You already know all this... but interesting re Cora, Peter and others...
IPS was founded in 1963 by two former White House and State Department aides, Marcus Raskin and Richard
Barnet, who set about organizing networks of "progressive" contacts on Capitol Hill, in executive branch agencies, and
among academics. IPS placed its contacts in seminars with disarmament leaders and revolutionary activists who
supported Fidel Castro's Cuba and various Third World "national liberation movements" backed by the Soviets.
Together they worked out "alternative" U.S. policies - disarmament, ending military alliances, and nonintervention
against Soviet aggression carried out through surrogates. IPS's main targets remain the NATO alliance, Defense
Department, defense contractors, arms manufacturing companies and the intelligence agencies.
Richard Barnet provided a promotional blurb for The Iron Triangle in which he called it a "comprehensive and
devastating analysis of the defense procurement process." He praised CEP's report as "a major accomplishment and
of great importance." Barnet was listed among the CEP's first advisors and consultants in 1970, and from 1977 to
1980 was a CEP trustee.
The principal source for IPS funds(and a funder of the $100,000 CEP study) is the Samuel Rubin Foundation. The
chairman of the IPS board of trustees and president of the foundation is Peter Weiss, husband of Cora Weiss and
son-in-law of Samuel Rubin.
Until his death in December 1978, Samuel Rubin, retired chairman of Faberge, used his fortune to support the arts,
medical research, charities and many radical groups in addition to IPS and its Transnational Institute(TNI) subsidiary.
In 1935, the Comintern directed its parties into the "popular front," an era of Communist "respectability." Secret U.S.
Communist Party members openly enrolled as Communists on the voter rolls for the 1936 elections. Among them
was Samuel Rubin.
Peter Weiss, born 12/8/25 in Vienna, Austria, is the senior partner of the law firm Weiss, Dawid, Fross & Lehrman in
New York. He is a member of several professional associations of patent lawyers and his firm specializes in
trademark, copyright and international law. Weiss is a prominent member of the National Lawyers Guild(NLG), a
radical lawyers association organized in 1936 with the assistance of the Comintern and lawyers from the Communist
Party, U.S.A.(CPUSA). The NLG remains the U.S. section of the Soviet-controlled international lawyers' front, the
International Association of Democratic Lawyers(IADL), which is controlled by the Comintern's successor, the
Soviet Communist Party's International Department. In addition to grants to CEP through the Samuel Rubin
Foundation and Fund for Tomorrow, Peter Weiss has been a direct funder of CEP.
For some 15 years, Weiss has been a leader of the Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR), a Tax-Exempt litigation
group of NLG activists handling important cases against the U.S. intelligence agencies, and in representing Philip
Agee's interests, Castroite parties and support groups for foreign terrorist movements. Radical attorney and prominent
defender of domestic terrorists, William Kunstler, is a member of the CCR.
Cora Weiss, an officer of the Rubin foundation, gained notoriety as a leader of the U.S. anti-Vietnam coalitions who
traveled to Paris and Hanoi for repeated meetings with the Vietnamese Communist leaders. Her own organization, the
Committee of Liaison, became a conduit for contacts between American POWs and their families. Three POWs
brought back by her group testified in the U.S. Senate that their release from Hanoi was conditional on their making
anti-war propaganda statements for Weiss' "Liaison" group, an indication of the regard in which the North Vietnamese
held her efforts. After the 1975 conquest of South Vietnam, Cora Weiss directed projects of two organizations sending
material aid to Hanoi - Friendshipment and the Church World Service. In 1976, she was a key organizer of the
July 4 Coalition's anti-bicentennial demonstration in Philadelphia. She subsequently became a leader of the U.S.
disarmament movement and directed the Disarmament Program of Riverside Church in New York.
The head of IPS's Transnational Institute, Orlando Letelier, had documents at the time of his murder in 1976 showing
that he was being paid money brought clandestinely from Havana via the Cuban diplomatic pouch. Letelier was
sending political reports to Havana in the same way through the New York station chief of the Cuban Direccion
General de Inteligencia(DGI), whose cover was First Secretary of the Cuban U.N. Mission. He was Julian Torres Rizo,
identified as a DGI official in 1969 when he was working as a boathand on the ship carrying the first Venceremos
Brigade members to Havana. Rizo, as he preferred to be called, had a "private" office at the Center for Cuban
Studies in New York.
In 1977, an IPS research project that gathered psychological data and profiled hundreds of top U.S. corporate officials
via general surveys and in-depth interviews with selected executives and family members, resulted in publication of a
book, The Gamesman, by Michael Maccoby. Critics panned the book for superficiality, but not for lack of diligence in
collection of data.
Cora and Peter Weiss have used two foundations under their personal control - the defunct Twenty-First Century
Fund and the Fund for Tomorrow - to receive some $50,000 a year from the Rubin Foundation and redistribute this to
radical projects working parallel to IPS and to the "independent" spin-off projects within the IPS network. These
recipients include the Center for Cuban Studies, the North American Congress on Latin America(NACLA) and the
Corporate Data Exchange(CDE). |
