Operation X
Prohibition artificially inflates the value of the prohibited commodity 20 to 100 fold. Only genuine agricultural “commodities” are subject to such inflation. That is, the demand is an evolutionarily structural, a permanent feature of the global economy. You can pretend that it’s possible to make wine or pot unavailable, but it’s not. There is no way around the pure physics of supply and demand. ‘Demand’ is human herbalism, instinct related to eating. It cannot be ‘reduced.’ Prohibition of a commodity with which humans share their evolution simply creates a hood monopoly. The kind of power Prohibition put in Lucky Luciano’s hands left every New York shopkeeper, cop and Mayor quacking in his boots. As Luciano put it, “There wasn’t a chance for Roosevelt to get the delegates from the city without makin a deal with Tammany, and in 1932 the guys who ran
Tammany was run by me and Frank Costello.”
During the war the Office of Naval Intelligence had to use Mafia chief Luciano to secure New York’s docks. Too much information was getting through to the deadly U-boats. The U.S. and its allies lost 120 merchant ships to German U-boats off the American coast in the first three months after Pearl Harbor. Freight specifics and sailing routes were insecure on the New York docks.
The tanker Dixie Arrow sunk by U-71, 3/26/1942; The Pennsylvania Sun hit by U-571, 7/15/1942, (Photo: Nova/National Geographic Special); The fully loaded oil tanker R. P. Resor torpedoed 2/28/1942 off New Jersey (Photo: Joseph Bilby)
The docks weren’t run by Luciano, but by Luciano’s amici. The capo mafioso wasn’t really capo di tutti capi because ‘organized crime’ wasn’t really that organized. It wasn’t a corporation with a rigid hierarchy. Luciano could defend his turf where he could, and others could do the same. Many of those others weren’t Italian and many chose to remain quite anonymous. But many were Italian or Sicilian, and the old Sicilian structure, the Mafia, provided methods whereby an underground economy could be managed. The mafiosi, for all their bloody reputation, were actually quite good at cooperating with one another, and few could touch them for guts, street smarts and organization
Socks Lanza ran the Fulton Fish Market with an iron hand, but his Brooklyn distribution depended on the trucks of other amici. Cockeye Dunn’s Longshormen helped run Luciano’s bookmaking on the docks and fix his smuggling. Luciano and his allies reciprocated by distributing Dunn’s hot cargoes and helping out with ‘labor problems.’ There was no way Cmdr. Charles Haffenden’s naval intelligence unit was going to penetrate the docks without these bosses.
Haffenden went to Tom Dewey’s experts, D.A. Frank Hogan and his top aide, Murray Gurfein, who went from the D.A.’s office to the OSS in 1942. They knew enough to contact Lanza, head of Local 16975 of the United Seafood Workers. Lanza, after trying to go it alone for a while, admitted that the only one with juice enough was Luciano, then languishing upstate, thanks to Dewey, in frigid Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, NY on the Canadian border. Luciano’s lawyer, Moe Polakoff, told the Feds that the only person who could successfully broach this subject with Luciano was his trusted partner Meyer Lansky. Lansky, who hated the Nazis guts, was glad to help. He was assigned his own code number as a naval intelligence contact, as was Luciano, who got transferred downstate to the more pleasant confines of Great Meadow in Comstock, NY. 2
Naval intelligence understood that the runaround, including some faux sabotage, was likely a ruse to get Luciano released, but the Mafia was needed not just for protection and intelligence on the docks, but to organize Sicily behind Patton, something only a Luciano could do. With street-level Mafia cooperation, recent Sicilian immigrants, many professional fishermen, were funneled into the New York office of Naval Intelligence. They helped to refine very accurate maps of the Sicilian coast and hinterland, providing the invasion force with tide tables and the location of docks, inlets, key roads, mountain passes and guerrilla groups. They also provided regular communication with the Mafia powers behind German lines in Sicily.
Don Calogero Vizzini and Don Giuseppe Genco Russo, although flexible enough to survive, had been badly weakened by Mussolini’s serious attempt to replace their coercive power structures with his own. Knowing that the Americans were unstoppable anyway, they provided a ready-made guerrilla army to roll out the red carpet for the invaders. Luciano had been born less than fifteen miles from Villalba, Don Calò Vizzini’s base, and had relatives who still worked for him. Villalba was only 55 miles from General Patton’s beachhead in Palermo.
Don Calogero Vizzini, left, and Don Giuseppe Genco Russo (Italy’s News Photos; Keystone)
When Lt. Paul Alfieri landed on Licata Beach, his Sicilian contacts were able to give him safe passage to the secret HQ of the Italian Naval Command. Inside, Alfieri found maps of the disposition of all German and Italian naval forces in the Mediterranean. The Mafia put out the word that Italian troops who resisted the Americans would be marked for reprisal, but those that deserted would be given civilian clothes and protection. Italian troops deserted by the truckload. Mafiosi guided Patton’s Seventh Army through the labyrinthine San Vito mountains, enabling Patton to split the 400,000 fascist troops in two. These Sicilians were directly responsible for saving thousands of American lives during the 1943 invasion.
Unfortunately, this was turned into a political tragedy for Sicily. Sicily’s economy was almost entirely agricultural. But, until the Land Reform Act of 1950, land wasn’t generally passed on in small family plots, but in large latifundia, plantations. Small plots were rented out for shares. The great Dons were landlords who violently opposed the efforts of the sharecroppers at land reform.
Sicily Invasion, July, 1943; Tank ‘Eternity’ lands at Red Beach2, 7/10/1943; Remains of an Italian Navy armed train destroyed by USS Bristol while opposing the landing at Licata Beach; Troops of The Loyal Edmonton Regiment entered Modica marching with fixed bayonets, 7/13/1943 (Wikimedia Commons)
The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) made Don Calogero Vizzini, his lieutenant and successor, Genco Russo, and many other mafiosi, mayors of important towns. Don Calò was appointed Mayor of Villalba, Giuseppe Genco Russo became Mayor of Mussomeli, while other clan members ended up in control of much of western Sicily. Coordinating the AMGOT effort was the former lieutenant governor of New York, Col. Charles Poletti, whom Luciano described as “one of our good friends,” that is, a made mafioso. 3
AMGOT’s great ally throughout Italy was the Church, a great landowner, which had bitterly opposed land reform as ‘communist.’ The Church had been largely pro-fascist during the war, for the most part enthusiastically supporting Mussolini. Every single Nazi puppet regime during the war had been a Catholic theocracy. In 1949, Pope Pius XII excommunicated all members of the Communist party, and all Catholics who read, published, or disseminated any media advocating Communist ideology – land reform, and unions, being interpreted as ‘communist.’ CIA Counterintelligence Chief Angleton himself was a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, as were William Casey, William Colby, John McCone, Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush Jr. (George H.W.’s brother), General Vernon Walters, Reagan’s National Security Adviser William P. Clark, P-2 chief Licio Gelli, Nazi founder of the West German BND Reinhard Gehlen, Safari Club founder SDECE chief Alexandre de Marenches, Ronald Reagan and Allen Dulles. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, 1953-1956, was a Dame of Malta. In 1955, when Pietro Nenni formally separated his Socialist party from Italy’s Communist party, Ambassador Luce argued against CIA political operations chief Bill Colby, who saw a political advantage in backing the moderate left. Luce, Angleton and Dulles insisted that the Socialists were just stalking horses for Palmiro Togliatti’s Communists, and that we should destroy the moderate left right along with the communists.
Since the Vatican was technically an independent country, Pope Pius XII, on June 27, 1942, created the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), commonly known as the Vatican Bank. Since the Vatican was a sovereign state, it made the rules for the Vatican Bank. The rules were that there were no rules, and that there were no public books available to any earthly authority. Stolen Jewish money, Nazi drug money, Mafia drug money, CIA drug money – fine, all blessed by the Holy See, in the name of anticommunism. Speaking of his boss, the great Sicilian mafioso Giuseppe Genco Russo, one of his lieutenants said, “He [Russo] is constantly in contact with priests, priests go to his place, and he goes to the bank—which is always run by priests—the bank director is a priest, the bank has always been the priests’ affair.” The basic Vatican Bank technique had been to keep minimal records, which were periodically destroyed, and to channel most large deposits immediately into numbered Swiss bank accounts, communicating the number to the depositor only. No audit was possible. Vatican Bank funds became anonymous and untraceable. 4
Col. Charles Poletti, military governor of Sicily, made New York’s most powerful expatriate Mafia capo, Vito Genovese, interpreter/liaison officer in the U.S. Army headquarters in Naples, thus putting New York organized crime at the very heart of Allied intelligence in Italy. Poletti, a first-generation Italian-American who had studied at the Universities of Rome and Bologna, was dead fluent in Italian, but there were those in Naples who did need an interpreter. Poletti became, successively, military governor of Sicily, Naples, Rome, Milan and Lombardy, providing introductions and security clearances for Genovese and his allies throughout Italy. Honoring the deal made with Naval Intelligence, Luciano was freed from his long prison term and deported to Naples, arriving on February 28, 1946.
Genovese, who fled New York in 1937 to avoid indictment by Dewey for the murder of fellow hood Ferdinand Boccia, spent the war in Naples helping to finance Mussolini, with whom he was personally close. Genovese and his Corsican ally Antoine d’Agostino played the fascist side of the fence, while Luciano’s mafiosi worked the Allied side. Their operational connections with each other made them indispensable to both sides. 5
Military Governor Charles Poletti, smiling center; Portella della Genestra commemorative poster
By 1944, under AMGOT auspices, Genovese’s hoods controlled major Italian ports, most of the black market in diverted American and Sicilian goods, and numerous ‘anticommunist’ goon squads on call for U.S. military intelligence. Not only the black market, but much of the legal and political structure fell into their hands as well. On Genovese’s June, 1945 return to New York, he was arraigned for the Boccia murder. The first eyewitness against Genovese was poisoned to death in his jail cell, and the second shot to death in New Jersey. All charges against Genovese were dropped and he was released a free man.
Politically active Sicilian peasants had their crops burned and their cattle slaughtered. When, in 1944, their leaders, Michele Pantaleone and Girolamo Li Causi, challenged Don Caló in his home town of Villalba by holding a political rally there, 14 demonstrators were left wounded, including Li Causi and Pantaleone. Italian ‘communists,’ partisan guerrillas who had stopped the fascists, were not Stalinists; for the most part they were democratic socialists who just wanted a fair crack at the ballot box. As Li Causi put it, “We plan no Soviet rule here.”
On May 1st, 1947, hundreds of peasants drove their gaily painted donkey carts to Portella della Genestra to celebrate Labor Day. As the speeches began, submachine guns opened up on the crowd from the surrounding hills. Eleven people were left dead and 27 wounded. Because they insisted on breaking up Sicily’s plantations, the Socialists and Communists were so popular that the Mafia, organized by the CIA, found it necessary to assassinate 500 of them from 1944 to 1949. This gave the Mafia, and their Christian Democrat allies, absolute control of the island. The Land Reform Act of 1950, which prohibited estates of larger than 500 acres, was largely vitiated by Mafia control of the Land Reform Boards. 6
Although Sicilian socialists were just poor farmers, they were identified by AMGOT as ‘potential Soviet agents.’ The very first major operation of the newly-formed CIA, personally directed by Allen Dulles and his Italy expert James Angleton, was the fixing of the 1948 Italian elections in favor of the Christian Democrats, the Mafia’s ally throughout Sicily and Italy. The U.S. had coerced the Christian Democrat PM, Alcide De Gasperi, to kick the Communist Party out of his all-party national coalition, thus needlessly alienating and radicalizing the Communists, who had been cooperating WWII allies.
Genovese’s 1944 NYC wanted poster; Genovese in his American uniform with Italian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, Sicily, 1940
Angleton, running the Strategic Services Unit in Rome, had no problem with Mafia control of Palermo’s port. He engineered it by allowing Mafia control of AMGOT’s Palermo structure. The only alternative was leftist control of the port. Angleton worked with Harry Anslinger’s top international agents, George White and Charles Siragusa. Their rationale, the one they were willing to talk about, at least, had something to do with the Russians, but they gave the Sicily-based mafiosi a protected worldwide reach. 7
Luciano himself was deported to Sicily in 1946, there to better manage his end of the vast Turkey or Indochina to Lebanon to Sicily to Marseille to Cuba to U.S. heroin run. He was joined by Sam Carolla, Sal Vitale and at least four hundred others. In 1948, another deported Sicilian, Joe Pici, got caught sending 35 pounds of pure heroin to his boys in Kansas City. In 1950, a Sicilian reporter snuck into the Hotel Sole in the center of old Palermo, then the residence of Don Caló Vizzini - and Lucky Luciano. He snapped a picture of Luciano schmoozing with Don Caló’s bodyguards. This so infuriated Luciano that he flogged the reporter to within an inch of his life.
Luciano and Don Caló, the previous year, had set up a candy factory in Palermo, which exported its produce throughout Europe and the USA. They also shared a hospital supply company and a fruit export operation - all ideal smuggling covers. In 1952, Luciano’s close childhood friend, Frank Coppola, had twelve pounds of heroin seized by Italian police on its way from Coppola in Anzio to a well-known smuggler in Alcamo.
In 1956, Joe Profaci, in Brooklyn, was recorded talking about the export of Sicilian oranges with Nino Cottone, in Sicily. Cottone lost his life that year in the battle for Palermo with rival mafiosi, but Profaci’s oranges kept on coming. The Brooklyn number rung by Cottone was the same number rung by Luciano from Naples and Coppola from Anzio. All were recorded by the Palermo Questura talking ecstatically about high grade Sicilian oranges. In 1959, Customs intercepted one of those orange crates. Hollow wax oranges, 90 to a crate, were filled with heroin until they weighed as much as real oranges. Each crate carried 110 pounds of pure heroin. 8
At all points, in exchange for their ‘anticommunist’ political violence, the hoods had the protection of the local military intelligence, though, as the busts indicate, not always of the local police. But enough support was provided so that the mafiosi were enabled, for years, to feed their network of heroin labs in Italy and Marseille with morphine base supplied by a Lebanese network run by the chief of the antisubversive section of the Lebanese police, or by their Corsican friends in Indochina. 9
The CIA used the Mafia’s allies, the Union Corse, to take Marseille away from the independent and communist unions, leaving the Corsican hoods in control of the most important port in France. The geopolitical rationale for this, from both the French and the American perspective, wasn’t only the threat the leftists posed to control of France, but to the Indochina war. The Viet Minh had considerable support among French leftists in 1947.
Captured Viet rebels, 1907
In an attempt to force the French government to negotiate with the Viet Minh, the socialist dock worker unions, the Communist-Socialist labor coalition known as the Confédération générale du travail, which were full of former Maquis fighters, refused to load American arms destined for the French in Vietnam. They saw the attempted French reconquest of Vietnam as racist and fascist, and as a betrayal of a respected WWII ally. The only outfits with enough muscle to challenge the socialist longshoreman unions for control of the docks, and the Marseille city council, were the union-busting Corsican hoods and their puppet-union goon squads. The puppet unions were put together by the FBN’s Charles Siragusa, who knew all the Corsican hoods, and Counterintelligence Chief Angleton, working with the AFL-CIO’s Irving Brown, who specialized in creating “compatible left” union fronts. The deal with the Corsican hoods, in exchange for stopping the French longshoremen, was protected license to deal drugs. That was the model for the deal Lucien Conein and Ed Lansdale made with the Corsicans during the Vietnam War years. The 1947-48 street war for control of Marseille’s docks, financed and coordinated by American military intelligence, was nasty, brutish and short. 10
The French secret services, also financed by American military intelligence, had been using Corsican opium dealers throughout Indochina, tied to Saigon’s Binh Xuyen mafia, to finance their operation against the Viet Minh. Thus they had a system in place for the collection and distribution of opium sap and morphine base from all over the Golden Triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand.
Morphine base is easily manufactured in makeshift jungle labs, pictured below. Opium’s major alkaloid is precipitated out of the raw sap by boiling it in water with lime. The white morphine floats to the top. That is drawn off and boiled with ammonia, filtered, boiled again, and then sun-dried. The resultant clay-like brown paste is morphine base.
That’s where the Corsicans came in. Heroin is diacetylmorphine, morphine in combination with acetic acid, the naturally-occurring acid found in vinegar. Heroin is preferred by users because the acetic acid renders it highly soluble in blood, therefore quicker acting and more potent than unrefined morphine. The combination process requires, firstly, the skillful use of acetic anhydride, chloroform, sodium carbonate and alcohol. Then the last step, purification in the fourth stage, requires heating with ether and hydrochloric acid. Since the volatile ether has a habit of exploding, the Union Corse had to advertise for a few good chemists.
With huge protected surpluses of morphine base available, the Corsicans built a network of labs to refine not only the Indochinese, but also the Persian and Turkish product, shipping the finished snow white #4 heroin out of a Marseille they now controlled. The Union Corse heroin was often shipped on the order of their Mafia partners, who controlled the great American retail market.
With that much leverage, the Corsican hoods became major CIA ‘assets’ throughout the fifties. Anslinger’s star international agents in the 50s, Charles Siragusa, George White and Sal Vizzini, actually brag in their memoirs about their operational CIA/Deuxieme Bureau connections. (The Deuxieme Bureau, the Second Bureau, was formerly the military intelligence branch of the French Expeditionary Corps, disbanded in 1940. Deuxieme Bureau is now used as a general term for French military intelligence.) That is, as they themselves obliquely admit, Anslinger’s FBN mission was essentially political, with the occasional cosmetic bust thrown in for credibility, or to destroy a competing ‘asset.’ White is the man who pretended that Burmese-KMT heroin came from the Reds. Siragusa, engineer of the Marseilles dock war, is the man who caught Luciano in Sicily with a half-ton of heroin being readied for shipment to Trafficante in Havana, and, pursuant to Anslinger’s orders, just let him go. 11
As our anti-Japanese guerrilla army, the U.S. had initially supported the Viet Minh in Vietnam. Then, under the influence of the Dulles brothers and their ilk, the U.S. shifted its support to the attempted French reconquest, who proceeded to lose anyway, despite the Dulles brothers’ heavy financing of the French Indochina War. In 1954, as the French were collapsing, President Eisenhower exploded with more anger than anyone there had ever seen before when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur Radford, and Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining, suggested in the National Security Council that we send American troops in to save the French: “The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight! There is just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us! I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!” That prescience from the organizer of D-Day. This was the almost unanimous technical military opinion of the U.S. military high command in 1954, including Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway and Marine Corps Commandant Lemuel Shepherd. 12
But Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been enraged by the Viet Minh victory. American politics, thanks largely to the Dulles brothers, had degenerated into an hysterical competition in apocalyptic inquisitorial red baiting. “For us there are two sorts of people in the world,” explained Secretary Dulles, “there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others,” including, apparently, all those nettlesome Buddhists.
As the French were collapsing, Secretary of State Dulles, who was mad as a hatter, actually offered French foreign minister Georges Bidault two atomic bombs to resolve the situation. Bidault, who was not a genocidal maniac, recoiled in horror, pointing out that our side would suffer every bit as much as the enemy. In 1953, when the Eisenhower administration had just taken office, Secretary of State Dulles seriously proposed in the National Security Council ending the Korean War with nuclear weapons. Dulles also seriously proposed solving the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis with China the same way, even after he was told that the ‘precision’ A-bombing of relevant Chinese targets would kill at least ten million civilians. The militarily sophisticated Eisenhower simply outfought the Chinese MiGs over the Taiwan Strait with Nationalist-piloted F-86 Sabrejets armed with our new Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, for which the Chinese had no answer. Just a few PRC pilots were killed. That same year Secretary Dulles actually pushed Eisenhower to resolve the confrontation over Berlin with nuclear weapons, which, obviously, would have started WWIII. Shooting down PRC MiGs, of course, virtually guaranteed the heavy logistical support of the People’s Republic of China for the Viet Minh. 13
Although opposed to full-scale war with the Viet Minh, Eisenhower agreed with the Dulles brothers that it was essential, both politically and militarily, that the Republicans not be seen to have ‘lost Vietnam,’ as the Democrats had ‘lost China.’ Thus he approved Allen Dulles’ device of sending the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), led by the CIA’s most dangerous covert operative, Col. Edward Lansdale, to engineer the ‘bloodless’ takeover of Vietnam. The model for this operation was the CIA’s recent operations in Iran and Guatemala, both of which had been relatively bloodless, as Eisenhower defined it, and relatively cost-free, as Eisenhower’s myopic team defined that. Having purged all the old China hands from the State Department during the recent McCarthyite hysteria, there was almost no one left in State to make the counter argument.
Magsaysay was a key WWII guerrilla leader, leading 10,000 troops under Col. Merrill; Eleanor Roosevelt with President Ramon Magsaysay and Mrs. Luz Magsaysay of the Philippines in Manila, 8/25/1955 (Wikimedia Commons)
Lansdale had just finished stomping the Philippine campesinos into submission. In the process, he installed our chosen commercial puppet, Ramón Magsaysay, thus securing pro-American corporate governance in the Philippines. As in Guatemala, the Huks were simply peasant farmers demanding an end to their abuse, caricatured as radical Stalinists by the Dulles brothers. The acronym Hukbalahap is short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, People's Army against the Japanese. They were sharecroppers in Central Luzon who banded together to deny the area to the Nazi Japanese. They felt they had earned an equal place in Philippine society. They used their WWII military structure to resist the forced landlord conversion of their sharecrop family farmsteads to monocrop corporate farms, leaving them, literally, with no place to live and no food to eat. Most were illiterate sweat-equity subsistence farmers who didn’t even know what Stalinism was. They were put under attack for insisting on renegotiating their slave-labor tenancies. Philippine and American corporate interests found Filipino control of Filipino land threatening to their bottom line. Sharecroppers were expendable, land wasn’t.
Lansdale caricatured the Huks with the Philippine version of Chiquita banana anticommunism, wildly exaggerating the threat with staged incidents which were splashed all over the media. Then Ramon Magsaysay, Lansdale’s well-chosen figurehead, rode to the rescue, in the media, with massive, ruthless, covert American military help, including artillery and napalm bombing of Huk villages. Lansdale also turned the Philippine army into more effective fighters, and instituted better command and control of the Philippine Constabulary, which cut down on the more flagrant police abuses, like gang rape. After Lansdale’s artillery barrages the shell-shocked Huks surrendered.
Magsaysay was a genuine WWII anti-Japanese guerrilla hero and was indeed a parliamentary democrat, as well as a U.S. commercial puppet, obediently signing the 1955 Laurel-Langley Agreement, a nationalistic update of the 1946 Bell Trade Act, which tied the Philippines to U.S. commercial interests somewhat more equitably. Given what followed, it’s fair to say that the Philippine operation was Lansdale’s most successful, largely because of Magsaysay’s stable character, genuine Filipino nationalism and political popularity. Magsaysay closely followed the Dulles brothers’ anticommunist political and economic line internationally, leading the 1954 foundation of SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
Lansdale, a former advertising executive, was the lead unconventional warfare officer attached to the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), ostensibly part of the Military Assistance and Advisery Group (MAAG), in place since 1950. Lansdale’s 12-man team was in place by June-July 1954, less than 2 months after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Lansdale operated in Vietnam with complete autonomy, reporting only to CIA Director Dulles, whose orders to Lansdale were simply “Find another Magsaysay.”
The Saigon Military Mission found that the well-organized Binh Xuyen street gang, which was in effect an arm of the Deuxieme Bureau, directly controlled Saigon’s police force. Lansdale used the mountain of American money and matériel at his disposal to buy the defeated French Vietnamese army, the VNA, renamed the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). When it was ready, in late April of 1955, the ARVN, in a savage 6-day battle that left 500 combatants and 1000 civilians dead, took Saigon back from the Binh Xuyen. 14
Lansdale worked in tandem with Lucien Conein, who, during the war, fought with the French and Corsicans as a Jedburgh in southern France, and then led OSS paramilitary operations in North Vietnam, fighting in the Tonkin jungle with French and Corsican guerrillas. He was instrumental in rescuing the French population in Hanoi from Viet Minh retribution on their 1945 takeover. Having worked with the French throughout their Indochina war, Conein knew North Vietnam well enough to operate there for Lansdale in 1954. His intimate knowledge of French forces, and his skillful use of troops, helped Lansdale take Saigon in 1955. 15
After all that effort, of course, it would have been a shame to lose ‘South Vietnam,’ an American fiction, to Ho Chi Minh in the 1956 all-Vietnam elections guaranteed by the Geneva Accords of 1954. The Accords had simply divided Vietnam into French or Viet Minh controlled electoral districts. But France lost control of its district. ‘South Vietnam,’ with its American-controlled ARVN, refused to participate in the guaranteed elections, despite French insistence that the Accords, although not formally recognized by the U.S., were internationally binding. The Accords were signed on July 21, 1954 by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, France, the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. gave only verbal assent to the Accords, and promised not to use force to reverse them. John Foster Dulles would not even talk to the Viet Minh or the Chinese, and stormed out of the Geneva conference days before it ended. He preferred to launch Ed Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission, starting a war to permanently divide Vietnam, the exact opposite of what was called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords and what the U.S. had promised.
Immediately on arrival in Vietnam, June-July 1954, Lansdale’s team declared, June 16, 1954, that Ngo Dinh Diem, still waiting in Paris, was now Prime Minister under the somnambulant French and Japanese puppet Emperor Bao Dai. All Bao Dai demanded of Lansdale in exchange for the appointment of Diem was a CIA pension so he could support himself in style on the French Riviera. Diem was flown into the country by the CIA on June 25, 1954 and anointed Prime Minister on July 7. To preempt the 1956 election, which all knew would elect Ho, Lansdale rigged a fake election, installing Diem as President of the previously nonexistent South Vietnam in October of 1955, with 98.2% of the vote.
President Diem then promptly declared the ‘Republic of Vietnam,’ banned all political parties and declared martial law with rule by presidential decree. Had the French administered the vote, as was called for by the Accords, there is no doubt that Ho’s victory in a southern election would have been a landslide, though, unlike the North, other parties had strength. France was set to formally recognize one Vietnam under the Viet Minh. President Eisenhower wrote in 1954, “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.” 16
Well, now they had a world-class dope peddler to fight for. Diem was a French-trained lawyer with the psychology of his mandarin ancestors. Diem served as Interior Minister at Bao Dai’s Imperial Court in Hue in 1933, but resigned when Bao Dai refused to be anything “but an instrument in the hands of the French.” He spent most of WWII trying to convince the Japanese to declare Vietnamense independence, under his leadership. The French refused to protect Diem from his Viet Minh death sentence, since he had opposed the French as well as the Viet Minh. Diem had tried to establish a third, Catholic force in Vietnam. He spent most of the French Indochina War living rent free in Catholic institutions in the U.S., lobbying the American right and advertising himself, after the French collapse, as the one who could ‘save the South.’ In 1953 he was introduced to the American power elite by New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, a powerful prince of the Imperial Church and a supporter of political fascism worldwide. Pierre Mendes-France, the French Prime Minister, warned Secretary of State Dulles at the 1954 Geneva conference that Diem’s Catholic fascism would be an obstacle in Buddhist Vietnam, but to no avail. Vietnam was 86% Buddhist, actually a native combination of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and, thanks to French rule, 7% Catholic. 17
Saigon CIA Deputy Chief of Station William Colby observed in 1959, “Diem’s style was that of the traditional mandarin, assuming the legitimacy of his position to be beyond challenge and manipulating the currents of the distant imperial court (now in Washington) to ensure the continued support necessary to his mission.” But the mission of the Saigon Military Mission was the destabilization, perhaps Catholicization is a better word, of southern Vietnam. By artificially creating anarchy, banditry and guerrilla war, where none existed before, the situation was militarized. The Red Menace would then require Diem’s Catholic police state. The puppet regime would then become a reliable source of raw materials, huge defense contracts, and the global heroin trade necessary to pay for those defense contracts. That’s advertising. As Colby put it, “The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership, and Diem’s messianic dedication seemed more appropriate for it than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.” By June 1960, Colby was Saigon Chief of Station. 18
The Geneva Accords had split the country into two roughly equal electoral districts at the 17th parallel. They also provided that Vietnamese were free to move from one district to another. The option to move from the Northern district to the Southern district expired in May of 1955. The Saigon Military Mission used this loophole to foment hysteria among Catholics in the North. This terror, in support of Diem’s call for northern Catholics to emigrate south, was largely, though not entirely, the work of Lansdale’s northern ‘psy-ops’ teams, led by Conein, a member of the Saigon Military Mission. While Lansdale operated out of Saigon, Conein established his paramilitary teams from Hanoi.
The Viet Minh did regard the pro-French Catholic paramilitary groups as traitors, and in the wake of the bitter French war there were executions of Catholic guerrillas, too many, but there was no mass murder, and Catholic retention became the official Viet Minh policy. Vo Nguyen Giap, in the fall of 1946, in a public statement to his colleagues, attempting to control the political damage, admitted that the Viet Minh had gotten carried away with the red hot warfare: “We made too many deviations and executed too many honest people. We attacked on too large a front and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread.” This hysterical anti-Catholic policy was reversed on the spot by the Viet Minh leadership, and the Viet Minh, demonstrating its usual policy discipline, ultimately earned considerable nationalist Catholic support.
That kind of public self-criticism, in real time, was an ingrained part of the Viet Minh’s culture. It was standard Viet Minh and NLF procedure, after an action, for both individuals and units to review their performance, unsparing public self-criticism being regarded as an heroic virtue. Commanders, like Giap, were expected to lead the way. The lessons learned were continually incorporated into future operations. If specific tactics were insufficiently understood, different units were tasked to perform tactical experiments and promulgate the results. Likewise American patterns of attack were studied, or mimicked, for ambush or booby trap opportunities. This tactical flexibility turned the NLF into the least predictable and most formidable guerrilla army in the world.
But most of the northern Catholic hysteria was the work of Lansdale’s psy-ops teams. As Lansdale himself put it in his Team Report to the Pentagon, “a refresher course in combat psywar was constructed and Vietnamese Army personnel were rushed through it…The first rumor campaign was to be a carefully planted story of a Chinese Communist regiment in Tonkin taking reprisals against a Vietminh village whose girls the Chinese had raped [playing on Vietnamese WW II experience]….On 1 July, Major Lucien Conein arrived, as the second member of the team. He is a paramilitary specialist, well-known to the French for his help with French-operated maquis in Tonkin against the Japanese in 1945, the one American guerrilla fighter who had not been a member of the Patti Mission….”
“On 21 July, the Geneva Agreement was signed. Tonkin was given to the Communists. Anti-Communists turned to SMM for help in establishing a resistance movement and several tentative initial arrangements were made. Earlier in the month they had engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region in early October, including items about property, money reform, and a three-day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled. Two days later Vietminh currency was worth half the value prior to the leaflets. The Vietminh took to the radio to denounce the leaflets; the leaflets were so authentic in appearance that even most of the rank and file Vietminh were sure that the radio denunciations were a French trick….Hanoi was evacuated on 9 October.”
“The northern SMM team left with the last French troops, disturbed by what they had seen of the grim efficiency of the Vietminh in their takeover…The northern team had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, in taking the first actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad…and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations (U.S. adherence to the Geneva Agreement prevented SMM from carrying out the active sabotage it desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbor, and bridge)…. The Vietminh long ago had adopted the Chinese Communist thought that the people are the water and the army is the fish. Vietminh relations with the mass of the population during the fighting had been exemplary…” 20
Lansdale dropped tens of thousands of leaflets with slogans like “Christ has gone south” and “the Virgin Mary has departed from the North.” Conein arranged with the Bishops to have these flyers distributed in the churches. Soothsayers were bribed to prophesy doom for Catholics in the North, and Conein arranged to have these dark prophesies confirmed in the popular astrological almanac. Boy Scout-handsome CIA agent Navy doctor Tom Dooley, supposedly a humanitarian, insisted that Ho had celebrated his takeover of Hanoi “by disemboweling more than 1,000 native women in Hanoi.” This was Lansdale’s scripted nonsense, but it worked. CIA agent Chester Cooper, who was there, said “the vast movement of Catholics to South Vietnam was not spontaneous.” The departing French helped to herd the terrorized Catholic peasants into Haiphong harbor, where they were loaded onto French and U.S. Navy transports. The CIA’s Civil Air Transport also pitched in, and many just walked across the border. The CIA spent about $100 million on Operation Passage to Freedom. 19
Haiphong Harbor, August, 1954 (National Archives, Wikimedia Commons)
By 1955, almost a million Vietnamese, mostly impoverished Catholic Tonkinese, were dropped, with no social support, among the traditional villages of the southern Cochinese in the Mekong Delta. These populations had never mixed before and despised one another. The homeless Tonkinese Catholics were outnumbered by the native Cochinese Buddhists 12:1. By 1955, 55% of South Vietnam’s 1.1 million Catholics, a ready-made Diem constituency, were refugees from the North. Unfortunately for Diem, these Catholic refugees included about 15,000 Viet Minh sleeper agents.
Ike and Dulles greet Diem at Washington National Airport, 5/8/1957 (Wikimedia Commons)
Conein became Diem’s CIA case officer, and together, working with Lansdale, they rigged the 1956 National Assembly elections, which gave Diem supporters 112 of the 123 seats. No opposition candidates were allowed to stand. Diem then proceeded to confiscate traditional village or hill tribe lands and hand them to homeless northern Catholics or absentee northern landlords who still expected the old colonialist rents. Since ‘South Vietnam’ had never existed before, it had no governmental structure - no tax system, military, police, legislature, civil service - nothing. Diem filled these slots with his pet Catholics. He then abolished all municipal elections and filled those slots with Catholics as well. As Lansdale himself complained, “A French colonial administrative system, super-imposed upon the odd Vietnamese imperial system was still the model for government administration.” A discouraged Lansdale complained that Diem was creating “a fascist state.”
The CIA’s official history puts it quite well: “…the [Viet Minh] movement’s anticolonialist legacy, its land reform policy, its egalitarian style and offer of opportunities for the ambitious among the rural poor, together with the assiduous personal attention devoted to even low-level candidates for recruitment, stood in stark contrast to Diem’s mandarism, which had ‘dried the grass’ of peasant resentment into incendiary opposition.” That opposition was confronted by Diem’s army commander, Gen. Tran Van Don, who had been born and educated in France, and fought both WW II and the French Indochina War with the French. 21
Diem then did something truly diabolical. He destroyed the traditional Mekong Delta barter economy by expelling all ethnic French and Chinese. The rural economy - the grain and commodity markets run for centuries by the mercantile Chinese, collapsed. Commodities as basic as dry-season drinking water became unavailable as the harvests rotted for lack of buyers. Dung-soaked rice-paddy water is undrinkable. The situation did indeed militarize.
Until Lansdale and Conein’s psy-ops, one of which was Diem himself, southern Vietnam had been introverted, tribal, peaceful and wealthy - and for the most part completely unaware of the Viet Minh. But in the face of starvation, uncontrolled banditry by homeless northern invaders, the systematic destruction of their economy and property rights, and enslavement at gunpoint in “strategic hamlets” - most southern Vietnamese accepted the discipline of the only Vietnamese-led army in Vietnam, the Viet Minh. As senior CIA agent Chester Cooper, who was part of Secretary Dulles’ 1954 Geneva team, put it, “innumerable crimes and absolutely senseless acts of suppression against both real and suspected Communists and sympathizing villagers. . . . Efficiency took the form of brutality and a total disregard for the difference between determined foes and potential friends.” That was the racist Dulles doctrine in action, no different in Vietnam than in Guatemala.
As the Pentagon Papers put it, “It can be established that there was endemic insurgency in South Vietnam throughout the period 1954-1960. It can also be established - but less surely - that the Diem regime alienated itself from one after another of those elements within Vietnam which might have offered it political support, and was grievously at fault in its rural programs. That these conditions engendered animosity toward the GVN seems almost certain, and they could have underwritten a major resistance movement even without North Vietnamese help….As far as attitudes toward Diem were concerned, the prevalence of his picture throughout Vietnam virtually assured his being accepted as the sponsor of the frequently corrupt and cruel local officials of the GVN, and the perpetrator of unpopular GVN programs, especially the population relocation schemes, and the ‘Communist Denunciation Campaign.’ Altogether, Diem promised the farmers much, delivered little, and raised not only their expectations, but their fears…. his ‘political reeducation centers’ were in fact little more than concentration camps for potential foes of the government…” 22
That’s the Pentagon’s own analysts speaking. In 1958, Hanoi once again asked the Diem government to help organize all-Vietnam nationwide elections. Until the rigged parliamentary elections of 8/30/1959, the Viet Minh government in the North, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam run by Ho’s Lao Dong, the Workers Party, urged the many anticolonialist factions in the South to concentrate on political organization and participation, not violence. The day after the rigged elections, Ngo Dinh Nhu thanked Cambodia’s neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk for his peacemaking efforts by sending him the gift of an explosive-laden suitcase, blowing Sihahouk’s chief of protocol, Prince Vakrivan, to kingdom come. Only when it became clear that Diem and Nhu were bent on a return to colonialist-style totalitarian fascism did the Viet Minh support military action in the South, founding the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. In 1961, U.S. military intelligence declared that 80-90% of the NLF in the South were of southern origin. There was no ‘invasion’ from the North, according to our own military intelligence. In 1962, the ‘Strategic Hamlet’ program of forced relocation was formally initiated. A strategic hamlet was a barbed-wire enclosed prison camp.
Since the urbane, Catholic, French-speaking Diem lacked the popular support of the Viet Minh, in rural, Buddhist, Vietnamese-speaking Vietnam, he was forced to rely for his financing on his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, a world-class opium and heroin dealer tied to the Corsicans. Lansdale and Conein pitched in with a coordinated effort to repeat the French Operation X, which organized the Hmong of highland Laos to operate against the popular Pathet Lao and Viet Minh. 23 24
The original French Operation X was run by paratroop Major Roger Trinquier, below, who traded massive amounts of Laotian Hmong and Thai KMT opium with the Binh Xuyen-Corsican mafia to finance his vast army of 40,000 tribal mercenaries operating in northern Vietnam. This was the original ‘French Connection.’ The military theorist Trinquier, author of the counterinsurgency manual Modern Warfare, coined the term ‘strategic hamlet.’ Trinquier’s Mixed Airborne Commando Group (MACG), using the French Air Force, supplied the Saigon-based Corsicans with morphine base. The Corsicans shipped that base to their brethren in Marseille and Vientiane for conversion into their famous snow-white #4 heroin. Note Dien Bien Phu on the map. That famous base on the Laotian border, where the French made their last stand, was built in defense of Trinquier ‘s Operation X.
Lucien Conein had helped the French run Operation X, and had been a Corsican operative since his WWII days in southern France and the Tonkin jungle, bordering the Hmong in Laos. Since the major Hmong crop, opium, was made valuable enough to trade for arms by our Prohibition, CAT-Air America, which tied together the disparate Hmong mountain villages, went into the opium-for-arms business. Small mountaintop bases were serviced by their Helio-Courier STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, which look like Piper Cubs. They could take off on a 100 yard runway and float down on a mountaintop at 35 miles an hour. The proceeds were used to finance both the Hmong army, led by the former French-serving Vang Pao, and Diem’s nepotistic regime.
All of Diem’s five surviving brothers had important government functions. Ngo Dinh Nhu’s weird Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party (shortened, in Vietnamese, to Can Lao), composed mostly of former French-serving Vietnamese Catholics, staffed the bureaucracy, while Nhu supervised the CIA-trained secret police. Nhu’s man at the head of the secret police, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, managed the large-scale dope dealing, feeding the profits to the family patriarch, oldest brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, the Archbishop of Hué, who managed the family’s expanding financial empire.
Ngo Dinh Nhu; Ngo Dinh Thuc; Tran Kim Tuyen (Wikimedia Commons)
One of Tran Kim Tuyen’s most trusted senior deputies was Pham Xuan An, who had joined the Viet Minh in 1944 at 16, then gotten his journalistic credentials in the U.S. after the French war. He returned to Vietnam in 1960 as an accredited Reuters and Time correspondent, working with all the well-known journalists of the day, ostensibly serving the Diem government as a propagandist. He was actually a colonel in the NLF. He was declared a “People's Army Force Hero” by the Vietnamese government on 1/15/1976 and given the rank of general.
Pham with California Governor Pat Brown, 1959; Pham with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, 1976 (Photos: VTC News)
After the Viet Minh victory, Pham Xuan An publicly disagreed with the government over its policy of centralized economic planning, pointing out that an economy cannot be managed like an army, and needed to institutionalize market forces to succeed. Although this cost An some minor political trouble, he and others like him were heeded by the pragmatic Viet Minh, most of whom themselves came from a mercantile tradition, and all of whom respected honest self-criticism, their very successful battlefield tactic. The prestigious accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers declared, in February 2017, that Vietnam may be the fastest-growing economy in the world, with an annual GDP growth of 5.1%, which would make it the 20th-largest in the world by 2050. Ho made it perfectly clear to Col. Archimedes Patti, his OSS liaison, that was his strategic direction in 1945, when he offered the U.S. lucrative government to industry partnerships.
Diem’s government had been completely penetrated by the DRV from its inception. Nu’s chief of the Strategic Hamlet Program, the Catholic Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, was, in fact, an NLF agent, a Viet Minh hero of the French Indochina War. He used his Catholicism to lend credibility to his renunciation of communism, enabling him to get close to Archbishop Thuc. Thao made sure to place the Strategic Hamlets in areas where they would be most vulnerable to NLF attack. On the event of Diem’s assassination, Bill Colby, President Kennedy’s Special Envoy and the CIA's Far East Division chief, went first to Col. Thao, who was the Diem government’s counterinsurgency chief. In 1965, he was killed after attempting to overthrow General Khanh’s regime. The victorious Viet Minh awarded him the posthumous rank of one-star general.
Another Ngo brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, was ambassador to Great Britain. Government contracts were invariably let to the Ngo Dinh’s army of relatives. Ngo Dinh Can controlled central Vietnam as a traditional warlord. There was no government spending on rural infrastructure, schools, housing or medical care. Rural spending was confined to the forced resettlement of the peasants into “strategic hamlets.” The peasants placed their hopes with the Viet Minh, which had always been wise enough to strengthen their rural economy. For the Viet Minh, a healthy, traditional village, militarily strong enough to defend itself was a “strategic hamlet.” Such hamlets were incinerated with napalm, bombed, or strafed by high-speed gatling guns. Between 1956 and 1963, Diem and his American allies killed about 100,000 Vietnamese men, women and children. 25
Strategic Hamlet, August 1964 (Wikipedia Commons)
Kennedy’s Commandant of Marines, Gen. David Shoup: “in every case...every senior officer that I knew...said we should never send ground combat forces into Southeast Asia.” Kennedy, who talked constantly of “communist aggression” and “assault from the inside,” answered Shoup’s critique by subscribing wholeheartedly to the “limited counterinsurgency” doctrine espoused by military adviser Gen. Maxwell Taylor in his 1960 book The Uncertain Trumpet. Taylor had been Eisenhower’s Army Chief of Staff from 1955-59, and so had worked closely with the Dulles brothers. Taylor was simply the next generation of military technician, understanding that “flexible response” with smaller, deployable units, was far more realistic than the unusable “massive retaliation” of the Eisenhower years. But of course Eisenhower was just using the simplistic sophistry of “massive retaliation” to keep us out of small imperialistic wars of conquest, like Vietnam. Eisenhower knew full well that small wars, like Vietnam, often turned into gigantic quagmires, as Vietnam had for the French. For Maxwell Taylor, warfare was much more user-friendly than ‘nuclear war or nothing.’ Kennedy made Taylor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October of 1962. Taylor, like Kennedy, saw Vietnam as the place to “stop the hungry Chinese” from dropping “the Bamboo Curtain.” That U.S imperialism was the only thing Vietnam and China agreed on never seems to have occurred to them. So all Taylor, an enthusiastic advocate of non-nuclear military funding, had to do was feed Kennedy enough strategic BS to make escalating military involvement in Vietnam seem plausible. 26 Eisenhower, Shoup, Lemnitzer, MacArthur, Mountbatten, Ridgway, Bradley, Gavin, Prouty and many others were horrified. They saw us heading for a repeat of the Korean nightmare. They predicted, before it ever happened, 60,000 American dead and a loss. They did not regard that as an option.
Taylor’s 1961 cables to Kennedy are a good example of the kind of policy-convenient lies he and his CIA cohorts practiced right through the Johnson years. “[South Vietnam is] not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate...comparable to parts of Korea where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort...North Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing….There is no case for fearing a mass onslaught of Communist manpower into South Vietnam and its neighboring states, particularly if our air power is allowed a free hand against logistical targets.” 27
Our Korean War commanders, MacArthur and Ridgway, who suffered the painful failure of air power in Korea, knew that was idiotic, dishonest. U.S. troops learned to live and work in Korea only after nearly being driven into the East China Sea by the Chinese army. The 1951 winter retreat from the China-North Korea border back to the Pusan Perimeter, below Seoul, was one of the most nightmarish in U.S. history. We had a far higher casualty rate in Korea than in Vietnam - 34,000 dead, another 120,000 wounded, in three years. At that rate, we would have lost more than 100,000 dead in Vietnam.
Taylor’s BS was good for ground forces appropriations, not the grunts at Ia Drang and Khe Sanh. At Ia Drang, November 14-16, 1965, American troops were awestruck, and badly bloodied, by an unrelenting hail of machine gun fire from North Vietnamese regulars, despite heavy air support. Both sides were left very badly bloodied. Joe Galloway, the courageous front-line reporter who lived through the battle with Hal Moore, the talented and courageous 7th Cavalry Regiment 1st Battalion commander, described Ia Drang as “the battle that convinced Ho Chi Minh he could win.” We dropped more high explosive on little Vietnam than all sides dropped in all of World War II, and we still found ourselves facing “a mass onslaught of Communist manpower.” What’s a logistical target in Vietnam? A mountain range? A forest? A thatched hut? A bicycle on a jungle trail? Five million widely dispersed cadres with shovels and Chinese machine guns?
Bicycle transport down the Ho Chi Minh Trail; Burning aircraft on ramp at Bien Hoa AB, 5/16/1965 (Wikimedia Commons)
Misperceiving this manipulative liar as an old school straight talker, Kennedy installed Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he moved Lemnitzer up to NATO. In so doing, he lost all hope of controlling the CIA, since the explicit National Security Action Memoranda he issued necessarily relied on the power of the Joint Chiefs for CIA oversight. Taylor fed Kennedy a steady stream of policy-convenient lies masquerading as military intelligence, lies designed by Dulles, Helms, Angleton, Lansdale, LeMay, Lodge and the other committed “counterinsurgents.”
This is not my analysis of Taylor’s approach to war in Vietnam I am presenting, but that of Col. Fletcher Prouty. Col. Prouty served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy. As an Air Transport Command VIP pilot during WW II, he flew the Chinese delegation to the November 1943 Cairo and Tehran Conferences. He also flew deep penetration missions through the Urals to the Russians, and into Japan, before the surrender, to set it up. He was the Chief Intelligence Officer of the U.S. Air Force from 1956 to 1963, and CIA Focal Point Officer of the Joint Chiefs under both Lemnitzer and Taylor until Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
In 1956 he set up the Air Force’s Office of Special Operations to coordinate Air Force work for the CIA, working closely with CIA Director Allen Dulles. As founding Chief of the OSO he literally wrote the Air Force manual for this work, and set up its worldwide system of offices and communications. Prouty’s unique interservice coordinating office was moved from the Air Force to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and then, during the Kennedy years, to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As the CIA Focal Point Officer, working for the Joint Chiefs, it was to Prouty that the CIA presented their matériel requests for the Bay of Pigs operation. The Joint Chiefs replied to the CIA matériel requests through Prouty – he was the Focal Point for all Joint Chiefs relations with the CIA, one of the highest ranking and most trusted intelligence officers in the U.S. military.
Prouty reported on a 1961 Joint Chiefs briefing: “Finally, the briefings on atomic energy matters, missiles and space, and other highly classified matters took place. Then the Chiefs began to hear some of the more closely held intelligence matters. The last item was the one that pertained to the CIA operational information. As I was ushered into the room I noted that everyone was leaving [for security reasons] except the chairman and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and the commandant was General David M. Shoup.”
Col. Prouty
“When the primary subject of the briefing had ended General Lemnitzer asked me about the army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, ‘Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me how many Army units there are that exist as “cover” for the CIA?’ I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said, ‘You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time, but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world.’” 28
That started an informal conversation between the three men that revealed to them the depth of penetration the CIA had achieved in an Army they thought they controlled. With control of strategic requisitions and contracting units, air bases, naval bases and customs units, using Army, Air Force, Navy or Marine resources, the CIA was able, without funding, to mount truly covert and unauthorized operations anywhere in the world. With CIA control of the oversight apparatus, oversight ceased to exist. Ex post facto approval was always granted. With the ability to move hundreds of millions covertly, the CIA was able to build Air America into the largest contract carrier in the world.
Arthur Schlesinger: “It had almost as many people under official cover overseas as State; in a number of embassies CIA officers outnumbered those from State in the political sections. Often the CIA station chief had been in the country longer than the ambassador, had more money at his disposal and exerted more influence. The CIA had its own political desks and military staffs; it had in effect its own foreign service, its own air force, even, on occasion, its own combat forces. Moreover, the CIA declined to clear its clandestine intelligence operations either with the State Department in Washington or with the ambassador in the field; and while covert political operations were cleared with State, this was sometimes done, not at the start, but after the operation had almost reached the point beyond which it could not easily be recalled.” At this time, CIA’s listed budget was 50% higher than State’s. 29
Prouty: “At that top echelon the Office of Special Operations acted as the liaison between the CIA and the DOD. What most people in Defense were totally unaware of was that in the very office that was supposed to serve the military departments and shield them from promiscuous requests, there were concealed and harbored some of the most effective agents the CIA has ever had. Their approval of CIA requests was assured. The amazing fact was that their cover was so good that they could then turn right around and write orders directing the service concerned to comply with the request.”
Col. Prouty received his orders to ground the Tibetan operation from the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, the same officer who ran the U-2 operation (and the Bay of Pigs). It is, therefore, not possible that Bissell missed Eisenhower’s order. But on May 1, 1960, Russia’s May Day, Bissell ordered Capt. Francis Gary Powers to overfly the Soviet Union with his high-altitude cameras. The spectacular U-2 incident, of course, did force cancellation of the Summit. Eisenhower’s dream of much lower defense spending went a-glimmering. Bissell had been taking orders from Allen Dulles since their early days together in the OSS, and had no intention of giving Eisenhower’s orders precedence of Dulles’. 31
Here are some selected paragraphs from Prouty’s January, 1978 Gallery Magazine article, The Sabotaging Of The American Presidency: “Three or four moles in the Pentagon, doing the bidding of their masters, flashed coded signals across the world to send out a lone U-2 plane on one of the longest and most impossible missions ever attempted by a U-2 -- a 3,900-mile journey from Peshawar, Pakistan across the Soviet Union to Bodo, on the northern tip of Norway. These men’s actions neatly bypassed the entire ultra-secret system and launched a plane that had been rigged to come down in the heart of the USSR on one of its most important holidays, May Day. Thus were destroyed the summit conference and Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace.”
“I was the properly designated military officer in the Pentagon for a period of nine years -- including 1960 -- responsible for exactly this function of supporting the clandestine activities for the CIA. Under my direction many aircraft, many items of equipment, and many personnel were properly sterilized and ‘sheep-dipped’ prior to use in secret missions. The U-2’s were no exception. As a matter of fact, the entire U-2 program was supposed to have been made sterile from production on up. I must say I knew the CIA to be meticulous about deniability. On regular clandestine overflights to China, Tibet, Indonesia, Burma, and other places, they did their best to conform with and obey the NSC directive. The identifying evidence included in Powers’ flight violated the NSC mandate. If this was a spy mission, the violation was clearly planned to wreck the upcoming summit conference.”
“It was normal DOD-CIA practice that pilots engaged in clandestine operations don pressure suits which contained no identification of any kind prior to takeoff. In the process, the pilot was required to strip, and all identity and personal items were removed by the officials in charge of that flight.”
“Powers’ U-2 had been flown from Turkey to Peshawar, Pakistan on April 30, 1960 just a few hours before Powers took off for the USSR. He had been flown to Pakistan by transport and given only two and a half hours’ warning before the flight. He has written: ‘I did not see the plane at close range.’”
“For some unaccountable reason Powers took off on this, the longest USSR overflight ever planned, and in the seat pack of his parachute was every identification imaginable. If Powers was supposed to play the role of a spy, then in accordance with the script that has historically been passed down, he would be nameless, faceless, a man without a country. He was none of those things. Why not? And who saw to it that he was none of these things?”
“Powers had in his kit one of the old World War II silk ‘escape-and-evasion’ flags. On the margin of this flag was written, among other things, ‘I am an American. I need food, shelter. I will not harm you. You will be rewarded.’ Does a spy carry such identity? And how about the cover story that he was a military pilot who unaccountably got lost and flew over the Soviet border? If he hadn't intended to fly over a ‘hostile’ country in peacetime, then why the escape-and-evasion kit? None of the official stories made the slightest bit of sense.”
“What was even more incriminating was the fact that Powers had his DOD identification card listing him as a member of the Air Force. He had forty-eight gold coins, four expensive watches, seven gold rings, and a pocketful of paper currency of many nations, including the USA and USSR. Powers had nineteen other forms of identity, including his Social Security card, 230-30-0321, a Lodge card, his USAF medical card, a driver's license, and two copies of his instrument cards, earned by all Air Force pilots for weather-flying qualifications.”
“During the Senate hearings, Allen Dulles said: ‘He [Powers] was given the various items of equipment which the Soviets have publicized and which are normally a standard procedure and selected on the basis of wide experience gained in World War II and in Korea.’ What experience was Dulles talking about? Military? CIA? Certainly Dulles knew that true spies are nameless.”
“When work with the special modification of the J-75 engine for the U-2 began, it was realized that the U-2 would be operating in a hostile environment. At very high altitude the engine can't breathe, and it needs help. It must have some air-mass intake to support combustion. During experiments, it was discovered that a trace of hydrogen introduced into the fuel-air mixture would support combustion and would virtually assure reliable operation of the burner at very high altitudes. Only those very close to the operation knew that the U-2 engine needed and had this hydrogen capability. Thus, the U.S. Air Force had an elaborate, ultra-secret program, directed from the aeronautical center at Dayton, Ohio, which provided cryogenic (super-cold) liquified hydrogen to the U-2 program all around the world, just before each planned mission.”
“Consider the scenario. A tiny group of top-level technicians with access to this hydrogen lifeline is charged with the responsibility of getting it to the Powers U-2. However, someone has arranged for less than a full cannister to be installed in the U-2 just before takeoff. The preflight check shows ‘Hydrogen-OK’ because the preflight inspection only shows that the cannister is there, not how much hydrogen is in it. The pilot has no way of knowing that there is not sufficient hydrogen in the cannister for 3,900 miles because there is no gauge on his instrument panel. So, the 24,000-pound aircraft takes off, accelerates to 114 knots, and begins the long climb to altitude. Everything appears to be perfectly normal. The engine runs fine. All equipment functions. Then, at precisely the predetermined time, the hydrogen runs out. The plane is as high as it can fly because it must make the longest flight it has ever made. At that great height, the pilot hears a slight rumble, typical of a flame-out, and his engine goes dead. One way or another, he lands.”
“There were certain upper-echelon officials in research and development who knew about the U-2’s special characteristics and could easily have arranged for the flame-out to occur.”
“Then came the challenge to Eisenhower. Did the President, who had worked so hard and so long to prepare for the ultimate summit conference and for his Crusade for Peace, direct that U-2 to overfly the USSR on May Day -- the day of its most important celebration? The idea was absurd, and Khrushchev knew it. Later Khrushchev gave Eisenhower every opportunity to admit that others in the U.S. Government had sent out that flight to sabotage the conference, stating that such an admission would salvage the meeting.”
“The camera the Russians recovered from Powers' U-2 was a military-type, 73B, serial number 732400. With wide-angle capability, it took pictures of a 125-mile-wide strip. The film was twenty-four centimeters wide and two thousand meters long, capable of shooting four thousand paired aerial pictures.”
“That camera was not the one routinely used by the CIA spy U-2’s. This U-2 had been doctored in Japan by someone who was willing to give away the plane but unwilling to reveal the technology of the newer U-2 camera. This was skillful deception from the inside.”
“Dr. Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, wrote in his book, Secrets, Spies and Scholars, ‘The invention of the U-2 high-flying aircraft and the camera capable of taking pictures from 80,000 feet, pictures that would permit analysts to recognize objects on the ground with dimensions as small as 12 inches . . . this technical miracle revolutionized intelligence collection. (The Lundahl system employed eight reflectors and exposed eight films through a single lens at the same time.)’”
“The pictures Khrushchev showed to the public and to newsmen gave away the ruse. The industrial installations and the rows of aircraft exhibited were tiny dots on regular film, and even with the best enlargement, they would never have met Dr. Cline’s criterion of twelve inches from 30,000 feet.”
“This is a crucial point. The U-2 incident was a clever and sinister deception. Its perpetrators intended for the Russians to find the U-2 and to think Powers was doing a spy’s work. Yet, these perpetrators were far enough up in Government circles to know that it was the technology of the camera which must not be given away.”
“Eventually, President Eisenhower took the blame for the whole thing, and his dream of a summit conference, trip to Moscow, and an around-the-world Crusade for Peace was shattered. Certainly he had the U-2 double-cross in mind when he delivered his famous ‘military-industrial complex’ speech at the end of his term of office.”
“During the first six months of 1960, I was the focal-point officer assigned by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force to provide special Air Force support to certain clandestine CIA overflight operations. In April 1960, a member of the Chief’s Pentagon office staff was in Thailand overseeing a major series of long-range overflights into Tibet and far northwestern China. Later that spring, orders came down to stop those overflights. The given reason was that the President wanted nothing to interfere with the success of his forthcoming Paris summit conference. Orders were sent from my office to ground the overflights.”
“These same orders applied to the U-2 program. We all took our orders from the same authorities. The U-2’s were supposed to have been grounded along with the Tibetan overflights. So, when Allen Dulles himself wonders who was directing the ship of state, it becomes apparent that he did not know who was running the country!”
Or, with the likes of Col. Prouty looking over his shoulder, was pretending not to know. When the U-2 went down, it was Col. Prouty, the Air Force’s senior intelligence officer, that Eisenhower called to decipher the mess. It was also Prouty who briefed CIA chief Allen Dulles before his Senate U-2 testimony. Prouty told both he thought it was an internal fix of the plane’s hydrogen/oxygen fuel system. A flameout at altitude caused by an empty hydrogen canister would force a landing or a low-altitude attempt at an oxygen-only restart. At low altitude Russian missiles could reach the powered glider. All that the Russians would need was a radar fix. Unbeknownst to Powers, his full military ID had been planted in the plane. These tough soldiers had witnessed the CIA use its mole tactics to infiltrate all the U.S. command and control mechanisms to which it was legally responsible, concentrating on the ‘enemy’ only as an adjunct to control of U.S. policy and power. The evolving covert government-by-defense-contractor scared the hell out of them.
On April 16, 1953, just three months into his presidency, one month after the death of Stalin, Eisenhower revealed his better angels in his inspired ‘Cross of Iron’ speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Eisenhower, angry at himself, came to feel that his administration had been ruined by the Wall Street militarists he had allowed to run it for their own profit. Talbot reports, “The president told White House aides Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray that he never wanted to set eyes on Dulles again.” 32
As Prouty says, Dulles’ sabotage of his Crusade for Peace was the impetus for Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 televised speech, a speech he knew to be his most historic, his Farewell Address to the nation, and an amazing bookend to his first great speech in 1953: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Eisenhower’s great phrase, “military-industrial complex” is now also known as the “deep state,” but I prefer Eisenhower’s more literal locution.
Eisenhower wrote that address with the key drafter of the speech, his staff assistant Ralph E. Williams, and Johns Hopkins professor of political science Malcolm Moos. Eisenhower, probably over concern for length or impact, dropped an entire section of the speech that reveals just how much Prouty, a WWII VIP pilot who, through the years, was often at his side, learned from Eisenhower. Eisenhower warns against a “permanent war-based industry….[with] flag and general officers retiring at an early age [to] take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions, and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust….[we must] insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.” Had he used that section of the speech as well, Eisenhower would be remembered as the presidential Nostradamus, or Cassandra. 33
Eisenhower didn’t just roll over for the Dulles brothers, who were continually advocating for increased military spending to benefit their corporate clients and, believe it or not, the use of the A-bomb against both Russia and China, apparently to lock us into a permanent state of war. Eisenhower cut the military budget by 20% between 1953 and 1955, giving us a balanced budget by 1956, the year he began building the Interstate Highway System, one of the most profitable investments in American history, having nothing whatever to do with warfare. Eisenhower reduced Army manpower by 44 percent from its 1953 level. With Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Matthew Ridgway as his strong technical supporter on the Vietnam issue, Eisenhower refused to rescue the French from their venal, genocidal attempt to reconquer our WWII ally, the Viet Minh, pointing out, as did virtually all our great field generals, that, as Eisenhower put it, “they would absorb our troops by divisions!” Both Eisenhower and Ridgway insisted that the French failure to reconquer Vietnam did not represent a threat to our “vital national interests.” George Kennan, the designer of the doctrine of containment, strongly and vociferously agreed. Having fought WWII, our field generals were accustomed to thinking of the Viet Minh as an ally.
Eisenhower also refused to support the 1956 attempt of the British, French and Israelis to conquer and occupy the Suez Canal, because, like Vietnam, it would start a widespread guerrilla insurgency throughout Egypt and north Africa which would drag America into a quagmire. An enraged Eisenhower, understanding this was an aggressive military gambit to force the U.S. into a colonialist counterinsurgency, angrily told British Prime Minister Anthony Eden that the “use of military force against Egypt under present circumstances might have consequences even more serious than causing the Arabs to support Nasser. It might cause a serious misunderstanding between our two countries.” That military threat was a direct order to the man whom Eisenhower had known as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary during the war: “Get the hell out!”
Eisenhower also rejected out of hand John Foster Dulles’ insane but serious repeated advocacy of using the A-bomb to end the Korean War, to stop the Viet Minh in 1954, and to begin wars with both Russia (over Berlin) and China (over Quemoy and Matsu). These repeated suggestions alone should have caused Eisenhower to realize what soulless fascists he was dealing with and fire both Dulles brothers. As Eisenhower put it, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, and its stupidity…. The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground during my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen.” Had he been less passive about McCarthyism, less racist and colonialist in his approval of the Dulles brothers’ corporate motives for their covert operations in Iran, Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam, which left plenty of dead Iranians, Guatemalans, Congolese and Vietnamese, he might have achieved enough control of his administration to prevent Dulles’ covert sabotage of his Crusade for Peace.
In 1955, President Sukarno, who had wrested Indonesia from the Dutch after the war, convened an international conference in Bandung of nonaligned Asian, African, and Arab nations. Sukarno was promoting a neutralist bloc of nations that would be able to fend off superpower colonialism. This was regarded as a mortal threat by the Dulles brothers, who immediately tasked the CIA with the removal of Sukarno. In 1958, they sold Eisenhower on the Indonesian coup by exaggerating the ‘communist’ threat from Sukarno. But the privateer right-wing officers the CIA backed did not succeed in overthrowing Sukarno, at which Dulles doubled-down, suggesting an escalated communist threat. Eisenhower then asked Dulles, “Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?”
The failed coup soured Sukarno’s gut. On August 17, 1964, during his Independence Day address, Sukarno declared, accurately, that the United States was the world’s prime enemy of anticolonialist nationalism. The attempted coup actually brought about the very result it purported to avoid, since, six years later, an aging, defensive, paranoid and ill Sukarno brought about his own overthrow by aligning with the communists, for the first time. The attempted American coup had convinced him that the communists were right about U.S. imperialism. Sukarno’s great genius had been to unite the left and the right in Indonesia behind the banner of “Nasakom,” nationalism, religion and communism. His swing to the left destroyed the national concensus, and made the PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, with its strength in minority communities, a military and Islamist target.
This turned into civil war and ethnic cleansing. On September 30, 1965, a group of junior army officers, organized by the CIA, assassinated six of the seven members of the Indonesian military’s high command. General Suharto took command of the armed forces. The CIA's Far East Division Chief, Bill Colby, rushed out to Indonesia to congratulate the new leaders. The CIA’s local coup engineer, Adam Malik, was installed as foreign minister. General Suharto, who ruled as absolute dictator for the next 30 years, immediately purged his widespread leftist and centrist Muslim opposition by committing what the CIA itself has called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” The CIA history doesn’t mention that it was Bill Colby, Chief of the CIA's Far East Division, who supplied Suharto with weaponry and, along with U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green, thousands of the names to be ‘liquidated.’
Once again, anti-communism had degenerated into pro-fascism. The fascist Dulles brothers understood democracy as contrary to the interests of their Sullivan and Cromwell industrial clients. As a worried Eisenhower said, government by military-industrial privateer had arrived. The CIA’s Abbot Smith, future chief of the agency’s Office of National Estimates, replying to Eisenhower’s complaints of the lack of reliable intelligence on the USSR at the end of 1958, wrote: “We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” 34
From 1957 to 1960, the politicized right-wingers in the CIA, not its actual technical analysts who knew better and said so, falsely reported to Eisenhower that a ‘missile gap’ existed between us and the Soviet Union. In 1960, the Dulles operatives told Eisenhower that the Soviets would have five hundred nuclear-tipped ICBMs ready to strike by 1961, so the Strategic Air Command planned and budgeted with the missile contractors accordingly. But Moscow didn’t have five hundred nuclear-tipped ICBMs, it had four. The hysteria was another bald-faced Dulles brothers lie fed to Eisenhower and Congress to increase their clients’ missile and aircraft appropriations and to augment the national policy drift toward total militarization.
Prouty: “In the case of the FAA, the actual CIA slotted men are in places where they can assist the ST with its many requirements in the field of commercial aviation, both transport and aircraft maintenance and supply companies.” The CIA slots in FAA, granted years before by other administrations, gradually expanded until they controlled basic FAA policy. Administrations change, bureaucrats just acquire seniority. “Turnover being what it is in bureaucratic Washington, it would not be too long before everyone around that position would have forgotten that it was still there as a special slot. It would be a normal FAA-assigned job with a CIA man in it.”
“This same procedure works for slots in the Departments of State, Defense, and even in the White House.... This is intricate and long-range work but it pays off, and the ST is adept at the use of these tactics. Of course, there are many variations of the ways in which this can be done.” 35
Lt. Col. William Corson, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and adviser to the Church Intelligence Committee, who had a doctorate in economics, pointed out that CIA and DIA operatives had so thoroughly infiltrated the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that internal criticism of CIA’s budgetary requests was all but eliminated. 36
Prouty: “Thus the CIA has been able to evolve a change in the meaning of and the use of the control word ‘direct’ and then to get its own people into key positions so that when they do present operations for approval they are often presenting these critical clandestine schemes to their own people.” 37
y
Shoup on Tarawa, 1943 (Photo Marine Corps); Maxell Taylor; Joint Chiefs 1961 (National Archives); The Joint Chiefs, 11/13/1961: L-R: Anderson, Decker, Lemnitzer, Lemay, Shoup (Wikimedia Commons)
“This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of national security he would place people in all areas of government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own cover organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.” 38
“Allen Dulles was able to get Maxwell Taylor into the White House as personal military adviser to President Kennedy.... Maxwell Taylor was not the White House military adviser in the regular sense; he was the CIA’s man at the White House, and he was the ‘paramilitary adviser.’ ....During the last days of the Dulles era, Maxwell Taylor served as the Focal Point man between Dulles and his Agency and the White House.” 39
As Senator JFK said in 1956, “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” Kennedy told his first National Security Council meeting that “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.” Ultimately Kennedy came to understand that third world nationalism was anything but a “monolithic conspiracy,” but too late – he had already lain down with Dulles’ dogs.
Kennedy ignored the advice of Deer Team leader Col. Archimedes Patti, Ho’s OSS liaison officer, who insisted that Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation movement was anything but a puppet of the Russians or the Chinese, whom they feared as imperial threats to their sovereignty. Patti, who knew them well, insisted that the Viet Minh represented a unique nationalism that had already proven it could be a reliable U.S. partner. Ultimately, Kennedy’s attitude was just what Dulles wanted, Catholic, in the French imperial sense of the word. Kennedy insisted that the French-speaking Catholic Diem, Cardinal Spellman’s nominee for chief colon, if we gave him enough military help, could rule Buddhist Vietnam in America’s interest. The idea was inherently colonialist and racist.
Taylor never challenged Kennedy politically, never opposed his policy. For that matter, Kennedy never opposed Taylor’s policy. The two had no policy differences. Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 52, 5/11/1961, “to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam” authorized a “program for covert actions to be carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency which would precede and remain in force after any commitment of US forces to South Vietnam…. The U.S. will attempt to strengthen President Diem’s popular support within Viet-Nam by reappraisal and negotiation, under the direction of Ambassador Nolting. Ambassador Nolting is also requested to recommend any necessary reorganization of the Country Team for these purposes.”
Kennedy agreed when Taylor wrote into NSAM 57, 6/28/1961: “A paramilitary operation...may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the United States or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us.” Although marginally sympathetic to Vietnamese nationalism, Kennedy, heavily influenced by the Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, and the Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge, instinctively accepted the idea that Vietnam ought to be a Catholic-led American colony, and Taylor fully supported the “Vietnamization” idea, which left most of the fighting to the rented gooks. Kennedy made Taylor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 10/1/1962. 40
Taylor, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote to Kennedy on September 2, 1963: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.” This bore no relation to reality. South Vietnam’s reporting to the Pentagon had been a sham designed to support U.S. funding, a sham supported by U.S. intelligence officers. Hamlets and villages claimed to be secure by the South Vietnamese were almost all ruled by the NLF. Almost all strategic hamlets had already been abandoned. Long An Province, 40 miles south of Saigon, was an NLF stronghold. By March, 1964 the NLF, because of their political strength, controlled almost half of South Vietnam. Taylor told Kennedy the opposite. 41
Decorated Korean War veteran Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was sent to Vietnam in March of 1962 to improve ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) supply train and tactics. His supply train success was widely lauded. Vann was the senior American adviser to Colonel Huynh Van Cao, commander of the ARVN IV Corps, which was up against the NLF in Dinh Tuong Province, in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon.
On January 2, 1963, Vann directed the seminal battle of Ap Bac from a slow, unarmed low-flying spotter plane, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for refusing to break off under heavy enemy fire. Despite an 8 to 1 numerical advantage, 2500 to 300, and artillery, armor, and helicopter support, including half-tracks, the ARVN troops lost the battle. The small, disciplined NLF force inflicted heavy casualties, over 80 ARVN killed, plus three American ‘advisers,’ shot down five helicopters, and escaped with only light casualties, leaving only three bodies behind. Vann’s after-action report excoriated ARVN incompetence, cowardice and laziness, their gross inflation of the VC body count, and the rank corruption of Diem’s dope-dealing high command. Reported Vann, Military Assistance Command – Vietnam (MACV) commander General Paul D. Harkins lazily swallowed too much Vietnamese BS. Vann also insisted that the Strategic Hamlet Program was political suicide.
Despite the fact that he was one of the Army’s premier logistical and tactical geniuses with extensive in-country battlefield experience, Maxwell Taylor would not permit Vann to brief the Joint Chiefs on his return in 1963. Vann, not a careerist prostitute, quit the Army in 1963 after doing his 20 years and proceeded to infuriate the American high command by taking his critique to David Halberstam of The New York Times and Neil Sheehan of UPI, who published it all over the world. Vann also talked to CIA analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who spent 1965 and 66 working for General Lansdale’s State Department intelligence unit in Vietnam. Ellsberg later passed the classified Pentagon Papers analysis ordered by McNamara, which he compiled, to Sheehan for publication in The New York Times and to Ben Bagdikian of The Washington Post, thereby blowing the lid off the Vietnam debate.
By blocking Vann’s critique, the politicized Taylor was selling the war, not objectively analyzing it or fighting to win it. A week after the battle of Ap Bac, Taylor sent Army Chief of Staff General Earle Wheeler with a team to investigate, and sure enough, things were just hunky dory. As H. R. McMaster reports in Dereliction of Duty, Johnson, McNamara, Rusk and Taylor spent an inordinate amount of time and energy fixing the ‘intelligence’ for political consumption, rather than taking it seriously. They continued to pretend that the Vietnamese ‘government’ they were ‘assisting’ was a legitimate government for which they were ‘buying time,’ rather than a rotating collection of fascist dope peddlers with no political legitimacy, support or decency.
The major internal American debate in the early days of the war was ‘gradual escalation’ vs. ‘fast escalation,’ essentially the political Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Bill Bundy at State and John McNaughton at Defense worrying about the 1964 election vs. the pragmatic Joint Chiefs, worrying about the military situation on the ground in Vietnam. Both options were designed, to quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor, to convince the “enemy that it is to his interest to desist from aiding the insurgents” and obtain “his cooperation in calling off” the insurgency in South Vietnam and Laos.
These conformist, racist fools had no idea what they were dealing with – they were literally living in their own colonialist dream world. As CIA agent Frank Snepp, who fought that war for six years, put it, “They were really distant from the reality you could document with intelligence, and they were trying to remake reality to fit their own favorite vision.” Snepp actually said that to DCIA Colby’s face during the May 1975 CIA wake for Vietnam at Langley, contradicting Colby’s insistence that we could have won, that the strategy had been realistic. The CIA’s top Vietnam expert, George W. Allen, the one who convinced Secretary of Defense McNamara to organize the Pentagon Papers review of policy, insisted that the intelligence was being fixed in favor of the Dulles brothers’ colonialist fantasies. His book, None So Blind, demonstrates how the Dulles brothers’ McCarthyism had been so successful, that dealing with the reality of the Viet Minh, as Roosevelt had so profitably done, wasn’t even considered an option among the war planners. Allen names the three top Army generals sent to South Vietnam in the 1950s and early 1960s, Joseph Collins, Samuel Williams and Paul Harkins; the ambassador to South Vietnam in 1964-1965, Maxwell Taylor; and Johnson administration heavies Walt Rostow, McGeorge and William Bundy and McNamara himself. Dealing realistically with the Viet Minh was off the table, despite the fact that the only political entity with widespread popular support in South Vietnam was the Viet Minh.
Fortunately for us, Assistant Secretary of Defense McNaughton’s assistant was Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the real content of their deliberations in The Pentagon Papers. But, like Ike’s Secretary of State Dulles, Johnson’s Secretary of State Rusk didn’t talk to the Reds. When George Ball, Rusk’s Under Secretary of State, advised diplomacy and withdrawal he was ignored. When Vice President Hubert Humphrey, just after Johnson’s landslide 1964 electoral victory, insisted, like Ball, that we should get out of Vietnam, Humphrey was completely excluded from all further war planning sessions. LBJ, as if taking talking points from the Dulles brothers, often equated Ho Chi Minh with Hitler, despite the fact that the Viet Minh had been an important part of our anti-Nazi coalition, heavily armed by us. LBJ, Press Conference, 7/28/1965: “Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed …bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we learned from the lessons of history.” To negotiate with the Viet Minh became the equivalent of Chamberlain at Munich. They built policy behind what they knew was BS, acting as if they really believed it. One of the most humiliating revelations in The Pentagon Papers was that they knew full well they were lying through their teeth to the American people about the war.
They gave the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the South a derogatory French name, ‘Viet Cong,’ and pretended that made them something other than Viet Minh. Well, the Viet Minh wasn’t buying it – Vietnam was one country, their country. It was Ho Chi Minh vs. Gen. Nguyen Khanh, that is, George Washington vs. Benedict Arnold. Allen Dulles protégé Gen. Maxwell Taylor, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Ambassador to South Vietnam 1964-65, was essentially dictating war strategy to President Johnson. Taylor thought of the war in just those terms. McMaster: “Before he arrived in Washington, Taylor sent a cable recommending that the United States ‘accept the fact’ that a stable government in South Vietnam was ‘unattainable’ and recognize that there was ‘no George Washington in sight’ to assume the leadership of the South Vietnamese people. Taylor thought that the United States should accept greater responsibility for the fight against the Viet Cong because the South Vietnamese government was so weak.”
They pretended South Vietnam was a real country, even though they knew it wasn’t. They were conquering southern Vietnam in opposition to the indigenous population, whom they pretended were invaders from the North, and they knew they were pretending. Taylor, a real field general with plenty of battlefield experience, began to see the U.S. as caught in a whirlpool of its own making. He cabled Secretary of State Rusk, worrying about American “vulnerability to communist propaganda and third world criticism as we appear to assume the old French role of alien colonizer and conqueror.” In an odd reversal of roles, Taylor began to worry about promiscuous American escalation trapping us in a ghastly quagmire, as of course it was doing. Taylor saw “the possibility of a kind of Dien Bien Phu,” as the long, drawn-out American collapse most certainly was.
In a November 7, 1964 memo, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton acknowledged that their recommended post-U.S. election option of gradual escalation had “some chance of coming out very badly.” Still believing it was possible to coerce the Viet Minh regarding ownership of their own country, Taylor, despite his realistic fear of quagmire, shared the administration’s muddled view that “an early willingness to negotiate would appear to the North Vietnamese as a sign of weakness,” and so continued to support gradual escalation.
They were defending a fantasy, a duplicitous cover story about an independent South Vietnam. The McCarthyite, the Dullesite parameters of the strategic dialogue had been established in the corridors of power, so the best evolved strategic thinking of the American military was marginalized and ignored. In 1965, while President Johnson was playing politics with military tactics, which is exactly the wrong thing to do with military tactics, General Harold Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, formally concluded that it would take five years and five hundred thousand men to defeat the insurgency in the South. A simultaneous Marine Corps technical study ordered by the JCS estimated that we would need seven hundred thousand men. As the Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, put it in January of 1965, the United States “should be prepared at an early date to either commit U.S. forces in sufficient strength to ensure victory for our side or get out before it is too late.”
DCIA John McCone told President Johnson to expect tit for tat from the North Vietnamese in response to his ‘gradual escalation.’ DCIA William Raborn, who replaced McCone in April of 1965, wrote President Johnson on May 8 that “we will find ourselves pinned down, with little choice left among possible subsequent courses of action: i.e. disengagement at very high cost or broadening the conflict in quantum jumps.” President Johnson consulted Clark Clifford, Democratic heavyweight since he was Truman’s White House Counsel. Clifford told Johnson to keep troop numbers “to a minimum consistent with the protection of our installations and property in that country….this could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open end commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.” Clifford, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, told Johnson to pursue negotiations.
But somehow Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, Taylor & Co. thought that it was necessary for “America’s honor” to start heavy B-52 bombing of North Vietnam, napalm and B-52 bombing of NLF communities in the South, and the insertion of American ground combat units. Otherwise, U.S. credibility, which, as Secretary Rusk put it, “is the pillar of peace throughout the world,” would be damaged. Maintaining their lies reduced these racist, conformist cowards to fascist doublespeak. I was 20 in 1965. As us young hippies used to say, “alienation is when your country is in a war and you want it to lose.” We also used to say, “As soon as the Viet Cong hit the Bronx I’ll join up.” The profit motive, not common sense, was driving their policy. They were engineering a war that would be profitable only to U.S. defense contractors and the protected global hard drug trade that was financing our military puppets and client armies. The colonialist strategic goal was possession of Vietnam’s considerable natural resources, including oil, natural gas and coal, but, absent the achievement of that ultimate goal, the war was vastly profitable to our defense contractors nonetheless.
South Vietnam’s most notorious heroin dealer, Air Force chief Nguyen Cao Ky, took the government by coup d’etat on June 19, 1965. Ky, one of Diem’s Catholic assassins, had been running the CIA’s heroin operation since 1961. The American military was told, by its own high command, that the strategic goal of the war was ad hoc defense of the Saigon government, whose only constituency was the American and Corsican mafia. There was almost nothing else in the country that supported the U.S. effort, which had become, literally, an exact repeat of the French attempt at conquest. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle Wheeler said that we were maintaining South Vietnamese “freedom and independence” - by killing the people of South Vietnam. At the June 11, 1965 NSC meeting, General Taylor reassured the high command that “the present VC campaign will be terminated without serious losses.” Assuming, that is, that you don’t count 60,000 American dead as a serious loss. 42
Douglas MacArthur himself, a military genius and a savage anticommunist, had warned Kennedy in the White House in 1961 that a Vietnam war was strategic suicide, predicting in detail everything that happened after Kennedy’s death. This meeting was recounted by Kennedy aide Schlesinger, who was in the room. MacArthur, who nearly lost his entire army to the Chinese in Korea, pointed out that China was still allied with neighboring Vietnam. As he went for the kill against the North Koreans on China’s border, the Yalu River, MacArthur was suddenly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of Chinese troops. 43
When Gen. Creighton Abrams, Patton’s superb European point brigade commander, inevitably asked President Johnson for permission to take Hanoi, the High Command had to refuse. It knew Abrams could do it, but it also knew that would force China into the war. And you can’t actually use nuclear weapons. MacArthur laid this all out before it ever happened. He knew that any American commander would face protracted guerrilla war in Vietnam against overwhelming numbers without the possibility of military victory.
Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who replaced MacArthur in Korea, also bitterly opposed American troops on the ground in Vietnam, and used all his influence to prevent it. Gen. Omar Bradley did the same. Eisenhower’s Chief of Plans for the Army, Gen. James Gavin, was also horrified at the thought of an Asian land war. Noted the prescient Gavin, “What appears to be intense interservice rivalry [in favor of intervention] in most cases...is fundamentally industrial rivalry.”
MacArthur observing the shelling of Inchon, 9/15/1950 (Wikimedia Commons); MacArthur on the beachhead at Leyte Island, 10/1944 (Wikimedia Commons); MacArthur with Kennedy in the White House, 8/16/1962 (Kennedy Library)
MacArthur, Eisenhower, Lemnitzer, Shoup and Prouty understood the meaning of that all too well. In 1959, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War, insisted that he did not “know of a single senior commander that was in favor of fighting on the land mass of Asia.” This despite the fact that Collins was Eisenhower’s personal envoy to Diem. In 1952, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett told NATO Commander Eisenhower that the Joint Chiefs were “unanimously opposed to the commitment of any troops” in Vietnam. In 1950, U.S. military intelligence told Douglas MacArthur, then in charge of our troops in Korea, that 80% of the Vietnamese people, North and South, supported Ho Chi Minh, and the remaining 20% were almost all neutral. MacArthur’s briefers stressed that for the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese this support had nothing to do with Ho’s politics, but his nationalism. 44
This, of course, was not news to MacArthur. He told Kennedy that Vietnam’s only Vietnamese-led army was synonymous with nationalism. He emphasized that the Viet Minh was a genuine national liberation front so popular that, if put under attack, it could mobilize virtually the entire population, giving it a numerical superiority that would enable it to absorb high losses indefinitely and still inflict unacceptable damage on any invader.
Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), addresses the French Socialist congress in 1920. This remarkable man was fluent in Vietnamese, French, English, Russian, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The refusal of the powers at Versailles to hear him in 1919 led him to begin organizing armed rebellion. The only military support he could find was in Moscow (Black Star)
MacArthur talked at length to Kennedy about Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 the French had placed 16,000 men at Dien Bien Phu on the North Vietnam-Laos border. This large “hedgehog” garrison had been airlifted into supposedly inaccessible mountain terrain to serve as a base for offensive operations to protect French assets, including their Hmong opium army in Laos. 80,000 Viet Minh porters, augmented by another 150,000 from the local hill tribes, then proceeded to do what the French high command had assumed was impossible. They hauled 200 heavy cannon and ample ammunition, disassembled piece by piece, through the vast rugged mountain range and up the heavily forested peaks surrounding the French garrison - and flattened it. General Giap had the tactical patience to spend months deliberately stockpiling ammunition and emplacing heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns on the slopes surrounding “the bottom of the teacup.” His sapper scouts pinpointed every protected artillery piece in the base. When Giap finally opened up, he was shooting at specific targets from higher ground, and had anticipated the aerial resupply effort. The French air force and the CIA’s contract airline CAT were able to fly only 28 heavy guns through the flak to the French pancakes, suffering heavy aircraft losses. The French lost the entire garrison. On May 8, the Viet Minh counted 11,721 prisoners, of whom 4,436 were wounded. The Viet Minh flag flying over Dien Bien Phu, became the symbol of Vietnamese independence worldwide. 45
The Fall of Dien Bien Phu, May 7, 1954; Less than half the 8000 ‘able bodied’ French prisoners survived the 500-mile march to prison camp (Wikimedia Commons)
.
On the 1954 French collapse, the Viet Minh, which had been heavily armed by the U.S. in 1945, inherited all the U.S. weaponry the French had to leave behind. Mass produced Viet Minh land mines turned jungle roads into death traps. Even neighboring China feared the Viet Minh. No Western invader, said MacArthur, could match Viet Minh manpower in Vietnam. This was, of course, the same thing that Earl Mountbatten, the Allied commander in Indochina, and Vo Nguyen Giap, the OSS’ man at the head of the anti-Japanese guerrilla army known as the Viet Minh, had to say. MacArthur was talking about the army that he and Mountbatten helped to build.
Complained OSS Indochina intelligence chief Paul Helliwell in 1943, “The French were infinitely more concerned with keeping the Americans out of Indochina than they were in defeating the Japanese or in doing anything to bring the war to a successful conclusion in that area.” Most of France’s colonial forces collaborated with the Japanese, managing Vietnam for their war machine. French forces were riddled with Japanese agents, so that the minority that wanted to resist failed. Poor French intelligence repeatedly got OSS sabotage teams bushwhacked. The only reliable help we had in northern Vietnam came from the Viet Minh. By 1944 the Viet Minh had taken complete control of the northern Tonkin provinces. They were a military reality. They were feeding the OSS South China command at Kunming genuine intelligence, supporting its raiding parties and rescuing its fliers. So we sent them rifles, machine guns, mortars, bazookas and grenades as they took Vietnam from the Japanese. And the Viet Minh made no secret of their intention to challenge the French and British positions everywhere in Vietnam once the war ended. 46
OSS Deer Team 1945, left to right, rear, Phần Đinh Hủy, Rene Defourneaux, Ho Chi Minh, Team leader Major Allison Thomas, Vo Nguyen Giap, Henry Prunier, Đàm Quang Trung, Nguyễn Quý, Paul Hoagland; front, Lawrence Vogt, Aaron Squires, Thái Bạch (Photo: Rene Defourneaux/U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons)
Roosevelt, at the Cairo and Teheran conferences of 1943, got Stalin and Chiang to agree that Vietnam should be completely independent. Roosevelt’s plan had been to put French and Dutch possessions under U.N. trusteeship, and then organize U.N. supervised elections. Churchill, protesting his ancestral love of colonialism, squelched the deal, to the great relief of the Gaullists. As a consequence, the Allies agreed by default that France was the rightful owner of Vietnam, thus starting the French Indochina War.
The Potsdam conference of July, 1945 had divided Vietnam into British and American-controlled zones at the 16th parallel. Thus it was Major General Douglas Gracey’s 20th Indian Division, reinforced by extra battalions of Gurkhas, under Churchill’s orders relayed through Mountbatten, that took actual control of Saigon for the South East Asia Command in August of 1945. When the British arrived they reacted with gratuitous hostility to the Viet Minh Provisional Executive Committee for South Vietnam which had taken control of Saigon in the absence of the Japanese, the French and the British. The Viet Minh ‘August Revolution’ was managing the city without violence or reprisals – the electricity was on, food was plentiful and the French were safe. Under orders to put the French in charge, Gracey wrote, “I was welcomed on arrival by the Vietminh, and I promptly kicked them out.” 44
With condescending, racist brutality, Gracey declared martial law, thus criminalizing the very Viet Minh in Saigon who had just defeated the Nazi Japanese and who welcomed the Allies with open arms. Gracey then freed the racist French colons imprisoned by the Japanese, armed them, and put them under de Gaulle’s command through ‘Governor’ Col. Jean Cedille, Sept. 22-23, 1945. Using these French colonialist troops, as well as his own, Gracey then executed a coup d’ etat that violently evicted the Viet Minh from Saigon Town Hall, running up the French Tricolor. Until that moment, cooperation with the Allies had been the official Viet Minh policy. The Viet Minh, once again, found themselves facing the racist French colons, the hostile Brits and Gurkhas, and even rearmed Japanese troops, in the streets of a Saigon they had just liberated. The fighting then extended throughout the British zone in southern Vietnam. By 1947 Gracey turned southern Vietnam over to General LeClerc’s French forces. Churchill and de Gaulle had started the French Indochina War.
OSS officers give M-1 carbine training to the Vietminh, 8/16/1945 (National Archives); Deer team leader Allison Thomas (2nd from right) musters with the Viet Minh as they prepare to occupy Hanoi, 8/1945 (National Archives); Archimedes Patti and Vo Nguyen Giap (both front center) celebrate Ho’s declaration of Vietnamese independence by saluting the Allied and Vietnamese flags as the Star Spangled Banner and Vietnamese national anthem played (Archimedes L. Patti Collection)
Ho based the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, September 2, 1945, co-written by his OSS liaison, Col. Archimedes Patti, on the American. It begins, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.” Ho was flanked by his American military mission when he read those words to the vast crowd in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, which was named after the 1886 rebellion against French colonialist enslavement. The American military plane that flew overhead was wildly cheered.
Ho declares Vietnamese independence; American-armed Viet Minh, Patti Collection
That was the same day that Japan formally surrendered to the U.S. At this time Ho repeatedly sent formal offers to the American government, through the OSS team attached to him, inviting massive American investment and lucrative government-to-industry partnerships. The War Department responded by sending half of the unused Japan-invasion stockpile on Okinawa to Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi - enough weaponry, according to Prouty, including heavy artillery, for 150,000 troops. 47
America could have had anything it wanted from Ho Chi Minh in 1945. Virtually all our intelligence officers who interacted with the Viet Minh, 1943-45, insisted on their common sense, legitimacy, and grass-roots support. These officers recognized that Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s reporting from the Mekong Delta in the early 1960s was accurate.
Ho with Col. Patti; Vo and Ho with Patti (Patti Collection)
Burchett was one of the nerviest frontline correspondents to come out of World War II. Seven days after we incinerated Hiroshima, Burchett, unaccompanied, rode a Japanese train, loaded with angry Japanese troops, to ground zero. As the first Allied journalist on site, his graphic report in London’s Daily Express mesmerized that part of the world that didn’t find it necessary to dismiss it as pro-Japanese propaganda. Burchett’s report was entitled “The Atomic Plague: I write this as a warning to the world.”
On the eve of the final battle for Dien Bien Phu, Burchett shared meals with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, listening to them explain their strategy. Because he loved these freedom fighters, his accurate reporting was dismissed as “communist propaganda.” Only too late did the French realize that Burchett hadn’t exaggerated Viet Minh popularity, or the effectiveness of their tactics, at all.
So too the Americans. The intrepid Burchett spent the better part of 1960-1964 living with the National Liberation Front (NLF), under attack, in the Mekong Delta. Burchett insisted that the NLF, so far from being an artificially created unit of the North Vietnamese Army, was an organic, broad coalition of Vietnamese political parties from the South, and as such had enormous local political support. But his dispatches were dismissed as propaganda by those for whom they were inconvenient. The CIA, by this time, had degenerated to the point where it was quoting its own political line as if that were military intelligence.
An early-60s CIA directive flatly asserted that there was no need to count the population at large as part of the “Viet Cong” because their support had been coerced. Burchett pointed out that mothers don’t have to be coerced into supporting their sons. Captured enemy documents, since they revealed the incredible depth of the Viet Minh ‘liberation associations’ in rural South Vietnam, were actually systematically ignored in the CIA’s reports to policy makers.
Burchett and his wife Vessa with Pham van Dong and Ho Chi Minh (Burchett Archive/State Library of Victoria)
When an astute CIA analyst, Sam Adams (great name – a family descendant), who naively thought his job was to objectively analyze the intelligence, insisted that NLF numbers were so overwhelming that we needed to reconsider our basic strategy, his information was intentionally withheld from policy makers. Adams concluded, from his in-country research into captured enemy documents and other sources, that the “previous estimates had undercounted the communists by hundreds of thousands. The implications were astounding.” Adams insisted, in his revision of the CIA’s Order of Battle for the Viet Cong, that MACV’s low NLF numbers were the result of political interference with the data. MACV wasn’t counting extended family and was relying on corrupt ARVN numbers. The result was an undercounting of NLF numbers by orders of magnitude. MACV asserted it was up against 270,000 VC, but Adams demonstrated that the number was closer to 600,000, with 20,000 VC double agents enrolled in the ARVN, not the 300 that the 1968 Saigon Station Chief Shackley claimed.
Adams’ work was rejected in 1967, but officially accepted after the January 1968 Tet Offensive. Louis G. Sarris, an analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, had reached the same conclusions in 1963. He was reassigned. Upon his return from his Vietnam fact-finding trip, Paul Kattenburg, chairman of Kennedy’s Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group, suggested to a National Security Council meeting on August 31, 1963 that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable quagmire from which we should extricate ourselves ASAP. Kattenburg, who first learned to evaluate jungle warfare as one of Merrill’s Marauders, was transferred to a diplomatic post in Guyana. Winning armies don’t do that to their best battlefield analysts.
General Westmoreland was all over the media giving his never ending ‘Victory is Just Around the Corner’ speech, first given to Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland saluted smartly as Congress gave him a standing ovation. Then, in celebration of the Vietnamese New Year, the Viet Minh stuck a bayonet right up Westy’s patriotic bubble. The simultaneous siege of Khe Sanh had been a ferocious feint. But Louis Sarris at State and Robert Layton at the CIA both predicted the January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive months before it happened. Westmoreland simply ignored our craftiest thinkers, all of whom insisted that successful counterinsurgency was essentially political. As the crafty Lansdale put it, “Find out what the people want and give it to them.”
John Paul Vann, William Corson, Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner, Rufe Phillips, Daniel Ellsberg, Chester Cooper – all possessed of high rank and influence, understood that the social justice issue, the visceral need not to be a slave, was the motivating factor in the success of the Viet Minh. As Helms put it, it was necessary to have “a motivated population, not merely an administered one.” But to act on that thinking would be to break with Dulles brothers Republican orthodoxy. Westmoreland and his ilk, running the military, displayed only the infantile historical imagination Daddy Dulles allowed, the imagination of a kid watching Cowboys and Indians at the movies. As Westmoreland put it, “We found that in our frontier days we couldn’t plant the corn outside the stockade if the Indians were still around. Well, that’s what we’ve been trying to do in Viet Nam. We planted a lot of corn with the Indians still around. . . . As security becomes greater . . . pacification will move along much better…. eliminate the enemy and all the rest falls into place…”
In other words, this guy, leading our troops, was a racist asshole. It never occurred to Westy that it was the Indians who invented the corn. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” just the way Sullivan and Cromwell wrote it. Generals Thieu and Ky, the fascist dope peddlers we put in charge of the Vietnamese government, thought Westmoreland had it exactly right. Throughout the country, ARVN troops ruled by fiat. Their corps commanders were also their political chiefs. Their troops consistently behaved among the people like the Mexican warlord’s drunken troops in The Magnificent Seven. This made the NLF, which had serious political discipline, look like heroes. Provincial and district chief ARVN appointments were for sale to the highest bidder. It was the ARVN Province Chief who distributed all that American largesse for local projects.
General Tran Thien Khiem, Interior Minister and then, under General Thieu, Prime Minister, oversaw this kickback system. Khiem’s wife and brother-in-law ran the family’s huge heroin business, making cheap, high quality heroin available to American GIs and much of the rest of the world, via Air America. Reformist General Nguyen Duc Thang, the South Vietnamese Minister of Reconstruction under Thieu and Ky, told Lansdale’s team that the ARVN were hopelessly corrupt dope-dealing extortionists and would never be anything else.
In 1969, President Thieu’s top security adviser, Huynh Van Trong, was arrested by the CIA and Vietnam’s Special Branch as a Viet Minh agent. The next year legendary CIA analyst Sam Adams pointed out that the entire Thieu regime, the officer corps and the civil bureaucracy, was infiltrated by thousands of Viet Minh agents. William Colby, George Carver, and John Hart, our 1968 Vietnam CIA team, concluded, in their memo two days after Tet, which they entitled “Operation Shock,” that “Tet demonstrated that the Thieu-Ky regime clearly lacked the attributes of a national government [able to] defend its frontiers.” The CIA team recommended negotiations with the Viet Minh. An angry Dwight Eisenhower, foreseeing exactly this defeat, had said much the same thing in the National Security Council in 1954. After pointlessly sending tens of thousands of young Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, to their deaths, the Paris Peace Talks began on 5/13/1968.
Colby and Vann tried to make the CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) program work, arming and financing villages directly. There was significant progress in weaning hamlets sick of endless war from the war-oriented NLF. The methodology was mostly civil, providing tractors, roads, electricity, wells, medical care and commercial market access. But the high command refused to coordinate with Colby.
‘Operation Speedy Express,’ December 1968 to May 11, 1969, using battalion and division level sweeps and free-fire zones, literally attacked the very villages and hamlets CORDS had just befriended. Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland and MACV commander General Creighton Abrams let loose Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, commander of the Ninth Infantry Division, “The Butcher of the Delta.” His nighttime hunter-killer operations wracked up huge body counts, mostly innocent civilians who made the natural mistake of running. His helicopter gunships pulverized anything that moved with their night-vision and body heat sensors triggering high-speed gatling guns. General Ewell was making the NLF’s point for them. The NLF knew that they were being tracked by movement and exertion, so they just remained stationary as the choppers flew overhead. Since Ewell’s units had a body count quota, without which they couldn’t return to base, these idiots killed about 7,000 civilians, leaving the disciplined NLF virtually untouched. The MACV CORDS program was switched to its most lethal component, the Phoenix mass assassination program. U.S. troops in Vietnam numbered 542,000. 48
J. Edgar Hoover responded to the anti-war opposition, which could see the real military intelligence every night on their TV screens, with COINTELPRO ‘New Left.’ In 1969, Admiral Rufus Taylor, DDCIA, wrote a letter to his second most famous analyst, Sam Adams, advising him to “submit his resignation” if he wouldn’t be a “helpful member of the intelligence team at CIA.” Walt Rostow, Johnson’s Special Assistant for National Security, told Adams, “I’m sorry you won’t support your president.” Adams, offended to the depths of his soul by being ordered to distort the intelligence, resigned the CIA in 1973 and went public, first in Harper’s magazine, May, 1975, then, in January, 1982, as a consultant for a CBS News documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.
General William Westmoreland, demonstrating the unreflective stupidity for which he had become famous, sued CBS for $120 million for libel when it accused him of deliberately undercounting Viet Minh numbers, naming CIA analyst Sam Adams as a co-defendant, along with Mike Wallace and producer George Crile. Then Westmoreland realized that he had just made Adams’ CIA work product, which had been duly presented to Westmoreland through channels, admissible as evidence. Westmoreland withdrew his suit before the case went to the jury, but the cat had already been let out of the bag.
The Institute of Defense Analysis, a Pentagon think tank, corroborated Adams’ work product and added the “most categorical rejection of bombing as a tool of our policy in Southeast Asia to be made by an official or semiofficial group.” A group of retired CIA officers, Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, gives the Sam Adams Award annually to an intelligence professional who has stubbornly told truth to power. 49 50
Most of those few Vietnamese who didn’t actively support the Viet Minh were neutral. Our side had the active support, at most, of 2% of the population. We were the externally-supported minority trying to shoot our way into power, as Daniel Ellsberg, a senior analyst in McNamara’s team, began to say publicly. That meant that we were knowingly sending our boys into a meat grinder.
It might have been convenient for imperialists to blur it, but the Vietnamese sense of nationhood was intense. “Nam Viet” first became a nation in 939 CE, after a millenium as a political entity under Chinese domination. The first time anyone ever heard of ‘South Vietnam’ was in 1955. Ngo Dinh Diem knew that. Ho Chi Minh means “He Who Liberates.” The “Viet Minh” was the Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội, the “Vietnam Independence League.” It was a jungle tiger.
Burchett’s 1965 paperback Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, became the bible of the anti-war movement. The proof that it accurately depicted the political situation is that it accurately predicted the military outcome. I no longer have the copy I read then, but, as I recall, the last words in the book were something like “They can be killed, but they can’t be conquered.”
Kennedy chose to attempt both, as he encouraged Taylor’s ‘counterinsurgency’ doublespeak. He had, after all, just nosed out Nixon in an election that was, to a great extent, a competition in red-baiting. Both Kennedy and Taylor talked of the Viet Minh as if they came from Mars, or China. The U.S., Taylor told an approving Kennedy, was “protecting” Vietnamese peasants from the Viet Minh. This was done by destroying their villages and herding the survivors at gunpoint into barbed-wire-enclosed “strategic hamlets,” where they were “free” to “choose” “democracy.” This fascist doublespeak was necessitated, of course, by the obvious facts, as outlined by American military intelligence itself throughout the fifties. The CIA’s Taylor moved from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to Ambasador to South Vietnam in July of 1964, where he made a point of deleting negative field intelligence before forwarding it to the White House. The result was CIA, that is Dulles brothers, policy-conformity from the field, and strategic suicide in the war.
Marine Commandant David Shoup, who spearheaded the Marine assault on the Japanese at Tarawa, a Congressional Medal of Honor winning veteran of an awful lot of combat, refused to play this defense-contractor boondoggle game. He was livid at the venality that drove this Nazi-like corruption of our military intelligence. He did not forgive the reckless waste of his troopers,’ or Vietnamese, lives. He told a 1966 convocation, “I believe that if we... would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for... and not the American style, which they don't want. Not one crammed down their throats by the Americans.” 52
Ambassador Lodge did not share these hippie sentiments. In a classified October 1963 communication to President Kennedy, he complained that “[South] Viet-Nam is not a thoroughly strong police state...because, unlike Hitler’s Germany, it is not efficient.” This is the man who called Jacobo Árbenz a communist in the United Nations as Árbenz protested the American invasion of Guatemala. Lodge also complained of the pragmatic willingness of Diem, in the face of military defeat, to talk truce with the Viet Minh. Again, so disappointingly unlike Adolf. Kennedy agreed with Lodge. If Diem wouldn’t “focus on winning the war,” then we would find someone who would.
On August 29, 1963, new Saigon ambassador Lodge cabled Washington: “We are launched on a course from which there is no turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.” Conein recruited Diem’s senior military adviser, the charismatic General Duong Van Minh, ‘Big Minh,’ who was as unhappy with the Ngo Dinh brothers as Lodge. As Conein later told a 1975 Senate hearing of the assassination of Diem, “I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy.” Diem and Nhu were assassinated on Nov. 2, 1963. 53 54
Like MacArthur, General de Gaulle had also warned Kennedy that Vietnam was “a bottomless military and political swamp.” Kennedy’s trusted Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, told him the same thing after his late 1962 fact-finding trip. The powerful and respected Senator Fulbright was also protesting that we were “bogged down” in a hopeless morass. After nearly three years of frustration, the pugnacious Kennedy was finally ready to accept this wisdom. He ordered Col. Fletcher Prouty to organize the high profile, high-level Vietnam intelligence-gathering trip on which Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 263, his last, was based. 55
Coup D'État
Mark Lane: “‘Kennedy dictated the rich parts of 263,’ Prouty told me. ‘He was not satisfied with the withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel, he wanted all Americans out of there.’ He meant, Prouty continued, ‘all CIA officers and agents.’ Prouty said that at the CIA there was despair. ‘They had been there since 1945. They were furious…. The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the corridors…. When Kennedy signed it, he signed an order for the almost immediate withdrawal of one thousand men, for all Americans to leave not long after the next presidential election, for the political kickoff for his 1964 campaign and, of course, not known to him, his own death warrant.’” 1
Prouty, a key intelligence staff officer, was surprised, in September, 1963, to learn that his November assignment, arranged by Lansdale, was to escort a group of VIPs on an extended trip through Antarctica and our South Pole facilities. But these were elected officials and important facilities. He looked forward to the trip as a paid vacation. Lansdale had also arranged that virtually all of Kennedy’s cabinet and almost all ranking related officials, more than 50 people, would also be absent from the capitol on Nov. 22, most at a conference in Hawaii to discuss escalation in Vietnam.
In early November, Gen. Lansdale made a point of telling Prouty to enjoy his trip. Prouty was dispatched on November 10, 1963. When he lunched with Mark Lane on Capitol Hill in June of 1991, Lane showed him an enlarged version of the news photo below taken in Dallas on the day of the assassination, showing a man striding away from the camera in the company of three tramps, providing a side-back view.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” Prouty told Lane, “that it’s Ed Lansdale.” Prouty had known Lansdale intimately for years. They were both attached to Gen. Krulak’s SACSA unit. When Prouty showed a sharp enlarged original copy to Gen. Krulak, the instantaneous reaction, which Prouty angrily advertised on his website, was: “The haircut, the stoop, the twisted left hand, the large class ring - it’s Lansdale.” Photo analysis shows the man to be exactly Lansdale’s height. Prouty sent the enlargements to many who worked with Lansdale – all, with no exceptions, identified the man as Lansdale. Prouty discusses this on www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA-3navQ-_E and www.prouty.org.
Prouty learned of the assassination from the public address announcer of the Hermitage Chalet at the foot of Mount Cook in rural New Zealand. Later he called his contact in the 316th Field Detachment of the 112th Military Intelligence Group at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, the unit that normally would have been used to provide a flying wedge of protection for the motorcade. Prouty was one of the inventors of that system and so was acquainted with the unit’s commander
“The commander of that unit, Lt. Col. Rudolph M. Reich, had offered his unit’s services for the entire Texas trip, but ‘they were point blank refused.’ He was ‘categorically refused by the Secret Service.’ Hot words were exchanged between the agencies…. The president had almost no experienced protection that day.” 2
One of the things Presidential protection units were trained to do is shut all windows overlooking the parade route. Any photo will show that many windows overlooking Dealey Plaza were left open. If the 316th flying wedge had been on duty, it wouldn’t have been possible for a 6th floor window in the Texas School Book Depository, or any other window in the Depository or the Dal-Tex Building, to house a shooter, because the closed window, once opened, would immediately have been targeted by an Army sharpshooter.
In the absence of a military flying wedge, the Secret Service was to provide one. This was clear, established Secret Service procedure - and it was not followed. Breaks in established procedure require specific, emphatic orders.
On Monday the 18th, the Chief of the Secret Service unit in Dallas, Forrest Sorrels, inexplicably added two abrupt turns to the Presidential motorcade, from Main Street onto Houston Street and from Houston onto Elm, taking the President precisely to the point of the assassination. This change was immediately announced to the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times-Herald, and printed by them on the 19th. 3
Who had the juice to order Sorrels, in contradiction of all established security procedures, to set up a sharp eleven-mile-an-hour turn directly below tall buildings? Speeds below 40 were officially defined as dangerous. But there were no Secret Service agents on the roofs of any of the buildings surrounding Dealy Plaza - no walkie-talkies, no sharpshooters, no window-closings. Who had the juice to tell the Secret Service to stand down?
Allen Dulles, that’s who. Douglas Dillon was Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury, in charge of the Secret Service. Wall street financier Douglas Dillon was a Council on Foreign Relations Republican heavyweight who had been Eisenhower’s Undersecretary of State. He was close to Allen Dulles for decades. Dillon’s family bank, Dillon, Read & Co., handled the Belgian Congo’s bond issues. Dulles’ law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, represented the American Metal Company (AMAX), which had vast mining interests in the Congo threatened with nationalization by Lumumba, who ended Belgian colonial rule in the Congo in 1960 through democratic election. Like Mosaddegh and Árbenz, the charismatic democrat Patrice Lumumba thought the Congo’s wealth belonged to the Congolese people. Dillon strongly backed Dulles’ assassination of Lumumba at the end of the Eisenhower administration. This amounted to covert CIA military support for venal warlords like Kasavubu, Mobutu and Tshombe, and the permanent destruction of democracy and stable government in the Congo. CIA and Belgian puppet Moise Tshombe, leader of ‘separatist’ Katanga, preferred to leave Katanga’s vast mineral wealth in French, Belgian and American hands. The uranium for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was mined in Katanga, home of the richest uranium deposits in the world. Cooperating with Kasavubu and Mobutu, Katangan and Belgian troops beat and shot Lumumba to death on January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy took office.
Douglas Dillon met with Allen Dulles on October 2, 1963. At the end of October, Dillon notified Kennedy that he would be on vacation for most of November. From November 21 thru November 27, Dillon told Kennedy, he planned to be in Japan. This left the Secret Service effectively in the hands of operatives taking orders from Allen Dulles. 4
Warren Commission staff attorney Howard Willens could get nothing from the Secret Service, despite the fact that “the Secret Service appeared to be neither alert nor careful in protecting the president.” Douglas Dillon just stonewalled Willens, changing the subject to lack of budget, and to Kennedy’s vanity (Kennedy allegedly didn’t want Secret Service blockers and motorcycles to inhibit the crowd’s view of the glamorous couple - pure fiction). Allen Dulles then thanked ‘Doug’ and ended the Warren Commission interview. LBJ put Douglas Dillon in charge of implementing the Warren Commission’s security recommendations.
Another indication of an internal setup, noticed by all, is the fact that when the shooting started, the Secret Service agent driving the President’s limo slowed down for a crucial five seconds, time enough for the third shot to explode Kennedy’s head. Who decelerates under fire? Secret Service agents? It actually takes incredible control not to speed up, except, of course, if you know you are not the target.
When the story of the century broke in Dallas on November 22, three competing professional news photographers from the Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram rushed to snap everything in sight. The back door of the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Oswald allegedly fired, opens directly onto the railroad yard. Lee Bowers, the railroad towerman, told the police that they needed to search the tramps he noticed acting suspiciously on the Grassy Knoll at the moment of the assassination. One appeared to throw a rifle into a car after “a flash of light or smoke.” As the tramps were being paraded by the police the three blocks to the Sheriff’s Office (Dallas police don’t normally take suspects to the sheriff, it’s a different department), the competing local newsmen snapped several pictures of them. Seven professional photos exist of these three at various points in their walk – just google ‘three tramps photos.’ These photos were instantly wired all over the world, and so became, in effect, public domain.
The first thing one notices about the photos is that these men are playing dress-up. They are obviously in very good health, showing none of the effects of the hobo life. They are all clean shaven, with fresh haircuts and new shoes (per analysis of the enlarged original photos). The police are also playing dress-up - their rifles and parts of their uniforms are not standard issue. Oddly, although records exist of almost all the other interviews, no record exists of the tramp interviews. In fact, unusually, these men were immediately turned over to the FBI, and the FBI just let them go. Dallas police claimed to have lost not only the interview and arrest records, but the mugshots and fingerprints as well. The large paper bag Hunt was carrying in the photo below was not even opened, and Hunt was allowed to leave with it. And no member of the Dallas police force has ever been able to identify the ‘policemen’ escorting the tramps.
As Weberman and Canfield point out in detail in Coup d’etat In America, the older tramp, in back in the photo above, is a dead-ringer for the CIA’s Cuba point man, Nixon’s Watergate organizer, Howard Hunt. Photo analysis proves that the older tramp is 5’8" tall, exactly Hunt’s height. Abovr, alternating, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963, Watergate, 1973. Acetate overlays, in the book, show them to be the same man.
The tallest tramp, above, just happens to be the spitting image of Hunt’s longtime associate, his fellow Cuba operative and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. Photo analysis shows the tallest tramp to be 6’1", exactly Frank Sturgis’ height. Below left and 2nd from right, in Dallas Nov. 22, with dyed hair parted on the opposite side and no mustache. 2nd from left, Cuba, 1959, center and right, Watergate, 1973. Again, acetate overlays show them to be the same man.
The third tramp, below in Dallas and in 1958, bears an uncanny resemblance to Gerry Hemming, another CIA agent who penetrated Castro’s movement with Frank Sturgis. He also bears an uncanny resemblance to the first FBI sketch of Martin Luther King’s killer, distributed as a lookout poster to Mexican border agents. Hemming did indicate, in an angry statement he made to a reporter in 1976, below, that he was King’s killer.
In 1958, the 18 year-old Oswald was serving as a radar operator assigned to Marine Air Squadron One in Atsugi, Japan, the base of a squadron of the new, super-secret U-2 spy planes. Sergeant Gerry Hemming worked with Oswald at the U-2 spy base in Atsugi, Japan in 1958, but claims to have first met Oswald the next year, in January of 1959 at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. The reason for Hemming’s denial of working with Oswald at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in 1958, according to CIA Director Helm’s special assistant Victor Marchetti, is that Hemming was Oswald’s case officer at the then-secret Atsugi base, and to admit running Oswald is to admit complicity in the assassination.
The young Oswald frequented the Queen Bee, an expensive Tokyo club used by the KGB to recruit vulnerable young servicemen. Oswald spent more money on his ‘girlfriend’ at that club than he could have made as a radar operator. It was U-2 secrets acquired in Atsugi that Oswald announced, in his scripted defection performance at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in October of 1959, that he intended to share with the Russians. But Oswald was allowed to leave the USSR, and was welcomed back into the U.S. on a CIA-paid red carpet with no consequences. Oswald had been trained in Russian by the CIA, was sent to the Soviet Union with valuable U-2 intelligence bait, was given pay and housing equivalent to a KGB officer upon arrival, was peacefully helped to leave by the KGB in June of 1962, and welcomed back by a CIA case officer with open arms. Oswald was both a KGB and CIA intelligence operative, as was his wife Marina, the niece of a KGB colonel. Intelligence cooperation with other intelligence services is SOP, since a job handed off to a cooperating intelligence service with a parallel goal is deniable. In August, 1978, former special assistant to CIA Director Helms, CIA officer Victor Marchetti, published an article in Spotlight asserting that the House Select Committee on Assassinations had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed Gerry Hemming, Howard Hunt, and Frank Sturgis had been the assassins who killed Kennedy. What a coincidence! The three tramps photographed in Dallas are the spitting image of three well-known CIA assassins named by numerous witnesses and high ranking intelligence officers who were there as the shooters – but it’s not them! Don’t believe your lying eyes! It’s just three people, for some reason masquerading as tramps, who happened to be dead ringers for three well-known CIA assassins deeply and provably involved in the Cuba operation. But it’s not them! It’s three dead ringers spotted at the moment of the assassination acting suspiciously together. But they’re just dead ringers! What are the odds! It is mathematically impossible that it is not them. Those photos are hard evidence.
The CIA’s own state-of-the-art photography analysis unit concluded that the Zapruder film (just google to watch) shows multiple bullets hit the President from the front as well as the rear, including from the grassy knoll in front of the limosine. Dozens of eye witnesses, and twenty-one Dallas cops, were pointing to the grassy knoll. No one who has seen it can forget Kennedy’s head exploding as it is thrown violently backwards and to the left. Only a shot from the front can do that. FBI photo analysis concurred with the CIA, but both reports were suppressed by the Warren Commission. The surgeons at Parkland who tried to save Kennedy also noted that Kennedy had been struck from the front as well as the rear, but were bullied into silence for three decades, until two finally spoke out.
All experts also agreed that the mail order $19.95 bolt-action WWII surplus Italian Mannlicher-Carcano with a faulty sight was incapable of rapid precision fire – it was a prop. Italian newspapers were full of stories from WWII veterans who had to use this rifle in combat, insisting that 3 accurate shots in 6 seconds with this clumsy bolt-action rifle was impossible. Oswald’s neighbor, Buell Frazier, who drove him to work that morning, insisted that Oswald carried a package far too small to hold the rifle, which did not disassemble. The nineteen year old neighbor kid was bullied by Dallas cops for hours to get him to change his story, but he refused.
More than half the Dallas police force were Kennedy-hating members of the KKK, likely to happily cooperate in his assassination. Oswald’s prints were not found on the rifle, and the Dallas FBI Field Office paraffin test on Oswald’s cheek could find no trace of gunpowder, meaning that he hadn’t fired any weapon, certainly not the cheap old WWII surplus rifle, which would have sprayed him with gunpowder residue. Also, the bullets and shells from the crime scene did not match the ostensible murder weapon.
Oswald was seen by numerous coworkers who knew him, just before the shooting, calmly eating his lunch in the depository’s second-floor cafeteria. When police officer Marrion Baker and the head of the depository, Roy Truly, walked into Oswald in the second floor cafeteria, 90 seconds after the shooting, Oswald, completely relaxed and not out of breath, was calmly sipping a coke. 6
Oswald sent away for the famous mail-order rifle in March of 1963, paying the princely sum of $21.45, including postage. He was obviously acting on orders from his handlers, and the false name he was told to use, A.J. Hidell, was connected, by them, to the left-wing Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald carried this phony ID the day of the assassination. The only reason Oswald would have laid a careful paper trail from “Hidell” to the rifle is that his handlers had told him he was gathering evidence for illegal sales by mail order companies and/or illegal purchases by Hidell of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - that is, that he was setting someone up. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee had been the premeditated connection to Castro, which the Luce media advertised widely immediately after the assassination. 7
Oswald was questioned by Dallas Homicide chief Capt. Will Fritz, the FBI’s James Hosty and Jim Bookhout, the Secret Service’s Thomas Kelly and Forest Sorrels, U.S. Marshall Robert Nash and Postal Inspector Holmes. None called in a stenographer or even transcribed their long interviews, a gross unprofessionalism that had to have been ordered. It is impossible not to see the hand of J. Edgar Hoover, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry and his boss, Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Dulles’ second-in-command, Gen. Charles Cabell, in all this. 8
The Warren Commission was dominated by Allen Dulles, for whom the commission was a full-time job. His major Commission ally was John McCloy, former Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and current Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dulles’ brain trust. Ambitious Republican congressman Gerald Ford, who had close ties to Hoover at the FBI, could also be relied on to toe the line. All these men were bitter political enemies of President Kennedy, as President Johnson, who appointed them, knew full well. Working together, the three overruled Earl Warren’s choice for chief counsel, Warren Olney, a pro-civil rights Assistant Attorney General in Eisenhower’s administration who had been unafraid to oppose the FBI’s Hoover. Instead they chose J. Lee Rankin, a trusted conservative Republican veteran of Eisenhower’s Justice Department, who, as he had always done, took orders from Dulles. In the mid-70s, the Church Committee led Rankin to renounce his duplicitous Republican conformity, feeling he had been misled into aiding a monstrous coverup.
Desperately trying to establish only one shooter, Allen Dulles’ Warren Commission insisted that one bullet entered Kennedy’s back below the right shoulder blade on a sharp downward trajectory from six floors above, then turned upward to exit his neck. This remarkable bullet then paused midair for 1.6 seconds, hit Governor Connally in the front seat in the right-rear armpit, then changed trajectory inside Connally’s chest to shatter his right wrist. Then the same bullet took another radical u-turn and lodged in Connally’s left thigh. Later, this magic bullet was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, where both Kennedy and Connally had been taken. Despite the fact that some of the bullet was still in Connally’s thigh, the bullet found was in pristine condition.
As Governor John Connally, sitting directly in front of JFK in the limo, told the Warren Commission: “Well, in my judgment, it just couldn’t conceivably have been the first one because I heard the sound of the shot … and after I heard that shot, I had the time to turn to my right, and start to turn to my left before I felt anything. It is not conceivable to me that I could have been hit by the first bullet.” Gerald Ford was caught rewriting the bullet trajectory, in his own hand, just before release of the Warren Commission Report. Ford, Hoover’s man on the Commission, placed Kennedy’s back wound higher, to make the ridiculous trajectory seem more plausible. Confirmatory documents of this trickery were released only in 1997. Kennedy’s back wound was six inches below the collar. Ford raised it six inches to the back of his neck, because only at that height could the magic bullet have hit Connally. Of the 126 witnesses interviewed by the Commission, 51 thought the shots came from the grassy knoll, 32 said that they came from the Texas School Book Depository. The Zapruder film indicates both directions. 9
Two Dallas cops, Bill L. Senkel and Fay M. Turner, not only managed to be at every important evidentiary discovery relating Oswald to the assassination, but were also in the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade. They arranged, ten minutes before the motorcade passed, for a phony ambulance call that slowed down the motorcade just as it passed Dealey Plaza. They were also present during Oswald’s police interviews. Jack Ruby just happened to be in the Dallas Morning News Building, overlooking Dealey Plaza, when the assassination happened. 10
Jack Revill, a former commander of the Dallas narcotics unit, admitted to the House Assassinations Committee under oath that he had known Ruby since 1953. It was Revill, second in command of Dallas’ Special Service (Criminal Intelligence) Bureau, who organized the search of the Texas School Book Depository that found the old Mannlicher-Carcano. Revill was also present in the basement of the Police and Courts Building when Ruby shot Oswald.
In fact there was hardly a cop in the basement who didn’t know Ruby, who protected his position by becoming the unofficial mob liaison, easy loan shark and pimp for the Dallas Police Department. It was common knowledge in the Dallas mob that when access to the cops was needed, the man to see was Jack Ruby.
Barney Baker, Jimmy Hoffa’s muscle man, was telephoned by Ruby just before the assassination, as were other old hood associates, in a flurry of calls both just before and just after the assassination. The powerful Teamster fixer Irwin Weiner was also called. Weiner, who reinvested the huge Las Vegas skim, worked with Vegas’ Johnny Roselli for years. Ruby, of course, knew professional assassin Roselli and met with him a month before the assassination. At the time of the assassination, Weiner told the Warren Commission that he was in Miami meeting with Santos Trafficante. 11
Ruby also called Dusty Miller, another key Hoffa operative, head of the Southern Conference of Teamsters. Ruby both received a call from and made a call to Marcello’s top aide, Nofio Pecora. Ruby was close to Harold Tannenbaum, who lived on Pecora’s property, helping to manage the many strip joints run by Marcello’s brother Pete and others. Ruby spoke to any number of Hoffa, Trafficante and Marcello intermediaries during this period. A series of ten calls went to Lewis McWillie, the Trafficante operative who worked with Giancana and Roselli. 12
Mob infiltration of the Dallas police department, as mob infiltration under Roselli of the Los Angeles police department, had the practical effect of targeting liberal outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union and the mayor’s political opposition, and protecting the KKK and the vice rackets. As Lt. George Butler put it, “half the police force in Dallas were members of the KKK.” He oughta know, he organized them. Butler worked with the Special Service Bureau, which handled intelligence, vice and narcotics, and so worked closely with Jack Ruby for years. Butler was in the basement just before Ruby shot Oswald, and film shows him to be uncharacteristically nervous, literally trembling in anticipation. Just after the shooting, Butler insisted that Ruby had nothing to do with the Mafia. 1314
Ruby and Oswald, in fact, were friends and knew each other well. Dozens of regulars and employees at Ruby’s Carousel Club saw them together there regularly, as did many at the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s headquarters on Camp Street. As New Orleans DA Jim Garrison put it concerning the Ruby-Oswald connection: “there is simply no question about it. We didn’t even have to do a great deal of investigative digging; connections popped up everywhere we scratched the surface.” Ruby was deeply in debt to Marcello, who probably ordered the hit on Oswald. Ruby knew that if he disobeyed Marcello he would be left to die slowly hanging on a meat hook. Ruby died in his Dallas prison cell of ‘cancer’ just before he was set to testify again at his retrial. 15
On November 20, 1963, the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s Sergio Arcacha Smith was traveling with Ruby’s drug mule, 34-year-old heroin addict Rose Cherami, who worked for years as a stripper for Ruby. Cherami was also intimate, for years, with Lee Harvey Oswald. Arcacha and Cherami were accompanied by another Batistiano drug dealer, Emilio Santana. Cherami got into a fight with Arcacha at the Silver Slipper Lounge, a bar and whorehouse near Eunice, Louisiana on November 20, 1963, according to the owner, Mac Manual, who knew the two men well. A few miles down the road Arcacha and Santana threw Cherami out of the car, while it was moving. Cherami was found unconscious on the side of the road by a good Samaritan who took her to a local clinic. The local clinic called State Police Lt. Francis Fruge, who took her by ambulance to East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson.
While on the two hour drive to the state hospital, Fruge and Cherami had an extended interview, November 20, 1963. Cherami told Fruge “We’re going to kill President Kennedy when he comes to Dallas in a few days….[the purpose of the trip was] to number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby and to kill Kennedy.” Those are certified police investigative notes registered two days before the assassination. Dr. Victor Weiss, who treated Cherami at the hospital, testified under oath before House Select Committee investigators that Cherami told him the same thing – one day before the assassination. Dr. Wayne Owen and other interns at the Louisiana hospital also confirmed that Cherami told them the same thing, before the assassination. Immediately after the November 22nd assassination, Lt. Fruge called the hospital, ordering them not to release Cheramie until he could question her further, which he did on November 25.
As Lt. Fruge testified to House Select Committee on Assassinations investigators, “The men were going to kill Kennedy and she was going to check into the Rice Hotel [in Houston], where reservations were already made for her, and pick up 10 kilos of heroin from a seaman coming into Galveston. She was to pick up the money for the drug purchase from a man who was holding her baby. She would then deliver the drugs to Mexico.” The Louisiana State Police confirmed Cheramie’s story with Chief Customs Agent for the Galveston region, Nathan Durham. The Customs Agent confirmed that the ship with the seaman carrying the heroin was about to dock in Galveston. Cherami had identified both the ship and the sailor, although the sailor managed to elude capture. The FBI told both Lt. Fruge and Agent Durham that they had no interest in interviewing Cherami.
The police also confirmed that Cherami’s traveling companions Arcacha and Santana were known drug traffickers and pimps. Emilio Santana admitted in an interview with Jim Garrison’s office that the CIA hired him on August 27, 1962, the evening of the day he arrived in Miami as an exile from his native Cuba. Santana was immediately hired by the Agency to serve as a crewmember on a boat sailing back to Cuba, carrying weapons and electronic equipment for CIA-sponsored guerilla actions. As a Cuban fisherman with intimate knowledge of the coastline, Santana became one of the Batistianos the CIA’s Bill Harvey used in his unauthorized commando raids on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Santana was one of the Batistianos Kennedy promised Khrushchev that he would stop, thus earning Kennedy the implacable hatred of the CIA Cubans. The other man in the car with Cherami, Sergio Arcacha Smith, had been Batista’s diplomatic consul in Madrid, Rome, Mexico City and Bombay. He became the CIA’s man in its New Orleans-based FRD, Frente Revolucionario Democratico, later called the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), the CIA-organized Cuban ‘government in exile.’
In Texas on September 4, 1965, Cherami, whose real name was Melba Christine Marcades, was found dead in Big Sandy, Texas in front of the property of right-wing extremist Dallas billionaire H. L. Hunt’s top security officer. Records at Gladewater Hospital describe a “deep punctate stellate” (starlike) wound to her right forehead. She had been assassinated by a contact gunshot wound to the head and then had her skull crushed by a car. More than 100 people who saw Kennedy killed or who had relevant information died in the next two years at a statistically impossible rate, many by obvious murder. 16
Senior CIA agent Marchetti's Spotlight article also asserted that assassin Frank Sturgis’ girlfriend Marita Lorenz had provided essential corroborating evidence, as she did again under oath in the 1985 lawsuit. Because of Marchetti’s and his sources’ legally binding non-disclosure agreements, Marchetti had to be content with assertions, since production of original documentation would have been prosecutable.
The internal CIA memo leaked by Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and adviser to the Church Intelligence Committee, signed by Helms and Angleton, places Howard Hunt in Dallas on the day of the assassination, just as Marita Lorenz testified. In the memo, Helms and Angleton were discussing how to keep Hunt’s presence in Dallas that day a secret. Hunt’s daughter refuted his alibi that he was home with her. Defense Attorney Mark Lane’s 1985 Miami jury, in fact, found that Howard Hunt had not been libelled by Spotlight magazine, when the CIA’s Victor Marchetti asserted that Howard Hunt was part of the team that killed Kennedy, because the assertion was true. Hunt thought to use the cosmetic surgery he had on his ears as a refutation of the photos. Lane states that during a later meeting they had, Hemming, who by this time had become quite talkative, corroborated the details of the assassination as outlined during the trial. 17
Hemming served as a military trainer of the CIA’s anti-Castro force in the early sixties. Hemming was arrested on August 23, 1976 for drug smuggling and weapons violations. It was at this time that Hemming’s military discipline seemed to snap. He told Alan Weberman, co-author of Coup D’Etat in America: “All of a sudden they're accusing me of conspiracy to import marijuana and cocaine. Hey, what about all the other things I've been into for the last 15 years, lets talk about them. Let's talk about the Martin Luther King thing, let's talk about Don Freed, Le Coubre, nigger-killers in bed with the Mafia, the Mafia in bed with the FBI, and the goddamn CIA in bed with all of them. Let's talk about all the people I dirtied up for them over the years.” Hemming seems to be threatening his handlers to do something about the drug charges, or else. The French freighter La Coubre, loaded with 76 tons of Belgian munitions, exploded in Havana harbor on March 4, 1960, killing at least 100 people. It was a terrorist setup – thirty minutes after the first blast there was a second even larger explosion, aimed at the rescuers. When Hemming was busted again for drug trafficking in Palm Beach County in 1980, he said he was undercover for Lucien Conein’s DEA operation. More like in business with Lucien Conein.
Frank Sturgis, wearing a 26 of July Movement armband, stands on a mass grave of Batista supporters that he helped execute by firing squad on San Juan Hill on Jan. 11, 1959 (Wikimedia Commons)
Marita Lorenz, who was travelling with Frank Sturgis in October and November of 1963 (clear photos confirm this), claims to have been at meetings with Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Gerry Hemming, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s Orlando Bosch (blurry photos exist which confirms this). She identified them, under oath in defense attorney Mark Lane’s 1985 Hunt libel suit, as the men who killed Kennedy. There is a great deal of corroborating evidence that makes this probable. It was Sturgis, while still working for Castro in 1960, along with Hemming, who turned 18 year-old Marita Lorenz, Castro’s lover, who felt trapped and scared by the relationship, into a CIA asset, in exchange for help escaping. 18
Sturgis (originally Fiorini), a WWII Marine combat vet, had penetrated Castro’s movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains for the CIA by supplying arms to it. He functioned as one of Castro’s combat trainers, then, immediately upon victory, one of Castro’s most often used executioners. Carlos Prio was the Cuban President overthrown by Fulgencio Batista in 1952. His was a famously corrupt kleptocracy in bed with the hoods. Prio, for obvious reasons, was as anti-Batista as Castro and so financed him, introducing Castro to Sturgis. Sturgis, a Prio operative since 1957, knew all the pre-revolution hoods Prio worked with, and so became Castro’s Minister of Gaming, negotiating the survival of the hood gambling operations for Castro.
Hunt, Sturgis and Hemming, of course, worked for ZR/RIFLE, Gen. Lansdale’s assassination team deployed against Castro, run by Johnny Roselli and Hughes operative, ex-FBI agent and active CIA contractor Robert A. Maheu, out of Operation Mongoose. Mongoose was run out of the CIA’s vast intelligence gathering station known as JM/WAVE, commanded by Lansdale. As Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean puts it in his book Blind Ambition, Maheu was “the point of contact for the CIA’s effort to have the Mafia assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.” When Columbia University lecturer Jesús de Galindez, who had worked for Rafael Trujillo, started documenting Trujillo’s CIA/Syndicate contacts and political murders in the Spring of 1956, it was a Robert A. Maheu associate, specifically New Jersey mob boss Joe Zicarelli, who traded arms for dope with Trujillo, who handled the assassination. Thirteen days after he started talking, Galindez disappeared. 19
As Trafficante’s consigliere and lawyer Frank Ragano put it, in his book Mob Lawyer, “Maheu’s search for Mob killers began with Johnny Roselli who brought in Sam Giancana, the Chicago boss, and Santos [Trafficante] … The CIA operatives told Maheu he could offer $150,000 to the assassins, and that Castro’s murder was a phase of a larger plan to invade Cuba and oust the Communist government.” If caught in the act, Mafia hit men, practiced and competent, also gave the CIA a layer of deniability. 20 21
DCIA Allen Dulles, Col. Edward Lansdale, Air Force Chief Gen. Nathan Twining, DDCIA Charles Cabell, 1/17/1955, (Wkimedia Commons, Lansdale)
Mongoose was run from Miami’s CIA station JM/WAVE, an old wooded 1500-acre blimp base calling itself Zenith Technological Enterprises, 12 miles south of the University of Miami. It had covert funding in the hundreds of millions, dozens of bases and staging areas, and about 400 front companies throughout the region. Under the command of Deputy Director for Plans Helms, who appointed Ted Shackley to run the station, it became the largest in the world, with 600 agents, at least 4,000 operatives, and enough matériel and ships to conquer most small countries. General Lansdale, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, served as Helms’ control officer. The paramilitary component, called Task Force W, was run by Berlin CIA veteran William Harvey. Diversified hit and run, sabotage, surveillance, propaganda and assassination teams were systematically thrown at Cuban targets, to “build gradually toward an internal revolt,” as Lansdale put it. Upon presentation of the kill Castro order, Col. Sheffield Edwards, CIA security chief, met with his superior, Richard Bissell, Deputy Director for Plans, as well as Deputy CIA Director Charles Cabell and Director Allen Dulles, at which time, Bissell recalled, in sworn testimony, “the plan would be put into effect.” 22 23
“The plan” was to be executed by the “Executive Action” unit, code-named ZR/RIFLE. Just before he handed the helm to Helms, in late 1961, Bissell ordered the “application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba.” Helms told Senator Church’s 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee that he had approved the Castro assassination operation previously approved by his predecessor Bissell at Plans without the knowledge or approval of Kennedy or his CIA director McCone. That is, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Helms admitted, in sworn Senate testimony, commanding and deploying the CIA/hood assassination team, which just happened to include people photographed dressed as tramps in Dallas. 24 25
While Oswald was alive in custody, on November 23, J. Edgar Hoover received information that his Special Agent Forsyth and Captain Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency correctly briefed “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” about potential problems relating to the assassination. The memo, reproduced above, referring to the Nov. 23 origin of the information in the last paragraph, was dated Nov. 29. The last paragraph is where we see “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” The problems related to possible unauthorized military actions against Cuba by hothead Cuban exiles, and George H.W. Bush was understood to be the CIA contact for such matters. That is, Bush knew what was and was not authorized.
Bush, the archetypal privateer, operated the CIA-front Zapata Petroleum Corp. and the Houston-based Zapata Off Shore Co.. Colonel Prouty was responsible for providing the ordinance and transport for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which he tells us was code-named “Operation Zapata.” The disguised Navy ships Prouty provided for the invasion were named, after Prouty delivered them, “Barbara” and “Houston.” Isn’t George romantic about Barb? What a nice guy, so civil. 26
In 1953, Bush got money from his powerful uncle Herbert Walker, his father Prescott Bush, the Liedtke brothers and Thomas J. Devine to found Zapata. According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, young Thomas Devine, still in his twenties, was a CIA staffer who had resigned but continued to work for the CIA under commercial cover. Devine accompanied Bush to Vietnam in late 1967 as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency. In 1988, Barron’s said Zapata, in the early 60s, was “a part time purchasing front for the Central Intelligence Agency.” 27 28
By 1958, the new company was drilling on CIA contractor Howard Hughes’ Cay Sal Bank islands in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, just thirty miles north of Cuba. These islands were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Former FBI agent and CIA mercenary Robert Maheu, who co-managed the ZR/RIFLE hit teams with Johnny Roselli, worked for Howard Hughes. During the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bush’s Zapata oil rigs were used as CIA listening posts. CIA agent John Sherwood, who worked under ZR/RIFLE manager William Harvey, explained to journalist Joe Trento, that Bush’s role was “to provide cover to allow our people to set up training facilities and invasion launch points against Cuba in the 1960-61 period…. We had to pay off politicians in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and elsewhere. Bush’s company was used as a conduit for these funds under the guise of oil business contracts. We used his company to find Cuban refugees jobs.” Bush sold his interest in Zapata Offshore in 1966. Remaining partner Hugh Liedtke merged Zapata with Penn Oil to create Pennzoil. In 1981, the year Bush became Vice President, all Securities and Exchange Commission filings for Zapata Off-Shore Co. between 1960 and 1966 were “inadvertently shredded.” 28
The 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee and the 1979 House Assassinations Committee determined that J. Edgar Hoover, like Allen Dulles, not only knew of the ZR/RIFLE hit teams, captained by Johnny Roselli and Robert Maheu, and failed to tell the Warren Commission, but had taped the 1962 and 1963 mob threats to Kennedy’s life. Hoover, fully aware of the threats, failed to tell the Secret Service or the President at the time. That makes Hoover, at the very least, an accessory before the fact. 30
The Mayor of Dallas, in control of the parade route, the police force and all the initial evidence, was Earle Cabell, the younger brother of General Charles Cabell, Dulles’ second-in-command, the Deputy Director of the CIA fired by Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Since a trial would have given Oswald’s defense attorney the right to subpoena evidence and witnesses, it was essential that be avoided. That was the official conclusion of the 1979 House Select Committee: “The murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby had all the earmarks of an organized crime hit, an action to silence the assassin, so he could not reveal the conspiracy.” 31
The Assassinations Committee established that Ruby had the help of Cabell’s Dallas police in getting to Oswald. Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean was in charge of security when Oswald was hit. Dean actually bragged, within earshot of Peter Dale Scott, whose Deep Politics is such an expert analysis, of his good relations with Mafia boss Civello. Dean said Civello had helped him in the “many, many dope cases I made.”
After Civello returned to Dallas from his unhappy 1957 visit to Appalachin, New York, where he functioned as Carlos Marcello’s representative at the ill-fated Mafia confab, he had dinner with Sergeant Dean. Dean always insisted that Dallas “had no trouble with the Italian families.” He certainly didn’t, anyway. The Dallas County sheriff into whose hands Oswald was being transferred, Bill Decker, was Civello’s character witness in his pardon application after Civello served six of the fifteen years he was sentenced to in 1937 for dealing dope. It was the local and state New York police that busted the famous 1957 mafia conference in Appalachin, drawn by so many expensive cars with out of state plates. The spectacular front page publicity forced Hoover, for the first time, in 1957, to acknowledge the existence of organized crime. The bust saw the detention of 58 mafiosi, including Santos Trafficante, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino and Joe Profaci, as they left the estate of hitman, bootlegger, dope dealer and legit Canada Dry bottler Joe Barbara. Hoover, of course, had been using Mafia gunsels since the union-busting Palmer raids of 1919, which he organized. Hoover famously used Lansky and Luciano to trap Lepke Buchalter in 1937, for the publicity provided by Walter Winchell - but there was no organized crime. In 1959, Hoover had more than four hundred agents based in New York chasing commies, and four chasing the mob. 32
Lansky associate Seymour Pollack insisted that Lansky had taken compromising photos of Hoover and his inseparable lifelong companion Clyde Tolson holding hands in public and having sex, and that may have been a factor in Hoover’s reticence to recognize organized crime. CIA electronics expert Gordon Novel, who worked for counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, reported to Anthony Summers, author of Official and Confidential, that Angleton showed him a 1946 photo of Hoover, clearly identifiable, giving Tolson head. Novel was shown the photos by Angleton to give him leverage with Hoover in the CIA’s argument with Hoover over the CIA’s lawsuit, which Novel was running, against Jim Garrison, which Hoover wanted dropped. Tolson shared vacations with Hoover since the early 1930s. He became FBI Associate Direector in 1947. They lunched together most days, sharing two or three meals a day for years. Tolson inherited Hoover’s estate of $3.3 million in today’s money, accepted the flag at his funeral and moved into Hoover’s house after he died. They are buried by his side. 33
Hoover’s sexual orientation, of course, is notable not only in light of the leverage it gave others in a homophobic world, but in light of his own ruthless persecution of gay people, literally equating homosexuality with communism, per the example of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Hoover actually established the secret Responsibilities and Sex Deviates intelligence programs that used local FBI offices to illegally inform college and public school administrators all over the country of the presence of gay teachers, getting hundreds fired. This gay couple really were very nasty, duplicitous rats.
As Deputy Attorney General of the United States from 1974 to 1975, Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative Republican, was tasked by the House Judiciary Committee with reviewing the recently croaked J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files, which he described as ‘the single worst experience of my long governmental service.’ Said Silberman, “this country—and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—would be well served if [Hoover’s] name were removed from the bureau’s building. It is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history." 34
A former Civello employee, outraged to hear on TV that Ruby had no organized crime connections, went to the FBI and outlined his detailed knowledge of Civello’s and Ruby’s long relationship. Bobby Gene Moore’s testimony, which included considerable proof, was deliberately hidden by Hoover’s FBI from the Warren Commission. Civello’s top lieutenants, the Campisi brothers, were among Ruby’s closest friends and associates. A 1956 FBI file links Ruby to a “large narcotics setup operating between Mexico, Texas, and the East,” explaining that one “got the okay to operate through Jack Ruby of Dallas.” Ruby was the influential fixer who transmitted Civello’s OK and picked up the vig. 35 36
During the original FBI investigation, Atlanta FBI Agent Daniel Doyle uncovered the fact that Ruby had run guns to Castro with Eddie Browder, an operative of Trafficante lieutenant Roughhouse Rothman. When these facts were “washed out” of the Atlanta FBI report finally sent to Washington, Doyle resigned in protest. Browder’s FBI file, more than a thousand pages, was never shown to the Warren Commission. When suspicious Warren Commission lawyers Griffin and Hubert asked the CIA for information on this, they got none. 37
Ruby himself had admitted to the Warren Commission (actually chaired by the CIA chief Kennedy fired, Allen Dulles), that he had sold jeeps to Castro in 1959, but, despite that admission, the Commission adamantly insisted that “no substantiation has been found for rumors linking Ruby with pro- or anti-Castro Cuban activities.” In 1959 the FBI designated Jack Ruby a PCI, a Provisional Criminal Informant. Despite the fact that Hoover and Dulles knew, the Commission was never told that Ruby visited Trafficante in Cuba in 1959, or that he was working with the FBI. 38
Ruby warned his first lawyer that the name ‘Davis’ would mean trouble. Ruby had met bank robber and assassin Thomas Davis in one of his clubs shortly before the assassination. Davis was one of Roselli’s hitters in ZR/RIFLE, run by CIA agent Bill Harvey. When Davis was arrested in Tangier a month after the assassination, he was sprung by CIA contractor QJ/WIN, a mysterious oft-used European assassin. This again points to the Kennedy hit as a ZR/RIFLE operation, as Roselli himself obliquely asserted - just before his own assassination. Correspondence at the time shows Hoover to have been personally aware of Davis’ Moroccan detention, but he never mentioned any of this to the Warren Commission, despite the fact that Davis had a relationship with Ruby. 37a
Helms’ subordinate, Gen. Lansdale, was the operational chief of Mongoose. Lansdale was Helms’ control officer, with official titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations and Staff Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance. Lansdale was also Bobby Kennedy’s top military aide. The Kennedys not only knew of ZR/RIFLE, but actively encouraged it – until the nuclear showdown with Russia. RFK fired Lansdale on October 16, 1962, six days before JFK announced the Missile Crisis to the world by instituting the naval blockade of Cuba. Lansdale had been resisting RFK’s operational control of Mongoose, using Bill Harvey to launch aggressive unauthorized operations in Cuba, assuming an invasion was in the offing. At the height of the Missile Crisis, Harvey and Lansdale sent ten guerrillas into Cuba to prepare for the invasion Lansdale and Harvey, and the rest of their Dulles team, intended to engineer – by sabotaging the President in the midst of his Missile Crisis negotiations. Such policy insubordination was unacceptable to RFK, who fired Lansdale as his military adviser and sent Harvey to Rome as chief of station. But Lansdale went on controlling the operation anyway under Helms’ now covert orders. The alcoholic Harvey was replaced by Far East division chief Desmond Fitzgerald, another trusted Dulles operative.
RFK’s dismissal of Harvey was also an illusory half-measure. True, Harvey was in Rome, but that didn’t stop him from initiating, without the President’s authorization, Operation Demagnetize, with our former Ambassador to Italy, Dulles operative Clare Boothe Luce, and Licio Gelli, soon to be Italy’s P-2 chief. The CIA paid the elite P-2 Masonic Lodge $10 million per month for the services of its on-call death squads. Luce engineered the appointment of P-2’s General Giovanni de Lorenzo to head Italy’s Servizio Informazioni Forze Armate (SIFAR), the Armed Forces Information Service.
SIFAR was the coordinating mechanism with Operation Gladio’s fascist death squads throughout Italy, both inside and outside the army, such as Ordine Nuovo, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Avanguardia Nazionale and many others. Harvey authorized SIFAR to implement the CIA’s ‘strategy of tension,’ political, psychological, and paramilitary, to diminish the growing popularity of the Italian Communist Party, which was genuinely populist and democratic, not Stalinist. Because of their effective resistance to Mussolini’s fascism, the word ‘Communist’ had political cachet in Italy.
The long-planned strategy began with the October, 27, 1962 false-flag assassination of Italian oil magnate Enrico Mattei, blamed on the Communists. As the CIA expected, the April 1963 elections saw the Communists win 25% of the vote. Harvey put hundreds of Operation Gladio operatives from his fascist death squads, disguised as police, on the street to attack a huge demonstration of the construction workers union. The construction workers, of course, fought back. The idea was not particularly different than that employed in Iran - to build toward nationwide civil war and then impose a right-wing government of ‘public safety,’ thus obviating the election results. The CIA’s urban warfare expert Vernon Walters went to Italy to coordinate with Harvey and Col. Renzo Rocca, director of the Gladio units in the army.
Four thousand civilian Gladio operatives from Italy’s fascist groups were ready to attack left-wing groups throughout the country. Rocca’s Army units had been armed and prepped. Only a crafty and timely political compromise by Christian Democratic Prime Minister Aldo Moro, conceding key ministries, caused the left to calm down. Peace on the streets forced cancellation of the fascist coup. This Gladio operation in Italy was put into action without Kennedy’s approval or knowledge. This was Dulles’ CIA contradicting announced Kennedy executive policy, committing treason, coming to within a hair’s breadth of overthrowing the Italian government. That would have been the one thing certain to guarantee a Communist victory in the next free election, if any were ever held after a fascist coup d’etat. 38a
RFK had assumed virtual operational command of Mongoose, pressing all those around him for quick results and micromanaging the operation. Both Kennedys had independent contacts among the Batistianos, and, like them, wanted Castro dead. But whether they had ordered the attempts on Castro’s life after October of 1962, or were able to control them, is open to question, since JFK ended the Cuban Missile Crisis with a promise to Khrushchev to terminate all sabotage operations. RFK had specifically ordered DCIA McCone, right in the middle of the crisis, to halt all CIA attacks on Cuba. JM/WAVE station chief Shackley, per Lansdale’s instructions, ignored the order.
It was during the October, 1962 nuclear confrontation with Russia that Kennedy learned to have great respect for Nikita Khrushchev’s military sanity. Khrushchev had been one of the leaders of the ghastly Battle of Stalingrad, and desperately did not want to live through a nuclear encore. Kennedy came to understand that, politically, Khrushchev was facing the same kind of economically and psychologically corrupt privateer warhawk opposition in the Russian administration that he was facing in the American, and that the doves were in the minority in both camps. The Russians had plenty of Curtis LeMays and Allen Dulles’. Keeping his operational word to Khrushchev became, then, a matter of supreme geopolitical importance. Nuclear war was avoided in 1962 only because Khrushchev trusted Kennedy to have control of his government, to be able to keep his operational word. Less than a year later, on August 5, 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, also bitterly opposed by the war hawks in both camps, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. It was another example of Kennedy’s farsighted economic and political genius.
Castro and Kennedy had, in fact, been making peaceful overtures to one another in the fall of 1963. Castro had reacted to Kennedy’s vicious trade embargo, which included the poisoning of Cuban food shipments and the sabotaging of machine parts, by distributing much of the American property he had expropriated to the poor. This brilliant political maneuver helped Kennedy understand that buying Castro might be the cheapest way to wean him from Mother Russia. So, while he still approved the occasional pinprick raid as a warning against hemispheric interference, the authorized raids dwindled to an insignificant trickle.
In mid-November of 1963 Kennedy sent the distinguished French journalist Jean Daniel of L’Express from the White House with the message that he accepted responsibility for the “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation” of Cuba. “The United States can coexist with a nation in the hemisphere that espouses a different economic system, the Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding. It is the subservient relationship with the Soviet Union that creates the problem.” If Castro would leave Kennedy free to pursue his Alliance For Progress without revolutionary interference, Kennedy was prepared to recognize Castro. Castro actually approved of Kennedy’s support for Alliance for Progress allies Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic and Ramón Villeda Morales in Honduras. Nor did he object to Kennedy’s hostility to the likes of Trujillo and Somoza. 39
Bosch and Kennedy, Jan.10,1963 (JFK Library);Villeda Morales meeting with John F. Kennedy, Nov. 30,1962 (Wikipedia Commons)
But unauthorized CIA raids, such as the March 1963 raid of Antonio Veciana’s Alpha 66, which shot up a Soviet army installation and freighter, proliferated. This caused a major diplomatic incident and threatened the progress of the breakthrough nuclear test ban treaty negotiations. That, apparently, was the CIA intention. Veciana insisted, before the Schweiker-Hart Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, that it was his CIA case officer, “Maurice Bishop,” CIA Western Hemisphere chief David Phillips, who planned the attack. Bishop repeatedly told Veciana that the purpose of the raid was to destroy détente.
Apparently détente wasn’t the only thing the CIA wanted to destroy. Veciana later testified, before the House Assassinations Committee, that in late August 1963, at his meeting with Bishop at the Southland Center in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald was present. Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Blakey concluded that “Veciana’s allegations remain undiscredited…” Veciana told a September 2014 convocation of assassination experts in DC, “I was trained by the CIA, as was Oswald….Oswald and Fidel Castro were ideal scapegoats for the murder of the president. . . . It really was a coup d’etat.” Kennedy reacted to the March Alpha 66 raid by having Attorney General RFK announce, on March 30, that the FBI would be employed to stop unauthorized raids. 4041 42
In 1961, new President Kennedy had been assured by the CIA that the upcoming ‘covert’ Bay of Pigs operation (Operation Zapata) that Eisenhower had approved, and which had the support of the U.S. military, would have its own internal Cuban momentum, and that overt U.S. invasion of Cuba, which would risk war with Russia, would not be necessary. Suspecting that he was being railroaded into using American troops, Kennedy, on April 12, 1961, eight days before the launch of the operation, announced to the press, “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces…” The next day, pursuant to presidential orders, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lemnitzer added such an abort order to the rules of engagement for Operation Zapata, contingent on Cuban popular non-participation in the ‘uprising.’ But overt U.S. overthrow of Castro had been precisely what Dulles, Bissell, Helms, Lansdale & Company had been trying to engineer from the beginning. It was over this snooker that Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as CIA chief, Gen. Charles Cabell as Deputy Director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell as Deputy Director for Plans. 43
The highly classified CIA Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuba Operation, by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, was dated October of 1961, and declassified, thanks to Dulles, only in 1997: “The fundamental cause of the disaster was the Agency’s failure to give the project... appropriate organization, staffing throughout by highly qualified personnel, and full-time direction and control of the highest quality.” It was DCIA Dulles who divided authority so disastrously, an amateur’s mistake this CIA grey eminence, and Bissell, his experienced operational chief, were unlikely to have made unintentionally. Bissell, in direct control of the operation, was personally warned at his home in DC just eight days before the operation launched by the two senior agents in charge of the operation that it would fail. CIA project director Jacob Esterline, in day-to-day control of the operation, and Colonel Jack Hawkins, the senior military planner, insisted to Bissell’s face that the new landing beach was too isolated to involve the Cuban population.
With the insufficient air cover being planned (to make it seem like a Cuban guerilla, not an American military operation), the isolated Bay of Pigs became a military cul de sac. They insisted that Brigade 2506’s 1,400 troops could not possibly outfight Castro’s 20,000 troops. Esterline and Hawkins told Bissell that if he did not cancel the operation, they would resign. Bissell talked them out of it, promising Esterline and Hawkins to jawbone Kennedy into using the USAF to take out Castro’s rather substantial 36 combat aircraft. A few days before, Dulles told Kennedy that the Cuba coup was a sure thing, like Guatemala. Dulles assured Kennedy that he told Eisenhower the Guatemalan coup against Árbenz had been a slam-dunk, and that the Cuba coup chances were even better. What Dulles actually told Eisenhower in 1954 was that the CIA’s chances in Guatemala were one in five, and none without air power, which is why Ike kicked in the planes.
It was also interesting to RFK that the CIA had lied through its teeth when it assured Kennedy that the small invasion would spark a popular uprising. It had the report of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Guantanamo, which insisted that Castro was profoundly popular, the keeper of the economic and political hopes of most ordinary Cubans. This inconvenient intelligence was never presented to the Bay of Pigs planning group. The CIA leadership knew precisely how popular Castro was, and how unpopular their Batistianos were. The Inspector General’s report stressed that the CIA knew that no organized underground existed, and that the landing beach was too isolated. The recently released (2005) minutes of the Cuba Task Force meeting of Novemeber 15, 1960, a week after Kennedy’s election, proved that the CIA knew that a successful Brigade 2506 landing was “seen as unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action.” Bissell did not relay this information to Kennedy, nor did he tell Kennedy that Eisenhower had never approved an over-the-beach invasion. The hawks were trying to engineer a fait accompli, a military situation in which Kennedy would feel compelled to use U.S. power. Eisenhower had acquiesced to just such a snooker in Guatemala, and Dulles and Bissell just assumed Kennedy would follow the manipulable Eisenhower’s example. The Batistianos lost 114 dead and 1,189 captured. 44
As Brigade 2506 started to lose, it was Admiral Arleigh Burke, along with Bissell and Lemnitzer, who confronted Kennedy in the Oval Office to strongly advocate a direct U.S. naval attack in support of the invasion. Burke already had two Marine battalions on Navy destroyers ready to strike. Burke was supported by the Air Force’s vulgar, KKK-loving, cigar-chomping nuclear cowboy Curtis LeMay. ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay was Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern’s model for Generals Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper, who launches a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, the funniest black comedy I have ever seen.
LeMay, who ran the genocidal firebombing of Tokyo, was commander of the Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957. He had supported all of John Foster Dulles’ insane nuclear-use proposals. He was segregationist George Wallace’s running mate on their 1968 presidential ticket. But Kennedy, possessed of the guts of the war hero that he was, refused Burke, Bissell and Lemnitzer, realizing he was being jawboned into risking a full-scale war with Russia, since an overt U.S. attack on Cuba would leave Khrushchev with no political choice but to take Berlin. Kennedy told his old WWII buddy, Undersecretary of the Navy Paul Fay Jr., “We’re not going to plunge into irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in the country puts so-called national pride above national reason.” 45
On November 29, 1961, Kennedy forced Dulles to resign. Allen Dulles was out, but not out of touch. Although Kennedy removed Dulles and a few of his top aides, he didn’t disassemble the CIA control apparatus that Dulles had built. Lansdale, an organic part of the Dulles team, had successfully sold Operation Mongoose to Kennedy, outlined under National Security Action Memorandum 100 on October 5, 1961, and approved by Kennedy on November 30. This was the huge CIA-run Batistiano war on Castro run out of station JM/WAVE in Florida that left Castro more popular than ever, and Lansdale more powerful than ever.
Lansdale’s immediate superior was the CIA’s number two man, Richard Helms, the new Deputy Director for Plans, a trusted Dulles operative since their days together in Germany. Dulles’ longtime main man from his OSS and postwar Italy days, James Jesus Angleton, was left in charge of Counterintelligence, that is political assassination and dirty tricks, also known as the ‘alternative CIA.’ Dulles also had the unflinching loyalty of other old OSS comrades, still in place, such as Cord Meyer, Desmond Fitzgerald, William Colby, Sheffield Edwards and Howard Hunt. All used J. Edgar Hoover’s domestic Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPROS) to function within the United States. John McCone, Kennedy’s new DCIA, the WWII shipbuilder, although a competent administrator who had served in Truman’s Department of Defense and headed the Atomic Energy Commission for Eisenhower, did not have the experience to control the CIA.
Nixon was in Dallas the day of the assassination, ostensibly for the convention of his client, Pepsi Cola, for whom he was chief counsel. Nixon learned of Kennedy’s assassination while in a meeting with the Pepsi high command in Dallas. He flew out that afternoon. Jack Ruby visited the same convention, to hand out free tickets to his strip joint. Nixon knew Ruby. Congressman Nixon actually intervened in 1947 to get Jack Ruby excused from testifying before Congress about the Mafia. The supporting FBI note, discovered in 1975, reads: “It is my sworn testimony that one Jack Rubenstein [Ruby’s original name] of Chicago … is performing information functions for the staff of Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican of California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open testimony in the aforementioned hearings.” Sam Giancana, in the 1992 book Double Cross written by his brother and godson, identified this as a favor Nixon did for Giancana’s lieutenant Ruby. 46 47
Nixon was a lifelong ally of the assassination engineers, his financiers: Dulles, Helms, Angleton, Hoover, Marcello, Trafficante, Giancana, Hoffa, Lansky, Murchison, and all the CIA Cubans, whom he organized as the Bay of Pigs strike force under Eisenhower. At the height of the Watergate coverup, on June 23, 1972, Nixon gave Haldeman the following message for Richard Helms at the CIA: “If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate - both for the CIA, and the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy. Just tell him to lay off.”
Helms’ rage at being threatened with “the Bay of Pigs thing” forced Haldeman to conclude that “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.” Haldeman noted that “After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup.” When the Watergate scandal broke, in January 1973, Nixon’s immediate cover-up team included no fewer than eleven former staffers and members of the Warren Commission. 48 49
In a very busy ‘retirement,’ Dulles met regularly in his Q Street manor house and his favorite DC haunts with the most rabid of the anti-Kennedy Batistianos and right-wing militarists. He also continued to meet regularly with his brain trust, The Council on Foreign Relations, the Sullivan and Cromwell Wall street clique whose consensus amounted to his marching orders since the 1920s. He also continued to meet with the CIA high command at ‘The Farm,’ a secret rural command and training center located within Camp Peary’s 9,000 acres near Williamburg, Virginia. After receiving news of Kennedy’s death the afternoon of Nov. 22, Dulles did not go home, according to his datebook, he went to ‘The Farm’ to confer with the CIA high command. 50
Dulles had a heavy flurry of meetings just prior to Kennedy’s assassination with quite a few of the very Batistianos implicated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations as directly involved in Kennedy’s murder. Astute researcher David Talbot, author of The Devil’s Chessboard, asks why recently released, and heavily redacted, CIA documents relating to Allen Dulles’ 1963 itinerary reveal a meeting he and retired right-wing General Lucius Clay held on April 15, 1963 at one of Dulles’ posh DC haunts with Paulino Sierra Martinez, a recently exiled graduate of Batista’s secret police. Sierra had no business credentials, he lived in a covert world. His only claim to fame was as a former Batista assassin, that is, employee of Santos Trafficante, now living anonymously, after passing his U.S. bar exam, in the legal department of Chicago’s Union Tank Car Company, a Rockefeller operation. This was a man only an Allen Dulles could have found.
A month after his meeting with Dulles and General Clay, Sierra convened a large meeting of Batistianios at the Miami Royalton Hotel, despite the fact that, until then, he was virtually unknown as an anti-Castro leader. He told the assembled Cuban fascists that he had millions in corporate cash to organize an invasion of the island, and he began spreading the cash around to prove he wasn’t just whistling Dixie. The cash flowed through Chicago’s Union Tank Car Company. Sierra’s name came up as the financier during a Secret Service investigation into a mob-financed weapons deal Sierra did with another Batistiano assassin, Homer Echevarria, on November 21, the day before Kennedy was murdered. Echevarria said he would conclude the deal “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.” But President Johnson transferred all Secret Service investigations of this kind to the FBI, and Hoover’s FBI simply terminated the investigation. Sierra briefly relocated to Chile just before Allende’s overthrow. 51
General Lucius Clay, who met Sierra with Dulles, was the Commander in Chief, U.S. Forces in Europe, and military governor of the U.S. Zone, Germany, 1947 - 1949. Clay orchestrated the 1948–1949 Berlin Airlift. It was Clay who had introduced 1952 presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower to John Foster Dulles. In 1961 Clay was Kennedy’s Special Adviser in West Berlin, that is, the US commanding officer in Berlin. Clay was deeply resentful of Kennedy for preventing him from starting WWIII in Berlin on October 27, 1961, when he seriously threatened, without authorization, to knock down the newly-built Berlin Wall with his tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. The Eastern bloc, particularly East Germany, had been hemorrhaging population through West Berlin since the late 1940s, four million Germans fleeing to the West by 1961.
The massive spontaneous 1953 East German uprising was triggered by Stalin’s “systematic implementation of Socialism,” which felt an awful lot like Hitler’s militarization of Germany, with a radical increase in food prices and work quotas at the expense of the civilian economy. Strikes and work stoppages wracked the GDR. Emigration skyrocketed since it had been possible, until 1955, to just hop a bus or a flight to West Germany from West Berlin.
But the Soviet Union, in 1955, transferred control of border crossing to East Germany, a country NATO did not recognize. The agreement at Yalta had foreseen German unification, not permanent division. In 1956 East Germany banned all travel between East and West, and in 1961, per Soviet orders, walled in West Berlin, making defection from East to West impossible. But free travel to and from West Berlin had been guaranteed by the original Yalta division of Berlin into Allied zones, collectively known as West Berlin, a hundred miles inside East Germany. When ID was demanded of U.S. personnel by East German authorities before they would be admitted to West Berlin, General Clay, and many others, felt they were being forced to recognize East German hegemony over an Allied zone.
The military standoff initiated by General Clay saw ten fully armed U.S. M-48 tanks facing ten Russian T55s, 100 meters apart, with guns uncovered, revving their engines at each other for 16 hours. Berlin was deep inside East Germany, a Western island in a sea of Soviet military might. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Lauris Norstad, solemnly stressed to Kennedy the overwhelming number of Soviet tanks, aircraft, and men arrayed against NATO forces in Germany. General Bruce Clarke, then the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army Europe, protested General Clay using his special diplomatic status to go outside channels to override Clarke’s command authority, deploying tanks without Clarke’s orders.
Like Kennedy, Khrushchev was surrounded by hawks, but, like Kennedy, Khrushchev was militarily sane. Khrushchev acceded to Kennedy’s demand that American officials not be forced to show ID upon entering Berlin, thus partially preserving the pre-Wall Allied political definition of Berlin as an open city. Clay was forced to stand down, and removed from Berlin in May. Kennedy stoically concluded, “…a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war." 52
Like many another American military idiot, General Clay thought Kennedy had “lost his nerve.” Clay believed he ought to have been allowed to start WWIII on October 27, 1961 when he threatened to knock down the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. Clay insisted, for some reason, that the Russians, who had just won the greatest tank battle in history against the Wehrmacht, would just withdraw their revving tanks, rather than use them. Clay was apparently analogizing the successful 1948-49 Berlin Airlift, when the Russians didn’t have nuclear weapons, to 1961, when they did. “I did not win all those battles, your Majesty,” Wellington is said to have told Queen Victoria, “by underestimating the enemy.” Wellington rarely initiated conflict. He was famous for making the enemy strike first, and then adapting his defensive strategy to the enemy’s actual battlefield array. With this agile mindset, he frequently prevailed against superior numbers.
Khrushchev and Kennedy strengthened each other politically at home. Both were looking to deescalate the military hostility in favor of domestic spending, convinced there was no future or political benefit in endless warfare. As Soviet Premier in 1958, Khrushchev had to face up to the fact that the Warsaw Pact was too expensive to maintain and that the Soviet collectivist, centrally-planned economy was a disaster. But, like Kennedy, Khrushchev was under intense pressure from his military hardliners, led by Brezhnev, who inserted live tactical nuclear weapons into Cuba, enough nuclear firepower to destroy most of America’s retaliatory capacity. Kennedy realized that Khrushchev was not in unilateral control of the Soviet military, just as Khrushchev could see that Kennedy had exactly the same problem. Krushchev himself confirmed this by sending Kennedy a conciliatory letter in the midst of the crisis, immediately followed by a beligerant one. The Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, ended the only way it could have, with a Soviet humiliation. Yekaterina Furtseva, the first female member of the Politburo, with deep connections in the KGB, and Khrushchev’s lover, set up a back channel that enabled a non-military solution. Col. William Corson, one of Kennedy’s top intelligence aides who was part of this, said “she was the reason the back channel worked.”
Right in the middle of the most dangerous nuclear standoff in history, directly contradicting Kennedy’s specific orders not to attack Cuba, Lansdale, taking orders from Dulles through Helms, ordered Harvey and Shackley to lauch Task Force W commando attacks against Cuba from JM/WAVE. Lansdale was able to deflect Bobby Kennedy’s rage to Bill Harvey, who ended up in Rome before being cashiered.
Khrushchev came to see Kennedy as a political solution to Russia’s military overextension, and began negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with him, signed 8/5/1963. They installed a ‘hotline’ to avoid future military confrontation. Krushchev publicly called for an end to the arms race, insisting that it was bankrupting the Soviet Union. His call for more non-military domestic spending was very popular – it was the same policy he tried to push with Eisenhower’s Crusade For Peace, also sabotaged by Dulles.
Brezhnev was an industrial war hawk intent on protecting the political dominance of his kleptocratic elite, which was built on constant fear of and production for war. Brezhnev thought Kennedy’s willingness to deescalate was a strategic threat to the totalitarian Russian government itself, a threat made real by support from Khrushchev. Brezhnev wanted Kennedy dead, and Khrushchev gone from power. Brezhnev replaced Krushchev in the October, 1964 KGB coup.
Throughout the fall of 1963 the CIA, like the KGB, continued to actively oppose the peaceful option. That’s why operational control of the CIA became so important to the Kennedys. “I remember him saying that the CIA frequently did things he didn’t know about, and he was unhappy about it. He complained that the CIA was almost autonomous,” recalled JFK’s close friend, Senator George Smathers. Kennedy actually was far advanced in his systematic planning for CIA reorganization. Arthur Schlesinger, on Kennedy’s orders, had presented a CIA reorganization plan to Kennedy on June 30, 1961. Schlesinger’s plan would have divided the agency into an action arm and an intelligence arm, subjecting all future covert operations to review by a presidentially-controlled Joint Intelligence Board before approval. Allen Dulles viewed this plan as a lethal threat to the CIA’s political independence, as indeed it was. 53 54
Kennedy refused to recognize the September 1963 overthrow of Alliance for Progress ally Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, nor the October overthrow of Ramón Villeda Morales in Honduras, another important Alliance for Progress ally. Kennedy angrily broke relations with Santo Domingo and Tegucigalpa, insisting that coups are “self-defeating...not only because we are all committed under the Alliance for Progress to democratic government and progress but also because of course dictatorships are the seedbeds from which communism ultimately springs up.” Clearly, Kennedy wasn’t running the CIA. 55
It was during this contest for control of Agency operations, on July 31, 1963, that Carlos Marcello’s Minuteman Lake Pontchartrain camp, run by Hemming and Sturgis, at which Ferrie and Oswald trained, was seized by RFK’s FBI. But, although the Kennedys could arrest a few operatives, they were unable to control the massive Mongoose monster they helped to create. Mongoose was discontinued, but Task Force W remained, renamed the Special Activities Staff. With independent covert CIA funding, much of it from Marcello’s and Trafficante’s huge dope profits, the rogue weasels born of Mother Mongoose went on an uncontrolled rampage. It is no coincidence that Hemming and Sturgis, who survived the maelstrom they created, went into the dope business. 56
ZR/RIFLE was under the direct command of the famous fat assassin and counterintelligence ace William ‘The Pear’ Harvey, who coordinated with Lansdale and Shackley. Harvey had been CIA station chief in Berlin and Rome throughout the fifties, the most dangerous early period of the Cold War. Harvey honed his assassination skills under the tutelage of Col. Boris Pash, who fought with the Czarist White movement from 1918-1920. Pash joined U.S. military intelligence in 1940, and had been an early security supervisor of what became the Manhattan Project. As the war was ending, Pash was sent to Europe as head of the Alsos Mission to rescue Hitler’s best nuclear and chemical warfare experts. That turned into Wisner’s OPC Program Branch 7 (PB-7), the model for ZR/RIFLE. PB-7 was part of Operation Bloodstone from 1948-51, responsible for helping to recruit militarily useful ex-Nazis and to eliminate inconvenient enemy agents behind the Iron Curtain. 57
Bill Harvey; Johnny Roselli; Frank Sturgis leaves the Miami federal courthouse building in handcuffs after being convicted in 1975 of taking cars stolen in Texas to Mexico (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1951, it was Harvey’s ‘Staff D’ that first unmasked the Soviet double agent Kim Philby, who had worked with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, operating from high position in the Foreign Office. Staff D, officially called the Electronic Surveillance Branch of the Clandestine Service Division, was a tough gang of break-in artists and assassins who would steal foreign codebooks and ciphers and eliminate inconvenient enemy agents. Harvey was an old ally of Counterintelligence chief Angleton, Pash’s PB-7 finger man. Howard Hunt, the assassin photographed in Dallas on Nov. 22, told The New York Times, 12/26/1975, that his mission as part of PB-7 had been “the assassination of suspected double agents and similar low-ranking officials.” 58
It was Harvey’s 1954-56 tunnel operation under East Berlin, famously called ‘Harvey’s Hole,’ engineered by Dulles and MI6, that opened East German telephone traffic to the CIA’s ears. The tunnel operation employed new technology that was able to translate the electronic echoes passing though telephone cables into the words creating those echoes. But the operation had been penetrated by the KGB from its inception and was closed a year later. One of MI6’s original supervising agents, George Blake, was a Soviet spy.
In February 1962 Deputy Director for Plans (Director of Covert Operations) Helms ordered Harvey’s Staff D to create an ‘executive action’ team, code-name RIFLE. Helms, knowing that DCIA McCone, because of his Catholicism, would reject the assassination operation, did not include McCone in the loop. The Kennedys, even after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, did not object to the Castro assassination and overthrow project, called Mongoose, although the operational inclusion of the Mafia was a problem for them, according to Agency security chief Sheffield Edwards. Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, fresh from Vietnam, was in overall command of Mongoose.
The Castro assassination project began in the Eisenhower administration when CIA Western Hemisphere Director J.C. King pushed it through in the White House Special Group in March of 1960. Thinking of deniability, Edwards and Harvey got Deputy Director for Plans Bissell’s approval of Mafia involvement in August of 1960. Said Bissell, the Mafia were “well-motivated to see that the job got done…to regain control of the casinos.” The hard drug business, though they won’t mention it in their memos, was the real protected covert hood income, worth far more than the flashy casinos. Edwards and Harvey told Bissell they would use a cutout, a deniable front-man, to do the mafia recruiting. They chose Howard Hughes operative Robert Maheu, who had worked with Harvey in the FBI before the war, and was already on a CIA monthly retainer. Counterintelligence chief Angleton warned Bissell not to do it.
The mission of Harvey’s RIFLE wasn’t merely the assassination of Castro, that was just one of its many tasks. The operational function of Harvey’s unit was assassination in general, as tasked, globally. RIFLE’s first task was the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, but a rival rebel group, aided by the CIA, got to Lumumba first. Harvey also headed Task Force W, which was the Agency’s coordinating component with Operation Mongoose. In that capacity Harvey worked with Howard Hunt, another protégé of Boris Pash. In 1976, just as Congress was about to hear what he had to say, ZR/RIFLE’s Bill Harvey had a fatal “heart attack.” 59
In April of 1962, pursuant to orders, Harvey met once again with Jim O’Connell, Maheu’s CIA case officer, and Johnny Roselli to plan a new round of Castro assassination attempts. Between 1960 and 63, Roselli’s teams made eight serious attempts on Castro’s life, closely coordinating their efforts with Trafficante, for mob liaison, as Trafficante himself confirmed before the Assassinations Committee in September of 1978. 60
ZR/RIFLE also boasted the services of David Sanchez Morales, a famously savage murderer known as ‘El Indio.’ Morales had recently returned from a grotesque murder spree aimed at the Tupemaros in Uruguay. El Indio had a bloody hand in the Guatemalan coup of 1954 and had worked, as an attaché of the American consulate, with the Batista/Trafficante death squads during their final spasm of 1958-59. 61
Trafficante’s most dangerous assassin, Johnny Roselli, provided with false papers and the rank of Colonel, had complete access to CIA station JM/WAVE in Coral Gables. It was from a motel near there that Roselli and El Indio planned Fidel’s assassination with snipers. Capt. Bradley Ayers, a combat trainer for Operation Mongoose, insisted that “Any suggestion that Roselli’s activities were less than legitimized by the establishment is total BS….he had virtual carte-blanche into the highest levels of the station.” 62
Roselli and Hunt probably assassinated Rafael Trujillo in May of 1961, at least according to the Church Committee and Trujillo’s 1960 security chief, Luis M. Gonzalez-Mata, who identified Roselli as “a friend of Batista,” that is, a Trafficante operative. This was a CIA operation, under the command of Bill Harvey. Their Dominican contact was Henry Dearborn, the deputy chief at the American Embassy – really the CIA station chief. Eisenhower was deeply offended by the corrupt and murderous Trujiillo bribing so much of Congress. Ike, with an eye toward Trujillo’s elimination, appointed veteran FBI agent Joseph S. Farland, adept at secret operations, to be American ambassador to the Dominican Republic. The assassination was managed by Richard Bissell, chief of CIA covert operations. Kennedy took over from Ike and approved the operation. The CIA ‘Family Jewels’ memo released by Helms reveals, as the 1973 Inspector General’s report puts it, “quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters.” Trujillo was shot to death on 5/30/1961 in an ambush outside Santo Domingo. 63
Roselli and Hunt also worked together with Tony de Varona, 1948 Cuban PM under President Carlos Prio’s kleptocracy, leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Roselli and Trafficante operative John Martino also operated together in 1963, out of a Key Biscayne motel. Martino, a security systems expert and gambling technician, had been one of those jailed by Castro along with Trafficante and Jake Lansky. Unlike the others, Martino wasn’t released until late 1962. Martino actually went on a June 1963 hit-and-run anti-Castro mission with the powerful Ambassador William Pawley himself, a trusted Dulles/Helms operative.
The Miami-based Pawley had been U.S. ambassador to Peru and Brazil in the late 1940s and erstwhile owner of Havana’s bus system and Cuban sugar refineries. With a connection to Curtiss-Wright, Pawley founded Nacional Cubana de Aviación Curtiss in 1928, sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932. In 1933 he became president of China National Aviation Corporation, operating between Hong Kong and Shanghai, again sold to Pan Am. In partnership with the Chinese Nationalist government he ran Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Hangzhou and in Loiwing on the China-Burma border. In 1940 he organized Hindustan Aircraft Limited in India, then moved to Burma to assemble Curtiss P-40 fighter aircraft for the Flying Tigers, which he helped to set up.
Pawley, close to Eisenhower and Dulles, was also close to the CIA’s Paul Helliwell, with whom he had worked in Asia and the Caribbean in the founding of the Flying Tigers, Civil Air Transport, SEA Supply of Bangkok and Air America. As a CIA privateer in Peru, Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba and Nicaragua, Pawley had been one of the engineers of the 1954 Guatemala coup. The 65-foot yacht Pawley was using in guerrilla raids on Cuba was called Flying Tiger II. Pawley may have wanted to observe up close the combined team of CIA and Syndicate assassins - Hemming, Sturgis, Hunt, Bayo, Hall, Martinez, Robertson - sharpshooters all - that Martino and Roselli were running. 64
In April of 1963, Pawley wrote to Dick Nixon, “All of the Cubans and most Americans in this part of the country believe that to remove Castro, you must first remove Kennedy, and that is not going to be easy.” In October of 1975 Dulles operative Clare Boothe Luce confirmed to Senator Schweiker of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that, against Kennedy’s wishes, she financed Pawley’s unauthorized raids. In 1977, just before he was to testify for the House Assassinations Committee, Ambassador Pawley allegedly committed suicide because of illness. 65 66
Like Pawley and Martino, Roselli didn’t hesitate to go out on raids himself, and actually had two boats shot out from under him, barely escaping with his life. Roselli would later claim, in a sophisticated disinformation effort forced on him by legal pressure, that Castro turned one of his hit teams back on Kennedy, who was, after all, trying to kill Castro. This also just happens to be the current CIA line, originated, according to Helms’ special assistant Victor Marchetti, by CIA Director Richard Helms in 1967, when the progress of the Garrison investigation became a regular topic at the morning staff meetings at Langley. Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison was played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s great film JFK. 67
Although plausible to some who haven’t done their homework, Roselli’s disinformation doesn’t wash, as both the Church Committee and the House Assassinations Committee concluded. Killing Kennedy was idiotic from Castro’s perspective, since it would have doomed the détente Castro desperately wanted, which included an end to the crippling embargo, something Castro knew Kennedy was actively considering. Killing Kennedy would also have provided grounds for a U.S. invasion of Cuba, which Castro knew he couldn’t survive. 68
Like most intelligence legends, the Helms-Roselli assertion is, nonetheless, believable. Castro knew Trafficante, Sturgis and Hemming well, since they were part of the Nixon-approved 1959 CIA operation that penetrated Castro’s movement by selling arms to it. The operation was led by Col. Jack Cannon, and used Syndicate operative Roughhouse Rothman to organize the smuggling. Rothman was a very close aide of Santos Trafficante, managing the Sans Souci Casino and the Tropicana slots for him. Jack Ruby also participated in this operation. 69
Castro used Sturgis to conduct his initial bargaining for the continuation of mob operations in Cuba after he took power. Castro’s reaction to the April 1959 failure of his negotiations with Vice-President Nixon was to go back to Cuba and throw Santos Trafficante and Jake Lansky in jail. That was his idea of bargaining with Richard Nixon. While in Castro’s detention, Trafficante was visited several times by Jack Ruby, according to British journalist John Wilson, who was in the same prison. Wilson reported this to the American embassy in London on Novemeber 26, 1963, two days after Ruby shot Oswald. 71
Although Trafficante and Lansky were forced to renegotiate their casino ownership with Fidel, Trafficante’s Cuban imprisonment was luxurious and temporary, probably because he found a medium of exchange other than plastic chips. Fidel, who had a personal appreciation of the utility of cocaine on the battlefield, had operational guerrilla groups throughout Latin America - enough leverage and territorial control to deliver a whole lot of coke and pot to Don Santos. Trafficante had made a point of arming Fidel while he was still fighting from the Sierra Maestra mountains, so there was good will between Fidel and Don Santos. On his release from Castro’s country club detention, which was just for show, Trafficante stayed in Havana, and continued talking with both Fidel and Raoul Castro, the country’s chief military officer. Lansky was completely outflanked by Trafficante, who made it appear that Lansky was financing ZR/RIFLE. All Lansky wanted was his casinos back, but he had no personal relationship with Fidel, and never armed him, and so allowed himself to be outfoxed by the brilliant Trafficante, who made sure to suffuse the Batistiano resistance in Florida, which took orders from Trafficante, with Fidel’s DGI agents. 72
Lansky lost his extensive Cuban interests, including his beautiful new twenty-one story, 440-room Riviera Hotel and Casino, and so backed those intent on toppling Fidel. But Lansky was essentially a casino operator, not a hitter, and proud of it. He had the muscle to maintain his interests, but his relationship to Batista had to do with his uncanny understanding of tourist development, something in which his close friend Batista was intensely interested. Roselli and all his hitters, on the other hand, worked for Trafficante, the quietly brilliant, utterly ruthless organizer who helped run Batista’s vast international dope-dealing network, a far larger enterprise than casinos. Santos Trafficante Jr, who took over the family business when his old man died in 1954, grew into one of the most powerful drug traffickers of the century. Trafficante actually means ‘trafficker’ in both Italian and Spanish. I wonder if it’s a nom de guerre.
Brigade 2506 itself, since it was composed of and organized by former Batista officers, was virtually Santos Trafficante’s private army. Trafficante’s dope-dealing Batistianos were indeed grateful for all the free bases, boats, arms and communications equipment provided by Operation Mongoose. But somehow Roselli’s expert hitters always managed to miss Fidel. As JFK proved, they didn’t usually miss. High-ranking CIA agent Scott Breckinridge, one of the authors of the CIA’s 1967 Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, was forced to the conclusion “that Trafficante had been providing Castro with details of the plot all along.” That is, Trafficante was dealing dope with Fidel and running ZR/RIFLE with Helms, Bissell, Lansdale, Harvey and Roselli, and it was Kennedy they all wanted dead, not Fidel. 73
Castro knew precisely who his powerful world-straddling drug kingpin partner was, bigger indeed than U.S. Steel, with far more global muscle and power. Throughout 1962 Bobby Kennedy had been tying to assassinate Castro using ZR/RIFLE through his control of the White House Special Group and General Lansdale. That mission did not conflict with that of ZR/RIFLE’s formal commanding officer, Bill Harvey. But by 1963, Castro, through Trafficante, knew that ZR/RIFLE, Trafficante’s protected hitters, had covert orders, through Dulles and Lansdale, to hit Kennedy.
Castro had warned Kennedy, in a very serious way, not to lie down with the dogs. On September 7, 1963, Rolando Cubela, a highly placed Cuban security officer and hero of the revolution, met with Desmond FitzGerald, now head of Mongoose. Also at the meeting were Cubela’s case officer Nestor Sanchez and other CIA officers in Brazil, meeting at the international Collegiate Games, where Cubela represented Cuba. Cubela offered, for the second time, to pursue their ongoing plans to kill Castro. At the exact same moment, at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana, Castro walked up to reporter Daniel Harker and said: “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they, too, can be the cause of an attempt which will cause their death.”
Castro remembered the interview but not his exact words. Castro told the House Assassinations Committee that he was simply fully aware of the boomerang potential inherent in dealing with Trafficante, Roselli, Helms, Lansdale and Company. The 1979 Assassinations Committee concluded that if Castro had been planning to kill Kennedy, he would hardly announce it to the press in advance. Russia’s KGB had handed management of Oswald to Castro’s DGI, but Castro’s intelligence directorate didn’t control ZR/RIFLE – Dulles and Helms did.
That is, Dulles and Hoover, running the assasination in concert with Helms, wanted Kennedy dead; Brezhnev, running Oswald in concert with Castro and Helms, wanted Kennedy dead; Bissell, Helms and Trafficante, running ZR/RIFLE, wanted Kennedy dead; Marcello, running Oswald and Ferrie with Hoover, wanted Kennedy dead; and all the CIA Cubans wanted Kennedy dead. This operation ought to be taught at the CIA as a model of covert cooperation between intelligence services. Such cooperation is standard operating procedure because it confers deniability. Because of his connection to Trafficante and Roselli, Castro knew the assassination was inexorable and beyond his control. So Castro, as he says, may have been warning Kennedy, although he certainly cooperated in setting him up. Had it been left to Castro alone, he probably would not have pulled the trigger. Because of the deal to lift the embargo being negotiated with Jean Daniel, Castro lost big on Kennedy’s death, though his covert mob liaison, and the economic and political utility of the global drug trade, remained. 75
By not investigating Ruby’s CIA/Syndicate links, the FBI avoided having to investigate itself. It officially interviewed Ruby, as a paid Potential Criminal Informant, nine times in 1959 alone. This certainly related to Ruby’s hood/CIA work, the penetration of Castro’s movement by supplying it. Ruby was in and out of Cuba a lot in 1959, bringing an awful lot of electronic eavesdropping equipment with him. 76
In 1950 Jack Ruby actually appeared before the staff of the Kefauver Senate Rackets Committee (the Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce). The quid for Ruby’s testimony, according to his lawyer Luis Kutner, who was at that time a staff lawyer for Kefauver, was that Kefauver stay away from Dallas, which he did. Kutner, a practicing expert in these matters, said that “Ruby was a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as liaison for Chicago mobsters.” 77
Anthony Accardo in 1960; Allen Dorfman under arrest in 1981; Jimmy Hoffa with his son James P., 1965; Jack Ruby (Wikimedia Commons)
Before moving to Dallas in 1947, Ruby had been arrested by Chicago police in connection with the 1939 murder of Leon Cooke, founder of the Scrap Handlers Union local in which Ruby was secretary. The shooting happened in Ruby’s presence, and resulted in the installation of Paul ‘Red’ Dorfman, Allen Dorfman ’s stepfather. Dorfman proceeded to bring the Scrap Handlers into the Teamsters, and then to help engineer Jimmy Hoffa’s takeover. Hoffa was Frank Coppola’s Detroit drugs transport partner out of Teamster Local 985.
Red Dorfman was a Capone operative close to Anthony Accardo, one of Capone’s more powerful successors. The Dorfmans ended up in control of the entire Teamsters’ Central States, Southeast, and Southwest Areas Pension Fund, “the Mafia’s private bank,” from which hundreds of millions have been skimmed. Ruby’s associate John Martin was acquitted in the Scrap Handler’s murder on grounds of self-defense. 78
But the murder attracted the attention of Attorney General Kennedy in his war on Hoffa, which, ultimately, was a war for control of the Democratic Party. Kennedy had Hoffa indicted twice in 1963, once, in May, for jury tampering and once in June for fraud. Although the Chicago police transmitted Ruby’s 1939 arrest sheet for the Scrap Handlers murder to the Texas Attorney General, who gave it to the FBI, it never reached the Warren Commission. Coincidence? As the growling villain in Dollars put it, “I don’t believe in coincidence.”
RFK started the war as chief counsel to Senator McClellan’s Rackets Committee in 1957, on which sat Senator John Kennedy. As chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field from 1957-59, the savagely brilliant RFK amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Syndicate, with which he often tripped up astonished witnesses. It was Kennedy’s relentless police work that uncovered Joe Valachi, the first made mafioso to spill his guts, in detail, before Senator McClellan, in September, 1963. Valachi’s vernacular Italian, cosa nostra, became part of the language. 79
The Appalachin fiasco had enabled Senator McClellan to force the Justice Dept. to set up a Special Group on Organized Crime. To Sam Giancana’s consternation, Senator McClellan’s man, new Attorney General RFK, expanded this group from 15 to 60 legal eagles, most recruited from tough big-city DAs. RFK also forced Hoover, technically his subordinate, to create an FBI Organized Crime (Special Investigative) Division, run by a trusted Kennedy ally from the McClellan days, Courtney Evans, a 25-year FBI veteran who would likely have been the brothers’ choice to replace Hoover. 80 81
By 1963 Attorney General Kennedy was getting nearly 400 organized crime convictions a year and had forced the FBI, which was becoming Kennedy’s FBI, into an aggressive war on the hoods - extensive wiretaps, stings, audits - the works. This was not the fix Chicago’s Sam Giancana had authorized when he backed the Daley machine in support of JFK at the behest of JFK’s father, the old bootlegger and movie mogul Joseph Kennedy. Buffalo boss Stefano Magaddino fumed, over a wiretap, “They know everything under the sun. They know who’s back of it, they know amici [made mafiosi], they know capodecina [family captains], they know there is a commission. We got to watch right now, this thing, where it goes and stay as quiet as possible.” 82
In an effort to avoid deportation, Marcello had contributed $500,000 to Nixon’s 1960 campaign, funneling the money to Nixon’s lawyer, the versatile Irving Davidson, through Jimmy Hoffa. Marcello also had the help of the Kingfish’s son, Senator Russell Long, working the Democratic side of the fence, but to no avail.
RFK’s Organized Crime Section targeted virtually all of Marcello’s most powerful underworld allies - not only Hoffa, but incredibly, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, Anthony Accardo, Mickey Cohen, Frankie Carbo, Tony Corallo, Angelo Bruno and even Sam Giancana. Kennedy actually succeeded in making it a federal crime to transmit gambling information across state lines electronically, thereby effectively criminalizing one of the mob’s most profitable hustles. 83
Just after he took office, on April 4, 1961, RFK had the INS virtually kidnap and deport Carlos Marcello to Guatemala. Marcello had listed Guatemala as his place of birth on a phony birth certificate because it was nearer his Louisiana base than Tunisia, where his migrating Sicilian mother had actually borne him. Since Marcello came to the U.S. in 1910 as a babe of seven months in his mother’s arms, his case for citizenship, although he never formally applied for it, was actually quite good. 8485
When Bobby Kennedy deported Carlos Marcello to Guatemala, he enraged some of the most dangerous men in the world. In September, 1962, Marcello told his longtime associate Carlo Roppolo, in the presence of Ed Becker, a private investigator then working with Roppolo, that the way to handle Bobby, the “tail” of the dog, was to kill John, “the head” that wags the tail. The idea, said Marcello, was to set up “a nut, like they do in Sicily.” 86
Trafficante at San Souci’s bar, Havana, Cuba, 1955; Sam Giancana in 1965; Carlo Gambino’s NYC mugshot, 1930’s (Wikimedia Commons)
It was that same month that Marcello’s closest and most powerful ally, Santos Trafficante, told José Aleman that Kennedy was “going to be hit.” Trafficante’s assertion was made as he arranged a huge Teamster loan to Aleman on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa, who worked, essentially, for Sam Giancana. Also that same month Hoffa described his plans to Louisiana Teamster leader Ed Partin, an FBI informant, to use a sniper to blow John Kennedy’s head off. Jimmy wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie. After Ruby murdered Oswald, Ruby’s brother Earl approached one of Hoffa’s lawyers to represent his brother. 87 88
The Kennedys were going for the very heart of CIA-Syndicate power, in a serious attempt to control both. On September 22, 1966, New York City police interrupted a Mafia summit at the La Stella restaurant, arresting 13 major mobsters. The mafiosi were held overnight and released on $100,000 bail each. The next week, during the lunch break from their required Queens Criminal Court grand jury testimony, Frank Regano and Santos Trafficante invited photographers to their lunchtime reunion at the La Stella. The lunch included Carlos and John Marcello, Anthony Carollo, Frank Cagliano and Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s consigliere and Hoffa’s lawyer - each with connections to a vast professional army and tens of millions at his disposal, each a mortal enemy of the Kennedys. Marcello’s reach was such that his Guatemalan attorney was chairman of the Latin America branch of the CIA-organized World Anti-Communist League, giving him direct access to right-wing terrorist groups throughout Latin America and Europe, and, through its KMT-organized sister branch, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, terrorist groups throughout Asia. Those CIA-organized terrorist groups were primarily connected by the drugs and arms business, all operating as sanctioned extensions of their respective secret services. 89
The connections between these crafty powerhouses and CIA operations were symbiotic, an evolved co-dependence, making it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Marcello was speaking from deep inside knowledge about setting up “a nut, like they do in Sicily.” Johnny Roselli, operational captain of the ZR/RIFLE hit team, was as much a Marcello operative as a Trafficante operative, and Marcello, Trafficante and the CIA were partners, managing a business that was, indeed, “bigger than U.S. Steel.”
Senator Richard Schweiker: “I think that by playing a pro-Castro role on the one hand and associating with anti-Castro Cubans on the other, Oswald was playing out an intelligence role. This gets back to him being an agent or double agent…. I personally believe that he had a special relationship with one of the intelligence agencies, which one I’m not certain. But all the fingerprints I found during my eighteen months on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence point to Oswald as being a product of, and interacting with, the intelligence community.” 90
That was also the opinion of Gerry Hemming, the ZR/RIFLE assassin who penetrated Castro’s movement with Sturgis. Hemming admits meeting Oswald in January of 1959 at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles: “At that point in time I felt that he was a threat to me and to those Castro people, that he was an informant or some type of agent working for somebody. He was rather young, but I felt that he was too knowledgeable in certain things not to be an agent of law enforcement or of Military Intelligence, or Naval Intelligence…. Somebody had briefed him; somebody told him to approach me.” There’s plenty of information in that disinformation. 91
Oswald, a highly intelligent Marine, was tapped for a course in Russian at the Monterey School of the Army (now the Defense Language Institute). After being trained by Naval Intelligence in Russian, Oswald “defected” to the Soviet Union, just as Hemming “defected” to Cuba, with visas, clearances and money promptly provided by a cooperative State Department. 92
As a qualified radar operator, Oswald may have been carrying some disinformation about the U-2 or other technical bait to Russia. Oswald and his Russian wife Marina, the neice of a KGB officer, may herself have been the same sort of security plant that Oswald was. They returned to the U.S. in June of 1962.
Far from being arrested for divulging what technical information he had to the Russians, in violation of his Security Termination Statement, Oswald was greeted in Hoboken by Professor Spas T. Raiken, a CIA-connected Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations activist who later became a member of Nixon’s 1973 Fairness to the President Committee. The Oswalds moved to Fort Worth the next day, there to bunk with Oswald’s brother Robert.
Oswald’s first Dallas-Ft. Worth handler was oilman and CIA agent George De Mohrenschildt. When Oswald moved from Ft. Worth to Dallas in October, 1962, it was De Mohrenschildt who arranged the job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a graphics arts company that contracted with the U.S. Army Map Service. De Mohrenschildt took an intense interest in Oswald’s welfare, going so far as to chauffeur the family from time to time. De Mohrenschildt ushered Oswald into the highest levels of the powerful Dallas White Russian emigré community. 93
‘Baron’ De Mohrenschildt’s father was a White Russian nobleman, the chosen representative of the landed aristocracy to the throne. He had been a pre-revolutionary director of Nobel Oil. He was allowed to put his expertise to the service of the revolution as head of the Soviet Department of Agriculture - until he was caught operating with the Church in opposing the revolution’s antireligious violence. His son George graduated from the Polish cavalry academy before coming to the U.S. on the eve of World War II. The elder De Mohrenschildt spent WW II helping the Germans with their oil problem. During the war young George was ejected from Mexico for spying with Douglas MacArthur’s nephew.
By 1945 he was working for Warren Smith, president of Pantipec Oil, owned by the parents of William F. Buckley. Smith and De Mohrenschildt formed the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Trust Company, which, until Castro nationalized it, held the rights to about half the oil in Cuba. Throughout the fifties De Mohrenschildt worked on CIA-related intelligence projects, such as the assessment of Yugoslav military strength while ostensibly doing a geological oil survey for the U.S. Economic Cooperation Administration. Yugoslavia ejected him, suspecting espionage. De Mohrenschildt was in Guatemala when the Bay of Pigs operation was launched from there. His ECA ‘oil’ itinerary was like that. CIA Dallas field agent J. Walton Moore regularly debriefed De Mohrenschildt on his return from these missions. It was oil man Colonel Lawrence Orlov, a friend of agent Moore, who introduced De Mohrenschildt to Oswald. Like George Bush, most of the various oil and land development companies De Mohrenschildt owned were CIA assets. De Mohrenschildt was invited to Soviet receptions, both in the U.S. and in Yugoslavia. He always cleared his itinerary with the CIA and gave a thorough debriefing. That is, it is equally possible that De Mohrenschildt was a KGB asset as a CIA asset.
De Mohrenschildt, through his scholarly brother Dimitri, chair of Dartmouth’s Russian Civilization Department, knew Jackie Kennedy’s parents, the Bouviers, well enough to play tennis with them. Dimitri had been a CIA asset since 1950. It was Dimitri’s reliable anticommunism that recommended his younger brother George to Allen Dulles. When De Mohrenschildt moved to Dallas in 1962, he joined the exclusive Dallas Petroleum Club. De Mohrenschildt shared personal and business interests with banker Richmond Harper, a Nixon associate who helped Marcello handle his money. Harper often worked through Herman Beebe, a major player in Reagan’s S&L debacle of the late 1980s. Harper was indicted in 1972 in an arms-for-drugs operation along with the CIA’s Barry Seal of Contra Cocaine fame and Murray Kessler, a Gambino operative. 94
De Mohrenschildt partnered up with Haitian banker Clemard Charles, money launderer for Carlos Marcello, Herman Beebe, Frank Sturgis, André Labay and Mario Renda. They put together a holding company for Haiti’s oil reserves. In May of 1963, according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which forced the release of his CIA file, De Mohrenschildt and Charles took part in a Pentagon-CIA meeting that may have discussed the overthrow of Haiti’s aging lunatic Papa Doc Duvalier. De Mohrenschildt’s Army Intelligence contact, Col. Sam Kail, was also one of the agents who ran Antonio Veciana of Alpha 66, to which Oswald was connected through the FBI’s Guy Banister. 95
De Mohrenschildt also knew and worked with another key Marcello ally, oilman Clint Murchison Sr, who owned the Del Mar racetrack and the Hotel Del Charro resort. In 1955 a Senate committee discovered that 20 per cent of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was owned by Vito Genovese and his family. The committee also discovered Murchison had close financial ties with Carlos Marcello. Lyndon Johnson was Clint Murchison’s political protégé. Murchison was a primary source of funding for the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party. 96 97
De Mohrenschildt, through Murchison’s Dallas Petroleum Club, knew J. Edgar Hoover socially. Clint Murchison entertained J. Edgar annually, for years, at his high society-hoodlum blowout at the Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, California. In 1958, Murchison, through his publishing company Henry Holt, published Hoover’s committee-written red-baiting classic Masters of Deceit. At the Del Charro, Hoover rubbed shoulders with the Genoveses and their Las Vegas allies, as well as with Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Senator Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, W.R. Grace, George De Mohrenschildt and Carlos Marcello. Nixon was recorded on his White House tape system boasting that he had seen Hoover socially “at least a hundred times. He and I were very close friends … [expletive deleted]— Hoover was my crony. He was closer to me than [Lyndon] Johnson actually, although Johnson used him more.” 98 99
Other members of the Dallas Petroleum Club with whom De Mohrenschildt socialized included the rabidly anti-Kennedy financier H.L. Hunt, and oilman David Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository. It was Byrd who engineered Oswald’s job as an order-filler at the Depository a month before the assassination. D.H. Byrd, cousin of Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, was a prominent white supremacist. D.H. Byrd was also the founder of the Civil Air Patrol, at which Oswald trained with David Ferrie. Another Petroleum Club member was Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of General Charles Cabell, the Deputy Director of the CIA fired by Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Other friends of the Petroleum Club including the Brown brothers, George and Herman, of construction giant and CIA-contractor Brown and Root. The Brown brothers were longtime financiers of Lyndon Johnson’s political career.
Oswald in custody, 11/23/1963; Banister’s 1959 New Orleans Yellow Pages ad; Ferrie in custody (Wikimedia Commons)
Why would a powerhouse like De Mohrenschildt suddenly become so passionately concerned with the broke, unconnected, directionless likes of Oswald - unless, of course, Oswald’s presence at an upcoming high society-hoodlum blowout was absolutely necessary? De Mohrenschildt, using his lengthy Warren Commission testimony – two days - did everything he could to tar Oswald with pathological jealousy of Kennedy. That was the best Dulles could cook up as a motive. Many who knew Oswald, including De Mohrenschildt himself at other times, insisted that the politically liberal Oswald liked Kennedy, thinking that he was “an excellent president, young, full of energy, full of good ideas.” In fact Dulles himself, writing to British novelist Rebecca West during the Warren Commission, asked her to invent a motive he could use for Oswald, since “All I can tell you is that there is not one iota of evidence that he had any personal vindictiveness against the man Kennedy.” 100
In April of 1963, De Mohrenschildt left Dallas. James Angleton told journalist Joe Trento that he believed this was the time that the KGB handed Oswald off to Castro’s DGI. In his memoir, written years later, an ostracized and despondent De Mohrenschildt described Allen Dulles’ silent presence at his Warren Commission testimony as “there as a distant threat.” He never elaborated on what that meant, but in his memoir, I am a Patsy, given to the House Select Committee on Assassinations a month after his death by his wife Jeanne, he insisted that the Oswald he knew was never violent and could not have done it, and he apologized for betraying his friend Oswald. 101
In March 1977, the night before investigators from the House Assassinations Committee could get to him, George De Mohrenschildt’s head was blown off by a shotgun. His personal telephone book, dating to the early 60s, contained this entry: “Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.” De Mohrenschildt actually wrote to his friend Geoge Bush, then head of the CIA, begging him to do something about the constant surveillance. The week after De Mohrenschildt’s death, just before investigators could get to him, one of De Mohrenschildt’s more interesting associates, former Cuban president Carlos Prio, was also shot to death. 102 103
Why would a powerhouse like De Mohrenschildt suddenly become so passionately concerned with the broke, unconnected, directionless likes of Oswald - unless, of course, Oswald’s presence at an upcoming high society-hoodlum blowout was absolutely necessary? De Mohrenschildt, using his lengthy Warren Commission testimony – two days - did everything he could to tar Oswald with pathological jealousy of Kennedy. That was the best Duls could cook up as a motive. Many who knew Oswald, including De Mohrenschildt himself at other times, insisted that the politically liberal Oswald liked Kennedy, thinking that he was “an excellent president, young, full of energy, full of good ideas.” In fact Dulles himself, writing to British novelist Rebecca West during the Warren Commission, asked her to invent a motive he could use for Oswald, since “All I can tell you is that there is not one iota of evidence that he had any personal vindictiveness against the man Kennedy.” 100
In April of 1963, De Mohrenschildt left Dallas. James Angleton told journalist Joe Trento that he believed this was the time that the KGB handed Oswald off to Castro’s DGI. In his memoir, written years later, an ostracized and despondent De Mohrenschildt described Allen Dulles’ silent presence at his Warren Commission testimony as “there as a distant threat.” He never elaborated on what that meant, but in his memoir, I am a Patsy, given to the House Select Committee on Assassinations a month after his death by his wife Jeanne, he insisted that the Oswald he knew was never violent and could not have done it, and he apologized for betraying his friend Oswald. 101
In March 1977, the night before investigators from the House Assassinations Committee could get to him, George De Mohrenschildt’s head was blown off by a shotgun. His personal telephone book, dating to the early 60s, contained this entry: “Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.” De Mohrenschildt actually wrote to his friend Geoge Bush, then head of the CIA, begging him to do something about the constant surveillance. The week after De Mohrenschildt’s death, just before investigators could get to him, one of De Mohrenschildt’s more interesting associates, former Cuban president Carlos Prio, was also shot to death. 102 103
Trafficante’s Chicago partner, Sam Giancana, was helping to finance and organize the Roselli-Hunt RIFLE assassination teams. In July 1975, Giancana, just before he was to testify before the Senate’s Church Committee, was also murdered. One of Roselli’s hitters, involved in the anti-Castro plots, who knew Giancana well, complained to Anthony Summers, author of the brilliant Conspiracy, that “all Sam was going to say was ‘I did a contract for Santos - period.’” That was apparently way too much for Don Santos. Aside from the first fatal shot in the back of the head, Giancana was shot once through the mouth and stitched five times in a semicircle under the chin, a traditional Mafia warning to respect omertá, the code of absolute silence. 104
Roselli, in the midst of repeated Congressional appearances in 1976, was also murdered, as was Charles Nicoletti, the Giancana enforcer who replaced Roselli on the Castro project. Roselli was last seen alive on a boat owned by an associate of Santos Trafficante. His decomposing body was found August 7, 1976 floating in a drum in Dumfoundling Bay. 105
Joey Aiuppa, new boss of the Chicago Syndicate, was upset that Roselli’s body, which had been weighted with chains, was found. Recorded in a wiretap, he screamed at hit-man Frank Bompensiero, “Trafficante had the job and he messed it up!” That was also the conclusion of the Assassinations Committee, although they couldn’t prove it. John Martino was also murdered in 1976, just before the Church Committee could get to him. His private papers revealed a decades-long relationship with Santos Trafficante. 106 107
Oswald left Dallas for no apparent reason and arrived in New Orleans on April 24, 1963. While he looked for a job and a place of his own, he bunked with his uncle, Charles ‘Dutz’ Murret, one of Carlos Marcello’s bookies. Growing up in New Orleans with his uncle Dutz and his mother, Marguerite, living in Exchange Alley in the French Quarter, Oswald knew any number of Marcello operatives and they knew him. Murret worked under Sam Saia, a New Orleans boss very close to Marcello. Marguerite dated many of Marcello’s key gang members.
Oswald found a job at the William Reily Coffee Company. Reily was an active supporter of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the CIA’s Cuban government in exile. The CRC had its New Orleans office around the corner from Reily’s company, at 544 Camp Street.
It was in late May that Oswald began the pro-Castro posturing for the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, of which he was the only member in New Orleans. The address on Oswald’s FPCC leaflets was 544 Camp Street, the offices shared by the CRC and the racist fascist Guy Banister, who worked for Carlos Marcello and J. Edgar Hoover, in that order.
The House Assassinations Committee found that Marcello was probably the key mob assassination engineer, because it “identified the presence of one critical evidentiary element that was lacking with the other organized crime figures...credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby...” In 1981, the FBI’s Brilab sting nailed Marcello for racketeering and bribery. The 73-year-old Marcello reported to prison in 1983, serving until 1989. The FBI’s planted cellmate, Jack Van Laningham, told his FBI handler in 1985, according to the handler’s contemporary notes, that Marcello told him, “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself!” The contemporary FBI transcripts of the bugs in Marcello’s cell confirm that Marcello ordered Ruby to kill Oswald. Marcello was also taped saying he used his long-time operative Ferrie to bring Oswald, whom Ferrie had known since 1956, into the plot. Ferrie was also, of course, a CIA pilot who participated in the Bay of Pigs operation. Ferrie had been a CIA contract agent run by Helms, who coordinated the handling of Oswald with Marcello and Hoover. 108 109
Marcello’s man Guy Banister was a slugger - former Agent-in-Charge of the FBI’s Chicago office and ex-New Orleans Deputy Chief of Police. He had ties to pro-Batista, Trujillo and Somoza terrorist groups and to their financiers, the Marcello/Trafficante drug dealers. 110
Banister helped run the FBI’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee COINTELPRO, which did indeed destroy the reputation of this peaceful group. The COINTELPRO was run with Ed Butler, an intelligence agent who ran Standard Fruit’s Information Council of the Americas (INCA).
The Counter Intelligence Program was also run with Carlos Bringuier, head of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), one of the CIA proprietaries run by David Phillips that had penetrated Castro’s revolution by working with it. Bringuier has been one of Batista’s cops. His DRE, operating from its base in the Escambray Mountains, actually took Batista’s palace for the revolution, but was left out of Castro’s post-revolutionary power structure. As of 1963 the DRE was the largest anti-Castro student group operating in Miami and New Orleans. Oswald used DRE activists to start a phony street fight over his pro-Castro FPCC flyers, all coordinated by Banister. Agents Milton Kaack and Warren de Brueys met with Oswald frequently, according to one of Bringuier’s operatives, Orest Peña, who was involved in the phony debates and street confrontations designed to advertise Oswald as a leftist activist from the the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). Oswald and Carlos Bringuier of the DRE, staged a phony street fight on August 9, 1963, and on August 17 debated each other on a local New Orleans radio show, along with Standard Fruit propagandist Ed Butler of INCA. 111
A September 1963 liaison note from the CIA to the FBI, published by Church’s Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, states that “Also during May 1961, a field survey was completed wherein available public source data of adverse nature regarding officers and leaders of FPCC was compiled and furnished Mr. DeLoach [Hoover’s top aide] for use in contacting his sources.” 112
As an integral part of this FPCC COINTELPRO, Oswald was under heavy FBI surveillance and control from the moment he arrived in New Orleans. When Hoover told the Warren Commission that it had affidavits from every FBI agent who had contact with Oswald, he left out the two most important, the agents running the FPCC COINTELPRO. On October 9, 1963, FBI agent Marvin Gheesling removed Oswald from the FBI watch list, despite the fact that he had been heavily advertised, by the FBI itself, as a dangerous leftist.
Oswald’s status as an FBI operative was confirmed by FBI security clerk William Walter, who saw documents, before the assassination, indicating that Oswald was a Bureau informant. Agent DeBrueys had served in various South American embassies as a “legal attaché,” that is, a CIA counterinsurgency expert. Hoover, who was running FBI/CIA agent deBrueys, wrote a 1961 memo discussing the use of Oswald’s name to buy trucks for his agent Guy Banister’s network in New Orleans. 113
Hoover did not disclose that Oswald had been a paid FBI informant since September of 1962, according to Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr and the Dallas District Attorney, Henry Wade. This was disclosed in formal Warren Commission proceeding in chambers by these two men, and was confirmed by FBI security clerk William Walter, who processed FBI documents showing that Oswald was on the FBI payroll for $200-a-month, with the informant number S-172. Hoover was running Oswald through his ex-agent Banister, a Marcello operative, which makes Hoover, along with Dulles and Helms, very likely original engineers of the assassination. Marcello could handle the street stuff, but only Dulles, Helms and Hoover could handle the Secret Service, the FBI, and the ZR/RIFLE hit team. 114
When Oswald was arrested in August following the phony street fight with Bringuier, he was bailed out by Emile Bruneau. Bruneau worked for Nofio Pecora and Joe Poretto, Carlos Marcello’s two key aides, the men who gave orders to Banister and to Oswald’s bookie uncle Dutz.
Ben Tragle was the operator of a bar partly owned by Marcello, just down the road from Marcello’s headquarters, the Town and Country Motel. Tragle had mentioned to his employee, FBI informant Eugene De Laparra, a conversation he had with “the professor” (probably Marcello operative David Ferrie) in March in which the professor asserted that a plot was afoot to kill Kennedy. De Laparra himself claims to have overheard Tony Marcello, one of Carlos’ six brothers, tell Tregle that “The word is out to get the Kennedy family.” De Laparra says that Oswald knew Tragle at this time, that is, that he was acting as a runner for his bookie uncle Dutz. Another FBI informant reported seeing Joe Poretto hand Oswald money in the Town and Country restaurant, at the end of April, 1963. 115 116
The head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), Tony de Varona, who had been Cuba’s Prime Minister under President Prio’s kleptocracy, shared offices with Guy Banister. With his Havana connections, de Varona was a key assassination team contact for the CIA’s ZR/RIFLE hit team run by Johnny Roselli.
Delphine Roberts, Banister’s personal secretary and lover, who had extensive memories of Oswald, told author Anthony Summers that the dapper Roselli visited Banister at 544 Camp Street. Roselli knew and worked with virtually every major operative Banister did. Sergio Arcacha Smith, one of Batista’s more diplomatic operatives, was New Orleans representative of the CRC. Arcacha said that 544 Camp Street was the “Cuban Grand Central Station.” Carlos Marcello was Arcacha’s main New Orleans financier. 117 118
The CIA’s CRC coordinator was Howard Hunt, veteran of the Guatemala coup and organizer of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation’s first 1958 convocation. Banister was a key operative of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, a Somoza project tied to the CAL (Confederación Anticomunista Latina), and as such worked closely with Dallas’ right-wing financier H.L. Hunt. 119
Many of the Latin CAL death squads were Trafficante/Marcello drug gangs. Explained a member of a Honduran death squad coordinated by the Confederación Anticomunista Latina, “CAL is also called The White Hand, The White Force, and The White Brigade. It got its name because it has the backing of powerful people who erase all evidence surrounding a murder.” 120
Banister was also working with Carlos Marcello’s lawyer, G. Wray Gill, and his aide, the extraordinarily strange David Ferrie, a former Eastern Airlines pilot who ran daring terrorist raids against Castro and, apparently, participated in the Bay of Pigs operation. Ferrie, a member of the CRC, took a leave from his pilot duties at the time of the Bay of Pigs and was fired by Eastern shortly thereafter. His wrongful dismissal suit against Eastern brought him into contact with Gill. Before that, Ferrie was part of the CIA-Syndicate smuggling operation that ran arms to Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Jack Ruby was also part of that operation.
In 1955, when Oswald was 16, Captain Ferrie taught him to fly as a member of the Civil Air Patrol, as he had Barry Seal, a major player in the Reagan/Bush Contra cocaine operation (see the ‘Contra Cocaine’ chapter in Vol. 2). According to CIA agent Victor Marchetti, who was a top aide to CIA Director Richard Helms at the time, Ferrie was one of the contract agents Helms was running when he was Deputy Director for Plans in 1963. Oswald and Ferrie were seen together in 1963 running a minor sting on a local voter registration drive organized by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, a COINTELPRO target. At least ten different witnesses saw Ferrie and Oswald together at various places that summer, including one who heard Ferrie, a vociferous member of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, talk of the desirability of killing Kennedy. 121 122 123
When Oswald was arrested following the assassination, he was carrying a library card with Ferrie’s name on it. Although the card itself immediately disappeared, Marcello’s lawyer, Wray Gill, was immediately warned by someone in the Dallas police department. Gill went to Ferrie’s apartment two days after the assassination, on November 24th, and told his roommate to warn Ferrie about the card as soon as he returned from his hysterical post-assassination trip to Texas. That information found its way into the November 28th FBI report. But when the FBI interviewed attorney Gill, his transparent fabrications were accepted as gospel, and his claim that Ferrie’s November telephone records were “unavailable” went unchallenged. 124
Neither the FBI nor the Secret Service interviews of Ferrie, November 25 and 26, totaling more than 100 pages, were mentioned in the FBI reports or turned over to the Warren Commission. The investigation of Ferrie was immediately dropped. It is absurd to pretend that this was FBI “incompetence.” Ferrie was one of Oswald’s closest associates, and he tied Oswald to Marcello, one of Kennedy’s most dangerous enemies. And Marcello, through Banister and his associates, tied Oswald and Ferrie to the CIA and the FBI.
This FBI/CIA pattern, seen throughout the investigation, can only be an internal fix indicating collusion in the assassination, as well-placed CIA agent Victor Marchetti indicates. Helms, Marchetti’s immediate superior, was running Ferrie, Marcello’s dutiful subordinate. That, of course, means that Helms and Marcello were working together. That is a virtual certainty, since without Marcello there could have been no ZR/RIFLE hit teams aimed at Castro, most of whose members, especially its operational leader Roselli, were Marcello/Trafficante operatives. Roselli, it will be recalled, rearranged the Guatemalan government for the CIA in 1957 over drug and gambling interests he shared with Marcello and Trafficante.
The highly intelligent Ferrie met regularly that year with Marcello, supposedly planning legal strategy to block Robert Kennedy’s ongoing effort to deport Marcello. But why would Marcello need Ferrie to plan legal strategy, when he had Wray Gill, Mike Maroun and the brilliant Washington lawyer Jack Wasserman? It was the possibly illegal tactic of judicial kidnapping employed by RFK that gave Marcello enough legal juice to hold Kennedy off in court as they tussled over Marcello’s deportation. Wasserman was far more qualified to deal with this arcana than Ferrie, who was a pilot, not a lawyer. More likely Marcello and Ferrie were planning the handling of Ferrie’s good buddy Oswald.
When Marcello was violently dumped into Guatemala by RFK in April 1961, he was flown back to the U.S. two months later by a pilot who was identified by the Border Patrol, at the time, as David Ferrie. Marcello spent the two weekends prior to Kennedy’s 1963 arrival in Dallas, the 9th and 10th and the 16th and 17th of November, sequestered at Churchill Farms, his country estate, with David Ferrie. A few months later, Marcello bought Ferrie a lucrative gas station franchise. 125
On February 22, 1967, less than a week after New Orleans DA Jim Garrison announced his JFK investigation, Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. Garrison's aide, Lou Ivon, said that Ferrie telephoned him the day after the Garrison story broke, telling him, “You know what this news story does to me, don't you. I'm a dead man. From here on, believe me, I'm a dead man....”
Working with Marcello, Trafficante and Giancana, Sam and Kelly Mannarino had helped Vice-President Nixon, the CIA’s O’Connell and Roselli put together the first ZR/RIFLE hit teams in 1960. The Mannarinos were partners, with Roughhouse Rothman and Giuseppe Cotroni, in two major Cuban casinos, the Sans Souci and the Tropicana, fronting for Trafficante, the Lanskys and ex-Cuban president Prio. They were also major drug importers. In 1960 they were caught running guns to Batistiano Cubans using $8.5 million in stolen securities, what the FBI called “the biggest burglary in the world.” Rothman insisted that it was a “protected” operation and that, despite conviction, he and his codefendants would avoid imprisonment. They did. Their lawyer was Ruby’s lawyer, Luis Kutner. 126
In 1971, when Nixon was President, Sam Mannarino was in trouble again, indicted along with two other mafiosi for stealing millions from the Teamsters Pension Fund. Mario Brod, the chief Mafia case officer of James Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence unit, walked into court and got Sam Mannarino and the other two mafiosi acquitted on grounds of national security. When the U.S. Attorney on the case discovered the Swiss bank laundering that money for the Teamsters, Attorney General Mitchell discontinued the investigation. 127
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations formally concluded that “the CIA-Mafia-Cuban plots had all the elements necessary for a successful assassination conspiracy - people, motive and means - and the evidence indicated that the participants might well have considered using the resources at their disposal to increase their power and alleviate their problems by assassinating the President.”
Trafficante, who was deeply feared by those near him, died in 1987. Carlos Marcello had a debilitating stroke in 1989 and was likewise no longer feared by Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s longtime lawyer. Ragano, in various interviews in 1992 and in his 1994 autobiography Mob Lawyer, said that he relayed a request from Hoffa to Trafficante and Marcello asking that the two bosses, whom Hoffa knew were partners, to kill Kennedy. “Something has to be done. time has come for your friend (Trafficante and Carlos Marcello) to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy.” Ragano wrote that Trafficante’s deathbed confession, which he heard in the original Italian, was “Carlos messed up. We shouldn't have killed Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby.” 128
Mark Lane had managed presidential candidate John Kennedy’s New York City campaign in 1960, and got elected to the New York State Assembly that year with Kennedy’s help. The assassination of his charismatic friend came as a deep trauma to Lane. The CIA actually intervened with American publishers to prevent the publication of Mark Lane’s book, the seminal Rush To Judgement, first published in Britain. As the CIA obviously suspected it might, this book became the nation’s number one bestseller in 1966. I remember riding in a car with Lane in the Spring of 1964, after having helped to organize his lecture at the University of Buffalo, where I was a freshman. His warm, cheerful enthusiasm gave me no idea of the risk he was running. CIA agents tapped his phones and intervened in his lecture schedule, forcing the cancellation of scheduled events. They also engineered absurd smears and constant police harassment.
During a collegial 1977 debate with Lane at UCLA, former CIA Western Hemisphere chief David Phillips, who headed the CIA Task Forces that overthrew Árbenz and Allende, in a perhaps too enthusiastic partial hangout, said, “There are certainly a number of things I regret, and I regret the attempts to destroy Mr. Lane.” Phillips admitted this after admitting that the Mexico City Oswald evidence had been faked! The fakery consisted of someone in Mexico City pretending to be Oswald, seven weeks before the assassination, calling the Cuban and Soviet embassies. No less a personage than J. Edgar Hoover, after analyzing the CIA’s taped intercepts of those calls immediately after the assassination, formally told President Johnson that the voice on the tapes was not Oswald. That meant, of course, that an intelligence service capable of this sophisticated trickery, just prior to the assassination, was running Oswald. 129 130
Nixon’s War Using Drugs
National Security Action Memorandum 263 was actually hammered out and elaborated by Kennedy himself in 26 high-level meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff between August 28 and November 13, 1963. Prouty’s immediate superior officer, Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak, was at 23 of those meetings as the President’s Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). Prouty, as chief of the Special Operations Office of the Joint Chiefs, was the lead officer on the receiving end of Krulak’s orders pursuant to those meetings.
It was Krulak and his SACSA staff, not McNamara and Taylor, who wrote the McNamara-Taylor Trip Report of October 2 that became NSAM 263 a few days later. Krulak’s trip to Vietnam the previous month provided most of the current data, and calls to McNamara in Vietnam provided the rest. Prouty was one of the officers who actually wrote NSAM 263, using Kennedy’s own personal comments and notes. The completed report was then flown to McNamara and Taylor as they arrived in Hawaii from Vietnam. They presented Kennedy’s own report to him as their “trip report.” Such was the policy discipline demanded by Kennedy from McNamara and Taylor. 1
NSAM 263, October 11, 1963, is very terse, and doesn’t necessarily commit the U.S. to unconditional withdrawal, only withdrawal “without impairment of the war effort.” It orders “an increase in the military tempo,” so as to enable “the Vietnamese” to assume the “essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel” by the end of 1965. “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time....the Defense Department should....withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort.”
The report went on to explain that “any significant slowing in the rate of progress [of the war effort] would surely have a serious effect on U.S. popular support for the U.S. effort.” But it insisted that “No further reductions should be made until the requirements of the 1964 [military] campaign become firm.” 2
NSAM 263 still aimed at military victory, but it was to be the victory of surrogates - if they could pull it off. The CIA knew they could not. Kennedy, of course, realized that too, but nonetheless laid out the specific plan by which American troops were to be extricated from Vietnam. He did this before their numbers reached 20,000.
Right in the middle of that intense series of meetings with the Joint Chiefs in which he actually hammered out this policy, on September 2, 1963, Kennedy told Walter Cronkite, on the air, “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”
Stars and Stripes, 10/4/1963, showing President Kennedy, Sec. McNamara and Gen. Taylor in the Oval Office with the ‘Saigon Trip Report’ on the coffee table, dated 10/2/1963.
Kennedy based his withdrawal order on the Agency’s own absurdly rosy projections of a “manageable” situation evolving within the next year - Taylor’s BS. He always talked the Agency’s language, which, of course, gave him a shot at actually taking control of Agency policy. It was precisely this insider’s savvy that made Kennedy so dangerous to the radical hawks - he threatened to actually take command. “Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War,” said Kennedy at American University in June of 1963, as he installed a direct “hot line” to the Kremlin. That, combined with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s warnings that defense spending might be continued “at a lower level” made the defense contractors very unhappy. 3
When McNamara’s team successfully stood up to the combined forces of Boeing, the Air Force and the Navy in awarding the huge $6.5 billion TFX fighter-bomber contract to General Dynamics, the contractors knew that their Cold War spigot was in danger of being throttled. Former Ford CEO McNamara flatly declared that the day had past when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems.
On April 9th, 1963, McNamara’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric, addressed a powerful group of bankers on “The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the United States Economy.” He assured them that “I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could adjust to a decline in defense spending.” 4
It wasn’t just the policy specifics in NSAM 263 that enraged the hawks, it was the immediate threat of real executive policy control. Stars and Stripes ran the headline “U.S TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.” That was the looming disaster. There were hundreds of billions in military contracts, tens of thousands of jobs at stake. The Vietnam War was mandatory.
Diem, acting under brother Archbishop Thuc’s advice, was actually stupid enough to criminalize some Buddhist religious celebrations, in favor of his officially sanctioned Catholicism. Diem actually forbade public celebration of the Buddha’s birthday, May 8, which also happened to be the anniversary of the fall of Dien Bien Phu. Thich Tri Quang, leader of the General Association of Buddhists of Vietnam, representing five thousand pagodas, operating out of the traditional imperial capital of Hue, called for massive demonstrations. The Buddhists were 86% of the country, the Catholics were 7%. It was the perfect storm. The Catholic deputy province chief ordered the police to open fire on the demonstrators, leaving nine peaceful demonstrators, including children, dead. The country exploded.
The revered Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation, 6/11/1963 (Wikimedia Commons)
In the summer of 1963, in mindless defense of their kleptocracy, the Ngo Dinh brothers initiated a completely unnecessary series of bitter street confrontations with their only potential Vietnamese support, the anticommunist Buddhists. The Buddhists, amidst ongoing massive demonstrations, presented a manifesto demanding legal equality with Catholics. On June 10, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself afire on a busy Saigon intersection. These demonstrations, which completely destroyed any vestige of legitimacy Diem may have had, included the shooting of unarmed protesters and the mass arrest of the revered monks.
Referring to the spectacular self-immolation of holy men, the unforgettable fashion plate Madame Nhu, considered the First Lady of Vietnam, earned the undying hatred of many Vietnamese when she ridiculed the monk’s “barbeque.” Her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, continued to funnel his American-supplied Laotian opium and heroin to the world market through Saigon, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Archbishop Thuc, who managed his brother Nhu’s drug money, was eventually excommunicated by the Vatican for religious extremism.
The actual Diem assassination orders came from Ambassador Averell Harriman, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, in consultation with State’s Vietnam expert Roger Hilsman and the NSC’s Mike Forrestal. Kennedy, aware of the orders, did not intervene. Harriman left the final decision to his Republican hit man, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who saw himself as Vietnam’s Proconsul, and Diem as dead. New Ambassador Lodge imperiously ordered Diem, to his face, to release the Buddhist prisoners from jail, to repeal all of the anti-Buddhist laws, and to reopen the schools and universities, which had become centers of protest. Diem responded by giving Lodge an angry lecture on his dictatorial prerogatives, which included unilateral talks with the NLF. Lodge gave Lucien Conein the kill order.
Madame Nhu and Vice President Johnson, 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, Nov. 2, 1963 (Wikimedia Commons)
Secretary of State Rusk cabled Ambassador Lodge that “once a coup under responsible leadership has begun . . . it is in the interest of the U.S. Government that it should succeed.” Conein, with funds provided by Ambassador Lodge, paid his old friend, the French-born Gen. Tran Van Don, to organize the kill team with the ‘Military Revolutionary Council,’ led by Generals Duong Van ‘Big’ Minh and Le Van Kim. With multiple participants and broad support from the ARVN, both the ruling Ngo Dinh brothers were left splattered all over the back of an armored personnel carrier.
Kennedy at the White House with Lodge, 1961 (Wikimedia Commons)
The Golden Triangle opium/heroin trade remained the financial mainstay of the Saigon regime long after the November 2, 1963, U.S.-engineered demise of the transparent, and increasingly independent, Ngo Dinh brothers. Ambassador Lodge cabled Secretary Rusk that the coup had been “a remarkable performance in all respects.” A remarkable performance that left our crew of fascist dope peddlers facing the full strength of the regular North Vietnamese Army, led by Vo Nguyen Giap, a professional field general, not a professional dope peddler, who had just whipped the entire U.S.-backed French army. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s Central Committee Ninth Plenum, December 1963, formally decided to take South Vietnam. 5
Col. Fletcher Prouty: “Maxwell Taylor...by the time he had returned to the Pentagon as chairman of the JCS, was actually more of a Judas goat, as far as the military was concerned, than the leader of the herd, as he had been when he left three years before. Few great armies have been so vastly demoralized and stricken by an integral campaign as had the U.S. Army since those dark days of 1964 and 1965, when Maxwell Taylor and his ST counterparts led them into Vietnam under the banner of counterinsurgency.”
“With McGeorge Bundy in Taylor’s old job in the White House, responsible for all clandestine activity; with Bill Bundy as the principle conduit from the CIA to McNamara (later in State), and with Taylor on top of the military establishment, the ST (Secret Team) had emerged from its nadir on the beaches of Cuba and was ready for whatever might develop in Vietnam.” 6
The CIA had the legal authority to command Johnson’s attention every single day, and it told him exactly what it wanted him to hear. Johnson was only two cars behind JFK in Dallas. He literally heard the bullets whiz by his head. He also knew that, contrary to all established procedure, Kennedy’s entire cabinet was directed to be out of Washington on November 22. They were all at a conference in Honolulu – McNamara, Taylor, Rusk, Lodge, Harkins. This prevented the formation of a Cabinet quorum on the day of the assassination. The subject of that conference, conducted by the CIA, was the need to escalate the Vietnam War in the wake of Diem’s assassination.
Johnson knew who was running the show. Taylor’s rosy projections of easy victory, on which Kennedy’s plans for withdrawal were based, were withdrawn at that strange Honolulu conference - 2 days before Kennedy’s death. Johnson was fed a steady stream of grim reality. After many months of unrelenting VC progress, Johnson was willing to accept that without American troops, South Vietnam would collapse. Withdrawal, if it had ever been, was no longer an option.
Lyndon Johnson, Joseph Califano and Ramsey Clark, 10/19/1967 (LBJ Library)
Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak’s SACSA staff was charged with coordinating the inexorable escalation within the Department of Defense. Col. Prouty was Krulak’s lead officer on the SACSA staff: “His contacts in this select circle in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, were such men as Major General Edward D. Lansdale, who was McNamara’s special assistant for all matters involving the CIA and special operations; William Bundy, who appears throughout the Pentagon Papers as one of the key men of the Secret Team and was at that time a recent alumnus of the CIA, with ten years in that agency behind him; John T. McNaughton, another member of the ST and a McNamara favorite; Joseph Califano, who moved from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the White House...and others.” 7
Johnson terminated the counterproductive Cuba operation in April of 1964. This interrupted the efforts of Joe Califano. Califano was in charge of overall Defense Department liaison with the dope-dealing Batistianos, 1963-64, both before and after the assassination. Califano was the DOD liaison officer to the remnants of Batistas secret police, Santos Trafficante’s heroin dealers. Lt. Col. Alexander Haig worked under Califano. For American military intelligence, the Vietnam War was, to a very large extent, a drug war, and, just as in Cuba, we were the dealers. Oil and other mineral wealth, of course, played a major role, as did the great defense contractor boondoggle. The Vietnam War was worth $240 billion to defense contractors in overt appropriations, and at least another $300 billion in covert and indirect appropriations.
The artificial Prohibition-created value of the opium from Laos, Burma and Thailand became, therefore, a major factor in the Indochinese military equation - the covert, off-the-books means by which our fascist clients could pay for our arms. Drug Prohibition has made the illegal drug trade the economic basis of military power throughout much of the world. The global decriminalization of drugs would be a disaster for the world’s arms dealers, which is why Califano became famous for opposing decriminalization. Like the pious hypocrites running the Vatican Bank, the world’s number one drug money laundry, the job of this pious Catholic propagandist, a Knight of Malta, was to keep the price up by making legalization or decriminalization politically impossible.
By late August, 1964, the Joint Chiefs were realistically insisting that “accelerated and forceful action with respect to North Vietnam is essential to prevent a complete collapse of the US position in Southeast Asia.” The planted axiom, of course, was that continued incremental escalation could be effective. 8
Prouty: “McGeorge Bundy, Mike Forrestal, Joe Califano, Maxwell Taylor, and the others always looked good when they could sit down, calm and composed, with the President and with Rusk and McNamara, already knowing what was in the reports these men were poring over page by page. McNamara would give one of his classic ‘fully charted’ briefings...and have the President and other Cabinet officers hanging on his every word - words he had been learning and rehearsing while he sped by jet from Honolulu. At the same time, the Secret Team members were secure in their knowledge that they already knew every word that McNamara was going to say and that they had staff studies and Presidential messages already drafted to send to the Ambassador and the commanders in Indochina.” 9
As the deep rage of Prouty, Shoup, Ridgway, MacArthur, Eisenhower and many other ranking intelligence officers indicates, they equated lying through your teeth to the Commander-in-Chief with treason. Eisenhower’s rejection of rescuing the French with U.S. troops at the 1954 NSC meeting was the most intense display of anger anyone there had ever seen from Eisenhower. Strategically speaking, withdrawal was the only option. The Viet Minh had made that point long ago. They were the overwhelming majority, therefore there was no military option but to treat them as such. That had always been perfectly clear to American military intelligence. Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Matthew Ridgway and David Shoup did not consider 60,000 American dead, which they all predicted, or genocide, an option.
Support for Saigon’s dope dealers was rationalized by the same Nazi-like counterinsurgency doublespeak that rationalized support for Trafficante’s Cuban sluggers. I remember hearing Secretary of State Dean Rusk rationalize Johnson’s Vietnam escalation as a necessity to prevent the whole region from going communist. That was the official rationalization contained in NSAM 288, March 17, 1964. That speech became a split-screen antiwar poster when someone noticed that it was, virtually word for word, the 1940 speech given by Joseph Goebbels in defense of the Nazi invasion of Russia, with “Vietnam” substituted for “Russia.” The Nazis were very concerned about the ‘domino effect’ of ‘Bolshevism.’ They were also, like the Japanese, great dope dealers.
CIA agent Califano’s Vietnam era playmates, William Colby, Edward Lansdale, Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson, Lucien Conein, Richard Secord, Richard Armitage, John Singlaub, Felix Rodriguez, Barry McCaffrey and Oliver North, engineers of the Vang Pao-Laotian Opium connection, went on to engineer Reagan’s Trafficante-supported Contra-Cocaine connection. Califano carved a career niche by hyping the drug hysteria, thus maintaining the drug price support and militarizing domestic American culture with mass imprisonment. We are no more under attack by ‘drugs’ than we were under attack by the Viet Minh. If we hadn’t tried to conquer them the Viet Minh would not have killed a single American soldier. Holland has less than 20% of our per capita opioid use. Obviously the problem is our public policy, not ‘opioids,’ unless we are being told that opioids act differently in Holland than they do in the U.S.
Ted Shackley, ‘the Blond Ghost,’ a protégé of founding CIA grey eminences Allen Dulles and Desmond Fitzgerald, functioned as Santos Trafficante’s chief requisitions officer as head of the CIA’s huge Miami station during the early 60s. JM/Wave was running Operation Mongoose, the Cuba regime-change operation. Trafficante had been Batista’s full partner in running Cuba, and was the real commanding officer of the CIA’s Batistianos, Brigade 2506, the remnants of Batista’s secret police. General Lansdale was Shackley’s commanding officer in Operation Mongoose.
Shackley then transferred to Vientiane, Laos, where he served as CIA station chief from 1966-68, again under the overall direction of Lansdale and the CIA’s Far East Division chief, William Colby, 1963-1967, who had been Saigon Chief of Station from 1960 to 1962. Santos Trafficante was Vang Pao’s, that is, the CIA’s, biggest customer, the largest manufacturer and wholesaler of China white heroin in the world. As in Cuba, Shackley coordinated massive opium and heroin delivery with Trafficante, whose purchases were funding the CIA’s client armies.
Shackley served as Saigon Chief of Station from 1968 to 1972. As such, he had control of the Udorn Air Base in Thailand, with its powerful fighter and recon squadrons, giving him regional hegemony. Ambassador to Thailand William Sullivan coordinated with Shackley and Major Richard Secord, in charge of tactical air operations in Laos. Shackley also coordinated with Col. John Singlaub’s 8,000 Indochinese and 2,000 American troops operating covertly, and illegally, in Laos, in support of the Hmong and KMT opium operations, which were financing the war.
David Corn: “One evening, Frank McCulloch, the Time-Life bureau chief in Saigon, was in a bamboo bordello-bar on the raunchy Strip of Vientiane. He got talking with a group of rowdy, drunk Americans. Two boasted they were Air America pilots and were flying opium out of Laos – and Ted Shackley had approved their enterprise. McCulloch was stunned they would so brazenly discuss this with a stranger, even if opium smuggling in Laos was an open secret. But he did not pursue the lead. The part about Shackley seemed merely talk; maybe the drug pilots were looking for cover. Besides, McCulloch was already busy investigating the involvement of South Vietnamese officials in the Laotian opium business. But he was one of the first to encounter the ugly rumor that would haunt Shackley and the Company for years to come: that in Laos the CIA actively participated in narcotics trafficking.”
During those years Colby coordinated with Shackley as chief of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), which ran the Phoenix mass assassination program, designed to ferret out and assassinate the NLF leadership using Provincial Reconnaissance Units feeding the Provincial Interrogation Centers. Between 1968 and 1972, the Phoenix program, according to CORDS statistics, ‘neutralized’ 81,740 people, some by imprisonment, some by murder.
From Vientiane, Laos, Station Chief Shackley directed operations for the CIA’s Hmong opium army, working with such heroes as Michael Hand, a CIA Green Beret who, in 1973, founded the notorious dope-dealing Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Frank Nugan had been a CIA finance officer in the 1960s when he worked under Shackley, Clines and Secord at the CIA’s Udorn base in Thailand transhipping Vang Pao and KMT heroin. Nugan, by 1973, was a mob-connected Australian lawyer working as a director of a publicly-owned mining company. 10
Nugan Hand Ltd. shared offices in drug distribution center Chiang Mai, Thailand, with the DEA, the DEA abetting Nugan Hand as CIA paymaster for its mid-70s drug-financed Thai operations. The DEA receptionist actually answered Nugan Hand’s phone when their receptionist was out. Nugan Hand’s Chiang Mai branch manager, Neil Evans, told Australia’s Drug Trafficking task force: “I was never under any illusion . . . that I was to go over there for any other purpose, but to seek out drug money.” Evans told Australian TV: “We were to become the paymasters for the CIA around the world.” Evans added that Nugan Hand functioned solely “for the disbursement of funds, anywhere in the world, on behalf of the CIA, and also for the taking of money on behalf of the CIA.”
After only 4 years in business, Australia-based Nugan Hand Bank had exploded to 22 branches with annual turnover exceeding one billion dollars. Nugan Hand opened up branches wherever drug money needed to be covertly washed. Nugan Hand’s Taiwan branch manager was Dale Holmgren, former flight services manager for Civil Air Transport (CAT) and Air America. His only banking experience was delivering opium and heroin.
In 1976, the Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking demonstrated, with documentation and sworn testimony, that Australian police attached to the CIA were running regular hundred-pound loads of pure heroin from Thailand to Sydney, to be transshipped to Hong Kong and then to Santos Trafficante in the USA. Nugan Hand Bank was used to transfer the purchase money from Sydney to Hong Kong.
Newly-elected Labor PM Gough Whitlam announced the end of Australian military involvement in Vietnam in January of 1973. Sick of parroting the American line, Whitlam relocated the Australian mission from Taipei to Beijing, and declared his intention to establish or strengthen diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany and the PLO. He also ended the draft, instituted universal health care and free college. Whitlam then attempted to remove the ASIO, the Aussie CIA, from its cooperation agreements with American intelligence. That threatened the geographically unique satellite receptor station at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in rural Australia. That was a bridge too far.
Ted Shackley and Bill Colby, working with MI6, used funds from Nugan Hand Bank, in an operation run by Ed Wilson, to smear Whitlam with a phony financial scandal. Simultaneously, Nugan Hand Bank heavily funded the conservative opposition. A parliamentary crisis ensued when the conservatives wouldn’t fund Whitlam’s social programs. When Whitlam refused to call for a new election, Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed him, forcing the new election, which Whitlam’s Labor Party, engulfed in scandal and unable to fund its own programs, lost by a landslide. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation remained wedded to the CIA, per the WWII era UK-USA Treaty, and Pine Gap continued to operate for the CIA.
Encouraged by Whitlam’s Labor Party, the Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking published the following partial list of Nugan Hand-related U.S. military operatives in June 1982: Nugan Hand’s 1980 legal counsel was former CIA Director William Colby. Its president was former Rear Admiral Earl Yates. Former Pacific Command chief of staff Lt. Gen. Leroy Manor was Nugan Hand’s Manilla representative. Its Hawaii branch manager was General Ed Black, former U.S. troop commander in Thailand and Army Chief of Staff. Dale Holmgren, former chief of flight services for the CIA's airline CAT, ran the Nugan Hand Taiwan office. The consulting firm of General Erle Cocke, Cocke & Phillips International, managed Nugan Hand’s Washington DC office. Nugan Hand’s board of directors and administrators included: Dr. Guy Parker, CIA’s RAND Corporation financial consultant; Major General Richard Secord, director of the Defense Security Assistance Agency; CIA agents Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines; Walter McDonald, former CIA deputy director, head of the Nugan Hand Annapolis branch; Richard Armitage, the CIA agent who later outed Valerie Plame; Robert ‘Red’ Jansen, former CIA Bangkok station chief, Nugan Hand’s Thailand representative, who worked closely with Armitage on funds transfers; Patry Loomis, former CIA adviser to the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit in Vietnam. But Australia’s 1983 Stewart Commission cleared Nugan Hand of all wrongdoing on “assurances given by the US Vice President, Mr. G. Bush.”
The bank’s 1980 collapse immediately followed Frank Nugan’s January 1980 murder in Australia by gunshot to the head. Upon the bank’s collapse, it was the CIA’s Thomas Clines who rescued bank cofounder Bernie Houghton from arrest by covertly ferrying him out of Australia. Former DCIA Bill Colby’s business card, with his Asian itinerary written on it, was found on Frank Nugan’s body. Immediately upon hearing of Nugan’s death, Michael Hand rushed back to Sydney to shred all of the bank’s documents. The next day he instructed everyone at the emergency directors meeting to shred all their documents or they would “finish up with concrete shoes,” or find themselves delivered to their wives “in pieces.”
Thomas Clines was Shackley’s second in command in Vientiane, Laos, with special responsibility for Hmong relations at the heroin processing center in Long Tieng, Laos. Edwin Wilson set up front companies for this CIA team, regularly dealing illegal arms through Nugan Hand. Australian investigators “placed Nugan Hand in the critical role of surreptitiously transferring drug income overseas, where it obviously could be reinvested in more illegal drugs.” 11
CIA Laos and Vietnam station chief Ted Shackley’s team of Phoenix program assassins operated in Vietnam under Donald Gregg, the CIA base chief for Bien Hoa Air Base. The team included Felix Rodriguez, Luis Posada, David Morales, Frank Sturgis and Chi Chi Quintero. Shackley managed this team using Rudy Enders, who had worked under Shackley when he ran the Miami station JM/WAVE, employing the above Batistiano assassins. Gregg went on to become George H.W. Bush’s National Security Adviser. Shackley and Major Richard Secord managed combat and Air America opium transport operations, as well as those of Vang Pao’s Air America offshoot, Xieng Khouang Air Transport, without which there was no Hmong opium army. This was a measure of the bankruptcy of our policy – we were literally defending a government of dope dealers by dealing dope. 12
Johnson's special assistant for national security affairs, Walt Rostow, repeatedly ordered the CIA to produce good war news, in lieu of accurate intelligence. In August 1966, Secretary of Defense McNamara, who always knew he was being snookered by all the military-contractor happy talk, forced a showdown with one of DCIA Helms’ top two Vietnam experts, George W. Allen, Deputy to the Special Assistant for Vietnamese Affairs (SAVA). Pacific combat vet George Allen had been involved with Vietnam since WWII, had predicted the French defeat and had warned, at the time, against U.S. involvement. After a few hours alone with Allen in his office, McNamara ordered the top-secret CIA review of Vietnam policy which became known as the Pentagon Papers, and recommended the immediate commencement of negotiations with North Vietnam.
As Eisenhower, MacArthur, Shoup, Gavin, Prouty, Patti, Allen and the others had predicted in 1954, there was no way we could win against Viet Minh numbers. They had virtually the entire population on their side. This convinced Daniel Ellsberg, in McNamara’s command and one of the CIA’s RAND Corporation analysts who compiled McNamara’s report, that “It was no more a ‘civil war’ after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power – which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest – was not a civil war. To say that we had ‘interfered’ in what is ‘really a civil war,’ as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of ‘aggression from the North.’ In terms of the UN Charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.”
On September 12, 1967, DCIA Helms sent a top secret report to President Johnson, entitled “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” that concluded that the U.S. “cannot crush a revolutionary movement which is sufficiently large, dedicated, competent, and well-supported…. The structure of U.S. military power is ill-suited to cope with guerrilla warfare waged by a determined, resourceful, and politically astute opponent.” 13
Mainstream critics of the war, ever fearful of media or academic blacklist, obsequiously called our ruthless mass-murder “an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence,” and “defending the South” (John King Fairbank) or “blundering efforts to do good.” (Anthony Lewis). 14
Only hippie crackpots like Allen Ginsberg, a practicing shaman, insisted that we were doing good by financing mass murder with dope. Time, Feb. 9, 1959, derided Ginsberg for making that claim, but in 1972 the intrepid Alfred W. McCoy proved it was true with the publication of his seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.
Wrote McCoy, “It was not only General Belleux who convinced me that the Vietnam drug problem needed investigation. At a street demonstration in New Haven for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, I met the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who insisted that the CIA was deeply involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade. To back his claims and aid my research, he mailed me a carton containing years’ worth of unpublished dispatches from Time-Life correspondents that documented the involvement of America’s Asian allies in the opium traffic.” That Ginsberg was an enthusiastic herbal sacramentalist and McCoy rather pharmacophobic is beside the point. Both were antifascist. 15
On June 21, 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics announced the dénouement of Operation Eagle, “the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement.” 105 of the 150 dealers arrested were Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs. They were defended by Frank Ragano, Santos Trafficante’s lawyer. Attorney General Mitchell said that this was “a nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin and 75 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States.” 16 17
Nixon got his anti-drug publicity, and Attorney General Mitchell proceeded to sabotage most of the Eagle indictments on national security or invalid warrant grounds. Nearly all the heroes of Brigade 2506, who had originally been recruited under Vice-President Nixon, went right back to work for Don Santos. John Mitchell made sure to do almost all of the wire taps without valid court orders, intentionally ruining the warrants.
Santos Trafficante used Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya to set up the World Finance Corporation (WFC) in 1971 as his drug money laundry. Trafficante lieutenant Juan Roamanach was a director of the WFC. All were close to Nixon’s right-hand man Bebe Rebozo, a lifelong Trafficante operative. Nixon was an old friend of Trafficante’s partner, Fulgencio Batista. Senator Nixon went to Cuba in 1952 with Bebe Rebozo, Miami city manager Richard Danner (who became an executive in the Howard Hughes organization) and Los Angeles lawyer and Nixon fundraiser Dana Smith. They were celebrating Batista’s reacquisition of power. Nixon famously gambled at the Sans Souci, run for Trafficante and Lansky by Norman ‘Roughhouse’ Rothman, an old friend of Danner.
Shantytown Shack Adjacent to Havana Beseball Stadium, 1954 (Wikimedia Commons)
Upon reacquiring power, Fulgencio Batista suspended the constitution, freedom of speech and assembly, political parties, and the right to strike. By 1955, most of the sugar industry was in American hands, as was the mining and other heavy industry, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land. Cubans who protested their starvation wages were met with Batista’s murderous secret police, called the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities. The Bureau left thousands of Cubans dead, which, obviously, gave rise to Castro’s movement.
Lansky and Trafficante made sure to pay Batista generously for his support of their gambling, narcotics and prostitution empire. Havana turned into their well-protected cash cow. The port of Havana became the center of Trafficante’s vast holdings.
Batista Executes a Rebel, 1956 (Wikimedia Commons)
The maniacal Howard Hughes actually commissioned Robert Maheu, working through Chotiner, to see what could be done “to keep the Vietnam war going.” The result, apparently, was the ‘Nixon strategy.’ In return for such plums as the half-billion dollar Glomar Explorer contract, Hughes Aircraft, Hughes Tool and TWA became worldwide CIA conduits. In 1968, when Hughes needed Nixon’s help to buy Air West and to squelch antitrust pressure against his acquiring yet more of Las Vegas, Hughes gave Bebe Rebozo a hundred grand in cash; he got what he paid for. 19 20
Rebozo, a lifelong Syndicate operative, helped Rolando Martinez, Frank Sturgis and Bernard Barker, Trafficante operatives, loot America’s banking system. Barker had been the chief of Batista’s secret police. This team of Batistianos, through Miami’s Ameritas Realty, helped pay for the Watergate operation they engineered. Nixon’s banking ties to Syndicate/CIA money were so extensive that they comprised virtually his entire financial web. Keyes Realty, for instance, through which he bought the Florida White House, was a major money laundry for hundreds of millions of Trafficante, Lansky, Batista and Prio dollars.
Sicilian financier Michele Sindona attended Nixon’s 1973 inaugural. Sindona, a prominent member of the P-2 Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due, was part of the Gambino family, which, by marriage, included the Inzerillo and Spatola clans in Sicily. The Gambinos washed their heroin profits through Sindona’s holding company, Liechtenstein-based Fasco International. Sindona also acquired the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF) in Milan, the Sicilian Banca di Messina, which allowed conversion of Mafia drug money directly from Sicily, and the Banque de Financement (Finabank) in Geneva, co-owned with the Vatican Bank. Fasco’s assets included many other banks, including shares in the Opus Dei Bank in Barcelona, part of the Vatican Bank itself, and Long Island's Franklin National Bank.
Sindona bought much of the Franklin National Bank from Laurence Tisch, the CEO of CBS and part owner of Loews Corporation, an influential Council on Foreign Relations-OSS-CIA heavyweight. Sindona paid $8.00 per share over market value to Tisch’s Loews Corporation, acquiring 20% ownership of the bank for $40 million. Franklin was the country’s 19th largest bank, with assets of $3.3 billion. Was a debt being paid for controlling interest in the bank? Was the bank being purchased to be looted? Was Tisch accumulating his shares in Franklin from the beginning for Sindona? Sindona used the powerful bank’s ability to transfer funds, produce letters of credit, and trade in foreign currencies to facilitate the washing of Sicilian drug money through the Vatican Bank.
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the manager of the Vatican Bank, cooperating with Sindona and Roberto Calvi, founded the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau, Bahamas, to further plug his drug money clients into this banking system. Cisalpine grew into one of Pablo Escobar’s favorite banks. Marcinkus himself called Cisalpine “a perfect crime.” The financial route was from one of the six Vatican shell banks in Panama, or Cisalpine in Nassau, by wire to Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, then to the Vatican Bank in Vatican City, and then to anonymous numbered accounts at Banca del Gottardo or Union Bank in Switzerland. The Vatican Bank fee was 15 to 20%. Given that Escobar was shipping 15 tons of cocaine per day to the U.S., we are talking about tens of millions in Vatican Bank fees. On November 17, 1978, the 12-man team of Bank of Italy examiners, after an intensive 5-month investigation, concluded: “Independently of its position as stockholder, the IOR [Vatican Bank] is bound by strong interest connections to the Ambrosiano group, as is demonstrated by its [the Vatican’s] constant presence in some of Ambrosiano's most meaningful and delicate operations.”
Chicago Tribune, ‘Marcinkus Among 23 Sought By Italy,’ By Uli Schmetzer, 2/27/1987: “According to the new evidence, Archbishop Marcinkus not only provided two letters of patronage for Calvi, but the Vatican bank obtained shares in the bank`s foreign dealings through the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in Nassau, Bahamas…Investigators say the Nassau bank’s register of administrators lists both Calvi and Archbishop Marcinkus. They say this is evidence that the two were business partners and not merely colleagues in similar affairs as the Vatican has often declared.” 21
By August, 1974, the Federal Reserve knew that Franklin National Bank was failing due to fraud. Despite that, without any hope of recovery, the Federal Reserve gave Sindona another $2 billion, supposedly to save the bank. The April 1974 stock market crash was dubbed by the Italian press Il Crack Sindona. On October 8, 1974, Franklin National Bank was declared insolvent due to mismanagement and fraud. Sindona was convicted in 1980 in the U.S. on 68 counts of fraud, perjury, false bank statements and misappropriation of bank funds, and sentenced to 25 years. His U.S. prison time was interrupted by his 9/26/1984 extradiction to Italy to face trial for the murder of attorney Giorgio Ambrosoli, the court appointed liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana. Sindona was sentenced to life.
David M. Kennedy was chairman of Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. of Chicago until 1969, when he became Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury. Kennedy was also a director of Sindona’s Fasco International, and, through Continental Illinois, an investment partner of Fasco. Continental Illinois was the seventh-largest bank in the U.S.. Cardinal John Cody, the Archbishop of Chicago, officially managed the total assets of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, in excess of $1 billion, with Kennedy, whose Continental Illinois Bank held those assets. Both men were close to the Gambinos, Michele Sindona and Archbishop Marcinkus, using the Vatican Bank to wash and transfer their Chicago funds for right-wing political purposes globally, such as the defeat of liberation theology in South America. About $1 million of the church’s funds disappeared under Cody’s tenure, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops lost more than $4 million in a single year while Cody was treasurer. The U.S. Attorney's office issued subpoenas to Cody and the archdiocese, but Cody’s 1982 death ended the investigation.
Paul Marcinkus; Michele Sindona; Roberto Calvi (Wikimedia Commons)
Of the Vatican Bank’s 11,000 accounts, less than 1,650 related to an ecclesiastical endeavor. The remaining 9,350 accounts were owned by Sindona, Calvi, Gelli, Marcinkus, and other leading Sicilian Mafiosi, including the Spatola and Inzerillo families and members of the Camorra of Naples and Milan. The Banda della Magliana gang serviced the accounts of Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò, known as the Mafia's cashier for his money laundering skills. Don Pippo was also the head of the Porta Nuova clan. Other Vatican Bank accounts were held by leading Italian politicians and businessmen in service to the CIA’s false-flag death-squad coordination, Operation Gladio, and still others the foreign embassies of Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and many other governments in the drug business.
Paul L. Williams relates this verifiable story in Operation Gladio: In 1971, Sindona and the Gambinos cooked up a spectacular billion dollar swindle with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, dean of the College of Cardinals, and with Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank. They printed up counterfeit bonds from blue chip American companies like American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, Chrysler and Pan American World Airways. Cardinal Tisserant provided a letter bearing the official insignia of the Sacra Congregazione Dei Religiosi certifying the bonds’ authenticity, and Archbishop Marcinkus made trial deposits at the Handelsbanken in Zurich and at Banca di Roma. The securities were examined and certified as authentic, thus eligible for bank sale. But, double-checking their new assets, both banks went with bond samples to examiners at the Bankers Association in New York, who concluded that the securities were counterfeit. The Organized Crime and Racketeering Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sought an interview with Cardinal Tisserant only to learn that he had just died. U.S. officials, after interviewing Marcinkus, sought an indictment, but Nixon’s FBI killed the probe. 22
Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury David Kennedy, chairman of Continental Illinois Bank, was personally close not only to Sindona, but to Prince Massimo Spada, the Vatican Bank’s premier commercial agent, called a delegato. Major Vatican real estate and corporate investments flowed through Kennedy’s Continental Illinois Bank. The Chicago-based Giancanas used Continental Illinois to launder their drug money and transfer funds to Sindona’s banks and enterprises throughout Europe. The Giancanas could buy from the Gambinos in Sicily and pay for it in Rome or Geneva. Through the connection to Sindona’s European banking system, and with the blessing of Opus Dei itself, Continental Illinois served as a major conduit of CIA and Gambino funds to Gladio operatives throughout Europe.
$4 million flowed from Continental Illinois to Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria in Milan and then to the Greek colonels for their 1967 coup, a CIA-engineered Gladio operation. The traceable wires, in early April 1967, went from Continental Illinois to BPF and then to Colonel George Papadopoulos’ Hellenicki Tecniki Greek-army owned construction company. That same month, a month before the scheduled May 28 Greek elections, the colonels seized the government. In 1984, David Kennedy’s Continental Illinois became the largest ever bank failure in U.S. history, when a run on the bank led to its seizure by the FDIC. This was Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury.
Sindona’s Banca Privata Finanziaria would systematically steal depositors’ funds, transferring them to a BPF account in the inscrutable Vatican Bank, which is still largely inaccessible to the EU’s Financial Action Task Force. The Vatican Bank, for a 15% fee, would transfer the funds to Sindona’s private account at his Finabank. When the Christian Democrats lost policy control in 1969, Aldo Moro’s center-left coalition proposed repealing the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which granted tax-free and independent status to the Vatican’s vast holdings. Sindona showed the panicked Pope Paul VI how to transfer the holdings of the Vatican Bank to various tax-free off-shore vehicles, such as the Eurocurrency market and various reliable American bond devices. The Pope named Sindona Mercator Senesis Romanam Curiam, ‘the leading banker of the Roman Curia,’ and granted him complete control over the Vatican's foreign and domestic investment policy. This was a vast multi-billion dollar fortune conferring enormous political power.
A 1979 federal grand jury in Manhattan questioned Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury David Kennedy, who said he had received $200,000 in 1974 as a loan from Sindona. Kennedy also testified that Sindona set up a $150,000 trust fund for Kennedy in a Swiss bank for his “out of pocket expenses.” Sindona’s Fasco was represented in the U.S. by Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, the firm of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell. The Pike Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Democrat Otis Pike, showed that Sindona’s banking system was used by the CIA to distribute millions to Europe’s dope-dealing right-wing death squads and Italian political parties, per Gambino family and P-2 strategy. P-2, Propaganda Due, is a reference to their modus operandi, killing popular center-left politicians, and committing horrible terrorist bombings, and making these atrocities appear to be the work of the radical left. Nixon’s CIA financed these Gladio death squads, whose business was the assassination of the democratic center in Europe. This system included considerable Sindona and Gambino generosity to Nixon himself, who profited directly from death-squad dope dealing. 23
On July 11, 1979, attorney Giorgio Ambrosoli, the court appointed liquidator of Sindona’s Banca Privata Italiana, was shot dead in Milan by three mafia hit men commissioned by Sindona. Ambrosoli had provided enough evidence to the U.S. Justice Department to convict Sindona for his role in the collapse of the Franklin National Bank. Ambrosoli had demonstrated the criminal involvement of Paul Marcinkus of the Vatican Bank and Roberto Calvi. Calvi, Chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, ended hanging by the neck from London’s Blackfriars Bridge, the only P-2 action of which I approve. On March 19, 1986, a Milan court convicted Sindona for the Ambrosoli murder, showing that he paid mafia hit man William Arico $50,000 for the job. Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco, head of the Rome Security Service, forwarded evidence to Ambrosoli demonstrating the close relationship between Sindona and capo mafioso Licio Gelli, head of P-2. On July 13, 1979, Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco and his chauffeur were shot to death with a sawed-off shotgun.
Palermo Police Superintendent Giorgio Boris Giuliano, cooperating with Ambrosoli in his own investigation of Mafia heroin dealing, was shot to death July 21, 1979. Giuliano had checks and other documents indicating that Sindona had been recycling the proceeds from Mafia heroin sales through the Vatican Bank to his Amincor Bank in Switzerland. Mafioso Francesco Marino Mannoia, a prolific hit man and heroin chemist who had turned informant as a matter of survival during the Second Mafia War, demonstrated that Sindona was laundering the very considerable heroin proceeds of the Corleonesi-Bontade-Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino network. The mafiosi wanted their money back, hence Calvi and Sindona’s obvious bank fraud – their lives were on the line. Sindona was convicted in 1980 in the U.S. on 65 counts, including fraud, perjury, false bank statements and misappropriation of bank funds. Sindona was extradicted from his U.S. federal prison to Italy in 1984, where, in two separate trials, he was sentenced to 12 years for his financial and drug crimes, and life for Ambrosoli’s murder.
According to Mafioso Francesco Mannoia, Banco Ambrosiano Director Calvi’s killer was Francesco Di Carlo, and the order to kill Calvi came from Mafia bosses Giuseppe ‘Pippo’ Calò and P-2 chief Licio Gelli. Mannoia had turned pentito (penitent, rat) in an effort to survive the ferocious Second Mafia War in Sicily, which saw hundreds killed. The day after he gave the bulk of his formal testimony for magistrate Giovanni Falcone, Mannoia's mother, aunt and one of his sisters were murdered in their Bagheria, Sicily home. American Mafia hitman William Arico, hired by Sindona to kill Abrosoli, implicated Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a politician close to Sindona, in a threatening phone call taped by Ambrosoli. Hitman Arico fell to his death “while trying to escape” from a federal prison in New York in 1984. Sindona was resentful of the lack of support from his old allies and had become way too talkative. He was killed in Lombardy’s new super-secure women’s prison in Voghera, near Milan, by cyanide in his coffee in 1986.
Giulio Andreotti (right) with Licio Gelli (center) (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1979, when Bank of Italy investigators sent a report regarding another massive fraud engineered by Banco Ambrosiano partners Calvi and Marcinkus regarding Calvi’s paper purchase of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto from the Vatican Bank, Judge Emilio Alessandrini prepared to indict all involved, including Calvi, Marcinkus and other top Vatican Bank officials. On January 29, 1979, five Mafia gunmen riddled Judge Alessandrini with bullets at a stoplight in Rome, halting the investigation.
Calvi, Marcinkus and Sindona had been heavy contributors to Nixon and the Republican Party, hence Nixon’s opposition to ‘bank regulation.’ Nixon’s financial backers also included the KMT’s Anna Chen Chennault, Robert Vesco, Jimmy Hoffa, William Pawley and any number of other major players in the drug business, including a long list of known fronts for Trafficante, Marcello and Gambino. Hence Nixon’s war on the American Mafia’s most dangerous competition, the Marseille-based Corsican mafia, the Union Corse, the French Connection.
The French Connection, a very good 1971 movie based on an excellent 1969 non-fiction book, ends where the story gets politically interesting. Most of the French connection heroin was stolen from the NYPD Property Clerk’s office in Manhattan, replaced by flour and cornstarch, and resold on the street. The cops, not nearly as attractive as Gene Hackman, weren’t really in the law enforcement business so much as the armed robbery business, as Frank Serpico’s 1970 revelations demonstrated. NYPD Narcotics cop Serpico’s 2/12/1970 New York Times article forced Mayor Lindsay to appoint the Knapp Commission to investigate the NYPD. Serpico got himself shot in the head. NYPD Detective Frank King was charged with the French Connection theft but was acquitted, upon which he went to work for mafioso Vincent Papa, a capo in the Lucchese family. Papa was arrrested in 1973 with a suitcase containing nearly one million dollars in cash. The Knapp Commission estimated that over 400 pounds of heroin and cocaine disappeared from the Property Clerk’s Manhattan office between 1969 and 1972.
Nixon’s collection of Trafficante and CIA killers known as the ‘Plumbers,’ created in 1971, was originally called ‘the Special Investigation Unit of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention.’ That’s almost as funny as the oxymoronic name of Nixon’s ally, Mexico’s PRI, the ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party.’
Wanting absolute control of all narcotics intelligence and enforcement, Nixon, in 1973, consolidated the BNDD, ODALE and ONNI into the new DEA. Famed Union Corse ally Lucien Conein, who was part of both the French and American Operation X, was put in charge of the DEA Special Operations Group. The DEASOG was composed mostly of former officers of Batista’s secret police, Santos Trafficante’s pistoleros – running the DEA. That about sums up Richard Nixon. When DEA agent Frank Peroff developed evidence against swindler Robert Vesco, a very active Nixon supporter, indicating he was organizing massive heroin smuggling and distribution, agent Peroff was fired and his life threatened. When the Senate Investigations Subcommittee asked for the Vesco file it was told that it had been lost. Relevent witnesses repeatedly suffered fatal accidents, such as being machine gunned to death in a parking lot, or shot while watching TV at home. Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson noted, “More than any single person, Vesco has information which, if he talked, would make Watergate look like a picnic.” 24
Nixon’s much-touted “war on drugs” took the media focus off his escalation of the Vietnam War. This included the genocidal B-52 carpet-bombing of much of Vietnam and Cambodia, and the simultaneous invasion and overthrow of the neutralist Cambodian government. Nixon’s incredible brutality was an attempt to outrun the visceral rage the obvious genocide was producing back home. The drug war was also a way of turning the police loose on the antiwar demonstrators, many of whom considered pot sacramental, and culture leader Allen Ginsberg a hero.
“If we cannot destroy the drug menace, then it will destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative,” intoned President Nixon in June of 1971. On 4/5/1971, 8 kilos of General Ouane Rattikone’s Double U-O Globe heroin was seized by Customs in New Jersey from the U.S. military postal system. A Filipino diplomat, Domingo Cnieso, and his Chinese partner from Bangkok, were arrested in NYC, 11/11/1971, with 15 kilos of Double U-O Globe heroin. Another with 40 kilos. The son of Panama’s ambassador to Taiwan was arrested with 50 kilos. And a Laotian prince, the Royal Laotian ambassador to France, was arrested on 4/26/1971 with 60 kilos of Double U-O Globe heroin he had attempted to bring into Paris under his diplomatic pouch. These were all anticommunist allies financed by Richard Nixon.
Double U-O Globe was famous for its high quality, being 98% pure, as compared to Marseilles’ 94%. Each kilo pack bore the Chinese words “This product is of the highest quality, it will put wind in your sails.” Packed in double, clear plastic bags, there was a coded paper slip between the two bags with the date of manufacture, so that each kilo could be traced to the individual producing chemist. Double U-O Globe maintained strict quality control and really was the best in the business. 25
Nixon explaining Cambodia, 4/30/1969; Prince Sopsaisana (Wikimedia Commons)
The Laotian prince with the 60 kilos, Sopsaisana, was the head of the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League, the chief political adviser of Vang Pao, military commander of the CIA’s Laotian Hmong army. The heroin itself was made from Hmong opium, collected at Long Tieng, the CIA’s headquarters in northern Laos, then refined into heroin at Vientiane and given to Sopsaisana on consignment by Vang Pao. The contraband made its way from Vang Pao in Long Tieng to Sopsaisana in Vientiane via Vang Pao’s division of General Secord’s Air America, coordinated by General Ouane Rattikone, commander-in-chief of the Royal Lao Armed Forces. That, apparently, was an alternative Richard Nixon was willing to accept. 26
Early in 1967, the brilliant Marine Colonel William Corson, who spoke Malay, Vietnamese, three dialects of Chinese, and could read Russian, French and German, was transferred from his command of a Marine tank battalion to Director of the Combined Action Program, in which small detachments of Marines served with South Vietnamese militia in villages throughout the country. The purpose of the program was to provide security from the NLF so as to popularize the Saigon government. Colonel Corson was praised by his superiors for his ability to relate to Vietnamese villagers and win their confidence.
Corson was then transferred to a sensitive assignment in Washington, becoming Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia Intelligence Force in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense. Then, a month after his retirement, July 1, 1968, his bombshell critique of the Vietnam War, The Betrayal, came out. “I saw things in the assassination programs, and the brutality of our effort, that told me this war was doomed.” The Betrayal was an erudite frontline critique from a brilliant intelligence officer who had earned a doctorate in economics from American University. In a July, 1967 interview, Corson told the Los Angeles Times, “The problem here is that we treat the government of Vietnam like we should treat the people, and we treat the people like we should treat the government. Frankly, I am not sanguine about the prospects here.”
Corson, decorated for his frontline combat in WWII, Korea and Vietnam, was one Marine who had as much guts off the battlefield as on. As a frontline Marine intelligence officer, Corson had been the only uniformed American with the French when they surrendered at Dien Bien Phu. General Vo Nguyen Giap personally sent Corson back to President Eisenhower with the message that the U. S. faced the same fate as the French should they try to repeat their attempted conquest. Corson thought the domino theory was propagandistic nonsense, and that the Vietnam war was, from the Vietnamese perspective, more about nationalism than communism.
Describing the heroin trade the CIA was running with Vang Pao, in which Corson participated as the ranking Marine intelligence officer Vang Pao had to coordinate his Air America logistics with, Corson reported that “Vang Pao’s army was very effective…. They worked with my army…. Portable heroin processing facilities were brought in…It was a creation of the CIA’s technical services division. They even trained the Meo [Hmong] in how to run the things.” This nifty CIA invention, which eliminated the need to transport and process bulky opium sap, condensing it into lightweight processed heroin powder, diacetylmorphine without all the vegetable goo, has now been put to widespread use by the Taliban and its partners in Afghanistan. 27
Vang Pao’s heroin was destined for global distribution through Santos Trafficante’s vast CIA-protected network. Corson estimated the heroin profits to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This was the operation run by Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Erich von Marbod, who became head of the Defense Security Assistance Administration, General John K. Singlaub, Air Force Major Richard Secord, and one of Secord’s assistants, Second Lieutenant Oliver North. Singlaub ran covert air operations for the entire Laos region. As with Corson, Secord and North saw extensive combat as well as heroin transport duties.
Colonel Corson, working with Special Forces combat veteran Michael Hand, also coordinated Air America operations with the Montagnards of Vietnam’s central highlands. Montagnard is the French translation of their traditional Vietnamese appellation, ‘mountain people.’ The Montagnards are actually a collection of matrilineal tribes comprising six different ethnic groups who speak languages drawn primarily from the Malayo-Polynesian, Tai, and Austroasiatic language families. They have ethno-linguistic affiliations with the Hmong and regard themselves as independent peoples. Because the Viet Minh were politically hostile to their traditional communal crop, opium, regarding it as a tool of the colonialists, and because the Vietnamese treated them with racist condescension, it just took some regular arms shipments, some basic air support for their opium deliveries, and a few village clinics to enlist them as a pro-American guerrilla army.
Said Ho Chi Minh of the French imperialists, in his 1945 Declaration of Independence, “To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.” Ho’s complaint was essentially that of the Chinese, who understood that the financial power of the opium trade translated into military power. Corson’s job, in exchange for their combat against the Viet Minh, was to help the Montagnards get their traditional opium crop to market. “They had made their living for generations growing opium. They foolishly took our word that they should fight for us. We merged them with Vang Pao’s opium army. When we decided we were losing the war to the Pathet Lao, we moved many of them down to the Delta and we did not provide for them. We began carpet-bombing with B-52’s – essentially destroying several ancient cultures.” 28
It was Michael Hand who ferried the Montagnard opium, via Air America and its contract airlines, to the Thai warlords in Bangkok, who converted it into cash. The cash was laundered through Helliwell’s Royal Thai Military Bank. Helliwell’s privateer replacement in Bangkok was Bernie Houghton, who moved to Australia in 1967. Houghton may have been Michael Hand’s CIA case officer in Laos. Hand was a cofounder, with Houghton and Australian lawyer Frank Nugan, of the CIA moneywash Nugan Hand bank. Joe Trento: “Hand was the bagman between the opium warlords and a banking conduit set up to launder drug profits. He used Air America pilots to move the drugs and money and then, working with Houghton, Shackley and Colby, used the Royal Thai Military Bank … to launder the profits…” 29
CIA officer Del Rosario: “In 1971, I was an operations assistant for Continental Air Services, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company’s transport planes shipped large quantities of rice. However, when the freight invoice was marked ‘diverse,’ I knew it was opium. As a rule, an office telephone with a special number would ring and the voice would say, ‘The Customer’s here,’ and that was the code designation for the CIA agents that hired us. ‘Keep an eye on the plane from Ban Houai Sai. We’re sending some goods and someone’s going to take care of it. Nobody’s allowed to touch anything, nothing can be unloaded,’ was a typical message. These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in Vientiane and stored in Air America depots. At other times it went to Bangkok or Saigon.” That is, the CIA’s Air America was Santos Trafficante’s major wholesaler.
Victor Marchetti, in 1966, was Special Assistant to the Chief of Planning, Programming, and Budgeting at the CIA and special assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms: “We were officially spending $27 million a year on the war in Laos while Shackley was there [Vientiane]. The war was costing ten times that amount. It was no secret how they were doing it: they financed it with drugs. They gave Shackley a medal for it.” Watching the CIA run the global heroin trade was one of the things that made Marchetti quit the CIA in 1969 and go to legal war with it over the contents of his 1973 book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.
Professor McCoy: “The importance of these CIA clients in the subsequent growth of the Golden Triangle’s heroin trade was revealed, inadvertently, by the agency itself when it leaked a classified report on the Southeast Asian opium traffic to The New York Times [6/6/1971]….’the most important [heroin refineries] are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand.’”
The trouble with leaks and partial hangouts, of course, is that they’re likely to be picked up by analysts capable of using them. The Times didn’t bother to explain, but McCoy, who had spent some time asking rude questions and dodging bullets in that neighborhood, knew that Tachilek was run by Shan rebels formerly allied with the CIA. Ban Houei Sai was owned by the CIA’s very own General Ouane Rattikone, commander of the Royal Laotian Army. Nam Keung was a CIA Yao base and Mae Salong was a CIA-supplied KMT base. Tachilek was reputed to be the largest refinery of China White heroin in the world. 31
The only traditional cash crop of the scattered highland Hmong villages was opium. It was only Vang Pao’s status as the premier opium broker that enabled him to organize the CIA’s 30,000-man Hmong army. That status was entirely dependent on Vang Pao’s CIA-supplied weaponry, air power and commercial transport. Vang Pao’s opium was transported via CAT/Air America and Nguyen Cao Ky’s South Vietnam Air Force to international hubs throughout Southeast Asia.
In 1961, when the CIA organized 32 C-47’s into the First Transport Group to trade Hmong Laotian opium for CIA arms via Ngo Dinh Nhu’s distribution apparatus, Col. Nguyen Cao Ky was its commander. Six weeks after Ngo Dinh Diem’s 1963 overthrow, the French-trained Ky was in command of the entire South Vietnamese air force. In June of 1965, the Catholic-supporting Ky, whose political base was exclusively military, won the infighting between election-rigging factions to become Prime Minister of South Vietnam. 32
In September, 1972, Nixon very publicly ordered all U.S. embassies to cooperate with the CIA in the global antidrug effort. He called staff from 54 embassies back to DC to hear him formally order the CIA to engage “the slave traders of our time.” The practical effect of that, of course, as Nixon well understood, was to give the CIA dope dealers carte blanche in U.S. embassies throughout the world. 33
The CIA’s Lucien Conein had helped Ky’s security chief, Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, revive the old Saigon-Corsican-Binh Xuyen alliance, Operation X. Loan became world-famous when he was photographed executing a Viet Minh guerrilla, below, during the Tet offensive. He did that in defense of his vast vice network. Vice-financed street-gang rule was the only way to prevent NLF control of Saigon’s streets. This extra legal structure included the entire South Vietnamese air force and security apparatus, the Cholon Chinese gangs and Gen. Ouane Rattikone’s Royal Laotian Army, which included Vang Pao. It fed heroin or morphine base, largely through the Hong Kong gangs and Taiwan, to Santos Trafficante’s vast refinement and distribution system.
As Gen. Edward Lansdale pithily put it, in his May 1968 report to Ambassador Bunker describing the relative strengths of the Ky and Thieu factions, “Loan has access to substantial funds through extra legal money-collecting systems of the police/intelligence apparatus.” Lansdale and Conein, of course, had helped Loan and Ky build that extra legal apparatus. As both Ramparts and Senator Ernest Gruening put it, in May of 1971, “Marshal Ky: The Biggest Pusher in the World.” 34
Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Minh guerrilla, 2/1/1968 (Wikimedia Commons)
When Lansdale returned to Saigon in 1965 as Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s security chief, he worked out a truce with Saigon’s Corsican underworld. Lansdale’s key contact with the Corsicans, Lucien Conein, who fought with them against both the Germans and the Viet Minh as a French-speaking OSS agent. He had been on intimate terms with the Paris, Marseille, Saigon, Bangkok, Vientiane and Phnom Penh Corsican hoods for years. The Corsicans fed vast amounts of Indochinese morphine base to their chemically sophisticated brethren in Marseille, who could handle the tricky fourth step in the manufacture of white heroin.
The Union Corse was an important element of the Ky and succeeding Thieu power structures, and so was assiduously cultivated by U.S. military intelligence, despite the fact they were largely responsible for the easy availability of high-grade heroin to U.S. troops. When Ky was Prime Minister, 1965-67, Lansdale was his senior CIA liaison officer and prime U.S. defender. When Prime Minister Ky met with President Johnson in Honolulu in February of 1966, the fluent “Great Society” speech he gave was written for him by Lansdale’s CIA team. When Ambassador Lodge went back to the U.S. in 1967, he was replaced by Ellsworth Bunker, owner of the National Sugar Refining Company and heavy investor in United Fruit Company. 35
In 1968, Santos Trafficante, after visiting his Chiu chau associates in Hong Kong, stopped in Saigon to meet with Corsican syndicate leaders. In the absence of the possibility of legal redress, these personal meetings of Syndicate leaders connoted the most solemn contractual undertakings. On Conein’s departure from Saigon, the same Corsican syndicate leaders presented him with a heavy gold medallion embossed with the Napoleonic eagle and the Corsican crest, a traditional symbol of Corsican syndicate leadership. The medallion was engraved Per Tu Amicu Conein, “For Your Friendship, Conein.” 36
Although Conein himself was an important part of Nixon’s DEA intelligence apparatus, Nixon’s BNDD/DEA hardly ever mentioned Southeast Asian heroin, preferring instead to live in the clichés of the fifties. To facilitate further CIA control of drug enforcement, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was subsumed by the new Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. Nixon’s first major Cabinet-level drug policy implementation meeting, the 11/3/1969 “Heroin Committee” meeting, specifically exempted Lebanon and the Far East for “national security” reasons. The Heroin Committee was Kissinger’s management device to insure Nixon-CIA control of the vast drug enforcement global muscle.
Nixon aimed almost exclusively at breaking the Corsican-Turkish ‘French Connection,’ about which we heard so much, leaving Asian heroin production almost completely untouched, and everybody’s eyes on Marseilles - and off Sicily’s hundreds of new heroin labs, the destination for so much Asian morphine base. The new DEA was stacked with politically obedient CIA agents who had proven amenable to CIA drug dealing in support of selected paramilitary operations, like the one run out of Laos in support of Vietnam’s dope dealer government.
The ’French Connection’ was convenient not only as Nixon anti-drug snow, but as security to France’s pro-American President Georges Pompidou, who needed to break the power of France’s far-right secret services, who were in bed with the vast Ricord drug distribution apparatus. These were led by the SDECE, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionage. Its street fighting arm was SAC, the Service d’Action Civique. There was also the domestic security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and the police intelligence force, Renseignements Generaux (RG). These were the French fascists who had put so much effort into trying to assassinate DeGaulle for his withdrawal from Algeria, brilliantly dramatized in the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal. 37
On 2/6/1970, the leadership of the BNDD and the French General Directorate of the National Police met at the French Interior Ministry to sign the preliminary Drug Enforcement Accords. The Franco-American Accords were finalized on 2/26/1971 in a ceremony involving the enforcement leadership of both countries. Thus, Nixon enrolled French help in building his politicized drug enforcement apparatus, part of the CIA’s Operation Chaos aimed at the domestic American left. Pompidou enrolled American muscle in breaking the mutinous SDECE, who originally ran the French Operation X with their Union Corse allies. By weakening the SDECE, Nixon helped his Mafia partners replace the Union Corse in their global wholesale supply system.
It was Nixon’s Heroin Committee that engineered The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the cornerstone of the paramilitary ‘no-knock’ and mass-incarceration drug enforcement model institutionalized throughout America (recently used to assassinate the completely innocent Breonna Taylor). In September, 1971, the Heroin Committee was reorganized as the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control (CCINC) under the chairmanship of Secretary of State William Rogers, providing political coordination between 24 departments and agencies. DDCIA General Robert Cushman attended most CCINC meetings. Narcotics Control Officers, military intelligence agents, were put in every U.S. embassy. Egil Krogh, Nixon’s liaison to the BNDD, mandated that all press statements and public speeches on narcotics be cleared by his office. Krogh went on to head up the BNDD/DEA ‘Special Investigation Unit,’ the leak-plugging ‘plumbers’ of Watergate fame.
In order to get their political targeting correct, Nixon created, 7/27/1972, the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI), headed by Wiliam Sullivan, Hoover’s chief of the COINTELPRO operations aimed at the civil rights movement and the American left. Sullivan was a rabid racist. It was Sullivan who picked Nixon’s Drug War enforcement targets.
One of those targets was back-to-the-land hippie couple Dirk Dickenson and Judy Arnold, happily building their country homestead in California’s Humboldt County near the town of Eureka in April of 1972. Some local nark, on a career-boosting hippie hunt, swore he saw a “million dollar meth lab” during his helicopter flyover. On the basis of that unrecorded high altitude observation alone, they hit the place by rappelling down from a HUEY helicopter they had borrowed from the Army, toting submachine guns. The unarmed 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson was shot to death in the back by BNDD agent Lloyd Clifton as Dickenson fled in panic. No meth lab was found, no weapons were found, and no one was charged with murder. The Army did stop lending choppers to the BNDD for domestic raids, agreeing that it was a violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, Operation Chaos or not.
Former FBI agent and NYS nark Gordon Liddy, since 1970 an aide to White House Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman, presented Nixon his plan for the new Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), created by Nixon executive order in January of 1972 without congressional review. The primary tools of ODALE were the same no-knock forced entry and warrantless searches. Nixon now had a raft of domestic tools specifically designed for kicking down the doors of his domestic political and cultural opponents. ODALE was turned into the DEA on July 1, 1973. 38
Liddy’s boss, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Assistant for Domestic Affairs, was one of the major authors of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the current federal law enforced by the DEA. Convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the Watergate affair, with nothing left to lose, Ehrlichman got uninhibitedly blunt with author Dan Baum in 1994: “‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’” 39
Everyone knows that marijuana leaves and flowers are not the same thing as refined heroin, but Nixon’s ‘Heroin Team’ made a point of defining it as the same ‘schedule1’ type of ‘dangerous drug.’ What this actually did was make heroin look as harmless as pot, thereby popularizing it and institutionalizing its Mafia distribution apparatus. That’s why the U.S. has six times as much heroin use per capita as Holland. The Dutch never criminalized pot, and don’t equate whole herbs with refined concentrates in their law, as we do., Dutch drug drug law isn’t politicized BS, so the Dutch have a small fraction of our hard drug use rate.
When the Saigon Military Mission took military control of Saigon from France in 1955, the Corsicans kept their Marseille labs humming by aligning themselves with the new powers and adding Turkey as a major supplier of morphine base. This enabled them to keep their vast distribution apparatus supplied with Marseille’s famous snow-white #4 heroin. Most of Marseille’s heroin was turned into cash via the French distribution apparatus in South America. France’s ambassador to Uruguay in the late 60s was WWII, Indochina and Algeria veteran Colonel Roger Barberot, a very dangerous top-level SDECE agent, as was France’s ambassador to Bolivia, resistance hero Dominique Ponchardier. Both were mortal political enemies of Pompidou. These men functioned as politico-military liaison to the huge South American dope-arms-terror network of Auguste Ricord, which supplied most of the snow-white Marseille heroin on American streets through his Mafia partners.
Ricord, a French-Corsican heroin trafficker and Gestapo agent, built heroin labs for the Nazis in Marseille during the war, using funds stolen by the Carlingue, the French Gestapo auxiliary. The Asunción, Paraguay-based Ricord was particularly powerful in Stroessner’s Paraguay, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, strongholds of his old Nazi-Gehlen allies. These included arms dealer and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who boasted the Bolivian Army’s Chief of Staff, Alfredo Ovando Candia, on the board of his shipping company Transmaritima Boliviana. Ovando became Bolivian President on Gen. Barrientos’ convenient death in a 1969 helicopter crash.
Ricord could also count on Friedrich Schwend in Peru, who had been involved in Operation Bernhard, the SS attempt to forge enough Bank of England notes to turn itself into an independent economic power. Like Barbie, Schwend was a postwar beneficiary of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. Schwend and Barbie teamed up to keep South America’s right-wing death squads well-supplied with high quality arms - from CIA proprietary Merex International Arms, which was as much an arms broker as manufacturer. Merex was founded by Gerhard Mertins in Bonn after the war, and was represented by Hitler’s favorite commando, Col. Otto Skorzeny. These were first-line NATO heavy arms – armored cars, rocket launchers, air cannon - the works.
That this was an American, French and German-driven effort, or at least an effort of their cooperating secret services, is demonstrated by the fact that the Israelis worked right alongside the Nazis. Ovando of Bolivia, Laugerud of Guatemala, D’Aubuisson of El Salvador and countless others had Israeli training and were loyal customers of the Israelis as well as the Germans. Losing WWII has rendered the Israelis very militarily pragmatic. The Israelis, in the early 1960s, actually used Otto Skorzeny to assassinate quite a few Nazi missile experts, veterans of Wernher von Braun’s elite Peenemünde team, working for the Egyptians. The famous Nazi had no trouble penetrating Egyptian military intelligence to kill the missile experts. The only other option would have been to allow Egyptian missiles to target Israel. 40 41
There was also Hans Ulrich Rudel in Paraguay, the former Luftwaffe air ace. Rudel was personally close to Stroessner in Paraguay, and became a good buddy of Chile’s Pinochet as well. The host governments of these Nazi agents usually suffered, since they traded the secrets to which they were privy as easily as any other commodity. What didn’t suffer was the trade in their favorite commodities - arms and dope.
With the help of Otto Skorzeny in Spain and Portugal and Reinhard Gehlen in Germany, these Nazis helped Ricord coordinate the South American secret services with the young European fascist death squads. Ricord’s Germans and his entrenched Corsicans had Trafficante and his Syndicate allies by the economic and military throat in Latin America, and so were regarded as a security problem by the Syndicate’s global partner, CIA covert operations.
Unfortunately for Ricord, when Pompidou decided to use the CIA to gain control of French intelligence, the French Connection was doomed. Pompidou replaced the head of the SDECE and dismissed more than 800 agents. The criminal contingent of SAC was also decimated, leaving the Union Corse’s political power severely curtailed. Nixon’s ally pulled the political protection out from under the Marseille labs and Ricord’s SDECE distribution network. According to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, Pompidou’s police busted at least ten major SAC heroin distributors in France in 1970-71.
On April 5, 1971, a ranking SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage) agent, Roger Delouette, was intercepted on a freighter docked at Elizabeth, New Jersey with 45 kilos of Marseille white heroin stuffed into his VW van. Delouette had worked for SDECE officer Col. Roger Trinquier in Operation X, selling Laotian-derived heroin in support of the French Indochina War, as had Col. Paul Fournier, implicated by Delouette as his commanding SDECE officer in the heroin smuggling operation for which he had just been busted. Delouette’s van, aboard the freighter Atlantic Cognac, was flagged to the customs port officer by a CIA tip. Delouette had planned to rendezvous with Claude-Andre Pastou of Christian David’s Ricord-connected dope distribution network.
Col. Fournier’s real name, according to Col. Roger Barberot, the SDECE powerhouse who worked closely with Auguste Ricord in Bolivia, was Col. Paul Ferrer. This was initially suspected to be an SDECE attempt to blow up the Franco-American drug accord that allowed Pompidou to use American muscle to take control of the SDECE. But two smugglers, both arrested separately in 1972 with large heroin loads, identified a photo of Corsican smuggler Dominic Mariani, not directly connected to the SDECE, as Delouette’s real handler. Mariani confirmed, 2/19/1972, his connection to Delouette to French police, and Claude Pastou confirmed the Christian David link, turning this into a straightforward criminal investigation, and the supposed SDECE link into bait, disinformation. Both Delouette and Fournier were indicted, but Fournier remained unextradictable in France. Delouette pleaded guilty, in November, 1971, getting a radically-reduced sentence of five years for his apparent cooperation. 42
Major bust followed major bust as the joint BNDD-CIA-French intelligence operation unraveled the Corsican-SDECE structure. Between 1971 and 1973 virtually the entire Ricord network, by this time actually controlled by Ricord’s top lieutenants like Christian David, was destroyed. David himself was captured and sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. federal prison on 12/2/1972. It made great ‘French connection’ publicity for Nixon, of course, but it actually increased the volume of heroin coming into the U.S., since it destroyed the American Syndicate’s only competition. The old heroin distribution hub of Marseille was replaced by Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sicily. In early 1976, the DEA’s chief of international operations, John Cusack, officially reported, “It appears almost certain that the bulk of the white heroin found during 1975 in the inner-city areas of our eastern cities has been Asian no. 4 smuggled from Bangkok.” 43 44
In 1973, Thai national Puttaporn Khramkhruan was busted for attempting to smuggle 59 pounds of pure white heroin through JFK airport. Puttaporn Khramkhruan was an officer of the Thai-based KMT, and on the CIA payroll of the Agency for International Development (AID) as part of their Thai anti-drug border police training program. His contact for the heroin was the U.S. consul in Chiang Mai. This was heroin destined for Trafficante’s U.S. distribution system. Citing national security, the CIA had the case squelched and Mr. Khramkhruan sent home. “It was ironic,” reported the 1977 House Government Operations subcommittee that brought this case to light, “that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.” It was also ironic that although Congress could put its finger on it, it couldn’t do a damn thing about it. 45
In 1974, at about the same time that Nixon was collapsing, the Office of Public Safety (OPS) within the Agency for International Development (AID), the CIA’s major international police trainer, was spending hundreds of millions training and supplying police in at least 50 countries. But the OPS had been publicly associated with Vietnam’s mass-murdering Operation Phoenix, which it ran, and with Costa Gavras’ 1973 film State of Siege, about the OPS torture-murder operation against the Tupemaro guerrillas in Uruguay. Congress, in its righteous indignation, reacted by outlawing the use of foreign assistance money for police training - except for drug enforcement programs. OPS agents simply became DEA agents and went right on with their work. The OPS became the DEA. Instead of being paid through AID, they were now paid through DEA from the State Department’s Narcotics Assistance program. 46 47
Since the CIA is charged with international counterintelligence, and the FBI with domestic counterintelligence, the two agencies, by charter, have always functioned together through shared offices (the State Department’s Counterterrorism Office) and liaison officers (the FBI’s international Legal Attachés). That is, the FBI always was the CIA-FBI. The CIA-FBI merged with the DEA in 1982, when the DEA was put under Justice Department-FBI control, and is now the largest overt foreign intelligence and police training operation of the U.S. government. Congress, in other words, in 1974, aside from teaching the CIA a good lesson in political optics, did nothing. 48
In 1969, Nixon’s Heroin Committee bought off Turkish opium production for a pittance in foreign aid, $35 million, encouraging Turkey to reduce the number of provinces authorized to grow opium, suggesting peanuts as an appropriate substitute crop. The Turks took the money, but continued to grow opium, understanding that the suggested substitute was peanuts. The temporary shortage of Turkish product only strengthened the KMT-connected Chinese gangs running Southeast Asian dope. Efforts were made by a DEA team in Bangkok to stem heroin exports from there, but these amounted to little more than public relations and price support for Thailand’s KMT-connected dope-dealing military, covered by the arrest of a few Asian fall guys. The Mexicans picked up any slack let drop by the Asians. 49
Afghanistan and Pakistan, responding both to public pressure on the Golden Triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand, and a 2-year drought in Southeast Asia, soon captured the European heroin market. Then Nixon’s ally, the Shah, announced that Iran would resume opium production, putting 50% more land under poppies than Nixon had just bought off in Turkey. This move was wildly popular in Iran - hailed as a defense of traditional Iranian culture, which it was.
Scoring the opium seed capsules, Shiraz, Persia, c.1920. An elegant Teherani lady enjoys the results; Asia, c.1925; Eagle-Earth opium, the Shah’s brand
In January, 1971, Nixon used his good financial relations with Turkey to set up the regional Mideast BNDD headquarters in Ankara. That enabled CIA officers Dewey Clarridge and Henry Schardt, operating from the BNDD office in Ankara, to support the fascist Grey Wolf death squads coordinated by Turkey’s military right wing to overthrow the Turkish government. The death squads began a murderous dirty war aimed at the progressive left that lasted for more than a decade. The BNDD office in Ankara coordinated weapons deliveries to the Turkish army in the name of the anti-drug effort, and the Turkish military went directly into the heroin business with the Grey Wolves and the CIA, using the CIA’s weapons to attack the Kurds.
By the early 1980s Southeast Asian production had recovered, so that the sum total of Nixon’s pressure on Turkey and Ricord’s ‘French Connection’ was to vastly strengthen the world’s heroin production capacity. And Nixon left the geographically flexible American Syndicate distribution apparatus, controlled largely by Teamster partner Santos Trafficante, a longtime Nixon financier, almost completely untouched. These were the conclusions of the 1977 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, as well as virtually every other expert. 50
Paraguay simply became a German-American rather than a German-French operation. Ricord himself was extradited to the U.S. in 1973, but his Paraguayan partner, Pastor Coronel, the chief of Stroessner’s secret police, was left stronger than ever, the recipient of a mountain of Nixon’s “antidrug” and “antiterrorism” aid. Pastor Coronel was very “antidrug” and “anticommunist.” He attended all of Hunt’s Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation meetings, along with most of the CIA’s Latin American station chiefs
And we still finance this same dope-dealing Paraguayan military structure today, promulgating the same Nixonian victory-is-just-around-the-corner doublespeak, word for word: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2014 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: “Paraguay is a major drug transit country and money laundering center. A multi-billion dollar contraband trade, fed in part by endemic institutional corruption, occurs in the border region shared with Argentina and Brazil (the tri-border area, or TBA) and facilitates much of the money laundering in Paraguay. While the Government of Paraguay suspects proceeds from narcotics trafficking are often laundered in the country, it is difficult to determine what percentage of the total amount of laundered funds is generated from narcotics sales or is controlled by domestic and/or international drug trafficking organizations, organized crime, or terrorist groups.”
U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Fact Sheet, September 7, 2016: “Paraguay is a partner in hemispheric initiatives to improve counter-narcotics cooperation, protect intellectual property rights, combat money laundering, trafficking in persons, and other illicit cross-border activities. Paraguay has taken significant steps to combat illegal activity in the tri-border area it shares with Argentina and Brazil. It also participates in antiterrorism programs and fora with its neighbors and the United States…. The U.S. Government aids the Government of Paraguay in stemming corruption, creating jobs, reducing rural poverty, and countering international criminal organizations operating in the country.”
That is, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs publishes the fact that Paraguay is a dope-dealing narcostate, and then the U.S. State Department publishes the fact that we are in the business of aiding this narcostate. U.S. aid, with, by their own admission, no strategic effect whatever over the decades on the flow of drugs. The aid just strengthens the very Paraguayan military actually dealing the drugs, in the name of the antidrug effort, using the antidrug military equipment to actually deliver the drugs. Stroessner’s long-time right-hand man, Mario Abdo Benítez, is the father of the current President of Paraguay, of the same name, and the same military dope-dealing structure.
Nixon’s most dangerous drug enforcement unit, Lucien Conein’s Special Projects (Assassination) unit within the Intelligence Group/Operations of the newly-created DEA, was a collection of Latin CIA killers, many Trafficante operatives, calling themselves DEA Clandestine Operations Network, DEACON. The CIA suggested that “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” But the key CIA players, including Trafficante’s Cubans, Conein’s Corsicans and Vietnamese, and their related Thai, Laotian and Burmese powerhouses, went almost completely untouched. Ricord’s operatives and small independents who competed with Don Santos found Conein’s various regional Deacon units hell on wheels, but Trafficante’s operation, the largest and most visible dope distribution network, were in business with the DEA.
Numerous DEA officials confirmed to noted journalist George Crile III that “meetings were held to decide whom to target and what method of assassination to employ. Conein then assigned the task to three of the former CIA operatives assigned to the Connecticut Avenue safe house.” In September, 1972, to coordinate with Conein’s DEACON teams, the CIA created the Bureau of Narcotics Intelligence Network, BUNCIN, a hit squad run directly from the CIA. 51 52
Conein shared his DEA office with his old OSS comrade and Bay of Pigs veteran, CIA weapons manufacturer Mitch WerBell III, charged with his partner, Robert Vesco, with narcotics and weapons violations. DEACON 1 became, essentially, a CORU (The Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) operation run by right-wing terrorist Orlando Bosch, cofounder of CORU with Luis Posada, the Cubana airline bomber. Posada helped Felix Rodriguez supply Barry Seal with tons of cocaine to finance the Contras from the U.S. airbase at Ilopango in El Salvador (see ‘Contra Cocaine,’ in Vol. II). Bosch was named by Marita Lorenz as one of the ZR/RIFLE assassination engineers she met with.
DEACON 1 operative Carlos Hernandez Rumbaut, a Bay of Pigs vet and convicted drug dealer, became second in command of the Costa Rican Narcotics Division, upon CIA Director George Bush’s 1976 refusal to extradite him for his 1969 drug wholesale conviction. Hernandez had been the bodyguard of Vesco’s close friend and partner Pepe Figueres, Costa Rica’s former President. Conein was running Hernandez as a DEA agent out of DEACON. Hernandez was issued a U.S. diplomatic passport, using that cover to help supply CIA partner Santos Trafficante with much of his South American cocaine from his protected Costa Rican diplomatic perch.
U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), Costa Rica, 2017: “Drug traffickers take advantage of Costa Rica’s strategic location, porous borders, thinly patrolled waters, and lack of a standing military to make it a major transit country for illicit drugs. According to U.S. Department of Defense estimates, 83 percent of U.S.-bound South American cocaine passed through the Mexico/Central American corridor in the first half of 2014.”
“The development of its Border Police force and improvements to its Coast Guard are tangible examples of Costa Rica’s commitment to disrupting the flow of illicit drugs….Ministry of Public Security elements are more closely coordinating in drug interdiction activities, with large seizures in 2015 facilitated by the combined efforts of the Coast Guard, the Air Surveillance Service, the Counter-drug Police, and the Fuerza Publica, including the Border Police. The United States actively supports the further professionalization of Costa Rican police, including updating the academy curriculum.”
The Costa Rican police take our money, equipment and training – and that’s tangible proof of commitment? The United States officially acknowledges no strategic progress whatever over the decades in controlling drug exports from Costa Rica, while continuing to do what is has always done over the decades, actively support the dope dealing Costa Rican police, in the name of the antidrug effort. “Fighting drugs in Costa Rica” has been U.S. policy since Chiquita Banana and Vice President Nixon.
Bibliography
Abel,Ernest L.:Marihuana:Plenum Press,1980
Achterberg,Jeanne:1:Imagery In Healing:New Science Libary,1985
2:Woman As Healer:Shambhala,1990
Aeschylus:Collected Works:Herbert Weir Smyth,tr.,Harvard University Press,1922
Allegro,John:1:The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross:Doubleday & Company,1970
2:The Dead Sea Scrolls:Penguin Books,1964
AMA:The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine:Random House,1989
Anderson,Edgar:Plants,Man & Life:University of California Press,1969
Anderson,Scott & Anderson,Jon Lee:Inside The League:Dodd,Mead & Company,1986
Andrews,George & Solomon,David:The Coca Leaf And Cocaine Papers:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1975
Apollodorus:The Library:Sir J.G.Frazer,tr.,Harvard University Press,1989
Apollonius Rhodius:TheArgonautica:R.C.Seaton,tr.,G.P. Putnam’s Sons,1921
Ardrey,Robert:1:African Genesis:Dell Publishing Co.,1961
2:The Territorial Imperative:Dell Publishing Co.,1966
3:The Social Contract:Dell Publishing Co.,1970
Aristotle:The Athenian Constitution:P.J.Rhodes,tr.,Penguin Books,1984
Arms,Suzanne:Immaculate Deception:Bantam Books,1977
Artaud,Antonin:1:Artaud Anthology:City Lights Books,1965
2:The Peyote Dance:Helen Weaver,tr.,Farrar,Strauss and Giroux,1976
3:The Theater and its Double:Grove Press,1958
Ashley,Richard:Cocaine:St.Martin’s Press,1975
Athanassakis,Apostolos N.:The Homeric Hymns:The Johns Hopkins University Press,1976
Attwood, Shaun: War on Drugs:Gadfly Press, 2017, Kindle Edition
Augustine,Saint:The City of God Against The Pagans:David S.Wiesen,tr.,Harvard University Press,1968
The Badianus Manuscript:Emily Walcott Emmart,tr.,The Johns Hopkins Press,1940
Baer,Robert: Sleeping with the Devil: Crown Publishers,2004
Bailyn,Bernard,et al:The Great Republic:D.C.Heath and Company,1977
Bakalar,James B. & Grinspoon,Lester:Drug Control In A Free Society:Cambridge University Press,1988
Bamford,James:A Pretext for War:Anchor,2005
Barber,Elizabeth Wayland:Women’s Work:W.W.Norton & Company,1994
Bardach, Ann Louise:Without Fidel:Scribner,2009
Barnstone,Willis:Sappho:New York University Press,1965
Barrett,Leonard:The Rastafarians:Beacon Press,1977
Baum,Dan:Smoke and Mirrors:Little,Brown and Co.,1996
Beowulf:Michael Alexander,tr.,Penguin Books,1973
Bergen, Peter: United States of Jihad, Broadway Books – Crown, 2016
Berntsen, Gary and Pezzulo, Ralph: Jawbreaker, Crown Publishers, 2005
Beschloss,Michael R.:Taking Charge:Simon & Schuster,1997
Boardman,John, Griffin,Jasper & Murray,Oswyn:1:Greece and the Hellenistic World:Oxford University Press,1989
2:The Roman World:Oxford University Press,1989
Bordin,Ruth:Woman and Temperance:Temple University Press,1981
Bourke,John Gregory:On the Border with Crook:Charles Scribner’s Sons,1891
Bovenkerk, Frank & Yesilgoz, Yucel: The Turkish Mafia: Milo Books Ltd, 2011, Kindle edition
Brecher,Edward M.,ed.:Licit & Illicit Drugs:Little,Brown and Company,1972
Brewton,Pete:The Mafia,CIA & George Bush:S.P.I. Books,1992
Brooks,Rosa:How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everythng:Simon & Schuster,2017
Broun,Heywood & Leech,Margaret:Anthony Comstock:Albert & Charles Boni,1927
Brown,Dee:Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee:Henry Holt and Company,1970
Brown,Peter:Augustine of Hippo:Faber & Faber,1967
Brunton,T.Lauder:Pharmacology,Therapeutics and Materia Medica:Lea Brothers & Co.,1889
Budge,E.A. Wallis:1:The Mummy:Collier Macmillan Publishers,1974
2:The Egyptian Book Of The Dead:Dover Publications,1967
3:Egyptian Magic:Dover Publications,1971
4:The Divine Origin Of The Craft Of The Herbalist:Culpeper House,1928
Burroughs,William & Ginsberg,Allen:The Yaje Letters:City Lights Books,1971
Butler,Smedley D.:War Is A Racket:Round Table Press,1935
CAH:The Cambridge Ancient History:The Cambridge University Press
1:1:Prolegomena and Prehistory
1:2:Early History of the Middle East
2:1:The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c.1800-1380 BC
2:2:The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c.1380-1000 BC
3:1:The Prehistory of the Balkans, The Middle East and the Aegean
3:3:The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries BC
4:The Persian Empire and the West
5:Athens: 478-401 BC
6:Macedon: 401-301 BC
7:1:The Hellenistic World
8:Rome and the Mediterranean, 218-133 BC
9:The Roman Republic, 133-44 BC
10:The Augustan Empire, 44 BC-AD 70
11:The Imperial Peace, AD 70-192
12:The Imperial Crisis and Recovery, AD 193-324
Califano,Joseph A.Jr.:Radical Surgery:Random House,1994
Canfield,Michael&Weberman,Alan J.:Coup d’etat In America:The Third Press,1975
Cantor,Norman F.:The Civilization of the Middle Ages:Harper Collins Publishers,1993
Carter,Howard:The Tomb of Tutankhamen:E.P. Dutton & Co.,1972
Carthy,J.D. & Ebling,F.J.,eds.:The Natural History of Aggression:Academic Press,1964
Castillo,Celerino III & Harmon,Dave:Powderburns:Mosaic Press,1994
Chandrasekaran, Rajiv: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Vintage, 2006
Chomsky,Noam:1:The Chomsky Reader:Pantheon Books,1987
2: Rethinking Camelot:South End Press,1993
3: Deterring Democracy:South End Press,1991
Churchland,Patricia Smith:Neurophilosophy:The MIT Press,1989
Clark,W.E.LeGros:History of the Primates:The University of Chicago Press,1965
Clarke, Richard A: Your Government Failed You: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008, Kindle Edition
Clarke, Richard A:2: Against all Enemies: Free Press, 2004, Kindle Edition
Cockburn,Alexander&St.Clair,Jeffrey:Whiteout:Verso,1998
Cockburn,Leslie:1:Out of Control:The Atlantic Monthly Press,1987
2:& Alexander Cockburn:Dangerous Liaison:Harper Collins,1991
Cocteau,Jean:Opium:Peter Owen Ltd.,1968
Cohn,Norman:Europe’s Inner Demons:Basic Books,1975
Coll,Steve:Ghost Wars:Penguin Books,2005,ebook edition
Coll,Steve:2:Directorate S:Penguin Press,2018,ebook edition
Cook,Arthur Bernard:Zeus:Cambridge University Press,1925
Copenhaver,Brian P.:Hermetica:Cambridge University Press,1992
Corn, David: Blond Ghost: Simon & Schuster, 1994
Corson, William R,:The Armies of Ignorance:The Dial Press, 1977
Coulter,Harris L.:Divided Legacy:Wehawken Book Co.,1975
Coulter,Merle C. & Dittmer,Howard J.:The Story Of The Plant Kingdom:The University of Chicago Press,1972
Churchill,Ward & Vander Wall,Jim:Agents of Repression:South End Press,1988
The Creel Report:Da Capo Press,1972
Crystal,David:The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language:Cambridge University Press,1987
Cultural Survival:Coca and Cocaine:Cultural Survival,1986
Cumont,Franz:The Mysteries of Mithra:Dover Publications,1956
Curtis,Mark:Secret Affairs:Serpent’s Tail,2011
Daniel,Glyn:The First Civilizations:Thomas Y.Crowell Company,1968
Darrow,Clarence & Yarros,Victor S.:TheProhibition Mania:Boni and Liveright,1927
Dart,Raymond A.:Adventures With The Missing Link:The Institutes Press,1967
Dartmouth:The Dartmouth Bible:Houghton Mifflin Company,1961
Davies,David:The Centenarians Of The Andes:Anchor Press,1975
Davis,John H.:Mafia Kingfish:McGraw-Hill,1989
DeKorne,Jim:Psychedelic Shamanism:Loompanics Unlimited,1994
Deno,Richard A., Rowe,Thomas D., Brodie,Donald C.:The Profession of Pharmacy: J.P. Lippincott Company,1966
Detienne,Marcel and Vernant,Jean-Pierre:The Cuisine Of Sacrifice Among The Greeks:The University of Chicago Press,1989
Dio Cassius:Dio’s Roman History:Earnest Cary,tr.,MacMillan Company,1914
The Dispensatory of the United States of America,13th Edition:J.B. Lippincott And Co.,1874
The Dispensatory of the United States of America,20th Edition:J.B. Lippincott Company,1918
Dobkin de Rios,Marlene:Visionary Vine:Waveland Press,1984
Dodds,E.R.:1:The Greeks and the Irrational:University of CaliforniaPress,1951
2:Pagan And Christian In An Age Of Anxiety:W.W.Norton & Company,1965
Drake,William Daniel Jr.:The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana:Straight Arrow Books,1971
Dreyfuss,Robert:Devil’s Game:Metropolitan Books,2006
Drug Facts and Comparisons:J.B. Lippincott,1989
Dubois,W.E.B.:The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the U.S.A.,1638-1870:Dover Publications,1970
Duke,Steven B. & Gross,Albert C.:America’s Longest War:G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1993
Eisenberg,Dennis; Dan,Uri; Landau,Eli:Meyer Lansky:PaddingtonPress,1979
Eisenhower,Dwight D.; Mandate for Change:Doubleday,1963
Eisler,Riane:The Chalice & the Blade:Harper & Row,1987
Eliade,Mircea:Shamanism:Princeton University Press,1974
Ellis,William T.:Billy Sunday:The John C.Winston Co.,1914
Ellul,Jacques:Propaganda:Random House,1973
Engelmann,Larry:Intemperance:The Free Press,1979
Epstein,Edward Jay:Agency Of Fear:G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1977
Erman,Adolf,ed.:The Ancient Egyptians:Harper & Row,1966
Euripides:Collected Works:Arthur S.Way,tr.,Harvard University Press,1912
Euripides:The Bacchae:Michael Cacoyannis,tr.,New American Library,1982
Eusebius:The History of the Church:G.A.Williamson,tr.,Dorset Press,1965
Evans,Sir Arthur:The Palace Of Minos At Knossos:Macmillan And Co.,1921-1935
Evans-Wentz,W.Y.:The Tibetan Book Of The Dead:OxfordUniversity Press,1968
Fenton,Kevin:Disconnecting the Dots:Trine Day,2011,Kindle edition
Finegan,Jack:Light From The Ancient Past:Princeton University Press,1959
Fleming,Paula Richardson & Luskey,Judith:The North American Indians:Dorset Press,1986
Fontenrose,Joseph:The Delphic Oracle:University of California Press,1978
Forbes,Thomas R.:The Midwife and the Witch:Yale University Press,1966
Fort,Charles F.:Medical Economy During The Middle Ages:Augustus M. Kelley,1973
Fowden,Garth:The Egyptian Hermes:Princeton University Press,1986
Frazier,Jack:The Marijuana Farmers:Solar Age Press,1974
Frend,W.H.C.:1:The Rise of Christianity:Fortress Press,1984
2:Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church:NewYork University Press,1967
3:Religion Popular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries:Variorum Reprints, 1976
4:The Early Church:Fortress Press,1982
Freud,Sigmund:Cocaine Papers:Robert Byck,ed.,Stonehill Publishing Company,1974
Friedman,Milton & Szasz,Thomas S.:On Liberty And Drugs:The Drug Policy Foundation Press,1992
Fulsom,Don:The Mafia’s President:Thomas Dunne Books,2017,Kindle edition
Furnas,J.C.:The Late Demon Rum:G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1965
Furst,Peter:1:Hallucinogens and Culture:Chandler & Sharp Publishers,1988
2:Mushrooms:Chelsea House Publishers,1986
Gaddis,John Lewis:The Cold War:Penguin Books,2006
Gaskell,G.A.:Dictionary Of All Scriptures And Myths:The Julian Press,1973
Gaskin,Stephen:Jurisdictional Statement:The Farm,1973
Gelb,I.J.:A Study of Writing:The University of Chicago Press,1963
Gervais,C.H.:The Rumrunners:Firefly Books,1980
Gibson,J.C.L.:Canaanite Myths And Legends:T.&T.Clark,1978
Gimbutas,Marija:1:The Goddesses and Gods Of Old Europe:University of California Press,1982
2:The Language Of The Goddess:Harper Collins Publishers,1989
3:The Civilization Of The Goddess:Harper Collins Publishers,1991
Ginger,Ray:Eugene V. Debs:Macmillan,1949
Ginsberg,Allen:Allen Verbatim:Gordon Ball,ed.,McGraw-Hill Book Company,1974
Goldman,Eric F.:Rendezvous With Destiny:Vintage Books,1956
Goodman,Melvin A.:Whistleblower at the CIA:City Lights Books,2017, Kindle Edition
Goodman,Melvin A.:2: National Insecurity::City Lights Books,2013, Kindle Edition
Gordon,Cyrus H.:1:The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilization:W.W.Norton & Company,1965
2:Ugarit And Minoan Crete:W.W.Norton,1966
Gosch,Martin A. & Hammer,Richard:The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano:Little Brown and Company,1975
Goshen,Charles E.:Drinks,Drugs,and Do-Gooders;The Free Press,1973
Goodall,Jane:In The Shadow Of Man:Houghton Mifflin Company,1988
Graves,Robert:1:The Greek Myths,George Braziller,Inc.,1959
2:The White Goddess:Vintage Books,1959
3:Apuleius’ The Golden Ass:Farrar,Strauss & Giroux,1951
Gray,Mike:DrugCrazy:Random House,1998
The Great Geographical Atlas:Rand McNally:1989
Grieve,M.:A Modern Herbal:Dover Publications,1971
Griggs,Barbara:Green Pharmacy:The Viking Press,1981
Grinspoon,Lester:1:Marihuana Reconsidered:Harvard University Press,1971
2:& Bakalar,James B.:Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered:Basic Books,1979
Grossinger,Richard:1:Planet Medicine:Anchor Books,1980
2:Embryogenesis:North Atlantic Books,1986
Guignebert,Charles:The Jewish World in the Time of Jesus:University Books,1965
Gutman,Roy:Banana Diplomacy:Simon & Schuster,1988
Haard,Richard & Karen:1:Poisonous & Hallucinogenic Mushrooms:Cloudburst Press,1975
2:Foraging for Edible Wild Mushrooms:Cloudburst Press,1974
Haggard,Howard W.:Devils,Drugs and Doctors:Halcyon House,1929
Haller,John S.Jr.:American Medicine in Transition,1840-1910:University of Illinois Press,1981
Hand,Wayland D.,ed.:American Folk Medicine:A Symposium:University Of California Press,1976
Harner,Michael J.:1:The Jivaro:Anchor Books,1973
2:ed.:Hallucinogens and Shamanism:Oxford University Press,1973
3:The Way of the Shaman:Bantam Books,1986
Harris,Bob:Growing Wild Mushrooms:Wingbow Press,1976
Harrison,Jane Ellen:1:Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion:Cambridge University Press,1908
2:Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion:Cambridge University Press,1921
3:Themis:Cambridge University Press,1912
Hass,Hans:The Human Animal:Dell Publishing Co.,1970
Hawkes,Jacquetta:The Atlas of Early Man:St.Martin’s Press,1993
Hawkins,Gerald S.:Stonehenge Decoded:Dell Publishing Co.,1965
Helmer,John:Drugs and Minority Oppression:The Seabury Press,1975
Herer,Jack:The Emperor Wears No Clothes:Hemp Publishing,1993
Herman,Edward S.:The Real Terror Network:South End Press,1982
Herodotus:The History:David Grene,tr.,The University of Chicago Press,1987
Hesiod:The Collected Works,The Homeric Hymns and Homerica:Hugh G.Evelyn-White,tr.,G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1914
Hersh,Seymour M.:The Dark Side of Camelot:Little,Brown and Company,1997
High Times:1:High Times Greatest Hits:St. Martin’s Press,1994
2:High Times Encyclopedia:Stonehill Publishing Company,1978
Hill,G.F.:Illustrations Of School Classics:Macmillan and Co.,1903
Hinckle,Warren & Turner,William W.:The Fish Is Red:Harper & Row,1981
Hodes, Cyrus and Sedra, Mark: The Search for Security in Post-Taliban Afghanistan: Routledge, 2013
Hoffer,A. & Osmond,H.:The Hallucinogens:Academic Press,1967
Hofmann,Abbie with Silvers,Jonathan:Steal This Urine Test:Penguin Books,1987
Hofmann,Albert:LSD,My Problem Child:J.P.Tarcher,1983
Hogshire,Jim:Opium For the Masses:Loompanics,1994
Holbrook,Stewart H.:The Golden Age of Quackery:The Macmillan Company,1959
The Holy Bible:King James Version:Tyndale House Publishers,1979
The Holy Bible:Revised Standard Version:Meridian,1974
Homer:1:The Iliad:Richmond Lattimore,tr.,The University of Chicago Press,1967
2:The Odyssey,Robert Fitzgerald,tr.,Doubleday and Company,1963
Howell,F.Clark & Bourliere,Francois,eds.:African Ecology And Human Evolution:Aldine Publishing Company,1966
Hughes,Muriel Joy:Women Healers in Medieval Life and Literature:Books For Libraries Press,1968
Huxley,Aldous:The Doors of Perception:Harper & Row,1954
Hyams,Edward:Dionysus:The Macmillan Company,1965
Inglis,Brian:The Forbidden Game:Charles Scribner’s Sons,1975
Jacobs,Seth:America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam:Duke University Press,2004
James,Wharton:Learning from the Indians:Running Press,1974
Jayne,Walter Addison:The Healing Gods of Ancient Civilizations:University Books,1962
Jonas,Susanne:The Battle for Guatemala:Westview Press,1991
Josephson,Emanuel:Merchants in Medicine:Chedney Press,1941
Josephus:1:The Essential Writings:Paul L. Maier,tr.,Kregel Publications,1988
2:The Jewish War:Penguin Books,1967
Jung,C.G.:The Collected Works:Princeton University Press,1956
5:Symbols Of Transformation
10:Civilization In Transition
11:Psychology And Religion:West And East
12:Psychology And Alchemy
13:Alchemical Studies
14:Mysterium Coniunctionis
15:The Spirit In Man,Art,And Literature
Kahin,George McTurnan, & Lewis,John W.:The United States In Vietnam:Dell Publishing Co.,1969
Kaplan,John:Marijuana-The New Prohibition:Thomas Y.Crowell Company,1975
Karnow,Stanley:Vietnam:The Viking Press,1983
Karlsen,Carol F.:The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:W.W.Norton,1987
Kennedy,David M.:Birth Control In America:Yale University Press,1976
Kennedy,Jospeh:Coca Exotica:Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,1985
Kerenyi,Karl:1:Dionysos:Princeton University Press,1976
2:Asklepios:Pantheon Books,1959
3:Eleusis:Pantheon Books,1967
4:Prometheus:Thames And Hudson,1963
5:The Religion Of The Greeks And Romans:E.P.Dutton & Co.,1962
6:Athene:Spring Publications,1978
7:Hermes:Spring Publications,1976
Kerr,K.Austin:Organized For Prohibition:Yale University Press,1985
Kick,Russ,ed.:You Are Being Lied To:Disinformation Books,2001
Kick,Russ,ed.:You Are Still Being Lied To:Disinformation Books,2009
King,Rufus:The Drug Hang-Up:W.W. Norton & Company,1972
Kinzer,Stephen:The Brothers:Henry Holt,2013
Kinzer,Stephen:2:Overthrow:Times Books,2006
Kluver,Heinrich:Mescal And Mechanisms Of Hallucinations:The University of Chicago Press,1971
Kramer,Samuel Noah:1:The Sumerians:The University of Chicago Press,1963
2:Sumerian Mythology:Harper & Row,1961
Krauss,Melvyn B. & Lazear,Edward P.:Searching ForAlternatives:Hoover Institution Press,1991
Krippner,Stanley & Rubin,Daniel:The Kirlian Aura:Anchor Books,1974
Krout,John Allen:The Origins of Prohibition:Alfred A. Knopf,1925
Kruger,Henrik:The Great Heroin Coup:South End Press,1980
Kruger,Henrik & Meldon,Jerry,The Great Heroin Coup Updated:Trine Day,2016
Kwitny,Jonathan:1:Vicious Circles:W.W.Norton & Co.,1979
Kwitny,Jonathan:2:The Crimes of Patriots:W.W.Norton & Co.,1987
LaBarre,Weston:The Peyote Cult:Archon Books,1975
Lacey,Robert:Little Man:Little,Brown and Company,1991
Lader,Lawrence:The Margaret Sanger Story:Doubleday & Company,1955
Lajoux,Jean-Dominique:The Rock Paintings of Tassili:Thames and Hudson,1963
Landels,J.G.:Engineering in the Ancient World:University of California Press,1978
Lane,Earle:Electrophotography:And/Or Press,1975
Lane,Mark:Plausible Denial:Thunder’s Mouth Press,1991
Latimer,Dean & Goldberg,Jeff:Flowers in the Blood:Franklin Watts,1981
Lea,Henry Charles:The Inquisition:Russell & Russell,1958
Leakey,L.S.B.:Adam’s Ancestors:Harper & Row,1960
Leaney,A.R.C.:The Jewish And Christian World, 200 BC To AD 200: Cambridge University Press,1984
Leary,Timothy, Metzner,Ralph, & Alpert,Richard:The Psychedelic Experience:University Books,1964
Lee,Martin A.& Schlain,Bruce:Acid Dreams:Grove Press,1985
Léons,Madeline Barbara&Sanabria,Harry:Coca, Cocaine,and the Bolivian Reality:State University of New York Press,1997
Levine,Michael with Kavanau-Levine,Laura:The Big White Lie: Thunder’s Mouth Press,1993
Levy,G.Rachel:Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age:Harper & Row,1963
Linder,Amnon:The Jews In Roman Imperial Legislation:Wayne State University Press,1987
Lindesmith,Alfred R.:Addiction And Opiates:Aldine Publishing Company,1968
Linklater,Magnus, Hilton,Isabel, Ascherson,Neal:The Nazi Legacy:Holt, Rinehart & Winston,1984
Loehr,Franklin:The Power Of Prayer On Plants:New American Library,1959
Long,James W.:The Essential Guide To Prescription Drugs: Harper & Row,1977
Lorenz,Konrad Z.:King Solomon’s Ring:Thomas Y. Crowell Company,1952
Lyons,Albert S. & Petrucelli,Joseph R.:Medicine:Abradale Press,1987
The Mabinogion:Jeffrey Gantz,tr.,Penguin Books,1976
Maccoby,Hyam:1:Revolution in Judaea:Orbach and Chambers,1973
2:The Sacred Executioner:Thames and Hudson,1982
3:The Myth-Maker:Harper Collins Publishers,1987
4:Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil:The Free Press,1992
MacMullen,Ramsay:Paganism in the Roman Empire:Yale University Press,1981
Mainage,Th.:Les Religions De La Préhistoire:L'Age Paléolithique:Desclée,DeBrouwer & Cie.,1921
The Malleus Maleficarum Of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger:Dover Publications,1971
Mangelsdorf,Paul C.:Corn:Harvard University Press,1974
Marks,Geoffrey and Beatty,William K.:The Story of Medicine in America:Charles Scribner’s Sons,1973
Marks,John:The Search for the Manchurian Candidate:Dell,1988
Marshack,Alexander:The Roots Of Civilization:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1972
McKenna,Terence:1:Food Of The Gods:Bantam Books,1993
2:The Archaic Revival:Harper Collins Publishers,1991
McCoy,Alfred W.:1:The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia:Harper & Row,1972
2:The Politics of Heroin:Lawrence Hill Books,1991
McCoy,Alfred W. & Block,Alan A.:War on Drugs:Westview Press,1992
McIlvaine,Charles & Macadam,Robert K.:One Thousand American Fungi:Dover Publications,1973
McMaster, H.R.: Dereliction of Duty: HarperCollins,1997
Mead,G.R.S.:1:Fragments of a Faith Forgotten:University Books,1960
2:Apollonius of Tyana:University Books,1966
Meek,Theophile James:Hebrew Origins:Harper & Row,1960
Mellaart,James:1:Catal Huyuk:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1967 2:Earliest Civilizations of the Near East:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1965
Mertz,Henriette:Pale Ink:The Swallow Press,1972
Merz,Charles:The Dry Decade:Doubleday,Duran & Co.,1931
Messick,Hank:Syndicate Abroad:Macmillan,1969
Mezzrow,Mezz & Wolfe,Bernard:Really the Blues:Doubleday & Company,1972
Mikuriya,Tod H.,ed.:Marijuana:Medical Papers:Medi-Comp Press,1973
Mils,C. Wright:The Power Elite:Oxord University Press,2000
Mills,James:The Underground Empire:Doubleday & Company,1986
Millspaugh,Charles R.:American Medicinal Plants:Dover Publications,1974
Milt,Harry:The Revised Basic Handbook on Alcoholism:Scientific Aids Publications,1977
Minucius,Marcus:The Octavius:G.W.Clarke,tr.,Newman Press,1974
The Mishnah:Jacob Neusner,tr.,Yale University Press,1988
Mizruchi,Ephraim H.,ed.:The Substance of Sociology:Meredith Corporation,1973
Moldea,Dan E.:1:Dark Victory:Viking Penguin,1986
2:The Hoffa Wars:Paddington Press,1978
Morales,Edmundo:Cocaine:The University of Arizona Press,1989
Moran,William L.:The Amarna Letters:The Johns Hopkins University Press,1992
Morgan,Lewis H.:Ancient Society:Harvard University Press,1878/1964
Morris,Desmond:The Naked Ape:Dell Publishing Co.,1973
Mortimer,W.Golden:History Of Coca:J.H.Vail & Company,1901
Murray,Margaret A.:1:The God of the Witches:Oxford University Press,1970
2:The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:Oxford University Press,1971
Musto,David F.:The American Disease:Yale University Press,1973
Myerhoff,Barbara G.:Peyote Hunt:Cornell University Press,1976
Nadelmann,Ethan A.:Cops Across Borders:The Pennsylvania State University Press,1993
National Formulary XIV:American Pharmaceutical Association,1975
Neeley,Bill:The Last Comanche Chief:John Wiley & Sons
Neihardt,John G.:1:Black Elk Speaks:University of Nebraska Press,1961
2:The Splendid Wayfaring:University of Nebraska Press,1970
Neumann,Erich:The Great Mother:Ralph Manheim,tr.,Princeton University Press,1974
The New English Bible:Oxford University Press,1971
NHL:The Nag Hammadi Library:James M. Robinson,ed.,Harper Collins Publishers,1990
Nilsson,Martin P.:1:The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology:University of California Press,1972
2:The Dionysiac Mysteries Of The Hellenistic And Roman Age:Arno Press,1975
3:Imperial Rome:Schocken Books,1967
Nonnos:Dionysiaca:W.H.D.Rouse,tr.,Harvard University Press,1952
Oakley,Kenneth P.:Man The Tool-Maker:The University of Chicago Press,1959
Origen:Contra Celsum:Henry Chadwick,tr.,Cambridge University Press,1965
Osler,William,ed.:Modern Medicine:Lea & Febiger,1925
Oss,O.T. & Oeric,O.N.:Psilocybin:And/Or Press,1976
Ott,Jonathan:Hallucinogenic Plants of North America:Wingbow Press,1976
2:Pharmacophilia: Jonathan Ott Books
3:Pharmacotheon: Jonathan Ott Books
4:The Age of Entheogens:Jonathan Ott Books
Ovid:Metamorphoses:Frank Justus Miller,tr.,Harvard University Press,1916
The Oxford Book Of Food Plants:Oxford University Press,1973
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology:Oxford University Press,1966
Pagels,Elaine:1:The Gnostic Gospels:Vintage Books,1989
2:The Gnostic Paul:Fortress Press,1975
3:Adam,Eve,And The Serpent:Random House,1988
Palast,Greg:The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:Plume,2004
Palmer,Leonard R.:Mycenaeans and Minoans:Alfred A. Knopf,1965
Pantaleone,Michele:The Mafia and Politics:Coward-McCann,1966
Parvati,Jeannine:Hygieia:A Woman’s Herbal:Freestone Collective,1983
2:Conscious Conception:Freestone Publishing Co.
Patai,Raphael:The Hebrew Goddess:Ktav Publishing House,1967
Paterculus,Velleius:Res Gestae Divi Augusti:Frederick W.Shipley,tr., Harvard University Press,1924
Pausanias:Guide To Greece:Peter Levi,tr.,Penguin Books,1988
PDR:Physicians Desk Reference:1989:Edward R. Barnhart
Pei,Mario:The Story of Language:The New American Library,1965
Pentagon Papers:Beacon Press,1971
Perowne,Stewart:Caesars & Saints:Barnes & Noble,1992
Peters,Edward:1:Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe:University of Pennsylvania Press,1989
2:Torture:Basil Blackwell,1986
3:Inquisition:The Free Press,1988
Peters,Gretchen:Seeds of Terror:St. Martin’s Press,2009
Plato:The Dialogues:Harold North Fowler,tr.,Harvard University Press,1914
Plato:Laws:R.G.Bury,tr.,G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1926
Pliny:Natural History:H.Rackham,tr.,Harvard University Press,1942
2:A Selection of His Letters:Clarence Greig,tr.,Cambridge University Press,1978
Polybius:The Histories;W.R.Paton,tr.,G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1922
Porter,Joseph C.:Paper Medicine Man:University of Oklahoma Press,1986
Porphyry:1:On the Cave of the Nymphs:Thomas Taylor,tr.,Phanes Press,1991
2:Letter To His Wife Marcella:Alice Zimmern,tr.,Phanes Press,1986
Pritchard,James B.,ed.,:The Ancient Near East:Princeton University Press,1971
Prouty,L.Fletcher:1:The Secret Team:Prentice-Hall,1973
2:JFK:Carol Publishing Group,1996
Rappleye,Charles & Becker,Ed:All American Mafioso:Doubleday,1991
Rank,Otto:Art and Artist:Agathon Press,1968
Rashid,Ahmed:Descent into Chaos: Penguin Group, 2008, ebook edition
Rashid,Ahmed:2:Taliban,Second Edition:Yale University Press,2010
Reed,Terry & Cummings,John:Compromised:Clandestine Publishing,1995
Reichel-Dolmatoff,G.:The Shaman and the Jaguar:Temple University Press,1975
Ricks, Thomas E.: Fiasco: The Penguin Press, 2006
Ricks, Thomas E.:2: The Gamble: Penguin Books, 2009, Kindle edition
Riebling,Mark:Wedge:Alfred A. Knopf,1994
Riedlinger,Thomas J.,ed.:The Sacred Mushroom Seeker:Dioscorides Press,1990
The Revised English Bible:Oxford and Cambridge University Presses,1989
Richardson,Cyril C.,tr.:Early Christian Fathers:The Westminster Press,1953
Riddle,John M.:Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine:University of Texas Press,1985
Riis,Jacob A.:How The Other Half Lives:Dover Publications,1971
Robbins,Rosell Hope:The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology:Crown Publishers,1959
Rodriguez,Felix I. & Weisman,John:Shadow Warrior:Simon & Schuster,1989
Roe,Derek:Prehistory:University of California Press,1970
Rorabaugh,W.J.:The Alcoholic Republic:Oxford University Press,1979
Rose,Jeanne:Herbs & Things:Grosset & Dunlap,1975
Rosenthal,Franz:The Herb:E.J.Brill,1971
Rotella,Sebastian:Twilight on the Line:W.W. Norton & Company,1998
Rothenberg,Jerome,ed.:1:Shaking the Pumpkin:Doubleday & Company,1972
2:& Quasha,George:America a Prophesy:Random House,1974
3:Technicians of the Sacred:Doubleday & Company,1969
Rowland,Beryl:Medieval Woman’s Guide To Health:The Kent State University Press,1981
Ruck:2:See Wasson:2
3:See Wasson:3
Ruspoli,Mario:The Cave of Lascaux:Harry N.Abrams,Inc.,1983
Sandoz,Mari:Crazy Horse:University of Nebraska Press,1961
Sanger,Margaret:An Autobiography:W.W.Norton & Company,1938
Sauer,Carl O.:1:Seeds,Spades,Hearths and Herds:The MIT Press,1969
2:Northern Mists,Turtle Island Foundation,1968
Schlieffer,Hedwig,ed.:Sacred Narcotic Plants Of The New World Indians:Hafner Press,1973
Schlesier,Karl H.(‘S’):The Wolves of Heaven:University of Oklahoma Press,1987
Schlesinger,Arthur M.:1:A Thousand Days:Houghton Mifflin Company,1965
2:The Age of Jackson:Little,Brown & Company,1946
Schlesinger,Stephen & Kinzer,Stephen:Bitter Fruit:Doubleday & Company,1982
Schonfield,Hugh J.:The Passover Plot:Bantam Books,1971
Schultes,Richard Evans:Where the Gods Reign:Synergetic Press,1988
Schultes,Richard Evans & Hofmann,Albert:1:The Botany and Chemistry of
Hallucinogens:Charles C Thomas,1980
2:Plants of the Gods:Healing Arts Press,1992
Scott,Peter Dale:1:Deep Politics and the Death of JFK: University of California Press,1993
Scott,Peter Dale:2:American War Machine: Rowman & Littlefield,2010
Scott,Peter Dale:3:The Road to 911: University of California Press,2007
Scott,Peter Dale:4:TheAmerican Deep State: Rowman & Littlefield,2015,Kindle edition
Scott,Peter Dale & Marshall,Jonathan:Cocaine Politics:University of California Press,1991
Sered,Susan Starr:Priestess,Mother,Sacred Sister:Oxford University Press,1994
Shannon,Elaine:Desperados:Viking,1988
Shorrock,Tim:Spies for Hire: Simon & Schuster,2008,Kindle edition
Siegel,Ronald K.:Intoxication:E.P Dutton,1989
Simpson,Christopher:Blowback:Weidenfeld & Nicolson,1988
Sloman,Larry:Reefer Madness;The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Slotkin,J.S.:The Peyote Religion:Farrar,Strauss and Giroux,1975
Smallwood,E.Mary:The Jews Under Roman Rule:E.J.Brill,1976
Smith,R.Harris:OSS:University of California Press,1972
Snyder,Charles R.:Alcohol and the Jews:The Free Press,1958
Snyder,Solomon H. & Matthysse,Steven:Opiate Receptor Mechanisms:The MIT Press,1975
Soren,David,Ben Abed,Aicha & Slim,Hedi:Carthage:Simon & Schuster,1990
Soufan,Ali:The Black Banners:W.W. Norton & Company,2011,Kindle edition
Soufan,Ali:2:Anatomy of Terror:W.W. Norton & Company,2017,Kindle edition
Spuhler,J.N.ed.:The Evolution of Man’s Capacity For Culture:Wayne State University Press,1965
Stafford,Peter:Psychedelics Encyclopedia:And/Or Press,1977
Starr,Paul:The Social Transformation Of American Medicine:Basic Books,1982
Stein,Philip L. & Rowe,Bruce M.:Physical Anthropology:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1989
Steinmetz,E.F.:Kava Kava:Level Press
Streuver,Stuart,ed.:Prehistoric Agriculture:The Natural History Press,1971
Sturtevant,Edward Lewis:Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World:U.P. Hedrick,ed.,Dover Publications,1972
Summers,Anthony:Conspiracy:McGraw-Hill,1980
Summers,Anthony:2:Official and Confidential:Open Road Media,2013
Swain,Tony,ed.:Plants in the Development of Modern Medicine:Harvard University Press,1972
Szasz,Thomas:1:Our Right To Drugs:Praeger,1992
2:Ceremonial Chemistry:Anchor Books,1975
3:The Manufacture of Madness:Dell Publishing,1970
4:Ideology and Insanity:Anchor Books,1970
5:The Myth of Mental Illness:Harper & Row,1974
Szent-Gyorgi,Albert:The Crazy Ape:Philosophical Library,1970
Tacitus:The Histories:Clifford H.Moore,tr.,G.P.Putnam’s Sons,1925
Talbot,David:The Devil’s Chessboard:HarperCollins,2015:Kindle edition
Taussig,Michael:Shamanism,Colonialism,and the Wild Man:The University of Chicago Press,1987
Taylor,Arnold H.:American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic,1900-1939:Duke University Press,1969
Taylor,Colin F. & Sturtevant,William C:The Native Americans:Smithmark Publishers,1991
Taylor,Norman:Plant Drugs That changed The World:Dodd,Mead & Company,1965
Telushkin,Rabbi Joseph:Jewish Literacy:William Morrow And Company,1991
Theoharis,Athan G. & Cox,John Sturat:The Boss:Temple University Press,1988
Thomas,Lee:The Billy Sunday Story:Zondervan Publishing House,1961
Thompson, C.J.S.:The Mystic Mandrake:Rider & Co.,1934
Thucydides:The Peloponnesian War:Thomas Hobbes,tr.,The University of Chicago Press,1989
Trebach,Arnold:The Heroin Solution:Yale University Press,1982
Trento,Joseph: The Secret History of the CIA, MJF Books, 2001
Trento,Joseph J.:2:Prelude to Terror:Carrol & Graf Publishers,2005
Tuchman,Barbara W.:A Distant Mirror:Alfred A.Knopf,1978
Turnbull,Colin M.:The Forest People:Simon & Schuster,1962
Ucko,Peter J. and Rosenfeld,Andree:Palaeolithic Cave Art:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1967
Unger,Craig:House of Bush, House of Saud:Scribner,2004
USDA:Common Weeds of the United States:Dover Publications,1971
The United States Dispensatory,26th Edition:J.B.Lippincott Company,1967
Utley,Robert M.:The Lance And The Shield:Henry Holt and Company,1993
Valentine, Douglas: The Strength of the Pack: TrineDay, 2008
Vallance,Theodore R.:Prohibition’s Second Failure:Praeger Publishers,1993
Vaughan,J.W.:The Reynolds Campaign On Powder River:University of Oklahoma Press,1961
Veninga,Louise:The Ginseng Book:Ruka Publications,1973
Vermes,G.:1:The Dead Sea Scrolls in English:Penguin Books,1987
2:Jesus the Jew:Fortress Press,1981
Vogel,Virgil J.:American Indian Medicine:University of Oklahoma Press,1982
Wainwright, Tom: Narconomics:PublicAffairs,2016
Waley,Arthur:The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes:Stanford University Press,1968
Washburn,Sherwood L.,ed.:Social Life Of Early Man:Aldine Publishing Company,1961
Wasson,R.Gordon:1:Soma:Divine Mushroom of Immortality:Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich,1968
2:with Ruck,Carl A.P. & Hofmann,Albert:The Road To Eleusis:Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978
3:with Kramrisch,Stella, Ott,Jonathan & Ruck,Carl A.P.:Persephone’s Quest:Yale University Press,1986
4:The Wondrous Mushroom:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1980
Watts,Alan W.:The Joyous Cosmology:Random House,1963
Webb,Gary:Dark Alliance:Seven Stories Press,1998
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:G.&C.Merriam Company,1968
Weil,Andrew:The Natural Mind:Houghton Mifflin Company:1972
Weil,Andrew and Rosen,Winifred:Chocolate To Morphine:Houghton Mifflin Company,1983
Weiner,Tim:Legacy of Ashes:Anchor Books,Kindle Edition,2008
Weiner,Tim:2:Enemies:Random House,Kindle Edition,2012
Wesley,John:Primitive Remedies:Woodbridge Press Publishing Company,1973
Whorf,Benjamin Lee:Language,Thought & Reality:The M.I.T. Press,1964
Wilford, Hugh: The Mighty Wurlitzer: Harvard University Press, 2008
Willetts,R.F.:1:The Civilization Of Ancient Crete;University of California Press,1977
2:Cretan Cults And Festivals:Barnes & Noble,1962
Williams,Paul L.:Operation Gladio:Prometheus Books,2015,Kindle Edition
Williams,Selma R.:Riding The Nightmare:Atheneum,1978
Williams,Terry:The Cocaine Kids:Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,1989
Wood,Michael:In Search of the Dark Ages:Facts on File Publications,1987
Woods, Randall B.:Shadow Warrior: Basic Books,2013
Woolley,C.Leonard:1:The Sumerians:W.W.Norton & Co.,1965
2:Ur of the Chaldees:W.W.Norton & Company,1965
Wright, Lawrence: The Looming Tower:Vintage,2006, Kindle edition
Young,James Harvey:The Toadstool Millionaires:Princeton University Press,1961
Zimmer,Lynn:Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts:The Open Center Institute,1997
Journals, pamphlets, reports, plays, magazines, newspaper articles and web sites mentioned in the text or the notes have not been individually listed.
Notes
Notes are keyed to the Bibliography
Euroamerica
1 Wesley:Preface
2 Vogel:114
3 Marks:14;44
4 Bailyn:157
5 Chomsky:1:128
6 Marks:219
7 Starr:48
8 Rorabaugh:44
9 Bailyn:411;414
10 Marks:66
11 Coulter:3:40;20;29;49
12 Vogel:115
13 Marks:145
14 Haller:86
15 Coulter:3:16;39;50;62
16 Haller:48
17 Haller:49;Coulter:1:223
18 Haller:50
19 Marks:240
20 Coulter:3:59
21 Vogel:101
22 Vogel:226
23 Vogel:227
24 Vogel:117
25 Vogel:50
26 Vogel:215
27 Vogel:11
28 Vogel:116
29 Dunlop in Vogel:121
30 Stone in Vogel:120
31 Vogel:255
32 Vogel:261
33 Vogel:133
34 Marks:185
35 Starr:51
36 Starr:96;Coulter:3:6;92
37 Vogel:134
38 Goldman:98
39 Jung:10:45-49
40 Bourke:133
41 Bourke:37
42 Bourke:134
43 Porter:8
44 Taylor:78
45 Taylor:54
46 Slotkin:83
47 Neely:90
48 Brown:131-140
49 Bourke:273
50 Bourke:277
51 Taylor:113
52 Bourke:312
53 Porter:60
54 Bourke:415
55 Porter:85
56 Porter:67
57 Porter:66
58 Slotkin:87
59 Morgan:7
60 Morgan:22;33;41;42;51;57;59
61 Morgan:42
62 Bourke:484
63 Survey:5/13/1916
64 Hesiod:Theogony:53
65 Cartier in Vogel:4;249; Lacourciere in Hand:204
66 Vogel:10
67 Schultes in Swain: 105
68 Riddle:132
69 Crystal:6;407
70 Whorf:134-159
71 Crystal:4
72 Haller:134
73 Bailyn:993
74 Porter:65
75 Porter:61
76 Bourke:427
77 Porter:69
78 Bourke:217;437
79 Porter:144
80 Bourke:459
81 Porter:170
82 Porter:153
83 Bourke:468
84 Porter:308
85 Fleming:72
86 Fleming:74;Churchill:111
87 Slotkin:89
88 Slotkin:93
89 Fleming:181
90 Porter:264
91 Neihardt:262
92 Brown:431-445;170;Utley:269-314
Peyote
1 Brecher:338
2 Kluver:8
3 Myerhoff
4 Schultes & Hofmann:1:27
5 Vogel:166;Emboden in Hand; Meyerhoff
6 NHL:147
7 Heresies:1:5:4;in Pagels:1:144
8 Slotkin:112
9 Vermes:1:187
10 Rothenberg:1:363
11 Goldstein in Krauss:402
12 Churchland:67-69
13 Vermes:1:187
14 Schultes & Hofmann:1:25-27
15 AMA:405
16 Snyder & Matthysse
17 Hogshire:49
18 Slotkin:36-50
19 LaBarre:15
20 Slotkin:106
21 Slotkin:126
22 Minucius:Octavius:9
23 Commonweal:4/24/29
24 LaBarre:23;Ott:4:21
25 Malleus:2:1:16
26 Allen in Cultural Survival:42
27 Reichel-Dolmatoff in Schlieffer:74
28 Taussig
29 JAMA:4/9/1921
30 Robbins:93
31 New York Times:1/6/23
32 New York Times:1/14/23
33 Commonweal:4/24/1929
34 Brown:437
35 Slotkin:52;125;129
Inquisition
1 Myerhoff in Hand:107
2 Jung:13:85;305
3 Jung:13:161
4 Williams:139
5 Artaud:2:10
6 Vogel:50
7 Vogel:231
8 Vogel:232:238-44
9 Haller:51
10 Coulter:3:40
11 Haller:76
12 Haller:166
13 Haller:162
14 Haller:166
15 Haller:164
16 Haller:164-75
17 Gebhard in Hand:91
18 Haller:85
19 Haller:49
20 Coulter:3:69
21 Haller:36
22 Haller:64
23 Haller:99
24 Haller:91
25 Haller:98
26 Young:193
27 Holbrook:214
28 Holbrook:105
29 Marks:158
30 Cook:91
31 Cook:88;Holbrook:59
32 Vogel;Millspaugh;Grieve;Rose
33 Holbrook:65
34 Harner:1;Murray:1;Forbes:121
35 Disp:20:427
36 Wasson:2
37 Haller:150
38 Forbes:121
39 Robbins:364;511
40 Murray:1:91
41 Broun:143
42 42nd Congress: Sess.III: Ch.258: 1873
43 Lader:48
44 Malleus Maleficarum:1:6;11
45 Robbins:178
46 Robbins:178
47 Malleus Maleficarum:3
48 Augustine:Concerning Heresies:46 in Peters: 1:35
49 Malleus Maleficarum:2:1:2
50 Broun:155
51 Lader:48
52 Sanger:109
53 Lader:57
54 Sanger:112
55 Broun:249
56 Kennedy:43
57 Sanger:111
58 Broun:169
59 Lader:55
60 Sanger:81
61 Jonas:179
62 Lader:43
63 Lader:45
64 Lader:36;45
65 Furnas:235;252;277;Bordin:39
66 Bordin:3
67 Furnas:281;284
68 Kerr:48
69 Furnas:284
70 Bordin:9
71 Bordin:94
72 Bordin:57
73 Bordin:54
74 Bordin:109
75 Kerr:49
76 Furnas:193
77 Furnas:189
78 Kerr:127
79 Engelmann:37
80 Kerr:98
81 Kerr:154
82 Thomas:106
83 Engelmann:2
84 Furnas:305
85 Engelmann:11
Monopoly
1 Ashley:63
2 New York Times:6/12/1918
3 Disp:20:110-12
4 JAMA:2/6/1915
5 Good Housekeeping:10/1912
6 Disp:20:820
7 Disp:20:280
8 59th Congress:Sess.I: Ch.3915:1906
9 Bailyn:930
10 Gaskin:B-7
11 Harper’s:4/17/1915
12 Coulter:3:262-271
13 Haller:126
14 Haller:201
15 Haller:213
16 Coulter:3:446
17 Starr:121
18 Coulter:3:447
19 Haller:176
20 Haller:178
21 Haller:178
22 Haller:186
23 Starr:127
24 Arms
25 Deno:11
26 Josephson
27 Josephson;Starr:132
28 Coulter:1:348
29 Coulter:1:350-380
30 A.J.Pharm:11/1902
31 Shannon:76
32 Ames:Science:221:1256(9/23/83)
33 Carter in Cultural Survival:7;8
34 Mortimer in Cultural Survival
35 Davies
36 Freud:47
37 Freud:261
38 Freud:77
39 Musto:7;Andrews & Solomon:247
40 A.J.Pharm:10/1903
41 King:40-46
42 Szasz:1:53
43 Sat.Eve.Post:2/16/29
Black Fiends
1 Barrett in Hand:297
2 Sci.Amer:8/1/1891
3 Lit.Dig:1/18/1920
4 Schultes & Hofmann:1:238;Ott:4:24
5 Speyrer in Primal Feelings Newslatter:11:Winter 95-96; www.ibogainealliance.org/ ; maps.org/research/ibogaine-therapy
6 Bordin:104
7 Hobson:2:28
8 Weiner:2:228-247,289; The Atlantic:’ The FBI and Martin Luther King,’ by David J. Garrow,7-8/2002
9 www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Minister_Louis_Farrakhan_9/article_9108.shtml
10 Unger:loc.3231,3250
11 Tablet: ‘Is the Women’s March Melting Down?,’ By Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel : www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/276694/is-the-womens-march-melting-down ; ‘‘The View’ grills Women's March co-founder Tamika Mallory over ties to Louis Farrakhan,’ by Brian Flood, 1/14/2019: www.foxnews.com/entertainment/the-view-grills-womens-march-co-founder-tamika-mallory-over-ties-to-louis-farrakhan-why-call-him-the-greatest-of-all-time‘; Claims Of Anti-Semitism Cloud The Women's March,’ by Robin Young, 1/2/2019 : www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/01/02/womens-march-claims-anti-semitism ; CBS News: ‘Women's March leader Tamika Mallory defends relationship with Farrakhan,’ 3/8/2018 www.cbsnews.com/news/womens-march-leader-defends-relationship-with-farrakhan/ ; The New York Times: “Netanyahu Sparks Outrage Over Pact With Racist Party.’ By David M. Halbfinger, 2/24/2019: www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/world/middleeast/benjamin-netanyahu-otzma-yehudit-jewish-power.html ; The New York Times: ‘Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is Doing,’ By Bret Stephens, 3/7/2019: www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/ilhan-omar-anti-semitism.html ; Haaretz: ‘Haaretz Election Poll,’ by Yossi Verter, 3/10/2019: www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-haaretz-election-poll-support-for-gantz-drops-dramatically-right-wing-bloc-leads-1.7002703?=&ts=_1552226598136
12 Jewish Virtual Library: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minister-louis-farrakhan-in-his-own-words ; ‘A Word About Louis Farrakhan and Tamika Mallory,’ by Terrell Jermaine Starr, 3/9/2018: www.theroot.com/a-word-about-louis-farrakhan-and-tamika-mallory-1823607435
13 New York Times: ‘Malcolm Rejects Racist Doctrine,’10/4/1964, www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/malcolm-rejects-racist-doctrine-also-denounces-elijah-as-a.html ; Dave Kindred, Sound and Fury, 204; ‘Malcolm X & His Brothers Who Betrayed Him: The Judas Factor,’ by Omar Shabazz, 10/22/2016 : www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIU-A-IYhEM&has_verified=1
14 IslamonDemand.com: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4okDdnTbhFc
15 Artaud:2:10
16 Musto:277
White Hope
1 Musto:289;291
2 Brecher:46;Ott:personal communication
3 Taylor,Arnold:126
4 Trebach:167;McCoy:2:382
5 Brecher:22;34
6 Science:7/18/96;Baum:220
7 Gimbutas:3:196
8 Palmer:205
9 Pliny:NH:23:159;24:50;21:126
10 McCoy:2:3
11 McCoy:2:78
12 McCoy:2:148;Ott:personal communication
13 McCoy:2:97
14 Disp:20:651
15 Brecher:46
16 McCoy:2:271
17 Snyder:3
18 Snyder:188;Milt:81-85
19 Snyder:202
20 Schultes & Hofmann:349;Drug Facts: 575
21 JAMA:6/1/94:1642
22 Rosenthal in Krauss:228
23 Achterberg:1:9
24 Achterberg:1:99
25 Duke & Gross:300
26 Eliade:215
27 JAMA:v.271#21:6/1/94:1648
28 JAMA:v.271#21:6/1/94:1647
29 Helmer:40
30 Brecher:62
31 Ostrowski in Krauss:312
Propaganda
1 63rd Congress:Sess.III:Ch.I:1914
2 Musto:43
3 Musto:255
4 63rd Congress:Sess.III:Ch.I:1914
5 Deterring Democracy:Noam Chomsky: ch.4
6 Musto:267
7 Musto:264
8 Sanger:74
9 Bailyn:970
10 Schlesinger & Kinzer:80
11 Scott:1:156
12 Rappleye:74
13 High Times:1:128
14 Popular Mechanics:12/1941
15 High Times:1:124
16 Frazier:49-71
17 The Nation:3/12/30
18 Musto:207;Lacey:60
18a Weiner:2:58
19 Herer:1-40
20 Literary Digest:2/6/1937; Theoharis: 119
21 Eisenberg:167; Theoharis:148; McCoy:2:27
22 Scott:1:146
23 Bailyn:1023
24 Goldman:222
25 Bailyn:1026
26 Ginger:421;428
27 Bailyn:1058
28 Theoharis:52;58
29 Harper’s:1/16/1915
30 Young:234
31 NYT:4/27/52;5/6/52;11/24/53;7/18/54;8/29/54;Am. Mercury:9/53; Reader’s Dig.:2/55
32 McCoy:222
33 Kruger:16;Scott:1:167
34 Lit.Dig:2/1/30
35 Sci.Am:1/31
36 New York Times:1/16/32
37 New York Times:10/10/33
38 Time:1/13/36
39 Sci.Nws.Ltr:12/21/40
40 Sci.Nws.Ltr:2/23/57
41 Califano:113
42 Califano:98
43 Califano:99
44 Duke & Gross:105
45 New York Times Magazine:1/29/95:41
46 Califano:119
47 New York Times Magazine:1/29/95:41
48 Califano:120
49 Califano:93
50 Califano:119
51 Morgan in Krauss:411
52 Califano:124
53 NORML:Spring 1995
54 www.drugtext.com:2/23/96
55 NPR:1/30/96
56 NPR:1/30/96
57 JAMA:6/1/94:1636
58 JAMA:6/1/94: Skolnick: ”Collateral Casualties Climb in the Drug War”
59 Baum:268
60 Califano in NYT:1/29/95:40
61 JAMA:6/1/94:Skolnick:”Collateral Casualties Climb in the Drug War”
62 Ostrowski in Krauss:314
63 New York Times Magazine:1/29/95:40; APNews: ‘Video shows Chicago cop shooting unarmed black autistic teen,’ 10/17/2018: www.apnews.com/b76e462b44964af7b431a735fb0a2c75 ; Chicago Tribune: “2 Sacramento cops who shot unarmed black man in backyard won't face charges,’ 3/2/2019: www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-backyard-police-shooting-20190302-story.html ; New York Times: ‘A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City Is Full of Questions,’ 9/14/2018: www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/us/botham-jean-dallas-shooting-amber-guyger.html
64 NORML:Spring/95
65 Freud:47
66 Mortimer
67 Califano:126
68 Krauss:314
69 Califano:128
70 The Narcotic Peril:Hobson:Int’l. Narcotic Ed. Ass.:23
71 Musto:322;159
72 Epstein:44;Baum:70
73 Trebach:259
74 King:39
75 Musto:107
76 Musto:174
77 Goshen:43
78 Kerr:269
79 1998 Marijuana Crop Report:Jon Gettman,Paul Armentano:10/98: NORML Foundation
Neocolonialism
1 Duke & Gross:216
2 1 kilo of Southeast Asian heroin wholesales for about $110,000, according to the DEA, 1997. That’s nearly $3,000 per ounce. Cut into bags for street retail, that’s about $30,000 per ounce. Legal value, about $500. per ounce, retail.
3 Reuters:10/4/95
4 McCoy & Block:5
5 Excelsior (Mexico):10/14/94;in Chomsky:”Rollback,”Z Magazine:2/95
6 Scott:1:178
7 Nadelmann:113
8 Nadelmann:114
9 Nadelmann:115
9a Kinzer:2:131
10 Jonas:23
11 Jonas:26
11a Kinzer:148
11b Kinzer:193
12 Jonas:1
13 Schlesinger & Kinzer:55
14 Jonas:20
15 Jonas:18
16 Schlesinger & Kinzer:62
17 Schlesinger:1:143
18 Schlesinger & Kinzer:84
19 Kinzer:2:138
20 Jonas:19
21 Schlesinger & Kinzer:71-77
22 Schlesinger & Kinzer:82
23 Schlesinger & Kinzer:83
24 Kinzer:83
25 Schlesinger & Kinzer:106
26 Kinzer:23
27 Kinzer:120
28 http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcorcoran.htm
29 Hinckle:79; PappasPost: ‘On This Day March 6, 1994: Cultural Icon Melina Mercouri Passes Away,’ by Gregory Pappas, 3/6/2018: www.pappaspost.com/on-this-day-march-6-1994-cultural-icon-melina-mercouri-passes-away/
30 Corson:352; Kinzer:2:123; markdankof.com/all_the_shahs_men.htm: ‘George Bush, Iran, and the Ghost of Kermit Roosevelt and Operation Ajax,’ by Mark Dankof
31 Otto Lehmann-Russbeldt, Aggression, Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., London, 1934:44; The New York Times, October 11, 1944, quoting Senator Claude Pepper
32 Newsweek:12/14/98:p.48; Trento:2:6
33 Talbot:29; CIA: ‘The Exploits of Agent 110,’ by Mike Murphy: www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol37no1/html/v37i1a05p_0001.htm ; Stephenhalbrook.com: ‘Operation Sunrise,’ by Stephen P. Halbrook: www.stephenhalbrook.com/law_review_articles/operation_sunrise.pdf
34 Kinzer:68
35 Talbot:82
36 Smith:169;204-241
37 Prouty:2:25
38 Simpson:45
39 Simpson:7
40 Trento: 164-165
41 Simpson:65
42 Trento: 30
43 Simpson:56
44 Weiner:loc.597
45 Simpson: 96ff; Cockburn,A:135; The New Yorker: “Getting Real, George F. Kennan’s Cold War,” by Louis Menand, 11/14/2011: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/getting-real ; Wilson Center: George Kennan's 'Long Telegram,' 2/22/1946: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116178.pdf : Wilford: 22
46 Trento: 78-80
47 Simpson:145
48 Simpson:146
49 Simpson:179; VanityFair: ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ by John Cornwell, 10/1999: www.vanityfair.com/style/1999/10/pope-pius-xii-199910
50 Simpson:181
51 Simpson:132
52 Simpson:92
53 Anderson & Anderson:39
54 Simpson:185
55 Anderson & Anderson:43; Williams,Paul L.:loc.1075
56 Simpson:204
57 Trento: 30
58 Kinzer:129; Kinzer:2:122
59 Weiner:loc.1484; Kinzer:2:126-128
60 Weiner:loc.2441
61 Smith:243
62 Robbins:44
63 McCoy & Block:254;McCoy:2:266; Cockburn,A:221
64 Mills:48
65 Smith:254;265
66 Smith:183
67 Intelligence Connection:Letter of the Month:10/96:From Burt Wilson
68 Smith:270;Cockburn,A:222
69 Smith:282
70 Anderson & Anderson:47
71 Kruger:131;Robbins:85ff; McCoy:2:165
72 Corson:322;McCoy:2:173; Cockburn,A:215;225
73 Scott:2:chapter 7
74 Scott:2:chapter:’Helliwell’s Connections to the Mob’
75 London Weekend Telegraph:3/10/67,p.25
76 McCoy & Block:255
77 Schlesinger & Kinzer:91
78 Hinckle:41
79 Kinzer:167
80 Schlesinger & Kinzer:88; The New York Times: ‘Sydney Gruson, 81, Correspondent, Editor and Executive for The New York Times, Dies,’ by Eric Pace, 3/9/1998: www.nytimes.com/1998/03/09/nyregion/sydney-gruson-81-correspondent-editor-and-executive-for-the-new-york-times-dies.html
81 Gutman:101
82 Schlesinger & Kinzer:184
83 Hinckle:33; Spartacus-Educational: ‘Gerry Droller (Frank Bender),’: spartacus-educational.com/JFKdroller.htm
84 Corson:382
85 Rappleye:179
86 Summers:355
87 Corson:367
88 Jonas:38
89 Woods:102
90 Scott:2:chapter ‘Effect on the Drug Trade’
91 Schlesinger:274
92 McCoy:2:300;344;Cocburn,A:228; 247
93 Jonas:41
94 Schlesinger & Kinzer:234
95 Rappleye:149
96 Scott:1:110
97 Rappleye:169
98 Rappleye:163
99 Rappleye:150
100 Rappleye:152
101 Schlesinger & Kinzer:239
102 Rappleye:150
103 Jonas:70
104 Schlesinger & Kinzer:247
105 Anderson 7 Anderson:167
106 Chomsky:1:365
107 Schlesinger & Kinzer:247; Anderson & Anderson:185
108 Anderson & Anderson:189ff
109 Levine:80
110 Kruger:16;Lane:252
111 McCoy:2:352
112 Anderson & Anderson:137; lib.luc.edu: ‘The Ellacuria Tapes:’ www.lib.luc.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/ellacuria-tapes/salvadoran-civil-war/catholic-church ; Daily Beast: ‘Bringing El Salvador Nun Killers to Justice,’ Raymond Bonner, 11/09/2014; globalsistersreport.org: ‘The four churchwomen murdered in El Salvador,’ by Tracy L. Barnett, 6/19/2017: www.globalsistersreport.org/news/four-churchwomen-murdered-el-salvador-47386
113 Associated Press: "Ex-Salvador Ambassador, Critic of US Foreign Policy, Dies," 1/19/2015; Goodman: 104; Goodman: 348; Goodman:2:45; Weiner:2:351-352
114 www.state.gov/j/inl/regions/westernhemisphere/219167.htm ; www.insightcrime.org/news/brief/intelligence-report-details-role-of-guatemala-police-in-drug-trade/ ; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111601349.html?noredirect=on
115 Scott:1:109;Davis:160;168
116 Anderson & Anderson:23;37
117 Linklater:187
118 Anderson & Anderson:31
119 Hersh:158
120 Anderson & Anderson:168
121 Jonas:78
122 Jonas:78
123 Jonas:79
124 Jonas:95
125 Jonas:177ff
126 Jonas:95
127 Jonas:2
128 Jonas:90
Operation X
1 Gosch:159
2 Lacey:121
3 McCoy:2:35
4 Williams,Paul L.:loc.593
5 Moldea:2:42;63;Cockburn,A:128-129
6 Pantaleone:85;133;Kruger:14
7 Scott:1:166;174ff
8 Pantaleone:184-193
9 McCoy:2:41
10 Cockburn,A:140
11 Nadelmann:137;Cockburn,A:131
12 Foreign Relations of the United States:1952-54:Department of State, Washington,D.C.:in Prouty:2:51
13 Talbot:244; Kinzer:2:215
14 McCoy:118;2:153; Woods: 117
15 Smith:352
16 Eisenhower:372
17 Jacobs:132
18 Woods: 128
19 Trento: 329
20 Pentagon Papers, Gravel Ed., Vol 1, Doc. 95, pp 573-83
21 Pentagon Papers, Gravel Ed., Vol 1, Ch 5, Sec.2, pp 283-314; Woods: 136
22Pentagon Papers, Gravel Ed., Vol 1, Ch 5, Sec.1, pp 242-269
23 Kruger:129; Woods: 121
24 McCoy:2:131; Corn: 174
25 Kruger:133; Woods: 168
26 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 95
27 Karnow:252
28 Prouty:258;Corson:349
29 Schlesinger:1:357
30 Prouty:43;100;104
31 Prouty:2:100;124ff
32 Talbot:366
33 Goodman:2:31
34 Weiner:loc.2741
35 Prouty:109;111;409
36 Corson:445
37 Prouty:120;411;110
38 Prouty:260
39 Prouty:109;111;409; Woods: 141-142; ‘National Security Action Memorandum No. 52,’ :
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v01/d52 ; ‘National Security Action Memorandum No. 57,’ : https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d34
40 Prouty:2:215
41 Prouty:2:255
42 McMaster: loc. 2089, loc. 3020, loc. 3652, Loc. 4957, loc. 5202, loc. 5705, loc. 5955; Woods: 422
43 Prouty:410;Schlesinger:1:284
44 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 91
45 McCoy:2:140
46 Smith:330
47 Smith:354
48 Woods: 257-318
49 Cockburn,A:97; Goodman: 51-53
50 Weiner:loc.4352
52 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 95
53 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 60
54 Weiner:loc.3704; WGBH: ‘Vietnam: A Television History; America's Mandarin (1954 - 1963); Interview with Lucien Conein, 1981,’ 5/7/1981: openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_17B091E22675449F9D3E61ABF070482F
55 Karnow:268
Coup D'État
1 Lane:103
2 Lane:XV
3 Davis:172
4 Talbot:377,560
5 Canfield:60
6 Summers:111;Davis:189; Canfield:143
7 Davis:243
8 Lane:17
9 Fulsom:location 134
10 Scott:272;Talbot:563
11 Rappleye:246;Moldea:2:155
12 Hinckle:216;Davis:144
13 Scott:160
14 Summers:490
15 Fulsom:173
16 Mars, Jim: Crossfire; www.maryferrell.org/pages/Rose_Cherami.html ; www.jfk-online.com/cherdoc0.html ; www.jfkonline.com/cherfile.html
17 Lane:320; Lane:152;167
18 Lane:300
19 Rappleye:183
20 Fulsom:222
21 Fulsom:222
22 Corson:392
23 Rappleye:188
24 Rappleye:198
25 Hinckle:124
26 Lane:333
27 Unclassified Document; CIA: Record Number: 104-10310-10271; Google Listing: HRG Group
28 Bardach:60; Trento:2:17
30 Davis:263
31 Scott:1:128
32 Davis:140
33 Fulsom:199;edgar-hoover.tripod.com
34 The Washington Post: ‘Horror Stories and the FBI's Honor,’ By Robert D. Novak, 1/1/2005; Weiner:2:176
35 Davis:142
36 Scott:1:131
37 Summers:492
37a Summers:493
38 Canfield:158
38a Williams,Paul L.:loc.1146
39 Lane:105
40 Summers:356
41 Summers:361
42 Talbot:541
43 Summers:261
44 Talbot:398; Weiner:loc.2959; Corson:383
45 Talbot:402
46 Fulsom:loc.58
47 Fulsom:159
48 Corson:399;Fulsom:loc.152
49 Hinckle:113-117;Fulsom:loc.152
50 Talbot:546
51 Talbot:460
52 Gaddis:115
53 Summers:271;Canfield:96
54 Talbot:439; Trento: 250
55 Schlesinger:1:833
56 Summers:332
57 Corson:362
58 Corson:287
59 Trento: 198
60 Davis:400
61 Rappleye:146
62 Rappleye:224
63 Rappleye:225; Weiner:2:222
64 Scott:1:113
65 Talbot:455
66 www.scribd.com/document/203874052/Claire-Booth-Luce
67 Rappleye:274
68 Rappleye:271
69 Summers:460
70 Fulsom:183; Assassination Records Review Board, 1995 Releases, RIF #104-100-15-10440 (11/ 28/ 63) CIA #201-289-248
71 Scott:1:178
72 Rappleye:177
73 The Inspector General’s Report:An Introduction:Peter Dale Scott:12/20/94
74 Riebling:172
75 Summers:437; Trento: 198-201
76 Summers:466
77 Summers:458;Moldea:2:167
78 Brewton:26;27;Kwitny:159ff
79 Kwitny:52
80 Theoharis:322
81 Theoharis:326
82 Rappleye:236
83 Scott:1:219
84 Davis:90
85 Rappleye:238
86 Rappleye:238
87 Riebling:171;Hinckle:217; Summers:284
88 Hinckle:222
89 Brewton:315;Davis:319; Queens Chronicle: ‘Queens Boulevard power lunch — mob style,” by Ron Marzlock, 12/31/2009; mywriterssite.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-lastella-raid-by-john-william-tuohy.html
90 Summers:296
91 Summers:172
92 Summers:155
93 Lane:32;Summers:222ff
94 Scott:1:79
95 Summers:509
96 Scott:1:202
97 Scott:1:207
98 Theoharis:311
99 Fulsom:128
100Talbot:582
101Talbot:526; ‘I Am a Patsy!,’ by George de Mohrenschildt ; 22november1963.org.uk/george-de-mohrenschildt-i-am-a-patsy-chapter01 ; Trento: 258-259
102 Lane:332
103 Hinckle:339
104 Summers:502
105 Moldea:276
106 Rappleye:8
107 Hinckle:337
108 Davis:401
109 Fulsom:175
110 Scott:1:87
111 Summers:300ff;Canfield:40
112 Summers:304
113 Summers:311
114 Fulsom:139
115 Davis:119
116 Davis:124;128
117 Summers:326
118 Davis:85
119 Hinckle:205
120 Anderson & Anderson:xvi
121 Summers:329
122 Summers:334
123 Davis:131
124 Summers:497;Davis:195
125 Summers:337
126 Scott:1:200
127 Scott:181;201;Hinckle:288
128 Fulsom:loc.105
129 Lane:82
130Talbot:542
Nixon’s War Using Drugs
1 Prouty:2:xxxiii
2 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 56
3 Scott:228
4 Prouty2:148
5 McCoy:126;2:197; Woods: 192; NSArchive: ‘JFK and the Diem Coup,’ by John Prados: nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm#doc17
6 Prouty:120;411;110
7 Prouty:11;14
8 Chomsky:2:Chapter 1:note 86
9 Prouty:11;14
10 Corn: 147; Valentine: 333
11 Kwitny:2:243; Trento:2:60;Williams,Paul L,:loc.2455; Crikey: ‘Rundle: proving the CIA-backed conspiracy that brought down Whitlam,’ by Guy Rundle,11/25/2015; The Guardian: ‘The British-American coup that ended Australian independence,’ by John Pilger, 10/23/2014; The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Intelligence agency friends hide corruption’ by Paul Malone, 11/13/2015; Valentine: 336
12 Cockburn:221
13 cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001166443.pdf: “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam”
14 Chomsky:131
15 McCoy:2:x
16 Kruger:147
17 McCoy & Block:150
18 Fulsom:12
19 Hinckle:279
20 Hinckle:283
21 Williams,Paul L.:loc.3112
22 Williams,Paul L.:loc1296
23 Williams,Paul L.:loc1296; Washington Post: ‘David Kennedy Testifies to Link With Sindona,’ by John F. Berry,1/10/1979
24 Kruger & Meldon:179; Valentine: 192; Mafia Wiki: ‘Vincent Papa:’ mafia.fandom.com/wiki/Vincent_Papa ; Thd New York times: ‘Ex‐Detective Is Linked to Drug Dealer,’ 2/25/1974: www.nytimes.com/1974/02/25/archives/exdetective-is-linked-to-drug-dealer-basis-of-movie-wiretap-used.html
25 Kruger:124; Valentine: 80; McCoy: 222, 351
26 Kruger:125;McCoy:2:259;283;Cockburn,A:240-246
27 Trento:2:26-37
28 Trento:2:26-37
29 Kruger & Meldon:275; Valentine: 335
31 McCoy:2:288
32 McCoy:2:197
33 Baum:72
34 Davis:317
35 Karnow:426
36 McCoy:2:250-254
37 Prouty:2:134
38 Valentine: 99, 160; The Humboldt Herald: ‘Humboldt Trials and Tribulations,’ 12/18/2006: humboldtherald.wordpress.com/2006/12/18/humboldt-trials-and-tribulations/ ; The New York Times: ‘Narcotics Agent Clear In Slaying,’ 9/29/1974: www.nytimes.com/1974/09/29/archives/narcotics-agent-clear-in-slaying-statement-of-cliftons-ruling-from.html
39 Harper’s Magazine:’Legalize It All’:April,2016
40 Hinckle:100
41 Linklater:228; Haaretz: ‘The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman,’ by The Forward and Dan Raviv And Yossi Melman, 3/27/2016: www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/the-strange-case-of-a-nazi-who-became-a-mossad-hitman-1.5423137 ; Valentine: 44
42 McCoy:2:68
43 Kruger:115
44 Kruger & Meldon:168; The New York Times: ‘A Heroin Smuggler Chooses U.S. Prison Over the Guillotine,’ By Robert D. Mcfadden, 12/2/1972: www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archives/a-heroin-smuggler-chooses-us-prison-over-the-guillotine-heroin.html ; The New York Times: ‘Paris Bid Reported In Delouette Case,’ 11/21/1971: www.nytimes.com/1971/11/21/archives/paris-bid-reported-in-delouette-case.html ; Deeppoliticsforum.com: ‘L'Affaire Delouette (French Connection):’ https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?12897-L-Affaire-Delouette-(French-Connection)#.XIXBbCJKhpg ; The New York Times: ‘French Judge Comes to Query Heroin Smuggler,’ By Eric Pace, 3/8/1972: www.nytimes.com/1972/03/08/archives/french-judge-comes-to-query-heroin-smuggler.html ; The New York Times: ‘French Aide Backs U.S. in Drug Case,’ By John L. Hess, 11/20/1971: www.nytimes.com/1971/11/20/archives/french-aide-backs-us-in-drug-case-french-official-supports-u-s.html
45 Kruger:173
46 Nadelmann:116
47 Kruger:165;Nadelmann:119
48 Nadelmann:152
49 McCoy & Block:263ff
50 Kruger:121;McCoy & Block:13
51 Moldea:2:351-2;Cockburn,A:239; Scott & Marshall: 29; The New York Times: ‘Florida Drug Ring Reported Broken,’ 12/17/1987: www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/us/florida-drug-ring-reported-broken.html
52 Kruger & Meldon: 161; Valentine: 208
We need your consent to load the translations
We use a third-party service to translate the website content that may collect data about your activity. Please review the details in the privacy policy and accept the service to view the translations.