Charles B. Towns’ cure, officially endorsed by the AMA, was famous throughout the country in the teens and twenties. It almost certainly would make anyone stop taking anything. It consisted of huge simultaneous doses of foxglove and belladonna, two of the most famous witchcraft herbs of Europe. Foxglove contains the cardiac stimulant digitalis, and belladonna contains the powerfully psychoactive scopolamine and hyoscyamine.

Towns claimed his cure was effective for opium, cocaine or alcohol addiction. His New York sanitarium charged between $200-$350 for a private room for the five-day course, and $75 for a double occupancy, big money in those days. Towns’ theoretical and commercial partner was Dr. Alexander Lambert, chief of the AMA’s Medicolegal Bureau during the fight to pass Harrison, later head of the AMA. Together they profitably administered the Towns-Lambert method. 1

Lambert’s entry on cocaine addiction in Osler’s prestigious 1925 medical textbook, Modern Medicine, solemnly pronounced that “The most effective treatment is the Towns treatment and the method is the same as in dealing with an alcoholic, except that the cocaine should be cut off immediately. Strychnine, with or without some form of, belladonna, prickly ash bark and strong purgatives, coupled with constant prayer. Foxglove and belladonna should be given from the beginning. The belladonna mixture and from 3 to 5 cathartic pills and 5 gr. of blue mass should be given simultaneously as the first dose. The belladonna mixture is continued every hour of the day and night, and twelve hours after the initial dose the patients are again given from 3 to 5 cathartic pills followed six hours later by a saline, and at the twenty-fourth hour after the initial dose they are again given cathartics and again at the thirty-sixth hour. After these last cathartics the bilious stool appears, and by the forty-fifth to forty-eighth hour castor oil is given.”

That is, they pharmacologically kicked the shit out of their patients; they “puked and purged” ‘em. They divined their success ratio by counting as cured all those who didn’t return for further punishment.

Between 1893 and 1895 the British Opium Royal Commission produced three twelve hundred page volumes of expert notarized testimony concerning the use of opium in India. It made no attempt to exclude negative witnesses. Its only requirement was verifiable expertise on some aspect of the subject. One English missionary, who knew of no “hardier, thriftier or more careful people than the Punjabis,”insisted regular opium use “seems to interfere neither with their longevity nor with their health.” That was the overwhelming majority opinion of the hundreds of physicians, civil servants, merchants, missionaries and working people recorded by the Commission.
Small amounts of opium produce a pleasant and energetic bodily lightness conducive to work and mental activity. Opium was used as a pre-battle stimulant by the Punjabis, and no British soldier wanted to face them. Larger amounts produce a dreamy reverie, “an aid to music composers” as one 1912 New York Times article had it.

Above, an opium smokers tools, Scientific American, 11/1921

Smoking opium sap is not analogous to injecting morphine or heroin. Dr. Brecher in Licit & Illicit Drugs: “Only about 10% of the morphine [5-15% of commercial opium by weight]...enters the vapor, and only a portion of the morphine in the vapor enters the human bloodstream when inhaled; there are no ‘tars’ or other carcinogens to cause cancer. The so-called ‘opium-smoker’ is actually a vapor inhaler. At a very rough estimate, a smoker would have to smoke 300 or 400 grains of opium to get a dose equivalent to the intravenous injection of one grain of heroin [diacetylmorphine].” 2

Smoked, all 39 of opium’s alkaloids are delivered in concert, slowly and in minuscule doses, CNS exciters right along with the depressants. The most harm an opium smoker can do to himself is put himself to sleep. Morphine, on the other hand, opium’s major alkaloid, is a powerful CNS depressant, especially in conjunction with alcohol, and hypodermic injection makes absorption immediate and irreversible. But that, again, reduces to a question of dosage, expertise and public policy, not toxicity. As Jonathan Ott, the great entheobotanist and chemist, wrote to me: “So-called opiate overdose [overwhelmingly caused by anaphylaxis or toxicity of adulterants, as opposed to true overdose] results from respiratory, not cardiac, arrest, via a relaxant effect on the respiratory muscles, there’s virtually no other toxicity at these dose-levels...morphine is one of the least-toxic drugs in the pharmacopoeia, and deaths from medicinal administration, also of heroin in Britain, even if from intravenous administration, are almost unknown, since known dosage and purity are givens.”

That is, you can get into trouble with morphine if it is a) adulterated, b) mixed with alcohol, or c) given in overdose. You can’t overdose on the smoked sap. Artificial concentrates are more dangerous than whole herbs when criminalized, because: a) they are easier to adulterate; b) amateurs are untrained in concentrate dosage and administration; and c) concentration and toxicity of unlabeled street alkaloids is unknown.

But the 1909-1914 criminalization of the safe sap automatically popularized the refined alkaloid, since it’s far more profitable to smuggle. This was the conclusion of the official USPHS study conducted by Kolb and Du Mez in 1924. Prior to 1914 gum opium was favored by regular users, after 1914 the gum had been almost totally replaced by heroin and morphine. As Professor Trebach pointed out, this substitution process repeated itself after WW II when American drug law was foisted on a supine world. Hong Kong, North Europe, Japan, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, Borneo and Turkey all found their opium smokers using the only available substitute - heroin. Professor McCoy repeatedly makes the same point. 3 4

NYT, 11/7/1926

Is regular morphine or opium use ’addiction’ simply because it is regular? All genuine addiction experts agree that opiates do no physiological damage to the user at all - they do not damage liver, central nervous system, stomach, muscles, kidneys, glands, heart or brain. The most famous example of this is Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a clinical founder, chief of surgery, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Halsted injected morphine, or a combination of morphine and cocaine, every day for the last thirty years of his life and, simultaneously, was renowned as the greatest technical surgeon alive, “the father of modern surgery.” He died at seventy, still operating. 5

NYT, 1/21/1912

How then does one define ‘addiction?’ Is the word just an epithet? Halsted was a productive genius who used drugs. And the major ‘drug’ he was using was the isolated botanical version of a naturally-occurring human neurochemical. He was practicing psychopharmacology, to be sure, but to great advantage. The same can be said of a very long list of wildly productive contemporary geniuses, including some of our greatest novelists, filmmakers, songwriters, astronomers, physicists, physicians and entrepreneurs.

Prohibition, then, has very little to do with scientific pharmacology and its related disciplines, and much to do with the politicization of pharmacology. As Professor Alfred Lindesmith put it in the introduction to his 1947 classic Addiction and Opiates: “alcohol is addicting in approximately the same sense that heroin is...the fact that marijuana, cocaine, and heroin and other opiate-type drugs are covered in the same anti-narcotics legislation is a fertile source of confused thinking because it obscures the facts that the use of marijuana is totally unlike heroin or morphine addiction and that alcoholism...actually has very much in common with opiate addiction.”

Alcohol, heroin and cocaine all show approximately the same ratio of addicts or abusers to users, 10% or less, hardly a proportion requiring mass hysteria. Cigarettes produce a rate of addiction higher than 50% in occasional users. 6

Coca leaf and opium sap would be preferred by many to cocaine and heroin, were they available, but their legend is so terrifying, like Dracula’s fangs, the mere mention of their phantasm brings shudders of fear, as if Dracula were real. In fact, neither opium sap nor coca leaf are a problem in their native cultures, where they’re both religious sacraments and social inebriants.

Throughout southern Neolithic Europe, in the lakeshore villages of north Italy and Switzerland, for instance, opium was a major crop, and its association with Cretan and Greek ecstatic rites is certain. Demeter’s name is often used as a synonym for “poppy fields” in the Cretan palace records of 1600 BC, and she is often represented as “Opium Mother,” either holding or wearing bulging poppy capsules. Inscribed Mycenaean Greek jars, full of an edible opium-containing “unguent,” have been found in the earliest levels at Eleusis, c. 1300 BC. Opium was a sacred symbol carved into the temple walls at Eleusis, a probable ingredient of the entheogenic “mixture” (kykeon) that was the central sacrament of Classical Greece. Opium continued to be a symbol of fecundity well into Roman times. 7

Demeter Holding Opium Poppies beneath the sacred Double Axe, Gold Signet Seal, Crete, c. 1500 BC; Greek Sacramental Vase, c.350 BC

Opium was cultivated by the Sumerians of 3500 BC, who called it “the Joy Plant.” They had a thriving Asia trade. The Hindu surgeon Sushruta wrote of it in 300 BC. It seems likely that the Han dynasty scholars who compiled the pharmacopeia of Shen Nung around the time of Christ knew of opium, but the references are only suggestive. By the eighth century CE opium was a regular item in the Chinese herbals. 10

Asia, 1/1931

In 970 CE Su Che, in his poem “The Cultivation of the Medicinal Plant Poppy,” sang that opium’s “seeds are like autumn millet; when ground they yield a sap like cow’s milk; when boiled they become a drink fit for Buddha.” In 1057, Su Sung noted that the opium “poppy is found everywhere.” Throughout China, for more than a millennium, honored guests were greeted with drinks or pipes full of opium. 11

Of course, slaves under the lash in the turn-of-the-century colonial slave states could be expected to use opium, especially when it was substituted for their wages. It was literally the only escape they had. “Insufficient food, harsh work schedules, and beatings made most of the plantations slave labor camps with annual death rates higher than 20 percent.” 12

But whether slave opium use was a function of pain or the need to escape, or whether there was, in fact, a high rate of opium use at all in the labor camps is open to question. As Ott points out, “when people are in intense pain, they are much less likely to fall under the thrall of opiates administered even in exorbitant doses to ameliorate it. This is simply because allaying the pain in some way detracts from the euphoria [which, in any case, only a minority of people perceive - for the majority, opiates are nauseating and so aversive, not reinforcing, which is why opiates have never been and never will be majority inebriants]...” For a minority of users, then, opiates are euphoriants, and euphoria is, in a certain sense, analgesic. But one should not simplify the reasons people seek euphoria. 12

Opium, that is, is euphoriant enough for enough people to turn it into a demanded agricultural commodity worldwide. The European colonialists, and the Chinese Imperial slave states, then caricatured this large-scale use as “addiction,” justifying their politically selective enforcement - and their need to monopolize the trade.

A British opium inspector in India, 1905. Scoring the seed capsules in Yunnan, Asia, 1/1931

The Chinese Opium Wars were about control of that trade, that is, control of China. Opium smoking was demonized as low-rent treason, ‘addiction,’ by the Chinese monarchy, and its American ally, only after the British cornered the global trade by conquering opium-producing India and taking control of major Chinese ports. Until that time, Chinese poets sang opium’s praises. Under conditions of foreign monopoly, however, to smoke imported opium was to finance the British rape of China. It is finance and the attendant geopolitical power that Chinese Emperors worried about, not the health of their subjects.

British Opium Factory in India

This hypocrisy was epitomized by China’s leading mandarin, Li Hung-chang, at the 1877 Shanghai Missionary Conference. Li declared that “China views the question from a moral standpoint; England from a fiscal.” But Li forgot to mention that he himself was a large opium producer. Since Li’s Chinese opium contributed to the Emperor’s exchequer, his was moral opium, not that evil British stuff. 13

The raw sap drying in the Persian sun, 1925. Opium and sweet tea, Shiraz, Persia, 1925; Asia

Before the European attack on China’s sovereignty, opium was a commonly accepted social inebriant and aid to meditation with a very long history as the most important painkiller, soporific, antispasmodic and febrifuge known. This medical respect for opium was accepted worldwide. As the 1918 U.S. Dispensatory put it: “It is at present more frequently prescribed than perhaps any other article of the materia medica.” 14

Nearly all the empirical research supports the conclusions of Dr. Marie Nyswander, the popularizer of the politically acceptable ‘methadone maintenance:’ “There is a pattern of self-limitation or restraint in opium smoking in countries where it is socially acceptable. It is common for natives in these countries to indulge in opium smoking one night a week much as Americans may indulge in alcoholic beverages at a Saturday night party.... families who accept opium smoking as part of their culture are mindful of its dangers much as we are mindful of the dangers of overindulgence in alcohol.” 15

Describing the high rate of opium or heroin ‘addiction’ in Hong Kong in 1970, Professor McCoy stresses that “Most of the addicts were poor wage laborers who lived in cramped tenements and sprawling slums, which many social workers considered ideal breeding grounds for addiction.” 16

That is, it is the poverty that fosters the escapism, not the escapism the poverty. But of course, to acknowledge that politically would mean that public funds would start to flow out of police programs and into social programs.

Sociologists at the City College of New York in the early 1940s were astonished by the alcohol admission statistics of New York City’s public hospitals, which then kept records by ethnicity. 25% of all admissions for alcohol-related problems were of Irish background, but only ½ of 1% were of Jewish background. On examination of other measures, they found that the same ratios held true. Alcoholism among Jewish Americans was one-fiftieth the rate of alcoholism among Irish Americans. 17
Since no biological or psychological differences could be found, the answer seemed to lie in the attitude of the cultures toward alcohol itself. Jewish culture, like many Mediterranean cultures, teaches the sane use of alcohol to its young rather than simply prohibiting it. That is, as Dr. Nyswander says, acculturation is everything. Proscription fails, prescription succeeds.

New York’s Lower East Side, 1887, Jacob Riis; Shanghai Opium Den, 1890s

This same pattern repeats itself worldwide and can be found in completely unconnected cultures. The Vicosinos of Peru, who enjoy ritual and social inebriation as often as the Jews, and who also share sanctioned ritual inebriation with the children, likewise have virtually no alcoholism. The Irish Catholic pattern is prohibition; even the sacramental wine is forbidden to all but the priest, producing a strong, alienated reaction in the pub. At Jewish celebrations, such as Passover, even the children get a cup of wine. Those cultures that prescribe rather than proscribe don’t have a drug problem. 18

Professor Charles Snyder: “Where drinking is an integral part of the socialization process, where it is interrelated with the central moral symbolism and is repeatedly practiced in the rites of a group, the phenomenon of alcoholism is conspicuous by its absence. Norms of sobriety can be effectively sustained under these circumstances even though the drinking is extensive. Where institutional conflicts disrupt traditional patterns in which drinking is integrated, where drinking is dissociated from the normal process of socialization, where drinking is relegated to social contexts which are disconnected from or in opposition to the core moral values and where it is used for individual purposes, pathologies such as alcoholism may be expected to increase.” 19

That is the general conclusion of empirical experts on drug abuse regardless of the inebriant. Polynesia has no problem with kava, Peru none with coca leaf, the Mbuti of the Congo none with marijuana, Yemen none with khat, Afghanistan none with opium sap, France none with wine. Prescribing cultures, in which teaching and familial love and acceptance replaces proscription and ostracism, don’t produce the stressful conditions in which inebriation become the focus of neurotic behavior. The ‘drug problem,’ then, is not one of pharmacology, but of public policy. Stress, alienation, pain, promotes the use of euphoriants and pain killers. Stress is the number one ‘gateway’ to ‘abuse.’

Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins from 1980 to 2006, explains that “while each drug acts on different receptors, ‘all seem to funnel through one common reward pathway in the brain,’ ...neural circuitry leading from lower brain regions to the nucleus accumbens in the forebrain. It seems to play a role in normal satisfaction-seeking behaviors involving food and sex but gets exaggerated in addiction...” That is, inebriative behavior is an instinctive oral behavior, physiologically, evolutionarily, related to eating and sex.

The ‘satisfaction’ is achieved largely through the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine is an endogenous precursor of the cerebrospinal neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Peyote’s major alkaloid, mescaline, also a phenylethylamine derivative, is very closely related to norepinephrine. Pure dopamine, chemically identical to the human catecholamine, is produced in large quantities by the saguaro cactus Carnegiea gigantea, used by the Seri Indians of Sonora to treat rheumatic pain. That is, just as the Seri say, the plant world is literally our biological mother. 20

The JAMA: “...scientific evidence supports the view of addiction as a chronic disease, says [NIDA Director Alan] Leshner [this country’s official top drug expert]. Addicts have a disability and therefore are ‘entitled to treatment,’ the same as patients with any other disease.”

That is, the “exaggeration” or neurotic abuse of heroin is defined by Dr. Leshner as a “disease,” which is an odd description for a volitional behavior. Dr. Leshner does acknowledge that much heroin use is not “addiction.” As Dr. Snyder pointed out, much heroin use, like most eating and sex, is rooted in “normal satisfaction-seeking behaviors” – “use,” not “abuse.” Dr. Leshner, of course, would argue that “abuse,” “addiction,” is a “disease” because it is not volitional, but his own research actually brings him to the assertion that most drug “abuse” is a “symptom,” not a “cause.”

Dr. Leshner: “Discerning when drug abuse is in fact an attempt to self-medicate for other disorders may also improve treatment efficacy. Some studies suggest that more than two thirds of patients with drug disorders also have mental disorder, and that almost a third of those with a mental disorder also have a drug problem.” 21

That is, absent the condescending medical jargon, people in pain turn to pain killers or euphoriants. The influential Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, head of Phoenix House, a leading “substance abuse professional,” turns this on its head, insisting that it’s the drug-taking that causes the pain, not the pain the neurotic drug-taking. That is, Rosenthal is engaging in a classic inquisitorial trick, insisting that the medicine is causing the disease. 22

There is a political dimension to this: fascism, the militarization of culture, feeds on the artificial production of stress, Trump’s major political technique. The exacerbation of stress, that is, is a traditional form of witchcraft: Dr. Jeanne Achterberg: “We have a thirty-year research effort from scientists such as Walter Cannon, Hans Selye, and many others, showing the potential for stress to hamper the immune function. There are series after series of animal trials from the most respected laboratories in the world showing that under stressed conditions, the compromised immune system can result in disease or even death. We even have growing acceptance for the notion that stress exacerbates the growth of cancer in humans, triggers flare-ups in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and sends asthmatics off to the emergency room for oxygen. Stress is implicated as a factor in both onset and exacerbation of all the autoimmune diseases - those conditions where the immune system can no longer discriminate self from nonself, friend from foe.” 23

Stress is debilitating, confusing and painful, causing people, instinctively, to reach for whatever painkiller or euphoriant is available. Stress is the number one “gateway” to drug abuse, and there is no empirical doubt about that among the mainstream of addiction scientists, even those who have trouble distinguishing “use” from “abuse.”

Rural India; Asia, c.1927; Jidda, Saudi Arabia, 1927; Edward A. Salisbury, Asia

Biofeedback stress reduction has been shown to be medically effective in reducing hypertension, heart disease, speech disorders, arthritis, diabetes and many other maladies, and is one of the few ancient ecstatic techniques, mechanized, reimbursed by medical insurance companies. 24

The proprioceptive, self-sensing, state induced by many herbal inebriants is an ancient form of biofeedback, since most traditional herbal inebriants employ or trigger the human body’s own neurotransmitters. These traditional herbal sacraments are therefore a direct threat to the production of stress and hysteria in the culture.

In India marijuana has been famous as a relaxant and aid to meditation from time immemorial, and has always been considered a religious sacrament. The rebellious Rastas, stiff-necked Ethiopians, also meditate with ganja, refusing to forget their ancient sacrament - and the musical genius that goes with it. Musical ecstasy, admittedly, is useless in Babylon, on the assembly line, but it does help to hold an African tribe together. That’s why slavers hate ganja. Creative geniuses make lousy, and dangerous, beasts of burden. They’re “addicts” - a word originally used in Roman law as a synonym for “belongs to,” “Spartacus is addicted to Crassus.” The Ethiopians of Jamaica found powerful allies in the East Indian Hindu sadhus brought to Jamaica in great numbers by the British during the nineteenth century.

There is no doubt that hysteria and depression are major reasons why people turn to inebriants for relief, just as there’s no doubt that stress is a major precursor to illness. Euphoria, recreational pharmakon use, can be profoundly healthful, in that mood improvement wards off stress. This is intuitive knowledge, rooted in oral instinct. 25

The millions who go to the local bar on Friday night to socialize and drink beer, this culture’s most popular herbal inebriant, are practicing instinctive social shamanism. Obviously, if the traditional herbs were legal, the concentrated alkaloids, with which it’s easier to get into trouble, would be a lot less popular. Prohibition promotes the use of alkaloids, as the difference in the alkaloid use rates between prescribing and proscribing cultures so easily proves. Holland has less than 20% of our per capita opioid use rate.

Hundreds of millions of people know from regular personal experience the feeling of relaxation, balance and creativity given by the occasional use of a beloved herb. “The principal function of the shaman in Central and North Asia is magical healing. Several conceptions of the cause of illness are found in the area, but that of the ‘rape of the soul’ is by far the most widespread... If shamanic cure involves ecstasy, it is precisely because illness is regarded as a corruption or alienation of the soul.” 26

I, however, have no legal right to the traditional tribal sacraments. I can’t even go to my “personal physician,” apparently my Daddy or Mommy, and ask for some traditional herbal euphoriant because I’m feeling musically uncreative; the request will be deemed “nonmedical.” I’ll be told to wait until I’m good and sick, and then will be given Prozac, which ain’t what I asked for. The jive term “habit-forming” will be applied to my “nonmedical” request, as if garlic, salt, oregano and coffee weren’t equally “habit-forming.”

JAMA:6/1/94: The AMA “discourages and condemns illegal drug use and encourages physicians to do all in their power to discourage the use of illegal drugs in their communities and to refuse to assist anyone in obtaining drugs for nonmedical use.” 27

An ecstatic Greek snake nymph holding the sacred herb carrier, the thyrsos, and the jaguar, symbol of her ferocity. She wears the magical snake in her hair - not a bringer of evil fruit, but symbol of her vegetal power to heal and enlighten. These symbols combined to form the Caduceus. The Brygos painter, c.490 BC; .Good Egyptians and Bad Egyptians, caught with their ancient sacrament, hashish; Asia, 6/1930

Dr. James Todd, the Executive Vice President of the AMA, is no Doc Simmons. This is not corruption. Today’s Journal of the AMA is a relatively open public health forum. This is genuine unconscious culture-centric bigotry, with just a touch of commercial self-interest. The good doctor automatically assumes Papal authority to decide for me what is and is not healthful. The AMA, apparently my legal guardian, tells me that my personal herbal curanderismo is “self-medication” and will not be tolerated. That is, organized medicine literally, legally, owns the lilies of the field.

The symbol of the AMA is the Caduceus, the healing snakes entwined on the living tree. ‘Caduceus’ is Latin for Kerykeion, the magical staff of the Snake Nymph Korykia, the ancient ‘bulb-mother’ of ‘underground’ herbal ecstasy (from krokus, ‘bulb’).

Korykia, also known as Persephone, is the archetypal Greek midwife. Ancient Greek midwives carried the Kerykeion as their power symbol (see my book Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda). Hippokrates of Kos, fl. 400 BC, the canonical ‘first physician’ who carried the Kerykeion, learned to induce his healing dream-state, known as incubation, at the feet of Korykia, as he himself readily acknowledged.

That pharmacologically-induced dream state, which was conceived as a return to the womb, was also called ekstasis, ecstasy. Dr. Todd, claiming to have taken the ‘Hippocratic Oath,’ will tell you that ekstasis is “nonmedical,” because it is “recreational.” Hippokrates would have thought that was as stupid as saying that, since eating a good meal is recreational, it is, for that reason, “non-nutritive.” You’re on the Assembly Line whether you like it or not. You can remember your Bulb-Mother, your connection to the Earth, your birthright, when you’re dead.

Dr. Christine Hartel, associate director for neuroscience in the Division of Clinical Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), expresses the pharmacological sophistry very well: “It’s a plant. We don’t hand out opium pipes to test morphine, and we don’t think about using marijuana in testing. We isolate the active compound and test that.” That is the precise logical equivalent of saying that “we don’t hand out spinach for eating, we isolate the vitamins and hand them out.” 28

Schedule II of The Controlled Substances Act, which allows unrefillable prescription but criminalizes unauthorized possession just as severely as Schedule I, defines opium sap and coca leaves as identical to “any salt, compound, derivative or preparation thereof” - just like Wiley wrote it. Possession of whole coca leaf is the legal equivalent of possession of cocaine, despite the fact that coca leaf tea, in Peru, is traditional baby medicine and morning tea. Possession of coca leaves, probably the best and safest tonic leaf on earth, would subject me to more severe penalties than possession of a bazooka. And I can’t go into court, evidence in hand, and prove that a coca leaf is not a bazooka; if the DEA says it’s a bazooka, it’s a bazooka. Senator Phil Gramm’s grandstanding amendment to the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act actually mandated twice the maximum penalty for bringing drugs into prison, 20 years, than for bringing in a bazooka.

As the California State Supreme Court told Yun Quong in 1911: “The validity of legislation which would be necessary or proper under a given state of facts does not depend on the actual existence of the supposed facts. It is enough if the lawmaking body may rationally believe such facts to be established.” 29

That is, it is sufficient if the California legislature, or the DEA, can imagine opium harming the health of Yun Quong; whether it actually does so is not legally relevant. Nor is Yun Quong’s own opinion of his private behavior, nor that of his physician. That is the ancient Roman prohibitio; it shouldn’t be current law.

It is absurd to insist that if opium and coca were legalized we’d all turn into junkies. Before 1914 opium, coca and their alkaloids were completely legal and widely available. The Kolb and DuMez study of 1924, which covered the years immediately preceding Prohibition, shows approximately ¼ of 1% of the population of 110 million regularly using opiates, as opposed to eighty times as many today. 30

Between 1895 and 1904, before the propaganda campaign began, The New York Times had no call to run a single story about cocaine abuse, despite the fact that it was freely available over the counter. That lack of publicity, of course, is part of the reason there was so little “abuse.” The other part of the reason is that Vin Mariani and the original Coca Cola were also freely available, and, given the choice, most people prefer the herbal-strength dilution to the refined concentrate. The only practical effect of the criminalization of Vin Mariani has been the popularization of refined cocaine, the covert trade in which is controlled by our secret services and client armies, producing a very, very dangerous legal inertia in favor of Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act, that is, imprisonment for profit. 31

Propaganda

Prohibition is about economic and military power, not health or science. It was the geopolitical utility of medical monopoly that saw it come to pass. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was conceived in China, at the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, the idea being that America should pass a model ‘no license’ law it could then ask other nations to adopt. President Roosevelt had arbitrated the end of the Russo-Japanese War only to observe Russia and Japan dividing Manchuria, Mongolia and Korea between them. With China beginning to industrialize on a massive scale, all the imperial powers were delighted to have a ‘pro-Chinese’ issue they could sell while competing for China.

America, with never more than 2500 troops in China, had the weakest military position, and so led the fight for an “open door” and an end to the opium trade. The Chinese leadership had grown to hate opium because the British controlled the nationwide trade, and had used it as a lever to control China.

Industrialization, however, with its mills, mines and railroads, had created different stakes. For America, Chinese cooperation in the industrial competition was essential. The weaker the British position, the stronger the U.S. The Chinese government encouraged groups like the Foochow Anti-Opium Society to express their politically correct feelings for the foreign press.

Secretary of State Root rammed through the 1909 Opium Exclusion Act “in time to save our face at Shanghai,” even though the USDA’s Wiley said he didn’t need it to exclude opium.

The State Department then asked Dr. Hamilton Wright, a member of the Shanghai delegation, to draft a more general, model no-license law it could then ask other nations to adopt. This uniform international effort would force the British to give up an important element of their power, their near monopoly on the global opium trade. The Chinese staged opium burnings.

Asia, March, 1931; Current History, October, 1924

Wright criminalized unlicensed distribution of “opium or coca leaves or any compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, or preparation thereof,” thereby solidifying organized medicine’s monopoly. Lobbying Congress in 1910 for his new bill, Wright fretted about cocaine’s “encouragement among the humbler ranks of the Negro population in the South.... it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country.” That was straight out of The Nigger. Here you have the geopolitical, the economic utility of racism. Wright wrote the editor of the Louisville Journal Courier that “a strong editorial from you on the abuse of cocaine in the South would do a great deal of good - do not quote me or the Department of State.” 1 2 3

The 1912 Hague Opium Convention, which grew out of the Shanghai Commission, committed the U.S. by treaty to Wright’s law, the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, a domestic law controlling opium and coca products. Below, Hearst’s Magazine revivified the 1880s pulp legend of the roué Clendenin, in time to support Harrison. Domestic drug propaganda is still the tool of imperial foreign policy. Today the operative treaties, also engineered by the U.S., are the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 Vienna Antitrafficking Convention, criminalizing virtually all well-known traditional tribal herbal sacraments, as well as their refined concentrates, effectively criminalizing human tribal culture worldwide. These treaties facilitate colonialist land theft, and are thus a major foundation stone of global fascism. 4

Tobacco is the number one killer “drug” in the world, by far, and U.S. companies are among the world’s premier purveyors. In fact, the U.S. moves against any country that tries to restrict tobacco imports. Wrote Peter Bourne, Carter’s Director of Drug Abuse Policy, to Colombian president Virgilio Barco: “Perhaps nothing so reflects on Washington’s fundamental hypocrisy on the issue as the fact that while it rails against the adverse effects of cocaine in the United States, the number of Colombians dying each year from subsidized North American tobacco products is significantly larger than the number of North Americans felled by Colombian cocaine.” 5

The Philip Morris Company, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard and the other great tobacco companies sponsor the flag-waving Partnership for a Drug-Free America, prime producer of anti-marijuana TV ads. Other sponsors include the alcohol and pharmaceutical giants, and the ad industry dependent on their advertising. You won’t find The Partnership for a Drug-Free America worrying about the world’s number one killer drug, or about number two either.

Hamilton Wright explained the situation. He wrote Bishop Brent, his fellow delegate to the Shanghai Opium Commission, that the new Secretary of State Knox was “only now grasping the fact that in this opium business he has the oil to smooth any troubled waters he may meet with at Peking in his aggressive business enterprises there.” The other delegate, future President William Howard Taft, the inventor of “dollar diplomacy,” likewise worried about “one of the greatest commercial prizes in the world.... the trade with the 400,000,000 Chinese.” 6 7

America’s “aggressive business enterprises” were challenged head-on by anti-prohibitionist Eugene Debs, leader of the powerful American Railway Union. Debs’ moderate, libertarian Socialist Party was the electoral umbrella for scores of left-wing groups, including the industrial workers in the Northeast; German and Scandinavian enclaves in the upper Midwest; the radical populists of the Great Plains; Big Bill Haywood’s tough miners and lumberjacks in the Western Federation of Miners - core group of the IWW; Margaret D. Robins’ National Women’s Trade Union League, and Alice Paul’s direct action National Woman’s Party - the radical spearhead that actually forced through woman suffrage.

Debs’ constituency included the awesome scholar and cofounder of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois; the seminal young genius of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph; Margaret Sanger and her mentor, the pioneering psychologist Havelock Ellis; muckraking novelists Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser; the intrepid revolutionary reporter John Reed; the firebrand stump speaker Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the great writer Howard Fast - author of Spartacus; radical publishers Carlo Tresca and Max Eastman; historian Will Durant; populist painter George Bellows; socialite Mabel Dodge; theatricians John Sloan and Robert Edmond Jones; utopian socialist Emma Goldman; pioneering sociologist Thorstein Veblen and muckraking journalist Walter Lippmann. 8

Obviously, no tightly-held ideology bound this diverse group, but they all shared a libertarian fear of bureaucratic collectivism, finding William James and John Dewey more useful than Karl Marx. They also shared a respect for working folks, a disdain for racism and sexism, and a hatred of manipulative prohibitionism, which enshrined the values of the assembly line. Big Bill Haywood, the most radical of the lot, dreamed of a time when “experts will come together for the purpose of discussing the means by which machinery can be made the slave of the people instead of part of the people being made the slave of machinery.” It was their ideas of the minimum wage, social security and unemployment insurance that helped stabilize capitalism during the Great Depression. 9

Bernays Learned Crowd Psychology from his Uncle, Sigmund Freud

And it was Lippmann who warned in his seminal 1922 book Public Opinion that “the manufacture of consent” by the corporate owners of the media was a deadly threat to real democracy. As corporate hit-man Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations” put it, in 1928, in Propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” 10

Propaganda during these years meant William Randolph Hearst, who owned the most powerful chain of yellow journals in the country. Hearst built its core circulation, the Chicago Examiner, using Moe Annenberg’s gunsels to hijack delivery trucks, bomb newsstands and attack newsboys. Hearst literally fought for circulation city by city. 11

In 1910 Annenberg branched out for himself in Milwaukee, although the connection to Hearst remained. By the mid-twenties Annenberg owned Racing Form and American Racing Record, the basic betting sheets, and the General News Bureau, the wire service that provided up-to-the-minute race results. Without Annenberg’s wire, bookies were an easy target for those who did have the latest results. Annenberg’s full partner was Al Capone.

It was the national implications of Annenberg’s racing wire that caused Capone to invite him to the first great modern Syndicate confab, the 1929 Atlantic City Conference, necessitated by the lucrative interstate alcohol trade, now a hood monopoly, created by Prohibition.

The New York turf war between Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano was then going at fever pitch, and the bloodshed was bad for business. The ‘Castellammarese War’ was finally settled by two very dangerous young Turks, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Below, with their early financier, the legendary gambler Arnold Rothstein. Lansky and Siegel’s Jewish hitters, able to pose as G-men, walked right into Maranzano’s well-guarded Helmsley Building office near Grand Central Station and blew him away. Luciano’s button men had taken care of Joe the Boss six months earlier - April, 1931. Capone had been one of Luciano’s New York hitters before he was sent to Chicago.

Luciano, Lansky, Siegel from NYC police files; Rothstein in his office

As the official mob wire, Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service, by the mid-30s, enrolled more than 15,000 clients in 223 cities in 39 states. Hearst tagged along, always able to count on mob goons for ‘circulation.’ Hearst, in turn, always peddled the mob’s ‘anticommunist’ political line. 12

American Hemp Farmers

Hearst also owned Kimberly Clark-St.Regis, the paper and lumber conglomerate that is still busy gobbling up the competition. A major Kimberly Clark-St. Regis customer was DuPont, which converted Kimberly’s wood pulp into explosives and synthetic fiber. Hearst was very progressive. The progressive thrust was the orderly organization of industrial monopoly, that is, industrial fascism.

The economics of marijuana prohibition, brilliantly summarized by Jack Frazier in The Marijuana Farmers and Jack Herer in The Emperor Wears No Clothes, illustrate this fascism perfectly. Marijuana, hemp, was one of America’s most valuable crops in 1900. Much of the country’s textiles, canvas, sails, rope, paper, paints, industrial solvents, lighting oil, machine oil, food oil and medicine was made from it. Marijuana was the raw material for fire hoses, ships rigging, fine linen, work clothes, good paper, candy, bread, bird seed and cheap energy.

The products of a Michigan hemp mill; Scientific American, 6/4/1921

The first American pot law, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1619, actually required every farmer to grow it, since hemp rigging and caulking were deemed a strategic necessity. The Declaration of Independence and most of America’s pre-Civil War books were printed on combination hemp/flax paper. Tens of thousands of acres were in regular production.

Scientific American, 6/4/1921

In the 1930s, the iconoclastic industrial genius Henry Ford had terrified his fellow industrialists by demonstrating that methanol from easy-to-grow hemp could replace gasoline. An acre of hemp yields 1000 gallons of clean-burning methanol, and it’s far cheaper to make. 13

In Popular Mechanics, Dec. 1941, Ford’s test car body itself was made from the tough hemp fiber, wheat straw, sisal and resin binder. The gasoline, sheet metal, synthetic fiber and plastics industries were not amused by the car Henry Ford “grew from the soil.” They knew Ford was dangerous enough to invent them out of business. 14

Hemp, through ordinary pyrolysis, controlled burning, “cracking,” yields charcoal, fuel oil, methanol and BTU gas, all without toxic emissions. The growing hemp consumes three times as much carbon dioxide as it emits during burning. This cheap, nonpolluting biomass is literally capable, now, of economically replacing most fossil fuels and eliminating much industrial pollution. As Herer puts it, “The plant is an annual that grows in all 50 states. It is the fastest growing sustainable biomass on the planet. It can produce paper, fiber, food and fuel.” 15

Ford with his Hemp Car; Popular Mechanics, 12/1941

Not only could much coal and gasoline pollution be eliminated, so could the massive clearcutting of Alaska’s forests for sale to Japanese paper mills. According to Department of Agriculture Bulletin #404, 1916, “Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp-producing capacity of 40,500 acres of average woodland.” Hemp paper costs half of what tree-pulp paper costs to produce, and the production process is 80% less polluting. 16

Hemp cellulose was DuPont’s original raw material for rayon, the first synthetic fiber. An extrapolation of the same process of nitrating cellulose was used by DuPont to produce its dynamite and TNT. DuPont supplied 30% of the explosives for the Allies during WW I, and is today’s leading synthetic fiber manufacturer. Synthetic fibers, despite all the schmaltz DuPont puts on TV, are expensive, non-biodegradable, produced with polluting petrochemicals, patented, and capable of monopolistic control.

Hemp fibers and cellulose could economically, and ecologically, replace many synthetic fibers, building materials, insulations and plastic foams. As Henry Ford tried to make clear, there is no rational reason to be pumping millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the air each year. Biomass is here, now, and the statewide legalization movement has kicked open the door, throwing the petrochemical and synthetic materials industry open to small-scale competition, since high tech isn’t needed to process hemp for many applications. The bipartisan Hemp Farming Act of 2018 removed hemp, defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% THC, from Schedule I controlled substances and made it an ordinary agricultural commodity. It will take a few years, but some of the hemp industry will soon return to its former place in American agriculture. But ‘reefer madness’ has now become ‘opioid madness’ and the mass imprisonment and institutionalization of organized crime continues apace.

“The Transfer”; Ireland in Columbus Dispatch

DuPont’s financier, Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, engineered the legal destruction of the hemp industry for DuPont, clearing the way for rayon to replace hemp fiber. The first DEA, the Narcotics Division of the Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, was founded and funded by the Volstead Act of 1919, the enabling act of the 18th Amendment, Prohibition. The charter of the Narcotics Division, of course, was the Harrison Act of 1914, an original part of Prohibition’s political package. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was originally the responsibility of Treasury’s Alcohol Tax Division, but went largely unenforced until the Volstead Act of 1919 funded the Prohibition Unit and its subdivision, the Narcotics Division.

Levi Nutt, First Chief of the Narcotics Division; Arnold Rothstein Wanted Poster

The first chief of the Narcotics Division, Levi Nutt, held that job for eleven years. But in 1930, Treasury Secretary Mellon appointed an Assistant Commissioner of Prohibition specializing in diplomacy, Harry Anslinger, to head Treasury’s reorganized Bureau of Narcotics. Treasury’s hopelessly corrupt Prohibition Unit was transferred to Justice.

One of the straws that forced this reorganization reveals the actual dynamics of the situation: the indictment of Narcotics Chief Levi Nutt and most of his New York division by a New York Grand Jury, for being on the Rothstein/Lansky/Luciano payroll. Nutt took over when the Narcotics Bureau became the Narcotics Division in 1919 under exactly the same circumstances: “Indict 3,” below. 17

NYT, 2/1/1920; NYT, 11/8/1928

When the legendary gambler Arnold Rothstein was murdered by one of Dutch Schultz’ hitters named McManus in 1928, his dying body was found with a small fortune in opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine - and all his carefully kept legal books, including the history of his relationship with Nutt. The rabid prohibitionist Nutt started his tenure as head of the Narcotics Division in 1919 with his son Rolland Nutt listed as Rothstein’s attorney of record for tax matters with the Treasury Department, and his son-in-law L. P. Mattingly operating as Rothstein’s New York accountant and attorney. 18

It was Nutt’s boss, Mellon, to the great benefit of his clients Dupont, Hearst and their Syndicate allies, who ordered Anslinger to engineer the “Reefer Madness” campaign that criminalized marijuana. Mellon, through his bank, the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, was the major financial backer of DuPont and Hearst.

Mellon, Time, 7/2/1923 (Wikipedia Commons)

DuPont’s 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders looked forward to “radical changes” due to “the revenue raising power of the government ...converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.” From DuPont’s perspective, that meant the replacement of the hemp industry with the synthetic fiber industry, the patents for which it owned. The “no-license” Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, enforced by Secretary Mellon’s underling Anslinger, criminalized the entire hemp industry, proving that the authors of DuPont’s Annual Report knew precisely what they were talking about. Henry Ford’s “car grown from the soil” had become virtually illegal. 19

The criminal-governmental symbiosis is a two-way street. If gambling were legal, who’d need Annenberg’s gambling wire? If drugs were legalized or decriminalized, the hood monopoly would be broken and most popular street drugs would lose most of their value. The great hoods, geniuses at organizing street muscle, were for Prohibition, and Assistant Commissioner of Prohibition Anslinger, the Mellon-Dupont operative, was one of their major allies, operating the side of the street they couldn’t independently run.

The American Magazine, 7/1937; 1936 film

Alcohol and Drug Prohibitionist Anslinger, like his soul-mate J. Edgar Hoover, was in bed with the Mellon-Hearst-Annenberg-Syndicate hoods from the beginning. Anslinger always regarded Drug Prohibition as a tool for “social reorganization,” fearing “communist” unions far more than Syndicate heroin gangs, who were, after all, Mellon’s, DuPont’s, Hearst’s and Annenberg’s patriotic strike breakers. They were also J. Edgar Hoover’s most dangerous COINTELPRO operatives - right from the murderous Palmer raids of 1919-1920, which Hoover organized.

Labor was treated to the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918 and a revitalized Immigration Act permitting the deportation of naturalized citizens. These were almost word-for-word repeats of the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. It became illegal to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government in the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” “False reports or false statements” which brought the government or military “into contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute” became punishable crimes. 25

In 1918, for his criticism of the war, Debs was thrown into prison for ten years. Prohibition’s bitter enemy, the great libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow, helped win a pardon from Harding in 1921. Legally elected Socialists were refused their seats in Congress and the New York Legislature. The IWW was destroyed through imprisonment and assassination. Big Bill Haywood was sent to prison for twenty years, as were most of his surviving lieutenants. “America,” said prohibitionist preacher Billy Sunday, “is not a country for a dissenter to live in.” 26 27

Playing to the politics of the red scare, ignoring the law, Hoover, throughout December 1919 and January of 1920, using deputized local police departments, arrested between six and ten thousand people across the country, not for their actions, but for their political opinions. 591 were deported, and 178 were convicted under the new sedition laws – for their opinion. All the rest had to be freed for lack of evidence of any criminality. The arrests themselves reminded many, on the right as well as on the left, of the worst abuses of the Russian Bolsheviks. President Coolidge, a right-wing straight arrow, reacted by naming Harlan Fiske Stone, dean of the Columbia Law School, as his new attorney general.

On May 9, 1924, Attorney General Stone fired William J. Burns, Hoover’s boss, as director of the Bureau of Investigation, saying this: “A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood. The enormous expansion of Federal legislation, both civil and criminal, has made the Bureau of Investigation a necessary instrument of law enforcement. But it is important that its activities be strictly limited to the performance of those functions for which it was created and that its agents themselves be not above the law or beyond its reach. The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is only concerned with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which should be our first concern to cherish. Within them it should rightly be a terror to the wrongdoer.” 18a

Stone read the riot act to Hoover, but didn’t replace him as acting director. Stone remained as AG for only another 9 months before he ascended to the Supreme Court. Hoover ran the FBI for the next 48 years. And Hoover’s Red Scare training turned him into, as his bestselling book would later put it, one of the great Masters of Deceit. A few years later, prompted by Roosevelt’s new Attorney General, Homer S. Cummings, a former Connecticut state prosecutor, J. Edgar Hoover pioneered the well-publicized destruction of “public enemies,” brilliantly throwing a blanket of PR over his ineffectiveness and corruption. Hoover used the same ghost writer as Harry Anslinger, former circus press agent Courtney Ryley Cooper, the man who coined the phrase “Reefer Madness.” Cooper wrote flashy magazine stories dramatizing J. Edgar’s fictitious personal encounters with “America’s most wanted.” 20

In 1939 Hoover decided that Lepke Buchalter was “the most dangerous man in America.” This momentous decision was forced on J. Edgar when Lepke got himself indicted in 1937 for importing huge amounts of Japanese-KMT heroin from Tientsin. Although the FBI had nothing to do with the investigation or the indictment, it asked Lepke’s partners, Lansky and Luciano, to hand him over to Hoover personally, in the presence of Walter Winchell, no less, in exchange for anonymity and protection. Lansky and Luciano wisely complied - it was good for business, and they were wise guys. 21

Lansky, Trafficante, Marcello, Giancana, Roselli, Costello, Dalitz, Licavoli, Dragna, even the flamboyant Luciano never became FBI ‘Public Enemies’ like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde, redneck pistoleros who never actually owned a Banana Republic. Of course, if Hoover’s objective wasn’t the suppression of organized crime but the suppression of political dissent, then he was, by his lights, acting correctly. Lansky was a dedicated “anticommunist.” Look how he helped Lepke “decommunize” the New York clothing industry. Look what he and Trafficante did for Cuba. Look how Luciano and Adonis helped clean the Reds out of Sicily. Look what Roselli, Cohen and Siegel did for Hollywood’s production unions. Look how Roselli, a famous CIA contractor, cleaned up Guatemala. So far from going after the Syndicate or narcotics, Hoover’s FBI consistently used hood dope dealers as red-baiting finks and antilabor street muscle. 22

Hooover in his office, 4/5/1940 (Wkimedia Commons); The American Magazine, 1936

The Red Menace wasn’t just industrialist propaganda, it was Syndicate propaganda, as committed unionists knew all too well. One of the most menacing of the Reds, of course, was anti-prohibitionist Eugene Debs, who got 402,000 votes in the 1904 presidential election, coming in third to Roosevelt’s 7,600,000. In 1912 he got 900,000, compared to 206,000 for the Prohibition Party, which started out as a post-bellum Northern organization but ended up in bed with the KKK, strong vigilante enforcers of Prohibition during the 20s. By 1914 the Socialist Party had thirty members in twelve state legislatures, more than 300 city officials and one member of Congress, Victor Berger of Wisconsin.

The popular Debs stumped the country in opposition to the war, insisting that if industry supported the war it was only because it was to its tactical advantage to do so. This happens to have been the case. Corporate profits shot up 300% between 1914 and 1919, and leveled off at a spectacular 30% after the war. Inflation, on the other hand, doubled between 1913 and 1920, completely wiping out the modest wartime wage increases. In 1919 a bushel of corn bought five gallons of gas; two years later it bought a half gallon. Family farms went up for sale all across the country, gobbled up by gas companies. Eugene Debs, a farm boy, understood this. 23 24

Debs Campaigning, 1912

The war created an administrative alliance between business and government that became institutionalized. Industry ran the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the War Labor Board, the Committee on Public Information and the rest, setting national monetary, production, labor and propaganda policy. As Wilson said in 1917, “War means autocracy. The people we have unhorsed will eventually come into control of the country for we shall be dependent upon the steel, ore and financial magnates. They will run the nation.”

In 1919 there were 3600 strikes in the U.S. involving more than four million workers, and the strikers lost nearly every one. The army and state police were used as strike breakers so often they became specialists in the job. Wilson, citing “Bolshevism,” used the U.S. Army as strike breakers 25 times between 1919 and 1920. In 1923 thousands of viciously abused coal miners in West Virginia staged the largest armed uprising in the U.S. since the Civil War. It took two divisions of the regular army to put it down. The great film Matewan accurately depicts the buildup to this short but bitterly fought guerrilla war. “You load sixteen tons and whatd’ya get, another day older and deeper in debt.” In 1920, Socialist Debs, from his jail cell, got nearly a million votes for president. His constituents considered Syndicate goons to be considerably more of a threat to society than coal miners on a Friday night binge. The syndicate’s dope business had become protected and institutionalized. 28

NYT, 11/3/1918; NYT, 2/22/1919 and 2/27/1921

The wartime head of the Committee on Public Information, America’s first official Propaganda Minister, was Harper’s answer to Good Housekeeping’s Harvey Wiley, George Creel, just before the war the most famous anti-patent medicine screamer in the country. Creel’s 1913-15 series in Harper’s is full of dragons, snakes and dead babies boiled in soothing syrup.

“Vin Mariani,” wrote Creel dismissively, “ordinary Bordeaux red wine, strengthened by an alcohol preparation of coca leaves and sweetened with sugar.” In other words, after testing by its enemies, it proved to be exactly what Mariani said it was. The technique was to list the good with the bad, the invaluable herbal tonics right alongside the chemical shams, as if a high quality alcohol infusion of Mariani’s selected coca leaves was as worthless as colored water. 29

NYT, 11/3/1918; NYT, 2/22/1919 and 2/27/1921

The Ladies’ Home Journal’s answer to Wiley’s commercial success was Edward Bok; Collier’s was Samuel Hopkins Adams. In the early days of the propaganda campaign Bok and Adams would meet in Wiley’s office to plan coordinated articles. Subscription ads emphasized the importance of joining the anti-patent-medicine Crusade. 30

During the war Creel’s Committee on Public Information launched the largest government-sponsored propaganda campaign in history, coordinating press and broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, consistently portraying dissent as treason.

Incredibly, on Germany’s surrender in 1918, Wilson and the Allies immediately rushed massive amounts of armaments to the Prussian militarists they had just defeated. The Spartacists had risen in Germany, taking Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Essen, Bremen and Dusseldorf, and the Allies knew they couldn’t negotiate a reliable contract of reparations with them, so they backed the Prussians.

The revolt took the Prussians months to crush, and it is open to question whether they could have done it without Allied arms. Margaret Sanger’s inspiration, Rosa Luxemburg, the birth strike advocate, died leading this revolt. Had we heeded the socialists and taken the opportunity to crush the Prussians once and for all, we would have saved ourselves the last great battle of World War I, World War II, as predicted in writing by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of her execution.

Chortled The New York Times, á la George Creel, December 12, 1918: “...in a few years more Germany would have been irresistible in war, for she would have made drug fiends of all the other nations of the world. Into well-known German brands of tooth paste and patent medicines - naturally for export only - habit-forming drugs were to be introduced; at first a little, then more, as the habit grew on the non-German victim and his system craved ever greater quantities.”

Harper’s Weekly,2/1915; Ladies Home Journal, 1/1912

“Already the test had been made on the natives of Africa, who responded readily; if the General Staff had not been in such a hurry German scientists would have made their task an easy one; for in a few years Germany would have fallen upon a world which cried for its German tooth paste and soothing syrup - a world of ‘cokeys’ and ‘hop fiends’ which would have been absolutely helpless when a German embargo shut off the supply of its pet poison.”

NYT, 1/16/1919, and 8/20/1918

“But although the tale of this Teuton-all-too-Teuton scheme is probably a mere invention, Germany did concoct and spread through the world a habit-forming drug, and her leaders in this war have made good use of its ravages in other countries. More than half a century ago socialism was invented in Germany; and the rulers of the empire, foreseeing its vast possibilities in breaking down national morale, fostered its propagation abroad while they did their best to stamp out the habit at home.... Just as workmen in the tooth paste factories might have surreptitiously sampled the brands made for export only and found attractions not present in the products for the home market, so the Germans took to socialism and neosocialism. It is a rare poison that will not act on the system of its own inventor.”

That is almost exactly what Harry Anslinger told a Senate committee and the United Nations Narcotics Commission in 1951 about the Chinese Reds, holding up a bag of Lions Globe heroin he said they were shipping to our boys in Korea. This assertion was the basis of a major propaganda campaign that lasted for years. Anslinger handled the press with the finesse of Creel himself. Lions Globe was actually the brand manufactured by our own Kuomintang allies, Chiang’s boys, and the more entrepreneurial of the natives, also our allies, in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, as our boys in Nam discovered, and as our own Bureau of Narcotics confirmed in 1972. 31 32

In a famous 1959 case, Anslinger’s top international agent, George White, an OSS/CIA operative, made a major heroin bust. It was Burmese Kuomintang heroin funneled through Hong Kong, bound for distribution by the American Syndicate. But by allowing the ringleader, a well-known member of San Francisco’s KMT-organized Chinese Anti-Communist League, to escape, White was enabled to claim that it was Red Chinese dope, “most of it from a vast poppy field near Chungking.” 33

The Kuomintang was for Prohibition. Today we still arm the various military intelligence dope dealers around the world, Mexican, Colombian, Afghan or Pakistani, or finance their drug gangs through the artificial value our Prohibition gives these commodities, and the Lions Globe just keeps on comin’, like toothpaste out of a tube.

And what was the rationale for our support of Asia’s fascist dope peddlers? Communism and Heroin - successful, meaningless, scary, institutionalized propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” to quote the father of public relations.

In 1920 the army’s former chief neuropsychiatrist, Pearce Bailey, revealed in April’s Mental Hygiene that “It is in them [heroin users] that mental contagion which leads up to hysterical mass movements, spreads with the greatest rapidity, and in their minds sedition finds an easier route than realism.... Suggestible, they easily become the tools of designing propagandists in spreading seditious doctrines, or in the commission of acts in defiance of law and order.”

Dr. Alexander Lambert, of the Towns-Lambert method, President of the AMA and head of their “Committee on the Narcotic Drug Situation in the United States,” amplified Dr. Bailey’s insights in the Journal of the AMA, May 8, 1920: “We know that the misfit can no longer be ignored. He is too numerous; he has learned the lesson of organization; and he had learned through association means of cheap satisfaction that deaden for a time his elemental cravings, even though they return him to society more of a menace and a care than before.”

“If he had ‘nerves,’ someday he will get a nightmare vision of himself as a piece of social wastage, a victim of conditions far more far-reaching than his individual life. When he becomes organized and vocal, society may awaken to the fact that he is an I.W.W., a bolshevik, or what not. He is not wholly to blame.”

“If he finds his environment impossible to manipulate through lack of training, he will seek forgetfulness in some form of self-gratification. And some form is usually found in the unwholesome environment of the ordinary city street. If he comes in contact with those using narcotic drugs, they will find him responsive to imitation-suggestion./The correctional cases should be committed to institutions with no age limit - from the cradle to senility, if necessary.”

Here we have the basic elements of today’s propaganda barrage: political treason associated with drug addiction, peer pressure, street gangs, and three strikes and you’re out. This inquisitorial equation of all ecstatic pharmakon use with illness and subversive mania isn’t just camp; this quack wrote today’s drug laws, now administered by an army of careerist quacks with a vested interest in having “a clientage furnished through governmental coercion.”

In 1930, The Literary Digest reported that the fluid from blisters raised on the heroin user and injected was a promising new treatment of interest to the AMA. In 1931 Scientific American reported that the standard rabies treatment worked well on these mad dogs. In 1932 two Cornell researchers reported that “washing the brain” with sodium rhodanate would help “thin the thickened blood cells of the addict.” In 1933, the year of repeal, three anesthetists reported that intravenous injection of grain alcohol was useful. In 1935 Drs. Klingmann and Everts revived the Towns-Lambert method, with an emphasis on the scopolamine. In 1940 two geniuses reported “curing” addiction with “frozen sleep.” In 1957 the Naval Medical Field Research Laboratory at Camp Lejeune spared an addict “the distressing symptoms of withdrawal” by severing his frontal lobes from the rest of his brain. 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
Today’s Quack Commander in Chief, Emeritus, promulgating today’s update of this same propaganda, is the ‘progressive’ Joseph Califano, a key CIA operative both before and after Kennedy’s assassination, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and now founder and chairman of Columbia University’s Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), renamed the Partnership to End Addiction. Califano helps to channel a torrent of public money into 1930s-style politicized research, and coercive, Lambert-style ‘treatment.’ Califano’s CASA was one of McCaffrey’s major tools for coordinating national propaganda during the Clinton administration, and has served as a policy model for the DEA ever since.

For Califano all drug use is a “disease,” an “epidemic,” to use his words, which, not so coincidentally, are the same as those used by the Pope in 1487 in The Malleus Maleficarum about “witches’ medicines.” Like so many Roman lawyers before him, the man is a genuine anthropological ignoramus. Not once in the psuedo-scientific Radical Surgery (1994) does he mention the origins of human inebriative behavior, tribal culture, or a single significant pharmacologist, anthropologist, ethnobotanist or psychoanalyst, although he insists that “substance abuse and addiction...is - the most devastating health pandemic threatening our people.” Apparently it’s uniquely contemporary, like computer fraud. There’s not a single scholarly annotation in the whole book, which is committee written on a tenth-grade sound-bite level. In fact, he quotes priests as anecdotal medical authorities. 41

According to Califano, the absurd artificial value Prohibition gives inebriants, and the criminalization of people for simply trying to medicate themselves, in the absence of any sympathetic curanderismo, isn’t the cause of today’s street war. It’s the act of self-medication per se, despite the fact that the leading sociologists insist, and can prove, that safe herbal inebriants, in cultures which teach their traditional uses, cause no social problems whatever. Califano will wring his hands about collegiate “binge drinking” and never once mention an empirical expert on alcoholism. His idea of an expert is “the [unnamed] president of one of the nation’s top Jesuit colleges.” 42

His discussion of “The Rodney King Story” never once mentions the ruthless police beating of a helpless man to within an inch of his life. It was their acquittal, of course, despite that incredible videotape of six cops beating King to within an inch of his life, that set off the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But Califano never mentions the beating, which so many felt symbolized their own experience. Instead, he focuses on King’s drinking, concluding that “Months later, after the policemen’s acquittal, the riots began - not at the courthouse or at city hall - but at Pay-less Liquor and Deli in South Central L.A. There, around 4 P.M., five angry gang members stole some bottles of malt liquor, yelling ‘This is for Rodney King!’ Around 6 P.M., an angry mob, pelting passing motorists, chose its first target for looting: Tom’s Liquor store, from which the mob took more than a hundred cases of forty-ounce malt liquor bottles and ninety cases of sixteen-ounce malt liquor cans.”

“The focus of the crowd should not be a surprise. As U.S. News & World Report noted, 728 licensed liquor outlets smothered South Central L.A.’s crumbling landscape - an opportunity to buy booze around just about every corner.” 43

That is straight out of The Nigger: “Why, day befo’ yeste’day I had a count made an’ theah were three thousand four hundred an’ sixty-seven idle niggahs in the fifty-nine saloons o’ the levee district! That was the end, Clif, an’ the long an’ the sho’t of it is - we’re goin’ dry!”

Califano prescribes legal coercion to force all users trapped by the law, about 5% per year of the total of about 30 million, into a huge brainwashing bureaucracy, attached to the court system, that will pummel them until they submit. He plausibly advocates treatment over incarceration, accurately pointing out that “$1 invested in treatment saves $7 in crime, health and welfare costs.” But his “progressive compassion” is just as vicious as Lambert’s. 44 45

He says he knows that “Addiction is a chronic disease, more like diabetes and high blood pressure than like a broken arm or pneumonia, which can be fixed or cured in a single round of therapy.” But he then suggests that “Instead of across-the-board mandatory sentences, keep inmates with drug and alcohol problems in jails, boot camps or halfway houses until they experience a year of sobriety after treatment.” He adopts Dr. Leshner’s mainstream disease model, as he must to be plausible, but then advocates precisely the opposite therapy advocated by Dr. Leshner. Do we keep diabetics in boot camps until the diabetes goes away? Cigarette addicts? White man speak with forked tongue. This nasty hypocrite tells us that addiction is a chronic condition, and then proposes punishment for its sufferers, as the mainstream of drug abuse experts most certainly do not. 46 47

For Califano, addiction is really a “turpitude” to be corrected, not a symptom of a real medical condition requiring continuing pharmacotherapy. His medical compassion is simply a necessary pose. He repeats, as if it were a medical prescription, the Bush-Bennett National Drug Control Strategy: “That doesn’t mean we should soften up the toughness required to get them to quit, such as threat of dismissal from a job or incarceration upon repeated relapse or violation of drug laws.” Just what an addictive personality needs - the stress of unemployment and the threat of incarceration. That’s sure to promote sobriety. However one defines ‘addiction,’ I know of no physician who thinks denial of pain killers to those in pain, or imprisoning diabetics and denying them insulin, is medically indicated. 48

“The grim reality, shrouded for too long in our self-denial, is that any effort to provide all Americans health care at affordable cost is doomed to fail unless we mount an all-fronts attack on abuse and addiction involving all substances - cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, PCP, hallucinogens, sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, analgesics, inhalants, and steroids.” 49

So far as I can tell from his book, that’s his idea of all substances. Califano neither distinguishes herbs from concentrates nor use from abuse, even in the vast majority of cases that involve no abuse. A positive test automatically means “addiction to witchcraft.” It is precisely this indiscriminate idiocy that popularizes the street alkaloids and cigarettes. The Secretary tells us that his personal model for all drug use is his compulsive, 28-year tobacco addiction, up to 4 packs a day when he was busy telling Lyndon Johnson victory is just around the corner in Vietnam. Why wasn’t he thrown into a halfway house? 50

Califano is apparently, or conveniently, unaware that the average marijuana user smokes one cigarette for every pack consumed by a tobacco addict, and that addiction to marijuana is medically unknown. Dr. John Morgan: “Of course, a ‘heavy’ smoker of marijuana consumes 3 or 4 cigarettes per day, while a heavy tobacco smoker may consume 40 or more cigarettes per day. This probably explains the rarity of reported carcinoma in marijuana smokers.” Califano sophistically equates pot with tobacco, and then insists, lying through his teeth, that pot escalates cancer costs. That is a professional propagandist at work, not a scientist. 51

He dreamily insists that all traditional inebriative herbs are equally dangerous, and that all herbs are, magically, so to speak, as dangerous as the most dangerous refined concentrates. All inebriants, therefore, deserve no policy distinctions. This is also the official position of the U.S. State Department. Califano makes no connection between the unavailability of safe traditional herbs like marijuana, coca leaf and opium sap, which he never once mentions, and the wild popularity of relatively dangerous, but profitable to smuggle, street alkaloids like cocaine and heroin. Nor does he associate the unavailability of safe herbs with the popularity of poisonous crap like glue and PCP. On the contrary, he equates the herbs with the poisons.

Califano therefore advocates making crack worth an artificial fortune, and is then outraged when poor ghetto kids gang up to make it. Prohibition has created a multi-billion-dollar street trade run by kids cutting concentrated, amateurishly-produced alkaloids with sugars, procaine, baking soda, quinine, even poisons, forcing Uncle Joe to conclude that health problems from this garbage are ultimately caused by marijuana leaves. Califano informs us that teenagers who smoke pot are “85 times more likely to use cocaine.” 52

The intentional sophistry of this “stepping stone” statistic is disgusting. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, the outfit he founded as Carter’s Secretary of HEW, derived the “85 times more likely” snow-statistic in 1991 by dividing the proportion of U.S. marijuana users who ever used cocaine, 17%, by the proportion of cocaine users who never used marijuana, almost none, 0.2%. That is a sociological, not a pharmacological measurement. By that measure, tobacco, beer or steak could be shown to be causative cocaine-use factors. 53

83% of regular pot smokers never used cocaine, but that’s something Califano won’t advertise, since that would demonstrate that marijuana is a “terminus” rather than a ”gateway” drug. NIDA’s own 1991 survey concluded that 68 million Americans had tried marijuana, but that there were only about 6 million drug addicts or abusers in the whole country, most abusing inebriants other than marijuana. In other words, according to NIDA’s own stats, marijuana leads to very little abuse.

NIDA says that 17% of U.S. marijuana users have used cocaine at least once. The Dutch figure is less than one-tenth that; it’s so small it can’t even be accurately measured, which proves, obviously, that the supposed pharmacological connection between pot and coke is pure fiction. The connection is sociological - related to public policy, and proves the exact opposite of what the sloppy-thinking Califano is so hysterically trying to prove.

Here is part of the official end-of-year report from the Dutch Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs, 1995, signed by the Ministers of Health, Justice and Interior: “Dutch policy on the use of cannabis is based on the assumption that people are more likely to make the transition from soft to hard drugs as a result of social factors than because of physiological ones. If young adults wish to use soft drugs - and experience has shown that many do - the Netherlands believes that it is better that they should do so in a setting in which they are not exposed to the criminal subculture surrounding hard drugs. Tolerating relatively easy access to quantities of soft drugs for personal use is intended to keep the consumer markets for soft and hard drugs separate, thus creating a social barrier to the transition from soft to hard drugs…. The decriminalization which took place in the 1970s did not lead to an increase in the use of soft drugs then either.”

“The view held by some that the use of cannabis products alone causes a physiological or psychological need to use hard drugs as well - what is known as the stepping stone theory - has been belied by actual developments in the Netherlands. Dutch young people who use soft drugs are perfectly well aware of the greater dangers of using hard drugs such as heroin and have no desire to experiment with them. In the Netherlands the percentage of soft drugs users who also go on to use hard drugs is relatively low. In light of these findings the stepping stone theory should be regarded as one of the many myths in circulation about the use of drugs, though one which under certain circumstances could become a self-fulfilling prophesy: by treating the use of cannabis products and hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine in the same way may in fact make it more likely that cannabis-smokers will come into contact with hard drugs. Moreover, equating the one with the other undermines the credibility of the information provided about drugs to young people.”

The average age of Dutch heroin addicts is over thirty, that is, this policy, which has been in place for more than forty years, has succeeded in radically reducing the use of heroin among the young. Holland now has less than one-seventh our rate of hard drug use, and crime. “The fact that there are virtually no young people under 20 using heroin or cocaine in the Netherlands is extremely gratifying…” By refusing to distinguish whole herbs from either natural or artificial concentrates, Califano is actually engineering widespread concentrate use. And that, like it or not, is an historical function of military intelligence, which has always been financed by the Yakuza, the Mafia.

CIA agent Califano, in the early 60s, was the chief military liaison to Santos Trafficante’s Cuban dope dealers, the remnants of Batista’s secret police. It was Califano’s job to protect Trafficante’s huge heroin and cocaine operation, which supported our anti-Castro Batistiano guerrilla army. Califano’s job, then as now, was to keep the price of the ‘prohibited susbstances’ up. Medicalization of the refined concentrates, and legalization of the whole herbs, would collapse the price, putting organized crime out of the drug business.

Remember Califano’s other domino theory, the one about Vietnam? We could have bought the Viet Minh for a tenth of the price we paid to lose to them. Do we really want to take national policy cues from one of the engineers of two of the worst strategic disasters in American history, the Vietnam War and the Drug War?

The Dutch know what they’re doing. With this evidence in hand, The European Parliamentary Commission on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs recommended to the full European Parliament, 1/29/95, continent-wide marijuana decriminalization, insisting that the legal equation of soft and hard drugs caused hard drug use. The U.S. pulled out all the stops to prevent this political humiliation at the hands of the EP, which usually accepts the recommendations of its official commissions. 54

Times-Picayune, 6/5/1930; American Newspapers, Inc.,1938

Califano is peddling his “devil-drug” for all it’s worth, wringing his hands, crying in his beer for all those “crack babies.” This talented propagandist, a master at hyping “new studies” designed to induce artificial hysteria, constantly repeats the phrase “pediatric pandemic,” a great alliteration. Fascism is always maudlin. 55

Califano: “Put the children of drug- or alcohol-addicted welfare mothers who refuse treatment into foster care or orphanages.... Subject inmates, parolees and welfare recipients with a history of substance abuse to random drugs tests, and fund the treatment they need. Liberals must recognize that getting off drugs is the only chance these individuals (and their babies) have to enjoy their civil rights.” 56

JAMA: “Media-generated hysteria over ‘crack babies’ has led to the imprisonment of women who use cocaine during pregnancy. Many health care workers believe that the fear of prosecution and imprisonment discourages many of the women who most need prenatal care from seeking it. Ironically, properly controlled scientific studies suggest maternal cocaine use may pose less danger to a fetus than maternal cigarette smoking.” 57

While cigarette-addict Califano does include some boilerplate about cigarettes and alcohol, he doesn’t advocate criminalizing them, despite the fact that while only 2.5% of U.S. newborns may have some prenatal exposure to cocaine, 73% have some prenatal exposure to alcohol and 38% to cigarettes. And while there’s no medical doubt about the devastating effects alcohol has on a developing fetus, there’s considerable doubt that cocaine is anywhere near as harmful. When the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta put pregnant rhesus monkeys on an intravenous cocaine drip for the entire duration of their pregnancies, all their babies were born perfectly normal. The worst effect of prenatal cocaine use may be that users tend to smoke more cigarettes and drink more booze. 58 59

NYT, 3/6/1928

Califano: “Legalizing drug use would write off millions of minority Americans, especially children and drug-exposed babies, whose communities are most under siege by drugs.” That’s funny, I thought they were under siege by the police. I can’t remember the last time time I saw a pot plant smash a kid in the face with a nightstick, or shoot one in the back. Is that like Pope Gregory’s “it’s better to burn in this world than to burn in the next”? 60

All urban police departments, even if they won’t mention the tension they bring to the situation, stress that it’s the economics of Prohibition, the artificial underground economy, combined with the lack of opportunity, that is responsible for the gang warfare, not pharmacology per se.

Former Baltimore Mayor Schmoke, a former police officer: “Drug traffickers kill to protect or seize drug turf, and addicts commit crimes to get money for drugs. Almost half the murders in Baltimore in 1992 were drug related.” “When we say drug-related,” explains Deputy Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York City Police Department, “we’re essentially talking about territorial disputes or disputes over possession.... We’re not talking about where somebody is deranged because they’re on a drug.” 61 62

Califano, and his clones McCaffrey and succeeding DEA chiefs, are careful to invert this, insisting, in classic reefer madness style, that by some demonic magic pharmacology is the reason kids are shooting each other over dealing territory. Collapse the price with legalization, and the violence will collapse instantly. By creating an underground economy and then demonizing the normal money-seeking and ecstatic behavior of the young, we instigate their murder. As Eddy Engelsman, the former Dutch Minister of Health, puts it, “The effects of heroin and cocaine use are too often confused with the effects of their illegality.”

When I was 17, in 1962, a classmate of mine went down to north Harlem with a buddy to buy five dollars worth of pot and go to the movies. When they got busted, Steve’s buddy panicked and made for the subway, where it’s easy to hop one of the many trains flowing through the dense crowd. Just before the kid got to the subway stairwell the cop shot him in the back - dead. That is an absolutely typical drug war story.

On February 21, 1995, the cops set up 16 year-old Lawrence Meyers at his Patterson, New Jersey housing project. The enraged kid panicked and ran, at which rookie housing cop Ronald Cohen shot him through the back of the head. According to Califano, Lawrence Meyers was more of “the debris of drug use on city streets.”

That is, we have made no Drug War progress at all since the 1960s – the fascist horror stories are identical. Cops are still being taught that the people they are policing are military enemies, or legitimate targets for ‘ticketing’ extortion: “10/17/2018: Video shows Chicago cop shooting unarmed black autistic teen,” “3/2/2019: 2 Sacramento cops who shot unarmed black man in backyard won't face charges,” “9/14/2018: A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City Is Full of Questions.” I could fill the rest of this book with these stories. 63

Michael Slager calmly takes aim and pumps 5 shots into Walter Scott’s back, for a broken brake light, April 4, 2015 (Wikimedia Commons)

Country roads are also seeing their share of debris. In the middle of the night of April 28, 1995, in Wisconsin, four Dodge County troopers burst into Scott Bryant’s trailer with no warning and shot him dead: “They rushed the door but they didn’t holler anything. As soon as they kicked the door in, we heard the shot.” Bryant had offered no resistance, no firearms were found, and he was in possession of barely enough pot to make three joints. The idiots had simply worked themselves into a frenzy for the midnight raid and shot the terrified victim to death as he flinched. His stricken seven year old boy watched his Daddy die on the living room floor. “Liberals must recognize that getting off drugs is the only chance these individuals (and their babies) have to enjoy their civil rights,” says the seminally important Drug War fascist Califano, a leading member of the team that put this brutality in place. 64

If coca leaf preparations were legal, the mild, healthful coca leaf high, about as potent as coffee but far more delightful, would largely replace cocaine on the street. Until Decree 22095 of 1978 prohibited the possession and sale of coca leaves at altitudes below 1500 meters, cocaine use was virtually unknown in Lima. Coca is the basic sacrament and medicine of Andean culture. It is given to babies as a tonic and is used as a specific for altitude sickness, dysentery and various other complaints. When unavailable, it is not missed; there’s no such thing as ‘addiction’ to coca leaves. Califano handles this logical problem of his anti-legalization argument the same way NIDA chemists often do, by sophistically equating coca leaves with polluted street cocaine. He absolutely never mentions the leaves at all, despite, or perhaps because of, their preeminent place in Native American culture.

Like coffee, coca leaves are a work and concentration stimulant. They increase the efficiency with which the muscles use oxygen, as Freud demonstrated in 1884. The Incas, working in the oxygen-thin high Andes, named their Goddess Mama Coca. Coca leaves are the premier sacrament of Andean culture - and that’s why they’re illegal. Isolated cocaine has absolutely nothing to do with it. Coca leaves were immediately demonized by the Spanish slavers on conquest, hundreds of years before the isolation of cocaine. The drug war is motivated by the inquisitorial neurosis, reflexive, unconscious slaver hostility to tribal culture.

Protested Felipe L. Caceras, Vice Minister of Social Defense on boliviacocagrowers.org/: "We protest strongly against the recommendations of the report about the prohbition of coca. The coca leaf as a plant is part of nature. Thanks to Mother Nature, the Pachamama, coca can be used in medicine and as nutrition. It is not cocaine but it is the cultural heritage of the Bolivians."

Felipe Caceres

Tribal herbalism is matriarchal, non-industrial, shamanic and experiential, not theological. Cultural genocide is a necessary part of the industrial enslavement process. Mandatory religion is a slaver invention designed to institutionalize enslavement and land theft. When Constantine adopted Christianity he was the greatest slaver on the face of the planet. The Roman slavers inverted the message of the anti-slavery Israeli rebel Joshua to a theological endorsement of human enslavement. Hostility to matriarchal shamanism is an organic part of patriarchal slave state religion. That’s why the pro-legalization rationalists are having such a hard time getting their point across, despite the empirical integrity of their case. The inquisitorial neurosis isn’t susceptible to rationality - it is culturally inculcated emotional compulsion, slaver hostility to tribal culture, the psychological substrate of racism, the Catholic teaching that Native American culture, or for that matter Native African culture, is “pagan.” 65 66

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines neurosis as “individual or group behavior that is characterized by rigid adherence to an idealized concept of the personal or social organism especially when that concept is significantly at variance with reality and that results in interpersonal, cultural or political conflict… (the atmosphere of conformity, introduced by our present neurosis).” (Parenthesis theirs.)

A good short definition of neurosis is “an unrealistic reaction to a present situation based on a past memory or emotion.” Califano has no more reason to demonize Mama Coca than his coreligionist Pizzaro had, or, rather, he has the same reasons. The enslavement process inherently entails the forcible replacement of the matriarchal experiential shamanism with the patriarchal theocratic substitute, replacing spontaneous shamanic creativity with theologically mandated “submission.”

The powerful Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the Indian union, insists on the distinction between “the sacred leaf,” quite literally the Sacred Eucharist to them, and refined cocaine, as does the influential Central Obrera Boliviana, the largest trade union confederation. Native America is the majority down there, Euro-fascism or no. Has Joseph Califano ever sat down over a cup of coca leaf tea with an Incan shaman? Has he ever chewed a quid? He probably doesn’t even think it’s worth the effort; thinks he’s got nothing to learn, or too much to lose.

Cocaine’s or heroin’s availability through physicians or licensed distributors, at 5% of street prices, would a) bankrupt all the smuggling organizations and therefore render concentrates unavailable on the street - and that is the only way to do that; b) economically force all concentrate users into the hands of medical professionals; c) leave those professionals free to prescribe as they saw fit; d) remove the milieu and incentive for armed robbery and turf war instigated by the cost of illegal inebriants.

Herb legalization and controlled concentrate dispensation would also give the campesinos a legal market for, and partially collapse the price of, their most valuable crops. Crop substitution would then make some economic sense. End of drug war. But does military intelligence really want the war to end?

Califano, a major military intelligence operative of the Vietnam War years, reveals his rank dishonesty when he asserts, in his 1994 book, that “Arguments for legalization are notoriously short on details. Would we legalize all drugs or only some? Could they be marketed like alcohol and tobacco? How old would you have to be to get legal drugs? Old enough to drive a car? Would you have to prove you are already addicted? Could drugs be sold in pharmacies? In every neighborhood?” 67

Do you have to prove you’re addicted to buy beer? Does any sane person advocate drunk driving? Selling whiskey to eight-year-olds? Califano goes on with more inane staccato questions, prosecuting attorney style, always confusing traditional herbs with isolates and poisons, as if he were completely unaware of the large body of specific work, long on details, produced by so many.

Definitive indexes of this work can be found on the National Drug Strategy Network (ndsn.org), the Drug Policy Alliance (drugpolicy.org), the Drug Reform Coordination Network (stopthedrugwar.org), and NORML (norml.org).

Professor Steven Duke and Albert Gross are the authors of America’s Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs. These two brilliant lawyers and sociological thinkers presented their own detailed legalization plan in fifty pages of text. Am I to believe Califano never heard of this seminal best-seller on his subject, published the year before his own, or the work of so many others, long on details? This is intellectual dishonesty, overt lying.

Concludes Califano: “In his epic, A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee concluded that great civilizations are destroyed by self-inflicted wounds - not by enemies from outside, but from within. The threat from substance abuse is not the only internal threat our nation faces, but it is certainly as pernicious and costly as any other. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hospitals, emergency rooms, and doctors’ offices crowded with its victims and in the trail of shattered lives and families in every part of our nation.” 69

Rep. Richmond P. Hobson of Alabama, 1911: “History is a record of a sad procession of world tragedies. Nations and empires in turn have risen to greatness only to fall. Before the death blow was struck from without the evidence shows in every case the ravages of a titanic destroyer within, under whose operations the vitality and strength of the nation were submerged in a general degeneracy.”

“For centuries the world’s philosophers and historians have looked on appalled, overwhelmed. Only in the last few years has science taken up the question. Following her patient, rigid methods, under which nature and life have slowly yielded up their secrets, science has at last cleared up the mystery and identified the great destroyer as alcoholic poisoning.”

In 1925, Hobson, echoing virtually all of officialdom, including Califano and today’s DEA, insisted that “Heroin changes a misdemeanant into a desperado of the most vicious type…. Narcotic addicts lose their soul-life. They sink to the level of the brute.” Hobson, like Califano, violently opposed maintenance clinics that simply prescribed the desired inebriant under medical supervision, that is, that were allowed to practice harm reduction or limited legalization. 70

Dr. S. Dana Hubbard, one of the chief clinicians at the New York City Heroin Clinic in 1920, pointed out that the huge numbers of addicts imagined by the alarmists “are mythical and untrue and...therefore the fear of a panic of these miserable unfortunates was negative.” 71

Even the AMA’s Lambert had to agree that strict enforcement turned up only about 7000 addicts in all of greater New York. Almost all of them were completely nonviolent, and, given a cheap supply of morphine or opium, law abiding. Despite the constant political hysteria, this has been the conclusion of every serious study of addiction and crime ever since. As innumerable highly productive opiate users have demonstrated, given a cheap supply of opiates and a good work-study program, there is no heroin problem. Just as Vietnam, and we, would have been better off if we simply ignored it, so too would the “drug problem.” 72

Dr. Arnold Trebach, after a learned consideration of historical policy and pharmacology, concluded that, ideally, a major part of The Heroin Solution would be precisely what Dr. Lester Volk said it was on the floor of Congress in 1922: the family physician and smoking opium - and an end to the artificial hysteria. Dr. Volk, the only physician in Congress, pointed out, on January 4, 1922, that the AMA’s Lambert was a corrupt fraud, a co-proprietor of Towns’ hospitals, studying “the different shades and colors, consistency, and solidity of the products of elimination by which the learned gentlemen administering the medication determine the exact status of the will power of the patient.” 73

Volk noted that the two most famous American experts on addiction, Dr. George Pettey, who wrote Narcotic Drug Disease and Allied Ailments and Dr. Ernest Bishop, author of The Narcotic Drug Problem, were either completely ignored or under indictment by the USDA.

“As a substitute for open discussion of known medical facts there has been set up a propaganda for the incarceration of all drug users, their treatment by routine methods, and complete elimination of the family doctor. An undeniable effort is now being made whereby physicians are to be denied any discretion and power in the prescribing of narcotic drugs and to force all those addicted to the use of these drugs into hospitals exploiting questionable ‘cures.’” 74

In The Medical Record, Dec. 1921, Dr. Volk added: “For over two years the lay press has been pretty constantly portraying various spectacular, criminal, or morbid angles...of what is popularly called the ‘drug evil.’... The whole situation presents a picture of...strife, of influence, of power and of propaganda and publicity.... About the only undisputed fact...is the rapid extension of criminal and illicit ‘underworld’ smuggling and peddling, and the increase of addiction through its commercial extension...”

Chicago Herald and Examiner,1926; Sharing the Sacramental Kava, Samoa, c. 1920

The price of heroin skyrocketed from $6.50 an ounce in 1913 to $100 an ounce in 1920, as Harrison enforcement began in earnest, according to police. By forcing the physicians out, the USDA was enforcing an ironclad monopoly in favor of the hoods and their fascist military allies, handing them a completely artificial multimillion dollar trade they had every incentive to expand as rapidly as possible.

Before the 1923 closing, on Narcotics Chief Levi Nutt’s orders, of the prescribing Shreveport Clinic, the Shreveport Journal reported that the street trade in drugs was unknown, but that on the closing of the clinic, a lively underground trade had developed. This gave Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, the Marcello brothers, Huey and Earl Long and their banana-republic allies one more game to run in Louisiana. Do you think Levi Nutt, who had a direct business relationship with Rothstein, didn’t know that? 75 76

The amount of California acreage devoted to wine grapes went from 97,000 in 1919 to 681,000 in 1926, at the height of Prohibition, because Prohibition made grapes worth an artificial fortune. In 1931 the presidential Wickersham Commission concluded that Prohibition had caused an increase in the consumption of alcohol. 77 78

Marijuana, as everyone knows, is now medically or completely legal in dozens of states. And the states that have completely legalized it are in public policy heaven, with crime down and revenue up. States that have legalized medical marijuana, according to Medicare, have seen a distinct drop in prescriptions for opioid and other painkillers. The Hemp Farming Act of 2018 legalized cannabis with less than 0.3% THC, making it an ordinary agricultural commodity nationwide. But the ‘opioid epidemic’ and the ‘crack epidemic’ have replaced ‘reefer madness’ in the drug propaganda, even though coca leaf and opium sap are as harmless as pot, thus ensuring the continuing profitability of the imprisonment-for-profit, policing and drugs-for arms industries.

Neocolonialism

Coffee prices multiply approximately 3-fold from producer’s wholesale to retail. Heroin multiplies approximately 200-fold from its Prohibition-inflated wholesale price to retail. Heroin now retails, by weight, for 10 times the price of gold. That, of course, makes it the basis of military power in Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana – you name it. 1 2

Military power is built on money, and, thanks to global Prohibition, drug trafficking is the most profitable business on the planet. As the State Department itself puts it, in its end-of-year 1996 Enforcement Affairs report, “In terms of weight and availability, there is currently no commodity more lucrative than drugs. They are relatively cheap to produce and offer enormous profit margins that allow the drug trade to generate criminal revenues on a scale without historical precedent.”

The U.N estimates the global drug trade in the early 1990s to be worth 400 billion untaxed dollars a year. In 1994 Apolinar Biaz-Callejas of the Andean Commission of Jurists put it at $460 billion. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012, estimated $435 billion per year. On March 27, 2017, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a report, Transnational Crime and the Developing World, that estimated upwards of $500 billion. 3

The Guardian Weekly, 7/14/99: “The world’s organised criminals have a greater economic output than Britain, according to a United Nations report. Their turnover is now greater than all but three of the world’s economies.”

“The UN’s 1999 Human Development Report estimates that organised crime syndicates gross more than $1,500bn [1.5 trillion] a year. The UK’s economic output is just over $1,200bn. The report says the syndicates’ economic power rivals that of multinational corporations.”

Solely because of our Prohibition, “The biggest growth area is drugs, which is now a bigger global industry than motor manufacturing. Over the past 10 years, the production of opium has more than tripled and the production of coca leaves has doubled. The illegal drug trade - supplying 200m customers - is worth around $400bn, or 8% of world trade.”

According to the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, “drug traffickers launder an estimated $100 billion per year in the United States.” Biaz-Callejas estimated “$260 billion, which is circulated through its [the U.S.] financial system, in contraband, and through other ways.” 4 5

Since military power is built on money, and since governments, or at least relations between governments, are built on military power, the structural effect of the artificial value created by our Prohibition has been to create, over the decades, an unbreakable symbiosis between drug-dealing and covert military intelligence. Each is the greatest strategic ally of the other. The political effect has been the institutionalization of Prohibitionism, global industrial fascism, death-squad genocide, wherever campesinos threaten to take control of their own land. I speak of Nicaragua, Burma, Guatemala, the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uruguay, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Nigeria - the list is endless. If they’re lucky, these police states will evolve into propaganda-managed neofascist “democracies” that “reeducate” rather than assassinate. That’s the preferred American model, like El Salvador after the U.S.-induced unnecessary war.

Thanks to the peace accord signed on 12/29/96 by Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu and leftist rebel leaders, Guatemala is now also a “democracy.” The drug-dealing army that conducted the genocide is still in control of state machinery, but with a spruced-up image that will allow continued massive U.S. military assistance. That is, the peace accord will guarantee that the flow of cocaine from the Guatemalan military will remain uninterrupted.

Thanks to the pure physics of supply and demand, that pattern repeats over and over throughout Latin America. The U.S. maintains its drug price support with spotty enforcement aimed at political scapegoats, and the drug dealing structure in military intelligence remains unimpaired.

As the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2015 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report puts it: “In 2012, President Perez Molina attracted international attention by proposing drug decriminalization as a way to limit the violence associated with narcotics trafficking and to reduce the burden on transit country governments. Although the administration has stated that Guatemala will not unilaterally move to legalize narcotics, it has spearheaded efforts to review drug policies in the hemisphere, including hosting the 43rd meeting of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) in June, 2013. This was followed by a Special Session of the OAS General Assembly dedicated to this issue in Guatemala City during September 2014. In January, President Perez Molina appointed members of his cabinet and several prominent civil society leaders to a high-level commission to study alternative drug policies....”

“Among the most pressing issues facing Guatemala are the high levels of violence fueled by drug trafficking and other organized criminal activities…. As much as 40 percent of this violence, according to Guatemalan government estimates, is generated by the drug trade.”

“The major obstacle to achieving lasting reductions in the country’s high levels of violence are Guatemala’s weak law enforcement institutions, including a corrupt and ineffective police force, an overburdened and inefficient judiciary, and an inadequate corrections system.”

The New York Times, March 5, 2012: “Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delivered a blunt message on Monday to leaders in Latin America who are contemplating opening the door to the legalization of illicit drugs: The United States will not budge in its opposition.”

Reuters, Feb. 24, 2017 “The United States will request the extradition of former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti and a former cabinet minister on drug trafficking charges, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala said on Friday. Baldetti has been imprisoned in Guatemala since 2015 on charges of leading a network that defrauded the government of the Central American country along with former president Otto Pérez Molina, who has also been arrested and is awaiting trial.”

That is, they nailed the one Guatemalan leader who pressed for decriminalization, which would have collapsed the price, destroying the economic foundation of the whole ‘drug interdiction’ system, including military and police funding. All the other Guatemalan officials escaped due to “a corrupt and ineffective police force.”

Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (wola.org) reports, April 15, 2016: “In 2016, Central American military and police forces will receive more U.S. assistance than they have in over a decade. This increase comes as the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are ramping up drug interdiction and border security efforts, and deploying security forces—often trained in military combat tactics—onto the streets to respond to high murder and crime rates.”

The Guardian, July 17, 2015: “Just two months from a presidential ballot, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-backed independent group working with prosecutors to root out corruption, said that political contributor anonymity is facilitating links to organised crime. ‘Corruption is the principal source of financing for political parties,’ Ivan Velasquez, commissioner at the CICIG, told a news conference. The group’s investigations have rocked the government and led to the arrest of some high-ranking officials, including the central bank chief. The report said that drug trafficking had infiltrated local politics by financing campaigns, putting its own members up as candidates and creating construction companies that later won government contracts.”

From the 1930s to today, 2019, thanks to the artificial value our Prohibition gives drug crops, the same pattern repeats itself, over and over. Any reformer that tries to collapse the value with legalization, from Árbenz to Pérez Molina, is put out of action, one way or another, as the media soup is thickened with one more sacrificial lamb.

The image of the “democracies” will be reinforced through massive propaganda, legal coercion, imprisonment and selective assassination, rather than the clumsy, counterproductive genocide the Guatemalan or Salvadoran military had previously preferred. As in the U.S., the propaganda barrage, backed by the threat of imprisonment, property confiscation and “reeducation,” is said to reduce “demand.” And, as in the U.S., “demand” is reduced selectively, politically, using a “profile,” going after the center-left progressives who actually would collapse the artificial value created by Prohibition.

According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions in the world are the Burmese, Pakistani, Mexican, Peruvian, Guatemalan and Colombian militaries - all armed and trained by U.S. military intelligence - in the name of the antidrug effort, of course. Funny how all that effort never has any strategic effect. OK, so they nailed some Guatemalan banker – a hundred more are in line.

The centers of power controlling the trade in these demanded global commodities are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail price a hundred times higher than the legal value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle.

Another name for the muscle is military intelligence. The $500 billion dollar drug trade is run by allies we train and arm. The CIA, in its operational guidelines, actually emphasizes that its interest in the drug business is confined to the effect that business has on geopolitical power. Operationally, that has meant that the CIA’s dope-dealing Batista was no more an aberration than Somoza, or Diem, or Ne Win, or Chiang, or the Shah, or Marcos, or Salazar, or Papadopoulos, or Stroessner, or Mobutu, or Amin, or Videla, or Noriega, or Cedras, or Samper, or Salinas, or Suharto, or Fujimori or Karzai.

In Afghanistan, as everywhere else, all sides deal opium because its artificial value makes it the only crop that can be traded for weapons. The Taliban are quite correct when they insist that they are protecting the traditional crop of their farmers, and that protection is the source of their political credibility in Afghanistan. It is our Prohibition that financed their resurgence, as Gretchen Peters shows in Seeds of Terror (see Vol II).

The Civil Police Administration (CPA), created in 1955, was headed by the CIA’s Byron Engle. Engle had helped to bring the Japanese police up to snuff under MacArthur and thereafter trained numerous police and intelligence agencies. In Japan, Engle worked with Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2 chief, using the dope-peddling Yakuza gangs as goons against leftist unions, the elements of Japanese society that actually opposed the fascists who started WWII. This meant, of course, that, to that extent, the Yakuza were licensed to operate. In the 1950s Engle coordinated CPA training at the Inter-American Police Academy in the Canal Zone with the International Association of Chiefs of Police. 6

Under Kennedy, in 1962, Engle’s outfit turned into the Office of Public Safety (OPS) within the Agency for International Development (AID), spending hundreds of millions training and supplying police in at least 50 countries. Engle’s grad school was the International Police Academy in Georgetown, Washington DC. The great democrats of South Vietnam, Panama, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Haiti, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Greece, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Liberia, Uganda, Zaire, etc. graduated from Engle’s “school for torture.” 7

It was protested, as assistant secretary of state Elliot Abrams did in 1984 before a Congressional subcommittee investigating police torture, regularly practiced by all the above, that “if they learned a little bit more about modern professional police tactics, they would be more effective and more compassionate.”

It is perfectly true that our military intelligence understands that structural fascism, with a velvet glove, is far more long lasting than dirty-war-style bloodletting. Computerization can save a lot of interrogational sweat. But two academic experts on the evolution of the OPS, Cottam and Marenin, reveal the intentions of the training: “State Department officials and OPS advisers tended to argue for a civil police force subject to law, public demands, and legally instituted political authority. Civil, democratic police forces are visible, dispersed, and accessible; their members live among the people and conduct their work in the open. They use arms and force sparingly and concentrate on maintaining order, controlling crime, and providing services.”

“In contrast, U.S. officials working for secret and military agencies tended to argue for a paramilitary, intelligence-oriented counterinsurgency police force. Such forces tend to be concentrated for easy command: they are armed, secretly or openly repressive, concerned with gathering intelligence, and subject to direct political control.” 8

Professor Nadelmann adds, “Despite efforts to reconcile these two models, Cottam and Marenin observed, the paramilitary one ultimately prevailed.... Although often scorned by CIA agents abroad as just police trainers, OPS advisers in many countries developed close relationships with the CIA, provided occasional cover for intelligence operations, and pursued similar goals.” 9

Since ‘insurgency’ usually meant the reluctant rebellion of tortured campesinos who had no other option, ‘counterinsurgency’ meant the repression of tortured campesinos. That was the OPS paramilitary curriculum. The U.S. Army coordinated its counterinsurgency training with the OPS at its School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia, founded in 1946 in Panama and moved to Georgia in 1984. Among its 100,000 Latin graduates it numbers Anastazio Somoza of Nicaragua, Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, Hugo Banzer Suárez of Bolivia, Michel Francois of Haiti, Roberto D’Aubuisson of El Salvador and Julio Roberto Alpirez of Guatemala.

The politic Clinton administration, on June 28, 1996, released the report of its Intelligence Oversight Board: “The Army School of the Americas . . . used improper instruction materials . . . certain passages appeared to condone practices such as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment.” As Clinton’s continued support for the military fascists in Indonesia, Peru, Colombia, etc. proves, that understatement was just a ‘partial hangout,’ intelligence damage control, not a basic policy shift.

Guatemala is the archetypal CIA-OPS operation, a real pattern-setter. John Foster Dulles, acting as senior partner for his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, had negotiated a deal with dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1936 that gave United Fruit legal control of one-seventh of the arable land in Guatemala for 99 years, not including all the other land it owned in Guatemala, the fertile Pacific plain at Tiquisate. The deal also guaranteed tax exemption and sole control of Guatemala’s only port, Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast. 11a

In October of 1944 a popular coup led by liberal young army officers finished the brutal 14-year dictatorship of General Ubico. In March of 1945, Dr. Juan Arévalo, an idealistic scholar, was elected president with 85% of the (literate male) vote. Arévalo’s political hero was Franklin Roosevelt, whose “four freedoms” - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear - became the basis of his political program, “because order based on injustice and humiliation is good for nothing.” 9a 10

Arévalo aimed at land reform, unionization, education and permanent political democracy. Arévalo’s National Assembly created Guatemala’s first social security system, protected trade unions, established the forty-eight-hour work week, and taxed large landholders a small fee to finance the social programs. In the 1951 elections Arévalo was replaced by his Defense Minister, 41 year old Jacobo Árbenz, one of the engineers of the 1944 October Revolution that brought electoral democracy to Guatemala. Árbenz was elected with the votes of 63% of an electorate that now included literate women. The problem with the brilliantly competent Árbenz was that he proceeded to do everything Arévalo had so eloquently promised. 11

The leaders of the 1944 coup, L to R: Jorge Toriello, Juan José Arévalo, Francisco Arana, and Jacobo Árbenz. (Foto- Hemerotec PL); Árbenz seated next to his wife Maria Cristina Vilanova in 1944 (Wikimedia Commons)

Following the plan outlined for him by no less a radical organization than the World Bank (The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), Árbenz began the construction of a publicly-owned port on the Atlantic coast to compete with United Fruit’s Puerto Barrios, until then the only Atlantic port in Guatemala. Likewise Árbenz began the construction of a national Pacific-to-Atlantic highway to compete with United Fruit’s railroad monopoly, the International Railways of Central America, IRCA. He also challenged United Fruit’s monopoly on the telephone system and the airport.

Árbenz nationalized nothing except some unused rural land. He left all businesses in place, but set out to break the most destructive monopolies, what he called “feudalism,” by competing with them, creating “a national and independent capitalism.”

He began the construction of a government-run hydroelectric facility to compete with General Electric’s Electric Bond and Share Company, represented by Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell. Árbenz also initiated rural electrification and telephone service. These were, of course, the same infrastructure techniques that had been used to build the United States. Private enterprise built almost none of our highways, public schools or ports, and almost all of our seminal railroads and hydroelectric facilities were also publicly financed.

Árbenz then challenged United Fruit’s rural slave-labor system, which dominated 90% of the country’s 3 million people, 60% of them Indians, and most of the rest mestizos, known as ladinos, who made 50 cents per day. The 1952 Agrarian Reform Law aimed mostly at plantations larger than 672 acres, although fincas of over 223 acres were vulnerable if more than a third of the land was unused. Árbenz confiscated only unused arable land, distributing 1.5 million acres to thousands of landless families, in 42 acre plots. Árbenz himself, his extraordinary Salvadoran wife and his Foreign Minister, lost thousands of acres. 12 13

The key term here is ‘landless,’ since 1934 a Guatemalan legal definition that required ‘landless’ peasants to work 150 days a year for private growers or the state whether they wanted to or not. This was a cosmetic ‘reform’ urged on Ubico by the Rockefeller Foundation, which found the medieval debt bondage then in place too transparent. Ubico had come to power in 1931 with the help of the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation, which preferred him to the nationalists that threatened to take over. 14

Thus, by law under Ubico, landless peasants were forced to accept whatever wages were offered, such as room and board for the harvest season, which left them nothing to show for their work and nowhere to live afterwards. The Labor Department was part of Ubico’s National Police, so that those breaking the ‘labor laws’ found themselves facing Ubico’s Nazi-loving killers. Ubico did considerable business with Hitler’s Germany. 15

Árbenz, age 37, at his March 1951 inauguration (Wikimedia Commons)

At his inauguration, Árbenz declared his goal was “to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.” Árbenz used Arévalo’s 1947 Labor Code, which was based on Roosevelt’s Wagner Act. It insisted on the right of plantation workers to unionize, strike and bargain collectively. It set minimum wages and limited the work week to 48 hours. For the first time in Guatemalan history, the campesinos had military protection. Árbenz established rural farm cooperatives, public schools, public clinics, public buses and local cultural institutions. Everything Árbenz did, in fact, conformed to John Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress model. 16

One of the designers of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s Special Assistant, OSS veteran Arthur Schlesinger, wrote in 1946: “All across Latin America the ancient oligarchies - landholders, Church, and Army - are losing their grip. There is a ground swell of inarticulate mass dissatisfaction on the part of peons, Indians, miners, plantation workers, factory hands, classes held down past all endurance and now approaching a state of revolt.” 17

Like Árbenz, Schlesinger understood that the key to political stability was economic, so he looked to the inclusive social democratic parties, which built from the ground up. Kennedy would have given Árbenz all the help he could, in order, as Schlesinger put it, “to check Peronismo and Communism.” The Dulles brothers, running Eisenhower’s government, chose the pragmatic Juan Peron’s allies, Latin America’s military fascists. At the 1950 Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, meeting in Havana, Arthur Schlesinger met Ròmulo Betancourt of Venezuela, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic and Salvador Allende of Chile.

Eisenhower with his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the White House, 8/14/1956
(Wkimedia Commons)

Practicing sweat-equity free-enterprise, Árbenz immediately put the confiscated land into production by providing government-run support systems, as Roosevelt had done. He instituted no political repression of any kind in a mixed economy that was, for the first time, beginning to grow by leaps and bounds. United Fruit, Ike and the Dulles brothers insisted that this constituted “Communism in the Caribbean” and “a Russian toehold” in the hemisphere. 18

Guatemala, of course, had virtually no relations at all with Russia. The Communist Party, in fact, had been the only party that remained illegal under the idealistic libertarian Arévalo, who insisted that communism was “contrary to human nature.” Árbenz’ Revolutionary Action Party legalized the Communist Party (PGT) in 1951, and it held 4 of 61 seats in the National Assembly.

Since Árbenz was serious about land reform, he put committed Marxists, whom he trusted not to sell out, in charge of administering the 1952 Agrarian Reform program. But they were bound by the strictures of the law, and the basis of that law was sweat-equity free-enterprise. The market that the campesinos were encouraged to enter was just that, a free market. Árbenz’ Agrarian Reform Program was his idea of a rural Small Business Administration. He was succeeding in rendering thousands of campesinos economically independent, creating a genuinely nationalist, capitalist alternative to corporate colonialism. What the U.S. proceeded to do, however, convinced the 25 year-old Argentine doctor Ché Guevara, who was part of this, and quite a few others, that militaristic communism was indeed the only alternative to United Fruit-style fascism.

United Fruit, with 550,000 acres the country’s largest landowner, and with 40,000 workers the largest employer, had become the leader of the old Spanish aristocracy, which owned most of the rest of the country, including the Church. The Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Gennaro Verolino, became a key anti-Árbenz activist, as did the Archbishop, Mariano Rossell y Arellano. The Archbishop had been a key supporter of the genocidal General Jorge Ubico, the dictator overthrown by Arévalo and Árbenz in 1944, he who signed over much of Guatemala to United Fruit.

Coordinating with the CIA’s Howard Hunt and New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop had a Pastoral Letter read in all Guatemalan churches on April 9, 1954, warning Guatemalans of the “anti-Christian Communism” that was in the offing through Árbenz. The Pastoral Letter was reprinted in newspapers throughout profoundly Catholic Guatemala. New York’s Cardinal Spellman was a fascist supporter of Franco, Mussolini, Batista, Trujillo and Somoza, who would prove useful to the CIA in Vietnam as well, since Diem was his protégé. As Howard Hunt put it, we “were writing scripts or leaflets for the Guatemalan clergy, the Catholic clergy, and this information was going out [in pastoral letters] across the country and in radio broadcasts.” 19

Archbishop Rossell y Arellano, 1940; Contemporary United Fruit photos

(Wikimedia Commons)

After Árbenz was toppled, the Archbishop made sure to retain the church's right to own property and to run Guatemala’s schools. Archbishop Rossell y Arellano, above, looks resplendent in his 1940 photo with his royal purple robes and oversized bejeweled gold cross. Like the aristocracy, the Church was accustomed to ministering to Indians who were on their knees. United Fruit was accustomed to government-guaranteed low wages, total exemption from sales taxes and regulation, and duty-free import of all supplies. Árbenz, it was clear, intended to break both United Fruit’s stranglehold on the nation’s economy and its racist slave-labor system. 20

In June, 1952, Árbenz passed through the Guatemalan National Assembly the Agrarian Reform Law. He seized nearly 400,000 of United Fruit’s 550,000 acres, all unused, and all originally seized from the Indians. He compensated United Fruit in government bonds based on the company’s own radically deflated 1952 book value, which the company had used to lower its already miniscule land taxes. The company was enraged, and the company was led by Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray, one of the craftiest and most dangerous fighters ever to rise from the streets of New Orleans. .
Zemurray’s team included not only his Mafia partners on the New Orleans docks, led by the deadly Carlos Marcello, but the Boston Brahmin Thomas Dudley Cabot, Director of the State Department’s Office of International Security Affairs, a large shareholder and a director of United Fruit for many years, and president of the company from 1948 to 1949. Thomas Cabot was the brother of John Moors Cabot, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, another large shareholder and former president of United Fruit.Like other Latin America specialists at State, John Moors Cabot, although a Fruit stockholder and an anti-communist, was sensitive to the diplomatic reality that Guatemala’s neighbors did not consider Guatemala’s government communist. Such distinctions did not trouble another relative and major Fruit stockholder, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who violently denounced Arévalo’s unionism from the Senate floor in 1949. Henry Cabot Lodge was so consistent in his opposition to Guatemalan nationalism he was called “the Senator from United Fruit.” 22 23

Unloading Bananas in New Orleans, c. 1924
(Wikimedia Commons)

Both Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, CIA Director since 1953, were major Fruit stockholders and Board members. Through their law firm, the seminal corporate powerhouse Sullivan and Cromwell, they had helped arrange, through J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, the 1936 United Fruit takeover of Guatemala’s entire rail system, the International Railways of Central America, IRCA. United Fruit had been an important Sullivan and Cromwell client since its inception in 1899. In 1901, the government of Guatemala hired United Fruit to run the country's postal service, and in 1913 United Fruit created the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. By 1930 United Fruit had absorbed more than 20 rival firms, becoming the largest employer in Central America. Sullivan and Cromwell had also organized the American and Foreign Power Company, a General Electric spin-off of Electric Bond and Share Company, which owned Empresa Eléctrica de Guatemala, which controlled about 80% of Guatemala’s electrical capacity. Even this abbreviated corporate geneology makes it easy to see how difficult it was to get a legal handle on these corporate nesting dolls. 25

Schroder Banking, on whose board both Dulles brothers sat, was the banking and asset management equivalent of Sullivan and Cromwell, a seminal force in the industry. Founded in 1804, Schroder had offices in the City of London, Wall Street, Zurich, and its birthplace Hamburg, and was a principal of the Bank of New York. Schroder was the financial agent of United Fruit, IRCA and American and Foreign Power. It was John Foster Dulles, senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, who authored all of these arrangements for Schroder. Pragmatically, through their legal management contracts, the Dulles brothers owned Guatemala.

The Dulles brothers’ grandfather was President Harrison’s Secretary of State, John W. Foster, and their uncle by marriage was President Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. It was grandfather Foster, an influential friend of firm cofounder William Nelson Cromwell, who got John Foster his first job after Princeton graduation at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1911. If any one firm can be said to be the originator of the corporate privateer-run government from which we now suffer, it is Sullivan and Cromwell.

The term ‘privateer’ originated with the piratical likes of Drake, Raleigh and Morgan, authorized to operate for the Crown under ‘letters of marque,’ literally licenses to steal from the government’s enemies. Warships have turned into corporations, and the license to steal has extended to the government itself, so long as the privateer could control government policy, which was Sullivan and Cromwell’s forté. That is, small wars, which left Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients in control of the country, were Sullivan and Cromwell’s business model.

Sullivan and Cromwell, in the late 19th and early 20th century, had organized General Electric and U.S. Steel. They also engineered, through astute congressional lobbying, the Republic of Panama and the Panama Canal, all controlled and serviced by Sullivan and Cromwell clients – bondholding banks, construction companies and produce companies with a global reach. It was in the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s corporate clients, heavily invested in Cuba, that John Foster Dulles engineered, through his uncle, the Secretary of State, the 1917 landing of Marines in Cuba, called the ‘Sugar Intervention.’ The nationalist Liberals had legally wrested power, through the ballot box, from the pro-American Conservatives, so Dulles sent in the Marines.

By 1920, after accompanying President Wilson’s financial adviser Bernard Baruch to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, John Foster Dulles became a full partner at Sullivan and Cromwell. The disastrous reparations section of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which led directly to the German economic collapse and the rise of Hitler, was actually authored by John Foster Dulles, ghostwriting for his boss, Bernard Baruch. The consequences of the punitive reparations were famously forwarned at the time by seminal economist John Maynard Keynes, a delegate to the conference for the British Treasury. To the enormous irritation of John Foster, Keynes’ prescient 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, became a worldwide bestseller. By 1926 John Foster Dulles became Sullivan and Cromwell’s managing director, arguably the most powerful lawyer in the country, coordinating prestigious banks and industrial corporations throughout the world. He was brought on to the board of directors of many of those corporations. 26

Younger brother Allen Dulles entered the diplomatic service on graduation from Princeton in 1916. In 1917 he was transferred as a young embassy secretary from Vienna to Bern, the capital of neutral Switzerland. He was tasked to write his uncle, Secretary of State Lansing, weekly intelligence reports. He impressed his superiors deeply with brilliant summaries of German troop movements, planned attacks, and even the location of a secret factory making Zeppelin bombers. While serving in Istanbul in 1921, Dulles apparently took the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery of the czar’s secret police, seriously enough to send a coded report back to his State Department. 24

Upon earning his law degree in 1926, Allen Dulles left his post as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department and joined Sullivan and Cromwell, hired by his brother. After nine years as a State Department intelligence officer at sensitive posts throughout the world, Allen Dulles brought important global contacts with him to Sullivan and Cromwell. The next year he became the first director of the Council on Foreign Relations, established as a right-wing think tank in 1921. After legally forcing Royal Dutch Shell out of Colombia and fixing the 1930 Colombia presidential election in favor of the Sullivan client with the prior claim to the oil concession, Allen Dulles became a full partner at Sullivan and Cromwell.

John Foster Dulles helped to design the 1924 Dawes Plan, which restructured Germany’s war reparation payments in ways beneficial to Sullivan and Cromwell’s client banks. He also brokered, over the next few years, the equivalent of $15 billion in loans to major German industrial outfits, including the backbone of Germany’s military-industrial complex, dealing with great European banks such as Credit Lyonnais and Dresdner Bank, as well as American powerhouses. John Foster had worked closely for years with Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and so organized massive American financing for the new Hitler government, which John Foster saw as a bulwark against ‘bolshevism.’

Sullivan and Cromwell became the major broker of German government and industrial bonds in the USA. Sullivan and Cromwell sold these bonds through the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, and represented BBH in Germany. Senator Prescott Bush, President George H.W. Bush’s father, was the managing director of Brown Brothers Harriman, which co-owned, along with the Thyssens, vast German mining, industrial and banking interests. Prescott Bush was also a director of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), co-owned by Bush, E. R. Harriman and Fritz Thyssen, Hitler's primary financier. Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal conglomerate in Germany, founded by his industrialist grandfather Friederich in the Ruhr city of Duisburg. Thyssen profited mightily from Hitler's re-armament between the wars. Fritz Thyssen controlled the vast German Steel Trust, formed in 1926 with Dillon Read and Prescott Bush’s UBC, modeled on U. S. Steel. The German Steel Trust was Hitler’s key armorer. Prescott Bush personally managed Fritz Thyssen’s vast American portfolio from 1926 until 1942. Fritz Thyssen was Adolph Hitler’s single most important financier before Hitler took power in 1933.

Hitler and his Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, center, 1936
(Wikimedia Commons)

In 1931, Bush’s outfit, W. A. Harriman, merged with Brown Brothers, bringing the Thyssen account with it. Prescott Bush’s father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, had been president of W. A. Harriman and Co., Averell Harriman’s investment company, when he brought young Prescott Bush into the company to manage the new Thyssen account. Averell was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, who owned the Union Pacific. Prescott Bush became a director of Union Banking Corporation in 1934, as a reward for his expert handling of the Thyssen account.

Hitler with Thyssen, smiling center right, behind Hitler’s left shoulder, at United Steelworks, Thyssen’s Ruhr factory that Bush helped to manage, 1935, (Bundesarchive photo)

In 1942 the U.S. government confiscated two of Prescott Bush’s ventures co-owned with the Thyssens, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the Union Banking Corporation and the Silesian-American Company. Silesian-American was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border, and was run out of G. H. Walker and Co.. Sullivan and Cromwell floated bonds for Krupp and I.G. Farben, and blocked the Canadian effort to halt the export of steel to German arms makers. John Foster Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell arranged dummy Swedish ownership of the U.S. branch of the German Bosch engine-parts company. This enabled the Nazis to maintain actual ownership - and operatives in key U.S. defense installations. 32

Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian concluded, in the order that confiscated all of UBC’s stock, that the Union Banking Corporation had been the Nazi's single biggest operating front in the U.S., and had “been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort.”

John Foster Dulles’ brother Allen expressed deep alarm at Hitler’s 1933 accession to power and forced the firm to cut all German ties in 1935. Allen was concerned mainly with the damage to Sullivan and Cromwell that public association with Hitler could cause. But John Foster drew up the 1940 incorporation papers for the neofascist America First Committee pro bono, and gave speeches to them praising Hitler, after Hitler had already taken Austria and Czechoslovakia, denouncing Churchill and Roosevelt as “warmongers.” Roosevelt, of course, had dared to saddle American banks and investment houses with “regulations.” The New Deal innovation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, was run by anti-Nazi firebrand William O. Douglas, who, from John Foster’s perspective, was “communist,” especially after he put John Foster on the stand for two days. John Foster publicly supported Hitler even after the Nazis took Poland.

One of Allen Dulles’ good friends was the Republican candidate for New York governor in 1932, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Donovan was a legendary soldier who led a cavalry troop against Pancho Villa in 1916. In France, Donovan led New York’s ‘Fighting 69th,’ also called the ‘Fighting Irish.’ He won the Medal of Honor, the Croix de Guerre (which he wouldn’t accept until the Jewish soldier who participated with him in the rescue under fire was equally rewarded) and the Distinguished Service Cross, twice, becoming famous for his frontline courage and endurance. That earned him the moniker ‘Wild Bill,’ a sobriquet popularized by a turn of the century major league pitcher, also named Bill Donovan, a smiling baseball card favorite who was a star of the 1915 Yankees. Donovan went on to become a powerhouse Wall Street lawyer at his own firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard, and Irvine, occupying three floors of the expensive office building at No. 2 Wall Street.

Donovan and President Roosevelt were friends from their Columbia Law School and New York politico days, so Roosevelt tasked Donovan, who had been promoting a centralized international intelligence service, to meet the British high command in Whitehall – PM Winston Churchill, intelligence chief Stuart Menzies, and naval intelligence chief Rear Admiral John Godfrey. Donovan was also to scout the current battlefields in the Balkans and North Africa and report back regarding the efficacy of covert operations. Early in 1941 Churchill reciprocated by sending Admiral Godfrey and Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming (yes, that Ian Fleming) to the White House to urge Roosevelt to develop Donovan’s idea and build a modern centralized intelligence service for the coming conflagration, which had already engulfed Britain. Roosevelt asked Donovan to present him with a design for such a service. Upon approval of Donovan’s plan, Roosevelt gave Donovan a White House office, called the Coordinator of Information (COI), and had it very heavily funded.

By early 1942, Allen Dulles was acting as Bill Donovan’s right hand man, running hundreds of multi-lingual COI operatives from a large multi-floor suite of offices in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to the offices of the British Passport Control Office, the hub of British intelligence operations in the U.S., known governmentally as British Security Coordination.

The FBI’s international intelligence operation, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), calling itself the Importers and Exporters Service Company, was in the same building complex. But Hoover’s SIS was finding out the hard way that an international intelligence operation needed years of specialized preparation, and a lot more than gung-ho gunsels who just wanted to bust commie heads. They needed extensive international experience and the ability to speak the native tongue of the countries they were investigating. In the end, this job was so far out of Hoover’s wheelhouse that he reluctantly asked Roosevelt to let the SIS be subsumed by Donovan’s operation. Then, in the summer of 1943, an Assistant Secretary of State pulled Hoover’s chestnuts out of the fire by inventing the post of legal attaché. This enabled Hoover to put operatives in every U.S. embassy, and, like the military and naval attaché, the FBI operative held diplomatic status. Hoover’s legal attachés could now socialize with police chiefs and security ministers, and set up liaison offices with access to high level military and criminal intelligence from any country with a U.S. embassy.

Lt. Colonel Donovan serving with the 165th Regiment in France, September 1918; Admiral John Godfrey and Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)

The British, who had been doing international intelligence for their empire since Queen Elizabeth I, had a much firmer grasp. The British operation in America was run by Sir William Stephenson, the WWI flying ace who brought down 12 German aircraft, earning the Military Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Stephenson obtained a patent for the wireless transmission of photographs in 1924, a seminal invention that earned him the equivalent of $12 million a year for the duration of the 18-year patent. This enabled him to found Shepperton Film Studios and numerous other industrial outfits. His code name was Intrepid. Stephenson had been one of Churchill’s most important early sources of information demonstrating that Hitler was building a devastating military threat to England that he intended to use. It was Stephenson’s 1936 evidence that MP Winston Churchill used to warn against Chamberlain’s suicidal appeasement. Commander Fleming wrote that “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is ... William Stephenson.” It is obvious that one of Fleming’s other models was himself. Fleming was attached to Stephenson’s U.S. operation. Stephenson and his hit teams were indeed “licensed to kill” Nazi operatives in the U.S., and did just that. Commander Stephenson was also, by Allen Dulles’ own admission, his teacher.

Since he had the languages and extensive contacts in the German, Swiss and greater European business community, and the cover of actually working for the Germans, Donovan tapped Allen Dulles to establish the renamed Office of Strategic Services base in neutral Switzerland in 1942. Dulles knew Bern well, having functioned there as both spy and diplomat during and immediately after WWI. His years of corporate financial work for major German firms made his cover as Special Assistant to the Minister of the American Legation plausible. But Dulles barely made it into Switzerland, evading a Gestapo search just after the Germans had sealed the border with France. He was carrying classified documents, a codebook, a letter of credit for one million dollars and microfilm gear. 34

Once ensconced in a beautiful old townhouse at No. 23 Herrengasse in the Swiss capital Bern, his financial cover was cover enough. The Germans, who knew him, would see him as a useful tool in any case, since Dulles knew the leadership of Hitler’s Reichsbank and its tool, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), based in Basel, just 43 miles away from Dulles in Bern. Dulles knew the leadership of the Reichsbank and BIS intimately, having worked with them for years. Thomas McKittrick, the BIS president from 1940 to 1943, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, washed billions for the Nazis through BIS.

Dulles’ extensive pre-war local contacts, which included the pro-Nazi elements of British and European aristocracy, enabled him to build an intelligence gathering organization in Bern, despite constant German surveillance and, indeed, communication. The Germans had no problem with Lord and Lady Astor, the social center of Britain’s pro-nazi aristocracy, nor with their aristocratic German friends. Nor did they have a problem with the Dulles brothers continuing to launder Nazi funds through Sullivan and Cromwell, using the likes of McKittrick at BIS in Basel. McKittrick, of couse, was in daily touch with Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Finance Minister. The DuPont-I.G. Farben connection, both Sullivan and Cromwell clients, was important to the Germans. Allen Dulles was also concerned with preserving the financial and physical integrity of the great Nazi vehicle factory, Opel, owned by General Motors, and Germany’s largest electric company, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), the German General Electricity Company.

Dulles did execute some spectacular German infiltrations, intelligence coups and surrenders, dealing with anonymous moles as well as the likes of Himmler, Canaris and Gehlen. He organized weapons supply to resistance units and targeted parachute and commando attacks. Fritz Kolbe, a secretly anti-Nazi German diplomat, blew the cover of many active German spies to Dulles, and provided the plans for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. Part of the German foreign ministry in Berlin, Kolbe was able to copy much of their cable traffic to Dulles, including a steady supply of order of battle information, causing the Nazis much battlefield destruction. The cable traffic pinpointed a transmitter in the German Embassy in Dublin that was targeting Allied shipping, and caused the destruction of a much needed shipment of tungsten from Spain to German armament plants. Another anti-Nazi German, Hans Bernd Gisevius of the German Consulate in Zurich, put Dulles in contact with those in the German high command plotting Hitler’s death. Gisevius also proved to Dulles that the special German codebreaking component, the B-Dienst Group, had broken the U.S. Legation code system in Bern. Gisevius also located the German V-1 and V-2 rocket factories, leading to the massive RAF air raid on Peenemunde, 8/17/1943, killing hundreds of civilians and many German scientists and technicians. Another German contact documented the Midget ‘Beetle’ tank a year before it was first used at Anzio.

Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, and Walter Schellenberg, chief of German foreign intelligence, actually sent Prince Max von Hohenlohe, a talented diplomat Dulles knew, to Bern in early 1943 to discuss a separate peace with Dulles, since Himmler knew that Dulles agreed with him that a strong postwar Germany was a necessary bulwark against ‘bolshevism.’ Dulles spent weeks in 1943 negotiating an alternative other than unconditional surrender with Himmler’s emissary, but Roosevelt would have none of it. Dulles did receive verifiable evidence of the organized mass murder of the Jews, but did not forward it to Washington, preferring instead to warn Washington about burgeoning communist strength.

Dulles worked with SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff as Himmler ran the Holocaust. Wolff actually scheduled those famous trains to the death camps. Wolff became commander of Nazi forces in Italy, and was second in power only to Kesselring, who also was looking for a peaceful surrender. Wolff worked with Dulles and Swiss military intelligence to flank the Russian takeover of Italy by engineering an early German surrender. The rewards for saving this Nazi war criminal from Italian partisans seemed considerable to Dulles, since it prevented the destruction of north Italy’s many hydroelectric power plants, and put American military power in place before the arrival of the Russians. Dulles and Wolff engineered the German surrender at Allied Force Headquarters in the Italian Royal Palace at Caserta, Italy, April 29, 1945, only a few days before the general European surrender on May 7 at Allied headquarters in Reims, France. SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff contributed to the German final collapse by breaking the Nazi army into pieces with his surrender, which was acceeded to by Kesselring, cracking hardline Nazi control of the remains of the Wehrmacht. This prevented the guerrilla war Hitler and Himmler wanted. Dulles called his creative diplomacy “Operation Sunrise.” He is credited with shortening the war.

Dulles had turned Wolff into an OSS agent, feeding Dulles unique insight into the collapsing German regime. Dulles gave Wolff his guarantee of immunity for war crimes, although he had no such authority. Dulles saw this Nazi as a business partner, in that those north Italy power plants and factories were mostly owned by Italian Superpower Corporation, incorporated in Delaware in 1928 and owned by J.P. Morgan, a Sullivan and Cromwell client. Of course, the case can be made that saving the power plants was a strategic coup regardless of who owned them. But that begs the question, why weren’t those plants bombed to rubble years before? Who was doing the targeting? Why were so many German heavy industrial installations spared from destruction?

Protected by Dulles, Wolff, Himmler’s right-hand man, one of the key managers of the Holocaust, remained unpunished and did go on to become, as planned in Operation Sunrise, part of Dulles’ post-war German network. Dulles actually betrayed his own men, preventing evidence of Wolff’s personal torture of captured OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters from reaching the prosecutors at Nuremberg. Dulles executed the survival of significant parts of the Nazi war machine, much of it, such as I.G. Farben and Merck, also Sullivan and Cromwell clients. 35

John Loftus, while serving as a prosecutor in Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department, got access to classified wartime documents. He said “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany.” With control of U.S. military intelligence in Germany after the war, Dulles destroyed much documentation that incriminated his Nazi clients in war crimes, thereby helping to preserve much of their power. OSS veteran and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who had studied the Dulles brothers’ wartime operations for years, flatly told Aarons and Loftus, authors of The Secret War Against the Jews, “The Dulles brothers were traitors.” 33

Coordinating with Wolff, American military intelligence engineered the May 22, 1945 tactical surrender of Hitler’s best intelligence officer, 40 year-old Reinhard Gehlen. The essential intelligence-gathering technique of Gehlen’s Einsatzgruppen, death squads integrated into the Nazi army, was torture. Gehlen had not only microfilmed all his Eastern-front records, but preserved his entire operating intelligence organization, which was strongest where the OSS was weakest - in Russia. Gehlen ran a large cadre of Russian monarchists and death squad butchers, called the Vlasov Army, who now went to work for Allen Dulles’ U.S. Secret Intelligence Branch in Germany. General Vlasov originally agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany after his unit was captured on the Eastern Front. Since most of his unit were White Russian conscripts who hated the Reds, it was a natural fit.

Gehlen’s 1945 OSS photo (Wikimedia Commons)

Gehlen also ran German, Ukranian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Albanian, Estonian and other East European former Waffen-SS units, so-called “forces of national liberation.” The stay-behind German units called themselves “werewolves,” but as they began to coordinate with American military intelligence they changed it to “gladiators,” swordsmen. They weren’t humanitarians, reasoned the U.S. high command, but they were anticommunist. The American-run pan-European anti-communist effort came to be known as Operation Gladio, after the gladiators’ short swords. In 1945, the Pope, during his private meetings with OSS chief Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio, decorated Donovan as a crusader against Communism with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester, the most prestigious of papal knighthoods.

Assisting Dulles, operating as OSS Berlin station chief, later as Bern station chief, was Frank Wisner. Assisting Wisner was Richard Helms and OSS Secret Counterintelligence (SCI) chief James Angleton.As former OSS Bucharest bureau chief, Wisner had contested control of Romania with Stalin, and was Gehlen’s chief contact during his tactical surrender to the U.S.. Wisner ran “Operation Paperclip,” the recruitment, with Gehlen’s help, of ‘useful’ Nazis throughout Europe. The operation was controlled directly from the office of the Joint Chiefs, using a secret Army intelligence unit, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. Explained Angleton to journalist Joe Trento, “We did it because Gehlen was a shortcut to intelligence wherever the Nazis had a puppet government….The biggest difficulty was that we had no way of knowing if they had been revealed to Moscow and forced to work for Soviet intelligence.” 36 42

Angleton’s pro-Nazi father, Hugh, just before the war, had been president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy and owner of the Milan branch of the National Cash Register Company. As such he was technically useful to Mussolini. While operating for the OSS during the war in Italy, the elder Angleton developed many contacts of use to his son James, including the rabid Nazi Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. Coordinating with the Germans after Italy’s September 1943 surrender, Borghese used his 10,000-man naval commando unit to wage effective guerrilla war against the partisans in northern Italy. After Borghese’s May 15, 1945 arrest, Angleton saved him from trial for his war crimes when the OSS high command put Borghese and his 10,000 fascist guerillas, and all other police and military resources of the Italian state, under the command of Angleton’s SCI unit, there to become part of Operation Gladio. It was these Nazi thugs, under Angleton’s command, who proved pivotal in the destruction of the Italian left, by murder, sabotage and propaganda, in the fixing of the 1948 election in favor of the Christian Democrats and their dope-dealing mafia allies.

In September of 1945, Gehlen was personally escorted to the U.S. by Eisenhower’s chief of staff., General Walter Bedell Smith, on Ike’s own VIP aircraft. Assisting Smith was Colonel William Quinn, future head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Gehlen’s U.S. headquarters, fittingly, were at Pullach, near Munich, a former Waffen-Schutz Staffel (‘Armed-Defense Forces’) training center. Many of Gehlen’s high command were famous war criminals, expert in torture and mass-murder. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization, operating under CIA command, became the West German BND (Federal Intelligence Service). Through the 1960s, the CIA’s Berlin Operating Base and Soviet Branch Chief, David Murphy, insisted on close intelligence sharing with the BND, which had been thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB. This infiltration included Gehlen’s second in command, KGB agent Heinz Felfe. Through the Vlasov Army connection, Gehlen’s outfit was suffused with Soviet moles, including Felfe, Gehlen’s counterintelligence chief throughout the 1950s, who wasn’t arrested until November, 1961. Felfe, who was in the CIA loop, personally destroyed every single major CIA operation against the Soviets in the late fifties, dozens of operations costing hundreds of lives. 37 38 40

According to Victor Marchetti, the CIA’s former chief analyst of Soviet military plans and capabilities, a frontline CIA veteran of 1950s Berlin, Gehlen’s supposed Soviet expertise served as a screen behind which the Counterintelligence Corps and the CIA could exaggerate Soviet might and intentions, and thereby continually increase their budget, part of which always went to Gehlen. “In my opinion, the Gehlen Organization provided nothing worthwhile for understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capabilities in Eastern Europe or anywhere else.... The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon; the White House; the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.” 39 41

That is, the CIA adopted the Nazi ”Communist conspiracy” model of foreign affairs whole hog for covert institutional and political reasons which utterly corrupted the empirical value of its intelligence, much as the Nazis themselves had done. In 1946, when the bankrupt, exhausted and overextended Soviet Army was tearing up the East German rail system, essential to the Soviet military in Germany, and sending it back to Russia, Gehlen insisted that they were preparing to use East Germany to attack the West. By 1948, General Lucius Clay, America’s European commander, was cabling Washington that war was imminent. Given that Stalin and Beria were also falling all over themselves to employ Nazis, perhaps it was. Then again, perhaps it was a measure of our institutional corruption that we valued the same Nazi BS that Stalin and Beria did. 43

The Red Scare did encourage passage of the sensible and effective Marshall Plan, but the plan’s secret codicil, inserted by George Kennan, James Forrestal and Allen Dulles, allowed the CIA to conduct political warfare (fix elections) in Europe, specifically setting aside 5% of Marshall Plan funds for covert CIA use. The administrator of Marshall Plan funds in Germany, Hermann Abs, the Nazi wartime head of Deutsche Bank and director of I.G. Farben, was arrested for war crimes in 1946, but rescued by Dulles to work on the Marshall Plan.

The State Department’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), headed by Wisner, became the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. It defined political warfare as “rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts.” The Pentagon defined it as “guerrilla movements…underground armies…sabotage and assassination.” Until 1947, Dulles ran the OPC from his Sullivan and Cromwell office at 44 Wall St.. The CIA Acts of 1947 and 1949 gave the CIA legal authority to do virtually anything it wanted anywhere in the world, except in the USA. The Acts also gave the CIA the right to override U. S. immigration law in the name of national security, that is, import Nazis. 44

One of the craftiest and most successful operations initiated by OPC chief Frank Wisner had nothing to do with warfare or political subversion. Before joining the OSS, Wisner had been a white-shoe Wall Street lawyer at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, an ally of the Dulles brothers at Sullivan and Cromwell. Working closely with Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner was the first OSS liaison to the Gehlen organization. As OPC chief, Wisner got the Allies to replace the Western occupation zone currencies with a new stable Deutsche Mark to avoid runaway inflation, a visceral German fear, and provide a platform for stable economic growth, economically connecting West Berlin (the American, British and French zones, 100 miles inside East Germany) with West Germany. The Russians were so badly burned politically by that brilliant maneuver that they blockaded Berlin, demanding that the Allies discontinue the new currency in West Berlin. The Allies responded with the Berlin Airlift. The airlift, run by the U.S., the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders and the South Africans, was such a logistical success, with over 200,000 flights from June 1948–12 May 1949 delivering more cargo than had previously been delivered to the city by rail, that the humiliated Russians lifted the blockade. Obviously the centralized totalitarian economic system of the Russians was proven, over the next few decades, to be far inferior to the free market economy of the West, as an impoverished East Germany rushed to join a prosperous West Germany on the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While these innovative anti-communists were full of great ideas, like the Marshall Plan and the Deutsche Mark, they defined their anti-communism, per their Dulles brothers colonialist model, as pro-fascism, choosing the radical right over the center or center left every chance they got, unfailingly caricaturing the democratic, free-market left as ‘communist,’ just as the Dulles brothers had caricatured Roosevelt’s Democrats. We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Dulles brothers policy, the institutionalization of the global drug trade as a covert tool of the world’s fascist secret services.

The Dulles brothers turned Iran into an enemy, and Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador into destabilized narcostates, when, in each case, they could have established real capitalist or mixed economy democracy. Their rabid, colonialist anticommunism, that is, anti-nationalist fascism, became institutionalized CIA policy, resulting in today’s protected worldwide drug trade, one of the most important tools of global fascism. Among the first moderate center-left democrats falling to CIA coup were the Italian Socialists in 1948, followed by Iran’s Mosaddegh in 1953, Guatemala’s Árbenz in 1954, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960, Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan in 1964, Brazil’s João Goulart in 1964, Papandreou’s Centre Union overthrown by the American-supported Greek military junta of 1967, and on and on. As Allen Dulles put it, “You can’t run the railroads without taking in some Nazi Party members.”

Hilger, glasses, with Molotov and Ribbentrop, 1940 (Bundesarchiv); Reichstag Session, 5/4/1941, Clockwise from top left: Funk, Krosigk, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Neurath (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1948, Operation Bloodstone, designed by these geniuses of ‘containment,’ placed 250 top Nazi administrators, their most dangerous people, in high positions in the U.S. State Department and in each of our military services. Those directly involved in Bloodstone included the entire ruling elite of the CIA and the State Department. Gustav Hilger, a top aide to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, had helped to negotiate the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hilger reported directly to Hitler on the progress of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. By 1950, thanks to Operation Bloodstone, Hilger was reporting directly to Truman, as a top aide to the State Department’s George Kennan, the designer of the doctrine of containment.

Kennan’s idea of an ideal government was Salazar’s Portugal, a fascist Catholic theocracy. As the lead American diplomat in Portugal in 1943, Kennan negotiated the use of bases in the Azores by U.S. aircraft with Salazar himself. Kennan arrived in Moscow on July 1, 1944 as Ambassador Harriman’s second-in-command. That is, he learned his distrust of the Russians by dealing with Stalin himself. He was in the room when Stalin refused Harriman’s request to save the August 1944 Warsaw uprising, preferring to let the SS wipe out the Polish resistance, the easier to turn Poland into a Russian puppet state.
In February, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he described the Second World War as the “inevitable result . . . of modern monopoly capitalism.” The alarmed Secretary of State, James Byrnes, asked our embassy in Russia for an analysis. The embassy’s answer was Kennan’s famous Long Telegram, advising us to expect nothing but perfidy from Stalin, suffering, as many Russians did, from a neurotic fear of another Napoleon or Hitler. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity….[fearing] capitalist encirclement….please note that…this party line is…simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible…. In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

But Kennan was a realist as well as a professional diplomat. He emphasized that the Soviet Union was relatively weak, territorially overstretched, and most definitely not seeking more war. This Long Telegram was turned into the July 1947 Foreign Affairs article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” “It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Referring to the use of his realistic assessment of Stalin and his doctrine of containment as an excuse for our postwar militarism, Kennan told David Gergen on PBS in 1996, “I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it.” In 1966, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Vietnam does not represent America’s vital interests and that we should get out – or be defeated. He invoked John Quincy Adams’ famous warning about not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, saying that U.S. credibility would be better served by the “liquidation of unsound positions than by the . . . stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”

But for all his military pragmatism, Kennan encouraged the colonialist, racist arrogance of the elite of his generation that led to the aggressive antinationalist militarism of the Dulles brothers. Kennan saw their racist colonialism as an inherent part of “our traditional way of life.” Kennan was bitterly opposed to the Nuremberg trials, insisting that the bulk of what was “strong, able and respected in Germany” was in the Nazi party. In the two volumes of his memoirs, there is not a single mention of the Holocaust, although he was serving right there in the middle of it. Kennan wrote his sister in 1935, “I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’” He hated what he called “the Latin-American fringe.” Kennan actually advocated restricting the vote to white males.

In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan chief of the new Policy Planning Staff, giving him a leadership role in the formulation of American foreign policy. The brilliant Marshall Plan, and the insertion of leading Nazis into U.S. military intelligence and administration using Marshall Plan money, was largely Kennan’s idea. Kennan warned the intelligence agencies employing those Nazis to beware of the promulgators of socialist ideology, “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines [and] publishing houses.” Kennan urged “the inauguration of organized political warfare…[run by a] covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government.” This became Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).

One of the earliest OPC operations was the rigging of the 1948 Italian elections, run by Angleton, which included the caricature of illiterate Sicilian farmers looking for land reform as Soviet agents, and using dope-dealing mafiosi for systematic political assassination throughout Italy. This necessarily entailed the protection of the Mafia’s drug business, seen by the OPC as covert, off-the-books street muscle. Kennan wrote the White House that he feared the commie seizure of “the most ancient seat of Western Culture. In particular, devout Catholics everywhere would be gravely concerned regarding the safety of the Holy See.” 45

NSC directive 10/2, June 18, 1948, called for covert anti-Soviet attacks worldwide, anti-Soviet usually meaning pro-fascist. Kennan’s man on the National Security Council was investment banker Paul Nitze, author of the influential NSC 68, April 7, 1950, which, per the Dulles brothers Sullivan and Cromwell philosophy, called for tripling military spending and a “reduction of Federal expenditures for purposes other than defense and foreign assistance, if necessary by the deferment of certain desirable programs.” This turned the postwar world into a binary choice of Red or Dead, promoting the profitable militarization of American culture and foreign policy by America’s military-industrial elite, the global devaluing of social programs, and the demonization of neutralist nationalism.

Pushed by General Curtis LeMay, commander of USAF Europe and coordinator of the Berlin airlift, who commanded the Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1948 to 1957, the U.S. actually used Gehlen’s postwar SS commando structure to site Soviet targets for the coming world war, which LeMay was convinced was imminent. The East European guerrilla army we were going to employ after we destroyed Soviet infrastructure was disguised as the U.S.-created ’Labor Service Divisions’ in Germany. They were created from, and led by, Gehlen’s former Waffen-SS units.

The 4000th Labor Service Company, the Albanians, were used by Dulles and Wisner in 1949, as a combined OPC and British MI6 operation, to spark a ‘spontaneous uprising’ in Albania. Since these small paratroop units were thoroughly infiltrated by double agents, Uncle Joe and his Albanian proxy Enver Hoxha were ready and waiting to greet their errant Albanians. And the overseer of security for these operations against the Soviets in eastern Europe, James Angleton, coordinated with his MI6 liaison in the Pentagon, the famous Soviet double agent Kim Philby. All these operations, which went on for years in Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and of course, Russia, had been penetrated before the fact and failed miserably, suffering almost 100% losses. 47

Wisner’s operational analogy seems to have been the combined British SOE and American OSS Jedburgh operations into Nazi occupied France and Belgium, which found large active resistance groups on the ground to greet their paratroopers. George Sharp, Dulles’ partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, headed up the OSS Western European section that ran the Jedburgh operations. DeGaulle’s Free French were formally in charge. These French-speaking Allied paratroopers were an impressive, death-defying lot, including Bill Colby, Stewart Alsop and Lucien Conein. Using their lightweight radios, they dropped behind enemy lines to target weapons drops, which included grenades, bazookas, plastic explosives and machine guns, to the French Maquis, the rural resistance groups. The lightweight hand-held Sten submachine gun had a 32-round magazine, and the ammo matched standard German issue for their Lugers and MP 40 submachine guns, so the French guerrillas never ran out of ammo. They just took it off the dead krauts. They made the Nazi rear very uncomfortable on D-Day. But despite the CIA’s institutional need to analogize the Communists with the Nazis, there were few popular resistance groups under the Russians, who were not nearly as hated, or as genocidal, as the Nazis. The Nazis concentrated on genocide and enslavement, the ideological Soviets concentrated on conversion. 46

Gehlen’s own plans for these Labor Service Divisions, led by his League of Young Germans, that is former Wehrmacht professionals, were exposed in a famous 1952 scandal. They included the elimination of the entire leadership of the West German Social Democratic Party in a coup d’etat. These ‘Labor Service’ and ‘Young German’ troops were trained and financed by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. And the Nazis had not been reticent with their U.S. trainers about their political intentions. The U.S. rationale for this reorganization of Wehrmacht killers was, of course, the need to counter Soviet activities. These non-American contract killers were, obviously, deniable, and gave the U.S. the ability to effect cross-border penetrations and assassinations. Latvians don’t stand out in Latvia. 48

These contract killers were organized with the help of the very powerful fascist elements within the Vatican. Working closely with Gehlen and Allied military intelligence, they organized a vast “refugee relief” program for these Latvian, Croatian, Ukranian, Romanian, Byelorussian and Hungarian war criminals. The majority of the German puppet governments in Europe during the war were led by Catholic fascist political parties. Nazi Slovakia was run by Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Admiral Nicholas Horthy’s Hungary was ruled by the Church. It willingly cooperated in identifying and legally isolating the “Zionist/Bolshevik” elements of society, although Horthy himself, to the annoyance of Hitler, hesitated at actual mass-murder, as did Mussolini. Vichy France, Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, of course, were all fascist Catholic theocracies. The Polish genocide was very popular with the pro-Nazi elements of the Polish Catholic Church, which to this day has the gall to contest control of Aushwitz with the remnants of Polish Jewry. Croatia’s Ante Pavelic, leader of the Ustashi fascist death squads, led Hitler’s puppet Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945. Pavelic oversaw a mass extermination program targeting Croatia’s 2.2 million Serb Orthodox Christians and a smaller number of Jews and Gypsies. Pavelic, in early fall of 1941, after an appalling wave of ethnic murder, was received by the Pope Pius XII.

Hitler Greets Pavelic at the Berghof in Bavaria, 6/9/1941; Pavelic’s Celebrating his Ascension to Dictator (Poglavnik) of Hitler’s Independent State of Croatia, 2/1942; Pavelic celebrates recognition of his Croatian government by Mussolini, May 18, 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)

After the war, the Allied secret services, working with the fascist elements within the Vatican, provided the well-organized East European Nazis with false papers and passports, and smuggled them out through ‘rat lines’ in Trieste and Genoa. Lithuanians went to Reverend Jatulevicius on the Via Lucullo, Hungarians to Padre Gallov on the Via dei Parione and so forth. 49

These Western intelligence operations, working exclusively with former Nazi collaborators, functioned parasitically on the Vatican’s generalized relief operations. The technique, perfected by Reinhard Gehlen, was to place operatives in key refugee assistance posts. Thus, Theodore Oberlander, the Nazi commander of the Ukranian genocide, served as West German minister for refugee affairs until 1960.

Intermarium (‘Between the Seas’), the influential Catholic lay organization, became the single most important source of CIA East European assassins and “exile” political leaders. A U.S. Army Intelligence report defined Intermarium, established in the mid-30s, as “an instrument of the German intelligence [Abwehr].” 50

Archbishop Ivan Buchko of the Ukraine, for instance, on Intermarium’s ruling council, intervened with Pope Pius XII to win freedom for a Ukranian Waffen-SS legion. Virtually the entire original Intermarium ruling council were Nazi collaborators. As the Abwehr’s senior officer in the East, Reinhard Gehlen had worked closely with Intermarium on behalf of Hitler. He performed the same function for U.S. military intelligence.

Intermarium became a mainstay of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The CIA umbrella organization for Radio Liberty, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, was originally created by Hitler’s SS and the Nazi Foreign Office in 1944, as the German Committee, as were its member groups, the North Caucasian National Committee, the Georgian Government in Exile and so forth. All the CIA groups, which kept their original Nazi names, were led by the original Nazi leaders. Some Nazi war criminals, such as Viorel Trifa and Vilis Hazners, actually became well-known personalities on Radio Free Europe. 51

Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai of Milan, who helped Allen Dulles negotiate the surrender of German troops in Italy, also helped Walter Rauff of the SS to escape retribution. Rauff was the inventor of the gas truck extermination program, which killed, by suffocation, at least 100,000 women and children. Rauff, as he later testified, was hidden “in the convents of the Holy See.” Rauff died at the age of 77 in 1984, working for Pinochet’s death squads, the DINA, thanks to Allen Dulles. During the 1948 Italian elections, Bicchierai lead a CIA-financed goon squad of 300 men. Dulles worked with Bicchierai for years. 52

The Croatian Ustashi (‘Insurrection’) was part of the Vatican ‘refugee’ operation, run by Monsignor Draganović and Father Levasic, was run out of the Instituto di Santa Jeronimus at 132 Tomaselli Street in Rome. During the war, in Croatia, Krunoslav Draganović had helped Ante Pavelic “relocate” at least 400,000 Serbs and Jews. With the help of Draganovic and Abwehr officer Kurt Merk, who was running his spy network for U.S. Army Counterintelligence, Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the most hated Nazi officer in France, made it to Bolivia in 1951. With bases in La Paz, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Madrid, Asunción, Melbourne and throughout Europe, Ustashi functioned as contract killers for Stroessner, Trujillo and the CIA (in the Congo, for one). 53 54

Ante Pavelić and Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, 1941; Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (far right) with two Catholic priests at the funeral of the Ustashi leader and Croatian Parliament President Marko Došen in September 1944; An entire Serbian family lies slaughtered in their home following a raid by the Ustashi militia.1941 (Wikimedia Commons, Stepinac)

Licio Gelli had been one of Mussolini’s Black Shirts in Spain, then he became Mussolini’s key liaison officer to Field Marshall Hermann Göring’s elite SS Division. Upon the Allied occupation of Italy in 1943, Gelli quickly volunteered to serve with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. OSS chiefs William Colby and Allen Dulles found Gelli useful in the establishment of the Office of Reserve Affairs, their new strong-arm squad located on Rome's Via Sicilia. Gelli helped Ustashi Fr. Krunoslav Draganović set up the ratlines that ferried Nazi war criminals to safe haven in South America, or service in another covert U.S. operation.

One of Cardinal Montini’s first acts upon becoming Pope Paul VI in 1963, was the appointment of Licio Gelli as Equitem Ordinis Sancti Silvestri Papae, a Knight in the Order of St. Sylvester, one of Catholicism’s highest honors. This was an obvious political act since Gelli was well-known as an avowed atheist who never did anything in the name of the Church. It simply signaled to CIA Gladio operatives worldwide that the fascist power elite and the Vatican were on the same page.

The Republican Party’s 1952 “ethnic” effort was headed by Arthur Bliss Lane, former ambassador to Poland. His Russian and Ukranian specialist was Vladimir Petrov, who ran the Nazis’ publicity campaign for Gehlen’s Vlasov Army and administered the city of Krasnodar during the gas truck extermination program. The 1984 Republican Party “Guide to Nationality Observances” listed April 10, 1941, the day the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia and the Ustashi joined the SS, as “Croatian Independence Day.” 55

Civil engineer John Kosiak, leader of the Byelorussian Liberation Movement, active in the Chicago Republican Party, built the Minsk ghetto for the SS. He was wanted for war crimes in Russia. The Daugava Hawks, led by officers of the Latvian Waffen-SS death squads, became, under CIA sponsorship, the Latvian-American Republican National Federation and the Committee for a Free Latvia. 56

Between 1945 and 1955, U.S. military intelligence spent at least $200 million on the Gehlen Organization, which became the West German BND. The pragmatic Nazis themselves, as CIA analyst Marchetti says, were “sucking off both tits,” that is, functioning as double agents for the Russians whenever convenient. Gehlen’s own agenda entailed using his most dangerous agents, like Otto Skorzeny and Klaus Barbie, to build an operating chain of fascist terror groups - in Spain, Paraguay, Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey - all working as contractors for the secret services of those countries and all financing themselves with drugs and arms. As Robert Crowley, the CIA’s first Covert Operations Executive put it, “Our dependence on Gehlen made us sitting ducks for disinformation. The more paranoia he could foster among U.S. officials, the more dollars and power for himself.” 57

Papadopoulos’ Greece, Peron’s Argentina and Stroessner’s Paraguay became major drug entrepôts thanks to cooperating German, British, French and American secret services. During the 1946-49 civil war in Greece between the popular leftist coalition that had defeated the Nazis and the British-backed Royalists, the U.S., using Gehlen’s agents, backed IDEA, the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, founded by the Greek army’s Nazi collaborators in 1944. These were the fascist elements in the professional army that had fought with the Nazis during the war. There certainly were communists on the other side, looking to establish a Soviet-style police state, but they were not in

power. The democratic Greek government of National Unity was. Papadopoulos became a U.S. intelligence asset at this time. With enough American matériel for 15,000 men, Colonel George Papadopoulos was able to take control of Greek intelligence, the KYP, and thereby control the Greek military. In 1967, Papadopoulos took direct control of Greece in a bloody coup initiated by a period of death squad assassinations and false flag terrorist operations blamed on the left, for which Greek democrats have yet to forgive the U.S.. That same year, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright (D-AR), published The Arrogance of Power, in which he charged that in its mindless pursuit of the Red Menace the United States was actively supporting fascism worldwide, just as the Dulles brothers wanted.

The Greek colonels overthrew the perfectly democratic center-left government of the Center Union coalition led by the elderly George Papandreou, who died under house arrest in November of 1968. When one of the lead CIA agents in Greece who engineered the coup with the Colonels, Greek-speaking Gust Avrakotos, who later helped Charlie Wilson win his war against the Russians in Afghanistan, was asked by the Colonels what to do with Papandreou’s politically powerful 48-year-old son Andreas, Avrakotos replied, “Shoot the motherfucker because he’s going to come back to haunt you.” They didn’t, and he did. From exile the younger Papandreou organized the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK, which took the government by electoral landslide in 1981, ruling for 11 of the next 15 years.

One of the leaders of the democratic resistance, a cofounder of PASOK, was the heroic and glamorous Melina Mercouri, who I fell madly in love with at the age of 15 in 1960 when I saw Never on Sunday. This film, written, directed and costarring her husband Jules Dassin, one of the writers known as the Hollywood Ten (actually more like the Hollywood 500), made her an international superstar. The movie theme song, sung by Mercouri, became a worldwide hit and Mercouri won Best Actress at Cannes. Risking her life, Mercouri toured Europe’s capitals organizing resistance and speaking against the fascist Colonels. The regime reacted by revoking her citizenship and confiscating her property. She famously replied, “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Mr. Pattakos [Minister of the Interior] was born a fascist and he will die a fascist.” I remember walking past Melina Mercouri and Irene Pappas in the late 60s, strolling arm-in-arm near Washington Square in the Village after a performance on a beautiful summer night. They had to be followed by bodyguards. The charismatic Mercouri became Minister of Culture in Papandreou’s government from 1981 to 1989, then won a seat in the Hellenic Parliament. She established the European Capital of Culture within the framework of the European Union, and began a campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, stolen from the Temple by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. She is the most beloved Greek in modern history.

When the Dulles brothers engineered the destruction of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953, the largest corporate beneficiary was the denationalized Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government and largely controlled by Sullivan and Cromwell client Schroder Banking. The Dulles brothers sat on the board of Schroder Banking. Per its 1901 concession agreement, the AIOC owned all of the oil in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became BP. By 1950 Iran’s Abadan oil refinery was the largest in the world. The global threat coming from the Mosaddegh government wasn’t communism, but economic nationalism, nationalization, which would indeed threaten American and British colonial interests globally. 29

Like Arévalo, Mohammad Mosaddegh had in fact refused to re-legalize the Communist (Tudeh) Party, banned after a 1949 attempt on the Shah’s life. Although he respected their support of nationalization and women’s rights and did not crush them, Mosaddegh deeply disrespected their support for imperialist Russian policy, especially the 1944 Russian grab for Iranian oil in Azerbaijan, and allowed no Communists in his government. Henry Grady, Truman’s ambassador in Iran, reported that Mossadegh “has the backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people of this country.” Undersecretary of State George McGhee reported that Mossadegh was “a conservative….a patriotic Iranian nationalist….[with] no reason to be attracted to socialism or communism.”

Roger Goiran, chief of the CIA station in Tehran, had built a formidable anti-Russian propaganda operation, attempting not to overthrow the government, but to influence it in the right direction, for which he had considerable Iranian support, including Mosaddegh. As soon as Goiran learned of the projected coup, he refused to support it, insisting that the Iranians would forever view the United States as a supporter of what he called “Anglo-French colonialism.” Dulles fired Goiran, the coup went off as planned, and Goiran’s dark prophesy came to pass.

Mosaddegh was a pragmatic neutral in the Cold War, that is, insufficiently anticommunist from the Dulles perspective. But his pragmatism was informed by his Persian nationalism. He, like most Persian nationalists, had always regarded the Russians as an imperialist threat. Persian nationalists were far more anti-Russian than anti-American. There were five Russo-Persian wars for regional hegemony between 1651 and 1828. There was also the 1911 Russian invasion of Tabriz, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941, and the 1946 Azerbaijan Crisis. 30

Truman with Mossadegh, 10/23/1951; Fascist hoodlum Shaban Jafari, one of the Shah’s street gang thugs (Wikimedia Commons, Mossadegh)

Dulles ally Henry Luce, the powerhouse publisher of Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, who closely coordinated propaganda with the Dulles brothers, twisted it this way in Life, “If disorders flare up in Iran as a result of nationalization, the Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War III.” That was word for word John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower, planning Iranian policy at a National Security Council meeting on March 4, 1953, innocently asked why we couldn’t “get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” The slick, international lawyer John Foster Dulles answered with a longer version of the double talk Luce put in Life, always bringing it back to the boogeyman of the Red menace, never even considering that a stable, well-financed, democratic, capitalist Iran, which Mosaddegh was building, would be a powerful bulwark against Russian incursion, and a valuable ally. What the duplicitous Dulles never mentioned was that his real enemy was Iranian control of its own oil. Dulles learned this imperialist deflection about the “bolsheviks” from his Nazi clients, word for word. 58

Luce, working with Joe McCarthy and the “China Lobby,” widely advertised their every hysterical claim, especially that China had been “lost” because the Democrats had been running policy, as if the fascist killer we financed, Chiang, had nothing to do with it. John Foster Dulles purged the State Department per Senator Joe McCarthy’s instructions, using Hoover’s FBI bulldog Scott McLeod as “internal security chief.” Liberals, and gays, who weren’t fired were bullied into resigning. The common-sense old Persia hands favored by Pesident Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were gone, replaced by amateur right wing ideologues who couldn’t even speak Persian. Ambassador Harrison Symmes, who worked in the Near East division of the State Department under Secretary of State Dulles: “John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists—anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes - should be done.” If that wasn’t your tilt, you were a “pinko.” 60

Allen Dulles began contemplating the overthrow of the Iranian government when Mosaddegh succeeded in killing Dulles’ Overseas Consultants project in the Iranian parliament in 1950. In 1949, Allen Dulles, through Sullivan and Cromwell, put together a consortium of eleven major American engineering firms, Overseas Consultants. Inc., that proposed to redevelop the entire nation of Iran – roads, dams, major infrastructure – in exchange for the equivalent of $5 billion in today’s money. OCI would own the country, and would be a model for development agreements for Sullivan and Cromwell industrial clients globally. Dulles got his chosen puppet to back the plan, the young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom the Allies used to replace his pro-Nazi father during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941. The pragmatic problem, therefore, not beyond the Dulles brothers to solve, was the installation of their chosen puppet as the absolute ruler of this constitutional monarchy, that is, the neutralization of the Iranian parliament. 27

In March of 1951 the Iranian parliament had voted unanimously to nationalize the entire Iranian oil industry, voiding the 1901 agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. On May 1, 1951, the day Mosaddegh, leader of the center-left National Front Party became Prime Minister, he nationalized the AIOC. The move was so spectacular that Mosaddegh became Time Magazine ‘Man of the Year.’ The Brits, who did indeed need the money, responded with outrage, despite their own nationalization of coal and steel, in 1946 and 1949. The updated 1933 concession agreement was largely window dressing which left the situation basically unchanged, with the Iranians getting about 10% of the oil income, as figured by AIOC. The Brits condescendingly rejected Mossadegh’s offer of a 50-50 split of the oil income and access to the books. Mossadegh’s reaction to the British condescension was nationalization.

In reaction to the nationalization, Britain engineered an international trade embargo on Iranian oil with the world’s major oil companies, the ‘seven sisters’ who controlled global oil refinery and distribution, five American and two British, causing Iran severe economic dislocation. Without a refinery to buy the crude oil, or a tanker to deliver it, crude oil is worthless, and the seven sisters owned most of the refineries and tankers in the world. Iranian crude oil production went from 241 million barrels in 1950 to 10 million barrels in 1952. Iran lost its entire oil income. With the big Saudi step-sister, the Arabian-American Oil Company, ARAMCO, filling in the production gap at friendly pricing, the Iranians were the only ones to feel the economic squeeze.

The Brits also sent the fleet to blockade Iranian ports, physically preventing the export of Iranian oil by tanker, and enthusiastically joining Dulles in planning Mosaddegh’s military overthrow, even if that meant the permanent destruction Iranian democracy. Iran, reacting to the British blockade and suspecting a coup, had closed the British embassy in Tehran in October of 1952, so the Brits had to act in concert with the Americans. This was just fine with the Americans, because British connections in Iran with the military, the press, the clergy, industry and the political opposition were far superior to that of the Americans.

Unfortunately for Mosaddegh, sitting in the PM’s office in Whitehall from 1951 to 1955 was Winston Churchill, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915. It was Churchill who converted the British fleet from coal-fired steamships to oil-fired engines, and was personally responsible for the 1913 British government takeover of the very same Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (then called ‘Anglo-Persian’) that Mosaddegh had just nationalized. Needing a Cold War political victory, a hesitant Eisenhower, whose first instinct had been to support Mosaddegh, approved the Dulles brothers’ relatively bloodless overthrow plans, so Churchill and Eisenhower, emotionally accustomed to working together anyway, were on the same page.

The CIA team for Operation Ajax, under the command of Frank Wisner, Deputy Director of Plans, was run by OSS veteran Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, a leading CIA Arabist. In 1952 he was CIA liaison to Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers Movement, helping to overthrow the useless, self-indulgent and grotesquely profligate King Farouk. This operation was hilariously called Project FF (Fat Fucker). During the transition from Truman, who was not coup-friendly, to Eisenhower, who was putty in the Dulles brothers’ hands, it was the CIA’s Dulles, Smith and Wisner who were making policy. Wisner actually commented at this time that the “CIA makes policy by default.”

In the summer of 1953, operating from Tehran, along with MI6, Roosevelt bribed key politicians, army and security officers and coordinated nationwide propaganda by buying anti-Mosaddegh newspaper editorials and sermons. Mosaddegh’s army security chief, General Mahmoud Afshartous, was kidnapped and murdered, as were numerous other key Mosaddegh supporters. When a premature attempt by the commander of the Shah’s Imperial Guard to arrest Mosaddegh backfired, causing the arrest of the Guard commander himself, near civil war broke out in the streets.

At this point riots were not hard for the CIA team and MI6 to organize, since Mosaddegh, not a military man, was retreating, not attacking. False flag black ops proliferated, which included the heavy financing of right-wing mullahs who opposed Mosaddegh’s secular democracy (one of whom was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 coup). Bands of hired thugs and ‘Islamic’ gangs were employed to advertise fear of a communist takeover, and to promote a royalist government, in defense of Islam. Other hired thugs, advertising themselves as ‘pro-Mosaddegh communists,’ performed widely publicized terrorist acts and attacked the ‘Islamic’ thugs. The police, many of whom had been bought by Roosevelt, ignored Mosaddegh’s orders to restore peace. When hired street gangs and pro-fascist military, including the Shah’s imperial guard, attacked Mosaddegh’s heavily defended house, and each other, on August 19, 1953, city-wide rioting left three hundred dead, providing the coup plotters the chaos they needed to ‘restore order.’

The fixed machine gun positions in Mossadegh’s house were countered with army tank fire. Roosevelt’s paid operatives seized Radio Tehran, the foreign ministry, the central police station and army headquarters. Roosevelt sat General Fazlollah Zahedi down at Radio Tehran with instructions to proclaim that he was “the lawful prime minister by the Shah’s orders.” The coup was artful, cheap as these things go, and not one single American lost his life. It was also one of the stupidest, most evil, and counterproductive things ever done by the CIA. 59

The cowering Shah, who had already signed the required royal decrees legitimizing the coup and dismissing Mosaddegh, was personally flown back from Rome by Allen Dulles, who, per Dulles’ instruction, publicly dismissed the fleeing Mosaddegh. With CIA control of the key national media, the army took over and Mosaddegh surrendered. Nazi collaborator General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister. Professor Masoud Kazemzadeh in The Day Democracy Died: “Bahram Shahrokh, a trainee of Joseph Goebbels and Berlin Radio's Persian-language program announcer during the Nazi rule, became director of propaganda. Mr. Sharif-Emami, who also had spent some time in jail for his pro-Nazi activities in the 1940s, assumed several positions after the 1953 coup, including Secretary General of the Oil Industry, President of the Senate, and Prime Minister (twice).”

The Shah, declaring martial law, ordered the execution of many of Mosaddegh’s most influential supporters, including Hossein Fatemi, his charismatic foreign minister. Political dissent and free speech became a thing of the past. The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, was trained and organized by the U.S. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which became British Petroleum (BP), was replaced, at the behest of John Foster Dulles, with a Sullivan and Cromwell-organized American-led consortium, Iranian Oil Participants Ltd, which included BP, Gulf, Royal Dutch Shell and six others. The consortium shared its profits 50-50 with Iran’s National Iranian Oil Company, although the Iranians did not have access to the books. Zahedi’s new puppet government signed all the CIA-approved oil contracts presented to it. The coup manager, Kermit Roosevelt, went to work for one of the coup beneficiaries, Gulf Oil. The well-managed and docile U.S. media called it a “popular uprising.” The Shah, until his 1979 overthrow, traded his oil and massive amounts of Iranian opium, a traditional crop, and heroin for U.S. arms. Another Sullivan and Cromwell construct made in privateer heaven.

Like Árbenz, Mosaddegh was a moderate secular democrat replaced by a murderous fascist dope peddler. The results, as we have seen, have not been happy. Until he was talked out of it by the Dulles brothers, waving the magic word ‘communist,’ the fuzzy and pliable Eisenhower’s own first instinct had been to support Mosaddegh with a $100 million loan. The ultimate ascension of the ultra-nationalist fascist clergy in Iran in reaction to the colonialist overthrow of Mosaddegh was predicted in detail at the time by many of the old Persia hands that Dulles had replaced during the McCarthy witch hunt. Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the British had “a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran.”

The next pro-fascist coup of the Dulles brothers took place the next year in Guatemala, in favor of United Fruit, a Sullivan and Cromwell client run by Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray. Zemurray’s United Fruit team included ’Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran, one of Roosevelt’s original brain trusters. Corcoran was part of the three-man legal team that wrote the legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1937 Corcoran, who was personally close to Roosevelt, made sure that Sam Rayburn of Texas became Speaker of the House. That was the beginning of a lifelong closeness to Texas big oil. But Corcoran fell out with Roosevelt over Spain. An effective domestic liberal in Rooseveltian terms, he was a pro-fascist conservative Catholic internationally. Roosevelt always regretted letting Corcoran talk him out of arming the Spanish Republicans, especially after we found ourselves at war with Hitler and Mussolini, who had supported the Spanish Nationalists and so gained strategic depth and time to build their armies. But Corcoran was in strong agreement with Roosevelt over the need to stop the Nazi Japanese in Asia. Roosevelt asked Corcoran to leave government to set up an ostensibly private corporation, China Defense Supplies, so as to have a mechanism, not subject to the oversight of the isolationist Congress, to arm Chiang Kai-shek in his resistance to the Japanese. Roosevelt knew we’d be facing a military superpower if the Japanese took all of China.

Corcoran’s China Defense Supplies worked closely with Chiang’s military adviser, Captain Claire Chennault, Chief of Pursuit Section at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s. Corcoran got Roosevelt’s approval of the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers. One hundred Curtiss-Wright P-40 warhawk fighters, intended for Britain, were redirected to Chennault in China. William Pawley, Curtiss-Wright’s Asia representative, reassembled the fighters with his Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) in Rangoon. It was Pawley’s CAMCO that paid the pilots. Corcoran’s China Defense Supplies approached Disney for a logo for the Flying Tigers, a name that had already evolved in the media. Disney did indeed make each plane look like an attacking tiger, with shark’s teeth.

Corcoran with Roosevelt’s powerful Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, 12/6/1938 (Wikimedia Commons, Corcoran)

Recruited from army, navy and marine reserve officers, the pilots were very well-paid, $600 a month and $500 for every kill. $600 in 1940 money equals $10,286 in 2016 money. The Flying Tigers, three fighter squadrons of around 30 aircraft each, began operating against the Japanese as part of the Chinese Air Force on December 20, 1941, just 12 days after Pearl Harbor. Their P-40s had pilot armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, and heavy armament riding on sturdy construction. Most importantly, the P-40 had a higher diving speed than most Japanese aircraft, preventing the Japs from twisting out of the way of a diving attack from altitude. In seven months, the Flying Tigers, with superior “dive and zoom” tactics, destroyed 296 Japanese planes and lost only 24 men. Their very first mission, 12/20/1941, saw two squadrons intercept 10 unescorted Kawasaki twin engine light bombers attacking Kunming. Only 1 Japanese bomber survived. The Flying Tigers were a major factor in keeping the Burma Road open, a key supply route to China, providing good news at a time it was sorely needed.

Having been shown the way by Roosevelt, Corcoran became one of the original defense contractor privateers. He helped builder Henry J. Kaiser obtain lucrative government contracts from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He introduced Kaiser to William S. Knudsen, head of the Office of Production Management, who provided $645 million in building contracts, keeping Kaiser’s ten shipyards humming. Kaiser’s two main partners were Stephen D. Bechtel and John A. McCone. In 1937 McCone became president of Bechtel-McCone, who joined forces with Kaiser to establish the California Shipbuilding Company. Thanks to Corcoran’s way with defense contracts, there were plenty of ships to build. John McCone became Eisenhower’s AEC chief, and Kennedy’s DCIA.

Understanding the necessity for magnesium to produce lightweight metal alloys for aircraft, Corcoran arranged a Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan for Kaiser to build a magnesium production plant in San Jose, California. Corcoran took $135,000 in cash and 15% of the business. During the war, Corcoran kept Brown & Root busy building ships on the Houston Ship Channel. During the war years, the Brown Shipbuilding Company built 359 ships and employed 25,000 people – most contracts delivered by Tommy Corcoran.

Hell’s Angels Squadron, Flying Tigers, 5/28/1942; Flying Tigers squadron photo, 1942 (Wikimedia Commons, Flying Tigers)

But Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in Asia, resented Chiang as a corrupt fascist dealing dope and arms with the Japanese, and so disapproved Corcoran’s support of Chiang. Marshall and Stilwell preferred Mao’s more popular, and far more disciplined, Yan’an-based force, which they regarded as far superior anti-Japanese fighters. Mao, at this time, was deeply friendly to the United States, needing a counterbalance to the Russians and the Japanese, if only we would reciprocate. Stilwell complained about Corcoran's ability to present Chiang in the best possible light with Roosevelt. Stilwell wrote to Marshall that the “continued publication of Chungking propaganda in the United States is an increasing handicap to my work….we can pull them out of this cesspool, but continued concessions have made the Generalissimo believe he has only to insist and we will yield.” 28

Chennault with Chiang; Chennault Planning Tactics, Kunming, 1942; Life, August 10, 1942 (Wikimedia Commons, National Archives)

Corcoran worked closely with Colonel Paul Helliwell, OSS chief of special intelligence in China. Civil Air Transport, CAT, was the peacetime version of Chennault’s Flying Tigers, also cofounded with Helliwell. That grew into the CIA proprietary Air America, also a Helliwell operation. Corcoran was Helliwell’s Washington DC representative, representing CAT and Helliwell’s other ventures. On November 1, 1948, Corcoran, on behalf of CAT, signed a formal agreement with the CIA to fly agency personnel and equipment in and out of Chungking, Kweilin, Luchnow, Nanking, and Amoy. In March, 1950, Frank Wisner, on behalf of the CIA, arranged the CIA purchase of CAT with Corcoran, who was not only CAT’s attorney but also part owner. Upon the creation of the CIA on July 26, 1947, Allen Dulles engineered the original Agency structure and recruitment with his trusted friend, Tommy Corcoran. 61 62

In late 1950, as the prospect of an Árbenz victory in the 1951 Guatemala elections loomed, Corcoran had no trouble getting Allen Dulles, Deputy Director of the CIA, to sit down for a nice long discussion of regime change in Guatemala in favor of his client, United Fruit Company. But the Truman administration wasn’t coup friendly – it was satisfied with the democratic elections being held in Guatemala. Then Eisenhower took the presidency. With the Dulles brothers on board, Corcoran sat down with Walter Bedell Smith, who moved from DCIA to Undersecretary of State in the new Eisenhower administration. Smith promised Corcoran his full support, making it clear that he would appreciate a place on the United Fruit board upon retirement from State. He got it. Corcoran was as effective a political manipulator as Allen Dulles himself. Dulles moved up to DCIA and with John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, Tommy the Cork got his Operation Success.

When the operation went into action, Corcoran arranged arms deliveries to the CIA’s operatives in Guatemala using United Fruit’s ships. Corcoran arranged for his friend and partner in Civil Air Transport, CAT, Whiting Willauer, to become Eisenhower’s ambassador to Honduras. Willauer arranged training sites, instructors and air crews for the rebel air force, and kept the Honduran government “in line so they would allow the revolutionary activity to continue,” as Willauer wrote to his long-time friend, Claire Chennault. Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray had the most powerful lobbyists in Washington on his side.

During the war, the Flying Tigers and the OSS functioned in China through the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, SACO, under the directorship of General Dai Li. Dai Li headed Chiang’s vast secret police, which ran as many as 300,000 operatives from China to San Francisco. It was this organization that was the inspiration for the KMT’s World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

Chiang with Roosevelt and Churchilll at the 1943 Cairo Conference; Green Gang leader Du Yuesheng and fifth wife, 1950 (Wikimedia Commons)

Chiang’s Kuomintang used the Shanghai Green Gang, their Mafia, to organize its vast opium-for-arms trade. Green Gang death squads had helped Chiang and Dai Li put down the 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai, and had been a key factor in Chiang’s power structure ever since. Du Yuesheng, the Green Gang leader, had been invested with the rank of Major General by Chiang.

General Dai Li and Rear Admiral (then Commander) Milton E. Miles on Christmas, 1942. (Photo by Jack Miller, courtesy of SACO US Naval Group China Veterans)

Wherever the Japanese conquered in north China after 1930, they immediately encouraged the planting of opium. Du Yuesheng, on behalf of Chiang, worked out a plan whereby Japanese gunboats would ferry his and their Yangtze opium to his 24 heroin labs in Japanese-controlled north China. The heroin was then sold throughout all of China, in the north by the Japanese Army through its new chain of 6,900 pharmacies, and in the south by Chiang’s KMT. In return, Du, Chiang and Dai-Li were left in control of the Yangtze River opium trade and the export market for their surplus heroin. One of their more famous distributors was Lanksy-Luciano partner Lepke Buchalter. 63

The OSS expected Chiang’s opium traders to function as intelligence agents behind Japanese lines, running a fairly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese, blowing bridges and killing troops, while also trading opium with them. Dai-Li and Du, for instance, controlled all the dives and opium dens in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, as well as most of the labor unions and police. Thanks to Dai-Li, when the retreating Japanese decided to demolish the port, the OSS had the street muscle to prevent it. The inverse, of course, was also operative. Many of SACO’s street fighters were Japanese agents, since the vast opium/heroin trade was sanctioned by both sides across the battle lines. 64

Stilwell, right, marches American troops out of Burma, 5/1942; With Chiang “the little peanut” and his famous dragon lady, Burma, 4/1942; Planning tactics in Burma with Gen. Frank Merrill (Wikimedia Commons, Stilwell)

The OSS Far Eastern chief, Commander. Milton Miles, was Dai-Li’s first Deputy Director of SACO. Miles launched OSS operations throughout the opium-producing Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand, closely coordinating his efforts with Dai-Li. Dai-Li’s elite officer corps was trained by American agents on loan to the OSS from Hoover’s FBI and Anslinger’s FBN. At this time Dai-Li was among the biggest opium and heroin smugglers in the world. 65 66

Stilwell’s outfit, Merrill’s Marauders, crossing the Tanai River in the Burma monsoon, March 18, 1944 (Photo: U.S. Army). The Myitkyina attack was the climax to four months of unrelenting combat that saw 5 major and 30 minor engagements. Capture of the all-weather airstrip at Myitkyina would allow supply planes flying over the Himalayas to China to refuel en route. The 2400 Marauders suffered 80% casualties. Every single member of the unit won the Bronze Star. (Photo; Hoover Institution)

Col. Fletcher Prouty: ”I was with the Air Transport Command in Cairo then. We sent a transport plane every month with the Finance Officers to Burma so they could physically pay the troops with cash. These men had ‘foot-lockers’ full of cash: American for the Americans, British for the British and foot-lockers packed with small white envelopes of heroin to pay the Chinese. That was the customary Chinese ‘pay.’” 67

General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater, protested that the alliance with “the little peanut” Chiang was a de facto alliance with the Japanese, since Dai-Li, whom he called “the Chinese Himmler,” was trading dope and arms on a massive scale with the enemy. OSS agents who moved independently against SACO’s pro-Japanese dope smugglers were murdered. Mao’s Yan’an-based force, which had to face SACO’s KMT dope smugglers as well as the Japanese, was implacably hostile to all aspects of the opium trade, perceiving it as a security threat on all levels. Mao’s troops, if they valued their lives, did not smoke opium. Stilwell, a great field general, insisted that Mao’s force was “battle-hardened, disciplined, well trained in guerrilla war and fired by a bitter hatred of the Japanese.” This from the commander of one of the greatest fighting units in the history of American arms, Merrill’s Marauders. 68

Stilwell strongly advocated an all-out alliance with Mao, and Mao wanted a U.S. alliance as a counterweight to both the Kuomintang and the Russians. Although many OSS officers agreed that Mao’s was the far superior anti-Japanese force, Chiang was able to prevent the Stilwell-Yan’an alliance through his direct contact with the likes of Tommy Corcoran, thus giving the Russians a leverage with Mao they otherwise never would have had.

Chiang demanded and got Stilwell’s recall in October of 1944. Stilwell became chief of Army Ground Forces and commanded the U.S. 10th Army on Okinawa in the final months of the war, but lost his influence on China policy. Like Castro and Ho, Mao started out as strongly pro-American. Stilwell’s pro-Yan’an OSS officers, our most effective fighters, and their allies in the State Department, became a target of the Hoover-McCarthy witch hunters in the 1950s.

Chiang’s Republic of China established the Taiwan Provincial Government in September 1945. In 1947, two years before his final military defeat on the mainland, Chiang moved the KMT base to Formosa. The native Formosans were reluctant to give up their autonomy, so, in March of 1947, 12,000 KMT regulars slaughtered 20,000 Formosans, the leading lights of the society. Thereafter Formosa became ‘Taiwan,’ with a million Chinese nationalists ruling 15 million Formosans. 70

American Military Intelligence, led by MacArthur, then decided that Chiang’s Taiwan was the perfect base from which to pursue the Korean War. The American Military Assistance Advisery Group showered this fascist killer with a torrent of arms and money. John Singlaub of Iran-Contra fame was CIA deputy chief in South Korea at this time.

In 1954, Chiang founded the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. Chiang’s partners were the CIA’s partners. There was Park Chung Hee, founder of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who became President of Korea in 1961. Park was a fascist who fought with the Japanese in China and then broke the Korean Communist Party as a double agent for South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee.

Then there was the absolutely incredible Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who is the Son of Jesus Christ. Sun is also the Son of the KCIA. The Unification Church was run by Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who used to be the KCIA military attaché in Washington. Richard Nixon Himself acknowledged that Reverend Moon’s message resonated with God Almighty Himself. When Moon’s International Federation for the Extermination of Communism, financed by the Tong-il Armaments Company, opened up its American branch, the name was wisely changed to the Freedom Leadership Foundation - so much more, como se dice, Republican.

Postwar mug shots; Sasakawa with Mussolini

Joining Chiang, Park and Moon in founding the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League were Japan’s Ryoichi Sasakawa, Yoshio Kodama and Nobusuke Kishi. Just after the war American occupation forces had arrested Sasakawa, Kodama and Kishi as Class A war criminals. However, thanks to their wholesale rape of China, they were fabulously wealthy Class A war criminals - and their Yakuza street gangs were needed to break the so-called communist unions. American Military Intelligence, if that’s the right word, then decided, in 1948, to rehabilitate these misunderstood patriots by allowing them to form the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan as a “liberal” one-party police state for decades thereafter. This rule included the coordinated CIA sabotage of Japan’s Socialist Party and labor unions. That is, the LDP literally went on the CIA’s payroll, insuring, among other things, continued U.S. military presence on Okinawa during the Vietnam war, despite considerable local resistance. Thus, the old fascist Yakuza-industrialist coalition that had started World War II came back into power, resurrected as “democrats” - with a 99% criminal conviction rate and violently enforced social conformity.
These Asian ‘anticommunists’ were represented in Washington by ’Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran. Corcoran was the mid-50s diplomatic escort of Claire Chennault’s wife, Anna Chen Chennault, head of the KMT China Lobby. Like the Chennaults, Corcoran was a registered agent of Taiwan. The China Lobby was very worried about a Commie takeover of the opium-producing Golden Triangle, now partly controlled by the hard-core remnants of the mainland KMT. That army was serviced as a CIA Special Operation by Corcoran’s client airline CAT/SEA Supply operating from Taiwan and Bangkok. 71

Helliwell worked with Frank Wisner in the CIA’s action-oriented alter ego, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was merged with the CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO) to become the Directorate of Plans in 1952. The reorganization was a reaction to the outing of the OPC’s support of the Thai and Burmese opium armies. Under Wisner’s guidance the OPC grew from 300 to more than 6000 contract employees, many of them active guerrillas. Wisner was given enormous independent power as the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) of the CIA’s new covert operations division, the Directorate of Plans, 1951-1958. Richard Helms was Wisner’s chief of operations. It was this office that coordinated the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran and Árbenz in Guatemala.

Helliwell founded SEA (South-East Asia) Supply of Bangkok in 1950 specifically to transport cargo, such as arms from Okinawa, to his Civil Air Transport for the Burma KMT operation (Operation Paper). The 1950 idea was to use the Kuomintang troops in Burma to threaten “China’s soft underbelly.” But the underbelly didn’t turn out to be so soft, with the 1951-52 CIA-KMT jabs into Yunnan easily repulsed. So the entrepreneurial KMT settled into the opium business instead, sending CAT’s arms supply planes back to Bangkok and Taiwan loaded with opium or morphine from Burma’s Shan states of Kokang, Wa and Kengtung. 72

In fact, with military control of the richest opium-producing area in the world, the KMT was no longer dependent on even the pretense of political legitimacy, since it now had the tactical support of the Thai and Taiwanese armies. The CIA’s KMT operation, therefore, became self-sustaining, an enlightening object lesson for all intelligence professionals in achieving complete independence from civilian policy control. As DCIA William Casey, who worked under Helliwell, later put it, in relation to the Contra-Cocaine operation he engineered, “a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.”

In the early 1950s Miami-based attorney Paul Helliwell, of Helliwell, Melrose, and DeWolf, organized not only Civil Air Transport, SEA Supply of Bangkok and Air America, but the Bank of Perrine in Key West, the Bank of Cutler Ridge, and the Bahamas’ Castle Bank of Nassau, the CIA-Syndicate money laundry through which the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban hit teams, serviced by SEA Supply, were funded. Richard Nixon had an account at Castle Bank, as did many Santos Trafficante operatives. When Castro’s Cuba seemed to dry up as a Mafia drug distribution hub, Helliwell, through his extensive Asian connections, made sure Don Santos did not want for high quality heroin to sell. Trafficante and his partners distributed the Indochinese heroin ferried by Air America, which was not subject to customs inspection, throughout the U.S.. Helliwell’s law firm represented Trafficante-Teamster partners in Resorts International, as they developed Bahamas gambling, with the help of Johnson’s bag man Bobby Baker. 73 74

Gen. Bill Donovan, wartime head of the OSS and 1953 ambassador to Thailand, coordinated the now self-funding KMT dope operation with the Thai paramilitary units he helped to create. The CIA created the Thai National Police (TNP) and Police Aerial Reconnaissance Units (PARU), paramilitary operations which functioned essentially as extensions of the KMT’s opium army. The KMT’s main Bangkok connection, the brutal military dictator Gen. Phao Sriyanond, the commander of the Thai police who coordinated CAT air traffic with Gen. Li Mi’s 5,000-man Shan State KMT, was also the commander of the Thai government’s relationship with the CIA. Donovan hailed Phao’s generals, owners of Bankgkok’s opium dives, whorehouses, liquor and food distributors, as defenders of democracy, despite Phao’s habit of summarily executing his political opposition without trial.

Explained KMT Gen. Tuan Shi-wen, “To fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.” So the KMT went into the business of enslaving the Karen hill tribes as opium sharecroppers. This is the origin of the so-called ‘ethnic’ conflict in bordering Burma (Myanmar). According to Professor McCoy, the first snow-white #4 heroin lab was opened by KMT-affiliated Hong Kong chemists on the Thai-Burma border in the late 60s. The KMT are also known, fittingly, as the “White Chinese.” 75 76

The KMT’s lawyer, ‘Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran, was also United Fruit’s lawyer. Corcoran was intimate with the entire leadership of the CIA, which he had helped to organize, and which was, in any case, extremely sympathetic to United Fruit. Walter Bedell Smith, Gen. Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff and Truman’s CIA director, was now John Foster Dulles’ Undersecretary of State. In 1953 he had asked Corcoran for the presidency of United Fruit, and in 1955 was named to its board of directors. Gen. Robert Cutler, chairman of the National Security Council, already sat on the United Fruit board. John J. McCloy, the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was a former board member. Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica, got to the UF board in 1960. Hill was connected to Grace Shipping, another CIA friend heavily invested in Guatemala. 77 78

United Fruit was so profitable because it paid no duties or taxes and was subject to no labor regulations. Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray’s team also included Edward Bernays, the formidable “father of public relations,” who filled the American media with phony reportage about “communism in Guatemala.” Bernays could place stories at will in the ‘liberal’ New York Times, the ‘liberal’ New Leader, Time, Life, New York Herald Tribune, Readers Digest and on and on. The right-wing John Clements helped from his perch as Director of Public Relations for the Hearst Corporation. As the Editor of The American Mercury, Clements, with Russell Maguire, owner of the Thompson Submachne Gun Company, decided that what was happening in Guatemala was all a liberal Jewish plot.

When a real New York Times journalist, legendary reporter Sydney Gruson, on the ground in Guatemala, began filing stories detailing the beneficial effects of Árbenz’ reforms, Allen Dulles called his old Princeton classmate, Gen. Julius Ochs Adler, The Times' general manager, and had the reporter recalled, with the consent of The Times’ publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. As The Times’ 1998 obituary for Mr. Gruson puts it, “In 1977, The Times reported that the C.I.A.’s files contained some evidence that it had feared that Mr. Gruson’s reporting, while based in Mexico City, was edging toward a premature discovery of the agency’s role in Guatemala.” 79 80

Eisenhower’s private secretary, Ann Whitman, was the wife of Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s publicity director. Whitman’s 1953 film, Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas, is now up on YouTube. Opening with cheerful Carmen Miranda-Chiquita Banana music, we are introduced to the grey-haired Scripps-Howard Latin America beat reporter Edward Tomlinson. Pointing to a map of the Panama Canal, just below Guatemala and Nicaragua, “one of the vital and strategic waterways of the Free World,” Tomlinson explains in stentorian tones that Guatemala is just “a few minutes by guided missile” from the United States. “Little wonder then that the leaders in the Kremlin are determined to establish a political, if not a military, bridgehead in this area.” The only thing preventing them is the Church, and the economic and social progress offered by United Fruit and its commercial partners. “And therefore the agents of international communism have selected the United Fruit Company as a prime target of attack.” This publicity campaign included the coerced Organization of American States (OAS) approval of the necessity to reverse “communist intervention” in Guatemala.

Once the ‘demographics’ had been taken care of, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers had the support of every Democrat in Congress. With Nicaragua’s Somoza, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Venezuela’s Pérez Jiménez and Cuba’s Batista champing at the bit, Operation Success began in early June of 1954. John Peurifoy, who took over as Ambassador to Guatemala in October 1953, led the operation, assisted by Flying Tiger co-founder William Pawley, who provided deniable aircraft. Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner was the operational director assisted by former U.S. Army Colonel Albert Haney, recent chief of the CIA station in South Korea. With control of the air, the sea and all the neighboring countries, Allen Dulles’ CIA had no trouble overwhelming Jacobo Árbenz with a military and propaganda campaign coordinated from both inside and outside the country.

Aerial bombardment of the presidential palace, with both munitions and leaflets, was combined with a mercenary ground force of about 450 low-rent hoodlums, divided into four strike forces scattered around the country, led by Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. Castillo had originally supported the Arévalo and Árbenz progressive 1944 coup against Ubico, but was later cashiered for supporting the 1949 counter-coup led by Col. Francisco Javier Arana, who thought power should remain in military hands. Arana was killed by Árbenz loyalists, but Castillo either escaped or was released to Honduras, where he plotted yet another coup with Somoza and Trujillo. Castillo had achieved some name recognition among the right-wing military, and proved to be an obedient CIA puppet. Army commanders were bought off, and those that wouldn’t sell out were assassinated. The size and popularity of Castillo’s force was wildly exaggerated by well placed and very powerful Radio Liberty transmitters, which easily overrode the Government’s weak signal, advertising Castillo’s various F-troop defeats as great victories for the “uprising.”

The propaganda campaign was run in-country by David Phillips, who would play a prominent role in the war on Castro. The propaganda for the “Voice of Liberation” radio station was scripted by Phillips and OSS China veteran Howard Hunt, the Political Action Officer who later planned the Watergate burglary for Nixon. “Struggle against Communist atheism! Struggle with Castillo Armas!” The invasion was timed to coincide with United Fruit stockholder Henry Cabot Lodge’s tenure as President of the U.N. Secirity Council. Lodge was able to prevent the Security Council from sending a team to investigate, so Árbenz’ last hope evaporated on June 25, 1954.

The American contingency plan, ‘Hard Rock Baker,’ had U.S. fighter planes at the ready and a Marine landing force as part of a naval blockade of Guatemala, but Plan A worked so well that Plan B wasn’t needed. Eisenhower replaced two of the four P-47’s that had gone out of action, so there was just enough airpower, with the Thunderbolt’s eight .50-caliber machine guns and rockets, to terrify the civilian population, and to convince the military that if it resisted it would be facing the U.S. military. When the phony war achieved a high level of hysteria in Guatemala City, with aerial bombs exploding everywhere, including at munition dumps and fuel depots, agents were sent in to buy off key army officers, who were in the mood to deal. Árbenz, disheartened by the prospect of civil war with his own army, resigned on June 27, 1954. 81

The U. S. had actually turned into the communists’ best recruiting tool. The 1954 Doolittle Report on the Covert Activities of the CIA told President Eisenhower, “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost….We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us….There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Fascism is the best possible recruiting tool for radical communism. By supporting fascism worldwide, in the name of anticommunism, we turned ourselves into the Soviets’ best argument. 89

The young doctor Ché Guevara, who had come to Guatemala filled with hope, vainly tried to organize guerrilla units to retreat into the mountains to continue the fight. Guevara realized that it was Árbenz’ failure to inflame and arm the populace that made his defeat inevitable. Intelligence professionals, it was obvious, could always rent mercenary troops and manipulate the media. The enraged Guevara made his way to Mexico City, where he met a like-minded Fidel Castro, himself a miraculous survivor of bold attempts to overthrow both Trujillo and Batista. Back in Guatemala City, David Phillips, pouring over Árbenz’ captured documents, opened a file on Ché Guevara.

One of the first things Guevara told Castro on their accession to power in January of 1959 was that “We cannot guarantee the Revolution before cleansing the armed forces. It is necessary to remove everyone who might be a danger. But it is necessary to do it rapidly, right now!” By taking that advice, Castro became as ruthless a streetfighter as Allen Dulles himself - executing three hundred Batistianos by March of 1959. Castro did that because he knew he was under CIA military attack by the same military team that had just overthrown Árbenz.

The Cuban Communist Party, both because it was close to Batista and because it had orders from Moscow, had opposed Castro when he was in the hills. In 1959, before he was driven into Russian arms as a matter of survival, the CIA agent who interviewed the cooperative Castro concluded that “Castro is not only not a Communist, he is a strong anti-Communist fighter.” The only thing intractable about Castro, concluded Agent ‘Frank Bender’ (Gerry Droller), was his social idealism and his nationalism. Although the military and political pressure inherent in his situation forced Castro to embrace the radical left, he always preferred his Fidelismo, what he called “utopian socialism,” to Guevara’s Communismo. 83

Castro met with Vice-President Richard Nixon in April. Despite Castro’s willingness to compromise, and before he had expropriated anything, Nixon, Eisenhower’s point man on Cuba, decided that all-out war was the only answer. Nixon recommended using the newly-exiled Batistianos as the spearpoint. This was, of course, a CIA Special Operations Group plan that had already been designed before Castro’s visit. For Castro, talking to Nixon was like talking to a wall. The political signals from the Eisenhower administration, which had immediately recognized Castro, were far more positive, but the wary Castro always kept his eye on the military signals. He knew Nixon represented the ‘Sullivan and Cromwell’ interests threatened by Cuban nationalism, including United Fruit, which had extensive interests in Cuba. There was also Texaco, ITT, Standard Oil, Cuban-American Sugar Company, Domino Sugar, American and Foreign Power Company and any number of others. 84

Col. J. C. King, chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, the man who had been the CIA’s chief liaison to United Fruit during the Guatemala coup, had advised Eisenhower, in his Cuba “action plan,” that “Thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.” Eisenhower signed off on the plan on March 17, 1960, after Allen Dulles’ formal presentation of “Operation Pluto” to the National Security Council. But, however sympathetic he may have been to the elimination of Fidel, Eisenhower had approved only a small 300-man force of small-team infiltrators, not the massive 3000-man over-the-beach invasion presented to Kennedy. In the transition from Ike to Kennedy, January 1961, diplomatic relations were broken with Cuba, and Brigade 2506 was set to invade. 85

Castro, who had plenty of double agents among the Batistianos, realizing he was under attack, opened diplomatic relations with Moscow on May 7, 1960. In October he began the process of nationalizing every significant U.S. business in Cuba. Dulles’ protégé, Richard Bissell, who had replaced Wisner as Deputy Director for Plans, was in charge of the ‘covert’ Operation Pluto.

The model for all the Cuba planners was their Guatemala operation of 1954. The Cuba plan included not only assassination, but sabotage and an expert operation, that almost succeeded, aimed at destabilizing Cuba’s currency. This, ultimately, was no more than Castro expected. ‘Imperialism’ was not an empty word to Fidel and Ché. They never forgot Jacobo Árbenz and the destruction of democracy in Guatemala, and they knew, right from the start, that they would be treated the same way. It was Árbenz’ fate that convinced Ché that the Communist military model - a model developed in reaction to the death-squad fascism of the Czar and the 1919 invasion of Russia by the colonial powers - was the only survivable alternative to CIA-United Fruit “democracy.” 86

All the intelligence services were aware of the Dulles thesis, that revolt in Eastern Europe had proven impossible to foment under Stalin, but possible under Khrushchev, whose relative liberalism gave intelligence operatives wiggling room. “We should also like to extend a special greeting to Jacobo Árbenz,” said Ché in 1960, “president of the first Latin American country which fearlessly raised its voice against colonialism; a country which, in a far-reaching and courageous agrarian reform, gave expression to the hopes of the peasant masses. We should also like to express our gratitude to him, and to the democracy that gave way, for the example they gave us and for the accurate estimate they enabled us to make of the weaknesses which that government was unable to overcome.” 87 88

The essential militarism of communism, of course, enraged Castro’s democratic supporters, like Manolo Ray, Huber Matos, Manuel Arrutia, David Salvador and Amador Odio, all heroes of the revolution who broke with Castro, but those that didn’t end up behind bars in Cuba found little comfort among the CIA’s Batistianos. Ché knew that real political democracy presented an opportunity for the CIA to destabilize the revolution from the inside, as it had done with Árbenz.

The then-current CIA destabilization of the neutralist government of Souvanna Phouma in Laos was a case in point. Souvanna Phouma was driven into an alliance with the Pathet Lao and the Viet Minh, both of which had vast popular support, by a corrupt gang of fascist dope peddlers who had no popular support whatever, just a mountain of CIA money and arms. The “Royal Laotian Army” and the “Royal Lao Air Force” were created out of whole cloth by the CIA - they literally didn’t exist before the Dulles brothers invented them, and had no funding, including Laotian, other than American.

In 1958 the Pathet Lao, through legal elections, became an important element in Souvanna Phouma’s neutralist coalition. The Dulles brothers immediately cut off all aid and engineered the military collapse of the coalition, using the CIA’s strongman, the former French-serving Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. Eisenhower was informed of U.S. coup involvement, of which he would not have approved, only after the fact. 90

Nationalist paratroop captain Kong Le, in an attempt to return Souvanna’s coalition to power, took Vientiane away from Phoumi in August of 1960. But Kong Le couldn’t hold it in the face of the combined CIA forces of Phoumi and Vang Pao’s Hmong opium growers, operating in the Plain of Jars. So, in December 1960, Kong Le led a substantial portion of the Royal Laotian Army, in American trucks loaded with American equipment, into the Plain of Jars to join up with the Pathet Lao and challenge Vang Pao. The sum total of the Eisenhower-Dulles policy in Laos was to radicalize the Pathet Lao, vastly increase its strength, and badly weaken the democratic center.

The whole mess was then handed to John Kennedy, who found the CIA’s Laotian strongman Phoumi completely intractable. Kennedy cut off Phoumi’s American funding, at least that part of the funding he was aware of. But, as Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger recalled, of both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, “The CIA station chief refused to follow the State Department policy or even to tell the Ambassador his plans and intentions.” 91

Rather than accede to the State Department’s demands for another coalition government, Gen. Phoumi, who continued to receive covert CIA funding, sent Gen. Ouane Rattikone into Burma to arrange independent funding for the Royal Laotian Army. Using his vast stores of CIA arms as barter, Ouane was enabled to build up enough regular trade with the KMT Shan state opium armies to become the first Chairman of the secret Laotian Opium Administration, in 1962. 92

The CIA, meanwhile, as the French had done, had been organizing the Hmong army of Vang Pao in the Laotian highlands, the only possible military counterweight to the Pathet Lao in northern Laos. The only cash crop of the Hmong was opium, and there was no way 40,000 Hmong troops would fight for any outfit that didn’t support their economy. The Hmong are also called Meo, a Chinese insult, meaning ‘barbarian.’ Hmong means ‘the people,’ ‘mankind.’ It was largely the Pathet Lao hostility to the opium trade, a traditional tool of the colonialists, that turned the scattered Hmong highlanders, who had been French allies, into American allies. Phoumi and Ouane shipped their Laotian opium, as their Burmese, to Ngo Dinh Nhu in Saigon via the CIA-run Royal Lao Air Force.

Ché knew that the CIA modus operandi in Guatemala and Cuba was no different than in Laos. It not only originated with the same policy makers, it employed the same CIA agents and military trainers, the same individuals and front companies. Immediately after the Guatemalan coup, as Ché looked on from Mexico City, Secretary of State Dulles instructed the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala to instruct Col. Castillo that all unionists were to be labeled “communist” and that all “communists” were to be charged with high treason and either shot or summarily exiled. The obedient Castillo immediately outlawed all political parties, labor unions, peasant and Indian organizations and restored the old dictator Ubico’s death-squad chief to his old post, as head of the secret police. That is, Dulles insisted on the revitalization of the old political death-squads. At least 8,000 people, many of them political and union leaders, were murdered in the first two months of the Castillo regime, and another 10,000 imprisoned. Every political leader who could left the country. 93

The secret police imposed press censorship and even burned all “unauthorized” books, including not only the writings of Arévalo, but Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. Castillo’s party was called the National Democratic Movement. His personal secretary, a man who had proven very handy with a gun, was Mario Sandoval Alarcón, the man who, funded by the CIA, went on to become “the godfather of Latin America’s death squads.”

Castillo drove all the Native American and mestizo campesinos off the land Árbenz had given them and gave it back to the old landlords, returning the country to the monocrop coffee and banana slave-labor economy, virtually bankrupting it. Vice-President Nixon, after his 1955 visit, declared that “President Castillo Armas’ objective, ‘to do more for the people in two years than the Communists were able to do in ten years,’ is important. This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one.” Fascist doublespeak, all his life. 94

In 1957 the intrepid Mafia point-man and Trafficante operative, Johnny Roselli, made another trip to Guatemala City, as he had done many times throughout 1956. This time the trip was in reaction to Castillo’s jailing of his partner, casino operator Ted Lewin. Castillo was promptly gunned down, and Col. Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Johnny Roselli’s gambling and narcotics partner, became the new head of Guatemala’s secret police. 95 96

Col. Trinidad Oliva was also the key CIA contact in the Guatemalan government, working under his half-brother, the defense minister. Trinidad Oliva coordinated all “foreign aid” coming through the CIA conduit ICA, the International Cooperation Administration, the forerunner of the Agency for International Development, AID. Roselli and Trinidad then helped the murderous old Gen. Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, one of Ubico’s assassins with close ties to mob partner Trujillo, to become head of state. Mario Sandoval Alarcón organized the right-wing of Castillo’s party into the National Liberation Movement (MLN) and hired himself out to Trinidad and Roselli.

This Republican-supported dope dealer government instituted a policy of genocide against the bulk of Guatemala’s people, the Native Americans and mestizos, that continues to this day. Little 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, the girl who died in ICE custody on 12/8/2018, was a Native American whose family was fleeing the racist Guatemalan government the U.S. installed in 1954 and still supports. Had we left Árbenz in peace, we would now have a major Guatemalan trading partner, and no hysterical refugees begging for their lives at our door.

The same year that Johnny Roselli helped the CIA engineer the change in the Guatemalan government, he was asked by his Syndicate associates to put together Giancana in Chicago, Costello in New York, Lansky in Miami, and Marcello in New Orleans for the huge $50 million Tropicana construction project in Las Vegas. According to Fred Black, a political fixer who was close to Roselli, Bobby Baker and Lyndon Johnson, Roselli’s influence was such that he gave orders to the Dorfmans, who controlled the Teamsters’ huge Central States Pension Fund. During the 50s and 60s, it was Johnny Roselli who “set up protection” in Las Vegas. 97 98

Throughout 1956 and 57 Roselli travelled back and forth from Mexico City, the planning center for all CIA operations in Latin America, and Guatemala City. An experienced ICA operative noted that “John had access to everyone and everything that was going on there. He had an open door at the embassy in Guatemala, and in Costa Rica. He was in there plenty of times. I know because I saw him. He supplied information to the government, and had a hand in a lot of the intrigues that were going on.” 99

Roselli’s mug shots, 1925 & 1966

This means, operationally, that Johnny Roselli’s interests became the CIA’s interests. “Throughout Latin America,” notes Frank McNeil, a junior political officer in the Guatemalan Embassy in 1960, “there were two American governments - one intelligence and one official.” McNeil’s boss, Ambassador John Muccio, learned of the Bay of Pigs invasion force being trained in Guatemala only after the story broke in The New York Times. As John Kennedy found out to his chagrin, Roselli, his Syndicate and Batistiano allies, had more operational clout than the State Department. 100

But Gen. Ydígoras’ death-squad rule was not popular, even with the Guatemalan military, nor was his gift of a military base in Retalhuleu to the Americans, for the training of their Batistiano invasion force. Castro’s macho nationalism was deeply admired by Latin military men, and Ydígoras was bitterly resented for turning Guatemala into another “USS Honduras.” In November of 1960, a month before Kong Le joined up with the Pathet Lao, more than half the Guatemalan army rose against Ydígoras. The U.S., fearing harm to the Bay of Pigs operation, squelched the revolt as a training exercise for its fascist Cuban force, which now had the run of Guatemala. 101

This created an alliance in Guatemala, as it had in Laos, of the nationalist military and the revolutionary left. In Guatemala, the left was led by the Guatemalan Party of Labor, the PGT, and its Revolutionary Movement of November 13th (MR-13). Both nationalist military rebels who led their regular troops into the hills to join up with the PGT, Luis Turcios Lima and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, had U.S. counterinsurgency training. Master-spy Roselli, following traditional intelligence practice, maintained relations with both sides in this guerrilla war, supplying arms and selected information as necessary.

Roselli had important ties to Standard Fruit, the smaller of the two fruit giants, through Seymour Weiss and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, fruit importing mafioso Jack Dragna on the West Coast and the Genoveses in New York. Using Col. Trinidad Oliva and some of Dragna’s best hitters from the Coast, as well as guerrilla hit teams from MR-13, Roselli convinced United Fruit that it would be cheaper to allow Standard Fruit to use United’s rail and port facilities than to fight with Roselli. This was also the position of the U.S. Justice Department, which supported “free enterprise” in Guatemala. 102

The popular Guatemalan guerrilla war was a convenient “crisis” for the intelligence services, providing a willing John Kennedy an excuse to approve the sending of Office of Public Safety (OPS) trainers to organize a “pacification” program in Zacapa and Izabal provinces. U.S. Special Forces were flown in from Laos, and Ydígoras’ best killers were matriculated from the CIA’s counterinsurgency college in the Canal Zone. The ensuing mass murder made even the arch-conservative churchmen puke in public, and they were a constituency John Kennedy heeded. In January of 1963 Kennedy engineered the departure of Ydígoras in favor of a hopefully more politic murderer, who disappointed expectations.

Over the next few years, under the OPS-Military Assistance Program, Guatemala’s “counterinsurgency” force was modernized with tens of millions of dollars. The Zacapa-Izabal campaign turned into a political mass-assassination program, run by the same OPS-Green Beret operatives who ran Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This became the most horrible genocide in Guatemalan history, aimed at the Mayan people. Amnesty International said that in 1966 alone, 30,000 Guatemalan civilians were assassinated by the OPS death squads. 103 104

U.S. AID Photo, Guatemala, 2005 (Wikimedia Commons)

Leading those death-squads was Mario Sandoval Alarcón, who, with CIA-KMT help, had organized his MLN (National Liberation Movement ) into a politico-military unit that not only fielded troops, but local jefes politicos capable of regimenting the campesinos and identifying death-squad targets. When a village wouldn’t submit to an MLN political chief, U.S. Special Forces jets, operating out of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, bombed it with napalm. Hundreds of Guatemalan children were burned to death by flaming jelly. 105 106

This is what earned the Guatemalan army commander, Col. Carlos Arana Osorio, Sandoval’s commanding officer, the sobriquet “Butcher of Zacapa,” which he took as a compliment. The CIA/OPS, working with Sandoval, founded and funded numerous free-lance assassination teams, with cute acronyms like OJO, “Eye for an Eye” and MANO, “National Organized Anticommunist Movement.” By 1970 over 30,000 Guatemalan police had received Office of Public Safety training, many going directly into the free-lance death-squads, all of which supplemented their income by running drugs for their employers, the Syndicate and the Guatemalan secret police. 107

The Salvadoran equivalent of the MLN, ORDEN (‘Order’), the Democratic Nationalist Organization, was created by the OPS in El Salvador between 1960 and 1965. Taiwan’s Col. Chu was instrumental in organizing ORDEN on the populist KMT model, with 80,000 cadres. As in Guatemala, rural ORDEN informants turned over subversive names to the Salvadoran National Security Agency, ANSESAL, headquartered in the Presidential Palace, which dispatched a death squad to deal with the “traitor.” The infamous Roberto D’Aubuisson, funded by Reagan during the Contra war, was strongman Blondie Medrano’s protégé in ANSESAL. 108

Brazil went through the same process, with some 100,000 police receiving OPS training. This resulted directly in General Castelo Branco’s 1964 overthrow of President João Goulart’s reformist parliamentary government, and the resurgence of Brazil’s death-squads. Brazil remained a military police state for the next 40 years. The coup was engineered by US ambassador Lincoln Gordon and his military attaché, the CIA’s Colonel Vernon A. Walters, actively organizing right-wing elements of the Brazilian military and providing heavy financial and military support.

The popular ‘Jango’ Goulart was a moderate, center-left democrat whose Rooseveltian policies addressed Brazil’s structural problems, quite like the policies of Jacobo Árbenz. On April 4, 1962, President Kennedy publicly welcomed Goulart to the USA, explicitly referencing President Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbor’ visit to Brazil 26 years before. Kennedy lauded Goulart’s efforts, under the Alliance for Progress model, “To provide housing for our people, education for our children, employment for our workers, security for our older citizens, a better and more secure life for our farmers.” Kennedy loved Goulart’s Rooseveltian politics, and would have bitterly resisted the CIA’s ‘Operation Brother Sam.’ The coup was cooked up by ITT President Harold Geneen and CIA Director John McCone, as was their ex post facto BS about Kennedy’s approval. The coup, explained the CIA, was necessary to “prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba.” The Operation was brought to fruition on April 1, 1964. Goulart, to save his life, fled to Argentina.

Goulart with President Kennedy during his visit to the U.S., April 3,1962; Goulart’s tickertape parade in New York City, April 5, 1962 (Wikimedia Commons, Goulart)

On April 9, 1964 coup leaders published the First Institutional Act, which granted authority to remove elected officials from office, dismiss civil servants, and revoke the political rights of those found guilty of subversion or misuse of public funds. On April 11, 1964 the Brazilian Congress, under this gun, elected the Army Chief of Staff Marshal Branco as President. Branco granted all the Sullivan and Cromwell-style commercial concessions demanded by the U.S. government, including a new profit remittance law and an investment guarantee treaty covering U.S. corporate subsidiaries. By 1967 foreign companies owned 50 percent of Brazilian industry. Because Goulart remained an influential voice, Sérgio Paranhos Fleury, head of the Department of Political and Social Order, engineered Goulart’s murder on orders from President Ernesto Geisel. On December 6, 1976 João Goulart was poisoned to death in his apartment.

The Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, was part of the CIA-KMT’s World Anti-Communist League, WACL, an extension of their Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. The first meeting of the CAL was organized by the CIA’s Howard Hunt in 1958, to celebrate the 1954 Guatemalan coup, in which he played a major role. Old OSS hand Hunt had direct ties to Taiwan’s KMT. 109 110

Ray Cline, CIA station chief in Taiwan from 1958-1962, later Deputy Director of the CIA, founded the WACL along with Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son. Ching-kuo headed the Kuomintang’s secret police under Chiang and rose to become President of Taiwan. He was overall military commander of the KMT’s Shan states opium armies. The WACL’s finishing school was the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Peitou. Roberto D’Aubuisson, ‘Major Blowtorch,’ graduated from both this school and the International Police Academy in D.C., as did many of South America’s finest. When appropriate, courses at Peitou, Taiwan, were taught in Spanish. By 1961, the American military was providing 75% of Taiwan’s budget. Kuomintang heroin flooded the world. 111

‘Political warfare’ is a combination of sheer terror and unrelenting propaganda aimed at the merciless domination of the bulk of the population by the ruling industrial elite - what the KMT calls “total war.” The cadres are schooled in the arts of interrogation, propaganda, militarily-based social organization and terror. Major Blowtorch got straight A’s. D’Aubuisson’s party, ARENA, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, was structured exactly like the Kuomintang. It “has a politico-military organization which embraces not only a civilian party structure but also a military arm obedient to the party,” to quote President Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White. 112

White is a good example of the deep divisions that existed within the structural U.S. government between many of the democratically-minded professionals of the State Department and the pro-fascist elements of military intelligence. White was fired in 1981 by Reagan’s first Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, for bitterly protesting the 12/2/1980 murder of three Maryknoll nuns and a lay worker, who were personal friends of his. White swore, at the site where their bodies were being dug up, “this time the bastards won’t get away with it.” Ambassadors John Binns in Honduras and Anthony Quainton in Nicaragua also loudly protested dope-dealing CIA-supported death squads and were also summarily fired by Haig. Upon his ouster, Ambassador White told the AP, “In 1981, as the ambassador to El Salvador, I refused a demand by the secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., that I use official channels to cover up the Salvadoran military's responsibility for the murders of four American churchwomen. I was fired and forced out of the Foreign Service.”

The FBI’s Stanley Pimentel, the ranking FBI legal attaché in Central America, that is, an officer of the State Department with diplomatic immunity, showed the backbone he was born with. Pimentel penetrated the Salvadoran military with the help of a State Department political officer to prove that the kill orders came directly from the director of the Salvadoran National Guard, General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova. Risking his life, Pimentel obtained the original murder weapons, placed them in a diplomatic pouch, and, after an armed confrontation at the airport with Salvadoran troops, who didn’t dare shoot an American diplomat, shipped the weapons to the FBI lab. The lab matched the weapons to the bullets found in the nuns’ bodies and the fingerprints found at the murder scene. Four National Guardsmen were convicted in the killings. But Vides Casanova was promoted to become the Salvadoran minister of defense in 1983, still heavily financed and armed by the U.S., in the name of the antidrug effort.

As senior CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who was in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence at the time, put it, “White exposed the cooperation of U.S. military advisers and CIA operatives in aiding El Salvador’s brutal death-squad military.” In 1999, as President of the Center for International Policy, Ambassador White said, “In the name of anticommunism, U.S.-supported armies suppressed democracy, free speech, and human rights in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. Torture and assassination of democratic leaders, including presidential candidates, journalists, priests and union officials became commonplace.”

Ambassador Binns’ successor in Honduras, John Negroponte, had no problem covering for those dope-dealing death squads. Negroponte, a close ally of cold-warrior DCIA Casey, as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, went on to become a key player in the Contra-Cocaine machinery run by Casey from the Contra bases in Honduras, which I describe in detail in the ‘Contra-Cocaine’ chapter in Vol. II, using the photos and narrative given me by Cele Castillo, the DEA’s lead agent in Homduras.

Negroponte went on to become Director of National Intelligence, 2005–2007, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, 2007–2009. Negroponte and his ilk, still running our diplomatic and intelligence machinery, institutionalized the protected global drug trade, which is still run by those death squads and their secret services. That’s why we have a flood of terrified campesinos from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, literally mothers with babes in their arms, begging for asylum from those dope dealing death squad police states. Police states that we built and still finance, in the name of the anti-drug effort. ‘Drugs’ was just substituted for ‘communism’ in the Sullivan and Cromwell privateer script. The policy is now “antidrug” as well as “anticommunist.” Casey, Negroponte and their ilk have institutionalized the hard drug business. Negroponte helped run Reagan’s Somocista Contra Cocaine operation, trading multiton loads of cocaine for Contra arms. Negroponte was sitting directly behind Colin Powell, next to DCIA George Tenet, when Powell made his phony pitch for Bush Jr.’s Iraq War. 113

Prepared Statement of: Richard H. Glenn, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, May 23, 2018: “In Central America, debilitating gang violence, staggering homicide rates, pervasive extortion, and weak state institutions, especially in the ‘Northern Triangle’ of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, are key drivers of irregular migration to the United States. TCO [Transnational Criminal Organization] networks are fluid, flexible and successfully dismantling them requires that we apply well-coordinated and comprehensive solutions at the local, national, and international levels. In support of Executive Order 13773, Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking, INL leads the Department of State’s efforts to combat transnational crime overseas by strengthening the capacity of partner nations to prevent and combat crime before it reaches U.S. borders.” That is word for word the same BS as in 1980. To stop the drugs from entering the U.S. we are arming and training the drug dealers.

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), ‘Countering Narcotics,’ 1/25/2019: “In 2016 Guatemalan police seized record amounts of narcotics as INL programs started to take hold. Despite these gains, drug traffic has risen dramatically through Guatemala leading INL to expand its counternarcotics programming to combat the increase. In the coming months INL intends to begin a program to restore helicopter mobility to specialized anti-narcotics teams, giving them national interdiction capability. INL continues to support, train, and vet DEA-sponsored units that investigate and arrest drug traffickers. Coordination between U.S. and Guatemalan units has been excellent, and DEA intelligence has been used by Guatemalan police to seize over one thousand kilograms of illicit drugs in 2017.” One thousand kilograms sounds like a lot, but it is just one metric ton, a miniscule fraction of the 1,400 metric tons of cocaine produced, according to the UNODC, by Colombia alone in 2017, making the seemingly large figure of “one thousand kilograms” a propagandistic bone, PR.

The State Department and the DEA forgot to mention that the Guatemalan police they are arming and financing are the drug dealers, and that the drugs are transported on those donated helicopters. These State Department reports have been word for word identical since 1954, as if next year the anti-drug policy will finally “take hold” and the pure physics of supply and demand, or Salvadoran or Guatemalan police, will be different this year than last year.

Insightcrime.org:, ‘Intelligence Report’ Details Role of Guatemala Police in Drug Trade,’ by Elyssa Pachico, 10/14/2014, “A report allegedly produced for US anti-drug and intelligence agencies has detailed how corrupt factions of Guatemala’s police - including high-level officers - dedicate themselves to stealing and reselling drug shipments, among other illicit activities. The report, reprinted in elPeriodico, called these corrupt police the ‘Charola Cartel’ (‘charola’ being a reference to police insignia), and said they emerged after drug traffickers began paying Guatemalan police officers to protect their drug shipments in the 1990s. Some officers allegedly began stealing these shipments (a practice known as a ‘tumbe’) and selling them to traffickers based along the Guatemala-Mexico frontier.”

The Washington Post, ‘Guatemalan Anti-Drug Official Indicted,’ By Mark Sherman, The Associated Press, 11/16/2005: “Washington - Guatemala's top anti-drug investigators have been arrested on charges they conspired to import and distribute cocaine in the United States after being lured to America for what they thought was training on fighting drug traffickers.”

The Associated Press, ‘Guatemala arrests 28, including 9 police, in crime ring bust,’ 2/5/2018: “Guatemala City (AP) - Guatemalan authorities have arrested 28 people, including nine police officers, in a bust of a network allegedly involved in organized crime and drug trafficking.” I could go on for the next 500 pages with identical stories. We are arming and financing the drug dealer governments that we built, and we know it, because that’s how these fascist police states pay for our armaments. That’s the fascist structure the Dulles brothers and their ilk institutionalized. 114

Operation X

Prohibition artificially inflates the value of the prohibited commodity 20 to 100 fold. Only genuine agricultural “commodities” are subject to such inflation. That is, the demand is an evolutionarily structural, a permanent feature of the global economy. You can pretend that it’s possible to make wine or pot unavailable, but it’s not. There is no way around the pure physics of supply and demand. ‘Demand’ is human herbalism, instinct related to eating. It cannot be ‘reduced.’ Prohibition of a commodity with which humans share their evolution simply creates a hood monopoly. The kind of power Prohibition put in Lucky Luciano’s hands left every New York shopkeeper, cop and Mayor quacking in his boots. As Luciano put it, “There wasn’t a chance for Roosevelt to get the delegates from the city without makin a deal with Tammany, and in 1932 the guys who ran Tammany was run by me and Frank Costello.” 1

During the war the Office of Naval Intelligence had to use Mafia chief Luciano to secure New York’s docks. Too much information was getting through to the deadly U-boats. The U.S. and its allies lost 120 merchant ships to German U-boats off the American coast in the first three months after Pearl Harbor. Freight specifics and sailing routes were insecure on the New York docks.

U.S. tanker Dixie Arrow sunk off Cape Hatteras by U-71, 3/26/1942; (National Archives)

The docks weren’t run by Luciano, but by Luciano’s amici. The capo mafioso wasn’t really capodi tutti capi because ‘organized crime’ wasn’t really that organized. It wasn’t a corporation with a rigid hierarchy. Luciano could defend his turf where he could, and others could do the same. Many of those others weren’t Italian and many chose to remain quite anonymous. But many were Italian or Sicilian, and the old Sicilian structure, the Mafia, provided methods whereby an underground economy could be managed. The mafiosi, for all their bloody reputation, were actually quite good at cooperating with one another, and few could touch them for guts, street smarts and organization.

Socks Lanza ran the Fulton Fish Market with an iron hand, but his Brooklyn distribution depended on the trucks of other amici. Cockeye Dunn’s Longshormen helped run Luciano’s bookmaking on the docks and fix his smuggling. Luciano and his allies reciprocated by distributing Dunn’s hot cargoes and helping out with ‘labor problems.’ There was no way Cmdr. Charles Haffenden’s naval intelligence unit was going to penetrate the docks without these bosses.

Haffenden went to Tom Dewey’s experts, D.A. Frank Hogan and his top aide, Murray Gurfein, who went from the D.A.’s office to the OSS in 1942. They knew enough to contact Lanza, head of Local 16975 of the United Seafood Workers. Lanza, after trying to go it alone for a while, admitted that the only one with juice enough was Luciano, then languishing upstate, thanks to Dewey, in frigid Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, NY on the Canadian border. Luciano’s lawyer, Moe Polakoff, told the Feds that the only person who could successfully broach this subject with Luciano was his trusted partner Meyer Lansky. Lansky, who hated the Nazis guts, was glad to help. He was assigned his own code number as a naval intelligence contact, as was Luciano, who got transferred downstate to the more pleasant confines of Great Meadow in Comstock, NY. 2

Naval intelligence understood that the runaround, including some faux sabotage, was likely a ruse to get Luciano released, but the Mafia was needed not just for protection and intelligence on the docks, but to organize Sicily behind Patton, something only a Luciano could do. With street-level Mafia cooperation, recent Sicilian immigrants, many professional fishermen, were funneled into the New York office of Naval Intelligence. They helped to refine very accurate maps of the Sicilian coast and hinterland, providing the invasion force with tide tables and the location of docks, inlets, key roads, mountain passes and guerrilla groups. They also provided regular communication with the Mafia powers behind German lines in Sicily.

Don Calogero Vizzini and Don Giuseppe Genco Russo, although flexible enough to survive, had been badly weakened by Mussolini’s serious attempt to replace their coercive power structures with his own. Knowing that the Americans were unstoppable anyway, they provided a ready-made guerrilla army to roll out the red carpet for the invaders. Luciano had been born less than fifteen miles from Villalba, Don Calò Vizzini’s base, and had relatives who still worked for him. Villalba was only 55 miles from General Patton’s beachhead in Palermo.

Don Calogero Vizzini, left, and Don Giuseppe Genco Russo (Italy’s News Photos; Keystone)

When Lt. Paul Alfieri landed on Licata Beach, his Sicilian contacts were able to give him safe passage to the secret HQ of the Italian Naval Command. Inside, Alfieri found maps of the disposition of all German and Italian naval forces in the Mediterranean. The Mafia put out the word that Italian troops who resisted the Americans would be marked for reprisal, but those that deserted would be given civilian clothes and protection. Italian troops deserted by the truckload. Mafiosi guided Patton’s Seventh Army through the labyrinthine San Vito mountains, enabling Patton to split the 400,000 fascist troops in two. These Sicilians were directly responsible for saving thousands of American lives during the 1943 invasion.

Unfortunately, this was turned into a political tragedy for Sicily. Sicily’s economy was almost entirely agricultural. But, until the Land Reform Act of 1950, land wasn’t generally passed on in small family plots, but in large latifundia, plantations. Small plots were rented out for shares. The great Dons were landlords who violently opposed the efforts of the sharecroppers at land reform.

Sicily Invasion, July, 1943; Tank ‘Eternity’ lands at Red Beach2, 7/10/1943; Remains of an Italian Navy armed train destroyed by USS Bristol while opposing the landing at Licata Beach; Troops of The Loyal Edmonton Regiment entered Modica marching with fixed bayonets, 7/13/1943 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) made Don Calogero Vizzini, his lieutenant and successor, Genco Russo, and many other mafiosi, mayors of important towns. Don Calò was appointed Mayor of Villalba, Giuseppe Genco Russo became Mayor of Mussomeli, while other clan members ended up in control of much of western Sicily. Coordinating the AMGOT effort was the former lieutenant governor of New York, Col. Charles Poletti, whom Luciano described as “one of our good friends,” that is, a made mafioso. 3

AMGOT’s great ally throughout Italy was the Church, a great landowner, which had bitterly opposed land reform as ‘communist.’ The Church had been largely pro-fascist during the war, for the most part enthusiastically supporting Mussolini. Every single Nazi puppet regime during the war had been a Catholic theocracy. In 1949, Pope Pius XII excommunicated all members of the Communist party, and all Catholics who read, published, or disseminated any media advocating Communist ideology – land reform, and unions, being interpreted as ‘communist.’ CIA Counterintelligence Chief Angleton himself was a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, as were William Casey, William Colby, John McCone, Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush Jr. (George H.W.’s brother), General Vernon Walters, Reagan’s National Security Adviser William P. Clark, P-2 chief Licio Gelli, Nazi founder of the West German BND Reinhard Gehlen, Safari Club founder SDECE chief Alexandre de Marenches, Ronald Reagan and Allen Dulles. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, 1953-1956, was a Dame of Malta. In 1955, when Pietro Nenni formally separated his Socialist party from Italy’s Communist party, Ambassador Luce argued against CIA political operations chief Bill Colby, who saw a political advantage in backing the moderate left. Luce, Angleton and Dulles insisted that the Socialists were just stalking horses for Palmiro Togliatti’s Communists, and that we should destroy the moderate left right along with the communists.

Since the Vatican was technically an independent country, Pope Pius XII, on June 27, 1942, created the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), commonly known as the Vatican Bank. Since the Vatican was a sovereign state, it made the rules for the Vatican Bank. The rules were that there were no rules, and that there were no public books available to any earthly authority. Stolen Jewish money, Nazi drug money, Mafia drug money, CIA drug money – fine, all blessed by the Holy See, in the name of anticommunism. Speaking of his boss, the great Sicilian mafioso Giuseppe Genco Russo, one of his lieutenants said, “He [Russo] is constantly in contact with priests, priests go to his place, and he goes to the bank—which is always run by priests—the bank director is a priest, the bank has always been the priests’ affair.” The basic Vatican Bank technique had been to keep minimal records, which were periodically destroyed, and to channel most large deposits immediately into numbered Swiss bank accounts, communicating the number to the depositor only. No audit was possible. Vatican Bank funds became anonymous and untraceable. 4

Col. Charles Poletti, military governor of Sicily, made New York’s most powerful expatriate Mafia capo, Vito Genovese, interpreter/liaison officer in the U.S. Army headquarters in Naples, thus putting New York organized crime at the very heart of Allied intelligence in Italy. Poletti, a first-generation Italian-American who had studied at the Universities of Rome and Bologna, was dead fluent in Italian, but there were those in Naples who did need an interpreter. Poletti became, successively, military governor of Sicily, Naples, Rome, Milan and Lombardy, providing introductions and security clearances for Genovese and his allies throughout Italy. Honoring the deal made with Naval Intelligence, Luciano was freed from his long prison term and deported to Naples, arriving on February 28, 1946.

Genovese, who fled New York in 1937 to avoid indictment by Dewey for the murder of fellow hood Ferdinand Boccia, spent the war in Naples helping to finance Mussolini, with whom he was personally close. Genovese and his Corsican ally Antoine d’Agostino played the fascist side of the fence, while Luciano’s mafiosi worked the Allied side. Their operational connections with each other made them indispensable to both sides. 5

By 1944, under AMGOT auspices, Genovese’s hoods controlled major Italian ports, most of the black market in diverted American and Sicilian goods, and numerous ‘anticommunist’ goon squads on call for U.S. military intelligence. Not only the black market, but much of the legal and political structure fell into their hands as well. On Genovese’s June, 1945 return to New York, he was arraigned for the Boccia murder. The first eyewitness against Genovese was poisoned to death in his jail cell, and the second shot to death in New Jersey. All charges against Genovese were dropped and he was released a free man.

Politically active Sicilian peasants had their crops burned and their cattle slaughtered. When, in 1944, their leaders, Michele Pantaleone and Girolamo Li Causi, challenged Don Caló in his home town of Villalba by holding a political rally there, 14 demonstrators were left wounded, including Li Causi and Pantaleone. Italian ‘communists,’ partisan guerrillas who had stopped the fascists, were not Stalinists; for the most part they were democratic socialists who just wanted a fair crack at the ballot box. As Li Causi put it, “We plan no Soviet rule here.”

On May 1st, 1947, hundreds of peasants drove their gaily painted donkey carts to Portella della Genestra to celebrate Labor Day. As the speeches began, submachine guns opened up on the crowd from the surrounding hills. Eleven people were left dead and 27 wounded. Because they insisted on breaking up Sicily’s plantations, the Socialists and Communists were so popular that the Mafia, organized by the CIA, found it necessary to assassinate 500 of them from 1944 to 1949. This gave the Mafia, and their Christian Democrat allies, absolute control of the island. The Land Reform Act of 1950, which prohibited estates of larger than 500 acres, was largely vitiated by Mafia control of the Land Reform Boards. 6

Genovese’s 1944 NYC wanted poster; Genovese in his American uniform with mafioso Salvatore Giuliano, Sicily, c.1943 (Wikimedia Commons)

Although Sicilian socialists were just poor farmers, they were identified by AMGOT as ‘potential Soviet agents.’ The very first major operation of the newly-formed CIA, personally directed by Allen Dulles and his Italy expert James Angleton, was the fixing of the 1948 Italian elections in favor of the Christian Democrats, the Mafia’s ally throughout Sicily and Italy. The U.S. had coerced the Christian Democrat PM, Alcide De Gasperi, to kick the Communist Party out of his all-party national coalition, thus needlessly alienating and radicalizing the Communists, who had been cooperating WWII allies.

Angleton, running the Strategic Services Unit in Rome, had no problem with Mafia control of Palermo’s port. He engineered it by allowing Mafia control of AMGOT’s Palermo structure. The only alternative was leftist control of the port. Angleton worked with Harry Anslinger’s top international agents, George White and Charles Siragusa. Their rationale, the one they were willing to talk about, at least, had something to do with the Russians, but they gave the Sicily-based mafiosi a protected worldwide reach. 7

Luciano himself was deported to Sicily in 1946, there to better manage his end of the vast Turkey or Indochina to Lebanon to Sicily to Marseille to Cuba to U.S. heroin run. He was joined by Sam Carolla, Sal Vitale and at least four hundred others. In 1948, another deported Sicilian, Joe Pici, got caught sending 35 pounds of pure heroin to his boys in Kansas City. In 1950, a Sicilian reporter snuck into the Hotel Sole in the center of old Palermo, then the residence of Don Caló Vizzini - and Lucky Luciano. He snapped a picture of Luciano schmoozing with Don Caló’s bodyguards. This so infuriated Luciano that he flogged the reporter to within an inch of his life.

Luciano and Don Caló, the previous year, had set up a candy factory in Palermo, which exported its produce throughout Europe and the USA. They also shared a hospital supply company and a fruit export operation - all ideal smuggling covers. In 1952, Luciano’s close childhood friend, Frank Coppola, had twelve pounds of heroin seized by Italian police on its way from Coppola in Anzio to a well-known smuggler in Alcamo.

In 1956, Joe Profaci, in Brooklyn, was recorded talking about the export of Sicilian oranges with Nino Cottone, in Sicily. Cottone lost his life that year in the battle for Palermo with rival mafiosi, but Profaci’s oranges kept on coming. The Brooklyn number rung by Cottone was the same number rung by Luciano from Naples and Coppola from Anzio. All were recorded by the Palermo Questura talking ecstatically about high grade Sicilian oranges. In 1959, Customs intercepted one of those orange crates. Hollow wax oranges, 90 to a crate, were filled with heroin until they weighed as much as real oranges. Each crate carried 110 pounds of pure heroin. 8

At all points, in exchange for their ‘anticommunist’ political violence, the hoods had the protection of the local military intelligence, though, as the busts indicate, not always of the local police. But enough support was provided so that the mafiosi were enabled, for years, to feed their network of heroin labs in Italy and Marseille with morphine base supplied by a Lebanese network run by the chief of the antisubversive section of the Lebanese police, or by their Corsican friends in Indochina. 9

The CIA used the Mafia’s allies, the Union Corse, to take Marseille away from the independent and communist unions, leaving the Corsican hoods in control of the most important port in France. The geopolitical rationale for this, from both the French and the American perspective, wasn’t only the threat the leftists posed to control of France, but to the Indochina war. The Viet Minh had considerable support among French leftists in 1947.
In an attempt to force the French government to negotiate with the Viet Minh, the socialist dock worker unions, the Communist-Socialist labor coalition known as the Confédération générale du travail, which were full of former Maquis fighters, refused to load American arms destined for the French in Vietnam. They saw the attempted French reconquest of Vietnam as racist and fascist, and as a betrayal of a respected WWII ally. The only outfits with enough muscle to challenge the socialist longshoreman unions for control of the docks, and the Marseille city council, were the union-busting Corsican hoods and their puppet-union goon squads. The puppet unions were put together by the FBN’s Charles Siragusa, who knew all the Corsican hoods, and Counterintelligence Chief Angleton, working with the AFL-CIO’s Irving Brown, who specialized in creating “compatible left” union fronts. The deal with the Corsican hoods, in exchange for stopping the French longshoremen, was protected license to deal drugs. That was the model for the deal Lucien Conein and Ed Lansdale made with the Corsicans during the Vietnam War years. The 1947-48 street war for control of Marseille’s docks, financed and coordinated by American military intelligence, was nasty, brutish and short. 10

The French secret services, also financed by American military intelligence, had been using Corsican opium dealers throughout Indochina, tied to Saigon’s Binh Xuyen mafia, to finance their operation against the Viet Minh. Thus they had a system in place for the collection and distribution of opium sap and morphine base from all over the Golden Triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand.

Morphine base is easily manufactured in makeshift jungle labs, pictured below. Opium’s major alkaloid is precipitated out of the raw sap by boiling it in water with lime. The white morphine floats to the top. That is drawn off and boiled with ammonia, filtered, boiled again, and then sun-dried. The resultant clay-like brown paste is morphine base.

That’s where the Corsicans came in. Heroin is diacetylmorphine, morphine in combination with acetic acid, the naturally-occurring acid found in vinegar. Heroin is preferred by users because the acetic acid renders it highly soluble in blood, therefore quicker acting and more potent than unrefined morphine. The combination process requires, firstly, the skillful use of acetic anhydride, chloroform, sodium carbonate and alcohol. Then the last step, purification in the fourth stage, requires heating with ether and hydrochloric acid. Since the volatile ether has a habit of exploding, the Union Corse had to advertise for a few good chemists.

With huge protected surpluses of morphine base available, the Corsicans built a network of labs to refine not only the Indochinese, but also the Persian and Turkish product, shipping the finished snow white #4 heroin out of a Marseille they now controlled. The Union Corse heroin was often shipped on the order of their Mafia partners, who controlled the great American retail market.

With that much leverage, the Corsican hoods became major CIA ‘assets’ throughout the fifties. Anslinger’s star international agents in the 50s, Charles Siragusa, George White and Sal Vizzini, actually brag in their memoirs about their operational CIA/Deuxieme Bureau connections. (The Deuxieme Bureau, the Second Bureau, was formerly the military intelligence branch of the French Expeditionary Corps, disbanded in 1940. Deuxieme Bureau is now used as a general term for French military intelligence.) That is, as they themselves obliquely admit, Anslinger’s FBN mission was essentially political, with the occasional cosmetic bust thrown in for credibility, or to destroy a competing ‘asset.’ White is the man who pretended that Burmese-KMT heroin came from the Reds. Siragusa, engineer of the Marseilles dock war, is the man who caught Luciano in Sicily with a half-ton of heroin being readied for shipment to Trafficante in Havana, and, pursuant to Anslinger’s orders, just let him go. 11

As our anti-Japanese guerrilla army, the U.S. had initially supported the Viet Minh in Vietnam. Then, under the influence of the Dulles brothers and their ilk, the U.S. shifted its support to the attempted French reconquest, who proceeded to lose anyway, despite the Dulles brothers’ heavy financing of the French Indochina War. In 1954, as the French were collapsing, President Eisenhower exploded with more anger than anyone there had ever seen before when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Arthur Radford, and Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining, suggested in the National Security Council that we send American troops in to save the French: “The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight! There is just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us! I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!” That prescience from the organizer of D-Day. This was the almost unanimous technical military opinion of the U.S. military high command in 1954, including Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway and Marine Corps Commandant Lemuel Shepherd. 12

But Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been enraged by the Viet Minh victory. American politics, thanks largely to the Dulles brothers, had degenerated into an hysterical competition in apocalyptic inquisitorial red baiting. “For us there are two sorts of people in the world,” explained Secretary Dulles, “there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others,” including, apparently, all those nettlesome Buddhists.

As the French were collapsing, Secretary of State Dulles, who was mad as a hatter, actually offered French foreign minister Georges Bidault two atomic bombs to resolve the situation. Bidault, who was not a genocidal maniac, recoiled in horror, pointing out that our side would suffer every bit as much as the enemy. In 1953, when the Eisenhower administration had just taken office, Secretary of State Dulles seriously proposed in the National Security Council ending the Korean War with nuclear weapons. Dulles also seriously proposed solving the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis with China the same way, even after he was told that the ‘precision’ A-bombing of relevant Chinese targets would kill at least ten million civilians. The militarily sophisticated Eisenhower simply outfought the Chinese MiGs over the Taiwan Strait with Nationalist-piloted F-86 Sabrejets armed with our new Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, for which the Chinese had no answer. Just a few PRC pilots were killed. That same year Secretary Dulles actually pushed Eisenhower to resolve the confrontation over Berlin with nuclear weapons, which, obviously, would have started WWIII. Shooting down PRC MiGs, of course, virtually guaranteed the heavy logistical support of the People’s Republic of China for the Viet Minh. 13

Although opposed to full-scale war with the Viet Minh, Eisenhower agreed with the Dulles brothers that it was essential, both politically and militarily, that the Republicans not be seen to have ‘lost Vietnam,’ as the Democrats had ‘lost China.’ Thus he approved Allen Dulles’ device of sending the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), led by the CIA’s most dangerous covert operative, Col. Edward Lansdale, to engineer the ‘bloodless’ takeover of Vietnam. The model for this operation was the CIA’s recent operations in Iran and Guatemala, both of which had been relatively bloodless, as Eisenhower defined it, and relatively cost-free, as Eisenhower’s myopic team defined that. Having purged all the old China hands from the State Department during the recent McCarthyite hysteria, there was almost no one left in State to make the counter argument.

Magsaysay was a key WWII guerrilla leader, leading 10,000 troops under Col. Merrill; Eleanor Roosevelt with President Ramon Magsaysay and Mrs. Luz Magsaysay of the Philippines in Manila, 8/25/1955 (Wikimedia Commons)

Lansdale had just finished stomping the Philippine campesinos into submission. In the process, he installed our chosen commercial puppet, Ramón Magsaysay, thus securing pro-American corporate governance in the Philippines. As in Guatemala, the Huks were simply peasant farmers demanding an end to their abuse, caricatured as radical Stalinists by the Dulles brothers. The acronym Hukbalahap is short for Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, People's Army against the Japanese. They were sharecroppers in Central Luzon who banded together to deny the area to the Nazi Japanese. They felt they had earned an equal place in Philippine society. They used their WWII military structure to resist the forced landlord conversion of their sharecrop family farmsteads to monocrop corporate farms, leaving them, literally, with no place to live and no food to eat. Most were illiterate sweat-equity subsistence farmers who didn’t even know what Stalinism was. They were put under attack for insisting on renegotiating their slave-labor tenancies. Philippine and American corporate interests found Filipino control of Filipino land threatening to their bottom line. Sharecroppers were expendable, land wasn’t.

Lansdale caricatured the Huks with the Philippine version of Chiquita banana anticommunism, wildly exaggerating the threat with staged incidents which were splashed all over the media. Then Ramon Magsaysay, Lansdale’s well-chosen figurehead, rode to the rescue, in the media, with massive, ruthless, covert American military help, including artillery and napalm bombing of Huk villages. Lansdale also turned the Philippine army into more effective fighters, and instituted better command and control of the Philippine Constabulary, which cut down on the more flagrant police abuses, like gang rape. After Lansdale’s artillery barrages the shell-shocked Huks surrendered.

Magsaysay was a genuine WWII anti-Japanese guerrilla hero and was indeed a parliamentary democrat, as well as a U.S. commercial puppet, obediently signing the 1955 Laurel-Langley Agreement, a nationalistic update of the 1946 Bell Trade Act, which tied the Philippines to U.S. commercial interests somewhat more equitably. Given what followed, it’s fair to say that the Philippine operation was Lansdale’s most successful, largely because of Magsaysay’s stable character, genuine Filipino nationalism and political popularity. Magsaysay closely followed the Dulles brothers’ anticommunist political and economic line internationally, leading the 1954 foundation of SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

Lansdale, a former advertising executive, was the lead unconventional warfare officer attached to the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), ostensibly part of the Military Assistance and Advisery Group (MAAG), in place since 1950. Lansdale’s 12-man team was in place by June-July 1954, less than 2 months after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Lansdale operated in Vietnam with complete autonomy, reporting only to CIA Director Dulles, whose orders to Lansdale were simply “Find another Magsaysay.”

The Saigon Military Mission found that the well-organized Binh Xuyen street gang, which was in effect an arm of the Deuxieme Bureau, directly controlled Saigon’s police force. Lansdale used the mountain of American money and matériel at his disposal to buy the defeated French Vietnamese army, the VNA, renamed the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). When it was ready, in late April of 1955, the ARVN, in a savage 6-day battle that left 500 combatants and 1000 civilians dead, took Saigon back from the Binh Xuyen. 14

Lansdale worked in tandem with Lucien Conein, who, during the war, fought with the French and Corsicans as a Jedburgh in southern France, and then led OSS paramilitary operations in North Vietnam, fighting in the Tonkin jungle with French and Corsican guerrillas. He was instrumental in rescuing the French population in Hanoi from Viet Minh retribution on their 1945 takeover. Having worked with the French throughout their Indochina war, Conein knew North Vietnam well enough to operate there for Lansdale in 1954. His intimate knowledge of French forces, and his skillful use of troops, helped Lansdale take Saigon in 1955. 15

After all that effort, of course, it would have been a shame to lose ‘South Vietnam,’ an American fiction, to Ho Chi Minh in the 1956 all-Vietnam elections guaranteed by the Geneva Accords of 1954. The Accords had simply divided Vietnam into French or Viet Minh controlled electoral districts. But France lost control of its district. ‘South Vietnam,’ with its American-controlled ARVN, refused to participate in the guaranteed elections, despite French insistence that the Accords, although not formally recognized by the U.S., were internationally binding. The Accords were signed on July 21, 1954 by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, France, the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. gave only verbal assent to the Accords, and promised not to use force to reverse them. John Foster Dulles would not even talk to the Viet Minh or the Chinese, and stormed out of the Geneva conference days before it ended. He preferred to launch Ed Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission, starting a war to permanently divide Vietnam, the exact opposite of what was called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords and what the U.S. had promised.

Immediately on arrival in Vietnam, June-July 1954, Lansdale’s team declared, June 16, 1954, that Ngo Dinh Diem, still waiting in Paris, was now Prime Minister under the somnambulant French and Japanese puppet Emperor Bao Dai. All Bao Dai demanded of Lansdale in exchange for the appointment of Diem was a CIA pension so he could support himself in style on the French Riviera. Diem was flown into the country by the CIA on June 25, 1954 and anointed Prime Minister on July 7. To preempt the 1956 election, which all knew would elect Ho, Lansdale rigged a fake election, installing Diem as President of the previously nonexistent South Vietnam in October of 1955, with 98.2% of the vote.

President Diem then promptly declared the ‘Republic of Vietnam,’ banned all political parties and declared martial law with rule by presidential decree. Had the French administered the vote, as was called for by the Accords, there is no doubt that Ho’s victory in a southern election would have been a landslide, though, unlike the North, other parties had strength. France was set to formally recognize one Vietnam under the Viet Minh. President Eisenhower wrote in 1954, “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.” 16

Well, now they had a world-class dope peddler to fight for. Diem was a French-trained lawyer with the psychology of his mandarin ancestors. Diem served as Interior Minister at Bao Dai’s Imperial Court in Hue in 1933, but resigned when Bao Dai refused to be anything “but an instrument in the hands of the French.” He spent most of WWII trying to convince the Japanese to declare Vietnamense independence, under his leadership. The French refused to protect Diem from his Viet Minh death sentence, since he had opposed the French as well as the Viet Minh. Diem had tried to establish a third, Catholic force in Vietnam. He spent most of the French Indochina War living rent free in Catholic institutions in the U.S., lobbying the American right and advertising himself, after the French collapse, as the one who could ‘save the South.’ In 1953 he was introduced to the American power elite by New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, a powerful prince of the Imperial Church and a supporter of political fascism worldwide. Pierre Mendes-France, the French Prime Minister, warned Secretary of State Dulles at the 1954 Geneva conference that Diem’s Catholic fascism would be an obstacle in Buddhist Vietnam, but to no avail. Vietnam was 86% Buddhist, actually a native combination of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and, thanks to French rule, 7% Catholic. 17

Saigon CIA Deputy Chief of Station William Colby observed in 1959, “Diem’s style was that of the traditional mandarin, assuming the legitimacy of his position to be beyond challenge and manipulating the currents of the distant imperial court (now in Washington) to ensure the continued support necessary to his mission.” But the mission of the Saigon Military Mission was the destabilization, perhaps Catholicization is a better word, of southern Vietnam. By artificially creating anarchy, banditry and guerrilla war, where none existed before, the situation was militarized. The Red Menace would then require Diem’s Catholic police state. The puppet regime would then become a reliable source of raw materials, huge defense contracts, and the global heroin trade necessary to pay for those defense contracts. That’s advertising. As Colby put it, “The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership, and Diem’s messianic dedication seemed more appropriate for it than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.” By June 1960, Colby was Saigon Chief of Station. 18

The Geneva Accords had split the country into two roughly equal electoral districts at the 17th parallel. They also provided that Vietnamese were free to move from one district to another. The option to move from the Northern district to the Southern district expired in May of 1955. The Saigon Military Mission used this loophole to foment hysteria among Catholics in the North. This terror, in support of Diem’s call for northern Catholics to emigrate south, was largely, though not entirely, the work of Lansdale’s northern ‘psy-ops’ teams, led by Conein, a member of the Saigon Military Mission. While Lansdale operated out of Saigon, Conein established his paramilitary teams from Hanoi.

The Viet Minh did regard the pro-French Catholic paramilitary groups as traitors, and in the wake of the bitter French war there were executions of Catholic guerrillas, too many, but there was no mass murder, and Catholic retention became the official Viet Minh policy. Vo Nguyen Giap, in the fall of 1946, in a public statement to his colleagues, attempting to control the political damage, admitted that the Viet Minh had gotten carried away with the red hot warfare, culminating in their victory at Dien Bien Phu: “We made too many deviations and executed too many honest people. We attacked on too large a front and, seeing enemies everywhere, resorted to terror, which became far too widespread.” This hysterical anti-Catholic policy was reversed on the spot by the Viet Minh leadership, and the Viet Minh, demonstrating its usual policy discipline, ultimately earned considerable nationalist Catholic support.

That kind of public self-criticism, in real time, was an ingrained part of the Viet Minh’s culture. It was standard Viet Minh and NLF procedure, after an action, for both individuals and units to review their performance, unsparing public self-criticism being regarded as an heroic virtue. Commanders, like Giap, were expected to lead the way. The lessons learned were continually incorporated into future operations. If specific tactics were insufficiently understood, different units were tasked to perform tactical experiments and promulgate the results. Likewise American patterns of attack were studied, or mimicked, for ambush or booby trap opportunities. This tactical flexibility turned the NLF into the least predictable and most formidable guerrilla army in the world.

But most of the northern Catholic hysteria was the work of Lansdale’s psy-ops teams. As Lansdale himself put it in his Team Report to the Pentagon, “a refresher course in combat psywar was constructed and Vietnamese Army personnel were rushed through it…The first rumor campaign was to be a carefully planted story of a Chinese Communist regiment in Tonkin taking reprisals against a Vietminh village whose girls the Chinese had raped [playing on Vietnamese WW II experience]….On 1 July, Major Lucien Conein arrived, as the second member of the team. He is a paramilitary specialist, well-known to the French for his help with French-operated maquis in Tonkin against the Japanese in 1945, the one American guerrilla fighter who had not been a member of the Patti Mission….”

“On 21 July, the Geneva Agreement was signed. Tonkin was given to the Communists. Anti-Communists turned to SMM for help in establishing a resistance movement and several tentative initial arrangements were made. Earlier in the month they had engineered a black psywar strike in Hanoi: leaflets signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region in early October, including items about property, money reform, and a three-day holiday of workers upon takeover. The day following the distribution of these leaflets, refugee registration tripled. Two days later Vietminh currency was worth half the value prior to the leaflets. The Vietminh took to the radio to denounce the leaflets; the leaflets were so authentic in appearance that even most of the rank and file Vietminh were sure that the radio denunciations were a French trick….Hanoi was evacuated on 9 October.”

“The northern SMM team left with the last French troops, disturbed by what they had seen of the grim efficiency of the Vietminh in their takeover…The northern team had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, in taking the first actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad…and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations (U.S. adherence to the Geneva Agreement prevented SMM from carrying out the active sabotage it desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbor, and bridge)…. The Vietminh long ago had adopted the Chinese Communist thought that the people are the water and the army is the fish. Vietminh relations with the mass of the population during the fighting had been exemplary…” 20

Lansdale dropped tens of thousands of leaflets with slogans like “Christ has gone south” and “the Virgin Mary has departed from the North.” Conein arranged with the Bishops to have these flyers distributed in the churches. Soothsayers were bribed to prophesy doom for Catholics in the North, and Conein arranged to have these dark prophesies confirmed in the popular astrological almanac. Boy Scout-handsome CIA agent Navy doctor Tom Dooley, supposedly a humanitarian, insisted, in his team-written book Deliver Us From Evil, that Ho had celebrated his takeover of Hanoi “by disemboweling more than 1,000 native women in Hanoi.” This was Lansdale’s scripted nonsense, but it worked. CIA agent Chester Cooper, who was there, said “the vast movement of Catholics to South Vietnam was not spontaneous.” The departing French helped to herd the terrorized Catholic peasants into Haiphong harbor, where they were loaded onto French and U.S. Navy transports. The CIA’s Civil Air Transport also pitched in, and many just walked across the border. The CIA spent about $100 million on Operation Passage to Freedom. 19

Haiphong Harbor, August, 1954 (National Archives, Wikimedia Commons)

By 1955, almost a million Vietnamese, mostly impoverished Catholic Tonkinese, were dropped, with no social support, among the traditional villages of the southern Cochinese in the Mekong Delta. These populations had never mixed before and despised one another. The homeless Tonkinese Catholics were outnumbered by the native Cochinese Buddhists 12:1. By 1955, 55% of South Vietnam’s 1.1 million Catholics, a ready-made Diem constituency, were refugees from the North. Unfortunately for Diem, these Catholic refugees included about 15,000 Viet Minh sleeper agents.

Ike and Dulles greet Diem at Washington National Airport, 5/8/1957
(Wikimedia Commons)

Conein became Diem’s CIA case officer, and together, working with Lansdale, they rigged the 1956 National Assembly elections, which gave Diem supporters 112 of the 123 seats. No opposition candidates were allowed to stand. Diem then proceeded to confiscate traditional village or hill tribe lands and hand them to homeless northern Catholics or absentee northern landlords who still expected the old colonialist rents. Since ‘South Vietnam’ had never existed before, it had no governmental structure - no tax system, military, police, legislature, civil service - nothing. Diem filled these slots with his pet Catholics. He then abolished all municipal elections and filled those slots with Catholics as well. As Lansdale himself complained, “A French colonial administrative system, super-imposed upon the odd Vietnamese imperial system was still the model for government administration.” A discouraged Lansdale complained that Diem was creating “a fascist state.”

The CIA’s official history puts it quite well: “…the [Viet Minh] movement’s anticolonialist legacy, its land reform policy, its egalitarian style and offer of opportunities for the ambitious among the rural poor, together with the assiduous personal attention devoted to even low-level candidates for recruitment, stood in stark contrast to Diem’s mandarism, which had ‘dried the grass’ of peasant resentment into incendiary opposition.” That opposition was confronted by Diem’s army commander, Gen. Tran Van Don, who had been born and educated in France, and fought both WW II and the French Indochina War with the French. 21

Diem then did something truly diabolical. He destroyed the traditional Mekong Delta barter economy by expelling all ethnic French and Chinese. The rural economy - the grain and commodity markets run for centuries by the mercantile Chinese, collapsed. Commodities as basic as dry-season drinking water became unavailable as the harvests rotted for lack of buyers. Dung-soaked rice-paddy water is undrinkable. The situation did indeed militarize.

Until Lansdale and Conein’s psy-ops, one of which was Diem himself, southern Vietnam had been introverted, tribal, peaceful and wealthy - and for the most part completely unaware of the Viet Minh. But in the face of starvation, uncontrolled banditry by homeless northern invaders, the systematic destruction of their economy and property rights, and enslavement at gunpoint in “strategic hamlets” - most southern Vietnamese accepted the discipline of the only Vietnamese-led army in Vietnam, the Viet Minh. As senior CIA agent Chester Cooper, who was part of Secretary Dulles’ 1954 Geneva team, put it, “innumerable crimes and absolutely senseless acts of suppression against both real and suspected Communists and sympathizing villagers. . . . Efficiency took the form of brutality and a total disregard for the difference between determined foes and potential friends.” That was the racist Dulles doctrine in action, no different in Vietnam than in Guatemala.

As the Pentagon Papers put it, “It can be established that there was endemic insurgency in South Vietnam throughout the period 1954-1960. It can also be established - but less surely - that the Diem regime alienated itself from one after another of those elements within Vietnam which might have offered it political support, and was grievously at fault in its rural programs. That these conditions engendered animosity toward the GVN seems almost certain, and they could have underwritten a major resistance movement even without North Vietnamese help….As far as attitudes toward Diem were concerned, the prevalence of his picture throughout Vietnam virtually assured his being accepted as the sponsor of the frequently corrupt and cruel local officials of the GVN, and the perpetrator of unpopular GVN programs, especially the population relocation schemes, and the ‘Communist Denunciation Campaign.’ Altogether, Diem promised the farmers much, delivered little, and raised not only their expectations, but their fears…. his ‘political reeducation centers’ were in fact little more than concentration camps for potential foes of the government…” 22

That’s the Pentagon’s own analysts speaking. In 1958, Hanoi once again asked the Diem government to help organize all-Vietnam nationwide elections. Until the rigged parliamentary elections of 8/30/1959, the Viet Minh government in the North, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam run by Ho’s Lao Dong, the Workers Party, urged the many anticolonialist factions in the South to concentrate on political organization and participation, not violence. The day after the rigged elections, Ngo Dinh Nhu thanked Cambodia’s neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk for his peacemaking efforts by sending him the gift of an explosive-laden suitcase, blowing Sihahouk’s chief of protocol, Prince Vakrivan, to kingdom come. Only when it became clear that Diem and Nhu were bent on a return to colonialist-style totalitarian fascism did the Viet Minh support military action in the South, founding the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. In 1961, U.S. military intelligence declared that 80-90% of the NLF in the South were of southern origin. There was no ‘invasion’ from the North, according to our own military intelligence. In 1962, the ‘Strategic Hamlet’ program of forced relocation was formally initiated. A strategic hamlet was a barbed-wire enclosed prison camp.

Since the urbane, Catholic, French-speaking Diem lacked the popular support of the Viet Minh, in rural, Buddhist, Vietnamese-speaking Vietnam, he was forced to rely for his financing on his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, a world-class opium and heroin dealer tied to the Corsicans. Lansdale and Conein pitched in with a coordinated effort to repeat the French Operation X, which organized the Hmong of highland Laos to operate against the popular Pathet Lao and Viet Minh. 23 24

The original French Operation X was run by paratroop Major Roger Trinquier, below, who traded massive amounts of Laotian Hmong and Thai KMT opium with the Binh Xuyen-Corsican mafia to finance his vast army of 40,000 tribal mercenaries operating in northern Vietnam. This was the original ‘French Connection.’ The military theorist Trinquier, author of the counterinsurgency manual Modern Warfare, coined the term ‘strategic hamlet.’ Trinquier’s Mixed Airborne Commando Group (MACG), using the French Air Force, supplied the Saigon-based Corsicans with morphine base. The Corsicans shipped that base to their brethren in Marseille and Vientiane for conversion into their famous snow-white #4 heroin. Note Dien Bien Phu on the map. That famous base on the Laotian border, where the French made their last stand, was built in defense of Trinquier ‘s Operation X.

Major Roger Trinquier

Lucien Conein had helped the French run Operation X, and had been a Corsican operative since his WWII days in southern France and the Tonkin jungle, bordering the Hmong in Laos. Since the major Hmong crop, opium, was made valuable enough to trade for arms by our Prohibition, CAT-Air America, which tied together the disparate Hmong mountain villages, went into the opium-for-arms business. Small mountaintop bases were serviced by their Helio-Courier STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, which look like Piper Cubs. They could take off on a 100 yard runway and float down on a mountaintop at 35 miles an hour. The proceeds were used to finance both the Hmong army, led by the former French-serving Vang Pao, and Diem’s nepotistic regime.

All of Diem’s five surviving brothers had important government functions. Ngo Dinh Nhu’s weird Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party (shortened, in Vietnamese, to Can Lao), composed mostly of former French-serving Vietnamese Catholics, staffed the bureaucracy, while Nhu supervised the CIA-trained secret police. Nhu’s man at the head of the secret police, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, managed the large-scale dope dealing, feeding the profits to the family patriarch, oldest brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, the Archbishop of Hué, who managed the family’s expanding financial empire.

Ngo Dinh Nhu; Ngo Dinh Thuc; Tran Kim Tuyen (Wikimedia Commons)

One of Tran Kim Tuyen’s most trusted senior deputies was Pham Xuan An, who had joined the Viet Minh in 1944 at 16, then gotten his journalistic credentials in the U.S. after the French war. He returned to Vietnam in 1960 as an accredited Reuters and Time correspondent, working with all the well-known journalists of the day, ostensibly serving the Diem government as a propagandist. He was actually a colonel in the NLF. He was declared a “People's Army Force Hero” by the Vietnamese government on 1/15/1976 and given the rank of general

Pham with California Governor Pat Brown, 1959; Pham with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, 1976
(Photos: VTC News)

After the Viet Minh victory, Pham Xuan An publicly disagreed with the government over its policy of centralized economic planning, pointing out that an economy cannot be managed like an army, and needed to institutionalize market forces to succeed. Although this cost An some minor political trouble, he and others like him were heeded by the pragmatic Viet Minh, most of whom themselves came from a mercantile tradition, and all of whom respected honest self-criticism, their very successful battlefield tactic. The prestigious accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers declared, in February 2017, that Vietnam may be the fastest-growing economy in the world, with an annual GDP growth of 5.1%, which would make it the 20th-largest in the world by 2050. Ho made it perfectly clear to Col. Archimedes Patti, his OSS liaison, that was his strategic direction in 1945, when he offered the U.S. lucrative government to industry partnerships.

Diem’s government had been completely penetrated by the DRV from its inception. Nu’s chief of the Strategic Hamlet Program, the Catholic Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, was, in fact, an NLF agent, a Viet Minh hero of the French Indochina War. He used his Catholicism to lend credibility to his renunciation of communism, enabling him to get close to Archbishop Thuc. Thao made sure to place the Strategic Hamlets in areas where they would be most vulnerable to NLF attack. On the event of Diem’s assassination, Bill Colby, President Kennedy’s Special Envoy and the CIA's Far East Division chief, went first to Col. Thao, who was the Diem government’s counterinsurgency chief. In 1965, he was killed after attempting to overthrow General Khanh’s regime. The victorious Viet Minh awarded him the posthumous rank of one-star general.

Another Ngo brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, was ambassador to Great Britain. Government contracts were invariably let to the Ngo Dinh’s army of relatives. Ngo Dinh Can controlled central Vietnam as a traditional warlord. There was no government spending on rural infrastructure, schools, housing or medical care. Rural spending was confined to the forced resettlement of the peasants into “strategic hamlets.” The peasants placed their hopes with the Viet Minh, which had always been wise enough to strengthen their rural economy. For the Viet Minh, a healthy, traditional village, militarily strong enough to defend itself was a “strategic hamlet.” Such hamlets were incinerated with napalm, bombed, or strafed by high-speed gatling guns. Between 1956 and 1963, Diem and his American allies killed about 100,000 Vietnamese men, women and children. 25

Strategic Hamlet, August 1964 (Wikipedia Commons)

Kennedy’s Commandant of Marines, Gen. David Shoup: “in every case...every senior officer that I knew...said we should never send ground combat forces into Southeast Asia.” Kennedy, who talked constantly of “communist aggression” and “assault from the inside,” answered Shoup’s critique by subscribing wholeheartedly to the “limited counterinsurgency” doctrine espoused by military adviser Gen. Maxwell Taylor in his 1960 book The Uncertain Trumpet. Taylor had been Eisenhower’s Army Chief of Staff from 1955-59, and so had worked closely with the Dulles brothers. Taylor was simply the next generation of military technician, understanding that “flexible response” with smaller, deployable units, was far more realistic than the unusable “massive retaliation” of the Eisenhower years. But of course Eisenhower was just using the simplistic sophistry of “massive retaliation” to keep us out of small imperialistic wars of conquest, like Vietnam. Eisenhower knew full well that small wars, like Vietnam, often turned into gigantic quagmires, as Vietnam had for the French. For Maxwell Taylor, warfare was much more user-friendly than ‘nuclear war or nothing.’ Kennedy made Taylor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October of 1962. Taylor, like Kennedy, saw Vietnam as the place to “stop the hungry Chinese” from dropping “the Bamboo Curtain.” That U.S imperialism was the only thing Vietnam and China agreed on never seems to have occurred to them. So all Taylor, an enthusiastic advocate of non-nuclear military funding, had to do was feed Kennedy enough strategic BS to make escalating military involvement in Vietnam seem plausible. 26 Eisenhower, Shoup, Lemnitzer, MacArthur, Mountbatten, Ridgway, Bradley, Gavin, Prouty and many others were horrified. They saw us heading for a repeat of the Korean nightmare. They predicted, before it ever happened, 60,000 American dead and a loss. They did not regard that as an option.

Taylor’s 1961 cables to Kennedy are a good example of the kind of policy-convenient lies he and his CIA cohorts practiced right through the Johnson years. “[South Vietnam is] not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate...comparable to parts of Korea where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort...North Vietnam is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing….There is no case for fearing a mass onslaught of Communist manpower into South Vietnam and its neighboring states, particularly if our air power is allowed a free hand against logistical targets.” 27

Our Korean War commanders, MacArthur and Ridgway, who suffered the painful failure of air power in Korea, knew that was idiotic, dishonest. U.S. troops learned to live and work in Korea only after nearly being driven into the East China Sea by the Chinese army. The 1951 winter retreat from the China-North Korea border back to the Pusan Perimeter, below Seoul, was one of the most nightmarish in U.S. history. We had a far higher casualty rate in Korea than in Vietnam - 34,000 dead, another 120,000 wounded, in three years. At that rate, we would have lost more than 100,000 dead in Vietnam.

Taylor’s BS was good for ground forces appropriations, not the grunts at Ia Drang and Khe Sanh. At Ia Drang, November 14-16, 1965, American troops were awestruck, and badly bloodied, by an unrelenting hail of machine gun fire from North Vietnamese regulars, despite heavy air support. Both sides were left very badly bloodied. Joe Galloway, the courageous front-line reporter who lived through the battle with Hal Moore, the talented and courageous 7th Cavalry Regiment 1st Battalion commander, described Ia Drang as “the battle that convinced Ho Chi Minh he could win.” We dropped more high explosive on little Vietnam than all sides dropped in all of World War II, and we still found ourselves facing “a mass onslaught of Communist manpower.” What’s a logistical target in Vietnam? A mountain range? A forest? A thatched hut? A bicycle on a jungle trail? Five million widely dispersed cadres with shovels and Chinese machine guns?

Bicycle transport down the Ho Chi Minh Trail; Burning aircraft on ramp at Bien Hoa AB, 5/16/1965 (Wikimedia Commons)

Misperceiving this manipulative liar as an old school straight talker, Kennedy installed Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he moved Lemnitzer up to NATO. In so doing, he lost all hope of controlling the CIA, since the explicit National Security Action Memoranda he issued necessarily relied on the power of the Joint Chiefs for CIA oversight. Taylor fed Kennedy a steady stream of policy-convenient lies masquerading as military intelligence, lies designed by Dulles, Helms, Angleton, Lansdale, LeMay, Lodge and the other committed “counterinsurgents.”

This is not my analysis of Taylor’s approach to war in Vietnam I am presenting, but that of Col. Fletcher Prouty. Col. Prouty served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy. As an Air Transport Command VIP pilot during WW II, he flew the Chinese delegation to the November 1943 Cairo and Tehran Conferences. He also flew deep penetration missions through the Urals to the Russians, and into Japan, before the surrender, to set it up. He was the Chief Intelligence Officer of the U.S. Air Force from 1956 to 1963, and CIA Focal Point Officer of the Joint Chiefs under both Lemnitzer and Taylor until Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

In 1956 he set up the Air Force’s Office of Special Operations to coordinate Air Force work for the CIA, working closely with CIA Director Allen Dulles. As founding Chief of the OSO he literally wrote the Air Force manual for this work, and set up its worldwide system of offices and communications. Prouty’s unique interservice coordinating office was moved from the Air Force to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and then, during the Kennedy years, to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As the CIA Focal Point Officer, working for the Joint Chiefs, it was to Prouty that the CIA presented their matériel requests for the Bay of Pigs operation. The Joint Chiefs replied to the CIA matériel requests through Prouty – he was the Focal Point for all Joint Chiefs relations with the CIA, one of the highest ranking and most trusted intelligence officers in the U.S. military.

Prouty reported on a 1961 Joint Chiefs briefing: “Finally, the briefings on atomic energy matters, missiles and space, and other highly classified matters took place. Then the Chiefs began to hear some of the more closely held intelligence matters. The last item was the one that pertained to the CIA operational information. As I was ushered into the room I noted that everyone was leaving [for security reasons] except the chairman and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and the commandant was General David M. Shoup.”

Col. Prouty

“When the primary subject of the briefing had ended General Lemnitzer asked me about the army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, ‘Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me how many Army units there are that exist as “cover” for the CIA?’ I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said, ‘You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time, but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world.’” 28

That started an informal conversation between the three men that revealed to them the depth of penetration the CIA had achieved in an Army they thought they controlled. With control of strategic requisitions and contracting units, air bases, naval bases and customs units, using Army, Air Force, Navy or Marine resources, the CIA was able, without funding, to mount truly covert and unauthorized operations anywhere in the world. With CIA control of the oversight apparatus, oversight ceased to exist. Ex post facto approval was always granted. With the ability to move hundreds of millions covertly, the CIA was able to build Air America into the largest contract carrier in the world.

Arthur Schlesinger: “It had almost as many people under official cover overseas as State; in a number of embassies CIA officers outnumbered those from State in the political sections. Often the CIA station chief had been in the country longer than the ambassador, had more money at his disposal and exerted more influence. The CIA had its own political desks and military staffs; it had in effect its own foreign service, its own air force, even, on occasion, its own combat forces. Moreover, the CIA declined to clear its clandestine intelligence operations either with the State Department in Washington or with the ambassador in the field; and while covert political operations were cleared with State, this was sometimes done, not at the start, but after the operation had almost reached the point beyond which it could not easily be recalled.” At this time, CIA’s listed budget was 50% higher than State’s. 29

Prouty: “At that top echelon the Office of Special Operations acted as the liaison between the CIA and the DOD. What most people in Defense were totally unaware of was that in the very office that was supposed to serve the military departments and shield them from promiscuous requests, there were concealed and harbored some of the most effective agents the CIA has ever had. Their approval of CIA requests was assured. The amazing fact was that their cover was so good that they could then turn right around and write orders directing the service concerned to comply with the request.”

“This is a clear example of how far the Agency has gone in getting around the law and in creating its own inertial drift, which puts it into things almost by an intelligence-input-induced automation system, without the knowledge of its own leaders and certainly without the knowledge of most higher-level authorities.... what secrecy there was - what real deep and deceptive secrecy existed - existed within the U.S. Government itself. More effort had been made by the Secret Team to shield, deceive, and confuse people inside Government than took place on the outside.” 30

Prouty’s melodramatic phrase The Secret Team, the title of one of his great books (the other is JFK), lends itself to derision as another ‘conspiracy theory,’ but what this brilliant military intelligence officer is saying is that policy ceased to be driven by an empirical analysis of the strategic facts, as honestly presented to the political leadership, and instead became driven by covert centers of economic power, per the Sullivan and Cromwell privateer model, intentionally presenting false intelligence to the political leadership. Eisenhower, hardly a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ recognized this as operational fascism. Although generally in agreement with the CIA Director from Sullivan and Cromwell, Eisenhower truly feared this loss of political control at the top.

Eisenhower had wanted to leave the presidency as a great peace maker. To this end he launched his Crusade For Peace, arranging a May 16, 1960 Summit in Paris with Nikita Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan of Britain and Charles de Gaulle of France. Khrushchev, who had been ‘destalinizing’ Russia since 1953, had been perplexed at the Dulles brothers’ summary rejection of his every peace overture. Attempting to match American military spending was bankrupting Russia. Khrushchev correctly concluded that he needed to deal directly with Ike.

In September, 1959, the two old WW II allies had very successful ice breaker meetings during Khrushchev’s 12-day goodwill tour of the U.S. This convinced Eisenhower that a profound de-escalation of the Cold War, and the consequent diversion of national resources to the civilian sector, which both leaders felt they needed, was possible. As part of normal preparations, Eisenhower ordered that all U.S. troops, overt and covert, were to avoid all combat. He also ordered all U-2 spy flights over Soviet territory grounded. These were unambiguous conventional orders from the Commander in Chief. Tragically, even our heavy air support of the Khamba resistance in Tibet, run by Col. Prouty, was halted.

Col. Prouty received his orders to ground the Tibetan operation from the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, the same officer who ran the U-2 operation (and the Bay of Pigs). It is, therefore, not possible that Bissell missed Eisenhower’s order. But on May 1, 1960, Russia’s May Day, Bissell ordered Capt. Francis Gary Powers to overfly the Soviet Union with his high-altitude cameras. The spectacular U-2 incident, of course, did force cancellation of the Summit. Eisenhower’s dream of much lower defense spending went a-glimmering. Bissell had been taking orders from Allen Dulles since their early days together in the OSS, and had no intention of giving Eisenhower’s orders precedence over Dulles’. 31

Here are some selected paragraphs from Prouty’s January, 1978 Gallery Magazine article, The Sabotaging Of The American Presidency: “Three or four moles in the Pentagon, doing the bidding of their masters, flashed coded signals across the world to send out a lone U-2 plane on one of the longest and most impossible missions ever attempted by a U-2 -- a 3,900-mile journey from Peshawar, Pakistan across the Soviet Union to Bodo, on the northern tip of Norway. These men’s actions neatly bypassed the entire ultra-secret system and launched a plane that had been rigged to come down in the heart of the USSR on one of its most important holidays, May Day. Thus were destroyed the summit conference and Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace.”

“I was the properly designated military officer in the Pentagon for a period of nine years -- including 1960 -- responsible for exactly this function of supporting the clandestine activities for the CIA. Under my direction many aircraft, many items of equipment, and many personnel were properly sterilized and ‘sheep-dipped’ prior to use in secret missions. The U-2’s were no exception. As a matter of fact, the entire U-2 program was supposed to have been made sterile from production on up. I must say I knew the CIA to be meticulous about deniability. On regular clandestine overflights to China, Tibet, Indonesia, Burma, and other places, they did their best to conform with and obey the NSC directive. The identifying evidence included in Powers’ flight violated the NSC mandate. If this was a spy mission, the violation was clearly planned to wreck the upcoming summit conference.”

“It was normal DOD-CIA practice that pilots engaged in clandestine operations don pressure suits which contained no identification of any kind prior to takeoff. In the process, the pilot was required to strip, and all identity and personal items were removed by the officials in charge of that flight.”

“Powers’ U-2 had been flown from Turkey to Peshawar, Pakistan on April 30, 1960 just a few hours before Powers took off for the USSR. He had been flown to Pakistan by transport and given only two and a half hours’ warning before the flight. He has written: ‘I did not see the plane at close range.’”

“For some unaccountable reason Powers took off on this, the longest USSR overflight ever planned, and in the seat pack of his parachute was every identification imaginable. If Powers was supposed to play the role of a spy, then in accordance with the script that has historically been passed down, he would be nameless, faceless, a man without a country. He was none of those things. Why not? And who saw to it that he was none of these things?”

“Powers had in his kit one of the old World War II silk ‘escape-and-evasion’ flags. On the margin of this flag was written, among other things, ‘I am an American. I need food, shelter. I will not harm you. You will be rewarded.’ Does a spy carry such identity? And how about the cover story that he was a military pilot who unaccountably got lost and flew over the Soviet border? If he hadn't intended to fly over a ‘hostile’ country in peacetime, then why the escape-and-evasion kit? None of the official stories made the slightest bit of sense.”

“What was even more incriminating was the fact that Powers had his DOD identification card listing him as a member of the Air Force. He had forty-eight gold coins, four expensive watches, seven gold rings, and a pocketful of paper currency of many nations, including the USA and USSR. Powers had nineteen other forms of identity, including his Social Security card, 230-30-0321, a Lodge card, his USAF medical card, a driver's license, and two copies of his instrument cards, earned by all Air Force pilots for weather-flying qualifications.”

“During the Senate hearings, Allen Dulles said: ‘He [Powers] was given the various items of equipment which the Soviets have publicized and which are normally a standard procedure and selected on the basis of wide experience gained in World War II and in Korea.’ What experience was Dulles talking about? Military? CIA? Certainly Dulles knew that true spies are nameless.”

“When work with the special modification of the J-75 engine for the U-2 began, it was realized that the U-2 would be operating in a hostile environment. At very high altitude the engine can't breathe, and it needs help. It must have some air-mass intake to support combustion. During experiments, it was discovered that a trace of hydrogen introduced into the fuel-air mixture would support combustion and would virtually assure reliable operation of the burner at very high altitudes. Only those very close to the operation knew that the U-2 engine needed and had this hydrogen capability. Thus, the U.S. Air Force had an elaborate, ultra-secret program, directed from the aeronautical center at Dayton, Ohio, which provided cryogenic (super-cold) liquified hydrogen to the U-2 program all around the world, just before each planned mission.”

“Consider the scenario. A tiny group of top-level technicians with access to this hydrogen lifeline is charged with the responsibility of getting it to the Powers U-2. However, someone has arranged for less than a full cannister to be installed in the U-2 just before takeoff. The preflight check shows ‘Hydrogen-OK’ because the preflight inspection only shows that the cannister is there, not how much hydrogen is in it. The pilot has no way of knowing that there is not sufficient hydrogen in the cannister for 3,900 miles because there is no gauge on his instrument panel. So, the 24,000-pound aircraft takes off, accelerates to 114 knots, and begins the long climb to altitude. Everything appears to be perfectly normal. The engine runs fine. All equipment functions. Then, at precisely the predetermined time, the hydrogen runs out. The plane is as high as it can fly because it must make the longest flight it has ever made. At that great height, the pilot hears a slight rumble, typical of a flame-out, and his engine goes dead. One way or another, he lands.”

“There were certain upper-echelon officials in research and development who knew about the U-2’s special characteristics and could easily have arranged for the flame-out to occur.”

“Then came the challenge to Eisenhower. Did the President, who had worked so hard and so long to prepare for the ultimate summit conference and for his Crusade for Peace, direct that U-2 to overfly the USSR on May Day -- the day of its most important celebration? The idea was absurd, and Khrushchev knew it. Later Khrushchev gave Eisenhower every opportunity to admit that others in the U.S. Government had sent out that flight to sabotage the conference, stating that such an admission would salvage the meeting.”

“The camera the Russians recovered from Powers' U-2 was a military-type, 73B, serial number 732400. With wide-angle capability, it took pictures of a 125-mile-wide strip. The film was twenty-four centimeters wide and two thousand meters long, capable of shooting four thousand paired aerial pictures.”

“That camera was not the one routinely used by the CIA spy U-2’s. This U-2 had been doctored in Japan by someone who was willing to give away the plane but unwilling to reveal the technology of the newer U-2 camera. This was skillful deception from the inside.”

“Dr. Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, wrote in his book, Secrets, Spies and Scholars, ‘The invention of the U-2 high-flying aircraft and the camera capable of taking pictures from 80,000 feet, pictures that would permit analysts to recognize objects on the ground with dimensions as small as 12 inches . . . this technical miracle revolutionized intelligence collection. (The Lundahl system employed eight reflectors and exposed eight films through a single lens at the same time.)’”

“The pictures Khrushchev showed to the public and to newsmen gave away the ruse. The industrial installations and the rows of aircraft exhibited were tiny dots on regular film, and even with the best enlargement, they would never have met Dr. Cline’s criterion of twelve inches from 30,000 feet.”

“This is a crucial point. The U-2 incident was a clever and sinister deception. Its perpetrators intended for the Russians to find the U-2 and to think Powers was doing a spy’s work. Yet, these perpetrators were far enough up in Government circles to know that it was the technology of the camera which must not be given away.”

“Eventually, President Eisenhower took the blame for the whole thing, and his dream of a summit conference, trip to Moscow, and an around-the-world Crusade for Peace was shattered. Certainly he had the U-2 double-cross in mind when he delivered his famous ‘military-industrial complex’ speech at the end of his term of office.”

“During the first six months of 1960, I was the focal-point officer assigned by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force to provide special Air Force support to certain clandestine CIA overflight operations. In April 1960, a member of the Chief’s Pentagon office staff was in Thailand overseeing a major series of long-range overflights into Tibet and far northwestern China. Later that spring, orders came down to stop those overflights. The given reason was that the President wanted nothing to interfere with the success of his forthcoming Paris summit conference. Orders were sent from my office to ground the overflights.”

“These same orders applied to the U-2 program. We all took our orders from the same authorities. The U-2’s were supposed to have been grounded along with the Tibetan overflights. So, when Allen Dulles himself wonders who was directing the ship of state, it becomes apparent that he did not know who was running the country!”

Or, with the likes of Col. Prouty looking over his shoulder, was pretending not to know. When the U-2 went down, it was Col. Prouty, the Air Force’s senior intelligence officer, that Eisenhower called to decipher the mess. It was also Prouty who briefed CIA chief Allen Dulles before his Senate U-2 testimony. Prouty told both he thought it was an internal fix of the plane’s hydrogen/oxygen fuel system. A flameout at altitude caused by an empty hydrogen canister would force a landing or a low-altitude attempt at an oxygen-only restart. At low altitude Russian missiles could reach the powered glider. All that the Russians would need was a radar fix. Unbeknownst to Powers, his full military ID had been planted in the plane. These tough soldiers had witnessed the CIA use its mole tactics to infiltrate all the U.S. command and control mechanisms to which it was legally responsible, concentrating on the ‘enemy’ only as an adjunct to control of U.S. policy and power. The evolving covert government-by-defense-contractor scared the hell out of them.

On April 16, 1953, just three months into his presidency, one month after the death of Stalin, Eisenhower revealed his better angels in his inspired ‘Cross of Iron’ speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower, angry at himself, came to feel that his administration had been ruined by the Wall Street militarists he had allowed to run it for their own profit. Talbot reports, “The president told White House aides Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray that he never wanted to set eyes on Dulles again.” 32

As Prouty says, Dulles’ sabotage of his Crusade for Peace was the impetus for Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 televised speech, a speech he knew to be his most historic, his Farewell Address to the nation, and an amazing bookend to his first great speech in 1953: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Eisenhower’s great phrase, “military-industrial complex” is now also known as the “deep state,” but I prefer Eisenhower’s more literal locution.

Eisenhower wrote that address with the key drafter of the speech, his staff assistant Ralph E. Williams, and Johns Hopkins professor of political science Malcolm Moos. Eisenhower, probably over concern for length or impact, dropped an entire section of the speech that reveals just how much Prouty, a WWII VIP pilot who, through the years, was often at his side, learned from Eisenhower. Eisenhower warns against a “permanent war-based industry….[with] flag and general officers retiring at an early age [to] take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions, and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust….[we must] insure that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.” Had he used that section of the speech as well, Eisenhower would be remembered as the presidential Nostradamus, or Cassandra. 33

Eisenhower didn’t just roll over for the Dulles brothers, who were continually advocating for increased military spending to benefit their corporate clients and, believe it or not, the use of the A-bomb against both Russia and China, apparently to lock us into a permanent state of war. Eisenhower cut the military budget by 20% between 1953 and 1955, giving us a balanced budget by 1956, the year he began building the Interstate Highway System, one of the most profitable investments in American history, having nothing whatever to do with warfare. Eisenhower reduced Army manpower by 44 percent from its 1953 level. With Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Matthew Ridgway as his strong technical supporter on the Vietnam issue, Eisenhower refused to rescue the French from their venal, genocidal attempt to reconquer our WWII ally, the Viet Minh, pointing out, as did virtually all our great field generals, that, as Eisenhower put it, “they would absorb our troops by divisions!” Both Eisenhower and Ridgway insisted that the French failure to reconquer Vietnam did not represent a threat to our “vital national interests.” George Kennan, the designer of the doctrine of containment, strongly and vociferously agreed. Having fought WWII, our field generals were accustomed to thinking of the Viet Minh as an ally.

Eisenhower also refused to support the 1956 attempt of the British, French and Israelis to conquer and occupy the Suez Canal, because, like Vietnam, it would start a widespread guerrilla insurgency throughout Egypt and north Africa which would drag America into a quagmire. An enraged Eisenhower, understanding this was an aggressive military gambit to force the U.S. into a colonialist counterinsurgency, angrily told British Prime Minister Anthony Eden that the “use of military force against Egypt under present circumstances might have consequences even more serious than causing the Arabs to support Nasser. It might cause a serious misunderstanding between our two countries.” That military threat was a direct order to the man whom Eisenhower had known as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary during the war: “Get the hell out!”

Eisenhower also rejected out of hand John Foster Dulles’ insane but serious repeated advocacy of using the A-bomb to end the Korean War, to stop the Viet Minh in 1954, and to begin wars with both Russia (over Berlin) and China (over Quemoy and Matsu). These repeated suggestions alone should have caused Eisenhower to realize what soulless fascists he was dealing with and fire both Dulles brothers. As Eisenhower put it, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, and its stupidity…. The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground during my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn’t just happen.” Had he been less passive about McCarthyism, less racist and colonialist in his approval of the Dulles brothers’ corporate motives for their covert operations in Iran, Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam, which left plenty of dead Iranians, Guatemalans, Congolese and Vietnamese, he might have achieved enough control of his administration to prevent Dulles’ covert sabotage of his Crusade for Peace.

In 1955, President Sukarno, who had wrested Indonesia from the Dutch after the war, convened an international conference in Bandung of nonaligned Asian, African, and Arab nations. Sukarno was promoting a neutralist bloc of nations that would be able to fend off superpower colonialism. This was regarded as a mortal threat by the Dulles brothers, who immediately tasked the CIA with the removal of Sukarno. In 1958, they sold Eisenhower on the Indonesian coup by exaggerating the ‘communist’ threat from Sukarno. But the privateer right-wing officers the CIA backed did not succeed in overthrowing Sukarno, at which Dulles doubled-down, suggesting an escalated communist threat. Eisenhower then asked Dulles, “Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?”

The failed coup soured Sukarno’s gut. On August 17, 1964, during his Independence Day address, Sukarno declared, accurately, that the United States was the world’s prime enemy of anticolonialist nationalism. The attempted coup actually brought about the very result it purported to avoid, since, six years later, an aging, defensive, paranoid and ill Sukarno brought about his own overthrow by aligning with the communists, for the first time. The attempted American coup had convinced him that the communists were right about U.S. imperialism. Sukarno’s great genius had been to unite the left and the right in Indonesia behind the banner of “Nasakom,” nationalism, religion and communism. His swing to the left destroyed the national concensus, and made the PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, with its strength in minority communities, a military and Islamist target.

This turned into civil war and ethnic cleansing. On September 30, 1965, a group of junior army officers, organized by the CIA, assassinated six of the seven members of the Indonesian military’s high command. General Suharto took command of the armed forces. The CIA's Far East Division Chief, Bill Colby, rushed out to Indonesia to congratulate the new leaders. The CIA’s local coup engineer, Adam Malik, was installed as foreign minister. General Suharto, who ruled as absolute dictator for the next 30 years, immediately purged his widespread leftist and centrist Muslim opposition by committing what the CIA itself has called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” The CIA history doesn’t mention that it was William Colby, Chief of the CIA's Far East Division, who supplied Suharto with weaponry and, along with U.S. Ambassador Marshall Green, thousands of the names to be ‘liquidated.’

Once again, anti-communism had degenerated into pro-fascism. The fascist Dulles brothers understood democracy as contrary to the interests of their Sullivan and Cromwell industrial clients. As a worried Eisenhower said, government by military-industrial privateer had arrived. The CIA’s Abbot Smith, future chief of the agency’s Office of National Estimates, replying to Eisenhower’s complaints of the lack of reliable intelligence on the USSR at the end of 1958, wrote: “We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” 34

From 1957 to 1960, the politicized right-wingers in the CIA, not its actual technical analysts who knew better and said so, falsely reported to Eisenhower that a ‘missile gap’ existed between us and the Soviet Union. In 1960, the Dulles operatives told Eisenhower that the Soviets would have five hundred nuclear-tipped ICBMs ready to strike by 1961, so the Strategic Air Command planned and budgeted with the missile contractors accordingly. But Moscow didn’t have five hundred nuclear-tipped ICBMs, it had four. The hysteria was another bald-faced Dulles brothers lie fed to Eisenhower and Congress to increase their clients’ missile and aircraft appropriations and to augment the national policy drift toward total militarization.

Prouty: “In the case of the FAA, the actual CIA slotted men are in places where they can assist the ST with its many requirements in the field of commercial aviation, both transport and aircraft maintenance and supply companies.” The CIA slots in FAA, granted years before by other administrations, gradually expanded until they controlled basic FAA policy. Administrations change, bureaucrats just acquire seniority. “Turnover being what it is in bureaucratic Washington, it would not be too long before everyone around that position would have forgotten that it was still there as a special slot. It would be a normal FAA-assigned job with a CIA man in it.”

“This same procedure works for slots in the Departments of State, Defense, and even in the White House.... This is intricate and long-range work but it pays off, and the ST is adept at the use of these tactics. Of course, there are many variations of the ways in which this can be done.” 35

Lt. Col. William Corson, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and adviser to the Church Intelligence Committee, who had a doctorate in economics, pointed out that CIA and DIA operatives had so thoroughly infiltrated the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that internal criticism of CIA’s budgetary requests was all but eliminated. 36

Prouty: “Thus the CIA has been able to evolve a change in the meaning of and the use of the control word ‘direct’ and then to get its own people into key positions so that when they do present operations for approval they are often presenting these critical clandestine schemes to their own people.” 37

Shoup on Tarawa, 1943 (Photo Marine Corps); Maxwell Taylor; Joint Chiefs 1961 (National Archives); The Joint Chiefs, 11/13/1961: L-R: Anderson, Decker, Lemnitzer, Lemay, Shoup (Wikimedia Commons)

“This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of national security he would place people in all areas of government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own cover organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.” 38

“Allen Dulles was able to get Maxwell Taylor into the White House as personal military adviser to President Kennedy.... Maxwell Taylor was not the White House military adviser in the regular sense; he was the CIA’s man at the White House, and he was the ‘paramilitary adviser.’ ....During the last days of the Dulles era, Maxwell Taylor served as the Focal Point man between Dulles and his Agency and the White House.” 39

As Senator JFK said in 1956, “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” Kennedy told his first National Security Council meeting that “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence, on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.” Ultimately Kennedy came to understand that third world nationalism was anything but a “monolithic conspiracy,” but too late – he had already lain down with Dulles’ dogs.

Kennedy ignored the advice of Deer Team leader Col. Archimedes Patti, Ho’s OSS liaison officer, who insisted that Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation movement was anything but a puppet of the Russians or the Chinese, whom they feared as imperial threats to their sovereignty. Patti, who knew them well, insisted that the Viet Minh represented a unique nationalism that had already proven it could be a reliable U.S. partner. Ultimately, Kennedy’s attitude was just what Dulles wanted, Catholic, in the French imperial sense of the word. Kennedy insisted that the French-speaking Catholic Diem, Cardinal Spellman’s nominee for chief colon, if we gave him enough military help, could rule Buddhist Vietnam in America’s interest. The idea was inherently colonialist and racist.

Taylor never challenged Kennedy politically, never opposed his policy. For that matter, Kennedy never opposed Taylor’s policy. The two had no policy differences. Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 52, 5/11/1961, “to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam” authorized a “program for covert actions to be carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency which would precede and remain in force after any commitment of US forces to South Vietnam…. The U.S. will attempt to strengthen President Diem’s popular support within Viet-Nam by reappraisal and negotiation, under the direction of Ambassador Nolting. Ambassador Nolting is also requested to recommend any necessary reorganization of the Country Team for these purposes.”

Kennedy agreed when Taylor wrote into NSAM 57, 6/28/1961: “A paramilitary operation...may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the United States or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us.” Although marginally sympathetic to Vietnamese nationalism, Kennedy, heavily influenced by the Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, and the Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge, instinctively accepted the idea that Vietnam ought to be a Catholic-led American colony, and Taylor fully supported the “Vietnamization” idea, which left most of the fighting to the rented gooks. Kennedy made Taylor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 10/1/1962. 40

Taylor, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote to Kennedy on September 2, 1963: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.” This bore no relation to reality. South Vietnam’s reporting to the Pentagon had been a sham designed to support U.S. funding, a sham supported by U.S. intelligence officers. Hamlets and villages claimed to be secure by the South Vietnamese were almost all ruled by the NLF. Almost all strategic hamlets had already been abandoned. Long An Province, 40 miles south of Saigon, was an NLF stronghold. By March, 1964 the NLF, because of their political strength, controlled almost half of South Vietnam. Taylor told Kennedy the opposite. 41

Decorated Korean War veteran Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was sent to Vietnam in March of 1962 to improve ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) supply train and tactics. His supply train success was widely lauded. Vann was the senior American adviser to Colonel Huynh Van Cao, commander of the ARVN IV Corps, which was up against the NLF in Dinh Tuong Province, in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon.

On January 2, 1963, Vann directed the seminal battle of Ap Bac from a slow, unarmed low-flying spotter plane, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for refusing to break off under heavy enemy fire. Despite an 8 to 1 numerical advantage, 2500 to 300, and artillery, armor, and helicopter support, including half-tracks, the ARVN troops lost the battle. The small, disciplined NLF force inflicted heavy casualties, over 80 ARVN killed, plus three American ‘advisers,’ shot down five helicopters, and escaped with only light casualties, leaving only three bodies behind. Vann’s after-action report excoriated ARVN incompetence, cowardice and laziness, their gross inflation of the VC body count, and the rank corruption of Diem’s dope-dealing high command. Reported Vann, Military Assistance Command – Vietnam (MACV) commander General Paul D. Harkins lazily swallowed too much Vietnamese BS. Vann also insisted that the Strategic Hamlet Program was political suicide.

Despite the fact that he was one of the Army’s premier logistical and tactical geniuses with extensive in-country battlefield experience, Maxwell Taylor would not permit Vann to brief the Joint Chiefs on his return in 1963. Vann, not a careerist prostitute, quit the Army in 1963 after doing his 20 years and proceeded to infuriate the American high command by taking his critique to David Halberstam of The New York Times and Neil Sheehan of UPI, who published it all over the world. Vann also talked to CIA analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who spent 1965 and 66 working for General Lansdale’s State Department intelligence unit in Vietnam. Ellsberg later passed the classified Pentagon Papers analysis ordered by McNamara, which he compiled, to Sheehan for publication in The New York Times and to Ben Bagdikian of The Washington Post, thereby blowing the lid off the Vietnam debate.

By blocking Vann’s critique, the politicized Taylor was selling the war, not objectively analyzing it or fighting to win it. A week after the battle of Ap Bac, Taylor sent Army Chief of Staff General Earle Wheeler with a team to investigate, and sure enough, things were just hunky dory. As Gen. H. R. McMaster reports in Dereliction of Duty, Johnson, McNamara, Rusk and Taylor spent an inordinate amount of time and energy fixing the ‘intelligence’ for political consumption, rather than taking it seriously. They continued to pretend that the Vietnamese ‘government’ they were ‘assisting’ was a legitimate government for which they were ‘buying time,’ rather than a rotating collection of fascist dope peddlers with no political legitimacy, support or decency.

The major internal American debate in the early days of the war was ‘gradual escalation’ vs. ‘fast escalation,’ essentially the political Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Bill Bundy at State and John McNaughton at Defense worrying about the 1964 election vs. the pragmatic Joint Chiefs, worrying about the military situation on the ground in Vietnam. Both options were designed, to quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor, to convince the “enemy that it is to his interest to desist from aiding the insurgents” and obtain “his cooperation in calling off” the insurgency in South Vietnam and Laos.

These conformist, racist fools had no idea what they were dealing with – they were literally living in their own colonialist dream world. As CIA agent Frank Snepp, who fought that war for six years, put it, “They were really distant from the reality you could document with intelligence, and they were trying to remake reality to fit their own favorite vision.” Snepp actually said that to DCIA Colby’s face during the May 1975 CIA wake for Vietnam at Langley, contradicting Colby’s insistence that we could have won, that the strategy had been realistic. The CIA’s top Vietnam expert, George W. Allen, the one who convinced Secretary of Defense McNamara to organize the Pentagon Papers review of policy, insisted that the intelligence was being fixed in favor of the Dulles brothers’ colonialist fantasies. His book, None So Blind, demonstrates how the Dulles brothers’ McCarthyism had been so successful, that dealing with the reality of the Viet Minh, as Roosevelt had so profitably done, wasn’t even considered an option among the war planners. Allen names the three top Army generals sent to South Vietnam in the 1950s and early 1960s, Joseph Collins, Samuel Williams and Paul Harkins; the ambassador to South Vietnam in 1964-1965, Maxwell Taylor; and Johnson administration heavies Walt Rostow, McGeorge and William Bundy and McNamara himself. Dealing realistically with the Viet Minh was off the table, despite the fact that the only political entity with widespread popular support in South Vietnam was the Viet Minh.

Maxwell. Taylor thought that the United States should accept greater responsibility for the fight against the Viet Cong because “the South Vietnamese government was so weak.”

They pretended South Vietnam was a real country, even though they knew it wasn’t. They were conquering southern Vietnam in opposition to the indigenous population, whom they pretended were invaders from the North, and they knew they were pretending. Taylor, a real field general with plenty of battlefield experience, began to see the U.S. as caught in a whirlpool of its own making. He cabled Secretary of State Rusk, worrying about American “vulnerability to communist propaganda and third world criticism as we appear to assume the old French role of alien colonizer and conqueror.” In an odd reversal of roles, Taylor began to worry about promiscuous American escalation trapping us in a ghastly quagmire, as of course it was doing. Taylor saw “the possibility of a kind of Dien Bien Phu,” as the long, drawn-out American collapse most certainly was.

In a November 7, 1964 memo, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton acknowledged that their recommended post-U.S. election option of gradual escalation had “some chance of coming out very badly.” Still believing it was possible to coerce the Viet Minh regarding ownership of their own country, Taylor, despite his realistic fear of quagmire, shared the administration’s muddled view that “an early willingness to negotiate would appear to the North Vietnamese as a sign of weakness,” and so continued to support gradual escalation.

They were defending a fantasy, a duplicitous cover story about an independent South Vietnam. The McCarthyite, the Dullesite parameters of the strategic dialogue had been established in the corridors of power, so the best evolved strategic thinking of the American military was marginalized and ignored. In 1965, while President Johnson was playing politics with military tactics, which is exactly the wrong thing to do with military tactics, General Harold Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, formally concluded that it would take five years and five hundred thousand men to defeat the insurgency in the South. A simultaneous Marine Corps technical study ordered by the JCS estimated that we would need seven hundred thousand men. As the Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, put it in January of 1965, the United States “should be prepared at an early date to either commit U.S. forces in sufficient strength to ensure victory for our side or get out before it is too late.”

DCIA John McCone told President Johnson to expect tit for tat from the North Vietnamese in response to his ‘gradual escalation.’ DCIA William Raborn, who replaced McCone in April of 1965, wrote President Johnson on May 8 that “we will find ourselves pinned down, with little choice left among possible subsequent courses of action: i.e. disengagement at very high cost or broadening the conflict in quantum jumps.” President Johnson consulted Clark Clifford, Democratic heavyweight since he was Truman’s White House Counsel. Clifford told Johnson to keep troop numbers “to a minimum consistent with the protection of our installations and property in that country….this could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open end commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.” Clifford, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, told Johnson to pursue negotiations.

But somehow Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, Taylor & Co. thought that it was necessary for “America’s honor” to start heavy B-52 bombing of North Vietnam, napalm and B-52 bombing of NLF communities in the South, and the insertion of American ground combat units. Otherwise, U.S. credibility, which, as Secretary Rusk put it, “is the pillar of peace throughout the world,” would be damaged. Maintaining their lies reduced these racist, conformist cowards to fascist doublespeak. I was 20 in 1965. As us young hippies used to say, “alienation is when your country is in a war and you want it to lose.” We also used to say, “As soon as the Viet Cong hit the Bronx I’ll join up.” The profit motive, not common sense, was driving their policy. They were engineering a war that would be profitable only to U.S. defense contractors and the protected global hard drug trade that was financing our military puppets and client armies. The colonialist strategic goal was possession of Vietnam’s considerable natural resources, including oil, natural gas and coal, but, absent the achievement of that ultimate goal, the war was vastly profitable to our defense contractors nonetheless.

South Vietnam’s most notorious heroin dealer, Air Force chief Nguyen Cao Ky, took the government by coup d’etat on June 19, 1965. Ky, one of Diem’s Catholic assassins, had been running the CIA’s heroin operation since 1961. The American military was told, by its own high command, that the strategic goal of the war was ad hoc defense of the Saigon government, whose only constituency was the American and Corsican mafia. There was almost nothing else in the country that supported the U.S. effort, which had become, literally, an exact repeat of the French attempt at conquest. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle Wheeler said that we were maintaining South Vietnamese “freedom and independence” - by killing the people of South Vietnam. At the June 11, 1965 NSC meeting, General Taylor reassured the high command that “the present VC campaign will be terminated without serious losses.” Assuming, that is, that you don’t count 60,000 American dead as a serious loss. 42

Douglas MacArthur himself, a military genius and a savage anticommunist, had warned Kennedy in the White House in 1961 that a Vietnam war was strategic suicide, predicting in detail everything that happened after Kennedy’s death. This meeting was recounted by Kennedy aide Schlesinger, who was in the room. MacArthur, who nearly lost his entire army to the Chinese in Korea, pointed out that China was still allied with neighboring Vietnam. As he went for the kill against the North Koreans on China’s border, the Yalu River, MacArthur was suddenly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of Chinese troops. 43

When Gen. Creighton Abrams, Patton’s superb European point brigade commander, inevitably asked President Johnson for permission to take Hanoi, the High Command had to refuse. It knew Abrams could do it, but it also knew that would force China into the war. And you can’t actually use nuclear weapons. MacArthur laid this all out before it ever happened. He knew that any American commander would face protracted guerrilla war in Vietnam against overwhelming numbers without the possibility of military victory.

Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who replaced MacArthur in Korea, also bitterly opposed American troops on the ground in Vietnam, and used all his influence to prevent it. Gen. Omar Bradley did the same. Eisenhower’s Chief of Plans for the Army, Gen. James Gavin, was also horrified at the thought of an Asian land war. Noted the prescient Gavin, “What appears to be intense interservice rivalry [in favor of intervention] in most cases...is fundamentally industrial rivalry.”

MacArthur observing the shelling of Inchon, 9/15/1950 (Wikimedia Commons); MacArthur on the beachhead at Leyte Island, 10/1944 (Wikimedia Commons); MacArthur with Kennedy in the White House, 8/16/1962 (Kennedy Library)

MacArthur, Eisenhower, Lemnitzer, Shoup and Prouty understood the meaning of that all too well. In 1959, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War, insisted that he did not “know of a single senior commander that was in favor of fighting on the land mass of Asia.” This despite the fact that Collins was Eisenhower’s personal envoy to Diem. In 1952, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett told NATO Commander Eisenhower that the Joint Chiefs were “unanimously opposed to the commitment of any troops” in Vietnam. In 1950, U.S. military intelligence told Douglas MacArthur, then in charge of our troops in Korea, that 80% of the Vietnamese people, North and South, supported Ho Chi Minh, and the remaining 20% were almost all neutral. MacArthur’s briefers stressed that for the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese this support had nothing to do with Ho’s politics, but his nationalism. 44

This, of course, was not news to MacArthur. He told Kennedy that Vietnam’s only Vietnamese-led army was synonymous with nationalism. He emphasized that the Viet Minh was a genuine national liberation front so popular that, if put under attack, it could mobilize virtually the entire population, giving it a numerical superiority that would enable it to absorb high losses indefinitely and still inflict unacceptable damage on any invader.

Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), addresses the French Socialist congress in 1920. This remarkable man was fluent in Vietnamese, French, English, Russian, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The refusal of the powers at Versailles to hear him in 1919 led him to begin organizing armed rebellion. The only military support he could find was in Moscow (Black Star)

MacArthur talked at length to Kennedy about Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 the French had placed 16,000 men at Dien Bien Phu on the North Vietnam-Laos border. This large “hedgehog” garrison had been airlifted into supposedly inaccessible mountain terrain to serve as a base for offensive operations to protect French assets, including their Hmong opium army in Laos. 80,000 Viet Minh porters, augmented by another 150,000 from the local hill tribes, then proceeded to do what the French high command had assumed was impossible. They hauled 200 heavy cannon and ample ammunition, disassembled piece by piece, through the vast rugged mountain range and up the heavily forested peaks surrounding the French garrison - and flattened it. General Giap had the tactical patience to spend months deliberately stockpiling ammunition and emplacing heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns on the slopes surrounding “the bottom of the teacup.” His sapper scouts pinpointed every protected artillery piece in the base. When Giap finally opened up, he was shooting at specific targets from higher ground, and had anticipated the aerial resupply effort. The French air force and the CIA’s contract airline CAT were able to fly only 28 heavy guns through the flak to the French pancakes, suffering heavy aircraft losses. The French lost the entire garrison. On May 8, the Viet Minh counted 11,721 prisoners, of whom 4,436 were wounded. The Viet Minh flag flying over Dien Bien Phu, became the symbol of Vietnamese independence worldwide. 45

The Fall of Dien Bien Phu, May 7, 1954; Less than half the 8000 ‘able bodied’ French prisoners survived the 500-mile march to prison camp (Wikimedia Commons)

On the 1954 French collapse, the Viet Minh, which had been heavily armed by the U.S. in 1944-45, inherited all the U.S. weaponry the French had to leave behind. Mass produced Viet Minh land mines turned jungle roads into death traps. Even neighboring China feared the Viet Minh. No Western invader, said MacArthur, could match Viet Minh manpower in Vietnam. This was, of course, the same thing that Earl Mountbatten, the Allied commander in Indochina, and Vo Nguyen Giap, the OSS’ man at the head of the anti-Japanese guerrilla army known as the Viet Minh, had to say. MacArthur was talking about the army that he and Mountbatten helped to build.

Complained OSS Indochina intelligence chief Paul Helliwell in 1943, “The French were infinitely more concerned with keeping the Americans out of Indochina than they were in defeating the Japanese or in doing anything to bring the war to a successful conclusion in that area.” Most of France’s colonial forces collaborated with the Japanese, managing Vietnam for their war machine. French forces were riddled with Japanese agents, so that the minority that wanted to resist failed. Poor French intelligence repeatedly got OSS sabotage teams bushwhacked. The only reliable help we had in northern Vietnam came from the Viet Minh. By 1944 the Viet Minh had taken complete control of the northern Tonkin provinces. They were a military reality. They were feeding the OSS South China command at Kunming genuine intelligence, supporting its raiding parties and rescuing its fliers. So we sent them rifles, machine guns, mortars, bazookas and grenades as they took Vietnam from the Japanese. And the Viet Minh made no secret of their intention to challenge the French and British positions everywhere in Vietnam once the war ended. 46

OSS Deer Team 1945, left to right, rear, Phần Đinh Hủy, Rene Defourneaux, Ho Chi Minh, Team leader Major Allison Thomas, Vo Nguyen Giap, Henry Prunier, Đàm Quang Trung, Nguyễn Quý, Paul Hoagland; front, Lawrence Vogt, Aaron Squires, Thái Bạch (Photo: Rene Defourneaux/U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons)

The Potsdam conference of July, 1945 had divided Vietnam into British and American-controlled zones at the 16th parallel. Thus it was Major General Douglas Gracey’s 20th Indian Division, reinforced by extra battalions of Gurkhas, under Churchill’s orders relayed through Mountbatten, that took actual control of Saigon for the South East Asia Command in August of 1945. When the British arrived they reacted with gratuitous hostility to the Viet Minh Provisional Executive Committee for South Vietnam which had taken control of Saigon in the absence of the Japanese, the French and the British. The Viet Minh ‘August Revolution’ was managing the city without violence or reprisals – the electricity was on, food was plentiful and the French were safe. Under orders to put the French in charge, Gracey wrote, “I was welcomed on arrival by the Vietminh, and I promptly kicked them out.” 44

With condescending, racist brutality, Gracey declared martial law, thus criminalizing the very Viet Minh in Saigon who had just defeated the Nazi Japanese and who welcomed the Allies with open arms. Gracey then freed the racist French colons imprisoned by the Japanese, armed them, and put them under de Gaulle’s command through ‘Governor’ Col. Jean Cedille, Sept. 22-23, 1945. Using these French colonialist troops, as well as his own, Gracey then executed a coup d’ etat that violently evicted the Viet Minh from Saigon Town Hall, running up the French Tricolor. Until that moment, cooperation with the Allies had been the official Viet Minh policy. The Viet Minh, once again, found themselves facing the racist French colons, the hostile Brits and Gurkhas, and even rearmed Japanese troops, in the streets of a Saigon they had just liberated. The fighting then extended throughout the British zone in southern Vietnam. By 1947 Gracey turned southern Vietnam over to General LeClerc’s French forces. Churchill and de Gaulle had started the French Indochina War.

OSS officers give M-1 carbine training to the Vietminh, 8/16/1945 (National Archives); Deer team leader Allison Thomas (2nd from right) musters with the Viet Minh as they prepare to occupy Hanoi, 8/1945 (National Archives); Archimedes Patti and Vo Nguyen Giap (both front center) celebrate Ho’s declaration of Vietnamese independence by saluting the Allied and Vietnamese flags as the Star Spangled Banner and Vietnamese national anthem played (Archimedes L. Patti Collection; National Archives and Records Administration)

Ho based the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, September 2, 1945, co-written by his OSS liaison, Col. Archimedes Patti, on the American. It begins, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.” Ho was flanked by his American military mission when he read those words to the vast crowd in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, which was named after the 1886 rebellion against French colonialist enslavement. The American military plane that flew overhead was wildly cheered.

Ho declares Vietnamese independence; Patti Collection

That was the same day that Japan formally surrendered to the U.S. At this time Ho repeatedly sent formal offers to the American government, through the OSS team attached to him, inviting massive American investment and lucrative government-to-industry partnerships. The War Department responded by sending half of the unused Japan-invasion stockpile on Okinawa to Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi - enough weaponry, according to Prouty, including heavy artillery, for 150,000 troops. 47

America could have had anything it wanted from Ho Chi Minh in 1945. Virtually all our intelligence officers who interacted with the Viet Minh, 1943-45, insisted on their common sense, legitimacy, and grass-roots support. These officers recognized that Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s reporting from the Mekong Delta in the early 1960s was accurate.

Ho with Col. Patti; Vo and Ho with Patti (Patti Collection)

Burchett was one of the nerviest frontline correspondents to come out of World War II. Seven days after we incinerated Hiroshima, Burchett, unaccompanied, rode a Japanese train, loaded with angry Japanese troops, to ground zero. As the first Allied journalist on site, his graphic report in London’s Daily Express mesmerized that part of the world that didn’t find it necessary to dismiss it as pro-Japanese propaganda. Burchett’s report was entitled “The Atomic Plague: I write this as a warning to the world.”

On the eve of the final battle for Dien Bien Phu, Burchett shared meals with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, listening to them explain their strategy. Because he loved these freedom fighters, his accurate reporting was dismissed as “communist propaganda.” Only too late did the French realize that Burchett hadn’t exaggerated Viet Minh popularity, or the effectiveness of their tactics, at all.

So too the Americans. The intrepid Burchett spent the better part of 1960-1964 living with the National Liberation Front (NLF), under attack, in the Mekong Delta. Burchett insisted that the NLF, so far from being an artificially created unit of the North Vietnamese Army, was an organic, broad coalition of Vietnamese political parties from the South, and as such had enormous local political support. But his dispatches were dismissed as propaganda by those for whom they were inconvenient. The CIA, by this time, had degenerated to the point where it was quoting its own political line as if that were military intelligence.

An early-60s CIA directive flatly asserted that there was no need to count the population at large as part of the “Viet Cong” because their support had been coerced. Burchett pointed out that mothers don’t have to be coerced into supporting their sons. Captured enemy documents, since they revealed the incredible depth of the Viet Minh ‘liberation associations’ in rural South Vietnam, were actually systematically ignored in the CIA’s reports to policy makers.

Burchett and his wife Vessa with Pham van Dong and Ho Chi Minh (Burchett Archive/State Library of Victoria)

When an astute CIA analyst, Sam Adams (great name – a family descendant), who naively thought his job was to objectively analyze the intelligence, insisted that NLF numbers were so overwhelming that we needed to reconsider our basic strategy, his information was intentionally withheld from policy makers. Adams concluded, from his in-country research into captured enemy documents and other sources, that the “previous estimates had undercounted the communists by hundreds of thousands. The implications were astounding.” Adams insisted, in his revision of the CIA’s Order of Battle for the Viet Cong, that MACV’s low NLF numbers were the result of political interference with the data. MACV wasn’t counting extended family and was relying on corrupt ARVN numbers. The result was an undercounting of NLF numbers by orders of magnitude. MACV asserted it was up against 270,000 VC, but Adams demonstrated that the number was closer to 600,000, with 20,000 VC double agents enrolled in the ARVN, not the 300 that the 1968 Saigon Station Chief Shackley claimed.

Adams’ work was rejected in 1967, but officially accepted after the January 1968 Tet Offensive. Louis G. Sarris, an analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, had reached the same conclusions in 1963. He was reassigned. Upon his return from his Vietnam fact-finding trip, Paul Kattenburg, chairman of Kennedy’s Vietnam Interdepartmental Working Group, suggested to a National Security Council meeting on August 31, 1963 that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable quagmire from which we should extricate ourselves ASAP. Kattenburg, who first learned to evaluate jungle warfare as one of Merrill’s Marauders, was transferred to a diplomatic post in Guyana. Winning armies don’t do that to their best battlefield analysts.

General Westmoreland was all over the media giving his never ending ‘Victory is Just Around the Corner’ speech, first given to Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland saluted smartly as Congress gave him a standing ovation. Then, in celebration of the Vietnamese New Year, the Viet Minh stuck a bayonet right up Westy’s patriotic bubble. The simultaneous siege of Khe Sanh had been a ferocious feint. But Louis Sarris at State and Robert Layton at the CIA both predicted the January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive months before it happened. Westmoreland simply ignored our craftiest thinkers, all of whom insisted that successful counterinsurgency was essentially political. As the crafty Lansdale put it, “Find out what the people want and give it to them.”

John Paul Vann, William Corson, Frank Scotton, Ev Bumgardner, Rufe Phillips, Daniel Ellsberg, Chester Cooper – all possessed of high rank and influence, understood that the social justice issue, the visceral need not to be a slave, was the motivating factor in the success of the Viet Minh. As Helms put it, it was necessary to have “a motivated population, not merely an administered one.” But to act on that thinking would be to break with Dulles brothers Republican orthodoxy. Westmoreland and his ilk, running the military, displayed only the infantile historical imagination Daddy Dulles allowed, the imagination of a kid watching Cowboys and Indians at the movies. As Westmoreland put it, “We found that in our frontier days we couldn’t plant the corn outside the stockade if the Indians were still around. Well, that’s what we’ve been trying to do in Viet Nam. We planted a lot of corn with the Indians still around. . . . As security becomes greater . . . pacification will move along much better…. eliminate the enemy and all the rest falls into place…”

In other words, this guy, leading our troops, was a racist asshole. It never occurred to Westy that it was the Indians who invented the corn. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” just the way Sullivan and Cromwell wrote it. Generals Thieu and Ky, the fascist dope peddlers we put in charge of the Vietnamese government, thought Westmoreland had it exactly right. Throughout the country, ARVN troops ruled by fiat. Their corps commanders were also their political chiefs. Their troops consistently behaved among the people like the Mexican warlord’s drunken troops in The Magnificent Seven. This made the NLF, which had serious political discipline, look like heroes. Provincial and district chief ARVN appointments were for sale to the highest bidder. It was the ARVN Province Chief who distributed all that American largesse for local projects.

General Tran Thien Khiem, Interior Minister and then, under General Thieu, Prime Minister, oversaw this kickback system. Khiem’s wife and brother-in-law ran the family’s huge heroin business, making cheap, high quality heroin available to American GIs and much of the rest of the world, via Air America. Reformist General Nguyen Duc Thang, the South Vietnamese Minister of Reconstruction under Thieu and Ky, told Lansdale’s team that the ARVN were hopelessly corrupt dope-dealing extortionists and would never be anything else.

In 1969, President Thieu’s top security adviser, Huynh Van Trong, was arrested by the CIA and Vietnam’s Special Branch as a Viet Minh agent. The next year legendary CIA analyst Sam Adams pointed out that the entire Thieu regime, the officer corps and the civil bureaucracy, was infiltrated by thousands of Viet Minh agents. William Colby, George Carver, and John Hart, our 1968 Vietnam CIA team, concluded, in their memo two days after Tet, which they entitled “Operation Shock,” that “Tet demonstrated that the Thieu-Ky regime clearly lacked the attributes of a national government [able to] defend its frontiers.” The CIA team recommended negotiations with the Viet Minh. An angry Dwight Eisenhower, foreseeing exactly this defeat, had said much the same thing in the National Security Council in 1954. After pointlessly sending tens of thousands of young Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, to their deaths, the Paris Peace Talks began on 5/13/1968.

Colby and Vann tried to make the CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) program work, arming and financing villages directly. There was significant progress in weaning hamlets sick of endless war from the war-oriented NLF. The methodology was mostly civil, providing tractors, roads, electricity, wells, medical care and commercial market access. But the high command refused to coordinate with Colby.

‘Operation Speedy Express,’ December 1968 to May 11, 1969, using battalion and division level sweeps and free-fire zones, literally attacked the very villages and hamlets CORDS had just befriended. Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland and MACV commander General Creighton Abrams let loose Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, commander of the Ninth Infantry Division, “The Butcher of the Delta.” His nighttime hunter-killer operations racked up huge body counts, mostly innocent civilians who made the natural mistake of running. His helicopter gunships pulverized anything that moved with their night-vision and body heat sensors triggering high-speed gatling guns. General Ewell was making the NLF’s point for them. The NLF knew that they were being tracked by movement and exertion, so they just remained stationary as the choppers flew overhead. Since Ewell’s units had a body count quota, without which they couldn’t return to base, these idiots killed about 7,000 civilians, leaving the disciplined NLF virtually untouched. The MACV CORDS program was switched to its most lethal component, the Phoenix mass assassination program. U.S. troops in Vietnam numbered 542,000. 48

J. Edgar Hoover responded to the anti-war opposition, which could see the real military intelligence every night on their TV screens, with COINTELPRO ‘New Left.’ In 1969, Admiral Rufus Taylor, DDCIA, wrote a letter to his second most famous analyst, Sam Adams, advising him to “submit his resignation” if he wouldn’t be a “helpful member of the intelligence team at CIA.” Walt Rostow, Johnson’s Special Assistant for National Security, told Adams, “I’m sorry you won’t support your president.” Adams, offended to the depths of his soul by being ordered to distort the intelligence, resigned the CIA in 1973 and went public, first in Harper’s magazine, May, 1975, then, in January, 1982, as a consultant for a CBS News documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.

General William Westmoreland, demonstrating the unreflective stupidity for which he had become famous, sued CBS for $120 million for libel when it accused him of deliberately undercounting Viet Minh numbers, naming CIA analyst Sam Adams as a co-defendant, along with Mike Wallace and producer George Crile. Then Westmoreland realized that he had just made Adams’ CIA work product, which had been duly presented to Westmoreland through channels, admissible as evidence. Westmoreland withdrew his suit before the case went to the jury, but the cat had already been let out of the bag.

The Institute of Defense Analysis, a Pentagon think tank, corroborated Adams’ work product and added the “most categorical rejection of bombing as a tool of our policy in Southeast Asia to be made by an official or semiofficial group.” A group of retired CIA officers, Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, gives the Sam Adams Award annually to an intelligence professional who has stubbornly told truth to power. 49 50

Most of those few Vietnamese who didn’t actively support the Viet Minh were neutral. Our side had the active support, at most, of 2% of the population. We were the externally-supported minority trying to shoot our way into power, as Daniel Ellsberg, a senior analyst in McNamara’s team, began to say publicly. That meant that we were knowingly sending our boys into a meat grinder.

It might have been convenient for imperialists to blur it, but the Vietnamese sense of nationhood was intense. “Nam Viet” first became a nation in 939 CE, after a millenium as a political entity under Chinese domination. The first time anyone ever heard of ‘South Vietnam’ was in 1955. Ngo Dinh Diem knew that. Ho Chi Minh means “He Who Liberates.” The “Viet Minh” was the Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội, the “Vietnam Independence League.” It was a jungle tiger.

Burchett’s 1965 paperback Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, became the bible of the anti-war movement. The proof that it accurately depicted the political situation is that it accurately predicted the military outcome. I no longer have the copy I read then, but, as I recall, the last words in the book were something like “They can be killed, but they can’t be conquered.”

Kennedy chose to attempt both, as he encouraged Taylor’s ‘counterinsurgency’ doublespeak. He had, after all, just nosed out Nixon in an election that was, to a great extent, a competition in red-baiting. Both Kennedy and Taylor talked of the Viet Minh as if they came from Mars, or China. The U.S., Taylor told an approving Kennedy, was “protecting” Vietnamese peasants from the Viet Minh. This was done by destroying their villages and herding the survivors at gunpoint into barbed-wire-enclosed “strategic hamlets,” where they were “free” to “choose” “democracy.” This fascist doublespeak was necessitated, of course, by the obvious facts, as outlined by American military intelligence itself throughout the fifties. The CIA’s Taylor moved from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to Ambasador to South Vietnam in July of 1964, where he made a point of deleting negative field intelligence before forwarding it to the White House. The result was CIA, that is Dulles brothers, policy-conformity from the field, and strategic suicide in the war.

Marine Commandant David Shoup, who spearheaded the Marine assault on the Japanese at Tarawa, a Congressional Medal of Honor winning veteran of an awful lot of combat, refused to play this defense-contractor boondoggle game. He was livid at the venality that drove this Nazi-like corruption of our military intelligence. He did not forgive the reckless waste of his troopers,’ or Vietnamese, lives. He told a 1966 convocation, “I believe that if we... would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for... and not the American style, which they don't want. Not one crammed down their throats by the Americans.” 52

Ambassador Lodge did not share these hippie sentiments. In a classified October 1963 communication to President Kennedy, he complained that “[South] Viet-Nam is not a thoroughly strong police state...because, unlike Hitler’s Germany, it is not efficient.” This is the man who called Jacobo Árbenz a communist in the United Nations as Árbenz protested the American invasion of Guatemala. Lodge also complained of the pragmatic willingness of Diem, in the face of military defeat, to talk truce with the Viet Minh. Again, so disappointingly unlike Adolf. Kennedy agreed with Lodge. If Diem wouldn’t “focus on winning the war,” then we would find someone who would.

On August 29, 1963, new Saigon ambassador Lodge cabled Washington: “We are launched on a course from which there is no turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.” Conein recruited Diem’s senior military adviser, the charismatic General Duong Van Minh, ‘Big Minh,’ who was as unhappy with the Ngo Dinh brothers as Lodge. As Conein later told a 1975 Senate hearing of the assassination of Diem, “I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy.” Diem and Nhu were assassinated on Nov. 2, 1963. 53 54

Like MacArthur, General de Gaulle had also warned Kennedy that Vietnam was “a bottomless military and political swamp.” Kennedy’s trusted Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, told him the same thing after his late 1962 fact-finding trip. The powerful and respected Senator Fulbright was also protesting that we were “bogged down” in a hopeless morass. After nearly three years of frustration, the pugnacious Kennedy was finally ready to accept this wisdom. He ordered Col. Fletcher Prouty to organize the high profile, high-level Vietnam intelligence-gathering trip on which Kennedy’s National Security Action Memorandum 263, his last, was based. 55