Informed Sources

CIA'S COVER BLOWN IN AMERICA

According to Newsweek Magazine, a CIA source has acknowledged that the agency investigated campus disorders when CIA stations were involved- including the 1968 bombing of a recruiting office in Ann Arbor.

Last month it was confirmed that the CIA had in fact been conducting surveillance operations against the antiwar movement in this country, after all those years of denials.

Since then, the entire top command of the CIA's counterintelligence division has resigned, ostensibly to collect retirement benefits. President Ford is scratching his head and declining to release a 50-page CIA rejoinder to the charges of domestic activity. He is reported to be reasoning that "people's lives and reputations are at stake," and that the situation is "complicated."

Complicated is hardly the word. Finally on January 4 Ford announced a citizen's panel would investigate the charges, but any serious investigation will expose people in high places.

At least a few Congressmen knew about the operation, as did Henry Kissinger's National Security Council and the Nixon White House. CIA officials deny they did anything illegal, but their claims rest on extremely broad interpretations of the CIA charter, which plainly prohibits domestic intelligence gathering.

One of the four just-resigned counterintelligence chiefs, James Angleton, served on an interagency panel which reported directly to the White House on the threat of domestic disturbances.

A congressman who has admitted being in the know is Detroit Congressman Lucien Nedzi, chairman of one of the four Congressional subcommittees which is supposed to oversee the CIA and never has. Two weeks ago Nedzi said he had been briefed by CIA director James Colby last year and knew "something" about the operation.

Nedzi has said his committee would investigate, but more recently he's gone on the Today Show to sigh over the "time-consuming upheaval" which an investigation will cause. He also said he is in daily contact with the CIA, and that the American people ought to trust his promise that the CIA is no longer spying on Americans.

[photo captions: Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Former CIA Director James Colby.]

ELLSBERG RIPPED-OFF AGAIN

In October, it has been learned, Daniel Ellsberg's house was burglarized and various State Dept. documents stolen. Police in Mill Valley, California called the break-in a "dumb, routine burglary," but only documents, not valuables, were taken, there were no fingerprints and and a note was left warning Ellsberg not to notify police.

JOHN MARKS ARRESTED

In Saigon John Marks, the SUN's guest in Ann Arbor last month who co-authored the whistle-blowing CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was arrested by police and then reportedly deported. The U.S. Embassy says he was put on an airplane to Bangkok, but at the time of this writing, Mark's organization, the Center for National Security Studies said they hadn't heard from him. The Center thinks he's all right; we're worried.

INDIAN TREATY RIGHTS

The Justice Department has announced it will try to prosecute AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks again for their roll in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Federal Judge Fred Nicholl ordered charges dropped in September after finding the government had engaged in willful misconduct in its attempts to convict the two. All twelve jurors in the St. Paul, Minn. trial have since petitioned the Justice not to hold another trial.

Hearings to determine the validity of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, on which AIM based the Wounded Knee occupation, began Dec. 16 in Lincoln, Nebraska. If the treaty is recognized as binding, it could lead to dismissal of all charges and convictions from the Sioux-led occupation. It would also be the first step toward recognition of Indian sovereignty and return of treaty-guaranteed land, which includes substantial portions of several states.

On the south rim of the Grand Canyon, Havasupai Indians have prevailed against the National Park Service and environmentalist groups to regain 185,000 acres of ancestral homeland. Conservationists had charged Havasupai were "cigar store Indians fronting for corporate interests seeking to exploit the land."

"We had never planned on big manufacturing," said Ethel Jack, a 66 year old member of the tribe who lobbied in Washington for passage of the enabling bill. "It isn't the big things we need- we need just to be up there again."

[photo caption: Ethel Jack]

TEAMSTER SCAB SENTENCED

An ex-teamster official has been sentenced to one year in prison for accepting a $10,000 bribe to destroy a United Farm Worker's organizing effort in San José, California November 25. Theodore J. Gonzalves, former secretary-treasurer of teamster local 748 in Modesto, California, accepted $10,000 from vegetable packers James Martin and Thomas Hitchcock to hire 300 "goons" to picket the San Francisco Produce Market in an effort to sure the market to boycott UFW picked lettuce. Teamster goons also went to caravans to fields where the UFW were organizing and picketing. The caravan would often drive in and out of the UFW pickets, breaking up the formation and generally intimidating and harrassing UFW organizers. All this happened in 1970, the Teamsters did not remove Consalves from office until 1972 when the government began to investigate.

[photo caption: Chevaz and UFW]

UN PASSES CHARTER OF ECONOMIC RIGHTS & DUTIES OF STATES

The United Nations, once the bastion of the industrial West, continues to turn against imperialism. Following recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the expulsion of racist South Africa, the General Assembly has adopted a charter which recognizes the right of each state to nationalize foreign holdings without guaranteeing compensation.

The only opponents of the document, a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties for States, were the United States and five West European countries.

In another turnabout, under Third World pressure, the UN's scientific and cultural organization UNESCO has voted on two occasions against Israel. Commentators in this country are now bemoaning the "tyranny of the majority," but a Cuban observor noted that the UN's actions "simply reflect the changes in power relationships which have taken place globally in the past several years."

The Kuwaiti representative called the retreating western bloc "the group that used to roam the building like serene falcons in an uninhabited forest."

COMMUNISM GAINS POPULAR SUPPORT ACROSS EUROPE

This revolution in global power is becoming obvious in the internal political struggles of several European countries. After two decades spent underground or being rejected at the polls, West Europe's Communist parties are resurgent.

In France the Communist Party aligned itself with socialists to win 49 percent of the vote in last May's presidential election. The party is the best organized and most disciplined of all French political organizations, and has elected no less than 1,094 communist mayors. The party's foundation is in the labor unions, whose crippling strikes in May 1968 and again in late 1974 brought the nation to near standstill.

Italy's Communist Party is the largest in the West, 1.5 million members strong and generally winning thirty percent of the vote in national elections. The party controls eight hundred of the nation's municipalities and three of its twenty regional governments, plus 175 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 74 in the Senate.

In Portugal the Communist Party has triumphantly emerged from the underground after fifty years of struggle as the most disciplined party in the nation. It may be the single largest vote-getter in the national election this spring, and is expected to capture at least 15% of the vote in Portugal's leftward-leaning, but splintered political spectrum.

Britain's Communist Party is influential in the current Labor government. Support for the party is strongest in Britain's three most powerful unions, which together control almost half the vote at the Labor Party's annual convention. Ten percent of major union executives are reckoned to be party members.

ROLL OVER PAPODOPOULOUS

On November 24 nearly a million people marched through the streets of Athens on the first anniversary of the Polytechnic School strike and massacre. Thirty-four students were killed by police and the army in that strike, a series of events which led to the downfall of the Greek junta this summer.

Shortly after the Polytechnic massacre the strong man, Papodopoulous was ousted from the junta by even more rabid hardliners. Their government fell after the botched coup in Cyprus, opening the way to a more open form of government and elections last fall.

FRANCO'S FACIST SPAIN

Franco's fascist Spain has been rocked by the largest general strike in 26 years, when 200,000 workers and students joined in an action which swept through the Basque region December 11 . The Euzkadis, as the Basques call themselves, have their own language and culture and have been struggling for a progressive Basque nationalist government for decades.

Recent strikes have been organized largely by the outlawed ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna) or Basque Liberation Front, which recently renewed guerilla warfare using the rugged Pyreenees Mountains as their base.

[photo caption: Rhodesia's Ian Smith]

Black Unity in Africa

Thousands of miles to the south of Europe's softening underbelly, black liberation is surging forward in the parts of Africa still controlled by white supremecist government. Dec. 8 leaders of five Zimbaboe (Rhodesian) groups refused to convent with the government of Ian Smith for for a constitutional convention. Instead they agreed to unify and recognize the "inevitability of continued armed struggle" to free their people.

The signing of the unity agreement came just one day after the white Rhodesian regime rejected black proposals for peace based on "immediate majority rule." This would result in the transfer of power from 270,000 whites to the six million blacks who live in the country.

Prime Minister Smith offered the convention as a step toward majority rule, but also insisted that "terrorism" cease and that there be no "lowering of standards," a euphemism for immediate majority rule.

He was reportedly pressured into the convention offer by South Africa, which has watched Mozambique fall to liberation forces and guerilla activity move through Rhodesia and closer to its own border.

Puerto Under The Gun

U.S. Army troops and Marines have been placed "on alert" in Puerto Rico at the request of Puerto Rican National Guard Commander Gen Fernando Chardon. Gen Chardon's request came after 2,000 National Guard and colonial police were unable to break a seven week old strike by 3,000 angry sewer workers.

Strike and socialist leaders have been raided in their homes by police carrying shotguns and automatic weapons, but as repression intensifies so does resistance. Bombs have demolished an ITT office, blown out pipes carrying water to Commonwealth Oil and Union Carbide refineries. Several U.S. Army vehicles, a Burger King and a Woolworth's have also been bombed. Pedro Grant, head of the MOU (United Labor Movement) comprised of one hundred member unions, has threatened a general strike which will cripple the country if the National Guard is not recalled.

Besides striking for the right to unionize, the workers are also protesting the colony's electric utility, which charges U.S. based multinational corporations as little as one sixth the consumer rate. The utility is controlled by the First National City Bank, to which it is heavily indebted and which forces Puerto Rican consumers to subsidize below cost service to the corporations.