Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: General

Original essays treating the assassinations of 1960s, their historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • Bremer & Wallace: It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

    Bremer & Wallace: It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

    From the May-June 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 4) of Probe

    “I have no evidence, but I think my attempted assassination was part of a conspiracy.”
    – Governor George Wallace

    The story was both familiar and devastating. Another crazy gunman, portrayed as a withdrawn loner, had taken down another leading political figure in our country. On May 15, 1972, Arthur Herman Bremer pulled a gun and fired upon Governor George Corley Wallace during his campaign rally at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland.

    CBS photographer Laurens Pierce caught part of the shooting on film. A clip from this piece is included in the film Forrest Gump. Wallace is seen with his right side exposed as Bremer reaches forward through the crowd, plants the gun near Wallace’s stomach, and fires. Bremer continues firing four more shots, all in essentially the same forward direction, roughly parallel to the ground. Due largely to what was shown on the film, and to the apparent premeditation exhibited in his alleged diary, Bremer was arrested, tried and convicted.

    To most people, this case was truly incontestable. This time, a deranged (though not legally insane) gunman had taken out a presidential hopeful. But as with the assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, there appears to be more to the story.

    Wallace alone was wounded in nine different places. Three other people were wounded by a bullet apiece. That makes twelve wounds. The gun found at the scene and presumed to be the only weapon used could only hold five bullets. Looks like someone brought magic bullets to Laurel that day.

    Doctors who treated Wallace said he was hit by a minimum of four bullets, and possibly five. Yet three other victims were hit by bullets, and bullets were recovered from two of them. The New York Times reported that there was “broad speculation on how four persons had suffered at least seven separate wounds from a maximum of five shots,” adding that although various law enforcement agencies had personnel on the scene, these agencies claimed that “none of their officers or agents had discharged their weapons.”1 Curiously absent is the logical deduction: perhaps a second shooter was present.

     

    nyt-wounds.jpg

     

    Bear in mind that shots 1 and 2 in the above picture represent two wounds each since they were through-and-through wounds, bringing Wallace’s total wound count to nine. In addition, three other people were wounded, bringing the total wound count to 12.

    Note too the low placement of the upper chest wound (4). Watch where this wound appears in the other two bullet scenarios which follow.

     

    shots-wp.jpg (47354 bytes)

    (Picture from the Washington Post, 5/17/72)

    Note that in the scenario described above, bullets would have had to enter Wallace from three directions: his right side, his front and from behind his left shoulder. How could one man, firing straight ahead, do that?

     

    newsweek-wounds.jpg (26538 bytes)

    (Picture from Newsweek, 5/29/72)

    Note the odd trajectories posited by Newsweek. The bullet paths do not trace to a single firing position, and instead require the shooter to be both behind and somewhat above Wallace.

    There were policemen on the roof of the shopping center, looking for snipers. Did they miss one? Did they include one?

    And if the shoulder wound entered the chest first and then exited the shoulder, then there is the problem of the wound across the back of Wallace’s left shoulder blade. The CBS film of the shooting shows Bremer firing a gun, but does not show us how Wallace’s body was positioned following the initial shot. Wallace ultimately fell on his back. If he turned his back to the gun, allowing the bullet to graze his back left shoulder blade, how did a bullet enter his chest to exit his right shoulder?

     

    Curious Bullet Trails

    Two bullets were removed from Wallace. Wallace’s right arm was shot through in two places, leaving four wounds. Doctors speculated that the two bullets that caused these wounds continued on into Wallace’s chest and abdomen. The two bullets were recovered from the chest and abdomen wounds. But three wounds remained unaccounted for on Wallace at that point. The second chest wound was connected, perhaps by necessity, to the wound in the shoulder. In addition, Wallace took a grazing wound in the left shoulder blade.

    One bullet was removed from Secret Service agent Nicholas Zarvos. He was shot in the right side of his throat; the bullet lodged in his left jaw. Another bullet was removed from the knee of campaign worker Dorothy Thompson. Curiously, the fact that a bullet was removed from Ms. Thompson was not made public until Bremer’s trial. Capt. Eldred C. Dothard of the Alabama State Patrol was wounded by a bullet grazing his abdomen. And one bullet was recovered from the pavement. If four bullets wounded Wallace, and two others had bullets in them, at least one of the bullets that wounded Wallace went on into one of the other victims. And if only one of them went into another victim, Dothard’s grazing bullet must have ended in Thompson’s knee or Zarvos’s throat. No single scenario seems to satisfy all wounds.

    But the wounds are only the start of the curiousities in this case.

    Ballistic Evidence (or Lack Thereof)

    At Bremer’s trial, his court-appointed lawyer, Benjamin Lipsitz, got Robert Frazier of the FBI to admit to the following facts:

    1. Bremer’s fingerprints were not found on the gun recovered at the scene.
    2. The gun could not be matched to the victim bullets.
    3. The bullets were too damaged to make such a comparison possible.2

    In the CBS film, Bremer is clearly shown holding a gun without gloves. How is it that he failed to leave fingerprints? And matches between guns and bullets are routinely made. How is it that the bullets were so damaged in this case, and not damaged beyond identifiability in so many others? As for Frazier’s comment that the bullets were too damaged to be able to make comparisons, note that the day after the shooting, the Washington Post had reported that Zavros’ doctor stated that the bullet from Zavros’ jaw “was removed intact.”

    In addition, Frazier admitted that Bremer had been given paraffin casts, but tested negative for nitrates (found in gunpowder, among other substances), as had Lee Harvey Oswald in similar tests nine years earlier. However, a doctor who treated Bremer for his own wounds shortly after the shooting claimed he had washed Bremer’s hands with surgical soap, which would have removed all traces of gunpowder residue. It seems odd, however, that the authorities holding Bremer would allow evidence to be washed away.

    The gun itself was not wrested from Bremer’s hand, but was found on the pavement by Secret Service agent Robert A. Innamorati. He picked it up from the pavement, and then “kept it secure until 9:00pm that evening,”3 at which point he turned it over to the FBI.

    The gun was traced to Bremer because his car license was recorded in the files. But the owner of the shop did not remember Bremer. That may seem normal in most cases, but by nearly all other recorded accounts, Bremer was hard to miss. People described him as having a sickly, incessant smile, and a pasty white color that made him stick out from the crowd.

    There were other guns at the plaza that day. The Washington Post reported that “At least two Prince George’s policemen were stationed on the shopping center rooftop, surveying for potential snipers, when Governor Wallace’s caravan arrived….”4 Many other policemen and Secret Service agents were in the crowd near Wallace during his appearance there.

    Because of the numerous discrepancies and lack of hard physical evidence linking Bremer to the actual bullets that wounded the victims, at the opening of his trial, Bremer’s lawyer said, “I’m not trying to kid you. I don’t know whether he [Bremer] shot Wallace or not. I think some doctors will tell you even Arthur Bremer doesn’t know if shot Wallace.” Lipsitz suggested instead that the bullets may have been fired by any of the dozens of policemen at the scene.

    During the trial, Bremer was placed in the audience portion of the courtroom. Several witnesses could not identify him in the crowd as having been the gunman they claimed to have seen or tackled.

    Second Suspect Rumors

    The Maryland police originally issued a bulletin regarding a second suspect in the shooting. An all-points bulletin described the man as a white male, six feet three inches, 220 pounds, with silver gray hair, driving a 1971 light blue Cadillac.5 The bulletin was retracted soon after, however, and the police disavowed later that the bulletin had anything to do with the assassination attempt. Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward, wrote several of the pieces relating to the Wallace shooting, authored an article claiming to refute this and other rumors surrounding the case. According to Bernstein, a man had been seen changing his auto license tags from Georgia to Maryland plates. The car, a light blue Cadillac, was later found abandoned. The police reported that the incident was unconnected with the shooting.

    There had been an earlier incident that bears noting. According to Dothard, two men with guns appeared at a Wallace rally nine days before the attempted assassination. One man apprehended was, without explanation, released. The other man escaped. Curiously, there is no record of the man’s arrest, or of anything about his companion.6

    CBS and the Wallace Shooting

    As mentioned earlier, CBS cameraman Laurens Pierce made a now famous film of the attempt on Wallace’s life. What’s odd is that this was the third time Pierce had caught Bremer on tape. Pierce had seen Bremer twice before shooting day—once at an earlier rally in Wheaton, Maryland, and once sometime before that. According to the New York Times (5/17/72),

    Mr. Pierce, who has been traveling with the Governor since April 30, said in an interview that he was convinced he had seen the suspect before he encountered him Monday in Wheaton, because “the previous time I saw him he was fanatic almost in appearance, so I did a close-up shot.”

    Pierce dould not remember where this earlier occurance took place. At Wheaton, however, Pierce related that he went up to Bremer and told him he had filmed him at a previous ralley. Pierce claimed, “he shied away from me, as if to say, ‘No, no!’”7

    Catching a would-be assassin on film before the shooting happened most recently in the Rabin assassination case. The alleged assassin was filmed for several minutes by himself, before the assassination took place.

    What is especially odd is that, while Pierce picked Bremer out of the crowd, filmed him and talked to him, the Secret Service did not, despite his having crossed places with them before. During a Nixon appearance in Canada, Bremer stayed at a hotel that housed about three dozen Secret Service agents. In his diary, Bremer talks about watching them with his binoculars, and being caught by one of them on camera. In addition, according to William Gullett, the chief executive of Prince George’s County, Maryland, Bremer had been arrested previously in Milwaukee and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The charge was later reduced to disorderly conduct. Milwaukee police, however, were unable to find any record of his arrest. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, at a previous Wallace appearance, a parking lot attendant had called the police because he saw Bremer sitting in a car, outside the place Wallace was later to appear, for the better part of the day. The police questioned Bremer, but when Bremer told them he simply wanted to get a good seat, they believed him and left him alone. Bremer had also walked away from his life a few months earlier, disappearing from two jobs without any word. Wallace campaign workers noticed Wallace and mentioned that he seemed strange. Lastly, Bremer’s family was listed as a problem family with social service agencies in Wisconsin. Despite all of the above, the Secret Service data bank had no record of Wallace.

    Bremer’s Expenditures

    Bremer spent at least two months traveling between Milwaukee, Canada, New York and Maryland before the Laurel incident. Yet Bremer never had any significant source of income. His last two jobs before he disappeared from Milwaukee mid-February of 1972 were as a busboy and a janitor. As the New York Times put it,

    How did the former bus boy and janitor, who earned $3,016 last year, according to a Federal income tax form found in his apartment, support himself and manage to buy guns, tape recorder, portable radio with police band, binoculars and other equipment he was carrying, as well as finance his travels?8

    Curiously, the New York Times appeared to have inflated the income figure. Both the Washington Post and Time magazine had previously reported that the Federal income tax form found in Bremer’s apartment showed a much lower figure: $1,611. The lower figure is likely the accurate one, given that Bremer made only $9.45 a day. And even then, he would have had to put in for overtime to reach that figure. Bremer could not have had that full sum available, as he had to pay rent and eat during that year. Assuming he spent money on little else, there is still an enormous problem here. Bremer was able to purchase a car for $795 in cash, fly to and from New York City, stay at the exclusive Waldorf Astoria hotel, drive to and from Ottawa, Canada, where he stayed at another exclusive hotel, the Lord Elgin (where the Secret Service were staying during Nixon’s visit), buy three guns, all of which cost upwards of $80, take a helicopter ride in NYC, obtain a ride in a chauffered limousine, tip a girl at a massage parlor $30, and so forth. As with the cases of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, this “loner” clearly had financial support from an outside source.

    One person may have provided a key to this part of the puzzle. Earl S. Nunnery, trainmaster for the Chesapeak & Ohio Railway’s rail-auto ferry service through the Great Lakes region, told the Associated Press and confirmed to the New York Times that Bremer had taken his automobile from Milwaukee to Ludington, Michigan in April and again in May. But more importantly, Nunnery recalled the Bremer was not alone. He described Bremer’s companion as a well-dressed man, about 6′ 2″ tall, weighing 225 pounds, with curled hair that appeared heavily sprayed, that hung down over his ears. The companion appeared to have a New York accent. Nunnery said the man talked excitedly about moving some political campaign from Wisconsin to Michigan. Nunnery was so curious about which political candidate these two were discussing that he ventured a look at the car, hoping a bumper sticker might provide an answer. In the car of Bremer’s companion, he saw a third person with long hair, who could have been male or female.9 Interestingly, at the Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Bremer had been seen talking to a slim, attractive woman accompanied by some “hippie types” who were distributing anti-Wallace literature.10

    Despite this evidence, the FBI, police and media were busily painting Bremer as a loner, without accomplices.

    Curiously, Bremer was not simply following Wallace. His Ottawa trip coincided with Nixon’s appearance there, and his diary is full of references to his wanting to kill Nixon. His stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC corresponded to a night candidate Hubert Humphrey had planned to stay there. But Humphrey cancelled, and Wallace went back to Milwaukee, only to leave the next day on the auto-rail ferry for Michigan.

    The FBI’s Strange Behavior

    In a move reminiscent of the treatment of witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, the FBI busily instructed witnesses not to talk to the press.11 The FBI took possession of hotel records and instructed Waldorf-Astoria hotel employees not to divulge how much Bremer paid to stay there.12 They told Representative Henry Reuss and his aides not to divulge Bremer’s responses to a questionnaire he had responded to and returned to them.13

    E. Howard Hunt and Bremer?

    The belated desire for secrecy does not jibe with other actions taken by the Bureau. For example, right after the shooting, FBI people entered Bremer’s apartment in Milwaukee. But then, the FBI left for an hour and a half. Upon their return, they sealed off the apartment to all visitors. But why was the apartment left open for press and other visitors in the interim? Anyone could have walked off with, or more interestingly, planted incriminating evidence there. In fact, Gore Vidal, in the New York Review of Books, wrote a long essay in which he postulated that Watergate figure, expert forger and longtime Kennedy assassination suspect Everett Howard Hunt had penned Bremer’s infamous diary. He cited literary allusions and devices combined with misspellings that looked so phony as to have been made deliberately as reasons to disbelieve that Bremer was the original author. Hunt had claimed that Charles Colson had asked him to fly to Milwaukee after the assassination attempt to see what Bremer’s political leanings were.14 Colson maintained, however, that no such conversation took place, and claimed he had instead asked the FBI to look closely into the matter and to keep him posted on what they found. Colson argued that it would make no sense for him to ask the FBI to investigate, and then to send Hunt into the waiting arms of the FBI at Bremer’s apartment. Given Hunt’s proclivity to tell untruths, and given the plausibility of Colson’s position, it seems likely Hunt’s story emerged to cover his own interest in the case. In his autobiography, Hunt claims he went so far as to call airlines in an attempt to book a flight to Milwaukee that night. Hunt wrote,

    Reluctantly, I began to pack a bag, adding to it the shaving kit that held my CIA-issue physical disguise and documents….I called several airlines and found that the only available flight would put me in Milwaukee about 11 o’clock that night.15

    In the end, however, Hunt claims he decided not to go when he realized the place would be crawling with FBI by the time he got there. Was Hunt afraid that a flight he had booked, and perhaps taken, would be discovered, hence the cover story? In the end, we do not know whether Hunt flew there or not, and whether or not Colson or Hunt suggested the trip in the first place. But there is a curious footnote to this. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post received an anonymous tip that one of the Watergate suspects had gone to meet with Bremer in Milwaukee.16 While no evidence emerged to support that tip, it remains an intriguing item. Even Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, made the following comment to Woodward, Bernstein and other editors he had summoned. “There’s one thing we’ve got to think about,” he said, regarding the Wallace shooting. “The ultimate dirty trick.”17

    Dirty Tricks in ’72

    The suggestion of something more sinister in the shooting of Governor Wallace needs to be placed against the backdrop of all that was happening in 1972. Donald Segretti pulled off many dirty tricks on the Democrats during this year. For example, at a Muskie fundraiser, liquor, flowers, pizza and entertainers suddenly appeared, unrequested, cash on delivery. A reprint of an article dealing unfavorably with Edward Kennedy’s role in the Chappaquidick incident was distributed to members of Congress on facsimiles of Muskie’s stationery. Interestingly, the FBI found numerous phone calls from E. Howard Hunt to Segretti, implying that Hunt was perhaps directing Segretti’s efforts.

    1972 was truly a low point in American democracy. This was the year of the “Canuck Letter,” a letter supposedly written by an aide to presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie, in which the aide claimed Muskie condoned the use of the perjorative term “Canuck” regarding the many French-Americans living in New Hampshire. This letter was published by right-winger William Loeb before the New Hampshire primary. The following day, the same publication displayed a scathing personal attack on Muskie’s wife. On the next day, when Muskie abandoned his prepared speech and uncharacteristically took off after Loeb for these pieces, Muskie inexplicably lost his famous composure and broke down into tears. According to Bob Woodward, his famous source “Deep Throat” told him the Canuck Letter came right out of the White House. According to another source, Ken Clawson, the man who originally provided Bremer’s identity to the Post’s editors when no one was talking, admitted to having written the Canuck letter. Clawson was then employed by the White House. But even more intriguing is what Miles Copeland, longtime CIA heavyweight, had to say about Muskie’s subsequent breakdown and Hunt’s possible role therein:

    On one occasion, Jojo’s [a pseudonym for a high-level CIA officer] office was asked for an LSD-type drug that could be slipped into the lemonade of Democratic orators, thus causing them to say sillier things than they would say anyhow. To this day, some of my friends at the Agency are convinced that Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy or somebody got hold of a variety of that drug and slipped it into Senator Muskie’s lemonade before he played that famous weeping scene.18

    Dirty tricks were used against George McGovern’s campaign as well. In All the President’s Men, Woodward claimed his source Deep Throat told him the following:

    [Hunt’s] operation was not only to check leaks to the papers but often to manufacture items for the press. It was a Colson-Hunt operation. Recipients include all you guys—Jack Andersen, Evans & Novak, the Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune. The business of [McGovern’s choice for Vice President, Senator Thomas] Eagleton’s drunk-driving record or his health records, I understand, involves the White House and Hunt somehow. 19

    On a more sinister note, Lou Russell was on James McCord’s payroll while employed to provide security for McGovern’s campaign headquarters. McCord paid Russell through Bud Fensterwald’s Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CIA).20 Another plant inside the McGovern campaign, Tom Gregory, was being run by Howard Hunt.21

    1972 is most famous, however, for the Watergate break-in, which ultimately led to Nixon’s self-removal from office. The CIA played a heavy and interesting role in both the break-in and the subsequent revelations that led to Nixon’s removal. As Probe has written about in past issues, it appears the CIA operatives deliberately got themselves caught in the Watergate hotel so as not to blow other operations. Then, when Helms was removed, removing Nixon was seen as payback. Those who most contributed to exposing Nixon’s activities, such as Alexander Butterfield, James McCord, and Howard Hunt, all had relationships with the CIA. If the cumulative weight of the evidence is to be believed, it appears that the CIA ran the country’s election process in 1972, deciding which candidates would survive or fail, and participating in acts of sabotage.

    Is it too far fetched to suggest they may have had an interest in controlling the political fortunes of others that year, even by such drastic means as assassination? From what we know of their presence in the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, such as suggestion can hardly be called far-fetched. Therefore, we must ask that most ugly of questions: is there evidence of CIA involvement in the Wallace shooting?

    According to newspaperwoman Sybil Leek and lawyer-turned-investigative-reporter Bert Sugar, the answer is yes.

    Sinister Connections

    According to Leek and Sugar, while Bremer was at the Lord Elgin hotel in Ottawa, he met with a Dennis Cossini. Famed conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell and Alan Stang identified Cossini as a CIA operative. Cossini was found dead from a massive heroin overdose in July, 1972, just two months after the Wallace shooting. Cossini had no history of drug use.

    Cossini’s address book contained the phone number of a John J. McCleary. McCleary lived in Sacramento, California, and was employed by V & T International, an import-export firm. McCleary drowned in the Pacific ocean in the fall of 1972. His father, amazingly, drowned around the same time in Reno, Nevada.22

    If the CIA was somehow involved, that could explain both E. Howard Hunt’s immediate interest in the case, as well as the role of CBS in filming Bremer in the act of shooting. CBS and the CIA shared a particularly close relationship. CIA involvement might go far in explaining the following connections as well.

    Bremer’s brother, William Bremer, was arrested shortly after the Wallace shooting for having bilked over 2,000 Miami matrons out of over $80,000 by signing them up for non-existant weight-loss sessions. Curiously, Bremer’s lawyer was none other than Ellis Rubin, the man who had defended many anti-Castro activists and who defended the CIA men who participated in the Watergate break-in.23

    Even more curious is Bremer’s half-sister Gail’s relationship with the Reverend Jerry Owen (ne Oliver Brindley Owen), who figures prominently in the RFK case. Owen’s bible-thumping show was cancelled from KCOP in Los Angeles when evidence surfaced showing he had a possibly sinister relationship with Sirhan Sirhan just prior to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. After the assassination, Owen had gone to the police with a strange tale of having picked Sirhan up as a hitchhiker. But other witnesses claimed Owen had given Sirhan cash, and had more of a relationship with Sirhan that he had admitted. Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward wrote a letter to his colleagues detailing an interesting experience he had with Owen:

    In the summer of 1971 as a broadcaster, I attempted unsuccessfully to contact Owen for an interview. In the spring of 1972, while I was campaigning for political office, Jerry Owen left word at my campaign headquarters that he would like to see me the following day. The call was placed just hours after Governor Wallace had been shot. Owen did not keep the appointment the following day.

    A short time after the hearing I conducted last May [1975] into the Senator Kennedy ballistics evidence, Jerry Owen called again, saying he would like to see me to disclose the full story behind the conspiracy.

    He came the following day, and I obtained his permission to tape record his conversation. In my opinion, he provided no information beyond what he had stated in 1968 to the authorities and to the press. However, there was one addition: when I questioned him as to why he did not keep our appointment the day after Governor Wallace had been shot, Owen volunteered that he was personal friends with the sister of Arthur Bremmer [sic]….Owen stated that Gale Bremmer [sic – his half sister was Gail Aiken] was employed by his brother here in Los Angeles for several years and had then just left Los Angeles for Florida because she was continually harassed by the FBI.24

    Links to the RFK case, which appears to be awash in CIA involvement, do not end here. In fact, Bremer had checked out two books on Sirhan from the Milwaukee Public Library in 1972 and had made comments about them in his journal. But perhaps the most interesting connection yet is the one discovered by Betsy Langman. Langman flew from her New York home to Los Angeles to talk to Dr. William Bryan, suspected hypnotist of Sirhan in the RFK assassination saga. On the pretext of doing an article on hypnosis, she encouraged the egotistical Bryan to elaborate at length on his ventures with “Boston Strangler” Albert Di Salvo, “Hollywood Strangler” Henry Bush, and about hypnosis in general. But when she brought up the subject of Sirhan, Bryan became suddenly curt and short-winded, charging out of the office declaring “This interview is over!”

    A sympathetic secretary of Bryan’s joined Langman for coffee across the street, and dropped an interesting item. As Bill Turner and Jonn Christian recounted it in their book on the RFK case,

    According to the secretary, Bryan had received an emergency call from Laurel, Marlyand, only minutes after George Wallace was shot. The call somehow concerned the shooting.25

    Could Bremer have been hypnotized to shoot Wallace?

    The Specter of Hypnosis

    Bremer’s behavior both before and after the shooting was strange, to say the least. The media shared only tantalizing clues:

    According to one Federal officer, who asked not to be identified, Mr. Bremer “seemed incredibly indifferent to what was going on around him, even the things that affected him. He was blasÈ, almost oblivious to what was going on. He seems like a shallow, mixed-up man, but not an ideologue.”26

    Some witnesses commented, as others had about Sirhan, of Bremer’s “spine-tingling” smirk,27 or “silly grin.”28 In November of the previous year, Bremer had been questioned by the police while parked alone in a no-parking zone in Fox Point, a wealthy Milwaukee suburb. On the seat, he had several boxes of bullets. When the policeman asked why he had a gun, Bremer turned it over. According to a Newsweek account, the policeman later testified that Bremer was “completely incoherent” although the terms “drunk” or “drugged” are nowhere to be found.29 This was the incident referred to earlier, where Bremer was originally arrested for having a concealed weapon, but later released after paying the fine for the lesser charge of “disorderly conduct.”

    Finally, there is the report from Leek and Sugar that Bremer had a friend named Michael Cullen who was a hypnotist and a master of behavior modification and psychological programming. In light of the evidence, the hypothesis of mental manipulations cannot be dismissed out of hand.

    Aftermath

    The question of conspiracy goes hand in hand with the old one of Cui Bono? Who benefits? 1972 was a year in which the Vietnam war was dividing the country. On the one hand, George McGovern was pulling votes from the more moderate Hubert Humphrey in large part because he was willing to speak out against the carnage there. McGovern could never have won in a direct fight with Nixon, as history proved. But with Wallace splitting the conservative vote, McGovern had a chance of becoming president. Clearly, those who supported the Vietnam engagement gained when Wallace was taken out of the running by the bullets in Laurel, Maryland.

    Wallace lived to be 79. Bremer is still alive and incarcerated. He is not yet 50. According to Patricia Cushwa, chairman of the Maryland Parole Commission, “There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what he [Bremer] does.” Not surprising, considered the defense and prosecution pyschiatrists had portrayed Bremer as a schizophrenic. What was surprising was how the jury could find this man, who could not even answer whether he had shot Wallace or not, legally sane. His original crime, it seems, was being born defenseless into a family that was unable to care for him. He grew up in a dysfunctional environment. He was given neither love nor guidance growing up. Either he grew into a criminal, or was twisted into one by forces as yet unknown. What does Bremer think now, after all this time? “Everyone is mean nowadays….[We’ve] got teenagers running around with drugs and machine guns, they never heard of me….They never heard of the public figure in my case, and they could care less. I was in prison when they were born. The country kind of went to hell in the last 24 years.”30 Make that 36.

    Notes

    1. New York Times, 5/17/72.

    2. Washington Post, 8/2/72.

    3. Washington Post, 8/1/72.

    4. Washington Post, 5/16/72.

    5. Sybil Leek and Bert R. Sugar, The Assassination Chain (New York: Corwin Books, 1976), p. 251.

    6. Washington Post, 5/20/72.

    7. New York Times, 5/17/72.

    8. New York Times, 5/22/72.

    9. The fullest account of Nunnery’s comments appears to be the New York Times of 5/22/72.

    10. New York Times, 5/22/72.

    11. New York Times, 5/22/72.

    12. New York Times, 5/22/72.

    13. Washington Post, 5/19/72.

    14. Washington Post, 6/21/73.

    15. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1974), p. 217.

    16. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 326.

    17. Bernstein and Woodward, p. 326.

    18. Miles Copeland, The Real Spy World (London: Sphere Books Limited, 1978), p. 299.

    19. Bernstein and Woodward, p. 133.

    20. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 255, 304.

    21. Hougan, p. 140.

    22. Sybil Leek and Bert R. Sugar, p. 254.

    23. Turner and Christian, p. 267.

    24. Memorandum from Baxter Ward to fellow supervisors, 7/29/75, published in the Appendix of The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, by William Turner and Jonn Christian.(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1978 & 1993, originally published by Random House, 1978), p. 374.

    25. Turner and Christian, p. 227.

    26. New York Times, 5/17/72.

    27. Newsweek, 5/29/72.

    28. New York Times, 8/2/72.

    29. Newsweek, 5/29/72.

    30. AP Online, 9/20/98.

  • Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold

    From the March-April, 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 3) of Probe

    “In Elizabethville, I do not think there was anyone there who believed that his death was as accident.” – U.N. Representative Conor O’Brien on the death of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold

    “A lot has not been told.” – Unnamed U.N. official, commenting on same

    The CIA has long since acknowledged responsibility for plotting the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the popular and charismatic leader of the Congo. But documents have recently surfaced that indicate the CIA may well have been involved in the death of another leader as well, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold died in a plane crash enroute to meet Moise Tshombe, leader of the breakaway (and mineral-rich) province of Katanga. At the time of his death, there was a great deal of speculation that Hammarskjold had been assassinated to prevent the U.N. from bringing Katanga back under the rule of the central government in the Congo. Fingers were pointed at Tshombe’s mercenaries, the Belgians, and even the British. Hardly anyone at the time considered an American hand in those events. However, two completely different sets of documents point the finger of culpability at the CIA. The CIA has denied having anything to do with the murder of Hammarskjold. But we all know what the CIA’s word is worth in such matters.

    In the previous issue of Probe, Jim DiEugenio explored the history of the Congo at this point in time, and the difference between Kennedy’s and Eisenhower’s policies toward it. In the summer of 1960, the Congo was granted independence from Belgium. The Belgians had not prepared the Congo to be self-sufficient, and the country quickly degenerated into chaos, providing a motive for the Belgians to leave their troops there to maintain order. While the Belgians favored Joseph Kasavubu to lead the newly independent nation, the Congolese chose instead Patrice Lumumba as their Premier. Lumumba asked the United Nations, headed then by Dag Hammarskjold, to order the Belgians to withdraw from the Congo. The U.N. so ordered, and voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Impatient and untrusting of the U.N., Lumumba threatened to ask the Soviets for help expelling the Belgian forces. Like so many nationalist leaders of the time, Lumumba was not interested in Communism. He was, however, interested in getting aid from wherever he could, including the Soviets. He had also sought and, for a time, obtained American financial aid.

    Hatching an Assassination

    In 1959, Lumumba had visited businessmen in New York, where he stated unequivocally, “The exploitation of the mineral riches of the Congo should be primarily for the profit of our own people and other Africans.” Affected minerals included copper, gold, diamonds, and uranium. Asked whether the Americans would still have access to uranium, as they had when the Belgians ran the country, Lumumba responded, “Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium; it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the U.S. worked out their own agreements in the future. 1 Investors in copper and uranium in the Congo at that time included the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims and C. Douglas Dillon. Dillon participated in the NSC meeting where the removal of Lumumba was discussed.

    According to NSC minutes from the July 21, 1960 meeting, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA and former lawyer to the Rockefellers, sounded the alarm regarding Lumumba:

    Mr. Dulles said that in Lumumba we were faced with a person who was Castro or worse … Mr. Dulles went on to describe Mr. Lumumba’s background which he described as “harrowing” … It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists; this also, however, fits with his own orientation.2

    Lawrence Devlin, referenced in the Church Committee report under the pseudonym “Victor Hedgman,” was the CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). On August 18th, Devlin cabled Dulles at CIA headquarters the following message:

    EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT…. WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER, ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER CONGO AND THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA.3

    The day this cable was sent, the NSC held another meeting at which Lumumba was discussed. Robert Johnson, a member of the NSC staff, testified to the Church Committee that sometime during the summer of 1960, at an NSC meeting, he heard President Eisenhower make a comment that sounded to him like a direct order to assassinate Lumumba:

    At some time during that discussion, President Eisenhower said something – I can no longer remember his words – that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba…. I remember my sense of that moment quite clearly because the President’s statement came as a great shock to me.4

    The Church Committee report on the Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders recorded that Johnson “presumed” Eisenhower made the statement while “looking toward the Director of Central Intelligence.”5 With or without direct authorization, on August 26, 1960, Allen Dulles took the bull by the horns. He cabled Devlin in the Congo station the following message:

    IN HIGH QUARTERS HERE IT IS THE CLEAR-CUT CONCLUSION THAT IF [LUMUMBA] CONTINUES TO HOLD HIGH OFFICE, THE INEVITABLE RESULT WILL AT BEST BE CHAOS AND AT WORST PAVE THE WAY TO COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF THE CONGO WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PRESTIGE OF THE U.N. AND FOR THE INTERESTS OF THE FREE WORLD GENERALLY. CONSEQUENTLY WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS SHOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION.6

    Assassination requests would normally have gone to Richard Bissell. Because Bissell was away on vacation, Dulles told Eisenhower he would take care of Lumumba. According to Dulles family biographer Leonard Mosley, Dulles put Richard Helms in charge of preparing the assassination plot. A few days later, Helms produced a “blueprint” for the “elimination” of Lumumba.7 Although the Church Committee report includes no references to Helms’ involvement, this is certainly plausible. One of the first people involved in the plot to kill Lumumba was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who enjoyed Richard Helms’ patronage within the agency. As Helms moved up in the Agency, so too did Gottlieb.8 Gottlieb is identified as “Joseph Scheider” in the Church Committee report. Gottlieb was the grandfather of the CIA’s mind control programs, as well as the producer of exotic and deadly biotoxins for the CIA’s “Executive Action” programs.

    After returning from vacation, Bissell approached Bronson Tweedy, head of the CIA’s Africa Division, about exploring the feasibility of assassinating Lumumba. Gottlieb also conversed with Bissell, and claimed Bissell had indicated they had approval from “the highest authority” to proceed with assassinating Lumumba.

    By September 5, the situation in the Congo had deteriorated badly. Kasavubu made a radio address to the nation in which he dismissed Lumumba and six Ministers. Thirty minutes later, Lumumba gave a radio address in which he announced that Kasavubu was no longer the Chief of State. Lumumba called upon the people to rise up against the army. Just over a week later, Joseph Mobutu claimed he was going to neutralize all parties vying for control and would bring in “technicians” to run the country.9 According to Andrew Tully, Mobutu was “discovered” by the CIA, and was used by CIA to take charge of the country when the favored Kasavubu lost authority. The CIA’s relationship with Mobutu is pertinent to the ultimate question of the CIA’s final culpability in the assassination of Lumumba. Tully refers to Mobutu as “the CIA’s man” in the Congo.10 When Mobutu claimed power, he called on the Soviet-bloc embassies to vacate the country within 48 hours.11 John Prados wrote that Mobutu was “cultivated for weeks by American diplomats and CIA officers, including Station Chief Devlin.”12

    Gottlieb was sent to the Congo to meet Devlin. The CIA cabled Devlin that Gottlieb, under the alias of “Joseph Braun,” would arrive on approximately September 27. Gottlieb was to announce himself as “Joe from Paris.” The cable bore a special designation of PROP. Tweedy told the Church Committee that the PROP designator was established specifically to refer to the assassination operation. According to Tweedy, its presence restricted circulation to Dulles, Bissell, Tweedy, Tweedy’s deputy, and Devlin. Tweedy sent a cable through the PROP channel saying that if plans to assassinate Lumumba were given a green light, the CIA should employ a third country national to conceal the American role.13 Clearly, from the start, deniability was the highest concern in the assassination plotting.

    The toxin was supposed to be administered to Lumumba orally through food or toothpaste. This effort was clearly unsuccessful, if it had ever been fully attempted. Gottlieb’s and Devlin’s testimony conflicted regarding the disposal of the toxins. Both said they disposed of all the toxins in the Congo River. But if one of them did this, the other is lying, and both could be lying to protect the continued presence of toxic substances, as indicated by a cable from Leopoldville to Tweedy, dated 10/7/60:

    [GOTTLIEB] LEFT CERTAIN ITEMS OF CONTINUING USEFULNESS. [DEVLIN] PLANS CONTINUE TRY IMPLEMENT OP.14

    In October 1960, Devlin cabled Tweedy a cryptic request for him to send a rifle with a silencer via diplomatic pouch, a violation of international law:

    IF CASE OFFICER SENT, RECOMMEND HQS POUCH SOONEST HIGH POWERED FOREIGN MAKE RIFLE WITH TELESCOPIC SCOPE AND SILENCER. HUNTING GOOD HERE WHEN LIGHTS RIGHT. HOWEVER AS HUNTING RIFLES NOW FORBIDDEN, WOULD KEEP RIFLE IN OFFICE PENDING OPENING OF HUNTING SEASON.15

    There is no evidence to suggest a silenced rifle was or was not pouched at this point. The CIA did, however, send rifles to be used to assassinate Rafael Trujillo by diplomatic pouch to the Dominican Republic.

    A senior CIA officer from the Directorate of Plans was dispatched to the Congo to aid in the assassination attempt. Justin O’Donnell, referred to in the Church Committee records as “Father Michael Mulroney,” refused to be involved directly in a murder attempt against Lumumba, saying succinctly, “murder corrupts.”16 But he was not opposed to aiding others in the removal of Lumumba. He told the Church Committee:

    I said I would go down and I would have no compunction about operating to draw Lumumba out [of U.N. custody], to run an operation to neutralize his operations….17

    O’Donnell planned to lure Lumumba away from U.N. protection and then turn Lumumba over to his enemies, who would surely kill him. “I am not opposed to capital punishment,” O’Donnell explained to the Church Committee. He just wasn’t going to pull the trigger himself.

    O’Donnell requested that CIA asset QJ/WIN be sent to the Congo for his use. O’Donnell claimed he wanted QJ/WIN to participate in counterespionage. (The CIA’s IG report, however, indicated that QJ/WIN had been recruited to assassinate Lumumba.18) O’Donnell’s plan, which appears to have been successful, was for QJ/WIN to penetrate the defenses around Lumumba and encourage Lumumba to “escape” his U.N. guard. Once in the open, Mobutu’s forces could then arrest Lumumba and kill him. In the end, this is exactly what appears to have happened. Although O’Donnell denied that QJ/WIN had anything to do with Lumumba’s escape, arrest and murder, a cable to CIA’s finance division from William Harvey implies otherwise:

    QJ/WIN was sent on this trip for a specific, highly sensitive operational purpose which has been completed.19

    Another CIA operative, code-named WI/ROGUE, was dispatched to aid in the Congo operation. The CIA provided WI/ROGUE plastic surgery and a toupee “so that Europeans traveling in the Congo would not recognize him.” WI/ROGUE was described as a man who would “dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions.”20

    WI/ROGUE was apparently assigned to Devlin. a report prepared for the CIA’s Inspector General described the preparation to be undertaken for his use:

    In connection with this assignment, WI/ROGUE was to be trained in demolitions, small arms, and medical immunization.21

    While in the Congo, WI/ROGUE undertook to organize an “Execution Squad.” One of the people he attempted to recruit was QJ/WIN. QJ/WIN did not know whether WI/ROGUE was CIA or not, and refused to join him. Both O’Donnell and Devlin claimed WI/ROGUE had no authority to convene an assassination team. But that assertion seems hard to believe, given that a capable assassin was assigned to a group plotting the permanent removal of Lumumba. And given that WI/ROGUE was to be trained in “medical immunization” it seems possible WI/ROGUE was to administer the poisons brought to the Congo by Gottlieb.

    The CIA, while accepting responsibility for plotting to kill Lumumba, disavows responsibility for his eventual murder. The Church Committee bought this line from the CIA and concluded the same in their report. Yet within the report and elsewhere on the record are events that belie that conclusion. For example, a cable from Devlin to Tweedy implies possible CIA foreknowledge of Lumumba’s escape which led to his death:

    POLITICAL FOLLOWERS IN STANLEYVILLE DESIRE THAT HE BREAK OUT OF HIS CONFINEMENET AND PROCEED TO THAT CITY BY CAR TO ENGAGE IN POLITICAL ACTIVITY…. DECISION ON BREAKOUT WILL PROBABLY BE MADE SHORTLY. STATION EXPECTS TO BE ADVISED BY [unidentified agent] OF DECISION MADE…. STATION HAS SEVERAL POSSIBLE ASSETS TO USE IN EVENT OF BREAKOUT AND STUDYING SEVERAL PLANS OF ACTION.22

    The Church Committee believed that one CIA cable seemed to indicate the CIA’s lack of foreknowledge of Lumumba’s eventual escape. But in another instance they cited this troubling passage, which indicates likely CIA involvement in his capture:

    [STATION] WORKING WITH [CONGOLESE GOVERNMENT] TO GET ROADS BLOCKED AND TROOPS ALERTED [BLOCK] POSSIBLE ESCAPE ROUTE.23

    According to contemporaneous cable traffic, the CIA was kept informed of Lumumba’s condition and movements during the period following his escape. Some authors believe that the CIA was directly involved in his capture. Andrew Tully acknowledges that “There were reports at the time that CIA had helped track him down,” but adds, “there is nothing on the record to confirm this.” However, nearly all authors agree that Lumumba was captured by Mobutu’s troops, and Mobutu was clearly, as Tully called him, “the CIA’s man” in the Congo.

    By January of 1961, Devlin was sending urgent cables to CIA Director Allen Dulles stating that a “refusal [to] take drastic steps at this time will lead to defeat of [United States] policy in Congo.”24 That particular cable was dated January 13, 1961. The very next day, Devlin was told by a Congolese leader that the captive Lumumba was to be transferred to a prison in Bakwanga, the “home territory” of his “sworn enemy.” Three days later, Lumumba and two of his closest supporters were put on an airplane for Bakwanga. In flight, the plane was redirected to Katanga “when it was learned that United Nations troops were at the Bakwanga airport.” Katanga claimed, on February 13, 1961, that Lumumba had escaped the previous day and died at the hands of hostile villagers. However, the U.N. conducted its own investigation, and concluded that Lumumba had been killed January 17, almost immediately upon arrival in Katanga. Other accounts vary. Some accounts indicated that on the plane, Lumumba and his supporters were so badly beaten that the Belgian flight crew became nauseated and locked themselves in the flight deck. Another account indicated that Lumumba was beaten “in full view of U.N. officials” and then driven to a secluded house and killed. But a contradictory version indicated that U.N. officers were not allowed in the area where the plane carrying Lumumba landed, and that the U.N. officials only had a glimpse at a distance of the prisoners when they disembarked. By all accounts, however, this was the last time any of the prisoners were seen in public alive.

    In a bizarre footnote to this story, former CIA man John Stockwell wrote of a CIA associate of his who told him one night of his adventure in Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), “driving about town after curfew with Patrice Lumumba’s body in the trunk of his car, trying to decide what to do with it.” Stockwell added that his associate “presented this story in a benign light, as though he had been trying to help.”25 And in a similarly incriminating statement, CIA officer Paul Sakwa remembered that Devlin subsequently “took credit” for Lumumba’s assassination.26 In an open letter to CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner, Stockwell wrote:

    Eventually he [Lumumba] was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries.27

    From the CIA’s own evidence, the CIA sought to entice Lumumba to escape protection. They then monitored his travel, assisted in creating road blocks, and when he was captured, encouraged his captors to turn him over to his enemies. The CIA had a strong relationship with Mobutu when Mobutu had the power to decide Lumumba’s fate. And then there are the admissions reported by Stockwell and Sakwa. How can anyone, in the light of such evidence, claim the CIA was not directly responsible for Lumumba’s murder?

    Hammarskjold’s Last Flight

    The CIA could not have been satisfied solely with the death of Lumumba. One of the barriers to completing the takeover of the Congo remained the United Nations, and more specifically, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.

    Dag Hammarskjold’s heritage stemmed from that of a Swedish knight. Subsequent generations had served as soldiers and statesmen. It seemed only fitting that with such a heritage, Hammarskjold would be drawn to a life of governmental service. He grew up in the Swedish capital among a group of progressive economists, intellectuals, and artists. He sought out companions and mentors from these fields. But Hammarskjold was on a strong spiritual quest as well, seeking his own divine purpose and contemplating the sacrifices of others for the common good. He was an intensely private man who never married. Because of this, many assumed he must have been a homosexual. Hammarskjold always denied this, and once wrote a Haiku addressing his frustration at having to deal with this constant accusation:

    Because it did not find a mate
    they called
    the unicorn perverted.28

    Speaking four languages and having a reputation as an agile negotiator, Hammarskjold was a natural choice for the United Nations. Always gravitating toward roles of leadership, he came ultimately to serve in the highest position of that body during one of the most difficult periods in its existence.

    When he took office, the United States was embroiled in virulent McCarthyism. His predecessor at the U.N. had bent over backwards to please American sponsors by expelling suspected communists from the ranks of the U.N. When Hammarskjold took his place, his first acts focused on rebuilding badly damaged morale among the U.N. workers. Once in office, he traveled the world seeking peace and reconciliation among warring factions. He felt that dispatching U.N. troops on peacekeeping missions was a necessary, if poor substitute for failed political negotiations. In 1958, Hammarskjold was unanimously reelected to a second five-year term as Secretary-General.

    By far, Hammarskjold’s biggest challenge was the Congo. Hammarskjold understood the complexity of the political situation there and resisted moves that would put the people in that country at risk of exploitation. When Katanga seceded, the Soviets were furious that Hammarskjold didn’t send troops in to prevent the secession, and claimed Hammarskjold was siding with colonialists. Lumumba too lashed out at Hammarskjold for not responding in force. Hammarskjold’s hands were tied, however, by the American, British, French and Belgium factions which wanted to see Katanga secede in order to maintain access to the great mineral wealth there. But Hammarskjold did not give in completely to these non-native interests, and sent U.N. troops between the warring Congo and Katanga forces to see that one side did not annihilate the other. Hammarskjold had originally been impressed with Lumumba, but his opinion of him declined as Lumumba increasingly acted in an irresponsible manner. The country virtually fell apart in September when first Kasavubu (another Congo leader in the CIA’s pocket29), then Lumumba, and ultimately Mobutu claimed to be the country’s leader. One of the few world leaders openly supporting Hammarskjold’s policy in the Congo was President John Kennedy.

    Hammarskjold died in a plane crash sometime during the early morning hours of September 8, 1961. He was flying aboard the Albertina to the Ndola airport at the border of the Congo in Northern Rhodesia, where he was to meet with Tshombe to broker a cease-fire agreement. The pilot of the Albertina filed a fake flight plan in an attempt to keep Hammarskjold’s ultimate destination hidden. Despite this and other measures taken to preserve secrecy, less than 15 minutes into the flight the press was reporting that Hammarskjold was enroute to Ndola.

    At 10:10, the pilot radioed the airport that he could see their lights, and was given permission to descend from 16,000 to 6,000 feet. Then the plane disappeared. It was found the next day, crashed and burnt at a site about ten miles from the airport. The unexplained downing of the plane gave rise immediately to rumors of attack and sabotage.

    Two of Hammarskjold’s close associates, Conor O’Brien and Stuart Linner, had been targets of assassination attempts. Several attempts had been made in Elizabethville on O’Brien. And gunmen tried to lure Linner to Leopoldville, then under Kataganese control. One gunman even made his way into Linner’s office before being apprehended. Forces both inside and outside the Congo made clear that they did not approve of the U.N.’s handling of affairs there. U.N. forces were continually attacked. And Hammarskjold himself had received various threats. Because of this obvious animosity, it was no stretch for people to believe Hammarskjold’s death was no accident.

    The origin of the plan to meet at Ndola was itself under dispute. O’Brien asserted in print on three different occasions that the location had been chosen by Lord Lansdowne. As one author noted,

    He was doing more than accuse Lansdowne of not telling the truth. He was implying the Britisher was partly responsible for a journey that ended in disaster.30

    The British government has always insisted the choice of Ndola was Hammarskjold’s. But the British were clearly working against Hammarskjold by siding with Katanga. The British colony of Northern Rhodesia also sent food and medical supplies to Katanga. Rhodesia’s Roy Welensky served as a media conduit for Tshombe. Clearly, the British had a motive to get rid of Hammarskjold, who stood in the way of Katanga’s independence, and therefore their denial regarding the choice of Ndola should be weighted accordingly. In fact, leaders from around the world accused Britain of being directly responsible. The Indian Express, India’s largest daily, wrote, “Never even during Suez have Britain’s hands been so bloodstained as they are now.” Johshua Nkomo, President of the African National Democratic Party in Southern Rhodesia, said “The fact that this incident occured in a British colonial territory in circumstances which look very queer is a serious indictment of the British Government.” The Ghanian Times ran an editorial headed “Britain: The Murderer.” Note that this prophetic piece was written in 1961:

    The history of the decade of the sixties is becoming the history of political and international murders. And one of the principal culprits in this sordid turn in human history is that self-same protagonist of piety – Britain.

    Britain was involved, by virtue of her NATO commitments, in the callous murder of the heroic Congolese Premier, Patrice Lumumba.

    But Britain stands alone in facing responsibility for history’s No. 1 international murder – the murder of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.31

    Due to public interest and obvious questions, both the British-contolled Northen Rhodesian government and the U.N. convened commissions to investigate the incident. Two of the earliest claims regarding the crash were given focus by both commissions: reports of a second plane, and reports of a flash in the sky near the airport. Seven different witnesses told the Rhodesian commission of a second plane in the vicinity of the Ndola airport. In Warren Commission-like fashion, the Rhodesian authorities waved away these sightings under various excuses. The only plane officially recorded to be in the vicinity was Hammarskjold’s, therefore the witnesses had to be wrong. But the airport was not using radar that night, and another plane could easily have been in the area. One witness chose not to talk to the Rhodesian authorities and went directly to the U.N.. He too had seen a second plane, following behind and slightly above a larger plane. After the plane crashed and exploded, he saw two Land Rover type vehicles rush at “breakneck speed” toward the site of the crash. A short time later, they returned. Asked why he hadn’t shared his account with the Rhodesians, the witness replied simply, “I do not trust them.” The U.N. report theorized that perhaps people had seen the plane’s anti-collision beam and thought it represented a second plane. However, some of the witnesses claimed the second plane flew away from the first after the crash, negating that theory. 32 Earwitness evidence was also suggestive. Mrs. Olive Andersen heard three quick explosions at the time when the plane would have passed overhead. W. J. Chappell thought he heard the sound of a low-flying plane followed by the noise of a jet, followed later by three loud crashes and shots as if a canon was firing.33

    Assistant Inspector Nigel Vaughan was driving on patrol that night about ten miles from the site of the crash. He told investigators that he saw a sudden light in the sky and then what seemed to be a falling object. But he placed the sighting an hour after the plane disappeared, and so his testimony is ignored. However, other witnesses also claimed to see a flash in the sky that night, including two police officers, one of which thought the sighting important enough to report to the airport.

    Adding to suspicion of a broader plot was the fact that, despite the Albertina’s having announced its arrival at the airport, no alarm was raised when the plane did not land. In fact, Lord Alport sent the airport people home, claiming the Albertina’s occupants must have simply changed their mind and decided not to land there. No search and rescue operation was launched until well into the following morning.Later examinations of the bodies showed that Hammarskjold may well have survived the initial crash, although he had near-fatal if not fatal injuries. There was a small chance that had he been found in time, his life may have been saved.

    Royal Rhodesian Air Force Squadron Leader Mussell told the U.N. commission that there were “underhand things going on” at that time in Ndola, “with strange aircraft coming in, planes without flight plans and so on.” He also reported that “American Dakotas were sitting on the airfield with their engines running,” which he imagined were likely “transmitting messages.”

    Beyond the strange circumstances surrounding the downing of the plane, the plane itself contained interesting, if controversial evidence. 201 live rounds, 342 bullets and 362 cartridge cases were recovered from both the crash site and the dead bodies. Bullets were found in the bodies of six people, two of whom were Swedish guards. The British Rhodesian authorities concluded that the ammunition had simply exploded in the intense heat of the fire, and just happened to shoot right into the humans present. But this contention was refuted by Major C. F. Westell, a ballistics authority, who said,

    I can certainly describe as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body.34

    He based his statement on a large scale experiment that had been done to determine if military fire brigades would be in danger working near munitions depots. Other Swedish experts conducted and filmed tests showing that bullets heated to the point of explosion nonetheless did not achieve sufficient velocity to penentrate their box container.35

    If someone aboard the plane fired the bullets found in these bodies, who would it have been? P. G. Lindstrom, in Copenhagen’s journal Ekstra Bladet, wrote that one of Tshombe’s agents in Europe told him that an extra passenger had been aboard who was to hijack the plane to Katanga. No evidence of an additional body was found in the wreckage, however.

    Transair’s Chief Engineer Bo Vivring examined the plane and noted damage to the window frame in the cockpit area, as well as fiberglass in the radar nose cone, and concluded that these injuries were likely bullet holes. He told the Rhodesian commission months later, “I am still suspicious about these two specimens.”36

    In their final report, the Federal Rhodesian commission concluded that the incident was the result of pilot error, and denied any possibility that the plane was in any way sabotaged or attacked. The U.N. took a more cautious stance, declining to blame the pilot. But they were unable to pinpoint the cause, and refused to rule out the possibility of sabotage or attack. In contrast, the Swedish government, along with others carried the strong opinion that the plane had been shot from the ground or the air, or had been blown up by a bomb.

    And there the matter lay, as far as the public was concerned. No one would know for sure. Some had suspicions. In a curious episode, Daniel Schorr once questioned whether the CIA was behind the murder. The question must be set in its original context.

    In January of 1975, President Ford was hosting a White House luncheon for New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, among others, when the subject of the Rockefeller commission came up. One of the Times’ editors questioned the overtly conservative, pro-military bent of the appointees. Ford explained that he needed trustworthy citizens who would not stray from the narrowly defined topics to be investigated so they wouldn’t pursue matters which could damage national security and blacken the reputation of the last several Presidents. “Like what?” came the obvious question, from A. M. Rosenthal. “Like assassinations!” said clumsy ex-Warren Commission member Ford, who added quickly, “That’s off the record!” But Schorr took the question to heart, and wondered what Ford was hiding. Shortly after this episode, Schorr went to William Colby, then CIA Director, and asked him point blank, “Has the CIA ever killed anybody in this country?” Colby’s reply was, “Not in this country.” “Who?” Schorr pressed. “I can’t talk about it,” deferred Colby. The first name to spring to Schorr’s lips was not Lumumba, Trujillo, or even Castro. It was Hammarskjold.37

    Is there any evidence of British or CIA involvement in Hammarskjold’s death? Sadly, the answer is yes. Of both. In 1997, documents uncovered by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission indicated a conspiracy between the CIA and MI5 to remove Hammarskjold. Messages written on the letterhead of the South Africa Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), covering a period from July, 1960 to September 17, 1961, the date of Hammarskjold’s crash, discussed a plot to kill Hammarskjold named Operation Celeste. The messages, written by a commodore and a captain whose names were expunged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reference Allen Dulles. According to press reports, the most damning document refers to a meeting between CIA, SAIMR, and the British intelligence organizations of MI5 and Special Operations Executive, at which Dulles agreed that “Dag is becoming troublesome…and should be removed.” Dulles, according to the documents, promised “full cooperation from his people.” In another message, the captain is told, “I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice [Lumumba].”

    Later orders to the captain state:

    Your contact with CIA is Dwight. He will be residing at Hotel Leopold II in Elizabethville from now until November 1 1961. The password is: “How is Celeste these days?” His response should be: “She’s recovering nicely apart from the cough.”38

    According to the documents, the plan included planting a bomb in the wheelbay of the plane so that when the wheels were retracted for takeoff, the bomb would explode. The bomb was to be supplied by Union Miniere, the powerful Belgian mining conglomerate operating in the Katanga province. However, a report dated the day of the crash records that the “Device failed on take-off, and the aircraft crashed a few hours later as it prepared to land.”39

    A British Foreign Officer spokesman suggested to the press that the documents were Soviet disinformation.40 The documents were also dismissed as fakes by a former Swedish diplomat, but according to news reports, “they bear a striking resemblance to other documents emanating from SAIMR seven years ago … These documents show the SAIMR masterminded the abortive 1981 attempt to depose Seychelles president Albert RenÈ. It was also behind a successful 1990 coup in Somalia.”41

    The reference to cooperation between MI5 and CIA is not farfetched either. British and American interests worked together to defeat Mossadegh in Iran. In his book that was originally banned in Britain for revealing too many state secrets, former MI5 officer Peter Wright described how William Harvey, the head of the CIA’s “Executive Action” programs, accompanied by CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, visited MI5 in 1961 to ask for help finding assassins.42 And according to Paul Lashmar in his book Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948-1997, the British secretly aided in the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965, a coup for which the CIA bears a great deal of responsibility.

    Brian Urquhart, a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General and the author of an extensive biography of Dag Hammarskjold, stated that “The documents seem to me to make no sense whatsoever.” He praised Bishop Desmond Tutu for saying there was no verification for the authenticity of these documents. But Urquhart went too far when he said, “Even supposing there was any such conspiracy, which I strongly doubt, there is no conceivable way they could have got within any kind of working distance of Hammarskjold’s plane in time.”43 In fact, the plane was left unguarded for four hours. There was general security at the airport, but anyone who knew what they were doing would have no trouble gaining access to the plane. The cabin was secured, but the wheelbay, hydraulic compartments and heating systems were accessible.44 Urquhart also contends that saboteurs would have attacked the wrong plane, as Lansdowne and Hammarskjold switched planes that day. But if the saboteurs were as sophisticated as the CIA was with Lumumba, that information would have been known in advance by the necessary parties. What if the plotters themselves occasioned the switch of the planes? Urquhart shows himself to be a man of limited imagination in this regard. Urquhart caps his comments by adding that he had seen “20 or 30 different accounts” over the years of how Hammarskjold was killed, and that “if one is true all the other 29 are false.” In the words of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Does the word ‘duh’ mean anything to you?” There can be only one truth. Having 29 false leads would not negate the truth of the remaining one.

    While Bishop Tutu conceded the documents may be disinformation, he added the following qualifier:

    It isn’t something that is so bizarre. Things of that sort have happened in the past. That is why you can’t dismiss it as totally, totally incredible.45

    In the Independent of 8/20/98, author Mary Braid wrote that “In 1992, ex-U.N. officials said mercenaries hired by Belgian, U.S. and British mining companies shot down the plane, as they believed their businesses would be hurt by Hammarskjold’s peace efforts.” The key here is to understand that these assertions are not mutually exclusive. The CIA has shown its disdain for official government positions on more than several occasions, and has a long track record of working with private corporations to effect a foreign policy dictated more by business needs than political ones. In the Congo, we saw that the CIA apparently pursued a triple track. They planned poison, gun, and escape-capture-kill plans as they sought to remove Lumumba from the scene. If they were intent on getting rid of Hammarskjold, as the Truth Commission discoveries suggest, the CIA may have employed both bomb planters and mercenaries.

    Has anyone ever claimed responsibility for Hammarskjold’s death? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. A longtime CIA operative claimed he personally shot down the plane.

    Confessions of a Hitman

    In 1976, Roland “Bud” Culligan sought legal assistance. After serving the CIA for 25 years, Culligan was angry. He had performed sensitive operations for the company and felt he deserved better treatment than to be put in jail on a phony bad check charge so the agency could “protect” him from foreign intelligence agents. He had been jailed since 1971, and now the agency was disavowing any connection with him. His personal assets had mysteriously vanished, and his wife Sara was being harassed. But Culligan had kept one very important card up his sleeve. He had kept a detailed journal of every assignment he had performed for the CIA. He had dates, names, places. And Culligan was a professional assassin.

    Culligan sought the aid of a lawyer who in turn required some corroborative information. The lawyer asked Culligan to provide explicit details, such as who had recruited him into the CIA, who was his mutual friend with Victor Marchetti, and could he describe in detail six executive action (E.A.) assignments. Culligan answered each request. One of the executive actions he detailed was his assignment to kill Dag Hammarskjold.

    Culligan described first in general terms how he would receive assignments:

    It is impossible, being here, to recall perfectly all details of past E.A.’s Each E.A. was unique and the execution was left to me and me alone. Holland [identified elsewhere as Lt. Gen. Clay Odum] would call, either by phone or letter memo. At times I would be “billed” by a fake company for a few dollars. The number to call was on the “bill.” I have them all. I studied each man, or was introduced by a mutual friend or acquaintance, to dispell suspicion. I was not always told exactly why a man was subject to being killed. I believed Holland and CIA knew enough about matter to be trusting and I did my work accordingly…. By the time I was called in, the man had become a total loss to CIA, or had become involved in actual plotting to overthrow the U.S. Gov, with help from abroad. There were some exceptions.

    …When an E.A. was planned, I was given all possible details in memo form, pictures, verbal descriptions, money, tickets, passports, all the time I needed for plan and set up. I and I alone called the final shot or shots.

    Culligan matter-of-factly described five other EAs. But when he told of Hammarskjold, it was out of sequence and in a different tone than the other descriptions:

    The E.A. involving Hammarskjold was a bad one. I did not want the job. Damn it, I did not want the job…. I intercepted D.H’s trip at Ndola, No. Rhodesia (now Zaire). Flew from Tripoli to Abidjian to Brazzaville to Ndola, shot the airplane, it crashed, and I flew back, same way…. I went to confession after Nasser and I swore I would never again do this work. And I never will.

    Culligan did not want his information released. He only wanted to use it to pressure the CIA into restoring his funds, clearing his record, and allowing his wife and himself to live in peace. When this effort failed, a friend of Culligan’s pursued the matter by sending Culligan’s information to Florida Attorney General Robert Shevin.

    Shevin was impressed enough by the documentation Culligan provided to forward the material along to Senator Frank Church, in which he wrote,

    It is my sincere hope and desire that your Committee could look into the allegations made by Mr. Culligan. His charges seem substantive enough to warrant an immediate, thorough investigation by your Committee.

    Culligan was scheduled to be released from prison in 1977. He wrote the CIA’s General Counsel offering to turn in his journal if he was released without any further complications. But once out of jail, Culligan found himself on the run continuously, fearing for his and his wife’s life. A friend continued to write public officials on Culligan’s behalf, saying,

    There are forces that operate within our Government that most people do not even suspect exist. In the past, these forces have instituted actions that would be repugnant to the American people and the world at large. I have always wanted to see this situation handled quietly and honorably without a lot of publicity. Unfortunately, the agencies, bureaus, and services involved are devoid of honor. This story is extremely close to going public soon and when it does, I fear for the effect upon our Country and her position in the world community.

    The story never did go public, until now. And this is only a piece of what Culligan had to say.46 You can’t see all of what he had to say. These files remain restricted at the National Archives, withdrawn by the CIA, unavailable to researchers. Not even the Review Board could pry forth the tape Culligan made in jail detailing his CIA activities. And no wonder. Want to hear one of Culligan’s bombshells? In the list of Executive Actions Culligan detailed, three related to the Kennedy assassination. Culligan wrote that he was hired to kill three of the assassins who had participated in, as he called it, the “Dallas E.A.” Apparently, the three were asking for larger sums to cover their silence. Culligan recruited them for a mission and told them to meet him in Guatemala. When they showed up, he killed all three.

    Is Culligan to be believed? Why can’t we know for certain? Where are the leaders who are not afraid to confront the demons of the past, to genuinely seek out the truth about our history? Who will take this information and pursue it where it leads? Because no one pursued the truth about Lumumba at the time, and no one found the truth about Hammarskjold’s death, assassination remained a viable way to change foreign policy. Malcolm X, the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King fell prey to the same forces. When will the media serve the public, instead of the ruling elite, by finally reporting the truth about the assassinations of the sixties?

    Notes

    1. Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 325-326.

    2. Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 57, hereafter Assassination Plots.

    3. Assassination Plots, p. 14.

    4. Assassination Plots, p. 55

    5. Assassination Plots, p. 55.

    6. Assassination Plots, p. 15.

    7. Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network (New York: The Dial Press, 1978), pp. 462-463. From his notes, Mosley’s source for this appears to have been Richard Bissell.

    8. John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1979), p. 60.

    9. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjold (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 451.

    10. Andrew Tully, CIA: The Inside Story (New York: Crest Books, 1963), pp. 178, p. 184.

    11. Hammarskjold was later to write that policy in the Congo “flopped” and cited as two defeats “the dismissal of Mr. Lumumba and the ousting of the Soviet embassy.” Urquhart, p. 467.

    12. John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 234.

    13. Assassination Plots, p. 23.

    14. Assassination Plots, p. 29.

    15. Assassination Plots, p. 32.

    16. Assassination Plots, p.38n1.

    17. Assassination Plots, p. 39.

    18. Assassination Plots, p. 45.

    19. Assassination Plots, p. 44.

    20. Assassination Plots, p. 46.

    21. Assassination Plots, p. 46.

    22. Assassination Plots, p. 48.

    23. Assassination Plots, p. 48

    24. Assassination Plots, p. 49.

    25. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), p. 105.

    26. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 67.

    27. Mahoney, p. 71, citing the letter as published in the International Herald-Tribune of April 25, 1977.

    28. Urquhart, p. 27.

    29. William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1986), p. 158.

    30. Arthur Gavshon, The Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold (New York: Walker and Company, 1962), p. 167. Gavshon was, according to the biography on the back flap of his book, a “veteran diplomatic correspondent for one of the world’s biggest new agencies and from his London vantage point has had access to the confidential information known to the diplomats and governments riding the dizzying Congolese merry-go-round.”

    31. Gavshon, p. 50.

    32. Gavshon, p. 237.

    33. Gavshon, p. 17.

    34. Gavshon, p. 58.

    35. Gavshon, p. 58.

    36. Gavshon, p. 57.

    37. Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), pp. 143-145.

    38. Mail & Guardian (of Johannesburg, South Africa), 8/28/98.

    39. Mail & Guardian, 8/28/98.

    40. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 8/20/98.

    41. Mail & Guardian, 8/28/98.

    42. Peter Wright, Spy Catcher (New York: Dell, 1988), pp. 203-204.

    43. Anthony Goodman, Reuters, 8/19/98.

    44. Gavshon, p. 8.

    45. The Atlanta Constitution and Journal, 8/22/98.

    46. For more information on Culligan, see Kenn Thomas’ interview of Lars Hansson in Steamshovel Press #10, 1994.

  • The Attempted Coup Against FDR

    From the March-April 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 3) of Probe

    The John F. Kennedy assassination represents a theme in our political history. The causes, even the inevitability, of the assassination were born out of the power struggles among the ruling elite which are consistent throughout the American story. These struggles revolve around questions of what is the proper role of government vis a vis the business community’s pursuit of its own self-interest. Is the government’s role minimal or laissez-faire? Should government only provide a stable environment of “law and order”, through increased police powers, conducive to the maximization of profits and the minimization of workers wages and benefits? Or does the government have a higher purpose? Is it responsible for the common good? Is it the one entity capable of implementing justice, equality, and a partial redistribution of wealth through the regulation and taxation of corporations in order to provide a cushion against the more egregious effects of the free market? Should it ensure the worker’s share in the profits they helped to create?

    At various times factions of what has become known as “corporate America” have argued over which role of government is ultimately more advantageous to their own ends. Generally speaking, banking and Wall Street favor less government. Retail, light manufacturing and small to medium size corporations are more tolerant of an activist government which might put more money in the hands of their consumers, and protect small businesses against the unfair competitive practices of larger corporations.

    The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression dramatically thrust the question of government’s role to the forefront of American political and corporate life. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented a revolutionary realignment of political power: the ascendancy of the Democratic party facilitated by new voting coalitions of rural south and industrialized north which dislodged the Republican Party’s nearly seventy-year dominance, signaling the abandonment of laissez-faire economics in favor of state regulation. The losers in this political process coalesced into right-wing Republicanism, and the next sixty years of American history is, in part, the story of their attempt to regain power, reinstitute Lassiez-faire policies, and dismantle the New Deal.1 I would like to suggest that the forces behind the assassination of President Kennedy were born in the furies which the Great Depression unleashed between these competing sectors of American political and economic life.

    I believe that in 1934 there was a foreshadowing of the JFK assassination. A conspiracy was uncovered in which right-wing elements of big business, namely the DuPont family and the Morgan banking interests, planned to finance and arm a veteran’s army to march on the White House and hold President Roosevelt captive.2 The conspiracy was reported by two- time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. Although the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities found his allegations credible, it failed to call major conspirators to testify, and the Committee deleted crucial testimony from its final report to the public. The press relegated the story to the back pages, and discredited those, including Major Butler, who tried to alert the public to the threat against republican government. No prosecutions were forthcoming from the Justice Department, in part because the main witness who would have substantiated Butler’s claims died suddenly from pneumonia at the age of 37. In short, there was a cover-up, maybe worse.

    Background

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in November 1932, three years into the Great Depression. National income was cut by more than half and five thousand banks had crashed, wiping out nine million savings accounts. More than fifteen million workers had lost their jobs. Not only was the question “What to do” being asked, but also “Who was to blame?” A Senate investigation into the machinations of Wall Street found that investors organized raids on the stock market, pulled out all their money hoping for prices to drop, and then bought low. Insiders were also afforded the opportunity to buy securities at prices much lower than the public. Financiers were lining their pockets with fantastic bonuses, and the committee found that “…the Stock Exchange was no more than a glorified gambling casino where the odds were weighted heavily against the eager outsiders.”3

    The severity and persistence of the Depression raised questions in the minds of the public about business leaders and capitalism itself. Underlying this questioning was the perennial debate over what role the government should take. Although Roosevelt wanted and needed the support of business, he also knew that the government must advance beyond representing the “single interest” that is big business and represent the needs of all segments of society. Such interests as farm groups and unions were to be given a voice in the government which had been previously denied them so that, as Senator Robert Wagner argued, “…the strong may not take advantage of the weak.”4 Roosevelt himself felt that reforms that from time to time would impose policies distasteful to representatives of industry would be essential to lasting relief. While asking Congress to pass the Securities Act to regulate the Stock Exchange, Roosevelt stated,

    In the working out of a great national program seeking the primary good of the greater number, it is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on, and are going to be stepped on. But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some short cut that is harmful to the greater good.

    Roosevelt did step on some toes. Roosevelt and the New Dealers were determined to eliminate the abuses of the financial system by subjecting it to federal regulation. Threatened by prospects of government regulation and taxation of individual wealth as well as corporate profits to fund relief programs and public works, industrialists took up the offensive.

    In 1934, two events aroused the wrath of the DuPonts and the Morgans. First, there were rumors that pressure was being exerted to open a Senate investigation into the munitions industry’s alleged role in America’s entry into WWI. The DuPonts were the leading armament producers in the world. They had already earned the title “Merchants of Death” because of the huge profits they made during the Civil War and the War of 1812. The DuPonts always tried to bury this fact in carefully crafted public relations euphemisms such as” DuPont – Better things for better living through chemistry.” The DuPonts have always remained reticent about revealing the extent of their wealth, corporate holdings and armament productions. Certainly, a Senate investigation revealing their irregular dealings and huge profits during a time of national hardship, when many Americans were already questioning whether financiers really had the national interest at heart, could be disastrous for industrialists like the DuPonts. It could only lead to more popular support for the reforms Roosevelt was trying to implement.5

    The second event that alarmed the big financiers, striking directly at the heart of the Morgan empire, was the passage of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934. This legislation proposed federal supervision of securities traded over state boundaries, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission empowered to enforce the regulations. Some of the abuses that the commission was to address were insider trading, bear raiding, and manipulating stocks to create the illusion of activity. One of the most alarming propositions was that companies selling stocks would have to reveal their financial histories to the public. In choosing a chairman for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roosevelt needed a man who would strike a balance between the more radical, anti-business theorists of the New Deal, and the entrenched business interests whose support Roosevelt needed. Confiding to his advisors with the cavalier phrase “I’ll set a thief to catch a thief,” Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.6 With this appointment Kennedy became responsible for drafting legislation which would regulate the business dealings of his former Wall Street colleagues. Furthermore, an alliance between the Roosevelt and Kennedy families was indelibly printed upon the minds of reactionary elements of business. I will return to this Kennedy-Roosevelt alliance and its repercussions later.

    The Coup

    During this same period, retired Marine Corps General Smedley Darlington Butler was approached by two members of the American Legion: Bill Doyle, and Gerald C. MacGuire (who was also a bonds salesman for a Morgan concern). The American Legion, ostensibly a veterans’ benevolent society, was founded by wealthy industrialists who used the Legionnaires as strike busters.7 The men invited Butler to address an upcoming Legion convention. They were dissatisfied with how the organization was being run, and hoped Butler’s influence would help them oust the present leadership. Butler politely listened, but refused, saying he did not wish to get involved in Legion politics. A short time thereafter the two men called upon Butler again. They seemingly disregarded Butler’s former refusal to attend the convention. They had a new plan. Butler would now bring a few hundred Legionnaires with him to the convention and scatter them throughout the audience. MacGuire assured Butler that the Legionnaires’ expenses would be covered as he showed him a bank book with deposits totaling over $100,000. When Butler appeared in the spectator gallery, the Legionnaires were to leap to their feet demanding he speak. MacGuire then produced the prepared speech he wanted Butler to give. The speech urged the convention to adopt a resolution calling for Roosevelt to return to the Gold Standard.

    Up until that time the dollar was backed by gold, meaning the US Treasury could only print as much money as there was gold reserve backing that money in Fort Knox. Going off the Gold standard allowed for more money to printed and pumped into the economy, partially to fund the proposed relief programs. Those who had a lot of money were opposed to going off the Gold standard for fear their money would have less value. So Butler was to convince the veterans, who were due a second bonus payment, that if they were not paid in money backed by gold, their bonuses would be compromised. Butler became suspicious. Who was trying to use him in this way? Where did MacGuire get all this money and for whom was he really working? And wasn’t the Gold Standard argument merely a means to alienate the veterans from Roosevelt by convincing them his policies would render their money worthless?8 Feigning interest in order to learn more about the purpose of the intrigue, and who was behind it, Butler said he might be interested, but he needed to know the plan was foolproof. Butler also said he wanted to talk to the top man, and not intermediaries. After some hesitation MacGuire revealed that Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark was instrumental, as was Grayson M.P. Murphy. Murphy ran a Wall Street brokerage house, was a director of Guaranty Trust, a Morgan Bank, and also had interests in Anaconda Copper, Bethlehem Steel and Goodyear Tire.9

    Other meetings followed. At one point MacGuire took out his wallet and threw down 18 $1000 bills saying he wanted to pay Butler for his help. Robert Sterling Clark himself paid Butler a visit, and hinted at such things as Butler’s mortgage payments. Finally MacGuire revealed their real plans: he wanted Butler to lead an insurrection army to march on the White House, “force” Roosevelt to resign, and install a Secretary of General Affairs to take Roosevelt’s place and reinstate the Gold Standard.

    Why would the plotters choose Butler? Butler, a two-time congressional medal of honor winner was one of the few well-loved military men. Only Butler could induce veterans, who would ordinarily have nothing to do with insurrection to follow him. The plotters felt they could seduce Butler with money and power. They misjudged him.

    Butler was an extraordinary man. Of Quaker stock, he served for thirty years in the Marines and enjoyed great popularity among the men he commanded as well as among the rank and file veterans. His military experiences in China, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba eventually led him to suspect that these interventions were nothing more than scouting expeditions for big business. He felt that the lives of American boys were being sacrificed for the profits of United Fruit. In retirement Butler become very outspoken about this. He went on speaking engagements, and even penned a book entitled “War is a Racket”.10 He was also one of the few military men to support the Bonus Marchers. These veterans had camped outside the capital demanding the money owed them, only to have their tents burned down by the likes of Generals MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower acting on orders from President Hoover.

    Butler was still unconvinced that there was a real plot; however, MacGuire made some starling predictions. He predicted there would be an announcement in the press about the formation of a new organization, the American Liberty League. The American Liberty League, funded by the DuPonts, was to complement the coup by functioning as a propaganda organ to discredit the overthrown Roosevelt in the public’s mind (a technique which should be all too familiar to students of the character postmortem on JFK).11 MacGuire was also able to predict, well in advance, important personnel changes in the White House. This apparent forecasting ability indicated to Butler that conspirators were even within the New Deal administration. Butler, now taking the conspiracy seriously, approached some of his friends in Congress and the media. The House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, chaired by Congressmen John McCormack and Samuel Dickerstein, agreed to hear Butler’s testimony.12

    What The Committee Revealed

    Not surprisingly, when called as a witness, MacGuire denied any plot. He claimed he was part of The Committee For Sound Dollar and Sound Currency, Inc., which was spearheading a lobbying effort on behalf of the Gold Standard. However, his contradictory testimony and his inability to satisfactorily explain the large amounts of money which were deposited in several of his accounts compromised his credibility as a witness. At one point he said he was acting as purchasing agent of securities for Clark, but he never produced any evidence that he ever purchased any securities at all.13 It was also revealed that Clark had sent MacGuire on a trip to Germany, Italy, Spain, and France allegedly to study ‘economic’ conditions. But records of the Committee for a Sound Dollar, where MacGuire filed his reports, indicated he was studying something more. In each of the countries he met with veterans in paramilitary groups. These were the types of groups that carried out coups and assassinations in Germany and Italy on behalf of Hitler and Mussolini. A similar group operated in France, the Croix de Feu, about which MacGuire wrote this glowing report: “… this French super organization is composed of about 500,000 men, and each of them was the leader of 10 others, and that is the kind of organization that we should have in the United States.”14 Finally, Butler’s story was corroborated by Commander James Van Zandt of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who claimed he was also approached to lead an insurrection army. It was also alleged by Butler that MacGuire had guaranteed arms on credit from the Remington Arms Company. Investigation by the committee revealed that the DuPonts had just bought the controlling interest in Remington Arms.15

    The committee stated in its final report that it found credible evidence of a contemplated plot to overthrow the elected government with a military coup. Nevertheless, some alleged co-conspirators (supposedly revealed to Butler by MacGuire) such as General Hugh Johnson, (who was head of FDR’s National Recovery Administration), former NY Governor Al Smith and General Douglas MacArthur were never subpoenaed.16

    Media Treatment Of The Plot

    The media gave little or scant coverage to the committee’s final report. The Luce Press, which always led the charge in attacking Roosevelt and bolstering Fascism, ran a story called “A Plot Without Plotters”17 which sought to discredit Col. Butler. He was called a “hothead.” Other evidence of Butler’s unsavory character, according to Luce, was that he had once given a speech in which he criticized Mussolini. His advocacy of the penniless Bonus Veteran Army was transformed into haranguing. The committee chairmen fared no better under Luce’s pen. They were accused of only seeking publicity (despite their having sought to suppress the most explosive parts of their discoveries). The New York Times showed an astonishing lack of interest. Reference to the alleged coup was relegated to two paragraphs at the bottom of page five.18 However, not every newspaper discounted the plot. The independent Philadelphia Record ran a cartoon showing big business pointing to a soapbox Communist as the threat, while General Butler marches in with evidence revealing armed Fascists hiding beneath a banker’s coat.19 References to the alleged conspiracy disappeared from the press. Nevertheless, individual reporters did attempt to pursue the story. Paul Comley French of the Philadelphia Record and investigative journalist John Spivak went to the Justice Department. They asked why no one implicated was ever questioned; and since MacGuire had perjured himself, did they intend to file criminal prosecution? The Justice Department indicated it had no plans to carry matters any further at the moment. MacGuire, the only man who could have testified against the rest, died soon after of complications from pneumonia. His physician claimed that his death was partly due to the stress of the charges made by Butler. Grayson M.P. Murphy, the Morgan banker and treasurer of the American Liberty League, died soon after.20

    Aftermath And Beyond

    Although the coup never materialized, the unrelenting propaganda attack against Roosevelt and the New Deal reforms continued, spearheaded by the American Liberty League. The League listed as its main contributors the DuPont family, representatives of the Morgan interests, Robert Sterling Clark, the Pew Family (Sun Oil), and Rockefeller Associates. Its Treasurer was Grayson M.P. Murphy, MacGuire’s immediate boss. The League itself was ostensibly dedicated to the virtues of the Constitution, individual freedom and free market capitalism. But it claimed that all New Deal reforms were inspired by Communists within the Roosevelt administration.21 In the election of 1936, the League spent twice as much money as the Republican Party in trying to defeat Roosevelt. Although the League disbanded after Roosevelt won his second term, it spawned a series of extreme right-wing groups and paramilitary bands which constituted a network that endured through the 1960s, and whose descendants are with us today. Their propaganda was anti-Communist and anti-Semitic; their tactic was violence. Some groups which the League financed were the Sentinels of the Republic (which labeled the New Deal “Jewish Communism”), the Minutemen and the Minutewomen. Another group, the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, was associated with the Silver Shirt Squad of the American Storm Troopers. The goals of this organization, headed by a Texas oil magnate, were to create a mass movement of whites in the South to dilute Roosevelt’s Dixie vote, and to stir up anti-black racism in order to attack organizing drives by the unions from the North. Significantly, these same hate sentiments were being stirred up against JFK, and for the same reasons. These groups formed the dark underside to the League, which tried to present a polite public face.22 But some industrialists, like Henry Ford, had no qualms about explicitness. American Fascists groups hawked his anti-Semitic tracts like “The International Jew.”

    The main function of these hate groups was to enforce the will of right-wing corporate America, seeking to regain the political power it lost in the 1932 election. On the grassroots level, this intention translated into supporting the efforts of management to stop workers from unionizing. The most glaring example of this is the struggle at the General Motors plants (General Motors was owned by the DuPonts). The DuPonts employed the Black Legion, a sort of Northern Klux Klux Klan, which would terrorize workers, bomb union halls, and torture and murder organizers. The Legion was organized into arson squads, execution squads, and anti-Communist squads. Discipline within its own ranks was maintained with the weapons of torture or death and was strictly enforced. The LaFollette Committee found that the Legion had penetrated police departments, high government offices, and the Michigan Republican Party.23

    These groups also acted as intelligence networks. They infiltrated unions, leftwing groups, and universities, and they sold their information to industry. One example of such an intelligence agency was the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, headquartered in Chicago and operated by Harry Jung.24 Jung later relocated to New Orleans where he was an associate of Guy Bannister, who also hailed from Chicago. Banister’s Detective Agency was spying for right-wing businesses as well. Some believe it may have been in Jung’s hotel in New Orleans that the famous Congress of Freedom meeting took place in the Spring of 1963. At this meeting, with Edwin Walker and Joseph Milteer in attendance, a police informant reported there was talk of murdering national leaders.

    In the Thirties, corporate America’s fear of government regulation threatened by Roosevelt’s New Deal, (“Socialism” in their minds), gave them a reason to embrace Fascism. It justified their financing of paramilitary hate groups to carry out violent, anti-government and anti-union campaigns exploiting the vehicles of racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. By the Sixties these groups had become entrenched in the grassroots landscape.

    The institutionalization of the military industrial complex and the national security state, with which corporate America would meld, developed during World War II and its aftermath. The DuPonts, as well as other industrialists, implicated in the attempted coup against FDR played a major role in these developments.

    The Nye Committee Hearings to investigate the munitions industry were finally held in 1935. Committee findings revealed that the DuPonts were heavily invested in fascist Italy, and had played a major role in the rearming of Germany.25 According to the Versailles Treaty, which ended WWI, it was illegal to sell arms to Germany, but the DuPonts lobbied State Department delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. They finally obtained assurance from one of the delegates that their business with Germany would be “winked at.” That delegate was Wall Street lawyer Allen Dulles. In addition, the Wall Street lawyer who represented the DuPonts at the hearings was William Donovan, who went on to head the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS was the forerunner of the CIA) during WWII.

    In spite of the DuPonts’ illegal dealings, no prosecutions were forthcoming as a result of the Nye committee either. The DuPont family interests represented the largest holdings in the military industrial complex. DuPont built and operated the plant for the Manhattan project. They built all the facilities for atomic bomb production including the facility at Oak Ridge Tennessee. DuPont technicians and engineers ran the show; and by the Sixties the DuPonts effectively had control of the whole atomic energy industry.26

    The JFK Presidency and the New Deal Legacy

    The post war economic boom, coupled with the Democratic Party’s advocacy for civil rights, encouraged the Republicans to try to win back the voting coalition of urban ethnic groups, the Dixie vote and the Catholic vote that Roosevelt had captured.27 But when John F. Kennedy was elected, that chance evaporated. Kennedy had stopped the Catholic vote on its way back to the right. In spite of the controversy at the time, the Democrats needed a Catholic candidate, not a Mafia Don, to secure the election.

    When Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was payback time. For it was Joseph Kennedy as chair of the Roosevelt election committee who helped put together that winning “Roosevelt coalition” of urban ethnic groups and the Catholic votes of the Northeast. Kennedy and his family had a powerful legacy in the urban political wards and could deliver that vote. They also elicited the support of some businessmen who were otherwise suspicious of FDR (Kennedy even managed to get William Randolph Hearst to support FDR’s first bid for the Presidency). The Roosevelts and the Kennedys cooperated on other levels as well. James Roosevelt, the President’s son, was instrumental in securing British liquor franchises for Joseph Kennedy. Elliot Roosevelt, another son, served alongside Joseph Kennedy Jr. in WWII. In fact, he was flying the escort plane when Joseph was shot down.28

    The relationship between Kennedy and Roosevelt was not always cordial, but Kennedy’s isolationism vs. Roosevelt’s internationalism is beyond the scope of this article.29 Kennedy nevertheless remained a loyal Roosevelt supporter even after most businessmen abandoned the New Deal ship. By the time Roosevelt sought his third term, Kennedy had become more critical of FDR, fostering hope in the business community that he might endorse Wendel Wilkie. Robert E. Woods of the right-wing America First Committee encouraged Kennedy to support Wilkie. Kennedy apparently led Woods, and the Luces, to believe he would shift allegiances. Remember, in 1940 Kennedy was a well-known public figure, and the nation anxiously awaited his radio address to announce whom he supported for President. In spite of his contrary posturing, Kennedy finally supported Roosevelt. Years later, he told Claire Booth Luce, “I simply made a deal with Roosevelt. We agreed that if I would endorse him for President in 1940, then he would support my son Joe for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942.”30 So Joseph Kennedy gained the enmity of FDR’s enemies; he was perceived as a traitor.

    In the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy consciously welded himself to the FDR legacy. The New Frontier was to be the fulfillment of the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., later to become JFK’s Undersecretary of Commerce, campaigned with Kennedy throughout states such as West Virginia, where memories of the Great Depression were still vivid. Certainly this campaign, as well as Kennedy’s proactive policies, gained the ire of FDR’s New Deal enemies.

    In his book Battling Wall Street, Donald Gibson convincingly shows that JFK did come up against the same business interests that opposed FDR. 31 For example, in his confrontation with U.S. Steel (a company in which DuPont owned a significant share of stock) over price increases Kennedy railed against “a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profits exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interest of 185 million Americans.”

    Recall the FDR speech about Wall Street bankers harming the greater good.

    In closing I would say the attempted coup against FDR and the power struggles surrounding it will not give us a smoking gun to the Kennedy assassination. But it will allow us to draw some important implications about the assassination.

    1. The coup attempt against FDR gives us an historical precedent to conclude that powerful interests will consider using every available means including political murder in order to pursue their personal wealth.
    2. The Kennedy assassination was domestic in nature.
    3. The assassination was carried out by two groups created by corporate interests: The national security state and right-wing paramilitary organizations.
    4. Although foreign policy issues such as Cuba and Vietnam were important, JFK’s domestic policies and vision of an activist government mediating for the interests of all segments of society precipitated his assassination.
    5. Since the assassination was domestic in nature the cover- up that followed was not to avoid an international nuclear war, but to avoid a domestic civil strife.
    6. Finally, if nothing else, studying the anti-FDR coup attempt and what it represents allows us to break the seals on a chapter of our history which, like the JFK case, vested interests would like to keep hidden.

    Notes

    1. For an in-depth analysis of this political realignment see Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (New York, Oxford’ Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 1-16.

    2. Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973). See also Clayton E. Cramer’s article “An American Coup D’Etat?” in History Today, November, 1995.

    3. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, London: Harper Colophon

    Books Harper & Row Publishers, 1963), pp. 20, 89.

    4. Ibid., p. 89.

    5. For one of the best histories of the DuPonts see Gerard Colby’s DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).

    6. Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (New York: Random House, 1964) pp.83-89.

    7. For a more detailed account of the formation of the American Legion see Richard 0. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: Cameron Associates, 1955) pp. 211-216, 280.

    8. Archer, pp. 10-11, 14-19, 25-27. Interestingly enough, the person who wrote the Gold standard speech was a John W. Davis, a chief attorney for J.P. Morgan. Morgan may have been creating an alibi for himself while publicly stating that “…going off the Gold standard saved the country from complete collapse. It was vitally necessary…” see Leuchtenburg, p. 51.

    9. Ibid., pg. 12.

    10. Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (Costa Mesa, California: The Noontide Press, reprinted 1991) The forward to this edition contains a concise biography of Butler.

    11. Archer, pp.31-32. On FDR’s problems with the DuPonts and Liberty League, see Harold Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L.Ickes: The First Thousand Days 1933-1936 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954) pp.523-525. Also Miles, pp.32-33 and Leuchtenburg, pp.91-92.

    12. This was before the Committee was taken over by Martin Dies, a right-wing Southern Democrat who used the committee to label all political enemies “communists”. This was to reach its apogee in the McCarthy years when the committee was using the red scare to purge all New Dealers from government and cultural life. See Archer, p. 136; also Miles, p. 36. For an account of Martin Dies’ committee surpressing investigation of fascist activites, and his association with Harry Jung, a later associate of Guy Bannister, see John L. Spivak, Secret Armies:The New Techniques of Nazi Warfare (New York: Modern Age Books, Inc., 1939) pp.136-154.

    13. U.S. House of Representatives, Public Statement of Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Seventy-Third Congress, Second Session, November 24, 1934. pp.5-10.

    14. U.S. House of Representatives, Investigation of Un-American Activities, Seventy-Third Congress, Second Session, November20, 1934. Testimony of Col. Butler-pp. 17-19; testimony of Paul Comly French pp.20-23.

    15. Ibid., Testimony of Paul Cornley French. Initally this testimony concerning Remmington and the Duponts was censored, see Archer, p. 161. Also Colby, p. 291.

    16. Archer, pp.209-210.

    17. Time, December 3, 1934

    18. New York Times, March 26, 1935.

    19. Cartoon reprinted in Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House.

    20. Ibid., pp.197-198. See also Cramer, “An American Coup d’Etat?’ in Historv Today, November 1995.

    21. Archer, p. 228. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964) p. 189.

    22. Archer, p. 201. See also Spivak for a flill description of American fascist organizations.

    23. Boyer and Morais, pp. 280-281; Colby, pp.327-331.

    24. Spivak, pp.81-83.

    25. Colby, pp. 302-315. See also Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast (New York: Grove Press, 1993) pp.43-57 for a detailed account of the Dulles brothers’ dealings on behalf of the German armament industry.

    26. Ibid., pp.364-365.

    27. Miles, p. ix.

    28. Beschloss, pp. 68-95, 173-174, 256.

    29. A good description of the Kennedy-Roosevelt controversy is in Nigel Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992) pp.368-376.

    30. Beschloss, p. 276.

    31. Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1994).

    32. The New York Times, The Kennedy Years (New York: Viking Press, 1964) p. 263.

  • CTKA’s Presidential Endorsement (1996)

    Pity a populace that must choose between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton as the chief executive of their government. Or even Dole, Clinton, and Ross Perot. In good conscience, CTKA cannot endorse any of them. There is someone we do support. But before we explain why, we will explain why not.

    For us, Bob Dole is, in political parlance, a “non-starter”. Many have recently pointed out Dole’s support for the tobacco companies as indicative of the kind of politician he is. We say the indications go back much further and deeper than just the tobacco companies. Dole was a fond admirer of the great divider of the American political system, Richard Nixon. And Dole staunchly supported Nixon through both the escalation of the Vietnam War and the paralyzing Watergate scandal. Dole has rarely found a corporate cause or thiet he didn’t like. When two multimillionaire oil entrepreneurs were hauled before a Senate committee for stealing 30 million in oil from Indian reservations, Dole used the old chestnut of launching diversionary attacks against witnesses in order to disrupt the proceedings. The Koch brothers then became major contributors to Dole and the Republican party (for a complete report on this, see The Nation of 8/26/96). Like husband, like wife. Liddy Dole is supposed to be his better half. Not true. When Ms. Dole ran the Red Cross in the early 90’s, her chief adviser was Mari Will, wife of Washington Post pundit, Oswald did it stalwart, and CIA defender George Will. Any candidate close to the Wills is an enemy of the research community, and consequently, good government.

    Most revealing about Bob Dole was his behavior during the Iran-Contra scandal. As the mainstream media tried to make Jim Garrison the criminal when he probed the Kennedy case, Dole tried to make Lawrence Walsh the culprit of that later scandal. According to Robert Parry, Dole detracted attention from the allegations against Reagan-Bush officials by hectoring Walsh over issues like where he paid his local taxes and his first class airfares. In other words, Dole was part of the Washington “insider” effort to defuse and defund Walsh’s investigation. After Bush stopped Walsh’s probe by pardoning his suspects, Dole boasted in public about his role in derailing Walsh. If one is looking for someone to fund and extend the Review Board, and later appoint an independent consul, Dole would be a hapless choice. Ross Perot is to be credited for offering an alternative to the two party system. He wants to clean the lobbyists and special interests out of Washington. He campaigned against NAFTA. But Perot has an erratic and dictatorial streak in him, as exemplified by the controversy in the nominating process of his Reform Party. Although people in the research community offered him material on Gerald Posner, he has not used it even though Citizen Perot is a hit piece timed for the presidential race. Also, like Dole, Perot was a strong supporter of Richard Nixon as is attested to in John Ehrlichmann’s bookWitness to Power. Reportedly, Perot also contributed to the candidacy of Oliver North in his run for the Senate. Recently another of North’s criminal activities was brought to light: the selling of cocaine for distribution to gangs in Los Angeles. So although Perot is better on some issues, he seems a bit myopic about the overall picture.

    Which brings us to the incumbent. Most of us at CTKA voted for Bill Clinton in ’92. George Bush, former DCI, had fought the JFK Act. During the campaign, Clinton made some overtures our way. He stated in McKeesport, Pennsylvania that he realized many people had lingering questions about the JFK case and they deserved answers. The centerpiece of his nominating convention was the famous film of himself at the White House in 1963 shaking hands with President Kennedy. After his election, he made a grand photo opportunity out of his visit to Kennedy’s grave at Arlington. After a slow start, he did finally get the Review Board nominated. But then in 1993, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, he blindsided us. In response to a question by a CNN reporter Clinton said that, after reading Case Closed , he was now satisfied with the official verdict in the case. Since then, as noted in our last issue, he has yet to make a positive decision in favor of the Review Board in any of its disputes with the FBI over redactions in released documents. To our knowledge, he has made only one mention of the Board in public since Mr. Marwell was instated, and that was a passing notice. On the Robert Kennedy case, Clinton wrote the foreword to the recent book The Last Campaign, by Time-Life photographer Bill Eppridge and writer Hays Gorey. The book states that Sirhan killed RFK. Clinton implies the same in his unqualified opening endorsement. In retrospect, we should have known better about Clinton in 1992.

    With our knowledge of the media, painfully culled from its treatment of the JFK case, we should have known something was up with the Arkansas governor. Back in 1988, when Clinton blew his nationally televised nominating speech for Michael Dukakis, he was invited onto The Tonight Show where he was allowed to kid himself over his longwindedness thereby redeeming his national image. When he finished second in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, he was allowed the guest spot on Nightline and, unchallenged by Ted Koppel, he announced himself the “real” winner since he finished a closer second than expected. When the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal brimmed over, he got a spot on Sixty Minutes with Hillary as his Tammy Wynettish wife that patched up his “family man” image. Later in the campaign, when the Whitewater and Mena stories started to leak out of Arkansas, Time did its turn with a remarkably deceptive cover story. Entitled “The Doubts About Bill Clinton”, it masqueraded as an inquisition of his tenure as governor. In reality it ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt on every accusation. In other words, it was designed to put the rumors to rest.

    How does a candidate get the red carpet treatment into the White House? Why would NBC, ABC, CBS, and Time-Life smooth the rails to get a Democrat into power? Those are the questions we should have been asking ourselves amid these odd maneuverings. The answers are in Roger Morris’ new book on the Clintons, Partners in Power. In our Jan/Feb issue, we recommended the Morris biography of Richard Nixon as the best in that crowded field. He has repeated that feat with his work on the Clintons. Some of the things revealed in this book confirm the suspicions many people have had about the Clintons and explain the remarkable orchestrations to get him into office. Consider:

    1. Clinton lied to the University of Arkansas to escape the draft and used a crony of former governor Winthrop Rockefeller to stall his local draft board into delaying their decision on his case. These delay tactics were enough to get him out of serving in the Vietnam War since Nixon instituted a draft lottery in 1969. Clinton has orchestrated a cover-up of these facts since his first run for office in 1974.
    2. Morris cites three confidential sources in making his case that Clinton was a CIA informant at Oxford reporting on radicals in the anti-war movement abroad.
    3. The Rose Law Firm was the Sullivan and Cromwell of Arkansas. If Allen and John Foster Dulles had been attorneys in Little Rock instead of New York City, they would have felt at home there. It was a lawyers’ school for scandal that fits right into the contemporary–and well-deserved–caricature of attorneys who, as long as they are paid $300 an hour, will cover up any kind of corporate malfeasance. Clinton got Hillary her the job there. It is at this time that Hillary Clinton took part in her patently rigged commodities deal, which Morris exposes as a thinly disguised political bribe. If Hillary Clinton had any ideals, and Morris indicates she had some, they were lost when she went to work at Rose in 1976.
    4. If Clinton had any ideals–and the case is weaker for him–he lost them after his failed reelection bid for governor in 1980. Contrary to popular belief, that loss did not change him from a dewy-eyed idealist into a pragmatist. It put him even more solidly in the camp of the powerful and wealthy interests who had backed him from the start.
    5. If the drugs for weapons transfer site at Mena, Arkansas is ever honestly examined by the major media or a legislative body, it will destroy Clinton and put Oliver North and George Bush in jail. Which, of course, is where they should have been if Dole had not obstructed Walsh.

    The amazing thing about all of the above points is that they were all evident to Arkansas observers before Clinton ran in the Democratic primaries. Yet the American people were not allowed to know the full truth about Bill Clinton. The fact that the media provided interference for him should have alerted us like a flare in the night. So the failures of his administration, not just on the JFK Act, should have been no surprise or provided little disappointment. As Robert Parry has pointed out, Clinton was in a great position to reopen the “October Surprise” investigation since the Russians offered him new evidence that it had actually happened. Clinton has had opportunities to expose the sordidness of the Reagan-Bush years on the horrors of the El Mozote massacre, on Iraqgate, on the GOP tampering with his mother’s State Department files. On all these, as well as the JFK case, he has remained silent. In many ways he has actually endorsed two political tendencies that CTKA most deplores and anyone who still values in the legacy of John Kennedy holds dear: the excesses of the national security state, and the wild maldistribution of wealth that has ravaged America since 1980. Clinton has doubled the number of FBI authorized wiretaps that Bush allowed. As exposed by the Los Angeles Times, he secretly authorized arms shipments into Bosnia through Iranian allies. Now that historians like Gar Alperovitz have exposed the myth of the “necessity” of dropping the atomic bomb, Clinton tries to reinflate it by saying he would have made the same choice as Truman did.

    On the economy, unlike JFK, Clinton does anything except battle Wall Street. Giant investment house Goldman Sachs was one of the major contributors to his ’92 campaign, so they are well represented with Robert Rubin at Treasury. The same Rubin who defended the FBI’s incineration of 96 people at Waco. Late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was a partner of Tommy Boggs, a $500 per hour Washington lobbyist. Boggs is the son of Hale Boggs and brother of Cokie Roberts, George Will’s partner in bashing Stone’s JFK and Nixon in front of millions on TV. Clinton had an opportunity to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan, that darling of Rockefeller-Morgan interests on Wall Street. He didn’t and this keeps Wall Street and other wealthy interests happy; happy enough to give Clinton twelve million on his recent August 19th birthday, a sum that smashes all records for Democratic, and possibly GOP, fundraisers.

    There must be a hitch to all this. Nobody shells out 12 million for nothing. There is. Far from reversing, or even halting the Reagan-Bush upward redistribution of wealth, Clinton has aided it. In a report issued in July, the standard of living for the poor is revealed as bad or worse in 1994 than in any year since 1967. The frightening pace of corporate mergers, especially in the media, has not abated. Pentagon and CIA budgets have not been seriously curtailed by the collapse of the “Red Menace”. Wall Street has been so cheered by Clinton’s policies that a headline in the Los Angeles Times of August 3rd actually reads, “Job Rate Growth Slows, Cheering Wall Street”. The defeat of Kennedy’s economic policies (so aptly portrayed by Donald Gibson), is so complete that Kennedy adviser Dick Goodwin can write an editorial lamenting the fact that Kennedy’s struggle for economic justice is now over; the rich have won out. Goodwin should have ended with the quote, “Bill, you’re no JFK.”

    This is unfortunate for both Clinton and the Democrats. It is also, in an American way, short-sighted on sheer political terms. First, as Kevin Phillips has pointed out, since the issue of the Warren Report the average American’s cynicism about government has grown to epidemic proportions. This has now spread to the GOP, i.e. there seems to be a dealignment of both parties marked by large defections to third parties or independent status. In a July poll, an astonishing 60% of the public favors the rise of a third party. One of the main reasons quoted was that: People have such an incredibly poor view of politics and politicians, and such incredibly low expectations that it takes very little to make them convinced that what they are seeing is the same “old stuff”.

    Concomitant with this is the voters’ knowledge that things weren’t always this bad on the economic front; there was a president we used to trust. This was demonstrated in a July New York Times /CBS poll. When the respondents were asked which former president they would like to have running the country today, the winner in a landslide was John Kennedy. He received double the votes of Reagan and triple the amount of Truman, Lincoln, or FDR. This is even more remarkable in light of the myriad attempts to defame both the man and his presidency in every kind of media. An attempt which, we feel, has demonstrably increased in recent years. When a respondent was asked specifically why she voted for Kenendy, the reply was because he was “for the poor people, while today everyone seems to be more for the rich.” In other words, he wasn’t part of the Washington crowd which Morris calls, “the culture of complicity”. For us there is very little difference between Clinton, Dole, and Perot. Or between those three and the corporate lobbyists and media pundits with whom they cavort. Kennedy wasn’t part of that Washington crowd. He felt they distorted his message. As he told Ben Bradlee, “I always said, when we don’t have to go through you bastards, we can really get our story to the American public.” Kennedy’s willingness to stand up for the public and against these money interests was never more vividly illustrated than in Executive Order 11110 of June 7th, 1963. This instructed Treasury to bypass the Rockefeller-Morgan Federal Reserve Board and begin minting its own silver dollars and silver certificates. Wall Street denizen Douglas Dillon pressed Johnson to reverse that decision. He did three weeks after the assassination.

    There is one candidate running for president this year that we can endorse. In fact as this is being written I am listening to his acceptance speech given at UCLA’s McGowan Hall. His name is Ralph Nader and he is the candidate of the Green Party. Some of our younger readers may not know who he is. As a young lawyer in Hartford, he noticed that many of his personal injury clients had been crippled as a result of automobile accidents. Upon investigation he discovered that the automobiles could have been manufactured more safely to minimize many of the injuries. In 1965 he wrote a book that exposed Detroit’s culpability: Unsafe at Any Speed. It became a bestseller and vaulted him to Capitol Hill where his Senate testimony forced Congress to pass the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. The next year he was instrumental in getting Congress to pass a law for more stringent inspection of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. It was Nader who convinced Jock Yablonski to run against corrupt UMW leader Tony Boyle. When GM launched a secret investigation of Nader, he sued and won. With this money he set up Public Citizen Inc., the umbrella group for his investigations of misleading advertising, abuses in nursing homes, and yes, a sick political system that ignores citizens yet is all to quick to respond to corporate and Pentagon wishes. Nader’s example caused a whole slew of idealistic young people–Nader’s Raiders–to join him. Compared to Dole, Clinton, and Perot on a moral and political plane, Nader has the stature of Nelson Mandela. In fact, next to Mandela, he still looks OK. Recently, his name was enough to stop what he calls “tort deformation” in California, i.e. the limiting of malpractice awards in civil cases. Reportedly, James Carville, Clinton’s chief political adviser fears a well-funded, media exposed Nader candidacy more than any other. In other words, if Nader had Perot’s money, Carville would be having sleepless nights.

    To quote Malcolm X, what we are seeing now is the “chickens coming home to roost.” The beginning of the breakdown of the traditional two party system in America. To which Probe says “Good riddance”; but more in sorrow than in anger. The party of FDR and JFK was a good one. But a party that won’t demand the truth about the murder of its most popular leader, or the man who would have saved us from Nixon, Robert Kennedy, or its equivalent of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, does not deserve to persist. In Nader’s acceptance speech of August 19th, he talked about U. S. support of foreign dictatorships that exploit cheap labor; the debasement of democracy by giant corporations; the maldisribution of wealth in America and how to correct it; the bloated Pentagon budget in the wake of the Cold War; a revival of citizenship and democracy among in schools. In short, he sounded a bit like young John Kennedy. If he gets on the national debates, Carville might have some difficulty sleeping. Even if he doesn’t, we’re for him. We’d rather cast a vote for a new beginning, no matter how far off, than be a sucker for false hope, even if it comes cynically gift-wrapped in the mantle of JFK.

  • Bob Woodward

    From the January-February, 1996 issue (Vol. 3 No. 2) of Probe

    Robert Upshur Woodward rose from obscure reporter working for the Washington Post to become one of the most famous journalists of recent times for his role, with that of Carl Bernstein, in “breaking” the Watergate story. Together, “Woodstein” broke one of the biggest news stories of all time: a chain of abuse by the Executive office of the Presidency that led to calls for impeachment, and the eventual resignation, of President Richard Nixon.

    Immortalized by Robert Redford in the movie based on the book All the President’s Men, the real Woodward is quite an enigma. Adrian Havill, in his recent book Deep Truth, presents the most comprehensive biography to date of both Woodward and Bernstein. He also details some of the fabrications that passed for nonfiction in the book from which the film was based. Most importantly, he gives us a great wealth of background on who Woodward really is, where he comes from, and what his connections are.

    A Yalie and a Secret Society Member

    The staunchly conservative Bob Woodward grew up in Wheaton, Illinois. A good student at Yale, he was ultimately one of fifteen seniors “tapped” for one of that university’s secret societies, Book and Snake, a cut below the more infamous Skull and Bones, but the top of the second-tier fraternities. Woodward had his first journalistic experience working for the Banner, a Yale publication. In his 1965 yearbook he was referred to as a “Banner mogul.” Havill writes,

    Certainly, with the CIA encouraged to recruit on the Yale campus, particularly among history majors and secret societies, it is more than reasonable to assume Bob may have been one of those approached by the agency, or by a military intelligence unit, especially after four years of naval ROTC training. Although it would answer a lot of questions that have been raised about Bob Woodward, at this point one can only speculate as to whether he was offered the chance to become a “double-wallet guy,” as CIA agents who have two identities are dubbed. It would certainly be understandable if he decided not to adhere to the straight and accepted the submerged patriotic glamour and extra funds that such a relationship would provide. It would also explain the comments of Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas, when he wrote in 1989 that Bob Woodward was “temperamentally secretive, loathe to volunteer information about himself,” or the Washingtonian‘s remarks in 1987: “He is secretive about everything.” As Esquire magazine put it, summing up in its 1992 article on Bob, “What is he hiding?”

    The “Floating Pentagon” Assignment

    Three days after graduating from Yale, Woodward was sent by the U.S. Navy to Norfolk, Virginia, where he was commissioned as an ensign by none other than U.S. Senator George Smathers from Florida. Bob’s assignment was to a very special ship, called a “floating Pentagon,” the U.S.S. Wright. The ship was a National Emergency Command Ship-a place where a President and cabinet could preside from in the event of a nuclear war. It had elaborate and sophisticated communications and data processing capabilities. It had a smaller replica of the war room at the Pentagon. It ran under what was called SIOP-Single Integrated Operation Plan. For example, in the event of nuclear war, the Wright was third in line to take full command if the two ahead of it, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha (SAC) and NORAD, were rendered incommunicado. Woodward-straightfacedly-told authors Colodny and Gettlin (Silent Coup) that he guessed he was picked for the ship because he had been a radio ham as a kid.

    Aboard the Wright, Woodward had top secret “crypto” clearance-the same clearance researcher Harold Weisberg found had been assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was himself in the Marines. Such clearance in Woodward’s case gave him full access to nearly all classified materials and codes on the ship. Woodward also ran the ship’s newspaper. Woodward has insisted that possessing a high security clearance is not necessarily indicative of intelligence work.

    The Wright carried men from each of the military services, as well as CIA personnel. One of Havill’s government sources reported that the CIA would likely have had additional informants on a ship of such sensitivity, adding that “the rivalry between the services was intense.”

    After a two and a half year stint on the Wright, Woodward was assigned to go to Vietnam. Woodward wrote the Pentagon asking to serve on a destroyer. The wish was granted. One naval captain told Havill that it seemed reasonable Woodward would have a little pull from his previous duty to avoid getting assigned to Vietnam. Another former naval officer disputed that, saying “Nobody got out of going to Vietnam in 1968.”

    But Woodward did. He was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Fox, based in Southern California. The personnel on board the Fox included an intelligence team, many of whom had studied Russian and Asian languages at the famous armed services language school in Monterey, California.

    By 1968, Woodward ran the ship’s radio team. In 1969, Woodward was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal for his communications work. From there, Woodward moved on to a Pentagon assignment, a job that included briefing top officers in the government. Admiral Thomas Moorer and former secretary of defense Melvin Laird are both on record noting that Woodward briefed Al Haig at the White House during this period. What is suspicious is Woodward’s semi-admittance to Hougan that he had done some briefing, and his complete denial to Colodny and Gettlin that he had ever briefed anyone at the White House. Havill notes:

    Considering the evidence, Bob Woodward’s denial more strongly suggests intelligence than it does his uninvolvement in White House briefings.

    Woodward’s secrecy about his past, his choice of associates, and what is known of his activities caused Havill to write:

    The question, then, begs itself once more. Was Bob Woodward ever a free-lance or retained Central Intelligence Agency liaison officer, informant or operative . . . ? This author got various forms of affirmative opinions from intelligence experts. It would explain his assignment to the Wright and his misleading statements to interviewers. It would make understandable his being able to get out of going to Vietnam in 1968, his extension for an additional year at the Pentagon, his being chosen to brief at the White House and his denials as well. It would also help explain his subsequent high-level friendships with leaders of the U.S. military and the CIA.

    It would also explain the role Woodward and Bernstein wittingly or unwittingly played in keeping the CIA’s nose clean while making sure the world saw the President’s nose was dirty.

    The Legacy of Deep Throat

    Whatever his background, whatever his connections, one cannot trust what Woodward says as fact. Take, for instance, his account in Veil of his last interview with dying CIA Director William Casey. Havill tracked down Casey’s family, friends, hospital security staff and CIA guardians and found that the visit Woodward described was impossible. First of all, Casey was under 24 hour guard by several layers of security: CIA members, hospital security, and Casey’s family. And Woodward had already been stopped once while trying to see Casey. According to one of Havill’s sources, Woodward was not merely asked to leave, as Woodward reported in his book, but was forcibly shoved into the elevator. And Woodward’s story kept shifting. Woodward told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he had gotten in by flashing his press pass. To Larry King, Woodward claimed he just “walked in.” But even assuming he somehow managed to get by all of that security, Woodward would still have been the only person to claim that Casey had uttered intelligible words in those last hours. The only other person to make such a claim was Robert Gates, who himself became CIA Director. The family, doctor and medical staff said Casey could not make words at this point, only noises. At least Gates questioned whether he might have been imagining he heard words. Woodward has never retracted his “conversation.” In addition, Woodward once said that Casey sat bolt upright, which would seem highly implausible given his rapidly deteriorating state. Onetime CIA Director Stansfield Turner, a friend of Woodward’s since 1966, said Woodward told him he’d walked by Casey’s room and Casey had waved to him. Casey’s bed was positioned in such a way in the room as to make that impossible too.

    Likewise, Woodward does not seem to demand authenticity from subordinates. Under his watch as Assistant Managing Editor of the Metro desk, the Post suffered a humiliation of the highest proportions at the hands of one of his hires, Janet Cooke. It was this incident that knocked the Post from its perch as “America’s leading newspaper,” as it had been called in the wake of its Watergate reporting.

    Janet Cooke was a gifted writer with a knack for capturing the essence of the streets of D.C. She went to the Post for a job, and Woodward hired her. More illustrator than reporter, she painted vivid images, if not entirely accurate ones. The latter trait soon brought her trouble.

    Cooke’s crowning glory-and worst disaster-was a story called “Jimmy’s World,” about an eight year old heroin addict. The story brought both praise and outrage: praise for the vivid writing, outrage that a reporter could just stand by and watch a kid taking drugs. The controversial story managed to earn a Pulitzer, but only after some arm twisting by the committee head, who overruled the committee’s first choice for the prizewinner to pick “Jimmy’s World.” Some of the committee members hadn’t even read the story, but not wanting to appear divisive, they stood together, for better or for worse. Made bold by the award, Janet Cooke’s fabrications grew even larger and more personal. She started making up a history for herself that she didn’t possess, including training in languages she couldn’t speak. Several at the Post, including Woodward, were worried that her story of Jimmy may not be true. They pressured Cooke to produce “Jimmy.” Losing the battle to protect her source, it rapidly became clear that she had no source. There was no Jimmy. And for the first time ever, a Pulitzer was returned. The Post was thoroughly embarrassed by a woman under Woodward’s direct supervision at the paper.

    But Woodward’s most stunning deceptions come from the work that launched his career, his tracking of the Watergate story as retold in the supposedly nonfiction work All the President’s Men. Adrian Havill found curious discrepancies between accountings of incidents as reported in the book, and the rest of the available facts (see Deep Throat).

    Given his role in the Watergate cover-up, and the misrepresentations in his own work, it remains to us a huge mystery why this man is treated with the reverence he is. Considering his behavior, his background, his credibility, and his connections, we now feel compelled to join Adrian Havill in asking who is Bob Woodward? Whom does he serve? Is his career sustained for the purposes of those with a “secret agenda”?

  • Adrian Havill, Deep Truth

    Deep Throat: The Deceptions of «All the President’s Men»

    From the January-February, 1996 issue (Vol. 3 No. 2) of Probe

    Had the book been presented as fiction, readers could not complain. However, the book sits on non-fiction shelves around the world. Maybe it shouldn’t.

    In his book Deep Truth, author Adrian Havill presents several events in All the President’s Men that are, to put it generously, highly suspect. One example is the scene in which Woodward and Bernstein have made their first egregious mistake. They sourced Hugh Sloan’s grand jury testimony for a story that Sloan had never told the Grand Jury, showing that Haldeman was one of the inner group at CREEP controlling the mysterious slush fund. In the book, the dejected Woodward and Bernstein walk home in the rain, beaten both physically and symbolically by the elements, with only newspapers over their head to keep them dry. Havill did some checking. It never rained that day. That might seem an inconsequential detail to some, but others will understand that it was a device created to bring drama. How many other “events” were merely fictional devices? Havill found several. For instance, at one point, Carl Bernstein is about to be subpoenaed by CREEP, and Ben Bradlee advised Carl to go hang out at a movie until after 5:00 p.m., then to call into the office. According to the book, Carl went to see Deep Throat, hence the reason for the name “Deep Throat” having been given to Woodward’s secret source. But there was no Deep Throat playing anywhere in D.C. at that time. In fact, the theaters were being very cautious, having recently been raided by law enforcement authorities. Not one theater in town was showing Deep Throat.

    And speaking of “Deep Throat” . . .

    One of the most astonishingly bald-faced inventions was the process by which Woodward and “Deep Throat” allegedly made contact when they needed to speak to one another. In the book, much is made of the spooky, clandestine meetings between “Deep Throat” and Woodward. When Woodward needed to ask “Deep Throat” something, he was to put a flower pot with a red flag in it on his sixth floor balcony, which, we are supposed to believe, this high level source checked daily. When “Deep Throat” wanted to speak to Woodward, a clock would supposedly be drawn in his copy of the New York Times designating the meeting time. But neither of these scenarios fits the reality of where Woodward lived. Woodward, who could remember the exact room number (710) where he met Martha Mitchell just once, evidently had trouble remembering the address at which he had lived. In an interview he once said it was “606 or 608 or 612, something like that.” However, Havill found that Woodward’s actual address was 617. This is important, because the balcony attached to 617 faced an interior courtyard. Havill poked around and found that the only way to view a flower pot on the balcony was to walk into the center of the complex, with eighty units viewing you, crane your neck and look up to the sixth floor. Even then, a pot would have been barely visible. There was an alley that ran behind the building that allowed a glimpse of the apartment and balcony, but at an equally difficult angle. And in both cases, we are to believe that this source, who strove hard to protect his identify, would walk up in plain view of the eighty apartments facing the inner courtyard or the alley on a daily basis, on the chance that there might be a sign from Woodward. When Havill tried to poke around, just to look at the place, residents of the building stopped him and inquired who he was and what he was looking for. Unless “Deep Throat” was well known to the residents of the building, his daily visits seem to preclude being able to keep his identity a secret.

    As for the clock-in-the-paper, the New York Times papers were delivered not to each door, but left stacked and unmarked in a common reception area. There was no way “Deep Throat” could have known which paper Woodward would end up with each morning.

    Havill, in fact, believes that “Deep Throat” is no more real than the movie episode or the rain, but rather, a dramatic device. It certainly worked well. And Woodward’s and Bernstein’s editor at Simon and Schuster, Alice Mayhew, urged them to “build up the Deep Throat character and make him interesting.” While it is now clearly known that at least one of Woodward’s informants was, in fact, Robert Bennett, the suggestions from Colodny and Gettlin in Silent Coup about Al Haig and Deborah Davis’s suggestions in Katherine the Great about Richard Ober may not be contradictory. Other names that have been suggested have included Walter Sheridan (Jim Hougan in Spooks) and Bobby Ray Inman (also in Spooks). If Havill is correct and there is no “person” who was known as “Deep Throat”, it is possible that any or all of the above were passing along information, explicitly not to be sourced or credited to them in any way, on deep background.

    Havill asks, and then answers, his own questions as to the dishonesty in All the President’s Men:

    Why would Bob and Carl invent or embellish such seemingly incidental details of their book? Why would they make up meetings with a character named Deep Throat? The answer is Bob was consumed by naked ambition, anxious to prove that he could succeed at his newly chosen profession. There was money and fame at stake. . .

    And maybe a cover story to protect as well.

  • From Dallas to Watergate: It’s Déjà-Vu All Over Again

    From the January-February 1995 issue (Vol. 3 No. 2) of Probe

    (Click here to open in a separate page.)