The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 191
in World War II. He was Eisenhower’s psyops expert in Europe,
and he helped shepherd the CIA into existence. On going back
to work for Luce, Jackson was appointed managing director of
Time-Life International, with a staff of nine hundred employees
posted in sixteen countries around the world, and publisher
of Fortune and Life.
Other intelligence agents who worked for Time Inc. included
Dick Billings, a Life staff writer who spent time in
Cuba trying to overthrow Fidel Castro, and William McHale,
former Time bureau chief in Beirut and Rome who helped
organize the Iraqi military coup in 1963 that eventually brought
Saddam Hussein to power. McHale is said to have contributed
a list of names, including Iraqi professors, doctors, and other
members of the middle class, who were tortured and killed
after the Ba’athist coup. Time provided cover for the CIA’s
first station chief in Paris, Philip Horton, and Paris bureau
chief Enno Hobbing also worked for the CIA. The Agency
moved Hobbing to Guatemala in 1954 to lead a coup against
Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s elected president. Hobbing went
on to serve another stint as a reporter in the Washington bureau
of Life.
Henry Luce enthusiastically supported the CIA initiative
launched in 1948 and known informally as Operation Mockingbird,
which funneled government propaganda into domestic
newspapers, magazines, books, and television. Described by
founder Frank Wisner as a “mighty Wurlitzer”—a great pipe
organ of propaganda—the operation had tentacles reaching
around the world. Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer:
How the CIA Played America, writes that the relationship
between Time and the Agency was so close that “it was difficult
to tell precisely where the Luce empire’s overseas intelligence
network ended and the CIA’s began.”
Wisner’s activities first came to light in the 1975 congressional
hearings chaired by Senator Frank Church, which also exposed
Edward Lansdale’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro