Chapter ThirteenFrom Hiss to WhitewaterThe Cold War was actually very Hot -it claimed real lives and it evoked the common prejudices, hates and fears that all wars evoke. Secretively waged, the atrocities that it produced were also very real. Like trench warfare, the surefire consequence of deeply entrenched prejudices is death and destruction. Deliberately cultivated prejudice, sprung from the view that diplomacy is a futile avenue for peace, produced a rigid, self-defining, Cold war agenda which made targets of the very best [the objective and the independent-minded] and often propelled the careers of the very worst [the ideologically inclined demagogue] . World War I was followed by the Treaty of Versailles, the imposed peace treaty that allegedly sowed the seed that produced a tyrant like Hitler, and the smouldering ashes of the second World War were still hot when the spectre of the Cold War emerged. Dominated by hysteria over the Soviet-American rivalry, the Cold War produced an intense degree of emotion, conflict, controversy, fear, paranoia and hatred that divided Americans into two opposing camps -one leaned towards the effort to achieve peace through international cooperation, the other towards the demand to achieve peace through military confrontation. The Soviet impulse to spread Communism exasperated anti-Communist hysteria and facilitated the opportunity to exploit fear and paranoia through the deliberate exaggeration about the "other side's" capacity to spread Communism. Preaching the need to be more violent, more ruthless and more secretive than the Communists themselves, Cold War zealots routinely violated individual human rights and the Constitution, in an anti-Communist crusade which claimed the lives of some of the very best and very brightest. The casualties of the effort to outwit the "evil empire" by deploying totalitarian tactics are people like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. Having created an atmosphere which ultimately hinged upon peculiar delusions rather than upon democratic ideals, Cold War zealots declared war on Communists abroad and on people erroneously deemed to be subversive, at home. The undeclared civil war captured widespread attention in the 1950's, when Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that 205 members of the State Department were members of the American Communist party. McCarthy's unproven charges were either a delusion or a publicity hoax which sought to generate support for his crusade against Communism. McCarthyites branded, targeted, and destroyed people not because of anything they had done, but for what they believed in, and as long as they successfully manufactured fear and hysteria, they were in a position to exploit it. McCarthy was ultimately discredited, but people who had supported him and who shared his views soldiered on and tyrants like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover kept the McCarthyite spirit alive. It was in fact Richard Nixon who had actually ushered in the McCarthy era when he targeted and destroyed the promising career of Alger Hiss. A highly respected State Department official since 1936, Hiss was branded a Communist because he did not manifest the brand of ignorance and paranoia that McCarthy had tried to popularize. In 1945, Alger Hiss was the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and like most Americans, he embraced the belief that the United Nations was the best hope for world peace. When the San Fransisco conference worked out the United Nations Charter, Hiss articulated the general intention when he said, "we had high hopes that disputes could be settled in advance so that the Assembly would be what Americans called the town meeting of the world. The United Nations promised peace. But in a more nationalistic sense, it appealed because it was here in the United States". In retrospect, the San Fransisco conference controversy foreshadowed the Cold War at home, because instead of fulfilling the promise of the United Nations charter, leaders like Hiss were targeted and destroyed by zealots like Richard Nixon. If the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union made it difficult to encourage peace through the United Nations, the antagonism between Cold War zealots and advocates who tried to promote peace through the United Nations, made it impossible because the undeclared civil war at home, derailed a meaningful, peace progress. In 1947, Hiss became an even bigger target when he took office as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It is not at all surprising that Cold war zealots branded him an agent of communism because that's what they did to anybody who did not share their delusions. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a writer and editor for Time magazine, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), to publicly claim that Hiss belonged to a group of government employees who were part of an underground Communist party group. A self-professed cloak-and-dagger expert who claimed to have been an espionage agent for the Soviet Union during the 1930's, Chambers was a bizarre character (like Anne Coulter) who achieved celebrity status by stroking the prejudices of ideologues like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, when Hoover and Nixon were upset over the fact that the House Committee on Un-American Activities did not have and did not merit any credibility, Chambers rescued the imminent dissolution of the otherwise discredited committee, by targeting Alger Hiss. Anti-Communist crusaders claimed that internal Communisim was a serious threat to the national security of the United States and that they required a reputable un-American Activities committee, to purge the imagined threat that domestic Communism posed. President Truman dismissd the evident paranoia of domestic spy chasers and acknowledged the inherent stupidity of un-American hearings that simply diverted attention away from domestic issues. Nixon and Hoover set out to prove that Truman's views were contemptuous, and they set out to "prove" him wrong through the anti-Hiss crusade. The product of the fierce and relentless campaign to brand Hiss a Communist produced a failed prosecution, and Nixon therefore called for a probe to examine Judge Samuel H. Kaufman's fitness for the bench. Needless to say, it is Richard Nixon who failed every test of fitness, and in retrospect, it is quite astounding that he managed to destroy Hiss through the trumped-up charge that branded him a spy. The suspiciously vague allegations were factually bankrupt. They did not prove that Hiss was a Communist but simply attacked his credibility by calling him a liar. Hiss had allegedly lied about having taken classified State Department papers and given them to Chambers and his recollection about an alleged meeting with Chambers was also challenged. The first perjury charge ended in a hung jury, the second trial registered a conviction and the reputation of the grotesque un-American Activities committee was restored -a remarkable fraud where Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison because the hysterics of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover managed to pervert justice. At the outset, a young, cocky Hiss [since he was innocent and could not have possibly imagined what lay in store for him] casually dismissed the charges that branded him a spy and made his accusers look as ignorant as they in fact were. His accusers did not merit a shred of credibility, but if you keep manufacturing evidence without being held accountable, the outcome is quite predictable. Initially, Whittaker Chambers, Hiss's public accuser, did not produce documents to back up his allegations, but when it became clear that the campaign to destroy Hiss demanded "proof", it is not surprising that it was fraudulently produced. It did not take any more effort than to pass on State Department documents to a bizarre character like Chambers, who falsely claimed that he had received them from Hiss himself. According to popular mythology, the statute of limitations to prosecute Hiss for espionage had expired and that is why he was charged with perjury. According to anybody who understands J. Edgar Hoover, Hiss was targeted because he did share the prejudicial opinions of his political adversaries, and the claim that J. Edgar Hoover combated Communist spies through perjury charges is extremely amusing. Richard Nixon gloated over the persecution of Alger Hiss through the following, predictable rant; we must give complete and unqualified support to the FBI and to J. Edgar Hoover, its chief. Mr. Hoover recognized the Communist threat long before other top officials recognized its existence. The FBI in this trial did an amazingly effective job running down trails over 10 years old and in developing the evidence which made the prosecution successful.1 In fact, Richard Nixon was publicly applauding the fact that J. Edgar Hoover routinely perverted the law. Czar Hoover was clearly nothing beyond a single-minded fanatic who routinely "developed evidence" which recognized his peculiar delusions, he did not convict criminals. The astounding paranoia that motivated the overzealous prosecution of Alger Hiss was exposed when Hoover appeared before HUAC and said: ... once public opinion is thoroughly aroused as it is today, the fight against Communism is well on its way. Victory will be assured once Communists are identified and exposed, because the public will take the first step in quarantining them so they can do no harm. Communism, in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life -an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic and like an epidemic a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the Nation.2 In 1988, Alger Hiss wrote a credible book which promotes the claim that he was framed by his accusers and History absolutely supports the fact that he was simply a victim of an illegitimate, anti-Communist witch-hunt. In fact, the paranoia and the lies that targeted people like Alger Hiss are not exclusive. Thousands upon thousands of Americans who were erroneously branded "security risks" were in fact victims of deliberately manufactured anti-Communist hysteria and they were clearly not dangerous, threatening, subversive spies, as branded and targeted by J.Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Nixon routinely exploited the Red Scare and in 1952, he emphasized the fact that Hiss had been successfully prosecuted, to encourage anti-Communist hysteria and to ridicule political adversaries like Adlai Stevenson. Like Hiss, Stevenson did not share the paranoia that motivated Nixon and his cronies and instead of embracing the anti-Communist crusade, he declared war against poverty, injustice and inequality. Richard Nixon used the Hiss case to justify anti-Communist paranoia and to attack Stevenson for not sharing his concerns. Campaigning in Augusta, Maine on September 6, 1952, Nixon said: I think that many good Americans are concerned by the way in which President Truman and Governor Stevenson have both attempted to ridicule and pooh pooh the Communist threat within the United States. Well all will recall that President Truman referred to the Alger Hiss case as a red herring. And now Governor Stevenson comes along and refers to the Communists of the United States as phantoms amongst ourselves. Now I have in my hands here some of the papers that came out of that famous pumpkin that Whittaker Chambers had on his farm. Hundreds of pages of secret State Department documents. They were turned over by Alger Hiss to Chambers, and then they were turned over to the Russians. Now that the Cold War is over and Communist propaganda no longer prevails, the Russians confirmed the fact that Hiss was not a spy and that he never turned over any State Department papers to them. Regardless, during the 1956 campaign, Nixon waved his so-called evidence and used it like a club to beat up on the Democrats. In one particularly grotesque photo-opportunity, Sherlock Nixon, with magnifying glass in hand, shook his head in disgust as he examined a microfilm that Hiss had allegedly turned over to the Russians. Nixon's anti-Communist crusade dominated publicity and Stevenson's reasoned appeal that "what counts is not just what we are against but what we are for" was drowned out by the bellow to declare war against communism. How did Nixon's vulgar, McCarthyite rhetoric survived effective opposition. In the campaign of 1956, Richard Nixon said: Just let me say this last word. Regardless of what happens, I'm going to continue this fight. I'm gonna campaign up and down in America until we drive all the crooks and the Communists and those who defend them out of Washington. Indeed, Richard Nixon spend all his time and effort developing plots to "drive all crooks and the Communists and those who defend them out of Washington". The only glitch of course is that it was Richard Nixon who was the crook and the tyrant who deployed totalitarian security methods to target his enemies. Tragically, Richard Nixon was what he publicly opposed, and his enemies proved to be as relentless as he was. On October 29, 1992, the frail eighty-seven year old Hiss, armed with further evidence that he was simply a target of overzealous McCarthyite's, claimed that the historical record would ultimately absolve him, and it has. The Americans who were targeted and destroyed by the un-American Activities witch hunts were victims, not criminals, and it is their accusers, not they, who have everything to be embarrassed about. Hiss was convicted for perjury on the strength of the allegation that he lied to the Grand Jury about having given State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers and that he denied having met with Chambers after January 1, 1937. But with cohorts like Nixon and Hoover, the anti-Hiss truth squad was a group of felons, liars and fraud artists who routinely perverted justice and Richard Nixon himself betrays the fact that the entire campaign against Hiss was mounted upon the Nixonian spirit to evade the law, when he said Because of Truman's executive order we were not able to get any direct help [in the campaign to "prosecute" Hiss] from J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI. However, we had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful in our investigations.3 TRANSLATION: The campaign to prosecute Hiss was a product, not of an accountable, authorized legal network, but of the secretive, informal network that Hoover and Nixon used to fraudulently destroy their enemies. Working through the apparatus that David Wise called the invisible government, compulsive spies like Howard Hunt defined their existence by the zeal to destroy Communism and routinely engaged illegal, clandestine, political operations, of the sort that destroyed Alger Hiss' political career. What makes covert, illegal operatives like Hunt especially significant in terms of the Hiss case is that they had access to the sort of documents which were used to fraudulently prosecute him. Even as late as 1971, Hunt forged top-secret State Department telegrams, for the purpose of distorting the historical record. Hunt was a predictable extremist who joined the CIA in 1947 or 1948, and his only legacy is the slew of undetected illegalities he managed to get away with, between the occasional blunders that exposed his criminal operations. In recent years, much has been written about a so-called unbroken chain of events which stretch from the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, to the Watergate scandal that cost Nixon the presidency. It is indeed a link with a solid foundation. Like most zealots, Nixon and his cronies were very disturbed by the Kennedy presidency and they shared the commitment to do whatever they could, to satisfy their paranoia-motivated vision of the country. The initial bone of contention was policy over Cuba, until Kennedy started "messing around" in Southeast Asia. As Nixon records in his memoirs: I was disturbed by some of Kennedy's early foreign policy actions. During his first week in office, he was confronted with a crisis involving Communist aggression in Laos. After an initial show of strength in one of his first press conferences, he pulled back and ended up accepting a supposedly neutral government that everyone knew would be heavily influenced by the Communists. I decided that it was time for the administration's honeymoon to end, and I agreed to give a speech before the Executives Club of Chicago on May 5, 196l.4 In retrospect, the telling fact that Richard Nixon began his campaign to oppose the "dangerous" foreign policy course that Kennedy charted is like one of the many smoking guns which links him directly to the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Indeed, Nixon was an extremely relentless, unethical adversary who routinely targeted and destroyed any political opponent who failed to share his prejudicial opinions, and JFK was one of many casualties. When Kennedy was murdered, Richard Nixon and cronies like Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, did not share in the grief of the nation, they shared the need to produce an alibi to prove that they were in no way responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On the day of the assassination, Richard Nixon was in Dallas surveying the assassination site, and according to his recollection immediately after the assassination, he was not in Dallas.5 The convenient memory lapse is sustained by the fact that Nixon was only in Dallas Texas until 9:05 a.m., on the 22nd of November 1963, having landed at New York's Idlewild at 1:00 p.m., (currently, Kennedy International Airport). In 1978, Nixon's memory improved, as his memoirs disclose the following: Early on the morning of November 22 on the way to the Dallas airport I saw the flags displayed along the motorcade route for the presidential visit.6 Nixon further claimed that he called J. Edgar Hoover on the 22nd of November, to ask if one of those "right-wing nuts" was responsible for murdering President Kennedy. According to Nixon, Hoover's reply was "No, it was a Communist." In other words, in a single day, on November 22nd, 1963, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover had not only reviewed "the crime scene", they had also identified the "criminal", and that is a remarkable admission of guilt on both their parts. Hoover and Nixon, who were both in Texas on the 21st of November 1963, and in retrospect, that is not at all surprising, is it? As a matter of fact, in a vain attempt to prove Oswald's violent temperment, Hoover and Nixon had even promoted the ludicrous claim that "Oswald had been planning to kill me [Richard Nixon] when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she [Marina Oswald] managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so."7 It doesn't get any stranger than that -you need a good psychiatrist to be able to fully explain that delusion of grandeur. Marina Oswald supported this hoax under the threat of deportation, but the suggestion that an intelligent former Marine like Lee Harvey Oswald contemplated the assassination of diametrically opposed politicians is quite preposterous. To be sure, Hoover and Nixon manufactured the fiction they thought they required to cover up the truth about the assassination of JFK, and as we all know. "it's not the crime, it's the cover up, stupid" that exposes the truth. Nixon crony Howard Hunt was also obsessed by the determination to counter reports that he too was in Dallas Texas on the 22nd of November 1963. According to Hunt, he was not in his CIA office in Langley Virginia but with friends in Washington D.C., "And since it is a law of physics that you can't be in two places at the same time", Hunt boldly asserts, "I was not in Dallas Texas." Alright, we get the point. But most Americans are not obsessed by the need to develop alibies to "prove" that they did not murder the President of the United States. Nixon and Hunt were both violent anti-Communist crusaders with a penchant for plotting the assassination of their political enemies. Two of the earliest and most persistent advocates who promoted assassination plots against Castro, Hunt and Nixon were essentially the trusted allies of rogue spies, their rhetoric was not typical, wishful thinking. Quoted in the New York Times on November 22nd after having made a timely evacuation from Dallas, Richard Nixon publicly recognized his anti-Kennedy zeal through the bold assertion. "I am going to work as hard as I can to get the Kennedys out of there. We can't afford four more years of that kind of administration." The day before he made that comment, (November 21, 1963) Hoover and Nixon were at the home of Clint Murchison in Dallas Texas, the oil tycoon who backed Lyndon Johnson, and that certainly set the political stage for the next 8 years, Nixon did not run for the Presidency in 1964. He didn't want to oppose Lyndon Johnson, just Kennedy, and that ultimately betrays the bipartisan collusion that made it practically impossible to expose the truth. Political pundits claim that Richard Nixon didn't run because he didn't think he could win in 1964, and that is certainly the joke of the last century. As a matter of fact, the March 23, 1964, issue of Newsweek betrayed Nixon's overinflated ego where he was quoted extolling his own abilities in the following terms: "I feel there is no man who can make the case generally [against the Johnson Administration] more effectively than I can... I have the national name, I have some experience." Astute reporters noted the bizarre relationship between Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, and in 1968, it prompted Hugh Sydney of Life Magazine to write: "Would Lyndon Johnson really mind terribly much if there were a Republican victory? It is curious how the thought recurs in these bastions 1,000 miles apart. There have been so many little things to suggest it and no big things to deny it." Hugh Sydney further noted that Nixon's visit to the LBJ ranch was friendly, intimate and intense, while Humphrey's visit was an untrumpeted affair. 8 Party politics should have made them adversaries, but the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam war had made them allies, and the media was understandably perplexed. Moreover, Richard Nixon believed that Dean Rusk was "one of the ablest and most honorable men ever to serve as Secretary of State," and he did not have to worry about America's foreign policy going astray in 1964 because Kennedy, who essentially claimed the right to veto Rusk when he disagreed with him, was dead. 9 John Ehrlichman further confirmed the fact that Hoover and Nixon were behind-the -scenes, policy activists when he said; Hoover and Nixon had kept in touch during all the year Nixon was out of office. Rose Mary Woods had been Hoover's Nixon contact for the exchange of information and advice between them. Whenever Nixon travelled abroad as a private citizen, the FBI agents who posed as "legal attaches" in U.S. embassies were instructed by Hoover to look after Nixon. Hoover fed Nixon information during those years via Cartha De Loach, and through Lou Nichols, a retired Bureau assistant director who had become a distillery executive. But Hoover was more than a source of information -he was a political advisor to whom Nixon listened.10 Despite the popular belief that shrewd political acumen kept Nixon out of the White House race in 1964, the evidence clearly indicates that behind-the-scenes scheming between cronies dictated the Nixon decision to "wait it out". The Kennedy assassination produced a consensus that crossed party lines and was secretively linked by the relentless zeal to control the foreign policy of the United States and the common ground that united anti-Communist zealots was the obsession to do whatever was necessary to facilitate the opportunity to prosecute the Vietnam war. This is why Richard Nixon facilitated the 1964 Democratic landslide victory of "co-patriot", Lyndon Johnson, despite the fact that he thought that he was the Republican who had the ability to efectively oppse Johnson. And so, like the convoluted plot of a Shakespearean play, the Nixon-assisted Lyndon Johnson landslide foreshadowed the dramatic new beginning in Vietnam -the introduction of the combat divisions that Kennedy had vigorously opposed. Nixon's relentless commitment to the war was long and hard. In 1954, President Eisenhower wrote to Diem to emphasize Washington's determination to keep the Communists out and since then, his overzealous Vice President Richard Nixon was determined to do whatever he perceived to be necessary to defeat the Communists in Southeast Asia. The profound philosophical conflict between Richard Nixon's declaration of war against Communism and Kennedy's tendency to focus upon the root of a problem was glaringly exposed during the Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960. Regarding Cuba, for example, Nixon believed that the Eisenhower administration of which he was a part of had followed a proper course and that the American effort to free Cuba would succeed. Kennedy criticized Nixon for having paved the conflict as early as 1955 and for having failed to use the influence of the United States to persuade Batista to hold free elections in 1957 and 1958. Kennedy claimed that American policy in Cuba ignored the needs of the Latin Americans and supported the cause of a corrupt dictator rather than the cause of freedom. Nixon view of freedom did not match Kennedy's. As far as he was concerned, only those who violently opposed Communism without reservation, were viewed to be on the side of freedom. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was in a quandary over what to do about Cuba, and he sought everybody's advise including the opinion of Richard Nixon. Nixon didn't hesitate to take the opportunity to encourage a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. In his own words: I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in. There are several justifications that could be used, like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base in Guatahamo. I believe that the most important thing to do at this point is to get Castro and communism out of Cuba.11 The implications of this extreme foreign policy divergence between Nixon and Kennedy are rather clear and obvious. Kennedy used his intelligence in effort to contain military involvement whereas Richard Nixon entertained "proper legal cover" schemes to promote the need for war. Regarding Vietnam, the glaring distortion behind the claim that Johnson and Nixon inherited Kennedy's war, is a product of excessive propaganda and foolish punditry. In actual fact, Nixon, Johnson, Hoover and the like, "engineered" the Vietnam war. Moreover, the power that Nixon and Hoover cultivated was not strictly official. The home of Clint Murchison for example, where Hoover and Nixon met on November 21, 1963 to plan the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination was in itself a powerhouse of influence beyond policymaking in Washington. Murchison, a wealthy oil baron in Dallas Texas, owned everything from the Dallas Cowboys to publishing house, Henry Holt and Company, to the racetrack where Hoover placed his $100 bets, to the luxurious Del Charro Motel in California where Hoover vacationed annually free of charge, to oil-gas interests... As a corrupt benefactor of the "business climate" that J. Edgar Hoover encouraged, it is not surprising that Murchison's operations were evidently tailor-made to suit the fancy of Director Hoover. Murchison was the recipient of huge loans from Teamster's pension funds, and since Hoover shaped the politically correct, dissent-free membership of the Teamsters by blacklisting the so-called un-Americans within, the patriotism that Hoover defined was based on unsavory collusion. Like Hoover and Nixon, Mafia boss Carlos Marcello was also a Murchison associate (which explains Hoover's refusal to acknowledge the existence of organized crime) and this is the nature of the wealthy allies who provided Nixon and Hoover the kind of power, independence and unaccountability that the Mafia demanded. It is therefore not surprising to note that the Murchison financial conglomerate was a politically motivated empire which "fronted" clandestine schemes of the sort that Nixon and Hoover thrived upon, and the nature of the meeting at Murchison headquarters in Dallas Texas on the 21st of November 1963, is therefore quite understandable, in retrospect. The biggest known financial conglomerate which served as a front for clandestine intelligence operations was the empire of Howard Hughes, and like Murchison, all his associates were "pure patriots" -men like Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, James Jesus Angleton... The private resources of "patriots" like Hughes sheltered them from public accountability, not historical scrutiny. These people were so secretive and so paranoid, the following epigram in a novel by Howard Hunt manifests their total withdrawl from every sense of genuine loyalty: It is in the political agent's interest to betray all the parties who use him and to work for them all at the same time, so that he may move freely and penetrate everywhere. These elusive spies initially engaged the effort to kill Castro, and when that did not pan out, they justified their failure by blaming it on others, specifically, the President John F. Kennedy, because he did not endorse their fanaticism. It is therefore not surprising that they eventually turned their attention (and their resources) to assassinate perceived political enemies like John F. Kennedy. The transference of the perceived need to assassinate Castro was very clear and obvious. By the fall of 1963, the Kennedy administration denied Cuban exiles and right wing zealots the opportunity to continue to use the United States as the training ground to mount an anti-Castro paramilitary assault, and Cold War zealots began to transfer their wrath to the so-called Communist at home, the President of the United States. Howard Hunt appears to have spent a lifetime embracing anti-Kennedy plots. As late as 1971, long after Kennedy's death, he forged Vietnam cables, in effort to distort his legacy, blacken his reputation and ultimately conceal the fact that Kennedy was murdered because he actually opposed the zeal to embrace a futile, military engagement in Southeast Asia. When Howard Hughes died, Howard Hunt's fellow former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton stepped forward to praise a "co-patriot" in the following words: Howard Hughes! Where his country's interests were concerned, no one knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him. He was a great patriot.12Angleton, the CIA's first head of counterintelligence held on to his position for twenty-seven years before scandal claimed his career. The so called spook's spook was so secretive that he has attained a legendary reputation within as well as outside of the CIA. When Hoover died, it was Angleton who was reportedly spotted moving boxes and loading them into the trunk of his car before driving away with all the dirty laundry. After the death of former FBI agent Guy Banister, the unofficial head of operations against Castro, Hoover's FBI cleaned out his office. The informal alliance between crusading zealots and the government limited public exposure and J. Edgar Hoover, the Czar of corruption, successfully evaded public accountability. Until 1947, American intelligence was concentrated in the hands of the FBI and the military and that gave Hoover the head start he needed to be in the loop of practically every covert operation. When Harry Truman created the CIA, Hoover wanted to be the head of the newly created spy agency as well as the Director of the FBI and while he was officially denied the official privilege of being America's spymaster, in practise, he actually was. Hoover tightened his grip upon the intelligence community through covert alliances with spooks like James Jesus Angleton, he did not seek Truman's approval to access CIA resources. And when they required an even deeper cover, they used the Mafia (which was not formally recognized so it didn't even exist as far as law enforcement was concerned) and wealthy patrons like Howard Hughes, to evade accountability, but their operations were not exclusively below the radar of public disclosure. In 1967, a presidential directive created the joint CIA/FBI operation which involved Angleton's counterintelligence staff and was charged with the responsibility to determine whether the anti-Vietnam war movement was foreign sponsored. By 1971, the CIA was infiltrating protest groups. Like Hoover's FBI, the CIA was used for political purposes and it engaged clandestine schemes that involved wiretaps, mail opening, break-ins and planting bugs. At the behest of Lyndon Johnson, the routine abuse of power that Hoover's FBI practised was transplanted to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton. Lyndon Johnso was fortunate enough to survive this abuse, but precedent did not spare Richard Nixon. When Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was assigned the responsibility to investigate the Nixon White House, Nixon repeatedly stonewalled the investigation and ordered the Attorney General of the United States to fire Cox. When Richardson refused, Nixon predictably appealed to his perverted views about the national security interest to say, "I'm sorry that you choose to prefer your purely personal commitments to the national security." Fortunately, Richardson and Cox were motivated more by an interest in law and order and less by the abuses that Johnson and Nixon had routinely deployed. Undaunted, Nixon ordered the FBI to seal off the office of the special prosecutor. After the Hiss case, Nixon had evidently developed the notion that he could break any law and get away with it as long as he appealed to what he termed national security interests, and that became quite clear and obvious in 1972 when he compared the indefensible Watergate scandals to the Hiss case, because in his mind, it was all the same -a game of creating appearances and destroying political enemies. Nixon betrayed the ugly fact that Watergate and the Hiss case were ultimately comparable at an impromptu news conference on October 5, 1972 when he said that the FBI Watergate probe made the 1948 investigation of Alger Hiss seem like a "Sunday school exercise."13 The entire truth about Watergate was never exposed and Nixon is quite content that it never will, because, in his own words, "the factual truth [about Watergate] could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one's knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else's."14 Nixon believes that the judgment of history depends on who writes it, and he evidently thinks that the truth has been sufficiently buried deep enough to deny the opportunity to expose it. Hehas no concept of the fact that the only purpose of genuine history is to describe an event as it happened, and that by definition, somebody who uses his or her perverted sense of the national security in effort to conceal the truth is a propagandist, not a historian. It is no surprise that a sufficient number of Nixon apologists, propagandists and/or incompetent historians have been deployed in effort to revive the reputation of the disgraced Richard Nixon, but the deeper one probes, the worst Nixon becomes. In particular, Nixon allies like Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy and Frank Sturgis have clearly established a track record of plotting murder in effort to destroy their political enemies, and their well established reputation is solidly documented. In fact, the relationship between Sturgis and Nixon stretches back to the Eisenhower years when they were co-patriots in the struggle to assassinate Castro. The bizarre assassination plots they engaged makes the assassination of John F. Kennedy the "Sunday school picnic" of their covert operations. For example, they had tried to brainwash Castro's mistress, in effort to turn her into a CIA-trained assassin. The had even tried to murder Castro through a poisoned cigar, merely one of an string of the strange plots that Sturgis enthusiastically embraced. What the public has been told about Watergate is absolutely uneventful, compared to a thorough probe of the players involved and the magnitude of their covert operations. Sturgis had initially supported the revolution and fought side by side with Castro, but anti-Communist hysteria turned the former object of an honorable revolution into a target of execution. It is an interesting history that is easy to confuse, because the details/the nuances are not adequately understood, In 1963 President Kennedy declared war on the paramilitary operations of anti-Castro extremists and they responded with disdainful comments like: "In Florida, where we were once welcome, we must now operate in the hills of Escambray. We are watched like criminals." By the fall of 1963, former soldiers-of-fortune like Sturgis, who had expected the cooperation of their government, were primed to oppose a new enemy -not Castro, the Communist abroad, but Kennedy, the so-called Communist at home. The war between John F. Kennedy and anti-Castro exiles made Nixon allies like Frank Sturgis lifetime operatives in the plot to cover up the truth about murder of president Kennedy. In 1977, the New York Times reported that Frank Sturgis was arrested for threatening a woman to prevent her from testifying before the Assassinations Committee. Marita Lorenz told police that three days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, she accompanied Sturgis and Oswald on a drive from Miami to Dallas. Under the circumstances, it is easier to believe that Sturgis was a player in the effort to frame Oswald than to doubt his involvement. After all, this is the same person who had tried to brainwash Castro's mistress into becoming a trained assassin for the CIA. Framing Oswald was "a Sunday school picnic" in comparison. Serious researchers no longer doubt the Kennedy assassination involvement of Watergate burglars Hunt and Sturgis. According to correspondent Ted Szulz, "Hunt was serving in Mexico City at the time of Oswald's supposed visit to the Cuban Embassy. Hunt denies this."15 Szulz had no motive to lie. In 1975, an anonymous sender in Mexico City send U.S. researchers the following letter dated November 8, 1963, proven to be the authentic writing of Lee Harvey Oswald: Dear Mr. Hunt,Just two weeks prior to the Kennedy assassination, Hunt was evidently seeking to "employ" Lee Harvey Oswald in some sort of operation that was too fuzzy for Oswald to understand, and isn't that because he was "just a patsy"? When Hunt, Sturgis and Liddy bugged the offices of the Democratic National Committee and made their escape without detection, the game was over -no detection, no crime. It is only when the microphones they had planted failed to work that they went back and got caught. Nixon's cronies were saboteurs and intelligence operatives who were versed in the art of clandestine operations, and they routinely got away with murder because they covered their tracks. It is popular to assert that they were incompetent amateurs because they got caught -but Watergate was the exception. The criminal operations of former FBI and CIA agents Liddy and Hunt and their Cuban cohorts did not begin or end with Watergate -they were essentially career criminals who routinely sabotaged American domestic politics in the name of the national security. The fact that they broke into buildings, planted bugs, and photographed documents in effort to re-elect Nixon, is not evidence of a "third rate burglary" as it is commonly misrepresented. It is the tip of the iceburg. John Dean did not betray Nixon, as is commonly asserted, he controlled the damage. The Nixon White House had managed to subvert independent disclosure by providing John Dean the opportunity to coach witnesses. When you are absolutely guilty, the best defence is to contain the consequences, and that is what John Dean did for Richard Nixon. Retired FBI agent Angelo Lano exposed the fact that the FBI investigation had been compromised when he said: We had no idea that John Dean was getting the information. And what John Dean was doing with the information is circumventing our investigation. Every avenue that we tried, John was either there or was about to approach somebody -debrief them and I don't know exactly what he said to them -whether he told them don't say this or don't say that.16Working closely with acting director of the FBI Pat Gray, Dean cultivated a position where he selectively exposed only what he could not cover up rather than everything he knew. As Lano explains: What was happening was, the acting director Pat Gray, insisted that certain material that we were gathering during the course of the investigation be made available to him either on a daily basis or every seven days, in the form of a report -and that report would consist of hundreds of documents. Unbeknownst to us, at the time it was happening, he was furnishing the results of interviews that were being conducted all across the country, as well as in the D.C. area, to John Dean. And of course, John Dean knew every step that we were about to take.17Those who claim that John Dean betray Richard Nixon do not understand the fact that he essentially protected him by putting on a show that effectively blocked a substantive probe of Richard Nixon's massive, criminal operations. Needless to say, the details that Dean did not expose were far more serious than the so-called "third rate burglary," the term commonly used to dismiss the seriousness of Watergate. The White House Transcripts, the New York Times release about the Watergate tapes, provide some insight about matters that Dean failed to disclose. In particular, an obscure quotation which ties him directly to the Kennedy assassination cover up, reads as follows: Sept. 16. At a news conference, President Nixon says, would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through.. the complicity in the murder of Diem.18This distortion which places blame for the Vietnam war on the assassination of Diem, (rather than on the Kennedy assassination which provided the opportunity to engage combat troops) betrays the organized deception that Howard Hunt also engaged, when he forged diplomatic cables to create the false impression that Kennedy had ordered the murder of Diem. The attempt to create false documentation to "prove" that assassination of Diem is responsible for American involvement in Vietnam war, was supposed to cover up the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy, but it has not. Nixon always invented a delusion or a cover story to misrepresent actions like his obsession to reverse Kennedy's morally grounded foreign policy agenda and every explanation was contrary to reason. He called himself a peacemaker, but he waged war. The U.S. dropped more than 7 million tons of bombs on Indochina -nearly three times the tonnage dropped in World War II and Korea combined, and he bragged because...? He claimed that he never obstructed justice but he always did. He called himself a patriot but he deployed the tactics of a terrorist. He claimed the duty to protect the national security interests of the United States but he provoked the greatest constitutional crisis in American history. The following passage from his diary betrays the scope of his ignorance, hatred and intolerance: When I saw some of the antiwar people and the rest, I'd simply hold up the "V" or the one thumb up; this really knocks them for a loop because they think this is their sign. Some of them break into a smile. Others, of course, just become more hateful. I think as the war recedes as an issue, some of these people are going to be lost souls. They basically are haters , they are frustrated, they are alienated-they don't know what to do with their lives.His reference to Kent State and the so-called weak, pitiful professors who scrambled around Nixon for protection, betrays the psychosis of a deep and hopeless delusion. At Kent State, students who were protesting the war in Cambodia were confronted by National Guardsmen [or Nixon cronies in disguise] who calmly levelled guns, aimed and fired into a crowd of students. When it was all over, four students were dead, eleven were wounded, and Richard Nixon appears to be elated because he evidently thinks that Kent State betrayed "the weakness of the professors." It appears as if the hateful Richard Nixon was motivated by the obsession to make the cost of dissent very clear, but that is not what freedom is. Jeffrey Glen Miller, one of the victims, had reached the decision that he would never go to Vietnam to kill, and he wanted to make his intent clear. He was shot in the head. Bill Schroeder was a nineteen year old sophomore who was disgusted by the thought of the senseless killing. He was shot and killed. Sandra Lee Scheuer was filled with hope, humour and the will to live. She was shot and killed. Allison Krause was an honour student who despised the fact that Nixon had called anti-war demonstrators "bums." She was shot and killed. Richard Nixon was determined to prove that the Vietnam war was a moral and strategic imperative and anyone who did not agree was weak and deluded. he responded by defiantly escalating the bombing. Predictably, he responded to the Kent State massacre by blaming the protestors, and he made that very clear when he wrote, "When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy."20 There were about five hundred students and about one hundred National Guardsmen at Kent State. There was no legitimate reason to indiscriminately fire into a crowd of students without provocation. But as far as Richard Nixon was concerned, dissent was provocation. The students threatened to interfere with the bombing of Cambodia, and that "invited tragedy" that Nixon conveniently justified when he said: "Public opinion seemed to rally during the weeks after Kent State, when the military success of the Cambodian operation became increasingly apparent."21The astounding, relentless capacity to justify every brutality is overwhelming. Nixon cited his remarkable gallup poll, 65% approval rating and the pleasing survey which indicated that 58% blamed "demonstrating students" for Kent State while only 11% blamed the National Guard.22 In retrospect, 100% should have blamed Richard Nixon for all the violence because he was evidently behind every assassination. Nixon and his cronies were essentially criminals who were motivated by their national security-inspired delusions, and as far as they were concerned, Kent State was simply a public relations triumph. The Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign and most Americans thought they had heard the last of Nixon -well they had, but that was only because Nixon prudently kept a low profile -even though he continued to carry a big stick. As Nixon biographer Sam Anson has uncovered, Nixon has had an almost uninterrupted capacity to influence White House decision making. Code-named the Wizard, Richard Nixon had direct access to the Ford White House through an elaborate secret communication set up. Nixon's almost unbroken link to the White House was briefly interrupted by the Carter administration. He predictably loathed Carter because he wasn't fanatically anti-Communist. When Reagan won the election, Nixon's white House power was omnipotent because Reagan was a hands-off President who gave Nixon and CIA Director, Bill Casey the opportunity to direct American foreign policy. Historian, Sam Anson described the incredible degree of influence that Nixon exercised over the Reagan White House when he said: Nixon gets into his office every morning about 7:30. By noon he Will have made and taken 40 calls, most of them to Washington. First he calls the White House and talks to (presidential counsellor) Ed Meese, (national security adviser) Bud McEarlane, and President Reagan. Then he starts working the State Department. Everyone from (Secretary of State) George Schultz on down. He not only gives advice on foreign policy, but on politics in general. What he says is taken very seriously.23The tone of the Reagan era was set during the election campaign, when Ronald Reagan offered Casey the opportunity to be his campaign manager. Reagan was in awe of the intelligence spook who organized intelligence missions behind enemy lines for Eisenhower during World War II and as soon as Casey joined the campaign, Reagan said: "You're the expert Bill. Just point me in the right direction and I'll go".24 Richard Nixon, Casey's ideological twin, became the senior partner of the foreign policy that was shaped in the 1980's. Ronald Reagan was nothing more than a trusting subject who enthusiastically embraced the path that Nixon and Casey paved. Absolute loyalty defined the relationship between Casey and Nixon. In 1970, when anti-war demonstrators disturbed President Nixon, Bill Casey let it be known that anyone who opposed the war was misinformed and irresponsible. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Bill Casey and Richard Nixon claimed the right to define the course of American foreign policy, and Casey'ds unswerving support for Nixon made it all possible. Casey had even supported Nixon through the Watergate crisis when he wrote: All of your friends, all of us who view you as a national asset with a historic mission, and the general public, want to pull all the political shenanigans behind us and get on with the vital things to be done.25The dirty tricks that these like-minded fanatics deployed to get Ronald Reagan are astounding, as betrayed in the book, October Surprise, which exposes the plot to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran until after the election, to sabotage Jimmy Carter's prospect of winning the election. Vigorously denied, the allegation appears to be true, as suggested by an obscure New York Times story which exposed the fact that Reagan's campaign manager, who was presumably supposed to be planning Reagan's election strategy in America, was actually abroad. A brief item in the New York Times dated July, 30 1980, expsed the absence of Reagan's campaign manager in the following terms; "William Casey plans to open negotiations with the Right to Life group when he returns from a trip abroad." The Casey/Nixon agenda defined the Reagan years, and the so-called Reagan revolution was in fact a re-visitation of the lawless Nixon years. Accomplished in the art of plotting clandestine schemes, Nixon and Casey were ushered in an unprecedented reign of terror with a vengeance. Carter had interrupted the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House and the first order of producing the dissent-free environment they demanded was the prompt "liquidation" priority target, John Lennon. On December 2, 1980, Richard Nixon betrayed the pre-planned agenda of the Reagan White House in his book, The Real War, wherin he claimed confidence in "the background of those new policies that will now begin to emerge as the new administration takes office." Nixon's book paints the paranoid portrait of a nation waging an obsessive battle to win World War III, and he made himself the hero of this delusional mythology. The home front of Nixon's so-called Real War was the realm of ideals and ideas, and according to the perversity he actively promoted "we will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals" as long as the battle is waged "in the name of that supreme priority."26 Having extolled the virtue of waging a covert, unethical war to support friends and destroy enemies, Nixon essentially justified his absolute commitment to do whatever was necessary, including the need to murder a "peacnik" like John Lennon, because in the words of Nixon's absolute delusion, "in World War III there is no substitute for victory."27 Committed to contain communism through the methods and means that totalitarian states deploy, Richard Nixon was the sort who was even able to assert that "senseless terrorism is often not as senseless as it may seem. To the Soviets and their allies, [and to those who deploy their tactics] it is a calculated instrument of national policy."28 This is the logic which made Richard Nixon believe that the calculation behind the Kent State massacre was legitimate, and that is what makes him and his cohorts the biggest terrorists in American history. This is not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it is his defined rules of engaging his enemies, clearly proclaimed through his stated, absolute determination to do whatever was necessary in the multi-fronted effort to win World War III, and sponsoring the murder of a so-called trendy like John Lennon, was par for the course. In his own words: If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the "trendies" -those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, fount the fashionable protests and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given to them and their causes romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. Whatever the latest cause they embrace -whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness -it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.29Since Nixon believed that the murder of a "trendy" like John Lennon was absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of World War III, does anybody doubt his role in plotting the assassination of John lennon? Is anybody in fact that stupid? In Nixon's own terms, "in a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless."30 Has Richard Nixon convinces the world that the murder of John Lennon was "meaningful"?" The road to the murder of John Lennon had a long history of intrusive, illegal surveillance and harassment. In particular, the Nixon White House sought to "neutralize" Lennon's capacity to organize an antiwar movement and Hoover's FBI "policed" Lennon while the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport him because of a 1968 conviction for possession of cannabis in London. The FBI surveillance of Lennon produced a stack of papers twenty-six pounds in weight, not to mention documents which remain classified or are "withheld in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy."31 In 1969, John Lennon protested the Vietnam war by organising bed-ins for peace. In his own words: The point of the bed-in, in a nutshell, was a commercial for peace as opposed to war, which was on the news everyday in those days. Everyday there was dismembered bodies, napalm, and we thought, "Why don't they have something nice in the papers?"32A proposed bed-in in New York did not materialize, because, as Lennon recounted: We tried to do it in New York but the American government wouldn't let us in. They didn't want any peaceniks, so we ended up doing it in Montreal and broadcasting back across the border.33Indeed, the effort to politically silence Lennon was less than accommodating and Lennon's lawyer exposed the full score when he told him that "if he did anything more along the lines of this anti-war rock and roll campaign he would almost certainly be immediately deported, but if he cooled it, through various legal manoeuvres, he might be able to stay."34 John Lennon did what he had to do to avoid being deported. At the same time, even though he was politically silenced, FBI harassment persisted and he appeared on the Dick Cavett show to expose the fact that he was being followed by the FBI and that his phones were being tapped. The FBI had indeed mounted a major offensive operation against Lennon, but many thought he was crazy and Lennon related the common scepticism in the following terms: "Lennon, oh you big-headed maniac, who's going to follow you around?" Most people did not understand or fathom the fact that Hoover's FBI did not have anything better to do. It was not until after the resignation of Richard Nixon that Lennon's immigration case was thrown out of court and in 1976, his Green Card finally came through. For the next four years, Lennon retired from all forms of public life, and in 1980, the self-styled peace advocate came out of retirement and prepared to mount a crusade to "turn the world on to peace." At the same time. Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were setting the stage for the Reagan declaration of war against Communism in Central America, and peaceniks like Lennon were caught in the crossfire. Reagan's foreign policy advocates prepared to satisfy the unfinished agenda of the Nixon White House and serious threats were promptly eliminated. The so-called lessons of the 1960's were very close to the hearts of "time warp patriots" who blamed the loss of the Vietnam war on the antiwar movement and they resented the influence of activists like Lennon to the point of paranoia. In short, Reagan's upcoming, anti-Communist crusade could simply not tolerate an invigorated John Lennon and "he had to be cut down before the reasons for his death became obvious: before Reagan took the oath of office on 20 January 1981, before the world realized that Lennon was coming back to being the old Lennon, the man who sang Give Peace A Chance.35 In 1969, the Vietnam war had prompted the largest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the United States and young people who rallied around Lennon's protest songs had infuriated the Nixon White House. Kent State massacre was immediately followed by protesters who circled the White House and chanted "all we are saying is give peace a chance" and Richard Nixon was obviously prepared to do the exact opposite, in 1980. when Nixon was President, Hoover had dispatched his political police to "initiate discreet efforts to locate subject [John Winston Lennon] and remain aware of his activities and movements." Hoover died less that a year after the Republican convention in 1972, and Lennon's murder in 1980 was merely a product of "unfinished business". An obvious casualty of the Nixon navigated, Reagan revolution, the dominance of Richard Nixon's influence is not doubted by anybody. Even Reagan noticed the fact that Nixon's extraordinary White House authority practically exceeded that of the official President. After leaving the White House, the Reagan's were disturbed by what they perceived to be "Reagan Bashing" by the Bush team, and it was Nixon who contacted Bush's Chief of Staff, to intercede on behalf of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. "Nixon made the call, telling Sununu that attacking the Reagans was counterproductive for the White House. For whatever reason, the attacks stopped".36 Nixon did not physically occupy the White House, but "the replica" was indeed the actual source of White House power. When Richard Reeves interviewed Richard Nixon in his "exile sanctum" in New York in 1980, his apartment was arranged like the Oval Office. "The flags, the couch, the chairs were just like it..." Indeed, Richard Nixon was so obsesses with his role-play, that when the interview was concluded, he escorted Reeves to the supplies closet "because the closet door in the faux Oval Office was in the same place as an exit in the real Oval Office."37 It is therefore clear and obvious that the ultimate leader of the powerful, unaccountable, parallel government within-a-government that Oliver North operated was Richard Nixon himself -which probably explains the public controversy between Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. The secret government "was believed to have grown out of a group Mr. Casey set up during the final weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign, called the October Surprise Group.38 Casey and Nixon were evidently full of surprises and on the very day that the press headlined the announcement that a "local screwball" murdered Lennon, the political backdrop was the innocuous headline, Reagan set to announce cabinet. The claim that John Lennon was the target of a political assassination is not original. In 1989, Fenton Bresler, an intelligent British Barrister wrote a book called The Murder of Lennon, and he raises many of the serious questions about Lennon's murder that have been almost totally ignored. In particular, he convincingly argues that Mark Chapman, Lennon's assassin was brainwashed by the CIA. Indeed, all the "traditional" motivations that are ascribed to Mark Chapman are relatively absurd compared to Bresler's analysis. On December 17, 1992, Chapman was interviewed on Larry King Live, and that was certainly an eye opener in terms of exposing the real Mark Chapman. In a nutshell, Chapman reflected the demeanour of a cold, dispassionate, methodical, cold blooded murderer. In particular, Chapman ascribed a phoney motivation to account for Lennon's murder, and that is certainly the mark of a cover up. On the one hand, Chapman claimed that he "was so bonded with Lennon" and on the other, he boldly asserted that he "struck out at something he perceived to be phoney, and that extraordinary contradiction, reflects duplicity, deception and the fact that Mark Chapman was not a "lone nut", he was a consensus fanatic like Richard Nixon. The most striking, consistent element in the short adult life of Mark Chapman is his affiliation to the YMCA. Indeed, he had given serious consideration to applying himself to a career with the International Division of the YMCA. When he was arrested, one of the few items that Chapman left "on display" for the police to find was the following letter of recommendation from David Moore, then stationed at the Geneva office of the World Alliance of YMCAs: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERNIt is certainly not an exaggeration to assert that the YMCA was essentially Mark Chapman's surrogate family. But what is more significant however is the mysterious, troubling implications of the fact that Chapman was not a "lone nut." In 1967, Ramparts Magazine exposed the fact that the CIA used students to gather information from abroad and in the 1970's and 1980's, the CIA was evidently using YMCA patrons as spies. Philip Agee, the first-known CIA defector blew the cover on the CIA/YMCA link, and Mark Chapman's YMCA link was evidently too substantial and too "political" to preclude a CIA link as well. In 1975, Mark Chapman, the vehemently anti-Communist Southerner applied to represent the YMCA as a counsellor in the Soviet Union, but that bid was denied because Chapman did not speak Russian. Instead, Mark visited Lebanon, where, according to radio commentator, Mae Brussell, the CIA maintained training camps for assassins at the time.40 Whether Chapman was a trained CIA assassin or not, his Beirut experience had a profound impact on his life, and following narrative indicates that Mark's harrowing overseas experience produced a very deep, psychological impact which was ripe for exploitation: June 1975 seems to have been the first time that Mark heard gunfire, the whizzing of bullets, bombs bursting nearby and the screams of people in pain and dying. It etched deep into his consciousness. This "gentle" man, who hated violence, came back from Beirut with a cassette recording that he had actually made of the barbarous sounds of warfare. He played it time and again to anyone in Atlanta who would listen. Says Harold Blankinship: "He played us this recording he had made in his hotel room at the YMCA in Beirut of all the fighting going on. You could hear the shooting, etc. That could have affected him. He was real up-tight about it, I know that." Whether intentional or otherwise, Lennon's future killer had indeed been "bloodied" in war-torn Beirut.41 The violence of war-torn Lebanon was Chapman's first, it wasn't his last firsthand look at the miserable dislocation that war produced. After Beirut, Chapman worked with Vietnamese refugees in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where the YMCA was setting up services to accommodate them. Since the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled to the United States and in the eyes of "time warp" patriots, antiwar activists [phonies] like John Lennon were directly responsible for that particular "mess." And so, Mark Chapman, who travelled the world at the behest of the CIA-linked YMCA, was ripe for exploitation -he was an ideal brainwash victim -he had witnessed firsthand the world disorder that so-called phonies like John Lennon were responsible for. Indeed, Mark Chapman dabbled in the philosophy of "time warp" patriots who blamed the 1960's for every ill in society, and that sort of mentality is transmitted from "patriot" to receptive ear, it did not develop in Chapman alone. Since he murdered John Lennon, Mark Chapman boasted: "I murdered a man. I took a lot more with me than just myself. A whole era ended. It was the last nail in the coffin of the '60's."42 After killing his target and simultaneously satisfying the paranoia of "time warp patriots" who are in a perpetual war against the so-called 1960's, Chapman did not flee the murder scene, he calmly started to read his copy of The Catcher in the Rye when amazed New York City police officers arrested him. Chapman obviously wanted to get caught -the implication being that he would plead guilty and the Lennon case would close without investigation. Over the years, when asked why he murdered Lennon, Chapman would direct attention to the book The Catcher in the Rye. That in turn, directs attention towards patriots like George Herbert Walker Bush, who claim to have been most influenced by the books War and Peace and The Catcher in the Rye.43 The Catcher in the Rye is about a "crusade against phoneyness" and Mark Chapman, who used the assassination of Lennon to promote the book, claimed that he was motivated by Holden Caulfield, the book's sixteen-year-old "crusader". In a nutshell, Holden Caulfield hated phonies and Mark Chapman's crusade against a "phoney" like Lennon was "ideologically" aligned with the agenda of overzealous "patriots" who were occupied by the obsession to neutralize the influence of popular antiwar activists. In the awkward words of Mark Chapman: "I have a small part in me that cannot understand the world and what goes on in it. I did not want to kill anybody... I fought against the small part for a long time. I'm sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield. The small part of me must be the Devil."44 Seeking to activate the "big part" of Mark Chapman, his "handlers" could have easily exploited his evident compassion for children and made him believe that "phonies" like John Lennon were ultimately responsible for the horror and the dislocation of war. Friends and associates made a point of having observed a very close bond between Mark Chapman and children, and that certainly provided the opportunity to exploit his Achilles heel. In the words of Mark Chapman: "I never wanted to hurt anybody my friends will tell you that. I have two parts in me the big part is very kind, the children I worked with will tell you that."45 Chapman struggled to avoid hurting Lennon but his "big part won" and he took his gun out of his coat pocket and shot Lennon in the chest, in the left arm and in the head. Mark Chapman had evidently mustered up the courage he required to satisfy the agenda of patriots who considered themselves to be exempt from the normal restraint of the law, because in their eyes, the "big picture", the "big part", the national security interest or whatever else they chose to call it, was essentially a license to kill -and John Lennon was clearly a priority target. In the final analysis, the terrifying reality is that the impressionable Mark Chapman is just one of hundreds of thousands of young people who are not appreciably distinct, in the absence of the "exposure" they receive. Under the circumstances, since Chapman travelled the world as a guest of the YMCA, it is reasonable to expect the organization that sponsored Chapman's psychologically harrowing adventures to assume at least some responsibility for the extraordinary mental transformation -from Mark Chapman, the compassionate young man, to Mark Chapman, the awkward, reluctant assassin who had to be prodded, to murder John Lennon. If one looks at the foreign policy direction of the Reagan White House, it is glaringly obvious that "patriots" like Bill Casey and Richard Nixon were steering the course. Clearly, the "invisible prints" of the clandestine, foreign policy strategists who coordinated the entire intelligence apparatus of the government to mount a fierce, unprecedented war against dissent, belong to Casey and Nixon. Richard Nixon made that absolutely clear in The Real War, when he wrote: "I am confident that President Reagan and the members of his administration will have the vision to see what needs to be done and the courage to do it. Nixon's confidence obviously stemmed from the fact that Reagan's inclination to mount an anti-Communist crusade provided zealots like himself the opportunity to use the "acting President" to promote their vision. The Reagan/Bush years are certainly distinguished by the fact that "patriots" were routinely granted license to ignore the law as long as the intended consequence was to advance the President's anti-Communist crusade. The law was routinely violated in the process, and blatant, illegal acts of terror targeted domestic dissidents at home, and entire countries, abroad. Clearly, the CIA deployment of mines in the harbours of Nicaragua was an illegal act of war, and it is not possible to ignore the fact that the Reagan administration routinely disrespected and disregarded the law. Moreover, the paranoid, Nixon assertion that "we will do whatever is necessary" to win World War III, is a clear reflection of the violent, ominous assault that was deployed, to "neutralize" any influential activist who did not think like Richard Nixon's patriots. In the final analysis, the deaths of the people that Nixon targeted were as predictable, as they were tragic. Clearly, The Real War that Nixon waged produced Real Casualties, and "patriots" like Richard Nixon and Bill Casey were directly responsible for slaughter. One of the premises of The Real War was that the need to win on the battlefield was as vital as the need to control the public opinion arena, and the compromise of every worthy American ideal was deemed to be acceptable. After Mark Chapman hammered the so-called final nail in "the coffin of the '60's", Richard Nixon had the audacity to write a book called The Real Peace, and he was so excited about it that he privately printed and distributed it to more than 100 government officials, journalists and friends, before it was published by Little, Brown & Co. Ronald Reagan was officially the President of the United States, but time evidently warped when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stood before a battery of microphones in Washington to brief reporters about their "brain-dead" vision for peace and democracy in Central America. Nixon had just finished testifying before Kissinger's National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (no, Kissinger was not Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State), and one can safely assume that like any predictable ideologue, Nixon simply disseminated propaganda. He certainly did not expose the inspiration behind The Real Peace: Did he get the idea to disparage the word "peace" before or after John Lennon was murdered? In retrospect, one can confidently state that Richard Nixon always targeted his enemies and he always managed to cover up the entire truth about his covert schemes, and since he rose to national prominence through successfully framing Alger Hiss, his positive track record bodes an ominous threat to all of his political enemies. Bill Clinton, the current President of the United States, is certainly the current, primary target of the Nixon agenda, and one can safely assume that he planned to destroy him through the so-called Whitewater scandal. As long as Reagan was the President, Richard Nixon, the cerebral commander-in-chief was able to exercise power, and in 1987, he personally extolled the virtue of "attack politics" in effort to make Robert Dole the next President.46 When Dole failed to win the Republican nomination, George Bush was an acceptable alternative -until Bill Clinton defeated him and became the President of the United States in 1992, and Richard Nixon was deeply offended. In particular, the Democrats lambasted the "decadent" 1980's, and Richard Nixon, who was extremely proud of his so-called "enlightened decade" was absolutely infuriated, and it was only a matter of time before Nixon developed a plan to destroy Clinton -the so-called Whitewater scandal. Indeed, Richard Nixon, the "patriot" who subscribed to the diabolical "assassinations formulae" -destroy your enemies through derogatory fabrication if possible, kill them if necessary, was certainly capable of producing and prone to manufacture a scandal like Whitewater. Nixon may no longer be around to advance his agenda, but "residue zealots' like Gordon Liddy are evidently still seeking to re-elect a Nixon clone. Appearing on Nightilne, on August 25, 1994, Liddy still sounds like he is engaged in a life and death struggle against communism and claimed that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Fidel Castro were the only communists left in the world. Given the obsession and the paranoia that still prevails, Canadian political commentators like Dalton Camp place the so-called Whitewater scandal in perspective when they say. "There can't be much doubt the purpose of Whitewater is to put Clinton off his agenda -notably, health care, which threatens so many powerful interests -and no better way than to flatten Hillary Rodham Clinton in the bargain".47 But despite the obvious facts that Dalton alludes to, an aggressive anti-Clinton crusade repeatedly draws false parallels between Whitewater and Watergate, and evidently seeks to cripple the Clinton presidency in the process. According to Senator Al D'Amato, who spoke to the press on March 8, 1994: It would seem to me, that with all of the attempts to stop a special prosecutor at first and now to stifle Congress from its legitimate role, which is to oversight of these committees, and then to say oh you' re interfering with our job, that smacks of what took place with Watergate.Senator D'Amato is either an extremely ignorant man or he has deliberately engaged a highly sophisticated, illegal plot to cripple the Clinton presidency. Either way, he certainly devalues the American Senate. If one wants to draw a parallel between Watergate and Whitewater, one can credibly say that Nixon [who never failed to target his political enemies] was evidently behind both scandals, but one can certainly not suggest that there is the slightest bit of significance in the reluctance to highlight manufactured allegations. The effort to reform the nation's health care system produced the most ambitious social legislation to face Congress since the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, and if history provides reliable insight, it also produced a violently ambitious opposition. In the battle to reform or not to reform, "Dole craft" [Nixon sponsored?] has thus far prevailed. During the election of 1992, Bush opposed a national health care plan, and while that is not surprising because George Bush routinely rejected Democratic initiatives, one should not ignore the fact that "patriots" like Bush traditionally deploy illegal tactics to deny the political will of their "enemies". Like Richard Nixon, George Bush was motivated by contempt for the opposition, and his "do nothing" domestic agenda diametrically opposed the "do everything" refrain of reform. The basic tactic of a "patriot" like George Bush is to snatch power away from the Democrats because, in his own words, "to accomplish things, you have first got to beat down the Democrats."48 Iran-Contra certainly exposed the fact that George Bush belonged to a sleazy cabal of "patriots" who proved that "powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes and get away with it", and that certainly does not bode very well with doubting Bush's capacity to pervert the law. Indeed, when George Bush was the vice president, fellow "patriot" Oliver North operated a powerful, parallel, unaccountable government, and Bill Casey had instituted a domestic propaganda apparatus that fulfilled the perversions of deluded spies and provocateurs who routinely targeted their perceived enemies. Oliver North may have evaded Congressional oversight by shredding the bizarre truth about the domestic, propaganda apparatus that routinely perverted the law in the 1980's, but the bizarre unfolding of the so-called Whitewater scandal strongly suggests that the diabolical plots of clandestine, political operatives, have survived the Reagan/Bush years. Indeed, given the fact that Whitewater reflects absolutely nothing [in terms of how it has unfolded] beyond a triumph of propaganda, one can safely assume that clandestine, political operatives, are busily defining the Whitewater agenda. The implications of the "timely" unfolding of the Whitewater witch hunt are certainly very clear. During Clinton's first major foreign policy encounter, for example, the President received favourable press coverage in Brussels, Prague, Kiev and Moscow over his handling of affairs, but reporters at home ignored the nature of his trip and questioned him about Whitewater. The politically motivated scheme frustrated the President, and even if the press was not a conscious participant in the effort to embarrass Clinton, history clearly demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate the press through "handing out" the news. If George Bush is a party to a sophisticated propaganda machine which seeks to manipulate public opinion, the press will certainly never report the fact -that kind of news is not handed out. Bush seldom, if ever, makes a casual disclosure, he is always very deliberate. In August of 1994, prior to speaking to reporters, Bush defined his restrictive ground rules when he said: "You'll waste your time if you ask me about American politics or Canadian politics, because I don't do interviews [on politics]."49 Enough said. George Bush obviously knows more about American "patriots" than he does about American politics, and the world of clandestine plots is evidently the primary "political arena" that "patriots" like George Bush acknowledge. In 1992, during his bid for a second term as President, Bush repeatedly questioned Bill Clinton's character, judgment and patriotism for opposing the Vietnam war and vigorously promoted the claim that Clinton was not fit to be the commander-in-chief because he was not a "patriot". Since 1980, when Bill Casey brought former covert operatives out of retirement, "patriots" enjoyed an uninterrupted, 12-year long period of domestic sabotage and spying that was sanctioned by the White House, and Bush-style intelligence zealots who equated "patriot" and "fit to govern", were obviously not very pleased by the election of Bill Clinton. The independent-minded public servants that Bill Clinton recruited did not stroke the fantasies of the "patriots" and they consequently became the targets of what can only be described as a plot to "realign" the White House. The sinister implications of the cloak-and- dagger clash between secret warriors and independent, dedicated public servants, are extremely repugnant and repulsive, but they are not surprising. George Bush is not even in the White House, yet all of his friends are on the offensive, while all of the President's are on the defensive. Roger Altman was recently forced to resign, simply because he allegedly failed to give a full accounting of Treasury Department contacts with the White House -and what was the "contact" about? It was about the so-called Whitewater scandal -the fraudulent, anti-Clinton assault which has been sustained through a covert, semi-government, semi-private witch hunt. Bernard Nussbaum resigned because he failed to discourage contact between the White House and the Treasury Department -that's right, contact about Whitewater. Vincent Foster was murdered [or he conveniently committed suicide] to deprive the President of a friend, an independent public servant, an adviser and a Whitewater expert. In the meantime, the media has made George Bush's friends the new spokespeople of America. On June 13, 1994, Ed Meese, a staunch Bush ally, appeared on Nightline to proclaim that the President of the United States is not above the law and that Paula Jones, a Clinton accuser, deserved a prompt, delay-free day in court to air her frivolous [because they are obviously politically motivated] sexual harassment charges. Sounding like he personally represented Jones and that every word that ever came out of her mouth was an absolute fact, Meese certainly exposed his ignorant, extremely overbearing, anti-Clinton crusade. Perhaps Meese, the ultimate hypocrite, should acknowledge the fact that he was the Attorney General when Bill Casey revived illegal, covert operations that targeted American citizens and if George Bush had not pardoned criminal "patriots" who covered up the sinister truth about their routine tendency to pervert the law, Meese would probably be serving a life sentence for treason. There is evidently no shame and no limit to the pro-Bush, anti-Clinton witch hunt that is now called Whitewater. On August 5, 1994, a Federal appeals panel replaced independent Whitewater counsel Robert Fiske Jr., with Kenneth Starr, a former Bush administration solicitor general. Fiske's investigation had found no basis to accuse the Clinton White House of criminal wrongdoing, and the politically motivated panel of judges that appointed Starr was evidently so disappointed by the failure to "criminalize" the Clinton White House that they granted Starr the authority to re-investigate Bill Clinton. But history dictates the fact that politically motivated men are not judges, they are, as Judge Jim Garrison aptly demonstrated, criminals in legal garb. Judge David B. Sentelle, for example, who cast the deciding vote in the three-judge panel that appointed Starr, is responsible for overturning the convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter, obtained by independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. If Sentelle is so keen on throwing out convictions, then why is he seeking to "criminalize" the Clinton White House? In retrospect, the fact that Sentelle is simply a national security motivated "patriot" is too obvious to deny, and the fact that George Bush's friends have a perverse concept of law and order, should certainly not determine the course of justice in America. Finally, the credibility of this research which is now over two decades old, has been conclusively confirmed by additional research like the following, which is so conclusive it exposes the clear link between Watergate and the assassination of John Lennon. 2E
1Richard Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, p.301. |
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