Douglas Caddy

David Talbot yesterday (10/19) added a significant comment to his Facebook review of the new film, Bridge of Spies. Up until I read his comment, I had been recommending the film, which I saw last week. But its historical omission of a very important fact disclosed below by David has caused me to cease recommending it: The film omits the key fact that James Donovan had been general counsel of the OSS in World War II (the predecessor of the CIA). (James Donovan was not related to Wild Bill Donovan, by the way.) The film mentions (without explanation) that James Donovan had been a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials. He was an espionage professional and not simply a "common man" insurance lawyer. In dealing with Dulles, he wouldn't have been seen as an amateur. This omission radically changes the story.

David Talbot wrote on Facebook today (10/19/15): Dan Rather -- who knows a thing or two about the pitfalls of telling the truth (see the new movie where he's played by Robert Redford) -- just sent this endorsement of my book "Devil's Chessboard" via my publisher: "David Talbot has scored again with an important, good read." Thanks, Dan, much appreciated.

GOVT CONVENIENTLY DELETED ENTIRE DATABASE OF EVIDENCE OF DOCUMENTING PAEDOPHILE RINGS Published: October 19, 2015 Blacklisted News.com http://www.blacklistednews.com/Govt_Conveniently_Deleted_Entire_Database_of_Evidence_of_Documenting_Paedophile_Rings/46737/0/38/38/Y/M.html

3D Model Showed Controversial Photo of John F. Kennedy’s Assassin Is Not a Fake Doubts surrounded the incriminating photo since Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 By Erin Blakemore smithsonian.com October 19, 2015 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/3d-model-just-proved-authenticity-controversial-photo-jfks-assassin-180956991/#Vhce2ROu6DHRUwIA.99

The Deep State and the Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection By Charles Burris October 19, 2015 https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/10/charles-burris/the-deep-state-3/

The Deep State and the Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection By Charles Burris October 19, 2015 https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/10/charles-burris/the-deep-state-3/

Here is The New York Times book review of the just published Brinkley-Nichter book on the 1973 Nixon tapes that includes information about Vietnam policy: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/the-nixon-tapes-1973-edited-by-douglas-brinkley-and-luke-a-nichter.html

Here is The New York Times book review: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/the-nixon-tapes-1973-edited-by-douglas-brinkley-and-luke-a-nichter.html

David Talbot wrote on Facebook today: Saw "Bridge of Spies" yesterday, the new Spielberg-Hanks take on the Cold War (one resolute American takes on the CIA, Soviet power and wins the day). Filled with the usual American sentimentalism of this Hollywood duo, but it features the always brilliant acting of Mark Rylance. And it does spotlight a true American hero -- a lawyer named James Donovan who was tapped by the Kennedy administration to negotiate the release of downed U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Dulles, btw, makes a brief but appropriately chilling appearance in the film. But strangely JFK's central role in this affair is completely ignored. The filmmakers obviously wanted to sell the idea that in true High Noon fashion, it was just Donovan against the world, instead of someone acting as the envoy of a president who was increasingly eager to find a way out of the Cold War by negotiating with our enemies. Speaking of which, Donovan's equally dramatic negotiations with Castro to release the some 1,100 Bay of Pigs prisoners is briefly referred to at the end of the film. But in some ways, as I write about in my book "Brothers," this episode of his diplomatic career was even more intense. Donovan, who had the Irish love of drink and gab, formed a jovial relationship with the voluble Castro over their lengthy, late-night negotiations. But the CIA was not happy about JFK and Donovan's peace efforts in Cuba. At one point, the agency arranged to have a poisoned wet suit manufactured in its death lab and given to Donovan before one of his trips to Havana. The CIA planned to have Donovan, who was completely unaware of the CIA's assassination plot, deliver the wet suit to Castro as a gift. Donovan the peacemaker would have then unwittingly been turned into an agent of death. But either the toxins in the poisoned wet suit failed to do the job, or Donovan delivered the wrong wet suit. In any case, Donovan's peace mission to Cuba ended when JFK himself was killed in Dallas.

On the other hand, some persons might find Peter Bergen's CNN article to be self-serving. I, for one, have never believed the Obama Administration's official line on what happened to Osama Bin Laden. I was disappointed but not surprised that in the Times article's enumeration of government deceptions there was no mention of the multitude of questions that exist surrounding the assassination of JFK. But from what I have read this is a topic that is off limits to reporters of that newspaper.

Excerpts from the article "The Mysteries of Abbottabad - What do we really know about the killing of Osama Bin Laden?" by Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2015: It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011. There are different ways to control a narrative. There’s the old-fashioned way: Classify documents that you don’t want seen and, as Gates said, ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ But there’s also the more modern, social-media-savvy approach: Tell the story you want them to believe. Silence is one way to keep a secret. Talking is another. And they are not mutually exclusive. ………………………………………. Then there was the sheer improbability of the story, which asked us to believe that Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal mission, invading Pakistani air space without air or ground cover, fast-roping into a compound that, if it even contained bin Laden, by all rights should have been heavily guarded. And according to the official line, all of this was done without any sort of cooperation or even assurances from the Pakistani military or intelligence service. How likely was that? Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the conspicuously large bin Laden compound — three stories, encircled by an 18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire — was less than two miles from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. And what about the local police? Were they really unaware that an enormous American helicopter had crash-landed in their neighborhood? And why were we learning so much about a covert raid by a secret special-operations unit in the first place? American history is filled with war stories that subsequently unraveled. Consider the Bush administration’s false claims about Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Or the imagined attack on a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. During the Bay of Pigs, the government inflated the number of fighters it dispatched to Cuba in hopes of encouraging local citizens to rise up and join them. When the operation failed, the government quickly deflated the number, claiming that it hadn’t been an invasion at all but rather a modest attempt to deliver supplies to local guerrillas. More recently, the Army reported that the ex-N.F.L. safety Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire, rather than acknowledging that he was accidentally shot in the head by a machine-gunner from his own unit. These false stories couldn’t have reached the public without the help of the media. Reporters don’t just find facts; they look for narratives. And an appealing narrative can exert a powerful gravitational pull that winds up bending facts in its direction. During the Iraq war, reporters informed us that a mob of jubilant Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Never mind that there were so few local people trying to pull the statue down that they needed the help of a U.S. military crane. Reporters also built Pvt. Jessica Lynch into a war hero who had resisted her captors during an ambush in Iraq, when in fact her weapon had jammed and she remained in her Humvee. In an Op-Ed essay in The Times about the Lynch story in 2003, it was Bowden himself who explained this phenomenon as ‘‘the tendency to weave what little we know into a familiar shape — often one resembling the narrative arc of a film.’’ Was the story of Osama bin Laden’s death yet another example of American mythmaking? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/magazine/what-do-we-really-know-about-osama-bin-ladens-death.html

From the article cited in the title to this topic: "Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, with the CIA’s assistance, was involved in a “coup d'etat” to assassinate former President John F. Kennedy, an American scholar in Wisconsin says. Johnson, along with high level CIA officials, “engineered the murder of Kennedy as a coup d'etat,” said Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance." From the caption under the photo: "Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson (left), along with high level CIA officials, “engineered the murder of Kennedy as a coup d'etat,” Dr. Kevin Barrett told Press TV on Tuesday" I took the title to mean that Dr. Barrett was the scholar. Fetzer is not mentioned anywhere. The article and accompanying video are the product of PressTV, which is the voice of Iran. While one can justifiably take issue with some of the statements made by Dr. Barrett, it is significant that a foreign power through its media akin to the "Voice of America" is taking the policy position that the assassination of JFK was a "coup d'état." How many other foreign countries have done this? http://www.presstv.com/

Letters that Jackie wrote to friends in the years after the assassination of JFK showed that she suffered from PTSD until her death. Who wouldn't have done the same after going through the living nightmare that she did on November 22, 1963? An employee of my dentist in Houston worked in an exclusive dentist's office in New York City when Jackie was a client. She was known as an endless smoker and this presented a special challenge to the dentist. Constantly smoking was another sign of suffering PTSD. She died of cancer at age 64, probably brought on by endless stress in post-1963. She was a victim in a sense as much as was JFK of the evil cabal that plotted and carried out the murder of her husband. Fortune spared her seeing the mysterious death of John, Jr. as such a blow might have pushed her totally over the edge mentally if not physically.

From the article: “Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself?" Jackie asked the priest. "It is so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn't God understand that I just want to be with him?" http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/12/opinion/maier-jackie-kennedy-letters/index.html

New Orleans footprints in the JFK assassination New Orleans Magazine By Michael L. Kurtz October 2013 http://www.myneworleans.com/New-Orleans-Magazine/October-2013/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Fifty-Years-Later/

David Talbot posted this on Facebook today (Oct. 16): More blowback from the guardians of official (and dull) U.S. history. The San Francisco Chronicle found some obscure academic named Glenn Altschuler from the continuing education program at Cornell to review my book. I've never heard of the gentleman and he does not seem to have published anything of distinction, or have any expertise at all about U.S. intelligence history. And yet in his breathless and uninformed review, he proclaims the book "animated by conspiracy theories." This of course has become the convenient way for the academic and media establishments and all credulous chroniclers of power to dismiss deep research into American history that they find too disturbing. It's a way of shutting off true intellectual debate -- because once you've been tarred a conspiracy theorist, you are exiled to the lunatic fringe. It's clear that Altschuler does not have the background to seriously engage with my book, and he consistently misreads it, out of ignorance or malice. For instance, he states that my only source for writing that Dulles's CIA was suspected of supporting a 1961 military coup attempt against President de Gaulle were reports in the French press. But I actually drew from French and U.S. government documents as well, and from the work of French historians. Even the NY Times, certainly no watchdog when it came to covering the the rampant mischief of the CIA, carried reports at the time about how CIA collusion with the mutinous French generals was causing concern in the Kennedy White House. The Chronicle hired a clerk to do a real historian's job. But this is all too typical of San Francisco's daily paper these days -- a newspaper in the heart of a well-educated bastion of higher learning that has no serious intellectual content, has reduced its book review to a couple random pages stuck inside its entertainment calendar, and which is more interested in serving as a mouthpiece for the SF Chamber of Commerce and the corporate interests that are ruining the city than it is in fostering real civic debate and public enlightenment. This is a newspaper that would rather crusade against the homeless than challenge the big-money interests that are making people homeless. The paper is a disgrace to all who have a brain...or a heart. And it's about time that we built a rival daily that can take away the Chronicle's dwindling and increasingly dispirited readership, and put the thing out of its money-losing misery. Oh, did I tell you that I hate the mainstream media, with all its shady, petty, corporate-driven agendas, and it shabby relationship to the truth? Throughout the Cold War, and now the War on Terror, the press has been a willing party to our intellectual enslavement.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=bridge+of+spies+trailer Today I saw the new movie, Bridge of Spies, which is about the exchange of the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U.S. pilot Gary Francis Powers. Excellent film. However,I was startled when a scene suddenly appeared on the screen in which CIA Director Allen Dulles sketches out how the exchange is to be accomplished. He is portrayed as being in total command of the situation. Fortunately, it is the only scene in which he appears.

Headline: Happy birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald? Weekend conference in Kenner complete with cake, conspiracy theories http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/neworleansnews/13715820-173/conspiracy-theorists-to-hold-birthday

David Talbot wrote on Facebook today: I've been told that the Washington Post is refusing to even review "The Devil's Chessboard" -- after reviewing my two previous books. Major newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times have historically been far too cozy with U.S. intelligence, particularly throughout the Dulles regime at the CIA. One would hope, for the good of press freedom and our democracy, that the Washington media establishment -- after all the government manipulation and lies of the Cold War and now the War on Terror -- would FINALLY be growing a backbone in its coverage of the national security state. In the meantime, read "The Devil's Chessboard" -- the book that the CIA and the media elite don't want you to read.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2015/10/20

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3271482/Did-CIA-Director-Allen-Dulles-order-hit-JFK-New-book-makes-astonishing-claims-chief-spy-undermined-betrayed-president-served.html

The Don Reynolds saga, briefly told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=meCnZOZqNk0

Review of Bob Woodward's latest book, "The Last of the President's Men", that deals with the issue of Vietnam. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/books/bob-woodward-last-of-the-presidents-men-review.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/books/bob-woodward-last-of-the-presidents-men-review.html

The Murder of JFK: Another Puzzle Piece Solved By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News 15 October 2015 http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32954-focus-the-murder-of-jfk-another-puzzle-piece-solved