CIA set for Pentagon buyout?
Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a DIA campaign to remilitarize the US intelligence structure. According to Coleman the Pentagon has never forgiven President Truman for turning OSS into a supposedly civilian entity, and is well on the way to running the entire US spy apparat.
I don’t really believe this strict military-civilian dichotomy. CIA has long been full of military spooks – General Charles P. Cabell and Admiral Stansfield Turner, for instance. But, according to Coleman, CIA has already lost control of NSA to the Pentagon, who will also run the new Defense Human Intelligence Service (DHIS). DHIS, which will be at the heart of future covert ops, will nominally be headed by CIA director John Deutsch, but day-to-day control will be by DIA’s National Military Collection Agency, under the command of Maj. General John A. Leide.
Our military leaders
- Colin Powell
Given the widespread disgust with conventional politics (where Clinton and Bush begin to look as alike as Major and Blair), there has been much mumbling about the possibility of a ‘third party’ in the US. The media’s chosen standard bearer last time was the extraterrestrial Texas magnate Ross Perot (the media, liberal and conservative, regularly ignore the sizeable Libertarian Party and the efforts of Jesse Jackson while fixating on weird eccentrics). This time as a ‘third party’ possibility both Perot and the media have been touting Colin Powell, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Billed as a war hero (he shared responsibility for the Iraqi turkey shoot), Powell supposedly appeals to the right wing, while his blackness and vaguely-articulated Clintonesque views make him apparently acceptable to liberals. Less is said about Powell’s spooky contacts, especially his relationship with his ‘best friend’ Richard Armitage.Armitage is one of the ‘State Department’ types who, over the years, has been accused of drug dealing and involvement with the Vietnamese mafia. President Bush tried to appoint him Ambassador to Japan (Congress said ‘no’), while militia poster boy ‘Bo’ Gritz accused him publicly of trafficking drugs in South East Asia. Gritz and Perot were very thick for a while (Gritz claims Perot offered to pay him to assassinate Colombian drug dealers in a privately-sponsored Kristalnacht), so it will be interesting to see how long Perot’s admiration for President-to-be Powell (and future National Security Adviser Armitage?) lasts. Especially if he decides to run as a Republican…. - John Shashkivili
General Shash., the present head of the Joint Chiefs, entered the US with his father in 1947. Nothing wrong with that except that dear old dad, was a paid-up member of the SS, and as such ineligible to enter the US. Under the controversial terms of California’s Proposition 187, those who enter the USA illegally may be denied education and medical treatment and summarily deported. Since Proposition 187 visits the sins of the fathers on the children, General Shashkivili would be well advised to stay clear of the sunshine state.
Our Man in Chechnya?
Alas, no more. On 22 April 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported the disappearance of a US ‘relief worker’ in the latest Russian killing field. ‘The president of the Soros Foundation (!) appealed for help…in finding a well-known American disaster relief worker who has disappeared in Chechnya.’ The missing Samaritan, Frederick C. Cuny, described as a 50-year old ‘oil specialist’, vanished some time after 31 March. The six foot four inch Cuny, who weighed 250 pounds and was last seen wearing cowboy boots, had also worked for the majorly spooky (sorry, humanitarian relief-oriented) International Rescue Committee in Bosnia.
Silence re. Cuny for some months. Then, on 18 August, a New York Times report, ‘Moscow Accused in Aid Worker’s Killing’. Frederick Cuny’s brother announced at a news conference in Moscow: “Let it be known to all nations and humanitarian organizations that Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians”….. ‘Christopher Cuny said that he believed that Russia had set up the killing of Mr Cuny, 50, and his three Russian travelling companions in revenge for an article Mr Cuny wrote in the New York Review of Books (!) criticising the Russian military operation begun in December to quell the secessionist rebellion in Chechnya.’
Watch what you write, old boy!
Alien autopsy?
The Murdoch cable Fox TV network ran an hour-long show based on the Ray Santilli-sponsored footage of the alleged autopsy performed on a dead alien at Fort Worth Air Force Base in 1947. This film-making viewer found it hokey for the following reasons.
- The camera moves constantly, rarely coming to rest on anything for long enough for it to be studied. Anyone who has seen films shot in the 40s will know that cameras were invariably situated on tripods to achieve a rock-stready image. Only battlefield documentary material was shot ‘in the hand’. Murdoch’s alien footage looks like it was shot by the creators of NYPD Blue.
- The image repeatedly goes out of focus as the operator approaches the alien ‘corpse’. An ‘expert’ interviewed for the show suggested this is a property of the lense, but this is bullshit: the lense used on motion picture cameras in the 40s were essentially the same ones used today. They are not fixed-focus lenses. If the cameraman makes no deliberate attempt to rack focus as he approaches his subject he is either very inexperienced – which this one apparently wasn’t – or he is deliberately trying to obscure his subject by making the picture ‘soft’.