Jack Anderson

[James Richards]

Jack Anderson served alongside Capt. John Birch, Capt. Mitchell L. WerBell III, S/Sgt. Robert Emmett Johnson, USMC, Major John Singlaub, Lt. Roger Hillsman, et al. !! (Gerry Hemming)

It's a pity that Gerry seems to be no longer posting as this information is tantalising to say the least.

Anderson and George Bush below.

James

[James Richards]

Anderson and George Bush below.

James,

But who's the babe sittin in the middle?

Good question, Daniel.

As far as I am concerned, you just can't go past big hair and padded shoulders.

James

[John Simkin]

Jack Anderson served alongside Capt. John Birch, Capt. Mitchell L. WerBell III, S/Sgt. Robert Emmett Johnson, USMC, Major John Singlaub, Lt. Roger Hillsman, et al. !! (Gerry Hemming)

It's a pity that Gerry seems to be no longer posting as this information is tantalising to say the least.

Anderson and George Bush below.

James

I assume Gerry means they were all in China during the Second World War. John Birch was a member of the China Air Task Force when he was killed in 1945. Anderson worked as a foreign correspondent in China. He disliked this work and managed to get involved with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This is where he made his future CIA contacts including Phil Graham who I suspect helped him get the job with Drew Pearson on the Washington Post in 1947. Mitchell WerBell was also a member of the OSS and saw action in Burma and China. Singlaub was in the OSS in France but moved to China in the final stages of the war. Unfortunately I know very little about Robert Emmett Johnson's war record. Hillsmen was in China but I do not see this as being significant. However, it might have helped shape his views on Vietnam where he was a JFK dove. As a result he was sacked by LBJ after the assassination.

There were other interesting figures in China working with the OSS. This includes William Pawley, Tommy Corcoran, Whitey Willauer, Claire Lee Chennault, Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, Lucien Conein and Ray Cline.

Why was this important?

(1) This was the first time that these right-wingers joined forces with drug lords to fight communism. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, these OSS members in China were paid for their work with five-pound sacks of opium. When most of these became members of the CIA they continued this relationship with criminals. This was especially true of Cuba in the 1950s and South-East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. Ted Shackley became the leader of this group and as well as the assassination of JFK they were also the core members of the Iran-Contra scandal.

(2) The other reason China is important is that it was the first time that the intelligence services began to do "private jobs" for right-wing businessmen. Tommy Concoran was the main instigator of this program. Later William Pawley was to play a central role in this. This started in Guatemala in 1954 but then spread to other countries in Latin America. Operation 40 was used to assassinate people who got in their way.

For the full story see the thread on Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-2006.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799

[James Richards]

Unfortunately I know very little about Robert Emmett Johnson's war record. (John Simkin)

John,

I can tell you that Johnson was in China during 1948/49. He was with the Sixth Marines based in Tsingtao. In this image below, Robert Emmett Johnson is the man on the far right.

James

[Harry J.Dean]

Jack Anderson served alongside Capt. John Birch, Capt. Mitchell L. WerBell III, S/Sgt. Robert Emmett Johnson, USMC, Major John Singlaub, Lt. Roger Hillsman, et al. !! (Gerry Hemming)

It's a pity that Gerry seems to be no longer posting as this information is tantalising to say the least.

Anderson and George Bush below.

James

Jeffrey Willis {Mormon Bishop} and long time CIA personel director

revealed that many other CIA men were also Mormon church members

when he sought public relations advise from an old friend, newspaper

columnist Jack Anderson also a member of the Silver Springs Maryland

church ward.

"Sisterhood" Is a term with roots at the CIA where the church is particularly

well represented. CIA agents also refer to one another as 'sisters"

George H W Bush learned to appriciate the Mormon sisterhood within the

larger CIA sisterhood ........ when he served as director of Central Intelligence.

Scowcroft had served at the seat of power from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,

and Ronald Reagan.

At that time he worked closely with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Even before taking

office Bush named Scowcroft, Roger Porter, and Steve Studdert, all Mormons

to top White House Posts, in foreign affairs, domestic policy, and political

schedualing. The "sisterhood" was overjoyed.

While Scowcroft, Porter, and Studdert were the most visible Mormons running

the government as Bush administration began they were only three among

hundreds and thousand DC saints with influential positions in the federal gover-

nment. Furthermore, simular Mormon "knots" thrive at state, county, and local

levels throughout the nation.

The resulting power elite-a tightly knit, almost exclusively white male assemblage

of jurists, journalists, FBI agents, CIA executives, Interior Department managers,

Pentagon brass, corporation chiefs, ranking White House officials, Mormons make

up a substantial portion of U.S.Government management, including some Congress

persons and Senators.

Scowcroft, along with others continue to serve the present Bush

Administration.

H. J. Dean

[John Simkin]

George H W Bush learned to appriciate the Mormon sisterhood within the

larger CIA sisterhood ........ when he served as director of Central Intelligence.

Scowcroft had served at the seat of power from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,

and Ronald Reagan.

At that time he worked closely with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Even before taking

office Bush named Scowcroft, Roger Porter, and Steve Studdert, all Mormons

to top White House Posts, in foreign affairs, domestic policy, and political

schedualing.

Scowcroft played an important role in the Iran-Contra cover-up. In November, 1986, Ronald Reagan set-up a three man commission (President's Special Review Board) to investigate Iran-Contra. The three men were John Tower, Brent Scowcroft and Edmund Muskie.

The report implicated Oliver North, John Poindexter, Casper Weinberger and several others but did not mention the role played by George H. W. Bush. It also claimed that Ronald Reagan had no knowledge of what had been going on.

The House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran was also established by Congress. The most important figure on the committee was the senior Republican member, Richard Cheney. As a result George H. W. Bush was totally exonerated when the report was published on 18th November, 1987. The report did state that Reagan's administration exhibited "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law."

When George H. W. Bush became president he set about rewarding those who had helped him in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Bush appointed Richard Armitage as a negotiator and mediator in the Middle East. Donald Gregg was appointed as his ambassador to South Korea. Brent Scowcroft became his chief national security adviser and John Tower became Secretary of Defence. When the Senate refused to confirm Tower, Bush gave the job to Richard Cheney.

Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, Elliott Abrams and Alan D. Fiers, Jr. were charged and convicted but they were all pardoned by Bush.

[John Simkin]

I have just finished reading Scott and Jon Lee Anderson's "Inside the League". The excellent book about the activities of the World Anti-Communist League was written by two of Jack Anderson's sons. They might be worth contacting about their father's files.

[Sterling Seagrave]

Do you have any thoughts on Jack Anderson as an investigative journalist?

I've known Jack since the early 1960s, and of course I had worked with Les Whitten at The WashPost (Whitten for a while writing many of Jack's columns as a sort of co-investigator and co-columnist). I later got to know Dale VanAtta, who also was a co-investigator and co-columnist with Jack -- all of them working out of Jack's offices in a red brick townhouse next to the Carnegie Institution. In fact, Peggy and I hired (and richly paid) Jack's investigative team to help us with legwork and archival searches in Washington DC while we were living in Holland, working on THE MARCOS DYNASTY. To some extent the arrangement paid off, but most of Jack's people let us down badly. Jack himself was helpful in giving us access to his filing cabinets going back umpteen years, and Dale was helpful in other very useful ways. But in retrospect we were hugely disappointed by just about everybody we paid to help us with research on that book, not only Jack's people but people in Manila and Hong Kong. The book was a struggle, because of all the famous journalists who'd been based in Manila or worked for a while in Manila, or passed through Manila, not one had ever seriously researched all of the claims made by Ferdinand Marcos. The one exception being Al McCoy who researched Marcos's claims to being a war her, and discovered they were fraudulent. It went much farther than that, of course, because Marcos had actually been working for the Japanese, as was his putative father (who was drawn and quartered by guerrillas for what he did). Jack and his organization are essentially part of the Morman Church intelligence network, which is one of the really powerful and effective private intelligence networks in America, whose computer data base on genealogy provides cover for a vast archive of intelligence files on a great many people.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Reviewing the material from the Spartacus thread and on this one, the following generalizations about Jack Anderson would seem valid:

A) He was close to LBJ

He was close to the CIA

C) His politics would seem to be far right, although hidden sometimes.

D) China Lobby Connections may have played a role in his political perspective, and reporting from time to time.

It has been suggested that In 1967, he did the CIA a favor by writing about the Castro- reversed-Trafficante-hit-team hypothesis for the JFK assassination;

the purpose of this was to divert attention from the Garrison investigation, which pointed more at the CIA than at the mafia.

Recently I discovered that Anderson was the source on the Corruption story that proved the eventual downfall of Sen. Thomas Dodd. I read that this scandal also began to be uncovered in 1967. I was wondering if anyone had the dates on those articles, if they in fact were from 1967. I know that CIA had some big damage control meetings re: the Garrison investigation, in 1967.

I wonder if Dodd's role in the events of 1963 came up in those 1967 CIA meetings. He was connected to the mail order rifle via Southern California where his Senate Subcommittee used Manny Pena, of the LAPD and LEIU. As I understand it, his committee had records involving an Oswald ordering a mail order rifle under the name Hidell, and he may have made some critical errors with the press re: these records in the days immediately after the assassination.

Might the CIA have now considered the Dodd succommittee info a loose end that might prove dangerous if the Garrison investigation continued?

Was Jack Anderson used to solve this Dodd problem? Just how aberrant were Dodd's fundraising practices from the traditional pattern of defense-contractor campaign contributions to Democrats from Connecticut?

Might Dodd's attempt to revive the Ed Butler INCA attempts to link Oswald with pro-Castro Cubans in August of 1963 have been dangerous for the CIA, given Garrisons investigations into the CIA's activities in New Orleans in 1963? Perhaps the Trafficante-Castro link was considered safely out of town.

Edited February 2, 2008 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[John Simkin]

Reviewing the material from the Spartacus thread and on this one, the following generalizations about Jack Anderson would seem valid:

1) He was close to LBJ

2) He was close to the CIA

3) His politics would seem to be far right, although hidden sometimes.

4) China Lobby Connections may have played a role in his political perspective, and reporting from time to time.

It has been suggested that In 1967, he did the CIA a favor by writing about the Castro- reversed-Trafficante-hit-team hypothesis for the JFK assassination;

the purpose of this was to divert attention from the Garrison investigation, which pointed more at the CIA than at the mafia.

Jack Anderson is usually considered to be left-of-centre. However, I suspect he did hold right-wing views. He got his "liberal" image from his association with Drew Pearson, who was definitely an idealistic journalist. During the war he worked closely with the OSS in China. This group included people like Phil Graham, Mitchell WerBell, Robert Emmett Johnson, William Pawley, Tommy Corcoran, Whitey Willauer, Claire Lee Chennault, Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, Lucien Conein and Ray Cline.

This is where he made his future CIA contacts including Phil Graham who I suspect helped him get the job with Drew Pearson on the Washington Post in 1947. If this is the case, was Anderson's job to infiltrate Pearson's investigations?

In his autobiography, Anderson admits that he was very close to Joe McCarthy. However, he had to abandon this friendship when McCarthy targeted Pearson as a "commie lover".

Pearson was an "anti-authority" journalist who would expose corruption wherever he found it. Understandably, he was very hostile to LBJ. Anderson admits in his autobiography that he did everything he could to get Pearson to change his mind on LBJ. This seemed to work as we now know from the LBJ tapes that Pearson joined Anderson in the smear campaign against Don Reynolds who attempted to expose LBJ's corruption on the day JFK was assassinated. We also now know that Reynolds had been in contact with RFK via John Williams, who had been leading the investigation of LBJ in Congress.

[John Simkin]

Jack Anderson served with O.S.S. Detachment # 202 in China. He served under Col. Paul Helliwell, who as a CIA asset attorney, helped set up the "Castle Bank Operation" in Nassau, The Bahamas.

[One of my assets, Norman Casper, Key Biscayne, FL -- penetrated this operation for the I.R.S. Intelligence Division, which was the agency I worked under, while liaising with the So. Fla. Drug Interdiction Task Force. The title was changed to the "Vice Prez's TF" when Bush #41 opted to take cxontrol !! (Drug Interdiction Ops

- 1970s - 1980s)]

While the O.S.S. "Europe" teams were recruited into Wisner's O.P.C., the WWII veterans who later became ("in the the majority") the CIA's "Clandestine Service" -- were recruited from O.S.S. Detachment # 101 ("Behind the Burma Road"). The JM/ATE "BOP" boss, Jake Esterline was a Captain in Det. #101 for 2+ years.

Jack Anderson served alongside Capt. John Birch, Capt. Mitchell L. WerBell III, S/Sgt. Robert Emmett Johnson, USMC, Major John Singlaub, Lt. Roger Hillsman, et al. !!

Chairs,

GPH

Others working in China at the time included Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Hawkins, Lucien Conein, Philip Graham, Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley. These men were later to become very important to Anderson in his journalistic career.

In an article published in the Washington Post on 18th December, 2005, it was admitted that he did not publish a scoop about President Reagan's arms-for-hostages swap. I wonder why? Could it have been that those Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operatives that he met in China were now senior officers in the CIA who were involved in the Iran-Contra operation.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAandersonJ.htm