The CIA Watergate Bait-and-Switch—17–18 June 1972

[Ashton Gray]

Please allow me to give dubious distinction to that most virtuous of organs, The Boston Globe

(from usinfo.state.gov):

"In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a full-scale evaluation of how the United States became involved in the Vietnam War. A study team of thirty-six persons took more than a year to compile the report, which ran to forty-seven volumes, with some 4,000 pages of documentary evidence and 3,000 pages of analysis. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department economist who had grown disillusioned with the war, copied major portions of the study and then turned them over to the press. ..."

These media accounts so rarely get around to saying who put the copies of the report into Ellsberg's hands to begin with.

I'm not shy: it was Harry Rowan, president of the Rand Corporation, who kept himself 3,000 miles away while the dirty work was being done in the Rand D.C. offices on Tuesday, 4 March 1969. Here's a Phun Phact: that was just a little over a month after Nixon's inauguration.

Ellsberg was "sworn in as a top secret courier," and ordered by Rowan over the phone not to let anyone, including security officers at Rand, know that he had it. Also in the loop were Leslie Gelb, Paul Warneke, and Morton Halperin, and it's Gelb and Halperin who later deposit copies in the National Archives the day before the first New York Times release. It's so in-your-face that it's suffocating.

The surface hasn't even been scratched on Ellsberg and Rand yet. Ellsberg is the boy who—while in the bosom of Rand—more than anyone else gave the world the gift of M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. Like venereal disease, it's the gift that keeps on giving. And it took a madman to spawn it.

This is the Great Saint of Eternal Peacedom. This is the Great Ally of Love and Brotherhood.

As these layers continue to peel back, they're going to peel back to what "think tank" means. In another level of "in your faceness," it is the hidden mind. It's where all these black ops are hatched. All of them. It's where the "brightest and best" go—as long as they wipe their morality off on the door mat before they enter. It's where six-figure salaries are paid to people who spend their day with their heels on their desk, gazing at the ceiling.

It's where all the dirty details are worked out. It's where all the lies are manufactured. It's where psy-ops are honed to utter perfection.

They plan decades in advance. Literally.

That's why Ellsberg was handed the documents just a little over a month after Nixon was inaugurated. Ellsberg, with his Rand buddies, wrote himself a big, glorious starring role in the script.

CIA is an execution arm made up of amoral thugs who will do anything. Anything. Tell any lie. They are professional deceivers, and their purpose is to deceive. That's what they do. They are the slickest con artists in history, with an almost unlimited budget.

At some point somebody's going to pull the string on Daniel Ellsberg and Rand and the JFK assassination.

Ashton

Edited July 12, 2006 by Ashton Gray

[Ashton Gray]

Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!

_______________________________

My God! Ash, you wanna take this?

Take it? I don't even read it any more. I've been reading the same old crap in the newspapers for 40+ years. It's just the same old propaganda line. It doesn't change.

Take it? I might print it out if I needed to wrap some fish. I wouldn't take it, though, to the dump.

Ashton

[Pat Speer]

CIA is an execution arm made up of amoral thugs who will do anything. Anything. Tell any lie. They are professional deceivers, and their purpose is to deceive. That's what they do. They are the slickest con artists in history, with an almost unlimited budget.

At some point somebody's going to pull the string on Daniel Ellsberg and Rand and the JFK assassination.

Ashton

What? Am I reading you correctly? Now you're accusing Daniel Ellsberg of complicity in the Kennedy Assassination?

It just gets wilder and wilderer.

And please explain why we should believe the CIA's "purpose is to deceive." Somewhere I read they were fighting a cold war, for the purpose of defeating what they believed to be a great evil, communism. The record indicates their perception of this evil was distorted, however, so that everything that was good for American interests became good and everyhing bad for American interests became a possible communist plot. Do you really mean to imply that deception was never a means to an end, but the actual end?

Have you ever actually talked or met someone from the CIA? Or from the Rand Corporation? In your upside down world, you've twisted the Watergate story from Nixon's men discussing the firebombing of the Brookings Institute to the Rand Corporation's killing Kennedy and deliberately driving Nixon from office. You also villify Ellsberg for his M.A.D. theory, a concept that kept the United States and Russia at arms length, but seem completely comfortable with Nixon and Kissinger's Madman theory, in which he deliberately targeted North Vietnamese civilians in hopes it would drive the North Vietnamese back to the bargaining table. In short, the only pattern in your ramblings seems to be that Richard Nixon was a victim. You're probably the only person in history to feel more sorry for Nixon than Nixon himself.

P.S. On a lighter note, what are your feelings on The Beatles? John Lennon protested the war. Was he CIA?

Edited July 12, 2006 by Pat Speer

[Ashton Gray]

After much longer than I could have imagined possible, I finally have posted Part II of this series:

The CIA Watergate Bait-and-Switch—19 June 1972

I had made promises to several people in several threads that I was going to post such an article, which first became a series, and now is practically threatening to become book-length. Although I was very familiar with the events (and false claims of events), and although I knew of their complexity, I had not come even close to correctly estimating the difficulty of attempting to explain that complexity, and the malevolent CIA machinations involved, to others.

It became so daunting that I finally had to extract from the work an entirely separate article, CIA Psy-Ops of Watergate and Beyond, which is an indispensable companion piece to the series. I strongly advise not to attempt to read the Part II article without visiting that outline of CIA psy-ops used in Watergate.

Even then, Part II may be as difficult to read as it was to write. There enters a subjectivity factor where authorship becomes welded to the very confusion that is built into the psy-ops one is attempting to explain and analyze, and objective assessment almost can't be made by the writer himself about whether the enormous confusion generated is from the inherent pernicious nature of the material, or just really awful writing.

I finally had to submit it as it is, and hope that, for those who can endure, it will somehow reveal the underlying motives and malign design of the instigators and perpetrators who visited this catastrophic fraud on the world.

To those who I promised an article on this subject over a week ago, I apologise for having taken this long, and for even now being probably only half way through. I only can devote so many hours of the day to it, but with your continued forbearance I will get there.

Ashton Gray