Ignore Hutton, listen to vox!
by voxfux
War is peace, slavery is freedom, aggression is compassion, economic devastation is wealth, immorality is piety - The state of fascism has never been stronger.
The clampdown on freedom is in full effect. The un-auditable electronic voting machines are in place in key electoral states, and in each machine in strategic districts will be a "glitch" this glitch (which is legal) will hand surprise victories to key republicans in order to sway the key electoral votes necessary to achieve a total presidential election theft once again for the forces of evil.
And in the event of nationwide calls for a recount, there is in place the very same judicial team which will guarantee that there will be no recount.
But nothing will be left for chance - nothing. And so clandestine teams of military intelligence black-ops have already deployed in key cities terrorist devices of either a radiological dirty bomb or a bio-terror device designed to kill hundreds to tens of thousands of Americans in a strategic pre-election terrorist attack designed to cause waves of fear and confusion throughout the American population.
These terrorist attacks will be accompanied by coordinated media campaigns scripted by the CIA to propagandize, incite, enrage and cause fear and convulsing jolts of hyper-patriotism and thuggish nationalism.
The US military will immediately launch retaliatory wars against any middle east country which has vital oil reserves and lucrative pipeline routes and any other resources that is needed for imperial aggression and profitable rebuilding contracts.
In place and ready to go will be carefully scripted fraudulent "news" stories about how Americans would not feel comfortable with any democrats because after all only the current administration knows best how to deal with the terrorists, (especially with over a 60 year history dealing with terrorists and a thirty year history dealing specifically with the bin laden family.)
In place will be carefully scripted fraudulent polls declaring that 95% of all Americans agree that the present leadership must remain.
Several polls will magically surface out of thin air which claim that nearly 75% of all Americans agree that an election isn't even really necessary considering the threat to the "Homeland."
The CIA has in place carefully scripted fraudulent news stories about how critical the role of the Internet was in Al Queda's latest strategic pre-election attack and there will be carefully orchestrated fraudulent protests of Americans demanding a "clampdown" on the Internet and within days all activist and dissident websites will be purged from ISP's and the Internet will be under limited operation mode. Major corporations will be granted approval to operate websites and anyone else caught operating an Internet website without government approval will be tried under the new Patriot "3" statutes as a terrorist.
Speculation will be rampant among terrorist sympathizers as to the whereabouts of leading leftist personalities and leftist news personalities many of whom will be "vanished" immediatly after the attacks and many who will be detained by military and intelligence and law enforcement personnel and who will remain unaccounted for, however the rumors regarding these missing terrorist sympathizers will not air on any American television news networks and will be overshadowed by further spectacular terrorist strikes on Americans and on further shock and awe campaigns in foreign countries.
Full story...
Friday, 30 January 2004
56% Of British - 'Hutton Report A Whitewash'
"Whitewash" is putting it MILDLY, we here at codshit.com would rather refer to the Hutton "report" as A FUCKING JOKE! Oh yeah, there's no conspiracy here, nothing to see here at all, move along people, move along. Just a load of elitist freemasonic establishment public-school batty-boys abrogating democracy, the rights of the individual, and justice itself. Nothing really important or anything! Go back to bed Britain your government has figured out how it all transpired, go back to bed Britain your government is in control again. Here, here's Jordan's boobs, watch this, shut up! Go back to bed Britain you don't need to think about anything, we'll do your thinking for you!
A majority of voters thinks the Hutton report on events leading to the death of Dr David Kelly is a "whitewash", a YouGov poll for The Telegraph says today.
The public expressed doubts about the report's one-sided verdict, which savaged the BBC while exonerating the Government, as Tony Blair claimed a second scalp with the resignation of Greg Dyke, the BBC's director-general. He also secured an "unreserved" apology from the corporation's governors.
The survey found that 56 per cent of people interviewed said Lord Hutton, as a member of the Establishment, was too ready to sympathise with the Government.
Only 34 per cent thought his report represented a thorough and impartial attempt to discover the truth about Dr Kelly's death.
After the BBC suffered the most traumatic 24 hours in its history, the poll shows that the corporation is still trusted more than the Government.
YouGov found that 67 per cent trust BBC news journalists to tell the truth, compared with 31 per cent who trust the Government.
The finding is a blow to the Prime Minister, who had hoped that the report would enable him to rebuild trust, badly damaged by the controversy over the Iraq conflict.
He called a halt to his eight-month war with the BBC after what amounted to an unconditional surrender by the corporation's board.
Sir Christopher Bland, a former BBC chairman, said Lord Hutton had whitewashed the Government and "tarred and feathered the BBC".
Lord Rees-Mogg, a former vice-chairman of the BBC board, said the report was a "bad bit of work". Clare Short, who resigned from the Cabinet over the war, described it as "completely one-sided".
Full story...
MORE WHITEWASH NEWS:
'Cut the crap, bring Greg back'
Dyke casts doubt on Hutton report
The Evidence That Hutton Ignored
British media warns of a whitewash too far
More questions on Dr Kelly's death as a confidante rejects suicide claim
Hutton Inquiry Whitewashes Blair Government Over Iraq War
Judge Who Cleared Blair, Blamed BBC Accused Of Whitewash
BBC Chairman Resigns After Hutton Report
Hutton Blasts BBC's Kelly Investigation - 'Whitewash' Charged
Whitewash - Dr. Kelly Evidence Not Included In Hutton's Report
Hutton Confirms Kelly Suicide - Many Stunned By Decision
A majority of voters thinks the Hutton report on events leading to the death of Dr David Kelly is a "whitewash", a YouGov poll for The Telegraph says today.
The public expressed doubts about the report's one-sided verdict, which savaged the BBC while exonerating the Government, as Tony Blair claimed a second scalp with the resignation of Greg Dyke, the BBC's director-general. He also secured an "unreserved" apology from the corporation's governors.
The survey found that 56 per cent of people interviewed said Lord Hutton, as a member of the Establishment, was too ready to sympathise with the Government.
Only 34 per cent thought his report represented a thorough and impartial attempt to discover the truth about Dr Kelly's death.
After the BBC suffered the most traumatic 24 hours in its history, the poll shows that the corporation is still trusted more than the Government.
YouGov found that 67 per cent trust BBC news journalists to tell the truth, compared with 31 per cent who trust the Government.
The finding is a blow to the Prime Minister, who had hoped that the report would enable him to rebuild trust, badly damaged by the controversy over the Iraq conflict.
He called a halt to his eight-month war with the BBC after what amounted to an unconditional surrender by the corporation's board.
Sir Christopher Bland, a former BBC chairman, said Lord Hutton had whitewashed the Government and "tarred and feathered the BBC".
Lord Rees-Mogg, a former vice-chairman of the BBC board, said the report was a "bad bit of work". Clare Short, who resigned from the Cabinet over the war, described it as "completely one-sided".
Full story...
MORE WHITEWASH NEWS:
'Cut the crap, bring Greg back'
Dyke casts doubt on Hutton report
The Evidence That Hutton Ignored
British media warns of a whitewash too far
More questions on Dr Kelly's death as a confidante rejects suicide claim
Hutton Inquiry Whitewashes Blair Government Over Iraq War
Judge Who Cleared Blair, Blamed BBC Accused Of Whitewash
BBC Chairman Resigns After Hutton Report
Hutton Blasts BBC's Kelly Investigation - 'Whitewash' Charged
Whitewash - Dr. Kelly Evidence Not Included In Hutton's Report
Hutton Confirms Kelly Suicide - Many Stunned By Decision
Confessions of an American College Teacher When the Cold War Threatened to go Nuclear
by Trowbridge H. Ford
When I was discharged from the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps in Orleans, France in July, 1954, I had little idea of who I was, what life was all about, and how I could make my way in the world. All I knew for sure was that I didn't want to follow in my father's footsteps in the Army, as it seemed to be a most parochial existence where secret agendas, selfish fancies, and limited concerns held sway, what I had come to appreciate while growing up on military posts.
During the next generation, I came to find my niche in life, what required an effort to join a large advertising firm but without success, a stint on a daily newspaper in the South as sport editor, and then a news reporter, and finally returning to graduate school to gain a doctorate in political science, and start a career in college teaching. Thanks to knowing a former president of N. W. Ayer, the large Philadelphia advertising firm, I sought a position with it, an effort ultimately derailed, though, by endless questioning about why I wanted a career in advertising, an experience which gave me insights into the benefits of hostile interrogations. In journalism, while learning to write with some skill, and insight, I became increasingly discouraged by the political correctness, and limited agendas which dominated the field. The thing which bothered me the most was the police's bigotry, joking constantly about blacks not even being human beings, and the paper's refusal to expose systematic collusion by the sheriffs with the local bondsmen where blacks were forced under threat of police harrassment into accepting loans at exorbitant rates of interest, and signing bad checks as collateral, what would be used against them in a sure-fire criminal prosecution if they didn't pay up shortly thereafter.
When I returned to Columbia University to start my graduate work in 1956, I was still largely unconcerned about political issues. The fact that alleged Soviet spy Ralph Bowen was no longer around to teach history, apparently the result of McCarthyism, escaped my notice. The fact that New York State law required me, who had held a Top Secret clearance while in the Army, to take a loyalty oath in order to teach undergraduate courses did not phase me. Being a student of European politics, I was most uninvolved during the Cuban Missile Crisis, thinking, like the average citizen, that the President was only doing what he had to under the circumstances. When I did a year's research in London during which JFK was assassinated, I was most unconcerned about who did it, and why, even getting into raucous argument with a Canadian historian, which almost resulted in fisticuffs, when he suggested that the Kennedy brothers were sterling characters, and that LBJ might well have been behind the killing. I didn't have an inkling that America's covert government had conspired to kill the President at the expense of Castro's communist Cuba, a plot which risked world war since it threatened a Soviet takeover of Western Europe in retaliation.
What really politicized me was trying to complete my degree during the Vietnam War. By this time, I had been exiled to a small college in the hinterlands of Ohio for contesting the preferential treatment of the son of a famous Columbia professor for having plagarized a paper in a class I taught, a process which threatened my never getting my degree as the first reader of my Ph.D. dissertation on English lawyer, politician, and judge Henry Brougham was also the head of the course's department. He was on record that he would make sure that I never got my degree for the controversy I caused, an effort I only defeated by obtaining the correspondence about the scandal, and threatening to use it in a court case against Columbia when he tried to make good on his threat at the dissertation's defense. Once I was awarded the degree, I publicized the controversy in the June 1968 issue of Ramparts, the radical magazine which was drawing the ire of America's intelligence community for its opposition to all Establishment efforts, starting in Vietnam (Angus Mackenzie, Secret: The CIA's War at Home, pp.16-24).
I had already become an object of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO, and the Agency's MHCHAOS operations by writing my first letter to a Washington official, President Johnson, complaining of his massive escalation of the war in Vietnam, on the pretext of the co-called Tonkin Gulf incidents, after he had campaigned as the peace candidate against the super hawk Barry Goldwater in the recent election. In a very short letter, I expressed my dismay over what he was doing, vowing to see that the course was reversed, and that he was rejected in the next election. For my trouble, I became a charter member of the alleged communist conspiracy which was seeking to defeat at home what our troops were achieving on the battlefield in Southeast Asia.
My listing as a traitor had been guaranteed when I and a colleague in the same department, a Vietnam veteran, decided to conduct a teach-in on the merits of the war in the college's main hall. He was a sensible, but troubled participant and witness of what was going on, and was eager to debate the justification of America's involvement just to clear his own mind, and conscience. While the teach-in went well, with my holding my own, I believe, on the need of America's immediate withdrawal, you can imagine our amazement when the local newspaper treated the debate as if my opponent had only given a lecture in defense of America's involvement. While I did force the editor to print a clarification of what had happened, in doing so I earned a one-way ticket out of the cozy college community from its president for the embarrassment caused. While I didn't think of it at the time, a curvaeous coed then dropped by my house one afternoon when my wife was known to be away, offering breathlessly to do anything I wanted in order to improve her grade, the only time such a possibility occurred in 30 years of teaching, a proposition which promised apparently more than a just train ticket out of town if I had accepted. If I had dropped my pants, I might have started serving time in an Ohio penitentiary.
If the country had not been in a such turmoil, and there being such a shortage of qualified college teachers, my career might well have ended there. As it was, I gained a post at the University of Maine, but not for long. No sooner had I arrived than Vice President Hubert Humphrey appeared, justifying in the strongest terms support for LBJ's war against America's most dangerous foe. (George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, p. 136ff.) The liberal Humphrey, in my estimation, was the greatest betrayer of American values by his mythic pursuit of communists. (For more on this, see Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, p. 137ff.) No sooner did I join pickets protesting Humphrey's mission than the department chairman informed me that my contract with the university would not be renewed. With nearly the whole year left to serve my own agenda without worrying about staying on, I let all my opposition to the Vietnam War hang out, attacking the international relations professor's justification of American involvement at a public debate, and writng so strongly in the Bangor paper in defense of Cassius Clay's (aka Mohammed Ali) efforts to keep his crown, and avoid the draft that I earned the sobriquet "nigger-lover" among colleagues, one of whom threatened a fist fight over the matter in an office we shared.
By this time, I considered myself finished in the academic profession. It just so happened, though, that Holy Cross College, a leading Catholic undergraduate college in the country, was looking for a person in my field, and my growing "radical" credentials, given my military service during the Korean War, were an advantage for once, considering the outlook of its president, the composition of its student body, and the fact that it had two reserve officers training units on campus. The all-male student body, including a number of well-qualified black students (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had just graduated.), even some Black Muslims, was in a most excited state because of the war, and the spate of political assassinations, especially Martin Luther King's, causing various walkouts of students, and shutdowns of classes. Students were most worried about having to serve in Vietnam as either draftees, or as a Navy, Marine, or Air Force Officers. With the faculty concerned about only the usual professional matters of promotion, stature, and tenure, my agitational style was just what the situation called for.
The next decade was certainly the most exciting, engaging period of my academic life. While completing my dissertation, and starting to have articles published in scholarly journals, I still poured out letters, especially in The Worcester Telegram, against the war and the White House, participated in teach-ins, scholarly gatherings, and talk shows for the same purpose, and tried to guide and educate students during confrontations on campus. The events which stand out in my memory were complaining in The Columbia Journalism Review about Communication Director Herb Klein's use of the American Political Science Association, a seemingly non-parisan body, to spread Nixon propaganda as a matter of course, a letter in the local paper complaining of the President's unctuous eulogy for deceased FBI Director Hoover, the speech that the State Department's William Bundy gave to the local Council on Foreign Relations on the need of arming everyone around the world to frustrate Soviet ambitions, and encourage national conflict, preventing radical students from being expelled for threatening to burn down the Air ROTC building at the instigation of government agent provocateur Vito Trimarco, and the NROTC editor of the college yearbook calling upon me to give an account of the turmoil on campus during one of those years.
At the same time, I started researching the background of Nixon's troubles, what soon led me to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. I was particularly interested in Representative Gerald Ford's role on the Warren Commission, complaining particularly about his constantly leaking details of the inquiry to Hoover, promoting the idea of the "magic bullet" to eliminate suspicions of a conspiracy, and preparing a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, contending that he alone killed JFK. When Nixon selected Ford instead of the expected former Texas Governor John Connally to replace scandal-ridden Vice President Spiro Agnew, I was put in the uncomfortable position of being asked by CIA contact Dana Beal to come to Washintgon on an all-expenses-paid visit to spread my complaints against the Congressman, an effort which would help prevent Nixon's removal, and what I understandably declined. Then J. David Truby, a professor at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, started querying me about my research for an article on the Dallas assassination, what I ultimately suspected he was doing for Chief of Staff General Alexander Haig aka "Deep Throat" to prepare the ground for Nixon's removal from office, and pardon. This was when the President was musing with Kissinger about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam to escape from the trap which was engulfing him.
The most intriguing experience I had was when an assassination conference was scheduled at Boston University. While many famous critics of the Warren Commission would be attending, I was not planning on going as I found such conferences counter productive as its supporters always panned the programs as merely the products of irrational true believers. Then John and Rita Paine called up, and asked if my wife and I would like to spend the weekend with them, attending the conference after a dinner they had arranged with all kinds people interested in the JFK assassination. The Paines had befriended people like the widow of Salvatore Allende, Hortensia, and my father, now retired, and one of the few American generals openly speaking out against the war. He had the honor, for example, to be showered with red paint by Dallas rednecks after he delivered a speech against it.
At the Paines, the guests questioned me so much about my research that we arrived late at the conference, obliged to take back seats in the hall. Of course, I was not concerned because I had not planned to say anything anyway. The next day, Mr. Paine asked if I would like to discuss my research with a stringer from The Boston Globe, an opportunity I readily took advantage of. While I talked with her for the better part of a day, nothing ever appeared in the newspaper, though I ultimately had the impression that the files at Langley had consequently increased.
My research has always concentrated upon what daily newspapers have to say about people and events, sources which are ignored for documents governments see fit to provide, and for diaries and letters provided by participants. In explaining the Dallas assassination, I found newspapers in Dallas, New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, New York, Washington, Chicago, Las Vegas, and La Grange, Ga. most helpful, once I carefully examined their pages. For example, The Dallas Morning News had most revealing stories on the first anniversary of the final week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, stating that the process was beginning again exactly 13 months later, and that Nixon, like Dallas Representative Bruce Alger, was receiving postcards from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, from a "possibly dangerous social deviant", details which seemed to suit Oswald to a tee. Lawyer Nixon still came to Dallas on Nov. 20th, attending the Bottlers' Convention at Market Hall the next day, and making so much of his lack of security concerns that the newpaper emphasized a "Guard not for Nixon" story on the fatal day. Then there were Hal Hendrix's stories in the Miami News, showing that he preferred to be with Haig's Operation Americas rather than with Oswald in Dallas when the killing occurred. The next day, The Washington Post published AP photographer James Altgens' half-page picture of the assassination, what apparently showed Oswald standing at the Book Depository's entrance, and convinced Director Hoover that there was insufficient evidence to convict him, making his murder necessary.
Instead of developing this material, and much more, other researchers chose either to ignore it, or change it so that the cover-up could continue. For example, Michael Canfield and A. J. Weberman in Coup d'Etat in America, while quoting the story about threatening postcards, left out the word "dangerous", and changed "possibly" into an adjective in order to radically diminish its significance. Truby went wild to establish that I was claiming that Nixon actually knew Jack Ruby, when I only said that he knew about Jacob Rubenstein's communist background from HUAC files when he prepared the Nixon-Mundt Bill for dealing with the alleged red menace, and that E. Howard Hunt was one of the tramps arrested in the marshalling yard shortly after the shooting, something photographic expert Richard Sprague promoted at my expense, and Paul Hoch legitimized, when I asked Sprague if Oswald was the person in the Altgens' photo. Hunt actually had more important coordinating responsibilities in Washington and Mexico City than just being a decoy in Dallas. Then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's Commission asked me to write a report about now President Ford's performance on the Warren Commission, what was intended to help promote Nixon's pardon rather than clear up JFK's murder.
When Giancana was murdered, I made an appointment with the Worcester FBI agent to discuss its relation to the JFK assassination, and his scheduled testimony before the Church Committee. Momo had been set-up for the Dallas hit because of the trouble he had created for Frank Sinatra at Lake Tahoe's Cal-Neva Lodge, the mobster being in the Nevada State Gaming Commission's Black Book as a persona non grata when he visited lover and singer Phyllis McGuire there, as the five-part series by Wallace Turner in The New York Times surrounding the assassination amply demonstrated, and his killer obviously learned he was going to testify about while talking to him. While the Special Agent wrote up a cryptic report about my leads, he was obviously more concerned about my possibly shooting him than who shot Giancana from behind. I shall never forget when I opened my briefcase to retrieve copies to the Turner articles to refresh my memory than the agent hastily grabbed for something, apparently a revolver, in the middle drawer of his desk. The experience certainly cooled my interest in visiting other federal officials in their cavernous office buildings about similar matters. For my trouble, the IRS successfully contested in Tax Court my claim that an employer-financed fellowship was entitled to the usual deductions for expenses, and subjected my tax return to an audit, what would statistically occur only once in 625 years.
Ultimately, I was obliged to threaten Truby with a court case if he published his distortions of my research, what he got round by seeing that a watered down version was printed in a sensational tabloid, and I settled by explaining my side of the story in a January 1976 article, "Tattling on The National Tattler," in The Writer's Digest. By then, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, who helped induce JFK to take more risks when he visited San Antonio the day before the assassination by joking about his connections with Castro, was pushing for a re-investigation of the murder, and he asked me to write a report about my research. No sooner had I written a 2,000 word synopsis of my findings than Chief Counsel Richard Sprague of the newly appointed committee, the most successful prosecutor threatening to use lie detectors to determine the truth, replied, thanking me for my assistance, and assuring me that he would check out my claims.
After that, the whole inquiry was simply stopped unless Sprague stepped aside for much less threatening inquiries. Chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi assured me, though, my leads were being followed up, and as the inquiry was coming to a close, his subordinate Mickey Goldsmith called me up, assuring me, in such hushed tones as if he were afraid that he would be overheard, that all my concerns were being investigated. In the meantime, I had written a long article on the JFK conspiracy, though it did not note Oswald's experience with the Agency's MK-ULTRA program, William Harvey's direction of the actual killing (Operation Cleopatra), and the independence of Sam Giancana's hitmen in its performance, for the April, May, and June 1978 issues of Tom Valentine's The National Exchange. The falsity of Fonzi's and Goldsmith's assurances was demonstrated when the House Select Committee reported, my articles for Valentine, plus an outline of the assassination published in the U. S. Farm News, not even being cited in the inquiry's volume-long bibliography, one including articles which claimed that the President had even been assassinated by extra-terrestrial beings.
When apparent CIA agent Verne Lyon saw my articles, he wrote, claiming that he had worked for several years in Cuba, and that his experience supported some of my claims. He wondered if I would be interested in colloborating in a work which would deal with both the direct and indirect results of the Dallas assassination. While I replied favorably to his suggestion, I never heard from him again. Since it seems that he was serving time at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas at the time, I can only assume that he was seeking information about the assassination, or my character and mental stability which his prosecutors would look favorably upon for an early release, The Justice Department is always looking for ill-advised remarks critics make about its work, and important politicians.
When L. Fletcher Prouty, a friend of Truby's, and author of The Secret Team, saw this material, he wrote me a most encouraging letter on May 8, 1979, suggesting that I look higher than people like E. Howard Hunt, Allen Dulles, and Nixon for the real conspirators. While this is good advice, provided one looks for people like William Harvey, Richard Helms, and Richard Bissell, Prouty could only suggest the most unlikely characters, like Pepsico lawyer Deluca, Air Force General Godfrey McHugh, and former Treasury Secretary Jim Farley. Prouty could only offer his classic bit of dissembling about who JFK's killers might be:
See what you can learn about (Robert) Maheu at Holy Cross and about a Maheu protege named Ed Nigro who at one time was Pres of Air West. Nigro worked in the same office with the Chairman of the JCS-Twining later Lemnitzer and the man who sat at the desk beside Nigro's was L. Patrick Gray. Gray sat in on the U-2 investigation in Fulbright's office as the sole DOD representative and retired from the Navy that month (May 60) to work in the Nixon campaign against JFK.
My most otherworldly experience occurred when I called a press conference at the college to announce the findings of my research. I invited reporters from newspapers in surrounding towns, the Associated and United Presses, and a reporter from Tass to come. The only one who came, though, was the latter, all the way from New York, along with apparently a KGB colleague to tape record what I had to say, plus, of course, a host of Bureau agents in trailing cars. Given the trouble the two had gone to, I had to go ahead with the press conference, and a continuation of the conversation in my office. The only other person in attendance was a student, apparently an informant for some government agency, who was keeping track of my research. I suspect that this experience had never occurred before, and has not be repeated.
The most predicable event occurred when I sent the piece Valentine published first to Columbia's
Political Science Quarterly, hoping to mend some fences with the university. When the managing editor returned the manuscript, along with two ridiculing rejections, I was so angry that I wrote to my former mentor, who had been caught in the middle of the plagiarism case, and was the beleaguered Dean of the Graduate Faculties when my piece appeared in Ramparts, to complain. He kindly responded, expressing his interest in its content, and his understanding of my irritation, adding that the journal had been hijacked by covert interests:
As far as Columbia is concerned, you may not be aware that about six years ago all ties between the Academy of Political Science (& the PSQ) & the Faculty of Political Science (& the University) were broken by the President on the advice of the faculty, since the Academy for the first time in its history, refused to accept the Faculty's nomination of an Editor for the PSQ & insisted on naming its own candidate as Editor. The Academy & the PSQ no longer occupy space at Columbia & have no official connection with the University. (Professor Herbert Deane's letter, May 18, 1978)
With the coming of the Reagan administration, I decided that it was not only time to leave Holy Cross but also America. Campus life had completely changed with Nixon's disgrace, and the end of the Vietnam War. With the end of the draft, the introduction of co-education at the college, and the installation of a completely conservative administration, headed by the famous defense lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, Holy Cross seemed more interested in training applicants for the Knights of Malta than informed citizens for a democratic society, Washington's agenda too. The growing role of DCI William Casey, NSA Richard Allen, Navy Secretary John Lehman, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and others, all Knights, in its actions was truly frightening. Williams was noted for representing people like Haig, Giancana, "Milwaukee Phil" Alderisio, Bobby Baker, James Hoffa, and Richard Helms before various forums. During a sabbatical leave in England, I hoped to find a publisher for my biography of Oxford professor A. V. Dicey, complete another one of barrister Brougham, and obtain new employment in Britain.
In London, I became acquainted with the political editor of Private Eye, Paul Halloran, who, upon learning of my research into the Dallas assassination, especially Haig's role, asked me to write a "Letter from Washington" about it, which appeared on November 20, 1981. Halloran's interest, though, was in getting rid of Reagan's Secretary of State so that the Cold War could be put on a more East-West basis, what I unknowingly promoted by writing a personal letter to Haig a few days later, promising more trouble. Then another couple we knew from the States, the husband having all kinds of connections with the Pentagon and former DCI Helms, made such a point about visiting us that we were obliged to invite them. During their week's stay, though, they hardly left our apartment in Walton-on-Thames, more interested apparently in determining my basis for going after Haig than in Britain's beauties. A similar concern prompted some nice soul to send me a packet of clippings from Chicago about what happened to squealers like Richard Cain, Sam Giancana, and Chuckie Nicoletti, what I informed the Thames Valley Special Branch of just in case I too ended up with my head blasted off, a bullet through the back of it, or in a burning car. Then there was someone who called me up right after an IRA bomb went off on Oxford Street, stating that "we have done it," and then hanging up.
Needless to say, by this time I was wearing out my welcome in Britain, and after I gave a false statement upon returning from a holiday in Crete, I was ordered by the Home Office to leave forthwith, as I later described in the Newsletter of the British Politics Group. In order to work for the American School in Esher, I was obliged to get working papers, and after a few months there, I decided it was better not to, or to return to the States, given the academic hassle, its political correctness, and poor wages. American schools around the globe are isolated microcosms of the worst of the States which should be avoided like the plague. If one cannot enjoy, and take advantage of what a host country has to offer, one should never leave home. I speeded my return by failing to change my visa, something I was informed by the Home Office that I didn't need to bother about before I left for Crete, and then acting as if I were still working at Esher when questioned by an immigration official about my employment late at night at Luton upon my return. When I had to renew my visa, the discrepancy was noted, and I was ordered to leave the U.K. within a relatively short period of time, though an immigration adviser to the Home Office acknowledged the difficulty I would have been in if I had denied still working at Esher. I contested the deportation order at Harmondsworth until I finished my research in August 1984.
Back at Holy Cross, I found the atmosphere truly stultifying. With Knights of Malta completely in control in Washington, the student body only seemed interested in furthering their policies. I was concerned about the rising confrontations between West and East, highlighted by the Soviets shooting down KAL Flight 007, and terrorism in the Middle East. When the CIA paid some Lebanese Christians to kill Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadallah, Washington being convinced that he was behind the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut in October 1983, and the Sept. 1984 bombing of the American Embassy, but killing 80 innocent Shiites instead, I wrote a draft "Letter from Washington" for Private Eye in the hope that Halloran would publish it. When he didn't, I wrote to NSA Robert McFarlane at the end of May 1985, complaining about how he was following in Haig's footsteps with his own campaign of terror. By this time, Reagan had cancelled his "license to kill". (William Blum, Rogue State, p. 41) I concluded the letter by hoping that it was still not too late for the President avoiding JFK's fate.
When the letter was typed, though, the department secretary, I believe, left out the word "not", making it seem that I hoped Reagan was assassinated too. While I didn't keep my draft of the letter, and didn't notice the omission until months later, it is impossible to be sure about what I wrote, though what was written hardly made sense since I had complained for years about JFK's assassination. I believe that the omission was deliberate, part of a plan devised by the department chairman, John Esposito, to make it look like I, like whistleblower Jack Terrell (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, p. 125ff.), was plotting Reagan's murder. Esposito is now at Georgetown where he heads a Muslim Institute. The plan had the approval of Bennett Williams, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and soon enlisted the services of Robert Mueller, then U. S. Attorney for Boston, and now the Bureau's Director. Williams was hoping to replace the ailing William Casey as DCI.
I, along with Esposito, was working with NROTC intern Christopher Goode, trying to place him with a sponsoring agency in Washington, and directing the paper he would write about his experience. ( I mention the student's name because the NSC's Lt. Col. Oliver North, noted for his rapport with similar students, soon adopted the code name William Goode in his arms-for-hostages efforts.) I found a place for Chris with the American Friends Service Committee, but he somehow managed to find a better one with Amnesty International. The next thing I knew, he sent me an outline of the paper he intended to write, claiming that the United States should consider breaking relations with Morocco's King Hassan II because his human rights record, ties with Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and suppression of the Polisario in the Western Sahara was threatening NATO's southern border. Morocco, of course, has been the lynchpin of American interests in North Africa. I could just see where I would be if he concluded with this thesis in the final version, so I called up Amnesty International in Washington to complain about how he was using the internship, and dropped the sponsorship of Goode's efforts.
Then a junior colleague in my department who had spent the previous year in Rome, apparently trying to prove for the Jesuits that the KGB was beyond the attempted assassination of the Pope, asked me to address the NROTC students on the current state of international relations. This was just after the Navy had solved the Achille Lauro affair to Reagan's complete satisfaction. The NROTC unit at Holy Cross is one of the Pentagon's primier ones in the country, and in retrospect I believe that Navy Secretary Lehman had something to do with the invitation. I readily accepted, giving a most grim survey of what was going on, and comparing it to the countdown which led to JFK's assassination where the Pentagon and the intelligence community were committed to a most dangerous covert program of their own.
Instead of being thanked and complimented for my efforts, I was asked a few days later by the same faculty member if I would like to take early retirement. I readily accepted again, as I had long been wanting to leave. While the administration seemed eager to pursue the matter, it soon started dragging its feet about it for some reason. To keep up my interest, I then received a Christmas greeting from Minnesota's Harold Dorland, a kind of civilian version of Prouty when it came to the JFK assassination, stating that he had decided to run as the Democratic candidate for President in 1988, and asking me to join and help his effort. In seeking my suggestions, Dorland made it sound as if I could expect a position in his campaign. Since Dorland had not even gotten around to mailing the greeting until Jan. 3, 1986, and never wrote again, I didn't take it seriously, considering it more like Hubert Humphrey's revenge than a serious one, I did pursue early retirement to a successful conclusion in early March. My swan song for Holy Cross was to write an article for the spring issue of The Student Review, warning Washington to back off from its confrontation with Moscow, and to take Gorbachev's efforts to reduce intermediate range missiles seriously. In the same vein, I wrote to NSA John Poindexter, two weeks before Al Shiraa published the story about arms sales to Iran, calling upon him to resign, like his predecessor, because of all his dangerous plotting.
My troubles with Holy Cross did not cease, however. Given the lateness of my retirement, it seemed that the college would have trouble replacing me for the next academic year. Out of the blue, apparently, it managed to hire Jeffrey Herf who agreed to let me keep my files on the JFK assassination in my old office, only for the college to destroy them when it was being redecorated. Herf went on to join the faculty of the Naval War College at Newport, R. I. the next year. Then Jonathan Vankin, a reporter for The Worcester Magazine, wrote articles on what local professionals thought about America's political assassinations, and protection of academic freedom, ones where my ideas and experience figured largely. In talking to Vankin, who went on to write Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes, I several times alluded to the fact that I was under surveillance by government agencies, claims he was increasingly dubious of. When he asked if he could have power of attorney to do an FOIA check on me with the FBI, I readily agreed.
On Feb. 2, 1989, Michael Callahan, Principal Legal Advisor of the FBI office in Boston's Government Center, replied favorably to Vankin's request, providing a copy of my 1965 letter to LBJ, the 1972 one in The Worcester Telegram comparing Hoover to Beria despite Nixon's eulogy, and the results of some record checks on me, and stating that "...central records system reveals one main file reponsive to your request." Its release would require approval from Washington. Apparently because of Vankin's article about Holy Cross's infringement of my academic freedom, though, Headquarters refused on May 16th to release it, citing Title 5, United States Code Section 552a and/or Section 552 itself, allowing non-disclosure for purposes of combating crime when no unwarranted invasion of privacy occurred, and when it could jeopardize sources, a lawful national security intelligence investigation, and a private institution which furnished information on a confidential basis. For Vankin to overturn the ruling protecting the persons, and institutions concerned, he would need a court order.
Instead of pursuing the matter further, as Vankin suggested, I simply decided to leave America's police state, first staying in Portugal, and then moving on to Sweden, moves which its expanded, self-justifying war on terrorism have given me no cause to regret.
When I was discharged from the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps in Orleans, France in July, 1954, I had little idea of who I was, what life was all about, and how I could make my way in the world. All I knew for sure was that I didn't want to follow in my father's footsteps in the Army, as it seemed to be a most parochial existence where secret agendas, selfish fancies, and limited concerns held sway, what I had come to appreciate while growing up on military posts.
During the next generation, I came to find my niche in life, what required an effort to join a large advertising firm but without success, a stint on a daily newspaper in the South as sport editor, and then a news reporter, and finally returning to graduate school to gain a doctorate in political science, and start a career in college teaching. Thanks to knowing a former president of N. W. Ayer, the large Philadelphia advertising firm, I sought a position with it, an effort ultimately derailed, though, by endless questioning about why I wanted a career in advertising, an experience which gave me insights into the benefits of hostile interrogations. In journalism, while learning to write with some skill, and insight, I became increasingly discouraged by the political correctness, and limited agendas which dominated the field. The thing which bothered me the most was the police's bigotry, joking constantly about blacks not even being human beings, and the paper's refusal to expose systematic collusion by the sheriffs with the local bondsmen where blacks were forced under threat of police harrassment into accepting loans at exorbitant rates of interest, and signing bad checks as collateral, what would be used against them in a sure-fire criminal prosecution if they didn't pay up shortly thereafter.
When I returned to Columbia University to start my graduate work in 1956, I was still largely unconcerned about political issues. The fact that alleged Soviet spy Ralph Bowen was no longer around to teach history, apparently the result of McCarthyism, escaped my notice. The fact that New York State law required me, who had held a Top Secret clearance while in the Army, to take a loyalty oath in order to teach undergraduate courses did not phase me. Being a student of European politics, I was most uninvolved during the Cuban Missile Crisis, thinking, like the average citizen, that the President was only doing what he had to under the circumstances. When I did a year's research in London during which JFK was assassinated, I was most unconcerned about who did it, and why, even getting into raucous argument with a Canadian historian, which almost resulted in fisticuffs, when he suggested that the Kennedy brothers were sterling characters, and that LBJ might well have been behind the killing. I didn't have an inkling that America's covert government had conspired to kill the President at the expense of Castro's communist Cuba, a plot which risked world war since it threatened a Soviet takeover of Western Europe in retaliation.
What really politicized me was trying to complete my degree during the Vietnam War. By this time, I had been exiled to a small college in the hinterlands of Ohio for contesting the preferential treatment of the son of a famous Columbia professor for having plagarized a paper in a class I taught, a process which threatened my never getting my degree as the first reader of my Ph.D. dissertation on English lawyer, politician, and judge Henry Brougham was also the head of the course's department. He was on record that he would make sure that I never got my degree for the controversy I caused, an effort I only defeated by obtaining the correspondence about the scandal, and threatening to use it in a court case against Columbia when he tried to make good on his threat at the dissertation's defense. Once I was awarded the degree, I publicized the controversy in the June 1968 issue of Ramparts, the radical magazine which was drawing the ire of America's intelligence community for its opposition to all Establishment efforts, starting in Vietnam (Angus Mackenzie, Secret: The CIA's War at Home, pp.16-24).
I had already become an object of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO, and the Agency's MHCHAOS operations by writing my first letter to a Washington official, President Johnson, complaining of his massive escalation of the war in Vietnam, on the pretext of the co-called Tonkin Gulf incidents, after he had campaigned as the peace candidate against the super hawk Barry Goldwater in the recent election. In a very short letter, I expressed my dismay over what he was doing, vowing to see that the course was reversed, and that he was rejected in the next election. For my trouble, I became a charter member of the alleged communist conspiracy which was seeking to defeat at home what our troops were achieving on the battlefield in Southeast Asia.
My listing as a traitor had been guaranteed when I and a colleague in the same department, a Vietnam veteran, decided to conduct a teach-in on the merits of the war in the college's main hall. He was a sensible, but troubled participant and witness of what was going on, and was eager to debate the justification of America's involvement just to clear his own mind, and conscience. While the teach-in went well, with my holding my own, I believe, on the need of America's immediate withdrawal, you can imagine our amazement when the local newspaper treated the debate as if my opponent had only given a lecture in defense of America's involvement. While I did force the editor to print a clarification of what had happened, in doing so I earned a one-way ticket out of the cozy college community from its president for the embarrassment caused. While I didn't think of it at the time, a curvaeous coed then dropped by my house one afternoon when my wife was known to be away, offering breathlessly to do anything I wanted in order to improve her grade, the only time such a possibility occurred in 30 years of teaching, a proposition which promised apparently more than a just train ticket out of town if I had accepted. If I had dropped my pants, I might have started serving time in an Ohio penitentiary.
If the country had not been in a such turmoil, and there being such a shortage of qualified college teachers, my career might well have ended there. As it was, I gained a post at the University of Maine, but not for long. No sooner had I arrived than Vice President Hubert Humphrey appeared, justifying in the strongest terms support for LBJ's war against America's most dangerous foe. (George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, p. 136ff.) The liberal Humphrey, in my estimation, was the greatest betrayer of American values by his mythic pursuit of communists. (For more on this, see Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, p. 137ff.) No sooner did I join pickets protesting Humphrey's mission than the department chairman informed me that my contract with the university would not be renewed. With nearly the whole year left to serve my own agenda without worrying about staying on, I let all my opposition to the Vietnam War hang out, attacking the international relations professor's justification of American involvement at a public debate, and writng so strongly in the Bangor paper in defense of Cassius Clay's (aka Mohammed Ali) efforts to keep his crown, and avoid the draft that I earned the sobriquet "nigger-lover" among colleagues, one of whom threatened a fist fight over the matter in an office we shared.
By this time, I considered myself finished in the academic profession. It just so happened, though, that Holy Cross College, a leading Catholic undergraduate college in the country, was looking for a person in my field, and my growing "radical" credentials, given my military service during the Korean War, were an advantage for once, considering the outlook of its president, the composition of its student body, and the fact that it had two reserve officers training units on campus. The all-male student body, including a number of well-qualified black students (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had just graduated.), even some Black Muslims, was in a most excited state because of the war, and the spate of political assassinations, especially Martin Luther King's, causing various walkouts of students, and shutdowns of classes. Students were most worried about having to serve in Vietnam as either draftees, or as a Navy, Marine, or Air Force Officers. With the faculty concerned about only the usual professional matters of promotion, stature, and tenure, my agitational style was just what the situation called for.
The next decade was certainly the most exciting, engaging period of my academic life. While completing my dissertation, and starting to have articles published in scholarly journals, I still poured out letters, especially in The Worcester Telegram, against the war and the White House, participated in teach-ins, scholarly gatherings, and talk shows for the same purpose, and tried to guide and educate students during confrontations on campus. The events which stand out in my memory were complaining in The Columbia Journalism Review about Communication Director Herb Klein's use of the American Political Science Association, a seemingly non-parisan body, to spread Nixon propaganda as a matter of course, a letter in the local paper complaining of the President's unctuous eulogy for deceased FBI Director Hoover, the speech that the State Department's William Bundy gave to the local Council on Foreign Relations on the need of arming everyone around the world to frustrate Soviet ambitions, and encourage national conflict, preventing radical students from being expelled for threatening to burn down the Air ROTC building at the instigation of government agent provocateur Vito Trimarco, and the NROTC editor of the college yearbook calling upon me to give an account of the turmoil on campus during one of those years.
At the same time, I started researching the background of Nixon's troubles, what soon led me to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. I was particularly interested in Representative Gerald Ford's role on the Warren Commission, complaining particularly about his constantly leaking details of the inquiry to Hoover, promoting the idea of the "magic bullet" to eliminate suspicions of a conspiracy, and preparing a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, contending that he alone killed JFK. When Nixon selected Ford instead of the expected former Texas Governor John Connally to replace scandal-ridden Vice President Spiro Agnew, I was put in the uncomfortable position of being asked by CIA contact Dana Beal to come to Washintgon on an all-expenses-paid visit to spread my complaints against the Congressman, an effort which would help prevent Nixon's removal, and what I understandably declined. Then J. David Truby, a professor at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, started querying me about my research for an article on the Dallas assassination, what I ultimately suspected he was doing for Chief of Staff General Alexander Haig aka "Deep Throat" to prepare the ground for Nixon's removal from office, and pardon. This was when the President was musing with Kissinger about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam to escape from the trap which was engulfing him.
The most intriguing experience I had was when an assassination conference was scheduled at Boston University. While many famous critics of the Warren Commission would be attending, I was not planning on going as I found such conferences counter productive as its supporters always panned the programs as merely the products of irrational true believers. Then John and Rita Paine called up, and asked if my wife and I would like to spend the weekend with them, attending the conference after a dinner they had arranged with all kinds people interested in the JFK assassination. The Paines had befriended people like the widow of Salvatore Allende, Hortensia, and my father, now retired, and one of the few American generals openly speaking out against the war. He had the honor, for example, to be showered with red paint by Dallas rednecks after he delivered a speech against it.
At the Paines, the guests questioned me so much about my research that we arrived late at the conference, obliged to take back seats in the hall. Of course, I was not concerned because I had not planned to say anything anyway. The next day, Mr. Paine asked if I would like to discuss my research with a stringer from The Boston Globe, an opportunity I readily took advantage of. While I talked with her for the better part of a day, nothing ever appeared in the newspaper, though I ultimately had the impression that the files at Langley had consequently increased.
My research has always concentrated upon what daily newspapers have to say about people and events, sources which are ignored for documents governments see fit to provide, and for diaries and letters provided by participants. In explaining the Dallas assassination, I found newspapers in Dallas, New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, New York, Washington, Chicago, Las Vegas, and La Grange, Ga. most helpful, once I carefully examined their pages. For example, The Dallas Morning News had most revealing stories on the first anniversary of the final week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, stating that the process was beginning again exactly 13 months later, and that Nixon, like Dallas Representative Bruce Alger, was receiving postcards from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, from a "possibly dangerous social deviant", details which seemed to suit Oswald to a tee. Lawyer Nixon still came to Dallas on Nov. 20th, attending the Bottlers' Convention at Market Hall the next day, and making so much of his lack of security concerns that the newpaper emphasized a "Guard not for Nixon" story on the fatal day. Then there were Hal Hendrix's stories in the Miami News, showing that he preferred to be with Haig's Operation Americas rather than with Oswald in Dallas when the killing occurred. The next day, The Washington Post published AP photographer James Altgens' half-page picture of the assassination, what apparently showed Oswald standing at the Book Depository's entrance, and convinced Director Hoover that there was insufficient evidence to convict him, making his murder necessary.
Instead of developing this material, and much more, other researchers chose either to ignore it, or change it so that the cover-up could continue. For example, Michael Canfield and A. J. Weberman in Coup d'Etat in America, while quoting the story about threatening postcards, left out the word "dangerous", and changed "possibly" into an adjective in order to radically diminish its significance. Truby went wild to establish that I was claiming that Nixon actually knew Jack Ruby, when I only said that he knew about Jacob Rubenstein's communist background from HUAC files when he prepared the Nixon-Mundt Bill for dealing with the alleged red menace, and that E. Howard Hunt was one of the tramps arrested in the marshalling yard shortly after the shooting, something photographic expert Richard Sprague promoted at my expense, and Paul Hoch legitimized, when I asked Sprague if Oswald was the person in the Altgens' photo. Hunt actually had more important coordinating responsibilities in Washington and Mexico City than just being a decoy in Dallas. Then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's Commission asked me to write a report about now President Ford's performance on the Warren Commission, what was intended to help promote Nixon's pardon rather than clear up JFK's murder.
When Giancana was murdered, I made an appointment with the Worcester FBI agent to discuss its relation to the JFK assassination, and his scheduled testimony before the Church Committee. Momo had been set-up for the Dallas hit because of the trouble he had created for Frank Sinatra at Lake Tahoe's Cal-Neva Lodge, the mobster being in the Nevada State Gaming Commission's Black Book as a persona non grata when he visited lover and singer Phyllis McGuire there, as the five-part series by Wallace Turner in The New York Times surrounding the assassination amply demonstrated, and his killer obviously learned he was going to testify about while talking to him. While the Special Agent wrote up a cryptic report about my leads, he was obviously more concerned about my possibly shooting him than who shot Giancana from behind. I shall never forget when I opened my briefcase to retrieve copies to the Turner articles to refresh my memory than the agent hastily grabbed for something, apparently a revolver, in the middle drawer of his desk. The experience certainly cooled my interest in visiting other federal officials in their cavernous office buildings about similar matters. For my trouble, the IRS successfully contested in Tax Court my claim that an employer-financed fellowship was entitled to the usual deductions for expenses, and subjected my tax return to an audit, what would statistically occur only once in 625 years.
Ultimately, I was obliged to threaten Truby with a court case if he published his distortions of my research, what he got round by seeing that a watered down version was printed in a sensational tabloid, and I settled by explaining my side of the story in a January 1976 article, "Tattling on The National Tattler," in The Writer's Digest. By then, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, who helped induce JFK to take more risks when he visited San Antonio the day before the assassination by joking about his connections with Castro, was pushing for a re-investigation of the murder, and he asked me to write a report about my research. No sooner had I written a 2,000 word synopsis of my findings than Chief Counsel Richard Sprague of the newly appointed committee, the most successful prosecutor threatening to use lie detectors to determine the truth, replied, thanking me for my assistance, and assuring me that he would check out my claims.
After that, the whole inquiry was simply stopped unless Sprague stepped aside for much less threatening inquiries. Chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi assured me, though, my leads were being followed up, and as the inquiry was coming to a close, his subordinate Mickey Goldsmith called me up, assuring me, in such hushed tones as if he were afraid that he would be overheard, that all my concerns were being investigated. In the meantime, I had written a long article on the JFK conspiracy, though it did not note Oswald's experience with the Agency's MK-ULTRA program, William Harvey's direction of the actual killing (Operation Cleopatra), and the independence of Sam Giancana's hitmen in its performance, for the April, May, and June 1978 issues of Tom Valentine's The National Exchange. The falsity of Fonzi's and Goldsmith's assurances was demonstrated when the House Select Committee reported, my articles for Valentine, plus an outline of the assassination published in the U. S. Farm News, not even being cited in the inquiry's volume-long bibliography, one including articles which claimed that the President had even been assassinated by extra-terrestrial beings.
When apparent CIA agent Verne Lyon saw my articles, he wrote, claiming that he had worked for several years in Cuba, and that his experience supported some of my claims. He wondered if I would be interested in colloborating in a work which would deal with both the direct and indirect results of the Dallas assassination. While I replied favorably to his suggestion, I never heard from him again. Since it seems that he was serving time at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas at the time, I can only assume that he was seeking information about the assassination, or my character and mental stability which his prosecutors would look favorably upon for an early release, The Justice Department is always looking for ill-advised remarks critics make about its work, and important politicians.
When L. Fletcher Prouty, a friend of Truby's, and author of The Secret Team, saw this material, he wrote me a most encouraging letter on May 8, 1979, suggesting that I look higher than people like E. Howard Hunt, Allen Dulles, and Nixon for the real conspirators. While this is good advice, provided one looks for people like William Harvey, Richard Helms, and Richard Bissell, Prouty could only suggest the most unlikely characters, like Pepsico lawyer Deluca, Air Force General Godfrey McHugh, and former Treasury Secretary Jim Farley. Prouty could only offer his classic bit of dissembling about who JFK's killers might be:
See what you can learn about (Robert) Maheu at Holy Cross and about a Maheu protege named Ed Nigro who at one time was Pres of Air West. Nigro worked in the same office with the Chairman of the JCS-Twining later Lemnitzer and the man who sat at the desk beside Nigro's was L. Patrick Gray. Gray sat in on the U-2 investigation in Fulbright's office as the sole DOD representative and retired from the Navy that month (May 60) to work in the Nixon campaign against JFK.
My most otherworldly experience occurred when I called a press conference at the college to announce the findings of my research. I invited reporters from newspapers in surrounding towns, the Associated and United Presses, and a reporter from Tass to come. The only one who came, though, was the latter, all the way from New York, along with apparently a KGB colleague to tape record what I had to say, plus, of course, a host of Bureau agents in trailing cars. Given the trouble the two had gone to, I had to go ahead with the press conference, and a continuation of the conversation in my office. The only other person in attendance was a student, apparently an informant for some government agency, who was keeping track of my research. I suspect that this experience had never occurred before, and has not be repeated.
The most predicable event occurred when I sent the piece Valentine published first to Columbia's
Political Science Quarterly, hoping to mend some fences with the university. When the managing editor returned the manuscript, along with two ridiculing rejections, I was so angry that I wrote to my former mentor, who had been caught in the middle of the plagiarism case, and was the beleaguered Dean of the Graduate Faculties when my piece appeared in Ramparts, to complain. He kindly responded, expressing his interest in its content, and his understanding of my irritation, adding that the journal had been hijacked by covert interests:
As far as Columbia is concerned, you may not be aware that about six years ago all ties between the Academy of Political Science (& the PSQ) & the Faculty of Political Science (& the University) were broken by the President on the advice of the faculty, since the Academy for the first time in its history, refused to accept the Faculty's nomination of an Editor for the PSQ & insisted on naming its own candidate as Editor. The Academy & the PSQ no longer occupy space at Columbia & have no official connection with the University. (Professor Herbert Deane's letter, May 18, 1978)
With the coming of the Reagan administration, I decided that it was not only time to leave Holy Cross but also America. Campus life had completely changed with Nixon's disgrace, and the end of the Vietnam War. With the end of the draft, the introduction of co-education at the college, and the installation of a completely conservative administration, headed by the famous defense lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, Holy Cross seemed more interested in training applicants for the Knights of Malta than informed citizens for a democratic society, Washington's agenda too. The growing role of DCI William Casey, NSA Richard Allen, Navy Secretary John Lehman, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and others, all Knights, in its actions was truly frightening. Williams was noted for representing people like Haig, Giancana, "Milwaukee Phil" Alderisio, Bobby Baker, James Hoffa, and Richard Helms before various forums. During a sabbatical leave in England, I hoped to find a publisher for my biography of Oxford professor A. V. Dicey, complete another one of barrister Brougham, and obtain new employment in Britain.
In London, I became acquainted with the political editor of Private Eye, Paul Halloran, who, upon learning of my research into the Dallas assassination, especially Haig's role, asked me to write a "Letter from Washington" about it, which appeared on November 20, 1981. Halloran's interest, though, was in getting rid of Reagan's Secretary of State so that the Cold War could be put on a more East-West basis, what I unknowingly promoted by writing a personal letter to Haig a few days later, promising more trouble. Then another couple we knew from the States, the husband having all kinds of connections with the Pentagon and former DCI Helms, made such a point about visiting us that we were obliged to invite them. During their week's stay, though, they hardly left our apartment in Walton-on-Thames, more interested apparently in determining my basis for going after Haig than in Britain's beauties. A similar concern prompted some nice soul to send me a packet of clippings from Chicago about what happened to squealers like Richard Cain, Sam Giancana, and Chuckie Nicoletti, what I informed the Thames Valley Special Branch of just in case I too ended up with my head blasted off, a bullet through the back of it, or in a burning car. Then there was someone who called me up right after an IRA bomb went off on Oxford Street, stating that "we have done it," and then hanging up.
Needless to say, by this time I was wearing out my welcome in Britain, and after I gave a false statement upon returning from a holiday in Crete, I was ordered by the Home Office to leave forthwith, as I later described in the Newsletter of the British Politics Group. In order to work for the American School in Esher, I was obliged to get working papers, and after a few months there, I decided it was better not to, or to return to the States, given the academic hassle, its political correctness, and poor wages. American schools around the globe are isolated microcosms of the worst of the States which should be avoided like the plague. If one cannot enjoy, and take advantage of what a host country has to offer, one should never leave home. I speeded my return by failing to change my visa, something I was informed by the Home Office that I didn't need to bother about before I left for Crete, and then acting as if I were still working at Esher when questioned by an immigration official about my employment late at night at Luton upon my return. When I had to renew my visa, the discrepancy was noted, and I was ordered to leave the U.K. within a relatively short period of time, though an immigration adviser to the Home Office acknowledged the difficulty I would have been in if I had denied still working at Esher. I contested the deportation order at Harmondsworth until I finished my research in August 1984.
Back at Holy Cross, I found the atmosphere truly stultifying. With Knights of Malta completely in control in Washington, the student body only seemed interested in furthering their policies. I was concerned about the rising confrontations between West and East, highlighted by the Soviets shooting down KAL Flight 007, and terrorism in the Middle East. When the CIA paid some Lebanese Christians to kill Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadallah, Washington being convinced that he was behind the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut in October 1983, and the Sept. 1984 bombing of the American Embassy, but killing 80 innocent Shiites instead, I wrote a draft "Letter from Washington" for Private Eye in the hope that Halloran would publish it. When he didn't, I wrote to NSA Robert McFarlane at the end of May 1985, complaining about how he was following in Haig's footsteps with his own campaign of terror. By this time, Reagan had cancelled his "license to kill". (William Blum, Rogue State, p. 41) I concluded the letter by hoping that it was still not too late for the President avoiding JFK's fate.
When the letter was typed, though, the department secretary, I believe, left out the word "not", making it seem that I hoped Reagan was assassinated too. While I didn't keep my draft of the letter, and didn't notice the omission until months later, it is impossible to be sure about what I wrote, though what was written hardly made sense since I had complained for years about JFK's assassination. I believe that the omission was deliberate, part of a plan devised by the department chairman, John Esposito, to make it look like I, like whistleblower Jack Terrell (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, p. 125ff.), was plotting Reagan's murder. Esposito is now at Georgetown where he heads a Muslim Institute. The plan had the approval of Bennett Williams, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and soon enlisted the services of Robert Mueller, then U. S. Attorney for Boston, and now the Bureau's Director. Williams was hoping to replace the ailing William Casey as DCI.
I, along with Esposito, was working with NROTC intern Christopher Goode, trying to place him with a sponsoring agency in Washington, and directing the paper he would write about his experience. ( I mention the student's name because the NSC's Lt. Col. Oliver North, noted for his rapport with similar students, soon adopted the code name William Goode in his arms-for-hostages efforts.) I found a place for Chris with the American Friends Service Committee, but he somehow managed to find a better one with Amnesty International. The next thing I knew, he sent me an outline of the paper he intended to write, claiming that the United States should consider breaking relations with Morocco's King Hassan II because his human rights record, ties with Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and suppression of the Polisario in the Western Sahara was threatening NATO's southern border. Morocco, of course, has been the lynchpin of American interests in North Africa. I could just see where I would be if he concluded with this thesis in the final version, so I called up Amnesty International in Washington to complain about how he was using the internship, and dropped the sponsorship of Goode's efforts.
Then a junior colleague in my department who had spent the previous year in Rome, apparently trying to prove for the Jesuits that the KGB was beyond the attempted assassination of the Pope, asked me to address the NROTC students on the current state of international relations. This was just after the Navy had solved the Achille Lauro affair to Reagan's complete satisfaction. The NROTC unit at Holy Cross is one of the Pentagon's primier ones in the country, and in retrospect I believe that Navy Secretary Lehman had something to do with the invitation. I readily accepted, giving a most grim survey of what was going on, and comparing it to the countdown which led to JFK's assassination where the Pentagon and the intelligence community were committed to a most dangerous covert program of their own.
Instead of being thanked and complimented for my efforts, I was asked a few days later by the same faculty member if I would like to take early retirement. I readily accepted again, as I had long been wanting to leave. While the administration seemed eager to pursue the matter, it soon started dragging its feet about it for some reason. To keep up my interest, I then received a Christmas greeting from Minnesota's Harold Dorland, a kind of civilian version of Prouty when it came to the JFK assassination, stating that he had decided to run as the Democratic candidate for President in 1988, and asking me to join and help his effort. In seeking my suggestions, Dorland made it sound as if I could expect a position in his campaign. Since Dorland had not even gotten around to mailing the greeting until Jan. 3, 1986, and never wrote again, I didn't take it seriously, considering it more like Hubert Humphrey's revenge than a serious one, I did pursue early retirement to a successful conclusion in early March. My swan song for Holy Cross was to write an article for the spring issue of The Student Review, warning Washington to back off from its confrontation with Moscow, and to take Gorbachev's efforts to reduce intermediate range missiles seriously. In the same vein, I wrote to NSA John Poindexter, two weeks before Al Shiraa published the story about arms sales to Iran, calling upon him to resign, like his predecessor, because of all his dangerous plotting.
My troubles with Holy Cross did not cease, however. Given the lateness of my retirement, it seemed that the college would have trouble replacing me for the next academic year. Out of the blue, apparently, it managed to hire Jeffrey Herf who agreed to let me keep my files on the JFK assassination in my old office, only for the college to destroy them when it was being redecorated. Herf went on to join the faculty of the Naval War College at Newport, R. I. the next year. Then Jonathan Vankin, a reporter for The Worcester Magazine, wrote articles on what local professionals thought about America's political assassinations, and protection of academic freedom, ones where my ideas and experience figured largely. In talking to Vankin, who went on to write Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes, I several times alluded to the fact that I was under surveillance by government agencies, claims he was increasingly dubious of. When he asked if he could have power of attorney to do an FOIA check on me with the FBI, I readily agreed.
On Feb. 2, 1989, Michael Callahan, Principal Legal Advisor of the FBI office in Boston's Government Center, replied favorably to Vankin's request, providing a copy of my 1965 letter to LBJ, the 1972 one in The Worcester Telegram comparing Hoover to Beria despite Nixon's eulogy, and the results of some record checks on me, and stating that "...central records system reveals one main file reponsive to your request." Its release would require approval from Washington. Apparently because of Vankin's article about Holy Cross's infringement of my academic freedom, though, Headquarters refused on May 16th to release it, citing Title 5, United States Code Section 552a and/or Section 552 itself, allowing non-disclosure for purposes of combating crime when no unwarranted invasion of privacy occurred, and when it could jeopardize sources, a lawful national security intelligence investigation, and a private institution which furnished information on a confidential basis. For Vankin to overturn the ruling protecting the persons, and institutions concerned, he would need a court order.
Instead of pursuing the matter further, as Vankin suggested, I simply decided to leave America's police state, first staying in Portugal, and then moving on to Sweden, moves which its expanded, self-justifying war on terrorism have given me no cause to regret.
Thursday, 29 January 2004
Now Blair Must Tell Truth on WMD
When even the inspectors are saying the were no WMD, for the government to still stand by their justification for war, is even more vacuous than the Hutton report.
Tony Blair would have been justified in cracking open a bottle of bubbly last night.
He and those around him had been vindicated by the Hutton report.
With the narrow victory on university fees the previous day, it made an incredible double for a Prime Minister written off by many pundits.
There were no celebrations at the BBC, though. Lord Hutton was brutal about their management and journalism.
They pride themselves on being the best in the world so, when they fall short of that standard, they must expect the roof to fall in.
Their chairman, Gavyn Davies, an honourable man, did the decent thing and resigned. That will make it easier for them to sort out how the Corporation is run in future.
As Mr Davies said, you must accept the verdict of the referee so there is no point in complaining about the Hutton judgment.
There is no doubt BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan should not have said that Downing Street knowingly inserted a false claim in what was called the dodgy dossier.
He said they knew it wasn't true that Saddam Hussein could fire weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes - a claim proved false by Hutton.
But in the first three letters of complaint from No.10, no mention was made of that claim, which became the focus of Hutton's report.
The rest of Gilligan's short broadcast was correct. He was RIGHT that the 45-minute claim was inserted late, RIGHT that there was disquiet in the intelligence communities about the dossier and RIGHT that there was an anonymous, single source for the information.
But that lone mistake was one too many for the BBC. Even though the main thrust of the Gilligan report was correct.
And there lies the crucial point which Mr Blair has yet to address.
The BBC was not running an anti-war agenda despite the frenzied insistence of Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's former press chief.
It was properly reflecting the views of millions of Britons who did not believe that the evidence was there to take us to war in Iraq.
SIXTEEN months later, not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found. Far less one which can be prepared and fired on another country in 45 minutes.
The Hutton inquiry focused on the most narrow terms of reference - for which Mr Blair has to thank his old pal Lord Falconer, just as he had to be grateful to Gordon Brown for his Commons victory the previous day.
That meant the real issue - the existence of WMD - wasn't even touched on.
Full story...
Tony Blair would have been justified in cracking open a bottle of bubbly last night.
He and those around him had been vindicated by the Hutton report.
With the narrow victory on university fees the previous day, it made an incredible double for a Prime Minister written off by many pundits.
There were no celebrations at the BBC, though. Lord Hutton was brutal about their management and journalism.
They pride themselves on being the best in the world so, when they fall short of that standard, they must expect the roof to fall in.
Their chairman, Gavyn Davies, an honourable man, did the decent thing and resigned. That will make it easier for them to sort out how the Corporation is run in future.
As Mr Davies said, you must accept the verdict of the referee so there is no point in complaining about the Hutton judgment.
There is no doubt BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan should not have said that Downing Street knowingly inserted a false claim in what was called the dodgy dossier.
He said they knew it wasn't true that Saddam Hussein could fire weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes - a claim proved false by Hutton.
But in the first three letters of complaint from No.10, no mention was made of that claim, which became the focus of Hutton's report.
The rest of Gilligan's short broadcast was correct. He was RIGHT that the 45-minute claim was inserted late, RIGHT that there was disquiet in the intelligence communities about the dossier and RIGHT that there was an anonymous, single source for the information.
But that lone mistake was one too many for the BBC. Even though the main thrust of the Gilligan report was correct.
And there lies the crucial point which Mr Blair has yet to address.
The BBC was not running an anti-war agenda despite the frenzied insistence of Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's former press chief.
It was properly reflecting the views of millions of Britons who did not believe that the evidence was there to take us to war in Iraq.
SIXTEEN months later, not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found. Far less one which can be prepared and fired on another country in 45 minutes.
The Hutton inquiry focused on the most narrow terms of reference - for which Mr Blair has to thank his old pal Lord Falconer, just as he had to be grateful to Gordon Brown for his Commons victory the previous day.
That meant the real issue - the existence of WMD - wasn't even touched on.
Full story...
Demands grow for inquiry into the case for war as Hutton is accused of a 'whitewash'
The only lie that was told was the lie that Saddam had WMD and posed a "serious and current" threat to Blighty and the world. Our political system has been exposed as a sham and a joke.
The BBC chairman Gavyn Davies became the first casualty of the inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly as Lord Hutton was accused last night of presiding over a "whitewash".
Tony Blair, his former director of communications Alastair Campbell and the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon were all cleared of any improper behaviour leading up to the suicide of the weapons expert, bringing barely disguised relief in Government circles.
Vindication of Mr Blair allowed him to survive the most testing 24 hours of his premiership, following his wafer-thin victory in Tuesday's Commons vote on tuition fees. The combination of both events could have cost the Prime Minister his job but one jubilant aide said last night: "Houdini has done it again."
However, Lord Hutton failed to settle the crucial question of whether Mr Blair took Britain to war in Iraq on a false prospectus. After he ruled that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was beyond his terms of reference, the Tories and Liberal Democrats renewed their demands for an independent inquiry into the build-up to war.
The 740-page report sent shockwaves through the BBC. Lord Hutton said that the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan's allegation that the Government had "sexed up" its dossier on Iraqi weapons and included intelligence it knew to be probably wrong or questionable was "unfounded".
He criticised as "defective" the BBC management system which allowed the reporter to make his claims on Radio 4's Today programme and said the BBC governors should have investigated the Government's complaint about his story more fully.
The BBC board of governors was in a crisis session last night and will meet again today amid speculation that further resignations are on the cards - possibly by all 12 members.
Accepting "ultimate responsibility", Mr Davies said: "I have been brought up to believe that you cannot choose your own referee, and that the referee's decision is final."
But he went on to challenge key elements of Lord Hutton's findings, asking: "Is it clearly possible to reconcile Lord Hutton's bald conclusions on the production of the September 2002 dossier with the balance of evidence that was presented to him during his own inquiry?"
He also asked: "Are his conclusions on restricting the use of unverifiable sources in British journalism based on sound law and, if applied, would they constitute a threat to the freedom of the press in this country?" Mr Davies's comments reflected anger at the BBC at Lord Hutton's surprisingly strong criticism. One BBC insider described it as "an old man's report that is simply wrong".
Greg Dyke, the corporation's director general, said: "The BBC does accept that certain key allegations reported by Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme on 29 May last year were wrong and we apologise for them."
Full story...
The BBC chairman Gavyn Davies became the first casualty of the inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly as Lord Hutton was accused last night of presiding over a "whitewash".
Tony Blair, his former director of communications Alastair Campbell and the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon were all cleared of any improper behaviour leading up to the suicide of the weapons expert, bringing barely disguised relief in Government circles.
Vindication of Mr Blair allowed him to survive the most testing 24 hours of his premiership, following his wafer-thin victory in Tuesday's Commons vote on tuition fees. The combination of both events could have cost the Prime Minister his job but one jubilant aide said last night: "Houdini has done it again."
However, Lord Hutton failed to settle the crucial question of whether Mr Blair took Britain to war in Iraq on a false prospectus. After he ruled that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was beyond his terms of reference, the Tories and Liberal Democrats renewed their demands for an independent inquiry into the build-up to war.
The 740-page report sent shockwaves through the BBC. Lord Hutton said that the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan's allegation that the Government had "sexed up" its dossier on Iraqi weapons and included intelligence it knew to be probably wrong or questionable was "unfounded".
He criticised as "defective" the BBC management system which allowed the reporter to make his claims on Radio 4's Today programme and said the BBC governors should have investigated the Government's complaint about his story more fully.
The BBC board of governors was in a crisis session last night and will meet again today amid speculation that further resignations are on the cards - possibly by all 12 members.
Accepting "ultimate responsibility", Mr Davies said: "I have been brought up to believe that you cannot choose your own referee, and that the referee's decision is final."
But he went on to challenge key elements of Lord Hutton's findings, asking: "Is it clearly possible to reconcile Lord Hutton's bald conclusions on the production of the September 2002 dossier with the balance of evidence that was presented to him during his own inquiry?"
He also asked: "Are his conclusions on restricting the use of unverifiable sources in British journalism based on sound law and, if applied, would they constitute a threat to the freedom of the press in this country?" Mr Davies's comments reflected anger at the BBC at Lord Hutton's surprisingly strong criticism. One BBC insider described it as "an old man's report that is simply wrong".
Greg Dyke, the corporation's director general, said: "The BBC does accept that certain key allegations reported by Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme on 29 May last year were wrong and we apologise for them."
Full story...
Wednesday, 28 January 2004
BBC targeted as Hutton clears Blair
Well suprise suprise! This is even more of a joke than I thought it was going to be, and watching Phony Tony gloating about it on TV makes my stomach turn and I get this urge to vomit all over his expensive suit. Apart from the fact that I don't believe Dr Kelly committed suicide, this whole enquiry has simply served to deflect attention away from the fact that I haven't seen any of those bloody WMD Blair kept banging on about, and don't give me any of that WMD "programmes" bullshit, I'm not that stuipd. That basically means that despite what Hutton says, THE GOVERNMENT LIED ABOUT THE REASONS FOR GOING TO WAR IN IRAQ. But they're getting away with it, and will now probably use this as an excuse to make changes that will ensure Auntie does what she's told in future.
· Corporation's governors criticised
· 'No third party' in Kelly death
· Blair delivers Commons response
Lord Hutton today gave full backing to the government's conduct in the David Kelly affair, but accused the BBC of "defective" editorial management.
In a one and three-quarter hour summary of his findings, delivered at the high court, the judge ran through the sequence of events that began with the writing of the September 2002 dossier and ended with Dr Kelly's suicide.
The prime minister, Tony Blair, has called for those who had impugned his integrity and that of the government to withdraw their allegations.
By contrast, the BBC's robust defence of itself in the face of government complaints over the story came in for heavy criticism.
The law lord said the corporation's management had failed to appreciate that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's notes did not support the most serious of his allegations.
He added that governors should have recognised and investigated the differences between them.
Lord Hutton accused Alastair Campbell of "raising the temperature" of the row by the tone of his complaints. But he added that the governors should have recognised that their legitimate desire to protect the BBC's independence was not incompatible with investigating those complaints.
Lord Hutton said that the dossier's 45-minute claim may be proved to be wrong in the future, but that Mr Gilligan's allegation that the government knew that it was wrong when the dossier was published was "unfounded" because intelligence chiefs believed its source was reliable.
He described Mr Gilligan's report as a "grave allegation" and a slur on the government's integrity.
Full story...
· Corporation's governors criticised
· 'No third party' in Kelly death
· Blair delivers Commons response
Lord Hutton today gave full backing to the government's conduct in the David Kelly affair, but accused the BBC of "defective" editorial management.
In a one and three-quarter hour summary of his findings, delivered at the high court, the judge ran through the sequence of events that began with the writing of the September 2002 dossier and ended with Dr Kelly's suicide.
The prime minister, Tony Blair, has called for those who had impugned his integrity and that of the government to withdraw their allegations.
By contrast, the BBC's robust defence of itself in the face of government complaints over the story came in for heavy criticism.
The law lord said the corporation's management had failed to appreciate that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's notes did not support the most serious of his allegations.
He added that governors should have recognised and investigated the differences between them.
Lord Hutton accused Alastair Campbell of "raising the temperature" of the row by the tone of his complaints. But he added that the governors should have recognised that their legitimate desire to protect the BBC's independence was not incompatible with investigating those complaints.
Lord Hutton said that the dossier's 45-minute claim may be proved to be wrong in the future, but that Mr Gilligan's allegation that the government knew that it was wrong when the dossier was published was "unfounded" because intelligence chiefs believed its source was reliable.
He described Mr Gilligan's report as a "grave allegation" and a slur on the government's integrity.
Full story...
Have They Forgotten Palestine Yet?
Copyright Dr Annie Higgins, Lebanon, January 2004
Before the launch of the Israeli experiment in 1948, one of its founders summarized the solution to the existing population of Palestine thus: The old ones will die, and the young ones will forget.
How is the solution progressing? Many of the old ones have died, it is true, without ever seeing their homes again, or any justice regarding their forced exile and dispossession.What about their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren?
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Come with me on a bief tour of exile.Our first stop is Nahr al-Barid (pronounced Nahh-Ral-Ba-Red) Refugee Camp in northern Lebanon. This is the first official refugee camp that UNRWA set up for the population fleeing on foot from attacks on their homes in northern Palestine.
We are walking rather briskly through the narrow lanes marked out by the cement-block houses spaced in winding lines three feet apart. Many of the structures reach three storeys high, and a few even higher, severely filtering the sky’s generous daylight. But like the sea that reveals treasures as you dive farther from the sun’s reach, these winding lanes unfold constant scenes of well-wishing and welcome manners. “Peace upon you.” “And upon you peace. How are you today?” “Fine, praise God. God keep you and your children.” There is something about close quarters that brings out either the best or the worst in people. In a constricted passage where one hem brushes another, it is a happy thing that people make these contacts a positive opportunity. The danger of superficiality is overcome by sincerity, even if it is just a tiny portion of humane exchange.
We knock on a metal door divided down the middle. “Please come in!” comes the response. So we push open the right panel of the door with its heart-shaped grille-work, and spill into the breadth of a tiled entrance. Proceeding to the first-floor room that constitutes the house, we shed our shoes at the threshold. One lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provides plenty of light in lieu of the small window letting in a few grey rays. Brightness also comes from the cheery scene of silk flower arrangements sporting assorted colors in various corners. Here is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of three framed pictures placed in aesthetic order on the walls. Here is a red Mother’s Day card with the photo of a mother’s final farewell to her son as he departs to disable the invasion of the homeland. “You see, Tahani? The nation is more precious than the son.”
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Walls in homes and offices become exhibition spaces for the Palestinian flag. More than one door is made into a flag, as the proportions are perfect. The holy places of Jerusalem take myriad forms in photographs, watercolors, oils, pastels, children’s drawings, calendars, bead and shell craft creations, and are framed with flowers or adorned with a martyr postcard. If we were to stack up all of these renditions of the Dome of the Rock, they would surely make a line long enough to thread through all the alleys of the camp.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
We are taking a short drive to Baddawi Refugee Camp which has far fewer people spread over a larger area. Here the sky is bigger than the buildings. But a mural covering the entire side of a building still attracts notice, and we get a full perspective of it from the wide streets and open areas. A four-storey Palestinian flag flies in a blue sky, with a map of Palestine and the Dome of the Rock in the middle. It is signed by the Committee to Support the Resistance in Palestine. This is a delegation of Iranian artists who import their talents during brief visits, and leave colorful reminders of their support on prominent display. Another shows al-Aqsa Mosque with a flag and an armed member of the Resistance in the foreground.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet? Have their outside supporters forgotten Palestine yet?
We travel a little farther this time, and find a portrait high above a main crossroads in Ayn al-Hilwa Refugee Camp. Larger than life, Yahya Ayyash surveys the daily comings and goings, with his traditional checkered scarf/kafiyya wrapped around his neck. He is known as “the engineer” for his technical expertise in planning explosive operations against an invader who began by attacking Palestinian civilians, and has not yet ceased. Israel annihilated him about a decade ago by using his father’s call to detonate a bomb in the mobile phone he was using. His portrait monitors the streets of the camp.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Rain is beginning to fall rather than drizzle, so we stop at a shop with umbrellas in every size hanging from the front awning. Palestinian flags and scarves/kafiyyas and Arafat tee-shirts fill the emporium’s glass shelves. The owner is happy to display his treasures: souvenirs to take back home. Souvenirs that bring home, Palestine, to this place of exile.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Full story...
Before the launch of the Israeli experiment in 1948, one of its founders summarized the solution to the existing population of Palestine thus: The old ones will die, and the young ones will forget.
How is the solution progressing? Many of the old ones have died, it is true, without ever seeing their homes again, or any justice regarding their forced exile and dispossession.What about their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren?
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Come with me on a bief tour of exile.Our first stop is Nahr al-Barid (pronounced Nahh-Ral-Ba-Red) Refugee Camp in northern Lebanon. This is the first official refugee camp that UNRWA set up for the population fleeing on foot from attacks on their homes in northern Palestine.
We are walking rather briskly through the narrow lanes marked out by the cement-block houses spaced in winding lines three feet apart. Many of the structures reach three storeys high, and a few even higher, severely filtering the sky’s generous daylight. But like the sea that reveals treasures as you dive farther from the sun’s reach, these winding lanes unfold constant scenes of well-wishing and welcome manners. “Peace upon you.” “And upon you peace. How are you today?” “Fine, praise God. God keep you and your children.” There is something about close quarters that brings out either the best or the worst in people. In a constricted passage where one hem brushes another, it is a happy thing that people make these contacts a positive opportunity. The danger of superficiality is overcome by sincerity, even if it is just a tiny portion of humane exchange.
We knock on a metal door divided down the middle. “Please come in!” comes the response. So we push open the right panel of the door with its heart-shaped grille-work, and spill into the breadth of a tiled entrance. Proceeding to the first-floor room that constitutes the house, we shed our shoes at the threshold. One lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provides plenty of light in lieu of the small window letting in a few grey rays. Brightness also comes from the cheery scene of silk flower arrangements sporting assorted colors in various corners. Here is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of three framed pictures placed in aesthetic order on the walls. Here is a red Mother’s Day card with the photo of a mother’s final farewell to her son as he departs to disable the invasion of the homeland. “You see, Tahani? The nation is more precious than the son.”
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Walls in homes and offices become exhibition spaces for the Palestinian flag. More than one door is made into a flag, as the proportions are perfect. The holy places of Jerusalem take myriad forms in photographs, watercolors, oils, pastels, children’s drawings, calendars, bead and shell craft creations, and are framed with flowers or adorned with a martyr postcard. If we were to stack up all of these renditions of the Dome of the Rock, they would surely make a line long enough to thread through all the alleys of the camp.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
We are taking a short drive to Baddawi Refugee Camp which has far fewer people spread over a larger area. Here the sky is bigger than the buildings. But a mural covering the entire side of a building still attracts notice, and we get a full perspective of it from the wide streets and open areas. A four-storey Palestinian flag flies in a blue sky, with a map of Palestine and the Dome of the Rock in the middle. It is signed by the Committee to Support the Resistance in Palestine. This is a delegation of Iranian artists who import their talents during brief visits, and leave colorful reminders of their support on prominent display. Another shows al-Aqsa Mosque with a flag and an armed member of the Resistance in the foreground.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet? Have their outside supporters forgotten Palestine yet?
We travel a little farther this time, and find a portrait high above a main crossroads in Ayn al-Hilwa Refugee Camp. Larger than life, Yahya Ayyash surveys the daily comings and goings, with his traditional checkered scarf/kafiyya wrapped around his neck. He is known as “the engineer” for his technical expertise in planning explosive operations against an invader who began by attacking Palestinian civilians, and has not yet ceased. Israel annihilated him about a decade ago by using his father’s call to detonate a bomb in the mobile phone he was using. His portrait monitors the streets of the camp.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Rain is beginning to fall rather than drizzle, so we stop at a shop with umbrellas in every size hanging from the front awning. Palestinian flags and scarves/kafiyyas and Arafat tee-shirts fill the emporium’s glass shelves. The owner is happy to display his treasures: souvenirs to take back home. Souvenirs that bring home, Palestine, to this place of exile.
Have they forgotten Palestine yet?
Full story...
Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue
With Lord Hutton conveniently deflecting attention away from the real issue surrounding the death of David Kelly it looks as if Phony "The Teflon Warmonger" Tony is going to get off, again. Typical really, spin, lies, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, more lies, more spin and even more bullshit, topped off with a Whopper so big as to put BK to shame! I wonder if His Lordship is serving onion-rings or fries with that, and can I get a milkshake instead of that nasty watered-down cola they serve? Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and war is fucking peace, okay?!? Now shut-up and go back to work slave, don't forget your credit card bill!
The government's dogged insistence that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given suffered two serious blows yesterday as ministers braced themselves for the findings of the Hutton inquiry.
As the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was once again forced to defend the justification for going to war, the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.
Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.
He told the Guardian: "We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it."
The admission came as David Kay, who resigned as the coalition's chief weapons inspector in Iraq on Friday, accused the intelligence agencies of failing to detect that Saddam's weapons programme was in disarray as a result of corruption and increasingly erratic leadership.
Mr Straw admitted that it was "disappointing" that the inspectors had not found evidence of the weapons, but said the war with Iraq was more justified today than it had been when MPs voted for the invasion.
"We were never saying that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United Kingdom... The serious and current threat [was] to the world, and that was absolutely true, and I remain convinced it was," he told the BBC Radio 4 programme Today.
The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by Tony Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war.
It was also at the heart of the row between Downing Street and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly.
But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a "crock of shit". "Clearly we have not found WMD," he said.
Full story...
The government's dogged insistence that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given suffered two serious blows yesterday as ministers braced themselves for the findings of the Hutton inquiry.
As the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was once again forced to defend the justification for going to war, the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.
Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.
He told the Guardian: "We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it."
The admission came as David Kay, who resigned as the coalition's chief weapons inspector in Iraq on Friday, accused the intelligence agencies of failing to detect that Saddam's weapons programme was in disarray as a result of corruption and increasingly erratic leadership.
Mr Straw admitted that it was "disappointing" that the inspectors had not found evidence of the weapons, but said the war with Iraq was more justified today than it had been when MPs voted for the invasion.
"We were never saying that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United Kingdom... The serious and current threat [was] to the world, and that was absolutely true, and I remain convinced it was," he told the BBC Radio 4 programme Today.
The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by Tony Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war.
It was also at the heart of the row between Downing Street and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly.
But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a "crock of shit". "Clearly we have not found WMD," he said.
Full story...
Tuesday, 27 January 2004
Three Doctors Dispute How David Kelly Died
Letters forwarded to national British newspapers
As medical professionals, a trauma & orthopaedic surgeon, a specialist anaesthesiologist, and a diagnostic radiologist, we do not think evidence given at the Hutton Inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.
Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist who appeared at the Hutton Inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound in his left wrist. We consider this highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to drastic blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - was completely transected. Complete transection means the artery quickly retracts, promoting clotting of the blood:
"When an artery is completely divided, the highly elastic quality of its wall causes it to retract into the tissues, thereby diminishing the calibre of the vessel and promoting clotting."
A Textbook of Surgery by Christopher, Fourth Edition, 1945, p210
It was reported by the ambulance team that blood at the scene was minimal. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vaso-constricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose 3 litres of blood; in our view it is unlikely that Dr Kelly would have lost more than a pint from the wound described.
Mr Alexander Allan, the toxicologist testifying at the Inquiry, considered the ingestion of co-proxamol insufficient to cause death. Mr Allan could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of co-proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Mr Allan conceded that the blood level of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
In summary, we dispute that Dr Kelly could have died either from haemorrhage or from co-proxamol ingestion. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken in recent days of resuming the inquest into Dr Kelly's death. If it does re-open, a clear need exists for further scrutiny into Dr Hunt's conclusions regarding the cause of death.
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As medical professionals, a trauma & orthopaedic surgeon, a specialist anaesthesiologist, and a diagnostic radiologist, we do not think evidence given at the Hutton Inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.
Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist who appeared at the Hutton Inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound in his left wrist. We consider this highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to drastic blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - was completely transected. Complete transection means the artery quickly retracts, promoting clotting of the blood:
"When an artery is completely divided, the highly elastic quality of its wall causes it to retract into the tissues, thereby diminishing the calibre of the vessel and promoting clotting."
A Textbook of Surgery by Christopher, Fourth Edition, 1945, p210
It was reported by the ambulance team that blood at the scene was minimal. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vaso-constricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose 3 litres of blood; in our view it is unlikely that Dr Kelly would have lost more than a pint from the wound described.
Mr Alexander Allan, the toxicologist testifying at the Inquiry, considered the ingestion of co-proxamol insufficient to cause death. Mr Allan could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of co-proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Mr Allan conceded that the blood level of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
In summary, we dispute that Dr Kelly could have died either from haemorrhage or from co-proxamol ingestion. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken in recent days of resuming the inquest into Dr Kelly's death. If it does re-open, a clear need exists for further scrutiny into Dr Hunt's conclusions regarding the cause of death.
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Anatoliy Golitsyn: The KGB's Most Dangerous Defector
by Trowbridge H. Ford
The KGB's Anatoliy Golitsyn, like all important Soviet defectors, was most dangerous because he was really a disinformation agent, sent over specifically to suggest false targets, to undermine effective opponents, and to exploit distrust that MI5's Peter Wright, the Soviets' leading spy, was especially cultivating among Western intelligence agencies, helping induce them to adopt their own secret agendas in policy, to target leaders, particularly domestic ones, who would not go along, and to coopt politicians who would. Communist disinformation was intended to confuse the West by means of fabricated messages, fake messengers, and false feedback about what Moscow's real intentions were, and how it hoped to achieve them. Real defectors, like Igor Gouzenko, Yuri Nosenko, and Konstantin Volkov, were rendered useless by similar Soviet counterintelligence which either discredited or disposed of them.
While Western historians, particularly Cambridge's Christopher Andrew, have understandably been most reluctant to discuss Golitsyn's alarms - dismissing them generally as well-intended but wild conspiracy theories which a few paranoid counterintelligence officers, especially the Agency's CI Chief James Angleton, and Wright himself, unfortunately took too seriously, as if intelligence agencies are democracies run by majority rules - when they do, they neither put them in the right context nor discuss the countermeasures the West adopted against them. Instead they discuss Golitsyn's operational claims - the KGB had penetrated the intelligence services, including CIA, of every NATO country, would send false defectors to discredit Golitsyn, and was plotting to kill a Western political leader (Mark Rebling, Wedge, pp. 181-2), though even here they never followed their fallout to their obvious conclusions.
By 1961, with the jailing of Gordon Lonsdale's network, the KGB was now more interested in paralyzing Western counterintelligence capability rather than gaining any new intelligence sources. Lonsdale's network had not really been hurt by its imprisonment because the KGB Colonel was no longer needed to recruit new agents and sources, the Krogers aka the Cohens were no longer needed for receiving, and sending intelligence, and Harry Houghton and his girl friend, Ethel Gee, were now convenient scapegoats who had outlived their usefulness as spies. The real spies, headed by the famous 'K' aka Peter Wright and SCOTT, were in place, and capable of developing new sources of information while individually passing along what they had amassed to Moscow by various means. Wright's over-the-top pursuit of Lonsdale had just cleaned up the network so that it could operate more secretly and efficiently.
When Golitsyn defected in December 1961, walking into the American Embassy in Helsinki where he was serving in the KGB residency, and being taken immediately to Ashford Farm in Maryland for debriefing, it is true that East-West relations were most tense because of JFK's unwillingness to support the anti-Castro Cubans, especially their invasion plans, and Khrushchev's surprise construction of the Berlin Wall in August, what historians have concentrated upon. (See, e. g., Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield, p.177ff.) Actually, though, the really important event was the briefing that the Agency's Inspector General Lawrence Houston gave Attorney General Robert Kennedy in October about its use of the Mafia to assassinate the Cuban leader - what RFK took the strongest exception to, and DDP Richard Helms immediately negated by having Wright return to headquarters to reinvigorate the operation.
RFK's reaction to this most counterproductive news to his crime-fighting crusade, what had started in September 1960 after Lee Harvey's Oswald's efforts as a Manchurian Candidate in the USSR were clearly not panning out, was that the CIA should inform the Attorney General if it ever tried it again, what Helms had no intention of doing, once Wright sorted out the friction caused by his lecture on RAFTER with Angleton, and 'Executive Action' head William Harvey over the forced defection of the Polish Intelligence Service's Michael Goleniewski. Wright indicated that the KGB had been able to intercept the CIA's communications with Goleniewski - something that MI5 knew, but had failed to inform the Agency of - which caused his premature exposure, and flight from his native land. Wright had apparently forced the matter because the Bureau's Al Belmont had indicated that Western counterintelligence was closing in on Lonsdale's network when the head of its domestic counterintelligence suggested that the Krogers might indeed be the Cohens.
For Harvey, heading the Agency's assassination program in Cuba, Wright made the need of using the Mafia to kill Castro crystal clear after they cleared up the inter-agency bitterness caused by MI5 failing to inform CIA of the risk it took by continuing to communicate, thanks to Soviet RAFTER capability, with Goleniewski by HF radio. After Wright joked about Harvey having missed the original briefing he had given two years earlier on the need (p. 154), as if Harvey had not been working round the clock to satisfy it, as I tried to show in my article about him, Britain's technical expert made it clear that CIA had no option but to use the Mafia again before JFK worked out some disreputable deal with the Cuban dictator, what Britain's Colonial Office had done with the Cypriot leader, EOKA's Colonel Grivas, before MI5 and the Army could assassinate him.
Wright, after informing them how Britain tried to eliminate Egypt's Gamal Nasser during the Suez Crisis - what the MI5 officer had done more than anyone else to make sure worked out to Moscow's advantage - explained that it was now Langley's problem to resolve with the needed personnel, and improved technical means. After Wright ruled out borrowing soldiers from Special Air Service (SAS), though MI6 might agree to the use of retired personnel, he discussed in most suggestive, but deliberately ill-informed ways Sir William Stephenson's use of the Mafia in New York during WWII (p. 161), and how SIS crudely tried to assassinate Nasser with a poisoned dart, as if he were a stand-in for CIA's efforts against Castro, operations Wright claimed he disapproved of during peacetime. "Beyond that, there was little help I could offer Harvey and Angleton, and I began to feel I had told them more than enough." (p. 162) For good measure, though, Wright concluded: "We're the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It's your responsibility now."
Golitsyn's defection six weeks later just reinforced Wright's message. The defector claimed that Khrushchev, despite his leaked denunciation of Stalin at the 20th CPSU Congress, was still seeking world domination. Now that the General Secretary had crushed his competitors for the leadership, he had given Alexandr Shelepin, the new KBG head, the responsibility of determining how to win the Cold War without war, starting with rapid expansion in the Third World. Instead of the communist world being badly divided, and the disarray growing worse by the day, as the faint-hearted in the West were claiming, Moscow had decided to make a viture out of false appearances, what the new organizations to propagate disinformation, especially Colonel Agayants' Department D, and to promote active measures, particularly the KGB's Department 13, were to perform, once General Serov had been transferred out to head the GRU in mid-1959. In light of all this, Andrew still only asserted that the Soviets only started acting on Shelepin's strategy then, in the summer of 1961 when Golitsyn was planning to defect. (p. 363ff.)
To show that Shelepin meant business, the KGB immediately, it seems, had Bodgan Stashinsky, who had apparently killed Ukrainian ideologue Lev Rebet two years earlier, assassinate Stephan Bandera in October 1959 with a similar spray gun in West Germany, the Ukrainian nationalist leader dying like the tied up dog in the experiment. Two months later, according to Golitsyn, Stashinsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the deeds, and started attending an accelerated English language course so that he could carry out an extensive program of "wet affairs" against Western leaders, especially British ones. In June 1960, as the American presidential election campaign was heating up, Shelepin allegedly impressed upon Khrushchev the need of such covert actions because the Pentagon was allegedly gearing up for a first strike against the USSR.
While the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall to defend better against such a possibility in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, it was one day too late from preventing Stashinsky fleeing to the West where he quickly spilled the beans to a West German court about what Moscow was up to. Stashinsky's confession, though, especially since there were no witnesses to the stairway sprayings, could have been clever disinformation to prime Western countermeasures which Moscow could take advantage of. "According to Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected four months after Stashinsky," Andrew added vaguely, "at least seventeen KGB officers were sacked or demoted." (p. 362) Of course, Golitsyn was put next to Igor Gouzenko, the famous cipher clerk who tried to spill the beans on Soviet atomic spying, on the KGB's death list for the trouble he caused. (p. 367)
With this message, and these credentials, it was hardly surprising that CIA went overboard about anything Golitsyn claimed. While Harvey was busy seeing that anything Castro might come in contact with was sprinkled with some toxic, exploding, or disorienting substance (For more on this, see Senate Select Committee with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1975.), Helms took Golitsyn's serials about moles within CIA most seriously. The problem that Peter Karlow had consequently with the Agency was just the tip of the iceberg. (See Mark Riebling, Wedge, pp. 180-4.)
After the JFK assassination, when Nosenko defected to dampen suspicions of Soviet involvement for his own benefit, as Golitsyn had predicted, CIA was most eager to discredit not only him but anyone attempting to corroborate what he was claiming. Angleton was given the Special Investigations Group under the leadership of Scott Miler to go after targets Golitsyn provided, thanks to FBI feedback. Before it was through, it had discredited another Ukrainian nationalist, CIA's contract agent-handler in Berlin Igor "Sasha" Orlov aka Alexander Koptatsky; Orlov's handler Paul Garbler, Moscow Station Chief who used to play tennis with SIS officer George Blake in Korea, who possibly betrayed Oleg Penkovsky during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Richard Kovich of the Soviet Division who might have compromised Colonel Pyotr Popov during the Berlin Tunnel operation, and Kovich's chief, David Murphy, who was also suspected of betraying Andrew Yankovsky's network in North Korea, while throwing a cloud of suspicion over the Bureau's only important spies, Aleksei Kulak aka Fedora, and Dmitri Polyakov aka Top Hat. "Perhaps Golitsyn had been planted," Reibling belatedly confessed, "to discredit all future KGB sources, no matter who they were" (Emphasis his, p. 225.), a possibility that Andrew would not even entertain. (p. 185)
While Agency CI was pursuing Golitsyn's false leads, he concentrated on getting to higher-ups, ultimately the President, to inform them of the need of fixing Shelepin's strategy, starting with Castro's Cuba. Khrushchev had just appointed Alexandr Alexiev, with the KGB chief's approval, Soviet ambassador to Havana because of his rapport with the increasingly isolated, island nation, and in May, Alexiev sold the idea to Castro of installing Soviet nuclear missiles as the only way of saving his revolution from American aggression. (Jon Lee Anderson, CHE Guevara, p. 523ff.) Golitsyn's mission was to see that the missiles were removed, and the strategically-useless island regime with them. While the defector was able to see RFK about the need, DDP Helms would not let him see the President. After the settlement of the Missile Crisis, Helms saved this task for himself, forcing his way into the Oval Office with allegedly conclusive evidence of Cuba's expansive intentions just before JFK left Washington on his fatal Texas trip. The President ignored Golitsyn's warnings via Helms about monolithic communism at this peril.
At the same time, the defector was creating similar disarray among British intelligence services, what Wright had already anticipated through "the grapevine" when MI5's Arthur Martin informed him that Golitsyn was telling all. (Spycatcher, p. 163ff.) Of course, the Security Service gobbled up his 10 serials, especially about Cambridge's "Ring of Five", like manna from Heaven, leading, thanks to additional hints from Venona decrypts, to the exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and Ultra's John Cairncross who had already fled to Rome, though they had long since stopped spying for the Soviets. Golitsyn fingered homosexual clerk John Vassall, who had been passing NATO secrets from Lord Carrington's office to the Soviets, and confirmed UB officer Michael Goleniewski's claim that George Blake had compromised the Berlin Tunnel Operation. Then there were murkier claims about David and Rosa, who had already been conveniently declared Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, being, in fact, Tess and Victor Rothschild, who had worked with MI5 during the war, and now was head of research at the Shell Oil Company.
Wright, of course, made such a meal of Golitsyn's serials, ultimately even claiming that MI5's DG Roger Hollis was one, that the Security Service was made the laughing stock of Moscow before it was through, even Oleg Gordievsky so reporting to Michael Smith, author of New Cloak, Old Dagger (pp. 62-1), much to Andrew's discomfort. Actually, the pursuit of the serials was the least damaging of the feedback that Wright provided, though, since he used them to see that any associates, even innocent ones, were exposed, and discredited, thanks to technical assistance DDP Richard Helms provided after the Dallas assassination, creating a witch hunt.
More important, Wright used the suspicion of Rothschild to make sure that he supported his program to develop new scientific means of spying, what the Soviets desperately wanted, to pursue Golitsyn's leads about what was allegedly locked up in Moscow's safest safes - i. e., the KGB special file on British intelligence, the index at headquarters on Britain's moles, who in SIS had betrayed "Buster" Crabbe's diving mission when Khrushchev came visiting on the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, who stole Wright's own "Technics" Document, and the like. (p. 278).
Finally, Wright used Golitsyn to confirm that the Soviets had killed the thriving Labour leader Hugh Gaitsell somehow with lupus disseninata when he visited the USSR in 1963 to see that its top agent of influence, Harold Wilson, would be the next Prime Minister. (Actually, Gaitsell was quite sick at the time, so sick that he could have only contracted lupus erythematosus at the Soviet Embassy in London as he never left the country.) Gaitsell's doctor, like Wright, was apparently so surpirsed by his sudden demise that he volunteered his suspicions of foul play to MI5, causing Wright, Martin and Angleton to get involved to prove that the Soviets had done it. (p. 362) (Apparently, the doctor, a counterintelligence specialist, got in touch with the Security Service anytime an important patient died of an unexpected disease.)
The Vietnam War just added fuel to this destructive process against Anglo-American intelligence, one which would only abate with Watergate, and its fallout. While Nixon was being forced to resign after the understanding he reached with his Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig, that he would receive a pardon to escape criminal prosecution, Helms, Harvey, Angleton, Miler, Director Hoover, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, E. Howard Hunt, and William Colby, with their most secret files, departed the Washington intelligence scene too. In the process, though, President Gerald Ford, America's only appointed chief executive, was able to arrange the false legend, thanks to Colby's candor for which he was canned, that his predecessors were responsible for CIA's worst dirty tricks, especially its assassination efforts.
In London, the weakened Heath government, racked by civil unrest because of its too vigorous pursuit of subversion at home and in Northern Ireland, gave way to a suspect Wilson administration. Martin had long since departed from MI5 because of its failure to pursue vigorously enough alleged moles within its ranks, though Wright did stick around long enough to see Margaret Thatcher replace Heath as Conservative Party Leader in Febraury 1975, and the culmination of Golitsyn's undoing of the PM, Wilson resigning in March 1976 despite assurances by the new DCI George Bush that there was no such plot against him. Wright's final contribution to the campaign had been to claim that Wilson was working for the KGB's Vaygaukas through cutout Joseph Kagan, a Lithuanian emigre turned shady businessman. The only evidence for this claim was the fact that Wilson's friend and benefactor sometimes played chess with a Soviet diplomat who was also a KGB agent. (Lewis Baston, Sleaze, 83)
Incredible as it may seem, Golitsyn's network was revived, once Thatcher and Reagan got their rabid anti-communism campaigns together after the hiccup caused by Argentina's seizure of the Falklands. Just as Washington was giving up on its tough economic sanctions against the USSR, what risked doing the greatest damage to NATO because of how it effected British interests, its submarines started operating in Swedish waters contrary to the policy and knowledge of Stockholm's new statsminister, Olof Palme. The British Prime Minister approved every intrusion, according to Ola Tunander's Harsfjarden (p. 13), complementing what Reagan had agreed to the US Navy doing off the Kola peninsula the previous year. (Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff, p. 315ff.) Sir Keith Speed, a former Navy Minister under Thatcher, and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's SOD, admitted as much in March and April 2000 interviews for the Swedish TV2 program Striptease.
The unknown American and British intrusions into the Stockholm archipelago in October 1982 recalled the Soviets' U-137 going aground off Karlskrona before Palme regained power. The new intrusions created a chorus of disapproval against the new statsminister, defense experts in London and Washington, especially Milton Leitenberg, and Gordon McCormick, universally clamoring that he was permitting Moscow's U-boats to use Swedish waters for offensive purposes, and allowing them to escape undetected when threatened with exposure. The effect of the NATO disinformation campaign was dramatically demonstrated when Swedish public opinion, fearful of Soviet intentions, tripled in only three years.
To legitimize the campaign against Palme, CIA's Scott Miler, MI5's Arthur Martin, and MI6's Stephen de Mowbray, now retired, persuaded Golitsyn to publish his latest thoughts about KGB disinformation, New Lies For Old, even providing an introduction to strengthen its Sisyphean message (p. xvi), and published both in England and America in 1984. According to Wright, de Mowbray, SIS's handler of Golitsyn, kept alive their claims of KGB penetration of the Security Service. (p. 202ff.) Golitsyn now saw Moscow's cycle of deception entering a new, most dangerous phase in which the Soviets' leading agent of influence threatened to achieve what Eurocommunists, social democrats, and misguided fellow-travellers were vaguely attempting, based upon the classic communist "false flag" recruitment technique.
Thanks to Golitsyn's alleged experience in the NATO section of the Information Department of the KGB's FCD during 1959-60, he slowly developed a tale of betrayal, especially in Scandinavia, centered around this claim: "A KGB agent was planted on the leadership of the Swedish social democratic party" (p. 55), whose interests Moscow was willing to promote by selected assassination, as Stashinsky did to Bandera on Shelepin's orders (ibid.), and the Soviets did to Afghan President Amin in 1979. (p. 164) Along the way, Golitsyn used other social democrats, like Finland's Herta Kuusinen and Mauno Koivisto, as substitutes for this agent's dangerous policies of "Finlandizing" the whole of Europe.
It was only three hundred pages later, though, that the reader discovered that the culprit was, in fact, Palme (p. 349), the social democrat who threatened to make Soviet stooges out of all of Scandinavians for Moscow's strategic purposes, what "Leader" (p. 282ff.) and "Timo" (p. 285ff.) allegedly had only been able to achieve within Finland, though they seem fictions invented by the author for dramatic effect. According to Golitsyn, Palme made himself so indispensible to statsminister Tage Erlander, thanks to his recruitment by Novosti's bureau chief in Stockholm, N. V. Nejland (p. 287ff.), to pass along messages to Moscow, for which he was paid, that Erlander intended for the American and British ambassadors, that he replaced him. Novosti was the leading organ of Shelepin's disinformation campaign. (p. 46)
It was little over a year later on February 28, 1986 that Golitsyn got what he wanted, Palme's assassination, neutralizing at the strategic level the "...political damage caused by communist agents of influence and their disinformation." (p. 363) This was despite the statsminister's most vigorous efforts to show that he was not a Soviet stooge, even sacking his foreign minister, Lennart Bodstrom, when he dismissed the idea of Soviet submarine intrusions. Apparently, London and Washington took Golitsyn's claims more seriously than the statsminister's actions. In the end, the libel judgment in January 1986 against Private Eye, for denying two years earlier American Ambassador to Helsinki Mark Austad's claim that all Scandinavians were Soviet stooges, had provided the former CIA agent ample reward for repeating Golitsyn's warning.
Of course, Golitsyn's published views had helped tip off Moscow what the West was planning in Stockholm, explaining why Vitali Yurchenko "defected" to the CIA in August 1985 to check on the bona fides of its Aldrich "Rick" Ames as a Soviet spy in the double-agent Operation Courtship, and why, after being briefed by defector Gordievsky about current operations, he rushed without authority, thanks to the assistance of fellow spy, the FBI's Robert Hanssen, to the Soviet Embassy in Washington two weeks before the statsminister's shooting to inform Moscow of its timing. On the day of the assassination, KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov even gave an unprecedented press conference in Moscow, warning the West that all its double-agent operations had been rolled up. For good measure, the KGB closed down its residency that night in Stockholm to make sure that neither the Agency nor Sweden's Security Service gained any damaging feedback while it was being carried out, making it such an isolated act that it almost defied solution.
When Stockholm duly failed to provide a solution to the most expert operation, something that only elite special forces were capable of, Golitsyn's disinformation became highly dangerous, explaining why MI5's DD Anthony Duff did a flip-flop over the appearance of Spycatcher. While Wright was finishing the manuscript, and trying to find a publisher, Duff went to unprecedented lengths, even going public in the press, to stop him. It was only when Britain's High Court was hearing the appeal for an injunction against publication in the UK that Duff suddenly gave up the fight, as Mr. Justice Scott noted: MI5 had taken no steps to prevent the importation of copies from America, or the publication of books with similar complaints of the Security Service. (Smith, note 18, p. 285)
The reason was clear - MI5 could take comfort in what Wright was now most wrong about. Britain was no longer the junior partner in operations that Harvey had previously conducted -having provided the assassin, apparently Captain Simon Hayward aka Captain James Rennie, the Ops Officer of the 14 Intelligence Company's South Detachment, in the Palme shooting - and the Security Service had clearly done more with Golitlsyn than its former Assistant Director had claimed. Duff was most willing to take the heat for all the failed operations, and the too vigorous pursuit of alleged subversives in return for this refusal of British help to CIA's assassination program: " ' They don't freelance, Bill ', I told him. ' You could try to pick them up retired, but you'd have to see Six about that.' " (p. 161) About the defector, Wright, retired for over a decade, added: "Although MI5 avoided the excesses of the CIA, Golitsin was still badly handled. He was allowed to think himself too important. All defectors should be treated at arm's length, and made to earn their keep, and as little feedback as possible should ever be given them.... Right from his first visit to Britain in 1963, we opened up to Golitsin, and I was responsible for that as much an anyone." (p. 315)
Under the circumstances, CIA understandably felt obliged, after a decent interval to dim recollections, to come to Golitsyn's defense, Riebling claiming that he had proved a real Cassandra in New Lies for Old when it came to the Soviet Union! (p. 407ff.) Despite all the harsh criticism by reviewers, Riebling contended, Golitsyn had predicted all the important changes which led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to power, and the transformations which led to the collapse of the USSR: "This person's analysis of events in the communist world had even been provided to the Agency on a regular basis. But the American intelligence community had chosen not to listen - and the roots of that willful deafness could be traced back, ultimately thirty years, to a series of developments that caused a clash of mind-sets between CIA and FBI."
The contortions and contradictions that Anglo-American intelligence services went through to deny Golitsyn's extensive use were repeated in how London was forced at the same time to handle the Captain Simon Hayward matter. After SIS had been forced to set him up on a drug smuggling charge in Sweden because of opposition by 'Steak Knife', the British Army's most important mole among the republican paramilitaries, to his use in operations against arms shipments from Libya for the PIRA, culminating in the capture of Eksund at the end of October 1987, Margaret Thatcher was sacked three years later as Prime Minister because of its fallout.
The KGB's Anatoliy Golitsyn, like all important Soviet defectors, was most dangerous because he was really a disinformation agent, sent over specifically to suggest false targets, to undermine effective opponents, and to exploit distrust that MI5's Peter Wright, the Soviets' leading spy, was especially cultivating among Western intelligence agencies, helping induce them to adopt their own secret agendas in policy, to target leaders, particularly domestic ones, who would not go along, and to coopt politicians who would. Communist disinformation was intended to confuse the West by means of fabricated messages, fake messengers, and false feedback about what Moscow's real intentions were, and how it hoped to achieve them. Real defectors, like Igor Gouzenko, Yuri Nosenko, and Konstantin Volkov, were rendered useless by similar Soviet counterintelligence which either discredited or disposed of them.
While Western historians, particularly Cambridge's Christopher Andrew, have understandably been most reluctant to discuss Golitsyn's alarms - dismissing them generally as well-intended but wild conspiracy theories which a few paranoid counterintelligence officers, especially the Agency's CI Chief James Angleton, and Wright himself, unfortunately took too seriously, as if intelligence agencies are democracies run by majority rules - when they do, they neither put them in the right context nor discuss the countermeasures the West adopted against them. Instead they discuss Golitsyn's operational claims - the KGB had penetrated the intelligence services, including CIA, of every NATO country, would send false defectors to discredit Golitsyn, and was plotting to kill a Western political leader (Mark Rebling, Wedge, pp. 181-2), though even here they never followed their fallout to their obvious conclusions.
By 1961, with the jailing of Gordon Lonsdale's network, the KGB was now more interested in paralyzing Western counterintelligence capability rather than gaining any new intelligence sources. Lonsdale's network had not really been hurt by its imprisonment because the KGB Colonel was no longer needed to recruit new agents and sources, the Krogers aka the Cohens were no longer needed for receiving, and sending intelligence, and Harry Houghton and his girl friend, Ethel Gee, were now convenient scapegoats who had outlived their usefulness as spies. The real spies, headed by the famous 'K' aka Peter Wright and SCOTT, were in place, and capable of developing new sources of information while individually passing along what they had amassed to Moscow by various means. Wright's over-the-top pursuit of Lonsdale had just cleaned up the network so that it could operate more secretly and efficiently.
When Golitsyn defected in December 1961, walking into the American Embassy in Helsinki where he was serving in the KGB residency, and being taken immediately to Ashford Farm in Maryland for debriefing, it is true that East-West relations were most tense because of JFK's unwillingness to support the anti-Castro Cubans, especially their invasion plans, and Khrushchev's surprise construction of the Berlin Wall in August, what historians have concentrated upon. (See, e. g., Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield, p.177ff.) Actually, though, the really important event was the briefing that the Agency's Inspector General Lawrence Houston gave Attorney General Robert Kennedy in October about its use of the Mafia to assassinate the Cuban leader - what RFK took the strongest exception to, and DDP Richard Helms immediately negated by having Wright return to headquarters to reinvigorate the operation.
RFK's reaction to this most counterproductive news to his crime-fighting crusade, what had started in September 1960 after Lee Harvey's Oswald's efforts as a Manchurian Candidate in the USSR were clearly not panning out, was that the CIA should inform the Attorney General if it ever tried it again, what Helms had no intention of doing, once Wright sorted out the friction caused by his lecture on RAFTER with Angleton, and 'Executive Action' head William Harvey over the forced defection of the Polish Intelligence Service's Michael Goleniewski. Wright indicated that the KGB had been able to intercept the CIA's communications with Goleniewski - something that MI5 knew, but had failed to inform the Agency of - which caused his premature exposure, and flight from his native land. Wright had apparently forced the matter because the Bureau's Al Belmont had indicated that Western counterintelligence was closing in on Lonsdale's network when the head of its domestic counterintelligence suggested that the Krogers might indeed be the Cohens.
For Harvey, heading the Agency's assassination program in Cuba, Wright made the need of using the Mafia to kill Castro crystal clear after they cleared up the inter-agency bitterness caused by MI5 failing to inform CIA of the risk it took by continuing to communicate, thanks to Soviet RAFTER capability, with Goleniewski by HF radio. After Wright joked about Harvey having missed the original briefing he had given two years earlier on the need (p. 154), as if Harvey had not been working round the clock to satisfy it, as I tried to show in my article about him, Britain's technical expert made it clear that CIA had no option but to use the Mafia again before JFK worked out some disreputable deal with the Cuban dictator, what Britain's Colonial Office had done with the Cypriot leader, EOKA's Colonel Grivas, before MI5 and the Army could assassinate him.
Wright, after informing them how Britain tried to eliminate Egypt's Gamal Nasser during the Suez Crisis - what the MI5 officer had done more than anyone else to make sure worked out to Moscow's advantage - explained that it was now Langley's problem to resolve with the needed personnel, and improved technical means. After Wright ruled out borrowing soldiers from Special Air Service (SAS), though MI6 might agree to the use of retired personnel, he discussed in most suggestive, but deliberately ill-informed ways Sir William Stephenson's use of the Mafia in New York during WWII (p. 161), and how SIS crudely tried to assassinate Nasser with a poisoned dart, as if he were a stand-in for CIA's efforts against Castro, operations Wright claimed he disapproved of during peacetime. "Beyond that, there was little help I could offer Harvey and Angleton, and I began to feel I had told them more than enough." (p. 162) For good measure, though, Wright concluded: "We're the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It's your responsibility now."
Golitsyn's defection six weeks later just reinforced Wright's message. The defector claimed that Khrushchev, despite his leaked denunciation of Stalin at the 20th CPSU Congress, was still seeking world domination. Now that the General Secretary had crushed his competitors for the leadership, he had given Alexandr Shelepin, the new KBG head, the responsibility of determining how to win the Cold War without war, starting with rapid expansion in the Third World. Instead of the communist world being badly divided, and the disarray growing worse by the day, as the faint-hearted in the West were claiming, Moscow had decided to make a viture out of false appearances, what the new organizations to propagate disinformation, especially Colonel Agayants' Department D, and to promote active measures, particularly the KGB's Department 13, were to perform, once General Serov had been transferred out to head the GRU in mid-1959. In light of all this, Andrew still only asserted that the Soviets only started acting on Shelepin's strategy then, in the summer of 1961 when Golitsyn was planning to defect. (p. 363ff.)
To show that Shelepin meant business, the KGB immediately, it seems, had Bodgan Stashinsky, who had apparently killed Ukrainian ideologue Lev Rebet two years earlier, assassinate Stephan Bandera in October 1959 with a similar spray gun in West Germany, the Ukrainian nationalist leader dying like the tied up dog in the experiment. Two months later, according to Golitsyn, Stashinsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the deeds, and started attending an accelerated English language course so that he could carry out an extensive program of "wet affairs" against Western leaders, especially British ones. In June 1960, as the American presidential election campaign was heating up, Shelepin allegedly impressed upon Khrushchev the need of such covert actions because the Pentagon was allegedly gearing up for a first strike against the USSR.
While the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall to defend better against such a possibility in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, it was one day too late from preventing Stashinsky fleeing to the West where he quickly spilled the beans to a West German court about what Moscow was up to. Stashinsky's confession, though, especially since there were no witnesses to the stairway sprayings, could have been clever disinformation to prime Western countermeasures which Moscow could take advantage of. "According to Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected four months after Stashinsky," Andrew added vaguely, "at least seventeen KGB officers were sacked or demoted." (p. 362) Of course, Golitsyn was put next to Igor Gouzenko, the famous cipher clerk who tried to spill the beans on Soviet atomic spying, on the KGB's death list for the trouble he caused. (p. 367)
With this message, and these credentials, it was hardly surprising that CIA went overboard about anything Golitsyn claimed. While Harvey was busy seeing that anything Castro might come in contact with was sprinkled with some toxic, exploding, or disorienting substance (For more on this, see Senate Select Committee with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1975.), Helms took Golitsyn's serials about moles within CIA most seriously. The problem that Peter Karlow had consequently with the Agency was just the tip of the iceberg. (See Mark Riebling, Wedge, pp. 180-4.)
After the JFK assassination, when Nosenko defected to dampen suspicions of Soviet involvement for his own benefit, as Golitsyn had predicted, CIA was most eager to discredit not only him but anyone attempting to corroborate what he was claiming. Angleton was given the Special Investigations Group under the leadership of Scott Miler to go after targets Golitsyn provided, thanks to FBI feedback. Before it was through, it had discredited another Ukrainian nationalist, CIA's contract agent-handler in Berlin Igor "Sasha" Orlov aka Alexander Koptatsky; Orlov's handler Paul Garbler, Moscow Station Chief who used to play tennis with SIS officer George Blake in Korea, who possibly betrayed Oleg Penkovsky during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Richard Kovich of the Soviet Division who might have compromised Colonel Pyotr Popov during the Berlin Tunnel operation, and Kovich's chief, David Murphy, who was also suspected of betraying Andrew Yankovsky's network in North Korea, while throwing a cloud of suspicion over the Bureau's only important spies, Aleksei Kulak aka Fedora, and Dmitri Polyakov aka Top Hat. "Perhaps Golitsyn had been planted," Reibling belatedly confessed, "to discredit all future KGB sources, no matter who they were" (Emphasis his, p. 225.), a possibility that Andrew would not even entertain. (p. 185)
While Agency CI was pursuing Golitsyn's false leads, he concentrated on getting to higher-ups, ultimately the President, to inform them of the need of fixing Shelepin's strategy, starting with Castro's Cuba. Khrushchev had just appointed Alexandr Alexiev, with the KGB chief's approval, Soviet ambassador to Havana because of his rapport with the increasingly isolated, island nation, and in May, Alexiev sold the idea to Castro of installing Soviet nuclear missiles as the only way of saving his revolution from American aggression. (Jon Lee Anderson, CHE Guevara, p. 523ff.) Golitsyn's mission was to see that the missiles were removed, and the strategically-useless island regime with them. While the defector was able to see RFK about the need, DDP Helms would not let him see the President. After the settlement of the Missile Crisis, Helms saved this task for himself, forcing his way into the Oval Office with allegedly conclusive evidence of Cuba's expansive intentions just before JFK left Washington on his fatal Texas trip. The President ignored Golitsyn's warnings via Helms about monolithic communism at this peril.
At the same time, the defector was creating similar disarray among British intelligence services, what Wright had already anticipated through "the grapevine" when MI5's Arthur Martin informed him that Golitsyn was telling all. (Spycatcher, p. 163ff.) Of course, the Security Service gobbled up his 10 serials, especially about Cambridge's "Ring of Five", like manna from Heaven, leading, thanks to additional hints from Venona decrypts, to the exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and Ultra's John Cairncross who had already fled to Rome, though they had long since stopped spying for the Soviets. Golitsyn fingered homosexual clerk John Vassall, who had been passing NATO secrets from Lord Carrington's office to the Soviets, and confirmed UB officer Michael Goleniewski's claim that George Blake had compromised the Berlin Tunnel Operation. Then there were murkier claims about David and Rosa, who had already been conveniently declared Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, being, in fact, Tess and Victor Rothschild, who had worked with MI5 during the war, and now was head of research at the Shell Oil Company.
Wright, of course, made such a meal of Golitsyn's serials, ultimately even claiming that MI5's DG Roger Hollis was one, that the Security Service was made the laughing stock of Moscow before it was through, even Oleg Gordievsky so reporting to Michael Smith, author of New Cloak, Old Dagger (pp. 62-1), much to Andrew's discomfort. Actually, the pursuit of the serials was the least damaging of the feedback that Wright provided, though, since he used them to see that any associates, even innocent ones, were exposed, and discredited, thanks to technical assistance DDP Richard Helms provided after the Dallas assassination, creating a witch hunt.
More important, Wright used the suspicion of Rothschild to make sure that he supported his program to develop new scientific means of spying, what the Soviets desperately wanted, to pursue Golitsyn's leads about what was allegedly locked up in Moscow's safest safes - i. e., the KGB special file on British intelligence, the index at headquarters on Britain's moles, who in SIS had betrayed "Buster" Crabbe's diving mission when Khrushchev came visiting on the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, who stole Wright's own "Technics" Document, and the like. (p. 278).
Finally, Wright used Golitsyn to confirm that the Soviets had killed the thriving Labour leader Hugh Gaitsell somehow with lupus disseninata when he visited the USSR in 1963 to see that its top agent of influence, Harold Wilson, would be the next Prime Minister. (Actually, Gaitsell was quite sick at the time, so sick that he could have only contracted lupus erythematosus at the Soviet Embassy in London as he never left the country.) Gaitsell's doctor, like Wright, was apparently so surpirsed by his sudden demise that he volunteered his suspicions of foul play to MI5, causing Wright, Martin and Angleton to get involved to prove that the Soviets had done it. (p. 362) (Apparently, the doctor, a counterintelligence specialist, got in touch with the Security Service anytime an important patient died of an unexpected disease.)
The Vietnam War just added fuel to this destructive process against Anglo-American intelligence, one which would only abate with Watergate, and its fallout. While Nixon was being forced to resign after the understanding he reached with his Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig, that he would receive a pardon to escape criminal prosecution, Helms, Harvey, Angleton, Miler, Director Hoover, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, E. Howard Hunt, and William Colby, with their most secret files, departed the Washington intelligence scene too. In the process, though, President Gerald Ford, America's only appointed chief executive, was able to arrange the false legend, thanks to Colby's candor for which he was canned, that his predecessors were responsible for CIA's worst dirty tricks, especially its assassination efforts.
In London, the weakened Heath government, racked by civil unrest because of its too vigorous pursuit of subversion at home and in Northern Ireland, gave way to a suspect Wilson administration. Martin had long since departed from MI5 because of its failure to pursue vigorously enough alleged moles within its ranks, though Wright did stick around long enough to see Margaret Thatcher replace Heath as Conservative Party Leader in Febraury 1975, and the culmination of Golitsyn's undoing of the PM, Wilson resigning in March 1976 despite assurances by the new DCI George Bush that there was no such plot against him. Wright's final contribution to the campaign had been to claim that Wilson was working for the KGB's Vaygaukas through cutout Joseph Kagan, a Lithuanian emigre turned shady businessman. The only evidence for this claim was the fact that Wilson's friend and benefactor sometimes played chess with a Soviet diplomat who was also a KGB agent. (Lewis Baston, Sleaze, 83)
Incredible as it may seem, Golitsyn's network was revived, once Thatcher and Reagan got their rabid anti-communism campaigns together after the hiccup caused by Argentina's seizure of the Falklands. Just as Washington was giving up on its tough economic sanctions against the USSR, what risked doing the greatest damage to NATO because of how it effected British interests, its submarines started operating in Swedish waters contrary to the policy and knowledge of Stockholm's new statsminister, Olof Palme. The British Prime Minister approved every intrusion, according to Ola Tunander's Harsfjarden (p. 13), complementing what Reagan had agreed to the US Navy doing off the Kola peninsula the previous year. (Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff, p. 315ff.) Sir Keith Speed, a former Navy Minister under Thatcher, and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's SOD, admitted as much in March and April 2000 interviews for the Swedish TV2 program Striptease.
The unknown American and British intrusions into the Stockholm archipelago in October 1982 recalled the Soviets' U-137 going aground off Karlskrona before Palme regained power. The new intrusions created a chorus of disapproval against the new statsminister, defense experts in London and Washington, especially Milton Leitenberg, and Gordon McCormick, universally clamoring that he was permitting Moscow's U-boats to use Swedish waters for offensive purposes, and allowing them to escape undetected when threatened with exposure. The effect of the NATO disinformation campaign was dramatically demonstrated when Swedish public opinion, fearful of Soviet intentions, tripled in only three years.
To legitimize the campaign against Palme, CIA's Scott Miler, MI5's Arthur Martin, and MI6's Stephen de Mowbray, now retired, persuaded Golitsyn to publish his latest thoughts about KGB disinformation, New Lies For Old, even providing an introduction to strengthen its Sisyphean message (p. xvi), and published both in England and America in 1984. According to Wright, de Mowbray, SIS's handler of Golitsyn, kept alive their claims of KGB penetration of the Security Service. (p. 202ff.) Golitsyn now saw Moscow's cycle of deception entering a new, most dangerous phase in which the Soviets' leading agent of influence threatened to achieve what Eurocommunists, social democrats, and misguided fellow-travellers were vaguely attempting, based upon the classic communist "false flag" recruitment technique.
Thanks to Golitsyn's alleged experience in the NATO section of the Information Department of the KGB's FCD during 1959-60, he slowly developed a tale of betrayal, especially in Scandinavia, centered around this claim: "A KGB agent was planted on the leadership of the Swedish social democratic party" (p. 55), whose interests Moscow was willing to promote by selected assassination, as Stashinsky did to Bandera on Shelepin's orders (ibid.), and the Soviets did to Afghan President Amin in 1979. (p. 164) Along the way, Golitsyn used other social democrats, like Finland's Herta Kuusinen and Mauno Koivisto, as substitutes for this agent's dangerous policies of "Finlandizing" the whole of Europe.
It was only three hundred pages later, though, that the reader discovered that the culprit was, in fact, Palme (p. 349), the social democrat who threatened to make Soviet stooges out of all of Scandinavians for Moscow's strategic purposes, what "Leader" (p. 282ff.) and "Timo" (p. 285ff.) allegedly had only been able to achieve within Finland, though they seem fictions invented by the author for dramatic effect. According to Golitsyn, Palme made himself so indispensible to statsminister Tage Erlander, thanks to his recruitment by Novosti's bureau chief in Stockholm, N. V. Nejland (p. 287ff.), to pass along messages to Moscow, for which he was paid, that Erlander intended for the American and British ambassadors, that he replaced him. Novosti was the leading organ of Shelepin's disinformation campaign. (p. 46)
It was little over a year later on February 28, 1986 that Golitsyn got what he wanted, Palme's assassination, neutralizing at the strategic level the "...political damage caused by communist agents of influence and their disinformation." (p. 363) This was despite the statsminister's most vigorous efforts to show that he was not a Soviet stooge, even sacking his foreign minister, Lennart Bodstrom, when he dismissed the idea of Soviet submarine intrusions. Apparently, London and Washington took Golitsyn's claims more seriously than the statsminister's actions. In the end, the libel judgment in January 1986 against Private Eye, for denying two years earlier American Ambassador to Helsinki Mark Austad's claim that all Scandinavians were Soviet stooges, had provided the former CIA agent ample reward for repeating Golitsyn's warning.
Of course, Golitsyn's published views had helped tip off Moscow what the West was planning in Stockholm, explaining why Vitali Yurchenko "defected" to the CIA in August 1985 to check on the bona fides of its Aldrich "Rick" Ames as a Soviet spy in the double-agent Operation Courtship, and why, after being briefed by defector Gordievsky about current operations, he rushed without authority, thanks to the assistance of fellow spy, the FBI's Robert Hanssen, to the Soviet Embassy in Washington two weeks before the statsminister's shooting to inform Moscow of its timing. On the day of the assassination, KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov even gave an unprecedented press conference in Moscow, warning the West that all its double-agent operations had been rolled up. For good measure, the KGB closed down its residency that night in Stockholm to make sure that neither the Agency nor Sweden's Security Service gained any damaging feedback while it was being carried out, making it such an isolated act that it almost defied solution.
When Stockholm duly failed to provide a solution to the most expert operation, something that only elite special forces were capable of, Golitsyn's disinformation became highly dangerous, explaining why MI5's DD Anthony Duff did a flip-flop over the appearance of Spycatcher. While Wright was finishing the manuscript, and trying to find a publisher, Duff went to unprecedented lengths, even going public in the press, to stop him. It was only when Britain's High Court was hearing the appeal for an injunction against publication in the UK that Duff suddenly gave up the fight, as Mr. Justice Scott noted: MI5 had taken no steps to prevent the importation of copies from America, or the publication of books with similar complaints of the Security Service. (Smith, note 18, p. 285)
The reason was clear - MI5 could take comfort in what Wright was now most wrong about. Britain was no longer the junior partner in operations that Harvey had previously conducted -having provided the assassin, apparently Captain Simon Hayward aka Captain James Rennie, the Ops Officer of the 14 Intelligence Company's South Detachment, in the Palme shooting - and the Security Service had clearly done more with Golitlsyn than its former Assistant Director had claimed. Duff was most willing to take the heat for all the failed operations, and the too vigorous pursuit of alleged subversives in return for this refusal of British help to CIA's assassination program: " ' They don't freelance, Bill ', I told him. ' You could try to pick them up retired, but you'd have to see Six about that.' " (p. 161) About the defector, Wright, retired for over a decade, added: "Although MI5 avoided the excesses of the CIA, Golitsin was still badly handled. He was allowed to think himself too important. All defectors should be treated at arm's length, and made to earn their keep, and as little feedback as possible should ever be given them.... Right from his first visit to Britain in 1963, we opened up to Golitsin, and I was responsible for that as much an anyone." (p. 315)
Under the circumstances, CIA understandably felt obliged, after a decent interval to dim recollections, to come to Golitsyn's defense, Riebling claiming that he had proved a real Cassandra in New Lies for Old when it came to the Soviet Union! (p. 407ff.) Despite all the harsh criticism by reviewers, Riebling contended, Golitsyn had predicted all the important changes which led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to power, and the transformations which led to the collapse of the USSR: "This person's analysis of events in the communist world had even been provided to the Agency on a regular basis. But the American intelligence community had chosen not to listen - and the roots of that willful deafness could be traced back, ultimately thirty years, to a series of developments that caused a clash of mind-sets between CIA and FBI."
The contortions and contradictions that Anglo-American intelligence services went through to deny Golitsyn's extensive use were repeated in how London was forced at the same time to handle the Captain Simon Hayward matter. After SIS had been forced to set him up on a drug smuggling charge in Sweden because of opposition by 'Steak Knife', the British Army's most important mole among the republican paramilitaries, to his use in operations against arms shipments from Libya for the PIRA, culminating in the capture of Eksund at the end of October 1987, Margaret Thatcher was sacked three years later as Prime Minister because of its fallout.
Confessions of an American Counterspy in Paris during the Korean War
by Trowbridge H. Ford
I have never written about my experience a half-century ago in the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in its Paris Field Office because of feelings of guilt, embarrassment, constraints, ignorance, and other priorities, a heady mixture which other counterintelligence agents might have seen as simply paranoia if matters had turned out worse.
When Robert Hanssen, a top FBI counterintelligence officer in New York, was confronted by Anglo-American operations during 1985-6, especially Operation Courtship's double agent Sergei Motorin's assignment in Moscow to call a girlfriend in America to indicate that the Soviets had been completely surprised by the assassination of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme, what threatened the world's very survival, he felt obliged to spy for the Soviets, though he hated communism, was so troubled by what he was doing that he constantly confessed his sins to his priest, and did not need nor want the money, even giving it away to a hooker he never used.
This led Tom Mangold, the biographer of CIA's James Angleton, to conclude wrongly in a recent New York Times OP-ED piece that it was the result of the paranoia and loneliness the job induced, what caused the former CI Chief to incarcerate defector Yuri Nosenko, like the Soviets did with defectors, when he claimed that they had had nothing to do with the JFK assassination. Actually, DDP Richard Helms was responsible for Nosenko being locked up in a cell at Camp Peary, and he did it, as I tried to show in my article about him, to help hide the Agency's involvement, especially with Lee Harvey Oswald.
As with all official historians, the idea that Western intelligence agencies could commit horrendous blunders was not in Mangold's conceptual framework. Spying is always the result of something unexpected, like a secret political agenda, or expensive tastes, or something lacking, like basic integrity, in the spy. The counterspy, however, is in a better position than the simple spy to know what is really going on, what can bring into play all kinds of humanistic, mental, and probability calculations, especially if he has much experience.
He may be forced to see just how stupid, unnecessary, or criminal, even reckless, intelligence operations are, though they are not serious enough for him to officially complain, or to put them in print, much less spy for the other side. The differences between my career as a counterspy and Hanssen's are that my superiors never took matters to such ridiculous lengths that I had to spy for Moscow, though they broke almost every standard I came to know in carrying out what should have been the most routine tasks.
When I received my A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1952, I decided not to enter graduate school, making myself immediately available for the draft. I was an Army brat from the Depression years who grew up with a very false, insulated view of the world, though possessing enough intelligence to suspect that there had to be more to things than I gleaned from army life. Early on, all I knew was that I did not want to follow in my father's footsteps, and attend West Point.
Service life is the closest America ever has come to the welfare state with one's material and physical needs basically satisfied, though at terrible mental, cultural and psychological costs. I shall never forget how my childhood chums were always wondering why my family had some bookcases containing some of the world's classics. They were a local wonder, like collections of space rocks, or clerical relics. It was to compensate for this deprivation that I was sent off from the boondocks to a New England prep school at the end of WWII, and then on to college as the Cold War was heating up.
While I did well enough to graduate, all I thought that was necessary, I should have made more of the opportunities, though my choice of becoming a medical doctor, and McCarthyism were already affecting adversely the process. It was only after I had finished most of the pre-med requirement, a host of courses noted for their dryness, and drudgery, that I discovered that I didn't want to be one, especially because of my near pathological fear of seeing blood, particularly my own.
In searching around for a substitute, I wanted to register for a course taught by Franz Neumann, the famous political theorist whose study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth, has become a classic. Of course, with my grades, and background, it was out of the question, and I had to settle for a course taught by Ralph Bowen on the Enlightenment, one in which he discussed everything about the period except what the philosophes actually thought.
It was only recently that I read that they both might well have been important Soviet spies. According to John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their chapter in Venona on spies in the U. S. government, Neuman aka Ruff, an economist in the OSS, was a Soviet agent (pp. 194-5) who worked with the infamous Elizabeth Bentley (p. 220), and Bowen aka Alan, while working for the State Department in some economic capacity (p. 247), had been targeted to become one during WWII by Flora Wovschin, a KGB asset so noted for collecting information from contacts that she had taken over handling them, much to the disapproval of Moscow's spy masters.
Haynes and Klehr cited Neumann twice in Appendix A, those who had covert relations with the Soviets, and based the claim upon a clarification of what had been stated about Ruff in Allen Weinstein's and Alexander Vassiliev's The Haunted Wood. It seems that there were two Ruffs, though, but Haynes and Klehr are quite sure that the dangerous one was Neumann (n. 218, p. 459). Nigel West, in his Venona, added to the catch by claiming that Bowen continued to spy for the Soviets even after Wovschin aka Zora had arrived in USSR in 1949, the year before I took the course with him.
Now, all this is misuse of Venona fragments by most ignorant analysts to make the worst case possible against the persons in question. That any authors could publish a book, especially by Yale University Press, and claim that Neumann was an economist does not imspire confidence in their work. Robin W. Winks, in YUP's Cloak & Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, published in 1987, had a most positive view of Neumann, seeing him as not only a "superb intellectual historian and political analyst" (p. 85), but also a dedicated naturalized citizen who held OSS's Central European section together as best he could despite its weak leadership, disparate interests, and sharp differences about Germany's future. Under these circumstance, to clarify the false claim by Weinstein and Vassiliev about Ruff at Neumann's expense, rather than admit that the matter is just too confused to be resolved with the evidence available, was a form of witch hunting, which they then go on to compound by claiming that he worked with Bentley when he clearly was not that Ruff.
Similar complaints can be made of Bowen's treatment who was an historian of ideas when they indicated that he may well have been an important economic spy. What could a person with knowledge about thinkers like Rousseau, Fenelon, and Montesquieu have had which the KGB would be even the slightest bit interested in? (They wouldn't claim, would they, that this was why his lectures were so boring - he was saving all the interesting bits for Moscow?) Bowen was simply a broken man by the time I met him. This fishing expedition for important spies became even more vindictive when Haynes and Klehr discussed the unsatisfactory settlement of Rudolf Abel's spy ring because of his hurried arrest, implying that they may have been Columbia's spies who Lona and Morris Cohen were now working with. (p. 317ff.)
I mention these cases not only as other examples of what I complained about in an earlier article - the tendency of spy chasers, thanks to Venona, to make everyone, even those who clearly had an alibi, equally guilty - but also to illustrate the broad knowledge needed to be an effective counterspy, what I sadly lacked when I joined CIC. While I do believe that my performance in tests resulted in my going to Fort Holabird as a possible intelligence analyst rather than to Korea as a so-so rifleman, I nearly didn't graduate because of how I reacted to an asinine order that I write, as if I were a child, 500 times that "I shall not smoke in the latrine" while on breaks from classes, a new restriction I overlooked soon after it was made, and what I compounded by adding all kinds of contingencies to the written demand which still might result in failure.
I later came to learn that my mother did everything short of suicide to make sure that I was assigned to Europe upon completion of my eight-week course rather than to the Far East. She instinctly knew that I would get mixed up with some gung-ho character, and get myself killed.
Once in Europe, my father, a brigadier general who commanded Com Z's Advance Section in Verdun, part of NATO's support structure, pressured people in CIC through his mere inquiries about when I would be posted, possibly to Paris, that I sailed through the administrative steps in record time, a process which left other soldiers I met understandably angry, and me feeling most guilty. I never asked for any special treatment. 66 CIC's headquarters in Suttgart, on the morning after I arrived, reacted to his call about my arrival by making sure that I was gone by the next morning, something unheard of, and my stay in Detachment A's headquarters in Orleans was similarly abbreviated.
In Paris, my education began in earnest. It was right after Stalin had been assassinated by his underlings for fear that he was about to start another round of blood baths, and the Rosenbergs were executed the following June, precipatating the most violent riots I have ever witnessed. The French capital was where the action was, and my official senior officer, the commander of Detachment's A middle region, wanted to take over its Paris Field Office (PFO) as its headquarters. Attached to PFO, though, was a Major Frederick Sala, the Paris Liaison Officer, who reported directly to the CO in Orleans. I was the clerk/typist for both.
One day, the Major from Orleans appeared unannounced, and once he had determined that no one else was in the office, he ordered me to open Sala's files, hoping to find evidence that he was neither qualified nor performing his function. When I refused, explaining he was not authorized to see them, he threatened to court martial me after I repeatedly declined to obey direct orders. I knew enough about the Army that he could not make good on his threats. I disliked the cut of this character from Orleans.
While I was predictably never court martialed, the regional headquarters in Orleans moved to Paris. The whole experience, though, was so traumatic for him that he forgot that I knew all the combinations to Sala's safes, so I was amazed to discover one night on duty, the collective punishment he institututed to get back at those who did not relish his move to Paris, that they were now filled with a choice collection of French pornographic literature. Those who performed night duty did seriously entertain the idea of doing a surveillance of the new chief while visiting all its whorehouses after he had put his wife and kids on the plane for trips elsewhere, the closest we ever came to the alleged paranoia the duty induced, but we never got round to it because we were too busy with our personal lives.
Of course, the consolidation led to a two fold increase in personnel without any official increase in our mission. Officially, the office was just to process security applications for French citizens seeking employment with Uncle Sam, work the French Army counterpart (Service de la Securite de la Defense Nationale, Section Guerre) actually performed, and to check on alleged Army personnel and civilians who were engaged in possible subversive activity. I processed the former, making applications for record checks, and writing up their results in six copies- what the French achieved with a single form which they stamped with a favorable or unfavorable finding, or that the applicant was unknown - what one of our officers handled with a monthly visit to French Army headquarters.
As a result, the other agents were hard pressed to find things to do. The Operations Officer was so superfluous to them that he made a visit almost daily to see what was cooking at the PX and Commissary at Neuilly-sur-Seine. (Actually, it was better as I made fewer typing errors when he was unable to gossip in the office.) The only recollection I have of one of the agents was that he almost blew my head off, thinking apparently that I was a KGB intruder, when I arrived unexpectedly at the office late one evening.
Our new boss, once he settled down from the possibility of exploiting French hospitality by having us see if the Soviets were parachuting spies into the Massif Centrale during the East German riots, was most eager to have us break into the apartment of a DOA civilian who was suspected of being a communist. The mission was finally scrubbed, though, after the boss stated that we would be on our own if caught by the gendarmes, and we concluded that the chances of finding anything, even communist literature, which would prove the claim was almost impossible. As CIC agents, we were expected to know, if not possess, such material.
The absurdity of it all peaked when a very official looking person, wearing a trench coat, and carrying a briefcase, arrived in the office when I was alone, typing away. He identified himself as the FBI legat from the Embassy, and said that he wanted to speak to the person in charge. Once I explained that there was only me, he asked me to take a message for when he returned: we were using another agency's informant, and according to conventional practice, our office should drop him. I replied that if he would not explain who he was talking about, and for whom, there was no way we could act on his request. He replied that the information was classified, and that he was not authorised to disclose it. Of course, I had a good idea of who he was talking about, as our office had so few informants, but we would have to discard them all to satisfy this vaguest of requests, one which would have made us look absurd if we had acted on it.
Ultimately, CIA admitted that the informant was theirs, one Henri Costin, and we dropped him. Costin contended that French government instability was the result of the communists blackmailing other parties over their conduct during the Occupation. Of course, the CP had a lot of explaining to do for its activities during the Non-Aggression Act. Costin's ideas were simplistic to the point of absurdity, as scholarly studies of French politics, like Philip Williams' Politics in Post-War France, and computer studies of parliamentary voting showed. Actually, instead of center and right-wing parties being blackmailed by the communists into breaking up weak coalitions, the biggest source of parliamentary instability was the socialists whose grassroot organizations were not prepared to go along with the compromises necessary to keep coalitions afloat. Costin was apparently part of CI James Angleton's network to manipulate French politics Washington's way, a process which failed utterly with the Fourth Republic's overthrow, and de Gaulle's kicking out NATO.
I suspected that Costin was HENRI, who had survived the war to recruit a group of CP members, starting in Toulouse, and extending to Paris as the Germans departed, whose KGB network infiltrated French intelligence with devastating results, and was now extending its grip to the Agency. In typical fashion, though, Vasili Mitrokhin's KGB file, which was made available to Christopher Andrew for the preparation of The Sword and the Shield, has provided even less about possibilities (pp. 150-2) than I imagined a half-century ago. Mitrokhin almost never supplied new names of spies.
Our agent using Costin then turned his efforts to proving that Georges Bidault, the Christian Democratic leader who often served as Foreign Minister, was a communist stooge because of his marriage. Bidault, according to Andrew (p. 152), knew that his private secretary was a communist, but, according to our agent, he did not know that Suzanne, his wife, was the leading female leader of the CP. After an extensive investigation, one which was not even completed before I left the Army, the State Department was instructed, I have been told, to raise the matter with the French government, only for a last minute check to determine that there were two Suzanne Bidaults before a nasty diplomatic row ensued. Of course, there was no punishment of the CIC agent whose activities were completely without authorization.
The whole office, though, was authorized at the highest level to conduct an extensive surveillance of a high official, named Burns, in the American CP, thanks to the demands of FBI Director Hoover. Around Christmas 1953, Burns booked a flight to Paris, and, in due course, we were instructed to determine as much as we could about his visit to the French capital when he arrived, in May, as I remember. A few months later, Burns cancelled the ticket, and hardly had we started to relax than we were instructed to resume our plans as another Mr. Burns had booked for the flight when it touched down in Canada. Of course, there was no indication that the two were the same person, but we were instructed to go ahead with the surveillance until we made sure they weren't.
When he arrived at Orly, our watchers quickly lost track of him, and for eight to ten hours, our agents were searching frantically around Paris to find the wanted Burns whose hands were appropriately scarred with burns.
When the suspect finally arrived at his hotel, our waiting agent, later a US Senator who got into the deepest trouble with the Nixon Administration over release of The Pentagon Papers, walked over to the desk, picked up Burns's hands, and utttered "Nope!", causing all kinds of relief for us, but only consternation to the subject. If either suspect is still alive, and reading this report, they can now appreciate how their private lives put American officialdom through its paces for no legitimate reason whatever.
In my simple capacity, I tried to achieve the same result when I was asked to discuss with our counterparts in the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) the political reliability of The Reporter magazine, epecially its editor Max Ascoli, since I was known to be a regular reader. The chances of Ascoli being communist were even less than Soviet physicist Peter Kapitsa. Actually, Ascoli's connection seemed to be with the Agency, as its use of writers like Priscilla Johnson Macmillan, and its dogged support of American policies, especially in Vietnam, indicated. In sum, the suspicion was absurd, but OSI investigating it was even more so, and I told the "fly boys" so in no uncertain terms. Its source was OSI's head, General Joseph Carroll, Hoover's close associate who had been parachuted in by Senateor Stuart Symington to lead the new agency, and who, like CIA's William Harvey, cooperated with the Bureau in intelligence gathering, and operations.
The culmination of the whole, wacky experience occurred when I returned to Orleans instead of the States to be discharged from the service. I wanted to serve my full two years to the last day to make more sure that I was not recalled if there was another national emergency. Of course, during my passes, and furloughs, I often visited my parents in Verdun during which my father usually asked me about my experiences in the PFO. I never held back, though officially supposed to, giving him the low-down on the absurdities, the latest of which was CIC's G-2 visiting all the posts around the globe semi-annually. The best way to describe the visits is to recall what priests do when they go on retreat or holiday. Nothing in terms of wine, food, and lodging were held back, and the personnel being visited had dry runs before the G-2's arrival to make sure that nothing was amiss. For all CIC personnel, the G-2's visit was the year's highpoint.
You can imagine my nervousness when the CO in Orleans said that he wanted to see me before I said goodbye to CIC. Actually, the agent who tracked down Burns, the PFO Adjutant, and I had shared a house on the Marne east of Paris, and the agent and I had looked seriously into the possibility of going into business in France after our discharges, thanks to the per diem pay we were receiving. We investigated the legal and technical problems involved in producing Rapid Shave, and you imagine our surprise when we learned that our potential backers, including a former French Minister of Education, had conducted serious investigations of us, including surveillances, without our knowledge. It was while returning with my associate from a Sunday visit with them at Rambouillet in a government sedan for a dinner engagement that it was rammed from behind in a pileup on the Versailles motorway, leading the boss to gloat with glee that he had finally caught us misusing government property, something he could court martial us for.
Since I was a corporal, and the agent was a lieutenant, though, there was no way he could prosecute me, though I suspected that this was still what the CO wanted to see me about. You can imagine how my nervousness turned to anxiety when the genial Texan brought up everything I had told my father about the PFO, what he had gotten feedback from the G-2 when he visited my father's HQ, asking about CIC's performance in his command. My father had hardly trusted me with the time of day until then. Fortunately, I had not disclosed anything which wasn't true, and needed fixing. After hearing me out, the CO thanked me, shook my hand, and wished me well in civilian life. Short of this, I might have been prosecuted for telling tall tales.
Unfortunately, I don't think that my candor did either my father or CIC any good. He was forced to retire two years later, and I'm sure his involvement with me didn't help. As for Detachment 'A', the last thing I heard shortly afterwards was that the course-loving CO had moved the comfortable headquarters, noted for its sumputous lunches and leisurely afternoons, to Pithiviers at the cost of $100,000 to the tax-payers, after complaining to the Adjutant that "the chateau is all hunted out."
I have never written about my experience a half-century ago in the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in its Paris Field Office because of feelings of guilt, embarrassment, constraints, ignorance, and other priorities, a heady mixture which other counterintelligence agents might have seen as simply paranoia if matters had turned out worse.
When Robert Hanssen, a top FBI counterintelligence officer in New York, was confronted by Anglo-American operations during 1985-6, especially Operation Courtship's double agent Sergei Motorin's assignment in Moscow to call a girlfriend in America to indicate that the Soviets had been completely surprised by the assassination of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme, what threatened the world's very survival, he felt obliged to spy for the Soviets, though he hated communism, was so troubled by what he was doing that he constantly confessed his sins to his priest, and did not need nor want the money, even giving it away to a hooker he never used.
This led Tom Mangold, the biographer of CIA's James Angleton, to conclude wrongly in a recent New York Times OP-ED piece that it was the result of the paranoia and loneliness the job induced, what caused the former CI Chief to incarcerate defector Yuri Nosenko, like the Soviets did with defectors, when he claimed that they had had nothing to do with the JFK assassination. Actually, DDP Richard Helms was responsible for Nosenko being locked up in a cell at Camp Peary, and he did it, as I tried to show in my article about him, to help hide the Agency's involvement, especially with Lee Harvey Oswald.
As with all official historians, the idea that Western intelligence agencies could commit horrendous blunders was not in Mangold's conceptual framework. Spying is always the result of something unexpected, like a secret political agenda, or expensive tastes, or something lacking, like basic integrity, in the spy. The counterspy, however, is in a better position than the simple spy to know what is really going on, what can bring into play all kinds of humanistic, mental, and probability calculations, especially if he has much experience.
He may be forced to see just how stupid, unnecessary, or criminal, even reckless, intelligence operations are, though they are not serious enough for him to officially complain, or to put them in print, much less spy for the other side. The differences between my career as a counterspy and Hanssen's are that my superiors never took matters to such ridiculous lengths that I had to spy for Moscow, though they broke almost every standard I came to know in carrying out what should have been the most routine tasks.
When I received my A.B. degree from Columbia University in 1952, I decided not to enter graduate school, making myself immediately available for the draft. I was an Army brat from the Depression years who grew up with a very false, insulated view of the world, though possessing enough intelligence to suspect that there had to be more to things than I gleaned from army life. Early on, all I knew was that I did not want to follow in my father's footsteps, and attend West Point.
Service life is the closest America ever has come to the welfare state with one's material and physical needs basically satisfied, though at terrible mental, cultural and psychological costs. I shall never forget how my childhood chums were always wondering why my family had some bookcases containing some of the world's classics. They were a local wonder, like collections of space rocks, or clerical relics. It was to compensate for this deprivation that I was sent off from the boondocks to a New England prep school at the end of WWII, and then on to college as the Cold War was heating up.
While I did well enough to graduate, all I thought that was necessary, I should have made more of the opportunities, though my choice of becoming a medical doctor, and McCarthyism were already affecting adversely the process. It was only after I had finished most of the pre-med requirement, a host of courses noted for their dryness, and drudgery, that I discovered that I didn't want to be one, especially because of my near pathological fear of seeing blood, particularly my own.
In searching around for a substitute, I wanted to register for a course taught by Franz Neumann, the famous political theorist whose study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth, has become a classic. Of course, with my grades, and background, it was out of the question, and I had to settle for a course taught by Ralph Bowen on the Enlightenment, one in which he discussed everything about the period except what the philosophes actually thought.
It was only recently that I read that they both might well have been important Soviet spies. According to John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their chapter in Venona on spies in the U. S. government, Neuman aka Ruff, an economist in the OSS, was a Soviet agent (pp. 194-5) who worked with the infamous Elizabeth Bentley (p. 220), and Bowen aka Alan, while working for the State Department in some economic capacity (p. 247), had been targeted to become one during WWII by Flora Wovschin, a KGB asset so noted for collecting information from contacts that she had taken over handling them, much to the disapproval of Moscow's spy masters.
Haynes and Klehr cited Neumann twice in Appendix A, those who had covert relations with the Soviets, and based the claim upon a clarification of what had been stated about Ruff in Allen Weinstein's and Alexander Vassiliev's The Haunted Wood. It seems that there were two Ruffs, though, but Haynes and Klehr are quite sure that the dangerous one was Neumann (n. 218, p. 459). Nigel West, in his Venona, added to the catch by claiming that Bowen continued to spy for the Soviets even after Wovschin aka Zora had arrived in USSR in 1949, the year before I took the course with him.
Now, all this is misuse of Venona fragments by most ignorant analysts to make the worst case possible against the persons in question. That any authors could publish a book, especially by Yale University Press, and claim that Neumann was an economist does not imspire confidence in their work. Robin W. Winks, in YUP's Cloak & Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, published in 1987, had a most positive view of Neumann, seeing him as not only a "superb intellectual historian and political analyst" (p. 85), but also a dedicated naturalized citizen who held OSS's Central European section together as best he could despite its weak leadership, disparate interests, and sharp differences about Germany's future. Under these circumstance, to clarify the false claim by Weinstein and Vassiliev about Ruff at Neumann's expense, rather than admit that the matter is just too confused to be resolved with the evidence available, was a form of witch hunting, which they then go on to compound by claiming that he worked with Bentley when he clearly was not that Ruff.
Similar complaints can be made of Bowen's treatment who was an historian of ideas when they indicated that he may well have been an important economic spy. What could a person with knowledge about thinkers like Rousseau, Fenelon, and Montesquieu have had which the KGB would be even the slightest bit interested in? (They wouldn't claim, would they, that this was why his lectures were so boring - he was saving all the interesting bits for Moscow?) Bowen was simply a broken man by the time I met him. This fishing expedition for important spies became even more vindictive when Haynes and Klehr discussed the unsatisfactory settlement of Rudolf Abel's spy ring because of his hurried arrest, implying that they may have been Columbia's spies who Lona and Morris Cohen were now working with. (p. 317ff.)
I mention these cases not only as other examples of what I complained about in an earlier article - the tendency of spy chasers, thanks to Venona, to make everyone, even those who clearly had an alibi, equally guilty - but also to illustrate the broad knowledge needed to be an effective counterspy, what I sadly lacked when I joined CIC. While I do believe that my performance in tests resulted in my going to Fort Holabird as a possible intelligence analyst rather than to Korea as a so-so rifleman, I nearly didn't graduate because of how I reacted to an asinine order that I write, as if I were a child, 500 times that "I shall not smoke in the latrine" while on breaks from classes, a new restriction I overlooked soon after it was made, and what I compounded by adding all kinds of contingencies to the written demand which still might result in failure.
I later came to learn that my mother did everything short of suicide to make sure that I was assigned to Europe upon completion of my eight-week course rather than to the Far East. She instinctly knew that I would get mixed up with some gung-ho character, and get myself killed.
Once in Europe, my father, a brigadier general who commanded Com Z's Advance Section in Verdun, part of NATO's support structure, pressured people in CIC through his mere inquiries about when I would be posted, possibly to Paris, that I sailed through the administrative steps in record time, a process which left other soldiers I met understandably angry, and me feeling most guilty. I never asked for any special treatment. 66 CIC's headquarters in Suttgart, on the morning after I arrived, reacted to his call about my arrival by making sure that I was gone by the next morning, something unheard of, and my stay in Detachment A's headquarters in Orleans was similarly abbreviated.
In Paris, my education began in earnest. It was right after Stalin had been assassinated by his underlings for fear that he was about to start another round of blood baths, and the Rosenbergs were executed the following June, precipatating the most violent riots I have ever witnessed. The French capital was where the action was, and my official senior officer, the commander of Detachment's A middle region, wanted to take over its Paris Field Office (PFO) as its headquarters. Attached to PFO, though, was a Major Frederick Sala, the Paris Liaison Officer, who reported directly to the CO in Orleans. I was the clerk/typist for both.
One day, the Major from Orleans appeared unannounced, and once he had determined that no one else was in the office, he ordered me to open Sala's files, hoping to find evidence that he was neither qualified nor performing his function. When I refused, explaining he was not authorized to see them, he threatened to court martial me after I repeatedly declined to obey direct orders. I knew enough about the Army that he could not make good on his threats. I disliked the cut of this character from Orleans.
While I was predictably never court martialed, the regional headquarters in Orleans moved to Paris. The whole experience, though, was so traumatic for him that he forgot that I knew all the combinations to Sala's safes, so I was amazed to discover one night on duty, the collective punishment he institututed to get back at those who did not relish his move to Paris, that they were now filled with a choice collection of French pornographic literature. Those who performed night duty did seriously entertain the idea of doing a surveillance of the new chief while visiting all its whorehouses after he had put his wife and kids on the plane for trips elsewhere, the closest we ever came to the alleged paranoia the duty induced, but we never got round to it because we were too busy with our personal lives.
Of course, the consolidation led to a two fold increase in personnel without any official increase in our mission. Officially, the office was just to process security applications for French citizens seeking employment with Uncle Sam, work the French Army counterpart (Service de la Securite de la Defense Nationale, Section Guerre) actually performed, and to check on alleged Army personnel and civilians who were engaged in possible subversive activity. I processed the former, making applications for record checks, and writing up their results in six copies- what the French achieved with a single form which they stamped with a favorable or unfavorable finding, or that the applicant was unknown - what one of our officers handled with a monthly visit to French Army headquarters.
As a result, the other agents were hard pressed to find things to do. The Operations Officer was so superfluous to them that he made a visit almost daily to see what was cooking at the PX and Commissary at Neuilly-sur-Seine. (Actually, it was better as I made fewer typing errors when he was unable to gossip in the office.) The only recollection I have of one of the agents was that he almost blew my head off, thinking apparently that I was a KGB intruder, when I arrived unexpectedly at the office late one evening.
Our new boss, once he settled down from the possibility of exploiting French hospitality by having us see if the Soviets were parachuting spies into the Massif Centrale during the East German riots, was most eager to have us break into the apartment of a DOA civilian who was suspected of being a communist. The mission was finally scrubbed, though, after the boss stated that we would be on our own if caught by the gendarmes, and we concluded that the chances of finding anything, even communist literature, which would prove the claim was almost impossible. As CIC agents, we were expected to know, if not possess, such material.
The absurdity of it all peaked when a very official looking person, wearing a trench coat, and carrying a briefcase, arrived in the office when I was alone, typing away. He identified himself as the FBI legat from the Embassy, and said that he wanted to speak to the person in charge. Once I explained that there was only me, he asked me to take a message for when he returned: we were using another agency's informant, and according to conventional practice, our office should drop him. I replied that if he would not explain who he was talking about, and for whom, there was no way we could act on his request. He replied that the information was classified, and that he was not authorised to disclose it. Of course, I had a good idea of who he was talking about, as our office had so few informants, but we would have to discard them all to satisfy this vaguest of requests, one which would have made us look absurd if we had acted on it.
Ultimately, CIA admitted that the informant was theirs, one Henri Costin, and we dropped him. Costin contended that French government instability was the result of the communists blackmailing other parties over their conduct during the Occupation. Of course, the CP had a lot of explaining to do for its activities during the Non-Aggression Act. Costin's ideas were simplistic to the point of absurdity, as scholarly studies of French politics, like Philip Williams' Politics in Post-War France, and computer studies of parliamentary voting showed. Actually, instead of center and right-wing parties being blackmailed by the communists into breaking up weak coalitions, the biggest source of parliamentary instability was the socialists whose grassroot organizations were not prepared to go along with the compromises necessary to keep coalitions afloat. Costin was apparently part of CI James Angleton's network to manipulate French politics Washington's way, a process which failed utterly with the Fourth Republic's overthrow, and de Gaulle's kicking out NATO.
I suspected that Costin was HENRI, who had survived the war to recruit a group of CP members, starting in Toulouse, and extending to Paris as the Germans departed, whose KGB network infiltrated French intelligence with devastating results, and was now extending its grip to the Agency. In typical fashion, though, Vasili Mitrokhin's KGB file, which was made available to Christopher Andrew for the preparation of The Sword and the Shield, has provided even less about possibilities (pp. 150-2) than I imagined a half-century ago. Mitrokhin almost never supplied new names of spies.
Our agent using Costin then turned his efforts to proving that Georges Bidault, the Christian Democratic leader who often served as Foreign Minister, was a communist stooge because of his marriage. Bidault, according to Andrew (p. 152), knew that his private secretary was a communist, but, according to our agent, he did not know that Suzanne, his wife, was the leading female leader of the CP. After an extensive investigation, one which was not even completed before I left the Army, the State Department was instructed, I have been told, to raise the matter with the French government, only for a last minute check to determine that there were two Suzanne Bidaults before a nasty diplomatic row ensued. Of course, there was no punishment of the CIC agent whose activities were completely without authorization.
The whole office, though, was authorized at the highest level to conduct an extensive surveillance of a high official, named Burns, in the American CP, thanks to the demands of FBI Director Hoover. Around Christmas 1953, Burns booked a flight to Paris, and, in due course, we were instructed to determine as much as we could about his visit to the French capital when he arrived, in May, as I remember. A few months later, Burns cancelled the ticket, and hardly had we started to relax than we were instructed to resume our plans as another Mr. Burns had booked for the flight when it touched down in Canada. Of course, there was no indication that the two were the same person, but we were instructed to go ahead with the surveillance until we made sure they weren't.
When he arrived at Orly, our watchers quickly lost track of him, and for eight to ten hours, our agents were searching frantically around Paris to find the wanted Burns whose hands were appropriately scarred with burns.
When the suspect finally arrived at his hotel, our waiting agent, later a US Senator who got into the deepest trouble with the Nixon Administration over release of The Pentagon Papers, walked over to the desk, picked up Burns's hands, and utttered "Nope!", causing all kinds of relief for us, but only consternation to the subject. If either suspect is still alive, and reading this report, they can now appreciate how their private lives put American officialdom through its paces for no legitimate reason whatever.
In my simple capacity, I tried to achieve the same result when I was asked to discuss with our counterparts in the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) the political reliability of The Reporter magazine, epecially its editor Max Ascoli, since I was known to be a regular reader. The chances of Ascoli being communist were even less than Soviet physicist Peter Kapitsa. Actually, Ascoli's connection seemed to be with the Agency, as its use of writers like Priscilla Johnson Macmillan, and its dogged support of American policies, especially in Vietnam, indicated. In sum, the suspicion was absurd, but OSI investigating it was even more so, and I told the "fly boys" so in no uncertain terms. Its source was OSI's head, General Joseph Carroll, Hoover's close associate who had been parachuted in by Senateor Stuart Symington to lead the new agency, and who, like CIA's William Harvey, cooperated with the Bureau in intelligence gathering, and operations.
The culmination of the whole, wacky experience occurred when I returned to Orleans instead of the States to be discharged from the service. I wanted to serve my full two years to the last day to make more sure that I was not recalled if there was another national emergency. Of course, during my passes, and furloughs, I often visited my parents in Verdun during which my father usually asked me about my experiences in the PFO. I never held back, though officially supposed to, giving him the low-down on the absurdities, the latest of which was CIC's G-2 visiting all the posts around the globe semi-annually. The best way to describe the visits is to recall what priests do when they go on retreat or holiday. Nothing in terms of wine, food, and lodging were held back, and the personnel being visited had dry runs before the G-2's arrival to make sure that nothing was amiss. For all CIC personnel, the G-2's visit was the year's highpoint.
You can imagine my nervousness when the CO in Orleans said that he wanted to see me before I said goodbye to CIC. Actually, the agent who tracked down Burns, the PFO Adjutant, and I had shared a house on the Marne east of Paris, and the agent and I had looked seriously into the possibility of going into business in France after our discharges, thanks to the per diem pay we were receiving. We investigated the legal and technical problems involved in producing Rapid Shave, and you imagine our surprise when we learned that our potential backers, including a former French Minister of Education, had conducted serious investigations of us, including surveillances, without our knowledge. It was while returning with my associate from a Sunday visit with them at Rambouillet in a government sedan for a dinner engagement that it was rammed from behind in a pileup on the Versailles motorway, leading the boss to gloat with glee that he had finally caught us misusing government property, something he could court martial us for.
Since I was a corporal, and the agent was a lieutenant, though, there was no way he could prosecute me, though I suspected that this was still what the CO wanted to see me about. You can imagine how my nervousness turned to anxiety when the genial Texan brought up everything I had told my father about the PFO, what he had gotten feedback from the G-2 when he visited my father's HQ, asking about CIC's performance in his command. My father had hardly trusted me with the time of day until then. Fortunately, I had not disclosed anything which wasn't true, and needed fixing. After hearing me out, the CO thanked me, shook my hand, and wished me well in civilian life. Short of this, I might have been prosecuted for telling tall tales.
Unfortunately, I don't think that my candor did either my father or CIC any good. He was forced to retire two years later, and I'm sure his involvement with me didn't help. As for Detachment 'A', the last thing I heard shortly afterwards was that the course-loving CO had moved the comfortable headquarters, noted for its sumputous lunches and leisurely afternoons, to Pithiviers at the cost of $100,000 to the tax-payers, after complaining to the Adjutant that "the chateau is all hunted out."
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