates as a training center for radical organizers. And, even more importantly, that it serves as a center for the transmission of radical programs designed to affect the United States foreign and domestic policies by exerting influence in Congress among "Liberals" of both the Democratic and Republican parties. And, when possible, in the Administration and White House as well. A recent example of this was the near-confirmation of IPS-member Morton Halperin to Assistant Secretary of Defense under Secretary Les Aspin. It was only the courage and vigilance of Senator Strom Thurmond that prevented this appointment to one of our most sensitive security positions.

But all is well for the IPS fellow; despite the efforts of Senator Thurmond, President Clinton appointed Halperin to a government position anyway, one not requiring Senate confirmation. For one never to have had to carve his sustenance from our capitalist system, and with a high degree of contempt for same, what better recourse than to subvert it from within - with another government job.

The single cord that binds IPS's multitude of projects and activities is that the changes in US policies sought by IPS are favorable ultimately to the interests of world communism. Ostensibly, we are told that world communism is 'dead', and that all we must do to prevent its resurgence is to increase our foreign aid to that dismal country. Contradicting that widely held belief is the opening of an IPS/TNI office in Moscow, and former TNI head, Katrina vanden Heuvel, now editor of the leftist American journal The Nation, spends much of her time in Moscow; one would presume her intended purpose is to strengthen the IPS-Soviet Union global partnership committed to expanding world communism. Yes, the Soviet Union and IPS themes remain unchanged: dismantling of NATO; termination of other defense agreements with US allies; "nonintervention" against communist insurgencies, whether direct as in Afghanistan or through local surrogates and agents as in Indochina, Angola, South Africa, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, or Mexico; government control of major US industries as well as housing, health, transportation, and education; and, a "planned economy" with comprehensive "income redistribution." Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin would recognize it all.

COVERT CADRE, by S. Steven Powell - Excellent Read, Highly Recommend!


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