Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Now, a similar thing happened in Laos that happened in Vietnam. Because the CIA could not field a nativist army strong enough to fight the leftist rebels, the decision was made to resort to an air campaign, with heavy bombing.51 All kinds of incendiary devices were used. According to one witness, “Village after village was leveled, countless people burned alive by high explosives, or burnt alive by napalm and white phosphorus, or riddled by anti-personnel bomb pellets.”52 And as with Johnson and Vietnam, the bombing policy reduced to a logic that destroying the country was necessary in order to save it. One Senate report stated that “The United States has undertaken … a large scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas and to interdict North Vietnamese infiltration.”53 The report continued that this had been done by subterfuge and in secrecy, “through such things as saturation bombing and the forced evacuation of population from enemy held or threatened areas—we have helped to create untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers.”54

  In the late 1960s much of the two million tons of bombs dropped over Laos were dropped over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the southern part of the country. And it was not just bombs that Air America dropped in Laos. The CIA dropped millions of dollars in forged Pathet Lao currency in order to wreck the economy of the areas the leftists controlled.55 The CIA even bombed its own Meo tribesmen, people who were supposed to be their allies in the war against the Pathet Lao. Their offense was that some of them did not want to give up their young sons to fight in the CIA’s war. And it was from this war that the heroin trade in the Golden Triangle was now facilitated by Air America. According to Dr. Alfred McCoy, in the sixties and seventies, 70 percent of the world’s supply of heroin had its origins in this area. As one reporter wrote, “It is transported in the planes, vehicles, and other conveyances supplied by the United States. The profit from the trade has been going into the pockets of some of our best friends in Southeast Asia.”56 One of those “best friends” was Vang Pao, a Hmong leader who rose to become a general in the Royal Lao Army.

  When a settlement was reached in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was not needed anymore by the North Vietnamese for infiltration purposes. Therefore a cease fire was arrived at in Laos in 1973. Another coalition government was formed. This one lasted until 1975. At that time, the Pathet Lao took control of Laos. But what was left of the country? As one writer has stated, “Laos had become a land of nomads, without villages, without farms; a generation of refugees; hundreds of thousands dead, many more maimed.”57 Yet, unsparingly, when the U.S. Air Force shut down its radio station, the sign off message was, “Good-bye and see you next war.”58

  As with Mexico City, Jim Garrison was the first critic of the Warren Commission to understand that the Kennedy assassination was not just about bullet trajectories or firing positions in Dealey Plaza. There was much more to it than that. To understand this aspect of the case, Garrison began to accumulate a large library about the creation and maintenance of the military industrial complex. One of his favorite authors was Seymour Melman.59 But beyond that, Garrison’s investigation attracted many private citizens who understood something was really wrong with the Warren Commission. Therefore, in 1968, a professor from Ohio University mailed him a twenty-five-page handwritten treatise on how the Vietnam War was escalated after Kennedy’s assassination.60 And this allowed the DA to see at an early date that the reason for the assassination was a fundamental shift Kennedy was making in his approach to the Cold War. In addition to the above changes which took place in Vietnam, Congo, Indonesia, and Laos, we have seen how Kennedy’s attempt for a détente with Castro died on the vine once Johnson became president. We could mention other places where this pattern was repeated, for example in Dominican Republic, Brazil, Iran, and Greece. In the last case, President Johnson memorably told the Greek ambassador, “Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador, fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant …. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament, and Constitutions, he, his Parliament, and his Constitution may not last very long.”61 And, of course, because of these reverses, Kennedy’s attempt at a relaxation of tensions with Moscow, so beautifully expressed in his commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963, also ended up being stillborn.

  In fact, through William Walton’s mission to Moscow in early December of 1963, we know what Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy thought about the assassination. And also what they thought about Johnson’s ability to keep the attempt at American-Soviet détente going. Walton, a painter, was visiting Moscow on a mission to meet various Soviet artists. But this ended up being a cover for him to convey two important messages through an intermediary to Chairman Khrushchev. The first message was that “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world” the Kennedys believed there was a large conspiracy behind JFK’s murder. A conspiracy that was domestic and rightwing in its orientation, not communist. Secondly, they advised that the Soviets should not trust that President Johnson would continue in President Kennedy’s tradition in working for world peace. Walton said that LBJ would be “incapable of realizing Kennedy’s unfinished plans.” Johnson’s close ties to big business would bring their representatives into the White House and they would have an adverse impact on the quest for a winding down of the Cold War. And, in fact, Johnson was much closer to both the Rockefellers and Texas oil tycoons than Kennedy ever was.62 To the point that he even thought of nominating Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice-President in 1968. Walton’s message finished by saying Bobby Kennedy would resign as Attorney General in 1964. He then would run for a political office. This would be in preparation for a run for the presidency. Walton said that only RFK could then complete what his brother had started after Johnson induced a cooling down period.63 So what the Kennedys had communicated to the Soviets in secret after the assassination, Jim Garrison understood by late 1967.

  But there was one person who understood all this way before Jim Garrison. And he actually sat on the Warren Commission.

  On December 22, 1963, Harry Truman wrote an editorial that was published in the Washington Post. The former president wrote that he had become “disturbed by the way the CIA had been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of government.” He wrote that he never dreamed that this would happen when he signed the National Security Act. He thought it would be used for intelligence analysis not “peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” He complained that the CIA had now become “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for Cold War enemy propaganda.” Truman went as far as suggesting its operational arm be eliminated. He concluded with the warning that Americans have grown up learning respect for “our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” This column was published on December 22, 1963, one month to the day after Kennedy was killed. Ray Marcus first brought this editorial to relevance in his self-published monograph entitled Addendum B. He called it the “least known important public policy statement by a president or former president in the twentieth century.” There was even more to the story than anyone thought. Marcus, through the Truman Library, has filled it in.

  Through the acquiring of Truman’s notes, it turns out that the first draft of this editorial was completed on December 11. But the rough draft was started on December 1, which brings the provenance of the piece to about one week after Kennedy’s murder. On December 27, Admiral Sidney Souers congratulated Truman on the editorial by calling it a “splendid statement.” Souers had been part of Naval Intelligence and Truman picked him to head the Central Intelligence Group in 1946. From 1947–50 he served on the National Security Council and later was a consultant to the White House on military and foreign affairs. Souers w
rote to Truman that Allen Dulles “caused the CIA to wander far from the original goal established by you, and it is certainly a different animal that I tried to set up for you.”

  But someone else saw the column and had a different reaction. In April of 1964, while serving on the Commission, Allen Dulles arranged to meet Truman at his home. After exchanging formalities, Dulles had arranged for his assistants to leave the room. Dulles then did two things: 1.) He tried to soften Truman up by telling him how much he admired him for setting down the Truman Doctrine after World War II, and 2.) He tried to say that what he covertly did as CIA Director was only a natural evolution of the Truman Doctrine. In short: guilt by association. Dulles then pulled out the real reason for why he was there. He took out the December 22 editorial and said that, consequently, Truman’s editorial “seemed to be a misrepresentation of his position.” In Dulles’s April 21, 1964, memo to CIA counsel Lawrence Houston, he says that Truman then studied his essay, and seemed “quite astounded at it. In fact, he said that this was all wrong. He then said that he felt it had made a very unfortunate impression. He asked me if he could keep the article.” Dulles then continues with: “At no time did Mr. Truman express other than complete agreement with the viewpoint I expressed and several times said he would see what he could do about it, to leave it in his hands. He obviously was highly disturbed at the Washington Post article.”

  As the meeting ended and his associates rejoined the two men, Dulles explicitly praised John McCone, the man JFK picked to succeed to his office after Kennedy fired him. But as of yet, there had been no explicit mention of President Kennedy himself. Dulles now did so. And in a truly startling way. As he was leaving, Dulles mentioned the “false attacks” on CIA in relation to Vietnam and how Kennedy had repudiated those attacks.

  Dulles concludes the memo by saying he was not sure “what will come of all this. It is even possible, maybe probable, that he will do nothing when he thinks it over.” He then suggests that Houston get the president’s old pal Clark Clifford to contact Truman and perhaps even McCone should do so himself. He then tells Houston to show the memo to Richard Helms and Cord Meyer and perhaps they can do something with the Director.

  The clear implication is that Dulles wanted Truman to either take back or soften his December editorial. If he didn’t succeed, he wanted a phalanx of people to intervene: Clifford, Helms, Cord Meyer, even John McCone if necessary. Secondly, this author doubts the description of Truman’s reaction. Does anyone think Truman actually asked for a copy of a column he already wrote? Further, Truman worked on the piece for at least ten days. According to a memo he wrote on December 1, he called Souers for his input. So how could he later be “quite astounded” at his own column’s contents? The crafty CIA Director was likely leaving a disinformation trail back at CIA HQ. One for others to pick up on later.

  We now come to the utterly fascinating parting shot: Dulles bringing up the recent “false attacks” on CIA in relation to Vietnam. He’s probably referring to the now-famous columns published in October of 1963. The October columns were penned by Arthur Krock and Richard Starnes for the NY Times and Washington Daily News. Krock’s piece mentioned a source in Vietnam who likened the CIA’s growth “to a malignancy,” which even the White House could not control. His source added that if the USA ever experienced a coup it would come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. Starnes’s source said the same: “If the United States ever experiences a Seven Days in May it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon.” Contravening Dulles’s final comment, this author knows of no place where Kennedy repudiated the October columns. In all probability, Dulles was trying to dupe Truman into issuing a retraction. But his actions are even more suggestive if he was referring to those columns; especially when one adds in the fact that he specifically mentioned Kennedy to Truman in regards to them. Dulles’s comments imply that he thought Truman wrote the column due to his suspicions about the CIA, Kennedy’s murder, and the Vietnam war—which Johnson was now in the process of escalating. What makes this even more fascinating is that if one looks at the very first wave of Kennedy assassination books and essays, no one connected those dots—Vietnam, those columns, JFK’s death—that early. By getting Truman to retract, was Dulles trying to prevent anyone from doing so in the near future? If so, as prosecutors say, it reveals “consciousness of guilt.”

  On December 29, 1967, Pacifica Radio did an hour long interview with Josiah Thompson. His book, Six Seconds in Dallas, had just been published. It is subtitled “A Micro Study of the Kennedy Assassination.” And it certainly is. It’s chockfull of trajectory configuration, wound examination, frame by frame Zapruder film study, and ballistics analyses and so on and so forth. It is a font of technical sophistication deconstructing the Warren Report. On this program, Thompson said that on the way to the studio he heard Jim Garrison had “announced that the assassination was in fact a coup d’etat—a shift in power in this country. And this was the proper grounds for understanding it.” He went on to say that at the present time there was precious little evidence for that. And a good reporter could make Garrison look foolish by questioning him on this point. The implication being that a responsible critic would never say anything like that.

  Recall, at this time the coup in Indonesia was completed. After the slaughter of at least 200,000 communists, Kennedy’s friend Sukarno was now under house arrest and Suharto was selling off the country. In Africa, the Kennedy-Hammarskjold attempt at preserving Congo for its citizens was now completely shattered. The USA had actually joined up with the former colonizer Belgium to stop an alleged “Chinese inspired” rebellion. The target of the Kennedy backed UN action, Moise Tshombe, was now part of the Congo government. The dictator Mobutu was in power and siphoning off the resources of his incredibly rich nation for himself. Kennedy’s neutralization of Laos had been broken, and the Air America air war was now pounding its citizens daily. While their planes carried heroin back to addict Americans while enriching Laotian generals. There were 540,000 combat troops in Vietnam. And Operation Rolling Thunder was in the process of exploding more bombs in South Vietnam than were ever dropped on Nazi Germany. Approximately 20,000 Americans were dead, and about a million Vietnamese had perished. Finally, Kennedy’s attempt to work toward diplomatic recognition of Castro had been cast adrift by Johnson. And Bobby Kennedy had told the Soviets that, with Johnson in power, their attempt at détente would have to be placed on hold.

  Thompson was missing the forest for the trees. While he was counting bullets on Elm Street, the rivers in Indonesia were being dyed red with the blood of the PKI massacre. Garrison didn’t miss the trees, but he had his eye on the forest. It took the rest of the critics decades to catch up with him. Some of them still haven’t.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Denouement

  “I suppose I’d describe myself as a Wilsonian-FDR-Kennedy liberal.”

  —Clay Shaw to James Kirkwood

  Once Clay Shaw was acquitted and Herbert Christenberry threw out Garrison’s perjury case against him, Shaw began to visit college campuses and give his spin as to what motivated Garrison on such a misguided legal action, and just how flimsy the DA’s case against him was.1 Other surrogates— such as James Phelan, local attorney Milton Brener, and James Kirkwood—also helped in this effort. Brener had served as counsel to both Walter Sheridan, and Ferrie’s good friend Layton Martens. Kirkwood had worked with both Phelan and Hugh Aynesworth throughout the trial and, as we have seen, Shaw had actually enlisted him to write the book American Grotesque. Because the covert apparatus employed to undermine Garrison would remain hidden, and because the mainstream press was so biased against him, even many Warren Commission critics ended up sounding like Phelan, Aynesworth, Sheridan, and Kirkwood on the subject. To use one example, David Lifton actually spoke at FBI asset James Phelan’s wake.2 When Phelan passed away, Paricia Lambert told the Los Angeles Times that, “He was a dying breed” and the world was a sadder, barren place without him.3 Neither one of
these writers have ever detailed the sorry record revealed in this book concerning Phelan’s munificent cooperation in doing assignments for government agencies and his later lies about these assignments. So when Lambert says Phelan was a dying breed, it is hard to understand what she is talking about. Especially in light of the now declassified record. Government assets are always common on the journalistic scene. And that kind of career sell out usually benefits the reporter by getting him more work and a higher profile. This is why Phelan was chosen by Bob Loomis to do a quickie biography of the CIA associated Howard Hughes after his death, and he also wrote several essays for the New York Times. And if America did not have so many compromised journalists, it would probably be a better country and not be in a state of decline.

  One thing Phelan never did was admit the truth about Clay Shaw. Even though Phelan did not pass away until September of 1997, he always resisted admitting Shaw’s ties to the CIA as much as he did his own ties to the FBI. Today, with the declassification process of the ARRB, these are simply undeniable. And Shaw’s misrepresentation, as quoted above to James Kirkwood, is simply part of the deception set forth by himself, his lawyers, and compromised journalists like Phelan and Aynseworth. This deception can begin to be exposed just by looking at who Shaw worked for and with: the International Trade Mart and its sister organization, International House. As the author has shown in this book, one of Kennedy’s largest splits with the Eastern Establishment was that he was a proponent of Third World nationalism. Shaw’s two agencies were early advocates for what we term today as globalism, or the One World free trade doctrine. That is, the idea that American companies can take advantage of “free trade” in order to develop business connections overseas that allow them to exploit foreign workers at low prices, and then bring the profits back to corporate headquarters.