Paul Rigby

Many thanks for that, I'll try what you recommend. By way of reciprocating, here's one early glimpse of CIA pseudo-gangs, under Special Forces direction, in mainstream US media: Paul

Gordon Brown reviewed Austen Morgan's undistinguished biography of Harold Wilson for the Independent on Sunday in the paper's edition of 14 June 1992. "Nye, Clem, Jim, Michael and the other one" contains the following: "But he does not, despite his promise to do so, explain the sudden resignation in 1976. Nor does he get to the bottom of Wilson's obsession with the security services." Somehow I don't think Brown will be pursuing that line of enquiry now he's in No.10. I think Benn's wife, an American, boasted the genuine distinction of joining the "Who Killed Kennedy?" committee in '64. Another reason for the CIA's gimps in British intel not to trust him.

Marquis Childs, "Bobby, Bombing and the New Left," Washington Post, 3 March 1967, p.A18: "The issue of Ramparts that blew the role of the CIA with various left-of-center groups, such as the National Student Association...led off with a savage attack on Kennedy. Written by Ramparts managing editor, Robert Scheer, the article...said...'Bobby is believable and for that reason much more serious.' From the viewpoint of the New Left, dangerous could be substituted for serious. The obvious objective is to destroy any middle ground between the demand for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and the cry of the hawks for the end of all restraint and total bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Ramparts article charges that Kennedy's involvement with the Vietnam war goes back to the earliest days of the Kennedy Adminsitration, beginning in 1961 when 'he did as much as any man to get us deeply involved there.' Bobby Kennedy's vision of foreign affairs, Scheer writes, 'is standard cold war mythology.'" RFK more responsible for the US assault on Vietnam than, say, Allen Dulles? The strategy is as old as politics; and may yet be used in 2008. More from the same fine Childs column. First up, Ramparts and its political campaigning: Childs concluded the column with a prophetic meditation on the likely effect of Ramparts’ political endeavours: Few today recall that Nixon’s campaign speeches in ’68 were littered with the word “peace” and variants.

Excellent post, John, with the material on Lee entirely new to me, and of precisely the kind I've been looking for. (Will become evident why in future post.) Would be obliged if you could furnish the source(s) of this. Paul

Thanks, Shanet, too true. And here's the editorial that went with it: Who knows, perhaps a professional American historian will pluck up the courage to ask Dick about what he saw and heard in Saigon. There must be one vertebrate among them!

Then there is the small matter of institutional motivation for wanting JFK dead, recently held elsewhere on this forum to be noticeable only by its absence in the case of the Secret Service. Here again, the truth is quite contrary, as David Talbot makes clear in Brothers, p.22: Stripped of the task of protecting the president, the Secret Service would have lost budget, and, every bit as importantly, face and clout, not, you understand, with the mere politicians they guarded, or the public they purported to serve also, but with real power: and real power would have lost what was arguably its most important institutional cloak, under which cover Nixon was assisted to destruction, Reagan nearly eliminated, and the anti-Clinton campaign furthered. On the eve of Dallas, the Secret Service, like the CIA, was fighting to preserve its real raison d’etre. If there was a more powerful motivation for participating in the summary public execution of America's thirty-fifth President, it has yet to be disclosed.

As, of course, were Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and, very nearly, Reagan, and both Roosevelts. Direct positive is thus the commonest means of killing, or attempting to kill, a US President/ex-President. Not a bad pedigree when trying to understand what happened to JFK.

Bill, Great link, for which thanks. Please reassure me that this is just for public consumption - they really can't believe this claptrap, can they? Paul

Yes, Kathy, I am. This is a question that puzzles me. Whenever the finger is pointed at the SS we are routinely invited to consider the organisation as somehow inured to or exempt from the usual, well-attested, overwhelmingly right-wing bias of US intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies. Why? The SS worked hand-in-glove with both the CIA and the local police forces. (Not so, as I understand it, with Hoover's FBI.) It recruited from the FBI etc. None of these are now, or will ever be, bastions of liberalism, or, indeed, democratic sentiment. Thus the SS was staffed with men of precisely the kind of views and prejudices to be found in these other manifestly right-wing outfits: Ideological/political animus against Kennedy was thus every bit as likely to be found in the SS as in Langley and its myriad offshots. And that is your prerogative. But I can't help observing that as a rule of thumb, grassy knollers direct far more hostility towards in-car shootists than lone nutters. An odd state of affairs, and one not without significance. Paul

The December 1996 edition (32) of Robin Ramsay’s Lobster contained a book review by John Newsinger, “SAS: the Stiff Memoir,” pp.10-12. Peter Stiff’s See You In November (Alberton, SA: Galago, 1983), charted a career of service first with the official SAS – Borneo, Aden, Thailand/Laos – then with one of its numerous unofficial offshoots, David Stirling’s Watchguard International, and, finally, a Rhodesian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). Newsinger noted how routine assassination and terrorism were to such as Stiff, and went on to quote at length the following extract from his book. It was new to me, and continues to impress, for it was/is that rare thing, a brief, lucid, and logical typology of assassination: Both Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X were killed by the most reliable method of all, according to Stiff’s typology, the direct positive. I believe JFK was, too. It would be of interest to know a) how the US Secret Service classified assassination attempts, and how it trained to counter them; and c) whether CIA and US Special Forces worked with a similar typology.

Garter Sash is dead? When? Who done it?

The rise and rise of the political pathologist - what a false dawn Noguchi proved.

John, Mme. Nhu undoubtedly was briefing any journo who would listen, the trouble was, not many of the American kind were, or could afford to, at least, not in 1963, hard on the heels of certain of her less diplomatic offerings. Starnes wrote of her twice to my knowledge in October ’63, first while in Saigon, then when back in Washington. In chronological order: If Starnes was beholden to Mme. Nhu, it was very well disguised, as the second piece confirms:

John, Mme. Nhu undoubtedly was briefing any journo who would listen, the trouble was, not many of the American kind were, or could afford to, at least, not in 1963, hard on the heels of certain of her less diplomatic offerings. Starnes wrote of her twice to my knowledge in October ’63, first while in Saigon, then when back in Washington. In chronological order: If Starnes was beholden to Mme. Nhu, it was very well disguised, as the second piece confirms:

I dunno Bill.... At RFK, the End of an Aerie By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 23, 1996 Jack Kent Cooke's legendary owner's box at RFK Stadium beat a whimpering exit into Power Washington history yesterday. .....Cooke's box was filled with decidedly B-list celebrities yesterday. The biggest star was probably retired Gen. Colin Powell. After that, the luminosity dimmed. There was Virginia Gov. George Allen, his wife and mother. Former governor Douglas Wilder was there with his wife. So were British Ambassador John Kerr and former senator Eugene McCarthy, but they're both regulars. Not a great day for stargazing..... Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sport...rticles/box.htm From Lights, Camera, Democracy by Lewis Lapham: On Thursday afternoon, less than thirty-six hours after the polls had closed in California, Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Washington Redskins, discovered that he was acquainted with a surprisingly large number of Democrats. An invitation to sit in his box at RFK Stadium counts as one of the most visible proofs of rank within the Washington nobility, and during the fat years of the Reagan triumph and the Bush succession the sixty-four seats were comfortably stuffed with personages as grand as Edwin Meese, George Will, and Robert Mosbacher. But on that Thursday, in answer to a question from a correspondent for The New York Times, Mr. Cooke remembered that time passes and fashions change: “I’m a Republican, but strangely I have a great many Democrat friends. Dodd. Brzezinski. Greenspan–he’s of indeterminate lineage. Sam Donaldson–what’s he? Gene McCarthy and George McGovern.” http://www.ebooks.com/ebooks/book_display.asp?IID=193497 At the risk of terminating a near perfect enmity, this is very good. My apologies for noting so.

Extract from David Talbot's Brothers, p.360: "Meanwhile, McCarthy fought bitterly on. Despite his victory in Oregon – where the white suburban population responded to the former professor's cerebral charm – even McCarthy, a quirky and diffident campaigner, knew his chances of winning the nomination were remote. Instead, he seemed increasingly intent on spoiling Kennedy's chances. McCarthy never let go his resentment of Kennedy for entering the race, after he had taken the initial risk of challenging Johnson. As the California campaign heated up, the Humphrey and McCarthy campaigns seemed to be collaborating to drive Kennedy out of the race. The ties between the two campaigns began to grow when a former CIA official named Thomas Finney, who was close to Humphrey, took over as McCarthy's campaign boss – and reports that Humphrey partisans had funneled $50,000 to McCarthy – drove some of the peace candidate's staff to resign in protest. It is possible that the CIA and the Democratic Party establishment were working to split the peace vote to hand the nomination to Humphrey. But McCarthy himself was surprisingly popular in CIA circles, where Kennedy was reviled and there was growing disaffection with the war, which some officials believed was damaging the country's national security interests. Dick Helms – who advised President Johnson in a secret 1967 memo that the CIA believed he could withdraw from Vietnam without any permanent damage to the United States – was one of the McCarthy sympathizers in the agency's upper ranks. Over the years, Helms wrote in his memoir, he and the Minnesota senator 'lunched occasionally and encountered one another at the usual Washington events, or as guests in owner Jack Kent Cooke's box at Redskin football games. McCarthy was always good company, intelligent and witty.'" Hi Paul, I don't doubt McCarthy's campaign was peppered with CIA and ex-CIA people, as he attracted an intellectual crowd around him. I don't believe however, that there was collusion between McCarthy and Humphrey. Though they came from the same neck of the woods, Humphrey was a party lackey and McCarthy a free thinker and his own man. Nor would I think McCarthy would watch the Redskins from the Kennedy's box at RFK stadium. BK Bill, I'm not getting at you, merely asking you, and others like you, to revisit the 60s with fresh eyes. It wasn't just the assassinations that were not as they appeared. Best, Paul

Dupe, eliminated.

Extract from David Talbot’s Brothers, p.360: “Meanwhile, McCarthy fought bitterly on. Despite his victory in Oregon – where the white suburban population responded to the former professor’s cerebral charm – even McCarthy, a quirky and diffident campaigner, knew his chances of winning the nomination were remote. Instead, he seemed increasingly intent on spoiling Kennedy’s chances. McCarthy never let go his resentment of Kennedy for entering the race, after he had taken the initial risk of challenging Johnson. As the California campaign heated up, the Humphrey and McCarthy campaigns seemed to be collaborating to drive Kennedy out of the race. The ties between the two campaigns began to grow when a former CIA official named Thomas Finney, who was close to Humphrey, took over as McCarthy’s campaign boss – and reports that Humphrey partisans had funneled $50,000 to McCarthy – drove some of the peace candidate’s staff to resign in protest. It is possible that the CIA and the Democratic Party establishment were working to split the peace vote to hand the nomination to Humphrey. But McCarthy himself was surprisingly popular in CIA circles, where Kennedy was reviled and there was growing disaffection with the war, which some officials believed was damaging the country’s national security interests. Dick Helms – who advised President Johnson in a secret 1967 memo that the CIA believed he could withdraw from Vietnam without any permanent damage to the United States – was one of the McCarthy sympathizers in the agency’s upper ranks. Over the years, Helms wrote in his memoir, he and the Minnesota senator ‘lunched occasionally and encountered one another at the usual Washington events, or as guests in owner Jack Kent Cooke’s box at Redskin football games. McCarthy was always good company, intelligent and witty.’”

Nat, Sorry about the delay in responding, but I either missed your reply first time round, or, more likely, got distracted and forgot about any intended reply. Worse, I revisited this thread merely to note with approval David Talbot’s inclusion of Starnes’ ‘Arrogant CIA in Brothers – see pp.217-218 - which arrived this morning. Talbot first describes the despatch as “a remarkable report” (p.217), then as “stunning” (p.218). Extraordinary, is it not, that Talbot could find the piece forty-plus years after the event, while Lane, Weisberg et al never once referenced it in the 60s! Let’s hope a US academic or two is sufficiently emboldened to interview Dick while the chance remains. A small quibble: Talbot erroneously claims that Richardson, the CIA station-chief in Saigon, was anti-coup at the time of his recall. The truth, of course, not least from Richardson’s own hands (see earlier in the thread), is quite contrary. And so to your questions from August last: No, I don’t agree with Dick’s characterisation of the CIA’s role in both the U-2 and Bay of Pigs “incidents” as “bumbling.” But then I suspect this was as far as he thought he could go in the contemporary discourse, certainly in the case of the BoP. Starnes couldn’t jump in at the time, as he was in Israel covering the Eichmann trial, but he did make comment on it, briefly, in The Ugly American Made Even Uglier, 28 April 1961, pp.1&7. He did return to the subject of the BoP, however, in a mid-July 1965 column: Starnes on the U-2 incident remains terra incognita: I didn’t have enough spare cash at the time to pay for the necessary copying of Dick’s 1960 columns. I hope to harvest them if I can get to Washington in the autumn. As to your second question, “Did Starnes have access to this interpretation?,” I can’t answer that, but I’ll certainly put it to him when we next speak. As a general observation, Scripps-Howard group journalists, the one US newspaper group’s to emerge with real credit from the coup’s prelude and aftermath – not that you’ll find S-H execs boasting about this – challenged the consensus chiefly on empirical, not theoretical, grounds: Kantor met Ruby at Parkland, Starnes visited Saigon as the CIA ran amok, Ruark was a hunter and thus thought the Warren Report on ballistics utter baloney, etc. Not until the publication of Sylvan Fox’s Unanswered Questions did this change. Paul

Arghhh, and I thought that was a genuine battle between Saudi/US backed Sunnis and Iranian Shia's for control of Iraq and an increased geopolitical position in the Middle East ultimately preventing a pan-Arab front against Israel etc. An Israeli arms dealer labours under the same lucrative misconception: I also saw an interesting piece from an Egyptian newspaper a few months ago detailing the arrest (?) of CIA recruiters for Iraqi insurgents. The real civil war is American: If the Iraqi paradigm had proved a success, what need the US elite of CIA? Just send in the Pentagon! Now, of course, the traditional CIA way is back in fashion.

Yup, perfect, isn't it, for CIA purposes; and, once again, a situation with south-east Asian precedence: At the time of Diem's overthrow, we have a regime installed and hitherto sustained by the CIA, under sustained attack from a CIA-backed military clique, and a National Liberation Front which turns out to be chock full of violently anti-communist sect members whose leadership was bought from the French by Langley. In other words, recent events Palestinian represent business as usual. Sad, but it needs facing. Paul

John, For a lengthy profile of Ulius Louis Amoss, see: John Kobler, “He Runs a Private OSS,” Saturday Evening Post, 21 May 1955, pp.31, 141-2, & 144: p.31: “Among Amoss’ efforts is a four-page intelligence letter called Inform, published under the aegis of the International Services of Information Foundation, Inc., of which he is founder and president. Replete with purportedly exclusive inside news and forecasts mostly concerning the USSR and her satellites, it is circulated at irregular intervals to about 1100 subscribers who pay twenty-five dollars a year for it.” p.141: “…Amoss has warm sympathisers. Among ISI trustees he numbers seven retired generals, including Brig. Gen. Thomas B. Catron, onetime editor of the The Infantry Journal (1927-31)…Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers…and Maj. Gen. Everett S. Hughes, former chief of Amy Ordnance…” p.141: “Among ISI’s subscribers [to a scheme to obtain a MIG – PR] was the former governor of Maryland, William Preston Lane, Jr., now the attorney for Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp…Lane’s law partner, Stuart Bushong, was an ISI trustee…” p.142: “Who, Amoss wondered, might be willing to invest in such a scheme? [To smuggle Stalin’s son out of the Soviet Union – PR] He found the answer through a complicated chain of contacts, beginning with Mrs. Mary Vaughan King, who runs the Baltimore public relations firm, Counsel Services, of which the colonel is a client. It led to Clendenin Ryan, a somewhat quixotic multi-millionaire, who once served as an assistant to Mayor La Guardia, ran for the New York mayoralty himself on an independent ticket and the governorship of New Jersey, published a semi-political magazine, and sent large sums abroad to break communist-inspired strikes and influence voters in favor of anti-communist candidates for high office.” p.142: “But Amoss did not leave Germany entirely empty handed. He carried with him what he calls the ‘Bluebird Papers’…Running to 150 pages, written in German, but bearing an official USSR stamp, it appeared to be nothing less than a communist master plan for world-wide sabotage.” p.142: “He was stationed in Cairo as an OSS deputy director in charge of sabotage and guerrilla warfare for Eastern Europe“ where he met his wife-to-be, Veronica Grogan, who was “an employee of the British Secret Intelligence Service, with the assignment of keeping tabs on Amoss.” p.144: “Grecian Formula 16, the product of Questers Ventures Inc., an enterprise founded by Amoss and other ISI officers with the object of earning more money with which to support the spy network.” p.144: “During World War I he landed the post of YMCA secretary for the 79th Division, stationed at Camp Meade, Maryland. After the armistice he was sent to Greece to serve in a similar capacity to the Greek Army…He organized the Greek YMCA” and was “allowed to attend a sabotage and spy school in Salonika…” p.144: “In 1926, having returned to the United States, he started an import-export business, Gramtrade, which gave him opportunities to go abroad…referred by friends to Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan, head of OSS,…Commissioned a lieutenant colonel, he wound up in charge of all OSS intelligence from Italy to India and from Poland to Ethiopia, presently taking on sabotage and guerrilla operations. In 1943 he was appointed deputy chief of staff to the 9th Air Force…He left the service a full colonel.” p.144: “It was while on terminal leave in 1945 that the colonel conceived the idea of a private OSS. He persuaded a group of Baltimore and Washington businessmen to form a corporation which would embrace both export-import trade and ISI, the profits from the former to be diverted to the latter. Some dozen investors put up $10,000 each…The export-import side of World-Trade Services, Inc. as they named it, came to nought…” In short, Amoss was a classic "alongsider," doing jobs the CIA wanted doing, but couldn't be seen to be associated with.

All new to me, and fascinating, so thanks. I've often wondered - chiefly with regard to the Lincoln assassination - if we're not collectively missing a trick or two by not having a thread dedicated to 19th century US and UK parapolitics. Paul

Dead men file no accounts. One sees the advantages from the off. Surprised Noo Labour didn't try it. Presumably "Internal Democracy" didn't quite pass muster.

Too cruel - not even a nod to MI6 and the Muslim Brotherhood? Surely an old Agency trick, not least in Laos in the late 50s and early 60s? Such cynicism: Entirely merited! Is that Pentagon betting ring still in operation? Anyone fancy a flutter?