Freeport Sulphur, the Castro Plots, and the Indonesia Coup

[Paul Brancato]

Cliff. Two points. First, Laos was not where the action was. It was one of many hotspots.

Second - Lovett's dislike of Dulles style geopolitics does not in any way absolve Dulles. You decided to reduce the discussion about Freeport Sulfur to Lovett's complaints. Your point was well made, but it's a very narrow view of the research on Freeport that Jim provided from Probe magazine. 

Edited May 11, 2017 by Paul Brancato

[Paul Brancato]

On 5/2/2017 at 11:50 AM, James DiEugenio said:

Paul, here you go on Part 2  http://www.thesecrettruth.com/freeport-indonesia.htm 

 

Here you go on Part 1 https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/david-atlee-phillips-clay-shaw-and-freeport-sulphur

If you have not read Incubus of Intervention by Greg Poulgrain, you should pick it up.  Or listen to his two appearances on Black Op Radio.  He knows more about Indonesia than anyone I have met.  He was actually there for the overthrow of Suharto.  And he found out the truth about how Suharto got rid of Sukarno.

It turns out that the Dutch deliberately disguised how much gold was at the Ertzberg.  Instead they accented the copper.  But the gold deposits turned out to be much more valuable--I mean much more.  In Poulgrain's book, he shows how Dulles understood this through his access at Sullivan and Cromwell to the exploratory expeditions.  Which is why he advised Freeport not to do a deal with the Dutch.  There was too much at stake, and they could have it all.  Which is what happened.  And boy was he right.  I always said about Allen, I respected his brains as much as I did not the uses to which he put them.

It turned out that the combination of the Ertzberg and Grasberg created the largest gold deposit in the world.  And between the two mining spots, it stayed that way for over forty years. On one of Poulgrain's appearances he said how it actually superseded Congo in monetary value.  Which is really saying something.  In just one year, from the Grasberg, Freeport extracted over 58 million grams of gold, 174 million grams of silver, and 611 tons of copper.  As Chris Davidson says, do the math. Plus, he mentions something I knew nothing about.  There was also a giant petroleum deposit on the island.  It turned out to be the largest one in Southeast Asia.  Called the Vogelkop, if you can believe it, Greg makes an interesting argument that DeMohrenschildt worked on that site.

You can see how getting rid of Kennedy, and then Sukarno, greatly aided Freeport profits.  Because Kennedy, before he was killed, was helping to arrange nationalization deals for Sukarno that would be a 60-40 split in Indonesia's favor.  Once Suharto took over, these turned into 90-10 deals for the company.  But if Suharto was getting most of the ten percent, it was great for him.  Sukarno was going to use the money to help build the country.

BTW, since these threads disappear so fast now, take a look at JFK at 100 over at Kennedysandking.com  It turned out really well I think.  Even I didn't realize all the good things JFK did  in less than three years.

  https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-at-100

Thanks Jim. Finally resumed this thread, which had all but disappeared. The Pease article is very interesting. Kennedy's and King JFK-at-100 should be a museum show. It's great.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Paul Brancato

[Cliff Varnell]

58 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Cliff. Two points. First, Laos was not where the action was.

Demonstrably incorrect.

Averell Harriman negotiated the partition of Laos in the face of uniform opposition from the American foreign policy/military establishment.

Only Kennedy approved of the 1962 Geneva Accords which gave the communists the eastern part of Laos with the Ho Chi MinhTrail (a/k/a The Averell Harriman Highway) and the military penetration of South Vietnam; the United States got the western part of Laos with the poppy fields and intelligence penetration of China.

Dividing countries into separate halves is action -- an action Kennedy took no where else.

58 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

It was one of many hotspots.

What other countries did Kennedy partition?

58 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Second - Lovett's dislike of Dulles style geopolitics does not in any way absolve Dulles.

Absolve Dulles of what?

Conspiring with Freeport to whack Kennedy?

According to DiEugenio Dulles worked with Freeport when he was on the Saudi Arabia desk at Sullivan Cromwell over a decade before Kennedy was killed.

That's your proof Dulles and Freeport conspired?

58 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

You decided to reduce the discussion about Freeport Sulfur to Lovett's complaints.

Wasn't just Lovett complaining. Dulles had significant opposition in the Eastern Liberal Establishment. 

58 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Your point was well made, but it's a very narrow view of the research on Freeport that Jim provided from Probe magazine. 

You cited Indonesia as a possible motive to whack Kennedy, and you claim Dulles helped orchestrate the JFK murder.  I challenge those views.

Indonesia wasn't a life-or-death investment for Freeport, and Kennedy's death didn't solve their difficulties there.

Allen Dulles sleep-walked his way thru the Bay of Pigs invasion -- who would hire someone that flaky to orchestrate a Presidential assassination?

Dulles had Alzheimers, which made him more fit for a patsy jacket than the mastermind hat.

 

[George Sawtelle]

Cliff

Do you no when Dulles developed Alzheimers?

Is it the same type of Alzheimers that Reagan developed after he left the presidency?

[Cliff Varnell]

Check out the Stephen Kinzer book The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

The problem came a-cropper during the Bay of Pigs when Dulles behaved detached from the entire enterprise.

There was far more pressure on Kennedy not to take military action than pressure to intervene.

[George Sawtelle]

Cliff

Okay so detachment is proof of Alzheimers.

I got you. Thanks 

[Cliff Varnell]

 

How the worst blot on JFK's presidency happened

Was Allen Dulles' early dementia to blame for the Bay of Pigs?

By Stephen Kinzer

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/11/jfk-bay-of-pigs-allendulles.html

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Sen. John F. Kennedy, (left), and Allen W. Dulles, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, walks towards newsmen on the lawn of the Democratic presidential candidates in Hyannis Port, MA., home on July 23, 1960. AP

Before dawn on April 17, 1961, a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles landed in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's new regime. History has recorded the disaster that befell them. "How could I have been so stupid?" President John F. Kennedy shouted after the scope of the failure became clear.

Soon afterward, Kennedy fired his CIA director, Allen Dulles. "In a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office," he told Dulles. "But under our system, it is you who must go."

Historians often call the Bay of Pigs failure the worst moment of Kennedy's presidency. Historian Michael Beschloss has called it Kennedy's "first enormous defeat" and said Kennedy felt he had "blotted his copy book forever." What has not been understood, however, is that this failure may have been in part the result of dementia that was beginning to affect Dulles.

Listening to baseball

Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began under President Dwight Eisenhower. As soon as Dulles was given the assignment, he did something he had never done before in his eight years as CIA director: He turned over a vital assignment to another officer and stopped paying attention to it.

The person Dulles chose, Richard Bissell, did almost all the talking every time the two of them went to the White House to brief Eisenhower on the plot. When Bissell briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dulles did not even attend.

Stories of Dulles' increasingly distracted behavior had already begun to circulate quietly at the CIA. One day in 1958, an analyst took him a batch of surveillance photos taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane but found him unwilling to switch off the baseball game he was listening to. He paid little attention to the photos and remained absorbed in the game, muttering comments like, "He couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a banjo." With the same extreme inattention, he absented himself from planning for the Bay of Pigs.

In the weeks before the invasion, secrecy was broken by reporters from Time, The New York Times and other news outlets. The landing spot was changed to a beach, from which the invaders would have no chance to reach mountain hideouts. Kennedy, eager to limit U.S. involvement in the plot, made clear that he would allow only eight planes to provide air cover — not enough to knock out Castro's air force — and would under no circumstances order U.S. Air Force planes to support them.

These changes convinced the two men Bissell had chosen to direct the invasion — CIA officer Jacob Esterline and Col. Jack Hawkins of the Marine Corps — to conclude that it would fail. On Sunday morning, April 9, they went to Bissell's home, evidently distraught, and told him the plot was certain to end in "terrible disaster." He told them it was too far advanced to be called off and persuaded them to go back to work.

Under other circumstances, these two men might have appealed to Dulles himself. They did not because they understood that Dulles did not know much about the plan, had delegated everything to Bissell and would have nothing to say.

On the day of the invasion, Dulles was not even in Washington. Instead he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, joining Margaret Mead and Dr. Benjamin Spock as speakers at a convention of young businessmen. He returned late at night.

"Well, how is it going?" he asked the aide who met his plane in Baltimore. "Not very well, sir," the aide said. Dulles' only reply was, "Oh, is that so?"

The two men chatted on the ride to Dulles' home in Georgetown. After they arrived, Dulles invited his aide in for a drink. Over whiskey, he shifted the subject away from Cuba and began rambling aimlessly. The aide later described this conversation as "unreal."

Sobering lessons

After the invasion failed, Dulles fell into a period of shock. Then–Attorney General Robert Kennedy later wrote that he "looked like living death" and "was always putting his head in his hands." John Kennedy dismissed him a few months later.

The declassified transcript of a closed hearing that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held two weeks after the invasion shows that some of Kennedy's advisers attributed the fiasco to Dulles' dreamy absentmindedness. "He showed up at meetings and sat there smoking his pipe," said Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations. "I blame him for not being there."

Years later, in an oral history now available at the Dulles family archives at Princeton University, another witness to the disaster, William Bundy, made a similar judgment.

"I had the feeling that by then, he was slowing down a bit," said Bundy, who at that time worked under Paul Nitze, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security Affairs. "He hadn't been quite the man I had known. All through, he hadn't been as much on top of the operation as I expected."

Several years after his forced retirement, Dulles wrote rambling notes for an essay defending his performance, but his sister, Eleanor Dulles, persuaded him not to publish it because "he had already begun to lose his command over his memory and ideas." In retirement, he began losing his way on the streets of Georgetown.

"Perhaps it was what we call Alzheimer's disease today," a cousin, Eleanor Elliot, who cared for him later suggested. She recognized what no one at the White House or CIA had seen — or dared to mention — in the weeks leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

When Allen Dulles died in 1969, obituaries focused on his responsibility for what one called "the greatest U.S. intelligence blunder." His appalling performance may be explained at least in part by the onset of dementia. It taught Kennedy what he called "sobering lessons," but it remains the low point of his presidency.

<quote off>

That's the guy top perps picked to orchestrate the murder of JFK?

If you buy that I happen to own concessions on a couple of bridges here in the Bay Area and I can get you great deal.  I recommend the orange one.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Cliff Varnell

[Paul Brancato]

Cliff - who in your opinion orchestrated the assassination? 

you've backed up your suspicion that Dulles was slipping into senility. I've not seen that referenced elsewhere. It appears to me to be a bit of a leap, considering his long history and his clear hatred of JFK. Talbot's book is excellent and very revealing. Have you read it?

[Cliff Varnell]

34 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Cliff - who in your opinion orchestrated the assassination? 

you've backed up your suspicion that Dulles was slipping into senility. I've not seen that referenced elsewhere. It appears to me to be a bit of a leap, considering his long history and his clear hatred of JFK. Talbot's book is excellent and very revealing. Have you read it?

It's good until he gets to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination.

Check out Talbot's account of the Bay of Pigs.  He corroborates Kinzer's account of a clocked-out Dulles but Talbot still manages to conclude Dulles was acting like a master-mind.

Talbot's conclusion flies in the face of Agency reservations about Dulles' capabilities.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Cliff Varnell

[George Sawtelle]

Cliff V

I read the account you provided but did not read anything about a doctor diagnosing Dulles with dementia or Alzheimers.

Anything short of a doctor's diagnoses smacks as cover up for Dulles transgressions.

His friends seem to be saying we need to absolve poor Dulles because he had dementia.

Dulles was known to play the fool. That is why he was taken in by many. 

[Cliff Varnell]

44 minutes ago, George Sawtelle said:

Cliff V

I read the account you provided but did not read anything about a doctor diagnosing Dulles with dementia or Alzheimers.

That's how his care-taker cousin described it.

That would account for his detachment from the BOP.

Quote

Anything short of a doctor's diagnoses smacks as cover up for Dulles transgressions.

His friends seem to be saying we need to absolve poor Dulles because he had dementia.

Dulles was known to play the fool. That is why he was taken in by many. 

So he sleep-walked thru the Bay of Pigs because he was a master mind?

Believe what you like...but the facts are that JFK was under more pressure NOT to intervene in the BOP than any pressure put on him by Charles Cabell's 4am D-Day call or Adm. Burke's D-Day+2 offer to involve the US Navy.

From the Kinzer article:

"I had the feeling that by then, he was slowing down a bit," said Bundy, who at that time worked under Paul Nitze, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security Affairs. "He hadn't been quite the man I had known. All through, he hadn't been as much on top of the operation as I expected."

William Bundy's assessment was wide-spread in the US Eastern Liberal Establishment.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Cliff Varnell

[Paul Brancato]

Cliff - The Eastern Establishment, guys like the Bundy brothers, are now your go to source for assessing the health of Allen Dulles. I believe I've read your view previously that the EA were the leaders of the conspiracy. Is that so? In any case, who do you believe masterminded the assassination?

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, George Sawtelle said:

Cliff V

I read the account you provided but did not read anything about a doctor diagnosing Dulles with dementia or Alzheimers.

Anything short of a doctor's diagnoses smacks as cover up for Dulles transgressions.

His friends seem to be saying we need to absolve poor Dulles because he had dementia.

Dulles was known to play the fool. That is why he was taken in by many. 

Good points.

[Cliff Varnell]

6 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Cliff - The Eastern Establishment, guys like the Bundy brothers, are now your go to source for assessing the health of Allen Dulles.

Along with people who worked closely with him, and his family care-givers.

6 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

I believe I've read your view previously that the EA were the leaders of the conspiracy. Is that so? In any case, who do you believe masterminded the assassination?

Who is EA?

[Paul Brancato]

Sorry - Eastern Establishment.