The Western Goals Foundation was a private intelligence dissemination network active on the right-wing in the United States. It was wound up in 1986 when the Tower Commission revealed it had been part of Oliver North's Iran–Contra funding network.
After the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals of the early 1970s, several laws were passed to restrict police intelligence gathering within political organizations. The laws tried to make it necessary to demonstrate that a criminal act was likely to be uncovered by any intelligence gathering proposed. Many files on radicals, collected for decades, were ordered destroyed. The unintended effect of the laws was to privatize the files in the hands of 'retired' intelligence officers and their most trusted, dedicated operatives.
Many of these people, like John Rees and Congressman Larry McDonald, were members of the World Anti-Communist League, the John Birch Society, and similar organizations. These two men joined forces with Major General John K. Singlaub to form the Western Goals Foundation in 1979. One of its principal sponsors was the Texan billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt.
Western Goals was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after a police officer was caught adding information from the disbanded Los Angeles Police Department "Red Squad" to a related computer Bulletin board system.
It also founded an offshoot, Western Goals (UK), (later the Western Goals Institute), which was briefly influential in British Conservative politics.
Famous quotes containing the words western, goals and/or foundation:
“But go, and if you listen she will call,
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
“If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“The ability to secure an independent livelihood and honorable employ suited to her education and capacities is the only true foundation of the social elevation of woman, even in the very highest classes of society. While she continues to be educated only to be somebody’s wife, and is left without any aim in life till that somebody either in love, or in pity, or in selfish regard at last grants her the opportunity, she can never be truly independent.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)