John Simkin

As James Richards has pointed out, Colby’s death might be linked to the Nugan Hand Bank Scandal. However, this scandal is also linked to Ted Shackley’s Secret Team and therefore, possibly, the assassination of JFK. Let me explain. In 1971, Edwin Wilson left the CIA to run shipping companies for a secret Navy intelligence organization called Task Force 157. This included World Marine Incorporated in Washington. Wilson also ran this company for his own benefit. In 1973 he earned a $500,000 fee by delivering a spy ship to Iran under the cover of World Marine. In 1973 Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer, and Michael Hand, a former CIA contract operative, established the Nugan Hand Bank. Another key figure in this venture was Bernie Houghton, who was closely connected to Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines. Nugan ran operations in Sydney whereas Hand established a branch in Hong Kong. This enabled Australian depositors to have access to a money-laundering facility for illegal transfers of Australian money to Hong Kong. According to Alfred W. McCoy, the "Hand-Houghton partnership led the bank's international division into new fields - drug finance, arms trading, and support work for CIA covert operations." Hand told friends "it was his ambition that Nugan Hand became banker for the CIA." In 1974 the Nugan-Hand Bank got involved in helping the CIA to take part in covert arms deals with contacts within Angola. It was at this time that Edwin Wilson became involved with the bank. Two CIA agents based in Indonesia, James Hawes and Robert Moore, called on Wilson at his World Marine offices to discuss "an African arms deal". Later, Bernie Houghton arrived from Sydney to place an order for 10 million rounds of ammunition and 3,000 weapons including machine guns. The following year Houghton asked Wilson to arrange for World Marine to purchase a high-technology spy ship. This ship was then sold to Iran. By 1976 the Nugan-Hand Bank appeared to have become a CIA-fronted company. This is reflected in the type of people recruited to hold senior positions in the bank. This included Admiral Earl Yates, retired chief strategist of the U.S. Pacific Command, as president. Other appointments included William Colby, retired director of the CIA, General Leroy J. Manor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Pacific Command, General Edwin F. Black, former commander of U.S. forces in Thailand, Walter McDonald, retired CIA deputy director for economic research and Dale Holmgren, former chairman of the CIA's Civil Air Transport. The investigative journalist, Jonathan Kwitny, became convinced that the Nugan-Hand Bank had replaced the Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau, as the CIA's covert banker. Former CIA agent, Kevin Mulcahy later told the National Times newspaper "about the Agency's use of Nugan Hand for shifting money for various covert operations around the globe." Castle Bank had itself been closed down as a result of an IRS investigation. This came to an end as a result of pressure being applied on the IRS. According to the Wall Street Journal, “pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency… caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax evasion case of all time.” In February 1976, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the new head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, discovered that Edwin Wilson was involved in some dubious undercover business deals. A few months later Wilson was asked to leave the ONI. Wilson continued to run the CIA-fronted companies he had established. The largest of these was Consultants International and over the next few years amassed a fortune of over $20 million. This enabled him to buy a 2,338-acre farm in Northern Virginia, where he often entertained his close friends, Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines. Much of his money was made in the arms trade. His most important customer was Moammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya. Wilson claimed that it was Ted Shackley of the CIA who first suggested he should go to Libya. Wilson got contracts to sell Libya army uniforms, ammunition, explosive timers and 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives. In 1976 Wilson recruited Raphael Quintero to kill a Libyan dissident in Egypt. Quintero selected two brothers, Rafael and Raoul Villaverde, to carry out the killing. However, the killing was later called off. One of the men Wilson employed was former CIA officer Kevin Mulcahy. He became concerned about Wilson's illegal activities and reported them to the CIA. However, Ted Shackley, Deputy Director of Operations, was initially able to block any internal investigation of Wilson. However, in April, 1977, The Washington Post, published an article on Wilson's activities stating that he may be getting support from "current CIA employees". Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s new director of the CIA, ordered an investigation and discovered that both Shackley and Clines had close relationships with Wilson. Turner demoted both men. In 1978 Clines left the CIA. He now joined with Raphael Quintero and Ricardo Chavez (another former CIA operative) to establish API Distributors. According to David Corn (Blond Ghost) Edwin Wilson provided Clines with "half a million dollars to get his business empire going". In 1979 Clines established International Research and Trade Limited in Bermuda. Later that year he joined forces with Hussein Salem in providing U.S. military hardware to Egypt. After leaving the CIA in September, 1979, Ted Shackley formed his own company, Research Associates International, which specialized in providing intelligence to business. He was also given consulting work with API Distributors, the company established by Clines, Quintero, and Chavez. According to Alfred W. McCoy (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade): "Throughout 1979 the Wilson network and the Nugan Hand Bank began to build a close commercial alliance in the netherworld of national security subcontracting". Shackley and Clines were also drawn into a relationship with the Nugan Hand Bank. Michael Hand wrote to Shackley on 27th November, 1979, suggesting a business meeting. Hand's latter also referred to Bernie Houghton, who had worked for Shackley in Vietnam. Michael Hand probably wanted to talk about Edwin Wilson. In 1979 a Washington grand jury began gathering incriminating evidence about his illegal arms sales. To avoid arrest he moved to London. In the winter of 1979, Wilson had a meeting with Bernie Houghton and Thomas Clines in Switzerland in an attempt to help him out of his difficulties. This included a non-delivery of 5,000 M16 automatic rifles to Libya. The three men discussed ways of using the Nugan Hand Bank to float a $22 million loan to finance the delivery. Hand was obviously concerned that if Wilson was arrested he might begin talking about his dealings with the Nugan Hand Bank. Michael Hand also had talks with William Colby, the former director of the CIA. It is not known what was discussed at this meeting but Colby submitted a bill to Nugan Hand Bank for $45,684 for his legal advice. On 27th January, 1980 Frank Nugan was found dead in his car. Bernie Houghton was in Switzerland at the time and he immediately rang his branch office in Saudi Arabia and ordered the staff to leave the country. Houghton also visited Edwin Wilson's office in Switzerland and left a briefcase with bank documents for safekeeping. Soon afterwards, a witness saw Thomas Clines going through the briefcase at Wilson's office and remove papers that referred to him and General Richard Secord. Two days after Nugan died, Michael Hand held a meeting of Nugan Hand Bank directors. He warned them that unless they did as they were told they could "finish up with concrete shoes" and would be "liable to find their wives being delivered to them in pieces". According to one witness, Thomas G. Clines helped Bernie Houghton escape from Australia. Michael Hand also left the country accompanied by James O. Spencer, a man who served with Ted Shackley in Laos. The two men travelled to America via Fiji and Vancouver. Hand then disappeared and has never been seen again. The Australian authorities were forced to investigate the bank. They discovered that Ricardo Chavez, the former CIA operative who was co-owner of API Distributors with Thomas Clines and Raphael Quintero, was attempting to take control of the bank. The Corporate Affairs Commission of New South Wales came to the conclusion that Chavez was working on behalf of Clines, Quintero and Wilson.

Richard Bissell does not mention Phillips in his autobiography, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (1996). However, as head of Directorate for Plans he would have got to know Phillips during the Bay of Pigs operation. Phillips in charge of Radio Swan at the time (broadcasts being made on a small island in the Caribbean calling for the Cuban Army to revolt). http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbissell.htm

Part 2 During the First World War saw the emergence of journalists like, John Reed, Dorothy Day, Louise Bryant, Randolph Bourne, Crystal Eastman, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alexander Berkman, Waldo Frank, Michael Gold, Brand Whitlock, Theodore Dreiser, Emma Goldman and Floyd Dell. Most of these worked for The Masses. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTmasses.htm In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young, Boardman Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp that appeared in The Masses had violated the Espionage Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The Masses to cease publication. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as his attorney general. Palmer, who had in his youth been seen as a progressive, was now an extreme right-winger. Soon after taking office, a government list of 62 people believed to hold "dangerous, destructive and anarchistic sentiments" was leaked to the press. This list included the names of journalists such as Oswald Garrison Villard. It was also revealled that these people had been under government surveillance for many years. Palmer recruited John Edgar Hoover as his special assistant and together they used the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) to launch a campaign against those on the left. Palmer and Hoover claimed that Communist agents from Russia were planning to overthrow the American government. On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, over 10,000 people were arrested. Palmer and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed revolution but 248 people were deported to Russia. This included journalists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAredscare.htm The "Red Scare" made it more difficult for investigative journalists. Anyone who asked awkward questions of the government were described as "communists". Two of the most important crusading journalists now concentrated on writing novels: Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. Others like Max Eastman sold out and joined the right-wing backlash. The most important investigative journalists in the 1930s were Charles Edward Russell, Lincoln Steffens, George Schuyler, Drew Pearson, Heywood Broun, Edgar Snow and Ray Stannard Baker. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjournalists.htm

When information about the Iran-Contra scandal first emerged in 1986, George H. W. Bush was in serious trouble. The fact that it happened could not be denied. The issue then became very similar to Watergate: “What did he know, and when did he know it.” Reagan’s story was that he was kept in the dark about the whole event. The American public went along with this story. Some commentators believe this was psychological. Democracy would have been completely undermined if it had been confirmed that two presidents in a short period of time had been involved in illegal activities and had lied about it. Bush was another matter. He was only the vice president and it would not be traumatic for the country to see him impeached. For example, remember the response when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign? Bush was also more likely candidate than Regan to have come up with this idea. Bush had been a former director of the CIA, an organization that had been heavily involved in the scandal. Questions were asked about whether Bush was the man who had organized the Iran-Contra deal. If so, he would have had to have worked very closely with the CIA. Journalists therefore investigated Bush’s relationship with the CIA. They discovered that throughout 1980 he had been having regular meetings with Ted Shackley. A former senior CIA officer, John Murray, suggested that Shackley had some sort of control over Bush. He suspected it was something to do with illegal covert activities that had been carried out when Bush was director of the CIA. (pages 317-318, David Corn, Blind Ghost) Shackley also had a deep hatred for Jimmy Carter. He told friends that if Ford defeated Carter in 1976, he would be appointed as director of the CIA. Instead of that, Carter won and blocked him from further promotion and he was forced to retire from the service in 1979. Journalist discovered that Shackley and Bush continued to have a close relationship after he left the agency in 1979. They met on a regular basis during Bush’s attempts to become the Republican presidential candidate. (His wife, Hazel Shackley, even worked for Bush during this period). In March, 1980, a CIA asset, Michael Ledeen, wrote an article suggesting that Stansfield Turner had been mismanaging the CIA and that if Bush won in November, Shackley would become the new head of the agency (New York Magazine, 3rd March, 1980). In August, 1980, Reagan selected Bush as his running-mate. Shackley’s meetings with Bush now became more frequent. In an interview with David Corn, Chi Chi Quintero told him that during the campaign, Bush was meeting Shackley “every week” (page 358, David Corn, Blind Ghost). According to Barbara Honegger, a researcher and policy analyst with the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated. On 22nd September, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. The Iranian government was now in desperate need of spare parts and equipment for its armed forces. Carter now proposed that the US would be willing to hand over supplies in return for the hostages. The CIA leaked this information to Reagan/Bush. Shackley now suggested a strategy that would make it impossible to do a deal. One way was to leak the story to the press. On 17th October, The Washington Post reported rumours of a “secret deal that would see the hostages released in exchange for the American made military spare parts Iran needs to continue its fight against Iraq”. These stories continued to be published throughout the rest of the campaign. One Washington Post report quoted French officials as being shocked by news that Carter was willing to be blackmailed by the Iranians into “providing spare parts for American weapons”. A couple of days before the election Barry Goldwater was reported as saying that he had information that “two air force C-5 transports were being loaded with spare parts for Iran”. This of course was not true. This publicity had made it impossible for Carter to do a deal. Reagan on the other hand, had promised the Iranian government that he would arrange for them to get all the arms they needed in exchange for the hostages. According to Mansur Rafizadeh, the former U.S. station chief of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, CIA agents had persuaded Khomeini not to release the American hostages until Reagan was sworn in. In fact, they were released twenty minutes after his inaugural address. The actions of Reagan and the CIA spent at least an extra 76 days of imprisonment. One of these hostages, Cynthia Dwyer, was kept back until the Iranian negotiators got further assurances on the deal. The arms the Iranians had demanded were delivered via Israel. By the end of 1982 all Regan’s promises to Iran had been made. With the deal completed, Iran was free to resort to acts of terrorism against the United States. In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists blew up 241 marines in the CIA Middle-East headquarters. The Iranians also once again began taking American hostages in exchange for arms shipments. On 16th March, 1984, William Francis Buckley, a diplomat attached to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was kidnapped by the Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite group with strong links to the Khomeini regime. Buckley was tortured and it was soon discovered that he was the CIA station chief in Beirut. In October, 1980, Shackley joined the company owned by Albert Hakim (he was paid $5,000 a month as a part-time “risk analyst”). It seems that Hakim was keen to use Shackley’s contacts to make money out of the Iran-Iraq War that had started the previous month. This just happens to be the same time that William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign are having meetings with the Iranians in order to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Is it also a coincidence that later Hakim joined forces with Richard Secord and Thomas Clines (Shackley’s former deputy in the CIA) to provide Iran with the weapons as a result of Reagan winning the 1980 presidential election? Just before the election Michael Ledeen wrote an article claiming that Billy Carter, the President’s brother, had visited Libya in 1979 and accepted from the Qaddafi government a $50,000 payment and a $220,000 loan related to an oil deal (New Republic, 1st November, 1980). It was later revealed that at this time Shackley and Ledeen had become business partners. The story also appears to have come from one of Shackley’s old contacts, Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI, the military intelligence service of Italy. It is also at this time that Ledeen arranges for $20,000 to be placed in Shackley’s bank account in Bermuda (page 359, David Corn, Blind Ghost) It was clear that if Bush was going to survive he had to try to disguise his relationship with Shackley. In fact, to really protect himself, he had to make sure that Shackley was not identified as one of the main organizers of the Iran-Contra deal. Shackley was horrified when he discovered that Buckley had been captured. Buckley was a member of Shackley’s Secret Team that had been involved with Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Raphael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, in the “assassination” program. Buckley had also worked closely with William Casey (now the director of the CIA) in the secret negotiations with the Iranians in 1980. Buckley had a lot to tell the Iranians. He eventually signed a 400 page statement detailing his activities in the CIA. He was also videotaped making this confession. Casey asked Shackley for help in obtaining Buckley’s freedom. Shackley had good reason to get Buckley out of Iranian hands. However, he was unhappy about not being rewarded for his help getting Reagan elected in 1980. He had expected to be appointed director of the CIA. That job instead went to Casey, the key figure in the “arms for hostages” negotiations. How was Shackley to be rewarded? What we know is that just three weeks after Buckley’s disappearance, President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive 138. This directive was drafted by Oliver North and outlined plans on how to get the American hostages released from Iran and to “neutralize” terrorist threats from countries such as Nicaragua. This new secret counterterrorist task force was to be headed by Shackley’s old friend, General Richard Secord. This was the basis of the Iran-Contra deal. Reagan could not afford to replace Casey with Shackley as director of the CIA. However, there were other ways of rewarding Shackley for his covert actions on behalf of Bush in Iran. Talks had already started about exchanging American hostages for arms. On 30th August, 1985, Israel shipped 100 TOW missiles to Iran. On 14th September they received another 408 missiles from Israel. The Israelis made a profit of $3 million on the deal. Why should this money go to the Israelis? It would be a better idea to give this business to Shackley and his mates. In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua. It had already been decided to use this money to finance the selling of arms to Iran. Some of the profits could then be used to provide money and arms to the Contras and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The following month, Shackley traveled to Hamburg where he met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division at the Atlantic Hotel. Also at the meeting on 22nd November was Manuchehr Ghorbanifar. According to the report of this meeting that Shackley sent to the CIA, Ghorbanifar had “fantastic” contacts with Iran. At the meeting Shackley told Hashemi and Ghorbanifar that the United States was willing to discuss arms shipments in exchange for the four Americans kidnapped in Lebanon. What Shackley did not put in his CIA report was that there were two other men at this meeting at the Atlantic Hotel. They were Oliver North and Leslie Aspin, a British arms dealer. The problem with the proposed deal was that William Buckley was already dead (he had died of a heart-attack while being tortured). The date is not known but it was sometime between June and October 1985. The Aspin arms deal with Iran never took place. Instead, Shackley and Secord began organizing these arms deals. Shackley recruited some of the former members of his CIA Secret Team to help him with these arm deals. This included Thomas G. Clines, Raphael Quintero, Ricardo Chavez and Edwin Wilson of API Distributors. Also involved was Carl Jenkins and Gene Wheaton of National Air. The plan was to use National Air to transport these weapons. For some reason, Wheaton and Jenkins fell out with Shackley. In May 1986 Wheaton told William Casey, about what he knew about this illegal operation. Of course Casey already knew what was going on and refused to take any action. Wheaton now took his story to Daniel Sheehan. He also contacted Newt Royce and Mike Acoca, two journalists based in Washington. The first article on this scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 27th July, 1986. The Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, was now asked about if it is "true that foreign money, kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign covert operations." Weinberger denied all knowledge of the matter. On 5th October, 1986, a Sandinista patrol in Nicaragua shot down a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras. Eugene Hasenfus, the only one wearing a parachute, survived the crash (two other Americans, Buz Sawyer and William Cooper died when the plane hit the ground). Hasenfus told his captors that the CIA was behind the operation. He also provided information on two Cuban-Americans running the operation in El Savador. This resulted in journalists being able to identify Raphael Quintero and Felix Rodriguez as the two Cuban-Americans mentioned by Hasenfus. (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, 214-223). Shackley was able to keep his name out of the scandal and actually won damages from Daniel Sheehan. (See David Corn, Blond Ghost, pages 380-401, for a full account of this story). However, there were others who knew the truth about what had been going on. This included William Casey who conveniently died on 6th May, 1986. As did Frank Nurgan in Australia and Steven Carr in California. And would this story have ever have come out if it was not for Eugene Hasenfus insisting that he wore a parachute? Both the House and Senate set up select committees to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. At first Shackley was seen as a prime suspect. He was a colleague and business partner to the main operators. He had been closely linked to Edwin Wilson (the main reason why Stansfield Turner had brought his career in the CIA to an end). Also, along with Secord, Clines and Quintero, Shackley had been involved in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal (Alfred McCord, The Politics of Heroin: pages 461-478 and Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 103-104). Bush was also identified as someone who must have known about the Iran-Contra deal. There was documentary evidence that Bush attended the meeting on 6th August, 1985, when National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane outlined the deal to trade U.S. arms for American hostages held by the Iranians. Bush also attended the meeting on 7th January, 1986, where George Shultz and Casper Weinberger expressed their opposition to the deal signed the previous day by Reagan to sell TOW missiles in order to win the release of the American hostages. When asked how he did not know about the Iran deal, Bush claimed: “I may have been out of the room at the time” (page 14, Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President). There was also documentary evidence that Bush attended a meeting with Amiram Nir, Israel’s advisor on terrorism at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 29th July, 1986. Also at the meeting was Bush’s aide, Craig Fuller. He kept notes of the meeting. He reported that Nir told Bush that he had been active throughout the past year “to gain the release of the hostages, and that a decision still had to be made whether the arms desired by the Iranians would be delivered in separate shipments or for each hostage as they are released.” Bush and Reagan did what they could to stop this document being sent to the John Tower investigation. Bush’s first defence was that he could not remember the meeting at King David Hotel. Later, he admitted he did remember it but did not understand what Nir was saying. Amazingly, the Tower Commission believed him. In a PBS Frontline documentary, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a convicted financier for the Meddellin drug cartel, talked about Felix Rodriguez’s role in the CIA involvement in the drug trade: “If Felix had come to me and said I’m reporting to… Oliver North, I might have been more sceptical. I didn’t know who Oliver North was and I didn’t know his background. But if you have a CIA, or what you consider to be a CIA-man, coming to you saying, ‘I want to fight the war, we’re out of funds, can you help us out? I’m reporting directly to Bush on it,’ I mean it’s very real, very believable, have you have a CIA guy reporting to his old boss.” According to one report, the first telephone call that Eugene Hasenfus made after his plane was shot down was to Bush’s staff (The Progressive, May, 1987). Then there was the handwritten note from November from George Bush to Oliver North that thanked him for his “dedication and tireless work with the hostage thing with Central America”. When asked about this note, Bush said “he didn’t recall why he sent it”. As Joel Bainerman pointed: “Why can a doctor be sued for malpractice of his profession but a national leader can just say he forgot, and no further investigation is required” (page 22, The Crimes of a President). One person whose name appeared on several documents concerning the Iran-Contra affair was Donald Gregg, Bush’s National Security Adviser. Gregg had also been the CIA liaison to the Otis Pike committee. He was a man who Bush believed could keep secrets. In 1985, Gregg sent Felix Rodriguez (a member of Shackley’s Secret Team) to El Salvador to aid the Contra re-supply effort. General Paul Gorman, the head of U.S. military forces in Central America, wrote a memo to the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador. In it he said: “”Rodriquez is operating as a private citizen but his acquaintanceship to the VP (Bush) is real enough, going back to the latter days of DCI (Director of the CIA)” (The Progressive, March, 1989). The problem for Bush is that too many people knew about his relationship with Felix Rodriquez (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, page 224). Bush was eventually forced to admit that along with Gregg he had met with Felix Rodriguez three times. However, he argued that he had not discussed Nicaragua with him (CBS 60 Minutes, March, 1987). He also defended Gregg’s decision to deny these meetings with Rodriguez. According to Bush, Gregg had not lied, he merely “forgot” about these meetings. At the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, headed by John Kerry, Richard Brenneke, a CIA operative, claimed that Donald Gregg was the Washington contact for a complicated arms/drugs deal that was part of the Iran-Contra operation. This story was leaked to Newsweek magazine. Bush responded to the story by claiming that it was Kerry who had leaked these “slanderous allegations” to the magazine. Bush added that “this guy whom they are quoting is the guy who is trying to save his own neck” (The Washington Post, 17th May, 1988). This is indeed ridiculous because Brenneke had not been charged with any offence. Bush’s story eventually became that Gregg was working on his own initiative and that he was unaware of his role in the Iran-Contra affair. The links between Bush and Shackley failed to go away. The role of Felix Rodriguez was particularly embarrassing as it provided another association with Shackley. The same was true of Chi Chi Quintero, Thomas Clines and Luis Posada. All four men had worked for Shackley since the early 1960s. They had also been active covert operators when Shackley was taking orders from George Bush during the period when he had been director of the CIA. (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 121-122, 181-83) It was reported in the Miami Herald that two men, one an arms dealer and the other a security consultant, had been working for Dr. Mario Castejon, a politician from Guatemala. They told the reporters that Shackley was used as a channel to the Agency regarding the Contra-Iran deals (The Miami Herald, 26th March, 1987). Shackley denied the story. Congressional investigators did not believe him and sent him a subpoena requesting all documents he had related to various companies and individuals. It was during this period that evidence emerged that Shackley had met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division, and Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, at the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, on 22nd November, 1985. Shackley had no option to admit to this meeting. Cameron Holmes, the lead investigator, was convinced that Shackley was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. As he explained when he was interviewed by David Corn: “How could Shackley be the one person in this mob unaware of what was going on? Why was he so insistent he had not picked up a single whiff of the Contra operation or the Iran initiative? There was no crime in knowing. Shackley proclaimed his ignorance too much.” (page 390, David Corn, Blind Ghost). Holmes was shocked when special counsel Lawrence Walsh decided not to pursue Shackley. He was not even called as a witness. Walsh did not even take Shackley’s deposition until after Congress had finished its hearings on the affair. However, Thomas Clines told David Corn in 1992 that in 1985 he was purchasing arms for the Contras in Lisbon when he had a call from Richard Secord. He told him that Shackley had suggested that he knew a better arms dealer in Lisbon than the one Clines was using (page 391, David Corn, Blind Ghost). This confirms that Shackley played a role in the Iran-Contra affair. As did Bush. I suspect that it was a leading role but they knew that as long as they stuck together, they would survive. The only possible problem was that their underlings would give evidence against them if they were brought to trial. Thanks to Lawrence Walsh and the George Bush pardons, this never happened.

I wasn't aware of this part of the story. Is there evidence that Shackley told Bush what was up? My understanding was that it was Robert MacFarlane who sold out Carter, much as it was Henry Kissinger who sold out Johnson in 68. When information about the Iran-Contra scandal first emerged in 1986, both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were in serious trouble. The fact that it happened could not be denied. The issue then became very similar to Watergate: “What did he know, and when did he know it.” Reagan’s story was that he was kept in the dark about the whole event. The American public went along with this story. Some commentators believe this was psychological. Democracy would have been completely undermined if it had been confirmed that two presidents in a short period of time had been involved in illegal activities and had lied about it. Bush was another matter. He was only the vice president and it would not be traumatic for the country to see him impeached. For example, remember the response when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign? Bush was also more likely candidate than Regan to have come up with this idea. Bush had been a former director of the CIA, an organization that had been heavily involved in the scandal. Questions were asked about whether Bush was the man who had organized the Iran-Contra deal. If so, he would have had to have worked very closely with the CIA. Journalists therefore investigated Bush’s relationship with the CIA. They discovered that throughout 1980 he had been having regular meetings with Ted Shackley. A former senior CIA officer, John Murray, suggested that Shackley had some sort of control over Bush. He suspected it was something to do with illegal covert activities that had been carried out when Bush was director of the CIA. (pages 317-318, David Corn, Blind Ghost) Shackley also had a deep hatred for Jimmy Carter. He told friends that if Ford defeated Carter in 1976, he would be appointed as director of the CIA. Instead of that, Carter won and blocked him from further promotion and he was forced to retire from the service in 1979. Journalist discovered that Shackley and Bush continued to have a close relationship after he left the agency in 1979. They met on a regular basis during Bush’s attempts to become the Republican presidential candidate. (His wife, Hazel Shackley, even worked for Bush during this period). In March, 1980, a CIA asset, Michael Ledeen, wrote an article suggesting that Stansfield Turner had been mismanaging the CIA and that if Bush won in November, Shackley would become the new head of the agency (New York Magazine, 3rd March, 1980). In August, 1980, Reagan selected Bush as his running-mate. Shackley’s meetings with Bush now became more frequent. In an interview with David Corn, Chi Chi Quintero told him that during the campaign, Bush was meeting Shackley “every week” (page 358, David Corn, Blind Ghost). In October, 1980, Shackley joined the company owned by Albert Hakim (he was paid $5,000 a month as a part-time “risk analyst”). It seems that Hakim was keen to use Shackley’s contacts to make money out of the Iran-Iraq War that had started the previous month. This just happens to be the same time that William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign are having meetings with the Iranians in order to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Is it also a coincidence that later Hakim joined forces with Richard Secord and Thomas Clines (Shackley’s former deputy in the CIA) to provide Iran with the weapons as a result of Reagan winning the 1980 presidential election? Just before the election Michael Ledeen wrote an article claiming that Billy Carter, the President’s brother, had visited Libya in 1979 and accepted from the Qaddafi government a $50,000 payment and a $220,000 loan related to an oil deal (New Republic, 1st November, 1980). It was later revealed that at this time Shackley and Ledeen had become business partners. The story also appears to have come from one of Shackley’s old contacts, Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI, the military intelligence service of Italy. It is also at this time that Ledeen arranges for $20,000 to be placed in Shackley’s bank account in Bermuda (page 359, David Corn, Blind Ghost) It was clear that if Bush was going to survive he had to try to disguise his relationship with Shackley. In fact, to really protect himself, he had to make sure that Shackley was not identified as one of the main organizers of the Iran-Contra deal. Both the House and Senate set up select committees to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. At first Shackley was seen as a prime suspect. He was a colleague and business partner to the main operators. He had been closely linked to Edwin Wilson (the main reason why Stansfield Turner had brought his career in the CIA to an end). Also, along with Secord, Clines and Quintero, Shackley had been involved in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal (Alfred McCord, The Politics of Heroin: pages 461-478 and Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 103-104). Bush was also identified as someone who must have known about the Iran-Contra deal. There was documentary evidence that Bush attended the meeting on 6th August, 1985, when National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane outlined the deal to trade U.S. arms for American hostages held by the Iranians. Bush also attended the meeting on 7th January, 1986, where George Shultz and Casper Weinberger expressed their opposition to the deal signed the previous day by Reagan to sell TOW missiles in order to win the release of the American hostages. When asked how he did not know about the Iran deal, Bush claimed: “I may have been out of the room at the time” (page 14, Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President). There was also documentary evidence that Bush attended a meeting with Amiram Nir, Israel’s advisor on terrorism at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 29th July, 1986. Also at the meeting was Bush’s aide, Craig Fuller. He kept notes of the meeting. He reported that Nir told Bush that he had been active throughout the past year “to gain the release of the hostages, and that a decision still had to be made whether the arms desired by the Iranians would be delivered in separate shipments or for each hostage as they are released.” Bush and Reagan did what they could to stop this document being sent to the John Tower investigation. Bush’s first defence was that he could not remember the meeting at King David Hotel. Later, he admitted he did remember it but did not understand what Nir was saying. Amazingly, the Tower Commission believed him. In a PBS Frontline documentary, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a convicted financier for the Meddellin drug cartel, talked about Felix Rodriguez’s role in the CIA involvement in the drug trade: “If Felix had come to me and said I’m reporting to… Oliver North, I might have been more sceptical. I didn’t know who Oliver North was and I didn’t know his background. But if you have a CIA, or what you consider to be a CIA-man, coming to you saying, ‘I want to fight the war, we’re out of funds, can you help us out? I’m reporting directly to Bush on it,’ I mean it’s very real, very believable, have you have a CIA guy reporting to his old boss.” According to one report, the first telephone call that Eugene Hasenfus made after his plane was shot down was to Bush’s staff (The Progressive, May, 1987). Then there was the handwritten note from November from George Bush to Oliver North that thanked him for his “dedication and tireless work with the hostage thing with Central America”. When asked about this note, Bush said “he didn’t recall why he sent it”. As Joel Bainerman pointed: “Why can a doctor be sued for malpractice of his profession but a national leader can just say he forgot, and no further investigation is required” (page 22, The Crimes of a President). One person whose name appeared on several documents concerning the Iran-Contra affair was Donald Gregg, Bush’s National Security Adviser. Gregg had also been the CIA liaison to the Otis Pike committee. He was a man who Bush believed could keep secrets. In 1985, Gregg sent Felix Rodriguez (a member of Shackley’s Secret Team) to El Salvador to aid the Contra re-supply effort. General Paul Gorman, the head of U.S. military forces in Central America, wrote a memo to the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador. In it he said: “”Rodriquez is operating as a private citizen but his acquaintanceship to the VP (Bush) is real enough, going back to the latter days of DCI (Director of the CIA)” (The Progressive, March, 1989). The problem for Bush is that too many people knew about his relationship with Felix Rodriquez (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, page 224). Bush was eventually forced to admit that along with Gregg he had met with Felix Rodriguez three times. However, he argued that he had not discussed Nicaragua with him (CBS 60 Minutes, March, 1987). He also defended Gregg’s decision to deny these meetings with Rodriguez. According to Bush, Gregg had not lied, he merely “forgot” about these meetings. At the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, headed by John Kerry, Richard Brenneke, a CIA operative, claimed that Donald Gregg was the Washington contact for a complicated arms/drugs deal that was part of the Iran-Contra operation. This story was leaked to Newsweek magazine. Bush responded to the story by claiming that it was Kerry who had leaked these “slanderous allegations” to the magazine. Bush added that “this guy whom they are quoting is the guy who is trying to save his own neck” (The Washington Post, 17th May, 1988). This is indeed ridiculous because Brenneke had not been charged with any offence. Bush’s story eventually became that Gregg was working on his own initiative and that he was unaware of his role in the Iran-Contra affair. The links between Bush and Shackley failed to go away. The role of Felix Rodriguez was particularly embarrassing as it provided another association with Shackley. The same was true of Chi Chi Quintero, Thomas Clines and Luis Posada. All four men had worked for Shackley since the early 1960s. They had also been active covert operators when Shackley was taking orders from George Bush during the period when he had been director of the CIA. (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 121-122, 181-83) It was reported in the Miami Herald that two men, one an arms dealer and the other a security consultant, had been working for Dr. Mario Castejon, a politician from Guatemala. They told the reporters that Shackley was used as a channel to the Agency regarding the Contra-Iran deals (The Miami Herald, 26th March, 1987). Shackley denied the story. Congressional investigators did not believe him and sent him a subpoena requesting all documents he had related to various companies and individuals. It was during this period that evidence emerged that Shackley had met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division, and Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, at the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, on 22nd November, 1985. Shackley had no option to admit to this meeting. Cameron Holmes, the lead investigator, was convinced that Shackley was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. As he explained when he was interviewed by David Corn: “How could Shackley be the one person in this mob unaware of what was going on? Why was he so insistent he had not picked up a single whiff of the Contra operation or the Iran initiative? There was no crime in knowing. Shackley proclaimed his ignorance too much.” (page 390, David Corn, Blind Ghost). Holmes was shocked when special counsel Lawrence Walsh decided not to pursue Shackley. He was not even called as a witness. Walsh did not even take Shackley’s deposition until after Congress had finished its hearings on the affair. However, Thomas Clines told David Corn in 1992 that in 1985 he was purchasing arms for the Contras in Lisbon when he had a call from Richard Secord. He told him that Shackley had suggested that he knew a better arms dealer in Lisbon than the one Clines was using (page 391, David Corn, Blind Ghost). This confirms that Shackley played a role in the Iran-Contra affair. As did Bush. I suspect that it was a leading role but they knew that as long as they stuck together, they would survive. The only possible problem was that their underlings would give evidence against them if they were brought to trial. Thanks to Lawrence Walsh and the George Bush pardons, this never happened.

I wasn't aware of this part of the story. Is there evidence that Shackley told Bush what was up? My understanding was that it was Robert MacFarlane who sold out Carter, much as it was Henry Kissinger who sold out Johnson in 68. When information about the Iran-Contra scandal first emerged in 1986, both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were in serious trouble. The fact that it happened could not be denied. The issue then became very similar to Watergate: “What did he know, and when did he know it.” Reagan’s story was that he was kept in the dark about the whole event. The American public went along with this story. Some commentators believe this was psychological. Democracy would have been completely undermined if it had been confirmed that two presidents in a short period of time had been involved in illegal activities and had lied about it. Bush was another matter. He was only the vice president and it would not be traumatic for the country to see him impeached. For example, remember the response when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign? Bush was also more likely candidate than Regan to have come up with this idea. Bush had been a former director of the CIA, an organization that had been heavily involved in the scandal. Questions were asked about whether Bush was the man who had organized the Iran-Contra deal. If so, he would have had to have worked very closely with the CIA. Journalists therefore investigated Bush’s relationship with the CIA. They discovered that throughout 1980 he had been having regular meetings with Ted Shackley. A former senior CIA officer, John Murray, suggested that Shackley had some sort of control over Bush. He suspected it was something to do with illegal covert activities that had been carried out when Bush was director of the CIA. (pages 317-318, David Corn, Blind Ghost) Shackley also had a deep hatred for Jimmy Carter. He told friends that if Ford defeated Carter in 1976, he would be appointed as director of the CIA. Instead of that, Carter won and blocked him from further promotion and he was forced to retire from the service in 1979. Journalist discovered that Shackley and Bush continued to have a close relationship after he left the agency in 1979. They met on a regular basis during Bush’s attempts to become the Republican presidential candidate. (His wife, Hazel Shackley, even worked for Bush during this period). In March, 1980, a CIA asset, Michael Ledeen, wrote an article suggesting that Stansfield Turner had been mismanaging the CIA and that if Bush won in November, Shackley would become the new head of the agency (New York Magazine, 3rd March, 1980). In August, 1980, Reagan selected Bush as his running-mate. Shackley’s meetings with Bush now became more frequent. In an interview with David Corn, Chi Chi Quintero told him that during the campaign, Bush was meeting Shackley “every week” (page 358, David Corn, Blind Ghost). In October, 1980, Shackley joined the company owned by Albert Hakim (he was paid $5,000 a month as a part-time “risk analyst”). It seems that Hakim was keen to use Shackley’s contacts to make money out of the Iran-Iraq War that had started the previous month. This just happens to be the same time that William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign are having meetings with the Iranians in order to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Is it also a coincidence that later Hakim joined forces with Richard Secord and Thomas Clines (Shackley’s former deputy in the CIA) to provide Iran with the weapons as a result of Reagan winning the 1980 presidential election? Just before the election Michael Ledeen wrote an article claiming that Billy Carter, the President’s brother, had visited Libya in 1979 and accepted from the Qaddafi government a $50,000 payment and a $220,000 loan related to an oil deal (New Republic, 1st November, 1980). It was later revealed that at this time Shackley and Ledeen had become business partners. The story also appears to have come from one of Shackley’s old contacts, Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI, the military intelligence service of Italy. It is also at this time that Ledeen arranges for $20,000 to be placed in Shackley’s bank account in Bermuda (page 359, David Corn, Blind Ghost) It was clear that if Bush was going to survive he had to try to disguise his relationship with Shackley. In fact, to really protect himself, he had to make sure that Shackley was not identified as one of the main organizers of the Iran-Contra deal. Both the House and Senate set up select committees to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. At first Shackley was seen as a prime suspect. He was a colleague and business partner to the main operators. He had been closely linked to Edwin Wilson (the main reason why Stansfield Turner had brought his career in the CIA to an end). Also, along with Secord, Clines and Quintero, Shackley had been involved in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal (Alfred McCord, The Politics of Heroin: pages 461-478 and Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 103-104). Bush was also identified as someone who must have known about the Iran-Contra deal. There was documentary evidence that Bush attended the meeting on 6th August, 1985, when National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane outlined the deal to trade U.S. arms for American hostages held by the Iranians. Bush also attended the meeting on 7th January, 1986, where George Shultz and Casper Weinberger expressed their opposition to the deal signed the previous day by Reagan to sell TOW missiles in order to win the release of the American hostages. When asked how he did not know about the Iran deal, Bush claimed: “I may have been out of the room at the time” (page 14, Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President). There was also documentary evidence that Bush attended a meeting with Amiram Nir, Israel’s advisor on terrorism at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 29th July, 1986. Also at the meeting was Bush’s aide, Craig Fuller. He kept notes of the meeting. He reported that Nir told Bush that he had been active throughout the past year “to gain the release of the hostages, and that a decision still had to be made whether the arms desired by the Iranians would be delivered in separate shipments or for each hostage as they are released.” Bush and Reagan did what they could to stop this document being sent to the John Tower investigation. Bush’s first defence was that he could not remember the meeting at King David Hotel. Later, he admitted he did remember it but did not understand what Nir was saying. Amazingly, the Tower Commission believed him. In a PBS Frontline documentary, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a convicted financier for the Meddellin drug cartel, talked about Felix Rodriguez’s role in the CIA involvement in the drug trade: “If Felix had come to me and said I’m reporting to… Oliver North, I might have been more sceptical. I didn’t know who Oliver North was and I didn’t know his background. But if you have a CIA, or what you consider to be a CIA-man, coming to you saying, ‘I want to fight the war, we’re out of funds, can you help us out? I’m reporting directly to Bush on it,’ I mean it’s very real, very believable, have you have a CIA guy reporting to his old boss.” According to one report, the first telephone call that Eugene Hasenfus made after his plane was shot down was to Bush’s staff (The Progressive, May, 1987). Then there was the handwritten note from November from George Bush to Oliver North that thanked him for his “dedication and tireless work with the hostage thing with Central America”. When asked about this note, Bush said “he didn’t recall why he sent it”. As Joel Bainerman pointed: “Why can a doctor be sued for malpractice of his profession but a national leader can just say he forgot, and no further investigation is required” (page 22, The Crimes of a President). One person whose name appeared on several documents concerning the Iran-Contra affair was Donald Gregg, Bush’s National Security Adviser. Gregg had also been the CIA liaison to the Otis Pike committee. He was a man who Bush believed could keep secrets. In 1985, Gregg sent Felix Rodriguez (a member of Shackley’s Secret Team) to El Salvador to aid the Contra re-supply effort. General Paul Gorman, the head of U.S. military forces in Central America, wrote a memo to the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador. In it he said: “”Rodriquez is operating as a private citizen but his acquaintanceship to the VP (Bush) is real enough, going back to the latter days of DCI (Director of the CIA)” (The Progressive, March, 1989). The problem for Bush is that too many people knew about his relationship with Felix Rodriquez (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, page 224). Bush was eventually forced to admit that along with Gregg he had met with Felix Rodriguez three times. However, he argued that he had not discussed Nicaragua with him (CBS 60 Minutes, March, 1987). He also defended Gregg’s decision to deny these meetings with Rodriguez. According to Bush, Gregg had not lied, he merely “forgot” about these meetings. At the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, headed by John Kerry, Richard Brenneke, a CIA operative, claimed that Donald Gregg was the Washington contact for a complicated arms/drugs deal that was part of the Iran-Contra operation. This story was leaked to Newsweek magazine. Bush responded to the story by claiming that it was Kerry who had leaked these “slanderous allegations” to the magazine. Bush added that “this guy whom they are quoting is the guy who is trying to save his own neck” (The Washington Post, 17th May, 1988). This is indeed ridiculous because Brenneke had not been charged with any offence. Bush’s story eventually became that Gregg was working on his own initiative and that he was unaware of his role in the Iran-Contra affair. The links between Bush and Shackley failed to go away. The role of Felix Rodriguez was particularly embarrassing as it provided another association with Shackley. The same was true of Chi Chi Quintero, Thomas Clines and Luis Posada. All four men had worked for Shackley since the early 1960s. They had also been active covert operators when Shackley was taking orders from George Bush during the period when he had been director of the CIA. (Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, pages 121-122, 181-83) It was reported in the Miami Herald that two men, one an arms dealer and the other a security consultant, had been working for Dr. Mario Castejon, a politician from Guatemala. They told the reporters that Shackley was used as a channel to the Agency regarding the Contra-Iran deals (The Miami Herald, 26th March, 1987). Shackley denied the story. Congressional investigators did not believe him and sent him a subpoena requesting all documents he had related to various companies and individuals. It was during this period that evidence emerged that Shackley had met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division, and Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, at the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, on 22nd November, 1985. Shackley had no option to admit to this meeting. Cameron Holmes, the lead investigator, was convinced that Shackley was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. As he explained when he was interviewed by David Corn: “How could Shackley be the one person in this mob unaware of what was going on? Why was he so insistent he had not picked up a single whiff of the Contra operation or the Iran initiative? There was no crime in knowing. Shackley proclaimed his ignorance too much.” (page 390, David Corn, Blind Ghost). Holmes was shocked when special counsel Lawrence Walsh decided not to pursue Shackley. He was not even called as a witness. Walsh did not even take Shackley’s deposition until after Congress had finished its hearings on the affair. However, Thomas Clines told David Corn in 1992 that in 1985 he was purchasing arms for the Contras in Lisbon when he had a call from Richard Secord. He told him that Shackley had suggested that he knew a better arms dealer in Lisbon than the one Clines was using (page 391, David Corn, Blind Ghost). This confirms that Shackley played a role in the Iran-Contra affair. As did Bush. I suspect that it was a leading role but they knew that as long as they stuck together, they would survive. The only possible problem was that their underlings would give evidence against them if they were brought to trial. Thanks to Lawrence Walsh and the George Bush pardons, this never happened.

The connection between Ted Shackley and October Surprise began in 1979. Shackley had expected to become director of the CIA. However, Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Stansfield Turner, had blocked his advance up the ladder. The same was true of all those involved in the illegal covert operations in the 1960s and 70s. The only way back for Shackley (he resigned from the CIA in 1979) was for the removal of Carter. In 1980 he had regular meetings with George Bush where he advised him of his election strategy. Bush did not get the nomination but when he became Reagan’s vice presidential candidate, Shackley continued to advise him. Shackley told Bush that Carter was attempting to negotiate a deal with Iran to get the American hostages released. This was disastrous news for the Reagan/Bush campaign. If Carter got the hostages out before the election, the public perception of the man might change and he might be elected for a second-term. According to Barbara Honegger, a researcher and policy analyst with the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated. On 22nd September, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. The Iranian government was now in desperate need of spare parts and equipment for its armed forces. Carter now proposed that the US would be willing to hand over supplies in return for the hostages. Once again, the CIA leaked this information to Reagan/Bush. Shackley now suggested a strategy that would make it impossible to do a deal. One way was to leak the story to the press. On 17th October, The Washington Post reported rumours of a “secret deal that would see the hostages released in exchange for the American made military spare parts Iran needs to continue its fight against Iraq”. These stories continued to be published throughout the rest of the campaign. One Washington Post report quoted French officials as being shocked by news that Carter was willing to be blackmailed by the Iranians into “providing spare parts for American weapons”. A couple of days before the election Barry Goldwater was reported as saying that he had information that “two air force C-5 transports were being loaded with spare parts for Iran”. This of course was not true. This publicity had made it impossible for Carter to do a deal. Reagan on the other hand, had promised the Iranian government that he would arrange for them to get all the arms they needed in exchange for the hostages. According to Mansur Rafizadeh, the former U.S. station chief of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, CIA agents had persuaded Khomeini not to release the American hostages until Reagan was sworn in. In fact, they were released twenty minutes after his inaugural address. The actions of Reagan and the CIA spent at least an extra 76 days of imprisonment. One of these hostages, Cynthia Dwyer, was kept back until the Iranian negotiators got further assurances on the deal. The arms the Iranians had demanded were delivered via Israel. By the end of 1982 all Regan’s promises to Iran had been made. With the deal completed, Iran was free to resort to acts of terrorism against the United States. In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists blew up 241 marines in the CIA Middle-East headquarters. The Iranians also once again began taking American hostages in exchange for arms. On 16th March, 1984, William Francis Buckley, a diplomat attached to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was kidnapped by the Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite group with strong links to the Khomeini regime. Buckley was tortured and it was soon discovered that he was the CIA station chief in Beirut. Shackley was horrified when he discovered that Buckley had been captured. Buckley was a member of Shackley’s Secret Team that had been involved with Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Raphael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, in the secret “assassination” program. Buckley had also worked closely with William Casey (now the director of the CIA) in the secret negotiations with the Iranians in 1980. Buckley had a lot to tell the Iranians. He eventually signed a 400 page statement detailing his activities in the CIA. He was also videotaped making this confession. Casey asked Shackley for help in obtaining Buckley’s freedom. Shackley had good reason to want to get Buckley out of Iranian hands. However, he was unhappy about not being rewarded for his help getting Reagan elected in 1980. He had expected to be appointed director of the CIA. That job instead went to Casey, the key figure in the “arms for hostages” negotiations. How was Shackley to be rewarded? What we know is that just three weeks after Buckley’s disappearance, President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive 138. This directive was drafted by Oliver North and outlined plans on how to get the American hostages released from Iran and to “neutralize” terrorist threats from countries such as Nicaragua. This new secret counterterrorist task force was to be headed by Shackley’s old friend, General Richard Secord. This was the basis of the Iran-Contra deal. Reagan could not afford to replace Casey with Shackley as director of the CIA. However, there were other ways of rewarding Shackley for his covert actions on behalf of Reagan in Iran. Talks had already started about exchanging American hostages for arms. On 30th August, 1985, Israel shipped 100 TOW missiles to Iran. On 14th September they received another 408 missiles from Israel. The Israelis made a profit of $3 million on the deal. Why should this money go to the Israelis? It would be a better idea to give this business to Shackley and his mates. In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua. It had already been decided to use this money to finance the selling of arms to Iran. Some of the profits could then be used to provide money and arms to the Contras and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The following month, Shackley traveled to Hamburg where he met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division at the Atlantic Hotel. Also at the meeting on 22nd November was Manuchehr Ghorbanifar. According to the report of this meeting that Shackley sent to the CIA, Ghorbanifar had “fantastic” contacts with Iran. At the meeting Shackley told Hashemi and Ghorbanifar that the United States was willing to discuss arms shipments in exchange for the four Americans kidnapped in Lebanon. What Shackley did not put in his CIA report was that there were two other men at this meeting at the Atlantic Hotel. They were Oliver North and Leslie Aspin, a British arms dealer. The problem with the proposed deal was that William Buckley was already dead (he had died of a heart-attack while being tortured). The date is not known but it was sometime between June and October 1985. The Aspin arms deal with Iran never took place. Instead, Shackley and Secord began organizing these arms deals. Shackley recruited some of the former members of his CIA Secret Team to help him with these arm deals. This included Thomas G. Clines, Raphael Quintero, Ricardo Chavez and Edwin Wilson of API Distributors. Also involved was Carl Jenkins and Gene Wheaton of National Air. The plan was to use National Air to transport these weapons. For some reason, Wheaton and Jenkins fell out with Shackley. In May 1986 Wheaton told William Casey, about what he knew about this illegal operation. Of course Casey already knew what was going on and refused to take any action. Wheaton now took his story to Daniel Sheehan. He also contacted Newt Royce and Mike Acoca, two journalists based in Washington. The first article on this scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 27th July, 1986. The Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, was now asked about if it is "true that foreign money, kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign covert operations." Weinberger denied all knowledge of the matter. On 5th October, 1986, a Sandinista patrol in Nicaragua shot down a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras. Eugene Hasenfus, the only one wearing a parachute, survived the crash (two other Americans, Buz Sawyer and William Cooper died when the plane hit the ground). Hasenfus told his captors that the CIA was behind the operation. He also provided information on two Cuban-Americans running the operation in El Savador. This resulted in journalists being able to identify Raphael Quintero and Felix Rodriguez as the two Cuban-Americans mentioned by Hasenfus. Shackley was able to keep his name out of the scandal and actually won damages from Daniel Sheehan. However, there were others who knew the truth about what had been going on. This included William Casey who conveniently died on 6th May, 1986. Another person who knew the truth was John Tower and John Heinz. In November 1986, Reagan persuaded Tower to chair the President's Special Review Board to study the actions of the National Security Council and its staff during the Iran-Contra affair. Heinz had chaired a three-man presidential review board that probed the Iran-Contra affair. Coincidentally, both John Heinz and John Tower died in plane wrecks on successive days in 1991 – Tower in Georgia, and Heinz in Montgomery County.

The connection between Ted Shackley and the Iran-Contra scandal began in 1979. Shackley had expected to become director of the CIA. However, Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Stansfield Turner, had blocked his advance up the ladder. The same was true of all those involved in the illegal covert operations in the 1960s and 70s. The only way back for Shackley (he resigned from the CIA in 1979) was for the removal of Carter. In 1980 he had regular meetings with George Bush where he advised him of his election strategy. Bush did not get the nomination but when he became Reagan’s vice presidential candidate, Shackley continued to advise him. Shackley told Bush that Carter was attempting to negotiate a deal with Iran to get the American hostages released. This was disastrous news for the Reagan/Bush campaign. If Carter got the hostages out before the election, the public perception of the man might change and he might be elected for a second-term. According to Barbara Honegger, a researcher and policy analyst with the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated. On 22nd September, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. The Iranian government was now in desperate need of spare parts and equipment for its armed forces. Carter now proposed that the US would be willing to hand over supplies in return for the hostages. Once again, the CIA leaked this information to Reagan/Bush. Shackley now suggested a strategy that would make it impossible to do a deal. One way was to leak the story to the press. On 17th October, The Washington Post reported rumours of a “secret deal that would see the hostages released in exchange for the American made military spare parts Iran needs to continue its fight against Iraq”. These stories continued to be published throughout the rest of the campaign. One Washington Post report quoted French officials as being shocked by news that Carter was willing to be blackmailed by the Iranians into “providing spare parts for American weapons”. A couple of days before the election Barry Goldwater was reported as saying that he had information that “two air force C-5 transports were being loaded with spare parts for Iran”. This of course was not true. This publicity had made it impossible for Carter to do a deal. Reagan on the other hand, had promised the Iranian government that he would arrange for them to get all the arms they needed in exchange for the hostages. According to Mansur Rafizadeh, the former U.S. station chief of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, CIA agents had persuaded Khomeini not to release the American hostages until Reagan was sworn in. In fact, they were released twenty minutes after his inaugural address. The actions of Reagan and the CIA spent at least an extra 76 days of imprisonment. One of these hostages, Cynthia Dwyer, was kept back until the Iranian negotiators got further assurances on the deal. The arms the Iranians had demanded were delivered via Israel. By the end of 1982 all Regan’s promises to Iran had been made. With the deal completed, Iran was free to resort to acts of terrorism against the United States. In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists blew up 241 marines in the CIA Middle-East headquarters. The Iranians also once again began taking American hostages in exchange for arms. On 16th March, 1984, William Francis Buckley, a diplomat attached to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was kidnapped by the Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite group with strong links to the Khomeini regime. Buckley was tortured and it was soon discovered that he was the CIA station chief in Beirut. Shackley was horrified when he discovered that Buckley had been captured. Buckley was a member of Shackley’s Secret Team that had been involved with Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Raphael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, in the secret “assassination” program. Buckley had also worked closely with William Casey (now the director of the CIA) in the secret negotiations with the Iranians in 1980. Buckley had a lot to tell the Iranians. He eventually signed a 400 page statement detailing his activities in the CIA. He was also videotaped making this confession. Casey asked Shackley for help in obtaining Buckley’s freedom. Shackley had good reason to want to get Buckley out of Iranian hands. However, he was unhappy about not being rewarded for his help getting Reagan elected in 1980. He had expected to be appointed director of the CIA. That job instead went to Casey, the key figure in the “arms for hostages” negotiations. How was Shackley to be rewarded? What we know is that just three weeks after Buckley’s disappearance, President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive 138. This directive was drafted by Oliver North and outlined plans on how to get the American hostages released from Iran and to “neutralize” terrorist threats from countries such as Nicaragua. This new secret counterterrorist task force was to be headed by Shackley’s old friend, General Richard Secord. This was the basis of the Iran-Contra deal. Reagan could not afford to replace Casey with Shackley as director of the CIA. However, there were other ways of rewarding Shackley for his covert actions on behalf of Reagan in Iran. Talks had already started about exchanging American hostages for arms. On 30th August, 1985, Israel shipped 100 TOW missiles to Iran. On 14th September they received another 408 missiles from Israel. The Israelis made a profit of $3 million on the deal. Why should this money go to the Israelis? It would be a better idea to give this business to Shackley and his mates. In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua. It had already been decided to use this money to finance the selling of arms to Iran. Some of the profits could then be used to provide money and arms to the Contras and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The following month, Shackley traveled to Hamburg where he met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division at the Atlantic Hotel. Also at the meeting on 22nd November was Manuchehr Ghorbanifar. According to the report of this meeting that Shackley sent to the CIA, Ghorbanifar had “fantastic” contacts with Iran. At the meeting Shackley told Hashemi and Ghorbanifar that the United States was willing to discuss arms shipments in exchange for the four Americans kidnapped in Lebanon. What Shackley did not put in his CIA report was that there were two other men at this meeting at the Atlantic Hotel. They were Oliver North and Leslie Aspin, a British arms dealer. The problem with the proposed deal was that William Buckley was already dead (he had died of a heart-attack while being tortured). The date is not known but it was sometime between June and October 1985. The Aspin arms deal with Iran never took place. Instead, Shackley and Secord began organizing these arms deals. Shackley recruited some of the former members of his CIA Secret Team to help him with these arm deals. This included Thomas G. Clines, Raphael Quintero, Ricardo Chavez and Edwin Wilson of API Distributors. Also involved was Carl Jenkins and Gene Wheaton of National Air. The plan was to use National Air to transport these weapons. For some reason, Wheaton and Jenkins fell out with Shackley. In May 1986 Wheaton told William Casey, about what he knew about this illegal operation. Of course Casey already knew what was going on and refused to take any action. Wheaton now took his story to Daniel Sheehan. He also contacted Newt Royce and Mike Acoca, two journalists based in Washington. The first article on this scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 27th July, 1986. The Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, was now asked about if it is "true that foreign money, kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign covert operations." Weinberger denied all knowledge of the matter. On 5th October, 1986, a Sandinista patrol in Nicaragua shot down a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras. Eugene Hasenfus, the only one wearing a parachute, survived the crash (two other Americans, Buz Sawyer and William Cooper died when the plane hit the ground). Hasenfus told his captors that the CIA was behind the operation. He also provided information on two Cuban-Americans running the operation in El Savador. This resulted in journalists being able to identify Raphael Quintero and Felix Rodriguez as the two Cuban-Americans mentioned by Hasenfus. Shackley was able to keep his name out of the scandal and actually won damages from Daniel Sheehan. However, there were others who knew the truth about what had been going on. This included William Casey who conveniently died on 6th May, 1986. Another person who knew the truth was John Tower and John Heinz. In November 1986, Reagan persuaded Tower to chair the President's Special Review Board to study the actions of the National Security Council and its staff during the Iran-Contra affair. Heinz had chaired a three-man presidential review board that probed the Iran-Contra affair. Coincidentally, both John Heinz and John Tower died in plane wrecks on successive days in 1991 – Tower in Georgia, and Heinz in Montgomery County.

Yesterday, Paola Di Cano commented: “I am a fascist, not a racist.” He should have spent more time reading English history books when he was playing for West Ham. It is true that Italian books try to claim that fascism was not the same as racism. The actions of Mussolini were not as bad as those of Hitler, but many of his policies were indeed racist. For example, in October 1935, Mussolini sent in the Italian Army into Ethiopia. The poorly armed Ethiopians were no match for Italy's modern tanks and aeroplanes. The Italians even used mustard gas on the home forces. Later he allowed Italian Jews to be deported to Germany where they were exterminated in the concentration camps. It should be pointed out that the people of London's East End played an important role in the defeat of fascism in Britain. In 1934, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, made several strong anti-Semitic speeches and organized provocative marches through Jewish districts in London. Mosley announced that on 4th October 1936, Mosley and his fascists intended to march through Stepney. This alarmed a lot of people as Stepney was mostly Jewish. 100,000 people signed a petition to ban the march, but the Government said that a ban was undemocratic, so allowed it to go on. The local people took the law into its own hands and gathered on the streets to stop the fascists marching. 6000 police went there to stop any fights, but ended up fighting the people who wanted to stop the march. It was reported that there were between 310,000 and half a million people there. The police could not clear the streets of all these people. The Blackshirts decided to march down Cable Street, as this street was mainly Jewish. The crowd of anti-fascists overturned a lorry to form a barricade, and pelted the police, who were trying to allow the march, with fruit and bottles. Many police and anti-fascists were injured. Eventually the Police Commissioner called off the march. The victory of the East End people led to the passing of the Public Order Act. This gave the Home Secretary the power to ban marches in the London area and police chief constables could apply to him for bans elsewhere. The 1936 Public Order Act also made it an offence to wear political uniforms and to use threatening and abusive words. This measure successfully controlled the activities of the fascists. The East End people have a long record of fighting racism and deserve the reputation of being the people who brought an end to the fascist movement in Britain.

If anybody studies the history of investigating covert operations, you will see that most of the useful information that we have about cases like the JFK assassination, Watergate, October Surprise, Iran-Contra, CIA and Drug Dealing, etc. has come from “inside” sources or what Gerry Hemming calls “snitches”. My dictionary defines a snitch as: “One who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority.” Despite its unpleasant sounding name, I believe “snitches” are good people and play an important role in a democratic society. (I prefer to call them by a more respectable sounding name, “whistleblower”). Gerry is also clearly a snitch/whistleblower. Like it or not, people involved in investigating political conspiracies, have to rely on “inside” sources. As these conspiracies nearly always involve covert and illegal actions, it is virtually impossible to rely on the normal documentary evidence usually available to journalists and historians. It is of course highly unlikely that people involved in these illegal activities will record it for posterity. In rare circumstances this does happen, for example, the tape recordings of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. However, both these men did this to help them write their memoirs and did not expect them to enter the public domain. These two high profile examples have virtually guaranteed this will ever happen again. For example, during the UK investigation into the background of the invasion of Iraq, it was discovered that Tony Blair insisted that no minutes should be kept of these private discussions that took place concerning this proposed action. I expect George Bush did the same. Since starting my website in 1997 I have been contacted by a large number of whistleblowers. The main reason for this is that my webpage on them is usually ranked very high at Google. For example, both my pages on Gerry Hemming and Tosh Plumlee are ranked number one at Google. Therefore, my interpretation of them becomes very important. It is in their interest to contact me and to negotiate about what I have said about them. Over the years I think I have become fairly good at working out who is telling me the truth. I use this experience when looking at any information that comes from “inside” sources. These are the sorts of questions I ask of this information: (1) I am very interested in motivation. Why did this person become a whistleblower? Were they seeking money? Were they attempting to gain revenge against an individual or organization? I have found the most convincing whistleblowers are those who seem to be genuinely appalled by the behavior of the people they are informing on. I am even more impressed if they are appalled by their own behavior. (2) Do they know too much? One of the problems with disinformation agents is that they often know too much. What we know about conspiracies is that individuals involved are only told about their section of the convert operation. Yet some whistleblowers claim to have details about the whole conspiracy. They would only know about this if they had overall charge of theoperation. Therefore, I am much more willing to believe them if they only tell me a small amount. I am always impressed when they answer “I don’t know”. (3) It is a fact that one of the problems for the police when they are investigating high profile murders is that a great deal of their time is taken up by people making “false” confessions. These people are suffering from an identifiable psychological problem. They have a strong need to be in the limelight. To be someone of importance, even if it means they have to confess to being a murderer. I suspect this psychological condition explains why some people provide false information on political conspiracies. (4) Disinformation agents. Victor Marchetti has described this type of CIA operation as a “limited hangout”. To quote Marchetti: “A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.” All those who come forward with information must be considered as potential disinformation agents. (5) How do they react when questioned? Some inside sources react in a very aggressive way when asked follow-up questions. This is because that the question implies that you have doubts about the truthfulness of previous answers. Sometimes they even start talking about suing your for libel. Those who are telling the truth are much more relaxed about this questioning process. (6) It is not enough for the witness to be convinced they are telling the truth. For example, a study of people responsible for death by dangerous driving, came up with some interesting results. Apparently, some people cannot face up to the reality of what they have done. They therefore tell themselves over and over again what they believe actually happened. They also tell the same story to all those who are willing to listen to them. In this story they are not responsible for the death they have caused. However, all the available evidence (witness statements, skid marks on the road, etc.), indicate they are not telling the truth. Even so, they appear very convincing because they really believe they are telling the truth. I think some sources of information fall into this category. (7) The witness tells their story in a clear and uncomplicated way. This is very important as it allows you to check the story against other available evidence. (8) The information they give is consistent over time. They do not change their story after evidence is provided that suggests they have made a mistake in an earlier version of events.

Exactly right. Tony Summers has always been reluctant to speculate about the evidence concerning the assassination of JFK. This might frustrate his readers but Summers is at heart a historian, rather than a conspiracy theorist. What he has done over the years is to accumulate the evidence that indicates that JFK was not killed by a lone gunman. Tony Summers is a much respected investigative journalist in the UK. For many years he worked for the BBC (Panorama). Along with people like Tom Mangold (read his great book on James Angleton) he broke a great many important stories. As well as writing one of the best books about the JFK assassination, he has also written the best book about Hoover The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993). Other books worth reading are The File on the Tsar (1976), Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985), Honeytrap (1988) and The Arrogance of Power:The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000). I suspect that Tony Summers has upset Pamela McElwain-Brown because he does not believe Judyth Baker’s story. But then again, no serious researcher does believe her. I don’t know what Tony Summers has done to upset J. Raymond Carroll. However, it is never a good idea to quote John McAdams. This is especially true when he is quoting Lisa Pease. She has complained several times that someone has been impersonating her on the John McAdams’s news group. His system of distributing information involves him controlling what he allows people to communicate. I cannot understand why anybody would want to receive information in this way. I have invited McAdams and his cronies to join this Forum on several occasions. This would allow them to freely post their opinions on the assassination. It would also give us the opportunity to openly challenge these views. It is no surprise that these lone gunman theorists are unwilling to participate in this kind of debate.

Thank you very much for answering these questions. It is great that you are willing to provide information that will enable historians to write more accurate accounts of Watergate in the future. 5. You will have to define operation Gemstone. The files I complied were referred to as Gemstone. No with respect to Operation Sandwedge. Gemstone was the operation being run by James McCord/Gordon Liddy. Sandwedge was the operation being run by Jack Caulfield/Anthony Ulasewicz. It seems that Gemstone concerned itself with fairly low level matters. Sandwedge on the other hand, dealt with the more serious issues, such as taking Edward Kennedy and George Wallace out of the 1972 presidential election. My view is that Nixon took the rap on Gemstone in order to avoid the more serious crimes associated with Sandwedge. 6. I have my own personal opinion based on my conversations with McCord at that time, and I should add this opinion hasn't changed in any way even with all the information and data that has come forth since 1972. I would be very interested to hear what your opinion is on this matter. 7. Will leave this for a future reply because it might require a lengthy explanation. I look forward to your reply.

Part 1: Investigative journalism began in the late 19th century. Most of these journalists were in favour of social reform. A common theme was the power of major corporations to corrupt democratic politicians. America was at the forefront of this type of journalism. Writers and publishers associated with this investigative journalism movement between 1890 and 1914 included Henry Demarest Lloyd, Nellie Bly, Jacob A. Riis, Frank Norris, Ida Tarbell, Charles Edward Russell, Lincoln Steffens, David Graham Phillips, C. P. Connolly, Benjamin Hampton, Upton Sinclair, Rheta Childe Dorr, Thomas Lawson, Alfred Henry Lewis and Ray Stannard Baker. By 1906 the combined sales of the ten magazines that concentrated on investigative journalism reached a total circulation of 3,000,0000. President Theodore Roosevelt responded to investigative journalism by initiating legislation that would help tackle some of the problems illustrated by these journalist. This included persuading Congress to pass reforms such as the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Meat Inspection Act (1906). Roosevelt was seen to be on the side of these investigative journalists until David Graham Phillips began a series of articles in Cosmopolitan entitled The Treason in the Senate. This included an attack on some of Roosevelt's political allies and he responded with a speech where he compared the investigative journalist with the muckraker in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: "the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth on the floor." These investigative journalists objected to being described as muckrakers. They felt betrayed as they felt they had helped Theodore Roosevelt to get elected. Lincoln Steffens was furious with Roosevelt and the day after the speech told him: "Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you." After Roosevelt's speech these investigative journalists became known as muckrakers. David Graham Phillips believed that Roosevelt's speech marked the end of the movement: "The greatest single definite force against muckraking was President Roosevelt, who called these writers muckrakers. A tag like that running through the papers was an easy phrase of repeated attack upon what was in general a good journalistic movement." Some of the magazines such as Everybody's, McClure's Magazine, and the American Magazine continued to publish investigations into political, legal and financial corruption. However, as John O'Hara Cosgrave, editor of Everybody's admitted, the demand for this type of journalism declined: "The subject was not exhausted but the public interest therein seemed to be at an end, and inevitably the editors turned to other sources of copy to fill their pages." In his book, The Era of the Muckrakers (1933), C. C. Regier argued that it is possible to tabulate the achievements of investigative journalism during this period: "The list of reforms accomplished between 1900 and 1915 is an impressive one. The convict and peonage systems were destroyed in some states; prison reforms were undertaken; a federal pure food act was passed in 1906; child labour laws were adopted by many states; a federal employers' liability act was passed in 1906, and a second one in 1908, which was amended in 1910; forest reserves were set aside; the Newlands Act of 1902 made reclamation of millions of acres of land possible; a policy of the conservation of natural resources was followed; eight-hour laws for women were passed in some states; race-track gambling was prohibited; twenty states passed mothers' pension acts between 1908 and 1913; twenty-five states had workmen's compensation laws in 1915; an income tax amendment was added to the Constitution; the Standard Oil and the Tobacco companies were dissolved; Niagara Falls was saved from the greed of corporations; Alaska was saved from the Guggenheims and other capitalists; and better insurance laws and packing-house laws were placed on the statute books."

Aaron McGruder is the cartoonist behind the award winning Boondocks. In a recent interview he said: "When you consider how quickly and how forcefully the extreme right came into power in the last few years - not just in terms of war but the clampdown on American journalism ... well, ultimately, some counter-voice gets through. It will always be somewhat limited and marginalised. It's just fortunate for me that my voice was allowed to continue. There is a silent majority that is opposed to the direction of the country and my strip gives them a small outlet every day to feel like they're not crazy. I keep telling people, 'Powerful corporations allow you to see that strip every day so it's not the revolution.' But sometimes it surprises me." The Boondocks revolves around two child characters - 10-year-old Huey and eight-year-old Riley - who have moved, with their grandfather, from the southside of Chicago to a white suburb where they attend the J Edgar Hoover elementary school. In one strip in the aftermath of 9/11 included Huey calling the FBI's terrorism tip-off line to say that he knows of many Americans who helped train and finance Osama Bin Laden. "All right, let's see," he tells the operator. "The first one is REAGAN. That's R-E-A-G ... Hello? Hello?" A couple of years ago McGruder and Condoleezza Rice met at an awards ceremony. Both of them were given an award by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the oldest civil rights organisation in the country. Beforehand, McGruder had told anyone who would listen that Rice was a mass murderer (it was not long after the invasion of Afghanistan) and that he would have no qualms about telling her so to her face. However, this did not happen. He now says "I had a brief encounter with her and I knew I had to say something. I said something like: 'I don't want you guys to kill me so I'm just going to mind my own business.' I was eminently aware when I met Condi that she could make my whole family disappear. I have never been fearless. I've always had a healthy fear of this government."

The idea that America as a left of centre media has been put around since McCarthy began his rantings in the late 1940s. It is true that the media world did contain some people on the left before McCarthyism took hold. However, most were identified by McCarthy and they were sacked and blacklisted. In June, 1950, three former FBI agents and a right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. The names had been compiled from FBI files. They were also blacklisted and many never worked again in the media in America. Many moved to the UK where they worked in our media. Some worked on the television series, Robin Hood, where they resurrected the myth that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. The blacklist was partly lifted in 1960 with the making of the film Spartacus (both the writer of the novel, Howard Fast, and the screenplay, Dulton Trumbo, had been on the blacklist). It is no coincidence that Spartacus was the topic of their movie (it is also no coincidence that it is the name of my publishing company and the sponsor of this Forum). America has never fully recovered from McCarthyism and it is still very difficult to hold left-wing views and work in the mainstream media. This study is deeply flawed because of the way it defines left and right. To non-Americans, it is strange to imply that being a member of the Democratic Party makes you a “liberal” or “left-wing”. From a European perspective, the vast majority of Democrats are right of centre. I recently spent some time in America and as far as I could see, the media is very much under the control of the right. This was especially true of radio and television. However, newspapers and magazines tended to be more balanced in its political outlook. I imagine that is because the masses tend to get their information mainly from radio and television. There have been several studies of political bias and the news media in the UK. They have shown that even in the UK there is a heavy bias against the left. It is not too difficult to work out why. (1) Media organizations are invariably owned by rich people who are hostile to any idea of redistribution of wealth. They are therefore unlikely to provide a platform to those who hold strong left-wing views. Some media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black are fairly open about this use of power whereas others tend to do it in a much more low-profile manner. (2) Most media outlets rely on advertising. For example, it is impossible for newspapers to make money from the money received from their customers. They need to sell advertising space in order to survive. Those tending to buy advertising space are large corporations owned by wealthy businessmen. Once again, they are unlikely to be supporters of left-wing causes. They often use their “financial muscle” to shape the content of the newspaper, magazine, television station, etc. The same is also true in the United States. That is why your media will always be biased against the left.

I hope you don’t mind Al but I would like to broaden this discussion out to consider all “inside” sources. If anybody studies the history of investigating covert operations, you will see that most of the useful information that we have about cases like the JFK assassination, Watergate, October Surprise, Iran-Contra, CIA and Drug Dealing, etc. has come from “inside” sources or what Gerry Hemming calls “snitches”. My dictionary defines a snitch as: “One who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority.” Despite its unpleasant sounding name, I believe “snitches” are good people and play an important role in a democratic society. (I prefer to call them by a more respectable sounding name, “whistleblower”). Despite his obvious aggression towards Tosh, Gerry is also clearly a snitch/whistleblower. Like it or not, people involved in investigating political conspiracies, have to rely on “inside” sources. As these conspiracies nearly always involve covert and illegal actions, it is virtually impossible to rely on the normal documentary evidence usually available to journalists and historians. It is of course highly unlikely that people involved in these illegal activities will record it for posterity. In rare circumstances this does happen, for example, the tape recordings of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. However, both these men did this to help them write their memoirs and did not expect them to enter the public domain. These two high profile examples have virtually guaranteed this will ever happen again. For example, during the UK investigation into the background of the invasion of Iraq, it was discovered that Tony Blair insisted that no minutes should be kept of these private discussions that took place concerning this proposed action. I expect George Bush did the same. Since starting my website in 1997 I have been contacted by a large number of whistleblowers. The main reason for this is that my webpage on them is usually ranked very high at Google. For example, both my pages on Gerry Hemming and Tosh Plumlee are ranked number one at Google. Therefore, my interpretation of them becomes very important. It is in their interest to contact me and to negotiate about what I have said about them. Over the years I think I have become fairly good at working out who is telling me the truth. I use this experience when looking at any information that comes from “inside” sources. These are the sorts of questions I ask of this information: (1) I am very interested in motivation. Why did this person become a whistleblower? Were they seeking money? Were they attempting to gain revenge against an individual or organization? I have found the most convincing whistleblowers are those who seem to be genuinely appalled by the behavior of the people they are informing on. I am even more impressed if they are appalled by their own behavior. (2) Do they know too much? One of the problems with disinformation agents is that they often know too much. What we know about conspiracies is that individuals involved are only told about their section of the convert operation. Yet some whistleblowers claim to have details about the whole conspiracy. They would only know about this if they had overall charge of theoperation. Therefore, I am much more willing to believe them if they only tell me a small amount. I am always impressed when they answer “I don’t know”. (3) It is a fact that one of the problems for the police when they are investigating high profile murders is that a great deal of their time is taken up by people making “false” confessions. These people are suffering from an identifiable psychological problem. They have a strong need to be in the limelight. To be someone of importance, even if it means they have to confess to being a murderer. I suspect this psychological condition explains why some people provide false information on political conspiracies. (4) Disinformation agents. Victor Marchetti has described this type of CIA operation as a “limited hangout”. To quote Marchetti: “A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.” All those who come forward with information must be considered as potential disinformation agents. (5) How do they react when questioned? Some inside sources react in a very aggressive way when asked follow-up questions. This is because that the question implies that you have doubts about the truthfulness of previous answers. Sometimes they even start talking about suing your for libel. Those who are telling the truth are much more relaxed about this questioning process. (6) It is not enough for the witness to be convinced they are telling the truth. For example, a study of people responsible for death by dangerous driving, came up with some interesting results. Apparently, some people cannot face up to the reality of what they have done. They therefore tell themselves over and over again what they believe actually happened. They also tell the same story to all those who are willing to listen to them. In this story they are not responsible for the death they have caused. However, all the available evidence (witness statements, skid marks on the road, etc.), indicate they are not telling the truth. Even so, they appear very convincing because they really believe they are telling the truth. I think some sources of information fall into this category. (7) The witness tells their story in a clear and uncomplicated way. This is very important as it allows you to check the story against other available evidence. (8) The information they give is consistent over time. They do not change their story after evidence is provided that suggests they have made a mistake in an earlier version of events. I have been asking Tosh Plumlee questions by email (and on this Forum) for a couple of years. He has always reacted like a man who is telling the truth. Therefore I consider him a reliable witness.

According to FBI documents, General Walker was in Austin Texas from the last of June until the second week of July. On the fourth of July he attended a fireworks display in Austin with a Capt. of the Texas 49th Armord Div. The next day they were at Ft Sam Houston and San Marcous Texas according to the 62- serv file of the FBI.

------------------------------------- Mr. McKnight: As you know, Howard K. Davis ["Davy"] and I, visited with Gen. Walker during the late evening hours of July 4th, and continued through the late morning hours, of July 5th, 1963. You might recall that upon leaving Walker's home on Turtle Creek Drive, and returning to rest at the apartment of Wally Welch's secretary [Welch had been a Fiorini/Sturgis operative]; we both had some rather serious exchanges regarding current report, and those that made reference to Walker's future plans. [We were especially concerned about exactly which Miami Cuban exile entities he might align his organization with, and thereby tend to dominate the Miami scene -- just as Paulino Sierra was attempting to accomplish at that very moment !!] We also disussed the fact that: Despite Walker having been shot at, less than 3 months previous, we were much chagrined that; throughout the night [and early morning hours] Walker had permitted us to sit just underneath where the bullet had struck his wall !! We both concluded that he was either some kind of nut -- for wilfully exposing all three of us to an ongoing sniper threat; or that the shooting had been a "set-up" by him !! And/or. that he had acquiesced to same by other parties. Moreover, we did notice that he continued to have a small crew of "Gay" men still residing at his home. [of course, the term "Gay" was not used during that Era]. What we both wondered, and even after our return to Miami: Why didn't the extant "official?" law enforcement reports contain any quotes ["statements"] by said "house guests" ??!! They most certainly would fall under that category defined as being routiine "material witnesses"??!! Are you aware of the report that: When the shooting occured, Walker was NOT seated alone; but was speaking with a rather notorious "visitor" that night ?! Another report identifies the bullet as a .38 calibre, but doesn't discuss the notable disimilarities (which still exist) between those used in automatic pistols, from those fired by revolvers ??!! Chairs, GPH __________________________

This is the entry at Wikipedia: Proponents of the theory, such as Barbara Honegger, a researcher and policy analyst with the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign (interviewed in link), allege that William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. The idea was that Reagan's opponent, the incumbent President Jimmy Carter, whose team had been negotiating, wouldn't gain a popularity boost (an 'October Surprise') before election day. The allegations included a date-specific allegation that William Casey met with an Iranian cleric in Madrid, Spain, and much of the tardy investigations have centered on whether, at the weekend in question he was actually at a Bohemian Grove retreat in California. Though William Casey was probably in London following the alleged meetings, critical pages of his daybook diary were unaccountably missing when the investigators came to look for them over a decade later. Carter was at the time dealing with the Iran hostage crisis and the hostile regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Those who assert that a deal was made allege that certain Republicans with CIA connections, including George H. W. Bush, arranged to have the hostages held through October, until Reagan could defeat Carter in early November, and then be released. The hostages were in fact released on the very day of Reagan's inauguration, twenty minutes after his inaugural address. Two months earlier, in a campaigning interview, Ronald Reagan had said that he had a "secret plan" involving the hostages. "My ideas require quiet diplomacy," he had responded when pressed, "where you don't have to say what it is you're thinking of doing." A 1983 Congressional probe into the Reagan campaign's theft of White House briefing books on the eve of a presidential debate (see Debategate) disclosed that Reagan campaign manager William Casey (later appointed as Director of Central Intelligence in the Reagan administration) was receiving highly classified reports on closely-held Carter administration intelligence on the Carter campaign and the Democratic president's efforts to liberate the hostages. A PBS Frontline documentary in 1990 brought a sound bite unavoidably to the surface in detail, as did a 15 April 1991 New York Times article by Gary Sick. In 1991, while playing golf with George Bush in Palm Springs, Ronald Reagan gave reporters a sound bite. In 1980, he had "tried some things the other way," that is, to free the hostages, he told them. When pressed he said that the details remained "classified." The remark was widely publicized and linked to Reagan's 1980 campaign remark undisclosed "secret plan" to free the hostages, with the unanswered question of how a Presidential candidate in 1980 had received "classified" information Separate House and Senate investigations were further delayed until 1992. William Casey, the alleged go-between, was dead by then, and it seemed impossible to account for all his moves during the summer of 1980, when he is said to have conferred with agents representing the Ayatollah Khomeini's government. If the allegations are true, some believe that dealing with a hostile foreign government to achieve the defeat of a domestic administration would have been an act of treason. According to Sick's theory, Oliver North was the administration's scapegoat, taking responsibility in order to conceal the "treason" of Reagan and Bush. A PBS documentary, "The Secret Government," hosted by Bill Moyers, detailed the "off the shelf, self-financing, independent covert operations" entity mentioned by North, and tracing it to its cold war beginnings won an Emmy for best documentary film. Former CIA agent Richard Brenneke has also claimed that Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986 because of his refusal to take part in the Iran-Contra scandal. According to this source, the arms-trade would have been part of the agreement of the October Surprise. Licio Gelli, headmaster of the P2 lodge, would have taken part to this assassination.

Jack Anderson has of course written a great deal about the JFK assassination. He is associated with stories that suggested that Castro and the Mafia were behind the assassination. On was discussing this with Peter Dale Scott on the phone yesterday. He reminded me that initially Anderson believed the same story as the one told recently by Gene Wheaton. That JFK had been killed by gunman who had been trained by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro. In 1966 Anderson changed his views on the assassination. At the time attempts were made to deport Johnny Roselli as an illegal alien. Roselli moved to Los Angeles where he went into early retirement. It was at this time he told attorney, Edward Morgan: "The last of the sniper teams dispatched by Robert Kennedy in 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro were captured in Havana. Under torture they broke and confessed to being sponsored by the CIA and the US government. At that point, Castro remarked that, 'If that was the way President Kennedy wanted it, Cuba could engage in the same tactics'. The result was that Castro infiltrated teams of snipers into the US to kill Kennedy". Morgan took the story to Jack Anderson. Drew Pearson then passed the story to Earl Warren. He did not want anything to do with it and so the information was then passed to the FBI. When they failed to investigate the story Anderson wrote an article entitled "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb" about Roselli's story. It has been suggested that Roselli started this story at the request of his friends in the Central Intelligence Agency in order to divert attention from the investigation being carried out by Jim Garrison. In 1976 the story changed again. Anderson interviewed Johnny Roselli just before he was murdered. On 7th September, 1976, the newspaper reported Roselli as saying : "When Oswald was picked up, the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them. This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald." Anderson came up with a new story in 1989. This time the information came from undercover cop, Joseph Shimon. He claims he had been at meetings with Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante where they discussed plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. All these plots failed and Shimon became convinced that Trafficante was working for Castro. This story eventually appeared in the Merry-Go-Round column.

Drew Pearson was a Quaker and held fairly left-wing views. However, Anderson, his assistant, was always looking for ways to make money. This resulted in him developing close relationships with Howard Hughes and Lyndon Baines Johnson. I have already pointed out how Anderson got information from Hughes to destroy the career of Owen Brewster. Anderson also tried to persuade Pearson to support LBJ. Pearson considered LBJ a crook. In fact, in 1956 Pearson began investigating the relationship between LBJ and George R. Brown. Pearson believed that Johnson had arranged for the Texas-based Brown and Root Construction Company to avoid paying large tax bills. Johnson brought an end to this investigation by offering Pearson a deal. If Pearson dropped his Brown-Root crusade Johnson would support the presidential ambitions of Estes Kefauver (a close friend of Pearson). Pearson accepted and wrote in his diary (16th April, 1956): "This is the first time I've ever made a deal like this, and I feel a little unhappy about it. With the Presidency of the United States at stake, maybe it's justified, maybe not - I don't know." In 1960 Pearson supported Hubert Humphrey in his efforts to become the Democratic Party candidate. However, those campaigning for John F. Kennedy, accused him of being a draft dodger. As a result, when Humphrey dropped out of the race, Pearson switched his support to LBJ. One of the ways he helped the JFK/LBJ campaign was to investigate the relationship between Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon. Pearson and Anderson discovered that in 1956 the Hughes Tool Company provided a $205,000 loan to Nixon Incorporated, a company run by Richard's brother, F. Donald Nixon. The money was never paid back. Soon after the money was paid the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reversed a previous decision to grant tax-exempt status to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This information was revealed by Pearson and Anderson during the 1960 presidential campaign. Nixon initially denied the loan but later was forced to admit that this money had been given to his brother. It was claimed that this story helped JFK defeat Nixon in the election.

Rebecca Smithers, education editor Thursday December 22, 2005 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,...1672340,00.html Secondary schools are concentrating too much on teaching about "Hitler and Henry" and should do more to help broaden their pupils' knowledge and understanding of history, according to a report today by the government's exam regulator. There has been a gradual narrowing and "Hitlerisation" of post-14 history, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority warns in its annual report on the subject. The content of history lessons for GCSE and A-level continues to be dominated by topics such as the Tudors and the 20th century dictatorships, giving "increasing cause for concern" about the narrow range of subject matter, the QCA says. The trend has been exacerbated by the unitisation of A-level courses into "bite-sized" modules, the report notes, which has "fragmented the overall learning experience for pupils and reduced the time for wider reading and reflection" in the subject. A new GCSE in history is being developed on behalf of the QCA by the OCR exam board and will be piloted in around 50 schools and colleges from next year. But the report - one of nine published today on the main national curriculum subjects - warns that history is playing "an increasingly marginal role" within the wider curriculum at both primary and secondary schools where it is often given a low priority. "One reason may be a perception that it has only limited relevance to many pupils' future working lives," the report suggests. History is a compulsory national curriculum subject at primary and secondary schools up to key stage 3 for 11-14-year olds. Yet many pupils fail to learn very much throughout their entire school career, the report finds. "Pupils' experience of history at primary school is extremely variable, not just in terms of substantive content but also in terms of how much time they have spent at history ... many pupils (perhaps more than 40%, according to this survey) arrive at secondary school with negative perceptions of the subject. Even by the end of year 7 (the first year at secondary school) many pupils appear to have forgotten much of what they learned in history and can bring to mind little more than the names of some of the topics of periods they encountered." At secondary level, the authority notes that the quality of history teaching is "a real strength". But the QCA also warns that there has been no "discernible change" after its complaint last year that many schools largely ignore the black and multi-ethnic aspects of British history. "Too often, the teaching of black history is confined to topics about slavery and postwar immigration, or to 'black history month'. The effect, if inadvertent, is to undervalue the overall contribution of black and minority ethnic people to Britain's past and to ignore their cultural, scientific and many other achievements." The quality of assessment in some areas has also come in for criticism, including a failure to examine historical interpretation and source evaluation properly, and the decline of opportunities, particularly at GCSE, for brighter candidates to display their full range of narrative skills. The schools minister, Jacqui Smith, said: "Standards in history continue to rise and Ofsted confirm that history is very well taught. The national curriculum for history includes a statutory requirement for all pupils to be taught about the social, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of the societies studied, both in Britain and the wider world." A spokeswoman for the DfES added: "We have commissioned the QCA to develop new history units which will be published shortly to ensure pupils gain the broadest possible understanding of history. The first of these new units, encouraging pupils to explore the history of Germany since 1945 and going beyond a narrow focus on the 12 years of Nazi dictatorship, is expected shortly." Some of the other nine subject reports published today are also critical. In its assessment of modern foreign languages, the QCA reports that the government's decision to allow youngsters to drop languages at the age of 14 has led to "a significant decline in the number of pupils learning MFL at key stage 4 and an associated drop in GCSE entries in the summer of 2005". The QCA says it is "very worried" by the fact that "large numbers of average students are possibly reducing their future prospects of job mobility and choice by giving up language learning at 14".

Review of Ultimate Sacrifice: http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=7078 Progressive Portland radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann has co-authored the ne plus ultra of conspiracy books about the JFK assassination. At a doorstopping 900-plus pages, Ultimate Sacrifice presents enough speculation mixed with fact to fill at least three books. Part I reveals in convincing detail a covert U.S. plan led by Bobby Kennedy to use Cuban exiles to assassinate Fidel Castro and invade Cuba, with full U.S. military backing if necessary, in December 1963. Part II describes how the Mafia, led by mob bosses Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante and Johnny Rosselli, infiltrated the Cuba coup plan, purportedly to compromise U.S. officials into suppressing a thorough investigation of JFK's murder, which the godfathers later organized. Part III discloses two heretofore overlooked or unknown plots to kill Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa, Fla., which bore several similarities (a sniper or snipers with scoped rifles were to fire on the president's motorcade) to his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Whether you agree or disagree with the authors' theories, it's impossible to ignore this book as an important counterpoint to Gerald Posner's 1993 book Cased Closed, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting the president. Marshaling reams of newly declassified documents, interviews with surviving participants, and stray puzzle pieces from other researchers, the authors have compiled an imposing mass of scholarship on the 1963 coup plan and the Mafia's interest in it. Where Ultimate Sacrifice is ultimately unconvincing, though, is in linking the mob's penetration of the coup plan to JFK's assassination. The Mafia would have had plenty of reasons to want to help overthrow Castro, none of which necessarily involved killing Kennedy: For one thing, the coup would have let Marcello, Trafficante and Rosselli in on the ground floor to regain control of organized crime in Cuba. Kennedy's murder actually hindered that, because plans to invade Cuba were dropped after JFK's death. The book's treatment of the assassination itself, at a scant 16 pages, is an incoherent mess, rehashing the usual hooey about unidentified gunmen, shots from the grassy knoll and "magic bullet" theories, without incontrovertibly linking the mob to the scene of the crime. The authors try repeatedly to show Oswald being manipulated by "mob associates" to take the fall for Kennedy's murder, but almost everyone mentioned in this book, including Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe, is described as a mob associate.

Fascinating. It is definitely interesting the way people like Alfred McCoy, Daniel Sheehan, Gary Webb, etc. have been treated when they have tried to get this story out into the public domain. In some senses, this was even a bigger crime than the killing of JFK.

I agree. This was the only excuse that LBJ could come up with after he decided not to go along with the Castro did it theory being pushed by the FBI and the CIA. It is complete nonsense of course. There was no way that the Soviets would have launched a nuclear war if the US invaded Cuba. It is for the same reason that the US did not launch a nuclear attack when the Red Army marched into Hungary in 1956. It was all to do with sphere of interest policy. It this policy was not kept, the Cold War would have quickly become a Hot War (and I mean hot). This provides the key clue to why LBJ launched a cover-up. It makes no sense at all unless you consider what might have happened following an invasion of Cuba. The whole world would have demanded to see the evidence for the charge that Castro organized the assassination of JFK. The only evidence for this was evidence manufactured by the FBI and the CIA. Anyone with any political understanding of the Cold War knew that it was not in the political interests of Castro to kill JFK. Questions would have been asked about LBJ’s willingness to believe this story. Was he in someway involved in the assassination? Why was it important that he became president in November, 1963? People would have begun to look closely at the Bobby Baker scandal that had been emerging at that time. Don B. Reynolds testimony about LBJ and the General Dynamics TFX contract, given in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee on the day of the assassination would have become public. Even if LBJ was not guilty of organizing the assassination, most people would have believed this was the case. LBJ was a shrewd politician who always kept risks to the minimum. His safest course was to force Hoover and McCone to come up with the lone gunman theory. Then it would be case-closed and he would then be in a position to use his power to cover-up the Bobby Baker scandal. The clue to this concerns the first person they had to kill after the assassination. E. Grant Stockdale on 2nd December, 1963.