‘CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS’: SHEARER’S APPARENT UNTRUTHS TO SENATE BESPEAK LARGER, OMINOUS PROBLEMS WITH CLINTON TEAM

In a 1 March 1994 Center for Security
Policy Decision Brief, href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
President Clinton’s decision to nominate
Derek Shearer to serve as the next U.S.
Ambassador to Finland was characterized
as “one of the most preposterous
choices yet made by the Clinton
Administration in the course of staffing
up its foreign and defense policy team —
a extraordinary indictment when one
considers other dubious candidates.”
Such a harsh evaluation of this
appointment, which is now awaiting a
confirmation vote by the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, is based on three
considerations:

• Dr. Shearer has a long record of
  advocacy of radical left-wing
  economic and political causes
  raising serious questions about
  his past judgment — if not his
  present attitudes and policy
  predilections.
• Dr. Shearer has longstanding ties
  to the hard-left Institute for
  Policy Studies and a number of
  its “spin-offs”
  organizations.
• In light of these facts, Dr.
  Shearer would appear to be a
  singularly unsuitable candidate
  for a sensitive overseas post at
  a moment when the U.S. government
  is being rocked by revelations of
  serious breaches of security by
  the KGB and by a White House that
  is awash with Clinton staffers
  lacking requisite security
  clearances.

Such concerns have only been
intensified by Dr. Shearer’s oral and
written testimony before the Foreign
Relations Committee. Taken together, it
amounts to a pattern of egregious
misrepresentations, misleading statements
and, in some cases, what appear to be
falsehoods.

In the interest of ensuring that the
Foreign Relations Committee and the full
U.S. Senate are acquainted with the facts
— and, thereby, able to hold the Clinton
Administration and its nominee for
Embassy Helsinki properly accountable —
the Center for Security Policy has
assembled the following information from
public sources. It represents a good
faith, if of necessity somewhat
superficial, effort to assemble an
accurate picture of Dr. Shearer’s record
despite his own efforts to prevent such a
picture from emerging. href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

Problem #1: A Record of
Poor Policy Judgment

Derek Shearer is a pedigreed radical
socialist whose enthusiastic embrace of
central planning and government diktat in
the economic sphere is a matter of
record. Such a conclusion is evident from
his two major manifestoes, Economic
Democracy: The Challenge of the 1980s
(published in 1980 with Martin Carnoy)
and A New Social Contract: The
Economy and Government After Reagan (published
in 1983 with Carnoy and Russell
Rumberger).

The first of these books presents
itself as “a discussion of an
argument for alternatives to the
present structure of production in the
United States; alternatives that would
change the control of capital and how it
is used.” In it, Shearer
asserts that the U.S. “economy is
faced with a set of economic problems
that appear to be unsolvable by corporate
capitalist development” and that
“the way the economy is
governed and the way things are produced
will have to be changed as well.”
He even goes so far as to opine that,
“Any alternative economic and social
strategy must start by dismantling, or at
least restricting, the power of these
corporations. They are the antithesis of
democracy.”

The second book strives to transpose
what it calls “the American
obsession” with the “alleged
worldwide Communist revolution” to
giant “U.S. private
corporations” who are held
responsible for pushing “the
anti-Communist ideology” thanks to
their “direct economic interest in
military expansion.” The “New
Social Contract” would involve the
“creation of public corporations
that operate under rules whereby public
needs dictate investment policy.”

I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever
Been…

When questioned in writing by Sen.
Hank Brown (R-CO) about such socialist —
or more extreme — views, however,
Shearer responded by claiming that “I
have not advocated socialism…I have
never described myself that way, nor
viewed myself as such.” He also
contended that “I did not then [in
1980] nor do I now advocate “radical
change.” He maintains that
the centerpiece of his strategy of
“economic democracy” namely,
creating “a new government holding
company [that would acquire effective
control] of at least one major firm in
each major industry dominated by a few
companies” is “not a
nationalization strategy.” Even
though he no longer supports it, he wants
Sen. Brown and his colleagues to believe
this approach is, rather, simply a
“strategy of ‘selective and
competitive public enterprise.'”

Unfortunately for Shearer,
such statements are belied by his own
past pronouncements about the need to use
code words and euphemisms to promote the
socialist agenda. For example,
in 1979, he crowed to the IPS mouthpiece,
In These Times Magazine:

“Socialism has a bad name in
America and no amount of wishful
thinking on the part of the Left is
going to change that in our
lifetimes….The words ‘economic
democracy’ are an adequate and
effective replacement.”

Shearer’s 2 March statement before the
Foreign Relations Committee in response
to questioning about the above quotation
from Sen. Brown — “I do not think I
was quoted exactly correctly, or it was
taken out of context” — does not
ring true in light of his pronouncement
at a 1981 conference of left-wing
activists convened by Ralph Nader:

“While we can’t use the ‘S’
word [socialism] too effectively in
American politics, we have found that
in the greatest tradition of American
advertising that the word ‘economic
democracy’ sells. You can take it
door-to-door like Fuller Brushes, and
the door will not be slammed in your
face.”⁽³⁾

No less convincing are Shearer’s
repeated disavowals, made orally and in
answers submitted for the Foreign
Relations Committee hearing record, of
his earlier, specific recommendations and
policy prescriptions. A sampling of these
disavowals include the following:
“It is not a view that I
particularly hold any more”; “I
do not now endorse [or] support any such
process”; “I no longer advocate
such a position”; “I no longer
advocate these views”; “I no
longer advocate such a strategy”;
“I do not now think that the public
as a whole through the government is the
best way to decide the use of economic
resources.”

Just What Did He Believe —
and Until When Did He Believe It?

Shearer suggests that he realized that
“part of [his book, Economic
Democracy] does stand the test of
time on some issues and areas, and in
some areas we were clearly wrong“
after his three-month stint in the
Commerce Department last year. That
experience, he would have Senators
believe, “made me deeply skeptical
of the ability of the Government to do
many of the things that I might have
written about when I was a
professor.” Of course, at issue is
not what he “might have
written about” — but what he did
forcefully advocate at least, as
far as can be determined, until the
moment when he faced questioning about
his position from Sen. Brown.

For his part, Shearer claims that he
has not “used ‘economic democracy’
to describe myself for over a
decade.” Pride of authorship alone
would seem to make that unlikely. Still,
he is nothing if not flexible in his
rhetoric: In 1986, for instance, his
euphemism of choice appeared to be
“progressive” as in, “a
reform-minded Democratic president…will
appoint a progressive Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development to spread
information about progressive programs
across the country” and implement
“progressive” policies like
those Shearer advanced while a planning
commissioner in Santa Monica, California
during the 1980s. href=”#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾
As with terms like “economic
democracy” and “alternative
media” much favored by the Left,
however, “progressive” has some
baggage. It has often been used
synonymously with other, more ominous
words like “socialist.” href=”#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾

Today, Shearer casts himself as an
advocate of “democratic
capitalism” and an “economic
nationalist.” As proof of his
conversion to the former, he is inclined
to cite the fact that he has “served
on the board of the National Consumer
Cooperative Bank” in Washington. As
noted by Prof. Thomas DiLorenzo in the Wall
Street Journal, however, the purpose
of this Bank according to its principal
sponsor, Ralph Nader, is not exactly
democratic capitalism — rather, it is to
“replace the existing
capitalist economy with a cooperative
economy.”

As for the moniker “economic
nationalist,” he wrote Sen. Brown to
explain its meaning in the most
platitudinous terms:

“[This] is not a philosophy,
but a term that has been used in the
U.S. to refer to people who believe
that the U.S. should have a clear and
coherent national economy strategy;
that the U.S. should have a strategic
trade policy that actively opens
markets to American products and
American investment; and that in the
new world economy with competition
from Asia and Europe, that [sic] it
is essential to forge a new
government-business
partnership.”

In short, Derek Shearer appears today,
as in the past, willing to employ
whatever marketing pitch will sell his
product. The Senate is entitled
to have a better sense, though, whether
the product is appreciably different now
than it has been for the past twenty
years — a radical socialist agenda by
any (and seemingly almost every)
other name.

‘Potemkin Village’

Even if one were inclined to give
Derek Shearer the benefit of the doubt on
the question of whether he has undergone
a real conversion from
socialism, his present recantation calls
into serious question his original
judgment — so much so as to raise
questions about his fitness to hold a
position of trust in the U.S. government.

For example, in Economic Democracy
he bought into the communist propaganda
line:

“Ironically, Marxist economic
and social philosophy, which — as
the basis for a political movement —
was and is an attempt to humanize
economic and social life, is
associated with dehumanization. In
part this is a false image:
American visitors to China and Cuba,
for example, will attest to the
austerity of life in those countries;
yet they also comment on the
spirit of cooperativeness and
well-being that pervades Chinese and
Cuban life.” (p. 20)

“The Yugoslav, Chinese and
Cuban cases can teach us about the
possibilities and problems of worker
control, but these problems all exist
within the political context of
relatively underdeveloped socialist
states.” href=”#N_6_”>⁽⁶⁾
(p. 139)

In response to Sen. Brown’s questions,
however, Shearer wrote last week:

“We were mistaken to
suggest that there are positive
lessons to be learned from China.
Having learned more about China, I
now understand that most of what
appeared to be participation to
outside visitors (and we relied on
secondary sources for our comments,
not first-hand experience), was, in
fact coercive group participation
enforced by the authority and power
of the Chinese Communist
Party….”

“I do not think that there
are positive lessons to be learned
from Cuba. The few references to Cuba
in the book were based on secondary
sources, not on first-hand research,
and suffered from the
Potemkin Village syndrome of Western
visitors seeing a rosy but false
picture.”

Shearer has yet to renounce — as
another Clinton ambassador-designate, Sam
Brown, has done in his own
“confirmation conversion” href=”#N_7_”>⁽⁷⁾
— the equally benighted view that the
United States was the real
threat to international stability. As an
editor of a tendentious, IPS-sponsored
“students'” critique of the
Defense Department published in 1970 and
entitled, The Pentagon Watchers:
Students Report on the National Security
State, Shearer wrote that: “It
is not difficult to see that America has
become the new imperial power.
Every day the headlines about Southeast
Asia drive the message home. What we
wanted to elucidate [in this book] was
the workings of that imperial
system.”

Problem #2: What Is The
Truth About Shearer’s Hard-Left
Associations?

As it happens, many of the
“secondary sources” who were
misled about the realities of
international communism — and upon whom
Derek Shearer evidently relied — were
his friends and colleagues in the radical
Left community. In fact, so
inextricably linked was Shearer with this
movement that his present efforts to
disassociate himself from it would be
entertaining, if they were not so
foreboding.

The Institute for Policy
Studies

According to Shearer’s testimony
before the Foreign Relations Committee —
both that orally delivered on 2 March and
that submitted in writing on 11 March in
response to Sen. Brown’s written
questions — his “relationship with
the Institute for Policy Studies”
was extremely circumscribed.

“[It] occurred very early
when I was a student — and this is
basically the extent of it — in the
summer of 1969. I was involved in a
student study [which produced The
Pentagon Watchers]….That study
was conducted, I was involved in
that. I was never a fellow.”

In fact, at least two of the
Institute for Policy Studies’ annual
reports list Shearer as one of the
organization’s Associate Fellows.
The 1979-1980 report, for example, does
so under the heading “The Institute
Community” and with the following
explanation:

“The Institute community of
scholars and activists includes
networks of individuals and
organizations in the United States
and abroad. These continuing
relationships with others are central
to the Institute’s work. No
manageable list can encompass these
associations. In 1980, the formal
Institute community included:
Associate Fellows….Derek
Shearer.”

Shearer’s name also appears as an
Associate Fellow as of 1983 in the
Institute’s twentieth anniversary annual
report. Still, Shearer claims that he was
“never an associate fellow at
IPS” and “I was unaware that I
was so listed. I did not object because I
did not know that IPS so characterized
me.” Shearer defended not listing
the IPS as an organizational affiliation
in documents submitted to the Foreign
Relations Committee on the grounds that
“I was not an employee of them
[sic].”

In the thirtieth anniversary report
issued last year, however, Shearer is
still represented to have an IPS
connection. In the 1993 report, though,
he is placed under a listing called
“Former Associate Fellows, Visiting
Scholars and Current Transnational
Institute Fellows.” This raises an
interesting point: If he were as of 1993
a former Fellow, it would appear
that some deliberate action was taken to
remove him from the list of active
Associate Fellows. Alternatively, if he
now falls into one of the other two
categories — as a Visiting Fellow at IPS
or a fellow with IPS’ Transnational
Institute clone — it strains
credulity that he would also be
ignorant of such an arrangement.

The IPS Spin-offs

Shearer is no more transparent in his
comments about his relationships with
various organizations spawned by the
Institute for Policy Studies. There have
been scores of such organizations over
the years, many of them with similar
sounding names, overlapping personnel
rosters, common funding sources and, at
least in some cases, a shared address.

This is — as the Soviets were wont to
say — no accident, comrade. According to
The Coercive Utopians by Rael
Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, “There
are reasons why IPS spins off institutes
so readily, providing them with seed
money, institute personnel and help in
obtaining tax exemption”:

“One advantage that accrues
to IPS is that the spin-offs make it
appear that a variety of groups and
publications have independently made
the same analysis of the problems of
our society and come to the same
solutions. For example, Mother
Jones is a glossy muckraking
magazine that fills the gap left by
the passing of Ramparts. One
does not subscribe to Mother
Jones but becomes a member of
the Foundation for National Progress,
entitling one to the Foundation’s
publication….According to its own
financial report the Foundation for
National Progress was created ‘to
carry out on the West Coast the
charitable and educational activities
of the Institute for Policy
Studies.'” href=”#N_8_”>⁽⁸⁾

The following are among the
IPS-related organizations with which
Derek Shearer appears to have been
associated — and the relevant
information he has chosen to withhold
from the Foreign Relations Committee.

The National Conference on
Alternative State and Local Public Policy:
In Economic Democracy,
Shearer wrote:

“In 1974, the
Institute for Policy Studies
in Washington realized that many
1960s activists were running for and
winning public office at the state
and local levels. It seemed that
substantial political change could
occur only if a base of support could
be built in local communities where
people actually live and work….A
network was formed called the
National Conference on Alternative
State and Local Public Policy…which
provides a vital link for reform
efforts in different cities and
states.” (p. 362)

Despite this clear and personally
acknowledged connection to IPS,
Shearer told the Foreign Relations
Committee only that “I
believe one of the members of the [CASLP]
Steering Committee at one time had been a
Fellow at IPS. But to the best of my
knowledge it was funded by foundation
grants.” As with the IPS
itself, he saw no reason to include any
reference to CASLP in background
information submitted to the Committee —
even under Sen. Brown’s questioning, when
he was obliged to acknowledge that he
“was involved for the first few
years on the Advisory Steering
Committee” — on the grounds that
“I was not an employee of that
[sic].”

Equally striking is the spin Shearer
gave the Committee about the purposes of
the CASLP. He called it, “An
organization that held meetings in the
1970s of mainly elected officials from
State and Local Government, to discuss
innovative policies that were being tried
out in different cities and states around
the country.”

In fact, according to a July 1975
press release issued under the
letterhead of the Institute for Policy
Studies, the mission was much less
benign:

“This new network has been
established to strengthen the
programmatic work of the Left. It
should end the sense of isolation
felt by elected and appointed
officials, organizers and planners
who share a populist or radical
outlook. Its further goal is to
enlarge the base committed to
policies for a restructured
America.”

On that press release, Derek Shearer
was listed (together with Sam Brown, who
was then serving as the Treasurer of the
State of Colorado) as the co-chairman of
the Public Banks and Finance Task Force
work group set up at the conference’s
inaugural meeting. Barbara Bick of the
IPS staff and Lee Webb, a former national
chairman of the revolutionary Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS), were
identified as the individuals under whose
“direction” the conference
would operate.

In his written response to further
questions, Shearer was scarcely more
forthcoming, acknowledging only “I
am aware that IPS fellow Lee Webb was
involved in the founding of the
conference and that IPS provided initial
housing.” He also acknowledged that
he was involved with CASLP for
approximately five years from
1974-1979.

Washington School:
In response to a direct question from
Senator Brown, Shearer said that he did
not “ever participate in a seminar
or teach courses at the Washington School
which, according to its own
documentation, was based in the Institute
for Policy Studies.” According to
the Spring 1981 bulletin of the
Washington School, entitled Programs in
Politics and Ideas, however, Derek
Shearer and Martin Carnoy are featured
participants in an “all-day
seminar” on “Building a
Progressive Movement.” Other
identified participants were slated to be
Jo Butler,⁽⁹⁾
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Lee Webb.

While it could not be ascertained
whether this seminar occurred as
advertized — or whether Shearer
participated in other Washington School
events — his categorical denial to Sen.
Brown of any association with the
Washington School seems, to put it
charitably, unwarranted and misleading.

Working Papers for a New
Society: Shearer also
failed to respond fully to a written
question put to him by Senator Brown
concerning the association between IPS
and an “alternative” journal
called Working Papers for a New
Society. While Shearer acknowledges
serving as the West Coast editor for this
publication from “1974 to
approximately 1978,” he chose not to
answer the question of whether he was
“aware that this publication was
sponsored by the Cambridge Policy Studies
Institute, Inc. [a.k.a., the Cambridge
Institute] and according to its own
documentation, the Institute for Policy
Studies?”

Instead, he avers knowledge only that
“Working Papers originally
was housed in the Cambridge Institute,
but as I remember it, it moved to
separate offices.” This statement,
while factual as far as it goes, could
mislead the Committee by failing to
acknowledge that the Cambridge Institute
was indeed an IPS spin-off, founded by
IPS Fellows Gar Alperovitch and
Christopher Jencks. IPS was, in effect,
the grandfather of Working Papers
after the latter was, in due course,
spun-off by the Cambridge Institute.

Interestingly, at least some
of the credit for creating Working
Papers and its sister
“alternative media” outlets
without unduly obvious links to the IPS
organization might be due Derek Shearer.
After all, in a chapter he authored of
the 1970 book The Pentagon Watchers
entitled, “The Pentagon Propaganda
Machine,” Shearer offered the
rationale for creating such entities:

“Too much can be made of the
military’s public relations
activities. The American people are
not automatons, and blacks and
students through their own reading
and experience have rejected the
Pentagon’s propaganda. Nevertheless,
the problem is that the great
majority of the American public has
been affected by twenty-five years of
Cold War propaganda, and that there
is no countervailing source of
information.

“Those who wish to dismantle
the military-industrial complex, and
radically alter America’s foreign
policy, are finding it necessary to
counter the Pentagon’s public
relations machine with their own
education program.” (p.
139).”⁽¹⁰⁾

The Campaign for Economic
Democracy: Perhaps most
peculiar of all Shearer’s distortions of
his past record are his oral and written
statements to Senator Brown concerning
the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED)
and his misleading statements about Tom
Hayden. Shearer told the Foreign
Relations Committee flatly, “I did
not join CED.” He also claimed that:

“Tom Hayden and I did
not organize the campaign for rent
control [CED]. In it point
of fact, [the campaign for] rent
control was organized by a broadbased
citizens’ group. I had nothing to do
with the drafting of that particular
law [i.e., the relevant rent control
codes for the city of Santa Monica,
California] and I am certainly not
particularly close, personally and
politically, to Mr. Hayden.”

It is not entirely clear whether
credit for launching the Campaign for
Economic Democracy lies most with the
unsuccessful Hayden bid for the U.S.
Senate or with the Conference on
Alternative State and Local Public
Policies. Either way, however, it
is indisputable that Derek Shearer was
intimately involved in it from the
inception.

In written answers to further
questions from Sen. Brown, Shearer
acknowledged, for example, that he
“served as an unpaid policy advisor
to the [Hayden campaign for U.S. Senate
in 1976]” and “shared some
policy ideas with the Hayden campaign,
such as employee representation on
corporate boards of directors.”
Another policy idea he appears to have
“shared with Hayden” was his
concept for “direct workers’ control
of industry,” href=”#N_11_”>⁽¹¹⁾
a variation on the theme of “worker
controlled enterprises” whose
practice he acknowledges having admired
in China, Cuba and Yugoslavia.

Alternatively, due to his active
involvement with the IPS-sponsored
Conference on Alternative State and Local
Public Policies (see above), Shearer was
in a position to be helpful in spawning
the CED from that organizational base.

In any event, there is no doubt about
Derek Shearer’s close association with
the Campaign for Economic Democracy. For
example, according to Barrons
Magazine, in 1980, he proudly described
the Campaign for Economic Democracy’s
strategy for getting the city of Santa
Monica to adopt what is unquestionably
some of the strictest rent-control laws
in the nation:

“Political campaigns are not
educational vehicles. What you do is
play on feelings and sentiments….We
sent out a postcard of an elderly
family, somewhat haggard — they
looked a little bit like an Auschwitz
picture. Stamped across their chest
was the word EVICTED.

“We found a senior citizen
who was dying of cancer who was being
evicted. We reprinted an article
[about him in the local paper]; the
headline was “Before I Die I’m
Going To Vote for Ruth Yannatta
[Goldway, Shearer’s hard-left wife]
and Rent Control.” We
distributed that on the door of every
tenant in the city two days before
the election…We considered
techniques hat played on people’s
feelings and emotions around a very
simple idea: that housing is a basic
human right, that it comes before the
need to profit.” href=”#N_12_”>⁽¹²⁾

The Campaign for Economic Democracy’s
rent-control initiative created an
electoral organization that served in
1981 to elect Shearer’s wife mayor of
Santa Monica and to give five of the
seven city council seats to CED
candidates. Shearer was, himself,
appointed — along with other CED
activists — by Mayor Goldway to the city
planning commission.

The CED in Power: This
radical cadre’s ambitions were
unmistakable. In 1982, Shearer told CBS
News “60 Minutes” that America
is a “profoundly unequal
country.” According to the Wall
Street Journal, Shearer said that as
a first step toward rectifying this state
of affairs, “the Campaign for
Economic Democracy was recommending a
radical redistribution of wealth in Santa
Monica.” Shearer informed “60
Minutes” that the idea was “to
use the power…of the government to
control the wealth of the city.” href=”#N_13_”>⁽¹³⁾

Interestingly, the means for
accomplishing this were laid out in 1976
in a book entitled The Cities’
Wealth: Programs for Community Economic
Control in Berkeley, California. It
was penned by Ed Kirshner, a fellow at
the West Coast IPS spin-off Foundation
for National Progress and publisher of
its magazine Mother Jones, and
others. The Cities’ Wealth was
published and distributed by the IPS
Conference on Alternative State and Local
Public Policy, with which Shearer was
associated.

This book offered “techniques of
economic and political policy which lead
toward controlling and reallocating a
city’s wealth.” The idea was to
develop in city government “a
feasible alternative to continued
corporate dominance of the economy”
— a favorite Shearer theme:

“Community ownership of
housing and real estate is the
ultimate goal of [our] housing
programs. That goal has been
approached through tenant unions,
rent control, a neighborhood
preservation ordinance,
rehabilitation and code enforcement
programs, and cooperative ownership
conversion. Each of these reforms is
intended as an interim step towards
cooperative and community-owned
housing by limiting property
speculation and thus deflating or
partially expropriating income
property values.” href=”#N_14_”>⁽¹⁴⁾

Such stratagems were employed to
considerable extent by Shearer and his
fellow CED activists from their positions
throughout the Santa Monica city
government of the mid-1980s. The
result came to be widely ridiculed as the
“People’s Republic of Santa
Monica,” a community at the tender
mercies of left-wing ideologues who
succeeded in seriously disrupting the
economy and degrading the quality of life
of the majority of citizens in pursuit of
radical redistributionist agenda.

Given the dubious achievements of this
period, Shearer’s efforts to disassociate
himself with CED are understandable, if
not excusable. The truth is that he was a
driving force behind the larger
“economic democracy”
initiative, of which the Campaign was a
part, for years. Indeed, it is
unsettling in the extreme that a man who
claims that he was disabused of most of
his life-long notions by just three
months in government service at the
U.S. Commerce appears to have learned so
little from several years of
service on the Santa Monica city planning
commission. href=”#N_15_”>⁽¹⁵⁾

Problem #3: The Clinton
Security Clearance Crisis

The preceding pages document a pattern
of apparent falsehoods, misleading
statements and highly selective
representations by Derek Shearer that
raise serious questions about his
truthfulness, reliability and eligibility
for a U.S. government security clearance.
Given the extraordinary lengths he has
gone to deny or conceal his long and
myriad relations with the Institute for
Policy Studies, for example, it would
appear that Dr. Shearer has something to
hide. This evident lack of
transparency would seem to preclude such
an individual from being given access to
classified information — to say nothing
of denying him a position that would
oversee a sensitive CIA post in a foreign
nation.

Concerns about Shearer’s connections
with IPS might, moreover, take on
additional significance in light of a
classified study conducted for the CIA’s
Office of Counter-Intelligence in 1989.
According to a 7 March 1994 letter
requesting a copy of this unpublished
study from CIA Director James Woolsey
signed by Sens. Jesse Helms and Hank
Brown, this study concerns “the
InterPress Service of Rome and its ties
to the Institute for Policy Studies,
headquartered in Washington, D.C.”
(The letter also asks Director Woolsey to
supply any other studies that have been
completed concerning IPS.) The
signatories contend that, “The
contents of this study are directly
relevant to the jurisdictional
responsibilities of [the Foreign
Relations] Committee in reviewing the
qualifications of a nominee currently
before the Committee [i.e., Derek
Shearer].”

Grounds for unease about granting
Shearer access to classified information
are also to be found in his published
view that:

“…The security
classification system is being used
not to prevent information from being
revealed to potential enemies, but to
insure control by the executive
branch over national security policy
and to prevent its revelation to the
American people.” href=”#N_16_”>⁽¹⁶⁾

Recent revelations of the discovery of
a KGB mole in the CIA has already
prompted insistent demands from Capitol
Hill for a tightening of procedures
governing access to classified
information. Such demands can only be
intensified by press accounts to the
effect that as many as
“hundreds” of White House
personnel are currently being given
protracted access to sensitive government
materials without proper security
vetting.

The Clinton Administration’s
apparent, cavalier disregard for Derek
Shearer’s record — and his own lack of
candor about it — seem, against this
backdrop, to be of a piece with its
serious inattention to security
procedures elsewhere. The ultimate effect
of such practices will inevitably be to
undermine the institutions responsible
for preserving the secrecy of classified
information and to invite future
catastrophes like that which resulted
from Aldrich Ames’ recruitment by Soviet
intelligence.

Conclusion

The Center for Security Policy
believes that, in light of the foregoing,
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
must reject Derek Shearer’s nomination to
become U.S. Ambassador to Finland. Were
the Committee to do otherwise, it will
emplace in a sensitive post a man whose
predilection for radical left-wing causes
will likely complicate bilateral
relations with a strategic nation and
possibly jeopardize important
intelligence operations under the purview
of the CIA station in Finland. At
the very least, it could create a very
undesirable precedent: that lying to the
Committee is not an impediment to
confirmation for presidential appointees.

The Center strongly recommends that,
at a minimum, the Foreign Relations
Committee must hold a further hearing on
the Shearer nomination in order to review
what appear to be the nominee’s untrue,
incomplete and misleading statements.
Under present circumstances, the Senate
will be unable to give its informed
advice on — let alone its responsible
consent to — this appointment to Embassy
Helsinki.

1. See From
the Folks Who Brought You the ‘Halbotts’:
Clinton Taps the Hard Left for Embassy
Helsinki, ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_24″>No. 94-D 24).

2. Emphasis added
throughout.

3. See, “The
Economist on Clinton’s Left,” by
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Wall Street
Journal, 10 September 1992.

4. From The
Nation, 1986.

5. For example,
Barbara Bick, an IPS staffer who became
national coordinator of the IPS-sponsored
National Conference on Alternative State
and Local Public Policy (CASLP), said in
1977 that this organization was to serve
as a “network” of “populist,
progressive, socialist,
innovative, open-minded, locally elected
officials.” As will be
discussed below, Shearer was an active
member of the CASLP “network.”
(From an interview with Bick in Communities
Magazine in February 1977.

6. It is one of
the ironies — and indictments — of the
quality of people being selected by the
Clinton Administration to occupy top
security policy positions that the same
17 March meeting of the Foreign Relations
Committee slated to consider the Shearer
nomination is also to consider another
highly controversial choice: Sam Brown’s
appointment to become Ambassador to the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe (CSCE). On 28 March 1978, an
article in the Chicago Tribune
reported that the former anti-Vietnam
activist turned Director of ACTION for
Jimmy Carter told a State Department
“Secretary’s Open Forum” that
“work-place democracy is a concept
ill-conceived in American society. It is
another of the place that we stand to
learn from Jamaica, from Tanzania, from
Cuba, from Yugoslavia.”

7. Brown responded
in writing on 11 March 1994 to questions
submitted by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC),
denying a New York Times account
of his conduct and that of other U.S.
anti-war activists in attendance at a
September 1977 event sponsored by the
communist Vietnamese on the occasion of
their admission into the U.N.
Specifically, he asserts now that he
“did not believe at the time that
the U.S. was acting as an imperialist
force seeking colonial gains in
Vietnam.”

8. Chicago,
Regnery Gateway, 1984, p. 131.

9. A member of the
U.S. Communist Party who Human Events
reported in June 1983 charged that the
United States was “not going to El
Salvador to kill Communists, but to kill
women and children.”
(“Liberal-Left Plans Anti-Reagan
Rallies, 25 June 1983, p. 4).

10. The Center
for Security Policy regrets that it has
been unable to substantiate a contention
made in its 1 March 1994 Decision
Brief concerning Derek Shearer’s
involvement with one of these
“alternative media” outlets
started by IPS — the rabidly anti-U.S.,
anti-Vietnam War Dispatch News Service.
His comment statement to the Foreign
Relations Committee that “To the
best of my knowledge, no stories of mine
were carried either by the international
or the domestic Dispatch News
Service” is not exactly categorical.

Ascertaining the truth in this case,
moreover, may be more complicated than in
other areas of Shearer’s record since he
clearly published, at least on occasion,
under a pseudonym. For example, an
article published in Parade
Magazine (at which his father, Lloyd
Shearer, was editor-at-large) on 21
September 1971, entitled “What the
War Has Done to Saigon,” has Derek Norcross
on the byline.

11. See, In
These Times, 9 May 1979.

12. As quoted by
John Boland in “Nader Crusade: The
Anti-Business Lobby is Alive and
Well,” Barrons, 12 October
1981, p. 20.

13. See, Prof.
DiLorenzo, op.cit.

14. Eve Bach,
Thomas Brom, Ed Kirshner, et. al., The
Cities Wealth: Programs for Community
Economic Control (Washington, D.C.:
Conference on Alternative State and Local
Policies, 1976), pp. 1, 45 and 19.

15. According to
the 11 September 1986 Los Angeles
Times, Shearer’s tenure on the
Planning Commission was abruptly ended
when he was ousted by a vote of the
Commission majority in light of his
“public criticism” of its
director and a fellow commissioner as
well as for “his [poor] attendance
record at commission meetings.”

16. From the
editors’ introduction to The Pentagon
Watchers, pp. xx-xi.