Tag: COLD WAR

  • Review of Film – Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War

    Review of Film – Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War


    The valuable Fletcher Prouty finally has his biographical film. And its also autobiographical; since a good part of it is made up of various interviews with him. 

    Prouty was a military man who interfaced with the CIA for years on end, sometimes speaking directly to Allen Dulles.  After graduating from University of Massachusetts Amherst he began his military career with the 4th Armored Division in Pine Camp, New York. In 1942 he was transferred to the Army Air Force and became a pilot. He began service in World War II in 1943 in British West Africa.  He served as personal pilot to, among others, General Omar Bradley. In October of 1943 he flew a geological survey team into Saudi Arabia  to confirm oil deposits for the upcoming Cairo Conference. He later flew Chiang Kai Shek’s Chinese delegation to Tehran.

    Promoted to captain, he was shifted to the Far East in 1945 and ended up being on Okinawa at war’s end.  When the peace treaty was signed in Tokyo Harbor Prouty flew in Douglas MacArthur’s phalanx of bodyguards and he later shipped out American POWs. All in all, it was a distinguished war record.

    Afterwards Prouty was assigned by the army to start up an ROTC program at Yale. This is where he meet William F. Buckley and he later said he wrote some things for Buckley’s Yale paper. In 1950 he was sent to Colorado Springs to build the Air Defense Command. The mission of this branch was air defense of the Continental United States or CONUS. During the Korean War he served as manager of the Tokyo International Airport during the American occupation.

    In 1955 he began service at the position that would later make him stellar in studies of the John F. Kennedy assassination.  This was as a coordinator for military supplies between the Air Force and the CIA. Which roughly meant that if a CIA covert operation needed an air aspect, Prouty would be the man to consult. His work was so distinguished here that he was promoted to Colonel and became the focal point officer for the Defense Department with the same duties. He retired in 1964 and was awarded a Joint Service Medal by Max Taylor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs. After retirement he worked in banking and the railroad industry.  

    But there was a third area Prouty was involved in after he retired from his long stay in the service.  And that was the writing of books and articles.  Since he did not sign a non-disclosure agreement, unlike others, Prouty did not have to clear in advance what he wrote about his career, his assignments or his knowledge of certain affairs. Therefore, he was one of the first to disclose secret information about men like James McCord and Alexander Butterfield, both involved in the Watergate scandal. The former was not just a technician, and the latter—as Prouty learned from Howard Hunt– was a CIA contact in the Nixon White House. 

    Jeff Carter has now made a film about the fascinating life and career of this unique character.  The first part of Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War deals largely with the man’s military background.  And Carter goes into much more expansive detail than what I have sketched above.  But beyond that the film handles all of this information with skill and agility.  Carter did an admirable job in finding back up pictures and films to fill in the foreground and background of some very important points in Prouty’s career that happen to intersect with modern history. For instance, while at Okinawa, Prouty saw literally tons of equipment being landed and warehoused for a possible invasion of mainland Japan.  But since Japan surrendered before any such invasion, these arms were transferred to Indochina since Ho Chi Minh had been resisting Japan in the August Revolution.

    There are also valuable insights about how Allen Dulles started the Cold war with his part in Operation Paper Clip.  This was the transference of top grade Nazi scientists from Germany to the USA to play a role in designing modern weaponry against Russia. That agreement, of course, was accompanied by General Walter B. Smith with a parallel agreement. This one made between the OSS and Reinhard Gehlen to have the former Nazi spy chief take his information about the Russians from Germany’s eastern front to Washington DC. This was quite natural for the Dulles brothers—Allen and John Foster–since their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was active in business dealings in Germany until 1939. Therefore between the brothers and John McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany, the decision was made to go easy on the former Nazi regime in order to ramp up for our new enemy, Russia.

    The film deals with another subject that was relatively ignored until Prouty repeatedly pointed out its importance. This was the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report. That 1949 document was 193 pages long and was critical of what the CIA had done so far and also the performance of the Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter. That report stated the CIA was not coordinated to meet national security interests, did not supply accurate National Intelligence Estimates often enough, and did not have a single office yet for covert and clandestine operations.

    The ultimate impact of this report was that Hillenkoetter resigned over his failure to predict the invasion of South Korea, and Walter B. Smith became the new DCI. One of the authors of the report, William Harding Jackson, became Smith’s deputy. And Smith and Jackson implemented that report into the Agency.  Thus the CIA now became more of a covert action rather than an intelligence gathering group.  And when Dulles became Deputy DCI and then Director, this aspect fully flowered.

    Prouty wrote a series of memorable articles for various publications in the seventies and eighties.  These essays displayed an intimate knowledge of contemporary American history, characters , American conflicts in world affairs and just how the CIA worked, both abroad and domestically. For instance, he was one of the first to point out that the Agency had lists of cleared attorneys and doctors in major cities who could be called upon to cover up certain crimes the CIA committed. A document proving such was the case was later declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 35)

    Along with Peter Scott, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, he was one of the first to argue—contrary to conventional wisdom—that President Johnson had seriously altered Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam.  Fletcher Prouty was aware of this since he worked for General Victor Krulak. And Krulak was very closely involved with Vietnam policy in 1963.  As time went on, Fletcher also became more and more interested in the assassinations of the sixties, especially the murder of President Kennedy.  There was a now famous exchange of letters between Jim Garrison and Prouty over the former DA’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Prouty was appreciative of Garrison’s efforts. So as Jeff Carter’s film notes, when Oliver Stone talked to both Garrison and his editor, Zach Sklar—who became co-screenwriter of JFK—those two urged him to get in contact with Fletcher.  

    As Prouty notes in the film, only half-humorously, if he would have known what was about to happen to him, he would have run for the hills.  To understand how this happened one needs to be reminded of the fact that the character of Mr. X, so memorably delineated by Donald Sutherland, was based on Prouty.  And it was through that character that the film JFK exploded the myth that Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination, had continued Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. 

    That explosion, quite literally, was a shock to the system. In retrospect we can see that the entire establishment—the MSM, academia, Washington—had cooperated to, not just hide the facts, but to also marginalize the voices that had tried to reveal the truth about this epochal tragedy. And they had done this assiduously for close to thirty years.  The combination of the film presenting the hidden record so dramatically and effectively, plus showing how Garrison was exposed to it at the time—which, as the ARRB proved, was also accurate—was just too much.  Too many people were now shown to be utterly and completely wrong e. g. New YorkTimes journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Plus, as the film suggested–because the policy reversal was so abrupt—it could have been the reason for Kennedy’s assassination. For as JFK demonstrated, the Warren Report was a false document. Lee Harvey Oswald had not killed President Kennedy. 

    Sutherland’s role as Mr. X in the film was a tour de force. And during the memorable walk he took in Washington with Garrison (Kevin Costner), the information that X conveyed about the overseas crimes of the CIA was all accurate information. And Prouty was there for much of it e.g. the secret war against Cuba.  

    But it was what Sutherland said about Vietnam that was so disturbing.  One reason being that just four months after the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission were issued, the first combat troops landed in DaNang.  An escalation that Kennedy would simply not countenance. (Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, p. 63) Further, the film took proper notice of NSAM 263.  That October 1963 order was to begin Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in December, to be completed in 1965.  Prouty knew about all this since, through his superior, Krulak, he worked on the withdrawal program. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, second edition, p. 408).  As he says in the film, the actual Taylor/McNamara report was ready and waiting to be handed to the visiting delegation upon their return.

    In other words, what Mr. X/Prouty, was saying in the film was this:  if Kennedy had lived, 58, 000 Americans, 3.8 million Vietnamese, and 2 million Cambodians would not have perished. America would have been spared ten more years of civil strife and massive demonstrations.  And the rebuilding of Vietnam would have begun much sooner.  What Stone and Sklar were also saying was this: there had been a cover up about this colossal matter, and just about the entire establishment was complicit in it.

    Because Prouty was the figure in the film that conveyed this rather powerful message, both the information, and the messenger were singled out for attack by the likes of George Lardner, Robert Sam Anson and Edward Epstein. (For my specific reply to Epstein, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-abstract-reality-of-edward-epstein

    What these three journalists all had in common was that they had previously attacked Jim Garrison back in the sixties and seventies. They were not going to stand idly by while they were belatedly proven wrong. So they all attacked Stone’s film, which because of their proven bias, they should not have been allowed to do.  In fact Lardner and Anson did so before the film was actually released. (See The Book of the Film, by Oliver Stone and Zack Sklar, pp. 191-98; 208-229) All three men either went after Prouty or disputed the information that Prouty (and historian John Newman) had supplied to director Oliver Stone about Vietnam.

    But here is the ultimate irony.  The declassifications of the ARRB proved beyond reasonable doubt that the film, and Prouty, were correct. In the documentary film, JFK Revisited, are displayed the records of the May 1963 Sec/Def conference. Those records were so compelling that even the New York Times had to admit that Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam at the time of his death. (See the book JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 186) So, bottom line, this was all Sturm and Drang about Prouty to disguise the fundamental truth that he and Stone were correct about Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (For more on what Anson tried to do to Prouty, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-the-arrb

    The film deals with other controversial subjects which Prouty has special knowledge of, for example, the Suez Crisis of 1956, where Israel, France and England tried to dislodge Nasser as the leader of Egypt. In this episode, Fletcher concentrates on the duplicity of Foster Dulles and how he set up Anthony Eden to take the fall in the affair. His discussion of the U2 shootdown is also quite interesting since he thinks that Gary Powers’ flight was sabotaged.  The motive being to sandbag the upcoming May 1960 Summit Meeting in Paris.  Prouty also discusses how the Bay of Pigs mysteriously morphed from the time it was being planned by Richard Nixon and the CIA—then it was a guerilla action with 300 men—to the time Kennedy was inaugurated, where it was now training almost 3000 men. Prouty has always stressed the importance of the Taylor Commission afterwards, where Bobby Kennedy went after Allen Dulles tooth and nail.  It was here that RFK began to suspect that the operation was never expected to succeed, and that its imminent failure would be used to coax JFK into using the Navy to intercede.

    All in all, this is a worthy tribute to a worthy man. One  who was unjustly smeared, even by those in the critical community. Jeff Carter has interweaved several interviews with Fletcher by people like John Judge, Dave Ratcliffe, Bruce Kainer, and Len Osanic for maximum informational effect.  And there is a concluding interview with Oliver Stone which was done in Vancouver.  Here the director gives Fletcher Prouty the praise he deserves for the solid and valuable information he contributed to his landmark film.  

    From which, the establishment never recovered.

    The film may be watched here:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fletcherproutyscoldwar

  • UK and US accused of obstructing inquiry into 1961 death of UN chief


    The US and UK have been accused by university researchers of obstructing a United Nations inquiry into the 1961 plane crash that killed the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold. A conference in London heard an update from the UN assistant secretary general for legal affairs, Stephen Mathias, on progress in the inquiry, which is seeking archive documentation from member states. The participants said the US and UK had been dragging their feet in handing over potentially vital information.

    Read more here. (The Guardian)

  • The Kennedy Withdrawal, by Marc Selverstone

    The Kennedy Withdrawal, by Marc Selverstone


    Marc Selverstone begins his book The Kennedy Withdrawal with a curious, self-serving statement. He says that Kennedy’s withdrawal plan has not previously been treated in an extensively scholarly way. Is the author saying that somehow the works of John Newman, James Galbraith, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, Gordon Goldstein, Howard Jones and James Blight do not matter? Its clear from his references that he has read virtually all of these works. But he barely refers, for example, to John Newman.

    In 1992, the combination of John’s book, plus Oliver Stone’s film JFK—which utilized his data—had a powerful public impact, since much new information was conveyed to the audience. It eventually caused the formation of the Assassination Record Review Board which, among 60,000 documents, declassified hundreds of pages on Vietnam. John’s work, and those newly declassified pages, showed how, with very few exceptions, the prior work in this field had relied on false premises and ongoing empty cliches. Many of them owing to none other than Lyndon Johnson. This might be the reason Selverstone wants to ignore John.

    II

    The first thing that one notices about this book is that there is little background to the years under question: 1961-64. That is, there is not much detailed information about how America got caught in such a predicament in Indochina. And further, what Kennedy’s views on colonial matters were, as opposed to his predecessors: President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon and the Dulles brothers, i.e. John Foster at State, and Allen at CIA. Not only is this dealt with rather briefly, the small portion offered is delivered in a sweeping, synoptic manner. But, even worse, Selverstone distorts the little he does offer.

    For example, he tries to imply that somehow, Kennedy never considered a neutralist solution in Vietnam. (p. 18) Not only did Kennedy consider it, he even tried for one. But he was betrayed on this by Averill Harriman. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 119) In his comments on the general subject of neutralism, Selverstone uses Robert Rakove’s Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. But he uses it in an argument to turn Kennedy into a Cold Warrior. (Selverstone, p. 18)

    Yet, the whole point of Rakove’s book is to demonstrate how JFK did battle with the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower in the fifties. And to show how, once in the White House, his policies broke with the Cold War ethos they had created. Rakove illustrates this in places like the Middle East and Africa. In fact, Kennedy was clear about this in conversations with Harris Wofford prior to the 1960 primary season. He said, “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the Cold War.” He then continued by saying, if LBJ or Stu Symington won the 1960 nomination, “we might as well elect Dulles or Acheson, it would be the same cold war foreign policy all over again.” (Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, pp 36-37)

    But that is not all Selverstone is up to. He is determined to portray Kennedy as not just a Cold Warrior, but something like a conservative Democrat. So he says that Kennedy had a halting pursuit of civil rights as president. (p. 52) Again, this is simply wrong. As I have proven, Kennedy did more for civil rights in 3 years than Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower did in three decades. That is simply a fact. (Click here) Yet, this is how comprehensive the author is in his attempt to caricature JFK.

    Selverstone mentions, like others, that in 1961 Kennedy would break certain aspects of the 1954 Geneva Accords. (p. 48) I have always thought this to be patent nonsense. Those peace accords were shattered in 1956 when Eisenhower refused to conduct the national elections which were to unify Vietnam, after a division that was only temporary. But also, neither side was to form any foreign military alliances. Not only did Eisenhower and Foster Dulles do that, they placed in power a whole new government through Colonel Edward Lansdale. It was through Lansdale that South Vietnam had Ngo Dinh Diem installed as fiat leader. Further, in late 1955, France let America set up a Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon, superseding and dispelling their own. That cinched a new military alliance. For this, and other reasons—like Hanoi’s infiltrations into the south—the Accords were a dead letter as far back as 1955. Selverstone is using transparent camouflage.

    For example, he writes that Kennedy set up a task force for Vietnam. He leaves out the fact that that this was part of Kennedy’s wholesale revision of Eisenhower’s approach. JFK also did this for other trouble spots like Congo and Laos. (Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 38) It was done so he would not be imprisoned by prior Eisenhower and Dulles policies— to halt the bureaucratic momentum Ike had set in motion. Laos is a good example of this. The day before Kennedy was inaugurated, Eisenhower told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia. If Laos fell, America would have to write off the entire area. (Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition, p.9)

    With respect to Laos it took about five months to bring the government around to JFK’s views. (Kaiser, p. 39). This included Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow. They agreed with Eisenhower, who favored intervention. As did the Pentagon who wanted to mass 60,000 men, use air power, and, atomic weapons in case China intervened. As David Kaiser wrote, the joint chiefs had “thoroughly absorbed the Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine of treating nuclear weapons as conventional weapons.” (Kaiser, p. 43) Kennedy disarmed the hawks by estimates of how many men the Chinese and Hanoi could get into Laos for a war. He also talked in private with Ambassador Winthrop Brown and steered him to a neutralist approach. (Kaiser, pp. 40-41) As Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, referring to the Joint Chiefs on the Bay of Pigs and Laos: “If it weren’t for Cuba, I might have taken this advice seriously.” (Mike Swanson, Why the Vietnam War? p. 284)

    To most prior writers on the subject, Kennedy’s handling of Laos is an important precedent.

    III

    If Kennedy was a prototypical Cold Warrior on Southeast Asia, why was he promoting the book and film The Ugly American from 1958 through 1962? That book was one of the most trenchant, bitterest indictments of American Indochina foreign policy in all literature. It essentially says that if all America had to offer in the Third World was anti-communism, then she might as well close shop and go home. Kennedy bought a copy for all 100 senators and helped purchase a full page ad for the book in The New York Times. He then helped get the film made in Thailand. (See, the film JFK : Destiny Betrayed or click here) The imaginary country the action takes place in, Sarkhan, is meant to symbolize Vietnam.

    Continuing in this vein, Selverstone also wants to display the image of JFK abiding by the Domino Theory. (See p. 148). Even if he has to use the unmitigated hawk Walt Rostow to do so. (p.230) Again, Selverstone is not telling the whole story. In 1961, Kennedy told journalist and family friend Arthur Krock that he had serious doubts about the Domino Theory, and did not think the USA should get into a land war in Asia. (Swanson, p. 335)

    McGeorge Bundy also commented on this whole “falling dominoes” concept, which allegedly would have trapped Kennedy in Saigon. Bundy once said that, although Kennedy was not prepared to be an anti-domino theorist, “he certainly was not in the sort of straightforward way, ‘you lost this and all is gone’ kind of fellow….” (Goldstein, p. 230). Bundy then said something very important about Vietnam: “He was deeply aware of the fact that this place was in fact ‘X’ thousand miles away in terms both of American interest and American politics.” (ibid)

    In short: Was Vietnam an inherent part of America’s national security? Kennedy famously asked General Lyman Lemnitzer in November of 1961, words to the effect: If we did not go into Cuba, which is so close, why should we go into Vietnam, which is so far away? Lemnitzer replied, that the Joint Chiefs still felt we should go into Cuba. (Newman, pp. 139-40). This crystalizes Kennedy’s dispute with the vast majority of his advisors. And it shows that Selverstone’s attempts at diminishing that dispute and foreshortening Kennedy’s attempts to break out of the Cold War paradigm are persiflage. As we shall see, those two traits did not apply to Lyndon Johnson.

    The November 1961 epochal debates over combat troops and what we should do in Vietnam is given rather short shrift by Selverstone. More importantly, the mission given to John Kenneth Galbraith right after is also discounted. (Selverstone, pp. 43-45) To me, those two events, plus the November 27th meeting of Kennedy with his advisors, are crucial to understanding what happened in 1963 and how JFK’s policies were reversed by LBJ.

    The November meetings are key since they show Kennedy disarming the hawks just as he did with Laos—by asking a series of probing questions. (Howard Jones, Death of a Generation, p. 126) Upon General Maxwell Taylor’s return from Saigon, Kennedy was shocked by his combat troops request. Because he had advised Taylor in advance not to do so. He was so taken aback “that he recalled copies of the final report.” Kennedy also planted stories in the press that Taylor had not really recommended combat troops. (Newman, pp. 137-38).

    IV

    One reason Kennedy was adamantly opposed was the simple reason that he had been in Vietnam during the imperial war in the early fifties and saw what had happened to France. Therefore, to Kennedy, the war was Saigon’s to win or lose. If it became a “white man’s war” America would be defeated, just as the French had been. (Jones, pp. 125-26). Selverstone leaves out that part of Kennedy’s quote and he (shockingly) writes that, whether Kennedy was going to make a 300,000 man combat troop deployment is unclear. (Selverstone, p. 42) As many have written—including Newman, Jones, Goldstein and James Galbraith—such a thing is pretty much unimaginable. Because the line Kennedy drew on the “no combat troops” issue in 1961 was indelible. In fact, U. Alexis Johnson, Dean Rusk’s Deputy, said for the record that “the line has clearly been drawn in Vietnam.” (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 371)

    As per John Kenneth Galbraith’s journey to Saigon, Selverstone has this happening almost out of nowhere: somehow Galbraith decided to take a sight-seeing tour of Saigon on his way back to India. (p. 45) The record shows that Galbraith had been in Washington during a part of these November debates. He had stolen a copy of the Taylor/Rostow report off of Walt Rostow’s desk. He took it back to his hotel room and was horrified. (Parker, pp. 367-68) Kennedy asked him to write a memo to counter it, and JFK used some of these points in his warding off the hawks. On the day Galbraith was going to leave Washington, Kennedy gave his instructions to the Ambassador for India: he was to visit Saigon as quickly as possible and report back to him personally and to no one else. He wanted Galbraith’s advice as to what should be done next. (Parker, p. 372)

    The third critical point, the November 27, 1961 meeting, is not even noted by Selverstone. Yet this event is of maximum importance. This White House meeting was attended by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and Max Taylor among others. Although he called the meeting, Kennedy was the last to arrive. After making a bit of small talk, the president forcefully unloaded on the reason for the meeting. He was clearly frustrated by how hard he had to fight to get NSAM 111 approved, which denied combat troops but raised aid and advisors to Saigon. Kennedy said as clearly as possible, “When policy is decided on, people on the spot must support it or get out.” He demanded whole hearted support for his decisions. He then asked: Who was going to implement his Vietnam policy. McNamara said he would. (Newman, p. 145-46)

    Why is this so important? And why is it inexplicable that Selverstone left it out? Because, in April, Galbraith would be in Washington again. And what Selverstone does with this trip is once more, just strange. He seems to want to make Galbraith the MC running the whole agenda. But the record does not support that. Galbraith had written another report in early April arguing against any further involvement with the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. He even warned of the possibility of an escalation to a Korean War conflagration. (Letter to Kennedy of April 4, 1962). Kennedy was very taken by this communication. And he read it to diplomat Averill Harriman and NSC assistant Mike Forrestal. Galbraith was then directed by Kennedy to talk to McNamara about the memo. (Newman, p. 235) According to Galbraith McNamara got the message. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 129; Pentagon Papers, Vol. 2, pp 669-671)

    So in a very real way, after the November 27th meeting, Kennedy directed Galbraith to his man on Vietnam policy, McNamara, and this begat the origins of the withdrawal program. This is double sourced through McNamara’s deputy Roswell Gilpatric, who said the withdrawal “was part of a plan the president asked him [McNamara] to develop to unwind this whole thing.” He also added, that Kennedy:

    …made it clear to McNamara and me that he wanted to not only hold the level of US military presence in Vietnam down, but he wanted to reverse the flow and that’s when this question of bringing back some of the US military personnel came up. But it was in keeping with his general reluctance to see us sucked in militarily to Southeast Asia. (Jones, pp. 381-82)

    The reason I think that Selverstone does this curtailing is because he wants to suggest that somehow the withdrawal plan was really McNamara’s doing. (See p. 71 for an example)

    But not only does the above record not indicate this, but to buy into it one has to explain how McNamara, on his own, did a 180 degree pirouette on the issue. During the November debates, he advised Kennedy to commit six combat divisions to Indochina. (Goldstein, p. 60) I have shown above how McNamara’s reversal was caused by JFK. The last certifying event is when McNamara attended the Sec/Def meeting of 5/8/62. He told Commanding General Harkins, along with General Lyman Lemnitzer, to stay after. Reciting Kennedy, McNamara said Vietnam was not America’s war. The American function was to help train the ARVN, the army of South Vietnam. He then asked Harkins when the ARVN could take over completely. After the shock wore off, the Defense Secretary said he wanted plans for how the American military structure was going to be dismantled. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 120)

    It is clear how this May 1962 order came about; and it was not McNamara’s doing.

    V

    Before getting to Selverstone’s off the wall denouement, let me point out four other absurdities.

    At times, the author actually tries to suggest that, somehow, the withdrawal was done to curry favor with the media. (p. 122, p. 135) I had to go back to Daniel Hallin’s book, The Uncensored War to look this one up. Hallin’s fine study concluded that up until the Tet offensive, the media embraced the war and had no strong objections to escalation. (Hallin, p. 174) The best example of this was what they did to Governor George Romney of Michigan. When Romney went against that grain on Vietnam in 1967, suggesting America should not be there, he was literally destroyed as a viable presidential candidate for 1968. In fact, as he often does, Selverstone later admits that the press supported a firm commitment to remain in Vietnam. So the author contradicts his thesis.(p. 149)

    But JFK understood this. This is why he tried to keep his decision to begin the withdrawal low key. So low key that some historians had a problem locating it for decades on end. There was no political upside in withdrawal at that time. Kennedy was doing it since he felt it was the right thing to do. Newman notes in his book that it was Kennedy’s enemies—the military in Saigon— who actually publicized his decision and forced him to formulate it into NSAM 263. (Newman, p. 435)

    Selverstone also tries to repeat a Chomskyite strophe which I thought was long ago obsolete. That somehow Kennedy’s withdrawal plan was based on the course of the war. (p. 128) Way back in 1997, the release of hundreds of pages of documents more or less put an end to that maneuver. (See Probe Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 19-21) As I wrote back then, after reading these documents, everyone in the loop seemed aware that Kennedy would begin his pullout in December of 1963 and end it at the end of 1965. Even General Earle Wheeler observed that any proposal for overt action invited a negative presidential decision. And the specific transition plans are laid out in black and white.

    As James Galbraith and Howard Jones wrote, Kennedy’s withdrawal was unconditional and did not rely on victory. (Boston Review, “Exit Strategy” September 1, 2003) Newman made this issue deader than a doornail when he listened to McNamara’s debrief from the Pentagon. McNamara said that once the training period was over, he and Kennedy had decided the effort was complete. They could not fight the war for Saigon. They were leaving. (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd C Gardner and Ted GIttinger, pp. 166-67)

    Third, Selverstone has no mention of the circumstances of the writing of the Taylor/McNamara Report of October 1963. Once the plans for turning the war over to Saigon were handed in, Kennedy sent those two men to Saigon in order to pen a report that would certify his decision to begin his withdrawal. Realizing what Taylor had done back in 1961, he was taking no chances. It was written before the party departed. (Jones, p. 370) But still, on the return, people like William Sullivan forced the removal of the section on withdrawal. Selverstone has Taylor putting it back in. (p. 167) Newman writes that Kennedy called Taylor and McNamara into his office. When they emerged, McNamara had the section put back in the report. (Newman, p. 411) As the reader can see, as with the origins of the withdrawal plan, Selverstone is trying to keep Kennedy’s hands off its result.

    The book moves toward the famous last words of Kennedy to Mike Forrestal before JFK went to Dallas. Forrestal said in 1971 that before the president departed Washington he told him that there would be a review of Indochina policy when he got back, Selverstone writes that, since in an earlier interview Forrestal did not mention that, then somehow Forrestal was embellishing. Since Forrestal had long passed, that is easy to say. He then writes that this typifies the ‘expansion of claims about Kennedy’s intentions” at a time when they seemed most laudable and prophetic. Meaning, by 1971, the war was a mess.

    When I read that, I realized that this was what the book was really about. But, like any zealot, Selverstone is not aware that he has set himself up to have the plank sawed off beneath him. Because, as Peter Scott has noted, way back in 1967 Charles Bartlett and Edward Weintal wrote a book called Facing the Brink. It has a chapter dealing with the transition between Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam. They confirmed what Forrestal said: That shortly before he was assassinated, JFK had ordered a complete review of American policy in Southeast Asia. (p. 71). That book was released in 1967, so it was likely being written in 1965-66. Which was before the war had gone south, before the media had altered course, and while Johnson was still rallying public opinion to save South Vietnam. Therefore, far from indicating any “expansion” of Kennedy’s intentions, what Selverstone has shown is his insistence on ignoring what the president was actually doing.

    That insistence extends much further than Forrestal. In my review of Newman’s 2017 revision of JFK and Vietnam, I listed 19 people who Kennedy had revealed his intent to withdraw from Vietnam. This included senators, generals, ambassadors and journalists. Were all these people being deceitful? Or was Kennedy a pathological liar? If you do not deal with this evidence in any real way, then you can simply—and, as we have seen, wrongly—chalk it up as an “expansion of claims about Kennedy’s intentions”.

    VI

    The subtitle of Selverstone’s book is “Camelot and the Commitment to Vietnam”. The reader might ask himself, is not the full title somewhat of an oxymoron? The McNamara/Taylor report states three times that the American forces would be out by 1965. But agreeing with Howard Jones, Selverstone states that it allowed for a small amount of advisors to be left for further training. In either case, it would have been 1,500 at the most.

    So here is my question: If that would have been the case—and Johnson had not first stopped and then reversed Kennedy’s policies—what would have happened? I can tell you what would have happened. The same thing that occurred in 1975, when Hanoi overran South Vietnam in two months. In 1965, Hanoi had a total armed force, including reservists, of about 750,000 men. (Some estimates go beyond that into seven figures.) That does not include about 80,000 Viet Cong in the south. That army was being supplied with munitions by both the USSR and China. The idea that a thousand or so American advisors, plus the ARVN, was going to stop that force from taking Saigon is so ridiculous that it almost seems satirical. To use another example, Hanoi’s Easter Offensive of 1972 would have succeeded except for extreme American bombing, some of it laser guided, by the Air Force and off of aircraft carriers of the Seventh Fleet. Hanoi had defeated France, but been robbed by the cancellation of the Geneva Accords. They understood that to unify their country they would need a military victory over Saigon and that is what they were prepared to do. And eventually did do. For Selverstone to compare this situation to Afghanistan is ridiculous.

    As we all know, instead of America being out by the end of 1965, Johnson sent 170,000 combat troops to Vietnam. Thus breaking a line that Kennedy had drawn back in 1961. How does the author explain this? He says that the withdrawal plan was flexible and conditions changed. (Selverstone, p. 244) As John Newman explained to me, the only way it was flexible is that Kennedy did not want Saigon to fall before the election. So the outflow of advisors could be adjusted to prevent that. (2020 Interview for Oliver Stone’s film JFK Revisited)

    But that is not at all what happened. And conditions do not change over a space of four days. Which was the space between Forrestal’s talk with JFK and the first meeting Johnson had on Vietnam. One example of the latter: Henry Cabot Lodge had been recalled to Washington for the purpose of Kennedy firing him. (Douglass, p. 374) Not only did that not happen, but the people at that meeting understood that a new martial tone was now being installed. How else does one explain this: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” (ibid, p. 375)

    As Scott wrote many years ago, this kind of talk in relation to Vietnam was pretty much not part of Kennedy’s lexicon. For New Year’s, a month later, Johnson wrote a letter to the new leader of Vietnam, Duong Van Minh. In that letter LBJ proclaimed “…the fullest measure of support…in achieving victory.” (NY Times, January 4, 1964) Achieving victory? Even the Times admitted that this communication appeared to cancel any deadline for removing American forces by 1965. Clearly, McNamara understood that Johnson was enacting a sea change in policy. For as Scott also adds, McNamara and CIA Director John McCone went to Saigon in mid-December and announced the change to Minh. McNamara told him that America was ready to help “as long as aid was needed.” How could the alteration of JFK’s policy be any more clear? (Government by Gunplay, edited by Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian, p. 183)

    These almost immediate changes could not be due to a sudden reversal of military conditions. Which is what Selverstone wants us to think. This was simply the difference between Johnson and Kennedy. And Johnson was explicit about this: “…the only way to subdue the Viet Cong was to kill them and not to bring the New Frontier to South Vietnam.” (Ibid, p. 155). Again, can anyone imagine Kennedy saying this?

    As delineated by Newman, Selverstone tries to get around Johnson’s alterations to NSAM 273. For instance, he says that any changes Johnson would have made to the draft of the document would likely have been made by Kennedy anyway. (p. 208) This ignores two key points: McGeorge Bundy drew up the draft in anticipation of what he thought JFK would want. Secondly, one of the major changes allowed the CIA and military to actually use US forces in hit and run raids in the north. Bundy knew Kennedy was against that from the start. Which is why he did not include it. LBJ had no such compunctions and altered it. (Newman, pp. 456-57)

    In regards to that overall issue, Selverstone actually writes that “Johnson’s determination to prevail flowed in part from his understanding that it was Kennedy’s as well.” (Selverstone, pp. 205-06) The idea that Johnson did not know that Kennedy was withdrawing in a losing situation, and he was now reversing that policy is undermined by Johnson’s own communications with McNamara. In fact, one reason that, one by one, Kennedy’s advisors left was because they now felt that Johnson was blaming his escalation on JFK. (Blight pp. 306, 309-10)

    The ultimate proof of that difference is NSAM 288. As most commentators agree, this was the beginning of planning for a total war against Hanoi, including massive air power and bombing. It had been urged on and commented on by the Joint Chiefs. (Kaiser, pp. 302-305) , Kennedy did not even want military men visiting Vietnam, let alone drawing up his policy. (America’s Last President, by Monika Wiesak, p. 133) But what JFK refused to countenance in three years, Johnson was now doing in three months.

    For this book, that, and many other things, are not really difference makers. Marc Selverstone’s The Kennedy Withdrawal is so agenda driven, so littered with dubious assumptions, so averse to logic and common sense, that its less a book than a curiosity piece.

  • CounterPunch Whiffs Again!

    CounterPunch Whiffs Again!


    On July 15th, CounterPunch did it again.  The occasion was an article comparing the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan with the American debacle in Indochina.  Author David Schultz used the famous line, this time attributed to Hegel, that the only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. He wrote that as the Taliban now takes over some of us “wonder if this is not Déjà vu all over again and that what we thought we had learned from the Vietnam War proved to be a fleeting lesson.”

    Schultz goes on to note the Kent State shooting, helicopters over the embassy in 1975, the domino theory, over 58,000 dead American soldiers, tens of billions wasted.  He then mentions some of the literature on the Vietnam War.  First off is Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake which tried to accent how different the culture of Vietnam was and how the American military did not understand it.  Then, of course, since this is CounterPunch, Schultz has to mention David Halberstam and The Best and the Brightest.

    Here is how Schultz quantifies Halberstam’s book.  He writes that it pointed to:

    ….the arrogance of the Kennedy administration in failing to understand that Vietnam was more about colonial independence than it was about communism and Cold War rivalry.

    As I have indicated too many times to enumerate here, this misses two major points about Halberstam.  First, Halberstam completely revised his view of Vietnam between his first book, The Making of a Quagmire, and his second book on the subject The Best and the Brightest.  In that first book, Halberstam  criticized Kennedy for not being militant enough in Vietnam. In 1965, Halberstam said that Kennedy should have gotten America in earlier. In fact, that book is an utterly coruscating critique of American policy in Vietnam until 1965. The hero of the book is Colonel John Paul Vann.  Why?  Because Vann knew how to win the war! (See Chapter 11) Halberstam is even more explicit about this later when he declares, “Bombers and helicopters and napalm are a help, but they are not enough.” (p. 321)  He then gives us his Schultzian lesson about Vietnam: “The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder, and force the other side to practice self-deception.” (p. 322)

    Halberstam’s role model in 1965, Vann, thought that if America was going to win the war, American troops were needed. (See the Introduction to the 2008 edition by Daniel Singal, p. xi) Well, Lyndon Johnson gave Vietnam about 500,000 American troops and it did not work out very well. Since Halberstam started writing The Best and the Brightest in about 1968, when this had all clearly turned out to be a disaster, the author decided to cover his tracks.  Back in 1963, Kennedy did not like what Halberstam and Vann were trying to do––which was move toward escalation by criticizing what they saw as JFK’s timidity. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 261) So therefore, even though America had been involved in Vietnam for eleven years prior to Kennedy’s inauguration, Halberstam focused a large part of 1972’s The Best and the Brightest on the years 1961-63, virtually ignoring what the Eisenhower administration had done to secure a commitment to Vietnam.  Eisenhower had, in fact, created a new country there, one that had not existed prior to 1954. And since America had created it, then America was obliged to defend it.

    By relying on Halberstam’s museum piece, Schultz gets the other part he writes about wrong also. President Kennedy did comprehend what the Vietnam war was about.  He understood the true circumstances because of his association with Edmund Gullion going back to Saigon in 1951. (Click here for details) This is why he refused to commit combat troops in theater. During the crucial debates in November of 1961, Air Force Colonel Howard Burris took notes. They are contained in James Blight’s book, Virtual JFK (pp. 282-83)

    Kennedy argued that Vietnam was not a case of aggression as was Korea. Therefore, America would be subject to intense criticism from even her allies. He then argued that the French had spent millions there with no degree of success. He also argued that the circumstances were such that even Democrats in Congress would have a hard time defending such a commitment. Further, one would be fighting a guerilla force, “sometimes in phantom-like fashion.” That would mean whatever base of operations American troops had would be insecure. Burris noted that during the debate, Kennedy turned back attempts by Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Lyman Lemnitzer to derail his train of thought.

    I don’t see how one can locate a more defining moment, or show how well Kennedy really understood what the facts of the war were than this.  One can argue that Ed Lansdale had been the first person to suggest inserting combat troops into Vietnam, something Kennedy refused many, many times. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, first edition, p. 20; Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 52) After Kennedy’s death, when Lansdale returned to the White House, he recommended sending John Paul Vann back to Vietnam. Vann did return in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson overturned Kennedy’s policy by sending tens of thousands of combat troops into Vietnam. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 384). Using David Halberstam today as any measure of what happened in Vietnam would be like cranking up a Model T Ford to make a cross country trip.  Halberstam was the author who called 1964, the “lost year” in Vietnam. Geez Dave, wasn’t the Tonkin Gulf Resolution kind of important? (For more on Halberstam click here”>)

    Another issue with the article is its comparison with how America got into Vietnam and how America got into Afghanistan. Schultz writes that America got into the latter as a result of the attacks of 9/11. Which is only partly true.  America was involved even before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979. President Carter had allowed the CIA to operate in the country at his National Security Advisor’s request. The late Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that such aid would likely induce a Soviet invasion and that would give the USA an opportunity to hand Russia its own Vietnam. (January, 1998, interview with Le Nouvel Observateur)  As most people know, the CIA now began to back the struggle of the Islamic radicals against the Russians. This included Osama Bin Laden. Much of this aid went through Pakistan.  And in return, America agreed to look the other way as that country built a nuclear weapon. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 386)

    Unlike America’s commitment to Vietnam, the Russians never had more than 120,000 troops in theater. Mikhail Gorbachev recommended a peace agreement before the Russians formally withdrew in 1989. The concept was to leave behind Mohammad Najibullah as president and he would form a coalition government with some of the more moderate tribes. The goal was to marginalize the Islamic fundamentalists. For whatever reason, the USA would not sign onto this sensible agreement. (The New Yorker, 9/29/2009, article by Steve Coll) There were warnings from people like the late Benazir Bhutto that were quite frank and accurate.  She said, “You are creating a Frankenstein.” (Newsweek, 10/1/2001, article by Evan Thomas)

    Bhutto was correct.  Unlike the Tom Hanks depiction of the late congressman Charlie Wilson, the congressman backed this decision. (DiEugenio, p. 387) America actually gave aid to some of these deplorable fundamentalists, e.g., Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The one decent tribal leader in the area, Ahmad Shah Massoud, only got a fraction of what those two men received. (Alternet, 12/20/2007, article by Melissa Roddy)

    As Bhutto and Gorbachev predicted, the country descended into a horrifying civil war. After three years, Najbullah was dislodged.  Pakistan then sent in its own charges, the Taliban, who backed Sharia Law. Najbullah was taken prisoner, mutilated and killed in late 1996. Massoud held out for years until he was assassinated two days before the 9-11 attacks.

    This is not just an interesting story for what it says about Tom Hanks and his cartoonish movie Charlie Wilson’s War. But also because, after Massoud’s demise, the Taliban took over the country.  It became a hiding place for Osama Bin Laden.  More specifically, the Battle of Tora Bora, featuring American special forces, took place there in December of 2001. The result was, again for whatever reason, Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

    On October 7, 2001, George W. Bush launched his invasion of Afghanistan, which dislodged the Taliban. President Obama reduced this operation significantly. And now President Biden will, perhaps, finally end it.

    One can argue that, in all this, America was still fighting the Cold War, except this time it was in Afghanistan, not Indochina.  But was there really a reason to do this? Especially in light of Gorbachev’s peace offering? To me, that is the real resemblance of the two situations. In the first instance, America created a country in the name of the Cold War. In the second, America decided to radically Islamize a country in the name of the Cold War.

    In the first instance, we know Kennedy did not agree with the policy and was withdrawing at the time of his death.  With what this author has discovered about Kennedy and the Middle East, I doubt very much he would have sided with the radical Moslems. (Click here as to why )

    But that is a story CounterPunch could never tell.

  • Jonathan Chait meets Michael Kazin

    Jonathan Chait meets Michael Kazin


    Almost any notice in the media about John F. Kennedy will supply an excuse for someone in the MSM to write a derogatory article about him. As we have seen, Michael Kazin used the occasion of a recent book about Kennedy to do a hit piece on him in The New York Review of Books. (Click here for details) Recently, a panel of scholars for C-SPAN did a poll ranking past presidents, including Donald Trump. Journalist Jonathan Chait didn’t like it. Why? Because Kennedy ended up in eighth place. Chait thinks this was unwarranted. Therefore, New York Magazine let him do a Kazin: that is a hit job on the slain president. (June 30, 2021)

    What is immediately noticeable about these rants is this: None of the writers knows very much about Kennedy or his presidency. But they pretend they do. For instance, Chait writes that Kennedy made some promises on civil rights in his presidential campaign, but abandoned them when he saw this would offend southern conservatives. The thinking being that it would stop the passage of his other domestic programs.

    As I have explained before, this is a liberal orthodoxy that has a serious problem with it. It isn’t true. This author spent months studying the issue for a four-part series about the Kennedys and civil rights. (Click here for that series)

    Kennedy did not abandon civil rights at all. He was advised by his specialist on the issue, Harris Wofford, that it would be very difficult to pass an omnibus civil rights bill in his first year and probably even in his second year. After all, there had been nine different attempts to pass such a bill since 1917 and they all failed. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 39) Wofford therefore advised Kennedy to issue executive orders and also to rely on the court system, through the Attorney General, to further the cause. The hope being that this would create a furor over the issue that would tilt the balance in the House and Senate. That would then make it possible to pass such a bill.

    That is what Kennedy did; and that is what happened. Anyone can read about this in more than one book (e.g. Wofford’s Of Kennedys and Kings, or Irving Bernstein’s Promises Kept). (Bernstein, pp. 40–41, 48–50)

    To list all the things that Kennedy did for civil rights in just his first year illustrates the utter fallacy of what Chait is trying to sell. Right out of the chute, JFK and his brother intervened in the New Orleans school segregation court case, something that President Eisenhower had avoided. (Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 122) Eisenhower’s failure to act allowed the state legislature to pass laws attempting to curtail and avoid the court’s decision to implement Brown v Board. When Bobby Kennedy got the news about this scheming he replied, “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” (Bass, p. 131)

    The Kennedy administration did something that the Eisenhower administration would never have dreamed of doing. The Attorney General filed charges against the state Secretary of Education, Shelby Jackson. The idea was to stop the governor’s attempt to cut off funding for integrated schools. (Bass, p. 135) When a trial date was set, Jackson backed off and said he would not interfere. This episode began in February of 1961, a month after Kennedy’s inauguration.

    A similar case occurred in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Due to scheming by the governor and legislature, Prince Edward County had no schools to attend. Again, Eisenhower said he could not do anything about it. Shockingly, he even said states were not required to maintain a school system and, therefore, the president was “powerless to take any action.” (Brian Lee, Ph. D. thesis, A Matter of National Concern, p. 50)

    Again, the Kennedys reversed Eisenhower’s course. The president now began to remake the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals governing Virginia and nearby states. (Lee, p. 6) But the Kennedys also began doing two things that were, again, unprecedented. First, they joined the NAACP lawsuit as a plaintiff, not a friend of the court. Secondly, realizing the court reworking would take time, they appointed family friend William Vanden Heuvel to raise a large amount of money. The idea was to build, from scratch, a free school system to educate the African American students, so they would not fall further behind. (Lee, pp. 145–50)

    Did Chait miss all of this? Well, no surprise, since he also missed those two executive orders that Kennedy signed for affirmative action. The first was written in his first year, which again, no president had ever done before. (Bernstein, p. 56) Finally, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy made it a point to speak at the University of Georgia Law School. He spent half the address talking about civil rights. He said he would enforce the Brown v. Board decision. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, this was the first time anyone could recall an Attorney General speaking out on the issue in the South. (Carl Brauer, John F Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, p. 95)

    That was in May of 1961. Again, we are to assume that Chait missed all of this, which is weird, since it was all unprecedented in the field. But that was just the beginning of a crescendo that led to the submission of Kennedy’s omnibus civil rights bill in February of 1963. (For the rest of the story, click here)

    Chait leads off his article by saying that Kennedy was elected due to his youth and his campaigning about the missile gap. He leaves out the fact that there was only a four-year difference in age between himself and his opponent Richard Nixon. Considering his second point, in Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angles at the Democratic convention, there was no mention of a missile gap. He talked about things like separation of church and state, racial discrimination, the plight of the poor, and said this was no time to try and uphold a status quo that was not working. (Click here for the address) At a famous speech in September, which he gave before the Liberal Party in New York, again one will find no mention of a missile gap. But one will find the following: Kennedy tried to define what he thought the word liberal meant in a political sense, as opposed to how the Republicans defined it:

    But if by a Liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if this is what they mean by a Liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a Liberal.

    Kennedy went on to say that he also believed “…in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities.” He continued by saying that when government “has a job to do, I believe it should do it.” This was then exemplified by his above actions in his first year on the civil rights issue, which, as I showed, were starkly different than Eisenhower’s. (For the whole speech click here)

    One of the nuttiest things that Chait writes is that Kennedy was a man out of his time period, because he thought there were no great problems to solve, no great dragons to slay, and no great compromises to be made. That Chait could borrow that comment from one of the worst biographers of Kennedy, the late Richard Reeves, tells you just what his game is, because Kennedy says just the opposite in both of these speeches. A constant refrain is his haranguing the GOP for not facing up to the problems as he perceives them: of the urban poor, of dispossessed farmers, of creating an imaginative foreign policy. And he clearly implies that a party of Coolidge, Hoover, and Taft simply could not really do anything about these dilemmas. He contrasted that with people like FDR, who chose to act in a time of crisis. And he compared the 1960 election to that of 1932. In other words, the Democrats could do something and would use government to solve problems.

    Chait tries to define Kennedy’s foreign policy by using the Bay of Pigs as an example. He then says, in regards to the Missile Crisis, that the president bungled his way into a nuclear showdown over Cuba. I hate to confront Mr. Chait with the facts, but I must. It was the Russians who placed a first strike capability in Cuba. This featured all three arms of the nuclear triad: long and medium range missiles, bombers, and submarines. In addition, they had 45,000 troops on the island and had also given Fidel Castro tactical atomic weapons. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 66) These would have annihilated any large invading force. This was all done in secret, knowing that Kennedy had insisted there be no offensive weapons in Cuba. And when, due to U2 photography, Kennedy inquired about them, the Soviet foreign minister lied to him about their presence. (Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p. 169) When it came time to confront the situation, Kennedy chose the least provocative action: no invasion, no air strikes, but a blockade. Choosing that option gave each side time to resolve the crisis peacefully. Anyone can read the transcripts of these taped conversations. Clearly, Kennedy was keeping the hawks at bay almost throughout. For a good example, read the record of his meeting with the Joint Chiefs, especially note their derisive comments about the president after he leaves the room. (May and Zelikow, pp. 173–88)

    As we can see, Chait’s article, like Kazin’s, is not factually based. His real point is to try and reverse the concept that somehow there was a step down in class and achievement from Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. For instance, he writes that two programs that Kennedy was trying to get passed, but could not, were federal aid to education and health care for the elderly. As Irving Bernstein has written, Kennedy did get federal aid to education through the senate in October of 1963. (Bernstein, p. 241) Kennedy failed to get a Medicare bill through in 1962, but what Chait leaves out is that Kennedy was bringing it back for consideration through powerful congressman Wilbur Mills in 1963. And on the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy’s congressional liaison, Larry O’Brien wrote that “with Mill’s objections met, the passage of Medicare was assured.” (Bernstein, p. 258) In other words, Kennedy had set the table for Johnson on these two bills.

    This meme is continued when Chait lists the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the War on Poverty as Johnson’s achievements, giving no credit to Kennedy or anyone else. As I have mentioned several times, the idea that Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed is a myth supported by establishment figures like Robert Caro. Clay Risen, who wrote a book about the passage of the act, has shown why it is a myth. (Click here for details)

    President Johnson told Martin Luther King that he could not get the Voting Rights Act passed on his own. The only way he could so was if King did something to give him the torque to implement it. King did so by staging the Selma demonstration, which he was already arranging before Johnson told him this. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker, 7/1/2013)

    The War on Poverty began after Kennedy read Dwight MacDonald’s review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, pp. 242–43) In June of 1963, JFK was already thinking past the Civil Rights Act he had submitted to congress. So he called in his chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, and they began to formulate a plan to counteract pockets of poverty. After Kennedy was assassinated, Heller told Johnson about this plan he and Kennedy had formulated. In other words, the War on Poverty was not Johnson’s concept. It was Kennedy’s. In his jihad to inflate LBJ and downgrade Kennedy, this is how anti-historical Chait becomes.

    If one can comprehend it, Chait even tries to elevate LBJ at Kennedy’s expense over what became Johnson’s disaster in Indochina. With all we know about Vietnam today, I would have thought no one would even think of doing this. But one should never underestimate the stubbornness and perversity of the MSM. Chait begins by saying that it is an unproven assumption that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam. That worn out standby is not sustainable today. With all the information that the Assassination Records Review Board declassified, combined with the work of writers like Gordon Goldstein, Howard Jones, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, James Blight, and the revised version of John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, there is little or no question about the issue: Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. We have a veritable cornucopia of evidence to prove it. And he was going to enact that withdrawal around the 1964 election. (Click here for details)

    Johnson was aware of this plan and within 48 hours of the assassination he started to reverse it. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310; also see Chapter 23 of the 2017 version of Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.) Contrary to Kennedy, Johnson’s concept was to work his escalation plan around the 1964 election. In other words, as he was saying things like he wished no wider war and he did not want to send American boys to die in a war that Asian boys should be fighting, he was arranging to do just that. This has been proven by too many scholars to belabor the point here. But to name just three: Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War, and Edwin Moise’s Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.

    Chait now writes that Kennedy’s policies laid the groundwork for Johnson’s escalation; due to the calculation that no Democrat could lose a territory to communist expansion. I threw my arms up at this one. If Kennedy was withdrawing at the time of his death and Johnson stopped that withdrawal, planned on going to war in Indochina, effectively declared war on Vietnam, and then invaded the country with hundreds of thousands of combat troops—how did Kennedy lay the groundwork for that? In November of 1961, with NSAM 111, Kennedy drew the line: he refused to send combat troops to Indochina. He never crossed that line. There was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day he was killed than on the day he entered office. Johnson not only sent half a million combat troops there, he also initiated one of the largest American air wars ever devised, Rolling Thunder, to try to bomb North Vietnam into submission. Does any credible person think that Kennedy would have countenanced these things, let alone allowed them to happen?

    This relates to Chait’s other point about the fear of “losing Vietnam.” Kennedy simply did not think that Vietnam was worth going to war over. Just like he did not want to commit combat troops to Laos, even though Eisenhower had advised him he might need to do so. (Newman, p. 9) Kennedy was a more sophisticated thinker about the Cold War than Johnson was. For him, Berlin was a flash point, since he was not going to let the Atlantic Alliance be challenged, but Vietnam was simply not worth the price. And this indicates how uninformed Chait is about JFK. Kennedy understood just how hopeless an imperial conflict would be in Vietnam. He comprehended this due to his relationship with diplomat Edmund Gullion in Saigon way back in the early fifties, where he saw firsthand the doomed French effort to recolonize the area. (Click here for details) He also understood the problem from his Ambassador to India, John K. Galbraith who wrote him a memo to counter the hawks who wanted him to intercede in 1961. (Click here for more)

    Compare that to LBJ. Johnson actually said that, if he left Vietnam, he would be doing what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich with Hitler and Mussolini. He then compared losing Vietnam to losing China and that the former would be even worse than the latter. He concluded that reverie with the following:

    Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that. (Blight, p. 211)

    Can anyone conceive of Kennedy saying such things? There is no evidence for it. In fact, as I noted in my review of John Newman’s revised version of JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy told many people that Vietnam was a hopeless struggle, which America could not win. Therefore, he was getting out. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 183) What is so incredible about Chait’s abomination is that, at the end, he concludes that Kennedy’s rating in the poll is due to a lack of analysis. We have just seen what analysis does to Chait.

    Make no mistake, Chait’s handiwork is not an accident. As Jeff Morley wrote in his recent e book about his lawsuit against the CIA, no one ever got ahead in the journalistic world trying to expose new facts about Kennedy’s assassination. Well, since 2013, the same figure applies to Kennedy’s presidency, especially in light of the fact that we now know what happened in Indochina as a result of his death. And since that switch in policy came so fast, perhaps—just perhaps—the two events were related. And if such was the case, how could the MSM have missed it with such completeness?

    As noted at the start, I recently wrote about Michael Kazin’s similar hatchet job about Kennedy’s presidency, disguised as a review of Fredrik Logevall’s book JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century. Well, if one looks back to 2013, Kazin did the same in the pages of The New Republic. At that time, he was allegedly reviewing Thurston Clarke’s book JFK’s Last Hundred Days. (July 15, 2013) As was the case of Kazin with Logevall, it was a review that was not a review. It was a way to downgrade Kennedy and wonder out loud: Geez, why does anyone pay any attention to this guy at all? The title of the article was: “On the Fiftieth Anniversary of JFK’s Assassination Don’t Bother with the Tributes.”

    As I have written before, the MSM drive to conceal who Kennedy really was has become as systematic and assiduous as the attempt to cover up the circumstances of his assassination. As noted above in regards to Vietnam, it’s pretty obvious as to why.

    Mr. Chait meet Mr. Kazin. Future employment for both is secured.

    Action suggested:

    Contact at twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanchait

    The editor of New York Magazine is David Haskell, david.haskell@gmail.com


    See also Brian E. Lee’s Ph.D. thesis from 2015 on the Kennedy administration efforts to restore public education to Prince Edward County, VA.

  • Deep Fake Politics: Empire and the Criminalization of the State

    Deep Fake Politics: Empire and the Criminalization of the State


    In the two previous installments of this review of Can’t Get You Out of My Head (CGYOMH) by Adam Curtis, I covered his poor handling of things like financial chicanery, monetary policy, oil markets, the JFK assassination, and “conspiracy theories” in general. To conclude this review, I am going to cover some of the ways in which Adam Curtis beguiles the audience on crucial issues such as state criminality, the dual state, geopolitics, Western imperialism, and the West’s adversaries—Russia and China specifically. Finally, I conclude with a brief summation of the CGYOMH and an exhortation for us all to take a large grain of salt with anything produced by this BBC pied piper.

    A Shallow Take on the Deep State

    Curtis has a strange way of grappling with US imperialism and the country’s secret government which emerged after World War II. In the fifth episode of CGYOMH, Curtis mentions that the CIA had been manipulating political systems and overthrowing governments around the world without the knowledge of the US public. He then brings up the illustrious Hans Morgenthau and his assessments of the American shadow government. This whole section is baffling to me. First, Curtis identifies Morgenthau as “one of the most senior members of the US State Department.” Then he says that Morgenthau “had given this hidden system of power a name, […] the dual state.” According to Curtis, Morgenthau deemed this duality necessary because of the realities of international power politics. These dark clandestine tactics needed to be hidden from the public because acknowledging them would undermine Americans’ beliefs in their democracy and in their exceptionalism—beliefs that were necessary in the Cold War.

    Curtis states that the US in the Cold War ran covert operations to overthrow 26 foreign governments in 66 attempts. Morgenthau, it is stated in CGYOMY, believed that this secrecy was creating a dangerous time bomb at the heart of America. Beginning in the 1960’s, these secrets began to be exposed by writers like former CIA officer Miles Copeland. In this section, Curtis even runs footage of a trailer from the original film adaptation of The Quiet American. The trailer is a montage featuring narration and clips from the movie which depict an American agent sowing chaos and violence “across all the Orient.” The film is certainly relevant to the discussion. That said, Curtis could have told the audience that the protagonist of the book and film is widely understood to be based on the activities of infamous CIA officer Edward Lansdale. Furthermore, Curtis could have also told the audience that Lansdale himself—acting on behalf of the CIA—was involved in the production of the film adaptation. To that end, the plot of the film was changed in such a way as to obscure the titular Quiet American’s responsibility for a terror bombing. The episode illustrates how the secret government was even manipulating the public through Hollywood—going so far as to alter those rare, informed critiques of US neocolonial imperialism in literature and film.

    Morgenthau, the Rockefellers and The University of Chicago

    But I digress. As mentioned above, Curtis’ treatment of Morgenthau and the dual state is strange. For one thing, Morgenthau did not give the dual state its name. The term comes from a German émigré named Ernst Fraenkel and his 1941 book, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Study of Dictatorship. The book described how alongside the normative state which operated lawfully, there emerged a prerogative state which operated lawlessly to serve as the guardian of the normative state.[1] Furthermore, Morgenthau is not most notable for being “one of the most senior members of the US State Department.” As far as I know, he never actually occupied a high position in the state department, though he did work there as a consultant under different US presidential administrations. Morgenthau is, however, quite famous for being the modern seminal classical realist philosopher in the field of international relations—a subdiscipline of political science. Why Curtis omits this is a mystery.

    In fact, Morgenthau’s actual academic position during those years is very relevant to Curtis’ discussion of the dual state—i.e., CGYMONH’s exploration of the lawlessness of America’s postwar secret government, because Morgenthau was a professor at the University of Chicago. Famously described as Standard Oil University by Upton Sinclair, the University of Chicago has a unique relationship to the right-wing brain trust that has informed many imperial US strategies in terms of foreign policy and political economy. Perhaps most infamously, the University served as an incubator of sorts for the neoconservative, right-wing imperialists who were heavily influenced by German émigré Leo Strauss.

    Strauss, who I will return to, himself first received Rockefeller funding thanks to the intervention of Carl Schmitt[2]—the jurist, political theorist, and prominent Nazi whose ideas informed the legal thinking of the Third Reich. In his exploration of the dual state, Curtis would have been better served looking at Carl Schmitt in order to situate the lawless US pursuit of “security.” Summarizing Schmitt, I have written elsewhere[3] that he

    …wrote famously, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”[4] The state of exception “is not codified in the existing legal order.” It is “characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state.” The gravity of the state of exception is such that “it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.”[5] Sovereignty for Schmitt is defined by the ability to decide when the state of exception exists and how it may be eliminated. Any liberal constitution can hope, at best, to mandate the party with which sovereignty rests.[6]

    In other segments of CGYOMH, Curtis mentions the critiques of Western leftists who argued that the essence of fascism had not been extinguished with the Allied victory in World War II. In the prior installment of this review, I covered Curtis’ shortcomings in terms of exploring this perspective. In his treatment of lawlessness and the dual state, Curtis compounds those errors. With Carl Schmitt and his University of Chicago descendants, there is a fairly clear German antecedent to the institutionalization of American state criminality that was established with the outbreak of the Cold War and never abandoned (i.e., an historical precursor to the lawlessness of a nominal constitutional republic). The reader may recoil at such a comparison, but the analogy is not particularly hard to grasp, psychic resistance notwithstanding. Even in terms of their respective creations, both were borne of bogus pretexts which conjured an existentially threatening Communist menace. The exceptionalist or legally unconstrained Nazi state took its mature form in the wake of the Reichstag Fire, a terror spectacle which the Nazis likely facilitated.[7] Likewise, much of the early postwar hysteria over the Soviet Union derived from erroneous Anglo-UK accusations that Stalin had grossly violated the postwar terms regarding Eastern Europe which had been negotiated at Yalta.

    All this is not to say the US is a new Nazi Germany. Only Nazi Germany was Nazi Germany, just as only the US empire is the US empire. That said, it is worth noting that in key national security documents like NSC 68, Cold War US policymakers explicitly argued for an exceptionalist approach to combating the supposedly existential threat posed by the Soviet Union.[8] I have written that such documents, in effect, served to grant

    …authority to the state to covertly conspire to violate the law. Since the US Constitution’s supremacy clause establishes that ratified treaties are “the supreme law in the land” and the US-ratified UN Charter outlaws aggression or even the threat of aggression between states, CIA covert operations are carried out in a state of exception. Given that the authority for these operations has never been suspended and the operations have been a significant structural component of the US-led world order, [I coined] the term exceptionism […] to describe the historical fact of institutionalized state criminality.[9]

    Schmitt, Strauss, and the Cold War

    To explain the duality and lawlessness of modern Western states, it is practically essential to discuss Carl Schmitt. In the German case, the Weimar Republic gave rise to a despotic dualism that quickly devoured the Republic, such as it was. In the US, the state’s lawful/lawless duality arose from the Cold War national security state which had been empowered by the supposed existential threat posed by communism. In the US case, the lawful democratic state (or public state) was never completely subsumed by authoritarian forces. This remains true, even if—as I have argued—anti-democratic forces in US society have consolidated so much wealth and power as to constitute a deep state that exercises control and/or veto power over democracy and the national security state. In my dissertation, I describe a tripartite state comprised of the public state, the security state, and a deep state.[10]

    Let us return to Leo Strauss, Morgenthau’s colleague at the University of Chicago. Strauss was an anti-Enlightenment thinker whose affinity for liberal democracy went only so far as to acknowledge that it served an important mythical function in legitimizing the hegemonic US project. One German commentator summarizes Strauss’ thinking about democracy:

    [L]iberal democracies such as the Weimar Republic are not viable in the long term, since they do not offer their citizens any religious and moral footings. The practical consequence of this philosophy is fatal. According to its tenets, the elites have the right, and even the obligation, to manipulate the truth. Just as Plato recommends, they can take refuge in “pious lies” and in selective use of the truth.[11]

    To summarize, Strauss and his mentor (of sorts) Carl Schmitt were both essentially Hobbesians. In the tradition of English thinker Thomas Hobbes, they saw the world as a dangerous and threatening place, the peril of which necessitates the creation of—and submission to—“the sovereign” or more simply, the state. The overriding imperative of the state is security, because without it, all of society is imperiled. Therefore, any measures necessary to secure the state are not just acceptable, but basically necessary. Germany infamously took Schmitt’s Hobbesian logic to a notable conclusion. Writing largely after World War II in the US, Strauss in essence advocated for state duality. He grudgingly accepted liberal democratic myths and formal institutions, while at the same time advocating for wise men like himself and his acolytes to counsel leaders, deceive instrumentally, and effect desired political outcomes in a top-down fashion. It is a mystery as to why Curtis does not mention Strauss given that the philosopher was a central figure in his interesting, but flawed, documentary series, The Power of Nightmares.

    Let us return now to CGYOMY’s treatment of Morgenthau. Curtis offers a brief summation of the realist philosopher’s thinking on the dual state that is, at best, very incomplete—and quite likely wrong. Previously and elsewhere, I wrote about Morgenthau in the same context that Curtis situates him in.

    As a 20th century analog of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt elucidated a grim, illiberal understanding of the true nature of power within the state. Recognizing this same illiberal essence, other theorists described the “state of exception” and the securitization of politics as a slippery slope that would create authoritarianism, perhaps with pseudo-democratic trappings.[12] In the early years of the Cold War, seminal realist Hans Morgenthau would comment on these illiberal forms emerging within the American political system. He identified a change in the control of operations within the U.S. State Department. The shift was toward rule according to the dictates of “security.” Morgenthau wrote, “This shift has occurred in all modern totalitarian states and has given rise to a phenomenon which has been aptly called the ‘dual state’” In a dual state, power nominally rests with those legally holding authority, but in effect, “by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police—coordinated to, but independent from the official makers of decision—at the very least exert an effective veto over decisions.”[13] Thus does Morgenthau describe a dynamic akin to Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty.

    To wit, Morgenthau did expound on Schmittian ideas about the sovereign and he addressed the dual state concept derived from two of the Germans discussed above: Carl Schmitt and Ernst Frankel.[14] To my knowledge, however, Morgenthau’s most noteworthy exploration of the subject was the 1955 New Republic article cited above. In this essay, he did not argue that the emergence of this dual state was positive or necessary. Rather, he bemoaned how the US State Department had been decimated by the dictates of an overweening security apparatus and he explicitly situated this dual state in the context of totalitarianism. The Nazi example would have been obviously at the forefront of Morgenthau’s mind. At the very least, Curtis should have mentioned the New Republic article and its critique, since it was written in a major US magazine. More recently, the 1955 Morgenthau essay was discussed in a scholarly article on the subject of the deep state by Swedish scholar Ola Tunander in 2009.[15]

    Curtis touches on the institutionalized lawlessness and thus the duality of the state in the US, but he fails to hash out the implications. With his blinkered treatment of Morgenthau, his omission of Schmitt and Strauss, and with his treatment of the JFK assassination, the filmmaker cannot bring himself to confront the American deep state and the cataclysmic historical episodes in which it was decisive. Discussed in greater depth in the previous installment of this review, Dallas was a coup d’état profounde—a stroke of the deep state. It is nonetheless interesting that Curtis spent any time at all covering the assassination and the deep state.[16]

    Imperial Security

    The historical limited hangout approach deployed by Curtis permeates the accounts of Western imperialism in CGYOMH. At one point, the film briefly covers the assassination of Congo’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. To his credit, Curtis acknowledges CIA involvement in Lumumba’s death. He acknowledges that the US installed the brutal puppet Joseph Mobutu, but for some reason he fails to mention that it was Mobutu’s forces who arranged the execution of Lumumba. He states that the abrupt Belgian withdrawal plunged Congo into crisis. But he neglects to mention that this was by design—part of a plot to break away from Congo its most resource rich province of Katanga.[17] Curtis credulously reports that the US was worried that without intervention, Congo’s copper might fall into communist hands. He neglects to mention that it was the West’s refusal of help which forced Lumumba to seek Soviet aid. There is reason to believe that this was done by design, as it then gave Allen Dulles the pretext to assassinate Lumumba—an action which Eisenhower went on to authorize.

    The assassination was carried out in such a time and fashion as to indicate that people like Dulles feared a change in policy under the incoming Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s policy was much more sympathetic to Lumumba than that of Eisenhower and Dulles, but the young Congolese prime minister was killed 72 hours before Kennedy had been sworn in as president. With the facts selected and presented as they are in CGYOMH, the reader gets the impression that policies such as this were decided on the basis of myopic, but earnest, anticommunism. With Curtis, the obvious economic interests are ignored or minimized. But with Curtis, the implication is that another set of those darn bureaucrats are once again too much enthrall to another set of wrongheaded ideas.

    When one takes the longer view, this explanation falls apart. As one of the most resource-rich places in the world, Congo was brutally exploited and expropriated by Europeans for more than a century before the Cold War. During the Cold War, the plunder continued, overseen by the US-installed puppet following the assassination of Lumumba, the man who famously asserted that the resource wealth of Congo should be used for the benefit of the Congolese people. After the Cold War and up to the present day, the Congolese have been subjected to unspeakable violence on a massive scale, while the pillage of its resources has continued apace. But since Curtis filters everything through his anti-leftist lens, he cannot present cogent analysis, even when the episodes under discussion are pregnant with weighty implications.

    The Dark Art of Western Geopolitics

    In CGYOMH, Curtis looks at numerous examples of Western imperialism in places like Iraq, China, and Africa. The series would have benefitted from a discussion of geopolitics—specifically the theories of Halford Mackinder and the more contemporary policymakers and scholars who have examined Mackinder’s ideas and their applications. The Brit Mackinder looked at the world and saw that Europe, Asia, and Africa were really one massive “world island” containing most of the world’s resources and productive capacity. With Britain located on the periphery of the world island, its imperial strategists needed to assert control over key areas and destabilize or Balkanize regions to preclude any counter-hegemonic force from uniting the enormous landmass.

    The British applied this logic throughout their imperial reign. Both world wars can be seen, in part, as consequences of the applications of Mackinder’s theses. As one example, the Anglo establishment was much alarmed by Germany’s proposed Berlin-Baghdad railway. This project would have integrated Germany, Central Europe, the Balkans, and the oil-rich Middle East into a massive German-led industrial powerhouse. Interestingly, the radical historian Guido Preparata sees a Russian hand in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Russia was, of course, Britain’s ally at the time.[18] Prior to World War II, the Soviet Union’s existence threatened the great powers in Western Europe and the US. This no doubt informed the thinking of Anglo-US elites who helped rebuild and fuel, respectively, the German and Japanese war machines. With other factors at work—and with geopolitics not being an exact science—the anti-Soviet Anglo-American elites did not get their preferred outcome. Germany chose softer targets first before launching their ultimately ruinous campaign against the Soviet Union almost two years later.

    When the Japanese got into military conflict with the Soviets in 1939, they were soundly defeated at Nomohan. In the aftermath, Japan signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR. This would prove crucial in shaping the war’s outcome. In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia and were headed for Moscow. Since there was little threat of a Japanese invasion, the Soviets were able to send divisions from the Far East and stop the Germans just short of the capitol. The Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact held until the last days of the war when Soviet forces swept through Manchuria, actually killing more Japanese than the atomic bombings. Though in Western historical memory, Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly overshadowed the Soviet invasion, considerable evidence indicates that it was the crushing Japanese defeat in Manchukuo—along with the threat of an impending Soviet attack on the main islands—that actually prompted the Japanese surrender to the Americans.[19]

    As historian Alfred McCoy points out, a central strategy of the postwar US empire was to rebuild the defeated Axis powers and make them essentially US satellites. With Germany and Japan reconstructed as largely demilitarized, capitalist industrial powerhouses, the US controlled both “axial ends” of Eurasia, Mackinder’s “world island.”[20] Trade and capital flows went across the Atlantic and across the Pacific, making the US the richest empire in world history. This was by design. In retrospect, the US war in the Pacific was particularly a war for postwar hegemony. And some have argued the dual atomic bombs kept Russia out of Japan.

    The American Century

    American claims to legitimate possession over Hawaii and the Philippines—where the Japanese attacked the US—were dubious at best. They are part of a history that goes all the way back to the 1850’s. Following the imperialist Mexican-American War and the US acquisition of California, enterprising officials and businessmen looked to the Pacific to enrich the US and themselves. Starting as early as Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition to Edo, US trade and investment in the Pacific were too lucrative to pass up. Hence, we have the absurd fact that in the Spanish-American War, ostensibly fought for Cuban independence, the first shots were fired as the US attacked the Spanish Philippines.

    Prior to US entry into World War II, Life magazine publisher Henry Luce made a case for American empire. As a mouthpiece for the Wall Street-dominated Council on Foreign Relations, Luce made the argument in his “American Century” essay, laying out the case for US hegemony over the postwar capitalist world. While much of his essay was couched in “liberal” rhetoric, in one passage he was quite candid about Asia.

    Our thinking of world trade today is on ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being worth only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero—or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence.[21]

    Geopolitics, control of resources, markets, financial and political systems…these are the aspects of the US hegemonic reign that allow us to make sense of the activities of the intelligence agencies, the military, the business elites, and the public officials who serve these constituencies. Curtis fails to offer cogent analysis of these deep political issues. Thus, the quirky myopia of his commentary on things like covert operations, the dual state, and “humanitarian intervention.” It is worth asking whether British state television would ever sponsor an honest, penetrating documentary film that would bring the reality of our crumbling systems to a vast audience. Does the BBC exist to act in the public interest by providing the range and depth of programming needed for enlightened democratic public debate? Or does the prestige media outlet serve to entertain and manufacture consent?

    Losing the Great Game on the Eurasian Chessboard

    The most famous contemporary adherent of Mackinder’s geopolitical theories was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Co-founder of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and US National Security Advisor under Carter, Brzezinski expounded on post-Cold War geopolitics with his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. In it, he argued that “keep[ing] the barbarians from coming together” was a “grand imperative of imperial geostrategy.”[22] By “barbarians,” Brzezinski was referring to Russia and China. These two countries have indeed come much closer together in the intervening years, largely in response to their shared grievances under US hegemony. Termed the “rules-based liberal international order” by US officials and their media/academic courtiers, the Post-Cold War era of unipolar US dominance has by-and-large allowed the US to essentially make—and break—the “rules” of international politics according to its whims. A small number of countries have resisted US dominance with varying degrees of success. In the 21st century, three of them—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—saw their governments overthrown and their societies devastated. In Eurasia, an “axis of resistance” has emerged which includes most notably China, Russia, Iran, and Syria—with Iraq in the wings as the US still refuses to honor the Iraqi parliament’s request to withdraw US military forces from the country.

    In this context, it should be noted that much of Curtis’ previous documentary series, Hyper-Normalization, devoted much screen time to denigrating two Western targets—Libya and Syria—in a multitude of dubious ways. True to form, the real villains in CGYOMH are (surprise!) Russia and China. The countries, according to Curtis, have one thing in common: they believe in nothing. Curtis states this repeatedly, though he contradicts himself, somewhat, by also stating that the Chinese only believe in money. The BBC should spring for some kind of editor to make sure that Curtis’ chauvinism is at least internally consistent, but, alas, such is not the case.

    The Soviet Union of CGYOMH appears to be the most depressing society that ever existed. Stock footage is used to depict a country of hopeless, nihilistic, victims of communism. While the post-Soviet era of Boris Yeltsin is acknowledged as a disaster, Curtis minimizes the extent to which the shock therapy privatization was a Western operation that enriched Western finance—along with that class of underworld-connected figures who became known as the oligarchs following their seizure of the Russia’s patrimony. Curtis also does not adequately explore the US interference on behalf of Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 Russian election. Portrayed in a glowingly brazen fashion on the cover of Time magazine, those US operations were of a scale far greater than even the most fanciful accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

    The true Russian villain of CGYOMH, predictably, is Vladimir Putin. To my surprise, and to the credit of Adam Curtis, he does largely dismiss Russiagate. Without spending too much time on the subject, Curtis suggests that Russiagate paranoia was symptomatic of US anomie, insecurity, and paranoia. On the one hand, it is good that even with his highly negative take on Russia, Curtis doesn’t stoop to regurgitating Russiagate claims that are thoroughly debunked—most notably by Aaron Mate in outlets like The Nation magazine and The Grayzone website. Too bad Curtis doesn’t look at the role of the dual/deep state in concocting and maintaining the hoax. CGYOMH spends a good amount of time addressing various intelligence capers. It could have been illuminating to see the Russiagate saga portrayed in a well-produced documentary film.

    Putin: That Dirty Guy!

    Instead, Curtis tells us that the dream of turning Russia into a liberal democracy went wrong and a new rapacious oligarchy came to power. At the highest levels of power, did the US ever want to see Russia become a prosperous democracy? Russia was subjected to structural economic changes that much of the rest of the world has experienced under US hegemony—privatization, austerity, massive upward transfer of wealth, and capital flight. Given the negative results of neoliberalism in the last 40+ years, why is it not assumed that those outcomes are intentionally brought about to further enrich US/Western elites and immiserate most people on purpose?

    Furthermore, with Russia, there are additional reasons to suspect that US elites deliberately wrecked and polarized Russian society. After the Gulf War, neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz said, “[W]e’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes—Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq—before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”[23] Subsequent covert and overt US actions in the Balkans, Georgia, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria all demonstrate how the US has time and again launched military interventions in ways that threatened post-Soviet Russia’s national interests. US elites and the corporate media were major supporters of Boris Yeltsin, whose reign was an unmitigated disaster for the Russian people. These same actors now despise Vladimir Putin, a statesman who—shortcomings notwithstanding—has presided over an era in which conditions in Russia have much improved from the situation he inherited. The US media treatment of the two Russian leaders belies any claims of made about US leaders being concerned about the well-being of the Russian people in the Putin era.

    In episode six of CGYOMH, Curtis states that Putin was selected by the Russian oligarchs to rule Russia. My understanding was that he was first handpicked by Boris Yeltsin—an historical oddity given how the two men seem like polar opposites. At the time of his anointing, Curtis tells us, Putin “was an anonymous bureaucrat running the security service and a man who believed in nothing.” Having installed the nihilist Putin as president, the oligarchs thought they would continue to dominate the country. Then, as Curtis so often tells us, “something unexpected happened.” A nuclear submarine exploded and sank to the ocean floor in August of 2000. The uncertainty about the fate of the crew and the eventual news of their deaths served to outrage Russians.

    Eventually, Vladimir Putin came to Murmansk to address the public and the grieving families. Curtis tells us that Putin, “to save himself, turn[ed] that anger away from himself and towards the very people who put him in power,” i.e., the oligarchs. Putin told Russia that it was the corrupt oligarchs in Moscow who, by stealing everything, had destroyed the Russian military and Russian society. Instead of suggesting that Putin was using his office to address legitimate grievances on behalf of the vast majority of the population, Curtis tells us that Putin had instead merely “discovered a new source of power”—the anger of the people.

    Even with his new source of power, Putin continued to believe in nothing and to have no goals according to CGYOMH. A Russian journalist is quoted talking about how under Putin there is no goal, no plan, no strategy…only reactive tactics with no long-term objectives. Later, Curtis quotes another Russian journalist who claimed that what Putin had really done was to take the corruption of the oligarchs and move some of into the public sector so that Putin and his cronies in the government could get in on the corruption: “The society Putin had created was one in his own image. It too believed in nothing.” The journalist was later murdered, outrage ensued, yet things did not improve. However, oil prices soon exploded, serving to ignite a bonanza of Russian consumerism. Cue the footage of a cat wearing a tiny shark hoodie, sitting atop a Roomba, gliding over a kitchen floor, pursuing a baby duck. This, presumably, is some kind of metaphor for the directionless nihilism of Russia. Take heart, Anglo-Americans: Whatever our problems, we have yet to see such horrors in the freedom-loving West.

    Curtis goes on to check all the obligatory boxes regarding Putin and Russia. The group Pussy Riot makes an annoying appearance. Alexi Navalny, a figure with very little popular following in Russia, is credited by Curtis with “chant[ing] a phrase that redefined Russia” for a, theretofore, apolitical generation. “Party of crooks and thieves!” chanted Navalny. This, we are told, made Putin furious at the ungrateful new middle class. In response, a paranoid Putin “shapeshifted again.” He created the “Popular Front,” a Russian nationalist organization. Worse: “He summoned up a dark, frightening vison from Russia’s past,” saying that “Eurasia was the last defense against a corrupt West that was trying to take over the whole world.” Putin was articulating “a great power nationalism that challenged America’s idea of its exceptionalism.” Putin, Curtis tells us, was promoting “Russian exceptionalism!” Flash to footage of the Nighthawks, a gauche pro-Putin motorcycle gang of Russian nationalists. Curtis then asserts that the Nighthawks are promoting a “paranoid conspiracy theory” that the West, led by the US, is trying to destroy Russia.

    Adam Curtis: Reality Check I

    Where to begin with Curtis’ treatment of Russia? Putin as alleged nihilist is simply a cheap shot. The man is obviously a nationalist. This cannot be lost on Curtis, but he refuses to grant Putin even that. Instead, Putin’s moves to curb the oligarchs’ power and his efforts to resist Western geopolitical moves are all presented as crass opportunism in the service of personal aggrandizement. What should Putin and the Russians have done after Yeltsin? Curtis cannot answer this question, so he never poses it. Putin is indeed a figure that can be criticized on a number of fronts. Most significantly, his measures against the oligarchs went nowhere near far enough. The legitimacy of their vast holdings is dubious at best. If Russia were to function on a more democratic basis, one of the most popular measures would be to nationalize or otherwise redistribute what are widely perceived as the ill-gotten gains of these propertied elites. But since Curtis is first and foremost an anti-leftist, there is no discussion of such possibilities.

    Nor is there any discussion of the steps Putin did take against particular oligarchs that he deemed (with at least some justification) to be acting against the national interest. At least Curtis does not endorse Russiagate. Nor does he mention the implausible Novichok poisonings that Western security services attribute to Putin himself. These omissions are interesting in and of themselves. What of Putin’s assertion that Eurasia is the last bulwark against a US-led West bent on world domination? Curtis mocks the very notion. He does not mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski explicitly made the same argument about Eurasia over twenty years ago. Keep in mind that Brzezinski was, in my estimation, part of the more sober wing of the US imperial hivemind. He could be characterized an Establishment liberal imperialist in contrast to the unhinged neoconservative imperialists.

    Going back further in US-Russian relations, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted JFK to endorse a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union to be carried out in the final months of 1963. Kennedy opposed such an unprecedented act of human barbarism. Notably, Kennedy himself was assassinated under suspicious circumstances during that same proposed window of time. Many commentators have noted how NATO has seemed to move closer and closer to Russian borders.[24] The late Robert Parry wrote often about the role of the US Embassy during the uprising in Ukraine.[25] In short, there is much historical and contemporaneous evidence that the US has sought to encroach Russia—or to at least deprive the country of any ability to impede US global hegemony. Realizing that such is the case, Russia under Putin has allied itself with its historical rival, China.

    Curtis, with China in his Sights

    At this point, it should be clear that Curtis is going to rubbish China, the most long-lived civilization in human history. Like many things in his film, Curtis does not appear to be an expert on Chinese history. On China, CGYOMH is at its most schizophrenic. Curtis acknowledges how the British devastated Chinese society with the Opium Trade and the Opium Wars. He actually soft-pedals much of this. For example, he could have mentioned that Western imperialism led to the social crises which spawned the Taiping Uprising, a conflict that killed perhaps as many as 15 million Chinese around the time of the US Civil War. Or he could have spent more time talking about the indemnities that poor China had to pay to the rich West after the Opium Wars and the so-called “Boxer Rebellion.” As I understand it, the Chinese paid over a trillion dollars’ worth of gold in today’s values as per the terms of the Boxer Protocol. This was for resisting British imperialism! The debt had only grown larger with interest before it was cancelled during World War II, when China allied with the US and British against Axis Japan. Nor is there any mention of how Japanese imperialism against China in the 1930’s was aided by the West. Such was the case up until 1940, when the US put an embargo on Japan after the Japanese invaded French Indochina. The embargo is what led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. All told, the Chinese may have lost 20 million people in the war with Japan.

    What about China after 1949? It being a communist country, Curtis is a harsh critic. Yet true to form, his critique is quirky and idiosyncratic. CGYOMH does not much mention the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Curtis discusses the Cultural Revolution, but does not explain it very well at all. Instead, it is depicted as a bizarre power play by Mao vis-à-vis his ambitious and megalomaniacal wife, Jiang Qing. The amount of time Curtis spends on Jiang Qing is completely out of proportion to her historical importance. To my understanding, she is a deeply unpopular figure in China and she comes across worse to Western students of this period of Chinese history.

    At a time when a deeper understanding of Chinese history in the West is desperately needed, Curtis does a great disservice with CGYOMH. With his cursory mentions of the Opium Wars and later of the racist Fu Manchu movies, he attempts to place a type of multicultural fig leaf over his smug imperial chauvinism. The fall of Dynastic China and the struggles of the People’s Republic of China are never properly contextualized. China was hopelessly disadvantaged against the technologically superior West in the last century of the Qing Dynasty. Due to the predations of the Western powers—and then those of the West’s Asian imitator, Japan—China was in such a horrendous state as to experience the rarest of events: a successful social revolution.

    China after 1949

    Though nominally Marxist, there was no clear way for the victorious Chinese communists to apply Marxist principles to the situation that Mao inherited. Marx saw communism as something that was a progression: from feudalism to capitalism…and eventually to communism. He explicitly stated that a communist revolution could not succeed in China or Russia, because they did not have the necessary levels of development to create the class dynamics necessary to seize the means of production. Those requisite industrialized means of production had not yet come into being outside of the Western European world, thus Marx thought that Germany was the most likely place for Communism to arise. By the 1960’s, with China having suffered some spectacular setbacks, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Part political struggle, part cultural crusade—it marked a time of tremendous upheaval in Chinese society. Across China, problems of the revolution were attributed to those elements of the millennia-old Chinese culture that hadn’t been discarded. As a result, the Cultural Revolution produced many tragic spectacles, including the destruction of untold numbers of great and small works of art and architecture as part of a campaign to exorcise a multitude of historical traumas.

    In this context, CGYOMH is frankly offensive in its repeated assertion that the Chinese, like the Russians, believe in nothing. Western imperialism—practiced by Europeans and then the Japanese—wrought unimaginable misery in China. It led to enormous political and cultural upheavals that most Westerners cannot fathom. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping took over the role as China’s helmsman. The free-market reforms introduced in this era served to slowly modernize China by integrating it into the international economy. This development also caused social dislocations and instability, with matters coming to a head of sorts during the so-called “Tiananmen massacre.”

    In the wake of the events of 1989, Chinese leaders had to grapple with the fact that the legitimizing communist ideology was insufficient. The Cultural Revolution had disoriented the Chinese people. In some sense, it robbed them of their cultural heritage. But the history, myths, legends, and spiritual practices of the past were decidedly incompatible with Marxist ideology. Furthermore, the 1989 reality of vast industrial production for the international market economy was incompatible with Marxism as well as with traditional Chinese culture wherein merchants were regarded ambivalently, at best. In response, China began to grapple anew with the past even as present conditions were changing at a dizzying pace. In the wake of that tumultuous 1989, the Chinese Communist Party commissioned a television production of the Ming Dynasty novel (set at the end of the Han Dynasty), Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Such was the dramatic disavowal of Cultural Revolution era efforts to de-Sinify China. China’s cultural inheritance was rehabilitated in the service of Chinese unity.

    Adam Curtis: Reality Check II

    For Curtis, none of this historical context is necessary. China, like Russia, is to be understood as a profoundly depressing society. Again, as Curtis would have it, China today believes in nothing while also believing only in money. Chinese organized crime is out of control. China is excessively militarized. The Chinese Communist Party is terrified of its own countrymen. The Chinese state surveilles and oppresses the citizenry. Average Chinese people have no good prospects because “the princelings” (the children of Chinese elites) are hoarding all opportunities thanks to “ultra-corruption.” This is the China presented in CGYOMH.

    Adam Curtis wants us to bear witness to the rise and fall of the Chinese official, Bo Xilai. Frankly, I cannot even figure out what CGYOMH is trying to say about Bo Xilai. I followed the story a bit when it was an international scandal in the news. I could never arrive at any salient take on the saga and Curtis does not clarify matters here. Bo did have some populist appeal. And he did seem to have some Anglophile tendencies and associations that the state would not have welcomed given Bo’s position. The whole thing seems like inside baseball—Chinese Communist-style. Perhaps this is the point: China is to be understood as an inscrutable, mysterious Oriental despotism.

    Were Curtis to be objective, he would need to inform the audience that the only significant tangible improvements in the well-being of humanity during the last 40 years are due to Chinese progress. The rest of the world—largely following US-dictated economic prescriptions and models—has stagnated or regressed with the exception of the superrich. Meanwhile in China, a billionaire class did emerge, but not without socio-economic conditions for the general population steadily improving. Unlike in the West, Chinese adults who believe that their children will be more prosperous than themselves are not delusional. China’s “militarism” seems not at all unreasonable given the US military bases encircling the country. Furthermore, China spends much less on the military that the US in both relative and absolute terms.

    For a Westerner to decry Chinese organized crime is laughable given the US governments’ partnerships with underworld figures like Meyer Lansky, “Lucky” Luciano, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, the KMT, the anti-Castro Cubans, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Contras, Ramon Guillen Davila, etc, etc, etc. And while there are, no doubt, privileged Chinese “princelings,” at least the Chinese can plausibly argue that their well-heeled heirs are not part of a class project to perpetually keep the bulk of the population in a state of material insecurity. In the US (and Curtis’ UK is not that much different), every aspect of life—food, housing, education, health care—is an avenue for rent-seeking and profiteering. And while aspects of the Chinese surveillance state are indeed Orwellian and alarming, it is worth keeping in mind that Western depictions of its adversaries are invariably unreliable and incomplete. Furthermore, and as Ed Snowden revealed, the US is no slouch when it comes to totalitarian surveillance. And even with the vast wealth in the US, we still lead the world in depriving our citizens of liberty in the harshest way: In both absolute and per capita terms, no country incarcerates more of its own citizens than the US.

    The Garden Paths of Adam Curtis

    In conclusion, I cannot recommend Can’t Get You Out of My Head except as a case study in sophisticated propaganda. The filmmaking talents of Adam Curtis are, as ever, impressive. However, the film’s commentary on the West is marred by a consistent failure to acknowledge the class interests that—when properly understood—illuminate so much of the unfortunate foolishness that Curtis attributes to bureaucrats and other members of the middle circles of power. The film’s deeply flawed explanations of financial/monetary matters represent a missed opportunity to explain crucial information to a badly misinformed public. Curtis’ treatments of Kerry Thornley and the JFK assassination are inexcusable, given all that we know now. His superficially revelatory discussion of the dual state represents a lost opportunity to demonstrate how the state has become our world’s most impactful and prolific lawbreaking entity. Lastly, when Curtis skewers entire swaths of humanity like Russia or the Chinese, the viewer should not lose sight of the fact that the filmmaker is on state television defaming the state’s enemies.

    Imperialism, in a word, is what Curtis can’t deal with. All the aspects of CGYOMH which I criticize in these reviews—they all pertain to Curtis and his failure to call an imperial spade a spade. I would like to assign Curtis a few books on the subject. Michael Parenti would be a good place to start. He defined imperialism as “the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.”[26] Compared to Curtis’ muddled ideology, Parenti’s definition can much better explain what CGYOMH bungles—namely: post-Bretton Woods dollar hegemony, the oil shocks, the Third World debt crises, neoliberalism, anti-communism, CIA covert operations, so-called “humanitarian” wars,” the postwar rise of America’s secret government, the Iraq War, and the various financial crises which always end up benefiting those “dominant politico-economic interests.” Since Curtis cannot bring himself to acknowledge the imperial elephant in the room—except obliquely or in the distant past—he cannot properly explain how the empire has devoured the republic. Without addressing the central thrust of America’s drive for global hegemony, Curtis cannot understand how this enormous concentration of wealth and power has transformed the state.

    Therefore, Curtis cannot illuminate the goings-on in the higher circles. Notably, he cannot hope to understand or explain the JFK assassination. Kennedy, for all his Cold Warrior posturing and/or pronouncements, did understand imperialism. In 1957, he gave a speech condemning French imperialism in Algeria. Said Kennedy on the Senate floor:

    [T]he most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism. […] Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa.[27]

    Much of the shift from colonialism to neocolonialism occurred in the 1950’s and 60’s. It was managed, often through covert operations, by the United States. Kennedy, as seen above, sparred with the Eisenhower administration (most notably, the Dulles brothers) over these policies. He supported the Third World nationalists who wanted their countries’ resources to improve the lives of their own impoverished citizens. Though Kennedy was against communism—sometimes opportunistically so—I believe the evidence today shows that he sought to end the Cold War. He pursued such a course in part to remove the threat of nuclear annihilation. But Kennedy also must have realized that the Cold War was an overriding structural constraint to any serious progressive reforms—both in the US and in the world. As long as every conflict was viewed in the Manichean, zero-sum terms of the Cold War, no US President had freedom to pursue any kind of reasonable foreign policy without encountering tremendous resistance. One can make a good argument that for his threat to the empire, Kennedy was killed. And it makes Curtis look an even bigger fool. Can he really not know that Kerry Thornley despised Kennedy over JFK’s devotion to what Lumumba stood for: a unified, independent, non-imperial Congo. President Johnson returned the US to the CFR/Acheson/Eisenhower/Dulles imperial consensus, reversing JFK’s policies in some of the world’s largest and most resource-rich countries. LBJ’s America would go on to attack the formerly colonized countries of Congo, Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Only Vietnam was able to hold on to its national sovereignty, but at an enormous cost.

    Curtis cannot grapple with JFK, just as he cannot deal squarely with those other aspects of Anglo-US imperialism. His pitiful rubbishing of the empire’s enemies seems to be his way of saying, in the midst of the collapse of US hegemony, “Look! Look at them! They have bad systems of power too—worse even!” In these tumultuous times, this is not what is needed for British or American audiences. We do not need to be fixated on what our leaders tell us is bad about our much less powerful “enemies.” These are fatal flaws in his filmography. While parts of Adam Curtis films like The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares are well-done, they invariably lead the viewer down garden paths in such a way as to muddle understanding and obscure responsibility. Can’t Get You Out of My Head continues in this tradition. All of this is a long-winded—yet by no means exhaustive—way of saying, again, that we need to get Adam Curtis out of our heads.

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 1): Getting Adam Curtis Out of Your Head

    see Deep Fake Politics (Part 2): The Prankster, the Prosecutor, and the Para-political


    And listen now to:

    Deep Fake Politics—Historiography of the Cold War, the Clandestine State, and Political Economy of US Hegemony with Aaron Good


    [1] Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Study of Dictatorship (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1941).

    [2] Gerhard Sporl, “The Leo-Conservatives,” Spiegel International, April 8, 2003.

    [3] Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): pp. 4–29.

    [4] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 5.

    [5] Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 6.

    [6] Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 7.

    [7] The fact that this is a controversial statement is an interesting data point for understanding the sociology of Western historiography, especially in light of events such as the Cold War Gladio bombings in Europe. For a comprehensive exploration of Nazi culpability, see: Benjamin Carter Hett, Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).

    [8] Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” (Temple University, 2020), pp. 235–6.

    [9] Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” (Temple University, 2020), p. 236.

    [10] Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State,” (Temple University, 2020).

    [11] Sporl, “The Leo-Conservatives.”

    [12] For examples, see: Harold D . Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” The American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4 (1941): pp. 455–68; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

    [13] Hans Morgenthau, “A State of Insecurity,” The New Republic 132, no. 16 (1955), p. 12.

    [14] Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Study of Dictatorship.

    [15] Ola Tunander, “Democratic State vs. Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West,” in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson (New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 56–722.

    [16] He uses the term dual state, but it is bears much in common with scholarly works on the deep state produced in works like Tunander, “Democratic State vs. Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West”; Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America; and Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State.”

    [17] That imperialist project, as you may recall, was near and dear to Kerry Thornley’s heart. JFK’s opposition to the operation further fueled Thornley’s hatred of the president.

    [18] Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2005), pp. 20–21.

    [19] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2019).

    [20] Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017).

    [21] Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941.

    [22] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997), p. 40.

    [23] Glenn Greenwald, “Wes Clark and the Neocon Dream,” Salon, November 26, 2011.

    [24] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Op-Ed: Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise,” LA Times, May 30, 2016.

    [25] Robert Parry, “The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made,” Truthout, July 15, 2015.

    [26] Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1995), p. 1.

    [27] John F. Kennedy, “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (Washington D.C.), July 2, 1957.

  • Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War

    Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War


    Greg Parker’s Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War is quite appropriately titled. There have been many biographies of Oswald, some of them good, some adequate, and some downright poor. The dividing line, both temporally and in content, was Philip Melanson’s Spy Saga. Released in 1990, Spy Saga was the first work to make a book length case that Oswald was intimately tied up with the world of American intelligence—and most likely not in a casual way. Phil also did important work on the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy cases. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2006. But when he appeared before the Assassination Records Review Board, he made a rather pithy and self-deprecating comment. He said he hoped when their mission was complete, the new database on Oswald would make Spy Saga look like a Cliff Notes pamphlet.

    There is no doubt that Melanson’s prognostication came true. For example, the declassified notes of HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf create an epiphany concerning the relationship between the CIA and Oswald before his defection to Russia. (Click here and go to Section 2) In his book, Parker has not gotten to that point yet. (This review is of the compilation Volumes 1 and 2.)

    Several books on Oswald track his character through the progress of the Cold War. But, quite naturally, the Soviet/American conflict is always in the background. The unusual thing about Parker’s book is that there really is no background. His volume blends so much of the Cold War into the story that background and foreground are almost indistinguishable. That is why I stated that the title is all too appropriate.

    To underline this point: the volume opens in a most unusual manner. Many books on the case, and some biographies of Oswald, discuss the overthrows of Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and the killing of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, not to mention the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. This book begins with an assassination in Bogota, Colombia. It discusses the murder of Jorge Elicier Gaitan, who, quite frankly, I had never heard of before. (Parker, pp. 4ff) I sure as heck will not forget him now.

    Gaitan was a mayor of Bogota, a member of congress, Minister of Education, and Minister of Labor, Health, and Social Welfare. He was a lawyer who gradually shifted over to politics, especially after seeing the influence of the United Fruit company in his country, particularly after what is called the Cienega, or Santa Marta, massacre. (Parker, pp. 5–8) This event was more or less covered up for decades until Gabriel Garcia Marquez made it famous in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude. What enraged Gaitan about the event was that the American press and State Department tried to paint the massive machine gunning as a natural reaction to a communist plot. It was no such thing. United Fruit demanded the government intervene to halt a strike, since their policy was no negotiations. In fact, United Fruit’s influence may have extended up to having Frank Kellogg, the American Secretary of State, threaten to invade if United Fruit was not protected.

    Gaitan used this event to vault himself into the political arena. He was so effective as a speaker and organizer that he created a kind of rump group to the Liberal Party called the National Leftist Revolutionary Union, or UNIR. Gaitan was a combination Socialist and Populist. Land reform was very important to him. In 1946, he ran for president and lost, mainly because the Liberals ran two candidates, himself and Gabriel Turbay. As Parker makes clear, its odd how Turbay died a year later. (Parker, p. 26) And Gaitan was assassinated a year after that—on the verge of taking over the Liberal Party.

    Before reviewing Gaitan’s murder, the author discusses just how influential the American government was in Latin America. United Fruit’s law firm was the formidable Sullivan and Cromwell, which employed a young John Foster Dulles. Foster Dulles was a kind of roving ambassador for the company in that area. (Parker, p. 9) America was very powerful in Colombia due to the scheme used by Phillipe Bunau Varilla, William Nelson Cromwell, and Teddy Roosevelt to pretty much create the new country to the north in order to finish the Panama Canal. (Parker, pp. 10–13)

    Before the creation of the CIA, the FBI had domain in Latin America through its Special Intelligence Service or SIS. But by 1946, the SIS was on the way out due to the creation of the CIG, the Central Intelligence Group, and the CIA in the following year. Birch O’Neal was an SIS agent who joined the new group. He soon became one of James Angleton’s chief—and most secretive—assistants. (Parker, p. 20) Preceding both the SIS and CIA was the Office of Naval Intelligence. Founded in 1882, by 1929 it had widened its scope from just spying on the advancements of the navies of other nations. (Parker, p. 3)

    On April 9, 1948, Gaitan emerged from his office at about 1 PM. He was shot at four times with one bullet missing. The man apprehended for the crime was Juan Ros Sierra. He was immediately taken to a pharmacy by two policemen. But when they called for reinforcements, no one answered the phone at the station. When asked who put him up to the assassination the defendant only said, “Powerful things that I can’t tell you! Oh Virgin of Carmen! Save Me!” (Parker, p. 29)

    In a startling coincidence, both Gabriel Marquez and Fidel Castro were in direct proximity to the scene of the crime. Marquez later said that he saw a tall, well-dressed man urging the mob to break the police line and extract revenge by killing the suspect. Once this was successful, that man drove away in a new car. (ibid) What happened after must have clearly influenced Castro in his revolutionary career. It came to be called El Bogotazo: ten hours of violence, mayhem, and chaos that left four thousand dead and a large section of the city in ruins. (Parker, p. 30) In turn, that ignited La Violencia, a ten-year civil war that took the lives of about 200,000 people. This reveals not just how much Gaitan was a symbol of hope to the masses, but also how they collectively felt that the—now dead—accused was not working alone. (Parker, p. 30)

    They were correct. A man named John Espirito later made a confession to this effect. He said that the murder was timed for the meeting of the Latin American leftist group which Castro was there to attend. Although Espirito clearly implied that Roa performed the shooting, Parker disagrees. Roa was in the habit of performing mind control exercises that would place him in a trance state in front of a mirror. He then imagined someone emerging from the mirror. The author writes that it actually was a man and he was part of the set up. He corresponds to someone at the scene who had a trench coat draped over his arm. Parker writes that this was the main assassin and that Roa only fired the last shot, the one that missed. (Parker, p. 54)

    The chapter ends with a postulation: was this the CIA’s first assassination plot? If so, it certainly resembles the RFK scenario, not just in its intricacies, but because it stopped a liberal leader from taking power and produced years of chaos. In the American case, it prolonged the Vietnam War.

    II

    The Gaitan murder happened closely after the official opening of the Cold War, which is usually timed with George Kennan’s long telegram from Moscow. The author then jumps forward a few years to Korea. He focuses on two types of specialized warfare that emerged during the conflict. The first was what had been apparently used with Roa: mind control. The second was germ warfare. The United States coveted Japan’s so called “Devil Doctor,” Ishii Shiro and his infamous Unit 731. He was perhaps the most advanced microbiologist of his day and performed thousands of experiments on human guinea pigs, including American POW’s. Douglas MacArthur made sure he was not prosecuted and so he ended up at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (Parker, pp. 78–80) In other words, what happened with Operation Paper Clip in Europe also occurred in Asia, except in this instance it was not rocketry, but biological science. It was left to the Russians to expose Ishii for what he was and how he had experimented on American prisoners. This is how America developed the science for bacteria weapons in Korea and then, according to Parker, lied about its usage. (Parker, pp. 83–86) One way they did so was by saying the Chinese had brainwashed the men who said they did it.

    All of this clearly amped up domestic Cold War tensions. Ruth Paine started to attend Quaker meetings in 1947, but did not actually join the church until 1951. The author describes a kind of factionalism within the Quaker movement that gained traction over the forties and fifties. The Hicksites, a very pure and spiritual sect inside the church who had been strongly anti-slavery, now gave way to a more conservative evangelical strain. (Parker, pp. 94–95). This struggle was exemplified by a meeting of the Friends at Earlham College which Ruth attended. Earlham was a hotbed of this early kind of conservative evangelical movement. A future graduate of Earlham was Von Edwin Peacock. By the time of the FBI inquiry into Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City, Peacock was acting Director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The AFSC ran the Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City. A local Quaker said he saw Kennedy’s alleged assassin at that place while he was in Mexico City in 1963. (Parker, p. 96)

    What makes this interesting is that the latest work on this aspect indicates that Oswald was not in Mexico City. But yet, one of the things that Ruth Paine did complemented what the AFSC group did for the Warren Commission. She supplied articles that were allegedly returned to Dallas by Oswald from Mexico City. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 203)

    In an interesting piece of discovery, the book states that Marguerite Oswald once worked at a naval base in Algiers, Louisiana as a switchboard operator. (Parker, p. 104) This was during World War II, when Oswald was perhaps 2 years old. Parker believes this job involved some kind of research project through Pittsburgh Paint and Glass at that base. It was at this time, late 1941 or early 1942, that she met Edwin Ekdahl, an electrical engineer. Ekdahl would become her third husband and the step father to Lee since the child’s real father had died before he was born in October, 1939. Parker believes that Marguerite met Ekdahl while at the base and that the company he worked for, Ebasco, a division of GE, was also involved in that research project. (Parker, p. 106) You will not find this information in the Warren Commission report or that by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

    The two eventually married in 1945 and moved to Fort Worth, where Ekdahl was now working. The couple stayed together until 1948. Parker notes more oddities about Lee’s enrollment in 2 elementary schools: Ekdahl is listed as his father, but in the blank for mother, no one is listed. (Parker, pp. 117–18). Although the wife thought the husband was having an affair, it was the husband who filed for divorce first. The attorney he hired was Fred Korth, who had an office in close proximity to his own. (Parker, pp. 110, 118) Korth was a lawyer and a banker. He would eventually become Secretary of the Navy in 1962, succeeding John Connally. Both men served at Vice President Johnson’s request. Parker points out something about Korth here that may be more than just passing interest. Though Korth handled Ekdahl’s end of the divorce, the Warren Commission could not find any evidence that Ekdahl had legally divorced his first wife, Rasmina. What makes that even more odd is that Rasmina and Edwin ended up being buried together. (p. 119)

    III

    The scene now moves to New York City. As many have noted, it has never been entirely clear as to why Marguerite decided to move to the Big Apple. The ostensible reason is that her first son, John Pic, and his wife lived there. With Robert Oswald, Lee’s older brother, in the service, Marguerite said she did not want Lee to be alone while she was at work. (Warren Report, p. 675) But, as the author points out, Ekdahl was now living in New York and may have helped get Lee into Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School. (Parker, p. 128) And third, there is the mysterious issue of Lee’s “mental tests” that were likely done at Yeshiva University. This was discovered through an FBI interview with a house cleaner for Marguerite, Mrs. Louise Robertson.

    The living arrangement did not last long. Parker does a nice job in exposing the Warren Commission version of how it ended. In their attempt to show that somehow the 13 year old Oswald was already a sociopath, they wrote that Oswald threatened Pic’s wife with a knife and smacked his mother while this was going on. (Warren Report, p. 676) By going through the original sources, the author shows how the Commission completely distorted the whole affair. He shows that when first interviewed about it with the FBI, Pic said no one had ever informed him any such threatening incident. But by the time he testified before the Commission, his memory had been completely refreshed. Except for one telling point—he had to take out his notes to keep the details straight. (Parker, pp. 131–33) What likely happened is that Pic’s wife did not care for her mother-in-law and her son. And she completely exaggerated what had happened in order to get them out. The FBI and the Commission then did what they usually did. With Oswald having no attorney, they were allowed to turn the incident into something it wasn’t—as long as it was exaggerated to Oswald’s detriment.

    Parker does an equally adroit analysis with the famous Youth House report by Renatus Hartogs. Oswald was truant from his schooling and was referred to a kind of halfway house for three weeks in the spring of 1953. There he was examined by Dr. Hartogs. To this day, if one views the Wikipedia entry on Oswald, one will read about Oswald threatening Pic’s wife with a knife—which most likely did not occur. But also, various newspapers in 1963, like the New York Times and Charleston News and Courier, had written stories based on alleged reports Hartogs had made about Oswald back in 1953. According to those reports Hartogs had written that Oswald had “schizophrenic tendencies” and that Oswald was “potentially dangerous” and should be committed. (Parker, pp. 170, 179)

    Evidently, from reading the newspapers, Hartogs came to think that this was what he had written. And he never bothered to cross check this with his original reports. But Wesley Liebeler had the reports when he examined the doctor on April 16, 1964. It turned out that Hartogs made no such comment about having Oswald committed. He thought Oswald should be placed on probation. He also never wrote that he thought Oswald was capable of a possible violent outburst. As Liebeler also pointed out, there was no reference to Oswald as “incipient schizophrenic” or “potentially dangerous” in his report. Finally, there was no evidence that Oswald was suffering from either delusions or hallucinations. (Parker, pp. 174–78)

    Incredibly, in 1968, Hartogs was still claiming he had predicted Oswald was potentially dangerous. A few years later, he was successfully sued by one of his patients for sexual molestation. (Click here for details)  Some witness.

    IV

    Marguerite moved back to New Orleans in 1954. Although the HSCA tried to say that Uncle Dutz Murret served as a kind of surrogate father for Lee, that is in contradiction to what the man said to the Commission. He told them he did not take much interest in or pay much attention to the lad. (Parker, pp. 194–95) The author concludes that the only real father figure Oswald had was Ekdahl and he passed away in 1953.

    Another myth proposed by the HSCA regarding Oswald was that somehow Beauregard Junior High School had the reputation of being a spawning ground for future criminals. Yet again, this was contradicted by someone who should know, namely Marguerite’s sister, Lillian Murret, who lived in New Orleans her entire life. The reason that Marguerite used Lillian’s address was in order to register Lee for Beauregard, since “it had a good reputation as a good school.” Family friend Myrtle Evans said the same, that it was a good school and Marguerite had used Lillian’s address to get him in for that specific reason. (Parker, pp. 200–01)

    In 1955, Lee completed a personal history in class which said his career choices were the military and undecided. Two weeks later, his brother Robert Oswald returned from active duty. Two weeks after that, Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) with his friend Ed Voebel. As his mother tried to tell the Commission: Was it not odd that at the same time Lee was reading the Marine Corp Manual, he was also studying Karl Marx? (Parker, p. 216)

    In its original design, the CAP was designed to be, among other things, a kind of Loyalty Police. The author sources this to a NY Daily News story from 1948. To support this belief, he writes that the story was quickly withdrawn and then denied. But that story got a reaction from other papers who said that the CAP was “Fascism wrapped in the American flag.” (Parker, p. 221)

    From here, we shift to oil tycoon Harold Byrd and how he figured in both the creation of the CAP and the purchase of what would become the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). Byrd was one of the founders of the group back in 1941. He then became commander of the Texas wing and then a Colonel in the patrol before he went off to the Department of War in 1943. He eventually ended up as Vice Chair and then Chair of the national organization in 1959. (Parker, p. 222) Byrd bought the building which became the TSBD in 1939 for a fire sale figure of $35,000. He go it since he had been a part of the original loan, which had been defaulted on for about ten times that price.

    Appropriately, the author now goes into the relationship between CAP leader David Ferrie and Oswald. For all his faults, which are well known, the author writes that Ferrie had the reputation of being a good trainer in the Cleveland CAP, which is where he was born. (Parker, p. 224) He describes how Ferrie was booted out of the CAP in New Orleans and then started his own renegade group. He focuses on the secret group that Ferrie had created inside his unit. Sometimes this was called the Omnipotents, at times it was given the longer rubric: Internal Mobile Security Unit. The members of this inner group were given special training and special assignments: like getting a passport so one could emigrate to Cuba through South America. (Parker, p. 227) This indicates the degree of control that Ferrie had over his cadets.

    In the fall of 1955, someone forged a letter in Marguerite’s name which stated that Oswald was leaving school for San Diego. Oswald attempted to drop out. But Marguerite fouled it up by enclosing his real birth certificate in a duffel bag. (Parker, p. 233) In fact, as is mentioned in passing, someone dressed and posing as a Marine recruiter showed up at the Oswald home to try and convince her to let him join, even though he was underage. In Bill Davy’s discussion of this episode, he suggested this may have been Ferrie. (Let Justice be Done, p. 6) As Parker notes once more, the Commission gravely distorted this episode by writing that Oswald was able to convince his mother to make a false statement about his age.

    V

    One of the highlights of the book is the discussion of Oswald’s employment at Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. The author brings in an aspect about this brief employment that I was not aware of. The founder of the company was A. E. Hegewisch and it was his name that was used in its original title. It was a freight forwarding business and it began in 1923. As a vociferous anti-communist, Hegewisch was plugged into the New Orleans higher circles. In fact, he was the second president of International House. (Parker, p. 236) It’s pretty easy to figure out why. He knew the CIA approved Dr. Alton Ochsner, CIA agent Clay Shaw, and CIA asset William Gaudet. He was also an early president of an Agency front, the Cordell Hull Foundation. That foundation originated in Nashville—Hull was born in Tennessee—but it moved to New Orleans in 1954 and was housed inside the International House. Ochsner took over the presidency in 1956.

    In 1953, Hegewisch turned over the company to five of his employees. This included Mr. Tujague, who became president, thus the name change. (Parker, p. 237) It appears that, as with Hegewisch, the Agency stayed in the background of the picture, because, later, Tujague was one of the founders of Friends of Democratic Cuba, which we know was associated with Ochsner and Shaw’s colleague, Guy Banister and also with the CIA associated Sergio Arcacha Smith. The author’s hypothesis is that Oswald was employed there in 1955, most likely through his acquaintance with Ferrie. His performance as a runner was a test of “Lee’s ability to deliver ‘goods’ and messages around the ports to the various networks of agents, informants and assets.” (Parker, p. 237) As Jim Garrison once noted, this is why New Orleans was so important to the CIA and FBI, because of its centrality as a portal to and from Latin America.

    After a bit over two months, Oswald went to JR Michels, Inc., which was located in the same building. His job there was “running Export Declaration forms to the Customs Office for authentication.” (Parker, p. 238) It required that a file with picture be kept of Lee at the Customs office. It was reportedly destroyed around 1958. As Joan Mellen later observed, that destruction was not solitary. Her research assistant Peter Vea later discovered that Oswald had meetings at Customs in 1963, yet those files were never recovered by the ARRB. (Mellen at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference of 2003)

    The author postulates that these temporary positions were more of less a dress rehearsal for Oswald’s ultimate enlistment, this time at a legal age. And he mentions programs like REDSOX, and REDCAP, and an ONI program which were supposedly designed for infiltration and false defectors. (Parker, pp. 230, 257) Parker notes that when Oswald wrote a letter to the Young Socialist League it was before he signed the Loyalty Certificate for Personnel of the Armed Forces. And that organization was listed on the certificate as being subversive. In the letter, he was asking to not just join, but perhaps start his own branch. There was no ambiguity about that. (Parker, p. 263) Yet this violation triggered no action against Oswald, even though an FBI check was done. Was this perhaps because, according to Ferrie’s friend Van Burns, Ferrie would meet with Oswald before his defection in 1959? Therefore, was everything cleared in advance?

    As we all know, in the Marines, Oswald was sent to Atsugi air base in Japan, one of the homes of the U2. An utterly fascinating revelation in the book is about Ruth Paine, more specifically about her sister Sylvia Hoke. It turns out that she was part of the FICON project, the precursor to the U2. In other words, Hoke was working under the guise of a civilian for the Air Force when, in fact, she was really employed by the CIA. She worked on that project through the auspices of George Washington University. (Parker, pp. 266–267). Is this why Ruth denied any knowledge of her sister’s employment when Jim Garrison questioned her before the New Orleans grand jury?

    Another provocative issue the author brings up is Oswald’s meeting with Rosaleen Quinn while in the service. Quinn worked for Pan Am Airlines, but she was taking a Berlitz class in Russian because she wanted to join the State Department. What is new here is that Pan Am had a close association with the CIA, “more specifically between the CIA and members of the flight crews.” (Parker, p. 276) But not just the CIA. Employees were participating with “State Department operations involved behind the scene mission in dangerous locations.” Parker is clearly postulating that the so called “Quinn date” was really another test, this time for Oswald’s ultimate mission to Moscow. If so, he passed, since Quinn said he spoke Russian better than she did. To amplify that opinion, the author notes that Quinn met with Oswald’s radar commander afterwards, John Donovan.

    Parker closes his book with the Albert Schweitzer College episode. Stephen Frichtman was the famous minister at the Unitarian church in Los Angeles. This was in easy driving distance to Santa Ana, where Oswald was stationed. Frichtman’s name was found in Oswald’s undercover cohort Richard Case Nagell’s notebook. (Parker, p. 287) The point being that Albert Schweitzer did very little advertising. And a person who was familiar with the college told the late George Michael Evica that recruitment was usually done through personal contact. The highest entry class was about 30 people and sometimes the place was near empty. As Evica found out, Hans Casparis and his wife—who were running the place—were both academic frauds. So in preparation for travel abroad, why and how did Oswald list this place on his passport itinerary and how did he find the application form? Parker seems to imply it was with the help of Frichtman and/or Kerry Thornley, his supposed friend at the base.

    Parker has written an unusual, provocative, and insightful work. I have some disagreements, but considering the overall quality, they are really too mild to bring up. He and Seamus Coogan and Frankie Vegas (real name) are all significant contributors to the case from down under (i.e. Australia and New Zealand). Parker has had some serious health problems of late. Let us wish him well. I would really like to see the concluding volumes of this intriguing series.

  • The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

    The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins


    Vincent Bevins’ book, The Jakarta Method is an ambitious volume. It essentially tries to tell the story of the Cold War, largely from its impact in what we today call the “Third World.” In his introduction, Bevins writes that he has avoided speculation entirely. (p. 7) He then adds that there is much we do not know. As we shall see, he fails to deal with some things we do know and he does not avoid speculation.

    I note upfront, Bevins is not an academic, let alone an historian. He is a journalist who has been employed by the LA Times, Washington Post, and the Financial Times of London. He gives acknowledgements to several academics, including Bradley Simpson of the University of Connecticut. As we shall see—and as I will explain—that is a rather revealing statement by the author.

    I

    The book has no index. But I took extensive notes. Oddly—considering his subject—Bevins gives rather short shrift to the origins of the Cold War. One of the strangest things about the book is this: I could find no mention of George Kennan. Any writer dealing with the subject would have to at least make mention of the crucial importance of Kennan in how it all began. Bevins does not.

    George Kennan enlisted in the American diplomatic corps out of college in 1925. He was stationed in Prague during the Anschluss and in Berlin until the American declaration of war against Germany in December of 1941. Kennan had studied the USSR and sided with the likes of former ambassador William Bullitt and State Department experts like Loy Henderson and Chip Bohlen on the subject, thereby disagreeing with Franklin Roosevelt’s former Russian ambassador Joseph Davies about the possibility of any kind of reliable alliance with Joseph Stalin against the Third Reich. Yet, as anyone who has studied the era understands, this was what Roosevelt was relying on in his pre-war strategy and his actual tactics during the conflict.

    At the end of the war, Kennan was appointed deputy chief of mission in Moscow. What makes what he did there so important is that FDR had passed on in April of 1945. Davies’ influence was now weakened. In February of 1946, Kennan cabled his famous/infamous Long Telegram to Washington. It’s called that since it was well over 5,000 words in length. (Click here for more information)

    Many observers consider the Long Telegram crucial in understanding what came afterwards. It provided an intellectual underpinning for the hardliners in the White House and State Department to sanction the Cold War and depict it as a life and death struggle over the fate of mankind. Whatever one thought of Kennan, he was an intelligent, well-read man who could write. So even if one disagreed with him, one had to admit he knew how to construct an argument. It was the Long Telegram and Kennan’s article in Foreign Affairs magazine the following year that set the stage for the American policy of containment against the—according to Kennan—naturally expansive Soviet Union. President Harry Truman adapted it and it governed American policy towards the USSR for the next forty years. And some would say longer.

    Now, one of his implicit arguments—never formally stated, but clearly implied—is that the Cold War, and all its accompanying savagery, was somehow inevitable. That pall hangs over The Jakarta Method as thickly as it does David Halberstam’s similarly flawed—and today obsolete— book on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest. But, if FDR and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull had stayed in power, it is highly suspect that Kennan’s Long Telegram would have carried the day. In fact, Kennan spent a large part of his later career denying that he ever meant his cable to be carried to the extremes it was taken to. (Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, pgs. 211, 229–30) The Kennan-induced hysteria led to Paul Nitze’s complete militarization of the Cold War with his 66-page document labeled NSC 68, presented to Truman in 1950. Nitze was not satisfied with containment. He advocated rollback. (Click here to read NSC 68)

    It’s not just important to mention FDR’s cooperation with the USSR before and during the war. We should also note his plans for after the war. In a secret interview with Robert Sherwood in 1946, Anthony Eden, Churchill’s foreign minister, said that he blamed the present state of affairs on the death of Roosevelt. He spoke of Roosevelt’s subtlety and contrasted that with Truman and Winston Churchill. Eden told Sherwood that, had Roosevelt lived and maintained his health, he would have never let the Soviet/American situation deteriorate as it had. He concluded that FDR’s “death therefore was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.” (Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, by Frank Costigliola, p. 2)

    This relates directly to Bevins’ subject. For instance, FDR did not want Indochina to be returned to France after the war. He said, “The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.” Stalin supported Roosevelt on the decolonization issue. FDR also said, one week before his death, that once the Japanese had been cleared from the Philippines, that archipelago would be granted its independence. (Stone and Kuznick, pp. 112–13). Neither of these occurred. Winston Churchill resisted this decolonization movement. It was Truman who befriended Churchill even after he was defeated for reelection for prime minister. He then allowed Churchill to make his wildly Manichaean Iron Curtain speech in the USA in March of 1946. It came less than a year after FDR’s death. Five months later, Eden made his comments to Sherwood about the calamitous loss of Roosevelt.

    When looked at in this manner, the so-called inevitability—or the ineluctable tragedy of the Cold War—is not so inevitable and not so ineluctable. With Roosevelt and Hull in power, it might not have happened. Or at least it would not have been so epochal. I could not detect that alternative in the Bevins book. In my view, any real historian would have noted it.

    II

    When I got to Chapters 2 and 3, I detected another historical lacuna in The Jakarta Method. This is where Bevins begins to focus on Indonesia and also the rise of the CIA as an overseas arm of American foreign policy. I got the impression that somehow Bevins thought that CIA clandestine operations officer Frank Wisner and American ambassador to Indonesia Howard Jones were more important in those two areas than the Dulles brothers and Dwight Eisenhower. This is the impression a novice would get in reading those two chapters (pp. 31–75).

    Blanche Weisen Cook noted in her book, The Declassified Eisenhower, that while he was serving as president of Columbia University in New York, Dwight Eisenhower was attending a tutoring course at the Council on Foreign Relations. He concentrated on economics and how America was influencing the world through the Marshall Plan. In all likelihood it was through this process, plus his disagreement with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Eisenhower became enamored with both covert action and the use of economic forces in order to confront communism and control nationalistic revolution in the Third World. This was much more attractive to him than risking a final and devastating war with Russia. As she wrote, “For Eisenhower, missiles represented deterrence. Yet covert operations, misinformation, nonattributable intervention were part of his active arsenal.” (Letter to the New York Times of August 2, 1981) I should also add that, in her book, the key role of C. D. Jackson as a propaganda expert was first fully revealed. It was through people like Jackson that Eisenhower made propaganda and psychological warfare a constant in countries like Poland, Hungary and Italy. (ibid)

    Eisenhower actually asked at an NSC meeting in 1953 why it was not possible “to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” (Stone and Kuznick, p. 258) Eisenhower never really learned how to answer that question in any practical way. As historian Philip Muehlenbeck notes in his study of African colonial liberation, from 1953 to 1960 nineteen independent states emerged on that continent. Not once did the USA ever vote against a European power over a colonial dispute at the UN. (Betting on the Africans, p. 3) Eisenhower rarely, if ever, criticized colonial rule by an ally. He would often find a reason to go golfing when a new African head of state arrived in Washington. (ibid)

    His vice-president had the same lack of empathy and understanding of the Third World. Richard Nixon made his reputation in the Alger Hiss case. That case helped launch the Red Scare of the 1950’s. Therefore, a virulent strain of anti-communism now existed domestically as well as in American foreign policy. Nixon was part of both. In 1954, Nixon was the first high official to advocate for inserting American troops into Vietnam. (John Prados, Operation Vulture, E book version, Chapter 9) To say Nixon was rather condescending to the peoples of the Third World is an understatement. At an NSC meeting the vice-president claimed that “some of the peoples of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” (Muelhenbeck, p. 6) These personal traits carried over into action. While Nixon was president, the military wanted to cut back on Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, Nixon had it renewed. (Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, p. 334) Bevins covers Phoenix as part of his theme of brutalization of third world populations. (p. 267) Yet, I barely recall Nixon being mentioned in the book in relation to Indochina.

    For this reviewer, there was another lacuna in the book which I also found strange. In large portion, Bevins draws the Cold War in terms of ideology. Certainly that is the way that operatives like Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes saw it. But as one goes up the ladder the motivational funnel broadens. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, both worked for decades at the giant international law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. That firm represented sprawling corporate interests in varying fields e.g. banking, petroleum and mining. Many of these were part of either the Rockefeller or Morgan empires. Those business interests had large holdings in the Third World. As international corporate lawyers, the Dulles brothers were beholden to these interests and therefore sensitive to them. This is why Michael Parenti has said that the acronym CIA could also stand for Corporate Interests of America. The book doesn’t have a bibliography, but from scanning his notes, Bevins would have benefited in reading A Law unto Itself, a history of Sullivan and Cromwell. Concerning the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala, he just says the Dulles brothers worked on Wall Street and they did some things for United Fruit. (p. 46) Later, he does supply a bit more information, but this is in his footnotes. (p. 279)

    Bevins follows this pattern with Operation Ajax in 1953 in Iran, the overthrow of Mossadegh. Bevins spends all of six paragraphs on the overthrow. Considering the subject of the book, this was so skimpy as to be jarring. Bevins did not have to devote a full chapter to Iran, but to deal with this very important subject in just six paragraphs was, for me, a non-starter, because it does not do justice to the event, the people involved in it, its importance in history and therefore to the story he is telling. And that story relates to Iran, the Third World, and the United States.

    III

    In 1933, the Anglo-Iranian Oil company—later to become British Petroleum—was formed. It was a combination in ownership of the British government and private business, i.e. British Shell. That entity purchased a 100,000 square mile claim of land in Iran. The company then sold off 20% of it to Exxon and Mobil. The terms were a 20 year sublease expiring in 1953. (John Blair, The Control of Oil, pp. 43–44) The interests of the American ownership in the company were represented by Allen Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell. And the Shah of Iran was a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Dulles. (Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsis, A Law unto Itself, p. 210)

    The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was the pride and joy of Winston Churchill. He looked at it as a way of supplying the great British navy with an endless supply of cheap fuel. (Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, p. 109). The company was rather stingy in its arrangement with the Iranian government. The split between the two was 84–16% in favor of the company. There was a lot of money involved since the company was the third largest producer of crude in the world. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 258). From the time he was in the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Mosaddegh detested dealing with the British. Like another secular Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, he considered them the worst colonizers on the globe. As early as 1944 he advocated nationalizing their holdings. (Dreyfuss, p. 109) This was made worse when Mosaddegh learned that the American owned Arabian American Oil Company had a 50/50 profit sharing deal with Saudi Arabia.

    Shah Reza Pahlavi did not really want to be a monarch. He admired what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey. So he also wished to turn Iran into a republic. But the powerful set of mullahs, named the Ulema, resisted this. (Dreyfuss p. 110) They were backed by the radical fundamentalist terrorist group the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood resorted to assassination of members of the Shah’s government between 1949–51. In a very important point, completely missed by Bevins, this extremist group was backed by the British who supplied them with suitcases full of money to bribe the mullahs and to purchase followers in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran. (Dreyfuss, pp. 111–13) As Robert Dreyfuss points out in his fine book Devil’s Game, the British did not want the Middle East turned into a Pan Arab union of republics, for this would mean that they would not get the favored oil arrangements they had from the royal monarchies.

    Mossadegh led the political group called the National Front. The Shah appointed him prime minister in 1951. He announced a series of progressive and democratic reforms; peasantry was banished, unemployment insurance was begun, land reform was instituted. On May 1, 1951 Mossadegh nationalized Anglo-Iranian. He wished to use the profits for the betterment of Iranians. In another key point slighted by Bevins, when Mossadegh visited Washington in 1951, Truman warned London not to attack Iran. A policy which his Secretary of State Dean Acheson was in agreement with. (Dreyfuss, p. 113; Stone and Kuznick, p. 259) Therefore, Churchill decided to wage economic war on Tehran. Mossadegh cut off diplomatic relations with London.

    The British knew they needed an ally in their goal of overthrowing Mossadegh. He was being granted emergency powers because of the economic warfare. Under Truman and Acheson, the USA would not volunteer. Under the new administration, America did so. In fact, people in the CIA understood something had now changed with Iran policy. Previously, they liked Mossadegh and he was seen as a bulwark against the Tudeh, Iran’s small communist party. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 69) They were now going to work with the British MI-6 to displace him, and the issue was oil. (Dreyfuss, p. 115) When the CIA station chief in Tehran resisted, Allen Dulles removed him. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 260)

    With his brother Allen as CIA Director, the blueprint to overthrow Mossadegh was designed in John Foster Dulles’ office in the State Department in June of 1953. (John Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 261) The idea was to get the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh, which he was reluctant to do. In August of 1953, he finally did. Then the Shah fled to Rome. Once Mossadegh was formally dismissed, the idea was to portray him as a tool of Tudeh, which Foster Dulles knew he was not. But both the New York Times and Allen Dulles said he was. (Blum, pp. 70, 75). In fact, during the entire crisis, the Russians did not try and extend aid to ease the economic embargo, even in the face of the actual overthrow. And Mossadegh did not ask for Russian aid. (Blum, p. 75) Step three was the CIA, under their ground supervisor, Kermit Roosevelt, would now enlist the British allied Muslim Brotherhood and the Ulema to raise violent demonstrations against Mossadegh. They even got some of the Brotherhood to masquerade as members of the Tudeh. Under disguise, they threw rocks at mosques and mullahs and wore placards saying they would hang the mullahs from lampposts in all major cities in Iran. (Dreyfuss, p. 117; Stone and Kuznick, p. 260) Step five was, in the face of this CIA created chaos— which weakened Mossadegh—to secretly supply the army and enlist them on their side. (Blum, p. 73) In the midst of this violent and deadly maelstrom, step 6 was now taken: the Shah was to appoint a new leader, handpicked by the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt. After a final tank battle was waged in front of his home, Mossadegh stepped down. He was first imprisoned and then placed under house arrest. His followers were jailed, many were executed. Allen Dulles, who had temporarily stationed himself in Rome, now ordered a plane to transport the Shah from Italy back to Tehran. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pp. 235–38)

    I have outlined what happened in Tehran from 1951–53. I invite anyone to compare the above six paragraphs with what Bevins has written on the subject. (See pgs. 38–40). I guarantee the reader will learn more, in every way, from the above. Recall, this was the first successful overthrow of an elected government through covert action by the CIA.

    The results, for the American oil companies allied with the Anglo-Iranian company, were tangible. They got an increased share of the company. (Blair, p. 46) The Shah was now the recipient of well over 100 million dollars in aid in the first year he was restored. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 260). He gratefully joined the Baghdad Pact. The Dulles brothers were quite pleased with what had occurred in Tehran, as was Eisenhower. Kermit Roosevelt was not. When Foster Dulles asked him to repeat the performance later, he declined. In 1958, he quit the CIA and went to work for Gulf oil. (Ranelagh, p. 264). As anyone can understand, except perhaps Vincent Bevins, the forces that the Dulles brothers helped unleash to bring down Mossadegh in 1953 were, in large part, the same forces that overthrew the Shah in 1979. This included the Ayatalloh Khomeini, who, in 1979—with the help of the BBC and ABC—turned the USA into the Great Satan of the Middle East. (Stone and Kuznick, p. 260) Khomeini also ushered in the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism that—as we shall see, but Bevins does not—Senator John Kennedy warned about in 1957.

    IV

    I have tried to show above how there was a discernible darker gradation from Franklin Roosevelt, to Harry Truman, to Dwight Eisenhower in regards to the Cold War. I did not really detect this in Bevins’ book. It was under Ike that Allen ran the CIA and Foster was Secretary of State. It was then that the CIA tried to perfect the art of the overthrow. Prior to this, the Agency was run by two military men. On and off, Allen Dulles had served in both the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services, as well as at Sullivan and Cromwell, for virtually his entire life.

    With that in mind, and in this reviewer’s opinion, to leave out Truman’s regret at what Allen Dulles had done to the CIA is not being candid with the reader. Those regrets were real and he shared them with others like Admiral Sidney Souers. Appointed by Truman, Souers briefly ran the Central Intelligence Group, the immediate forerunner to the CIA. Years later, Truman had communicated with Souers about what Allen Dulles had done to the CIA. Both men were gravely disappointed in the result. Souers wrote to Truman that Dulles “caused the CIA to wander far from the original goal established by you, and it is certainly a different animal than I tried to set up for you.” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 379)

    This was not an isolated opinion. Both Robert Lovett and David Bruce also lamented what the Dulles brothers had done. Both were scions of the Power Elite e.g. Bruce was a longtime ambassador who married into the wildly wealthy Mellon family. Lovett worked for Brown Brothers Harriman as well as serving under Truman as Secretary of Defense. As well established in the upper circles as these men were, they were highly critical of what the Dulles brothers had done with the CIA. They filed a report while serving on the civilian control board for the Agency. Bruce referred to what Allen Dulles was doing as “king-making”. Agreeing with Truman, both men wrote that intelligence collection had been superseded by covert action under Dulles. And this was not what Truman had in mind at the outset. (DiEugenio, p. 49) Their complaints fell on deaf ears since Eisenhower was president at the time.

    This is important because it touches on what is supposed to be the main focus of Bevins’ book: Indonesia. In the Bruce-Lovett report, it specifically points out that Foster Dulles had removed ambassador John Allison in advance of the attempted coup against Sukarno in 1958, for the reason that Allison opposed it. (DiEugenio, p. 49). He was replaced by Howard Jones, who was kept in the dark about what was upcoming.

    Before addressing the attempted 1958 coup against Sukarno, I think it’s important to mention the Bandung conference of 1955, Bevins does deal with this event, but I think its notable to point out a chronology. Many commentators believe that Sukarno of Indonesia and Nehru of India called the Non-Aligned Conference at this time because the CIA had overthrown elected governments in Iran and Guatemala in the two consecutive years prior. These leaders specifically singled out their lack of trust and belief in John Foster Dulles. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, p. 3) But it was not just Dulles’ interest in Third World overthrows that made him suspect. It was also his penchant for ringing the world with anti-communist treaties. Nehru specifically called this out as “a wrong approach, a dangerous approach, and a harmful approach.” (Rakove, p. 5) For instance, Dulles created the Baghdad Pact just two months before Bandung. As noted, the Shah joined. Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt did not. (ibid, p. 6) Foster Dulles counted this against Nasser. It was one of the reasons why the USA pulled out of the Aswan Dam deal, which led to the Suez Crisis of 1956, which led to Nasser going to the Russians for co-financing of Aswan. (See this essay for an in depth treatment of this event) This is what Nehru meant when he said Foster Dulles’ penchant to divide up the world was a harmful approach. The Baghdad Pact was especially offensive to the non-aligned leaders since the United Kingdom—the greatest colonizer in the modern world—was part of it.

    Bevins deals with Washington’s reaction to Bandung in five sentences. (p. 59) Yet, Dulles’ State Department called the expansion of the non-aligned movement “one of the most dangerous political trends of the fifties.” Foster Dulles was so predisposed against the movement that he thought of staging a shadow conference featuring conservative, American allied nations. At a speech in Iowa in 1956, the Secretary of State said that the idea of neutrality was simply a false pretense. He added that his alliance system had eliminated that alternative. After his death, Dulles was reviled in the non-aligned world as the man who made their foreign policy immoral. (Rakove, pp. 6–10) There is even evidence that the CIA plotted to blow up Zhou En Lai’s plane as he was traveling to the conference. (NY Times, November 22, 1967, p. 23)

    In 1957, the CIA decided to enlist a group of officers in the outer islands of the Indonesia archipelago to rebel against Sukarno. This ended up being the largest covert action project the Agency had attempted prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. But to fully understand what Eisenhower and Foster Dulles were doing, one must keep this in mind: Sukarno was not a communist. There were no communists in the high echelons of the military or in his government. That included D. N. Aidit, the leader of the PKI. In fact, the military was opposed to the PKI.

    Then what was this really about? One way to reply is that it was part of the CIA’s war on neutralism. If we recall, there were no real indications that Mossadegh was a communist either. Therefore, one way to interpret the almost mad reaction to both men is simply that Foster Dulles meant what he said about there being no room for neutrality in the Cold War. As a result, and due to a wide examination of the record, Audrey and George McT. Kahin ended up agreeing with Blanche Weisen Cook. In 1995, in. a book length study of the attempted overthrow, they wrote that “Probably at no time since World War II has violence—especially on a militarized level—in the execution of American foreign policy been so widespread as during the Eisenhower administration.” (Subversion as Foreign Policy, p. 8)

    The 1958 overthrow attempt against Sukarno failed. It was climaxed by the shooting down of a CIA pilot, Alan Pope. This exposed the denials of U.S. involvement by the American government and the New York Times. (Bevins, pp. 68–69) Australian Indonesia scholar Greg Poulgrain postulates that Allen Dulles saw the fail coming. He, therefore, shifted allegiance in the conflict for the purposes of giving the army Strategic Reserve Command, Kostrad, more power and stature in the government. (The Incubus of Intervention, pp. 8–10) As we shall see, Allen Dulles knew something about Indonesia that neither Eisenhower nor Sukarno did.

    V

    Up until this point, I was ready to call Bevins’ book fair to middling. If I was a professor, I would have given him a passing grade. When I got to his writing about John Kennedy, I altered that grade downward. It is important to note just what he does.

    Kennedy’s first appearance in The Jakarta Method is as a senator. (Bevins, p. 59) The author spends two paragraphs on JFK and what he labels as a speech he gave in the senate opposing Eisenhower’s backing of France in Algeria. He does make a vague reference to other speeches Kennedy made after Bandung, which occurred in 1955. But Bevins references this as a speech by Kennedy on European colonialism from 1952, before Bandung. (Bevins, p. 281) In that reference, he says this speech took place in the senate. But Kennedy was not in the senate in 1952. He was still in the lower House. It gets worse. Because the rebellion in Algeria did not begin until 1954, two years after the date Bevins puts on this speech. Kennedy’s milestone speech against Eisenhower and Foster Dulles on Algeria did not occur until 1957. And, as I have noted, in that speech Kennedy warned about the possible explosion of Islamic fundamentalism in north Africa.

    Whatever the reason for this sloppiness, it indicates something faulty in Bevins’ depiction of Kennedy. For Kennedy did not begin his crusade against the State Department’s approach in the Third World in 1955 or in 1957. It began in 1951, owing to his meeting with diplomat Edmund Gullion in Saigon amid France’s attempt to retake Indochina after the war. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 108) There, at a rooftop restaurant, Gullion told the young Kennedy that France would not win their colonial war in Vietnam. (Click here for a full discussion)

    As several authors have described, this meeting had an impact on Kennedy. He immediately began to communicate his doubts about supporting the French effort—and the State Department’s overall performance in the Third World—to his constituents. (Mahoney, pp. 14–15). In other words, from 1951 to the end of his senate term, Kennedy was in opposition to both Truman/Acheson and Eisenhower/Dulles. At times, he specifically said both political parties were wrong in their approach to the problem of nationalism in emerging nations. (Mahoney, p. 18) He was upset that Eisenhower had greatly increased aid to France for its colonial war in Indochina—going way beyond what Truman had been willing to give in that lost cause. (Mahoney, p. 16) Therefore, at the start, Bevins’ portrayal of Kennedy in relation to his main theme is both foreshortened and inaccurate.

    This continues with president elect Kennedy and the Congo. What Bevins does with this episode is startling. He leaves out the fact that Kennedy was the chair of a senate subcommittee on Africa in 1959–60. During the 1960 campaign, the senator mentioned Africa close to 500 times. (Muehlenbeck, p. 37) The problem was, unbeknownst to Kennedy, Eisenhower and the CIA had marked out Patrice Lumumba, the elected leader of Congo, for assassination. Allen Dulles was backing the Belgian plan to split off the mineral rich Katanga province from Congo, thereby depriving Lumumba of Congo’s main source of wealth. When the USA would not help the democratically elected Congo leader expel the uninvited Belgian paratroopers, Lumumba turned to the USSR. That sealed his fate in the eyes of Eisenhower and Allen Dulles. The CIA now put together a series of murder plots to assassinate Lumumba. (John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, pp. 236–68)

    They did not work. But the CIA cooperated with the Belgians to capture Lumumba and have him shipped to Katanga. There, he was executed by firing squad, his corpse soaked in sulphuric acid and then set aflame. (Newman, pp. 295–96). Bevins writes that Lumumba was killed three days before Kennedy was inaugurated. He does not note that the CIA never told Kennedy about his murder. He found out about it through Adlai Stevenson at the UN almost a month later. Bevins also fails to note that some authors think the CIA hurried the plots in order to kill Lumumba before Kennedy took office. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23) And he does not show the reader this picture.

    Kennedy gets the news of Lumumba’s death on 2/13/61 from Adlai Stevenson. This picture was taken by Jacques Lowe who said Kennedy groaned and said “Oh no.”

    But perhaps most importantly, Bevins does not tell the reader that—not knowing he was dead—Kennedy immediately began to alter American policy in Congo. He even removed the ambassador and replaced him with Gullion. (Mahoney, pp. 77–78) He did these things because, unlike Eisenhower who wanted him killed, he favored Lumumba. And unlike Allen Dulles, he did not back the Katanga secession. He admired UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who moved to stop the secession. (Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold?, p. 239)

    And, this only tells the reader half the story, for Bevins then makes a Bob Beamon historical leap to Josef Mobutu taking control of Congo. (Bevins, p. 84) Again, this is startling, since it did not formally happen until 1965. But by making that elision, he cuts out the whole two year struggle Kennedy went through with Hammarskjold—and then after Dag’s murder—to keep Congo independent and stop it from reverting back to European imperialism. Kennedy did this mostly on his own. Because after the assassination of Hammarskjold in September of 1961, the UN was not that eager to spend more money on this conflict. Kennedy went to the UN twice to convince them to see the mission through. Partly perhaps because Gullion had cabled Washington that he suspected the Hammarskjold plane crash was not an accident, it was done by sabotage. (Interview by Oliver Stone with Richard Mahoney for the upcoming documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed. For a concise treatment of this whole tragic episode, click here)

    And here is the capper. By avoiding all of this, Bevins can dodge the fact that President Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s Congo policy and essentially reverted back to what Eisenhower and Allen Dulles were advocating. (Mahoney, pp. 230–31; Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies, pp.79–85). This is how Mobutu took over and became a 30-year dictator, imperial stooge and, perhaps, the wealthiest man in Africa.

    VI

    Following the lead of the late Alexander Cockburn and author Roger Morris, Bevins tries to implicate Kennedy in the Ramadan Revolution of February, 1963. This was the overthrow of the leader of Iraq, Karim Qasim, by the Baath Party. (Bevins, p. 89) Morris made this implication in an article he did for the New York Times in March of 2003. This was at the height of the MSM’s wild propaganda war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. We know, through the disgraced work of Times reporter Judith Miller, that the Times was an armature for Dick Cheney to build a huge broadcast and print communications wave. That wave was created to prepare America for President George W. Bush’s (ultimately) disastrous invasion of Iraq. That pointless attack ended up being the worst American foreign policy disaster since Lyndon Johnson landed ground troops in Vietnam. In the face of all this, Bevins uses a Times newspaper column as his source for the Qasim overthrow. Even though there have been much more scholarly sources—books and dissertations—written on the subject since that time. Let us use those to indicate the quality of his scholarship.

    In 1958, Qasim led a violent coup against the Hashemite monarchy, one which killed both the king and the crown prince. Qasim then tried to navigate amid four sources of power in the country: the communist party (CPI), the Baath party, which admired Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the army, and the Kurds of Northern Iraq. The main outside influence was the Iraq Petroleum Company, owners of the large oil concession which was of major value to both Iraq, and the world’s, supply. To put it mildly, Qasim was not up to this juggling task. In 1959, in a plot which Hussein was a part of, the Baaths tried to assassinate him. (Bryan Gibson, US Foreign Policy : Iraq and the Cold War 1958–75, London School of Economics dissertation, 2013)

    In the beginning, the problem for Qasim was posed by the Pan Arabists and a demonstration they held in Mosul. This caused him to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact, which angered Allen Dulles. (Gibson, p. 47) But according to both Gibson and another dissertation by Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, done at Stanford in 2005, nothing Dulles had planned for was ever approved or put in action. There is no evidence, according to Wolfe-Hunnicutt, that the Baath had any connections to the CIA prior to the 1959 plot. (p. 42, The End of the Concessionary Regime.) Gibson agrees with this, saying the CIA did not even know about it. (pp. 57–58)

    What is striking about the Kennedy administration is that it does not appear that President Kennedy was very interested in Qasim, especially in comparison with Eisenhower, who had set up a special committee on Iraq. (Gibson, p. 49) That committee was, for all practical purposes, rendered null during the Kennedy administration. (Gibson, p. 68) By this time, 1961, Qasim had abandoned the CPI. In fact, he had actually turned on the communists. (Wolfe-Hunnicutt, pp. 52–56). As time went on, he had serious problems with the British, because he had revised the concessionary agreement with the oil consortium, the IPC. This was a largely British owned company centered in London. Qasim now claimed all the land IPC had not used for oil development as Iraq’s. (Wolfe-Hunnicutt, pp. 68–71)

    An even more serious problem was the Kurdish rebellion in the north, which evolved into a civil war. This went on for months on end. The Kurds were good guerilla fighters who inflicted a series of defeats on the Iraqi army at the end of 1962. This caused a drop in morale in the military ranks. (Gibson, p. 92) And that set the stage for the February 8, 1963, coup against Qasim. Because the Baaths, after the Kurdish victories, now infiltrated the army. But in addition, representatives of that party now negotiated with the Kurds. (Ibid) There is no credible evidence that the CIA or State Department commandeered this plot either. (Peter Hahn, Missions Accomplished?, p. 48) Consequently, the underlying tenets of what the author presents in this passage are dubious.

    That includes the idea that the CIA supplied names of hundreds of communists for the Baath Party to eliminate. Bevins says the number ended up being 5000. (p. 267) Neither the CIA station nor the State Department had even 1/20 of that many names in their files. (Wolfe-Hunnicutt, p. 85) Finally, although Bevins says Hussein was part of this overthrow, most biographies of Saddam place him in Egypt studying law at the time. For that reason, the idea that this led to his rise to party leader is both questionable and illogical. But beyond that, the Baaths were removed just eight months later. When Saddam returned to Iraq, he was placed in prison.

    VII

    The author gives the Alliance for Progress the back of his hand. (Bevins p. 88. For an objective view of that socio-economic effort, click here) In my view, he makes a mess of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Operation Mongoose. (pp. 85–88) Predictably, he leaves out President Kennedy’s attempt at détente with Castro after the Missile Crisis. He also makes the spurious statement that Bobby Kennedy suspected Castro may have been involved in his brother’s assassination. (Bevins, p. 106)

    Next to Indonesia, his second area of concentration is Brazil. He writes that Janio Qadros, who was president from January to August of 1961, angered the Kennedy administration because he admired neutralists like Nehru and Nasser. This is nonsense. Anyone who has read anything about Kennedy—going as far back as 1983 and Richard Mahoney’s book—would know that Kennedy liked and worked with both men.

    Kennedy made a mistake in approving Lincoln Gordon as ambassador to Brazil. In that position, Gordon proved to be a Henry Jackson type Democratic cold warrior. Today, his cables are almost legendary in their rhetoric against Qadros’ successor, Joao Goulart. In one Gordon compared the turn of Brazil to the left as equivalent to the fall of China to Mao Zedong. Unfortunately, Kennedy and his Secretary of State Dean Rusk took these seriously. This began a program to weaken Goulart in 1963. (Anthony Pereira, June 20, 2016, Bulletin of Latin American Research).

    But Kennedy did not approve his overthrow. In fact, he refused to take a meeting with David Rockefeller for that reason. (A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, p. 104). In January of 1964, President Johnson—who was quite friendly with the Rockefellers—did take the meeting. Quickly, the coup planning was on. There is a debate today over whether or not the American arm of the overthrow was necessary. Some, like the late scholar Thomas Skidmore—a Brazil specialist—believed that Goulart had alienated the military to the point that they would have gotten rid of him themselves. But there is no doubt that the USA was involved. Bevins tries to say that few people knew about that at the time. (pp. 110–11) Yet there were demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro against Hanna mining, a Rockefeller company. And pro-Goulart newspapers wrote that John McCloy, the point man for David Rockefeller, was in Rio in late February of 1964 negotiating with Goulart. (Kai Bird, The Chairman, p. 551) In his biography of McCloy, Bird tends to agree with Skidmore: the Brazilian military did not need the outside help. (ibid, p. 553)

    Robert Kennedy was quite upset with what Johnson had done with the Alliance for Progress. He was also outraged that Johnson had sent troops to the Dominican Republic to stop Juan Bosch, who JFK had favored, from returning to power. Bosch said at the time that the aims of the Alliance stopped when JFK was killed in Dallas. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and his Times, p. 722) When Bobby became senator from New York, he arranged a tour of Latin America. When he got to Brazil he met with the new leader, Castelo Branco. After that meeting, he was being driven back to his hotel when he saw some of the crowd being struck by soldiers trying to keep them away from his car. He jumped out of the car and shouted, “Down with the government! On to the palace!” (John R., Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, p. 245)

    McCloy was doing his mission for Rockefeller while he was serving on the Warren Commission, the official inquiry—some would call it the official cover up—of President Kennedy’s assassination. That subject greatly interested Goulart when McCloy visited him. (Bird, p. 552) In 1968, Lincoln Gordon was on the nominating committee for the Ramsey Clark panel. He helped pick the doctors who reevaluated the medical evidence in the JFK case. By reviewing the autopsy photos and x-rays, the panel radically altered the original autopsy findings. But, even at that, it still decided that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. (Lisa Pease, “The Formation of the Clark Panel”, Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 1) Bevins is oblivious to these two rather disturbing ironies.

    VIII

    We conclude with what is supposed to be the heart of The Jakarta Method. That is the author’s discussion of the 1965 coup that resulted in the house arrest of President Sukarno and the rise to power of General Suharto. At the start, Bevins makes the following statement: “Indonesia was one place where Lyndon Johnson took a different approach from his successor [sic].” The idea that Indonesia was the one place where Kennedy and Johnson differed is ludicrous. Several scholars have proven that, as Johnson was freezing out Sukarno in 1964–65, he was also getting ready to reverse Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. He was going to do what President Kennedy would likely never have done: insert thousands upon thousands of American combat troops to fight the war for Saigon. Johnson also appointed Thomas Mann as his czar over Latin America, and Mann would begin to cut back on the Alliance for Progress. (Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, pp. 156–60) LBJ also swung strongly against Nasser and toward Israel in the Middle East. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, pp. 245–47) Further, Kennedy was thinking about returning Mossadegh to power in Iran. (Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, pp. 224–25)

    Bevins also underplays both the speed and completeness of this alteration. Roger Hilsman, an Asian specialist under Kennedy, noted that everyone was taken aback when Johnson refused to sign continuing aid to Indonesia, since they knew it would have been a matter of routine with Kennedy. Beyond that, Johnson made sure that whatever aid America was sending went to the military. (Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 407)

    A problem with Sukarno in 1964 was the confrontation with the British over the creation of Malaysia. Bobby Kennedy was sent by Johnson to try and get a cease fire there, which he did. But RFK was surprised that he only had one meeting with Johnson over this issue. Bobby later felt “he had been used as a decoration to paste the Kennedy name over the politics of another man.” (Hilsman, p. 409)

    When Johnson called off the visit to Jakarta that Kennedy had scheduled for 1964, everyone realized the obvious. As Hilsman wrote:

    The United States, in fact, had made a major shift in its policy. It had abandoned its effort to steer the new nationalism of Indonesia into constructive channels, and moved to a hard line in support of the British effort to isolate Indonesia politically and contain it militarily. (ibid)

    Bevins’ underplaying of the shift toward Indonesia is strange since he greatly appreciates what Bradley Simpson has done in this field. Simpson clearly states in his book, Economists with Guns, that there is no question that Johnson immediately reversed Kennedy’s policy. He repeated this on camera in an interview with Oliver Stone for the director’s upcoming documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed.

    Once LBJ signaled the change, the dam broke. Howard Jones, a moderate, was replaced as ambassador by Marshall Green, a hardliner. (Bevins, p. 126) As Simpson is at pains to elucidate in his book, the CIA and the State Department now began to do what they could to undermine Sukarno and search for an alternative. This traffic was especially marked in the late summer and fall of 1964. Then, in December of 1964, there were reports in intelligence circles that Indonesia would fall amid a premature leftist coup. That would provide the opportunity for the army to crush the PKI and make Sukarno a prisoner of their goodwill. (Lisa Pease, “JFK, Indonesia, CIA and Freeport Sulphur”, Probe Magazine, June/July 1996)

    But someone else also seemed to know what was coming. That was the board members and owners of a company called Freeport Sulphur, later Freeport McMoran. As Lisa Pease noted in her milestone article, there were reports that Freeport had made large mining plans as early as April 1965, when Sukarno was threatening to nationalize American industries. Then, just one month after the first outbreaks of the September 30th Movement, Langbourne Williams of Freeport called Forbes Wilson. a chief engineer for the company. He asked him if he had the time to work on Freeport’s project in West Irian. (Click here for more information) As Pease points out, this is quite notable. Since, at that time, no one could possibly determine what the outcome of the huge upheaval taking place was going to be. But as both Pease and author Greg Poulgrain have shown, Freeport had tens of billions of dollars riding on the outcome. And Gus Long, another director of Freeport, was sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Johnson. It was his reward for supporting LBJ in 1964. That board advised, reviewed and recommended intelligence operations.

    As far as I could detect, Bevins spends all of two sentences on Freeport. (pp. 152–3) By doing so, he underplays the role of the Power Elite in this the Indonesian atrocity. To be specific, and as Pease points out, Freeport was a Rockefeller controlled company. Therefore, this reveals Johnson’s closeness to that clan, but also his overall friendliness with big business, which is what Bobby Kennedy warned the USSR about in his and Jackie Kennedy’s secret letter to the Kremlin in late November of 1963. They said that the détente President Kennedy was working on would be put on hold for this precise reason. (David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 29–34). This pattern is also notable in Vietnam and in Johnson’s weakening of the Alliance for Progress.

    Bevins does not make any clear statement as to what really happened with the abduction and killing of the generals by the September 30th Movement, which triggered the horrible reaction by the army against the PKI. Bevins outlines three theories as to what the plan may have been. (pp. 130–31) In this reviewer’s opinion, Greg Poulgrain’s solution, outlined in his new book, is the best explication we have yet.

    Finally, I must say that the book’s title indulges in a bit of poetic license. The concept of the American government assembling names of people in the Third World for elimination purposes actually began in Guatemala in 1954. (Larry Hancock, Nexus, p. 19) And Bevins is not the first to show that the threat of this kind of extermination was used later in Chile. Don Freed and Fred Landis pointed it out way back in 1980. (Death in Washington, p. 93)

    As I said at the outset, this book had a quite ambitious aim. For the reasons stated throughout, it does not achieve it. America’s Cold War reaction was not a monolithic type movement. It was impacted by the death of Roosevelt, which gave an opening to the messianic fear mongering of Kennan and Nitze. That, in turn, impacted Truman in a way it would not have Roosevelt. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers made this all the worse since they combined the ideological imbalance with an allegiance to the Eastern Establishment and its monetary agenda. If we view Kennedy objectively—which he does not—he was trying to move back to Roosevelt. Kennedy was not in the grasp of the Power Elite as the previous administration was, e.g. Kennedy never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; the Dulles brothers almost ran that group.

    Bevins was too beholden to his journalistic roots and his MSM background. Like journalist David Halberstam and his useless relic about Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, he built a narrative first. He then fitted his ordained facts into that narrative. Historians, at least good ones, don’t settle for that.

  • Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 3

    Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 3


    I. Was Oswald a Government Agent?

    In part 3, we will try to answer the most important question regarding Oswald. Was he a secret agent of some U.S. intelligence service and, if so, who was controlling him? We will examine his actions in Dallas and New Orleans and, finally, his alleged trip to Mexico before the tragic events of 11/22/1963. We will show that what happened in Mexico has many similarities with his USSR defection and the U2 incident.

    The Warren Commission had examined the possibility that Oswald was some kind of a “government agent”. J. Lee Rankin, the Commission’s general counsel, during the January 27th, 1964 meeting, was trying to convince the other members that they should counter the “dirty rumor” that Oswald was a “government agent”. Three days earlier, the chair of the Commission, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Rankin had met secretly with members of the Texas Court of Inquiry to discuss whether or not Oswald was a CIA informant. Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney, informed them that somehow he learned that Oswald’s CIA identity number was 110669 and that it was consistent with the CIA’s filing system. Rankin later found out from Oswald’s CIA 201 personality file that Oswald’s CIA number on the file was 289248. Rankin never shared the above information with other members of the Commission and instead told them that there was a rumor out there, saying that Oswald was an FBI informant with identity number S-172 and S-179, which were bogus.[1]

    It was Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General, who had provided the information to Rankin that Oswald had an FBI badge with number 179 and he was being paid $200 a month.[2] If that was true, then there should have been records at FBI HQ and probably in Dallas and in New Orleans. He would not have a badge, but a number that would be consistent with the Dallas field office abbreviation (DL), a four-digit number and the letter S at the end to denote security (e.g. DL1268S).[3]

    As it was concluded in part 2 of this series, Oswald’s Pro-Soviet, Pro-Communist bona fides would have allowed him to infiltrate communist subversive and pro-Castro organizations targeted by both the CIA and FBI. It is doubtful that Oswald would have been directly employed by the CIA or the FBI, but he was most likely employed by a private investigating agency that had connections to both or one of these two agencies, most likely the CIA.

    Peter Scott believed that this particular investigating agency’s field was that of industrial security.[4] To answer if that was the case, we should examine the life of another Marine who, like Oswald, showed sympathy towards revolutionaries, communists, and subversives. His name was Robert C. Ronstadt and in 1946 he started selling subscriptions to the Communist Daily People’s World and in 1947 joined the Communist party. However, he later testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was only pretending to be a Communist. In reality, he was working in the Los Angeles firm Allied Records and he was tasked to smoke out employees with Communist sympathies and affiliations. It was also revealed that his true employer was not Allied Records but the private investigative firm owned  by P. McCarthy and Joseph Dunn that was responsible for providing industrial security to Allied Records. Ronstadt was not an FBI agent, but his employers, McCarthy and Dunn, were reporting their work to the FBI. Later, Ronstadt left the security company and became a paid informant to the FBI.[5]

    During the Cold War, all defense contractors and oil companies were obliged by law to conduct industrial security investigation to make sure that no leftists and subversives were hired by them. It was Lee Pennington Jr., an FBI agent, who joined the private organization the American Legion and started collecting and storing information on subversives in a massive library. The infamous James McCord of the CIA contacted Pennington, when he was looking to expose subversives.[6] Later, Pennington became a CIA consultant and transferred his library files from the American Legion to the newly created American Security Council (ASC ), which was a joint FBI-CIA-military industrial complex organization. Among its benefactors were both right wing anti-communists and Wall Street Eastern Establishment members. Some of them were Bernard Baruch, Nelson Rockefeller, Eugene W. Rostow, Henry and Clare Luce, Senator Thomas Dodd, Averell Harriman, General Lyman Lemnitzer, General Edward Lansdale, General John Singlaub, Patrick Frawley, Ray Cline, and James Jesus Angleton.

    Angleton created the Security and Intelligence Fund (SIF) after his forced retirement. John M. Fischer, one of the ASC’s presidents, was a founding director of SIF. Two other members of the Council, Elbridge Durbrow and General Robert Richardson III, were also SIF’s President and secretary/treasurer respectively. Large defense contractors like U.S. Steel, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas were consulting its industrial security database to check potential personnel who could pose threats to their security.[7] Other notable members of the ASC were Admiral Felix B. Stump, Air America’s board Chairman, Henry O’Melveny Duque, Nixon’s former law partner, and vice presidents from Atlantic-Richfield, Standard Oil of California, General Dynamics, and the National Security of Industrial Association.[8]

    Do we have any evidence that Oswald was doing industrial security to expose subversives?

    When Oswald returned to Dallas from the USSR, he contacted Peter Gregory who was a petroleum engineer in Fort Worth. In August 1962, Gregory invited Oswald to dinner, where he met George Bouhe, leader of the White Russian community. We can recall from part 2 that Oswald was probably receiving leaflet materials from a White Russian organization and not the Cuban Consulate, as it was first believed. Bouhe introduced Oswald to other members of the White Russian community, among them Max Clark and his wife Katya, born as Princess Sherbatov of the Russian Royal family.[9] Max Clark was a retired Air Force Colonel and he used to work at General Dynamics as industrial security officer. Clark had also received covert security clearance from the CIA for “Project Rock” while working for General Dynamics. A CIA document had linked “Project Rock” to Project Oarfish, a code for the manufacturing of the U-2 airplane.[10] Clark later denied that he was working for the CIA, but he probably had some connection to them through that project. Surprisingly, another infamous character, William Harvey of CIA’s staff D, also had security clearance for “Project Rock”. According to a CIA document, they re-evaluated Harvey’s file in respect for approval to get security clearance to the above mentioned project.[11]

    Max Clark was working closely with I.B. Hale, a former FBI agent and later head of General Dynamics industrial security. It was Virginia, wife of I.B. Hale, that had helped Oswald to get a job at Leslie Whiting on July 1962.[12]

    George DeMohrenschildt was encouraged by Max Clark and J. Walton Moore of the CIA to befriend Oswald and become his mentor.[13] It was George DeMohrenschildt who helped Oswald get a new job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) after he quit his job at Leslie Welding. JCS was doing contract work for the U.S. Army Map Service and that work was related to U-2 flights over Cuba. Oswald got the job four days before President Kennedy was shown pictures of missiles in Cuban taken by the U-2.[14]

    When Oswald moved to New Orleans, it is possible that his job there was related to industrial security in search for subversives. He was employed by the Reily Coffee Company, but he also worked covertly for Guy Banister. William Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, was the company’s Vice President and specialized in industrial security. Alfred Claude, the man who hired Oswald, left Reily and went to work in Chrysler’s aerospace division, which was based in NASA’s New Orleans facilities. Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s supervisor, and two other Reily employees, Dante Marachini and John Branyon, went on also to work for NASA[15], more likely in the industrial security division. Oswald was frequenting a New Orleans’s garage and had revealed to its owner, Adrian Alba, that he was going to work for NASA. Bill Nitschke, a Banister associate, confessed that Banister had given an offer to NASA to get a contract for industrial security in NASA’s New Orleans facilities.

    That Banister’s investigating agency was doing industrial security work can be indicated by the testimony of former Banister associate, Joseph Oster. He told L.J. Delsa, an HSCA investigator, that Banister was using two sources to seek out subversives and Communists, FIDELAFAX and the American Security Council.

    One of the people who Oswald met in New Orleans was Ed Butler, the founder of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. After Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison learned about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his contacts with Butler and INCA. Butler got so scared that he packed all the INCA files and parts of Banister’s files and moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment with Patrick J. Frawley, a prominent member of the American Security Council.[16]

    It will not then be a surprise to learn that, in the fall of 1962, Oswald subscribed to the Daily Worker newspaper of the American Communist Party USA, applied for membership in the Socialists Workers Party, and subscribed to that party’s newspaper The Militant.[17] Both parties were a hive of leftists, subversives, and Communists.

    One could conclude that Oswald was not on the direct payroll of the CIA or the FBI, but possibly through Max Clark he was employed by an unknown industrial security private agency with the purpose of reporting on subversives that were of interest to CIA, the FBI, and defence contractors.

    Had this agency been created and controlled by the CIA or the FBI? For Ed Butler was in contact with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and CIA officer Ed Lansdale, a member of the ASC.[18]

    When Oswald was in New Orleans, he was in contact with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw.  When Oswald was fifteen, he met David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Ferrie was a Captain. In 1961, Ferrie and an exiled Cuban, Sergio Arcacha Smith, were part of the CIA’s training and preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[19] During the same period, Banister’s office was located in the Balter building in New Orleans. In the same building were located the offices of a Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), and Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative.[20] When Banister moved to 544 Camp Street, Arcacha Smith rented an office for CRC in the same building. It was CIA officer E. Howard Hunt who had helped create this organization.[21] Gordon Novel has said that he met Arcacha Smith in 1961 at Banister’s office upon Ed Butler’s recommendation and, at that meeting, was a person who fit the description of David Phillips.[22]

    In Part 2, we concluded that high-level CIA officer James Angleton had utilized Oswald for a Counter Intelligence operation. John Newman thought that Oswald was an off-the-books agent for Angleton. When Oswald returned from Russia, Angleton probably would not have used him as an official CIA agent, but he may have used his connection with the American Security Council and “hired” Oswald from the back door through an industrial security private firm. Angleton was very close to William Sullivan, the head of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division 5, and they had cooperated in the past against the KGB in search of a mole. Most of Sullivan’s men were in continuous cooperation with Angleton’s Counter Intelligence and his secret CI/SIG mole hunting unit. Don Moore of the FBI’s Soviet Counterintelligence interviewed Soviet defector Anatliy Golitsyn and he was the FBI’s representative to the joint CIA/FBI mole hunt task force that included Sullivan and Sam Papich. Papich was the FBI’s liaison to Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff and, as we shall see later on, he was part of a joint CIA/FBI effort to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in foreign countries where it had support.[23]

    Angleton and Sullivan also conspired to rehearse questions and answers for the Warren Commission. It can be logically concluded that Oswald’s mission against subversives was a joint CIA/FBI project orchestrated by Angleton.


    II. Oswald as Agent Provocateur

    Lee Harvey Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963 and visited his Uncle and Aunt, Dutz and Lillian Murret, where he stayed for a while until he could a find a job and settle down on his own. As it was shown earlier, Oswald got a job at Reily Coffee Company and then secured his own apartment.

    In part 2, we reported that Oswald was a frequent visitor to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles where the people that later founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) were members. We have also concluded that Oswald’s Soviet bona fides were a part of his preparation to later infiltrate this particular organization. In New Orleans, he did so. On May 26, 1963, Oswald wrote to the central offices of the FPCC asking them to accept him as a formal member and informed them that he would open a small office to use as branch of the organization. He asked if the organization could provide him with a charter, leaflets, paperwork, and a photograph of Fidel Castro.[24]

    On May 29, 1963, the director of FPCC, Vincent Lee, informed Oswald that he was accepted as an official member of the organization. But he tried to discourage him from opening a chapter in an area which he knew would attract few members, since they would have to work hard just to put together a rudimentary apparatus. He also warned about a branch office provoking violent reaction of the city’s well known right-wing extremists, so he advised renting a postal box. [25]

    Oswald did rent a P.O. Box in his own name with number 30061, New Orleans, Louisiana. He added his wife’s name, Marina Oswald, and someone by the name of A. J. Hidell to also be able to receive mail. He then made an order to print 1000 leaflets and 500 applications using the name Lee Osborne. [26] On the leaflets, he had his name printed with A. J. Hidell as the chapter President.  He then informed the Worker and Militant of his new P.O. Box.[27]

    In May and June of 1963, Oswald was distributing FPCC leaflets in at least three New Orleans locations: Tulane University, Canal Street, and the port. Two university students had in their possession FPCC leaflets with “Hands off Cuba” and the name A. J. Hidell instead of Lee Harvey Oswald. A military intelligence officer reported to the FBI that he had found one such a leaflet at Tulane with the name A. J. Hidell, P.O. Box 30016. Oswald also distributed leaflets outside the aircraft carrier Wasp.[28] Although the correct P.O. Box address was 30061, for some peculiar reason on the above occasion, it was written 30016.

    On June 24, 1963, Oswald applied for a passport to travel to England, France, Germany, Holland, the Soviet Union, and Poland. He received it the next day with the warning that he was not allowed to travel to Cuba. On July 19, 1963, the Reily Company fired Oswald on the grounds that he was not working efficiently and he was absent from his post quite often. On July 27, 1963, his cousin Eugene Murret asked him to talk about his life in the Soviet Union at the Jesuit College in Mobile, Alabama, where he was a student.[29]

    During his speech, he said the Communist Party USA had betrayed itself. It had become a sidekick of the USSR against the American government, so the Soviet Union could become the absolute ruler of the American continent. This is strange since Oswald first joined the Communist party USA and now was accusing it of betrayal. It is also odd that he accused the Soviet Union while some days ago, he had applied to travel there. On August 1, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to Vincent Lee informing him that he had opened the P.O. Box and distributed leaflets on the streets. Then he wrote something bizarre, but prophetic, saying to Vincent that some exiled Cubans attacked one of his demonstrations, the police intervened, and because of that he lost any support and was left alone.[30] We don’t know if Oswald possessed clairvoyant powers, but something similar happened four days later. On August 5, 1963, he visited the clothes shop of Carlos Bringuier, an Anti-Castro exiled Cuban and member of the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE), to offer him his skills that he had acquired as U.S. Marine. He appeared to be anti-Castro, but on the 9th of August his true face was revealed when Bringuier and two of his associates witnessed Oswald distributing FPCC “Hands off Cuba” leaflets while seeking support for Castro. This double-faced behavior of Oswald made Bringuier extremely angry and he accused Oswald of  being “a traitor and Communist”. Oswald didn’t seem to be very shaken and replied “OK Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me”. The police intervened, like Oswald had foreseen, and arrested them all.[31]

    Oswald was locked in jail and he could have been immediately released if he had paid the $25 bail, but he chose not to and stayed in for the weekend. During that time, he was visited and questioned by Police officer Francis Martello and FBI agent John Quigley. What he said to both of them and how this impacted him on 11/22/1963 will be explained later on.

    The focus for the time being will be on the aftermath of his arrest and his subsequent radio interview about the Canal Street event. On the 12th, Oswald testified before the court that he was guilty of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to ten days. However, he paid the bail of $10 and was set free. The Cubans were not sentenced and were released.[32] Oswald continued his leafleting and Bringuier asked the help of Ed Butler of INCA to expose Oswald’s true colors.

    First, Oswald gave an interview to William K. Stuckey’s WDSU-radio program “Latin Listening Post” and talked about his FPCC organization, but he refused to reveal the names of its members. Oswald was questioned if he was a Communist and if Castro’s regime was a Soviet front in the western hemisphere. Oswald did not deny being a Communist, but he said that he was not member of the Communist Party. Stuckey asked Oswald if the FPCC activities promote Communism, which he denied saying that the organization is only concerned with Cuban matters. When asked if he had visited Latin America, he answered that he had been only to Mexico. It should be noted that Oswald never offered the information that he had lived in the Soviet Union. He said the American government and their anti-Cuba policies had forced Castro to seek help from the Soviet Union. Finally, he accused the CIA of mishandling Cuba and called the CIA defunct and Allen Dulles defunct, which might be something an anti-Castro exile would say who thought the Agency did not do a proper job in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.[33]

    At the end of the interview, Stuckey asked Oswald if he could come again for a more detailed interview and he agreed. On August 21, 1963, Oswald appeared on Stuckey’s show “Conversation Carte Blanche” to debate Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler of INCA.[34] Stuckey began the interview by asking Oswald if he had lived in the Soviet Union, a tip provided to him by Bringuier. Oswald was surprised by the question and replied that he had. Bringuier intervened and asked him if he represented the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or Fair Play for Russia Committee. Oswald replied that this was a provocative question that didn’t need answering.

    Stuckey then dropped the bomb and asked Oswald if he’d renounced his American citizenship and had become a Soviet citizen. Oswald replied that this had nothing to do with the topic of Cuban-American relations. But Stuckey insisted that it did, since Oswald had been proclaiming that Cuba is not a Russian puppet and now it was revealed that he had past relationship to Russia and maybe he was a Communist. Oswald did not answer if he was a Communist, but admitted that he was a Marxist.

    Stuckey wondered how he supported himself his three years in Russia and asked if he was given any government subsidy there. Stressed, Oswald almost revealed his true purposes when he said that:

    …I worked in Russia. I was under the protection, I was not under the protection of the American government, but I was at all times considered an American citizen. I did not lose my American citizenship…I am back in the United States. A person who renounces his citizenship becomes legally disqualified for returning to the United States.

    In the first interview, he denied that Cuba was under Russia’s control and insisted the FPCC’s concern was only Cuban independence and opposing intervention in Cuban affairs. In his second interview, he was exposed as a Marxist and possible Communist working for the Soviets and taking his orders from them, perhaps as a Soviet spy himself. Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, had connected the FPCC to the Soviet Union and had hurt the organization’s reputation and credibility. After this debate, Oswald’s career as member of FPCC and Castro’s supporter had lost its purpose, value, and meaning.

    With his help, his interlocutors made the FPCC look like a Russian Trojan horse in America and a dangerous Communist spying niche. It is more likely that Oswald was acting as such as part of CIA’s anti-FPCC campaign which, as John Newman found out, had been orchestrated by James McCord and David Atlee Philips since 1961.[35] The CIA and FBI suspected that the FPCC back then was trying to infiltrate students that were travelling to Cuba. So Phillips decided to dangle an American student, Court Wood, into the FPCC by pretending to be pro-Castro interesting in starting a new FPCC chapter, something that Oswald tried to emulate two years later.[36]  Although the CIA was not allowed to run domestic operations, the FBI knew they did and turned a blind eye to them as FBI agent in New Orleans Warren DeBrueys told author Jim DiEugenio.[37] It would be very plausible that this CIA anti-FPCC campaign had been passed to CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), formed in 1962. 

    Researcher Peter Vea discovered a list of documents in the National Archives regarding Clay Shaw’s contacts with the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). One of these documents stated Clay Shaw had been granted covert security approval for project QK/ENCHANT.[38] Newly discovered documents revealed that the CIA was examining the prospect of using Banister’s agency as a cover company for project QK/ENCHANT. Based on ARRB investigation, QK/ENCHANT was a cryptonym for “permission to approach” and utilization for cleared contact purposes. These probably indicated the use of individuals and companies as contact cover for CIA proprietary organizations.[39]

    Author Bill Davy showed the above document to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and, after examining it, he said to Davy, “That’s interesting…he was doing something there.” He added that Shaw would not need a covert security clearance for DCS. Marchetti then said he was likely doing something for Clandestine Services.  When Dave asked which one, Marchetti replied:

    The DOD (Domestic Operations Division). It was one of the most secret divisions within Clandestine Services. This was Tracey Barnes’s old outfit. They were getting into things…uh exactly what I don’t know. But they were getting into risky areas. And this is where E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time.”[40]

    The DOD offices were not located at Langley, but on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. When Richard Helms was asked about the DOD behind closed doors in 1968, he described the DCS which was not a part of the Directorate of Plans.[41] Donald Freed wrote in his book Death in Washington that the DOD was involved in illegal domestic cover companies and operations against the FPCC.[42]


    III. Setting Up the Patsy

    In this section, we shall look into the events and incidents showing that Oswald was set up to take the fall for Kennedy’s murder. There were many such efforts, but we will concentrate on the most important, since it will be impossible to report in every detail the life of Oswald in this article.

    A. Senator Dodd, Hidell and the Mannlicher – Carcano

    The Warren Commission had a hard time proving that Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the weapon that allegedly was used to kill Kennedy. What is certain, though, is that Oswald was interested in how to purchase weapons by mail. When he was working at the Reily Company, Oswald was spending his time visiting Adrian Alba’s garage and engaging him in conversations about mail order weapons. Oswald would also study some magazines about guns in Alba’s office. He had asked Alba, “How many weapons had I ever ordered, and how long did it take to get them, and where had I ordered the guns from.”[43]

    The Dallas Police said they found an order page from the June 1963 American Rifleman magazine about a Manlicher–Carcano.[44] Oswald, however, had already ordered a Manlicher–Carcano from Klein Sporting Goods on March 12th, 1963, using a coupon from the February issue of the same magazine under the name A. Hidell. He also ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 gun from Seaport Traders of Los Angeles on January 27th, 1963, under the name A. J. Hidell. This was the same gun that Oswald allegedly used to kill Officer Tippit.[45] Was it a coincidence that these two weapons companies were under investigation by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency (ATF)?

    Besides ATF, there was another ongoing investigation about these two companies, conducted by Senator Thomas Dodd, another member of the powerful American Security Council. Dodd was the Chairman of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee trying to legislate the use of interstate mail orders for weapons.[46] Dodd’s subcommittee started its hearings two days after Hidell ordered the Smith & Wesson gun and the Manlicher–Carcano was also one of the weapons investigated.[47]

    Senator Dodd was also member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—headed by the racist, right-wing Senator James Eastland of Mississippi—which was investigating the FPCC. Dodd called the FPCC “the chief public relations instrument of the Castro network in the United States” and believed that both the Socialist party and the Communist Party had infiltrated the committee. It might have been possible that Oswald, as a member of a private investigating firm, was contacted by Dodd’s committee to infiltrate these three organizations.[48]

    The son of one of Senator Dodd’s friends, who had been hired as an investigator to do work for the subcommittee, was involved in a strange incident in Mexico, causing a disturbance in a strip club. He was arrested by Mexican police for having a gun and posing as a police officer. The same man was arrested for carrying three weapons and ammunition in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on a weekend that President Kennedy was there.[49]

    As others have pointed out, it would have been stupid for Oswald to order a rifle via interstate mail intending to kill JFK, since it would leave a trail that would ensnare him. It would have been easier to buy a rifle from a gun shop in Dallas anonymously. When Oswald was arrested in New Orleans, he was interviewed by Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans Police Intelligence Division and New Orleans FBI Agent John Lester Quigley. He showed two FPCC cards, one signed by Vincent T. Lee and the other by A. J. Hidell, his alleged New Orleans FPCC officer. As a result, this information was related by Martello to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group (MIG) at Fort Sam Houston and by Quigley to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Algiers, Louisiana.[50]

    After the assassination, Colonel Robert E. Jones of the 112th MIG informed the FBI that Oswald was carrying a fraudulent Hidell selective service card; therefore this information linked Oswald to Hidell and the weapon used to shoot the President.[51] This would trace back to the FPCC and, perhaps, Castro as a leading force behind the assassination.  One has to wonder why Oswald would order a weapon using an alias and then carry with him an identity card that would link him to the weapon on the day of the assassination.

    B. The Clinton-Jackson Incident

    Jim Garrison was the first official to present witnesses that had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the areas of Clinton and Jackson, ninety miles north of New Orleans.

    One day, during the late summer of 1963, Ed McGehee the owner of a barbershop in Jackson was visited by a stranger who he later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald asked if he could find a job as an electrician in the area. McGehee told him to ask in the East Louisiana State hospital and informed him that it was a mental hospital, something that Oswald did not know and surprised him. He advised him to contact state representative Reeves Morgan.[52]

    Oswald visited Morgan, but he told him that he could not help him since he could not put him ahead of his own constituents. He advised him to register to vote and that might net him extra points in his search of work. Van Morgan, playing in the front yard, noted the black Cadillac parked outside the house; with a man with a shock of white hair in the driver’s seat.[53]

    The next day, Oswald and his two companions went to the neighboring village of Clinton to register. It happened to be the day when a drive to register black voters—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—was on. When the Cadillac appeared, most voters thought it might be the FBI, so they noticed the car and its occupants. Several witnesses, from simple voters, to the Registrar, and the local Sheriff, testified that they identified the three people as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. The Sheriff even approached the car and asked the tall grey haired driver for his license. It turned out to be Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart of New Orleans. Oswald and another man were the only two white voters trying to register that day.[54] When Registrar Henry Palmer asked him for ID, Oswald showed him some Marine separation papers and offered two references, both doctors, Malcom Pierson and Frank Silva. Oswald said that he was living in the state hospital together with the above mentioned doctors. Then Palmer asked him why he wanted to register and Oswald replied that he was advised this would help him secure a job at the hospital. Palmer replied that this was not so, since he knew many people out of Mississippi that were working in Jackson. Hearing that, Oswald left the office, returned to the car and the trio departed.[55]

    Oswald then resurfaced at the East hospital trying to get a job, but he was making a spectacle of himself. Talking loudly and being obnoxious, he asked the hospital employees what it would take to take Castro down, since he was a Marine and he was involved in getting rid of Castro. Frank Silva, a Cuban doctor that Oswald had used as a reference, heard the conversation and took an immediate dislike to Oswald.[56]

    Maxine Kemp, the hospital secretary, remembered Oswald filling an application and a year later, after the assassination, looked for the file and found it. When Garrison investigators went there looking to find it, the file had disappeared.[57]

    Why did Shaw and Ferrie take Oswald to Jackson to seek a job at the hospital and register as a voter? If we could consider Oswald’s actions against leftists and subversives, it would make sense to try to register with the black voters so to link CORE through himself to FPCC, Castro, and the Soviet Union, something that would comprise the CORE movement for racial equality.  However, the most important aspect of this trip was his visit to a mental hospital acting as a troubled young man talking nonsense and behaving erratically. Garrison believed that if Oswald had secured a job at the hospital it would have been easy for someone to alter his file from employee to a mental patient, something that would fit with his later portrayal as the lone nut assassin.

    C. The Odio Incident

    Sylvia Odio was the daughter of the Cuban truck magnate Amador Odio, who was imprisoned back in Cuba along with his wife for actions against the Castro regime. She was living in a Dallas apartment with her two children and her sister Annie, who was helping Sylvia move to another apartment. In late September, Sylvia was visited by two men who presented themselves as Cuban exiles and an American. The exiles were introduced to Sylvia by their war names: Leopoldo and Angelo. They said they were members of JURE, Manolo Ray’s liberal exile organization of which Amador Odio was a founding member.[58] They had come from New Orleans and asked Sylvia to write them letters in proper English to be used to attract financial support for JURE. Sylvia declined since she did not know or trust these strangers and they then left. But the next day one of the Cubans, Leopoldo, called her and told her that the American accompanying them was named:

    Leon…he was an ex-Marine, an expert marksman…he could do anything, like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. He says we Cubans don’t have any guts; we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should a thing like that.[59]

    Sylvia never heard from them again and wrote her father about these strange visitors. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Sylvia and her sister Annie recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as “Leon,” the American that came to her house. Sylvia was certain that they visited her apartment on Thursday, the 26th of September or the next day. This created a huge problem for the Commission: Oswald was supposed to be on a bus to Mexico on the 26th of September. This incident is very similar to Oswald’s bragging to Doctor Silva about getting rid of Kennedy and showing radical, unpredictable, and bizarre behavior.

    JURE was considered by the CIA as a leftist organization that had infiltrated the JMWAVE station. At one point, CIA Officer Henry Hecksher had ordered Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s protégé, to fire on JURE vessels.[60] Hunt despised Ray and referred to his philosophy as Castroism without Castro.   It is plausible that this incident could have been an effort to connect JURE to Oswald and, subsequently, to Castro and the assassination of Kennedy.

    D. Castro’s Gun Dealer

    Either just before or right after visiting Sylvia Odio, two men visited Robert McKeown, a former gun dealer at his house in Bay Cliff near Houston. One of them introduced himself as Lee Oswald and his companion, a Cuban, as Hernandez. They explained that they wanted to buy a large number of guns to start a revolution in El Salvador. McKeown was skeptical and refused to sell them anything, since he was on probation for smuggling guns to Castro in Cuba on behalf of Prio Socarres. When he refused, Oswald tried to convince him to at least sell them four Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights for $10,000. McKeown again refused and said to Oswald that he could buy these for a few hundred dollars from any Sears Roebuck store in Texas.[61] He thought that the whole deal was fishy and maybe someone wanted to get him in trouble if the guns were really for Castro; especially when he recognized Hernandez as a man he knew in Cuba years ago as a Castro supporter.[62]

    If McKeown had fallen for the trap and one of the rifles was proven to be used in the JFK assassination, then the gun could have been traced back to him and eventually to Castro and Cuba as the instigators of the crime.

    The most important event that took place to incriminate Oswald was the infamous Mexico City incident. Due to its complexity, it will be examined separately, in more detail than the above four.


    IV. Mexico Histrionics

    Oswald’s trip through Mexico and what occurred there is the most convoluted and enigmatic event regarding the assassination, one that could lead to the core of a momentous plot. Analysing it in all its aspects is not within the scope of this essay. One should read John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA or the Lopez Report, to name just two sources, for a detailed and deep analysis. A summary of the incident will be presented here to note if any parallels can be drawn between the episode and the U-2 shoot down in the Soviet Union.

    Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City on a Friday, September 27, 1963, around 11 a.m. and asked Sylvia Duran—the consulate’s secretary—to grant him an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union. To make his case, he showed her his work papers from Russia, his marriage certificate, and his membership cards in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and in the FPCC. Duran found his behaviour odd, since he was a member of CPUSA, which was illegal in Mexico; and he had not gotten a visa from CPUSA which had a special agreement with Cuba’s Communist Party to get instant visas for its members. Duran asked him to get some passport photographs, Oswald left, and then returned with photographs, but Duran advised him that she could not issue him an in-transit visa to Cuba unless he first had obtained a visa to the Soviet Union.[63] So Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy. The Soviets refused him a visa, telling him that that he had to fill in an application form that would be sent to Washington and it could take months for a reply. Oswald returned to the Cuban Consulate and told Duran a bold lie, that the Soviets had issued him a visa. Duran, incredulous, called the Soviet Embassy to find out if they had. KGB operative under diplomatic cover Valery Kasimov told her that the reply from Washington could take months. As John Newman concluded, those who handled Oswald had advised him to lie because they wanted to force Duran to call Kostikov and the conversation would be recorded by CIA’s LI/ENVOY telephone tap secret operation in Mexico City. But neither of the two mentioned Oswald by name and instead referred to him as the American.[64]

    Duran would not issue Oswald a transit visa and told him to leave. Oswald got angry and displayed erratic and aggressive behaviour, making a bad impression on the Cubans. He had to be escorted out of the Consulate.

    The next day, Saturday 28, 1963, he returned to the Soviet Embassy, which was closed on weekends. But he managed to meet with Kostikov for a final desperate attempt to get a visa. According to the Russians, he had a revolver, which he said he needed to protect himself from the FBI. They denied his request and asked him to fill in an application for Washington’s Soviet Consulate. Oswald never filled in the form and gave up, leaving the premises.[65] He never again visited either the Cuban Consulate or the Soviet Embassy.

    What happened next is the beginning of the most enigmatic tangled web that surrounded Oswald: a man and a woman impersonating Duran and Oswald, called the Soviet Embassy asking for the visa application that Oswald had not filled in. The name of Oswald is not mentioned. Also, the man spoke poor Russian but good Spanish which was the opposite of Oswald’s case. The imposter told the Russian that he went back to the Cuban consulate to ask for his address in Mexico since they had it.[66] Newman believes that the impersonators wanted it recorded that Oswald had some special relationship with the Cubans. Duran later denied that she made the call as did the Soviets, so it is likely that the Russian recorded answering was also an impersonator.

    Because Oswald’s name was not mentioned, another call occurred on Tuesday, October 1, 1963. The imposter called the Soviet embassy and asked if there were any news on a cable to Washington. Those impersonating Oswald did not know the details of his visits to the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy nor that he had declined to fill in the visa application. If they had known, they would have never asked such a pointless question. Again, the caller spoke poor Russian, which would later pose a problem to them. The imposter asked what was the name of the Soviet official he spoke to and the Russian replied “Kostikov.” Why was it so important to link Oswald to Kostikov? Because Kostikov, according to CIA was, part of KGB’s department 13, responsible for assassinations.

    Newman concluded that the impersonators wanted the names of both Oswald and Kostikov to be mentioned so it would be recorded by LI/ENVOY, planting a virus into the CIA’s records that would be activated on November 22, 1963. That virus would link KGB assassinations and the Soviet Union to the murder of President Kennedy. President Johnson would use the impersonation charade to convince Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren into preventing a conflict “kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”[67] The WWIII virus made sure that the Warren Commission would never investigate what really happened in Mexico.

    It is undeniable that someone impersonated Oswald on these phone calls. But did they impersonate the historical Lee Harvey Oswald or another imposter? There are indications that the real Oswald never travelled to Mexico and there are testimonies by Duran, Cuban Consul Azcue, and a Cuban student that confirm he was not the real Oswald they saw in Mexico.

    Duran testified under interrogation that Oswald was blonde, short, dressed inelegantly, and his face turned red when angry.[68] When the CIA gave Duran’s testimony to the Warren Commission, they eliminated the above description. When Duran testified to the HSCA, she offered the following description: “as approximately five feet six, with sparse blonde hair, weighing about 125 pounds.”[69] Consul Azcue gave a similar description “a white male, between 5’6″ and 5’7″, over 30 years of age, very thin long face, with straight eye brows and a cold look in his eyes.”[70] A Cuban student, Oscar Contreras said that he met an American named Lee Harvey Oswald and he was blonde and short.[71] If these testimonies are true, the impersonator who made the calls had impersonated an already impersonated Oswald: which perplexes things even further.

    Two CIA assets working undercover inside the Cuban consulate told Lopez that the man they saw was not the man accused of assassinating the President.[72] This issue could have been resolved if photographs of Oswald going in and coming out of the embassies existed. The CIA has never been able to present any such photographs and thanks to the Lopez report we know why. Anne Goodpasture was a CIA officer from Staff D posted to the Mexico CIA station. She tried to disguise her role in retrieving photos each day. But Lopez and Hardway found out the man she named in this function only did the legwork for Goodpasture. They finally discovered that Goodpasture was responsible for photographic and electronic surveillance. The translating team said that they did not review all photographs from the Soviet Embassy, only what Goodpasture would allow them to see, and all such photographs were under her control. They also revealed that, although Goodpasture was an assistant to station chief Win Scott, she was a closer assistant to David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action. During that same period, Phillips was also working for the SAS/CI.[73] Phillips was questioned by HSCA Chief Counsel Dick Sprague if he had any photographs of Oswald in Mexico. He replied that the camera was not working those days.[74] Hardway wrote a memo to HSCA Chairman Louis Stokes saying that about ten feet of film was taken from the camera that covered the Cuban Consulate on the 27th and 28th of September. These were developed and sent to CIA HQ, then lost and never seen again.[75]

    The CIA always maintained that the tapes had been erased and there were not any originals for Lopez and Hardway to compare with the existing transcripts. There was a missing conversation of September 30, 1963, that the translator, Mrs. Tarasoff, had transcribed. She remembered that it was a very lengthy call and Oswald had spoken in English and had requested financial aid from the Soviets. She had marked it as urgent and according to her recollection Phillips had also heard it.[76]

    On October 1, 1963, a diplomatic pouch was sent to CIA HQ addressed to a Michael Choaden. This was an alias for Phillips. Phillips had access to all information from Mexico to Washington and vice versa. He had the original tapes that Goodpasture had given him, plus the copies and transcripts at CIA HQ. Simply put: Phillips would have been able to alter the tapes or phony up the transcripts.[77]

    On October 8, 1963, the Mexico station sent a cable to CIA HQ to report an American citizen’s contact with Kostikov. This contact had been known for a week. Phillips tried to explain the delay to Lopez by saying the translators were too slow. But Lopez found out they had finished the translation after 24 hours. Phillips insisted that he was certain about this, since he signed the cable because it concerned Cuban matters. That was another lie, because he had left Mexico the 1st of October and the cable did not say anything about Cuban matters.[78]

    The cable had two separate sections. The first reported that an American male, Lee Oswald, who spoke broken Russian, talked with Soviet consul Kostikov. The second section informed that they had photos of someone entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy that was age 35, athletic build, 6 feet, receding hairline and balding top. The cable did not state that this “mystery man” photographed was the same as Lee Oswald, who was only recorded on the phone.[79]

    It should have been obvious that the mystery man was not Oswald. When Goodpasture was questioned about it, she replied that it was the only photograph of a non-Latin person taken on October 1, 1963. But Lopez and Hardway discovered that the photo was taken on October 2, 1963.[80] All of these falsehoods made Hardway and Lopez suspicious of Goodpasture and Phillips.


    V. A Sinister Mole Hunt Deja Vu

    The Mexico desk at CIA HQ received the Kostikov cable and John Whitten—alias John Scelso—then retrieved Oswald’s 201 file. He found out that it had been dormant for the previous eighteen months. This file had been kept by its custodian Ann Egerter of Angleton’s super secretive CI/SIG. What Whitten could not possibly have known was that the FBI report of Oswald’s debriefing in 1962 was missing. He also could not have known that the FBI reports concerning Oswald’s activities with Cubans and the FPCC in Dallas and New Orleans were not included in his 201 file. Around September 23, 1963, just before Oswald went to Mexico, all this crucial information had been bifurcated to file 100-300-011, entitled “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”[81] There were no indications that the Cuban affairs office (SAS) read that file, but its Counterintelligence staff SAS/CI did.[82] More importantly, Whitten had no information about Kostikov and did not know that he was suspected of being a KGB officer responsible for assassinations.

    On October 10, 1963, CIA HQ sent a cable to State, FBI, and Navy connecting the mystery man to Oswald and informed them that Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy and spoke to consul Kostikov. It described Oswald as 35 years old, athletic build, six feet tall with receding hairline. It also reported that this Oswald might be identical to a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and implied that he was still there with his family.[83]

    The same day, they sent another cable to the Mexico City station that included a different description of Oswald as five 5’ 10”, 165 pounds, light brown wavy hair and blue eyes.[84] This cable also identified Oswald with a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and still living there according to latest HQ info dated may 1962; no word about his return to the States and his escapades in Dallas and New Orleans.[85] Most of the Counterintelligence officers in CI/SIG knew that the information included on these cables was not true, but rather deceptive.

    Jane Roman, one the counterintelligence officers who signed both of the cables was interviewed by John Newman and Jefferson Morley in 1994. Roman admitted to them that:

    I am signing off on something I know isn’t true…The only interpretation I could put on this would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control…

    She added “Well, to me, its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis.”[86]

    On September 16, 1963, a day before Oswald obtained his tourist visa to Mexico, the CIA sent a memo to FBI for a joint operation to embarrass the FPCC in countries where it had support by planting deceptive information. It would have been a counterintelligence operation inspired by CI/OPS and carried out by SAS/CI.[87] As we have seen in the previous section, Oswald was probably under the control of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), but now that he was to be moved outside of U.S. soil, the SAS and David Phillips would have taken the reigns. Could this have been his mission in Mexico to discredit the FPCC, as he had in New Orleans?

    The CIA, and most likely Phillips, had already run an impersonation operation against an American named Eldon Hensen in Mexico. Hensen wanted to help provide useful information to the Cubans and requested a meeting. The CIA station in Mexico City had an agent pretend to be Cuban and meet Hensen. As a result, Hensen walked into a trap.[88]

    However, most clandestine operations have at least two purposes and an operation might be hidden inside another. It is possible that the SAS could have used Oswald or his legend in an operation designed to kill Castro, although no such evidence exists.  Bill Simpich, in his book State Secret, made the case that the disinformation and false data presented in the two cables were designed as a mole hunt to find out who had betrayed a CIA operation in Mexico by impersonating Oswald. I would agree with him up to a point, that there was a mole hunt but it was not benign, as he seems to think, but a sinister one. The name Lee Henry Oswald, the wrong descriptions of Oswald, Marina’s surname pronounced Pusakova instead of Prusakova were marked cards used in a mole hunt.

    This mole hunt had eerie similarities to the one we described in Part 2, which Angleton used as a cover for the U-2 shoot down. Simpich also believes that it was CIA officer from JM/WAVE, David Sanchez Morales, that had used his Cuban intelligence forces, called AMOTs, to impersonate Oswald and Duran. Morales was clever and knowledgeable of counterintelligence operations, but he was not in any way a CIA general. Would Morales be able to bifurcate information into two separate Oswald files? It was this bifurcation that kept his Cuban activities secret and lowered his profile so he would not be included on the Secret Service security index. These two files emerged after November 22, 1963, to complete Oswald’s profile and reveal that an ex defector to the USSR had been involved upon his return to the States in pro-Castro activities and had been in contact with a Soviet KGB assassinations officer in Mexico City. Further, could Morales have foreseen that the FBI would remove the flash warning from Oswald’s file on October 9th, the day before the CIA issued the two faulty memos? That warning had been intact since 1959. This also allowed Oswald’s threat profile to be lowered.  One last point, as we shall see, the probability remains that Oswald was not in Mexico City. Could Morales have known that the double operation was planned with a man who was not going to be there?  Who was a legend?  And would Morales know what specific legend it was? Was Morales really that far up the food chain?

    By excluding Oswald’s Cuban escapades from the two cables, only the Soviet Counterintelligence staff would be responsible for drafting and signing them, while the SAS was kept in the dark. Tennent Bagley, the Chief of Soviet Russia/CI, had nothing to say about Kostikov’s role as KGB assassination officer. Yet on November 23, 1963, submitted a memo describing Kostikov as “an identified KGB officer…in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th department responsible of assassinations.”[89] It is worth mentioning that Bagley was transferred in 1963 from the Bern station in Switzerland to Langley and promoted as Chief of SR/CI, just in time for the suppression of Kostikov’s KGB role. Could Morales have been able to transfer Bagley, an Angleton ally, back to CIA HQ and place him in the right place to ensure that everything would go as he planned and loose ends would be unexposed? Could Morales have anticipated with precision each of Angleton’s moves, all the way to the point that the FBI would remove Oswald from the security index, ensuring he would not  be picked up and removed from the motorcade route in advance?

    Putting it all together, we can try to synthesize the puzzle of what happened in Mexico City. Angleton, who John Neman believes was privy to the conspiracy to assassinate the President, had to design a foolproof plot. The idea was to make it appear that the Cubans and Soviets manipulated Oswald in Mexico City in such a way to use him in the assassination of Kennedy. Angleton knew that the exposure of this plot would plant a WWIII virus in Oswald’s files that would halt any real investigation in order to prevent a possible nuclear war. To achieve that, Oswald’s profile had to be lowered for the six weeks before the assassination. Angleton had to come up with a cover story so no one would ever question his role in the plot. As Newman revealed, he was the only person with access to all the Oswald files and information and he managed to manipulate and restrict his FPCC activities in Dallas and New Orleans. He knew the allegedly explosive information about Kostikov’s involvement in wet affairs and he was in a position to instigate a SAS counterintelligence operation against the FPCC in Mexico.

    Would Oswald have been asked to go to Mexico if only his legend was to be used? Or was he too important for the assassination plot’s success to place him in suspicious and dangerous situations in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, especially with someone as lethal as Kostikov in direct proximity? More importantly, if anyone had taken a photo of him and somehow his legend was exposed, it would have been extremely difficult to lower his profile. He would have been marked a potential threat and would have not have been allowed on the motorcade route. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that a short, blonde man was sent to Mexico to impersonate the real Oswald as part of an SAS counterintelligence operation.

    But we don’t really know how the impersonation was justified for this legitimate CIA operation. The plan was for Oswald to fail to get a transit visa to Cuba, thereby provoking Duran to call Kostikov and plant the WWIII virus. Even if Duran had mentioned Oswald by name to Kostikov, I believe that the telephone call impersonations on 9/28 and 10/1 would have still occurred. This necessitated the bifurcation and also the removal of the flash warning.

    Angleton used the impersonations as an excuse to start a mole hunt in a similar way he did back in 1960 when a mole had betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to its shoot down. Angleton did not find any mole. But he used the mole hunt as an alibi to cover his role in the U-2 incident, which resulted in the Paris Peace Summit cancellation.

    The mole had returned to action and now he had betrayed the CIA operations against Cuba in Mexico, even contacting the head of KGB assassinations before he himself tried to get to Cuba. Angleton had the excuse to manipulate information and to lower Oswald’s profile in a way that it would not raise suspicion until after November 22. Again Angleton would fail to catch a mole, but he had used the mole hunt to cover his true role that resulted in the murder of a U.S. President.

    Below a table would present the parallels between the two mole hunts, in the Soviet Union and in Mexico.

    Oswald in Soviet Union

    Oswald in Mexico

    Oswald defected to USSR

    Oswald claimed to return to USSR via Cuba

    Visited Embassy on a Saturday so he could not defect

    Visited Soviet Embassy in person and phone calls to the embassy on Saturday when closed

    Never returned to sign defection papers

    Never returned to complete visa application

    Impersonated to look like he was replaced by a Soviet Illegal

    Impersonated to look like a Cuban or Latin person had replaced him

    Angleton believed that the U2 was compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIA

    SAS operation to embarrass FPCC
    A possible SAS operation to assassinate Castro and the CIA surveillance operations were all compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIA

    Purpose to cancel Paris peace summit

    Purpose to show that the Cubans and the Soviets controlled Oswald in a plot to kill Kennedy to revenge CIA’s plan to kill Castro

    Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find out the Soviet mole that betrayed the U2 secrets

    Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find the Soviet mole that betrayed the SAS operation

    Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose

    Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose

    FACT: A mole was never uncovered but the Peace Summit was cancelled

    FACT: A mole was never uncovered and JFK was killed instead

    Angleton was the man pulling the strings from the CIA HQ and David Phillips and Anne Goodpasture were his foot soldiers covertly pulling strings down in Mexico City. It is more likely that Morales would have also taken orders from Angleton and not the other way around. This author remains incredulous to the theory that Morales was such a diabolical puppet master that he could organize such an evil plot from Miami, forcing CIA’s Counterintelligence and Angleton’s CI/SIG to unwittingly dance to his music resulting in the President’s assassination. And then get away with it.

    Go to Part 1

    Go to Part 2

    Go to Part 4

    Go to Part 5

    Go to Part 6

    Go to Conclusion

    Go to Appendix


    NOTES

    [1] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 332.

    [2] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 129.

    [3] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 131.

    [4] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 243-244.

    [5] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 244.

    [6] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 244-245.

    [7] The American Security Council.

    [8] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2008, p. 235.

    [9] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.152.

    [10] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 15, p. 39.

    [11] CIA RIF#104-10106-10582, 17/9/1959.

    [12] Simpich Bill, The Twelve who built the Oswald legend, part 6.

    [13] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.153.

    [14] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.154.

    [15] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.157.

    [16] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    [17] Summers Antony, Not in your Lifetime, Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, p. 187.

    [18] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    [19] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.86.

    [20] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.

    [21] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.395.

    [22] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.

    [23] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, kindle version.

    [24] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 3.

    [25] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 4.

    [26] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 30.

    [27] NARA, JFK Files, RIF 124-10011-10133.

    [28] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 310-311.

    [29] SAC Mobile, November 30, 1963, FBI 105-82555-383 1st NR.

    [30] Warren Commission Report, Vol. XX, pp. 524-525.

    [31] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 315.

    [32] Kaiser David, The Road to Dallas, Belknap Press 2008, p. 219.

    [33] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 19, pp. 60-74.

    [34] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 321.

    [35] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 236.

    [36] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 165.

    [37] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.158.

    [38] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.

    [39] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.

    [40] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.

    [41] Marchetti-Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Coronet Books, 1974, p. 257.

    [42] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.

    [43] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.

    [44] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.

    [45] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.

    [46] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.

    [47] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.

    [48] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.

    [49] Evica, George Michael, A Rifle Symposium, The Assassination Chronicles 1976.

    [50] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 258.

    [51] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 259-260.

    [52] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.157.

    [53] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.89.

    [54] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.158.

    [55] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.92.

    [56] Mellen Joan, Farewell to Justice, Potomac Books, 2005, pp. 220-221.

    [57] DiEugenio James, The Assassinations, Feral House, 2003, p. 208.

    [58] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 20.

    [59] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 21.

    [60] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 156.

    [61] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, pp. 26-27.

    [62] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew too Much, Carroll & Graf, p. 280.

    [63] Lopez Report, p. 192.

    [64] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 616.

    [65] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.

    [66] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 145.

    [67] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.

    [68] Lopez Report, p. 186.

    [69] Lopez Report, p. 194.

    [70] Lopez Report, p. 205.

    [71] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 289-290.

    [72] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 293-294.

    [73] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [74] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [75] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [76] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [77] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [78] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [79] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 398.

    [80] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [81] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 619.

    [82] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 394.

    [83] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 398-399.

    [84] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 399.

    [85] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 400-401.

    [86] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.

    [87] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.

    [88] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 362.

    [89] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics II, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2003, pp. 31-32.