Morton Halperin (CFR) and his ultra-radical Center for National Security Studies

Morton H. Halperin was born on June 13, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, son of Lillian Neubart and Harry Halperin. He married Ina Weinstein. He is an alumnus of Columbia University(B.A., 1958) and Yale University(M.A., 1959; Ph.D., 1961). He is the author of Limited War in the Nuclear Age(1963) and China and the Bomb(1965). He is co-author of Strategy and Arms Control(1961). Morton’s son, Mark, also to the far left has been Political Director of ABC News since 1997.

Morton’s other son David is a gay activist and professor at the University of Michigan.  He has authored and edited a number of books about homosexuality, including: How to Do the History of Homosexuality; Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography; The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love.

Morton H. Halperin is the Executive Director of the Open Society Policy Center. Halperin has a distinguished career in federal government, having served in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations. Halperin also has a long record as a Washington advocate on national and international issues. He spent many years at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for National Security Studies, where he focused on issues affecting both civil liberties and national security. Halperin has been associated with a number of think tanks and universities including Harvard University where he taught for six years (1960-66) and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been widely published in newspapers and magazines across the world, and has authored, coauthored and edited more than a dozen books. Halperin holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Yale University. He received his B.A. from Columbia College.

From 1961 until 1966, Halperin was at Harvard University in the Center for International Affairs as instructor(1961-1963), research associate (1961-1966) and assistant professor (1964-1966) of government. From 1966 until 1969, he was with the Department of Defense as a special assistant on planning to the assistant secretary of defense for internal security affairs(1966-1967) and deputy assistant secretary of defense on policy planning and arms control(1967-1969). In 1969, he was a senior assistant to Henry A. Kissinger, the President’s assistant for national security affairs. Since 1970, he has been a senior fellow at Brookings Institution. He is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations(CFR). He has been a consultant to some of the more prestigious think factories: RAND Corporation(1960-1966), Hudson Institute(1961-1966), and the Institute for Defense Analyses(1961-1966).

From 1961 until 1965, he was a consultant to the National Security Council, but he resigned the position in 1970 in protest against the president’s decision to move American troops into Cambodia and to increase bombing raids against anti-aircraft installations in North Vietnam.

Since 1961, Halperin has been one of the most prolific pleaders for disarmament and a policy of “limited” warfare.

During the Johnson Administration, Halperin was quite content with the Administration’s no-win policy in Vietnam. He was under the illusion that as long as such a policy was followed, Communist China would not intervene militarily in Vietnam. In March, 1966, while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Halperin urged that the United States extend diplomatic recognition to Red China and work for Red China’s admission into the United Nations. Shortly thereafter, Halperin was appointed to a position in the Defense Department. Halperin was retained in the Defense Department by the Nixon Administration up until his protest resignation in 1970.

In 1974, Halperin became director of the newly-formed Center for National Security Studies(CNSS). Just prior to this position, Halperin headed the Project on National Security and Civil Liberties sponsored jointly by the Tax-Exempt sponsors, Fund for Peace(FFP) and the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU).

With approximately one half of its $400,000 budget provided by grants from the Field Foundation via its Tax-Exempt sponsor, the Fund for Peace, the CNSS was launched with its stated intention being to expose “policies decided in secret” in order to ensure that national security “institutions do not become a permanent threat to the liberties and security they claim to protect.”

The staff of the Center for National Security Studies has included a significant number of persons drawn from the Institute for Policy Studies, and the National Lawyers Guild(NLG). This organization was formed in the late 1930s with the aid of the Comintern(Communist International), whose leading members, according to NLG internal critics, particularly on its international committee, remain aligned with Cuba, Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The NLG remains affiliated with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers(IADL), a body dominated by the Soviet Union. NLG attorneys, many of them also active in the ACLU, aided by NLG law students and paralegals, have played an active role in lawsuits and discovery proceedings against a wide range of U.S. intelligence agencies. It has largely been because of these well coordinated activities assaulting our domestic and international intelligence agencies that their effectiveness in protecting American citizens has been greatly diminished or dismantled entirely.

CNSS staff drawn from the Institute for Policy Studies have included David Cortright, a former organizer of anti-Vietnam war GIs at Fort Bliss, Texas; Courtland Cox, a former activist with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee(SNCC); and Mark Ryter, a member of the IPS Government Accountability Project.

Others prominent in the NLG group at CNSS have included Robert Borosage, then active on the District of Columbia chapter executive board; Susan Kaplan, previously in the NLG San Francisco chapter; and Judy Mead, who in 1977 was the NLG national treasurer. Other staff and consultants have come from the North American Congress on Latin America(NACLA), along with agencies of the Cuban government credited by CIA-turncoat Philip Agee with providing him with material needed for his anti-CIA expose book.

Furthermore, the CNSS advisory committee, as listed in its December 1975, newsletter, Intelligence Report, included two leading NLG figures, Peter Weiss, who was also chairman of the IPS board of trustees, and former NLG president Thomas I. Emerson. In 1956, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee included Emerson’s name in its list of the eighty-two most active and typical sponsors of Communist front organizations.

One can begin to understand why Halperin viewed our intelligence agencies with great suspicion, he realizing that some occasion may arise when they’d be focused on his un-American activities.

Halperin has been affiliated with the internationalist-pacifist International Movement for Atlantic Union; Freedom House, a center for anti-anti-Communism; the American Friends of Vietnam, which was nothing less than a propaganda front for the late Ngo dinh Diem; and the leftist-oriented National Committee on United States-(Red) China Relations. He is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

It’s a pretty sure thing, that whatever party resides in the White House, Morton H. Halperin will find a comrade-in-arms, and a secure position within one of our most sensitive defense agencies.