Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CIA PLOTS

  • John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Volume 1

    John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Volume 1

    I

    In this reviewer’s opinion, Professor John Newman has written two of the most important books on the JFK case in the last 25 years.  The first was published in 1992. Since Newman was a professor of Asian history, he had done a lot of work on America’s struggle in Indochina.  He had come to the conclusion that the mainstream media’s belief that President Johnson had continued President Kennedy’s policies in Indochina was false. So he decided to prove, in a scholarly way, that the MSM was wrong on this point.

    Newman’s work was finally published in 1992.  Entitled JFK and Vietnam, it was the first book length study to vitiate the establishment view that there was continuity between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the conduct of the Vietnam War. Newman’s book was the first systematic and categorical rejection of the Kennedy/Johnson continuity concept. In 460 pages of sober, careful, and documented text, Newman essentially rewrote the history of 1961-63 as far as American involvement in Vietnam went. He showed, among other things, that  Lyndon Johnson was in the pocket of the Pentagon on this issue as far back as 1961. Unauthorized by Kennedy, but influenced by the military, he had offered the leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, the introduction of American troops into the theater.  (See p. 72)

    In addition to that, Newman also proved that while Kennedy was trying to disguise his withdrawal plan around the rosy and unrealistic reports of Diem winning the battle on the ground, LBJ knew the truth.  From his military aide Howard Burris, Johnson was getting the actual intelligence reports, which showed the contrary: Diem was actually losing the war.  (See pp. 225-27)

    By the end of the book, Newman had exposed one of the great historical lies of the second half of the 20th century:  namely, that American involvement in Vietnam was an inevitable tragedy.  A myth that had been sustained, not just by the MSM, but also by self-proclaimed historians like David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow. Others have further mined the field Newman pioneered, and today we have good books by people like Gordon Goldstein and James Blight—Lessons in Disaster, and Virtual JFK—that have furthered Newman’s milestone thesis.

    Newman had worked as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s film JFK.  He was also commissioned by PBS to do some work on the Lee Oswald files, then just beginning to be declassified at the National Archives. This was in regard to the PBS 1993 anniversary program about Oswald. Stone’s film had created such a national outcry that congress created the JFK Act of 1993 to begin declassifying tens of thousands of records that had been, either wholly or partly, classified.  That experience caused Newman to write his second book, Oswald and the CIA. Which was another milestone in the field. This time it was in the study of Lee Harvey Oswald’s relations to the intelligence community: from his defection to Russia to his return to Dallas from Mexico in 1963.  Originally published in 1995, it was reissued in 2008.  In his Afterword to the later edition, Newman squarely pointed his finger at James Angleton, the CIA’s longtime chief of counter-intelligence, as the ultimate control agent for Lee Harvey Oswald.  In my opinion, the MSM deliberately ignored the revolutionary findings in this important book. (For my review of the reissue, click here).

    There is a difference between the two books.  Not just in subject matter.  The first book was artfully organized and written.  Therefore, although it was dealing with highly complex persons and issues, and it was dense with new information, it was quite readable.  Newman had an editor on that book.  As I wrote in my review, Oswald and the CIA is not as easy to read—perhaps because it was written in a much shorter time, maybe because it lacked a strong editor.

    A few years after the publication of this book, Newman retired from the field of JFK studies.  He resigned from his position as an instructor at the University of Maryland, and migrated to James Madison University in Virginia.  He also became a yoga instructor. He then wrote a book about the historic parallels of that subject with mysticism and Christian theology.  This was called Quest for the Kingdom.

    Three years later, in 2014, Newman decided to re-enter the JFK field.   Before he had left, he was planning a comprehensive study of the Kennedy administration’s relations with Castro.  That book was tentatively entitled Kennedy and Cuba, and was to be issued in tandem with a re-release of JFK and Vietnam. Once John left the field, that endeavor was, in part, abandoned.  I say in part, because in speaking to the author, he is now updating his first book in a plan to have it reissued.  But secondly, it seems that the author kept many of his research files from his Cuba project, because they seem to form the backbone for his planned multi-book series entitled Where Angels Tread Lightly.  We will discuss part one of that series here.  But before beginning, it is important to note that because this is a multi-volume series, that is, a work in progress, any ultimate evaluation will have to be delayed until the last volume is published.  So the reader should see this review as something of a descriptive marker, a buoy in a channel on the way to land.

    II

    In the preface, the author reveals that the title comes from a phrase in a letter that one Catherine Taafe wrote to Bobby Kennedy in late April of 1961.  She figures in the book.  For she had been a CIA asset involved in Agency dealings inside of Cuba. She was writing the Attorney General about the humiliation he and his brother had just experienced over the Bay of Pigs debacle.  In the following Prologue, Newman says this book will be about something he calls “dark operations”.  Later on, he will describe this specifically as the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro being a pretense for the boomerang theory:  that is, the idea that these attempts formed the pretense for the murder of President Kennedy. And specifically the CIA’s plotting around Oswald, i. e., building a pro-Castro legend around him, while also manipulating his files concerning the Mexico City episode; this was all done while inbreeding the threat of nuclear war from his alleged visits to the Cuban and Russian embassies there. These were all elements of the plot.

    Newman also writes that it is necessary to break into the CIA’s codes, that is, its pseudonyms and cryptonyms, in order to unmask these “dark operations”.  For as he says:

    Without unmasking the CIA’s pseudonyms, cryptonyms, and multiple identities, it will not be possible to find out … who was behind the assassination in Dealey Plaza, and how they got away with it.

    As the author sees it, this is the key to unraveling the murder of President Kennedy.  And at the end of the first volume, he assembles a long appendix, which features his deciphering of the multiple names, identities and cryptos used by say, Howard Hunt—along with several others.

    Newman begins Chapter 1 with what he considers the bungling of the Eisenhower administration in the handling of a dual problem: the weakening of the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and the growth of overt civil disturbances against him. He notes that, even in the middle of 1958, the CIA was still funneling money to Castro’s forces.  Castro was using men like Frank Sturgis to get weapons from a supplier in Miami.   Sturgis was caught smuggling arms twice but released with the help of the CIA.  He then was a captain in Castro’s army.

    Castro grew bolder throughout 1958. He abducted personnel from Guantanamo Bay and seized the Nicaro Nickel Plant, a huge subdivision of powerful Freeport Sulphur.  The CIA now stopped arms shipments to Batista, since they perceived him as being ousted soon. But they also begin to investigate if Castro was part of the international Comintern.  The CIA and businessman William Pawley dreamed up a couple of last minute Hail Mary schemes to stop Castro from gaining power, but they both failed.  In December of 1958, CIA Director Allen Dulles told the president that the indications were that Castro was a communist.  But it was too late to stop his march to Havana. (Dulles would not inform Eisenhower until late March of 1959 that Castro was running a communist dictatorship.)

    Chapter 2 begins with Castro’s takeover and the evacuation of thousands of Americans out of Cuba.  Santo Trafficante was arrested, but he made a deal with Raul Castro. Castro declared martial law. Eisenhower now relieved the American ambassador, Earl Smth.

    Castro was careful in the beginning to disguise who he really was.  He distanced himself from the existing Cuban communist party.  But some remnants of the anti-Batista movement suspected Castro was at least a commie sympathizer.  Some of these men, like Pancho Varona, Rolando Cubela, and Carlos Tepedino actually were informers for the Agency on Batista.  Once they began to realize who Castro was, and suspecting he would install a leftist dictatorship, those men now become the opposition to Castro.  They will soon meet with two CIA officers. This was the beginning of the DRE, or the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil.

    III

    FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was shocked by the rise to power of Castro in Cuba. In his files, Newman found evidence that Richard Nixon’s lifelong friend, Bebe Rebozo, fronted as a funnel for Mob money and investment in business ventures between Ambassador Earl Smith and Batista. Nixon was also getting a cut of this graft.  The author has three sources for this. (Newman does not note it, but this makes three fonts of dirty money Nixon was getting prior to becoming president: from the Shah of Iran, from Romanian industrialist Nicolae Malaxa, and now Batista.  JFK researchers like to point out how corrupt LBJ was. He had nothing on Nixon.)

    Parts of the CIA, and a larger part of the State Department, were willing to wait on Castro. But another part of the Agency developed other informants on him. This included Sturgis—a relationship that was actually approved by CIA HQ—and military commander Camilo Cienfuegos.

    When Sturgis had a falling out with Raul Castro, he was instructed to visit the American embassy in Havana.  From there he was told to meet two CIA officers in Miami.  It is there that he began his relationship with Bernard Barker. Barker and Sturgis were assigned to William Kent of the psy-war branch. Sturgis now began work with James Noel, chief of the CIA office in Havana, along with psy-war expert David Phillips. Phillips was undercover as one “James Stewart”, working for an advertising agency. (As the author notes, whenever one hears that the CIA had no formal relationship with Sturgis, we can now show this is a  deception.)

    Castro, at first, closed the casinos, and their gambling operations.   But there were so many foreigners still on the island that he decided to reopen them temporarily.  Castro asked Sturgis to work as his liaison to the casinos.  It is here that Sturgis got to  know Juan Orta, Castro’s secretary.  Santo Trafficante will later recruit Orta to take part in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.  But Sturgis had already volunteered to plant a bomb in the second floor conference room at an Air Force Base he regularly visited.

    The author now introduces another female protagonist. She is June Cobb.  Readers of Oswald and the CIA will recall that Newman spent a good deal of time with Cobb there, since she was a CIA infiltrator—one among many—inside the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  It seems that Cobb began her intelligence career as a double-dealing drug peddler.  That is, she was dealing drugs in Cuba, but also working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  This began as far back as 1957, when she actually informed on her boyfriend.

    In 1959, when Castro first visited America, Cobb landed a job as a translator for Fidel.  She actually translated his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech.  Castro liked her work and invited her back to Cuba. He put her in charge of English publications.

    Frank Sturgis was also hard at work as an informant.  In March of 1959, he went to Washington to inform the FBI about Castro.  He did this at the behest of Pedro and Marcos Diaz Lanz, two commanders in Castro’s military.  Sturgis told the Bureau that all three were alarmed about the growing communist influence in Cuba. They worried that Cuba could now become a communist forward base in the Caribbean, e.g., against Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.  Both men were backed by the USA. In fact, Cuba did make very small incursions into both countries, along with Panama, in 1959.  When this happened, certain soldiers of fortune now joined up in the battle against Fidel; e.g., pilot Leslie Bradley, trainer Gerry Hemming, and the man the FBI would wrongly accuse of being at Sylvia Odio’s door, Loran Hall.  After joining the Cuban army, Hemming later engaged in training Nicaraguans.  Hall did also.  While in Cuba, Hall got to know Mafia Don Santo Trafficante.

    n June of 1959, Raul Castro began to purge the military of all suspected informers and double agents.  This included later CIA assets like Sergio Sanjenis.  He especially concentrated on the higher ranks. Lanz took over Radio Havana on June 29, 1959 and criticized Castro’s leftward drift in a lengthy speech. Castro was outraged. He ordered Diaz Lanz under house arrest, and gave Juan Almeida his job as commander of the Air Force.  Sanjenis and Pedro Diaz Lanz defected with the help of the CIA in June of 1959.  Diaz Lanz became a prized asset of the CIA.  He testified in public before Senator Thomas  Dodd’s Internal Security committee.  He would later take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

    The Diaz Lanz defection really hit home with Fidel. He now turned even more to the left.

    IV

    The first drastic piece of legislation moving Cuba toward a communist state was the Agrarian Reform Program.  At first, this bill did not allow for compensation when Cuba confiscated property for future redistribution.  As a result, the minister of agriculture, Sori Martin, resigned.

    Castro’s program set up a body of local cooperatives that he labeled INRA (the National Institute for Agrarian Reform). Now, only Cubans could buy land on the island.  INRA was a very powerful agency that shaped land distribution and all infrastructure projects in Cuba.  Manuel Artime ran Zone 22.

    It was the creation of INRA that now drove American business interests to lay siege to the White House, especially in light of the lack of promises by Castro to pay compensation for land. (Castro did tell the new ambassador Philip Bonsal that he would pay later, but not right now.)  In the summer of 1959, these business interests wanted Eisenhower to start a formal program of counter-revolution.  And now, people like Bernard Barker joined up with Manuel Artime (before his defection) to aid Mario Lazo.  Lazo was a high level Cuban attorney under Batista.  He served as corporate counsel for Freeport Sulphur on the island.  Taafe used her contacts to steal inside documents from INRA.

    In the fall of 1959, Castro came out of the closet. After keeping the communist party at arm’s length, he now appointed the leader of the party as Minister of Labor.   He then began to appoint members of the party to all levels of his government.  Thereafter, he announced that Cuba would be a fully communist country in three years.  The CIA heard about this meeting announcement through Artime.

    Through the Havana CIA station, David Phillips and Dave Morales now worked on the defection of Marcos Diaz Lanz.  This decision went all the way up to Chief of the Western Hemisphere, J. C. King.  Phillips and Morales were assisted on this by Bernard Barker.

    The author now addresses a weird episode.   Both the Dominican Republic and Cuba had plans to invade each other almost at the same time in the summer of 1959.  Because he was informed of the Trujillo action in advance, Castro struck first by about four days. But he was not informed of the CIA backing of Trujillo’s invasion of Cuba.  The American Ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, did not back the Dominican Republic invasion, since he thought it had little chance of success, and would therefore strengthen Castro.  Through informants and agents, Allen Dulles pushed for the Cuban invasion of the Dominican Republic, but said little to the NSC about the Dominican Republic invasion of Cuba. Both attacks were failures.  But Trujillo’s was much worse since Castro rounded up about a thousand POW’s.  After this there were even more defections to the USA, since Castro now started a purge of the military of all suspected American allies.

    After this victory, in September of 1959, Castro announced that Freeport Sulphur’s 75 million dollar plant at Moa Bay would come under property review. Since the regime needed money, Raul Castro actually wanted Fidel to directly expropriate the property. In reaction, business leaders now called for an emergency meeting with both the State Department and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.  As a result, David Phillips became a PR advisor for the business interests still on the island. But he reported back that these interests wanted more than PR, they wanted action.

    Short of an American invasion, it was probably too late. For, in October of 1959, Castro wearied of all the defections by people like Sturgis, Sanjenis, and Diaz Lanz. The last one was Manuel Artime, a project that, again, Phillips and Morales worked on. Fidel now made his brother Raul minister of defense.  Bonsal wired Washington that, in and of itself, this was a disturbing development, since Raul was considered even more leftist than Fidel. Further, Fidel Castro cracked down on all suspects who he thought were about to defect:  for example, jailing former Commander Huber Matos.   A week later, Artime began the MRR, an anti-Castro exile group, with Sergio Sanjenis.

    Also in October, the State Department announced a new policy paper in regards to Cuba.  It was titled “Current Basic United States Policy Towards Cuba”.  Part of the objective entailed the removal of Fidel Castro from power by no later than the end of 1960. President Eisenhower adopted this paper in November, along with CIA Director Allen Dulles.  In January of 1960, it extended to the Pentagon.

    At the White House, Vice-President Richard Nixon demanded an action plan.  From the outside, William Pawley—former diplomat and now businessman—wanted another invasion of Cuba through the Dominican Republic. But Allen Dulles vetoed that move.  In December of 1959 Dulles, Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, and Western Hemisphere Chief J. C. King now began to devise a covert action plan against Cuba. When it was completed, Dulles presented it to the National Security Council.

    After Phillips worked on the exfiltration of Artime, he began work on getting Rolando Cubela out of Cuba. Cubela was another government employee who became disenchanted with Castro’s leftward drift.  But the CIA decided that Phillips was becoming overexposed.  So they recalled him back home.  Two cohorts of Phillips handled the Cubela operation: the Cuban friend of Cubela, Carlos Tepedino, and CIA official Tony Sforza.  In talks with Cubela, the CIA learned that government official Manolo Ray was also disenchanted with Castro. But, as time went on, Cubela decided to stay on the island to fight Castro.  Sforza then focused on Juanita Castro, sister of Fidel, as a possible exfiltration target.

    Newman notes that in the middle of all these fateful and furious debates about Cuba, the Russians had stayed hidden in the shadows. This minimized the specter of a Cuban/Russian alliance.  But in late 1959, through Air Force General Curtis LeMay and former Air Force Secretary, and now Senator, Stuart Symington, there began to be talk about a Missile Gap—in favor of the Soviets.  Since Symington was planning on running for the White House the next year, this is probably what motivated him to take part in this nonsense.  As it did Lyndon Johnson, who said the Russians would have a 3-1 advantage in three years.  The facts were that the USA was already two generations ahead of the Soviets in ICBM technology.  The USSR was still testing its first delivery systems while Eisenhower was debating whether to bypass the Atlas rocket for the Minuteman and the Polaris.  This gap in America’s favor would, of course, set the stage for the Missile Crisis.

    This book is exceedingly rich in detail.  Much more than I can begin to convey in a relatively concise review.  What the author is doing has three layers.  First, he is giving us a history of the Castro revolution.  At the same time he is showing how the USA reacted to that epochal turnover, stage by stage in its evolution. Third, he is tracing certain people and movements who will return to the stage in 1963, after Kennedy changes policy, and begins a détente attempt with Cuba.  Other authors have tried this before, but never on this scale or with this intricacy.

  • Shenon and the CIA’s Benign Cover-Up

    After failing to use a crap detector in order to provide a reasonable answer to a key question like “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?” (Politico Magazine, March 18, 2015), Philip Shenon has returned this fall. But again without such a tool in hand. So he asserts again that the Warren Commission was not really fraudulent or wrong, but rather did not have all the facts on time.

    His newest piece “Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover Up” (Politico Magazine, October 6, 2015) emphasizes that CIA Director John McCone “was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now the CIA says he did.”

    Shenon is trying to take advantage of a declassified chapter of the still classified biography of McCone written by CIA historian David Robarge in 2005. It was internally released as a report two years ago (“Death of a President: DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” in Studies in Intelligence 57, No. 3, September 2013). After being redacted for its public release on September 29, 2014, it´s now available at the National Security Archive.

    Robarge didn´t question the Warren Commission findings, especially that Oswald was the lone gunman. Shenon adds that it’s “a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.” In making that preposterous statement about the evidence in the case, Shenon ignored the quanta of proof to the contrary. Which was furnished by, among others, Martin Hay in his essay Ballistics and Baloney. Shenon also snubbed the fact that the WC reported a wrong Mannlicher Carcano carbine as the murder weapon, (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 477), a wrong CE 399 as the Magic Bullet (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227), and a wrong CE 543 shell (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, p. 51). And finally, as Dr. David Mantik has revealed, the current autopsy report, that is by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, wants us to think that the bullet which killed Kennedy – that is the one which struck him in the head – also has magical properties. Why? Because it struck Kennedy in the rear of the skull, then split into three parts. Miraculously, the middle part stuck in the rear of Kennedy’s skull without penetrating it. But the head and tail of this same bullet proceeded through his brain, went out the side of his head, and fell onto the front of the limousine. (See DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 133-35) Nowhere in any of Shenon’s growing archive of literature on the JFK case, does he ever confront any of these disturbing, but true, facts. He just assumes that the ballistics evidence supports his thesis. It does not.

    Shenon focused on Robarge´s suggestion that “the decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation.” In other words, Shenon is again ginning up the old news about the CIA not telling the Warren Commission about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Which has been around since the Church Committee report in 1975. In other words, for 40 years. Thusly, the former New York Times reporter persists in reopening a line of inquiry already proven fruitless: that the Kennedy brothers and the CIA compelled Fidel Castro to take a preemptive lethal action against a sitting U.S. President. As if the Cuban leader wasn´t aware that killing JFK wouldn´t solve anything, but entailed risking everything. And at the same time that President Kennedy was engaging in back-channel diplomatic moves to establish détente with Cuba, something that Lyndon Johnson, with help from the CIA, dropped after Kennedy’s death – much to Castro’s chagrin. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 394)

    For Robarge and Shenon, the cover-up by McCone and others – Deputy Director Richard Helms, Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, former Director Allen Dulles – may have been benign under the bureaucratic impulse towards CIA self-preservation. But it was a cover-up nonetheless, since it withheld information that might have prompted an aggressive investigation about Oswald’s ties to Castro. In reality (something absent in Shenon’s writings), the CIA’s cover-up was aimed at avoiding a deep investigation of Oswald’s ties to itself and to anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

    The key is not that the CIA revealed nothing about the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, but that it revealed very little about its close tabs on Oswald: the CIA knew what he was doing and was evaluating him. As John Newman, and others, have noted, three CIA teams were watching Oswald all the way down from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963): the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group (CI-SIG), Counterintelligence Operations (CI-OPS), and the Counter-Espionage unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).

    Oswald’s longtime friend and Civil Air Patrol colleague, David Ferrie, was also a CIA trainer for the covert operations against Castro codenamed Pluto (Bay of Pigs) and Mongoose. He blatantly lied about not knowing Oswald and having no association to any Cuban exile group since 1961.

    The CIA generated an index card for Oswald in the FPCC file (100-300-011) on October 25, 1963. In early summer he was leafletting the obsolete 1961 edition of The Crimes against Cuba, of which the CIA had ordered 45 copies. He was running his own one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New Orleans, while the CIA and the FBI were running a joint operation against that very same committee. Oswald was really working out of Guy Banister’s office and even put his address [544 Camp Street] on some FPCC flyers. A point that Banister was quite upset about. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 111)

    Banister was not only close to Ferrie, but also to anti-Castro belligerent groups. When Gordon Novel was invited by Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha to a meeting in Banister’s office for a telethon supporting the anti-Castro cause, a certain Mr. Phillips was there, and his description aligns with CIA officer David Phillips. (ibid, p. 162) According to Cuban anti-Castro veteran Antonio Veciana, Phillips was his CIA handler, known to him as “Maurice Bishop”, and met Oswald at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963.

    Just after the assassination, Phillips vouched for a “reliable” informant who told a story about Oswald being paid in advance by a “negro with red hair in the Cuban Embassy” to kill Kennedy. In 2013, Shenon followed Phillips´ steps by including, toward the very end of his book A Cruel and Shocking Act, the long-ago discredited remake of that baleful story by Mexican writer Elena Garro: that Sylvia Duran, a Mexican employee at the Cuba Consulate, was a Castro agent who cranked Oswald up to kill Kennedy in a twist party at her brother-in-law’s house, where not only the notorious red-haired negro, but Garro herself were in attendance.

    Although Robarge also reported that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963, and had secretly monitored him since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 (through the illegal mail-opening program HTLINGUAL), Shenon overlooks this part. He wants to bolster the “Castro-did-it” propaganda campaign, apparently planted by the CIA even before the JFK assassination. Today it is clearly being orchestrated to manage public opinion in the face of the release – as required by law – of the remaining JFK records in October 2017.

    Overlooking all the sound investigation after the declassification process unleashed by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), Shenon cherry-picked through Robarge´s piece in order to find “misconceptions [like] the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination,” as if it weren´t a fact that the CIA has never produced either an Oswald photo or a tape of his voice in Mexico City.

    By posing again a question highly appreciated by the CIA, “Had the [JFK] administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”, Shenon has no choice other than to distort the facts by asserting that “Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death.”

    In Brothers (2007), David Talbot has demonstrated that RFK´s suspicions settled instead on a domestic conspiracy. Neither his friends nor his relatives suggested that RFK feared that Castro was behind the assassination. On the contrary, he immediately asked DCI John McCone if the CIA was involved in the killing. His other leading suspects were the Cuban exiles and the mob. And his son RFK Jr. said the same years later in a Dallas interview with Charlie Rose (during the lead-up to the 50th anniversary: see The MSM and RFK Jr.)

    Shenon of course, also adds that: 1) RFK was in on the CIA-Mafia plots, and that 2) RFK was instrumental in getting Allen Dulles appointed to the Warren Commission. The first assertion was denied by the CIA in its own Inspector General Report on the plots way back in the sixties (1967). Somehow, Shenon missed both that and the Church Committee report on the subject, which also denied that the Kennedys were in on the plots. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327)

    As for RFK using his influence with President Johnson to get Allen Dulles on the Commission, well, what can one say? Except the following: Everyone and his mother knows that LBJ and Bobby Kennedy hated each other’s guts from an early date. And it only got worse, not better, after JFK was killed. In light of that, the idea that Johnson would ask for Kennedy’s advice to man the Warren Commission is ridiculous. But further, as Leonard Mosley wrote many years ago in his book on the Dulles family, Bobby Kennedy was the prime mover in getting his brother to fire Allen Dulles in 1961. Not satisfied with that, he then asked Dean Rusk if any other member of the Dulles family was still in their employ. Rusk said yes, there was Allen’s sister, Eleanor. Kennedy demanded she also be fired since he did not want any of the Dulles family around anymore. So why would he then request that Dulles be brought back after he helped get him and his sister fired – let alone to investigate the murder of his beloved brother? (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 395)

    Martin Hay has also chimed in on this issue in his review of Howard Willens’ book, History Will Prove us Right. There is no record of any communication by Johnson with Bobby between when the Commission idea is accepted by him and his call to Dulles. LBJ suggested a series of names to J. Edgar Hoover. When he got to Dulles, he did not say a word about Dulles being suggested by Bobby Kennedy. When he got Dulles on the phone, he told the former CIA director he wanted him to join the Warren Commission “for me”.

    But as Hay writes, even more convincing is LBJ’s phone call to his mentor Senator Richard Russell. Russell asked Johnson if he was going to let Bobby nominate someone. Johnson replied with a firm and direct “No.” (see Willens review)

    In a note to Jeff Morley at the web site JFK Facts, Shenon tried to defend his contention by pointing to a memo written by longtime Johnson assistant Walter Jenkins. This document was allegedly written on November 29, 1963, the day that Johnson called Dulles to appoint him to the Commission. Why do I say “allegedly”? Because as Dan Hardway notes, what Shenon does not mention is this: a handwritten notation at the bottom of this memo says, “Orig. not sent to files”. And further, it bears a stamp saying that it was received in the central files in April of 1965! Moreover, as Hardway also points out, there was a three-way call between Dulles, Johnson and Kennedy in June of 1964. This was during a racial crisis in Mississippi. Both Johnson and Kennedy had more than one opportunity to affirm that RFK had suggested Dulles for the Commission. Neither of them did. (See JFK Facts entry of October 24, 2015)

    Shenon´s approach to a benign cover-up by the CIA for diverting the WC away from Castro actually seeks to turn the public away from the largely declassified Lopez Report, the monumental 300 page investigation by the HSCA of Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City on the eve of Kennedy’s assassination. By doing so, he deflects the genuine line of inquiry about what appears to be the intricate CIA deception prepared in advance of the JFK assassination. In any case, Shenon and other mouthpieces for the “Castro did it” diversion – or in the light version of “Castro knew it” by Dr. Brian Latell – put the CIA in a very delicate position.

    If Oswald, a former Marine re-defector from the Soviet Union, was a true believer in Marx, with the zeal to engage in a variety of pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, then it’s a colossal CIA blunder that he would be allowed to travel to Mexico City and visit both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies – which were under heavy surveillance by the Agency; and that, afterward, the CIA would lose track of him, even after the former Russian defector allegedly met with a Soviet representative in their embassy. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 354-55) And lose track of him to such a degree that no one from the FBI, the police, or Secret Service even talked to him upon his return to Dallas, despite it being just seven weeks before President Kennedy was slated to visit the city. And incredibly, the re-defector would now actually end up on Kennedy’s parade route, thereby walking through any FBI or Secret Service security scheme in broad daylight. What does the silence on the CIA-Mafia plots have to do with any of that? What makes this drivel even worse is that reportedly, Politico dropped an excerpt from David Talbot’s important new book on Allen Dulles in order to run more of Shenon’s fabricated bombast.

    Shenon even avoids addressing the most recent declassification move by the CIA at a public symposium. This was called Delivering Intelligence to the First Customer at the LBJ Library. Among the 2,500 President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the Kennedy and Johnson administration released on that occasion, the one from November 25, 1963 reveals that the CIA told Johnson the same blatant lie in which Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway caught CIA Inspector General John H. Waller: “It was not until 22 November 1963 (…) that the [CIA] Station [in Mexico City] learned that [the] Oswald call to the Soviet Embassy on 1 October 1963 was in connection with his request for visa [and] also visited the Cuban Embassy.” In fact, six senior CIA officers reporting to Helms and Angleton knew all about “leftist Lee” six weeks before JFK was killed.

    Shenon is simply performing another high-wire balancing act: dealing openly with CIA misdemeanors in order to hide more serious wrongdoing, and therefore supporting an unsupportable thesis; namely, that the WC was right about Oswald as the lone gunman.

    See also Jim DiEugenio’s review of Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act.

  • CIA and the Bay of Pigs

    A Federal appeals court says the CIA doesn’t have to reveal information about the Bay of Pigs.

    by Josh Gerstein, At: Politico

  • Larry Hancock, NEXUS

    Larry Hancock’s new book Nexus has an interesting and rather unique idea behind it. As Larry explained at the 2011 Lancer Conference in Dallas, the idea here was to trace the Kennedy assassination from a macroscopic view. That is, from the top down rather than from a typical detective story, which works from the bottom up. When I heard Larry talk about this I thought it was a good idea. And something that, to my knowledge, had not been done before. So I looked forward to reading the book.

    For a bit over three–fourths of the book, Hancock keeps to that plan. And I found that part of the book interesting and rewarding. The author begins with some good work on the origins of the Cold War and the CIA. I had not known the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a plan for a nuclear attack on Russia in late 1945. Which is really remarkable, since Russia was our ally in World War II. (Hancock, p. 13) He then goes into the famous directive NSC 68, which essentially said that the USA was at war with communism. And that this new kind of war justified Machiavellian ends in order to win out. Therefore, once the CIA was born out of the National Security Act of 1947, many of its covert aspects were done outside the law. And into these covert acts, was built the culture of deniability: That is, a “cover story” was always created in order to be able to shift the blame for the act onto someone else.

    Some of these operations were dealt with through so called “soft files”, that is files that were not entered into the CIA’s central filing system. This allowed certain officers to start their own projects that were hard to detect or attribute. (ibid, p. 16)

    In 1954, Larry Houston, the CIA’s General Counsel, made out an agreement with Bill Rogers at Justice so that crimes of the CIA would not be prosecuted. (ibid, p. 17) With this agreement, Hancock rightly states that national security was now placed ahead of criminal violations by CIA personnel. This included all crimes up to and including murder.

    This agreement was very useful in that it was made the same year of the CIA coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Here, Hancock brings in the most recent declassified study on that operation. He uses it to show that this was perhaps the first time that the CIA actually arranged a so-called “kill list” of certain citizens to be taken care of after the coup. (ibid, p. 19) He also brings in the fact that neighboring leaders Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, and Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic both agreed to the coup. And, in fact, the bloodthirsty Trujillo requested four specific people be killed. Certain CIA officers wanted Arbenz killed, and his death, of course, to be blamed on the communists. (ibid, p. 20)

    What makes this latter fact important is that two famous CIA officers were involved in this overthrow who later figured in the JFK case. They were David Phillips and Howard Hunt. This idea, of killing a liberal head of state and then blaming it on the communists, projects a familiar theme ten years hence. The actual project officer on the coup was Tracy Barnes. From him, the chain of command went to J. C. King, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell and Allen Dulles.

    Hancock has studied the documents of this coup—codenamed PBSUCCESS—carefully. Especially those dealing with the murder lists. In his measured opinion, “Clearly, regardless of any official position being taken in Washington, PBSUCCESS CIA field staff were very much involved with the subject of assassination and actively involved in preparing surrogate personnel to carry out political eliminations.” (ibid, p. 25) In other words, the actual killings were not to be done by CIA agents, but cut outs. Therefore, the hallowed concept of deniability would be followed. In fact, the CIA had an assassination manual prepared in advance for the coup. (ibid, p. 28) And there was actually a discussion at a PBSUCCESS staff meeting in March of 1954 that 15-20 Guatemalan leaders would be killed by gunmen sent over by Trujillo. (ibid, p. 26)

    Interestingly, Hancock lists some of the Congressional backers of the coup. They were Lyndon Johnson, Jack Brooks, Martin Dies, and George Smathers. (ibid, p. 31) The message that came down was literally, “Arbenz must go, how does not matter.” (ibid, p. 32) After Guatemala, Barnes and Bissell do further work in assassinations. But also, a lesson is learned: Don’ t put it down in writing. (ibid, pgs. 34-35)

    II

    Around the time of the Arbenz overthrow, the CIA also learned how to kill people through poisons. And, looking forward, this will be one of the ways that the CIA will brainstorm to kill Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. Hancock deduces from circumstantial evidence that Barnes was involved in the killing of Trujillo in 1961. And around this time, the operations to kill Castro also were in full swing. On these, Bissell had worked with Dulles, while Barnes had run his own attempts. (ibid, p. 40) Although, as Hancock correctly points out, the idea for the plots was also hinted at by Richard Nixon at a National Security Council meeting. (See Oswald and the CIA by John Newman, p. 120) And right after that 1959 NSC meeting, the first phase of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro began.

    The idea of “kill lists” was then carried over into the Bay of Pigs planning with the infamous Operation Forty plot. This was designed to get rid of any left-leaning part of the invasion force if the landing was successful.

    What the author has so far tried to do is to introduce several gestalt concepts that he will rely upon later:

    1. The idea that covert operations had a deniability apparatus worked into them.
    2. That covert actions as sanctioned by the CIA were done in a holy war against communism.
    3. That since they were so sanctioned they were actually practiced as if they were above the law.
    4. That these actions even included murder, as was exhibited by the “kill lists” for the Guatemala overthrow.
    5. After Guatemala, the orders to murder were not placed in writing.
    6. Later assassination targets were Lumumba, Trujillo, and Castro. The wholesale nature of Operation Forty was a descendant of the “kill lists” for Guatemala.

    Now, as John Newman notes in his book Oswald and the CIA, most insiders expected Nixon to become president in 1961. And he was important to the anti-Castro operations already being planned. But Kennedy pulled off an upset. And therefore, this did much to upset the CIA plans against Cuba.

    Hancock now introduces the figure of CIA officer William Harvey, who he clearly suspects as being a significant figure in the JFK case. Harvey was involved in two Top Secret CIA operations: Staff D and ZR Rifle. The former was an attempt to use the NSA to figure out opposing nations secret transmittal codes. But it also served as a cover for the latter operation, which was aimed at assassinating foreign leaders. Hancock notes that CIA Director of Plans Richard Helms personally placed Harvey in that position. (Hancock, p. 47)

    All of these various elements—deniability, assassination targets, covert acts done outside the law, a holy war against communism—were now to be mixed into a swirling cauldron with many of these same players: Harvey, Bissell, Barnes, Phillips, Dulles and Hunt. The cauldron was called the Bay of Pigs operations, codenamed Operation Zapata. But, as noted, there was one notable alteration to the cast. It was not going to be run by Richard Nixon, who originated much of the official antipathy toward Castro’s revolutionary regime. The responsible officer was going to be John Kennedy.

    That was going to make a big difference.

    III

    From here, Hancock now describes what some previous writers have called, “The Perfect Failure”, and others have termed, “A Brilliant Disaster”. I am referring, of course, to the Bay of Pigs operation. His synopsis and analysis takes up his entire Chapter Seven. It is one of the better short summaries/critiques of this debacle that I have read.

    The author begins with an observation first originated by Fletcher Prouty. Namely that between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the operation seemed to morph from what was essentially intended as a guerilla/infiltration project, until by November of 1960, it became a full fledged amphibious assault. (Ibid, p. 51) Why this was done has never been fully explained. But the author states that the CIA’s Director of Plans, Dick Bissell, is the man who gave the order to alter the operation to the military planner Marine Corps Col. Jack Hawkins. (ibid, p. 53) Once this was done, Hawkins—who was an expert in amphibious assaults—told Bissell that if this was the route he wanted to go then it was necessary to have strong air support. If that was not approved in advance, then the project in that form should be abandoned. The author then notes that this memo, by the project’s main military planner, never got to Kennedy’s desk. It got as high up the chain as Bissell. (ibid, p. 54)

    Hawkins was also against the use of tanks and planes. He thought this would all but eliminate the CIA’s plausible deniability. Therefore their use would expose the project as sponsored by the USA.

    Hancock next reveals another interesting nugget. The project’s other main designer, CIA officer Jake Esterline, was banned from all the high level meetings. These included those with President Kennedy and other White House advisors and Cabinet members. (ibid) But meanwhile, Bissell was telling Kennedy that the operation would be rather low-key and use minimal air power. This was true for the first plan, under Eisenhower. Which was drafted by Esterline in January of 1960 and approved by Eisenhower in March of that year. But it was not true of this new plan that Bissell had evolved. The first plan used a pool of about 500 Cuban exiles to land at the beach at Trinidad. This group would then unite with the paramilitary groups that the CIA had already developed in opposition to Castro on the island. They would then try and build a larger resistance force with CIA furnished communications equipment. Hancock suggests that one reason this plan was altered was because of the effective crackdown that Castro and Che Guevara had made on resistance groups on the island by late 1960. (ibid, p. 53)

    It is important to note here that the two men closest to the operation on the ground, Hawkins and Esterline, are cut off from the White House. Sensing their isolation, as the actual invasion day approached, both Esterline and Hawkins told Bissell that they would resign if the air attacks were not guaranteed. They told him the beachhead could not be established or maintained without it. (ibid, p. 55) Therefore the Cuban T-33 jet fighters had to be eliminated in advance. Yet, as Hancock notes, Bissell acquiesced to Kennedy’s wishes to cut back the number of air attacks by the exiles. And further, during the actual invasion, the CIA turned down an offer to plead their case for more air cover to Kennedy directly. (ibid p. 55)

    The author adduces Bissell’s strange behavior to the CIA’s secret attempt to kill Castro during the operation. (ibid) This is an aspect of the project which was kept from Kennedy. I don’t fully agree with this. I believe that both CIA Director Allen Dulles and Bissell both thought that Kennedy would change his mind about direct American involvement in the operation once he was confronted with the stark alternative of defeat. There is no doubt that Nixon would have committed American power: he told Kennedy that is what he would have done. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 288) And Dulles later admitted that this was something he had actually relied upon with Kennedy, that the president would not accept an American humiliation. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 14)

    Because the two internal reports on the Bay of Pigs—Lyman Kirkpatrick’s for the CIA, and Maxwell Taylor’s for the White House—were so closely held, the CIA managed to create a mythology about what really happened. Their cover story was that the plan would have succeeded had the D-Day air raids not been cancelled. When in fact, those raids were reliant on the establishment of a beachhead. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pgs. 127-28) Which was not achieved. But as Kirkpatrick pointed out, relying on the D-Day air raid was not realistic. Since the bridges had not been blown, the speed at which Castro got his infantry and armor to the beach made it impossible for 1,500 men to establish a beachhead, let alone to break out from it. (ibid, p. 41) Especially since Castro’s total troop allotment at this time was over 200, 000 men.

    But with the CIA’s allies in the media, the failure for the operation was switched to President Kennedy. As far as Hancock’s narrative goes, the reason this reversal is important is that now the CIA had forged a permanent alliance with the Cuban exiles involved with the Bay of Pigs. That bonding was strongly based on their mutual antipathy for the president. In Hancock’s outline of the actual assassination maneuvering, some of these very same Cubans would be used in what they perceived as a retaliation against the man they thought had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. And this suspicion and distrust was also felt by Kennedy in reverse. He began to feel as if he could not work with the leaders of the CIA. He therefore fired the top level of the Agency—Dulles, Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell-and placed his own man in charge, John McCone. McCone was not part of the so-called Old Boys network. But he also then supplemented McCone with Robert Kennedy, who served as a sort of ombudsman over Cuban operations. As the author notes, RFK’s presence, and his insistence at reviewing each aspect of each proposed raid on Cuba, greatly agitated William Harvey. (Hancock, p. 80)

    IV

    After the Bay of Pigs, CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton got involved in assessing Castro’s intelligence apparatus. And as Bissell was forcibly retired, Harvey now began to assume more control over Cuban operations. His program was called Task Force W. (Hancock, pgs. 61-62,67) Helms had already placed Harvey in charge of ZR Rifle, but now Angleton comes on board there also. (ibid, p. 65) Harvey now reactivated the Castro assassination plots. He reached out to mobster John Roselli and Cuban exile leader Tony Varona.

    During the Missile Crisis, when Harvey made an authorized order to infiltrate CIA contract agents into Cuba, Bobby Kennedy found out about it. Perceiving Harvey as an unreliable cowboy, he had him removed from Cuban operations and eventually relocated to Rome. Des Fitzgerald now took command of the Cuba desk at Langley. (ibid, p. 71)

    During this post Bay of Pigs phase, Hancock notes the relationship between Cuban exile leader Antonio Veciana and CIA officer David Phillips. These two first got to know each other on the island and then continued their partnership in the USA. After the Bay of Pigs, which Phillips was a major part of, Phillips began to see that Operation MONGOOSE was not going to be effective at removing Castro. MONGOOSE was the CIA operation that sponsored raids and coordinated attacks by the exiles against Cuba in 1962. But with Robert Kennedy managing it from above, both Harvey and Phillips decided it had no real teeth. It therefore was not going to work. Consequently, Phillips decided he had to do something provocative. Kennedy would only do something strong if his back was to the wall. Phillips had to create headaches for him in order to get him to act. If he had to , he would publicly embarrass him. Therefore, the CIA now began to sanction raids against the island in defiance of directives by the Kennedys. (Hancock, pgs. 83-84)

    Hancock then furthers his argument for the motivation of the CIA/Cuban exile alliance against Kennedy. He now notes that the Pentagon had planned on invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis. There had been contingency plans for this operation. They were activated for the Missile Crisis. Fortunately, Kennedy defused the crisis. Fortunate since what no one on the American side knew is that the Russians had installed tactical atomic weapons on the beaches, and Soviet subs stationed there had been outfitted with atomic torpedoes.

    But word got out that Kennedy had made a “no invasion” pledge to the Russians over Cuba as part of the resolution to the crisis. That pledge seemed to seal any further hope of the exiles taking back the island. This further exacerbated the hatred felt by the Cubans against Kennedy. They now called him a “traitor”. (Hancock, p. 86)

    What made this even worse for the exiles was this: MONGOOSE was retired after the Missile Crisis. What took its place was a very weak program which, as many have written, was just meant to keep the noise level up about Cuba. Hancock notes that, under Des Fitzgerald, very little was done in the first half of 1963. We know from declassified documents that there were only five raids authorized in the second half of that year. Fitzgerald sanctioned an operation to try and create rebellion leading to a coup. Ted Shackley and Dave Morales of the CIA’s JM/Wave station in Miami disapproved. They thought this was completely unrealistic in the face of the controls Castro’s security forces had established on the island. And, in fact, almost everyone contacted to lead the resistance turned out to be a double agent. (Hancock, pgs. 85 and 98)

    Operation TILT exemplified the desperation felt by the Cuban exiles and their allies. This was a renegade project. The Special Group inside the White House, headed by RFK, did not authorize it. (ibid, p. 85) This was a June 1963 infiltration operation that was meant to bring back two Russian officers from Cuba. Once returned, they would testify how all the nuclear missiles on the island were not gone yet. In advance of the project, individuals like John Martino—a close ally of the exile community who had served time in Castro’s jails-and exile groups like Alpha 66 shopped the story in advance. In fact, a reporter from Life magazine was a part of the boat mission to Cuba. And even though the Special Group did not authorize the project, Shackley provided logistical support for it. The mission was a complete failure. And it is doubtful that the two Russian officers ever existed.

    But what further exasperated the exiles and their allies in the CIA was that Kennedy now moved to honor his “no invasion” pledge. He did this by moving what was left of the anti-Castro operations out of the 48 states. Kennedy enlisted the FBI to enforce this ban. Therefore boats and weapons in the USA were seized. The INS began to issue warnings and to take legal action against the exiles. Pilots had authorizations taken away. (Hancock, p. 95) The war against Cuba now seemed to be over. Some of the remaining exile groups were actually at odds with each other. Manuel Artime hated Manuelo Ray. Shackley liked Artime. He did not like Ray. But Shackley understood why JFK did, since Ray was a liberal. (Hancock, p. 99) Dave Morales, Shackley’s Chief of Staff, felt that Ray had an infiltration program going against the JM/Wave station. So he authorized Artime to fire on Ray’s boats. Things were now going so poorly, they were turning inward.

    V

    Then came the icing on the cake: the back channel. This refers to Kennedy’s negotiations with Castro through reporter Lisa Howard, diplomat William Attwood, and French journalist Jean Daniel. The goal was to normalize relations with Cuba. This began in January 1963 and continued all the way up to Kennedy’s death. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Helms were opposed to it. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara looked at it as a way of weaning Castro from the Soviets. In fact, McNamara said the end result could be an ending of the American trade embargo in return for Castro removing all Soviet personnel from the island. (Hancock, pgs. 99-100) Averill Harriman from the State Department was also for it. But he said, “Unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” (ibid, p. 102) Hancock interestingly notes that Bundy was part of the movement to block any continuance of the back channel when LBJ became president.

    Since Helms knew about the back channel, and since the NSA likely was picking up some of Howard’s phone calls, Hancock here makes an interesting assumption. Since Angleton and Helms were good friends, and since Angleton’s domain was counter-intelligence, Angleton very likely knew about the back channel. Through both Helms and the NSA. Since he and Harvey were close in 1963, Angleton had to have told him.

    Hancock then advances some interesting evidence that at least three of the Cuban exiles knew about the back channel. They were Rolando Otero, Felipe Vidal Santiago, and Bernardo DeTorres. (Ibid, pgs. 114-15, 122)

    Hancock then begins to lay out the plotting around Oswald in the summer of 1963. He clearly implies that this was done to kill off the back channel, which it did. As the time comes to move the plot to Mexico City and Dallas, the occurrences of Oswald “doubles” begin to manifest itself. The author notes the famous Sylvia Odio incident and states that the Odio family was associated with Ray’s group called JURE. And, in fact, Sylvia had just visited with Ray and his assistant that summer. So this may have been an attempt to associate Oswald with the CIA’s least favorite exile group.

    From here on in, which is about the last thirty pages or so of the book, I thought Hancock lost sight of his goal. He now begins to lose the macro view of the assassination, that is, from the top down; and he begins a micro view. That is how the ground level worked in Dallas with Ruby as a featured player. Not to say that this information is not interesting. Much of it is. I was especially taken by the work of Anna Marie Kuhns-Walko on Roy Hargraves. The substance of this is that Hargraves had Secret Service credentials and was in Dallas in November of 1963. Hancock does not really recover the macro focus until the very end where he mentions that Harvey’s files were gone through after his death. (Hancock, p. 186) And he finalizes the work with a nice closing quote from Phillips saying that JFK was likely killed in a conspiracy, likely utilizing American intelligence officers. (ibid)

    I have some other disagreements. Hancock apparently buys the part of the CIA Inspector General report saying that Roselli met with Jim Garrison in Las Vegas in 1967. In a private letter I saw, Garrison says it never happened. And he would not know Roselli if he saw him.

    I disagree with part of Hancock’s analysis on Mexico City. He seems to think Oswald was actually there and did most all the things attributed to him. My view is that Oswald may have been in Mexico City, but the weight of the evidence says he did not do most of the things attributed to him. I also thought the author did not make enough of what was going on with Oswald in New Orleans. After all, the CIA program to counter the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was being run by Phillips. And that is what it appears Oswald was up to in New Orleans. At one point in the narrative Hancock says there is no evidence that Ruby knew JFK was going to be killed in the motorcade route. Well then, what about Julia Ann Mercer? And I would be remiss if I did not say that the book is studded with numerous typos and pagination errors. Apparently, there was a rush to get the volume out for the 48th anniversary.

    But overall, I think this is an interesting and worthwhile work. As I said, it has a unique approach to it, and Hancock’s analysis of the crime has sophistication, intelligence and nuance to it. Which, in these days of Lamar Waldron, Tom Hartmann and Mark North, is not all that common.

  • Journalists and JFK, Part 2: The Real Dizinfo Agents at Dealey Plaza

    Intro
    Part 1
    Part 3

    Henry and Clare Booth Luce, C. D. Jackson & Issac Don Levine – That’s LIFE

    In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy a decision was made at the highest levels of government; that, even though the evidence indicating the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting at the behest of Cuba was not true, it could be used to strong arm reluctant leaders in the legislative and judicial branches of government to do what the new president wanted.

    Earl Warren later explained in an oral history interview for the LBJ Library, that after he was asked to head the commission, “I told them I thought I shouldn’t do it, and I made some suggestions to them as to people whom they might get who would fill the purpose. And I thought that was the end of it. And then in about an hour I got a phone call from the White House and was asked if I could come up and see the President. And I said, ‘certainly,’ so I went up there. And the President told me that he was greatly disturbed by the rumors that were going around the world about a conspiracy and so forth, and that he thought that it might because it involved both Khrushchev and Castro – that it might even catapult us into a nuclear war if it got a head start, you know, and kept growing.”

    “And he (LBJ) said that he had just been talking to McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense then,” Warren continued, “and that McNamara had told him that if we got into a nuclear war that at the first strike we would lose sixty million people. And he impressed upon me the great danger that was involved in having something develop from all this talk. He said he had talked to the leaders of both parties and that members of Congress – Dick Russell and Boggs on the Democratic side and Ford and Cooper on the other side – and John McCloy from New York and Allen Dulles would be willing to serve on the commission if I was to head it up.” (1)

    And this was not just an off-the-cuff decision, as John Newman puts it, “It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” (2)

    By threatening nuclear war if it were true, LBJ used the disinformation of Castro and Cuban complicity to convince the Chief Justice and congressmen to join the Commission. The nuclear threat helped persuaded them to go with the Lone-Nut scenario because a conspiracy had to be a foreign one. To accept the Lone-Nut scenario as possible or even plausible, all of the accused assassin’s intelligence connections had to be ignored and the assassin portrayed as a sociopathic loser acting upon unknown psychological motives. (3)
    Life magazine was one of the most prolific supporters of this fairytale. Just as it had been previously in leaking Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and Mongoose intelligence. And as it would after the assassination in anointing the disputed Tonkin Gulf Incident in order to get Congressional authorization for the war in Vietnam. (4)

    As the most popular magazine in America, Life was more influential than radio and TV news at the time. Life was the perfect platform to deliver any disinformation the CIA wanted widely distributed to a mass audience. It was used to influence key policy makers as well as the public, and also to discredit President Kennedy, as it tried to do on numerous occasions.

    Who were these guys? Well in looking at the Life magazine masthead of that era you will find a number of pertinent names – including Henry and Clare Booth Luce, C.D. Jackson and Issac Don Levine.

    Henry Luce, born in China to missionary parents, attended Yale, was a member of Skull & Bones, and with his schoolmate and partner Briton Hadden, quit the Baltimore News to form Time Inc., publishing Time Magazine in 1926, Fortune in 1930 and Life magazine in 1936. He remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964. A powerful Republican Party leader and committed anti-communist, he was a strong supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and “the China Lobby,” and against Castro in Cuba. Although Henry Luce died in 1967, his legacy continues to make an impact today. (5)

    It wasn’t a one-man show. Luce surrounded himself with like-minded publishers, editors, photographers and writers, most notably his second wife, Clare Booth Luce.

    Before dealing with Clare Booth Luce, it should be noted for the record that Henry Luce is also said to have had an affair with Mary Bancroft, one of Allen Dulles’ OSS agents and paramour, while Dulles is said to have been intimate with Luce’s wife. And in retrospect, Clare Booth Luce was in many ways more of a player than Henry Luce himself. (6)

    Before she became a Congresswomen and ambassador (to Italy), Clare Booth Luce had struck up an early friendship with John F. Kennedy, sending him a good luck coin during World War II. (7)

    Clare Booth Luce has been aptly described as, “One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Luce was responsible for later ‘leads’ in the JFK assassination aftermath. Luce will later claim that sometime after the Bay of Pigs she receives a call from her ‘great friend’ William Pawley – who wants to put together a fleet of speedboats which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on ‘intelligence gathering’ missions. Luce eventually sponsors one of the boats. She refers to the crew of this boat as ‘my boys.’ Luce will also maintain that it is one of these boat crews that brings back the first news of Soviet missiles in Cuba. JFK, she says, didn’t react to it so she helped to feed the information to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public.” (8)

    She sat in the same limo with LBJ on JFK’s inauguration day, and when she asked him why in the world he took the Vice Presidential slot instead of staying in the more powerful position he held in Congress, she quoted him as saying, “Clare, I looked it up; One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” (9) Although the true odds were one in five presidents, or twenty percent, died in office, perhaps LBJ knew he could improve those odds, and it wasn’t such a gamble at all.

    With the new Democratic administration, Luce brought aboard a new publisher, C. D. – Charles Douglas– Jackson, an OSS hand and President Eisenhower’s personal administrative assistant on psychological warfare and Cold War strategy. (10)

    While Jackson would remain in the background, devising strategy, Clare Booth Luce wrote a weekly column and an occasional photo feature for Life. The magazineran articles on the impending invasion of Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, and in one column, a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Clare Booth Luce chastised the President for ignoring the evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. (11) She says she had been told this by ‘her boys,’ who ran commando missions in and out of Cuba. But she also apparently saw the U2 photos leaked by the Air Force liaison to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, before they were revealed to the president. The NPIC U2 photos of missiles in Cuba were also shown to Sen. Keating (R. NY) by Col. Philip J. Corso, who later bragged about leaking it in his book The Day After Roswell. (12)

    After the Cuban Missile crisis was successfully resolved, Luce began writing stories about Mongoose, the CIA’s covert operations against Castro, which you could have read all about in Life, as they ran photos and stories about Operation Red Cross (aka the Bayo/Pawley Mission), and other anti-Castro missions. Clare was particularly proud of “her boys,” the team of anti-Castro commandos who ran maritime missions into Cuba in their speed boat, and she financially backed, though they were also supported by the CIA. They were based out of the CIA’s JMWAVE base in Florida, affiliated with the DRE and led by JulioFernandez. (13)

    On the night of the assassination, Clare Booth Luce says she was awakened from sleep by a phone call by Fernandez. He claimed to have exclusive knowledge of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, including recordings of him, and other records that appeared to substantiate his pro-Castro leanings i.e. the original Phase One cover-story., Castro did it. Luce told him to call the FBI. But he didn’t, or at least there is no record of him having done so. (14)

    The Luces could have slept soundly that night, knowing that Life was on top of the story. They had people at Dealey Plaza – the scene of the crime of the century. And before the weekend was over they would have sole ownership of the single most desired peace of evidence in the case, the Zapruder film. They would also obtain the infamous Backyard Photos of the accused assassin, his “Historic Diary,” exclusive photos of the Oswald family and then contractually tie up Marina’s story for decades.

    But before the weekend was out, the accused assassin would be killed while in police custody, and then branded the lone assassin. It was just a matter of whether he was going to be portrayed as part of a Cuban Communist conspiracy or as a deranged, lone nut, the answer to which would depend on how it all played out in public.

    Life had a good team working on the assassination. Texas bureau chief, Holland McCombs was in Austin, working on a story about the sex lives of college students. McCombs got the job at Life after giving Henry Luce a raucous tour of Texas, introducing him to cantinas, tequila and hot peppers. After Luce hired him, its rumored that his first job was to get a spy in the office of the president of Mexico, clearly showing Luce’s interests also went south of the border. (15)

    McCombs had served in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) so such an operation was within his wherewithal. McCombs later helped abort Life’s belated 1967 investigation of a domestic conspiracy. McCombs supported his friend Clay Shaw, a suspect in Jim Garrison’s case in New Orleans, even though his own team had developed evidence that supported a conspiracy.

    As early as February 1964 McCombs and Life had developed the fact that the McCurley brothers, who had assisted Oswald in handing out the FPCC leaflets in New Orleans, patronized the Black Lamp, a gay bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At that tavern, there was a bartender named Frankie Hydell. The Warren Report claimed that there was no such person as Hidell, which was the name Oswald used as an alias. And the information McCombs and Life developed went uninvestigated by both Life and the Warren Commission. (16)

    Although McCombs was in Austin at the time of the assassination, he had hired a young intern and stringer, Patsy Swank, who was heels on the ground in Dallas and would come up with the scoop on the Z-film.

    As soon as they heard about the assassination, McCombs, and the west coast editor in Los Angeles Richard Stolley, flew immediately to Dallas, probably under orders or assignment from C. D. Jackson in New York. Stolley brought along photographer Alan Grant. Writer Tommy Thompson, who was from Dallas, also flew in. Stolley set up shop in a room at the Adolphus Hotel, just across the street from the Carousel Club, and where the Secret Service and White House Communications Agency (WHCA) had their base of operations during the President’s visit. (17)

    Although the FBI maintains it had lost track of Oswald when he moved to New Orleans, and he kept a room by himself in Oak Cliff, Oswald had subscribed to magazines that were sent to the Paine home, including The Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party in the USA, the Trotskyite Militant, and Time Magazine. Therefore, at the time of the assassination, Time-Life had Oswald’s address at the Paine home in their files in New York, where their offices were at Rockefeller Center. (18) Which is also where the British Security Coordination was based, and where Oswald’s mother had worked in a retail shop on the first floor of the Empire State Building. While it may have been unknown to some of the authorities who were looking for him, Time-Life had Oswald’s address in their subscription file. And it didn’t take long for the Life team to get there.

    While Thompson and photographer Alan Grant went out to the Paine house in Irving, Patsy Swank was at the Dallas Police Department, where she had been tipped off about a film of the assassination. She called Stolley at the Adolphus on the phone and in a hushed voice so other reporters wouldn’t hear her, told him about the movie of the assassination that was taken by a man whose last name began with a “Z.” Stolley quickly found Zapruder’s name in the phone book, assumed it was him, and called his home every fifteen minutes until Zapruder finally answered. Mr. “Z” had been driving around aimlessly thinking about what he had witnessed through the lens of his camera. Stolley wanted to meet him immediately but Zapruder told him to see him at his office early the next morning. (19)

    Meanwhile, with Grant snapping exclusive photos, Thompson had gotten Marina’s confidence, and with C. D. Jackson persuading her with cash, the wife and mother of the accused assassin agreed to give them their exclusive story if Thompson would take them to see Oswald at the jail. (20)

    Although the Zapruder film, the Backyard Photos, the “Historic Diary,” Thompson’s articles and Grant’s photos that Life published, have all been examined extensively and deserve even further scrutiny, Marina’s story is the clincher. With the death of Oswald, his guilt or innocence in the eyes of the public depended on how she portrayed him for history. But it wasn’t really Marina’s portrait of Oswald in Life. It was the author’s portrait, as described, at least in part, by Marina in Russian, and translated by the author.

    At first it was reported that Marina’s story would be ghost written by Issac Don Levine, its in-house Russian defector and professional anti-communist propagandist. (21) Levine would have been perfect for the job, if they were going to stick with the Cuban Communist Conspiracy Cover-story. But that fell by the wayside as it became apparent that it just was not accurate.

    That didn’t matter to Levine any more than it didn’t matter to LBJ. Levine had previously written The Mind of the Assassin, about Leon Trotsky’s killer Raymond Mercader, who Levine cleverly unmasks as a deep penetration agent of Stalin’s KGB’s assassination directorate SMERSH. Mercader got to Trotsky in exile in Mexico City and stabbed him to death, was convicted for it, served time in prison and was later released. (22)

    Oswald had described himself as a Trotskyite, and subscribed to The Militant, the monthly publication of the Trotskyite party in the United States, which was founded by the father of Michael Paine, Oswald’s chief benefactor at the time of the assassination. Besides providing room and board for Oswald’s wife and two kids, Michael Paine also handled Oswald’s belongings, including the alleged assassination rifle, which was kept in his garage while Oswald went to Mexico. (23)

    It’s still unclear what Oswald did in Mexico City, but with his fascination with Trotsky, one must wonder if he visited the apartment where Trotsky was killed, or knew the details, as written and published by Levine in his book. If you look up Issac Don Levine’s Wikipedia biography, it fails to even mention The Mind of the Assassin, possibly his most important work. (24)

    Marina’s story is not listed there either. But for a different reason. Because he never got the job. Instead, the contract was given to Priscilla Johnson (McMillan). Priscilla, like George DeMohrenschildt, had the unique attribute of having made the acquaintance of both the President and his accused assassin. Oswald’s good friend DeMohrenschildt knew the Kennedys from their support of the Cystic Fibrosis Charity that he established with his second wife, Dr. De De Sharples. Priscilla knew JFK from Massachusetts, where she worked for him in 1954, and a few years later she met Oswald in Moscow at the time of his defection. (25) So she wasn’t entering the drama cold. She was already a player, and an integral part of the disinformation network that promoted the Dealey Plaza operation cover-story and protected those responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.

    Notes

    1. LBJ strongarm. LBJ Library Oral History Collection. http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Warren-E/Warren-e.PDF
    2. See Video: J.E. Hover, L.B. Johnson, and the Warren Commission’s role -1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZdtTa_164o
    3. Newman, John – Oswald & the CIA (2008 edition); http://droberdeau.blogspot.com/2011/05/page-13.html
    4. Life and Tonkin Gulf Incident. Life Magazine August 14, 1964 p. 21 Special Report – “From The Files of Navy Intelligence Aboard the Maddox” p. 21 – Cover story on LBJ – “The Complex and Extraordinary Man Who Is The President” – In Two Articles – an intimate and revealing portrait. http://books.google.com/books?id=cUkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2 – v=onepage&q&f=false –
    5. Henry Robinson Luce New York Times Obituary, March 1, 1967. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0403.html
    6. Bancroft, Mary – Autobiography of a Spy. http://jungcurrents.com/bancroft-sp/
    Also see: http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-A-Bu-and-Obituaries/Bancroft-Mary.html
    7. Clare Booth Luce gives coin to JFK & JFK Letter to CBL
    http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/postwar/election/jfklettr.html
    Clare Booth Luce background http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/luce-cla.htm.
    8. Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology.
    9. http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/1054343251/presidents-talk-about-presidents-john-f-kennedy – “I looked it up; one out of every four Presidents has died in office.  I’m a gamblin’ man, darling, and this is the only chance I got.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, to Clare Booth Luce, on why he accepted the Vice Presidential nomination from JFK, January 1961. Also see: Ira David Wood III – JFK Assassination Chronology. http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v2n1/chrono1.pdf
    10. Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology. See above.
    11. C. D. Jackson background “The CIA’s assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy.”
    http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.php
    Before he became an ardent cold warrior, C.D. Jackson was
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjacksonCD.htm
    According to Carl Bernstein, Jackson was “Henry Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA”. He also claimed that in the 1950s Jackson had arranged for CIA employees to travel with Time-Life credentials as cover.
    11. Clare Booth Luce & Cuban Missile Crisis – Cuba –and the unfaced truth – Our Global Double Bind – Life Magazine, Oct. 5, 1962, p. 53.
    12. Corso & NPIC Leak – Corso, Philip J. (Day After Roswell, Simon & Schuster , 1997) and Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology.
    http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15829
    Corso & JFK black prop op – see: “The Zipper Documents,” Gregory.
    13. Clare Booth Luce & Julio Fernandez & DRE Clare Booth Luce and Julio Fernandez:
    http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/julio-fernandez.html
    Also see Gary Shaw and John Stockwell: http://images.mitrasites.com/illustration/julio-fern%C3%A1ndez.html
    14. Clare Booth Luce & Julio Fernandez on 11/22/63
    15. Holland McCombs & Luce – Kelin, John – Holland McCombs – “The Investigation that Never Was.”
    http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/32nd_Issue/holland.html
    16. Kelin, John – Holland McCombs – The Investigation That Never Was. Also see McCombs archive at University of Tennessee.
    http://www.utm.edu/departments/acadpro/library/departments/special_collections/manus/ms001.htm
    17. Life Team in Dallas Patsy Swank & Z film. Thompson, Josiah. Why The Zapruder Film Is Authentic, JFK Deep Politics Quarterly, April 1999, Vol. 4, No. 3. http://www.manuscriptservice.com/DPQ/dparchiv1.htm – FILM
    18. Oswald address & Time-Life – Education Forum – Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK – John Dolva post.
    http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5046
    Stolley bio: http://www.santafe.com/articles/author/richard-b-stolley/ http://www.life.com/image/72386160
    20. Thompson & Marina. Grant, Alan. The Day The President Was Shot – The Kidnapping of the Oswald Family.
    http://www.allangrant.com/oswaldstory.htm For Alan Grant’s photos see: http://www.allangrant.com/newsevents7.htm. Also see: Richard Stolley on Tommy Thompson:
    http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20087091,00.html
    21. Issac Don Levine (19 January 1892 – 15 February 1981) Scott, Peter Dale,  Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1996. says C. D. Jackson, on the urging of Allen Dulles employed Issac Don Levine to ghost-write Marina’s story. This story never appeared in print. Levine background:.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Don_Levine.
    Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambershttp://en.wikipedia….saac_Don_Levine
    22. Issac Don Levine & Trotsky – Levine, wrote the book Mind of the Assassin, that details how the KGB’s agent Raymond Mercader assassinated Trotsky. See Peter Sedgwick’s Review
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1960/11/assassin.htmhttp://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2139856.The_Mind_of_an_Assassin
    23. Michael Paine, Trotsky & Oswald in MC. Weberman. Nodule X16 http://ajweberman.com/noduleX16-PAINES CIA CONNECTIONS.pdf
    Forbes Family history (Linda Minor): http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg22399.html
    Michael Paine Warren Commission Testimony: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/paine_m1.htm
    24. Levine & Wiki & “Mind of the Assassin.” Bibliography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Don_Levine
    25. Lee Oswald, Marina and Priscilla Johnson.
    ARRB Testiomony http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arrb/index4.htm
    PBS Interview: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/interviews/mcmillan.html

  • Robert Maheu Dies at 90

    Robert A. Maheu, who was a powerful aide to reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes and whose cloak-and-dagger exploits included involvement in a CIA and Mafia plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, died Aug. 4 at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas. He was 90 and had cancer and heart ailments.

    Mr. Maheu (pronounced MAY-hew) was a onetime FBI agent who ran a Washington company that he said carried out secret missions for the Central Intelligence Agency.

    Mr. Maheu’s first jobs for Hughes in the 1950s included private-eye snooping on Hughes’s past and prospective girlfriends in Hollywood. Later, as Hughes’s chief adviser, he helped make his boss Nevada’s third-largest landowner, after the federal government and the state power company. After becoming Hughes’s director of Las Vegas operations in 1966, Mr. Maheu was the most influential member of the billionaire’s inner circle and acted as his liaison to leading political figures and the world at large.

    “If he wanted someone fired, I did the firing,” Mr. Maheu wrote in his 1992 autobiography, Next to Hughes. “If he wanted something negotiated, I did the bargaining. If he had to be somewhere, I appeared in his place. I was his eyes, his ears, and his mouthpiece.”

    Before he was abruptly fired in 1970, Mr. Maheu spoke with Hughes as many as 20 times a day on the telephone. But in all their years together, he never met the eccentric mogul face to face. Hughes lived in seclusion on the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel, with only a few private aides admitted to his presence.

    “He finally told me that he did not want me to see him because of the way in which he had allowed himself to deteriorate, the way in which he was living, the way he looked,” Mr. Maheu said on Larry King Live in 1992. “He felt that if I ever in fact saw him, I would never be able to represent him.”

    Mr. Maheu earned $520,000 a year and was living in one of the largest houses in Las Vegas when Hughes had two other aides fire him in December 1970. In 1972, Hughes broke a long silence by speaking in a telephone news conference, seeking to prove he had nothing to do with a purported autobiography by Clifford Irving, which was later confirmed a hoax.

    During that news conference, Hughes called Mr. Maheu “a no-good son of a bitch who robbed me blind.” Mr. Maheu sued him in federal court for defamation. He initially won a $2.8 million settlement from Hughes, but the decision was overturned.

    The four-month trial revealed many engrossing details about Hughes’s business dealings, his political contributions and his increasingly bizarre private life. Mr. Maheu disclosed that in 1970 he delivered $100,000 to Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo, a close friend of President Richard M. Nixon’s, in return for possible future favors for Hughes. Mr. Maheu entertained Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, on his yacht and regularly played tennis with then-Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt (R), who became a U.S. senator.

    But Hughes spread his political largess to both parties, contributing $100,000 to 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey. Mr. Maheu said he personally placed a briefcase containing $50,000 cash — from receipts at the Hughes-owned Silver Slipper casino — in Humphrey’s limousine. The contributions were legal at the time because they were considered private donations from an individual, not corporate contributions.

    Mr. Maheu said he twice turned down requests from Hughes to arrange $1 million payments to Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon — payable after they left office — if they would agree to stop underground nuclear testing in Nevada, where Hughes lived until moving to the Bahamas in 1970. (He died at age 70 in 1976.)

    “In ’57, when I agreed to be his alter ego,” Mr. Maheu told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1992, “I thought it would be very challenging: representing him at presidential inaugurals, handling multimillion-dollar deals in his behalf … In reality, you’re living a lie.”

    Robert Aime Maheu was born Oct. 30, 1917, into a French-speaking family in Waterville, Maine. After he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., he analyzed aerial photographs for the Department of Agriculture before joining the FBI.

    During World War II, the FBI assigned him to monitor a French spy who became a double agent and helped deceive the Nazi high command with false radio transmissions. By the mid-1950s, Mr. Maheu said he did undercover work for the CIA — “those jobs in which the agency could not officially be involved,” he wrote in his autobiography.

    Recently declassified CIA files confirm that Mr. Maheu was present at a 1960 meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., between organized crime bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., as part of an abortive CIA effort to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The plan was dropped after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

    “If anything went wrong,” Mr. Maheu wrote in his memoir, “I was the fall guy, caught between protecting the government and protecting the mob, two armed camps that could crush me like a bug.”

    After leaving Hughes, Mr. Maheu became a successful real estate investor but was admittedly careless in his bookkeeping.

    “Most people, I have observed, spend 90 percent of their time scribbling notes and keeping records to justify their existence,” he said in 1974. “I prefer to use that time getting things done.”

    Mr. Maheu had expensive tastes and helped found a Las Vegas chapter of a French gourmet society, and as time went on, he reveled in chances to tell of his colorful life.

    His wife of 62 years, Yvette Doyon Maheu, died in 2003. A daughter also preceded him in death. Survivors include three sons; 10 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

  • 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.