Paul Rigby
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I wonder if a similar comparison has been made with the Berlin visit(s). It's just a curiosity arising from Ewald Peters, the German head of security, that a SS detail member spoke highly of, who after the assassination (December) accompanied the Chancellor on a visit to LBJ's ranch, and a month+ later hung himself in jail after being unmasked and arrested as a Nazi war criminal. He was responsible for the Berlin visit security.
John,
Are you aware of a detailed study of the motorcades featuring Kennedy and his immediate predecessor? I mean very detailed - order of vehicles, position of outriders, SS personnel and locations, pre-trip threat assessments and how they impacted on the routes etc. This would appear to be a gaping lacuna in assassination studies.
Paul
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Paul, I fail to see where you discount the following:
Cliff,
I don't. In fact, I welcome Bamford's work and think it very significant. I think you entirely right in urging its significance. Were I think you err is in 1) your interpretation of its significance; and 2) your failure to take account of the much greater benefits to the US of Castro remaining in power.
What do I mean by 1)? Well, consider the case of China. Twice the military and CIA came close to provoking full-scale war with China, first through the medium of the US intervention in Korea, then again in Vietnam. In both instances, "higher forces" within the politico-corporate elite rallied to thwart the attempts. Luce and his publications, for example, offer fascinating insights into the limitations of CIA-Pentagon reach.
I agree, but only up to a point. The degree of consensus among the leadership of the Agency, both formal and actual, as to the desirability of offing Kennedy seems to me formidable; and is reflected in the diverse components of the organisation deployed in coup preparation, execution, and cover-up.Cliff Varnell:I do not buy the view that "the CIA" was, or is, a monolithic entity
wherein all the players are on the same page.
Cliff Varnell:In 1963, I'll argue, there were factions in CIA loyal to different masters.
Again, qualified agreement. But surely these differences raised their head post-coup, not pre-? In other words, what united them was a shared contempt and hatred for Kennedy. After the coup, the fracture lines appeared.
Have a good New Year,
Paul
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The recent exchanges on this forum between Ashton Gray and Cliff Varnell involved, among other things, a fierce dispute concerning the coup plotters intentions toward Cuba. The former poured scorn on the proposition that Kennedy’s murder was organised as prelude to, and pretext for, a concerted US drive to oust Castro. I agree with him, and think the topic so important I offer the radically incomplete work-in-progress below. My hope is to provoke a full debate on the issue, one I believe is long overdue.
What follows is an early draft of a chapterlet in my preface to ‘Arrogant’ CIA: The Selected Journalism of Richard Starnes. A later, greatly expanded, version appears to have disappeared following my hard-drive’s recent encounter with a nifty little Trojan. (I stupidly failed to back up this & many other files.)
Tomorrow, I’ll append the Starnes article which gave rise to the chapterlet, so the reader can see what provoked it.
Cuban Smoke and the French Connection: why the CIA installed Fidel Castro
3 October –21 November 1963.
Between ‘Arrogant CIA’s’ publication on October 2 and the Agency coup in Saigon on November 1, Starnes twice more launched savage attacks on the organisation. America had been here before, insisted Starnes, and the lessons were plain. But the Castro precedent he instanced was a very different story from the fairy tale version propagated at the time by the New Left , and mainstream historians ever since. Starnes refused to forget an inconvenient fact: Castro was armed, financed, and propagandised for, and by, the CIA. And, not content with installing him in Havana, the Agency had then covered Castro’s back for sufficient time to permit the “revolution’s” turn to the left, the turn that sucked the Soviet Union in, and brought the Cold War to within ninety miles of America’s shores – the very object of the exercise for the CIA, and the nation’s military-industrial complex. It was the perfect rejoinder to Eisenhower’s “crusade” for détente.
Sections of the US elite had supported ostensibly “revolutionary” insurrections throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1840 and 1852, “American filibusterers, devoted to the slave system, aided Cuban risings against Spain. President Fillmore issued a proclamation forbidding the organization” of such “expeditions on American soil and ordered the civil, naval, and military authorities at the ports of New York and New Orleans to prevent” them from sailing. Kennedy was to face the same difficulty in 1962-63 with the support of Cuban exile raiders by, most notably, Henry Luce and his Time-Life empire.
The United States government later adopted the tactic officially, supporting or fomenting “revolutions” in Hawaii, Panama, and Nicaragua. On the eve of the First World War, the US, in a fight for Standard Oil to wrest control Mexican oil from Britain, the waning world hegemon, organised the Madero revolt against Diaz; and later backed Pancho Villa against Huerta. The propaganda campaign for Villa saw him lionised in Hollywood. The father of William F. Buckley, the CIA officer who founded the National Review, was involved in an attempt to overthrow the Mexican government – again, for reasons of petropolitik – in the late 1920s.
In the immediate post-war period, genuine Cuban leftists, mostly notably in the trade unions, were systematically murdered or driven into exile. The campaign was exposed at the time .In November 1946, Hoy, the then paper of the Cuban Confederation of Labour (CTC), ran a photostat of two letters, the second of which, from Francesco Aguire to the AFL’s man in Chile, Bernardo Ibanez, dealt with the splitting of Latin American trade unions and a planned campaign to assassinate “anti-Yankee” labour leaders. “Some of Cuba’s outstanding labour leaders were assassinated in that period and a plot to kill Lazaro Pena, the head of the CTC, was uncovered.” The result, in Cuba, as elsewhere, was to create opportunities for the production and insertion of simulacrums of genuine leftists. Into this breach stepped a Jesuit-educated Catholic rightist called Fidel Castro. In January 1948, a Communist leader of the sugar workers, Jesus Larrondo, was shot dead by an army captain in Manzanillo. Among the mourners at the ensuing funeral was, on cue, the enduringly unmolested Fidel.
A “hidden hand” recurs so frequently in Castro’s rise to power as to render mainstream accounts silly. In April 1948, Castro participated in a pseudo-Communist revolt in Colombia launched in ostensible response to the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. According to a conservative Colombian paper, Castro and the rest of the Cuban delegation were quietly evacuated from the country by the Cuban embassy.
Among the US Embassy staff in Bogota at the time was Roy Rubottom , who subsequently reappeared in the Sierra Maestra bringing succour to Castro in 1957. Rubottom was instrumental in organising a briefing for a newly arrived US Ambassador at the hands of Herbert Matthews, the leading, though by no means sole , propagandist for Castro in the pages of the New York Times. One veteran of Central American politics – and at least one CIA coup attempt, in 1954, opposed by the then US Ambassador – went so far as to describe Castro as a “fabrication” of the US press, which had “sold him to Latin America.” The Agency’s effective control of both right and left-wing Castro publicists is neatly conveyed by two figures, Hal Hendrix, and Jules Dubois. The latter was an asset , while the former gives every evidence of being a career intelligence officer.
Captured in the aftermath of the militarily stupid, but profile-raising coup attempt of July 1953, Castro was not executed on the spot because he fell into the hands of “a humane officer who ignored orders to summarily execute prisoners.” The same Batista regime that ordered the summary execution of the other prisoners then acted in character by “unexpectedly” releasing Castro into exile a mere fifteen months later.
In 1956, in response to pressure from Batista, and as prelude to deportation back to Cuba, the Mexican government ordered the arrest of Castro and his 26 July Movement. Again the “hidden hand” – the CIA’s – intervened to safeguard Castro. “Details of the deal between Castro’s group and the Mexicans remain unclear,” wrote one British obituarist of a former Mexican secret police chief, Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, who reportedly brokered the deal, but what is clear is that the seemingly unlikely friendship between the interrogator from the fanatically anti-Communist DFS – which in the 1970s ran a murderous anti-leftist death squad, the Brigada Blanca - and Castro, endured: “Guttierez visited Havana on many occasions, and when Casto attended the 1988 inauguration of President Carlos Salinas, he was personally attended by his former jailer. The two men even travelled to Tuxpan, in Veracruz, for a memorial ceremony at the spot where the revolutionaries embarked for Cuba.” The same obituarist, writing this time of Arturo Durazo, the DFS member who oversaw the investigation of Castro and his group, wrote vaguely of “political pressure” for the group’s release. That Carlos Prio, the multimillionaire ex-President of Cuba and acknowledged financier of the 26th July Movement, wrote an open letter to the Mexican President in support of Castro is not at issue . What is is the sufficiency of this source in securing Castro’s release.
With Castro and his motley band safely restored to Cuban soil in December 1956, CIA money soon flooded in. Between “October or November 1957 and the middle of 1958, the CIA delivered no less than fifty thousand dollars to a half-dozen or more key members of the 26th July Movement in Santiago.” The funds were “handled by Robert D. Wiecha, a CIA case officer …who served in Santiago from September 1957 to June 1959.” In mid-October 1958, a senior figure within the 26th July Movement wrote to Castro detailing the extent of the CIA support in the US Embassy in Havana, and quality of the information that support gave: “I have been in contact with people close to the embassy. These contacts have told me that people who are on our side – but who do not appear to – have had conversations with the ambassador himself. I think this is the best possible, since we are kept up-to-date about everything happening there and of all the possible U.S. plans…” New York Times reporter Tad Szulc knew of this support in 1959, but disclosed it only in 1986. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA undertook a limited hang-out, conceding to a few, favoured mouthpieces that, yes, there had been some limited supply of arms in this period, but from an “ex-“CIA man, Sam Cummings, whose Interarmco was a private venture. Cummings had reportedly supplied the arms used by the Agency’s Guatemalan proxies to overthrow the Arbenz government in 1954.
In his testimony before a Senate Sub-committee on 30 August 1960, Earl T. Smith, the US Ambassador to Cuba from June 1957 to January 1959, complained of precisely this overt, and unbending CIA support within the Embassy for Castro. He drew this conclusion from his bitter experience at the hands of the Agency: “There is no advantage to the United States in sending an Ambassador to a country if the CIA representatives there act on their own and take an opposite position.” Among Ambassador Smith’s guests at the Embassy’s December 1957 Christmas party was a Senator from Massachusetts, whom Smith introduced as the man “who may very well be our next President.”
Castro has long been fond of boasting of the number of coup and assassination attempts he has allegedly survived. Almost as fond, indeed, as the CIA has been in confessing its many failures. On the 46th anniversary of his coming to power, readers of one British broadsheet were solemnly informed that the “Cuban Ministry of the Interior has investigated 637 assassination attempts.” And yet the same leader has always been renowned as one of the most accessible rulers in the world, and thus “an easy target for assassination. Yet,” mystifyingly, “no public attempt was ever made against him anywhere.”
The CIA had a variety of purposes in mind for revolutionary Cuba. A key intention was to use Cuba as the launch pad and pretext for a series of “revolutionary” movements throughout Latin America that would in turn “compel” CIA intervention in the unfortunate countries concerned. The Caribbean, Central and Latin America would thus be remade in the desired US image, the region’s reformist and nationalist governments alike destroyed in favour of murderous militarised oligarchies and US finance. Castro’s government was to arrest previously supportive CIA men engaged in precisely such activity – in this early instance, against the government of Nicaragua – no later than April 1959. Sihanouk offered a typically shrewd Asian encapsulation: “All the efforts of the CIA were aimed at implanting an armed political opposition inside the country so that we would have to beg for American arms to keep order…”
The Bay of Pigs operation was at once a self-sabotaged trap and a smokescreen: the real CIA action in late April 1961 was against De Gaulle. Even elements of the wretchedly timid and censored British press were stirred to a muted observation or two.
CIA operations in Europe encountered opposition from Kennedy-appointed Ambassadors. In the summer of 1962, the left-wing Greek nationalist, Andreas Papandreou flew to Washington to protest at the Agency’s role in, among other dark adventures, fixing the October 1961 election. The President was in Florida, so Papandreou had to make do with Carl Kaysen. The protest, in conjunction with the findings of Henry Labouisse, appointed by Kennedy to the Athens ambassadorship earlier that year, resulted in the replacement of the CIA station chief, Laughlin Campbell, in August 1962. Somewhat ironically, Campbell was transferred to Paris.
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The CIA had its own (small) fleet of U-2s, and the USAF had their own fleet (albeit not as advanced in ECM or performance as the CIA fleet).
Formal responsibility for U-2 overflights of Cuba was turned over to the USAF on 12 OCT 62. This was because it was thought that the cover story for the CIA pilots (Lockheed employees ferrying aircraft) was too weak, and it would be better to use USAF pilots and claim it was a mission which had strayed off course. This was agreed, but it was pointed out the CIA aircraft were more capable and the USAF pilots were not familiar with them. It was decided to use USAF pilots after they had done a familiarisation with the CIA aircraft.
(Memorandum for DCI McCone from McGeorge Bundy, "Reconnaissance of Cuba", 12 OCT 62)
The person who objected to the transfer of responsibility was the Acting DCI, GEN Marshall S. Carter, US Army. He felt that the CIA already had demonstrated command & control of such flights, whereas the USAF lacked experience in controlling overflights. carter thought that changing C&C at such a crucial time was a mistake.
(The CIA and the U-2 Program 1954-1974, Gregory W. Pedlow & Donald E. Welzenbach, 1998)
Evan,
Thanks for the info.
I'm puzzled Marshall should have advanced such a fantastic argument - he seriously thought wrecking the Paris summit between Ike and Khrushchev was a solid demonstration of CIA judiciousness in the deployment of the U-2?
A second thought occurs: Does the Pedlow/Welzenbach tome omit all reference to Scoville's resignation? Surely not?!
And a final thought: Are we really to believe Kennedy et al were satisfied with the CIA's performance in the run up to the missile crisis? A Republican Senator, Keating, was being spoon fed info that was withheld from the President and his National Security Adviser - didn't Bundy go on TV in late September '62 to deny the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba? - and Kennedy was untroubled by this? After the Bay of Pigs? The Agency revolt over the Genevan settlement on Laos? (To name but two pieces of rank insubordination...)
Forsooth!
Paul
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The U-2 program remained under the reigns of the CIA from 1954 until 1974 when it was turned over to the United States Air Force.
The above information is from the website globalsecurity.org
Robert,
Thanks for the impressively certain pronouncement from the global-thingyme website. Central claim true, do you think?
It certainly prompted me to a rummage through my chaotic files & book shelves. In order of discovery, the following:
1) Michael R. Beschloss. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p.391:
“In September 1962, U-2 pilots brought back the first concrete evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Stepping up the flights, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had the fliers formally transferred from CIA back to the Air Force.”
2) Mark J. White. The Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996), pp.98-99:
“An interesting footnote…was the fact that during the missile crisis the president himself began to question the loyalty of the CIA. On the evening of 25 October Ray S. Cline, deputy director of intelligence, was attending a party hosted by Mrs. Anna Chennault, when an angry Kennedy called. According to Cline, the president said:
he had heard stories that CIA officers were alleging that intelligence on offensive missile bases in Cuba had been available for several days before it was called to the attention of the President. He asked me to confirm that I was responsible for the analysis of this kind of intelligence and appropriate dissemination of it to higher authorities, and to tell him the facts in the case.”
Cline proceeded to assure Kennedy that these rumours were unfounded, an explanation that apparently satisfied the President. (28)
(28) Cline memorandum, “Notification of NSC Officials of Intelligence on Missile Bases in Cuba,” 27 October 1962, in ibid., 149.
3) Stewart Alsop, “CIA: The Battle for Secret Power,” Saturday Evening Post, July 27, 1963, p.19:
“As this is written, the job of McCone’s fifth key man is open. Until mid-June, it was occupied by Herbert (Pete) Scoville, an able scientist highly regarded in the White House. Scoville was D.D.R. – deputy director for research, a post newly created by McCone. A more accurate title might be deputy director for technical espionage. Mata Hari, in fact, is rapidly giving ground to such scientific intelligence devices as the U-2, reconnaissance satellites, side-viewing radar, long-range communications intercepts and other unmentionable technical means of finding out what the other side is up to.
At the height of the Cuban crisis, the job of overflying Cuba in U-2s was taken out of Scoville’s hands, and assigned to the Pentagon. The deed – the fell deed in the CIA’s eyes – was done with McCone’s approval after a bloody jurisdictional hassle at Scoville’s level, although the hassle did not, contrary to published report, lead to any ‘surveillance gap.’ Scoville is not talking, but it is a good guess that the Pentagon’s tendency to move in on him, and McCone’s tendency to remain above the resulting battle, had a lot to do with his resignation in June. The search for a successor is under way.”
Paul
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Watching grown men swop forgeries to their hearts content must greatly amuse Langley. Come to think of it, it does me, too.
Paul
Just exactly what about it amuses you? Is this some sort of parlour game?
Dawn
Dawn,
The alternative is tears. Better laughter. There are some tremendously bright and sincere people who seem to me to utterly misguided in their obsession with the photographic record. It strikes me as a great pity that they're not applying otherwise first rate minds to getting us off that bloody CIA fall-back position on the grassy knoll.
Paul
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Paul,
Many thanks for that interesting info.
In the course of your research on Scripps-Howard, have you came accross any obvious Mockingbird connections?
BK
Bill,
Yes, but...My hard-drive was Trojaned a month ago, and I lost both the word document and email containing Dick Starnes' recollection of a particularly revealing incident.
To keep it brief; and from memory.
In early 1960, Starnes resigned as managing editor of the NYWT&S. In the late summer of that year, he was assigned to visit Egypt. Shortly before departure, the third in charge of the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau called him into his office for a chat. Starnes found another figure, unknown to him, present. The stranger turned out to be Agency, and the offer was for the Congo, not Cairo.
Present in the Congo for S-H at that time was D'Lynn Waldron: she had proved very helpful to Lumumba, carrying handwritten messages across the border for transmission to Washington. (Lumumba was anxious to establish good relations with Eisenhower and had high hopes that he could correct the myths and rumours surrounding his intentions.) The plan appears to have been to terminate Waldron's tenure, and replace with a tame hack who would run pieces on cannibalism and chaos.
Starnes declined the Agency man's offer. The latter turned instead to the unfortunate Henry N. Taylor, who was ex-ONI. No sooner had he arrived in the Congo than he was killed in a clash between government troops and a tribe backed by the Agency.
Much of the datings etc for this sequence can be established from Waldron's fascinating website.
I hesitate to name the S-H exec who served as the Agency's point man within the group because I can't remember it exactly. I keep thinking of the name "Olin Russell," but don't hold me to that as it has temporarily gone from both memory and computer.
Paul
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Len/Bill/Robert,
Forgive my ignorance, but am I right in recalling that JFK transferred control of the U2 programme from CIA to Pentagon/DIA in either 1961 or 1962? I dimly recollect a senior CIA figure resigned in protest against the transfer. True or false?
Paul
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You must know what is coming.....especially from me!
You cannot explain the head wound for a very simple reason. Your determination is being made on a false basic premise. The truth which is recognized by a great many who do not have their heads buried in the sand, is that the government / conspirators have presented an unexplainable scenario.....yet you are trying to make sense of a nonsensical situation. It didn't occur as SEEN on Zapruder.
Best post of recent weeks, Charlie.
To give a concrete example of what Charlie's getting at.
Factor in the "missing" left veer of the presidential limo and at least two key pieces of the jigsaw fall instantly into place: the peculiar specificity of Hargis' description of where the brain matter struck his windshield; and that extraordinary series of stills capturing the retrieval of a discharged cartridge case from the south curb of Elm.
Watching grown men swop forgeries to their hearts content must greatly amuse Langley. Come to think of it, it does me, too.
Paul
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Muchmore had her film in her possession until Monday the 25th of Novemeber where upon it was sold to UPI sight unseen - then flown to NY - then developed and aired on TV. Any tampering after that would have been disasterous considering the local TV station had already aired it.
Bill Miller
Oh dear, not still making that tired old claim, eh, Bill?
Either substantiate it - simply tell us in which afternoon New York paper of November 26, plus the edition, article title and page reference, the showing of the Muchmore film is recorded - or retract the claim!
Couldn't be simpler, what?
Paul
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among those who also hunted at the Barron's African safriland was Robert Ruark. A prolific adventure writer, adventurer and hunter, in doing a Google it appeared that at one point Dorothy Kilgallen fell asleep while reading one of Ruark's books.
Now I don't know what that means, other than Kilgallen didn't find Ruark's book very exciting, and it seems they all run in the same social circles. I just can't imagine Dorothy Kilgallen on a hunting expedition without an umbrella.
BK
A few bits and pieces on Ruark:
Extract from:
Barry Ulanov, “Is Sinatra Finished?,” Modern Television & Radio, December 1948
Frank's troubles all started sometime in 1946--just ten years after his memorable visit to the Bing Crosby movie that decided him on his career of moon and swoon. Sinatra happens to be a good-natured guy; in fact, the gold in his heart often seems to make him slightly soft in the head.
Anyway, "The Voice" was persuaded by certain political salesmen to identify himself with "Causes" that would (so he was convinced) help mankind. These "Causes" would help the underdog they said--and also help the downtrodden masses. He was shown how to do his bit by attending certain Hollywood rallies, by collecting funds for folks unable to help themselves, by making speeches in ballrooms and ballparks. Frankie went all out in these activities. He's not the kind to spare himself when he firmly believes he is on the side of right. The only trouble was that Frank had been persuaded to tie himself up with "transmission belts." These are outfits (sometimes called "innocent organizations") that use people like Sinatra, who more often leap with good heart than hard head. Unfortunately, the political color of this cause happens to be a deep shade of red!
Sinatra's disillusion with his "innocent" activities, plus the bad publicity it resulted in, was followed quickly by a nasty experience that was headlined on thousands of newspapers. That was the smear campaign resulting from Frankie's famous 1947 handshake, in Cuba, with the notorious gangster, Lucky Luciano.
It was just plain hard luck for "The Voice" that Robert Ruark, a widely-syndicated columnist, happened to be in Cuba at the time. It seems that the unsavory Luciano was a Sinatra fan, and somehow managed to arrange a meeting with the singer. It also happens that Robert Ruark was nearby when the historical handshake took place . . . Thus started the one-week newspaper sensation that boosted some newspaper circulation sky-high, but did nothing to boost Frankie's reputation. Especially coming on the heels of Frankie's innocent association with pro-Soviet causes. And so another dent was added to the reputation of "The Voice."
Now the more a guy hits the front pages, the more the gossip columnists, scandal-mongers and ill-wishers get to work on him. Newspapermen just like to write about other people in trouble. So the disparaging remarks about Frankie's "caverns in his cheeks," his "English Droop figure" and his bevy of swooning, screaming bobby-sox fans increased. There was no romantic scandal to sock Frankie with in the press--so the careless speech here, and the casual handshake there, provided grist for the gossip mill.
Full article: http://www.jazzsingers.com/IsSinatraFinished/
Two further Ruark pieces of interest:
Robert Ruark, “The Spy Business Is Quite Unnecessary,” The New York World-Telegram & Sun, August 1957 (?), p.?, on the Abel case:
“What in the name of the Kremlin, Abel could have found out in America I cannot say. We publish so much of our so-called top secrets in papers and magazines that often a spy can ring for room service and ask for the coffee and the latest printed information on what’s cooking. A lot of this microfilm nonsense is for the moving pictures.
Some spies are little sillier than bird-watchers. They see a bird, they know it’s a bird, and they send off a message saying: ‘Saw tufted titmouse today in Connecticut.’ This is a big deal for some bum with a pair of spyglasses. He might have well have said: ‘Saw English sparrow following horse.’
I have known in my time a mess of spies. Mostly, they never bought a drink, and asked questions like, ‘Where is the Sixth Fleet?’ when the Sixth Fleet was anchored in full view. Tangier used to be full of spies, and most of them couldn’t find the way home if they had the cab fare.
A spy can be useful in wartime, if you want a bridge blown up, or some people throttled. A spy can be useful in peacetime, if you want to assassinate someone or explode a bridge. But apart from the repulsive physical aspects of espionage, you might as well leave it, because there is not much information a paper-stealer can swipe that’s worth stealing…”
[source: Joachim Joesten. They Call It Intelligence: Spies and Spy Techniques Since World War II (NY: Abelard-Schuman, 1963), p.13.]
James Tracy Crown. The Kennedy Literature: A Bibliographical Essay on John F. Kennedy (London: University of London Press, 1968), p.160:
Writing of Sylvan Fox’s Unanswered Questions About President Kennedy’s Murder (NY: Award Books, 1965), Crown writes: “The question about the official version of the Dallas slaying raised by Fox’s widely distributed paperback seem to have spurred a number of other skeptics to continue their research. Fox’s critique may have been the result of his job as city editor of the late New York World Telegram & Sun, a paper where the deep press room doubts about the government version of Dallas kept popping into print much more frequently than in other papers. See Richard Starnes’ “Warren Report Is Big, But So Is Loophole,” November 25, 1964, and Robert Ruark’s “Puzzled By Warren Report,” October 9, 1964. Ruark, who knew his guns, wrote: “I have read the Report scrupulously several times and the ballistics end of it makes no sense.”
Colleague Richard Starnes’s tribute to Richard Ruark, who died in 1965, is to be found here: “One of the Rare Ones,” Washington Daily News, July 2, 1965, p.25
Paul
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It has been a long, slow shock to realise just how deeply the spook state has penetrated almost every significant sinew and nerve ending of our body politic in the western world.
In my opinion, a central task for humanity in this new century must be to consign these clandestine criminal networks, that operate under the cover of 'state security', to the dustbin of history.
Purporting to be necessary for the protection of modern society, these networks have, in reality, corrupted the modern world with their sordid, bigotted agenda and their willingness to use lies and murder to further their goals - include destablising and/or killing inconvenient elected leaders and popular heros.
I hope and pray that in future, saner, times, people will look back with wonder and amazement at how we - in this era - blithely permitted 'our' intelligence agencies to control archival releases about their own misdeeds, allowing them to ensure that release of information is so long in comng that the perpetrators of crimes within any generation of spooks are effecively shielded from justice.
We need real accountability for our 'intelligence agencies'. If we can't have that, we'd be better off without them. Given that they have spent the last century demonstrating the proposition that they are inherently unaccountable - I believe abolition is the way to go.
Well put!
PS Not forgotten your request re: Beria. Will atttend to in New Year.
Best wishes,
Paul
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The Arthur Krock article, Oct 3, '63 warning of the CIA overthrow the gov't:
"Among the views attributed to United States officials on the scene, including one described as a "very high American official who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy" are the following:
The C. I. A.'s growth was "likened to a malignancy" which the "very high Official was not sure even the White House could control "any longer." "If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the C. I. A. and not the Pentagon."The agency"represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone."
Myra,
If you re-visit Krock’s piece, you’ll quickly discover it’s a defence of the CIA, and an attack on Kennedy for permitting public criticism of that fine band of thugs and murderers. The despatch upon which Krock hung his Agency hat, however, is the real McCloy. Here it is:
As it’s Christmas, put this in your stocking with it:The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, October 2, 1963, p.3'SPOOKS' MAKE LIFE MISERABLE FOR AMBASSADOR LODGE
'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam
By Richard Starnes
SAIGON, Oct.2 - The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power.
Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high United States source here.
In one of these instances the CIA frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington because the agency disagreed with it.
This led to a dramatic confrontation between Mr. Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Mr. Lodge failed to move Mr. Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy.
It is one of the developments expected to be covered in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's report to Mr. Kennedy.
Others Critical, Too
Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.
"If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically.
("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.)
CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.
An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about "that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel's uniform." He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can't understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans.
Another American officer, talking about the CIA, acidly commented: "You'd think they'd have learned something from Cuba but apparently they didn't."
Few Know CIA Strength
Few people other than Mr. Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks.
Even Mr. Richardson is a man about whom it is difficult to learn much in Saigon. He is said to be a former OSS officer, and to have served with distinction in the CIA in the Philippines.
A surprising number of the spooks are known to be involved in their ghostly trade and some make no secret of it.
"There are a number of spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here, " one official - presumably a non-spook - said.
"They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone," he added.
Coupled with the ubiquitous secret police of Ngo Dinh Nhu, a surfeit of spooks has given Saigon an oppressive police state atmosphere.
The Nhu-Richardson relationship is a subject of lively speculation. The CIA continues to pay the special forces which conducted brutal raids on Buddhist temples last Aug. 21, altho in fairness it should be pointed out that the CIA is paying these goons for the war against communist guerillas, not Buddhist bonzes (priests).
Hand Over Millions
Nevertheless, on the first of every month, the CIA dutifully hands over a quarter million American dollars to pay these special forces.
Whatever else it buys, it doesn't buy any solid information on what the special forces are up to. The Aug. 21 raids caught top U.S. officials here and in Washington flat-footed.
Nhu ordered the special forces to crush the Buddhist priests, but the CIA wasn't let in on the secret. (Some CIA button men now say they warned their superiors what was coming up, but in any event the warning of harsh repression was never passed to top officials here or in Washington.)
Consequently, Washington reacted unsurely to the crisis. Top officials here and at home were outraged at the news the CIA was paying the temple raiders, but the CIA continued the payments.
It may not be a direct subsidy for a religious war against the country's Buddhist majority, but it comes close to that.
And for every State Department aide here who will tell you, "Dammit, the CIA is supposed to gather information, not make policy, but policy-making is what they're doing here," there are military officers who scream over the way the spooks dabble in military operations.
A Typical Example
For example, highly trained trail watchers are an important part of the effort to end Viet Cong infiltration from across the Laos and Cambodia borders. But if the trailer watchers spot incoming Viet Congs, they report it to the CIA in Saigon, and in the fullness of time, the spooks may tell the military.
One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.
Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither.
There is naturally the highest interest here as to whether Mr. McNamara will persuade Mr. Kennedy something ought to be done about it.
The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, December 24, 1963, p.13Truman and the CIA
By Richard Starnes
The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman.
Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it.
"It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."
For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon.
Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent.
Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous.
The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us.
It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam.
It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety.
This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads.
Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done.
There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.
Paul
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The fact that the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman has been transfered from prison to a hospital is a sure indication that the end may be near, a death that could have even more explosive ramifications than that of Castro or a Democratic Senator.
Abdel-Rahman's will, if he dies in U.S. custody, calls for "the most violent revenge," so it's written in the books [see: Worsening health of terror cleric could spark attacks, FBI warns. AP By Laura Jakes Jordan, Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 ]
Bill,
Below, two of my favourite clippings on the first World Trade Centre false flag op. First up, a tale with a moral: For Arab dupes of the CIA and/or Mossad, urine trouble whether “witty” or not.
By the way, anyone know if Ms. Hadas dances?
Last but not least, a piece which the Egyptian President’s press secretary hastily disavowed a day later, presumably after a less than subtle reminder as to who pays the bills. Mohammed Abdel-Moneim, the unfortunate spin-doctor in question, assured the Associated Press that everyone in the room listening to Mubarak had heard the same wrong thing simultaneously. Similar acoustics, doubtless, to the room in which Kilduff announced his boss’s death.Martin Walker, “Rivalry dogs hunt for New York bomber,” The Guardian, March 9, 1993Washington – “After nine days shoring up the 150ft crater under the bomber World Trade Centre in New York, FBI forensic experts finally started a comprehensive search at the epicentre of the blast yesterday, in a case that has begun spinning out of control in a welter of rumour, luck and circumstantial evidence.
Intense rivalry among investigators – the FBI, New York police and the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) – has already brought a separate investigation into possible falsification of evidence by the ATF. The ATF has claimed credit for one of the more bizarre pieces of evidence that may have pointed to an Israeli link – a telephone number given by the man who rented the van that carried the explosives.
The same rivalries are being blamed for the press leak last week which said the van had been traced to the Jersey City rental agency where the Jordanian, Mohammed Salameh, was arrested when he went to claim his cash refund.
Once the rental agency was named, in the Newsday newspaper, the FBI telephoned Mr Salameh to say his refund was ready. He walked into his arrest.
The arrest, however, is said to have disrupted other monitoring operations by the New York police. Several potential suspects have, as a result, left the United States.
Sheikh Omar Abdel –Rahman, the fundamentalist cleric who runs the mosque were Mr Salameh worshipped, has disappeared after media speculation about the mosque’s involvement. Three other worshippers, who were arrested Friday, have been released.
The address Mr Salameh gave on the van rental form led the FBI to the apartment of Ibrahim Elgabrowny, a cousin of the Muslim militant El Sayid Nosair. Nosair is serving a prison term for involvement in the assassination of the extremist Jewish nationalist, American-born rabbi Meir Kahane.
Mr Elgabrowny is in custody, charged with resisting arrest when the FBI raided his apartment. Although suspected of deeper involvement, the FBI does not have the evidence to charge him in connection with the bombing.
But the telephone number given by Mr Salameh when he rented the van, which he insists was stolen from him the day before the blast, was traced to an apartment in the name of Josie Hadas. Neither the FBI nor the ATF would comment yesterday on reports that she has links with Israeli intelligence. But the Treasury confirmed yesterday that one agent was being questioned in “a procedural matter regarding the collection and preservation of evidence.”
Then there is the Nicaraguan connection. Five counterfeit Nicaraguan passports and birth certificates in the name of Nosair and his family were found in Mr Elgabrowny’s apartment.
The hunt is now focused the unidentified man who was seen with Mr Salameh when he rented the van and who was also tentatively identified by photofit drawings with the man seen driving the van into the World Trade Centre.
FBI sources said yesterday that they knew the name and whereabouts of this man, adding that a search of his apartment at the weekend had found electrical wiring and circuitry diagrams, and three identical small alarm clocks.
The forensic team searching the crater are looking for evidence of a timing device which could match up with these clocks.
As mosques and Islamic groups around the United States reported a spate of death threats and broken windows at the weekend, the investigation seemed to have stalled. Conspiracy theories linked to the Middle East are rife.
So far, there is only circumstantial evidence against Mr Salameh. He rented the van, reported it stolen the day before the blast, and then acted as if he were an innocent victim. He reported the theft to the police and went back to the rental agency to recover his deposit. The nitrate traces on the rental forms could indicate explosives, or urine.
When Mr Elgabrowny was arrested, the FBI said he “plunged his hands into a toilet bowl so that the urine would negate explosive tests on his hands.” His lawyer said he was washing his hands in a basin to prepare for prayer.
No need, of course, to labour the relevance of previous State Department “bureaucratic errors.”
Zina Hemady (Cairo), “Mubarak: Muslim cleric on CIA payroll,” Washington Times, May 29, 1993, p.A7Cairo – A radical Egyptian cleric whose followers are charged in the World Trade Centre bombing is a paid CIA agent, President Hosni Mubarak was quoted as saying in a government newspaper.
“The sheik [Omar Abdel-Rahman] has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan…He still earns a salary,” Mr Mubarak told newspaper editors, columnists and intellectuals at a meeting in Cairo on Wednesday. “The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did.”
Mr Mubarak’s comments were quoted Thursday in the government newspaper Al Gomhuria.
The statement challenges the U.S. government’s version of how Sheik Abdel-Rahman’s multiple-entry U.S. visa was issued in 1990 despite his presence on a State Department list of people ineligible for U.S. visits.
In New York, Barbara Nelson, Sheik Abdel-Raman’s immigration attorney, said: “That would be news to me…I know just the opposite. He has said he never worked for the CIA.”
The U.S. government’s version is that the American Embassy in Sudan didn’t notice the blind cleric’s name on the list of undesirables, despite notification eight days earlier that Sheik Abdel-Rahman was visiting Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.
The sheik’s presence in the United States has strained relations between Washington and Cairo. But there was no indication why Mr Mubarak chose to go public with a version of events directly contradicting Washington’s.
Mr Mubarak was quoted as saying that the case has also led to a dispute in the United States between the FBI and the CIA.
The FBI, responsible for domestic security, wants Sheik Abdel-Rahman out of the country while the CIA wants him to stay, Mr Mubarak was quoted in the newspaper as saying.
Mr Mubarak’s spokesman could not be contacted for comment yesterday, the eve of a major Muslim holiday.
The sheik, acquitted in Egypt of sanctioning the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, is spiritual leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (The Islamic Group). It wants to replace Mr Mubarak’s secular government with a theocracy like Iran’s. Sheik Abdel-Rahman uses his New York-area base to disseminate his anti-Egyptian message.
Several suspects in the Feb. 26 bombing at New York’s World Trade Centre, which killed six persons and wounded more than 1,000, worshipped at a New Jersey mosque where Sheik Abdel-Rahman preaches.
His journey from Egypt followed a circuitous route through Sudan, Afghanistan and other countries. The State Department says its Khartoum Embassy tried to cancel his visa two weeks after it was issued. But Sheik Abdel-Rahman had left 11 days earlier for Afghanistan. He later went to the United States.
A State Department chronology on the sheik’s comings and goings also recounts a purported series of bureaucratic errors that allowed him to leave and return to the United States without interception. But the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service revoked his permanent residence in March 1992, just over a year after he got it.
The immigration service said it revoked the permit because Sheik Abdel-Rahman lied on his application, hiding that he was polygamist and has been convicted in Egypt of writing a bad check. He was two Egyptian wives.
Paul
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5, Why were Catesby, and Percy(fellow plotters) shot to death before they could be arrested and tortured, so that the names of more conspirators could be found out?
Answer: Percy was a Cecilian "projector"!
John Gerard, S.J. What was the Gunpowder Plot? The Traditional Story Tested by Original Evidence (London: Osgood, McIlvane & Co., 1897), pp.152-3
“Immediately before the fatal Fifth of November, Percy had been away in the north, and he returned to London only on the evening of Saturday, the 2nd. Of this return, Cecil, writing a week later, made a great mystery, as though the traitor’s movements had been of a most stealthy and secret character, and declared that the fact had been discovered from Faukes only with infinite difficult, and after many denials. It happens, however, that amongst the State Papers is preserved a pass dated October 25th, issued by the Commissioners of the North, for Thomas Percy, posting to Court upon the King’s especial service, and charging all mayors, sheriffs, and postmasters to provide him with three good horses all along the road.”
Paul
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The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, October 2, 1963, p.3
'SPOOKS' MAKE LIFE MISERABLE FOR AMBASSADOR LODGE
'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam
SAIGON, Oct.2 - The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power.
Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high United States source here.
In one of these instances the CIA frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington because the agency disagreed with it.
This led to a dramatic confrontation between Mr. Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Mr. Lodge failed to move Mr. Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy.
It is one of the developments expected to be covered in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's report to Mr. Kennedy.
Others Critical, Too
Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.
"If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically.
("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.)
CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.
An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about "that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel's uniform." He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can't understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans.
Another American officer, talking about the CIA, acidly commented: "You'd think they'd have learned something from Cuba but apparently they didn't."
Few Know CIA Strength
Few people other than Mr. Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks.
Even Mr. Richardson is a man about whom it is difficult to learn much in Saigon. He is said to be a former OSS officer, and to have served with distinction in the CIA in the Philippines.
A surprising number of the spooks are known to be involved in their ghostly trade and some make no secret of it.
"There are a number of spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here, " one official - presumably a non-spook - said.
"They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone," he added.
Coupled with the ubiquitous secret police of Ngo Dinh Nhu, a surfeit of spooks has given Saigon an oppressive police state atmosphere.
The Nhu-Richardson relationship is a subject of lively speculation. The CIA continues to pay the special forces which conducted brutal raids on Buddhist temples last Aug. 21, altho in fairness it should be pointed out that the CIA is paying these goons for the war against communist guerillas, not Buddhist bonzes (priests).
Hand Over Millions
Nevertheless, on the first of every month, the CIA dutifully hands over a quarter million American dollars to pay these special forces.
Whatever else it buys, it doesn't buy any solid information on what the special forces are up to. The Aug. 21 raids caught top U.S. officials here and in Washington flat-footed.
Nhu ordered the special forces to crush the Buddhist priests, but the CIA wasn't let in on the secret. (Some CIA button men now say they warned their superiors what was coming up, but in any event the warning of harsh repression was never passed to top officials here or in Washington.)
Consequently, Washington reacted unsurely to the crisis. Top officials here and at home were outraged at the news the CIA was paying the temple raiders, but the CIA continued the payments.
It may not be a direct subsidy for a religious war against the country's Buddhist majority, but it comes close to that.
And for every State Department aide here who will tell you, "Dammit, the CIA is supposed to gather information, not make policy, but policy-making is what they're doing here," there are military officers who scream over the way the spooks dabble in military operations.
A Typical Example
For example, highly trained trail watchers are an important part of the effort to end Viet Cong infiltration from across the Laos and Cambodia borders. But if the trailer watchers spot incoming Viet Congs, they report it to the CIA in Saigon, and in the fullness of time, the spooks may tell the military.
One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.
Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither.
There is naturally the highest interest here as to whether Mr. McNamara will persuade Mr. Kennedy something ought to be done about it.
A further glimpse of Starnes' key source for 'Arrogant' CIA is perhaps to be found in another magnificent piece from the period. Here he is pouring scorn on the composition of the Warren Commission in mid-December 1963:
The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Wednesday, December 11, 1963, p.49Light On a Shadow
By Richard Starnes
A small, but possibly significant, insight into ourselves as others see us is to be obtained in reading an account of Fidel Castro's reaction to the news that the American President had been murdered.
He was, of course, deeply concerned with the nature of his new adversary - Lyndon B. Johnson. Writing in the current New Republic, Jean Daniel, who was with Castro when he heard of Mr. Kennedy's assassination, reports that the Cuban dictator asked:
"Who is Lyndon Johnson? What is his reputation? What were his relations with Kennedy? With Khrushchev? What was his position at the time of the attempted invasion of Cuba?"
The: "What authority does he exercise over the CIA?"
Shielded as they are from the realities of life, Americans are easy to placate and reassure on the score of such cloudy organisms as the Central Intelligence Agency. Not so, however, are sophisticated foreigners, particularly foreigners against whom the CIA is waging war. Castro falls within this category.
The unlikely figure of Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia is another alien princeling whose thoughts are much with the shadowy spooks of the CIA. So much so, indeed, that he turned off the U.S. foreign aid spigot that had poured $355 million into his country, chucked out the U.S. aid mission and U.S. military advisers, and may have condemned his country to the gravitational lure of Communist China - all because he believed the CIA was assisting rebels seeking to overthrow him.
It is possible to reject the maunderings of such as Sihanouk and Castro. But it is not so easy to turn aside episodes such as a conversation with an American official of high rank (and immense personal prestige) who was at the time stationed in the Far East. We had been talking about the CIA, when he said:
"I have Q security clearance, which is the highest anyone can have, and I thought I pretty much knew what was going on. But I have been appalled by what I've seen here. I seriously question whether President Kennedy himself has any effective control over this monstrous bureaucracy."
Castro's question, then, is perhaps not so foolish as it might first appear to be.
President Johnson may be forgiven if his special commission to examine into the murder of John F. Kennedy seems on sober second thoughts to be a curiously ill-assorted group. He had many problems nagging at him and consuming his time; he unquestionably sought the advice of the Chief Justice, among others, and it is clear now that some of the advice he obtained was poorly considered.
If he had any idea of the tremendous CIA psychosis that is abroad in the world today, he most certainly would not have named Allen W. Dulles to the extraordinary commission. Dulles headed the CIA for eight years, a tenure which spanned such dismal episodes as the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs disaster, and he now seems bent on spending his declining years as apologist without portfolio for the huge, bumbling espionage apparatus.
What the meaning of Dulles' appointment is, no one outside the White House knows. But whatever the final judgement of the commission is, it will be looked upon as a product, at least in part, of Dulles' thought processes, conditioned reflexes and rigidly-fixed notions of what is the public's business and what isn't.
In the eyes of foreigners, indeed, Dulles' role in the verdict of the commission will loom larger than life size. He is the only member of the commission (with the exception of Justice Warren) who is widely known abroad. He is known, moreover, as the dean of American spies. His appointment to the commission was not an act designed to reassure those organs of world opinion that are terribly concerned and frightened over what the true significance of the Kennedy assassination may be.
A great many journalists talk about speaking truth to power. Few do it. Dick Starnes did, when it mattered.
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Tripple thanks for both of your general overviews, Mr. Hogan and Mr. Rigby.
Nathan,
Do you have the misfortune to own a copy of Thompson's Six Seconds?
If not, let me know and I'll do you a photocopy of the witness table at the back - it makes fascinating reading, particularly when you compare Thompson's versions of who said what was fired from where, with what they actually said.
If you have a copy already, start with, let me see, Austin Miller, perhaps?
Best wishes,
Paul
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Paul, you can call a rock - a tree, but it is no truer by you merely repeating it over and over again.
Bill, I'd rather call the Z fraud what it is - a fake.
Zapruder's film never captured the President's turn onto Elm Street.Quite right: He, Rather, Snider and any others who described seeing the turn on the Dallas version of the film either a) made it up, or
where involved in a complex conspiracy for God knows what purpose.Very plausible.
As far as Abe's film not being a clock for the assassination .... I guess this would be true for only those who cannot compute film frames into incrememnts of time. It should be pointed out to those who forget - The copy prints made from the camera original on 11/22/63 do not have any frames removed, thus the actual assassination does have a clock!Circular reasoning's finest hour. I am not worthy.
So in other words, Paul ... are you saying that Dan Rather actually saw the President's head go violently forward on the Zapruder film ???Bill Miller
Absolutely. On Nov 25, the version he saw in Dallas contained precisely that nonsense. I bet it's the same version the Russians saw that evening, and the viewers of selected UPI-subscribing US TV stations saw on the early afternoon of November 26 - before the film was recalled.
Where is the KGB when you need 'em? Damn it, Chekists, leak your recording of the Nov 25 showing!
Bill Miller wrote:No, David ... just the people who merely state a position, but aren't able to give a logical response based mon facts for saying what they do.
Bill,
Pot calling the kettle black, no? Your logical response to Z & others describing the film capture of the presidential limo's turn from Houston onto Elm is....where exactly?
And cut out the French - "mon facts" - don't you know there are sensitive American eyes persuing this richly informative thread?
Paul
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I would be gratefull if the other side might post a similarly concise reasoning as to why they think the film was not faked.
This is about as concise as it's gonna get:
Why the Zapruder Film is Authentic
Presented in Dallas on Friday, November 20, 1998
by Dr. Josiah Thompson
Maybe Rigby believes that Thompson, like Weisberg is a witting servant of the CIA.
Mike,
You're getting the hang of this - yup, absolutely.
Or wasn't Thompson a participant in that grand Agency paramilitary op in the Lebanon in '58?
Paul
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Lovely thought, and utterly improbable, more's the pity. If any film should appear in such circumstances, I'd work from the assumption it's a further CIA fraud, until proven otherwise.
Whither next the Agency, one wonders, on this subject? Heavy concentration on a long-distance south knoll shooter, perhaps? And how about a flood of film and bits of film, stills and negatives seemingly contradicting the Z film? Makes sense: If you can't hold a strong point, deny it to the enemy - better still, plant a few booby-traps!
Paul
Given the confessions implicating Trafficante, Roselli and Giancana, I firmly believe there exists a filmed trophy of the assassination that will withstand intense scrutiny from the research community. Call me an idealist, but I think it will happen in my lifetime.
John,
I hope you're right. But don't hold your breath...
Paul
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Owen,
Terrific post, for which thanks. Two points suggest themselves.
First, one finds mainstream US press descriptions of CIA-run pseudo-gangs active in Vietnam as early as 1961. From memory, Joe Alsop was the Agency hack, and they appeared in, doubtless among other places, the Washington Post in January or February. Colby was what in 1961 - chief of station?
Second, on the subject of Indonesia, worth looking at the memoirs of the US Ambassador to Indonesia during Kennedy's presidency. John M. Allison's Ambassador from the Prairie: Or Allison in Wonderland (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973) contains some brief but fascinating glimpses of his strained relationship with the Agency. The president's loyal tool, Hersh would have us believe.
Paul
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I seem to recall a particularly outrageous story about a party that occurred at Bing Crosby's estate in the California desert.
Isn't this where the CIA sought to entrap Sukarno in the company of some peroxide hookers?
Good old Bing, more interesting than we ever suspected - he ran an Agency knocking shop, complete with cameras...
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Interesting theory... although, hindsight tells me that Dan Rather is not the beacon of truth in this matter...
John,
Dan Rather was an ambitious careerist of no obvious scruple, but nevertheless a thoroughly rational one. Given that according to the conventional timeline the Z film rights were not sold until November 26, a day after Rather described seeing both the presidential limo turn on Elm, and Kennedy's head being driven forward by the impact of the lethal head shot, he would have been an idiot to lie about two key, obvious features of a film he had every reasonable expection would be shown soon on US TV.
Now, that is not to say the original version - the one described by Rather on November 25 - was a true or accurate version of what happened on Elm. I don't believe that for a moment. It's just that Rather was not in the loop, and simply described what he saw. No more, no less.
I'm sure every researcher has daydreamed about the moment when someone discovers a dusty film canister in a dead relative's safety deposit box that can be described as the "smoking gun" in this case... will that be this "original" film?Lovely thought, and utterly improbable, more's the pity. If any film should appear in such circumstances, I'd work from the assumption it's a further CIA fraud, until proven otherwise.
Whither next the Agency, one wonders, on this subject? Heavy concentration on a long-distance south knoll shooter, perhaps? And how about a flood of film and bits of film, stills and negatives seemingly contradicting the Z film? Makes sense: If you can't hold a strong point, deny it to the enemy - better still, plant a few booby-traps!
Paul
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Sorry, Paul ... it must have been Paul McCartney who posted:
Bill,
This is outrageous, and unacceptable: Paul McCartney?
I might yet contact a lawyer with a view to my lawyer contacting your lawyer so that both shysters can make a huge some of money at our expense.
Paul McCartney?! I ask you! Now, if you'd offered someone from the Kinks, the Small Faces, or the 'Oo, that would have been fine. But Paul bloody McCartney? This is war...
"On 22 November 1963, Zapruder said he filmed the turn from Houston.Reporters who viewed the film 23 November and shortly thereafter said/wrote they saw the turn.
Film as available to be viewed as film - since late 1964? - has NO turn.
Not that difficult, surely?
Paul"
Yup, Bill, that's me - and nothing at all about reporters describing a wide turn in any of the press reports I've instanced. It's that amnesia thingy again....
As I said before, the "abreast" remark attributed to Zapruder can be easliy understood by cross-referencing that remark to what other witnesses had said. Such witnesses such as Phil Willis, Hugh Betzner, Mary Woodard, Bill Newman, just to name a few. There is a point in time when JFK's location on Elm Street fits their descriptions. One can take any one statement and try and make something out of nothing from it, but when these witnesses statements are plotted out - the limo's position on Elm Street becomes quit obvious. Mary Woodard for example said that the President was directly out in front of her location while smiling and waving to her and the women she was standing near when the first shot rang out. That time span falls between Z193 to Z198. Willis said the first shot sounded just prior to his taking his photo, Betzner said that he had just snapped his shutter when the first shot sounded. Betzner and Willis are talking about a time frame between Z189 to Z202. I have given you an explanation as to why Zapruder chose the words that he did ... I cannot give you the ability to formulate a rational understanding of the evidence pertaining to this particular matter.Get over it, the film's a fake, as you confirm by your silence on the early journalism - not to mention Z himself -on the first film version that described the presidential limo's turn onto Elm.
As Newcomb and Adams observed long ago, "With time removed, the film is useless as a clock for the assassination" (Murder From Within, p.113).
Amen.
where involved in a complex conspiracy for God knows what purpose.
Cuban Smoke and the French Connection:Why the CIA installed Fidel Castro
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Again, with regard to your first paragraph-statement, I've never said they didn't. But note your second para - it's Vietnam that gets attacked, not Cuba! How come? Are we really to believe that the CIA could successfully sheep-dip Oswald in Russia, but couldn't lay an uncomplicated, if bogus, trail from Oswald to Castro? Yet this is precisely what happened, with Oswald undertaking a series of contradictory steps and poses that rendered "the Castro dunnit" scenario untenable. Angleton couldn't do better in New Orleans than he could in Minsk?
Absolutely - but not just Neo-Con. Hasn't this mostly been the case?I haven't poured anything remotely resembling "ridicule and scorn" on the notion - I sought to put a reasoned case that a) the CIA installed Castro, and
did so for eminently rational, if thoroughly deplorable, reasons. My point being that this was a long-term, political programme that was not to be terminated within a couple of years of initiation. But the veneer of deep-seated hostility had to be preserved, even as successive would-be coups/assassination attempts were cocked-up and thwarted. Deliberately, in my view.
No, not least because I wouldn't attempt anything so half-baked. I accept, mostly without reservation, the enduring determination of most, if not all, of the anti-Castro Cubans, to chuck out Castro. Trouble is, a) they were never the ones with the real power; and
I rather suspect that a significant number of anti-Castro Cubans share my disbelief at the genuine resolve of the CIA et al to effect such a change.
Paul
(first half of post - had to split in two due to exceeding permissible number of quotes)