By Peter Dale Scott on
Oct 5, 2014
Peter Dale Scott is
considered the father of “Deep Politics”— the study of hidden permanent
institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends
the elected, appointed and career officials who come and go.
A
Professor of English at Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat, he is the
author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of our
country’s recent past, including Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK ; Drugs,
Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (War
and Peace Library); The
Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
and American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library). He is also a poet, whose long work, Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, was hailed as “the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time,” by Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.
and American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library). He is also a poet, whose long work, Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, was hailed as “the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time,” by Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.
- See more
at: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/10/05/the-hidden-government-group-linking-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-and-911/#sthash.UkoL7cu1.dpuf
Daniel Ellsberg said of his book Drugs, Oil and War, “It makes
most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current
interventions read like government propaganda written for children.”
What
follows is based on a recent Scott lecture entitled “The JFK
Assassination and Other Deep Events”, and will be expanded on further in his
next book, The American Deep State, due out in November.
***
For some time now, I have been
analyzing American history in the light of what I have called structural deep
events: events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in,
Iran-Contra, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are
mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have
political consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently
covered up by systematic falsifications in the mainstream media and internal
government records.
The more I study these deep events, the
more I see suggestive similarities between them, increasing the possibility
that they are not unrelated external intrusions on American history, but parts
of an endemic process, sharing to some degree or other a common source.
A deep state event seen from deep
space. New York City, 9/11. NASA
Photo
For example, one factor linking Dallas,
Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all four deep
events of personnel involved in America’s highest-level emergency planning,
known since the 1950s as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more
colloquially inside the Pentagon as “the Doomsday Project.” A few of these
actors may have been located at the top, as overseers of the secret COG system.
Others – including some I shall talk about today – were located further down in
its secret communications network.
I see this planning group as one among
many in what I have chosen to call the American deep state, along with agencies
like the CIA and NSA, the private groups like Booz Allen Hamilton to which more
than half of the US intelligence budget is outsourced, and finally the
powerful banks and corporations whose views are well represented in the CIA and
NSA. But if only one group among many, the COG planning group is also special,
because of its control of and access to a communications channel, not under
government control, that can reach deeply into the US social structure. I
discuss these matters at some length in my next book, The American Deep State, due out in November.
COG planning
was originally authorized by Truman and Eisenhower as planning for a response
to a crippling atomic attack that had decapitated government. In consequence
its planning group contemplated extreme measures, including what Alfonso Chardy
in 1987 called “suspension of the Constitution.” And yet in Iran-Contra
its asset of a secret communications network, developed for the catastrophe of
decapitation, was used instead to evade an official embargo on arms sales to
Iran that dated back to 1979. My question today is whether the network could
have been similarly misused in November 1963.
The Iran-contra misuse has been
well-documented. Oliver North supervised the sale of arms to Iran by using his
resources as the National Security Council action officer for COG planning,
under cover of a “National Program Office” that was overseen by then
Vice-President George H. W. Bush. North and his superiors could thus
use the COG emergency network, known then as Flashboard, for the arms sales to
Iran that had to be concealed from other parts of the Washington bureaucracy as
well as the public. So when North had to send emergency instructions for arms
delivery to the US Embassy in Lisbon, instructions that directly contravened
the embargo prohibiting such sales, he used the Flashboard network to avoid
alerting the Ambassador and other unwitting personnel.
The documented
example of Iran-Contra allows me to explain what I am saying about the users of
the COG network, and also what I am not saying. To begin with, I am not saying that a single “Secret Team”
has for decades been using the COG network to manipulate the US Government from
outside it. There is no evidence to suggest that North’s actions in Iran-Contra
were known to any of his superiors other than CIA chief William Casey and
probably George Bush. The point is that a very small group had access to a
high-level secret network outside government review, in order to implement a
program in opposition to government policy. They succumbed to the temptation to
use this secure network that had been designed for other purposes. I have
argued elsewhere that this secure network was used again on 9/11, to implement
key orders for which the 9/11 Commission could find no records. Whether it was
also used for illicit purposes is not known.
It is certain that the COG emergency
network program survived North’s demise, and continued to be secretly developed
for decades, at a cost of billions, and overseen by a team including Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It is relevant that the two men’s presence on the
committee spanned three administrations – those of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton
— even though at one point under Clinton neither man held a position inside the
U.S. government. Such continuity was essential for a group so secret that few
records existed of its activities. And on 9/11 COG plans were officially
implemented for the first time, by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, the two men who had planned them for so many years.
Whether or not they knew about
Iran-Contra, Cheney and Rumsfeld were on the COG planning committee at the time
of Iran-Contra. There is no such obvious link between COG planning and
Watergate, but the involvement of COG personnel in Watergate is nonetheless
striking. James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, was a member of a small
Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency
Preparedness (OEP) that was assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to
develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in
time of war.” His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program
(WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing
censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including
government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security
risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’” In addition, John Dean,
perhaps the central Watergate figure, had overseen secret COG activities when
serving as the associate deputy attorney general.
In the case of
the JFK assassination, I wish to focus on two men who functioned as part of the
communications network of the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP), the agency
renamed in 1968 as the Office of Emergency Preparedness (to which McCord was
attached), and renamed again in 1982 as the National Program Office (for which
Oliver North was the action officer).
These two men (there are others) are
Winston Lawson, the Secret Service advance man who from the lead car of the
motorcade was in charge of the Secret Service radio channels operating in the
motorcade; and Jack Crichton, the army intelligence reserve officer who with
Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin selected the Russian interpreter for
Marina Oswald’s first (and falsified) FBI interview.
Lawson has drawn the critical attention
of JFK researchers, both for dubious actions he took before and during the
assassination, and also for false statements he made after it (some of them
under oath). For example, Lawson reported after the assassination that
motorcycles were deployed on “the right and left flanks of the President’s car”
(17 WH 605). On the morning of November 22, however, the orders had been
changed (3 WH 244), so that the motorcycles rode instead, as Lawson himself
testified to the Warren Commission, “just back of the President’s car” (4 WH
338; cf. 21 WH 768-70). Captain Lawrence of the Dallas Police testified that
that the proposed side escorts were redeployed to the rear on Lawson’s own
instructions (7 WH 580-81; cf. 18 WH 809, 21 WH 571). This would appear to have
left the President more vulnerable to a possible crossfire.
Early on November 22, at Love Field,
Lawson installed, in what would become the lead car, the base radio whose
frequencies were used by all Secret Service agents on the motorcade. This radio
channel, operated by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), was used for
some key decisions before and after the assassination, yet its records, unlike
those of the Dallas Police Department (DPD) Channels One and Two, were never
made available to the Warren Commission, or any subsequent investigation. The tape
was not withheld because it was irrelevant; on the contrary, it contained very
significant information.
The WHCA
actually reports to this day on its website that the agency was “a key player
in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.” However it is not
clear for whom this documentation was conducted, or why it was not made
available to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). It
should have been.
For one thing, the WHCA tape, as
Vincent Palamara has written, contains the “key” to the unresolved mystery of
who, after the shooting, redirected the motorcade to Parkland hospital. The
significance of this apparently straightforward command, about which there was
much conflicting testimony, is heightened when we read repeated orders on the
Dallas Police radio transcript to “cut all traffic for the ambulance going to
Parkland code 3” (17 WH 395) – the ambulance in question having nothing to do
with the president (whose shooting had not yet been announced on the DPD
radio). In fact the ambulance had been dispatched about ten minutes before the
assassination to pick someone from in front of the Texas School Book Depository
(TSBD), who was wrongly suspected of having suffered an epileptic seizure.
Lawson later reported to the Secret
Service that he heard on his radio “that we should proceed to the nearest
hospital.” He wrote also that he “requested Chief Curry to have the hospital
contacted,” and then that “Our Lead Car assisted the motorcycles in escorting
the President’s vehicle to Parkland Hospital” (17 WH 632), cf. 21 WH 580). In
other words, after hearing something on the WHCA radio, Lawson helped ensure
that the President’s limousine would follow the route already set up by the
motorcycles for the epileptic. (In his very detailed Warren Commission testimony,
Lawson said nothing about the route having already been cleared. On the
contrary he testified that “we had to do some stopping of cars and holding our
hands out the windows and blowing the sirens and horns to get through” (4 WH
354).
The WHCA radio channel used by Lawson
and others communicated almost directly to the WHCA base at Mount Weather in
Virginia, the base facility of the COG network. From there, Secret Service
communications were relayed to the White House, via the
batteries of communications equipment
connecting Mount Weather with the White House and “Raven Rock” — the
underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington — as well as with almost
every US military unit stationed around the globe.
Jack Crichton, head of the 488th
Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was also part of this Mount Weather
COG network. This was in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil
Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ
Baker reports, “Because it was intended for ‘continuity of government’
operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with
communications equipment.” In retrospect the Civil Defense Program is
remembered derisively, for having advised schoolchildren, in the event of an atomic
attack, to hide their heads under their desks.But in 1963 civil defense was one
of the urgent responsibilities assigned to the Office of Emergency Planning,
which is why Crichton, as much as Secret Service agent Lawson, could be in
direct touch with the OEP’s emergency communications network at Mount Weather.
Jack Crichton
is of interest because he, along with DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin of the
488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit, was responsible for choosing a
Russian interpreter for Marina Oswald from the right-wing Russian community.
This man was Ilya Mamantov, who translated for Marina Oswald at her first DPD
interview on November 22. What she allegedly said in Russian at this interview
was later used to bolster what I have called the “phase one” story, still
promoted from some CIA sources, that Russia and/or Cuba were behind the
assassination.
As summarized by the FBI, Mamantov’s
account of Marina’s Russian testimony was as follows:
MARINA OSWALD advised that LEE HARVEY
OSWALD owned a rifle which he used in Russia about two years ago. She observed
what she presumed to be the same rifle in a blanket in the garage at [Ruth
Paine’s residence]…. MARINA OSWALD stated that on November 22, she had been
shown a rifle in the Dallas Police Department…. She stated that it was a dark
color like the one that she had seen, but she did not recall the sight.
These specific details – that Marina
said she had seen a rifle that was dark and scopeless – were confirmed in an
affidavit (signed by Marina and Mamantov, 24 WH 219) that was taken by DPD
officer B.L. Senkel (24 WH 249). They were confirmed again by Ruth Paine, who
witnessed the Mamantov interview, (3 WH 82). They were confirmed again the next
night in an interview of Marina by the Secret Service, translated by Mamantov’s
close friend Peter Gregory. But a Secret Service transcript of the interview
reveals that the source of these details was Gregory, not Marina:
(Q) This gun, was it a rifle or a
pistol or just what kind of a gun? Can she answer that?
(A) It was a gun
Mr. Gregory asked: Can you describe it?
NOTE: Subject said: I cannot describe
it because a rifle to me like all rifles.
Gregory translation: She said she
cannot describe it. It was sort of a dark
rifle just like any other common rifle…
Subject in Russian: It was a hump (or
elevation) but I never saw through the scope….
Gregory translation: She says there was
an elevation on the rifle but there was
no scope – no telescope.
We have to conclude not just that
Gregory had falsified Marina’s testimony (“a rifle to me like all rifles”); but
so probably had his friend Mamantov, who later testified no less than seven
times to the Warren Commission that Marina had used the word “dark” to describe
the gun. There were others in Dallas who claimed that Oswald’s gun indeed had
been scopeless, until Oswald had a scope installed on it by Dallas gunsmith
Dial Ryder. The Warren Report elaborately refuted this corroborated claim, and
concluded that “the authenticity of the repair tag” used to support it was
“subject to grave doubts.” (WR 317).
We can see here, what the Warren
Commission did not wish to see, signs of a conspiracy to misrepresent Marina’s
testimony, and possibly to link Oswald’s gun to a dark and scopeless rifle he
had in the Soviet Union. Our concerns that Mamantov misrepresented her lead us
to concerns about why two Army Intelligence Reserve officers from the 488th
unit (Jack Crichton and Deputy DPD Chief George Lumpkin) selected Mamantov as
her interpreter. Our concerns are increased when we see that B.L. Senkel, the
DPD officer who took Marina’s suspect affidavit, was the partner of F.P.
Turner, who collected the dubious rifle repair tag (24 WH 328), and that both
men spent most of November 22 with DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin. For example, they
were with Lumpkin in the pilot car of the motorcade when Lumpkin was
communicating with Winston Lawson in the lead car behind them.
I conclude that when we look at the
conduct of the two men we know to have been parts of the COG emergency
communications network in Dallas, we see patterns of sinister behavior that also
involved others, or what we may call conspiratorial behavior. These
concatenated efforts to implicate Oswald in a phase-one conspiracy narrative
lead me to propose a hypothesis for which I have neither evidence nor an
alternative explanation: namely, that someone on the WHCA network may have been
the source for the important unexplained description on the Dallas Police tapes
of a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight (5 feet 10 inches, 165
pounds) recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.
Note that
there are no other known sources ascribing this specific height and weight to
Oswald. For example, when he was arrested and charged in Dallas that same day,
Oswald was recorded as having a height of 5’9 ½ inches, and a weight of 131
pounds. The first reference to Oswald as 5’10”, 165 pounds, was that
offered by Oswald’s mother Marguerite to FBI Agent Fain in May 1960, when
Oswald himself was absent in Russia.
The DPD officer contributing the
description on the Police Channel was Inspector Herbert Sawyer, who allegedly
had heard it from someone outside the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) whom
he could not identify or describe. The Warren Report said categorically that
his source was Howard Brennan (WR 5), and that on the evening of November 22,
Brennan “identified Oswald as the person in the lineup who bore the closest
resemblance to the man in the window but he said that he was unable to make a
positive identification” (WR 145). But there are many reasons to doubt this,
starting with conflicts in Brennan’s own testimony (as Anthony Summers reported
in Conspiracy, pp. 109-10) . And Ian
Griggs has made a strong case that Brennan never saw Oswald in a line-up that
evening. (There are police records placing Oswald in three line-ups that day,
and corroborating witness reports of them; but there is no evidence whatever
that Brennan attended any of the three.)
There is another strong reason to doubt
that the source was Brennan. Brennan testified later to the Warren Commission
that he saw his suspect in a window of the Texas School Book Depository,
“standing up and leaning against the left window sill.” Pressed to describe how
much of the suspect he saw, Brennan answered, “I could see probably his whole
body, from his hips up. But at the time that he was firing the gun, a
possibility from his belt up” (3 WH 144).
The awkwardness of Brennan’s language
draws attention to the fundamental problem about the description. It is hard to
imagine anyone giving a full height and weight estimate from seeing someone who
was only partially visible in a window. So there are intrinsic grounds for
believing the description must have come from another source. And when we see
that the same description is found in Oswald’s FBI and CIA files — and nowhere
else – there are reasons to suspect the source was from government secret
files.
We have seen that there was interaction
in Dallas between the WHCA and DPD radio channels, thanks to the WHCA portable
radio that Lawson had installed in the lead car of the presidential
motorcade. This radio in turn was in contact by police radio with the
pilot car ahead of it, carrying Dallas Police Department (DPD) Deputy Chief
Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit. At the same time, as
noted above, it was in contact with the COG nerve center at Mount Weather,
Virginia. And Mount Weather had the requisite secret communications to receive
information from classified intelligence files, without other parts of the
government being alerted.
Permit me at this moment an instructive
digression. It is by now well established that Kennedy in 1963 was concerned
enough by “the threat of far-right treason” that he urgently persuaded
Hollywood director John Frankenheimer “to turn [the novel] Seven Days in May into a movie.” In this book, to quote Wikipedia,
a
charismatic superior officer, Air Force
General James Mattoon Scott, intend[s] to stage a coup d’état …. According to
the plan, an undisclosed Army combat unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency
COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country’s telephone, radio,
and television networks, while the conspiracy directs the military and its
allies in Congress and the media from “Mount Thunder” (a continuity of government
base based on Mount Weather).
It is no secret also that in 1963
Kennedy had aroused major right-wing dissatisfaction, largely because of signs
of his increasing rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The plot of the book and
movie reflects the concern of liberals at the time about generals like General
Edwin Walker, who had resigned in 1961 after Kennedy criticized his political
activities in the Army. (Walker had given his troops John Birch Society
literature, along with the names of right-wing candidates to vote for.) We can
assume however that Kennedy had no firm evidence of a Mount Weather conspiracy:
if he had, it is unlikely his response would have just been to sponsor a
fictionalized movie.
It is important at this stage to point
out that, although COG elements like Mount Weather were considered part of the
Pentagon, the COG “government in waiting” was at no time under military
control. On the contrary, President Eisenhower had ensured that it was broadly
based at the top, so its planners included some of the nation’s top corporate
leaders, like Frank Stanton of CBS. By all accounts of COG leadership in the
decades after Reagan took office in 1981, this so-called “shadow government”
still included CEOs of private corporations, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick
Cheney, as well as three former CIA directors: Richard Helms, James
Schlesinger, and George Bush.
Alfonso Chardy wrote in 1987 that the
“virtual parallel government” empowering North to run Iran-Contra had also
developed “a secret contingency plan that called for suspension of the
Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA.” Subsequently
North was questioned in the Iran-Contra Hearings about this charge, but was
prevented by the Committee Chairman, Democratic Senator Inouye, from answering
in a public session.
Later, investigating the powerful COG
planning group, CNN called it “a hidden government [in the USA] about which you
know nothing.” James Mann emphasized its hawkish continuity, unaffected by
changes of presidency in the White House:
Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a
part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United
States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America
always keeps on fighting.”
Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1974
Going one step further, Andrew Cockburn
quoted a Pentagon source to support a claim that a COG planning group under
Clinton was now for the first time staffed “almost exclusively with Republican
hawks.” In the words of his source, “You could say this was a secret
government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was extraordinarily
inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on.”
The Pentagon official’s description of
COG planners as a “secret government-in-waiting” under Clinton (which still
included both Cheney and Rumsfeld) is very close to the standard definition of
a cabal, as a group of persons secretly united to bring about a change or
overthrow of government. A very similar situation existed under Jimmy Carter,
when some of those who would later figure in Iran-Contra (notably George H.W.
Bush and Theodore Shackley) worked with chiefs of foreign intelligence services
(the so-called Safari Club) “to start working with [former DCI Richard] Helms
[then U.S. Ambassador to Iran] and his most trusted operatives outside of
Congressional and even Agency purview.” This group began by backing
guerrilla forces in Africa (notably UNITA of Jonas Savimbi in Angola), which
they knew would not be backed by the CIA under William Colby or Stansfield
Turner.
But some of these figures, notably
Alexandre de Marenches of the French spy agency SDECE, became involved with
Casey, Bush, Shackley, and others in a 1980 plot – the so-called Republican
“October Surprise” – to prevent the reelection of Jimmy Carter. The essence of
this plot was to frustrate Carter’s efforts to repatriate the hostages seized
in the U.S. Tehran Embassy, by negotiating a Republican deal with the Iranians
that would be more to their liking. (The hostages in fact were returned hours
after Reagan took office in 1981.)
This Republican hostage plot in 1980
deserves to be counted as a fifth structural deep event in recent US history.
Unquestionably the illicit contacts with Iran established by the October
Surprise Group in 1980 became, as Alfonso Chardy wrote, the “genesis” of the
Iran-Contra arms deals overseen by the COG/ Mount Weather planners in 1984-86.
In an important interview with
journalist Robert Parry, the veteran CIA officer Miles Copeland claimed that a
“CIA within the CIA” inspired the 1980 plot, having concluded by 1980 that Jimmy
Carter (in Copeland’s words) “had to be removed from the presidency for the
good of the country.” Copeland made it clear to Parry that he shared this
view that Carter “represented a grave threat to the nation,” and former Mossad
agent Ari Ben-Menashe told Parry that Copeland himself was in fact “the
conceptual father” of the 1980 arms-for-hostages deal, and had “brokered [the]
Republican cooperation with Israel.” And Copeland, together with his
client Adnan Khashoggi whom he advised, went on with Shackley to help launch
the 1984-85 Iranian arms deals as well.
However, just as Knebel in Seven Days may have overestimated the
military component in the COG Mount Weather
Peter Dale Scott, Russ Baker, David
Talbot, Daniel Ellsberg, Jefferson Morley at a recent lunch
leadership, so Copeland may have dwelt
too exclusively on the CIA component behind the October Surprise Group. In The Road to 9/11, I suggested that this
CIA network overlapped with a so-called “Project Alpha,” working at the time
for David Rockefeller and the Chase Manhattan Bank on Iran issues, which was
chaired by the veteran establishment figure John J. McCloy.
I will conclude by again quoting James
Mann’s dictum that the Mount Weather COG leadership constitutes a “permanent,
though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, … a world in
which Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.” And I
would like this audience to investigate whether elements of this enduring
leadership, with its ever-changing mix of CIA veterans and civilian leaders,
may have constituted “a secret government-in-waiting,” not just under Clinton
in the 1990s, not just under Carter in 1980, but also under Kennedy in November
1963.
Footnotes:
[1] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big
Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2014 [forthcoming]). 1.
[2] For a partial list of anomalies
between the JFK assassination and 9/11, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep
Politics of War (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 341-96.
[3] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 6.
[4] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and
the Secret Government,” Miami Herald,
July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877:
“Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel
government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from
the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials
have concluded.”
[5] Iran-Contra Committee Counsel
Arthur Liman, questioning Oliver North, “had North repeat his testimony that
the diversion was Casey’s idea” (Arthur Liman, Lawyer: a life of counsel and controversy [New York: Public
Affairs, 1998], 341).
[6] James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America’s intelligence
agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 72.
[7] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 213-14,
219-29.
[8] Bamford, A Pretext for War, 71-81.
[9] Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1974), 23.
[10] Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16. For more on WISP,
see David Wise, The Politics of Lying:
Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973),
134-37.
[11] John Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New
York: Little Brown, 2004), 120. In addition Howard Baker, in 1973 the ranking
Republican member of the Senate Committee that investigated Watergate, was
later part of the COG secret leadership (CNN Special Assignment, November
17, 1991).
[12] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York:
Viking, 2004), 142.
[13] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol.
9, p.106 (or 9 WH 106) ; Scott, Deep
Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family
of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White
House, and What Their Influence Means for America (New York: Bloomsbury
Press, 2009), 119-22.
[14] “White House Communications
Agency,” Signal Corps Regimental History,
http://signal150.army.mil/white_house_communications_agency.html.
[15] In the 1990s the WHCA supplied
statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington
on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008). The
Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the
unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip
from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes
had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in
Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: “The Review Board’s repeated
written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not
bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the
provenance of the edited tapes.” See Assassinations
Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf.
[16] 17 WH 394-95, 23 WH 841; 17 WH
368, 395; Scott, Deep Politics and the
Death of JFK, 273-74, 278. The alleged epileptic walked away from the
ambulance after it arrived at Highland (Warren Commission Document 1245, 6-10).
[17] Statement of Special Agent Winston
E. Lawson [to Secret Service],” 17 WH 632; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278.
[18] Richard Pollock, “The Mysterious
Mountain,” The Progressive, March,
1976; cf. “Mount Weather’s ‘Government-in-Waiting,’”
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/mt_weather.htm.
[19] Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
[20] Dee Garrison , Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense
Never Worked
(New York: Oxford University Press,
2006), 46.
[21] Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23
WH 383-84.
[22] Commission Document 344 – SS
Howard Tape Copy of 01 Dec 1963, p. 23.
[23] Lee Harvey Oswald fingerprint
card, 17 WH 308. The heaviest Oswald actually weighed was 150 pounds, when he
left the Marines in 1959 (19 WH 584, 595).
[24] FBI report by Special Agent Fain,
dated May 12, 1960, 17 WH 706. In the same report Marguerite named Oswald’s
father as “Edward Lee Oswald.” His actual name was Robert Edward Lee Oswald (WR
669-70).
[25] Testimony of Inspector Herbert
Sawyer, 6 WH 321-22: “I remember that he was a white man and that he
wasn’t young and he wasn’t old.” Cf. Dallas Police Channel Two Tape at 12:25 PM
(23 WH 916).
[26] Ian Griggs, “Did Howard Leslie
Brennan Really Attend an Identification Lineup?”
http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/28th_Issue/id_draft.html.
[27] Statement of Secret Service
Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630: “I checked with Chief Curry as to location of Lead
Car [at Love Field] and had WHCA portable radio put in and checked.”
[28] “The lead car was in radio contact
with the pilot car by police radio, and with the Presidential limousine by
Secret Service portable radios” (Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The Presidential
Lincoln Continental SS-100-X,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=16241&relPageId=27).
Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of
JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).
[29] David Talbot, Brothers: the hidden history of the Kennedy years (New York: Free
Press, 2007), 148.
[30]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May.
[31] Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A time for
choosing: the rise of modern American conservatism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), .
[32] Hope Yen, “Eisenhower Letters
Reveal Doomsday Plan: Citizens Tapped to Take Over in Case of Attack,” AP, Deseret News, March 21, 2004, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/595050502/Eisenhower-letters-reveal-doomsday-plan.html?pg=all.
[33] CNN Special Assignment, November
17, 1991.
[34] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and
the Secret Government,” Miami Herald,
July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877:
“Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel
government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from
the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration
officials have concluded.”
[35] Iran-Contra Committee Counsel
Arthur Liman, questioning Oliver North, “had North repeat his testimony that
the diversion was Casey’s idea” (Arthur Liman, Lawyer: a life of counsel and controversy [New York: Public
Affairs, 1998], 341). Cf. The “October Surprise” allegations and the
circumstances surrounding the release of the American hostages held in Iran:
report of the Special Counsel to Senator Terry Sanford and Senator James M.
Jeffords of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Volume 4,
p. 33 (October Surprise Group).
[36] CNN Special Assignment, November
17, 1991.
[37] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.
[38] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
(New York: Scribner, 2007), 88.
[39] Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the
legacy of America’s private intelligence network (New York: Carroll &
Graf, 2005), 61.
[40] Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington,
Pretoria and the struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, [2013]), 66-68; Elaine Windrich, “The
Laboratory of Hate: The Role of Clandestine Radio in the Angolan War,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 3(2),
2000.
[41] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and
the Secret Government,” Miami Herald,
July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877:
“The group, led by campaign foreign policy adviser Richard Allen, was founded
out of concern Carter might pull off an “October surprise” such as a
last-minute deal for the release of the hostages before the Nov. 4 election.
One of the group’s first acts was a meeting with a man claiming to represent
Iran who offered to release the hostages to Reagan.
Allen — Reagan’s first national
security adviser— and another campaign aide, Laurence Silberman, told The
Herald in April of the meeting. they said McFarlane, then a Senate Armed
Services Committee aide, arranged and attended it. McFarlane later became
Reagan’s national security adviser and played a key role in the Iran-contra
affair. Allen and Silberman said they rejected the offer to release the
hostages to Reagan.” [The Iranian was Houshang Lavi, and after Lavi’s death
Robert Parry confirmed from Lavi’s diary that the meeting did take place].
[42] Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and
the Secret Government,” Miami Herald,
July 5, 1987, http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9877.
[43] “America’s False History Allows
the Powerful to Commit Crimes Without Consequence,” Mark Karlin Interview of
Robert Parry, January 15, 2013, Truthout Interview, http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/13904-americas-false-history-allows-the-powerful-to-commit-crimes-without-consequence.
[44] Robert Parry, Trick or Treason, 175.
[45] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America
(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 81-83, 88. A key figure was CIA veteran and Copeland friend
Archibald Roosevelt, in 1980 a Carter foe and also employee of the Chase
Manhattan Bank.
[46] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.
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