Q&A About the Assassination of President Kennedy

[Michael Schweitzer]

Mr. Schweitzer,

There are many researchers on this forum who have been at this for decades. We all can learn from the fresh, non-jaded, ideas of the novice, as well as the wisdom and experience of the seasoned researcher. Many of the items that you mention as your sources were actually released to the public as a result of the efforts put forth by members of this forum. We are very aware of the contents and significance of those documents and we welcome your interpretation of their significance even if it is at odds with our own. That said, do not expect to go unchallenged when you offer a pet theory that has been re-hashed countless times by the critical community. Perhaps you will offer something new to the arguments that we have already considered and perhaps you will persuade. So far, you have offered nothing new and you have not persuaded. The burden is on you. We are not required to accept your conclusions merely because "you say it is so" without your having provided a solid foundation upon which to base your assertions.

Colonel Prouty was my friend. I have a box full of dozens of correspondences from him. I have hours of recorded conversations with him. I have been to Alexandria Virginia where he lived and was with him for the last time at Arlington National Cemetery when he was laid to rest. I can assure you that much of your interpretation of Prouty--as presented here--is inconsistent with his work.

Perhaps you will appreciate this 30 minute video presentation from last year's COPA conference as it is based on Prouty's communications with me. It is regarding NSAM's 263 and 273:

http://justiceforken...esentation.html

Greg, please accept my apology for losing my cool. I know and respect your many contributions to assassination research. My mention of Col. Prouty was limited to referencing the captions of three photographs in a more recent edition of his book "JFK" than you appear to have, as supporting my proposition the CIA has sabotaged peace attempts. I do not consider that to be an interpretation, but a citation, and at no other point do I even mention, much less interpret, the work of your late friend. Did Col. Prouty ever tell you anything about the U-2 incident that is inconsistent with the captions opposite page 60 of the 2009 edition of his book?

Apology accepted, Michael. Thank you.

In my copy of the book the photos and attendant captions you reference are located between pages 156 and 157 in the glossy photos section. I agree with you that the CIA did indeed attempt and many times succeed in derailing the peace process, including, but not limited to Eisenhower's "Crusade For Peace" among others. Fletch emphasized his conviction that Gary Powers' U-2 flight was sabotaged by the intentional dilution of his fuel supply (it lacked sufficient hydrogen).

In my view, your having made statements that assert "the CIA did it" and that "Dulles was the loop" in the context of Prouty's work is misleading, albeit unintentional.

Additionally, you also mentioned the Gold Key Club in your opening paragraph. That is a Prouty euphemism. So, you did "interpret" Prouty in more areas than you admit.

I intended no attribution to Col. Prouty whatsoever in any statement except my reference to the captions we discussed. And I was unaware "Gold Key Club" is a Prouty euphemism. Authors have used it without attribution – so much so, they give the impression is was a group's actual self-designation. Now you have raised my curiosity. When Col. Prouty used the term, was he referring to a particular group of people? Did they stand uniquely apart as an actual sort of club? Did they refer to themselves by their own insider term?

[Greg Burnham]

You'll need to do your own research. But, here's something to consider...

How the CIA Controls President Ford

By L. Fletcher Prouty

In this monstrous U.S. government today, it's not so much what comes down from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or from the middle -- the least scrutinized level. (Contrary to the current CIA propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, "What the Agency does is ordered by the President.")

As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch if you know the cops and the courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and to shield them from outside eyes.

Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He knew the girls were happy, busy, and well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what they were doing. His favorites, all through the years of his prime as Director of Central Intelligence, were such stellar performers as Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White, Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for them to do anything they came up with.

When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Tom Gates, then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor.

While he peddled the hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the king. This works for the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student and practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in the ways of the cloth.

But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable -- and surely the best -- of these was an agent named Frank Hand.

In my book, The Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name; but a small item in a recent obituary column stated that:

"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall, Minn. . . . (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had served with the CIA from 1950 until retirement in 1971."

After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency, all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a "senior official."

Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Tom Gates or Allen Dulles or John Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories about Frank Hand. They would do more to characterize the nature and the sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work unobtrusively.

You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids," lost in the maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, Hobbit-like, pleasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was brought in with the original load of concrete. Thousands of career men to this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked anywhere else. I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963, and he was at my farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip he made in those busy years between the Pentagon and the CIA he would have died a very wealthy man. He popularized the Agency term "across the river" and the "Acme Plumbers" nickname for agents of the CIA. (A term later to be confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt, McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and connections and therefore were "Plumbers." Only the insiders knew about the real "Acme Plumbers.")

Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or Fitzgerald. Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

There has long existed a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to industry-banking law and to the multinational corporate centers of greed and power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For example, if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should turn up something. Real power is the ability to keep the government bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.

Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity, as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never did. He was so anonymous that even his friends could not find him.

The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a Bill Colby, Dick Helms, or Allen Dulles, you know the real value of an indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are down, the CIA could care less about overturning "Communism" in Cuba or Chile. What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than control over the government of Jordan or Syria.

Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war, I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412/2 committee). That meant the agency had neither been directed by the National Security Council to move those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a tactical movement. In other words, the planned intervention into South Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.

This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine operations in Laos.

At that time my immediate superior was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the CIA. Also at that time, Frank Hand, "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was a cover assignment -- "cover slot" as it was known to us and to the CIA. Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon.

No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the subject around to his point with such a comment as, "Fletch, who do you suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.

The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he would set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries. In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with the most "highly sensitive" tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In this manner he would find out what the real thinking in the Pentagon might be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea -- such as in the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people. He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the CIA.

Then he would drop out of the picture for awhile to travel back to the old CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General Cabell. On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial, to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, and other operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how to overpower and outmaneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the White House.

The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001 percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that, "What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves without having the President find out -- or at least without discovery until it is too late."

"It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment, carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.

In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind. Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam, in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to change his policy of limited involvement.

Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or bypass the Secretary of Defense for the time being by going to the White House for support. In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the CIA wanted no more of it. Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or feeding. The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger prospects in Vietnam.

So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos, he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.

This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26 bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other weapons, C-46, C-54 and other Air America-supported heavy transport aircraft, U-2 operations over Indochina, radar and other clandestine equipment, C-130's specially modified for deep Tibetan operations, and much more. From the point of view of the CIA, the helicopters were simply the tip of the iceberg, and the decision was its most important in that decade.

Typically, in his unwitting Mother Superior-style, which included bulldog tenacity, Dulles chose the route to the White House. Here again he could rely strongly on Frank Hand. Working with Hand in Erskine's office was the CIA's other best agent, Major General Edward G. Lansdale, who had long served in the CIA. Like Hand, he had unequalled contacts in the Department of State and in the White House. In support of Dulles, they contacted their friends there and began a subtle and powerful move destined to prepare the way for what would appear to be a decision by President Eisenhower. This was an important feature of the "case study": The apparent Presidential decision.

When the CIA wants to do something for which it does not have prior approval and for which it does not have legal sanction, it works from the bottom, using all of its guile with security and "need to know" -- a euphemism for "keep the scheme away from anyone at any level of government who might stand in its way." Hand and Lansdale, among others, were almost always able to line up enough support in the right places to make it possible for the CIA to get a favorable reading from the "Forty Committee" on any subject, legal or not. In fact, this is the great weakness of such a committee. Rather than working to control the agency it works the other way. The procedure makes it possible for the agency to win approval from a lesser echelon of the NSC intrastructure, and then, by clamping on a security id, it makes others believe that the CIA had orders from the NSC or perhaps even from the President, when in fact it did not.

Thus it was that, about two weeks from the day that I received that first call requesting the movement of the squadron of helicopters, received word from General Erskine that he had been "officially" informed that the White House (Forty Committee) had approved the secret operation. The helicopters were moved into Vietnam. They were the first of thousands.

The great significance of this incident is to point out how the CIA works powerfully, deftly, and with great assurance at any level of our government to get anything it wants done. But the anecdote shows only the surface coating of the application of the CIA apparatus.

One year earlier, in 1959, Frank Hand had directed a Boston banker to my office. At that time I worked in the Directorate of Plans in Air Force headquarters and my work was top secret. Few of my contemporaries in the Pentagon knew that I was in charge of a global U.S. Air Force system created for the dual purpose of providing Air Force support for the CIA and for protecting the best interests of the USAF while performing that task. My door was labeled simply, "Team B"; yet that Boston banker knocked and entered with assurance. Somehow he knew what my work was and he knew that I might be able to help him.

In 1959 there were very few helicopters in all of the services, and military procurement of those expensive machines was at an all-time low. The Bell Helicopter Company was all but out of business, and its parent company, Bell Aerospace Corp., was having trouble keeping it financially afloat. Meanwhile, the shrewd Royal Little, President of the Providence-based Textron Company, had a good cash position and could well afford the acquisition of a loser. Textron and the First National Bank of Boston got together to talk helicopters. Neither one knew a thing about them. But men in First Boston were close to the CIA, and they learned that the CIA was operating helicopters in Laos. What they needed to know now was, "What would be the future of the military helicopter, and would the use of helicopters in South East Asia escalate if given a little boost -- such as moving a squadron from Laos to Vietnam?" The CIA could tell them about that, and Frank Hand would be the man who could get them to the right people in the Pentagon.

The banker from Boston phrased his questions as though he believed that the helicopters in Laos were somehow operating under the Air Force, and then went on to ask about their tactical significance and about the possible increase of helicopter utilization for that kind of warfare. This was at a time when not even newspapers had reported anything like the operation of such large and expensive aircraft in that remote war. We had a rather thorough discussion and then he left. He called me several times after that and visited my office a month or two later.

As the record will show, Textron did acquire the Bell Helicopter Company and the CIA did step up use of helicopters to the extent that one of the CIA's own proprietary companies, Asia Aeronautics Inc., had more than four thousand men on each of two bases where helicopters were maintained. Most of those men were involved in their maintenance -- Bell Helicopters, no less!

Orders for Bel Helicopters for use in Vietnam exceeded $600-million. Anyone wanting to know more about how the U.S. got so heavily ($200-billion and the loss of 58,000 American lives) involved in Indochina need look no further. This was the pattern and the plan.

At the present time, when the White House, the House, and the Senate are all investigating the CIA, it is important to understand the CIA and to put it all in the proper perspective. It is not the President who instructs the CIA concerning what it will do. And in many cases it is not even the Director of Central Intelligence who instructs the CIA. The CIA is a great, monstrous machine with tremendous and terrible power. It can be set in motion from the outside like a programmer setting a computer in operation, and then it covers up what it is doing when men like Frank Hand -- the real movers -- put grease on the correct gears. And in a majority of cases, the power behind it all is big business, big banks, big law firms and big money. The agency exists to be used by them.

Let no one misunderstand what I mean. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson who on more than one occasion said that the CIA was "operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Carribean." In other words, he knew it was doing this -- and he was the President! This knowledge has been recently confirmed by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (who is a former head of the CIA) and others by their admission that they told the agency to end all "terminations." But Lyndon Johnson was powerless to do anything about it. This is an astounding admission from a President, the very man from whom, the CIA says, it always gets its instructions.

The present concern over "domestic surveillance" and such other lean tidbits -- most important to you and me as they are -- is not important to the CIA. It can easily dispense with a James Angleton or even a Helms or a Colby (just look at the list of CIA bigwigs who have been fired -- Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Dick Helms, and now perhaps Colby); but the great machine will live on while Congress digs away at the Golden Apples tossed casually aside by the CIA -- the supreme Aphrodite of them all. Notice that the agency cares little about giving away "secrets" in the form of cleverly written insider books such as those by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. The CIA just makes it look as though it cared with some high-class window dressing. Actually the real harm to the American public from those books is to make people believe that certain carefully selected propaganda is true.

In the story of Frank Hand we come much closer to seeing exactly how the CIA operates to control this government and other foreign governments. It is still operating that way. Today it is President Ford who is the unwitting accessory.

[Thomas Graves]

You'll need to do your own research. But, here's something to consider...

How the CIA Controls President Ford

By L. Fletcher Prouty

In this monstrous U.S. government today, it's not so much what comes down from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or from the middle -- the least scrutinized level. (Contrary to the current CIA propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, "What the Agency does is ordered by the President.")

As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch if you know the cops and the courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and to shield them from outside eyes.

Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He knew the girls were happy, busy, and well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what they were doing. His favorites, all through the years of his prime as Director of Central Intelligence, were such stellar performers as Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White, Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for them to do anything they came up with.

When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Tom Gates, then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor.

While he peddled the hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the king. This works for the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student and practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in the ways of the cloth.

But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable -- and surely the best -- of these was an agent named Frank Hand.

In my book, The Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name; but a small item in a recent obituary column stated that:

"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall, Minn. . . . (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had served with the CIA from 1950 until retirement in 1971."

After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency, all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a "senior official."

Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Tom Gates or Allen Dulles or John Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories about Frank Hand. They would do more to characterize the nature and the sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work unobtrusively.

You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids," lost in the maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, Hobbit-like, pleasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was brought in with the original load of concrete. Thousands of career men to this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked anywhere else. I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963, and he was at my farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip he made in those busy years between the Pentagon and the CIA he would have died a very wealthy man. He popularized the Agency term "across the river" and the "Acme Plumbers" nickname for agents of the CIA. (A term later to be confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt, McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and connections and therefore were "Plumbers." Only the insiders knew about the real "Acme Plumbers.")

Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or Fitzgerald. Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

There has long existed a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to industry-banking law and to the multinational corporate centers of greed and power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For example, if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should turn up something. Real power is the ability to keep the government bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.

Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity, as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never did. He was so anonymous that even his friends could not find him.

The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a Bill Colby, Dick Helms, or Allen Dulles, you know the real value of an indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are down, the CIA could care less about overturning "Communism" in Cuba or Chile. What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than control over the government of Jordan or Syria.

Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war, I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412/2 committee). That meant the agency had neither been directed by the National Security Council to move those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a tactical movement. In other words, the planned intervention into South Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.

This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine operations in Laos.

At that time my immediate superior was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the CIA. Also at that time, Frank Hand, "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was a cover assignment -- "cover slot" as it was known to us and to the CIA. Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon.

No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the subject around to his point with such a comment as, "Fletch, who do you suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.

The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he would set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries. In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with the most "highly sensitive" tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In this manner he would find out what the real thinking in the Pentagon might be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea -- such as in the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people. He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the CIA.

Then he would drop out of the picture for awhile to travel back to the old CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General Cabell. On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial, to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, and other operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how to overpower and outmaneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the White House.

The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001 percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that, "What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves without having the President find out -- or at least without discovery until it is too late."

"It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment, carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.

In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind. Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam, in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to change his policy of limited involvement.

Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or bypass the Secretary of Defense for the time being by going to the White House for support. In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the CIA wanted no more of it. Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or feeding. The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger prospects in Vietnam.

So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos, he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.

This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26 bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other weapons, C-46, C-54 and other Air America-supported heavy transport aircraft, U-2 operations over Indochina, radar and other clandestine equipment, C-130's specially modified for deep Tibetan operations, and much more. From the point of view of the CIA, the helicopters were simply the tip of the iceberg, and the decision was its most important in that decade.

Typically, in his unwitting Mother Superior-style, which included bulldog tenacity, Dulles chose the route to the White House. Here again he could rely strongly on Frank Hand. Working with Hand in Erskine's office was the CIA's other best agent, Major General Edward G. Lansdale, who had long served in the CIA. Like Hand, he had unequalled contacts in the Department of State and in the White House. In support of Dulles, they contacted their friends there and began a subtle and powerful move destined to prepare the way for what would appear to be a decision by President Eisenhower. This was an important feature of the "case study": The apparent Presidential decision.

When the CIA wants to do something for which it does not have prior approval and for which it does not have legal sanction, it works from the bottom, using all of its guile with security and "need to know" -- a euphemism for "keep the scheme away from anyone at any level of government who might stand in its way." Hand and Lansdale, among others, were almost always able to line up enough support in the right places to make it possible for the CIA to get a favorable reading from the "Forty Committee" on any subject, legal or not. In fact, this is the great weakness of such a committee. Rather than working to control the agency it works the other way. The procedure makes it possible for the agency to win approval from a lesser echelon of the NSC intrastructure, and then, by clamping on a security id, it makes others believe that the CIA had orders from the NSC or perhaps even from the President, when in fact it did not.

Thus it was that, about two weeks from the day that I received that first call requesting the movement of the squadron of helicopters, received word from General Erskine that he had been "officially" informed that the White House (Forty Committee) had approved the secret operation. The helicopters were moved into Vietnam. They were the first of thousands.

The great significance of this incident is to point out how the CIA works powerfully, deftly, and with great assurance at any level of our government to get anything it wants done. But the anecdote shows only the surface coating of the application of the CIA apparatus.

One year earlier, in 1959, Frank Hand had directed a Boston banker to my office. At that time I worked in the Directorate of Plans in Air Force headquarters and my work was top secret. Few of my contemporaries in the Pentagon knew that I was in charge of a global U.S. Air Force system created for the dual purpose of providing Air Force support for the CIA and for protecting the best interests of the USAF while performing that task. My door was labeled simply, "Team B"; yet that Boston banker knocked and entered with assurance. Somehow he knew what my work was and he knew that I might be able to help him.

In 1959 there were very few helicopters in all of the services, and military procurement of those expensive machines was at an all-time low. The Bell Helicopter Company was all but out of business, and its parent company, Bell Aerospace Corp., was having trouble keeping it financially afloat. Meanwhile, the shrewd Royal Little, President of the Providence-based Textron Company, had a good cash position and could well afford the acquisition of a loser. Textron and the First National Bank of Boston got together to talk helicopters. Neither one knew a thing about them. But men in First Boston were close to the CIA, and they learned that the CIA was operating helicopters in Laos. What they needed to know now was, "What would be the future of the military helicopter, and would the use of helicopters in South East Asia escalate if given a little boost -- such as moving a squadron from Laos to Vietnam?" The CIA could tell them about that, and Frank Hand would be the man who could get them to the right people in the Pentagon.

The banker from Boston phrased his questions as though he believed that the helicopters in Laos were somehow operating under the Air Force, and then went on to ask about their tactical significance and about the possible increase of helicopter utilization for that kind of warfare. This was at a time when not even newspapers had reported anything like the operation of such large and expensive aircraft in that remote war. We had a rather thorough discussion and then he left. He called me several times after that and visited my office a month or two later.

As the record will show, Textron did acquire the Bell Helicopter Company and the CIA did step up use of helicopters to the extent that one of the CIA's own proprietary companies, Asia Aeronautics Inc., had more than four thousand men on each of two bases where helicopters were maintained. Most of those men were involved in their maintenance -- Bell Helicopters, no less!

Orders for Bel Helicopters for use in Vietnam exceeded $600-million. Anyone wanting to know more about how the U.S. got so heavily ($200-billion and the loss of 58,000 American lives) involved in Indochina need look no further. This was the pattern and the plan.

At the present time, when the White House, the House, and the Senate are all investigating the CIA, it is important to understand the CIA and to put it all in the proper perspective. It is not the President who instructs the CIA concerning what it will do. And in many cases it is not even the Director of Central Intelligence who instructs the CIA. The CIA is a great, monstrous machine with tremendous and terrible power. It can be set in motion from the outside like a programmer setting a computer in operation, and then it covers up what it is doing when men like Frank Hand -- the real movers -- put grease on the correct gears. And in a majority of cases, the power behind it all is big business, big banks, big law firms and big money. The agency exists to be used by them.

Let no one misunderstand what I mean. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson who on more than one occasion said that the CIA was "operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Carribean." In other words, he knew it was doing this -- and he was the President! This knowledge has been recently confirmed by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (who is a former head of the CIA) and others by their admission that they told the agency to end all "terminations." But Lyndon Johnson was powerless to do anything about it. This is an astounding admission from a President, the very man from whom, the CIA says, it always gets its instructions.

The present concern over "domestic surveillance" and such other lean tidbits -- most important to you and me as they are -- is not important to the CIA. It can easily dispense with a James Angleton or even a Helms or a Colby (just look at the list of CIA bigwigs who have been fired -- Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Dick Helms, and now perhaps Colby); but the great machine will live on while Congress digs away at the Golden Apples tossed casually aside by the CIA -- the supreme Aphrodite of them all. Notice that the agency cares little about giving away "secrets" in the form of cleverly written insider books such as those by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. The CIA just makes it look as though it cared with some high-class window dressing. Actually the real harm to the American public from those books is to make people believe that certain carefully selected propaganda is true.

In the story of Frank Hand we come much closer to seeing exactly how the CIA operates to control this government and other foreign governments. It is still operating that way. Today it is President Ford who is the unwitting accessory.

Greg,

--Tommy

[Michael Schweitzer]

You'll need to do your own research. But, here's something to consider...

How the CIA Controls President Ford

By L. Fletcher Prouty

In this monstrous U.S. government today, it's not so much what comes down from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or from the middle -- the least scrutinized level. (Contrary to the current CIA propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, "What the Agency does is ordered by the President.")

As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch if you know the cops and the courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and to shield them from outside eyes.

Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He knew the girls were happy, busy, and well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what they were doing. His favorites, all through the years of his prime as Director of Central Intelligence, were such stellar performers as Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White, Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for them to do anything they came up with.

When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Tom Gates, then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor.

While he peddled the hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the king. This works for the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student and practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in the ways of the cloth.

But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable -- and surely the best -- of these was an agent named Frank Hand.

In my book, The Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name; but a small item in a recent obituary column stated that:

"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall, Minn. . . . (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had served with the CIA from 1950 until retirement in 1971."

After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency, all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a "senior official."

Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Tom Gates or Allen Dulles or John Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories about Frank Hand. They would do more to characterize the nature and the sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work unobtrusively.

You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids," lost in the maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, Hobbit-like, pleasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was brought in with the original load of concrete. Thousands of career men to this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked anywhere else. I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963, and he was at my farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip he made in those busy years between the Pentagon and the CIA he would have died a very wealthy man. He popularized the Agency term "across the river" and the "Acme Plumbers" nickname for agents of the CIA. (A term later to be confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt, McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and connections and therefore were "Plumbers." Only the insiders knew about the real "Acme Plumbers.")

Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or Fitzgerald. Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

There has long existed a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to industry-banking law and to the multinational corporate centers of greed and power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For example, if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should turn up something. Real power is the ability to keep the government bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.

Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity, as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never did. He was so anonymous that even his friends could not find him.

The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a Bill Colby, Dick Helms, or Allen Dulles, you know the real value of an indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are down, the CIA could care less about overturning "Communism" in Cuba or Chile. What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than control over the government of Jordan or Syria.

Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war, I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412/2 committee). That meant the agency had neither been directed by the National Security Council to move those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a tactical movement. In other words, the planned intervention into South Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.

This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine operations in Laos.

At that time my immediate superior was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the CIA. Also at that time, Frank Hand, "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was a cover assignment -- "cover slot" as it was known to us and to the CIA. Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon.

No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the subject around to his point with such a comment as, "Fletch, who do you suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.

The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he would set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries. In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with the most "highly sensitive" tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In this manner he would find out what the real thinking in the Pentagon might be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea -- such as in the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people. He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the CIA.

Then he would drop out of the picture for awhile to travel back to the old CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General Cabell. On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial, to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, and other operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how to overpower and outmaneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the White House.

The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001 percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that, "What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves without having the President find out -- or at least without discovery until it is too late."

"It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment, carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.

In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind. Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam, in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to change his policy of limited involvement.

Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or bypass the Secretary of Defense for the time being by going to the White House for support. In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the CIA wanted no more of it. Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or feeding. The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger prospects in Vietnam.

So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos, he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.

This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26 bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other weapons, C-46, C-54 and other Air America-supported heavy transport aircraft, U-2 operations over Indochina, radar and other clandestine equipment, C-130's specially modified for deep Tibetan operations, and much more. From the point of view of the CIA, the helicopters were simply the tip of the iceberg, and the decision was its most important in that decade.

Typically, in his unwitting Mother Superior-style, which included bulldog tenacity, Dulles chose the route to the White House. Here again he could rely strongly on Frank Hand. Working with Hand in Erskine's office was the CIA's other best agent, Major General Edward G. Lansdale, who had long served in the CIA. Like Hand, he had unequalled contacts in the Department of State and in the White House. In support of Dulles, they contacted their friends there and began a subtle and powerful move destined to prepare the way for what would appear to be a decision by President Eisenhower. This was an important feature of the "case study": The apparent Presidential decision.

When the CIA wants to do something for which it does not have prior approval and for which it does not have legal sanction, it works from the bottom, using all of its guile with security and "need to know" -- a euphemism for "keep the scheme away from anyone at any level of government who might stand in its way." Hand and Lansdale, among others, were almost always able to line up enough support in the right places to make it possible for the CIA to get a favorable reading from the "Forty Committee" on any subject, legal or not. In fact, this is the great weakness of such a committee. Rather than working to control the agency it works the other way. The procedure makes it possible for the agency to win approval from a lesser echelon of the NSC intrastructure, and then, by clamping on a security id, it makes others believe that the CIA had orders from the NSC or perhaps even from the President, when in fact it did not.

Thus it was that, about two weeks from the day that I received that first call requesting the movement of the squadron of helicopters, received word from General Erskine that he had been "officially" informed that the White House (Forty Committee) had approved the secret operation. The helicopters were moved into Vietnam. They were the first of thousands.

The great significance of this incident is to point out how the CIA works powerfully, deftly, and with great assurance at any level of our government to get anything it wants done. But the anecdote shows only the surface coating of the application of the CIA apparatus.

One year earlier, in 1959, Frank Hand had directed a Boston banker to my office. At that time I worked in the Directorate of Plans in Air Force headquarters and my work was top secret. Few of my contemporaries in the Pentagon knew that I was in charge of a global U.S. Air Force system created for the dual purpose of providing Air Force support for the CIA and for protecting the best interests of the USAF while performing that task. My door was labeled simply, "Team B"; yet that Boston banker knocked and entered with assurance. Somehow he knew what my work was and he knew that I might be able to help him.

In 1959 there were very few helicopters in all of the services, and military procurement of those expensive machines was at an all-time low. The Bell Helicopter Company was all but out of business, and its parent company, Bell Aerospace Corp., was having trouble keeping it financially afloat. Meanwhile, the shrewd Royal Little, President of the Providence-based Textron Company, had a good cash position and could well afford the acquisition of a loser. Textron and the First National Bank of Boston got together to talk helicopters. Neither one knew a thing about them. But men in First Boston were close to the CIA, and they learned that the CIA was operating helicopters in Laos. What they needed to know now was, "What would be the future of the military helicopter, and would the use of helicopters in South East Asia escalate if given a little boost -- such as moving a squadron from Laos to Vietnam?" The CIA could tell them about that, and Frank Hand would be the man who could get them to the right people in the Pentagon.

The banker from Boston phrased his questions as though he believed that the helicopters in Laos were somehow operating under the Air Force, and then went on to ask about their tactical significance and about the possible increase of helicopter utilization for that kind of warfare. This was at a time when not even newspapers had reported anything like the operation of such large and expensive aircraft in that remote war. We had a rather thorough discussion and then he left. He called me several times after that and visited my office a month or two later.

As the record will show, Textron did acquire the Bell Helicopter Company and the CIA did step up use of helicopters to the extent that one of the CIA's own proprietary companies, Asia Aeronautics Inc., had more than four thousand men on each of two bases where helicopters were maintained. Most of those men were involved in their maintenance -- Bell Helicopters, no less!

Orders for Bel Helicopters for use in Vietnam exceeded $600-million. Anyone wanting to know more about how the U.S. got so heavily ($200-billion and the loss of 58,000 American lives) involved in Indochina need look no further. This was the pattern and the plan.

At the present time, when the White House, the House, and the Senate are all investigating the CIA, it is important to understand the CIA and to put it all in the proper perspective. It is not the President who instructs the CIA concerning what it will do. And in many cases it is not even the Director of Central Intelligence who instructs the CIA. The CIA is a great, monstrous machine with tremendous and terrible power. It can be set in motion from the outside like a programmer setting a computer in operation, and then it covers up what it is doing when men like Frank Hand -- the real movers -- put grease on the correct gears. And in a majority of cases, the power behind it all is big business, big banks, big law firms and big money. The agency exists to be used by them.

Let no one misunderstand what I mean. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson who on more than one occasion said that the CIA was "operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Carribean." In other words, he knew it was doing this -- and he was the President! This knowledge has been recently confirmed by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (who is a former head of the CIA) and others by their admission that they told the agency to end all "terminations." But Lyndon Johnson was powerless to do anything about it. This is an astounding admission from a President, the very man from whom, the CIA says, it always gets its instructions.

The present concern over "domestic surveillance" and such other lean tidbits -- most important to you and me as they are -- is not important to the CIA. It can easily dispense with a James Angleton or even a Helms or a Colby (just look at the list of CIA bigwigs who have been fired -- Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Dick Helms, and now perhaps Colby); but the great machine will live on while Congress digs away at the Golden Apples tossed casually aside by the CIA -- the supreme Aphrodite of them all. Notice that the agency cares little about giving away "secrets" in the form of cleverly written insider books such as those by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. The CIA just makes it look as though it cared with some high-class window dressing. Actually the real harm to the American public from those books is to make people believe that certain carefully selected propaganda is true.

In the story of Frank Hand we come much closer to seeing exactly how the CIA operates to control this government and other foreign governments. It is still operating that way. Today it is President Ford who is the unwitting accessory.

Greg,

--Tommy

Greg,

Thank you very much for sharing the article. Very illuminating. And Col. Prouty was perceptive in anticipating Colby's fate. Ford fired Colby about 3 months after the article was published. If I may return to an earlier question, what is your understanding of what Col. Prouty meant when he referred to the "Gold Key Club"?

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

[Michael Schweitzer]

You'll need to do your own research. But, here's something to consider...

How the CIA Controls President Ford

By L. Fletcher Prouty

In this monstrous U.S. government today, it's not so much what comes down from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or from the middle -- the least scrutinized level. (Contrary to the current CIA propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline, Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, "What the Agency does is ordered by the President.")

As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch if you know the cops and the courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and to shield them from outside eyes.

Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He knew the girls were happy, busy, and well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what they were doing. His favorites, all through the years of his prime as Director of Central Intelligence, were such stellar performers as Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White, Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for them to do anything they came up with.

When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Tom Gates, then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor.

While he peddled the hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the king. This works for the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student and practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in the ways of the cloth.

But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable -- and surely the best -- of these was an agent named Frank Hand.

In my book, The Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name; but a small item in a recent obituary column stated that:

"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall, Minn. . . . (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had served with the CIA from 1950 until retirement in 1971."

After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency, all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a "senior official."

Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Tom Gates or Allen Dulles or John Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories about Frank Hand. They would do more to characterize the nature and the sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work unobtrusively.

You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids," lost in the maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, Hobbit-like, pleasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was brought in with the original load of concrete. Thousands of career men to this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked anywhere else. I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963, and he was at my farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip he made in those busy years between the Pentagon and the CIA he would have died a very wealthy man. He popularized the Agency term "across the river" and the "Acme Plumbers" nickname for agents of the CIA. (A term later to be confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt, McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and connections and therefore were "Plumbers." Only the insiders knew about the real "Acme Plumbers.")

Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or Fitzgerald. Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

There has long existed a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to industry-banking law and to the multinational corporate centers of greed and power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For example, if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should turn up something. Real power is the ability to keep the government bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.

Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity, as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never did. He was so anonymous that even his friends could not find him.

The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a Bill Colby, Dick Helms, or Allen Dulles, you know the real value of an indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are down, the CIA could care less about overturning "Communism" in Cuba or Chile. What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than control over the government of Jordan or Syria.

Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war, I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412/2 committee). That meant the agency had neither been directed by the National Security Council to move those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a tactical movement. In other words, the planned intervention into South Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.

This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine operations in Laos.

At that time my immediate superior was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the CIA. Also at that time, Frank Hand, "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was a cover assignment -- "cover slot" as it was known to us and to the CIA. Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon.

No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the subject around to his point with such a comment as, "Fletch, who do you suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.

The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he would set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries. In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with the most "highly sensitive" tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In this manner he would find out what the real thinking in the Pentagon might be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea -- such as in the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people. He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the CIA.

Then he would drop out of the picture for awhile to travel back to the old CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General Cabell. On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial, to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, and other operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how to overpower and outmaneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the White House.

The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001 percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that, "What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves without having the President find out -- or at least without discovery until it is too late."

"It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment, carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.

In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind. Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam, in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to change his policy of limited involvement.

Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or bypass the Secretary of Defense for the time being by going to the White House for support. In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the CIA wanted no more of it. Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or feeding. The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger prospects in Vietnam.

So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos, he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.

This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26 bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other weapons, C-46, C-54 and other Air America-supported heavy transport aircraft, U-2 operations over Indochina, radar and other clandestine equipment, C-130's specially modified for deep Tibetan operations, and much more. From the point of view of the CIA, the helicopters were simply the tip of the iceberg, and the decision was its most important in that decade.

Typically, in his unwitting Mother Superior-style, which included bulldog tenacity, Dulles chose the route to the White House. Here again he could rely strongly on Frank Hand. Working with Hand in Erskine's office was the CIA's other best agent, Major General Edward G. Lansdale, who had long served in the CIA. Like Hand, he had unequalled contacts in the Department of State and in the White House. In support of Dulles, they contacted their friends there and began a subtle and powerful move destined to prepare the way for what would appear to be a decision by President Eisenhower. This was an important feature of the "case study": The apparent Presidential decision.

When the CIA wants to do something for which it does not have prior approval and for which it does not have legal sanction, it works from the bottom, using all of its guile with security and "need to know" -- a euphemism for "keep the scheme away from anyone at any level of government who might stand in its way." Hand and Lansdale, among others, were almost always able to line up enough support in the right places to make it possible for the CIA to get a favorable reading from the "Forty Committee" on any subject, legal or not. In fact, this is the great weakness of such a committee. Rather than working to control the agency it works the other way. The procedure makes it possible for the agency to win approval from a lesser echelon of the NSC intrastructure, and then, by clamping on a security id, it makes others believe that the CIA had orders from the NSC or perhaps even from the President, when in fact it did not.

Thus it was that, about two weeks from the day that I received that first call requesting the movement of the squadron of helicopters, received word from General Erskine that he had been "officially" informed that the White House (Forty Committee) had approved the secret operation. The helicopters were moved into Vietnam. They were the first of thousands.

The great significance of this incident is to point out how the CIA works powerfully, deftly, and with great assurance at any level of our government to get anything it wants done. But the anecdote shows only the surface coating of the application of the CIA apparatus.

One year earlier, in 1959, Frank Hand had directed a Boston banker to my office. At that time I worked in the Directorate of Plans in Air Force headquarters and my work was top secret. Few of my contemporaries in the Pentagon knew that I was in charge of a global U.S. Air Force system created for the dual purpose of providing Air Force support for the CIA and for protecting the best interests of the USAF while performing that task. My door was labeled simply, "Team B"; yet that Boston banker knocked and entered with assurance. Somehow he knew what my work was and he knew that I might be able to help him.

In 1959 there were very few helicopters in all of the services, and military procurement of those expensive machines was at an all-time low. The Bell Helicopter Company was all but out of business, and its parent company, Bell Aerospace Corp., was having trouble keeping it financially afloat. Meanwhile, the shrewd Royal Little, President of the Providence-based Textron Company, had a good cash position and could well afford the acquisition of a loser. Textron and the First National Bank of Boston got together to talk helicopters. Neither one knew a thing about them. But men in First Boston were close to the CIA, and they learned that the CIA was operating helicopters in Laos. What they needed to know now was, "What would be the future of the military helicopter, and would the use of helicopters in South East Asia escalate if given a little boost -- such as moving a squadron from Laos to Vietnam?" The CIA could tell them about that, and Frank Hand would be the man who could get them to the right people in the Pentagon.

The banker from Boston phrased his questions as though he believed that the helicopters in Laos were somehow operating under the Air Force, and then went on to ask about their tactical significance and about the possible increase of helicopter utilization for that kind of warfare. This was at a time when not even newspapers had reported anything like the operation of such large and expensive aircraft in that remote war. We had a rather thorough discussion and then he left. He called me several times after that and visited my office a month or two later.

As the record will show, Textron did acquire the Bell Helicopter Company and the CIA did step up use of helicopters to the extent that one of the CIA's own proprietary companies, Asia Aeronautics Inc., had more than four thousand men on each of two bases where helicopters were maintained. Most of those men were involved in their maintenance -- Bell Helicopters, no less!

Orders for Bel Helicopters for use in Vietnam exceeded $600-million. Anyone wanting to know more about how the U.S. got so heavily ($200-billion and the loss of 58,000 American lives) involved in Indochina need look no further. This was the pattern and the plan.

At the present time, when the White House, the House, and the Senate are all investigating the CIA, it is important to understand the CIA and to put it all in the proper perspective. It is not the President who instructs the CIA concerning what it will do. And in many cases it is not even the Director of Central Intelligence who instructs the CIA. The CIA is a great, monstrous machine with tremendous and terrible power. It can be set in motion from the outside like a programmer setting a computer in operation, and then it covers up what it is doing when men like Frank Hand -- the real movers -- put grease on the correct gears. And in a majority of cases, the power behind it all is big business, big banks, big law firms and big money. The agency exists to be used by them.

Let no one misunderstand what I mean. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson who on more than one occasion said that the CIA was "operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Carribean." In other words, he knew it was doing this -- and he was the President! This knowledge has been recently confirmed by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (who is a former head of the CIA) and others by their admission that they told the agency to end all "terminations." But Lyndon Johnson was powerless to do anything about it. This is an astounding admission from a President, the very man from whom, the CIA says, it always gets its instructions.

The present concern over "domestic surveillance" and such other lean tidbits -- most important to you and me as they are -- is not important to the CIA. It can easily dispense with a James Angleton or even a Helms or a Colby (just look at the list of CIA bigwigs who have been fired -- Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Dick Helms, and now perhaps Colby); but the great machine will live on while Congress digs away at the Golden Apples tossed casually aside by the CIA -- the supreme Aphrodite of them all. Notice that the agency cares little about giving away "secrets" in the form of cleverly written insider books such as those by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. The CIA just makes it look as though it cared with some high-class window dressing. Actually the real harm to the American public from those books is to make people believe that certain carefully selected propaganda is true.

In the story of Frank Hand we come much closer to seeing exactly how the CIA operates to control this government and other foreign governments. It is still operating that way. Today it is President Ford who is the unwitting accessory.

Greg,

--Tommy

Greg,

Thank you very much for sharing the article. Very illuminating. And Col. Prouty was perceptive in anticipating Colby's fate. Ford fired Colby about 3 months after the article was published. If I may return to an earlier question, what is your understanding of what Col. Prouty meant when he referred to the "Gold Key Club"?

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

[Greg Burnham]

Greg,

Thank you very much for sharing the article. Very illuminating. And Col. Prouty was perceptive in anticipating Colby's fate. Ford fired Colby about 3 months after the article was published. If I may return to an earlier question, what is your understanding of what Col. Prouty meant when he referred to the "Gold Key Club"?

Mike

Mike,

Here's a very short excerpt from a Dave Ratcliff interview with Prouty:

"Ratcliffe: In looking back at the actual execution of the murder -- the planning and execution -- what role, if any, do you feel the following government agencies (or individuals within those agencies) played. I want to just run down a list here. Start with the FBI.

Prouty: I'll just say first that no agency played a role as an agency. What happens in such things as this -- in fact, we had a term for it, we called it the "Gold Key Club." A certain small group coalesces and they are given an order to do something and it's not by agency. As a comparison: there was a program that had been constituted, I think in '62, called Mongoose. The objective of Mongoose was to remove Castro from office in Cuba. The people that were assigned to Mongoose (under the direction of General Lansdale), were from various agencies and various countries working together. Some others who were not from any agencies -- they were hired employees from other specialties and other businesses that are competent in this business of establishing coup d'états and things like that.

So it's not correct to say that the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the State Department, had a role in this. To over-simplify, their people are bureaucrats. It could very well be (and I'm quite sure it was) that people from those agencies might have been called upon for certain special functions, but that isn't how these jobs are done.

Ratcliffe: So there wouldn't be much point in looking at it by agency as far as being able to identify anyone that you felt, "Oh, yes, that person must have had this to do with it or that to do with it -- "

Prouty: Not that way specifically. Those things are done. I have worked on assassinations in other countries, or the removal from office of people from other countries, and it was not done agency by agency. It was done on the basis of a very clever group arrangement which would get the job done by people who are very proficient in that type of business -- and totally unknown, or "faceless."

Edited December 21, 2011 by Greg Burnham

[Guest Tom Scully]

A conversation with Peter Dale Scott

This conversation with Peter Dale Scott was recorded in London at the end of August

1984. For the most part it is verbatim Scott: my contributions have been tidied up a

good deal. As anyone who has met me knows, I am not as concise and articulate as the

'RR' presented here.....

....RR: If 'X' wanted to control John Kennedy, why not just blackmail him? Why

actually shoot him? Why not poison him? Why so public? Why so vulgar?

PDS: Yes, particularly if you're saying it was a high-level operation. Why not just give

him something which made him have a heart attack? That's a very good question.

I've thought about this before and I used to talk about a two or three-tiered

conspiracy in which what might happen would be A learns that B is going to kill

the President; and whereas A normally might be able to stop it, A's culpability is

allowing B to go ahead and do it. That's why I don't totally rule out the organised

crime thing at all. I just simply said from the very beginning that the cover-up

proves that it was sanctioned at a level higher than organised crime. No way that

Blakey can explain the cover-up. He has to pretend that a cover-up didn't occur.

And this is particularly sensitive for him because Blakey himself was in the

Justice Department close to the area that was the responsibility of Howard

Willens. And Howard Willens was seconded to the Warren Commission to

become a kind of key man, assigning A to do this and B to do that and nobody at

all to find out who killed the President.

Vernon Walters:

Gene Wheaton was one of the key figures in exposing the Iran Contra Scandal. He was interviewed by Matt Ehling about this on 4th January, 2002. The full interview can be found here:

http://www.strategic-road.com/confid/archiv/special1102.htm

However, this section is well-worth reading as I believe it is relevant to the investigation into the assassination of JFK:

This stuff goes back to the scandals of the 70s... of Watergate and Richard Helms, the CIA director, being convicted by Congress of lying to Congress, of Ted Shackley and Tom Clines and Dick Secord and a group of them being forced into retirement as a result of the scandal over Edmond P. Wilson’s training of Libyan terrorists in conjunction with these guys, and moving C-4 explosives to Libya. They decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy. They felt that the government had betrayed them and that they were the real heroes in this country and that the government became their enemy. In the late 70s, in fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76 to Jimmy Carter, and then these guys became exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for whatever reason... there were different factions involved in all this stuff, and power plays... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush."

Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House. They’d let Ronald Reagan and Nancy out of the closet and let them make a speech and run them up the flagpole and salute them and put them back in the closet while these spooks ran the White House. They made sure that George Bush was the chairman of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations things. One of them was the Vice President’s Task Force On Combating Terrorism. They got Bush in as the head of the vice president’s task force on narcotics, the South Florida Task Force, so that they could place people in DEA and in the Pentagon and in customs to run interference for them in these large-scale international narcotics and movement of narcotics money cases. They got Bush in as the chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in ’83 so they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be so loosely structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars of what amounted to the taxpayers’ money out of these Savings and Loans and then bail them out. They got hit twice: they stole the money out of the Savings and Loans, and then they sold the Savings and Loans right back to the same guys, and then the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation -- the taxpayers money -- paid for bailing out the Savings and Loans that they stole the money from ... and they ran the whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president even before the ‘88 election when he became president.

See, when Harry Truman signed the National Security Act creating the CIA, he specifically stated in that act that they could not have any police powers. And they could not operate domestically in the United States, because he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a little at a time, that coup has taken place.

This crowd really believes that the unwashed masses are ignorant, that we are people who are not capable of governing ourselves, that we need this elitist group to control the country, and the world -- these guys have expanded. They look at the United States not as a country, not in any kind of patriotic mode now, but they look on it as a state within a world that they control. And that’s this attitude that they have. They’re not unlike any other megalomaniac in the world. They’re nutty as fruitcake, but they’ve got distinguished gray hair, three-piece dark suits and they carry briefcases, and they’ll stand up and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in the world, but they don’t socialize and function outside their own little clique. My experience with them is that they could be certified as criminally insane and put away in a rubber room and have the key thrown away. That’s how dangerous they are. But they’re powerful, and they’re educated. And that makes them twice as dangerous. And that’s basically what’s running the world right now.

If I had not been part of this, and hadn’t seen it first hand, I would not believe a word I’m saying. You couldn’t convince me that something like this -- and the American people will not believe it. Because you can’t get the average citizen . . . I’ve talked to judges and lawyers who have invited me in to talk to them. Some of them really patriotic concerned people. It turns them off, because it changes their entire life experience, and the reason that they have existed, and the things they have believed in all their life if you tell them this.

I have sat on the banks of the Potomac in restaurants with 75 and 80-year-old retired CIA people and retired generals, West Point graduates, honorable people ... these old men have sat with tears in their eyes and told me that, "Gene, what you’re into, you understand it more than we did, and it’s absolutely true, but it’s just so big you can’t do anything about it." I guess if I believed that, I’d go off to some South Sea island and drink a few Cuba Libres laying in the sand or something, but somebody has to keep charging in there, you know. The biggest chink in their armor – and it would take somebody smarter than me to figure out how to exploit it -- is their insecurity. They are afraid of a peasant with a pitchfork. And the reason they react so strongly and violently against anybody who opposes them, is because they’re afraid someone will grab a thread and unravel it, and their whole uniform will come unraveled ...

The only way I can think of to get this thing exposed, would be to coordinate with all of the different independent small newspapers and radio stations in the United States -- and television networks -- and get them to start blasting this thing -- and some universities -- because the major media’s not going to do anything about it.

Vernon Walters:

[PDF]

1972 INVITATIONS EXTENDED TO AND ACCEPTED BY DDCI

www.foia.cia.gov/best-of.../CIA-RDP80R01731R002100090006-8.p...

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View

Mrs. Tartiere & Ernest Byfield's lunch at Glen Ora farm, Middleburg. ... 1974 Invitations Extended to DDCI which he Accepted. British Charge Sykes' Luncheon .

[Richard Hocking]

Tom (and John),

I had not seen the Wheaton interview before. Very interesting.

Thanks for posting it.

[Michael Schweitzer]

WHY WAS PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATED?

by Michael B. Schweitzer

Attorney at Law (retired)

THE TRUTH: The CIA assassinated President Kennedy, in what is nowadays called a "regime change." The directive came from its former director, Allen Dulles, a criminal mastermind fired by Kennedy for launching unauthorized covert military operations to force him into wars. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a ruthless political manipulator with a mania to be president and a manic-depressive serial killer with a personal assassin (Malcolm Wallace), supported the plan, secured the financing from his Texas oil backers (H.L. Hunt, John Mecom and especially Clint Murchison, pronounced "Murkison," whom Kennedy enraged by proposing to eliminate a massive tax break for oilmen), and waited in the wings to control the cover-up. Johnson had positioned himself as Kennedy's successor in 1960, by blackmailing Kennedy into nominating him for the vice presidency with evidence of Kennedy's womanizing furnished by Johnson's close friend and neighbor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The assassination, although uniquely ambitious, was another CIA covert military operation, intricately planned by members its inner circle, the "Gold Key Club," hand-picked by and still loyal to Dulles. The killing itself was carried out by the United States Secret Service and long-time CIA Mafia contract shooters. The operation, code-named "The Big Event," ambushed the president in a Dallas motorcade by maneuvering his open limousine into a killing zone where bullets struck him from multiple directions. Johnson then created a seven-man, "blue ribbon" investigative committee, the Warren Commission, to preempt all other inquiries (especially by Congress), and Hoover falsified and manipulated all evidence fed to it and the public. The Commission – whose members included Dulles and, as FBI informant, then-Congressman and later President Gerald R. Ford – issued a "definitive" report that pinned the blame on a "lone nut" assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was actually an FBI "asset" who had infiltrated secret CIA training camps for a Cuban invasion so Hoover could shut them down, ironically gifting the CIA a disposable asset of its own. Oswald himself was shot dead two days after Kennedy in an event staged for live television by the CIA so all Americans could see for themselves "case closed."

JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney, I state facts, not speculation. I devoted more than 4,000 hours to research, reviewing mountainous written and pictorial evidence (including newly-declassified CIA and White House memoranda) and studying the life histories of key individuals. Then I assembled the array of disparate fragments into a coherent whole. Anyone can do the same, because the information is all in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. Turning to specific questions:

WHY WAS PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATED? Mainly because Kennedy was about to end the Cold War, an extraordinarily profitable enterprise for the military-industrial complex. (There were additional reasons, but this was the main one.) The Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, transformed both Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy became an outspoken peace advocate and called for nuclear disarmament. Khrushchev responded by secretly entering into in peace negotiations. Kennedy had become our first and last anti-Establishment president. He threatened to gut the profits of American's most powerful private interests. Both leaders had to go, and Dulles knew better than anyone outside the Kremlin that killing Kennedy would topple Khrushchev as well, because replacing Kennedy with hardliner Johnson would compel the Soviets to counter-move by installing their own hardliner, Leonid Brezhnev, which they did 11 months after the assassination. The Cold War, about to end in Kennedy's second term, continued for another profitable quarter of a century. The surprise is not the assassination. The surprise would be if there wasn't one. And one must admit Dulles was clever. He overthrew the two most powerful governments on earth by killing just one man.

EFFECT ON THE WAR IN VIETNAM: Johnson's first major act as President was to issue National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 on Nov. 26, 1963. It reversed Kennedy's NSAM 263, issued Oct. 11, 1963, that ordered all American military personnel withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1965. Interestingly, McGeorge Bundy, the highest-ranking CIA infiltrator in the Kennedy Administration (the national security adviser), drafted NSAM 273 the day BEFORE the assassination.

KENNEDY PREDICTED THE CIA WOULD LEAD A COUP: 50 days before the assassination, famed New York Times columnist Arthur Krock published an article quoting a "very high American official" as stating: "If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA." Krock later revealed the "official" was President Kennedy, who spoke the words to him the day before. Kennedy often turned to his friend Krock to publish statements too politically explosive for him to speak as President.

HOW DID DULLES GAIN SUCH POWER? President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him as the first civilian CIA Director in March, 1953, shortly after taking office, on the advice of Ike's friend and confidant Prescott Bush. Bush, during WWII, had been Hitler's American banker until the FBI seized his bank, and both his son and grandson became U.S. presidents. Dulles, a mysterious man with a Nazi past, in effect infiltrated the CIA as its first Nazi director. President Harry S Truman had created the CIA in 1947 as the intelligence arm of the Executive Branch, by signing the National Security Act. The Act included a CIA charter that unambiguously stated it would function only in response to directives of the president and of the president's own intelligence apparatus, the National Security Council. Nowhere does the charter even infer the CIA is allowed to initiate policy. Dulles, with free reign from Ike to run it as he chose, endowed the CIA with a policy-making function that served his personal aims: to act as the enforcement arm of the military-industrial complex by conducting "covert operations." This military function gave the CIA full use of legitimate armed forces resources off the books and absorbed more than 80% of its budget. Dulles also re-structured the Agency horizontally, not vertically, so no compartment could know what any other was doing. He had also learned to profit from an intelligence post during World War II, when he ran a European office of the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) while acting as intermediary for Hitler's bankers. Dulles' CIA profited the most powerful private interests in America: industrialists, bankers, big oil, agribusiness, the Rockefellers, and himself. His covert actions included two "regime changes" that turned democracies into dictatorships. In Iran in 1953, he overthrew the Mossadegh government (Operation TP-AJAX) after it nationalized a British oil company that controlled Iran's oil industry; new arrangements gave U.S. corporations an equal share with the British over Iranian oil. Then in Guatemala in 1954, it overthrew the Arbenz government (Operation PBSUCCESS) after it initiated a land-reform program that re-distributed land mainly owned by United Fruit Company (later United Brands) to landless peasants. United Fruit owned 80% of the country's arable land. Dulles had been a lawyer for United Fruit and remained (with his Secretary-of-State brother John Foster Dulles) a major stockholder. In his Guatemala invasion, Dulles killed 150,000 people.

THE DULLES TOUCH: Dulles, as CIA chief, specialized in 4 things: assassinating people, overthrowing governments, infiltrating and manipulating the news media (Operation Mockingbird), and conducting horrific mind-control experiments on unknowing subjects (Project MK-ULTRA). The "MK" stood for "mind control" (as spelled in German, "kontrolle") and "ULTRA" was a top secret CIA classification so high it withheld information from the president. Dulles staffed his brainwashing project with dozens of Nazi scientists he smuggled into secret CIA bases in the U.S. to continue the work they had done for Hitler. Among Dulles' imports: the most sadistic man on earth, Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele (code-named "Dr. Green"), to disembowel children in front of other children to desensitize them. Dulles also planted teams of infiltrators throughout the federal government, including every branch of the military, every secretive agency, and the White House. His operatives could easily influence or even direct Secret Service activities and cut deals with the Mafia. Indeed, one recently declassified CIA memo discloses Dulles personally approved a murder contract with Johnny Roselli, second-in-command of the Chicago Mob under Sam Giancana. Even after losing his CIA post, Dulles remained on retainer as the attorney-enforcer for the military-industrial complex, and continued to serve his clients (as would any good lawyer) through his CIA loyalists, including killing Kennedy – which, for a CIA like that, would be a day at the office.

WHO TOLD THE TRUTH? Ironically, the only players who told the truth were the two supposed "killers": Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who "shot" him in the stomach during his basement-garage transfer from Dallas city to county jail! In a city jail corridor, Oswald told the media he was "just a patsy," and Ruby later told the media "the answer is the man in office now." Then, in 1967, just before his death from sudden lung cancer, Ruby told reporter Tom Johnson the Kennedy assassination "is the most bizarre conspiracy in the history of the world."

THE RUBY-OSWALD CASE-CLOSER: Ruby actually fired a blank! Oswald, who had asked to wear a dark sweater before the transfer so he would look better on television, groaned twice and dropped to the ground in an Oscar-worthy performance. The CIA then double-crossed him in the ambulance and shot him for real. The necessity: The coup required 2 assassinations: JFK and Oswald. Letting Oswald live would have kept questions alive for years – during the prolonged process of trial and appeal – which would not only have delayed legitimizing the Johnson presidency, but given the public time to think about what happened and a jury a chance to acquit. That door had to be shut at once – and it was, within 48 hours. Planners selected Ruby so the second killing, like the first, could be pinned on a "lone nut" gunman. But the scenario required a single shot to play out plausibly. Ruby had to lunge at Oswald through a throng of police, reporters and photographers – a multiplicity of variables to hinder him. A fatal shot could only be guaranteed if someone else fired it. Absent this precaution, there may well have been a second "magic bullet" to explain: how a single shot by Ruby caused two wounds to Oswald. The evidence that Ruby did not shoot Oswald: photographer Bob Jackson, who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the "shooting," said there was "not a speck of blood anywhere" on the body or at the crime scene; the two "stretcher photos" of Oswald being carried to the ambulance show not only no blood on his sweater, but no damage to a single a fiber; and a shot by Ruby would have passed straight through him, but the trajectory of the bullet that killed him was upward. And Ruby, recounting the "incident" (his words) in an interview three weeks before he died, said: "I can't recall what had happened from the time I came to the bottom of the ramp until the police officers had me on the ground." His mind was blank about everything he said and did during his encounter with Oswald, as if programmed by MK-ULTRA to auto-erase. To those who doubt the proposition the Ruby-Oswald "shooting" was staged, consider this: in a plot that required two assassinations, what is the probability the first occurred by conspiracy and the second by chance?

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #1: The Warren Commission itself concluded Oswald could have fired only three shots. But their own evidence proved at least five. The Commission claimed a first shot missed and injured bystander James Tague with a flying curb fragment, a second (the "magic bullet") penetrated Kennedy's neck and struck Gov. John Connally three times, and the third hit Kennedy's head. But Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat, testified he heard Kennedy cry out, "My God, I'm hit!" (Warren Hearing Transcripts, Vol. II, p. 73.) Kennedy could only have said this BEFORE the throat-shot, because it took out his vocal chords. Moreover, some 40 out of 40 eye-witnesses (civilian and governmental) swore they heard two head-shots, half-a-second apart. Incidentally, the last shot was an exploding projectile fired from the front that blew the president's brains so far beyond the trunk of the car they splattered people behind it, and the famous Zapruder film shows First Lady Jacqueline stretch her arm to the far end of the trunk to retrieve a piece. (Curiously, the news media has consistently and falsely reported she climbed onto the trunk, as if to escape. The Zapruder film clearly shows she never left the back seat, but planted her knees atop it, grabbed the brain tissue, and immediately sat down again.) There is only one impossibility in the murder of President Kennedy: a lone assassin.

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #2: Six of the ten members of Kennedy's Cabinet were sent out of the country before the assassination, on a flight to Japan that only one of them had to make, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Flying with them, for no reason, was Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger – an expert on motorcade security. Only two important Cabinet members were in Washington, D.C. when Lyndon Johnson became the President of the United States: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Attorney General, Kennedy's brother Robert. Everyone else with authority to run a Department of the federal government was stranded over the Pacific Ocean in a presidential aircraft – with the code book to communicate with the White House missing! They learned about the assassination from an old-fashioned telex – and with no code book, only Johnson could run their Departments. Meanwhile, McNamara, attending a budget meeting at the Pentagon, was never told by anyone there that Kennedy died. He only learned about it 90 minutes later, when he received a personal phone call from Robert Kennedy. Someone cleared a path for Johnson to run almost the entire federal government himself, without any impediment, for the first 24 hours after the assassination. And also absent from the country during the assassination was the Joint Chief of Staff's intermediary with the CIA, Col. Fletcher Prouty. Someone sent Prouty on a pointless mission to the South Pole!

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #3: Only the CIA had the capability to carry out the assassination the way it happened, including making full use of the Secret Service (which designed a motorcade route that forced the presidential limo, improperly placed first in line for easy targeting, to make a slow-speed 120-degree turn – almost a U-turn – into a plaza open to gunfire from all directions to enter a freeway it did not have to use, abandoned all presidential security in Dallas including ordering his bodyguards off the back bumper of his limo, and later secretly shipped the limo to Ford Motors in Detroit where Lee Iacocca rebuilt it to destroy all evidence of bullet hits, including a bullet hole in the windshield positioned perfectly to hit Kennedy in the head), and staging the Oswald-Ruby case-closer (heavily promoted for public viewing by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry). The entire sequence of events displays the distinct and brilliant hallmarks of Allen Dulles, as identifiable as an artist's brushstrokes on a painting. The JFK assassination is a case study of how Allen Dulles' mind worked.

AND A FINAL TWIST: Rep. Hale Boggs, the member of the Warren Commission most dissatisfied with its findings, died in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska on Oct. 16, 1972. He had blasted the FBI on the House floor the previous year – on April 5, 1971 – for using Gestapo tactics against opponents of federal policy. Boggs was taken to the airport for the first leg of the trip by a young Democrat who later, as president, appointed Boggs' wife, Lindy, as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican after she served 18 years in Congress after her husband disappeared. The young Democrat: Bill Clinton.

CAVEAT: This summary answers only the second-level question: Who assassinated President Kennedy? (The CIA.) It does not address the first-level question: Who was the mastermind that set the machinery in motion? Many people, including Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, believed it was Lyndon Johnson, who coveted the presidency and blackmailed JFK into making him next in line. I believe it was Allen Dulles. I do not find credible the CIA assassinating the President of the United States to serve Lyndon Johnson personal ambitions. The CIA served the global geopolitical and profit interests of the top industrial and financial multinational corporations in the country. Their power exceeded the president's, they were Dulles' clients, and Kennedy had initiated policies that imminently threatened their profiteering.

This is what I see while reading your post

That you just watched the movie JFK for the first time recently

Just about everything in your post comes across as being said word for word in the movie JFK

Not from your "extensive research"

Dean, thank you for pointing out that the second paragraph of my essay (in which I mention my 4,000 hours of research) is, in effect, so threadbare it creates the impression I drew my thoughts from a viewing of Oliver Stone's film. I have re-written the paragraph to cite some of my key sources. Here is the revised text, and I would appreciate your feedback:

"JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years' experience specializing in legal research and evaluating evidence, I state findings, not speculation. I have devoted more than 4,000 hours to researching the assassination of President Kennedy. I have read what I consider the most scholarly books on the subject; studied the 'primary source' materials (statements and images from the time preserved in various media); reviewed many thousands of documents, including volumes of recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, the transcripts of the Warren Commission hearings, much of the 40-volume Senate 'Church Committee' report on the CIA (completed in 1976 after two years of investigation) that unmasked astonishingly un-American activities, and a long-withheld 600-page Justice Department report on CIA-Nazi collaboration entitled 'Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,' finally coerced into release in 2010 by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, National Security Archive v. Dept. of Justice; and went back decades in time, studying the life histories of the key individuals. Then I integrated the array of disparate fragments into a coherent presentation (which, for sake of brevity, does not include footnotes, but every fact is sourced). Anyone can do the same, because all of the information is in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. I do not pretend, to paraphrase that famous triple-redundancy they say in court, to have found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I offer my findings for your consideration."

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

Edited December 24, 2011 by Michael Schweitzer

[Michael Schweitzer]

Horrifically, among Dulles' personal imports, under the code name "Dr. Green," was literally the cruelest man on earth, Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele. Mengele, according to recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, [/size][/font] contributed to Dulles' project by disemboweling children in front of other children to desensitize them. BTW, "MK" stood for "mind control" as spelled in German ("kontrolle") and "ULTRA" was a top secret CIA classification so high it barred knowledge from the president.

Can you provide a citation for this?

Len, I already asked for one, my man!

My problem isn't so much the claims made (though some are clearly in error), it is that Michael stated "As an attorney, I state facts, not speculation. I devoted more than 4,000 hours to research, reviewing mountainous written and pictorial evidence (including newly-declassified CIA and White House memoranda) and studying the life histories of key individuals. Then I assembled the array of disparate fragments into a coherent whole. Anyone can do the same, because the information is all in the public domain..."

However, the sources, as far as I can tell, are pretty much limited to Prouty, E Howard Hunt and few internet sites similar in style and content to this one: http://www.bibliotec.../reptiles07.htm

I could be wrong.

Greg & Len,

I believe the term was described in the Church Committee testimony of Adm. Stansfield Turner, but I would have to search for it. BTW, you may find of particular interest in the 40-volume "Church Report" (completed in 1976 after 2 years of investigating the CIA) Volume 5, entitled "The Investigation of the Assassination of President J.F.K.: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies." The Committee found a multiplicity of failures by the intelligence agencies that investigated the assassination. Since the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, over 50,000 pages of Church Committee records have been declassified and made available to the public concerning these investigate failures and related topics.

Regarding my sources, I was remiss in not citing them (except in a few references in my essay). Other Forum members have pointed out this shortcoming, and appropriately so. I apologize for the omission, and have re-written both the second paragraph of my essay (which refers to my research) and my biography. Here is the revised text of my paragraph about my sources, and I welcome your feedback:

"JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years’ experience specializing in legal research and evaluating evidence, I state findings, not speculation. I have devoted more than 4,000 hours to researching the assassination of President Kennedy. I have read what I consider the most scholarly books on the subject; studied the 'primary source' materials (statements and images from the time preserved in various media); reviewed many thousands of documents, including volumes of recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, the transcripts of the Warren Commission hearings, much of the 40-volume Senate 'Church Committee' report on the CIA (completed in 1976 after two years of investigation) that unmasked astonishingly un-American activities, and a long-withheld 600-page Justice Department report on CIA-Nazi collaboration entitled 'Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,' finally coerced into release in 2010 by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, National Security Archive v. Dept. of Justice; and went back decades in time, studying the life histories of the key individuals. Then I integrated the array of disparate fragments into a coherent presentation (which, for sake of brevity, does not include footnotes, but every fact is sourced). Anyone can do the same, because all of the information is in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. I do not pretend, to paraphrase that famous triple-redundancy they say in court, to have found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I offer my findings for your consideration."

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

[Greg Parker]

Horrifically, among Dulles' personal imports, under the code name "Dr. Green," was literally the cruelest man on earth, Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele. Mengele, according to recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, [/size][/font] contributed to Dulles' project by disemboweling children in front of other children to desensitize them. BTW, "MK" stood for "mind control" as spelled in German ("kontrolle") and "ULTRA" was a top secret CIA classification so high it barred knowledge from the president.

Can you provide a citation for this?

Len, I already asked for one, my man!

My problem isn't so much the claims made (though some are clearly in error), it is that Michael stated "As an attorney, I state facts, not speculation. I devoted more than 4,000 hours to research, reviewing mountainous written and pictorial evidence (including newly-declassified CIA and White House memoranda) and studying the life histories of key individuals. Then I assembled the array of disparate fragments into a coherent whole. Anyone can do the same, because the information is all in the public domain..."

However, the sources, as far as I can tell, are pretty much limited to Prouty, E Howard Hunt and few internet sites similar in style and content to this one: http://www.bibliotec.../reptiles07.htm

I could be wrong.

Greg & Len,

I believe the term was described in the Church Committee testimony of Adm. Stansfield Turner, but I would have to search for it. BTW, you may find of particular interest in the 40-volume "Church Report" (completed in 1976 after 2 years of investigating the CIA) Volume 5, entitled "The Investigation of the Assassination of President J.F.K.: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies." The Committee found a multiplicity of failures by the intelligence agencies that investigated the assassination. Since the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, over 50,000 pages of Church Committee records have been declassified and made available to the public concerning these investigate failures and related topics.

Regarding my sources, I was remiss in not citing them (except in a few references in my essay). Other Forum members have pointed out this shortcoming, and appropriately so. I apologize for the omission, and have re-written both the second paragraph of my essay (which refers to my research) and my biography. Here is the revised text of my paragraph about my sources, and I welcome your feedback:

"JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years' experience specializing in legal research and evaluating evidence, I state findings, not speculation. I have devoted more than 4,000 hours to researching the assassination of President Kennedy. I have read what I consider the most scholarly books on the subject; studied the 'primary source' materials (statements and images from the time preserved in various media); reviewed many thousands of documents, including volumes of recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, the transcripts of the Warren Commission hearings, much of the 40-volume Senate 'Church Committee' report on the CIA (completed in 1976 after two years of investigation) that unmasked astonishingly un-American activities, and a long-withheld 600-page Justice Department report on CIA-Nazi collaboration entitled 'Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,' finally coerced into release in 2010 by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, National Security Archive v. Dept. of Justice; and went back decades in time, studying the life histories of the key individuals. Then I integrated the array of disparate fragments into a coherent presentation (which, for sake of brevity, does not include footnotes, but every fact is sourced). Anyone can do the same, because all of the information is in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. I do not pretend, to paraphrase that famous triple-redundancy they say in court, to have found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I offer my findings for your consideration."

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

Thanks Michael. Not everything said here needs to be cited or we'd all go bonkers... but something like your presentation, ideally, should be.

I don't agree with it all. Where I think you're on the right track is in the motive/s you've assigned.

Stansfield seemed genuinely clueless about much of the history of the areas of research you're looking at.

[Michael Schweitzer]

Allen Dulles WAS the loop.

No, you are quite mistaken. Dulles' own basic training was primarily as a lawyer. Even as DCI Dulles did not give orders, he took them.

From whom did Dulles take orders?

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

[Michael Schweitzer]

Allen Dulles WAS the loop.

No, you are quite mistaken. Dulles' own basic training was primarily as a lawyer. Even as DCI Dulles did not give orders, he took them.

Dulles' experience was primarily as a Nazi operative and financier. And you are worse than mistaken. You ought to be lobotomized.

I really do not understand, Mr. Schweitzer. Your post opening this thread seemed intelligent and well-thought out. While I don't necessarily agree 100% with everything that you wrote, it was good reading. I don't always agree 100% with Mr. Burnham, or Mr. Kelly or anyone else. And I think that is probably true for everyone on this forum: everyone probably disagrees with everyone about one thing or another.

I happen to agree with you about Allen Dulles in that I have a hard time believing that he was out of the loop. I just do not think that one could be DCI for as long as he was and not maintain serious contacts. On the other hand, I do also tend to agree with Mr. Burnham that the military played a major part, if not the major part, in the overall operation.

You resort to name-calling. I find it all so demeaning and childish. To suggest that Mr. Burnham should be lobotomized: what purpose does it serve? It just makes you look foolish, in my opinion.

Do you know Mr. Kelly and all the work he does to try to get to the facts and the truth of this whole nasty business? To suggest he is a "mockingbird" also makes you look foolish in my opinion.

For sure, you are not the only person here who resorts to name-calling when their opinion is challenged. We have all seen the large number of threads that have degenerated. But you are new here; maybe I am foolishly hopeful that some of the new members could work to raise the standard of discourse. We have a lot of intelligent and dedicated people here, and this forum contains an enormous wealth of information. Unfortunately too many times the valuable information is lost in the name-calling noise.

Can't we all do better than that?

I have apologized to Greg Burnham. I was taken aback by some very mean name-calling against me when I first posted my essay and over-reacted.

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

[Michael Schweitzer]

Horrifically, among Dulles' personal imports, under the code name "Dr. Green," was literally the cruelest man on earth, Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele. Mengele, according to recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, [/size][/font] contributed to Dulles' project by disemboweling children in front of other children to desensitize them. BTW, "MK" stood for "mind control" as spelled in German ("kontrolle") and "ULTRA" was a top secret CIA classification so high it barred knowledge from the president.

Can you provide a citation for this?

Len, I already asked for one, my man!

My problem isn't so much the claims made (though some are clearly in error), it is that Michael stated "As an attorney, I state facts, not speculation. I devoted more than 4,000 hours to research, reviewing mountainous written and pictorial evidence (including newly-declassified CIA and White House memoranda) and studying the life histories of key individuals. Then I assembled the array of disparate fragments into a coherent whole. Anyone can do the same, because the information is all in the public domain..."

However, the sources, as far as I can tell, are pretty much limited to Prouty, E Howard Hunt and few internet sites similar in style and content to this one: http://www.bibliotec.../reptiles07.htm

I could be wrong.

Greg & Len,

I believe the term was described in the Church Committee testimony of Adm. Stansfield Turner, but I would have to search for it. BTW, you may find of particular interest in the 40-volume "Church Report" (completed in 1976 after 2 years of investigating the CIA) Volume 5, entitled "The Investigation of the Assassination of President J.F.K.: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies." The Committee found a multiplicity of failures by the intelligence agencies that investigated the assassination. Since the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, over 50,000 pages of Church Committee records have been declassified and made available to the public concerning these investigate failures and related topics.

Regarding my sources, I was remiss in not citing them (except in a few references in my essay). Other Forum members have pointed out this shortcoming, and appropriately so. I apologize for the omission, and have re-written both the second paragraph of my essay (which refers to my research) and my biography. Here is the revised text of my paragraph about my sources, and I welcome your feedback:

"JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney with 30 years' experience specializing in legal research and evaluating evidence, I state findings, not speculation. I have devoted more than 4,000 hours to researching the assassination of President Kennedy. I have read what I consider the most scholarly books on the subject; studied the 'primary source' materials (statements and images from the time preserved in various media); reviewed many thousands of documents, including volumes of recently declassified CIA internal memoranda, the transcripts of the Warren Commission hearings, much of the 40-volume Senate 'Church Committee' report on the CIA (completed in 1976 after two years of investigation) that unmasked astonishingly un-American activities, and a long-withheld 600-page Justice Department report on CIA-Nazi collaboration entitled 'Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,' finally coerced into release in 2010 by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, National Security Archive v. Dept. of Justice; and went back decades in time, studying the life histories of the key individuals. Then I integrated the array of disparate fragments into a coherent presentation (which, for sake of brevity, does not include footnotes, but every fact is sourced). Anyone can do the same, because all of the information is in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. I do not pretend, to paraphrase that famous triple-redundancy they say in court, to have found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I offer my findings for your consideration."

Mike

Biography: http://educationforu...dpost&p=235641

Thanks Michael. Not everything said here needs to be cited or we'd all go bonkers... but something like your presentation, ideally, should be.

I don't agree with it all. Where I think you're on the right track is in the motive/s you've assigned.

Stansfield seemed genuinely clueless about much of the history of the areas of research you're looking at.

As to one of the areas, Helms, of course, had ordered all MK-ULTRA documents destroyed. So in fairness to Stansfield, he had little to work with on the topic. In reading his testimony about it, I thought he was being sincere, and he did make disclosures that had never been made before. BTW, I met Sen. Church, when he was the guest speaker at a Los Angeles charity fund-raising dinner, while the hearings were going on. We spoke for a few minutes and his dedication to getting at the truth was genuine. But stalwart Americans like Bush and Kissinger blockaded him every way possible. It seems to me no small achievement that his committee was able to assemble a 40-volume report in the face of such adversity.

Mike

Edited December 25, 2011 by Michael Schweitzer

[Michael Schweitzer]

You had me going there Michael, up until you got to the part about Ruby firing a blank and the CIA killing Oswald in the ambulance.

The CIA was only one of a number of government intelligence agencies that included individuals with the motive, power and capacity to kill the president, and just because whatever happened at Dealey Plaza can be shown to have been the result of a cover intelligence operation, that doesn't mean it had to be the CIA who pulled it off.

To me, blaming the CIA is a cop-out, an easy way out of really determining the individuals who did it, and Allen Dulles was out of the loop at the time.

The CIA were just as much a Patsy as Oswald, and those individuals really responsible for the murder got away with it.

BK

JFKcountercoup

WHY WAS PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATED?

by Michael B. Schweitzer

Attorney at Law (retired)

THE TRUTH: The CIA assassinated President Kennedy, in what is nowadays called a "regime change." The directive came from its former director, Allen Dulles, a criminal mastermind fired by Kennedy for launching unauthorized covert military operations to force him into wars. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a ruthless political manipulator with a mania to be president and a manic-depressive serial killer with a personal assassin (Malcolm Wallace), supported the plan, secured the financing from his Texas oil backers (H.L. Hunt, John Mecom and especially Clint Murchison, pronounced "Murkison," whom Kennedy enraged by proposing to eliminate a massive tax break for oilmen), and waited in the wings to control the cover-up. Johnson had positioned himself as Kennedy's successor in 1960, by blackmailing Kennedy into nominating him for the vice presidency with evidence of Kennedy's womanizing furnished by Johnson's close friend and neighbor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The assassination, although uniquely ambitious, was another CIA covert military operation, intricately planned by members its inner circle, the "Gold Key Club," hand-picked by and still loyal to Dulles. The killing itself was carried out by the United States Secret Service and long-time CIA Mafia contract shooters. The operation, code-named "The Big Event," ambushed the president in a Dallas motorcade by maneuvering his open limousine into a killing zone where bullets struck him from multiple directions. Johnson then created a seven-man, "blue ribbon" investigative committee, the Warren Commission, to preempt all other inquiries (especially by Congress), and Hoover falsified and manipulated all evidence fed to it and the public. The Commission – whose members included Dulles and, as FBI informant, then-Congressman and later President Gerald R. Ford – issued a "definitive" report that pinned the blame on a "lone nut" assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was actually an FBI "asset" who had infiltrated secret CIA training camps for a Cuban invasion so Hoover could shut them down, ironically gifting the CIA a disposable asset of its own. Oswald himself was shot dead two days after Kennedy in an event staged for live television by the CIA so all Americans could see for themselves "case closed."

JUST THE FACTS: As an attorney, I state facts, not speculation. I devoted more than 4,000 hours to research, reviewing mountainous written and pictorial evidence (including newly-declassified CIA and White House memoranda) and studying the life histories of key individuals. Then I assembled the array of disparate fragments into a coherent whole. Anyone can do the same, because the information is all in the public domain – but, as President Kennedy said he wanted to do to the CIA, splintered in a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds. Turning to specific questions:

WHY WAS PRESIDENT KENNEDY ASSASSINATED? Mainly because Kennedy was about to end the Cold War, an extraordinarily profitable enterprise for the military-industrial complex. (There were additional reasons, but this was the main one.) The Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, transformed both Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy became an outspoken peace advocate and called for nuclear disarmament. Khrushchev responded by secretly entering into in peace negotiations. Kennedy had become our first and last anti-Establishment president. He threatened to gut the profits of American's most powerful private interests. Both leaders had to go, and Dulles knew better than anyone outside the Kremlin that killing Kennedy would topple Khrushchev as well, because replacing Kennedy with hardliner Johnson would compel the Soviets to counter-move by installing their own hardliner, Leonid Brezhnev, which they did 11 months after the assassination. The Cold War, about to end in Kennedy's second term, continued for another profitable quarter of a century. The surprise is not the assassination. The surprise would be if there wasn't one. And one must admit Dulles was clever. He overthrew the two most powerful governments on earth by killing just one man.

EFFECT ON THE WAR IN VIETNAM: Johnson's first major act as President was to issue National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273 on Nov. 26, 1963. It reversed Kennedy's NSAM 263, issued Oct. 11, 1963, that ordered all American military personnel withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1965. Interestingly, McGeorge Bundy, the highest-ranking CIA infiltrator in the Kennedy Administration (the national security adviser), drafted NSAM 273 the day BEFORE the assassination.

KENNEDY PREDICTED THE CIA WOULD LEAD A COUP: 50 days before the assassination, famed New York Times columnist Arthur Krock published an article quoting a "very high American official" as stating: "If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA." Krock later revealed the "official" was President Kennedy, who spoke the words to him the day before. Kennedy often turned to his friend Krock to publish statements too politically explosive for him to speak as President.

HOW DID DULLES GAIN SUCH POWER? President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him as the first civilian CIA Director in March, 1953, shortly after taking office, on the advice of Ike's friend and confidant Prescott Bush. Bush, during WWII, had been Hitler's American banker until the FBI seized his bank, and both his son and grandson became U.S. presidents. Dulles, a mysterious man with a Nazi past, in effect infiltrated the CIA as its first Nazi director. President Harry S Truman had created the CIA in 1947 as the intelligence arm of the Executive Branch, by signing the National Security Act. The Act included a CIA charter that unambiguously stated it would function only in response to directives of the president and of the president's own intelligence apparatus, the National Security Council. Nowhere does the charter even infer the CIA is allowed to initiate policy. Dulles, with free reign from Ike to run it as he chose, endowed the CIA with a policy-making function that served his personal aims: to act as the enforcement arm of the military-industrial complex by conducting "covert operations." This military function gave the CIA full use of legitimate armed forces resources off the books and absorbed more than 80% of its budget. Dulles also re-structured the Agency horizontally, not vertically, so no compartment could know what any other was doing. He had also learned to profit from an intelligence post during World War II, when he ran a European office of the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) while acting as intermediary for Hitler's bankers. Dulles' CIA profited the most powerful private interests in America: industrialists, bankers, big oil, agribusiness, the Rockefellers, and himself. His covert actions included two "regime changes" that turned democracies into dictatorships. In Iran in 1953, he overthrew the Mossadegh government (Operation TP-AJAX) after it nationalized a British oil company that controlled Iran's oil industry; new arrangements gave U.S. corporations an equal share with the British over Iranian oil. Then in Guatemala in 1954, it overthrew the Arbenz government (Operation PBSUCCESS) after it initiated a land-reform program that re-distributed land mainly owned by United Fruit Company (later United Brands) to landless peasants. United Fruit owned 80% of the country's arable land. Dulles had been a lawyer for United Fruit and remained (with his Secretary-of-State brother John Foster Dulles) a major stockholder. In his Guatemala invasion, Dulles killed 150,000 people.

THE DULLES TOUCH: Dulles, as CIA chief, specialized in 4 things: assassinating people, overthrowing governments, infiltrating and manipulating the news media (Operation Mockingbird), and conducting horrific mind-control experiments on unknowing subjects (Project MK-ULTRA). The "MK" stood for "mind control" (as spelled in German, "kontrolle") and "ULTRA" was a top secret CIA classification so high it withheld information from the president. Dulles staffed his brainwashing project with dozens of Nazi scientists he smuggled into secret CIA bases in the U.S. to continue the work they had done for Hitler. Among Dulles' imports: the most sadistic man on earth, Auschwitz' "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele (code-named "Dr. Green"), to disembowel children in front of other children to desensitize them. Dulles also planted teams of infiltrators throughout the federal government, including every branch of the military, every secretive agency, and the White House. His operatives could easily influence or even direct Secret Service activities and cut deals with the Mafia. Indeed, one recently declassified CIA memo discloses Dulles personally approved a murder contract with Johnny Roselli, second-in-command of the Chicago Mob under Sam Giancana. Even after losing his CIA post, Dulles remained on retainer as the attorney-enforcer for the military-industrial complex, and continued to serve his clients (as would any good lawyer) through his CIA loyalists, including killing Kennedy – which, for a CIA like that, would be a day at the office.

WHO TOLD THE TRUTH? Ironically, the only players who told the truth were the two supposed "killers": Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who "shot" him in the stomach during his basement-garage transfer from Dallas city to county jail! In a city jail corridor, Oswald told the media he was "just a patsy," and Ruby later told the media "the answer is the man in office now." Then, in 1967, just before his death from sudden lung cancer, Ruby told reporter Tom Johnson the Kennedy assassination "is the most bizarre conspiracy in the history of the world."

THE RUBY-OSWALD CASE-CLOSER: Ruby actually fired a blank! Oswald, who had asked to wear a dark sweater before the transfer so he would look better on television, groaned twice and dropped to the ground in an Oscar-worthy performance. The CIA then double-crossed him in the ambulance and shot him for real. The necessity: The coup required 2 assassinations: JFK and Oswald. Letting Oswald live would have kept questions alive for years – during the prolonged process of trial and appeal – which would not only have delayed legitimizing the Johnson presidency, but given the public time to think about what happened and a jury a chance to acquit. That door had to be shut at once – and it was, within 48 hours. Planners selected Ruby so the second killing, like the first, could be pinned on a "lone nut" gunman. But the scenario required a single shot to play out plausibly. Ruby had to lunge at Oswald through a throng of police, reporters and photographers – a multiplicity of variables to hinder him. A fatal shot could only be guaranteed if someone else fired it. Absent this precaution, there may well have been a second "magic bullet" to explain: how a single shot by Ruby caused two wounds to Oswald. The evidence that Ruby did not shoot Oswald: photographer Bob Jackson, who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the "shooting," said there was "not a speck of blood anywhere" on the body or at the crime scene; the two "stretcher photos" of Oswald being carried to the ambulance show not only no blood on his sweater, but no damage to a single a fiber; and a shot by Ruby would have passed straight through him, but the trajectory of the bullet that killed him was upward. And Ruby, recounting the "incident" (his words) in an interview three weeks before he died, said: "I can't recall what had happened from the time I came to the bottom of the ramp until the police officers had me on the ground." His mind was blank about everything he said and did during his encounter with Oswald, as if programmed by MK-ULTRA to auto-erase. To those who doubt the proposition the Ruby-Oswald "shooting" was staged, consider this: in a plot that required two assassinations, what is the probability the first occurred by conspiracy and the second by chance?

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #1: The Warren Commission itself concluded Oswald could have fired only three shots. But their own evidence proved at least five. The Commission claimed a first shot missed and injured bystander James Tague with a flying curb fragment, a second (the "magic bullet") penetrated Kennedy's neck and struck Gov. John Connally three times, and the third hit Kennedy's head. But Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat, testified he heard Kennedy cry out, "My God, I'm hit!" (Warren Hearing Transcripts, Vol. II, p. 73.) Kennedy could only have said this BEFORE the throat-shot, because it took out his vocal chords. Moreover, some 40 out of 40 eye-witnesses (civilian and governmental) swore they heard two head-shots, half-a-second apart. Incidentally, the last shot was an exploding projectile fired from the front that blew the president's brains so far beyond the trunk of the car they splattered people behind it, and the famous Zapruder film shows First Lady Jacqueline stretch her arm to the far end of the trunk to retrieve a piece. (Curiously, the news media has consistently and falsely reported she climbed onto the trunk, as if to escape. The Zapruder film clearly shows she never left the back seat, but planted her knees atop it, grabbed the brain tissue, and immediately sat down again.) There is only one impossibility in the murder of President Kennedy: a lone assassin.

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #2: Six of the ten members of Kennedy's Cabinet were sent out of the country before the assassination, on a flight to Japan that only one of them had to make, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Flying with them, for no reason, was Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger – an expert on motorcade security. Only two important Cabinet members were in Washington, D.C. when Lyndon Johnson became the President of the United States: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Attorney General, Kennedy's brother Robert. Everyone else with authority to run a Department of the federal government was stranded over the Pacific Ocean in a presidential aircraft – with the code book to communicate with the White House missing! They learned about the assassination from an old-fashioned telex – and with no code book, only Johnson could run their Departments. Meanwhile, McNamara, attending a budget meeting at the Pentagon, was never told by anyone there that Kennedy died. He only learned about it 90 minutes later, when he received a personal phone call from Robert Kennedy. Someone cleared a path for Johnson to run almost the entire federal government himself, without any impediment, for the first 24 hours after the assassination. And also absent from the country during the assassination was the Joint Chief of Staff's intermediary with the CIA, Col. Fletcher Prouty. Someone sent Prouty on a pointless mission to the South Pole!

IF ANY DOUBT REMAINS #3: Only the CIA had the capability to carry out the assassination the way it happened, including making full use of the Secret Service (which designed a motorcade route that forced the presidential limo, improperly placed first in line for easy targeting, to make a slow-speed 120-degree turn – almost a U-turn – into a plaza open to gunfire from all directions to enter a freeway it did not have to use, abandoned all presidential security in Dallas including ordering his bodyguards off the back bumper of his limo, and later secretly shipped the limo to Ford Motors in Detroit where Lee Iacocca rebuilt it to destroy all evidence of bullet hits, including a bullet hole in the windshield positioned perfectly to hit Kennedy in the head), and staging the Oswald-Ruby case-closer (heavily promoted for public viewing by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry). The entire sequence of events displays the distinct and brilliant hallmarks of Allen Dulles, as identifiable as an artist's brushstrokes on a painting. The JFK assassination is a case study of how Allen Dulles' mind worked.

AND A FINAL TWIST: Rep. Hale Boggs, the member of the Warren Commission most dissatisfied with its findings, died in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska on Oct. 16, 1972. He had blasted the FBI on the House floor the previous year – on April 5, 1971 – for using Gestapo tactics against opponents of federal policy. Boggs was taken to the airport for the first leg of the trip by a young Democrat who later, as president, appointed Boggs' wife, Lindy, as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican after she served 18 years in Congress after her husband disappeared. The young Democrat: Bill Clinton.

CAVEAT: This summary answers only the second-level question: Who assassinated President Kennedy? (The CIA.) It does not address the first-level question: Who was the mastermind that set the machinery in motion? Many people, including Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, believed it was Lyndon Johnson, who coveted the presidency and blackmailed JFK into making him next in line. I believe it was Allen Dulles. I do not find credible the CIA assassinating the President of the United States to serve Lyndon Johnson personal ambitions. The CIA served the global geopolitical and profit interests of the top industrial and financial multinational corporations in the country. Their power exceeded the president's, they were Dulles' clients, and Kennedy had initiated policies that imminently threatened their profiteering.

Allen Dulles transformed the CIA from its chartered mission as the intelligence arm of the Executive Branch into a policy-making operation (in violation of its charter) and a military organization that served the profit interests of the military-industrial complex. Did the CIA's clients take competitive bids? Dulles' CIA mastered the "regime change," to precisely the specifications and with precisely the resources its clients required when Kennedy started to pull the plug on the Cold War. There is no profit in peace, JFK was about to cost the most dominant powers in the nation their income, and the CIA was in virtual stand-by mode to stop him. The only credible competitor would have been Prof. Moriarty, and he was fictional, which Dulles regrettably was not.