JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Crisis in Laos…by Mark Arnold

 Note: I was recently asked by a reader what evidence existed to demonstrate that if President Kennedy had lived the United States never would have become involved in the ground war in Vietnam, in effect preventing that war from happening beyond the level the CIA had  already escalated it to in 1963. She was wondering because she had heard that President Lyndon Johnson simply continued Kennedy's policies regarding Vietnam when he came to office. I am very glad that she brought this question up because it is a classic example of the effect of the revisionist histories that have been published of this time period. In the next few blogs of this series we will walk through the crises that JFK faced while in office and the reader will see for himself the pressures exerted upon him to force him to war and the measures he took to avoid it. You will also see for yourself the track of events that brought him to the conclusion that the way for the United States to move forward in the world  was through policies promoting peace. As Kennedy walked this track ever closer to that fateful day in Dallas, you will see the pressures building against him. The simple truth is that Kennedy's turn toward peace was at direct odds with those forces promoting and wanting the Vietnam War, and so when they assassinated him in Dallas in 1963, it was a major turning point for our nation and has drastically affected everything since. Understanding this, the real question becomes this: who benefits by promoting the revisionist view that Kennedy initiated the policies that resulted in the Vietnam War? Keep that question in mind as you read through this information....answers are forthcoming...MA

O

JFK 

n January 19^th, 1961, the day before he was to be inaugurated as President, John Kennedy was getting a transitional briefing from  outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower. One of the subjects they discussed was the Southeast Asian country of Laos. In 1961 Vietnam was not yet the major crisis it would become, but Laos very much was. The small country, just to the west of Vietnam, had also been a French colony prior to World War II and like Vietnam attempted to win its independence from France after the Japanese were defeated in 1945. Opposing the French in Laos was a group of communist rebels known as the Pathet Lao, (meaning simply Lao Nation) who had allied themselves with Hoh Chi Minh and the Viet Minh.

Eisenhower and Kennedy

          When the French lost at Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954 French rule ended in Indochina. The Geneva accords ending that conflict (known as the First Indochina War) temporarily divided Vietnam into northern and southern zones for a period of two years at which time national elections were to occur to determine how the country would be governed. (Though the U.S. did not sign the Geneva Accords it did pledge to honor them) The Geneva accords also granted Laos full sovereignty as a neutral nation. All the warring parties, the French, the Pathet Lao and the Vietnamese were to withdraw and allow the new Laotian government to form. The French did leave but with no way to enforce the Geneva agreements the Pathet Lao supported by the North Vietnamese stayed and remained in control of several provinces. Staying too was the CIA, working under the cover of something called the Programs Evaluation Office in late ’55 and early ‘56, which was supposed to be a civilian aid program, and later the Agency for International Development which had a similar false purpose. The CIA had been in Laos since 1953, initially in response to French requests for assistance with air transport for troops and materiel in their fight against the Pathet Lao and Viet Minh. (The CIA used its proprietary airline Civil Air Transport, later known as Air America, for this purpose in ’53 and ’54 and also to deliver the secret CIA operatives of the Saigon Military Mission to North Vietnam to wreak their havoc there.)

          Finally, after several efforts, out of the confusion in Laos emerged a coalition government in 1956 that had been negotiated by the neutral Prince Souvanna Phouma and his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong of the Pathet Lao. As a result Phouma was made the Laotian Premier and Souphanouvong assumed a chief role in the cabinet. It was also agreed that the Pathet Lao would be merged into the government’s Royal Laotian Army and that their controlled provinces would be assimilated under the Phouma government.

Prince Souvanna Phouma

          For a while things became relatively calm. Then in 1958 national elections were held with the result that communists gained additional seats in the National Assembly. That was enough for the CIA which, under the guise of the Agency for International Development, proceeded to cut aid to and foment against the Phouma government, the ultimate result of which was the installation to power of the CIA backed and anti-communist general Phoumi Nosavan in 1960. The consequence of this was, of course, the return of full blown civil war to Laos with the Pathet Lao and the neutralist forces fighting those of the dictator Nousavan. That was more or less the situation at the time Eisenhower was briefing JFK in early ’61.                                                                              

Prince Souphanouvong

          God what a mess!

                                                                                                               

        In the transition briefing from Eisenhower, Kennedy asked the old general if he preferred to resolve the Laotian crisis by negotiating a new coalition government with the communist Pathet Lao or by intervening militarily with US troops. Shocked that Kennedy would even suggest something as outlandish as a coalition government with the communists, Eisenhower responded that intervening militarily would be the far better choice. On hearing Eisenhower’s words, Kennedy was skeptical but kept his own counsel. He realized that Eisenhower himself had avoided sending ground troops to Laos through the last 6 years of his administration and he also had the warning from Edmund Gullion 10 years earlier about what we could expect if we intervened with ground troops in Southeast Asia based on the French example. During the Cold War mentality of the times, however, John Kennedy’s view was in the distinct minority, as he would soon find out.

Phoumi Nosavan

         With the above in mind you can see that at the outset of JFK’s administration in 1961, though he was as anti-communist as anyone, the seeds of conflict with those who would become his closest advisors in military and intelligence matters, the top officials of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were already planted and well on their way to sprouting. The CIA already had in motion covert military operations in Laos. They already were in the process of training and equipping 30,000 Hmong (pronounced Moong) tribesman from the Laotian highlands for battle against the Pathet Lao and already were using Air America for supply drops and personnel transport. They already had a massive covert military operation planned for Cuba (the Bay of Pigs) and already were planning on the use of regular U.S military in these operations. Kennedy on the other hand, was committed to finding diplomatic or other solutions that would stop short of direct U.S. military involvement. He did not want his nation to go through what the French did in Indochina from 1946 to 1954 and he did not want to risk direct confrontation with the Soviet Union thus risking nuclear war. To understand Kennedy and his actions at this time it is important to understand these things.

Winthrop Brown

          Two weeks into his new administration, on February 3^rd 1961, Kennedy had a meeting in Washington DC with the U.S. Ambassador to Laos, a man named Winthrop Brown. Kennedy asked Brown what he thought about the situation in Laos. Brown responded with the normal Cold War rhetoric he thought the Commander in Chief wanted to hear. Kennedy stopped him mid sentence. “That’s not what I asked you”, he said. “I said ‘What do you think, you, the Ambassador?” Stunned that JFK actually wanted to know the truth, Brown told him what he actually thought; that the only way Laos could be united again was under the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, whose government had been deposed by the CIA and General Nosavan the year before. Kennedy continued to question Brown thoroughly about the possibility of a coalition government under Souvanna that all parties, including the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao could support. Over the next several weeks he also questioned  his  military and intelligence advisers closely, picking apart their reasons for urging direct U.S. involvement. Ultimately this led to a March 23^rd news conference on Laos in which Kennedy stated that the U.S. “strongly and unreservedly” supported a neutral and independent Laos tied to no outside power or group of powers and free from domination. He endorsed an appeal for a cease fire between the neutralist/Pathet Lao forces and the CIA backed General Nosavan’s army and, along with the British, called for an international conference on Laos.

                                                                                        

JFK at March 23rd Laos Press Conf

          Meantime the tide of battle in Laos was turning in favor of the communists and it looked as though the Nosavan government might fall before the conference Kennedy called for could even be convened in Geneva. The CIA and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, used this fact to press Kennedy for direct U.S. military involvement in Laos; otherwise there may be nothing left to negotiate at Geneva when the time came. Kennedy saw the problem and for several weeks seriously considered what his CIA and military advisers wanted him to do. While he wanted a neutral Laos he was equally certain that he did not want a communist one and the results on the battlefields seemed to be making that a likely possibility. Then something happened that caused the crisis in Laos to be put on hold, at least for the time being. On April 17^th, 1961 the CIA trained and equipped Cuban brigade landed on the Cuban beaches at the Bay of Pigs.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

A Turn From War: JFK and the Road to Dallas… by Mark Arnold

Note: During the nearly three years he was in office President John Kennedy underwent a remarkable metamorphosis. In his masterful book, “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” author James Douglas does an expert job of chronicling the events Kennedy experienced and which precipitated this change. Of all the books I know of on the Kennedy years and his assassination Douglas’s book and L. Fletcher Prouty’s excellent “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” are the two best and most important. They both are meticulously researched and documented. Most of the material for this series of articles comes from these books and for the full story you must read them. It has been 50 years since these events have taken place. Revisionists have had their way with the histories of those times. Most young people I have talked to are woefully ignorant of the true facts of this history and in their computer and video game world are never likely to find out. Even most of those of my generation, who actually lived through these times, do not know the truth behind the influences that have shaped their lives and which in many ways shaped the nation we have today; a nation that is in serious  danger of losing forever our precious heritage of freedom. It is my hope that illuminating the truth will douse the mystery and put people into action in present time. If enough people are challenged fast enough there is still time to save the United States. MA

         

A

JFK

t the time of his election in 1960 John F. Kennedy was a committed Cold Warrior. In his January, 1961 inaugural address he acknowledged as much when he said: “…let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” In the bellicose, anti-communist days of the early ‘60s we all knew that comment was directed at the Soviet Union. JFK knew it too. Over the next two and a half years, however, Kennedy would make a sea change and in all likelihood would have brought about a sea change for the nation had he not been assassinated. Subtly at first, and then more markedly as his administration progressed through 1962 and into 1963, Kennedy made the turn toward a policy of peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and away from the “Report from Iron Mountain” idea that a nation’s war powers provided its governmental means of control over its population as well as its economic well being. (For information on “Report from Iron Mountain” please see my earlier blog in this series “Some Comments on War...”) It was this change and the promise that it held for changing the nation that got JFK killed. The military-intelligence-industrial complex and those above it pulling its strings would not allow the Kennedy sought change toward peace to occur.

          As discussed in earlier blogs in this series, John Kennedy’s presidential rocking chair was hardly warm when he was hit with the first major crisis of his administration; the CIA caused disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in April, 1961. (Due to a bad back JFK would often sit in a rocking chair.) As noted in those writings, though he took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs debacle publicly, privately he felt he had been lied to and misled by the CIA. The handlings he took to depower the CIA included firing the Director and Deputy Director (Allen Dulles and Charles Cabell) and the issuing of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #55 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in which he directed that they would be as responsible for advice to him in Cold War operations as in regular wartime operations, thus signaling to the CIA the intent to curtail their covert operation powers. In addition to these already noted actions he also fired Richard Bissell, who as Deputy Director for Plans ran the Bay of Pigs operation and was, for practical purposes, the number three man at the CIA. He also cut the CIA’s budget and issued orders to all the U.S. embassies around the world that he held the U.S. Ambassador to each nation responsible for the actions by all U.S. personnel in his zone. This effectively put the U.S. Ambassador to any country senior to any CIA personnel and operations within that country with power over them. Needless to say, the CIA did not like these efforts at control and as a result a major schism developed between the President and his intelligence community.

          Following the Bay of Pigs through to the end of 1962 Kennedy negotiated his way through an obstacle course of one crisis after another, starting first with the Southeast Asian country of Laos (situated just to the west of Vietnam), then Berlin and finally the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. Looming over all of these was the specter of Vietnam, which from 1954 on was being built up by the CIA and would ultimately become the next major armed conflict in the Cold War. Had Kennedy lived Vietnam never would have happened, and therein is the key to his assassination. Because of this fact his death was a major turning point for the nation, which can now be clearly seen in retrospect. To appreciate the magnitude of this turning point, ask yourself these questions:

“What if the Vietnam War had never happened? What if the 58,000 Americans who died there went on to live out their lives? What if, by some estimates, the nearly 2 million Vietnamese killed through the Vietnam War were never killed? What if the nearly $500 billion (in 1960s dollars) spent on the Vietnam War was never spent and what if the social upheaval in the United States that occurred in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as a result of the war never took place?” 

Ask yourself these questions and try to envision the answers. Do so and you will start to have an appreciation of just what occurred in Dallas on November 22^nd, 1963 when President Kennedy was killed. Revisionist historians have tried to obscure the truth, claiming that JFK is the President who got us into Vietnam. As we walk through the events leading to Kennedy’s murder in Dallas draw your own conclusions. 

          During the First Indochina War, in 1951, ten years before he was elected President and at the time a congressman, John F. Kennedy took a trip to Vietnam with his brother Robert. You will recall that after World War II the French were trying to re-assert their control over their former colony. They were being opposed in this effort by Hoh Chi Minh and his army, the Viet Minh, who were fighting for Vietnamese control of their homeland. During the trip Kennedy spoke to the French commander, who had over 250,000 troops at his disposal. The French commander told JFK that with this overwhelming force there was no way he could lose to the Viet Minh. On this trip Kennedy also spoke to a friend of his, a man named Edmund Gullion, who at the time was an official at the U.S. consulate. Gullion told Kennedy the exact opposite:

Edmund Gullion

“We’re going nowhere out here”, he said. “The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us.”

Spoken 3 years before the devastating French defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Gullion’s words take on a kind of prophetic air. Kennedy never forgot them.

          This partially explains why, though at the beginning of his term he was as dedicated an anti-communist as any of his intelligence or military men, Kennedy would never commit U.S. ground troops to action in any of the crises he handled, despite the pressure brought from the CIA or the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do so. In addition he was acutely aware of the threat posed by a possible nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and what this would mean for mankind. In September of 1961 he revealed this concern in an address to the United Nations when he stated:

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

For these reasons, time and again when faced with a crisis, with his military and intelligence men demanding that he commit U.S. forces to action, Kennedy would find a way out and not do it. The pattern, as we shall see, is unmistakable. It manifested in the Bay of Pigs debacle when he refused to release U.S. forces to salvage the CIA’s battered brigade on the Cuban beaches and it would manifest several more times through the next two years. It was a pattern that would cost him his life.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

Fox in the Henhouse: The Story of Allen Dulles…by Mark Arnold

                       

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Allen Dulles

o study of the decline of the United States as a nation over the last half of the 20th century and on into the 21^st century could possibly be complete without a grasp of the role played by Allen Dulles. His impact on the U.S. intelligence community in both World War II and the Cold War was immense and reverberates to this day. As Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, due to the expanded role of covert operations he took on for the Agency, often violating the sovereignty of other nations as well as international law and the National Security Act itself, he had a vast effect on American foreign policy. As a result much of the negative attitude of other nations towards the U.S. can be traced to him and the actions and policies he authorized for the CIA. As you will see, if you confront the information fully, his actions had a devastating effect on the nation domestically as well and include assistance in the cover up of the truth behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, if not outright participation in the plot to kill the President. If ever there was a key figure to understand in the middle part of the 20^th century in the United States, and a bona fide “fox in the henhouse”, it would be Allen Dulles.

          Born in 1893 and educated at Princeton University, Allen Dulles began his intelligence career rather humbly in 1916 when he was stationed as a diplomat in Bern, Switzerland collecting political data for the State Department on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I. By the late 1920’s he was working with his older brother John Foster Dulles (who became Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower in the‘50s) as a lawyer and international finance specialist for Sullivan and Cromwell, a Wall Street law firm in New York. Across the 1930s he and his brother worked with top Nazi industrialists and played a major role in fostering U.S.-Nazi corporate relations. He was a legal counsel for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the infamous Nazi chemical giant I.G. Farben, (the producer of the poison gas used in the extermination of the Jews.) as well as banks and financial institutions established by German steel magnate and Nazi supporter August Thyssen. In 1933 both Dulles brothers attended a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Germany at which German industrialists pledged to support Hitler in exchange for Hitler’s promise to suppress the German labor unions. They encouraged their Western clients to contribute to the Nazi party and war machine and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Dulles brothers by their actions significantly helped Hitler and the Nazis attain power and build up their war machine once they were in power. They had many communication lines into the Nazi regime.

          When the U.S. entered WWII, Dulles became the Bern (Switzerland) station chief for the wartime Office of Strategic Services. At one point none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suspected Dulles of being a traitor due to his connections to Nazi linked corporations. After the war was over Dulles was instrumental in helping Nazi corporations that had used slave labor to produce Nazi war materials evade prosecution. He and his brother were also able to prevent the prosecution Nazis who were known mass killers and assisted in arranging their flight from Germany and Europe to the U.S. or South America. He helped the Nazi intelligence apparatus turn over its assets to the West specifically negotiating the surrender of Nazi General Reinhard Gelen, the top German spymaster dealing with Russia and the eastern front. Gelen brought with him his corp of 350 or so Nazi intelligence operatives and they all proceeded to go to work for the OSS and ultimately the CIA under Dulles. Gelen’s group was added to as other Nazi’s found their way to him and ultimately numbered as high as 4,000, being mostly former German army and SS officers.

          By the early 50s, when Dulles assumed the post of director of the CIA, he was well connected in the both the intelligence and international banking fields. Through the 1950’s under the Eisenhower Administration he shepherded the CIA away from merely an intelligence coordination office into a nearly autonomous covert operations force, beyond the control of the President, and the likes of which the country had never seen. That was the man running the CIA at the time Kennedy came into office.

          To give you some idea of how the CIA under Alan Dulles operated and interfered in the internal affairs of other nations we will take a look at an actual example; the Central American country of Guatemala in 1954. A leader named Jacobo Arbenz had won the Guatemalan presidential election of 1950. After establishing himself in office he started initiating land reforms in which land held by several U.S. corporations that had been ceded to them or sold to them by earlier Guatemalan dictators (to the dictator’s profit and to the loss of the Guatemalan people) was nationalized and made available for peasant use and ownership. The largest of these corporations was United Fruit Company, a former client of Dulles’s old law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. United Fruit owned something like 42% of the arable land in Guatemala and they weren’t going to take this loss lying down. They exerted pressure in Washington D.C. on the Truman and later the Eisenhower administrations which resulted in the full covert operations force of the CIA being called into operation against Arbenz. The CIA actions taken included a black propaganda campaign against Arbenz from a CIA secret radio station in southern Florida that would broadcast into Guatemala labeling Arbenz a Soviet puppet and a communist. In addition the CIA equipped and trained a 480 man rebel force under a disaffected Guatemalan right wing general for the purpose 

of staging a coup d' etat against the Arbenz government and also created hit lists of Arbenz sympathizers to be assassinated during the coup and the days immediately following. In order to avoid being killed Arbenz and his top advisors resigned their posts and fled the country. Guatemala, destabilized by CIA interference in their internal affairs, ended up in a prolonged civil war that lasted over 30 years and in which several hundred thousand Guatemalans died.

        The Guatemalan coup of 1954 is typical of CIA covert ops being run around the world during the Dulles tenure that were justified as fighting communism. Very few Americans at the time knew these actions and coups were taking place in their name and using their tax dollars; but they were taking place and these actions by the CIA did not endear the U.S. to the peoples of these countries, of that I can assure you. That the actions I refer to definitely involved the assassinations of heads of state by the CIA is made evident by documents from this Guatemala period being made available by Freedom of Information Act requests. One such document is a 19 page training manual on how to conduct political assassinations. One shudders to consider the use to which this manual was put during the Dulles era at CIA and in the decades following based on his example and the policies he set while running the Agency.

Fidel Castro ca.1960

                                                                                          

          By 1961, when JFK came into office, the CIA’s Vietnam operation was simmering but the Cuban operation was about to boil over. The invasion group of Cubans equipped by the CIA for the purpose of re-taking Cuba from Castro had been in training for some time. Part of the operation called for the assassination of Castro prior to the invasion and the CIA had partnered with none other than the Mafia in order to get it done; another great use of your tax dollars. However, none of the various schemes they concocted were effective and by mid April of 1961, immediately prior to the scheduled invasion, Castro was still in power. The CIA prevailed upon the new Kennedy administration and it was decided the invasion would take place anyway. So on April 18, 1961, with JFK only 3 months into his administration, the CIA’s Cuba Brigade hit the beaches at a place called the Bay of Pigs on the Cuba coastline and attempted to take the country back from Castro. The invasion was a miserable failure. Something had happened to prevent the brigade’s expected air cover and the small Cuban air force was not destroyed while the planes sat on the tarmac as had been planned. Those few planes were then able to take to the air and cut the CIA’s Cuba brigade to pieces on the beaches.

          When it was apparent that the invasion was on the verge of collapse the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA tried to pressure the new President to intervene with U.S. forces to help the Brigade. Kennedy, realizing this as an act of war and against international law, refused. He would not go to war over the failed Cuban Brigade. Publicly he accepted responsibility for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. Privately he felt he had been lied to and misled by the CIA and Dulles. He ordered his brother Robert, who was the Attorney General, to conduct an investigation to determine the cause of the failure, and as a result of this he fired the top two posts in the CIA, director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell.

          It was following the Bay of Pigs disaster that JFK made his famous statement that he wanted to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”As if the firing of Dulles and Cabell was not enough he took the first step to removing the CIA’s covert operations power on June 28^th, 1961 when he issued National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM for short) #55. NSAM #55 was directed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces of the United States. It basically stated that the President held the Joint Chiefs as responsible for advice regarding Cold War operations as he did for advice regarding actual wartime operations. This signaled to the CIA the intent to move Cold War operations and activities away from the CIA and to the regular military. Needless to say none of these actions were received well in the hallowed halls of intelligence. In addition, though Dulles and Cabell were gone, many of their loyal intelligence officers remained in the CIA in high posts and they and many of the surviving Cuban brigade blamed JFK for the failure at the Bay of Pigs. The schism between Kennedy as Commander in Chief and his own government’s intelligence community had reached irreparable proportions and would have disastrous effects for both the young President and the nation.

Lyndon Johnson and
John Kennedy

          Two years later, on Nov 22^nd 1963, President John F. Kennedy would die in a hail of bullets at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, supposedly fired by a lone and crazy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. When Oswald himself was gunned down two days after JFK by Jack Ruby, thus ensuring he would not stand trial, President Lyndon Johnson chose to head off any further inquiry into Kennedy’s murder by appointing a Presidential commission to investigate and assign responsibility for the assassination. He appointed as head of the commission the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren. And In a final irony as regards his relationship to JFK, who do you suppose Johnson also appointed to the Warren Commission? None other than our old friend Allen Dulles.

          The fox was back in the henhouse.

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

Back Story to a Tragedy: JFK Revisited..
by Mark Arnold

Note: What I present here is really the third in a series of articles delving into the history of how our nation as arrived at its current crisis state of decline. The other two were published earlier in this blog (“From a Native Son”) and are entitled “Some Comments on War” and “How Tax Exempt Foundations Have Destroyed the   United States”. While this article can be read on its own I do recommend reading the other two first as some terms and concepts are discussed in those that would be helpful in understanding what I cover here. I have put quite a bit of effort into ferreting out the information I cover here. You won’t find it in regular history books of the period. If you are truly interested in how we have nearly lost our country; if you really want to help turn it to a better course and bring about a better tomorrow, then this is information you need to know. MA   

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n the morning of Friday, November 22^nd 1963, a New York City attorney named Mark Lane was busy defending a client being tried at the Criminal Court Building in lower Manhattan. At 1pm the judge declared a lunch recess and Lane left the Court building and headed toward a favorite Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. After lunch as he walked back to the courthouse he observed people on the street gathered by radios listening intently. He asked one of the people what was going on and was told that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Lane ran back to the courthouse and headed straight to the press room where he found a number of reporters, bailiffs and attorneys all listening to the radio. After a few minutes the announcement was made to the stunned crowd…the President was dead. Like everyone else, Mark Lane stood there in shock, only then realizing that for the first time in his life he was late for a court appearance; the trial of his client was to have resumed 5 minutes earlier. Lane dashed to the courtroom; half thinking the judge would cancel the afternoon session due to the tragedy that had unfolded in Dallas. The judge, however, had other ideas and ordered that the trial continue.

President John F. Kennedy

          Later that afternoon, with his client acquitted, Lane rushed from the courtroom to find a TV so he could get updated on the momentous occurrences that had transpired while he was in court. As he ran down the steps of the Criminal Court Building he encountered a judge he knew who was also walking down the steps. The judge turned toward him and said, “Well, Lane, do you think he did it alone?” Being out of the loop on the afternoon’s happenings Lane responded, “Who, sir? Did what?”

          “Do you think this Oswald killed the President?” he asked.

          Lane explained that he had been trying a case all afternoon and had heard nothing of the details of the assassination. The judge, ignoring Lane’s explanation of his ignorance, just looked at him and said:

          “He couldn’t very well shoot him from the back and cause an entrance wound in his throat, could he?”

          Not waiting for a response from Lane, the judge continued:

          “The doctors said the throat wound was an entrance wound. It’ll be an interesting trial. I want to see how they answer that question.”

          In November of this year 50 years will have passed since John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the question that Mark Lane’s judge friend asked him on the Court Building’s steps in 1963 has still not been adequately answered. Indeed, it remains the central illogic at the heart of the JFK murder case. How could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the front causing a throat entry wound if he was behind the President shooting from the Texas School Book Depository? In the hectic first few minutes after the assassination, before the full cover story of Oswald as a lone nut killer had taken hold in the media, some truth had leaked out. One of the emergency room doctors trying to save Kennedy’s life told a reporter that the small, round bullet hole they observed at the front of JFK’s throat before they cut across it in performing a tracheotomy, was an entry wound. All of these doctors were seasoned trauma room professionals who knew gunshot wounds. They had also observed a large, gaping wound at the rear of Kennedy’s skull, which they identified as an exit wound. In addition grassy knoll witnesses interviewed referred to shots coming from up the knoll behind the fence and a number of them went running up the hill right after the shots had been fired to find who had pulled the trigger. Lane’s judge friend had caught some of these initial reports on the radio or TV and had, like a good jurist would, immediately spotted the contrary facts of the case. Oswald was in the Book Depository behind the President. He couldn’t have caused a throat entry wound and rear skull, exit wound from that location.

                                                                                   

JFK and Mark Lane in 1960

          Seeing the illogic his friend had pointed out, Mark Lane immediately took on the JFK assassination case as his personal mission and like a pit bull has never let go. Being a defense attorney, he had a unique perspective. He knew that no jury of his peers would have convicted Oswald of Kennedy’s killing based on the evidence presented in the Warren Report. A competent defense would have picked that case apart easily. He was also personally impacted by Kennedy’s death, having met JFK and his brother Robert on several occasions. Lane had been elected to the New York state legislature in 1960 with Kennedy’s endorsement and also had helped to organize JFK’s campaign for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1959. For these reasons as well as a commitment to justice, Lane took on the task of getting at the truth of JFK’s assassination. His most recent book on the subject was written 2 years ago and is entitled “Last Word”. His first was 1965’s bestselling “Rush to Judgment”. In between are nearly 50 years of Lane and others striving to get at the facts and we owe him and these other researchers a debt of gratitude.

          This is, however, not an article about Mark Lane. In an earlier blog I made mention of the radical decline we are now witnessing in the United States as a nation. I also stated that decline has a number of elements to it; it didn’t just spring into being full bloom during the Obama Administration. What is happening today is the sum of what has happened before, and a huge part of THAT was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is very important, therefore, that we understand what happened on November 22^nd, 1963, not just to Kennedy but to our nation.

          The illogical presentation of data pointed out by Mark Lane’s judge friend above, is but a small fraction of the array of contrary and conflicting facts to be found when one starts digging in to the mass of evidence on the Kennedy assassination. Besides the doctors’ statement of the throat wound being an entry wound, consider the home movie of the assassination taken by a guy named Abraham Zapruder. He was standing just to the left of the grassy knoll shooting his film as Kennedy’s motorcade passed in front of him. Zapruder’s film clearly shows Kennedy being shot and slumping forward and then being hit by a fatal head shot and being thrown backward and to the left by the force of impact of the bullet. The only way he could be thrown backward is by a bullet striking him in the head coming from the front. Yet Oswald was supposedly in the Book Depository to the rear. Watch the film yourself. It really is all you need to know to understand there was a conspiracy involved in JFK’s death. While there were shots fired from behind, as all the wounds received by Texas Governor John Connally seem to indicate, the fatal head shot and throat shot were from the front, and as the judge pointed out, Oswald could not shoot the President from the front and behind at the same time.

          This leaves two possibilities. The first is that two assassins, each unaware of the other, chose to kill the President in Dallas at the same time and in the same place completely and entirely accidentally. And of course the obvious other option is that at least two, and probably more, people conspired to kill the President. We do not even need to look at the fact that Oswald was known to be an average marksman at best; that the shoddy, WW II vintage, Italian rifle he supposedly used had a defective scope and was also known as the “humanitarian” rifle for its poor performance in battle; that FBI sharpshooters could not duplicate Oswald’s supposed accuracy in their own re-enactments of the assassination or that the official autopsy photos do not show the large, exit wound observed by the doctors on the rear of Kennedy’s head, indicating the photos had been tampered with so as to create the illusion of only shots from the rear. (This last fact points to Government involvement in the cover-up, if not the assassination itself.) We do not need to know that a piece of Kennedy’s skull from the occipital (rear) region of his head was retrieved the next day from the grass next to the road in Dealey Plaza or that a man was seen by an eyewitness behind the picket fence at the top of the knoll breaking down a rifle and handing it to another man in the first seconds after the shooting…or that a number of witnesses reported hearing from 4 to 6 shots that day, while the Warren Commission says there were only 3. (In the duration of the shooting, as documented by the Zapruder film, Oswald would have been hard pressed to get off the 3 shots; 4 to 6 was out of the question, indicating there must have been a second shooter.) I could go on and on with this sort of thing but there is no real reason to. In light of all the above we should just be done with any debate about if there was a conspiracy and instead just concentrate on the question “Why?”. Why was Kennedy killed?

          To understand this one must have some understanding of the context of the times. Remember the principle from “Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace”; that war and preparation for war provide the means by which a government can maintain control over its population. World War II ended in August 1945 with the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With those explosions, not only was the war ended but a new age ushered in; the atomic age. The face of war was changed forever. All out war, as had been waged in WWI and WW II, was no longer a viable option. It would destroy the planet and everyone on it. What were the “puppet masters” to do? No problem; war and threat of war could still be used; it would just be a Cold War. Our former WWII ally, Soviet Russia, was turned in to the antagonist and off we went. The USSR shortly developed nuclear weapons and imposed its political system on the countries it wound up in control of after WWII, which was most of Eastern Europe. The term “Iron Curtain”, first coined by Winston Churchill in a famous speech he gave in the late ‘40s, was used to describe the border between the Soviet controlled eastern European countries and the “free” western European countries.

          In 1947 Congress, largely in response to the perceived Soviet threat, passed the National Security Act. This law created our current Department of Defense with a single secretary as its head, three independent branches of armed force (Army, Navy, and Air Force), the National Security Council and lastly the Central Intelligence Agency. It was signed into law by then President Harry Truman. The original mandate of the CIA per the law was to operate as an information coordination apparatus, its chief role being to take the information coming in from the various intelligence arms of the military and government and coordinate it into a useful, coherent package. In the beginning that is largely what it did. But by the early ‘50s the CIA was increasingly involved as a policy making and covert operations activity and performing actions that went far beyond its original intended purpose.

Allen Dulles

          Under director Allen Dulles, through the 1950’s, and using the justification of countering the Soviet threat, the CIA bit by bit garnered more and more power. Since its activities were secret, as well as its budget, it became harder and harder to control. The National Security Council, originally intended as the controlling entity of the CIA and the group the CIA reported to, in a role reversal ended up being itself manipulated through the effective controlling of information by the CIA and director Dulles. By the early 50’s the CIA was involved in covert operations in the Philippines supposedly in response to the communist HUK guerilla movement there. The acronym “H.U.K”. stands for “Hukbo ng Bayan Leban sa Hapon”. In native Filipino tongue this means “Peoples anti-Japanese Army”. The Philippines had been occupied by the Japanese in World War II and the HUKs resisted them. In 1946, when the Philippines were granted independence by the U.S., elections were held. Some HUKs won seats in the Filipino Congress but were then unseated by the ruling party after the elections. The HUKs retreated to the jungle and started their rebellion. As they had Communist leadership and the Cold War was in full bloom they became logical targets of the CIA. In reality the HUKs were not the threat they appeared to be as will be seen.

          Now enters legendary CIA operative Ed Lansdale. During WW II Lansdale was with the wartime Office of Strategic Services. He had been stationed in the western Pacific and the Philippines at the end of the war and so was familiar with the area and people. Now working for the CIA, Lansdale was able to create the illusion of a much larger communist insurgency in the Philippines than the HUKs actually were by getting a military group he controlled to stage mock attacks on villages and take them over only to be driven off by another military group he controlled, which were the Government backed forces under a handpicked military officer named Ramon Magsaysay. They would stage a battle, complete with fake dead, as a result of which Magsaysay would emerge the hero for driving out the HUKs. In such a way Magsaysay developed a national reputation and soon became the President of the country, the real HUK leadership was arrested and jailed and the CIA announced another Cold War victory over the communists. In the Philippines the CIA and Lansdale learned valuable lessons and strategies to be applied later in another South East Asian country called Vietnam.

          At the end of World War II a Vietnamese leader named Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese people looked forward to their country of Vietnam being at long last run by Vietnamese. The French had dominated Vietnam for generations prior to the war and it was, in effect, a French colony during that time. With World War II the Japanese invaded and subjugated Vietnam until they were defeated in 1945. During the war Ho had established a Vietnamese army called the Viet Minh (from a Vietnamese term meaning “League for the independence of Vietnam”.) which teamed with the Allies and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in fighting the Japanese. With the end of the war the French attempted to re-assert their control of the country and by 1946 they were at war with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh in what became known as the First Indochina War. In 1954, the Viet Minh defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and it looked as though the country of Vietnam was about to throw off its European colonial shackles at last and for the first time in generations Vietnam would be run by Vietnamese. But as Ho Chi Minh, had pro communist ties and possibly was communist, Vietnam was chosen as the CIA’s next theatre of operations for the energetic Ed Lansdale. A theory was concocted known as the “Domino Theory” to justify these actions. The Domino Theory held that communism was an international and monolithic movement systematically trying to take over the world and that if one country in Southeast Asia fell to communism then they all would, like dominoes falling.

          After the French had lost at Dien Bien Phu, a peace treaty was signed that temporarily divided the country into north and south zones. An election was to be held in two years which would determine the future of the country and reunite it. Meantime Ho Chi Minh and his victorious Viet Minh consolidated power in the north and a U.S. and CIA backed regime under a man named Ngo Dinh Diem was installed in the south. Enter once again, Ed Lansdale. He and a team of CIA operatives entered the northern zone and through rumors and covert actions of one kind or another raised havoc there. This ranged from putting sugar into the gas tanks of Viet Minh vehicles to dropping millions of propaganda leaflets opposing the Viet Minh to spreading rumors that Ho and his group intended to massacre Catholics living in the north. This was the famous Saigon Military Mission brought to light in the Pentagon Papers scandal in the early ‘70s.

                                                                                           

Allen Dulles (L) with
Ed  Lansdale (C)

          As a result of all this Catholics began fleeing the north by the thousands and in the end over a million relocated and settled in the south, dislocating in the process people who had lived had lived in the southern area for generations. Long story short, the intended elections to reunite the country never occurred, the CIA installed and backed Diem consolidated power in the south using the blank checkbook of the CIA and the southern indigenous people displaced by the northern refugees formed the foundation of what would become the Viet Cong. The seeds of the Vietnam War had been sown, a war from which the U.S. would not extricate itself for twenty years. That war was entirely a creation of the CIA. The Saigon Military Mission was six years in the rear view mirror when JFK was elected in 1960 and he inherited all of its ramifications.

          Another major event occurred in the late 50’s and that was the overthrow of the corrupt Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro and his band of guerillas in 1959. Shortly after this Castro announced his alignment with communism and proceeded to set up a communist style dictatorship on Cuba. In the Cold War climate of the 50s this was considered a huge threat to the U.S. and of course justified CIA sponsored covert operations to undo Castro’s revolution. The plot the CIA hatched to do this was to create a brigade of disaffected Cubans, train them, equip them and then send them storming back into Cuba to retake it from Castro. By 1960 this operation was well under way in its formation and training stages. Kennedy also inherited this operation when he was elected in 1960.

          So you can see that by 1960, the foreign policy situation that Kennedy inherited was soon to be dominated by these two CIA created scenarios in Vietnam and Cuba. The CIA itself was now far removed from its original mission of intelligence coordination and was full blown into covert military operations. Over the prior ten years under Allen Dulles it had consolidated its power and more and more operated in a fashion that did not really answer to the President but went according to the dictates of Dulles himself and whoever was influencing him. Therefore it is important to know a little about this guy Allen Dulles. Who was he?

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

Down to the Depths Went Elbert Hubbard...by Walt Mason

Down to the depths went Elbert Hubbard
With smiling eyes that knew no fear
And all the lovely mermaids rubbered 
And Neptune shouted, “See who’s here”

Well might there be a great commotion

Throughout the sea from East to West

For seldom has old Father Ocean

Clasped hands with such a splendid guest

The inkstand waits upon his table

His pen is rusting in the sun

There is no living hand that’s able

To do the work he’s left undone

There is no brain so keen and witty

No voice with his caressing tones

And Elbert in the deep sea city

Is swapping yarns with Davy Jones

And all the world that reads evinces

Its sorrow that he’s dwelling there

Not all the warring kings and princes

Are worth a ringlet of his hair

Death keeps a record in his cupboard

Of victims of the monarchs hate

“A million men and Elbert Hubbard”

So goes the tally, up to date

If it would bring you back, Elbertus

To twang your harp with golden strings

It would not worry us or hurt us

To drown a wagon load of kings

---

*rubber: (verb)  to stare at something wide eyed, as if in surprise