OPINION ONLY

The UN Human Rights main office was in Geneva, and this gave her husband a solid base in Switzerland together with access to top UN administrators, including those in the World Health Organisation (WHO) and rival UN organisations like the FAO (Agriculture) and World Bank, which promoted tobacco as a cash crop.

Both Laura and Paul Dietrich were dedicate' 'progressive' Catholics. While spending time in Italy and Switzerland, the Dietrich's also developed strong Vatican connections (both through State Department Cold-war associations, and the religious liks) which provided another level of networking contacts for Paul in Latin America, the Philippines, etc. He became an administrator of the Knights of Malta which, in America, ran fiercely Anti-Communist Jesuit-type operations.

Dietrich operates through a number of different channels:

The Republican Party

Paul Dietrich serving one term in the Missouri State Assembly, lost an election, and then attached himself to the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign by setting up the Funds for a Conservative Majority (FCM) operation with the help of Jack Kemp and some of the Missouri and Washington party leaders.

During the campaign they raised $2 million for Reagan, and after their 1980 success, they transformed the FCM into an anti-Democrat harrassment organisation, running legal attack campaigns against associations which, in their eyes, had been guilty of funding the Democratics. This harrassment continued until after the second term Reagan election.

Overlapping his political activites, in 1982 he joined forces with a few other Missouri Republicans to run a commercial disinformation and lobbying operation called the National Center for Legislative Research (NCLR) which published an elaborate propaganda newsletter (Legislative Policy) , which was sent free to all American politicians and power-brokers. It featured paid editorial material cobbled together from material submitted by corporations and trade associations.

The tobacco archives show that the Tobacco Institute paid $30,000 a year for the privilege of having their articles circulated through this magazine.

Tobacco Industry lobbying.

In what appears to have been a 'test run', they bought the then popular American cultural magazine, the Saturday Review , and installed Dietrich as managing editor. He was supported by a 'publisher' who was actually Kansas City restaurant-owner associated with the tobacco industry's law firm Shook Hardy & Bacon (with Smokeless Tobacco Association family connections). Later Nixon's faithful aide and biographer, Frank Cannon (who's family also worked for Phillip Morris) also came on-board as the real editor.

The combination proved to be disastrous, and the group ended up with Dietrich and his editorial team serving out their contractual obligations by developing and publishing the Philip Morris Magazine, an expensive give-away glossy magazine with both propaganda and general interest stories which the company free-mailed to a million or so smokers around the world.

[The story is too complex to go into here. See the full story of the Saturday Review takeover.]

In order to exploit both Dietrich's talent for intrigue and his contacts in Geneva and the United Nations (mainly via his wife), Philip Morris then paired him with lawyer-lobbyist David A Morse under the corporate control of Andrew Whist who headed PM Intenational's Corporate Affairs. This team became involved in a number of ventures, mainly those to do with recruiting European and Asian scientists (WhiteCoats) as supporters of their claim that second-hand smoke was of harmless. They also focussed on denigrating the activities of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in an attempt to make it drop its anti-smoking programs by branding it a "waste of money" and claiming that smoking was a "low budget priority". Progressively Morse and Dietrich, under Andrew Whist, became involved in international political lobbying for the tobacco industry as a whole, but Morse died suddenly in 1990 — and he had many of the most useful contacts.

An index of Paul Dietrich's main accomplishments held in the Philip Morris files lists (among other radio and TV activities) these headings for his achievements in planting anti-WHO articles in newspapers (only a few cuttings are in the archives):

• Wall Street Journal Articles;
• Other US syndicated articles written on WHO;
• London Times, International Herald Tribune & other British articles;
• European articles written on WHO;
• South China Morning Post & other Asian articles written on WHO;
• Middle East article written on WHO;
• South African article written on WHO;
• Latin American articles written on WHO.

a) Trade promotions operations:

• American European-Community Association (AECA)
• New York Society for International Affairs (NYSIA)

[These were fake Philip Morris funded and controlled organisation which provided junkets to a range of American, European, and South American politicians to bring them into intimate contact with the tobacco industry]

• Libertad, This involved a series of global junkets and journalistic media-circuses under the banner of a hedonistic 'Anti-Wowser/ Anti-Nanny-State 'circle of literary giants'. It was actually run by Whist, Morse and Dietrich from Philip Morris in association with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, columnists,. and Richard Mellon Scaife's American Spectator magazine. The focus of this fake society was to brand anti-smoking activists as 'kill-joys'.

• Institute for International Health and Development (IIHD) which acted as a front for Philip Morris's totally-controlled McGill University ETS conference.

  The IIHD supposedly 'sponsoring' the McGill University conference and published the concocted scientific proceedings in many different languages. It's funding came from the tobacco industry for all of these services, and it acted as a publishing house for tobacco propaganda.

  The IIHD was never more than a small office housed in the grounds of the Catholic University (Paul Dietrich was on the Uni Board) in Washington DC, with a staff of four (two part-time). They were mainly involved in producing a quarterly free-circulation magazine called International Health & Development which appears to contain both industry and State Department articles.

  The IIHD also had a letter-drop office in Geneva in what had been the premises of Surrey & Morse, the law firm that Dietrich had joined. Although it had de facto NGO status (allowing it entry to closed UN discussions) it had no membership, and no other source of funds than the tobacco industry (unless the Catholic Church or the State Department had been persuaded to contribute).

Catholic and Vatican Connections

Clearly these religious associations were used to persuade the Washington Catholic University to provide credibility and cover for the surreptitious tobacco-promoting IIHD operation. Around 1990 it began to carry "The Catholic University" name on its letterhead, as if it were a true Catholic operation.

Catholic and ILO credentials carried a lot of weight in Geneva at the time the Berlin Wall began to come down — opening up Eastern Europe to Western religious and social influences — and also to corporations anxious to get a foot-hold in new marketing territory. This entirely-fictious, tobacco-funded, organization managed to gain NGO [Non-Government Organization] status with some of the United Nations agencies which meant that its representatives could sit in on otherwise-closed conferences while tactics, programs and projects were being discussed.

Dietrich used the facade of the IIHD to focus a series of attacks on the budgetary priorities of the World Health Organisation (WHO), in an attempt to get it to abandon its anti-smoking programs. These articles were planted in major US and European newspapers and magazines. He also made many personal appearances on radio and television programs, and built a reputation as an expert on the WHO, and an independent auditor and critic of UN excesses (and there were many at this time). He lobbied hard for the USA to withdraw funding from UN institutions.

As a critic of WHO, he also managed to get himself coopted (alongside ex President Jimmy Carter) to WHO's Latin-American subsidiary, the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO). And this put him in a position where he was able to influence, and possibly sabotage, some of the WHO/PAHO Latin American anti-smoking plans. He seems to have tried but not succeeded (at least, the PAHO now claims he didn't succeed!)

International Health & Development

In the mid 1990s, Dietrich specialised in a few areas of tobacco industry promotion:

• He became a regular lecturer for Philip Morris and British American Tobacco in speaking to journalists at media junkets held (usually) at some tropical resort in the Caribbean. These were run by the tobacco industry "to provide balance" to the growing anti-smoking movement, and he used his own status as editor/director of the Saturday Review to impress the journalists. Philip Morris later handed Dietrich over to work under BAT's Issues Manager, Sharon Boyse on most of these junkets.
• For many years he also specialised in influencing high-ranking politicians in Asia (using his wife's credentials at the UN, and also his Catholic connections). Surrey & Morse and the old ILO associations had also giving him trade union and political contacts in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia.
• He also became keynote speaker at many junkets for journalists run under the Libertad banner. These involved prominent newspaper columnists, lawyers and academics with a 'bon-vivant' slant, who toured the world as a pleasure-seeking group, holding media conferences condemning anti-smoking activists as 'wowsers' who were trying to promote a 'Nanny State.'

He has openly boasted, for instance, that he was commissioned by the US State Department to hound the Japanese Director-General of the WHO out of office (which would also have pleased his tobacco industry associates).

For those who are dubious about "CIA conspiracy claims", there is tobacco industry document indexing the many activities Paul Dietrich had performed on their behalf which simply includes this entry:

15. Other negative articles on the WHO. (Paul Dietrich assisted the editors in all of these articles and provided information used in the articles. Almost all of the material appearing in the New York Times front page article came from a US State Department document leaked to the NYT by Paul Dietrich.)

David Morse, Dietrich's partner in many of these ventures (until he died in 1990), was clearly associated with the State Department on his own account, and also had connections through his previous partnership with Walter Surrey Morse (who helped the CIA establish the money-laundry operation known as .

Surrey & Morse's business was essentially to help American companies make the right contacts with business and political leaders in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. They employed ex-CIA operatives and ex-Ambassadors as their partners, and were able to call upon State Department assistance when floating tobacco and other business ventures around the world.

Walter Sterling Surrey (Surrey & Morse) had been the key State Department offical charged with ferreting out the Nazi gold stashes held in neutral countries (Switzerland, Sweden, and Middle East/North Africa) after the war. This put him into close association with Swiss and Swedish bankers (mainly the Wallemburf family), and this served him well when he later became a banker for the CIA. This has now been well exposed (World Finance Corporation, Nugan Hand Bank, etc.).

So Surrey & Morse, with their banking, business, labor and Catholic connections had highly exploitable political links to many of the top leaders, businesmen and bankers in Eastern Europe, and many also in the Middle East and some parts of Asia. Whenthe Stalinist lock-down of the USSR ended, and the American tobacco industry began to expand internationally, they were in a prime position to provide contacts and grease-the-skids for the American cigarette companies.

[According to one recent (and credible) report, in 2004-05 Laura Jordan Dietrich was still working for the State Department in some sort of CIA operative training in Maryland. This acces to a secret underground network gave Dietrich, Surrey and Morse influential connections at a top bureaucratic level.]

It is also quite likely that Dietrich's capital fund management operations also have some of their roots in the State Department koffers. CIA staffers also need managed superannuation schemes, and such services are usually provided as a sort-of 'bonus' through old friends and ex-employees.