John Tusa

From Powerbase
Jump to: navigation, search

Sir John Tusa (born 2 March 1936) is a BBC journalist who in the 1960s ran the London based CIA propaganda operation Forum World Features with fellow journalist Brian Crozier. According to The Guardian, Tusa was unaware of the CIA connection. [1]

Forum World Features

Forum World Features was part of a worldwide CIA propaganda operation overseen by Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent who had engineered the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953. Roosevelt approached wealthy American families asking for money to fund CIA propaganda operations abroad, asking: 'Are you patriotic?' [2] One man who agreed was Crozier's acquaintance John Hay Whitney. Whitney set up a CIA 'propriety' in Delaware called Kern House Enterprises which with the knowledge and co-operation of British intelligence, established a London subsidiary, Kern House Enterprises Ltd. Kern House Enterprises Ltd, which was based in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields, in turn established Forum World Features, the full title of which was Kern House Enterprises (Forum World Features) Ltd.

Forum World Features was ostensibly a small commercial news service, selling weekly packets of stories to as many as 50 newspapers around the world, including at one time about thirty in the U.S. Its purpose was chiefly to smuggle in propaganda among the well-written and generally innocuous articles that Forum sent out each week. It also published a journal called Conflict Studies and established a subsidiary company called the Current Affairs Research Services Centre.

According to The Guardian, Tusa 'resigned after an argument over editorial policy', [3] and was replaced by Cecil Eprile, editor-in-chief of South Africa's Drum Publications. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

Notes

  1. cited in Richard Norton-Taylor, 'With the right on his side', The Guardian, 4 August 1993
  2. Brian Freemantle, CIA: The Honourable Company (London: Michael Joseph, 1983) p.189
  3. cited in Richard Norton-Taylor, 'With the right on his side', The Guardian, 4 August 1993