Conversations With the Crow

by Gregory Douglas

  GD: You told them the truth?

  RTC: Oh, be a realist here. Of course not. We lie to Congress and the White House every day. We know so much about all of them, just like old Hoover did, that they shut up and we have our people at the New York Times write things up the way we wish. And then the public goes off and watches a football game and opens another beer.

  GD: Could any of this ever get out?

  RTC: No. Say some gung ho reporter wants to do a story on how we killed Diem or something else like that. We would hear about it at once because we have our people in all the major papers and television offices so we would get the word right away. The usual drill is to call up the editor and have a talk with him and the reporter gets assigned to inspect whale shit somewhere.

  GD: And if he gets too curious or won’t give up?

  RTC: There’s always the heart attack or the road accident.

  GD: Of falling out of the window.

  RTC: Not much of that anymore. As you say, too messy.

  GD: Heini used to off them and then turn up the heat in their house until they got really ripe.

  RTC: Not personally?

  GD: No, he used Arno to off people. Arno is a real jewel. He’s a Lutheran minister at the present time but Heini told me once that Arno loved the knife and some of his victims looked like something Picasso would have painted

  RTC: (Laughter) Yes, well, we had some of those too.

  GD: I recall the Diem business. That was the turning point over there. The hawks won out.

  RTC: What a mess that was, Gregory. Now mind you, I felt that Diem just would not listen to us and was causing such bad publicity here by his undemocratic behavior that I really don’t think we had much of a choice. Kennedy was a twit and proved to be so unreliable in the business that we eventually decided he had to go too. Johnson would do what he was told but Kennedy was as independent as a hog on ice so onto the face of the fifty cent piece and into the hearts of all Americans. You won’t find Johnson on a coin but he put plenty of them into his pocket. Give me the crook over the idealist any time.

  GD: I agree. Anyway, I am writing the art business up for the new book. They never took anything really big but all the small stuff fell through the cracks. Müller used to call it degenerate filth and that Hitler was right about it but I notice he never burnt any of the Klees or Picassos. You can get money for all of that and I find that money has such a soothing effect, Robert.

  RTC: Yes, I believe it does. It is the root of all evil, after all.

  GD: No, the actual Biblical quotation is that the love of money is the root of all evil.

  RTC: One or the other.

  (Concluded at 11:55 AM CST)

  Conversation No. 51

  Date: Saturday, November 30, 1996

  Commenced: 11:30 AM CST

  Concluded: 11; 45 AM CST

  RTC: I was reading over your analysis of the present political and business status and I thought it was interesting. At least I thought your final conclusions were not at all outrageous. But I should caution you against sending such things to Kimmel or Bill. Kimmel would be outraged and Bill will pass this on to Langley because that’s what he does.

  GD: None of that surprises me, Robert. I was just stating the obvious. At least it is obvious to me. I suppose if you read history, everything is so compressed and obvious but if you are living it, the end is not always clear. Distance is always important in making conclusions. People don’t like to do this because they want this or that kind of ending so they twist and distort the obvious to suit themselves. When I was writing such reports in the Army, I learned very quickly on not to express attitudes that were opposite of my superiors, no matter how obvious they might be.

  RTC: A manifestation of early survival instinct, Gregory.

  GD: Yes, why not? No one cares about inconvenient truths but they dearly love convenient lies. But the truth is still there, isn’t it?

  RTC: Yes, but we never see it until it’s too late.

  GD: The French Revolution was entirely predictable but only if you could stand back from it. Not a revolt of the masses but initially a perfectly reasonable desire for a burgeoning middle business class to gain parity with the great triumvirate: The Monarchy, the Nobility and the Church. Of course the latter trio did not want to share power and the ensuing struggle spilled over and the mob got it. Reasonable beginnings but terrible endings.

  RTC: But could have anyone foreseen the end?

  GD: Good point. A few but not the ones that mattered. A Polish writer, Bloch, very accurately foresaw the deadly trench warfare of the First World War but at the time he wrote, the great bulk of military theorists had more conventional views so no one heard him. Afterwards, of course, he became famous. At the time, not. The same with my views.

  RTC: I must confess, Gregory, that I am a little conventional and predictions of social upheaval, anarchy and economic collapse are a bit alien to me.

  GD: Yet you were accustomed to predict such things in other governments you wanted to either replace or destroy. Correct?

  RTC: Well, we fomented more than one revolution and collapsed more than one economy but we didn’t predict these things, Gregory, we made them happen. You don’t plan to make a revolution or collapse our economy.

  GD: No, I don’t. But if you see a man building a house on the beach, doesn’t it occur to him that a good storm might easily topple it? After all, Robert, the Bible says this but, of course, it’s only common sense. No empire, and we have an empire now, ever lasted forever. Rome did not and England did not. They rise and they fall. It will be the same with us. After two major wars, we rule. Of course we contested with Russia but since we were better grounded economically, we survived. They may yet come back but it’s not for certain. I see China as our immediate rival but they have uncontrolled capitalism under the control of an aging dictatorship and I would predict that they will shoot up economically and this boom will frighten the leaders. Money creates the desire for power and an empowered mass is very dangerous. And we learned after 1929 that if our marketplace had no controls, it would indulge in peak or collapse on a regular and very destructive basis. Remove these controls would be like blowing up a dam and flooding all the countryside below it. Money for a few and disaster for the rest. Clinton has not encouraged this decontrol but God help us if the right wing ever gets into power. We have all kinds of fiscal dinosaurs waiting in the wings, mating with the lunatics of the religious right and they may yet have their day. Unfettered markets and Jesus in every home, no stores open on Sunday and the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Oh, and not to mention a stake through the heart of the evil Darwin. Nuts. The world is only 6,000 years old and the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s mythical flood. Action and reaction. If that dismal project comes to pass, there will be a reaction, believe me.

  RTC: But your predictions of revolution?

  GD: People get bored sometimes, Robert, get tired of taxes and dream of some kind of social paradise where everyone is equal. Who knows what monsters are waiting to be born? But the economy is based on credit and like a Ponzi scheme, credit has its limits. You can only use it so far and no further and if we go too far with our credit cards and loans, the end can be easily seen as the python said as he wrapped himself around the tree.

  RTC: Well, it won’t happen during the rest of my lifetime, Gregory. Perhaps in yours.

  GD: Probably. We need a Bismarck now but we won’t get him. Democracy is its own worst enemy, Robert. Greed, lack of coordination, corruption, and God alone knows what else. And our national education system is a horror. We are cranking out generations of the illiterate and ill-informed and these know-nothings will eventually get into power. Then we need all the help God can give us. Well, we always get what we pay for, don’t we? Political correctness is idiotic. We should teach our children to question, to evaluate and to analyze, not bleat in their pens like placid sheep. It’s like trying to stab someone with a pound of butter.

  RTC: (Laughter)
Well, a fat and comfortable public….

  GD: Yes, a fat public. Well, it’s only a matter of conjecture, isn’t it? What is it the Bible says? While we are in the light, let us walk in the light for the darkness cometh. Something like that. Enough realistic pessimism for the day, Robert. I recall telling Kimmel, when I found out he taught Sunday school, that he ought to let his little charges read the Song of Solomon and he had a fit. But, I told him, it’s in the Bible so it can’t be wrong. He didn’t see it that way. One dimensional. Never ask questions because you might not like the answers. The truth will not make you free but cause spastic colon. Anyway, I like to speculate, Robert, that’s all. If a dam is leaking, is it wrong to predict a collapse?

  RTC: The real estate people down below it would not approve of such sentiments.

  GD: No, but they probably live on higher ground.

  (Concluded at 11:45 CST)

  Conversation No. 52

  Date: Monday, December 2, 1996

  Commenced: 9:45 AM CST

  Concluded: 10:21 AM CST

  GD: Good morning, Robert. Well, we should be having a nice lunch in a week from today.

  RTC: I’m very eager to meet you, Gregory. The telephone is fine, but nothing like a face-to-face to really establish a good relationship.

  GD: I agree. As I understand it, you will ship your annotated copies of the complete Warren Report to my hotel and you will bring with you the material on ZIPPER. And pass it to me away from the others. Right?

  RTC: That’s the drill now, Gregory. I have the books boxed and you may have to take them with you as shipped baggage. A bit much to stick into the overhead bins.

  GD: Understood. But the rest of it?

  RTC: No, that you can keep under your seat or up above. No problem with that.

  GD: I am looking forward to all of this, Robert, but a little concerned about your friends. Kimmel I can do without, if you take my meaning.

  RTC: Gregory, I will be there and he won’t stray off the path.

  GD: That’s a comfort. Dueling with the blind is not entertaining. You know, I have been doing my homework on the ZIPPER themes and if you have the time, I have a number of questions.

  RTC: Go ahead.

  GD: Well, theories abound on this. One says this and another says that. You have given me your background, pretty much, and I am trying to pick the wheat from the chaff as they say. Why use Oswald?

  RTC: Obvious, Gregory. We wanted a war with Soviet Russia, that’s why we used Oswald. Here he is, a professed Marxist and defector to the Soviet Union, shooting the president. We had to establish a trail to the KGB so we got, or rather Jim Angleton got, our station chief in Mexico City, Win Scott, to work up a scenario placing Oswald in that city and visiting the Soviet and Cuban embassies. They prepared a paper showing Oswald was in connection with Comrade V.V. Kostikov, head of the 13th section of the KGB…assassinations…and so on. They fucked the whole thing up so badly that we had to drop it. Fake pictures of someone not even remotely resembling Oswald, fake stories and they were working on a fake letter from Oswald to Kostikov in which he told him he was going to become a great hero by killing Kennedy. The motives? Kennedy’s humiliation of the Russians over the Cuban missile business. Howard Hunt was involved with this and he is a very vain and stupid person. He’s a little like Bill Corson, Gregory, but you mustn’t repeat any of this. Very self-important person, with delusions.

  GD: Won’t say a word.

  RTC: I knew you wouldn’t. Bill can fool the Trentos, who are as gullible as he is phony and they both deserve each other, believe me. No, they ruined the Russian plan at the beginning. You see, after Kennedy was dead, our agency would reveal to all the world that the Russians had plotted this and then Johnson would order a surprise nuclear attack on them. Of course, Johnson was a gutless wonder, going this way and going that, so unless we got The New York Times and other papers we influenced, to start a firestorm of anger in Americans, that one was as dead as the dodo. We had it all planned out, too. Later, they got Oswald’s bitch of a wife being deposed and two phony Russian translators who would claim that she had seen the very rifle in Russia. Of course that was a .22 target rifle and the one we planted was the cheap wop piece with a cheaper scope, so that one went out.

  GD: Posner claims that Marina’s uncle was only a deputy sheriff in Russia. He said uncle had been a local bigwig in the MVD which was “just like the sheriff’s office.” Even I know better than that. In fact, as you know, Robert, the MVD was the ministry that ran the KGB. Did Posner expect anyone to believe that silly shit?

  RTC: I know what you mean, but of course he did. Another self-important hebe with the brains of a cockroach but a willing tool, Gregory, You don’t have to love them to use them after all.

  GD: So the war fell through. Did Johnson get wet pants?

  RTC: No, it never went that far. Still, it was a distraction, but I always wince when I read the breathless expose in the Warren sludge.

  GD: And there are so many theories.

  RTC: Tell me about it, Gregory. Some we cooked up but mostly they are the work of the tiny of brain and the huge of ego. Oh yes, it was the mob, out to get Kennedy because of his brother’s attacks on them ordered by Joe, the ex-bootlegger. Listen, I know people in the Chicago mob and as much as they detested Kennedy, and they did get him elected by voting every cemetery early and often, they are far too smart to even try to kill a sitting president. We had the cooperation of the leadership of the FBI, who would have the lead in the investigation, but the mob would not and if that ever got out, Hoover would have to clean their respective clocks for them. No, in spite of their hatred of him, they would never have done such a thing.

  GD: And the Cuban anti-Castro people…

  RTC: Yes, emotional enough and after they felt Kennedy had deserted them during the Bay of Pigs disaster, they had plenty of motive, but no opportunity and emotional as they are, they would boast and Hoover’s men would have nailed them.

  GD: And Lansky and the mob people who wanted to get back into the gambling business in Cuba?

  RTC: The same. Meyer Lansky was a very smart man and the same I said about the Chicago mob would hold true for him and his boys. They wished Kennedy dead, but let someone else do it.

  GD: Yes, and Castro.

  RTC: Castro is not a stupid man and even though it leaked out, on purpose, of course, that we were trying to kill him, Castro did not have the connections to reverse the attacks on him. Like the mob and others, he was not sad to see Kennedy killed but had nothing to do with any real plotting. This sort of silly shit keeps the buffs all atwitter and with all of the books, seminars, tapes and so on, they keep anyone from digging too deeply into the realities of the dastardly deed. All the stories about mysterious tramps, men with umbrellas, men in the sewer, fake epileptics throwing convenient fits and so on are just smoke and mirrors. All the mob bosses, Cuban exiles, rich Texas oilmen, Richard Nixon and anyone else suggested either couldn’t or wouldn’t have tried to shoot Kennedy. You see, we had Hoover and the Johnson people in our camp. With these, we could shut off any inconvenient revelations at any time. And we have iron influence, let’s call it, with the major media, so no worry there. We have various retrospective television programs, usually somewhere around November 22 each year that rehash all the idiot stories and I watch them with great humor. Beats ‘I Love Lucy’ for real humor.

  GD: When you started this, was it solely to provide an excuse for nuking the Russians?

  RTC: No, that was a sort of afterthought, Gregory. Angleton hated the Russians and he did know that the Kennedy people were in touch with the KGB and Khrushchev people so he went from there. You might say that Jim was the sparkplug on that engine, right along. I wouldn’t pay any attention to the conspiracy books, Gregory. You know better than that, don’t you?

  GD: Yes, of course, but if I am going to write about it, I will have to know what others have said. And I can just hear the squealings if and when I do this.

  RTC: Oh ye
s, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned or a tin-horned academic one-upped.

  GD: That I agree with, but the concept of one man, Jim Angleton, having the power to start a nuclear war is horrifying to me and I assume it will be to others. This is a manifestation of far too much power concentrated in too few hands. What kind of oversight was there? How many wars and assassinations were caused by someone’s upset stomach or throbbing piles? I said this Kennedy business is a microcosm of ill-advised plots and I hope you aren’t upset with me when I tell you that I am very glad it never happened. You sent me the German intercepts of the Roosevelt and Churchill talks over their secret lines and that smacks of the same thing. Personal spite, vaunting ambition and tens of thousands or millions die. Not good, Robert, not good at all.

  RTC: If you ever walked in the corridors of power, Gregory, you would have a more realistic view. I don’t mind that you have occasional lapses into idealism, but please don’t let it cloud your judgment.

  GD: It’s a little like doing the breast stroke in a septic tank.

  (Concluded at 10:21 AM CST)

  Conversation No. 53

  Date: Thursday, December 5, 1996

  Commenced: 2:10 PM CST

  Concluded: 2:25 PM CST

  GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Still coping with the cold?

  RTC: The temperature or my nose?

  GD: Oh, both.

  RTC: I stay inside and take medicine. At my age, the cold goes away and so does the person. No, pretty much under control. How are you doing?

  GD: The diabetes is under control but my son is not. If he ever told me the truth, I would fall flat on the floor. He has the unfortunate habit of knocking his girlfriends up and then ditching them. Not only do I disapprove of such behavior but I am the one who has weeping and pregnant people on my front porch while he hides in the bathroom. I have other things I would rather do, I can assure you.