Question of the Day

Why is it that book reviewers who tout anybody-but-the-CIA killed Kennedy books so often have ties, alleged or proven, to the CIA?

Case in point.

Note the book reviewer's credentials:

Justin P. Liuba is a free-lance journalist, former Romanian bureau chief of Radio Free Europe and president of the Romania Relief Foundation.

Why does this raise my eyebrows?

On June 1, 1949, a group of prominent American businessmen, lawyers, and philanthropists – called the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE) – filed incorporation papers in New York City. The event drew little notice at the time. Only a handful of people knew that NCFE was actually the public face of an innovative "psychological warfare" project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That operation – which soon gave rise to Radio Free Europe – would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.

...

From the start, [Frank] Wisner and OPC [an OSS offshoot and forerunner to the CIA] regarded NCFE as one of their signature operations. As the Cold War reached perhaps its most dangerous phase, NCFE and other projects (such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1950) rallied anti-Communist intellectuals, politicians, and activists to fight the Soviets on the “plane of ideas” and what was later called "public diplomacy."

Oh sure, you'll say. But what about this?

CIA subsidies to the Free Europe Committee (NCFE's later name) ended in 1971, after Sen. Clifford P. Case (R-NJ) revealed that it received covert assistance. Radio Free Europe was re-chartered as a public corporation (receiving Congressionally appropriated funds). All funding and oversight responsibilities were transferred to the presidentially appointed Board for International Broadcasting.

If you believe the CIA has severed all ties, I have some fantastic swampland real estate to sell you.

Source (the CIA's own Web site).