Paul Rigby

Are you saying President Kennedy was killed by the Secret Service -- Direct-Positive? Kathy

Yes, Kathy, I am.

And what reasons would the Secret Service have to want to bump off the President?

I see his Assassination as a "Direct- Non Positive," to use those terms.

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:

“The art of assassination, like anything else, can be taught from a text book as it is in the SAS and other special force units. There are even various set terms used for the exercise, which are built around four words: positive, non-positive, direct and indirect.

The most certain way of killing someone is by a direct positive method. An example would be to walk up to a person, press a gun against his body and pull the trigger.

Direct non-positive is the next most likely method to be successful. This would include hiding on a roof with a rifle and shooting the target as he entered the house opposite. This would be direct because the assassin was actively involved and present when it happened and non-positive because the target was moving and the range didn’t exclude the possibility of a miss.

Next in order comes indirect positive. This method is where the would-be killer waits until his victim is asleep in his bed and then climbs the garden wall and plants a bomb under his car. It is indirect because the man who plants the bomb leaves once he has done so, but it is positive because when the victim detonates the charge with his car, it is a strictly no nonsense goodbye. There remains a possible element of failure though, because someone else might come out the next morning to wash the car and reap the consequences.

The least certain method is the indirect non-positive method. This is when someone poisons the milk on the doorstep in the early morning. It is indirect because the poisoner will not be there to oversee the result…and non-positive because the target might only decide to have black tea and not drink the milk at all,” (pp.129-130).

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.

I also think he was mainly SIS, although that does not limit his use to other agencies on an ad hoc basis. I was told that once it was clear he was going to be prosecuted for criminal fraud, he had to be got rid of... just take your pick who pulled the metaphorical trigger - Brits, Yanks, Israeli's.

David

Garter Sash is dead? When? Who done it?

The authoritative one that contradicted the two other authoritative autopsies...

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

Starnes Source?

http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents...2|2|1|1|32871|A

(image)

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:

New York World-Telegram & Sun, 3 October 1963, p.25

It’s A Dirty War

Saigon – A big fish that wouldn’t die…An old man who died badly in flaming gasoline…The world’s worst newspaper…Oriental despotism and intrigue…Guerilla war…Brave men…And money…lots and lots of good old United States dollars.

These are a few of the ingredients in the dirtiest little war American men have ever been required to fight.

The wonder is not that it is understood so poorly at home, but that there is any understanding at all. Yet it behooves the United States to try to make sense of it.

First, in spite of the dictatorial family rule of Viet Nam, the United States is going to keep on supporting it and trying to do business with it.

Second, and this may be the biggest point of all, no one has any assurance that 16,000 Americans now in Viet Nam, mostly military, are going to be enough. What would the decision be if Ho Chi Minh’s 400,000 regulars poured across the border from North Viet Nam to administer a death blow to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s shaky regime?

That would be Korea all over again, and it would demand the same hard decision: Fight a Korea-size war, or pull out ignominiously.

So let’s start with that fish story. Soon after Viet Nam’s Buddhist crisis erupted, a huge fish was seen in a lake in a northern province. Someone suggested it might be a reincarnation of a long-departed Buddhist holy man.

Soon word spread that the fish was indeed a reincarnated bonze and hundreds flocked to the lake in an attempt to get a glimpse of it. So the big fish threatened to become a symbol of Buddhist protest, and a rallying point for dissident elements.

The province chief, a lieutenant in Diem’s political machine, decided the fish had to be disposed of. He sent American-trained special forces troops to kill it. But the big fish wouldn’t be killed, or so the story goes, and the government was losing face to a fish.

Ultimately, after hand grenades were lobbed at it, the big fish vanished. But people were convinced it wasn’t dead, or at worst was in the process of investing itself in yet another reincarnation.

Then, on June 11, a venerable Buddhist priest saturated himself with gasoline and set himself afire. The photograph of Thich Quang Duc burning to death horrified the Western world and brought the conflict between this nation’s ruling Catholic mandarins and its Buddhist majority into stark, clear focus.

Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, the president’s acid-tongued sister-in-law, then retired the trophy for free-style bad taste by declaring she would applaud if any more Buddhist priests “barbecued” themselves.

The English-language Times of Viet Nam is a shameless mouthpiece for Mme. Nhu. Scarcely an edition goes to press without a cloying account of her good works – or without a near-hysterical attack on American newsmen in Saigon.

Particular targets of this Nhu mouthpiece are United Press International and the New York Times. Headlines reading “UPI Lies, Lies, Lies!” are typical.

And when Mme. Nhu outraged Americans here by calling young U.S. officers here “soldiers of fortune,” the Times of Viet Nam ran a column-long account undertaking to explain that her words had been misinterpreted because of faulty translation. She immediately uttered another statement adding that some of our American soldiers were “saboteurs” as well.

The truth is that in South Viet Nam, the United States is involved with a feudal despotism as deadly and absolute as anything ever put together by the Borgias.

And the United States is paying dearly for its policy of trying to get along with the Diems at any cost - a policy that once moved former Ambassador Frederick Nolting to shout at me: “I’m not going to answer any such question” when the question itself was a wholly innocent one. I merely had inquired how long the United States was going to be able to stomach Diem and his kin.

If Starnes was beholden to Mme. Nhu, it was very well disguised, as the second piece confirms:

New York World-Telegram & Sun, 17 October 1963, p.21

So What’s Nhu?

Washington – Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu’s one-woman roadshow played the Women’s National Press Club yesterday. The girl reporters lost.

The ladies of the WNPC, and slathers of male guests, arrived for the luncheon implacably determined to see that the diminutive First Lady of South Viet Nam got fair play. But by the time the charming torrent of half-truths, Oriental Goldwynisms and an occasional out-and-out whopper had subsided, Mme. Nhu had clearly demonstrated that she needed fair play the way the Borgia girls needed Fanny Farmer’s cookbook.

Example:

Question – Viet Nam’s secret police beat up three American reporters the other day. Why?

Answer (delivered sweetly, vox angelica in full cry): My people never beat anyone – especially Americans.

No civil rights proposal ever brought forth more artful filibustering than Mme. Nhu showed the girl scribes and their guests. The Dragon Lady stumbled just enough in her English (which is good, and which is deadly because she thinks in Vietnamese) to stimulate the juices that Americans traditionally secrete on behalf of the underdog. And by the time this witness discovered he’d been flummoxed, the underdog had bitten him through the ankle and gone scampering away.

Mme. Nhu skillfully disarmed the reporters in her brief and faintly poignant opening remarks.

She had, she said, been accused of calling the young American officers fighting (and once in a while dying) in Vietnam “soldiers of fortune.”

Almost tenderly, the lovely lady said it was her duty to place the true facts before the American press. She never made any such remark, she said, “But if I had made it – and indeed I never did – it was in the European sense of the word, where “little soldiers of fortune” actually means something like “self-made hero.”

Any flannel-mouthed American Throttlebottom could learn this technique from Mme. Nhu. In a bind over an ill-considered tirade? Make Noah Webster your co-defendant and wriggle off the hook.

In a real bad bind, like saying you’d applaud seeing more Buddhist priests “barbecue themselves”? Then, if you’re lucky enough to have one, play your real trump card. It was on this egregious bit of wantonly bas taste that Mme. Nhu was at her lovely, deadly best.

“My daughter,” she explained plaintively, “was in a snack bar where Americans gathered (at this point every eye in the room went to the fragile, beautiful 18-year-old Le Thuy, and all the males present promptly forgot what the question was), and she heard some Americans say that the way to stop the Buddhists from burning themselves was to ridicule them.

“So (now with big eyes and guilelessly) I tried to ridicule them by my barbecuing remark. I was the victim of bad American advice.”

What did Mme. Nhu think of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge?

“To me (warily) he is more mysterious than an agent.”

When she was asked to explain previous statements that the American government is “too liberal,” Mme. Nhu deftly emphasized that she was talking about only a few members of the administration. “Liberals,” she instructed her audience, “are not red yet, but they are pink.”

In general, the toothsome sister-in-law of the President of Viet Nam kept her talons retracted. Sweet reason prevailed while she explained that the Communists are exploiting the Buddhists because they realize they are losing the war; that there is “absolutely” no religious persecution in South Viet Nam; that it did no good to “boo and hiss” her, but that she truly wanted Americans to like her and to tell her country “precisely” what is expected of it.

And in the end, dazzled by charm and reeling from dissembling, one witness left with the unshakable conviction that if ever South Viet Nam becomes the 51st state of the United States, Mme. Nhu is a cinch to become our first female President.

Starnes Source?

http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents...2|2|1|1|32871|A

(image)

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:

New York World-Telegram & Sun, 3 October 1963, p.25

It’s A Dirty War

Saigon – A big fish that wouldn’t die…An old man who died badly in flaming gasoline…The world’s worst newspaper…Oriental despotism and intrigue…Guerilla war…Brave men…And money…lots and lots of good old United States dollars.

These are a few of the ingredients in the dirtiest little war American men have ever been required to fight.

The wonder is not that it is understood so poorly at home, but that there is any understanding at all. Yet it behooves the United States to try to make sense of it.

First, in spite of the dictatorial family rule of Viet Nam, the United States is going to keep on supporting it and trying to do business with it.

Second, and this may be the biggest point of all, no one has any assurance that 16,000 Americans now in Viet Nam, mostly military, are going to be enough. What would the decision be if Ho Chi Minh’s 400,000 regulars poured across the border from North Viet Nam to administer a death blow to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s shaky regime?

That would be Korea all over again, and it would demand the same hard decision: Fight a Korea-size war, or pull out ignominiously.

So let’s start with that fish story. Soon after Viet Nam’s Buddhist crisis erupted, a huge fish was seen in a lake in a northern province. Someone suggested it might be a reincarnation of a long-departed Buddhist holy man.

Soon word spread that the fish was indeed a reincarnated bonze and hundreds flocked to the lake in an attempt to get a glimpse of it. So the big fish threatened to become a symbol of Buddhist protest, and a rallying point for dissident elements.

The province chief, a lieutenant in Diem’s political machine, decided the fish had to be disposed of. He sent American-trained special forces troops to kill it. But the big fish wouldn’t be killed, or so the story goes, and the government was losing face to a fish.

Ultimately, after hand grenades were lobbed at it, the big fish vanished. But people were convinced it wasn’t dead, or at worst was in the process of investing itself in yet another reincarnation.

Then, on June 11, a venerable Buddhist priest saturated himself with gasoline and set himself afire. The photograph of Thich Quang Duc burning to death horrified the Western world and brought the conflict between this nation’s ruling Catholic mandarins and its Buddhist majority into stark, clear focus.

Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, the president’s acid-tongued sister-in-law, then retired the trophy for free-style bad taste by declaring she would applaud if any more Buddhist priests “barbecued” themselves.

The English-language Times of Viet Nam is a shameless mouthpiece for Mme. Nhu. Scarcely an edition goes to press without a cloying account of her good works – or without a near-hysterical attack on American newsmen in Saigon.

Particular targets of this Nhu mouthpiece are United Press International and the New York Times. Headlines reading “UPI Lies, Lies, Lies!” are typical.

And when Mme. Nhu outraged Americans here by calling young U.S. officers here “soldiers of fortune,” the Times of Viet Nam ran a column-long account undertaking to explain that her words had been misinterpreted because of faulty translation. She immediately uttered another statement adding that some of our American soldiers were “saboteurs” as well.

The truth is that in South Viet Nam, the United States is involved with a feudal despotism as deadly and absolute as anything ever put together by the Borgias.

And the United States is paying dearly for its policy of trying to get along with the Diems at any cost - a policy that once moved former Ambassador Frederick Nolting to shout at me: “I’m not going to answer any such question” when the question itself was a wholly innocent one. I merely had inquired how long the United States was going to be able to stomach Diem and his kin.

If Starnes was beholden to Mme. Nhu, it was very well disguised, as the second piece confirms:

New York World-Telegram & Sun, 17 October 1963, p.21

So What’s Nhu?

Washington – Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu’s one-woman roadshow played the Women’s National Press Club yesterday. The girl reporters lost.

The ladies of the WNPC, and slathers of male guests, arrived for the luncheon implacably determined to see that the diminutive First Lady of South Viet Nam got fair play. But by the time the charming torrent of half-truths, Oriental Goldwynisms and an occasional out-and-out whopper had subsided, Mme. Nhu had clearly demonstrated that she needed fair play the way the Borgia girls needed Fanny Farmer’s cookbook.

Example:

Question – Viet Nam’s secret police beat up three American reporters the other day. Why?

Answer (delivered sweetly, vox angelica in full cry): My people never beat anyone – especially Americans.

No civil rights proposal ever brought forth more artful filibustering than Mme. Nhu showed the girl scribes and their guests. The Dragon Lady stumbled just enough in her English (which is good, and which is deadly because she thinks in Vietnamese) to stimulate the juices that Americans traditionally secrete on behalf of the underdog. And by the time this witness discovered he’d been flummoxed, the underdog had bitten him through the ankle and gone scampering away.

Mme. Nhu skillfully disarmed the reporters in her brief and faintly poignant opening remarks.

She had, she said, been accused of calling the young American officers fighting (and once in a while dying) in Vietnam “soldiers of fortune.”

Almost tenderly, the lovely lady said it was her duty to place the true facts before the American press. She never made any such remark, she said, “But if I had made it – and indeed I never did – it was in the European sense of the word, where “little soldiers of fortune” actually means something like “self-made hero.”

Any flannel-mouthed American Throttlebottom could learn this technique from Mme. Nhu. In a bind over an ill-considered tirade? Make Noah Webster your co-defendant and wriggle off the hook.

In a real bad bind, like saying you’d applaud seeing more Buddhist priests “barbecue themselves”? Then, if you’re lucky enough to have one, play your real trump card. It was on this egregious bit of wantonly bas taste that Mme. Nhu was at her lovely, deadly best.

“My daughter,” she explained plaintively, “was in a snack bar where Americans gathered (at this point every eye in the room went to the fragile, beautiful 18-year-old Le Thuy, and all the males present promptly forgot what the question was), and she heard some Americans say that the way to stop the Buddhists from burning themselves was to ridicule them.

“So (now with big eyes and guilelessly) I tried to ridicule them by my barbecuing remark. I was the victim of bad American advice.”

What did Mme. Nhu think of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge?

“To me (warily) he is more mysterious than an agent.”

When she was asked to explain previous statements that the American government is “too liberal,” Mme. Nhu deftly emphasized that she was talking about only a few members of the administration. “Liberals,” she instructed her audience, “are not red yet, but they are pink.”

In general, the toothsome sister-in-law of the President of Viet Nam kept her talons retracted. Sweet reason prevailed while she explained that the Communists are exploiting the Buddhists because they realize they are losing the war; that there is “absolutely” no religious persecution in South Viet Nam; that it did no good to “boo and hiss” her, but that she truly wanted Americans to like her and to tell her country “precisely” what is expected of it.

And in the end, dazzled by charm and reeling from dissembling, one witness left with the unshakable conviction that if ever South Viet Nam becomes the 51st state of the United States, Mme. Nhu is a cinch to become our first female President.

Nor would I think McCarthy would watch the Redskins from the Kennedy's (JKC's?) box at RFK stadium.

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.

My antimosity towards RFK, even in death, has been tempered by meeting and working with his sons RFK, Jr. and the late Michael, and reading David Talbot's Brothers, which I believe is an accurate interpation of events.

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.

My antimosity towards RFK, even in death, has been tempered by meeting and working with his sons RFK, Jr. and the late Michael, and reading David Talbot's Brothers, which I believe is an accurate interpation of events.

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.’”

Paul-- thanks. Always good to read CONTEMPORARY accounts of the struggle between JFK and CIA.

Generally a brave article, but one question re the word "bumbling" in the same sentence as U-2 incident and Bay of Pigs. As you know there are those who argue that both incidents were staged disasters used by the CIA to force the Ike and JFK into a corner.

Do you agree with these interpretations of the U-2 and Bay of Pigs incidents?

Did Starnes have access to this interpretation?

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:

The Washington Daily News, 28 July 1965, p.31

A Shocking Oversight

The disaster of the Bay of Pigs has been illuminated during the last few days by the recollections of two of John F. Kennedy’s principal aides, and by a published interview with the former CIA official who was the chief architect of the invasion.

Theodore C. Sorenson and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., now disgorging high-priced memoirs in Look and Life respectively, agree in general: After the debacle Mr. Kennedy felt he had been deceived in key points regarding the invasion, and he reproached himself for trusting the “experts.”

But the interview with Richard M. Bissell, Jr., the principal planner of the operation, copyrighted by the Washington Evening Star, reflects none of Mr. Kennedy’s pre-invasion doubts. It is, indeed, a good specimen example of the self-serving, now-let’s-get-my-side-of-it interview with a wounded bureaucrat.

Mr. Bissell professes to believe that the invasion would have had “A damned good chance” of success if air support had not been withdrawn at the last moment.

The Bissell interview contains only one notable insight: The fear that if the invasion was cancelled (A move which Mr. Kennedy was sorely tempted to make) the Cuban exile force (“The most powerful military force between Mexico and Panama”) might run riot throughout Guatemala, Honduras of Nicaragua.

But the truth – a truth that is amply documented and scandalously ignored – is that Mr. Kennedy would not have succeeded in calling off the invasion even if he had tried. The CIA, according to unchallenged testimony that is on the public record, told invasion leaders a few days before the scheduled landing at the Bay of Pigs that it was possible the invasion would be called off by Washington.

If that took place, the CIA’s mysterious “Frank” (who was the chief training officer for the invasion force) told exile leaders, they were to take their CIA shepherds prisoner and go ahead with the planned landing.

This account of contingency treason is contained in interviews with three leaders of the ill-fated Brigade 2506. The interviews were taken by Haynes Johnson and published in his meticulously documented book, “The Bay of Pigs.”

Of all the revelations about the shabby double-dealing that led to a humiliating defeat for the U. S., the planned betrayal of Mr. Kennedy is the most shocking. But equally shocking is the fact that this sensational imputation of disloyalty to a high CIA officer has been completely ignored by Congress, which finds time to investigate everything, and by President Johnson.

The men who made the charge are not irresponsible; indeed, they were the CIA’s choice to lead the invasion. Two of them, Jose Perez San Romain (commanding officer of Brigade 2506) and Erneido Oliva (his deputy), are now officers in the U.S. Army. The third, Manuel Artime, was the civilian leader of the exile force that came to grief at the Bay of Pigs.

The only conclusion that the sensible observer can draw is that the power of the elephantine, unaccountable CIA is now so great that no organism of government dares challenge it, however compelling the circumstances may be.

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

Sadly also the case with the 'Syrian' backed 'Sunni Insurgency' and the 'Iranian' backed 'Shia Resistance' in you know where...

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:

Israeli officer sells weapons to terrorists in Iraq

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:44:47

Ma'ariv Daily has reported that an Israeli retired officer sells weapons to terrorist groups in Iraq.

Shmoel Avivi, an Israeli retired officer, had established a firm in Iraq 2 years ago, which secretly sold arms to terrorist groups in Iraq, Ma'ariv reported.

Amnesty International reported that Avivi was one of the biggest weapon dealers in the Middle East.

Iraqi sources earlier announced that terrorist attacks in Iraq were backed by the intelligent agencies of CIA and Mossad and the secret agents of Iraqi former regime.

Earlier, Iraqi parliament security commission chairman Hadi Ameri had accused the occupying soldiers of secretly directing the terrorist attacks and forming terror squads in Iraq.

Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=1854

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.

On the strength of this thread and being the simpleton I obviously am, we now appear to have a situation where Hamas - which is a CIA stooge - is engaged in a life and death battle for survival with Fatah - which is also a CIA stooge.

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

In order to collect all info in one place, copied from above topics. Thank you, James. The Official 'Grecian Formula 16 has him as Julius Amos. No wonder searches otherwise came up empty.

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…”

Joachim Joesten. They Call It Intelligence: Spies and Techniques Since WWII (Abelard Schuman, 1963), p.35:

“…privately sponsored secret services…International Service of Information Foundation, Inc., operated by Air Force Reserve Colonel Ulius (Pete) Amoss on a $50,000 grant from millionaire businessman Clendenin Ryan. This outfit, which at one time claimed to have 7,000 agents (including twelve intelligence chiefs) in different parts of the world, was responsible for a colossal boner in 1953.

Between Beria’s downfall early in July 1953, and his execution late in December of the same year, Colonel Amoss flooded the world press with false reports that the deposed Soviet intelligence chief was still alive and had flown the coop. His story allegedly was based on confidential information he had received from a MVD major. It caused enough of a stir to set the CIA, the FBI and other authentic intelligence forces to hunt confirmation of the report. It was not finally disproved until a volley of bullets ended Beria’s life in a Soviet prison.

According to Newsweek (October 5, 1953), Amoss “suspects that U.S. intelligence agencies aren’t very happy about his efforts – and in this he is absolutely right. The Pentagon rights them off as a dead loss. And a Central Intelligence Agency official has remarked: ‘I can’t think of a single time when Amoss was right.’”

In short, Amoss was a classic "alongsider," doing jobs the CIA wanted doing, but couldn't be seen to be associated with.

A nexus of political and business interests had much to gain by Custer's defeat. From elimination of a whipped -- or, better yet, dead -- Custer from the field of 1876 presidential candidates, to the ultimate demonization of the killers of Custer that would make palatable their final, brutal subjugation and the opening of their lands to railroad, mining, and other business interests, the Boy General faced an array of enemies that, to readers of this forum, may seem all too familiar.

And Benteen, who loathed Custer, might very well have been the paid agent of the latter's demise.

Months after the battle, the only officer under Benteen's command who attempted to obey Custer's order to "come on" wrote to his friend, the widow Elizabeth Custer, that he knew terrible truths about why her husband was left to die. I speak of Captain Thomas Weir, after whom the Weir Point battlefield landmark is named.

(There's a lot more to this "friendship," but such is another story.)

Soon after he sent that communication, Weir was dead.

Custer was a son of a bitch. But compared to the forces that destroyed him — forces all too similar to those that took out the Kennedys — he was the Son of the Morning Star.

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

I particularly liked the name of the following Medellin business entity:

I.S.I. INSUMOS Y SERVICIOS INDUSTRIALES

Calle 37 B, Sur No. 27, E53, No. 213

EnvigadoMedellin

COLOMBIA

Contact: Jorge Trujillo

That would be Jorge Trujillo deceased by the way.

ISI Colombia. Has a nice ring to it doesn't it.

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.

A Hamas dominated Islamic 'statelet' in Gaza is a bit of a curate's egg to most liberal minded sorts. And so it should be. After all, Hamas is a Mossad creation and modern day Islamic fundamentalism is largely CIA inspired...

Too cruel - not even a nod to MI6 and the Muslim Brotherhood?

There is no way that Hamas, with less than a tenth of the militia force at Fatah's disposal could have taken control over Gaza, unless the latter were stood down. And no way too that all this could have happened without the very public clear out of Jewish settlers last year. This whole stunt has been carefully choreographed in Tel Aviv (but all is not yet lost, Abbas is simply begging Olmert to let his fighters cross over Israeli territory to reclaim control!)

Surely an old Agency trick, not least in Laos in the late 50s and early 60s?

What we are witnessing here folks is the creation of the first of many 'dhimmi' that may well come to litter the Middle East as the decades roll by. This was the vision of Israeli 'journalist', Oded Yinon, who, nearly 30 years ago, advocated a remodelling of the Ottoman 'Millet' system of statehood in the Middle East for the modern era: small, autonomous states that were ethnically and religiously homogenous.

The principal purpose of this resurrected scheme would be to defeat pan Arabism (ironically, Saddam's path to power was CIA backed to prevent an Iraqi/Syrian union) which Mossad perceived as the greatest existential threat to the state of Israel.

It goes without saying, of course, that this kind of arrangement would also be the ideal political environment for oil and gas exploration and extraction by the 'Super Majors.'

PS Watch out for the very public release in the coming days/weeks of a certain BBC hostage (curiously, the only Western hack left in Gaza at the time of his abduction) by a previously 'unknown' (ie Mossad) Islamic 'terror' group as part of the 'new' Gaza's charm offensive.

Is that Pentagon betting ring still in operation? Anyone fancy a flutter?

Sorry to disappoint, Len, forgot to mention - Tom McCoy described as "ex-CIA" in Rowland Evans & Robert Novak, "Semi-Pros Replace Rank Amateurs As Top Strategists for McCarthy," Washington Post, 27 June 1968, p.25.

But very recent “ex-“. Just how recent was made clear in R. Harris Smith’s paean to OSS and, admittedly besieged, CIA “liberalism,” OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Univ of California Press, 1972): “Fifty-year-old Thomas McCoy had first joined the CIA in 1951 and held top Agency posts at Rome and Madrid. He retired from the government in the spring of 1968 to become a top campaign aide to peace candidate Eugene McCarthy” (p.381). He was invited to join the campaign by the aforementioned long-retired CIA man, Thomas Finney, “who had served in Copenhagen in the early 1950s” (Ibid., p.382).

So what kind of peace did McCoy mean? For that far from inessential detail, it’s over to Peter Dale Scott’s chapter, “The Vietnam War and the CIA-Financial Establishment,” as contained within the Mark Selden-edited volume, “Re-making Asia: Essays on America Power (NY: Pantheon Books, 1974), p.138: “One recent opponent of the war…is Thomas Finney, a former Laos operative who resigned from the CIA in 1968 after seventeen years’ service ‘to become a top aide to peace candidate Eugene McCarthy’ [scott here quoting from Harris Smith].” Scott goes on: “Yet McCoy had not the same aversion for the CIA’s covert warfare. In 1972 he wrote a letter to the Washington Post, claiming that the job done by the CIA in Laos, ‘based on any comparison with the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, would have to be: A spectacular success” [WaPo, 11 January 1972, p.A15].

In summary, then, for McCoy – and the rest of the ’67-68 CIA peaniks, one suspects – there was no moral objection to the wars waged by America against the disparate peoples of south-east Asia. To the contrary, the real spurs to opposition were a) the wrong bureaucracy was in charge (CIA good, Pentagon bad); and the question of efficiency (ditto).

...while I'm on the subject of Lowenstein, a friend tells me that the current edition of Lobster, 53, contains vindication of another Richard Cummings claim, to wit, that Peter Matthiessen, founder of the Paris Review, was indeed Agency at the time of the magazine's creation. Citation to follow.

Robin Ramsay, “The view from the bridge: Matthiessen and the CIA,” Lobster, June 2007, (53), p.26.

...it must be borne in mind that many of these 'Russian' news outlets are deeply hostile to the current Russian administration and that includes the KavKaz Center, the Chechan website (voice piece of the 'Caucasian Mujahideen') that broke the Litvinenko story.

Terrific stuff - and a classic example of CIA/MI6 "black media" being used to first surface, then funnel, complete fabrications into the domestic mainstream media, the spook-dominated BBC to the fore!

Mr. C, here ends any hopes of a career within the Beeb - congratulations.

Wow Paul you finally documented an long ex-CIA agent in the McCarthy campaign...

Sorry to disappoint, Len, forgot to mention - Tom McCoy described as "ex-CIA" in Rowland Evans & Robert Novak, "Semi-Pros Replace Rank Amateurs As Top Strategists for McCarthy," Washington Post, 27 June 1968, p.25.

In his extended obit for Lowenstein, Robert G. Kaiser describes Lowenstein as "president of the National Student Association before that organization developed ties to the CIA" ("A Complex, Frenetic Life Built on the Discovery of People," Washington Post, 16 March 1980, p.A12). This must be the parapolitical equivalent of what US evangelicals are pleased to style "the time before time."

And while I'm on the subject of Lowenstein, a friend tells me that the current edition of Lobster, 53, contains vindication of another Richard Cummings claim, to wit, that Peter Matthiessen, founder of the Paris Review, was indeed Agency at the time of the magazine's creation. Citation to follow.

MSC files : http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/arlib/contents/er/sovcom/

folder search : N

NATIONAL STUDENT ASSOCIATION AND CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

also do relevant name searches, eg dulles, kennedy, Scheer etc etc etc.

Many names are multiple listed so the surname - last one or two letters + first initial yields most results. Sometimes leaving out initial yields more.

On each document, news clipping, report etc scroll down to link on lower left to first page, previous, and next.

Thanks for the link, John, I look forward to reading the stuff on Finney in Mississippi in '64. Here's why:

Thomas D. Finney, Jr., died, aged 52, in late January 1978. His Washington Post obit., “Thomas Finney, Lawyer, Political Strategist, Dies,” appeared in the paper’s edition of 1 February 1978, p.C4. It is interesting on several grounds.

First up, was Finney a member of the Central Intelligence Agency? Yes, according to the paper, serving in Denmark for three years, 1952-55. It offers no explanation as to why he returned to the US in that year, and invites the reader to infer that he ceased connection with Langley. It would be interesting to know what he was doing in Copenhagen, not least in relation to domestic Danish developments. Any Danes on the forum, please don’t hesitate to enlighten.

Between 1955 and 1957, when he arrived in Washington to serve as administrative assistant to Senator A.S. Mike Monroney (D-Okla.), Finney was “in private law practice in Oklahoma,” his home state. He worked for Monroney until an unspecified date in 1963. In either 1963, at the conclusion of his work for Monroney, or for an unspecified period in the course of Kennedy’s presidency, the paper describes how JFK “borrowed” Finney “to work on the Trade Expansion Act which Mr. Kennedy considered one of his most outstanding achievements. Mr. Finney advised the president as a member of his Task Force on Foreign Policy, as deputy special assistant to the president for Foreign Trade Policy and as director of congressional liaison for the Trade Expansion Act.” It would, of course, be interesting to know just what advice exactly he offered Kennedy on foreign policy.

Kennedy’s decision to “borrow” Finney – if, indeed, he had anything to do with it and had much idea who he was – was characteristically magnanimous: Finney had worked for Stevenson in 1960, according to his WaPo obituarist, and, at the Democratic presidential convention that year, organised the “spontaneous” gallery demonstration that sought to snatch the nomination from Kennedy in favour of his candidate. The proposer of the last-minute move for Stevenson was none other than Eugene McCarthy.

In 1964, Finney was reunited with his old boss, Allen Dulles, when LBJ sent both men to Mississippi “when disorders developed there involving the registration of black voters.” Both “ex-“ CIA men were particularly well positioned to influence events in the state: Large amounts of Agency money had long been funnelled, through foundations and other fronts such as the New World Foundation, Aaron E. Norman Fund, the Southern Regional Council and the Georgia Council on Human Relations, ostensibly to facilitate increased black American participation.(1) One wonders if they called on the expertise of Allard Lowenstein, who was in the South in much the same period, working on behalf of another recipient of CIA money for the purpose, the National Student Association. Finney recommended, the obit. goes on, “that FBI agents be sent to the rural counties of Mississippi to monitor the registration.” Let us all hope that the G-men sent thither were not the same G-men who had made careers sniffing MLK’s undergarments, and otherwise discrediting the Civil Rights movement.

In the period 1964-1968, Finney worked for the law firm of Clifford, Glass, and McIlwain, which he joined, seemingly as a partner, in his very busy year of 1963. In 1968, following McCarthy’s disappointing results in Indiana and Nebraska, Finney “took a leave of absence from his law firm” to restore the campaigns fortunes, supplementing, he insisted, but not replacing, the work of Curtis Gans, McCarthy’s national political operations director.(2) Finney enjoyed success in Oregon, and reportedly “designed part of McCarthy’s California campaign strategy – including the sharp attacks on Kennedy.” (3)

(1) Drew Pearson & Jack Anderson, “CIA Funds Aided Negro Registration,” Washington Post, 7 April 1967, p.D17.

(2) UPI, “McCarthy Aide Denies He Quit, Says It Was a Courtesy Gesture,” Washington Post, 21 May 1968, p.A2.

(3) William Chapman, “McCarthy Staff a Pickup Team,” Washington Post, 21 July 1968, p.B2.

Chapter Five - A Brief Life

Terrific research - keep it coming. Particularly looking forward to the section(s) on overview and motives. (Or do we just conclude "Oil and Gas"?)

Paul

So Ramparts was part of the Empire too?

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.

Perhaps you'd be willing to quote directly from the books

Perhaps you'd be willing to open one - it won't hurt!

Colby claimed that Hersh got the info from someone else and he only confirmed it. Perhaps true, perhaps not. If he wanted to get rid of Angleton I imagine he’d leak the info in away he hoped would have the most impact and Hersh was then a “hot shot” reporter working for the NY Times the most important paper in the US. If indeed he were the original source his control of the story came from the info he provided.

Were his revelations of the Mai Lai massacre and Project Jennifer and his writings about KAL 007, Abu Guarib, “the Samson Option”, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Gulf War Syndrome etc etc at the agency’s behest as well?

Hersh CIA and as far back as 1968? Highly UNlikely unless you can come up with better evidence.

Some wonderful stuff on Hersh and his history of service to the CIA in James DiEugenio’s chapter, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (see pp.364-369) in James DiEugnio & Lisa Pease (Ed.). The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X (LA: Feral House, 2003).

Hersh’s My Lai massacre journalism appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in November 1969; the book on the slaughter in 1970. As DiEugenio notes, quoting the Agency wordsmith, Hersh would have us believe “There was no conspiracy to destroy the village”; and that the cause was individual ambition compounded by erroneous assumptions, the consequence of “the basic incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army” (p.367). True? According to DiEugenio, citing Douglas Valentine, false: My Lai was part of the Phoenix Program. Founder of Phoenix Program? Yes, the same William Colby who feeds the anti-Angleton morsels to him in 1974.

You were right, by the way. "Highly likely" didn't cut mustard. I should have written: "Overwhelmingly probable."