Free Ride Department
Meanwhile the Rand Corporation (that liberal think tank in Santa Monica which helps decide which Russian cities should be atom-bombed) has declared that the federal government must continue to support an obscure military satellite system known as Global Positioning Network. Much beloved by high-tech hikers and rental car enthusiasts, the GPS supposedly enables you to determine your position anywhere on the planet within 100 meters. According to Rand study author Scott Pace, the GPS will support a $9 billion industry in California by the end of the decade, providing the US government keeps funding it and charges no fees for the system’s signal.
Mr Pace warns that unless Uncle Sam continues to support the GPS, Japanese and European techies may opt for the rival Russian Glonass system. Unfortunately, the Glonass is already the system of choice for true global positioning buffs, since the Pentagon degrades the information it provides non-military users. The non-degraded Russian system allows for accuracy of better than 10 meters to all commercial users. And it probably comes with a kool Red Star logo like the pocket watches advertised in Private Eye.
The Rand Corporation’s support for public funding of GPS is but the tip of a large iceberg of US tax dollars supporting the spooks’ entry into private enterprise. According to some reports, the highly-spooky Evergreen Corporation (which runs hotels, air cargo and a Taiwan-based airline, and owns Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose) has been given the US Postal Service’s priority mail contract without competition.
A few years back Federal Express, the USPS’s number one rival, absorbed the spooky Clare Chennaults’s Flying Tigers. Fed Ex is a major recipient of government largesse.
Red Car Man
I suspect many Lobster readers were turned on to parapolitics by the suspicious deaths of the Kennedy brothers and the sloppy cover-ups which followed. (I even had Len Deighton’s Jackdaw version of Rush to Judgement with its very own pop-up model of Dealey Plaza!) The Los Angeles Times reports another mysterious disappearance of evidence in the Robert Kennedy case. A fifteen year-old amateur photographer called Jamie Scott Enyart was present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where RFK was killed. He took three rolls of photographs. Most of his shots were of Kennedy’s victory speech (RFK had just won the California primary and looked set to win the Democratic Party nomination and would have challenged Richard Nixon in the 1968 Presidential election). Enyart’s films were confiscated by police investigators. When he tried to get them back he learned that all files and evidentiary material in the case had been sealed by court order for 20 years.
In 1988, 20 years after the murder, Enyart asked for his photos back. The City of Los Angeles said it had lost them (just as the Los Angeles Police Department lost bullets, ceiling tiles and other crucial evidence). Enyart responded with a $2 million lawsuit against the city. In August 1995, Enyart was told that his photos had been found in the state archives in Sacramento, where they had been misfiled. The state hired a courier, one George Philip Gebhart, who flew to Los Angeles International Airport, with an envelope said to contain the negatives.
Gebhart rented a car at LAX and proceeded to drive downtown on Century Boulevard. Near Freeman Avenue he got a flat tire. He got out to inspect the tire. When he got back into the car, his jacket and the envelope, which he claims he had left on the back seat, were missing.
According to the LA Times, ‘Gebhart acknowledged that he didn’t see anyone near the car when he got out to check his tire. But he said that when he stopped for a traffic light a block earlier, he had seen a man get out of a red car behind him and start pounding the fender of the red car with his fist. That man, Gebnar suggested, might have slashed his tire.’
On 5 February, city attorneys displayed contact prints which they claimed had been made from the negatives before they were lost. None of the prints show Kennedy after he left the ballroom at the Ambassador. Enyart insists that he photographed the shooting of RFK in the hotel kitchen. His lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles continues.
(Clearly the Times has missed a major scoop here. I have it on good authority that the Red Car Man – as he will henceforth be known – was none other than E. Howard Hunt, disguised as Gordon Novel, en route to activate the traps and pitfalls in the Richard Case Nagell’s pad in Echo Park.)
Regarding RFK, a scrub war has broken out among American researchers, following the publication of Dan Moldea’s The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy – an Investigation of Motive, Means and Opportunity (W.W. Norton). Moldea, a longtime investigator of the Mafia and author of the very good Dark Victory (about Ronald Reagan’s mob connections), was one of many researchers to finger a Cuban-American security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar as a possible second gunman. Now he has reversed himself, claims Sirhan Sirhan acted alone, and has threatened the Baltimore Sun with a libel action on behalf of Mr Cesar.
For a sensible perspective on the case, the reader is recommended Philip Melanson’s book The Assassination of RFK, which, in addition to a lot of hard research, contains a chilling interview with Sirhan Sirhan’s state-appointed hypnotist!
Operation Bowart, Part 2
Though I still don’t buy Walter Bowart’s Satan’s Slaves Meet Black Helicopters thesis, the winter 1995 issue of Unclassified offers one of the footnotes Bowart’s Operation Mind Control 2 cries out for, an article about a CIA-sponsored paedophile group called ‘The Finders’. The tale is bizarre, but it contains names, dates and documentation that the super-spooks were running a child-abuse and computer fraud gang in Washington DC during the 80s under the guidance of a USAF intelligence agent, Marion David Pettie. Unclassified seems somewhat uncertain about the piece, however, and refers readers’ enquiries to the author Wendell L. Minnick.
The latest Unclassified (number 36) contains a grim but well researched piece by John Kelly about postwar CIA collaboration with Nazi doctors in radiation experiments in the US, and much other stuff of interest. Despite its frequent typos, Unclassified is a very valuable resource. [20001 S. Street NW, Suite 740, Washington DC 20009].
Honey, I shrunk the spooks
The New York Times of 1 March reports that a presidential commission has recommended shrinking the USA intelligence agencies while leaving their structure fundamentally unchanged. The report recommends revealing the size of the secret intelligence budget (estimated at $26-28 billion per year) and giving enhanced power to the Director of Central Intelligence to manage all thirteen spook agencies. The bi-partisan presidential commission was created by Congress in December 1994, and heard testimony from present and former intelligence officials: it recommended the elimination of as many as 5,000 jobs within CIA, NSA and DIA.
Next day, the House Intelligence Committee (dominated by Republicans) issued its own report, which recommends (as predicted by Lester Coleman in Unclassified) the subordination of CIA to DIA, placing all covert ops and most intelligence gathering in the hands of the US military.
Pentagon pollarded?
The Pentagon did not receive much applause from its usual glee club in the press, however, when a confidential Defense Department memo regarding Israeli spies was leaked. The memo, circulated by the Defense Investigative Service, warned US military contractors that the Israeli government was ‘aggressively’ trying to steal military and intelligence secrets – by trading in part on its ‘strong ethnic ties’ to the US. Following complaints from the Anti-Defamation League, the Pentagon withdrew the memo after senior officers decided that its author had improperly singled out Jewish ethnicity as a counter-intelligence concern. Pentagonal fears of another Jonathan Pollard (the Navy Intelligence analyst who spied for Israel until 1985) remain.
Oklahoma bombing linked to the EU?
In the run-up to the trail of the alleged Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh, defence lawyers tried unsuccessfully to subpoena CIA and other agency documents indicating links between right-wing extremists in the US and the UK, and to depose John Tyndall, David Irving and Charlie Sergeant.
Sounds like the land of the loony stuff, but American and British fascists are certainly getting palsy-walsy, perhaps due to the availability of cheap air fares to Florida (the most humid and reactionary state of the United States).
The San Francisco Chronicle of 28 February brought us the odd tale of three British would-be Nazis who killed themselves in a suicide pact in Arizona and California. Ruth Fleming and Stefan Bateman shot themselves at a shooting range in Mesa, AZ, while Jane Greenhow blew her head off near Shasta Lake, CA, after writing a long suicide note to her Glock pistol. The slant the papers give these Nazi-oriented stories is usually one of wry disbelief, normally ending with a dismissive comment from the cops. But such tales crop up with increasing regularity, as Christian Identity types challenge the FBI to raid their compounds and a group calling itself ‘Sons of the Gestapo’ derails an Amtrak passenger train….
Garrisonia
The same day that the US papers carried the disappearance of ex-CIA head Willian Colby, later found drowned after a canoing tragedy (do you think Tom Clancy or Le Carré could come up with stuff like this?) news surfaced re. the Garrison investigation into the JFK hit.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle of 1 May, ‘secret documents just released by a federal agency strongly support the contention that the late Jim Garrison’s investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination was irresponsible and perhaps fraudulent.’
The Assassination Records Review Board, responsible for making public documents which do not threaten ‘national security, intelligence sources etc’ has released 15,000 pages of Garrison documents and 6,000 pages from Clay Shaw’s attorney, Edward Wegmann. Many of the Garrison documents relate to sightings of ‘Lee Oswald’ and ‘Clay Shaw’, or their doppelgangers, in Jackson and Clinton, La, prior to the assassination.
Wegmann’s documents, predictably enough, are said to depict Garrison as a sloppy and irrational homophobe
Adios LA?
Finally, a tiny item in the Los Angeles Times (30 January) prior to the Taiwanese elections and attendant Chinese wargames. Having warned American visitors to Beijing that China might invade Taiwan as early as the Spring, ‘Chinese officials added[ed] a veiled but startling threat: if the United States intervenes militarily to stop China forcibly regaining its “rebel province”, China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Los Angeles.’
Why LA? Because the Rand Corporation is there? Because it is the home of all that is hideous in contemporary cinema? So far, at least, LA continues to exist – and the Chinese government has contented itself with banning the movie Babe. But if the thermonuclear armageddon, toe-to-toe with the yellow peril, must occur, I do think Los Angeles is an excellent place to start. And I live there!