Levenstein, Aaron. Escape to Freedom: The Story of the International Rescue
Committee. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. 339 pages.
This book is an in-house puff piece written for the International Rescue
Committee's fiftieth anniversary. IRC, Free Europe Committee (the CIA's Radio
Free Europe), Freedom House, National Endowment for Democracy -- these and
others are regarded by us as U.S. intelligence assets because of the people
behind them. John Richardson, Jr., for example, was president or chairman of
all of the above at one time or another. Leo Cherne has been chairman of IRC
and Freedom House, and was on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board from 1973-1977 and again in 1986, serving as chairman and vice-chairman.
William Casey had been on IRC's board and was eventually IRC president.
The revolving door between intelligence-community heavies and certain
organizations such as these makes it difficult to take their protestations
of innocence seriously. Levenstein's single page about IRC connections with
the CIA concerns reports that the money from the Norman Foundation was from
CIA. IRC insisted that the reports were unfounded, and got retractions.
(Levenstein got the date wrong; the foundations were exposed in 1967, not
during the early 1970s.) The only thing in his account that's easy to believe
is the part about retractions. No newspaper is going to risk challenging
IRC's hardball players over the facts surrounding a mere $15,000 grant. For
a much better book on the IRC, look at the one by Eric Thomas Chester.
ISBN 0-313-23815-4
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