Tag: FOREIGN POLICY

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 27^th, 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 9^th 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 12^th, 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 12^th, 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 27^th, 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 112^th 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 112^th 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 26^th 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 26^th 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 27^th and 28^th 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 1^st 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 9^th, 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 13^th 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.

May 23, 2020

Counterpunch, JFK , and Vietnam

As readers of this site will understand, Counterpunch has consistently been one of the far left’s bastions of ideological purity. They do some good work from that vantage point. But one of the problems with that point of view is that it tends to sweep up all of history into a sanctimonious vacuum. And one of the things that gets swept up and homogenized is the issue of John Kennedy and Vietnam. (Here is a previous example.)

Their latest in this vein was posted on April 30, 2020. It is another of their “Letters from Vietnam” series. This one is from an American living in Vietnam named Mark Ashwill. Ashwill is an educational entrepreneur. The occasion for him writing his letter is the 45^th anniversary of America leaving Indochina in 1975. This was due to the agreements that were negotiated by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig under Richard Nixon’s supervision in Paris.

Ashwill writes the letter as if he were a citizen of Vietnam (which he may well be) and is preaching to his former countrymen about the evil that they visited on his new nation. I would like to inform the editors of Counterpunch and also Mr. Ashwill that this history lesson is not exactly new. It has been going on at least since the rise of Students for a Democratic Society early in the sixties. It was given popular voice in the pages of Ramparts magazine, and was in book form during that decade through the work of men like William Appleman Williams and historians influenced by him who created New Left studies.

In fact to go through his rather antique complaint today is kind of boring. Most of us know that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam free from French domination at the end of World War II. That he used American historical documents like the Declaration of Independence to do so. Many, many years ago Williams produced the letter that Ho sent to Harry Truman in 1945 asking the American president to cooperate with his cause against France. We also know how that letter was ignored and Harry Truman and his later Secretary of State Dean Acheson decided to side with France. And America ended up bankrolling about 80% of the French war effort. We also know the rest of Ashwill’s litany: how the defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to the Geneva Accords, and how President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sabotaged that agreement by not holding elections in 1956. And that this key event inevitably led to the USA getting involved in a second war against North Vietnam. This would have been prevented if the Geneva Accords had been honored.

Ashwill now makes a large leap to 1961 and President John F. Kennedy. The reason I say this is a large leap is because by leaving out 1956-60, in his own David Halberstam-ish way, the author eliminates a central point. John Foster Dulles clearly ran the American participation at Geneva. The attorney realized that his oral agreement with the Accords could easily be broken if he did not sign them and this is what he advised the president to do. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 137)

Within days of the end of the conference, Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, director of the CIA, began a long series of clandestine actions in order to create a new country called South Vietnam. These actions were supervised by General Edward Lansdale, who was in reality a high-level CIA action officer. It included a psychological terror war in the north to convince the Catholics that they would be persecuted by Ho Chi Minh and they should flee to the south. This helped prop up America’s chosen leader of this new country, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem. Once this creation was completed, Foster Dulles made the infamous assertion, “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” (Blum, p. 139). Leaving out Lansdale and the Dulles brothers is not just reminiscent of Halberstam, it is also what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick did more recently in their long dud of a documentary series called The Vietnam War.

There was no South Vietnam before this. Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers and Vice President Richard Nixon created it. Once it was created, the USA was committed to propping it up any way it could. It was through Diem that America formally cancelled the scheduled unification elections. (Blum, p. 139) This also meant using the fig leaf of communist infiltration from the north as a pretext to invoke the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a mutual defense doctrine. Omitting these details thus ignores the fact that those four men had split the country in half and then fabricated a civil war for their own purposes. It was this threat that gave Ho Chi Minh pause about enforcing the Geneva Accords and forcibly holding the elections––which could have easily been achieved. ((Blum, p. 139)

The USA now began to send new military advisory units to Saigon in further defiance of the Geneva Accords. Lansdale began to rig elections to keep Diem in power. The Dulles brothers were not furthering democracy. They had installed and now supported a dictator. And they trained his security forces at Michigan State University. (Blum, p. 140) These techniques included torture and imprisonment in the infamous “tiger cages”.

To skip over all this, plus the large amounts of aid we were giving Diem, is to paper over why it was not easy to get out. The Saigon government was a creation of Washington. And, to say the least, Diem was not a good choice for its leadership. But in doing all this, it created a tactical and strategic commitment that had not existed in 1952. In my opinion, it is not something that can be discounted or ignored, since in historical terms, it is crucial. To make this Bob Beamon leap to President Kennedy and 1961 is bad history, even for an informal letter.

What makes it all worse is the fact that the editors at Counterpunch then placed a picture of President Kennedy at the top of the article next to a map of a divided Vietnam. As if, somehow, Kennedy was involved in the decision to split up the country. This is misleading not just because he was not involved, but because Kennedy was one of the very few voices in Washington to oppose the Dulles/Eisenhower policy not just in Vietnam, but throughout the Third World. This conflict between the senator and the White House was documented by Richard Mahoney back in 1983 in his important book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. In that book, Mahoney specifically noted Kennedy’s 1957 landmark speech about the ongoing French colonial war in Algeria. During that speech Kennedy harked back to Dien Bien Phu and said what happened in Indochina will happen in Algeria, and that it would thus behoove America to be on the right side of history this time. (The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80)

So there is ample evidence that Kennedy understood the appeal of nationalism in Third World countries emerging from the shackles of colonialism. (For more current scholarship describing Kennedy’s familiarity with the issue, please read Betting on the Africans, by Philip Muehlenbeck, and Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, by Robert Rakove.) But further, what Ashwill does with Kennedy’s presidency in relation to Vietnam is, well, the best word I have for it is “minimalist”.

Ashwill describes a meeting between Kennedy and French President DeGaulle in May of 1961 in Paris where the former French resistance leader warned Kennedy about the quagmire he would be getting into if America intervened in Indochina, that it would be an endless entanglement America could not win. He then quotes DeGaulle as later saying that Kennedy listened to him but that events proved he had not convinced him.

First of all, this discussion between Kennedy and DeGaulle is again an antique bit of news. To cite just one source, it was already described back in 1972 by Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell in Johnny We hardly Knew Ye. (p. 13) But Kennedy was not just getting this kind of advice from DeGaulle. He also got it from General Douglas MacArthur. The retired general warned him that even if he placed a million men in Asia, it would not work. (Powers & O’Donnell, pp. 13-14). He also got the same advice from Senator Mike Mansfield. (p. 15) And most importantly, he heard the same thing from his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.

This is why during the debates in the oval office in November of 1961, Kennedy refused to commit combat troops into the theater. And that was a line that he never crossed. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 136-39). But, as Galbraith biographer Richard Parker demonstrates in the above link, Kennedy went further than this. He sent Galbraith to Saigon and asked him to write a report, knowing that the ambassador would advise against any further involvement. (Virtual JFK, edited by James Blight, pp. 72-73). Galbraith did write such a report, and when the ambassador returned to Washington in April of 1962, Kennedy had him hand deliver it to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, pp. 236-37). One month later, McNamara arranged to meet with all the inter-agency chiefs of all American forces in Vietnam. After going through the regular agenda items and adjourning the meeting, he called aside General Paul Harkins, the overall commander of American forces in Indochina. He told Harkins that it was time to switch responsibility for the war over to the ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, and he wanted to begin the planning on the reduction of American advisors as soon as possible. This was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. (Newman, p. 254)

As anyone familiar with the newly declassified record should know, in May of 1963, McNamara called another such meeting, this time in Hawaii. At this meeting the withdrawal schedules were submitted to the Secretary. He said that they needed to be accelerated. He wanted a thousand advisors withdrawn by the end of the calendar year. He directed that those plans be drawn up. (James Douglass, JFK the Unspeakable, p. 126). In October of 1963, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 ordering the first thousand advisors to be withdrawn by the end of the year and the rest by 1965. (Douglass, p. 188). In other words, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam at the time of Kennedy’s death than there was when he took office. And he was in the process of removing all advisors.

Somehow, Mark Ashwill missed all of this with a completeness that is astonishing. But the Vietnamese educator also missed a chance to have this confirmed by a source in his adopted country, namely, the son of the late North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. If someone visiting Vietnam from the USA could do this, then why couldn’t Mr. Ashwill?

From here, Ashwill takes another leap forward. This time to 1966. By the end of that year, Lyndon Johnson had committed 385,000 combat troops, with 60,000 sailors stationed offshore. In just that one year, 6,000 Americans would perish and 30,000 would be wounded. Ashwill discusses a speech by Ho Chi Minh in which the North Vietnamese leader says America took “the wrong fork in the road”. Ashwill never explains how America went from having no combat troops in Indochina to having nearly 400,000. The man who took the wrong fork in the road was Lyndon Johnson. And if any president’s picture should be at the top of the article, it should be his.

As any serious study of the Vietnam War reveals, there were three events that took place––a meeting and two specific orders issued––that overturned Kennedy’s withdrawal plan and replaced it with an escalation plan that was quite apparent by 1966. These were the first Lyndon Johnson meeting on the war on November 24, 1963; the last draft of NSAM 273 signed on November 26^th; and NSAM 288 finalized in March of 1964.

At the November 24^th meeting, the principals realized that Johnson’s attitude and style about Vietnam were both quite different from Kennedy’s. He said things that Kennedy never did. For instance: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.” (Newman, p. 442) Kennedy never expressed these kinds of Cold War sentiments about Indochina. He simply did not think Vietnam was imperative to American security. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy agreed with this evaluation in comparing the two presidents. And he expressed those characterizations in discussions with both James Blight and his biographer Gordon Goldstein. (Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 231)

NSAM 273 was altered to allow direct American naval involvement in patrols against the North Vietnamese coast. According to Bundy, it was altered by Johnson. (Newman, pp. 445-49) This allowed for the OPLAN 34 A plans and the so called DE SOTO patrols. The former were hit-and-run attacks by speedboats, the latter were American destroyers meant to decipher where return fire from North Vietnamese bases was coming from. In December, Johnson requested these types of covert actions against the North, with the help of Americans forces if need be. The operations ended up being largely American. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 5, 7-8, 14) As many commentators agreed , including those inside the White House, these patrols were, in fact, provocations. (Moise p. 68; Goldstein, p. 125)

NSAM 288 was Johnson’s specific preliminary design to escalate the war, including an air war against North Vietnam. This included 94 bombing targets. In three years Kennedy had never even contemplated this. The combination of the DESOTO patrols with NSAM 288 resulted in the casus belli the White House sought in order to escalate the war. (Moise, pp. 26-28) This was of course the Tonkin Gulf incident. And this is what Ashwill skips over to get to 1966.

The rest of the article is a listing of all the damage inflicted on Vietnam, in bombs, land mines, defoliants, and so forth. Which, of course, any interested party already is cognizant of. Are we supposed to believe that the editors at Counterpunch do not know that 99% of all this happened after Kennedy’s death? And if his plan had been left intact, we would not be having this discussion? That is not speculation. Today, with the declassified documents of the Assassination Records Review Board, it can be proven.

Near the end, Ashwill says that the American leaders did not understand what the war was really about. As I have labored to show, President Kennedy did know what it was about. That is why he was getting out. Just ask General Giap’s son.

May 2, 2020
Goodbye and Good Riddance to Chris Matthews

On Monday March 2^nd, Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC program Hardball, announced on the air that he was resigning after 20 years. That resignation was effective immediately. Therefore, he would not be around for the next day’s Super Tuesday primary elections. Which suggests that this was not his idea and he was forced out. Furthering this idea was how he announced his leaving, which he said was not due to his lack of interest in politics. (For the brief sign-off, click here)

To put it mildly, Matthews has had a pretty bad last couple of weeks. Even for a dyed-in-the-wool MSM zealot, he has made some real bonehead comments. When Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses, Matthews compared that victory to the Third Reich’s successful invasion of France in 1940. After the New Hampshire debate between Democratic candidates, Matthews indulged himself in a diatribe against socialists. During that tirade, in John Birch society mode, he confused socialism with communism and said that if Fidel Castro had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park and he would have been killed while others were cheering. He then added, “I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years, I don’t know what he means by socialism.” This reveals either extreme bias or a feigned ignorance, since Sanders has held political office for about 35 years.

In another blunder, last week Matthews confused Jaime Harrison, an African American candidate for the Senate in South Carolina, with another black politician, Tim Scott, who is the GOP incumbent senator from that state. After Harrison corrected him, Chris apologized for the “mistaken identity”. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin was a column by writer Laura Bassett appearing on Saturday in the magazine GQ. In that column she complained about some sexist comments Matthews had made to her while she was in the makeup chair.

Jimmy Carter

Tip O’Neill

Matthews began in Washington as an officer with the United States Capitol Police. He then became an aide for four Democratic members of Congress before he failed in an attempt to win a congressional seat in Pennsylvania. After this, he became a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. When Carter failed to win reelection in 1980, Matthews signed up with House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Matthews then switched over to print journalism for 15 years.

H.R. Haldeman

Richard Helms

It was in his position as a columnist that Matthews now emerged as a rabid, mocking conservative member of the Washington establishment. After Oliver Stone released his film Nixon, Matthews criticized that picture for its use of a passage from H. R. Haldeman’s book The Ends of Power. In that passage, Haldeman had described a meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms in which the Bay of Pigs invasion was discussed. Helms’ reaction was so extreme that Haldeman concluded that Nixon’s use of the incident had been code for the Kennedy assassination. In a December of 1995 column, Matthews said this was all strained interpretation by Stone that Haldeman had blamed on his co-author Joe DiMona. Matthews could write this since he did not visit with DiMona. Dr. Gary Aguilar did so, and he learned why Matthews had not. DiMona told Aguilar that the book had gone through five drafts and Haldeman made many changes, but he never altered that passage. Clearly, Matthews had realized that after his films JFK and Nixon, Stone had become a lightning rod for the MSM. And if he was going to advance up the ladder, he had to join in the assault.

Therefore in 1996, Matthews published his book entitled Kennedy and Nixon. This was supposed to be a dual biography of these two central political characters. But to anyone who knew who Matthews was, and understood the two men, there was a not so subtle subtext to the volume. Matthews was actually trying to say that, contrary to popular belief, Richard Nixon and John Kennedy had more in common than they had differences. Oliver Stone agreed that this was an unjustified interpretation. The LA Times allowed him to review the book in June of 1996. He took the author to task for his unwarranted assumption that the two were somehow chums and comrades in arms. Two weeks later, on June 30, 1996, the Times allowed Matthews to reply. The columnist said he had nothing but contempt for Stone and all but called him a liar.

This got his ticket punched and Matthews now made the transfer into television. He first became a commentator for ABC’s Good Morning America, and then he got his own CNBC show titled Politics with Chris Matthews. That program eventually morphed into Hardball and was then placed on MSNBC.

While the host of this program, Matthews made good on his promise to be one of the foremost bastions of the MSM. How bad could Matthews get? He even visited the disgraced Tom DeLay at his home in Sugarland, Texas after he forcibly left Washington. The alleged Democrat admitted to voting for George W. Bush in 2000. He later defended this admission by saying that he thought Al Gore was kind of strange. Is it only a coincidence that Gore was one of the high-level politicians who had no problem admitting that he thought John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy?

For, as Doug Horne writes on his blog in the wake of Matthews’s resignation, the Hardball host was one of the foremost defenders of the Warren Commission during his 20-year span. In all of those years, this writer can only recall one small exception to the rigor with which Matthews took pains to mock and ridicule those who held a different view of the JFK assassination than the Warren Report did. This was after Jesse Ventura did an interview for Playboy back in 1999.

Jesse Ventura

At that time, Governor Ventura was making the rounds of talk shows after the controversy caused by his rather bold pronouncements during that interview. One of the interviews he did was with Matthews at Harvard. (Probe, November/December 1999) When Matthews asked Ventura about his opinion of Vietnam, Ventura very soberly said that the United States should have never sided with France in that conflict. This was a mistake that prefigured our own involvement in Indochina. Matthews replied by saying the American buildup actually started under Kennedy. When Ventura stated that there were certain elements in the country that favored us going to war in Indochina, Matthews said that it was Kennedy who was giving them what they wanted from 1961-63. Ventura did not think fast enough to say, “Chris, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam after Kennedy’s death than when he took office. So please show me the huge expenditures made by Kennedy?”

Matthews then shifted to the assassination itself. He tried the old chestnut about having to believe in a large conspiracy if one advocated for a plot. Ventura replied that if one thinks the Dallas Police were involved, then their negligence does not denote a wide conspiracy. Ventura turned the tables and asked a question of Matthews: Why didn’t the Commission call all the witnesses who smelled smoke on the grassy knoll? To which Chris finally made his minor exception. He beat a tactical retreat by saying that he would admit the Warren Report was a rush job and he agreed with Ventura’s critique of their work. But this author has to note that Matthews’ retreat was very limited. In his book Kennedy and Nixon, he endorsed the verdict of the Commission and said that Oswald shot Kennedy.

Towards the end of the interview, Matthews went completely off the rails. He characterized Oliver Stone’s film JFK in a completely nutty, wild manner by saying that somehow Nixon was involved in the plot depicted in the film. Since Nixon does not appear in the film except for the introduction over the credits, this is simply a smear. In fact, even if we expand this to the film Nixon, it is still not true. But Matthews really showed who he was when, near the end of the interview, he said that Stone tried to portray Kennedy as a peacenik when, in fact, he was a Cold Warrior. He then added that no one in JFK’s administration said he was trying to get out of Vietnam. Which is astonishing. For even at that time one had people like Roger Hilsman of the State Department, and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who both said such was the case. One can also add in Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Max Taylor, advisor Ted Sorensen, and assistants Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell. All of these men said that Kennedy would never have gone into Vietnam with combat troops and direct American military intervention. So what was Matthews talking about?

But this nonsense is consistent with Matthews’ book on Kennedy, titled Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. In that book, Matthews never mentioned NSAM 263. This was the order issued by Kennedy in October of 1963 which began a formal withdrawal from Vietnam of a thousand advisors by the end of the year and the rest of the advisors by early in 1965. If one does not mention that document, then one can say the things Matthews does. And I do not for one moment believe that Matthews did not know about it, since it was featured so prominently in Oliver Stone’s film. Matthews chose to ignore it due to his own bias against Stone.

He is now gone, from at least MSNBC. I cannot help but wonder who will replace him, and if that person will be any kind of an improvement. I would think he or she could not be much worse.

Link to Jim DiEugenio’s review of Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero : https://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/03/why-mr-hardball-found-jfk-elusive/

Link to Jim DiEugenio’s review of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/04/distorting-the-life-of-bobby-kennedy/

March 4, 2020
The “Confessions” of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs

August 17, 2019
Garrison Interview, “Some Unauthorized Comments on the State of the Union” (May 27, 1969)

This remarkable interview with Jim Garrison was done about two months after Clay Shaw was acquitted.

It is an interview with a European publication since, for reasons he notes, Garrison had given up doing such things with the American press.

Note that some of the things he brings up differ from his previous interview in 1967 in Playboy. For instance, quite early, he brings up the importance of Vietnam to the assassination, and he then returns to this at the end. He is now open about the role of the FBI in cooperation with the Warren Commission in the cover up. (p. 3). Right after this, he singles out Allen Dulles for his role on the Commission. He then becomes one of the first commentators to say there was a link between the murders of JFK, King, and Bobby Kennedy. He understands just how important Pierre Finck’s bombshell testimony was at the Clay Shaw trial (p. 18). He then describes the after-effects of a coup d’état and how the new government ratifies itself (p. 20). He is very pessimistic on the truth about Kennedy’s murder ever coming to light. In retrospect, what makes all this so impressive is how correct he was in the light of history on all these points. It is also enlightening to compare his ideas about the case to what others were writing and saying at the time. Most of the other critics were still concentrating on what happened in Dealey Plaza. They were not even aware of the bombshells in Finck’s testimony. But we now know the Justice Department certainly was, to the point they sent Thornton Boswell, another JFK pathologist, to New Orleans to discredit Finck, although they did not follow through on the plan.

Our thanks to Bart Kamp and the invaluable Malcolm Blunt for this engrossing interview. Thanks also go to Prof. Dennis Riches of Seijo University, Tokyo, for providing the following, more legible transcription of the original document.

~ Jim DiEugenio

(Click here to open the document in another page.)

August 6, 2019
NATO’s Secret Armies, Operation Gladio, and JFK

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control.

– John F. Kennedy, addressing the American Newspapers Publishers Association, April 27, 1961

I. JFK in Italy

On 1 July 1963, less than five months before his assassination, John F. Kennedy was escorted by motorcade through Rome, passing a large crowd gathered beside the Roman Coliseum, where gladiatorial contests were once held. The Latin-based gladiator is rooted to the Celtic term gladius, or sword. In Italy, the gladio of the ancient warriors was characterized by a short double-edged blade.

JFK motorcade passing the Colosseum

That evening, Kennedy was the special guest at a banquet held in the Quirinale Palace and arranged by the Italian president, Antonio Segni. One of the dignitaries Kennedy was due to confer with was Pietro Nenni, head of Italy’s Socialist Party (PSI). Nenni’s greatest hope was that JFK would lend his support to the “opening to the left” (l’apertura a sinistra): a plan frowned upon by the Eisenhower administration, which would create a left-of-center coalition between the Socialists and Italy’s ruling party, the Christian Democrats. Nenni was not disappointed. Deeply moved by their intense conversation, he left the meeting with tears of joy in his eyes. Shortly afterward, Kennedy would give his official approval to l’apertura and ask labor leader Victor Reuther and his brother Walter, president of the United Auto Workers, to help generate financial aid to the Socialists.

President Kennedy at the Quirinale Palace

Upon his return from Europe, the president remarked to his special assistant Arthur Schlesinger (the man who had initially convinced Kennedy to support l’apertura): “So far as I could see, everyone in Italy is for an opening to the left.” For any scholar familiar with the history of Operation Gladio, such a remark could mean only one of two things. Either Kennedy was playing his cards very close to his vest with a man who had already earned his trust and confidence, or he was completely uninformed on the subject of Italy’s postwar clandestine “stay-behind” guerrilla army: a virulently anticommunist, antisocialist, and one might even say antidemocratic organization, code-named Gladio.

As the Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser explains in his book about NATO’s secret armies,

When John F Kennedy became president in January 1961 the policy of the United States toward Italy changed because Kennedy, unlike his predecessors Truman and Eisenhower, sympathized with the PSI [Italian Socialist Party]. He agreed with a CIA analysis that in Italy “the strength of the socialists, even without aid from outside, means that left-wing sentiment looked forward to a democratic form of socialism.” Yet Kennedy’s plans for reform met with stiff resistance from both the U.S. State Department and the CIA.1

JFK at City Hall in Rome

Indeed, there were shadowy forces back in Washington that remained hell-bent on thwarting the president’s goals and whose actual alliance was to a power elite that transcended the agenda of any mere president. At this historical moment, the covert “powers that be” were, in part, represented by some rather sinister overt figures who also liked to linger in those shadows, as “spooks” are wont to do.

One was James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of Counterintelligence, who played a singular role in rescuing and recruiting some of the more bestial Fascists who were later to serve in Operation Gladio, such as Prince Junio Valerio Borghese (aka “The Black Prince”), commander of an anti-partisan campaign that murdered hundreds of Italian communists who had fought against Mussolini. Prince Borghese, “in close collaboration with the CIA in Rome on the night of December 7, 1970 started the second right-wing Gladio coup d’état in Italy, code-named Tora Tora”2 (now known as the Borghese coup). As historian Stuart Christie notes, “Angleton became the key American figure controlling all right wing and neofascist political and paramilitary groups in Italy in the postwar period.”3

Another notable spook was Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, who, along with Allen Dulles, helped to establish MKULTRA, a barbaric mind-control program that even the CIA’s current website admits broke the Nuremberg Code that “prohibits experimentation with humans without their consent.”

And then there was Bill Harvey. Although Harvey wasn’t part of the upper echelon, he was a hard-boiled operator who was placed in charge of running some important missions. One was Task Force W, part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s covert war against Cuba. Another was ZR/RIFLE, the Agency’s assassination program designed to eliminate foreign leaders. Harvey had particularly incurred the wrath of the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, because of his insubordination during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the midst of delicate negotiations between JFK and Soviet Premier Khrushchev that narrowly avoided World War III, Harvey had the temerity to secretly launch three boat missions against Cuba. As a result, an utterly furious RFK demanded he be sacked. Instead, Richard Helms quietly shipped Harvey off to Europe as a means of protecting him. Harvey was appointed as the CIA’s Rome station chief, where he would work closely with certain right-wing members of the Italian secret service.

We should also highlight the figure of Allen Dulles, who, although officially “retired” in 1961 at JFK’s insistence, continued to exert significant influence behind the scenes.4 Dulles’s Operation Paperclip and Gehlen Operation had rescued Nazis from prosecution at the Nuremberg trials (either by changing their names or altering their résumés) so they could later be used as scientists and engineers in American research projects and also as intelligence officers against the USSR for West Germany. Paperclip paved the way for similar compromises with unrepentant Fascists, Nazis, and right-wing terrorists who were recruited to serve in the secret Gladio network throughout Europe, all with NATO’s consent.

Dulles directed the creation of Gladio from its inception. In the words of Dr. Ganser: “Dulles during his time as Director of CIA had been the brain behind the secret anti-Communist armies. When the Gladio secret armies were discovered across Western Europe in 1990, an unnamed former NATO intelligence official explained that ‘though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact ever since it was born in the head of Allen Dulles.’”5

Approaching NATO headquarters in Naples

In a story that was first reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard, as soon as Kennedy returned to Washington, Dino Pionzio,6 the “CIA’s leading operator in Italy,” approached Aldo Moro’s administrative secretary (and future prime minister) Sereno Freato. Dino wanted to pick his brain about Moro’s recent conversation with Kennedy during the Rome visit. (Moro, a prominent member of the Christian Democrats, would serve his first term as prime minister beginning on December 4^th of that year.) This was when Pionzio—and the powers that be—learned that JFK and Moro had agreed to advance the goals of l’apertura or the “opening to the left.” Talbot adds: “Dulles and the CIA felt they had a proprietary relationship with the Christian Democrats, ever since those early Cold War days when the agency began funneling money to the Italian party.”

As Daniele Ganser likes to point out, rigging the 1948 Italian election was the first operation ever conducted by the recently formed CIA. Some of it was done out of the office of the Dulles brothers law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. (James Angleton would also play an important role in helping to steal that ’48 election.) An electoral success by the Christian Democrats would allow for a non-Communist Italy to join NATO the following year. Once that was accomplished, the direction of the Italian government would fall under the secret control of NATO’s clandestine operational arm, Gladio. During the Cold War, Britain and the United States were both deeply alarmed over the prospect of a coalition government in Italy that included the Socialists and the Communists. According to Italian magistrate Felice Casson, to undermine such collaboration a “strategy of tension”—the disruption of ordinary civilian life by prefabricated social violence and chaos—would be put into place by forces within the State.

Pionzio’s meeting with Freato put the Christian Democrats on notice: their budding alliance with the Socialists did not enjoy full support in Washington, particularly in national security circles […] The CIA’s attempt to subvert the aperture was one more flagrant example of how the agency sought to undermine the Kennedy presidency, as well as Italian democracy.7

JFK attending ceremony at NATO headquaters, Naples

Nonetheless, that November—in a move that would later help to seal his fate—Aldo Moro went ahead and created a coalition government that included the Socialists. The following summer, when JFK-hater Bill Harvey arrived in Rome to assume his position as CIA station chief, he didn’t waste any time. In a page taken right out of the Gladio script, Harvey tried to convince Renzo Rocca, an espionage chief working with Italian intelligence (or SIFAR) “to use his ‘action squads’ to carry out bombings of Christian Democratic Party offices and newspapers—terrorist acts that were to be blamed on the left.”8 This was a foreshadowing of what would occur in the years ahead, during Italy’s infamous Anni di piombo, or “Years of Lead”: a period extending from the late Sixties to the late Eighties. Even Harvey’s deputy in Rome, Felton Wyatt, who served as a principal CIA liaison with Operation Gladio, later professed to be shocked by Harvey’s extremism.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the escalating violence of the “Years of Lead” coincided with the appointment of General Lyman Lemnitzer as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO (SACEUR). In his position as SACEUR from 1963 to 1969, Lemnitzer would have the final word over the activities of Gladio.

Lemnitzer served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1960 to 1962, but was relieved of his position by JFK shortly after Lemnitzer approved of Operation Northwoods. This plan proposed the staging of false-flag operations, including terrorist bombings in Florida and in the nation’s capital, that would have wounded Cuban refugees (and, one assumes, other innocent bystanders). Northwoods also proposed the blowing up of an American ship harbored in Guantanamo Bay—and then blaming all the terror on pro-Castro Miami Cubans. As if to illustrate that such false-flag mayhem was nothing new, the Northwoods memo even makes reference to the sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba, another probable act of state-directed violence that conveniently served as a trigger for the Spanish-American war.

On March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer submitted his Northwoods plan to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Fortunately, Northwoods was never carried out, and it remains uncertain whether JFK ever saw the original memo. However, three days later, at a Cuba strategy meeting held in the Oval Office, Lemnitzer “informed Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs ‘had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force [against Cuba], with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.’” According to Air Force officer Edward Lansdale, the president replied “bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force.”9 Lemnitzer’s relationship with Kennedy was antagonistic and his persistence in trying to convince JFK to take military action against Cuba finally forced the president’s hand. A few months later, Kennedy denied Lemnitzer a second term and informed the general that he would instead be serving at the helm of NATO.

Kennedy’s motorcade, featuring a fully enclosed security phalanx, driving through Naples

In his 2018 memoir, American Values, Robert Kennedy Jr. calls Lemnitzer a “warmongering general” and “a Cold War fanatic,” adding:

That Operation Northwoods memo should serve as a warning to the American people about the dangers of allowing the military to set goals or standards for our country.10

The Northwoods memo is unique only insofar as it remains the single official document released by the government that spells out a plan for terror directed against American citizens on domestic soil. No doubt, there were other equally insane military contingency plans floating around which have either remained classified or been destroyed.11 But Northwoods clearly illustrates how this sort of amoral “strategic” thinking was typical of the power elite. In the years ahead, the same strategy of false-flag pandemonium was actually carried out in Europe, especially in places such as Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Turkey, and Greece, all of which suffered some of the worst State-sponsored terror that was unleashed by NATO’s secret army.

Gladio was coordinated by NATO and run by various European secret services under the supervision of the CIA and Britain’s MI6. All this is the subject of Daniele Ganser’s groundbreaking and encyclopedic tome, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (which I have relied upon for most of the Gladio-related information in this essay). Building on earlier works such as Philip Willan’s seminal Puppetmasters (an examination of Gladio in Italy) and British reporter Peter Murtagh’s The Rape of Greece, Ganser has constructed the first in-depth examination of the Gladio network as it unfolded throughout all of Western Europe.

In various interviews with Dr. Ganser, the listener may notice a frequent use of the term “data” and the question of whether certain statements are adequately supported by such objective facts. A quick look at his background is illuminating in this regard: Ganser was Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the prestigious Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), in Zurich. He studied at Basel University in Switzerland, at Amsterdam University in the Netherlands, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Ganser’s history professors at this most prestigious British institution had never heard of Gladio: an omission that Ganser compares to a specialist on late-twentieth-century history having never been schooled about the Vietnam War!) Thus, as a serious historian who gradually grew fascinated with the subject of secret warfare and the eventual exposure of the Gladio network, Ganser’s first question concerned the nature of the extant factual data and how it might support this seemingly outlandish tale. As a result, his narrative proceeds from one fact to the next, with a minimum of speculation or theoretical detour. For those familiar with some of the more ungrounded and meandering sallies into this territory, such an approach is surely welcomed.

Dr. Daniele Ganser

II. The Secret Armies

Perhaps there exists no better summary of Operation Gladio than the opening paragraph of Ganser’s meticulously researched, scholarly account:

As the Cold War ended, following judicial investigations into mysterious acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries across Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox Warfare section of NATO, the secret army had been set up by the U.S. secret service, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the British secret intelligence service (MI6) or (SIS) after the end of the Second World War to fight communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network which, after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister, was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics, and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named “Gladio” (the sword) in Italy, while in other countries that Network operated under different names […] In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist party within the state in close collaboration with the CIA or the MI6, unknown to parliaments and populations. In each country, leading members of the executive, including prime ministers, presidents, interior ministers, and defense ministers were involved in the conspiracy, while the “Allied Clandestine Committee” (ACC), sometimes also euphemistically called the “Allied Co-ordination Committee” and the “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC), less conspicuously at times also called “Coordination and Planning Committee” of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), coordinated the networks on the international level. The last confirmed meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.12

As mentioned earlier, the Italian gladio weapon was made with a double-edged blade. Likewise, from the inception of this covert operation, the secret armies served a dual purpose. One was to remain behind enemy lines in the event of a Soviet invasion and to operate as a guerilla resistance network. Gladio soldiers were supplied with arms caches composed of explosives, sophisticated radio communication equipment, and light weapons that were secretly stockpiled, hidden in caves, or buried at various sites across Europe.

But the other function of the “stay-behind” was to sabotage political parties, elected representatives, or left-wing supporters that NATO and its CIA bedfellows deemed inappropriate. And the methods used were utterly Machiavellian. As briefly discussed above, various acts of State-fabricated terror were set into motion that led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and these crimes were subsequently blamed on the left. Sometimes, this involved the creation of fictional “left-wing” groups that were, in fact, nonexistent and the planting of falsified evidence that included anonymous phone calls or letters (often penned in the stereotypical style of B-movies).

As we find throughout history, legitimate leftists who had nothing to do with violence were seized by the police and forced into the role of the patsy. For example, in the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, Giuseppe Pinelli, a mild-mannered pacifist, anarchist, and autodidact—Pinelli had been too poor to pursue studies in school—was escorted to police headquarters in Milan. He was on friendly terms with the local authorities and was allowed to drive his scooter to the police station. Detained and subjected to a prolonged examination, Pinelli never survived his interrogation. Shortly before midnight on December 12^th , he went flying through a fourth-floor window, plummeting to his death. At first, police claimed that Pinelli had committed suicide. Then, a 1975 inquiry ludicrously concluded that he’d “fainted” out the window. Pinelli was eventually cleared of any involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing. His murder inspired Nobel Prize laureate Dario Fo to write a play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, that immortalized this man of such humble origins who had been employed as a railroad worker.

Giuseppe Pinelli

At other times—as in the case of Italy’s Red Brigades—extant left-wing groups were steered to violence once the leadership of these groups was usurped. After the former leaders were pushed aside—either disgraced, imprisoned, or killed—the new leaders (in reality, agents provocateurs) directed State-sponsored murder disguised as a “radical left” action. In this context, one might speak of turning an entire organization into a patsy. In other cases, when government intel agencies were tipped off to impending terrorist actions fomented by either the right or left, a passive “stand back and do nothing” approach was taken—if such acts simultaneously served a “higher” goal of the Deep State (the “state within the state,” from the Turkish derin devlet), such as incriminating the left and strengthening the call for increased security measures at the sacrifice of civil liberties and freedom.

Thus, the “double-edged sword” shifts from a literal to a figurative meaning: “Something that can have both favorable and unfavorable consequences; something that has both good and bad parts or results.”

It’s also important to note that secret armies were established in certain European countries even before the existence of NATO (1949) and its Gladio network. In 1944, Winston Churchill ordered the establishment of one such covert army in Greece, known by the acronym LOK. In France, a secret army was created immediately after the end of the war. Once again, fear of the electoral strength of the Communist Party and the left was the issue; as always, the “solution” was the installation of a right-wing dictatorship.

On July 30, 1947, the existence of the French secret army was suddenly revealed to a startled populace: “French Socialist Minister of the Interior Edouard Depreux lifted the veil and declared to a baffled population that a secret right-wing army had been erected in France behind the back of the politicians, with the task to destabilize the French government. ‘Toward the end of 1946 we got to know of the existence of a black resistance network, made up of resistance fighters of the extreme right, Vichy collaborators, and monarchists,’ Depreux explained. ‘They had a secret attack plan called Plan Bleu, which should have come into action toward the end of July, or on August 6, [1947].’”13 Although the army was shuttered following public outcry, another was created shortly afterward to replace it.

Although Ganser doesn’t venture into the subject of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO, which heavily infiltrated the American Communist Party) or the CIA’s domestically-based Operation CHAOS,14 similar acts of infiltration and incitement to violence were also occurring on U.S. soil during this same period. To cite just two examples, members of the Weather Underground in Cincinnati were taught the art of bomb making by an ex-Green Beret and Vietnam veteran named Larry Grathwohl: an agent provocateur and FBI informant who also supplied them with guns.15 And the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) was infiltrated by an intel asset named Lee Harvey Oswald, whose sudden thrust into the limelight on November 22, 1963 served the dual purpose of providing a patsy for the JFK assassination and destroying the FPCC. As Republican Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, remarked in 1975: “We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.” (No better one-line description of what Oswald was up to has ever emerged.) It was only recently revealed that Richard Gibson, co-founder of the FPCC, offered his assistance to the CIA in July 1962 and officially worked for the Agency as a spy (code name: QRPHONE-1) from 1965 to 1977.16 Perhaps an even better example of CIA/FBI domestic infiltration and destruction can be found in the history of the Black Panther movement, which featured the CIA’s drug-induced manipulation of Huey Newton,17 and the Bureau’s role in manipulating police to assassinate Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.18 Informants who assisted in these Black Panther murders were effectively paid a “bounty” in the form of bonuses personally approved by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.19 And, as antiwar activist Noah Chomsky recalls: “Government agencies financed, helped organize, and supplied arms to right-wing terrorist groups that carried out fire bombings, burglaries, and shootings … In most cases [it was] the FBI, although one right-wing terrorist in Chicago claims that his group was financed and directed in part by the CIA.”20 Thus, the link between such actions in the U.S. and Europe is revealed not only in the modus operandi, but in the presence of high-ranking personnel who supervised such operations, both here and abroad.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from to 1935-72

So, who were these modern-day “gladiators”? As Ganser is quick to note, not every European nation fell subject to such abyssmal acts; and many soldiers who served in the Gladio network considered themselves to be patriots whose sole job was to defend their country against the Soviet Union. For example, in the Cold War period that Ganser covers in his book (1945–1990), Norway, Switzerland, and Austria were never victimized by false-flag attacks. And many Scandinavians who enlisted in the stay-behinds later objected to even being called a “Gladio” soldier. But when we study the events that occurred during this same period in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Turkey, and Greece, a wholly different picture emerges. That is, many Gladio operatives were hardened right-wing fanatics who thought nothing of participating in terror, torture, and the taking of innocent lives in the service of a “higher” cause—one they often spoke of with a religious fervor. Not surprisingly, the ranks of the Gladio armies were brimming with recalcitrant Nazis and Fascists. As one neofascist confessed after his arrest: “The personnel was recruited in circles where anti-communism was at its strongest; that is to say on the far right.”21 To make matters worse, some of the directors and leading figures of national intelligence agencies were also recycled from these same Nazi and Fascist networks.

One of the most infamous was General Reinhard Gehlen, whom Hitler appointed as chief of Foreign Armies East in 1942, and whose secret service career with the Nazis was focused on fighting the Soviet Union. According to author Christopher Simpson, “Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some four million Soviet prisoners of war.”22 Gehlen was rewarded for such niceties by being scooped out of Germany by the Americans and shipped with his top staff to Fort Hunt, Virginia. After a cordial meeting with Allen Dulles, it was decided that Gehlen would be given a new assignment. Once the general and his crew were shipped safely back to Germany, he became the director of the “Gehlen Organization”: West Germany’s top intelligence agency, which also integrated other brutal, incorrigible Nazis into its structure. According to Ganser:

When the Gladio scandal erupted in 1990, an unnamed former NATO intelligence officer explained that the covert action branch of the CIA under Frank Wisner, in order to set up the German secret army, had “incorporated lock, stock, and barrel the espionage outfit run by Hitler’s spy chief Reinhard Gehlen. This is well known, because Gehlen was the spiritual father of Stay Behind in Germany and his role was known to the West German leader, Konrad Adenauer, from the outset.” According to the unnamed NATO officer, U.S. President Truman and German Chancellor Adenauer had “signed a secret protocol with the U.S. on West Germany’s entry into NATO in May 1955, in which it was agreed that the West German authorities would refrain from active legal pursuit of known right-wing extremists. What is not so well known is that other top German politicians were privy to the existence of secret resistance plans.”23

Thus, the State-controlled terrorists were given carte blanche to operate without fear of reprisal.

Reinhard Gehlen

Ganser devotes the first three chapters of his chronicle to establishing the basic facts behind the Gladio network; its eventual exposure; and the subsequent refusal of NATO, CIA, and MI6 to even acknowledge its existence. The next dozen chapters go into greater detail about all twelve European nations that hosted the Gladio networks, with a chapter on each national history. Condensing this complex, baroque narrative must have been a daunting task, but the author pulls it off brilliantly. In the course of this essay, we will touch upon just a few highlights, but this barely does justice to the rich contents of NATO’s Secret Armies.

As Ganser explains, the invitation to join NATO was itself a double-edged sword. Western European nations were pressured to participate in the alliance and reap its benefits. Yet, to do so, they were forced to sign secret protocols that essentially stripped them of their sovereignty. NATO would have the final word regarding whether an elected official or his party could continue to serve or whether, instead, he should be besmirched, overthrown, or killed. The protocols remained a secret to many of the leaders of these countries. Communist, socialist, or left-leaning parliamentarians could not be trusted—so went the logic—to keep this arrangement secret. Neither could many of the prime ministers or presidents. Besides fearing a backlash from the public, NATO feared the Soviets might be informed. Thus, only “trustworthy” leaders were privy to such information. And, in certain cases, the signatories of these agreements were right-wing directors of intel agencies rather than the democratically elected leaders of said countries.

President Kennedy may have also fallen into this category of so-called untrustworthy men who would remain uniformed about the details of Operation Gladio.24 After all, the president was viewed by many on the extreme right as a “communist appeaser.” Kennedy would establish backchannels of communication with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was also on the verge of attempting a rapprochement with Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro.25 We should also note that, as early as 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was well aware of the foreign policy connection to the JFK assassination. In his On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison states his belief that Clay Shaw’s motivation to participate in the conspiracy “stemmed from Shaw’s history as a CIA operative and his desire, shared by the hard-core cold warriors in the intelligence community, to stop Kennedy’s attempt to turn around U.S. foreign policy.”26

As it turns out, it was not just Kennedy’s foreign policy in Vietnam and Cuba they wanted to reverse, but his policy in key strategic areas around the globe, including Indonesia and the Congo. Congo possessed copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, and the world’s largest and most densely concentrated deposit of uranium oxide. (The high-grade uranium used in the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima was derived from a Congolese mine in Katanga.) Indonesia was one of the very few nations that surpassed Congo in resource wealth. It was brimming with silver, copper, gold, and vast reserves of oil. It still hosts one of the world’s largest—if not the largest—copper and gold mine. This immense wealth at least partly explain why the CIA supervised several assassination plots of the Congo’s nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba. They succeeded just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration—and the Agency managed to keep it a secret from JFK for the next twenty-four days. It also explains why, after failing to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, the Agency directed a successful coup in 1965 that cost at least a half million innocent lives. And which Allen Dulles may have been secretly involved with, even though JFK had retired him in late 1961. (See the upcoming book by Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia)

As early as 1959, while Chairman of the African Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kennedy clearly carved out his position: “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution … The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.” Years after Kennedy was killed, Fidel Castro told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: “If your uncle had lived, the relationship between our countries would have been very different. He was a great president, an unusual man with love for children and a powerful understanding of the military and large corporations that run your country. We were on a road to peace.”27 This is exactly what the military-industrial complex did not want.

Kennedy’s willingness to negotiate with nationalist leaders of nonaligned Third World nations and his increasingly anti-colonialist foreign policy which would have cost powerful multinational corporations billions of dollars—especially in places such as Africa and Indonesia—28 would have placed him in a far more dangerous position than, say, Charles de Gaulle or Aldo Moro, both of whom were also victims of assassination attempts. Moro was kidnapped and killed; Charles de Gaulle survived numerous close-calls with death; both leaders were targeted in these attacks by members of the Gladio network. In the latter case, this was admitted by the French chief of the secret services (DGSE), Admiral Pierre Lacoste, in 1990. But, unlike Kennedy, de Gaulle had a countermeasure in place that wasn’t available to JFK. That is, he possessed his own extensive network of loyal military and secret service personnel that were willing to engage in “unorthodox” operations to avenge their president and war hero. This included former members of the Service d’Action Civique, a veritable Gaullist praetorian guard, and loyalists in the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE). After the failed Generals’ Putsch of April 21–26, 1961, de Gaulle’s SDECE operatives were said to have placed bombs in Algerian cafes frequented by the same Gladio/OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) members who had tried to eliminate de Gaulle—and blew them to smithereens. “The old general was willing to fight with equal ferocity.”29 Indeed, “like few others, Charles de Gaulle had been at the center of secret warfare in France for most of his lifetime.” And during the attempted coup, President de Gaulle called directly upon les français—the ordinary French citizens—to help rally against such seditious threats:

And all over France, millions of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general strike was organized to protest the putsch…. Over ten million people joined the nationwide demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands marching in the streets of Paris, carrying banners proclaiming “Peace in Algeria’ and shouting, “Fascism will not pass!” Even police officer associations expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests.30

Although President Kennedy lent his full support to de Gaulle, Allen Dulles and the CIA—who had a hand in the coup attempt—were not pleased. Besides sending his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to the Élysée Palace, Kennedy phoned the French ambassador, Hervé Alphand, to convey his assurances that he was opposed. But also to warn him about what they were both up against: “The CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.” The president had learned his lessons about CIA duplicity during the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which had occurred just days before, on April 17, 1961. Someone was clearly trying to overload the president’s work schedule.

President De Gaulle greeted by a grateful populace in 1961, after the failed Generals’ Putsch

Once de Gaulle was informed about the secret Gladio network, in 1966 he decided to remove France from the military portion of NATO and kick NATO headquarters out of France. (Until then, it was located in Paris.) His memo signaling this withdrawal takes on a deeper dimension in light of what we now know about the secret NATO protocols that, in essence, nullified a nation’s freedom: “France is determined to regain on her whole territory the full exercise of her sovereignty.”

De Gaulle denounced the protocols as an infringement of national sovereignty. Similar secret clauses were also revealed in other NATO states [… historian] Giuseppe de Lutiss revealed that when becoming a NATO member, Italy in 1949 had signed not only the Atlantic Pact but also secret protocols that provided for the creation of an unofficial organization “charged with guaranteeing Italy’s internal alignment with the Western Bloc by any means, even if the electorate was to show a different inclination.”31

After its expulsion by de Gaulle, NATO set up shop in Brussels. In the years ahead, Belgium became the sorry host of horrific domestic terrorism, thanks to this same Gladio network.

III. Gladio Exposed

The unraveling public exposure of Gladio traces back to a terrorist attack in the small village of Peteano, in 1972. The Carabinieri (Italy’s national gendarmerie) received an anonymous tip about an abandoned car. When they arrived on the scene and opened the trunk, three policemen were killed by an explosion. Shortly afterward, the Red Brigades were said to have claimed responsibility for the terror. In addition, an official investigator reported that the explosive material used in the attack could definitively be attributed to the Red Brigades network.

Peteano car bomb, 1972

Eighteen years later, in the summer of 1990, a courageous, resolute Italian magistrate named Felice Casson was busy at work, combing through data on right-wing terrorism that was stored in the archives of the military secret service. Casson’s research led him to conclude that there were unquestionable links between terrorist operations and the State. He said that a “strategy of tension” had been intentionally developed in order to eviscerate left-leaning political parties, both in Italy and elsewhere. The purpose of this strategy, he continued, was to:

Create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies. While this strategy was being implemented, it was necessary to protect those behind it, because evidence implicating them was being discovered. Witnesses withheld information to cover right-wing extremists.

Judge Casson (who now serves on the Italian Senate) discovered that an operator named Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of a paramilitary terrorist organization called Ordine Nuovo, was behind the crime. (Gladio researcher Philip Willan characterizes Vinciguerra as a “virulent fascist of psychopathic ruthlessness.”)32 Arrested and placed on trial in 1984, Vinciguerra bluntly stated that he was protected and enabled by the government’s own intelligence and security organizations, which shared his extremist anti-Communist views:

With the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with a capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the state itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organize a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army.

[This] super-organization, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.

According to Vinciguerra, all the bombings that followed the Peteano massacre stemmed from the same “single, organized matrix.”33 Most chilling of all, Vinciguerra fleshed out the strategy of tension in a manner that only a hardened killer could who had participated in its every step:

You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.34

For students of the theater, this pithy statement could be viewed as the climactic dialogue of a key protagonist that serves to encapsulate the principal theme of the drama and, more importantly, suddenly illuminates what lies at its core. As we shall see, Vincenzo Vinciguerra’s revelations did not exist in a vacuum.

On December 7, 1970, Gladio’s right-wing extremists launched a coup that was code-named Tora Tora. According to Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters, the coup was named after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that had also occurred on 7 December, in 1941. Although it was called off at the last moment, one paramilitary group had already entered the Interior Ministry and distributed 180 machine guns to their Gladio comrades. As a result of all this, Italian politicians and parliamentarians on the left were sent a clear message regarding how easily they could be humbled, pushed aside, or done away with. Part of the coup plan “called for the arrest of left-wing political and trade union leaders as well as leading journalists and political activists who were to be shipped away and locked up in the Gladio prison in Sardinia.”35

Puppetmasters, by Philip Willan

Giovanni Tamburino, an investigative magistrate of the Italian city Padua, critically investigated the Tora Tora operation and, to his massive surprise … discovered the involvement of a mysterious secret army, later discovered to be Gladio. Thereafter, he arrested Vito Miceli, the acting director of the SID [Servizio Informazioni Difesa, Italy’s foreign intelligence service] who before had directed NATO’s Security Office in Brussels. Tamburino charged Miceli with “promoting, setting up, and organizing, together with others, a secret association of military and civilians aimed at provoking an armed insurrection to bring about an illegal change in the constitution of the state and the form of government.” His data suggested that a mysterious armed organization existed within the state, and as its real code-name Gladio had not yet been discovered, the structure during questioning was referred to as “Super-SID.”

Placed on trial on November 17, 1974, “an angry Miceli shouted: ‘A super SID on my orders? Of course not! But I have not organized it myself to make a coup d’état. This was the United States and NATO who asked me to do it!’” In 1977, Miceli confessed: “There has always been a certain top secret organization, known to the top authorities of the state and operating in the domain of the secret services, involved in activities that have nothing to do with intelligence gathering.”36

In 1990, after Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to admit the reality of Gladio, parliamentarians launched an investigation. In 1995, they produced a 370-page report, which tepidly stated that the “CIA [had] enjoyed maximum discretion” in Italy during this period. Five years later, a second parliamentary investigation concluded that the U.S had supported the “strategy of tension” (i.e., terror) in order to “stop the PCI [Italian Communist Party] and to a certain degree also the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] from reaching executive power in the country.” The Senate report also concluded:

Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.37

Note the term: “structures” of U.S. intelligence. This leaves the door open to include not only the CIA but other intel agencies such as the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Further highlighting the significance of Vinciguerra’s admission, Ganser adds: “In marked contrast to other right-wing terrorists that had collaborated with the Italian military secret service and walked free, Vinciguerra after his revelations was sentenced for life and imprisoned.”38

Additional confirmation surfaced in the testimony of General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence. During a March 2001 trial of right-wing terrorists accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre (a bombing that killed sixteen and wounded eighty), the general made a telling remark: “The impression was that the Americans would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left.” And he added: “The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left; and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism … Don’t forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man … a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.” Later on, at the ripe age of seventy-nine, Maletti revealed another quintessential element in the Gladio equation: “‘Italy has been dealt with as a sort of protectorate’ of the United States. ‘I am ashamed to think that we are still subject to special supervision.’”39

Piazza Fontana bombing

Maletti’s reference to Nixon is significant. When we examine the strange death of Aldo Moro, the shadow of Nixon’s henchman, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, will be seen flickering across the final act of the Moro tragedy. Also of significance is the general’s use of the term “unorthodox”: that adjectival euphemism most often employed in intel circles to describe inhumane or terrorist methods generated from within their own agencies.

Unfortunately, besides Italy, the only countries to initiate parliamentary investigations were Belgium and Switzerland. In this sense, Vinciguerra had the final word when he proclaimed: “The State cannot condemn itself.”

Following Judge Casson’s exposure of the Italian Gladio, journalists approached French President François Mitterrand to ask about a possible French connection. But Mitterrand, who was often referred to as “l’Dieu” (God), quickly attempted to sidestep the matter and sweep it under a rug. “When I arrived [Mitterrand was first elected in 1981], I didn’t have much left to dissolve. There only remained a few remnants, of which I learned the existence with some surprise, because everyone had forgotten about them.” Although the French president was also known as the “Old Fox,” Prime Minister Andreotti’s own foxiness was clearly on par with that of his French counterpart. Refusing to allow Mitterrand to assume a smug, paternalistic high road, Andreotti slyly pointed out that the French Gladio representatives were also seated at the last Allied Clandestine Committee meeting held in Brussels, which had occurred as recently as October 24, 1990. At this point, Mitterrand assumed his most well-known persona: that of an old French fox with sealed lips.

In Belgium, the falling dominoes of Gladio revelations made a spectacular, clattering crash on November 7, 1990 when Socialist Defense Minister Guy Coeme announced, during a special televised broadcast, that NATO’s secret army had been active in Belgium since the Cold War. Coeme’s climactic statement was: “I want to know whether there exists a link between the activities of this secret network and the wave of crime and terror which our country suffered from during the past years.”40 One of the more notable terrorist acts that the defense minister was referring to was the dreadful Brabant Massacres, a grisly series of attacks in which innocent men, women, and children were gunned down in places such as shopping markets by masked, hooded men with shotguns. The Brabant Massacres resulted in twenty-eight deaths, with another twenty-two injured. Journalist Phil Davison remarked: “If the object was to sow terror, the killers chose the perfect targets: women, children, and the elderly, cut down by rapid gunfire while wheeling their trolleys through a local supermarket.”41

A 2017 memorial ceremony in Aalst, Belgium, for victims killed and injured by the Brabant assassins. The mayor of Aalst, criticizing the Justice Department, said: “You have failed for years in correctly dealing with the victims, and the investigation has been extremely unprofessional. There are so many questions that remain. Who is lying? Who is telling the truth?”

A parliamentary investigation subsequently discovered that the secret army had been structured into two separate branches of the Belgian secret services. One (SDRA8) was located within the military secret service; the other (STC/Mob) was contained within the civil secret service. (Many of the Gladio stay-behinds were disguised in this way: like a graduated series of Chinese boxes.)

To properly investigate possible connections to terrorism, parliamentarians demanded to see a list of the Gladio soldiers, or even a list with their names excised and replaced by birth dates, in order to compare them to known terrorist suspects. To maintain confidentiality, the Senate commission agreed that the list would be shown only to three judges, who were investigating the case.

But their efforts to arrive at the truth were blocked, and the investigation went nowhere. Despite pressure and protest from the Senate, M. Raes, director of the state security service, and Lieutenant Colonel La Grande, chief of the military secret service, effectively prevented any deeper, more meaningful probe. They also refused to hand over the lists. Thus, Defense Minister Coeme’s crucial question about terrorist links to Gladio was left hanging in midair.

The parliamentarians were equally outraged with the CIA and MI6 over their refusal to hand over their own identical list of Belgium’s “gladiators.” (Washington and London possessed a master copy of every single Gladio soldier operating in Europe, along with a complete set of fingerprints.) Apparently, avenging the deaths of innocent civilians and meting out justice to their murderers was not high on the American Empire’s to-do list. Furthermore, the parliamentarians would even be ridiculed by their own security chief, who had the audacity to post a victory message in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir: “‘Give us the names!’ ‘Never!’ reply the ‘Gladiators.’ The hour of truth has come. This is Brussels calling. Dear friends in Operation Stay Behind. Section SDRA8 [the military secret service] assures you of its very high esteem and thanks you for your devotion to your country. They guarantee that the pressures and threats will be empty and that undertakings will be honored. Adolphe is looking well!”

Once the Senate concluded that the encoded message originated from Lieutenant Colonel La Grande, both La Grande and Raes were forced to resign.

Brabant Massacre memorial incribed with phrase: “Why, Gladio?”

It was later confirmed that a neo-Nazi group called Westland New Post (WNP) was connected with the stay-behind Gladio army. A WNP member named Michele Libert confessed that the head of WNP regularly met with U.S. Embassy officials. WNP chief Paul Latinus eventually informed journalist Rene Haquin that American military secret services had instructed him to construct WNP.

When the Gladio scandal spread to Germany, a socialist parliamentarian named Hermann Scherer called for an investigation of what he termed a reprehensible Ku Klux Klan-like group. But Scherer withdrew his request upon learning that members of his own Socialist Party had participated in hushing up Gladio’s existence. All this occurred amidst growing outcries in the press over the shameful history of Reinhard Gehlen and his Nazi-staffed “Gehlen Organization.”

But the exposure of Gladio in Germany could actually be traced back to September 9, 1952, when a gentleman named Hans Otto strolled into police headquarters in Frankfurt. According to government records, Otto, a former SS officer, claimed “to belong to a political resistance group, the task of which was to carry out sabotage activities and blow up bridges in case of a Soviet invasion.” Otto’s dramatically climactic line was: “Although, officially, neofascist tendencies were not required, most members of the organization featured them.” Otto added: “The financial means to run the organization had been provided by an American citizen with the name Sterling Garwood.” In addition, he claimed that his group had assembled blacklists of communists and socialists who were to be gathered up and executed in case of a national emergency.

Otto revealed that the name of this secret army was Technischer Dienst des Bundes Deutscher Jugend (TD BDJ). August Zinn, Prime Minister of the Hessen region, called for a judicial investigation. TD BDJ members were arrested … and then, as early as 30 September, allowed to walk free when a higher court in Karlsruhe stepped in and, behind Zinn’s back, mysteriously ordered the release of these Nazi secret soldiers. A baffled and exasperated Zinn concluded: “The only legal explanation for these releases is that the people in Karlsruhe declared that they had acted upon American direction.”

Greece 1967 coup

Another problem with parliamentary investigations was that in some of the countries that hosted Gladio all forms of democracy had already been eclipsed. Spain and Portugal were in the throes of long-term dictatorships. Turkey underwent three coup d’états; and its Gladio network was so deeply integrated into the traditional structures of government that the State was, in effect, synonymous with Gladio itself. Neighboring Greece underwent a Gladio-controlled coup in 1967 that ushered in the infamous Regime of the Colonels, a dictatorship that lasted until 1974.

The Hellenic cradle of democracy had also hosted an early military use of napalm, when the United States sprayed the countryside with this incendiary liquid in order to decimate the same communist partisans who had fought in unison with the Allies in attempting to defeat the Nazis. Via “Operation Torch,” the U.S.,

used chemical warfare to defeat the Greek partisans by dropping thousands of gallons of napalm on Greece. In late 1948, the Greek resistance, which on their native soil had defeated both the German Nazis and the British troops, collapsed. The end of the Civil War meant total victory for the Greek Right and its patron, the United States.43

Thus, all across postwar Europe, the United States was not only obsessed with avoiding a “slip to the left”; it was actively promulgating a push to the right, even if this resulted in dictatorship.

General Talat Turhan, torture victim

In Turkey, the 1990 revelations lent a new voice to former Turkish General Talat Turhan, who had been brutally tortured by the Turkish Gladio (code-named Counter-Guerrilla). “When it was discovered in 1990 that Italy had an underground organization called Gladio, organized by NATO and controlled and financed by the CIA, which was linked to acts of terrorism within the country, Turkish and foreign journalists approached me and published my explanation as they knew that I have been researching the field for years.”44 General Turhan called for an independent European Union investigation into Gladio in order to bypass the immovable roadblocks that would inevitably be raised by the Turkish military should the government even attempt to initiate its own probe. However, a subsequent Counter-Guerilla scandal that occurred in 1996 led to a seven-month investigation after thousands took to the streets in protests. It concluded with the Turkish prime minister admitting, in a television broadcast watched by millions, that an “execution squad was formed within the state,” and that “all parts of the state were aware of what was going on.” Derin devlet, indeed.45

*   *   *

Ganser titles the third chapter of his book “The Silence of NATO, CIA, and MI6.” Like the backpedaling of President Mitterrand, NATO’s response suggests that its leadership was also caught off guard:

After almost a month of silence, on Monday November 5, 1990, NATO categorically denied Andreotti’s allegation concerning NATO’s involvement in Operation Gladio and the secret armies. Senior NATO spokesman Jean Marcotta said at SHAPE headquarters in Mons, Belgium that “NATO has never contemplated guerilla war or clandestine operations; it has always concerned itself with military affairs and the defense of Allied frontiers.” Then, on Tuesday November 6, a NATO spokesman explained that NATO’s denial of the previous day had been false. The spokesman left journalists only with a short communiqué which said that NATO never commented on matters of military secrecy and that Marcotta should not have said anything at all. The international press protested against the ill-advised public relations policy of the military alliance when it related with bitterness: “As shock followed shock across the Continent, a NATO spokesman issued a denial: nothing was known of Gladio or stay-behind. Then a seven-word communiqué announced that the denial was “incorrect” and nothing more.”46

Alas, doublespeak had reached new heights.

MI6 also refused comment, but a Conservative Party member named Rupert Allison told the Associated Press: “‘We were heavily involved and still are … in these networks.’ The British ‘certainly helped finance and run, with the Americans,’ several networks and, through the MI6 together with the CIA, were directly involved.”47

Gladio’s exposure in 1990 occurred during America’s Gulf War. Although the secret army was widely reported by the European press, it was given scant attention by the U.S. media. Both President Bush and the CIA refused to comment. But several middle-ranking retired CIA officers were more forthcoming. One was Thomas Polgar, a thirty-year Agency veteran who “explained with an implicit reference to CPC [NATO’s Clandestine Planning Committee] and ACC [NATO’s Allied Clandestine Committee] that the stay-behind programs were coordinated by ‘a sort of unconventional warfare-planning group linked to NATO.’ In their secret headquarters the chiefs of the national security armies ‘would meet every couple of months in different capitals.’”48

And twelve years earlier, one “Company Man” made the following statements in his memoir:

He said that a covert branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), “had undertaken a major program of building, throughout those Western European countries that seemed likely targets for Soviet attack, what in the parlance of the intelligence trade were known as ‘stay-behind nets,’ clandestine infrastructures of leaders and equipment trained and ready to be called into action as sabotage and espionage forces when the time came.” His assignment was to “plan and build such stay-behind nets in Scandinavia.” The author also referred to the hidden arm caches: “These nets had to be coordinated with NATO’s plans, the radios had to be hooked to a future exile location, and the specialized equipment had to be secured from CIA and secretly cached in snowy hideouts for later use.”49 Although he never mentions the word “Gladio,” he clearly describes some of its key elements.

The book’s publication aroused ire in Scandinavian circles, but somehow these shocking revelations seemingly passed unnoticed by the other European nations aligned with NATO. William Colby’s memoir (with its unwittingly amusing title) Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA, was penned in an attempt to enhance the battered image of the CIA during the late Seventies. Thus, the former Director of Central Intelligence was careful to never admit that, besides preventing a Soviet advance, the armies had also served a more diabolical function.

As a case in point: terrorism experts employed by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had produced a classified training manual known as Field Manual 30–31 (along with two equally barbaric appendices, 31A and 31B). The 140-page booklet, which was translated into several languages, offers “advice for activities in the fields of sabotage, bombing, killing, torture, terror, and fake elections.” It also instructs the secret soldiers to “carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness.” (The strategy of tension.) “Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and urge them to use violence.” All this reads like a virtual Bible and explicit blueprint for what occurred during the Years of Lead. And it makes the Northwoods document pale in comparison, or even read like a “limited hangout” admission, since Northwoods was never enacted whereas the Field Manual was actively used in training offered by the American government to Gladio operators. As Ganser notes, FM 30–31 “stressed explicitly as its main point that the involvement of the Pentagon had to remain secret under all circumstances.” According to the manual, “Only those persons who are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the U.S. Army in the internal affairs of an allied country.”

Military officers running the Turkish Gladio net received their training at the U.S. government’s notorious School of the Americas. And one of the principal manuals used for their instruction was FM 30–31. In 1973, in the midst of a rash of inexplicable terrorist attacks that rocked Turkey, a Turkish newspaper announced the publication of the manual. Shortly thereafter, the journalist who had obtained it was “disappeared.” After FM 30–31 was translated and published in Turkey, it soon surfaced in Spain and Italy. With the 1990 exposure of NATO’s secret armies, interest in the manual was reawakened, and researchers explored its connection to Gladio.50

Since the Gladio scandal involved all twelve member states that then composed the European Union, it was perhaps inevitable that Gladio was finally discussed by the European Parliament. A debate was held on November 22, 1990 (oddly enough, on the anniversary of the JFK assassination).

The Greek parliamentarian Vassillis Ephremidis was particularly outspoken during his E.U. address: “It was set up by the CIA and NATO, which while purporting to defend democracy were actually undermining it and using it for their own nefarious purposes.” Calling for further investigation and referring to the Gladio-imposed Greek dictatorship (the bloody Reign of the Colonels), he added: “The Democracy we are supposed to have been enjoying has been, and still is, nothing but a front.” The truth at last. Next, one of the French parliamentarians, Monsieur De Donnea, took a diametrical viewpoint, preferring to address the need to maintain the secrecy of those employed in the clandestine groups. “We must therefore pay tribute to all those who, while the Cold War lasted, worked in these networks.” But De Donnea also paid lip service to the need to investigate possible connections to terrorism. Dutch parliamentarian Vandemeulebroucke next took an opposing view: “We are entitled to attribute to it all the destabilization, all the provocation, and the terrorism that have occurred in our countries over these four decades.” After stating, “This affair leaves a bad taste in the mouth,” he made it clear that it was the very secrecy of the networks that most troubled him. He added: “I should like to protest most strongly against the fact that the American military, whether through SHAPE, NATO, or the CIA, think they can interfere in what is our democratic right.”

Following this debate, the E.U Parliament passed a resolution that included a seven-point introduction featuring some very frank, unambiguous language.

Whereas for over forty years this organization [Gladio] has escaped our Democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO … whereas such clandestine networks may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so … whereas in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime … whereas these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law … whereas the various “Gladio” organizations have at their disposal independent arsenals … thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries … and greatly concerned at the existence of decision-making and operational bodies which are not subject to any form of democratic control … the resolution of the E.U. parliament condemns the clandestine creation of manipulative and operational networks and calls for full investigation.

The resolution that followed this preamble attempted to address each of the points raised in the introduction, including dismantling the networks and instituting judicial parliamentary investigations. But sadly enough, as Dr. Ganser concludes: “The dog barked loudly, but it did not bite. Of the eight actions requested by the EU parliament not one was carried out satisfactorily. Only Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland investigated their secret armies with a parliamentary commission, producing a lengthy and detailed public report.” Although the resolution was also sent to NATO and the U.S., neither President Bush or NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner publically replied or supported an investigation.51

*   *   *

In 1992, filmmaker Allan Francovich produced an important BBC documentary about Gladio. In the film, he presents a copy of Field Manual 30–31 to Ray Cline, former head of the Directorate of Intelligence for the CIA. (Cline held this position from 1962 until 1966.) In his filmed response, Cline replies unequivocally: “This is an authentic document.” But when Francovich filmed a similar interaction with William Colby, who had served as CIA director from 1973 to 1976, the former director evasively claimed: “I have never heard of it.” (But then, why would he state otherwise? Colby was, after all, an “honorable man.”) Gladio kingpin Licio Gelli—a character we shall soon explore—was far more forthcoming: “The CIA gave it to me.”52

One result of the Gladio exposé was to resurrect interest in one of its prime players. Daniele Ganser views Licio Gelli as a parallel figure to Reinhard Gehlen. Like Gehlen, despite his dishonorable past, Gelli was accorded royal treatment by the United States. No stranger to fascists, Gelli fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He served alongside the SS in World War II. One of Gelli’s more marketable skills involved the liberal use of torture. A political chameleon, near the end of the war Gelli played both sides and nimbly switched allegiances when the time seemed right.

For such an undereducated man, his rise to power seems incredible. (Philip Willan says that Gelli “was only semi-educated, having been expelled from school at the age of thirteen for striking the headmaster.”53) In 1969, Henry Kissinger and U.S. General Haig (who ran NATO as SACEUR from 1974–1979) authorized Gelli to “recruit four-hundred high ranking Italian and NATO officers into his lodge.”54 This was a secret Masonic group called Propaganda Due (P2), of which Gelli would eventually become—at the very least—titular head. (The widow of prominent bank chairman Roberto Calvi claimed that P2’s real director was Giulio Andreotti.55 This might explain why Licio liked to confess that his childhood dream had been to become a puppet master.) Gelli was invited to the inaugurations of American presidents Ford and Carter; during Reagan’s administration the former SS associate even scored a front-row seat.

Near the end of his life, Licio Gelli proclaimed: “I am a fascist and will die a fascist.”

The significance of Gelli’s Propaganda Due Lodge (P2) is paramount to an understanding of the Gladio operation in Italy—and beyond. Gladio and P2 were U.S. funded; both were, in Ganser’s words, “parallel governments.” The membership list of Propaganda Due consisted of a virtual “Who’s Who” of powerbrokers and leading military and government officials. In no uncertain terms, P2 was the Italian power elite. The Lodge was also linked to leading right-wing figures in Latin America. (P2 was active in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.)

In 1981, during an investigation of Mob-connected Michele Sindona and the collapse of his bank, police broke into Gelli’s house shortly after Gelli had fled the scene and discovered a list of 962 Propaganda Due members. Although probably not complete, the list included figures such as the future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the heads of all three Italian intelligence services. Another prominent member was Stefano delle Chiaie, an Italian neofascist connected to Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed program of State terror and assassination in Latin America. Gladio’s tentacles were, in fact, transatlantic, and they exercised a firm grip on events in various Latin American countries. (Delle Chiaie would also play an important role in the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro.) As Philip Willan explains:

The membership list discovered in 1981 showed that 195 high-ranking officers from all branches of the military belonged to the lodge. There were officers from the Carabinieri paramilitary police, six from the police, and thirty-seven from the finance police; nine belonged to the Air Force, twenty-nine to the Navy, and fifty to the Army […] “As can be seen at a glance, the membership lists reveal a map of the highest levels of military power, with individuals who have often played a central role in particularly significant moments of the recent history of our country, as well as in events of a subversive nature,” the P2 Commission commented.56

No wonder that Gelli—tipped off by someone within the State apparatus about the imminent visit of the Carabinieri at dawn—had decided to join his neofascist pals in Latin America. (He was rumored to have found safe harbor in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.) Narrowly missing arrest, he lacked even the time to scoop up his secret papers. Gelli would later be charged with obstructing justice in the investigations of the Piazza Fontana bombing: one of several bombs that exploded in various locations in Rome in a single day, December 12, 1969. (Piazza Fontana was also the first of a series of dreadful acts that ushered in Italy’s Years of Lead. In 1969, there were 398 terrorist attacks in Italy, a figure that steadily increased each year, culminating at 2,513 attacks in 1979.)

At an airport in Rome in 1982, additional documents were found in a suitcase in the possession of Gelli’s daughter. Titled “Memorandum on the Italian Situation” and “Plan of Democratic Rebirth,” they characterized the trade unions and the Italian Communist Party as enemies of the State. (Italy’s largest union had lent its support to the Socialist and Communist Parties.) Equally troubling, they called for a disruption of the planned “Historic Compromise” that Aldo Moro was then working on: the integration of Italy’s Communist Party (PCI) into a coalition with the Christian Democrats (DCI), thus sharing the executive branch of government. As former Culture Minister Dario Franceschini explained: “He convinced the two winners of an election, neither of which had a majority, to support a government,” (Note that the PCI had distanced itself from Moscow and was functioning more along the lines of Eurocommunism or what we would today regard as a socialist democratic party.) Moro’s Historic Compromise was taking things a step further than merely inviting the Socialist Party in out of the cold, as Pietro Nenni and Moro had been planning during JFK’s visit in the summer of 1963. Instead, it was promoting something that was at the heart of NATO’s greatest fear.

Striking workers at FIAT, 1969

Gelli’s documents called for the installation of a right-wing authoritarian (but so-called democratic) government. There remains little doubt that the P2 roster represented the hand-picked leadership of this new regime. In 1981, the P2 Commission run by Tina Anselmi concluded that Propaganda Due was a criminal organization: “It tried to influence and condition political life in our country, above all by acting through the secret services, which it controlled for many years.” Anselmi added: “These people did not intend to talk about Masonic brotherhood or business. Besides, businessmen were underrepresented in the lodge.”57 Not surprisingly, Gelli and his Propaganda Due Lodge had been expelled by the Masonic Grand Orient of Italy, in 1976.

*   *   *

Almost eleven years after President Kennedy’s death, this time it was Aldo Moro who would board a plane and fly cross the Atlantic. Like Kennedy, he would not live long upon his return to the homeland. Accompanied by Italian President Giovanni Leone, Moro was traveling to Washington:

to discuss the inclusion of the Italian left in the government. But their hopes were shattered. … In a heavy confrontation with Henry Kissinger … the Italian representatives were told that under no circumstances must the Italian left be included in the Italian government. Italy had to remain firmly and strongly within NATO. The visit weighed heavily on Aldo Moro, who had already lived through both the Piano Solo Gladio coup and the Tora Tora Gladio coup and hence had no illusions concerning the influence of the United States on Italy’s First Republic.

Upon his return to Italy, Moro was sick for days and contemplated his complete withdrawal from politics. “It’s one of the few occasions when my husband told me exactly what had been said to him without telling me the name of the person concerned,” Moro’s wife Eleonora later testified. “I will try and repeat it now: “You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration. Either you give this up or you will pay dearly for it.”

Aldo Moro

Nonetheless, on March 16, 1978, the courageous politician gathered together the documents related to the Historic Compromise between the Christian Democrats (DCI) and the Communist Party (PCI). He then traveled, with his bodyguards, to the Italian parliament in Rome, “where he was determined to present the plan to include the Italian Communists in the executive.” After Moro’s ominous meeting with Kissinger in Washington, he had requested a bulletproof car, but his request was denied. As Moro and his five bodyguards cruised through a residential suburb of Rome, the car was ambushed.

Six assailants opened fire, killing all five of Moro’s bodyguards in what appeared to be a highly professional operation. Only one of Moro’s guards managed to return a couple of rounds.

Moro was captured unharmed and held hostage for fifty-five days in a drama that took the strategy of tension to new heights. His body was later found riddled with bullets and stuffed into the trunk of a car abandoned in central Rome, on Via Caetani. This despite the fact that the streets were swarming with secret service. The precise location was a symbolic one: “parked halfway between the headquarters of the DCI [Christian Democrat Party] and the headquarters of the PCI [Italian Communist Party].”58 Although the kidnapping and execution were blamed on the Red Brigades, “the professional skill of the principal gunman did not correspond to that of any known Red Brigades member.”59

Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini, the original leaders of the Red Brigades, were already in jail; and the titular, ersatz leader, Mario Moretti, was secretly linked to the Italian State. In addition, the building where Moro was supposedly held captive was located on the Via Gradoli, a neighborhood under the complete control of the Mafia (those cozy bedfellows of Gladio and the Italian State). And the Via Gradoli had already been under police surveillance before the kidnapping on March 16^th.

Scene of the Moro kidnapping

Two days after Moro’s abduction, the police finally paid a visit to 96 Via Gradoli, knocking on the door of apartment 11, a Red Brigades base controlled by Mario Moretti. When there was no response, the neighbors assured them that the gentleman in residence was “respectable,” so they left and never returned. At least, this was the official story. In fact, one neighbor in the building had informed the police that she heard Morse code transmissions at night. The police later claimed to have never received this information even though the woman had requested that her written statement be delivered to “a senior officer of her acquaintance.”

In early April, the police also received a tip that included the word Gradoli. Instead of searching Via Gradoli, they took a trip to an Italian town of that same name. Even Moro’s wife “suggested that the tip could refer to the name of a Rome street but was told by Interior Minister Cossiga that no such street was listed in the Yellow Pages map of the city. The street exists and was listed.”60

There may also have been a symbolic aspect (witting or unwitting) to the location of Aldo Moro’s corpse on the Via Caetani. Mino Pecorelli, an Italian journalist with numerous high-level sources and connections, published a magazine that specialized in producing encoded messages that would have tried the patience of a Sherlock Holmes. On May 23, 1978, it featured a particularly puzzling tale.

Mino published what appears to be an eyewitness account of the scene in Via Caetani, where the body of Aldo Moro was dumped in the boot of a car, parked next to the high wall which runs down one side of the street. A “blond woman” is present among the bystanders at the scene and comments that behind the wall lie “the remains of the Theater of Balbus, Rome’s third amphitheatre.” She continues: “I read in a book that in those days runaway slaves and prisoners were taken there so that they could fight one another to the death. Who knows what there was in the destiny of Moro that his death should be discovered next to that wall? The blood of yesterday and the blood of today.” Pecorelli is talking about “gladiators” in the context of Moro’s death, but until mid-1990 very few people could have understood what he meant.

Among other things, Philip Willan concludes that Pecorelli, who was renowned for his vast net of secret service contacts, “appears to be hinting that the gladiators were in some way implicated in Moro’s murder.”61

Corpse of Aldo Moro discovered on Via Caetani

Pecorelli was assassinated one year after Aldo Moro. In an article featured in the May 9, 2003 Guardian newspaper, Willan reports: “A Perugia appeals court convicted Giulio Andreotti of ordering his murder. The court ruled that the killing was carried out at the behest of the seven-time prime minister to prevent Mr. Pecorelli from making damaging revelations about the Moro case in his magazine, Osservatore Politico. Mr. Pecorelli’s writings attained an added significance last November, when a Perugia appeals court convicted Giulio Andreotti of ordering his murder.”

Giulio Andreotti—that perennial éminence grise who served as prime minister on and off from 1972 to 1992—was no stranger to the most privileged and elite corridors of byzantine Italian politics, and for the most part he sailed unfettered through such convoluted and dangerous labyrinths. Serving his second term (1976–1979) during the time of the Moro kidnapping, he didn’t hesitate. Andreotti immediately blamed the Red Brigades and “cracked down on the left: 72,000 roadblocks were erected, and 37,000 houses were searched. More than six million people were questioned in less than two months.”62

But convincing evidence suggests that Moro’s kidnapping was carried out by a Deep State apparatus with ties to Lucio Gelli and Propaganda Due. And that furthermore, leading conservative forces in the Christian Democrats Party stood back and did nothing even though Moro could easily have been rescued. And clearly, the assassination had served its purpose, in that Moro’s Historic Compromise died with its author.

The Moro assassination has been subject to nearly the same level of microanalysis as the JFK coup (in Europe, it’s referred to as the “JFK assassination of Italy”). And the results of this analysis point to the same sort of inexplicable, contradictory facts. Including the complex involvement of figures known to continually weave their way in and out of intelligence services, positions of political power, mafia circles, and the military: the handmaidens of what is traditionally referred to as the power elite. But one danger of microanalysis is that it may miss or forget the bigger picture. The macrocosm focus of each of these murders rests upon the issue of foreign policy.

IV: JFK, Gladio, and Permindex

James DiEugenio describes Clay Shaw as a “well-dressed, dignified, upstanding representative of upper-crust New Orleans”63 who, among other things, was the director of the International Trade Mart. One of the reasons District Attorney Jim Garrison remained so intrigued by the elusive figure of Shaw is that, while he prosecuted Shaw for participating in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, he came across information in the Italian press that tied Shaw not only to the CIA—a connection Garrison had already suspected—but to two highly suspicious organizations that he categorized as the “twin international intelligence combines, the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (World Trade Center) and Permindex.”64 Before elaborating on what has been learned about these entities since Garrison’s time, it might be helpful to summarize his own words as they appear in his 1988 account, On the Trail of the Assassins.

Clay Shaw

Garrison says that the news articles exposed “Shaw’s secret life as an Agency man in Rome trying to bring Fascism back to Italy.” This remark resonates with added implications given what we now know about Gladio on the one hand (whose fascist operators were specially trained in the use of patsies) and, on the other, Shaw’s numerous associations not only with members of the global economic elite but with a lowly “nobody” and future patsy named Lee Harvey Oswald. Recall that Garrison’s investigation discovered that Shaw had driven Oswald to Clinton, Louisiana in a black Cadillac during the summer of 1963, where they were seen by numerous members of this small town, who later positively identified them. Other credible witnesses to this hours-long visit identified a third man accompanying Shaw and Oswald: right-wing extremist David Ferrie, an intriguing presence in the events of November 22^nd. (Ferrie also appears in a 1950s photograph with Oswald, who joined Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol when Lee was only fifteen years old.)

The Italian dailies Paese Sera and Corriere della Sera reported on the Permindex scandal in 1967, with Paese Sera publishing a six-part series in March. In the years ahead, both Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) would exhibit visible strands directly connecting them to Gladio operators.

“Centro Mondiale Commerciale,” continues Garrison, “had initially been formed in Montreal but then moved to Rome in 1961. Among the members of its board of directors … was one Clay Shaw from New Orleans.” Another director was Ferenc Nagy, the “exiled former premier of Hungary and the former head of its leading anti-Communist political party. Nagy also was described by the Italian newspapers as the president of Permindex (ostensibly a foundation for a permanent exposition and an offshoot of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale). Nagy, the Italian newspaper said, had been a heavy contributor to fascist movements in Europe.” Another Permindex director was Giuseppe Zigiotti, president of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms.

Garrison also paraphrases from Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy (1969): “The Centro was apparently representative of the paramilitary right in Europe, including Italian Fascists, the American CIA, and similar interests. [Flammonde] described it as ‘a shell of superficiality … composed of channels through which money flowed back and forth, with no one knowing the sources or the destination of these liquid assets.’” In 1962, both Permindex and CMC were expelled from Italy for “subversive intelligence activity.”

Paese Sera reported that Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) “was a creature of the CIA … set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA … funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.” And here’s the punch line: Centro Mondiale Commerciale represented “the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain aspects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is anti-communism so strong that it would swallow up all those in the world who have fought for decent relations between East and West, including Kennedy.” In his inimitably laconic manner, Garrison drolly concludes:

That just happened, as well, to be a trenchant one-line description of the parent organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. As for Permindex, which Clay Shaw also served as a director, the Italian press revealed that it had, among other things, secretly financed the opposition of the French Secret Army Organization (OAS) to President de Gaulle’s support for Independence for Algeria, including its reputed assassination attempts on de Gaulle.65

These were prescient, far-reaching statements, especially for the time. I would posit that this last fact—the funding of OAS assassination attempts by an organization (Permindex) with a CIA man on its board (Shaw) who also served as a director—is the clearest indication that Permindex may have been working hand-in-hand with Gladio. The key question is whether Permindex was also funding various other Gladio operations, either in Italy or abroad.

Jim Marrs, an indefatigable researcher and author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1989, 2013), notes that the 1962 edition of Who’s Who in the South and Southwest lists Shaw as a member of the Permindex Board of Directors. In the 1963–64 edition, however, the reference to Permindex is deleted. Marrs goes on to discuss how Permindex’s major stockholder Louis Bloomfield reportedly “established Permindex in 1958 as part of the creation of worldwide trade centers connected with CMC.” There is also evidence that Bloomfield may have worked with the British/Canadian Special Operations Executive William Stephenson.

Permindex “began to draw attention in 1962, when French President Charles de Gaulle publically accused the company of channeling funds to the outlawed Secret Army Organization (OAS). De Gaulle identified several major and well-known international companies as investors in Permindex, which had made several attempts on de Gaulle’s life.”

Another intriguing fact that brings us to the penumbra of Gladio: both CMC and Permindex were expelled from Italy in 1962 “for subversive activities connected to those in the much-publicized Propaganda-2 masonic lodge scandal … in which the lodge was accused of attempting to overthrow the Italian government and set up a fascist regime.” Marrs also cites the work of whistleblower Victor Marchetti, author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) and former assistant to the CIA’s deputy director. Marchetti revealed that Clay Shaw and David Ferrie were each employed by the Agency and that CIA Director Richard Helms “repeatedly voiced concern over the prosecution of Shaw and even instructed top aides to ‘do all we can to help Shaw.’”66

Perhaps no other researcher knows more about how, why, and to what great extent the Agency stepped in to secretly defend Shaw—and to keep an eye on the bothersome Garrison—than James DiEugenio. As DiEugenio writes in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed (1992, 2012), a researcher named Peter Vea “discovered a very important document while at the National Archives in 1994,” a CIA memo that stated “Shaw had a covert security approval in the Project QKENCHANT” in 1967, “meaning that Shaw was an active covert operator for the CIA while Garrison was investigating him.”

The author goes on to explain that financial backing for Permindex came from J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, a firm “that had been closely associated with Allen Dulles” via the latter’s law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. Dulles eventually became the bank’s General Counsel. Its “founder, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, was associated with the Third Reich, especially Heinrich Himmler.” Apparently, the Swiss were none too happy to learn of all this; as a result, Permindex was forced to leave Switzerland and relocate to Rome.

The board of directors of Permindex was packed with the crème de la crème of fascist scoundrels: “Bankers who had been tied up with fascist governments, people who worked the Jewish refugee racket during World War II, a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schact, the economic wizard behind the Third Reich, who was a friend of Shaw’s. These people would all appeal to the conservative Shaw.” Nagy, one of Permindex’s founding members, was a friend of OAS leader and former governor general of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle. As we have seen, the OAS “later made several attempts on de Gaulle’s life, which the CIA was privy to.” According to French news reports, a few months before the Generals’ Putsch against de Gaulle in April 1961, Soustelle had met with the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, in Washington.

DiEugenio also describes how, the day after Kennedy was shot, Shaw, under his alias Clay Bertrand, “called his lawyer friend Dean Andrews” and asked Andrews to defend Oswald.67 This is not at all surprising since a CIA agent named David Phillips “was managing the CIA’s anti-FPCC program [anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee], of which Oswald was a part of.”68

The subject of Permindex and the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) doesn’t make an appearance in either Puppetmasters or NATO’s Secret Armies. But it has been explored at length by Michele Metta, author of a recently published book, CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK. Thanks to Metta’s work, we now have conclusive proof that Shaw served on the CMC board of directors; that fascist-supporter Ferenc Nagy (director of CMC and president of Permindex) was a CIA asset; and that numerous connections exist between CMC and Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic Lodge.

Michele Metta’s recently published book on CMC and Permindex

Metta has also documented an attempt to defeat JFK’s presidential election. That is, a pact between U.S. and Italian Freemasons to “influence Italian immigrants in the USA to vote against Kennedy” (this in the words of Enzo Milone, Grand Master of the Freemasons). The plot was hatched by CIA agent Frank Gigliotti and organized by Giuseppe Pièche. The latter figure served on CMC’s board and was a former general under Mussolini.

Apparently, Dr. Gigliotti was no middling, low-level functionary. Instead, “he was a CIA agent with great power.” Metta cites a September 30, 1952, letter written by Gigliotti to President Truman, in which “Gigliotti showed a decisive tone of command by asking Truman to fire [Walter] Bedell Smith, who was then director of the CIA … As a matter of fact, Bedell Smith was actually fired; and it was exactly thanks to this firing that, from February 1953, Allen Dulles reached the top of the CIA. The latter was a Freemason himself.”69

In Puppetmasters, Philip Willan reveals that Gigliotti played an important role in the Masonic world of Lucio Gelli. Gelli’s Propaganda Due Lodge (P2) was part of the Grand Orient of Italy. After the Second World War, the “revival of freemasonry in Italy … was encouraged by both the British and the Americans” as a means of steering Italian masons toward appropriate political interests and objectives, i.e., anti-Communism. Indeed, there were American lodges established for each NATO base in Italy.

Gelli was given the task of working for the unification of the various Italian masonic groupings and to improve relations with the Catholic Church … In 1971, he was made secretary of P2. This accelerated Masonic promotion was personally instigated by Grand Master Giordano Gamberini, who has been dubbed “the traveling-salesman of anti-communism.” On his retirement in 1970, Gamberini was given responsibility for contacts with foreign masonic lodges and with the CIA.

Willan concludes that Gelli’s close association with this figure probably explains Gelli’s rapid ascent in the masonic world. Again, fear of the “Communist Peril” was at the heart of all these NATO/CIA/freemasonry relationships.

Until its confiscation by Mussolini’s forces, the seat of the masonic order of the Grand Orient of Italy was the Palazzo Guistiniani, a palace in Sant’ Eustachio, Rome. After the war, pressure from American freemasonry led to its return to the Grand Orient. “A key role in the negotiations was played by one Frank Gigliotti, a former OSS and then CIA agent,” who attended the official signing-over ceremony with the American ambassador and the Italian Finance Minister, in 1960.70 The palace is now the official residence of the President of the Italian Senate.

Palazzo Guistiniani

From Metta we learn that the aforementioned Italian intel asset, Giuseppe Pièche, “with the complicity of the … Italian Interior Minister Mario Scelba, created and directed a Servizio Antincendi” (an agency for fire prevention). According to Metta, this seemingly innocuous institution served a hidden purpose: “In reality [it] obscured a Stay-Behind structure. He was helped in this venture by a soon-to-be member of P2, [Count] Edgardo Sogno.” “In the 1990s [Sogno] made several public declarations clearly qualifying this Antincendi as a NATO project linked to the Gladio network.”71

The implications of all this are enormous, because here we find a clear, visible link between a CMC board member (Pièche) and the Gladio stay-behind. Pièche’s colleague Count Sogno was associated with supporters of the 1970 Borghese coup and was a conspirator in the planned seizure of the Quirinale Palace in 1974. Philip Willan informs us that the Count, like Licio Gelli, possessed “high-level U.S. and NATO contacts.”72

Metta notes that Giuseppe Pièche protected neofascist groups and filed secret reports on Italian progressives through this “fire prevention” mechanism. (This is confirmed in declassified CIA documents cited by the author.) He adds that Italian intel documents “reveal a strong symbiosis between the Antincendi and the so-called Gehlen organization,”73 which, as we have seen, was another Gladio-related group.

The other significant finding to emerge from Metta’s research is the evidence he provides linking Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) to the CIA. A recently declassified memo from the CIA’s International Organizations Division (“the CIA branch occupied in psychological warfare both at home and abroad”) documents that Ferenc Nagy had asked the CIA to place an American businessman on Permindex’s board and a CIA agent on its staff. Nagy also asked the Agency to invest in Permindex so that it could subsequently participate in the firm’s management. Metta’s data also conclusively proves that Clay Shaw was serving on CMC’s board.74

Metta reproduces a CIA memo on Jean-René Souètre, a member of the dissident OAS that tried to kill de Gaulle. Souètre was “in Fort Worth on the morning of November 22^nd” (so was JFK) “and in Dallas in the afternoon.” (Ditto.) “The French believe that he was expelled to either Mexico or Canada.” (In fact, Souètre was apprehended within forty-eight hours of the JFK assassination.) The memo continues: “Subject is believed to be identical with a Captain who is a deserter from the French army and an activist in the OAS. The French are concerned because of de Gaulle’s planned visit to Mexico.”75 (One wonders: if the French were so worried about de Gaulle, why weren’t the Americans equally concerned about the fate of President Kennedy?) As James DiEugenio points out, Souètre had developed contacts with radical rightwing elements in Dallas and New Orleans, and also with anti-Castro Cubans.

Jean-René Souètre

CIA documents on Souètre were declassified in 1976 and have long held the interest of JFK researchers. To fully comprehend their significance, one must recall that, as a young senator, on July 2, 1957, JFK delivered a speech to the Senate chamber that had a radical impact on the entire situation in Algeria. As James DiEugenio points out, “It was Kennedy’s powerful Algeria speech that helped collapse the Fourth Republic and brought de Gaulle to power.” DiEugenio concludes:

But the speech had even more impact than that. As Alistair Cooke noted, the way the speech was perceived by the [Eisenhower] White House, and the derogatory comments made by its occupants, had now vaulted Kennedy’s profile into high relief in Europe. He was the man pointing out their dogged and doomed attempts to hang onto fading empires. In America he had made himself the Democrat that Eisenhower had to “do something about.” … five months after making the watershed Algeria speech, on December 12, 1957, Time published its first cover story on Kennedy. It was titled, “Man Out Front.”

And in the speech, Kennedy called for the French withdrawal from their Algerian colony, something that the OAS would have been livid about. Kennedy said that France’s “overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence.” Kennedy later added: “The time has come for the United States to face the harsh realities of the situation and to fulfill its responsibilities as leader of the free world … in shaping a course toward political independence for Algeria.”76

As mentioned earlier, the renegade OAS officers were tied to Gladio, especially in its international functioning. And this “worldwide” aspect brings us to our final point:

Metta discusses various characters who weave their way in and out of Aginter Press: a right-wing terrorist organization, located in Lisbon, with strong ties to the OAS. This would make sense since, as revealed by Philip Muehlenbeck in his book, Betting on the Africans, Kennedy had tried to talk the Portugese dictator Salazar into freeing the African colonies of Mozambique and Angola. When this did not work, Kennedy sent aid to the rebels there. (Muehlenbeck pp. 107–11) Aginter also received support from the CIA. Metta reproduces memoranda generated from a “special branch of the Italian Carabinieri” that reviews how the aforementioned Guido Giannettini (the right-wing journalist and intel agent who helped to develop the strategy of tension) “‘met [OAS officer Yves] Guerin-Serac in 1964 in Lisbon, and presented him to Captain Jean Souètre of the OAS.’” The documents add that “Souetre was given by [Guerin-]Serac the command of mercenaries recruited by Aginter.”77

Metta believes that “Aginter Press was born of a marriage between the OAS and the so-called Gehlen Organization.”78 According to Daniele Ganser, although posing as a press agency, Aginter was actually a branch of Gladio. What’s special about Aginter is that it featured a virtual import-export group of assassins. Bear in mind the word international. Ganser devotes most of his ninth chapter, “The Secret War in Portugal,” to this Gladio/Aginter Press operation.

When Gladio was exposed in 1990, the Portuguese newspaper O Jornal “informed a stunned audience in the country that ‘The secret network, erected at the bosom of NATO and financed by the CIA … had a branch in Portugal in the 1960s and the 1970s. It was called “Aginter Press” and was allegedly involved in assassination operations in Portugal as well as in the Portuguese colonies in Africa.’” (My emphasis.) And note the widening global thread in what follows. Ganser continues:

Aginter Press was no press at all. The organization did not print books or anti-Communist propaganda leaflets but trained right-wing terrorists and specialized in dirty tricks and secret warfare in Portugal and beyond. The mysterious and brutal organization was supported by the CIA and run by European right-wing officers who, with the help of the PIDE [International and State Defense Police], recruited fascist militants. The investigation of the Italian Senate into Gladio and the secret war and massacres in Italy discovered that Italian right-wing extremists had also been trained by Aginter Press, while in Portugal it was revealed that a sub-branch of Aginter Press called “Organisation Armée contre Communisme Internationale” (OACI) had also operated in Italy. The Italian senators found that the CIA supported Aginter Press in Portugal and that the secret organization was led by Captain Yves Guerin, better known by his adopted name of Yves Guérin-Sérac.79

Judge Salvini, who worked with the Italian Senate investigation, explored the ominous link between Yves Guérin-Sérac and Guido Giannettini:

Giannettini was an Italian active in the OAS support network during the Algerian War. He was also a paid agent of the Italian intelligence agency SIFAR, and a linchpin between right-wing extremists and the Italian intel services. A principal figure in the State’s manipulation of terror and the intellectual development of the strategy of tension, in November 1961 Giannettini held a three-day seminar at the United States Central Naval Academy at Annapolis on “The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d’Etat in Europe.” Philip Willan tells us that Giannettini’s manual, Techniques of Revolutionary War (1965), was also on the recommended reading list (along with Hitler’s Mein Kampf) at the Ordine Nuovo’s summer camp for aspiring fascists. (“Selective terrorism,” Giannettini writes, “is carried out by eliminating particular men carefully chosen for a series of motives,” one of which is “because their removal will provoke harsh reprisals which increase the tension, creating an irreversible process leading to civil war.”)80

Yves Guérin-Sérac

Former OAS Captain Yves Guillou, aka Yves Guérin-Sérac, ran Aginter Press. Guérin-Sérac was also implicated, along with Giannettini, in the Italian “State massacre” known as the Piazza Fontana bombing. Moreover, Guérin-Sérac was considered to be its mastermind. Ganser rightly characterizes him as “an unmatched strategist of terror.” He had skillful mentors. During the French Indochina War (1946–1954), Guérin-Sérac served as French liaison officer with the CIA. During the Korean War he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal from the United States. He was also a chief protagonist in the attempted OAS coup against de Gaulle.

After the failed OAS rebellion, he boasted: “The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS, I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions—which is to say, a planetary dimension.” (In other words: worldwide.) Next, Guérin-Sérac rounded up his fugitive OAS pals who, along with other extremists, set up shop at Aginter Press headquarters in Lisbon. Ganser adds: “The OAS diaspora strengthened militant right-wing networks internationally.”81 We should bear this in mind since Aginter had what might be called global subsidiaries.

After the fall of Portugal’s dictatorship, Guérin-Sérac fled to Franco’s Spain. Meanwhile, the new Portuguese secret service [SDCI] launched an investigation. It concluded that Aginter had four principal functions:

First, it had been an internationally well-connected “espionage bureau run by the Portuguese police and, through them, the CIA, the West German BND or ‘Gehlen Organisation,’ the Spanish Dirección General De Seguridad, South Africa’s BOSS, and, later, the Greek KYP.” Next to this intelligence gathering task Aginter Press had secondly functioned as a “center for the recruitment and training of mercenaries and terrorists specializing in sabotage and assassination.” According to the SDCI document, Aginter Press had thirdly been a “strategic center for neofascist and right-wing political indoctrination operations in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Europe in conjunction with a number of sub-fascist regimes, well-known right-wing figures, and internationally active neofascist groups.” Fourth, Aginter Press had been a secret anti-Communist army, an “international fascist organization called “Order and Tradition” with a clandestine paramilitary wing called OACI, “Organisation Armée contre le Communisme International.”

From Guérin-Sérac’s newly established digs in Madrid, among other acts of terror, he organized attacks abroad that were blamed on the Algerian liberation movement. His bombs were deposited at the Algerian Embassies in France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain. One unexploded mechanism that failed to detonate in Frankfort was found to contain C–4. In Judge Salvini’s words, C–4 is “an explosive exclusively used by the U.S. forces, which has never been used in any of the anarchist bombings.”

In these investigations data has emerged which confirms the links between Aginter Press, Ordine Nuovo, and Avanguardia Nazionale” Judge Salvini explained to the Italian senators investigating the secret war in Italy and beyond. “It has emerged that Guido Giannettini had contacts with Guerin-Serac in Portugal ever since 1964. It has emerged that instructors of Aginter Press … came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives.” Judge Salvini concluded that, based on the available documents and testimonies, it emerges that the CIA front Aginter Press had played a decisive role in secret warfare operations in Western Europe and had started the great massacres to discredit the Communists in Italy.82

From all this, we may conclude that Gladio, far from being a local phenomenon strictly anchored within its respective host nations was, in reality, a fluid network with complex international appendages. (As mentioned earlier, this nexus extended even to Latin America.) Whether such poisonous strands reached into Dallas in 1963 through figures like Yves Guérin-Sérac—with his sick dream of a “planetary dimension” of State-sponsored terror—remains a question. And the implications of his OAS colleague, Jean Souètre, shadowing the movements of JFK on that fateful day are intriguing.

*   *   *

On November 22, 1963, after his scheduled departure from Dealey Plaza, the next stop on the president’s agenda was supposed to be a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart. A year after Kennedy’s death, this business center became host to a bronze sculpture of an eagle with its wings spread, created by artist Elisabeth Frink. Engraved upon its platform is a line from William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius lift up thy head!” A second engraving reads: “Placed in memorial by the friends of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy who awaited his arrival at the Dallas Trade Mart Nov. 22, 1963.”83

Elisabeth Frink’s “Eagle” sculpture at the Dallas Trade Mart, in memory of President John F. Kennedy

For Blake, this majestic creature was a symbol of the soaring, unfettered creative imagination—and even the genius of special talent.84 Diametrically opposed to this we find the symbol of the crow, subject of another of Blake’s “Proverbs of hell”: “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.”

In another proverb, Blake writes: “The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.” Unfortunately, John F. Kennedy was all too often forced to suffer the presence of crows, as was Aldo Moro. The kind of “thinking outside the box” exemplified by Moro and JFK—who both dared to steer a foreign policy course against the powerful tide of the powers that be—was a direct threat to the crows, who could imagine no other way of dealing with it.

Interview with Dr. Daniele Ganser

Bibliography:

David Black, ACID: A New Secret History of LSD (London: Vision Paperbacks, 2001).

[The title of Black’s book is perhaps misleading since so much of it concerns the “extraordinary career” of Ronald H. Stark, an MKULTRA asset who played an important role in right-wing terrorism in Italy and, in particular, in the secret undermining of the Red Brigades. The last three chapters chronicle Stark’s life in Italy during the Years of Lead: his connections to the Mafia, Propaganda Due, the Italian secret service, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and certain American Embassy officials. Besides all this (no doubt, as part of his MKULTRA assignment), Stark was one of the world’s largest independent producers of LSD, a substance that did a marvelous job of distracting the youth movement and destroying the disciplined work and clear thinking of political groups the world over. No wonder that Dick Helms once called it “dynamite.” Stark is also featured in Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters and in Acid Dreams, by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain.]

James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, Second Edition (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012).

Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

Daniele Ganser, “Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Armies,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, p. 74.

Michele Metta, CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK (independently published, 2018).

Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017).

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Books, 1991).

Notes:

1 Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 70.

2 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 76.

3 Stuart Christie, Stefano delle Chiaie, (London: Anarchy Publications, 1984), p. 4, as quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 65.

4 After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK forced the resignation of Allen Dulles. His official letter of resignation was released by the White House on November 29, 1961. Exactly two years later, on November 29, 1963, President Johnson appointed Dulles to the Warren Commission, in which capacity Dulles served as its “single most active member” (as noted by James DiEugenio in Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, Second Edition (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), p. 394). According to author David Talbot, even after his resignation Dulles continued to meet with CIA officials and to direct secret operations. See David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), pp. 545–48.

5 Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 59.

6 Dino’s “claim to fame was the time he spent as CIA deputy chief of station in Santiago, Chile, in 1970, during the massive CIA destabilization of the Allende government.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, number 33, winter 1990, archive.org.

7 David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 468. For a detailed account of these events, see pp. 463–78.

8 Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 475.

9 Talbot, Brothers. The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2008), pp. 107-08.

10 Robert F. Kennedy Jr, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2018), pp. 135, 215, 368.

11 Although Danielle Ganser doesn’t explore the subject of Northwoods (or Lemnitzer) in his book, in various interviews he discusses its significance as a “military-industrial-complex” document. The first person to serve in the position as SACEUR was General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1951–1952). Eisenhower was followed by General Alfred M. Gruenther (1953–1956) and General Lauris Norstad (1956–1962). Kennedy replaced Norstad with Lemnitzer in 1963. After Lemnitzer’s departure in 1969, the other generals appointed to SACEUR during the Cold War (all Americans) were Andrew J. Goodpaster (1969–1974), Alexander M. Haig (1974–1979), and Bernard W. Rogers (1979–1987). These men stood at the helm of NATO during a period of the bloodiest terrorist violence in Western Europe. (In Italy alone there were 398 terrorist attacks in 1969, a figure that continued to rise, reaching its peak at 2,513 in 1979.) Rogers was followed by General John R. Galvin, who served from 1987–1992.

12 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 1.

13 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 88.

14 Amidst growing opposition to the Vietnam War, in 1965 President Johnson asked the CIA to launch a program to surveil and counter domestic dissent. Authorized by Johnson in 1967, the program, later known as Operation CHAOS, was greatly expanded by President Nixon. All this occurred despite the fact that the Agency is legally forbidden to engage in domestic spying. The program was developed by James Angleton under Richard Helms. It maintained at least 10,000 files on American citizens.

15 Martin A. Lee; Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), p. 232.

16 Jefferson Morley, “CIA Reveals Name of Former Spy—and He’s Still Alive.” Newsweek, May 15, 2018, newsweek.com.

17 “CIA agent John Stockwell said the CIA waged psychological warfare on Huey Newton from the time he left prison until his death.” John L. Potash, Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2015), p. 241.

18 “FBI dirty tricks, the Senate intelligence committee later discovered, provoked ‘shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest’ in the Black Panther movement. For two Panthers in Chicago, the FBI tactics brought sudden death. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark died in a hail of gunfire, and three others were wounded, when police burst into their apartment at 4:00 a.m. on December 3, 1969. It later emerged that the police had fired ninety-eight rounds, the Panthers—maybe—one. “In 1982, after persistent litigation, the survivors were awarded $1.85 million in damages against the police, in a case that revealed the killings had been the direct result of action by the FBI. The Bureau had provided the police with detailed information on Hampton’s movements, along with a floor plan of the apartment. Veteran agent Wesley Swearingen quoted a Chicago colleague as telling him: ‘We told the cops how bad these guys were, that the cops had better look out or their wives were going to be widows … We set up the police to go in there and kill the whole lot.’” Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Putnam, 1993), pp. 458–59.

19 One informant was paid $300 “for uniquely valuable services”: information that helped the FBI to locate Fred Hampton and arrange for him to be killed while he was asleep in bed. The snitch was Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, William O’Neal. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), pp. 620–21.

20 Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Nelson Blackstock, Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988), as quoted by David Black, ACID: A New Secret History of LSD (London: Vision Paperbacks, 2001), p. 107.

21 Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2002), p. 141.

22 Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 44, as quoted by Ganser in NATO’S Secret Armies, p. 191.

23 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 193, quoting from the British periodical, Searchlight, January 1991.

24 This is my speculation, not necessarily Ganser’s.

25 In his autobiography, Fidel Castro says: “It’s my opinion—I’ve said this before—that if Kennedy had survived, it’s possible that relations between Cuba and the United States would have improved.” In a footnote to this remark, Ignacio Ramonet adds: “In 2003 a conversation between President Kennedy and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, was made public; it showed that the president wanted to explore a rapprochement with Cuba, and had agreed to the possibility of a secret meeting with an emissary from Havana, on the suggestion of Fidel Castro.” Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, My Life. A Spoken Autobiography. Trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Scribner, 2009), pp. 592, 709.

26 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Warner Books, 1988), pp. 293–294.

27 Robert F. Kennedy Jr, p. 262.

28 See Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa; Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders; Greg Poulgrain, The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles; Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. These represent some of the most significant developments in JFK research and focus on Kennedy’s brilliant yet rarely discussed foreign policy innovations, many of which could not help but incur the wrath of the power elite, both in the U.S. and abroad.

29 Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 423.

30 Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 420.

31 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 98–99. In 1961, Richard Helms spread disinformation against Paese Sera, claiming the CIA had nothing to do with supporting the OAS generals and their attempt to assassinate de Gaulle. This was an outright lie.

32 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 138.

33 In a 5 December 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vinciguerra further elaborated: “The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix.”

34 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 7.

35 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 76.

36 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 78.

37 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 82.

38 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 8.

39 Willan, “Terrorists ‘Helped by CIA’ to Stop Rise of Left in Italy,” Guardian, March26, 2001, as cited by Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 6.

40 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 17.

41 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 144.

42 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 147.

43 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 215.

44 Ganser, “Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Armies,” Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, p. 74, fpri.org/orbis.

45 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 20.

46 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 25.

47 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 36.

48 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 33.

49 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 56–57.

50 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 230–35.

51 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 20–24.

52 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 235.

53 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 55.

54 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 74.

55 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 57.

56 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 59.

57 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 75.

58 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 79–80.

59 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 215.

60 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 241.

61 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 158. One wonders why the tale’s narrator is described as a “blond.” Was this supposed to be the portrait of an American and, thus, a reference to U.S. government influence?

62 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 80.

63 DiEugenio, p. 93.

64 Garrison, p. 137.

65 Garrison, pp. 101–03.

66 Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 470–71.

67 DiEugenio, pp. 385–87. Regarding Shaw’s connections to the economic elite: “The first speaker for the International Trade Mart opening in 1948 was brought down from New York, William McChesney Martin, who later became Federal Reserve Chairman. The companies that promoted the creation of these kinds of bodies were called The World Trade Corporation, headed by Winthrop Aldrich, chair of the Chase National Bank. Herbert Brownell was on the board. The year before it was created, Aldrich and Allen Dulles made speeches promoting the idea of world trade at a luncheon in New York. The other body that promoted these marts was the World Commerce Corporation (WCC), started in 1945 as the British American Canadian Corporation. The WCC board included former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, and former OSS Director William Donovan, and William Stephenson who ran British intelligence in the USA during World War II.” DiEugenio, June 25, 2019, private communication, citing Donald Gibson, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2000) for most of this information.

68 DiEugenio, p. 395.

69 Michele Metta, CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK (independently published, 2018), pp. 14–15.

70 Willan, Puppetmasters, pp. 57–59.

71 Metta, p. 16.

72 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 110.

73 Metta, p. 130.

74 Metta, pp. 91–92. “This evidence is very important because it confirms that this company’s purpose was not just to provide an exhibition hall for companies wanting to sell their products, but that there was also an intelligence aspect to it.” John Kowalski, “The Canadian Archives, Michele Metta, and the Latest on Permindex.” February 8, 2019, kennedysandking.com.

75 Metta, p.134.

76 DiEugenio, pp. 27–28.

77 Metta, pp. 132–34.

78 Metta, p.130.

79 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 115.

80 Willan, Puppetmasters, p. 204.

81 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, p. 116.

82 Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 120–22.

83 The “divine in man” was one of three main themes in Frink’s work.

84 “The eagle, which was reputed to be able to gaze unblinded on the sun, is the symbol of genius.” S. Foster Damon and Morris Eaves, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), p. 112.

July 15, 2019
garrison: Issue 001…. PRINT VERSION NOW AVAILABLE!

June 30, 2019
The Greenfield-Cohen-Rice Suck Up
For a long time, this site has maintained that the cover up about President Kennedy’s assassination is institutional and multi-leveled. The aim is to conceal both the facts of his murder and his achievements as a politician. Those twin goals permeate almost every aspect of American society across the board: academia, broadcast media, print media, publishing, even our judicial and political system. A good example of the last is illustrated in an article written for this site by the late attorney Roger Feinman. That article was about associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and it derived from Feinman’s personal experience with her. His article was quite acute at showing how these institutions crossed over and intersected and how ultimately the judiciary branch—as represented by Sotomayor—salvaged people as repulsive as author Gerald Posner and publisher Robert Loomis from exposure. (If you were not aware of this essay, please take the time to read it now.)

The message underlying Feinman’s memorable essay about Sotomayor was simple: to advance one’s career in the professional realm, one does not defy the conventional wisdom on the JFK case. Or, to put it more generally and prosaically: to get along, one goes along—and it doesn’t matter if one has to prevaricate, be a hypocrite, or dispense with one’s value system. People can learn to live with those things as long as their personal ambitions are fulfilled. Some examples in the JFK field would be the late Tom Pettit, Rachel Maddow, and Gus Russo. The denizens of the MSM have all learned that if one wants to feed off our society’s gravy train, one must submit to the absurd tenets of the Warren Commission. On the other hand, people like Mark Lane, Oliver Stone, and Feinman himself, all discovered that if one does not so genuflect, one’s career will suffer.

One of the subjects of this current essay has been dealt with on this site previously. Jeff Greenfield wrote a book in 2013 entitled If Kennedy Lived. That book was an example of what is called alternative history. As I noted previously, since it was a novel, it was in the looser category of that genre, as opposed to the non-fiction, much more historically solid category (e.g. Virtual JFK, by James Blight). For someone like me, what Blight did is much more interesting and rewarding. The Greenfield example is supposed to be more entertaining. Except, unlike say with Philip Roth and his excursion into the genre–The Plot Against America–Greenfield’s gifts as a novelist were leaden. Therefore, the entertainment value was, for me, nil.

The year before If Kennedy Lived was released, Greenfield published a work in the same genre of alternative history. That volume was entitled Then Everything Changed. In that volume, he took three different examples of alternative history. They dealt with John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Gerald Ford. In the first, President Kennedy was killed by suicide bomber Richard Pavlick in December of 1960. In the second, Bobby Kennedy exited the Ambassador stage a different way and was not shot in the kitchen pantry. (Although as Lisa Pease’s book, A Lie too Big to Fail notes, this would likely not have made any difference.) In the third, Jerry Ford manages to salvage his notorious gaffe in the 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter about Eastern Europe not being under the control of the communists. And this allows him to defeat Carter in the election.

As the reader can see, Greenfield likes churning out these alternative history products. The problems I have with Greenfield are twofold, and they both loom large in evaluating his work and his persona. First, in order to do any kind of alternative history that has real value, it helps if one is an historian. Greenfield is not. He is another in the long line of journalists who tries to masquerade as such. The second problem with Greenfield is that he is a dyed-in-the-wool premium member of the MSM. These two aspects of his character combine to make his work so compromised as to be pretty much worthless.

To show just how bad Greenfield is, one should just browse through his book on the Florida voter debacle of 2000. It is entitled Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow. In that book, he actually tries to say that the reason George W. Bush ended up in the White House was the Democrats gave out the wrong instructions on how to mark the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach. This is the same excuse that Karl Rove was droning on about to any media charlatan who would listen—of which Greenfield evidently did. A second excuse he allows for was the candidacy of Ralph Nader. In my opinion, it is pretty hard to make CNN reporter Jeff Toobin look good, but in this instance, Greenfield does. In his book on the subject, Too Close to Call, Toobin described the whole Roger Stone choreographed “Brooks Brothers riot” that stopped the recount since it would have given Gore the election. If not for that phony event, the butterfly ballot and Nader’s campaign would not have mattered. As Toobin also reveals, Stone later reported to Dick Cheney about his success. This was made even worse by the fact that Antonin Scalia overruled the Florida Supreme Court in permanently halting the recount of votes. As any lawyer can tell you, a court issued stay order should only be granted if there is irreparable harm involved. There was no irreparable harm in counting each and every vote. And if there was, the irreparable harm was to Al Gore. Plain and simple: Scalia knew Gore would win if the votes were recounted to measure the intent of the voter. He did not want to see that happen and that is why he issued his order.

There are at least three good books on the monumental heist in Florida that address this issue head on: Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, John Nichols’, Jews for Buchanan, and Lance DeHaven Smith’s The Battle for Florida. All three of those works show that what took place in Florida was not due to the networks naming the wrong winner too early, or to butterfly ballots, or because of Ralph Nader. What happened in Florida was a preplanned, methodical deprivation of voter rights in which people of color were specifically targeted since the GOP knew that they would much more likely vote for Gore than Bush. The network calls of the state were off for the simple reason that they did not have the slightest inkling that this scheme was being enacted. The fact that no one was ever brought to justice in either state or federal court shows just how hapless and lost the system has become. But by writing such a breezy, cavalier book, Greenfield also ignored the deeper background factors that plagued the political system before their exposure in Florida—and have only gotten worse since the Florida heist. That is the planned and carefully executed methods by which the Republican Party has done all they could to dilute the votes of any demographic group that they feel will vote largely Democratic. This has come to be called voter suppression. And the Republicans have raised it to an art form.

In an interview Greenfield did for Chicago Gate in 2016, he even said there was nothing wrong with the 2004 election either. He added that only “diehards” would hold out about that one. After all, Bush won by 3 million votes. He does not note that Al Gore won by a half million votes, but lost the Electoral College due to Florida. Perhaps he doesn’t because then we would have to add this fact: if John Kerry had won Ohio, he would have emerged victorious in the Electoral College. And according to the son of the man Greenfield used to work for, what happened in Florida did happen in Ohio. And that is what gave us two terms of one of the very worst presidents in history. Greenfield began his political career as a speech writer for Senator Robert Kennedy. It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who wrote what is probably the best expose on how the Republicans managed to rig the vote in Ohio in 2004. Kennedy also wrote that there was a large media blackout on how this was achieved.

Why is this important to this discussion? For the simple reason that elections have consequences. And no alternative history exercise is necessary to demonstrate that fact. It was the heist in Florida that allowed George W. Bush to enact one of the worst crimes ever committed by an American president. One which everyone can be pretty certain Al Gore would not have committed. That is, of course, the disastrous American/British invasion of Iraq. There was never any reason for such utter folly. It was quite simply a war of choice. W and his neocon fruitcakes from the Project for the New American Century thought they could somehow turn the Middle East into a laboratory for democracy. To say the least, it did not work out that way. It was a disaster for the people of Iraq, it bankrupted the American treasury, and it caused tens of thousands of American casualties—God knows how many Iraqis perished. All based on nothing but a pack of lies. Not to mention that it also caused a whole new mutation of Islamic fundamentalism now represented by the likes of ISIS. So when the late Antonin Scalia requested that Americans should get over that horrendous Supreme Court decision that he initiated, someone should have flown him to Iraq, helicoptered him to an ISIS stronghold and said, “Please go negotiate with ISIS and then we can get over your decision.” These were the results of Greenfield’s—and the MSM’s—lighthearted accommodation with the Florida crime. To put it bluntly, they were part of the cover up. In reality, people should have gone to jail for what happened there.

II

Make no mistake about Greenfield. He made a U-turn shortly after his boss Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. In 1972, he and Jack Newfield wrote a book that I read at the time. I was much impressed by it. It was called A Populist Manifesto. It is a book that is worth reading even today. It would serve as a good guidebook for someone like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It clearly reflected the influence of Robert Kennedy and his unforgettable 1968 campaign; one which, in historical terms, can only be matched by those of Jessie Jackson and Bernie Sanders for pure populist impact. But clearly, after a few years in the wilderness, working for the likes of political consultant David Garth, Greenfield learned his lesson. The politics of Bobby Kennedy would not work in the age of Reagan. This fact is exemplified by Greenfield’s comments on his late boss Robert Kennedy and his brother, John F. Kennedy. A most recent example would be his contribution to last year’s magazine, What if, a collection of alternative history topics.

Before we address Greenfield’s specific comments, I should note something about non-historians masquerading as historians. The debilitating trend of journalists impersonating historians probably began in its modern form with David Halberstam and his book The Best and the Brightest. That volume was so pernicious because it ended up being both a critical and a popular success. It sold almost 2 million copies, and was nearly universally praised. Therefore, its portrait of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the Vietnam conflict held sway for approximately 25 years. That is, until the coming of Oliver Stone’s film JFK and the book by John Newman entitled JFK and Vietnam. It was only at that time and with the later declassification of documents that one could finally see how utterly wrong Halberstam was.

But as with Halberstam, so with Greenfield. Somehow, he is an historian and he can pontificate about historical matters, especially those dealing with the Kennedys. Consequently, with a pseudo-historian like Greenfield, Joseph Kennedy has an “at best” questionable relationship with the Mafia. And somehow, the best biography of Bobby Kennedy was penned by Evan Thomas. (Daily Beast, April 13, 2017 “What we lost when Bobby Kennedy Died”). Concerning Evan Thomas, how any biographer who uses the late literary fraudster David Heymann as a source—which Thomas did—can be praised in any way, that claim alone makes Greenfield’s judgment laughable. But beyond that, I can name five books on RFK that are all better than Thomas’, and I could explain at length why they are better. As per Joseph Kennedy and his mythological relationship with organized crime, I was at pains to show why this concept is so clearly false in my review of Mark Shaw’s last book, Denial of Justice. In that review, I refer to two scholarly books—not alternative history novels—to show why this charge is bunk. But again, this shows that Greenfield would rather rely on the likes of Frank Ragano and Chuck Giancana—both proven liars—rather than read archived documents or scholarly works. This is why he is not an historian. He is a journalist and not a very good one.

Another reason why Greenfield is not an historian is his failure to place events in any kind of historical context. In the Daily Beast article noted above—and elsewhere—Greenfield says that RFK hated welfare programs, attacked federal aid to education, and wanted more community control over government funds. Now, if one just states those stances outright, then it sounds like politicians like the late Jack Kemp could claim Bobby Kennedy as one of their own. (Which is what some GOP hack writers do.) But as I reviewed at length in my four-part series on the Kennedys and civil rights, this is simply not the case. For example, concerning community control, RFK differed from President Johnson on the issue of community action grants—part of the War on Poverty—which originated with RFK’s assistant on juvenile delinquency David Hackett. As Hackett originally designed that program for John Kennedy’s version of the War on Poverty, he wanted the citizens in the impacted areas to vote on where the federal funds would end up in their communities. Whereas in Johnson’s version, he wanted the money to go to established bureaucracies like school districts and the mayor’s office. But in either case, the funds would come from Washington and so would the guidelines.

This is part of a larger issue that Greenfield has helped distort. That larger issue was using Bobby Kennedy’s name to help the likes of Bill Clinton, Dick Morris, and Al From phase out welfare. When Clinton decided to greatly cut back on these programs, he used Bobby Kennedy’s name to do so. Peter Edelman, who was working in the Clinton administration at the time, resigned in protest. Edelman worked with Bobby Kennedy when he was a senator from New York. It was Edelman who helped persuade RFK to fly to Delano, California and listen to the complaints of Cesar Chavez and the migrant workers there. Unlike Greenfield, Edelman never became a part of the MSM. When Clinton made his decision, Edelman got so angry with the invocation of RFK’s name that he wrote a whole book—Searching for America’s Heart—about why this was wrong. (Please note, as far as I can find, Greenfield did no such thing.) The bill that Clinton signed in the election year of 1996 turned over welfare to states in the form of block grants. From his experience as Attorney General, RFK knew what would happen to poor African Americans in the South under those conditions, which is one reason Edelman was so incensed about the issue. What Bobby Kennedy was proposing was a large reform of the welfare system, which included things like massive job creation, day care centers, plus improvements in education. His program would actually have initially cost more than what had existed. As Edelman wrote, the act Clinton signed did not even resemble what Bobby Kennedy had proposed before his death. Under Clinton’s auspices, what happened is that states have now used the 1996 bill in the worst way possible since the states were allowed to define the poverty line. Since the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the poverty stricken had no one representing them. Therefore, it was an easy thing to do.

But distorting his former boss is only half the story. And really, it’s the smaller half. In the What if magazine noted above, at greater length, Greenfield does the same with President Kennedy. In that interview, Greenfield does say that Vietnam would likely not have happened if Kennedy had lived. Yet, he does not relate Kennedy’s policies there to JFK’s other foreign policy forays (e.g. Congo and Indonesia). Or how what happened in Vietnam under Johnson is then roughly paralleled in those two places. Kennedy’s policies about supporting a nationalist leader (e.g. Cyrille Adoula in Congo and Sukarno in Indonesia) were quickly altered beyond recognition. In Indonesia and Congo, what LBJ and the CIA designed and executed were fascist takeovers with horrible results for the populaces. Therefore, what Kennedy wished to avoid, a replacement of colonialism with imperialism, occurred and stayed in place for decades on end. Again, if Greenfield is not aware of this, he is not an historian.

Like other MSM talking heads (e .g. Larry Sabato), Greenfield says that John Kennedy came late to civil rights. He further pontificates that JFK was not really passionate about the issue. With an apparent straight face, he then says that Lyndon Johnson was. (When one notes Johnson’s record and statements in congress from 1937 until 1957, this is an almost ludicrous statement.) As I noted in my four-part series on the Kennedys and civil rights, Greenfield is simply and utterly wrong about this issue. Senator John Kennedy endorsed the epochal Brown vs. Board decision in public in 1956. He then did it again in 1957. The first instance was in New York City, the second was in, of all places, Jackson, Mississippi.

In other words, contra Greenfield, JFK was in favor of civil rights and school integration before he entered the White House. Either Greenfield was not aware of this or he chose to ignore it. If the former, then it proves he is no historian. If the latter, it shows him to be a compromised hack. When Kennedy became president, he went to work on the civil rights issue the evening of his inauguration. That day, he was disturbed that there were no African Americans in the Coast Guard procession. Therefore, that night he called up Secretary of Treasury Douglas Dillon and asked him why that was so. Within weeks, the Coast Guard policy was being changed to actively recruit young men of color. In other words, at the time he should have been celebrating the triumph of his career, he was on the phone beginning his campaign to overturn, more or less, a century of neglect on civil rights. If that is not being passionate about the issue, then what is? I would also ask: if Nixon had won the election, would he have done the same thing?

As a result of that phone call to Dillon, Kennedy decided to make active recruitment of minorities an overall policy of his government. He therefore signed an executive order to that effect. This was the beginning of affirmative action. He signed that order in March of 1961. I ask Mr. Greenfield: how does two months in office translate into being late on civil rights?

As I noted in the last part of my series, no previous president had anywhere near the positive impact on civil rights that Kennedy did. No one even came close. But again, like the VIP member of the MSM that he is, Greenfield gives credit, not to JFK for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but to Johnson. Again, this conclusion is false. As Clay Risen showed in his fine book on the subject, The Bill of the Century, it was Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Republican senator Thomas Kuchel who got the bill passed. And this was only after JFK organized the largest White House lobbying campaign in modern history to grease the skids. It’s a bit of a mindbender that Greenfield would actually take credit away from his former boss—and his boss’s brother—and hand it to LBJ, who, to put it mildly, Bobby did not like very much. But this is part and parcel of what can only be called a hatchet job on the subject by Greenfield. To illustrate what I mean by that, in the sources for If Kennedy Lived, he listed Nick Bryant’s atrocity of a book on the subject The Bystander. To me, this would be like doing a report on the American invasion of Iraq and using Judy Miller of the New York Times as a source.

Greenfield would not be Greenfield unless he mentioned another piece of mythology: President Kennedy’s alleged dalliance with Marilyn Monroe. As I have written for decades, this episode is dubious to the core. I tried to explain why in Part 2 of my essay The Posthumous Assassination of John F Kennedy. But the MSM never lets up on this phony issue, no matter how problematic the facts are (e.g. Robert Dallek and Mimi Alford). So, in 2005, when the late John Miner came out with what he and the MSM called tapes of Monroe talking to her psychiatrist, the media did not note that, in reality, these were not tapes. They were Mr. Miner’s notes on tapes he said he heard. Secondly, those notes are questionable since some of the things Miner presented have been discredited.

But further, how can one trust a former assistant Los Angeles DA who served as the executor to the estate of William Joseph Bryan? Which Miner was. Bryan is the man who many suspect programmed Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Bobby Kennedy. Need I add that Bryan’s offices were immediately sealed after his death and that John Miner was part of the prosecution team at Sirhan’s trial? (The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by William Turner and Jonn Christian, p. 229). Jeff Greenfield would not complicate his presentation with these troublesome details. They get in the way of the MSM narrative he wants to spin.

III

Before proceeding on to Jared Cohen and Condolezza Rice, it is important to review the origins of the neoconservative movement. If someone asked me to locate the provenance for it, I would suggest it began with President Gerald Ford’s appointment of what came to be called Team B. That watershed moment—when a White House approved special committee overrode the CIA’s official estimates of Soviet military power—occurred shortly after Ford performed one of the largest Cabinet shake-ups in modern presidential history. In early November of 1975, Ford did the following:
1. Removed Henry Kissinger as National Security Advisor and replaced him with Brent Scowcroft.
2. Fired James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense and replaced him with his Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld.
3. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld’s deputy, now was named Chief of Staff.
4. Ford terminated William Colby as CIA Director and appointed George H. W. Bush to that position.
5. Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was told he would not be on the presidential ticket in 1976.
Many commentators believe that these momentous maneuverings were caused by two factors. The first was pressure from the GOP far right in the form of early campaigning by California Governor Ronald Reagan for president. Secondly, Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to curb the power of Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Kissinger. Those two friends and colleagues did not believe in the Kissinger/Nixon attempts at détente and arms agreements with the Soviets. Ford’s changes successfully sidelined those policy forays and greatly reduced Kissinger’s influence. Ford later said he regretted giving in to the ultraconservatives and—forgetting what he did on the Warren Commission—this was one of the few cowardly things he had done in his life. (Smithsonian, October 25, 2012, “A Halloween Massacre at the White House”).

Rumsfeld and Cheney had now set the stage for the construction of Team B. That journey started with the formation of a private body of conservative to centrist Democratic Party politicians and foreign policy mavens who titled their organization the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM). One of the prime movers behind the CDM was Senator Henry Jackson. (Robert Gordon Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, p. 312) Jackson represented the Dean Acheson foreign policy school of the Democratic Party. It was this hardline attitude, especially in the Third World, which John F. Kennedy spent a large part of his senatorial career trying to ameliorate. Jackson also went up against Kennedy in the so-called “TFX Scandal”. As with the Sam Giancana mythological intervention in the 1960 West Virginia primary, this was another fabricated scandal. Since Jackson was from Washington, home of Boeing, and since Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had bypassed that company in favor of General Dynamics to build the F-111 fighter, Jackson urged hearings in the senate in order to placate his backers at Boeing. In fact, Jackson’s nickname was “The Senator from Boeing”. (Columbia Magazine, Vol. 11 No. 4, article by Richard S. Kirkendall)

Jackson was so hawkish on defense, so conservative in foreign policy that some of his assistants and admirers later turned into Ronald Reagan staffers e.g. Richard Perle, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Richard Pipes. It was Pipes who Rumsfeld appointed to head Team B in 1976. Two other members who CIA Director Bush allowed to contest Agency estimates of Soviet strength were Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz. (Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, p. 199) As journalist Fred Kaplan and analyst Anne Cahn have written, Team B’s report was so inflated it ended up being wrong on every important point. So wrong that Cahn actually labeled their estimates “a fantasy”. (Deadly Contradictions, by Stephen P. Reyna, p. 229)

Many commentators have deemed Paul Nitze perhaps the strongest behind the scenes promoter of the Cold War since 1950. In that year, he co-wrote NSC-68 and seven years later he had input into the Gaither Report. Those reports were ridiculously overwrought estimates of the Soviet threat and they did much to make the American expenditure on weaponry larger than the combined amount of the next twenty countries. For example, NSC-68 so alarmed Harry Truman that it caused a tripling of Pentagon expenditures. The Gaither Report actually stated that America was vulnerable to a Soviet first strike on her bomber force and that, by the early sixties, the Soviets would surge ahead in ICBMS. (Sanders, p. 128). It was issued in 1957, under Eisenhower. When the facts later emerged via U-2 flights, the situation was quite the contrary—the USA was wildly ahead in each leg of the atomic triad: submarines, ICBMs and strategic bombers. Concerning Wolfowitz, as almost everyone knows, he later was one of the strongest advocates—some would call him the architect—of the American invasion of Iraq. He seems to have learned from the master Nitze. Nitze taught him that one can achieve one’s goal by fixing intelligence estimates in advance, e.g. the mythological Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Mother Jones, “Secret Way to War”, May 16, 2005)

Wolfowitz learned, not just from Nitze’s prior examples, but also from his experience with Team B. As with the prior 1976 instance—which was allowed by President Ford and Director Bush—the exercise of overruling the CIA’s intelligence estimates was repeated as part of the buildup to the Iraq War. (Mother Jones, “The Lie Factory”, January/February 2004)

Like Richard Perle, Wolfowitz had worked for Henry Jackson. Wolfowitz later served in the Carter administration. In other words, he was a Democrat. In 1980, he retired from his position under Carter to work at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. As James Mann clearly denotes in his book, Rise of the Vulcans, this move was done in expectation of a Ronald Reagan victory. Therefore, around this time, Wolfowitz changed his party identification to Republican.

IV

Which brings us to Jared Cohen. Cohen is the author of a recently published book called Accidental Presidents. That title stems from the fact that the book is about vice-presidents who became presidents. The three chapters that concern this site are those on the transitions from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. What struck me most about what Cohen does in those chapters is that they amount to almost the inverse of what Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone did in their film and book, The Untold History of the United States. In that book and documentary series, the authors clearly stated that 1.) The choice by the party bosses of Harry Truman as vice president over Henry Wallace in1944 was a mistake that altered history and jump started the Cold War, and 2.) The assassination of President Kennedy greatly impacted the foreign policy of the USA, especially in regards to Indochina.

To understand where Cohen is coming from, one needs to know a bit about him. At the age of 24, in 2006, he had a degree in International Relations from Oxford. He went to work as an intern for Condi Rice, Secretary of State. He was then promoted to the Policy Planning department. He stayed on after the election of Barack Obama and worked with Hillary Clinton. He left the State Department in 2010 and became director of Jigsaw, a division of Google.

I began to get suspicious of what Cohen was up to when he quoted someone as saying about Harry Truman, “he had never made any racial remarks.” (Cohen, p. 280) The author did not qualify that statement in any way, which is stunning. As far back as 1991, historian William Leuchtenburg found correspondence by Truman in which he wrote, “I think one man is just as good as another, as long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” (American Heritage, November, 1991). Further, Truman applied for membership in the Ku Klux Klan but was rejected because he was not a strong enough anti-Catholic. (Author interview with Peter Kuznick, June 17, 2019). Later on, Truman did alter his views and tried to pass a civil rights bill as president. But to let a statement like that stand without qualification is simply not leveling with the reader.

Cohen deals with the controversy over the selection of Truman over Henry Wallace in several pages. (Cohen pp. 281-92). Oddly, he writes very little about who Wallace was and what his policies were. Cohen does not even deal with the significant accomplishments of Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture. By not doing this, he achieves two things. First, there is no comparison between the two men; therefore, there is no explication of what was lost when Wallace was forced off the ticket by the party bosses. Second, by keeping Wallace a cipher, the motivation of those bosses (e. g. Robert Hannigan and Edwin Pauley) to eliminate Wallace is not addressed. And that motivation was almost rabid. They actually stooped to telling FDR that Wallace would sink the ticket because his approval ratings were in the single digits, when in fact they were a healthy 65%. (Peter Kuznick interview, July 17, 2019)

There is not enough space in this critique to try and convey why this creates such a lacuna in Cohen’s book. But I will say that Wallace was such a visionary progressive that the reactionary right spent decades trying to label his 1948 presidential campaign as some kind of Moscow backed Fifth Column. It is hard to believe but Truman actually took direct part in this ugly smear. (The Concise Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, p. 139). That is how necessary William F. Buckley and his crowd felt it was to bury any scholarly look at Henry Wallace and his legacy. Wallace predicted in 1945 that the Russians would soon try and compete with America for hegemony in atomic weapons. (Ibid) He was calling for peaceful co-existence with Russia back in 1946, many years before John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Once Wallace made the following speech in Madison Square Garden, focusing on that issue, Truman fired him as Secretary of Commerce.

With the problem of comparison with Wallace tucked under the rug, Cohen can ignite the other half of his agenda: justifying what Truman did after Roosevelt’s death to help jump start the Cold War. Many recent scholars believe that this was one of Truman’s aims in dropping the atomic bombs over Japan. It is hard to comprehend, but Cohen does not source what is probably the best book ever written on this subject. That would be The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz. If an author does not use such a valuable resource then what is one to conclude? It would be only natural to think that Cohen is not going to inform the reader of any of the strong evidence that demonstrates Truman’s decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki was politically and not militarily guided. (Click here for a discussion)

After the terrible fire bombings of major cities by Curtis LeMay and the horrendous losses incurred in the battles of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the Japanese were being forced to negotiate. According to Peter Kuznick, who has done as much study on this as almost anyone except Alperovitz, if Truman had made it clear that Japan could keep the emperor and told them the Russians would join in an invasion from Asia, this would have very likely provoked a surrender—without the atomic bombs or an invasion. As many have pointed out, including Alperovitz, the Russian invasion of Manchuria started about ten hours before the second bomb was dropped. And the Russians simply overpowered the Japanese troops—it was a mismatch.

Although Cohen ignores Alperovitz, he uses David McCullough’s bestselling book on Truman. Because of this, he does something strange in his footnotes. (See page 461, note 115). Cohen uses an estimate of up to one million allied casualties in a Japanese islands invasion. McCullough did the same in his biography to defend Truman’s decision. Unlike McCullough, Cohen does not source this to General Thomas Handy. It was actually written by former president Herbert Hoover, who had little or no factual basis for his estimate. McCullough’s “error”—some suspect it was really not a mistake—was exposed by, among others, Professor Barton Bernstein. Although Cohen correctly sources the memo to Hoover, he does not tell the reader about McCullough’s faux pas. More importantly, he fails to note that Bernstein discovered the military actually ridiculed Hoover’s estimate. Bernstein wrote that the real Pentagon figures were at about 46,000 on the high side and 20,000 on the low side.

Recall, if LeMay was firebombing Japanese cities, what air force could the Japanese have had? Their navy had been pretty much rendered useless by the consecutive defeats at Coral Sea, Midway and, worst of all, Leyte Gulf. Further, the American invasion was not scheduled until November. Therefore, Truman had three months to negotiate before making a decision to either invade or drop the bombs. These factors have led some to speculate that Truman did what he did in order to, not just intimidate Stalin, but to also prevent the possibility of a shared occupation of Japan with the Russians. In fact, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s magisterial account of the last days of the war in the Pacific, Racing the Enemy, makes a powerful case that it was the Russian invasion that caused the Japanese surrender. (At this point it is almost superfluous to add that this book is not in Cohen’s bibliography.)

Just how much does Cohen want to defend Truman? At the Potsdam meeting in July of 1945, he describes how Stalin was not surprised when Truman hinted to him that America had developed a new and super destructive weapon. The author then adds that Stalin’s mild reaction can be explained because he likely knew about the Manhattan Project through the espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Cohen, p. 312) Even some conservative authors do not maintain this. The two main sources of information to the KGB on the Manhattan Project were Klaus Fuchs and the lesser known Theodore Hall. (E-mail communication with Kuznick, June 17, 2019; also Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Conspiracy). Cohen is trying to justify the executions of the Rosenbergs, which is inexplicable in light of the fact that Fuchs was imprisoned for only nine years and Hall not at all. In keeping with this, Cohen also writes that Alger Hiss was convicted for espionage. (p. 324). Again, this is wrong. Hiss was convicted for perjury. And there is no doubt today that his principal accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was either a pathological liar or was enlisted by Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover to create a case against Hiss. There are three good books of recent vintage on the Hiss case, those by Lewis Hartshorn, Martin Roberts and Joan Brady. The Hartshorn book, which uses recently available grand jury records, devastates Chambers’ credibility to the extent that it proves it was he who should have been indicted.

In his David-McCullough-type ode to Truman, Cohen quite naturally concludes that somehow there was continuity between Roosevelt and Truman. He thus ignores Frank Costigliola’s interesting book showing how Truman mangled Roosevelt’s plans for a continuing postwar alliance system. Costigliola begins his book with testimony from someone who was there and watched the transition, Anthony Eden. The British foreign secretary stated flatly that the turning point which began the disintegration of the alliance was Roosevelt’s death. Eden was quite disturbed at what happened between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin after FDR’s passing. He said, “had Roosevelt lived and retained his health he would never have permitted the present situation to develop.” To hammer his point home, Eden added, Roosevelt’s “death therefore was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.” (Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, pp. 1-2).

V

Following from his treatment of Truman and FDR, his chapter on the transition from John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson is predictable. Still, for anyone who understands the newest research in the field it is a bit shocking. He begins his chapter by saying that Kennedy would have had a tough race for reelection in 1964. (Cohen, p. 327) Which contravenes the Gallup poll published in the Dallas Morning News of November 17, 1963. That poll had Kennedy defeating Goldwater by a margin of 58-42%. The usual rule is that anything over a 10% margin is considered a landslide.

Cohen then tried to build on this foundation of quicksand. In New York Times/Robert Dallek style, he writes that Kennedy had no real achievements to campaign on either at home or abroad. The author somehow missed Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, his backing of Dag Hammarskjold in Congo, the Peace Corps, Alan Shephard and the Mercury project, the raising of the minimum wage, Kennedy standing up to the steel companies, the successful negotiations for the return of Gary Powers, the passage of the Manpower Training Act, the release of Allen Pope from Indonesia, Kennedy’s attempt to pass a Medicare program etc. (For a visual essay on JFK’s achievements, click here)

Ignoring all the above, Cohen gets even worse. He now tries to say—in an even worse way than Greenfield—that Kennedy only spoke about civil rights but it was unclear if he would do anything. (Cohen, pp. 334-35). Who does he use as his source for this? His old boss, Condolezza Rice. He uses her because she lived in Birmingham during the huge 1963 demonstration there and the September Klan bombing that killed four young girls. This shows just how completely Rice and Cohen wish to ignore the historical record. Either that or they committed a schoolboy howler. Because Kennedy had submitted his civil rights bill to congress in February of that year. (Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century, p. 36). In other words, it preceded the whole SCLC Birmingham demonstration. Another example: Kennedy’s great June 1963 speech on civil rights was made directly after his showdown with Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama. It was Kennedy’s integration of that university—backed by a combined force of 3,500 military troops and federal marshals that spelled the end of segregation in higher education in the south. So when Rice and Cohen say Kennedy only used words and did not act for civil rights, this is either pure ignorance or pure propaganda. Knowing Rice, it is probably the latter.

It gets worse when Cohen then writes, “The Kennedy courtship of black America was an extraordinary deception.” (p. 335). Can one imagine an author who uses Condolezza Rice as a source talking about using deceptions? I again refer the reader to my four-part essay on the subject, especially the chart at the end of Part 3.

That evidence proves that the Kennedys accomplished more in less than three years on this issue than Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower combined did in almost three decades. This is a fact that Cohen and Rice do not wish to face. Further, because JFK was making so much progress and achieving so many tangible benefits for the African American community, he was sacrificing his popularity in the south. Again, this is a proven fact. If one reads the figures in this link, the reader will see that Kennedy would have been clobbering Goldwater by an even wider margin if not for his devotion to the civil rights cause.

In his aversion to the historical record, Cohen, like Greenfield, tries to give credit to LBJ for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As I noted in my discussion of Greenfield, this is simply false. (If one needs more evidence, click here) Like Michael Eric Dyson, Cohen actually wants to also give LBJ credit for the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Housing Act. As I noted in Part 2 of my series, this is simply wrong. The 1965 act passed as a direct result of King’s Selma demonstration. I still think this is King’s greatest accomplishment. Johnson told King he could not get the bill through without something like that happening. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker 7/8/13) The 1968 Fair Housing Act was an expansion of the bill Kennedy signed in late 1962. Johnson needed another major event to get it passed, namely King’s assassination.

But as bad as Cohen is on the civil rights issue, he might be even worse on Vietnam. What can one say about an author who uses people like Rice and Henry Kissinger as interview subjects? Does this mean that Cohen will only use National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State who qualify as war criminals for his information? Another way to look at this is if someone had the record those two have in Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Iraq and the Middle East, then would you be willing to give Kennedy any credit for saving America from a disaster? I doubt it.

Cohen begins to address Vietnam in a mindboggling way. He quotes Johnson as saying that Kennedy never spoke a word of importance in the senate or accomplished anything. (Cohen, p. 343) Again, this is the problem I have with pseudo-historians. Anyone can read John Shaw’s volume entitled JFK in the Senate. That book is a fairly good chronicle of what Kennedy did once he arrived in Washington. It’s simply not true that Kennedy sat around and twiddled his thumbs. Shaw published his book in 2015, four years ago.

But perhaps there is a method to the abeyance, because Shaw concluded that Kennedy’s most significant achievement in the senate was his mapping out of an alternative foreign policy to the reigning Cold Warrior ideas of John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson. (Shaw, p. 110) Part of this included Kennedy’s doubts about the French military struggle in Vietnam. That broadened out to a whole new Gestalt view of American foreign policy in the Third World which culminated in his landmark 1957 Algeria Speech on the senate floor. Cohen mentions none of this: not one sentence about it! Perhaps because it completely contravenes Johnson’s statement, rendering it worthless?

From here, Cohen now begins to design an idea that dates from as far back as David Halberstam’s obsolete and pernicious book, The Best and the Brightest. He blames the escalation of the Vietnam War not on Johnson but on Kennedy’s advisors. (Cohen, p. 347) This completely ignores the declassified tapes made possible by the Assassination Records and Review Board. On those tapes, one can hear Robert McNamara proposing a plan to withdraw from Vietnam in October of 1963. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 100, 124). On another tape from February of 1964, we hear Johnson bawling out McNamara:

LBJ: I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.

RM: The problem is—

LBJ: Then comes the questions: how in the hell does McNamara think, when he’s losing a war, he can pull men out of there? (ibid, p. 310)

This crystallizes the difference between the two men. Johnson knew Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam. He disagreed with that policy. The reason being that he knew America was losing and he did not want to countenance defeat. He kept quiet about this disagreement since he was only the VP. But now he was president and the policy would be reversed, which it was. But he had to work on McNamara, which, as shown above, he did. But Johnson went even further. In another taped phone call, he now wanted McNamara to take back his announcements about withdrawing. (ibid). So clearly, Johnson knew what he was doing and was now trying to blur the line between Kennedy’s policy and his planned escalation. This was made clear by National Security Action Memorandum 288, which began to map out target areas for a military escalation of the war, a much greater commitment to the internal affairs of Vietnam, and closing down any option of withdrawal. (Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 128-29) In three months, Johnson was now doing something that Kennedy had not done in three years: he mounted an open-ended commitment to Vietnam containing a military option with direct American intervention. As we know, that was implemented due to the (ersatz) Tonkin Gulf incident.

What about Kennedy’s withdrawal program? Cohen goes to his old boss again. Rice says, well see Jared, those were all policy planning papers. And those change all the time, they really aren’t worth anything. (Cohen, p. 350) Recall, Cohen worked in the Policy Planning Department at State. Are we to believe that he and Rice do not know the difference between a policy planning paper and a National Security Action Memorandum? I have a hard time buying that one. Kennedy’s two major NSAM’s on Vietnam were numbers 111, and 263. In neither one did he allow direct American intervention or combat troops. In the latter he ordered the advisors in theater to begin coming home. Every major military advisor to JFK has said that he was not going to commit combat troops to Vietnam. This includes Defense Secretary McNamara, in his book In Retrospect, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, p. 245) and Joint Chiefs chairman Maxwell Taylor. (Virtual JFK, pp. 357, 365). But somehow, we are to believe Ms. WMD, “We don’t want the Smoking Gun to be a mushroom cloud”, Condolezza Rice?

In truth, as any honest observer understands, Kennedy’s withdrawal plan began in April of 1962. It was ignited by ambassador to India John K. Galbraith. Kennedy sent him to Vietnam since he knew he would be opposed to American involvement in the conflict. (Interview with Jamie Galbraith, June 3, 2019) Kennedy had Galbraith deliver his report to McNamara and this began the withdrawal plan. In 1997, the Review Board declassified those Vietnam withdrawal documents from McNamara’s Honolulu Conference in May of 1963. At that meeting, all elements of the American contingent in Vietnam understood Kennedy was withdrawing, (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126) In October, NSAM 263 enacted the withdrawal. These simple facts remain: there was not one combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was inaugurated, nor was there one there on the day he was killed. LBJ was inaugurated in January of 1965. By the end of the year, there were 185,000 combat troops in theater. As Fredrik Logevall proves in Choosing War, Johnson had planned his escalation around the election. Therefore, he continually lied about this during his campaign. (Logevall, pp. 171, 253). To top off Cohen’s clownish performance, he says that 250,000 South Vietnamese perished as a result. This is ridiculous. The best estimates available today place that figure about 4-5 times higher. And the total dead, on both sides, civilian and military is close to four million.

As noted above, the neocon revolution was begun by the man who did so much to cover up the death of President Kennedy. The contagion spread to the disciples of Henry Jackson and thus became a virus contaminating both political parties. Jared Cohen worked for both political versions of the virus: Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Thus, his book is not a work of history. It is an example of that strain. One of its uncontrollable symptoms is to wipe out the memory of what John Kennedy’s foreign policy really was.
June 20, 2019

Jim DiEugenio’s 25-part series on Destiny Betrayed, with Dave Emory

For three months, beginning in November of 2018, Jim DiEugenio did one-hour-long interviews on Dave Emory’s syndicated radio show For the Record. Emory has been broadcasting for 40 years. These 25 programs constitute the longest continuous interview series he has ever done. The subject was a sustained inquiry into DiEugenio’s second edition of Destiny Betrayed. Emory was very impressed by the author’s use of the declassified record excavated by the Assassination Records Review Board and how it altered the database of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy. This series is also the longest set of interviews DiEugenio has ever done about the book. Emory read the book and took extensive notes, which made for an intelligent and informed discussion of what the present record is on the Garrison inquiry.

December 3, 2018		For The Record #1031 Interview #1
December 10, 2018		For The Record #1032 Interview #2
December 14, 2018		For The Record #1033 Interview #3
December 17, 2018		For The Record #1034 Interview #4
December 21, 2018		For The Record #1035 Interview #5
December 24, 2018		For The Record #1036 Interview #6
December 28, 2018		For The Record #1037 Interview #7
December 28, 2018		For The Record #1038 Interview #8
January 7, 2019		For The Record #1040 Interview #9
January 11, 2019		For The Record #1041 Interview #10
January 14, 2019		For The Record #1042 Interview #11
January 18, 2019		For The Record #1043 Interview #12
January 21, 2019		For The Record #1044 Interview #13
January 25, 2019		For The Record #1045 Interview #14
January 28, 2019		For The Record #1046 Interview #15
February 1, 2019		For The Record #1047 Interview #16
February 4, 2019		For The Record #1048 Interview #17
February 8, 2019		For The Record #1049 Interview #18
February 11, 2019		For The Record #1050 Interview #19
February 15, 2019		For The Record #1051 Interview #20
February 18, 2019		For The Record #1052 Interview #21
March 1, 2019		For The Record #1053 Interview #22
February 25, 2019		For The Record #1054 Interview #23
March 1, 2019		For The Record #1055 Interview #24
March 4, 2019		For The Record #1056 Interview #25

May 4, 2019

The Battle of the Letters, 1963: John F. Kennedy, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and the U.S. Inspections of Dimona

May 3, 2019