Tag: FOREIGN POLICY

Mal Hyman, Burying the Lead: The Media and the JFK Assassination

I

Burying the Lead is an exceptionally readable history of the half-century of deception and propaganda surrounding the JFK assassination that has been promulgated by the mainstream media, who as Hyman aptly demonstrates, were instrumental in maintaining the “Big Lie”. Chronologically structured, Hyman centers his survey of the media on their coverage of events immediately after President Kennedy’s death and extends his analysis to the later congressional probes into the CIA’s dirty tricks bag, the Reagan and Bush administrations’ handling of the declassification of sensitive documents, and the eventual breakthrough event that was Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which led to a renewed public interest in the psychic trauma of the assassination and, eventually, the further release of thousands of sealed documents. The book succeeds in doing what so many like it have failed to do: 1) It circumscribes the players likely involved in the crime of the century; 2) Provides a cogent and compelling motive that even die-hard true believers in the official version of the JFK narrative will be hard pressed to refute; and 3) Manages to keep the reader not just glued to the page, but emotionally invested in a case whose repercussions directly affect us today.

II

Mal Hyman—former public school teacher, U.N. liaison and U.S. Congressional candidate, and current college professor—draws on a lifetime of reading and primary source research to bring readers one of the most robust and compelling sagas of the United States at mid-century. He is particularly interested in the inclusion of foreign views on both U.S. foreign policy and the conclusions of the Warren Commission. The first chapter, “Crisis Coverage,” is written in a racing, almost stream of consciousness fashion, with Hyman describing AP wires which at first were sending dramatically conflicting reports of the mayhem unfolding in Dallas following Kennedy’s assassination. From the four different rifles cited as the murder weapon—an Argentine Mauser, a .30-30, a British Enfield with a high power scope, and finally the infamous Mannlicher-Carcano; to wildly divergent motives cited (Cold War Soviets, a pathological loner, the Mob sick of harassment, a Castro revenge plot)—Hyman shows that left to their own devices, there were some serious journalists questioning the curious events and findings that afternoon in Dallas. Many accurately cited the dozens of witnesses who heard shots from the grassy knoll or the triple overpass. Some reporters tried to get a closer look at the bullet hole in the limousine’s windshield before being turned away by the Secret Service. But within hours of the assassination and the subsequent arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, the propaganda and disinformation apparatus spooled up to high gear and successfully silenced any and all opposing narratives of those six fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza.

Consider the following, which Hyman expounds on throughout the opening chapters: FBI Director Hoover immediately phoned a recently sworn in Lyndon Johnson to tell him “we have our man.” This is fascinating given the actual reports flooding FBI headquarters which directly contradicted this. No one, to my knowledge, can also explain unless the obvious setup was already firmly in place, just how or why Lee Harvey Oswald was picked up at the Texas Theater. No reliable witness saw him in the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building. The excuse that he was the only employee not at his post has also been refuted. The official tip-off for the APB has never been identified. People like Aquila Clemons, who witnessed the later Tippit shooting in nearby Oak Cliff, saw two people shoot the officer, neither of which resembled Oswald; automatic shell casings were first reported at the site of the Tippit shooting, yet Oswald had a .38 revolver, which does not eject shells. Law enforcement paraffin tests concluded Lee had not fired a rifle that day, regardless of his whereabouts. Why did seven police cars rush to the Texas Theater during a presidential assassination to investigate a man who didn’t pay for a movie ticket? None of it makes sense. And yet, despite all of these clearly established facts, which were known that day or shortly thereafter, the mainstream media conveyed almost none of them.

What we got, instead, was a ready-made, Life magazine profile of a lone Marxist weirdo who, in a final disgruntled act of defiance, shot JFK—perhaps the most progressive and pro-détente president in American history—because he … um … well, he was a nut! As Michael Paine, Oswald’s Dallas acquaintance who was part of a State Department/CIA related family, told the Washington Post (a CIA-infiltrated newspaper) in the following few days:

After the assassination there were reports that the killer took his time and aimed his rifle deliberately. That would be characteristic of Lee Oswald … He had little respect for people … He saw them as pawns. (Hyman, Burying the Lead p. 39)

The irony of that statement really can’t be topped considering it was Michael’s FBI friendly wife Ruth Paine and himself who moved the intelligence community pawn Lee Oswald and his wife Marina into the Fort Worth area and helped him find the job in the TSBD. And the list goes on, but this minor vignette showcases what Hyman so well outlines in dramatic fashion: a massive cover-up whose perpetrators reach deep into the corporate, military, intelligence and media organizations of the United States. As he notes:

The CIA has at times owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals, and other communications entities, sometimes in the country, but mostly overseas … At least 22 American news organizations had employed, though sometimes only on a casual basis, American journalists who were also working for the CIA. The organizations included ABC, CBS, Time, Life Newsweek, the New York Times, Associated Press and United Press International, the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, the Hearst newspaper chain, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Forbes … College Press Service, Business International, the McLendon Broadcasting Organization, and the Copley News Services, among others. (Hyman, p.56)

All of this was part of CIA Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner’s Operation Mockingbird, colloquially referred to in the agency as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer”. With this apparatus, he could make the press dance to whatever tunes best fit the intelligence community’s agenda. It’s interesting to note that propaganda was officially outlawed by Congress in the United States under the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948.

Understanding that Cold War tensions might give rise to the continuing expansion of WWII-style propaganda, the Smith-Mundt Act, as it became known, enjoined the State Department to

… tell the truth; explain the motives of the United States; bolster morale and extend hope; give a true and convincing picture of American life, methods, and ideals; combat misrepresentation and distortion; and aggressively interpret and support American foreign policy. (Sarah Nilsen: Projecting America, 1958. p. 4)

And while this thoughtful and prescient legislation had good intentions, little did those signing it understand the monster that was forming right down the block out of the remains of the OSS.

III

Hyman spends a considerable amount of time balancing a fascinating and nuanced history of the formation of the CIA with the media’s contemporaneous reporting on both the agency’s dirty deeds and the critics of the Warren Commission. He also includes some previously—at least to my knowledge—unexplored clippings from international newspapers around the time of the assassination, including some prescient Indian and French takes on things like the ease with which Jack Ruby shot Oswald, the conspicuous lack of Secret Service protection in Dallas that day, and the almost cartoonish serendipity with which CE399 -the pristine magic bullet—was found in Parkland Hospital after the fact. Concurrent with his coverage of this is his survey of the history of the media’s infiltration by, and increasingly close ties with, the CIA. With only a few dissenting voices during the height of the Cold War, Hyman does an excellent job showing readers just how rare it was for anyone in a position of influence in the media to challenge the dominant narratives of the age. John Swinton, Chief of Staff for the New York Times, in a bold gesture at the 1953 New York Press Club gala, told the audience:

There is no such thing, at this date in history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print … any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. (Hyman, pp. 54-55)

The author also cites Walter Karp of Harper’s, who lamented, “It is a bitter irony of source journalism that the most esteemed reporters are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.” (Hyman, p.46)

And yet the vast majority of the MSM, both then and now, did precisely that. This reinforced the myths promulgated by the power elite and advanced the belief that if any major abuses of power from the top were actually as grotesque and far-reaching as what the evidence surrounding the assassination of JFK suggests, Americans would have turned on the evening news or opened the morning newspaper over breakfast to discover the truth of the matter. Let’s not forget that it was around this time that the CIA, in an internal memo, advised its embedded sources in the press to promulgate the buzzword “conspiracy theory” to discredit anyone challenging the Warren Report. As this declassified 1967 cable explains:

Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit circulation of such claims in other countries.

In other words, legitimate investigations—which by definition seek to expose conspiracies of one sort or another—are to be attacked.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by an extensive conspiratorial network involving overseas agents; Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot by conspirators in an open car in broad daylight, which precipitated World War I; secret backroom deals between the OSS, the Vatican, U.S. politicians and other opportunists secured the release and expatriation of thousands of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to South America and the U.S. at the end of World War II. The 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala was a CIA-planned conspiracy involving hundreds of people sworn to secrecy. An international conspiratorial cabal involving officials from U.S., Belgium, and Katangese rebels planned the capture and murder of Patrice Lumumba seven years later. All of these are demonstrably provable conspiracies. But in the face of all that, the evidence that might erode the great shining lie surrounding the assassination of our nation’s progressive leadership in the 1960s, this evidence is shunted off as “conspiracy theories.” And, of course, no one can prove theories, which in actual scientific discourse are not qualitatively less significant than say “laws,” but actually denote a separate but equally sound paradigm based on complex natural or physical interactions rather than the direct relations of say two objects in a gravitational field. Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection is a theory. Newtonian gravity is a law. Einstein’s notion of General Relativity is a theory, but is understood as true. As I’ve always said, I am a proud conspiracy theorist, as should any historian be. It’s our job to investigate the relationships of human beings, some of which have ulterior motives. The above-cited memo is itself proof that conspiracies are real; a secret team of intelligence officers decided to discredit critics of a major American mystery. We were not privy to this meeting and it was intended to obfuscate the truth. A textbook conspiracy if ever there was. But only if you believe in that sort of thing.

Hyman also does a fine job detailing the various congressional committees that during the mid to late seventies first opened Pandora’s box and discovered that the CIA’s surveillance of American citizens’ mail was just the tip of the iceberg. From assassination units, both domestic and foreign, to witch doctors like Sidney Gottlieb—who from a CIA-sponsored laboratory had cooked up his exotic poisons and killing devices—to the CIA’s bizarre but very real trauma-based mind control experiments on unwitting American subjects, it wasn’t looking good for the intelligence community. And yet, as Hyman notes, the fallout was essentially inconsequential. What could and should have been a legal mandate for the Central Intelligence Agency to come forward with its tax-payer-funded ledger of dirty deeds turned into the smug reply of people like Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, who famously told committee members, “It is inconceivable that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”

IV

Perhaps the most significant achievement of this book, besides its comprehensiveness and exquisite delivery, is Hyman’s treatment of JFK’s foreign policy. Only a handful of authors, I feel, have sufficiently addressed just how much John Kennedy diverged, both practically and philosophically, from his Eastern Establishment colleagues and advisers in the White House and Pentagon. Hyman takes readers through each of the struggles of the Third World that faced a young JFK during his brief tenure in office, from the inherited Congo Crisis, to Sukarno’s bid to nationalize Indonesia’s natural resources, to the infamous thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

There is now enough evidence, both from declassified documents and in the form of fine secondary sources, to adamantly make the case that JFK’s primary antagonism with the power elite– and what ultimately led them to assassinate him—stemmed from his radically progressive views of the developing world. While he and his brother Robert strove to effect tangible street-level change on America’s domestic race issue—and did, to a large extent through things like affirmative action, legal investigations of racist hiring practices and meetings with prominent civil rights leaders—they attempted to apply their visions of a better human future most boldly in the Third World. Consider, as Hyman does, Kennedy’s absolutely prescient analysis of the Middle East in 1951:

The fires of nationalism are ablaze … A Middle East Command operating without the cooperation and support of the Middle Eastern countries … would intensify every anti-western force now active in the area, [and] from a military standpoint would be doomed to failure. The very sands of the desert rise to oppose the imposition of outside control on the destinies of these proud people … Our intervention on behalf of England’s oil interests in Iran directed more at the preservations of interests outside of Iran than at Iran’s own development … Our failure to deal effectively after three years with the terrible tragedy of more than 700,000 Arab refugees [Palestinians], these are things that have failed to sit well with Arab desires, and make empty the promises of the Voice of America.

Already, just years after its creation, the CIA had overthrown the secular democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq in their first ever orchestrated coup. This ushered in nearly three decades of violent oppression and torture under Shah Reza Pahlavi, who happened to be future CIA Director Richard Helms’ pal from Swiss boarding school. The proximate motive given was that Iran was exhibiting strange communist tendencies in its decision to keep the profits of its own oil sales from Britain, a nation that had extorted billions from what it essentially viewed as a backwater desert satrapy.

Thus was born a classic CIA playbook: using the mantra of an international communist conspiracy to disguise its ulterior motives of protecting corporate interests. Similarly, Jacobo Árbenz, the 25th president of Guatemala, exhibited these same nationalist economic tendencies in 1954. When he requested a fair return on land owned by the United Fruit Company—which had been ripping off Guatemala to the tune of millions in back taxes for years—the CIA-backed paramilitary army of Carlos Castillo-Armas marched into Guatemala City and staged a coup. With CIA assets going so far as to plant Marxist literature in Árbenz’ private study, later dumping a large crate of Soviet weapons near a beach, just in time for CIA-approved reporters to discover them. President Eisenhower presided over this operation, codenamed PBSUCCESS, which he viewed as a spectacular covert feat. Castillo-Armas, a brutal ex-chief of police who had been living in exile in Honduras, was featured on the cover of Time magazine a year later, with a glowing review of his visit to the United States entitled, “Guest from Guatemala.” (Time, Nov. 7, 1955)

Kennedy had already recognized the folly of this behavior. Consider his 1957 speech on Algeria to the U.S. Senate:

The most powerful force in the world today … is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent … We did not learn in Indochina … Did that tragic episode not teach us that whether France likes it or not, or has our support or not, their overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence … The time has come to face the harsh realities of the situation and to fulfill its responsibilities as leader of the free world. (Hyman, p.457)

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, along with brother and Director of CIA Allen Dulles, both suggested to Eisenhower that dropping nuclear bombs on the Vietnamese threatening to overtake the French forces trapped at Dien Bien Phu could win the war. To say that Kennedy’s and the viewpoints of figures like Allen Dulles slightly differed, as is so often regurgitated in the mainstream histories of his presidency, is not just inaccurate but dishonest. They were diametrically opposed. And this played out in dramatic fashion when the two were forced to work together after the 1960 election. Similarly, the author notes this sentiment of solidarity with the Third World was a theme running deeply throughout Kennedy’s tenure as both a senator and as president, not a grandstanding ploy or an appeal to the far-left voter base. As he told the Senate two years later, in 1959, regarding Central African turmoil, “Call it nationalism. Call it anti-colonialism … Africa is going through a revolution … The word is out—and spreading like wild fire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.”

These words eerily parallel the 1960 victory speech given by president elect Patrice Lumumba to throngs of ecstatic Congolese:

We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us. That was our lot for the eighty years of colonial rule and our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten. We have experienced forced labor in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones. (“Speech at the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence, June 30, 1960”)

President Eisenhower refused to meet with Lumumba when he flew to Washington, and later signed off on his assassination.

Too often critics of non-mainstream JFK assassination theories smugly resort to arguing lack of motive for a non-Oswald shooter, or intelligence community backing. Why, we’ve heard again and again, would other rich white Eastern Establishment power elites assassinate one of their own? Even I, who have an extensive background in 20^th-Century foreign policy, was reminded of this in my graduate training, with a few memorable professors conceding that basically Jack Kennedy was a cooler, younger version of say, Eisenhower, or a more sophisticated version of Johnson with a better tailored suit. But he was not fundamentally any less hawkish than either of his presidential bookends. Yes, Oliver Stone suggested Kennedy’s likely withdrawal of advisers from Vietnam as the contributing cause of the military-industrial complex’s decision to remove him. But, they would remind me, we all know that’s just a theory. Had they read NSAM 263? Did they not also realize there were no combat troops in Vietnam in November 1963 when Kennedy was killed? Kennedy presided over Operation Mongoose and the “failed” exile-invasion of Cuba, they often repeated, so he was no stranger to using gunboat diplomacy.

Let’s examine these claims, as Hyman does to a great extent in his final and excellent last chapters. As authors like James DiEugenio, Richard Mahoney, Col. Fletcher Prouty and others have shown, President Kennedy had an immediate, actionable withdrawal and de-escalation order effective upon his return from Dallas that month. This was not a verbal agreement or handshake over drinks that has been anecdotally passed through the research community. It’s all clearly spelled out in NSAM 263, a National Security Action Memorandum that concretely establishes JFK’s divergence from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency’s cold warrior, Manichean view of the free and communist worlds.

As we know through John Kenneth Galbraith’s biographer Richard Parker, Kennedy had previously tried for an appeal to Hanoi for a neutralist diplomatic solution to the Vietnam problem with Nehru of India playing the broker. As Gareth Porter showed in his book The Perils of Dominance, this effort was sabotaged by the State Department’s Averill Harriman. Similarly, we know, from a variety of his foreign policy dealings in the Third World, that President Kennedy was entirely more nuanced in his understanding of nationalism than most people in the room during briefings. Kennedy correctly understood that the quick and sloppy conflation of liberation, decolonization, or resource-redistribution movements in places like the Congo, Indonesia and ultimately, Vietnam, with Soviet Communism, was a dangerous game to play. Because it dismissed the forces of nationalism.

The fallout from the intelligence and military communities’ efforts to prop up pro-U.S. dictators has been much explored by authors like William Blum, (Killing Hope), David Schmitz (Thank God They’re On Our Side), and Max Friedman (Rethinking Anti-Americanism), and is beyond the scope of this review to accurately survey. Suffice it to say, Hyman does an excellent job of unpacking these critical departures between an increasingly isolated John and Robert Kennedy during times like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Or to use another example, in a June 20^th, 1961 meeting, General Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles “proposed an official plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.” (Hyman, p. 424.) Like he did before and would do again, Kennedy, according to aides present, walked out in disgust. Around this same time, people like General Lucius Clay in West Berlin were mobilizing their tanks to make a move against the Soviets. Strategic Air Command, without the president’s authority, began deploying nuclear-equipped long-range bombers, even going so far as to cross established international airspace parallels which essentially signaled to the Soviets that this was not a routine drill. It’s amazing, at least to me, that not only did the nuclear-armed superpowers not destroy humanity during the Missile Crisis, but that the world’s most important two-week vigil landed in the lap of figures like John and Robert Kennedy. Replay the events with Eisenhower/Nixon in power. It doesn’t end well. We now know that had a full blown invasion with U.S. air support taken place it would have faced over a quarter of a million Cuban and Soviet ground troops who had dozens of tactical nuclear missiles poised to repel an amphibious invasion.

It also cannot be stressed enough that the Bay of Pigs invasion was both thrown in his lap due to its delayed planning during the Eisenhower/Nixon administration, and designed to fail without full-blown U.S. naval and carrier-based air support—and likely the landing of 100,000 ground troops. The myth that Kennedy got “cold feet,” as my grandpa Marcel used to tell me back in Florida, was a pure creation of … wait for it … the CIA! Allen Dulles and E. Howard Hunt paid a CIA-cleared journalist to ghostwrite their completely honest, objective, 100-percent transparent evaluation of President Kennedy’s failure of nerve in Fortune magazine, a journal run by … wait for it … a CIA asset on payroll! We know this through documents revealed in Allen Dulles’ personal papers at the Princeton University collection. And Kennedy knew this intuitively. As Hyman cites him telling his friend, Undersecretary of the Navy Paul Fay:

Now in retrospect, I know damn well they didn’t have any intention of giving me the straight world on this … Looking back at the whole Cuban mess, one of the things that appalled me was the lack of broad judgment by the heads of the military services. They wanted to fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would probably give the OK to pour in whatever else was needed. (Hyman, p. 424)

We are arguably all still here because of JFK’s acumen during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet this is almost never explored by the media, who portray the harrowing events and their unspectacular, negotiated resolution as somehow inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Hyman spends considerable time hammering this point home in his final chapters. Which, I should add, follow a lengthy and extremely interesting unpacking of Lyndon Johnson’s behavior after the events of Dealey Plaza, which should appeal to those on the fence regarding his culpability and seeming complicity at times with the conspirators.

Philosophically, as Hyman conclusively shows readers, John F. Kennedy represented a psychic break from the entrenched corporate/military/industrial power elites, whose post-traumatic irrationality, myopic reductionism and retrograde colonial opportunism dominated American politics at mid-century. Shaken to the core by the implications of Soviet dominance over vast reaches of Europe and Asia in the wake of the Second World War, and seeking a much-needed bogey man to fulfill their Hegelian negative-identity criteria, by which national worth can only be defined in opposition to a foreign adversary or internal enemy, U.S. policy makers at the height of the Cold War largely viewed the Kennedys as traitors. Traitors to the great mantle of tremendous military might fortuitously bequeathed to an otherwise backwater new nation called the United States in the wake of the Second World War’s global carnage. Traitors to the corporate interests who cared little what a million Congolese suffered under CIA-backed dictators like Mobutu, so long as their diamond and cobalt mines in Katanga poured forth abundance. Traitors to the then-as-now accepted postwar view that the United States is an exceptional nation with an exceptional, quasi-religious historical mission which despite hundreds of overthrows, embargoes, assassinations, lies, and disinformation campaigns by its politicians and intelligence officers, is fundamentally well-meaning and just.

Anyone interested in tracing the origins of this dark legacy will be doing themselves a favor by picking up Burying the Lead. It is one of those rare things: a balanced, engaging, fascinating look at the slimy underbelly of the American power structure. And the hired guns of the media who cover up for them.

Addendum, May 30, 2019

The John Swinton quote used in the above review is misattributed in time. John Swinton passed away in 1901. He made the statement in 1880, after he had concluded his employment with the New York Times and was working at the New York Sun. Please see the following for more information: https://www.constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm

May 3, 2019
Truthdig, Major Danny Sjursen and JFK

On April 6, 2019 Truthdig joined the likes of Paul Street and Counterpunch in its disdain for scholarship on the subject of the career and presidency of John F. Kennedy. To say the least, that is not good company to keep in this regard. (see, for instance, Alec Cockburn Lives: Matt Stevenson, JFK and CounterPunch, and Paul Street Meets Jane Hamsher at Arlington) What makes it even worse is that the writer of this particular article, Major Danny Sjursen, was a teacher at West Point in American History. In that regard, his article is about as searching and definitive as something from an MSM darling like Robert Dallek. The problem is, Truthdig is not supposed to be part of the MSM.

Sjursen’s article is part of a multi-part series about American History. The title of this installment is “JFK’s Cold War Chains”. So right off the bat, Sjursen is somehow going to convey to the reader that President Kennedy was no different than say Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, or Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson in his foreign policy vision.

Almost immediately Sjursen hits the note that the MSM usually does: Kennedy was really all flash and charisma and achieved very little of substance in his relatively brief presidency. And the author says this is true about both his foreign and domestic policy. Like many others, he states that Kennedy hedged on civil rights. I don’t see how beginning a program the night of one’s inauguration counts as hedging.

On the evening of his inauguration, Kennedy called Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon. He was upset because during that day’s parade of the Coast Guard, he did not see any black faces. He wanted to know why. Were there no African American cadets at the Coast Guard academy? If not, why not? (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 52) Two days later, the Coast Guard began an all-out effort to seek out and sign up African American students. A year later they admitted a black student. By 1963 they made it a point to interview 561 African American candidates. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 114)

This was just the start. At his first cabinet meeting Kennedy brought this incident up and said he wanted figures from each department on the racial minorities they had in their employ and where they ranked on the pay scale. When he got the results, he was not pleased. He wanted everyone to make a conscious effort to remedy the situation and he also requested regular reports on the matter. Kennedy also assigned a civil rights officer to manage the hiring program and to hear complaints for each department. He then requested that the Civil Service Commission begin a recruiting program that would target historically black colleges and universities for candidates. (Carl Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, pp. 72, 84) Thus began the program we now call affirmative action. Kennedy issued two executive orders on that subject. The first one was Executive Order 10925 in March of 1961, three months after his inauguration.

Kennedy’s civil rights program extended into the field of federal contracting in a way that was much more systematic and complete than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. (Golden, p. 61) In fact, it went so far as to have an impact on admissions of African American students to private colleges in the South. As Melissa Kean noted in her book on the subject, Kennedy tied federal research grants and contracts to admissions policies of private southern universities. This forced open the doors of large universities like Duke and Tulane to African American students. (Kean, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South, p. 237)

I should not have to inform anyone, certainly not Major Sjursen, about how this all ended up at the University of Mississippi and then the University of Alabama. The president had to call in federal marshals and the military in order to escort African American students past the governors of each state. In both cases, the administration had helped to attain court orders that, respectively Governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace, had resisted. That resistance necessitated the massing of federal power in order to gain the entry of African American students to those public universities.

After the last confrontation, where Kennedy faced off against Governor Wallace, he went on national television to make the most eloquent and powerful public address on civil rights since Abraham Lincoln. Anyone can watch that speech, since it is on YouTube. By this time, the summer of 1963, Kennedy had already submitted a civil rights bill to Congress. He had not done so previously since he knew it would be filibustered, as all other prior bills on the subject had been. Kennedy’s bill took one year to pass. And he had to mount an unprecedented month-long personal lobbying campaign to launch it. (Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century, p. 63) When one looks at Kennedy’s level of achievement in just this one domestic field and locates and lists his accomplishments, it is clear that he did more for civil rights in three years than FDR, Truman and Eisenhower did in nearly three decades (see chart at end).

The reason for this is that the Kennedy administration was the first to state that it would enforce the Brown vs. Board decision of 1954. The Eisenhower administration resisted enacting every recommendation sent to it by the senate’s 1957 Civil Rights Commission. (Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 21) As Michael Beschloss has written, Eisenhower actually tried to persuade Earl Warren not to vote in favor of the plaintiffs in that case.

Kennedy endorsed that decision when he was a senator. In fact, he did so twice in public. The first time was in New York City in 1956. (New York Times, 2/8/56, p. 1) The second time he did so was in 1957, in of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. (Golden, p. 95) Attorney General Robert Kennedy then went to the University of Georgia Law Day in 1961. He spent almost half of his speech addressing the issue: namely that he would enforce Brown vs Board. Again, this speech is easily available online and Sjursen could have linked to it in his article. So it would logically follow that in 1961, the Kennedy administration indicted the Secretary of Education in Louisiana for disobeying court orders to integrate public schools. (Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 135)

Once one properly lists and credits this information, its easy to see that the Kennedy administration was intent on ripping down Jim Crow in the South even if it meant losing what had been a previous Democratic Party political bastion. (Golden, p. 98) Kennedy’s approval rating in the South had plummeted from 60 to 33% by the summer of 1963. He was losing votes for his other programs because of his stand on civil rights. But as he told Luther Hodges, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand….” (Brauer, pp. 247, 263-64)

In addition to that, Kennedy signed legislation that allowed federal employees to form unions. (Executive Order 10988 , January 17, 1962) This was quite important, since it began the entire public employee union sector movement, today one of the strongest areas of much diminished labor power. In March of that same year, Kennedy signed the Manpower Development and Training Act aimed at alleviating African American unemployment. (Bernstein, pp. 186-87)

On April 11, 1962 Kennedy called a press conference and made perhaps the most violent rhetorical attack against a big business monopoly since Roosevelt. Thus began his famous 72-hour war against the steel companies. Kennedy had brokered a deal between the unions and the large companies to head off a strike and an inflationary spiral in the economy. The steel companies broke the deal. Robert Kennedy followed the speech by opening a grand jury probe into monopoly practices of collusion and price fixing. He then sent the FBI to make evening visits to serve subpoenas on steel executives. No less than John M. Blair called this episode “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a President and corporate management.” (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, p. 9) When it was over, the steel companies rescinded their price increases.

Three months later, Kennedy tried to pass a Medicare bill. It was defeated in Congress. But on the day of his assassination, he was working with Congressman Wilbur Mills to bring the bill back for another vote. (Bernstein, pp. 256-58) In October of 1963, Kennedy’s federal aid to education bill was passed. This was the first such bill of its kind. (Bernstein, pp. 225-230)

At the time of his assassination, due to the influence of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Kennedy was working on an overall plan to attack urban poverty. As careful scholars have pointed out, the War on Poverty was not originated by Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy had been working on such a program with the chairman of his Council on Economic Advisors, Walter Heller, for months before his murder. (Edward Schmitt, The President of the Other America, pp. 92, 96) As more than one commentator has written, what Johnson did with the Kennedy brothers’ draft of that plan was quite questionable. (Wofford, p. 286 ff.) To cite just one example, LBJ retired the man—David Hackett—who the Kennedys had placed in charge of the program.

I could go on with the domestic side, pointing to Kennedy’s almost immediate raising of the minimum wage, his concern for lengthening unemployment benefits, his establishment of a Women’s Bureau, the comments by labor leaders that they just about “lived in the White House”, etc., etc. In the face of all this, for Sjursen to write that Kennedy’s administration contained “so few tangible accomplishments” or did nothing for unemployed African Americans, this simply will not stand up to a full review of the record.

Sjursen’s discussion of Kennedy’s foreign policy is equally obtuse and problematic. He begins by saying that Kennedy fulfilled “his dream of being an ardent Cold Warrior.” He then writes that “Kennedy was little different than—and was perhaps more hawkish than—his predecessors and successors.”

In the light of modern scholarship, again, this will simply not stand scrutiny. Authors like Robert Rakove, Philip Muehlenbeck, Greg Poulgrain, and Richard Mahoney—all of whom Sjursen ignores—have dug into the archival record on this specific subject. They have shown, with specific examples and reams of data, that Kennedy forged his foreign policy in conscious opposition to Secretaries of State Dean Acheson, a Democrat and Republican John Foster Dulles.

This confrontation was not muted. It was direct. And it began in 1951, even before Kennedy got to the Senate, let alone the White House. His visit to Saigon in that year and his meeting with a previous acquaintance, State Department official Edmund Gullion, about the French effort to recolonize Vietnam, was the genesis for a six-year search to find a new formula for American foreign policy in the Third World. Congressman Kennedy was quite troubled with Gullion’s prediction that France had no real chance of winning its war against Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. Upon his return to Massachusetts, he began to make speeches and write letters to his constituents about the problems with America’s State Department in the Third World. In 1954, Senator Kennedy warned that

… no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an enemy of the people which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.

In 1956, he made a speech for Adlai Stevenson in which he criticized both the Democratic and Republican parties for their failures to break out of Cold War orthodoxies in their thinking about nationalism in the Third World. He stated that this revolt in the Third World and America’s failure to understand it, “has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism.” (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, pp. 15-18) Stevenson’s office wired him a message asking him not to make any more foreign policy statements associated with his campaign.

My question then to Mr. Sjursen is: If you are too extreme for the liberal standard bearer of your party, how can you be “little different than” or even “more hawkish” than he is?

This was all in preparation for his career-defining speech of 1957. On July 2 of that year, Kennedy spoke from the floor of the Senate and made perhaps the most blistering attack on the Foster Dulles/Dwight Eisenhower Cold War shibboleths toward the Third World that any American politician had made in that decade. This was Kennedy’s all-out attack on the administration’s policy toward the horrible colonial war going on in Algeria at the time. He compared this mistake of quiet support for the spectacle of terror that this conflict had produced with the American support for the doomed French campaign to save its colonial empire in Indochina three years previously. He assaulted the White House for not being a true friend of its old ally. A true friend would have done everything to escort France to the negotiating table rather than continue a war it was not going to win and which was at the same time tearing apart the French home front. In light of those realities, he concluded by saying America’s goals should be to liberate Africa and to save France. (John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, pp. 66-80)

Again, this speech was assailed not just by the White House, but also by people in his own party like Stevenson and Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson. (Mahoney, p. 20) Of the over 130 newspaper editorials it provoked, about 2/3 were negative. (p. 21) A man who was “little different” than his peers would not have caused such a torrent of reaction to a foreign policy speech. To most objective observers, this evidence would indicate that Kennedy was clearly bucking the conventional wisdom as to what America should be doing in the Third World with regards to the issues of nationalism, colonialism and anti-communism. As biographer John T. Shaw later wrote about these speeches, what Kennedy did was to formulate an alternative foreign policy view toward the Cold War for the Democratic party. And this was his most significant achievement in the Senate. (John T. Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 110) But for Mr. Sjursen and Truthdig, this is all the dark side of the moon.

By not noting any of this, Sjursen does not then have to follow through on how Kennedy carried these policies into his presidency. A prime example would be in the Congo, where Kennedy pretty much reversed policy from what Eisenhower was doing there in just a matter of weeks. The man who Kennedy was going to back in that struggle, Patrice Lumumba, was hunted down and killed by firing squad three days before the new president was inaugurated. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles had issued an assassination order for Lumumba in the late summer of 1960. (John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, p. 236) After he was killed, the CIA kept the news of his death from President Kennedy until nearly one month after Lumumba was killed. But on February 2, not knowing he was dead, Kennedy had already revised the Eisenhower policy in Congo to favor Lumumba. (Mahoney, p. 65) In fact, this was the first foreign policy revision the new president had made. Some have even argued that the plotting against Lumumba was sped up to make sure he was killed before Kennedy was in the White House. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23)

How does all of the above fit into the paradigm that Sjursen draws in which the Cold War heightened under Kennedy and his vision had no room for nuances of freedom and liberty? Does anyone think that Eisenhower would have reacted to Lumumba’s death with the pained expression of grief that JFK did when he was alerted to that fact? Eisenhower was the president who ordered his assassination. (For an overview of this epochal conflict and how it undermines Sjursen and Truthdig, see Dodd and Dulles vs Kennedy in Africa)

One of the most bizarre statements in the long essay is that Kennedy was loved by and enamored of the military. The evidence against this is so abundant that it is hard to see how the author can really believe it. But by the end of the 1962 Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were openly derisive of JFK. They told him to his face that his decision to blockade Cuba instead of attacking the island over the missile installation was the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler at Munich. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 57) They were also upset when he rejected the false flag scenarios outlined in their Operation Northwoods proposals, e.g., blowing up an American ship in Cuban waters. These were designed to create a pretext for an invasion of the island. He also writes that Kennedy deliberately chose the space race since it was a popular way to one-up the Russians. This ignores the fact that Kennedy thought it was too expensive and wanted a joint expedition to the moon with the Soviets. According to the book One Hell of a Gamble by Tim Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko, Kennedy actually attempted to do this earlier, in 1961, but was turned down by Nikita Khrushchev.

Sjursen blames the failure of the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy. First of all, the Bay of Pigs invasion was not Kennedy’s idea. And anyone who studies that operation should know this. It was created by Eisenhower and Allen Dulles. Dulles and CIA Director of Plans Dick Bissell then pushed it on Kennedy. They did everything they could to get Kennedy to approve it, including lying to him about its chances of success. The important thing to remember about this disaster is that Kennedy did not approve direct American military intervention once he saw it failing. This had been the secret agenda of both Dulles and Bissell, who knew it would fail. (DiEugenio, p. 47)

Kennedy later suspected such was the case and he fired Dulles, Bissell and Charles Cabell, the CIA Deputy Director. There is no doubt that if Nixon had won the election of 1960, he would have sent in the Navy and Marines to bail out the operation. Because this is what he told JFK he would have done. (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 288) And today, Cuba would be a territory of the USA, like Puerto Rico. Again, so much for there being no difference between what came before Kennedy and what came after.

Sjursen then tries to connect the Bay of Pigs directly to the Missile Crisis. As if one was the consequence of the other. Graham Allison, the foremost scholar on the Missile Crisis, disagreed. And so did John Kennedy. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had a meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. He found the Russian leader obsessed with the status of Berlin. So much so that during the Berlin Crisis in the fall of 1961, the Soviets decided to build a wall to separate East from West Berlin. In the fine volume The Kennedy Tapes, still the best book on the Missile Crisis, it is revealed that Berlin is what Kennedy believed the Russian deployment was really about. (See Probe Magazine, Vol. 5, No 4, pp. 17-18) That whole crisis was not caused by Kennedy. It was provoked by Nikita Khrushchev. And again, Kennedy did not take the option extended by many of his advisors, that is, using an air attack or an invasion to take out the missiles. He insisted on the least violent option he could take. One person died during those thirteen days. He was an American pilot. Kennedy did not take retaliatory action.

I should not even have to add that Sjursen leaves out the crucial aftermath of the Missile Crisis: that Kennedy developed a rapprochement strategy with both Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Both of these are well described by Jim Douglass in his important book JFK and the Unspeakable. (see pp. 74-90 for the Castro back-channel; pp. 340-51 for the Kennedy/Khrushchev détente facilitated by Norman Cousins) The rapprochement attempt with Russia culminated with Kennedy’s famous Peace Speech at American University in the summer of 1963. Which, like Kennedy’s Algeria speech, Sjursen does not mention.

Predictably, Sjursen ends his essay with Kennedy and Vietnam. He actually writes that Kennedy’s policies there led the US “inexorably deeper into its greatest military fiasco and defeat.” What can one say in the face of such a lack of respect for the declassified record?—except that all of that record now proves that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his murder. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 18-21) That Johnson knew this at the time, and he consciously altered that withdrawal policy, and then tried to cover up the fact that he had. And we have that in LBJ’s own words today. (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, pp. 306-10) There was not one combat troop in Vietnam when Kennedy was inaugurated. There was not one there on the day he was killed. By 1967, there were over 500,000 combat troops in theater.

Many informed observers complain about the censorship and distortion so prevalent on Fox News. But I would argue that when it comes to this subject, the journals on the Left do pretty much the same thing, ending up with the same result: the misleading of its readership. I would also argue the very process—from the editor on down to the choice of author and sources used—skews the facts and sources as rigorously and as stringently as Fox. On two occasions, I have asked Counterpunch to print my reply to anti-Kennedy articles they have written. I sent an e-mail to Truthdig to do the same with this essay. As with Counterpunch, I got no reply. This would suggest that there is a Wizard of Oz apparatus at work, one which does not wish to see the curtain drawn. Such a contingency reduces this kind of writing to little more than playing to the crowd. With Fox, that crowd is on the right. With Counterpunch and Truthdig, it is on the left. In both cases, the motive is political. That is no way to dig for truth.

April 16, 2019

The Hidden Hand: The Assassination of Malcolm X

“I know, too, that I could suddenly die at the hands of some white racists. Or I could die at the hands of some Negro hired by the white man.”

~ from The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Conspiracy theories have engulfed the four major American political assassinations of the 1960s since inception. Even before the controversial Warren Commission was empaneled, reasonable doubts emerged about Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Within days of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, his confidantes and constituents expressed skepticism over government claims that James Earl Ray, an ill-educated, inept stick-up artist from the south side of St. Louis acted alone.1

When Robert F. Kennedy was felled inside a Los Angeles hotel during a campaign stop on June 6, 1968, many Americans questioned the official version about a poor Palestinian immigrant shooting the presidential candidate in the back of the head, primarily because key eyewitnesses stated that Sirhan Bishira Sirhan was facing Kennedy when he fired.2

More than half a century later, government accounts stick to the “lone assassin” theory in those cases despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Most Americans harbor the delusion that every government but their own assassinates its citizens on occasion.

Only in the fourth case, the assassination of Malcolm X, is there incontrovertible proof of conspiracy. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, a charismatic African American revolutionary, was shot to death inside New York City’s Audubon Ballroom just seconds after greeting a crowd of about three hundred. To many, the assassination was the predictable culmination of a battle between him and the black separatist sect that ousted him eleven months earlier.3

Once home to Rabbi Max Koppel and Congregation Emes Wozedek in the 1930s4, the Audubon was located in a Washington Heights neighborhood bordering Harlem, where Malcolm had until recently headed Muhammad’s Mosque Number Seven. (Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska in May 1925.)

Now an orthodox Muslim, Malcolm used the Audubon for weekly rallies sponsored by his newly formed group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The group was patterned after the Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963 with the goal of uniting African nations that had recently wrestled their independence from American, Russian, and European colonialism.

Both the OAU and OAAU had a common goal: to promote Pan Africanism as a vehicle for alleviating economic, social, and political oppression. Sensing that his organizational skills, intelligence, and understanding of American politics could be instrumental in altering the world’s geopolitical landscape, African, Asian, and Latin American leaders had begun appealing to Malcolm X to champion their causes.

An electrifying orator, Malcolm had impressed Third World leaders during two extended trips to Africa in April and July of 19645. The first trip occurred weeks after his official break with the so-called Nation of Islam, a quasi-religious group promoting segregation in a quixotic quest for a separate nation within America exclusively for African Americans.

Malcolm X drew large crowds during rallies in Harlem. His popularity was seen as a national security risk by the FBI.

Malcolm quit the sect in March 1964 after discovering that Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the NOI who claimed to be a divine prophet, had fathered over half a dozen children by at least six of his former personal secretaries, some of them teenagers. Muhammad denied the allegations and blamed Malcolm for spreading malicious “rumors,” precipitating helter-skelter plots against Malcolm, former national representative of the NOI.

Nearly a dozen attempts were made on his life between December 1963, when Malcolm was suspended as spokesman for the NOI, and February 1965. He was ostensibly excommunicated for describing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” (At the time, the Central Intelligence Agency was suspected of the actual or attempted assassination of numerous Asian, African and Latin American heads of state, among them Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.6 As such, Malcolm postulated that American violence against foreign leaders had boomeranged and claimed the life of an American president.)

Newspaper account of the suspension of Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam in December 1963.

But the underlying cause of his suspension was a scandal that had shaken Malcolm to his core. In 1962, a rumor began circulating that Elijah Muhammad had fathered children by several of his secretaries. Since nonmarital and extramarital sexual relations were verboten and grounds for expulsion, almost no one in the sect believed it, and certainly not about their “infallible” messiah (Muhammad claimed to have been educated by God in “the person of Wallace D. Fard,” founder of the Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1931.) For them, anyone making such an outlandish claim was a demonic hypocrite “worthy of death.” Like the majority of NOI members, Malcolm ignored the salacious gossip. In the fall of 1963, however, the rumors were confirmed by three unimpeachable sources: Wilfred X Little, minister of the Detroit NOI mosque and Malcolm’s oldest brother, and Wallace Muhammad, Elijah’s son and putative heir to the throne upon his father’s demise. The third source was none other than Elijah himself.7

UPI story broke in early 1964 about paternity suit filed by two young black women against Elijah Muhammad, the married leader of the Nation of Islam.

In explaining his actions during a private meeting at his Chicago mansion, Elijah said that his extramarital affairs were merely the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. “When you read about how David took another man’s wife, I’m that David,” he said. “You read about Noah, who got drunk—that’s me. You read about Lot, who went and laid up with his own daughters. I have to fulfill all of those things.”8 Weeks after recovering from the paralyzing shock of the confession, Malcolm suggested that Elijah permit his ministers to tell their assemblies that his moral transgressions were akin to what other prophets had done and yet held favor with God.

Thinking that Elijah had approved, Malcolm told several prominent ministers that the rumors were true, and that they should explain it in biblical terms to followers. Several ministers, among them Louis X [Farrakhan] of Boston, called Muhammad and told him that Malcolm was one of the “hypocrites” spreading the rumors about the secretaries.9

Louis Farrakhan denounced Malcolm X in Muhammad Speaks newspaper as the “chief hypocrite” in the Nation of Islam and said that Malcolm was “worthy of death.”

Elijah summoned Malcolm to his home in Phoenix and castigated him for telling them. Malcolm apologized, saying that he thought he had Elijah’s approval. Elijah retorted that he had in no way approved of Malcolm’s suggestion and said that his three-month suspension for the JFK comment was now indefinite. A few days after the meeting, Elijah contacted several prominent East Coast members of the NOI and said that Malcolm was the sect’s chief hypocrite and that it was therefore time to “close his eyes.”10

Declassified FBI memo summarizes wiretapped telephone conversation between NOI leader Elijah Muhammad and a Boston mosque official in which murdering Malcolm X is discussed.

Several attempts to kill Malcolm soon followed. When he discovered from a prominent Muslim that Elijah had sanctioned the plots to kill him, Malcolm publicly denounced the Nation of Islam and warned that any further attempts to harm him would be met with the biblical justice. He vowed to exact an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.”

Malcolm was bearing a heavy cross when he arrived at the Audubon on February 21. The war with Muhammad had taken its toll; it was one man fighting a legion of zealots. Associates were alarmed by his appearance that morning. They recall him looking haggard, anxious, and exhausted.

The most notable attempt to kill him had occurred seven days earlier. Around two o’clock on Valentine’s Day, Molotov cocktails crashed through bedroom windows of his tiny Elmhurst home. If his four-year-old daughter had not been awakened by breaking glass, Malcolm and his wife Betty would have perished along with their four daughters. Betty was pregnant with twin girls.11

An around-the-clock harassment campaign which followed the bombing had unnerved Malcolm. He told several colleagues that he could understand why Elijah Muhammad wanted him silenced, but he could not fathom the religious leader approving the murder of women and children to accomplish that goal.

He was debilitated by the fire not only because of the near-death of his entire family, but because, he said, the fire revealed that the NOI’s attempts were being aided by the New York Police Department, the New York Fire Department and possibly even the federal government. “The police in this country know what’s going on. This is a conspiracy that leads to my death,” he said at a press conference.12

A few hours after the fire, investigators claimed that they discovered an unlit Molotov cocktail on a dresser in his daughters’ bedroom. The explosive concoction was in a whiskey bottle. Police officials insinuated that Malcolm might have set the house on fire because he had been evicted days earlier by court order. NOI officials who filed the lawsuit repeated the claim, noting that Malcolm’s home legally belonged to the sect.

New York Police Department and Nation of Islam both argue that Malcolm X firebombed his own house.

Malcolm and Betty dismissed the speculation as nonsense. To begin with, Betty replied, they would never have alcoholic beverages in their home. Malcolm said angrily that only a madman would set fire to his home with his family asleep inside. Moreover, a black fireman who secretly met with them said that he saw a white man in a firefighter’s uniform place the Molotov cocktail on the dresser after the fire was extinguished. The revelation nearly caused Malcolm to have a psychotic break, the reason being that he knew his death was both imminent and inevitable if governmental forces were in cahoots with the Nation of Islam. A close friend noticed his agitated state and arranged for him to see a doctor to get something to help him sleep.

On the evening of February 20, Malcolm checked into a downtown New York hotel under a pseudonym. Nearly undone by the arson attack, he took a sedative and fell asleep. His rest was interrupted, however, by the loud ringing telephone. “Wake up, Mr. Small,” the caller said before hanging up. The call was ominous because only his wife and two close aides knew where Malcolm planned to stay that evening. Unbeknownst to him, a group of Muslims had shown up at the hotel a few hours after he checked in, demanding the desk clerk to tell them which room Malcolm X was in. The clerk said he knew nothing about Malcolm X being there.

At three o’clock on February 21, with his wife and children looking on, Malcolm stood at the podium on the ballroom’s stage. “As Salaam Alaikum,” he said, meaning “peace be with you.”

Suddenly, two young black men seated in the middle of the room stood up and started arguing. “Niggah,” one of them said, “get your hand out of my pocket!”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it,” Malcolm pleaded. Three young black men on the center front row stood up, removed firearms from underneath their coats, and fired at Malcolm. Two were armed with handguns while the third had a sawed-off shotgun. A tall tout black man with the shotgun crouched before the stage and fired twice, striking Malcolm in the chest. Three pellets landed near his heart. The force of the blasts hurled Malcolm backward, and his head hit the stage with a loud thud.

During the ensuing pandemonium, the shotgun assassin wrapped up his weapon in a jacket and dropped it on the ballroom floor as he escaped. The assassin with the German Luger fired at crowd members trying to capture him as he made his escape. The third gunman wasn’t so lucky. He was shot in his left thigh by a member of Malcolm’s security team. As he fell, he dropped his .45 automatic and was tackled and beaten by the crowd.

On the afternoon of the assassination, police were conspicuous by their absence. On past Sundays, there were nearly two dozen officers present in and outside the Audubon. Police arrived as people dragged the man outside. As police tangled with Malcolm’s supporters for custody of the assassin, the other two assassins and the two men who caused the initial distraction escaped.

Thomas Hagan, the wounded suspect, refused to divulge the name of his accomplices. Eyewitnesses, however, gave police descriptions consistent enough to lead them to Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, lieutenants in the Harlem mosque where Malcolm was minister until his ouster. Butler and Johnson were well-known as enforcers with a reputation for brutalizing wayward Muslims.13 In fact, they were awaiting trial for attempted murder of Benjamin Brown, a NOI defector who had recently opened his own storefront mosque. When the defector refused to remove a photograph of Elijah Muhammad from the front window, Butler and Johnson went to his home. After he opened the door, Johnson shot him at point-blank range in his chest with a rifle. The defector somehow managed to survive the blast.

Butler was arrested on February 26 and Johnson shortly thereafter. All three suspects pleaded not guilty. Following a joint trial one year later, a jury found them all guilty of the assassination and each received a life sentence.14

Case closed, or so it seemed.

Butler and Johnson both steadfastly denied involvement in the assassination. Their case was buttressed by some of Malcolm’s chief aides, who claimed that it would have been virtually impossible for Butler and Johnson to have entered the ballroom that day without detection by the OAU’s security team.

But Johnson and Butler had shaky alibis. Both men, incredulously, claimed to have been immobilized by leg injuries at the time of the assassination. Johnson’s case was helped somewhat by eyewitness accounts, nearly all of whom described the shotgun assassin as a tall, stout, dark-skinned black man sporting a short beard.15 Johnson had a caramel-colored complexion, was of average height, and clean-shaven but for a pencil mustache. Conversely, eyewitnesses described Butler perfectly. One of them, Sharon X Poole, even said that she recognized him as a fellow member of the Harlem mosque.16

Although Norman 3X Butler denies involvement in the assassination of Malcolm X, he appears on film outside the Audubon Ballroom moments after the murder, attempting to get a look at Malcolm X’s body.”

For ten years, there was little to refute the official version of the assassination. Malcolm X was killed as a result of a feud with Elijah Muhammad stood as gospel despite suspicions by his admirers and Third World leaders of American government involvement.

In March 1971, white radicals broke into the FBI’s document storage facility in Media, Pennsylvania and made off with a goldmine of files detailing the agency’s decades-long clandestine wars against political and social organizations of every hue and stripe, the Ku Klux Klan and Nation of Islam among them.17 A counterintelligence program—COINTELPRO—which started in the 1950s to combat the spread of Communism in America, soon engulfed thousands of groups, even the benign National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

When several thousand pages were released from the COINTELPRO operations against Malcolm X in the early 1980s, they revealed a massive campaign against him and the Nation of Islam. The initial campaign, started in 1953 (a year after he was released from prison), was intended to retard the astronomical growth of the Nation of Islam.

They also show that in 1964, following a complaint by White House aide Benjamin H. Read that Malcolm’s affiliations with Third World leaders were damaging American foreign policy in Africa, the Central Intelligence Agency was asked to consider killing Malcolm X.

White House official Benjamin H. Read asked the CIA to consider treating Malcolm X the way it did hostile foreign leaders.

Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, told Read that the CIA had serious qualms about killing American citizens but would nonetheless explore the possibility of neutralizing Malcolm.18 The FBI had been spying on the Nation of Islam since the 1940s after its male members refused to register under the Selective Service Act. By 1964, it had informants in the highest ranks of not only the NOI but inside Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity as well.

In addition to being under surveillance by the CIA and FBI, the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (nicknamed BOSSI) had Malcolm under close surveillance and had several high level informants in the OAU. At least one of them, Eugene “Gene” Roberts, was a member of Malcolm’s security detail and on duty at the hour of reckoning.

Gene Robert (in circle) was an undercover NYPD detective who infiltrated Malcolm X’s organization and became part of his main security detail.

Malcolm X had been on around-the-clock surveillance by the FBI for more than six months before his assassination. Transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversation between Malcolm X and other prominent black activists are included in the files, some of them heavily redacted.

Declassified FBI documents include a detailed account of the FBI sending anonymous letters to Elijah Muhammad’s wife and NOI ministers across the country about Elijah’s extramarital activities. Bureau agents bragged in several memos about starting the disputes which led to the ouster of Malcolm from the NOI and fomenting a war between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad.19

The FBI was alarmed that Malcolm X had begun courting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders following his ouster from the Nation of Islam in March 1964.

While the CIA and State Department have been reticent to release many documents from their files on Malcolm X, those released thus far reveal an urgent counterintelligence campaign to “neutralize” Malcolm X after several African and Arab countries offered him financial support in 1964 and vowed to support his petition to the United Nations in which he accused the United States government of violating the human rights of African Americans.

Along with Che Guevara, the physician-turned-revolutionary who played a major role in Cuban revolution of 1959, Malcolm X was expected to be one of the preeminent attractions at the Second Asian-African Congress commencing on February 26 in Algeria. The conference was postponed due to the overthrow of Ahmed Ben Bella, an event most reputable historians attribute to the CIA and British intelligence.20 Ben Bella and Malcolm had become friends, and the Algerian leader was a staunch supporter of both Malcolm X and the civil rights movement.

The CIA was concerned about Malcolm X’s impact on US foreign policy in Africa.

Declassified FBI and CIA documents suggest that the American government was extremely eager to prevent Malcolm from attending at all cost. He was assassinated five days before the aborted assembly. As it happens, Malcolm’s assassins were recruited in late June 1964, within weeks of the White House’s request to the CIA to handle Malcolm X the way it did hostile foreign leaders.21

In April 2011, Newark NOI member William Bradley was identified as the shotgun shooter. The day after the New York Times asked the Justice Department whether it would investigate the allegations against Bradley, a spokesman said that there was nothing the FBI could do because no federal laws had been violated.

William Bradley (standing, in circle), the man who fired the shotgun at Malcolm X, was captured on film outside the Audubon as he attempted to free assassin Thomas Hagan from police and angry Malcolm X supporters.

That was, of course, an egregious error. The assassins had traveled from New Jersey to New York to assassinate Malcolm X. Traveling across state lines to commit murder is a federal crime. And under both federal and state laws, there is no statute of limitations for murder.

The Justice Department’s hasty decision to reject reopening the case involving the civil rights movement leader Malcolm X was predictable. After all, it was revealed more than three decades ago that the man seen in the famous Life magazine photo administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Malcolm X was none other than Gene Roberts, an undercover detective for BOSSI. Moreover, a top aide to Elijah Muhammad was linked to the FBI. Although he has denied any involvement with the FBI and the Malcolm X assassination, prosecutors of Malcolm’s assassins had an eyewitness willing to testify that the aide met at the Americana Hotel with the assassins the night before the assassination.

Notes

1 Schechtman, Jeff. “The Plot to Kill King: A Look at Who Really Killed Martin Luther King,” April 4, 2018. https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/04/04/the-fbi-in-peace-war-and-assassination/.

2 “The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination,” https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Robert_Kennedy_Assassination.html

3 Drash, Wayne. “Malcolm X Killer Freed After 44 Years,” April 28, 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/26/malcolmx.killer/index.html

4 Lowenstein, Steven M. Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). pp. 109-110. Also see: http://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/audubon-ballroom. Rabbi Mas Koppel, founder of the Emes Wozedek Congregation, was murdered in 1974. Seigel, Max H. “Neighbors Call Slain Rabbi Friend to All,” New York Times, December 18, 1974, A49.

5 Jacobs, Sean. “When Malcolm X Went to Africa,” June 2011. https://africasacountry.com/2011/06/malcolm-x-in-africa1/

6 “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” (1975). https://cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp83-01042r000200090002-0

7 Haley, Alex with Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965) See, in general, ‘Chapter 16: Out.”

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 FBI Main file on Malcolm X, memo dated March 23, 1964.

11 “Malcolm X’s Home is Firebombed in 1965,” (reprint) New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/malcolm-x-home-firebombed-1965-article-1.2529655

12 Scott, Stanley. “Recalls Prophetic Words: Newsman Witnesses Murder of Malcolm X,” Desert Sun, February 22, 1965, pA6.

13 Newman, Andy and John Eligon. “Killer of Malcolm X is Granted Parole,” New York Times, March 19, 2010, A13.

14 “Three Men Convicted of the Assassination of Malcolm X in 1966,” New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/men-convicted-murder-malcolm-x-1996-article-1.2558206

15 Based on documentary footage from local television news in the archives of the University of Los Angeles Film School.

16 Kihss, Peter. “Malcolm X Shot to Death at Rally Here; Three Other Negroes Wounded—One is Held in Killing,” New York Times, February 22, 1965, A1.

17 Mazzetti, Mark. Burglars Who Took On FBI Abandon Shadows,” New York Times, January 7, 2014, p. A1.

18 CIA file on Malcolm X, memo from Richard Helms dated August 11, 1964.

19 See, in general, the FBI New York Field Office file on Malcolm X and the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations file on Malcolm X.

20 Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

21 The assassins, all of them from the Newark mosque of the Nation of Islam, was recruited in late June 1964, according to Thomas Hagan.

Also of interest:

March 11, 2019

John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, Volume 2
John Newman has just released the third part of his series on the murder of John F. Kennedy. Titled Into the Storm, we are running an excerpt from it on our site, while linking to another excerpt. This review deals with the second volume, Countdown to Darkness. It is indefinite as to how long this series will be. I originally heard it would be a five-volume set. But now I have heard from other sources it may be six. (I will comment on this length factor later.)

Countdown to Darkness assesses several subjects. Some of these the author deals with well. Some of his treatments disappoint. The point is the book is wide-ranging in scope, as I imagine the rest of the series will be. It does not just deal with topics relating to the JFK murder. There are subjects dealt with that are more in keeping with a history of Kennedy’s presidency. Therefore, the book is broad based.

Countdown to Darkness begins with the peculiar arrangement surrounding the dissemination of Oswald’s file at CIA. This valuable information is a combination of Newman’s examination of the file traffic, plus insights gained by the estimable British researcher Malcolm Blunt. Those insights were achieved through Blunt’s discussions with the late CIA officer Tennent Bagley. In this analysis, Newman repeats his previous thesis that although the first Oswald files went to the Office of Security, they should have gone to the Soviet Russia Division. (p. 3; all references to the e-book version) He expands on this by saying this pattern appears to have been prearranged. The mail distribution form was altered in advance to make this happen. (p. 2) One effect of this closed off routing was that there was little chatter about Oswald’s implied threat to surrender radar secrets. When Blunt talked to Bagley, Malcolm told him about this dissemination pattern. Bagley asked Blunt if he thought this was done wittingly. When Malcolm said he was not sure, the CIA officer replied he should be—because it was set up that way in advance. Blunt said that this disclosure was “a significant departure from Bagley’s normal cautious phrasings.” (p. 30)

II

From here, the book turns to Cuba and President Dwight Eisenhower’s intent to overthrow Castro. CIA Director Allen Dulles with Vice President Richard Nixon first discussed this idea in 1959. The initial planning on the project was handed to J. C. King and Richard Bissell; the former was Chief of the Western Hemisphere, the latter was Director of Plans. (p. 32) The author traces the familiar story of how the original idea—to integrate a guerilla force onto the island to hook up with the resistance—began to evolve into something larger in January of 1960. This was coupled with the Allen-Dulles-inspired embargo, which extended to include weapons from England. This was meant to force Castro to go to the Eastern Bloc and the USSR for arms. (pp. 36-37) Dulles also wanted to sabotage the sugar crop, but Eisenhower turned that request down.

Bissell turned over the architecture of the overthrow plan to CIA veteran officer Jake Esterline. (p. 48) Esterline had been a deputy on the 1954 task force in the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala. Like David Talbot before him, the author points out the fact that warnings about the overall design problems, and how the objective differed from Guatemala, were deep-sixed. (p. 55) By March of 1960, Eisenhower started talking about a different approach, a strike force type invasion. The president wanted OAS support for this plan. And here the author introduces something new to the reviewer: his concept of Eisenhower’s Triple Play. That is, in order to achieve such outside support, the White House and CIA would rid Latin America of a thorn in its side, namely, the bloodthirsty dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. (p. 90) This will later expand into an attempt to also get NATO behind the overthrow. Hence, Ike’s Triple Play will include the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo.

One of the contingencies upon which Eisenhower based his overthrow of Castro was the establishment of a government in exile. This consisted of the banding together of several individual groups of Cuban exiles under an umbrella called the Revolutionary Democratic Front, or FRD. (p. 127) This endeavor ended up being quite difficult, for two reasons. First, some prominent exile members, like Tony Varona, did not want to join. Second, a principal officer involved for the CIA, Gerry Droller (real name Frank Bender), had rather poor organizational skills. The author gives us more than one example of this trait. (pp. 129-32)

As the operation morphed from a guerilla-type incursion into a brigade invasion concept, more managers were grafted onto the project. The author first names Henry Hecksher. (p. 140) Hecksher worked with David Phillips on the Arbenz overthrow, then went to Laos, and then was assigned to Howard Hunt’s favorite exile, Manuel Artime, in 1963-64. (pp. 142-44) Another person named by the author as part of this expansion is Carl Jenkins.(p. 147) Jenkins worked at the Retalhuleu military base in Guatemala. A base was also set up in Nicaragua and some of the Alabama National Guard pilots were enlisted.

As the brigade concept was escalating, false information was entered into the information flow. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon said only 40% of the Cuban populace would end up supporting Castro. (p. 170) Which, to put it mildly, turned out to be almost ludicrously wrong. Castro now began to import a flow of Eastern Bloc arms through Czechoslovakia. (p. 171) As this occurred, Eisenhower, through Dulles, began to activate the Trujillo aspect of the Triple Play. This appears to have been set in motion between February and April of 1960. (p. 172)

When Castro began to seize oil companies like Texaco, Esso and Shell, Vice President Nixon began to urge Eisenhower into action. He recommended “strong positive action” to avoid becoming labeled, “uncle Sucker” throughout the world. (p. 174) National Security Advisor Gordon Gray said much the same thing: “… the U.S. has taken publicly about all it can afford to take from the Castro government ….” (p. 174)

On July 9, 1960, Nikita Khrushchev threatened the USA with ICBMs over Cuba. Eisenhower replied that America would not be intimidated by these threats. (p. 176) The author mentions that at this time there was an attempt by the Agency to solicit a Cuban pilot to assassinate Raul Castro. Newman scores author Evan Thomas for distorting this as the pilot’s idea, when the impetus was clearly from the CIA. (p. 182) General Robert Cushman, working on the staff of Richard Nixon, urged Howard Hunt to use as much skullduggery as possible to get rid of Castro. (pp. 184-85)

But as the Inspector General report by Lyman Kirkpatrick later revealed, the attempt to arm and supply the dissidents on the island was not working. In fact, at times, it was counter-productive, since Castro’s forces would recover the supplies and arms. As the threat grew, Russia sent in more arms to the island: tanks, mortars, cannons. With these advantages Castro began to close in on the resistance. And this was another reason the original guerilla plan was modified into a brigade-sized invasion. (p. 185)

III

We now come to what this reviewer feels is probably the highlight of the first two books in the series: the author’s work on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. Newman devotes four chapters to this subject. In my opinion the result is one of the best medium-length treatments of the Congo crisis I have read. As noted above, Eisenhower felt that by getting involved in Belgium’s colonial problems, this would encourage NATO allies to stand by him in his attempt to overthrow Castro. After all, the NATO alliance began in 1948 with the Brussels Treaty.

As early as May 5, 1960 Allen Dulles was aware that Belgium was attempting to set up a breakaway state in the Congo called Katanga. This was two months before the ceremony formalizing the Belgian withdrawal from its African colony. (p. 153) Katanga was the richest region in Congo, and perhaps one of the richest small geographical areas in the world. If the Katanga secession were successful, it would do much to benefit Belgium and its covert ally England, at the same time that it would damage the economy of the new state of Congo.

Dulles was predisposed to favor Belgium because of his prior career as a corporate lawyer with the global New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. That firm represented many companies that benefited from low wage conditions in the Third World. Therefore Dulles and his deputy Charles Cabell began to smear independence leader Patrice Lumumba at National Security meetings in advance of his assuming power. Combined with the fact that the Belgian departure was not total, this pitted Lumumba against both the former imperialists and the growing malignancy of the USA. (p. 154)

Lumumba’s stewardship was not just hurt by the Katanga secession, but also by the fact that Belgium had removed Congo’s gold reserves and placed them in Brussels prior to independence being declared. (p. 155) With little cash on hand, Lumumba’s army mutinied and spun out of control. This created the pretext for Belgium to send in paratroopers. The Belgians now began to fire on the Congolese. On July 11^th, Katanga declared itself a separate state. By July 13, 1960, two weeks after independence, the Belgians occupied the Leopoldville airport and Lumumba decided to break relations with Brussels. The next day the United Nations, under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, passed a resolution to send troops to Congo. In the meantime Allen Dulles was working overtime to tell anyone on the National Security Council and in the White House that Lumumba would tie Congo to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Castro and the Communist Bloc. (pp. 162-63)

This tactic worked. When Lumumba arrived in Washington to ask for supplies, loans and aid in expelling the Belgians, Eisenhower was not on hand to greet him. Instead, Lumumba talked to Secretary of State Christian Herter and Under Secretary Douglas Dillon. They lied to him by saying they were working through Hammarskjold. (p. 220) This left Lumumba little choice but to ask Russia for supplies. The USSR sent him transport planes and technicians. (p. 222)

When the Russians sent Lumumba the military aid, it sealed his fate. On August 18, 1960 Leopoldville station chief Larry Devlin sent a cable that was drawn in the most hyperbolic terms imaginable. Devlin told CIA HQ that Congo was now experiencing a classic communist takeover, and there was little time to avoid another Cuba. (p. 223) This was clearly meant as a provocation. It worked. On the day this cable arrived, Eisenhower instructed Dulles to begin termination efforts against Lumumba. This was kept out of the meeting record. It was not revealed until the investigations of the Church Committee. The recording secretary to the meeting, Robert Johnson, told the committee that it was too sensitive to be included in the minutes. (p. 227)

The plot began the next day. Director of Plans Dick Bissell told Devlin to begin action to replace Lumumba with a pro-Western leader. On August 26, Allen Dulles sent an assassination order to Devlin that authorized a budget of $100,000 to terminate Lumumba, the equivalent of close to a million dollars today. (p. 236) Bissell now called in the head of the Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, and they began to assemble a list of assets they could employ in order to do the job. (p. 246) One of these was the infamous Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, who began to prepare poisons for use in the assassination. Devlin also got President Joseph Kasavubu to remove Lumumba from his position as prime minister. At this point Hammarskjold sent his own emissary, Rajeshwar Dayal, to Congo to protect Lumumba.

This was necessary because, in addition to Gottlieb, Devlin now bribed the chief of the army, Josef Mobutu, to also assassinate Lumumba. (p. 265) At around this time, two CIA-hired killers, codenamed QJ WIN and WI ROGUE, both arrived in Leopoldville. Not knowing each other, they both stayed at the same hotel. Gottlieb then arrived in Congo. (p. 268) In September of 1960, with a multiplicity of lethal assets on hand, Tweedy now cabled Devlin to produce an outline of how he planned on terminating Lumumba.

The use of the two codenamed assassins in Congo marks the beginning of the ZR/Rifle program. This was the CIA’s mechanism for exterminating foreign leaders. It began under Eisenhower in September of 1960. (p. 280) The next month it was taken over by CIA officer William Harvey. ZR/Rifle was sort of like the reverse side of Staff D, which was a burglary program to break into embassies and steal codebooks. Harvey and his assistant Justin O’Donnell recruited safe crackers, burglars and document forgers for that part of the program. (pp. 284-85) When Harvey testified before the Church Committee, he lied about the use of ZR/Rifle in the Lumumba case. He was fully aware of what the two men were doing in Congo. (p. 290)

Mobutu now tried to arrest Lumumba, but Dayal blocked the attempt. Three things happened in November of 1960 that penned the final chapter. CIA officer Justin O’Donnell arrived in Congo to supervise the endgame. John Kennedy, who the CIA knew sympathized with Lumumba, was elected president. And third, America and England cooperated in seating Kasavubu’s delegation at the United Nations. This last event provoked Lumumba into escaping from Dayal’s house arrest. O’Donnell had decided that the CIA should not actually murder Lumumba. But they would help his enemies do the deed. Therefore, Devlin cooperated with Mobutu to cut off possible escape routes to Lumumba’s base in Stanleyville. He was captured, imprisoned and transferred to Elizabethville in Katanga. (p. 295) Lumumba was executed by firing squad and his body was soaked in sulphuric acid. When the acid ran out, his corpse was incinerated. (p. 296) Thus was the sorry end of the first democratically elected leader of an independent country in sub-Saharan Africa.

As I said, for me, this section on Lumumba is the highlight of the first two volumes.

IV

Another topic that the author spends significant time on is the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. The author traces this idea from Allen Dulles to Dick Bissell. He believes that Eisenhower gave his tacit approval to the plots. He also believes that Bissell dissembled in his testimony on how the plots were hatched, and he mounts several lines of evidence to demonstrate this. (p. 327) Bissell dissembled in order to conceal the fact that it was he who approved of giving the assignment to the Mafia through CIA asset Robert Maheu. By mid-August of 1960, the CIA’s Technical Services Division was at work manufacturing toxins to place in Castro’s cigars.

Maheu offered gangster Johnny Roselli $150, 000 to kill Castro. (p. 331) Both Allen Dulles and his deputy Charles Cabell were briefed on this overture in late August by Chief of Security Sheffield Edwards, who was part of the Mafia outreach program. Meetings were arranged with Roselli in Beverly Hills and New York City. Maheu and CIA support officer Jim O’Connell masqueraded as American businessmen who wanted to protect their interests by getting rid of Castro. But Maheu eventually told Roselli that O’Connell was CIA. Therefore, the veneer of plausible deniability was lost. (p. 333) Roselli now began to recruit Cubans in Florida for the murder assignment. He also arranged a meeting in Miami for Maheu to be introduced to Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, respectively the Mafia dons for Chicago and Tampa. When this occurred the author writes that, because of the reputations and history of these two men, the plots and the association should have been reassessed and approval cancelled. They were not.

They should have been. Because the recruitment of Giancana was a huge liability. Not just because of his history of being a hit man; but also because of his inability to keep a secret. Feeling emboldened, since he was now in the arms of the government, he bragged about his role in the plots to at least two people. From there the word spread to others, including singer Phyllis McGuire. Giancana revealed both the mechanism of death—poison pills—and the projected date of the assassination—November of 1960. (p. 334-35) Through his network of informants, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover found out about Giancana’s dangerous chatter. But Hoover did not know that the CIA had put him up to it. The Director told Bissell about it, but Bissell did not inform Hoover about his role as recruiter.

Maheu now arranged to have McGuire’s room wired for sound in Las Vegas. This was done for two reasons. First, to see if she was talking about the plots; and second, as a favor to Giancana, who suspected she was cheating on him with comedian Dan Rowan. The police discovered this illegal bugging. In addition to the security problem, this all had disturbing repercussions when Attorney General Robert Kennedy began his crusade against organized crime in 1961. (p. 336)

Along with these assassination plots, on November 3, 1960, National Security Officer Gordon Gray came up with the idea of using Cuban exiles dressed as Castro soldiers to stage an attack on Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an invasion. (p. 346) As the author suggests, the very fact that the murder plots and this false flag operation were contemplated show that those involved in managing the strike force invasion understood that its chances for success were low. (pp. 345-46) To further that miasma of doubt, at this same meeting, a question was asked about “direct positive action” against Fidel, his brother Raul and Che Guevara.

There was good reason for both the doubt and the fallback positions, because about two weeks later, CIA circulated a memo admitting that there would not be any significant uprisings on the island due to any incursion, and also that the idea of securing an air strip on the island was also not possible unless the Pentagon was part of the attempt. (p. 348) This memo was not shared with the incoming President Kennedy. The author deigns that it was not shared because the internal uprising myth was used to manipulate Kennedy into going along with the operation. It thus became part and parcel with the new “brigade strike force” concept. (pp. 352-53)

On January 2, 1961, Castro broke relations with the United States. The favor was returned two days later. These actions caused the training of the exiles in Central America to be expanded, and also for the action against Trujillo to be accelerated. (p. 355) On January 4^th, Chief of the CIA paramilitary section wrote a memo to one of the operation’s designers, Jake Esterline. The memo said the invasion would be stuck on the beach unless an uprising took place or there was overt military action by the USA. (p. 355) As the author notes, this is another indication that the people involved at the ground level understood that, left to its own devices, the prospects for the invasion were fey. Hawkins added that Castro’s military forces were growing. They would soon include featured tanks, artillery, heavy mortars and anti-aircraft batteries. Given those facts, Hawkins warned that:

Castro is making rapid progress in establishing a communist-style police state that will be difficult to unseat by any means short of overt intervention by US military forces. (p. 356, Newman’s italics)

Since Bissell was a supervisor of both the assassination plots and the invasion, one wonders if he was banking on the murder of Castro to bail out what looked like an upcoming failure on the beach. In fact, as the author notes, at NSC meetings of January 12 and also January 19, the idea of overt intervention was brought up again. What made the time factor even more pressing was that the CIA had information that the shiploads of these munitions would reach Cuba in mid-March and continue with daily arrivals after that. This is why Hawkins urged that the invasion be launched in late February and no later than March 1. (p. 356) This would not happen, since Kennedy rejected the first proposal for the operation, namely the Trinidad landing site.

V

Kennedy had two meetings on the subject during his first week in office. At neither did he appear enthusiastic about it. On February 3, 1961 the Joint Chiefs wrote a ten-page report in which they viewed the plan favorably. This was something of a reversal from their previous assessments. But they cautioned that the plan was reliant on indigenous support from the island, meaning defections from Castro. They foresaw that if the force retreated to the mountains it might need overt American intervention. But even with these reservations, the executive summary at the end was positive. (pp. 363-64) Newman comments that one way to explain this reversal is that the Joint Chiefs felt that if the CIA plan failed, they would be called in to save the day and collect the glory.

Kennedy now chimed in with his reservations about having the operation look too much like a World War II amphibious assault. He asked if it were possible to configure it more like a guerilla operation. (p. 366) This was a harbinger of what was to come from the president, who clearly never liked the operation in the first place. Knowing this, those pushing the plan tried to convince Kennedy that the strike force would ignite a rebellion on the island, even though they knew that such was not the case. (p. 383) Newman writes that this manipulation was done so that JFK would not cancel the operation—the gamble being that he would feel obligated to send in the Pentagon once he saw the invasion faltering. This hidden agenda to the Bay of Pigs episode was pretty well established in 2008 by Jim Douglass in his fine book JFK and the Unspeakable.

At White House insistence, the location of the plan was moved away from Trinidad, 170 miles southeast of Havana, at the foothills of the Escambray Mountains. (p. 389) The reason for the switch was that Trinidad had a population of about 26,000 people. This decreased the odds of surprise and opened up the possibility of civilian casualties. Trinidad also did not have a proper length airfield for B-26 bombers. For these reasons, the locale was shifted to the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), east of the Zapata Peninsula. The CIA now went to work tailoring a plan for the new location.

There was a serious problem with these delays. The longer it took to launch the operation, the more time Castro had to import weaponry from the USSR. The arms supplies began arriving in earnest on March 15. After that, one or two ships would unload per day. (p. 392) At this point, both Esterline and Hawkins wanted to leave the project.

As the author notes, another important alteration was that the air cover and assaults were gradually whittled down in frequency and scope. This was owed to the reluctance of Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to reveal the hand of American involvement. The first Hawkins-Esterline plan featured well over one hundred sorties in five different waves. (p. 390) When Kennedy asked Bissell how long it would take for the invasion force to work its way off the beachhead, he replied about ten days. In light of what actually happened, this was absurd, since no beachhead was ever established to break out of.

As late as an April 4 meeting, Kennedy was still trying to argue for an infiltration plan. Inserting groups of 200-250 men and developing a build-up from there. Kennedy was trying to make it appear less as an invasion and more as an internal uprising. The CIA replied that this would only alert Castro, and each group would then be eliminated. (p. 394) The next day Kennedy asked assistant Arthur Schlesinger what he thought of the project. Schlesinger said he opposed it. He felt that Castro was too entrenched to be displaced by a single landing force. And if the landing did not cause uprisings, logic would dictate American intervention. The author notes the late date of this cogent observation: ten days before the launch from Central America. Newman also notes the fact that no one from the Pentagon pointed this out at the meeting; just as there was no real discussion of the air cover plan. Making it all the worse: Kennedy had instructed Bissell to tell the brigade leaders that no American military forces would participate or support the invasion in any way. (p. 393)

But further, Kennedy drastically cut back on the amount of air sorties he would allow. And this is what had Esterline and Hawkins ready to depart the project. (p. 396) As stated previously, they insisted there had to be five waves of air strikes and over 100 individual sorties. Kennedy and Rusk opposed this aspect. Newman blames the Joint Chiefs for not stepping in and pointing out the difference between the Esterline/Hawkins design and what was happening to it. The author, citing Bissell, now says that what was left was the strikes scheduled the day before, and also the D-Day air strikes. Newman, citing Bissell, says that Kennedy then cancelled the latter the day before they were scheduled. (pp. 399-400) I was surprised to see the author adopt this interpretation of the controversial issue. This is a point of dispute which I will delve into later.

The invasion was an utter failure and the battle was decided within the first 24 hours. There was no surprise. There were no defections. And in the first 24 hours there was no Allen Dulles. Bissell had encouraged him to keep a speaking engagement in Puerto Rico. Dulles did keep it. Newman makes an interesting observation about this. Dulles kept the engagement to give the appearance that the operation was really Bissell’s. Therefore, after the Navy saved the day, he should be forced to resign while Dulles kept his job. (p. 402)

What no one thought would happen did happen at midnight on April 18. Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and Navy Chief Arleigh Burke tried to convince the president that he must intervene. (p. 403) Kennedy turned down this last attempt to get him to commit American power into the failed beachhead. Dulles’ plan to overthrow Castro and save his position had failed.

Burke was relieved of duty in August of 1961. Later in the year, Dulles, Bissell and Cabell were also terminated. Lyman Lemnitzer was moved to NATO command and replaced by General Maxwell Taylor. In a conclusion, the author writes that after doing the research for this book, he has now downgraded his opinion about Eisenhower as a president. (pp. 404-405) After doing my own work on the man, I would have to agree. But I would make this judgment not just on foreign policy but also with civil rights. Eisenhower had some remarkably good circumstances accompanying his presidency; for instance, a growing economy, positive net trade balance in goods and services, a great military advantage over the USSR, and a unified populace behind him. In retrospect, he had a lot of political capital to make some daring decisions with, both abroad and on the domestic scene. For whatever reason, he chose not to. He passed those decisions on to his successor.

VI

I might as well begin the negative criticism with the subject of the Bay of Pigs. As the reader can see from my above synopsis, the author advocates for the stance put forth by Allen Dulles and Howard Hunt in their Fortune magazine article, saying that Kennedy cancelled the D-Day air strikes. (September, 1961, “Cuba: The Record Set Straight”) And that somehow this was the fatal blow delivered to the enterprise. (Newman, p. 400)

I would have thought that by now, this stance would have been discredited. In the penetrating report delivered by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, he poses the hypothetical: Let us assume that Castro’s air corps had been neutralized. That would have left about 1,500 troops on the beach against tens of thousands of Castro’s regular army, reinforced by a hundred thousand or more men in reserve. And the Russians had been delivering shiploads of artillery, mortars and tanks every day for over a month, the very weapons one uses to stop an amphibious invasion on the ground. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 41, 52. This book contains most of the Kirkpatrick Report and its appendixes.) What made this aspect even worse is something Newman barely mentions: the element of surprise. One reason Kennedy moved the operation out of Trinidad is that the area was too populated, which would mitigate against that element. The Zapata peninsula was sparsely populated and the CIA said there was no paramilitary patrol there. This turned out to be false. There was a police force at Playa Giron beach the night of the landing. (Kornbluh, p. 37) They alerted Havana. Castro had his troops, with armor and artillery, on the scene within ten hours. But it’s actually worse than that. Castro had so thoroughly penetrated the operation by his intelligence sources that he knew when the last ship left Guatemala. (Kornbluh, p. 321) Therefore, on high alert, he was literally waiting for the landing. To top if off, the other element that the CIA said would be important to the invasion’s success, mass defections from the populace, was non-existent. In fact, Castro later crowed about how even the small number of people on the scene had backed him against the exiles. (Kornbluh, pp. 321-22) Therefore, with no defections, no surprise, being massively outnumbered, and with mortars, tanks and artillery shelling the force on the beach, as Kirkpatrick wrote: What difference would it have made with or without Castro’s air corps in operation?

But I would further disagree with the author’s presentation. There is today an ample body of evidence that the so-called D-Day air strikes were not actually cancelled. They were contingent on being launched from an airfield on the island, which is one reason the Zapata Peninsula was chosen. Prior to the invasion, the CIA had agreed to this in their March 15^th outline of the plan. In fact, they mention the issue three times in that memo. (Kornbluh, pp. 125-27) Further, both the Kirkpatrick Report and the White House’s Taylor Report mention this stipulation. (Kornbluh, p. 262; Michael Morrisey, “Bay of Pigs Revisited”, The Fourth Decade, Vol. 1 No. 2, p. 20) In the latter, the report states that National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy explicitly told CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell that such would be the case. (p.23)

This speaks to another issue directly related to the alleged cancellation of the D-Day air strikes. Newman says that both Cabell and Bissell went to the office of Dean Rusk and pleaded their case for the strikes. Rusk was against it and he then got Kennedy on the line and he was also against it. This disagrees with both Dan Bohning’s book, The Castro Obsession, and Peter Kornbluh’s fine volume, Bay of Pigs Declassified. Both of those works say that Rusk offered to get Kennedy on the line, but the offer to talk to JFK in person was turned down. (Bohning, p. 48, Kornbluh p. 306) There is a good reason why Cabell would not want to talk to Kennedy about this subject. It comes from an unexpected source, namely Howard Hunt. In his book on the subject, Give Us this Day, he describes being at CIA headquarters monitoring the operation. He writes that Cabell actually stopped the D-Day strikes from lifting off. Cabell did so because he knew this was not part of the final plan! (Hunt, p. 196)

Newman’s source for much of this rather controversial material is Dick Bissell’s memoir, Reflections of a Cold Warrior. To put it mildly, between his role in the CIA/Mafia Castro plots and the Bay of Pigs—and his dissembling about both—one would think that any author would look at what Bissell had to say about those topics with an arched eyebrow. Larry Hancock, who is quite familiar with the Bay of Pigs, actually called Bissell an inveterate liar on the subject. For instance, he kept on lying to Esterline and Hawkins about his meetings with Kennedy and about the cutting down of the air strikes. He also told them that if there was too much cut back, he would abort the project. He did not. (e-mail communication with Hancock, 2/23/19)

If for some reason the author feels all of this information is wrong and Bissell was correct, then he should have at least acknowledged the discrepancy and explained why he felt such was the case.

But probably worse than this are the two chapters Newman devotes to Judith Exner, Sam Giancana and Kennedy. Before I read this book, I would have thought I would have never seen anything like that topic in a book penned by Newman, for the simple reason that he has almost always been circumspect about the sources he uses for his writing. What caused him to drop his guard on this topic is inexplicable to this reviewer. But whatever the reason, he did.

And he dropped it all the way down. He buys into just about everything Exner ever authored. To the point that he actually writes that the Church Committee allowed her to get away with lying to them. But that somehow, some way, she did tell the truth to—of all people—Seymour Hersh for his hatchet job on JFK, The Dark Side of Camelot. (p. 203) And I should add, it is not just Hersh. The author’s sources for these two chapters include people like Tony Summers on both Exner and Frank Sinatra, and Chuck Giancana on Sam Giancana. I don’t know how he missed the likes of Randy Taraborrelli and Sally Bedell Smith.

If one is going to buy Exner’s stories, one has to examine them in order and be complete about the inventory, or relatively so. The first time she ever spoke in public about her affair with JFK was in her book, My Story, published in 1977. That book was co-authored by Ovid Demaris, an experienced crime author who wrote a fawning book about J. Edgar Hoover called The Director. He also co-wrote a book called Jack Ruby, which pretty much takes the stance toward Oswald’s killer that the Warren Commission did. In that work, he also went out of his way to criticize the Warren Commission critics, like Mark Lane. So right from the beginning, one could at least find evidence that Exner was being used as a vehicle.

My Story was 300 pages long. Demaris was anti-JFK, and he made this clear in his own introduction. If Exner had anything significant to say beyond her Church Committee testimony, she had the opportunity and, in Demaris, the correct author to do it with. She did not. But eleven years later, she did. In a February 29, 1988 cover story for People magazine, Exner was now billed as “the link between JFK and the Mob.”

What did that title signify? Exner was now telling America that, since she knew both Giancana and Kennedy, they were using her as a messenger service for things like buying elections and also the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. But this was all done with Exner being unaware of what she was doing. Newman writes that Exner likely first talked about this in 1992 with talk show host Larry King. (Newman, p. 203) The author apparently never looked up this 1988 story. This allows him to miss some important aspects of the Exner saga.

There was another key point in the Exner tales. This came in 1997 with a double-barreled blast from both Liz Smith in Vanity Fair and Hersh in his hatchet job. All one needed to do is compare the installments for an internal analysis to see if they were consistent with each other. One easily finds out they are not. For instance, in 1977 Exner said the idea that she had an abortion was a lie spread about her by the FBI. She denies it in the most extreme terms. She actually said she wanted to kill the agent for slandering her. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 336) But in 1997, she now said she did have an abortion and beyond that, it was JFK who impregnated her. Major revisions like that should raise serious doubts in anyone’s mind about Exner and how she was being used.

But that’s not all. For People magazine, Exner said she was not cognizant of her role as a message carrier. She never bothered reading any of the messages between Giancana and Kennedy, or opening any of the containers. But as Michael O’Brien later wrote, this was contradicted in 1997 for Smith, to whom she said that Kennedy showed her what was in one of the large envelopes. Supposedly it was $250,000. Somehow, in 1983, she forgot about being shown that much money. (Washington Monthly, December 1999, p. 39)

There is another whopper in this trail of horse dung. In 1992, when asked by Larry King if Bobby Kennedy had anything to do with this message-carrying service or if she had any kind of relations with him at all, she said no she did not. Either Exner lost track of all the lies she told, or her handlers didn’t give a damn, because in 1997 this was reversed. Now she said that when she was at the White House having lunch with JFK, Bobby would come by and pinch her on the neck and ask if she was comfortable carrying those messages back and forth to Chicago for them. (Washington Monthly, p. 39)

If Newman had done his homework on this, he would have discovered just how and why the 1983 fantasy version started. Exner knew she could make money off her story. Contrary to what Newman writes, she ended up making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling her tall tales to the anti-Kennedy press. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 330) She was paid $50,000 to sit down with Kitty Kelley for the People story in 1983. (O’Brien, p. 40)

As biographer George Caprozi later revealed, the two did not get along at all. The problem was that Kelley kept on trying to pump Exner for information about Frank Sinatra. She was preparing one of her biographies about him at the time. Exner did not like this and so the two fought like cats and dogs. Nothing productive came out of the meetings. Since they had to pay both women, the editors decided that they themselves would pen the story. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 334) I should not have to ask Newman, or anyone reading this review, who owns People magazine. The purview of the cover story would come under the aegis of Time-Life. The people who hid the Zapruder film for eleven years; who edited the stills from the film so as not to reveal the head snap; the same people who, on February 21, 1964, placed a dubious photo of Oswald on their cover with the alleged weapons he used to kill Officer Tippit and JFK. In 1983, the time of the story’s publication, the principals were all dead: Sam Giancana, John Roselli and John F. Kennedy. With Exner bought off, the story was libel-proof.

Finally, to prove that Exner was being used as an anti-Kennedy vehicle, consider the Martin Underwood appendage to the saga. By 1997, Exner had gone hog-wild with her mythology. She now said she was carrying money and messages to Chicago from the White House and she would deliver them to a train station with Giancana waiting for her. This was so silly on its face that Hersh knew he needed a corroborating witness for it. So apparently, with help from Gus Russo, he tried to recruit Martin Underwood to accompany Exner in this film noir scenario. Underwood had worked for Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago and then did some advance work in 1960 for the Kennedy campaign. But the Exner follies now collapsed. Under questioning from the Assassination Records Review Board, Underwood would not go along with the scheme and said he knew nothing about such train travel or Judith Exner. (O’Brien, p. 40; see also “ Who is Gus Russo?”)

I could go on and on. But I think the above is enough to expose Judy Exner for what she was: a lying cuss. Someone who would sell her soul for money and tinsel to the likes of Hersh, Smith and Time-Life. She did not deserve one sentence in this book, let alone two chapters.

Let me make one final overall criticism. I have reviewed parts one and two of the series. Countdown to Darkness ends with the debacle at the Bay of Pigs. That took place in April of 1961. Kennedy had been in office for all of three months. I don’t have to tell the reader how long this series could be if the author keeps up this pace. The overall title of the series is The Assassination of President Kennedy. That is not what the series is really about. The book is really about the Kennedy administration. For instance, Volume 3, Into the Storm, features chapters on the association of the Kennedy administration with Martin Luther King. Unless the author is going to say the Klan killed Kennedy, I fail to see how that fits the overall rubric.

When I was talking about and reviewing Vincent Bugliosi’s elephantine Reclaiming History, I wrote that because something is bigger does not make it better. In my opinion, with an astute and sympathetic editor, these first two volumes could easily have been collapsed into one—with the Exner garbage completely cut. More does not automatically connote quality. Sometimes it’s just more. I had the same complaint about Doug Horne’s five volumes series. Our side does not have to compete with the late Vince Bugliosi to exhibit our knowledge or bona fides. This is a long way of saying that I really hope Newman contains himself, or finds a decent editor who he respects and will listen to. He should stop at five volumes.

There is a saying among actors: Sometimes, less is more.

SEE ALSO:
February 28, 2019

The Canadian Archives, Michele Metta, and the latest on Permindex

A review of

CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK

by Michele Metta

with two Appendices

In his book, Michele Metta has provided his readers with a glimpse into the world of Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). But along with that, the author gives us an insight into the politics of post-war Italy that is quite encompassing and incisive. It’s very clear that Italy was a hard target of American interests in the Cold War. With the help of some books published in Italy that would not normally be available to an Western audience, Metta takes us further into those attempts to control Italian politics.

Centro Mondiale Commerciale came to the attention of Jim Garrison’s investigation into John F. Kennedy’s assassination because Clay Shaw, the man he would accuse of participating in a plot to murder Kennedy, was a member of its board of directors. As more than one author had noted, that shadowy corporation had a rather curious background prior to opening in Rome amid much hoopla. They had previously been thrown out of Switzerland due to the controversial nature of some of its members, and also due to the mystery surrounding the company’s financial backing.

The charge made by Garrison against Shaw is one of the reasons why there is so much discussion on the internet about CMC, located in Rome Italy, and its associated company Permindex, located in Basel, Switzerland. The discussion has also included much unreliable and/or unverified information that is rooted in accusations made by Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) and David Copeland, aka William Torbitt, who wrote Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. This includes stories depicting Permindex as a front company operated by Montreal lawyer, Louis M. Bloomfield, from which Bloomfield supervised assassinations. These stories have been circulating for many decades and for some people these stories about Bloomfield and Permindex are considered as fact.

When I discovered that an Italian journalist, Michele Metta, had done research on CMC, I was hopeful. Finally, a study of this company that would not build on the falsehoods created by Larouche and Copeland, and instead would provide the reader with a narrative supported by actual evidence. What I found however, was a bit of both. Metta provides evidence that actually proves that Shaw was on the board of directors of CMC, that CMC member Ferenc Nagy was a CIA asset, and that another CMC member, Georges Mandel, aka Giorgio Mantello, was connected to Israeli intelligence. The author further describes connections between CMC and the notorious Italian organization, Propaganda Due (P2), that is linked to the “Strategy of Tension” that was responsible for a wave of bombings and violence in Italy. He also provides connections to persons involved in Kennedy’s assassination. But the book falls short in another aspect of its story. Metta attempts to link CMC to the “Strategy of Tension” and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although he makes some interesting connections in those regards, he does not really achieve his aim.

The book however does an excellent job at showing connections. Metta’s research links many members of CMC to Mussolini’s old fascist guard and neo-fascists associated with the “Strategy of Tension.” He does this by providing names of CMC members and then describing their personal histories. He demonstrates that these ardent cold warriors dreaded socialist and communist parties controlling the Italian government, and were prepared to go to great lengths, including violence, to stop them from achieving power. These are the same people who would also oppose Kennedy’s soft-on-communism foreign policy, including his conciliatory attitude towards leftists in the Italian government. These numerous right-wing connections to CMC make it apparent that it could be used as a vehicle for promoting subterfuge in Italian politics and perhaps even play a role in Kennedy’s assassination. But connections alone do not constitute proof. The fact that one person knows another, and that person is somehow connected to CMC is not proof that CMC played a role in the Dallas plot. These numerous right-wing connections, however, create a lot of suspicion about this company’s activities, a suspicion so great that it demands further investigation into its operations. It also shows that Garrison’s interest in the organization was merited and that later attempts to somehow demonstrate that this was all a KGB disinformation ploy are not founded. But more research is needed to provide the actual details of how CMC participated in Kennedy’s assassination. Metta does not provide this important evidence. For example, when he attempts to link the financing of the plot to Valerio Borghese and CMC, he offers only more connections, instead of how money went into CMC’s bank account and then out to the assassination team.

The author informs us of other events he tries to link to the members of the CMC: for example, interfering with President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980 and an assassination attempt on his life. He also tries to tie CMC to the assassination of Italian politician, Aldo Moro, in 1978. But again Metta offers only connections between people as proof that CMC played a role in these events.

Before examining his book in more detail, we must first examine the question mentioned earlier: why all the interest in CMC/Permindex, and why it has continued to be a topic of interest for Kennedy researchers for such a long time.

II

As previously stated, this interest in CMC began with Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. In his investigation he found out that Shaw, who had been the manager of the International Trade Mart (ITM) in New Orleans, had also served on the board of directors of CMC. To the casual observer, Shaw’s appointment made sense. CMC, like Permindex and the ITM, were both created to provide a showcase for goods produced by different companies. Given his many years of experience managing the ITM, he appears to have been a good candidate for work with CMC. But Garrison’s suspicions were raised when he discovered that Montreal lawyer, Louis M. Bloomfield, who he believed was a former member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, was a major stockholder in CMC.1 Garrison also indicated in his book that Le Devoir, a French-language Canadian newspaper, had published an article in 1967 that stated that Bloomfield had done espionage work for the United States government and was a major stockholder in Permindex.2 While I have yet to see credible evidence that Bloomfield was an OSS agent, Garrison was right about his suspicions regarding CMC. Once the public found out about them it was only a matter of time before stories, ever the more wild, began to circulate about both Permindex and Bloomfield. These accusations came to Bloomfield’s attention, and in a letter to I. G. Alk in 1979 he lamented:

There is an outfit calling itself the North American Labour Party run by some fellow called Larouche, apparently whose propaganda is not treated seriously, but whose propaganda accuses me and other prominent Canadians of all sorts of heinous crimes. (Exhibit 1 3 )

These attacks and the perceived damage to his reputation, along with other misinformation about him, were the probable reasons for his wife to ask Library and Archives Canada (LAC) not to release his papers to the public. The archive’s compliance with her wishes resulted in two lawsuits against them. (A discussion of these two lawsuits and a third one brought by me can be found in Appendix 1.)

Metta continues in this vein. He believes Bloomfield to be a stockholder in the companies and states that he founded Permindex. (p. 7) The evidence from LAC does not support these statements. He is not a direct shareholder nor a founder of Permindex. (A description of his actual role with these two companies can be found in Appendix 2.)

III

One of the insights I gained about the anti-Kennedy forces in Metta’s book is found in a pact made between Italian and American Freemasons against Kennedy, which included a member of CMC and the CIA. This is an important assertion, since it is implying that CMC is involved in an anti-Kennedy plot. It also shows a connection between a member of CMC’s board of directors and the CIA. (p. 10) This pact involved Dr. Gigliotti, who was a CIA agent, and was organized by Giuseppe Pièche. (p. 13) Pièche was a member of CMC’s board of directors. (p. 15) The purpose of this pact was to oppose Kennedy’s bid for the 1960 presidential election. In a letter from the Grand Master of the Freemasons, Enzio Milone, to the Christian Democratic Member of Parliament, Elio Rosati, dated September 24, 1960, he told them to:

… propagate as much as possible the protestant idea—influence Italian immigrants in the USA to vote against Kennedy … (p. 10.)

But is the pact subversive? To many people, including this reviewer, it looks like typical election politics: encouraging a certain ethnic group to vote a certain way. The fact that it stemmed from a foreign country, Italy, is also not that unusual.

Giuseppe Pièche, who organized the above-mentioned anti-Kennedy pact, also provides a link between CMC and far-right Italian politics. This connection is important because CMC has always been a suspicious entity, the suspicion being that the company owed its existence to a motive other than profit. And Metta does provide the reader with reasons to be suspicious. Pièche was a general in Mussolini’s army. If this isn’t enough of a fascist credential, Metta goes on to state that he and Mario Scelba “created and directed” the Servizio Antincendio [Fire Service]. He was assisted in the Fire Service by Edgardo Sogno who was connected to P2 and who later told the press that the Fire Service was a NATO organization linked to the Gladio network. (p. 13.4) The author also informs the reader that Pièche and Sogno created and ran an organization called “Pace e Libertà” [Peace and Freedom], which received funding from Allen Dulles. (pp. 14-15) These are credentials that should make any reader be wary. But then Metta makes a strained conclusion. He states that Pièche was a member of the CMC Board of Directors; that Antonio Trabuchi, who was present at the signing of the Freemasons’ pact, was a also a member of the government led by Fernando Tramboni, who wanted to make Italy into a dictatorship (pp. 9, 15); and finally, that Tramboni’s son-in-law, Franco Micucci Cecchi, was also a member of CMC (p. 15).

From these facts he concludes: “Therefore, there is ample evidence so far to sustain that CMC was behind the pact against JFK.” (p. 15) Yet, he has already told us that the pact against Kennedy was between American and Italian Freemasons. (p. 9) If CMC was the catalyst for the pact, he should have demonstrated how CMC’s board of directors had created and implemented it.

IV

Metta then introduces a new statement into his narrative. It is an assertion which is truly sinister, one that implies Freemason participation in Kennedy’s death. At a meeting of the Sacro Collegio del Rito [Sacred Panel of Rites] held on December 5, 1981, which Metta describes as “… the high assembly of top Italian Freemasons,” there were concerns about a document in the possession of Enzo Milone, whose letter described the anti-Kennedy pact of 1960 mentioned above. (p. 16)

At this meeting, Milone stated: “Everything happening [today] had its matrix in what occurred in 1962.” (p. 18) During this meeting, Franco Nataloni stated that: “If these papers were to get into the hands of the D.C. Tina ANSELMI, this could put all of us in trouble.” (p. 19)

The Freemasons had a good reason to be concerned about Tina Anselmi. She led an Italian government commission of inquiry that could connect Italian Freemasons to P2 and other subversive activities. (p. 9) Metta then reminds us that the statement regarding what happened in 1962 was after Kennedy was elected and was residing in the White House at the time, so it does not have anything to do with their pact to block his election to the presidency. He goes on to state: “Milone says 1962; when Kennedy is already in the White House, and to stop him means something else; it means things like Dallas.” (p. 18)

Is he implying that 1962 was the year that the Freemasons began their plot to assassinate Kennedy? It certainly seems like it because he mentions Dallas. But what actually did occur was a lot less sinister. The author also states: “Besides, in 1962 the plot against JFK started involving a key figure of the Italian Intelligence and Freemasonry: Giovanni De Lorenzo, an individual who was closely linked to the CMC …” ( p. 24)

But the plot was not an assassination plot; it was a five-point plan to oppose left-wing parties in Italy. These are enumerated by Metta (pp. 34-35):

Point 1. Program diverse actions for possible emergency situations.
Point 2. Intensify finances to the forces which oppose the political swing [to the left].
Point 3. Support single leaders in the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and political lobbies willing to rally around the new President of the Republic Antonio Segni (Segni, like Gronchi before him, placed full trust in General De Lorenzo), who did not like the party’s opening to the left.
Point 4. Support any action which seeks to weaken the structure of the Socialist Party and favor any kind of internal split.
Point 5. Strengthen voices in the media who are able to influence public opinion in the field of economics and politics.

As can be seen, this was a plan to disrupt the attempt being made by left-wing parties to gain the confidence of Italian voters. As David Talbot mentioned in his book on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, Kennedy thought that the ruling party in Italy, the Christian Democrats, should open itself up to the Socialists. This “plot against Kennedy” thus was in opposition to “l’apertura a sinistra”, the opening to the left that Kennedy would propose on a trip to Rome the next year. (Talbot, p. 464)

V

Metta does however create some suspicion about CMC’s connections to the Masonic Lodge P2. P2 was, according to the author, linked to the “Strategy of Tension,” which was responsible for much violence in Italy, including the Bologna railway station massacre that killed 85 people and injured over 200 people in 1980. The goal of these attacks was to terrorize the Italian public into accepting an authoritarian government. (p. 21) Led by Licio Gelli and financier Michele Sindona, P2 was declared by the Anselmi Commission to be a criminal organization. P2 was a remarkably dangerous and secret society. Their influence extended beyond Italy, as far away as Argentina. As a result of the Anselmi Commission, it was eventually outlawed.

Metta believes that the P2 lodge and CMC were so closely linked that: “In fact, we are now about to discover in how many infinite ways the CMC is indistinguishable from the Masonic Lodge P2 …”(p. 21)

The evidence he cites to connect CMC to P2 is a company called IAHC, which was a subsidiary of CMC. (p. 21) He then tells us that its board of directors meetings were held at the office of Roberto Ascarelli, whom he also links to Licio Gelli, found guilty of the Bologna massacre. (pp. 21-22) Anselmi’s commission stated that P2 also met at Ascarelli’s office. (ibid)

This is important evidence. It certainly creates a link between P2 and CMC’s subsidiary IAHC, and therefore to CMC itself. Sharing the same offices is similar to the situation Lee Harvey Oswald found himself in, sharing office space with Guy Banister at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. But while this is evidence of possible collaboration between CMC and P2 through its subsidiary, IAHC, it does not prove conclusively that CMC is indistinguishable from P2. Metta is relying on a connection, and while that is important, it does not tell the reader what subversive activities IAHC participated in. Although this is definitely a step forward in describing CMC, more research is needed to show how IAHC participated in P2 operations and how it participated in the Dallas plot.

VI

Metta also tries to explain to the reader another aspect of the assassination plot; how it was financed. His attempt to link Valerio Borghese to the Dallas plot gets mired in a large number of connections. It does create suspicion that certainly warrants further research, but does not prove that CMC was somehow connected to Kennedy’s murder.

Borghese was a naval officer under Mussolini. After the war he was rescued and then mentored by James Angleton. Nicknamed the Black Prince, he became a hardline fascist political figure in postwar Italy. He took part in an attempted coup in 1970. After it failed, he fled to Spain where he lived out the last years of his life.

Metta introduces the reader to a bank called Credito commerciale e industriale, which is abbreviated to Credicomin. Credicomin was bought by a company called Società finanziara italiana (SFI). On the board of directors of SFI is a man named Antonio Covo, whose brother-in-law is Giovanni Gronchi, who is linked to CMC members, (p. 47). He then tells us that Credicomin came into the hands of Ramfis Trujillo (p. 50), the son of Rafael Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic. Borghese then became Credicomin’s president and Trujillo deposited 10 billion lira into Credicomin. This money promptly disappeared. (p. 50) He also adds to the mix the story Gerry Hemming gave to a newspaper in 2005, in which he said that Ramfis Trujillo and Johnny Abbes Garcia, Rafael Trujillo’s former intelligence director who tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, met in Haiti in February 1963 to finance Kennedy’s assassination. (p. 49) He also mentions that the telephone number of Marcella Borghese, a cousin of Valerio Borghese, was found in Clay Shaw’s telephone book. (p. 50)

Though some have doubts about Hemming, if this is all accurate, it does look sinister. Shaw, the accused Kennedy plotter, knows Borghese’s cousin. Money is disappearing from a bank controlled by Ramfis Trujillo, who Hemming accused of meeting in Haiti to finance the Dallas plot. These are certainly interesting links; but there is a problem. Metta does not tell us how CMC participated in the financing of the assassination. Yes, Shaw was on CMC’s board of directors and Gronchi is connected to CMC, but what exactly did CMC do to facilitate the financing of Kennedy’s murder? These connections between SFI, Credicomin, Borghese, Trujillo and Shaw also do more to implicate Credicomin than CMC in Kennedy’s assassination, because money disappeared from a Credicomin bank account, not from CMC’s bank account.

VII

Metta does however produce real evidence that links CMC to the CIA. Here he provides a document from which the following facts emerge: Dr. Ferenc Nagy, President of Permindex, had asked the CIA to place an American businessman on the board of Permindex and also that a CIA agent be placed on the staff of Permindex. Nagy then goes further. He even asks CIA to invest money in Permindex so that it can have input into the management of the company. (p. 87 fn. and p. 88, Exhibit 2 5) 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. This evidence is further corroborated by a document provided by Metta that shows that CIA asset Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’s board of directors.6

Metta establishes another link between CMC and an intelligence agency. Georges Mandel, aka Giorgio Mantello, a member of CMC, was connected to the Israeli Intelligence Service (ILS). Quoting a CIA memorandum, the author states: “ … at Point 5, makes a very detailed but also formidable revelation: witnesses identified Georges Mandel alias Giorgio Mantello, as belonging to the Israeli spy network.” (p. 114) He also informs us that he was employed by the Banque Pour le Commerce Suisse-Amérique Centrale in Geneva that hired ILS agents. (p. 114)

There are now three persons linked to Permindex and CMC—Nagy, Shaw and Mandel—who have or had intelligence connections. It is getting harder to believe that this company’s only purpose was commercial. But once again it must be said that these intelligence connections alone do not support Metta’s theory that CMC played a role in the Dallas plot. What is needed is evidence that the intelligence assets used CMC as a conduit to carry out the plot.

VIII

In his narrative Metta tries to link the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) to Kennedy’s murder and CMC. The challenge here is to see if he offers proof that the OAS, the same organization that was behind assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle, was involved in Kennedy’s murder, and then connect the dots to CMC.

He does offer some proof about a possible OAS involvement in the Dallas plot. He provides the reader with the contents of a CIA memorandum which states that Jean Souetre was:

… in Fort Worth the morning on 22 November and in Dallas in the afternoon. (p.128)

The memorandum also states that Souetre: “… is believed to be identical with a Captain who is a deserter from the French army and an activist in the OAS.”

He then presents us with more incriminating information. He reminds us that Fernando Tamborini, who was linked to the masonic pact against Kennedy and whose son-in-law, Franco Micucci Cecchi, was a member of CMC, had a “special office” that was, quoting SISMI papers: “… probably, also the headquarters for OAS activities in Italy (at least at the high level).” (p. 131)

The Souetre presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963 has always been fascinating, for more than one reason. For instance, the OAS had been bitterly opposed to Kennedy since 1957, when he advocated for Algerian independence. Metta does make a connection between the OAS and Tamborini, but this connection is attenuated because the SISMI paper qualifies the identification of Tamborini’s office with “probably”. He then attempts to connect the OAS to CMC using Tamborini’s son-in-law but does not provide evidence to show how Cecchi involved CMC in the Dallas plot. Again, this is new and interesting evidence, but it does not go as far as it should in the details.

IX

Connections, connections, connections; this is the core of Metta’s book. He attempts to show that a myriad of connections between the far-right of Italian politics, the CIA, Israeli intelligence and CMC all came together to plot and carry out the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The author even states after describing still more connections between members of CMC and various right-wing personalities: “Yes, for the umpteenth time, everything is connected.” (p. 139)

But connections are a double-edged sword. Connections can draw the attention of the reader to important relationships between members of the CMC and fascists, and perhaps even to the Dallas plot because the likely suspects were members of the far-right. But connections alone are not enough, because they do not show the crucial details of how Kennedy was murdered: who gave the orders, how the plot was organized, how the snipers were recruited, and what role CMC played in this tragic event.

Metta does make an interesting connection between the P2 and CMC subsidiary IAHC, but this needs more work because he does not tell the reader what subversive activities it was involved in.

He also fails to show the reader how CMC was used as a conduit in the Dallas plot. For example, he attempts to link the financing of the assassination to Borghese, Trujillo, Credicomin, Shaw and CMC, but here again we have that double-edged sword. These connections are interesting: missing money, Shaw on the board of directors of CMC and Shaw with Borghese’s cousin’s telephone number. But he does not show how the money went from Credicomin’s bank account to CMC’s bank account and from there to the actual plotters. These connections do raise suspicions, and they should be investigated further. But by themselves they do not prove that CMC acted as financier for the Dallas plot.

He also provides evidence to establish that there were at least three people, Nagy, Shaw and Mandel, who were connected to intelligence agencies. This is important because it confirms the suspicions of the newspaper Paesa Sera that there was more to CMC than just providing exhibition space for companies to sell their products.

Metta also includes CMC links to events that occurred after the assassination. He attempts to connect CMC to election meddling by participating in a plot to scandalize President Carter’s brother and to an attempt on Jimmy Carter’s life. He also tries to connect CMC to the murder of Aldo Moro, but CMC’s alleged role in these two events does not inform us about the events of 1963 in Dallas.

Metta’s book also has a problem with its format: the book does not have an index. This creates a lot of difficulty for the reader because so much of what the author writes about is connections. Attempting to follow the histories of different persons mentioned in his book is difficult without knowing on which pages a person is mentioned. This requires the reader to re-read whole sections of the book to locate information about an individual and this is frustrating. Particularly for a reviewer. Hopefully, this will be improved in a later edition.

Appendix 1: The Bloomfield Papers Law Suits

In 1978, Montreal attorney Louis M. Bloomfield donated his personal papers to Library and Archives Canada (LAC). His papers contained a wide variety of items, including a large number of his letters, articles and manuscripts written by him, including photographs. A complete list of what he donated to LAC can be found in the archives finding aid. (Exhibit 3)7 When he donated his papers to LAC he stipulated that all items donated by him were to be released to the public, without any restrictions whatsoever, 20 years after his death. In the intervening years, between the time of his death and the papers’ release date, his wife, Mrs. Justine Cartier, now remarried, would act as literary executrix. Her control of the documents would cease 20 years after his death.

In 1984, while on a trip to Israel, Bloomfield passed on. In 2004, Maurice Philipps, author of a book about Kennedy’s assassination called De Dallas à Montréal, asked LAC to grant him access to Bloomfield’s papers. According to his will, this should have been done automatically because 20 years had elapsed since his death. The archives consulted with Bloomfield’s widow and asked her about granting Philipps access to her husband’s papers. She told them to deny Philipps access. The archives complied with her wishes, even though her request contravened her husband’s stipulation. Philipps, after being informed that he could not access Bloomfield’s papers, asked the Federal Court of Canada to review the archive’s decision to not allow him to review Bloomfield’s papers. In 2006 the Court ruled in Philipps’ favour and ordered LAC to review their decision.8

In 2007, after consulting with Mrs. Cartier, the archives made a decision to release some of Bloomfield’s papers, and to hold others back. The papers that were held back were those deemed by LAC to be subject to “solicitor-client privilege” (SCP). This was due to Bloomfield’s status as a lawyer, and they would therefore be released 50 years after the last date in the file in which those papers were contained. The archives created a document that listed all items in the Bloomfield papers and indicated which ones were open for public review and which ones would only be released when the documents were 50 years old. (Exhibit 4) Philipps appealed this decision and asked that all files be released immediately. This time the Court ruled in favour of the archives. Their decision to hold certain files back for 50 years would stand.9

As a result of his actions, Philipps was finally able to review some of Bloomfield’s papers. He created a website called “I Have Some Secrets for You” in which he provided copies of letters written by Bloomfield in regard to his work with Permindex. Philipps discovered some interesting communications in this first release, specifically between Bloomfield, Permindex and David Rockefeller. Apparently, Ferenc Nagy was trying to solicit funds for Permindex from one of the richest men in America. There was also a CIA connection since Nagy had invited the Agency to use this new company in Rome for any purposes it wished. There is more, as the reader can see by clicking through to his web site.

I began my own research into Bloomfield’s papers in 2012. The examination began with those files that were already open and then continued with those papers that could only be reviewed after they were 50 years old. This required me to return to LAC as different papers, which had reached 50 years of age, were opened by LAC for review by the public. I accessed them on a number of occasions, and as late as 2017 had been granted access to them. In January 2018, I asked for those papers that were now available for review and was told by the archives that they could not be viewed by the public. The reason given by LAC was that those files were considered to be covered by SCP. In an email from Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, he stated that it was not Mr. Bloomfield’s prerogative to donate his legal papers to the archives because SCP protects communications between a lawyer and his client from being divulged to the public. In response to this decision by LAC to not release his papers to me I submitted an “Application for Judicial Review” to the Federal Court of Canada asking the Court to review the archive’s decision.10 In my case I argued that Bloomfield’s papers were not subject to SCP because they did not meet the legal test for privilege that can be found in Canadian case law. The archive agreed to do a second review of those files they deemed to be subject to SCP. They subsequently released over 2,000 documents to me and held back just 69 documents. The archives also agreed to update the access forms on their website so future researchers would be aware that, except for the 69 documents held back by them, his papers can now be accessed without waiting for them to reach 50 years of age.

But what would cause the archives, after two previous court cases, to again try to block public access to Bloomfield’s papers? I do not have a definite answer to this question but do have a theory. The most likely cause of this problem was the October 2017 release of Kennedy assassination documents as stipulated by the Assassination Records Review Board in Washington. The release of these documents is rooted in the decision by the United States government, taken in the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, to declassify all documents pertaining to Kennedy’s murder in 25 years. Therefore all documents were to be released in 2017. When the time came for the documents to be open to the public, the media was full of stories about the releases. I was still able to access Bloomfield’s documents as late as November 2017, but with all of the media attention given to the JFK documents release, a decision was made to block access to them. The reason for blocking access to them, using the excuse that they were subject to SCP, was most likely caused by all of the media hoopla in America.

II

On December 18, 2018, LAC released to me over 2,000 documents previously deemed subject to SCP. These files had been reviewed by the archives and deemed to be not subject to SCP. Only 69 documents from the Bloomfield papers were not released because LAC claims they are subject to SCP. A list of Bloomfield’s correspondence that will not be released is in Exhibit 5.

A review of the papers that were released did not reveal anything new. The documents found there were the same ones that had previously been considered subject to SCP and held back for 50 years, and these I had reviewed on a number of occasions since 2012. The papers released in 2018 are comprised of letters and cablegrams from Bloomfield to his business associates and other personal contacts. The fact that interesting connections were found but nothing incriminating is not surprising because it appears that Bloomfield was not actually a shareholder in either Permindex or Centro Mondiale Commerciale. His role with these two companies was to protect the interests of certain other shareholders who may have been from the class of the Power Elite. If he had dealings with Director Clay Shaw, or was aware of the company’s intelligence connections, he did not include these documents with the papers he donated to the archives. A review of the correspondence in Exhibit 5 also reveals that important Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commericale figures such as Georges Mantello, Joseph Slifka, Hans Seligman and others, do not appear as recipients on the list of 69 documents that will not be released.

Appendix 2: Bloomfield’s Role in Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commerciale

For a long time Bloomfield has been the object of suspicion on many internet forums, and also in some books. Some have insinuated he was the mastermind behind the creation of Permindex, which has allegedly organized a few assassinations. These rumours began during the Jim Garrison investigation. Garrison had been given articles written about Permindex by writers like Ralph Schoenmann and the late Paris Flammonde. But Garrison, for whatever reasons, never brought this information up at the trial of Clay Shaw. After the acquittal of Shaw, a man named David Copeland, using the alias of William Torbitt, wrote a pamphlet called Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. This pamphlet began to circulate widely in the research community. And it was here, for the first time, that both Bloomfield and Permindex were accused of being part of the JFK assassination. In fact, the very first chapter of the pamphlet focuses on Permindex and names Bloomfield as the top supervisor of the plot. As Jim DiEugenio, in his book Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition notes, there are many, many scholarly problems with this pamphlet, one being that its few references do not check out.

Years later, in 1981, Lyndon Larouche—in an issue of Executive Intelligence Review written by Jeffery Steinberg and Peter Goldman—published at length about Permindex. Again, Bloomfield was a central focus of that long essay. For the most part, author Michele Metta thankfully does not go that far. He does not accuse Bloomfield of being the leader of an assassination team, but the evidence does indicate that he made some skewed assumptions about Bloomfield’s role with Permindex. He also raises some suspicions about him because he corresponded with the late George H. W. Bush.

In his book, he states that Bloomfield was the founder of Permindex. But he does not supply a source for the statement. Without evidence from the author to support it, we need to look to the Bloomfield papers for an answer. What does Bloomfield have to say about his relationship to Permindex?

In a letter from Bloomfield to J. Metzger dated April 8, 1960, he informs him: “…I am not the Treasurer of Permindex but am acting solely in the capacity of lawyer for certain shareholders.” (Exhibit 6 11 ) Who these shareholders are, he does not tell us, but we now know he is stating that he is not an investor in Permindex.

In a letter to Enrico Mantello dated January 21, 1960 he writes: “I would have never undertaken this job if I had not been assured of your cooperation.” (Exhibit 7 12 ) Those are not the words of a founder, they are a statement being made by a representative.

In a letter to Tibor Rosenbaum dated July 12 1961, Bloomfield discusses ownership positions in a syndicate created to buy the shares of a development called Marina Reale (Exhibit 8 13 ):

… so the position today…

George Mantello	25%
Enrico Mantello (and Tim Fales)	25%
Dov Biegun	10%
Joseph Slifka	15%
L.M. Bloomfield (in trust for clients)	10%
Max and Moe Pascal	7 ½%
Nate Dolin	7 ½%
Total	100%.

Again it appears from the evidence that Bloomfield is acting on his client’s behalf and does not have a financial stake in Marina Reale.

Metta also tries to raise suspicion about Bloomfield’s correspondence with George H. W. Bush, a director of the CIA, who later became both Vice President and President of the United States. His cites as evidence Bloomfield’s connection to Bush, the implication being that since they knew each other, there must be wrong-doing here. He also states that the correspondence between Bloomfield and Bush has been blocked from public access. This is not accurate today. The files are available for public review because LAC only blocked access to those files that they deemed to be subject to SCP. Given that Bloomfield was not Bush’s lawyer, their correspondence is open for review. He also states that the correspondence is “dense”, suggesting that they exchanged many letters. (p.110.) This writer could find only 18 items in Bush’s file and they do not discuss Permindex or CMC, or conspiratorial matters. All of these items can be found in Exhibit 9.14 This does not mean that we can automatically excuse President Bush, or Bloomfield for that matter. It is simply stating that the evidence is not there in these files.

A question that must also be posed is why Larouche and Copeland would accuse Bloomfield of such major crimes. In Copeland’s case the reason seems to be to simply obfuscate the Kennedy case. At the early date he began to circulate his pamphlet, very little was known about Permindex or the CMC. Thus the field was wide open to attribute all kinds of illicit actions to those bodies. A review of available literature can provide some insights into Larouche’s motivation. His organization and much of his writing tends to accuse the United Kingdom for many international problems. It is not an exaggeration to say that, to the editors of Executive Intelligence Review, Great Britain is the locus of much of the evil in the world. In the 1981 article we mentioned earlier, the authors attempted to connect Bloomfield to the legendary Canadian/British intelligence officer William Stephenson. In 1940, Winston Churchill sent Stephenson to New York as the chief of British Security Coordination. He was also the chief liaison to American intelligence during that conflict. His office was located in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. There is no evidence in Bloomfield’s war file that he worked with Stephenson; his correspondence, however, indicates that he may have known Stephenson in the 1950s. (Exhibit 10)15 Bloomfield felt that there was also a tinge of anti-Semitism in these accusations. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League had written that, “The LaRouche operation has been marked since 1978 by continuous emanations of anti-Semitism. Its publications single out prominent Jews, Jewish families, and Jewish organizations for particular abuse.”16

Bloomfield was affected by this anti-Semitic campaign because only a year later, in 1979, in a letter to I. G. Alk, he told him what Larouche was saying about him and other prominent Canadians. (Exhibit 1)

Exhibits

Exhibit 1 – Bloomfield letter to I. G. Alk

Exhibit 2 – Nagy asks CIA to make Permindex a CIA front company

Exhibit 3 – Bloomfield collection finding aid

Exhibit 4 – Bloomfield collection file release dates

Exhibit 5 – Bloomfield collection files not released by Library and Archives Canada

Exhibit 6 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

Exhibit 7 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

Exhibit 8 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

Exhibit 9 – Bloomfield Bush Correspondence

Exhibit 10 – Bloomfield connection to William Stephenson

Notes

1 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, Warner Books Edition, New York 1991, p. 101.

2 Garrison, p. 102.

3 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 29 File 16, General Business Correspondence 1979.

4 Gladio in Italy was part of a larger group of secret armies under the command of NATO that operated in different countries using different names. In Denmark it was called “Absalon”, in Norway it was called “ROC” and in Belgium it was called ‘SDRA8.” They were set up by the CIA and MI-6, and their job was to act as a stay-behind orce that would operate in countries that might be occupied by the Soviets after an invasion of Western Europe. Their objective was to help local resistance movements in occupied territories, evacuating pilots who were shot down and sabotaging enemy supply lines. This network was modeled on the British Special Operations Executive that sent soldiers behind enemy lines during World War II to fight a secret war. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, London 2005, pp. 1-2.

5 Metta’s source for this document is CIA. HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, (microfilm—reel 17: Ruiz-Webster), Memorandum: Subject—Trace results on persons connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale (World Trade Center). NARA Record Number: 104-10181-10114. The document in exhibit 2 was sourced from The Black Vault website.

6 On p. 8 of Metta’s book is a link to a website that contains documents provided by the author. One of the documents shows that Clay Shaw was on CMC’s board of directors.

7 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG31-E25.

8 Philipps v. Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Date: 2006-11-14, File numbers: T-1517-05. A copy of the Court’s decision, including the facts of Philipps’ case and legal issues can be found on the Federal Court’s website.

9 Philipps v. Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Date: 2008-09-16, File numbers: T-1192-07. A copy of the Court’s

decision, including the facts of Philipps’ case and legal issues can be found on the Federal Court’s website.

10 John Kowalski v. Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, File numbers: T-381-18. While documents have been released, the facts of this case and legal issues has not been published on the Court’s website.

11 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 1, Letter Book 14, 1960.

12 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 1, Letter Book 14, 1960.

13 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 3, Letter Book 16 1960-1961.

14 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Bush, George (Sr.)—Correspondence 1976-1984, Container 16, file 1.

15 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 19, File 1, Letter Book 3, 1953-1954.

16 The LaRouche Political Cult: Packaging Extremism A case study, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York, Spring 1986, p.2.

February 8, 2019

The Murder of Hammarskjold
For a long time this site has tried to point out that the Congo struggle was one of the most important, yet underreported, foreign policy episodes that took place during the Kennedy administration. Sloughed off by the likes of MSM toady David Halberstam, it took writers like Jonathan Kwitny and Richard Mahoney to actually understand the huge stakes that were on the table in that conflict, namely European imperialism vs African nationalism. Kennedy had radically revised America’s Congo policy from Dwight Eisenhower to favor the latter. Not knowing he was dead, JFK was trying to support Congo’s democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba. JFK was also one of the few Western leaders trying to help UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold stop the Europeans from crushing Congo’s newly won independence.

In September of 1961, just eight months after Lumumba was murdered, Hammarskjold died in a plane crash. It was officially ruled an accident. But there were doubts from the beginning. For example, Harry Truman told the New York Times, that Hammarskjold was on the verge of getting something done “when they killed him.” It now turns out that Kennedy’s ambassador to Congo, Edmund Gullion, also suspected Hammarskjold’s plane was shot down. And he suspected it the night it happened. This key fact was not revealed for fifty years.

Below we link to three stories in the press of late that have finally circulated about the true circumstances of what happened to the Secretary General, the man who Kennedy called, “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.”
It is nice that the MSM is finally catching up to what we wrote about 20 years ago in Probe Magazine. In particular:
- Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa
- Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold
In the first of these two articles, Jim DiEugenio lays out the overall struggle of Kennedy and Hammarskjold to keep Congo free and united against the imperial forces of Belgium and England. In the second, Lisa Pease examines the murders of Lumumba and Hammarskjold within eight months of each other. Those assassinations left Kennedy standing alone. When he was killed, the imperialists triumphed.

During the ensuing decade, CTKA continued to focus on this important story, again underscoring the links between Kennedy and Hammarskjold, but now reinforced by the work of historian Greg Poulgrain with regard to their cooperation over Indonesia. See:
- Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs. The Power Elite
Finally, two decades later, the MSM is acknowledging that work. We don’t like to toot our own horn, but … Honk! Honk!
January 23, 2019
The Past American Century

Mike Swanson has inaugurated a new website, The Past American Century, to host materials on the JFK assassination and other topics.

Check out this recent video on the Schlesinger memo from June, 1961 about eliminating/restructuring the CIA.

November 20, 2018
Kennedy and Indochina

(Click here to open in a new page.)

November 8, 2018
Major Ralph P. Ganis, The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK

I

When I heard that a previously undiscovered collection of personal correspondences from SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny had recently surfaced, I was truly interested. Besides his famous exploits in WWII, including the daring mountaintop rescue of Benito Mussolini and the kidnapping of Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy’s son from his Bucharest palace, Skorzeny was infamous for his postwar dealings with a number of intelligence agencies the world over. As a child, my grandfather, Marcel, a French resistance fighter, used to tell me stories of Otto’s exploits during car rides. I thought I was in for a real treat when I found this book. That Skorzeny could have had a hand on the team that killed President Kennedy was also an interesting hook.

The subtitle of this book is “Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK,” and therein lies its true problem: if by evidence we are referring to clear-cut forensics, incriminating memos, newly declassified documents, newly discovered tapes, or reliable eyewitness testimonies that place Skorzeny either at the scene or in a position directly responsible for the assassination of JFK, then we have little to no “evidence” to justify the book’s subtitle. What the author of the book, Major Ralph Ganis, USAF (retired) seems to suggest is largely tangential to the actionable plot that took Kennedy’s life; that is, Skorzeny, from his position in Madrid as a jack of all trades with ties to postwar Nazis, Texas oil moguls, the Mossad, and French intelligence operatives, could have been a link in a long and winding chain of figures who eventually connected to those who executed the crime of the century. And yet, as we will see, even that supposition is largely based on fantastical leaps of logic, a primary source base that we are never allowed to verify—or see a picture of, or direct reference to—and a conclusion that is not only ridiculous but insulting to the JFK research community.

Dick Russell, who wrote the introduction to The Skorzeny Papers, rightly claims that the book provides a “chronological tracing of the dark alliances that sheds fresh light on how long-suspicious CIA officials like William Harvey and James Angleton wove Otto Skorzeny into their tangled web, or vice versa.” I will give Ganis and Russell that—most of the book is largely this, an extremely dry, almost colorless list of dozens and dozens of figures who were responsible for placing Skorzeny in a secure position from which to run his operations after the war: within only a few pages in chapter seven we have “Enter Major General Lyman L. Lemnitzer and the NATO Link,” “Enter Clifford Forster,” “Enter Don Isaac Levine.” I like to think I have a pretty good memory, but the sheer volume of second- and third-string players in this book is bewildering, with connections seemingly drawn from any and all personnel affiliated with anything remotely clandestine, few of which are ever revisited, and none of which seem truly important given the book’s central thesis, which is that Otto Skorzeny was somehow a key aspect of the Kennedy assassination.

The so-called “Skorzeny Papers,” which Ganis acquired through an American auction house bid in 2012, are alleged correspondences between Skorzeny and some of these underworld and intelligence-based figures, along with letters to his wife, who aided him in his dirty work to some degree. “As the story goes, many of the papers were burned over time, but a fragmentary grouping of documents (the ones used for the research in this book) survived. The archive ranges from 1947 to around the period of Skorzeny’s death.” (xv).

But since we are not allowed to view them or translate them from the German ourselves, we must take the author’s word that they are not mistranslated or even fraudulent.

Ganis begins his book’s preface with a bold proclamation: “Why was President John F. Kennedy killed and who carried it out? All of the investigations, commissions, and academic works have not answered these questions. This book integrated startling new information that does resolve the mystery.” (p. xxi) Let’s unpack that for a moment. Not all commissions are equal. The Warren Commission is not the same as Jim Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw, the HSCA, or the later ARRB. The latter three found quite compelling evidence that a domestic intelligence outfit indeed murdered JFK. The former was staffed by Allen Dulles and was essentially a disinformation campaign whose objective was to obfuscate the truth and put the story to bed for the nightly news, which had also been compromised through the Central Intelligence Agency’s media liaisons. As much has been exhaustively detailed in scholarly works, from John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, to Jim DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, to Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable. That we cannot say with certainty who pulled the trigger on the fatal shot so vividly captured in the Zapruder film is ultimately inconsequential; for all intents and purposes, given the time elapsed since that fateful November afternoon fifty-five years ago, we do have a clear picture of the likely suspects behind the plot’s orchestration, along with compelling motives for why JFK was targeted. Bold claims like Ganis’s require even bolder evidence, and to open with a whopper like that, one would presume that Skorzeny’s purported personal papers contain something akin to the map of Dealey Plaza’s sewer system that investigators found in Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha Smith’s apartment, or a handwritten “thank you” note from James Angleton after the Warren Commission had ended for services Skorzeny rendered to the CIA. And yet not only is Otto Skorzeny himself only a tangential part of a book entitled The Skorzeny Papers, but the “evidence for the plot to kill JFK” is awkwardly squeezed into the last two pages of a 346-page work, with a final revelation that made me both angry for investing hours of my life reading the tome, and confused as to how an author with a true breadth of working knowledge about postwar intelligence networks could presume so myopic an assassination motive.

II

Otto Skorzeny was an Austrian by birth who joined the Nazi party somewhat reluctantly, mainly as a way to make a living as the outbreak of the Second World War ramped up in the late 1930s. A mechanic by trade, and a semi-professional fencer, his notorious scar across his face from a missed parry and his 6’4 stature made him something of an icon in the German army. Skorzeny was known for his fearlessness, guile and unconventional approach to commando warfare. As he once said in a postwar interview, “My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy’s cheek, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in.” (Charles Whiting, Skorzeny, 1972, p. 17) In many ways, his belief that small units could actually move world history in a similar or even greater fashion than regiments and divisions was affirmed after his thirty-man glider-borne SS unit spirited away Mussolini from the Gran Sasso Hotel with not even a single shot fired. Even Winston Churchill heaped praise on him for his bravery in the face of incredible odds.

Rearranging signposts during The Battle of the Bulge, his commandos, who wore captured American uniforms and spoke fluent English with almost no accent, attempted to sow chaos behind Allied lines, seeking to misdirect troops and armored units away from key areas. While the entire Wacht am Rhein [“Watch Along the Rhine”] operation, which was the German code name for Hitler’s last desperate gamble to capture the Belgian port of Antwerp and cut the British and American forces in two, was ultimately a futile dying gasp of an already-defeated Nazi war machine, it proved so devastating to Allied morale (and killed 75,000 Americans) that some planners did reconsider whether the war would be over any time soon. And when a handful of Skorzeny’s men were captured in their false uniforms during that bitterly cold winter of 1945, panic spread throughout SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force), leading to a comical scene in which General Eisenhower frantically argued with his staff who insisted he station twenty guards with sub machine guns around his Paris office at all times in case Skorzeny tried to kill or abduct him. In the middle of the night, the future Director of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s aide-de-camp, ran out with his staff in pajamas and started firing his carbine into the brush just beyond the headquarters’ window.

He and his men later found the dead cat that had been scurrying about in the dark, but the legend of Otto Skorzeny had taken hold.

Dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Skorzeny finally surrendered to the Allies in occupied Germany, after seeing the futility of carrying out Hitler’s final order for his “werewolves” to continue the war after the end of hostilities. He was summarily booked and processed, and awaited trial for his role as a top Nazi official and a one-time personal bodyguard of Adolf Hitler. He was later approached by OSS officers as he languished in his holding cell at Darmstadt Prison and it is from this first contact that Ganis believes the true exploits of Skorzeny began. While stories differ as to the mechanics of his escape—Skorzeny claimed in his memoirs that he stole away in the trunk of a car and had a German driver unwittingly smuggle him through the checkpoints; while Arnold Silver, his American point of contact and debriefer said he was released on official terms—he nonetheless was a free man by 1948. After relocating to Paris, where he was unofficially used as a conduit through which CIA officials could monitor communist activity in postwar Europe, Skorzeny was quickly identified due to his conspicuous face and looming profile, and was outed by the French press during one of his many strolls down the Champs-Elysée with his wife Ilse.

Relocating to Madrid, it is here that Ganis believes his real work began, work that—Ganis believes—would ultimately find him involved with dark forces that killed JFK a decade later. Set up in a comfortable office that saw Skorzeny ostensibly managing a construction company that also handled imports and exports of mechanical parts to places in Central Africa and elsewhere, he for all outward purposes seems to have lived a quiet life. Writing memoirs, consulting with foreign governments for a variety of clandestine work, and running a low-key commando training school whose members included some of his former comrades from the SS, French OAS soldiers, American special forces officers, and a rogue’s gallery of other unsavory characters, his postwar life had little in common with his daring exploits during WWII.

The bulk of The Skorzeny Papers deals with the nebulous formation of both the CIA and its shell companies from the remains of the OSS, with familiar figures like Frank Wisner, Arnold Silver, Bill Harvey, and William Donovan featured prominently in Ganis’ narrative. The central portion of the book meanders from French anti-communist hit teams and their American handlers, to the also newly-formed Mossad and its eventual use of Skorzeny for the removal of Egyptian nuclear scientists, to a whole host of West German ex-Nazi intelligence personnel and their largely dull exploits passing mostly fabricated evidence of an impending Soviet invasion to Washington in exchange for their freedom and a career on the American payroll. Somewhere in this tangled web, Ganis situates Skorzeny who, because of his extensive contacts and personal daring during the Second World War, seems—in Ganis’ estimation—uniquely positioned to wrangle these disparate forces into something of a rogue network that is totally off the books. Ganis reiterates this throughout the book, seeking to distinguish ostensible layers of the spy world from what he considers its truly dark realm, which he identifies as a series of assassination teams bankrolled through corporate shell organizations like SOFINDUS, which eventually morphed into the World Commerce Corporation (WCC). In The Skorzeny Papers the WCC is akin to SPECTRE from the old James Bond novels; a looming, impenetrable evil menace whose tentacles reach into almost every aspect of Cold War politics and planning, Ganis spends a considerable amount of the book detailing its creation, key operators, possible ties to international Nazi groups and ultimately its potential role as the dark budget from which Skorzeny was able to fund his various international commando operations after the war. In reality, while I’m sure this is all very interesting to someone truly looking for an exhaustive account of postwar dirty money, it has very little to do with Skorzeny, and almost nothing to do with the domestic assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.

The book then delves into the French OAS, focusing on the enigmatic Captain Jean René Souètre, who of course was allegedly deported from Fort Worth, TX, the afternoon of the JFK assassination. And while I am not denying that Souètre could have indeed been on the ground in Texas in some capacity, Ganis goes to great lengths—even putting him on the book’s cover next to Skorzeny and Kennedy—to implicate him in the plot: “The actual sniper, or team of snipers, was directed by Jean René Souètre, the former OAS officer wanted by French security services for an attempt on the life of President Charles de Gaulle in 1962.” While Souètre was a known paramilitary outlaw who hated the idea of Algerian independence from France—which Kennedy firmly championed from the Senate floor in the mid 1950s—he seems from the available evidence to have been a rogue player who drifted through these turbulent times, training commandos, taking exotic posts with his OAS buddies, and advising the CIA on a handful of ultimately uninteresting developments in the Third World. To suggest, as Ganis does, that he was the lynchpin of the ground operations in and around Dealey Plaza, while ignoring the more probable Cuban exile culprits, seems strained.

The Souètre chapter ends with a few lines that reveal a frustrating and repeated aspect of this book, where the author assumes that one’s proximity to a situation necessarily guarantees association and willing complicity. For example, Ganis argues:

The movements of Skorzeny during this period point to his being in attendance at the Lisbon meeting between Souètre and the CIA. In fact, Skorzeny made several trips to Portugal between March and July 1963 concerning his businesses. With the OAS cause now unsustainable, it appears Souètre left the meeting with a new option for employment, signing on with Skorzeny. Captain Jean René Souètre was now a soldier of fortune working for Otto Skorzeny in one of the most guarded secret organizations in the history of American intelligence.” (p. 248, italics added)

It’s not at all clear that these conclusions can be verified, and as Skorzeny’s whereabouts are only deduced from “the Skorzeny Papers,” which are never directly quoted—here or anywhere in the book to my knowledge—one must once again have faith that Ganis is being honest and accurate.

III

The book then spends a considerable amount of time on the Third World and its myriad decolonization movements, with a quite lengthy digression into Ganis’ analysis of the Congo Crisis, exploring the potential for Skorzeny to have been the mysterious QJ/WIN assassin the CIA hired to kill Patrice Lumumba. Ganis takes a fairly condescending approach to his analysis of Lumumba’s rise to power, claiming “As well-founded as Lumumba’s words may have been, they were politically ill-advised. This tense atmosphere was further compounded by the lack of a plan for the organized transition to power.” (p.279). As I have detailed in my article, “Desperate Measures in the Congo,” the United States destroyed any hope for a free Congo before Lumumba had risen to anything nearing real power. In fact, both Belgium and the CIA had planned on separating Katanga, the Congo’s richest area, from the country before it became independent. Belgium had stolen the country’s gold reserves, brought them to Brussels and refused to return them. President Eisenhower refused to meet with Lumumba after the Belgians had landed thousands of paratroopers inside the country. By the time Lumumba’s plane had landed back in Africa, Allen Dulles and friends all but marked Lumumba for death. For Ganis to say he had no plan for an “organized transition to power” smacks of paternalism: given his eloquence, popular appeal and vision of a new dawn for his recently unshackled nation, Lumumba may well have succeeded if he had not been undermined in advance.

The assassination mission was later aborted when the CIA and Belgian intelligence aided Katangese rebels with Lumumba’s capture after he fled his UN protection in a safe house. While I can see where Ganis is going, and how it could be possible, given that Skorzeny seems to have been in the Congo around this time, to my knowledge it’s been pretty strongly established that QJ/WIN, the CIA digraph of one of two selected assassins for the Congo plot, was actually Jose Marie Andre Mankel. To have sent a person as instantly recognizable as Otto Skorzeny into an unfolding international crisis involving the Soviet Union, Belgian and Congolese troops, U.N. officials from multiple nations, and American station personnel seems, to put it mildly, unwise. Indeed, WI/ROGUE, another CIA-sponsored hit man and agent sent on the assignment, had had plastic surgery and was said to be wearing a toupee during his visit. No matter Skorzeny’s connections to Katanga Province’s mining operations, which were real, he was more likely a visiting business opportunist rather than an actionable agent during the Congo Crisis, if he was present there those critical weeks surrounding Lumumba’s capture and execution at all.

Ganis then details Skorzeny’s one brief interview with a Canadian television program in September 1960, in which he boasts about being in high demand by both the enemies of Fidel Castro and Fidel himself, explaining a plot which he takes credit for being the first to discover. This was Operation Tropical, in which the CIA was allegedly training Skorzeny and his commandos for a kidnapping of the Cuban premier in early 1960. Ganis bases his description on an unnamed newspaper clipping found in the papers he secured in his winning auction bid. Curiously, I happened upon Operation Tropical in a perusal of the CIA’s online reading room months before I’d read this book, and searched in vain for the newspaper they cite as having outlined the plot, which they claim is the Sunday supplement edition of the Peruvian newspaper, La Cronica, dated August 7, 1966. I would be interested to read it if anyone can secure a copy. It would go a long way in verifying the validity of Ganis’ main body of evidence, and would be an interesting find for researchers more broadly. In any case, with the aborted Castro plot and a mainstream boilerplate description of the “failed Bay of Pigs invasion,” which of course Ganis attributes to Kennedy’s refusal to release nearby carrier-based air support (something Kennedy staunchly forbade before the operation was underway, a point which Ganis’ omits), we now enter the final stretch of the book, which looks directly at Skorzeny’s role in the JFK assassination.

Spoiler alert—there is none.

IV

“General American Oil Company,” “Colonel Gordon Simpson,” “Algur Meadows,” “Sir Stafford Sands,” “Colonel Robert Storey,” “Jacques Villeres,” “Permindex,” “Judge Duvall,” “Paul Raigorodsky,” “Thomas Eli Davis III,” “ Robert Ruark,” “Jake Hamon,” and about twenty other sub-headings flash across the first dozen or so pages of the final chapter of The Skorzeny Papers. The organization of the book centers on these disjointed, one-to-two-page sub-chapters which give the reader the disorienting and queasy feeling of reading it through glasses with the wrong prescription. Not only did Ganis miss the opportunity to style the life and times of Nazi Germany’s most infamous commando personality along the lines of a thrilling narrative, with exotic locales and shady deals over drinks and cigars, but he arranged the book in so awkward a fashion that he constantly has to end sentences with “and we will get back to him shortly,” or “and I will show you how this ties in later.” Even if one were to storyboard his entire panoply of tertiary personalities, it would look more like a Jackson Pollock art installation than a coherent plot with a compelling impetus culminating in the JFK assassination as we understand it. A story should be clear enough to draw the reader in with its simple facts, and should sensibly unfold on its own accord so as to prevent the need to constantly handhold during the descent into the labyrinth.

Conspicuously absent in The Skorzeny Papers are any substantial sub-headings detailing Cuban exiles, Allen Dulles, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or any of the genuine suspects of the JFK assassination, save for meanderings on James Angleton’s and Bill Harvey’s roles in the creation of Staff D, the CIA’s executive action arm. Ruth and Michael Paine are nowhere to be found. Neither is a description of the aborted Chicago plot, or any substantive explanation of how Lee Harvey Oswald was moved into the Texas School Book Depository, or a note about David Phillips’ role in the whole affair from his Mexico City station. While these very real aspects of the actual JFK plot are infrequently touched upon in passing—Ganis cannot ignore the entire body of evidence, despite his best efforts—he insists on crow-barring his newfound “primary source data” into a story that at this point doesn’t permit much unique interpretation. It’s safe to say, in 2018, that President Kennedy was assassinated by a domestic, military-industrial-intelligence apparatus that viewed his foreign policy as anathema to both the “winning” of the Cold War and to their image of the United States’ role in world affairs. That Kennedy was a staunch decolonization advocate, a friend and champion of Third World leaders like Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt, Lumumba in the Congo, and sought diplomatic solutions to prevent the impending nuclear Armageddon with Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union is all but ignored in Ganis’ conclusions as to why JFK was shot in Dallas. None of it is suggested. What ultimately led to the tragedy in Dealey Plaza, according to Ganis, is something much bigger.

V

It all comes down to JFK’s sexual indiscretions, folks. That’s right. Jack Kennedy just couldn’t resist the advances of the hundreds of femme fatales who threw themselves at him, and according to Ganis, the high command had to take him out when he cavorted with the ultimate Cold War honeypot.

I wish I were kidding. But unfortunately I’m not.

The author submits to the reader that the act to assassinate President Kennedy was carried out for reasons that far exceeded concerns over U.S. National security. In particular, they arose out of a pending international crisis of such a grave nature that the very survival of the United States and its NATO partners was at risk. At the source of this threat was breaking scandals that unknown to the public involved President Kennedy. To those around the President (sic) there was also the impact these scandals had on the president’s important duties such as control of the nuclear weapons and response to nuclear attack. It also appears the facts were about to be known. The two scandals at the heart of this high concern were the Profumo Affair and the Bobby Baker Scandal. (p.294)

I will spare anyone reading this a rebuttal of the relevance of this assertion, but suffice it to say, Ganis places the final straw at Kennedy’s—demonstrably disproven—affair with Eastern Bloc seductress Ellen Rometsch. Ganis claims, “Historians are taking a hard look at this information, but preliminary findings indicate Rometsch was perhaps a Soviet agent.” (p.295) He continues, “Her potential as a Soviet agent is explosive since Baker had arranged for multiple secret sexual liaisons between her and President Kennedy.” (p. 295)

He then scrapes together a weird narrative of how Attorney General Robert Kennedy was pleading with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to withhold these revelations in a “desperate effort to save his brother and the office of the presidency.” (p.296), He argues that “As President Kennedy was arriving in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, a very dark cloud of doom was poised over Washington, and the impending storm of information was hanging by a thread.” (p. 296). That’s when Skorzeny—from Madrid—was activated to save the Western world. It seems pointless to add that retired ace archive researcher Peter Vea saw the FBI documents on this case. The agents had concluded there was no such liaison between the president and Rometsch. In other words, to save himself, Baker was trying to spread his racket to the White House. Bobby Kennedy called his bluff.

Ganis pretentiously concludes, “In the end, the assassination network that killed JFK was the unfortunate legacy of General Donovan’s original Secret Paramilitary Group that included as a key adviser from its early inception—Otto Skorzeny. Furthermore, the evidence would seem to indicate Skorzeny organized, planned and carried out the Dallas assassination, however, we may never know what his exact role was.” (p. 342)

Indeed we may never, because there does not seem to be any. Ganis continues, “On November 22, 1963, an assassination network was in place in Dallas; it was constructed of associates of Otto Skorzeny and initiated by his minders in the U.S. Government and clandestine groups within NATO.” Wrapping up, the author reiterates, “The events that led to this killing were triggered by a limited group of highly placed men in the American government. They were convinced that the West was in imminent danger and posed to suffer irreparable damage, and, for some of them, imminent exposure to personal disgrace beckoned. All of this sprang from reckless debauchery in the White House and beyond. With the situation breached by Soviet intelligence and ripe for exploitation, it became untenable for this group. They took action.”

I’ll give you a few minutes now to wipe the tears from your eyes. Okay, good. Are you still with me? Overall, The Skorzeny Papers could, I suppose, serve as something like a compendium or glossary for those who just have to know the minutest details of the inner workings of this or that shell corporation that may or may not have had a hand in some world affair during the Cold War. But there are much better books on that. Ultimately, Ganis’ book is an uncomfortable, freewheeling careen down strange dead-end tracks, with unannounced detours through cold dark streets full of faceless characters, and later, journeys through mirror-filled fun houses of speculation, with a final twist and turn that spits you out right over Niagara Falls, barrel and all.

October 19, 2018
John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

As many who are interested in the JFK case know, John Kenneth Galbraith was truly A Man for All Seasons. There are few men in public life who pulled off the triple crown like he did: serving with distinction as a public figure, an academician, and as a man of letters. Specifically, Galbraith was an advisor to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; he served as an instructor at Harvard for over 25 years; was a writer and editor at Fortune and, all told, wrote over forty books. Two of them are considered classics: The Great Crash and The Affluent Society. To have performed just one of those endeavors would make an individual a significant figure in American life. To have done all of them is a remarkable achievement. To have done them with the wit and style that Galbraith possessed makes what he did just about unique in modern American history.

Galbraith was born in Ontario, Canada in 1908. He was granted an undergraduate degree at a branch of the University of Toronto in 1931. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley to attain his Masters and Ph. D. in agricultural economics. After graduation he taught at both Harvard and Princeton from 1934-40. He worked in the Office of Price Administration for Roosevelt, and then as one of the directors of the Strategic Bombing Survey under Truman. In the last position, he disagreed with his boss, the eternal hawk Paul Nitze, on the effectiveness of the bombing over Germany in reducing war production. After this he went to work at Henry Luce’s Fortune and then in 1949 he was appointed a full professor in economics at Harvard.

Galbraith had a role in writing the summary reports for both the bombing survey of Germany and Japan. He concluded that war production had expanded during the bombing of Germany. Some strategic targets were impacted; others were not. But bombing had not decided the war in Europe. The air war cost America more than it did the Germans; it was just that the USA could afford it at the time. The real value of the bombing was in support of ground troops. They had won the war. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 183)

Galbraith’s input into the summary survey of the bombing of Japan was probably even more important at dispelling myths. He described the terrible fire bombings of Japanese cities that sometimes consumed as many as 16 square miles, causing massive numbers of civilian deaths, but barely touching industrial production. He then wrote that in all probability, Japan likely would have surrendered in December of 1945, or maybe even in November, without the two atomic bombs being dropped. (Summary Report, Pacific War, July of 1946, p. 26)

These insights by a skilled economist like Galbraith seem to be quite valuable, especially in light of the later emphasis placed on bombing in both the Korean War and especially the war in Indochina. The tons of bombs dropped over Indochina exceeded the tonnage dropped over both Germany and Japan during World War II. In fact, it was not even close. Yet none of the countries in Indochina—Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam—had a real industrial base as did Japan and Germany. Most of the population made its living from agriculture. So Galbraith had a real perspective on this issue during his advisory years with President Kennedy.

It was during his first stretch of employment at Harvard that he met young John Kennedy. From 1936-39, Galbraith tutored JFK at Winthrop House. (Parker, p. 324)

It is difficult to overestimate how much Galbraith liked writing and being on the faculty at Harvard. For instance, in 1946, he turned down an offer from Nelson and David Rockefeller to become chief economist for the Rockefeller family. (Parker, p. 222) I should not have to inform our readers the kind of money and status that position would have offered him.

In 1956, Senator Kennedy sought his advice on an agricultural issue. After that, Kennedy developed a rather close relationship with Galbraith as an unpaid advisor. The relationship deepened after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The two would often meet in Cambridge when Kennedy was in Boston. Kennedy came to rely on Galbraith briefing him before his major appearances. (Parker, p. 325)

In 1960, Galbraith was one of candidate Kennedy’s floor managers at the Los Angeles Democratic convention. He then wrote several speeches for the nominee during the campaign and prepped him for the third debate with Richard Nixon. He was at Kennedy’s campaign headquarters the night of the election. (Parker, p. 336)

As most people who have studied Kennedy’s political career know, he had a genuine interest in the huge country of India. He felt that being the largest democracy in the world, and sitting in south Asia, it was of large strategic importance. In the late fifties, he wrote an article for The Progressive on the subject. With Senator John Sherman Cooper, he drew up an aid bill for the country. (Cooper had been President Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to India.)

But another reason Kennedy viewed India to be of central importance is because of its proximity to Red China, and also to the former countries of French Indochina. If there were tensions in that area—as there were bound to be—then India could be both a counterweight, and also a nearby emissary. If such were the case, Kennedy would need a man whom he trusted implicitly to be the ambassador there. Which is why he chose Galbraith for the position.

But with the kind of relationship the two men had, Galbraith was still advising Kennedy on a wide variety of subjects. On economics, Galbraith was a disciple of the great Englishman John Maynard Keynes. So he urged Kennedy to adapt an expansive economic policy in order to encourage growth. As almost any observer of the Kennedy presidency knows, the years 1961-66 were probably unmatched in post-war American economic history. Gross National Product averaged 5% growth each year, employment grew 2.5% each year, unemployment receded to 3.9%, poverty declined by a third and inflation was at a quite manageable 2 per cent. All of this was done with no significant budget deficits and a positive balance of payments.

To show how in sync Galbraith was with Kennedy, during his confirmation hearings, the economist suggested that the USA recognize Red China. This created quite a stir on the committee. (Parker, p. 351) But as our readers know through the recently posted interviews with State Department official Roger Hilsman, this is what Kennedy had discussed with Hilsman as early as 1961.

Galbraith tried to warn Kennedy about committing to the Bay of Pigs operation. He also warned about using American ground troops in Laos. (Parker, pp. 354-56) Kennedy agreed with this and told Richard Nixon, “I just don’t think we ought to get involved in Laos, particularly where we might find ourselves fighting millions of Chinese troops in the jungle.” (Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, pp. 45-48)

And, of course, there was Vietnam. Kennedy had been advised by the likes of Edmund Gullion, Nehru of India, and General Douglas MacArthur on the subject. They all advised him not to send in combat troops. Galbraith agreed with them. Inside the Kennedy White House, he sided with Chester Bowles and George Ball for non-intervention. In prior treatments of precisely what Galbraith’s role was in these debates, the picture painted of it was, to say the least, a bit murky.

For instance, in David Halberstam’s long book The Best and the Brightest, Galbraith is portrayed as being some kind of outsider, on the periphery of Kennedy’s circle. (Halberstam, p. 152) To state it kindly, Halberstam’s book has not aged well. To be unkind, today it seems quite misleading; so much so that this author would call it pernicious. In addition to getting the role of Robert McNamara wrong, the highly praised Halberstam also mischaracterized Galbraith’s part.

John Newman came closer to what the true facts and characterizations were in his milestone book JFK and Vietnam, first published in 1992. There, Newman wrote that Galbraith had written Kennedy in March of 1962 after visiting Vietnam. He was quite derisive about America being involved there at all. He suggested a neutralist political solution, similar to what the administration was negotiating for in Laos. (Newman, p. 236) This is more accurate but is still unsatisfactory since it is incomplete.

Galbraith’s role in all this began even before the famous two week long November, 1961 debate over committing combat troops to Saigon. In July of 1961, Galbraith wrote the president, warning him about the information he was getting about Indochina. He said that President Ngo Dinh Diem was not the right man to lead South Vietnam. He had alienated the public to a much further degree than the newspaper reporters have let on. (Galbraith, Letters to Kennedy, pp. 76-77) But it turns out that Galbraith was directly involved in the November debates.

The ambassador was in Washington to accompany Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on a state visit. Galbraith had already heard about the mission President Kennedy had sent General Max Taylor and Deputy National Security Advisor Walt Rostow on in October. The ambassador feared America’s entry into a war in Vietnam would be a disaster. It could endanger Kennedy’s domestic programs, tear the Democratic Party apart, and perhaps provide the opening for a new conservative era in American politics. (The Nation, February 24, 2005, “Galbraith and Vietnam”)

Galbraith had arranged the luncheon to be at the Newport Rhode Island home of Jackie Kennedy’s mother, so no other State Department representative would be there. Kennedy and Galbraith asked the Indian leader to participate in a neutralist solution for Vietnam. They even asked him to talk to Ho Chi Minh about forming a UN observer team as a first step in that direction. Nehru was non-committal except for saying that America should not get into a shooting war in Indochina. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 470-77)

The next day in Washington, Galbraith made a beeline for Rostow’s office. He questioned Rostow about the actual contents of the report. Rostow said it was highly classified. Then the phone rang. With Rostow distracted, Galbraith stole a copy of the report from his desk and left. (The Nation, 2/24/2005)

Reading it back at his hotel, the ambassador was stunned. He realized that this report and its recommendations would create the first commitment of combat troops to Saigon and that would then be the pretext for an open-ended conflict. The first group of 8,000 men were to go in under the guise of “flood relief workers”. The report recommended deepened cooperation between the CIA and Saigon’s intelligence, more covert operations and massive training of Vietnamese soldiers. Plus the use of a sprayed herbicide which Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Kennedy was really a weed killer. (At first this was called Agent Purple, it later turned into Agent Orange.)

Kennedy had seen Galbraith the day before the Newport meeting. Realizing there was going to be a long debate over the Taylor-Rostow report, he had asked him to prepare a paper to contest direct American involvement. This now became the basis for his memo to the president. JFK read both documents and then postponed the meeting on Vietnam. Meanwhile, Galbraith did something that the president had already done. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 107) The ambassador started leaking stories to the press that Kennedy was opposed to the escalation his advisors were pressing on him. Before Galbraith left to return to India, he told Kennedy it would be a good idea if he stopped off in Saigon. JFK agreed and then instructed the ambassador to report back to him alone. (The Nation, 2/24/2005; Parker, p. 370-72)

At the crucial meeting, which occurred on November 11, Galbraith’s biographer Richard Parker notes something that Newman did not mention, namely that Bobby Kennedy was in the room. Later, authors like David Kaiser and Gordon Goldstein did write about this information, based upon recovered notes. In what appears to be a mapped out plan, the Attorney General would repeatedly deny any suggestion of ground troops by saying flatly, “We are not sending combat troops. Not committing ourselves to combat troops.” (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 113) Then the president would add that if there was ever going to be a troop detachment sent in it would be a multilateral mission, under the aegis of the UN or SEATO. (Parker, p. 371)

As most of us know, this two week long debate ended with Kennedy issuing NSAM 111. That order significantly increased the number of American advisors to over 15,000 and it sent in more equipment, like helicopters. But this is as far as Kennedy was going to go. He was going to aid Saigon, but he was not going to fight their war for them. He never allowed combat troops into theater. In fact, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed than on the day he was inaugurated. The president even wanted to replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador to Saigon with George McGhee, who he knew was opposed to intervention. But Dean Rusk, who had been one of the leaders for troop insertion during the debate, nixed this idea by saying Nolting should stay since he had Diem’s confidence. (Parker, p. 376)

It seems to this author that with the information about Bobby Kennedy’s role in the November, 1961 debates, the attempt by Kennedy to replace Nolting, and the now fully revealed role of Galbraith, this episode is even more clearly a demarcation line than before. Kennedy simply was opposed to transforming Vietnam into America’s war, and he knew that was what it would become if ground troops were placed in theater. As the president had told Arthur Schlesinger:

They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale … The troops will march in; the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off and you have to have another … The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 63)

Upon Galbraith’s return to Asia, he did file a report from Saigon. In fact, he eventually filed three of them. These all ended up being back channel cables, meaning they bypassed the usual State Department protocols. They were laced with Galbraith’s blend of impatience and sarcasm: “Who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to … ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age.” (The Nation, 2/24/2005) And again, Halberstam was wrong about what happened as a result of these, just as he was wrong about how Kennedy regarded his advice in November of 1961. For Galbraith was not on the periphery, he was at the center of the story—in two ways.

First, Kennedy attempted to follow up on the ambassador’s proposal to open negotiations for a neutralist Vietnam settlement through India. Unfortunately, he tasked the wrong person with the mission. Averill Harriman was Kennedy’s point man on the attempts to defuse the Laotian situation with a coalition government. Apparently he did not feel the same way about Vietnam. In December of 1961, Harriman had been appointed to Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Kennedy asked Harriman to send instructions to Galbraith about pursuing a peace plan by having Indian and Russian diplomats approach Hanoi. Harriman suggested a delay, which the president agreed to. But Kennedy concluded “that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith, and that he would like to see such instructions.” Harriman said he would send them. (Douglass, p. 119) Harriman did send instructions, but “he struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line.” The diplomat dictated a memo to his colleague Edward Rice which changed the de-escalation approach to a threat of escalation of the war unless Hanoi accepted American terms. When Rice tried to rewrite the memo with the original instructions, Harriman again struck Kennedy’s language. He then simply killed the telegram altogether. (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance, pp. 158-59)

Galbraith’s other attempt at de-escalation was more successful. In early April of 1962, the ambassador was visiting the Kennedy family for a weekend at Glen Ora, their rented estate in the Virginia countryside. Jackie Kennedy had just made an official visit to India and they were watching a TV special about it. He then told the First Lady about his talk with the president about the situation in Saigon, his later visit to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the memo he left behind. (Parker, p. 389)

It turned out that Kennedy had been giving the Galbraith memos about Vietnam a lot of attention. He wanted the ambassador to put his thoughts in writing and give a copy to McNamara. In that memo, Galbraith stated American policy should keep the door open for a political solution. We should also measurably reduce our commitment to the present leadership of South Vietnam. He then added that the advisors who were already there should not be involved in combat and kept out of any combat commitment. Their roles should become as invisible as the situation allowed. (Newman, p. 236)

As described in JFK and Vietnam, this memo was mightily resisted by the Pentagon, because, just five months after sending in advisors and equipment, Kennedy now had an alternative. Newman also notes that Kennedy had said at that time “he wished us to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.” (Newman, p. 236) In other words, Galbraith had just given Kennedy support for what he really wanted to do in Indochina. As both Douglass and Newman have written, Galbraith’s visit to Washington and the handing off of his memo to McNamara were the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (Newman, p. 237; Douglass, p. 119)

The very next month, in May of 1962, Robert McNamara now delivered a surprising message to his subordinates in Vietnam. Arriving in Saigon for one of his so-called SecDef meetings, McNamara asked some of the higher-ups to stick around after the formal meeting ended. The defense secretary now echoed what the president had told Arthur Schlesinger: “It was not the job of the U.S. to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.” (Douglass, p. 120) He then asked when they thought Saigon would be able to assume sole responsibility for all actions. The secretary got no satisfactory reply, since everyone was shocked by the question. So he proceeded to tell the commander in charge of the American advisory command, General Paul Harkins, “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.” As Jim Douglass notes, Kennedy and McNamara only wanted a plan for withdrawal at this time. For as he had told Galbraith in November of 1961, “You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year.” (Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, p. 469) The president was referring to the Bay of Pigs and Laos, the latter of which he knew the Pentagon would consider a defeat.

It took quite a long time for the commanders of all departments in Vietnam to prepare their withdrawal schedules for McNamara. More than a year to be exact. But finally, in May of 1963, at a SecDef meeting in Hawaii, they were presented to McNamara. McNamara said they were not fast enough and requested they be accelerated “to speed up replacements of U.S. units by GVN units as fast as possible.” (Douglass, p. 126) This plan was then coordinated with Kennedy’s NSAM 263 order and its accompanying report, which dictated that a thousand men would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all American advisors would be removed by 1965. So much for Galbraith being at Halberstam’s “periphery”. In a very real sense, the ambassador had provided the rationale for Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

Galbraith always said that he would only serve under Kennedy for a bit more than two years since he had to get back to Harvard in order not to lose tenure. How badly did Kennedy want him to stay? He offered him the ambassadorship to the USSR. (Parker, p. 406) If Kennedy had lived, and Galbraith had taken that position, one can only imagine how relations between the two superpowers would have turned out. But the fact that JFK offered him the position shows what the president had in mind for the future. He saw how visionary Galbraith was on Vietnam, and he wanted to try more of that with Russia.

Galbraith continued to be an advisor to the White House after Kennedy’s assassination. But he and President Johnson simply did not agree on Indochina policy, and Galbraith really did not like how the escalation of the Vietnam War began to downsize the War on Poverty. In January of 1966, he wrote a memo to Johnson saying that America had no national interest at stake in Vietnam. A few months later he tried again. He offered to write a speech that would set the stage for American withdrawal. Johnson did not appreciate the advice. And that was about it for their relationship. (Parker, p. 431)

But about four months before that happened, and probably provoking the exchange, Galbraith had shared a dinner with Richard Goodwin, Carl Kaysen, Arthur Schlesinger, and Defense Secretary McNamara. By this time, January of 1966, each of these men, except for McNamara, had left the White House. Galbraith described the meeting as jarring. McNamara was extremely emotional as he described what was happening in Indochina and at the White House. The Defense Secretary said the war was spinning out of control. Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign Johnson had banked on, was not effective. Johnson was getting depressed over the results. But he still seemed insistent on victory, even if it meant more escalation. If America did not find a way out soon, we would lose the war. (Kai Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 345; Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 482-83) This is why he wrote to LBJ. Instead, Johnson escalated the war further. He then pushed McNamara out of office. But it was very likely that dinner which caused McNamara to begin the task of writing the Pentagon Papers.

Galbraith now wrote a book entitled How to Get out of Vietnam. It sold 250,000 copies. Along with Schlesinger and Goodwin, he organized a protest group called Negotiations Now. He had concluded that if LBJ would not end the war, someone who would must run against him in 1968. Things go so bitter between the two men that Johnson told White House advisor John Roche to start attacking Galbraith in the press. (Parker, p. 432)

Galbraith finally did find someone to run against Johnson. It was Senator Eugene McCarthy. When Bobby Kennedy later announced he was also in the race, Galbraith was in a sticky position. But he felt he should be loyal to his first choice, so he stuck with McCarthy, even though after Johnson made his shocking announcement not to run, it was apparent RFK was the stronger candidate with a better chance to defeat Richard Nixon in the fall.

After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, McCarthy, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of the race. After Kennedy’s funeral, Galbraith visited him in Washington. He later wrote the following about that meeting:

Gene was deeply depressed; the death of Robert Kennedy showed the hopelessness of the game. What had been real would now be pretense; what had been pleasure was now pain … I pleaded that he carry on. The banality of my argument still rings flatly in my ears. Gene remained sad and unmoved, but proposed another talk in Cambridge a few days later. This we had with Coretta King and a number of McCarthy’s local supporters present. His mood was better … but I don’t believe that Eugene McCarthy’s heart was ever again wholly in the battle. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, p. 499)

The Kennedy administration was responsible for being the first to bring some remarkable men into the White House, or promoting them to their highest positions. These individuals were not just outstanding civil servants; they were extraordinary men in their own right. People like Robert Kennedy, George Ball, Richard Goodwin, Harris Wofford, Ted Sorenson, Sargent Shriver, Arthur Schlesinger, Edmund Gullion, Adam Yarmolinsky and G. Mennen Williams were all distinguished individuals and personalities who have yet to be surpassed in talent and achievement by those who followed. As a group no other administration comes close.

John Kenneth Galbraith is one of the most distinguished of them all.

October 14, 2018

Tag: FOREIGN POLICY

Notes

Also of interest:

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SEE ALSO:

A review of

CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK

by Michele Metta

with two Appendices

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Appendix 1: The Bloomfield Papers Law Suits

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Appendix 2: Bloomfield’s Role in Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commerciale

Exhibits

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