World Peace Council

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World Peace Council

The World Peace Council was the Soviet front affiliated with the U.S. Peace Council. It describes itself as a "an anti-imperialist, democratic, independent and non-aligned international movement of mass action."[1]

Founding

In 1949 the World Peace Council (WPC) was founded in Prague during a "Peace Congress" sponsored by the Soviets and their Czech and other Eastern European satellites. The organization was planned and controlled by the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The WPC claimed to represent 600 million "organizers for peace" around the world.

About

Based in Helsinki, the Council is the major Soviet-controlled international Communist front organization. Operating under the joint control of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB, the WPC has two main functions: to influence public opinion and government policies in non-Communist countries along lines favorable to Soviet policy goals, and to provide logistical support to Soviet-supported terrorist groups.[2]

Soviet Front

In 1978 the House Intelligence Committee released a large CIA report on Soviet propaganda and front groups around the world (outside the U.S.) in which the WPC was identified as such a front. It has continued to be so identified in other government reports including State Department documents.

After being expelled from several countries, the WPC finally set up headquarters in Helsinki. Circa 1990, the WPC was estimated to have an annual budget of more than $40 million, almost all provided by the Soviet Union.[3]

Relations with the UN

In 1981 the WPC applied for Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council, but withdrew its application when required to submit audited financial statements.[4]

Members

Members circa 2009;

1975 WPC Delegation to the U.S. and U.S. hosts/greeters

In September-October, 1975, a delegation of World Peace Council leaders toured the United States in a major propaganda "effort to to coordinate a post-Vietnam drive against American defense preparedness, according to Rep. Larry McDonald (D-Ga) in a major report published in the "Congressional Record" of October 8, 1975, much of which will be excerpted here re what the WPC delegation did and where.[23]

The WPC delegation which arrived at Kennedy International Airport on September 28, 1975, was composed of:

DC meeting

D.C. Meeting of the WPC delegation Sept. 29-30, 1975, and those they met with or were accompanied by:

New York meeting

New York City meeting of the WPC delegation:

  • Angier Biddle Duke - a former Ambassador, State Department Chief of Protocol, and "influential member of the elite one-world internationalist Council on Foreign Relations . Director of the Department of Civil Affairs of New York City and "acted as Abraham Beame Abraham Beame's official representative in meeting the WPC entourage."
  • Dr. Luther Evans - president of the World Federalists whose public record of support and activity with pro-Soviet and pro-CPUSA fronts and causes has few rivals."

"Evans was a featured participant earlier this year in the CPUSA organized National Emergency Conference for a Drastic Cutback in Military Spending held in Chicago to advance the Soviet/WPC goal of an obsolete, under equipped, ineffective American military."

Citations as CPUSA fronts for NCRMA, ACPFB, NCASF and the MFSA can be found in The Guide of HCUA, 1961 [24]

Detroit meeting

Detroit Meeting sponsors and participants as listed in the Daily World of October 3, 1975:

(NB: Some of the above mentioned individuals will show up in other KeyWiki sections as sponsors and/or participants in CPUSA and SWP fronts and causes. For instance, Erma Henderson listed as "president Detroit City Council aka Detroit Common Council and Maryann Mahaffey both were listed in the Partial List of Sponsors of the founding convention of the U.S. Peace Council, November 1979)

World Peace Council, U.S. Organizing Committee for World Peace Council, 1976

In the CPUSA newspaper the Daily World, May 6, 1976, Page 14, "What's On" section of events, New York, - "May 8, 1976, "First-Hand Report From Angola. Wine & cheese reception for Frances Williams, West Coast Coordinator of U.S. Organizing Committee for World Peace Council USOCWPC WPC, just returned from Angola. Burney YMCA, 215 West 23 Street. Sponsor: World Peace Council, USOC"

WPC 1978 Bureau Meeting, Washington D.C.

coming soon


WPC 1981 Tour of the U.S.

Another WPC tour of the U.S. took place in May, 1981. Among the cities they visited included Chicago and New York. What appears below will be summaries of articles from the CPUSA newspapers and official WPC documents about who was in the delegation,what they did, and who helped them on the tours.

Chicago: Daily World, May 13, 1981, P. 13, "International Peace Activists: Unity a Key to Peace".

"Visiting peace activists urged Chicagoans to join the hundreds of millions around the world who are demanding an end to war and for the building of a lasting peace."

"Members of the World Peace Council WPC, the largest worldwide organization devoted to peace, are now touring several U.S. cities."

"The people have power to overcome those who want to destroy," Romesh Chandra, WPC president, told a peace rally gathered here at the DePaul University Center.

"The greed of the imperialists can be stopped," he said. "There is a growing movement of us who are fighting for a new peaceful life." ***

"He said there must be unity among the peace forces of the world and praised the peace movement here for making a decisive contribution to the ending of the Vietname War." ***

"While her Chandra bestowed a WPC service medal to 12 area peace activitists for their long-time work in the peace movement." {KW: These people were not identified by they most likely included some of those listed below who either spoke at the rally or had helped to sponsor them).

Members of the WPC delegation included:

Also speaking were:

The New York City Tour: Same source, DW, 5/12/81, p. 4, "Peace Leaders to Discuss Present War Danger"

The WPC delegation was scheduled to discuss the present war danger at the Hellenic Cultural Center at 44-01 Broadway, Astoria, New York, on Sunday, May 17. Speakers and delegations were to include:

"The meeting is being sponsored by the United States Peace Council, USPC - Queens Chapter, and is open to the public free of charge."

US Delegates 1977-80

The official World Peace Council publication/book World Peace Council - List of Members 1977-1980 listed the following members of the U.S. delegation with personal information and organizational affiliations.

The name Susan Bornstein has appeared in a HISC hearing ...

  • Stanley Faulkner - Lawyer; Member of the Bar of the US Supreme Court; Member, Board of Directors, New York Chapter of the National Lawyers GuildNLG. (The NLG has long been cited by Congress as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party, its front organizations, and controlled unions" [28]

Morford's credentials as a certified "Reverend" have been challenged. He was identified as a member of the CPUSA in [32]

Murrell was also listed in the WPC Delegation's list as - Day Care Program, Young Women Christian Association YWCA.

Also see "FBI Appropriations for 1969".

O'Dell was the private secretary of the late (Dr.) Martin Luther King, Jr. in the SCLC, and was chosen for that position by identified CPUSA member and Soviet-funds handler for the Party Stanley David Levison, also a key King advisor. [37], [38] The Church Senate Committee Hearings in 1975 had some information on Levison but reportedly most was not printed in the official volumes, especially any Executive Committee testimony.

  • Sandy Pollack - Coordinator, Solidarity Section US Peace Council. A longtime identified member of the CPUSA, Pollack was one of their top international "workhorses" in terms of the number of CPUSA and Soviet fronts that she worked on and for. These groups and organizations were written about in the "Tribute to Sandy Pollack" book by her friends after she died in a plane crash after leaving Cuba in 1982. All this information will be listed under her name a KeyWiki.

This group was exposed as having shared an office with a Trotskyite "peace front)" in the testimony of Max P. FriedmanApril 1, 1971. It soon disappeared from the Vietnam protest scene.[41]

"Second International Conference in Solidarity with the Independence of Puerto Rico"

On Monday morning, December 3, 1979, a school bus transporting 18 U.S. Navy personnel to work at a communications station was ambushed. near the country town of Toa Baja, ten miles west of San Juan, PR Two U.S. sailors were killed and ten were wounded, five of them women. The terrorists escaped.

A joint communique from three terrorist groups said the attack was in vengeance for the deaths of Carlos Soto Arrivi and Ernaldo Dalio Rosado, shot to death by police on July 25, 1978, while planting a bomb at an electrical transmission tower, and Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, 33, a member of the Central Committee of the Marxist-Leninist Socialist League of Puerto Rico, who was found hanged on November ll, at the federal prison at Tallahassee, FL, where he was serving a six-month sentence for trespassing on U. S. Navy property on Vieques Island on May 19, 1979.

The killing of the U. S. Navy personnel cam almost a year and a half after the deaths of Soto and Rosado, and a month after the death of Rodriguez, ruled a suicide; but only a day after the conclusion of a major World Peace Council conference in support of the Puerto Rican revolutionary movements. The World Peace Council, controlled by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the KGB, has two principal functions: to coordinate propaganda campaigns to influence public opinion in the Free World, and to provide logistical support to Soviet-approved revolutionary terrorist movements .

The main political resolution of the November 3-December 2, 1979 "Conference in Solidarity with the Independence of Puerto Rico," attacked U.S. "colonial domination of Puerto Rico" and stated, "Puerto Rico is a strategic center of the U.S. Navy, especially the enormous Roosevelt Roads Nuclear Military Complex at Ceiba and the island municipality of Vieques which is used as a shooting camp and where NATO members carry out important maneuvers against the wishes of its inhabitants who struggle valiantly for them to leave".

The WPC conference's main resolution went on to describe efforts of some Puerto Rican political figures to promote statehood as "the culmination of colonialism"-'and "a menace to the territorial integrity of Latin America."

The "honored guests" at this Second International Conference in Solidarity with the Independence of Puerto Rico (the WPC held the first such conference in Havana in September 1975) were the four surviving Nationalist Party terrorists who had attempted to assassinate President Truman in 1950 and kill Members of Congress in 1954. The four, Lolita Lebron, Oscar Collazo, Irvin Flores and Rafael Cancel Miranda, received Presidential pardons in 1979, and met with Fidel Castro during his stay in New York also in 1979. The Nationalist Party terrorists received ovations tor their reiterated statements backing terrorist "armed struggle" tactics after their release from prison.

In her address to the WPC audience of 400 delegates and as many observers from 53 countries and terrorist "national liberation movements," Lebron gushed, "Nicaragua and the Sandinistas give us strength, stimulate us. Fidel shines over us as the sun of the Caribbean!" Furthermore, the 48-member U.S. delegation to the Mexico City meeting issued a press statement expressing outrage at the murder of Puerto Rican liberation fighter Angel Rodriguez Cristobal in the U.S. federal prison in Tallahassee."

One of the more militant of the u.s. delegates, New York City Councilman Gilberto Gerena-Valentin, also a member of the New York Committee in Support of Vieques, said that U.S. "repression" had been demonstrated in the meting out of jail term to the Vieques demonstrators, and charged Rodriguez "was brutally tortured." "This murder is the mechanization of U.5. imperialism. While we have called upon the U.S. Department of Justice and the police for an investigation, we have no faith in the investigative system. They are not going to find themselves guilty of a system of racism in the United States ".

Although several members of the separate 28-member Puerto Rican delegation live in New York, in keeping with the "independence" theme, the delegations remained separate. In addition to those already named, the members of the U.S. and Puerto Rican delegations included Angela Davis and Gil Green, Communist Party USA ; Juan Mari Bras, Puerto Rican Socialist Party; Bishop Antulio Parrilla; Luis Lausell, UTIER (electrical workers union); Helen Rodriguez-Trias, M.D., Eneida Vasquez, Puerto Rican Peace Council; Michael Myerson, U.S. Peace Council; Tom Soto, Workers World Party, Javier Colon, Federation of University Students for Independence ; Carlos Reichehoff, Nationalist Party; Juan Bautista, Communist Party of Puerto Rico; Massachusetts Representative Mel King and Clemente Soto Velez.

Additional U. S. organizations represented in the delegation included the National Lawyers Guild, National Conference of Black Lawyers, Venceremos Brigade, La Raza Unida Party, American Indian Movement , Black United Front , and "trade unionists from the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the United Steel Workers of America ."

Other participants included the Palestine Liberation Organization, Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the Communist Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean, other international Soviet Communist fronts such as the Women's International Democratic Federation, the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization, and the World Federation of Trade Unions; delegates from the "peace movements" of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Cuba, the Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, and other Soviet client states. The largest delegations were those from Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Grenada, the Dominican, Republic, Haiti (exiles) and Grenada.

U.S. Representative Ron Dellums sent a message apologizing for his inability to attend and outlining his intention to hold Congressional hearings on the U.S. Navy's use of Vieques Island. The Dellums message also stated he would introduce another resolution calling for Congress to unconditionally transfer all sovereignty and powers to the people of Puerto Rico.

The chief WPC resolutions on Puerto Rico called for a "complete and unconditional" transfer of powers by the U.S. to Puerto Rico; for the repudiation of all "colonial plebiscites;" for the U.S. to renunciate any plans for the statehood - termed "annexation" - of Puerto Rico; for for immediate U.S. Navy withdrawal from its Puerto Rican facilities.

Minor resolutions touched on such "popular front" organizing issues as deteriorating housing conditions for Puerto Ricans in the U. S. and on the island, sterilization as a form of birth control ("genocide"), and on the "growing oppression of the Puerto Rican independence movement, most recently seen in the murder of Vieques activist Angel Rodriguez Cristobal."

While Rodriguez was a member of a small Marxist-Leninist group once affiliated with the Progressive Labor Party, the Communist Party USA, Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Workers World Party, the National Lawyers Guild, the Castroite comunist Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee have all joined in support activities around the death of Rodriguez.

While under the control of Moscow-line parties, the WPC's Puerto Rican Independence conference was dominated by the theme of the U.S. presence in the Caribbean as a "threat to world peace," several terrorist movements strongly influenced by Trotskyism presented a slightly different view. The Revolutionary Workers Party/People's Revolutionary Army of Argentina, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left of Chile, the NCT of the Dominican Republic, and several Salvadorean groups - the Unified Front for Popular Action, the People Leagues, and the Popular Revolutionary Bloc placed the Puerto Rican independence movement in the context of the new revolutionary upsurge in Latin America and a U.S. intention to strengthen its position in the Caribbean by holding on to Puerto Rico.[42]

External links

References

  1. ↑ About
  2. ↑ The War Called Peace: Glossary, published 1982
  3. ↑ Communists in the Democratic party, page 64
  4. ↑ Communists in the Democratic party, page 64
  5. ↑ Greek Committee for International Detente and Peace
  6. ↑ Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples
  7. ↑ Canadian Peace Congress
  8. ↑ U.S. Peace Council
  9. ↑ Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation
  10. ↑ Brazilian Center for Solidarity of the peoples and struggle for Peace
  11. ↑ VREDE
  12. ↑ STOP USA
  13. ↑ Czech Peace Movement
  14. ↑ OSPAAAL Spain
  15. ↑ Movement for Peace, Sovereignty and Solidarity between the Peoples
  16. ↑ German Peace Council
  17. ↑ Belgrade Forum for the world of equals
  18. ↑ Japan Peace Committee
  19. ↑ Le mouvement de la paix de France
  20. ↑ Swedish Peace Committee
  21. ↑ OSPAAAL Spain
  22. ↑ Peace Association of Turkey
  23. ↑ Congressional Record, October 8, 1975, The World Peace Council in Congress: Soviets Lobby for U.S. Disarmament, Rep. Larry McDonald, Extension of Remarks, pp. E5329-5331
  24. ↑ Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (and Appendixes), House Committee on Un-American Activities, December 1, 1961, pages 115-116; 18; 117-118; and 107, respectively
  25. ↑ Trial By Treason: The National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell, HCUA, August 25, 1956, p. 39]]
  26. ↑ Revolutionary Activities Directed Toward the Administration of Penal or Correctional SystemsParts 1-4, 1973, House Internal Security Committee
  27. ↑ The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive, Western Goals, 1982, p. 12
  28. ↑ Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications and Appendixes, December 1, 1961, House Committee on Un-American Activities, House Document No. 398, citing to Special Committee on Un-American Activities [[House Report 1311 on the CIO Political Action Committee, March 29, 1944, p. 149;HCUAHouse Report 3123 on the National Lawyers Guild], September 17 & 21, 1950; Senate Internal Security SubcommitteeHandbook for Americans, S. Doc. 117, April 23, 1956, p. 91, and ....)
  29. ↑ HCUAcited report on the National Lawyers Guild, Sept. 1950 and SISSHandbook for Americans, 1956
  30. ↑ The Venona Secrets:Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, Regnery, 2000, p. 397
  31. ↑ Soviet Active Measures, hearings before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, July 13-14, 1982, and 1982 letterhead
  32. ↑ [[Report and Order of the Subversive Activities Control Board in the case of Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Inc., p. 21 and Appendix B, p. vii, reprinted in 1 SACB 448]]
  33. ↑ Annual report for the Year 1961, HCUA, p. 4
  34. ↑ FBI Annual report for the Fiscal Year 1961
  35. ↑ Communist Infiltration and Activities in the South, HCUA, Hearings, July 29-31, 1958
  36. ↑ Structure and Organization of the Communist Party of the United States, Part I, HCUA, Nov. 20-22, 1961, p. 576
  37. ↑ The FBI and Martin Luther King, David Garrow, 1995?
  38. ↑ Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery, pp. 262-266, 1996.
  39. ↑ American-Korean Friendship Information Center publication
  40. ↑ Congressional Record, October 8, 1975, p. E5330, The World peace Council in Congress: Soviet Lobby for U.S. Disarmament, Rep. Larry McDonald
  41. ↑ American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1971, hearings, House Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, March-April, 1971
  42. ↑ Information Digest, December 14, 1979, page 374
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