Forum World Features

Forum World Features was a London based CIA propaganda operation which operated as a professional news service. It was run by the anti-communist crusader Brian Crozier.

Steve Weissman's 1976 essay The CIA makes the News provides a contemporary viewpoint on the exposure of this operation. For Weisman the first inkling about Crozier emerged in April 1975, when a team of British journalists from the TV series "World in Action" went to Washington to do a story on the CIA. The team uncovered a memo which purported to have come from inside CIA headquarters.

The memo appeared to have been written in May 1968; it was addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence (at the time Richard Helms), and it gave "an operational summary" of a CIA propaganda outfit located in London and called Forum World Features (FWF). "In its first two years," the memo explained, "FWF has provided the United States with a significant means to counter Communist propaganda, and has become a respected feature service well on the way to a position of prestige in the journalism world."

The memo — which proved to be authentic — also mentioned in a handwritten note that Forum was "run with the knowledge and cooperation of British Intelligence".

The CIA had originally created a Forum news service as part of an earlier operation, the heavily funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and Weismann links the two operations. In 1965, because the Cultural Freedom group and its lead magazine, Encounter, had come under suspicion, the CIA renamed the news service Forum World Features, and shifted it to the cover of a Delaware corporation called Kern House Enterprises. Kern House Enterprises was a CIA "proprietary" headed by the millionaire businessman John Hay Whitney, a former U.S. Ambassador to Britain and publisher of the International Herald Tribune. The CIA turned to Crozier to oversee operations in London.

The resulting operation, Forum World Features, was ostensibly a small commercial news service, selling weekly packets of stories to as many as 50 newspapers around the world, chiefly to smuggle in propaganda among the well-written and generally innocuous articles that Forum sent out each week:

...the CIA could easily slip in straight American propaganda, especially when it came to the war in Vietnam, or the campaign against the Allende government in Chile. The Agency could also use Forum to send almost anyone anywhere as "a journalist," and to give research and other backup to good friends such as Sir Robert Thompson, the former British security chief in Malaya, and a key advisor to the Americans on Vietnam. Control, of course, remained with the Americans, who had at least one "case officer" in the Forum office — a career CIA man named Robert Gene Gately, who was last seen as a member of the CIA Station in the American Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.

This, in brief, was the story as it came together in the spring of 1975, and then the editor of "World in Action" decided that it was too hot to handle on TV, it filtered down to the London news and entertainment weekly Time Out, and from there to the pages of the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Washington Post and beyond.

As congressional investigations into the CIA began, according to Weissman, it was admitted that the story was true and that the CIA did own Forum World Features. However, by the time journalists arrived at the offices, Crozier had completely shut down the entire Forum operation. A sympathetic London Sunday Times, story stated that "costs were going up, and Forum simply ran out of money."

Resources

• Citizen Scaife, part2: The small-bore publisher, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1981