Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: OPERATION NORTHWOODS

  • Into the Storm, by John Newman

    Into the Storm, by John Newman

    John Newman has finished his third volume on the JFK case. This entry is called Into the Storm. As readers of this site will know, I have already reviewed the first two volumes in the unprecedented series. (Click here for the first review and click here for the second)

    In foreign policy, the third volume focuses on the year 1962, up until the Missile Crisis. These events include the initiation of Operation Mongoose in Florida, the submission of the Northwoods provocation plans to Kennedy, the removal of Lyman Lemnitzer as Joint Chiefs chairman, and the assumption of that position by General Maxwell Taylor. These are all important developments. And one can argue that they may have had an impact of what happened to Kennedy in Dallas, but surprisingly the major part of the writing about them comes near the end of the book. And the weight of that description and analysis is outdone by the subjects the author deals with previously. For me, it made for an uneven and, in some ways, puzzling result.

    Prior to getting to those rather salient points, the author deals with four major topics at length. These are the activist group CORE and their Freedom Ride demonstrations in the south; the KGB/CIA spy wars over men like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, and Yuri Nosenko; the intelligence career of Cuban exile Antonio Veciana; and, finally, the false accusations of Agency officer Sam Halpern implicating the Kennedys in the CIA/Mafia plots against Fidel Castro.

    I

    Newman includes two chapters on the outburst of the race issue under the Kennedy administration. These amount to about 55 pages of text in a 400 page book. The vast majority of those pages deal with two topics: Martin Luther King’s arrest in Atlanta during the 1960 election and the Freedom Rides and the accompanying violence they incurred in 1961. This material has been dealt with many times in the past by several different authors. Newman maintains that they are integral to any story about Kennedy’s demise, since JFK would not have been president if not for the Kennedy brothers’ role in releasing Martin Luther King from a Georgia prison before the election. (p. 15)

    This may or may not be true. There have been several interpretations about how Kennedy won his narrow popular victory in 1960, which was wider in the Electoral College. This includes Robert Caro’s explanation of Lyndon’s Jonson’s campaigning in the south. But even if one were to grant the author his premise, I don’t see how that necessitates including them in a book that is subtitled “The Assassination of President Kennedy.” If, at the end of his series, Newman convincingly shows us how this racial strife somehow impacted Kennedy’s murder, I will be glad to make amends and thank him for his insight.

    In Chapter 2, the author brings up what I think is a more relevant subject, which he does not deal with at the length he does his four main fields of interest. This is the undeclared war of the Wall Street Journal—and all that powerful publication represented—against the introduction of Kennedy’s policy plans, both foreign and domestic. As Newman notes, that newspaper viciously attacked Kennedy right out of the gate, on both his domestic spending plans and level of foreign aid. (p. 39) One reason for this is because Kennedy’s policies posed a juxtaposition with President Eisenhower’s. But secondly, Kennedy had always been concerned about levels of joblessness and the length of unemployment benefits to those who could not find work. He was worried about the cumulative impact of structural unemployment on the economy.

    The author briefly deals with the rather controversial appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of Treasury. (p. 43) Many liberals wondered about this, since Dillon had been a mainstay of Eisenhower and worked at three different positions in his administration. Newman then comments on Kennedy’s counterbalancing of the conservative Dillon with the liberal Keynesian Walter Heller at the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). There can be little doubt that Heller’s ideas worked. The performance of the American economy was remarkable under JFK: in three years Kennedy doubled economic growth and increased GNP by 20 per cent. (See for example, John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, by Paul Harper and Joann Krieg, pp. 169–224; Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 118–217)

    The author also counteracts the accepted CW that Kennedy was unsuccessful at getting his proposals through congress. By late 1961, Kennedy had gotten 35 of his 55 bills passed. (p. 47) He declares that Kennedy had clearly sided with Heller and the CEA and his goals were to keep interest rates and mortgage rates low. (pp. 50–51). None of this success calmed down the attacks by the Wall Street Journal, especially when, recalling Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy began to implement economic programs as a way of dealing with social problems. This meant things like placement services to find jobs for those seeking work and extending unemployment benefits from 26 to 39 weeks.

    In summing up Kennedy’s economic achievement, Newman writes that prices remained stable in a way they had not under Eisenhower, while wholesale industrial prices actually declined. Both happened under a rapidly expanding economy. (p. 59) My one complaint about this section of the book is that there was no mention of the rather important figure of James Saxon, Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency. It seems clear to me that Kennedy was relying on both Saxon and Heller to effectively counter the innate conservatism of both the Federal Reserve and Dillon. In my online discussions with British researcher Malcolm Blunt, he seemed to agree with me. (Click here for details)

    II

    One of Newman’s preoccupations, both in this book and in his public appearances, has been his disagreement with the late Cuban exile Antonio Veciana. To anyone who knows anything about the JFK case, I should not have to remind them that Veciana was first interviewed by Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi. At that time, Gaeton was working under the Church Committee’s Senator Richard Schweiker. Fonzi was then transferred over to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) by attorney Robert Tanenbaum. Senator Schweiker showed Tanenbaum some of what Fonzi had accomplished under his stewardship and the New York prosecutor was favorably impressed. (Fonzi, p. 431) Gaeton decided to stay on the HSCA even after both Tanenbaum and the first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, had left.

    There, partnered with another Tanenbaum hire—New York detective Al Gonzalez—the two pursued various leads out of Miami, Dallas, and New Orleans. These are vividly captured in Fonzi’s fine book on the case, The Last Investigation. In that volume, Gaeton described his first meeting with Veciana and then his following relationship with the man all the way through the closing of the HSCA. Fonzi details the difference in his belief in Veciana and the committee’s disagreement with that belief. This includes Veciana being shot at—four times—after the appearance of the HSCA Final Report. (Fonzi, pp. 392–93)

    In that book, Fonzi meets up with Veciana as he is being released from prison on what the Cuban believed was a trumped-up drug charge. (Fonzi, pp. 123–24) Veciana had a degree in accounting from the University of Havana. He was good at what he did and ended up working closely with Julio Lobo. Lobo was a millionaire known as the Cuban Sugar King prior to the Castro revolution. Since Veciana became one of the most militant of the exile leaders and was associated with Alpha 66, Fonzi asked him who he was tied in with as part of the American government. This turned out to be a man named Maurice Bishop. At one of their meetings, he said that he had seen Lee Oswald with Bishop in Dallas around the beginning of September, 1963. (Fonzi, pp. 125–26). This became the famous Southland Building meeting, where Veciana had arrived a bit early and had seen Bishop chatting with Oswald. When Veciana approached, Bishop disposed of Oswald rather quickly. Fonzi had a police artist sketch a picture of Bishop along the lines of the description that Veciana had given. Veciana and Fonzi spent hours working on the sketch with the illustrator. When this was later shown to Schweiker, he said it looked to him like CIA officer David Phillips. (Fonzi, p. 158) Later, when Gaeton showed the sketch to a brother of David Phillips, he exclaimed “Why, that is amazing! That certainly does look like David!” His office secretary said the same. Then his daughter, David Phillips’ niece, said “What that’s Uncle David!”(Fonzi, p. 315)

    Gaeton then decided to search for sources who had been in the Agency who could confirm that Phillips had used the alias of Bishop on occasion. He ended up finding three such sources. (Fonzi, pp. 308, 364) Former CIA Director John McCone told the HSCA that he did recall a Maurice Bishop who worked for the Agency. (Fonzi, p. 434. The CIA later made McCone walk back the statement.)

    It should be noted: throughout The Last Investigation, Veciana never flatly states that Bishop is Phillips. In fact, there are instances where he denied it. (Fonzi, p. 251) This included a face to face meeting between the two. (Which, as Fonzi notes, Phillips lied about. See p. 276) At the end of the book, Veciana admits that, if it was Phillips, he could not admit it without Phillips’ approving it. (Fonzi, p. 396)

    Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi, wrote to Veciana after her husband’s death in 2012. She was preparing a new version of The Last Investigation. Marie asked permission from Antonio to quote him about Gaeton’s honesty and dedication in pursuit of truth. He agreed to do so. At this time, Veciana was working as an accountant for his son’s marine supply store in Miami.

    The next year, 2013, Marie asked Antonio to identify Bishop. She did not mention Phillips in that request. Veciana’s son typed the letter to her finally saying that Phillips was Bishop. His son asked Veciana if he was sure about what he was doing. Antonio said it was time. Marie alerted journalist Jerry Policoff to this fact and he wrote an online piece, which was picked up by other JFK sites; but got little if any MSM exposure. The following year, Veciana showed up at the 2014 AARC seminar and discussed what he wrote in public. (Email exchange with Marie Fonzi, 9/16/2021)

    There is more I could write about Fonzi’s work on Veciana. For instance about the personal profile he assembled about Bishop (pp. 155–56) and Bishop’s ultimate pay off to Veciana as witnessed by his wife. (p. 150) But I would just suggest that if you have not read The Last Investigation, you should.

    III

    Before beginning any discussion of Newman’s disagreement about the Veciana/Bishop relationship, I think it is important to state what is not in his argument. John never talked to Marie Fonzi or visited her home to look through what she still had left of her husband’s files. Even though Veciana died last year, he had time to talk to Antonio through his daughter who is a professional journalist. As most readers know, this reviewer has shown that Clay Shaw repeatedly lied on the witness stand at his trial. He also lied in public about his relationship with the CIA. This reviewer also believes that Shaw was part of the plot to set up Oswald in the murder of President Kennedy and this is why he called attorney Dean Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. But in spite of that, I interviewed three of Shaw’s four lawyers. I could not talk to Ed Wegmann, since he had passed on prior to starting the research on my first book.

    There are two main areas that Newman finds fault with in Veciana’s statements to Fonzi and others. The first is that, in his initial utterances, Antonio said that he first met up with Bishop in Cuba in 1960. As the author notes, Veciana later changed this to 1959. The first person to find a problem with this was Fabian Escalante. (Newman, p. 67) At the time of Kennedy’s murder, Escalante was part of Castro’s counterintelligence force. He eventually rose to helm Cuban state security forces. Probably no one on the island knew as much about anti-Castro CIA operations and Phillips as Escalante did. According to his information, Phillips had left Cuba in February of 1960. To his knowledge, he did not come back. (Newman, pp. 67–71)

    Newman’s other main point of contention is that, contrary to what Veciana told Fonzi, he was not primarily associated with the CIA. After leaving Cuba in October, 1961 Veciana was associated with the MRP. In late 1961, he was approved for CIA use in other operations, but did not like working for the Agency. The reason being that he wanted little or no restrictions placed on him. (Newman, p. 293)

    In Puerto Rico, Veciana helped create a group called Alpha 66. And he gained sponsorship from Army intelligence in November of 1962. (Newman, p. 299) The author concludes that, from his timeline, Veciana was working for the Army while he was participating in Alpha 66 activities. And he concludes that when Veciana told the Church Committee that the man behind Alpha 66 strategy was Maurice Bishop, he was being deceitful. (Newman, p. 313)

    John has done some good work with this and I think some of it is valuable. And he probably is not done yet. But let me point out what I see as a bit problematic. The author brings out his information about Veciana, Alpha 66, and Army Intel as if it had been buried underground. Yet it was written about as far back as ten years ago.

    In 2011, Larry Hancock penned a brief but valuable book called Nexus. In Chapter 11 of that work, he writes about how the success of Alpha 66 had drawn the interest of the Army in October of 1962. The CIA and G-2 then shared what information they had collected on the group’s projects. Cyrus Vance of the Army drafted a proposal for very select missions, but Vance’s proposal is marked “Not Used.” Everyone knows that after the Missile Crisis, the actions against Cuba were greatly slowed down and decreased. And, at Kennedy’s insistence, the little that was left was mostly moved off shore. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 70)

    The Missile Crisis concluded as a great success for Kennedy, but the Cuban exiles looked at it differently. The rumor in Miami was that somehow the Russians were lying and Castro was cheating. There were still missiles in Cuba and two defecting Russian officers were there willing to talk. As Hancock mentions both in Nexus and Someone Would Have Talked, the main source for this appears to have been Eddie Bayo of Alpha 66. (Respectively, p. 86, p. 337) If that group was only a G-2 operation at that time, 1963, then why did the reaction to this Alpha 66 rumor turn into a purely CIA project? I am referring of course to Operation Tilt, sometimes called the Bayo/Pawley mission. William Pawley was a zealous sponsor of the excursion into Cuba and presented it to CIA. Dick Billings of Life magazine was involved in this mission on Pawley’s yacht since Life was giving publicity to both the DRE and Alpha 66.

    Newman admits that there was a female contact who worked for Veciana, who communicated messages to him from Phillips. (Newman, p. 83) Delores Cao had been Veciana’s secretary and she recalled messages from a man who used the name Bishop. According to Hancock, in 1963, there was another woman who was used for messaging later. Veciana recalled her name as Prewett. This has to be be Virginia Prewett, who Phillips worked with in propaganda operations. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, p. 177) John also admits that some CIA agents stayed on the island after the revolution. And Veciana named one of them who appeared to be an associate of Phillips, but he rules out the possibility that Phillips would have ever returned, because he had no diplomatic immunity since he was not under state department cover.

    IV

     One of the major themes that the author spends many pages on is the controversy surrounding the espionage battles between the KGB and CIA in the fifties and early sixties. This includes figures like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, George Blake, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Yuri Nosenko, among others. In my discussions with John and in one of the talks I have seen him give, his assessment is going to be contra authors Tom Mangold and David Wise. What he appears to be saying is that there really was a high level mole inside the CIA, Golitsyn was somehow a credible source, and that Nosenko was a false defector.

    In 1992, British journalist Tom Mangold published a long biography of James Angleton and his reign over the CIA’s counterintelligence staff for two decades. That reign ended in 1974, when he was forced to resign by CIA Director Bill Colby, who had replaced Richard Helms. Mangold’s book was really the first full scale biography of Angleton. For too many reasons to mention here, it did not present an attractive portrait. In his review of CIA literature, in house historian Cleveland Cram praised the book as being honest and accurate. (October, 1993, Center for the Study of Intelligence, “Of Moles and Molehunters”)

    Much of Mangold’s valuable work focused on how Allen Dulles and Dick Helms had allowed Angleton to establish what was essentially his own fiefdom within the CIA, including his personal filing system which was not integrated with the Agency’s system. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that those two men allowed the very rightwing Angleton to more or less run roughshod, with little or no oversight. Another major theme of the book was Angleton’s firm belief in virtually anything that Golitsyn told him. Complimentary to that belief were the monetary rewards that Angleton bestowed on the man—no matter how wrong his predictions turned out to be. And many of them were.

    Within a year after Mangold’s book was released, much respected journalist David Wise—who had developed a reputation for dealing with intelligence matters—published his own book dealing with Angleton. This was called Molehunt. Wise traced all the organizational and personal damage to careers that Angleton had wrought in his search for what he thought was the mole in the CIA. This unhinged search was largely based on Golitsyn and the fact that he said the mole’s last name began with a K. To make a long story short, this resulted in the wreckage of CIA officer Peter Karlow’s career; along with Paul Garbler’s and Richard Kovich’s. And by agreeing with Golitsyn’s prophecy—that anyone who followed him would be ersatz—later defectors were either discounted or looked on with suspicion. This went on even beyond Angleton, with a man named Adolf Tolkachev, who later turned out to be a very valuable informant on Russian defense technology. His offer was turned down three times. President Carter later signed a bill called the Mole Relief Act in order to recognize and compensate Angleton’s victims. (Click here for more details)

    Nosenko had first tried to defect in 1962, but he wanted to act as an agent in place, so he stayed in the USSR. But after the assassination, he did defect at Geneva in January of 1964. His message was that while he was in Russia, and as part of the KGB, he was responsible for the Oswald file. The KGB had no interest in the Marine defector and little knowledge of his military background. They were still not interested even after Oswald married a Russian girl. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 316–17)

    Today, Newman is convinced that Nosenko was a false defector, to the point that he once told me that Bruce Solie, the CIA officer who helped rescue Nosenko from three years of torture and imprisonment, might have been the mole. What seems odd about all this to this reviewer is that the author also writes that the KGB had nothing to do with President Kennedy’s murder. (Newman, p. 339) Which means to me that, at worst, the Russians were trying to convince the USA that they had nothing to do with turning Oswald while he was in the USSR, or ultimately Kennedy’s murder.

    A lot of what the author writes in this section of the book is based on the works of Tennent “Pete” Bagley. An important part of what Newman writes about the longtime CIA officer concerns his relationship with esteemed British researcher Malcolm Blunt. This reviewer has material of value to add to their exchange over Oswald’s file that is not in the book under review.

    The Brit Malcolm became friendly with Bagley while the former agent was living in Brussels. By 2012, Malcolm had done some work on the declassified HSCA files of Betsy Wolf. One of her assignments was to investigate the Oswald file at CIA. Betsy was a thorough and conscientious researcher. One of the oddities about Oswald’s file that puzzled her was the fact that no 201 file had been opened on the man after he had defected in 1959. Betsy began to inquire with other CIA officers and to look up certain division charters. She found out that in not opening that file, the Agency was violating its own internal rules.

    The other problem she pondered was that Oswald’s files did not go where they should have gone, which was the Soviet Russia (SR) division. Instead, they went to the Office of Security (OS). The more people she talked to, the weirder this situation got. She came to suspect that somehow, someone had rigged the system so that no 201 file would be opened on Oswald. As she dug deeper, she realized such was the case. For OS did not open 201 files. This is why certain outside agencies were sending multiple copies of files on Oswald to CIA, but they were not getting distributed. After months of research work on this, Betsy interviewed the man who was the then present Chief of Security, Robert Gambino. He told her that the office of Mail Logistics is alerted in advance of where certain files should be headed in the system. She concluded that this is what had happened: someone had instructed that office in advance to misdirect Oswald’s files. (Click here for details, plus a diagram of how Oswald files were routed)

    Malcolm drew for Bagley the diagram of how Oswald’s incoming files were routed in 1959. That is, not going to where they should have been going, namely the SR division, where Pete had worked, but instead being diverted to OS where no 201 file would be opened. After looking at the diagram, Bagley asked Malcolm if Oswald was a witting or unwitting defector. Malcolm did not want to reply, but Bagley pushed him on the question telling him he had to know the answer. Malcolm said, “Okay, unwitting.” Bagley instantly countered with, “Oh no, he had to be witting!” (Newman, p. 339) What makes this even more interesting is that Bagley thought Oswald had killed Kennedy. So you had, for the first time, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer—who thought Oswald had killed Kennedy—saying that the man was a witting false defector.

    V

    I would like to close this discussion on a high point, actually two of them.

    Newman’s analysis of how the CIA switched back their plots to kill Castro onto the Kennedy White House is very well done. In fact, it is unmatched in the literature. As the author explicates it, this deception started with Director of Plans Dick Bissell; it was then continued, expanded, and elongated by William Harvey’s assistant Sam Halpern. The author proves that both men knowingly lied about the subject. It is important, because this whole mythology became a way to confuse what had happened in the JFK case. The myth that arose from it was that Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him. When, in fact, neither clause was true. And neither was the corollary: JFK dug the hole for his own death.

    Bissell was the first person who created the chimera that somehow “the White House” urged him to create an executive action capability. (Newman, p. 182) In fact, Bissell first told this story to William Harvey in 1961. But under examination by the Church Committee, Bissell said six times that he could not recall who the person at the White House was who first asked him to do this. Someone in the administration calls you about such a subject and you cannot recall who it was?

    But on its face, this was not credible. Because the CIA’s Staff D—which included this function—had already been created by then. Plus the CIA/Mafia plots were already in motion. The former began in October of 1960, the latter in August of 1960. And, in fact, it was Bissell’s idea to reach out to the Mafia. (Newman, p. 187) After doing depositions with Bissell, Harvey, and McGeorge Bundy, the Church Committee concluded that Kennedy had filed no such request with CIA and none had been discussed with him. (Newman, p. 191) In fact, the Church Committee was forced to ask Bissell: If the White House tasked you with that, why didn’t you reply that such actions were already proceeding?

    The reason that Bissell wanted to use this fabrication of White House approval was to egg on the Mafia plots in order to salvage the Bay of Pigs operation. This is most likely because he understood from the two designers of that operation—Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins—that it would not succeed due to the revisions that had been made in their plans. In fact, they wanted to resign, since they sensed a debacle was upcoming. Bissell understood if that happened, he would be left holding the bag, since he was the main supervising officer. (Newman, pp. 191–92).

    Halpern took this fabrication and made it his own, with two alterations. First, he switched the pushing of the plots from JFK to RFK and he used a CIA man he knew, Charles Ford, as RFK’s “accessory.” What was quite revealing about the Church Committee inquiry was that Dick Helms did not seem to know much at all about Halpern’s RFK/Ford schemes. And what he did know was through Halpern. (Newman, pp. 237–39)

    The giveaway about Halpern was his frequent assertion that RFK deliberately left no paper behind about his dealings with Ford. This turned out to be utterly false. And as the author points out, for Seymour Hersh to have accepted this from Halpern for his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, tells you all you need to know about Hersh’s piece of rubbish.

    In fact, Charles Ford testified twice before the Church Committee. For whatever reason, we only have his second deposition. But it is clear from the references he makes to the lost first interview that he never did what Halpern said he was doing. That is acting as a liaison for RFK to the Mob for the purpose of killing Castro. Considering Bobby Kennedy’s war on the Mafia, this was preposterous on its face. But as the author points out, we have documents from both sides today—RFK’s and Ford’s—as to what Ford was doing for Bobby. The idea was that he was supposed to check out some American representatives of anti-Castro groups in Cuba and also explore ways to retrieve the prisoners from the failed Bay of Pigs project. (Newman, pp. 260—67). These prove that Halpern was passing gas on two levels.

    But the capper about this is that Halpern knew about it, since he signed off on one of Ford’s memos. In fact, Ford was working with Halpern and Harvey in 1961. And since Ford worked under those two men in 1961, within their domain at CIA, he could not have been working under Bobby Kennedy. The Church Committee examined Ford’s testimony afterwards and found it to be accurate. (Newman, p. 276)

    Perhaps the sickest statement that Halpern made to Hersh was this: “Bobby Kennedy’s primary purpose is dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing—finding someone to assassinate Fidel Castro.” As Hersh could have found out through declassified documents available at that time, this was an ugly lie. Harvey had found someone he was working with to kill Castro. That was John Roselli. And the CIA had lied to Bobby Kennedy about the existence of this plot. (Newman, p. 279)

    Does it get any worse than that?

    VI

    The book closes with what is a testament to its title. The author notes that Dwight Eisenhower and his National Security Advisor Gordon Gray had thought of using a false flag operation at Guantanamo Bay in the waning days of Ike’s administration. That is, they would employ Cuban exiles to simulate an attack on the base and that would suffice as an excuse to invade Cuba. In fact, Eisenhower had told Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer that he had little problem with that scenario, as long as they could manufacture something “that would be generally acceptable.” (p. 372)

    As the author then writes, it is clear that Lemnitzer recalled Eisenhower’s approval of this concept, since both he and Edward Lansdale, who was running Operation Mongoose, were going to try and push it on President Kennedy. As Newman, and many others have written, once Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was up and running in February of 1962, the three men supervising it were not well-suited for each other. That would be Lansdale, William Harvey, and Bobby Kennedy. RFK was there at his brother’s request. Since after the Bay of Pigs, the president did not trust the so-called experts anymore. Lansdale did not like this. He actually asked CIA Director John McCone for complete control over Mongoose. A request that was promptly denied. On top of this, Lansdale and Harvey despised each other and Harvey hated RFK. (Newman, pp. 376–77)

    Lansdale was quite imaginative—and deadly—in his plans to shake up things on the island. He thought up outlandish schemes like Task 33. This was a plan to use biological warfare against Cuban sugar workers, but this was only part of an even more wild menu: to create a pretext to attack Cuba. Lansdale now brought back the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo to provoke an American invasion. There were two other scenarios that Lansdale thought up for this purpose.

    As the reader can see, what Lansdale had in mind actually preceded what the Joint Chiefs were going to propose to President Kennedy, which was the infamous Operation Northwoods. The problem was that President Kennedy not only did not want to provoke American direct intervention, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) But yet, on March 13, 1962 the Joint Chiefs proposed Northwoods to the White House. This was a series of play acted events designed to manufacture chaos in Cuba in order to provoke an attack by American forces. One was a staging of a “Remember the Maine” scenario: blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Castro. Another was to create a communist Cuban terrorism wave on cities like Miami. Kennedy rejected these proposals.

    Newman closes the book with Kennedy’s searing disagreements with Lemnitzer over both Cuba and Vietnam. About the latter, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” In regard to Cuba, Lemnitzer would not let up on the idea of American intervention. This led to his eventual rebuke by Kennedy in mid-March of 1962. (Newman, pp. 391–94) If there was any doubt that Lemnitzer was leaving—and there was not much—this settled it.

    Kennedy did kick him out of the White House, but he sent him to NATO, which, of course, was secretly guiding the Strategy of Tension under Operation Gladio. In other words, the terrorist plan Lemnitzer had been turned down on with Cuba, he was now going to be part of in Europe.

  • Alex Jones on the Kennedy Murder, Addendum: Who is James Bamford? And what was he doing with the ARRB?

    Operation Northwoods and Logic Gone Southwards

    This is an addendum to my two-part critique of Alex Jones. (Please see: Part One & Part Two.) What follows isn’t so much an examination of Operation Northwoods, but how it came to be so entwined with the Kennedy assassination, very often incorrectly. The reader has a series of old notes made over the best part of some 9-10 years on the subject and a reading of  Jones’ chief researcher Paul Joseph Watson’s awful book, Order Out of Chaos, to thank for what follows.

    In his work, Watson more than makes mention of Operation Northwoods and its origins. So when Watson grabs hold of something and clings to it, by now the reader should automatically sense trouble. As you will find in the following sections, Watson, as usual, is wrong on practically every detail about Northwoods:

    Long hidden documents, uncovered in 2001 by former ABC News investigative reporter James Bamford, code-named Operation Northwoods, put a haunting perspective behind the events of September 11.

    I can recall skimming through extracts of the Northwoods proposal in either 1999 or 2000. I didn’t give it too much thought. Except, that it was important because it was a clear indication from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) of Kennedy rejecting another hare-brained proposal from the military. (This reaction, I later found, was fairly common throughout the research community.) I gave it such a flickering glimpse that, when I saw 9/11 unfold, I did not register any parallel. Nor did the name of the man who most heavily associated himself with it, James Bamford, (whom I shall discuss shortly) come to the fore.

    To give credit where credit is due, I was reawakened to Northwoods (rather ironically) when watching the first version of Bermas’ Loose Change and remembering that no credit was given to the ARRB for unearthing the documents. But from what we know of Jason Bermas, it’s a stretch to think he would have known where it came from. After 9/11, in particular when Loose Change came out, researchers had slowly become aware of a new movement arising out of the carnage and rubble in New York. While on one hand, it was nice to see so many people – young and old alike – galvanized by what had occurred, on the other, I didn’t like what I was seeing from the various 9/11 groups and blogs. And one of the biggest frights I received was finding out that the Bushes had gone from being fringe dwellers (if even that) in pretty much all of the established JFK circles, to being full-fledged orchestrators of both the JFK hit and the 9-11 attacks in many unlearned parts of the new 9/11 milieu.

    Kennedy’s refusal to engage in Operation Northwoods had become one of the main causes, if not the main cause, of his death. People like Jim Fetzer – who also believes that the idea of no planes flying into the World Trade Center should be considered – seemed in support of this double view (a viewpoint even Prison Planet hasn’t swallowed, and which caused a major falling out between Fetzer and Steven Jones) and one time Fetzer supporter, Alex (no relation to the former) Jones himself.

    As Jim DiEugenio and I have tried to explain in our works on John Hankey and Russ Baker, the notion of the Bush family orchestrating the Kennedy assassination is seriously flawed disinformation foisted upon an unwitting public by these two pals.  As is the idea that Kennedy was killed as a result of his refusal to follow through on Northwoods. There are three major problems with this mode of thought:

    1. Kennedy lived for another year or so after the proposal.
    2. There were myriad other causes for his horrific death before, during, and after Northwoods. These issues have been well covered in Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street, John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, and in Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, to name but a few “big-picture” books.
    3. Many people involved in the 9/11 field (and rather alarmingly within the Kennedy assassination fold) forget that Northwoods itself was just one of many contingency plans dreamed up by the Pentagon. It’s a little known fact that the US army has created contingency plans to invade Canada. (Please see this Washington Post article: Raiding the Icebox.) And much has been made from some quarters by the likes of Fetzer about McNamara supposedly lying about its importance. But someone as long in the game as Fetzer should know that McNamara, who liaised with the Pentagon daily and who saw contingency plans big and small on a weekly basis as part of his job description, can be forgiven for being blasé about it. (Larry Hancock: email; 29 April. Greg Parker: Email; 30 April 2010)

    And further, as David Talbot in his 2007 book, Brothers, so authoritatively informs us:

    There is no record of how McNamara responded to this cynical proposal by his top military officers when Lemnitzer met with him that Tuesday afternoon. But the sinister plan, which was codenamed Operation Northwoods, did not receive higher approval. When I asked him about Northwoods, McNamara said, “I have absolutely zero recollection of it. But I sure as hell would have rejected it…. I really can’t believe that anyone was proposing such provocative acts in Miami. How stupid! (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 107).

    What makes the document important, as I have said, is that it was more hard evidence of Kennedy’s negative attitude towards an invasion of Cuba, which ran counter to disinformation that he was bent on Castro’s destruction. What makes it unique is that it is the only government document released that called for US casualties to be incurred on US soil to whip up popular support for an invasion of a foreign land. Note that I have said “released”, and as Larry Hancock states, there are likely others lurking around, and these could make Northwoods pale in comparison to other such initiatives. (Larry Hancock: email; 29 April, 2010)

    One such initiative, which makes Northwoods look more than a little humble, was the top secret NATO/CIA/MI6 Operation Gladio “false flag” initiative that went from 1948-1990 right across Western Europe and was focused largely in Italy. Gladio itself had consisted of numerous fascist groups murdering and bombing innocent civilians to stir up ill feeling against the very leftist organizations they had infiltrated.

    The Blind Eye of Activism

    What follows may come as something of a shock for the many peace activists, as well as critics of the official word on 9/11, who have devoured James Bamford’s literature over the last twenty-eight years. Bamford became a hero with his 1982 work, The Puzzle Palace, which detailed the National Security Agency (NSA). This was followed by his 2001 book, Body of Secrets, which contained the details of Northwoods. As has been discussed, the ARRB, was a body set up to declassify a massive amount of government documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination from 1994-1998. In his brief and begrudging acknowledgement to the press about where the documents had come from – i.e., the ARRB – Bamford seemed more concerned about bragging as to how he’d got wind of them – i.e., via a tip from a friend in the ARRB.

    Now before we delve into that little quagmire, perhaps one question is in order: If Northwoods was just one of many gruesome plans cooked up by the Pentagon, surely intelligence/military advisors like Bamford, who litter the major networks and are familiar with contingency planning, would have been immune to such initiatives? Because by 1997, Northwoods should have come as little surprise to anyone within Bamford’s line of work. Thus, it was interesting that during an ABC interview Bamford got extremely expressive about what he had found:

    The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government.

    Thus Bamford, who was born in 1946, is either a master of hyperbole or, like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, had been asleep for a long, long time. Perhaps we should refresh Mr. Bamford’s memory. George W. Bush, (perhaps the worst President in US history) had just stolen the 2000 election by alienating thousands of black voters in Miami and key states across America. There had been over 50-odd US interventions in foreign countries since World War II, the majority of them in support of right-wing or fascist initiatives which have resulted in the murder, rape and torture of millions. If Bamford doesn’t think MK/Ultra was an initiative that has ruined hundreds if not thousands of peoples lives, or that, say, Operation Phoenix is not one of the most “corrupt” plans created under the banner of the United States government – amongst numerous other atrocities – then what credibility can the man have? In 1990, Bamford, the whistleblower, was working for ABC in Washington when the aforementioned news of Operation Gladio broke. Why no noise from him then? And where was he during the CIA drugs smuggling scandals that first came out in the mid-1980’s and then erupted in 1996 – thanks to Gary Webb. Yet Bamford, for all the hype, made a big song and dance about something that never actually was even put in place or seriously contemplated. So what is Bamford playing at?

    Joe Backes, writing for JFK Lancer in 2001, was one of the first JFK researchers to rally against the Northwoods document being misappropriated in the controversy surrounding 9/11. But he was also one of the first JFK researchers to go public with his suspicions about Bamford’s posturing and clearly had problems with Bamford’s “tip off”. He noted that the full body of the document was available from January 29th, 1998. Bamford’s book came out in 2001. This was far too long a lapse for Bamford to claim any scoop. (Assassination Chronicles, Vol 7, 4, pg 2, 2001)

    Thus Bamford stood out not only for his being highly selective in his examples of corrupt government practice, he was clearly exaggerating – if not lying – about inside access in trying to hype his book. Bamford is a smart guy, he isn’t that brazen, and his work, while imperfect, certainly doesn’t indicate that he is a liar. Can it be that Bamford is simply not as good as he thinks?

    In 2006, Bamford and the ACLU harangued the NSA for their illegal gathering of information on US citizens. Now this may sound big of him, but in this very article Bamford mentions Arlen Specter’s criticism of the Bush administration’s illegal wire tapping of US citizens, in rather glowing terms. Bamford never mentioned that government “toady” Arlen Specter (who saw the writing on the wall for the GOP in 2008 and was likely making calculated criticisms so as he could become a Democratic candidate at the time) was a highly ironic person for him to make mention of. (For those of you new to this, Specter is regarded as the father of the magic bullet theory, and one of the most unscrupulous politicians of recent times.) Now many people will say that Bamford doesn’t have to be interested in the Kennedy assassination at all. As far as Specter is concerned, Bamford’s just calling the shots as he sees them. Right?

    OK. But when I came across an article in which Bamford (as per his schtick) gloated about spending time on his very own “60-foot motor yacht,” cruising the Potomac with a soon-to-be-deceased CIA operative friend, and in the company of another soon-to-be-spook-friend, the infamous double-agent Bob Hanssen, well, Bamford’s background starts becoming the story itself. Because it also appears that Bamford is not just friends with US intelligence officers, he is one himself. In another interesting article by Justin Raimondo, a rather prominent peace activist, Raimondo actually names Bamford – in a rather positive light – as a member of the “intelligence community.” An allegation that Bamford has apparently never denied.

    And so it was about this time that I checked out Bamford’s profile on the Random House website – which makes for quite an interesting read.

    The Charmed Life of James Bamford

    Bamford is an ex-Navy man who upon the end of his three-year service eventually gained a degree in law. However, he became fascinated with the goings-on around Watergate and became a journalist. But, as the blurb says, he didn’t work for any paper. He worked freelance to become an author. And what an author. His first ever book was his 1982 hit, The Puzzle Palace. (First published by Hougton Mifflin and then Penguin in paperback.) Herein he had used the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) to write the first profile of the NSA. What happened next is a classic case of Jimmy Stewart-like rash judgement, atonement, and forgiveness. Believing that Bamford had obtained the information illegally, the NSA (National Security Agency) first prosecuted Bamford, but then realized “no,” it was they who were wrong: Bamford had gained the information through legal means. Apparently, they then felt so bad, they dropped the case and eventually decided to use The Puzzle Palace as a core textbook in its Defense Intelligence College.  (George Bailey, in It’s A Wonderful Life, never had it so good.)

    FOIA requests take a lot of time and a lot of money. One could argue that Bamford was a trained lawyer and probably “knew the ropes” to speed up the process. The question is: How could the NSA, which monitors vast tracts of the planet, have missed the fact that Bamford (or a representative of his) was soliciting information from them via the FOIA? Could Bamford be a first? After all, since when does a book once prosecuted become a training manual? And since when does the author of said book eventually gain employment lecturing the NSA staff?

    But it’s Bamford’s time spent with Peter Jennings from 1987 till 1998 that should raise eyebrows. (In an interview with Timothy W. Maier, Bamford says 1998 which differs from the Random House date of 1997.) His role as Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings meant the two were close. Now, let us turn back to the long-suffering Paul Joseph Watson. While I could find little concerning Jennings within the Alex Jones matrix, what I did find was fairly alarming. Because Jennings, like Dan Rather, had earned folk hero status for mentioning that the collapse of one of the WTC towers seemed like a controlled demolition.

    Now anybody truly familiar with the Kennedy case knows that in 2003 Jennings would go on to besmirch his reputation with an appallingly bad show on the assassination of John Kennedy: Peter Jennings Reporting – The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. Gus Russo was his chief consultant. What is funny here is that Prison Planet had once endorsed conspiravangelist John Hankey’s 2003/2004 released JFK II in which Hankey launched a laughable attack on 9/11 hero Jennings and ABC. Yet, bizarrely, Watson’s detailing of Rather’s and Jennings’ demolition comments were being made as late as September 11, 2006 – with absolutely no mention of their previous obfuscations in the Kennedy arena.

    Returning to Bamford, what’s most significant is the year he left Jennings. As stated previously, this was either 1997 or 1998. Most interestingly, regardless on whose year you go by (as of this date, Bamford hasn’t bothered to correct Random House), it was in and around the time that Operation Northwoods first appeared publicly, i.e., on the 17th November, 1997.

    Random who?

    The above may seem just a bunch of coincidences to the reader. But it’s clearly no coincidence to Random House that Bamford left ABC to join them. And in so doing he became something of a “Mr. Fix it” for US intelligence (if he was not before). Though one wouldn’t anticipate someone of Paul Watson’s skill level conceiving of the issues surrounding Random House, how anybody versed in the Kennedy case could miss Bamford’s ongoing association with the company that employed James Angleton’s wife and cuddled up to Gerald Posner, amongst numerous other sins, is quite incredible. Especially in light of the numerous critiques of this most dubious of publishing companies.

    Should it come as any surprise, then, that Bamford’s coziness with the NSA and Random House turns out to be anything but random? :

    Unlike before with The Puzzle Palace, this time the NSA cooperated with Bamford. Alarmed by Hollywood films like Enemy of the State that portrayed his agency as a ruthless cadre of assassins, the director of the NSA, Lt. Gen Michael V. Hayden, wanted the American public to have a more accurate picture of how the NSA functioned. In order to encourage better communication between the NSA and the press, Hayden granted Bamford unprecedented access to Crypto City (the NSA campus in Ft. Meade, MD), senior NSA officials, and thousands of NSA documents while he researched Body of Secrets. The NSA even hosted a book signing for Bamford on the grounds of Crypto City. It lasted more than four hours as hundreds of NSA employees lined up to have their copies of Body of Secrets autographed. (Ibid., Bamford’s profile from Random House)

    It is with great shame that no one – bar a certain Carol A. Valentine (a crank similar to Jones and Watson) – has commented on Bamford’s Random House rÈsumÈ. Valentine is typically “off the planet” with regards to Northwoods being a fake document. But she was certainly the first to note that Bamford’s spiel about Northwoods was published in a book wholly designed not so much to inform but as to protect the reputation of a vital component of the U.S intelligence establishment, the NSA.

    Finding the Real Parallel

    Many people try and make parallels between Northwoods, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11, quite often forgetting that when an event of international significance occurs, like an untimely death, or a group of them, that there are often similarities. Kennedy’s death and 9/11 were never the first purported pretexts for expansion into foreign territories. There are numerous parallels right throughout U.S history: The 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident are classic examples. Sometimes no act of aggression is needed on behalf the intended victims. The U.S government just doesn’t have to like a government and that’s that. It need not be bloody or dramatic. Just look at the CIA’s ousting of Australia’s Whitlam government. (William Blum, Killing Hope, pgs 244-249)

    But the biggest parallel one can see between Operation Northwoods (after one dispels the utter crock that the Bush family organized both 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination) is not the crimes themselves, nor the use of airplanes, but that the book Northwoods first appeared in (i.e., Body of Secrets) was created for the exact same purpose and by the exact same company as Gerald Posner’s 1993 joke, Case Closed, which was clearly a response from the CIA to counter public reaction after the 1991 film JFK. What’s funny here is that while JFK was a political drama based around actual events and thus infinitely more serious in tone than the Will Smith Enemy of the State vehicle, we can see that Random House has clearly stated the NSA’s justification for publishing a counterpoint, and seem rather proud of themselves for doing so. Now I ask the reader to contrast Bamford’s profile with that of his fellow playmate at Random House, Gerald Posner. In Posner’s bio they say nothing about the CIA (or their intermediary Bob Loomis of Random House) approaching him to create a reply to Stone’s film, as this link here shows. And in their blurb about Case Closed, Random House clearly wants you to believe the lie that Posner – of his own accord – jumped up and defended the Warren Commission.

    Backes to the Egg

    Let’s us go back to the egg, or Joe Backes to be precise. Where once it looked as if Bamford was exaggerating how he came across Northwoods, it’s highly likely he was actually telling the truth when he says he got a “tip off” from someone in the ARRB. Bill Kelly, like Backes, was one of the few people to comment about this situation anywhere (albeit six years later). Initially, he believed that the NSA itself was behind the leak. (4/29/2007 Post at Spartacus Kennedy Education Forum). However, it is more than likely that it came from the ARRB itself because Doug Horne has since spoken and written that the ARRB was stacked with Warren Commission defenders and hints at intelligence plants (Horn: BOR, #459 1/28/2010). Debra Conway, in fact, confirmed that a number of leaks or more precisely “tip offs” did come from the ARRB, particularly concerning issues such as Cuba and Vietnam, not to mention information on Military Intelligence agent James Powell, which was leaked to Max Holland. However, Conway had no knowledge of who leaked the Northwoods documents. (Debra Conway: email; 6 May 2010) Returning to Bill Kelly. Though incorrect about the NSA leak, he asked questions about Bamford and Northwoods few people have ever voiced:

    The NSA doesn’t just give journalists tours of their operations, and retired CIA officers don’t just send documents to writers from the grave. There is a reason behind all this that isn’t what it appears to be.

    Kelly’s right. It’s hard to take seriously a man who was given access to practically all areas within the NSA apparatus who then says the “NSA never handed me any documents, it was a question of digging.” For 9/11 Truthers raised on a diet of Northwoods and James Bamford, what follows might be depressing: Though Bamford lamented the NSA’s not releasing the cockpit tapes, he openly praised the work of the 9/11 Commission. Did Fletcher Prouty, Victor Marchetti, Bill Turner, or John Newman ever praise the Warren Commission or the HSCA?

    Speaking of those two bodies, Bamford seemed to have little or no interest in Arlen Specter’s checkered history. Thus, one assumes he had no real interest in the Kennedy assassination. Yet one would be wrong in that assumption. Because Bamford addressed the JFK Accountability Conference on the 18th– 20th of November, 2005. I have little or no idea what Bamford discussed at this conference. According to the blurb, he discussed the 1962 book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, Seven Days in May, a fictional account of a military coup in America, and a book that Kennedy admired. One brief account by attendee and Probe co-editor Lisa Pease is also available. She wrote:

    Bamford discussed documents from Operation Northwoods, a plan that called for a wave of terrorism inside the United States that falsely would be blamed on Fidel Castro and become the justification for invading Cuba.

    Like much of Bamford’s work, this sounds good on the surface. But things take an interesting turn when Pease says one of the only people prepared to engage in a fully conspiratorial conversation at the conference was Bamford’s contemporary John Newman. This left me thinking. If anybody is familiar with Newman and Bamford they would understand that Newman’s quest for accuracy and detail in his works far surpasses anything Bamford has ever written. Because, Newman is a bonified and genuine intelligence expert. Bamford for all his bluster isn’t. But this should be no surprise. Bamford just happens to be an associate of a well-known lone gunman figure in the JFK research community, Gus Russo. Russo, you may recall, was the adviser for the awful Peter Jennings’ special, and a man long considered by many in the Kennedy assassination research community to be a CIA plant.

    The Return of Bamford’s Blindness

    At the above conference, Bamford was likely reading from the fourth chapter of his book Body of Secrets The question never asked by anyone in attendance (quite mercifully for Bamford) was: Why would anyone want to pay money to hear him talk about the assassination or Northwoods anywhere at any time? Judging by his chapter on Northwoods, Bamford quite clearly has no knowledge whatsoever of Kennedy-era covert operations, nor Operation Mongoose.

    Operation Mongoose was run in conjunction with the newly formed SG(A) or Special Group Augmented and was not really led by General Lemnitzer but by General Maxwell Taylor who was appointed by the President. Furthermore, civilians such as Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara often turned up to the meetings. The Central Intelligence Agency was represented by their Director John McCone and by his deputy Richard Helms. Helms was working closely with General Edward Lansdale, the coordinator of the project. Lansdale was purely a creature of the CIA, not the U.S military. Thus, the CIA retained a large amount of control over the operation, in particular with the rabid William Harvey leading Task Force W which was based in Miami at the JM Wave Station. This is all explained in the Church Committee Report. (pgs 139-145)

    So why did Bamford turn a blind eye to Lansdale’s real employers and the agency behind Mongoose? It may be his relationship with a one Richard Helms, a person heavily involved in Mongoose. I first became suspicious of this when I came across a glowing Helms review of Bamford’s work on the USS Liberty. This was followed up by a very odd call by Bamford regarding Helms’ non-assistance to John Roselli. This information recently surfaced through the CIA’s 2007 release of its so-called “family jewels,” a post-Watergate “limited hangout” which had been overseen by the then Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), James R. Schlesinger, and which detailed numerous illegal actions the CIA had partaken in from its inception in 1947 through to 1973.

    Bamford’s take on a piece of “the jewels” is a real gem:

    In the early 1960s the C.I.A. hired members of the Mafia, including mobster Johnny Roselli, to help in the assassination of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The operation never panned out. I found the section interesting in that it shows the crazy extent of the C.I.A.’s thinking in those days. I also found it somewhat uplifting that Richard Helms did not lift a finger to help Roselli after he was arrested and threatened to go public with the details of the plot.

    I have to ask what’s so uplifting about this? Was Bamford “hoping” Helms would be found doing no wrong? The man who Richard Case Nagell nicknamed Dirty Dick? Or is he trying to say that Helms had nothing to fear because he was not involved in the plots against Castro enough to be threatened by any revelations? If so, this is patently false as one can clearly see on the documents that Bob Maheu and Bill Harvey were more than prepared to become the Deep Throat and Oliver North of the scenario.

    Helms was no stranger to the covert shenanigans of countless CIA operations around the world and a man who was involved in more than a few incidents. Bamford’s selective eye for atrocities by the United States government never picked up on some of them. I say this because Bamford, in his usual name-dropping style, can’t help but tell the reader of sharing lunch with Helms on a number of occasions. Yes, they were lunch partners. If you want see how much Jim enjoys Dick, then read this rather delusional eulogy of Helms’ lousy 2003 biography, which was also released by (you guessed it) Random House.

    You may also want to check out how he gently lets Dick off of the murder of President Kennedy and ponder why on earth Bamford felt the need to even bring it up? Bamford kind of gives the game away here. Quoting Helms, he actually says that Operation Chaos was started at the instigation of LBJ to locate Russian funding for the anti-war movement. In fact, in Angus McKenzie’s splendid little book, Secrets, it was revealed that the CIA started it as a reaction to the numerous exposures by Ramparts magazine of its domestic operations. So when Bamford writes of Helms’ rueful, teary-eyed comment that Chaos had violated the CIA’s domestic operations charter, one does not know whether to laugh or cry.

    Similarly, Bamford praises Helms for keeping the CIA out of the Watergate scandal. When, in fact, one can argue that Helms created a cover story to disguise the Agency’s prime role in originating that scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. The icing on the cake is how Bamford deals with the Thomas Powers’ cover-up biography of Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. He first says that Helms was actually disdainful of reading the book since he thought it would be unfair to him. In fact, the Powers book was a set up all the way. Helms sat for four long interviews with Powers. And this book was one of the first to shift the blame for the Castro assassination plots from the CIA onto the Kennedys. The book was published before the CIA Inspector General report on the subject was declassified by the ARRB. If Bamford had read that report he would have realized that Helms and the CIA were lying to Powers and Powers went along with the lie. The IG report was written for Helms. It clearly states that the CIA concealed the Castro plots from the Kennedys. In fact, the CIA had actually lied to Bobby when they said the plots had been halted in 1962. They were not. They continued through 1963 and beyond. Powers later became a favorite of the intelligence community and the New York Times. This seems to be the kind of career advancement ladder that Bamford is seeking.

    A Final Consensus

    So what of Northwoods? Well, consensus abounds from many experienced Kennedy researchers that Northwoods was, at the time, a false flag contingency plan of some (but not massive) significance. It is agreed by many – Bob Groden, Greg Parker, Larry Hancock, Bill Davy, Pat Speer – that its coverage clouded many more important issues concerning the ARRB. Bill Davy went a little further saying that it could have been used as a ploy or limited hangout (William Davy: email 06/17/2010). If so, what more important revelations was Northwoods obscuring from the world? Well it’s quite a list:

    This accusation has sometimes been bandied at researchers with backgrounds in military and intelligence circles like Col. Fletcher Prouty or John Newman. Despite his earlier apparently staged troubles with the NSA, however, Bamford has never ever had his books pulled from the shelves as has Prouty, who wrote the following:

    After excellent sales of The Secret Team, during which Prentice Hall printed three editions of the book, and it had received more than 100 favorable reviews, I was invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the founder of Ballantine books. He told me he liked the book and would like to publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the deal with Prentice Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores through out the country.

    Then one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before and none the day of his call. They claimed they never had the book. I called other associates from across the country, I got the same story. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr. Ballantine had sold the company. I travelled to New York to visit the new “Ballantines Books” president. He professed to know nothing about me, and my book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown reason Prentice Hall was out of my book also. It had become an extinct species. (The Secret Team, Author’s Note, pgs.xi, xii)

    And neither has Bamford ever encountered the kind of hassles that JFK and Vietnam brought upon its author:

    John Newman’s book went much further than any of the above. So much further, that the publisher ditched the book. As Galbraith writes in his fine 2003 essay in Boston Review, 32,000 copies of JFK and Vietnam were initially printed in 1992. After 10,000 were sold, Warner Books ceased selling the hardcover. Even though the book had high visibility because of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, the company never spent anything on promoting the book. Incredibly, it was never reprinted in trade paperback. When Newman complained about this in 1993, the company quietly returned his rights. (Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived; Part Two of a review by James DiEugenio)

    In defending the integrity of both Newman and Prouty, we can see that Bamford is hardly frightening to the power structure at large. The “Northwoods guru” seems to be an incredibly poorly disguised (or overt to the point you can’t believe it the first time you look) intelligence asset. While this may be big news for those in the more wild-eyed 9/11 crowd, for those seasoned in the Kennedy case, Bamford’s posturing is nothing new – as Pat Speer explains:

    Bamford is not surprising to me. I realized some years ago that it’s all about access. Journalists get scoops based on who they know. Authors get published based on who they know. And who they know is related to the favors they’ve performed, and are willing to perform. As a result, some of the biggest stories in recent times have been broken by writers with contacts within the FBI or CIA, who have quite possibly repaid this access by burying important information related to other stories. These writers include well-known personalities such as Jack Anderson, Bob Woodward, and Seymour Hersh… it also includes lesser figures such as Max Holland and Joe Trento IMO. (Pat Spear: email; 16 June,2010)

    Greg Parker, Larry Hancock, William Davy all gave very similar statements (emails; June 2010). One prominent researcher (who refused to be named and who was strongly against this piece) commented along the lines: “Some people out there just aren’t very smart with their associations. He still has some good intel work.” The last part of this sentiment – i.e., that Bamford has inadvertently revealed something of the intelligence state – is not an opinion without some appeal to a few researchers of note. (Pat Speer, Deb Conway, emails June 2010)  Famed activists Nicky Hagar and Mike Frost have also utilized his work to great effect. Hence the warning here is clearly: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

    In the complex inter-departmental turf war struggles between agencies, enlightening information often comes out. Bamford may well be one of those conduits. But this is hardly “free” information, and no matter how “useful” Bamford may be in some areas, he certainly demands to be thought of in a wholly new light. As does the myth that Operation Northwoods is of huge significance to the assassination of President Kennedy. Or of it being the most significant document unearthed by the ARRB. Indeed, Northwoods may be important for a wholly different reason. When Bill Kelly stated all was not what it seemed with Northwoods he was not wrong and Bill Davy’s comment about it being a limited hangout exercise rings ominously true. Thus, it’s time to cast the myths about Northwoods aside along with the myth that Bamford is some fearless truth seeker. This much should by now be clear: No matter what waters the ex-Navy man, James Bamford, may be navigating, the NSA’s “limited-hangout baby” certainly has his limits.