On September 1, 1983, the New York Times, and most other newspapers around the world, displayed the headline “Korean Jetliner With 269 Aboard Missing Near Soviet Pacific Island.” Meanwhile, the same front-page article reported: “Korean Foreign Ministry officials cited the United States Central Intelligence Agency as their source for the report that the plane had been forced down on Sakhalin.” The Times continued “All 240 passengers and 29 crew members were believed to be safe.”
That front-page story related that, based upon this same CIA message that had been sent to Korea and Japan, an official of the U.S. Department of State had phoned the family of Georgia representative Larry P. McDonald, a passenger on that flight, late in the evening of August 31, 1983. The purpose of that call was to inform them that the plane, its passengers, and crew were safe on the ground at Sakhalin Island. This, of course, was untrue. The CIA message had been fabricated for other purposes, among them to cause the Japanese to recall the Air-Sea Rescue Fleet.
It is difficult to believe that officials of the Department of State would have made that humanitarian call if they did not believe in the validity of the CIA message. Why did the CIA send such a message?
The airliner never landed on Sakhalin Island, the passengers and crew have never been found and the aircraft had disappeared.
That issue of the New York Times had been printed late in the evening of August 31, 1983, and was accurate at that time. But a series of stunning events followed.
At ten A.M., September 1, 1983, in Washington, Secretary of State George Shultz appeared on nationwide TV to announce the Soviet Union had shot down that Korean airliner in cold blood. The plane and its occupants had vanished. Immediately out of Washington arose the ogre of the Evil Empire. The Cold War had reached its zenith. Within days, the largest Defense Department budget ever passed in peacetime whizzed through Congress and was eagerly signed by President Reagan. Thus began the most costly peacetime decade in the history of civilization.
So why was that most timely CIA message reported by the New York Times? During the evening of August 31, all that the Times knew was that the CIA message had been sent, what it said, and that the news media around the world knew about it. The same issue of the Times also reported that the plane had been on Japanese radar for six minutes before it disappeared. That positive radar trail led to a crash site southeast of Hokkaido, far from Sakhalin. The Japanese had sent twelve air-sea rescue vessels toward that location. While they were at sea, the CIA message arrived in Seoul and Tokyo and at the Department of State. As was predictable, as soon as the Japanese received that message, they recalled their rescue boats, and the chance to locate the wreckage, save survivors, and confirm its identity was lost.
With that essential diversion safely accomplished the government could announce any scenario it wanted for the loss of the Korean airliner and get away with it. No one was ever going to be able to locate the wreckage of the plane deep in the Kurile Trench of the Pacific Ocean.
This was the scene during the first weeks of September 1983. In the midst of this international uproar we discover the steady hand of the unruffled High Cabal. The world’s largest trade fair had been scheduled by US-TEC to be held in Moscow on October 17—25, 1983. This was the month after the mysterious loss of the Korean airliner, yet representatives of 109 of the largest American companies traveled to Moscow, home of the Evil Empire, to carry out their business as usual at the “Agribusiness USA” trade show.
As we look back at this trade show, at the Evil Empire days and at the existence of this most important US-TEC organization, we discover more elements of that power elite structure that we have been describing. Furthermore, this record confirms that what Roy Ash said during the 1971 conference about “East and West would meet some place toward the middle about 1990” was not a prediction but a master plan.
Such plans are comparable to the work of Allen Dulles as the OSS chief in Geneva during World War II with selected Germans, and to the activities of T. V Soong in China during the same period. These are examples of how these higher echelons are above warfare, both hot and cold, as they continue their own games on a more exalted level on both sides at the same time.
An item in a US-TEC journal of 1977 was written by David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. He has been one of the world’s most important international bankers as head of one of its most important banks. His letter made reference to “an unbroken relationship with Russian financial institutions that straddles well over fifty years.”
Think back fifty years, from 1977 to 1927, and recall all of the enormous ideological, military, economic, and political problems that existed between the East and the West. Yet Rockefeller and Chase Manhattan took pride in the fact that they had been in Moscow during that time doing business in the center of the maelstrom. I have mentioned earlier the statement of the American charge in the Saigon embassy to the effect “that in case of bankruptcy [of the country] which we now confront, bankers have [the] right to organize a receivership.”
That is an international banker’s way of putting it. He expected, as only natural, that bankers would arrange the policy for what took place in Vietnam, and they have done just that.
All of these things come together. While the President of the United States harangued the world about the Evil Empire, his good friends, our senior businessmen, were packing their briefcases for another big meeting for business as usual in Moscow. Rockefeller had reminded everyone that he and his banking interests had been working there since 1927, and then as a small aside, related in that same letter in the US-TEC journal how “the seventh session of the Dartmouth Conference in Hanover in 1972 had led to the idea of forming a joint high-level Trade and Economic Council.”
With these examples I believe we have taken a good look at the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and the atmosphere in which such planning took place. You can easily visualize a businessman’s club in downtown Washington, New York, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, or Toronto. A group of senior members have gathered after lunch for a third martini. One of them mentions that a director of his company had called that morning to say that Kennedy’s denial of the TFX procurement contract to the Boeing Company had hit his company, a major subcontractor, very hard. This struck a nerve of one of the other members, who reported that Roz Gilpatric, who works with that “goddamn” McNamara, had been telling the bankers things were going to change. They could no longer count on the practices that had feathered their nests for so many years.
Another member took a quick sip of his martini and said, “I had a call from one of our bankers in the City early this morning. He wanted to know how we were doing and was it true that Kennedy was going to take all Americans out of Vietnam. By God, we can’t have that. We’ve just sold McNamara on that electronic battlefield. It will be worth about one and one-half billion to us. That’ll go down the drain.”
An elderly member, who used to visit the Dulles family in their summer home on Henderson Bay, leaned over toward the center of that small group and almost in a whisper said that his boys had just completed a study of how many helicopters were going to be needed for a ten-year war in Vietnam. The total was in the thousands, and the cost ran into the billions of dollars. Then he looked around the group of old cronies and snarled, “That goddamn Kennedy bastard has been working all summer with some of Old Joe’s Irish Mafia and his favorite generals and they are planning every which way to get us out of Vietnam. This can’t happen. He’s got to go. Right now he’s a sure thing for reelection and then there is Bobby and after him Teddy. I tell you that Kennedy has got to go.”
On the perimeter of that intense group sat a younger man quietly attentive to every word and watching every move. Just then, as the speaker finished his words, he saw a wink in the eye of a senior member. He rose quietly and walked to a position behind his chair. That member turned and whispered a few words. They were all that he needed to hear, “In the fall, somewhere in the south. Find a way to get as many key peop
le out of the city as possible. It’s all up to you.”
There was the decision. It had been the result of a consensus of not that one meeting, but of many. This meeting was the climax. This man was a skilled professional. He know the codes, how to use them and who to call. He knew exactly how to set the train of events into operation. He knew then that his biggest job would be to put a small cadre of the best men in the world at work right away on the cover story and on the deception plan.
He would handle the call to the agent for the “mechanics” who operated from a foreign country, and he would begin the moves that would result in the ever-normal selection of the site. He would have to speak to no more than three others, and they would not know him except by an exquisite code. It was his job to handle the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Pentagon. As required, he would be assisted at every step by the CIA. He would not report back to the “members.” Should there be a change of plan, they could reach him. From that day until November 22, 1963, the plan ran smoothly. The game plan of the High Cabal never fails, because they are at the top. Even if it should fail, no one would ever be able to prosecute them or their allies.
I said in the beginning that this was not intended to be simply a history. It is an analysis of the secret history of the United States since World War II.
More importantly, I emphasized that I believe that God does not throw the dice. The affairs of man and of nature are not determined at random or by mere chance. You have had the opportunity to travel back through those years with me and will recall that 1963 marked a major turning point in this century because the power elite moved that year to remove John F. Kennedy from the White House and to take the course of the Ship of State into their own hands.
Furthermore, the year 1972 stands out as another one of those signal turning points. Recall the Nixon-era White House “Conference on the Industrial World Ahead” and the fact that those highly selected attendees had devoted three days to a discussion of the subject, “A Look at Business in 1990.” That was February 1972, and as those sessions came to a close, Roy Ash, president of Litton Industries made his momentous closing statement that described events that would occur twenty and thirty years hence.
His words have now become fact and cannot be changed. This is the way of the world as it approaches the year 2000. There are major plans, as David Rockerfeller notes, and when a Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the destruction of a Korean airliner are necessary, they will be caused to happen. They will not be left to chance or the bad aim of a lone gunman in a sixth-floor window in Dallas. This is the way things are. Successful men plan ahead. Brave men, such as Oliver Stone, make films such as JFK. The rest of us are the victims or the beneficiaries of all the rest.
AFTERWORD
Stone’s JFK and the Conspiracy
FEW MOTION PICTURES of the past several decades have had the impact upon the general public as did Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The fact of the existence of a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States is shocking; yet many Americans try to brush it aside.
Although the great majority of Americans do not believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald by himself killed Kennedy, they find it all but impossible to believe the alternative. This homespun psychological safety net was shattered by Stone’s film. From the time they saw that film they have been unable to accept the creative falseness of the cover story. That film made conspiracy the only true conclusion.
Of particular note was the film’s effect upon the professional community of assassination buffs. To begin with, these writers and researchers are not a homogeneous society. There are some who support the government line, with its Warren Commission, magic bullet, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and all the rest of that massive, highly contrived fiction. Then there are the dedicated researchers who know that the Warren Commission Report was a smoke screen and that all of its mythology is a masterful cover story designed and nourished at the highest level by those who have spent a lifetime concealing the facts of the case. It was this latter group of buffs who found encouragement in Stone’s masterful film, as well as renewed strength in its message.
To these more or less well organized groupings, we must add the new and rapidly growing hordes of assassination investigators who encountered reality and encouragement in the film and who have become interested in its challenging message. For them Stone’s film presented a comprehensive coverage of the assassination and all of its ramifications, public and private, that provided everyone with material they may not have heard before.
And, then there are the pure professionals. Many of the more prominent of this group viciously attacked Oliver Stone and his movie. Now why would they, of all people, so violently denigrate the film that supported the fact of the conspiracy? Don’t they see the truth? Have they made public their own personal beliefs? Quite frankly, I doubt it. These hard-liners comprise the most ardent sector of the assassination buff mélange because they are professional writers and journalists who work for some of the most important media outlets in the country.
One of them, Leslie Gelb, is the man Robert McNamara placed in charge of the task force that produced the “Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam,” aka the Pentagon Papers. His task force is the one that came up with the following “historical fact”:
22 Nov 1963
Lodge confers with the President.
Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.
Gelb had all but concealed Kennedy’s NSAM #263 in the Pentagon Papers, by dividing it into meaningless sections, and continued his assault on that Kennedy policy as he berated Stone for his film.
Another of these prominent writers was Tom Wicker of the New York Times. He also attacked Stone’s use of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy statement, NSAM #263, with the comment, “I know of no reputable historian who has documented Kennedy’s intentions.” NSAM #263 is the official and complete documentation of Kennedy’s intentions. It was derived from a series of White House conferences and from the McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report, and it stated the views of the President and of his closest advisers as is made clear in the U.S. government publication Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961—1963, vol. IV, “Vietnam: August-December 1963.” That source is reliable history Wicker’s December 22, 1991, Times article was a lengthy and unnecessarily demeaning diatribe against Stone and his movie.
So many of these professional writers attacked the film, even well before it was on the screens of the nation, that Oliver Stone took the unusual step of publishing The Book of the Film in 1992. In this important work, Stone does what few others have done. He presents the full JFK debate by publishing the demeaning articles of his detractors and the responses of his supporters side by side in the text. This evenhanded approach is rare in such public debates.
For the record, these reactions and commentaries came from the following people (number of articles in parentheses):
David Ansen, (2); Robert Sam Anson, (1); David W. Belin, (3); Jimmy Breslin, (1); Joseph A. Califano, Jr., (1); Alexander Cockburn, (4); Alan M. Dershowitz, (1); Roger Ebert, (2); Gerald R. Ford, (1); Leslie H. Gelb, (1); Tom Hayden, (1); Robert Hennelly, (2); George Lardner, Jr. (4); Anthony Lewis, (1); Norman Mailer, (1); William Manchester, (1); Richard M. Mosk, (1); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, (1); John Newman, (1); Andrew O’Hehir, (1); L. Fletcher Prouty, (2); Ron Rosenbaum, (1); Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., (1); Katherine Seelye, (1); Brent Staples, (1); Oliver Stone, (12); Garry Trudeau, (1); and Tom Wicker, (1); and others.
This latter group, among them Robert Sam Anson, Leslie Gelb, George Lardner, Anthony Lewis, William Manchester, Arthur Schlesinger, and Tom Wicker came out of nowhere to attack Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison and myself for what the movie offered the public: much of their work was done before the film had been produced and shown to the public. This is a rare form of movie review
and was almost universally adversarial, even though, in most cases, they, the writers, were in error and not the film itself. What is it that bonds these major writers together? The truth?
What is most interesting about this latter group of professional writers, most of whom work for major media bosses, is that they all wrote negatively about the film and all wrote in support of the anticonspiracy, lone-gunman, Warren Commission theory. They are a highly motived clan . . . for money.
Here is where this remarkable film of Stone’s hits the hardest among all of these “experts.” It strengthens the arguments of those who believe that there was a massive conspiracy, and it does battle, as did David versus Goliath, against the power of the throne. To all of this, the film—for both sides—enlivened the game and created new flocks of believers.
One of the film’s major achievements was that it aroused the United States Congress to “mandate a comprehensive review of all federal government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including the records of the Warren Commission, the House Assassinations Committee, the Church Committee, and all Executive branch agencies, including the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.” This was well intentioned; but in reality it is a sham. The answers to the source of the decision to murder John F. Kennedy are not in government files.
This action alone aroused the profession of the assassination buff to its highest level, as evidenced by the activities of the Coalition On Political Assassinations and others like it.
These achievements serve to make the film exceptional; but this was not the end. It was the goal of Oliver Stone and of those of us who worked with him that the truth about the murder of John F. Kennedy be brought to as many viewers as possible, not only in the United States of America but also around the world. This has been done, and the impact upon the ordinary layman who has not made a special study of this subject has, in many instances, been far greater, proportionately, than upon the professionals.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 49