David Talbot set to directly accuse Dulles of JFK murder

[MinM]

That was pretty funny .. as Talbot is really hammering the media she quickly throws it to Allan Nairn. Although it was a reasonable segue into current day Guatemala and their issues dating back to the Dulles led coup in 1954.

However she does it again when Talbot is getting to the heart of MKULTRA. Just as Talbot is exposing one juicy bit after another about the nature of mkultra they stop for a break never to return to that subject. Which I get they had a lot of ground to cover in the interview but some of that information just begged for follow-up questions...

There was a recent interview of Talbot by Amy Goodman. While she normally acts as a gatekeeper against anything conspiracy-oriented (you'll notice at one point when Talbot is really cooking, she interrupts with a time warning, then she continues after he stops to change the subject!), Talbot is able to say some things that were very revealing.

The Rise of America's Secret Government: The Deadly Legacy of Ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles

AMY GOODMAN: It’s been over half a century since Allen Dulles resigned as director of the CIA, but his legacy lives on. Between 1953 and '61, under his watch, the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, invaded Cuba, was tied to the killing of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first democratically elected leader.

A new biography of Allen Dulles looks at how his time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Biographer David Talbot writes, quote, "The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country. Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA." Talbot goes on to write, "Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign."

Well, David Talbot joins us now to talk about his new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. He’s the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. David Talbot is also author of the best-seller, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years...

DAVID TALBOT: The Devil’s Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers—John Foster Dulles, who’s secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIA—they loved to play chess with each other. They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that was a—you know, an apt metaphor.

But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—alternative media—before this. I think—I just want to underline what you were saying about how essential it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting through the media gatekeepers. They don’t want to hear about this, and in part because the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the media. I’ve been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know, showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an article based on recently leaked CIA documents—conveniently leaked—was written by a former New York Times reporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So the CIA is still manipulating the media, and it’s essential that independent media exists, like this.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, the Sulzberger family had a long relationship with Dulles. When he was inaugurated as CIA director, one of the Sulzbergers wrote to him, saying, "This is the best news I’ve heard in years." In another letter, he calls him affectionately "Ally." They were on a first name basis. They belonged to the same clubs. They were masters at—the Dulles brothers, particularly Allen—at manipulating the media. After the Warren Report comes out, the official investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, one of the top editors at Newsweek writes to Allen Dulles. And I’m getting all this from Allen Dulles’s own files; he was very proud of the fact that he could—he had the media in the palm of his hand. But this Newsweek editor writes to him, "Thank you so much for basically directing our coverage of the Warren Report. We couldn’t have done it without you." So, you know, this was the kind of cozy relationship that existed between the CIA and the media in those years. CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were all in the palm of the CIA’s hands. They all lived together in Georgetown. They had cocktail parties together. It was a very cozy set.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, in Guatemala today, there has been a popular uprising. It has been quite astounding. Otto Pérez Molina, OPM, the president, was thrown out, is in jail right now. I wanted to go to Allan Nairn, longtime investigative reporter, who was in Guatemala during this period. And this also goes back to 1954. But Allan Nairn has been covering Guatemala since the 1980s.

ALLAN NAIRN: This is an oligarchy in Guatemala which kills its own unionists, which kills peasants who try to organize the plantations, which works hand in glove with Washington and is now trying to hold onto their power, because, for the first time, it’s under threat. I mean, this is a historic moment. It all began in 1954, when the CIA invaded Guatemala, overthrew a democratically elected government and put the army in power. And now, the people have risen...

AMY GOODMAN: Explain it very briefly, and what happened to Allen Jr.?

DAVID TALBOT: MKULTRA was—they called it the Manhattan Project of the mind. It was an attempt by the CIA, funding—millions of dollars—funding scientists and doctors around the country, major institutions, to see if we could program people for whatever purpose. It was a mind control program. His son, Allen Jr., came back from the war, Korean War, with a piece of shrapnel in his brain. He was brain-damaged, and the family had difficulty with him. He was trying to find his way. And at one point, Allen Dulles put him in the hands of this scientist here in New York who did unspeakable sort of experiments on him involving insulin overdose therapy, which is a very traumatic therapy—convulsions, sometimes resulting in death. His sister was appalled—Allen Dulles’s daughter—when she went to visit him in the hospital. And it was from her that I got this story.

Joan Dulles is a very amazing woman—Joan Talley, as she’s known today, a retired Jungian therapist in New Mexico, drives a Prius with an Obama sticker on it. I’m sure her father is spinning in his grave. But she, herself, like many of us, at the age of 90 when I interviewed her, was grappling with this dark legacy in America, that played out within her own family. You know, she’s looking back on this now and is appalled, in some way, that she—it was a part of her life. But she’s reading the books—and I hope she reads mine—and is coming to some kind of determination about her father.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what MKULTRA was used for.

DAVID TALBOT: Well, MKULTRA, among other things, they were seeing if they could program a Manchurian candidate, assassins who would act in a robotic-like fashion to kill on CIA command. They were also using it as enhanced interrogation, as we call it today. Soviet prisoners who would fall into our hands, they were—

AMY GOODMAN: And the drug is actually?

DAVID TALBOT: Well, many different drugs, psychedelic—LSD was one of the drugs. They subjected—there was a particular place in Canada at the Allan Institute and McGill University in Canada, where one of these doctors, Dr. Ewen Cameron, he operated something called the sleep room, where women, many—mostly women, and patients of his would be put. These were people who were suffering from common neurotic disorders, postpartum depression and so on. And they were put in this sleep room and, through massive doses of various psychedelic drugs, were put into a sleep state, and then tape loops were played over and over again in an attempt to erase their bad patterns of thinking, and often wiping out their memory. They would come out of these experiments not knowing their family, who they were. In one case, a woman was reduced to an infantile state. She couldn’t use a toilet. And this was the wife of a Canadian—a member of the Canadian Parliament. So this was all CIA-funded research during the Cold War, and it was, you know, basically the most inhumane sort of methods being used on people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to David Talbot, and we digressed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy...

On the other hand Len Osanic and Jim DiEugenio were able to go there...

Posted 25 October 2015 - 02:22 AM

Len Osanic and I interviewed Talbot about his book The Devil's Chessboard this morning. He was kind enough to give us almost two hours.

Its the best interview of his you will hear, much better than Democracy Now.

Why? Because Len and I both read the entire book. In fact I finished it this morning before the interview. So we covered just about all the major topics in the book, especially about the evidence implicating the DCI in the JFK case. But incredibly, we could not cover everything. The book is that large in scope.

Talbot dishes some fascinating stuff on how bad the MSM is, and how Politico dumped him for Shenon! As I have said, the new media resembles the old media in that regard.

And he also gave us a nice tidbit on George Clooney.

Don't miss it.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=22375

Show #755
Original airdate: October 29, 2015
Guests: David Talbot w/Jim DiEugenio / Jim DiEugenio
Topics: Allen Dulles and The Devil's Chessboard / Phil Shenon

Play David Talbot w/Jim DiEugenio (1:49:06) Real Media or MP3 download

David's new book, The Devil's Chessboard: (2015) Brothers: (2008)
Bobby was looking at the CIA anti-Castro operations as the source of the plot
David thought of Allen Dulles as the chief culprit, the "Old Man"
The Dulles Era is the beginning of today's lawless era
Subversion, extraordinary rendition, assassinations, surveillance
David encourages that his book be bought at an independent bookstore
During WW II Allen Dulles conducted his own foreign policy
Allen and (John) Foster Dulles go way back with these Nazis
Sullivan & Cromwell, I.G. Farben, Zyklon B
They put the interests of their clients above the good of the war effort
Unconditional surrender, Operation Sunrise, Karl Wolff
The first tool of the Final Solution, Walter Rauff and Gas Vans
James Angleton hid Nazi war criminals in Italy
Reinhard Gehlen's rise through the West German power structure
Dulles' day calendars, blacked out for Dallas in October, 1963
American media, Washington press corps, timid and complicit
His "retirement", Dulles didn't get the memo when he was fired
An anti-Kennedy government-in-exile in his home in Georgetown
Cuban exile Paulino Sierra Martinez met with Dulles
Dulles put William Harvey in charge of assassinations
Trujillo, Dominican Republic, Jesus de Galindez, extraordinary rendition
CIA support of a coup attempt against Charles De Gaulle
The CIA "kill team" was brought back to Dallas
Mark Wyatt, Harvey's assistant, Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963
Dulles at Camp Peary, "The Farm" the weekend of the assassination
Dulles worked hard behind the scenes to get appointed to the WC
Angleton's and Dulles' daughters were two of David's sources
Dulles' JFK Oral History Interview
"the assassination ... if any one of the chess pieces ... had been
moved differently ... the whole thing might have been different"
CIA knew the (Bay of Pigs) Cuban Brigade was doomed to fail
The plan was to force Kennedy to send in the military
Arthur Schlesinger's Journals: 1952-2000 (2008)
Schlesinger worked up a CIA reorganization plan for President Kennedy
American media. lazy and ignorant or they have an agenda
David calls on NARA employees to leak the 1,100 CIA documents
Hollywood does not want to be Oliver "Stoned"

http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2015.html

[cptmarginal]

This book is immediately good. One of my first thoughts was to look for certain topics in the index and I was gratified to find both that the Bank for International Settlements is discussed right upfront, and that the relationship to Jung is also explored.

Threads worth looking at:

The Bank for International Settlements

Agent 488; Carl Jung and the CIA (OSS)

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Pleasantly surprised to see this on Alternet. Thought they had gone the same way as Salon in trying to woo-shame their readership. Glad to see that is currently not the case where JFK is concerned.

Inside the Plot to Kill JFK: The Secret Story of the CIA and What Really Happened in Dallas

The official narrative only gets more implausible, especially when you hear the stories of these secret super-spies.

By David Talbot / Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
December 8, 2015

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot (Harper, 2015):



Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that “someone would have talked.” This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting. The argument betrays a touchingly naïve media bias—a belief that the American press establishment itself, that great slumbering watchdog, could be counted on to solve such a monumental crime, one that sprung from the very system of governance of which corporate media is an essential part. The official version of the Kennedy assassination—despite its myriad improbabilities, which have only grown more inconceivable with time—remains firmly embedded in the media consciousness, as unquestioned as the law of gravity.

In fact, many people have talked during the past half of a century—including some directly connected to the plot against Kennedy. But the media simply refused to listen. One of the most intriguing examples of someone talking occurred in 2003, when an old and ailing Howard Hunt began unburdening himself to his eldest son, Saint John.

“Saint,” as his father called him, was a loyal and loving son, who had suffered through the upheavals of the spy’s life, along with the rest of his family. Late one night in June 1972, at the family’s Witches Island home in suburban Maryland, Hunt had frantically woken up his eighteen-year-old son. “I need you to do exactly as I say, and not ask any questions!” said Hunt, who was in a sweaty and disheveled state that his son had never before witnessed. He ordered Saint John to fetch window cleaner, rags, and rubber gloves from the kitchen and to help him rub away fingerprints from a pile of espionage equipment, including cameras, microphones, and walkie-talkies. Later, Saint helped his father stuff the equipment into two suitcases, which they loaded into the trunk of his father’s Pontiac Firebird. Hunt and his son drove through the darkness to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where the spook got out and tossed the suitcases into the murky water. On the way back home, Hunt told Saint that he had been doing some special work for the White House, and things had gone south.

It was the beginning of the Watergate drama, in which Howard Hunt played a starring role as the leader of the “White House plumbers,” the five burglars who were arrested while breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters. All five of the men had a long history with Hunt, dating back to the earliest days of the underground war against Castro, and at least two—Frank Sturgis and Virgilio Gonzalez—were rumored to have played roles in the Kennedy assassination.

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Hunt drew Saint and the rest of his family deeper into his disintegrating life. Saint’s beloved mother, Dorothy—an exotic beauty with her own espionage background—would die in a plane crash in the midst of the Watergate crisis, while serving as a mysterious courier for her husband. When her United Airlines flight from Washington’s Dulles Airport crashed while landing at Chicago’s Midway Airport in December 1972, Dorothy Hunt was carrying over $2 million in cash and money orders, some of which was later traced to President Nixon’s reelection campaign.

As Nixon frantically tried to cover his tracks in the widening scandal, sketchy money began flowing back and forth. The president was desperate to keep Hunt quiet and during one White House meeting, Nixon— caught on his secret taping system—figured it would cost “a million in cash. We could get our hands on that kind of money.” Hunt felt that Nixon owed him and his team. “I had five men whose families needed to be supported,” Hunt later said. “And I had a big house, stalls for six horses, kids in private school—I had needs for contributions that were greater than the average person’s. . . . There’s a long tradition that when a warrior is captured, the commanding officer takes care of his family.”

Nixon knew that Howard Hunt had played key roles in some of America’s darkest mysteries. On June 23, 1972—while discussing the Watergate break-in with H. R. Haldeman, his devoted political deputy and White House chief of staff—Nixon was taped saying, “Hunt . . . will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things. . . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon wanted Haldeman to lean on Dick Helms, who was then CIA director, by warning him that if the spy agency did not help shut down the growing Watergate scandal, “[t]he President’s belief is that this is going to open up that whole Bay of Pigs thing . . . and it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing . . . and we think it would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country at this time.”

Nixon’s ploy did not work. When Haldeman sat Helms down in his office and delivered the president’s thinly veiled threat about “the Bay of Pigs thing,” the normally icy-cool Helms exploded. “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this!” he shouted. Nixon only succeeded in further antagonizing a very powerful Washington institution, one capable of far more deviousness than even he was.

What did Nixon mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”? According to Haldeman, it was Nixon’s way of referring to the unspeakable—the Kennedy assassination. Other historians have speculated that it was shorthand for the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. In any case, “the Bay of Pigs thing” was an apt code name—it conjured all the swampy intrigue that began leaching through the Kennedy administration after Allen Dulles and his agency suffered their humiliation in Cuba, everything the CIA wanted to keep deeply hidden. And Howard Hunt was knee-deep in much of this muck.

Hunt’s adventures in the spy trade eventually tore apart his family and sent him to federal prison for nearly three years. By 2003, the retired spy was living in a modest ranch house in north Miami with his second wife, Laura, who was twenty-seven years younger. She had fallen for him while watching him give a prison interview on Watergate. “I liked all those men—that must seem strange to you,” Laura Hunt told a Miami Herald reporter. “Not for what he’d done—I don’t admire that—but I admired him for serving the government, and I admired his intellect.”

At eighty-four, Hunt seemed to be fading out, suffering from a variety of maladies, including hardening of the arteries, which had resulted in the amputation of his left leg and confined him to a wheelchair. He had a new family, including the two children he had with Laura. But Saint John Hunt felt it was time for his father to finally come clean for the sake of his first family. Following years of estrangement, Saint began to spend time with his father, watching his favorite Fox News shows with him at his Miami house and, when the old man felt up to it, dredging up the past. Laura did not want Saint John to reopen this history, but he felt strongly that his father owed him this honesty.

After his family fell apart, Saint John had gone on the road as a rock musician and drug peddler, a trip that eventually deposited him in the coastal redwoods of northern California. But by the time he reunited with his father, Saint was a sober, middle-aged, law-abiding citizen who was eager to make sense of his earlier life. He was particularly interested in talking with his father about the Kennedy assassination—which he knew his father had long been linked to in conspiracy literature.

Saint’s father had always insisted that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death, that he was at home in Washington the day of the assassination, not in Dallas, as many JFK researchers alleged. Hunt claimed that he was shopping for ingredients at a Chinese grocery store in Washington, to cook dinner that night with his wife, when the news bulletin about Kennedy came over the car radio. But Saint, who was in the fifth grade at the time, had no memory of his father being home that day when he was let out early from school, or later that evening. And he found his father’s cover story about cooking the Chinese meal, which Hunt told under oath at a trial related to the Kennedy assassination, absurd. “I can tell you that’s the biggest load of crap in the world,” Saint John told Rolling Stone in 2007. “My dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I’m so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever.”

His mother told Saint John, around the time of the assassination, that his father had indeed been in Dallas. The mystery of his father’s whereabouts that day would prey on Saint for years. He was determined to engage his father on the subject before it was too late.

By 2003, Howard Hunt was ready to finally talk. He feared that his life was coming to an end, and he was deeply regretful that he had so little to leave his family after all they had endured. For a time, he flirted with the idea of telling all to actor Kevin Costner, who had starred in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Costner dangled a big financial reward in front of Hunt if he revealed everything he knew about Dallas, but when the money never appeared, Hunt finally dismissed the actor as a “numbskull.” Saint John nonetheless urged his father to continue down the path of full disclosure while he was still of sound mind. He made his plea in a long letter to his father, telling him that it was time to finally reveal what he knew—he “owed it,” wrote Saint, “to himself, the Nation, and his family to leave a legacy of truth instead of doubt.”

Soon afterward, Hunt phoned his son in California and summoned him to Miami. On December 7, 2003, Saint John Hunt flew to Florida—where so much of his father’s secret life had unfolded—to hear his final testament.

*

When he arrived at his father’s house, at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Biscayne Bay neighborhood, Saint found Hunt in bed, looking frail and washed out. But the old man perked up when he saw his son. He asked Saint to wheel him into the TV room, where they shared some soup for lunch and watched an agitated round of Fox News at the high volume required by the hard-of-hearing Hunt. Finally, Saint broached the subject that he had come to discuss. “Papa, can we talk about my letter?”

Hunt suggested that Saint wheel him back to his bedroom, in case his wife returned. “We don’t want her getting upset by this,” Hunt told his son. “She believes what I told her: that I don’t know anything about JFK’s murder.”

“I think Laura’s very naïve about the darker side of politics,” said Saint John.

“Well, that’s one of the reasons I love her so much,” his father replied.

Then, after making Saint John promise he would never reveal what he was about to tell him without his permission, Hunt launched into a remarkable story of the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. It was—even at this late date in Hunt’s life—still a carefully parsed tale. He clearly was not telling everything he knew—and he seemed to be downplaying his own role in the crime as well as the complicity of former CIA superiors to whom he remained loyal. He also couched much of his narrative in an oddly speculative manner, as if he were not fully certain of the exact configuration of the plot. Nonetheless, what Hunt did tell Saint John that day was stunning enough. Over the following months, the spy elaborated on his story as his health occasionally improved. At one point, Saint brought in an expert on the Kennedy assassination and Watergate—Eric Hamburg, a Los Angeles writer-producer and a former aide to Senator John Kerry—to help videotape interviews with his father.

Laura Hunt ultimately cut short her husband’s extraordinary journey of truth telling with his son. But before Hunt died in 2007, he left behind video interviews, audiotapes, and notes in his own hand—as well as a somewhat revealing memoir called American Spy. Hunt’s confessional trove amounts to a tortured effort to reveal what he knew, while still guarding his family’s sensitivities, old professional loyalties, and whatever was left of his good name. After his father died, Saint John would make a valiant effort to get Hunt’s confessions—which should have been headline news—into the hands of the major media gatekeepers. A 60 Minutes producer spent days poring over Saint John’s rich material, but he was finally forced to apologize that the story had been spiked from above. In the end, only Rolling Stone—along with a scattering of alternative media outlets—covered the story of Howard Hunt’s astonishing final statements about the crime of the century. Saint John’s own memoir of his father’s escapades and his family’s ordeal, Bond of Secrecy, was released by a small Oregon publisher and received little promotion or attention.

This was the story that Howard Hunt left behind. Sometime in 1963, Hunt said, he was invited to a meeting at one of the CIA safe houses in Miami by Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune who had worked under Hunt in the anti-Castro underground—a man with whom Hunt would be forever linked when they were later arrested for the Watergate break-in. Also in attendance at the Miami meeting was David Morales, another CIA veteran of the anti-Castro campaign who was well known to Hunt. Morales—a big, intimidating man who had grown up in a poor Mexican American family in Phoenix—did not fit the polished CIA profile. But the agency found a use for “El Indio”—as Morales, with his strong indigenous features, was known by his colleagues.

“Dave Morales did dirty work for the agency,” according to Wayne Smith, a diplomat who worked alongside Morales in the U.S. embassy in Havana before Castro took power. “If he were in the mob, he’d be called a hit man.”

Thomas Clines, a colleague of Morales’s in the CIA’s Miami station, was more complimentary in his description, but it amounted to the same thing: “We all admired the hell out of the guy. He drank like crazy, but he was bright as hell. He could fool people into thinking he was stupid by acting stupid, but he knew about cultural things all over the world. People were afraid of him. He was big and aggressive, and he had this mystique. Stories about him permeated the agency. If the agency needed someone action-oriented, he was at the top of the list. If the U.S. government as a matter of policy needed someone or something neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people.”

Ruben Carbajal, Morales’s lifelong friend from their boyhood days on the streets of Phoenix, was even more blunt about “Didi”—the man who was like a brother to him: “When some asshole needed to be killed, Didi was the man to do it. . . . That was his job.”

According to Morales’s daughter, he was the CIA’s “peon.” Her father was utterly devoted to the agency. “He did whatever he was told. They gave him a lifestyle that he would never have had under any circumstances. . . . He did everything for the Company. His family wasn’t his life—the Company was his life.”

At the secret Miami meeting, Morales told Hunt that he had been recruited for an “off-the-board” operation by Bill Harvey, with whom El Indio had worked closely on the ZR/Rifle project to kill Castro. The aim of this “off-the-board” operation, it soon became clear, was to assassinate President Kennedy. Morales and Sturgis referred to the president’s planned demise as “the big event.”

In his account of the meeting, Hunt presented Harvey and Morales as the key operational figures in the plot; Harvey did not attend the meeting but seemed to loom over it. Hunt suggested that Harvey was in charge of hiring the sharpshooters to kill Kennedy and transporting the weapons to Dallas. According to Hunt, the gunmen were likely recruited from the Corsican underworld. As Harvey once indicated, when it came to highly delicate assignments, working with Corsican gangsters was preferable because they were harder to trace back to the CIA than Italian or American Mafia hit men.

Hunt found Harvey and Morales to be disturbing characters. The two men “could have been manufactured from the same cloth,” Hunt wrote in his memoir. “Both were hard-drinking, tough guys, possibly completely amoral. Morales was rumored to be a cold-blooded killer, the go-to guy in black ops situations where the government needed to have someone neutralized. I tried to cut short any contact with him, as he wore thin very quickly.”

To Morales, Kennedy was “that no good son of a bitch motherfucker” who was responsible for the deaths of the men he had trained for the Bay of Pigs mission. “We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Morales told his attorney, Robert Walton, in 1973, after an evening of drinking loosened the CIA hit man’s tongue. It was one more confession that the media ignored, even after it was reported by one of their own, Gaeton Fonzi, a Philadelphia investigative journalist who, after going to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, unearthed some of the most important information related to the Kennedy case.

[cptmarginal]

Halfway through the book now...

Reading about James Speyer Kronthal (starting on page 297) was pretty eye-opening. I've encountered his story before, in Albarelli's book and also in Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney, but for some reason it never really occurred to me just how crazy that situation was. A forum search for Kronthal turns up zero results.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/28/world ... d-cia.html

C.I.A. or Soviet Agent? The book also for the first time tells the story of James Speyer Kronthal, a Central Intelligence Agency official who committed suicide in 1953 after working for several years as a Soviet agent inside the agency. Mr. Corson, one of the authors, was at the time an aide to the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen W. Dulles.

Most of the interviews in the book were with former intelligence officials who agreed to be quoted by name. The events described are among the most controversial in intelligence work over the last three decades and have been the subject of disputes that have never been satisfactorily resolved.

According to the book, Soviet intelligence identified Mr. Kronthal as a homosexual by reviewing captured Nazi files from World War II. While serving for the C.I.A. in Switzerland, Mr. Kronthal was secretly filmed with young boys by the Soviets and was blackmailed into becoming a spy, the book says.

He was summoned back to the United States in May of 1952. Mr. Kronthal was a protege of Mr. Dulles and was in line for a high-level job when he was found dead in what the police said was a suicide.

I'm unfamiliar with this site but it seems like an OK source: http://nazigold.greyfalcon.us/loot.html

(There's a newly released book about the Speyer banking dynasty that I should mention, too.)

By all accounts James Kronthal had the makings of a ranking CIA official. He had attended New York's prestigious Lincoln School with Nelson Rockefeller. At Yale, he rejected the advice of his father that he major in business and studied art history instead. He joined the rowing crew and Phi Beta Kappa. Upon earning his degree in 1934, he found employment at the prestigious Frankfurt, Germany banking house of Speyer & Co. (the Kronthal's were blood relations of the Speyer family). Shortly thereafter, he established a network of middlemen to market artwork confiscated by the Nazis from Jewish collections. Kronthal was an eager Quisling, an advisor to Himmler and Goebbels. In fact, their intervention once pried him loose from the Gestapo after he was snared on charges of pedophilia.

His favors to the Nazi Party enriched him, but he was increasingly troubled by Nazi brutality and returned to the States to pursue a graduate degree at Harvard. There he befriended James Jesus Angleton, then a Law School freshman, and a decade later the CIA's highest ranking Soviet specialist. After the raid on Pearl Harbor, Kronthal and Angleton offered themselves to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Kronthal was assigned to Switzerland's Berne Station under Allen Dulles, whose family, like the Speyers, had conducted business with the Nazis as Hitler ascended to power.

After the war Kronthal was assigned to the recovery of art plundered by the Nazis. Millions of paintings and antiques had disappeared. Some of these had made their way to Switzerland and flooded the galleries, sold to finance the rearmament of Germany in the 1930s - with Kronthal's assistance - and the postwar ambitions of leading Nazis. By 1942 galleries of Zurich, Madrid, Laussanne, New York and elsewhere were glutted with plundered artwork, sold at a fraction of their true worth.

Sol Chaneles, former chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, notes that "countless objects can probably be found today in the homes of friends and relatives of Nazi and Nazi authorized art dealers where they were stored 'temporarily.' But the Nazis kept precise, detailed records of their pillage. Incomplete though they are, the records that survive list some 12 million individual items." A postwar inventory by the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Division (MFA&A) counted 16 million pieces, but to date a full inventory has not been attempted.

Following the Anschluss - Germany's annexation of Austria on March 13, 1938 - Hitler oversaw the wholesale confiscation of Jewish property, including the great art collections of barons Louis and Alphonse de Rothschild, the priceless paintings and rare volumes of the library belonging to Baron Butmann, and many more. Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia in May 1939 involved the seizure not only of Jewish-owned art, but also the library of Prague University, the holdings of the Czech National Museum, the palaces of the Schwartzenbergs and Collerdos, and the Lobkowicz collections, which included Flemish painter Breughel's masterpiece, Hay Harvest. The best of this loot was shipped to Germany, as were the Habsburg crown regalia from Vienna and the Bohemian crown jewels from Prague.

Raping nations of the cultural heritage not only demoralized conquered states - the reflected glory of pillaged landmarks of civilization lent the Third Reich an aura of grandeur. Having promised the Austrian city of Linz, where he had attended school, Hitler demonstrated in the Polish campaign of 1939 how highly the acquisition of precious art rated in his strategic military operations. SS units accompanying the invading Nazi troops, provided with detailed information about the location of dozens of works of art, captured the famous altar by Veit Stoss in Cracow, relocated by the Nazis to Berlin, and the legendary Czartoryski collections of coins and relics, Limoges enamels, and engravings by 15th-century artist Albrecht Durer.

An unknown number of invaluable European artifacts have been stored in American bank and Treasury Department vaults since the war, classified a "national security" secret by the CIA. Only 200,000 of the items on the MFA&A inventory have been returned as restitution, primarily to wealthy German families and countries crushed by the Nazis. The CIA kept its share. A rare exception were the Hungarian crown jewels, found in a German salt mine as WW II wound down, returned in 1978 by order of President Jimmy Carter.

Kronthal succeeded Allen Dulles as head of the Berne station in 1947 under the newly formed CIA, an extremely powerful position that put him in charge of most covert operations in Western Europe. (In the immediate postwar period, most of the CIA's recruits were staunch Nazis among them Otto Skorzeny, Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie. In the moral vacuum of cold war realpolitik, they were employed in the importation of drugs, the instigation of foreign coups, the arming of terrorists and death squad training.) Kronthal was given nearly complete authority in the handling of the plundered cultural wealth of Europe.

Unfortunately, Kronthal's pedophiliac urgings rendered him vulnerable to blackmail by the Soviet NKVD intelligence service under Lavrenti Beria, and comprehensive information on CIA activities in Europe soon flowed from Berne to Moscow Center. In 1952 Kronthal returned to Washington to assist in the reorganization of the Agency. A year later he met secretly with his former Berne handler, Allen Dulles, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence. The subject of discussion is not known. The next day, Kronthal's housekeeper entered his bedroom to find him dead, an apparent suicide.

"The death was quickly hushed up," according to late CIA operative William Corson. The Washington police force was called in "to cover up what the CIA wanted hidden.... A chemical analysis failed to determine the cause of death or the contents of the vial found next to Kronthal's body."

So this is the guy that Dulles, according to Talbot's account, affectionately referred to as "Jimmy" and treated like a son? And he didn't know about his proclivities... how? Allen Dulles was the kind of guy who invited even Reinhard Gehlen to visit him and dine at the exclusive Metropolitan and Chevy Chase clubs. Surely Kronthal moved in the same social circles, here and in Switzerland. There's also the irony of the NKVD discovering his weakness via information pilfered from the totally-penetrated Gehlen Organization.

(And of course never mind any of the details about the children who were filmed being raped in Switzerland. The closest you'll get to a description for them is simply "Chinese boys" but that's hardly a surprise.)

I'll add this informative excerpt from The Devil's Chessboard to close out the story:

The investigation into Kronthal's death was quickly taken over by Lieutenant Lawrence Hartnett of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police, a homicide detective with a history of helping tidy up CIA-related problems. Hartnett revealed that Kronthal had left a letter for Dick Helms, in which he revealed that he was "mentally upset because of pressure connected with work," as well as a letter for Dulles. An autopsy concluded that Kronthal had taken his own life, but the report left more questions lingering than it answered, failing to determine the cause of his death or the contents of the vial found in his bedroom. Sometime before his death, Kronthal had mailed a letter to his sister, revealing his homosexuality (which came as no surprise to her) and referring to the "tremendous difficulties" that his sexual identity posed for him. He then signed off in a perplexing way. Kronthal's final words to his sister were, "I can't wait till 1984. Love, Jim." Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother's suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?

The James Kronthal case was, like the Frank Olson matter later that year, another mess that Dulles's Office of Security had to clean up. If Kronthal's death was a suicide, it appeared to be assisted. This is what one high-ranking CIA official, Robert Crowley, later suggested. One way or another, said Crowley - who was interviewed the day after he retired by journalist Joseph Trento - Kronthal was induced to do the right thing for the good of the agency and of the men who had been his professional benefactors. "Allen probably had a special potion prepared that he gave Kronthal should the pressure become too much," Crowley speculated. "Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and the medical people produced all kinds of poisons that a normal postmortem could not detect."

Dulles never spoke in public about Kronthal after he was gone. Kronthal's sister's efforts to extract more information from the CIA about his death proved futile; the press made little effort to investigate the case. James Kronthal was dropped down the dark well where CIA complications disappeared.

Speaking of the Washington MPD, the CIA's Office of Security, and "the dark well where CIA complications disappeared"

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... 49#p562149

(More exotic requests by visiting heads of state were handled by the CIA's own Office of Security. That office ran a "sex shop" through its field offices, requiring chiefs of station to compile dossiers on the sex habits of male and female vice offenders. Such "black books" were compiled in liaison with local police chiefs who allowed Agency employees to photocopy relevant documents. The offenders - whose interests reportedly ranged from S&M to pedophilia - were later approached by the Agency to service the kinky needs of kings, presidents, defectors, and lonely agents in safe-houses that were sometimes equipped with two-way mirrors, microphones, and hidden cameras.)

[MinM]

Listen to David Talbot and Peter Dale Scott converse on 12/11/15


http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=22533

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censor ... r-11-2015/

[lunarmoth]

Has anyone read Dulles' own memoir, The Secret Surrender in which he describes (or boasts about) his secret deal with the SS that ended the Second World War, against Roosevelt's wishes and instructions? http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Surren ... B0006BNW08

I read it a few years ago, but remember vividly his final meeting with Roosevelt in Bethesda MD -- Dulles had flown from Switzerland in a last-ditch effort to sell his secret deal to FDR -- and the next day Roosevelt died of a mysterious stroke. Cause of death was not determined until much later.

Makes one wonder if Kennedy was his first Presidential kill.

[JackRiddler]

Has anyone read Dulles' own memoir, The Secret Surrender in which he describes (or boasts about) his secret deal with the SS that ended the Second World War, against Roosevelt's wishes and instructions? http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Surren ... B0006BNW08

I read it a few years ago, but remember vividly his final meeting with Roosevelt in Bethesda MD -- Dulles had flown from Switzerland in a last-ditch effort to sell his secret deal to FDR -- and the next day Roosevelt died of a mysterious stroke. Cause of death was not determined until much later.

Makes one wonder if Kennedy was his first Presidential kill.

No. I've always fantasized this might be the case, and now you're telling me this? And it's a real book by Dulles, absolutely. However, I just checked, and at least in the 2006 edition on Google Books, the words Bethesda and Maryland do not occur. He describes receiving word of Roosevelt's death on April 12th, but is in Switzerland, where he seems to have been for days, according to his account. So I don't see that his account supports a meeting with FDR just before the latter's death. See p. 122 here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=vspk5 ... lt&f=false

[lunarmoth]

I have the 2006 edition but it's far away. I'm in Greece, the book is in Montreal. I'm going by memory. Maybe not Bethesda, but some suburb of Washington famous for research into eg chemical warfare. It's in the last or next to last chapter. Dulles had been sending telegrams for days, urging FDR to support his deal with Hitler's SS generals and Roosevelt kept refusing. So in a way, that's all you need to know: Roosevelt opposed the secret agreement ending WW2, and it remained secret. But in the final hours of the war, Dulles flew in from Switzerland and met the President -- seems kind of obligatory, given they were at loggerheads over something so important -- and the next day Dulles flew back to Europe. Roosevelt conveniently died. They signed the deal. A German SS officer sent Dulles a note of sympathy, highly ironic.

A nice first step for Operation Paperclip, another Dulles baby.

If you were researching this, it would be useful to have access to FDR's papers e.g. private letters. Unfortunately, they were bought by Canadian media magnate and convicted fraud Conrad Black for $8 million +-, and auctioned off in a Fire Sale to a private buyer for much less a few years later. http://www.theguardian.com/business/200 ... raph.media

[Nordic]

I personally know someone who lied in their own autobiography. Why should we believe Dulles' own account as to where he was on that date unless it's been corroborated by others who weren't in the Dulles camp?

[JackRiddler]

No, that's not the point. lunarmoth says that Dulles' autobiography itself says that he, Dulles, met FDR on the day before FDR's death. This is what I'm trying to corroborate, for whatever it's worth. (Obviously Dulles would lie about everything and anything to his advantage, but that is a reason to believe him if he wrote that he met FDR at that time.) But so far I can't find the evidence for this claim in those parts of Dulles' autobiography viewable online. So now I'll order the book from the library.

[Iamwhomiam]

Maybe not Bethesda, but some suburb of Washington famous for research into eg chemical warfare.

Frederick, Md, home to Ft. Detrick.

[Cordelia]

Congressional Country Club, Bethesda Maryland

"The soldiers arrived in the dead of night, packed shoulder to shoulder in trucks with canvas walls that obscured the route to a secret destination. They were the first World War II recruits for a new covert operation called the Office of Strategic Services, a long, vague name that hid what the soldiers would become: spies, saboteurs, commandos and undercover agents.

The troops were unloaded at a large, bland tent city.

“It was six of us to a tent with a potbelly stove in the middle,” said the O.S.S. veteran Caesar Civitella, describing the night in 1943. “We had been sworn to complete secrecy. They told us to go to sleep, so we went to sleep.”

When the soldiers emerged from their tents in the morning, they turned to glimpse a palace beside the campsite, an immense Mediterranean-inspired clubhouse overlooking a Shangri-La — the rolling hills and golf holes of Congressional Country Club, site of this week’s 111th United States Open.

During World War II, the club’s more than 400 acres about 12 miles outside Washington had been leased to the United States government to serve as the training ground for America’s first intelligence agency, the forerunner to the C.I.A. and American Special Forces."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/sport ... -club.html

[Iamwhomiam]

Thanks, Cordelia. You had it right. Above I should have added a question mark.

I mentioned Ft. Detrick because "Historically, Fort Detrick was the center of the US biological weapons program from 1943 to 1969."

[Cordelia]

Thanks, Cordelia. You had it right. Above I should have added a question mark.

I mentioned Ft. Detrick because "Historically, Fort Detrick was the center of the US biological weapons program from 1943 to 1969."

Iawia, I think Ft. Detrick should most definitely be included. I was just adding Congressional. Frederick Maryland was long considered an exurb of Washington--an easy (not now) drive north of D.C. and Bethesda.

Also,

National Naval Medical Center, now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Re ... ly_history

directly across the street from....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... th#History

The list of early & current military/medical/research installations, hospitals, labs in that area is endless.

[MinM]

We really need to muddle things again at this stage, where it's been obvious for many years that Allen Dulles, presumably with a nod from the JCS, waved his hand at those who organized the team that shot Kennedy. And now it's becoming common knowledge. Too straightforward! Too much explained! So we're back at Hoover. Can a claim that a mobster ordered a hit because he was mad about Kennedy taking away his goomar be too far behind? ...

Listen to David Talbot and Peter Dale Scott converse on 12/11/15


http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=22533

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censor ... r-11-2015/

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... 543&page=6

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=22578

http://blackopradio.com/archives2015.html