The big switch
Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. What leapt out at me was a section on pp.306-8 which contrasts the views of the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, to which JFK was taken, with those of the autopsy personnel:
‘Seven civilian Parkland doctors, in the performance of normal resuscitative duties in a very abnormal trauma situation, spoke of the placement of chest tubes. Approximately eight hours later, government pathologists viewed incisions that did not breach the chest cavity. This suggests that either the Parkland doctors, all seven, were incompetent, or lying, or both; or that Humes [at the autopsy] was incompetent or lying, or both; or that the two separate sets of medical personnel were viewing a different body‘ (emphasis added)
Morningstar (see Lobster 37, The Big Switch) argued that JFK’s body had been switched with that of Dallas policeman Tippit and this seems to be another fragment of evidence in that direction.
Waco wake-up
I don’t always agree with Alexander Cockburn, but this is right on the money:
‘The ashes of the murdered Branch Davidians and their children – all 74 of them – were still glowing as the nation’s major news institutions rousingly endorsed the decision of Janet Reno and her boss, Bill Clinton, to give the FBI (and, as it turned out, the Delta Force) the go-ahead for an operation that ensured massacre. Newsweek, we particularly remember, rushed out its cover of Koresh swathed in flames like one of the damned in a mediaeval painting. It was one of the great failures of American journalism, one of the most sickening, one of the most predictable and one of the most revealing. To this day one can meet progressive types who devote many of their waking hours to activities designed to save Mumia abu Jamal who didn’t give a toss about the Branch Davidians and their terrible slaughter by the federal government, and who still don’t. Use the word “cult” and both reason and moral judgement enter recess.’
Part of a much longer piece, ‘Waco and the Press’ in CounterPunch, September 8, 1999.
OK bomb
In the same sort of territory is the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma. A very interesting posting on the Konformist newswire was ‘Reason for Oklahoma City Federal building bombing’ by Dave Hartley which includes this tantalising snippet:
‘This story details links between Gulf War Syndrome, a prison inmate medical testing program by a company that George Bush had investments in, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma………….the army’s medical records from the Gulf War were in storage at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City when it was bombed……’
Well now, there’s a thing!
http://www.Asheville-Computer.com
http://www.ioa.com/~davehart
Wavy gravy
In the New York Times Book Review of 31 October 1999, p.32, was a review of Secret State Experiments on Humans by Jonathan D. Moreno, surveying some of the well known US horrors – Tuskegee, radiation etc. Facing it, on p. 33, was a full page ad headed, ‘Years of research and testing result in electromagnetic pest control breakthrough’ – describing how ultrasonic and e-m technology can now drive pets (bugs, mice etc) out of your house. Of most interest is something called ‘phase-shift-current’ which alters the electromagnetic field ‘throughout the home’s wiring’. Next time you read about some poor so-and-so complaining of being assaulted by invisible rays, remember this ad: the technology exists.
Rent-a-mob?
After the demo in the City of London which caught the authorities on the hop, the Sunday Times reported on 20 June that protesters had been paid to take part:
‘Two claimed to be students from Nottingham University. They told traders at the Liffe exchange, “We were asked if we wanted to come down to the protests. We were paid £30 each, given a free bus ride down and provided with a packed lunch.”‘
Love the bit about the packed lunch….
I’m old enough to remember when the Sunday Times was a credible paper.
Timor docs hidden
Under the headline, ‘Britain keeps lid on MI6 role in ousting Sukarno’, Paul Lashmar in The Independent on 5 October reported:
‘…documents which would reveal Britain’s secret role in Indonesian politics in the Sixties that led to one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century and Jakarta’s eventual annexation of East Timor are being kept under lock and key. They would uncover the Foreign Office and MI6’s role in helping General Suharto seize power. ‘
One of those deeply involved, IRD’s Norman Reddaway, died recently. (See the anodyne obit in Guardian 25 October).
Expendables
Two recent examples of the way HMG treats its employees when they become embarrassing. Peter Bleach, a former intelligence officer turned arms dealer, is in prison in India after an arms deal he was involved with went sour. The Indian court agreed to examine notes of a meeting between North Yorkshire Special Branch officers and Bleach before the arms deal. (Bleach’s defence is that he told the SB about the proposed arms deal and got what he assumed was clearance.) And — would you believe it? — when the notes arrived at the Indian court, sections of them had been erased. When Teddy Taylor MP wrote to Home Secretary Jack Straw about this, Straw initially replied that the erasures were the result of a ‘clerical error’. A Special Branch officer, flown out to India, later admitted that the erasures had been done ‘on advice from the security service’. (Eastern Eye 4 June)
The second concerns Detective Sergeant Michael Hill of Hertfordshire CID who stumbled upon one of the many crooked deals being conducted in this country by Jamshid Hasemi, an MI6 informant. After being interviewed by Hill, Hasemi contacted his friends at MI6 and Hill was told to drop the case. According to the report in the Guardian (20 May):
‘When Mr Hill declined to drop the case, he was disciplined, told he was suffering from paranoia, and obliged to leave the police force.’
The background to the case is described in ‘How MI6 helped Iran buy arms’, by Mark Watts, in Sunday Business 9 May 1999.
A friend of Friends?
‘Former Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar has admitted he was the minister who breached Whitehall rules when he signed an emergency warrant for clandestine MI6 operations.’ (Guardian 19 June 1999; see also ‘Minister “exceeded power on bugging operation”‘ Guardian 18 June 1999)
This, presumably, has nothing at all to do with the fact that Dewar has been friends since his student days with the former MI6 officer Meta Ramsay, now Baroness Ramsay and a member of the government in the House of Lords. (‘Donald’s Mata Hari’, Daily Record [Glasgow] 9 August 1999)
The mystery of MRA solved?
The Francis Stoner Saunders book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA, reviewed below, is full of riveting little snippets. The one that struck me first time I flipped through the index was this, on pp. 150/1.
‘…in May 1952, the newly strengthened PSB [Psychological Strategy Board of the US Government] formally took over the supervision and the pace and timing of the CIA’s psychological warfare programme… the PSB now assumed supervision of the Moral Rearmament Movement [MRA]….’
This ends the debate about the MRA in this period in one sense: yes, the Americas were in there. When Tom Driberg wrote his The Mystery of MRA in 1964, the best he could offer was this libel-lawyered sentence:
‘There does not seem much point, therefore, in speculation on a suggestion that has sometimes been made — that, during the period of the Cold War, MRA’s services to the anti-Communist cause have been recognised by subsidies from official but secret, agencies in the United States or elsewhere.’
MRA certainly looks like an American operation after the war – all that money spent promoting views which fitted very nicely with the class co-operation/ productivity ideology being pushed in Europe by the organs of the US state as the alternative to socialism in various forms. Saunders’ ‘supervision of MRA’ seems to imply funding – why else be supervised? But does this mean that the CIA was funding MRA before the PSB took over? And after? Would we be correct to say that in the post-war period MRA was a CIA-funded operation? Although the book is well documented – there are 45 pages of notes – there is nothing to source this fascinating assertion.
Spy mania
The outburst of spy mania in September – Metrokhin Archive, the STASI stuff, ‘Stalin’s granny’ and all the rest of the piffle – opened the columns of The Times on 13 September to no less than Brian Crozier. Crozier told us, inter alia:
For decades, I was one of the very few (sic) who tried to alert public opinion and successive governments to the Soviet threat, for which I was pilloried by the media …in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, the CIA was virtually paralysed in the most important domain: countering the spread of misinformation by the KGB. When President Jimmy Carter, who succeeded Nixon, appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action, ceased to operate.’
Never mind Crozier forgetting – and The Times subs missing – that it was Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon, not Jimmy Carter, it was Crozier’s use of the term ‘Covert Action’ which rang my alarm bell: I didn’t remember the CIA ever using such explicit titles for its departments. So I looked up Stansfield Turner’s account of these events, in his memoir Secrecy and Democracy (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986). On pp.193-205 Turner says the following.
- The CIA cuts were in what he calls ‘the espionage branch’, otherwise known as the Directorate of Operations.
- Number of people actually fired was 17
- 147 were ‘forced to retire early’.
- ‘In short, the espionage branch’s authorised number of people shrank by 820; all of the reduction except the 147 forced into early retirement and the 17 dismissed was effected by attrition.’
It says much about the declining standards of the British broadsheets that no one at The Times thought it worth while either ringing Turner, checking the cuttings library or reading his book.
Travelling fellows?
One of those curious coincidences happened in the Guardian‘s letters page on 11 June. Under a letter by Professor Vic Allen, outed in September as a Stasi asset, was one by Peter Robinson, Director, Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (on which see David Osler’s piece in Lobster 33). If Allen was a Stasi asset, what is Robinson? A NATO asset?
Eco-freaked
The Ecologist, October 1999, ran an important 7-page article by Mark Hollingsworth on the business connections of ‘Nuclear Jack’, Dr John Cunningham, and his role in Whitehall on behalf of agribusiness and chemical companies. The day I wrote this paragraph in October Cunningham resigned from the government.