-Caveat Lector- from: http://members.home.net/memresearch/econ/rogue.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://members.home.net/memresearch/econ/rogue.htm";> Rogue Elephant</A> ---- According to journalist Daniel Hopsicker, records have recently come to light showing that Felix Rodriguez, a CIA cocaine smuggler during the Iran-Contra years and an associate of George Bush, was a member of the CIA's Operation 40 Cuban death squad in the 1960s and was recruited into the CIA in 1961 by a man named Bush, presumably George. Rodriguez was one of Fulgencio Batista’s policemen in pre-Castro Cuba, participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and eventually went to work at the CIA’s station in Miami, which was code-named JMWAVE. Rodriguez fits Sam Giancana’s vague description of one of the Kennedy gunmen as a "crooked former Batista cop." Both Bush and Rodriguez, and Richard Nixon are among the few men of their respective generations who deny being able to recall the exact circumstances in which they learned of the President’s murder (Hopsicker 167-68, Prouty 1992:119-120). John F. Kennedy’s vice president and successor was also closely linked to the narcotics smuggling interests. Lyndon Johnson's political career was built on fraud and graft and thrived on its continuation. The U.S. Senate seat that he took in the 1948 election was stolen (Scheim 1983:233). While serving as Senate majority leader, Johnson did favors for Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss whose territory extended into Johnson's home state of Texas. In exchange for shooting down anti-racketeering bills and steering congressional investigations clear of Texas, Johnson got hundreds of thousands of dollars from Marcello in the form of campaign contributions (Scott 1993). Johnson and FBI Director Hoover may have used evidence of Kennedy’s extramarital sexual escapades to blackmail JFK into taking Johnson as his running mate (Summers 1993:271-73). Acting as the illegal drug industry’s most highly-placed "mole" in the White House, LBJ fed information to the President’s enemies, including telling CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell of JFK’s plans to castrate the CIA (Morrow 1976:22). Cabell was close to Ed Lansdale and his brother, Earle Cabell, also happened to be the mayor of Dallas. Using John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam as a basis for commentary, Professor Peter Dale Scott discusses in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK one of Johnson’s early diplomacy efforts as vice president, which was to encourage Ngo Dinh Diem to request an increased U.S. troop presence in Vietnam: . . . Johnson had been, since 1961, the ally of the Joint Chiefs (and in particular Air Force General Curtis LeMay) in their unrelenting efforts, against Kennedy’s repeated refusals, to introduce U.S. combat troops into Asia. In May 1961 . . . LBJ had briefly been a "linchpin" in an attempted end-run around Kennedy’s reluctance. On May 10 the Joint Chiefs sent a recommendation to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that [Diem] be "encouraged to request" U.S. combat troops. . . . Johnson acted on the unapproved recommendation . . .and obtained from Diem the response that he "did want an increase in U.S. training personnel." Moments later, Diem had accepted the compromise . . . that U.S. combat troops be introduced "for direct training purposes." . . . [This] compromise "parallels precisely" a formula inserted into policy documents two weeks earlier in Washington by General Lansdale, saying that 16,000 U.S. combat troops were required in Vietnam as trainers (Scott 1993:30-31). Newman himself had this to say: Lansdale was not a combat troops man, yet the very first piece of paper ever in the history of the Vietnam War where an American officer recommends a U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam, Lansdale was the one who authors it. It's right in that critical time frame right after the failure at the Bay of Pigs; right before the crucial decision Kennedy has to make on going into Laos. His Vietnam Task Force paper is coming in through the door. The night, the very night that the Joint Chiefs figure out that Kennedy is going to say no on Laos, Lansdale, late at night in the Pentagon, slips in this combat troop proposal in the Vietnam Task Force report. Thus we have the loosely-connected association of General Edward Lansdale, his Air Force superior Curtis LeMay, Lyndon Johnson, and others unknown acting in concert to pressure the new president to send combat troops into Vietnam, a commitment that President Eisenhower had adamantly refused to make. Dave Ferrie was a CIA pilot, a close associate of Carlos Marcello, and much more. Ferrie is said to have flown Marcello back into the United States after his deportation by Robert Kennedy. As well as making clandestine flights into Cuba, Ferrie also flew drugs and guns out of Central America for Marcello (Giancana 1992:331). As an instructor in the Civil Air Patrol, Ferrie recruited Lee Harvey Oswald and Barry Seal into his clandestine world. Much has been written about all three men. Oswald, of course, is best known as the fall guy in the Kennedy assassination. Seal was Ferrie’s successor as manager of the CIA’s Louisiana air fleet after Ferrie’s 1967 murder during the prosecution of Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman who ran the International Trade Mart, where Seal is known to have had an office in 1969 (Hopsicker 2001). Seal was also the CIA’s most flamboyant drug trafficker until his own death in Baton Rouge in 1986 (Reed and Cummings 1993). Also working closely with Ferrie was Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who had resigned the Bureau as Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office in 1955 and come to New Orleans. In the early 1960s it was not uncommon for Banister’s office to contain crates of ammunition or Cuban paramilitary men (Hinckle and Turner 1992:229-236). Dave Ferrie worked closely with Clay Shaw. One of Seal’s CIA handlers, Dave Dixon, was Shaw’s close friend (Hopsicker 2001). Shaw remains the only man ever indicted in connection with the Kennedy assassination. Shaw was also on the board of Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), two CIA front companies involved in illegal arms transfers. Permindex and CMC had many officers in common. The Centro was originally formed in Montreal before moving to Rome in 1961. One of the CMC’s major stockholders was Major L. M. Bloomfield, formerly of the American OSS, who also was the Chairman of Permindex’s Montreal branch (Garrison 1988:100-101). Montreal is a significant city for many reasons, one of the lesser-known reasons being its role as a major North American hub for narcotics trafficking during this period. The Montreal syndicate was run by French Corsicans and was of great significance to the American traffic, described as "dominant" by one expert (Chambliss 1978). Major Bloomfield was also the attorney for the Bronfman family, which owned the Seagrams liquor company. The Canadian Bronfmans had made enormous amounts of money selling alcohol to America during the prohibition era. Criminologist William Chambliss has pointed out that the bootleggers of the 1920s were in many cases among the major heroin wholesalers of the decades to follow (Chambliss 1978). One Jules Kimble told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that he had accompanied Dave Ferrie and Clay Shaw to Montreal some time around 1962 (Garrison 1988:136-138). Jack Ruby also worked with Ferrie and Shaw to buy guns for the Cuban exile underground on behalf of the CIA (Morrow 1992). The OAS, a French terrorist group of the time, also figures heavily in this milieu. The OAS, or Secret Army Organization, was financed in large part by drug money and was determined to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle (Krüger 1980). There is evidence to suggest that one or more OAS terrorists were on hand at the assassination of President Kennedy (Twyman 1997:411). Permindex funded the OAS and de Gaulle in 1962 publicly accused Permindex of doing so (Marrs 1989:499; Garrison 1988:88-89). DA Jim Garrison discovered that Guy Banister had sent an associate to Paris with a suitcase containing between $100,000 and $200,000 in cash for the OAS (Marrs 1989:499). Ruby’s arms smuggling partner, Thomas Eli Davis, worked with the OAS (Twyman 1997:421-22). The Schlumberger Corporation, which is Brown and Root’s (that is to say, Halliburton’s) biggest competitor in the oil well services business even today, also supported the OAS (Garrison 1988:53); its president, Jean de Menil, was also on Permindex’s board of directors (DiEugenio 1993:213). Schlumberger was begun by a Houston family into which de Menil married; the de Menils were contributors to the arts and respected members of Houston society. George DeMohrenschildt counted de Menil as a close friend. The CIA also supported the OAS in the early 1960s and supplied Schlumberger with anti-personnel ammunition (Garrison 1988:53). After the apparent demise of the OAS, Dave Ferrie and several anti-Castro Cubans in the employ of Guy Banister removed explosives from a Schlumberger bunker at Houma, Louisiana for use in anti-Castro operations. Several crates of the munitions were seen at his office by a visiting friend (Hinckle and Turner 1992:230). Surveying the entire sordid mess from his Washington, DC office was J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a careful man who had not openly defied any President or Attorney General (his nominal superiors) but who doggedly pursued his own agenda, namely the protection and accumulation of his own power. No one has claimed to have been close to him, and none of those closest to him claim to have understood him. Hoover denied the existence of a national crime syndicate until the 1960s, when bureaucratic pressures from the White House became too great to withstand. How do we explain the reluctance of the nation's top law enforcement officer to prosecute organized crime? One possible reason is that Hoover practiced homosexuality and the mafia knew it and threatened to expose him. A 1993 biography would seem to establish as fact Hoover's deviant sexual behavior and presents evidence that Hoover protected mob boss Meyer Lansky because Lansky had photos of Hoover in compromising sexual behavior (Summers 1993:243-45). Such photographs are reported by more than one source to have been in the possession of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton (Hopsicker 2001:119; Summers 1993:244-45). It is believed that Hoover's second-in-command and constant companion Clyde Tolson was also his lover; this was something of an "open secret" in Washington (Summers 1993). A man of otherwise good character who was thus vulnerable to blackmail would find it difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute the crimes of those who held his weakness over his head at all times like Damocles' sword. For a man already inclined toward graft, such blackmail was the most common form of insurance against a sudden attack of conscience. But there are still those who insist that Hoover was not homosexual. Cartha DeLoach, one of Hoover's top assistants, ridiculed the research of Hoover biographer Anthony Summers on this subject as "gossip" and attacked the credibility of his sources. But could one truly expect "respectable" citizens to be firsthand witnesses to such behavior and thus to be available as sources? Contrary to the impression given by DeLoach in his book Hoover’s FBI, these allegations have been around for decades. Even in the 1940s, FBI agents were squelching rumors of Hoover’s alleged homosexuality (Theoharis 1995:346-356). Another explanation, one based on more common knowledge, is Hoover's affiliation with right-wing individuals who were connected to organized crime. He was a very close friend of Del Webb, the owner of the New York Yankees baseball team whose finances had been entangled with those of organized crime figures the likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, and of right-wing oil baron Clint Murchison, whose Murchison Oil Lease Company was found by the U.S. Senate to be 20 percent owned by the Genovese crime family of New York (Summers 1993:231-33). Murchison arranged for the FBI director to lend his name to the famous anti-Communist book Masters of Deceit, which he arranged to be published through his own company (Scott 1993:207). Hoover was sighted on several occasions meeting with mob boss Frank Costello. Hoover's retirement in January of 1965 was eventually waived by his old friend and neighbor, President Lyndon Johnson, with whom he had at least two things in common: an intense resentment of the Kennedys and little or no chance of staying in office if JFK had been reelected. The two men shared complicity in the assassination, having had foreknowledge of the shooting in Dallas. Madeleine Brown, Johnson’s mistress, recalled the following from a party on the evening before the assassination, hosted by Clint Murchison and attended by J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, Richard Nixon, John McCloy, George Brown (of Brown and Root) and H.L. Hunt: The group . . . went behind closed doors. A short time later Lyndon, anxious and red-faced, re-appeared. I knew how secretly Lyndon operated. Therefore I said nothing . . . not even that I was happy to see him. Squeezing my hand so hard, it felt crushed from the pressure, he spoke with a grating whisper, a quiet growl, into my ear, not a love message, but one I'll always remember: "After tomorrow those g—d--- Kennedys will never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise." (Brown 1997) There had been credible death threats against the Kennedys which had come to the attention of the FBI for several months prior to the assassination. Designed as the FBI was, only Hoover, and possibly some of his men at the top, could have seen the "big picture" which was being formed from bits of information passed on by the various field offices. It appears that Hoover sat on the information rather than passing it on to the Secret Service, and sat rather aloof from the developing conspiracy until it came to its climax in Dallas (North 1991). Hoover’s actions after the assassination were not consistent with his office. Not only did he mislead and withhold information from the presidential commission appointed to investigate the event, he publicly demanded that the Warren Commission agree with his declaration that Lee Harvey Oswald bore sole responsibility for the murder (North 1991:14). As soon as the commission’s seven members had been chosen, Hoover "ordered his aides to compile secret dossiers on each member . . . so he would have adequate dirt in his files, if a need arose." (North 1991:448) Congressman Hale Boggs, one of the seven commissioners, complained years later that Hoover had "lied his eyes out" on several points relevant to the case and accused Hoover of using "Gestapo tactics" to intimidate him. Boggs disappeared on a plane flight in 1972. (Groden and Livingstone 1989:116; Marrs 1989:562). Not all of the commissioners were disposed to complain about Hoover’s behavior. Former CIA director Allen Dulles was on the commission, and had no desire for an investigation that would expose the CIA’s proximity to the conspiracy. Future president Gerald Ford was Hoover’s active accomplice on the commission. According to the William Sullivan, then an Assistant Director at the FBI, Hoover was delighted when Ford was named to the Warren Commission. The Director wrote in one of his internal memos that the Bureau could expect Ford to "look after FBI interests" and he did, keeping us fully advised of what was going on behind closed doors. He was our . . . informant on the Warren Commission (North 1991:448-49) Ford altered the wording of a report describing the deceased president’s wounds to make a single-gunman explanation plausible (Feinilber 1997). Ford, along with commission counsel and future U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, was among the chief authors of the so-called "magic bullet" theory, which proposed that three shots were fired and that one of the bullets caused an impossible series of wounds, later to emerge from two men’s bodies showing no signs of impact. It was an implausible theory, but it was the best that could have been done, and in those days fewer people thought to question the government. The year after the Commission released its report, Ford authored Portrait of the Assassin, which supported the Commission’s conclusions. Though the book used materials that had been ordered sealed, Ford suffered no legal consequences. These details might be worth forgetting were it not for events in Ford’s later career. In the middle of Richard Nixon’s second term as president, Ford was appointed by Nixon to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew due to legal proceedings against Agnew. When the Watergate cover-up caught up with Nixon, he resigned and left Ford to take over the office; Ford immediately pardoned Nixon in advance of any Watergate-related charges which might be brought against the ex-president. Fifteen months after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Gerald Ford chose George Bush to head the CIA. It was in these circumstances that the National Security Council, over which Ford had direct oversight, made a deliberate and secret decision to use drug profits to fund the arming of the Kurds. As part of this program, the CIA used offshore oil rigs, some of which were owned by Bush’s Zapata Offshore company, to smuggle the contraband past U.S. Customs (Ruppert 2000). THE KENNEDYS’ WAR FOR CONTROL The Kennedy Justice Department’s targeting of the Teamsters Union and other persons affiliated with organized crime is well-known. The Teamsters were at the time aligned with the Republican party and thus represented a source of power and revenue to the Kennedys’ opposition. The Kennedy administration’s war on organized crime had earlier roots in the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, also known as the McClellan Committee. The committee was formed in 1957; Robert Kennedy was Chief Counsel and his brother John was a member. The McClellan Committee’s most notorious target was Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union. The committee reported that Teamsters Local 320 in Miami was a front for narcotics smuggling and identified the Marcello organization as the "key distribution point for drug shipments entering the United States" (Morrow 1993:39). The committee also put Sam Giancana in the hot seat and America watched on television as he pled the fifth on all questions and was ridiculed by Bobby Kennedy. After the 1961 inauguration, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, appointed by his brother the president, formed a "Get Hoffa" squad in the Justice Department to take down the powerful leader of the Teamsters. New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello was aligned with Hoffa, the anti-Castro Cubans, and other Republican interests, particularly anti-Communist organizations, and was summarily deported by Robert Kennedy to Guatemala in 1961. After what Marcello described as an ordeal in a remote Guatemalan jungle, Dave Ferrie flew him back to the states. Ferrie was with Marcello in court on the day of the assassination and had to make a hasty trip to Dallas, where he and Barry Seal are reputed to have flown getaway planes for the conspirators (Hopsicker 2001: 164-65). In addition to cleaning up organized crime – at least where it was serving rival interests – the Kennedy administration angered its enemies by seeking to replace the mafia-favored Cuban exiles with others more to its liking. Even before JFK’s inauguration, he had been warned by his Cuban confidants that former Batista cronies, those allied with Marcello and other underworld figures, were now in positions of prominence in the CIA’s Cuban "government-in-exile." There was a split in the CIA over which sort of Cubans ought to be leading the exile movement. A right-wing faction in the Agency had gained Vice President Nixon’s approval in creating "Operation Forty," a Cuban hit team with the mission of eliminating supposed leftists from the exile movement. Nixon and Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA, created the squad in October 1960 with Mario Kohly, an exile financier and the CIA-mafia alliance’s Cuban President-designate. Operation Forty, presumably named after the National Security Council committee (the "Forty Committee") responsible for the approval of covert operations, was to execute the leftist leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council – the Cubans favored by the new administration – in connection with the Cuban invasion (Morrow 1993:26). A half dozen of these leaders were indeed put under house arrest by the CIA during the Agency-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs the following spring and would likely have been left as martyrs dead on the beach if the invasion had succeeded and put Kohly in power. Although his reappointment of CIA Director Allen Dulles and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were Kennedy’s first official acts as President, circumstances quickly changed to show that these two powerful men would not remain in those positions. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, President Kennedy was determined to reorganize the intelligence community in a way that would neutralize his opposition in the CIA. Kennedy fired the top leadership responsible for the invasion, including Director Allen Dulles, his deputy Charles Cabell, and Dick Bissell, the deputy director in charge of the CIA’s covert action wing. On June 28, 1961 Kennedy signed National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs) 55,56, and 57, which placed the responsibility for covert operations – traditionally the CIA’s – in the hands of the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These memos sent shock waves through the defense establishment, but they were only the beginning. The Kennedy Administration created the Defense Intelligence Agency in October 1961. By year's end, Bobby Kennedy had become the cabinet officer in charge of Cuban operations. If his brother had had a second term as president, Bobby would likely have been made head of the CIA. In a series of meetings, memos, and telephone calls, he hounded the "Special Group" of Cuban operations officers to do more to undermine Fidel Castro in a new NSC operation dubbed "MONGOOSE." When RFK discovered the CIA/mafia joint effort to assassinate Fidel Castro, he was outraged and "turned it off." (David and David 1986:228) The Kennedys were determined to overthrow Castro, but on their own terms and in their own way and with people of their own choosing. Warren Hinckle and William Turner, authors of Deadly Secrets, described the Kennedys’ anti-Castro efforts this way: They would pick their own people, Kennedy people, and the second act of the Cuban drama would be directed from the White House, not Langley, not Miami. This was how the Kennedys saw it; but in their patrician manner, they didn’t tell it that way. They continued to wave before all the exiles the flag of a free Cuba while simultaneously cutting away many exile groups, and conversely anointing others to participate in the secret agenda (Hinckle and Turner 1992:170). If Cuba were to be made free, the Kennedys vowed, it would not be allowed to return to its former status as a cash cow for their rivals. Despite their aggressiveness, however, the Rogue Elephant had its revenge. President Kennedy made the serious mistake of making Ed Lansdale the administration’s right-hand man in Cuban operations, in charge of Operation MONGOOSE. Lansdale had been one of those who had challenged Allen Dulles’ claim that the Bay of Pigs invasion would succeed without direct U.S. military support. He did not believe that a popular uprising would follow, as Dulles claimed (Wyden 1979:71-73). This opposition, as well as Lansdale’s well-known service in Vietnam and the Philippines, may have contributed to Lansdale’s merit in Kennedy’s eyes and vouched for his fitness as a key figure in a new Cuba campaign. But, as we have seen, Lansdale may have been serving in Vietnam the very domestic interests the Kennedys were combating. And, as we shall see later, Lansdale’s position in MONGOOSE afforded him access to information and personnel which he may have used to organize the 1963 assassination and cover-up. At its heart, MONGOOSE was a series of air and sea raids against Cuba aboard small, non-military planes and watercraft. It was absolutely enormous, and was all coordinated by a secret CIA station at the University of Miami, code-named JMWAVE. If all the boats had belonged to another country, it has been said, it would have been one of the largest fleets in the western hemisphere. Since the raids on Cuba were in violation of the neutrality act, MONGOOSE was illegal on its face. In order to put a cloak of secrecy around the project, numerous other laws were broken. The south Florida business world was turned upside down by the arrival of hundreds of CIA front companies for which phony incorporation papers were filed. Income tax returns gave bogus sources of income. FAA regulations were violated by the filing of spurious flight plans and the taping over of registration numbers. The transportation of explosives on Florida highways transgressed state law. Possession of illegal explosives and war materiel contravened the Munitions Act, and acquisition of automatic weapons defied the Firearms Act. Every time a boat left for Cuba the Neutrality Act was broken; every time it returned Customs and Immigrations laws were skirted (Hinckle and Turner 1992:129-30). The CIA made arrangements with law enforcement at all levels – from the Dade County Sheriff’s Office to the FBI and Coast Guard – to look the other way and to release any of its people who got themselves into trouble. Pilots working for CIA fronts would be fed information from Agency contacts in the military on how to time their flights to pass through temporary holes in U.S. radar systems (Hinckle and Turner 1992:129-30). Of course, a transnational undertaking that is already illegal in nature and has neutralized all possible threats from law enforcement will create rampant drug smuggling. This has been proven to be the case not only with respect to Cuba but with every similar project since then. Where there is a protected smuggling pipeline, there is great wealth; and where there is wealth of that enormity, there is great power. And when that power is threatened, it will do anything to preserve itself. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Kennedys began what seemed to be a complete dismantling of the Cuba project. The exile training camps were shut down and where paramilitary activity persisted, the camps were raided by federal authorities. Counterfeiters involved in a CIA-sponsored program to flood Cuba with bogus currency were apprehended by U.S. Treasury agents. MONGOOSE was shut down; this meant that many of the most active exile Cubans were left out in the cold, and perhaps most traumatic of all to the administration’s deadliest enemies, there could be no more MONGOOSE-protected drug flights. In reality, the administration had not given up on ridding Cuba of Castro but was merely moving its anti-Castro operations overseas and purging certain exile elements. This purge was aimed chiefly at removing the administration’s enemies from the Cuba project and creating an exile Army with whom the administration could cooperate both during the anti-Castro campaign and after its anticipated success. The exile factions excluded from the administration’s new Cuba operations included many who were angry with Kennedy’s performance during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crises and those who were allied with the Gulf States crime syndicates – the syndicates hoping to re-establish their criminal power bases in a Castro-free Cuba. As a result of the purge, these exile factions could only have become more dependent on mob patronage and even more anti-Kennedy. At the height of the missile crisis, as the American and Soviet navies faced off in the Caribbean, CIA officer William Harvey was dispatching commando teams into Cuba, in an attempt to precipitate a full-scale invasion into Cuba. This move enraged the Attorney General and got Harvey dismissed from the Cuba project. Harvey had designed many aspects of the CIA's ZRRIFLE assassination program, was in charge of Task Force W, the CIA’s Cuban section, and answered to Ed Lansdale. Bobby Kennedy sent him to Rome, where he embarrassed the diplomatic corps by his public drunkenness and by engaging in diatribes against the Kennedys. However, Harvey continued to be a key player in the Agency’s ZRRIFLE program, for which he managed and recruited assassins. He was in touch with underworld figures such as Johnny Roselli throughout 1963. He and Roselli had multiple visits with David Morales, the JMWAVE station’s chief of "dirty work," who later made a drunken boast of having had a hand in JFK’s assassination. That summer, Harvey also made contact with David Atlee Phillips, another CIA officer and prime suspect in the assassination (Twyman 1997:307). Phillips’ role will be described shortly. In short, Harvey was the wrong sort of person for the Kennedys to have alienated. It was around the time of the missile crisis that plans to assassinate JFK reached a new intensity. Some staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations rightly concluded that Harvey was likely to have played a high-level role in engineering and coordinating the assassination of the president. By November 1963, the Kennedy Justice Department was hot on the trail of the Vice President. Johnson faced not only political ruin, but the strong possibility of going to prison if any of the matters being pursued developed into a viable case against him. Johnson had been getting enormous sums of gambling profits from Carlos Marcello through a Dallas gangster named Jack Halfen - $500,000 over a ten-year period. In return, Johnson had used his influence in the Senate to kill anti-racketeering bills, take the teeth out of the bills he couldn’t stop, and slwo down investigations of organized crime (Marrs 1989:293; Twyman 1997:799) Another conduit for the Marcello money was LBJ's secretary Bobby Baker, and that sordid story was beginning to come to light in 1963. Baker was forced to resign on October 8th, and on the day of Kennedy's fateful motorcade in Dallas, Richard Nixon was quoted in the newspapers predicting that the Baker scandal would result in Johnson being dropped from the 1964 ticket. Kennedy did in fact indicate to one of his secretaries that he intended to cut Johnson loose. Johnson had long since realized that his next destination after leaving the White House would likely be prison. This, of course, was not to be. On the day after the assassination, the FBI stopped sending Robert Kennedy reports on the Baker matter (Russell 1992:523). Though the issue did not die immediately, and Baker went to jail, Johnson ultimately survived it. Nearly hysterical, he ordered subordinates to make payoffs: [Baker] is going to ruin me. If that [deleted] talks, I'm gonna land in jail. . . . I practically raised that [deleted], and now he's gonna make me the first President of the United States to spend the last days of his life behind bars. . . . Nat can get to Bobby. . . Tell Nat to tell Bobby that I will give him a million dollars if he takes this rap. Bobby must not talk. I'll see to it that he gets a million dollar settlement (Scheim 1983:224). The "Nat" referred to was a Mob "fixer," or bribe broker. Several years later, biographer Robert Caro would write: For years, men came into Lyndon Johnson's office and handed him envelopes stuffed with cash. They didn't stop coming even when the office in which he sat was the office of the Vice President of the United States. Fifty thousand dollars (in hundred-dollar bills in sealed envelopes) was what one lobbyist - for one oil company - testified that he brought to Johnson's office during his term as Vice President. (Scheim 1983:248-49) Johnson's political career was not only advanced by the assassination of President Kennedy, it was saved by it. Johnson may not have had foreknowledge of the killing, but he was at least manipulated into helping to cover it up. This manipulation would have been possible for J. Edgar Hoover, who of course was aware of all the evidence building against Johnson in the famous scandals involving Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes. There was no love lost between Hoover and the Kennedys. Because of Hoover's incompatibility with the administration, President Kennedy had planned to let the FBI Director go when his mandatory retirement came up at age seventy. A battle of rhetoric was afoot between the left and right over the nature of the Communist threat to America; Hoover and the Kennedys were on opposite sides and at the forefront of this battle. President Kennedy asserted that "our peril . . . comes from without, not within." Several days later, Hoover rebutted: "The communist threat from without must not blind us to the communist threat from within." Turning Hoover's words against him, Senator Mike Mansfield suggested that the right-wing idea that the greater communist threat is from within indicated a lack of confidence in Hoover and his FBI. In the same month, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy added his opinion to the debate, saying, "If we think that the great problem in the United States now is the fact that there are 10,000 communists here, if we think that that's what's going to destroy our country, we are in very bad shape . . ." (North 1991:113-120) When Jack Kennedy took office and appointed his brother Bobby as Attorney General, Bobby broke with a long tradition in the Justice Department by asserting the authority of his office over the FBI. Hoover, who as FBI director had enjoyed relative autonomy for decades, now had to answer to this young upstart, who was leading a crusade against a crime syndicate whose very existence up to that point Hoover had denied. Not only had Hoover refuted allegations of the existence of a national crime syndicate, he had caused the disbanding of a federal task force and hindered the work of his agents who tried to investigate it. As Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy constantly jibed at and prodded Hoover to do more. He went out of his way to point out his authority over Hoover, going as far as having a hotline and buzzer installed in Hoover’s office to summon him on a moment’s notice (North 1991:68). After being snubbed by the Director during his first weeks in office, tried to make a point by behaving distractedly and throwing darts during their first meeting (North 1991:65-66). RFK threw a monkey-wrench into Hoover’s religiously-observed routine by visiting FBI headquarters on Saturdays to demand direct access to particular Bureau files. In the past, Hoover had been able to control what other Attorneys General had been allowed to see; Hoover began working Saturdays to keep an eye on him (North 1991:70). Though he publicly spoke of a commitment to winning the war, John F. Kennedy's private opposition to further U.S. involvement in Vietnam was unpopular in some powerful circles. In the spring of 1963 the president told White House aide Kenneth O'Donnell, In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected (O’Donnell and Powers 1972:16). In a CBS interview with Walter Cronkite on September 2nd 1963, Kennedy emphasized the Vietnamese government's domestic failings and placed final responsibility for the success of the war on the Vietnamese: "In the final analysis, it's their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it." In the early days of that month, advisers returned from a fact-finding mission in Vietnam. Based on their information, the President endorsed a plan for the reduction of the U.S. presence in Vietnam, caused this to be written as a report, and sent Defense Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on a second "fact-finding" mission to Vietnam. McNamara and Taylor made this tour during the last days of September 1963 and returned from the country with the ready-made report in hand (Prouty 1992:263). The report's contents were the seeds of National Security Action Memorandum #263, of October 1963. In its final months, with NSAM 263, the Kennedy administration announced its plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of the year and to have the bulk of the approximately 15,000 such personnel out of Vietnam by 1965. This was unwelcome news for military contractors and suppliers who were counting on escalation of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. One example of such a supplier was Bell Helicopter of Fort Worth, Texas. In 1960, the CIA moved twenty H-19 "Huey" helicopters from a base in Udorn, Thailand (where they were being used for operations in Laos) to the Saigon area. This move resulted from a telephone call by Charles Cabell, the CIA's deputy director, to the Office of Special Operations (OSO) in the Defense Department in December 1960. Col. Fletcher Prouty, who worked in the OSO at that time, notes that this telephone call . . . came shortly after the First National Bank of Boston had arranged for the Textron Corporation to acquire the Bell Helicopter Company. The CIA had arranged a meeting in the Pentagon in order for a vice president of the Boston bank to discuss Cold War uses of, and demand for, helicopters before it recommended the merger to the officers of Textron. It was the Bell-built "Huey" that became the most-used helicopter in Vietnam (Prouty 1992: 109). Prouty also says that by the end of the war, some 5,000 helicopters lay destroyed in various parts of Southeast Asia, accounting for one third of all U.S. fatalities. General Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, noted in that year that "Helicopters may be first-class equipment, but the way they are being used in Vietnam, they are wasted." (Prouty 1992:108) Bell took a significant share of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. poured into the Vietnam war effort; foreseeing such profits, they and others like them thus had reason to dislike the Kennedy administration's announcement of planned withdrawal from the area. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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