Sterling Seagrave

I think Bill Kelly and Jack White's comments are as clear and persuasive as anyone can reasonably expect, under the circumstances. The sort of thing you can either accept or dispute according to your own parallax. Just like whether you accept or reject the use of "enhanced" thermite, or nano-thermite, or military-grade thermite, so conspicuous in the three buildings at 9/11.

Mike Picardi ~ If you ever get a film made of your screenplay with someone like David Von Pein as the protagonist, let us know so we can avoid it.

Great review by Robert Steele. Luckily I visited the Magellan Hotel in April of 1993 just before the May 22, 1993 fire that destroyed it. There were a few books written with the Maggelan as a backdrop, weren't there? It seems that I read a novel before going to the Philippines in 1993 and was drawn to the Magellan. Sterling, I know I don't just speak for myself, in saying that, we all are very glad that you take the time to share your perceptions and knowledge of Far East intelligence history, here on the Forum, we're all the better for it. Robert John Simkin is a great man, and so are all his colleagues in this website, which has been a real feast for me with a hell of an ongoing conversation. Incidentally, the new edition of Lords of the Rim 2010 -- China's Renaissance, is dedicated to John, and France's General Henri Eyraud, for many years the French military attache in Beijing. If you read French, his book on China's reform and opening is superb. Thanks for allowing me to be a member.

Great review by Robert Steele. Luckily I visited the Magellan Hotel in Cebu in April of 1993 just before the May 22, 1993 fire that destroyed it. There were a few books written with the Maggelan as a backdrop, weren't there? It seems that I read a novel before going to the Philippines in 1993 and was drawn to the Magellan. I think America has made the same mistake Magellan made.

Thanks, Peter. Robert Steele (the reviewer you cited) is a champion of open intelligence replacing the Balkanized system in the States. I hope it's not already too late.

It's hard to describe briefly the self-induced misconception Americans have of their role in the Philippines, to this day. If you are an evangelical christian missionary, you have your own parallax. If you're in the military, diplomat, attorney, banker, sama-sama. But if you try hard enough to look at characters and events, motivations, consequences, without being in any self-induced construct, and just look at what happened, and who did what to whom, and what deceit and distortions sooner or later become evident, it's horrifying, or nauseating. I was first in Manila in 1947, and countless times since then to many of the islands in PI, and became acquainted with a lot of people including Prouty, Lansdale, Bohannen, and have researched and written eleven investigative books that cover all parts of East and Southeast Asia -- but also involve the Philippines. So, things keep clarifying as the decades pass. I spent years researching The Marcos Dynasty and over $100K on research help (aside from my wife and co-author who is a professional researcher). Then Lords of the Rim, and Gold Warriors. Three years ago I was asked to do a book based on a foot-high stack of G-2 documents newly passed over to the National Archives, and referred to as The Manila Project. These were the collected reports of agents for G-2, McMicking, Lansdale, Bohannen, etc., concerning Lansdale's efforts to make the Huks and thousands of unaffiliated farmers in Luzon, look like crazed Marxist revolutionaries, requiring millions of dollars, heavy military support, before they overthrew MacArthur's current postwar puppet regime. Since there was no serious existing evidence of threatening Marxist activity, it was necessary to generate false evidence. There were a bunch of young screwball Yanks messing around in Manila's underworld trying to get rich quick and easy, and attention was focussed on scores of them, until a young White Russian emigre arrived from Shanghai working for a Dutch trading and shipping company buying and refurbishing surplus US cargo vessels to sell to Chinese businessman in Shanghai. This White Russian was absurdly innocent and had left Siberia with his parents when he was just a child, first to Japan, then to Shanghai, where he married a very innocent White Russian emigre, and had a little boy. Lansdale chose him to be the evil Kremlin agent financing and arming the Huks (which Lansdale and Bohannen very clearly knew was not true -- they might be called evil but not stupid). In the course of digesting all these many hundreds of agent's reports, and memos from Lansdale and Bohannen, and going back over everything I'd worked on about the Philippines for half a century, I realized that the American role in the Philippines was far more disgraceful, deceitful, and outrageous than I had ever imagined. I realized that I was still just scraping the surface, but I found some comfort in reading more recent reassessments of the Huk thing, written by current US military analysts who, having their own viewpoint, came to many of the same conclusions I was reaching (like the fact that Willoughby was totally incompetent in his strategic and tactical assessments, blatantly in New Guinea but a long history of simple stupidity). This is what I used as the clockwork inside RED SKY, which was the rather small, compact book that emerged, and is now available at Amazon and Kindle. As someone once said about Subic Naval Base and Clark AFB, the Philippines had become America's "fellatrix". Shameful, but inarguable. Despite its brevity, I think it does much to clarify both the US and Philippine role, which is indeed an obscenity.

Several clarifications: I erred in putting Ft Bragg next to NSA when I meant Ft Meade. McMicking was the colonel left in charge of G-2 in Manila when MacArthur and his inner circle moved to Tokyo, and Prouty was on the G-2 staff when Lansdale arrived from the States. McMicking was already a very rich man, having married into the Zobel family long before Pearl Harbor, so he was part of the clique around MacArthur that included Whitney (MacArthur's attorney) and Willoughby (MacArthur's "lovable fascist"). When MacArthur put Whitney in charge of intel, instead of Willoughby, MacArthur gave Willoughby G-2. While this clique was in Tokyo, Lansdale reported initially to Col. McMicking in Manila. In Tokyo it was Whitney who drafted the Japanese constitution, while Willoughby was liberating Col. Tsuji, and Kodama, etc., and putting them to work snuffing leftists and liberals in Japan, and staging provocations in South Korea that led to reprisals by North Korea, and so forth. This MacArthur clique (including Herbert Hoover) was incredibly rich, as was McMicking and other clique members in Manila, when Santa Romana and Lansdale began recovering the troves of war loot in Luzon and they all became infinitely richer. The war loot was moved by ship from Subic and in numerous cases by plane to Hong Kong or Australia where it entered Paul Helliwell's network of banks with the help of Lansky and others, and dispersed in so many ways it became hard to trace thereafter. However, McMicking, promoted to general, and already a multimillionaire in 1945, eventually spent billions in Spain on real estate, and passed on huge sums to his heirs including his nephew, who is the partner of Howard Leach, who financed the Florida recount in 2000. What tangled webs we weave.

Thats pretty good, sort of like an inverted "old wines never die, they just ripen with old age" well maybe not, lol. I saw something that I wanted you to see, to see if you had any thoughts on it.... It has to do with Nick Arundel...... I believe the crime scene at Dealey Plaza and the voluminous amount of persons going in and out of Dallas before the assassination are the main indications there was a conspiracy. Such as the fairly big names who came to Dallas in the days and weeks before the assassination, coupled with the persons in the motorcade, and locals who have not exactly survived that event with their reputations intact. Governor George Wallace former Vice-President Richard Nixon [left Dallas early November 22, 1963; he told the FBI, in a Warren Commission document he left November, 19, 1963.] Donald Kendall, Pepsi CEO, and a strong financial backer of Nixon. actress Joan Crawford former CIA Director Allen Dulles former General Edwin Walker, [on a plane between Dallas and Louisiana] Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu [in Dallas on October 24, 1963] 112th Army Intelligence member James Powell, locked inside the TSBD, had been taking photos; one of the TSBD. Eugene Hale Brading known crime figure A photo taken moments after the assassination reveals someone identical with, or certainly attempting to create the impression that he is E Howard Hunt. Jack Lawrence [left his company car in Dealey Plaza ran to the bathroom of the Downtown Lincoln Mercury and threw up, shortly after the assassination. This was the same dealership where "Oswald" test drove a car in speeds of excess of 85 mph] Lawrence left Dallas after the assassination, with no forwarding address, the FBI does not seem to have made a serious attempt to locate him. Brothers Edward and Lawrence Meyers, and Lawrence's son Ralph The Meyers family is one area that provides a link of sorts between Jack Ruby and Richard Nixon. P.D. Scott is recorded as stating that Nixon was also in Dallas to purchase land for a new Pepsico plant from the Great Southwestern Corporation The night before the assassination. Ruby had dinner with the brothers at the Bon Vivant Room at the Cabana Hotel, he was friends with Lawrence. Lawrence's son Ralph was, a member of the Army Security Agency with a crypto-clearance. Edward was an owner of the Pepsico plant in Queens, New York Russell M Arundel was, at least in the early 1950's the Washington representative of Pepsi-Cola See page 85 Coup d'Etat In America only namebase.org listing same last name see below from http://www.oocities....rea/linksO.html I was also able to find out a little bit more about the professional life of Russell M. Arundel. Apparently, he was a Washington lobbyist for Pepsi Cola. He was also president/chairman of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. of Long Island, Inc. According to an article from Time magazine (January 12, 1953), "For 17 months, the Senate subcommittee on Privileges and Elections fitfully investigated Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joe McCarthy and Connecticut's Democratic Senator William Benton. Reasons for the investigation were 1) Benton's resolution to expel McCarthy from the Senate on the ground of unfitness, and 2) McCarthy's resolution to dispose of Benton in like manner. Last week, the subcommittee turned in its report." The article mentions an important connection between McCarthy and Arundel: "In 1947, McCarthy got Russell M. Arundel, a Washington representative for the Pepsi-Cola Co., to endorse a $20,000 note for him. That year, both Pepsi-Cola and McCarthy were urging the Federal Government to end sugar controls. Asked the subcommittee: Did McCarthy follow the 'Pepsi-Cola line' for financial gain?" Another source states that Arundel was questioned by the Senate panel in 1952: "The questioning was about a $20,000 note Arundel had endorsed for the senator in 1947. Arundel said the endorsement was a minor financial transaction for a friend." Ralph Morris, in his book The Future Catches Up: Selected Writings of Ralph M. Goldman states that McCarthy had began opposing sugar rationing in 1947. "At about this same time, McCarthy became an intimate of Walter Mack, then president of Pepsi-Cola Company, a firm with an intense interest in sugar rationing matters." McCarthy achieved the distinction of being the Senate spokesman for the soft-drink giant. "In fact, [he] came to be known, for a brief period, as 'the Pepsi-Cola Kid.' In January 1948, the Appleton State Bank loaned McCarthy $20000 against McCarthy's note (which was endorsed by Russell Arundel, Washington representative of Pepsi-Cola)." Ultimately, McCarthy and Republican Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio were successful in bringing enough pressure in Congress resulting in the end of sugar rationing. I was also able to ascertain that the Nova Scotia Bird Society (which owns a few other Tusket Islands) obtained Outer Bald Tusket Island from Russell Arundel and the Nature Conservancy of Canada on December 28, 1973. The price was one Canadian dollar. The Society then erected a sign which states: "Earle E. Arundel Breeding Bird Sanctuary Conveyed to The Nova Scotia Bird Society by Nature Conservancy of Canada. Hunting permitted in Season". According to Prof. David Currie, "The stone building is still there and as of the last survey in 1987, by Ted D'Eon, was in pretty good shape, but the wood parts were extensively rotted. There was no need to restore or maintain the building from a Bird Sanctuary point of view. Ted's grandfather was one of the mason's who worked on the building when or just before The Prince of Baldonia stayed there. One of the conditions of the ownership transfer was that the island continue to be used by specific people named in the deed for pasture land for sheep as long as those specific people lived. It also stated that there would never be interference of the tern colony that was once there." It seems that the Principality continued to exist even after Outer Bald Tusket Island was sold to the Nova Scotia Bird Society. On the Internet, I found mention of someone who worked at the studios of WAVA-AM "in a skyrise building on…N. Moore Street" in Rosslyn, VA (separated from the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. by the Potomac River). This radio station was owned by broadcasting pioneer, Arthur Windsor "Nick"/"Nicky" Arundel, who had bought the bankrupt country music radio station circa 1960/61 and turned it into the first all-news radio station in the country (WAVA-AM and WAVA-FM are currently based in Arlington, VA and they serve the Washington D.C. metropolitan area). "In 1974, I toiled daily on the building's fifth floor in a non-broadcast job, so I knew from reading the directory in the lobby that the station's penthouse quarters also housed the 'Embassy of Outer Baldonia'. One fine day, I happened to share an elevator ride with WAVA's big enchilada, Arthur W. Arundel. As I was a cocky young lad of 22, I boldly inquired, 'How are things in Outer Baldonia?.' Thirty-three years later, I can still remember Arundel's icy, silent stare as if that incident had happened yesterday." The author, after researching "Outer Baldonia" online, learned about Russell M. Arundel. This leads him to ask: "Does anybody know if the two Arundels were related?" After some additional investigation, I was able to ascertain that Arthur Arundel was indeed the son of Russell Arundel. He is a fascinating and controversial figure in his own right. A Harvard graduate, he became a decorated U.S. Marine Corps combat officer (1951-1955) in both Korea and Vietnam. He was the recipient of at least one Purple Heart. I found helpful details about his murky military/CIA career (he is listed as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon Papers), thanks to a fascinating article (Hunt Country crowd's minister of propaganda) authored by L. Wolfe, in the December 15, 1995 issue of the Executive Intelligence Review: "Nicky, a Marine paratroop officer, [was] tasked to the CIA during service in Korea and Vietnam in the early 1950s". This was achieved with the help of Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Jr. (more about this individual below). "Operating as part of the 'secret team' operations of Col. Edwin Lansdale, Nicky Arundel was taught, and practiced, the art of 'black propaganda' in 'civil affairs' operations, becoming a specialist in 'psywar ops.' He was involved, for example, in destroying the largest printing facility in what was then the northern section of Vietnam; later, he helped run a 'psywar' campaign aimed at setting up a counterinsurgency among northern tribes in Vietnam, causing their migration to the south and laying the ground for that country's partition; this, in turn, helped set the stage for the Vietnam War." Arthur Arundel also had a strong background in journalism. After he returned home, he worked in the Washington bureau of CBS and also served as a correspondent (wire service reporter) for United Press International. He also did a stint (arranged by his father and Coolidge) in the U.S. Commerce Department. But first and foremost, he was a newspaper publisher. He founded ArCom Publishing, Inc., which traces its roots to the time when Arundel purchased WAVA (the company was then known as Arundel Communications). In 1963, his business expanded from radio and television into print journalism with the purchase of the 165-year-old Loudoun Times-Mirror in Leesburg, VA. As he acquired more and more newspapers (Reston Times, the Loudoun Times-Mirror, the Fauquier Times-Democrat, Rappahannock News, etc…), he became Chairman, CEO, and Publisher of the Times Community Newspapers (ArCom Publishing remains the parent company). This suburban newspaper chain, which now includes a group of about 21 local publications in Northern Virginia, is the largest one in the region. Arthur Arundel sold WAVA and five other stations in the 1970s. He has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of Virginia Communications. The family-owned newspaper company is run today by Peter Arundel, the founder's son, successful in his own right as a career broadcast and print journalist (he became CEO in February of 2005). Peter's brother, John Arundel, is also a newsman: he became the Executive Editor and Publisher of the Alexandria Times in 2005. Wolfe's article contains some additional tidbits about Russell Arundel (including the topics of Pepsi and sweeteners) and his son: "Russell Arundel, once administrative aide to Sen. Jesse Metcalfe (R-R.L), was active in GOP circles working subversion against the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Those circles were dominated by the Morgan interests, one of the most notorious London-controlled private banking nexuses. As was the case with several picked-up operatives, the Morgans made sure that Russell Arundel had sufficient wealth and connections to be of use to them; it was they who inserted him into" their Fauquier County (he had moved to the area of Northern Virginia known as the Hunt Country in the 1930s) fox-hunting parties. Arundel "became a master of the hunt. The Arundel estate was located on Wildcat Mountain; the other side of the mountain was owned by Lawrence Morgan Hamilton, the grandson of J. P. Morgan. Sources in London and in Loudoun County, Virginia indicate that the key controller of Russell Arundel, and later the sponsor of his son, Nicky, was Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., a member of one of Boston's dirtiest Anglophile families and one of the creators of the British crown's far-flung private intelligence networks operating under 'environmental cover.' The Coolidge family were, by the middle of the last century, the leading opium traders in the United States, linked directly to the British East India Company and Jardine Matheson Company, the Crown's leading opium traders. The Coolidges parlayed this 'dope money' into control of the Bank of Boston and the United Fruit Company, both of which have been used as funding conduits and, in the case of United Fruit (now United Brands), cover for British-allied intelligence operations. The Coolidges intermarried into the Virginia 'aristocracy,' through the family of Thomas Jefferson. Coolidge, who later played an important role in promoting British-linked operative Allen Dulles's organization of American intelligence, picked up Russell Arundel in the mid-1930s, and put him into the leadership of the National Wildlife Management Institute, a position which Arundel held for most of the rest of his life. An intelligence community source in London describes the institute, which was created with funds from the Morgan-controlled du Pont interests, through sections of the arms industry (Remington Firearms), as fully integrated with British intelligence operations, dating back to the 1930s; it later functioned in parallel with Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund (WWF, now World Wide Fund for Nature), of which Coolidge was a founding member, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands' International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). (Coolidge, a mammologist, was closely associated with the British intelligence operative and biologist Julian Huxley. He was head of the IUCN and its president emeritus until his death in 1985.) Sources in Loudoun County report that Coolidge helped put Russell Arundel in touch with Pepsi Cola Company. Arundel was given the assignment of arranging, through his legislative connections, for an exemption for Pepsi to import corn syrup from the Caribbean at a time when sugar imports were prohibited. Under the direction of Pepsi chairman Wallace Groves (who in 1941 was convicted of mail fraud and sent to prison, and whose links to organized crime were later exposed), Arundel shuttled back and forth to Cuba, whose sugar and syrup production was effectively controlled by the Meyer Lansky 'Murder, Inc.' mob, which ran the unions and many of the production facilities, with overlapping connections into Coolidge's United Fruit. Russell Arundel got his fingers more than dirty in negotiating contracts for Pepsi. But he was well rewarded for his efforts, receiving in 1943 the Pepsi bottling franchise for New York. He later parlayed this into Pepcom, which held the franchise for the entire East Coast and is the source of the Arundel family fortune that provided Nicky with the seed money for his publishing empire." Arthur "inherited a considerable sum from his father." In another part of the article, Wolfe writes: "The [Arundel] family's involvement with Africa policy dates back to the 1930s, when Nicky Arundel's father, Russell, became involved with a British-linked network of intelligence specialists who established the National Wildlife Management Institute (NWMI), at the instigation of Harold Coolidge; this organization was directly linked to the International Nature Office, which was already at that time running projects nominally involved with the tracking and cataloging of various wildlife species in Africa…A London-based intelligence specialist in these matters reports that such projects were used by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as 'covers' for the placement of agents and for spying on various nationalist and other insurgencies. After the war, the NWMI played a role in helping establish the 'need' for large game preserves. The Oct.28, 1994 EIR Special Report, 'The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor,' documents how these preserves are used as bases of subversive activity, and a means to 'lock up' vast mineral reserves in Africa, under British control. In 1956, Russell Arundel, as director of NWMI, sponsored one of the first 'invasions' of Africa by American zoologists. The mission was led by Lee Tolbert, who was later to become a top consultant for the WWF, the director of the royal family-created International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and a top assistant to Russell Train at the Environmental Protection Agency. The mission was focused on the 'white rhino' and 'mountain gorilla' populations. During this period, Nicky Arundel went on several safaris to Africa on behalf of the National Zoo, including some with his father. It is not known whether he went on the 1956 mission…In 1961, Nicky Arundel was tapped by Coolidge, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, and Russell Train (reported to be a protégé of Coolidge) to found the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, now known as the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). This is an 'off line,' privatized intelligence operation which recruits and trains operatives to run the game parks. All its members can be described as highly trained Anglo-American intelligence assets. The AWF, which Arundel formerly headed, has been implicated in the genocide in Rwanda through its sponsorship of a mountain gorilla protection project in the Virunga game park on the Uganda-Rwanda border; this area, under the virtual supervision of AWF operatives, is the key transmission belt for British-backed forces which instigated the Rwandan civil war. Our London source says that the AWF and Nicky Arundel play a continuing important role in British Africa policy, through the mountain gorilla and other projects. Arundel's family foundation, as well Arundel personally, provide funding for these projects, as does the WWF and the Ohrstrom family foundations. Arundel is also reported to have influence over U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), whose Tenth District includes the Hunt Country of Loudoun and parts of Fauquier counties. Wolf has played a major role in the destabilization of Sudan, in accordance with British policy objectives. Wolf and his office have been in direct contact with British Overseas Development Minister Baroness Lynda Chalker on these and other matters pertaining to Africa policy." Outer Baldonia's sole numismatic issue is a 10 Tunar piece, dated "O.B. 1948" (which makes one wonder if Boudreau made an error in declaring, twice, that Arundel landed on Outer Bald Tusket Island in 1949). Two varieties exist: one minted in "STERLING SILVER" and one minted in ".826 FINE GOLD". I've even seen a pair of 14-karat gold earrings for sale that feature two of the gold coins! According to the seller: "My mom got them from a very elderly well to do lady along with many other pieces of jewelry. My mom still has a bracelet with I think 3 or 4 more of these coins on it." It just makes me wonder if Russell Arundel at some point had these jewelry items made as gifts for VIPs! I purchased a silver piece from a fellow collector, the Rev. Norman Winter, whom I met via eBay (he was the original bidder on the very first Zilchstadt coin I listed on that site). It is truly a well-designed, official-looking little artifact. ARUNDEL ARTHUR WINDSOR "NICK" * New Federalist 1994-10-10 (4) * Prouty,L.F. The Secret Team. 1973 (218) * Quinde,H. Affidavit. 1992-01-20 (21) * Schmidt,O. The Intelligence Files. 2005 (38) * Who's Who in America. 1984-1985 Google books Billboard - Aug 1, 1964 - Page 42 Vol. 76, No. 31 - 56 pages - Magazine - Full view ... off the air since February, will be given a new lease on life with purchase of the 5000 watter this month by Richmond attorney Braxton Valentine and communications executive Arthur W. Arundel, owner of WAVA AM-FM, Arlington, Va., ... books.google.com below the whole rundown http://en.wikipedia....ki/Nick_Arundel Wow, Robert, that's a Full Monty, and I'll need to digest it properly before replying. Just a couple of quick thoughts: Joan Crawford (Mummy, Dearest) was also on the top Pepsi board; Pepsi was heavily involved with Lansky and William Pawley who ran CAMCO in Nationalist China during WW2 for Mme. Chiang and Donovan and Lansky's attorney Paul Helliwell who set up the agency's black banks, Air America, and Southern Air Transport, and Pawley later was US ambassador to Brasil; Pawley and Lansky were intimate friends and owned most of the sugar fields in Cuba that supplied Pepsi, and involved a number of other Dealey noteworthies described at length by Russ Baker in his book about Mortimer Snerd Bush ("Family of Secrets"). I know the Hunt Country very well because of acquaintances living and working there, some of whom owned vast estates for fox hunting (many estates eventually being willed to the agency) and the agency's Warrenton Training Center on the hilltop with an antenna farm and much else. Lake Brittle is part of the agency history and of the owners of several major military/industrial megacorps. I imagine Maryland's Anne Arundel County outside DC also is connected (may be connected to your Arundels, but also to many agency activities, including home of NSA adjacent to Ft. Bragg). The Patuxent wildlife refuge is where a scientist from Ft Detrick who brought many kuru brains from the New Guinea highlands, injected kuru into animals at the refuge. The refuge was run down and some of those animals escaped into the wilderness region surrounding Chesapeake Bay, eventually spreading mutations of the disease to a large variety of wild animals all over the US and Canada, as one of the unforeseen consequences of the agency's global CBW search for exotic diseases like ebola immediately after WW2 (see Colm Kelleher's "Brain Trust"). Lansdale, Dulles, JFK, Lansky, Nixon who borrowed money from Lansky, Morgan, Mellon, Donovan, so many people networking and all tied to Dealey. Another tidbit: Singlaub's US Council for World Freedom has a major donor in Howard Leach, who financed the Florida recount in 2000 that put Mortimer Snerd in the White House; this is the Leach of the firm of Leach-McMicking, whose McMicking is the nephew of General Joe McMicking, Lansdale's boss at G-2 in Manila, who had the foresight to marry Mercedes Zobel of the richest oligarchic family in the Philippines and Spain. More later.

That photo looks like it was taken on the green directly in front of the agency's main entrance of the main building (the H-shaped main building was shaped that way because the architect's name began with an H -- Harrison of Harrison & Abramowitz) next to the separate round auditorium where they bestow the Intelligence Stars. It could not have been the old naval hospital complex the agency first moved into in Foggy Bottom, because it's greens are contoured, very well groomed, and closely surrounded by the old stone buildings, with the Potomac clearly visible if you have your back to the Department of State. Just after writing this I saw the photo with the red arrow posted just now by Karl, so he and I agree on the probable location. Plus you can see Harrison's H clearly in the aerial view.

Hi Robert ~ I wonder where French aristocrats go when they die? Especially when they die in the Great Satan !!! I remember somebody saying: "When good Americans die, they go to Paris." These days, when good Taiwanese die they go to Shanghai.

David ~ Thanks. I appreciate that very much. It always puzzled me that Pyle was portrayed as such a Casper Milquetoast, until I realized that Lansdale was playing the same game. Greene saw a lot of Lansdale as Casper in Saigon, but Greene's friends in the French SDECE were able to fill in Greene on Lansdale's extremely sinister side. In a sense this is a large part of the American self-portrait, pretending to be a democracy and mouthing all the Burma Shave maxims about goodness and charity, while massacring people all over the world. During WW2, the Japanese in the Philippines killed approximately 250,000 people. Half a century earlier, when America staged the Spanish-American War to distract its population during a serious depression, American troops fresh out from massacring Indians, killed over one million people in the Philippines. Including women and children. And now has made all the Japanese war loot vanish. Citibank came under legal pressure to release 50 million in gold bullion deposited in it by Santa Romana, the Opus Dei agent in Manila, and I've seen the state treasury documents from Albany verifying those accounts, but Citibank ducked the whole issue by moving all that bullion secretly to Cititrust in Nassau. In short, the bank stole the gold. Then recently pretended to be in danger of bankruptcy. The whole farce gives me nausea. And they try to get their hands on Assange by accusing him of terrorism and treason, while the Swedes charge him with rape when two girls who invited him into bed in their own homes claim the condom broke, so they might come down with AIDS. And the journalists keep reporting that Assange is charged with rape and sex crimes. If the girls withdrew the charges and admitted the condom broke, after inviting him to bed, where is the rape? It's the Lansdale sickness/psychosis, doublethink, and cultural gangrene.

I'm not saying Lansdale was innocent, just the opposite, but he was successful in fooling a lot of people by having Bohannen and Valeriano carry out the the actual murders. I have it direct from Bohannen's widow during a long conversation at her home in Manila that Lansdale (for instance), thought up taping two ice picks together to stab victims in the neck and make it look like a vampire did it; Bohannen then had a lot of them made and turned them over to Valeriano, whose death squads used them for mass murder. This enabled Lansdale to play a role in public where he mouthed endless evangelical opinions, which deceived a lot of people.

There is a fork in the road about Lansdale. Most people think he was playing an active villain's role. John Simkin appears to have become persuaded that Lansdale was not the nasty culprit so many people say he was, and that he had a lot of good qualities. I don't think John is playing the angel's advocate. I do think Lansdale was both things, and took a lot of time and trouble to extend and project his "good" image, while simultaneously continuing his "evil" role. My first impression of Lansdale many years ago, was that he was active in carrying out all sorts of murders and large scale atrocities. Not just making phony movies to promote Magsaysay. Gradually, I discovered that he had a number of people working under his command who did the blood and guts, allowing Lansdale to distance himself from all the gore, avoiding getting his hands dirty. While his hitmen (Bohannen in charge of planning, Valeriano in charge of the actual carnage) were carrying out the hits and massacres, Lansdale was able to sit back and discourse, over a glass of fine claret, an enlightened and very broad range of ideas that seem almost tenderhearted, humanitarian, even liberal. In the end, I concluded that Lansdale was playing a lifelong double game. Lansdale was the strategist with the crucial connections in Washington, the Pentagon and Langley, and in Manila, Saigon, etc. He dreamed up his strategies, and told Bohannen what needed to be done, and after Lansdale went off to lunch or dinner parties with the civilized folks, Bohannen sat down with Valeriano and (both being professional killers, and Valeriano a psychopath to boot), they worked out the dirty details. If anything was ghastly, there was no direct link to Lansdale, Bohannen was the intermediary, and Valeriano's teams of bloodthirsty psychos did the mass murders. I think this is why Pyle seems to be such an evangelist that some people find it hard to believe he's modeled on Lansdale; and John's take on Lansdale is almost evangelical. But let's not forget that he was an ad agency account executive as well as copy writer in San Francisco, and had a good many years to cultivate his benign image, before being posted to Manila by Donovan, where he was given Bohannen the award-winning military specialist in assassinating Japanese in New Guinea (one of the US top-guns), who then selected Valerianno as his weapon of choice. And Valerianno assembled the hit-teams. Graphic evidence of this can be found in our book RED SKY, now on Kindle, which is based on a great mass of G-2 documents, quoted extensively. So far as JFK goes, Lansdale was (figuratively) in the executive suite. He didn't pull the trigger. Always -- like Pyle -- the nice guy.

About Tsuji: I have some feelers out in Hanoi, Laos and Thailand regarding Tsuji's fate or whereabouts. Unfortunately, those who were involved in black ops in Laos in the early 60s, are either dead or aging to a point where probing them is unlikely to produce an answer. Others who are now retired, are afraid of losing their pensions. But I will see what I can learn. The station chief in Vientiene at that time kept them on a short umbilical cord. Not a nice guy. Sterling

Well, I cannot be certain what Tsuji's ultimate fate was, after stepping off the plane in Hanoi. But I can comment on his ties to the CIA after the war -- prior to and/or coinciding with his Hanoi trip. Actually I'm using CIA generically when I should simply say that Tsuji, like Kodama and many other really nasty guys, were bailed out and given jobs working for Willoughby. Or at least Willoughby was the head of that section for MacArthur -- in my mind Willoughby was simply too stupid to do anything ingenious (his record shows he was incompetent). But there were some very bright people on MacArthur's staff at that time in Tolyo like Al Haig. We describe this in some length in our book GOLD WARRIORS. I feel certain that Kodama helped the USA to provoke a North Korean attack, because Kodama and his Korean underworld cronies helped to stage several provocative acts in Korea to precipitate the Korean War, and Kodama accompanied JF Dulles on his tour of South Korea just prior to these provocations. I would imagine that Tsuji was equally employed by Willoughby, et al, in various parts of Asia. If the spooks wanted to kill Tsuji, they could have done so by blowing up his aircraft, as often was done in that epoch, or they could have had the North Vietnamese snuff him. Having effectively forgiven Tzuji and Kodama, etc., and let them write books and play politicians, I doubt if the agency sent him on a mission to Hanoi intending him to die, or be murdered. Frankly, I have not pursued it, but I will now make some inquiries of contacts I have in Hanoi, and see what they think became of Tzuji. More when I have it. Best regards, Sterling

And the horses they rode in on, like the Mellons, Hunts, Donovan -- the list is VERY long. Russ Baker's website is a good source, because he has put a lot of energy and brains into this in recent years. Currently, there's a lot of discussion about Bob Woodward's role at the WashPost/ Watergate, etc., and his long established ties to the intel community, almost making it seem like he was the only guy at the WashPost who was in bed with the agency. In fact, when I was on the WashPost staff for a few years in the 1960s, it was often discussed by staff members that the whole senior editorial management had all worked in the "same" intelligence units with Phil Graham during WW2, so it was a house full of spooks. Then, if you look farther into the past, you discover that Kay Graham's father (from whom she inherited the paper) was part of the network that set up the OSS, and before that was part of the group from Jekyll Island that created the Fed and fiat currency, and worked with Colonel House in steering Woodrow Wilson. The following is am extract from Wikipedia on Eugene Graham. Reminds me of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Born in Los Angeles, California, he was one of eight children[1] of Marc Eugene Meyer and Harriet Newmark. His parents were Jewish but he avoided identification as a Jew until later in life.[2] He grew up in San Francisco and attended college across the bay at the University of California, but he dropped out after one year and later enrolled at Yale University. He received his A.B. in 1895. After college, Meyer went to work for Lazard Freres, where his father was a partner, but quit in 1901 after four years and struck out on his own. He was a successful investor and speculator and owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He married Agnes Elizabeth Ernst, a Lutheran, in 1910; they had five children, including the future Katharine Graham and another daughter Florence Meyer (1911-1962) (Mrs. Oscar Homolka). By 1915, when he was forty, he was worth $40 million. In 1920, Meyer teamed with William H. Nichols of General Chemical to help fulfill his vision of a bigger, better chemical company. Meyer and Nichols combined five smaller chemical companies to create the Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation, which later became Allied Chemical Corp., and eventually became part of AlliedSignal, the forerunner of Honeywell’s specialty materials business. Both men have buildings named after them at Honeywell’s headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. Meyer went to Washington, D.C. during the First World War as a "dollar a year man" for Woodrow Wilson, becoming the head of the War Finance Corporation and served there long after the end of hostilities. President Calvin Coolidge named him as chairman of the Federal Farm Loan Board in 1927 and Herbert Hoover promoted him to chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in 1930. He served in that capacity from September 16, 1930 to May 10, 1933. Meyer strongly supported government relief to combat the Great Depression taking on an additional post as chief of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Herbert Hoover's unsuccessful attempt to aid companies by providing loans to businesses. Upon Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933, he resigned his government posts. Months later in 1933 he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, the paper having been ruined by its spendthrift socialite owner, Ned McLean. Over the next twenty years, Meyer spent millions of dollars of his own money to keep the money-losing paper in business, while focusing on improving its quality; by the 1950s, it was finally consistently profitable and was increasingly recognized for good reporting and important editorials. As publisher, Meyer occasionally contributed to stories: his friendship with the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, led to a Washington Post scoop on reporting of Edward VIII's relationship with Wallis Simpson. After World War II, Harry Truman named Meyer, then 70 years old, to be the first head of the World Bank in June 1946. Meyer appointed his son-in-law, Philip Graham, as publisher. However, after only six months with the World Bank, Meyer returned to the Post, serving as Chairman of the Washington Post Company until his death in Washington in 1959. Sterling Seagrave

Gene ~ I was on staff at the Washington Post in 1963, and a legman for Larry Stern on a number of investigations. Lansdale was living out near the agency, but I had contact with him only twice, both in connection with the Philippines. I did some articles on Jack Ruby, but most of what I know about Lansdale I picked up over many years since then. I stayed out of the JFK reporting during that period because I was working on a book about the PRC. Sterling

Sterling Seagrave has some interesting things to say about Lansdale on this thread: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13678&st=0. (Hi there Sterling, we have not heard from you in a while -- hope all is well) I submit that, as a general rule, the only reliable way to identify someone is by their FACIAL FEATURES (In extreme cases you might need dental records). Accordingly, I am not at all persuaded by Prouty's ID of a man who can be seen only from behind. But the funny thing is that I and others DO SEE A LANSDALE LOOKALIKE in one tramp photo, and he is not the guy that Prouty claims to identify. Please take at a look at the tramp photo linked below, and note the man seen in profile just to the left of "Frenchy" (his head merges into Frenchy's). To me this man DOES BEAR a remarkable resemblance to Lansdale, down to the COLOR AND LENGTH OF HIS HAIR (Grey/White, crew-cut)). In my mind he is definitely not the man with JET-BLACK hair that Prouty refers to. Note that the tall (middle) tramp seems to be making eye contact with the Lansdale lookalike in this photo, and that eye-contact has a conspiratorial appearance, in the eyes of this innocent country boy. This profile view looks identical to Lansdale as seen in a 1965 photo in Vietnam, Photo No. 18 in Cecil B. Currey's Lansdale biography. By 1965, at least, photos show that Lansdale could no longer be described as dark-haired. I regret I am unable to post the 1965 photo from Currey's book,(Edward Lansdale, the Unquiet American Cecil B. Currey) nor find it in Google images. If you, dear reader, can post that photo you will win a special prize (details TBA). Here is the tramp photo which shows the man I contend is the Lansdale lookalike in Dealey Plaza. http://ken_ashford.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/03/21/tramps.png I would also not be surprised if the well-dressed, well-groomed man with the conventioneers ID who is now walking behind the police is the SAME MAN seen earlier from behind, the man Prouty claims is Lansdale.

About Lansdale -- but not about Dealey Paza -- I wanted to draw your attention to a new book largely about Lansdale that Peggy and I have recently published at Amazon.com using BookSurge/CreateSpace. Title: RED SKY IN THE MORNING. This is set in Manila and Shanghai 1945-1952, when Lansdale first took up a post at G-2 in Manila. It is based on a huge pile of documents recently declassified that reveal the behavior of Lansdale, his legman Bohannen, and his top-gun Valeriano. Essentially, Lansdale was eager to climb the ladder, and had already made himself known in Washington by taking all the credit for breaking General Yamaxxxxa's chauffeur who showed them 12 huge caches of buried war loot that Truman decided must be recovered secretly. This made Lansdale a pet of the Dulles Brothers inner circle of the Georgetown Set. But it was a hard act to follow. So Lansdale decided to transform the rural reform movement called the Huks into a Communist Rebellion trying to violently overthrow the "democratically elected" government in Manila, with money and weapons provided secretly by the Kremlin. For this Lansdale needed some patsies, which he discovered in the form of two young American ex-GIs who were in Manila cleaning up surplus US military ships for sale to Chinese businessmen in Shanghai. Their third partner in this enterprise, which was entirely legal, was a White Russian emigre named Vladimir Chirskov, as young and wet behind the ears as the two ex-GIs. All Chirskov wanted was to get his wife and son out of Shanghai before Mao took over China, and he thought the Philippines would be the ideal solution. Lansdale and Bohannen chose to demonize this trio of guys in their twenties as "Soviet secret agents". They turned the Philippine police, Constabulary, and G-2 loose on the trio and built a huge dossier of ambiguities that eventually led to their arrest and imprisonment in Bilibad Prison, from which they escaped. Lansdale, meanwhile, set Valariano's "death squads" loose on rural farmers, making a free-fire zone of the whole agricultural plain of Luzon where they were free to identify any villager as a "Communist Huk guerrilla". Eventually the innocent Chirskov was captured, tortured and thrown out of a helicopter over the South China Sea. In a recent War College study of Lansdale, his fraudulent massacre of the Huks was given the CIA label, "slow extermination". This was Lansdale's first use of death squads and paid assassins, so it may have some value to theh discussion of Dealey Plaza. Sterling Seagrave

Sterling, please take at a look at another tramp photo linked below, taken shortly after the one just posted, and note the man seen in profile just to the left of "Frenchy". To me this man bears a remarkable resemblance to Lansdale. He MAY be the same man seen from behind in the earlier photo, but maybe not. I have always thought that this is the man Prouty referred to as being Lansdale, but I never spoke to Prouty. Anyway, note that the tall (middle) tramp seems to be making eye contact with the Lansdale lookalike in this photo. This profile view looks identical to Lansdale as seen in profile in a 1965 photo in Vietnam, Photo No. 18 in Cecil B. Currey's Lansdale biography. http://ken_ashford.typepad.com/photos/unca...3/21/tramps.png What say you? It's possible, I grant, but I can't be sure. There seems to be some disfigurement to the skin on this guy's neck, what I think of as "turkey neck" often caused by ingrown hairs. I'd have to study it under an eyepiece, and compare it to various Lansdale photos. I never feel at ease with Dealey photos or videos because so many of them were doctored or messed with. I do trust my instincts, however, and everything I've learned tells me Lansdale was heavily involved in Dallas, whatever the particulars. Bill Kelly's new post on Valeriano shows how much Lansdale's closest hitmen were to the Cuban and Central American ops. If Lansdale was sleeping in Ft. Worth the night before the assassination, and Valeriano was connected to Dealey, that reinforces. It's too easy for people to announce that Lansdale had nothing to do with it. If he thinks like a rat, smells like a rat, and was in all the rat places... why all the denial? Sterling Many thanks to Sterling for sharing his keen and insightful knowledge. Would James or someone have a photo of Napoleon Valeriano? While it's easy to view Dealey Plaza as a Lansdale operation, simply based on his track record and style, other than him being in the neighborhood at the time, and possibly photographed at DP sometime after the assassination, there's not much hard evidence at the scene that links him to the crime. I guess that's to be expected if he was putting the operation together, killing JFK, framing Oswald, blaming Castro, and compromise every possible investigation. There are the shells found by the sniper's nest which were traced to a batch sold to USMC in 1954, when they could have been used in covert ops in Guatemala, Iran or elsewhere. Then there's Gabe Kaplan, whose college mate was president of Swarthmore and head of CIA's Asia Foundation. Ruth Paine's papers are archived at Swarthmore, and Michael Paine, after leaving Harvard also attended Swarthmore, a small Quaker school on the Main Line in Philadelphia. Joe Smith says that Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where Paul Linebarger taught, was a practically run as a CIA adjunct, so maybe they used Swarthmore in a similar way. More on Paul Linebarger, who introduced Joe Smith to Lansdale. http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01...aley-plaza.html BK Bill ~ There's a photo of Valeriano in The Marcos Dynasty. I'll scan it and upload it soon as possible. Sterling

Al ~ This aspect of Lansdale's antics in the Philippines is covered in great detail in my book The Marcos Dynasty, including his fake war movies, his promos of Magsaysay, and all the boondoggles with elections. There hasn't been a fair election in the Philippines since 1945, or for that matter since the US arrived with a boatload of "democracy" and hijacked the Filipino independence movement. Sterling

Bill ~ There's a lot about Valeriano's personal background in The Marcos Dynasty. And he reappears in The Yamato Dynasty because of a young American woman (daughter of a US diplomat in Japan) who told how astonished and appalled she was by the abrupt appearance at her home of Lansdale and a group of hitmen from Manila (including Valeriano) who made no attempt to hide their weapons or to disguise their mission to snuff some people in Tokyo. Sterling

Sterling, please take at a look at another tramp photo linked below, taken shortly after the one just posted, and note the man seen in profile just to the left of "Frenchy". To me this man bears a remarkable resemblance to Lansdale. He MAY be the same man seen from behind in the earlier photo, but maybe not. I have always thought that this is the man Prouty referred to as being Lansdale, but I never spoke to Prouty. Anyway, note that the tall (middle) tramp seems to be making eye contact with the Lansdale lookalike in this photo. This profile view looks identical to Lansdale as seen in profile in a 1965 photo in Vietnam, Photo No. 18 in Cecil B. Currey's Lansdale biography. http://ken_ashford.typepad.com/photos/unca...3/21/tramps.png What say you? It's possible, I grant, but I can't be sure. There seems to be some disfigurement to the skin on this guy's neck, what I think of as "turkey neck" often caused by ingrown hairs. I'd have to study it under an eyepiece, and compare it to various Lansdale photos. I never feel at ease with Dealey photos or videos because so many of them were doctored or messed with. I do trust my instincts, however, and everything I've learned tells me Lansdale was heavily involved in Dallas, whatever the particulars. Bill Kelly's new post on Valeriano shows how much Lansdale's closest hitmen were to the Cuban and Central American ops. If Lansdale was sleeping in Ft. Worth the night before the assassination, and Valeriano was connected to Dealey, that reinforces. It's too easy for people to announce that Lansdale had nothing to do with it. If he thinks like a rat, smells like a rat, and was in all the rat places... why all the denial? Sterling

Antti ~ That sure looks like Lansdale's skull and hairline. He had a very pronounced facial and skull structure. I don't know if he always wore glasses, because I did not meet him until just before the Bay of Pigs. (I had been in Cuba during 1958-1959, and had a good Cuban source who was a medical doctor on one of the invasion ships, who gave me his diary of the disaster, which I translated for the Post.) Lansdale did wear glasses then, with a "bridle" or whatever those straps are called to keep them around your neck, and I could swear that the man in this photo Peter posted has such a bridle dangling behind his ears toward his collar. I'm sure that Fletcher Prouty was able to judge based on this view alone. I have other reasons for taking Fletcher seriously. He was a remarkably good source for me when I was at The Washington Post (1962-1965), on a wide range of investigations not having anything to do with Lansdale. And he continued to be an excellent source for my book The Marcos Dynasty, since Prouty flew VIPs back and forth between Washington and Manila, was an insider on the cocktail circuit in Georgetown, and spent so many years as liaison between the DIA and CIA. Sterling

I disagree. There is no evidence that Lansdale was involved in the assassination of JFK. Nor did he have a motive. JFK was influenced by Lansdale’s views on Vietnam. That is why he would have pulled out the troops if he had won the 1964 election. Lansdale was not sacked by JFK (although he did not intervene in the matter). It was Maxwell Taylor who arranged for Lansdale to have “early retirement”. The two men clashed about what should be done in Vietnam. Taylor took the view, as did virtually all the military top brass, that the war could be won by military power. Taylor and the Joint Chief of Staffs told JFK in the summer of 1963 that 40,000 US troops could clean up the Viet Cong threat in Vietnam and another 120,000 would be sufficient to cope with any possible North Vietnamese or Chinese intervention. His advice on Cuba was that the CIA should work closely with exiles, particularly those with middle-class professions, who had opposed Batista and had then become disillusioned with Castro because of his betrayal of the democratic process. Lansdale was also opposed to the Bay of Pigs operation because he knew that it would not trigger a popular uprising against Castro. Although JFK was highly suspicious of the CIA, as a result of the quality of Lansdale’s advice, he selected him to become project leader of Operation Mongoose. Lansdale had spent years studying the way Mao had taken power in China. He often quoted Mao of telling his guerrillas: “Buy and sell fairly. Return everything borrowed. Indemnify everything damaged. Do not bathe in view of women. Do not rob personal belongings of captives.” The purpose of such rules, according to Mao, was to create a good relationship between the army and its people. This was a strategy that had been adopted by the NLF. Lansdale believed that the US Army should adopt a similar approach. As Cecil B. Currey, the author of “Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American” pointed out: “Lansdale was a dedicated anticommunist, conservative in his thoughts. Many people of like persuasion were neither as willing to study their enemy nor as open to adopting communist ideas to use a countervailing force. If for no other reason, the fact makes Lansdale stand out in bold relief to the majority of fellow military men who struggled on behalf of America in those intense years of the cold war.” He argued against the overthrow of Diem. He told Robert McNamara that: “There’s a constitution in place… Please don’t destroy that when you’re trying to change the government. Remember there’s a vice president (Nguyen Ngoc Tho) who’s been elected and is now holding office. If anything happens to the president, he should replace him. Try to keep something sustained.” It was these views that got him removed from office. The pressure to remove Lansdale came from General Curtis LeMay and General Victor Krulak and other senior members of the military. As a result it was decided to abolish his post as assistant to the secretary of defence. He was not too upset because for some time McNamara had not been listening to Lansdale’s advice. His approach to foreign policy at once appealed to Kennedy and horrified the Joint Chiefs of Staff and politicians such as Dean Rusk. It is true that Lansdale was strongly anti-communist, but he was not a right-winger. In fact, although he was a conservative on some issues, he was liberal on others. Unlike most of the military leaders in Vietnam, he was not a racist. He had a deep respect for the Vietnamese culture and realised that you could not win by imposing American rule on the country. His second wife, Patrocinio Yapcinco, was from the Philippines. Out of office he continued to argue against LBJ’s decision to try and use military power to win the Vietnam War. When General William Westmoreland argued that: “We’re going to out-guerrilla the guerrilla and out-ambush the ambush… because we’re smarter, we have greater mobility and fire-power, we have more endurance and more to fight for… And we’ve got more guts.” Lansdale replied: “All actions in the war should be devised to attract and then make firm the allegiance of the people.” He added “we label our fight as helping the Vietnamese maintain their freedom” but when “we bomb their villages, with horrendous collateral damage in terms of both civilian property and lives… it might well provoke a man of good will to ask, just what freedom of what Vietnamese are we helping to maintain?” Lansdale quoted Robert Taber (The War of the Flea): “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert. Where these means cannot, for whatever reason, be used, the war is lost.” Lansdale thought this was the situation in Vietnam and wrote to a friend that if the solution was to “kill every last person in the enemy ranks” then he was “not only morally opposed” to this strategy but knew it was “humanly impossible”. Lansdale added “No idea can be bombed or beaten to death. Military action alone is never enough.” He pointed out that since 1945 the Viet Minh had been willing to fight against the strength of both France and the United States in order to ensure success of their own. “Without a better idea, rebels will eventually win, for ideas are defeated only by better ideas.” Lansdale was anti-communist because he really believed in democracy. Lansdale had been arguing since 1956 that the best way of dealing with the Viet Cong was to introduce free elections that included the rights of Chams, Khmers, Montagnards and other minorities to participate in voting. Lansdale said that he went into Vietnam as Tom Paine would have done. He was found of quoting Paine as saying: “Where liberty dwells not, there is my country.” He also distanced himself from the Freedom Studies Center of the Institute for American Strategy when he discovered it was being run by the John Birch Society. He told a friend: “I refused to have anything more to do with it… That isn’t what our country is all about.” Lansdale considered himself a “conservative moderate” who was tolerant of all minorities. Lansdale continued to advocate a non-military solution to Vietnam and in 1965, under orders from Lyndon Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, the new US ambassador in Saigon, put Lansdale in charge of the “pacification program” in the country. As Newsweek reported: “Lansdale is expected to push hard for a greater effort on the political and economic fronts of the war, while opposing the recent trend bombing and the burning of villages.” One of those who served under him in this job was Daniel Ellsberg. The two men remained friends until the death of Lansdale. Ellsberg liked Lansdale because of his commitment to democracy. Ellsberg also agreed with Lansdale that the pacification program should be run by the Vietnamese. He argued that unless it was a Vietnam project it would never work. Lansdale knew that there was a deep xenophobia among Vietnamese. However, as he pointed out, he believed “Lyndon Johnson would have been just as xenophobic if Canadians or British or the French moved in force into the United States and took charge of his dreams for a great Society, told him what to do, and spread out by thousands throughout the nation to see that it got done.” In February 1966 Lansdale was removed from his position in control of the pacification program. However, instead of giving the job to a Vietnamese, William Porter, was given the post. Lansdale was now appointed as a senior liaison officer, with no specific responsibilities. Unlike most Americans in Vietnam, Lansdale believed it was essential for Vietnamese leaders to claim credit for any changes and reforms. His attitude aroused antagonism in the hearts of many within the U.S. bureaucracy who didn’t like the idea of allowing others to receive credit for successful programs – although they did not object to blaming Vietnamese leaders for projects that failed. Most importantly, Lansdale thought that the military should be careful to avoid causing civilian casualties. As his biographer, Cecil Currey pointed out: “Lansdale was primarily concerned about the welfare of people. Such a stance made him anathema to those more concerned about search and destroy missions, agent orange, free fire zones, harassing and interdicting fires, and body counts.” According to Lansdale “we lost the war at the Tet offensive”. The reason for this was that after this defeat American commanders lost the ability to discriminate between friend and foe. All Vietnamese were now “gooks”. Lansdale complained that commanders resorted more and more on artillery barrages that killed thousands of civilians. He told a friend that: “I don’t believe this is a government that can win the hearts and minds of the people.” Lansdale resigned and returned to the United States in June 1968. Lansdale argued that the current strategy in Vietnam was not working. “I’m afraid that we’re being taught some savage lessons about a type of warfare that the next generation or so of Americans will have to face up to on other continents as on this one.” This is why he was very critical of US involvement in El Salvador in the 1980s and if he had been alive today, would have opposed the invasion of Iraq and the sending of troops into Afghanistan. John: Thank you for that perspective on Lansdale; he was a unique warrior. But he was still CIA, and his affiliations cause me to be suspicious. Perhaps I'm influenced by Prouty's allegations. I think it was Dean Rusk who mistrusted Lansdale, and influenced his unsuccessful ambassador quest. My instincts still don't allow me to paint him as a friend or ally of JFK. And his specialty (in PsyOps) was the elaborate drama and scripted misdirection, such as we see occur in Dealey Plaza. So, he remains on my short list... Gene I talked with Fletch several times about Lansdale. He shared an office with Lansdale for many years in Washington. I have no doubt that his identification of Lansdale in the tramp photo is accurate. If Lansdale was in Dealey Plaza, maybe Professor Simkin will be kind enough to explain this coincidence to us. Jack I think it's very useful that John Simkin posted his take on Lansdale as a "good guy" because that gives some balance to an otherwise reptilian personna. Later today I will post some material on Lansdale's activities in Luzon 1945-1954 viz-a-viz the Huks, which is informed by a recent Pentagon analysis of what Lansdale, Bohannan, and Valeriano actually did (as opposed to what they professed to be doing). This is one of the best things about Grahame Greene's portrayal of Pyle in The Quiet American, by characterizing him as a sort of evangelical missionary who did evil by doing good. I had the same experience with Ted Shackley who projected the image of an extraordinary good guy while doing unbelievably vile things. (If anybody tops Lansdale, it's Shackley, the White Vampire.) I had childhood friends in Asia who as adults worked in Black Ops for Shackley in Vientiane and Saigon, and who totally believed in the evangelical image. But this is the crux of the problem. Americans see themselves as evangelicals, when they are often actually political pederasts sodding the rest of the world, like priests driving the fear of god into choir-boys. One wishes they would stop inflicting their dubious blessings on the rest of humanity. The price is far too high. /// As to Fletch and Dealey Plaza, Fletch knew the real Lansdale from 1945 on to the bitter end, and if Fletch says Lansdale was in Dealey Plaza, that's uniquely persuasive to me. Dallas was like a fraternity picnic for so may people, we may never unscramble who all were there. I knew Lansdale fairly well, and spent a lot of time with Bohannan, a professional killer who executed Lansdale's instructions in Manila and Saigon, but I never actually met Valeriano (the psychopathic killer) face to face. It was Valeriano's team of hitmen who snuffed a number of prominent leftists and other dissenters in Japan, and quite a few in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and -- of course -- the Philippines. These were the guys who tortured Laurel at Malacanang Palace, while trying to force Laurel to give up the codes and original docs he had as a partner of "Santy" (Santa Romana) in the recovery and distribution of the war loot recovered by Santy and Lansdale in Luzon. They tore out Laurel's fingernails, cut off his genitals, ripped out his left eyeball, and (when Laurel finally admitted that he had made his wife his beneficiary) they dragged him half dead before a priest to marry him to a Marcos family member so they could attempt to claim she was his heir. This was all done to oblige the US Treasury and the Fed to pay off on billions of dollars in bonds and notes. I have personally examined those documents in the originals, and have on CD a forensic study of their validity carried out by the University of Catalonia in Spain. If these were good guys, and evangelicals, I'd really like to have somebody explain to me how I can distinguish them from real "bad guys". The only distinction I can discover is that real "bad guys" do not pretend to be "good guys". A footnote: Lansdale was personally obsessed -- as only an old advertising man can be obsessed -- with umbrellas and the Eye of Ra (the right eye of Ra is the "evil eye" although Lansdale often used the left eye which is the benign or feminine). It was Lansdale who set up the channel known as "The Umbrella Organization" to move the war loot all over the world; so it says a lot for Fletch to identify Lansdale as the bum who then raised and opened an umbrella at Dealey Plaza. Sterling Jack and Peter ~ Here's my promised bird's-eye view of Lansdale and the Huks, based on new material including a Pentagon study of newly declassified docs. For lots more detail on Lansdale's disinformation campaign, see The Marcos Dynasty. Today many people think the Cold War began with the Berlin Airlift or the Korean War. In Asia it actually began in the Philippines early in 1946 when an authentic land-reform movement of poor farmers known as the Huks was malignantly re-labeled a deadly Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the Manila government. By pouring gasoline on the rural fire, wildly exaggerating its size and potential, claiming it was being funded and supplied by Moscow, the Huk protest movement was made to seem like a raging civil war, requiring urgent attention and millions of dollars in military aid to Manila. The man who went out of his way to provoke this, and later polished his skills in Vietnam, Laos, and Latin America, was the former advertising agency copywriter and account executive Edward Lansdale. He had spent World War II in San Francisco writing propaganda for the OSS, in the process wildly inflaming his imagination, then was sent to Manila in 1945 to keep him on the payroll under the escutcheon of U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence, G-2. Lansdale did not dream up the Cold War, but he was an agent of those who did. His corporate clients this time were a powerful group of high-flying Wall Street bankers and lawyers, Washington bureaucrats and journalists, in what was called The Georgetown Set -- in particular a small group within the Set known as the Dulles brothers’ coven, a clandestine group of OSS officers, field agents and spooks, and their colleagues with secretive portfolios in various branches of the Roosevelt administration inherited by President Truman. The war with Japan had twice altered political relationships throughout Asia. In China, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Indochina, Burma, and The Philippines, resistance groups fighting the Japanese became America’s allies. When the war ended, the same guerrilla forces initially became America’s enemies, without exception. In most cases, after the war the guerrillas continued to fight for independence from returning colonial powers, British, French, or Dutch. During Japan’s occupation of The Philippines, there were guerrilla bands on different islands, but the most effective fighters were the Huks of central Luzon. Some 50,000 men and women, mostly tenant farmers in the rich agricultural lands of Pampanga and neighboring provinces. They took to the hills and harassed the Japanese effectively, often aided by American soldiers who escaped during the Bataan Death March. Most Huks had no education or political ideology, and were driven to rebellion by the tyranny of big landowners. But among their leaders were a few radical student activists, who entered politics after the war to continue campaigning for land reform. The big landowners fought back by calling them Marxist terrorists. With things going badly in China for the regime of Chiang Kai-shek, the prospect of communist victories electrified the White House and State Department. In Japan, postwar land reform had already been achieved, but there was still time to clean up some war criminals and put them back in power; strikes, labor unions, and leftist politicians could be suppressed. The situation in the Philippines was more ambiguous. In February 1946, the U.S. Congress debated the issue of Huk veteran rights. It had long been established that any Filipino who served in the U.S. military, including those who fought as guerrillas against the Japanese, were to be considered as American soldiers. In a move that shocked Filipinos, Congress initially denied the Huks their rights and benefits under the GI Bill, breaking a promise made to them by General MacArthur. They were also denied back-pay, hospitalization, mustering-out pay, and burial benefits. It was the first legislative sign that America had now entered into a Cold War mentality, not against a particular nation but against an alien state of mind, colored red, subgroup “terrorist”. Philippine independence remained on schedule for July 4, 1946. The election for positions in the new government was held in April. A handsome and popular young Huk leader named Luis Taruc easily won a seat in the Filipino congress, but he and other Huk candidates were then rejected on unspecific allegations of ‘voting irregularities’. Shunned by the ruling elite, the Huks retreated into the rainforest and mountains they knew so well, and resumed their insurrection. The newly elected President Manuel Roxas, MacArthur’s designated candidate, declared a “mailed fist” policy toward the Huks. The mailed fist was Lansdale at U.S. Army G-2 in Manila. His solution to the Huk ‘problem’ was a campaign of terror. As psychological warfare, he had village walls painted with the ‘all-seeing-eye’ of the ancient Egyptian sun god, called the Eye-of-Ra, or ‘evil eye’, then had villagers march in single file past a hooded figure whose nod was a death sentence -- a tactic borrowed from the Japanese kempeitai. With an unlimited budget from Washington, Lansdale created death squads called Nenita Units, or ‘skull squads’, whose mission was to find and kill Huks wherever they could be found, including men, women, and children -- a policy the CIA later called ‘gradual extermination’. When armed Huks proved strangely difficult to find, all effort was devoted to wiping out villages ‘assumed’ to be associated somehow with the Huks. Hundreds of villages across central Luzon were mortared, shelled, torched with flame-throwers. American napalm was used to destroy crops and villages. Those farmers who escaped the flames were rounded up and shot. This brutality was worse than that of the Japanese occupation. Stripped of disinformation, this was to exterminate all Filipino peasant farmers who would not submit to exploitation by the oligarchic families favored by Washington. (Here it is worth bearing in mind some interesting figures: During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, approximately 250,000 Filipinos are believed to have died; during the American conquest of the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War, when most of the U.S. Army were in the Philippines, the Filipino casualty figure was approximately 1-million.) As Lansdale had no combat experience, he sought out American veterans with unusual experience killing Japanese. Foremost among them was Lieutenant Charles ‘Boh’ Bohannan, who had made a name for himself killing Japanese in New Guinea. To head all the Nenita death squads Lansdale and Bohannan chose a sleekly handsome Filipino with a bottomless appetite for killing. Napoleon Valeriano was a graduate of the Philippine Military Academy who had fought in Bataan, then escaped from a Japanese prison camp to be picked up by a U.S. submarine and taken to Australia. There he became a protege of MacArthur and his head of G-2, General Charles Willoughby, with whom Valeriano shared a pathological anticommunism. Valeriano quickly rose to colonel’s rank in the U.S. Army, and after Japan’s surrender went after the men he blamed for his father’s death during the war, whom he believed to be members of ‘the Manila Politburo’. It was the start of his new career dedicated to anticommunist death squads and ‘skull-squadrons’ in The Philippines, Indochina, and Central America, all under the guidance of Lansdale and Bohannan. In Luzon, they applied these terror tactics to everyone they could find in large tracts of land considered ‘free kill zones’ in which death squads killed all villagers, farmers, loggers, fishermen, rural laborers, or members of isolated tribes of aborigines. In most cases, no effort whatever was made to identify them as Huks before they were killed. The ‘skull-squadrons’ rarely took prisoners, usually just stopping anybody they encountered and shooting them in the back of the head. Whether or not they were Huks did not matter. Soon, not a day passed when bodies were not seen floating in the rivers, or strewn by roadsides. Valeriano’s ‘Nenita’ death-squads were roaring around Central Luzon with skull-and-crossbones flags flying from their jeeps and scout cars, looking for victims of all ages. Their cruelty and lust for murder were psychotic. A Filipino senator wrote to President Roxas demanding the removal of Valeriano from Pampanga, “for having committed many atrocities, not only against dissident elements but against law-abiding people.” The Nenita wasted no time with legal procedures or even interrogation. In return, the Huks, who had learned to fight under brutal Japanese occupation, treated captured Military Police with equal viciousness. Bohannan and Valeriano countered by then demanding mutilation of bodies. They introduced a new weapon in their terror campaign: two ice-picks taped together and used to stab villagers in the throat, leaving what looked like vampire bite-marks in a horror movie. Ghoulish stories of vampires were spread across the countryside, of which these mutilation killings were evidence. The reason Lansdale had such a deep purse and a completely free hand to say and do whatever he wished, was an event that happened in total secrecy, making him the darling of what would become the new CIA. Immediately after his first arrival in Manila in September 1945, Lansdale heard the buzz in G-2 about a secret operation at Bilibad Prison where an agent named Santa Romana was torturing a Japanese officer. The prisoner, Major Kojima Kashii, had driven General Yamaxxxxa around in a command car during the last months of the war. It was widely believed that he knew the locations of secret vaults where the Japanese had hidden tons of treasure taken as war loot from across Asia. In previous months, big hoards of Nazi gold and art treasures had been found in Europe. The Japanese hoard could be even bigger, as Japan had started looting many years earlier when it invaded Korea in 1895. If Santa Romana could force the major to show them the vaults, America could recover vast sums of gold, platinum, barrels of currency taken from banks, and priceless art works including solid gold Buddha statues. Even better, The Philippines were still an American colony, so there would be no need to share the treasure with the allies, as had happened in Europe. Excited, Lansdale put himself in charge of the torture. Eventually he persuaded Santa Romana to try bribery, and soon afterward Major Kojima showed them the entrances to twelve vaults scattered across northern Luzon. Inside they found solid gold ingots stacked six feet tall in row after row across chambers the size of tennis courts. Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief MacArthur, then to Washington where he briefed the War Department and President Truman’s chief security adviser, Navy Commander Clark Clifford. Truman decided the vaults in The Philippines must be recovered secretly to avoid a global financial crisis. While Lansdale was in Washington, Clifford introduced him to the Dulles coven. Among its members were policy-makers such as Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, David Bruce, Walt Rostow, and ‘Chip’ Bohlen -- pointmen for the most powerful families in America. The hard core of the Dulles coven were a small group of very secretive and conspiratorial men who would head the new CIA: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Tom Braden, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, Tracy Barnes, Frank Wisner, and Desmond FitzGerald. Because Allen Dulles knew little about the Orient, Wisner and FitzGerald would be in charge of black operations in Asia. This group adopted Lansdale, and for years afterward whenever he was in Washington, he was a favorite guest at the weekly drinking parties in the Allen Dulles household. There he became especially close to Wisner and FitzGerald. As a man obsessed by secret societies and covert operations, Lansdale had fantasies of cabals ruling Europe and the United States from the shadows. His introduction to the Dulles coven, and its extreme secrecy, affirmed his most eccentric imaginings. These men were the eye at the top of the pyramid, whose responsibility was to maintain surveillance and control of everyone beneath them. Lansdale knew that in the 18th century, Freemasons were famously involved in revolutionary movements in Europe. Some of America’s Founding Fathers had been Masons, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Benedict Arnold, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. The pervasive influence of Freemasonry was manifest for all to see in the cryptic symbols on U.S. Currency, the Great Seal, and the designs and inscriptions of monuments and public buildings in the capital. From this it was only a small jump to Lansdale’s fetish with the Wedjat, or Eye-of-Ra, the magisterial eye of the ruling Establishment, and its self-proclaimed illuminati. Flattered and inspired by all the attention from these men in the inner circle of power, Lansdale returned to Manila with a mission, and a free hand to do whatever he could to block the spread of communism in Asia, starting with the Huks. According to a Pentagon study of documents recently declassified, Lansdale told Bohannan explicitly: “I have the charges, you invent the facts!” There were careers to be boosted, great sums to be misappropriated by the U.S. Congress for the new anti-communist crusade. As Lansdale pointed out many times, this was best done by stirring the pot, and scaring everyone. “If there isn’t fire,” he told Bohannan, “we’ll light one.” If the Huks were not sufficiently ‘marxist’ or sufficiently ‘terrorist’, Lansdale and Bohannan would and did stage all the acts of terror needed, using special units of the Philippine Army pretending to be Huks, while Lansdale’s movie cameras filmed the attacks. (See THE MARCOS DYNASTY for the bizarre details.) Lansdale launched a public relations spectacle modeled on the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC had got its start in the mid-1930s, investigating Nazi and Soviet propaganda inside the United States. After the Nazi defeat in 1945, HUAC focussed exclusively on Communists and ‘fellow travelers’. One committee member famously asked a witness whether Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had been a member of the Communist Party. Senator Joe McCarthy went on a rampage of accusations that destroyed the careers of government officials, diplomats, scientists, and more than 300 artists—film directors, radio commentators, actors and screenwriters. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, left the U.S. for good. In most cases, only allegations were necessary to doom the person named. Lansdale persuaded cooperative Filipino congressmen to create the House Un-Filipino Activities Committee of the Philippine Congress. Its public hearings started in October 1948, with Immigration Commissioner Fabre testifying that “Communistic tendencies among aliens here will spread unless the government takes [action].” Fabre said four White Russian emigres seeking refuge in the Philippines were ordered to be deported because of the danger that they might be smuggling weapons and money tok the Huks. No evidence whatever was provided to support the notion. The skipper of a Russian ship had refused to take them aboard. Shanghai authorities also refused to accept them. Commissioner Fabre got lurid press coverage when he declared that one of the four imprisoned White Russians had lost his temper and “threatened to come back here as a two-star general”. Fabre could not avoid acting as Lansdale’s mouthpiece because Bohannan had learned that Fabre was operating his own Immigration Department racket, extorting big payments from people who overstayed their visas. Violent events then changed the rules of habeas corpus. On April 28, 1949, the widow of prewar President Manuel Quezon was on her way by car through the Sierra Madre mountains to inaugurate the Quezon Memorial Hospital in her home town of Baler. She was accompanied by her eldest daughter, and son-in-law. Mrs. Quezon was hugely popular as a ‘queen-mother and patron saint’, but Lansdale considered her a dangerous populist. According to press reports, her small motorcade was “ambushed by 210 Huks under the leadership of Commander Stalin” -- a name dreamed up by Lansdale. Mrs. Quezon, her daughter and son-in-law, all died. The outpouring of grief over their death, blamed on the Huks, made it easy for President Quirino to shut down civil rights in October 1950 by declaring martial law, suspending habeas corpus throughout the country. TIME magazine quoted a Philippine Congressman saying that suspension of habeas corpus was “less to ferret out Communists than to intimidate Quirino critics.” This outburst of hypocrisy -- punishing the weak for the crimes of the strong -- was a particular sorepoint to the popular Dr. Victor Buencamino, head of the School of Veterinary Science and onetime advisor to President Quezon. His family were among Pampanga’s biggest landowners, with thousands of acres of sugar cane, but he was appalled by what his fellow oligarchs had done to Filipinos: “It was the task of my generation, under the leadership of Quezon, to seek the independence of this country. Then came the war, and something snapped. It was patriotic to steal from the enemy; to sabotage him. The only trouble was that long after the war was over, the stealing orgy went on, not the least among those in positions of authority. The desire to possess material things became a pervasive obsession. The prewar brand of integrity seems to have been destroyed. Vote buying became more rampant. Terrorism reigned, often with the acquiescence of the men at the top. Quezon once said he’d rather have a government run like hell by the Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans. It is a tragedy that a government run like hell came so soon.” For Lansdale, Bohannan, and Valeriano, it was only a test-run for Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and all of Central America. ⌘