Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Paul Linebarger and Napoleon Valeriano - CIA Trainers

Napoleon Valeriano - Filipino associate of Lansdale, who became part of Lansdale's team in Laos and Cuban operations, and trained Bay of Pigs Brigade in Guatemala.


VALERIANO NAPOLEON D.

Philippines 1946-1954 Vietnam 1954-1956 Guatemala 1959 Cuba 1961-1962
Seagrave, Sterling. The Marcos Dynasty. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. 485 pages.

Edward Lansdale had just installed Ramon Magsaysay as Philippine defense minister and planned to run him for president, but first he had to deal with the peasants. "In an area thought to be harboring a team of Huk guerrillas, Lansdale's ambushers snatched a peasant one night, punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, hung the body by the ankles to drain it of blood, then put the corpse back on the trail. When the peasants found the toothmarked bloodless corpse, the entire Huk unit moved away. The novelty of these games amused Lansdale, who slyly passed them on as combat anecdotes, enchanting his CIA superiors.... 

Lansdale's experiments were given top priority." (page 145) '

With friends like these, the Philippine elite had little need to maintain democratic appearances. Fake war hero Ferdinand Marcos was elected in 1965, declared marshall law in 1972, and then defrauded his countrymen and partied his way into the hearts of U.S. celebrities for the next 14 years. Also included are several chapters on "Yama's Gold" -- the apparent source of much of Marcos' wealth. There's still $100 billion or so that hasn't been recovered, which attracted treasure-hunters such as the John Birch Society and, as recently as 1986, John Singlaub, who wanted the gold to fund his anti-communist campaigns.

ISBN 0-06-015815-8

From Joseph Smith's Portrait of a Cold Warrior (Putnam, 1976, p. 94)

A large psychological warfare unit was developed and trained...History and traditions in all of the Huk areas were studied for clues to the appropriate appeals to make to wean the populace from supporting the Huks. Paul Linebarger made a number of trips to the Philippines to advise Lansdale on operations.

It was in connection with Linebarger's involvement in Philippine operations that I had one of my few direct contacts with the events that transpired there. In the fall of 1952, I was given the assignment of picking up one of the Lansdale team, Napoleon Valeriano, at the Philippine Embassy and taking him to Linebarger's house for a training session. Valeriano was not only one of the key members of the team, but he was one whom Lansdale counted on in future operations. When Valeriano was in Vietnam helping Lansdale in the early days of the Diem regime, he carreied off to Saigon the wife of a wealthy Filipino businessman. The injured husband immediately put out a contract on Valeriano, and he was never able to set foot in Manila again. It would have meant instant death. Subsequently, Valeriano worked in the Pentagon, trained the Cuban brigade preparing for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was involved in post-Bay of Pigs activities with which Lansdale was concerned.

Valeriano and I arrived at Linebarger's at five o'clock one afternoon and stayed four hours. Paul concentrated on his con-man line concerning how to use a subject's own hopes and longings to achieve results desired in a psychological operation.....

...Supporting this basic program were propaganda efforts - films, special radio programs, and so forth. George Aurell, the new division chief, never felt comfortable about any of this. He used to come over to our Plans offic and unburden himself to Kay. "What in hell is an intelligence agency doing running a rural resetlement program?" he used to ask. "I'm glad to help fight the Huks, but is it our job to rebuild a nation?" Ed Lansdale and his team in the Philippines, and later elsewhere, were convinced it was. Des Fitzgerald had no trouble tolerating this sort of diversity....

From Joe Smith's Portrait of a Cold Warrior (p. 94)'

....."You'll never get the Huks to surrender because the Philippine government wants them to," Paul (Linebarger) stressed. "They'll give up only if they think they're going to get something they want which is even more important to them than the satisfaction they get from defying authority by fighting in the hills...."

(p335)...First of all, Howard Hunt would have liked to have used in a key role a Batista follower who was a friend of J.C. King and especially of former ambassador to Cuba William D. Pauley....Gerry (Droller) of course, was following the line laid down by Tracy Barnes - the official position of taking care not to remove Castro in order to bring back the Batista gang, which was the reason the task force had to be established under Tracy Barne's control and not left to J.C. King....

...After August 1960, the operational planning of the Cuban task force changed course. Since Hunt and Droller couldn't form a political organization sufficiently coherent to confront Castro, the emphasis shifted to a larger-scale military action.

Napoleon Valeriano, Ed Lansdale's man, who had been training the Cuban exile guerrilla fighters, was dismissed and $13 million to train a full-fledged fighting brigade was approved. John Kennedy didn't know it, but there was no chance that the operation, which had originally been approved in March, 1960, could be undertaken before the November elections....

(p.342) ...J.C. King and his crew of former FBI men were more disturbed by Goodwin and Schlesinger than by General Taylor's investigating committee. They believed they had a chance with Maxwell Taylor - he and King had gone to West Point together - while they thought there was no hope with Goodwin and Schlesinger.....

SO PHILLIPINE NAPOLEON VALERIANO WAS GIVEN PERSONAL PSYCH-WAR LESSONS FROM LANSDALE'S PRIMARY MENTOR IN THE BLACK ARTS, PAUL LINEBARGER, AND THEN BROUGHT TO NICARAGUA TO TRAIN THE CUBANS AS GUERRILLAS - BK


Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Lost ID Leads to Underground Ravenrock Fallout Shelter

Man Accidentally Uncovered A Secret Facility That Reveals Our Biggest Fear
By Cody Mauro


Whether it’s a dollar bill or a lost winter glove, finding something on the cold cement of a parking garage floor isn’t likely to change your day all that much. Still, every now and then, a seemingly worthless item can turn into something so much more—just ask Garrett Graff.

A historian and political author, Graff didn’t think much of the item one of his work colleagues found on the floor of a parking garage. But upon closer inspection, he saw something on the object that piqued his journalistic curiosity. What followed was a life-changing, multi-year hunt into some of America’s most deeply buried secrets…

“It was a government ID for someone from the intelligence community.” Graff said, “and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he’s like, ‘I figure you can get this back to this guy.'” The friend, he noted, had found the ID on a parking garage floor. 

The directions led him to a mountain peak just over 70 miles outside of Washington D.C. There, at a peak known as Raven Rock, the road just… ended. It led to the face of the mountain and then, nothing.

Graff recalled everything else he saw once he made the trip out there. “You can see very clearly these big concrete bunker doors,” he said. “This little guard shack, chain-link fence, and then this set of concrete bunker doors beyond.” What had he just found?

“It was a facility that I had never heard of that wasn’t on any map,” Graff elaborated. His inner historian and journalist totally freaking out, he started researching what he’d found as soon as he could.

He didn’t know it when he first stumbled upon the structure, but the directions had led him to Raven Rock Mountain Complex, also known as ‘Site R’. To put it more bluntly, he’d found a nuclear fallout shelter!

Graff’s research turned up plenty of information on the United States government’s nuclear war contingency plan—some of it comforting, some of it horrifying, and all of it fascinating. For example…

The Truman administration sanctioned construction on the bunker in 1951 once the Cold War with the Soviet Union started warming up. They used a construction team who’d carved out New York City subway tunnels to do the job. So how’d they keep it secret?

Laborer Gene Bowman—who was paid $1.35 per hour in 1951 to bore through the granite of Raven Rock—put it this way: “They just said they were building a tunnel. Wasn’t nobody interested in what they were doing.” Once dug, however, it didn’t look like a simple tunnel.

In his interview with NPR, Graff described the Raven Rock Complex as “a free-standing city… built inside of this mountain.” Intended to be a “backup Pentagon,” Site R boasted two 34-ton blast doors capable of thwarting nuclear bomb blows.

Beyond the blast doors and inside the heart of the rock, 100,000 feet of office provided all the room military officials would need to operate. Infirmaries, cafeterias, and utility areas allowed for up to 1,400 of America’s V.I.P.s to live somewhat comfortably—with a catch.

With the president, his or her cabinet, officials, and military personnel inhabiting the bunker, there was no room for spouses. This led to a famous exchange between then-Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and another official…

Handed an ID badge for access to Raven Rock, Justice Warren realized there wasn’t one for his wife. When told she wouldn’t be allowed in, the justice handed back the ID and said, “you’ll have room for one more important official.”

But believe it or not, Raven Rock wasn’t just a place for the elite and powerful to hobnob as the world around them fell apart. As Graff discovered, officials set up very specific operation plans for every federal branch—even the IRS and post office.

Yep, even in the case of nuclear destruction, the government wasn’t going to let people off the tax hook so easily. The IRS had a post-bomb plan that covered how to appropriately tax damaged—rather, vaporized—property.

And where would people get money to pay taxes in an apocalyptic society? Uncle Sam had a plan for that, too: officials stashed away publicly scorned $2 bills in another bomb shelter to redistribute as currency.

Other federal departments had assigned duties as well: the Parks Department would set up refugee camps, the Department of Agriculture would divvy up rations, and the post office was charged with finding out who died in the blast.

At the time of the Cold War, a nuclear attack felt so imminent that Raven Rock had been fully manned and operated 24 hours per day—up until 1992. Operations were picked up and modernized once more after the September 11 attacks in 2001. They again run 24/7.

Though the ID card Graff received listed directions to only one secret bunker, his research uncovered half a dozen or so other doomsday shelters (like one beneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia here), each more or less the same in function and design.

In Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs lie another hidden doomsday bunker. Like Raven Rock, this complex was built in the 1950s and served as “the command post responsible for defending both Canada and the U.S. from air attacks,” Graff said.

Cheyenne Mountain had reservoirs of water and fuel, doctor’s offices, gyms, and even a Subway sandwich joint. So in the event of a nuclear attack, whoever was working the cash register at the time earned a spot among the surviving elite.

Through all of his research, though, Graff learned something unsettling. “If you’re trying to preserve and restart the government after an attack,” he explained to NPR, it “becomes this very existential question about what is America?”

As far as Graff could tell, the bunkers provided a disturbing answer. “The civilian population will be left to itself for weeks or months at a time,” he said, “and a small number of senior government officials will be spirited out to these bunkers.”

 In other words, the government’s plot to rebuild post-nuclear war America didn’t really include the people. Preserving artifacts and the system of government took precedent, but in a time of chaos, what else could be done?


Graff dove deeper into his findings in a book he titled Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die. To think, his journey into some of the country’s biggest secrets started with just a lost ID badge!






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