Roy Godson

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1942-[1]

Namebase notes:

Roy Godson has taught at Georgetown University since 1971, specializing in international relations and national security. During the 1980s he directed the Washington office of the National Strategy Information Center, a think tank for right-wing militarists. Godson has also been a consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. No mere academic, in 1985 Godson helped Oliver North channel contributions from private donors to the contras by using the Heritage Foundation to launder the funds.

According to Rightweb:

Roy Godson served as the U.S. representative to the Intl Youth Year conference, an event funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. He also served as a consultant to the U.S. Information Agency in the early 1980s and was a member of the CIA transition team in 1980.[2]
Roy Godson is on the boards of the Committee for a Democratic Majority and the League for Industrial Democracy.[3]Godson heads the Washington DC office of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), a right-wing think tank for military strategy. [4]

Contents

Education

"Godson's intense interest in intelligence operations is relatively new, the National Journal claimed in 1986. "Just 10 years ago, with a bachelor's from Vermont's Middlebury College and master's and doctoral degrees in international politics from Columbia University, he was a labor union specialist, having taught international relations and law at Georgetown since 1969."

Godson says he got hooked on intelligence studies in the 1970s, when Washington was swept by a flood of books and other documents describing the inner workings of the intelligence community. He recalls spending much of 1977, when he was on sabbatical, poring over records of the 1975-76 Senate hearings on U.S. intelligence operations and studying histories of the CIA.
In 1979, Godson and 25 other American academics formed a group called the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, which encourages, among other things, private research on intelligence topics.[5]

Godson's transition from Labour specialist to intelligence expert is perhaps less surprising when seen in the light of his father Joseph Godson's career as a Lovestonite Labour attaché.

National Strategy Information Center

In 1981 Phil Kelly wrote:

One of the central characters now distinctly overweight is Stephen Haseler, founder of the Social Democratic Alliance, the vanguard split from Labour, expelled last year for threatening to run candidates against it, a threat now to be fulfilled, in the GLC elections in May. Now that others have 'come out' the SDA hopes to be the organisationa! core of the planned social democrat party.
Haseler works for the US National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) founded in 1962 by William J Casey now appointed by Reagan to head the CIA. NSIC is a pressure group for militant anti-communism and is at the centre of a vast network of front organisations. One of its main activities, Casey told the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his CIA appointment, has been the buiIding of academic respectability for the practice of intelligence. It has helped to sponsor more than 200 professorial chairs and teaching posts in US universities and colleges devoted to teaching and researching intelligence.
NSIC provided some of the cash used by journalist and CIA contract employee Brian Crozier to transform his news agency Forum World Features, a CIA front organisation into the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Haseler works for the NSIC's 'left face', the Advisory Committee on European Democracy and Security (ACEDS), which published his book, Eurocommunism. Co-author of the work was NSIC's Dr Roy Godson, director of the International Labor Programme at Georgetown University in Washington DC. This institution has been a centre of cold war sentiment among US intellectuals, and many of itsstaff now find themselves in the Reagan administration. According to Haseler and Godson, Eurocommunism is nothing more than a Soviet ploy to detach western Europe from the U.S. without a war.
The same theme articulated by (among others) Henry Kissinger and David Owen, has been faithfully echoed in the Labour and Trade Union Press Service, a duplicated bulletin issued to trade union papers by the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU). The press service is 100 percent subsidised by NATO. It was started by a former US Labor Attache in London, Joseph Godson, who also works at Georgetown University and happens to be Roy Godson's dad. Three leading right-wing US trade unionists who are vice-chairmen of the LCTU are also members of the ACEDS. British members of the LCTU include Owen, Rogers, Tom Bradley (another renegade Labour MP) and EEPTU leader Frank Chapple. [6]

In 1983, the head of the NSIC Frank Barnett stated that Godson, then the Director of the Center's Washington Office, was a Social Democrat, i.e. a member of the Social Democrats USA.In a letter to the New York Times, Barnett denied claims that the NSIC had links to right-wing forces in Latin America.[7]

International Youth Year Commission

In the early 1980s, Godson displaced a group led by William Treanor, and favoured by the State Department's John McDonald, to lead US participation on the International Youth Year 1985.

the International Communication Agency decided that Soviet propagandists were certain to exploit the observance. The agency contracted with Roy Godson, an intelligence analyst at the National Strategy Information Center, to assess the world youth situation and recommend ways the United States could counter Soviet propaganda. Then, according to several Administration officials, I.C.A. officials successfully exerted pressure on the State Department to relieve Mr. McDonald of youth-year duty. Following that, Mr. Treanor's group learned that the Administration had designated the United States Youth Council, partially financed by the I.C.A., as the official coordinator of the American observance.[8]

In 1983, the head of the U.S. Information Agency, Charles Z. Wick was questioned about Godson's appointment by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wick acknowledged that there was a conflict of interest in using Godson as a consultant on youth issues while he was lobbying for USIA funding as a subcontractor for the International Youth Year Commission. Senator Edward Zorinsky suggested the USIA grant "appears to have a political purpose" and did not involve any cultural exchanges required under the grant program. Godson resigned as a USIA consultant in the same week as the hearing.[9]

Senator Zorinsky subsequently sponsored an amendment that would have removed Godson's group:

Zorinsky's amendment would require the council or any other participant in Youth Year activities to have a broad-based membership and to limit the number of foreign trips members could take at USIA expense.
"It's a gravy train," said William Treanor, executive director of the U.S. Committee on International Youth Year, which works with many of the traditional groups. "Let's depoliticize this and get groups like the Young Republicans out of it."
Treanor said the Youth Council has sent young leaders abroad to voice support for President Reagan's foreign policy, the deployment of U.S. missiles in Europe and U.S. involvement in Central America.
But Kelly Alexander Jr., vice president of the Youth Council and an NAACP director, called the issue a factional dispute with groups that lost the original contest for recognition. Some Zorinsky supporters, he said, "would have liked to have the lead themselves . . . . It's a case of sour grapes."[10]

Godson was head of the International Youth Year Commission when it came under investigation during the Iran-Contra affair.

Treanor said the U.S. Youth Council had designated the International Youth Year Commission in 1982 to be the official coordinator of U.S. participation in the United Nations event.
After a struggle for leadership of the commission in 1981, he said, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and U.S. Information Agency official Ronald Trowbridge gave the job to Roy Godson, a longtime associate of former CIA Director William Casey.
Abrams at that time was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, but now he is the administration's point man for Contra aid as the assistant secretary for inter-American affairs.
Godson, who was unavailable for comment Monday, now is head of the National Strategy Information Center, which Treanor said was founded by Casey in 1962.
An assistant to Godson, Robert Loveless, was named in Treanor's letter as a participant in planning sessions for the Caribbean conference, but he refused to comment. [11]

Disinformation Forecast

In the autumn of 1985, Godson founded the quarterly newsletter Disinformation Forecast.

The publication is useful, many intelligence experts say, because it exposes Soviet disinformation, which in the past has received little public attention. But Godson has his critics. Some call the newsletter unreliable; one has termed Godson's views on disinformation "just trash."
"He tends to be part of a school which sees anyone as either a witting or unwitting tool of the Soviets," said American University professor of government Jeffrey T. Richelson, who specializes in American and foreign intelligence. "I think he appeals to a fringe group really of former intelligence people, military people and just plain old civilian nuts."[12]

Walsh Report

An independent counsel's report found that Godson was involved in soliciting funds for the Contras:

On two occasions, Roy Godson of the Heritage Foundation helped solicit funds from private donors.14 In the fall of 1985, Godson, at North's direction, informed Miller that an anonymous donor wanted to make a large contribution to the Catholic church in Nicaragua. Based on a plan agreed to by Godson and Miller, the donor contributed $100,000 to the Heritage Foundation, which then forwarded the money to a Miller-Gomez entity known as the Institute for North-South Issues (INSI). Miller and Gomez took a $20,000 commission and forwarded $80,000 to their I.C. Inc. account in the Cayman Islands.[13]
In November 1985, North spoke with another private donor about the needs of the contras and the Nicaraguan Catholic church.15 North informed Miller that Godson had located the donor, who would be making a $60,000 contribution.16 The money was deposited directly into the INSI account and then transferred to the Lake Resources Account in Switzerland. Miller and Gomez took no commission on this donation.[14]

Palermo Conference

In December 2000, Godson spoke at the Palermo conference to mark the signing of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

Attended by representatives from over 140 countries, among the audience were the First Minister, David Trimble, MP, Minister of State, Adam Ingram MP, a representative of the Omagh bomb victims, Sean O'Callaghan and Henry Robinson, a human rights activist.[15]

Selling the Iraq War

Godson was close to the key Pentagon neoconservatives who pushed the intelligence case for the invasion of Iraq:

Informed sources say the person in charge of the unnamed unit is Abram Shulsky, another key member of the Perle-Wolfowitz war party. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was elected to the Senate in 1976, he "brought with him some of [Sen. Henry M.] Jackson's most militantly neoconservative former aides, among them Elliott Abrams, Chester Finn, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt," according to a 1986 account in The Washington Post. Perle was also a former Jackson aide, and Shulsky, Perle and many kindred thinkers got jobs in President Reagan's Department of Defense in the 1980s. Shulsky also spent years at the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), and at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, along with other fellow neocons, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff), Shulsky contributed a study called "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War." That study was a forerunner of the recent military strategy document released by the Pentagon suggesting that the United States act to preserve its global hegemony, even if it means pre-emptive war or preventive war making.
Roy Godson, the head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and a colleague of Shulsky's for many years, has high hopes for the success of the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence unit, despite its small size when arrayed against the CIA's might. "It might turn out to be a David against Goliath," says Godson.[16]

CSI Armed Groups Project

In July 2006, Godson and Richard H. Schulz Jr co-authored a Weekly Standard article entitled Intelligence Dominance, A Better Way Forward In Iraq. The article was based on their research for the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence Armed Groups Project, and included interviews with intelligence personnel from Israel and Northern Ireland.

When human collectors are in place and the composition and nature of the armed group has been defined, our interlocutor from the Special Branch said, "You're now ready to go get them, to put their leaders out of commission and shut down their safe houses and their bomb factories--in today's term, IED factories." To do this, he said, you use target intelligence to pinpoint the movements and activities of key leaders and personnel in armed groups well before the point of attack. This information from recruited agents is supplemented by intercepts of various electronic communications, from cell phones to the Internet, and by photographic imagery. The result is continual live coverage of selected targets, augmented by basic and infrastructure intelligence.[17]

Affiliations

Connections

Notes

  1. ↑ Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: US Covert Action and Counterintelligence, Roy Godson, 2001, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data>
  2. ↑ Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix B, Vol 12, 1988.
  3. ↑ Letter from the League for Industrial Democracy, received July 1989; Letterhead from the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, received July 1989.
  4. ↑ Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).
  5. ↑ A Source of Information About Disinformation, by Laura Zelenko, National Journal, 20 December 1986.
  6. ↑ An Unholy Alliance by Phil Kelly from The Leveller #52 (1981)
  7. ↑ A THINK TANK WRONGLY TIED TO LATIN 'ULTRAS', Letter by Frank R. Barnett, New York Times, 29 December 1983.
  8. ↑ Briefing: Switich on Youth Year, by Phil Gailey and Warren Weaver Jr, New York Times, 12 August 1982.
  9. ↑ Senate Panel Gives Wick Mixed Reception, by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 23 September 1983.
  10. ↑ Groups Battle Over Federal Funds For 'Youth Year', by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 3 November 1983.
  11. ↑ House probes link between Contras and youth commission, by Pat O'Brien, United Press International, 23 March 1987.
  12. ↑ A Source of Information About Disinformation, by Laura Zelenko, National Journal, 20 December 1986.
  13. ↑ Private Fundraising: The Guilty Pleas of Channell and Miller, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS], Lawrence E. Walsh, Chapter 13.
  14. ↑ Private Fundraising: The Guilty Pleas of Channell and Miller, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS], Lawrence E. Walsh, Chapter 13.
  15. ↑ The Mafia Culture, by Chris McGimpsey, Belfast Telegraph, 15 December 2000.
  16. ↑ The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA; Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy, by Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, 16 December 2002.
  17. ↑ Intelligence Dominance: A Better Way Forward in Iraq, By Richard H. Shultz Jr. & Roy Godson, Weekly Standard, 31 July 2006.
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