Tag: ASSASSINATIONS

Will the UN reopen the Dag Hammarskjold case?

Spy messages could finally solve mystery of UN chief’s death crash

by Jamie Doward, At: The Guardian

December 13, 2014
Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

by Shaila Dawan, At: NYT

July 22, 2011
Has Another of Malcolm X’s Assassins Been Found?

by Abdur Rahman Muhammad, At: A Singular Voice

May 12, 2010
David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories
An Incurious Man: David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories

On June 10, 1963, John F. Kennedy explained the foreign policy of the United States like so:

World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor – it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. [1]

On November 26, 1963, Lyndon Johnson expressed American foreign policy a little differently:

It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy …

We should concentrate our own efforts, and insofar as possible we should persuade the Government of South Vietnam to concentrate its efforts, on the critical situation in the Mekong Delta. This concentration should include not only military but political, economic, social, educational and informational effort. We should seek to turn the tide not only of battle but of belief, and we should seek to increase not only the control of hamlets but the productivity of this area, especially where the proceeds can be held for the advantage of anti-Communist forces. [2]

As historians, we might ask ourselves if there were any significant events that occurred in between these two events that might explain the difference. And we might, after a moment, think of the Kennedy assassination. However, if we were to do so, as logical as that might seem, we would be placing ourselves in opposition to most mainstream history of the last 47 years. Mainstream historians tend to ignore the significance of these changes, and some (like Noam Chomsky) have even argued that Kennedy was simply lying on June 10th and that JFK’s foreign policy would have been the same as Johnson. Recent revelations from various members of Kennedy’s cabinet have given the lie to this viewpoint, however.

There is another possible position to take on this issue. One could, in principle, say that it is simply insanity to even ask the question. Asking the question is already to take leave of one’s senses, to lose touch with reality. That is David Aaronovitch’s position.

His book Voodoo Histories: the Role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History has a contradiction built right into the title. According to Aaronovitch, conspiracy theories play no role in modern history, except as diversion and nonsense. In order to make his case, the author discusses several different conspiracy theories from all over the world. And it is here where we find the real problem of his book.

ORGANIZATION

Books of this type (Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History and so forth) generally rely on amateur psychology, failure to address the evidence, omission and falsification, and just plain illogic. Voodoo Histories has elements of all these things, although it far surpasses those works in terms of literary execution. However, the most important thing to note about the book is its organizational structure. In succession, the main topics of each chapter are the following: (1) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (2) Leon Trotsky and the Moscow Trials; (3) McCarthyism; (4) JFK; (5) the murder of Hilda Murrell; (6) the Da Vinci code; (7) 9/11 Truth; (8) the suicide or murder of Dr. David Kelly; and (9) the Obama birth certificate flap.

Let us first note that these topics are, to put it mildly, eccentric. Mixed into these various broad topics are: the alleged murder of Princess Diana, the moon landing hoax, Holocaust denial, etc. He does show restraint in not discussing UFOs or Elvis, but virtually every other conspiracy theory gets addressed at some point. This is quite clever. With an assortment like this, one’s head is likely to be nodding in agreement at some point – maybe most of them. And there is the occasional fact that one might find intriguing; for example, I was surprised to learn that two-thirds of alien abduction “victims” are women. Granted, I’d never given the matter any thought before, but that is sociologically interesting.

Most of these chosen targets are easy. The Protocols, among other things, were enthusiastically endorsed by Henry Ford. Ford’s anti-Semitism was such that he received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor that could be given to a non-German, by Adolf Hitler in 1938. [3] Unfortunately, this document remains relevant in our time, as there are some right-wing groups who cling to it, sometimes with the caveat that they don’t really mean the Jews as such, or not all Jews, or only the international banking Jews. People like Henry Makow and Alex Jones take the documents seriously, as did the late William Cooper. [4] In a case like this, the “conspiracy” plays second fiddle to the real issue, which is pure anti-Semitism. And though Aaronovitch’s discussion of the Protocols brings nothing new to the table, the subject matter is certainly worthy of attention.

However, of the other topics addressed in his book, there are really only two that concern the vast majority of political researchers: JFK and 9/11. The Obama birth certificate flap is an extension of various right-wing fantasies, although calling this a “conspiracy theory” is a bit of a stretch. I’m not sure how many people believed that the birth certificate had been manipulated with the foreknowledge that one day Obama would be a presidential candidate – hopefully very few. The Moscow Trials, while interesting historically, are not terribly relevant to today’s world. McCarthyism is a curious topic for the author to address, but dealing with it in any detail would require a much longer essay in itself. However, there are many contradictions and problems in dealing with McCarthy, and Aaronovitch doesn’t really go into them; he takes the standard position that McCarthy’s delusionary conspiracy theory ran out of control. There are two British murder investigations, into Hilda Murrell, an activist, and Dr. David Kelly, who had inconvenient information. While the interest in both cases is understandable (Murrell’s body was allegedly in her garden for four days before being found, and Dr. Kelly’s death had numerous curious details), the historical impact of these deaths (with all due respect) is minimal. Meanwhile, the Da Vinci code is shoehorned incongruously into the book, a topic for which the author has only disdain (his title for this chapter is “Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit,” which sums up his attitude).

We can therefore see, looking at this organization, that there is an immediate flaw in the conception, for there are an infinite number of ways to organize any given dataset. Aaronovitch, for his part, has selected a structure with two great benefits: (1) much of the material will superficially appear to support his thesis, and (2) it guarantees that readers will find some things to agree with, even if they dispute other sections of the book – an excellent marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, his decision is hardly satisfactory to anyone serious. Most political researchers, in doing analysis of certain significant events, discuss JFK, MLK, 9/11, and numerous other incidents of major world importance. But if one were to take the approach of, say, People magazine, one might write a book and include JFK alongside Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. That is, to say, in the world of commercial tabloids, or a star-obsessed perspective, the connection between the people or events involved ceases to be political. It rests, instead, on the fact that they are famous. “What makes the deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana so fascinating is the victims’ iconic status and their youth,” writes the author. [5]

Note how reductive this point of view becomes. All information exists, in the word chosen by John McAdams, as a series of “factoids.” Aaronovitch’s book, by endorsing this structure, is a Procrustean Bed equalizing all inquiry. As in the game Trivial Pursuit, the questions “Who Shot J.R.?” and “Who Shot JFK?” are worth the same piece of pie. No one whose interest is truth can afford to take this approach to what amount to the most serious historical subjects of our time.

JFK

By and large, this is not an evidential book. He doesn’t address the major assassinations in any detail, apart from Kennedy. His entire take on RFK is summed up as: “And if you thought JFK had been killed by ‘them,’ then why not his brother, gunned down in California in 1968?” [6] Alas, in his chapter on the JFK assassination, although he does not rely on simple rhetoric for his attacks, the evidence he sites is vastly out of date. There is nothing new in his discussion, particularly in light of Bugliosi’s recent Reclaiming History. If Bugliosi can’t prove the Warren Commission thesis in 2600 pages, then Aaronovitch will not be able to do so in 30 or so. However, he at least gives it a try, which is more than we can say about his assessment of the other political murders.

Aaronovitch’s point of view on Oswald is as follows:

If one reads the Warren Report, the circumstantial evidence that Oswald was the lone gunman seems overwhelming. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository, where, on the sixth floor, after the shooting, his rifle was discovered inside an improvised sniper’s nest. People had seen a man at the sixth-floor window, had seen the rifle barrel, had heard the shots. Oswald was the only employee unaccounted for after the shooting, and he was picked up shortly afterward in a cinema, having just shot a policeman looking for someone of his description. The words ‘slam dunk’ come to mind. [7]

Did I say the author was trying? OK, maybe not so much.

Without going into the evidence for all of this (see Jim DiEugenio’s book on Bugliosi [8] for a detailed rundown, as arguing with Aaronovitch is both redundant and silly given the scale of the other battle), note that he just restates the Warren Commission’s conclusions. When one looks into the detailed evidence, the case falls apart. Aaronovitch isn’t going to volunteer that the rifle was ordered under a different name, that the FBI initially failed to get prints off the rifle, that the FBI’s own nitrate test cleared Oswald of the murder, that the rifle changed shape three times before settling into the form of a Manlicher-Carcano, and that the State would never have been able to make a case against Oswald for shooting the policeman J.D. Tippit, much less JFK. “The detail is overwhelming,” he complains. [9] Yes, it is; such is the price for doing the investigative work. Unfortunately, if you don’t do the work, you are going to end up ineffectually repeating the same balderdash that nobody believed in 1963.

And, of course, he does. He calls the idea that Oswald shot at General Edwin Walker “an incontrovertible fact,” an embarrassing statement which he may want to delete in future editions. [10] He says of Norman Mailer’s book Oswald’s Tale that “It is suggestive that one of the eminent Americans who initially advocated the notion of conspiracy changed his mind when he began to study Oswald the man.” [11] It is indeed suggestive of the fact that Mailer desperately needed money to help him with the IRS, but apart from that it is unclear just how liberal Mailer was in the first place. Having gone through a substantial amount of personal correspondence located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, I can say that his political views were not consistent with his public statements; among other things, one of his best friends was G. Gordon Liddy.

The rest of his short JFK discussion, encased in a chapter entitled “Dead Deities,” will convince no one but the already convinced. And anyone convinced by his evidence doesn’t understand the concept.

9/11

Aaronovitch’s take on 9/11 is somewhat depressing. It is depressing because I am in the unfortunate position of having to agree with much of it. This is less a triumph on the author’s part and more a reflection on how disastrous the various truth movements have become. As a result of the large-scale illiteracy infecting those who would question the events of 9/11, many ridiculous notions have become commonplace memes. Aaronovitch goes right for them.

He describes a conversation with the alleged MI5 whistleblower David Shayler, who has been promoted by Alex Jones and Webster Tarpley, among others, in which he makes the absurd statement that a “cigar-shaped missile” struck the World Trade Center. [12] He invokes Dylan Avery’s popular film Loose Change, itself an easy target because of numerous factual errors and its endorsement of the no-plane-hit-the-Pentagon theory. This leads naturally into the work of Thierry Meyssan, who invented the no-plane theory, and then Aaronovitch uses this same theory to undermine David Ray Griffin, who gave and continues to give credence to it. Meyssan, of course, has been linked to Michael Collins Piper, and to the right-wing American Free Press and Christopher Bollyn. [13] The anti-Jewish nature of AFP is apparent to anyone familiar with the publication, which is also a trait of Eric Hufschmid, who produced one of the first films about 9/11 called Painful Questions. There are a couple of pages dedicated to Tarpley, who although he has reportedly left the LaRouchies behind, continues to believe in a worldview indistinguishable from LaRouche, with a powerful and controlling central government producing Star Wars defense systems and nuclear plants.

Now Aaronovitch doesn’t do a particularly good job of attacking these people – it is, for the most part, guilt-by-association – but in fact there is little I can say in their defense. I have dealt with a couple of these folks personally, and from my reading of the situation they arguably have done more damage than help in the 9/11 investigation. However, this could not have happened without the hordes of eager followers who read too little and watch too much. Aaronovitch doesn’t even exploit what may be the most incredible person to emerge from all this – Ace Baker – whose theory includes holographic planes at the Pentagon and WTC. As Horatio once said to Hamlet, “T’would be to consider too curiously to consider so.” And people continue to eat it up, not recognizing the contradiction in uniting behind a charismatic leader to oppose fascism.

The author does not deal with Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11 nor with the more credible sections of Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon because in doing so he would come up against the real questions of 9/11: the lack of military response, Norman Mineta’s testimony about Dick Cheney and the Pentagon plane, the fact that the Patriot Act was written prior to 9/11, the various business interests that gained from the attacks much the way Bell Helicopter profited from Vietnam. He doesn’t deal with these issues and he doesn’t have to, because the 9/11 movement has given him holograms and holes to fight instead.

OCCAM’S RAZOR AND THE ‘TRIUMPH OF NARRATIVE’

At some point in all of these books, there comes a point where the author must assert that conspiracists are psychologically damaged in comparison with the well-adjusted author. That happens a few times over the course of the book in different guises.

One tool that the author uses is to bring in Occam’s Razor. I have written about this particular device at length elsewhere, [14] but the main point is to remember that Occam’s Razor is a bit of advice that may or may not be useful depending on the context. It is entirely useless in biology, for example. It also depends heavily on what one means by the “simplest explanation.” For example, in the 9/11 attacks, the “simplest explanation” is said to involve a man on kidney dialysis who trains and inspires a team of devout Muslims from a cave in Afghanistan and never mind his long ties with the CIA, the Bush family, the fact that his followers apparently enjoyed drink and drugs, [15] wrote suicide notes that appeared to contradict Islam, [16] and so on. Trying to find the simplest model for something may or may not be a fruitful approach depending on circumstances.

The other tool is best exemplified by his discussion of a British biologist (yes, a biologist, but leave that aside for the moment) called Lewis Wolpert who theorizes that human beings have a “cognitive imperative” to attribute causes to the events of the world. The biologist tells us that all human beings have “a strong tendency to make a causal story to provide an explanation … ignorance about important causes is intolerable.” This represents, says this biologist, the “triumph of narrative.” [17]

There is little more than a restatement of Hume (and a pinch of Foucault) in this, but we should first note that if we take Wolpert seriously, we not only destroy religious belief but undermine science as well. Wolpert proposes a torch, but his torch is actually a flamethrower, burning down all possibilities of understanding the world. If he is correct, we will always be projecting our private consciousness onto everything like the conspiracies proposed by the heroes of Umberto Eco’s hilarious novel Foucault’s Pendulum.

What Aaronovitch wants to do, of course, is assert that opposition to the state will always follow a fantastical pattern desired by the conspiracists. Once again, however, his perspective on the issue has unintended consequences. In his chapter on the Moscow Trials, he reports how people were convinced of the guilt of the parties in the dock, and how the German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger gradually became convinced of the reverse. Feuchtwanger describes how he heard “what they said and how they said it,” and that “I was forced to accept the evidence of my senses and my doubts melted away …” [18] Does Aaronovitch take this opportunity to explain that Feuchtwanger is a conspiracy theorist, in opposition to consensus reality, and that his certainty is simply a symptom of his derangement? He does not. What is the difference? The identity of the state apparatus. Aaronovitch, like the Western press generally, is willing to accept conspiracy theories as they appear in other countries. Think back to when there was much speculation about Vladimir Putin’s role in the assassination of a political rival or Gerald Posner himself when discussing a possible Saudi conspiracy. [19]

TO THE MAN

To his credit, Aaronovitch does not engage in specific name-calling the way some have done in identifying certain people as idiots or lunatics. He is far too subtle for that. He works at creating associations to undermine the serious by lumping them in with the unserious. I will do him the same credit here. However, since he does decide to psychoanalyze conspiracy theorists, albeit with the assistance of a biologist, permit me to place him on the couch for a moment.

The son of a well-known Communist and anti-American comic book activist, Aaronovitch grew up as a Communist himself. He staged a protest in 1975 as part of the Manchester team on a UK television show called University Challenge, in which he and his fellows answered every question with the name of a revolutionary. [20] However, like Christopher Hitchens, after 9/11 he ceased being a leftist gadfly and became a raving warmonger, arguing that the Iraq War was justified simply to remove Saddam even if no WMDs were found. [21] Even when the scale of the disaster was evident, he refused to back down:

The government has lost a great deal of trust precisely because the weapons haven’t been found, and because the Gilliganesque charge that Number 10 somehow lied about their presence, has stuck. The trouble is that I find – partly as a result of the Hutton inquiry (the evidence, not the report) – that I don’t believe the government did lie. As the MoD intelligence dissident, Brian Jones, wrote to the Independent last week, “I cast no doubt on Mr Blair’s integrity. He evidently believed that Iraq possessed a significant stockpile of chemical or biological weapons and expected them to be recovered during or soon after the invasion… such a discovery would have enhanced, rather than undermined, ‘the global fight against weapons proliferation’.” [22]

Of course this was nonsense, and the Blair government made no errors in analysis. They lied, as did the Bush administration. [23] And eventually Tony Blair resigned his position to take a job at J.P. Morgan. [24] We should not, of course, draw any conclusions from this.

If we wanted to be amateur psychoanalysts, we could say that Mr. Aaronovitch is protesting too much; that is, that the former Communist is now bending over to prove his moderate credentials. And that he has become so blinded in his confusion that he now refuses to conform to reality in drawing his conclusions, continuing to defend the insanely corrupt Blair government despite voluminous physical evidence showing it to be a cesspool. He also reaches to defend the decision to remove Saddam because of the leader’s inherent evil, while not dealing with any of the geopolitical consequences in any sort of serious fashion. He thus transmutes himself into a less masculine version of Ann Coulter.

Q.E.D.

At one point in his book, Aaronovitch points out that “from 1933 to 1963, only Eisenhower was not the target of assassins.” [25] He doesn’t count the attempted overthrow of the Roosevelt government in this analysis, although one easily could. [26] He also doesn’t draw the conclusion that the U.S. is some sort of banana republic, given this history; instead, he notes how it provides ample evidence that America produces unmotivated psychopathy at a rate unparalleled in the Western world.

And this really gets us to the crux of the matter. In order to believe Aaronovitch, you have to take a long string of incidents and pretend they are of no consequence in American history. JFK orders withdrawal from Vietnam, fires Allen Dulles, and is murdered on November 22, 1963. In 1965, Malcolm X is shot to death, shortly after the pilgrimage to Mecca that greatly changed his views on racial conflicts in society. On April 4, 1967, MLK begins to attack the Vietnam War directly in a great speech called “A Time to Break Silence.” On April 4, 1968, King is shot to death. Bobby Kennedy is running for President at the time. In June of 1968, he is shot to death. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panthers are shot to death in December of 1969. Huey Newton goes to prison, Bobby Seale goes through his infamous trial, Stokely Carmichael is forced out of the country during the 1970s. The Democratic National Convention of 1968 is a disaster, paving the way for both Kevin Phillips’s Southern strategy and a Nixon administration that changes the face of politics. There is no one for the left to unite under, although there is a lukewarm coalition behind Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein was certainly not in the class of these former men, and in fact was a CIA informant, [27] but he was nonetheless shot to death himself in 1980. Also murdered in 1980 was John Lennon, not a political figure as such but greatly feared by the Nixon administration, and hated by an FBI that tried to deport him numerous times. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to receive public office in the United States, is shot to death in 1978.

Now at the same time that this is happening, we have an insane war in Vietnam, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and a vast wave of rightward movement culminating in Reagan’s “morning in America” in the 1980 election campaign. After that, the right-wing has enough momentum to continue demolishing the left to such an extent that even when Bill Clinton is elected President, Clinton’s liberalism can hardly be said to exist in comparison to people like Dr. King or the latter-day Bobby Kennedy. Liberalism, in effect, is wiped out. Aaronovitch invokes the book The Assassinations but fails to deal with the evidence in favor of its basic premise, which is that there was an internal war against the Left to prevent what would have been a revolution.

In order to decry this as some sort of conspiratorial fantasy, you have to say that none of this matters, that none of it had any real effect on history (the Chomsky structuralist interpretation), and to hold that believing otherwise makes you crazy. But look at what this means. In an ordinary criminal investigation, the closest parties to a murdered person become suspects. That is, if a woman is killed and she is married, all things being equal, the husband most likely did it. Children, overwhelmingly, are molested, beaten, and killed by their parents and not by strangers. That is because human beings operate from internal motives; they generally don’t kill at random or from a sociopathic perspective.

But it’s even worse than this. This line of reasoning suggests that the higher the stakes, the more likely it is that a murder is committed for no motive. In other words, it is reasonable to suggest that a guy who desperately needs money to pay rent might rob a liquor store, but to suggest that Lyndon Johnson (for example) had Kennedy killed in order to become President of the United States is unreasonable. This is illogical. Obviously, the greater the stakes, the more attractive criminal undertakings become. The history of Europe is filled with the devious murders of kings for the purpose of usurpation; just read Shakespeare.

The inherent lie in Aaronovitch’s work is that it is in any sense an honest review of “conspiracy theory.” I have many problems with this phrase in general, but putting those aside for the moment, the reason that there are conspiracy theories is because those models fit reality better than other models. For example, in the JFK case, there is a Warren Commission model that has been falsified by thousands of pieces of evidence out together in painstaking fashion by those who care about truth. In the course of this arose other models that attempt to better explain what happened, and some are no doubt closer than others. This is normal science. The distinction is that the WC model has a political value attached to it which is not dependent on its truth value.

If the author had truly been serious about writing an overview of conspiracies, he might have left behind the large package of straw men gathered in this book. He might have instead chosen from any number of real historical events, such as the 1846 invasion of Mexico led by Zachary Taylor, the 1898 bombing of the Maine leading to the Spanish-American War, Operation Paperclip, Operation Gladio, the Manhattan Project, the coup of Salvador Allende, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Iran Contra … there are endless examples, of which these are but a few. In doing so, he might have been to construct a model of how such things are done and thus produced some valuable work.

It’s obvious why he doesn’t go into these other cases. For example, he doesn’t say anything about the RFK case in his book, because if you simply list the agreed-upon facts in order, any idiot can see that Sirhan didn’t kill RFK. It’s physically impossible. Aaronovitch has produced a book that resembles talk radio, in that it speaks in a mocking tone designed to appeal to an audience confident in their conclusions and unacquainted with evidence. In so doing he produces another in a long assembly line of tomes purporting to enlighten but instead steeped in a smear campaign.

In a final bit of irony, Aaronovitch ends his book by using a long quote by the historian Stephen Ambrose, in which Ambrose complains that conspiratorial thinking led to the conditions that created McCarthy. [28] Why is this ironic? Because, rather like the disingenuous hack Gerald Posner, Ambrose was a serial plagiarist. [29] He, also like Posner, was heavily criticized for the shoddy research work that went into his books. [30] There was also the ugly incident involving James Bacque, for whom Ambrose had been a mentor. Bacque discovered evidence in the Soviet archives that Dwight Eisenhower had allowed Russian soldiers to starve to death while outside in prison camps. Ambrose initially supported the work, but then later denounced it, as Ambrose’s best known work was his allegedly definitive biography of Eisenhower. [31] Aaronovitch’s use of Ambrose is therefore very apt indeed. He was the perfect example of the modern American historian, a plagiarist maintaining the consensus by means of covering his eyes and ears.

Aaronovitch learned his lessons well. Ultimately, Voodoo Histories is a perfect illustration in the art of not paying attention.

Notes
1. John F. Kennedy, speech at American University, 10 June 1963.
2. National Security Action Memorandum No. 273.
3. Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews (Public Affairs: NY 2001), 284.
4. For Jones and Makow, see http://www.prisonplanet.com/121504makow.html; for Cooper, see his book Behold a Pale Horse (Light Technology Publishing: Flagstaff, AZ: 1991), where he instructs the reader to replace the word “Jew” with “Illuminati” and the word “goyim” with “cattle.” No joke.
5. David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy in Shaping Modern History (Penguin: NY 2010), 268.
6. Ibid, 131.
7. Ibid, 127-128.
8. James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland.
9. Aaronovitch, 129.
10. Ibid, 134.
11. Ibid, 136.
12. Ibid, 249.
13. Ibid, 260-261.
14. http://wp.me/pPsLn-b
15. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1340519/FBI-tracks-down-the-Florida-lair-of-flying-school-terrorists.html
16. http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0929-07.htm
17. Aaronovitch, 354.
18. Ibid, 65.
19. http://www.satribune.com/archives/sep7_13_03/P1_slept.htm
20. http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/11/david-aaronovitch-hoggart-abba
21. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,945551,00.html
22. http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-16-2004-50627.asp
23. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23803734-french-accuse-tony-blair-of-soviet-style-propaganda-in-run-up-to-iraq-war.do
24. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7180306.stm
25. Aaronovitch, 132.
26. See The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer & War is a Racket by Smedley Butler. The story is also retold in the superb documentary The Corporation.
27. See The Pied Piper by Richard Cummings (Imprint.com, 1985).
28. Aaronovitch, 356.
29. http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/10/0510ambrose.html
30. http://hnn.us/articles/504.html
31. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/24/books/ike-and-the-disappearing-atrocities.html?pagewanted=1
March 2, 2010
The Colosio Assassination: Chronology of Events Surrounding the Assassination of Luis Colosio, 23 March 1994
From the January-February 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 2) of Probe

Business had brought me to Mexico City on the day Luis Colosio was assassinated in Tijuana. The TV coverage of the event was every bit as obscure as the reporting of the JFK murder and worse than the coverage of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. The news video of the assassination didn’t play once; instead heads talked and voxes popped…

What follows is a chronology of events relating to, or concurrent with, the assassination of Colosio, Presidential candidate of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Internacional) in Mexico on March 23, 1993.

It is culled from printed sources, including the Mexico City News, Mexico City Times, La Jornada, Proceso, Los Angeles Times, AP Reports, John Ross’s reports in Mexico Barbaro and The Anderson Valley Advertiser, the invaluable Weekly News Update on the Americas, and the book Ya Vamos Llegando a Mexico… by Ciro Gomez Leyva and the staff of Reforma (Editorial Diana, Mexico, 1995. ISBN 968-13-2837-X).

It is perhaps interesting to assassination researchers since it seems to have certain traits in common with the JFK assassination: specifically, the murder of a (presumptive) head of state on the campaign trail, competing theories of a lone assassin and multiple gunmen, photographic evidence suggesting that the accused was elsewhere, and was impersonated by a “double”, the failure of a government-run “recreation” of the crime, more than a dozen attendant murders or “suicides”, corruption or gross ineptitude on the part of the magnicida‘s bodyguards, and the inevitable presence of at least one “former” agent of the CIA…

Organizations mentioned in the text:
- PRI: Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional)
- PAN: National Action Party (Partido de Accion Nacional)
- PRD: Democratic Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Democratico)
- CISEN: Center for Investigations and National Security
- SEDENA: National Defence Secretariat
- PGR: Attorney General of the Republic
- EZLN: National Zapatista Liberation Army (“Zapatistas”)
- EPR: Popular Revolutionary Army
1988

Members of a Colombian drug cartel allegedly funnel $200,000 into the campaign of CARLOS SALINAS DE GORTARI, Presidential candidate of the PRI. The money is given to his brother RAUL SALINAS to protect drugs shipped through Mexico. Thereafter RAUL receives $300,000 for each cocaine shipment he protects. (From a Colombian drug dealer’s deposition to the Swiss enquiry into the $132 million RAUL deposited in Swiss banks – El Universal, Agence France-Presse, 31 August 1998)

2 July

FRANCISCO XAVIER OVANDO and ROMAN GIL HERALDEZ, political aides to the PRD’s Presidential candidate CUAUHTEMOC CARDENAS, are murdered in the Transito district of Mexico City, less than 72 hours before the Mexican presidential elections.

6 July

The elections occur. By his own count, CARDENAS defeats the PRI’s SALINAS by a 39-37% margin.

14 July

Interior Secretary MANUEL BARTLETT insists that the Federal Electoral Commission’s computers have crashed, and SALINAS is awarded 50.2% of the vote. Tens of thousands of partially burned ballots marked for CARDENAS are found floating in rivers or smouldering in garbage dumps.

1990

January

LIONEL GODOY, a PRD special prosecutor, announces the arrest of RICARDO FRANCO VILLA, a former attorney general of Michoacan, as the mastermind of the XAVIER OVANDO and GIL HERALDEZ murders. FRANCO VILLA is jailed; no motive is ever advanced.

FRANCO VILLA was part of a celebrated prosecutorial team that included JAVIER COELLO TREJO, later President SALINAS’ drug czar, and GUILLERMO GONZALEZ CALDERONI, a Federal Judicial Police drug agent. According to El Universal CALDERONI said that he was asked by RAUL SALINAS to contract Gulf cartel hitmen to kill OVANDO and retrieve passwords to the electoral computers. (John Ross, Mexico Barbaro, 14-20 Aug 1998)

1992

29 January

CARLOS ENRIQUE CERVANTES DE GORTARI – cousin of President SALINAS – MAGDALENA RUIZ PELAYO, and others are arrested in Newark, NJ, on charges of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. (Weekly News Update on the Americas #371, 9 March 1997)

November

RUIZ PELAYO, who claims to have been the personal secretary to President SALINAS’ father, RAUL SALINAS LOZANO, is convicted.

1993

24 May

Cardinal JUAN JESUS POSADAS OCAMPO and six others are assassinated at Guadalajara International Airport, by members of the ARELLANO FELIX drug clan. AeroMexico flight 112 is delayed 12 minutes on the runway so that eight men carrying large canvas bags stuffed with weapons can board the aircraft via an airport bus. On board, one of the ARELLANO brothers, JAVIER (aka “EL TIGRILLO”), is repeatedly admonished by a flight attendant for spitting on the floor.

At Tijuana they are escorted off the plane, thru the departure lounge where their weapons set off metal detectors, to three vechicles with outlawed tinted windows parked illegally outside. Allegedly they also carry a black leather briefcase stolen from the Cardinal’s white Grand Marquis.

The Attorney General, JORGE CARPIZO, says it is all a case of mistaken identity: in fact the bandits had mistaken Cardinal POSADAS for their rival, “EL CHAPO” GUZMAN. The Cardinal was in full regalia, sporting a prominent crucifix, in a limousine. He was shot 45 times. A right wing, anti-Liberation Theologian, POSADAS was reputed to have received drug money prior to his elevation to Cardinal in 1990. (Anderson Valley Advertiser, 22 Dec 1993)

November

CARLOS SALINAS nominates LUIS DONALDO COLOSIO MURRIETA as the next Presidential candidate of the PRI. This nomination, known as the dedazo or fingering, means that COLOSIO will almost certainly be Mexico’s next President: the PRI have not lost an election for President in 65 years.

1994

1 January

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – becomes operative. The Zapatista rebellion breaks out in Chiapas. NAFTA is bitterly opposed by the EZLN, who believe it will benefit only 24 billionaires and further impoverish the poor.

10 January

President SALINAS makes former Mexico City mayor MANUEL CAMACHO SOLIS head of his peace commission in Chiapas – a move seen by the media as sidelining COLOSIO.

27 February

MANUEL SALVADOR GONZALEZ, 37 and ANTONIO TREJO, 35, are murdered on I-5 near Gorman, California. The two men are believed to have been working security for the COLOSIO campaign, probably as bodyguards. SALVADOR is said by police to be a PRI and Mexican Government official, carrying documents indicating he was “in charge of special investigations for the Government of Mexico.” Also found on the bodies is a letter of introduction from JOSE MARIA CORDOBA MONTOYA, President SALINAS’s Chief of Staff.

TREJO was driving their Cadillac at 75 mph south on the Golden State Freeway when another vehicle pulled up alongside and fired five shots from a 9-mm weapon. Because all five shots were to the neck and head, authorities suspect professional assassins. (Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1994)

3 March

Six Anti-Narcotics police arrest JAVIER ARELLANO. Judicial Police officers, working as bodyguards for the ARELLANO FELIX brothers, intervene and kill them. “EL TIGRILLO” is freed.

22 March

Chiapas peace negotiator MANUEL CAMACHO SOLIS – after 18 days spent promoting himself as a PRIista alternative to COLOSIO – withdraws his rival candidacy for the nomination.

23 March

COLOSIO is assassinated in Lomas Taurinas, a poor community near the Tijuana Airport. Tijuana is the capital of the state of Baja California Norte, and a stronghold of the rival PAN party. On national TV a PRI millitant accuses Baja Governor ERNESTO RUFFO APPEL; the broadcast is cut.

Arrested for the crime is MARIO ABURTO MARTINEZ, 23, previously a factory worker in San Pedro, California, now working at the Cameros Magneticos factory in nearby Otay Mesa. Press photos show a bloodstained young man being dragged along by several bystanders. According to news reports, he claims to be a pacifist and cries out, “I saved Mexico!” Also detained are JORGE ANTONIO SANCHEZ ORTEGA and VICENTE MAYORAL VALENZUELA, former head of the homicide division of Baja California State Judicial Police in Tijuana. Police say they are being detained as witnesses. (Mexico City News, 24 March 1994)

SANCHEZ ORTEGA tests positive for powder burns and has bloodstained clothing. SANCHEZ is an active member of CISEN (Center for Investigations and National Security), the successor organization to the DI – Direccion de Inteligencia – and to the notoriously corrupt DFS. DFS members trafficked in drugs and stolen cars and assassinated journalists including MANUEL BUENDIA, author of “The CIA in Mexico.” The DFS was disbanded in 1985. (Andrew Reding, The Nation, 27 July 1995)

MARCO ANTONIO JACOME, an agent of the Baja California Judicial Police, was instructed by his chief, RAUL LOZA PARRA, to videoptape the Lomas Taurinas meeting. The tape appears to show the involvement of another man, OTHON CORTEZ VASQUEZ. (Ya Vamos Llegando a Mexico, p 224)

General DOMIRO GARCIA REYES, deputy chief of the Presidential military staff and head of COLOSIO’s military security team, finds his path blocked by TRANQUILINO SANCHEZ, 58, a policeman from Sinaloa. SANCHEZ (no relation to SANCHEZ ORTEGA) is arrested five days later on suspicion of complicity in the crime. (Ya Vamos… pp 192, 235)

After the shooting, ABURTO is knocked to the ground by the head of COLOSIO’s civil security, FERNANDO DE LA SOTA, and by ALEJANDRO GARCIA HINOJOSO, 25 years old. DE LA SOTA is the head of a secret governmental organization, “Grupo Omega,” supposedly set up to provide additional security for COLOSIO. GARCIA JINOJOSO is also a member of the security detail and of the group. Others seize VICENTE MAYORAL VALENZUELA. Allegedly ABURTO has pointed MAYORAL out to them, saying “Fue el ruco, fue el ruco [It was that guy].” (Ya Vamos… pp 193, 221)

TRANQUILINO SANCHEZ, VICENTE MAYORAL, and his son RODOLFO, 24 (who allegedly obstructed the path of Colonel ANTONIO REYNALDOS DEL POZO during the shooting) were all hired as security guards by PRIista JOSE RODOLFO RIVAPALACIO TINAJERO, a member of a secret society of Tijuana cops called “Grupo Tucan.” (Ya Vamos… p 223)

Meanwhile an Army Lieutenant, REYNALDO MERIN SANDOVAL, who like Gen. GARCIA REYES has become separated from COLOSIO prior to the shooting, disarms a man with a gun standing over COLOSIO’s body. The man is not identified: however, another Grupo Omega member, RAFAEL LOPEZ MERINO, “loses” his .38 simultaneously. (Ya Vamos… pp 181-3, 225, 227-8)

Gen. GARCIA REYES is “photographed leaving the scene with an alleged second gunman.” GARCIA REYES answers directly to President SALINAS and to his Chief of Staff JOSE MARIA CORDOBA MONTOYA. (LA Times, 19 June 1995)

Hours after the assassination, JOSE MARIA CORDOBA resigns from the Office of the Presidency (“en que cogobierno con Salinas [i.e. in which he co-governed with Salinas]”). He moves to Washington DC, where he heads the Mexican delegation at the Interamerican Development Bank and later works as an adviser to the World Bank. “Tenia gran ascendencia sobre ERNESTO ZEDILLO [He had great influence over ERNESTO ZEDILLO].” (Ya Vamos… p 217, “JC vs JC”, Reforma, 16 June 1996)

Following the announcement of COLOSIO’s death, President SALINAS calls twice to comiserate with his widow, DIANA LAURA RIOJAS. She refuses to take his call. (Ya Vamos… pp 196-7)

24 March

MARIO ABURTO is transferred from Tijuana to Mexico City’s Almoloya prison. According to the PGR (Procuraduria General de la Republica – the Attorney General’s office), ABURTO has confessed, and has no visible signs of being beaten. Various commentators note a physical dissimilarity between the ABURTO photographed under arrest in Tijuana and the ABURTO now on display to the press at Almoloya.

“One of the theories surrounding ABURTO was that a double fired the fatal shots. ABURTO’s mother [MARIA LUISA MARTINEZ] has lent evidence to that claim. She reportedly said that in a Judicial Police jail cell in Tijuana she had been about to embrace a man she thought was her son – but who was not.” (Mexico City Times, 21 Aug 1996)

The US ATF states that the murder weapon, a Brazilian-made .38 Taurus revolver, was purchased in 1977 at a store in Northern California. ABURTO allegedly acquired it only a few weeks ago. (Mexico City News, 25 March 1994)

GRACIELA GONZALEZ DIAZ, 27, declares herself to be MARIO ABURTO’s girlfriend. She claims that he was a member of a secret political group in which he was known as Caballero Aguila. Three days later she withdraws the accusation and denies they were romantically involved.

JORGE ANTONIO SANCHEZ ORTEGA is released after being held for 24 hours.

4 April

Special Prosecutor MIGUEL MONTES GARCIA announces that at least seven people appear to have been involved in the assassination, based on analysis of videotapes that showed the men blocking COLOSIO’s path and clearing a way for ABURTO. At least five people had been arrested and jailed in connection with the hit, he said. (AP, 4 June 1994)

One of the accused is HECTOR JAVIER HERNANDEZ THOMASSINY, 20 years old at the time of the assassination: he too is a member of Grupo Omega. Others are VICENTE and RODOLFO MAYORAL. (Ya Vamos… pp 94)

24 April

An attempt by 60 agents of the PGR to reconstruct the assassination in Lomas Taurinas fails. The agent playing the part of COLOSIO is unable to recreate the 180-degree spin which COLOSIO is supposed to have made in between the first and second shots. COLOSIO was shot in the right temple and the left side of his body.

“They didn’t ask us to participate, nor ask us anything; I saw General DOMIRO [GARCIA REYES] pulling COLOSIO along by his belt loop,” said the PRI lideresa of Lomas Taurinas, YOLANDA LAZARO. (La Jornada, 24 April 1994)

Baja Governor ERNESTO RUFFO APPEL calls for more investigation into the background of ABURTO and of the ex-policemen involved in COLOSIO’s bodyguard – particularly those arrested after the assassination.

28 April

FEDERICO BENITEZ LOPEZ, Chief of Public Security in Tijuana, who has been investigating the COLOSIO murder, is assassinated by narcotraffickers. The alleged hit-men are ISMAEL HIGUERA, a principal in the ARELLANO FELIX gang, and Judicial Police agents RODOLFO GARCIA GAXIOLA and MARCO ANTONIO JACOME (who videotaped the COLOSIO Assassination). (Ya Vamos… pp 159-161, 221)

April / May

One of the Attorney General’s top advisers, EDUARDO VALLE ESPINOZA, quits, asking in his letter of resignation, “When are we going to have the courage and political maturity to tell the Mexian people that we suffer from a sort of narco-democracy?” His boss, DIEGO VALADES, SALINAS’ fourth Attorney General, quits a few days later.

EDUARDO VALLE, known as “EL BUHO”, testifies to Mexican investigators in Washington that Communications and Transport Minister EMILIO GAMBOA PATRON is a point man for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Traffickers use GAMBOA’s fiefdom of airports and highways to move drugs, VALLE claims: he also asserts that COLOSIO was murdered by drug cartel forces after he refused to meet with a brother of JUAN GARCIA ABREGO, head of the Gulf Cartel. “I cared a great deal for COLOSIO” said VALLE. “It cannot be permitted that they announce that a lone assassin killed him and that they leave it at that. I believe COLOSIO was killed because he did not [negotiate] with the drug traffickers or the ‘narco-politicians’.”

VALLE expresses suspicion about two COLOSIO security chiefs – former federal police officers with alleged criminal pasts – and about RAUL ZORRILLA, campaign coordinator of special events and a former transportation sub-secretary under GAMBOA. He claims ZORRILLA had “immense responsibility” in the protection of traffickers while working in the Transportation Ministry. (Los Angeles Times, 1 Oct 1994)

18 May

At his first news conference since replacing POSADAS OCAMPO as Cardinal of Guadalajara, JUAN SANDOVAL INIGUEZ says that the “accidental assassination” theory is not believable, and calls for credible answers as to why the Cardinal was slain and how his killers were able to escape. (LA Times, 24 May 1994)

22 May

MARIA LUISA MARTINEZ (MARIO ABURTO’s mother) and six relatives illegally enter the United States.

24 May

Six relatives of MARIO ABURTO, including his mother, brother, 19-year old wife, 1-year old son, and two sisters – apply for political asylum in San Diego. Their lawyer, PETER SCHEY, says “The facts surrounding the case are extremely murky… I think their fear is of violence by armed individuals and groups seemingly outside of the control of the government. They have no confidence that the Mexican government is in a position to protect them.” ABURTO’s father and brothers, who live in San Pedro, say they have been harrassed and shot at since the COLOSIO hit. (LA Times, 24 May 1994)

26 May

SCHEY announces that RUBEN ABURTO, father of the accused, is willing to give testimony to MIGUEL MONTES GARCIA if his safety is guaranteed. MIGUEL ANGEL SANCHEZ DE ARMAS, the Special Prosecutor’s spokesman, says that investigators are “even willing to go to Los Angeles” to interview RUBEN ABURTO, who has said publicly that in the weeks before the shooting, his son met as many as four members of COLOSIO’s security entourage. (Los Angeles is a three-hour flight from Mexico City. The return fare is around $200) (LA Times, 27 May 1994)

2 June

Reversing himself, Special Prosecutor MIGUEL MONTES announces that there is little evidence of a conspiracy in the COLOSIO murder. “It strengthens the hypothesis that the murder was commited by a single man: MARIO ABURTO MARTINEZ.” The suspicious behavior of six men, on further analysis, “could be interpreted as normal.” Prosecutors still have some evidence to support the theory three guards were involved, and they will remain in prison. But the cases against at least three others have fallen apart. (AP, 4 June 1994)

9 June

Passed over once again as Presidential candidate by CARLOS SALINAS, MANUEL CAMACHO resigns as the Government’s Chiapas peace commissioner.

21 August

Presidential Election. ERNESTO ZEDILLO PONCE DE LEON, President SALINAS’s second handpicked successor, wins.

28 September

JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU, Secretary-General of the PRI, former Governor of Guerrero, and former brother-in-law of CARLOS and RAUL SALINAS, is shot dead with a single bullet in the neck outside a Mexico City hotel. The gunman, DANIEL AGUILAR TREVINO, is arrested.

31 October

MARIO ABURTO MARTINEZ is sentenced to 45 years in jail for the murder of COLOSIO. Primary witnesses against him were two security officers: VICENTE MAYORAL, who claims to have tackled ABURTO seconds after the shooting, and FERNANDO DE LA SOTA, former leader of the secret Grupo Omega, now disbanded. When their depositions were taken hours after the murder, both men testified under oath that they had not seen who shot COLOSIO. At the trial, MAYORAL and DE LA SOTA swear they saw ABURTO shoot COLOSIO twice.

18 November

DIANA LAURA RIOJAS, the widow of COLOSIO, dies in Mexico City, of cancer. A few days previously, President SALINAS – accompanied by the press – attempted to visit her at the hospital. She refused to see him. (Ya Vamos… pp 142-3)

24 November

MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU – brother of the assassinated JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU – resigns as Deputy Attorney General, alleging a government coverup in the COLOSIO case, which he blames on anti-reform elements within the PRI.

November

SERGIO MORENO PEREZ, Federal Prosecutor for Baja California, tells reporters that the ARELLANO FELIX gang “is an invention of Mexico City; here, I haven’t known anything about the ARELLANO brothers and it is not my responsibility to go around investigating them.”

‘MORENO PEREZ… worked for the Special Prosecutor probing the July 1988 murders of FRANCISCO JAVIER OVANDO and ROMAN GIL HERALDEZ.’ (Mexico City News, 20 May 1996)

1 December

ERNESTO ZEDILLO takes office as President.

December

Two brokerage houses, one run by ROBERTO GONZALEZ BARRERA, a Monterrey billionaire and close friend of the SALINAS family, trigger massive capital flight when they suddenly begin buying up huge amounts of short-term, dollar-based tesobonos. Proceso magazine alleges that certain high-echelon PRI insiders were given privileged information about the impending Peso devaluation. (Anderson Valley Advertiser, 5 April 1995)

21 December

The Peso is devalued by almost 50%. Cashing in their tesobonos, the brokerage houses make a killing and bankrupt the Mexican economy.

1995

January

SERGIO MORENO PEREZ is replaced by LUIS ANTONIO IBA—EZ CORNEJO as Federal Prosecutor for Baja California.

30 January

U.S. President CLINTON guarantees a 50-billion dollar loan to Mexico to bail out the collapsing stock market. The Mexican market gambles of American companies like GOLDMAN-SACHS, a huge New York investment banking firm and one of CLINTON’s principal financial donors, are thereby secured.

24 February

The PGR announces that a second gunman in the COLOSIO assassination, OTHON CORTEZ VASQUEZ, has been arrested. CORTEZ has several links to PRI circles in Baja California.

28 February

RAUL SALINAS, brother of the ex-President, is arrested in Mexico City, charged with ordering and financing the murder of JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU. A PRI congressman, MANUEL MU—OZ ROCHA, has been accused of organizing the plot, but he has vanished and investigators say he may have been killed. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1 March 1995)

The arrest comes at the instigation of PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA, whom President ZEDILLO has appointed as Special Investigator in the COLOSIO, RUIZ MASSIEU and POSADAS murder cases. (Ya Vamos… p 218)

2 March

MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU leaves Mexico for the US after testiflying to federal police officials who believe him to be responsible for a series of irregularities in the inquiry into his elder brother’s death. Also interviewed is his aide, JORGE STERGIOS, an inspector general in the PGR.

3 March

In Monterrey, CARLOS SALINAS vows to go on a hunger strike until his reputation is cleared. He calls off the strike a few hours later.

That night, MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU is detained by customs agents at Newark International Airport as he attempts to board a plane for Madrid. He is carrying almost $50,000 in cash, despite claiming to have only $18,000. Mexican officials say they will charge RUIZ MASSIEU with obstructing his own investigation and with covering up the involvement of RAUL SALINAS. (NY Times, 5 March 1995)

7 March

Mexican officials say that nearly $7 million has been found in two accounts in the name of MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU at the Texas Commerce Bank in Houston. The deposits were made by JORGE STERGIOS. (NY Times, 8 March 1995)

11 March

Two weeks after he alleged that OTHON CORTEZ was an associate of Gen. DOMIRO GARCIA REYES and a driver for the President’s office, AARON JUAREZ JIMENEZ dies in a car accident on the dangerous road between Tijuana and Mexicali, La Rumorosa.

The same day CARLOS SALINAS flees Mexico, supposedly to exile in Massachusetts, Canada, or Cuba, in a Falcon executive jet supplied by PRIista industrialist ROBERTO GONZALEZ BARRERA.

20 March

DANIEL AGUILAR TREVINO and three co-conspirators are convicted of the murder JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Four others are convicted on lesser charges.

14 April

TRANQUILINO SANCHEZ is released from high security prison; his sentence for partipation in the COLOSIO homicide having been reversed. (Ya Vamos… p 235)

3 August

The New York Times reports that FERNANDO DE LA SOTA, the head of Grupo Omega and director of COLOSIO’s private security force, was a paid informer of the CIA from 1990 to 1992.

“Mexican officials say they were unaware of DE LA SOTA’s CIA connection, and that they do not believe it was relevant to their investigation.” He was fined $7,000 for making false statements to investigators. DE LA SOTA, 45, is a former DFS agent with a criminal record (he apparently accepted a payoff from the leading drug trafficker – and DFS Zone Commander – in Ciudad Juarez, RAFAEL AGUILAR GUAJARDO). (El Financiero, 7-13 Aug 1995)

December

The Pentagon releases a partially-censored report by US Military Intelligence regarding the terrorist threat in Mexico. Three paragraphs are devoted to the “probable scenario” for the deployment of US troops in Mexico. Two paragraphs indicate that “due to the history of Mexico-US relations it is highly improbable that the Mexicans could look with favor on the presence of US forces in their territory.” But “it is conceivable that an eventual deployment of US troops in Mexico might be received favorably if Mexico’s government confronted the threat of being overthrown as a result of widespread economic and social chaos.” (FOIA request by Jeremy Bigwood; La Jornada, 31 Sept 1996)

1996

7 February

VICENTE and RODOLFO MAYORAL apply for political asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry to California. Having spent more than a year in prison before a federal judge cleared them of aiding MARIO ABURTO, they say they fear they are once again suspects as a result of new witnesses implicating them in court hearings in Mexico City the previous day.

23 February

Gunmen in Mexico City shoot to death SERGIO ARMANDO SILVA MORENO, operations chief for the Federal Judicial Police in Baja California until January. He had worked under SERGIO MORENO PEREZ.

February

DR JORGE MANCILLAS, a professor at UCLA and supporter of the ABURTO family, claims that new photographic evidence (taken by American photographer ROBERT GAUTHIER of the LA Times, and analyzed by DORA ELENA CORTES and MANUEL CORDERO, investigative reporters for El Universal) shows MARIO ABURTO about 12 to 18 feet away from COLOSIO, standing right beside VICENTE MAYORAL.

“We took the photographs of the assassin and compared them to a man who was killed four hours after COLOSIO and there is a direct resemblance. His name is ERNESTO RUBIO and he was also 23 years old.” According to El Universal, RUBIO worked for the Federal Judicial Police and for Grupo Omega chief / CIA informant FERNANDO DE LA SOTA.

The RUBIO murder was being investigated by FEDERICO BENITEZ, head of the Municipal Police in Tijuana – himself assassinated on 28 April 1994. (AVA, 14 Feb 1996)

El Universal also employs a French criminologist and expert in facial reconstruction, DR JOSIANNE PUJOL, to compare photographs of the man arrested at Lomas Taurinas and the man in custody at Almoloya jail. Her conclusion is that the two “ABURTOS” are completely different persons.

“The criminologist’s report reinforces the popular version that the man arrested in Lomas Taurinas was killed the same night of 23 March, in a mechanic’s shop in Tijuana.” (Reporter, San Pedro, March 1996)

March

Despite requests by the Mexican Government and Special Investigator PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA, the United States refuses to extradite MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU to Mexico. Instead he is released on $9 milllion bail and remains, under police guard, in New Jersey.

21 March

COLOSIO’s father, LUIS COLOSIO FERNANDEZ, announces in an interview with a Hermosillo newspaper, that former Presidential Chief of Staff and World Bank official JOSE CORDOBA MONTOYA, “tuvo mucho que ver [had a lot to do with]” the murder of his son. “I hope the President won’t hide when the investigation focuses on CORDOBA MONTOYA.” (El Imparcial, 21 March 1996)

17 April

ARTURO OCHOA PALACIOS, Baja California’s former Federal Prosecutor, is shot four times at close range at a Tijuana jogging track. Police say the killing appears to be a “professional” hit.

OCHOA was appointed Baja California’s top law enforcement authority in June 1993. He was removed from the job in May 1994, just weeks after he began investigating the COLOSIO murder.

“OCHOA had been involved in the early stages of the COLOSIO investigation, in which investigators believe a cover-up took place to hide a conspiracy to kill the politician.” (Mexico City News, 20 May 1996)

OCHOA was also under investigation for corruption within the PGR. “Specificallly, investigators and documents reviewed by the Times have linked OCHOA to millions of dollars in suspected payoffs to Mexico’s former second-ranking law enforcement official, MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU. OCHOA and RUIZ MASSIEU… were friends and colleagues, Mexican investigators said.” (LA Times, 18 April 1996)

24 April

The PGR reports that it has captured the presumed killers of Cardinal POSADAS. MANUEL ALBERTO RODRIGUEZ RIVA and JOSE GUADALUPE ARMENTA VALDEZ were arrested by Federal Police.

MANUEL CAMACHO SOLIS calls for an opposition coalition against the PRI. “The former PRI leader also denounced former Chief of Staff JOSE CORDOBA MONTOYA for listening in on telephone conversations between him and… LUIS DONALDO COLOSIO. Claiming that CORDOBA could offer information on COLOSIO’s thoughts at the moment of his death, he repeated the call for CORDOBA to testify before the Federal Attorney General’s Office…” (Mexico City News, 25 April 1996)

An El Centro immigration judge turns down the MAYORALS’ request for asylum.

3 May

DANIEL AGUIRRE LUNA, representative of Special Investigator PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA, asks the judge to condem alleged second gunman OTHON CORTEZ to 50 years’ imprisonment.

6 May

CARLOS SALINAS meets political journalist JORGE G. CASTANEDA in Dublin, Ireland, where the ex-President now claims to reside. Rumours immediately circulate that SALINAS has discussed the possibility of ZEDILLO’s resignation.

“CASTANEDA believes JOSE MARIA CORDOBA MONTOYA has returned to Mexico with a view to once again reassume his role, as it was during the SALINAS administration, as the power behind the presidential throne…” (Mexico City News, 22 June 1996)

15 May

SERGIO MORENO PEREZ, the former BC Federal Prosecutor, and his son OSMANI are kidnapped in Mexico City by heavily armed men.

18 May

The bodies of MORENO PEREZ and his son are found in a car in Naucalpan, a western suburb of Mexico City. They have been tortured.

22 May

The PGR announces the arrest of “EL NAHUAL” aka ALVARO OSORIO OSUNA, another of Cardinal POSADAS’ presumed killers, in Sinaloa. “OSORIO OSUNA is a member of the ‘Frog Gun Gang’ that protects the ARELLANO FELIX brothers,” the PGR say.

“EL NAHUAL” confirms the PGR’s theory of “mistaken identity” in the POSADAS assassination, two days before the third anniversary of the murder. “There was a lot of confusion and his car was mistaken for GUZMAN’s… We were told that “EL CHAPO” would be inside a white Marquis car… then we realised it was the Cardinal.”

JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU’s personal security head, MIGUEL VILLAREAL AYALA, testifies to RAUL SALINAS’ defense team that there was bad blood between the two men. VILLAREAL says tensions ran especially high on the day of RAUL SALINAS’ marriage to PAULINA CASTANON. (RUIZ MASSIEU was married to SALINAS’ sister ADRIANA, whom he later divorced.) (Mexico City News, 23 May 1996)

24 May

Guadalajara Cardinal JUAN SANDOVAL, in a television statement, urges that former President CARLOS SALINAS be investigated for links to POSADAS’ murder. SANDOVAL says POSADAS had a heated argument with SALINAS just a week before he was gunned down, and that then-Social Development Sectetary COLOSIO and Mexico City Mayor CAMACHO SOLIS were also at the meeting.

SANDOVAL further alleges that baggage handlers at Guadalajara Airport have been threatened by police officers to keep quiet about the murder. He says of the PGR accidental death theory, “I am sure that Cardinal POSADAS was not killed in the midst of confusion or a shootout. These theories are infantile and do not convince anyone.” (Mexico City News, 25 May 1996)

23 June

CBS’ Sixty Minutes reports that RAUL SALINAS has been linked to 70 bank accounts in 70 countries that could contain more than $300 million. His personal banker at Citibank, AMY G. ELLIOT, tells US, Swiss and Mexican investigators that SALINAS said $100 million came from a recent sale of a construction company. (Mexico City Times/Reuters, 23 June 1996)

23 June

The PRI’s Federal District branch lodges its monthly protest with Attorney General (and member of the PAN) ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA, 27 months after the COLOSIO hit. The PRI also questions the re-assignment of the COLOSIO case special prosecutor, PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA. “Why has the special prosecutor been assigned to duties that are specifically distinct from the (COLOSIO) investigation?” (Mexico City News, 24 June 1996)

28 June

A new masked, armed group appears – the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR – at a memorial for peasants massacred by police in Guerrero.

2 July

Seven of MARIO ABURTO’s family members are granted political asylum in the US by immigration judge NATHAN GORDON, who says, “It appears to me that this family fled… because the sins of a son, if true, have been inflicted on them.” ABURTO’s mother, MARIA LUISA MARTINEZ, 45, her four other children, RUBEN, 24, JOSE LUIS, 22, ELIZABETH, 16, and KARINA, 10, and JOSE LUIS’ wife ADELA ALVARADO 20, and their 3-yr old son, LUIS JOVANI will be allowed to apply for perminent resident status. (This is a different group from that which allegedly crossed the border on 22 May 1994. It does not include ABURTO’s wife and son.) (Mexico City News, 3 July 1996)

1 August

Gen. DOMIRO GARCIA REYES is given command of military zone number 32, based in Valladolid, Yucatan, according to TV Azteca. Out of active service since the assassination, he takes over the Yucatan post from Colonel ELIHU VIDAL NAVARRO. (Mexico City Times, 22 Aug 1996)

7 August

OTHON CORTEZ, 20, accused of being the second gunman in the COLOSIO hit, is acquitted and freed by Second District Court Judge MARIO PARDO ROBELLEDO. The half-page verdict follows a trial of 18 months with more than 112 witnesses and 130 documents. It is described in both the SF Chronicle and the LA Times as a huge blow to the credibility of Attorney General ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA.

The judge also acquits FERNANDO DE LA SOTA and ALEJANDRO GARCIA HINOJOSA of perjury: both had been charged with lying to investigators by claiming they saw MARIO ABURTO fire two shots at COLOSIO.

HECTOR SERGIO PEREZ, CORTEZ’ lawyer, said that the evidence showed his client, “who is right-handed, had his right hand on the shoulder of COLOSIO’s chief of security, an army general who has also been investigated in the slaying” (LA Times). The Times does not name GARCIA REYES or mention DE LA SOTA’s CIA connection. The Chronicle piece concludes, “doubts have also been raised about whether the ABURTO arrested at the scene of the killing is really the same person now in prison for the crime.” (both articles 8 August 1996)

16 August

Attorney General ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA fires 737 commanders and beat cops of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) – out of a total 4,400 members – on grounds such as unlawful possesion of arms and illicit enrichment.

17 August

Gunmen in Tijuana murder JESUS MARIA MAGANO, 48 – one of the first Federal Prosecutors to question MARIO ABURTO after the COLOSIO hit. He is the fifth senior official from the PGR’s office in Baja California to be killed this year. (Mexico City News, 20 Aug 1996)

20 August

A taped telephone conversation between MARIO ABURTO MARTINEZ and his father is broadcast on Radio Red : “I was forced to write the confession in Tijuana… They took me to an office and dictated it to me. The director of the Federal Judicial Police, ADRIAN CARRERA FUENTES, was there and he… is witness to the fact that I was forced to write it.”

ABURTO says it was not “mere coincidence” that COLOSIO and RUIZ MASSIEU were killed within six months of each other. “There are people in the upper echelons of government who want the public to believe I’m the only assassin… The government doesn’t want this case to escalate, because its party [the PRI] would be the one most damaged and they could lose the elections.” The government, he claims, has three goals: “First, to convince everyone that I’m the only shooter; second, to claim that I’m crazy; and third, to assassinate me… and say I killed myself. That way everyone can forget about the COLOSIO case.” (Michelle Chi Chase, Mexico City News, 21 Aug 1996)

RUBEN ABURTO, father of MARIO, shares his son’s fears that he will fall victim to a “suicide.”

The same day an editorial in Mexico City’s Roman Catholic Archdiocise newspaper Nuevo Criterio claims that the COLOSIO hit was the result of a conspiracy within the PRI. “The resources used to carry out the crime, but especially the way it was handled afterwards, make it clear that… the mastermind was in the highest circles of power…”

Without directly accusing CARLOS SALINAS, the editorial says, “There is much evidence of the violent and vengeful way in which SALINAS DE GORTARI resolved his difficulties with other people.”

21 August

Attorney General LOZANO GRACIA insists that OTHON CORTEZ is the second gunman in the COLOSIO murder. His office is reported to have delivered 18 photographs to a court in the State of Mexico that show CORTEZ next to COLOSIO at the time of the murder.

Political analyst ALFREDO JALIFE tells the Mexico City News “Those on top are pulling the strings. OTHON CORTEZ is a pawn – he’s nothing.” One of COLOSIO’s campaign advisers and senior PRI deputy, SAMUEL PALMA, agrees: “The conspiracy theory has never hinged on CORTEZ … The theory is backed up by an investigation of impartial scientific analysis which has proved there was a second shot and a second weapon”.(David Abel, Mexico City Times, 22 Aug 1996)

22 August

HUMBERTO LOPEZ MEJIA, former independent investigator and employee of the PGR, says on public radio that he deciphered a coded message sent to the offices of the President just after the COLOSIO hit. “Mission accomplished in the campaign,” said the alleged message, sent from one operative code-named “EL PINO” to another called “EL ROBLE.” LOPEZ MEJIA claims that the message was from COLOSIO’s security chief Gen. DOMIRO GARCIA REYES to former President SALINAS.

“General REYES is no stranger to such allegations. Earlier this month he published an autobiographical aptly titled Domiro in which he set out to defend his integrity… Written for him by three prominent national journalists, the general’s book adds to prevailing public speculation that COLOSIO’s death was planned by then-government officials.

“In one particularly emotional excerpt REYES tells of an alleged conversation between himself and Federal Attorney General ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA in which LOZANO GRACIA intimated knowledge that COLOSIO had been ‘eliminated’ because he wasn’t toeing the party line in his campaign. REYES claims the Attorney General told him following the assassination, ‘I understand that President SALINAS DE GORTARI insinuated to you that COLOSIO must be eliminated.’ LOZANO GRACIA responded to the book… calling General REYES a liar and a man without honor.” (Pav Jordan, Mexico City News, 23 August 1996)

28/29 August

In a broad, coordinated assault, the EPR attack police, military and government targets in six states – Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas, Tabasco, Puebla, and Mexico. At least 16 people are killed and 23 injured.

31 August

LUIS RAUL GONZALEZ PEREZ is appointed new Special Prosecutor in the COLOSIO case.

8 September

LUIS COLOSIO FERNANDEZ, father of the murdered candidate, unveils a monument to his son in Tepic, Nayarit. “I still believe in justice and reason,” he says, “even though I know many people are skeptical of the new Special Prosecutor.” (Mexico City News, 9 Sept 1996)

10 September

Foreign Secretary JOSE ANGEL GURRIA tells the Mexican Congress that he has declined American Ambassador JAMES JONES’ offer of intelligence and military assistance against the EPR.

11 September

Reuters reports that US bank accounts belonging to RAUL SALINAS may have been used to launder drug money. According to PGR documents, one of the accounts is at the Laredo National Bank in Texas, owned in part by Mexican billionaire CARLOS HANK RHON.

PRI member and President of the Chamber of Deputies’ COLOSIO Case Commission ALFONSO MOLINA RUIBAL calls for the return and testimony of CARLOS SALINAS, JOSE CORDOBA MONTOYA, and former PGR prosecutor EDUARDO VALLE (“EL BUHO”). This is the first official, all-party concensus calling for ex-President SALINAS’ testimony. (Mexico City News, 12 Sept 1996)

12 September

Police raid the Mexico City offices of El Universal, formerly a pro-PRI newspaper which has recently criticized ZEDILLO and SALINAS. They arrest the owner JUAN FRANCISCO EALY ORTIZ for tax evasion.

Political analyst ALFREDO JALIFE calls this selective prosecution: “If the government went against El Universal why did it not go against all the others? It is a common fact that certain other papers are evading taxes; some are even involved in drug trafficking.”

JALIFE also doubts that SALINAS, CORDOBA or ZEDILLO will give evidence in the COLOSIO case: “It’s a smokescreen. Attorney General ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA belongs to the system, and the system doesn’t want to know anything about the real perpetrators of the crime.”

On a legal level, JALIFE says there is no longer any evidence to convict the culprits of the crime: “Within the structure of the Attorney General’s office, all the evidence has been extinguished. I have counted around 20 people belonging to the case who have been murdered.” (Robert Randolph, Mexico City Times, 14 Sept 1996)

14 September

28 days after becoming BC Federal Police Commander, ERNESTO IBARRA SANTES is machine-gunned to death in a taxi in Mexico City. He was in the process of updating “most wanted” posters with recent photographs of the ARELLANO FELIX brothers. (Anne-Marie O’Connor, LA Times, 16 Sept 1996)

IBARRA was killed with three bodyguards while leaving Mexico City Airport: in his pocket were $50,000 U.S. dollars. The previous week he had led fruitless raids on abandoned ARELLANO FELIX safehouses. (Wall St Journal, 7 Oct 1996)

GERARDO CRUZ PACHECO, a Mexican lieutenant who served in the Presidential Guard of CARLOS SALINAS, later confesses to assisting the ARELLANO FELIX cartel. He says that lawyers in the Tijuana Federal Attorney General’s office told the assassins when IBARRA was arriving in Mexico City, and names a military captain who hid the killers’ assault rifles. CRUZ also claims that Mexican Army privates have unloaded Colombian cocaine shipments at remote airstrips in Oaxaca state. (Anne-Marie O’Connor, LA Times, 5 February 1997)

9 October

Investigators of Special Prosecutor PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA, with the help of a paid psychic, FRANCISCA ZETINA, aka “LA PACA”, discover a dismembered and decomposed body at La Encantada, RAUL SALINAS’ ranch. CHAPA claims this is the corpse of vanished PRI legislator MANUEL MU—OZ ROCHA, 44.

18 October

Forensic specialists announce that the corpse cannot be positively identified.

The same day the Orange County Register reports that the United States plans to give the Mexican Army 73 UH-1H “Huey” helicopters and various C-26 aircraft “to help fight the drug war.” Tulane University Professor RODERIC CAMP and PETER SMITH, chairman of Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego, both comment that if the Mexican Army becomes further involved in the anti-drug effort, it will likely be corrupted by bribes.

SMITH: “No other military or law enforcement structure in Latin America has been able to resist, and it is not realistic to believe that the Mexican army would not be corrupted after having close encounters with drug rings.”

CAMP notes that, though the helicopters are supposed to be deployed along the US-Mexican border, their ultimate destinations may be Guerrero and Chiapas. (AP – Las Vegas Sun, 19 Oct 1996)

5 November

La Jornada reports that CASPAR WEINBERGER, President REAGAN’s defense secretary, has written a book predicting the possible invasion of Mexico by the USA. The Next War, containing fictionalized “scenarios” for the wars WEINBERGER considers most likely to occur over the next 12 years, describes a US invasion after the Mexican government is taken over by a “charismatic populist professor linked to the drug cartels.” His date for the invasion is 14 April 2003. MARGARET THATCHER, in her introduction, calls The Next War “an important book.” (La Jornada electronic edition 5 Nov 1996)

19 November

PABLO CHAPA orders the arrest of RAUL SALINAS’ wife, PAULINA CASTANON, on charges of giving false testimony in the RUIZ MASSIEU case; she has reportedly fled to Europe. RAUL SALINAS’ bodyguard, Lt. Col. ANTONIO CHAVEZ RAMIREZ, testifies that he disposed of a vehicle belonging to MANUEL MU—OZ ROCHA on 30 Sept 1994. His testimony contradicts that of other government witnesses, including clairvoyant “LA PACA”, and police informant RAMIRO AGUILAR LUCERO, who claims he saw RAUL SALINAS beat MU—OZ ROCHA to death with a baseball bat. (La Jornada, 24 Nov and 15 Oct, 1996)

27 November

CARLOS SALINAS is interrogated, regarding the COLOSIO murder, by Mexican federal investigators at the Mexican Embassy in Dublin. The questioning is led by LUIS GONZALEZ PEREZ, the fourth Special Prosecutor to investigate the COLOSIO hit. Official sources say that SALINAS’ testimony will remain sealed for some time. (LA Times, 28 Nov 1996)

2 December

President ZEDILLO fires Attorney General ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA, replacing him with former Human Rights Commissioner JORGE MADRAZO CUELLAR. PABLO CHAPA is also dismissed.

The decision to fire LOZANO is so sudden that it comes while a PGR spokesman is talking to reporters. The phone rings; the spokesman answers, hangs up: “We’ve resigned.” “Is this a joke?” the reporters ask. “No, we’ve resigned,” the spokesman answers, “I don’t understand President ZEDILLO; the Attorney General is the most loyal of his officials.” (La Jornada, 3 December 1996)

A recent poll of journalists, academics and analysts ranked LOZANO fourth for competence among 23 top Mexican officials; ZEDILLO came in eighth. (Washington Post, 3 December 1996)

3 December

MADRAZO signs off on ZEDILLO’s appointment of Army General JOSE DE JESUS GUTIERREZ REBOLLO – a member of the elite Presidential Guard – as “Mexico’s new drug czar.” GUTIERREZ replaces a civilian, FRANCISCO MOLINA.

5 December

Journalist YOLANDA FIGUEROA, her husband FERNANDO BALDERAS, and their three children aged 9 to 18, are bludgeoned to death at their home in Pedregal, Mexico City. FIGUEROA was the author of a recent book, “Boss of the Gulf: the Life and Capture of Juan Garcia Abrego”, which alleged that RAUL SALINAS and the COLOSIO and RUIZ MASSIEU assassinations were linked to Mexico’s drug cartels.

BALDERAS, her chief collaborator on the book, was an adviser, specializing in drug trafficking, to the Federal Prosecutor’s office until 1994. (LA Times, 7 Dec 1996)

(Family servants are later accused of the murders by police.)

1997

5 January

Tipped off by insiders in the military, AMADO CARRILLO FUENTES, head of the Juarez drug cartel, escapes a raid at his sister’s wedding at El Guachimalito, Sinaloa.

17 January

PABLO CHAPA is fined by a Mexico City court for failing to appear regarding the RAUL SALINAS case. His wife says he is “out of the country.” RAUL predicts that he himself will soon be released.

President ZEDILLO nominates two senior Army generals to take over civilian airports near Mexico City which have allegedly been frequented by drug traffickers. “These appointments – and dozens of others in which military officers have quietly assumed key federal law enforcement posts, including the unannounced naming last year of an admiral to run Cancun’s international airport – are fueling a debate here about the worrisome new civilian role of Mexico’s enigmatic armed forces.” (LA Times, 10 February 1997)

20 January

CARLOS SALINAS is again questioned by agents of the Attorney General at the Mexican Embassy in Dublin. A news release says he has been interrogated for 16 hours, this time regarding the RUIZ MASSIEU case. (LA Times, 29 January 1997)

31 January

Mexico City prosecutors arrest “LA PACA”, whom PABLO CHAPA paid $130,000 to locate a corpse on RAUL SALINAS’ property. They allege that the remains are actually those of JOAQUIN RODRIGUEZ RUIZ, the elderly father-in-law of “LA PACA”, and charge her with grave-robbing. Her son in law, various relatives, and RAUL SALINAS’ ex-girlfriend are also arrested. (LA Times, 5 February 1997)

January

Gen. JOSE GUTIERREZ REBOLLO is welcomed at the White House by US anti-drug czar General BARRY McCAFFREY, who extolls his firmness and incorruptability. He is briefed in Washington by the CIA and DEA regarding operations, tactics, personnel, and timetables related to joint US-Mexican drug interdiction plans. In Mexico he is also briefed as to the identities of US intelligence agents. (Unclassified, No 40, Spring 1997)

4 February

Mexico City prosecutors issue a warrant for the arrest of PABLO CHAPA, who has not been seen publicly in a week.

18 February

Anti-drug czar Gen. JOSE GUTIERREZ REBOLLO is charged with taking bribes to protect AMADO CARRILLO’s Juarez Cartel. The General is sent to Almoloya jail.

The former military commander of drug-riddled Sinaloa and Jalisco, Gen. GUTIERREZ pursued the cartel of HECTOR PALMA and JOAQUIN “EL CHAPO” GUZMAN, but allegedly protected both “Lord of the Skies” CARRILLO FUENTES and the ARRELLANO FELIX brothers’ gang. His troops preceeded police officers to the Cardinal POSADAS murder scene, and he played a key role in the ensuing investigation. (John Ross, Mexico Barbaro, #58, 16-23 March 1997)

26 February

The New York Times carries new information that the SALINAS family is linked to drug traffickers. According to leaked FBI documents from the MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU grand jury investigation, MAGDALENA RUIZ PELAYO claims that she was personal secetary to CARLOS SALINAS’ father, RAUL SALINAS LOZANO, from 1982 to 1988; and that during that time she repeatedly handled drug-related payoffs for SALINAS LOZANO.

Secret witnesses in the RUIZ MASSIEU indictment also charge that LUIS COLOSIO was connected to Sonora drug lords.

27 February

Swiss Federal Prosecutor CARLA DEL PONTE writes Attorney General JORGE MADRAZO CUELLAR a confidential letter saying that RAUL SALINAS “received enormous sums of money for his help in connection with drug trafficking.” She has testimony from a Mexican drug trafficker, working for Gulf Cartel head JUAN GARCIA ABREGO, who delivered $20 million in 1994 to fugitive PRIista banker CARLOS CABAL PENICHE, “and personally delivered a smaller amount in cash to RAUL SALINAS.” (Miami Herald, 3 April 1997)

A certain JOHN HALL of the US Embassy in Mexico warns the National Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) that the Miami Herald is about to publish a story charging that Gen. MARIO ARTURO ACOSTA CHAPARRO ESCIPATE, a couterinsurgency expert, and Gen. FRANCISCO QUIROZ HERMOSILLO are involved in drug trafficking. (Proceso, 27 July 1997)

4 March

President CLINTON recertifies Mexico as a US ally in the drug war, citing the GUTIERREZ REBOLLO arrest as evidence that President ZEDILLO is rooting out corruption.

15 March

A federal grand jury in Houston allows the US government to confiscate most of the $9 million MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU deposited in a Texas bank. (NYT, 16 March 1997)

23 March

Proceso reports that PABLO CHAPA is hiding in Chile, where he was spirited illegally, on a private plane. His escape was organized by officials of the PAN with the help of Chile’s right wing National Renewal (RN) party – lest he give testimony damaging to ANTONIO LOZANO GRACIA and the PAN before the 6 July elections. (Proceso, 23 March 1997)

30 March

CARLA DEL PONTE and VALENTIN ROSCHACHER, head of Switzerland’s anti-narcotics police, arrive in Mexico to continue their investigation into $84 million deposited by RAUL SALINAS in Swiss bank accounts. RAUL has a total of at least $100 million in Swiss accounts, along with $30 million in France, $30 million in Germany, $30 million in the US and $5 million in Panama. The developing scandal implicates big US banks like Citibank and Chase Manhattan in money laundering. (Miami Herald, 3 April 1997, Wall St Journal, 1 April 1997)

9 April

El Universal reports that DEL PONTE has linked CARLOS SALINAS, RAUL SALINAS, MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU, and JOSE CORDOBA MONTOYA to the drug cartels. The previous week she interviewed “EL CHAPO” GUZMAN – currently in the high security prison of Puente Grande – and ex-Federal Judicial Police Commander MARCO TORRES, now in the US witness protection program. Both men swore that they witnessed millions of dollars sent to the SALINAS brothers at Los Pinos, via JOSE CORDOBA “and an ex-Attorney General of the Republic.”

TORRES also swore he saw RAUL SALINAS pay four million dollars to MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU, at his Agualeguas ranch in Nuevo Leon, for the protection of the Gulf cartel under JUAN GARCIA ABREGO. (La Opinion, AFP, 9 April 1997)

11 May

Proceso prints excerpts from declassified Pentagon documents indicating a close relation between US and Mexican military intelligence as far back as mid-1993. The DIA (US Defense Intelligence Agency) had accurate information about the clandestine insurgency in Chiapas as early as 9 June 1993. “This Mexican guerrilla group is tentatively identified as the Zapatista National Liberation Front,” a cable reports.

16 May

PABLO CHAPA BEZANILLA is arrested by Mexican and Spanish agents after leaving a restaurant in Villafranca del Pardillo, near Madrid. He is held without bail while the Mexican authorities begin extradition proceedings.

30 May

A US immigration judge denies the US State Department’s request to deport MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU to Mexico. Although a US jury has found that millions of dollars belonging to RUIZ MASSIEU was linked to drug trafficking and bribe taking, Judge ANNIE GARCY rules there is not enough evidence to warrant his deportation. This is the fifth deportation attempt which RUIZ MASSIEU has defeated.

Special Prosecutor LUIS GONZALEZ reports to legislators that narcotraffickers were involved in the COLOSIO assassination. PAN deputy ANTONIO TALLABS claims GONZALEZ is attempting to shield the PRI groups which participated in the hit.

2 July

Gen. JESUS GUTIERREZ REBOLLO writes to Amnesty International stating that the charges against him are false and that he was imprisoned “for having discovered that drug trafficking has reached even to the President’s Office… I am a political prisoner, someone persecuted by the narco-officials.” The General claims to have evidence of the ARELLANO FELIX brothers’ involvement in the COLOSIO assassination. (La Jornada, 11 July 1997)

3 July

AMADO CARRILLO FUENTES allegedly checks into the Santa Monica clinic in Polanco, Mexico City, for a massive plastic surgery and liposuction session. Supposedly he dies of a heart attack during the operation.

“Questions persist about the assertion by Chilean officials that they were shadowing the traffickers and investigating CARRILLO’s suspected presence. How could they have not spotted CARRILLO if they were indeed following the gangsters, who set up front companies and made million-dollar investments? … It is also unclear why CARRILLO went back to Mexico for plastic surgery; Argentina and Brazil have booming plastic surgery industries.” (LA Times, 20 August 1997)

4 July

CARRILLO’s body is seized by the PGR for fingerprinting and DNA tests.

6 July

Local elections deny the PRI its congressional majority for the first time ever, while the PRD’s CARDENAS is elected Mayor of Mexico City with 50% of the vote.

The DEA announce that the corpse seized by the PGR in Sinaloa is that of AMADO CARRILLO FUENTES. Speculation continues that CARRILLO has faked his own death.

16 July

Mexican federal judge RICARDO OJEDA BOHORQUEZ throws out money-laundering charges against RAUL SALINAS. OJEDA rules that the PGR has failed to present sufficient evidence. The ruling gives RAUL access to more than $100 million he deposited in European banks under various false names. The European governments say they will keep the accounts frozen while their own investigations continue.

24 July

LUIS RAUL GONZALEZ PEREZ, latest PGR Special Prosecutor in the COLOSIO murder case, announces that the government is going back to its original “lone assassin” theory. He says the finding does not rule out a conspiracy.

El Financero

carries statements by a former Mexican police agent, and current DEA agent, ENRIQUE PLASCENCIA, that he has evidence that the real assassin is ABURTO look-alike JORGE ANTONIO SANCHEZ ORTEGA, an agent for CISEN. He is now said to go by the name TOMAS JASO. (El Diario – La Prensa, 28 July 1997)

29 July

A motorcyclist assassinates law clerk IRMA LIZETTE IBARRA NAVEJAT in Guadalajara. A former Miss Jalisco, she had also received death threats after being named as a key witness in the case against Gen. GUTIERREZ.

13 August

The PGR announces it has asked criminologist JUAN PABLO DE TAVIRA Y NORIEGA to resign: the previous week DE TAVIRA had declared that CARLOS SALINAS was the intellectual author of the COLOSIO murder.

12 September

US and Mexican officials announce that the US has frozen $26 million in a New York Citibank account as part of an investigation into money-laundering by CARRILLO FUENTES. A Citibank spokesman tells the Wall Street Journal, “We believe no Citibank accounts… have been part of a money-laundering apparatus by the CARRILLO drug cartel.” (Los Angeles Times, 13 Sept 1997)

21 September

President ZEDILLO cancels a scheduled meeting with Amnesty International General Secreteary PIERRE SANE, who has flown in to warn him that Mexico is in the throes of a “human rights crisis.”

2 November

The bodies of JAIME GODOY and RICARDO REYES – plastic surgeons who operated on AMADO CARILLO – are found in cement-filled oil drums along the Mexico City-Acapulco highway. Their fingernails have been torn out and their bodies burned.

4 November

Assassination attempt against San Cristobal bishop SAMUEL RUIZ of Chiapas fails; three catechists are wounded.

1998

May

RAUL SALINAS is cleared of charges of money laundering, but remains charged with “inexplicible enrichment” and involvement in the assassination of JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU.

December

CHARLES INTRIAGO, a former US federal prosecutor who edits the newsletter Money Laundering Alert, says that delays by the US government may have sabotaged a possible money laundering case against RAUL SALINAS and Citibank. According to INTRIAGO, the statute of limitations for such cases is five years, with some limited exceptions, so that “the investigators have now lost the right to present as evidence some of the first transactions.” (La Jornada, 27 December 1998)

1999

21 January

Judge RICARDO OJEDA BOHORQUEZ convicts RAUL SALINAS of masterminding the JOSE FRANCISCO RUIZ MASSIEU assassination. He gives him the maximum sentence of fifty years. OJEDA rejects the PGR’s contention that RUIZ MASSIEU was killed for interfering in SALINAS family projects: he blames RAUL’s resentment over a business deal with RUIZ MASSIEU and over the latter’s divorce from ADRIANA (RAUL and CARLOS’ sister). La Jornada reports that OJEDA has previously issued “decisions that were particularly sensitive for the national political system.” (La Jornada, 22 Jan 1999)

24 May

A commission of representatives from the Mexican federal government, the government of Jalisco, and the Catholic Church mark the sixth anniversary of the POSADAS murder by releasing a new report on the case. Jalisco state government secretary FERNANDO GUZMAN reads from the report that there was no plot to assassinate the Cardinal.

Cardinal JUAN SANDOVAL, a commission member, disagrees: he charges that “big fish” are “impeding the investigation” and that former Attorney General JORGE CARPIZO has suppressed videos connected with the case; he also charges that some of the witnesses are being protected by the US and others by the Mexican government. A Reforma poll shows that 83% of 400 Guadalajarans refuse to believe POSADAS was shot accidentally. (La Jornada, 25 May 1999)

15 June

The ZEDILLO administration announces it has been granted $23 billion in foreign loans from the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the US Eximbank, and a little-known bailout mechanism, the North American Financial Agreement (NAFA).

The bulk of the package – $16 billion – reschedules (i.e. delays) debt payments. Newspapers and opposition politicians claim that the additional debt is being acquired to delay another economic crash – so that the PRI can win the 2000 presidential election.

The Financial Times calls the new loan package “excessive … It looks like ZEDILLO is expecting something worse than what the markets predict.” (John Ross, Mexico Barbaro, 21-30 July 1999)

August

The US government announces its intention to prosecute MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU, who remains under house arrest in Palisades, New Jersey. The New York Times claims, fantastically, that the Mexican government has refused to extradite him from the USA.

15 September

MARIO RUIZ MASSIEU is found dead by his wife, MARIA EUGENIA BARRIENTOS, at their home. US Justice Department officials and RUIZ MASSIEU’s family claim he has commited suicide by taking an overdose of anti-depressants. He had been scheduled to travel to Houston on 16 Sept for his first court appearance on drugs charges. Today is Mexico’s Independence Day. (La Jornada, New York Times, 16 Sept 1999)

16 September

RUIZ MASSIEU’s US attorney, former federal prosecutor PEGGY FLEMING, and his widow make public his alleged suicide note at a press conference in New York. “I am absolutely innocent of all the charges made against me,” he wrote, saying that “my murderers” were President ZEDILLO and a series of Mexican prosecutors and Attorneys General. “To find my brother’s murderers, an investigation has to be started that begins with ZEDILLO. He and I knew that he wasn’t uninvolved in the two political crimes of 1994.” (El Diario-La Prensa, NYT, WSJ, 17 Sept 1999)

17 September

Insurgent Sub-Commandante MARCOS of the EZLN claims RUIZ MASSIEU isn’t dead at all. “We’ve already seen this movie,” he writes in a communique. “The ‘suicide’ isn’t one. It’s called a ‘Witness Protection Program,’ is a frequent practice in the US judicial system in international drug trafficking cases, and announces that surprises are coming for the one who wll be ‘ex’ after 1 Dec of the year 2000.”

ERNESTO ZEDILLO is scheduled to leave office on 1 Dec, 2000. (La Jornada, 18 Sept 1999.)

This article, in a longer form, first appeared in the British parapolitical journal Lobster. Like the rest of us, the editor of that publication, Robin Ramsey, got into these topics through an original interest in the Kennedy assassination. – Eds.
February 15, 2000
Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?

From the July-August 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 5) of Probe

It took almost two years for the American public to suspect a conspiracy was involved in the Kennedy assassination. It took less than two weeks before suspicions arose among many Israelis that Rabin was not murdered by a lone gunman.

The first to propose the possibility, on November 11, one week following the assassination, was Professor Michael Hersiger, a Tel Aviv University historian. He told the Israeli press, “There is no rational explanation for the Rabin assassination. There is no explaining the breakdown. In my opinion there was a conspiracy involving the Shabak. It turns out the murderer was in the Shabak when he went to Riga. He was given documents that permitted him to buy a gun. He was still connected to the Shabak at the time of the murder.”

Hersiger’s instincts were right, but he believed the conspirators were from a right wing rogue group in the Shabak. It wasn’t long before suspicions switched to the left. On the 16th of November, a territorial leader and today Knesset Member Benny Eilon called a press conference during which he announced, “There is a strong suspicion that Eyal and Avishai Raviv not only were connected loosely to the Shabak but worked directly for the Shabak. This group incited the murder. I insist that not only did the Shabak know about Eyal, it founded and funded the group.”

The public reaction was basically, “Utter nonsense.” Yet Eilon turned out to be right on the money. How did he know ahead of everyone else?

Film director Merav Ktorza and her cameraman Alon Eilat interviewed Eilon in January, 1996. Off camera he told them, “Yitzhak Shamir called me into his office a month before the assassination and told me, ‘They’re planning to do another Arlosorov on us. Last time they did it, we didn’t get into power for fifty years. I want you to identify anyone you hear of threatening to murder Rabin and stop him.’” In 1933, a left wing leader Chaim Arlosorov was murdered in Tel Aviv and the right wing Revisionists were blamed for it. This was Israel’s first political murder and its repercussions were far stronger than those of the Rabin assassination which saw the new Likud Revisionists assume power within a year.

Shamir was the former head of the Mossad’s European desk and had extensive intelligence ties. He was informed of the impending assassination in October. Two witnesses heard Eilon make this remarkable claim but he would not go on camera with it or any other statement. Shortly after his famous press conference and testimony to the Shamgar Commission, Eilon stopped talking publicly about the assassination.

There are two theories about his sudden shyness. Shmuel Cytryn, the Hebron resident who was jailed without charge for first identifying Raviv as a Shabak agent, has hinted that Eilon played some role in the Raviv affair and he was covering his tracks at the press conference.

Many others believe that pressure was applied on Eilon using legal threats against his niece Margalit Har Shefi. Because of her acquaintanceship with Amir, she was charged as an accessory to the assassination. To back up their threats, the Shabak had Amir write a rambling, incriminating letter to her from prison. The fear of his niece spending a decade in jail would surely have been enough to put a clamp down on Eilon.

Utter nonsense turned into utter reality the next night when journalist Amnon Abramovitch announced on national television that the leader of Eyal, Yigal Amir’s good friend Avishai Raviv, was a Shabak agent codenamed “Champagne” for the bubbles of incitement he raised.

The announcement caused a national uproar. One example from the media reaction sums up the shock. The newspaper Maariv wrote: “Amnon Abramovitch dropped a bombshell last night, announcing that Avishai Raviv was a Shabak agent codenamed ‘Champagne.’ Now we ask the question, why didn’t he [Avishai Raviv] report Yigal Amir’s plan to murder Rabin to his superiors..? In conversations with security officials, the following picture emerged. Eyal was under close supervision of the Shabak. They supported it monetarily for the past two years. The Shabak knew the names of all Eyal members, including Yigal Amir.”

That same day, November 16, 1995, the newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported details of a conspiracy that will not go away. “There is a version of the Rabin assassination that includes a deep conspiracy within the Shabak. The Raviv affair is a cornerstone of the conspiracy plan.

“Yesterday, a story spread among the settlers that Amir was supposed to fire a blank bullet but he knew he was being set up so he replaced the blanks with real bullets. The story explains why after the shooting, the bodyguards shouted that ‘the bullets were blanks.’ The story sounds fantastic but the Shabak’s silence is fueling it.”

Without the ‘Champagne’ leak, this book would likely not be written. Despite all the conflicting testimony at the Shamgar Commission, the book would have been closed on Yigal Amir and the conspiracy would have been a success. But Abramovitch’s scoop established a direct sinister connection between the murderer and the people protecting the prime minister.

So who was responsible for the leak? There are two candidates who were deeply involved in the protection of Eyal but probably knew nothing of its plans to murder Rabin. They are then-Police Minister Moshe Shahal and then-Attorney General Michael Ben Yair.

Shahal was asked for his reaction to the Abramovitch annoucement. He said simply, “Amnon Abramovitch is a very reliable journalist.” In short, he immediately verified the Champagne story.

Not that he didn’t know the truth, as revealed in the Israeli press:

Maariv, November 24, 1995

The police issued numerous warrants against Avishai Raviv but he was never arrested. There was never a search of his home.

Kol Ha Ir, January, 1996

Nati Levy: “It occurs to me in retrospect that I was arrested on numerous occasions but Raviv, not once. There was a youth from Shiloh who was arrested for burning a car. He told the police that he did it on Raviv’s orders. Raviv was held and released the same day.”

Yediot Ahronot, December 5, 1995

When they aren’t involved in swearing-in ceremonies, Eyal members relax in a Kiryat Araba apartment near the home of Baruch Goldstein’s family. The police have been unsuccessfully searching for the apartment for some time.

Everyone in the media knew about the apartment, as did everyone in Kiryat Arba. It was in the same building as the apartment of Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of 29 Arabs in the Hebron massacre of March ’94. The police left it alone because Raviv used it for surveillance.

He was also immune to arrest for such minor crimes as arson and threatening to kill Jews and Arabs in televised swearing-in ceremonies. But police inaction was inexcusable in two well-publicized incidents.

Yerushalayim, November 10, 1995

Eyal activists have been meeting with Hamas and Islamic Jihad members to plan joint operations.

This item was reported throughout the country, but Avishai Raviv was not arrested for treason, terrorism and cavorting with the enemy. Less explainable yet was the police reaction to Raviv taking responsibility, credit as he called it, for the murder of three Palestinians in the town of Halhoul.

On December 11, 1993, three Arabs were killed by men wearing Israeli army uniforms. Eyal called the media the next day claiming the slaughter was its work. But Moshe Shahal did not order the arrest of Eyal members. He knew Eyal wasn’t rsponsible. He knew they only took responsibility to blacken the name of West Bank settlers. His only action, according to Globes, December 13, 1993, was to tell “… the cabinet that heightened action was being taken to find the killers and to withdraw the legal rights of the guilty organization.”

After a week of international condemnation of the settlers, the army arrested the real murderers, four Arabs from the town.

At that point Shahal should have had Raviv arrested for issuing the false proclamation on behalf of Eyal. But Shahal did not because he was ordered not to interfere with this Shabak operation. As was Attorney-General Michael Ben Yair, who was so terrified of what could be revealed at the Shamgar Commission that he sat in on every session on behalf of the government and later approved, along with Prime Minister Peres, the sections to be hidden from the public.

After the assassination, it emerged that two left wing Knesset members had previously submitted complaints against Eyal to Ben Yair. On March 5, 1995 Dedi Tzuker asked Ben Yair to investigate Eyal after it distributed inciteful literature at a Jerusalem high school. And on September 24, 1995, Yael Dayan requested that Ben Yair open an investigation of Eyal in the wake of its televised vow to spill the blood of Jews and Arabs who stood in the way of their goals. He ignored both petitions, later explaining, “Those requests should have been submitted to the army or the Defence Minister,” who happened to be Yitzhak Rabin.

Both Shahal and Ben Yair were, probably unwittingly, ordered to cover up Eyal’s incitements. But when one incitement turned out to be the murder of Rabin, one of them panicked and decided to place all the blame on the Shabak.

Which one?

According to Abramovitch, “I have a legal background so my source was a high ranking legal official.” It sounds like the winner is Ben Yair, which hardly exonerates him or Shahal for supplying Eyal with immunity from arrest or prosecution, without which the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin would not have been possible. However, Ben Yair opened a police complaint against the leaker, and as late as June of ’96, reporter Abramovich was summoned to give evidence. The leak thus came from a “traitor” in Ben Yair’s office. And because there are Israelis who know the truth and are willing to secretly part with it, this book could be written.

The Testimony Of Chief Lieutenant Baruch Gladstein: Amir Didn’t Shoot Rabin

Everyone who saw the “amateur” film of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin witnessed the alleged murderer Yigal Amir shoot the Prime Minister from a good two feet behind him. The Shamgar Commission determined that Amir first shot Rabin from about 50 cm. distance. Then bodyguard Yoran Rubin jumped on Rabin, pushing him to the ground. Amir was simultaneously accosted by two policemen who held both his arms. Yet somehow Amir managed to step forward and shoot downward, first hitting Rubin in the elbow and then Rabin in the waist from about 30-40 cm. distance.

The amateur film of the assassination disputes the whole conclusion. After the first shot, Rabin keeps walking, there is a cut in the film and Rabin reappears standing all alone. Rubin did not jump on him and Amir has disappeared from the screen. He did not move closer nor get off two shots at the prone Rubin or Rabin.

And there is indisputable scientific proof to back what the camera recorded.

What if the shots that killed Rabin were from both point blank range and 25 cm. distance? Obviously, if so, Amir couldn’t have shot them.

Now consider the testimony of Chief Lieutenant Baruch Gladstein of Israel Police’s Materials and Fibers Laboratory, given at the trial of Yigal Amir on January 28, 1996:

I serve in the Israel Police Fibers and Materials Laboratory. I presented my professional findings in a summation registered as Report 39/T after being asked to test the clothing of Yitzhak Rabin and his bodyguard Yoram Rubin with the aim of determining the range of the shots.

I would like to say a few words of explanation before presenting my findings. We reach our conclusions after testing materials microscopically, photographically and through sensitive chemical and technical procedures. After being shot, particles from the cartridge are expelled through the barrel. They include remains of burnt carbon, lead, copper and other metals…

The greater the distance of the shot, the less the concentration of the particles and the more they are spread out. At point blank range, there is another phenomenon, a characteristic tearing of the clothing and abundance of gunpowder caused by the gases of the cartridge having nowhere to escape. Even if the shot is from a centimeter, two or three you won’t see the tearing and abundance of gunpowder. These are evident only from point blank shots.

To further estimate range, we shoot the same bullets, from the suspected weapon under the same circumstances. On November 5, 1996, I received the Prime Minister’s jacket, shirt and undershirt as well as the clothes of the bodyguard Yoram Rubin including his jacket, shirt and undershirt. In the upper section of the Prime Minister’s jacket I found a bullet hole to the right of the seam, which according to my testing of the spread of gunpowder was caused by a shot from less than 25 cm. range. The same conclusion was reached after testing the shirt and undershirt.

The second bullet hole was found on the bottom left hand side of the jacket. It was characterized by a massed abundance of gunpowder, a large quantity of lead and a 6 cm. tear, all the characteristics of a point blank shot.”

The author rudely interrupts lest anyone miss the significance of the testimony. Chief Lieutenant Gladstein testifies that the gun which killed Rabin was shot first from less than 25 cm. range and then the barrel was placed on his skin. In fact, according to a witness at the trial, Nat an Gefen, Gladstein said 10 cm and such was originally typed into the court protocols. The number 25 was crudely written atop the original 10. If the assassination film is to be believed, Amir never had a 25 cm. or 10 cm. shot at Rabin or even close to one. As dramatic a conclusion as this is, Officer Gladstein isn’t through. Far from it.

As to the lower bullet hole, according to the powder and lead formations and the fact that a secondary hole was found atop the main entry hole, it is highly likely that the Prime Minister was shot while bending over. The angle was from above to below. I have photographs to illustrate my conclusions.”

The court was now shown photographs of Rabin’s clothing. We add, according to the Shamgar Commission findings, Rabin was shot first standing up and again while prone on the ground covered by Yoram Rubin’s body. Nowhere else but in Gladstein’s expert testimony is there so much as a hint that he was shot while in a bent-over position.

After examining the bullet hole in the sleeve of Yoram Rubin, I determined that the presence of copper and lead, plus the collection of gunpowder leads to the likelihood that he, too, was shot from near point blank range… The presence of copper means the bullet used to shoot Rubin was different from that found in the Prime Minister’s clothing which was composed entirely of lead. The bullet that was shot at Rubin was never found.”

We now enter the realm of the bizarre, as is always the case when Yigal Amir chooses to cross-examine a witness. Chief Lieutenant Gladstein has provided the proof that Amir did not shoot the bullets that killed Rabin, yet Amir is determined to undermine the testimony.

Amir: “According to your testimony, I placed the gun right on his back.”

Gladstein: “You placed the gun on his back on the second shot and fired.”

Amir: “And the first shot was from 50 cm?”

Gladstein: “Less than 20 cm.”

Amir: “If one takes into account that there is more gunpowder from the barrel, then the muzzle blast should also increase.”

Gladstein: “To solve this problem, I shoot the same ammunition, and in your case, from the same gun, I shot the Baretta 9 mm weapon with hollowpoint bullets into the prime minister’s jacket.”

Amir: “When I took the first shot, I saw a very unusual blast.”

Amir is close to realizing finally that he shot a blank bullet but blows his case when he concludes, “We need a new expert because I didn’t shoot from point blank range.”

Away all talk about far-right, conspiracy nut theories. The Materials and Fibers Laboratory of Israel Police concluded that Rabin was shot from less than 20 cm and point blank range, no matter what Amir says. Furthermore, the bodyguard Yoram Rubin was shot by a different bullet than felled Rabin or was found in Amir’s clip. Unless Israel Police’s fibers expert is deliberately promoting far-right, conspiracy nut theories, Yigal Amir’s gun did not kill Yitzhak Rabin.

How did They Miss Amir at the Rally?

One of the questions the media asked after the assassination is how the Shabak missed identifying Amir in the sterile area where he “shot” Rabin. The first answer given by the Shabak was that because of the thick crowd, it was impossible to pick out Amir.

The “amateur film” purportedly made by Ronnie Kempler put that lie to rest. Amir is shown alone standing by a potted plant for long minutes without another soul in sight for yards around him. The only people who are filmed talking to him are two uniformed policemen.

Under normal circumstances, the Shabak would have prevented Amir from getting anywhere near the rally itself, and had he somehow gained access to the sterile area, he would have been apprehended on the spot. Because, you see, the Shabak had lots of information that Amir was planning to assassinate Rabin.

Take the famous case of Shlomi Halevy, a reserve soldier in the IDF’s Intelligence Brigade and a fellow student of Amir’s at Bar Ilan University. After being informed that Amir was talking about killing Rabin, he reported the information to his superior officer in the brigade. He told Halevy to go to the police immediately. Halevy told them that “A short Yemenite in Eyal was boasting that he was going to assassinate Rabin.” The police took Halevy very seriously and transferred his report to the Shabak where it wasn’t “discovered” until three days after Rabin’s assassination.

The weekly newsmagazine Yerushalayim on September 22, 1996 managed to convince Halevy to give his first interview since the discovery of his report and the subsequent media fallout. The magazine noted, “Halevy’s and other reports of Amir’s intentions which gathered dust in Shabak files have fueled numerous conspiracy theories…After the uproar, Halevy went into hiding.

“Shlomi Levy, if you did the right thing why have you hidden from the public?

“The assassination is a sore point with the Shabak. They’re big and I’m little. I don’t know what they could do to me.”

Halevy was the most publicized case because as a soldier in the Intelligence Brigade, the Shabak was absolutely required to take his evidence seriously, as did the police. But Halevy was not the only informant.

Yediot Ahronot, November 12, 1995

A number of weeks before the Rabin assassination, the Shabak received information about the existence of Yigal Amir and his intention to murder Yitzhak Rabin.

Yediot Ahronot was informed that one of the Eyal activists arrested last week was interrogated for being a possible co-conspirator with Yigal Amir because the assassin’s brother Haggai had mentioned him in his own interrogation.

At the beginning of his interrogation, the suspect broke out into bitter tears and told a tale that was initially viewed with tongue in cheek by the interrogators. Weeks before the murder, the suspect heard Amir speak his intentions and he was shocked. He was torn between informing the authorities and betraying his fellows, so he chose a middle route. He would give away Amir’s intentions without naming him.

After some hesitation, he informed a police intelligence officer about Amir’s plan in detail stopping just short of identifying him or his address. He told where Amir studied and described him as a “Short, dark Yemenite with curly hair.”

The description was passed along the police communications network and classified as important. The information was also passed to the Shabak, officers of which subsequently took a statement from the suspect. Because he was in a delicate position, neither the police nor Shabak pressed him further.

While interrogated, the suspect named the police and Shabak officers and his story checked out. He was then released. Shabak officials confirmed that the man had previously given them a description of Amir and his plan to murder Rabin.

Maariv, November 19, 1995

Hila Frank knew Amir well from her studies at Bar Ilan. After the assassination, she hired a lawyer and told him that she had heard Amir state his intention to murder Rabin well before the event. As a member of the campus Security Committee, she organized anti-government demonstrations. Thus, she was torn between exposing Amir’s intentions and the interests of the state.

To overcome the dilemma, Frank passed on her information to Shlomi Halevy, a reserve soldier in the Intelligence Brigade who promised that it would be given to the right people.

Yerushalayim, November 17, 1995

Why wasn’t a drawing of Amir based on Halevy’s description distributed to the Prime Minister’s security staff? Why didn’t they interrogate other Eyal activists to discover who the man threatening to kill the prime minister was?

Yediot Ahronot, November 10, 1995

A month and a half before the assassination, journalist Yaron Kenner pretended to be a sympathizer and spent two days at a study Sabbath in Hebron organized by Yigal Amir.

“Who organized this event?” I asked. He pointed to Yigal Amir…He had invited 400 and over 540 arrived. This caused organizational havoc.

When Amir spoke, people quieted down, testifying to some charisma. On the other hand, his soft tone and unimpressive stature wouldn’t have convinced anyone to buy even a Popsicle from him.

Maariv, December 12, 1995

During his “Identity Weekends,” hundreds of people heard Amir express his radical thoughts, amongst which were his biblical justifications for the murder of Rabin.

Yediot Ahronot, November 24, 1995

Yigal Amir turned into an object of attention for the Shabak beginning six months ago when he started organizing study weekends in Kiryat Arba and they requested a report on him. Raviv prepared the report.

Maariv, November 24, 1995

A carful of Bar Ilan students were driving from Tel Aviv when they heard the announcement of Rabin’s shooting on the radio. They played a game, each thinking of five people who might have done it. Yigal Amir was on all their lists.

How could the Shabak have missed Yigal Amir at the rally unless they did so on purpose? Yigal Amir did not keep his intentions to assassinate Rabin a secret. He told many hundreds of people gathered at his study weekends and seems to have told everyone within hearing distance at Bar Ilan University.

Besides the question of Amir’s most un-murderer-like desire to let the world know his plans, we must ask why the Shabak didn’t apprehend him. Yes, they knew about him. The proof is indisputable. Two people, one within Eyal, the other a soldier in the Intelligence Brigade told them. Their own agent Avishai Raviv heard his threats, along with hundreds of other people at the study weekends and reported them to his superiors.

So why didn’t they arrest him well before the rally, outside the rally or within the sterile zone?

Because wittingly or not, Yigal Amir was working for the Shabak.

The Kempler Film

Almost two months after the Rabin assassination, Israelis were shocked to read in their newspapers that an amateur film of the event would be shown on Channel Two news. The filmmaker was announced as a Polish tourist with a long, unpronounceable name. However, this story changed the day of the broadcast. The filmmaker was, in fact, an Israeli named Roni Kempler.

There were obvious questions asked by the public. Why had he waited a month to show the film when he would have been a few million dollars richer had he sold it to the world networks the day following the assassination? In his sole television appearance the night his film was broadcast, he explained he wasn’t interested in making money. What else could he say?

It was quickly discovered that Kempler was no ordinary citizen. He worked for the State Comptroller’s Office and was a bodyguard in the army reserves.

It is an extremely rare occurrence when the Israeli press publishes an opinion that expresses doubt about the veracity of the Shamgar Commission, which investigated the assassination on behalf of the government. Yet in the aftermath of a most revealing expose of the testimony of General Security Services (Shabak) agents and police officers present near the murder site published by Maariv on September 27, 1996, two letters were published in response. One was from Labour Knesset Member Ofir Pines who admitted he too heard numerous security agents shout that the shots which supposedly felled Rabin were blanks. He added rather weakly that in retrospect, perhaps he heard the shouts because he wanted to believe that the bullets weren’t real.

A second letter was from Hannah Chen of Jerusalem and she succinctly summarized some of the most blatant suspicions of Roni Kempler. The letter read:

Allow me to add my doubts about the strange facts surrounding the Rabin assassination. First, it was said that the video filmmaker who captured the murder didn’t own his own camera, rather he borrowed one. It’s odd that an amateur filmmaker didn’t own a camera and if he borrowed one, then from whom? Why weren’t we told what kind of a camera he used? Secondly, no one initially knew that he made the film, that a film of the assassination existed. Does that mean none of the security agents on the scene spotted him filming from a rooftop? And how did the video get to the media? Shouldn’t the Shabak have confiscated the film from its owner if this was the only documentary evidence describing the crime? And why didn’t the filmmaker voluntarily turn over the film to the police?

It is completely uncertain if the film is authentic. In my opinion, it was tampered with. Perhaps people were removed or bullet sounds added. It appears to me that we were all fooled. The filmmaker worked for the Shabak and everything to do with the film and the timing of its release were fake.

Ms. Chen expressed the view of many. Nonetheless, the film, as edited as it obviously was during its two months of non-acknowledgement, is as valuable to solving the Rabin assassination as was the Zapruder film in putting to rest the lone gunmen lie foisted on the American public in the wake of the JFK murder.

The event captured on the film that is becoming the center piece of doubts about the veracity of the Shamgar Commission is the door of Rabin’s vehicle that closes before he enters the car. To almost everyone who watches that door close, it is certain that someone, perhaps the murderer, was waiting in the Cadillac for Rabin. This is in direct contradiction to the official conclusion that Rabin entered an empty car. But there is more on the Kempler film that contradicts the official findings; much more.

As the fifteen minute film begins, Yigal Amir looks in the distance and as the television commentator noted, “Seems to be signaling someone.” It is not the first time that the possibility of an accomplice was noted. At the Shamgar Commission police officers Boaz Eran and Moti Sergei both testified that Amir spoke with a bearded man in a dark tee shirt who he appeared to know, about half an hour before the shooting.

As the film progresses, the viewer realizes that Shabak testimony to Shamgar was very wrong. One of the primary excuses given for not identifying Amir in the sterile area was because of the crowded situation. To prove the point, the testimony of police officers saying that “another well known demonstrator who works for the city rushed at Rabin and shook his hand,” is cited. Amir, then was not the only anti-Rabin individual in the sterile zone. However, Amir is not filmed in a crowd. He stood for long minutes meters away from anyone else. No one could have missed him had they wanted to see him.

Then, two security officers strike up a conversation with Amir. He was noticed and apparently had something to say to the very people who should have identified and apprehended him.

A few minutes later, Shimon Peres comes down the steps and walks towards the crowd at the barrier. He accepts their good wishes and walks to a spot about a meter and a half opposite the hood of Rabin’s car. He is accompanied by four bodyguards, one of whom clearly points to Yigal Amir sitting three meters away opposite them. Peres stops, looks inside the car and begins a conversation with the bodyguards. All now take a good look at the Rabin limousine windshield and turn towards Amir.

At this point there is a cut. Suddenly Peres is talking to Rabin’s driver, Menachem Damti. Damti was nowhere in the screen previously and was likely by his post beside the driver’s seat door. The cut was significant, probably of several seconds. There was something the folks who chopped the film didn’t want the public to see. Perhaps Peres acknowledged Amir too blatantly.

After a hard night at the rally, instead of getting into his car and going home, Peres decided it was more important to examine Rabin’s car and have a serious chat with his driver.

Ronnie Kempler was asked to explain the cut in the film under oath at Yigal Amir’s trial. He testified that, “Shimon Peres left and I filmed him as he was supposed to enter his car. But when Shimon Peres stood on the same spot for a long time, he stopped interesting me cinematically. I stopped filming and started again the moment he entered his car.”

Kempler’s account was wrong in every detail. If the film wasn’t cut and he shut off the camera, he decided to turn it back on while Peres was still standing opposite Rabin’s car, only now talking to Damti. Many seconds later, he started walking towards his own car. Kempler’s testimony was perjured, yet Amir’s lawyers, possibly not familiar enough with the film, let him off the hook.

Peres enters his car and Rabin descends the steps. The camera captures the agents at Rabin’s rear clearly stopping. They abandon Rabin’s back deliberately, a huge gap between them and Rabin opens allowing Amir a clear shot at the Prime Minister. Amir draws his gun from deep inside his right pocket and the television commentator notes, “Amir is drawing his gun to shoot.” Anyone, trained or not, could see that Amir was drawing a gun and at that point he should have been pounced on. But, this was not to be. Instead, he circles a student reporter named Modi Yisrael, draws the gun and shoots.

We now play the murder frame by frame. Rabin has supposedly taken a hollow point nine mm bullet in his lung, yet he doesn’t wince or flinch. He is not even pushed forward by the impact nor does his suit show signs of tearing. Instead, he continues walking forward and turns his head behind him in the direction of the noise.

Three doctors watched this moment with me; Drs. B. and H. asked for anonymity and Dr. Klein of Tel Aviv had no objection to being cited. I asked if Rabin’s reaction was medically feasible if he was only hit in the lung or if his backbone was shattered. I was told that if the spine was hit, Rabin would have fallen on the spot. However, in the case of a lung wound I was told that there are two types of pain reaction, one reflexive, the other delayed. Rabin, did not display the reflexive reaction, which would have most likely meant clutching the arm. Instead, he displayed a startle reaction, painlessly turning his head toward the direction of the shot. The conclusion of the doctors was that Rabin heard a shot, perhaps felt the blast of a blank and turned quickly towards the noise. This was a startle reaction and it cannot occur simultaneously with a reflexive pain reaction.

Rabin takes three or four steps forward and suddenly the film becomes totally hazy for just under two seconds. Cameraman Alon Eilat is convinced the film was deliberately made fuzzy by an artificial process duplicating a sudden, quick movement of the camera. To illustrate his belief, he put his finger on one point, a white reflective light on the windshield and notes that it stays in the same position while the camera is supposedly swishing. But the haze lifts momentarily almost two seconds later and Rabin appears, still standing but a step or two forward. He has taken at least five steps since the shooting. Then the swish returns and within the next round of haze, another shot is heard but not seen.

According to the Shamgar Commission and the judges at Yigal Amir’s trial, Yoram Rubin was on top of Rabin lying on the parking lot ground when the second shot was fired. The official version is that after hearing the first shot, Rubin jumps on Rabin and pushes him to the ground. Amir approached Rabin and Rubin and while being held by at least two other bodyguards pumped one bullet into Rubin’s arm and another into Rabin’s spleen. There followed a hiatus in the shooting, during which Rubin thinks to himself, “A defect in the weapon,” and then according to Rubin, “I shouted at him several times, ‘Yitzhak, can you hear me, just me and no one else, goddammit?’ He (Rabin), helped me to my feet. That is we worked together. He then jumped into the car. In retrospect, I find it amazing that a man his age could jump like that.” (The author finds it amazing that a man his age with bullets in his lung and spleen could jump at all.)

The Kempler film reveals that the whole story is utter hogwash. A famous photo of Rabin being shoved into the car shows up on the film as a flash. At that point, we know Rubin, injured arm and all, is not on the ground, rather he is on his feet holding Rabin. There are 24 frames/second in video film, so timing events is simple. From the time of the second shot to the flash, 4.6 seconds pass. Try repeating ,”Yitzhak can you hear me, just me and no one else, goddamit” three times in 4.6 seconds. Then add the hiatus, and how long is a hiatus before a man being shot decides it’s safe to get up, and think to yourself “A defect in the weapon.” Try all that in 4.6 seconds. Rubin’s timing is, simply, impossible.

Further, Rubin is not filmed on top of Rabin, and Rabin does not jump into the car. The photo of Rubin pulling Rabin into the car disproves that even without the added proof of the Kempler film. Rubin’s testimony, to put it mildly, is not born out by the Kempler film.

And now comes the piece de resistance, the most haunting moment of the tape. Two seconds before Rabin is placed in the car, the opposite back passenger door slams shut. This segment has been examined and tested by numerous journalists, every shadow on the screen traced, every possible explanation exhausted and in the end it has withstood all scrutiny. Someone, an unknown fourth person, possibly the murderer, was waiting inside the car for Rabin.

When I show this segment to audiences, inevitably I am asked, “Why did they make this film if it’s so incriminating?” I reply, “The film convinced the whole country that Amir murdered Rabin. People always say, ‘But I saw him do it with my own eyes.’ And that is what the film was supposed to do. But the conspirators were so sloppy, they left in the truth. Either they didn’t notice it, or they thought no one else would.”

So why didn’t Yigal Amir’s attorneys tear Kempler to bits on the stand or use the film to its maximum advantage? The truth be told, Amir’s attorneys either weren’t interested enough in his welfare, weren’t properly prepared or weren’t talented enough to challenge the kangaroo court head on. Take a look at how they handled the issue of the unexplainable closing door:

Defence: After the event, the back right door of the car was also open.

Kempler: I filmed what I filmed.

The end, no followup. And it’s not that the defence didn’t have plenty of ammunition. On the night his film was shown on Channel Two in January ’96, Kempler was interviewed by commentator Rafi Reshef. The fast talking, nervous Kempler was most unbelievable, as the following interview segments show;

Reshef: Why did you wait so long to release the film to the public?

Kempler: A few reasons. I didn’t want to be known. Also, I thought it was forbidden to show the film so soon after the murder. The public needed time to digest it as a historic film…But after the Shamgar Commission got it, I kept hearing on the street that I’m the sucker of the country. That really aggravated me, so I got a lawyer and decided to make some money selling it.

How altruistic! What Kempler forgets to mention is that he didn’t tell anyone he had filmed the assassination until two weeks later when supposedly he woke up to what he had and sent the Shamgar Commission a registered letter informing them. In the meantime, he was withholding vital evidence from the police.

Reshef: Did anyone observe you filming?

Kempler: Yes, the bodyguard…I’m sure I saw (singer) Aviv Gefen look right into my camera.

Kempler almost let slip that the bodyguards were watching him film, and indeed this is apparent on the film itself when just before the Peres cut, one of his bodyguards turns back and looks directly up to him, but he thought the better of it and switched to a nonsensical fantasy involving a pop singer.

Reshef: Why did you concentrate so much of the film on the killer?

Kempler: I felt there was something suspicious about him. I let my imagination run away with me and felt murder in the air. It wasn’t so strong when Peres was there but when Rabin appeared, ‘WOW.’

Kempler felt there was an assassination in the air and suspected Amir could be the assassin. This was truly a parapsychological feat but lucky it happened or he wouldn’t have bothered focusing in on Amir. And lucky he just happened to be the only cameraman on the balcony overlooking the murder scene. And luckily, it was so dark at the murder scene, few amateur cameras could have captured the act.

Reshef: There has been much speculation why you happened to be the only one in the right place to film the assassination. How do you explain it?

Kempler: I felt someone caused me to be in that place.

Reshef: What, are you a fatalist?

Nope, a mystic as we shall soon see.

Reshef: Did anyone try to interfere with you?

Kempler: There were undercover officers around. One told me it was alright to film but I had to stop when Rabin appeared.

Yeah, sure. Now compare Kempler’s version of events as told to Reshef with what Kempler testified to at Amir’s trial. To Reshef:

Kempler: An undercover policeman came up to me and asked me a few questions and asked to see my ID. I showed it to him and he walked away. He stopped, turned back and shouted, ‘What did you say your name was?’ I shouted it back. He said,‘Good.’ And that was that. The police had all the details of my identity.

So why didn’t they call that night to get the film? What is described is a very friendly encounter, indeed. Here is how the incident was transformed for Amir’s trial:

Kempler: There was an undercover cop who told me not to film. I told him he has no right to tell me not to film. I asked him if something secret was going on? I told him again he has no right to tell me not to film. And if he does it again, I would take down his particulars and issue a complaint to the police.

A rather drastically altered situation. Someone or more than one thought that Kempler’s explanation to Reshef about why he was permitted to film in such a sensitive security location was too weak, so he painted a new, tougher picture. An updated version of his previous explanation about why he focused in on Amir painted a much goofier portrait.

Kempler: When I stood on the balcony, I spent a lot of time in the dark and to my regret, my imagination began to work overtime. I begin to imagine many things, even God forbid, a political assassination…I have no explanation why I had this feeling. I’m not sure it wasn’t something mystic.

And because of this mysticism, Kempler felt, “The defendant stood out. I don’t know what he did… but I recall he stood out. I can’t recall anything other than what I filmed.”

Indeed he couldn’t because at the beginning of his testimony Kempler says the film shown to the public, “contained no changes or alterations.” By the end, he admits, “There are gaps and there are differences.”

Why the change of heart? Because Amir’s attorneys pointed out some very suspicious contradictions in the film.

Defence: We don’t hear everything in the film but we hear lots, including shouts. So why don’t we hear the shouts of “They’re blanks.”

Kempler: Don’t ask me. I’m not the address.

Defence: Yoram Rubin testified that he fell on Rabin, why don’t we see that in the film?

Kempler: I’m not a video or camera expert. I’m not the address for questions like that.

The address, of course, is the technical department of the Shabak, where the film was altered during the time Kempler decided not to turn it over to the police or sell it. But this was not a skilled technical department. While the film was being edited and altered, Yigal Amir was filmed a second time, during his reconstruction of the murder a few days after the event. And this reconstruction at the crime scene deeply compromised the validity of the Kempler film.

The first error made was enormous and was pointed out to me later by a man who claimed he was the first to report it to the press. In the reconstruction film, Amir shoots with his right hand, as numerous eye witnesses saw him do. But in the still of the Kempler film released initially exclusively to the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Amir is shooting with his left hand.

And that’s not all. In the reconstruction film, Amir has bushy unshaped sideburns past the middle of his ear. The shooter in the Kempler photo still has squared sideburns at the top of his ear. Another person was superimposed over Yigal Amir for the still and there is maybe one possible reason why. The superimposed figure’s arm looks longer, thus reducing the range of the shot, a necessity to be explained shortly. This is just one possibility. There are others, so far, less convincing. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, Amir’s image was almost certainly removed from the Kempler film still and replaced by another.

But the reconstruction film belied the Kempler film in other ways, as reluctantly testified to by Lieutenant Arieh Silberman, Amir’s chief investigator, at the defendant’s trial.

Defence: Did you notice the differences between the video shown on Channel Two and the film of the reconstruction? Did you see the reconstruction film?

Silberman: I saw the reconstruction. It was of the same event in principle but there was an obvious difference. You can see the difference.

Defence: You’re responsible for the defendant’s investigation. Why is there a difference between the reconstruction film and the video shown on Channel 2?

Silberman: To my eyes, the difference isn’t significant. The defendant doesn’t think so. He never brought it up. I wasn’t at the reconstruction.

Defence: Why is there a break where we don’t hear part of the audio?

Silberman: I didn’t make the film. It was handled by the technicians of several units. I’m responsible for investigating the defendant, not the film.

Defence (Amir now acts as his own attorney): Is there a difference between the original film and what was shown on Channel Two?

Silberman: Could be.

Defence: What’s the most outstanding difference?

Silberman: The position of the prime minister.

Defence: In the reconstruction, I go straight toward him.

Silberman: True.

Defence: And in the original video I took a roundabout route.

Silberman: According to what I saw, you circled someone before getting behind (Rabin).

Amir reconstructed his alleged crime wrongly according to the Kempler film. And he shot with the wrong hand according to the still of the Kempler film. If Amir’s attorneys had bothered to press the issue, they might have been able to construct a plausible argument that he wasn’t even at the scene of the crime, according to the Kempler film.

[This next section is a chapter Chamish wrote after his book, Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?, was published.—Eds.]

At Long Last: Rabin’s Third Wound Proven

November 1998. It had been a good eighteen months since the last hidden documentation about the Rabin assassination had been uncovered. Since then some serious evidence had emerged about the political side of the murder. A year before, the government released some sections of the previously closed Shamgar Commission findings which incriminated Avishai Raviv far more deeply in widespread crimes of provocation. Two months later, one former Eyal activist, Benny Aharoni signed a sworn statement to Knesset Member Michael Eitan, that under orders from Raviv, he phoned three dozen reporters and delivered the infamous “We Missed But We’ll Get Rabin Next Time” message, well before the shooting was announced on the Israeli media. And journalist Adir Zik had gathered powerful evidence of Carmi Gillon’s complicity in the murder.

But the tap had shut tight on any new medical, police or forensic documentation. It looked as though the evidence I had collected for this book would be the last of the proofs that Yigal Amir had not shot fatal bullets into Rabin. The strongest evidence was the testimony of Police Chief Lieutenant Baruch Gladstein proving that Rabin was shot point blank and Dr. Mordechai Guttman’s surgeon’s notes describing a frontal chest wound which passed through the lung before shattering the vertebrae at D5-6.

When this book was written I had read Guttman’s full surgical report, which included the description of three gunshot wounds and the publicly released procedural summation of November 5 which removed the frontal chest wound and shattered spine. Thus, it was Dr. Guttman’s written word from the night of the murder versus his altered version of events, co-authored with Drs. Kluger and Hausner, the next day. Whenever Dr. Guttman was confronted with his report of the chest wound on the murder night, he answered that he had mistaken Rabin’s ribs for his spine. If so, that Dr. Guttman couldn’t tell the difference between ribs and the spinal column, as one doctor attending a lecture of mine told the audience, he should be disbarred from ever practising medicine again. However, another doctor did give Dr. Guttman the benefit of the doubt: if the bullet shattered the vertebrae at the point where the ribs join the spine, such a mixup was both logical and understandable. The main problem was that we were missing reliable descriptions of Rabin’s condition before and after the doctors went to work on him. Dr. Guttman’s report of a frontal chest wound lacked overall perspective and seemed an oddity that could be sloughed off with the explanation that he was mistaken when he wrote it.

In early December, American filmmaker Peter Goldman arrived in Israel with the intention of gathering the evidence needed to justify raising funds for a full length documentary based on my book. I gave him my contacts, who were new to him and we shared one contact in common. I expressed the opinion that visiting him would be a waste of time. I had a meeting with him a year and a half before and followed it up with two phone calls. It was all for naught; this contact had not provided me with any new evidence. Undaunted, Peter met him anyway and was well rewarded for following his instincts. Just a few hours before departing the country, Peter presented me with three new documents. I immediately understood that they were the final pieces of the puzzle. We now had a complete diary of Rabin’s treatment at Ichilov Hospital. Document one was the initial visual diagnosis of Rabin by Dr. Guttman. Hastily written in English, the diagnosis reads, “GSW Abdomen and Chest”: Gunshot wounds to the abdomen and chest. When I read the word chest, I thought I had found the smoking gun. Rabin arrived with a chest wound. Amir never shot him in the chest. Case closed. I would have to change my book. There were only two wounds, not three. There was no third shot in the hospital. Rabin was shot in the chest in the car. However, within a few days, two experts set me straight. A chest wound can also begin from the back if the bullet travels forward and injures the chest. Page two was far more detailed. It begins with a description of Rabin’s first bodily examination and provides us with indisputable proof of Rabin’s condition immediately after he was placed on the examination table. Page three was the summation of the operation. At last, we no longer had to depend on the public summation of November 5 to understand the cause of Rabin’s death. I now had the whole story in hand and it was told in the following reports:

1. First diagnosis

2. First bodily examination

3. Surgical procedure

4. Operation summation

5. Altered public summation

By the time I had completed my book, I had read 3 and 5. Four months after the book was released, I received 1, 2 and 4. And to my great relief, they confirmed my thesis conclusively. The documents, though not lengthy nor wordy are surprisingly complicated and packed with information which can be interpreted in different ways. Nonetheless, one piece of information cannot be disputed: Rabin’s first chest wound cannot possibly be the same one which Dr. Guttman described on the last page of his surgical procedure report.

As recalled, Guttman operated on a wound beginning in the upper lobe of the right lung, which exited the lung in the direction of Dorsal Vertebrae 5-6, leaving a 2.5-3 cm. exit wound in the lung before shattering the vertebrae. That is the wound Rabin ended up with. Here is the wound he arrived with. According to the newly uncovered first bodily examination report, Rabin’s chest wound was caused by, “an entrance wound in the area of the right shoulder blade which lodged under the skin in ICS3 at MCL 3-4.” Translated: The bullet entered the right shoulder blade and took a straight line path to Intercostal Space 3 at Midclavicular line 3-4. Simplified: The bullet went from the right shoulder blade to just below the right nipple. Dr. Guttman could not have mixed up the ribs and the spinal column because this bullet was lodged in the mid-section of the ribs, almost as far from the spine as is possible. I received a detailed explanation from a physician who had the foresight to bring visual aids in the form of large-scale skeletal charts. In report 3, Dr. Guttman does indeed begin the operation with procedures to treat a rear chest wound. And Rabin responds. His pulse returns to 130, his blood pressure to 90. Then without explanation as to why, his pulse drops to 60, his blood pressure also to 60 and then all vital signs disappear from the monitor. It is at this point that Dr. Guttman suddenly operates on a frontal chest wound which shatters the backbone. The physician explained, “It’s as if that wound came out of nowhere. The patient’s vital organs had stopped functioning and other procedures were called for. There was no reason to begin a new operation, unless there was a new wound.”

The physician then tried every hypothetical bullet path to match the frontal chest/spine wound Dr. Guttman finally operated on, with the rear chest wound Rabin arrived with, as described in documents 1 and 2. Even with the most deft of contortions, the wounds didn’t match. In order for one bullet to do all the damage described in reports 1, 2, and 3, it would have to take the following journey: Amir would have had to have shot Rabin in a near straight line from the side, not the back, something he did not do. The bullet would have entered the shoulder blade and carried on to the upper lobe of the right lung, switching directions to go down to Dorsal Vertebrae 5-6, which are in the mid-back. Then it would have had to have shattered the vertebrae and been deflected upward, entering and exiting the lung again before lodging just below the skin in the area of the right nipple. The physician concluded, “If that was so, and I add that it most certainly wasn’t so, why was the first diagnosis a straight line back to chest wound and why didn’t Dr. Guttman report the two additional lung punctures? Even if somehow one bullet caused these two wounds, it was incumbent on the surgeon to accurately describe the damage.”

Finally, all three of Rabin’s wounds were revealed. The first two wounds, to the chest and abdomen occurred before Rabin’s arrival. The third, frontal chest wound, had to have been inflicted after he entered the hospital. Of the second wound, the bullet entered the abdomen via the left flank. Dr. Guttman failed to notice another rather important detail as we shall soon see. We now examine report 4, and what a tale it tells. The operation is now over and the surgical team writes its conclusion of their very busy night. And what a talented team it was. Department Heads all. No longer is Dr. Guttman the sole witness to the night’s events. Though he writes the summation, it is witnessed by Drs. Kluger and Yaacovitz, anaethesiologist Dr. Ostrovski and nurses Evelyn and Svetlana. Svetlana, co-signs the report and adds signed confirmation, finally, of Dr. Guttman’s surgical procedures. Let’s begin easy. At the bottom of the page are the times of the whole night’s events. Rabin was received at 22 hours, on the table at 22:05, under anesthesia at 22:10, operated on beginning at 22:15 and ending at 23:30. The problem here is that Rabin’s death was officially announced at 23:20. We’ll assume for now that the clock was wrong in the operating theater. The real story is at the top of the page. First, it goes a long way to confirming the laboratory conclusions of Chief Lieutenant Gladstein by noting that Rabin was shot from close range. Next, in report 1, we read that Rabin was admitted with gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen. By report 4, some new wounds seem to have been added. The major wounds are still GSW to chest and abdomen. But now four secondary wounds are added in English. They are:

GSW to right lung

laceration of spleen

hemorraghic shock

spinal shock?! [sic]

Dr. Guttman added the question and exclamation marks for emphasis, apparently indicating that this was the final cause of death. At least, that’s what the physician and an IDF officer from the medical corps both guessed. Laceration of the spleen and hemorraghic shock were likely internal wounds caused by the shot to the flank.

However, the first and last wounds are highly problematic, as the physician explains. “First, you must accept that unlike the nearly conclusive evidence of two chest wounds that we examined before, this document is open to much more interpretation. Still, some really bothersome questions should be asked. “Let’s look at the secondary gunshot wound to the lung. Why would the doctors have even mentioned it? They reported a major gunshot wound to the chest and that, except in the rarest of injuries, includes the lung. What’s the point of mentioning the lung wound again unless it came from another gunshot?”

The Shamgar Commission examined these very same documents and asked the same question. They were told that the second wound to the right lung was caused by the bullet that entered the flank. It passed through the spleen and stomach before lodging in the right lung. That is the official version held by the Israeli government and accepted by the judges at Yigal Amir’s trial.

However the physician notes a fact the Shamgar Commission somehow missed. In order for a bullet shot in the left flank to reach the right lung, it has to pass through the left lung and most likely the heart. If the doctors were so fastidious about noting a secondary wound to the right lung, why didn’t they record the entry and exit wounds that must have occurred in the left lung?”

And now the biggest issue of all, spinal shock. Recall that the state pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss conducted a limited autopsy on Rabin after Dr. Guttman’s team had completed its work and found no damage to the spinal column. Recall also, that based on this conclusion, the Shamgar Commission and the judges at Yigal Amir’s trial concluded that Rabin suffered no spinal damage. And finally, recall that the film of the assassination shows Rabin walking after the shot to his back, an impossibility if vertebrae 5 and 6 were shattered as Dr. Guttman reported.

Well, now it’s not only Dr. Guttman reporting spinal shock. It’s also five other members of his team. Would we could put them all in a courtroom and ask each why they agreed to appear on a report which concluded that Rabin died of spinal shock when the government of Israel’s Justice Ministry and courts insist he did not.

I asked the physician, can spinal shock be caused by something other than breakage in the vertebrae or spinal cord? Perhaps a severe bruise or shaking can cause spinal shock. “Out of the question,” he replied. “Spinal shock is the trauma resulting from a break or breaks in the spinal column. The breaks can be in the outer vertebrae or in the cord, but there is no other definition of spinal shock.”

The physician made another poignant observation. “When the patient arrived, the doctors did not record any symptoms of spinal shock. Again this is possible but hard to understand. One of the first things doctors look for in shooting cases is spinal shock. It’s very easy to diagnosis. When the spinal nerves are severed, the blood stops pumping naturally and is forced downward by gravity. So, typically, the upper body is white and the lower body, red. The victim was shot at 9:45 and examined at 10:05. You would expect that twenty minutes after being shot in the spine, spinal shock would be detected and diagnosed.”

The physician was reluctant to let me hear what I was waiting all these long months to prove. He would not say that the summation proved there was a third shot at Rabin from the time he was admitted to Ichilov Hospital but he stated, “If I didn’t know who the victim was or the circumstances of his death, I think I’d have to conclude that the patient received another wound subsequent to his initial admission. But I would advise you to stress your strongest points and they are that two separate chest wounds are reported by Dr. Guttman and that it is inconceivable that Rabin had no spinal damage. The six members of the operating team were too skilled to have all been wrong about that.”

There you have it. It is a certainty that Rabin suffered a frontal chest wound and spinal shock, neither of which Yigal Amir could physically have caused. But there is even more to the documents than just the description of the wounds. There is confirmation of a vital vignette in my book.

I recounted an episode told to me by Zeev Barcella, editor of the country’s largest circulation Russian-language newspaper, Vesti. On the morning of the assassination he received a phone call from a Russian-born operating nurse who told him, “The media is lying about Rabin’s wounds. I saw them. His spinal cord was shattered and they’re saying it wasn’t.” Ninety minutes later the nurse called Barcella back and with well-remembered fear in her voice said, “I didn’t call you before and you don’t know who I am.” Then she hung up the phone. The newly uncovered documents revealed new names to me of people who were in the operating theater that night. The nurse’s first name, Svetlana and her signature were on the surgical summation. By comparing another document I possessed, I discovered her full name, Svetlana Shlimovitz. I found her phone number, introduced myself as best I could and had the following short conversation:

“Svetlana, I would like to know what happened to Rabin in the operating theater.”

“How did you get my name?”

“You signed the surgical summation report.”

“I don’t work there anymore and I can never say what happened. Bye.”

And she hung up. Barcella’s story was true as well. As was my book. I got it right the first time around.

August 15, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Picture from Newsweek, 5/29/72)

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

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

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

Curious Bullet Trails

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

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

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

Ballistic Evidence (or Lack Thereof)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Suspect Rumors

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

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

CBS and the Wallace Shooting

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

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

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

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

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

Bremer’s Expenditures

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

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

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

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

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

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

The FBI’s Strange Behavior

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

E. Howard Hunt and Bremer?

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

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

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

Dirty Tricks in ’72

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sinister Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could Bremer have been hypnotized to shoot Wallace?

The Specter of Hypnosis

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

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

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

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

Aftermath

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

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

Notes

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

2. Washington Post, 8/2/72.

3. Washington Post, 8/1/72.

4. Washington Post, 5/16/72.

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

6. Washington Post, 5/20/72.

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Washington Post, 5/19/72.

14. Washington Post, 6/21/73.

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

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

17. Bernstein and Woodward, p. 326.

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

19. Bernstein and Woodward, p. 133.

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

21. Hougan, p. 140.

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

23. Turner and Christian, p. 267.

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

25. Turner and Christian, p. 227.

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

27. Newsweek, 5/29/72.

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

29. Newsweek, 5/29/72.

30. AP Online, 9/20/98.

June 15, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatching an Assassination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hammarskjold’s Last Flight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later orders to the captain state:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confessions of a Hitman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

3. Assassination Plots, p. 14.

4. Assassination Plots, p. 55

5. Assassination Plots, p. 55.

6. Assassination Plots, p. 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Assassination Plots, p. 23.

14. Assassination Plots, p. 29.

15. Assassination Plots, p. 32.

16. Assassination Plots, p.38n1.

17. Assassination Plots, p. 39.

18. Assassination Plots, p. 45.

19. Assassination Plots, p. 44.

20. Assassination Plots, p. 46.

21. Assassination Plots, p. 46.

22. Assassination Plots, p. 48.

23. Assassination Plots, p. 48

24. Assassination Plots, p. 49.

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

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

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

28. Urquhart, p. 27.

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

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

31. Gavshon, p. 50.

32. Gavshon, p. 237.

33. Gavshon, p. 17.

34. Gavshon, p. 58.

35. Gavshon, p. 58.

36. Gavshon, p. 57.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

44. Gavshon, p. 8.

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

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

April 15, 1999
The Attempted Coup Against FDR
From the March-April 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 3) of Probe

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coup

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

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

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

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

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

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

What The Committee Revealed

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

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

Media Treatment Of The Plot

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

Aftermath And Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The JFK Presidency and the New Deal Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Ibid., p. 89.

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

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

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

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

9. Ibid., pg. 12.

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Archer, pp.209-210.

17. Time, December 3, 1934

18. New York Times, March 26, 1935.

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

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

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

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

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

24. Spivak, pp.81-83.

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

26. Ibid., pp.364-365.

27. Miles, p. ix.

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

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

30. Beschloss, p. 276.

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

32. The New York Times, The Kennedy Years (New York: Viking Press, 1964) p. 263.
April 15, 1999

Tag: ASSASSINATIONS

Will the UN reopen the Dag Hammarskjold case?

Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case

Has Another of Malcolm X’s Assassins Been Found?

David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories

An Incurious Man: David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories

ORGANIZATION

JFK

9/11

OCCAM’S RAZOR AND THE ‘TRIUMPH OF NARRATIVE’

TO THE MAN

Q.E.D.

Notes

The Colosio Assassination: Chronology of Events Surrounding the Assassination of Luis Colosio, 23 March 1994

From the January-February 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 2) of Probe

1988

2 July

6 July

14 July

1990

January

1992

29 January

November

1993

24 May

November

1994

1 January

10 January

27 February

3 March

22 March

23 March

24 March

4 April

24 April

28 April

April / May

18 May

22 May

24 May

26 May

2 June

9 June

21 August

28 September

31 October

18 November

24 November

November

1 December

December

21 December

1995

January

30 January

24 February

28 February

2 March

3 March

7 March

11 March

20 March

14 April

3 August

December

1996

7 February

23 February

February

March

21 March

17 April

24 April

3 May

6 May

15 May

18 May

22 May