Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: ALLEN DULLES

The Incubus of Intervention – Chapter 2
Kennedy’s Planned Trip to Jakarta

In the Foreword to my book on Malaysian Confrontation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia’s leading writers, commented on President Kennedy’s anticipated visit to Jakarta in early 1964:

Kennedy’s plans to meet Sukarno in Indonesia never came to pass: that we all know, for he was murdered….

Pramoedya drew attention to the planned visit without elaborating, apart from saying that Kennedy, and Indonesia’s President Sukarno, had to disappear from the stage of history. Half a century has elapsed since these two leaders ‘disappeared’ and with them the political positivity of the now forgotten plan to visit Jakarta. Instead, in the mid-1960s, a proliferation of violence and military mentality suffused the nation. Indonesia still bears the scars. This outcome was in stark contrast to the ‘Indonesia strategy’ Kennedy was planning in 1963. Working in conjunction with Sukarno whose perennial aim was to unify his nation, JFK’s intended visit was lost in the turgid history of that time.

Kennedy’s proposed visit to Jakarta ‘in April or May of 1964’ according to the long serving US ambassador in Indonesia, Howard Jones, was a strategy to end Malaysian Confrontation. This period of hostility between Indonesia and Malaysia, involving armed skirmishes and provocative political posturing, fell short of war. It started in early 1963 as Indonesian ‘protest’ against the British format of decolonisation which was simply lumping together its disparate colonial possessions in Southeast Asia to ensure the numbers of Chinese overall were in the minority. The reaction in Washington to Confrontation resulted in US aid to Indonesia being reduced to a trickle. Reopening these aid channels was part of Kennedy’s rationale in making the trip because Indonesia was a vital component of his larger strategy in Southeast Asia. Planning the visit to Jakarta involved several months of negotiation before Kennedy and Sukarno reached an agreement; then on November 20th the visit was formally announced. Because of the tragedy in Dallas a few days later, the visit did not occur. ‘The assassin’s bullet put an end to our plans and disposed of the immediate prospects for settlement of the Malaysia dispute,’ wrote Jones.¹ Confrontation continued up to 1965/6 when President Sukarno was ousted by General Suharto.

As shown in my book The Genesis of Konfrontasi, from archival evidence and interviews, Sukarno was not the instigator of Malaysian Confrontation. Instead, the principal Indonesian player was the Foreign Minister, Subandrio, who ran the largest intelligence service in Indonesia and fully expected to be the next president. As well, Confrontation did not start without various covert actions by persons linked to both British intelligence (MI6) and American intelligence (CIA), centered in Singapore and operating outside the aegis of government.

President Sukarno’s role in Confrontation underwent a change after Kennedy’s assassination. Initially, when Indonesia became embroiled in the conflict not of his doing, Sukarno’s public statements were designed to steer a course through dangerous political currents beyond his control, whereas after November 1963 he was attempting to regain leadership of this anti-British, anti-colonial campaign. This change in Sukarno was reflected in the expression ‘Ganjang Malaysia’, popularised in Western media as ‘Crush Malaysia’. Earlier, Sukarno had disagreed with this interpretation, and actually performed for the media to demonstrate his meaning. ‘Ganjang’, he explained, was like nibbling food in your mouth to check it for taste – as would a politician, checking for any disagreeable taste of colonialism – then spitting it out! Territorial acquisition was not on the menu in Malaysian Confrontation. Nevertheless critics of Indonesia² readily depicted Confrontation as expansionism because it came hard on the heels of Sukarno’s sovereignty dispute over Netherlands New Guinea, a dispute in which President Kennedy’s role had proved crucial. Sukarno commanded great respect as the founding father of Indonesian independence, but he himself was unable to halt Confrontation because it was driven by domestic political rivalry.

Having ousted the Dutch from New Guinea, Indonesia in 1963 was still seething with anti- colonial venom. There were three rival streams of Indonesian opposition to Malaysia – one linked with Subandrio, another with the Indonesian communist party (PKI) and another with the Indonesian army. These three disparate groups were involved in the initial border skirmishes with Sarawak in east ‘Malaysia’ being defended by British troops, in the throes of decolonisation. The intermittent conflict drew criticism from Washington through the US ambassador in Jakarta who explained that the US government agreed that ‘Malaysia’ was the best format for decolonisation. Then, in September 1963, after the burning of the British Embassy in Jakarta, bilateral relations with USA were strained to the point where aid for Indonesia was reduced to a minimum. Kennedy’s efforts to ensure his aid program would not falter now attracted criticism from British officials who ‘told the White House with increasing frequency that UK and US interests regarding Indonesia were beginning fundamentally to diverge.’³ Republican Congressman William S. Broomfield claimed that Indonesia was misusing US assistance. Support to cut US aid came from a clique of other Congressmen including Mathias, Gross and Findley.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon then endorsed the ‘Broomfield amendment’, demanding that Indonesia be dropped from the list of recipients of US aid. ’I say we should wipe it off the aid program’, he declared.⁴

Kennedy’s planned visit to Jakarta was a radical move to re-open all funding as this was a vital part of the ‘follow-up strategy’ he had set in place after intervening in 1962 in the anti-colonial dispute with the Dutch. In Indonesia, Kennedy’s intervention had stirred popular euphoria in his favour, and this continued into 1963, such was the young American president’s charisma. The Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis – the Cold War crises confronting him were making global headlines which for Indonesian readers kept ‘JFK news’ current, well past the highpoint of the New York Agreement in August 1962. In terms of implementing his ‘follow-up strategy’ to the sovereignty crisis, the ideal time to exploit pro-JFK sentiment was in 1963, yet the proposed date for the visit to Jakarta in early 1964 would still benefit from the kudos surrounding President John F. Kennedy. His ‘footprint of fame’ had been greatly enhanced by intervening in the New Guinea dispute: unresolved since independence in 1949, it had created its own anti-colonial niche in Indonesia’s collective psyche.

Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 had caused the delay and then the Bloomfield Amendment, cutting the funding for his Indonesia strategy, left JFK no alternative. Only then did he resolve to make the Jakarta visit and employ his charisma as the last political weapon at his disposal. Success for Kennedy’s visit to Jakarta depended upon the response of the Indonesian populace; and this (in late 1963) was still very positive. So it seemed a forgone conclusion that he would have achieved his goal because of the degree of veneration for JFK in Indonesia, combined with the eloquence of Indonesia’s President Sukarno for whom there was still widespread adulation. The politics of personality was the only weapon at the disposal of both Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Confrontation to a stop, and it was their intention to employ it jointly, and to the full, once the US president was in Jakarta. During his three years in office, Kennedy’s image and reputation had acquired a very positive aura throughout Asia and Africa far surpassing his predecessor, President Eisenhower. The 43-year old president was seen as pro-Indonesian – his new political stance and willingness to act decisively, capped off by his intervention in the sovereignty dispute, was in stark contrast to the blatant political interference of his 70-year old predecessor.

Indonesians and especially Sukarno, whose oratorical skill was well-honed over four decades, welcomed the new style, the new era, as heralded in the inaugural address.

…Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace….

JFK’s political opponents ensconced in Washington throughout the 1950s were unaccustomed to a president asserting such personal control. It was his forte, especially in foreign policy. ‘Kennedy’s instinctive style which was one of personal and intimate command’⁵ took on unprecedented importance and became a threat to the political strategy of his opponent because it meant he was highly likely to implement the aims of his Jakarta trip.

Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia – bringing Indonesia ‘on side’. As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008):

One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam and Laos.⁶

Kennedy wanted to ensure that Indonesia was secure before implementing any policy decision regarding the US presence in Vietnam. The two interrelated parts of his action plan after the New Guinea sovereignty dispute involved utilising the predominantly pro-US Indonesian army, and large-scale US aid for development projects in Indonesia. Both Kennedy and his opponents in Washington pursued a paradigm of modernisation which had emerged in the late 1950s using the military as the most cohesively organised group in undeveloped countries. Simpson has outlined how the ‘US government’s embrace of military modernization’ in the early 1960s followed on from the March 1959 Draper Committee Report which called for using the armed forces of underdeveloped countries ‘as a major transmission belt of socio-economic reform and development’.

Admiral Arleigh Burke and CIA director Allen Dulles argued at a June 18 NSC meeting [1959] that the United States ought to expand military training programs in Asia to include a wide range of civilian responsibilities and to encourage Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAGs) to ‘develop useful and appropriate relationships with the rising military leaders and factions in the underdeveloped countries to which they were assigned’. A few months later the semi-governmental RAND Corporation held a conference at which Lucian Pye, Guy Pauker, Edward Shils, and other scholars expanded on these ideas.⁷

Admiral Arleigh Burke, Dulles and Pauker were ‘promoting the Indonesian armed forces as a modernizing force’ (a strategy linked to Dulles’ role in the 1958 Outer Islands Rebellion – see Chapter 4) and, continues Simpson:

the army simultaneously pursued a counterinsurgency strategy against internal opponents while greatly expanding its political and economic power following the 1957 declaration of martial law and the takeover of Dutch enterprises.

By the time Kennedy came to office, much of Southeast Asia-related US policy was infused with military modernisation theory. Civic action programs figured highly in Kennedy’s strategy in Indonesia, utilising the army but also the police, designed to counterbalance the attraction the PKI had for impoverished farmers – like moths to a light in the hope of salvation. The infrastructure and poverty reduction programs were tied to US funding and framed around the assessment made by Tufts University Professor Donald Humphrey. He recommended that US aid to Indonesia starting in 1963 should be in the order of US$325–390 million. Europe and Japan were to have contributed almost half of this, but Kennedy’s aid program soon encountered difficulties in the Congress.

While still acutely wary of policy interference as occurred with the Bay of Pigs like an inaugural ‘wake-up call’, Kennedy had no way of ascertaining how his Indonesia strategy actually threatened the Indonesia strategy of his opponents. Nevertheless, the fact that JFK insisted on denying the CIA any part in his own negotiations with Sukarno is an indication of the serious distrust he held by 1963. Earlier in 1961, when Dulles was at the height of his power and JFK had been in office only a few months, he had requested a Briefing Paper from the CIA, prior to President Sukarno’s visit in April 1961. The advice given President Kennedy was that ‘we should not now entertain any major increases in the scale of economic or military aid to Indonesia’. Mindful of Allen Dulles and Guy Pauker as the mouthpiece of military modernisation, Kennedy must have interpreted such advice as hypocritical. Similarly, the CIA advice on whether or not Kennedy should support Sukarno’s quest to oust the Dutch from New Guinea lacked not so much insight as vision; it offered only a bleak prospect, saying that whichever way the President moved it would not alter the inexorable rise to power of the PKI.

It would be gratifying to be able to propose an alternative course of action by the United States which would stand a good chance of turning the course of events in Indonesia in a constructive direction. Unfortunately, this is a situation in which the influence that the United States can exert, at least in the short run, is extremely limited, if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded.⁸

Kennedy chose to support Sukarno’s claim to the Dutch territory and follow through with precisely the opposite to what the CIA had advised – an economic aid program to counter the PKI by addressing poverty through civic aid and development projects. When the funding restrictions imposed by Congress brought JFK’s follow-up plan to a standstill and he resolved to make an historic visit to Jakarta to restart the US aid project, the threat to Dulles’ strategy left no option. In the same way that Dulles had offered Kennedy no option in the 1961 Briefing Paper, in 1963 Kennedy’s decision to visit Jakarta left no option for Dulles (whom JFK had already ushered to the political sidelines). We can surmise how the exit of Dulles in 1961 may have seemed a positive move for Kennedy and one that should have helped him in 1963 implement the Indonesia policy he wanted. While Dulles’ removal from office did little to diminish his influence, it could only have exacerbated the threat created by Kennedy’s plan to visit Jakarta. Dulles simply had no answer to counter Kennedy’s dramatic personal initiative to visit Jakarta: or to re-contextualise the same comment from the 1961 Briefing Paper given Kennedy, Dulles had no answer in 1963 ‘if (as must be assumed) crude and violent intervention is excluded’.

In two crucial aspects, Kennedy’s plan clashed with the ongoing strategy of ‘regime change’ which DCI Dulles had set in motion six years earlier. Firstly, JFK intended to utilise the Indonesian army as ‘servants of the state’ of Indonesia, not for the army to assume power. And secondly, Kennedy’s intention was to maintain the presidency of Sukarno. Unbeknown to Kennedy, his plan to use the army was in effect commandeering the same asset intended by Dulles to implement regime change. Not only was JFK usurping the benefits of the transformation occurring as a result of US training of Indonesian army officers – a process which David Ransome labelled with the pithy description, a ‘creeping coup d’etat’⁹ – but ensuring Sukarno remained president would prevent the full military option. Kennedy would not simply have overruled his opponent but, in addition, keeping Sukarno as president would have prevented gaining untrammelled access to natural resources, a project which had been many years in the planning. We may surmise Kennedy was partially aware that his overall plan was making use of a military option still in its preparatory stage, simply from the large number of Indonesian army officers being trained in the US. Their common ground was ‘the ideological focus of US officials on the military as a modernizing force’, but where Kennedy was starkly at odds with his Washington opponents was his determination to retain Sukarno as President of Indonesia.

The visit to Jakarta was premised on an understanding between Kennedy and Sukarno to bring Malaysian Confrontation to an end, while JFK was in Jakarta. Howard Jones, US Ambassador in Jakarta from 1958, was well acquainted with Sukarno and fully aware that the key to achieving this important political change was Kennedy’s charisma, combined with the adulation and respect he commanded. Together, Kennedy and Sukarno could bring about a cessation of Malaysian Confrontation but, as Jones observes in his book Indonesia: the Possible Dream, ‘Sukarno could not initiate a settlement of the dispute himself ’.¹⁰

JFK’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in personal correspondence with me (January 8, 1992)¹¹ wrote: ‘President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped….’ Only after several months of negotiation with the Indonesian President did Kennedy agree to the proposed visit, after three requests by Sukarno. The one precondition set by Kennedy was his insistence on achieving a ‘successful outcome’. Rusk confirmed in writing the arrangement with Sukarno: ‘President Kennedy made it clear that confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia should be stopped, not merely for the duration of Kennedy’s visit but on a permanent basis’. However, it was not confrontation that was stopped but rather, the visit by Kennedy himself.

For Sukarno, Kennedy’s precondition meant declaring a permanent cessation of hostilities during the actual visit of the American president; while for JFK himself, a ‘successful visit’ meant ending the hostilities which were jeopardising the Indonesia strategy he had initiated in 1962 and which Malaysian Confrontation in 1963 was threatening to turn into just another ‘Cold War fatality’.

As part of a wider Southeast Asian tour, the visit was described by JFK as one that would provide a much needed boost to his chances for re- election. This tongue-in-cheek explanation understated the real political significance which the visit held for Kennedy himself. Now with a half- century of hindsight, the adverse repercussions of not making that trip to Jakarta are more clearly delineated in terms of the tragedy that befell Indonesia in 1965. In Cold War terms, Kennedy’s Indonesia strategy held every chance of success – indeed, the very likelihood of success compelled the decision to prevent the trip. For Dulles’ Indonesia strategy, Kennedy’s intention to support and prolong the Sukarno presidency was political anathema.

Why Kennedy Retained Allen Dulles

Between election and inauguration, John Kennedy had 72 days to survey the tumult of domestic and international issues soon to be encountered as the 35th President. Some of these, among other issues, included political unrest in the Congo, Laos, Vietnam and Berlin. Two such issues actually ballooned into potential crises during his time as President-elect. One of these involved Cuba, the other Indonesia and both involved Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). President Kennedy for various reasons had retained Dulles from the Eisenhower administration, a fateful inheritance from the ailing incumbent.

When Kennedy began organising his administration as President- elect, the first press announcement he made was that Allen Dulles would remain as DCI. In finding ‘the best person for the job’ to meet the multifarious demands of staffing the new administration, staff which finally included fifteen Rhodes scholars, Kennedy often adopted a bipartisan approach. Surely, choosing Dulles indicated that Kennedy did not regard him as being among the ‘opponents in Washington’? Yet within the first three months of the Kennedy presidency, Dulles had inflicted so much political damage this question does not bear answering, but simply prompts another: why, then, did Kennedy retain Dulles as DCI? Dulles was an icon of US intelligence. Since 1916 – before John Fitzgerald Kennedy was even born – Dulles had served in that specialised field under every US president since Woodrow Wilson.

Another reason for retaining Dulles was linked to the narrow victory over Republican presidential contender, Richard Nixon. The winning mar- gin of votes – only 120,000 out of a total of 69 million¹² – was attributed to Kennedy’s success in the televised debates. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and special counsel throughout most of his political career, from Congressman to Senator and then President, described the debates as ‘the primary factor in Kennedy’s ultimate victory’.¹³ The televised debates in October 1960 were the first time such an event was held although nowadays televised debates between presidential candidates are the norm. For Kennedy and Nixon, there were four debates, four unprecedented opportunities to reach millions of Americans, and the first (which was on domestic policy) had an audience of 70 million. The second and third debates were questions and answers, while the fourth debate was on foreign policy, and this was where Allen Dulles played his hand. Castro and Cuba ‘only 90 miles from our shore’ had been much in the news during the year of presidential campaigning and claimed an important part of the fourth debate. Nixon already knew that the CIA was planning an invasion of Cuba, but of course could not mention this during the debate; but Dulles had provided Kennedy a strategically timed briefing on Cuba shortly before the debate. Dulles did not divulge information about the invasion – that would come at Palm Beach when he was President-elect and during his first week of office – but at this stage Dulles gave Kennedy the edge with other intelligence which proved crucial during the debate. And crucial too, it seems, when the time came for Kennedy to decide whether or not to retain Dulles as DCI. Dulles’ briefing must have seemed like a godsend when Kennedy was analysing the votes that won him the presidency.

There was still another reason for Dulles being included in the President-elect’s first announcement. After winning the Democratic nomination, Kennedy had requested two persons to prepare separate reports on the anticipated transition from Republican to Democratic administration. These two persons were Columbia professor Richard Neustadt and Clark Clifford whom Sorensen described as ‘a Washington attorney’. His former experience, however, included special counsel to President Truman during the 1948 presidential campaign against Thomas E. Dewey. Special counsel for Dewey was Allen Dulles who was also ‘the confidential link on foreign policy matters between the Truman administration and the Dewey campaign’.¹⁴ So in 1960, bipartisanship in relation to Allen Dulles was revisiting Clifford’s earlier contact with Dulles. In both reports, Kennedy was advised to retain Dulles as DCI (and J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI).¹⁵ Ironically, in May 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy invited Clifford into the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to ensure the accuracy and unbiased nature of the intelligence being supplied to the President. Neustadt had recommended the directors of five ‘sensitive positions’ remain unchanged, but of these only Dulles and Hoover were retained. Sorensen quipped that, of the five, ‘Kennedy kept only the first two, whom the dinner guests the previous evening had reportedly suggested be the first to be ousted’.¹⁶

The intelligence on Cuba, which Dulles provided to Kennedy before the crucial debate with Nixon, gave the Democratic candidate a clear advantage over his Republican rival. More than just highlighting Dulles’ familiarity with Cuba, this showed Dulles was investing in the possibility of Kennedy winning the presidency. Perhaps even more than this, it showed Dulles (who through family and social connections knew ‘Jack’ Kennedy, his wife and the extended family) already had his measure of the man. Dulles knew that Kennedy would not leave this debt unpaid. As it turned out, the narrower the margin of winning votes, the greater seemed the debt, and if Dulles’ briefing before the historic debates could be described as a pre-election psychological strategy, it worked perfectly. Kennedy’s perceived familiarity with the issue of Cuba may have proved crucial in winning the debate, but Dulles’ duplicity soon became apparent. In Kennedy’s first week in office, it was his unfamiliarity with the issue of Cuba, or rather, the CIA’s half-baked invasion of Cuba, that proved to be an international embarrassment for the new president. Sorensen commented: ‘The Bay of Pigs had been – and would be – the worst defeat of his career’.¹⁷

Fidel Castro’s Cuba, not Indonesian Papua, became the bête noir of US foreign policy after the CIA invasion force foundered in the Bay of Pigs on April 18, 1961. Castro’s declaration of a socialist state and the importing of Soviet missiles led to a nuclear standoff. While Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev, the world, collectively, held its breath. Cuba, however, had not become the touchstone of Cold War tension without the initial input from Allen Dulles.

Apart from the generational difference, JFK and Dulles both were in office alongside their siblings, JFK’s younger brother Robert as Attorney General and DCI Dulles’ elder brother John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. The depth of experience in the two Dulles brothers was unprecedented, starting from the Versailles Treaty with John Foster drawing up the reparations agreement and Allen in the intelligence section. Between them was always a fierce sense of rivalry to achieve results in international affairs, continuing the sibling rivalry that had persisted throughout their childhood. John Foster was firstborn and favourite whereas Allen, born seven years later with a clubfoot, was always trying to prove he was as good as Foster, if not better. It was Allen, not Foster, who had always wanted to be Secretary of State. There had already been two family members in that office – an uncle in the Wilson presidency and their maternal grandfather, in the Harrison presidency – yet it was John Foster not Allen who achieved that goal when Eisenhower became president in 1953.

If there was any similar in-family rivalry in the Kennedy clan, it disappeared after the deaths of the eldest son during the war and the eldest daughter soon after the war. In the case of John and Robert Kennedy when JFK was president, the two brothers were intensely reliant on each other’s abilities and tended to act as one unit, as in Robert’s negotiations with President Sukarno and Dutch Foreign Minister Luns in the New Guinea sovereignty dispute. In Kennedy’s various elections starting in 1952, culminating in the presidency, Robert was his trusted campaign manager. In the first Eisenhower administration, the link between John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of Central Intelligence, on both official and family levels, was seen by the media as beneficial to the national interest. The Dulles brothers were perceived as having created their own legend even before serving together under Eisenhower. While acting together, however, they were not one unit as the Kennedys were in the 1960s. The media reaction to this was often expressed in religious terms, JFK being the first Catholic to reach the office of president. John Foster followed his father in the Presbyterian faith, attending church every Sunday, whereas Allen had adulterous affairs for most of his working life without jeopardising his lifelong role in intelligence.

Similar indiscretion by John Kennedy may have led to the political pressure referred to by Frederick Kempe¹⁸ for retaining Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. Allen revelled in intelligence whereas John Foster ‘often chose to adopt the State Department mentality of knowing as little as possible about sordid operational details of intelligence’. Grose expounds this point further, saying that Allen always claimed his duty was intelligence, and policymaking was John Foster’s responsibility but ‘Allen was ever imaginative in devising intelligence operations that by their very nature determined the shape of national policy’.¹⁹

When John Foster Dulles passed away in April 1959, after two years of failing health because of colon cancer, Allen’s covert intelligence operations entered an even more radical stage. Allen began taking bigger risks. John Foster had not wanted Allen to succeed him as Secretary of State and bluntly told him so, closing the door on that lifelong ambition. He recommended that his successor be Christian Herter who was reliant on crutches because of osteoarthritis. Christian Herter and Allen Dulles were not close friends, despite being acquainted since the First World War. With a new Secretary of State for the remaining twenty-one months of the Eisenhower administration, the change in dynamic in the upper echelon of power influenced Allen’s mode of operations. As well, John Foster’s death no doubt served as a reminder to Allen of his own mortality. He was, after all, almost 67 years old when retained by Kennedy as Director of Central Intelligence. He was reaching the end of his career and the culmination of a major project centred on the Indonesian archipelago which had first caught his attention years earlier. The CIA- assisted ‘covert operation’ in Indonesia, the Outer Islands rebellion (otherwise known as the PRRI-Permesta rebellion which is examined in Chapter 4) was but one part of this major project. Allen Dulles has been openly linked with this rebellion which started in February 1958. It ended almost immediately, although for the next few years he maintained a supply of weapons for the rebels because continuing conflict ensured the officially declared ‘state of emergency’ also continued. This effectively delayed the holding of elections in Java and precluded the possibility of the Indonesian communist party attaining any increased representation or political power through the ballot box.

As a result of his vast experience in diplomacy, oil, intelligence and state affairs, Allen Dulles had at his disposal a network of contacts which he used in his Indonesia project. Ultimately, he was aiming for regime change, the essential ingredient of which was a central army command. Aware of the immense potential of natural resources in Netherlands New Guinea since pre-war days, Dulles wanted the Dutch territory to become part of Indonesia. While this was achieved on Sukarno’s watch, it was done only because the central army command was already amassing in the corridors of power awaiting regime change.

When Kennedy officially ended Dulles’ role as Director of Central Intelligence on November 29, 1961, Allen’s network of contacts was like an intelligence tsunami held in abeyance. The president described the departing DCI in prophetic terms:

I know of no other American in the history of this country who has served in seven administrations of seven Presidents – varying from party to party, from point of view to point of view, from problem to problem, and yet at the end of each administration each President of the United States has paid tribute to his service – and also has counted Allen Dulles as their friend. This is an extraordinary record, and I know that all of you who have worked with him understand why this record has been made. I regard Allen Dulles as an almost unique figure in our country.

Yet Dulles still commanded enormous influence. The newly appointed director, John McCone, with legions of staff moved into the new building at Langley. Ironically, in the design and construction of the new head- quarters, Dulles had played a prominent role, but he never occupied the new building. He still kept his former office and, as well, took up another with Sullivan and Cromwell, the legal firm in which he had worked with John Foster in the 1930s, representing Rockefeller oil interests and the myriad of subsidiaries. Allen had not actually married into the Rockefeller family as John Foster had done, but nevertheless his lifelong association with Standard Oil made him an essential member of the extended family. In the years between the First and Second World Wars, there was no legal restriction on someone like Allen Dulles sharing his expertise between private enterprise and the State Department as mentioned by John D. Rockefeller, at 98 years of age, openly expressing his thanks in his pre-Second World War publication, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events:²⁰

We did not ruthlessly go after the trade of our competitors and attempt to ruin it by cutting prices or instituting a spy system…. One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington…. I think I can speak thus frankly and enthusiastically because the working out of many of these great plans has developed largely since I retired from the business fourteen years ago.

Rockefeller’s reputation as ‘the richest man in history’ was not achieved without the acumen of Dulles gaining entry into oil rich regions, from the ‘Near East’ to the ‘Far East’, when European colonial power was still dominant. The important mining and oil exploration conducted in Netherlands New Guinea shortly before the Second World War (as revealed by Jean Jacques Dozy in Chapter 1) was an important part of the ‘oil-intelligence project’ which focused on Indonesia in its entirety. Ensuring West New Guinea changed hands, from Dutch to Indonesian control, became an integral part of Allen Dulles’ political strategy which then proceeded with the already advanced plan for ‘regime change’ in Indonesia. The problem was: for Dulles’ strategy, JFK’s notion of visiting Jakarta to support Sukarno, ensuring he would remain president, was political anathema.

Pre-war development in the New Guinea territory was meagre – with half a dozen small colonial settlements, scattered around the far-flung coastline. These had begun as a cluster of army encampments at the turn of the century in response to the US gaining control of the nearby Philippines. Within a few years, the giant US company, Standard Oil, which then was inseparable from the name Rockefeller, had initiated a takeover bid for Dutch oil interests in the Indies. The Dutch responded by joining forces with the British in 1907 to form Royal Dutch Shell. This started decades of pressure from Rockefeller oil interests to gain exploration rights in the vast, unmapped Dutch territory of New Guinea. Ultimately, in May 1935, with the formation of the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company²¹ which had 60% controlling US interest, Standard Oil was successful, but only with the help of their top European- based lawyer, Allen Dulles. NNGPM, as the company was called, was formed with the approval of Sir Henri Deterding, general manager of the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies since 1900. Deterding and Rockefeller, in former days, had been fierce opponents in the global oil business. When Allen joined his brother John Foster Dulles in Sullivan and Cromwell, the top Wall Street legal firm, his first big case in 1928 brought him face to face with Deterding. Despite the silver hair and penetrating black eyes which helped to create a Napoleonic presence, Deterding backed down and Allen Dulles won. Yet by the mid-1930s, when NNGPM was formed, Dulles and Deterding shared a common interest in the new leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Dulles had wasted no time in arranging to speak with Hitler personally, soon after he came to power in 1933, and Deterding’s friendship with Hitler led to million dollar donations. However, the key element which swayed Dutch opinion in the formation of NNGPM was the evidence that Japanese units were secretly conducting oil exploration in New Guinea territory. Without American assistance the Dutch could do little to assert colonial control and Dulles used the political tension generated by the Japanese incursion of colonial sovereignty to push through the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.

Leading up to the Second World War in the Pacific, the Japanese Navy formulated a grand theory of expansion, not merely as an answer to the problems the Japanese army was facing in its program of expansion in China, but as a grand theory of new development. It was called ‘the march to the South’ or Nanshin-ron. Here lay the wealth of the Netherlands East Indies; here there was oil, and in populous Java a market for the Japanese product. For natural resources, the eyes of the Japanese Navy turned to New Guinea. They envisaged this vast island (more than twice the total area of all the islands of Nippon) becoming the source of raw materials for a new imperial Japan. Nanshin-ron took shape with industrial speed in the upper echelons of Japanese Naval Intelligence which used a vanguard of fishing ships estimated by Dutch Intelligence to number as many as 500. Admiral Suetsugu, Commander of combined Japanese fleets and later Minister of Home Affairs, described these ‘fishermen’ as an integral part of the ‘March South’. Japanese anthropologists were dispatched to collect information on the tribespeople of New Guinea. The concern about Japanese intrusion as expressed by Jean Jacques Dozy (in the interview in Chapter 1) was part of this pre-war expansion utilised by Allen Dulles to gain the 60% US controlling interest in NNGPM.

After the Pacific War, geologists attached to General Douglas Mac- Arthur’s forces remained in the Dutch territory for most of the next decade conducting exploration. Only some of their findings were released, such as nickel on Gag Island, which (as mentioned above) was 10% of world nickel reserves. There was no mention of Dozy’s gold discovery. During the 1950s, neither Dulles nor the Dutch political hierarchy was willing to admit that the real issue at the centre of the sovereignty dispute, which so loudly proclaimed the territory had no natural resources, was how to gain control over the gold, copper and oil that lay waiting to be discovered. During the 1950s, using the Cold War to his advantage, Allen Dulles’ strategy took shape.

At the same time as the Bay of Pigs another crisis was occurring in Indonesia, lesser known but with the same potential for superpower conflict. This dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands, over sovereignty of the western half of New Guinea, pitted the US-Dutch NATO alliance against Soviet support for Indonesia. Kennedy’s settlement of this crisis and his follow-up strategy to bring Indonesia ‘on side’ in the Cold War came under threat with Malaysian Confrontation – hence the planned visit to Jakarta.

Introducing Indonesia

Before looking at Kennedy’s role in the sovereignty crisis, let me re-introduce Indonesia which after China, India and USA now has the fourth largest population in the world. Indonesia had emerged from the ‘colonial era’ only a decade before Kennedy’s involvement. When he expressed criticism of colonial rule (as he did at the UN General Assembly, September 25, 1961, upon the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld) he chose his words carefully to apply not only to the colonised peoples of Africa generally but also to Indonesia specifically.

He spoke of the exploitation and subjugation of the weak by the powerful, of the many by the few, of the governed who have given no consent to be governed, whatever their continent, their class, or their color.²²

European dominance in navigation, military technology and trade ensured the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago for centuries remained at the beck and call of colonial powers. As described by George Kahin, one of America’s most prominent Indonesia specialists, it was ‘probably the world’s richest colony … (or) ranked just after India in the wealth it brought to a colonial power’.²³

It is our collective unfamiliarity with this vast country which has led to our failure to ascertain how closely intertwined it was with the fate of President Kennedy. He very early recognised the significance of Indonesia not only in the political destiny of Southeast Asia but also in the outcome of the Cold War.

Indonesia is by far the largest country in Southeast Asia, both in population and in area. Forty-eight degrees of longitude on the equator, Indonesia covers almost one-seventh of the circumference of the globe and has long been prized for its abundant natural resources. Over a timeframe of three and a half centuries, the archipelago gradually came under Dutch colonial control, region by region. As a reflection of Dutch colonial wealth, the 17,000 islands were once described as a ‘belt of emeralds’ slung around the equator. Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Sumatra – three of the five main islands – are intersected by the equator but the other two, Java and Papua, are entirely in the southern hemisphere.

Not until the 20th century did Bali become part of the Dutch Realm and, after thirty years of war in the western extremity of the archipelago, so too did Aceh. In the eastern extremity, the territory of Netherlands New Guinea was twenty-three percent of the total area of the Indies and virtually untouched – a wilderness with jungle and precipice (in one location 3000m of sheer cliff) rising to cloud-forest, snow-capped mountains and glaciers, just below the equator – yet on international maps ‘Dutch’ since Napoleonic times. Colonial administration in Netherlands New Guinea, according to the official Dutch historian on the eve of World War Two (WW2) when the Japanese Imperial Army occupied the Indies, covered only five percent of the territory. So on August 17, 1945 when Sukarno declared independence, and General Douglas MacArthur’s troops had already re-occupied Netherlands New Guinea, we can say approximately 95% of the territory was occupied by the indigenous Papuan people. It was still ‘the land of the Papuas’²⁴ as named by the Portuguese when they had unsuccessfully attempted to colonise the territory in the early 16th century.

During the four years after Sukarno proclaimed independence, Indonesians (mainly in Java and parts of Sumatra) desperately opposed all attempts to recolonise. On December 27, 1949, the Dutch relinquished sovereignty of the Netherlands East Indies but retained the territory of New Guinea, announcing a plan to develop it further and bring the indigenous people to independence. However, a campaign to oust the remnant colonial Dutch presence from New Guinea began in the early 1950s. Indonesia claimed the rightful extent of its territory was from Sabang Island, the western extremity of the Indonesian archipelago, to Merauke in the east, a distance of 5390 kilometres (3350 miles).

Ironically the anti-colonial campaign was focused on the continuing Dutch presence in New Guinea rather than the continuing Dutch presence in Indonesia, as pointed out by Herbert Feith.²⁵ In newly independent Indonesia, he explained, referring to Indonesia at the start of the 1950s, ‘the largest chunks of economic power’ were still mainly in Dutch hands – ‘estate agriculture, the oil industry, stevedoring, shipping, aviation, modern-type banking … internal distribution, trade, manufacturing and insurance’ as well as exporting and, to a lesser degree, importing. It was no wonder that Sukarno often declared that the struggle for indepen- dence was ongoing, his ‘revolution’ not yet finished. Nevertheless, former Foreign Minister Sunario²⁶ pointed out that, in the late 1950s, ‘US sources’ were providing covert funding for the Indonesian army to promote the anti-colonial campaign against the Dutch in New Guinea. Even though Sunario did not confirm the identity of the ‘US sources’, it should be pointed out that the Indonesian army by 1959 had benefitted immensely from Sukarno’s seizure of Dutch assets in Indonesia, as part of the New Guinea campaign. (Consequently, the Dutch companies pressured the Dutch government to relinquish sovereignty in New Guinea, so they could resume business as before in Indonesia.) The money from ‘US sources’ was not simply to assist the army as an investment against the PKI, but was explicitly for the anti-Dutch campaign to ensure it was not unduly influenced by the effusive campaign mounted by the PKI, even though these two anti-colonial streams ran in parallel. Sunario’s information was in the same vein as the concern expressed at that same time in the late 1950s by a prominent Australian politician, Dr Evatt, Leader of the Opposition in the Australian parliament and former President of the UN General Assembly. Evatt pointed to the possible involvement of US oil interests in the Indonesian quest to oust the Dutch from New Guinea, when he declared on November 14, 1957²⁷: ‘Surely we are not going to have an argument as to who should have the sovereignty of Dutch New Guinea unless the exploitation of that territory by certain interests is involved’.

After losing the Indies temporarily to Japan in 1942 and then losing the Indies permanently to Indonesia in 1949, it was not until the 1950s that the Dutch attempted to impose their stamp of colonial rule on the New Guinea territory. This brief period has been recalled in a positive light by many elderly Papuans in the coastal, urban areas because they enjoyed a vast improvement in health and education, but as the Dutch presence increased so did the anti-colonial cry of Indonesia. The claim that the territory should not have been excluded from being part of Indonesia in 1949 only grew louder. The dispute reached crisis level when Indonesia had acquired a centralised army command and arms from the Soviet Union, two of the three things that led to a settlement of the dispute. The third was US intervention.

A centralised command was an historic step forward for the Indonesian army. Prior to the CIA-assisted 1958 rebellion, the Indonesian army command system across the archipelago was a fractured patchwork of regional commanders fending for their troops. Sukarno himself was in part responsible for creating this disjointed army command in response to an attempted coup in 1952. With little financial support from Jakarta, the head of the army General Nasution had less control over his far- flung battalions than the respective colonels in the Outer Islands, and the CIA exploited this ‘tyranny of distance’. The dramatic change in army command structure, which was brought about by the PRRI/Permesta or Outer Islands Rebellion was engineered on a grand scale by Allen Dulles during the second Eisenhower administration.

Yet the end result of CIA interference in Indonesian internal affairs via the 1958 Rebellion was depicted as failure at the time, and has consistently been depicted as failure since that time. This holds true only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal. Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of the Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’.²⁸ The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralised army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed. Dulles was able to deceive, or was capable of deceiving, friend and foe alike, all those who were monitoring the ‘covert operation’ with secession in mind as the stated goal. In the opinion of Howard Jones written more than a decade after he was the US Ambassador in Jakarta in 1958: ‘To the outside world, the conflict was pictured as anti-Communist rebels against a pro-Communist government in Jakarta. In fact, it was a much more complex affair, involving anti-Communists on both sides’.²⁹ In reality, Dulles’ aim was the formation of a central army command from the very start of the rebellion, while the perception of failure served as a lure to his Cold War opponents in Moscow. From the Cold War perspective, the perceived failure of the CIA operation offered Moscow an opportunity to increase its influence, which it did through an arms deal so large that it forced a conclusion to the Netherlands New Guinea sovereignty dispute.

The chief intelligence officer for the rebels was Colonel Zulkifli Lubis and the army commander under Sukarno was General Nasution. My extended interviews with both Lubis and Nasution (which began in Jakarta in 1983) have led to this completely different explanation for the so-called ‘CIA defeat’ in 1958. (As mentioned above) when Lubis declared ‘the Americans tricked us’, he was referring to the executive branch of government, not those in Sumatra. Nearly all the Americans who were involved onsite in Indonesia, genuinely helping the rebels, did not realise the rebellion was only the first stage of a larger intelligence scenario and their perception that the rebellion failed became an integral part of Dulles stratagem. In short, this 1958 operation (which is more fully explained in a later chapter) was an example of Dulles’ genius in intelligence. Another example was when Soviet penetration was suspected in the intelligence service of the British in the 1950s. It was Allen Dulles who first doubted the allegiance of Kim Philby before he finally defected to Moscow in 1963, an insight that may have helped generate Dulles’ failsafe stratagem in the Indonesian Outer Islands.

The combination of John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as DCI during the Eisenhower presidency brought the surname ‘Dulles’ into the public limelight in the early post-war years, so much so that Allen Dulles became the face of US intelligence. This official appointment was acknowledgement of Allen’s known achievements and brought into play his vast underlying experience. There was implicit trust that his private networks and host of contacts (not only from the Second World War but also as far back as the First World War) would somehow be used in the service of the nation. This was not to be the case. Allen Dulles, the Cold War warrior par excellence, used these ‘unknown capabilities’ to achieve his own ends, which ultimately for the nation was a disservice. Many of his friends from the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) utilised their skills when re-employed under DCI Dulles in the 1950s and 1960s. Earlier, with the Cold War looming when Dulles was OSS station chief in Berlin, working alongside him was a young Henry Kissinger.³⁰ Allen had already acquired a legendary status as OSS station chief in Berne during the Second World War, and (as I mentioned in the Introduction) it was Allen Dulles whom the Japanese approached with the first indication of surrender. Perhaps the highest accolade, however, came from Sir Kenneth W.D. Strong who ‘dominated Britain’s spy services for twenty-five years’ and who was the top British representative in the surrender of German forces in Italy after initial negotiations conducted by Dulles. Strong declared Allen Dulles was the ‘greatest intelligence officer who ever lived’.³¹

Allen Dulles – Accused

From the First World War to the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles’ life was immersed in the world of intelligence, dealing with issues that ranged from empire to armaments, national security to regime change, oil, military and many other matters. In Berne during the Second World War, the assistance he provided the Allied war effort from contacts within Germany and his own expertise was nothing less than extraordinary; so much so that in the following decade, Dulles was regarded as an icon of US intelligence and any accusation to the contrary was readily dismissed. However, six years after his death in 1969, a US investigation chaired by Senator Frank Church produced a different profile of Allen Dulles. As part of fourteen reports on US intelligence activities, the Church Committee revealed that some of the activities former DCI Allen Dulles engaged in were nefarious in the extreme and these included the assassination of foreign leaders.

The Church Committee found that the political assassination of Patrice Lu- mumba in the Congo, which occurred three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, was directly instigated by Dulles. In arranging for an agent to kill Lumumba, Dulles had left a paper trail revealing his role in the form of a telegram to Leopoldville, September 24, 1960:

We wish [to] give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position….

The Church investigation found that  two days later the Congo CIA station  officer (Hedgman) contacted a CIA go-between named Joseph Scheider (alias Joseph Braun) who did not himself kill Lumumba but was responsible for the group of persons who did. Answering a Church Committee question, Hedgman replied:

It is my recollection that he (Dulles) advised me, or my instructions were, to eliminate Lumumba.

By eliminate, do you mean assassinate?

Hedgman: Yes.³²

The killing of Lumumba, before he had served three months as the first Prime Minister of the Congo, involved much brutality and torture. This was public knowledge at the time; later, when added to the heinous role of Dulles as outlined in the findings of the Church Committee, it shocked the nation, indeed, shocked the world.

Political instability, created by the mineral rich province of Katanga wanting to break away from newly independent Congo, was fuelled by the killing of Lumumba. In September 1961, in the wake of the violence that erupted after Lumumba’s death, the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, became involved in mediation between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Katanga. A few minutes after midnight on Sunday, September 17, 1961, as the UN plane carrying the Secretary- General and 15 others was approaching the Ndola airstrip in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), it crashed, killing all.

Two Rhodesian enquiries in early 1962 concluded ‘pilot error – a misreading of the altimeters’ – had brought down the DC6, known as the ‘Albertina’. However, in March 1962, an investigation by the United Nations did not rule out sabotage although it fell short of stating officially that assassination was suspected. The Church Committee in 1975 did not make any links between Dulles and Hammarskjöld, and a 1993 investigation by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs concluded the pilot had made an error in judging altitude. Persistent investigation by George Ivan Smith, who was the Secretary-General’s spokesman and close friend, unearthed a disturbingly vital clue that the plane was forced down as a result of interference by hostile aircraft. Whether this caused the crash remained inconclusive. In 1997, more documentary evidence on the death of Dag Hammarskjöld emerged – whether accidentally or deliberately, we may never know – attached to another document, but otherwise unrelated to the widespread investigation carried out by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This chance discovery provided the impetus for a new enquiry which was started in 2012 by the Hammarskjöld Commission. It acknowledged the TRC and examined the documents and letters in some detail to decide if any new evidence justified re-opening another investigation into the death of the Secretary-General. The report of the Hammarskjöld Commission was published in September 2013, fifteen years after the TRC documents had first emerged, and a Report tabled in the UN.³³

In August 1998, the TRC Chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had called a press conference and released eight documents.³⁴ These papers and letters were additional material discovered in a folder from the National Intelligence Agency. A member of the TRC had requested the folder, seeking information on a 1993 assassination in South Africa, and the additional material happened to be in that same folder the TRC received. The additional sheets of paper referred to an ‘Operation Celeste’ – a plan to assassinate Dag Hammarskjöld – and the letters showed Allen Dulles was involved. Details were included about a small bomb to disable the outside steering mechanism on the underside of the plane carrying the UN Secretary-General in September 1961. The documents bore the letterhead of the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) and the name of Allen Dulles was specifically mentioned.

UNO [United Nations Organisation] is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people….³⁵

Information from Dulles included the type of plane the UN Secretary- General would use and the date he would arrive. More importantly, even though the letter was signed by a person at SAIMR, it was directly conveying the words of DCI Dulles. As mentioned above, when Dulles initiated the killing of Lumumba, the evidence brought before the Church Committee was written by Dulles: ‘We wish [to] give every possible support….’

The wording here seems relatively innocuous but in the context of the Church Committee investigation, the sinister import in Dulles’ euphemism acquires a meaning far more significant. It is the order to kill – but not read as such without the explanation from the CIA station chief in the Congo that Dulles requested him to kill Patrice Lumumba. Otherwise the euphemistic expression ‘give every possible support’ might well have been interpreted as if Dulles had played a secondary role when, in fact, he initiated the action that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. In the case of Hammarskjöld, the TRC document states that Dulles promised ‘full cooperation’ but this was written by a ‘commander’ of SAIMR, the intelligence organisation mentioned in the documents. The same commander then states:

I want his [Hammarskjöld’s] removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice.

This sentence also links SAIMR with Dulles, whom we know already initiated the killing of Patrice Lumumba. Up until the Church Committee proved otherwise, Lumumba’s death had been regarded as the tragic outcome of violence initiated by local tribespeople. But the order to kill Lumumba was given by Dulles, to be carried out by SAIMR, and local people were involved only in the final act. Using the similar euphemistic term of ‘promising full cooperation’, an equivalent scenario for Operation Celeste would have Dulles (from his office in Washington) initiating the killing of the UN Secretary-General, and for the operators, SAIMR (as revealed in the TRC documents) to carry out the assassination using lo- cally based European mercenaries including a pilot or two in the final act.

The ‘Operation Celeste’ documents were examined in 2011 by Susan Williams in her book Who Killed Hammarskjöld with extensive research into SAIMR. She concluded that it was involved in covert action over many years, and that its structure was in ‘cells’ which operated independently. This raises the possibility that ‘Operation Celeste’ involved SAIMR cells for three separate actions against Hammarskjöld’s plane involving hostile aircraft, a 6kg bomb to disable the steering mechanism and the altimeters.

There is a strong possibility that the altimeters were sabotaged as one way of bringing about a crash. The 2013 Commission presented reliable evidence that incorrect barometric readings (QNH) were given to the Albertina by Ndola air traffic control. Attention was drawn to the fact that the voice recordings of the air traffic controller at Ndola were turned off, possibly deliberately. As well, before the Albertina (Hammarskjöld’s plane) departed for Ndola, where it crashed, there was a four-hour period when the plane was left unattended. If altimeters in the cockpit of the Albertina were sabotaged, how was it possible sabotage was not detected in subsequent testing of the altimeters? In the ‘Comments from the United Nations’ (attached to the 1962 crash report) it was stated there could have been a ‘misreading of the altimeters’³⁶ as the DC6, just after midnight descended to 5000ft and was doing a procedural turn in preparation to land when it clipped trees and crashed at 4357ft. The action of a small fighter plane, which began to harass the DC6 in the final few minutes of descent, made the advice coming from Ndola air traffic control vitally important because the pilot at that moment would have been relying entirely on air traffic control and his own reading of the altimeters.

Immediately after the crash in September 1961, one of the first actions was removal of the altimeters. There were two CIA planes waiting at Ndola airport, ready to offer assistance. The altimeters were checked in the USA and the all clear was given by J. Edgar Hoover whose FBI intelligence network often overlapped with Dulles’ CIA. The 2013 Commission findings do not seem to have even considered the possibility that the ‘official check’ on the altimeters might have been fraudulent.

Although it has been suggested that a false QNH was given to the Albertina on its approach to Ndola, all three altimeters were found after the crash to be correctly calibrated.³⁷

The Commission tended to dismiss reliable evidence that the Albertina was given a false QNH on its approach simply because they did not consider the possibility that J. Edgar Hoover’s check on the altimeters might have been fraudulent. J. Edgar Hoover’s affiliation with Dulles needs no explanation (other than to say Kennedy re-appointed them both together). Because the Celeste documents refer to Allen Dulles in the plot to assassinate the UN Secretary-General, the reliability of the check on the altimeters must be seriously questioned.

In the United Kingdom in 1983, I interviewed two UN officers, Conor Cruise O’Brien who was in the Congo at the same time as Hammarskjöld, and George Ivan Smith who was there soon after the crash. Both UN officials expressed their belief that the Secretary-General was assassinated, despite the inconclusive evidence of the official investigations. Three times I visited George Ivan Smith³⁸ who lived at Stroud in Gloucestershire.

He had at first worked also alongside Hammarskjöld’s predecessor, Trygve Lie, a Norwegian. The first Secretary-General of the United Nations resigned in 1953, making way for Dag Hammarskjöld from Sweden. He and George Ivan Smith worked together over a period of eight years, becoming close friends. Ivan Smith was a trusted associate of Hammarskjöld, at times taking on a dual role as spokesman and confidant. It was in this role, Ivan Smith explained to me, discussing hopes and aspirations, the Secretary-General referred to an impending UN announcement which Hammarskjöld had been formulating in the preceding months of 1961. He fully intended to implement his plans upon his return from the Congo, but he never did and the announcement died with him! The Secretary-General arrived in Leopoldville on September 13, 1961, a few days before the fatal flight to Ndola where the plane crashed shortly after midnight on September 17/18th.

Before Dag Hammarskjöld departed on the mission of mediation which claimed his life, George Ivan Smith noted that the Secretary- General was very much focused on the plan he intended to launch at the UN General Assembly after dealing with the unrest in the Congo. Hammarskjöld had been conducting private talks with President Kennedy about the long running dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West New Guinea. Leading up to the General Assembly meeting in 1961, these talks had crystallised into new UN policy. At the same time, Kennedy had also engaged in confidential discussion on this and other issues with former president, Harry S. Truman (who one year earlier had doubted whether the youthful JFK had the foreign policy experience that was needed in the White House.) During his first year in office, Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, so much won the approval of Mr and Mrs Truman that they were known to stay overnight with the Kennedy family in the White House.

In terms of wending one’s way through Cold War issues, Kennedy’s understanding with Hammarskjöld over the proposal to resolve the New Guinea sovereignty dispute, which now held the potential for conflict with Moscow, no doubt had Truman’s support. Hammarskjöld’s resolve to implement a policy of ‘Papua for the Papuans’ was in effect a countermeasure to rising Cold War tension, an example of his Swedish- style ‘third way’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.³⁹ His plan was to annul all claims to sovereignty other than the indigenous inhabitants and to announce this at the UN General Assembly in October/November 1961, but his death occurred in September.

Surprisingly, Harry S. Truman, expressing his opinion on the tragic news to reporters of the New York Times on September 20, 1961, commented enigmatically:

Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘When they killed him’.

The report in the New York Times continued: 

Pressed to explain his statement, Mr Truman said, ‘That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. Draw your own conclusions’.

The Hammarskjöld Commission in 2013 commented on the statement to the press made by Harry S. Truman:

There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the New York Times’ report. What we consider important is to know what the ex-President, speaking (it should be noted) one day after the disaster, was basing himself on. He is known to have been a confidant of the incumbent President, John F. Kennedy, and it is unlikely in the extreme that he was simply expressing a subjective or idiosyncratic opinion. It seems likely that he had received some form of briefing.⁴⁰

The UN Secretary-General had Kennedy’s support in formulating a plan to make the UN a central player in the sovereignty dispute over Netherlands New Guinea. From Kennedy’s perspective, Hammarskjöld was proposing a welcome initiative because it would preclude the inevitable criticism of the alternative decision Kennedy himself would be forced to make: that is, if the UN did not assume full responsibility for the Papuan people in the disputed territory of West New Guinea, then Kennedy would be forced to choose between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Hammarskjöld no doubt was aware there would be opposition to his planned intervention in the Dutch-Indonesian sovereignty dispute, not only from the two principal disputants, the Netherlands and Indonesia, but also from both the Soviet Union and China, both of whom supported Indonesia’s quest to expel Dutch colonial power from New Guinea. While it cannot be said that the UN Secretary-General or President Kennedy were oblivious to the personal and political risk they were taking in pursuing this approach to the New Guinea sovereignty issue, neither of them seemed fully aware of how high the stakes were; or rather, how high the stakes were for others who were involved – such as Allen Dulles. The battle for sovereignty of Netherlands New Guinea, from Dulles’ perspective, involved far more than the plight of the indigenous inhabitants: it had become a key issue in the struggle to ‘win’ Indonesia and so (by virtue of Indonesia’s internal politics centred on the PKI, and the offer of Soviet arms to oust Dutch colonial power) also an issue in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Papua, the PKI and Indonesia itself was all part of the ‘wedge between Moscow and Beijing’. Hammarskjöld’s radical initiative to reclaim Papua from past and future colonial rule – upgrading in the process the status of the UN to protect indigenous peoples – would have totally disrupted the Indonesia strategy of Allen Dulles.

In terms of the totality of the disruption, both the UN Secretary- General and the US President were mostly oblivious to Dulles’ geopolitical machinations. The effect of Hammarskjöld’s plan bears a striking similarity to the effect which JFK’s planned visit to Jakarta would have had on Dulles’ Indonesia strategy. Because of this similarity, Dulles’ alleged involvement in the death of Hammarskjöld (through ‘Operation Celeste’) can be seen as a precedent for Dulles’ involvement in the death of Kennedy.

OPEX

Hammarskjöld’s planned intervention to settle the New Guinea dispute peacefully was following ‘unchartered UN guidelines’ but generally came within the ambit of the 1960 UN Declaration. This was a call for ‘the speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination’. There were still 88 territories under colonialist administration waiting to become independent national states. Had the UN Secretary-General succeeded in bringing even half of these countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counterweight to those embroiled in the Cold War. Cameroon, for example, with a land area the same as West New Guinea, had formerly been under French and English administrations. In March 1961, the people of Cameroon conducted voting under the auspices of the United Nations Plebiscite Commissioner for Cameroons. The people of the Northern Cameroons decided to achieve independence by joining the independent Federation of Nigeria, whereas the people of the Southern Cameroons similarly decided to achieve independence by joining the independent Republic of Cameroon.

Hammarskjöld was especially concerned about indigenous tribes- people. In the case of West New Guinea, Hammarskjöld’s intention was to declare both the Dutch and the Indonesian claims to sovereignty of the territory as invalid. He proposed to assist the Papuan people by declaring a role for the United Nations alongside an independent Papuan state, using UN officers to advise the main government departments. A United Nations Special Fund had been established, as he explained in an address to the Economic Club of New York on March 8, 1960, where he outlined this revolutionary approach already being implemented in some former colonial territories in Africa:

We have recently initiated a scheme under the title of OPEX – an abbreviation of ‘operational and executive’ – whereby the UN provides experienced officers to underdeveloped countries, at their request, not as advisers, and not reporting to the UN, but as officials of the governments to which they have been assigned and with the full duties of loyal and confidential service to those governments. OPEX officials have already been requested by, and assigned to, several newly-independent countries, and I hope that we may be able to use the scheme much more widely in the years to come.

As Williams has noted: ‘The activities of the UN in New York were vigorously scrutinised by the CIA’.⁴¹ Applying OPEX in West New Guinea, Hammarskjöld was threatening to take the territory and its natural resources out of the hands of all aspiring colonial powers and out of the hands of Rockefeller Oil which had first staked its claim before the Second World War. This solution to the sovereignty dispute was the antithesis of what Dulles had planned, using the Cold War to his advantage, by encouraging Jakarta to purchase Soviet armaments for the Indonesian Navy and Air Force. Hammarskjöld was constructing a solution for the Papuan people capable of withstanding Cold War pressure because he had Kennedy’s support.

Criticism of Hammarskjöld came from both Cold War blocs. In the ensuing turmoil, both East and West seemed to have their own motives to ‘remove Hammarskjöld’. The CIA was working conjointly with British intelligence, according to the Celeste documents, a precursor of the joint force used to spark Malaysian Confrontation. Given the political situation in mineral rich Katanga, there was no shortage of mercenaries but the overriding motive was that ultimate responsibility for the (Irish) UN troops who were pitted against Katanga lay with the UN Secretary- General (rather than Conor Cruise O’Brien). The killing of Lumumba had already displayed a willingness to resort to murder and mayhem, and no doubt the radicalised mercenary element was capable of taking the life of the UN Secretary-General. Two mercenaries (according to the 2013 Commission Report) were at the Ndola airport in the group awaiting the arrival of Hammarskjöld on the night of the crash.

However, the primary motive for Dulles’ participation was not the same as other participants in this tragic episode. His involvement in the assassination seemed driven by Cold War issues whereas the Belgian and British interests were more directly tied to the Katanga dispute. In the eyes of some, this may have added credibility to the secondary position Dulles seemed to adopt in ‘Operation Celeste’ – offering ‘…every possible support…’ but in reality Dulles’ motive to eliminate Hammarskjöld for interfering in the New Guinea dispute was far greater than any apparent motive Dulles may have had in the Congo. He was so far ahead of his contemporaries they did not suspect him of pushing a button, or causing a death, on one side of the world to benefit a covert strategy of his on the other side of the world.

When I spoke with George Ivan Smith, he raised two important points which (in the context of ‘Operation Celeste’) now link Dulles to Ndola. The first (as mentioned above) was that Hammarskjöld was going to announce at the General Assembly in New York his solution to the West New Guinea sovereignty dispute; and secondly, there was a CIA plane full of communication equipment, its engines operating but stationary on the Ndola airstrip, the same night that Hammarskjöld’s plane was due to land. Two such planes had just arrived at Ndola but only one of these was operating on the night, its engines running to provide power for the communications equipment that the CIA personnel were using inside the plane. The Commission Report drew attention to the CIA communication planes:

Also on the tarmac at Ndola on the night of 17 September were two USAF aircraft. Sir Brian Unwin’s recollection, in his evidence to the Commission, was that one had come in from Pretoria and one from Leopoldville, where they were under the command of the respective US defence or air attachés. Of these aircraft he said: ‘Those planes we understood had high powered communication equipment and it did occur to us to wonder later, whether there had been any contact between one or other of the two United States planes with Hammarskjöld’s aircraft, as they had, we understood, the capability to communicate with Hammarskjöld’s plane. …I do recall that when we saw these two planes on the ground we were … saying ‘Wonder what they’re up to’.

One of the conclusions of the Commission Report was to seek the voice transmissions from the cockpit of the Albertina in the minute or so before the fatal crash. The CIA communications plane on Ndola airstrip, as shown above, had the capacity to communicate with the Albertina and may well have made a record of the final words coming from the Albertina. But given the level of involvement of Allen Dulles, it is highly unlikely that self-incriminating evidence would ever be made available.

The Commission Report has drawn attention to several possible causes of the fatal crash – the presence of another plane that fired at Hammarskjöld’s DC6, the altimeters and a small explosive device to render the Albertina’s steering mechanism inoperable. It is possible (as mentioned above) that SAIMR tried to utilise all three. The Commission alluded to the possibility of igniting the explosive device by radio control, but it remained unclear whether this could have been done from another plane flying near the Albertina or from the Ndola airstrip.

Earlier in his eight-year span as UN Secretary-General, during the McCarthy era, Hammarskjöld had forcefully evicted Hoover’s FBI men from the UN building, but in September 1961 the tables had turned and Hammarskjöld was ousted – by assassination.

As a senator, Kennedy had first met UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld several years earlier, and as President-elect they met again to discuss the more urgent problems of the world. During 1961, Hammarskjöld’s proposed intervention in the New Guinea sovereignty dispute was the solution JFK preferred to solve an unwanted dilemma. OPEX implemented for the Papuan people meant Kennedy would not be forced to decide between supporting the colonial administration of a NATO ally or supporting the Indonesian administration over the Papuan people against the wishes of a NATO ally. With Hammarskjöld’s death, the pro-Papua plan was abandoned.⁴² So the Papuan people in the western half of New Guinea, who were on the verge of becoming an independent state under the auspices of the United Nations, were left hanging in history. Hammarskjöld’s death left Kennedy one of two options, the Dutch or the Indonesian, but Dulles’ preparation ensured Kennedy chose the latter.

Hammarskjöld positioned himself (and the role of the UN) between or above the Cold War blocs. He intended implementing OPEX to resolve the New Guinea sovereignty dispute but did not take into account the extent of covert involvement by Standard Oil and Allen Dulles. At the funeral of Dag Hammarskjöld, September 29, Kennedy described him as ‘the greatest statesman of the 20th century’.

Notes
1. Howard Palfrey Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, Gunung Agung, Singapore, 1980, p. 298. (First ed. 1971, Hoover Institution Publications).
2. Nor were critics simply along East-West lines in the Cold War conflict, as Beijing fully supported Confrontation but Moscow did not. Continued hostilities delayed Indonesian elections which Moscow wanted in order to open the door to government for the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Moscow’s disapproval of Confrontation was strong but subdued to avoid Sino-Soviet rivalry which – as the PKI were already involved in Confrontation – would advantage only Beijing.
3. Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns, p. 98.
4. Baskara T. Wardaya, SJ, Cold War Shadow – United States Policy toward Indonesia, 1953–1963, Galang Press, Yogyakarta. 2007, p. 377.
5. Thomas Preston, The President and His Inner Circle Leadership Style and the Advisory Process in Foreign Policy Making, Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 113–114.
6. Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns, Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 5.
7. Simpson (p. 69) has incorporated quotations from the Memorandum of Discussion at the 410th Meeting of the NSC, Washington. FRUS, 1958–59, Vol. XVI, pp. 97–103.
8. FRUS, Vol. XXIII, Southeast Asia, Doc. 155. ‘Memorandum from the Deputy Director for Plans, Central Intelligence Agency (Bissell) to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)’. Attachment ‘Indonesia Perspectives’, see paragraphs 9 & 10. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ frus1961-63v23/d155
9. David Ransome, ‘The Berkeley Mafia and the Indonesian Massacre’, Ramparts 9, 1970, pp. 26-49.
10. Howard Palfrey Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, Gunung Agung, Singapore, 1971, p. 296.
11. Personal correspondence with Dean Rusk when he was retired, at the School of Law, University of Georgia. This letter was signed January 8, 1992, although Rusk and I corresponded over a decade starting October 25, 1982.
12. The electoral margin was 303–219.
13. Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy, Harper & Row, NY, 1965, p. 197.
14. Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy – The Life of Allen Dulles, Andre Deutsch, London, 1994, p. 288.
15. Frederick Kempe suggests another reason (for Kennedy’s ‘unconventional decision’ to retain Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover) was ‘perhaps to prevent release of damaging intelligence about his past’. Without supporting evidence and as the nature of the intelligence is not specified, one must assume this is conjecture. Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2011, p. 52.
16. Sorensen, p. 230.
17. Sorensen, p. 308. Subsequent assessment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco by General Maxwell Taylor concluded it was ‘militarily marginal’. The Taylor Committee (which included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Allen Dulles and Robert Kennedy) found that ‘the invasion plan had become quite specific well before the Kennedy administration took command’. Using only 1400 Cubans on the beachhead meant that ‘victory was never a possibility’. Providing US air support was tantamount to US invasion which Kennedy refused. The net outcome was heightened Cold War tension. From this perspective the Bay of Pigs, win or lose, was not averse to Dulles’ wider strategic interests.
18. See note 15, p. 58.
19. Grose, p. 341.
20. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, Doubleday, Doran & Co. Inc., Garden City, New York, 1937, p. 57.
21. Nederlandsche Nieuw Guinea Petroleum Maatschappij, NNGPM was comprised of Royal Dutch Shell (40%), Standard Vacuum Oil and Standard Oil of California (60%).
22. President John F. Kennedy’s address in the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 1961, following the death (now deemed assassination) of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. http://www.state.gov/p/io/potusunga/ 207241.htm
23. Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, The New Press, New York, 1995, p. 20.
24. The Portuguese, who came mainly for spice and gold, used to delineate the (Indonesian) archipelago with a rhyming expression, ‘from the Nicobars to the Papuas’. The Nicobar Islands (now part of India) and the Andaman Islands were north-west of Sumatra, and south of Myanmar (Burma) in the Bay of Bengal. The Spice Islands were west of the ‘land of the Papuas’.
25. Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1962, p. 104.
26. Personal interviews in the house of Sunario, January 1988. See footnote 14, Chapter 1, Roeslan Abdulgani also referred to this source of US funding.
27. Hansard Reports, 1957, p. 882.
28. Kyle C. de Bouter, ‘Curbing Communism: American motivations for intervening militarily in Indonesia and Dutch Newspaper Representations, 1953–1957’. Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, November 2013, p. 3.
29. Howard Palfrey Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream, p. 71.
30. Kissinger was involved with Allen Dulles and the Rockefeller Brothers Panel in the late 1950s investigating the Sino-Soviet dispute, and he helped formulate the goal to ‘drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing’. He was on the Freeport McMoRan board 1988–95.
31. Srodes, James, Allen Dulles — Master of Spies, Regnery Publishing, Washington DC, 1999, p. 6.
32. US Senate, An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, ‘Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders’, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., N.Y. 1976, p. 24.
33. See: United Nations General Assembly, Sixty-eighth Session A/68/800, 21 March 2014, Agenda item 175, ‘Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him’.
34. He handed the originals over to the South African Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar, who commented no further on this matter before dying of cancer in 2004.
35. Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa, Hurst & Co., London, 2011, p. 200.
36. See: 1962 UN Crash Report (Appendix 1).
37. See paragraph 6.5, 1962 UN Crash Report.
38. George Ivan Smith (the ‘Ivan was short for Sullivan) came from Brisbane, my own home town, so part of our meetings involved some reminiscing. His brother was in charge of the Boggo Road Prison, which no longer operates, but the memory in silhouette of guards patrolling along the high imposing walls on Annerley Road was one of the more enduring images of my childhood. George Ivan Smith died in 1995.
39. See: Robert Skidelsky, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld’s Assumptions and the Future of the UN’, http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/artic…sumptions-and- the-future-of-the-un/
40. UN General Assembly, March 21, 2014, Sixty-eighth session, Agenda item 175, ‘Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him’. Annex: Report of the Commission of Enquiry, Paragraph 11.5.
41. Declassified CIA document, ‘Memorandum for the Record. Subject: Information concerning the Accidental Death of Dag Hammarskjöld’, January 17, 1975, C00023116, DDRS, cited in Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, p. 151.
42. In its wake came the ‘Luns Plan’, in which the Dutch Foreign Minister proposed a similarly prominent role for the UN but without the Dutch administration exiting, as envisaged by Hammarskjöld. According to the son of Joseph Luns, Huub Luns (whom I interviewed in Amsterdam) explained that before his father announced the ‘Luns Plan’ to the General Assembly, he knew it would not be approved. We may well ask: why, then, did he proceed?
June 18, 2016
Bridge of Spies: Spielberg and the Coen Brothers Punch Up History

The mythology about Rudolf Abel survived for decades on end. It began when he was captured and then tried as a Russian espionage agent in a New York City court in 1957. The legend was furthered by not one, but two hearings before the Supreme Court concerning whether or not the arrest of Abel was done within the boundaries of a legal search and seizure. It reached its apogee when President Kennedy approved an exchange of Abel for captured U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962. Abel’s American lawyer, a man named James B. Donovan, carried out that exchange in Germany. In 1964, Donovan wrote a book on the Abel case and the later prisoner exchange. Strangers on a Bridge became a national best seller. Now even more people were exposed to the Abel myth.

What do I mean by the “Abel mythology?” First off, there was no such Russian spy born with that name. He borrowed that name from a deceased Russian colonel. Abel’s real name was Willie Fisher. And as one can guess by that moniker, he wasn’t Russian. He was born in 1903 in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north of England. When his family moved to Russia in the twenties, Fisher became a translator since he had an aptitude for language acquisition. He later developed an affinity for electronics and radio operation. And this was what the NKVD, precursor to the KGB, used him for during World War II.

Another myth is that the FBI uncovered Fisher and then cracked the case. This is not at all accurate. Fisher was caught through the betrayal of his assistant. That assistant was named Reino Hayhanen. Moscow had sent Hayhanen to help Fisher. But Reino turned out to be a very bad assistant. He was both a drunkard and a womanizer—he squandered some of the money given to him by Fisher on prostitutes. When Fisher had had his fill of him, he sent Reino back to Russia. Sensing that he would be disciplined upon his return, Hayhanen stopped at the American Embassy in Paris. There he turned himself in as a Soviet spy.   And this is how Fisher was uncovered.

A third myth is that he was a master spy, somewhat on the level of Kim Philby. As several latter day commentators who have studied the Fisher case have concluded, there is simply nothing to even approximate such a lofty comparison. To use just one example: there is no evidence that, in the entire nine year period that Fisher was in America, he even recruited one agent, or source, on his own. But further, once the KGB got the news of Hayhanen’s betrayal, Fisher had an opportunity to dispose of much of the incriminating evidence in his flat. He did not. But further, although he had used a false name with Hayhanen, he had taken him to his home. By casing the building, by following some of the residents who fit Reino’s description, and then snapping a picture of the man Hayhanen knew as “Mark,” this is how Fisher was caught. Through his own carelessness and errors in tradecraft.

Fisher’s cover while in the United States was that of a painter/photographer. Steven Spielberg begins his film Bridge of Spies with a clever and adroit composition. The spy is painting a self-portrait in his studio. Shooting from behind, we see then a dual image of the man: one in a mirror, and the other on the canvas–with the real subject in between, his back to us. This makes not just for an interesting composition, but it’s a nice symbolic précis of who the man is. We then watch as the FBI begins to follow Fisher around New York as he paints and takes photos. They then break into his hotel room. Fisher asks for permission to secure his palette of colors, and as he does he hides a coded message he had just secured from a drop point.

From here, the film now cuts to the man who will be the main character, attorney James Donovan. Once Fisher was caught, the FBI had planned on deporting him, since he was in the country illegally under various aliases, and had not registered as a foreign national. Which is why the INS was in on the raid. They shipped him to a detention center in Texas. There, they tried to turn him into a double agent. (Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge, pgs. 16, 45) Fisher turned down the offer. Since the Bureau discovered so much incriminating material in both his hotel room and his apartment, they switched strategies. Instead of deporting him, they now decided to place him on trial. Which was a rather unusual decision. Because, as Donovan wrote, there was no case he could find of a foreign spy being convicted of peacetime espionage. (Donovan, p. 19) The actual indictment contained three charges: 1.) Conspiracy to transmit atomic and military secrets to Russia; 2.) Conspiracy to gather classified government information; and 3.) Illegal residency in the U.S. as a foreign agent. (ibid, p. 20)

The Brooklyn BAR association decided to ask Donovan to represent the defendant. (ibid, p. 9) Donovan was at this time, 1957, mainly an insurance lawyer. But he had worked for the OSS during the war, and was one of the lawyers at the Nuremburg trials. Although the film only shows Donovan with one assistant, he actually had two. (Donovan, pgs. 34, 54) Some affluent law firms through the BAR furnished these. To his and their credit, the local legal establishment was determined to give the spy a decent defense team. (In a rather odd departure, the film does not portray Reino Hayhanen on screen.)

Rather early in the case, Donovan discovered that his best hope in defending Fisher were problems with the original search and seizure. Donovan concluded that this process was legally faulty due to the fact that the original strategy was to use the threat of deportation to turn Fisher. In other words, the FBI wanted to keep the profile of the raid low, so that the KGB would not understand that they had turned Fisher into a double agent. Therefore, they had not secured the properly designated warrants. But once they failed to turn the man, they now wished to prosecute him as if they had the proper warrants.   (Donovan, pgs. 109-110)

The original trial judge would not accept Donovan’s motion to suppress evidence based on this issue. If he had, the prosecution’s case would have been gravely weakened. So once Fisher was convicted, Donovan raised the motion in an appeals court hearing. Once it was denied there, he went to the U.S. Supreme Court.   That court heard the case twice. They eventually denied the appeal on a 5-4 vote. The film does not include the original appeals court case. It then collapses the two Supreme Court hearings into one.

Spielberg apparently wanted to cut down on these legal procedures to add more about Donovan’s family life, specifically under the pressures applied during the case; and also to make more screen time for the Gary Powers aspect of the story. The assumptions being that the former will add more human interest for the audience; the latter more action and opportunity for visual imagery. But there ends up being a problem here. For me, it’s at about these points that the film starts to slide off the rails as far as dramatic license goes. For example, in his book, Donovan does note that he got some crank calls because of his defense of Fisher. He then changed his phone number. (Donovan, p. 50) That wasn’t enough for Spielberg. This gets changed to an actual shooting attempt on Donovan’s daughter as she is quietly watching television alone in the living room. Now, I am sure if this had actually happened, Donovan would have written about it. It probably would have been front-page news in New York.

This is paralleled by what Spielberg does with the shoot down of Powers over Russia in the U-2. As Philip Kaufman proved so memorably in his fine film, The Right Stuff, high altitude aviation can be viscerally exciting; it’s an excellent subject for cinematography. But again, that in and of itself was apparently not enough for Spielberg. After Powers ejects from his plane, we actually see him hanging onto the tail and working himself around to try and push the “Destruct” button on the front control panel. Which, of course, he fails to do. Then as he parachutes downward, we watch as the plane actually brushes alongside his chute. In no account I have read of this incident have I seen any of this mentioned. Why was it necessary? Powers had serious trouble ejecting anyway because he couldn’t separate from his oxygen tank. Secondly, one of the pursuing planes was shot down by friendly fire.

I was kind of taken aback—again. First, the CIA director does not represent the “highest levels” of government, at least not overtly. But second, Dulles had left the CIA in November of 1961. The new director was John McCone.

But beyond that, there are two other aspects that the director and writers could have used for dramatic effect. First, Lee Harvey Oswald was in the USSR at the time of the Powers shoot down. There are even some writers who think he may have been in the gallery during Powers’s trial. Secondly, it was this incident that scuttled the Paris summit conference scheduled for just two weeks later. President Eisenhower tried to deny it happened. But the Russians kept Powers confined and hid the wreckage that they found of the plane. So Eisenhower was blindsided.

From what I have been able to garner about the screenplay, it was originally written by Matt Charman. Spielberg then brought in the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) to, as they say, “punch it up.” To put it mildly, if I was doing an historical film, about the last writers I would bring in to “punch it up” would be the Coen brothers.

Because what I have mentioned above is just the beginning of the pushing the limits of dramatic license. After the Supreme Court ruling went against Donovan, and Fisher started serving his sentence, the White House decided to seriously move for a prisoner exchange between the Russian spy and Powers. Donovan writes about it in his book’s last chapter. But he prefaces it with a warning that it was secret and he cannot reveal all of its elements. (Donovan, p. 371) But he does reveal two important things about the mission. First, it began on January 11, 1962 when he attended a meeting in Washington with several other persons, including a Justice Department lawyer. (ibid, pgs. 373-75) Secondly, at this meeting, he was told that this prisoner exchange had been approved at the highest levels of the government. Is that not kind of unambiguous? The highest level of the government would be the White House, right?

Again, this was not enough for Spielberg and the Coen brothers. In the film, Donovan (played by Tom Hanks) goes to Washington to meet CIA Director Allen Dulles. I was kind of taken aback—again. First, the CIA director does not represent the “highest levels” of government, at least not overtly. But second, Dulles had left the CIA in November of 1961. The new director was John McCone. As I said, Donovan’s book places this meeting two months after Kennedy had forced Dulles to resign. Again, I don’t see what was gained by this.

But during this meeting, Dulles tries to tell Donovan that he will be getting very little support on this mission. He will be largely on his own. This is not true even in the film’s terms. But it is certainly not true according to Donovan’s book. In the film, we watch as Hanks is escorted around West Germany by various American agents. They give him a safe house and a phone number to call. (The film actually has Donovan memorize this phone number when, in reality, he kept it on a card as he went to East Germany.)

In fact, in every step of Donovan’s trip—including the flight over on a MATS plane—he was escorted and assisted by American agents. The only part of his mission where he was alone was when he crossed over into East Germany. And that, of course, was pretty much unavoidable. Again, in this aspect, we see Donovan spending time in a holding cell at the hands of those brutal East Germans. Not only did that not occur, but also the incident that causes it did not happen either (e.g., the Abel family lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, speeding at over a hundred miles per hour in his sports car).

Let us close with three more points of divergence. The film makes much of the dealings between Donovan and the Russian Embassy official Ivan Schischkin, and the family lawyer, Vogel. This is because Donovan wants to release both Abel and an American economics student imprisoned in East Germany, Frederic Pryor. This led to a much longer mission than planned. Two days stretched into over a week.   But this is not really accurate either. For Donovan actually was trying to release three prisoners. In addition to Pryor and Abel, he tried to release a man named Marvin Makinen. At this he did not succeed. But he did extract a promise that the Soviets would let him go later if super power relations improved. They did, and in October of 1963, Makinen was freed.

The film shows Donovan having his coat stolen from him under threat from a small gang of East German thugs. Again, this is not in Donovan’s book.   The arrest of Frederic Pryor is made while the Berlin Wall is being constructed. As Pryor later revealed, he was not even in Berlin when the wall was going up. (Click here for more from Pryor).

I could go on further, but here is my question: Where are the history defiler zealots? You know, those screaming fanatics who come out of the woodwork whenever Oliver Stone makes a history film and uses elements of dramatic license? This highly praised film got very little of that kind of criticism as far as I could see. The Washington Post did allow David Talbot a brief column pointing out the Dulles fallacy and the actual primacy of President Kennedy over the mission. (See 10/28/15) But that was about it as far as I could tell. I made this same distinction in my review of Clint Eastwood’s poor film J. Edgar. There really does seem to be a double standard for people in the club, and those not in the club—that is the Washington/Hollywood nexus. It is a slice of pernicious hypocrisy that seems ingrained into our society.

But let me add something here. In Oliver Stone’s case, he is working in fields in which there are many unknowns (e.g., the JFK assassination, Nixon and Watergate). In other words, he is pushing the envelope. I don’t think that applies in this case.

As per the aesthetic elements of the film, Spielberg had a very long apprentice period as a director. It was over ten years from when he began making his amateur films in Arizona until he made his first really well directed feature film, Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Since then, his films have generally been quite well made. As noted above, he has a good pictorial eye, knows what he wants lighting wise, and his films are acutely edited. As he himself has said, he doesn’t really have a directorial style. He tries to serve the material at hand as well as possible. And, most of the time, he does. (Who can forget the disasters of Hook and 1941?)

I have always thought Tom Hanks was a gifted comic actor. He proved that on television in Bosom Buddies, and then furthered that reputation in Splash. In comedy he has energy, timing, and technical command. I have never been very much enamored of him outside of comedy. And when he tried to really stretch himself in Road to Perdition, playing a heavy, he fell on his face. (Whereas Michael Caine, who also is good in comedy, pulled off a similar role quite well in Get Carter.) Hanks is passable here. He doesn’t really act. He flexes certain aspects of his personality to fit the moment. Sort of what someone like Gary Cooper would have done in the fifties, before the Actor’s Studio revolution took hold.

On the other hand, British actor Mark Rylance as Fisher/Abel really does act. It’s a subtle, understated performance. One that is full of delicate secrets untold hidden inside the character. From the start, Rylance is in that very low emotional register and he not only sustains it throughout, he manages to articulate the character without ever breaking out of that key. It’s a union of both the British tradition of technical surety, combined with the American revolution of method acting.

As I noted in my book Reclaiming Parkland, Hanks and Spielberg have definite ambitions in doing historical subjects. They both fancy themselves amateur historians. Their idol in the field was the late Stephen Ambrose. Bridge of Spies is a well-made film. I just wish it had dispensed with a lot of the dramatic license, which I do not think was really necessary. It would also be nice to see these two men do something a little gutsy concerning American history. Like what Jeremy Renner did with his film about Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger. But as I also showed in my book, because of personal reasons, that doesn’t seem possible. At least not right now.

May 15, 2016
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard

David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard has a massive scope to it. It deals with three main figures. The first, and the main character, is CIA Director Allen Dulles. The second, and a supporting character, is his brother, Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. The third major character, who is dealt with in the last 270 pages of the book, is President John F. Kennedy.

Beyond focusing on three historical giants, because the framework is a biography of Allen Dulles, the book deals with some extraordinarily complex, controversial, even convoluted, historical events. Because, as the subtitle of the book states, perhaps no other single individual did as much to create the so—called “secret government” of the United States. The one that the mainstream media refuses to recognize, but which the public, in growing numbers, has grown to accept as a fact of life. This dichotomy has done much to feed the growing disbelief by the populace in both the American government, and the American media.

Before we begin, it is important to place Talbot’s book in a historiographical framework (something which, to my knowledge, no reviewer has done yet.) For surprisingly, even though Allen Dulles passed away well over forty years ago, Talbot really did not have many antecedents. There were two previous, what I should call “group biographies”. That is, volumes dealing with Allen Dulles and his brother, and to a lesser extent his sister Eleanor (who also worked in the State Department.) In 1978, about ten years after Allen Dulles’ death, the prolific author Leonard Mosley wrote Dulles, about all three siblings. In 2013, former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer wrote The Brothers. There have been two biographies that were solely about Allen Dulles. In 1994, Peter Grose wrote Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. This was, more or less, an official version of Dulles’ life, befitting the fact that Grose was a member of a body that Allen Dulles himself very much controlled, the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999, James Srodes wrote Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Srodes has been a business writer for journals like Forbes, before becoming a contributor to conservative journals like American Spectator and the Washington Times.

(I should mention that one other attempted Dulles biography, by Richard Harris Smith, does not appear to have been actually published. In an e-mail communication with this reviewer, Talbot wrote that he did find this mysterious manuscript at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto. He called it a work in progress, and, as he recalled, Grose had gleaned the best parts of it for his volume. Many years ago, when professor Donald Gibson was trying to secure this biography, he asked Mr. Smith—author of a good book on the OSS—what happened to it. Smith replied that he was not in the mood to talk about conspiracy theories.)

In this reviewer’s opinion, Talbot’s book is a leap beyond these. I don’t want to convey the idea that Talbot is independent of them, for he does reference the previous books. But in this reviewer’s opinion, Talbot goes much further than these previous authors in his attempt to excavate just how involved Allen Dulles was in some of the unsavory aspects that helped create and maintain the Cold War state. Many of these aspects were ignored or minimized in the previous books. But Talbot does not shy away from detailing Dulles’ role in attempting to undermine some of America’s allies, like France during the revolt of the French generals in 1961. Beyond that, he goes much further than they do in explaining Dulles’ dismissal by President Kennedy (it was not all about the Bay of Pigs). And, most interestingly, he highlights Dulles’ rather bizarre insistence in maintaining something like what the author calls an anti-Kennedy government in exile. (Talbot, p. 7) That is, Dulles continued to have regular meetings with high-level CIA officers for years after Kennedy removed him from office. And he does not shy away from the question of Dulles’ involvement in both the assassination of, and the cover-up surrounding Kennedy’s murder.

Criticism should be nothing if not comparative. Therefore, in these ways, The Devil’s Chessboard is a milestone in the field. This is good in itself of course. But one has to wonder: Why did it take nearly a half-century to write such a book? Talbot’s work is not without flaws—which I will detail later. But it is so far ahead of its competitors, and it deals with such a wide variety of important subjects, that I strongly recommend reading it. Most books I review in this field I read once, and then walk outside and throw them in the dumpster. Talbot’s book is so large in scale, so rich in detail, so wide-ranging and relevant in its gallop through time, that I read it twice—all the while writing 43 pages of notes in preparation for this review. It was the only way to do the book justice. And anyone who says they can grasp and appreciate the 620 pages of text in one reading is not being candid.

I

Unlike Srodes and Grose, Talbot does not spend a lot of pages on the formative years of Allen Dulles. I assume that, since the book was quite long in its present form, the author did not think it was necessary to fill in the man’s boyhood, schooling, even his spy services in World War I. Talbot does little more than just mention these matters.

He begins the book in a rather daring way. After the Prologue, we start the story proper in 1942, with Dulles in Bern, Switzerland. He was working for the OSS, ostensibly against the Third Reich. But revealingly, Talbot entitles this chapter, “The Double Agent”, because despite the fact Dulles was supposed to be working to topple the Reich, he was not obeying the orders issued by his president, Franklin Roosevelt, on that all-important matter. In January of 1943, Roosevelt had decided on a policy of unconditional surrender for the Nazi regime. (p. 29) That is, there would be no negotiations by, or for, the Germans in quest of a truce. This was a sharp and visionary stricture by FDR. As the author notes, it was meant to reassure Josef Stalin—the almost pathologically insecure and paranoid Russian dictator—that his allies, the USA and England, would not cut a separate peace with the Nazis, and then turn on him.

With that in mind, Talbot begins the book with a scene between Prince Maximilian Egon von Hohenlohe and Dulles. This meeting directly contravened FDR’s instructions. For the two men were discussing a possible deal that would sacrifice Hitler, but save a large part of the Nazi government. (pp. 31ff) And—exactly what FDR wanted to prevent—they saw Russia as the enemy, and they wanted to use Germany as a bulwark against Stalin. Meanwhile, they would dispose of the genocide problem by sending the surviving Jews of East Europe to Africa. During these rather bizarre, and definitely insubordinate conversations, Dulles told the prince that he had the president’s complete support. Which, of course, he did not. These discussions went on for over two months. And as the author reveals—in what is probably the most shocking aspect of the entire negotiation—the prince was representing none other than Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS. In other words, Himmler was betraying Hitler, and Dulles was betraying Roosevelt. But further, the implications are stunning: Dulles had no problem working out a truce with the man who was running the Final Solution, thereby leaving him alive and free and running a largely Nazi state.

This opening is both daring and quite suitable. For, like a musical prelude, it sets the thematic overtones of the book at the outset. Dulles will not abide by the wishes of his superior in the White House. He then begins to formulate his own personal foreign policy, oblivious to how it violates the policy of his president. Further, it does not matter to him if he is, literally, dealing with the devil. This is all appropriate and, in a structural way, thematically sound—because this same concept will be repeated in 1961. Except then, Dulles will be insubordinate, not once, but three times within the first year of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. With just cause, Kennedy will then terminate him. However, as the author notes, Dulles had been in power for so long that he began to manage and control what the author outlines as an “anti-Kennedy junta” in exile. Except it was not really in exile; it operated within the confines of the USA, but in secret.

Why was Dulles predisposed to negotiate with a representative of Himmler’s? In addition to seeing Marxism as the enemy around the corner, Allen Dulles and his brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, had made a lot of money serving the business interests of Nazi Germany. (pp. 19-28) Their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was one of the largest and most powerful international corporate firms in America. And they had extensive dealings with Germany, way past the date when others had refused to deal with the Nazis since it had become obvious what Hitler was up to. In fact, Sullivan and Cromwell went as far as to set up phony shell companies to disguise the identity of IG Farben, along with Krupp, two of the largest business supporters of the Reich.

Very pointedly, as he is outlining all of this double-dealing with Nazis and their agents, Talbot also makes another telling observation about the personality of Allen Dulles. While having no qualms about dealing with the Nazis, even Himmler, Dulles essentially sat on more than one early warning about what the Reich had planned for the Jews of Eastern Europe. These were credible reports by Edward Schulte, Fritz Kolba, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. These men all had direct testimony about what the Nazis were doing after rounding up all these Jews. Schulte had witnessed an early demonstration for Himmler of what zyklon gas could do in a shower chamber. (p. 48) Kolbe stole documents about what Hitler planned on doing with the Hungarian Jews being transported by night on trains. (pp. 53, 54) Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and wrote a 40-page report on what was happening there. (p. 56) Dulles sat on the first, summarized the second falsely, and he sent the last one to Cordell Hull, knowing he would be hesitant to act.

But trying to preserve a large part of the Third Reich, while delaying any rescue attempts of the Jews, was not enough for Dulles. Near the end of the war, Allen Dulles began his attempts to save certain members of the Reich from the hangman’s noose at Nuremburg. Near the end of the war, with the allies tracking him down, Himmler tried to get to Dulles in Switzerland, thinking he could find sanctuary there. He failed in this attempt, was captured, and killed himself by taking a cyanide capsule.

General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff, was more fortunate. At the end of the war, Wolff was chief of all SS forces in Italy. As with Himmler, Dulles was trying to arrange a separate peace with the SS man prior to the end of the war. As the author notes, the aim of this was to prevent any influence from the Russians who were torrentially driving into Germany. Dulles wanted the Soviets to have no influence in Austria or the northern city of Trieste in Italy. (p. 76) As with his earlier dealings with Hohenlohe, Dulles falsely told Wolff that he was representing Roosevelt in these negotiations. (p. 77) Dulles told him he would probably be the Minister of Education in a new Germany after the war. (p. 87)

But the fall of the Reich changed all this. The Italian uprising against fascism literally endangered Wolff’s life. A cohort of Dulles saved him. Dulles then kept Wolff out of the first two rounds of trials at Nuremburg, even though the man arranged transportation to places like Treblinka and supervised some medical experiments there. Wolff also arranged for slave labor from the camps to large private contributors to the SS. (pp. 82-84) While in a rather comfortable detention—Dulles actually got him the use of a yacht—Dulles defended the SS manager from the worst of the charges brought against him by the Nuremburg prosecutors. These negotiations went on for month after month. Meanwhile, Dulles said Wolff should be in a hospital since he was suffering from nervous exhaustion. (p. 88)

When the charade was over, Dulles got Wolff’s penalty reduced to time served—less than four years. By the fifties, Wolff was fully rehabilitated. To the point that the State Department, under Foster Dulles’ control, granted him a visa. (p. 93) This same pattern was largely repeated with Eugen Dollmann, an assistant to Wolff.

But probably the most infamous Nazi who Dulles helped escape Nuremburg was Reinhard Gehlen. Talbot devotes a chapter to Hitler’s former chief of espionage on the eastern front. He begins it in a novel way: with Gehlen and a friend (also a former Nazi) watching the legendary 1951 World Series between the New York Giants and the Yankees, after which Joe DiMaggio retired. Dulles had helped arrange for the CIA to get the pair tickets, with a CIA escort.

From here, the author flashes back to the rescue of Gehlen from the Russians at the end of World War II. Like Himmler, Gehlen was making his way toward Dulles in hopes he could persuade the OSS spymaster in Bern to rescue him. For Gehlen was involved in a very large and heinous crime: the torture and sometimes murder of thousands of prisoners of war on the Russian Front. It turns out that Gehlen did not really have to seek out Dulles, as Dulles was searching for him. (Ibid, pp. 270-71) Other voices involved, like Army Intelligence, saw no point in enlisting Gehlen. But Dulles won the debate. After setting up a deal with Gehlen to be part of American intelligence after the war, the Nazi now began to recruit former SS officers into his organization, e.g., Konrad Fiebig, later charged with killing thousands of Jews in Belarus. (p. 275)

But this did not matter to the Dulles brothers because Gehlen delivered the goods they wanted: an inflated and venomous view of the USSR as a juggernaut intent on world domination. Except the Nazi went beyond that: “We live in an age which war is a paramount activity of man with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” (p. 278) Yet even the leaders of West Germany did not want Gehlen around after the country was declared an independent republic. But again, Dulles resisted the efforts of Konrad Adenauer to dump Gehlen, probably because Gehlen had contingency plots to take over the West German government if it drifted too far left. (pp. 282-83)

II

After World War II and his salvaging of so many former Nazis, Dulles went back to work for a while at Sullivan and Cromwell. These previous political moves helped his clients of course, because now they could rebuild business relations with Germany, while Dulles used some of these former Nazis to crank up the Cold War with Russia—something even more beneficial to his clients.

One of the key moves Dulles made was with the Noel Field affair. This has been one of the most puzzling aspects of Cold War history. Noel Field was a rather naïve State Department employee who was very much impressed by the anti-Fascist heroism during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, he resigned and worked for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s Relief Mission in southern France. During the war he worked as an informant for Dulles.

After the war, Field moved from Switzerland to Prague. He had allegedly been offered a teaching position at a university there. Shortly after he arrived in 1949, he was arrested. After Noel disappeared, his brother Herman began to search for him. He was also arrested. When his wife went looking for him, she was arrested. (pp. 140-43) The question all three detainees were asked during interrogation was, “How do you know Allen Dulles?”

It turns out that Dulles was using Noel Field. And his family. With the helpful ear of his protégée Frank Wisner, who ran CIA intelligence operations at the time, Dulles had concocted something called Operation Splinter Factor. (p. 151) Taking advantage of Stalin’s paranoia, Dulles had spread the word that the Fields’ going to Eastern Europe was part of a plot to destabilize the USSR. When the Fields did not confess—since there was nothing to confess to—Stalin went batty. He arrested over 170,000 Communist Party members. Show trials and executions followed. (p. 155) The Fields were not released until Stalin died in 1954.

A useful tool for Dulles to ratchet up the Cold War stateside was a young California congressman named Richard Nixon. Nixon first met Dulles in 1947 on a trip to Europe to promote the Marshall Plan. Representative Christian Herter was also on that voyage via the Queen Mary. These two men seduced Nixon into going along with the Marshall Plan, which most Republicans questioned. (pp. 158-161)

But Talbot writes that this was probably not the first time Nixon met Dulles. Borrowing from author/investigator John Loftus, he says that the introduction probably occurred in 1945. Nixon was an ensign about to leave the Navy, but he was wrapping up some matters when he discovered some documents relating to the Nazis and the Dulles brothers. He contacted Allen Dulles and the OSS chief told him to hush it up. In return, he and his brother would help him run for political office in California once he was decommissioned. Dulles came through—in spades. He had to, because Nixon’s opponent, Jerry Voorhis, wanted to shine some light on Wall Street’s cooperation with the Nazis during and prior to the war. (pp. 162-63)

With tons of cash at his disposal, Nixon began one of the great smear campaigns in American political history. The casting of Voorhis as a commie or commie sympathizer was complete fiction. And Nixon knew it. He later said, “Of course, I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a communist. I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win.” (p. 166) This Machiavellian code, combined with barrels full of money, helped launch one of the most pernicious political careers in post-World-War-II history. And with it, the Second Red Scare.

In August of 1948, congressman Nixon met secretly with a small coterie of inside-the-beltway high rollers. Among them were the Dulles brothers. Nixon’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had just accused Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy. This was largely based on the word of one Whitaker Chambers. Chambers said he was a former communist who broke with the party. He then turned into a conservative Time magazine writer, as well as a communist fear monger. The problem for Nixon was that Hiss had denied Chamber’s accusations of them knowing each other in the communist underground. Appearing before the committee, Hiss had done well. Some members of the runaway committee thought they should abandon the matter. Nixon was not one of them.

But he wanted to check with some heavy hitters in the Republican Party before proceeding, because he knew he needed their backing and support. John Foster Dulles was important since he ran the Carnegie Endowment for Peace where Hiss now worked. (p. 169) Nixon brought the committee’s files to this meeting, which indicated to him, and the HUAC, that Hiss was lying when he said he did not know Chambers. These files convinced the Dulles brothers that Nixon was correct and they approved his efforts to corral Hiss. As Foster Dulles later said, “It was clear he did not want to proceed until people like myself had agreed that he really had a cause to justify going ahead.” (p. 170) After all, it was a presidential election year.

As Joan Brady makes clear in her new book, America’s Dreyfus, Nixon had choreographed the proceedings perfectly, because at the time he made his denial, Hiss had not seen Chambers. When he asked to see him, Nixon always found a reason to avoid such a confrontation. Nixon knew, as Hiss did not, that the two men did know each other—except, at the time they did, Chambers went by a different name (one of many he used, perhaps as many as thirteen). That name was George Crossley. Further, in the 12-year interim, Chambers had gained something like fifty pounds, lost some hair, and greatly cleaned up his appearance, including extensive dental work. Which is why Hiss demanded a face-to-face meeting. He did not want to rely on photos—although Hiss suspected it was probably Crossley. On cue, when they did finally meet, Hiss asked Chambers if he used the name Crossley. Chambers denied it. This was a lie. (Brady, p. 123)

In fact, Chambers told so many lies that it was almost laughable that Hiss was the one indicted for perjury. But HUAC was a completely politically motivated apparatus. They were responsible for the infamous Hollywood Ten. As Talbot notes, they might have been responsible for the death of Harry Dexter White, a brilliant New Deal economist who was not in the best of health when he appeared before them. After he rode home by train, he died of a heart attack. (Talbot, p. 184) The chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, was later convicted for fraud. (Brady, p. 158)

At Hiss’ first trial, the prosecutor made a mistake. In his opening comments he said that if the jury did not believe Chambers, he had no case. (Brady, p. 228) Hiss’ first lawyer, Lloyd Stryker, caught Chambers in so many lies that one commentator wrote: getting another lie out of Chambers was like squeezing juice from an orange. But Prosecutor Murphy had the infamous typewriter. This was the legendary Woodstock #230099. Allegedly, Hiss’ wife used this typewriter to replicate the documents Hiss stole before giving them to Chambers to pass on to the Soviet underground in America.

Which is idiotic on its face. If Hiss were a spy he would just photograph the documents. But for Nixon to make a case, there had to be a direct connection between the documents, Hiss and Chambers. As Joan Brady comments—and every follower of the case now knows—Woodstock #230099 was the wrong typewriter. The serial number betrayed it had not been manufactured at the time the prosecution said it came into the hands of Hiss. (Brady, p. 315) Unfortunately for Hiss, his lawyers did not find this out until after the second trial, where he was convicted of perjury. Suffice it to say, if Stryker had known about this subterfuge, this combined with his demolition of Chambers would have been enough to stop Nixon right there. And then perhaps, as Brady and others have pointed out, the Frankenstein of Joe McCarthy might never have been unleashed.

When confronted with these troubling facts, the late author Allen Weinstein—the Gerald Posner of the Hiss case—always insisted: But the typewriter was found by the Hiss camp. The problem is that it had been found previous to that. (Brady, p. 218-19) Realizing it was the wrong typewriter, the FBI then built a machine itself. According to John Dean, Nixon actually admitted this to him. (ibid, p. 316) What makes that so compelling is this: the alleged Hiss investigator who found the typewriter and delivered it to the defense was a double agent. (ibid)

A point brought out by Brady which supports Talbot is that early on, Hiss asked Foster Dulles if he should go over to where Chambers was working and confront him. At least he would now be able to see the man in person. Dulles advised him not to. (Brady, p. 79) At the second trial, Foster Dulles appeared as a witness against Hiss. And Allen Dulles furnished Nixon with various intelligence files on the case. Indeed, “Nixon was impressed by the Dulles brothers’ bold decision to politically exploit the Hiss affair rather than run from it.” (Talbot, p. 171)

The author delves into something that Brady takes much further. A mystery about the case has always been why Hiss did not allow his stepson Timmy to testify at either trial. Talbot theorizes that there may have been a homosexual tryst between Hiss and Chambers. But in Brady’s book she suggests that the target of Chambers’ raging homosexuality was Timmy. The FBI discovered this apparently through Chambers, who reported it as a rumor, one he did not deny. (Brady, pp. 270-71) It was the discovery of this child abuse—Timothy was only 8 or 9 at the time—that caused Hiss to split from Chambers. If this is true, it greatly explains why Chambers told so many lies for Nixon. And why Timothy did not testify.

All in all, Nixon did a good job for his masters. He had successfully unleashed the fear of communist spies in our midst, even in our government. In turn, the Dulles brothers recommended him to Eisenhower as a VP candidate. (p. 185) Another Red Scare was on, and it would help the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket win in 1952. Allen Dulles further rewarded Nixon later, during the final stages of that election. It was then discovered that Nixon had taken a six-figure bribe from Romanian industrialist Nicolae Malaxa. But in a brilliant stroke of luck, the teller at the bank where it was deposited turned it over to some rivals of Malaxa. Unsuspectingly, they gave it to their CIA handler. When Drew Pearson reported the story, Dulles promptly arranged to have the evidence deep-sixed. (Talbot, p. 191) Which cinched the election for the Republicans. And guaranteed the Dulles brothers would be prominently featured in the upcoming administration.

III

As Talbot notes, James Forrestal got Allen Dulles on the Jackson-Correa Committee to recommend ideas to reform the CIA. This secured him a job as Deputy Director. (This was about the same time Dulles was creating the National Committee for a Free Europe by plundering Nazi gold. See Talbot, p. 150) Once Eisenhower was elected, it was just a matter of time until Foster Dulles got the president to promote his brother from Deputy Director to DCI. Once this was accomplished, with Allen at CIA and Foster as Secretary of State, as Talbot notes, the Dulles Imperium was on.

An advantage the brothers had in setting up their regime was that, with the Hiss case, they had done a good job in bringing the New Deal into question. Hiss had been part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Ivy League brain trust. He even helped form the United Nations for Harry Truman. Therefore, the establishment of the Red Scare at home now justified the fear of what Foster Dulles called “Godless communism abroad”.

But there was one more element to setting up this new imperial order. That was the Dulles connection to the Power Elite. Talbot adroitly introduces this by using the man who actually coined that term, C. Wright Mills. As the author writes, for the Dulles brothers, “Democracy … was an impediment to the smooth functioning of the corporate state.” (p. 197) Franklin Roosevelt was well aware of this oligarchy and its advocates. He once wrote, “The real truth … is that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the day of Andrew Jackson.” (ibid) Therefore, their backing of Nixon, and the creation of the Red Scare, all of this was a great opportunity for them to “prove masters of exploiting the anxious state of permanent vigilance that accompanied the Cold War.” (p. 195) As Mills referred to men like the Dulles brothers and Nixon, they believed in a “crackpot realism”; and in the name of that realism, “they have constructed a paranoid reality of their own.” (p. 198)

How far would they go in this respect? As the author notes, in 1952, Allen Dulles tried to convince DCI Walter B. Smith to assassinate Stalin at a Paris summit meeting. He also funneled funds from CIA front groups to the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket. (p. 203) This is how realpolitik worked for the Dulles brothers. In comparison to them, Henry Kissinger was an amateur. But Talbot does a nice job of sketching in the fact that as Nelson Rockefeller was a benefactor of Kissinger, the relationship between the Dulles clan and the Rockefeller brothers went back much further, and was intricately intertwined. (See pages 550-59) And to his credit, Talbot mentions the open letter from David Rockefeller to President Kennedy, which was suggested by publisher Henry Luce. In this letter, Rockefeller (the real chairman of the Eastern Establishment) criticized many of Kennedy’s economic policies. And he also expressed disdain for the Alliance for Progress. Even after Kennedy was dead, Nelson Rockefeller made a speech criticizing his foreign policy.

In his treatment of the two great disasters that the Dulles brothers orchestrated—the overthrow of the democratic governments of Iran and Guatemala—Talbot tries a different approach. He writes from a more personal level on both coups. For example, he notes that when the Shah fled Iran, he went to the same hotel Allen Dulles was staying at in Rome. This was no coincidence. Dulles was there to relay the progress of the overthrow and to firm up the resolve of the deposed dictator. In fact, Dulles actually flew back to Tehran with the Shah after the dirty work had been done. (p. 237) Dulles then manipulated the American press coverage of the coup, while covert officer Kim Roosevelt—who ran the operation on the ground—got a nice job with Gulf Oil afterwards.

With Guatemala—the following year—Talbot poignantly concentrates on the unfortunate personal fate that befell the family of Jacobo Arbenz after Howard Hunt arranged his family’s flight out of Guatemala. In the face of a CIA manipulated civil war, Arbenz had abdicated. His family became a band of wandering minstrels, going from country to country, until Jacobo died in Mexico City from an electric shock at the age of 57. But not before his daughter committed suicide. Arbenz’ only mistake was that he wanted more of his nation’s wealth to go to its citizens and less to United Fruit. If he had gone along with the wishes of the North Americans, he would have been a rich man, since they offered him two million dollars to shut his mouth. (p. 260) Instead, the fascist dictatorships that followed Arbenz ended up killing about 250,000 Guatemalans—in order to save the country from communism. Apparently, this is what Foster Dulles meant when he announced that their regime would be a A Policy of Boldness.

But the Dulles brothers were not just brutal abroad, they were also quite curt and short with their own employees. In this regard, Talbot provides nice summaries of the deaths of both Frank Olson and Jimmy Kronthal. Most readers understand the story of the former. Olson was part of the CIA’s MK/Ultra drug experimentation program, part of the aim of which was to produce a mind-controlled assassin. After Olson was doused with a dose of LSD, he allegedly fell to his death from the tenth floor of a Manhattan hotel. James McCord, part of the CIA’s Office of Security, called the case a suicide. (p. 296) The family did not buy it. Decades later, they had the body exhumed. The panel doing the examination ruled (with one exception) that there were traces of blunt force trauma on the head and chest area—before the fall. Dr. James Starrs, leader of the panel, told the press afterward, “I am exceedingly skeptical of the view that Dr. Olson went through the window on his own.” (ibid) In the latter case, Kronthal was a promising CIA officer who Dulles personally liked. The problem was that the Soviets found out he was a homosexual. They set up a honey trap for him, and then successfully turned him. (p. 298) The CIA found out about his doubling. In a private meeting at his personal residence, Dulles confronted him with the evidence. Kronthal then walked home, which was just two blocks from Dulles’ residence. Trailing him were two Office of Security agents. He left a note saying he was not to be disturbed the next morning. But later on, two men came to his house and told his housekeeper he had to attend a crucial meeting. When they went to his bedroom door, they found his dead body, fully clothed, with an empty vial next to it. (p. 299) Curiously, the autopsy failed to determine the cause of death, or what was in the vial next to his bed. CIA officer Robert Crowley came to believe that his suicide was assisted.

One of the highlights of the book is Talbot’s chronicle of what was probably the first case of extraordinary rendition on American territory. It occurred in 1956. This was the too little mentioned case of Jesus de Galindez, a professor at Columbia University.

After serving on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Galindez decided to move to the Dominican Republic. There, he decided to become an academic. The problem is that someone as intelligent and democratic as Galindez would find it hard to swallow the bizarre and dissolute rule of Rafael Trujillo. As authors like Jim Hougan have noted, the word bloodthirsty seems to have been created for the reign of Trujillo, who State Department employees often referred to as a Central American Dracula in their memos. (Hougan, Spooks, p. 104) Trujillo was one of the early appreciators of snuff film pornography. He was also an inhabitant of the outer limits of torture; e.g., he would often order the suspected traitor’s eyebrows sewn to their brows so they could not close their eyes. Once he was deposed, palace films were found of children being forced to mate with animals. All this while he was looting his country. He reportedly had $840,000,000 on deposit in Swiss banks, a mind-boggling sum for 1960. (Hougan, p. 109)

The Dulles brothers, as well as Nixon, not only tolerated Trujillo; they embraced him. Nixon once said that Americans needed to back the Dominican dictator because, after all, “Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them.” (Talbot, p. 318) Which is an odd comment coming from a man who ended his career with the Watergate scandal.

As if Trujillo did not have enough money on hand, the CIA and State Department passed on millions more to him each year, much of which he pocketed himself. After he left the country, Galindez wrote a 750-page expose on Trujillo. And he was also critical of the tilt of Foster Dulles’ foreign policy. (Talbot, p. 321) When Trujillo’s agents heard about the manuscript, they first tried to bribe the professor to prevent it from being turned into a book. When that failed, two Dominican thugs sat in on a class. When that did not do the trick, Allen Dulles helped the despot by farming out the Galindez kidnapping to Robert Maheu. The infamous Maheu was a former FBI man who left the Bureau to set up a CIA front company called Robert Maheu and Associates. Like Guy Banister’s operation in New Orleans, this was supposed to be a private detective agency. But it did little of that sort of work. Rather, it carried out domestic covert operations, like this one for the CIA, which was not supposed to perform covert ops stateside. After Galindez was kidnapped, he was flown to the Dominican Republic. He was confronted with his manuscript, and when he refused to renounce it, Trujillo ordered up his specialty. He first had the man boiled in water; he then fed him to his sharks. (p. 322)

But there was a problem that lingered after the murder. The pilot Maheu hired did not know what the end result of the rendition would be. So he began to talk. He was sent to see Trujillo. He then disappeared. This caused a lot of headlines in the papers that Dulles did not like. Neither did the Justice Department. So the authorities now arrested John Frank, who worked for Maheu as an agent on Trujillo’s estate. To make the Frank saga short: he was arrested, tried and convicted, but released on appeal. There was a lot of pressure placed on witnesses not to show up at the second trial. Therefore, the charges were plea-bargained down to Frank not registering as a foreign agent. In other words, although the authorities had a very good idea what had really happened, no one was ever arrested for the two murder/kidnappings.

IV

Talbot begins to segue into the major topic of the last part of the book by briefly outlining the close relationship between Dulles and his counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. Today Angleton is the man who many experts, like John Newman, believe to be Lee Harvey Oswald’s ultimate control agent. And later in the book Talbot devotes a long section to the indications that Oswald was some kind of lower level intelligence agent. Dulles gave Angleton many top-flight assignments. For instance, he was the CIA liaison to the foreign desks of major countries like France, West Germany, Turkey, Taiwan and, most importantly, Israel. He also had liaison duties with the FBI, and, at times, with the Mafia. (pp. 336-37) Talbot notes that in his approach to Meyer Lansky to attempt to kill Castro, Dulles did not use Angleton. He employed a lower level officer named Sam Halpern. (In his previous book Brothers, Talbot exposed Halpern as blaming these machinations with the Mafia on the Kennedys.)

And this forms the introduction to one of the most interesting passages in The Devil’s Chessboard. One that this reviewer had never read about before. Let us call it the Shelburne vs. Hotel Theresa incident. In 1960, Fidel Castro visited the USA for the second time. By then, Allen Dulles and the White House—Foster Dulles had died in 1959—had decided that Castro was a communist and there was no point in dealing with him. When Castro and his entourage tried to book a suite of rooms at the Shelburne Hotel near the United Nations, the management demanded a twenty thousand dollar deposit. As Talbot clearly implies, this was on orders from Washington. Castro refused to pay. And in a beautifully directed turnabout, he moved his company to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. (p. 339) Once ensconced there, leaders like Nasser, Nehru and Khrushchev visited him at the hotel. The man who took charge of the transfer was none other than Malcolm X. (p. 342)

Castro delivered what none other than I. F. Stone called a tour de force speech at the UN. The spectacle at the Theresa, and Castro’s powerful speech, caused the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to sponsor a party in his honor in the ballroom of the hotel. It was attended by such leftist luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes and C. Wright Mills. (p. 345)

In other words, the Dulles/White House operation was not just blunted. It was routed. After this September 1960 incident, two things happened which Talbot uses masterfully as a lesson in foreshadowing. First, the CIA now gets in contact with Maheu again. This time, the target is Castro. But secondly, the Theresa incident occurred in the middle of the presidential race. Two weeks after Castro left Harlem, candidate John Kennedy decided to book a room at the Hotel Theresa. He then spoke to a large crowd outside. (p. 349) He was joined by Eleanor Roosevelt and Representative Adam Clayton Powell. He gave an altogether memorable speech. One that revealed that it was Kennedy, not Nixon, who understood the temper of the times. Talbot quotes much of it verbatim:

I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad that Castro and Khrushchev came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution, which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution. (p. 350)

To put it mildly, this is not what Dulles and Eisenhower would have had Nixon say. But it presages the clash of ideas between Kennedy and Dulles that would take place almost immediately upon Kennedy assuming power. Actually, the clash began before Kennedy was inaugurated.

One of the most poetic and elegantly written sections of the book is Talbot’s reverie on the final days of Patrice Lumumba. During the campaign, it became obvious that Kennedy opposed the Dulles/Eisenhower alliance with European imperialists to keep control of the Third World. As historian Philip Muehlenbeck noted in his study of the subject, Kennedy referred to Africa over 400 times during his 1960 campaign. He once even asked Democratic foreign policy advisor Averill Harriman if he should openly back Lumumba. Lumumba was a dynamic, anti-colonial leader who was trying to shake off the Belgian colonialist shackles from his native Congo. He was deemed to be so dangerous to American interests that Eisenhower ordered Dulles to hatch a plot to kill him. Like Arbenz, his true crime was that he wanted to use the enormous mineral wealth of his country to enrich its citizens and not European and American corporations.

On August 18, 1960, the NSC, under the guidance of Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, decided that Lumumba had to be eliminated. At first, the CIA went to the ceremonial president, Joseph Kasavubu, the man Lumumba had beaten in a democratic election. They asked him to stage a coup. He refused. (Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 63) CIA station chief Larry Devlin then went to Josef Mobutu, an army colonel, to do the job. Some reports say Devlin wanted a wholesale disposal—that is, the elimination of Lumumba and his two closest political allies. Later Kasavubu swung over to the CIA’s side. On September 14th, the American inspired and designed coup succeeded.

After he was deposed by Mobutu, Lumumba was placed under house arrest. But he escaped. As Talbot describes it, he was running for his life. But right before he got to the sanctuary of his followers, he was separated from his wife and child. He then crossed back across the river to get them. It was this that allowed him to be captured. (Talbot, p. 382) Once this occurred, Lumumba was as good as gone. For Dulles had assigned two upper level officers to make sure Lumumba was now killed. These were Leopoldville station chief Devlin and Director of Plans, Dick Bissell. Dulles actually flew Bissell to Rome so he could monitor events more closely. Bissell assigned two hired assassins, codenamed QJ WIN and WI ROGUE, to kill Lumumba by either poison toxin or by rounding up an execution squad. (Talbot, p. 380) But these plots were called off in favor of one that afforded more plausible deniability.

While Dulles was getting the New York Times to print smear after smear about Lumumba, Lumumba’s captors decided to ship him to his direct opposition in Katanga province, the political base of Mobutu and his ally Moise Tshombe. Devlin knew about this three days in advance. Since he was in constant contact with Bissell and Devlin, Dulles had to have known also. (pp. 384-85) They allowed it to happen, knowing Lumumba’s fate. In fact, it later came out that the CIA picked up Lumumba’s corpse and pondered how to dispose of it.

As the author points out, Kennedy was racked with pain when he heard the news of Lumumba’s death. But he did not find out about it until almost a month after it happened. The CIA—Dulles, Bissell, and Devlin—deliberately kept it from him. As did the ambassador to Congo in the State Department. All these men had to know they were contradicting Kennedy’s announced reform policy for both Congo and Lumumba. Indeed, it is likely that Dulles speeded up the plot to make sure Lumumba was dead before Kennedy was inaugurated—which he was. It’s hard to believe that Kennedy did not later understand what had happened here. For the tragedy of the people of the Congo was truly epic. As with Arbenz and Guatemala, Congo fell under the claw of Josef Mobutu’s dictatorship, which lasted for well over three decades. Mobutu was simply a stand-in for European imperial powers, allowing them to sack the country, while he became perhaps the richest man in Africa. Congo has never really recovered from the death of Lumumba. As Jonathan Kwitny once wrote:

… the precedent for … the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (Kwitny, ibid, 75)

As good as the writing on Lumumba is, Talbot’s section on the CIA’s aid in the April 1961 attempt to overthrow Charles DeGaulle might be even better. Truth be told, it’s one of the absolute pinnacles of the book. This dramatic encounter has been touched on tangentially in other JFK- or Dulles-related volumes. But I have never seen it treated as thoroughly, or at this length before. At a talk he did in Los Angeles, the author mentioned that he found a book published in France, and had it translated into English. It must have been a good book, because the details Talbot provides were almost all new to this reviewer.

What Talbot is describing is the bold attempt by the leaders of a dissident military faction in Algeria to invade Paris, in order to force DeGaulle to abdicate. There were four main generals who formed the axis of French soldiers who vehemently opposed DeGaulle’s policy to cut loose the French colony of Algeria, a policy on which Kennedy was in agreement with DeGaulle. Recall that in 1957, Senator Kennedy made a brilliant speech from the Senate floor harshly criticizing France’s colonial war to maintain control of Algeria. It was this speech, more than anything else, which brought Kennedy into direct conflict with the Dulles brothers and Vice-President Nixon. Kennedy predicted that if France did not voluntarily give up Algeria, she would find herself in the same situation she just emerged from after her defeat in Vietnam. The Algerian war caused the fall of the Fourth Republic and the return to power of DeGaulle—who understood the wisdom of Kennedy’s words. Just as the military veterans in Algeria did not.

On April 22, 1961, the dissident French generals seized power in Algiers. They immediately spread the word that they would next strike in Paris. (Talbot, p. 412) The plan was a combined paratrooper and tank attack. Once these assaults were in process, the Elysée Palace would then be seized as well as other key government outposts. Anticipating the attack, DeGaulle prohibited air traffic over Paris, and cinemas were shut down.

The leader of the coup was Maurice Challe. Challe had been a top figure in Algeria and then a NATO commander in 1960-61. Through that association, he had relationships with high-ranking French officers. NATO also helped him meet American Pentagon and CIA representatives. As Talbot notes, the French papers stated that both Dulles and Bissell backed the coup. (p. 414) In fact, one paper called the coup attempt, “The Strategy of Allen Dulles.” The CIA did not like the many disagreements DeGaulle had with NATO policy, and they thought the Soviets would move into Algeria if France left. What’s more, the CIA actually tried to drum up corporate support for the coup and American aid for it in Paris. One counselor to the Henry Luce press stated, “An operation is being prepared in Algiers to put a stop to communism and we will not fail as we did in Cuba.” (ibid) Challe ignited the coup because he thought he had American backing all the way up to JFK.

In this, he had been duped. And since we have seen this MO before, it was probably by Dulles. Scotty Reston of the New York Times reported that in spite of Dulles’ denials, the CIA was indeed “involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.” This had contributed to the growing perception at the White House that the Agency “had gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence gathering Agency and has become the advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the Administration.” (p. 415)

The conflict between Dulles and DeGaulle went back to World War II. As OSS chief in Bern, Dulles opposed the segment of the French Resistance headed by DeGaulle. He preferred a more rightwing leader. (Considering that DeGaulle was, at most, a moderate, this shows how far right Dulles was oriented politically.) DeGaulle himself accused Dulles of scheming against his Resistance leadership at the end of the war. Dulles backed a more conservative rival. In typical Dulles methodology, this man had betrayed DeGaulle’s assistant to the Gestapo. (ibid) Once assuming power again, DeGaulle had grown so suspicious of Dulles he had tried to purge CIA influence in the capital of Paris, which was difficult to do since Dulles journeyed there each year to personally pay off informants and agents. The relationship was so chilly that DeGaulle refused to see the DCI personally. Dulles then wrote distorted reports to Kennedy, one which presented the possibility of a coup over DeGaulle’s mishandling of Algeria. In another memo, Dulles predicted DeGaulle would be gone by the end of 1961. And the basis for removal would be Algeria. (p. 417)

During the coup attempt, Kennedy called Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington. He told him that America supported DeGaulle. But he could not vouch for the CIA, because “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.” JFK also asked for information on suspected Americans aiding the coup so he could deal with them after. Finally, Kennedy told Ambassador James Gavin that the USA should extend help to DeGaulle in resisting the coup. (In some versions—which Talbot does not explicitly cite—it is stated that Kennedy offered France the use of the Sixth Fleet.) Although he appreciated the offer, DeGaulle declined. But after the calls, Kennedy went public with this support for the embattled French premier.

The plot fizzled because DeGaulle resorted to the airwaves. In a dynamic speech, he appealed directly to the people to preserve France. (p. 420) His ringing plea rallied the populace, especially on the left. A general strike was called; there were massive demonstrations against the Algerian war; hundreds of people went to airfields to stop any troops from landing from Algeria; civilians went to government buildings to protect them from attack. In the face of all this—which promised a brutal and bloody civil war—Challe surrendered.

But that is not the end of the story. Because later, Talbot actually caps this gripping chronicle. After the author relates the events of Kennedy’s murder, he quotes a much-suppressed interview of DeGaulle. This was made by one of his ministers upon DeGaulle’s return from Kennedy’s funeral in Washington. The French premier compared what happened to JFK with what almost happened to him over Algeria. He said Kennedy’s security forces were in cahoots with a renegade military. And the plotters invented Oswald as a cover story to cover their tracks. He continued in this vein by saying that Oswald was probably supposed to be shot. When he was not, Jack Ruby became the clean-up guy. DeGaulle concluded by explaining the rationale of the plotters: “Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.” (p. 567) It’s amazing that this analysis was made within days of Kennedy’s murder. The only political leader I know who had a comparable rapid understanding of what really happened was Fidel Castro.

Talbot’s description of the support by Dulles for the attempted coup against DeGaulle is written in tandem with his summary of Operation Zapata, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion—quite appropriately, since they happened at almost the same time. Talbot here conveys what has now become the accepted wisdom of those who have studied the declassified record of Zapata: namely, that the CIA deliberately tricked Kennedy into going along with it, knowing it had almost no chance of succeeding. Dulles and Bissell misjudged Kennedy. They thought that once he saw the assault crumbling, he would send in the Navy, which Admiral Arleigh Burke had stationed right off the coast of Florida. Unauthorized, he placed two battalions of Marines on board. (p. 401)

But he does bring in some fresh insights. He writes that the Zapata operation was staffed with some of the lowest graded officers in the CIA. In fact, almost half of them were graded in either the lowest third, and some of them in the lowest tenth percentile. Robert Amory, who wrote a book on amphibious landings, was not asked to join. (p. 397)

When Kennedy refused to send in American forces, after more than one personal plea, the operation was doomed. Immediately after, two reports were commissioned. One was by General Maxwell Taylor and one by Lyman Kirkpatrick of the CIA. Bobby Kennedy’s presence on the former panel sunk Dulles as a witness, and even Burke. President Kennedy was distraught, and then angry. He ordered a Reduction in Force—almost one in five CIA employees were retired. Afterwards Lyndon Johnson said, “You don’t hardly ever see the chiefs of staff around the White House anymore.” LBJ went on to say that the new first advisor to President Kennedy was RFK: “It isn’t McNamara, the chiefs of staff or anybody like that. Bobby is first in and last out. And Bobby is the boy he listens to.” (p. 412) Which was a keen observation by a man who thoroughly understood the workings of power in Washington.

When Kennedy digested the results of the two reports, he fired Dulles, Bissell and Deputy Director of the CIA, Charles Cabell. In each instance described above—Congo, the Paris coup, Zapata—Dulles had served his president poorly. More significantly, in each instance, Dulles had actually deceived Kennedy about important matters. It’s as if he did not work for John Kennedy. As a matter of fact, as Talbot points out, Dulles never hung a portrait of Kennedy at CIA Headquarters. (p. 403)

As the author further indicates, the fundamental problem was that 1.) Kennedy really thought he was president, and he wanted to run his own foreign policy, and 2.) His view of the world did not at all coincide with the Dulles/Nixon/Eisenhower view. Indeed, they were actually opposed on many issues. Therefore, if Kennedy was going to run his own foreign affairs, he had no choice but to fire Dulles. For what is truly remarkable about the above record of insubordination is this: It all happened in just four months! What was to be expected in four more years?

There was a problem with retiring Dulles, though. Powerful people don’t have to accept retirement. Dulles now set up his own mini government, one that was outside normal channels, and unbeknownst to Kennedy.

V

We now encounter the penultimate part of The Devils’ Chessboard. The part that has caused the most controversy. The part that has gotten Talbot boycotted by the major media—and Hollywood. For as the author told me, George Clooney requested the first press copy of the book. But as of today, Talbot has not heard from Clooney about the volume. As the author said to this reviewer, “It’s part 3 Jim.” Which is where Talbot outlines his case for Dulles being the CEO of the plot to kill President Kennedy.

I have seen some critical comments about this aspect of the book. Most of them, for example in The Daily Beast, begin by saying that this part is not as strong as the rest of the work. The problem with these critics is this: None of them deal with Talbot’s evidence in any kind of comprehensive way. Which, of course, makes what they write into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also indicates that they are dealing the readers a stacked deck. Let us deal the readers a full deck. That is the only way to be honest with them, and to treat the author fairly.

After his termination, Dulles was, quite naturally, distressed for awhile. But this did not last very long. Through his extensive press contacts he began to attack Arthur Schlesinger, who was always opposed to Zapata, and who Kennedy had tasked with outlining a giant reorganization of the CIA. (p. 431) At this time, Dulles began having private meetings at his home with high-level CIA officers. James Angleton, Richard Helms, Des Fitzgerald, Howard Hunt, and Thomas Karamessines—Helms’ top aide—began to drive up to his Georgetown home and meet with the lion in exile. (p. 449) In addition, Dulles also met with Arleigh Burke, who Kennedy had pushed out of service after his performance during the Bay of Pigs. (ibid, p. 450) We know all of this through the man’s own desk calendars and notebooks.

In 1963, after Kennedy’s peaceful settlement of the Missile Crisis, Dulles now said he could never work for Kennedy again. Further, he publicly announced that Kennedy would never oust Castro because, he said, Kennedy was too concerned with America being loved in the world, rather than respected. He concluded by saying there could be no compromise with communism, it was the equivalent of appeasement. (p. 456)

Although his travel records are redacted, it’s pretty obvious that Dulles did a lot of hopping around the country in his “retirement”.

Consider the following: in the summer of 1963, a young English professor named Peter Scott had begun a second career as an academic at UC Berkley. Scott’s first career had been as a Canadian diplomat who worked in Poland. Because of that link, he had been invited to a gathering of Polish emigres at the Palo Alto home of W. Glenn Campbell. Campbell had been placed in charge of the Hoover Institute on the campus of Stanford University. Campbell was a very conservative Harvard trained economist—a Milton Friedman clone—which is why Herbert Hoover had chosen him to shake up the institute that bore his name. To say he succeeded does not begin to do him justice. A longtime personal friend of Ronald Reagan, he grew the endowment from about 2 million, to well over 135 million when he retired. He did this by appointing conservative stalwarts and friends of Reagan to the staff. Campbell was also known as a very combative personality, one who did not shy away from confrontation. Therefore, at the gathering at his home that night Scott was surprised at how virulent the anti-Kennedy talk got. Scott was actually shocked by the tenor of the talk, which seemed to drag on incessantly. Finally, a Russian Orthodox priest stood up and commanded everyone’s attention. Very quietly, and confidently, he said they had nothing to worry about: “The Old Man will take care of it.” (p. 458)

At first, Scott thought that the priest was referring to Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father. But he later learned that Joseph Kennedy had been felled by a stroke in late 1961. He was bedridden, or in a wheel chair much of the time. He even had great difficulty speaking. Years later, Scott was told by another researcher that, in intelligence circles, Allen Dulles was often referred to as The Old Man. The dropping of Dulles’ name was enough to calm the heated discussion.

As noted, Talbot places this meeting in the summer of 1963. A couple of months prior to this, Dulles had taken another meeting. This one was in Washington. And it might explain why the priest said what he did about the Old Man taking care of the problem. That April 1963 meeting was with a Cuban exile named Paulino Sierra Martinez. Of late, Sierra Martinez is becoming a figure of more intense study by people like Larry Hancock, for the simple reason that he seemed to come out of nowhere to become an influential player in the Cuban exile community in 1963. Sierra Martinez had worked under Batista as a foreign diplomat, though some figured he was really a hit man. (Talbot, p. 459)

When he came to the USA he first lived in Miami, but he then moved to Chicago. He became a legal consul for Union Tank Car Company, founded by the Rockefellers. He then became a major figure among the exiles. A month after his meeting with Dulles (the third man at the meeting was General Lucius Clay), Sierra Martinez convened a conference at the Royalton Hotel in Miami. This was a crucial moment since, after the Missile Crisis, Kennedy made it clear that he was not going to have the CIA back the exiles anywhere near the extent they had done previously. With Kennedy’s stricture in place, Sierra arrived in Miami like a gift from the gods. He said he now represented a consortium of large corporations who wanted to recover their lost investments in Cuba. (ibid) He told the audience that his backers were willing to put up 30 million if they could reorganize and launch a new invasion of the island. Although this invasion would not have approval from the top, it would be backed by officers in the military. They would provide weapons and training facilities.

After this conference, Sierra then traveled around the country spreading around money in hopes of forming a working coalition, which he called the Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile. (ibid, p. 460) The source of his money, which was passed through Union Tank Car, was ill defined. Some reports suggested that some of the cash came though organized crime sources. In an interview with this reviewer, Larry Hancock said that the Mob money appeared to originate with Meyer Lansky. Lansky made tons of money for the Chicago Outfit through his interest in The Flamingo in Las Vegas. As Talbot points out, this is interesting because one of the plots against Kennedy in the fall of 1963 originated in Chicago. But further, after the failure of the Chicago plot, Sierra was negotiating an arms deal for one Homer Echevarria. This was in the days leading up to the successful Dallas murder. The day before JFK was killed, Echevarria supposedly said to an informant that his group—a part of Sierra’s umbrella junta—now had the money to mount a major Cuban operation since they had some Jewish money. (Lansky was Jewish.) And they would do so as soon as they took care of Kennedy. (Reuters dispatch of 12/20/95) Which sounds a bit like the troubling words used by the Polish priest with Scott.

How does a former judo instructor from Miami rise to the near top of the exile community? And with reputed backing from large corporations and the Chicago mob, in just a matter of months? Most objective people would think that the lunch with Dulles had something to do with it. And let us not forget, as Talbot noted, years earlier, Dulles had tried to get Lansky to do away with Castro.

In a fascinating dual discovery, Talbot sheds light on an ignored aspect of Kennedy’s foreign policy, and the role of a top CIA officer in obstructing it. As many know, Richard Helms got William Harvey out of the country after the Missile Crisis. He got him transferred to Rome. Bobby Kennedy was furious with the man since he had disobeyed orders by trying to launch offensive operations into Cuba during the crisis. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy visited Italy in what was to be the final European tour of his life. Schlesinger had been badgering JFK to formally back something called “l’apertura a sinistra”—the opening to the left. This would allow the Socialist Party to split from the Communists and allow a center-left coalition with the ruling Christian Democrats. (Talbot, p. 464) As far back as Eisenhower, both James Angleton and Italian ambassador Clare Booth Luce opposed this strophe. After all, Dulles and Angleton worked on a covert operation—right out of his offices at Sullivan and Cromwell— to rig the 1948 Italian elections so the communists would not win.

But Kennedy ignored these protests. He even arranged for the United Auto Workers to back the socialists. (Talbot, p. 466) What must have made it worse for the CIA is that the Socialist leader in 1963 was the same man Dulles and Angleton defeated in 1948. They were not going to take this lying down. Their man on the scene, Bill Harvey, began working with Italy’s security forces to torpedo the diplomatic move by bombing the Christian Democratic Party offices and newspapers. (p. 475) Harvey even wanted to recruit mobsters to assassinate Communists. Harvey’s second in command, Mark Wyatt, objected to this. When he did, Harvey pulled a gun on him. (ibid)

In 1998, after an interview with a French journalist in Lake Tahoe, Wyatt off-handedly said, “I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November of 1963.” (p. 477) As Talbot later discovered, Wyatt bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas at that time. When Talbot talked to Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he told him that he tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and his security file, but the CIA always blocked this. If this is valid, I don’t have to tell the reader how important it is. Because as Dulles himself admitted, he was in Dallas about three weeks before the assassination, ostensibly on a book tour. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 273) In a tearful admission to his brother, David Phillips acknowledged that he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 364) And as writers like Lisa Pease have demonstrated, James Angleton once wrote that the CIA had to construct an alibi for Howard Hunt being in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (ibid, p. 363) Can this sudden attraction of CIA officers for the dusty cow town just be a coincidence? Even when they are flying in from Italy? Or maybe all four men were Cowboys fans? (But the Cowboys were pretty bad that year: 4-10)

In September and October of 1963, Dulles met with Angleton and Angleton’s first assistant Ray Rocca. Both men would later figure as strong influences on the Warren Commission cover up. He also met with Des Fitzgerald, who was in Charge of Cuba operations at the time; and with Dick Helms top assistant, Thomas Karamessines. (Talbot, p. 545) Helms would helm the CIA relationship with the Warren Commission.

The week before Kennedy’s murder, Dulles had been in Boston and New York on his book tour for The Craft of Intelligence. (On which Hunt had been a major ghostwriter.) On the day JFK was killed, Dulles landed in Washington in the morning, made a speech at the Brookings Institute, and after getting the word of JFK’s murder, he went to Camp Peary. (ibid, p. 546) This was a CIA location sometimes called The Farm. As Talbot writes, this was an alternative Agency headquarters, in which Dulles had built an office from where he could direct covert operations. He was there from Friday in the early evening until Sunday. What could he have been doing there? Of course, one thing he could have been doing was coordinating with Phillips, Hunt, Harvey and Angleton. And when Oswald survived, perhaps Lansky. After all, high stakes gambler Lewis McWillie—a close friend of Jack Ruby— had worked for Lansky in Cuba. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination p. 272)

What makes this a bit more credible is another hidden point Talbot brings up. As we know through the sterling work of Donald Gibson, the idea of setting up a blue ribbon commission to inquire into the death of President Kennedy was not LBJ’s idea. It was forced upon him by Eugene Rostow and Joseph Alsop. Well, once that was done, Dulles began a lobbying campaign to get named to the Commission. (pp. 573-74) Among the sources for this was Agency military attaché William Corson, who knew Dulles, and also Dean Rusk. To my knowledge, no one else did this. Quite to the contrary, people like Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell had to be coerced into joining.

Why is that significant? Because as author Walt Brown has demonstrated, Dulles quickly became the most active member of the Commission. As Warren later said, “I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting.” (p. 575) And as Talbot shows, Dulles worked with Angleton, and others, to make sure that any tie by the CIA to Oswald was kept secret. (p. 578) Moreover, Dulles himself leaked stories that Oswald may have been a KGB agent. (p. 583) Dulles insisted that most of the report be consumed by a biography of Oswald, rather than the facts of the case. With his longtime friend John McCloy, and up and coming insider Jerry Ford, this trio controlled the Warren Commission pretty much completely.

We should now briefly add three more points to adequately summarize Talbot’s case. In December of 1963, Harry Truman wrote a newspaper editorial questioning how the CIA’s mission had evolved from what he had envisioned it. Dulles flew down to Missouri to meet with Truman and tried to get him to retract the statement. When this did not work, Dulles wrote a deceitful memo, which others could use to discredit Truman’s editorial. (pp. 565-72) In 1965, at UCLA, David Lifton attended a talk with Dulles. Bruin student Lifton stood up and began to question the Commission’s statement about there not being any evidence of a conspiracy in the JFK case. (p. 591) To say that Dulles was vehement in his denial does not even begin to describe his tenor. Suffice it to say, this reviewer never saw any of the six other members of the Commission react like this. Finally, when the Jim Garrison investigation was heating up, Dulles did what he could to monitor the proceedings. (p. 597) Again, I know of no other Warren Commissioner who did such a thing.

The above approximates Talbot’s case. Note that it follows through from the months in advance of the murder, to the day of the murder, to the aftermath of the murder. Do not trust anyone who describes it as “weak” unless they describe it in toto.

Because no one has.

VI

In a book of this size, scope, and depth, there were bound to be flaws, especially since the book was essentially a pioneering effort. Chief among these was the section on the Rolling Stone article devoted to one Saint John Hunt. (p. 496)

Saint John is the son of Howard Hunt. In 2007, he cooperated on a story with Rolling Stone magazine. Talbot essentially relates that story, along with references to his book Bond of Secrecy and Howard Hunt’s posthumously published book An American Spy. The worst thing about this section is that Talbot uses it to underline the battle between the MSM and alternative media for the truth about the JFK case. I agree on the general point that the MSM has utterly failed the nation on the Kennedy assassination—with horrific results. But this Rolling Stone article was a poor choice to point out that failure.

In 2007 when I first read the article, I noted that Saint John said that on the night of the Watergate burglary, his father woke him up and said he needed some help. They wiped the fingerprints off of some electronics equipment. They then stuffed the equipment into two suitcases, drove to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and dropped them into the water.

I had read several books on the Watergate caper by 2007. In fact, Probe devoted a special issue to the subject when Oliver Stone’s Nixon was released. At that time, the best book on Watergate was Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. When I looked this incident up in that masterful book, I could not find it. According to Secret Agenda, Alfred Baldwin, James McCord’s assistant, told Hunt that he was returning the electronics equipment to McCord’s home in a van. (Hougan, pp. 210-11) As per Hunt, Hougan writes that he returned to the White House first, and then the Mullen Company (where he had worked prior to being employed by the White House). He was preoccupied with arranging a legal defense. (ibid, pp. 216-17) This discrepancy was enough to raise my antennae about this Rolling Stone article.

Then there was the five million dollar sum. The article said that Kevin Costner offered Howard Hunt five million dollars to tell the secret history of the JFK assassination—and what he knew about it. Since I had studied films a very long time, I understood that no producer would offer his main source that kind of money for a historical documentary, especially as an offer before production began, or any deals were in place. Because the vast majority of documentaries, even controversial political ones, simply don’t merit that kind of investment.

It’s surprising to me that Talbot did not talk to Costner. Or perhaps, Costner’s associate in this enterprise, Canadian writer and TV journalist David Giammarco, since it was the latter who initiated the whole discussion of the subject with Hunt. Giammarco did a talk on this very subject at a JFK Lancer Conference back when the article surfaced. There, he revealed that he had worked on trying to get Howard Hunt to talk for over ten years. Saint John and his brother David only came in toward the very end. I also talked to Giammarco myself. He told me that the sum of five million dollars was never, ever mentioned. He said that Costner offered Hunt 250,000 dollars up front and a share of the profits. Which is the only sensible way such a deal could be bartered. Although there is much more to the rather sordid tale, we can end it now. This is enough to convey the fact that Talbot made a needless mistake here.

There are other, more minor, errors. Talbot writes that Oswald was given a Rosenberg flyer as a youth. (p. 511) As I wrote in Destiny Betrayed, this is highly unlikely. Oswald said this while in Russia, at the wired-for-sound Metropole Hotel. He specifically said he was fifteen at the time this happened. But when he was fifteen he was in New Orleans. Who would deliver Rosenberg literature in that southern town? Further, the couple had been executed the previous year. (DiEugenio, p. 145) On page 562, Talbot writes that “The so-called magic bullet that delivered the fatal blow to Kennedy’s skull before proceeding on its improbable course … .” This is wrong. The Magic Bullet did not hit Kennedy’s skull. It entered his back, and then proceeded on its wild ride forward through both Kennedy and John Connally.

On page 493, the author mentions a photo of LBJ on a horse with Dulles standing beside him. Talbot says the photo was taken in the summer of 1963 when Dulles visited with LBJ at his ranch. The visit may have happened. But the best research on the photo—by David Lifton and Larry Hancock—says the picture was not taken at that time, but in 1961.

When mentioning Oswald’s move to New Orleans in the spring of 1963, the author writes that he moved there with Marina and “the girls”. (p. 540) At this time, Oswald had one daughter. It was not until October of 1963 that Marina had a second daughter. Talbot writes that the Warren Commission questioned George DeMohrenschildt longer than any witness. According to Walt Brown, who did a very detailed study of the Commission, it was really Ruth Paine who was questioned the longest. And although Talbot deals with the Paines, I think he is a bit soft on them.

And finally, Talbot brings up the, by now, dated episode of H. R. Haldeman meeting Richard Helms during Watergate. President Nixon asked him to question Helms about the Bay of Pigs. The usually cool and unflappable Helms lost his composure and got very belligerent. (Talbot, p. 494) Haldeman later wrote in his book The Ends of Power, that he came to think that the “Bay of Pigs” matter was really Nixon’s backhanded code for the JFK assassination. Although Talbot allows for another interpretation, he would have been better off just ignoring the mildewed incident. It happened, but the meanderings about what Helms meant by his explosion is just that, meandering.

And that is really not good enough for The Devil’s Chessboard. The book is a major achievement in more than one way. It should now become the standard biography of Allen Dulles. In its stark excavation of the evil he represented, the book stands beside, and actually surpasses, Kai Bird’s biography of John McCloy. To think that these two men served on the investigatory panel to find out who killed President Kennedy—that fact is just not palatable today. This book proves that the Commission was doomed from the start.

December 15, 2015
Introduction to JFK’s Foreign Policy: A Motive for Murder

In a little over a year [2013-2014], I have spoken at four conferences. These were, in order: Cyril Wecht’s Passing the Torch conference in Pittsburgh in October of 2013; JFK Lancer’s 50th Anniversary conference on the death of JFK, in Dallas in November of 2013; Jim Lesar’s AARC conference in Washington on the 50th Anniversary of the Warren Commission in September of 2014; and Lancer’s Dallas conference on the 50th anniversary of the Commission in November of 2014.

At all four of these meetings, I decided to address an issue that was new and original. Yet, it should not have been so, not by a long shot. The subject I chose was President Kennedy’s foreign policy outside of Vietnam and Cuba. I noted that, up until now, most Kennedy assassination books treat Kennedy’s foreign policy as if it consisted of only discussions and reviews of Cuba and Vietnam. In fact, I myself was guilty of this in the first edition of Destiny Betrayed. My only plea is ignorance due to a then incomplete database of information. I have now come to conclude that this view of Kennedy is solipsistic. It is artificially foreshortened by the narrow viewpoint of those in the research community. And that is bad.

Why? Because this is not the way Kennedy himself viewed his foreign policy, at least judging by the time spent on various issues—and there were many different topics he addressed—or how important he considered diverse areas of the globe. Kennedy had initiated significant and revolutionary policy forays in disparate parts of the world from 1961 to 1963. It’s just that we have not discovered them.

Note that I have written “from 1961 to 1963”. Like many others, I have long admired Jim Douglass’ book JFK and the Unspeakable. But in the paperback edition of the book, it features as its selling tag, “A Cold Warrior Turns.” Today, I also think that this is a myth. John Kennedy’s unorthodox and pioneering foreign policy was pretty much formed before he entered the White House. And it goes back to Saigon in 1951 and his meeting with State Department official Edmund Gullion. Incredibly, no author in the JFK assassination field ever mentioned Gullion’s name until Douglass did. Yet, after viewing these presentations, the reader will see that perhaps no other single person had the influence Gullion did on Kennedy’s foreign policy. In a very real sense, one can argue today that it was the impact of Gullion’s ideas on young Kennedy that ultimately caused his assassination.

These presentations are both empirically based. That is, they are not tainted or colored by hero worship or nostalgia. They are grounded in new facts that have been covered up for much too long. In fact, after doing this research, I came to the conclusion that there were two cover-ups enacted upon Kennedy’s death. The first was about the circumstances of his murder. That one, as Vince Salandria noted, was designed to fall apart, leaving us with a phony debate played out between the Establishment and a small, informed minority. The second cover-up was about who Kennedy actually was. This cover-up was supposed to hold forever. And, as it happens, it held for about fifty years. But recent research by authors like Robert Rakove and Philip Muehlenbeck, taking their cue from Richard Mahoney’s landmark book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, have shown that Kennedy was not a moderate liberal in the world of foreign policy. Far from it. When studied in its context—that is, what preceded it and what followed it—Kennedy’s foreign policy was clearly the most farsighted, visionary, and progressive since Franklin Roosevelt. And in the seventy years since FDR’s death, there is no one even in a close second place.

This is why the cover-up in this area had to be so tightly held, to the point it was institutionalized. So history became nothing but politics. Authors like Robert Dallek, Richard Reeves, and Herbert Parmet, among others, were doing the bidding of the Establishment. Which is why their deliberately censored versions of Kennedy were promoted in the press and why they got interviewed on TV. It also explains why the whole School of Scandal industry, led by people like David Heymann, prospered. It was all deliberate camouflage. As the generals, in that fine film Z, said about the liberal leader they had just murdered, Let us knock the halo off his head.

But there had to be a reason for such a monstrous exercise to take hold. And indeed there was. I try to present here the reasons behind its almost maniacal practice. An area I have singled out for special attention was the Middle East. Many liberal bystanders ask: Why is the JFK case relevant today? Well, because the mess in the Middle East now dominates both our foreign policy and the headlines, much as the Cold War did several decades ago. And the roots of the current situation lie in Kennedy’s death, whereupon President Johnson began the long process which reversed his predecessor’s policy there. I demonstrate how and why this was done, and why it was kept such a secret.

It is a literal shame this story is only coming to light today. John Kennedy was not just a good president. Nor was he just a promising president. He had all the perceptions and instincts to be a truly great president.

That is why, in my view, he was murdered. And why the dual cover-ups ensued. There is little doubt, considering all this new evidence, that the world would be a much different and better place today had he lived. Moreover, by only chasing Vietnam and Cuba, to the neglect of everything else, we have missed the bigger picture. For Kennedy’s approach in those two areas of conflict is only an extension of a larger gestalt view of the world, one that had been formed many years prior to his becoming president.

That we all missed so much for so long shows just how thoroughly and deliberately it had been concealed.

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Wecht 2013 Presentation

Lancer 2014 Presentation

Version given at November in Dallas, November 18, 2016

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Lancer 2016 Presentation

Revision, presented on March 3, 2018, in San Francisco

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2018 Revision

December 22, 2014
On its 50th Anniversary: Why the Warren Report Today is Inoperative, In Five “Plaques”

Introduction to the Series

In late September and October of this year, the nation will observe the 50th anniversary of the issuance of, respectively, the Warren Report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. There are certain forms of commemoration already in the works. For instance, there is a book upcoming by inveterate Warren Report apologists Mel Ayton and David Von Pein. And undoubtedly, with the MSM in complete obeisance to the Warren Report, Commission attorney Howard Willens will undoubtedly be in the spotlight again.

At CTKA, since we report on the latest developments in the case, and are very interested in the discoveries of the Assassination Records Review Board, we have a much more realistic and frank view of the Warren Report. In the light of the discoveries made on the case today, the Warren Report is simply untenable. In just about every aspect. About the only fact it got right is that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. The Commission could not miss that since it was captured live on television. But, as we shall see, it got just about everything else related to that shooting wrong.

Today, to anyone who knows the current state of the evidence in the JFK case, the Warren Report stands as a paradigm of how not to conduct either a high profile murder investigation, or any kind of posthumous fact finding inquiry. In fact, just about every attorney who has looked at the Kennedy case since 1964 in any official capacity has had nothing but unkind words about it. This includes Jim Garrison, Gary Hart and Dave Marston of the Church Committee, the first attorneys of record for the HSCA, Richard Sprague and Robert Tanenbaum, as well as the second pair, Robert Blakey and Gary Cornwell, and finally, Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel of the ARRB. This is a crucial point-among many others– that the MSM ignored during its (disgraceful) commemoration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.

On the other hand, CTKA’s role is one of recording fact oriented history and criticism about President Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, we wish to assemble a list of reasons why, today, the Warren Report and its verdict has the forensic impact of a pillow slap.

In spite of that, we predict, come September, the MSM will carry virtually none of what is to follow. Even though everything you are about to read is factually supported and crucial as to why the Warren Report is so fatally flawed. The fact you will hear very little of the following, or perhaps none of it, tells you how dangerously schizoid America and the MSM is on the subject of the murder of President Kennedy. It also might give us a clue as to why the country has not been the same since.

The following starts a continuing series which will be added to on a regular basis until late October of this year. The series will be arranged in plaques or sets. These are composed of separate, specific points which are thematically related and will be briefly summarized after all the points in a plaque are enumerated. This first set deals with the formation of the Warren Commission. And we show just how hopelessly compromised that body was from the instant it was created. We strongly urge our readers to try and get the their local MSM outlets to cover some of these very important facts that are in evidence today, but, for the most part, were not known to the public back in 1964.

[For convenience, we have embedded the five originally separate articles into this single article. – Webmaster]

PLAQUE ONE: Hopelessly stilted at the start.

Posted June 20, 2014

1. Earl Warren never wanted to head the Commission and had to be blackmailed into taking the job.

Due to the declassified records made available by the ARRB, we now know that Chief Justice Earl Warren initially declined to helm the Commission. After he did so, President Johnson summoned him to the White House. Once there, LBJ confronted him with what he said was evidence that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Russian consulates in Mexico City. Johnson then intimated that Oswald’s previous presence there, seven weeks before the assassination, could very well indicate the communists were behind Kennedy’s murder. Therefore, this could necessitate atomic holocaust, World War III. Both Johnson and Warren later reported that this warning visibly moved the Chief Justice and he left the meeting in tears. (See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pgs. 80-83; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 358-59)

2. Clearly intimidated by his meeting with Johnson, Earl Warren had no desire to run any kind of real investigation.

Due to the declassification process of the ARRB, we now have all the executive session hearings of the Commission. Because of that, we know how effective Johnson’s chilling warning to Earl Warren was. At the first meeting of the Commission, Warren made it clear that he 1.) Did not want the Commission to employs its own investigators. 2.) They were just to evaluate materials produced by the FBI and Secret Service. 3.) He did not want to hold public hearings or use the power of subpoena. 4.) He even intimated that he did not even want to call any witnesses. He thought the Commission could rely on interviews done by other agencies. He actually said the following: “Meetings where witnesses would be brought in would retard rather than help our investigation.”

As the reader can see, Johnson’s atomic warning had cowed the former DA of Alameda county California, Earl Warren. He had no desire to run a real investigation.

3. Warren communicated Johnson’s warning about the threat of atomic warfare to his staff at their first meeting.

At the Commission’s first staff meeting, attorney Melvin Eisenberg took notes of how Warren briefed the young lawyers on the task ahead, i.e. trying to find out who killed President Kennedy. Warren told them about his reluctance to take the job. He then told them that LBJ “stated that rumors of the most exaggerated kind were circulating in this country and overseas. Some rumors went as far as attributing the assassination to a faction within the Government” that wanted to install LBJ as president. These rumors, “if not quenched, could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost 40 million lives.” (Emphasis added, Memorandum of Eisenberg 1/20/64)

Warren then added “No one could refuse to do something which might help to prevent such a possibility. The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.” (Emphasis added) In discussing the role of the Commission, Warren asserted the “importance of quenching rumors, and precluding future speculation such as that which has surrounded the death of Lincoln.” Warren then added this, “He emphasized that the Commission had to determine the truth, whatever that might be.”

It is those 14 words that Commission staffers, like the late David Belin, would dutifully quote for The New York Times. We now know that, by leaving out the previous 166 words, Belin was distorting the message. Any group of bright young lawyers would understand that Warren was sending down orders from the White House. The last 14 words were simply technical cover for all that had come before. When Warren said, “this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles”, he could not be more clear. In fact, that phrase is so telling that, in his discussion of the memo, Vincent Bugliosi leaves it out of his massive book Reclaiming History. (See Bugliosi, p. 367, and Reclaiming Parkland by James DiEugenio, pgs. 253-54)

But there is further certification that the staffers got the message and acted on it. For in her first interview with the Church Committee, Sylvia Odio talked about her meeting with Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler. After taking her testimony in Dallas, he told Odio, “Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.” (Odio’s Church Committee interview with Gaeton Fonzi, of 1/16/76)

4. Hoover closed the case on November 24th, the day Ruby Killed Oswald.

On that day, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Walter Jenkins at the White House. He said that he had spoken with assistant Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach already, and that they both were anxious to have “something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 4)

It was on this day that Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby live on television. How could Hoover have completed an investigation of that particular murder on the day it happened? To do such an inquiry, Ruby’s entire background would have to be checked, all the people he dealt with and spoke to in the preceding weeks would have to be located and spoken to, the Dallas Police force would have to be interviewed to see if he had help entering the City Hall basement, and all films, photos and audio would have to be reviewed for evidentiary purposes. This point would be crucial: if Ruby was recruited, this would indicate a conspiracy to silence Oswald. That whole investigation was done in less than a day?

Nope. And, in fact, not only was the murder of Oswald not fully investigated at the time Hoover closed the case, but just 24 hours earlier, Hoover had told President Johnson that the case against Oswald for the JFK murder was not very good. (ibid) This all indicates that Hoover was making a political choice, not an investigatory one. It suggests everything the Bureau did from this point on would be to fulfill that (premature) decision. Which leads us to the next point.

5. The FBI inquiry was so unsatisfactory, even the Warren Commission discounted it.

In fact, you will not find the FBI report in the Commission’s evidentiary volumes. Even though the Commission relied on the Bureau for approximately 80% of its investigation. (Warren Report, p. xii) Why? First, Hoover never bought the Single Bullet Theory. That is, the idea that one bullet went through both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging almost unscathed. The Warren Commission did end up buying into this idea, which later caused it so many problems.

But second, the FBI report sent to the Commission was inadequate even for the Commissioners. We know this from the declassified Executive Session transcript of January 22, 1964. The Commissioners were shocked about two things. First, the FBI is not supposed to come to conclusions. They are supposed to investigate and present findings for others to form conclusions. But in this case, they said Oswald killed Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit without accomplices. That Ruby killed Oswald with no accomplices or aid. And the two didn’t know each other. In other words, this report was a fulfillment of Hoover’s message to Walter Jenkins of November 24th. (See Point 4) The Commissioners, who were lawyers, saw that the FBI had not run out anywhere near all the leads available to them. As Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin exclaimed, “But they are concluding that there can’t be a conspiracy without those being run out. Now that is not my experience with the FBI.” (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 219)

In other words, in his zeal to close the case, Hoover broke with established FBI practice not once, but twice. In sum, the FBI report was so poor, the Commission decided it had to call witnesses and use subpoena power.

6. Hoover knew the CIA was lying about Oswald and Mexico City. He also knew his report was a sham.

President Johnson relied on the CIA for his information about Oswald in Mexico City. As we saw in Point 1, he used it to intimidate Warren. As we saw in Points 2 and 3, Warren then communicated this fear to the Commission and his staff.

But what if that information was, for whatever reason, either wrong, or intentionally false? Would that not put a different interpretation on the information, its source, and Johnson’s message to Warren?

Within seven weeks of the murder, Hoover understood that such was the case. Writing in the marginalia of a memo concerning CIA operations within the USA, he wrote about the Agency, “I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico, only to mention two instances of their double dealings.” (The Assassinations, p. 224, emphasis added) In a phone call to Johnson, Hoover revealed that the voice on the Mexico City tape sent to him by the Agency was not Oswald’s, “In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy down there.” (ibid) Needless to say, if Oswald was being impersonated in Mexico, this transforms the whole import of Johnson’s original message to Warren.

Knowing this, Hoover went along with what he knew was a cover-up. And he admitted this in private on at least two occasions. He told a friend, after the initial FBI report was submitted, that the case was a mess, and he had just a bunch of loose ends. In the late summer of 1964, he was asked by a close acquaintance about it. Hoover replied, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our political system would be disrupted.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 222)

7. Nicolas Katzenbach cooperated with Hoover to close the case almost immediately.

As we saw in Point 4, on November 24th, Hoover had closed the case. But he had also talked to Acting Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach that day about getting something out to convince the public Oswald was the sole killer. As we saw, Hoover did this with his makeshift FBI report.

Katzenbach also did this with the famous Katzenbach Memorandum. (Which can be read here.) As one can see, there is evidence that Hoover actually drafted the memo for Katzenbach. It says that the public must be satisfied Oswald was the lone killer and he had no confederates still at large. It does not say Oswald was the lone killer. After all, Ruby had just killed him the day before. How could there be any conclusions reached about the matter in 24 hours? Katzenbach wants to rely on an FBI report to convince the public Knowing that the previous day Hoover had told him he was closing the case already. This memo was sent to the White House, and Katzenbach would later become the Justice Department liaison with the Commission. In fact, he attended their first meeting and encouraged them to accept the FBI report. Which they did not. (Executive Session transcript of 12/5/63)

8. Howard Willens actually thought the CIA was honest with the Warren Commission.

As the Commission liaison, Katzenbach appointed Justice Department lawyer Howard Willens to recruit assistant counsel to man the Commission. Willens then stayed with the Commission throughout as an administrator and Katzenbach’s eyes and ears there.

In his journal, on March 12, 1964, Willens wrote the following: “I consider the CIA representatives to be among the more competent people in government who I have ever dealt with. They articulate, they are specialists, and they seem to have a broad view of government. This may be, of course because they do not have a special axes (sic) to grind in the Commission’s investigation.”

Recall, former Director Allen Dulles sat on the Commission for ten months. He never revealed the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Richard Helms also was in direct communication with the Commission. He did not reveal the existence of the plots either.

CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton was designated by Helms to be the point person with the Commission on Oswald. Tipped off by Dulles, he rehearsed with the FBI to tell the same story about Oswald’s lack of affiliation with both agencies. (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, pgs. 547-48) Today, of course, many informed observers believe that Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA and an informant for the FBI. There is ample evidence for both. (See Destiny Betrayed, Chapters 7 and 8, and John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA.) But you will not find any of it in the Warren Report.

9. When senior lawyers started leaving, Howard Willens hired law school graduates to finish the job.

As noted in Point 8, Howard Willens hired most of the counselors for the Commission. Surprisingly, many of these lawyers were not criminal attorneys. They had a business background or education e.g. David Belin, Melvin Eisenberg, Wesley Liebeler. But beyond that, by the summer of 1964, many of the senior counselors started to leave. Mainly because they were losing money being away from private practice. To replace them, Willens did a rather odd thing. He began to hire newly minted law school graduates. In other words, lawyers who had no experience in any kind of practice at all. In fact, one of these men, Murray Lauchlicht, had not even graduated from law school when Willens enlisted him. (Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act, p. 404) His field of specialty was trusts and estates. When he got to the Commissions offices, Lauchlicht was assigned to complete the biography of Jack Ruby. Another recent law school graduate who had clerked for one year was Lloyd Weinreb. The 24 year old Weinreb was given the job of completing the biography of Oswald. (ibid, p. 405)

Needless to say, these two aspects of the report, the biographies of Oswald and Ruby have come to be suspect since they leave so much pertinent material out. In fact, Burt Griffin told the House Select Committee on Assassinations, senior counsel Leon Hubert left because he did not feel he was getting any support from the Commission administrators, or the intelligence agencies, to understand who Ruby really was. (HSCA, Volume XI, pgs. 268-83) Obviously, someone who had not even graduated law school would not have those kinds of compunctions. Willens probably knew that.

10. The two most active members of the Commission were Allen Dulles and Gerald Ford.

As we have seen from Points 1-3, from the moment that Johnson conjured up the vision of 40 million dead through atomic warfare, Earl Warren was largely marginalized as an investigator. He was further marginalized when he tried to appoint his own Chief Counsel, Warren Olney. He was outmaneuvered by a combination of Hoover, Dulles, Gerald Ford and John McCloy. Not only did they manage to jettison Olney, they installed their own choice, J. Lee Rankin. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pgs.41-45)

Within this milieu, with no effective leadership, the two most active and dominant commissioners turned out to be Dulles and Ford. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 83-85) Which is just about the worst thing that could have happened. As we have seen, Dulles was, to be kind, less than forthcoming about both Oswald, and the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. As has been revealed through declassified records, Ford was, from almost the outset, a Commission informant for the FBI. (Breach of Trust, pgs. 42-44)

Later on, in the editing of the final report, Ford did something unconscionable, but quite revealing. In the first draft, the report said that the first wound to Kennedy hit him in the back. Which is accurate. Ford changed this to the bullet hit Kennedy in the neck. (ibid, p. 174) Which reveals that he understood that the public would have a hard time accepting the trajectory of the Single Bullet Theory. When the HSCA made public some of the autopsy photos, it was revealed the bullet did hit Kennedy in the back. Lawyers, like Vincent Bugliosi, call an act like that “consciousness of guilt”.

11. The Warren Report only achieved a unanimous vote through treachery i.e. tricking its own members.

One of the best kept secrets of the Commission was that all of its members were not on board with the Single Bullet Theory. In fact, as we know today, there was at least one member who was not ready to sign off on the report unless certain objections were in the record. The man who made these objections was Sen. Richard Russell. Sen. John S. Cooper and Rep. Hale Boggs quietly supported him behind the scenes. These three not only had problems with ballistics evidence, they also questioned the FBI version of just who Lee and Marina Oswald actually were. Russell was so disenchanted with the proceedings that he actually wrote a letter of resignation-which he did not send-and he commissioned his own private inquiry. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 258)

Realizing that Russell was going to demand certain objections be entered into the record at the final meeting, Rankin and Warren did something extraordinarily deceitful. They stage-managed a presentation that featured a female secretary there; but she was not from the official stenography company, Ward and Paul. (McKnight, p. 294) She was, in essence, an actress. Therefore, there is no actual transcript of this meeting where Russell voiced his reservations.

This fact was kept from Russell until 1968. Then researcher Harold Weisberg discovered it. When he alerted Russell to this internal trickery, the senator became the first commissioner to openly break ranks with his cohorts and question what they had done. (ibid, pgs. 296-97) Russell was later joined by Boggs and Cooper. Hale Boggs was quite vocal about the cover-up instituted by Hoover. He said that “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission.” (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 259)

12. In its design and intent, the Commission was a travesty of legal procedure, judicial fairness and objectivity.

One of the boldest lies in the Warren Report appears in the Foreword. There, the Commission declares that although it has not been a courtroom procedure, neither has it proceeded “as a prosecutor determined to prove a case.” (p. xiv) No one who has read the report and compared it with the 26 volumes believes this. For the simple reason that, as many critics pointed out, the evidence in the volumes is carefully picked to support the concept of Oswald’s guilt and Ruby acting alone. Sylvia’s Meagher’s masterful Accessories After the Fact, makes this point in almost every chapter. The Commission ignored evidence in its own volumes, or to which it had access, which contradicted its own predetermined prosecutorial conclusions.

A good example, previously mentioned, would be what Gerald Ford did with the back wound. (See Point 10) Another would be the fact that in the entire report–although the Zapruder film is mentioned at times–there is no description of the rapid, rearward movement of Kennedy’s entire body as he is hit at Zapruder frame 313.

Although it was helmed by a Chief Justice who had fought for the rights of the accused, the Commission reversed judicial procedure: Oswald was guilty before the first witness was called. We know this from the outline prepared by Chief Counsel Rankin. On a progress report submitted January 11, 1964, the second subhead reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald as the Assassin of President Kennedy.” The second reads, “Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives.” (Reclaiming Parkland pgs. 250-51) This was three weeks before the hearings began! Clearly, the Commission was arranged at this time as an adversary to Oswald. But there was no defense granted to the defendant. None at all.

This is a point that the Commission again misrepresents in its Foreword. They write that they requested Walter Craig, president of the ABA, to advise whether or not they were abiding by the basic principles of American justice. And he attended hearings and was free to express himself at all times. As Meagher pointed out, this arrangement lasted only from February 27th to March 12th. And not once did Craig make an objection in Oswald’s defense. (Meagher, p. xxix) After this, Craig and his assistants did not participate directly. They only made suggestions. Further, neither Craig nor his assistants were at any of the hearings of the 395 witnesses who did not appear before the Commission, but were deposed by Warren Commission counsel.

As more than one writer has noted, the Nazis at Nuremburg were provided more of a defense than Oswald. This fact alone makes the Warren Report a dubious enterprise.

13. As a fact finding body, the Commission was completely unsatisfactory.

For two reasons. First, usually, as with congressional hearings, when such a body is assembled, there is a majority and minority counsel to balance out two points of view. That did not happen here. And it was never seriously contemplated. Therefore, as we saw with Russell in Point 11, there was no check on the majority.

Second, a fact finding commission is supposed to find all the facts, or at least a good portion of them. If they do not, then their findings are greatly reduced in validity in direct proportion to what is missing from the record.

To cite what is missing from the Warren Report would take almost another 26 volumes of evidence. But in very important fields, like the medical evidence and autopsy procedures, like Oswald’s associations with American intelligence, as with Ruby’s ties to the Dallas Police and to organized crime, in all these areas, and many more, what the Warren Report left out is more important than what it printed. In fact, there have been entire books written about these subjects-respectively, William Law’s In the Eye of History, John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, Seth Kantor’s Who was Jack Ruby?-that completely alter the depiction of the portraits drawn of those subjects in the report. And when we get to other specific subjects, like Oswald in New Orleans, or the Clinton/Jackson incident, Mexico City, or the killing of Oswald by Ruby, the Warren Report today is completely and utterly bereft of facts. Therefore, its conclusions are rudderless since they have no reliable scaffolding.

Conclusion from Plaque One: The Warren Commission was hopelessly biased against Oswald from its inception. Actually before its inception, as we have seen with he cases of Warren, Hoover and Katzenbach. And since each of those men had an integral role to play in the formation and direction of the Commission, the enterprise was doomed from the start. As a criminal investigation, as a prosecutor’s case, and as a fact finding inquiry. The Commission, in all regards, was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: structurally unsound at its base. Therefore, all of its main tenets, as we shall see, were destined to be specious.

PLAQUE TWO: The Worst Prosecutorial Misconduct Possible

Posted July 23, 2014.

Introduction

As we have seen in Plaque 1, since there was no internal check on it, and no rules of evidence in play, the Warren Commission was essentially a prosecution run amok. And when a prosecutor knows he can do just about anything he wants, he will fiddle with the evidence. We will now list several examples where the Commission altered, discounted, or failed to present important exculpatory evidence in the case against Oswald.

14. Arlen Specter buried the testimony of FBI agents Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill.

Commission counsel Specter had a difficult job. He had to camouflage the medical evidence in the JFK case to minimize the indications of a conspiracy. Sibert and O’Neill were two FBI agents assigned by Hoover to compile a report on Kennedy’s autopsy. Their report and observations would have created insurmountable problems for Specter. Among other things, they maintained that the back wound was actually in the back and not the neck, that this wound did not transit the body, and it entered at a 45-degree angle, which would make it impossible to exit the throat. Years later, when shown the back of the head photos of President Kennedy – which depict no hole, neatly combed hair, and an intact scalp – they both said this was not at all what they recalled. For example, O’Neill and Sibert both recalled a large gaping wound in the back of the skull. Which clearly suggests a shot from the front. (William Matson Law, In the Eye of History, pgs. 168, 245) Neither man was called as a witness, and their report is not in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report. Specter told Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin that Sibert made no contemporaneous notes and O’Neill destroyed his. These are both false. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 121) But they allowed a cover for prosecutor Specter to dispense with evidence that would have vitiated both the Single Bullet Theory and the idea that all shots came from the back.

15. Arlen Specter never interviewed Admiral George Burkley or produced his death certificate.

Burkley was an important witness. Not just because he was the president’s personal physician. But because he was the one doctor who was present at both Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Medical Center. (See Roger Feinman’s online book, The Signal and the Noise, Chapter 8.) As Feinman details, Burkley was in the room before Malcolm Perry made his incision for a tracheotomy. Therefore, he likely saw the throat wound before it was slit. But further, on his death certificate, he placed the back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, which would appear to make the trajectory through the throat – and the Single Bullet Theory – quite improbable. (ibid) He also signed the autopsy descriptive sheet as “verified”. This also placed the back wound low (click here). The third thoracic vertebra is about 4-6 inches below the point at which the shoulders meet the neck. As we saw in Plaque One, Gerald Ford revised a draft of the Warren Report to read that the bullet went through the neck, not the back. Burkley’s death certificate would have seriously undermined Ford’s revision.

How troublesome of a witness could Burkley have been? In 1977, his attorney contacted Richard Sprague, then Chief Counsel of the HSCA. Sprague’s March 18th memo reads that Burkley “. . . had never been interviewed and that he has information in the Kennedy assassination indicating others besides Oswald must have participated.” Later, author Henry Hurt wrote that “. . . in 1982 Dr. Burkley told the author in a telephone conversation that he believed that President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy.” (Hurt, Reasonable Doubt , p. 49)

16. The Warren Report distorted the November 22nd impromptu press conference of Dallas doctors Kemp Clark and Malcolm Perry.

This press conference was particularly troublesome for the official story. Among other things, Dr. Malcolm Perry said three times that the throat wound appeared to be an entrance wound. This would indicate a shot from the front, and therefore a second assassin. Therefore, on page 90 of the Warren Report, a description of Perry’s comments appears which is simply not honest. The report says that Perry answered a series of hypotheticals, he explained how a variety of possibilities could account for JFK’s wounds, and he demonstrated how a single bullet could have caused all of the wounds in the president. This is, at best, an exaggeration.

On the next page, quoting a newspaper account, the report states that Perry said it was “possible” the neck wound was one of entrance. Perry never said this. And the fact that the report quotes a newspaper account and not the transcript gives the game away. Clearly, the report is trying to negate Perry’s same day evidence of his work on the throat wound, since he had the best view of this wound (click here). In modern parlance, this is called after-the-fact damage control. Attorneys searching for the truth in a murder case should not be participating in such an exercise.

17. In the entire Warren Report, one will not encounter the name of O. P. Wright.

Considering the fact that the report is over 800 pages long, this is amazing. Why? Because most people consider Commission Exhibit (CE) 399 one of the most important – if not the most important – piece of evidence in the case. Wright was the man who handed this exhibit over to the Secret Service. This should have made him a key witness in the chain of possession of this bullet. Especially since CE 399 is the fulcrum of the Warren Report. Sometimes called the Magic Bullet, Specter said this projectile went through both Kennedy and Governor Connally making seven wounds and smashing two bones. Without this remarkable bullet path, and without this nearly intact bullet, the wounds necessitate too many bullets to accommodate Specter’s case. In other words, there was a second assassin. So Specter did all he could to try and make the wild ride of CE 399 credible.

This included eliminating Wright from the report. Why? Because Wright maintained that he did not turn over CE 399 to the Secret Service that day. While describing what he did to author Josiah Thompson, Thompson held up a photo of CE 399 for Wright to inspect. Wright immediately responded that this was not the bullet he gave to the Secret Service. CE 399 is a copper-coated, round-nosed, military jacketed projectile. Wright said that he gave the Secret Service a lead-colored, sharp-nosed, hunting round. (Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)

Needless to say, with that testimony, in any kind of true legal proceeding, the defense would have moved for a mistrial.

18. The drawings of Kennedy’s wounds depicted in the Warren Commission are fictional.

After the Warren Commission was formed, pathologists James Humes and Thornton Boswell met with Specter about 8-10 times. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 119) Specter then arranged a meeting between a young medical artist, Harold Rydberg, and the two pathologists. To this day, Rydberg does not understand why he was chosen to do the medical illustrations for the Warren Commission. (Law, In the Eye of History, p. 293) He had only been studying for about a year. There were vastly more experienced artists available in the area.

But further, when Humes and Boswell showed up, they had nothing with them: no pictures, no X-rays, no official measurements. Therefore, they verbally told Rydberg about Kennedy’s wounds from memory. Rydberg later deduced that this was done so that no paper trail existed. For the drawings are not done in accordance with the evidence. First, presaging Gerald Ford, the wound in Kennedy’s back is moved up into his neck. Then a slightly downward, straight-line flight path links this fictional neck placement with the throat wound. (See WC, Vol. 16, CE 385, 388)

The head wound is also wrong. Humes and Boswell placed Kennedy’s head in a much more anteflexed position than the Zapruder film shows. In fact, Josiah Thompson exposed this as a lie when he juxtaposed the Rydberg drawing with a frame from the film. (Thompson, p. 111) Beyond that, the Rydberg drawing of the head wound shows much of the skull bone intact between the entrance, low in the rear skull, and the exit, on the right side above the ear. Yet, in Boswell’s face sheet, he described a gaping 10 by 17 cm. defect near the top of Kennedy’s skull. When Boswell testified, no one asked him why there was a difference between what he told Rydberg and what he wrote on his face sheet. (WC Vol. 2, p. 376 ff)

19. The most important witness at the murder scene of Officer Tippit was not interviewed by the Warren Commission.

According to his affidavit, Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the scene of the murder of Officer Tippit when the policeman was already on the ground and appeared dead to him. The key point he makes there is that he looked at his watch and it said 1:10 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 247)

This is important because the last known witness to see Oswald before the Tippit shooting was Earlene Roberts, his landlady. She saw him through her window. He was outside waiting for a bus – which was going the opposite direction of 10th and Patton, the scene of the Tippit murder. But she pegged the time at 1:04. (ibid, p. 244) It is simply not credible that Oswald could have walked about 9/10 of a mile in six minutes. Or less. Because Bowley told author Joe McBride that when he arrived at he scene, there were already spectators milling around Tippit’s car.

Bowley’s name is not in the index to the Warren Report, and there is no evidence that the Commission interviewed him.

20. Two other key witnesses to the Tippit murder were also ignored by the Commission.

Jim Garrison thought the most important witness to the murder of Tippit was Acquilla Clemons. (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 197) She said that she saw two men at the scene. One was short and chunky and armed with a gun she saw him reload. The other man was tall and thin. They were in communication with each other, and the shorter man was directed to run the other way from the scene as the taller man. (McBride, p. 492)

Barry Ernest interviewed another woman named Mrs. Higgins. She lived a few doors down from the scene. When she heard the shots she ran out the front door to look and saw Tippit lying in the street. She caught a glimpse of a man running from the scene with a handgun. She told Barry the man was not Oswald. She also said the time was 1:06. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p. 59)

Defenders of the Commission have tried to undermine Higgins by saying Tippit radioed in at 1:08. As Hasan Yusuf has pointed out, this depends on which of the radio chronologies submitted to the Warren Commission one picks to use. For in the final version of the radio log, submitted by the FBI, Tippit’s last call in appears to be at about 1:05. (CE 1974, p. 45)

21. The Commission cannot even accurately tell us when Tippit was pronounced dead.

How shoddy is the Warren Commission’s chronology of Tippit’s murder?

They say Tippit was killed at about 1:15 PM. (WR, p. 165) Yet this is the time he was pronounced dead— at Methodist Hospital! Realizing they had a problem, they went to a secondary FBI record. The Bureau had submitted a typed memo based on the records at Hughes Funeral Home. In that typed FBI memo, it said Tippit was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital at 1: 25.

There is no attempt in the report to reconcile this memo with the actual hospital record. (Click here and scroll down).

22. There is not a whiff in the Warren Report about the second wallet left at the scene of the Tippit murder.

One of the first things any high profile, public murder case should do is secure any and all audio or video recordings at the scene. Those exhibits should then be gone over minute by minute in order to secure any important evidence. This was not done in this case. Or if it was done, either the Warren Commission or the FBI failed to make all the results part of the record.

On the afternoon of the assassination, Channel 8 in Dallas showed a film by station photographer Ron Reiland. Taken at the scene of the Tippit murder, it depicted a policeman opening and showing a billfold to an FBI agent. That the Commission never secured this film for examination speaks reams about its performance. Because, years later, James Hosty revealed in his book Assignment Oswald that fellow FBI agent Bob Barrett told him that the wallet contained ID for Oswald and Alek Hidell! The problem with this is that the Warren Report tells us that the police confiscated Oswald’s wallet and ID in a car transporting him to city hall. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 101-102) This creates a huge problem for the official story. For it clearly suggests that the DPD deep-sixed the wallet from the Tippit scene to escape the implication that 1.) Someone planted Oswald’s ID at the Tippit scene 2.) Because–as Bowley, Clemmons, and Higgins indicate–Oswald was not there.

23. There is not a whiff in the Warren Report about the Babushka Lady.

This is the name given to a woman in a trench coat, with a scarf over her head. She is positioned on the grass opposite the grassy knoll, near prominent witnesses Charles Brehm, Jean Hill and Mary Moorman. In other words, to Kennedy’s left. She appears in several films and photographs e.g. the Zapruder film, Muchmore film and Bronson film. The fact that she appears in all of those films and the Commission never appeared to notice her is quite puzzling. But it is made even more so by the following: She has in her hand what appears to be either a still camera or movie camera. And she was using it during the assassination. Because of her location–opposite of Abraham Zapruder–what is on that film may be of the utmost importance. Because you could have a film taken to match up with Abraham Zapruder’s from an opposite angle. It may even contain views of possible assassins atop the knoll.

There is no evidence that the Commission ever made an attempt to track this witness down through any of its investigative agencies.

24. The Commission did everything it could to negate the testimony of Victoria Adams.

Victoria Adams was employed at the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination. Within seconds after hearing the shots, she ran out her office door and down the stairs. Her testimony was always immutable: she neither heard nor saw anyone on those stairs. This posed a serious problem for the Commission. Because their scenario necessitated Oswald tearing down those same stairs right after he took the shots. If Adams did not see or hear him, this clearly indicated Oswald was not on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting.

So the Commission went about trying to weaken and obfuscate her testimony. David Belin asked her to locate where she stopped on the first floor when she descended. But as Barry Ernest discovered, this exhibit, CE 496, does not include a map of the first floor. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 93) The report says she left her office within a minute of the shooting, when she actually left within a few seconds. (ibid) The Commission then failed to question her corroborating witness Sandy Styles, the girl who followed her out and down the stairs. They then buried a document written by her boss, Dorothy Garner, which further substantiated the fact that she was on the stairs within a few seconds of the shooting. (ibid)

Adams put a spear through the heart of the Commission’s case. The Commission made sure it didn’t reach that far.

25. The Commission screened testimony in advance to make sure things they did not like did not enter the record.

There is more than one example of this. (See Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 232-33) But a vivid and memorable example is what David Belin did with sheriff’s deputy Roger Craig. Craig told author Barry Ernest that when he examined his testimony in the Commission volumes, it was altered 14 times. Craig told Barry the following:

“When Belin interrogated me – he would ask me questions and, whenever an important question would come up – he would have to know the answer beforehand. He would turn off the recorder and instruct the stenographer to stop taking notes. Then he would ask for the question, and if the answer satisfied him, he would turn the recorder back on, instruct the stenographer to start writing again, and he would ask me the same question and I would answer it.

However, while the recorder was off, if the answer did not satisfy him, he would turn the recorder back on and instruct the stenographer to start writing again and then he would ask me a completely different question.” Craig added that none of these interruptions were noted in the transcript entered in the Commission volumes. (The Girl on the Stairs, E book version, p.95)

26. The Warren Commission changed the bullet in the Walker shooting to incriminate Oswald.

There was no previous firearms violence in Oswald’s past to serve as behavioral precedent for the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. General Edwin Walker had been shot at in April of 1963. The case was unsolved by the Dallas Police as of November, and Oswald had never even been a suspect. In fact, his name appears to have never even been brought up. But if one turns to the Warren Report, one will see that the Commission uses the Walker incident to “indicate that in spite of the belief among those who knew him that he was apparently not dangerous, Oswald did not lack the determination and other traits required to carry out a carefully planned killing of another human being…” (WR, p. 406)

There is one major problem with this verdict (among others). If Oswald misfired at Walker, it would have to have been done with a rifle different than the one the Commission says he used in Dealey Plaza. Because the projectile recovered from the Walker home was described by the Dallas Police as being a steel-jacketed 30.06 bullet. (See Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 49 and the General Offense Report of 4/10/63 filed by officers Van Cleave and McElroy.)

There is no evidence Oswald ever had this kind of rifle. And the Warren Report never notes this discrepancy in the ammunition used in the Walker shooting versus the Kennedy murder.

Conclusion

This section could go on and on and on. Because the record of evidence manipulation by the Commission and its agents is so voluminous as to be book length. But what this plaque does is show that the bias demonstrated in Plaque 1 was then actively implemented by the Warren Commission. To the point that it accepted altered exhibits, allowed testimony to be censored and screened, and deep-sixed important testimony and evidence it did not want to entertain.

Therefore, the Commission can be shown to be untrustworthy in its presentation of facts and evidence. Especially revealing is that none of this seems random or careless. All of these alterations point in one direction: to incriminate Oswald. As New York Homicide chief Robert Tanenbaum once said about the Warren Commission, he was taken aback by the amount of exculpatory evidence that the Warren Report left out, and also the major problems with the breaks in the evidentiary trail. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 65) What makes this even more shocking is that every single member of the Commission was a lawyer, as was every staff member. In their almost messianic zeal to convict Oswald, they all seem to have utterly forgotten about the rules of evidence and the canon of legal ethics.

PLAQUE THREE: The Warren Commission Manufactures the Case Against Oswald

Posted July 30, 2014

Introduction

In Plaque 1, we showed the insurmountable bias the Warren Commission had against Oswald at the very start. Nor was there a minority to check the excesses of a majority fact finding function. The last did not exist because what constituted the minority; Sen. Russell, Rep. Boggs, Sen. Cooper; were completely marginalized. In fact, we now have this in writing. On his blog, Commission administrator Howard Willens, has posted his diary. In his discussion of a Secret Service matter, Willens writes the following. “Apparently at least Congressman Ford and Mr. Dulles felt that PRS is not adequate to do the job. The two remaining members of the Commission, the Chief Justice and Mr. McCloy disagreed on this issue.” (italics added) Can it be more clear? If the remaining members besides Dulles and Ford were Warren and McCloy, then for Willens, the Commission did not include Russell, Boggs and Cooper. That takes marginalization as far as it can be taken. There simply was no internal check on the majority who were hell bent on railroading Oswald.

In Plaque 2, we showed that the Commission, because of its innate bias, would then manipulate, discount or eliminate evidence. We will now show how the evidentiary record was fabricated to make Oswald into something he was not: an assassin.

27. Oswald’s SR 71 money order.

The SR 71 was the fastest plane that ever flew. It achieved speeds up to, and over, Mach III. Unfortunately for the Warren Report, the post office never used this plane to carry mail from one city to another.

The Warren Report tells us that Oswald mailed his money order for a rifle on March 12, 1963. It then tells us that the money order arrived at Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago and was deposited at its bank the next day. (WR, p. 119) This is how Oswald allegedly ordered the rifle that killed Kennedy.

Chicago is about 700 miles from Dallas. Recall, 1963 was way before the advent of computer technology for the post office. It was even before the advent of zip codes. But we are to believe the following: The USPS picked up a money order from a mailbox. They then transported it to the nearest post office. There, it was sorted and shipped out to the airport. It flew to Chicago. It was picked up at the airport there and driven to the main post office. There, it was sorted, placed on a truck and driven to the regional post office. It was then given to a route carrier and he delivered it to Klein’s. After its arrival at Klein’s it was then sorted out according to four categories of origin (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 451) Klein’s then delivered it to their financial repository, the first National Bank of Chicago. There it was deposited in Klein’s account.

The Warren Report says that all of this happened in a less than 24 hour period. To which we reply with one word: Really?

28. The invisibly deposited money order.

This money order was made out for $21.45. Robert Wilmouth was a Vice-President of the First National Bank of Chicago. According to him, the money order should have had four separate stamps on it as it progressed through his bank and the Federal Reserve system. (ibid)

If such was the case, when one turns to look at this money order, one is surprised at its appearance. (See Volume 17, pgs. 677-78) For it bears none of the markings described by Wilmouth. The only stamp on it is the one prepared by Klein’s for initial deposit. Needless to say, Wilmouth did not testify before the Commission.

But further, if one looks in the Commission volumes for other checks deposited by Oswald, e.g. from Leslie Welding, Reily Coffee, and Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, one will see that these are properly stamped. (See, for example, Vol. 24 pgs. 886-90)

29. The invisible money order drop off.

From the markings on the envelope, the money order was mailed prior to 10:30 AM on March 12, 1963. The problem is that Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where Oswald was working at the time, recorded each assignment an employee did during the day. They also recorded how much time he spent on each assignment. When one checks on his assignment sheet for March 12th, one will see that Oswald was continually busy from 8:00 AM until 12:15 PM. (Commission Exhibit 1855, Vol. 23, p. 605) Further, as Gil Jesus has discovered, the HSCA inquiry said the post office where Oswald bought the money order from opened at 8:00 AM. (Box 50, HSCA Segregated CIA files.)

So when did Oswald mail the money order? Even though Oswald’s time sheet is in the volumes, the Warren Report does not point out this discrepancy. Let alone explain it.

30. The invisible rifle pick up.

It’s hard to believe but it appears to be true. In its ten-month investigation, the Warren Commission, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the post office could never produce a single postal employee who gave, or even witnessed the transfer of the rifle to Oswald. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 62, Armstrong, p. 477) In fact, there is no evidence that Oswald ever actually picked up this rifle at the post office. For instance we don’t even know the day on which the rifle was retrieved.

Maybe that is because the transaction should not have occurred the way the Commission says it did. The rifle was ordered in the name of A. Hidell. But the post office box it arrived at was in the name of Lee Oswald. (ibid) Postal regulations at the time dictated that if a piece of merchandise addressed to one person arrived at a different person’s box; which was the case here; it was to be returned to the sender. Therefore, this rifle should have never gotten to Oswald’s box.

The Commission had an ingenious way to get around this problem. They wrote that the portion of the postal application Oswald made out listing others who could pick up merchandise at his box was thrown out after the box was closed in May. (WR, p. 121) The report says this was done in accordance with postal rules. Yet, if this was so, why did the post office not discard his application for his New Orleans box?

Because the Commission was lying. Stewart Galanor wrote the post office in 1966 and asked how long post office box applications were kept in 1963. The answer was for two years after the box was closed.

31. The rifle the Commission says Oswald ordered is not the rifle the Commission says killed Kennedy.

This one is shocking even for the Warren Commission. The Commission says that Oswald ordered a 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano carbine rifle. But this is not the rifle entered into evidence by the Dallas Police. That rifle is a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano short rifle. Again, this discrepancy is never noted by the Commission nor is it in the Warren Report. (Armstrong, p. 477)

This issue is so disturbing for Commission defenders that they now say that Klein’s shipped Oswald the wrong rifle because they were out of the 36 inch carbine. To which the reply must be: And they never advised him of this first? When a mail order house is out of a product, they usually tell the customer that, and ask him if he wishes to change the order. At least that is this writer’s experience. There is no evidence or testimony in the record that any such thing happened in this case. Even in interviews of the executives from Klein’s.

There is evidence the Warren Commission knew this was a serious problem. This is why they entered into the record an irrelevant page from the November, 1963 issue of Field and Stream. This issue did carry an ad for the 40 inch rifle. But the magazine the commission decided Oswald ordered the rifle from was the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman. (Armstrong, p. 477, WC Vol. 20, p. 174)

32. Arlen Specter did not show Darrell Tomlinson CE 399.

As we showed in Plaque 2, O. P. Wright’s name is not in the Warren Report. But Arlen Specter did question Darrell Tomlinson. He was the hospital employee who recovered CE 399 and gave it to Wright. In the reports of the questioning of Tomlinson, and in his Warren Commission testimony, there is no evidence that Specter ever showed Tomlinson CE 399. (WC Vol. 6, pgs. 128-34)

To say this is highly irregular is soft-pedaling it. Wright and Tomlinson are the two men who recovered CE 399 and started it on its journey to the Secret Service and then the FBI lab that night. To not ask the two men who began the chain of possession; in fact, to totally ignore one of them; to certify their exhibit is more than stunning. It invites suspicion. The next point illustrates why.

33. The Warren Commission accepted a lie by Hoover on the validity of CE 399.

This was a mistake of the first order. Because it was later discovered that the FBI fabricated evidence to cover up the falsification of CE 399. As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson later discovered, the man who the FBI said got identifications of CE 399 from Wright and Tomlinson was agent Bardwell Odum. According to Commission Exhibit 2011, when Odum showed the bullet to these two hospital employees, their reply was it “appears to be the same one” but they could not “positively identify it.” (The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 282)

That in itself was a nebulous reply to an important question. But it turned out that it concealed something even worse. For when Aguilar and Thompson visited Odum and asked him about this identification, he denied it ever happened. He said he never showed any bullet to any hospital employees concerning the Kennedy assassination. And if he did he would have recalled it. Because he knew Wright and he also would have filed his own report on it. Which he did not. (ibid, p. 284)

34. Hoover lied about Elmer Lee Todd’s initials.

There was another lie Hoover told about CE 399. He said that agent Elmer Lee Todd initialed the bullet. (WC Vol 24, p. 412) This turned out to be false. The Commission never examined the exhibit to see if Todd’s initials are on the bullet. Many years later, researcher John Hunt did so. He found they were not there (click here).

35. Robert Frazier’s work records proved the lie about CE 399, and the Commission never requested them.

But beyond that, Hunt’s work with Frazier’s records revealed something perhaps even more disturbing. Todd wrote that he got the bullet from Secret Service Chief Jim Rowley at 8:50 PM. He then drove it to Frazier at the FBI lab. But Frazier’s work records say that he received the “stretcher bullet” at 7:30. How could he have done so if Todd was not there yet? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227)

From this evidence, either CE 399 was substituted or there were two bullets delivered, and one was made to disappear. Either way, the Commission fell for a phony story by Hoover (click here).

36. CE 543 could not have been fired that day.

The Commission tells us that there were three shells found near the sixth floor window, the so-called “sniper’s nest.” But one of these shells, CE 543, could not have been fired that day. As ballistics expert Howard Donahue has noted, this shell could not have been used to fire a rifle that day. For the rifle would not have worked properly. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 69) It also contains three sets of identifying marks which reveal it had been loaded and extracted three times before. It also has marks on it from the magazine follower. But the magazine follower only marks the last cartridge in a clip. Which this was not. (Thompson, p. 145)

Historian Michael Kurtz consulted with forensic pathologist Forest Chapman about this exhibit. He then wrote that the shell “lacks the characteristic indentation on the side made by the firing chamber of Oswald’s rifle.” (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, second edition, p. 51) Chapman concluded that CE 543 was probably dry loaded. The pathologist noted “CE 543 had a deeper and more concave indentation on its base…where the firing pin strikes the case. Only empty cases exhibit such characteristics.” (ibid, p. 52)

This was certified through experimentation by British researcher Chris Mills. He purchased a Mannlicher Carcano and then experimented repeatedly. The only way he achieved a similar denting effect was by using empty shells. And then the effect only appeared infrequently. Mills concluded this denting effect could only occur with an empty case that had been previously fired, and then only on occasion. (op cit. DiEugenio, p. 69)

37. In addition to the Commission presenting the wrong rifle, the wrong bullet and the wrong shell, it’s also the wrong bag.

The Commission tells us that Oswald carried a rifle to work the day of the assassination in a long brown bag. Wesley Frazier and his sister said the bag was carried by Oswald under his arm. The problems with this story are manifold. For instance, there is no photo of this bag in situ taken by the Dallas Police. The eventual paper bag produced by the police had no traces of oil or grease on it even though the rifle had been soaked in a lubricant called Cosmoline for storage purposes.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 177) Though the rifle had to be dissembled to fit under Oswald’s armpit, the FBI found no bulges or creases in the paper.

Further, after a long and detailed analysis by Pat Speer, it appears that the bag in evidence did not match the Depository paper samples. (ibid, p. 179) Further, the police did not officially photograph the alleged gun sack until November 26th!

All this strongly indicates that the bag the police brought outside the depository is not the same one in evidence today. (Click here for proof).

38. The Commission now had to alter testimony in order to match the phony evidence of the wrong gun, the wrong bullet, the wrong shell and the wrong bag. They did.

It was now necessary to place Oswald on the sixth floor in proximity to the southeast window. The Commission’s agents therefore got several people to alter their testimony. For instance, Harold Norman was on the fifth floor that day. He said nothing about hearing shells drop above him in his first FBI interview. Coaxed along by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, he now vividly recalled shell casings dropping for a convenient three times.(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 30-31.)

In his first DPD and FBI interviews, Depository worker Charles Givens said he had seen Oswald on the first floor lunchroom at about 11:50 AM, after he had sent up an elevator for him while they were working on the sixth floor. But when he testified before the Commission, Givens now added something completely new. Now he said that he forgot his cigarettes and went up to the sixth floor for them. There he conveniently saw Oswald near the southeast window. As many researchers, including Sylvia Meagher and Pat Speer have shown, it’s pretty clear that the Dallas Police, specifically, Lt. Revill got Givens to change his story. The Commission, which was aware of the switch, accepted the revised version. (ibid, p. 98).

Carolyn Arnold was a secretary working in the depository. She was interviewed by the FBI after the assassination. She told them she saw Oswald on the first floor at about 12:25. Years later, reporter Earl Golz showed her what the FBI had written about her. She was shocked. They had altered her statement to read that she saw him “a few minutes before 12:15 PM.” (ibid, p. 96)

With Oswald now transported up to the sixth floor, there was only Marina Oswald left. In her first Secret Service interviews, she had told the agents she had never seen a rifle with a scope. In fact, she did not even know such rifles existed. Which created a problem. Because the weapon in question did have a scope. Threatened with deportation, when she arrived for her Warren Commission testimony she was confronted with the scoped rifle. She now proclaimed “This is the fateful rifle of Lee Oswald.” (ibid, pgs.62- 63)

39. The WC never found any evidence that Oswald picked up the handgun with which it says Tippit was killed.

This weapon was shipped through the Railroad Express Agency. REA was a forerunner to private mail companies like Federal Express. When one looks at the evidence exhibits in the Warren Report one will see something strange. There is no evidence that Oswald ever picked up this revolver. In fact, the evidence trail stops right there. That is, at the point one would report to REA, show some ID, pay for the weapon, sign off on a receipt, and get a matching one. (WR, p. 173)

In fact, from the evidence adduced in the report, it does not even appear that the FBI visited REA. Which would be unfathomable. It is more likely they did visit and encountered the same situation there as at the post office with the rifle: No receipts, or witnesses, to attest to the pick-up.

40. The ballistics evidence in the Tippit case is fishy.

As many have noted, including Jim Garrison, the Dallas Police could not get the bullets expended in the Tippit case to match the alleged handgun used. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 199) They only sent one bullet to Washington, even though four were fired at Tippit. Further, on the day of the murder, Dallas police made out an inventory of evidence at the scene. That inventory did not include cartridge cases of any kind. (ibid, p. 200) These were not added until six days after the police got a report that he FBI could not match the bullets to the weapon.

Just as odd: the shell casings do not match the bullets. Three of the bullets were copper coated and made by Winchester. One bullet was lead colored and made by Remington. But two of the cartridges were from Winchester and two were made by Remington. (ibid, p. 201)

There is evidence that the shells found at the scene are not those in evidence. Sgt. Gerald Hill allegedly instructed Officer J. M. Poe to mark two of the shells. When Poe examined them for the Commission, he could not detect his markings on the shells. (ibid)

As Garrison suggested, this sorry trail indicates that once the police could not get a match for the bullets, they then fired the handgun to make sure they had a match for the shells. Even if they were not the same ones found at the scene. The Commission accepted this.

Conclusion

The Warren Commission misrepresented its own evidence. As we saw in Plaque 1, from its inception, the Commission had an overwhelming bias against Lee Oswald. And since Oswald was given no defense, and there were no restraints placed upon its bias, the Commission became a runaway prosecution. One which altered testimony and evidence, and accepted the most outlandish proclamations without crosschecking them.

There is actually internal documentary evidence to prove this point. In late April of 1964, staff administrator Norman Redlich wrote a memo to Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin. Discovered by researcher David Josephs, it is a startling letter, one which shows that the Commission literally made up its case as it went along. In discussing the three shot scenario, Redlich is still maintaining that all three shots hit targets: the first into Kennedy, the second into Gov. Connally, and the last into Kennedy’s skull. Yet, this will not be what the Warren Report concludes.

But Redlich also writes that “As our investigation now stands, however, we have not shown that these events could possibly have occurred in the manner suggested above.” He also writes that the first shot was probably fired at Zapruder frame 190. This was also changed in the final report since it would have necessitated firing through the branches of an oak tree. He concludes with this: “I should add that the facts which we now have in our possession, submitted to us in separate reports from the FBI and Secret Service are totally incorrect, and if left uncorrected will present a completely misleading picture.”

The problem is this: the FBI and Secret Service were the two prime sources of information for the Commission. (WR, p. xii) Responsible for about 90% of the raw material they had. If these were “incorrect,” then what would the Commission do to “correct” them?

This memo can be read here.

PLAQUE FOUR: Specter covers up the Medical Evidence

Posted September 7, 2014

Introduction

With what is known about the medical evidence in the JFK case today, looking back at what the Warren Commission did with it in 1964 is almost staggering. Today, with the work of writers like Gary Aguilar, David Mantik, Milicent Cranor, William Law, Pat Speer, and Cyril Wecht, no objective person can deny that something went seriously wrong at the Kennedy autopsy in Bethesda, Maryland. In light of that, the work that the Commission did with this evidence in ’64 needs to be analyzed to appreciate just how careful Arlen Specter was in navigating a minefield.

41. Although President Kennedy was killed by a bullet wound to the skull, that wound was never dissected by lead pathologist James Humes.

This fact is unbelievable. In any high profile homicide case in which the victim is killed by a bullet wound, it is standard procedure to track the trajectory of the fatal wound through the body. This has to be done in order to trace the bullet path, to test if the wound is a transiting one, and to note where it entered and exited. All of this information would be crucial as forensic evidence during a legal proceeding.

The problem is that the Warren Commission was not at all forensic, nor was it a legal proceeding. It was not even a respectable fact finding commission. Shockingly, outside of printing some primary documents, the medical aspects of this case are dealt with in just seven pages in the Warren Report. (pgs. 85-92) In that section, it is not revealed why the head wound was not sectioned. In fact, the report does not even admit there was no sectioning of the brain. In Volume II of the Commission evidence, Arlen Specter never brings up the lack of sectioning of the brain in his examination of James Humes.

And to add further to the incredulity, the supplemental report to the autopsy, which deals with the skull wound, also does not admit there was no sectioning. (See WR pgs. 544-45)

42. Without comment, the Warren Report says that President Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams.

In that supplemental report, it says that after formalin fixation, Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. (WR, p. 544) There is no comment on this in the 800 pages of the Warren Report. There should have been much comment about it. Why? Because the average weight of a brain for a 40-49 year old man is 1350 grams. Even allowing for the formalin fixing, Kennedy’s brain weight has more volume than it should.

Which is surprising considering the reports on the condition of the brain. FBI agent Frank O’Neill said half the brain was gone and a significant portion was missing from the rear. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 137) Dr. Thornton Boswell, Humes’ fellow pathologist, said about a third of the brain was missing. Humes himself said about 2/3 of the cerebrum was gone. (ibid) Floyd Reibe, a photographic assistant, said only about half the brain was left when he saw it removed. Jim Sibert, O’Neill’s fellow FBI agent at the autopsy said, “you look at a picture, an anatomical picture of a brain and it’s all there; there was nothing like that.” (ibid) The list of witnesses to how disrupted the brain was could go on and on.

The point is, given all this testimony, plus what we see happening in the Zapruder film–a terrific head explosion, with matter ejecting high into the air; how could the volume of the brain be what it is reported as? That is, larger than normal.

If you can believe it, and you can by now, in the entire examination of James Humes, Arlen Specter never even surfaced the issue of the extraordinary weight of the brain. (WC Vol. II, pgs. 348-376) Neither did it come up in the examinations of assistants Thornton Boswell or Pierre Finck. (ibid, pgs. 376-84) Since it was in the record for all concerned to see, that fact clearly suggests deliberate avoidance.

43. Kennedy’s back wound was not dissected.

As noted in point 41, Kennedy’s fatal skull wound was not sectioned. Neither was the other wound the Commission says he sustained, the wound to his back. (Which as we saw, Gerald Ford transferred to his neck.) Again, this has to be the first, perhaps only, high profile murder case by gunfire, in which neither wound sustained by the victim was tracked.

In the examinations of Humes, Boswell, and Pierre Finck, this question is never brought up by Specter. That is: Why did none of the doctors dissect the track of this back wound. Again, this was crucial in determining directionality, if the wound was a transiting one, and if it was, points of entrance and exit. Because there has been so much debate about the nature of this wound, in retrospect, this was a key failing of an autopsy procedure which many have called, one of the worst ever. And that includes Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA. (DiEugenio, op. cit, p. 114)

The reason Specter never asked why finally surfaced in 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. Called as a witness by Shaw’s defense team, under cross-examination by assistant DA Al Oser, Finck exposed much of the secrecy and subterfuge around the autopsy.

Finck revealed that the three autopsy doctors were not really in charge. He said that there were a number of military officers there; a fact which Humes covered up in his Commission testimony; and they actually limited what the doctors were doing. (See James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 300) To the point that a frustrated Humes asked, “Who is in charge here?” An Army General then replied, “I am.” (ibid)

When Oser tried to get Finck to answer the question Specter had deliberately ignored–namely why was the back wound not tracked–Finck clearly did not want to answer the question. Oser had to pose the query eight times. He even had to ask the judge to direct the witness to reply. Finck finally said, “As I recall I was told not to but I don’t remember by whom.” (ibid, p. 302) One can imagine the impact that confession would have had if it had been printed in the Warren Report. The obvious question then would have been: Why did certain people in the autopsy room not want the back wound dissected? Specter was sure to avoid that Pandora’s Box.

44. Arlen Specter’s questioning of Thornton Boswell was a travesty.

As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, Specter asked Boswell a total of 14 questions. When one subtracts the formalities, like tracing his education, that number is reduced to 8. (WC, Vol. II, p. 377)

Which is shocking. Because, for instance, of the controversy surrounding the face sheet which he allegedly prepared. That sheet places the posterior back wound well down into the back. In fact, in a place which corresponds to the evidence of the blood and holes in Kennedy’s back and shirt. It also allows for a rather large wound in the skull. This wound is not visible in either the autopsy photos or x-rays.

To ask such a key witness, who had such crucial information, just 8 relevant questions tells us what we need to know about Arlen Specter and his intentions as attorney for the Warren Commission. He was on a mission to conceal, not reveal.

45. The Commission slept through some of James Humes’ most revealing testimony.

In Volume II of the Commission volumes, James Humes made some puzzling and disturbing comments.

In responding to comments by Sen. John Cooper about determining the angle of the bullets from the Texas School Book Depository for the head shot, he said that this could not be done with accuracy, since the exit hole was too broad. But yet, this was not the question. The question was if he could determine the angle from the position Kennedy was in when he was struck. (p. 360) According to the Commission, they knew where this shot was fired from, and Humes indicated where it struck on the rear of the skull. (See Vol. 2, p. 351)

When Allen Dulles then tried to nail the location down by asking if the bullet was inconsistent with a shot from either behind or from the side, Humes made a reply that is mysterious to this day. He said, “Scientifically, sir, it is impossible for it to have been fired from other than behind. Or to have exited from other than behind.” (ibid, italics added) If the bullet exited from behind it was fired from the front. Stunningly, no one asked him to clarify what he meant by this. In fact, the next question, from John McCloy, was if he thought the head wound was a lethal one. Recall, the Commission had seen the Zapruder film several times.

As some have said, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

46. Humes and Specter cooperated on a cover story as to why Humes destroyed the first draft of his autopsy report.

James Humes originally stated that the reason he burned the first draft of his autopsy report was because he did not want the blood stained report to come into the possession of some cheap souvenir hunter. (WC, Vol. II p. 373)

Over three decades later, in 1996, under questioning by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board, this story fell apart. Because Gunn honed in on the fact that the report was written in the privacy of his own home. It is hard to believe that Humes did not wash up before he left the morgue. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 165)

But further, it was revealed that Humes also burned his unsoiled notes along with the first draft. Deeply agitated, and now outside the friendly patty cake of Specter’s cooperation, Humes began to come unglued. He offered up the startling excuse that, “it was my own materials.” (ibid)

This leaves two problems. First, what was the real reason Humes burned his report? Second, if he burned his notes, then how does one compare what is in the report with what it is supposed to be based upon?

47. The Commission lied about not having possession of the autopsy materials.

On January 21, 1964, Commissioner John McCloy asked J. Lee Rankin if the Commission had all the autopsy materials, including color photographs, in their offices. Rankin replied that yes they did. (See p. 36 of transcript) But according to Warren Commission historian Gerald McKnight, this information was kept hidden from most all of the Commission staff. (McKnight, p.171) The exception being Specter who was shown a photo by Secret Service agent Elmer Moore, Earl Warren’s “bodyguard.” (Specter alluded to this at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Symposium in 2003)

Rankin’s reply to McCloy is disturbing. Because at almost every opportunity in the intervening decades, the Commissioners and counsel had denied they had the materials. But further, they tried to say they did not have them because the Kennedy family denied them access. This was simply not possible. Because these materials, including photos and x-rays, were in the possession–and under the control–of the Secret Service at that time. Which is how Moore had them. So the Commission had to have gotten them from the Secret Service.

48. In the entire Warren Report, there is no mention of the Harper Fragment.

The Harper fragment is a crucial piece of forensic evidence. It was named after Billy Harper, the person who found this piece of bone in Dealey Plaza while taking photos on the 23rd. He brought it to his uncle, Dr. Jack Harper, who took it to Dr. A. B. Cairns, chief of pathology at Methodist Hospital in Dallas. Cairns determined it was occipital bone, from the rear of JFK’s head. He also had quality color slides made of both sides of the fragment. This is fortunate, since this piece of evidence has now disappeared.

Among the important points to remember about the Harper fragment is that, if it is occipital, then it strongly suggests a shot from the front. Secondly, when the House Select Committee tried to place the Harper fragment in their own reconstruction, situated to the front right side of the skull, it did not fit. And the HSCA tried to then ditch the evidence proving it did not. (See Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, by Michael Benson, p. 173; John Hunt, “A Demonstrable Impossibility” at History Matters website)

For the Commission to try and determine the nature of Kennedy’s head wounds without even noting this piece of evidence is irresponsible.

49. James Humes lied about the diameter of Kennedy’s anterior neck wound in his testimony.

Under examination by Specter, Humes said the neck wound measured a few millimeters in diameter. (See WC, Vol. II, p. 362) Since this wound was slit at Parkland Hospital in Dallas for purposes of a tracheotomy, Humes could not have garnered this information on his own. It turns out he got it from Dr. Malcolm Perry, the man who did the tracheotomy. But when one looks at the notation made about this information, it does not say a few millimeters. It says 3-5 mm. (See James Rinnovatore and Allan Eaglesham, The JFK Assassination Revisited, p. 26 for the note)

The probable reason Humes fudged his testimony was that he had testified that the posterior back wound was 7 x 4 mm. (WC Vol. II, p. 351) This would have meant the entrance wound was larger than the exit wound. Something that could only happen in the solipsistic world of the Warren Commission.

50. James Humes and Arlen Specter cooperated on a cover story to conceal the true location of Kennedy’s back wound for the Commission.

Under questioning by Specter, Humes said that the bullet holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt line up well with Commission Exhibit 385. (WC, Vol II, p. 366) The bullet holes in those two clothing exhibits both depict the wound to have entered in JFK’s back about six inches below the collar. Which Humes admits to. Anyone can see that CE 385 depicts that wound much further up, near where the neck meets the back. (Click here)

So how do Specter and Humes explain this deliberate misrepresentation? They say Kennedy was heavily muscled and waving at the crowd. (WC, op. cit) Kennedy was not heavily muscled. He was about 6′ 1″ and 175 pounds. Anyone who has seen photos of him in a swimsuit or at autopsy will tell you he was rather slender. And there is no way in the world that the very mild wave Kennedy performs before he goes behind the freeway sign could account for the raising of that six inch differential. In fact, when Kennedy starts waving, his elbow is on the car door. (Click here)

These misrepresentations are deliberately designed to cover up the fraud of CE 385. And, in turn, to make the wild fantasy of the Single Bullet Theory palatable.

Conclusion

Arlen Specter clearly understood that there were serious problems with the evidence of the autopsy in the JFK case. Which is why, as previously noted, he deep-sixed the Sibert-O’Neill report made by the FBI.

The questioning of the three pathologists by Specter was a masterpiece of avoidance. Or, in plain language, a cover up. The true facts of this horrendous autopsy did not begin to be exposed until the trial of Clay Shaw–five years later in New Orleans. There, under a real examination, Pierre Finck first revealed that the doctors were not running the autopsy. The scores of officers in the room were. This explains why the back wound was not dissected and the brain not sectioned. Without those two practices, we do not know the direction of the bullets through the skull, throat and back; nor do we know how many bullets struck; nor do we know if all the wounds were transiting.

Because of Specter, we also did not discover the real circumstances of Dr. Humes burning his first autopsy draft and notes. And because of Specter and Humes cooperation on a deception, the true nature of Kennedy’s back wound, and the problems in connecting it with the throat wound, were camouflaged. All of these dodges, and more, were meant to disguise evidence of more than three shots. And therefore, more than one assassin.

If the Commission had been a true legal proceeding, Specter’s actions would have been just cause to begin a disbarment case against him.

PLAQUE FIVE: The Conspiracy the Commission Couldn’t Find

Posted September 24, 2014

Introduction

In this final series, we will center on information that most certainly indicated a plot, or at least suggested a conspiratorial set of associations in the JFK case. Almost all the material discussed here was available back in 1964. The problem was that the agencies that the Commission relied upon were not forthcoming in forwarding the facts to the Commission. In other words, the Commission was more or less at the mercy of men like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, James Rowley and Elmer Moore at the Secret Service, and Richard Helms and James Angleton at the CIA. Since those three agencies provided the overwhelming majority of information to the Commission, the investigation was doomed from the start.

51. Within 72 hours of the assassination, David Ferrie was trying to deny his association with Oswald. And he broke the law to do so.

After Jim Garrison turned Ferrie over to the FBI, Oswald’s longtime friend and CAP colleague lied his head off to the Bureau. He said he never owned a telescopic rifle, or used one, and he would not even know how to use one. Considering his activities as a CIA trainer for the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, these were clear deceptions.

He also said he never knew Oswald and that Oswald was not a member of a CAP squadron in New Orleans.

He then said he did not know Sergio Arcacha Smith from 544 Camp Street, and he had no association with any Cuban exile group since 1961. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 177)

Every one of these statements was a lie. Further, it is a crime to perjure yourself to an FBI agent in an investigation. (ibid) That Hoover did not indict Ferrie, shows that 1.) He did not give a damn about Kennedy’s murder and 2.) The Commission was at his mercy.

52. The FBI knew about Ferrie’s friendship with Oswald through CAP member Chuck Francis, and they knew about the association of Oswald with Ferrie and Shaw in the Clinton-Jackson area.

What makes Point 51 above even worse is that the Bureau had the evidence to prove Ferrie was lying to them. After the assassination, CAP member Chuck Francis was interviewed by the Bureau. Francis took the now famous CAP photo depicting Ferrie with Oswald at a picnic. (ibid, p. 233) How could Ferrie have denied that evidence? In fact, he was worried about it. Since in the days following the assassination, he called various CAP members to see if they had any pictures of him with Oswald. The FBI knew about these frantic calls also. (ibid) As Vincent Bugliosi would say, the perjury by Ferrie plus his attempt at obstruction of justice would indicate a “consciousness of guilt.”

Through the work of Joan Mellen, we know that the Bureau had a report by Reeves Morgan that Oswald had been in the Clinton/Jackson area that summer with two men who fit the description of Ferrie and Clay Shaw. The FBI then visited the hospital personnel office where Oswald went to apply for a job. (ibid)

There is no evidence that Hoover forwarded any of this important information to the Commission.

53. Both the CIA and the FBI had counter-intelligence programs active in 1963 against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

At the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Commission counsel David Belin was one of the featured guests on a Nightline segment. During the telecast he made an astonishing declaration: He proclaimed he had seen every CIA document on the Kennedy case. If he was telling the truth, then why did he not say that the Agency, as well as the Bureau, had counter-intelligence programs arrayed against the FPCC in 1963, and that David Phillips headed the CIA operation? (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 236)

This would seem to most to be of extreme evidentiary importance. Because Oswald formed his own one-man operation for the FPCC in New Orleans while working out of Guy Banister’s office. In fact, he even put Banister’s address on some of his FPCC flyers. And the FBI knew that also. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 102) Needless to say, this would all seem to suggest that perhaps Oswald was not really a communist; but at work, through Banister’s office, for Phillips’ anti-FPCC campaign.

Which leads us to an amazing fact.

54. You will not find the name of David Phillips in the 19,000 pages of the Commission volumes.

In retrospect, this is startling. Why? Because today Phillips is seen as one of the chief mid-level suspects in the Kennedy case. Oswald was seen with Phillips at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963. Phillips occupied the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there in late September and early October, 1963. And if Oswald was an agent provocateur for the CIA infiltrating the FPCC, then Phillips had to have known about his activities in New Orleans that summer. Since he was in charge of coordinating them.

In other words, Phillips seems to have been in direct proximity to Oswald throughout 1963. In fact, he told his brother James before he died that he was in Dallas the day JFK was killed. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 364)

55. There is direct evidence and testimony linking Phillips to suspects in the JFK case in New Orleans.

After Gordon Novel first met Sergio Arcacha Smith, Arcacha invited him to a meeting in Guy Banister’s office. The subject was arranging a telethon in New Orleans to support the anti-Castro cause. Joining the trio was a fourth man, a Mr. Phillips. In a sworn deposition, Novel’s description of Mr. Phillips closely aligns with David Phillips. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pgs. 22-24)

Secondly, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA made a report on the Belle Chasse training camp south of New Orleans. Ferrie and Arcacha Smith were both heavily involved in this camp’s activities. (ibid, p. 30) That report is detailed in all aspects of the history of the camp including when it opened, who was trained there, how many were trained, and what they were trained in. Only someone with firsthand knowledge of its activities could have written the memo. At the end, the memo reads, “the training camp was entirely Agency controlled and the training was conducted by Agency personnel.” The memo was signed by Phillips. (ibid, p. 31)

Third, during the preparations for Operation Mongoose, another camp was opened across Lake Pontchartrain. Ferrie was a drill instructor at this camp also. (ibid, p. 30) When Bob Tanenbaum was Deputy Chief Counsel of the HSCA, he saw a film that was probably from this camp. He brought in witnesses to view it to get positive identifications. Three of the identified men were Oswald, Banister and Phillips. (ibid, p. 30)

As the reader can see, we now have evidence linking the people on the ground around Oswald in the summer of 1963, with a man one or two steps upward in the CIA’s chain of command. This would be an important development if one were seeking out a conspiracy.

56. The names of Rose Cheramie and Richard Case Nagell are not in the Warren Report.

Along with Sylvia Odio, this trio forms perhaps the most important evidence of a conspiracy before the fact. In fact, Jim Garrison once wrote that Nagell was the most important witness there was. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 94) Nagell was a CIA operative who was hired out of Mexico City by the KGB. They heard there was a plot brewing to kill Kennedy. They thought they would be implicated in it. They hired Nagell to track it down. (ibid, pgs. 95-96) By the fall of 1963, Nagell was hot on the trail of David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and Carlos Quiroga. He was convinced that Oswald, who the KGB had given him a photo of at the start, was being set up by these men. (ibid, p. 97)

Rose Cheramie predicted the assassination in advance. She had been abandoned by two men who were talking about the plot as the trio was enacting a drug deal. After she was abandoned, she was having withdrawal symptoms. But she predicted to the officer who picked her up and drove her to a state hospital that Kennedy would be killed in Dallas shortly. (ibid, p. 78) When this turned out to be true, the officer returned to her and got more details.

There is no evidence the Commission ever investigated Cheramie. But Jim Garrison did. He got identifications of Cheramie’s companions. They turned out to be Sergio Arcacha Smith and CIA operative Emilio Santana.

57. The Commission’s investigation of Oswald in Mexico City was so skimpy as to be negligent.

Declassified in 1996, this was called the Slawson-Coleman report, named after staff attorneys David Slawson and William Coleman. The man who coordinated with the Commission about their visit to Mexico City was CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 14) Helms advised that every step they took in Mexico that Slawson and Coleman deal “on the spot with the CIA representative.” (ibid) Consequently, this 37-page report does not mention Anne Goodpasture, or the Tarasoffs. Goodpasture has become an incredibly important figure today. Because she controlled the tapes and photo surveillance files from the Cuban and Russian consulates for suspect David Phillips. The Tarasoffs were the married couple that did the Russian translations from the surveillance tapes. Further, the Commission never interviewed Silvia Duran, the receptionist in the Cuban embassy who actually spent the most time with Oswald; or whoever this person was.

Why do I say that? Because the Slawson/Coleman report never reveals the following information: 1.) Duran talked to an “Oswald” who was short and blonde, not the real Oswald (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 349) 2.) The record says Oswald visited the embassies a total of five times. There should be ten pictures the CIA took of him entering and exiting the buildings. There are none. 3.) The FBI heard tapes the CIA said were of Oswald. The agents interviewing Oswald in detention said the man they talked to was not the man on the tapes. (ibid, p. 357) Which poses the question: was Oswald in Mexico City?

Maybe, but maybe not. Either way, it is doubtful he did the things the Commission said he did. In fact, the HSCA prepared two perjury indictments for the Justice Department to serve on this issue. One was for Phillips and one for Goodpasture. The Mexico City report issued by the HSCA, authored by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez; which was 400 pages long– enumerates numerous lies told to the Committee by those two. And it strongly indicates someone was manipulating the surveillance record. If that is so, then one has to wonder if it was a coincidence that this was done to the man who would be accused of killing Kennedy in advance of the assassination.

58. The chief witnesses against Oswald were Ruth and Michael Paine.

As Walt Brown notes in his book, The Warren Omission, the Paines were in the witness chair on a combined nine days. In total, they were asked well over 6,000 questions. In fact, Ruth was asked the most questions of any single witness. (See Brown, pgs. 262-63) Yet, except for Senator Richard Russell, not one commissioner ever posed any queries as to who they really were, what they did in this case, and why the Commission used them so extensively. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 195) But there is a telltale piece of evidence about all that. It appears that Allen Dulles solicited old friends of his from the Eastern Establishment to give the couple public endorsements as early as December of 1963; which was well before any witnesses were called, Or the Commission’s case took shape. (ibid)

But Dulles went even further about this connection. In private, he commented that the JFK researchers “would have had a field day if they had known…he had actually been in Dallas three weeks before the murder…and that one of Mary Bancroft’s childhood friends had turned out to be a landlady for Marina Oswald.” (ibid, p. 198) The Mary Bancroft Dulles was referring to had been an OSS agent he had run during World War II. Mary was a lifelong friend with Ruth Forbes, Michael Paine’s mother.

To make a long story short, both Ruth and Michael Paine came from family backgrounds that are intertwined with the power elite and the CIA. For instance, Ruth’s sister, Sylvia Hoke worked for the Agency in 1963, a fact the CIA and Ruth tried to keep from Jim Garrison. Sylvia’s husband worked for the Agency for International Development, which was closely affiliated with the Agency. Later in life, Ruth admitted to a friend her father worked for the CIA also. And during the Contra war in Nicaragua, many American Sandinista sympathizers on the scene saw Ruth’s activities there as being CIA sponsored. (ibid, pgs. 197, 199) There is also evidence that a man fitting the description of Michael Paine was at a restaurant adjacent to SMU trying to sniff out students who were sympathetic to Castro. Further, there were early reports that Dallas deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers, in his search of the Paine household, discovered several “metal filing cabinets full of letter, maps, records, and index cards, with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” (ibid, p. 198) There is also evidence that the Paines played a role in manufacturing the case against Oswald. For instance, they claimed the Minox spy camera found in Oswald’s belongings really belonged to Michael. (ibid, p. 207.) For a survey of the case against the Paines see, James DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pgs. 155-56, 194-208. (Also, click here for a visual essay). This declassified record makes the Paines appear fishier than an aquarium.

59. There is no mention of Carl Mather of Collins Radio in the Warren Report.

Carl Mather and his wife were good friends with Officer Tippit and his wife Marie. In fact, they went over to the Tippit home to console Marie at about 3:30 PM. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 527) What makes that so interesting is what happened about 2 hours earlier.

In Oak Cliff, on Davis Street horns were blaring and police cars moving within an hour of the assassination due to the murder of Tippit in that area. A veteran auto mechanic named T. F. White saw a man in a car looking suspicious, like he was trying to hide himself. This was in the parking lot of the El Chico Restaurant across the street from his auto garage. Which was about six blocks from the scene of the Tippit murder. White went over to the car and got a better look at the man and took down the license plate. When he got home that night and watched TV, he told his wife that the man in the car was Oswald. (ibid, p. 526)

When reporter Wes Wise heard about the story, he got the license plate number checked out. It belonged to Carl Mather. Thus began the mystery of how either Oswald, or a double, got in a car after the assassination with a license plate belonging to Tippit’s friend Mather. To make it worse, Mather worked for a CIA related company called Collins Radio. Collins did work for the White House, had contracts in Vietnam and worked with Cuban exiles on ships used in raids on Castro’s Cuba. (ibid, pgs. 527-28)

That the Warren Report does not mention this pregnant lead is incredible.

60. The Warren Report says that Jack Ruby had no significant connections to organized crime figures.

Since they did not know about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, maybe the Commission did not think Santo Trafficante was significant. But Trafficante was one of the three mobsters the CIA contacted in order to do away with Fidel Castro (the other two were John Roselli and Sam Giancana.) There were reliable reports, from more than one source, that Ruby visited Trafficante while he was imprisoned by Castro at Tresconia prison in late 1959. One eyewitness even said that he saw Ruby serving the mobster a meal. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pgs. 455-56)

Another witness said that on this trip to Cuba, Ruby was also seen with Lewis McWillie. McWillie was a former manager of Trafficante’s gambling casinos in Havana. Ruby actually shipped handguns to McWillie in Cuba. By all accounts Ruby idolized McWillie; and would do almost anything for him. (ibid, p. 272)

61. Officer Patrick Dean lied about how Ruby could have gotten into the city hall basement on Sunday November 24th to kill Oswald.

Dean was in charge of security for the transfer of Oswald that day. He told Burt Griffin of the Commission that Ruby would have needed a key to get into a door that ran along the alleyway behind the building. Griffin suspected Dean was lying about this point. Griffin wrote a memo saying he had reason to think that Ruby did not come down the Main Street ramp. But Dean was urging Ruby to say this as a part of a cover up. Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin would not back Griffin on this and succumbed to pressure out of Dallas, especially from DA Henry Wade. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 205-06)

It turned out that Dean was lying on this point. When the HSCA investigated this issue they found out that Ruby did not need a key to enter that door. They further found out that Dean flunked his polygraph test administered by the Dallas Police; even though he wrote his own questions! When the HSCA went looking for this test, it was nowhere to be found. (ibid, p. 205)

62. The FBI falsified Jack Ruby’s polygraph test.

The HSCA appointed a panel of polygraph experts to examine the records of Jack Ruby’s lie detector test for the Warren Commission. This was done by an FBI expert named Bell Herndon. The Commission accepted Herndon’s verdict that Ruby had passed the test. The HSCA panel did not. In fact, they exposed the test as being so faulty as to be about worthless. The panel said that Herndon violated at least ten basic protocols of polygraph technique. These ranged from having too many people in the room; which would cause diversions and false readings; to asking way too many questions. There were over 100; which is about six times as many as there should have been. (ibid, p. 244)

This was crucial. Because as the panel explained, liars become immune to showing physiological stimuli if questioned for too long. In other words, the subject could lie and get away with it. Herndon also confused the types of questions; relevant, irrelevant, and control questions; so that it was hard to arrange a chart based on accurate readings. (ibid)

Finally, Herndon completely altered the proper methods of using the Galvanic Skin Response machine (GSR). He started it at a low point of only 25% capacity, and then lowered it. The panel said the machine should never have been set that low. But it should have been raised, not lowered, later. (ibid, p. 245) This is interesting because when Ruby was asked, “Did you assist Oswald in the assassination?”; to which he replied in the negative; it registered the largest GSR reaction in the first test series. (ibid, pgs. 245-46)

63. The Dallas Police hid the best witness to the killing of Oswald by Ruby.

Sgt. Don Flusche was never examined by the Warren Commission. There are indications that the DPD did not want the Commission to know about him. (ibid, p, 204) Flusche was in a perfect position to watch the ramp from Main Street. He had parked his car across the street and was leaning on it during the entire episode of Ruby shooting Oswald. Further, he knew Ruby. He told HSCA investigator Jack Moriarty that “There was no doubt in his mind that Ruby did not walk down the ramp and further did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the Ramp.” (ibid, p. 203)

Conclusion

Much of the above evidence was kept from the Commission. Which shows how weak and controlled the whole exercise was. Without independent investigators, the Commission was reliant on the good will of bodies like the FBI and Dallas Police; who both had much to hide in regards to the murders of Kennedy, Tippit and Oswald.

But the clear outlines of a conspiratorial design is obvious in the evidence above. One in which Oswald is unconsciously manipulated by those around him in New Orleans and Mexico City e.g. Ferrie and Phillips. He then returns to Dallas where he and his wife are in the clutches of their false friends, Ruth and Michael Paine. Kennedy is killed, and the CIA brings in its old ally the Mafia. McWillie and Trafficante find the perfect man, one with prolific ties to the police, to polish off Oswald before he can talk.

Is this what happened? We don’t know that for sure since this scenario was never investigated at the time. But we know today that it is perfectly plausible; much more so than the wild fantasy proposed in the Warren Report.

We will stop at 63 pieces of evidence, for two reasons. First that is ten more than Vincent Bugliosi brought up in Reclaiming History to indict Oswald. And ours are much more solid and convincing than his. Second, it’s the year Kennedy was killed. And as many studies have shown e.g. Larry Sabato’s in The Kennedy Half Century; the vast majority of Americans felt that something went awry with America after Kennedy’s murder.

We agree. So although we could easily go to one hundred, 63 is a good number to stop at.

June 20, 2014
James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed (Second Edition)
By 1967, Jim Garrison became the Prometheus to the Achesonian Olympus.

– Robert Spiegelman

I. Garrison Unbound

About three years ago, at the Lancer “November in Dallas” conference, Jim DiEugenio gave an address entitled “Historical Revisionism and the JFK Case”, in which he defended his criticism of a few recent theories of the assassination, criticism which some – quite mistakenly, in this writer’s opinion – interpreted as counter to the spirit of free inquiry. The main point of his presentation was that revisionism should not denote a quest for novelty at the expense of accuracy. If we are to have any hope of coming to terms with what happened on November 22, 1963, we must take care to remain focused on the evidence. The reissue of Destiny Betrayed is extremely timely in this respect. I would fancy that when DiEugenio gave this talk, the need for an updated edition of his 1992 book had already crystallized in his thinking; but as we enter the 50th anniversary year it has become ever more urgent, as his lecture suggested, to revisit the breakthroughs made during the first decade and a half after John Kennedy’s death, and to build on them using the knowledge and insight we have since acquired. This thoroughly rewritten study does precisely that.

No single person uncovered as many clues¹ in that early period of the JFK investigation as did Jim Garrison. And it is impossible for the reader not to take away from Destiny Betrayed a sense of indebtedness to those leads. But the reader also cannot help but be impressed by the imposing factual edifice that is erected upon them. In that same lecture, DiEugenio paraphrased Garrison concerning what an investigator should hope to achieve in this case: “… a paradigm that would be justified internally by the evidence yet [whose] overall design would fit the shape of the plot.” This book fulfills Garrison’s prescription by offering an abundance of details – more so than perhaps any other reconstruction of the crime – that fit the players and their activities together into a coherent picture.

It does so in large part through the constant confrontation of old information with the new. From the seemingly inexhaustible font of documents declassified by the ARRB have flowed forth revelations in a number of areas explored by the author: Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Mexico City, James Angleton’s role in the setup of Oswald, Shaw and his legal team’s CIA connections, the Clark Panel and HSCA medical cover-ups, the complicity of the media and the federal government in sabotaging Garrison’s investigation – to name just a few highlights from the wide scope of this book. Further, the author’s own interviews during the mid-90s, his 1994 inspection of the DA’s files (he was the first person outside his staff allowed to copy Garrison’s files), along with the work of John Newman, John Armstrong, Bill Davy, and Jim Douglass, as well as a host of articles published in Probe by others such as Lisa Pease and Donald Gibson: these are all mustered to good effect in support of Garrison’s case. The corroborative weight of this evidence is quite compelling. Yet the author never ceases to remind us, as did the twelfth-century schoolmaster Bernard of Chartres, that if we can see farther, it is because we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants (and in particular, one giant, jolly and green though he may have been deemed).

This study not only offers convincing confirmation for Garrison’s hypotheses, but also ratifies Garrison’s more general suspicions concerning the clandestine interference with his investigation, and the direction in which the country was heading. In preparing this review, this writer had occasion to reread Garrison’s interview given to Playboy magazine in October 1967, and was impressed by the lucidity, force, and uncanny relevance of his final remarks:

our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society … We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line … I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dream world America I once believed in … Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

Recall, this was 1967!² At a distance of 50 years, where half of one’s readership has no memory of the event, the question of relevance naturally arises; but such relevance is not realized by fishing for links between the assassination and personages responsible for recent political crimes or abuses, as some of the authors criticized in DiEugenio’s lecture do, for these mostly end up having the consistency of gossamer. As Garrison alerted us, it is to the institutional consequences of the assassination that we must look, because, as Lisa Pease opines in her preface to the book, “the same operational template can be run again” (and indeed has been, repeatedly). Destiny Betrayed does not bludgeon the reader with this message; it makes the point cogently by showing rather than by telling.

For a number of reasons, this is not a typical book on the JFK assassination. As DiEugenio himself has declared (see, for instance, his remarks at the beginning of his well-known review of JFK and the Unspeakable), it was already his intention with the first edition to bring assassination research out of the ghetto. What he had in mind was a broadening of perspective beyond the mechanics of Dealey Plaza or the suspicious goings-on at Bethesda, and this is precisely the manner in which the reader is made to enter the maze:

The events that exploded in Dallas on November 22, 1963, had their genesis in Washington on a February day in 1947.

Much as with the traditional novel, one can almost unpack the remaining four-hundred-odd pages from that single opening assertion. The quest for the appropriate context in which to decipher JFK’s presidency and death is one of the principal tasks undertaken by the author. But his formal choices also transform his engagement with these events from a simple act of sleuthing into a veritable essay in the hermeneutics of history.

To illustrate what I mean by this, let me begin by observing that a dialogue of past and present is inscribed in the book through the interplay of narration and commentary. The narrative building-blocks are ordered mainly along chronological lines, leading from the initial post-war articulations of U.S. foreign policy, through JFK’s presidency, the activities in New Orleans and Dallas preceding his death, and the subsequent domestic investigations, to conclude with some reflections about the continuing impact of the assassination and its cover-up on the political climate of the United States today. This basic organization is, however, selectively adjusted for thematic purposes; for instance, Oswald’s activities in New Orleans (chpts. 5-6) are separated from his return to the U.S. and his final days (chpt. 8) by a flash-back dealing with his early life and defection (chpt. 7), thus lending, by its central position, an explanatory prominence to his intelligence training. (I should add here that these latter two chapters form the best concise treatment of Oswald I have yet to read.) The last three chapters also break with the preceding linear progression (more on this below). But emerging from within this broadly forward sweep are also narrative swirls and eddies where the author interrupts his story in order to indicate a noteworthy nexus which will be handled more fully later, or which involves knowledge we now possess but which was unavailable then. Far from obscuring or confusing the chain of events, this weaving in and out of strict chronology – and its attendant modulation between points of view – is adroitly handled and lends a sense of continuous integration to the reader’s journey.

Another narrative technique, related to and often conjoined with the preceding one, is that of the leitmotif. For instance, we meet a corporation called Freeport Sulphur in the very first chapter with respect to mining concessions in 1950s Cuba. We return to that company in the context of Garrison’s discovery of a Freeport link between Shaw, Ferrie and Banister (chpt. 10); then again in terms of Gaeton Fonzi’s reinvestigation of those leads for the HSCA (chpt. 15). And then finally, in the fullest and most crushing context, with that ignoble corporation’s role in the Indonesian coup, related in the penultimate chapter. Another example of this technique centers on the CIA’s turn to drug-running money after Kennedy defunded Mongoose, which we first read about in Chapter 6, and then again in Garrison’s discovery of the Ruby-Oswald-Cheramie connection (chpt. 10), with further confirmation via reference to Douglas Valentine’s discovery (2004) of the CIA’s infiltration of U.S. Customs, followed by a discussion of the Hubert-Griffin memo (see Section III below), putting Sergio Arcacha Smith, whose name peppers the pages of this book, decidedly in the middle of it all. Leitmotif is also used with respect to one of the cardinal figures in this story, Bernardo DeTorres. He is first discussed in the context of how news of the back channel to Castro was divulged among the Cuban exiles (chpt. 4), then with respect to his infiltration of Garrison’s inchoate investigation (chpt. 11), and then again with reference to his independent discovery by Fonzi through Rolando Otero which led to his wider connection to the probable operational faction of the plot (chpt. 15).

The artful use of such devices lends to Destiny Betrayed a concern with the intimate connection between meaning and expository process shared by few other books on this subject, the vast majority of which are simply organized by topic. More specifically, these literary techniques do not serve as mere artifice, extraneously imposed on the material, but emerge naturally from it, as the author winds and unwinds his thread through the Daedalian intricacies of a story that ultimately is revealed to have explicated itself. For over the retrospective span of the intervening decades, events have indeed disclosed their own significance before our very eyes, not only through documentary releases, but by the repeated pattern of the actions of their protagonists. One of the theses of the book is that the JFK assassination and the destruction of Garrison were interlocking covert operations, in which some of the same players were involved. Another theme, which runs in parallel, is that Kennedy’s presidency blocked the progress of economic globalism, which was then restored after his death. We are made conscious of these relationships, not just through a series of momentary epiphanies, but ultimately through participation in a larger unfolding. In a profound sense, this book claims that the meaning of November 22, 1963, lies as much in what subsequent occurrences have affirmed as in the case that can be constructed directly from the facts and circumstances of the crime.

This conviction manifests itself finally in the book’s broadest architecture, one based on recapitulation. The concluding chapters generate a triad of embedded arches – or perhaps even concentric rings: the outermost (chpts. 1-4, plus 17) deals with Cold War policy and JFK, echoed by a discussion of foreign policy changes under LBJ; inside that, we have a similar structure (chpts. 5-8, plus 16) addressing the significance of Garrison’s discoveries about New Orleans and Oswald and ending with Mexico City, the importance of which Garrison clearly understood, but the full truth about which was concealed from his view. This leaves the innermost tripartite (and most drama-like) sequence (chpts. 9-10, 11-13, 14-15) tracing Garrison’s career and entry into the case, the government and media campaign against him, and the actions subsequent to Shaw’s acquittal, including how the same forces deployed against Garrison made a shambles of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (Chapter 18 completes the composition, serving as a coda to the entire book).

At the center stands, of course, Jim Garrison, the oracular voice decrying national calamity and a knowing participant in his own professional ruin, whose vindication is as much a part of the story DiEugenio tells as is the exposure of the powers which removed JFK from office. It is, in fact, this dovetailing of two lives, this fateful encounter of purpose, that gives Destiny Betrayed its dramatic design. The book’s felicitous title, retained for this second edition, suggests an underlying logic impelling actions toward their “dénouement” (the title of the final chapter); a process, to take the author at his etymological word, to be perceived as the untying of a knot. The book’s title not only implies (somewhat paradoxically) the deliberate theft of what should have been, both in terms of U.S. foreign policy and in terms of bringing (at least one) of the perpetrators to justice; it also hints at how the unraveling of five decades has “betrayed” – that is, revealed – the character of both John Kennedy and Jim Garrison, despite monumental exertions to conceal or distort the truth.

The Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies … in my opinion the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism.

– John F. Kennedy, from a speech given during the Stevenson campaign, 1956

II. JFK, the Cold War Establishment, and Cuba

As mentioned in the preceding section, the first four chapters of the book, along with the penultimate one, raise a fundamental issue: whether JFK was ever a “Cold-Warrior”, and whether the assassination had any effect on the policies he had been pursuing. Seriously posing this question has long been anathema to mainstream writers on both the Left and the Right, some choosing to feign perplexity at the so-called “enigma” that was John F. Kennedy. At the very least we may observe that historians have been burdened by a considerable amount of preconceived baggage regarding what Kennedy’s politics could or could not have been. Yet I think John Newman put his finger on the crux of the matter in his masterful JFK and Vietnam: if one concentrates on the rhetorical indirections of his public statements – which JFK felt compelled to practice, for better or for worse, out of fear of vitiating his political efficacy – then one may derive the picture of a man who is mostly in conformity with the ideological matrix of his time. But as Newman teaches us, that is not the best way to understand his presidency. For, in the end, it is what he actually did and did not do which tells the more authentic tale. DiEugenio is not insensitive to the political pragmatist in Kennedy; but speaking of his desire to bolster his anti-communist credentials, especially during the 1960 campaign, the author insists that “below the level of campaign rhetoric, John Kennedy was not simply a more youthful version of Eisenhower” [19]³. Even James Douglass, with whose marvelous book this one aptly bears comparison (more on this momentarily), can be led astray by this side of JFK into believing that he changed his foreign policy stance in some essential way while he was president. With Destiny Betrayed, I believe we are finally given firmer footing for posing this question properly.

In order to do so, one must look to origins. That is where the first chapter, Legacy, begins. From the opening allusion to the request from the British Embassy asking Secretary of State Marshall for aid in quelling insurrection in Turkey and Greece, through the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the National Security Act, we witness the fateful passage from republic to empire as the United States assumes custody of former European colonial interests in the name of containing putative Communist aggression and the Domino Theory. For DiEugenio, the key which unlocks what follows is this implicit marriage of ideology with economic interest. Out of that unholy alliance is born, through the midwifery of Allen Dulles, the de facto executive arm of neo-colonialism in the guise of a drastically metamorphosed CIA. In Dulles, in fact, these two lines – a hard-core view of the Soviet Union (which he shared with Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, whose vast network Dulles, while chief of the Berlin OSS office, helped retain with Gehlen in control), and a globalist perspective held in common with the Rockefeller corporate interests (which he and his brother John served as senior partners at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell) – converged perfectly and literally became one. To quote DiEugenio, “With Allen Dulles, the acronym ‘CIA’ came to stand for ‘Corporate Interests of America’” [6]. By the time of the Bay of Pigs, so the long buried Lovett-Bruce report tells us, 80% of the CIA’s budget was going to covert operations [49].

While belief in the necessity of a nuclear deterrent is certainly one component of Cold War ideology, this Dulles-Rockefeller view of the Third World as their own economic protectorate is equally, if not more, critical. So, too, these two elements should bear at least equal weight when we assess the Kennedy presidency. DiEugenio’s treatment of the assassination plot shares a great deal of ground with that of Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, but it gives us a sharper picture of what made JFK so different from his peers by concentrating much more single-mindedly on this second pane of the Cold War lens. Though Douglass does write incisively about Kennedy’s resistance to the national security agenda in his Cuba and Vietnam decisions, his claim that JFK underwent an Augustinian moment in the garden during the Missile Crisis is, from the wider angle sought by DiEugenio, overstated (and the only feature which mars Douglass’s otherwise convincing treatment of Kennedy). Rather than conversion, DiEugenio’s chosen trope for JFK’s coming into his own is that of education, which he borrows from Richard Mahoney’s seminal work, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (1984).⁴ Taking his cue from that study, DiEugenio locates the decisive moment in Kennedy’s 1951 tour of the Far East and his meeting with Edmund Gullion, senior official at the American Embassy in Saigon (and later appointed by Kennedy as Ambassador to the Congo), an encounter which Robert Kennedy said had a major effect on his brother’s thinking [21-22].

From there the counterpoint between JFK’s views and the actions of the Dulles circle becomes increasingly evident. Kennedy even criticized his own party (Truman and Acheson) for their intellectual indolence in this area. In 1953 he wrote then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles a letter with forty-seven specific questions about what the U.S. aims in Vietnam were, asking how a military solution (including use of atomic weapons) could actually be feasible. While the Eisenhower government secretly conspired to undermine the Geneva accords and have the U.S. assume France’s role in Saigon, Kennedy began to give more speeches about the struggle of African and Asian peoples to throw off the yoke of oppression. The culminating moment in all this came in 1957 when he defended Algerian independence on the floor of the Senate, much to the disapprobation not only of about two-thirds of the major newspapers, but also of one of the Democrats farthest to the left, for whom he had in fact campaigned in 1956: Adlai Stevenson [22-28]. The author is correct to lament the lack of attention given to this speech in the assassination literature. Where Douglass, with good reason, sees the American University speech delivered in June of 1963 as a pivotal event in JFK’s Cold War diplomacy, DiEugenio is surely also right to consider the Algeria speech the Rosetta Stone for what JFK would later do and not do in the Oval Office. In fact, it would have been a good idea to excerpt the entire speech as an appendix in order to show just how far out of the mainstream Senator Kennedy was before he became president.

One of the author’s virtues is his determination to avoid isolating any one foreign policy decision from all the others. For the total picture eloquently proves Kennedy’s substantial divergence, not just from the Dulles coterie, but also from his own advisers. It is unnecessary to dwell at length here on what has become familiar since Newman’s 1992 opus, because it has been clamorously confirmed by the ARRB’s declassification of documents: Kennedy’s plans for withdrawal from Vietnam began in 1962 and were made official in May of 1963. DiEugenio does a fine job summarizing this “Virtual JFK” material, demonstrating the stark reversal of policy which occurred a mere forty-eight hours after the assassination, and which LBJ strove to disguise [365-371]. What the book adds to all this is a series of before-and-after snapshots from other areas of JFK’s Third-World policy, images which capture the same panorama.

In the Congo, for instance, Kennedy favored the nationalists against the Belgian and British allies who wished to see the mineral-rich Katanga province secede. It is more than probable that Lumumba’s assassination was instigated by Allen Dulles to occur just before Kennedy took office [28-29]. President Kennedy thereafter interceded twice with the U.N. to convince them to maintain peacekeeping forces in the region, which they did. Kennedy’s preferences, backed by the U.N., for how to train the Congolese were nevertheless subverted by the Pentagon in its support of eventual dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. LBJ, on the other hand, clearly allied the U.S. with Belgium, and in 1964 allowed right-wing Rhodesians and South Africans to join in this supposed war on a “Chinese inspired Left”, the economic consequences of which were a tremendous boon to Mobutu and the West but disaster for the Congolese [371-373].

JFK’s Indonesian policy follows a similar course. On behalf of Standard Oil and other Rockefeller interests, the CIA had unsuccessfully attempted a Guatemala-like coup there in the late 50s; Kennedy not only broke with this direction, but went well beyond it, befriending the PKI-allied (i.e., “Communist”) Sukarno, and in a parallel with the Congo, also obtaining U.N. support for the return of West Irian, another mineral-rich region coveted by Euro-American corporations, from the Netherlands to the Indonesians [31-33]. JFK’s Indonesian aid bill was never signed by LBJ. A chain reaction, begun by LBJ’s siding with the British over the creation of Malaysia, followed by Indonesia’s withdrawal from the World Bank and IMF, finally resulted in a CIA-prompted bloodbath of genocidal proportions foreshadowing Operation Phoenix. Like Mobutu in the Congo, the new Indonesian government under Suharto brokered mining rights off to the highest bidder [373-375].

Third in this litany of exploitation unleashed by Kennedy’s death is Laos. Newman, David Kaiser and others have recounted JFK’s adamant refusal to intervene unilaterally and his support for a coalition government there (this was an even more visibly pressing issue than Cuba in the first months of 1961). The CIA and military consistently undermined this position, particularly through Air America, the CIA’s covert air force. They destabilized the Laotian economy with forged currency and forced the Pathet Lao into retaliatory action, which turned into a civil war responsible for untold decimation. The economic fruit of all this was an immensely profitable heroin trade [375-377]. One could further include here LBJ’s analogous handling of situations in the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Iran, and Greece.

This general pattern of reversal is striking enough. But frequently the players involved have a recurring familiarity that is hard to dismiss as coincidental. For instance, John McCloy is the man who David Rockefeller and the CIA sent in to fix the Brazil situation after Kennedy’s death. Then there is LBJ’s campaign support from Augustus Long and Jock Whitney of Freeport Sulphur, a company with links to Shaw’s International Trade Mart, and which ended up making billions from Indonesian concessions. (Long established a group called the National Independent Committee for Johnson, which included the likes of Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers and Thomas Cabot, Michael Paine’s cousin.) But of course, proof of conspiracy does not (and cannot) rest merely at this speculative level. And while all of this provides a credible background against which to delineate what occurred in Dallas, DiEugenio never claims it as more than that. From the weight of the evidence, the true catalyst for the assassination still must be considered to be the powder keg of Cuban affairs.

Which also fits into the foregoing template. The book’s chapters on Cuba are unparalleled in the field. From their mini-history of Cuba before the revolution, what fairly jumps off the page is the reduction of the island to financial slavery by American corporate interests and Wall Street banking. This was made possible thanks to Batista’s lifting of taxes, a tremendous negative trade-balance (two thirds of Cuba’s needs were provided by American imports), and a spiraling indebtedness through short-term loans. We learn that by 1959, American investment in Cuba was greater than in any other Latin American country save oil-rich Venezuela [7-10]. When Castro sets out to rectify this through nationalization of agricultural and mining concerns (like the Moa Bay company), and turns to the Soviet Union in order not to bow to IMF strictures, Eisenhower and the CIA begin to organize against him, recruiting financiers, military leaders and other ex-members of the Batista regime in exile. It is out of this miasma that the personnel of this drama begins to take shape: the DRE [Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil], under the auspices of David Phillips; Guy Johnson arranging for Sergio Arcacha Smith’s escape; who joined with José Miro Cardona and Tony Varona into another group which Howard Hunt, authorized to form a Cuban government in exile by Tracy Barnes, augmented with Manuel Artime and turned into the FRD [Frente Revolucionario Democratico] and eventually CRC [Cuban Revolutionary Council] [14-16; 38-39].

But even more essential is DiEugenio’s exposition of the Bay of Pigs subterfuge. Drawing on several newer books on this topic, along with recently released documents which more than hint at perfidy on the part of the CIA, he outlines how Jake Esterline’s Trinidad plan, originally conceived as a small-scale penetration by a group of guerrilla-trained exiles, morphed into a full-blown D-Day assault under Dick Bissell’s supervision. It was this mutation, a development that Dulles and Bissell tried to obfuscate, which Kennedy in March 1961 nevertheless saw enough of to ask that it be scaled down. Dulles clearly understood Kennedy’s reluctance to commit, and tried to use the “disposal problem” (what to do with all these exiles?) as leverage, further offering him entirely false assurances about popular support for an uprising and the ability of the brigade to regroup in the mountains should they get pinned down on the beaches, and all the while denying him vital intelligence and refusing to allow him to inspect the details of the plan. JFK appears to have committed only because he was convinced of the essentially guerrilla nature of the action. A new site, the Playa Giron, was in fact chosen because it seemed very unlikely that the landing would encounter resistance there. Kennedy also added the requirement that any air strikes on the day of the invasion were to be conducted by the Cuban brigade after a beachhead had been secured – that is, from Cuban soil. He even asked Bissell if the recommended preliminary surgical strikes against Castro’s T-33 fighters were absolutely necessary, and Bissell assured him they would be minimal. But a CIA memo released in 2005 establishes that Bissell knew from November 1960 onwards that the entire plan was unworkable without the aid of the Pentagon. That memo was never forwarded to the President’s desk [34-37; 44-45].

What happens next is a series of tactical foul-ups followed by efforts to nudge Kennedy into military intervention. Not all of Castro’s T-33’s were taken out prior to the landing because Castro, who knew the invasion was coming, had dispersed them around the island. The main forces were crippled by the sinking of two supply ships. The whole operation was very poorly planned, and Castro managed to regain two of the three landing sites by the third day. At that point Deputy Director Charles Cabell tried to get Victor Marchetti to relay to Kennedy the false story of MiGs strafing the beaches (which Marchetti never delivered). Kennedy had made clear from the outset his refusal to deploy U.S. military force, but the CIA gave orders anyway to fly bombing missions over Castro’s airfields, which did not occur only because of fog [41].

Most decisive in its analysis of this episode is a fact which the book makes unequivocal – that Kennedy never withdrew air support, because the so-called D-Day strikes had never been authorized to begin with; they were not part of the revised plan. McGeorge Bundy reiterated Kennedy’s restriction on them to Cabell the night before the landing, and the next day, he and Bissell tried to argue the point with Dean Rusk. But when Rusk gave the CIA the chance to phone the White House and request such strikes the morning of the invasion, the CIA declined the invitation. On the third day, Cabell and the CIA similarly refused to request a naval escort to resupply the brigade with ammunition. In a conversation with Rusk and Adlai Stevenson the day of the invasion, Kennedy again said he had not approved any such strikes from Nicaragua [44, 46].

After ordering the Taylor inquiry (during which the Joint Chiefs basically tried to hang all the blame on the CIA) and consulting with Robert Lovett, co-author of the Lovett-Bruce report, who laid bare the true nature of the CIA, convincing him to fire Dulles, along with Bissell and Cabell, it became obvious to Kennedy that he had been snookered. Today we may reasonably share his opinion that the operation was a planned failure aimed at backing him into a corner and coercing him into an all-out invasion.

It is also patent that a Cuban-driven initiative to oust Castro was transformed into a CIA-controlled enterprise, one with callous disregard for the Cubans themselves, not only in the way they were knowingly turned into so much cannon fodder in a ploy to wrest the island back for American interests, but even in the way the political spectrum of the participants was managed by Hunt so as to exclude the left wing of the exile community, in particular Manolo Ray and JURE – a maneuver which Kennedy challenged by having Bissell explicitly instruct Hunt to include Ray in the CRC; Hunt nominally resigned his position just before the invasion in order to avoid having to deal with him [39-40]. Ray, in fact, was not in favor of the strike-force invasion. But Hunt and his group had plans of their own. First, there was the contingency to have the operational leaders imprisoned and the assault taken over by “renegade Cubans”, in case Washington called off further action [47-48]. And then, there was Operation 40, calling for the liquidation of the leftist contingent during the early stages of the takeover of the island [50-51]. After the debacle, this manipulation was given a new, and ultimately deadly, twist: the incitement of hatred among the Cubans for the Cold War Establishment’s number-one stumbling block.

And it is another achievement of the book that the author pinpoints how this was done, because to my knowledge, no one else has. It was first accomplished by an inflammatory cover story about the so-called cancelled air strikes, a tall tale concocted by Dulles and Hunt. This phony story was reported in Fortune through Dulles’ personal friend Charles Murphy. The purpose was to take the heat off the CIA by setting the blame for the failure at Kennedy’s door. Although it was a false story, it nevertheless stirred up hatred among the Cuban exile community for JFK’s supposed “betrayal”. As CIA anger grew during Mongoose – which William Harvey probably was correct in viewing as the administration’s half-hearted bone tossed to the hard-liners and which was effectively ended by the Missile Crisis – Cuban groups like Alpha 66 were enlisted by the Agency into activities well outside of Mongoose’s purview. This included raids on Russian ships in the Caribbean, faking an invasion of Cuba, and renewed plans to assassinate Castro. All these were intended to defeat the no-invasion pledge and to disrupt JFK’s move toward rapprochement [64-66]. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s end-run around his advisors, the CIA and the Pentagon, which he had found necessary in negotiating with Khrushchev, was repeated with Castro. During 1963 there was a sequence of back-channel communications involving journalist Lisa Howard, William Attwood (U.N. aide and former ambassador to Guinea), Cuban ambassador to the U.N. Carlos Lechuga, and French journalist Jean Daniel, with a view to initiating talks on the normalization of Cuban-American relations. I will not repeat here the full story (or the revealing statement Kennedy made to Daniel about U.S. complicity in Cuba’s enslavement under Batista), but simply stress that the exiles could have gotten wind of this only through their CIA managers, who, despite their having been locked out by Kennedy, had access to the NSA’s wiretaps. (It is also possible that McGeorge Bundy, who was in on some of these discussions, communicated them to his CIA contacts – he was a friend of Dulles. Helms also monitored progress in this area, as Douglass has shown.) Not only did David Morales’s counterintelligence group know of it [71]; as referred to previously, Rolando Otero revealed to Fonzi that he knew of the back channel through Bernardo DeTorres, declaring that at that point, “something big was being planned”. That this “dangerous knowledge” was held by the anti-Castro Cubans is confirmed by Fabian Escalante’s report of Felipe Vidal Santiago’s statement that the exiles, realizing their cause was doomed, began to hatch a plot to get rid of Kennedy and blame it on Castro. Vidal spoke with his CIA handler, Col. William Bishop. Shortly thereafter, a CIA official – very likely David Phillips – addressed a group of exiles in a Miami safe house, saying, “You must eliminate Kennedy” [393]. What is further remarkable about how the evidence for this angle fits together – and once again how symmetrically designed the book is – is revealed earlier [97]: working independently, Richard Case Nagell also discovered that the Cubans knew of the back channel and that “something big” was in the works. Attwood’s own fears that news would leak down, through the CIA, to the Cubans, and with dire consequences, appear not to be unjustified.

III. Many Mansions: Garrison’s evidence today

Whatever one may believe about Garrison, it is difficult today to argue that his investigation was marginal. The early leads he uncovered were all connected with Oswald or Ruby, and demonstrated foreknowledge of, or involvement in, the plot, or at least a concern over Oswald’s arrest. The sheer number of New Orleans-related incidents is impressive: Rose Cheramie’s story, the Clinton-Jackson incident, 544 Camp Street, Banister thrashing Jack Martin, Clay Bertrand requesting legal assistance for Oswald from Dean Andrews, Ferrie frantically searching for his library card and photos from the Civil Air Patrol, and so forth. And all of these facts were already known at the time of the first official inquiry, but were “concealed, discounted, or tampered with by the authorities. And the Warren Commission did nothing with them. Therefore, they laid dormant for four years,” writes DiEugenio [100].

A full account of the evidence adduced in Destiny Betrayed cannot possibly be given here. To do so would mean replicating it nearly page by page, for there is very little fat to trim away. Moreover, the broad outlines of the conspiracy in New Orleans and Dallas involving the setup of Oswald as patsy is without a doubt already familiar to the present reader. I think it therefore most useful to pass under review a number of the pieces in the puzzle whose position has been clarified since the DA’s time. That is, after all, one of the main goals of the book under discussion. What follows is a short list of fifteen of the more salient points.
1. In 1993, a photo of Oswald and David Ferrie from the Civil Air Patrol was shown on Frontline. Let me remind the reader that every newspaper editorial I can recall from 1991-1992 lambasted Oliver Stone’s film by spouting that no such evidence of their acquaintance existed [see DiEugenio’s mini-biography of Ferrie, 82-85].
2. One of Garrison’s most important findings was Oswald’s presence at Banister’s office at 544 Camp/531 Lafayette Street. Since Garrison, others such as Weisberg, Summers and Weberman have contributed to our knowledge of this node in the conspiracy, but no one tells it with the command DiEugenio has over this material, bringing to it his own field work, enhanced by released HSCA documents and files of the DA’s office (see in particular Chapter 6). I mention just two points of interest here. First, he confirms Tommy Baumler’s assertions that Shaw, Guy Johnson, and Banister constituted the intelligence apparatus in New Orleans [209-210; 274-275]. Second, he amplifies Sergio Arcacha Smith’s importance beyond his role in the Rose Cheramie – Jack Ruby drug run. As Francis Fruge stated to Bob Buras, Smith seems to have been the linchpin between New Orleans and Dallas; maps of the Dealey Plaza sewer system were actually found in his apartment [180-182; 329].
3. Davy’s and DiEugenio’s legwork has also reinforced Fruge’s and Dischler’s original discoveries about Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald in Clinton-Jackson. The author cites a large array of witnesses which leave no doubt that Shaw (and not Banister) was there as Oswald stood in line to register to vote. A sustained discussion of this incident sheds further light on its purpose: to get Oswald a job at the East Louisiana State Hospital (the same psychiatric hospital that Cheramie was later taken to), then switch the records to make it appear he was actually a ward. Oswald’s familiarity with the names of the doctors may have come through the acquaintance of Tulane Medical School’s chief of surgery, Alton Ochsner, who did LSD and electrode implantation research and was an INCA informant, with both Shaw and Banister; or it could have been through Arcacha Smith [88-93; 156-157; 185-187].
4. The Oswald chapters make good use of the seminal background research of John Newman and John Armstrong. I extract here only two nuggets from this very rich vein, having to do with his role as false defector:
  
  After being given the runaround by CIA and military intel, State Department security analyst Otto Otepka sent Bissell a request for information distinguishing false from real defectors; this got funneled through Jim Angleton to staffers who were told to stay away from certain names; Oswald’s was marked SECRET. Shortly thereafter, but thirteen months after his defection, the CIA created a 201 file on him. Had Otepka not inquired, all of Oswald’s files would likely have stayed hidden in the Counter Intelligence/SIG sector under Angleton’s eyes. Otepka’s safe was later drilled and his career destroyed; he was removed from his post on November 5, 1963 [164-165; see also 143-144].
  
  Donald Deneselya’s recollection of a CIA debriefing of Oswald in New York was reported on Frontline in 1993, but Helm’s disingenuous denials were there given the last word. John Newman then found a CIA memo wherein the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote of such a debriefing as motivated by an “operational interest in the Harvey [Oswald] Story” [149-150].
5. DiEugenio also casts further light on Oswald’s activities as agent provocateur in New Orleans. Again, I offer only two of his more telling conclusions:
  
  From the earliest critiques of the Warren Report (see, for instance, Meagher, Accessories after the Fact), but especially after Harold Weisberg obtained through the FOIA a transcript of the closed-door Warren Commission session discussing Oswald’s potential role as intelligence agent, the claim he was an FBI informant has repeatedly surfaced. DiEugenio builds a strong case for Warren DeBrueys as Oswald’s FBI handler in New Orleans. The FBI destroyed the files on Orestes Pena, witness to one of their meetings, just prior to the creation of the HSCA. It was DeBrueys that Oswald asked to see after his arrest following the leafleting incident. William Walter found an informant file on Oswald with DeBrueys’ name on it. DeBrueys most certainly knew of Oswald’s association with Banister before the assassination. FBI agent James Hosty later told Church Committee witness Carver Gayton that Oswald indeed was an informant [109; 158-160].
  
  The other side of the coin to the FBI’s interest in Oswald is suggested by Hosty’s probable prevarication that he learned Oswald left Dallas for New Orleans in mid-May; Newman has shown there are at least seven instances during this period when the FBI should have known where he was and also about his dealings with the FPCC. The reason for this sleight-of-hand was that the FBI, which had its own anti-FPCC program, was probably told not to interfere with a parallel CIA-run operation in which Oswald appeared to be a key player. The existence of such a CIA discreditation program, run by David Phillips and James McCord, was revealed by the ARRB. This explains why the CIA ordered 45 copies of the first printing of Corliss Lamont’s pamphlet, “The Crime Against Cuba,” in June of 1961; it was either Banister who then requested these from CIA, or someone, perhaps Phillips again, provided them as part of the program he was running with McCord [158-162; also 347-348, 356].
6. In connection with this CIA-directed anti-FPCC charade, there is evidence that Oswald’s Marine acquaintance, Kerry Thornley – the only one to finger him as a “true believer” –, frequented Oswald and Marina in New Orleans and partnered with him in the leafleting activity. DiEugenio gives a detailed portrait of this dubious fellow, from his two books about Oswald through his right-wing and intelligence connections, his retraction on the eve of the HSCA investigation of earlier denials made to Garrison concerning his knowledge of Banister, Ferrie, Shaw and the latter’s friend at Time-Life, David Chandler, and his subsequent diversionary yarns about his unwitting involvement in the plot. Weisberg (Never Again, 1995) tells how the Secret Service was blocked by the FBI from discovering Oswald had an accomplice in New Orleans, and tracked down witnesses identifying Thornley as this person. Then there is also Thornley’s own curious trip to Mexico City in July/August, just ahead of Oswald’s putative visit there [132; 187-193].
7. Philip Melanson followed the trail of the ties between the CIA and the White Russian community in Dallas, and more specifically between Dulles and George DeMohrenschildt, who was cleared to meet Oswald through J. Walton Moore, the head of the Dallas CIA office. Supplementing this discussion with additional information Garrison did not have – drawn in particular from the work of Carol Hewitt, Steve Jones and Barbara LaMonica – DiEugenio makes evident not only the more than casual acquaintance between the DeMohrenschildts and the Paines, but also the numerous links of both Michael’s and Ruth’s families to the CIA and Dulles. Again, this is a real achievement, since this fascinating information has not appeared in any previous book. Michael’s mother, Ruth Forbes, was close friends with Mary Bancroft, an OSS agent with whom Dulles had intimate professional and personal ties. Michael’s stepfather was one of the creators of Bell Helicopter, while his mother’s family descended from the Boston Forbes and Cabots, executives and board members of United Fruit and Gibraltar Steamship (a CIA front for David Phillips’s Radio Swan). Ruth Paine’s father and her brother-in-law both worked for AID, another CIA front, and her sister Sylvia Hyde was employed at Langley prior to 1963 as a psychologist. Both Michael and Ruth were themselves involved in undercover work. One document released by the ARRB reveals that Michael Paine engaged in infiltration activities at SMU in Dallas similar to those of Oswald; the Warren Commission was aware of filing cabinets found at the Paine residence containing data on pro-Castro sympathizers, which they downplayed in the “Speculations and Rumors” part of the report [193-200].
8. A “coincidence of cosmic proportions,” as DiEugenio phrases it, is the link revealed by declassified ARRB documents between Robert Maheu, who ran a cover company in D.C. for the recruitment of assassins to kill Castro, and Guy Banister, via Carmine Bellino. Bellino, who shared offices with Maheu, also partnered with Banister and helped him get started in New Orleans. Walter Sheridan brought Bellino onto the RFK “get Hoffa” squad. “It seems a bit ironic that a trusted aide of Robert Kennedy had been the partner of the man who helped set up the fall guy in the murder of his brother,” writes DiEugenio [257-258].
9. A declassified memo from 1964, written by Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, stated that “underworld figures, anti-Castro Cubans and extreme right-wing” elements were the most promising leads with respect to a Dallas-based gun-smuggling ring. The memo also suggests that Oswald’s Cuban connections in Dallas were never explored. Garrison himself was interested in Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, the head of the Dallas wing of Alpha 66. We now know, through Buddy Walthers’ informants, that a group of Cubans met at a safe house at 3128 Harlendale for months up until about a week before the assassination, when they vacated it; Oswald was also seen there [213].
10. Another declassified HSCA document, a 1977 memo from Garrison to L.J. Delsa and Bob Buras, recounts the story of Clara Gay, a client of Attorney G. Wray Gill whose office David Ferrie shared. She happened to call Gill right after Ferrie was interviewed by Garrison and the FBI and overheard the secretary deny Gill’s knowledge of Ferrie’s activities. Clara then went to the office, and noticed on Ferrie’s desk a diagram of Dealey Plaza with “Elm Street” on it, which she unsuccessfully tried to snatch in order to turn over to the FBI. What she recounted to Garrison can be put together with Jimmy Johnson’s claim to have seen a manila envelope, which Ferrie referred to as “The Bomb”, containing a diagram for a Castro assassination, and with the fact that Ferrie had studied the ejection angles of cartridges from various types of rifles. This suggests that the New Orleans group may have been involved in some of the actual planning of the crossfire, not just Oswald’s framing [215-216].
11. DiEugenio calls the “most ignored piece of key evidence” a package addressed to Oswald, but bearing a sticker with a non-existent address, which lay around the dead letter section of the Dallas post office unnoticed for twelve days (discussed in Meagher, 63-64). Surprisingly, the FBI did not apply solvents to the label in order to expose the probable original address beneath. Inside was a sheet of brown wrapping paper resembling the one recovered at the Book Depository, inside which Oswald supposedly smuggled the rifle into the building. There were absolutely no latent fingerprints on it. What is of further interest is the fact that the police found a postage-due notice at the Irving post office for a package sent on November 20 to a Lee Oswald at the Paine’s address, 2515 W. Fifth Street. Ruth tried to claim this was for magazines; this form is curiously attached to a postage due notice for George A. Bouhe, supposedly one of Marina’s English tutors, and neighbor of Jack Ruby. DiEugenio surmises that when an attempt to get Oswald’s fingerprints on an incriminating piece of evidence by having him open the package when he went to Irving the evening preceding the assassination failed because of postage due, the non-existent address was applied so as to route the package into oblivion [205-207].
12. I have already referred to Bernardo DeTorres, who was the first of the Garrison infiltrators. Garrison sent DeTorres to Miami on what turned out to be a fruitless investigation. Fonzi, Ed Lopez and Al Gonzalez all suspected him of being a conspirator. He is particularly noteworthy in that he was cross-posted between CIA and military intelligence, and for his link to Mitch Werbell, the arms expert some think designed the weapons used in Dealey Plaza. DeTorres also admitted to having been enlisted [sic!] by the Secret Service to guard Kennedy on his November 1963 Miami trip. He claimed to an informant of the HSCA that he possessed pictures taken during the assassination [226-228]. I myself wonder if DeTorres was the one who originally leaked news of Garrison’s investigation to reporter Jack Dempsey. I also wonder, given DeTorres’s coziness with Trafficante, whether the latter’s famous statement that Kennedy would be hit came from the same source.
13. We now come to one of the “smoking guns” in this case, Mexico City. Two extremely important documents were declassified by the ARRB in this area: the Slawson-Coleman report and the Lopez-Hardway report. The former shows how the Warren Commission’s investigators obligingly permitted themselves to be guided by the CIA; the explosive content of the latter (which is over 300 pages long) proves why it was censored for fifteen years. (An annex, entitled “Was Oswald an Agent of the CIA?,” has yet to be released.) A number of authors have more or less successfully navigated this material (John Newman and James Douglass are exemplary), but I recommend Chapter 15 of Destiny Betrayed for the well-lit path it cuts through a murky bit of business. The long and short of it is that it is doubtful Oswald was even there; but if he was, the appearances at the Cuban Consulate and Russian Embassy were very likely by impostors. There are, remarkably, no photos of him, despite routine daily takes from CIA surveillance cameras, and the man who spoke with Sylvia Duran does not fit Oswald’s physical description; moreover, this person was reportedly fluent in Spanish, which there is no evidence Oswald knew, but apparently struggled with Russian, of which Oswald had a good command. But the truly explosive part of the story is what John Newman revealed in his book Oswald and the CIA, and what DiEugenio refers to as “the dog that didn’t bark”. Thanks to the bifurcation of Oswald’s CIA files, the information concerning Oswald’s supposed meeting with Valery Kostikov (in his capacity as head of KGB assassinations) was kept out of his operational dossier, so that the connection between the two would not be made until the very day of the assassination. Oswald’s undisturbed return to Dallas was further guaranteed by the fact that the FBI’s FLASH warning on him was cancelled on October 9, just hours before the cable from the Mexico City station concerning his visit arrived in Washington. The story the CIA gave to the FBI about an anti-FPCC campaign in foreign countries may account for this [346-354]. It is not hard to discern here the earmarks of entrapment, which explains Hoover’s immediate cover-up of the FBI’s prior knowledge of Oswald’s activities.⁵
14. The post-assassination epilogue to the Mexico City episode is equally scorching in its implications. It is a cautionary tale that snafus can happen to the most diabolical schemes. Since a phone call made by Duran to the Russian Embassy did not clearly mention Oswald’s name, a fake call had to be made. Using a tape of this call was risky, because Oswald had been exposed on the media that summer in New Orleans. For some reason, Anne Goodpasture, Phillips’s trusted associate at the Mexico City station, sent the tape to FBI agent Eldon Rudd on the evening of the 22nd. After Hoover was told that the voice on it was not Oswald’s, Goodpasture and Rudd invented a cover story that the tape actually had been routinely erased, a story belied by other sources, and even by the person whom Helms replaced with Angleton as liaison to the Commission, John Whitten. Luckily, LBJ either did not draw the obvious conclusions from Hoover’s revelations, or decided not to act on them, but instead played along by using this phony evidence of a foreign plot to keep the lid on the investigation. What was later revealed was that Mexico City station chief Winston Scott had copies of this material, including the tape, in his safe, which Angleton flew down personally to recover when Scott passed away. All of this newer information serves to endorse Garrison’s opinions as expressed by a memo discovered by DiEugenio. In that memo Garrison wrote that he: 1) Doubts the existence of any photo of Oswald, because it would have certainly appeared in the Report; 2) Asks why consulate employees did not recognize photos of the real Oswald; 3) Notices that Duran’s name is printed in Oswald’s notebook; 4) Wonders why there is no bus manifest for Oswald’s trip; 5) Notes there are no fingerprints on Oswald’s tourist card. As DiEugenio asserts, Garrison was the only investigator at that stage to recognize the proof of the plot in this Mexican episode [357-364].
15. The last set of observations has to do with Clay Shaw. First, Ramsey Clark’s 1967 slip-up to the press about the FBI investigating Shaw in 1963 was based in fact. For the FBI had indeed run a check on Shaw then; it is uncertain whether they ever communicated this to the Commission [388]. Next, and as previously stated, Gaeton Fonzi rediscovered the connection, first uncovered by Garrison, between Shaw, Ferrie and Banister through Freeport Sulphur, Moa Bay and Nicaro Nickel. Freeport tried to arrange the transport of nickel to Canada from Cuba, with the ore refined in Louisiana. Shaw was on the exploratory team. When Castro threatened takeover of these concerns, an assassination plot was proposed inside Freeport’s ranks. Fonzi found that the executive board of Freeport included Godfrey Rockefeller, Admiral Arleigh Burke and the chairman of Texaco, Augustus Long. Donald Gibson has noted that four of the directors of Freeport were also on the Council on Foreign Relations – as much representation as DuPont and Exxon. Shaw was not just part of this group, but also of a wider net of globalist concerns such as the International House and the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans [208-209; 330; 383-384]. On the other side of these corporate connections lay Shaw’s long-time links to CIA. William Davy discovered from a declassified CIA note that one of the files on him had been destroyed. In 1994 Peter Vea also uncovered a document in the National Archives dating from 1967 (during the period Garrison was investigating him) giving Shaw covert security approval in the project QKENCHANT. Victor Marchetti clarified that routine domestic contact service does not require this kind of clearance. He speculated Shaw was involved in the Domestic Operations Division, one of the most secret subsectors of Clandestine Services, which once had been run by Tracy Barnes, and which Howard Hunt was working for at that time. We also now possess further confirmation of Shaw’s involvement with Permindex, which had ties to the Schroeder Banking Corporation and thereby with Heinrich Himmler’s onetime network, and which supported the French renegade military outfit, the OAS. We also know from the declassification process that Shaw’s lawyers had nearly unlimited cooperation from the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department, and that one of the reasons for their repeated delay tactics was to allow this covert assistance to do its job [383-391].
It is enlightening to watch as Garrison’s discoveries, transposed through this newer information, are accorded even more strength. It shows how good his and his main investigators’ instincts were, despite the infiltration of his team by CIA plants who tried to lead them astray.

History may not repeat itself, but often it rhymes.

– Mark Twain (attr.)

It’s Garrison all over again.

– Chris Sharrett, HSCA staffer

IV. The Rhyme of Two Investigations

Thanks to declassification, we can now assert with confidence that mass media and government agencies collaborated in a concerted program to sabotage Garrison’s investigation and to damage his reputation so that he would forever after be politically crippled. We also know that something quite similar occurred when the House Select Committee’s staff started heading down the same path under Dick Sprague’s and Bob Tanenbaum’s able and determined leadership.

Before addressing this topic, I would like to advert the reader to the chapter presenting Garrison’s biography and early career (Chapter 9). It is a welcome antidote to the received wisdom about him, which was a product of the lurid portrait painted by the mainstream press.⁶ I will not deal with that except to state that anyone who reads this material can no longer rationally believe, if they ever did, that Garrison was motivated by pecuniary gain or careerism, or that he was a tool of the Carlos Marcello syndicate with whom he allegedly was in cahoots. Not always a crusader, and moderate in his political views, Garrison’s consciousness was profoundly altered by the JFK case.

Garrison made a number of regrettable and costly tactical errors. Not arresting Ferrie earlier had the most conspicuously disastrous consequences. When the press initially got wind of the investigation, the DA’s reaction was not one of equanimity; he first denied everything, then after no longer being able to deny it, parried the attacks with a bluster about having solved the case which today we may forgive him for but which unfortunately allowed him to play right into the press’s hands [220-224; 260-261]. He was also too trusting when it came to accepting the help of volunteers, which enabled the infiltration of his office. In terms of the trial itself, his major blunder was not to use all his witnesses. The number of these who averred that Bertrand was Shaw, for instance, is considerable (see DiEugenio’s review of the DA’s files [290-291]).

By and large, however, Garrison was undone by forces beyond his control. Once again, to retrace this story in detail would amount to reproducing the book, so we will concentrate on the larger picture. But it must be stated here that no one has elucidated this program as clearly or in as much detail previously. On the basis of interviews and declassified documents, DiEugenio argues that there was a three-stage program to destroy Garrison and his case against Shaw. First, there were the “singleton” penetrations of his office. Second, there was a media blitz orchestrated by Walter Sheridan and his intelligence and journalistic assets, such as James Phelan and Hugh Aynesworth, leading up to the NBC special aired on June 19, 1967. Finally, when Garrison fought back, Angleton and Helms got directly involved [229].

From CIA documents, the HSCA found that there had been, at one time or another, nine undercover agents in the DA’s office [229]. The first of these, as we already mentioned, was Bernardo DeTorres. The second was William Gurvich, a local private investigator who offered Garrison his services in late 1966. Gurvich’s polygraph expert tried to intimidate prosecution witness Perry Russo. Garrison discovered after several months that Gurvich had been working with Sheridan, and when Gurvich formally defected from the DA’s ranks in June of 1967, he took a copy of Garrison’s master file with him. He later went to work for Shaw’s lawyers. Gurvich may have been recruited by Sheridan, but the third mole, Gordon Novel, was deliberately put there by Allen Dulles. Novel was a CIA explosives and electronics expert who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs. By 1959 he had come to know Ferrie, Shaw and Dean Andrews, and in 1966 he met Dulles. Once Garrison hired him, Novel started to convene with Sheridan. Novel had direct knowledge of all the principals of Garrison’s case, and Shaw had a phone number of Novel’s in Reno which very few people knew. When Garrison subpoenaed Novel to testify before the March 16, 1967 grand jury, he fled New Orleans to a safe house in Ohio. It was at that point that Dulles and Langley inserted Gordon into a network of CIA-friendly journalists, and Sheridan arranged for a phony polygraph test for him to bolster his credibility. On the basis of the latter, Sheridan then launched a propaganda barrage in the major media, furnishing governors and judges justification for ignoring extradition requests and not serving subpoenas originating from the New Orleans DA’s office [230-235]. Sheridan also sent Gurvich to RFK to try to influence his opinion of Garrison. As DiEugenio remarks, what is astonishing is the fact that these three infiltrations began nearly six months before Garrison even accused the CIA of complicity in the assassination [233].

In terms of the second phase, its impresario, Walter Sheridan, can no longer be taken, as he commonly has been, to be a Kennedy loyalist acting with the sanction of the former Attorney General. DiEugenio elucidates his true affiliations. While at the super-secret NSA, he worked out of the Office of Security, and later as Assistant Chief of the Clearance Division. That position is roughly analogous to Angleton’s at CIA, and as DiEugenio shows, it is hard to believe they did not know each other. When he was with the Hoffa squad, the agency they outsourced work to was, according to a Senate investigator, owned by the CIA [256-257]. We have already mentioned his link to Maheu through Carmine Bellino. From another set of declassified documents we know that Sheridan, through his lawyer Herbert Miller, was in contact with Langley concerning the arrangement of a trip to Washington for Al Beauboeuf, one of Ferrie’s companions on the Houston-Galveston trip the weekend of the assassination. Sheridan’s probable association with Angleton explains his willingness to incorporate the CIA’s perspective into the NBC show he was producing in 1967 [237-238]. Needless to say, NBC, Sheridan’s employer, and its parent company, RCA, had longtime associations through Robert and David Sarnoff with the ONI, the NSA, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund on foreign policy [255-256].

Sheridan’s strategy was fourfold: (1) to “flip” key witnesses; (2) to accuse Garrison of unethical practices; (3) to use allies of Shaw and the CIA to give a very slanted view of the prosecution’s case; (4) to engineer the presentation to look as though Garrison, not Shaw, were on trial. An affidavit released by the ARRB shows how far he was willing to go in suborning testimony. Fred Leemans, the final interviewee on Sheridan’s program, signed this sworn statement denying the accusations of bribery he made on the program [240-241].

Sheridan’s allies in the press also had intelligence ties. DiEugenio devotes separate sections to both Jim Phelan [243-249] and Hugh Aynesworth [249-255]. He demonstrates their complicity in the cover-up at length, relying in both cases, once again, on recently released documents. Again, the section on Phelan is a landmark contribution. No one has ever taken this ersatz journalist apart like this before. Phelan’s denials of having communicated with the FBI are clearly disproven by this new information. The lies he spread concerning Russo’s being drugged, or of Russo’s having retracted his statements to Sciambra – these and other deceptions are now exposed as knowing misrepresentations. In fact, Phelan also confessed to having tried to convince Russo that he had mistaken Banister for Shaw [309]. Aynesworth’s connections to the CIA have also come out. We now know that he had an ongoing relationship with J. Walton Moore of the Dallas CIA office, and had applied for a job with the Agency. Another FOIA document obtained by Gary Mack shows Aynesworth informing Hoover and President Johnson of Garrison’s intent to indict the FBI and CIA. Aynesworth, primed by Gurvich, impeded Garrison’s attempt to interview Sergio Arcacha Smith by suggesting to the Cuban exile that he request the presence of police, along with assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, for an interview with Garrison’s assistant Jim Alcock. Aynesworth was also in contact with Shaw’s lawyer, Ed Wegmann, through 1971, writing intelligence briefs on Garrison’s witnesses for him.

The most important revelations to come from declassification, however, have to do with the third stage. J. Edgar Hoover, according to Gordon Novel, had a counterintelligence operation going on. He had Garrison’s office under surveillance. Some of this illegal eavesdropping was certainly being relayed to Shaw’s legal staff via the Wackenhut investigative agency [262-265]. But it is with a September 1967 meeting of Shaw’s lawyers Ed Wegmann and Irvin Dymond with Nathaniel Kossack, an acquaintance of Sheridan’s in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, that a direct appeal for help went out. At this point, we see the formation of the “Garrison Group” at CIA, involving Ray Rocca of Angleton’s staff, plus six other high-level officers. There is no official record of the subsequent meetings, which, according to Victor Marchetti, were moved behind closed doors. But Rocca’s database on Garrison, examined by Bill Simpich, is very extensive [269-271]. One sign of what was going on was the intensified propaganda campaign conducted from early 1968 onward, involving David Chandler, Sandy Smith, Richard Billings and Robert Blakey. The idea was to smear Garrison by claiming he was tied to the Mafia and Marcello [274-277]. But even more damaging was the subversion of the legal process itself. Not only were extradition requests (such as for Arcacha Smith) defeated, but subpoenas were thwarted at both ends – New Orleans and Washington – thanks to cooperative judges [271-273]. The documentation mentioned above regarding Sheridan’s collaboration with the CIA showed there was a panel of CIA-cleared lawyers already working in New Orleans, one that was used by Shaw’s lawyers to assign attorneys to Garrison suspects and witnessess, whom they managed to turn; at this point a clandestine channel was set up directly between CIA and Shaw’s lawyers [277-278]. A final CIA-related penetration also occurred at this time in the figure of William Wood/Bill Boxley. Boxley was responsible for injecting all manner of disinformation into Garrison’s office, from his fingering of Nancy Perrin Rich’s husband as the grassy knoll assassin, to his wild goose chase involving Edgar Eugene Bradley, and his mediation of the Farewell America hoax, whose main sponsor Harold Weisberg discovered to be Philippe de Vosjoli, a double agent who worked for Angleton. Aside from this waste of valuable time and resources, this low point in Garrison’s investigation is both sad and comically absurd [278-283].

There were further interventions by federal authorities during the trial itself. There seems to have been an orchestrated attempt to intimidate witnesses from testifying (for example, Richard Case Nagell and Clyde Johnson). Another notable intervention involved sending Dr. Thornton Boswell down to clean up the mess created by Col. Finck’s unexpectedly truthful medical testimony. Boswell had already compromised himself by signing a letter which made it look like the Clark Panel originated from a request he had made. When Boswell revealed his trip to New Orleans to Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB, Gunn memorably wondered: What was the Justice Department’s jurisdiction in a case between the District Attorney and a resident of New Orleans? [299-305].

Turning now to the early days of the HSCA: the information passed on to Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum from the Church Committee through Senator Richard Schweiker immediately put them on the trail of CIA collusion. Tanenbaum organized teams for both New Orleans (L. J. Delsa, Bob Buras, Jon Blackmer) and Miami (Gaeton Fonzi, Al Gonzalez). And their work started to pay off very early on. What they uncovered were links to the next level of conspirators. Fonzi identified the Maurice Bishop who was Antonio Veciana’s CIA contact and who Veciana saw with Oswald in Dallas as none other than David Phillips (see The Last Investigation). But, as we have seen, he also traced DeTorres to Werbell and reopened the leads to Freeport Sulphur. After Fonzi, Delsa, Blackmer, Garrison and others conferred in the late summer of 1977, Blackmer reported: “We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] possibly one of the high level planners or ‘cut out’ to the planners of the assassination” [328-332].

Like Garrison, Sprague recognized he had made some errors of judgment, mostly with respect to how much Congress had his back after the retirement of Rep. Thomas Downing, who had authored the bill to form the House committee upon viewing the Zapruder film [326-327]. But it was no doubt the direction in which the investigation had started to go that brought down the walls around him. In his book, Fonzi further clarifies that Sprague and Tanenbaum refused to sign any non-disclosure agreements with the Agency, since the CIA was a prime suspect. From that point on, Sprague was subjected to the same kind of media barrage as Garrison was, even accusing the prosecutor, whose probity was on the same order as Garrison’s, of having mob associates [332-334]. The moment of transition from Sprague to Blakey is also marked by the intriguing death of George DeMohrenschildt. The author does a fine job in sketching the possible explanations for it; but whether he was hounded by Edward Epstein and Willem Oltmans, or by his own sense of guilt, into taking his own life, or whether he was actually liquidated, the event signals the beginning of the end of the HSCA’s viability [334-338].

DiEugenio characterizes the second Chief Counsel, Robert Blakey, as exhibiting a “protectiveness towards the CIA”: he turned over evidence to them and even ignored Agency advice not to use them to clean their own house when their employee Regis Blahut was caught burglarizing the safe containing the autopsy photos. Blakey, of course, immediately redirected all the committee’s energies into his pet Mafia-did-it theory, making sure that other kinds of leads were not followed, and eliminating or burying some of the evidence which was uncovered. For instance, he used selective or unreliable testimony to separate Oswald from Banister and Ferrie, and then kept evidence to the contrary classified. He also severely clamped down on the re-investigation of the Clinton-Jackson incident. When the New Orleans team polygraphed, at their own expense, a witness supporting Garrison’s claims, Blakey decided to replace them with his own lackeys. Blakey later admitted that the committee could not find any real underworld links to Oswald other than the extremely thin one through his uncle Dutz Murrett, who actually had gotten out of the bookmaking business in 1959. One of Sprague’s staff attorneys, Ken Brooten, who resigned in 1977, wrote Harold Weisberg that the committee “had compromised itself to such an extent that their final product has already been discredited” [340-344]. But no matter: the ghosts of 544 Camp Street had successfully been evicted from the halls of the Capitol.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

– H. G. Wells

The world’s history is the world’s judgment.

– Friedrich von Schiller

V

At the end of 1967, Garrison had the following working view of the plot:

A group at the operational level — the Cuban exiles — with real reasons to want Kennedy dead. A group at the organizational level — the CIA — with resources and experience to plan and execute such an operation. Both had access to the kind of marksmen necessary to pull off the lethal, military-style ambush in Dealey Plaza. From this perspective, Oswald’s odd associations with people like DeMohrenschildt, the Paines, and Ferrie fit in. So did the call from “Bertrand,” and Ruby’s final, culminating murder. [219]

In the final chapter of Destiny Betrayed, DiEugenio voices his contention that Garrison “was one step away from the next level of the conspiracy. This was the real reason for their wanting to stop him” [395]. While in most cases DiEugenio only implicitly signals who the occupants of this level might be (certainly Angleton and Phillips were involved in Oswald’s setup, with very possibly Hunt and Helms monitoring the operational end), he does make one explicit claim:

One of the main tenets of this book is that Allen Dulles was one of the top-level active agents in both the conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the disgraceful official cover up of his death. … Why Lyndon Johnson appointed Dulles to the Warren Commission remains a mystery that has never been satisfactorily solved. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Johnson had a rather hidden relationship with the Rockefellers, especially Nelson. As revealed by Donald Gibson in a groundbreaking essay, he was also badgered into creating the Commission by other Eastern Establishment stalwarts like Eugene Rostow, Joe Alsop, and Dean Acheson. [394].

Whether this claim would hold up in a courtroom is of course a moot question; but it is this reviewer’s opinion that the weight of the evidence, circumstantial as it may be, falls on DiEugenio’s side.

Destiny Betrayed departs from recent trends in that it does not try to render a totalizing image of the assassination in one epic swoop of a thousand-plus pages, but instead keeps its sights trained on what can be in some manner related to Garrison’s findings. For example, although DiEugenio does touch on problems presented by the forensic and medical evidence, this occupies only about a dozen pages out of the whole, and arises directly from his exposition of the Shaw trial. And though what Garrison uncovered in that area was and still is quite extraordinary – namely, that the autopsy was directed by the military chain of command towards pre-established conclusions –, the precise relationship of these orders to those responsible for the operation on the ground is left provocatively suspended. Similarly, while I believe Garrison had his own misgivings about the role of the Secret Service in Dallas, that aspect of the plot is not explored. But again, I am sure this was done so as not to lose the focus of the book.

For that reason the book is also a tantalizing springboard for further discussion. One such consideration crossed this writer’s mind while reading the material in the penultimate chapter concerning Johnson’s ramp-up to the Gulf of Tonkin. As I was reminded of the centrality of the Bundy brothers in this process, my thoughts leapt to Air Force One, en route from Love Field to Andrews Air Force Base, and the famous communiqué from the White House Situation Room (which was under McGeorge Bundy’s control) that the assassination was the work of one person. Now as DiEugenio notes at the end of his chapter on Mexico City,

When Lopez and Hardway digested all these false stories, they discovered that most of them came from assets of David Phillips. So it would seem that the actual managers of the plot tried to stage an invasion of Cuba in order to head off Kennedy’s attempt at détente with Castro. With his fear of World War III, Johnson put the brakes to this. In fact, through his aide Cliff Carter, it appears he got the local authorities not to charge Oswald as being part of a communist conspiracy because it could cause World War III. [362]

But this point of view may not have been unique to LBJ. There may have been others who thought it wise to clamp down on the more dangerous element introduced by the players referred to above. One faction of the plot may have wanted an invasion of Cuba or even an attack on Russia; but another faction, to which the Bundys may have belonged, may have wanted simply to remove JFK, knowing they would eventually get the Vietnam War. The more radical gambit may thus have been squelched by the “cooler” heads. I would further point out that both of these conjectured factions link again to Dulles: Bundy on one side, Hunt on the other.⁷

Over the nearly half century that the assassination has been written about, it has become a commonplace in the literature critical of the official story to conclude with an appeal for truth.⁸ It is also common to speak of how some large percentage of Americans does not believe the Warren Report, and instead believes in conspiracy. But what does that belief mean to them? And what “truth” are we talking about? The idea that a few underworld figures took care of a president who double-crossed them? That there was a power play, in the manner of some Merovingian palace murder, motivated by the unbridled ambition of a Vice President, as in a latter-day reprise of Macbeth? The particular truth which books like this one (or Douglass’s) force the citizenry of this country to contemplate is a more difficult one to swallow. Because it pierces through the mystifications of the high-school civics lesson and all the indoctrination which that entails. And it does not rely on anecdotal evidence, or the ravings of a senile old man.

The author explicitly revisits this rhetorical commonplace when he speaks of how the question of truth (in the sense of the public’s belief) continues to plague our national psyche. But in so doing he eschews the usual bromides about truth being the daughter of time. Nor does he engage us with the facile rhetoric of exorcism, the easy promise that we can presently restore the body politic to mythic wholeness by simply casting out this demon. The stance he adopts in the final pages of this work is more of chronicler than of political advocate. In relating Garrison’s 1968 warning to Johnny Carson’s audience, he breaks the narrative frame with the urgency of the present tense (“… if they do not demand to know …”), then returns us, through the use of third-person indirect speech, into anticipatory sympathy with them via future-in-the-past (“the country as they knew it would not survive”), but finally ends squarely in the perfect tense which contains the entire moment (“Garrison said … Jim Garrison understood it in 1968”). The insinuation being that the opportunity for deliverance might actually lie behind us. For we did not listen to our Cassandra when we were told that indifference would be our nation’s demise. No doubt, as with Cassandra, it was the powers that be who ensured that most would not take Garrison seriously. But that is precisely the tragedy of history.

At the end of his previously mentioned review of JFK and the Unspeakable, DiEugenio wrote that Jim Douglass’ book was the best in the field since Gerald McKnight’s. The author’s own book has a dual distinction. It is the best book on Garrison yet written, and it is the best work on the JFK case since the Douglass book.

Endnotes

[1] This assessment of course is not meant to diminish the seminal work done by other first-generation critics, most notably Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, and Sylvia Meagher; Garrison’s contribution, which relied on their painstaking critical evaluation of the Warren Commission Exhibits and Hearings, was to open up new avenues actually capable of leading to a solution of the crime.

[2] For further reflection on where Garrison was headed with his thinking, see the afterword by Robert Spiegelman to William Davy’s Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation(Reston, VA: Jordan Publishing, 1999). It should be noted that one of the first-generation critics, Vincent Salandria, has from the outset been telling us much the same thing.

[3] Henceforward, square brackets refer, unless otherwise noted, to page numbers in Destiny Betrayed, 2nd ed.

[4] The titles of the first two chapters of Destiny Betrayed pay tribute to the first two in Mahoney, in reverse order. The title of Chapter 17 similarly plays off of the titles of the last two chapters, again in reverse order, of JFK and the Unspeakable.

[5] The proposal by other researchers that Oswald was on a “legitimate” mission in Mexico City which got waylaid by outsiders who knew how the internals of CIA surveillance worked seems rather flimsy from this standpoint. As for the CIA’s FPCC program, whatever it may have been in 1961, by 1963 it seems to have turned into a sham for the benefit of manipulating Oswald and keeping the FBI at bay. Douglass (66 and n. 67; 178-179) suggests that the FBI’s own efforts at discreditation by that time had been so successful that the CIA would have had little to target.

[6] It is not the purpose of this review to compare this book with the work of Joan Mellen. I would refer the interested reader to DiEugenio’s own appraisals of Mellen’s two efforts, A Farewell to Justice, and Jim Garrison: His Life and Times.

[7] Today, I would, however, note the following. A year after writing this review/essay, I attended the AARC 2014 conference. When someone asked if McGeorge Bundy had prior knowledge of the assassination, John Newman said he didn’t think Bundy knew because there is language in NSAM 273 that looks like it was intended for Kennedy, attempting to convince him of a different course of action from NSAM 263.

[8] Douglass, for instance, ends his book, quite movingly, with an allusion to John 8:32, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (perhaps also as a tacitly ironic acknowledgment of the fact that this very motto appears at the entrance of the CIA’s Langley headquarters, placed there by its founders with much the same cynicism, I dare say, as the “Arbeit Macht Frei” inscription gracing the entrance to Auschwitz I).
April 26, 2013
George Michael Evica, A Certain Arrogance

A Certain Arrogance is the last published work by the late George Michael Evica. We mentioned the book in the Evica obituary on this site. There have been very few reviews or notices of A Certain Arrogance. But since the book deals with an interesting subject – and personages – I think it merits some discussion.

The overall subject of the work is the use of religious institutions by American intelligence agencies for purposes of infiltration, surveillance, and subversion. It is a subject that interested others in the assassination field e.g. Jim Garrison. In looking through the late District Attorney’s files, I saw that he had clipped certain articles on the subject. The book studies the efforts of the American government in this area especially during and after World War II. The prime focus is on the towering figures of the Dulles brothers: CIA Director Allen, and Secretary of State John Foster. As Evica notes, the brothers – especially Allen – had a history of using liberal Protestant groups to achieve these kinds of aims. Some of the denominations Evica names as targets are the Quakers, Unitarians and other liberal Christian groups. (p. 85) One of the families that Allen Dulles exploited in this regard was the Field family: Herbert and his son Noel. The author states that Herbert Field’s Quaker-based network of World War I would become an integral keystone of Allen Dulles’ OSS spy operations during the Second World War. (p. 93) And it was Herbert’s son Noel who helped run it for Dulles. There were also Unitarians incorporated into the spy apparatus like Varian Fry and Robert Dexter. (pgs 98-99)

Evica then points out the interesting paradox that the use of these liberal religious organizations allowed Allen Dulles an ideological mask over his operatives. Toward the end of their careers, Fry and Noel Field were accused of being communists. Yet until the end, Fry was associated with “several right-wing anti-Communist organizations closely tied to the CIA.” (p. 100) Noel Field began his government career as a State Department employee. He was a Quaker who later befriended the radical Unitarian, Stephen Frichtman, who constructed the Unitarian Service Committee in 1940. (p. 105) This committee later became part of a large umbrella group called Refugee Relief Trustees. The man supervising the Unitarian aspect of this umbrella group was Percival Brundage.

Noel Field began his espionage career by aiding anti-Fascists trying to get out of Spain during the advent of Franco’s rule. Dulles used Field to work leftists resisting the Nazis. Then, by 1943, when it became obvious that the Allies would win the war, he began using him to strengthen church groups against communists. John Foster Dulles, for example, was a leading member of the American Council of the Churches of Christ. And he used the body “both as a stabilizing factor for … the German people, and as a stronghold against Bolshevism.” (p. 114) The body used by Allen Dulles was the World Council of Churches. At a meeting of the group in 1945, German theologian Martin Niemoeller told Dulles’s girlfriend and employee Mary Bancroft about this effort. (p. 116) This religious-intelligence union eventually became so extensive that by 1960 all liberal Protestant or Quaker/Unitarian welfare agencies were placed under suspicion by the KGB. ( ibid)

Furthering just how secretive and extensive this nexus was is the fact that the curator of Allen Dulles’ personal papers from the time he was fired by JFK until his death was Garner Ranney. (This would include the former CIA Director’s time on the Warren Commission.) Then, after Dulles died, Ranney was one of a three-person team that governed the release of his papers through Princeton University. Ranney did the same kind of work for the Episcopalian church of Maryland. Evica notes that many of these files dealing with Field and the Unitarians have been sanitized. And the CIA cleared the boxes of cables and letters between Dulles and Field from the Unitarian Service Committee files stored at Harvard. And in fact, a writer who did a book on that Committee wrote to Evica that she had no doubt there were intelligence files on several of the upper level officers like Dexter and possibly Frederick May Eliot of the American Unitarian Association. (p. 134)

All of the above serves as (rather lengthy) background in the book for what will be the main focus of the first and last parts. That would be Lee Harvey Oswald and his association with Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, and his later association in Dallas with Ruth and Michael Paine, who were first Quakers and then joined a Unitarian church in Dallas. (p. 246)

As mentioned elsewhere on this site, Oswald’s association with Albert Schweitzer College is one of the most fascinating releases made by the Assassination Records Review Board. After a struggle with the FBI for a year, in December of 1995 the ARRB finally released a set of five documents concerning their search for Oswald in Switzerland – a place where he was never supposed to have been. This search was provoked by a request made long ago by Oswald’s mother to the FBI. She told agent John Fain that she had mailed her son a series of letters in Russia in late 1959. Some enclosed money orders. She got no reply. She was worried he might be lost. She alerted the Bureau to the fact that she had received a letter from an official of Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. A man named Hans Casparis told her that Lee had been expected there in April of 1960. Casparis also said that Lee had sent them a deposit registering for the spring, 1960 session.

J. Edgar Hoover then began a search for Mr.Casparis and this college. This search occasioned the famous June 3, 1960 memo by FBI Director Hoover saying that there may be an imposter using Oswald’s birth certificate. The FBI representatives in Paris had no idea where the place was, so they got in contact with the Swiss Police. It took them two months to locate the school. (See Probe Vol. 3 No. 3) So the obvious question is: How did Oswald know about this college? It is a question the Warren Commission never came close to answering. But Albert Schweitzer College fits into Evica’s framework since it was founded by the Unitarian Church in 1953, as the Cold War was ratcheting up. Shortly after Kennedy’s murder, in 1964, the college was closed down. The FBI visited the institution twice: once in 1960, and again in 1963. As Evica notes, this may be why most of the papers on Oswald from Albert Schweitzer are gone. (The author notes that the files on the college at its Providence headquarters, where most American applicant forms were sent, were also spirited away in December of 1963.)

Consider the facts above. Here you have an institution so obscure that the FBI in Paris never heard of it. So obscure that the Swiss Police took two months to locate it. An institution that actually closed down within months of JFK’s murder – yet Oswald only applied there; he never attended. In fact, from what we know, he never set foot in the place. Why did they then close shop, after eleven years, approximately when the Warren Report was issued? Especially since that report mentions Albert Schweitzer only briefly and in passing? (Referring to his passport application in Santa Ana California, here is the entirety of that mention: “His application stated that he planned to leave the United States on September 21 to attend the Albert Schweitzer College … .” (See Warren Report, p. 689) This is stunning in and of itself of course. Since, in any serious investigation, the mystery of how Oswald found out about Schweitzer would have been of some importance. Not to mention why he applied there, and why he did not show up. For as Evica notes, the college did not advertise in the Christian Register from 1948-59. (p. 65)

Evica’s book tries to do at least some of the work the Warren Commission chose not to do. For instance, when he left the Marines, on his trip to Europe in 1959, Oswald mentioned attending a school in Switzerland on two occasions. (Evica, p. 17) But he did not. He proceeded to Russia. Yet the Swiss Police found out that he wrote Schweitzer from Moscow confirming that he still planned on attending the fall semester of 1959. ( Ibid, p. 18) What makes this episode even more interesting of course is that in this exact time frame Oswald is getting his so-called “hardship discharge” even though a) His mother had no real hardship, and b) There is no evidence he helped her through anything. Interestingly, he told his brother Robert that he was leaving for Europe from New Orleans where he planned to work for an export firm. When he got to New Orleans he booked passage on a freighter from an agency at Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. (Of course, CIA agent Shaw’s cover was that business.) In fact, on a form he filled out there Oswald listed his occupation as “shipping export agent”. (p. 17) Further, he listed his stay abroad as being for only a couple of months. Yet, if he was attending Schweitzer it would have to have been at least a four-month stay.

One reason that the Commission ignored most of this may be that it did not want to draw attention to the holes in the paper trail. As I have noted above, some of it is missing – swept up in the wake of the FBI investigation. But even in what was left, Evica points out some tantalizing inconsistencies. For instance, Oswald sent a deposit to the school even though there is not a written record of his official acceptance. (p. 34) Yet, as the author notes, this was the official procedure as outlined by the college secretary, Erika Weibel: you were accepted first, then you sent the deposit. Further, there is no letter of introduction from Oswald to the college. In other words, there is no indication of how or why Oswald became interested in attending with his request for an application form. (p. 32) When Oswald did apply, he used the wrong form. He submitted an application form for the summer session, not the regular fall term. This short form was mailed before March 4, 1959. Yet the date on the form is March 19th. He also sent the longer, correct form on March 4th. But as Evica notes, since the college wrote Oswald that it got his incorrect form no later than March 28th ” the college could not have sent out the longer, correct form to him any earlier than March 28th, 1959.” (p. 33) So who got Oswald the longer, correct form before the college sent it out? And who told him that he sent out the wrong form in the first place? ( This is all reminiscent of Guy Banister correcting Oswald when he put his office address on his Fair Play for Cuba literature in New Orleans.)

Well, it may be one of the denizens from Banister’s office. Evica could not find any evidence that Oswald attended any Unitarian churches prior to applying to the Swiss school. But a close friend of Oswald’s in the Marines did attend. Interestingly, it was the Warren Commission’s prime witness attesting to Oswald’s communist leanings: Kerry Thornley. At the time he knew Oswald in the Marines, Thornley testified that he “had been going to the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles.” (p. 21) This particular church is the subject of a sixty-page FBI report at the National Archives. But when Thornley was then asked if Oswald had any connection to that church, he replied that he did not. (Ibid)

The man who wrote Oswald’s mother, Hans Casparis, is also an interesting character. He is one of the founders of the college, and in 1959-60 he was billed as the director. In his correspondence with Oswald, Casparis changed the opening date of the spring trimester three times. But Evica could find “no record in the available Albert Schweitzer College documents at Harvard Divinity School Library supporting this schedule modification.” ( p. 37) Evica also found a student who said the pushed back start date never took place. And that Oswald’s name never appeared on any student roster. (Ibid) Need I add that almost all the records for the Friends of Albert Schweitzer College at Harvard for the 1959-60 term are missing? (p. 289)

All these questions about Oswald, the college, and its sudden disappearance are accentuated by the questions about Hans Casparis. Casparis wrote that he had graduated from three universities and lectured at the University of Zurich. But when Evica contacted that university they said he had never lectured there. The universities he said he had graduated from were Zurich, Basel and the Univeristy of Chicago. But Evica discovered that he held no reported diplomas or degress from these three universities. (p. 78) So from Evica’s research, here you had a man who billed himself as a professor of a college who did not receive a degree from any of the academic institutions he said he attended. And this was supposed to be one of the “founders” of Albert Schweitzer.

Almost all of the material on Oswald and Albert Schweitzer is at the beginning of the book. And for me this was the best part of the volume. Evica was not a skilled or supple writer, but when he bit into a particular issue he persevered and saw it through to the end as he saw it. No one has taken the Albert Schweitzer story as far as he has. The second reason this demonstration is valuable is it shows once again that if you press on almost any aspect of the Oswald saga, questions, inconsistencies, paradoxes in abundance come to the forefront. How many Marines in 1959 applied for a Unitarian college abroad, sent their deposit forward, and then never showed up, deciding to defect to Russia instead? But that is about par for the course with Lee Harvey Oswald. Third, the appearance of Thornley and Shaw’s ITM reminded me of a talk I had with former House Select Committee investigator L. J. Delsa. Along with Bob Buras, Delsa manned the New Orleans beat for the HSCA. He told me that one of David Ferrie’s purposes as a Civil Air Patrol captain was the recruitment of young men for future military-intelligence functions.

As alluded to above, the long middle section of the book, ranging approximately from pages 85-219, basically chronicles how the American government used and abused religious institutions for subversive ends. This part of the volume could have used compression. In my view, about half of this part of the book could have been cut with very little of any substance lost. Evica was a friend and colleague of Peter Dale Scott, and some of the sub-headings and his approach here reminds me of Scott at his worst. For example, here are a couple of sub-headings: “The Killian/Brundage/Bissell/Rockefeller Space Program”, “The CIA, the Catherwood Foundation, the Young Family, the Philippines, and Ed Lansdale”. Like Scott, Evica does not use the rubric Chapter, but Essay. Essay Seven is titled “Percival Brundage, The Bureau of the Budget, James R. Killian Jr., Lyndon Baines Johsnon and the Unitarian Matrix.” And as with Scott, much of the material is just excess baggage. The connections are just too wide to be material or relevant. Especially in these days that are post ARRB.

But towards the end, the relevance picks up. First, Evica presents interesting facts about Percival Brundage who was involved with Albert Schweitzer College. Brundage was a major Unitarian Church officer from 1942-54, when it was cooperating with both the OSS and CIA. But even more interesting he was a signatory to the incorporation papers of Southern Air Transport. In fact, he became one of the registered stockholders in the company. (p. 223) As many people know, this was a notorious CIA proprietary company that did major air supply missions for the Company in both Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. It originated with Paul Heliwell’s purchase of Claire Chennault’s Civil Air Transport for the CIA. Civil Air Transport was then broken down into smaller units, one of them being Southern Air Transport. SAT specialized in the Caribbean area. When the Certificate of Incorporation of the Friends of Albert Schweitzer College was filed in New York, Brundage was one of the three directors named. He served as president of the body from 1953-58. So here you had a man who played an importnat part in Allen Dulles’ religious spy apparatus, and who was a major stockholder in a notorious CIA shell company, and he just just happens to end up the president of Albert Schweitzer College and a chief member of its American support team.

Then at the end, Evica ties the loop together by profiling the background on the Paines and how they fit into this milieu. As Evica notes, much of this material is taken from the extraordinary work done on the couple by Carol Hewett, Barbara La Monica, and Steve Jones. (Much of which was published in Probe. Evica makes good use of it, but inexplicably he leaves out some of the more important evidentiary aspects relating to the Warren Commission inquiry. This includes things like the mystery of the Minox camera and the origin of the rifle allegedly ordered by Oswald.) As the author notes, this work is so potent that it was attacked by a big gun of the GOP, Thomas Mallon in his pathetic whitewash of a book, Mrs. Paine’s Garage.

Evica uses much of Hewett, La Monica, and Jones’s excellent work and even supplements it with other authors. He makes other good points, like the exquisite timing of the separation of Ruth and Michael Paine, which made it so convenient for Marina to move in with Ruth before the assassination. How CIA contact George DeMohrenschildt introduced Oswald to the Paines and the White Russian community of Dallas-Fort Worth. And at one of the very first meetings of Oswald with this group, Lee talked to Volkmar Schmidt for three hours. And according to Schmidt, through Edward Epstein, “Oswald violently attacked President Kennedy’s foreign policy … Schmidt baited Oswald with a negative analysis of right-wing General Edwin A. Walker and an impending American fascism.” (p. 237) Why Oswald would want to talk to Schmidt, who was a neo-Nazi fascist, is puzzling. But Schmidt concluded that “Oswald was completely alienated, self-destructive, and suicidal.” This vignette encapsules what the Warren Commission would do with Oswald several months later: pin the shooting of Walker and murder of Kennedy on him, and paint him as a sociopath. I suppose it is just a coincidence that, at this time, Schmidt was living with Michael Paine. (ibid)

Evica closes the book with a couple who emerged as character witnesses for the Paines during the Warren Commission inquiry: Frederick and Nancy Osborn. The Osborn family, including his father Frederick Sr., was significantly involved in the American eugenics movement whose intention was to “create a superior Nordic race.” (p. 251) Frederick Sr. also worked with Allen Dulles in the organization of the National Committee for a Free Europe. (p. 254) The funding for this group eventually came from Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination in the CIA. (p. 255) These were the connections of the friends of the kindly Quaker couple who befriended Lee and Marina.

Mr. Mallon, are you paying attention?

September 1, 2008
Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

Introduction

The following essay by Jim DiEugenio appeared in the January-February 1999 issue of Probe (Vol. 6 No. 2). It is largely based on a much and sorrowfully overlooked book by Richard Mahoney entitled JFK: Ordeal in Africa. That book contains probably the best look at President Kennedy’s views of foreign policy, especially in the Third World. It concentrates on the Congo crisis of the late fifties and early sixties, following it from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson. Mahoney really did use the declassified record, as he visited the Kennedy library for weeks to attain documents to fill in the record. In examining this record, there can be no doubt about the facts, the actions, and the conclusions. In relation to his predecessor, and his successor, Kennedy was not a Cold Warrior, and he did not buy the Domino Theory. And he was in conflict with those who did, hence the title of the essay.

But this essay, and Mahoney’s book, go beyond just the Congo crisis and Kennedy’s sympathy for Lumumba. It explains why he held those beliefs about the Third World, and why they extended to Vietnam. As Mahoney notes, Kennedy was in Saigon when the French colonial empire there was crumbling. And it is there where he met Edmund Gullion, the man who would be his teacher on the subject of European colonialism. After learning his lessons, Kennedy returned home, where he tried to break the logjam of anti-communist boilerplate in the debate between the Dean Acheson Democrats and John Foster Dulles Republicans. His 1957 speech on the floor of the Senate about Algeria is still thrilling to read today–but it was a bombshell at the time. It is that speech we have to keep in mind in explaining the things he did not do as president: no Navy forces at the Bay of Pigs, no invasion during the Missile Crisis, and no combat troops into Vietnam. By the end of this essay we then see why Kennedy had those ingrained sympathies. In his revealing conversation with Nehru, we see that he never forgot where he came from i.e. Ireland had been subjugated by Britain for 800 years.

The following is not polemics. It is actually history. It tells the truth about an important event. But as it does so, it reveals the true character of the men who helped mold it: Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Lumumba, Thomas Dodd, Joseph Mobutu, Hammarskjold, Moise Tshombe, Cyrille Adoula, Johnson and, primarily, JFK. In doing that, it becomes larger than its subject, as it magnifies the moment and the people molding it. It therefore elucidates a complex episode, and by doing so, it empowers the reader with real information. Which is what good history usually does.

“In assessing the central character …
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
~ Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy

As Probe has noted elsewhere (especially in last year’s discussion of Sy Hersh’s anti-Kennedy screed, The Dark Side of Camelot), a clear strategy of those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in office. Hersh and his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was, where he was going, what the world would have been like if he had lived, and who and what he represented. As with the assassination, the goal of these people is to distort, exaggerate, and sometimes just outright fabricate in order to obfuscate specific Kennedy tactics, strategies, and outcomes.

This blackening of the record – disguised as historical revisionism – has been practiced on the left, but it is especially prevalent on the right. Political spy and propagandist Lucianna Goldberg – such a prominent figure in the current Clinton sex scandal – was tutored early on by the godfather of the anti-Kennedy books, that triple-distilled rightwinger and CIA crony Victor Lasky. In fact, at the time of Kennedy’s death, Lasky’s negative biography of Kennedy was on the best-seller lists. Lately, Christopher Matthews seemed to be the designated hitter on some of these issues (see the article on page 26). Curiously, his detractors ignore Kennedy’s efforts in a part of the world far from America, where Kennedy’s character, who and what he stood for, and how the world may have been different had he lived are clearly revealed. But to understand what Kennedy was promoting in Africa, we must first explore his activities a decade earlier.

The Self-Education of John F. Kennedy

During Kennedy’s six years in the House, 1947-1952, he concentrated on domestic affairs, bread and butter issues that helped his middle class Massachusetts constituents. As Henry Gonzalez noted in his blurb for Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street, he met Kennedy at a housing conference in 1951 and got the impression that young Kennedy was genuinely interested in the role that government could play in helping most Americans. But when Kennedy, his father, and his advisers decided to run for the upper house in 1952, they knew that young Jack would have to educate himself in the field of foreign affairs and gain a higher cosmopolitan profile. After all, he was running against that effete, urbane, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge. So Kennedy decided to take two seven-week-long trips. The first was to Europe. The second was a little unusual in that his itinerary consisted of places like the Middle East, India, and Indochina. (While in India, he made the acquaintance of Prime Minister Nehru who would end up being a lifelong friend and adviser.)

Another unusual thing about the second trip was his schedule after he got to his stops. In Saigon, he ditched his French military guides and sought out the names of the best reporters and State Department officials so he would not get the standard boilerplate on the French colonial predicament in Indochina. After finding these sources, he would show up at their homes and apartments unannounced. His hosts were often surprised that such a youthful looking young man could be a congressman. Kennedy would then pick their minds at length as to the true political conditions in that country.

If there is a real turning point in Kennedy’s political career it is this trip. There is little doubt that what he saw and learned deeply affected and altered his world view and he expressed his developing new ideas in a speech he made upon his return on November 14, 1951. Speaking of French Indochina he said: “This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long.” He later added that “the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been kindled and are now ablaze….Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men.” He then criticized the U. S. State Department for its laid back and lackadaisical approach to this problem:

One finds too many of our representatives toadying to the shorter aims of other Western nations with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and desires of the people to which they are accredited.

The basic idea that Kennedy brought back from this trip was that, in the Third World, the colonial or imperial powers were bound to lose in the long run since the force of nationalism in those nascent countries was so powerful, so volcanic, that no extended empire could contain it indefinitely. This did not mean that Kennedy would back any revolutionary force fighting an imperial power. Although he understood the appeal of communism to the revolutionaries, he was against it. He wanted to establish relations and cooperate with leaders of the developing world who wished to find a “third way,” one that was neither Marxist nor necessarily pro-Western. He was trying to evolve a policy that considered the particular history and circumstances of the nations now trying to break the shackles of poverty and ignorance inflicted upon them by the attachments of empire. Kennedy understood and sympathized with the temperaments of those leaders of the Third World who wished to be nonaligned with either the Russians or the Americans and this explains his relationships with men like Nehru and Sukarno of Indonesia. So, for Kennedy, Nixon’s opposition toward Ho Chi Minh’s upcoming victory over the French in Vietnam was not so much a matter of Cold War ideology, but one of cool and measured pragmatism. As he stated in 1953, the year before the French fell:

The war would never be successful … unless large numbers of the people of Vietnam were won over from their sullen neutrality and open hostility. This could never be done … unless they were assured beyond doubt that complete independence would be theirs at the conclusion of the war.

To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was replaced by the American version.

Kennedy and Africa

Needless to say, the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles decision on Indochina had an epochal ring that can be heard down to the present day. But there was another developing area of the world where Kennedy differed with these men. In fact it is in the news today because it still suffers from the parallel pattern of both Indochina and Indonesia, i.e. European colonialism followed by American intervention. In 1997, after years of attempted rebellion, Laurent Kabila finally ousted longtime dictator Joseph Mobutu in the huge African state of Congo. But Kabila’s government has proven quite weak and this year, other African states have had to come to his aid to prop him up. In late November, the new warring factions in that state tentatively agreed to a cease-fire in Paris brokered by both France and the United Nations. The agreement is to be formally signed in late December. If not, this second war in two years may continue. As commentators Nelson Kasfir and Scott Straus wrote in the Los Angeles Times of October 19th,

What Congo so desperately needs and never has enjoyed is a democratic assembly, one that can establish a constitution that will allow the country’s next president to enjoy sufficient legitimacy to get started on a long overdue development agenda.

There was a Congolese leader who once could have united the factions inside that country and who wanted to develop its immense internal resources for the Congolese themselves: Patrice Lumumba. As with Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Lumumba is not talked about very much today. At the time, he was viewed as such a threat that the Central Intelligence Agency, on the orders of Allen Dulles, planned his assassination. Lumumba was killed just before President Kennedy was inaugurated.

Yet, in the media commentaries on the current crisis, the epochal changes before and after Kennedy’s presidency that took place in the Congo are not mentioned. As with Indonesia, few commentators seem cognizant of the breaks in policy there that paved the way for three decades of dictatorship and the current chaos. One thing nobody has noted was that Mobutu came to absolute power after Kennedy’s death in a policy decision made by the Johnson administration. This decision directly contradicted what Kennedy had been doing while in office. Kennedy’s Congo effort was a major preoccupation of his presidency in which many of his evolving ideas that originated in 1951 were put to the test and dramatized in a complex, whirring cauldron. The cauldron featured Third World nationalism, the inevitable pull of Marxism, Kennedy’s sympathy for nonaligned leaders, his antipathy for European colonialism, and the domestic opposition to his policies both inside the government and without. This time the domestic opposition was at least partly represented by Senator Thomas Dodd and CIA Director Allen Dulles. This tortured three-year saga features intrigue, power politics, poetic idealism, a magnetic African revolutionary leader, and murder for political reasons. How did it all begin?

Kennedy Defines Himself

In 1956, the Democrats, always sensitive to the charge of being “soft on communism”, did very little to attack the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles foreign policy line. When they did, it was with someone like Dean Acheson who, at times, tried to out-Dulles John Foster Dulles. Kennedy was disturbed by this opportunistic crowd-pleasing boilerplate. To him it did not relate to the reality he had seen and heard firsthand in 1951. For him, the nationalistic yearning for independence was not to be so quickly linked to the “international Communist conspiracy.” Kennedy attempted to make some speeches for Adlai Stevenson in his race for the presidency that year. In them he attempted to attack the Manichean world view of the Republican administration, i.e. that either a nation was allied with America or she was leaning toward the Communist camp:

the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies….In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today – and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism. (Speech in Los Angeles 9/21/56)

This was too much even for the liberal Stevenson. According to author Richard Mahoney, “Stevenson’s office specifically requested that the senator make no more foreign policy statements in any way associated with the campaign.” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa p. 18)

Kennedy objected to the “for us or against us” attitude that, in Africa, had pushed Egypt’s Gamel Abdul Nasser into the arms of the Russians. He also objected to the self-righteousness with which people like Dulles and Nixon expressed this policy. John Foster Dulles’ string of bromides on the subject e.g. “godless Communism”, and the “Soviet master plan”, met with this response from Senator Kennedy: “Public thinking is still being bullied by slogans which are either false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive coexistence in which we live.” (Mahoney p. 18)

Kennedy on Algeria

Kennedy bided his time for the most fortuitous moment to make a major oratorical broadside against both political parties’ orthodoxies on the subject of Third World nationalism. He found that opportunity with France’s colonial crisis of the late 1950’s: the struggle of the African colony of Algeria to be set free. By 1957, the French had a military force of 500,000 men in Algeria committed to putting down this ferocious rebellion. The war degenerated at times into torture, atrocities, and unmitigated horror, which when exposed, split the French nation in two. It eventually caused the fall of the French government and the rise to power of Charles De Gaulle.

On July 2, 1957, Senator Kennedy rose to speak in the Senate chamber and delivered what the New York Times was to call “the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.” (7/3/57) As historian Allan Nevins wrote later, “No speech on foreign affairs by Mr. Kennedy attracted more attention at home and abroad.” (The Strategy of Peace, p. 67) It was the mature fruition of all the ideas that Kennedy had been collecting and refining since his 1951 trip into the nooks and corners of Saigon. It was passionate yet sophisticated, hard-hitting but controlled, idealistic yet, in a fresh and unique way, also pragmatic. Kennedy assailed the administration, especially Nixon and Dulles, for not urging France into a non-military solution to the bloody crisis. He even offered some diplomatic alternatives. He attacked both the United States and France for not seeing in Algeria a reprise of the 1954 Indochina crisis:

Yet, did we not learn in Indochina … that we might have served both the French and our own causes infinitely better had we taken a more firm stand much earlier than we did? Did that tragic episode not teach us that, whether France likes it or not, admits it or not, or has our support or not, their overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence. (Ibid p. 72)

The speech ignited howls of protest, especially from its targets, i.e. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Acheson, and Nixon. The latter called it “a brashly political” move to embarrass the administration. He further added that, “Ike and his staff held a full-fledged policy meeting to pool their thinking on the whys underlying Kennedy’s damaging fishing in troubled waters.” (Los Angeles Herald-Express 7/5/57) Mahoney noted that, of the 138 editorials clipped by Kennedy’s office, 90 opposed the speech. (p. 21) Again, Stevenson was one of Kennedy’s critics. Jackie Kennedy was so angry with Acheson’s disparaging remarks about the speech that she berated him in public while they were both waiting for a train at New York’s Penn Central.

But abroad the reaction was different. Newspapers in England and, surprisingly, in France realized what the narrowly constricted foreign policy establishment did not: Kennedy knew what he was talking about. The speech was a mature, comprehensive, and penetrating analysis of a painful and complicated topic. As one French commentator wrote at the time:

Strangely enough, as a Frenchman I feel that, on the whole, Mr. Kennedy is more to be commended than blamed for his forthright, frank and provocative speech…. The most striking point of the speech … is the important documentation it revealed and his thorough knowledge of the French milieu.

As a result, Kennedy now became the man to see in Washington for incoming African dignitaries. More than one commented that they were thrilled reading the speech and noted the impact it had on young African intellectuals studying abroad at the time. The Algerian guerrillas hiding in the hills were amazed at its breadth of understanding. On election night of 1960 they listened to their wireless radios and were alternately depressed and elated as Nixon and Kennedy traded the lead.

Ike and the Congo

Once in office, Kennedy had very little time to prepare for his first African crisis. It had been developing during the latter stages of the Eisenhower administration and like Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba it was a mess at the time Kennedy inherited it. With John Foster Dulles dead and Eisenhower embittered over the U-2 incident and what it had done for his hopes for dÈtente, Allen Dulles and, to a lesser extent, Nixon had an increasingly stronger pull over National Security Council meetings. This was even more true about subject areas which Eisenhower had little interest in or knowledge about.

In June of 1960, Belgium had made a deliberately abrupt withdrawal from the Congo. The idea was that the harder the shock of colonial disengagement, the easier it would be to establish an informal yet de facto control afterward. Before leaving, one Belgian commander had written on a chalkboard:

Before Independence = After Independence

As hoped for, the heady rush of freedom proved too much for the new Congolese army. They attacked the Europeans left behind and pillaged their property. The Belgians used this as a pretext to drop paratroops into the country. In response, the democratically elected premier, Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu asked United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for help. At his request, the United Nations asked Belgium to leave and voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo.

At this point, the Belgians made a crucial and insidious move. Realizing Hammarskjold would back the newly elected government against the foreign invaders, Belgium began to financially and militarily abet the secession of the Congo’s richest province, Katanga, in the southeast corner of the state. There was a primitive tribal rivalry that served as a figleaf for this split. But the real reason the Belgians promoted the break was the immense mineral wealth in Katanga. They found a native leader who would support them and they decided to pay Moise Tshombe a multimillion dollar monthly bounty to head the secessionist rebellion. As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, some of the major media e.g. Time and the New York Times actually backed the Belgians in this act. Yet, as Kwitny also notes:

Western industrial interests had been egging Tshombe on toward succession, hoping to guarantee continued Western ownership of the mines. They promised to supply mercenaries to defend the province against whatever ragtag army Lumumba might assemble to reclaim it. (Endless Enemies, p. 55)

In spite of the Belgian plotting and Tshombe’s opportunistic betrayal, Allen Dulles blamed Lumumba for the impending chaos. His familiar plaint to the National Security Council was that Lumumba had now enlisted in the Communist cause. This, even though the American embassy in Leopoldville cabled Washington that the Belgian troops were the real root of the problem. The embassy further stated that if the UN did not get the Belgians out, the Congo would turn to someone who would: the Russians. Further, as Kwitny and others have noted, Lumumba was not a Communist:

Looking at the outsiders whom Lumumba chose to consult in times of trouble, it seems clear that his main socialist influence in terms of ideas … wasn’t from Eastern Europe at all, but from the more left-leaning of the new African heads of state, particularly, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. (p. 53)

As Mahoney makes clear in his study, Nkrumah was a favorite of Kennedy’s who the new president backed his entire time in office.

Eisenhower Turns on Lumumba

At this inopportune moment, July of 1960, Lumumba visited Washington for three days. Eisenhower deliberately avoided him by escaping to Rhode Island. Lumumba asked both Secretary of State Christian Herter and his assistant Douglas Dillon for help in kicking out the Belgians. The response was purposefully noncommittal. Meanwhile, the Soviets helped Lumumba by flying in food and medical supplies. Rebuffed by Washington, Lumumba then asked the Russians for planes, pilots, and technicians to use against Katanga. This was a major step in sealing his fate in the eyes of Allen Dulles. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (then the capital of the Congo), wired CIA headquarters that the Congo was now experiencing “a classic Communist effort” to subjugate the government. Within 24 hours, Dulles, apparently with Eisenhower’s approval, set in motion a series of assassination plots that would eventually result in Lumumba’s death. Ironically, on the day the plots originated, Lumumba made the following radio address to his citizens:

We know that the US understands us and we are pleased to see the US position in bringing about international peace…. If the Congolese place their confidence in the US, which is a good friend, they will find themselves rewarded. (Mahoney, p. 44)

What the unsuspecting Lumumba did not know was that Eisenhower’s advisers had already made up their mind about him. As Douglas Dillon told the Church Committee, the National Security Council believed that Lumumba was a “very difficult, if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world.” (Kwitny, p. 57) Imagine, the newly elected premier of an undeveloped nation whose army could not even stop an internal secession was now threatening the safety of the world. But, to reiterate, there is little evidence of Lumumba even being a Communist. As Kwitny notes, “all through his brief career … he had publicly pledged to respect private property and even foreign investment” (p. 72). (Kwitny also could have noted that Dillon was hardly an unbiased source. As revealed in the book Thy Will be Done, Dillon was a co-investor with his friend Nelson Rockefeller in properties inside the Belgian Congo and therefore had an interest in it remaining a puppet state.)

Lumumba wanted the UN to invade Katanga. Hammarskjold refused. At this point Lumumba made his final, fatal error in the eyes of the Eisenhower establishment. He invited the Russians into the Congo so they could expel the Belgians from Katanga. Simultaneously, the Belgians began to work on Kasavubu to split him off from, and therefore isolate, Lumumba. The CIA now begin to go at Lumumba full bore. The CIA station, led by Devlin, began to supersede the State Department policy-making apparatus. Allen Dulles began to funnel large amounts of money to Devlin in a mad rush to covertly get rid of Lumumba. At the same time, Devlin began to work with the Belgians by recruiting and paying off possible rivals to Lumumba i.e. Kasavubu and Joseph Mobutu. This tactic proved successful. On September 5, 1960 Devlin got Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba as premier. But the dynamic and resourceful Lumumba got the legislative branch of government to reinstate him. When it appeared Lumumba would reassert himself, Dulles redoubled his efforts to have him liquidated. (The story of these plots, with new document releases plus the questions surrounding the mysterious death of Hammarskjold will be related in the second part of this article.)

With a split in the government, Hammarskjold was in a difficult position. He decided to call a special session of the UN to discuss the matter. At around this time, presidential candidate Kennedy wired foreign policy insider Averill Harriman a query asking him if Harriman felt Kennedy should openly back Lumumba. Harriman advised him not to. Since he felt that there was little the US could do unilaterally, he told the candidate to just stay behind the United Nations. (Interestingly, Harriman would later switch sides and back Tshombe and Katanga’s secession.) Kennedy, whose sympathies were with Lumumba, took the advice and backed an undecided UN. In public, Eisenhower backed Hammarskjold, but secretly the CIA had united with the Belgians to topple Lumumba’s government, eliminate Lumumba, and break off Katanga. Lumumba’s chief African ally, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, made a speech at the UN in September of 1960 attacking Western policy in the Congo. Kennedy now made references in his speeches to Nkrumah which – not so subtly – underlined his split with Eisenhower over the Congo.

The Death of Lumumba

As of late 1960, the situation in the Congo was a chaotic flux. Hammarskjold’s deputy on the scene, Rajeshwar Dayal of India, refused to recognize the Kasavubu-Mobutu regime. Dayal went further and decided to protect Lumumba and his second in command, Antoine Gizenga, from arrest warrants made out for them by this new government. The American ambassador on the scene, Clare Timberlake, was now openly supporting the pretenders, Kasavubu and Mobutu. His cables to Washington refer to Lumumba as a Communist with ties to Moscow. With Timberlake’s sympathies now clear, and the Belgians pumping in more war supplies to Katanga, Lumumba’s followers decided to set up their own separatist state in the northwest Congo, the province of Orientale with a capital at Stanleyville.

In November of 1960, Dayal rejected the Kasavubu-Mobutu government and blamed them for playing a role in murder plots against Lumumba. Following this declaration – and exposure of covert action – the US openly broke with Hammarskjold on Congo policy. The State Department issued a press release stating (incredibly) that it had “every confidence in the good faith of Belgium.” (Mahoney, p. 55) The White House further warned the UN that if Hammarskjold tried any compromise that would restore Lumumba to power, the U. S. would make “drastic revision” of its Congo policy. As Kwitny notes, this clearly implied that the US would take unilateral military action to stop a return to power by Lumumba.

Dayal had tried to save Lumumba’s life against Devlin’s plots by placing him under house arrest, surrounded by UN troops in Leopoldville. On November 27th, Lumumba tried to flee Congo territory and escape to his followers in Stanleyville. Devlin, working with the Belgians, blocked his escape routes. He was captured on December 1st and returned to Leopoldville. (There is a famous film of this return featuring Lumumba bloody and beaten inside a cage, being hoisted by a crane, which Timberlake tried to suppress at the time.) Enraged, Lumumba’s followers in Stanleyville started a civil war by invading nearby Kivu province and arresting the governor who had been allied with the Leopoldville government.

At this juncture, with his followers waging civil war, the Congolese government not recognized by the UN, and Lumumba still alive, the possibility existed that he could return to power. On January 17th, Lumumba was shipped to Kasai province which was under the control of Albert Kalonji, a hated enemy of Lumumba. There he was killed, reportedly on orders of Katangese authorities, probably Tshombe, but surely with the help of the CIA. As author John Morton Blum writes in his Years of Discord, the CIA cable traffic suggests that Dulles and Devlin feared what Kennedy would do if he took office before Lumumba was gone (p. 23). Kwitny also notes that the new regime may have suspected Kennedy would be less partial to them than Eisenhower was (p. 69). He further notes that Kasavubu tried a last minute deal to get Lumumba to take a subordinate role in the government. Lumumba refused. He was then killed three days before JFK’s inauguration.

Although he was murdered on January 17th, the news of his death did not reach Washington until February 13, 1961.

Kennedy’s new Policy

Unaware of Lumumba’s death, Kennedy requested a full-scale policy review on the Congo his first week in office. Kennedy had made an oblique reference to the Congo situation in his inaugural address. He had called the UN, “our last best hope” and pledged to support “its shield of the new and the weak”. Once in office he made clear and forceful those vague insinuations. On his own, and behind the scenes, he relayed the Russians a message that he was ready to negotiate a truce in the Congo. Ambassador Timberlake got wind of this and other JFK moves and he phoned Allen Dulles and Pentagon Chief Lyman Lemnitzer to alert them that Kennedy was breaking with Eisenhower’s policy. Timberlake called this switch a “sell-out” to the Russians. Upon hearing of the new policy formation, Hammarskjold told Dayal that he should expect in short order an organized backlash to oppose Kennedy.

On February 2nd, Kennedy approved a new Congo policy which was pretty much a brisk departure from the previous administration. The new policy consisted of close cooperation with the UN to bring all opposing armies, including the Belgians, under control. In addition, the recommendation was to have the country neutralized and not subject to any East-West competition. Thirdly, all political prisoners should be freed. (Not knowing Lumumba was dead, this recommendation was aimed at him without naming him specifically.) Fourth, the secession of Katanga should be opposed. To further dramatize his split with Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy invited Lumumba’s staunch friend Nkrumah to Washington for an official visit. Even further, when Nehru of India asked Kennedy to promise to commit US forces to the UN military effort and to use diplomatic pressure to expel the Belgians, Kennedy agreed. But although his policies were an improvement, Kennedy made a tactical error in keeping Timberlake in place.

The Republican Timberlake now teamed with Devlin and both ignored the new administration’s diplomatic thrust. They continued their efforts to back the increasingly rightwing Kasavubu-Mobutu government with Devlin also helping Tshombe in Katanga. When Congo government troops fired on the newly strengthened and JFK-backed UN forces, Timberlake stepped over the line. In early March of 1961 he ordered a US naval task force to float up the Congo River. This military deployment, with its accompanying threat of American intervention, was not authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone Kennedy. Coupled with this was another unauthorized act by Devlin. The CIA, through a friendly “cut-out” corporation, flew three French jet trainers into Katanga. Kennedy was enraged when he heard of these acts. He apologized to Nkrumah and recalled Timberlake. He then issued a written warning that the prime American authority in countries abroad was the ambassador. This included authority over the CIA station.

Enter Thomas Dodd

At this point, another figure emerged in opposition to Kennedy and his Congo policy. Clearly, Kennedy’s new Congo policy had been a break from Eisenhower’s. It ran contra to the covert policy that Dulles and Devlin had fashioned. To replace the Eisenhower-Nixon political line, the Belgian government, through the offices of public relations man Michael Struelens, created a new political counterweight to Kennedy. He was Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. As Mahoney notes, Dodd began to schedule hearings in the senate on the “loss” of the Congo to communism, a preposterous notion considering who was really running the Congo in 1961. Dodd also wrote to Kennedy’s United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson that the State Department’s “blind ambition” to back the UN in Katanga could only end in tragedy. He then released the letter to the press before Stevenson ever got it.

One of the allies that Dodd had in his defense of the Katanga “freedom fighters”, was the urbane, supposedly independent journalist William F. Buckley. As Kwitny wittily notes, Buckley saw the spirit of Edmund Burke in the face of Moise Tshombe. Dodd was a not infrequent guest on Buckley’s television show which was then syndicated by Metromedia. Buckley’s supposed “independence” was brought into question two decades ago by the exposure of his employment by the CIA. But newly declassified documents by the Assassination Records Review Board go even further in this regard. When House Select Committee investigator Dan Hardway was going through Howard Hunt’s Office of Security file, he discovered an interesting vein of documents concerning Buckley. First, Buckley was not a CIA “agent” per se. He was actually a CIA officer who was stationed for at least a part of his term in Mexico City. Second, and dependent on Buckley’s fictional “agent” status, it appears that both Hunt and Buckley tried to disguise Buckley’s real status to make it appear that Buckley worked for and under Hunt when it now appears that both men were actually upper level types. Third, when Buckley “left” the Agency to start the rightwing journal National Review, his professional relationship with propaganda expert Hunt continued. These documents reveal that some reviews and articles for that journal were actually written by Hunt, e. g. a review of the book The Invisible Government.

In other words, the CIA was using Buckley’s journal as a propaganda outlet. This does much to explain that journal’s, and Buckley’s, stand on many controversial issues, including the Congo crisis and the Kennedy assassination. It also helps to explain the Republican William F. Buckley allying himself with Democrat Tom Dodd in defending the Katanga “freedom-fighters.”

The Death of Hammarskjold

In September of 1961, while trying to find a way to reintegrate Katanga into the Congo, Hammarskjold was killed in a suspicious plane accident (to be discussed in part two of this article). At this point, with Hammarskjold gone, Timberlake recalled, and Dodd carrying the propaganda battle to him, Kennedy made a significant choice for his new ambassador to replace Timberlake in the Congo. He chose Edmund Gullion for the job. As Mahoney writes:

Kennedy’s selection of Edmund Gullion as ambassador was of singular consequence to Congo policy. In the President’s view, Gullion was sans pareil among his Third World ambassadors – his best and brightest. There was no ambassador in the New Frontier whose access to the Oval Office was more secure than his. (p. 108)

Gullion had been one of Kennedy’s early tutors on foreign policy issues and the pair had actually first met in 1948. Later, Gullion was one of the State Department officials Kennedy sought out in his 1951 visit to Saigon. He had been important in convincing Kennedy that the French position in Vietnam was a hopeless one. In 1954, when Kennedy began attacking the Eisenhower administration’s policy in Indochina, he had drawn on Gullion as a source. The White House retaliated by pulling Gullion off the Vietnam desk. As Mahoney states about the importance of Gullion’s appointment by Kennedy:

In a very real sense, the Congo became a testing ground of the views shared by Kennedy and Gullion on the purpose of American power in the Third World.… Both Kennedy and Gullion believed that the United States had to have a larger purpose in the Third World than the containment of communism. If the US did not, it would fall into the trap of resisting change…. By resisting change, the US would concede the strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. (p. 108)

What Gullion and Kennedy tried to do in the Congo was to neutralize the appeal of the extremes i.e. fascism and communism, and attempt to forge a left-right ranging coalition around a broad center. This policy, and Kennedy’s reluctance to let Katanga break away, was not popular with traditional American allies. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan questioned Kennedy’s intransigence on Katanga, Kennedy wrote back:

In our own national history, our experience with non-federalism and federalism demonstrates that if a compact of government is to endure, it must provide the central authority with at least the power to tax, and the exclusive power to raise armies, We could not argue with the Congolese to the contrary. (Ibid. p. 109)

This precarious situation, with both domestic and foreign opposition mounting against him, seemed to galvanize the usually cool and flexible Kennedy. He went to New York to pay tribute to Hammarskjold’s memory. He then moved to supplement Gullion inside the White House. George Ball was appointed as special adviser on the Congo. Even in 1961, Ball had a reputation as a maverick who was strongly opposed to US intervention in Vietnam. Ball agreed with Kennedy and Gullion that a political center had to be found in the Congo. The administration concentrated their efforts on the appointment of Cyrille Adoula as the new premier. Adoula was a moderate labor leader who, unfortunately, had little of the dynamism and charisma of Lumumba. By the end of 1961 he had moved into the premier’s residence in Leopoldville.

But there was one difference between Ball and Gullion on American Congo policy post-Hammarskjold. Ball seemed willing to compromise on the issue of Katanga’s autonomy; perhaps even willing to negotiate it away for a withdrawal of all mercenary forces from the Congo. But it seems that Kennedy’s visit to New York for Hammarskjold’s wake at the UN stiffened his resolve on this issue. Before the General Assembly, Kennedy had stated: “Let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain.” He then backed this up by allowing Stevenson to vote for a UN resolution allowing the use of force to deport the mercenaries and advisory personnel out of Katanga.

Dodd in Katanga

One week after the November 24, 1961 UN resolution, Senator Dodd was in Katanga. Moise Tshombe had already labeled the resolution an act of war and had announced he would fight the deployment of the UN force. Dodd was at Tshombe’s side when he toured the main mining centers of Katanga attempting to drum up support for the anticipated conflict. Dodd later did all he could to intimidate Kennedy into withdrawing U. S. support for the mission by telling him that Tshombe’s tour had elicited a “tremendous” popular response amid “delirious throngs” of both blacks and whites.

While in Katanga, a curious event occurred in the presence of Thomas Dodd. Dodd was being feted at a private home in Elizabethville when Katangese paratroopers broke into the house. They took hostage two UN representatives, Brian Urquhart and George Ivan Smith. A State Department employee, Lewis Hoffacker, bravely attempted to stop the kidnapping and managed to get Smith away from his abductors. But he couldn’t get Urquhart away. Under heavy threats from the UN military commander, Colonel S. S. Maitro, Urquhart was released shortly afterwards, albeit in badly beaten condition. The event is curious because it poses some lingering questions: 1) How did the paratroopers know about the location of the private party? 2) Dodd was not molested. Were the soldiers advised not to touch him? 3) Unlike Hoffacker, it does not appear that Dodd used his influence to intervene in the abduction. If so, why not?

Whatever the odd circumstances surrounding this event, and whatever Dodd’s actions in it were, it proved to be the causus belli in the war for Katanga. Shortly afterwards, Katangese tanks blockaded the road from the UN headquarters to the airport. The UN troops attacked the roadblocks and heavy fighting now broke out. Supplemented by U. S. transport planes, the UN effort was logistically sound. So the Katangese had to resort to terrorist tactics to stay even. They used civilian homes, churches, and even hospitals to direct fire at UN troops. The troops had no alternative except to shell these targets. Kennedy and the UN began to take a lot of criticism for the civilian casualties. But when the new Secretary General, U Thant, began to waiver ever so slightly, Kennedy gave him the green light to expand the war without consulting with the other Western allies who were not directly involved with the military effort. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk relayed the allies’ complaints over the expansion of the war, Kennedy replied that “some of our friends should use their influence on Tshombe.” (Mahoney p. 117) He further told Rusk that there would be no consideration of a cease-fire until Tshombe agreed to talk to Adoula.

The Propaganda War over Katanga

Once the shooting started in earnest, the propaganda war also began to heat up. A full page ad appeared in the New York Times. It compared Katanga to the Soviet client state of Hungary in its 1956 crisis. One of the signers for the ad was Buckley’s young conservative group, the Young Americans for Freedom. Time magazine placed Tshombe on its cover. Kennedy fought back by getting Eisenhower to issue a statement in support of his policies. He also sent an emissary to break up any attempted alliance between Dodd and southern senator Richard Russell of Georgia. When the same State Department officer tried to get in contact with Nixon, the former vice-president told him not to waste his time.

In December of 1961, Tshombe sent word to Kennedy that he wanted to negotiate. Tshombe was in a weak position as fighter jets were strafing his palace. Kennedy sent Gullion and former UN official Ralph Bunche to mediate the talks. The session did not go well. Tshombe, in the middle of the talks wished to leave to consult with other dignitaries from his government. Gullion would not allow it but he did get Tshombe to recognize the Congo’s constitution and place his soldiers under Kasavubu’s authority. He would then be allowed to run for the Congolese parliament. This would have been enough for Ball to agree to a cease-fire. But immediately upon his return to Katanga, Tshombe denounced the bargain and the violence was renewed.

Tshombe’s ploy almost worked. Adoula’s leftist followers lost faith in him and began to leave for Stanleyville. Britain and France defected from the mission. Congress did not want to refinance the UN effort to put down the revolt. Even Ball advised Kennedy to cut his losses and leave. It appears that it was Gullion who decided to press on in the effort to break Katanga and it seems it was his advice, and his special relationship with Kennedy, that kept the president from losing faith.

Kennedy’s Economic Warfare

In 1962, Kennedy decided to hit Tshombe where it hurt. A joint British-Belgian company named Union Miniere had been bankrolling the Katangan war effort in return for mineral rights there. Kennedy, through some British contacts now attempted to get the company to stop paying those fees to Tshombe. Union Miniere refused. They replied that they had billions wrapped up in Katanga and could not afford to risk the loss. Kennedy now went through the American ambassador in England to the Belgian representatives of the company. He told them that unless a good part of the stipend to Katanga was curtailed, he would unleash a terrific attack on Katanga and then give all of Union Miniere over to Adoula when the Congo was reunified. This did the trick. The revenues going to Tshombe were significantly curtailed. The cutback came at an important time since Tshombe had already run up a multimillion dollar debt in resisting the UN effort.

To counter these moves, Dodd forged an alliance with Senator Barry Goldwater, the ultraconservative senator from Arizona. Their clear message to Tshombe was that he should hold out until the 1964 presidential election in which Goldwater had already expressed an interest in running. Kennedy countered by bringing Adoula to both New York and Washington. In his speech at the United Nations, Adoula paid tribute to “our national hero Patrice Lumumba” and also criticized Belgium. (Mahoney, p. 134) At his visit to the White House, Adoula pointed to a portrait of Andrew Jackson and told Kennedy how much he admired Old Hickory. Remembering his history, and clearly referring to Tshombe and Katanga, Kennedy made a toast to Adoula quoting Jackson’s famous reply to secessionist John Calhoun, “Our federal union; it must be preserved.” Two months after the visit, Kennedy wrote a letter to Adoula:

These three months have been trying for us. I am searching for an agreement to end the armaments race and you are searching for an agreement to reunite your country…. You may be assured that we will spare no effort in bringing about this end. (Ibid p. 135)

The supporters of Tshombe needed to retaliate for the success of the Adoula visit. Tshombe’s press agent, Michel Struelens arranged for him to appear on a segment of Meet the Press, a rally at Madison Square Garden, and a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Dodd invited Tshombe to testify before his subcommittee. In the face of all this advance fanfare, Kennedy made it clear that he was considering not granting Tshombe a visa into the country. Gullion and Stevenson argued that it was not a legal necessity since Tshombe was not a real representative of the Congolese government. Kennedy’s legal adviser, Abram Chayes argued against the denial. In the end, Kennedy again sided with Gullion and denied the visa. Again, Kennedy took a barrage of criticism for this maneuver. His father’s old friend, Arthur Krock, accused the administration of evasion and of denying Tshombe his right to be heard. The John Birch Society now formally entered on Katanga’s side. Even Herbert Hoover lent his name to pro-Katanga statements.

The Last Round

Denied access to the US, Tshombe now set about rearming his military. Kennedy decided to push for economic sanctions followed by a blockade. But Kennedy tried one last time to open negotiations with Tshombe. But by October of 1962 these had proved futile. Moreover, Adoula misinterpreted Kennedy’s negotiation attempt as backing out on his commitment to the Congo. Adoula now turned to the UN and the Russians in hopes of one last knockout blow against Tshombe. On November 2, 1962 the first clashes began. Gullion worked overtime to get Adoula to stop courting the Russians. Kennedy then wrote to Rusk and Ball that he wanted both men to come to a conclusion on what the American role should be in the renewed hostilities. Finally, Ball decided on the use of force, even if it meant the direct use of American air power.

On December 24, 1962 Katangese forces fired on a UN helicopter and outpost. The UN now moved with a combined land and air strike code-named Operation Grand Slam. By December 29th, Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga was under heavy siege. By the second week of January, the UN advance was proceeding on all fronts. By January 22nd, Katanga’s secession effort was over. As Stevenson said later, it was the UN’s finest hour. Kennedy wrote congratulatory notes to all those involved. To George McGhee, special State Department emissary on the Congo, Kennedy wrote that the task had been “extraordinarily difficult” but now they were entitled to “a little sense of pride.” (Mahoney p. 156)

The Congo: 1963

A few months after Katanga had capitulated and Tshombe had fled to Rhodesia, the UN, because of the huge expense of the expedition, was ready to withdraw. Kennedy urged U Thant to keep the force in the Congo; he even offered to finance part of the mission if it was held over. But the UN wanted its forces out, even though it looked like Adoula’s position was weakening and the Congolese army itself was not stable or reliable. Kennedy had a difficult choice: he could quit the Congo along with the UN, or the US could try to stay and assume some responsibility for the mess it was at least partly responsible for. Kennedy chose to stay. But not before he did all he could to try to keep the UN there longer. This even included going to the UN himself on September 20, 1963 to address the General Assembly on this very subject:

a project undertaken in the excitement of crisis begins to lose its appeal as the problems drag on and the bills pile up…. I believe that this Assembly should do whatever is necessary to preserve the gains already made and to protect the new nation in its struggle for progress. Let us complete what we have started.

The personal appearance and the speech were enough to turn the UN around. The body voted to keep the peacekeeping mission in place another year. Adoula wired Kennedy his sincere gratitude.

But in October and November things began to collapse. President Kasavubu decided to disband Parliament and this ignited an already simmering leftist rebellion. Gizenga’s followers called for strikes and army mutinies. They tried to assassinate Mobutu. Kennedy followed the new crisis and wanted a retraining of the Congolese army in order to avert a new civil war. But there was a difference between what Kennedy wanted and what the Pentagon delivered. By October of 1963, Mobutu had already become a favorite of the Fort Benning crowd in the Army, the group that would eventually charter at that military site the School of the Americas, an institution that would spawn a whole generation of rightwing Third World dictators. Kennedy had wanted the retraining carried out by Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert who wanted the retraining to be implemented not just by the US but by five other western countries. Kennedy also agreed with U Thant that there should be African representation in the leadership of that program. Yet Mobutu, with the backing of his Pentagon allies, including Army Chief Earle Wheeler, managed to resist both of these White House wishes. In November, Kennedy ordered a progress report on the retraining issue. The Pentagon had done little and blamed the paltry effort on the UN.

1964: LBJ reverses Kennedy’s policies

In 1964, the leftist rebellion picked up strength and began taking whole provinces. President Johnson and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy decided that a weakened Adoula had to be strengthened with a show of American help. The CIA sent Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties against the rebels. When the UN finally withdrew, the US now became an ally of Belgium and intervened with arms, airplanes and advisors. Incredibly, as Jonathan Kwitny notes, Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the Congo government (p. 79). Further, Tshombe now blamed the revolts on China! To quote Kwitny:

In a move suspiciously reminiscent of a standard US intelligence agency ploy, Tshombe produced what he said were some captured military documents, and a Chinese defector who announced that China was attempting to take over the Congo as part of a plot to conquer all of Africa. (p. 79)

With this, the Mobutu-Tshombe alliance now lost all semblance of a Gullion-Kennedy styled moderate coalition. Now, rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were allowed to join the Congolese army in the war on the “Chinese-inspired left”. Further, as Kwitny also notes, this dramatic reversal was done under the auspices of the United States. The UN had now been dropped as a stabilizing, multilateral force. This meant, of course, that the tilt to the right would now go unabated. By 1965, the new American and Belgian supplemented force had put down the major part of the rebellion. General Mobutu then got rid of President Kasavubu. (Adoula had already been replaced by Tshombe.) In 1966, Mobutu installed himself as military dictator. The rest is a familiar story. Mobutu, like Suharto in Indonesia, allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the Congo, like those of Indonesia, were mined by huge western corporations, whose owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in abject poverty. As with the economy, Mobutu stifled political dissent as well. And, like Suharto, Mobutu grew into one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars (Kwitny p. 87). Just one Swiss bank account was worth $143 million. And like Suharto, Mobutu fell after three decades of a corrupt dictatorship, leaving most of his citizenry in an anarchic, post-colonial state similar to where they had been at the beginning of his reign.

The policies before and after Kennedy’s in this tale help explain much about the chaos and confusion going on in Congo today. It’s a story you won’t read in many papers or see on television. In itself, the events which occurred there from 1959 to 1966 form a milestone. As Kwitny writes:

The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (p. 75)

Whatever Kennedy’s failures as a tactician, whatever his equivocations were on taking quick and decisive action, he realized that nationalism would have to have its place in American foreign policy. As Mahoney concludes, Kennedy did what no other president before or after him had done. He established “a common ground between African ideals and American self-interest in the midst of the Cold War.” (p. 248) As Kwitny notes, this was the basis of Lumumba’s (undying) appeal:

Lumumba is a hero to Africans not because he promoted socialism, which he didn’t, but because he resisted foreign intervention. He stood up to outsiders, if only by getting himself killed. Most Africans … would say that the principal outsider he stood up to was the United States. (p. 72)

Mahoney relates an anecdote which helps explain why Kennedy understood the appeal of Lumumba. It has little to do with his 1951 trip to Saigon, although it may help explain why he sought out the people he did while he was there. The vignette illuminates a lot about the Kennedy mystery, i.e. why the son of a multimillionaire ended up being on the side of African black nationalism abroad and integration at home. In January of 1962, in the midst of the Congo crisis, Kennedy was talking to Nehru of India when, presumably, the great Indian leader was lecturing him on the subject of colonialism. Kennedy replied:

I grew up in a community where the people were hardly a generation away from colonial rule. And I can claim the company of many historians in saying that the colonialism to which my immediate ancestors were subject was more sterile, oppressive and even cruel than that of India.

Kennedy, of course, was referring to the conquest and subjugation of Ireland by the British. A colonization that has now lasted for 800 years. Clearly, Kennedy never forgot where his family came from.

It is also clear that in his brief intervention in the politics of the newly liberated continent of Africa, its new progressive leaders realized Kennedy’s sensitivity to their painful and precarious position. They also seem to have realized what Kennedy the politician was up against, and what may have caused his death.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana – a clear leftist who Kennedy had backed against heavy odds and who was perhaps the greatest of that period’s African leaders – was overcome with sadness upon hearing of the young American president’s death. In a speech at that time, he told his citizens that Africa would forever remember Kennedy’s great sensitivity to that continent’s special problems. (Mahoney, p. 235) Later, when the American ambassador handed Nkrumah a copy of the Warren Report, he thumbed through it and pointed to the name of Allen Dulles as a member of the Warren Commission. He handed it back abruptly, muttering simply, “Whitewash.”

In part two, Lisa Pease explores the covert action underlying the plots against Lumumba and new evidence which has surfaced regarding the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjold.

February 15, 1999