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:
“trying to live in the terrible western world
here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious,”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M”I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.””
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)