Paul Rigby

Bobby might also have transferred the ground war in Vietnam to a Laos-like solution, with death squads roaming the countryside to get rid of radicals. We know this because Bobby revealed it to Daniel Ellsberg in an interview reported in Ellsberg's memoir.

That piece of diction – “radicals” – lingers. Could it be that Mellen wishes to suggest to her readers that RFK, had he won the presidency in ’68, would have hunted down domestic “radicals” like, well, Mellen herself?

But we need not linger on mere suspicion of hysterical and self-dramatising anti-RFK propaganda when we have such clear proof of same: Did RFK really reveal any such plan – to fill Vietnam with “death squads,” no less - to Ellsberg? If so, why is it missing from Ellsberg’s first version of his contacts with, and impressions of, RFK? It certainly isn’t anywhere in an article on the subject which preceded Ellsberg’s book-memoir by thirty years: Jan Wenner, “Dan Ellsberg: Interview, part II,” Rolling Stone, 6 December 1973, pp.16-25. On the contrary, Ellsberg became increasingly impressed with RFK (p.24):

“The picture that people had of him, that he was purely an opportunist on the War – nailing down a particular position so as to oppose Johnson – I felt was exactly the opposite of the truth. That he cared very deeply about the War and that, often – too often – he compromised that feeling for political tactics. But I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, and that drew me to him very strongly.”

Of course, the obvious rejoinder to this charge of an obsession with the mere acquisition of power is what on earth could RFK achieve without it? One group certainly did not share the view of RFK here propounded by Mellen – the people who killed him, as Mellen herself, with that sure mastery of logic which so disfigures her Garrison book, proceeds to make clear in her very next paragraph:

Bobby states that a Laos-like solution is what he believed his brother would have done, re: Vietnam, had he lived. Yet the ground war was indeed what the military-industrial complex wanted and needed. So in a way Bobby was assassinated for the same reason his brother was.

A second group – let us here assume there were no links with the first - doubtless perplexed by Mellon’s version of JFK’s policies in Laos would appear to be the very CIA/Special Forces men running the actual death squads there in 1961-62.

Both the Agency and Military Assistance Advisory Group personnel there “scarcely hid their disapproval” of the Kennedy-backed peace negotiation and worked actively to “subvert it.” (1) The opposition became so naked that in mid-November 1961 Brigadier Andrew Boyle, commander of the US military “adviser” contingent in Laos, was obliged to threaten “that any enlisted man or officer who violated” his order to desist from public dissent to the Kennedy White House policy “would be returned immediately to the United States with an official reprimand and might face further disciplinary action.” (2) A New York Times editorial at the end of the month lamented that “American policy in Laos has often suffered from conflicting action by agents of different branches of the United States Government. In Vientiane the embassy has at times pursued one program, Pentagon men and Central Intelligence operatives still another.” (3)

In summary, Mellen’s game-plan is the familiar one – offer revelations about the CIA to gain credibility, then lavish the banked credit on a depressingly familiar assortment of preposterous inversions & crude smears.

(1) Don A. Schanche, “Have We Lost Southeast Asia?,” Saturday Evening Post, 7 April 1962, p.88.

(2) Jacques Nevard, “US Bars Carping By Aides In Laos,” The New York Times, 29 November 1961, p.8.

(3) Editorial, “Untogetherness in Laos,” The New York Times, 30 November 1961, p.

Uh, Paul, it is not "undoubted" that National Review had connections to the consspirators.

I for one doubt it.

Are you too aiming for inclusion in the second edition of VB's book?

William F. Buckley, Jr. - not the National Review, Tim, do keep up - was out of the loop? An outrageous proposition!

And no complaints about Buckley's ghastly invocation of the Holocaust in this context? Perhaps you've been taking lessons from the ADL.

Paul

Aside from having to arrange Oswald's murder, what difference did Oswald's capture make in the way the plot unfolded?

Thought it might be useful to revisit the immediate response of a CIA journo with undoubted connections to the upper levels of the plot. Worth noting before proceeding that Buckley's National Review did bother to blame Moscow for the CIA-directed coup attempt in Saigon in November 1960.

William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Guilt Is Personal,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 25 November 1963, p.10A:

“My own message, which I was called upon to make a few minutes after the President’s death, began as follows, (and thereby hangs a tale).

‘The assassination of President Kennedy was,’ I said, ‘the act presumably of a madman, heir to the madmen who killed Lincoln and McKinley and, for that matter, Christ, reminding us that the beasts are always with us, and that they continue to play decisive roles in history, and in human affairs.’

I meant in that first sentence to try to warn against an impending storm, whose electricity was hot on the air. The opinion-makers of the country, and probably large segments of the population, were getting ready to turn the President’s tragedy into an excuse for a pogrom against the American right.

Within a matter of minutes, nationally known radio and television commentators had started in, suggesting that the assassination had been the work of a right-wing extremist, and recalling that it was also in Dallas that Adlai Stevenson had recently been hit on the head by an anti-UN placard.

To the quite obvious dismay of the bloodhounds, it was only a matter of hours before the Dallas police put their finger on the probable culprit, against whom an almost undeniable case has apparently been built. And lo and behold the assassin turned out to be a member of a Communist front who only a couple of years ago tried to give up his citizenship in Russia as a means of expressing his contempt for this country.

Goodness knows what would have happened if Lee Oswald had not been apprehended, or even if he had been apprehended a day or two later.

Even as it was, the disappointment was more than some could bear, and the genocidal fury and there broke its traces. I think of one television commentator who made a statement about the right wing so fatuous that only the pomposity of the delivery, and the bitter grief of the moment, saved him from accountability for it.

And of course the Communist party’s Worker classified the assassination as the ‘ultimate depravity of the pro-Fascist, ultra-right forces.’

The point to remember, amid our grief, is that the act in question, although it was done by a far left-winger, is not an act for which the far left bears the collective guilt.

It was made by a fiend, a psychotic in all probability, and it is of no importance whatever whether his political delusions were of the left, or the right: The finger that pulled that trigger was directed by a febrile mind whose political coordinates are purely coincidental, and nothing of general nature is to be gathered from his membership in the fair play for Cuba committee, or his sympathy for Marxism.

"Pogrom"? "Genocidal"? Interesting to note how early the American elite right took up the Holocaust as a shield for its crimes.

How do you define..."coup d'etat" within the context of JFK's murder?

A revolution under the guise of a covert restoration of the status quo ante.

In his 1961 book, Secret Service Chief, ostensibly co-written with Leonard Wallace Robinson, recently retired Secret Service head U.E. Baughman offered a plausible picture of the background to his decision to retire:

“I well remember one particular day of the lovely spring. It was an incredibly beautiful day in May. I drove to work through a world of beginnings, for everywhere everything had broken into blossom and bloom. I suddenly didn’t feel my too familiar weariness any more. But somehow I didn’t want to go to my office. I did go, however, through years of accumulated habit, and when I got there I felt intolerably restless; cabined and confined, imprisoned.

My wife had been after me to retire again – just the night before. Her arguments were good, irrefutable. I’d done my job. I needed change, to loaf and to invite my soul. I’d earned it. She said all this but somehow I had hardly listened to her. However, now, suddenly, her words became more meaningful. There was no real problem. I was eligible to retire, eminently so. I had put in thirty-three years of service and was five years over the retirement age.

I looked out of the window of the Treasury Building at the spring blue skies, at the visitors to Washington strolling on Pennsylvania Avenue. You could tell the visitors form the workers by their leisurely gate…

I paced around my office. My wall was hung with pictures of the people I had known and the people I had protected…I stopped before one of the awards now, a citation from the American Veterans of World War II…The citation went on and on and, while it was on the rhetorical side, it moved me curiously. I gave a deep sigh…For the first time I thought: ‘Perhaps that’s true; perhaps I’ve done enough. Perhaps I ought to relax now and let others take over.’

I took up my hat on a sudden impulse and left the office without telling anybody where I was going…I stayed out till 3.30 p.m. and on my back I called my wife and told her we were going to retire. She was beside herself with joy. ‘Have you told them already?’ she asked, as if fearful that I’d back down on my decision.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

But I made good on that white lie at once. I went back and phone Secretary of the Treasury Dillon to tell him of my decision. Saying good-bye to a lifetime of work was as easy as that; a simple phone call and your whole life could be changed,” (pp.258-260).

But was it as simple – not to mention schmaltzy and hackneyed - as described? There is ground for scepticism.

One source of such doubt comprises a UPI-sourced piece which appeared in the NYT in late January 1961. It reported the retirement of the deputy chief of the SS, Russell Daniel, 54, “an agent of thirty one years” who “could have become Chief of the Secret Service had he not elected to retire…It was learned that the chief, U.E. Baughman, had considered retiring in favor of Mr. Daniel.Now Mr. Baughman plans to remain head of the service for three or four years” (UPI, “Secret Service Shifts,” NYT, 26 January 1961, p.20). Baughman was only 56.

Nor was this the only ground. As we have seen above, Baughman dated his day of decision to May 1961. Yet it was to take until late July for the news to reach the press, at minimum, then, nearly two full months: “Chief of Secret Service to Retire Next Month,” NYT, 25 July 1961, p.17. According to this report, Baughman possessed “no plans to seek another job,” but was now “thinking about writing a book about his career.” (The Washington Post report repeated the line that Baughman “had no plans for private employment at the moment,” but failed to record Baughman’s new-found literary ambitions.) Why such an apparently lengthy delay between decision and public announcement? Was there an event or development which occurred in the intervening period that it was felt better to gloss over?

The suspicion that the book version of the circumstances surrounding Baughman’s decision to retire is not entirely reliable or candid is reinforced by a report which appeared in the NYT in late August 1961. According to the NYT’s Joseph Loftus, reporting on the approval given to Baughman to keep his guns in retirement, the latter had “received several job offers. Since he was only 56, he would surprise no one if he started a new career” (“Baughman able to keep guns,” NYT, 20 August 1961, p.58). Surprise no one, that is, except the authors of a book called Secret Service Chief.

Memory plays tricks, of course, and it is not my attention to spatchcock Baughman into the ranks of the conspirators. To the contrary, it was likely because he was of pre-war Cold War vintage and honest that he was subject to a little inducement to help sway his decision. What form could such an inducement have taken? How to tip to the balance for retirement – let us concede, as the evidence suggests, the disposition existed - without arousing suspicion? We have already seen the answer.

Memoirs as CIA pay-off, buy-out, &/or syke-warfare.

In Gavan McCormack’s contribution, “Burchett’s Thirty Years’ War,” to the Ben Kiernan-edited Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (London: Quartet Books, 1986), there is a rare mention of a classic CIA gambit (p.180):

“A prominent American journalist, Edward Hymoff, then bureau chief for International News Service in Seoul, was authorized by the American CIA to offer Burchett the huge sum of $100,000 if he would co-operate. The CIA plan called for Burchett to shout ‘sanctuary’ and run to a waiting helicopter which would whisk him out of the area. In Burchett’s words: “The only intelligence agency which ever tried to recruit me was the CIA, during the Korean armistice talks, some twenty-four years ago, for a down payment of $100,000. I refused the offer, of course.”(88) Hymoff confirmed this: “Burchett just grinned and said nothing. He didn’t take the bait.”(89)

Unfortunately, neither Burchett nor Hymoff is very precise as to when this exchange took place. Burchett put it at ‘1952 or 1953’; Hymoff mentioned that the money offer was in the form of a bid to buy Burchett’s ‘memoirs’ in the same way that General Dean’s had been bought (for $50,000) by the Saturday Evening Post, which means it must have come after Dean’s repatriation on 4 September [1953 – PR].”

88: The Guardian (New York), 16 November 1977. (See also ibid. for 30 November.)

89: John Hamilton, reporting from Washington in the Herald (Melbourne), 27 and 28 December 1977.

The company which took Secret Service Chief was Random House, a publishing house characterised by Christopher Story, the editor of Soviet Analyst and a man with excellent connections in the Anglosphere spookocracy, as a veritable “front for the Central Intelligence Agency” (Volume 29, Numbers 1-2, (May-June 2004), p. 17). Serialisation rights were quickly arranged with none other than the Washington Post, a Mockingbird bastion par excellence, which duly offered ten instalments beginning Christmas 1961. The book had four stand-out utilities to the CIA. For the moment, I confine myself to two, both of which featured in the WAPo extracts from the book.

First, it promulgated the establishment fiction that all previous would-be, not to mention actual, presidential assassins had been “lone-nuts,” an assertion hammered home. Second, and most unsubtly of all, the threat posed by “a good marksman with a high-powered telescopic rifle” was flagged. This latter theme was to remain a staple of the genre: In a lengthy profile of Baughman’s replacement, James Rowley, by Emile C. Schurmacher published in True magazine – the edition dated 22 November 1963 – only the identity of the originator of the fear had been changed (Emile C. Schurmacher, “The Man Who Protects the President,” True, 22 November 1963, pp.12-15, 73-79). This was a deliberate and systematic red-herring. It was to work triumphantly.

Paul, have you looked at Chapter 8 of Lost Crusader lately? Its worth giving a second look.

Will do - I got it on inter-library loan, got side-tracked, then skimmed it in indecent haste to avoid the fiscal hammering that comes with late return. From what you say, I missed a trick. Ta for the tip.

At any rate he seems to imply that Richardson was not the real player in August, and the station chief who replaced him was not the key CIA figure in November. No?

Agreed - Richardson was essentially a front-man/blind for the more active players until the late August attempted coup, when the CIA institutionally moved into overt opposition to a negotiated settlement. In this, the August '63 coup followed the model established by the November 1960 effort. There, too, the station chief was not central to the attempt.

So from where was control exercised? Stategically, it had to be Washington (or rather its spookiest suburb) for the post-Dallas changes to US policy in Vietnam had to be readied in advance for integration into the broader post-Dallas narrative.

Tactically? That would have to be Saigon -USOM would be my favoured guess.

Paul

4) AP, "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3

Dallas, Tex.-AP - A strip of color movie film graphically depicting the assassination of President Kennedy was made by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8 millimeter camera.

Several persons in Dallas who have seen the film, which lasts about 15 seconds, say it clearly shows how the president was hit in the head with shattering force by the second of two bullets fired by the assassin.

Life magazine reportedly purchased still picture rights to the material for about $40,000.

("The film also was being distributed by United Press International Newsfilms to subscribing stations. WITI-TV in Milwaukee is a subscriber, but will reserve judgment on whether to show the film until after its officials have viewed it.")

This is what the film by Abe Zapruder is reported to show:

First the presidential limousine is coming toward the camera. As it comes abreast of the photographer, Mr. Kennedy is hit by the first bullet, apparently in the neck. He turns toward his wife Jacqueline, seated at his left, and she quickly begins to put her hands around his head.

At the same time, Texas Gov. John Connally, riding directly in front of the president, turns around to see what has happened.

Then Mr. Kennedy is hit on the upper right side of the back of his head with violent force. His head goes forward and then snaps back, and he slumps down on the seat.

At this time, Gov. Connolly is wounded and drops forward on his seat.

Mrs. Kennedy then jumps up and crawls across the back deck of the limousine, apparently seeking the aid of a secret service man who has been trotting behind the slowly moving vehicle. He jumps onto the car and shoves Mrs. Kennedy back into the seat. Then he orders the driver to speed to the hospital where the president died.

The elapsed time from the moment when Mr. Kennedy is first struck until the car disappears in an underpass is about five seconds."

UPI (London), “World Press Raises Doubts About Assassination Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 26 November 1963, p.4A:

…The Milan newspaper Corriere Lombardo…referred to a movie of the actual shooting and said it showed that “not more than five seconds elapsed from the moment Kennedy was shot and the moment his car sped away.”

Dupe deleted.

Paul,

When you ask, "Was the white Fiat introduced into the tale as a 'grassy knoll' piece of mis-direction from the Merc itself?" you are precisely on target.

The operation to blur the perceptions -- of witnesses and post-event investigators -- is an all-important component in an illegal public execution.

Uno/MB contact supports a plausible hypothesis of "accident" and simultaneously sends suspicious types like us speeding down our own dark tunnels.

If one were to undertake what I guess would be called a time-motion study of the MB from the Ritz to the crash scene, one would come across conflicting eyewitness testimony as to the configuration, speed, and route of what amounted to at least one motorcade. Why?

Let's stipulate that witness reports can be unreliable. Of course this is not to say that ALL witness reports are unreliable ALL THE TIME.

That being established, let's game the assassination. Given all we've learned about the overworld's underworld, how would we have done it?

Apres vous.

Charles

Charles,

A fascinating proposal, and one I may well take up at a future date. For the moment, however, an observation and two inferences from it.

Consider again the nature of the damage to the Merc. The front of the car bore a pronounced dent at the mid-front, to the extent that the wings of the car appeared to have curved round the impediment. It had clearly struck the column head on, not on either wing; and it was thus anything but a glancing blow.

My first inference from that reinforces both my own aforementioned viewing, early on the Sunday morning on BBC TV, of footage showing the car upside down, and its occupants, including Diana, still in it; and the eyewitness testimony quoted in that same day’s newspapers confirming same: A head on collision at great speed would likely cause the car, especially such a heavy one, to flip over.

My second: The fact that the Merc hit the pillar head on is powerfully suggestive that the driver was NOT in control of the vehicle. Why? Because the instinct to turn away from the looming obstacle is universal, universally powerful, and incredibly rapid. Even if Paul could not avoid it entirely, as was perhaps the case, one would confidently expect to see damage to one side or the other of the car’s front. Unless, that is, we are to believe that Monsieur Paul did not have time to make any instinctive reaction at all; or was either a hypno-programmed assassin, or else hopelessly drunk.

I’ve seen no reliable evidence for the Manchurian Candidate chauffeur hypothesis, or for his being steaming drunk. And the fact that the pillar struck was not right at the tunnel’s entrance leaves me with little option but to rule this objection unlikely.

Paul

I certainly did not remember your 2005 book as being ONLY attacking Bobby and ZERO questions raised about the credibility of the Agency? What happened? Seems like two different Joan Mellens.

Just a shift in emphasis, or a dropping of the mask?

Great questions!

Paul

One very neglected thread of JFK's search for a way out of Vietnam is that leading through London. Traces are rare - I've found them so, anyway - but they exist. Here's two:

Hilaire Du Berrier. Background To Betrayal: The Tragedy Of Vietnam (Mass.: Western Islands, 1965), p. 238: "Through the labor unions of Western Europe and a London group headed by a certain Labor member of Parliament *, Hanoi was kept informed of the Kennedy team's groping for a way out."

"Today's World Report: Truce Moves Reported In Viet Nam," New York World-Telegram & Sun, (Friday), 25 October 1963, p.6: "LONDON - The government of South Vietnam and Communist North Viet Nam are apparently making exploratory contacts that could lead to a truce, diplomatic sources said. There was no official confirmation…Diplomatic sources said the current moves were believed to be aiming at some sort of truce arrangement with possible wider ramifications."

*My best guess, and it is no more than a guess, would be Philip Noel-Baker. For more on his background, see the following links:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRnoelbaker.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Noel-B...aron_Noel-Baker

David J. Whittaker. Fighter for Peace: Philip Noel-Baker, 1889-1982 (York, England: William Sessions Ltd., 1989), pp.312-315:

Noel-Baker “circled the globe in 1962, visiting Canada, the USA, Moscow and…Peking, Hong Kong, and Tokyo…By the summer of 1965…a letter to The Times…lamented the way in which the American President seemed influenced by military advisers and the CIA*…”

*Philip Noel-Baker, “Letter to the Editor: An Authority Diminished – President Johnson’s Policies,” The Times, Monday, 19 July 1965, p.11. The CIA used a favoured creature of the period, Peter Bessell, to reply in The Times to Noel-Baker. Bessell’s letter appeared on 21 July 1965.

A further potential lead on British involvement in Vietnam peace negotiations came earlier this year from a surprising source – the Cottesloe theatre, London, and playwright Nicholas Wright, whose play, “The Reporter,” took as its subject the career and suicide of one-time star BBC reporter James Mossman.

Mossman’s was a household face in the UK in the early-to-mid ‘60s thanks to his appearances, among other places, on Panorama, BBC TV’s flagship current affairs-cum-investigative reportage programme. Founded in 1953, Panorama’s first editor, Dennis Bardens, was a spy-occultist – pre-war he “joined the bohemian and occult circles gathered round Victor Neuberg, the great disciple of Aleister Crowley” before a spot of “secret service work in Czechoslovakia” in the immediate post-war period (1) – who appears to have bequeathed the programme a tradition it was never to loose, as a front for British intelligence. Among the Brit spooks who wound their way onto the programme was James Mossman, who did “undercover work for MI6” earlier in his career (2).

In the summer of 1963, Mossman was in Saigon, where he witnessed “a Buddhist monk immolate himself, like a charred tottering marionette” (3). The inevitable question – was Mossman there on behalf of his former employer, MI6? And if so, what was his role? Mere observer?

One strong clue as to Mossman’s personal assessment of the political situation in Saigon was offered in a pre-curtain up piece for the Guardian by the playwright himself:

I saw him just once after this, early one evening in the Opera Tavern, off Drury Lane. He was with his lover Louis…It was the night of the American-inspired coup that toppled the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Over-awed, I made a stupid remark about it. Mossman was clearly angry about the day’s events and clearly thought I was an idiot. But he took the trouble to put me straight. I’ve reconstructed some of what he said, as well as I can remember it, in my new play The Reporter (4).

The script of the play appears to be unavailable as yet – has anyone reading this seen the play? And recall Wright’s version of what Mossman said the evening of Diem’s overthrow and murder?

(1)C.A.R Hills, “Obituary: Dennis Bardens,” The Guardian, Saturday, 21 February 2004, p.23.

(2)Kate Bassett, “Theatre: The life and loves of a fatal Englishman,” The Independent on Sunday, ABC section, 25 February 2007, p.15.

(3)Ibid.

(4)Nicholas Wright, “The real Jim,” The Guardian, Saturday Review, 3 February 2007, p.14.

... I'd add that the Windsors did not want the Muslim Dodi to be a step father to the king of England.

Myra,

One of the most intriguing and, from Diana’s point of view, ominous, pre-assassination pieces on her appeared in the Guardian’s Outlook section in mid-May 1993.

Jointly attributed to Martin Kettle (a New Labour bootlicker, but a well-connected one), Richard Norton-Taylor (no stranger he to MI6) and Michael White (a political correspondent ever willing & able to discern wisdom in our unelected rulers), it bore the snappy title “Diana may be a loose cannon on the English flagship. But its officers are also feeling the heat. Accustomed to greatness, the English ruling class is being destabilised and it is reacting with venom,” Saturday, 15 May 1993, p.23.

Though making a passing nod in the direction of her utility to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign against the traditional Right in Britain, the article was primarily concerned with Diana’s serious flirtation with conversion to Catholicism. (Her papal pied piper was Dom Henry Wansborough, the Benedictine monk who was master of St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former housemaster of her “friend” James Gilbey at Ampleforth.) There followed a surprisingly serious consideration of the implications of such a conversion for the Church of England, the Monarchy – and the intelligence services. The most interesting passages in that meditation follow. Ignore the absurd bit about MI5 officers deferring to “no other power” – you can’t become head of either MI5 or MI6 without CIA approval:

All of which provides ample justification… for the alleged interest of the security services. MI5’s task is to protect “national security”. This is defined as safeguarding “the state and the community against threats to their survival or well-being”. Conceivably, actions and decisions by individual members of the royal family – even the heir to the throne and certainly his estranged wife – could be seen as just such a threat.

Faced with such a problem the response of the security services epitomises many of the tantalising contradictions which run through the culture and institutions of the English ruling-class in this swirling situation. Officers of MI5 – responsible for the “defence of the realm” – say they owe their allegiance to the “Crown”. They defer to no other power. They have used this in the past to justify operations against MPs and ministers and – in the case of Harold Wilson’s Labour administration – the elected government of the day.

They therefore have a double interest in the maintenance of the monarchy. The Crown is their protection. It also embodies and stands at the head of the shared values of the traditional establishment, which includes army officers (some of whom are court officials, while others are apparently in the Prince’s circle of advisers) as well as senior MI5 and MI6 officers.

Yet the workings of this network are labyrinthine. Sir Colin McColl, known as C, for “Chief” of MI6, regularly communicates with the Queen’s private secretary, currently Sir Robin Fellowes, who is also, to complicate things further, Diana’s brother-in-law. MI6 enjoyed a special relationship with the Queen and her Palace advisers. Adverse reports about their behaviour have been included in classified diplomatic telegrams from British missions overseas, concerned about the damage the continuing scandals are inflicting on British “prestige”.

As is obvious, this was well-informed, shrewd and deeply serious stuff – and entirely forgotten in the wake of Diana’s death, most notably by that obsessive attacker of things even remotely conspiratorial, the Guardian, the very paper in which it had appeared.

Paul

“Dodi is killed, Diana badly injured in Paris car crash,” Sunday Times, 31 August 1997, p.1:

“Mike Walker, an American tourist from Ohio, saw Diana’s overturned Mercedes in the aftermath of the crash: ‘We were travelling in the opposite direction and saw the car lying flipped over at the bottom of the hill…’”

Again:

Mail on Sunday reporters, “Diana very grave after car crash,” Mail on Sunday, 31 August 1997, p.2:

“One witness at the scene said: ‘It looked as if the car hit the wall of the tunnel and flipped over.”

And again (though note the adverb "partially" - the car's position of rest in transition?):

Luke Harding, Owen Bowcott, John Hooper, Paul Webster, Alex Bellos, Stephen Bates, Chris Mihill in London, Paris and Rome, “How a game of cat and mouse ended with carnage in Paris,” The Guardian, Monday, 1 September 1997, p.5:

“The Mercedes had partially fallen on its roof, crushing it and forcing the engine back into the driver’s and passenger’s compartment.”

The delay in getting the injured and dead out of the car:

Luke Harding, Owen Bowcott, John Hooper, Paul Webster, Alex Bellos, Stephen Bates, Chris Mihill in London, Paris and Rome, “How a game of cat and mouseended with carnage in Paris,” The Guardian, Monday, 1 September 1997, p.5:

“The race to cut her free was proving difficult. The problem was the car’s dense armour plating…The specially reinforced steel made it extremely difficult to cut through and reach Princess Diana and the injured bodyguard…The firemen needed a good hour…After more than an hour of cutting, at 2am Diana was finally lifted clear of the carnage of the Mercedes.”

Given the weight and speed of the Mercedes, it would appear unlikely that a small Fiat Uno - or whatever it was - was capable of bumping the Merc into an unwanted change of direction. Was the white Fiat introduced into the tale as a "grassy knoll" piece of mis-direction from the Merc itself?

He freely admitted it in open court in the US and in letters to and interviews with media outlets.

But chose not to testify at his trail in Pakistan - odd, really, if he wanted to deliver his message to his home audience.

The glass and gun could have been planted but it's odd if they were that neither he nor his roommate said anything about it. Do you think the local cops were in on it too?

Given who he worked for - see below - my faith in the testimony of his roommate isn't the greatest. Planted evidence? Police in cahoots with the CIA? Unthinkable. Or may be that wasn't the case here (see final item).

You also ignored that he was IDed by witnesses, normally you put such a premium on eyewitness testimony.

Not too often you get a boat-load of eyewitnesses who openly admit to working for Langley.

I guess being shown to be wrong hurts leading you to resort to sarcasm. Almost all photos of Kansi show him to be light-skinned enough to pass as white especially by witnesses who got brief glimpses of him from inside their cars shortly after sun up as he was randomly shooting people (in their cars) with an automatic weapon.

All you've shown me, Len, is a photograph with what appears to be an unnatural light source on his face, a photograph whose provenance and handling would require a great deal more investigation than a thumbs-up from an habitual establishment shil.

And then there's the small matter of Kasi's job. Here's the aforementioned Rashid and Adams on that and other interesting bits and pieces:

"There is uncertainty on how he entered the United States. According to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, he applied for political asylum in 1991, claiming that he had entered the country through New York's Kennedy airport without being interviewed by immigation officials. In theory that is impossible; either Kansi [sic] came in some other way or he had high level help to avoid official screening. He also won a work permit without being interviewed by the INS, again breaking the rules."

Can we say "CIA"? I think we can. And just in case there's any doubt about this, we need only look at his employ at the time of the shooting. Rashid and Adams again:

Despite having a degree in English, he took a minor job as a courier - but with a company owned by Chris Marchetti, the son of Victor Marchetti, a legendary covert operator. It is the only courier company in the Washington area to deliver to the CIA headquarters.

So a man who presumably has access, but virtue of his job, to some interesting CIA locations, chooses to register his alleged protest by a harum-scarum random shooting at the entrance to a heavily guarded site when he could have pulled off something much more murderous much more easily in the course of a standard working day, and got away without a hot pursuit. Ho-hum. Yet another dog that doesn't hunt.

To finish, Rashid and Adams again:

"The police have complained that the CIA has done the bare minimum to co-operate with the investigation, fuelling suspicions that the agency may know more about the case than it has admitted so far. 'Kansi appears to be CIA-trained because he planned this so well and so methodically,' said a senior police officer involved in the search...Quetta, where Kansi's family are prominent landowners, was a key forwarding post for the CIA shipments of $6 billion of arms to the mujaheddin during the Afghan war."

The Agency burns yet another Muslim asset? The only novelty was in the location for, and the elaborateness of, the fit-up.

Paul, please expand on what you mean by more dishonest.

Sorry, Nat, I should have been clearer. (Brevity is sometimes, alas, no more than the soul of tiredness…)

I was merely alluding to themes touched upon previously in the thread. Humour me while I revisit them.

We are routinely invited to deride Kennedy, Harriman et al – the small group favouring a political settlement, not a military one, along the lines of the Geneva agreements on Laos – for their hypocrisy. Here’s a group of prize hypocrites, this view would have it, which publicly opposed assassination and coup d’etats until it suited, as, allegedly, in Diem’s case in November 1963. Now here’s that remarkable oddity again.

If this version had any truth in it, its advocates would surely seize upon any pre-coup instances of the peace group’s support for Diem to ram home the charge of hypocrisy. And who could blame them, for their interpretation would be true and justified? Yet for the most part, they don’t. Why the silence?

Well, part of the problem lies in the terms in which Kennedy, Harriman et al defended Diem. As we have seen earlier in the thread, courtesy of the estimable Bernard Fall, Harriman’s defence of Diem on a US radio station in February 1963 was anything but starry-eyed. The peace group did NOT harbour any great illusions about the nature of Diem’s government. Furthermore, what was true in Feb ’63 – that there simply was no viable political alternative to Diem – was as true in November of the year as it was eight months earlier. It was particularly true if, as was obviously the case, Kennedy and the peace faction were continuing to push for the political settlement strategy for Vietnam initiated in earnest at Honolulu in the summer of ’62. Diem was essential to it.

A further crucially important factor constraining the scope of the attack on Kennedy and the peace group is to be found in the propaganda myth erected around the work of the CIA’s press group in South Vietnam, the men used to sell us the Agency view – and plan, for Langley works assiduously, if necessarily covertly, to fulfil its own prophecies, thus appearing infinitely sage – embodied in Carver’s Feb 63 NIE.

Halberstam, Sheehan, Browne, and Arnett, to name but four of the most prominent “salesmen,” were sold to the US people as independent truth-seekers, fearlessly telling it like it was in the face of the best endeavours of a schlerotic, delusional, and pro-Diem foreign policy establishment. Recall that Halberstam boasts that Kennedy personally intervened with his publisher in late October 63 to have him recalled; while Arnett has Harriman seeking his removal a month earlier.

You see the problem at once: If Kennedy and the tiny pro-peace deal faction which he headed really were resolved to dish Diem, why on earth would they be seeking the removal of the very US journalists campaigning most vigorously for that very end? It makes no sense. But it does, I submit, account for the above-noted absence of vigour in unearthing and publicizing the peace faction’s public pronouncements in favour of Diem’s retention. In this specific context, to publicize Harriman’s Feb 63 support for Diem would be to leave the unmistakable suggestion, when allied to Arnett’s revelation that Harriman sought his removal in September 63, of continuity in the peace faction’s position. Now that would never do.

In summary, then, we have an apparently blatant disconnect in the CIA version of who advocated what, when, and for what purposes. But the contradictions are superficial and relatively easily accounted for by chronology and context: CIA propaganda requirements shifted as the year progressed; and, post-coup, necessitated the maintenance of mutually contradictory propaganda positions.

The really malign genius of the CIA’s work on Vietnam 1963 was in the realm of propaganda: the image-work with the Buddhists; and, above all, the campaign to create the impression, via selective leaks to the US press, that the peace faction, not the Agency, was driving the campaign in Washington to remove Diem. That’s the real hypocrisy I had in mind.

I'll come back to your other questions when time permits.

Paul

Nice theory but it brakes down on a few issues, Mir Aimal Kansi:

1 – Freely admitted he did it and said why.

Those ISI interrogators - such gentle souls.

2 - Was IDed by witnesses and the gun was found in his apartment along with clothing containing glass shards from victims’ cars. He bought a ticket for Pakistan shortly afterwards for that day. His roommate reported him missing.

My used car emporium beckons, Len..."glass shards...bought a ticket for Pakistan...reported missing" - proof positive, indeed.

3 – Was very light-skinned, light enough to pass for a slightly tanned white person. Have you ever been near someone shooting?

Why not go the whole hog, Len, and give him pink eyes - now a Pakistani albino, there's a runner!

The problem with your recollection is that if indeed such images were shown on TV people out there would have copies which would be available on the Net, in this case absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.

Er...logic's obviously a strong point of yours, Len. If it ain't on the Net, it never happened, right? A truly fascinating position, for which I feel confident chemical remedy will soon be found.

It is not uncommon for people to falsely recall having seeing footage of widely reported events that doesn't exists.

Particularly eyewitnesses to an event quoted shortly afterwards who have not yet seen any television footage of the event. Jeesh, Len, you're losing it.

Greenberg struggles to explain why Bush, having remembered events differently in his second recounting, went back to the original version.

Let's see if we can help Greenie out, shall we: Bush is an habitual lier with a memory of convenience and the IQ of a gnat? There, not too difficult, surely?

If you are willing to part ways with $25 you can read Greenberg’s paper...

Most kind.

While it's true Wikipedia is not the most authoritative source...

Who said Americans don't do understatement?

Paul

George McT. Kahin, "The Pentagon Papers: A Critical Evaluation," The American Political Science Review, Vol. 69 No.2, (June 1975), pp.675-684: See page 682: "One looks in vain for an account of how Colonel Lansdale's group won over to Diem, or neutralized, some of the key military leaders of the two principal southern religious sects, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa, through dispensing funds that are generally estimated in the millions of dollars, and finding places for approx 30,000 of their troops in Diem's army…Nor by reading the section on the origins of the insurgency would one know that even as late as the time of Diem's death a probable majority of the NLF's adherents were members of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa."

One man particularly resolved to keep the true role of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao in the “NLF” campaign against Diem firmly under wraps was George A. Carver, Jr. The son of missionary parents later to spend much time in China, Carver was talent-spotted at Yale, and reportedly joined the CIA in 1953 (1). In the April 1965 edition of Foreign Affairs, he modestly set out to refashion Vietnamese history in the interests of CIA propaganda against Diem. Predictably, suppression of information was nine-tenths of the lie. The remaining tenth was pure euphemism: “The Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao have emerged from nearly a decade of political insignificance to play influential roles, particularly in the provinces where their adherents are concentrated” (2). In accordance with the Langley fashion of the time, Carver’s farrago insisted the CIA-backed “revolutions” targeting Diem were a) spontaneous; and undertaken by the most patriotic elements of the society.

Foreign Affairs, on its “Contributors to this issue” page, described Carver as a “student of political theory and Asian affairs, with degrees from Yale and Oxford,” and a “former officer in the U.S. aid mission” (3) – a description as meaningful as characterising James Angleton as a keen angler with a penchant for orchids, and secreting hooch on riverbanks. Carver’s real career was much more interesting and sheds revealing light on two key aspects of post-Dallas CIA propaganda about who-did-what in Vietnam: the pretence that attempts on Diem’s life began and ended with Kennedy; and the CIA’s self-portrait as dutiful servant of White House policy in the Kennedy years.

In July 1963, Carver had been named as one of two senior CIA officers – the other was Howard C. Elting – who had masterminded a hasty and unsuccessful military putsch against Diem. Carver had served as the case officer of the coup’s domestic political front-man, Dr. Phan Quang Dan (4). The date? 11/12 November 1960, within days of Kennedy’s election.

If the CIA was indeed steadfast for Diem until Kennedy gave the green light in the autumn of 1963, its post-November 1960 treatment of Carver demonstrates it had a somewhat peculiar way of showing it. By the time of Dan’s trial – it was delayed by Diem and Nhu until such time as it seemed useful to expose an earlier set of CIA machinations, the better to reinforce allegations of current attempts – Carver “was assigned to CIA headquarters” where he served in Sherman Kent’s Office of National Estimates as “one of the analysts who could be called upon to write the first drafts of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), as they were called.” In short, then, a position of considerable bureaucratic power.

Prados assures us that though colleagues recalled his “passionate” desire to see Diem toppled, the tone of Carver’s crucial NIE (58-63) of February 1963, “drawn to measure progress in South Vietnam,” was “balanced.” Prados then rather ruins the effect by listing some of its most important conclusions: “At best Carver was saying…the Vietnam struggle would be protracted and difficult due to the many weaknesses of the Saigon regime, including poor morale and leadership, lack of trust, inadequate South Vietnamese intelligence, obvious penetration of the government by Viet Cong spies, and poor tactical use of available troops” (5). This was precisely the kind of boilerplate that was already forming the mainstay of the work of Halberstam, Sheehan et al; and much more dishonest than anything produced by Diem’s defenders in Washington in the same period.

1.John Prados. The Secret History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), p.30.

2.George A. Carver, Jr., “The Real Revolution in South Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs, April 1965, (Vol. 43, No.3), p.399.

3.Ibid., p.386.

4.Prados, op. cit., p.31.

5.Ibid., p.32.

On 26 January 1993, the Guardian carried a surprisingly short report from the paper’s then Washington correspondent on a dramatic shooting spree right outside the entrance to CIA’s Langley HQ. The germane passages follow:

Martin Walker, “Gunman flees after two die outside CIA headquarters,” The Guardian, 26 January 1993:

Two people died and three were wounded when an unidentified gunman in camouflage clothes ambushed the morning rush hour traffic entering the most closely guarded building in the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

Police with helicopters, squad cars and on foot pursued the gunman, who witnesses said was armed with a Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifle. White, young, with brown hair and “an ice-cold stare”, he made his escape into the network of roads through the wooded suburbs around the CIA building.

“There were two lanes of traffic. He was facing them as they were going into the CIA,” said ambassador-at-large Gilbert Robinson, who was driving into the building as the shooting began. “He was pointing the barrel first at one side, then the other, and shooting into the cars.”

So far, so clear: Witnesses were numerous, close, and presumably expert observers, many of them being career spooks. There was a rapid, large-scale pursuit. A young, white gunman did it.. Until, that is, the NYT of 27 January 1993:

Neil A. Lewis, “Tranquil Campus of C.I.A. Is Shaken by Killings of Two,” NYT, 27 January 1993, p.A10:

“The gunman, according to witnesses, …got in his car and drove away…

David Franklin, the commander of the major crimes unit of the Fairfax County Police, told a news conference that… the police now believe that the killer had a swarthy appearance…

“Some of the descriptions that we got did indicate a dark-complexioned, possibly dark curly hair, possibly Middle Eastern, Greek, of that type,” Officer Franklin said. The police said the assailant appeared to be in his early or mid-30s.”

On 10 February, the Guardian, playing a straight bat, though not necessarily maintaining a straight face, informed readers that “Police yesterday launched a worldwide manhunt for a Pakistani gunman…named…as Mir Aimal Kansi, aged 28” (Agencies, “Pakistani sought for CIA killings,” The Guardian, 10 February 1993.)

Four days later, the (London) Sunday Times offered an explanation for the initial eyewitness “confusion”:

Ahmed Rashid (Islamabad) and James Adams (Washington), “Search for CIA killer moves to Pakistan desert,” Sunday Times, 14 February 1993:

Although many of those who saw the attack were CIA agents, police were unable to get an accurate description of the gunman.

Some obliging soul – Martin Walker, perhaps - should really have sent David Franklin, the commander of the major crimes unit of the Fairfax County Police, a copy of the Guardian’s initial brief despatch on the shooting.

In late January 1998, the Guardian noted the effective end of the affair – justice done, honour satisfied – in a laconic piece in its “News in brief” column:

AP, “Death sentence for CIA shooter,” The Guardian, 24 January 1998, p.16:

A man who shot dead two motorists outside the CIA headquarters because he wanted to make a statement about US interference in Muslim countries was yesterday sentenced to death.

Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani, fired an assault rifle at motorists stuck in morning rush hour traffic exactly five years ago tomorrow. He was arrested last June in Pakistan.

During the trial, witnesses said Kasi stopped his car near a traffic light just outside the gates to the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia…

Kasi did not testify at his trial, but told the judge that his actions were “the result of a wrong policy toward Muslim countries. I don’t expect any justice or mercy from your country or this court.”

Talented coves, these Muslim terrorists. Not only are they blessed with the power of foresight - being able to anticipate massive US defence drills, and thus plan multiple, simultaneous attacks accordingly - but also the ability to change colour. Remarkable.

A Mauser becomes a Mannlicher-Carcano; a car on its roof becomes one right-side-up.

Minor details - that can all be 'corrected' and afterwards controlled.....

In the Magic World Of Covert Exterminations

My favourite metamorphosis is the Langley gates shooting of January 1993. If I can find the clippings concerned, will bang them on the forum.

Paul

Paul wrote:In every recreation I have seen, we are invited to believe that the Mercedes remained the right way up after the crash. It did not. As both my better half and I saw on television on the morning of the accident, and the next day's newspaper accounts from eyewitnesses confirmed, the car came to rest on its roof.

Len replied: It’s not uncommon for mistaken information to be reported in breaking news stories (The infamous ‘Dewey Wins’ headline comes to mind) are can you. This seems to be based on the account of a single witness who was driving by.)

I appear to have caught you on an "off" day, Len.

Revisit my post. My point was that both the wife and I saw the footage of the Merc upside down on the Sunday morning's TV coverage. We didn't need confirmation of the fact - which I strongly suspect contributed to the delay in getting Diana to hospital, as it was clear the door of the upside down vehicle wouldn't open cleanly - and I really paid no heed to this element of the newspaper coverage on Sunday* because it was such an obvious and unremarkable thing to say (that the vehicle came to rest upside down). It was only retrospectively that it assumed significance as recreation after recreation omitted this blatant fact.

Paul

*The story made the later editions of all the Sunday heavyweights available in this part of northern England.

I well remember Norton Taylor and his coverage of Britain's Iraqgate ...

I once enquired of retired Customs & Excise nabob who within the British establishment had green-lighted the expose of HMG's love-affair with Iraq. Came the answer: "The F.O." Cynics have long pondered the precise point at which the Foreign Office ends and MI6 begins.

No wonder Norton-Taylor was so well-informed - and foregrounded - during that black farce.

Paul

I was just re-reading Prouty's comments on reports from Dallas in the first hour and after [when full control was established over information] and how some of the true details got out in that first hour.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp3_p1.html

My suspicion, too. The JFK testimony it reminded me of came from Norman Similas. Now, that is a reordering of our accepted understanding of what happened comparable to the Diana testimony in the Sunday Times quoted above.

One other obvious trend within British newspapers over the first few weeks after the Diana assassination was a substantial reduction to the speed of the Merc. By about the end of the second week, I recall, it had been roughly halved, from circa 120mph to approx 60mph.

Why this need to change these particular facets of the event, one can only guess.

Paul

Paul, I'm not familiar with reports of the car being on its roof. Can you provide a reference?

“Dodi is killed, Diana badly injured in Paris car crash,” Sunday Times, 31 August 1997, p.1:

“Mike Walker, an American tourist from Ohio, saw Diana’s overturned Mercedes in the aftermath of the crash: ‘We were travelling in the opposite direction and saw the car lying flipped over at the bottom of the hill…’”

I can't find the box with my copies of the papers from Sunday, 31 August, but I did have the above as a handwritten note in a box containing subsequent clippings. From memory, there are several more quotations - most from American eyewitnesses - to this effect in that day's coverage, but that all changes just one day later, in the UK "qualities" at least, on Monday, 1 September. I suspect a survey of US press coverage from the same two days would yield similar results.

Paul

Have we learned nothing from our labors on the JFK case?

Before we start dismissing conspiracy in the death of Diana based upon an assessed unlikelihood of participation by the suspects of the moment, let us focus exclusively on the "how" of the event under scrutiny.

Well said.

Anyone in any doubt that it was an assassination might usefully reflect on perhaps the most blatant lie peddled by the British mainstream media ever since. In every recreation I have seen, we are invited to believe that the Mercedes remained the right way up after the crash. It did not. As both my better half and I saw on television on the morning of the accident, and the next day's newspaper accounts from eyewitnesses confirmed, the car came to rest on its roof.

There is plainly something very sensitive here concerning the speed of the Merc and its subsequent trajectory. The question is, what exactly are they hiding? I wish I knew. But I do know, beyond any doubt, that the media is lying; and doing so in an orchestrated fashion.

Paul