Arlington Cemetery. The funeral on January 7 was described by the Washington Post as
"a show of pomp usually reserved for the nation's most renowned military heroes."
Anthony Lewis of the New York Times described the funeral as "a political device" with
ceremonies "being manipulated in order to arouse a political backlash against legitimate
criticism." Norman Kempster in the Washington Star found that "only a few hours after
the CIA's Athens station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a
subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect result of
congressional investigations and the direct result of an article in an obscure magazine."
Here, in the words of a Washington Star headline, was "one CIA effort that worked."
Between Christmas and New Year's in Kennbunkport, looking forward to the decisive
floor vote on his confrimation, Bush was at work tending and mobilizing key parts of his
network. One of these was a certain Leo Cherne.
Leo Cherne is not a household word, but he has been a powerful figure in the US
intelligence community over the period since World War II. Leo Cherne was to be one of
Bush's most important allies when he was CIA Director and throughout Bush's
subsequent career, so it is worth taking a moment to get to know Cherne better.
Cherne's parents were both printers who came to the US from Romania. In his youth he
was a champion orator of the American Zionist Association, and he has remained a part
of B'nai B'rith all his life. He was trained as an attorney, and he joined the Research
Institute of America, a publisher of business books, in 1936. He claims to have helped to
draft the army and navy industrial mobilization plans for World War II, and at the end of
the war he was an economic advisor to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan. During that
time he worked for "the dismantling of the pervasive control over Japanese society which
had been maintained by the Zaibnatsu families," [fn 21] and devised a new Japanese tax
structure. Cherne built up a long association with the Industrial College of the Armed
Forces.
Cherne was an ardent Zionist. He is typical to that extent of the so-called
"neoconservatives" who have been prominent in government and policy circles under
Reagan-Bush, and Bush. Cherne was the founder of the International Rescue Committee,
which according to Cherne's own blurb "came into existence one week after Hitler came
to power to assist those who would have to flee from Nazi Germany...In the years since,
we have helped thousands of Jews who have fled from the Iron Curtain countries, all of
them, and have worked to assist in the re-settlement of Jews in Europe and the United
States who have left the Soviet Union."
Cherne's IRC was clearly a conduit for neo-Bukharinite operations between east and west
in the Cold War, and it was also reputedly a CIA front organization. CIA funding for the
IRC came through the J.M. Kaplan Fund, a known CIA conduit, and also through the
Norman Foundation, according to Frank A. Cappell's Review of the News (March 17,
1976). IRC operations in Bangladesh included the conduiting of CIA money to groups of
intellectuals. Capell noted that Cherne had "close ties to the leftist element in the CIA."