Paul Rigby

Yes, Palmerston offered the same rational, in 1839, for seizing the Yemen port of Aden as he did for arming Caucasus terror groups at much the same time: Specifically, the protection of India, the jewel in the crown, not forgetting lines of imperial communication and trade with Britain's other colonial possessions in Asia. Yemen was to be used as the primary impediment to Kennedy's further engagement with Nasser following the coup there of 26th September 1962. The received wisdom in the West is that this was the work of Nasser's agents, local and imported, but it looks much more likely to me that it was a CIA operation designed, a la Laos in late 1960, to foment precisely that cleavage. The subsequent Western response had the happy, and in my view, entirely intentional outcome, of reuniting British imperialists (the "Suez group") with their US counterparts in a way not seen since the overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953. For an excellent overview of the Yemen coup and its aftermath, try the following. There's a rich cast of characters encompassed, not least Allen Dulles with a vintage cameo, US oil men who fail to discover oil fields subsequently located decades later, and not a few names familiar to students of the JFK assassination: 140000 A Orkaby, The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968 (Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 314pp) https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/12269828

Dreyfuss's book is full of good things, but British financing of Islamists originates earlier, with Russian expansion into the Persian Caucuses. There are some fascinating details in Craig Murray's biography of the legendary Scottish spook Alexander Burnes, among them, this passage: Palmerston sent a British ship, the Vixen, into the Black Sea in 1836 to run arms to Dagestani rebels, under cover of a cargo of salt. It caused a diplomatic incident when the ship was intercepted by Russian forces, but Palmerston sent an assurance to the Russian Foreign Minister Nesselrode that the British government had no knowledge of the venture. Palmerston was an accomplished xxxx. The Vixen was part of widespread activity by the British secret service in sending arms and advisers to the Chechen, Dagestani and Circassian rebels, which has modern echoes. The operation had been organised by David Urquhart ‘who had brought all the scattered mujahedin units together and even created a single command structure for them to direct their military action against the Russian army’ (10). Urquhart then took up his appointment as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople. Four years earlier Palmerston had organised secret smuggling of arms for the Polish uprising. Colin Mackenzie, who served in Kabul with Burnes, had taken part (11). The anti-Russian mood of the British establishment went well beyond rhetoric. Craig Murray, Sikunder Burnes – Master of the Great Game (Birlinn, 2016)

“The seriousness of Kennedy’s Egyptian policy is well evident in the dramatic increase of economic aid which flowed into the U.A.R. during the period when JFK occupied the Oval Office. From the end of the Second World War to the final days of the Eisenhower administration, American assistance to Egypt amounted to slightly more than $250 million. During Kennedy’s tenure in the White House, that amount exceeded $500 million – a dramatic increase by any standard of measurement,” Andre G. Kuczewski, Kennedy and the Middle East [rev of Modechai Gazit’s President Kennedy’s Policy Toward the Arab States and Israel], Journal of Palestine Studies, V15 N1, (Autumn 1985), 130-131

The Assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme - The Police Trail Jun 24, 2022 The murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was a shock to all of Scandinavia, it was the first time in 200 years a Scandinavian head of state was murdered and it changed Scandinavian security and it also changed the Scandinavian innocence forever. The Police trail is a trail that leads into, not only the Swedish police and the Palme investigation, but into the extreme right-wing police within the police district of Norremalm in Stockholm. It leads into the military, into Sweden's security police sæpo, and it leads to South Africa. It's a trail that has its origin long before the murder and it’s a trail that has never been investigated. This is the police trail.

Eric Goldman's Jewish Cinémathèque: "Tantura" Dec 6, 2022 Director Alon Schwarz discusses “Tantura,” his documentary as it investigates controversial events at the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948, where survivors claimed to witness a massacre of civilians by Israeli troops. https://youtu.be/KALneGG2n_I?si=5_XSDF98luUXSNNF You can pay to watch the full documentary here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tantura2 Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura May 30, 2023 Commissioned by Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, this investigation reveals new evidence about massacres conducted in the Palestinian village of Tantura by Israeli forces after its occupation on 22-23 May 1948 and subsequent depopulation. Launched on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, it brings together testimonies and photographic evidence to locate several mass graves in which the victims were buried—including one previously unidentified. https://youtu.be/rteB5T4hwVY?si=5ND6pdaoDDIOLdC3 To read more: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/executions-and-mass-graves-in-tantura-23-may-1948

Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) Danish director Mads Brügger and Swedish private investigator Göran Björkdahl are trying to solve the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjöld. As their investigation closes in, they discover a crime far worse than killing the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

11. Hyperbolic Cinematic Similes & Metaphors (HCSMs) In the wake of at least three high-profile assassinations, American intelligence bureaucracies have selectively deployed HCSMs when substituting fabricated eyewitness (or, in one instance, eyewitness-participant) testimony for original statements adjudged significantly inconvenient. Three examples follow, from assassinations in 1963, 1968 and 1980, respectively. In each instance, we find the original testimony unmentioned, thus denying the casual reader the ability to compare and contrast; and the import of the fictional testimony, to reinforce the official narrative. HCSMs are used to bolster the credibility of the falsifications by suggesting that the selected eyewitnesses’ refashioned recollections are to be relied upon because their memories functioned as if a camera loaded with film. That such an absurdly mechanical conception of how human memory works*, a proposition ordinarily anathema to opponents of Zapruder film alteration, has not, to the best of my knowledge, encountered a single objection from this source, suggests HCSMs also function as a sign to intelligence assets within research communities to refrain from offering the standard objections to eyewitness testimony. a) JFK, 1963: Norman Similas In mid-1964, the CIA used two editions of a short-lived magazine Canadian magazine – entitled, with characteristic irony, Liberty - to rewrite the eyewitness testimony of an Elm Street eyewitness called Norman Similas. His initial testimony had appeared in late editions of the Toronto Star on the evening of November 22. The original follows. It bore no relation whatever to the Liberty version. “More than seven months have passed since the horrors of Dallas. Never a day passes but what the projector has not flipped in my mind, and the scenes tumble out in sequence after sequence…There is a fade out and I’m next standing…” [Extracts from Norman Similas, as told to Ken Armstrong, “The Dallas Puzzle: Part 1,” Liberty, July 15, 1964, p.20, as reproduced in Harold Weisberg’s Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures (Self-published: Frederick, Md., 1976, 226)] b) RFK, 1968: Nina Rhodes A particularly fine specimen is to be found in the FBI version of the testimony of Nina Rhodes, an eyewitness to the murder of RFK. Interviewed on July 8, 1968, Rhodes only discovered in 1992 the extent to which her G-man interlocutor had falsified her observations. In amongst the fabrications, we find this little gem: “Everything appeared to her like still frames in a stop-action movie…” “When shown her FBI summary in 1992, Nina Rhodes took issue with no fewer than 15 items as stated in the report, some minor, some not. Most relevant, Rhodes claimed in writing : “ I never said I heard 8 distinct shots. From the moment the tragedy began I knew that there was at least 10-14 shots and that there had to be more than one assailant. The shots were to the left and [emphasis added] right from where I was.” [William Klaber & Philip H. Melanson. Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p.127] c) John Lennon, 1980: Mark Chapman “In 1992, Mark Chapman gave further insight into the murder to the mysterious journalist, Jack Jones, for his Chapman book, Let Me Take You Down: ‘I aimed at his back. I pulled the trigger five times. It was like everything had been stripped away. It wasn’t a make-believe world anymore. The movie strip broke. I took the Catcher in the Rye book out and started reading it…I tried to read the book, but the words were crawling all over the pages. Nothing made any sense. I just wanted the police to come and take me away from there.’” [Dave Whelan, Mind Games: The Assassination of John Lennon, Orwell Books, 2023, 131-132] *Dr James Orr, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth: “Memories are not like videotape you can rewind and replay for perfect recall,” K Hilpern, Is your memory playing tricks on you? (The Guardian, G2, 16 September 2008, 19)

Congratulations to Dave Whelan on the publication of his ground-breaker. From a few days ago, his most recent appearance on Out of the Blank: https://youtu.be/7CRPZni9DXc?si=tnrmh5q1PGzVddCS

Dr David Stewart: “He described in detail the wounds President Kennedy received. He told the club the President had three visible wounds … The wound in the left front was definitely entered from the front,” JFK Shot From Front Speaker Tells Rotary (Lebanon Democrat, Thursday, 30 March 1967, 1) “Dr David Stewart...said doctors who administered aid to the President…thought that a bullet had struck him in the frontal part of the head ‘behind the hairline’ and had caused the massive damage to the back of the victim’s head,” Lewis Williams, Doctors Believed President Shot In Forehead: Physician (Nashville Banner, 17 January 1967, 1-2)

Really? Associated Press report, shortly after 2 pm, quoted by WOR Radio, New York, at 2:43 pm, CST (Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder from Within, p.154, n.58): ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” AP, “Treatment Described,” Albuquerque Tribune, 22 November 1963, p.58: “When asked to specify, Perry said the entrance wound was in the front of the head.” “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head,” Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/11339-why-transcript-1327c-is-a-fraud/

Tony, Alas, no, to the best of my recollection.

New York Review of Books, December 20, 2001 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/12/20/the-tragedy-of-lumumba-an-exchange/ To the Editors: In the review of my book The Assassination of Lumumba [NYR, October 4], Brian Urquhart focuses on the role of the UN in the Congo crisis (1960–1964). Thus Urquhart draws attention to a subject highly relevant for international politics today. The way he handles the issue, however, is less constructive. Research shows that UN Secretary-General Hammarskjöld played a decisive role in the overthrow of the Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba. Overlooking the facts, Urquhart calls this conclusion “ridiculous.” Once a member of the UN Secretariat himself, he clings to the official view that the UN is neutral and impartial, and that its intervention in the Congo had no other purpose than to keep “the cold war” out of Africa. If only this had been true. In July 1960 the Security Council sent Blue Helmets to the Congo, where Belgian troops had invaded and seceded the rich copper province of Katanga. The UN mission was to provide the Congolese government with military aid until it could fulfill its tasks properly. Formally responding to the request of Lumumba, the operation was conceived not to hurt Washington’s ally. The UN asked Belgium to withdraw, but without a deadline. UN troops were deployed in the Congo, but not in Katanga. This gave Brussels crucial time to build up a puppet regime in Katanga around Moïse Tshombe. Urquhart pretends that Lumumba was “obsessed” with the secession. Lumumba had good reasons for this: the secession deprived the Congo of two thirds of its income and was throttling the country. UN troops finally entered Katanga, but only after Hammarskjöld guaranteed that the Belgian troops could stay, provided they put on a “Katangese” uniform. Belgian functionaries were unhindered to construct the “independent” state. In September President Kasa Vubu carried out a coup and deposed Prime Minister Lumumba. Urquhart maintains that the UN didn’t take sides. In fact, the secretary-general had told US diplomats in secret that “Lumumba must be broken.” He gave the green light for the UN to support the coup. The UN closed the airports, so that loyal troops couldn’t come to the help of Lumumba. The UN also closed the radio station, so that Lumumba couldn’t appeal to the population. And the UN distributed money to the Congolese soldiers on condition that they stayed passive before the coup. (In his book Hammarskjöld Urquhart “forgets” to mention that the money was secretly provided by Washington…) After the coup, the Congolese parliament renewed its confidence in Lumumba. But Colonel Mobutu dissolved parliament, and Lumumba was locked up in his residence, surrounded by a double cordon: one of UN guards protecting him, and a second cordon of Mobutu’s soldiers, who officially wanted to arrest him. Urquhart states that the US wanted Mobutu to arrest Lumumba, but that Hammarskjöld refused this, and wanted a reconciliation between Lumumba and Kasa Vubu and the reopening of parliament. The truth is that the UN and the US agreed to keep Lumumba locked up: this signified “Lumumba’s political death,” as the US ambassador in the Congo wrote. UN leaders sent home a UN official who tried to reconcile Lumumba and Kasa Vubu. While the UN helped to destroy Congolese democracy, the secretary-general built his image of “neutrality.” His aides were to answer Lumumba’s letters for a particular reason: “I think more of our record than of courtesy to a certain individual. It would be good to be able later on, if necessary, to publish replies as having been sent before an attack” on the attitude of the UN… At the end of November, Lumumba fled his residence to join his supporters in the east. Halfway through his trip, he fell in the hands of Mobutu’s soldiers. Urquhart doesn’t mention that this happened after Lumumba had asked for UN protection but this was refused by UN Commander Von Horn… While in Mobutu’s death cell, and after his transfer to Katanga, while Lumumba was tortured and killed, the UN made not one move to save his life. Urquhart contests that the UN force was “huge.” However, compared with the extremely weak forces of Mobutu and Tshombe, it was overwhelming. In fact, without UN military support the Katangese secessionists would have been toppled by the nationalists long before they could lay their hands on Lumumba. Hammarskjöld’s problem was not a lack of military force, but of political will. Before Lumumba’s death, the UN wouldn’t even consider measures to reopen parliament, although its mandate was to help restore law and order. The UN followed in this the objectives of Washington, who feared Lumumba’s political power. The West and the UN favored the reopening of parliament only after his death, when the nationalist danger was gone. Urquhart is right that the West criticized aspects of the UN operation in the Congo. However, these criticisms were for public consumption, or a counterweight to the Afro-Asian pressure on the UN leadership to help Lumumba. In itself they don’t prove the “neutrality” of the UN. History shows that this neutrality is a myth. The UN was the most important vehicle of destroying the Congolese government and laying the groundworks for the dictatorship of Mobutu which wrecked the country. Ludo De Witte Louvain, Belgium

John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck By Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” The New York Times, 27 November 1963, 20: Dallas, Nov. 26 – The continuing investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy has cleared up some questions about the number of shots and how many struck the President. Three shots are known to have been fired. Two hit the President. One did not emerge. Dr Kemp Clark, who pronounced Mr Kennedy dead, said one struck him at about the necktie knot. ‘It ranged downward in his chest and did not exit.” Edward Epstein, Inquest – The Warren Commission & the Establishment of Truth (London, Hutchinson, proof copy, 210 note 11): “the New York Herald-Tribune, December 19, 1963, 8, stated that the pathologist who performed the autopsy reported ‘that the first bullet lodged in Kennedy’s lung.’ The Journal of the AMA (January 4, 1964, V187 N1, 15), said that the first bullet ‘did not go through the shoulder and was recovered during the autopsy’.”

From the Youtube intro: On Sunday Nov 19, Rising Tide Foundation President Cynthia Chung delivered a presentation honoring the life’s mission, and combat against imperialism, and the threat of WW3 led by America’s martyred president John F Kennedy who’s life was cut short in Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963. A rare, serious, extended attempt to define Kennedy's radical foreign policy perspectives and initiatives.

<snip> Anti-Politician Video </snip>

For the benefit of those new to the debate, the suspicion that Doorman, as the motorcade passed the TSBD, was holding something other than a drink, arose no later than late February 1964, according to the gadfly first generation researcher Jones Harris, as he recalled in an interview with Jim Fetzer, broadcast, as part of the latter’s Real Deal series, on 21 December 2012. Harris, his curiosity piqued by the version of Altgens 6 which had appeared in Four Dark Days, a hastily compiled photographic record of the assassination published in December 1963, acquired two copies of the same photo from Wide World Pictures, a commercial arm of Altgens’ employer, the Associated Press*. He then sent one of the two – oddly, the one AP was happy to sell him, not the better one he had so much trouble obtaining - to the Bernard Hoffman Laboratory in New York. There, Hoffman, by common consent an outstanding figure in his field**, produced enlargements of the entrance to the TSBD, which he then subjected to examination by microscope. According to Harris, “…in the blow-ups that Hoffman made, this hand had a card in it that was sort of being shown, as though the person in the doorway was not only looking out and everything, but had his hand out with a card in the palm of the hand. It was very vague at that point, but you could clearly see the edge outline that the hand held a card. I just pass that on to you for what it's worth.” The interview continued: Jim Fetzer: Which hand would this be? I mean, in the doorway. Jones Harris: He's pretty well pinned to his right. I would say it was his left hand. The left hand is reaching down in front of even the profile of a black man that's at mid torso, which is one of the very peculiar features. It's just in the vicinity of that. It couldn't be the black man's hand, obviously, and the white man off to the left with his elbows and so forth. It couldn't be his hand. It looked to us as though that was the hand of the man in the doorway, and I remember we asked Lovelady about the thing, and he said he didn't remember anything like that and so forth and so on, so there was no point trying to pursue that, because it was quite vague even in the blow-up. All of which is surpassing strange, as the CBS-TV version of Altgens 6, as broadcast at circa 1830hrs on 22 November, clearly showed that the limb in question belonged to Carl Jones, not Oswald. Which version of Altgens 6 had AP sold to Harris? How had a limb so clearly differentiated from Doorman’s shirt on television become an integrated component of Doorman’s shirt under Hoffman’s microscope a matter of months later? The mystery becomes even stranger when one considers that both the Associated Press and CBS shared the two most powerful motives media organisations could possess for disseminating Altgens 6 as quickly and in as finer form as they could: money and reputation. In Altgens 6, the single-most dramatic still photograph of the assassination, the AP had stolen a march on its major rival, UPI, and handed a scoop to its customers, most importantly, television broadcasters, a growing market at a time when a large traditional mainstay, afternoon newspapers, were falling like skittles. CBS, in its turn, was offered a chance to demonstrate the superiority, in speed and quality, of its news-gathering, particularly over industry-leading NBC. So what happened? It took nearly four and half hours for an image transmitted from Dallas at 1pm CST to appear on CBS at circa 1830hrs EST. How to account for such a delay, one so contrary to the commercial and reputational interests of both? The answer almost certainly lies in the strong relationship of both to the CIA, which had every incentive to delay - for scrutiny, manipulation, or erasure - images every bit as much as text; and the CIA’s necessarily obsessive interest in its patsy’s locations and movements during the assassination. CBS’s closeness to Langley is well-documented. Not so the AP. There is sufficient available material, nevertheless, to confirm what common-sense would suggest: the ties between AP and CIA were profound, enduring, and used to facilitate coups. Consider the case of the Agency’s overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953. Here we find that Archie Roosevelt “sent a message through CIA headquarters to the New York office of the Associated Press explaining what the Shah had done. The Associated Press then disseminated this information, and it was later picked up by the Iranian newspapers.” Much of this collaboration was unconcealed, as in the case of Don Schwind, the AP man on the ground, through whom the CIA ran many of its tightly controlled reports on events to the US public. He was granted “the use of Tehran radio facilities, owned by the government, to broadcast direct dispatches to the AP Monitoring facilities in London.”*** Both the AP and UPI were used extensively to heighten tensions with Cuba during JFK’s presidency: “On August 3, 1961, wire services (using suppositions shared by the police) inaccurately reported that two Cubans were in the process of hijacking an American jet airliner in Texas. Members of Congress kept running back to the tickers all afternoon and some worked themselves into such fury that they proposed resolutions all but declaring war on Cuba. The hijackers turned out to be a pair of Americans from Arizona.” Two years later, in the summer of 1963, the pair had again between used by CIA to promote an entirely false story about Cuba, rushing “to the teletypes with bulletins quoting the Cuban Revolutionary Council in Miami as saying that commandos had landed in Cuba in an invasion effort.” This latter fabrication occasioned a public apology from UPI’s managing editor, who conceded that ‘on the basis of experience with announcements from the exiles, the services should not have been so eager to shoot from the hip.’” Perhaps the best indictment of the wire-services' subservience to the CIA came from the latter. The dispatch merits quoting in full: 010326 CIA Boasts of Manipulating News http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y01/mar01/26e1.htm Yahoo! March 26, 2001 HAVANA, 24 (AP) - The CIA boasted in a recently declassified section of its propaganda plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba 40 years ago that it would be able to place stories about the operation "directly on international wire services.'' "Should military action be extended over a long period of time, the radio and leaflet operations previously described will be augmented by all the regular propaganda apparatus,'' read the document, which was shown for the first time Friday to key figures in the Bay of Pigs drama, who gathered here this week to compare notes. "This will include press placement throughout the hemisphere through CIA assets; through Miami exile contacts with Florida papers; and through Headquarters placement directly on international wire services,'' read the newly declassified sections of the propaganda plan passed among conference participants in Havana. The document did not indicate how the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) would accomplish getting its information on news wires. Much of the propaganda plan had previously been declassified in large part as an attachment to the government's Taylor Commission report, which examined the U.S. role in the April 17-19, 1961 armed invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles. The three-day invasion ended in disaster. Without U.S. air support and running short of ammunition, more than 1,000 invaders were captured. Another 100 invaders and 151 defenders died. The propaganda plan was also included in a briefing book supplied to conference participants. But a section on wire services was blacked out, leaving it unreadable, even though it had been declassified through the efforts of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, one of the conference organizers. Jon Ellington [sic: should read Elliston - PR], a former National Archive Security employee who used the Freedom of Information Act to gather U.S. documents for his book "PsyWar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda,'' said he received the more complete version of the document upon request from the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. "It may have been a mistake,'' Ellington said of the passages that were not blacked out." This shows how far they were willing to go, even to reach a domestic audience.'' The document said that the placement of news stories on the international wire services "deserves special comment.'' "For in spite of all elaborate planning to reach the Cuban people and the rest of the world directly, it is the output of the established wire services which most effectively do the job,'' it said. "One report on United Press International, for example, will be repeated on nearly every radio station and most of the newspapers of the Caribbean area. UPI was the only news agency mentioned by name. "Because of the importance of this, military planners should be aware of Headquarters capability of placing items directly on the wire service tickers,'' the document continued. "During a period of fighting, especially in the first few days,'' the document said, "we will be in a position to place specific messages and propaganda lines. This will be enormously important in influencing the actions of Cuban government leaders and stimulating sympathetic support of the patriotic rebellion from other countries.'' Those opposed to any suggestion of photographic manipulation in this case have long done signal service to the CIA by assiduously masking the integration of the US media into Langley’s totalitarian system. Those interested in the truth of the matter need have no such reservations.

One of the most interesting responses to Chris Hedges’ interview with Jeffrey Sachs came from Alastair Crooke, the retired MI6 man currently offering much-needed insight on the related crises in Ukraine and Palestine. In a recent piece on the former for the Strategic Culture Foundation, he effectively endorsed Sachs’ verdict that a CIA coup removed Kennedy. Those familiar with The (London) Times’ contemporaneous reports – most obviously those of Washington correspondent Louis Heren – and editorials will note how closely Crooke’s view follows that long-ignored body of work: By the time President JF Kennedy had come into office, the situation vis á vis Russia was completely fraught: Militarisation of NATO; the U2 crisis; the Bay of Pigs débacle and the Cuban missile crisis. The CIA clearly was cornering the President, cutting off the exits, and matters were getting out of hand. Kennedy was beside himself with anger at how the CIA had led the U.S. (and Kennedy personally) into this mess. He took on the establishment, firing CIA Director Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had handled the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy had stumbled badly in the first two years of his Presidency, but by the third year, was ready to make that famous speech saying that peace was possible – even with the Soviet Union: ‘They are human beings like us’. “I speak of peace as the necessary rational end of rational men”. And, Amazingly Khrushchev was listening. An agreement followed in weeks, and the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved it. “Well … then they killed him”, said Jeffrey Sachs in a recent discussion on JFK’s final political campaign – his quest to establish a secure and lasting peace with the Soviet Union. https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/10/09/sustained-peace-with-russia-is-it-possible/

Japan Strikes North: How the Battle of Khalkhin Gol Transformed WWII 27 Aug 2019 Military.com | By Joseph Micallef https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/08/27/japan-strikes-north-how-battle-khalkhin-gol-transformed-wwii.html Joseph V. Micallef is a best-selling military history and world affairs author, and keynote speaker. Follow him on Twitter @JosephVMicallef. Eighty years ago, this month, Soviet and Japanese forces clashed on an obscure river along the border between Mongolia and Manchuria (Manchukuo) called Khalkhin Gol. The battle was the climax of a six-year-long conflict between Japan and the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Japanese war, 1932-1939, gets scant mention in accounts of World War II. Yet it had a profound effect on Japan's strategic doctrine and paved the way for Tokyo's decision to attack Great Britain and the United States. Had Japan continued prosecuting its war with the Soviet Union, the war in the Pacific would have taken a dramatically different turn. Indeed, it probably would never have happened. Japanese Strategic Doctrine, 1890-1945 Ever since Japan emerged as an East Asian power in the late 19th century, its strategic doctrine revolved around two contesting views. One group, mostly centered around the Japanese Imperial Army, proposed a Northern Expansion Doctrine or Northern Road (Hokushin-ron). A second group, mostly based in the Imperial Navy, advocated for a Southern Expansion Doctrine or Southern Road (Nanshin-ron). The Northern Road group believed that Manchuria and Siberia should be the focus of Japan's imperial ambitions and that Russia, and later the Soviet Union, was Japan's greatest threat. The Southern Road Group believed that southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands should be the focus of Japanese expansion and that the United States was Japan's principal enemy. Significantly, the Northern Road was the initial focus of Japanese imperialism. Between 1890 and 1939, Japan fought two wars with China (1890, 1931); fought and defeated Czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904); invaded and seized German colonies in China and the North Pacific (1914); and participated in the Allied intervention in Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1918). In the process, it took possession of the Korean peninsula; Taiwan; Tsingtao; the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands; and Manchuria. During the Russian Civil War, Tokyo even considered seizing all of eastern Siberia, east of Lake Baikal. During this period, Japanese strategic doctrine called for "defense in the south and advance in the north." To that end, Tokyo aligned itself diplomatically with Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. The Imperial Defense Plan of 1936, the genesis of Japan's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," tried to reconcile the conflicting doctrines by proposing to seize the natural resources of Siberia by attacking the Soviet Union via Manchuria, while also targeting the resource-rich colonies of the Dutch, British and French in southeast Asia, especially the petroleum fields of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The Japanese seizure of Manchuria, a region where Czarist Russia once had wide-ranging interests, led to growing tensions between Tokyo and Moscow. The Sino-Japanese war, an undeclared conflict, lasted from 1932 through 1939, and came to a dramatic climax at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. The Soviet-Japanese War, 1932-1939 Disputes over the demarcation of the border between Manchuria and Mongolia were the initial cause of the conflict. Japan believed the border ran along the Khalk river (Khalkhin Gol in Mongolian). The Soviets and the Mongols believed the border was 10 miles further east, at the village of Nomonhan. Between 1932 and 1939, both sides accused the other of hundreds of border incursions. The Soviets were also concerned that Japanese troops in Manchuria were within easy striking distance of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, its only reliable link to the Soviet Far East. Starting in 1935, the cold war between Japan and the Soviet Union began to heat up dramatically. Between 1935 and 1939, there were a total of 108 incidents when both sides exchanged gunfire. Both parties steadily built up their military forces in the area, while relations between the two countries steadily worsened. In July 1935, the Seventh Comintern Congress declared Japan to be a "fascist enemy" of the Soviet Union. The next year, in 1936, Japan and Nazi Germany signed the anti-Comintern pact, in which they agreed to consult on how to respond to "safeguard their common interests" should either be attacked by the USSR. After Japan invaded China in July 1937, the USSR supplied the Chinese government with ammunition, military equipment and supplies, including 82 tanks; 1,300 pieces of artillery; 65,000 rifles and machine guns; 225 aircraft; and more than 1,500 trucks and tractors. Between 1937 and 1941, only the Soviet government provided substantial military aid to Chiang Kai-shek's forces. Moscow also provided 3,665 military advisers and volunteers as part of the Soviet Volunteer Group, along with loans totaling $250 million. By 1941, more than 1,200 planes had been sent to China. Roughly half the planes were flown by Soviet pilots, ostensibly volunteers, wearing Chinese military uniforms. When the Soviet aid began, the Chinese air force consisted of 100 antiquated planes and were outnumbered 13 to 1 by the better trained and equipped Japanese. Soviet volunteers conducted the only Chinese air raid of Japanese territory, on Feb. 23, 1938, when they attacked the main base of the Japanese air force on Taiwan. Between 1937 and 1941, Soviet pilots shot down 625 Japanese aircraft. The Soviet volunteer squadrons were withdrawn in 1941 when Japan and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact. In desperation, China turned to the United States. The Roosevelt administration promptly authorized the creation of the First American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers. The Battle of Khalkhin Gol Japanese-Soviet hostilities reached a climax between May and September 1939, in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol on the Mongolian-Manchurian frontier. The conflict began with a series of border skirmishes in May and June and would ultimately involve more than one hundred thousand men. The battle occurred at a time when Europe was moving inexorably toward war amid a flurry of diplomatic activity between the British and French governments, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Both the British and French governments, on the one hand, and the Soviets, on the other, were looking to negotiate a nonaggression pact with Germany. On Aug. 23, 1939, the world was stunned by the announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union. As Stalin was negotiating the details of the German-Soviet Pact, he was also pouring additional troops into eastern Mongolia. In 1938, a 42-year-old corps commander who had distinguished himself during the Russian Civil War named Georgy Zhukov had been put in command of the First Soviet Mongolian Army Group. By the summer of 1939, Japanese strength was estimated at around 80,000 soldiers, 180 tanks and 450 aircraft. Soviet strength had reached approximately 50,000 soldiers, supported by 498 tanks and armored vehicles and 581 fighters and bombers. In July 1939, Japanese forces moved across the frontier with Mongolia and, inflicting heavy losses on Soviet and Mongolian troops, occupied the disputed border region. On Aug. 20, 1939, upon the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, Zhukov launched an attack on Japanese forces in Mongolia. Using his artillery and infantry to pin Japanese forces in place, Zhukov sent his tanks to attack on both flanks of the Japanese position. The attack encircled the Japanese Sixth Army and ultimately crushed it. Roughly 75 percent of the Japanese frontline troops were killed in action. The fighting ended on Sept. 16. The next day, Soviet troops invaded Poland. The Soviet military and diplomatic offensive stunned Japan. The conflict was occurring on the heels of the Great Purge, carried out between 1936 and 1938, which had decimated much of the senior leadership of the Soviet military. The Japanese consequently had a low opinion of Soviet commanders. The nonaggression pact left Japan diplomatically isolated from its German ally. Faced with the prospect of dealing with the Soviet Union on its own, Japan moved quickly to de-escalate the conflict. The Battle of Khalkhin Gol was the largest tank battle hitherto fought. Zhukov's battle tactics and his use of armor at Khalkhin Gol presaged the blitzkrieg tactics that the Wehrmacht unleashed in Poland. For his success, Zhukov was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union, the first of four. The next year, he was made a general in the Soviet Army. The defeat at Khalkhin Gol discredited the proponents of the Northern Road Strategy in the Japanese Imperial Army and tipped the balance to the proponents of the Southern Road Strategy and the Imperial Japanese Navy. Aftermath: The Soviet-Japanese Nonaggression Pact of 1941 On April 13, 1941, Japan and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact. They also agreed to respect the territorial integrity of Mongolia and Manchukuo (Manchuria). At the time the agreement was signed, Japan was certainly aware that Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. By signing the pact, Japan was able to ensure that the Soviet Union would not threaten Manchukuo, freeing itself to pursue the Southern Road Strategy. When German forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Tokyo opted not to renew hostilities with the USSR, despite Berlin's urging to invade. Instead, three months later, Japanese forces invaded French Indochina. The Roosevelt administration responded by placing an embargo on exports of scrap iron and petroleum, among other things, to Japan. Deprived of critical raw materials, Tokyo set in motion plans to seize European colonies in Southeast Asia and to strike against the one force it believed could stymie Japanese ambitions: the U.S. Navy. Japan did keep its options open, especially in light of German's initial successes on the Eastern Front. In July 1942, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, was dispatched to Manchuria, ostensibly to organize Japanese troops there for a potential invasion of Siberia. By then, however, Japan was irrevocably committed to the Southern Road Strategy. Had the Japanese been victorious at Midway and had the German 6th Army succeeded in taking Stalingrad, it's possible that Japan might have invaded Siberia. Japan's decision not to invade the Soviet Union allowed Stalin to transfer 18 divisions, 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft -- some of which included the veterans of Khalkhin Gol -- to the Eastern Front during the critical Battle of Moscow in December 1941. Zhukov's Siberian divisions helped turn the tide, stopping the German advance within sight of Moscow, and participated in the subsequent Soviet counterattack. It's unlikely that the Soviet Union could have withstood a two-front war against both Germany and Japan in 1941. Had Japan opted to venture north instead of looking south, it's also likely that the U.S. would have continued to supply Japan with the critical war materials, especially scrap iron and petroleum, on which Japan was dependent. In the end, the most likely alternative history of the Pacific war is not one in which Japan emerged victorious, but one in which a Pacific War was never fought. Had Japan opted to follow the Northern Road Strategy, the history of WWII and America's role in it would have taken a very different trajectory.

ARGUMENT An expert's point of view on a current event. The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did. Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie? By Ward Wilson https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ MAY 30, 2013, 12:47 AM The U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan during World War II has long been a subject of emotional debate. Initially, few questioned President Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that, although the bombs did force an immediate end to the war, Japan’s leaders had wanted to surrender anyway and likely would have done so before the American invasion planned for Nov. 1. Their use was, therefore, unnecessary. Obviously, if the bombings weren’t necessary to win the war, then bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong. In the 48 years since, many others have joined the fray: some echoing Alperovitz and denouncing the bombings, others rejoining hotly that the bombings were moral, necessary, and life-saving. Both schools of thought, however, assume that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with new, more powerful weapons did coerce Japan into surrendering on Aug. 9. They fail to question the utility of the bombing in the first place—to ask, in essence, did it work? The orthodox view is that, yes, of course, it worked. The United States bombed Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, when the Japanese finally succumbed to the threat of further nuclear bombardment and surrendered. The support for this narrative runs deep. But there are three major problems with it, and, taken together, they significantly undermine the traditional interpretation of the Japanese surrender. Timing The first problem with the traditional interpretation is timing. And it is a serious problem. The traditional interpretation has a simple timeline: The U.S. Army Air Force bombs Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon on Aug. 6, three days later they bomb Nagasaki with another, and on the next day the Japanese signal their intention to surrender.* One can hardly blame American newspapers for running headlines like: “Peace in the Pacific: Our Bomb Did It!” When the story of Hiroshima is told in most American histories, the day of the bombing—Aug. 6—serves as the narrative climax. All the elements of the story point forward to that moment: the decision to build a bomb, the secret research at Los Alamos, the first impressive test, and the final culmination at Hiroshima. It is told, in other words, as a story about the Bomb. But you can’t analyze Japan’s decision to surrender objectively in the context of the story of the Bomb. Casting it as “the story of the Bomb” already presumes that the Bomb’s role is central. Viewed from the Japanese perspective, the most important day in that second week of August wasn’t Aug. 6 but Aug. 9. That was the day that the Supreme Council met—for the first time in the war—to discuss unconditional surrender. The Supreme Council was a group of six top members of the government—a sort of inner cabinet—that effectively ruled Japan in 1945. Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day. Unconditional surrender (what the Allies were demanding) was a bitter pill to swallow. The United States and Great Britain were already convening war crimes trials in Europe. What if they decided to put the emperor—who was believed to be divine—on trial? What if they got rid of the emperor and changed the form of government entirely? Even though the situation was bad in the summer of 1945, the leaders of Japan were not willing to consider giving up their traditions, their beliefs, or their way of life. Until Aug. 9. What could have happened that caused them to so suddenly and decisively change their minds? What made them sit down to seriously discuss surrender for the first time after 14 years of war? It could not have been Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred in the late morning of Aug. 9, after the Supreme Council had already begun meeting to discuss surrender, and word of the bombing only reached Japan’s leaders in the early afternoon—after the meeting of the Supreme Council had been adjourned in deadlock and the full cabinet had been called to take up the discussion. Based on timing alone, Nagasaki can’t have been what motivated them. Hiroshima isn’t a very good candidate either. It came 74 hours—more than three days—earlier. What kind of crisis takes three days to unfold? The hallmark of a crisis is a sense of impending disaster and the overwhelming desire to take action now. How could Japan’s leaders have felt that Hiroshima touched off a crisis and yet not meet to talk about the problem for three days? President John F. Kennedy was sitting up in bed reading the morning papers at about 8:45 a.m. on Oct. 16, 1962, when McGeorge Bundy, his national security advisor, came in to inform him that the Soviet Union was secretly putting nuclear missiles in Cuba. Within two hours and forty-five minutes a special committee had been created, its members selected, contacted, brought to the White House, and were seated around the cabinet table to discuss what should be done. President Harry Truman was vacationing in Independence, Missouri, on June 25, 1950, when North Korea sent its troops across the 38th parallel, invading South Korea. Secretary of State Acheson called Truman that Saturday morning to give him the news. Within 24 hours, Truman had flown halfway across the United States and was seated at Blair House (the White House was undergoing renovations) with his top military and political advisors talking about what to do. Even Gen. George Brinton McClellan—the Union commander of the Army of the Potomac in 1863 during the American Civil War, of whom President Lincoln said sadly, “He’s got the slows”—wasted only 12 hours when he was given a captured copy of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s orders for the invasion of Maryland. These leaders responded—as leaders in any country would—to the imperative call that a crisis creates. They each took decisive steps in a short period of time. How can we square this sort of behavior with the actions of Japan’s leaders? If Hiroshima really touched off a crisis that eventually forced the Japanese to surrender after fighting for 14 years, why did it take them three days to sit down to discuss it? One might argue that the delay is perfectly logical. Perhaps they only came to realize the importance of the bombing slowly. Perhaps they didn’t know it was a nuclear weapon and when they did realize it and understood the terrible effects such a weapon could have, they naturally concluded they had to surrender. Unfortunately, this explanation doesn’t square with the evidence. First, Hiroshima’s governor reported to Tokyo on the very day Hiroshima was bombed that about a third of the population had been killed in the attack and that two thirds of the city had been destroyed. This information didn’t change over the next several days. So the outcome—the end result of the bombing—was clear from the beginning. Japan’s leaders knew roughly the outcome of the attack on the first day, yet they still did not act. Second, the preliminary report prepared by the Army team that investigated the Hiroshima bombing, the one that gave details about what had happened there, was not delivered until Aug. 10. It didn’t reach Tokyo, in other words, until after the decision to surrender had already been taken. Although their verbal report was delivered (to the military) on Aug. 8, the details of the bombing were not available until two days later. The decision to surrender was therefore not based on a deep appreciation of the horror at Hiroshima.Third, the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. Gen. Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of Aug. 7. The idea that Japan’s leaders didn’t know about nuclear weapons doesn’t hold up. Finally, one other fact about timing creates a striking problem. On Aug. 8, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori went to Premier Suzuki Kantaro and asked that the Supreme Council be convened to discuss the bombing of Hiroshima, but its members declined. So the crisis didn’t grow day by day until it finally burst into full bloom on Aug. 9. Any explanation of the actions of Japan’s leaders that relies on the “shock” of the bombing of Hiroshima has to account for the fact that they considered a meeting to discuss the bombing on Aug. 8, made a judgment that it was too unimportant, and then suddenly decided to meet to discuss surrender the very next day. Either they succumbed to some sort of group schizophrenia, or some other event was the real motivation to discuss surrender. Scale Historically, the use of the Bomb may seem like the most important discrete event of the war. From the contemporary Japanese perspective, however, it might not have been so easy to distinguish the Bomb from other events. It is, after all, difficult to distinguish a single drop of rain in the midst of a hurricane. In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed. An estimated 1.7 million people were made homeless, 300,000 were killed, and 750,000 were wounded. Sixty-six of these raids were carried out with conventional bombs, two with atomic bombs. The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke. In the midst of this cascade of destruction, it would not be surprising if this or that individual attack failed to make much of an impression—even if it was carried out with a remarkable new type of weapon. A B-29 bomber flying from the Mariana Islands could carry—depending on the location of the target and the altitude of attack—somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 pounds of bombs. A typical raid consisted of 500 bombers. This means that the typical conventional raid was dropping 4 to 5 kilotons of bombs on each city. (A kiloton is a thousand tons and is the standard measure of the explosive power of a nuclear weapon. The Hiroshima bomb measured 16.5 kilotons, the Nagasaki bomb 20 kilotons.) Given that many bombs spread the destruction evenly (and therefore more effectively), while a single, more powerful bomb wastes much of its power at the center of the explosion—re-bouncing the rubble, as it were—it could be argued that some of the conventional raids approached the destruction of the two atomic bombings. The first of the conventional raids, a night attack on Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war. Something like 16 square miles of the city were burned out. An estimated 120,000 Japanese lost their lives—the single highest death toll of any bombing attack on a city. We often imagine, because of the way the story is told, that the bombing of Hiroshima was far worse. We imagine that the number of people killed was off the charts. But if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer. From our perspective, Hiroshima seems singular, extraordinary. But if you put yourself in the shoes of Japan’s leaders in the three weeks leading up to the attack on Hiroshima, the picture is considerably different. If you were one of the key members of Japan’s government in late July and early August, your experience of city bombing would have been something like this: On the morning of July 17, you would have been greeted by reports that during the night four cities had been attacked: Oita, Hiratsuka, Numazu, and Kuwana. Of these, Oita and Hiratsuka were more than 50 percent destroyed. Kuwana was more than 75 percent destroyed and Numazu was hit even more severely, with something like 90 percent of the city burned to the ground. Three days later you have woken to find that three more cities had been attacked. Fukui was more than 80 percent destroyed. A week later and three more cities have been attacked during the night. Two days later and six more cities were attacked in one night, including Ichinomiya, which was 75 percent destroyed. On Aug. 2, you would have arrived at the office to reports that four more cities have been attacked. And the reports would have included the information that Toyama (roughly the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1945), had been 99.5 percent destroyed. Virtually the entire city had been leveled. Four days later and four more cities have been attacked. On Aug. 6, only one city, Hiroshima, was attacked but reports say that the damage was great and a new type bomb was used. How much would this one new attack have stood out against the background of city destruction that had been going on for weeks? In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight—or almost a third—were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed? If Japan’s leaders were going to surrender because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you would expect to find that they cared about the bombing of cities in general, that the city attacks put pressure on them to surrender. But this doesn’t appear to be so. Two days after the bombing of Tokyo, retired Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro expressed a sentiment that was apparently widely held among Japanese high-ranking officials at the time. Shidehara opined that “the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily. In time their unity and resolve would grow stronger.” In a letter to a friend he said it was important for citizens to endure the suffering because “even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured, or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned,” additional time was needed for diplomacy. It is worth remembering that Shidehara was a moderate. At the highest levels of government—in the Supreme Council—attitudes were apparently the same. Although the Supreme Council discussed the importance of the Soviet Union remaining neutral, they didn’t have a full-dress discussion about the impact of city bombing. In the records that have been preserved, city bombing doesn’t even get mentioned during Supreme Council discussions except on two occasions: once in passing in May 1945 and once during the wide-ranging discussion on the night of Aug. 9. Based on the evidence, it is difficult to make a case that Japan’s leaders thought that city bombing—compared to the other pressing matters involved in running a war—had much significance at all. Gen. Anami on Aug. 13 remarked that the atomic bombings were no more menacing than the fire-bombing that Japan had endured for months. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no worse than the fire bombings, and if Japan’s leaders did not consider them important enough to discuss in depth, how can Hiroshima and Nagasaki have coerced them to surrender? Strategic significance If the Japanese were not concerned with city bombing in general or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in particular, what were they concerned with? The answer is simple: the Soviet Union. The Japanese were in a relatively difficult strategic situation. They were nearing the end of a war they were losing. Conditions were bad. The Army, however, was still strong and well-supplied. Nearly 4 million men were under arms and 1.2 million of those were guarding Japan’s home islands. Even the most hard-line leaders in Japan’s government knew that the war could not go on. The question was not whether to continue, but how to bring the war to a close under the best terms possible. The Allies (the United States, Great Britain, and others—the Soviet Union, remember, was still neutral) were demanding “unconditional surrender.” Japan’s leaders hoped that they might be able to figure out a way to avoid war crimes trials, keep their form of government, and keep some of the territories they’d conquered: Korea, Vietnam, Burma, parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, a large portion of eastern China, and numerous islands in the Pacific. They had two plans for getting better surrender terms; they had, in other words, two strategic options. The first was diplomatic. Japan had signed a five-year neutrality pact with the Soviets in April of 1941, which would expire in 1946. A group consisting mostly of civilian leaders and led by Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori hoped that Stalin might be convinced to mediate a settlement between the United States and its allies on the one hand, and Japan on the other. Even though this plan was a long shot, it reflected sound strategic thinking. After all, it would be in the Soviet Union’s interest to make sure that the terms of the settlement were not too favorable to the United States: any increase in U.S. influence and power in Asia would mean a decrease in Russian power and influence. The second plan was military, and most of its proponents, led by the Army Minister Anami Korechika, were military men. They hoped to use Imperial Army ground troops to inflict high casualties on U.S. forces when they invaded. If they succeeded, they felt, they might be able to get the United States to offer better terms. This strategy was also a long shot. The United States seemed deeply committed to unconditional surrender. But since there was, in fact, concern in U.S. military circles that the casualties in an invasion would be prohibitive, the Japanese high command’s strategy was not entirely off the mark. One way to gauge whether it was the bombing of Hiroshima or the invasion and declaration of war by the Soviet Union that caused Japan’s surrender is to compare the way in which these two events affected the strategic situation. After Hiroshima was bombed on Aug. 6, both options were still alive. It would still have been possible to ask Stalin to mediate (and Takagi’s diary entries from Aug. 8 show that at least some of Japan’s leaders were still thinking about the effort to get Stalin involved). It would also still have been possible to try to fight one last decisive battle and inflict heavy casualties. The destruction of Hiroshima had done nothing to reduce the preparedness of the troops dug in on the beaches of Japan’s home islands. There was now one fewer city behind them, but they were still dug in, they still had ammunition, and their military strength had not been diminished in any important way. Bombing Hiroshima did not foreclose either of Japan’s strategic options. The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator—he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic. Most of Japan’s best troops had been shifted to the southern part of the home islands. Japan’s military had correctly guessed that the likely first target of an American invasion would be the southernmost island of Kyushu. The once proud Kwangtung army in Manchuria, for example, was a shell of its former self because its best units had been shifted away to defend Japan itself. When the Russians invaded Manchuria, they sliced through what had once been an elite army and many Russian units only stopped when they ran out of gas. The Soviet 16th Army—100,000 strong—launched an invasion of the southern half of Sakhalin Island. Their orders were to mop up Japanese resistance there, and then—within 10 to 14 days—be prepared to invade Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s home islands. The Japanese force tasked with defending Hokkaido, the 5th Area Army, was under strength at two divisions and two brigades, and was in fortified positions on the east side of the island. The Soviet plan of attack called for an invasion of Hokkaido from the west. It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions. The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive—it foreclosed both of Japan’s options—while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not. The Soviet declaration of war also changed the calculation of how much time was left for maneuver. Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months. Soviet forces, on the other hand, could be in Japan proper in as little as 10 days. The Soviet invasion made a decision on ending the war extremely time sensitive. And Japan’s leaders had reached this conclusion some months earlier. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June 1945, they said that Soviet entry into the war “would determine the fate of the Empire.” Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe said, in that same meeting, “The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war.” Japan’s leaders consistently displayed disinterest in the city bombing that was wrecking their cities. And while this may have been wrong when the bombing began in March of 1945, by the time Hiroshima was hit, they were certainly right to see city bombing as an unimportant sideshow, in terms of strategic impact. When Truman famously threatened to visit a “rain of ruin” on Japanese cities if Japan did not surrender, few people in the United States realized that there was very little left to destroy. By Aug. 7, when Truman’s threat was made, only 10 cities larger than 100,000 people remained that had not already been bombed. Once Nagasaki was attacked on Aug. 9, only nine cities were left. Four of those were on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, which was difficult to bomb because of the distance from Tinian Island where American planes were based. Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, had been removed from the target list by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of its religious and symbolic importance. So despite the fearsome sound of Truman’s threat, after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons. The thoroughness and extent of the U.S. Army Air Force’s campaign of city bombing can be gauged by the fact that they had run through so many of Japan’s cities that they were reduced to bombing “cities” of 30,000 people or fewer. In the modern world, 30,000 is no more than a large town. Of course it would always have been possible to re-bomb cities that had already been bombed with firebombs. But these cities were, on average, already 50 percent destroyed. Or the United States could have bombed smaller cities with atomic weapons. There were, however, only six smaller cities (with populations between 30,000 and 100,000) which had not already been bombed. Given that Japan had already had major bombing damage done to 68 cities, and had, for the most part, shrugged it off, it is perhaps not surprising that Japan’s leaders were unimpressed with the threat of further bombing. It was not strategically compelling. A convenient story Despite the existence of these three powerful objections, the traditional interpretation still retains a strong hold on many people’s thinking, particularly in the United States. There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising. It is worth reminding ourselves how emotionally convenient the traditional explanation of Hiroshima is—both for Japan and the United States. Ideas can have persistence because they are true, but unfortunately, they can also persist because they are emotionally satisfying: They fill an important psychic need. For example, at the end of the war the traditional interpretation of Hiroshima helped Japan’s leaders achieve a number of important political aims, both domestic and international. Put yourself in the shoes of the emperor. You’ve just led your country through a disastrous war. The economy is shattered. Eighty percent of your cities have been bombed and burned. The Army has been pummeled in a string of defeats. The Navy has been decimated and confined to port. Starvation is looming. The war, in short, has been a catastrophe and, worst of all, you’ve been lying to your people about how bad the situation really is. They will be shocked by news of surrender. So which would you rather do? Admit that you failed badly? Issue a statement that says that you miscalculated spectacularly, made repeated mistakes, and did enormous damage to the nation? Or would you rather blame the loss on an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted? At a single stroke, blaming the loss of the war on the atomic bomb swept all the mistakes and misjudgments of the war under the rug. The Bomb was the perfect excuse for having lost the war. No need to apportion blame; no court of enquiry need be held. Japan’s leaders were able to claim they had done their best. So, at the most general level the Bomb served to deflect blame from Japan’s leaders. But attributing Japan’s defeat to the Bomb also served three other specific political purposes. First, it helped to preserve the legitimacy of the emperor. If the war was lost not because of mistakes but because of the enemy’s unexpected miracle weapon, then the institution of the emperor might continue to find support within Japan. Second, it appealed to international sympathy. Japan had waged war aggressively, and with particular brutality toward conquered peoples. Its behavior was likely to be condemned by other nations. Being able to recast Japan as a victimized nation—one that had been unfairly bombed with a cruel and horrifying instrument of war—would help to offset some of the morally repugnant things Japan’s military had done. Drawing attention to the atomic bombings helped to paint Japan in a more sympathetic light and deflect support for harsh punishment. Finally, saying that the Bomb won the war would please Japan’s American victors. The American occupation did not officially end in Japan until 1952, and during that time the United States had the power to change or remake Japanese society as they saw fit. During the early days of the occupation, many Japanese officials worried that the Americans intended to abolish the institution of the emperor. And they had another worry. Many of Japan’s top government officials knew that they might face war crimes trials (the war crimes trials against Germany’s leaders were already underway in Europe when Japan surrendered). Japanese historian Asada Sadao has said that in many of the postwar interviews “Japanese officials … were obviously anxious to please their American questioners.” If the Americans wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them? Attributing the end of the war to the atomic bomb served Japan’s interests in multiple ways. But it also served U.S. interests. If the Bomb won the war, then the perception of U.S. military power would be enhanced, U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and U.S. security would be strengthened. The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is troubling to consider, given the questions raised here, that the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at the heart of everything we think about nuclear weapons. This event is the bedrock of the case for the importance of nuclear weapons. It is crucial to their unique status, the notion that the normal rules do not apply to nuclear weapons. It is an important measure of nuclear threats: Truman’s threat to visit a “rain of ruin” on Japan was the first explicit nuclear threat. It is key to the aura of enormous power that surrounds the weapons and makes them so important in international relations. But what are we to make of all those conclusions if the traditional story of Hiroshima is called into doubt? Hiroshima is the center, the point from which all other claims and assertions radiate out. Yet the story we have been telling ourselves seems pretty far removed from the facts. What are we to think about nuclear weapons if this enormous first accomplishment—the miracle of Japan’s sudden surrender—turns out to be a myth? .Ward Wilson is a senior fellow at the British American Security Information Council and the author of Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, from which this article was adapted.

Always a pleasure to revisit that one, this time with its accompanying editorial, and a suitably dishonest Dullesian preface: In The Craft of Intelligence, published only months earlier, Allen Dulles opined: “I have frequently been asked what ‘myth’ about the CIA has been the most harmful…(I) finally chose the accusation that the CIA made foreign policy, often cut across the programs laid down by the President and Secretary of State, and interfered with what ambassadors and foreign service officers abroad were trying to do.” Now for the truth: The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, October 2, 1963, p.3 'SPOOKS' MAKE LIFE MISERABLE FOR AMBASSADOR LODGE 'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam By Richard Starnes SAIGON, Oct.2 - The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power. Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high United States source here. In one of these instances the CIA frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington because the agency disagreed with it. This led to a dramatic confrontation between Mr. Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Mr. Lodge failed to move Mr. Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy. It is one of the developments expected to be covered in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's report to Mr. Kennedy. Others Critical, Too Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA. "If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically. ("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.) CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis. An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about "that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel's uniform." He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can't understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans. Another American officer, talking about the CIA, acidly commented: "You'd think they'd have learned something from Cuba but apparently they didn't." Few Know CIA Strength Few people other than Mr. Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks. Even Mr. Richardson is a man about whom it is difficult to learn much in Saigon. He is said to be a former OSS officer, and to have served with distinction in the CIA in the Philippines. A surprising number of the spooks are known to be involved in their ghostly trade and some make no secret of it. "There are a number of spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here, " one official - presumably a non-spook - said. "They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone," he added. Coupled with the ubiquitous secret police of Ngo Dinh Nhu, a surfeit of spooks has given Saigon an oppressive police state atmosphere. The Nhu-Richardson relationship is a subject of lively speculation. The CIA continues to pay the special forces which conducted brutal raids on Buddhist temples last Aug. 21, altho in fairness it should be pointed out that the CIA is paying these goons for the war against communist guerillas, not Buddhist bonzes (priests). Hand Over Millions Nevertheless, on the first of every month, the CIA dutifully hands over a quarter million American dollars to pay these special forces. Whatever else it buys, it doesn't buy any solid information on what the special forces are up to. The Aug. 21 raids caught top U.S. officials here and in Washington flat-footed. Nhu ordered the special forces to crush the Buddhist priests, but the CIA wasn't let in on the secret. (Some CIA button men now say they warned their superiors what was coming up, but in any event the warning of harsh repression was never passed to top officials here or in Washington.) Consequently, Washington reacted unsurely to the crisis. Top officials here and at home were outraged at the news the CIA was paying the temple raiders, but the CIA continued the payments. It may not be a direct subsidy for a religious war against the country's Buddhist majority, but it comes close to that. And for every State Department aide here who will tell you, "Dammit, the CIA is supposed to gather information, not make policy, but policy-making is what they're doing here," there are military officers who scream over the way the spooks dabble in military operations. A Typical Example For example, highly trained trail watchers are an important part of the effort to end Viet Cong infiltration from across the Laos and Cambodia borders. But if the trailer watchers spot incoming Viet Congs, they report it to the CIA in Saigon, and in the fullness of time, the spooks may tell the military. One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer. Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither. There is naturally the highest interest here as to whether Mr. McNamara will persuade Mr. Kennedy something ought to be done about it. (See editorial on page 32.)

New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December 1963, p.13 Truman and the CIA By Richard Starnes The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman. Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it. "It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas." For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon. Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent. Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous. The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us. It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam. It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety. This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads. Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done. There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.

A taster:

Stop me if any of this seems familiar... Pike accuses CIA of staging missing papers ‘media event’ Rep. Otis G. Pike (D., N.Y.), chairman of the expired House Intelligence Committee, March 9 accused the Central Intelligence Agency of “running a media event” aimed at discrediting him and his former committee. Pike’s remarks referred to CIA statements that the Pike Committee had failed to return 232 classified documents loaned to the committee. As described by a CIA spokesman, the documents included reports dealing with CIA purchasing and budget audits, the coup in Portugal, disarmament talks with the Soviet Union and other matters. Pike said that 105 of the documents had been found by committee staff in the files where they were stored at CIA headquarters, and that for another 95 the CIA could produce no receipts from the committee. A CIA spokesman March 9 said that the recovery of the 105 documents had not been “verified;” he also insisted that the 95 documents questioned by Pike had been supplied to the committee. George Bush, director of the CIA, March 16 rejected the idea that the CIA had tried to use reports of missing documents as a media weapon against Pike or the House Intelligence Committee. Pike March 9 also said that the committee staff director, A. Searle Field, had told him that CIA special counsel Mitchell Rogovin had threatened political retaliation against Pike for leading his committee to vote for publication of its report, which was highly critical of the CIA. Pike said that Searle told him that Rogovin threatened: “Pike will pay for this, you wait and see – we’ll destroy him for this.” Rogovin March 9 denied ever having made any such threats against Pike. Judith F. Buncher (Ed.), The CIA & the Security Debate: 1975-1976 (NY: Facts on File, Inc., 117)

July 27, 2023 Judge Rejects Hunter Biden's Dirty Plea Deal https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/judge-rejects-hunter-bidens-dirty-plea-deal.html#more Yesterday Delaware US District Judge Maryellen Noreika nixed a plea deal negotiated between Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark and the prosecutor team from Joe Biden's Department of Justice. Hunter Biden is accused of two tax misdemeanors and wrongdoing in a gun case. The deal was constructed in an unusual way that would have given Hunter Biden immunity over additional accusations of not having registered as a foreign agent under the FARA law. The tax and gun cases were split and the judge would have only been given judicial oversight over the tax issue plea while the immunity part was hidden in the gun case plea deal, a diversion agreement, where the judicial oversight would have stayed with the prosecutor. The wide ranging immunity part would thus have been hidden from the public. The well explained legal technicalities can be found in this tweet: The results of the dirty deal would have been very generous for Hunter but the judge didn't fall for the trick: The court scene, with more drama, as described by the NY Times: The deal the prosecutors had agreed to was very unusual and smelled of influence from above: The prosecutors should be fired for offering an unprecedented sweetheart deal to the son of the sitting president and for trying to trick the court into agreeing with it. Clark, Hunter's lawyer, is also under fire. Days before some Republican Members of Congress had filed an amicus brief with the court's clerk. It included testimony from two IRS whistle blowers who allege that Hunter Biden's tax case had also received 'special' treatment. A person from Clark's office then called the clerk, claimed to be with the office of Theodore Kittila, the lawyer who handled the case for Congress, and asked to remove the whistle blower evidence from the file. The clerk did so but Kittila got notice of it: The New York Post has the full take of the story. The judge was miffed as Clark called this dirty trick a 'misunderstanding' but has not yet decided what to do about it: Under Joe Biden the IRS and the Department of Justice are bending the laws and precedents to make the doings of his son Hunter Biden look less crooked than they are. The lawyer of Biden's son plays dirty tricks to remove evidence from the court's case against him. Luckily the judge seems to have no sympathy for either. Should the Republicans decide to impeach Biden over all the issues related to this son's 'businesses' they will hear a lot of applause for making their case.