;Looking Glass and Silver Dollar on 11/22/63
Looking Glass EC-135
A mark of America's strategic excellence is its preeminent ability to command,
control, and communicate with its nuclear forces.
An essential element of that ability is the Airborne
Command Post, code named "Looking Glass.", which was retired from
service on 01 October 1998. Its highly-trained crew and staff ensured there was
always an aircraft ready to direct bombers and missiles from the air should
ground-based command centers become inoperable. Looking Glass guaranteed that
U.S. strategic forces would act only in the precise manner dictated by the
President.
The now-deactivated Strategic Air Command (SAC) began the mission on February
3, 1961.
The 24/7 Airborne Command post took the code name
Looking Glass because the mission mirrored ground-based command, control, and
communications.
A Looking
Glass aircraft was in the air at all times 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for
more than 29 years. On July 24, 1990, Looking Glass ceased continuous airborne
alert, but it remained on ground or airborne alert 24 hours a day. Crews
accumulated more than 281,000 accident-free flying hours.
The Importance of Alternative Networks to Provocation-Deceptions
PETER DALE SCOTT:
I would like to digress briefly to describe the central importance of America’s
emergency communications network (or so-called Doomsday communications network)
in four of the recent deception plots in our history: 11/22, Watergate,
Iran-Contra, and 9/11.
If one part of the government is deceiving another, it needs its own
alternative network to do so. Oliver North, for example, used just such an
anti-terrorist network, codenamed Flashboard, to conduct the Iran-Contra arms
operations for which he was ultimately fired.
Others beside myself have pointed to the meta-importance of those charged with
overseeing the Doomsday communications network, known most recently as the
Continuity of Government (COG) network. James Mann, for example, has referred
to the COG network overseers as “part of the permanent, though hidden, national
security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which
Presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.”
In 1991 a CNN feature on the COG overseers described them even more ominously
as a “shadow government,” and opened with “In the United States Federal
Government there is a super-secret agency which controls this Shadow
Government.”
We saw that the key to the provocation-deception producing the false Second
Tonkin Gulf Incident depended on the ability to transmit false information on a
restricted special network. I have written elsewhere about the importance of
war exercises on 9/11 that were being conducted on the special “continuity of
government” (COG) network….
….That (Jack|) Crichton had access to this network
in 1963 is a surprising discovery that makes me want to explore more fully a
few of the military analogies between the Kennedy assassination in 1963, or
what we may call 11/22, and 9/11 almost four decades later.
I wish I knew enough to talk today about the small detail that on both 11/22
and 9/11 there were unexplained reports involving an Air Force special plane,
the so-called “Doomsday plane,” – the plane that serves as the military
airborne command post (NEACP, pronounced “Kneecap”) for special emergencies.
The NEACP flight on 9/11 was in conjunction with a war game, Global Guardian;
that on 11/22 has been characterized as a “training” exercise only.
But one would like to know whether or not the 11/22
training exercise involved Jack Crichton and the Civil Defense Office in Dallas.
On 11/22 we know only that the EC-135 that served then as the National
Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP, or “Kneecap”), when in fact airborne,
contacted the Fourth Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio,
Texas. The call was extremely brief:
“This is Silver Dollar calling to test communications. I read you loud and
clear, loud and clear. How do you read me?”
But it was not routine: the army person receiving
did not know what “Silver Dollar” meant (it was NEACP’s communications code
name). This led to army intelligence inquiries that day, as soon as it was
realized that the call, at 12:25 PM, had come just five minutes before JFK was
assassinated.# The fact that NEACP was airborne and making test calls might
seem irrelevant to events on the ground in Dallas, until we learn that
Crichton’s Civil Defense Post was part of its network.
By 2001 the emergency communications network administered by the Doomsday Plane
had been massively augmented in Project 908, a project overseen in the 1980s by
a continuity of government (COG) or Doomsday planning group whose membership
included Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As part of the upgrade, the old
EC-135s of NEACP had been replaced by four Boeing E-4Bs, now known as “Advanced
Airborne Command Posts,” with a project name of “Night Watch.”
According to the Pentagon, all four are assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt Air
Force Base in Nebraska, the Strategic Air Force Command or STRATCOM base to
which George W. Bush flew on 9/11. Three of them were airborne on that day, in
connection with a live command-level exercise called Global Guardian. One of
them was said to be carrying the members of the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, which was joined one month later by Philip
Zelikow, still later director of the 9/11 Commission.
Stratcom canceled the 9/11 war exercises at 9:03 AM, when the second tower was
hit. Nevertheless, one of the Doomsday planes was seen and recorded by CNN one
hour later, just before 10 AM, in the restricted air space over the White
House. This was about the time that, as I have described elsewhere, Cheney and
perhaps Rumsfeld had begun to use the emergency COG communications network
administered by the E-4B.
Common sense suggests that it would have been natural to divert an EC4B,
already airborne on 9/11 for Global Guardian, to oversight of the perceived
attack on Washington. But the very core of COG planning was to ensure
geographic separation between the existing government and its shadow alternate.
Cheney reportedly sequestered personnel in underground bunkers for ninety days
after 9/11, “since there was evidence, he hinted, that the terrorist
organization al-Qa’ida…had nuclear weapons”
The EC4B’s presence in Washington can be taken as an indication that those responsible
for its presence there (presumably Cheney and Rumsfeld) had no such worries for
its safety. Recent research by Larry Hancock and Larry Haapanen indicates a
similar situation on 11/22: available records suggest that while some senior
bureaucrats worried about the possibility of a foreign attack on that day,
there was an eerie passivity at the highest levels, suggesting no such concern.
This would indicate that, while phase-one stories such as Stringfellow’s report
were being transmitted, those at the highest level of responsibility set no
store by them. I doubt that this disconnect can be attributed to ignorance. On
the contrary, I take
Crichton’s status in the Center as an sign that persons intimately involved
with each deep event (Crichton on 11/22, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on
9/11) were part of the secret Doomsday communications network evolved to deal
with a national emergency.
The same observation can be made about key figures in Watergate and
Iran-Contra, the two other major deep events of the last half-century. James
McCord, the leader of the burglars arrested inside Watergate, was among other
things a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, in a small unit charged with
developing contingency plans in a national emergency “for imposing censorship
on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government
communications).”
Oliver North, the Reagan White House point man on both Iran-Contra and COG
planning, had access to a secure communications system “that excluded other
bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…The counter-terrorism network even had its
own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, codenamed Flashboard, by
which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their
collaborators abroad.”# It was by this time, as noted above, that COG emergency
planning had been redefined under Reagan to designate “terrorism” as its
principal target.
Those with resource to such secure networks are in a position to manipulate our
country’s history, when necessary by provocation-deception plots.
Peter Dale Scott Dallas COPA 2010
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/11/peter-dale-scott-dallas-copa-2010.html
The JFK Assassination as an Engineered
Provocation-Deception Plot:
A Study in the Sociodynamics of Invasion Pretexts
Address to COPA, November 2010 [As Amended Dec. 13, 2010]
Preface:
The Sociodynamics of Deception Events as Pretexts for War
In my latest book, American War Machine, I argue that our state and society
have been seriously affected, and indeed restructured, by a series of what I
called deep events: events which are systematically ignored, suppressed, or
falsified in both the media and internal government documents.1. These deep
events are typically ascribed to marginal external agents, like the alleged
lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald.
But cumulatively, I write,
the historical succession of deep events—such as Dallas, Watergate, and
9/11—has impacted more and more profoundly on America’s political situation.
More specifically,...major foreign wars are typically preceded by deep events
like the Tonkin Gulf incidents, 9/11, or the 2001 anthrax attacks. This
suggests that what I call the war machine in Washington (including but not
restricted to elements in the Pentagon and the CIA) may have been behind
them.
After completing the later chapters of this book, I have come to state this
conclusion more forcefully. Since 1959, most of America’s foreign wars have
been wars 1) induced preemptively by the U.S. war machine and/or 2) disguised
as responses to unprovoked enemy aggression, with disguises repeatedly
engineered by deception deep events, involving in some way elements of the
global drug connection.
Since completing this book six months ago I have come to formulate this
conclusion even more forcefully. We cannot understand either Dallas or 9/11
until we recognize that, since World War One, the majority of the world’s major
wars have been preceded by deception deep events.
Let me give some foreign examples.
The second Sino-Japanese War in Asia was preceded by the Mukden Incident of
September 1931, when a Manchurian railroad was dynamited covertly by the
Japanese Army. The Army blamed Chinese dissidents; but it is now generally
conceded that the Japanese staged the bombing themselves as a pretext for war.
2.
In 1939 Hitler, before launching the European Second World War against Poland,
contrived to arrange a similar false-flag deception: “Germans from a
concentration camp were dressed in Polish army uniforms and ‘invaded’ Germany.
3.
Not all deception events are false-flag events. The Israeli-Egyptian War known
as the Suez Crisis of 1956 involved an “massive attempt to deceive,” in which
the British and French plotted with the Israelis to enter the conflict as
apparent peace-makers, rather than the co-plotters for war which they actually
were. 4. (The deception quickly failed.)
I raise these disparate examples to make it very clear that a repetitive use of
deceptions as pretexts for war does not by itself prove a common authorship for
them. These deception events do not flow from some kind of master conspiracy,
but rather a predictable sociodynamic that occurs when the leaders of an
expansive quasi-democratic state are persuaded there is a need for war, a need
which they know their public will not understand. I shall return to this point
in my conclusion.
11/22 and 9/11 as Engineered Provocation-Deception Plots
Other factors however have persuaded me to link the twin deceptions of 11/22
(the JFK assassination) and 9/11. One is the common modus operandi I have come
to see as underlying the details of both events. Two years ago I listed fifteen
striking similarities in my reissued book The War Conspiracy. I listed another
half dozen in an earlier draft of today’s talk, but there will not be time
today to share them.5.
More important than the similarities is the continuity I have described in my
recent books, in the evolution of what I have come to call the American War
Machine. By the American War Machine do not mean the American public state, or
even what is often referred to as the national security state. I mean a
coalition of forces both inside and outside government, extending to elements
of the American media and universities, which is distinct from the public
state; and has continuously systematically pressured the public state into more
and more ambitious designs for global dominance. 6.
I see both 11/22 and 9/11 as more complex than the simple false-flag deception
events employed in the 1930s by the Japanese Army and by Hitler, because in
both cases a prior sequence of falsified documentary records was elaborately
contrived. Drawing on the language of actual Joint Chiefs documents, I describe
such a contrivances (with respect to 9/11) as an “engineered deception event,”
and would now call an “engineered (or fabricated) provocation-deception plot.”
The words “engineered” and “fabricated” are taken from a Joint Chiefs of Staff
document of May 1963, JCS 2304/189, which is the starting point for my talk
today. Here is the thesis of that document: “The engineering of a series of
provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be
accomplished with the resources available” 7.
Like the Northwoods project of a year earlier, the May 1963 document JCS
2304/189, devised by J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not thinking
hypothetically. As a series of false-flag “FABRICATED PROVOCATIONS,” it
suggested
Fabricated provocations could be evolved by a carefully timed combination of
some of the following typical incidents:
(1) Arranging a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and
around Guantanamo to give a realistic appearance of being done by hostile Cuban
forces to establish a credible attack against the US Naval Base....
(2) Using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to harass civil air, attack
surface shipping or to attack US military….
(5) Make it appear that Castro was lending direct support to insurgent
communist elements in a Latin American country such as Haiti or Guatemala. 8.
The provocation-deception events being fabricated in this period by the Joint
Chiefs went far beyond the standard deception tactics engaged in by both the
CIA and armed forces – as when the Allies in World War Two managed to deceive
Germany as to the location of the D-Day invasion. The proposed target of these
engineered deceptions was clearly not Cuba, but the American people, to accept
the unilateral initiation by America of an illegal war. I shall refer to these
deceptions targeted against Americans as not just engineered
provocation-deception events, but as provocation-deception plots. In them the
recurring aim is to persuade the American people, falsely, that they have been
subjected to an enemy attack.
The brazen JCS proposal in 1963 to deceive the America people in order to
provoke a war is not a unique aberration in American history. The Iraq War was
also clearly preceded by a deep event—a false-flag lethal operation against
innocent civilians in the United States. I am referring to the 2001 anthrax
mailings, which were later identified as involving anthrax from a source inside
the U.S. biowar establishment. But at the time, there were numerous
pre-invasion stories such as this one in the Daily Mail by Simon Reeve:
Iraq has been identified as the most likely source of the anthrax used to
terrorise America during recent weeks. New plans are now being considered for
retaliatory military strikes against Saddam Hussein, according to American
government officials.
Although studies of the anthrax spores sent through the mail are continuing,
American scientists have discovered “hallmarks” that point to Iraqi involvement.
American investigators are increasingly convinced that the anthrax was smuggled
into the US and mailed to a number of targets by unidentified “sleeper”
supporters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation.9.
(Later Bush, in his State of the Union address to Congress leading up to the
Iraq war, would make the distorted charge, later disproven, that Iraq had
“materials sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax.”) 10. Much
later, referring to Fort Detrick, Salon reporter Glenn Greenwald pointed out
that “the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from
was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks
on Iraq.” 11.
The J-5 proposal of May 1963 is much more relevant to the Kennedy assassination
than the Northwoods proposal of a year earlier. The Northwoods proposal, signed
by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, was in response to a request from Edward Lansdale in
support of an operation, Mongoose, promoted by Robert Kennedy. In the May 1963
paper the Joint Chiefs, chaired by Lemnitzer’s successor Gen. Maxwell Taylor,
declare their belief “that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary”. 12.
This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October
1962, had given explicit assurances to Khrushchev, albeit highly qualified,
that the United States would not invade Cuba. 13.
Taylor and the Joint Chiefs, especially after Kennedy’s first tentative moves
towards détente, continued to pressure him with plans for direct military
intervention in Cuba. This risked war with the Soviet Union; but this risk in
their eyes was less a deterrent than an incentive, since they believed (in
their words) they could “counter any Soviet military response to such action.”
14. This obvious reference to US superiority in nuclear missiles was only one
example of JCS willingness to initiate a nuclear attack which (by their own
estimates) would result in “at least 140 million fatalities in the USSR.” 15.
America, of course, never invaded Cuba. My reading of JCS records in late 1963
is that the Joint Chiefs, still eager to confront the Soviet Union in the Third
World, backed off from their difficult and risky plans for a U.S.-initiated
direct invasion of Cuba; and instead they intensified their planning, already
under Kennedy but without Kennedy’s knowledge and against Kennedy’s intentions,
for more direct intervention on behalf of its proxies already fighting in
Vietnam.16. It is hard to prove this shift of JCS focus from Cuba to Vietnam;
because, as I have shown elsewhere, when we search for the relevant
documentation of about JCS Vietnamese planning in 1963 for escalated 34-A
operations against North Vietnam, nearly all of the documentation is missing.
17.
But that the JCS backed off from the Cuban provocation-deception plots is
clear. We find at the end of the 1963 document a notation dated 4 October 1963
that “JCS 2304/189 is withdrawn from consideration by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, in light of JCS 2304/194-1.” 18. (JCS 2304/194 appears not to have been
declassified; but there is a single reference to it, in yet another JCS
document, as a “current study being pursued by the Joint Staff which examines
the pros and cons of an invasion of Cuba at a time controlled by the United
States.”)19.
Thanks to the researches of Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, we know that in
early October the focus of JCS Cuba planning had shifted from provoking a
confrontation with Cuba to responding to a possible military coup there.
(Although only a few knew this, there was such a plot in preparation, led by
Juan Almeida, the chief of the Cuban armed forces). We now have a series of
late 1963 documents entitled “A Draft State-Defense Contingency Plan for a Coup
in Cuba” designed ”To provide planning guidance for US response to a coup in
Cuba.” 20.
Waldron and Hartmann argue from these documents that “the United States was on
the brink of invading Cuba.” 21. I believe this is overstated. The emphasis of
JCS 2304/189 in May had been on “fomenting a revolt in Cuba,” 22. or “to
contrive a revolution.” 23. The JCS 2304 documents in October, in contrast,
concern a Contingency Plan “To provide planning guidance for US response to a
coup.” Part of the Contingency Plan was to insert a joint DOD-State-CIA
“’special team’ to obtain information essential to making a decision to support
the insurgents.” This was to ensure “that the US would not commit its prestige
to the support of an uprising which might collapse.” 24. I do not doubt that
the US might have invaded Cuba on December 1, 1963, if a coup led by Juan
Almeida had been judged to have been successful. 25. But we know that there was
no such coup, and no such US response.
Tonkin Gulf as a Provocation-Deception Plot
In contrast Vietnam was a more feasible, more rewarding, more geostrategical,
and above all less dangerous terrain for escalation. And in August 1964, as we
well know, the graduated 34-Ops authorized on November 26, 1963, led to direct
US military action against North Vietnam. This was in response to the so-called
Second Tonkin Gulf incident, in which a US destroyer thought (mistakenly) it
was under attack on August 4 by North Vietnamese PT boats. After decades of
debate there is now universal agreement that (in the words of an in-house NSA
study, “no attack happened that night....In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in
nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.”
26. I shall argue that the United States was responding, not to an attack, but
to a successful provocation-deception plot.
There was no attack, yet McNamara, in urging passage of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, assured Congress that there was “unequivocal proof” that there was.
This proof, it developed later, consisted of alleged electronic intercepts
(actually, falsified reports of intercepts) that reached Washington on August
4, and helped finalize the decision to retaliate. We now know that the two most
relevant intercepts were changed in the reporting of them; and these changes,
intentionally or not, deceived decision-makers into thinking, wrongly, that
North Vietnam had attacked the US destroyers.
The two most crucial reports, we now know, were both false. The earliest
intercept, concerning a refueling operation, was summarized, in a Critic
message from a Marine SIGINT detachment in Phu Bai, as ““IMMINENT PLANS OF DRV
NAVAL ACTION POSSIBLY AGAINST DESOTO MISSION.” But a U.S. Navy report of the
same message, from San Miguel in the Philippines, was entitled.
“REPLENISHMENT OF DRV NAVAL VESSEL.” The San Miguel report translated the
critical sentence as: “T146 SUPPLY FUEL FOR THE 333 IN ORDER TO GIVE ORDERS TO
PUT INTO OPERATION ((2 GR G)) WITH T146….San Miguel viewed the information as
nothing more than the refueling of the damaged torpedo boats….In fact, there
was no intercept at all which hinted at an attack. 27.
The second intercept, stating “‘WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES,” reached Washington
decision-makers in the form ““WE HAD ALSO SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS.” 28.
Most analysts, reporting these changes, have characterized them as an “honest
mistake” or “major blunder by NSA” (which, we should not forget, is part of the
Department of Defense). 29. But their analysis does not deal with the problem I
first raised in 1970, that the second falsification was deemed credible because
it echoed the cables from the US destroyers: the Turner Joy itself had
reported, mistakenly but innocently, that it had sunk two enemy boats. As
Captain Herrick of the Maddox later told author Joseph Goulden, "We
heard...their damage report confirm our assessment that two of the boats had
been sunk." 30.
The unexplained alteration of the intercept into an echo of the Turner Joy’s
cable goes beyond what I can consider an “honest mistake.” I see it as
intentional, i.e., another example of a provocation-deception plot: in which,
as in the JCS plans, the result was to create the false impression of an enemy
attack.
Why am I talking about Tonkin Gulf in a talk addressing the Kennedy
assassination? Because of the case I am about to present to you that the JFK
assassination was also part of a provocation-deception plot.
Provocation-Deceptions from Army
Intelligence Reserve in Dallas, 11/22/1963
To begin with, we know that in Dallas, on November 22, there were people inside
the military who falsified their reporting of the Kennedy assassination to
create the false impression (or what I have called the “phase-one story”) of an
enemy attack.
I have
written before about these phase-one stories from Dallas concerning the JFK
assassination, but I did not realize until recently that all of them came from
a single Army Intelligence Reserve unit.
As these deceptions are immediately post-assassination, they do not in
isolation establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception
plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th
Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably
similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May that produced a menu of
“fabricated provocations” for the Joint Chiefs.
In 1977 I tried but failed to draw one such false report to the attention of
the House Committee on Assassinations. This was an army cable reporting a tip
from a Dallas policeman:
Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police
Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that
information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and
is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.
.
The cable sent on November 22 from the Fourth Army Command in Texas to the U.S.
Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible
retaliatory attack against Cuba. 32.
I knew before that Stringfellow’s superior officer, Captain W.P. Gannaway, was
a member of Army Intelligence Reserve. 33. Later Ed Coyle, himself a warrant
officer of the 112th Intelligence Group, testified to the Assassinations
Records Review Board that all the officers in the DPD’s Intelligence Section
were in army intelligence. 34.
Actually they were almost certainly in the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit
of Dallas: Jack Crichton , the head of the 488th, revealed in an oral history
that there were “about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of
them were from the Dallas Police Department.” 35.
The Stringfellow message was an example of a phase-one report in the Dallas
investigation: a deception report incriminating, falsely, either Cuba or the
Soviet Union. It was not isolated. In Deep Politics I showed how it was
supported by a concatenation of false reports about Oswald’s alleged rifle, and
specifically reports indicating, falsely, that Marina Oswald presumed Oswald’s
rifle in Dallas to be the rifle he owned in Russia. 36. (Marina’s actual words,
before mis-translation, were quite innocuous: “I cannot describe it [the gun]
because a rifle to me like all rifles.”) 37.
On the basis of such false phase-one stories, Dallas Deputy District Attorney
Bill Alexander reportedly prepared “to indict Oswald for killing the President
'in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.'" 38.
Evidence of a Provocation-Deception Plot Involving the Kennedy Assassination
Meanwhile, in Washington, the post-assassination phase-one stories out of
Dallas were augmented by a more serious item of pre-assassination false
evidence. A letter purporting to be from Oswald, mailed from Irving, Texas on
November 12 to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, was intercepted by the FBI. In
this letter, the writer spoke of "my meetings [plural] with comrade Kostin
in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City." The letter also alluded
suggestively to the lack of time there "to complete our business."
Even more alarmingly, the author revealed his accurate knowledge that the
Consul in the Cuban Embassy had been "replaced." 39.
This Kostin letter was completely unlike any other written by Oswald; to begin
with, it was not handwritten but typed. I have argued elsewhere that for
various reasons, including above all its timing, the letter was a false
artifact, or, as I would now say, part of a provocation-deception plot.
40.[1]
The Warren Commission however accepted the genuineness of this letter, largely
because of a rough draft, said to be in Oswald's handwriting, which Ruth Paine
allegedly discovered after the assassination. I believe that the draft was
composed, as well as discovered, after the assassination: to corroborate, and
also neutralize, the dubious Kostin letter. The "draft" pointedly
converts the typed letter's Phase-One language ("time to complete our
business") into an innocuous description of Kostikov's role ("time to
assist me").
Quite independently, and for different reasons, the researcher Jerry Rose also
argued that the draft was designed "to create proof that Oswald had
written the [typed Kostin] letter." Among other things, Rose pointed out that
six words spelt incorrectly in the "final" typed version, are in fact
spelt correctly in the "draft;” while there are no misspellings in the
"draft" that are corrected in the "final" version. 40.[2]
It is worth adding that virtually all the evidence that arrived separately to
the Warren Commission from Marina and Ruth Paine in 1964 - the Walker note, the
pristine Mexican bus ticket -- is suspect. 40.[3]
The Kostin letter dovetailed neatly with another piece of false
pre-assassination evidence: a report out of Mexico City, indicating that Oswald
had visited a KGB agent in the Soviet Embassy there named Valeriy Kostikov. The
evidence for this visit was clearly false; it relied on the tape of an alleged
phone call by Oswald which in fact had been made by someone else. 41. We have
documentary evidence that one day after the President's murder this tape was
listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in
fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other
reports, including cables claiming -- falsely -- that the tape had already been
destroyed before the assassination. 42.
There are a number of anomalies in both the FBI and CIA handling of Oswald in
the weeks just prior to the assassination, such as the CIA’s withholding of
important information about Oswald from the FBI. As one of the relevant CIA
officers (Jane Roman) conceded years later in an interview, there was probably
an “operational reason” for the CIA to have withheld important information about
Oswald from the FBI. 43.
The CIA’s operational interest in Oswald was conceivably part of an operation
directed against an enemy target, such as Fidel Castro. But the false Kostin
letter, and the false Kostikov phone call, cannot be attributed to such an
operation. These were provocation-deceptions designed to deceive, not the
enemy, but an American audience, about the assassination in Dallas that had not
yet occurred.
The Ubiquitous Shadow of the 488th Intelligence Reserve Unit
The explosive phase-one theory swiftly died, but did not lose its historical
relevance. It led to the perceived risk that right-wing elements, such as
Senator Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, would provoke a war
with Cuba and possibly Russia. This fear became Johnson’s excuse for
federalizing the murder case and persuading Earl Warren and Richard Russell to
join the Warren Commission.44. Thus was established the official phase-two
explanation, that Oswald was a misfit who acted alone.
Of interest still today is the coincidence that the same the 488th Army
Intelligence Reserve unit helped generate the false Marina story, as well as
the false Stringfellow report. The interpreter who first supplied the Marina
story, Ilya Mamantov, was selected as the result of a phone call between Deputy
Police Chief George Lumpkin and Jack Crichton.45. We have already seen that
Crichton commanded the 488th; and Lumpkin, in addition to being the Deputy
Police Chief, was also a deputy commander of the 488th under Crichton. 46.
John Crichton was the kind of figure
Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point described as a “connector....people with
a special gift for bringing the world together.” 47. Some of his contacts are
figures who should be familiar to students of the JFK assassination. His
superior in the Army Reserves, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, was on
11/22 in the pilot car of the Kennedy motorcade along with DPD Deputy Chief
George Lumpkin; the pilot car is of interest because of its unexplained stop in
front of the Texas School Book Depository.48. D.H. “Dry Hole” Byrd, owner of
the Texas School Book Depository, was a director of Crichton’s firm Dorchester
Gas Producing.49.
Crichton, an oil engineer and corporation executive, also doubled as a member
of the Dallas overworld. Although his 488th intelligence unit consisted almost
50 percent of Dallas policemen, Crichton also used it as a venue in the late
1950s to conduct “a study of Soviet oil fields;” and in the 1990s Crichton
would himself explore the oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet Union.50.
Also interested in Soviet oil reserves at this time were Ilya Mamantov’s
employers and personal friends, the wealthy Pew family in Dallas who were
owners of Sunoco. By 2009 the second largest source of crude for Sunoco (after
Western Africa) was Central Asia, supplying 86,000 barrels of crude a day. 51.
But Crichton’s most significant function as a connector on 11/22 may have been
in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked
out of an underground Emergency Operating Center under the patio of the Dallas
Health and Science Museum. As Russ Baker reports, “Because it was intended for
‘continuity of government’ operations during an attack, it was fully equipped
with communications equipment.” 52. A speech given at the dedication of the
Center in 1961 supplies further details:
This Emergency Operating Center is part of the National Plan to link Federal,
State and local government agencies in a communications network from which
rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is
a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan. 53.
In an earlier draft of this talk I attempted to describe the central
importance of America’s emergency communications network (or so-called Doomsday
communications network) in four of our country’s recent provocation-deception
plots: 11/22, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. If one part of the government
is deceiving another, it needs its own alternative network to do so. Oliver
North, for example, used just such an anti-terrorist network, codenamed
Flashboard, to conduct the Iran-Contra arms operations for which he was
ultimately fired. 54.
There is not time today to develop this theme, other than to note the importance
of Crichton’s access to it. But others beside myself have pointed to the
meta-importance of those charged with overseeing the Doomsday communications
network, known most recently as the Continuity of Government (COG) network.
James Mann, for example, has referred to the COG network overseers as “part of
the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States,
inhabitants of a world in which Presidents may come and go, but America always
keeps on fighting.” 55.
The DPD-Army Connection Reconsidered
I devoted a whole chapter of my book Deep Politics to the Dallas Police-Army
Intelligence connection. But I now think that I seriously misinterpreted its
significance, by seeing its phase-one propensity as an example of right-wing
Texas divergence from the phase-two inclination of those responsible for
running the country. Today we know that the phase-one zeal in Dallas to
implicate Castro, by the use of deceptive falsehoods, had also characterized
the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.
Researcher Larry Haapanen has discovered
the 488th seems to have had its own direct chain of command linking it to
Washington. In an esoteric publication entitled The Military Order of World
Wars (Turner Publishing Company, 1997, p. 120), he found that Crichton
"commanded the 488th MID (Strategic), reporting directly to the Army Chief
of Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency." 56. And in 1970
Haapanen was told by Crichton’s commander in the Texas Army Reserve, Lt. Col.
Whitmeyer, that Crichton's unit did its summer training at the Pentagon.
It is now clear that Stringfellow’s claims about Oswald as a Communist Party
visitor to Cuba, though clearly false, fell well within the guidelines for a
provocation-deception as set out in the Northwoods and May 1963 documents. All
this Cuban deception planning was in support of JCS OPLANS 312 (Air Attack in
Cuba) and 316 (Invasion of Cuba). These were not theoretical exercises, but
actively developed operational plans which the JCS were only too eager to execute.
As they told Kennedy, “We are not only ready to take any action you may order
in Cuba, we are also in an excellent condition world-wide to counter any Soviet
military response to such action.” 57.
In other words, they were prepared for a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia;
even though the JCS, as Air Force General Leon Johnson told the National
Security Council in September 1963, believed this would probably result in “at
least 140 million fatalities in the USSR.” 58.
At the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, according to Khruschchev’s
memoir, Robert Kennedy told the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin:
The President is in a grave situation and does not know how to get out of it.
We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our
military to use force against Cuba…. Even though the President himself is very
much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could
occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to
Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation
continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not
overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of
control." 59.
11/22 and 9/11: Their Consequences for War
This leads us to perhaps the most serious, and also complex, of the parallels
between 11/22 and 9/11: that each was promptly followed by one of the two
longest wars – Vietnam and Afghanistan – in U.S. history. Analysed a little
more closely, we see that in each deep event
1) there were powerful elements inside and government pressing for war –
against Cuba in 1963, against Iraq in 2001;
2) plans for escalation or war were promptly initiated – by NSAM 273 on Vietnam
on November 26, 1963, and by the overt invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001;
3) in each case the difficult direct war originally pushed for was sidelined
(permanently in the case of Cuba, only temporarily in the case of Iraq) and
planning for a direct invasion was displaced by planning for a different
intervention against a softer target (Vietnam, Afghanistan) in conjunction with
local proxies. 60.
In 1963-64 Johnson clearly turned a cold shoulder to the insistent pressures
from the Joint Chiefs and others for war against Cuba. Yet just before
Christmas 1963 Johnson told the Joint Chiefs, "Just get me elected and
then you can have your war” –meaning Vietnam. 61.
Daniel Ellsberg has recorded how throughout 1964 U.S. planners, despite public
assurances to the contrary, were driven by the conviction that defeat in
Vietnam “could be averted, even in the relatively short run, only by a direct
U.S. combat role.” 62.
The same substitution of countries occurred in 2001. Cheney and Rumsfeld, as
signers of a Project for the New American Century position papers, had called
as early as 1997 for action to unseat Saddam Hussein in Iraq. 63. There are
notes indicating that on 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing for military action against
Saddam as early as 2:40PM, and that he was soon joined in this campaign by his
Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Nevertheless, when Bush signed secret orders
for action five days later, his orders called for an immediate plan of military
support for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and only “to begin planning
military options for an invasion of Iraq.” 64.
There were in fact no credible pretexts to justify attacking either Cuba or
Iraq. Attacks on these primary targets would moreover have been premature: in
neither country did the conditions yet exist for an invasion to be popularly
supported and successful. But in both cases the talk of an invasion in country
1 may by its very extremity have facilitated the lesser decision for an
intervention in country 2 – just as the Pentagon, in order to obtain a $10
billion budget item, is accustomed to ask first for $20 billion.
The settling for the lesser decision may finally have been intended to
reinforce the image Johnson needed in 1963 that he was continuing Kennedy’s
policies, and the image Bush needed in 2001 that he was respectful of the
razor-thin mandate given him by the bitterly contested 2000 election. Both
presidents were put into office by events that were extraordinary; and both
presidents needed a cloak of moderation, to mask how they were in fact leading
this country into major wars.
To repeat what I said at the outset: both 11/22 and 9/11 are deep events which
have deeply affected this country, with consequences far greater than could
have been achieved by just 19 Arabs or one disgruntled ex-Marine. But one of
the neglected similarities between the two deep events is that in both cases
the changes were accomplished behind misleading promises of continuity:
Johnson’s “Let us continue,” and Bush’s assurances on 9/11 that the terrorist
attacks “cannot touch the foundation of America.” 65.
Conclusion
Let me close by clarifying what I am not saying, and also what I am saying. I
am saying that elements of the American War Machine, whether inside the
government or outside it, contributed to both 11/22 and 9/11; and they did so
because of their interest in promoting a major war. I am not saying that the
American government did this. In point of fact there features of both events
suggesting that, in both cases, personnel of foreign intelligence agencies may
have been involved. The American war machine is so complex, so pervasive in our
society, that to blame it for these events is as vague and as open-ended as the
sentence in my earlier book Deep Politics (for which I have been much
ridiculed) that “the deep political system” killed John F. Kennedy. My
conclusion does not try to identify individual culprits; it tries to identify
and define a systemic process of deception events.
Still less am I implying that the scenarios of 11/22 and 9/11 were extracted
and dusted off from some master conspiracy theory residing in someone’s safe.
What I am describing, as I said at the outset, is a predictable sociodynamic
that occurs when leaders of an expansive quasi-democratic state are persuaded
there is a need for war, a need which they know their public will not
understand.
In discussing 11/22 and 9/11, we lack the evidence to blame these events
narrowly on the US Government, Pentagon, CIA, Army Intelligence Reserve, or any
other specific agency. It is my belief however that we can blame them on the
American War Machine. In this sense I believe we can describe each event, the
JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, as being “an inside
job.”
There are still many Americans who will be shocked by this statement, even
deeply offended. But my own faith in America’s ultimate decency, and my hopes
for America’s ultimate future, depend on understanding how America’s policies
have been perverted, by forces including the military-industrial complex in its
midst.
NOTES
1. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 3.
2. Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, Volumes 1-2, 30.
3. George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil, 186.
4. David Tal, The 1956 War: collusion and rivalry in the Middle East, 139:
“This attempt ended in miserable failure.”
5. I shall today say very little about 9/11 as a deception event. However my
swift survey of recent wars suggests that it would have been uncharacteristic
of current history if the U.S.-Afghan war had not been in consequence of a
deception event.
6. I offer an overview of this process in The Road to 9/11, especially
pp.1-25,50-79
7. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report
of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 21,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=167&relPageId=21.
8. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”
Appendix,6NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. Two former CIA officers, Joseph B. Smith
and Philip Agee, have speculated that the last proposal may have been
implemented in November 1963, when a cache of arms was discovered on a
Venezuelan beach. But the cache was not at that time presented as a pretext for
war; instead it was quickly used by the United States to obtain OAS endorsement
of the US blockade of Cuba (“Venezuelan Arms Cache -A Northwood’s Operation?”
JFKCountercoup, April 18, 2009,)
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/04/venezuelan-arms-cache-northwoods.html;
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 197).
9. Simon Reeve, “Scientists Link Iraq to Anthrax Terror Attacks,” Sunday Mail
(London), October 28, 2001. It would be interesting to learn the identity of
Reeve’s “scientists.”
10. See discussion by John Dean, “Why A Special Prosecutor's Investigation Is
Needed To Sort Out the Niger Uranium And Related WMDs Mess,” Findlaw.com, July
18, 2003, http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030718.html.
11. Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon,
August 1, 2008, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/. Cf.
Richard Butler, Ambassador in Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations,
New York Times, October 18, 2001: “If the scientific path leads to Iraq as the
supporter of the anthrax used by the terrorist mailers in the United States, no
one should be surprised. Meetings between Mohamed Atta, who is thought to have
been an organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence official
in Prague in June 2000 may have been an occasion on which anthrax was provided to
Mr. Atta. There have also been reports of meetings between senior Iraqi
intelligence officials and members of Al Qaeda.” Butler, while still Executive
Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) was responsible for the
estimate cited by Bush, that “Iraq had not accounted for 520 kilograms of yeast
extract growth medium …sufficient for the production of 26,000 liters of
anthrax spores” (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Issue Brief, 29
October 2001, http://www.jcpa.org/art/brief1-8.htm). Butler’s claims about
Iraq, Atta, and al Qaeda have also since been discredited, although Richard
Cheney and his colleague James Woolsey continue to assert them.
12. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”
Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA
#202-10002-10018, 12.
13. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile
crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.
14. Memorandum From the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Kennedy, November
16, 1962, JCSM-910-62, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/msc_cuba186.asp:
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff are glad to report that our Armed Forces are in an
optimum posture to execute CINCLANT OPLANS 312-62 (Air Attack in Cuba)(1) and
316-62 (Invasion of Cuba).(2) We are not only ready to take any action you may
order in Cuba, we are also in an excellent condition world-wide to counter any
Soviet military response to such action.” This proposal to invade Cuba came three
weeks after Kennedy’s assurances he would not invade Cuba.
15. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 239-40.
16. Scott, American War Machine, 199-203, etc.
17. Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 292-98.
18. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”
Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA
#202-10002-10018, 38.
19. NARA #202-10001-10149.
20. E.g. 104-10307-10007, 63. The documents come from JCS, CIA, and the files
of Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, who had been charged by the Kennedys with
overseeing the plan. Cf. Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 3-13.
21. Waldron, Legacy of Secrecy, 3.
22. 202-10002-10018, 4.
23. Briefing Sheet for the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, for JCS meeting on
6 May 1963, 202-10002-10079, 3.
24. 104-10307-10007, 4.
25. 104-10307-10007, 4.
26. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The
Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified
in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.
27. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The
Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified
in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf,
28. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The
Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified
in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.
29. Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf, 254 (“honest mistake”); James Bamford, Body of
Secrets, 299 (“blunder”).
30. Scott, War Conspiracy, 112, 125-26
31. Scott, Deep Politics, 275; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977,
181.
32, Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129; Scott, War
Conspiracy, 382.
33.Scott, Deep Politics, 276; Scott, Deep Politics II, 78.
34. Edward J. Coyle, interview with ARRB staff person Timothy Wray, October 25,
1999ARA Record 607/11093, 3.
35. Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John
Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have
contained Oswald’s rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald
to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov’s
interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov’s account of it
to the Warren Commission.
36. Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383.
37. Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep
Politics, 168-72
38. Scott, Deep Politics II, 73n, 152.
39. Warren Commission Exhibit 15, 16 WH 33, discussion in Peter Dale Scott,
“Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,”
History-Matters.com, http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm.
40.[1]Warren Commission Exhibit 1 5, 16 WH 33; discussion in Peter Dale Scott,
“Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,”
History-Matters.com, http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm: “What
is particularly suspect about the November 9 Kostin letter is its timing. After
being intercepted by the FBI on its way to the Soviet Embassy in Washington,
the letter was summarized and communicated to Dallas, where the news arrived on
November 22. [FBI Agent James] Hosty thus only learned of it right after the
assassination. Had he learned earlier, Oswald might have been put under [FBI]
surveillance; and the assassination could not have unfolded as it did.” For
persuasive arguments against the authenticity of the Kostin letter, see Jerry
Rose, The Fourth Decade, November 1999,5.
[2] Jerry Rose, The Fourth Decade, November 1999, 5. Rose also pointed to real
problems with the date of the postmark on the typed letter, and the
unlikelihood that Oswald, having concealed the typed letter from Ruth Paine,
would then leave his "draft" on her desk for her to pick up
afterwards (cf. 3 WH 13-15). In the original oral version of this talk,
presented on November 20, 2010, I claimed, wrongly, that the FBI had never tested
the letter against the typewriter of Ruth Paine on which it was allegedly
typed. In fact the FBI did perform this test, and concluded that Ruth Paine’s
typewriter was the one used (Warren Commission Document 735, FBI Report of 10
March 1964, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=11133&relP).
[3] Both the Walker note and the Mexican bus ticket were retrieved from inside
other documents (the first from Ruth Paine, allegedly from inside a book in her
house, the second from Marina, allegedly from inside a cheap Mexican tourist
paper she had retained). Both were supplied to the Warren Commission just when
they were needed to fill gaps in the reconstruction Phase-Two account of
Oswald's life. The bus ticket for example replaced an earlier bus passenger
list on a different bus with the name "Oswld" on it, a list which the
FBI demonstrated to have been altered deceptively, perhaps in the office of the
Mexican president, a CIA asset. See Scott, Deep Politics, 95-96; 24 WH
619-22; 25 WH 599, 646, 736. Other suspect evidence would include the silver
Mexican coin, Spanish-English dictionary, silver bracelet for Marina, and
postcards from Mexico City, all of which Ruth Paine confirmed seeing together
in Marina's drawer; 3 WH 13). I owe thanks to Tim Brennan for pointing out an
error in my earlier account of the pristine bus ticket. However Brennan
misreads my position on Oswald in Mexico. Someone calling himself Oswald was
clearly in Mexico City, perhaps even Marina's husband (I am agnostic on this detail).
But the man overheard phoning the Soviet embassy, who called himself "Lee
Oswald," was clearly NOT Marina's husband: as the FBI itself confirmed at
an early stage (see Scott, Deep Politics, 40-43).
41. Jerry Rose, The Fourth Decade, November 1999,5
42. Peter Dale Scott, “Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in
Mexico,” History-Matters.com,
http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm; Scott, Deep Politics,
39-44.
43. Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 196-98; Scott, The War Conspiracy,
387-88.
44. Beschloss, Taking Charge, 67-69, LBJ phone call with Richard Russell,
11/29/63; cf. 65.
45. 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets,
119-22.
46. Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco
(Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.
47. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 38.
48. Discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 273-74.
49. In early November 1963, Byrd and his investment partner, James Ling, made a
significant insider purchase of stock in their defense industry investment,
LTV. Although required by SEC rules to report this insider purchase, they
delayed doing so until well after Kennedy’s assassination. Then in January LTV
received the first major LBJ defense contract from the Pentagon – for a fighter
plane designed for Vietnam. Cf. Joan Mellen, “The Kennedy Assassination and the
Current Political Moment,” Part II, http://www.joanmellen.net/truth-2.html.
50. Crichton’s collaborator in the 1950s study, fellow 488th member Lt. Col.
Frank Brandstetter, was in turn a friend of men like:
1) David Phillips, in charge of Covert Action at the Mexico City Station when
Oswald allegedly visited there; Phillips had known Brandstetter since both men
were together in Havana in the 1950s (Carlisle and Monetta, Brandy, 146-47)
2) Gordon McLendon, wealthy Dallas businessman whom Jack Ruby described as one
of his six closest friends (20 WH 39);
3) George de Mohrenschildt, the oilman whom some see as a handler for the
Oswalds in 1962; and also Dorothe Matlack and Sam Kail, the Army Intelligence
personnel who coordinated George de Mohrenschildt’s April 1963 visit with CIA
and Army Intelligence in Washington
4) Philippe Thyraud de Vosjoli, a French intelligence (SDECE) agent who worked
closely with Angleton in Washington. On 11/22 de Vosjoli reportedly panicked on
hearing of Kennedy’s death, packed a few clothes into a van, and departed
Washington to join Brandstetter in Acapulco. (Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior,
131-33).
51. Sunoco, Inc., Annual Report, 2009, 4.
52. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
53. “Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and
Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair
Park,” May 24, 1961, http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/fallout/dallaseoc.html.
Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the
Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable on line at
http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/cso/archives/FindingGuides/08001.html. I hope an
interested researcher may wish to consult them.
54. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism,
and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco),
XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30: cf. Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task
Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.
55. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New
York: Viking, 2004), 145. In 1991 a CNN feature on the COG overseers described
these overseers even more ominously as a “shadow government,” and opened with
“In the
United States Federal Government there is a super-secret agency which controls
this Shadow Government” (CNN, November 17, 1991, quoted in Shirley Anne
Warshaw, The Co-presidency of Bush and Cheney [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Politics and Policy, 2009], 162).
56. The Military Order of World Wars (Turner Publishing Company, 1997),
120.
57. Memorandum From the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Kennedy, November
16, 1962JCSM-910-62, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/msc_cuba186.asp:
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff are glad to report that our Armed Forces are in an
optimum posture to execute CINCLANT OPLANS 312-62 (Air Attack in Cuba)(1) and
316-62 (Invasion of Cuba).(2) We are not only ready to take any action you may
order in Cuba, we are also in an excellent condition world-wide to counter any
Soviet military response to such action.”
58. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 239-40.
59. Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970;
citation from paperback edition, New York: Bantam, 1971), pp. 551-52; quoted in
James K. Galbraith, “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for
1963?” American Prospect, 9/21/24; Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 27.
60. I would like also to record a fourth, possibly coincidental similarity,
without drawing any tendentious conclusions from such limited data. Both
interventions (in Vietnam and Afghanistan) were in support of beleaguered
minority factions embroiled in a civil war, and more specifically in support of
factions that in both cases had just been decapitated by assassination. This
left the US in a position to select as new leaders candidates who were more
dependent on US support (General Duong Van Minh in Vietnam, Hamid Karzai in
Afghanistan).
As is well known, Ngo dinh Diem and his brother Nhu had been assassinated in a
coup on November 1, 1963, three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.
Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance which became the
principal US ally against the Taliban, had been assassinated just two days
before 9/11, and just five days after the US had assigned a central role to the
Northern Alliance in a national security strategy for confronting al Qaeda in
Afghanistan (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars [New York: Penguin, 2004], 574-76). The CIA
involvement in the killing of Diem is well established. The killing of Massoud
is said to have been the work of Al Qaeda (Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, 22), and
there is no evidence at this time that the CIA’s double agents in Al Qaeda
might have been involved.
Yet it remains a fact that US planning to escalate radically in Vietnam had
begun just before 11/22; and Diem was an obstacle because of his profound
opposition to an expanded US military presence there. (Howard Jones, Death of a
Generation, 64, cf. 94). Likewise the US had finally approved, just before
9/11, a new plan to support Northern Alliance against Al Qaeda; yet there was
great resistance in Washington to backing Massoud, a drug trafficker suspected
for his links to Russia and Iran, and a determined enemy of Pakistan (Coll,
Ghost Wars, 536; Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, 20).
61. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, p. 326; Charles A. Stevenson, Warriors
and Politicians: US Civil-Military Relations Under Stress, 53.
62. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets, 48.
63. Scott, Road to 9/11, 192.
64. Bamford, Pretext for War, 287.
65. Veda Boyd Jones, George W. Bush, 94.
