Return of the Leviathan: The Fascist Roots of the CIA and the True Origin of the Cold War; The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today;
I posted Part 1 of this series when it was first published in early March. In order to make it easier for people to read the entire series, I've decided to repost Part 1, along with Part 2 and Part 3.
Return of the Leviathan: The Fascist Roots of the CIA and the True Origin of the Cold War
In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
This information sheds important light and confirms one of the biggest-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a secret campaign against the Soviet Union.
This campaign against the Soviet Union, which began while WWII was still raging, has been at the crux of Washington’s tolerance towards civil rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-communism, as seen with McCarthyism and COINTELPRO activities. With that fateful decision, the CIA was not only given free reign for the execution of anti-democratic interventions around the world, but anti-democratic interventions at home, which continues to this day.
With the shady origin of the Cold War coming to the fore, it begs the questions; ‘Who is running American foreign policy and intelligence today? Can such an opposition be justified? And in whose interest did the creation of the Cold War serve and continues to serve?’ This paper is part one of a three-part series which will address these questions.
Allen Dulles, the Double Agent who Created America’s Intelligence Empire
Allen Dulles was born on April 7th, 1893 in Watertown, New York. He graduated from Princeton with a master’s degree in politics in 1916 and entered into diplomatic service the same year. Dulles was transferred to Bern, Switzerland along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. From 1922 to 1926, he served five years as chief of the Near East division of the State Department.
In 1926, he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation, where his older brother (five years his senior) John Foster Dulles was a partner. Interestingly, Allen did not pass the bar until 1928, two years after joining the law firm, however, that apparently did not prevent him in 1927 from spending six months in Geneva as “legal adviser” to the Naval Armament Conference.
In 1927 he became Director of the Council on Foreign Relations (whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus), the first new director since the Council’s founding in 1921. He became quick friends with fellow Princetonian Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the Council’s journal, Foreign Affairs. Together they authored two books: Can We Be Neutral? (1936) and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939). Allen served as secretary of the CFR from 1933-1944, and as its president from 1946-1950.
It should be noted that the Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House) based in London, England. It should also be noted that Chatham House itself was created by the Round Table Movement as part of the Treaty of Versailles program in 1919.
By 1935, Allen Dulles made partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that helped rebuild Germany after WWI.
After Hitler took control in the 1930s, John Foster Dulles continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben, despite their integration into the Nazi’s growing war machine and aided them in securing access to key war materials. (1)
Although the Berlin office of Sullivan & Cromwell, (whose attorneys were forced to sign their correspondence with “Heil Hitler”) was shut down by 1935, the brothers continued to do business with the Nazi financial and industrial network; such as Allen Dulles joining the board of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of the London bank that Time magazine in 1939 would call “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” (2)
The Dulles brothers’, especially Allen, worked very closely with Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Hermann Schmitz, one of the many Dulleses’ law clients involved with BIS. Schmitz was the CEO of IG Farben the chemical conglomerate that became notorious for its production of Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s death camps, and for its extensive use of slave labour during the war. (3)
David Talbot writes in his “The Devil’s Chessboard”:
“The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner for the Nazis. Emil Puhl – vice president of Hitler’s Reichsbank and a close associate of McKittrick – once called BIS the Reichsbank’s only ‘foreign branch.’ BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries.”
The Bank for International Settlements is based in Switzerland, the very region that Allen Dulles would work throughout both WWI and WWII.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed on June 13, 1942 as a wartime intelligence agency during WWII. This was a decision made by President Franklin Roosevelt. William J. Donovan was chosen by Roosevelt to build the agency ground up and was created specifically for addressing the secret communication, decoding and espionage needs that were required for wartime strategy; to intercept enemy intelligence and identify those coordinating with Nazi Germany and Japan.
The OSS was the first of its kind, nothing like it had existed before in the U.S., it was understood by Roosevelt that such an agency held immense power for abuse in the wrong hands and it could never be allowed to continue once the war against fascism was won.
Allen Dulles was recruited into the OSS at the very beginning. And on Nov. 12th, 1942 was quickly moved to Bern, Switzerland where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of WWII. Knowing the shady role Switzerland played throughout WWII with its close support for the Nazi cause and Allen Dulles’ close involvement in all of this, one should rightfully be asking at this point, what the hell were Donovan and Roosevelt thinking?
Well, Dulles was not the only master chess player involved in this high stakes game. “He was a dangle,” said John Loftus, a former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department. They “wanted Dulles in clear contact with his Nazi clients so they could be easily identified.” (4) In other words, Dulles was sent to Switzerland as an American spy, with the full knowledge that he was in fact a double agent, the mission was to gain intel on the American, British and French networks, among others, who were secretly supporting the Nazi cause.
One problem with this plan was that the British MI6 spy William Stephenson known as the “Man Called Intrepid” was supposedly picked to keep tabs on Dulles (5); little did Roosevelt know at the time, how deep the rabbit hole really went.
However, as Elliott would write in his book “As He Saw It”, Roosevelt was very aware that British foreign policy was not on the same page with his views on a post-war world:
“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”
As the true allegiance of BIS and Wall Street finance became clear during the war, Roosevelt attempted to block BIS funds in the United States. It was none other than Foster Dulles who was hired as McKittrick’s legal counsel, and who successfully intervened on the bank’s behalf. (6)
It should also be noted that Bank of England Governor Montague Norman allowed for the direct transfer of money to Hitler, however, not with England’s own money but rather 5.6 million pounds worth of gold owned by the National Bank of Czechoslovakia.
With the end of the war approaching, Project Safehaven, an American intelligence operation thought up by Roosevelt, was created to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. It was rightfully a concern that if members of the Nazi German elite were successful in hiding large troves of their wealth, they could bide their time and attempt to regain power in the not so distant future.
It was Allen Dulles who successfully stalled and sabotaged the Roosevelt operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.” (7)
And while Foster worked hard to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property, Allen had his brother’s back and was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm.
“Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favourite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” stated John Loftus, former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department (8)
It is without a doubt that Roosevelt was intending to prosecute the Dulles brothers along with many others who were complicit in supporting the Nazi cause after the war was won. Roosevelt was aware that the Dulles brothers and Wall Street had worked hard against his election, he was aware that much of Wall Street was supporting the Germans over the Russians in the war, he was aware that they were upset over his handling of the Great Depression by going after the big bankers, such as J.P. Morgan via the Pecora Commission, and they hated him for it, but most of all they disagreed with Roosevelt’s views of a post war world. In fact, they were violently opposed to it, as seen by his attempted assassination a few days after he won the election, and with General Smedley Butler’s exposure, which was broadcasted on television, of how a group of American Legion officials paid by J.P. Morgan’s men (9) approached Butler the summer of 1933 to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt, an attempted fascist takeover of the United States in broad daylight.
Roosevelt was only inaugurated March 4, 1933, thus it was clear, Wall Street did not have to wait and see what the President was going to do, they already had a pretty good idea that Roosevelt intended to upset the balance of imperial control, with Wall Street and the City of London as its financial centers. It was clear Wall Street’s days would be marked under Roosevelt.
However, Roosevelt did not live past the war, and his death allowed for the swift entry of a soft coup, contained within the halls of government and its agencies, and anyone who had been closely associated with FDR’s vision was pushed to the sidelines.
David Talbot writes in his “The Devil’s Chessboard”:
“Dulles was more instep with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt. Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals.”
The True Origin Story of the Cold War
In L. Fletcher Prouty’s book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” he describes how in Sept 1944, while serving as a captain in the United States Army Air Forces and stationed in Cairo, he was asked to fly what he was told to be 750 U.S. Air crewmen POWs who had been shot down in the Balkans during air raids on the Ploesti oil fields. This intel was based off of his meeting with British Intelligence officers who had been informed by their Secret Intelligence Service and by the OSS.
Prouty writes:
“We flew to Syria, met the freight train from Bucharest, loaded the POWS onto our aircraft, and began the flight back to Cairo. Among the 750 American POWs there were perhaps a hundred Nazi intelligence agents, along with scores of Nazi sympathetic Balkan agents. They had hidden in this shipment by the OSS to get them out of the way of the Soviet army that had marched into Romania on September 1.
This September 1944 operation was the first major pro-German, anti-Soviet activity of its kind of the Cold War. With OSS assistance, many followed in quick succession, including the escape and carefully planned flight of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.”
In Prouty’s book, he discusses how even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, the first mumblings of the Cold War could be heard, and that these mumblings came particularly from Frank Wisner in Bucharest and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, who were both strong proponents of the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union.
Prouty writes:
“It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944—to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.”
The “official history” version has marked down the British as the first to recognise the “communist threat” in Eastern Europe, and that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe and that he did this after the end of WWII.
However, Churchill was neither the originator of the phrase nor the idea of the Iron Curtain.
Just before the close of WWII in Europe, the German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk made a speech in Berlin, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, in which he used the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron Curtain,” which was to be used in precisely the same context by Churchill less than one year later.
Following this German speech, only three days after the German surrender, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, to express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron Curtain” had come down. (10)
On March 4 and 5, 1946, Truman and Churchill traveled from Washington to Missouri, where, at Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill delivered those historic lines: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
The implications of this are enormous. It not only showcases the true origin of the source that trumpeted the supposed Cold War threat coming from Eastern Europe, the very Nazi enemy of the Allies while WWII was still being waged, but also brings light to the fact that not even one month after Roosevelt’s death, the Grand Strategy had been overtaken. There would no longer be a balance of the four powers (U.S., Russia, Britain and China) planned in a post war world, but rather there would be an Iron Curtain, with more than half of the world covered in shadow.
The partners in this new global power structure were to be the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, three of the WWII victors and two of the vanquished. It did not matter that Russia and China fought and died on the side of the Allies just moments prior.
With Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence on Sept. 2nd, 1945, the French would enter Vietnam within weeks of WWII ending with the United States joining them a few months after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. And thus, in little over a year after one of the bloodiest wars in history, the French and the Americans set off what would be a several decades long Indochinese war, all in the name of “freedom” against a supposed communist threat.
Prouty writes:
“As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for [the planned American invasion of Japan], supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island. Then, with the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war materiel was reloaded onto those ships. I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new materiel was being returned to the States.
His response was direct and surprising: ‘Hell, no! They ain t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina. ‘ “
The Godfather of the CIA
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”.
– The inscription chosen by Allen Dulles for the Lobby of CIA Headquarters from John 8:31-32
On Sept. 20th, 1945, President Truman disbanded the OSS a few weeks after the official end of WWII. This was the right thing to do, considering the OSS was never intended to exist outside of wartime and President Roosevelt would have done the same thing had he not passed away on April 12th, 1945. However, Truman was highly naïve in thinking that a piece of paper was all that was required. Truman also had no understanding of the factional fight between the Roosevelt patriots who truly wanted to defeat fascism versus those who believed that it was always about war with the Soviet Union, and would even be open to working with “former” fascists in achieving such a goal.
Truman thought of the OSS as a homogenous blob. He had no comprehension of the intense in-fighting that was occurring within the United States government and intelligence community for the future of the country. That there was the OSS of Roosevelt, and that there was the underground OSS of Allen Dulles.
Soon thereafter, on Sept. 18th, 1947, the CIA was founded, and was to be lamented by Truman as the biggest regret of his presidency. Truman had no idea of the type of back channels that were running behind the scenes, little did he know at the time but would come to partially discover, the disbanding of the OSS which took control away from William J. Donovan as head of American intelligence opened the door to the piranhas. The FDR patriots were purged, including William J. Donovan himself, who was denied by Truman the Directorship of the CIA. Instead Truman foolishly assigned him the task of heading a committee studying the country’s fire departments.
In April 1947, Allen Dulles was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.
Dulles, unsatisfied with the “timidity” of the new CIA, organised the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee report, over which Dulles of course quickly assumed control, which concluded its sharply critical assessment of the CIA by demanding that the agency be willing to essentially start a war with the Soviet Union. The CIA, it declared “has the duty to act.” The agency “has been given, by law, wide authority.” It was time to take full advantage of this generous power, the committee, that is Dulles, insisted.
Dulles, impatient with the slow pace of the CIA in unleashing chaos on the world, created a new intelligence outpost called the Office of Policy Coordination in 1949. Frank Wisner (who worked as a Wall Street lawyer for the law firm Carter, Ledyard & Milburn and was former OSS, obviously from the Dulles branch) was brought in as OPC chief, and quickly brought the unit into the black arts of espionage, including sabotage, subversion, and assassination (11). By 1952, the OPC was running forty-seven overseas stations, and its staff had nearly three thousand employees, with another three thousand independent contractors in the field.
Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency.
The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were “ex” Nazis. (12) Dulles and Wisner were engaged in a no-holds-barred war with the Soviet bloc with essentially no government supervision.
As Prouty mentioned, the shady evacuation of Nazis stashed amongst POWs was to be the first of many, including the evacuation of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.
Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war – which eventually totaled four million – that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture. (13)
Gehlen understood that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart (with sufficient sabotage), providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow.
He managed to convince the Americans that his intelligence on the Soviet Union was indispensable, that if the Americans wanted to win a war against the Russians that they would need to work with him and keep him safe. Therefore, instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow demanded, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany! (14)
Unbelievably, Gehlen’ spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, with no supervision and where he was allowed to live out his dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization –as it came to be known – thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency. (15) And it should have been no surprise to anyone that “former” SS and Gestapo officials were brought in, including the likes of Dr. Franz Six. Later, Six would be arrested by the U.S. Army counterintelligence agents. Convicted of war crimes, Six served a mere four years in prison and within weeks of his release went back at work in Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters! (16)
For those who were able to believe during the war that the Russians were their true enemies (while they died for the same cause as the Americans by the millions in battle) this was not a hard pill to swallow, however, there was pushback.
Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with “former” Nazis, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlen’s operation. It is not clear what stood in the way of this happening, but to suffice to say, Gehlen had some very powerful support in Washington, including within the national security establishment with primary backing from the Dulles faction. (17)
Walter Bedell-Smith, who succeeded Hillenkoetter as CIA Director, despite bringing Allen Dulles in and making him deputy, had a strong dislike for the man. As Smith was getting ready to step down, a few weeks after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Smith advised Eisenhower that it would be unwise to give Allen the directorship of the agency. (18) Eisenhower would come to deeply regret that he did not heed this sound advice.
With the Eisenhower Nixon victory, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.
It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.” (19)
Soon to follow in this series ‘The Fascist Roots of the CIA’: Part 2 Cold War Lessons from Vietnam and Part 3 Dulles vs Kennedy: The Last Stand. This article was originally published on Strategic Culture.
Footnotes:
(1) David Talbot Devil’s Chessboard, pg 21
(2) Ibid., pg 22
(3) Ibid., pg 27
(4) Ibid, pg 26
(5) Ibid, pg 23
(6) Ibid., pg 28
(7) Ibid., pg28
(8) Ibid., pg 29
(9) Ibid., pg 26
(10) L. Fletcher Prouty “The CIA, Vietname and the Plot to Assasinate John F. Kennedy”, pg 51
(11) David Talbot “The Devil’s Chessboard”, pg 128
(12) Ibid., pg 128
(13) Ibid., pg 228
(14) Ibid., pg 228
(15) Ibid., 228
(16) Ibid., pg 229
(17) Ibid., pg 229
(18) Ibid., pg 174
(19) C. Wright Mills “The Power Elite”
Source: Through A Glass Darkly
The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today
In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, remarks in his book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” that these massive arms shipments were not returned to the United States but rather, half were transported to Korea and the other half to Vietnam.
The implications of this are enormous.
It signifies that there were Cold War preparations already underway as early as August 1945 and likely much earlier, and that the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned five years in advance and the other ten years in advance respectively, before the actual wars were to take place.
What this means is that the official narrative for why the Korean War and the Vietnam War were fought are fabrications of the Cold War “reality.”
Therefore, it should be asked, what was the real reason that Americans entered these two brutal wars? Why did leading figures among the American elite, many who were so adamant on not joining in the combat against fascism in WWII, become so quickly convinced, that everything having to do with communism, was their personal responsibility to destroy?
These questions will be answered in this series titled “The Fascist Roots of the CIA.”
The CIA and the Pentagon: A Tale of Two Star Crossed Lovers
As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.
It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.”
The entire period of April 12th 1945 to that fateful Election Day can be best understood as the first stage of America’s coup. This is especially clear between the period of 1945 and 1949, when a number of new pieces of legislation were passed which successfully reorganised the departments within the United States such that much of the government and military decisions would be beholden to the authority of a few men, men who were much more powerful than the president himself.
The National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was one of the first of this new breed of legislation and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, placing it under the direction of the National Security Council.
Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, (less than four months after the creation of the CIA), the perceived necessity to “stem the flow of communism” in Western Europe—particularly Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue and NSC 4-A was born.
NSC 4-A was a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare,” this provided the authorization for the intervention of the CIA in the Italian elections of April 1948.
It was understood that the U.S. military could have no “direct” role in covert operations, since that would defeat the purpose of deniability.
The Communist Party of Italy, admired for leading the fight against Mussolini, was expected to win in Italy’s first post-war election. This, of course, was considered intolerable under the Iron Curtain diktat and American covert operations were deployed to block the anti-fascist victory. Investigative journalist Christopher Simpson writes in his book “Blowback,” how a substantial part of this funding came from captured Nazi assets. This intervention, according to Simpson, tipped the balance in favour of Italy’s Christian Democrats Party, which hid thousands of fascists in its ranks.
In just a few months from its creation, the CIA went from what was supposed to be a civilian intelligence gathering arm of the government to being responsible for covert operations including “psychological warfare.” This was a far cry from what had organised the United States prior to WWII, and which relied on a civilian army. Such a government mandate for cloak and dagger operations during a time of peace would have been considered unthinkable.
But that is why the Cold War narrative was so imperative, since under this paranoid schizophrenic nightmare, it was thought the world would never be at peace until a significant portion of it was wiped out. The Cold War defined a pixelated enemy that was under-defined and invisible to the eye. The enemy was what your superiors told you were the enemy, and like a shape-shifter could take the form of anybody, including your neighbour, your colleague, your partner…even the president.
There would always be an enemy, because there would always be people who would resist the Grand Strategy.
NSC 4-A was replaced by NSC 10/2, approved by President Truman on June 18th 1948, creating the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term “covert operations” was defined.
From 1948-1950 the OPC was not under CIA’s control, but rather was a renegade operation run by Allen Dulles. OPC was brought under CIA control in October 1950, when Walter Bedell Smith became Director of Central Intelligence, and it was renamed the Directorate of Plans.
Although the CIA was strictly in charge of covert operations, it often needed the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. In reality, the military, whether it liked it or not, found itself forever in the embrace of its toxic lover, the CIA.
Prouty writes in 1992:
“OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world… The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa…the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.”
A Daring Declaration
On Sept. 2nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for a new nation, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which stated the following lines:
“A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.”
Ho Chi Minh had been leading the nationalist Viet Minh independence movement since 1941 against the colonial rule of Japan. Like most of the world, Ho Chi Minh viewed the war against the fascists as aligned to a war against imperialism. He believed that if the world was to finally make a stand against such tyranny, than there would be no place for colonialism in the post-war world. The world would have to be organised according to the recognition and respect of independent nation states, along the lines of Roosevelt’s post-war vision.
After a long and horrific battle against the ruthless Japanese fascists, with support during the war from the United States and China, it was the hope of Ho Chi Minh that Vietnam could return to its former days of peace with its new-found independence from colonial rule.
The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so it was thought.
Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s brilliant military commander, while serving as Minister of the Interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Viet Minh. That, too, was in September 1945. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition.
But on September 23, 1945, shortly after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces (who had been given jurisdiction of the area from the Potsdam Conference) and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’état and seized control of the administration of Saigon, in South Vietnam, known today as Ho Chi Minh City.
By January 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam and reinstalled the French government.
It should be understood that the removal of the French presence in Indochina was no small feat, since it was not only their military presence that had to be dealt with, but also its business interests including French banks, among the most powerful in Asia. The French had imposed its colonial presence in Indochina since 1787.
Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris, but the conference failed due to French intransigence.
The French Indochina War broke out in 1946 and went on for eight years, with France’s war effort largely funded and supplied by the United States.
In 1949, Bao Dai, the former emperor who spent most of his time in the lap of luxury in Paris, France, was set up by foreign interest to be the puppet government of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam).
On May 8, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion.
There was never any official reason for why the United States changed its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French colonial interests and their puppet government. Although Ho Chi Minh’s belief in communism was used to justify this betrayal, the truth was that he was a threat because he considered himself first and foremost a nationalist, who believed that the Vietnamese people were one and that his nation deserved independence from colonial dominance.
It was this nationalism that could not be tolerated in areas of the world which were regarded as imperial territories and subject lands. It is for this very same reason that MI6 and the CIA staged a coup against the beloved nationalist Mosaddegh in Iran, a non-communist who held a Ph.D. in law and was well on his way to removing all British imperial claims on oil in the country after winning his case against the British at the Hague and at the UN Security Council in 1951.
This is why the interests of imperialism and fascism were often linked hand in hand, as seen with Edward VIII (though he was not alone in the British Royal family in his views), the Vichy government in France, King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III who appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister in 1922 (who only deposed Mussolini in 1943 when it was clear they were going to lose the war) and Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito.
It is for this reason that we saw, before WWII was even over,the imperialists and the fascists in discussion with each other as to what would form the post-war world. It is for this reason that the countries chosen to oversee this Grand Strategy would be the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Japan, rather than Roosevelt’s choice of the U.S., Russia, Britain and China.
It is for this reason that the Iron Curtain, that was originally announced, not by Churchill, but rather by German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, was to announce the terms of an indefinite war against communism. In reality, it meant any country opposed to imperial rule, opposed to the idea that some were born to rule and others to be ruled, in other words, imperialism and sovereign nation states could not co-exist.
Ho Chi Minh was an ally to the Americans under the leadership of Roosevelt. However, with Roosevelt’s death and the soft coup that followed, Ho Chi Minh was now an enemy.
The Saigon Military Mission
On January 8, 1954, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Eisenhower made his views clear that Americans did not belong in the Vietnam War. But that did not really matter.
Eisenhower, who was used to people diligently following his line of command as a General of WWII, was soon to learn that this did not apply as President of the United States.
Among those at the January 8, 1954 meeting of the National Security Council were Allen W. Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles. There was no way that the Dulles brothers could have misunderstood the words of President Eisenhower.
Yet, on January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said:
“Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam…[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”
Thus, the seed was planted. If the French were forced out, which was rather predictable, it was understood that the U.S. would not engage in open warfare with the Viet Minh. However, it could carry out clandestine operations against Ho Chi Minh’s forces so as to cause them trouble, or in the words of Foster Dulles “to raise hell.”
This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began, a war in which the Americans had been arming both sides since 1945 and to which there was no official military objective except “to raise hell.”
According to a record of the January 14, 1954 National Security Council meeting, it was:
“Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”
And, just like that, the entire overseeing of the Vietnam War was placed into the hands of the Dulles brothers.
Two weeks later, on January 29, Allen Dulles, selected Colonel Lansdale to head the team that was going to be deployed in Vietnam “to raise hell.”
Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the Saigon Military Mission, arrived in Saigon on June 1, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, for the purpose of a covert operation to conduct psychological warfare and paramilitary activities in South Vietnam.
Prouty writes:
“It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.
…With this action, the CIA established the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) in Vietnam. It was not often in Saigon. It was not military. It was CIA. Its mission was to work with the anti-Vietminh Indochinese and not to work with the French. With this background and these stipulations, this new CIA unit was not going to win the war for the French. As we learned the hard way later, it was not going to win the war for South Vietnam, either, or for the United States. Was it supposed to?”
It should be noted here that although NSC and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (such as the White Cloud teams) long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945. (1)
Though Lansdale is listed as a U.S. Air Force Col. who was put in charge of the SMM, this was just a ploy. He would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment’’ purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.
With Ho Chi Minh’s defeat of the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending the First Indochina War, it was understood that new oppositional leadership would be required if Ho Chi Minh were to be prevented from taking control of South Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem would oust Bao Dai in a rigged referendum vote in 1955, becoming the first President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The South Vietnamese were not interested in either candidate.
The reader should take note here that South Vietnam (otherwise known as Cochinchina for centuries), had never had a real form of government because it had never been a nation in its entire existence but rather had been made up of ancient villages for several centuries with relatively little change. There was no congress, no police, and no tax-system – nothing essential to the function of a nation. Diem’s “government” was nothing but a façade of bureaucracy.
Despite this, Diem’s Republic of Vietnam was treated as an equal member of the family of nations, as if it could stand on its own two feet and respond accordingly to the crisis its people were being thrown into. The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Viet Minh on its own behalf did not exist.
The choice of a predominant number of Indochinese was overwhelmingly for Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French. Ngo Dinh Diem was a nobody, who never accomplished anything to win the hearts of his people.
The Vietnam War, as it understood today, was full of oversights. But perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of the six U.S. administrations who oversaw the Vietnam War ever stated a positive American military objective for that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “communists” take over Vietnam, period. As Prouty stated repeatedly in his book, this does not constitute a military objective.
The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina.
That was their primary objective.
The Geneva Conference, A Genocidal Exodus
The defeat of the French resulted in the Geneva Accords in July 1954 which established the 17th parallel as a temporary demarcation line separating the military forces of the French and the Viet Minh. Within 300 days of the signing of the accords, a demilitarized zone, or DMZ, was created, and the transfer of any civilians who wished to leave either side was to be completed.
Ho Chi Minh and all northern Vietnamese believed the nation to be “one.” They did not want a division of their country, as the Geneva Agreements had guaranteed.
The closing article of the Geneva Agreements, Number 14, a scarcely noticed few lines, read; “…any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party, who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party, shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.”
The ominous meaning of this was concealed under the guise of humanitarian words. The American-British note spoke of a “peaceful and humane transfer,” as if they were being kind and sensitive to the situation at hand, ready to uproot people who had lived all their lives in a settled village that had existed for tens of thousands of years.
The people of the world, most of whom had no knowledge of the Tonkinese, were led to believe that this offer was a most compassionate gesture. And, what is worse, the planners of this sinister plot were certain that the people of the world would never learn the truth, that this movement of one million North Vietnamese was really intended to be the kindling that would set the country on fire. It was a set-up and would lay the essential groundwork for America’s direct entry into the war.
The mass exodus of North Vietnamese to South Vietnam would be orchestrated by the Saigon Military Mission. This was a terrible upheaval for these people but it was sold to the West as if they were refugees fleeing Ho Chi Minh. In reality, they were fleeing the “psychological warfare” and “paramilitary tactics” today called “terrorism” that the SMM were unleashing in these small Northern villages.
In their own words, as found in documents released with the Pentagon Papers, leaders of the SMM wrote that the mission had been sent into North Vietnam to carry out “unconventional warfare,” “paramilitary operations, ” “political-psychological warfare,” and rumor campaigns and to set up a Combat Psy War course for the Vietnamese. The members of the SMM were classic “agents provocateurs.”
Prouty writes:
“This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics”—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.
These penniless natives…were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions. wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name ‘‘Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.
…Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed. ”
It didn’t take long before the disturbance caused by the Diem-favored northern intruders onto the southern natives broke out into violence. Before long, the “friends,” according to the Diem government and its CIA backers were the one million northern Catholics, and the “enemy”—or at least the “problem”—was the native Cochinese of the south.
The time was right to fan the flames into war and to bring in the Americans.
Part three of this series “The Fascist Roots of the CIA” will discuss the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in relation to the Vietnam War and Kennedy’s last stand against Allen Dulles before he was gunned down on the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight.
Source: Through A Glass Darkly
A Damned Murder Inc: Kennedy’s Battle Against the Leviathan
As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to “prepare the ground”.
Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary (terrorist) activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.
This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam, but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).
Any country that was observed to hold views that were not aligned with U.S. foreign policy could not simply be invaded in most scenarios, but rather, the ground would need to be prepared to create the justification for a direct military invasion.
This is one of the roles of the CIA which abides by the motto “fake it till you make it.”
Don’t have an actual ‘enemy’ to fight and justify your meddling into another country’s affairs? Not a problem. Just split your paramilitary team into “good guys” and “bad guys” and have them pretend fight. Go village to village repeating this action-drama and you will see how quickly the word will spread that there are “dangerous extremists” in the area that exist in “great numbers.”
Prouty described this paramilitary activity, which is called “Fun and Games,” and how this tactic was also used in the Philippines, resulting in the election of Ramon Magsaysay who was declared a hero against a non-existing enemy. In fact, the Filipino elite units that were trained by the CIA during this period were then brought into Vietnam to enact the very same tactic.
Prouty writes:
“I have been to such training programs at U.S. military bases where identical tactics are taught to Americans as well as foreigners. It is all the same…these are the same tactics that were exploited by CIA superagent Edward G. Lansdale [the man in charge of the CIA Saigon Military Mission] and his men in the Philippines and Indochina.
This is an example of the intelligence service’s ‘Fun and Games.’ Actually, it is as old as history; but lately it has been refined, out of necessity, into a major tool of clandestine warfare.
Lest anyone think that this is an isolated case, be assured that it was not. Such ‘mock battles’ and ‘mock attacks on native villages’ were staged countless times in Indochina for the benefit of, or the operation of, visiting dignitaries, such as John McCone when he first visited Vietnam as the Kennedy appointed director of central intelligence [after Kennedy fired Allen Dulles].”
What Prouty is stating here, is that the mock battles that occurred for these dignitaries were CIA trained agents “play-acting” as the Vietcong… to make it appear that the Vietcong were not only numerous but extremely hostile.
If even dignitaries can be fooled by such things unfolding before their own eyes, is it really a wonder that a western audience watching or reading about these affairs going on in the world through its mainstream media interpreter could possibly differentiate between “reality” vs a “staged reality”?
Not only were the lines between military and paramilitary operations becoming blurred, but as Prouty states in his book, the highest ranking officers who were operating and overseeing the Vietnam situation were all CIA operatives, not only within the U.S. military but including the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Prouty writes:
“U.S. Ambassador Lodge – had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency.”
Prouty goes further to state in his book that Lodge was brought into the role as Ambassador on August 26th, 1963 specifically to remove Ngo Dinh Diem President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), who was seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict at that point.
Ngo Dinh Diem was killed two months after Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam, on November 1st, 1963. Twenty one days later John F. Kennedy who was in the process of pulling out American troops from Vietnam, was assassinated. The Vietnam War continued for 12 years more, with the Americans having nothing to show for it. And in 1976, the city of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh city.
A “Legacy of Ashes”
The militarization of government began to return power to the corporate elite, as captains of industry and finance moved into key government posts. The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.
Eisenhower wished to establish U.S. supremacy while avoiding another large-scale shooting war as well as the imperial burdens that had bankrupted Great Britain (to which the U.S. now did its bidding under NSC-75). By leveraging the U.S. military’s near monopoly on nuclear firepower, the president hoped to make war an unthinkable proposition for all American adversaries.
The problem with Eisenhower’s strategy was that by keeping Washington in a constant state of high alert, he empowered the most militant voices in his administration. Eisenhower had made the grave error of choosing Foster Dulles as one of his close if not closest advisers, and thus whether he liked it or not, Allen Dulles – I doubt Eisenhower ever had a free moment from the poisoned honey that was constantly being dripped into his ear.
The line between CIA and military became increasingly blurred, as military officers were assigned to intelligence agency missions, and then sent back to their military posts as “ardent disciples of Allen Dulles,” in the words of Prouty, who served as a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA between 1955 and 1963.
Approaching the end of his presidency, in May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate a “Crusade for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. It was Eisenhower’s clear attempt to finally push forward an initiative that was his own and which did not receive its “blessing” by Foster. If Eisenhower were to succeed in this, it would move to dissolve the Cold War Grand Strategy and remove the justification for a military industrial complex.
In preparation for the summit, the White House had directed all overflight activity over communist territory to cease until further notice. Yet on May 1st, 1960, a high flying U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers left Pakistan on a straight-line overflight of the Soviet Union en route to Bodo, Norway, contrary to the Eisenhower orders.
The U-2 crash landed in Sverdlovsk, Russia. Amongst the possessions found in the plane, were of all things, identification of Powers being a CIA agent, something highly suspect for an intelligence officer to be carrying during a supposed covert mission.
The incident was enough to cancel the peace summit, and the “Crusade for Peace” was bludgeoned in its cradle.
Rumours abounded quickly thereafter that it was the Soviets who shot down the plane, however, it was Allen Dulles himself, who gave testimony before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U-2 spy plane had not been shot down but had descended because of “engine trouble.” (1) This important statement by Dulles was largely ignored by the press.
Later, Eisenhower confirmed in his memoirs that the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine power and crash-landed in Russia.
Prouty suspected that the “engine failure” may have been induced by a pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel and that Powers’ identification items were likely planted in his parachute pack. With only a certain amount of fuel and a straight line trajectory, it would have been easy to calculate exactly where Powers would be forced to make a landing.
Prouty suspected that the CIA had intentionally provoked the incident in order to ruin the peace conference and ensure the continued reign of Dulles dogmatism.
Interestingly, the man who was in charge of the Cuban exile program, Richard Bissell (deputy director of plans for the CIA), was the same man who ran the U-2 program and who, according to Prouty ostensibly sent the Powers flight over the Soviet Union on May 1st, 1960.
Richard Bissell, who was most certainly acting upon the orders of Dulles, was among the three (Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA and Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA) who were fired by Kennedy as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or more aptly put for their act of treason.
On Jan. 5th, 1961, during a meeting of the National Security Council, a frustrated and worn down President Eisenhower, put on public record just weeks before Kennedy was to assume office, that the CIA under Dulles, had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left nothing but “a legacy of ashes for his successor.”
All Eisenhower had left of his own was his farewell address, which he made on Jan. 17th, 1961, where he famously warned the American people of what had been festering during his eight-year presidential term:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
A Phoenix Rising
Eisenhower may have left a legacy of ashes for his predecessor, but out of those ashes would emerge a force that would come to directly challenge the rule of the “power elite”. (2)
In April 1954, Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to challenge the Eisenhower administration’s support for the doomed French imperial war in Vietnam, foreseeing that this would not be a short-lived war. (3)
In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s own Independence Day, Kennedy declared:
“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism – and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.” (4)
In September 1960, the annual United Nations General Assembly was being held in New York. Castro and a fifty member delegation were among the attendees and had made a splash in the headlines when he decided to stay at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the midtown Shelburne Hotel demanded a $20,000 security deposit. He made an even bigger splash in the headlines when he made a speech at this hotel, discussing the issue of equality in the United States while in Harlem, one of the poorest boroughs in the country.
Kennedy would visit this very same hotel a short while later, and also made a speech:
“Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, [and] Khrushchev…there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil…We should be glad [that Castro and Khrushchev] came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.” (5)
What did Kennedy mean by this? The American Revolution was fought for freedom, freedom from the rule of monarchy and imperialism in favour of national sovereignty. What Kennedy was stating, was that this was the very oppression that the rest of the world wished to shake the yoke off, and that the United States had an opportunity to be a leader in the cause for the independence of all nations.
On June 30th, 1960, marking the independence of the Republic of Congo from the colonial rule of Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese Prime Minister gave a speech that has become famous for its outspoken criticism of colonialism. Lumumba spoke of his people’s struggle against “the humiliating bondage that was forced upon us… [years that were] filled with tears, fire and blood,” and concluded vowing “We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.”
Shortly after, Lumumba also made clear, “We want no part of the Cold War… We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.” (6)
As a result, Lumumba was labeled a communist for his refusal to be a Cold War satellite for the western sphere. Rather, Lumumba was part of the Pan-African movement that was led by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah (who later Kennedy would also work with), which sought national sovereignty and an end to colonialism in Africa.
Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles said at an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” (7) Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.” (8)
Lumumba was assassinated on Jan. 17th, 1961, just three days before Kennedy’s inauguration, during the fog of the transition period between presidents, when the CIA is most free to tie its loose ends, confident that they will not be reprimanded by a new administration that wants to avoid scandal on its first days in office.
Kennedy, who clearly meant to put a stop to the Murder Inc. that Dulles had created and was running, would declare to the world in his inaugural address on Jan. 20th, 1961, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
And so Kennedy’s battle with the Leviathan had begun.
La Resistance
Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, Kennedy was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.
The Bay of Pigs set-up would occur three months later. Prouty compares the Bay of Pigs incident to that of the Crusade for Peace, both events were orchestrated by the CIA to ruin the U.S. president’s ability to form a peaceful dialogue with Khrushchev and decrease Cold War tensions. Both presidents’ took onus for the events respectively, despite the responsibility resting with the CIA. However, Eisenhower and Kennedy understood, if they did not take onus, it would be a public declaration that they did not have any control over their government agencies and military.
Further, the Bay of Pigs operation was in fact meant to fail. It was meant to stir up a public outcry for a direct military invasion of Cuba. On public record is a meeting (or more aptly described as an intervention) with CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and Navy Chief Admiral Burke basically trying to strong arm President Kennedy into approving a direct military attack on Cuba. Admiral Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.” (9) (This incident is what inspired the Frankenheimer movie “Seven Days in May.”)
Kennedy stood his ground.
“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later told Special Assistant to the President Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.” (10)
Incredibly, not only did the young president stand his ground against the Washington war hawks just three months into his presidential term, but he also launched the Cuba Study Group which found the CIA to be responsible for the fiasco, leading to the humiliating forced resignation of Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Charles Cabell. (For more on this refer to my report.)
Unfortunately, it would not be that easy to dethrone Dulles, who continued to act as head of the CIA, and key members of the intelligence community such as Helms and Angleton regularly bypassed McCone and briefed Dulles directly. (11) But Kennedy was also serious about seeing it all the way through, and vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
* * *
There is another rather significant incident that had occurred just days after the Bay of Pigs, and which has largely been overshadowed by the Cuban fiasco.
From April 21-26th, 1961, the Algiers putsch or Generals’ putsch, was a failed coup d’état intended to force President de Gaulle (1959-1969) not to abandon the colonial French Algeria. The organisers of the putsch were opposed to the secret negotiations that French Prime Minister Michel Debré had started with the anti-colonial National Liberation Front (FLN).
On January 26th, 1961, just three months before the attempted coup d’état, Dulles sent a report to Kennedy on the French situation that seemed to be hinting that de Gaulle would no longer be around, “A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France… The Army and the Air Force are staunchly opposed to de Gaulle…At least 80 percent of the officers are violently against him. They haven’t forgotten that in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on his promise, and they hate him for that. de Gaulle surely won’t last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year—he will be either deposed or assassinated.” (12)
The attempted coup was led by Maurice Challe, whom de Gaulle had reason to conclude was working with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press, which reported the CIA as a “reactionary state-within-a-state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control. (13)
Shortly before Challe’s resignation from the French military, he had served as NATO commander in chief and had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters. (14)
In August 1962 the OAS (Secret Army Organization) made an assassination attempt against de Gaulle, believing he had betrayed France by giving up Algeria to Algerian nationalists. This would be the most notorious assassination attempt on de Gaulle (who would remarkably survive over thirty assassination attempts while President of France) when a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the president’s car, which managed to escape the ambush despite all four tires being shot out.
After the failed coup d’état, de Gaulle launched a purge of his security forces and ousted General Paul Grossin, the chief of SDECE (the French secret service). Grossin was closely aligned with the CIA, and had told Frank Wisner over lunch that the return of de Gaulle to power was equivalent to the Communists taking over in Paris. (15)
In 1967, after a five-year enquête by the French Intelligence Bureau, it released its findings concerning the 1962 assassination attempt on de Gaulle. The report found that the 1962 assassination plot could be traced back to the NATO Brussels headquarters, and the remnants of the old Nazi intelligence apparatus. The report also found that Permindex had transferred $200,000 into an OAS bank account to finance the project.
As a result of the de Gaulle exposé, Permindex was forced to shut down its public operations in Western Europe and relocated its headquarters from Bern, Switzerland to Johannesburg, South Africa, it also had/has a base in Montreal, Canada where its founder Maj. Gen. Louis M. Bloomfield (former OSS) proudly had his name amongst its board members until the damning de Gaulle report. The relevance of this to Kennedy will be discussed shortly.
As a result of the SDECE’s ongoing investigation, de Gaulle made a vehement denunciation of the Anglo-American violation of the Atlantic Charter, followed by France’s withdrawal from the NATO military command in 1966. France would not return to NATO until April 2009 at the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit.
In addition to all of this, on Jan. 14th, 1963, de Gaulle declared at a press conference that he had vetoed British entry into the Common Market. This would be the first move towards France and West Germany’s formation of the European Monetary System, which excluded Great Britain, likely due to its imperialist tendencies and its infamous sin City of London.
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson telegrammed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer directly, appealing to him to try to persuade de Gaulle to back track on the veto, stating “if anyone can affect Gen. de Gaulle’s decision, you are surely that person.”
Little did Acheson know that Adenauer was just days away from singing the Franco-German Treaty of Jan 22nd, 1963 (also known as the ÉlyséeTreaty), which had enormous implications. Franco-German relations, which had long been dominated by centuries of rivalry, had now agreed that their fates were aligned. (This close relationship was continued to a climactic point in the late 1970s, with the formation of the EMS, and France and West Germany’s willingness in 1977 to work with OPEC countries trading oil for nuclear technology, which was sabotaged by the U.S.-Britain alliance. For more on this refer to my paper.)
The Élysée Treaty was a clear denunciation of the Anglo-American forceful overseeing that had overtaken Western Europe since the end of WWII.
On June 28th, 1961, Kennedy wrote NSAM #55. This document changed the responsibility of defense during the Cold War from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and would have (if seen through) drastically changed the course of the war in Vietnam. It would also have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the coordination of intelligence.
The same year that de Gaulle and Adenauer were forming a pact to exclude Britain from the Commons Market, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 on June 4, 1963, effectively bypassing the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on controlling U.S. currency for the first time since the private central bank was created in 1913. This executive order authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue silver backed notes and “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury”.
By Oct 11th, 1963, NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy (16), was released and outlined a policy decision “to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963” and further stated that “It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965.” The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.
With the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, likely ordained by the CIA, on Nov. 2nd, 1963 and Kennedy just a few weeks later on Nov. 22nd, 1963, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 on Nov. 26th, 1963 to begin the reversal of Kennedy’s policy under #263. And on March 17th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.
The Vietnam War would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy’s death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans, and 30 years if you count American covert action in Vietnam.
The Last Days of Kennedy
By Germany supporting de Gaulle’s exposure of the international assassination ring, his adamant opposition to western imperialism and the role of NATO, and with a young Kennedy building his own resistance against the Federal Reserve and the imperialist war of Vietnam, it was clear that the power elite were in big trouble.
There is a lot of spurious effort to try to ridicule anyone who challenges the Warren Commission’s official report as nothing but fringe conspiracy theory. And that we should not find it highly suspect that Allen Dulles, of all people, was a member of this commission. The reader should keep in mind that much of this frothing opposition stems from the very agency that perpetrated crime after crime on the American people, as well as abroad. When has the CIA ever admitted guilt, unless caught red-handed? Even after the Church committee hearings, when the CIA was found guilty of planning out foreign assassinations, they claimed that they had failed in every single plot or that someone had beaten them to the punch.
The American people need to realise that the CIA is not a respectable agency; we are not dealing with honorable men. It is a rogue force that believes that the ends justify the means, that they are the hands of the king so to speak, above government and above law. Those at the top such as Allen Dulles were just as adamant as Churchill about protecting the interests of the power elite, or as Churchill termed it, the “High Cabal.”
Interestingly, on Dec. 22nd, 1963, just one month after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman published a scathing critique of the CIA in The Washington Post, even going so far as to state “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society, and I feel that we need to correct it.” (17)
The timing of this is everything.
As Prouty has stated, anyone with a little bit of free time during an afternoon could discover for themselves that the Warren Commission was an embarrassingly incompetent hodge-podge, that conducted itself as if it were a done deal that Oswald killed Kennedy and was disinterested in hearing anything contrary to that narrative.
Not only did the record of Oswald’s interrogation at the Dallas Police Department go up in smoke, likely because he was making the inconvenient claim that he was a “patsy,” but his nitrate test which proved that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov. 22nd, 1963, was kept secret for 10 months and was only revealed in the final report, (18) which inexplicably did not change the report’s conclusion that Oswald shot Kennedy.
During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine (whose founder Henry Luce was known to work closely with the CIA (19)). This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from behind.
When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman.
This was not the only piece of evidence to be tampered with, and includes Kennedy’s autopsy reports.
There is also the matter of the original autopsy papers being destroyed by the chief autopsy physician, James Humes, to which he even testified to during the Warren Commission, apparently nobody bothered to ask why…
In addition, Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney at the time who was charging Clay Shaw as a member of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, besides uncovering his ties to David Ferrie who was found dead in his apartment days before he was scheduled to testify, also made a case that the New Orleans International Trade Mart (to which Clay Shaw was director), the U.S. subsidiary of Permindex, was linked to Kennedy’s murder.
Garrison did a remarkable job with the odds he was up against, and for the number of witnesses that turned up dead before the trial…
This Permindex link would not look so damning if we did not have the French intelligence SDECE report, but we do. And recall, in that report Permindex was caught transferring $200,000 directly to the bankroll of the OAS which attempted the 1962 assassination on de Gaulle.
Thus, Permindex’s implication in an international assassination ring is not up for debate. In addition, the CIA was found heavily involved in these assassination attempts against de Gaulle, thus we should not simply dismiss the possibility that Permindex was indeed a CIA front for an international hit crew.
In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in Nov. 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico. (20)
Col. Clay Shaw was an OSS officer during WWII, which provides a direct link to his knowing Allen Dulles, and thus we come around full circle.
After returning from Kennedy’s Nov. 24th funeral in Washington, de Gaulle and his information minister Alain Peyrefitte had a candid discussion that was recorded in Peyrefitte’s memoire “C’était de Gaulle,” the great General was quoted saying:
““What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.
…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.
America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”
(1) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The Cia, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, ” pg 147
(2) C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite”
(3) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 304
(4) Ibid, pg 305
(5) Ibid, pg 295
(6) Ibid, pg 319
(7) Ibid, pg 319
(8) Ibid, pg 319
(9) Ibid, pg 337
(10) Ibid, pg 337
(11) Ibid, pg 359
(12) Ibid, pg 350
(13) Ibid, pg 353
(14) Ibid, pg 347
(15) Ibid, pg 354
(16) L. Fletcher Prouty, “The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” pg xxxiv
(17) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 201
(18) Jim Garrison, “On the Trail of the Assassins,” pg 116-117
(19) David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard,” pg 72, 128
(20) Ibid, pg 422
Source: Through A Glass Darkly
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