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.   

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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

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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

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Rashid,Ahmed:2:Taliban,Second Edition:Yale University Press,2010

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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

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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

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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

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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

 

 

 

 

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