Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein — veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government — described Grant/Wraga as \"one of our leading authorities\" on Soviet deceit.


In a 1998 article appearing in Investors Business Daily (IBD), reporter John Berlau wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow\'s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments.

John Dziak — onetime senior intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — is quoted by IBD as saying were it not \"for someone like Natalie, we would have had more failures, and the Soviets would have had more successes.\"

Which leads us where?

In many of her writings, she dropped her last name and wrote under the byline Natalie Grant. That takes us to the spring 1998 issue of The Register. Therein, Grant identified Green Cross International (GCI) as a Non-Government Organization (NGO) founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist dictator of the Soviet Union. The aim of GCI was worldwide enforcement of a rigid environmental agenda.

Concurrent with the advancement of GCI, there was the birth of yet another NGO called the Earth Council, chaired by Maurice Strong, a key environmentalist mover and shaker at the United Nations. According to Wikipedia, Strong — a Canadian — describes himself as \"a socialist in ideology and a capitalist in methodology.\" The bio also notes that \"some consider Strong a frightening power seeker.\" And then this: \"He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade at a global conference, he\'s the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.\"

Meanwhile, about a dozen people participated in the organizing meeting of Gorbachev\'s GCI, including then-U.S. Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.). The congressman had publicly stated that regardless of whether the allegation of man-made \"global warming\" was valid or exaggerated, the U.S. should proceed to take the steps required to fight it because those steps supposedly would benefit the planet. (As explained in last week\'s column, the Cap and Trade — \"Tax and Rob\" — legislation aimed at carrying out the radical enviro agenda at a steep cost to American consumers and taxpayers was dropped like a hot potato in the U.S. Senate June 6, lest the great unwashed arise in anger and deliver an unwelcome verdict at the polls. It will be back in 2009. Connecting these dots is relevant. But I digress.)

The main organizing events

Other GCI meetings were to follow, including what Grant called \"The Big Event — the Moscow Conference,\" in January 1990. Then-Senator Al Gore was among the speakers. Only two years before, he had conducted hearings on Capitol Hill where the \"global warming\" theory was showcased.

As the Moscow conference got underway, the Soviet Union was then was on its last legs — down, but not yet out, you might say. Gorbachev, still the Soviet leader, voiced his government\'s demand that the nations push for a nuclear test ban, an international environmental monitoring system, a covenant to protect \"unique environmental zones\" (a mindset that has since led to an international fight over UN efforts to disallow snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park on American soil), support for United Nations environmental programs, and a follow-up conference in June 1992 in Brazil.

Grant writes that while Gorbachev was expressing the \"views\" and \"suggestions\" of the Soviet Communist Party, those suggestions did not fall on deaf ears. \"Before long, the activities of the movement began to reflect the communist \'recommendations.\'\"

Update: 2008

Now, why all this background?

On May 28, here in Washington, the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) was The Honorable Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic.

Klaus\'s book Blue Planet in Green Shackles had just been released. As the Czech head of state put it at the dinner, the purpose of the book was to outline his firm belief that much of organized environmentalism is \"an ideology I consider the most dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity in the current era.\"

Was Schumpeter right?

Klaus believes that the United States — for all its problems — is \"the most free country in the world and the inspiration for all of us. I emphasize it here and now mainly because of my growing frustration with the developments on the other side of the Atlantic where I\'ve just come from.\"

President Klaus then referred to the philosopher Joseph Alois Schumpeter, whose knowledge of tyranny came from such events in his life as having to flee Nazi Germany. Klaus noted that \"[Schumpeter\'s] evolutionary theory of the demise of capitalism [would be] based on its very success.\"

Here\'s how that theory plays out: Innovations would become a matter of routine, progress would be mechanized, problems would be \"simply solved\" by reason and science, entrepreneurship would be replaced by mere calculation, individual motivation would subside, collectivistic mentality would prevail and the growing teamwork in large corporations would lead to the gradual obsoleteness and at the end the disappearance of the crucial player (or perhaps mover) of capitalism — the entrepreneur.

This column would interject here that in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam years of the late seventies, there were early signs the Schumpeter theory might eventually become reality. The optimism and humming economy of the eighties got America (and much of the world) back on track.

However, Klaus believes Schumpeter\'s theory \"seems to be too pessimistic.\" The world simply has not followed that script. \"As one who in my country actively participated in the dismantling of communism and the building of a free society,\" he says, \"the collapse of [the Soviet empire] and the explicit acceptance of capitalism almost all over the world [is something which] with all due respect is clearly incompatible with Schumpeter\'s hypothesis.\"

Then what is the problem?

As Klaus told his CEI audience, there are other factors \"by which capitalism could be brought to an end, [such as in] the enormously expanding and growing disbelief in the ingenuity of man and in the advantages of the market process.\"

In the past, the Czech chief executive noted, socialist arguments were laced with slogans about \"the immiseration of the masses\" (workers of the world, unite, etc.). Now instead, there is \"a more dangerous slogan: the immiseration (or perhaps destruction) of the Planet.\"

In the older times, it was easy to prove in relatively short order whether people (i.e., workers) were better off. \"Now it will take centuries to come up with convincing proof that the Planet has been destroyed or does not find itself on the brink of destruction.\"

In other words, \"The free riding [of] this horse is therefore much easier. The ambitious politicians who try to mastermind the world and their fellow citizens have been dreaming for decades to find such a marvelous, from reality-immunized doctrine. Years or decades of cold weather will not disprove it — to my great regret. It is almost religious. My certainty that this ideology becomes the main vehicle for the destruction of the free market was my main reason for writing the book.\"

And just to pinpoint the problem, Klaus adds: \"Schumpeter was hopefully wrong in his predictions. And in addition to it, he has been dead now for almost six decades. Al Gore, however, is very much alive.\"

The Marxists\' new propaganda weapon

Or — again — as the late Natalie Grant put it, \"Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.\"

When she died, Natalie Grant Wraga\'s obituary quoted her as saying, \"One must give the Soviets their due. No other country is capable as are the Soviets of manipulating public opinion in the West.\"

Just delete the word \"Soviets\" and replace it with \"environmental Marxists,\" and you get a pretty clear picture of what faces us today