Liddy’s deposition in the Hunt suit exposed a death squad in the executive branch: “We had perhaps a dozen men who were willing to come on board in this connection. And Mr. Hunt, to impress upon me the high caliber of these individuals, stated that they had accounted among them for a substantial number of deaths [22], including two who had hanged someone from a beam in a garage.”10
Were these the same “high caliber individuals” who killed gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby and the author of an open letter to Lyndon Johnson that appeared in her syndicated column on December 21, 1964: “MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT JOHNSON; Please check with the State Department . . . the leaders of our Armed Forces or our chief scientists, to discover what, if anything, we are doing to explore the ramifications of [electromagnetic] thought control . . . could change the history of the world.”
Kilgallen, one of the very few reporters in the country to question the Warren Commission’s findings, told friends in the entertainment industry that she was going to “bust the Kennedy assassination wide open.” But she never had the opportunity. She abruptly died of acute barbiturate and alcohol poisoning—the New York medical examiner could not say whether Kilgallen died accidentally or was murdered—on November 8, 1965. Mary Branum, one of Kilgallen’s editors, received a telephone call several hours prior to the discovery of the body. The anonymous caller informed Branum that the columnist had been “murdered.”11
Indisputably, she had. This was the conclusion of a forensic chemist who reported to Dr. Charles Umberger at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office—and was told to keep the chemical analysis under wraps—in 1978. The chemist ran an analysis of the glass Kilgallen had been drinking from when she died, using forensic techniques that did not exist in 1965. The tests turned up traces of Nembutol on the glass . . . but Nembutol was not found in her blood. The blood analysis revealed a lethal cocktail of drugs, three from the fastest-acting groups of barbiturates: secobarbitol, amobarbital and phentobarbital.12 None of these drugs were detected on the glass.
The CIA had assembled a thick concordia of lethal methods. On April 2, 1979, the Washington Post reported that the Agency had experimented with exotic poisons that left the subject in a condition that would indicate natural causes to an unsuspecting coroner. The project began with an anonymous, undated memo on assassination by “natural causes.” “Knock off key people,” the heavily censored document specified, “how [to] knock off key guys . . . natural causes . . .”
And then there’s a declassified memo from a CIA consultant to an official of the agency discussing clandestine methods for killing us softly:
1. bodies left with no hope if the cause of death being determined by the most complete autopsy and chemical examinations.
2. bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate accidental death.
3. bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate suicidal death
4. bodies left with residue that simulate those caused by natural diseases.”13
Kilgallen was not the only whistle-blower dispatched in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. In January, 1968, Ramparts magazine reported on the death of Gerrett Underhill, a staffer at the Army’s Military Intelligence Service and advisor to the Agency: “Immediately after the [John Kennedy] assassination, a distraught Underhill told friends that a semi-autonomous CIA clique which had been profiting in narcotics and gun-running was implicated.” A few months later, “Underhill was found dead of a bullet wound in the head.”
Some of the same “high-caliber individuals” behind the murders of Kilgallen and Underhill may have turned up yet again in the shooting of George Wallace, the fiercely segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who vied with Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1972.
Wallace was campaigning at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, an appearance that drew a crowd of some 2,000 supporters. Two critical primaries were a couple of days off and the polls predicted that Wallace would take Michigan and Maryland by a landslide. If he survived the primaries, there was every chance that he could walk away with a sizable share of conservative votes that otherwise would have gone to Nixon. Wallace was therefore perceived as a threat. “Remember one thing,” Wallace exhorted all in his last campaign speech, “there’s not a dime’s difference between Nixon and McGovern, or Nixon and Humphrey. It’s up to you to send them a message in Washington, a message they won’t forget!”
But it was Wallace who received the message when, after stepping down from the podium, a short, plump, smiling 21-year old man in sunglasses pushed through the crowd. “Hey, George. Over here!” Governor Wallace turned toward the voice of a grinning Arthur Bremer, an unemployed busboy from Milwaukee, who produced a snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver and fired four rounds into the candidate from Alabama. Three of the governor’s entourage were also wounded before the gun was pried from Bremer’s hand.
Wallace survived but spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair, his legs paralyzed. He took potent anti -depressants for years after the shooting. Bremer was summarily convicted on four counts of assault with intent to kill and was led away to serve a 53-year prison sentence. It was quickly determined that he had acted alone. Subsequent events suggest otherwise:
A few minutes after the shots were fired, Nixon aide Charles Colson directed E. Howard Hunt to fly to Milwaukee, break into Bremer’s apartment and recover all “embarrassing evidence,” according to Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men. Gore Vidal, novelist and literary critic, opined that Hunt actually penned Bremer’s diaries. Wallace himself stated openly, “my attempted assassination was part of a conspiracy.”
All told, the four victims suffered 18 bullet wounds—but Bremer’s gun was a five-shooter. Arthur told his brother that he had accomplices who had paid him handsomely to shoot George Wallace. Bremer was out of work, so who picked up the tab for his repeated stays at the opulent Waldorf-Astoria in New York?
Milwaukee police files on Bremer portrayed him as a “subversive” with ties to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These were seized after the shooting and classified secret by the ATF acting “under the highest authority.”
Tim Heinan, a Marquette University student who moonlighted as an undercover agent for the Milwaukee Police Departments Special Assignment Squad, learned that Arthur Bremer had ties to a CIA operative named Dennis Salvatore Cossini, a federal “counterterrorist” who specialized in the infiltration and control of radical organizations including the local SDS chapter the gunman had joined. The agent was fired after Heinan confessed his links to Bremer. Cossini headed for Toronto and was next seen dead, slouching in a parked car with an overdose of heroin in his veins. One of the police investigating the death mused: “Somebody gave him a hot shot.”14
Heroin “overdoses” would recur in the coming hit parade, and the Nixonites would dance on the graves of the casualties in a covert war that ultimately altered the political course of the country.
NOTES
1. Heinrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism, Boston: South End Press, 1980, p. 164. Krüger and others have documented assassination and extermination campaigns in Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil—represented in Latin America by local death squads. “The White House appears to have sponsored a secret assassination program under cover of drug enforcement. It was continued by the DEA, which seemingly overlapped with the CIA in political rather than drug enforcement. Until 1974 the training of torturers [and] Latin American death squads came under the auspices of the CIA and USAID’s Office of Public Safety.”
2. Henry Kissinger, an old CIA hand, was untouched by the scandal. He lied repeatedly to Congress concerning illicit wiretaps placed by his office on the telephones of newspaper reporters and National Security Council staff, yet gracefully escaped leaving the administration in disgrace with Richard Nixon (See, John Marks, ‘The Case Against Kissinger,” Rolling Stone, no. 166, August 1, 1974, pp. 10–14). Throughout the Wate
rgate exposures, the media sustained a hands-off policy toward Kissinger, despite the revelation of his threat to “destroy” anyone who leaked information on the secret bombing of Cambodia. He was portrayed by the press not as a perjurer or wire-tapper, but at all times as an eminent statesman and moral bulwark against Communist tyranny.
3. Adrian Havill, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, New York: Birch Lane, 1993, p. 43
4. Krüger, p. 155 Senator Smathers was a controlling shareholder in the Major Realty Co. with Lansky subordinates Ben Siegelbaum and Max Orovitz.
5. Admiral Moorer, Woodward’s superior officer, was the stereotypical hard-bitten Pentagon hawk, a close friend to two of the most powerful Nixon appointees, Henry Kissinger and John Mitchell. He was an enigma to most employees at the Pentagon, best known for his temper tantrums. The Admiral, a ferocious anti-communist, pushed for open warfare with the Soviet Union and denounced as a “dirty bastard” and “unshaven peacenik” anyone who disagreed with him on this score or any other. He was the most feared official in Navy history Mark Perry, a Nation correspondent, found that Moorer’s “apparent lack of intelligence was his most important quality.” Thus the Nixon administration’s “secret plan to end the war” echoed Moorer’s sentiments. The “plan”: the US should step up the Vietnam war to pressure North Vietnam to concede. Nixon considered Moorer to be a model “loyalist,” a figure he could respect. The Admiral won a reappointment to chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1972, and continued to urge Nixon on to more devastating levels of military violence in Vietnam.
Under the watch of Admiral Thomas Moorer, Bob Woodward held authority over all communications to the Naval wing of the Pentagon, including the Secretary of the Navy’s office. The Admiral and former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird both stated on tape in 1989 interviews that Woodward’s duties included briefing Alex Haig at the Nixon White House. “Later,” Havill found, “Moorer attempted to back away from his recorded statement.”
The Admiral back-stroked, made “contradictory statements and [sounded] befuddled. Laird said he was ‘aware that Haig was being briefed by Woodward.’”
6. Edward J. Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America, Verso Books, 1990. First published in 1977 by Putnam.
7. Liddy Deposition, September 30, 1980. Hunt v. Weberman.
8. Hunt’s testimony, July 11, 1984. Hunt v. Spotlight, USDC Miami, Florida.
9. Howard Kohn, “The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA from World War II to Watergate,” Rolling Stone, May 20, 1976.
10. Hunt v. Weberman.
11. Lincoln Lawrence, Mind Control, Oswald & JFK: Were We Controlled? Kenn Thomas, ed., Kempton, IL.: Adventures Unlimited, 1997, pp. 162–63.
12. Lee Israel, Kilgallen, New York: Delacourte, 1979, p 441.
13. Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989, p. 557. A significant CIA leak confirms that the Agency has a keen interest in the lethal arts. Barry Rothman, a CIA assassination methods specialist, was interviewed by Playboy in January, 1977, and explained that he’d been enlisted by an unidentified spy with “an encyclopedic knowledge of guns, particularly Nazi weaponry” The recruiter was “a fascist, basically. He had a deep-seated, violent prejudice against anything that wasn’t Aryan.” Rothman was recruited in 1952 and graduated from the development of certain explosives to sophisticated biochemical warfare toxins. Not an agency to let talent go to waste, the CIA requested that he write a handbook on improvised weapons systems. He surveyed plant poisons. “Common things you can walk out and find right now in your backyard can, if treated properly, yield very deadly poisons that are not easily detectable. I think I included about forty plants and instructions on how to use them. The Agency was very pleased with it.” He moved on to biological agents that “can be made without too much grief. There are a fair number of those.” But there was “one peculiar thing” about the CIA assignment that disturbed him: “I was specifically instructed to orient [the handbook] toward domestically available materials and plants. Plants that grow in the U.S. and materials that are sold in the US. What that means, I don’t know, but it makes you wonder.”
14. Eric Norden, “The Shooting of George Wallace—Who Really Wanted Him Dead,” April 1984, pp. 2l ff.
CHAPTER ONE
A [Killing] Field Day for the Heat
TIME MACHINE: THE SWING KIDS
SWING KIDS INVOLVES A VERY SMALL FOOTNOTE TO A VERY LARGE HISTORICAL EVENT. IN NAZI GERMANY IN 1939, WE LEARN, WHILE HITLER WAS ROUNDING UP JEWS AND LAUNCHING WORLD WAR II, A SMALL GROUP OF KIDS WORE THEIR HAIR LONG AND DANCED TO THE SWING MUSIC OF SUCH BANNED MUSICIANS AS BENNY GOODMAN AND COUNT BASIE. OCCASIONALLY THEY GOT INTO FIGHTS WITH THE BROWNSHIRTS OF THE HITLER YOUTH BRIGADES.
IF THE SWING KIDS HAD EVOLVED INTO AN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT DEDICATED TO THE OVERTHROW OF NAZISM, WE MIGHT BE ONTO SOMETHING HERE. BUT NO. A TITLE CARD AT THE END OF THE FILM INFORMS US THAT SOME OF THE KIDS DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZIS, AND OTHERS WERE FORCED INTO THE GERMAN ARMY AND KILLED IN BATTLE . . . .1 ROGER EBERT, FILM REVIEW, MARCH 5, 1993
In 1967, an increasingly subversive form of music melded with politics in San Francisco. Still eclipsed by federal classification are the tactics of the intelligence sector in the destabilization of the lives of politically-tuned musicians on the fringe of the anti-war movement, as revealed before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a leaked intelligence memorandum submitted for the record on April 26, 1976:
Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death. [“Intelligence Activities and Rights of Americans,” Book. II, April 26 1976, Senate Committee with Respect to Intelligence Report]
For the first time since its creation, the warfare state meticulously erected by the Dulles brothers, J. Edgar Hoover, Dean Acheson, General Douglas MacArthur, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and an army of anti-Communist cold warriors was threatened by an increasingly militant segment of the population. “Fascists” and “Pigs” burned in effigy on campus from sea to psychedelic sea.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation rose to the challenge. Many rock musicians of the day struggled for a place in the American pantheon of stardom only to experience ferocious political repression. “That’s what killed us,” recollects Roger McGuinn, lead guitarist for the Byrds. “We got blackballed after drug allegations in ‘Eight Miles High,’” and Hoover’s spies never seemed far away. “They’d been chasing after us because somebody left some hashish in the airplane coming back from England. So they came down on us in a recording studio and said, ‘Whose is this?’ Of course nobody claimed it.” On one occasion, on tour in Iowa, David Crosby, lounging on the balcony of a Holiday Inn, whiled away the time before a concert firing .22 caliber blanks with a slingshot at a brick wall about thirty feet down. A group of “Rednecks” staying at the Motel played poker at the ground level, and riled by the tiny explosions, “started climbing over the balcony, fuming, ‘Guys died in Iwo Jima for punks like you,’” McGuinn recalls. “They were pounding on Crosby, when suddenly the FBI appeared. You know, ‘FBI, son. Break it up!’ They took these guys out and sent them off to their room. I don’t know if it was just a coincidence, but what were [the FBI] doing in the middle of Iowa? From then on I used to be looking over my shoulder, thinking the government was after me.” 2
The deaths of Byrds’ guitarists Clarence White in July, 1973, and Gram Parsons two months later, have long been grist for speculation. Clarence White and his brothers were packing the car after a show in Palmdale, California—the ho
me of Lockheed (military contractor and CIA haunt)—when Clarence was struck by a drunk driver named Yoko Ito. Alan Munde, a banjo player for the White Brothers when they toured England and Sweden in the spring of 1973, recalled in an interview taped at the Tennessee Banjo Institute that White then lived “near Lancaster, California, where his mother and dad had lived. . . . But that’s where Edwards Air Force Base was, and that’s where there was a lot of aircraft industry up there, and Roland [White’s dad] worked there . . . and then Clarence bought a house . . . and [performed] at a club, you know, that Clarence had played many many times before he was with the Byrds, to pick, and was just comin’ out loadin’ up the stuff, and had put the stuff in the trunk and walked around to get into the car, and the lady came by and side-swiped the car and hit him, and knocked him on down the road, and Roland had just walked around to the front . . . and he was—you know, they don’t know that, but he was hit also and knocked over the hood of the car, by the lady . . . and you know, Clarence was, you know, 150 feet down the road.”3
“The driver of the car, Yoko Ito,” according to a brief in Nashville Babylon (1988) by Randall Riese, “was booked on suspicion of felony drunk driving and manslaughter.” The glassy-eyed Ms. Ito was reportedly pregnant, yet had gone on an alcoholic binge, picked a fight in a bar and capped off the evening by running over a popular musician and dragging him down the road, completely unaware of the fatality. Clarence White came tumbling over the hood of her car, and yet she didn’t know that she’d even struck a pedestrian.
White’s close friend Gram Parsons, a sometime Byrd with his own band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, was laid low at the Joshua Tree Inn shortly after midnight, September 19, 1973 (one day before singer Jim Croce was killed in an airplane crash, resulting, according to press reports, in the filing of a $2.5-million lawsuit against the FAA by the singer’s widow—the tree that killed him was not indicated in the map of the airport runway prepared for Croce). “The circumstances of Gram’s death were shrouded in mystery,” writes Rolling Stone correspondent Ben Fong -Torres.4 Initially, the press reported that Parsons died of “heart failure,” like Jim Morrison before him, “due to natural causes.” His death certificate, however, signed by Dr. Irving Root, states that Parsons was claimed by drug toxicity over a period of weeks. Traces of cocaine and amphetamine were detected in his urine, and a high concentration of morphine. The latter was found in his bile and liver. Convincing on the surface—until it is considered that morphine toxicity requires that the drug be found in the blood. It wasn’t. Forensic tests did detect alcohol, but no drugs were found in his bloodstream, so the cause of death was not an overdose, as many have since claimed, and drug toxicity is still possible but highly unlikely.
The Covert War Against Rock Page 2