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New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Printable Version

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New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

I will not be at liberty to give any more details other than to say that a definitive work on the life, times, intrigue, connections, and consequences of Reinhard Gehlen (concentrating on his end-of-War to end of life development of the BND, with the CIA's and other's help) is in the works. 

I likely will have a minor role in providing some leads and information to those already at work on this project. It is based on the efforts and work of Carl Oglesby. Carl had fought long and hard via FOIA and long legal battles to pry out and accumulate the largest number of US Govt. documents related to Gehlen as well as about those who made deals with him and his 'Org', putting him in the position to form the BND [basically the 'CIA' of first West Germany and now all of Germany].

Therefore, I wanted to make a new thread devoted to Gehlen, and post both some new things as well as to copy some posts from various older threads about him and things swirling around him and that resulted from his and his Org's work - and the information and often misinformation they fed their sponsors and 'friends' in other Western Intelligence circles. What were Gehlen's real motives and aims; what were the real consequences of his work after the War, up to his death and beyond, etc.

Please feel free and invited to post any other information, sources, resources you know about related to Gehlen and the Gehlen Org. - that became the BND. Here is the place to put any material or discussion on Gehlen. Better books, articles, videos, speeches and other materials are all welcome - along with your own thoughts.


RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

Carl Oglesby - Reinhard Gehlen FOIA


CARL OGLESBY, APPELLANT v. THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, ET AL., APPELLEES


No. 94-5408


UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT


316 U.S. App. D.C. 372; 79 F.3d 1172; 1996 U.S. App. LEXIS 5326


February 27, 1996, Argued


March 26, 1996, Decided


PRIOR HISTORY:
[**1] Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. (No. 87cv03349).


COUNSEL:
James H. Lesar argued the cause and filed the briefs for appellant.


Sherri L. Evans, Assistant United States Attorney, argued the cause for appellees, with whom Eric H. Holder, Jr., United States Attorney, and R. Craig Lawrence, Assistant United States Attorney, were on the briefs.


JUDGES:
Before: WALD, WILLIAMS and TATEL, Circuit Judges. Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge WALD.


OPINIONBY:
WALD


OPINION:


[*1175] WALD, Circuit Judge: This case marks yet another stage in Carl Oglesby's decade-long effort to retrieve World War II vintage documents about a Nazi general from six government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552 ("FOIA" or "Act"). Oglesby, a professional writer and lecturer with a special interest in the politics of clandestine services, submitted his original FOIA requests in 1985 to the Department of the Army ("Army"), the Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA"), the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), the National Archives and Records Administration ("NARA"), the National Security Agency ("NSA"), and the Department of State ("State"). Dissatisfied with the [**2] responses he received from the agencies, he filed suit in federal court. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants, but this court vacated that decision in 1990, with instructions for Oglesby to exhaust his administrative remedies. Oglesby v. Dep't of Army, 287 U.S. App. D.C. 126, 920 F.2d 57 (D.C. Cir. 1990). Several years later, having exhausted those remedies without receiving what he considered a satisfactory response, Oglesby returned to the district court, where the judge again ruled in favor of the agencies. Oglesby v. U.S. Dep't of Army, Memorandum Opinion, No. 87-cv-3349 (D.D.C. Nov. 2, 1994) ("Mem. Op."). Once again,


Oglesby has appealed to this court, this time challenging one agency's refusal to grant him a fee waiver for his search, and several agencies' allegedly inadequate searches, incomplete Vaughn indices, and impermissible exemption justifications. Oglesby raises three specific claims: (1) that the statute specifically authorizing NARA to set fees for document production is not exempt from FOIA's mandatory fee-waiver provision, and therefore NARA was obligated to waive or reduce the fees for Oglesby's search; (2) that Army, CIA, and NSA failed to submit [**3] adequate Vaughn indices and that Army and CIA also failed adequately to justify the exemptions on which they based their decisions to withhold certain responsive documents; and (3) that Army, CIA, FBI, NSA and State failed to demonstrate that they had conducted adequate searches in response to Oglesby's request. Because we find that Army, CIA, and NSA have failed adequately to justify their withholdings, and Army and CIA have failed to justify the adequacy of their searches, we remand once again for further explanation on these points. With respect to all claims against the other three defendants, we affirm the district court.


I. BACKGROUND
II.
Since the early 1970s, Oglesby has relentlessly pursued the story of General Reinhard Gehlen, who served as chief of a Nazi spy ring during World War II and who allegedly later negotiated an agreement with the United States which allowed his spy network to continue in existence despite post-war de-nazification programs. After World War II, his group, then known as the Gehlen Organization, was reportedly reconstituted as a functioning espionage network under U.S. command. According to Oglesby, control of the Gehlen Organization shifted [**4] back to the newly-sovereign West German Federal Republic as the BND (for Bundesnachrichtendienst, or "the Federal Intelligence Service") after ten years of U.S. control.


More than ten years ago, Oglesby submitted FOIA requests to six government agencies, seeking records pertaining to Gehlen and certain post-WWII Nazi organizations. Oglesby sent identical requests to Army, CIA, NSA, State, and NARA. The five requests sought the following information:


(a) Records of World War Two German General REINHARD GEHLEN and on his relationship with any United States [*1176] officials during the period 1944 through 1956.
(b) Records of the meetings held at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in the summer of 1945 between the aforesaid GEHLEN and American officials including U.S. Army General GEORGE V. STRONG and Office of Strategic Services officer ALLEN WELSH DULLES.
© Records of the U.S. Army "Operation Rusty," carried out in Europe between 1945 and 1948.
(d) Records of post-war Nazi German underground organizations such as ODESSA, KAMARADENWERK, BRUDERSHAFT, WEREWOLVES and DIE SPINNE.
(e) Records of OSS "Operation Sunrise" in 1945.


Joint Appendix ("J.A.") 39. The sixth request, submitted [**5] to the FBI, sought only requests (a) and (b) above. J.A. 64.
Two years later, dissatisfied with the responses he had received from the agencies, Oglesby initiated legal proceedings, first in the district court, and then in the Court of Appeals. With respect to five of the six defendants, this court held that Oglesby had not exhausted his administrative remedies. Oglesby, 920 F.2d at 65. However, finding that the precise exhaustion procedure required under FOIA had not previously been laid out with sufficient clarity, we permitted Oglesby an opportunity to appeal within each agency and thereafter refile his suit. With respect to the sixth defendant, State, the court reversed the district court's decision that the agency had successfully demonstrated the adequacy of its FOIA search. Id. at 59-60.
On remand, Oglesby exhausted his administrative remedies and, still dissatisfied, refiled in the district court. At some point during the proceedings, each of the agencies submitted at least one affidavit regarding the method and results of the search it conducted pursuant to Oglesby's request. These affidavits also describe--with varying degree of detail--the documents the agencies [**6] found but refused to disclose, and the FOIA exemptions on which the agencies based their refusals to release information. Once again, the district court determined that the searches were adequate and the exemptions were justified, and granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants. Oglesby now appeals that decision.
II. DISCUSSION
The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to comply with requests to make their records available to the public, unless the requested records fit within one or more of nine categories of exempt material. 5 U.S.C. § 552(a), (b). If a document contains exempt information, the agency must still release "any reasonably segregable portion" after deletion of the nondisclosable portions. Id. § 552(b). Although the Act makes public disclosure of nonexempt material mandatory, it also expressly permits agencies, in many circumstances, to charge certain reasonable fees to help defray the cost of compliance with their FOIA responsibilities. Id. § 552(a)(4)(A). However, in certain instances, where the dissemination of information will benefit the public, FOIA requires the responsive agencies to waive or reduce the fees they charge the requestor. [**7] Id. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii).
This court has held that the Act also requires an agency in possession of material it considers exempt from FOIA to provide the requestor with a description of each document being withheld, and an explanation of the reason for the agency's nondisclosure. See, e.g., King v. DOJ, 265 U.S. App. D.C. 62, 830 F.2d 210, 224 ("The agency affidavits must ... disclose as much information as possible without thwarting the exemption's purpose."); Vaughn v. Rosen, 484 F.2d 820 (D.C. Cir. 1973). The description and explanation the agency offers should reveal as much detail as possible as to the nature of the document, without actually disclosing information that deserves protection. See, e.g., King, 830 F.2d at 223. This requirement serves the purpose of providing the requestor with a realistic opportunity to challenge the agency's decision.
In this case, Oglesby first claims that NARA violated the mandates of FOIA when it refused to grant him a fee waiver for his [*1177] search. Second, he alleges that several of the defendant agencies provided him with inadequate descriptions of the responsive documents they had located, and that two agencies further failed to justify their reliance [**8] on certain FOIA exemptions. Finally, Oglesby argues that the agencies have not sufficiently demonstrated that the searches they conducted in response to his request were "reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents," as required under FOIA. Truitt v. Dep't of State, 283 U.S. App. D.C. 86, 897 F.2d 540, 542 (D.C. Cir. 1990).


A. NARA's Fee Statute and FOIA's Fee Waiver
FOIA's fee provision, 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A), requires agency regulations to provide for the setting of reasonable charges for document searches, duplication and review. The Act also contains a provision waiving the agency's fees for searches requested for certain noncommercial purposes:


Documents shall be furnished without any charge or at a charge reduced below the [reasonable standard charges] if disclosure of the information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester.


5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). However, a few paragraphs later, the Act states:


Nothing in [this provision] shall supersede fees chargeable under a statute [**9] specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records.


5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(vi) ("subsection (vi)").
NARA claims that subsection (vi) works as an exception not only to FOIA's fee provisions, but also to the Act's mandatory fee waiver. Since NARA's own enabling statute specifically provides for the setting of fees, the agency argues, it is therefore exempt from the FOIA waiver requirement.
The statute which NARA claims justifies its denial of Oglesby's waiver request authorizes the Archivist


to recover the costs for making or authenticating copies or reproductions of materials transferred to his custody. Such fee shall be fixed ... at a level which will recover, so far as practicable, all elements of such costs....


44 U.S.C. § 2116© ("NARA § 2116").
In response to NARA's claim of exemption, Oglesby argues that NARA's fee provision does not meet the requirements for exemption under subsection (vi) of FOIA's fee provision because NARA § 2116 "neither provides a set formula for the imposition of fees nor mandates the assessment of fees." Appellant's Brief at 19. Although on its face, the fee-waiver exception provision [**10] requires neither a statutorily fixed fee nor a mandatory fee, Oglesby claims that these requirements are implied by the legislative history of FOIA, which provided examples of fee-setting laws which should and should not qualify under the exception. See 132 CONG. REC. H-29618 (daily ed. Oct. 8, 1986).
The district court rejected Oglesby's argument, and found that NARA's fee provision was exempt from FOIA's fee-waiver requirement. We find as well that the plain language of the two statutes confirms the district court's determination that the NARA statute is indeed "a statute specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records," and thus fits comfortably within the exception carved out in FOIA subsection (vi).
The legislative history to which Oglesby directs our attention does not convince us that the district court erred. For example, the fact that Congress did not intend 31 U.S.C. § 9701, which generally permits the heads of agencies "to establish the charge for a service or thing of value provided by the agency," to enjoy exempt status has no bearing whatsoever on NARA § 2116. Whereas "a thing of value" clearly does not describe "particular [**11] types of records," Oglesby cannot credibly claim that NARA's statute, which refers to "materials transferred to [the Archivist's] custody," succumbs to the same attack. Although the "types of records" it describes do indeed encompass the vast bulk of material the agency deals with, the material is nonetheless accurately identified. In short, pursuant to the plain language of both provisions, NARA § 2116 qualifies as the [*1178] genre of fee-setting provision not to be "superseded" under FOIA's subsection (vi) exemption.
We wish, however, to make it clear that we are in no way ruling on a separate argument which Oglesby failed to raise in a timely fashion. In a motion filed after oral argument, Oglesby pressed the claim that the FOIA subsection (vi) exception excuses a qualified agency only from FOIA's fee-setting requirements, and not from the fee-waiver provision. Oglesby attempts at this point to argue that the legislative history of the fee-waiver and exception provisions suggests that Congress intended by subsection (vi) to allow agencies the freedom to develop their own fee-setting formulae, without also intending to allow those agencies to refuse categorically to provide [**12] waivers in the public interest. However, since Oglesby did not raise this argument in a timely manner, we do not address it on the merits. See, e.g., Charter Oil Co. v. Am. Employers' Ins. Co., 69 F.3d 1160, 1170-71 (D.C. Cir. 1995) (issue waived where not raised until reply brief); McBride v. Merrell Dowell & Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 255 U.S. App. D.C. 183, 800 F.2d 1208, 1211 (D.C. Cir. 1986) ("considering an argument advanced for the first time in a reply brief ... is not only unfair to an appellee but also entails the risk of an improvident or ill-advised opinion on the legal issues tendered.") (citations omitted). n1 We refer to this argument only to emphasize that our narrow ruling today on the argument Oglesby did successfully make is not intended to bar a future challenge on broader grounds. In this case, we hold only that NARA § 2116 fits within the description of fee-setting laws set out in FOIA subsection (vi).


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n1 Here, Oglesby did not even raise this argument in his reply brief; he raised it for the first time two weeks after oral argument.


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B. Vaughn Indices and Exemptions
In Vaughn v. Rosen, 157 U.S. App. D.C. 340, 484 F.2d 820 (D.C. Cir. 1973), this court outlined the requirements an agency must meet in indexing the documents it has found responsive to a FOIA request. The court explained that it would "simply no longer accept conclusory and generalized allegations of [FOIA] exemptions," but rather would require agencies to offer "a relatively detailed analysis in manageable segments." 484 F.2d at 826. Because FOIA challenges necessarily involve situations in which one party (the government) has sole access to the relevant information, and that same party bears the burden of justifying its disclosure decisions, the courts must require the government to provide as detailed a description as possible--without, of course, disclosing the privileged material itself--of the material it refuses to disclose. Additionally, the agency must determine if any portion of an exempt document contains nonexempt information, and, if so, must disclose that nonexempt portion. "In a large document it is vital that the agency specify in detail which portions of the document are disclosable and which are allegedly exempt." 484 F.2d at 827. If an affidavit [**14] submitted by an agency contains sufficient detail to forge the "logical connection between the information [withheld] and the claimed exemption," Goldberg v. U.S. Dep't of State, 260 U.S. App. D.C. 205, 818 F.2d 71, 78 (D.C. Cir. 1987), then the court will accord that affidavit substantial weight and consider the agency's "unique insights into what adverse effects might occur as a result of public disclosure." Id.
In this case, Oglesby challenges the adequacy of the document descriptions offered in the affidavits submitted by Army, CIA, and NSA, which he claims are too sparse to allow an assessment of the various exemptions on which the agencies based their decisions to withhold responsive documents. In an overlapping claim, Oglesby raises specific challenges to Army's and CIA's reliance on FOIA exemptions 1 and 3, even with respect to individual documents described in adequate detail in the affidavits. He criticizes Army for not specifically stating that the supposedly exempt documents had been classified in accordance with the appropriate procedures, and he faults CIA for failing to address specifically the age of the documents and for depending on an allegedly unreliable affiant.
[*1179] FOIA exemption [**15] 1, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1), protects from disclosure matters that are: (A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy; and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to that order. Id. The Army and the CIA both withheld information under this exemption.
Exemption 3, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3), protects from disclosure matters that are specifically exempted from disclosure by statute. The CIA withheld information under this exemption, claiming that two statutes specifically operated to exempt certain responsive information; 50 U.S.C. § 403(d)(3), which requires the CIA to protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure; and 50 U.S.C. § 403g, which provides that the CIA shall be exempt from any other law requiring the publication or disclosure of the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of people employed by the CIA.
Because resolution of the issues raised by Oglesby's appeal depends on a fact-intensive analysis of each of the agencies' searches and declarations, we outline the relevant facts regarding each agency separately. [**16]



  1. Army


In response to Oglesby's initial request in 1985, Army eventually informed Oglesby that it had located responsive documents concerning three of the topics contained in his request: Operation Rusty, Odessa, and Gehlen. In May, 1986, Army informed Oglesby by letter of its decision to withhold significant portions of the responsive documents. The unreleased information consisted of: eleven pages (and various redactions) in the ninety-nine pages of records pertaining to Odessa; all of the 483 pages of records it had located pertaining to Operation Rusty; and nine of 264 pages of records regarding Gehlen.


Oglesby sued for release of the undisclosed documents, which prompted Army to submit the affidavit of Robert Walsh, describing the responsive documents and attempting to justify Army's withholdings. The Walsh declaration revealed that the Army initially released seventy pages of Odessa records in their entirety and eighteen in redacted form. Another eleven pages, the Army withheld under exemption 1 (classified information). Aff. of Robert J. Walsh 3 (Apr. 6, 1988) ("Walsh Declaration"); J.A.189. Additionally, Army denied access to an entire 483-page Operation Rusty file, [**17] also on the basis of FOIA exemption 1. Id. at 7; J.A. 193.


The Walsh declaration described each of nineteen separate documents Army had identified as responsive to Oglesby's request, and detailed the justifications for any unreleased portions of those documents. In general, the affidavit contained sufficient detail to allow a reviewing court to assess the applicability of the claimed exemptions to the undisclosed information. For example, the Army declared with respect to two documents:


c. Document 3 is a cover letter originated by the 971th [sic] Counterintelligence Corps dated 19 May 1947 consisting of one page with one enclosure consisting of three pages. The subject of the cover letter is Organization Coburg, and is currently classified CONFIDENTIAL. Portions of paragraphs 2 and 3 of this cover letter were redacted to exempt classified information relating to intelligence methods and sources and foreign classified matters. The remaining paragraph and all three pages of the enclosure were regraded unclassified on 25 May 1986 and released to plaintiff.


f. Document 6 is a one-page letter originated by the 971th [sic] Counterintelligence [**18] Corps, dated 25 November 1946, with subject Organization ODESSA. This document was regraded unclassified on 25 May 1983 and redacted to exempt only the identity of a confidential source.


Id. at 4-5; J.A. 190-91.
With respect to the 483-page document withheld in full, however, the affidavit offers significantly less detail:


o. Document 15 is a complete intelligence operation consisting of 483 pages, entitled Operation Rusty. By letter dated 20 May 1986, plaintiff was advised that this document was properly and currently classified CONFIDENTIAL and was withheld in its [*1180] entirety. The operation concerned gathering positive and counterintelligence information concerning the activities and organizations of an Intelligence Service and activities of various dissident German organizations. The operation involved close coordination and cooperation with foreign and other US intelligence organizations. Release of this information would reveal intelligence activities, sources and methods as well as classified foreign government activities.


Id. at 7; J.A. 193.
On remand, Army supplemented the Walsh declaration with a 1992 affidavit by William Grayson. Decl. of William [**19] E. Grayson (Aug. 3, 1992) ("Grayson Declaration"); J.A. 177. For each item of information that still had not been turned over to Oglesby, Grayson explained what had been withheld and why. For example, with respect to one document, he wrote:


a. Pages 13-17
The information on these pages is from a document dated September 10, 1947 and describes activities of ODESSA and related organizations. We have withheld only the name and other identifying data--aliases, address, date and place of birth, occupation, and physical description--of the individual (apparently a German citizen) who was the confidential source of this information, and we relied upon [FOIA exemption 7] to support our withholding. Although the passage of time and/or the death of confidential sources do not extinguish the protections of [exemption 7], we note that this document indicates that the source was born during the 1920's and therefore would be likely to still be living.


Grayson Decl. at 3-4; J.A. 179-80. With respect to the Operation Rusty file, however, the Grayson declaration offered no new information. Grayson provided a similar description to that which appeared in the Walsh declaration, and [**20] concluded that "release of the information would reveal intelligence activities, sources, and methods and also classified foreign government activities" and was therefore not required under exemption 1. Id. at 8; J.A. 184. Grayson also declared that, "considering the nature of the document (which is, in effect, a collection of documents), no one portion could be considered reasonably segregable." Id. at 9; J.A. 185.
At the time of the Grayson declaration, nine of 264 pages regarding Gehlen had still not been turned over to Oglesby. Grayson explained these withholdings in paragraph 8 of the affidavit:


The remaining 9 pages contain information pertaining to intelligence activities, sources, and methods and also contain classified foreign government information. We cannot describe the material in more detail without revealing classified information. As with the Operation Rusty file, should the Court require further information, we will submit a classified declaration or the full text documents for the Court's in camera, ex parte inspection.


Id. at 9-10; J.A. 185-86.


Oglesby claims that Army's Vaughn index is inadequate for two reasons: first, because [**21] the Operation Rusty file is not indexed in detail; and second, because the affidavit fails to declare specifically that no portion of the withheld material pertaining to Gehlen was further segregable into exempt and nonexempt portions. Oglesby also claims that Army failed adequately to justify the withholdings it took under FOIA exemption 1, because the affidavits did not specifically assert that the "classified" information had been classified in accordance with the procedure laid out in the appropriate Executive Order.


Oglesby's first two complaints merit some attention. The Army provided the district court with relatively little information about a 483-page document it determined was wholly exempt from FOIA disclosure. Although the Army avers that the file is not segregable, the Grayson declaration provides no details justifying that conclusion. In fact, the affidavit describes the file as "in effect, a collection of documents." Id. at 9; J.A. 185. Since Vaughn and its progeny require that an agency itemize each document and explain the connection between the information withheld and the exemption claimed, the Army should be required on remand to provide any [*1181] disclosable [**22] information regarding each document in the Operation Rusty "compilation." The Army has not adequately explained why it cannot provide general information (for example: length, date, author and brief description of each document) which would present Oglesby with a more realistic opportunity to challenge Army's invocation of exemptions.


Similarly, Army has failed to offer any useful description of the nine undisclosed pages of Gehlen material. We cannot so easily accept the district court's determination that "the fact that such a tiny percentage of the [264 pages of] documents was withheld, coupled with the Army's evident awareness of the requirement that it disclose reasonably segregable nonexempt portions, leads the Court to the conclusion that the Amy did indeed make such a determination with respect to the Gehlen files." Mem. Op. at 4; J.A. 469. Although it is quite possible that the Army, which released the vast majority of the Gehlen material, was indeed aware of its duties under FOIA to disclose all nonsegregable information, Army has not provided this court with an adequate explanation on which we can rely for that finding. We therefore remand for a description of the specific [**23] documents (or segments) withheld and an explanation of the harm that might result from release of the undisclosed information.


Oglesby's third claim against this defendant--that Army failed to justify its reliance on exemption 1 because it did not specifically assert that the "classified" information had been labeled in accordance with the procedure laid out in the appropriate Executive Order--elicits less concern. The Walsh declaration asserts that the material withheld pursuant to exemption 1 "meets the criteria set forth in [the Executive Order] which provides that information concerning intelligence activities, sources, or methods shall be considered for classification protection." Walsh Declaration at 9, 10; J.A. 195, 196. Walsh also stated that he had personally reviewed each of the documents and determined that they were "currently and properly classified, SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL." Id. The district court held--and we agree--that these claims that the information was "classified" encompass both the procedural and substantive aspects of classification.


2. CIA
In response to Oglesby's initial 1985 FOIA request, CIA released twenty pages of material it had previously [**24] released to someone else pursuant to a 1983 FOIA request for information on Gehlen and Operation Sunrise. Letter from John H. Wright to Carl Oglesby (Sept. 10, 1985); J.A. 57. The agency then informed Oglesby that it would not conduct a new search on Gehlen or any of the other listed topics unless and until Oglesby wrote back and agreed to pay search fees. Rather than responding to the letter, Oglesby filed suit. In our earlier opinion, we encouraged the Army to reconsider a decision it had made to deny Oglesby a fee waiver, Oglesby, 920 F.2d at 66 n.11, and on remand, both Army and CIA informed Oglesby that his waiver would be granted. CIA then conducted a search, during which it discovered thirty-five responsive documents. The agency disclosed twenty-nine of these documents, and withheld six of them pursuant to various FOIA exemptions.


The CIA coordinated its Vaughn declaration with the FBI's, since the FBI had forwarded thirteen responsive documents for CIA review. The CIA submitted the declaration of Lee Carle, dated June 1, 1988, and the FBI submitted an affidavit by Angus Llewellyn, dated May 26, 1988. The Carle declaration described in impressive detail each document [**25] and portion thereof which CIA had located but refused to release. For example, Carle offered the following justification for withholding a one-page memo:


This one-page CIA memorandum to Director ... from Deputy Director ... is classified SECRET. This document is denied in its entirety pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3) as no meaningful segregation can be made for release to Plaintiff. Disclosure of any portion of this information would identify by name a foreign intelligence source of the CIA and specific methods by which CIA collected information on this source. The information [*1182] withheld relates to possible travels and activities of the source during a precise time period. The names of the source's traveling companions are also included in the deleted information. Release of the information itself would immediately reveal specific details relating to activities and travel plans of these foreign intelligence sources, thereby allowing them to be easily identified.


Declaration of Lee E. Carle 19-20 (June 1, 1988) ("Carle Declaration").
After our first remand, CIA supplemented the Carle Declaration with a 1993 affidavit by Katherine Stricker. Declaration of [**26] Katherine M. Stricker (Jan. 15, 1993) ("Stricker Declaration"); J.A. 248. In addition to the documents discussed in the Carle Declaration, Stricker addressed two new documents (documents 5 and 6 in her document description index, id. at 4; J.A. 251), which she described in significant detail. For example, Stricker referred to "document 6" as follows:


This 78-page document is a chronological accounting of Operation Sunrise. This document is released in sanitized form. The redacted information is withheld pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3). The information withheld on pages 11, 34, and 35 of this document pertains to a liaison relationship with a foreign government. (See paragraph 17, the Stricker Declaration [explaining that "liaison relationships" are initiated and continued only on the basis of secrecy] ). I have determined that release of this information could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security. Therefore, the full-text version of this document is currently and properly classified at the SECRET level.


Id. at 17; J.A. 264.
Although both Carle's and Stricker's declarations offer sufficient details to allow a court [**27] to assess the propriety of most of the exemptions claimed by the CIA, Stricker's declaration also contains a reference to "additional responsive documents" which the agency nowhere describes or explains. Id. at 4; J.A. 251. Apparently the agency intended to submit a classified index in camera, but for some reason failed to do so. n2 With respect to these documents, which CIA has never described for Oglesby, the agency has clearly failed to meet its FOIA obligation to justify each and every exemption taken.


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n2 Before oral argument, the defendants moved to dismiss Oglesby's appeal, claiming that the CIA's failure to submit the classified index for in camera review rendered the district court's disposition of this case non-final. Defendants allege that the judge could not have offered a final disposition against every defendant since she had not even seen all of the evidence on which she was to rule.
Although the defendants are certainly correct to note that a judge cannot properly find that evidence which she has never seen and which the agency has never described satisfies FOIA's exemption requirements, the impropriety of the ruling does not change the fact that the district court held that "the CIA's exemption 1 claims are justified." J.A. 471.


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Despite CIA's failure either to describe the documents or to submit the classified index in camera, the district court expressly found both that the CIA's Vaughn index was adequate, Mem. Op. at 5; J.A. 470, and that the CIA had described its withheld information and its justifications for the withholdings, "with reasonable specificity, demonstrating a logical connection between the information and the claimed exemption." Id. at 7; J.A. 472. At oral argument, counsel for the defendants conceded the need for a remand on this point. n3


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n3 Oglesby correctly notes that even if the CIA had submitted the index as planned, the agency had not created a sufficient public record to justify an in camera review because it had not made public as much information as possible. Lykins v. DOJ, 233 U.S. App. D.C. 349, 725 F.2d 1455, 1463-65 (D.C. Cir. 1984). In Lykins, the court found the government's Vaughn index "clearly insufficient" to support an in camera review where the index provided only the date, the type of document, and a conclusory declaration that the material would be potentially disruptive. The court warned that "a trial court should not use in camera affidavits unless necessary and, if such affidavits are used, it should be certain to make the public record as complete as possible." 725 F.2d at 1465. The CIA has offered far less information here than the agency in Lykins; the public record contains no information except a vague reference to "additional responsive documents."


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Oglesby challenges the adequacy of CIA's Vaughn index, which we can quickly [*1183] declare insufficient with respect to the undescribed "additional" documents. However, Oglesby also claims that CIA has failed to justify its withholding, under FOIA exemptions 1 and 3, of material it did describe in the affidavits. First, he argues that CIA's failure to explain expressly why the passage of time has not diminished the security concerns with respect to the undisclosed records renders the affidavits inadequate to justify the exemptions. Second, Oglesby charges that the district court should not have relied on the Stricker declaration because Ms. Stricker's credibility had been tarnished by her involvement in a separate proceeding, in which she submitted an affidavit stating that disclosure of certain information, which it was later learned had been released thirty years before without incident, would cause damage to the national security if released. Appellant's Brief at 36.


To back his claim that the passage of time has reduced the risk of this information leading to breaches in security, Oglesby points to the CIA's Historical Review Program ("HRP"), pursuant to which the agency systematically [**30] reviews for declassification all records more than thirty years old. See HR 70-14 a.(1); J.A. 333. Although we would not go so far as the district court and deny that CIA's review program "has any relevance" to Oglesby's claim, Mem. Op. at 8 n.4; J.A. 473, neither do we believe that the passage of time alone is enough to discredit an otherwise detailed and persuasive affidavit. Oglesby has not demonstrated that an agency's national security concerns automatically disappear with the passage of time, and therefore has not rebutted the affidavits stating that the material had been reviewed at the time of the request, and had been determined to pose a current threat to national security if released.


Nevertheless, we hesitate to describe the existence of the review program as "irrelevant," because if Oglesby could show that withheld information is substantially similar to information the government has declassified because of its age, he might raise a successful challenge to the government's reliance on exemption 1. In this case, however, he has presented no such evidence; he has merely made the naked assertion that the passage of time renders the national security claims questionable. [**31] As long as an agency declares through its affidavits that the responsive material has been reviewed to assure the continuing accuracy of its original classification, and that a determination has been made that the withheld information still poses a security risk if released, the mere passage of time is not a per se bar to reliance on exemption 1. n4


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n4 To back his argument that the agency must specifically address the passage of time, Oglesby cites several cases which we find inapposite. The only case from this court, King v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, 265 U.S. App. D.C. 62, 830 F.2d 210 (D.C. Cir. 1987), involved a request for documents which had been classified under an executive order which specifically directed the agency to consider "the passage of time" and which had been reviewed by the agency only for procedural compliance with the executive order. 830 F.2d at 226.


In addition to King, Oglesby points to dicta in two nonbinding cases from the Northern District of California which we find uncompelling in this context. In Powell v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, the court found that the government had "manifested a bad faith disregard for plaintiff's rights under FOIA," 584 F. Supp. 1508 at 1513, and supplied only conclusory affidavits claiming that the release of certain information could cause damage to national security, id. at 1517. Likewise, in Dunaway v. Webster, 519 F. Supp. 1059, 1069 (N.D. Cal. 1981), the government had submitted only "conclusory statements" to justify continuing classification under a different executive order which the court determined embodied a "clear policy" of declassification for older documents.


Id. [**32]


With respect to Oglesby's second challenge--to the credibility of CIA's affiant--we note that the record contains no suggestion that the error Stricker allegedly made in the unrelated case involved any duplicity or intentional misrepresentation. Without any allegation of bad faith, we are unwilling to assume that an agency employee who withholds information that ultimately turns out to be substantially similar to information that has already been released--in short, an employee who makes a mistake--is forever barred from serving as a reliable affiant in the future. Accordingly, we reject Oglesby's claim that the district court should have rejected the Stricker declaration on that basis.


[*1184] 3. NSA
NSA originally responded to Oglesby's request by informing him that his fee waiver had been denied and that the search would likely cost him $ 900. After Oglesby filed suit for the first time, NSA reversed its original position and granted him a waiver. In 1990, the agency made its "final response" to the request, releasing four documents pertaining to "werewolves" and several others regarding Gehlen. In addition, the agency withheld several documents pursuant to exemptions 1 and 3. [**33]
Oglesby appealed the agency's decision to withhold part or all of five separate reports and two letters. The NSA refused to disclose the documents in unredacted form because "release of certain portions of these documents would reveal specific information regarding communications intelligence and cryptologic activities, thereby jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods." Declaration of Michael A. Smith 4 (May 4, 1992) ("Smith Declaration"); J.A. 167. Through the Smith declaration, NSA claimed that some of the withheld information ("such as titles of reference documents used in the preparation of one of the reports at issue, codewords and distribution caveats, and matters of foreign relations") met the criteria for exemption 1, and the rest ("including employee names") was also protected by exemption 3. Id. at 5; J.A. 168.
In subsequent affidavits, NSA supplemented the Smith declaration with statements by Boyd Wooton, J.A. 453 ("Wooton Declaration"), and Robert Killen, J.A. 456 ("Killen Declaration"). Wooton described the usual search procedure for NSA, and Killen provided details regarding the actual procedure the agency implemented in conducting Oglesby's search. Killen [**34] ran a new search of the agency's files, entering the terms: Gehlen, Strong, Dulles, Hunt, Rusty, Odessa, Kamaradenwerk, Bruderschaft, Werewolf, Werewolves, Spinne, and Sunrise. Killen Declaration at 2; J.A. 457.


In June, 1994, Smith issued a supplemental declaration in which he explained that Killen's search had produced eight new responsive documents. Supplemental Declaration of Michael A. Smith (June 28, 1994) ("Smith Supp."); J.A. 459. Three of these documents were released in full and five were withheld in full. The supplemental affidavit offered no details regarding the five documents, but conclusively stated that they were all currently and properly classified either TOP SECRET or SECRET because "the disclosure of all or any portion of their contents could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage and serious damage, respectively, to the national security." Smith Supp. at 3; J.A. 461. Smith also averred that these five documents satisfied the requirements for exemption 3 as well, since they contained classified information concerning communications intelligence activities. Id. at 4; J.A. 462. The affidavit concluded with the sweeping declaration that "it [**35] is not possible to describe further the withheld information in an unclassified declaration because any additional description would itself divulge classified information." Id.


Oglesby claims that NSA's Vaughn index inadequately describes the responsive material, and we are inclined to agree with him. With respect to documents located since this case's last visit to the Court of Appeals, NSA's affidavits contain only sweeping and conclusory assertions that the agency withheld the documents because they contained material which could reasonably be expected to cause damage to national security. The affidavits offer no functional description of the documents; NSA has failed to disclose the types of documents, dates, authors, number of pages, or any other identifying information for the records it has withheld. Comparison of these affidavits with the Army and CIA declarations highlight the shortcomings of the NSA statements.


Thus we agree with Oglesby that NSA has clearly failed to provide an adequate Vaughn index. On remand, the district court should order NSA to submit an index describing the withheld documents to the greatest extent possible without disclosing information [**36] that must be protected.


C. Adequacy of the Searches
In addition to attacking the adequacy of the Vaughn indices and exemption justifications [*1185] offered by Army, CIA and NSA, Oglesby challenges the adequacy of the searches conducted by those agencies, as well as by FBI and State.


1. Army.
In a letter to Oglesby dated March 31, 1986, Army explained that it had searched its automated Defense Central Index of Investigations ("DCII") and Investigative Records Repository ("IRR") for records responsive to his FOIA request. Letter from Thomas Conley to Carl Oglesby (Mar. 31, 1986); J.A. 41. According to the letter, DCII "is a computerized index to intelligence investigative records maintained by the Department of Defense" and the IRR "is the Army's official storage facility for all intelligence investigative records." Id. at 1. Oglesby claims that Army has failed to aver that these two indices are the only places pertinent records might be stored. Appellant's Brief at 44 ("The record also does not clarify whether INSCOM maintains other indices of its records, computerized or manual. Discovery is needed to answer these questions.").


To back his claim on this issue, [**37] Oglesby cites to a book about Reinhard Gehlen in which the author asserts that Army Intelligence provided her with "well over a thousand documents" about Gehlen in response to her FOIA requests. MARY ELLEN REESE, GENERAL REINHARD GEHLEN: THE CIA CONNECTION xiii (1990); J.A. 342.


Although information in the record fails to reveal the precise nature of the FOIA request the book author submitted, and therefore her experience cannot prove that Army's search was inadequate, her claim raises enough of a doubt to preclude summary judgment in the absence of an affidavit describing Army's filing system and decision to search only the DCII and IRR indices. Although Oglesby argues that discovery is needed to answer his questions regarding the adequacy of Army's search, a relatively detailed affidavit addressing the issue could suffice.


2. CIA
With respect to the CIA, the district court ruled that the agency had conducted an adequate search, and that CIA's failure to describe its subsequent search which located additional records was "irrelevant." Mem. Op. at 10; J.A. 475. We disagree that the court had sufficient information on which to base its summary judgment determination. Particularly [**38] since the record does not disclose how many additional documents were produced in the subsequent search, or offer any description of the nature of these documents, the court could not properly conclude that the original search (which failed to locate any of these possibly numerous and important documents) was "reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents." Truitt v. Dep't of State, 283 U.S. App. D.C. 86, 897 F.2d 540, 542 (D.C. Cir. 1990); see also Founding Church of Scientology v. NSA, 197 U.S. App. D.C. 305, 610 F.2d 824, 837 (D.C. Cir. 1979) ("If, in the face of well-defined requests and positive indications of overlooked materials, an agency can so easily avoid adversary scrutiny of its search techniques, [FOIA] will inevitably become nugatory.").


3. FBI
The FBI submitted a detailed affidavit describing each document it found in response to Oglesby's original request, as well as each paragraph or subparagraph deleted from each document. See Declaration of Angus Llewellyn (May 26, 1988) ("Llewellyn Declaration"). Because Oglesby does not attack the adequacy of the FBI's index, we will not detail the documents withheld or the explanations offered to justify the exemptions.


Oglesby challenges [**39] only the adequacy of the search conducted by FBI. In response to his initial request, the FBI released a document which suggested to Oglesby that certain Gehlen files might be found in a "section tickler" and that this tickler might contain records responsive to his request. He wrote to the FBI and asked that they search under additional terms and that they search the section tickler. See Declaration of Karlton D. Bolthouse 3 (Sept. 24, 1992); J.A. 229. On August 8, 1991, the FBI responded that it had conducted the additional requested search and had located no additional documents. The letter also informed Oglesby that the reference to a "section tickler" did [*1186] not indicate that any other responsive documents existed.


Id. at 4; J.A. 230.


The FBI's response to Oglesby described the Bureau's search in sufficient detail to satisfy summary judgment standards. The FBI assured Oglesby that, "the reference to a "section tickler' was not an indication that other responsive records existed," id., and Oglesby has advanced no reason to doubt that allegation. Oglesby seems to believe that common sense dictates the conclusion that a "tickler" necessarily contains documents. We do not [**40] find it so clear that a "tickler" must be a repository for documents, and we will not second-guess FBI's affidavit on this point.


4. State
As with the FBI, Oglesby challenges the district court's ruling in favor of State only with respect to the adequacy of the department's search.


In a 1992 declaration submitted by Frank Machak, State described its filing system and the search the department conducted in response to Oglesby's request. Declaration of Frank Machak (Mar. 30, 1992) ("Machak Declaration"). According to the affidavit, State organizes its files under three categories: automated document system (files from 1973-present); central foreign policy files (1954-1973); and lot files (described by Machak as "paper files retired by foreign service posts and by Department offices, covering the time period circa 1954-present that are maintained in sealed boxes, known as lots, and arranged according to subject matter and time periods"). Id. at 6; J.A. 155.


All State records covering the period prior to 1954 had been accessioned to NARA, and therefore State conducted a search only with respect to the first item on Oglesby's request (records pertaining to Gehlen and his relationship [**41] with U.S. officials). A research specialist determined that any documents responsive to Oglesby's request which had been retained by State would be contained in the central foreign policy files. State apparently did not search the lot files, because "the description of records requested ... was not specific enough to allow for [it]."


Id. at 9; J.A. 158. Lot files are organized only by nine broad subject categories (administration, business affairs, consular affairs, economic affairs, military and defense, operations, political affairs, social affairs, and technology & science), and not by individuals' names. Id.
Oglesby raises two objections to State's conduct of its search: first, he alleges that the Department's failure to search the lot files rendered the search inadequate; and second, he claims that the court cannot rule on the adequacy of the search based on Machak's declaration because Machak was allegedly involved in an unlawful attempt to expedite an unrelated FOIA request in 1992. Appellant's Brief at 47. The district court rejected these claims, and we affirm that decision.


State adequately addressed the first of Oglesby's concerns when it explained that the lot [**42] files are organized by nine broad subject categories and not by individuals' names. J.A. 158. Since State's search only reached the first item on Oglesby's list (because the other items had been accessioned to NARA), the department sought only information pertaining to Gehlen and his relationship with U.S. officials. If, as the affidavit alleges, the lot files cannot be searched for an individual's name, we find that it is reasonable that State would require more specific information in order to search these files.


Oglesby's second challenge also lacks merit. The district court found "no reason to doubt Machak's credibility in this case," and we find no reason to challenge that conclusion. Particularly in light of the fact that the judge in the case which Oglesby claims reveals Machak's untrustworthiness ultimately determined that Machak's declaration in that case had been "well grounded in fact," Nation Magazine v. Dep't of State, 92-cv-2302, slip opinion at 29 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 1995), we find Oglesby's unsupported allegations attacking Machak's credibility insufficient to convince us to reverse the district court's decision.


5. NSA
Oglesby claims that the Smith declaration [**43] "contains no information whatsoever [*1187] concerning the nature of the search it conducted." Appellant's Brief at 48. What Oglesby's brief fails to mention is that on remand, NSA submitted additional affidavits that do detail the nature of the agency's search. The Killen declaration explains that Killen personally ran all of the main terms in Oglesby's request through NARA's Archival Information Retrieval System ("AIRS"), "the only system of records ... that could reasonably be expected to contain any archival records responsive to plaintiff's FOIA request." Killen Declaration at 1; J.A. 456. Because Oglesby has put forward no reason to doubt the sufficiency of this search, we affirm the district court's holding that NSA had demonstrated the adequacy of its search.


III. CONCLUSION


In sum, we affirm the district court in part and reverse in part, holding:
(1) that the district court correctly rejected Oglesby's claim that NARA's fee-setting statute was not a "statute specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records," and therefore did not fall within 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(vi)'s exemption from FOIA's fee requirements;
(2) that Army, CIA [**44] and NSA all submitted inadequate Vaughn indices;
(3) that the district court correctly held that FBI, State, and NSA had demonstrated that they had conducted adequate searches; and
(4) that Army and CIA have not provided sufficient information to justify the district court's finding that their searches were reasonably calculated to uncover all responsive documents.
Thus, we affirm the district court's decision with respect to NARA, FBI, and State, but reverse and remand for further proceedings involving Army, CIA and NSA.


So ordered.


RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

http://bnd-standortpullach.de/en/historie.htm [not much here either.....one should note that the original site of the Gehlen Org. was on the estate of Bormann.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12...m-d27.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/...1_0001.pdf

https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treat...l-oglesby/

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt by Carl Oglesby
[Image: ?format=1000w]Page 48, Figure 12 of the Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group Final Report of April 2007. Click HERE to download the full report.

William Shirer closed his 1960 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with the judgment that the Nazi regime "had passed into history,"1 but we cannot be so confident today. On the contrary, the evidence as of 1990 is that World War II did not end as Shirer believed it did, that Nazism did not surrender unconditionally and disappear, that indeed it finessed a limited but crucial victory over the Allies, a victory no less significant for having been kept a secret from all but the few Americans who were directly involved.
The Odessa and its Mission
Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany's massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. Defeat at Stalingrad meant, at a minimum, that Germany could not win the war in the East that year. This in turn means that the Nazis would have to keep the great preponderance of their military forces tied down on the eastern front and could not redeploy them to the West, where the Anglo-American invasion of Italy would occur that summer. Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe. 2
Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler the other by Martin Bormann.3 Himmler was chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, "protective echelon"), the blackshirted core of the Nazi party that emerged as Hitler's bodyguard in the late 1920s and grew into the most powerful of the Nazi political institutions. After the failure of the attempted military coup of July 20, 1944, which wounded but did not kill Hitler, the SS seized all power and imposed a furious blood purge of the armed services in which some seven thousand were arrested and nearly five thousand executed. 4 The SS was at that point the only organ of the Nazi state.
[Image: himmler_bormann.jpg]Himmler and Bormann.

Himmler's plan for dealing with the grim situation facing Nazism found its premise in Hitler's belief that the alliance between "the ultra-capitalists" of the U.S. and "the ultra- Marxists" of the Soviet Union was politically unstable. "Even now they are at loggerheads," said Hitler. "If we can now deliver a few more blows, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder."5 Himmler believed that this collapse would occur and that the U.S. would then consider the formation of a new anti-soviet alliance with Nazi Germany. The Nazis would then negotiate "a separate peace" with the United States, separate from any peace with the USSR, with which Germany would remain at war, now joined against the Soviets by the United States.
But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler's, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler's link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany's greatest industrial power.
With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler's separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optioptimistic.6 The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies' demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi's best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows.
Bormann and Schmitz developed a more aggressive self-contained approach to the problem of the looming military defeat, the central concept of which was that large numbers of Nazis would have to leave Europe and at least for a time, find places in the world in which to recover their strength. There were several possibilities in Latin America, most notably Argentina and Paraguay; South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia were also attractive rear areas in which to retreat.7
After the German defeat in the battle of Normandy in June 1944, Bormann took the First external steps toward implementing concrete plans for the Nazis' great escape. An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth- gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies. 8
There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing. Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims. And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods.
For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. 9 One part of the minutes of this meeting states:
The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.10
The Nazi expert in this area was Hitler's one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes. 11 It was Schacht's ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about. 12
Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis' material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler's "favorite commando. "13 Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes ("rat lines") that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south.
The international organization created to accommodate Bormann's plans is most often called "The Odessa," a German acronym for "Organization of Veterans of the SS." It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may indeed constitute Nazism's most notable organizational achievement. But we must understand that none of Bormann's, Skorzeny's, and Schacht's well-laid plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project.
Enter Gehlen
[Image: 220px-Reinhard_Gehlen_1945.jpg]This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen's fabled post-war organization was in large part staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that, without his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the Gehlen ploy, the Odessa's great escape scheme would have been discovered and broken up.
At 43, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was a stiff, unprepossessing man of pounds when he presented himself for surrender at the U.S. command center in Fischhausen.
But there was nothing small about his ego. "I am head of the section Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters," he announced to the Gl at the desk. "I have information to give of the highest importance to your government." The Gl was not impressed, however, and Gehien spent weeks stewing in a POW compound before an evident Soviet eagerness to find him finally aroused the Americans' attention. 14
Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich's Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April 1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany's military intelligence operations throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany's east. These included Stepan Bandera's "B Faction" of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania's Iron Guard, 16 the Ustachis of Yugoslavia, 17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, "Vlassov's Army, "19 the band of defectors from Soviet Communism marching behind former Red hero General Andrey Vlassov. Later on in the war, Gehien placed one of his top men in control of Foreign Armies West, which broadened his power; and then after Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was purged and his Abwehr intelligence service cannibalized by the SS, Gehien became in effect Nazi Germany's over-all top intelligence chief.
The Great Escape
In December 1943, at the latest, Gehlen reached the same conclusion about the war that had come upon Bormann, Schacht, Skorzeny, and Himmler. Germany was losing and could do nothing about it. Several months later, Gehlen says, he began quietly discussing the impending loss with a few close associates. As he writes in his memoir: "Early in October 1944 I told my more intimate colleagues that I considered the war was lost and we must begin thinking of the future. We had to think ahead and plan for the approaching catastrophe. "21
Gehlen's strategic response to Gotterdammerung was a kind of fusion of Himmler's philosophy with Bormann's more pessimistic Odessa line: "My view," he writes, "was that there would be a place even for Germany in a Europe rearmed for defense against Communism. Therefore we must set our sights on the Western powers, and give ourselves two objectives: to help defend against Communist expansion and to recover and reunify Germany's lost territories. "22
Just as Bormann, Skorzeny, and Schacht were beginning to execute their escape plans, so too was Gehien: "Setting his sights on the Western powers," and in particular on the United States. Gehien pursued the following strategic rationale: When the alliance between the United States and the USSR collapsed, as it was bound to do upon Germany's defeat, the United States would discover a piercing need for a top-quality intelligence service in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union. It did not have such a service of its own, and the pressures of erupting East-West conflict would not give it time to develop one from scratch. Let the United States therefore leave the assets assembled by Gehien and the FHO intact. Let the United States not break up Gehlen's relationship with East European fascist groups. Let the United States pick up Gehlen's organization and put it to work for the West, the better to prevail in its coming struggle against a Soviet Union soon to become its ex-ally.
Gehlen brought his top staff people into the planning for this amazing proposal. Together, during the last months of the war, while Hitler was first raging at Gehlen for his "defeatist" intelligence reports, then promoting him to the rank of brigadier general, then at last firing him altogether (but promoting into the FHO directorship one of Gehlen's co-conspirators), Gehlen and his staff carefully prepared their huge files on East Europe and the Soviet Union and moved them south into the Bavarian Alps and buried them. At the same time, Gehlen began building the ranks of the FHO intelligence agents. The FHO in fact was the only organization in the whole of the Third Reich that was actually recruiting new members as the war was winding down. 23
SS men who knew they would be in trouble when the Allied forces arrived now came flocking to the FHO, knowing that it was the most secure place for them to be when the war finally ended. 24 When Gehlen's plans were complete and his preparations all concluded, he divided his top staff into three separate groups and moved them (as Skorzeny was doing at the same time) into prearranged positions in Bavaria. Gehlen himself was in place before the German surrender on May 7, hiding comfortably in a well-stocked chalet in a mountain lea called Misery Meadow. Besides Gehlen, there were eight others in the Misery Meadow group, including two wounded men and three young women. For three weeks, maintaining radio contact with the two other groups, Gehlen and his colleagues stayed on the mountain, waiting for the American army to appear in the valley far below.
"These days of living in the arms of nature were truly enchanting," he wrote. "We had grown accustomed to the peace, and our ears were attuned to nature's every sound. "25
Destruction of the OSS
Gehlen was still communing with nature when William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arrived in Nuremberg from Washington, dispatched by the new president to assist Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Harry S. Truman had made Jackson the United States's chief prosecutor with the International Military Tribunal (IMT), established to try the Nazis' principal military leaders. Donovan's OSS was to function as an investigative arm of the IMT.
By the last half of the war if not before, President Roosevelt and Donovan were convinced that the U.S. needed a permanent intelligence service and that this service, like the OSS, should be civilian rather than military. They were convinced too that the OSS should be its foundation. On October 31, 1944, Roosevelt directed Donovan to prepare a memo on how such a service should be organized. 26
[Image: William+Donovan.jpg]William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan (January 1, 1883 February 8, 1959) was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. Donovan is best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He is also known as the "Father of American Intelligence" and the "Father of Central Intelligence". "The Central Intelligence Agency regards Donovan as its founding father," according to journalist Evan Thomas in a 2011 Vanity Fair profile.

Donovan consulted on this assignment with his colleague Allen Dulles, a force unto himself as wartime chief of OSS operations in Bern. Dulles advised Donovan to placate the military by proposing that the new agency be placed automatically under military command in time of war.27 Donovan's proposal incorporated this idea, 28 but only in order to state all the more strongly the case for civilian control and for making the OSS the basis of the new organization. As he wrote in his memo to Roosevelt of November 18, 1944, "There are common-sense reasons why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once…. We now have [in the OSS] the trained and specialized personnel needed for such a task, and this talent should not be dispersed. "29
Donovan proposed establishment of a civilian intelligence service responsible directly to the President and the Secretary of State, the chief mission of which would be to support the President in foreign policy. Except for the civilian Secretaries of War and the Navy, Donovan's plan did not even include a place for military representation on the advisory board, and he was careful to specify that the advisory board would merely advise and not control. The new service was to be all-powerful in its field, being responsible for "coordination of the functions of all intelligence agencies of the Government." The Donovan intelligence service, in other words, would directly and explicitly dominate the Army's G-2 and the Navy's ONI. 30.
Naturally, therefore, the Donovan plan drew an intense attack from the military. One G-2 officer called it "cumbersome and possibly dangerous. "31 Another referred to the OSS as "a bunch of faggots. "32 Nor was the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover silent. Hoover had fought creation of the OSS perhaps more bitterly than the military and had insisted throughout the war on maintaining an FBI intelligence network in Latin America despite the fact that this was supposed to be OSS turf. 33
Certain elements within Army intelligence were not only opposed to Donovan's plan but were also beginning to formulate their own notions of what a post-war intelligence system should be like. Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff ultra-secret copies of Donovan's proposal along with Roosevelt's own draft executive order to implement it. On January 1, 1945, the Chiefs formally reported to Roosevelt their extreme dissatisfaction with this scheme and leaked Donovan's memo to four right-wing newspapers, which leapt to the attack with blaring headlines accusing FDR and Donovan of conspiring to create "a super Gestapo." This attack put the Donovan plan on hold, and the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 destroyed it. 34
In early May 1945, president for less than a month, Truman made the OSS the American component of the investigative arm of the IMT. It is one of the fascinating conjunctions of this story that Donovan should have left for Nuremberg just as Gehlen was coming down from his mountain. It is one of its riper ironies that Donovan would soon resign from Jackson's staff in a disagreement over trying German officers as war criminals, which Donovan objected to but Jackson and Truman supported. 35
Had Donovan lent his energies to the trial of Nazis within the German officer corps, he might have confronted the very adversaries who would shortly take his place in the American intelligence system, not only militarizing it, but Nazifying it as well.
Gehlen Makes his Move
Gehlen had been on the mountain for exactly three weeks and the war had been over for almost two weeks when he decided on May 19 that it was time to make contact. He left the three women and the two wounded men at Misery Meadow and with his four aides began the decent to the valley town of Fischhausen on Lake Schliersee.
On the same day Soviet commissioners far to the north at Flensburg demanded that the United States hand over Gehlen as well as his files on the USSR. This was the first the U.S. command had heard of Gehlen. 36 Gehlen and company took their time, staying three days with the parents of one of his aides and communicating by radio with those who had remained at Misery Meadow.
On May 22, Gehlen at last decided the moment was right. He and his aides marched into the Army command center and represented themselves to the desk officer, a Captain John Schwarzwalder, to whom Gehlen spoke his prepared speech:
"I am head of the Section Foreign Armies East in German Army headquarters. I have information to give of the highest importance to your government."
Schwarzwalder had Gehlen and his group jeeped to Miesbach where there was a[n] OSS detachment. There Gehlen once again gave his speech, this time to a Captain Marian Porter: "I have information of the greatest importance for your supreme commander."
Porter replied, "So have they all," and shunted him and his cohorts off to the prison camp at Salzburg. Gehlen's disappointment at this reception was keen and his biographers all say he never forgot it, "lapsing," as one puts it, "into near despair" as he "presented the strange paradox of a spy-master thirsting for recognition by his captors. "37
Recognition was inevitable, however, since the CIC was trying to find him. By mid June at the latest, his name was recognized by a G-2 officer, Colonel William H. Quinn, who had Gehlen brought to Augsburg for his first serious interrogation. Quinn was the first American to whom Gehlen presented his proposal and told of his staff dispersed at several camps in the mountains as well as the precious buried archives of the FHO.
Unlike Captain Porter, Colonel Quinn was impressed. He promptly passed Gehlen up the command chain to General Edwin L. Sibert. Sibert later recalled, "I had a most excellent impression of him at once." Gehlen immediately began educating him as to the actual aims of the Soviet Union and its display of military might." As Sibert told a journalist years later, "With her present armed forces potential, he [Gehlen] continued, Russia could risk war with the West and the aim of such a war would be the occupation of West Germany."38
Acting without orders, Sibert listened to Gehlen for several days before informing Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. 39 Smith and Sibert then continued to develop their relationship with Gehlen secretly, choosing not to burden Eisenhower with knowledge of what they were doing "in order not to compromise him in his relations with the Soviets. "40
Eisenhower in fact had strictly forbidden U.S. fraternization with Germans. Gehlen was encouraged to resume contact with his FHO comrades who were still at large in Bavaria, releasing them from their vow of silence. Gehlen was sufficiently confident of his American relationships by this time that he dug up his buried files and, in special camps, put his FHO experts to work preparing detailed reports on the Red Army for his American captors.
Well before the end of June he and his comrades were "discharged from prisoner of war status so that we could move around at will. "42 They were encouraged to form a unit termed a "general staff cell" first within G-2's Historical Research Section, then later in the Seventh Army's Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden, where they worked in private quarters and were treated as VIPs. 43
Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early 1970s, noting at this time:
Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Dognitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too!44
In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans. Gehlen's biographers are under the impression that it took six weeks for someone in European G-2 to notice and recognize Gehlen in the POW cage, that Sibert did not tell Smith about finding him until the middle of August, and that it was much later still before Sibert and Smith conspired to circumvent Eisenhower to communicate their excitement about Gehlen to someone at the Pentagon presumably associated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.45 But documents released in the 1980s show that this part of Gehlen's story raced along much more quickly. Already on June 29, in fact, the Pentagon had informed Eisenhower's European command that the War Department wanted to see Gehlen in Washington. 46
It was a fast time. By no later than August 22, one of Gehlen's top associates, Hermann Baum was forming what would become the intelligence and counterintelligence sections of Gehlen's new organization. Gehlen himself, with retinue, was departing for Washington in General Bedell Smith's DC-3 for high-level talks with American military and intelligence officials. And the whole concept of the deal he was about to offer his conquerors had been approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning despite what the world thought and still does think was the Nazis' unconditional surrender.47
Gehlen arrived in Washington on August 24 with six of his top FHO aides and technical experts in tow. 48 World War II had been over about a week, the war in Europe about three and a half months.
The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt
As Gehlen and his six men were en route from Germany to Washington, Donovan's OSS troubles became critical. On August 23, Admiral William Leahy, chief of the JCS, the President's national security adviser and a man who despised Donovan, advised Truman to order his budget director Harold Smith to begin a study of the intelligence question. Stating: "this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason. "49 Truman may not have known that the Gestapo's Odessa heirs were landing in the lap of the Pentagon even as he spoke. Smith in any case responded to Truman's directive by asking Donovan for his OSS demobilization plans. Now, too late,. Donovan tried to fight.
The Gehlen party, "Group 6," was checking out its very comfortable accommodations at Fort Hunt at the very moment at which Donovan, writing from a borrowed Washington office, fired back a memo to Smith defending the OSS and its right to live: "Among these assets [of the OSS] was establishment for the first time in our nation's history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported information as seen through American eyes. As an integral and inseparable part of this service, there is a group of specialists to analyze and evaluate the material for presentation to those who determine national policy."50
Much more significant than the question of the adequacy of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union, however, was the question of civilian versus military control of the intelligence mission. Germany and England had fought this battle in the 19th century, the military capturing the intelligence role in Germany and the civilians maintaining a position in England. Throughout the summer and fall of 1945, this same battle raged in the U.S. government. 51 The battle for intelligence control was indeed the background for the arrival of Gehlen and his six aides at Fort Hunt, where Gehlen's party was housed and Gehlen himself provided with an NCO butler and several white-jacket orderlies. 52
[Image: 1280px-Fort_Hunt_Park_Battery_Mount_Vernon_2016.jpg]Battery Mount Vernon, Fort Hunt Park, Fairfax County, VA.

A momentous relationship was established at Fort Hunt, one that had the profoundest effects on the subsequent evolution of United States foreign policy during an exceptionally difficult passage of world history. The period of the Cold War as a whole, and more especially its early, formative years from Gehlen's coming aboard the American intelligence service until he rejoined the West German republic in 1955 was laden with the peril of nuclear war. On at least one occasion, in 1948,53 Gehlen almost convinced the United States that the Soviet Union was about to launch a war against the West and that it would be in the U.S. interest to preempt it.
Clearly it is important to know who made and authorized the decisions that led to our national dependency on a network of underground Nazis, yet because the relevant documents are still classified this central part of the Gehlen story still cannot be reconstructed.
From the handful of published books about the Gehlen affair (none of which cite their sources on this point) we can list only seven Americans who were said to be involved with Gehlen at Fort Hunt: Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff end Truman's national security advisor. Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern during the war. Sherman Kent, head of OSS Research and Analysis Branch and a Yale historian. General George V. Strong, head of Army G-2. Major General Alex H. Bolling of G-2. Brigadier General John T. Magruder, first head of the Army's Strategic Services Unit, a vulture of OSS. Loftus E. Becker, a lawyer assc. with G-2 and the Nuremberg war-crimes operation; the CIA's first deputy director.
We do not know if these people were involved as a committee, if they talked with Gehlen and his six aides a lot or a little, separately or all at once, or if they sent their own aides to work out the details. We do not know how a POW-interrogation was transformed into a bargaining process. Above all, we do not know what kind of communication the U.S. participants in the Fort Hunt-Gehlen talks had with the political authorities to whom they were responsible. Leahy is the only one who had obvious contact with President Truman. But there is nothing in the revealed record to indicate that he ever discussed Gehlen or the Fort Hunt deal with Truman, or took the least trouble to explain to Truman the implications of hiring a Nazi spy network. We have no idea, for that matter, how Leahy himself saw it.
What we do know is the outlines of the Gehlen deal itself, however it was hammered out and however it was or was not ratified by legal, political authority. That is because Gehlen himself laid out its terms in his autobiography, The Service. Gehlen says in this work (which has been attacked for its inaccuracies) that the discussion ended with "a gentleman's agreement," that the terms of his relationship with the United States were "for a variety of reasons never set down in black and white." He continues, "Such was the element of trust that had been built up between the two sides during this year of intensive personal contact that neither had the slightest hesitation in founding the entire operation on a verbal agreement and a handshake. "54
According to Gehlen, this agreement consisted of the following six basic points. His language is worth savoring. "I remember the terms of the agreement well," he wrote:
"1. A clandestine German intelligence organization was to be set up. using the existing potential to continue information gathering in the East just as we had been doing before. The basis for this was our common interest in a defense against communism."
"2. This German organization was to work not for' or under' the Americans, but jointly with the Americans."
"3. The organization would operate exclusively under German leadership, which would receive its directives and assignments from the Americans until a new government was established in Germany."
"4. The organization was to be financed by the Americans with funds which were not to be part of the occupation costs, and in return the organization would supply all its intelligence reports to the Americans." (The Gehlen Organization's first annual budget is said have been $3.4 million. 55)"
"5. As soon as a sovereign German government was established, that government should decide whether the organization should continue to function or not. But that until such time the care and control (later referred to as the trusteeship') of the organization would remain in American hands."
"6. Should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would consider the interests of Germany first. "56 Gehlen acknowledges that the last point especially might "raise some eyebrows" and make some think that the U.S. side "had gone overboard in making concessions to us." He assures his readers that actually "this point demonstrates better than any other Sibert's great vision: he recognized that for many years to come the interests of the United States and West Germany must run parallel. "57 Gehlen and his staff left Fort Hunt for Germany on July 1, 1946, having been in the United States for almost a year. They were temporarily based at Oberursel then settled into a permanent base in a walled-in, self-contained village at Pullach near Munich. Gehlen set up his headquarters in an estate originally built by Martin Bormann.58
There a start-up group of 50 began to turn the "gentlemen's agreement" of Fort Hunt into reality. The first order of business being staff, Gehlen's recruiters were soon circulating among the "unemployed mass" of "former" Nazi SS men, the Odessa constituency, to find more evaluators, couriers and informers. 59 Gehlen had "solemnly promised in Washington not to employ SS and Gestapo men, "60 although it will be noted that Gehlen includes no such provision in his list of terms. There is not the least question that he did recruit such men, supplying them with new names when necessary. Two of the worst of them were Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six was a key Nazi intellectual, and both Six and Augsburg were associated with the Wannsee Institute, the Nazi think-tank in Berlin where SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, in January 1942, announced "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Both of them had commanded extermination squads roving in East Europe in pursuit of Jews and communists, and both had gone underground with the Odessa when the Third Reich crumbled. Augsburg hid in Italy, then returned in disguise when Gehlen called. Six was actually captured by Allied intelligence, tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned, only to be sprung to work with Augsburg running Gehlen's networks of East European Nazis. 61
From the edge of total defeat Gehlen now moved into his vintage years, more powerful, influential and independent than he had been even in the heyday of the Third Reich. Minimally supervised first by the War Department's Strategic Services Unit under Fort Hunt figure Major General John Magruder, and then by the SSU's follow-on organization, the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney Souers,62 the Org grew to dominate the entire West German intelligence service. Through his close ties to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's chief minister, Hans Globke, Gehlen was able to place his men in positions of control in West Germany's military intelligence and the internal counterintelligence arm. When NATO was established he came to dominate it too. By one estimate "some 70 percent" of the total intelligence take flowing into NATO'S military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world was generated at Pullach.63
Not even the establishment of the CIA in 1947 and the official transfer of the Pullach operation into the West German government in 1955 (when it was retitled the Federal Intelligence Service, BND) lessened the reliance of American intelligence on Gehlen's product.64 From the beginning days of the Cold War through the 1970s and beyond, the United State's, West Germany's, and NATO's most positive beliefs about the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and world communism would be supplied by an international network of utterly unreconstructed SS Nazis whose primary purposes were to cover the escape of the Odessa and make the world safe for Naziism.
The Cost of the Fort Hunt Treaty
Gehlen's story has many branchings beyond this point. These include several spy scandals that exposed his operation as dangerously vulnerable to Soviet penetration. They include the pitiful spectacle of U.S. CIC agents pursuing Nazi fugitives on war- crimes charges only to see them summarily pardoned and hired by Gehlen. They include the dark saga of Klaus Barbie, the SS "Butcher of Lyon" who worked with the Gehlen Organization and boasted of being a member of the Odessa. They include assets of Operation Paperclip, in which right-wing forces in the U.S. military once again savaged the concept of de-Nazification in order to smuggle scores of SS rocket scientists into the United States. They include continuation of the civilian-vs. -military conflict over the institution of secret intelligence and the question of politically motivated covert action within the domestic interior. They include above all the story of the enormous victory of the Odessa in planting powerful Nazi colonies around the world in such countries as South Africa where the enactment of apartheid laws followed; or several countries in Latin America that then became breeding grounds for the Death Squads of the current day; and indeed even in the United States where it now appears that thousands of wanted Nazis were able to escape justice and grow old in peace.
In making the Gehlen deal, the United States did not acquire for itself an intelligence service. That is not what the Gehlen group was or was trying to be. The military intelligence historian Colonel William Corson put it most succinctly, "Gehlen's organization was designed to protect the Odessa Nazis. It amounts to an exceptionally well-orchestrated diversion. "65 The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was exactly as the right-wing pairs had warned in 1945 when they were aroused by Donovan's proposal for a permanent intelligence corps, warning their readers that a "super spy unit" could "determine American foreign policy by weeding out, withholding or coloring information gathered at his direction. "66 It was exactly as Truman had warned when he demobilized the OSS with the observation that the U.S. had no interest in "Gestapolike measures." The fact that this lively concern for a police-state apparatus should have been focused on the relatively innocuous OSS while at the same time the red carpet was being rolled out for Gehlen's gang of SS men must surely count as one of the supreme wrenching ironies of the modern period.
Another dimension of the cost the Gehlen deal is the stress it induced within American institutions, weakening them incalculably. The Gehlen Organization was the antithesis of the Allied cause, its sinister emergence on the scene of post-war Europe the very opposite of what the western democracies thought they had been fighting for.
Perhaps at least we can say that, despite Gehlen and despite the military, the United States did after all finally wind up with a civilian intelligence service. The National Security Act of 1947 did embody Donovan's central point in creating a CIA outside the military. But in fact the Gehlen Org substantially pre-empted the CIA's civilian character before it was ever born. The CIA was born to be rocked in Gehlen's cradle. It remained dependent on the Org even when the Org turned into the BND. Thus, whatever the CIA was from the standpoint of the law, it remained from the standpoint of practical intelligence collection a front for a house of Nazi spies.
[Image: 112fe26e7c0919435ba5224e11aa1124.jpg]The room in the "little red schoolhouse" in Reims, France, where Germany signed the Instrument of Surrender that ended the Second World War in Europe, May 7, 1945. | Ralph Morse, Life Magazine

The Org was not merely military, which is bad, not merely foreign, which is much worse, and not merely Nazi, which is intolerable; it was not even professionally committed to the security of the U.S. and Western Europe. It was committed exclusively to the security of the Odessa. All the Gehlen Org ever wanted the U.S. to be was anti- communist, the more militantly so the better. It never cared in the least for the security of the United States, its Constitution or its democratic tradition.
It is not the point of this essay that there would have been no Cold War if the Odessa had not wanted it and had not been able, through the naive collaboration of the American military Right to place Gehlen and his network in a position that ought to have been occupied by a descendant of the OSS. But it was precisely because the world was so volatile and confusing as of the transition from World War II to peacetime that the U.S. needed to see it, as Donovan put it in his plaintive appeal to Truman in the summer of 1945, "through American eyes." No Nazi eyes, however bright, could see it for us without deceiving us and leading us to the betrayal of our own national character. Second, there was no way to avoid the Cold War once we had taken the desperate step of opening our doors to Gehlen. From that moment on, from the summer of 1945 when the Army brought him into the United States and made a secret deal with him, the Cold War was locked in.
A number of Cold War historians on the left (for example D.F. Fleming and Gabriel Kolko) have made cogent arguments that from the Soviet point of view the Cold War was thrust upon us by an irrational and belligerent Stalin. The story of the secret treaty of Fort Hunt exposes this "history" as a self-serving political illusion. On the contrary, the war in the Pacific was still raging and the United States was still trying to get the Soviet Union into the war against Japan when General Sibert was already deep into his relationship with Gehlen.
The key point that comes crashing through the practical and moral confusion about this matter, once one sees that Gehlen's Organization was an arm of the Odessa, is that, whether it was ethical or not, the U.S. did not pick up a Gift Horse in Gehlen at all; it picked up a Trojan Horse.
The unconditional surrender the Germans made to the Allied command at the little red schoolhouse in Reims was the surrender only of the German armed services. It was not the surrender of the hard SS core of the Nazi Party. The SS did not surrender, unconditionally or otherwise, and thus Nazism itself did not surrender. The SS chose rather, to seek other means of continuing the war while the right wing of the United States military establishment, through fears and secret passions and a naivete of its own, chose to facilitate that choice. The history that we have lived through since then stands witness to the consequences.

* * * * * * * * * *

References: Carl Oglesby is the author of several books, notably The Yankee and Cowboy War. He has published a variety of articles on political themes. In 1965 he was the President of Students for a Democratic Society. He is the director of The Institute for Continuing de- nazification. For information on the Institute write to: 294 Harvard Street, #3, Cambridge. MA 02139.
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 1140. Ibid., p. 1033 fn. Enunciation of this policy surprised and upset some U.S. military leaders who feared it would prolong the war. See, for example, William R. Corson (USMC ret.), The Armies of Ignorance: The Rite of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 8-10. William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Op. cit. n. 1, p. 1072. Ibid., pp. 1091-92
This discussion of Bormann's strategy is based mainly on Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); and op. cit., n. 3. My summary of the Nazi survival plan is based on op. cit., n. 3; Infield, op. cit., n. 6; Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Charles Higham, American Swastika (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). On "neo- Nazi" colonies in the Near and Middle East and South America, see Wiesenthal, pp. 78- 95. Infield, op. cit., n. 6. p. 192. Ibid., p. 179; and Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7. pp. 87-88. Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7, p. 88. Also quoted in Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183. Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183.
Schacht, who had lost favor with Hitler in 1938, was acquitted of war-crimes charges by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was later convicted of being a "chief Nazi offender" by the German de-Nazification court at Baden-Wurttemberg, but his conviction was overturned and his eight-year sentence lifted on September 2, 1 948. Infield, op cit., n. 6.
Infield, op cit., n. 6, p. 16.
Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zoliing, The General Was A Spy (New York: Richard Barry, Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 54; and E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen, Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 120. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 160 ff. Simpson's is the best book on the Gehlen matter so far published.
Ibid., pp. 254-55.
Ibid., pp. 180, 193.
Ibid., pp. 10, 207-08.
Ibid., pp. 18-22. Also see Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 35-37; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56-58.
Cookridge op. cit., n. 14, p. 79. Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World, 1972), p. 99.
Ibid., p. 107.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 103, 106. I do not know of an estimate of the size of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) as of the end of the war. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 161, says that by 1948, when the Gehlen Organization was probably back up to war-time speed, its key agents "exceeded four thousand." Each agent typically ran a net of about six informants, Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 167. Thus, the total Gehlen net might have numbered in the range of 20,000 individuals.
Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 15.
Corson, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 6, 20; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 625; U.S. Senate, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities," Book IV, Supplementary Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence (known as, The Church Report), p. 5.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.130.
Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 626.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.
William M. Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Atlanta: University of Atlanta Press, 1984), pp. 123-25; Corson, op cit., n. 2, pp. 214-17; Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 625. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 627.
Ibid., p. 170.
Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1 981 ), p. 31 .
Ibid.
Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 744. This account of Gehlen's surrender is based on Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 52-56; Cookridge, op cit., n. 14, pp. 118-21; op. cit., 3, pp. 89-90; op cit., n. 15, pp. 41- 43; and the BBC documentary, Superspy: The Story of Reinhard Gehlen, 1974. There are many trivial discrepancies in these four accounts but they are in perfect agreement as to the main thrust.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 120.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. As to breaking orders, Gehlen is effusive in his praise of "Sibert's great vision…. I stand in admiration of Sibert as a general who this this bold step in a situation fraught with political pitfalls of taking over the intelligence experts of a former enemy for his own country…. The political risk to which Sibert was exposed was very great. Anti-German feeling was running high, and he had created our organizations without any authority from Washington and without the knowledge of the War Department."
Op. cit., n. 21, p. 123.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Ibid., pp. 58-59. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 120.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Undated CIA fragment with head, "Recent Books," apparently published circa 1972, partly declassified and released in 1986 in response to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) suit.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56, 58-59.
U.S. Army document SHAEF D-95096, September 15, 1946, declassified FOIA release. The routing of this cable through SHAEF HQ raises a question as to whether Eisenhower was really kept in the dark about Gehlen. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: "I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler's successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen's superior and chief of staff General Franz] Haider the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement."
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61. There is variance in the literature concerning how many assistants Gehlen took with him to Washington.
John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 92;
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125; and op. cit., n. 15, p. 42, say it was three while Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61, say four. A U.S. Army note of August 28, 1945 (a 1986 FOIA release) refers to "the 7 shipped by air last week" and that no doubt is the correct number. Another FOIA release, an unnumbered Military Intelligence Division document dated September 30, 1945, originated at Fort Hunt, labels the Gehlen party as "Group 6" and names seven members: Gehlen, Major Alberg Schoeller, Major Horst Hiemenz, Colonel Heinz Herre, Colonel Konrad Stephanus, and two others whose rank is not given, Franz Hinrichs and Herbert Feukner. The number is important for what it says about the nature of Gehlen's trip, Three might be thought of as co-defendants but six constitute a staff. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125, says Gehlen made the trip disguised in the uniform of a one-star American general, his aides disguised as U.S. captains. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 60-61, inflate the rank to two stars but then call the story spurious. Gehlen's memoir says nothing about it.
Corson, op. cit., n. 2, p. 239.
Ibid., p. 240.
Ranelagh, op. cit., n. 48, p. 102ff.
BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36. Corson, in an interview with the author, said the butler and the orderlies must have been CIC agents. Still, the detail rankles.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, 203; op. cit., n. 15. p. 1 36.
Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 21 .
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 1 4. p. 64, say that the details of this "gentlemen's agreement" were put into writing by the CIA in 1949.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 65.
Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 122. Ibid., pp. 122-23.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 119;
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 155,
BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 67.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 144.
Op. cit., n. 15, pp. 17, 46-47, 166, 225;
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 242-43.
Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 133.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 218.
Ibid., p. 128.
Author's interview with Corson, May, 1986.
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.
(This article was originally from CovertAction Information Bulletin, Fall, 1990)


RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020




RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

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[TD]Gen. Reinhard Gehlen persuaded the U.S. Army and then the CIA to sponsor his intelligence network even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.[/TD]
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The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146
Edited by Tamara Feinstein
February 4, 2005
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Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB." [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:
  • "I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman

  • "I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste

  • "Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer

The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.
The documentation unearthed by the IWG reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers. (Note 2)
[Image: critch2.jpg]The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material last May (2004) in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:
"The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service… Hindsight allows us to see that American use of actual or alleged war criminals was a blunder in several respects…there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war. Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed 'democratic convictions' were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem." (Note 3)
The Gehlen organization profiled in the newly posted CIA history represents one of the most telling examples of these pitfalls. Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia professor and consulting historian to the IWG who focused heavily on the declassified CIA material, highlighted the problems posed by our relationship with Gehlen: "Reinhard Gehlen was able to use U.S. funds to create a large intelligence bureaucracy that not only undermined the Western critique of the Soviet Union by protecting and promoting war criminals but also was arguably the least effective and secure in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As many in U.S. intelligence in the late 1940s had feared would happen, the Gehlen Organization proved to be the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance." (Note 4)

The documents annexed in the CIA history posted today by the Archive echo the observations of Professor Naftali. While placing much of the blame on the Army Counterintelligence Corps' initial approach to Gehlen, this history emphasizes the CIA's own reluctance to adopt responsibility for Gehlen's organization, yet the documents show the CIA ultimately embracing Gehlen.
Some of the highlights from this secret CIA documentary history include:
  • A May 1, 1952 report detailing how Gehlen and his network were initially approached by U.S. army intelligence. (Document 6)

  • Two evaluations of the Gehlen operation from October 16 and 17, 1946, advising against the transfer of Gehlen's organization to CIG hands and questioning the value of the operation as a whole. (Documents 21 and 22)

  • A March 19, 1948 memorandum from Richard Helms, noting Army pressure for the CIA to assume sponsorship of the Gehlen organization, and continued concern over the security problems inherent in the operation. (Document 59)

  • A December 17, 1948 report outlining the problems with the Gehlen organization, but ultimately recommending CIA assumption of the project. (Document 72)

In answer to the question "Can we learn from history?", the IWG's consulting historians noted "The real question is not whether we will make use of our past to deal with the present, but rather how well we will do so. To do it well, we need these documents." (Note 5)
"This secret CIA history is full of documents we never would have seen under the Freedom of Information Act, because Congress in 1984 gave the CIA an exemption for its 'operational' files, on the grounds that such files were too sensitive ever to be released," commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act has proven this assumption false. Release of these files has done no damage to national security, has provided information of enormous public interest and historical importance, and however belatedly, has brought a measure of accountability to government operations at variance with mainstream American values."

Documents
Note: Many of the following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
Note: The following CIA history has been split into separate pdf files for each separate document or volume introduction, due to its large size. It includes relevant documents from the CIA, Army Intelligence, and CIA predecessor organizations.
Forging and Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49. Edited by Kevin C. Ruffner for CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, and European Division, Directorate of Operations. 1999. Released May 2002.
Volume 1: Introduction
Volume 1: Part I - Firsthand Accounts
Document 1: Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the German Organization [undated]
Document 2: Statement of General Winder on the History of the Organization [undated]
Document 3: Statement of Hans Hinrichs on Early History of the Organization [undated]
Document 4: Statement of Heinz Danko Herre. April 8, 1953.
Document 5: Statement of General Gehlen on Walter Schellenberg Story (Post Defeat Resistance) [undated]
Document 6: Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen's Organization by John R. Boker, Jr. May 1, 1952.
Document 7: Statement of Lt. Col. Gerald Duin on Early Contacts with the Gehlen Organization [undated]
Document 8: Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization. March 26, 1970.
Document 9: Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the US Army's Trusteeship of the Gehlen Organization during the Years 1945-1949. September 30, 1969.


Volume 1: Part II - Stunde Null
Document 10: Seventh Army Interrogation Center, "Notes on the Red Army-Intelligence and Security." June 24, 1945.
Document 11: Headquarters, Third Army Intelligence Center, Preliminary Interrogation Report, Baun, Hermann. August 16, 1945.
Document 12: Captain Owen C. Campbell, Evaluation Section, to Lt. Col. Parker, Enclosing Interrogation Reports No. 5724 and 5725. August 29, 1945.
Document 13: Crosby Lewis, Chief, German Mission. October 25, 1945.


Volume 1: Part III - The Vandenberg Report
Document 14: SAINT, AMZON to SAINT, Washington, "Russian Experts of German Intelligence Service." January 8, 1946.
Document 15: Headquarters, US Forces European Theater (USFET), Military Intelligence Service Center (MISC, "Operation of the Blue House Project." May 11, 1946.
Document 16: Headquarters, USFET, MISC, CI Consolidated Interrogation Report (CI-CIR) No. 16, "German Methods of Combating the Soviet Intelligence Service." June 3, 1946.
Document 17: Headquarters, USFET, MISC, Lt. Col. John R. Deane, Jr. to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, USFET, "Plan for the Inclusion of the Bolero Group in Operation Rusty." July 2, 1946.
Document 18: Lewis to Chief, Foreign Branch M (FBM), "Operation KEYSTONE." September 9, 1946, enclosing Lewis to Brigadier General Sibert, G-2, September 6, 1946.
Document 19: Maj. Gen. W.A. Burress, G-2, to Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Director of Central Intelligence, "Operation RUSTY - Use of the Eastern Branch of the former German Intelligence Service." With attachments. October 1, 1946.
Document 20: Lewis to Richard Helms, Acting Chief of FBM, October 8, 1946, enclosing Lewis to Donald H. Galloway, Assistant Director for Special Operations, September 22, 1946.
Document 21: Draft to Deputy A, "Operation Rusty." October 16, 1946.
Document 22: Galloway to DCI, "Operation Rusty," October 17, 1946, enclosing Heidelberg Field Base to Chief, IB, "Agent Net Operating in the Bamberg Area," with attachment, September 17, 1946.
Document 23: DCI to Maj. Gen. Stephen J. Chamberlin, Director of Intelligence, War Department, "Operation Rusty-Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," November 20, 1946, enclosing Burress to Vandenberg, "Operation RUSTY-Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," October 1, 1946.
Document 24: Col. W.W. Quinn to Galloway, "Operation RUSTY," December 19, 1946.
Document 25: Helms, Memorandum for the Record, "Operation RUSTY." December 19, 1946.


Volume 1: Part IV - The Bossard Report
Document 26: Cable, Special Operations to [excised]. January 31, 1947.
Document 27: Cable, SO to [excised]. February 10, 1947.
Document 28: Lt. Col. Deane to the German Chief of Operation RUSTY, "Assignment of Responsibilities," February 25, 1947.
Document 29: Cable, SO to Frankfurt. March 6, 1947.
Document 30: Cable, Heidelberg to SO. March 11, 1947.
Document 31: Report, "Operation KEYSTONE." March 13, 1947.
Document 32: Cable, SO to Heidelberg. March 14, 1947.
Document 33: Samuel Bossard to [Galloway]. March 17, 1947.
Document 34: Memorandum to Helms, "American Intelligence Network," with attachment. March 18, 1947.
Document 35: Bossard to [excised] Chief, German Mission. March 20, 1947.
Document 36: Cable, Heidelberg to SO, March 21, 1947.
Document 37: Report, "American Intelligence in Bavaria." March 29, 1947.
Document 38: SC, AMZON to FBM for SC, Washington, "KEYSTONE: LESHCINSKY." March 31, 1947.
Document 39: Memorandum to [Galloway] and Bossard, "Evaluation of RUSTY CI Reports," with attachments. April 1, 1947.
Document 40: Cable, Heidelberg to SO. April 8, 1947.
Document 41: [Bossard] to [Galloway]. May 5, 1947.
Document 42: Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty." May 29, 1947.
Document 43: Galloway to DCI, "Operation RUSTY," June 3, 1947, enclosing Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," with annexes, May 29, 1947.
Document 44: Memorandum for [unspecified], "Operation RUSTY," with attachment, [undated]
Document 45: DCI to Secretary of State, et al, "Opertation Rusty," [undated], enclosing "Memorandum on Operation RUSTY," June 6, 1947.
Document 46: Cable, Central Intelligence Group to ACS, G-2, European Command, June 5, 1947.
Document 47: Cable, EUCOM to CIG, June 6, 1947.
Document 48: Galloway, Bossard, Memorandum for the Record, June 20, 1947.
Document 49: Brig. Gen. E.K. Wright, Memorandum for the Record, June 20, 1947.
Document 50: Galloway, Bossard, Helms, "Report of Meeting at War Department 26 June 1947." June 26, 1947.
Document 51: Bossard, "Recommendations drawn up at request of Gen. Chamberlin for the attention of Gen. Walsh." June 27, 1947.
Document 52: Cable, SO to Heidelberg, June 27, 1947.
Document 53: Cable, SO to Heidelberg, June 27, 1947.
Document 54: Cable, Heidelberg to SO, July 25, 1947.
Document 55: Chief of Station, Heidelberg to FBM, "RUSTY." October 1, 1947.
Document 56: Headquarters, First Military District, US Army, General Orders Number 54, "Organization of 7821st Composite Group." December 1, 1947.


Volume 2: Introduction
Volume 2: Part V - The Critchfield Report
Document 57: Chief of Station; Heidelberg to Chief, FBM, "Russian Newspaper Attack on American Intelligence Activities," with attachment. February 6, 1948.
Document 58: Memorandum to Helms, "Operation RUSTY," March 18, 1948.
Document 59: Helms to ADSO, "Rusty," March 19, 1948.
Document 60: Chief, Foreign Broadcast Information Branch to ADSO, "PRAVDA Report of US Spy Group in USSR Zone of Occupied Germany." March 30, 1948.
Document 61: Chief, FBIB to ADSO, "PRAVDA Report of US Spy Group in USSR Zone of Occupied Germany." March 31, 1948.
Document 62: Chief, Munich Operations Base to Acting Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, "Rusty." July 7, 1948.
Document 63: Acting Chief, Karlsruhe Operations Base to Chief, FBM, "RUSTY." August 19, 1948.
Document 64: DCI to Chamberlin, August, 31, 1948.
Document 65: Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to Chief, FBM, "RUSTY." October 15, 1948.
Document 66: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, October 27, 1948.
Document 67: [Helms] to COS, Karlsruhe, "RUSTY." November 2, 1948.
Document 68: [excised] to COS, Karlsruhe, "RUSTY." November 18, 1948.
Document 69: Chief, MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Bi-Weekly Letter," (excerpts), December 4, 1948.
Document 70: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, December 14, 1948.
Document 71: Cable, Karlsruhe to SO, December 17, 1948.
Document 72: Chief, MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-RUSTY," with annexes, (excerpts), December 17, 1948.
Document 73: Galloway to DCI, "Recommendations in re Operation Rusty." December 21, 1948.
Document 74: Cable, SO to Munich, Karlsruhe. December 22, 1948.
Document 75: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "Operation Rusty." December 24, 1948.
Document 76: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "Operation Rusty," December 28, 1948, enclosing DCI to Maj. Gen. William E. Hall, USAF, "Operation Rusty." December 22, 1948.


Volume 2: Part VI - A Year of Decisions
Document 77: Maj. Gen. S. LeRoy Irwin to DCI, "Operation 'RUSTY.'" January 19, 1949.
Document 78: Helms, Memorandum for the Files, "Operation Rusty." February 1, 1949.
Document 79: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "[Gehlen Organization]," February 2, 1949.
Document 80: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe. February 8, 1949.
Document 81: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe. February 9, 1949.
Document 82: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "[Gehlen Organization]," February 9, 1949.
Document 83: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, [untitled], February 10, 1949, enclosing Alan R McCracken, ADSO, to Irwin, "Operation Rusty." February 9, 1949.
Document 84: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Letter to General Hall," with enclosures, February 10, 1949.
Document 85: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Procedure for Handling Funds. March 14, 1949.
Document 86: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, March 16, 1949.
Document 87: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Current Financial Situation." March 21, 1949.
Document 88: Executive Officer to Chief of Operations and Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]," April 1, 1949.
Document 89: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Current Situation." April 18, 1949.
Document 90: Robert A. Schow, ADSO to Director, CIA, "EUCOM Support for the 7821 Composite Group (Operation Rusty)," April 21, 1949.
Document 91: [Critchfield] to COS, Karlsruhe, "Organization and Individual Security Problems [Gehlen Organization] Staff," May 4, 1949.
Document 92: Headquarters, EUCOM to Chief of Staff, US Army Director of Intelligence, June 6, 1949.
Document 93: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Basic Agreement with [Gehlen Organization]," June 13, 1949.
Document 94: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] General Policy," with enclosures, July 7, 1949.
Document 95: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Basic Considerations in Reviewing the Concept and Mission of [Gehlen Organization]," September 21, 1949.
Document 96: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] - Schneider's Negotiations with Third Parties," September 22, 1949, enclosing [Critchfield] to Dr. Schneider, "The Coordination and Control of Negotiations with German Political and Economic Circles and Representatives of Western European Intelligence Services," September 20, 1949.
Document 97: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Dr. Schneider's Reply to Recent Policy Guidance Letters," with enclosures, October 12, 1949.


Notes1. Douglas Jehl, "CIA Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files," New York Times, January 30, 2005.
2. Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, (Washington, DC: National Archive Trust Fund Board, 2004), 377.
3.Ibid, 8-9.
4. Ibid, 406.
5. Ibid, 8.

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RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

Assassination as a Tool of Fascism



Quote:
Quote:[The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Judge at a one-day conference entitled The Fourth Reich in America. A transcript of the entire conference, `The Fourth Reich in America,' is available from Flatland Books, P.O. Box 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.]
 
[size=undefined]BRETT McCABE: I would like to introduce now, a man who is very well known as an independent investigator and author. He's worked for 20 years to expose U.S. government involvement in mind control and murder. John Judge has also investigated the history of Fascism and political assassination and cover-up from Nazi Germany to John F Kennedy to Jonestown, Guyana. He works to expose US plans for concentration camps and genocide, here and abroad. He has had articles published in Critique, Utne Reader, Madness Network News, and Overthrow, and has spoken on these topics on radio, television, and in public forums since 1968. So, without wasting any more time, I introduce to you, John Judge. [/size]
JOHN JUDGE: Thank you. I started this work, really, in a sense, when I started to visit the Pentagon library. My parents, my mother and father, and my aunt who I lived with, worked as civilian employees in the Pentagon, and they used to take me in when I was a kid. And by the 6th grade, I had a 12th grade reading level, because I went to this private school, where they kind of pushed us. So they would drop me off in the library for the day, and I used to go through the stuff in there, because I was, you know, 10-11 years old, nobody seemed to care much what I was looking at. And I found it pretty interesting.
And one of the things I figured out back then, because I was interested in UFOs, was that they were really government spy craft, and not extraterrestrial craft from some other place. And for those of you who wanted them to be extraterrestrial, maybe a few of them were. But most of them were a Nazi secret weapon that was developed in the aerospace caves outside of Berlin, and seen by GIs when they came in, along with the jet engines. And it was a technology that was kept secret. Like William S Burroughs says, `If this was the Middle Ages, and Magellen was an American, and we sailed around the planet and found out it was round instead of flat, we wouldn't tell anybody so we could attack from the rear.'
So, I really began the research and the work there. And I like to research, I like to read. And I would go to these cocktail parties in my neighborhood around Christmas time, and the guy across the street sold all the weapons to Howard Hughes, and the next door neighbor was CIA, and two doors down was NASA, and those were my neighbors in Falls Church, VA when I grew up, and they would get a little stewed, and they'd talk about business.
And I thought it was all pretty strange, but I didn't have any reason to question that there was a secret government, because I lived with that secret government. And you get Bill Moyers now, and he tells you, `Well, there's a legitimate government, but from time to time, to do a certain job, they hire a rather unseemly crew, and sometimes they get a little out of control and make trouble.'
I'd suggest it's the other way around: that the real government are the people that are doing the killing, and that they hire the people in the three piece suits to stand up and make you think you've got a democracy in front of you. Don't you think that's what it is?
See, because the real government kills people, and that's part of how it stays in power. Now, if you go back to the period at the end of the Weimar Republic, in the late `20s and the early `30s, before Hitler rose to power, you'll find a pattern of political assassinations.
It's depicted, interestingly, in Ingmar Bergman's probably least distributed film, The Serpent's Egg. And, the people that begin to die are the labor leaders, the political activists, the musicians. The people who might have an effective public voice, and might stand against the Fascism, begin to die in large numbers. And the German police admitted that these were political assassinations. But they said they couldn't solve them. They couldn't make the historical link to what was happening, or they could but were paid not to, like many of the investigations that we have now in this country: They couldn't solve those murders.
They couldn't hook them to the most obvious suspects, which were the members of the Freikorps from World War I: the trained and paid assassins from that period, who were helping to pave the way for Hitler, and for the end of the political opposition there. And there was plenty of it. I mean there was quite a bit of socialist/communist organizing in that period. Marx's vision of the world was that the first countries to make the change would be these industrialized countries, like Germany, and so most of the people that were continuing the Bolshevik revolution in those years move foreward with that.
The idea of the political assassinations and their origins really go back to 1918. Not that no one was killed earlier; I certainly don't suggest that. But in terms of what we're dealing with in the current period, most of this is a reaction to that revolution, to that change of power there in Russia, and in some of the other countries, in that period of time, in the early 1900s.
And in response to that there were monarchists, there were industrialists, there were people that owned a tremendous amount of wealth, both here in the United States and in the industrialized countries in Europe, who had a vested interest in reversing that. Just as Reagan seems so focused on changing the situation in Nicaragua, there were people then who had very definite reasons not to want that kind of social change (that would redistribute wealth, or privilege, or power, to the extent that it did, or was able to) to happen where they were. They wanted to maintain their privileges.
And they had societies, they had groups that they formed. One of them was the Solidarists, made up of a link between the emerging Fascists and the neo-Nazis. Another core of reactionaries existed within the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church: Opus Dei, `The Work of God,' was newly emerging on that scale. And then another group that had been known as the Knights Hospitaliers, that were the military arm of the Church during the Crusades, who became the Knights of Malta. And these were lay aristocracies within the Church. People that still believed that there shouldn't have been a Counter-Reformation, that thought that the Inquisition should have continued. People that used flagellation and hair shirts for prayer. People sort of like the Christian Right that we talked about earlier today, with a few more excesses, and a lot more money.
And, it was in the interests of these people to have stories about visions of the Virgin Mary coming, to Fatima, in the early 1900s and telling them that God was against communism, so that the Church would be against communism, and take up that struggle.
Elements of the state, and elements of the rich, and the monarchies that still existed, formed a bond of interest. And, in large part, one of the motivating people who went around and collected their monies and their energies, in order to reverse the revolutionary change in Russia, was Herbert Hoover, who spent actually more time in Europe than he did in the United States. He was also later responsible for the formation of the ideas that led to the National Security Council and the National Security State.
And part of what happened was that the Romanoff treasury, which was stolen and secreted out of the country, was then turned around along with money collected by Hoover and these monarchists and others to finance the rearmament of Germany, secretly, from 1918 to 1932. And it's that rearmament that then gave them the impetus to set up the drive to essentially get back the Soviet Union. And only because that drive was defeated at tremendoushuman cost - about 20 million lives in Russia and those countries, some of the worst killing went on there, and the civilians also, but tremendous cost - they were militarily stopped in 1943.
And, at that point, a different position was taken by some of the Allied countries. There were divisions within the class as to how much money should have been expended on these Fascists. There were others there who supported them, but it was time to regroup. It was time to back off a little, to try to get what they had together. The resources were more or less expended in the effort to set up a permanent war economy, which Charles Wilson from General Electric talked about. And to go into what they called the `Cold War,' or `low intensity warfare,' and genocide against Third World people, while they continued to build the empire and maintain the hegemony. And to re-establish the Fourth Reich, the Fascism, not only here in the United States but throughout the world.
And part of that involved moving those Nazis all over the world. Moving those Fascists. And not all the Germans were Fascists, and not all the Fascists were German. There were Japanese Fascists, if you remember. Some of them seem to be still in control today. There was a kind of veiled threat, recently, from the Prime Minister of Japan, that the forces that operated in World War II hadn't forgotten what the US did to them; and that they were ready to rise back up if we didn't stop messing around on these trade issues for the international exchange. So the threat of them, you know, is still there. We talk a lot about Nuremberg, but much less about the Japanese war crime trials.
And it's known now, for instance, that when MacArthur's group went in, they found evidence of the POWs being experimented on with chemical and biological weapons by the Japanese. That they let all the scientists that did those war crimes off the hook, in exchange for the information that they could give them about how the weapons worked. So that, to them, was a fair trade.
Many of those scientists, many of the munitions and aerospace experts, many of the spies, (about 300 of them, in fact, under General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed up Hitler's intelligence network for the east and the Soviet Union) were brought, from 1943 up until even more recently in the present day, into the United States and into other countries around the world, South Africa included. There's quite a bit of collaboration between the South African government and World War II Fascists and Nazis. But the Fascism was an indigenous problem in many, many countries. It didn't just exist in Nazi Germany. There were groups of Fascists that the Nazis were able to use in many countries as collaborationist governments.
And the real hidden history of World War II was, in fact, the defeat in many places of those forces by more progressive elements. By people who were, out of reasons of patriotism, or out of a more progressive political philosophy, bound and determined to take back some freedom. And that's a history that hasn't had as much play as the standard version of the Allied powers: these empires getting together to defeat these things, the actual struggles of the resistance to Fascism in the different countries and what role that played.
Assassination was always a tool for them; not only the mass death, but the individual death of the people that could make a difference, of the politicians that might make a change, of the people that stood in the way. And they perfected those techniques, and those techniques were brought here and used in the United States. So that when Mae Brussell did her work with the Warren Commission, and I spent several years reading the volumes and going into depth (and I went through about 300 cubic feet of material in the Archives). We found those people in the Commission Record. In key places. And I'll just talk to you about a few of them, so you can get a sense of who these people are that I'm talking about, and how they would play in.
One important one is an American, in fact, an American Fascist by the name of John J McCloy. McCloy was a Rockefeller banking lawyer. I saw Marcel Ophuls who did some of the films on the Nuremburg situation, The Sorrow and the Pity, and Memory of Justice, at a public talk. And someone came up and asked him about McCloy, `Is he connected to the internationals?' And Ophuls said, `It would be more accurate to say the internationals are connected to him.'
There was a very good article some years ago in Harpers about him, `Minister without Portfolio,' that began to go into his background, all the way back to the 1920s when he was sent over to Germany to check about World War I sabotage activities, and ended up friends with some of Hitler's early cronies, and met Hitler, and stayed in that area for some time. He was connected to Sullivan and Cromwell, a Rockefeller banking firm that kept its German investments going even after the mass deaths of the Jews started in Germany. They had investments there that they didn't want to back off from.
And McCloy eventually got into a position in the government where he was the Under-Secretary of War. Somebody pointed out to me earlier that 1947-1948 is also when we changed from `Secretary of War,' to `Secretary of Defense.' And just that little word change is enough propaganda to make clear what's happening.
John J McCloy, among other things during the period when he was Under-Secretary of War, was responsible, along with Earl Warren and a fellow named S Dillon Reed, for the set-up of the Japanese concentration camps in the United States and the internment of Japanese, not German or white peoples, but Japanese people here. A lot of them lived out here in California, and you may know some of the history of the different concentration camps that were out here. People lost their property and their money. McCloy still speaks openly against any reparations for those people, and believes it was proper that he had them locked up and treated the way that they were during the war.
And it's interesting also that he worked on that with Earl Warren, who later shows up along with McCloy on the Warren Commission, to study the investigation of John Kennedy's death. He's one of the main members of the seven member Committee that helped to cover up the death of John F Kennedy.
John J McCloy also, in his position in the government, blocked efforts by the Jewish community here in America to have something done about the Nazi concentration camps. We knew they were there, we knew where they were. The Jews wanted the camps bombed, or they wanted the railroads going to the camps bombed, something, to stop the progress of the machinery of death in the Jewish community there. And his response at the time was that it would lead to `reparations against the Jews.' One has to wonder what they could have been. But he refused to go along with those plans.
And then after the war, when we came in militarily, we set up a fellow named General Lucius Clay, who also cut deals with many of these top Nazi elements. And then Lucius Clay's military occupation government was replaced by a transitional, but civil, government of the Allied powers that would then lead eventually into the earliest postwar German government. And who oversaw that transition? McCloy, as the High Commissioner of Germany. In that position he reversed some of the few convictions that happened at the Nuremberg trials. Only eight war criminals were sentenced to death for all the destruction that was done in that war. Only eight. Some were given prison sentences and almost all of those were out within a few years, in large part because of McCloy's intervention.
Of course, the trials were also undermined. One of the key people that undermined evidence and lost witnesses in that trial, working with the US Army, was later to go on into the International (Red) Cross, International Rescue Division. And that was one of a number of agencies; the Vatican also had a line for this, that provided false identification to the Nazi war criminals to help them move internationally. And that International Rescue Committee is still dominated by CIA and right wing elements. But at that time they were providing the `Glockenspiel,' the false identity cards. And then this fellow who moved into that position came to Texas. He was with a CIA front, a foundation called M Anderson, for many, many years. He was the special liaison between the Texas police investigation and the Warren Commission investigation of John Kennedy's death. And in that capacity he blocked any effective local study of the death, or local news from getting to the Warren Commission.
And there were a number of years when he was with Anderson. We don't hear of him. And then he reappears as the `most trusted man in America,' according to the press during the Watergate fiasco, in order to pardon Nixon. His name is Leon Jaworski.
OK. So these people move throughout the history. So I'm trying to give you some feel, or some examples, of how these people move. McCloy pardons all these key Nazis. He pardons Krupp. He pardons Dorhnberger. And these other top people are off the hook because of his intervention. And then, not only do they come here, but he continues to function right up to the current day. I mean Reagan, at the time he went to Bitburg, had a White House ceremony for some of them. The German government came and gave these awards to John J McCloy for his excellent work there in the period when we were supposed to be de-Nazifying Germany. And in fact, we were leading to the Nazification of the world, including America.
Another example would be that scientist I just mentioned, Walter Dorhnberger. He was a General, and he was responsible, essentially, for helping Werhner von Braun and the rocket program get whatever it wanted during the war. He was also responsible for being part of the administration of the Dora concentration camp, where Jews and other slave labor were worked to death building, at a tremendous pace, these V1 and V2 rockets that were being used against the civilian population in England. And there were heinous examples, besides the level of the labor and the forced labor, of public hangings and other types of war criminality there at Dora. And all these people nowadays either aren't asked ... I mean, I think they've got one sentence in one piece of footage of Werhner von Braun, our fabulous rocket scientist, talking about Dora, saying some little piece about the conditions in the mines, you know, ` ... weren't that bad.'
The fact is, they were there. They were in an administrative capacity. But because after the war we wanted their expertise, we brought over a thousand of these scientists and their families. They were down in Huntsville, Alabama. I don't know if you've ever been there. The Chamber of Commerce is named after Werhner von Braun. It has big pictures of all these Nazis and their families with their hands up, taking their oath of American citizenship. And they're proud of the Nazis they brought in. I guess to get 2 on the moon it's worth 30 million dead, huh?
One of them built the Saturn 5 rocket, and only just recently got chased out of the country, much to the chagrin of Lyndon LaRouche and his crew who are fighting to get him back in. That's Walter Rudolph, who helped to get us to the moon. And without them, these Nazis, we wouldn't have done it. Of course they say they weren't `ardent' Nazis, whatever that means. They weren't involved in the war crimes. But they were there, they were in the position to do something, to speak out. And when asked they say, `Well if I'd spoken out, I would have been in the camps with the Jews myself. So what could I have done?'
And Dorhnberger was actually scheduled for indictment. The British prosecutor, Shawcross, said that he ought to hang. He was suspected of having worked, not only at Dora, but with the `Butcher' at Auschwitz, at the Auschwitz concentration camp. And instead, when Werhner von Braun got here to the United States, he said that he wouldn't do any work on our rockets unless we saved his mentor, his old friend, Walter Dorhnberger. So McCloy and Lucius Clay intervened on his behalf and he was brought directly to the United States. And first, he got a job in Huntsville, I think at Mussel Shoals, with NASA for a little bit. And then he got into a position that he kept for many, many years, where he headed up the helicopter systems division at Bell Aircraft in the Dallas/Houston area.
And it was in that position that he hired, during the 1950s and `60s, a top-ranking military intelligence agent by the name of Michael Paine. Michael Paine had a wife, Ruth Paine, and the two of them were very tight with the White Russian Solidarist community that lived in Dallas, many of these White Russians. And I say the history of these Nazis dates back to the time of the [Bolshevik] revolution. They're disaffected. Many of them worked with the CIA and other spy agencies, and Paine's family had connections with them. They went to a White Russian Orthodox church there, in Dallas, that was built with monies from the Cummins Catherwood Fund from Philadelphia. One of the blue-line families out in Philadelphia, Cummins Catherwood also funded the Cuban Aid Relief for the Bay of Pigs survivors, who were intimately involved in the assassination.
It was at that church that meetings happened, in the Christmas of the early `60s, between the Paines and the Oswalds. And it was the Paines that housed Marina Oswald, out in Irving, Texas. It was the Paines, along with Marina, who were some of the few people to testify to the idea that Oswald owned a rifle. It was Ruth Paine that got Oswald the job at the Book Depository, in October, and placed him, in part, as the patsy there. It was her friend, Roy Truly, who lied to the police, and said that they had taken a roll call and that Oswald was the only one missing from the building at the time they came in to find the so-called assassin. Even though everybody else looked in a different direction to where the noise had come from, up on the Grassy Knoll, the police ran to where they were supposed to, to the School Book Depository.
So when you scratch the surface of how they set it up, who told the lies, who engineered the `patsying' of Oswald, you find these people with the connections to the International Fascists.
Werhner von Braun, knowing that the Russians, the Soviet troops, were going to come into Berlin, packed up shop at Dora, where he was building the rockets. He moved into Switzerland, leaving a trail for US Intelligence, that had contacted him and other scientists months before in something called Operation Overcast. When he got up into that area, General Thurston, who was in charge of the military takeover for that sector, followed through with the arrangements to have him and several other scientists arrested and brought to the United States.
The person who actually effected the arrests, the physical arrests, of Werhner von Braun and the rocket scientists, the Paper Clip boys (they called it Project Paper Clip, to bring these people in) was the aide-de-camp to Thurston, a fellow named Clay Shaw. Years later, Jim Garrison attempted to indict Clay Shaw for his involvement in the assassination of John F Kennedy. And Clay Shaw, among other things, was on the board of directors of a firm called Permindex, which had offices at that time out of Canada. Where they were doing training, along with British Intelligence, of assassins all during World War II. It was work that involved, among other people, Ian Fleming. And in fact, Ian Fleming's character, James Bond, is a real person that lives in Philadelphia and is very close to the Cummins Catherwood family.
So whenever I began to look, I found these little nests of snakes. They intertwine, you know, they lock together, and their histories coincide. They send each other books and messages. They know each other. They get each other jobs.
Another person with connections to the Nazis, who was very instrumental in the assassination, is George DeMohrenschildt. He came from a reactionary family in Russia. His father was a top level employee of the Nobel oil family, which was like the Rockefellers here, prior to the [Bolshevik] revolution. They lost their fortune there. His brother, Von DeMohrenschildt, was jailed by the revolution for a period. When they got loose, they went to Germany. They helped the Fascists set up. Von went into the CIA-funded Tolstoy Foundation, which was a center for the White Russians during the whole period. And George DeMohrenschildt was an oil engineer. Among other places that he worked, and was close to, was Kerr-McGee (he was tight with Mr. Kerr), where Karen Silkwood was later killed by the Industrial Security Command guards. That Defense Industrial Security Command was running Mussel Shoals and Huntsville, Alabama, when the Nazis arrived.
You see, it just goes over and over, back and forth. You can find the connections if you start with the evidence. If you look to see who are these people, who do they know, how are they funded? And I saw it not only there, but throughout the other assassinations. Who were the top lieutenants in Jonestown? All were tied in with the Nazi money, with the International Fascism, the training, or the movements of the Nazis themselves. I wanted you to see this before I quit. This is a documentary film made by a fellow named Bob Groden. He worked at Life magazine, in the photo department, when this film came from Dallas. This supposedly `homemade' film was made by a fellow named Abraham Zapruder, who was a bystander that `happened' to be standing near the Grassy Knoll filming the motorcade go by. And he caught, on this little piece of film, supposedly just by accident, the assassination of John F Kennedy.
The reason I'm making all these secondary comments is that we found out when Abraham Zapruder died that he's a White Russian. That he was from that same section there in Minsk, where George DeMohrenschildt and Marina's family came from. Marina's uncle was a high-ranking military officer in the NKVD, but her family was White Russian and anti-communist. And Gehlen infiltrated a lot of the KGB and Soviet military and intelligence structures during the war, and left agents in place. There's reason to believe that a number of people that were involved with Oswald, even in the Soviet Union, also tie to this International Fascism; and not to the idea that Oswald was some kind of a KGB agent. He was a Naval Intelligence operative. He had crypto clearance. He travelled around with the U-2. And he was a U.S. spy. He was sent to defect falsely to the Soviet Union.
He [Oswald] got out of the Marines (you try this) because a box fell on his mother's nose nine months before. And the letter documenting her nasopharyngitis (which means it was swollen) condition arrived 4 days after the discharge. But the number from the discharge sheet appeared a month before, on his passport out of the country, you see. So he was set to go.
And he was sent by the military, because there were no civilian flights when he went from Helsinki into the area. Nothing but a military flight could have explained his passage.
Also, when he was ready to come home, he'd met Marina four times in his life, and he married her the fourth time he met her. And then he took her out of the country. But of course they could get her to lie. Because she still didn't have her citizenship in `63, they could have sent her right back. And so what they had her do was say that she didn't speak English, and she spoke Russian. And they brought in George Bouhe and Raigorodsky and these other CIA translators. And in case the translator didn't translate the Russian just right, all the people stenotyping at that point, taking minutes, were on maternity leave from the CIA.
And then, of course, all the lawyers asking the questions were chosen in a meeting, the minutes of which are still buried in the National Archives as `National Security' matter until 2039. But I'm sure they weren't chosen just because they were under A's or B's in the phone book.
It's like when James McCord, a 21 year top man, operative with the CIA, gets caught at Watergate because he puts a second piece of tape on the door (that's what he calls his book, A Second Piece of Tape). Well, you know, if you go down and find that somebody's removed the tape, you've got to cheese the operation and get out of the building. He puts another piece of tape on, and when Wills comes around on the second round, he has to report it. So McCord's in there to make sure they get arrested. His guy Baldwin, across the street, doesn't warn anybody. But when McCord needs a lawyer for Watergate, he goes out and he gets this guy Bernard Fensterwald, who heads up something called the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. Which he uses the mnemonic, the CTIA. I wrote him a letter and said, `You know, in mnemonics, pronouns don't get a letter. It's really CIA, isn't it Bud?'
And then it comes out in the Watergate hearing that McCord was donating money to the CTIA. You know, he's a `conspiracy nut' too, I guess. Or else maybe the CIA was paying Fensterwald to find out what everybody knows. Sherman Skolnick challenged him, in 1972, at a meeting. He said, `You know, when a CIA guy gets sick, he goes to a CIA doctor. When he needs money, he goes to the CIA bank. When he needs a lawyer, he goes to Edward Bennett Williams, doesn't he?'
After that, Fensterwald was the lawyer for Paisley's wife, the guy who drowned in the drink, in the Potomac, and was part of the Nysenko briefing; a CIA agent. Although they say he committed suicide, he put diving weights on (if this is true), shot himself in the head, threw the gun overboard, and then leapt to his death. Skolnick says he drowned, 'cause all the water rushed in the hole in his head.
I was looking for an article this morning, about a suicide that was actually reported in the press from Baltimore: Where a guy committed suicide, get this, by hitting himself 38 times in the head with a hammer. And the police were there, demonstrating to the press how he might have done it. Thirty-eight times, what a headache. My best one came over the news about a year ago. They said the police had determined suicide in a case where the body parts were wrapped in a bag. And the bag was tied from the outside. I mean, Houdini's got nothing on this guy. So when you look at the pathology, which is what I do, and the nuts and bolts; the bullets, and what direction do they go, and where do they come from, and who shot them - just the police work - that's all you have to do. That's all you have to get. I mean, they hide it from you a little bit, but you can piece it together. Then you know, that it didn't happen the way they told you.
I mean, when you go into the evidence of the John F Kennedy assassination, you'll find that Oswald didn't own a rifle; he didn't own a pistol. He didn't fire a gun that day. There were no nitrate samples on the cheeks or on his palms. He didn't shoot a gun. He didn't kill anybody.
Then you go to the witness testimony and the photographic evidence. And you find out he wasn't on the sixth floor and couldn't have gotten down the stairwell to the first or second floor to be buying a coke, when the cop stuck a gun in his stomach in the first round of interchange a few minutes after the shooting. Seven people saw him watching the motorcade go by, on the first floor, as Kennedy was being shot. And we have a photo, James Altgen's photo, of him standing in the doorway. Of course, the Warren Commission said it was somebody else. But all you have to do is compare that guy's description of his shirt to the shirt that Oswald has on there, and the one he's got on when he's arrested. It's Oswald. You can tell. I'm not a photo expert, but you can see his face, hairline, and everything else is the same. He was what he said he was: a patsy.
And then, even if you say he's up there, and shooting with this Mannlicher-Carcano, the bullets can't do the damage. And it's the same thing every time I look at it.
The Robert Kennedy case is the same. I noticed that they even use the same language when they testify. There's this phrase they use. They say, `The bullet is consistent with having been fired from the weapon.' Now that's not a ballistic term. You know, ballistics can tell you pretty much, as long as they've got the bullet relatively intact, whether it came from that specific gun. Because of the scratches on it, the rifling, and what type of bullet it is. All that `consistent with having been fired from the weapon' means is that the bullet is not too big to get through the barrel. The caliber is either equal to, or smaller than, the gun caliber of the barrel. It won't get stuck.
And the way I finally realized that that didn't mean anything was in an affidavit in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Where the sheriff testified `Yes' when they asked him was the bullet in the guard at Braintree consistent with Sacco's gun. And he said that it was. And then he filed an affidavit later, saying that he didn't want to be misunderstood; that he was instructed by the judge to answer just `yes' or `no' and that all he meant was that the bullet would get through the barrel. But that same phrase is in the Robert Kennedy trial transcript, it's in the Warren Commission ballistic evidence.
Just to take one more example: When Reinhard Gehlen came here, many of his 300 operatives were funnelled through a section of the Defense Department known as the Army Historical Division. Because they, especially George Patton, were busy hiring Nazis to help them write the official history of World War II. So both Nazi war criminals and Nazi historians were channeled in through this, and then fed into the beginnings of the CIA, which was formed by Gehlen and his organization. And into Radio Free America and Radio Free Europe. The engines of the National Security State and the Cold War logic were a lie.
When the Warren Commission investigators had finished their work and they went to write the Report, they didn't take any of the attorneys or any of the people that they had, essentially, already bought off to do a phoney investigation. They wanted to make sure there was nothing in that Report that would go wrong. And when I went into the Archives, about 300 cubic feet of the minutes from the meetings were notes, voluminous notes, from those 5 different staff investigative teams to the Warren Commission, in relation to the final report which they had read. And the notes say, `What's the basis for this conclusion? What's the evidence for this?' Line after line. Even the liars couldn't go as far as the author of the Warren Commission Report had gone. But the report went out intact. Hale Boggs asked in one of the meetings whether they should print any of the evidence. `I guess you know,' Boggs said, `It might look a little fishy if we didn't.' `Go ahead and print it,' Dulles said. `Nobody will read it anyway.' And Boggs said, `A few of those people out there know how to read.' I doubt he meant me, but here I am.
And when you do read it, you can find it out. But the person that actually wrote the report is a fellow named Otto Winnacker. He was on TDY, transfer from the Pentagon to the Warren Commission, to do that job. He was also, historically, one of 26 official historians of the Reich who worked directly under the Reichschancellor, Adolph Hitler, and was brought here into the United States.
When Gehlen finished setting up the CIA here, he went back to Germany and helped set up the postwar German, NATO, and French Intelligence structures that rule the reactionary politics in those countries and in Europe today, and that command our constant military presence there. Forty years after the war's supposed to be over.
He was replaced in large part, at that point, by Otto von Bolshwing. Otto Albrecht von Bolshwing, who had been Adolph Eichmann's superior at the Hebrew desk for the movement of the Jews and the Final Solution and the killing and the planning. But he was never tried in Nazi Germany. He was just allowed to slip through the cracks, like many of them, and ended up here, in the United States. He helped form a corporation called TCI, with Edwin Wilson, Helena von Damm, and with other people connected to the intelligence agencies, as one of many front companies out here in California. When it went bankrupt, it sold its largest subsidiary to Albert Hakim and Richard Secord. And that subsidiary became Stanford Technology Trading Group, and Trading Group International. These were their fronts, during that time.
And the financing, if you remember, of [Oliver] North's operation, was through Credit Suisse. Well Credit Suisse was set up as a bank, in the 1940s, as the funnel and conduit for Permindex. It was the banking firm to take care of Permindex's international operations.
And just recently, when I was reading Tennessee Waltz by James Earl Ray, where he names the person in Canada that introduced him to the mysterious character Raoul, who set him up as the patsy. He says that that's a person named David Gravier. Well David Gravier is an international financier, connected to American Banking and Trust, which itself is a major subsidiary of guess who? Credit Suisse. Where did he [Ray] meet him [Raoul]? In Canada, where Permindex was located. See, so you'll find the connections going back to certain firms, certain cover.
The current world cover for the training of these assassins, I believe, is an evangelical right-wing organization known as World Vision. Among its employees at the Fort Chaffee Refugee Camp it was running for Laotian, Thai, and Vietnamese refugees was a young man named Mark David Chapman - responsible for the death of a very political musician who could have brought a million people out in response to Reagan's war efforts in a single day, named John Lennon.
Mark David Chapman had military training. He was in Beirut, interestingly enough, when military training was going on there by Wilson and Terpil. And he moved to Hawaii, worked for the large military firms. You'll remember he took a military stance at the time. The chairman of the board in those days of World Vision was none other than John Hinckley, Sr. The funding for World Vision was, primarily, during the Vietnam period, CIA directly funding it. They now still admit 5% coming through USAID, which was the cover. And they operated in all of Southeast Asia, collecting information on Laotians, Cambodians and others under the cover of this missionary work. They were in charge of the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla when the Fascist Phalange came in and killed the Palestinians.
They are in charge of the refugee camps, along the Honduran border, for the Central Americans, where the Contras are allowed to go in and actively recruit. They run the physical operation in the camps for the Cuban and Haitian refugees here in the United States. And it was at those camps, you remember, there were riots. Well part of what started that riots was that they brought into those camps a political education program that if you didn't attend, you didn't eat. And the people that ran that program for the Cubans were none other than Alpha-66 and Omega-7, the Cuban reactionaries left over from the Bay of Pigs invasion.
These international refugee communities they started in the `50s (I went back to their earliest populations) were really just attempts to manipulate people that were in Communist countries who were reactionary and were running from the situations or the changes in those countries. Refugee populations are expendable; they're manipulable. Part of the history of Jonestown is the history of refugees, `cause a lot of the reason they went to Matthew's Ridge is that they wanted cheap labor there.
But I found the same names cropping up, the same modus operandi, the same monies, (and I've only named a few of them), throughout not only the major assassinations (the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the Chappaquidik incident, where Ted Kennedy was set up and Mary Jo [Kopechne] was killed, the murder of Jessica Savitch, a number of these situations I've worked on), but also many of the witnesses that died (75 strange witness deaths in John Kennedy case, 80 each, or around that, each, in both Martin Luther King and the Robert Kennedy, another 35-40 strange deaths connected with Watergate, the Second House Select Committee on Assassinations). And a lot of the people that we knew were involved in the original research started to drop dead. There's people dropping dead now, during the Contragate investigation. It's a constant pattern: the witnesses are wiped out.
And when you go into the specifics: who did they know, or where they were, who was around them, or who helped set them up, you will find, I believe, (if you do the work, and I encourage you to do it on the things that you're interested in) people that have connections to Navy Intelligence. That's the central place where these people operated from, on the command level. You'll find people otherwise involved in the US Intelligence agencies. And you'll find people either with direct ties to Nazi Germany or with connections to current Fascist International networks that grew out of that period.
But those Nazis came here. They formed our foreign policy. There's a couple of new books out. If you haven't had a chance to see them, you should get them. This is by Bower, from a British publisher. It's called The Paperclip Conspiracy, and it's about the hunt for the Nazi scientists. There's an earlier book by Clarance Lasby, Project Paperclip that's very good, but these are recent ones, with some new information.
And this very good book by Chris Simpson. All these still miss pieces, or perspective, but this is called Blowback, which is an Intelligence term for negative effects from a covert operation; America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War.
All these things are available. It's not impossible to get this information. I think you need to focus a little bit.
What I'm suggesting is that there's this history of the Fascism moving; that assassination has been its long-term technique for certain political purposes; and that it's time you took a look around you. Because they are killing us. They're not killing all of us. But they're killing people not just at the top government levels, but all the way down to the activists and the people who are going to try to make a difference.
Which is not to me, again, an argument not to try to make a difference. Because they can't kill us all. Or if we don't do anything, they will kill us all. So you see, it's one or the other. But to me, there's really no choice.
If you stumble across Auschwitz in the 1940s, you're either going to go home, and be a `good German' and use the soap, or you're going to speak up. You see, you're going to speak up and you're going to have the horrible fate that Walter Rudolph didn't want. You're going to become one of the excess population; one of the untermenschen, one of the expendables.
But I'd suggest that, given the reality of the economy, that most of you here in the audience are that already. My obeisance to the FBI and CIA agents here; you probably have a good paycheck still. But I would think that most of you are not in such a secure position. And this economy is not so long for the world, in terms of taking care of everybody. If you haven't looked around you on the street lately, there's a depression out there, and that's what a depression looks like.
It's interesting too that a lot of those homeless people are Vietnam veterans. About 70% of the homeless on the East coast, in fact, are veterans. Which is an aspect that's been ignored, besides the suicides, tremendous unemployment rates and long-term problems, because these wars are genocidal wars. They have a little different technology, they drop the oven out of the air instead of picking the body up and putting it in the oven, but it's still genocide.
If the little countries of the world, where we are pushing ourselves around, could get into a court and tell what we've been doing there, it would not look so different from the Nuremberg trials; in fact, I suggest to you that it's worse.
My friends say to me, `If it's Nazi Germany, who are the Jews?' Well the Jews are the Central Americans. Some of the Jews are still the Jews if they don't have enough money and prestige and aren't being used for the current time in the reactionary processes. Women. The disenfranchised. The first people that Lori [a previous speaker] mentioned that were killed: the psychiatric inmates are certainly an expendable population. The institutionalized people: the elderly, children in institutions, prisoners, and people in the military. The veterans are guinea pigs; after they get out of all that military stuff they're just used by the system further.
So there are people dying every day. And if you don't add up the deaths, you don't get the right total, you don't get the sense of what's happening.
And then they say to me, `Yeah, but we don't live in terror. We live good.' Well if you were a good German and you went along with the program and you looked the other way when they came and got the neighbors, you lived good too. They were looting the whole world like we are. We're 6 percent of the population, consuming 60 percent of its energy, 30 percent of its raw materials coming right here, into this society. All this wealth doesn't come from out of some magic well in Kansas marked `Capitalism.' It comes from tentacles of exploitation of labor and resources all over the world. And because we exploit those societies, they're in worse shape and we're in better shape.
There's enough to go around. There's no shortage. There's surplus, in fact, if it weren't being used for war; and weren't being diverted into cash crops instead of growing food, everyone could eat, everyone could live comfortably. In fact, probably on a third of the budget they spend on warfare in the world. There is a surplus; the surplus has to be manipulated in order to disappear.
But there are populations, Rand Corporation studied them. In `68 they did a study saying that half of the world population, over two billion people, had to go, in order to make it economically comfortable for the elites. They studied setting up martial law in many countries where it came to pass: the Philippines, Yemen and South Korea, Vietnam, Canada even, and eventually the United States.
How do you set up martial law here? You do it with a terrorist scenario. I'd suggest a nuclear terrorist scenario. You have Abu Nidal, who's really Oliver North in drag. They say I'm paranoid. I don't have an eight foot security fence around my house. And he's working internationally with the people that financed Nidal. It's not mano a mano, it's have him over for dinner. That fence is up for us, in case we figure out who Ollie North really is and what he did to us.
You have this so-called `terrorist,' you know, the guy with the pop gun that terrorizes you. The nuclear weapons don't terrorize you, the state control doesn't terrorize you, the massive death and genocide that goes on in your name doesn't terrorize you. You don't know who the enemy is, and so you're afraid of a guy on an airplane with a pistol. But that's a terrorist, and you're shaking in your boots, and now they are going to be said to have a nuclear weapon. So, `Oh well, what can we do? We have to suspend civil liberties. We have to put people in camps. We have to do whatever is necessary in order to stop this "threat".'
So you come up with a scenario that's good enough, and then you move. And they have the plans, they know how to move, they have it down to the neighborhood level. If you buy the lie; if you don't identify who's oppressing whom and who the enemy really is. Believe me, you are not in danger of Abu Nidal, or the PLO, or whoever the Terrorist of the Month is supposed to be. Your life is not hanging on a hinge. Yeah, maybe if you travel internationally all the time you'll be on the wrong plane at the wrong moment. But I doubt most of you are jet setters.
The threat comes from someplace else. And even the people who take over the plane, in my experience, have ties to these same military intelligence networks. But they kill people. And at the same time it is possible to expose how they do it; and to break the cycle of the lies; and to catch up with it; and to understand who's assassinating whom, and how. Because the techniques work and they use them over. They're not that hard to figure out, once you understand the personnel and the pattern.



RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

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The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination
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Evidence of link between Nazis still in operation after World War II to the still unsolved murder of John F. Kennedy

by Mae Brussell


(from the short-lived Larry Flynt publication The Rebel, January 1984)




[size=undefined]1940-1945: The Nazi Connection to Dallas:
General Reinhard Gehlen[/size]

Quote:    The sparrow-faced man in the battle uniform of an American general clambered down the steps of the U.S. Army transport plane upon its arrival at Washington National Airport. It was August 24, 1945, two weeks after the surrender of Japan, three months after the German capitulation. The general was hustled into a van with no windows and whisked to Fort Hunt outside the capital. There he was attended by white-jacketed orderlies and, the next morning, fitted with a dark-grey business suit from one of Washington's swankiest men's stores.
    General Reinhard Gehlen was ready to cut a deal.
    Reinhard Gehlen had been, up until the recent capitulation, Adolph Hitler's chief intelligence officer against the Soviet Union. His American captors had decked him out in one of their uniforms to deceive the Russians, who were hunting him as a war criminal. Now U.S. intelligence was going to deploy Gehlen and his network of spies against the Russians. The Cold War was on.
    This is a story of how key nazis, even as the Wehrmacht was still on the offensive, anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West. It is the story of how honorable men, and some not so honorable, were so blinded by the Red menace that they fell into lockstep with nazi designs. It is the story of the Odd Couple Plus One: the mob, the CIA and fanatical exiles, each with its own reason for gunning for Kennedy. It is a story that climaxes in Dallas on November 22, 1963 when John Kennedy was struck down. And it is a story with an aftermath -- America's slide to the brink of fascism. As William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, put it in speaking of the excesses of the Nixon administration, "We could become the first country to go fascist through free elections."

 [size=undefined]Photo by Wide World[/size]

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[size=undefined]General Reinhard Gehlen, shown (center) in a rare photograph taken during WWII.[/size]

    Even Robert Ludlum would have been hard put to invent a more improbable espionage yam. In the eyes of the CIA Reinhard Gehlen was an "asset" of staggering potential. He was a professional spymaster, violently anti-Communist and, best of all, the controller of a vast underground network still in place inside Russian frontiers. His checkered past mattered not. "He's on our side and that's all that matters," chuckled Allen Dulles, a U.S. intelligence officer during the war who later headed the CIA. "Besides, one need not ask a Gehlen to one's club."
    Gehlen negotiated with his American "hosts" with the cool hand of a Las Vegas gambler. When the German collapse was at hand, he had looked to the future. He lugged all his files into the Bavarian Alps and cached them at a site called, appropriately, Misery Meadows. Then he buried his Wehrmacht uniform with the embroidered eagle and swastika, donned an Alpine coat, and turned himself in to the nearest U.S. Army detachment. When the advancing Russians searched his headquarters at Zossen, all they found were empty file cabinets and litter.
    The deal Gehlen struck with the Americans was not, for obvious reasons, released to the Washington Post. As Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling phrased it in The General Was A Spy, the German general took his entire apparatus, "unpurged and without interruption, into the service of the American superpower." There is no evidence that he ever renounced the Third Reich's postwar plan, advanced by his own family's publishing house, to colonize vast regions of Eastern Russia, create a huge famine for 40,000,000, and treat the remaining 50,000,000 "racially inferior Slavs as slaves."
    Allen Dulles may not have invited such a man to his club, but he did the next best thing: he funneled an aggregate of $200 million in CIA funds to the Gehlen Organization as it became known. Directing operations from a fortress-like nerve center in Bavaria, Gehlen reactivated his network inside Russia. Soon, news of the first Russian jet fighter, the MiG-15, was channeled back to the West. In 1949 the general scored an espionage coup when he turned up Soviet plans for the remilitarization of East Germany.
    When Dulles spoke, Gehlen listened. The CIA chief was convinced, along with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that the "captive nations" of the Soviet bloc would rise up if given sufficient encouragement. At his behest, Gehlen recruited and trained an exile mercenary force ready to rush in without involving American units. Also at Dulles' direction, Gehlen tapped the ranks of his wartime Russian collaborators for a cadre of spies to be parachuted into the Soviet Union. Some of these spies were schooled at the CIA's clandestine base at Atsugi, Japan, where, in 1957, a young Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald was posted to the U-2 spy plane operation there.
    Atsugi was only one station on Oswald's Far East intelligence route; he was also at the U-2 base at Subic Bay in the Philippines and, for a short while, at Ping-Tung. Taiwan In 1959 he was transferred to a Marine base at Santa Ana, California for instructions in radar surveillance. His training officer had graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, which had close Agency ties. In May, 1960, when President Eisenhower was planning a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, a U-2 was shot down over Russia and its pilot captured. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, later blamed his demise on Lee Harvey Oswald. The U-2 affair effectively sabotaged Ike's summit meeting.
    In 1955, by pre-arrangement, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German Government, becoming its first intelligence arm, the BND. The BND became a Siamese twin of the CIA a global operation. They had already worked well together, in Iran in 1953, where the country's first democratic government was in power. Two years earlier Premier Mossadegh had rashly nationalized the oil industry. Dulles, with Gehlen's help, engineered a coup that toppled Mossadegh and reestablished the Pahlevi family regime. The family patriarch, General Reza Pahlevi, had been banished from the country for his pro-nati activities during the war. Now his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, ascended the Peacock Throne. The Shah of Iran became one of the CIA's most faithful assets.
    Gehlen pioneered the setting up of dummy fronts and cover companies to support his farflung covert operations. A major project was to form Eastern European emigre groups in the U.S. that could be used against the Soviets. Both the Tolstoy Foundation and the Union of Bishops of the Orthodox Church Outside Russia were funded by the CIA. When Lee and Marina Oswald arrived from the Soviet Union in June, 1962 they were befriended by some three dozen White Russians in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Many had identifiable nazi links; others were in the oil and defense industries. It was an improbable social set for a defector to the U.S.S.R. and his wife from Minsk.
    By the time the Gehlen Organization became part of the West German state, Gehlen already had his agent-in-place in the United States. He was Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, who had been a captain in Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS and Adolph Eichmann's superior in Europe and Palestine. Von Bolschwing worked simultaneously for Dulles' OSS. When he entered the U.S. in February, 1954, he cleverly concealed his nazi past. He was to take over Gehlen's network not only in this country but in many corners of the globe. He became closely associated with the late Elmer Bobst of Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical, a godfather of Richard Nixon's political career, which brought him inside Nixon's 1960 campaign for the presidency. In 1969 he showed up in California with a high-tech firm called TCI that held classified Defense Department contracts. His translator for German projects was Helene van Damme, Governor Ronald Reagan's appointments secretary. Von Damme is currently U.S. Ambassador to Austria, next door to the nazi's homeland.
    In 1968 Reinhard Gehlen withdrew to his chalet in Bavaria. The chalet had been a gift from Allen Dulles.

Wild Bill Donovan of the OSS, Allen Dulles and the Vatican

[size=undefined] [/size]   Allen Dulles dubbed it Operation Sunrise. He mounted it from his walk-up office in Bern, Switzerland, where, since 1942, he had maintained contact with key nazis. Operation Sunrise was conceived when these nazis decided, in the face of defeat, that they preferred to surrender to the Americans and British. The agreement, which double-crossed the Russians, was signed April 29, 1945.
    The principle negotiator on the German side was SS Commander Karl Wolff, head of the Gestapo in Italy. Wolff acted with full authority, for he was formerly chief of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. Wolff’s relationship with Dulles spared him from the dock at Nuremberg, but when it was later discovered that he had dispatched "at least" 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp he was handed a token sentence. In 1983 Wolff made the social pages when he and some of his old SS buddies sojourned on the late Hermann Goering's yacht Carin II of Hamburg. The skipper was Gert Heidemann, an avowed Hamburg nazi. The yacht belonged to the widow, Emmy Goering, whose estate attorney was the celebrated Melvin Belli. Belli has always had an eclectic clientele. He represented Jack Ruby after he shot Oswald. And he represented actor Errol Flynn's family interests. Flynn (once a close friend of Ronald Reagan) has been identified as having collaborated with the Gestapo.

 [size=undefined]Photo by Wide World[/size]

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[size=undefined]John J. McCloy had a lengthy career riddled with Nazi sympathies[/size]

    When Wolff hammered out the secret surrender terms with Dulles, he had in the back of his mind a safe diaspora for his nazi compatriots. This is where the OSS, William Donovan and the sovereign state of the Vatican came in. "Wild Bill" Donovan was top dog in the OSS. Shortly before the Germans overran Europe, Father Felix Morlion, a papal functionary, had set up a Vatican intelligence organization called Pro Deo in Lisbon. When the U.S. entered the war Donovan moved Morlion lock, stock and barrel to New York and opened a sizeable bank account for him to draw on. The priest founded the American Council for International Promotion of Democracy Under God, on 60th Street. In the same building is the office of William Taub, whose name popped up during the Watergate affair. Taub is well-known as a wide-ranging middleman for such powerful figures as Nixon, Howard Hughes, Aristotle Onassis and Jimmy Hoffa, and his behind-the-scenes maneuvers were invaluable to Nixon in his 1960 run at the presidency. Taub was especially close to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviania of the Holy See, who arranged Mussolini's 1929 "donation" of $89 million to the Vatican to ensure its neutrality with Mussolini and Hitler. The money went into a special fund in the Vatican Bank, and after the war part of it was entrusted to "God's Banker" Michele Sindona for investment. Sindona channeled a good chunk of it to the Nixon campaign.
    When Rome was liberated in 1944 Morlion and Pro Deo relocated there. In recognition of Donovan's good works on behalf of Pro Deo, Pope Plus XII knighted him with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester. And before he flew off to Washington to cut his deal with the CIA, Reinhard Gehlen received the Sovereign Military Order of Malta award from the Pontiff. So did James Jesus Angleton, a Donovan operative in Rome who became the CIA's chief of counterintelligence.
    For Dulles, Operation Sunset was a personal triumph, one that set in motion his rise to the top of the intelligence heap. In 1963, by virtue of that position, he became the CIA's representative on the Warren Commission.

John J. McCloy and the Chase Manhattan

    President Lyndon Johnson asked John J. McCloy to serve on the Warren Commission. No less than nine presidents had called on the Wall Street lawyer for special assignments, yet he was little known to the public. McCloy said he entered the investigation "thinking there was a conspiracy," but left it convinced that Oswald acted alone. "I never saw a case that was more completely proven," he asserted.
    McCloy had long been involved in the murky world of espionage, intrigue and nazis. He spent the decade of the 1930s working out of Paris. Much of his time was spent on a law case stemming from German sabotage in World War I. His investigation took him to Berlin, where he shared a box with Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. He was in contact with Rudolph Hess before the Nazi leader made a mysterious flight to England in 1941.

 [size=undefined]Photo by Wide World[/size]

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 [size=undefined]Major General Charles A. Willoughby, "Our own Junker general."[/size]

    When the nazis occupied Europe, the banking exchanges between Britain and the U.S. on the one hand and Germany on the other carried on as usual. In Trading With the Enemy, Charles Higham documents the role of Standard Oil of New Jersey, owned by the Chase Manhattan Bank, and I.G. Farben's Sterling Products with the Bank for International Settlements. Standard Oil tankers plied the sea lanes with fuel for the nazi war machine. Prior to the war McCloy was legal counsel to Farben, the German chemical monopoly.
    As an assistant secretary in the War Department during the war:
    • McCloy blocked the executions of nazi war criminals
    • Forged a pact with the Vichy Regime of pro-nazi Admiral Darlan.
    • Displaced Japanese-Americans in California to internment camps.
    • Refused to recommend the bombing of nazi concentration camps to spare the inmates on grounds "the cost would be out of proportion to any possible benefits."
    • Refused Jewish refugees entry to the U.S.
Quote:    When the curtain fell on the war, McCloy helped shield Klaus Barbie, the "butcher of Lyons," from the French. Barbie and other vicious dogs from Hitler's kennel were hidden out with the 370th Counter Intelligence Corps at Obergamergau. One of their keepers was Private Henry Kissinger, soon to enter Harvard as a McCloy protege.
    In 1949 McCloy returned to Germany as American High Commissioner. He commuted the death sentences of a number of nazi war criminals, and gave early releases to others. One was Alfred Krupp, convicted of using slave labor in his armaments factories. Another was Hitler's financial genius, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who subsequently went on the payroll of Aristotle Onassis.
    In 1952 McCloy left a Germany that was prepared to re-arm to return to his law practice. He became president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, director of a dozen blue chip corporations, and legal counsel to the "Seven Sisters" of American oil. During this period he acquired a client, the Nobel oil firm, whose interests in Czarist Russia had been managed by the father of George de Mohrenschildt, Lee and Marina Oswald's "best friend" in Dallas.
    Busy as he was McCloy found time to supervise construction of the new Pentagon building. It was nicknamed "McCloy's Folly."

J. Edgar Hoover and Interpol

    FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover "mistrusted and disliked all three Kennedy brothers. President Johnson and Hoover had mutual fear and hatred for the Kennedys," wrote the late William Sullivan, for many years an assistant FBI director. Hoover hated Robert Kennedy, who as Attorney General was his boss, and feared John. In turn the President distrusted Allen Dulles, easing him out as CIA director after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. When JFK moved to lower the oil depletion allowance, he incurred the displeasure of John McCloy, whose clients' profits would be trimmed.
    Hoover, Dulles and McCloy did not belong to the Kennedy fan club. When the president was shot, Hoover controlled the field investigation, and Dulles and McCloy helped mold the final verdict of the Warren Commission.
    As America stood on the threshold of World War II Hoover continued a friendly relationship with the nazis who dominated Interpol, the Berlin-based international secret police. He had been obsessed with the "Red menace" since 1919 when he became head of the Bureau's General Intelligence Division. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe and other fanatical nazis were active in Interpol. Even after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Hoover ignored all evidence of nazi death squads and atrocities and cooperated with the boys in Berlin. As France fell, Hoover exchanged lists of wanted criminals, enclosing autographed photographs of himself. It was not until three days before Pearl Harbor that he called a halt -- and then only because he feared his image might be tarnished.
    When the war had been imminent Roosevelt charged Hoover with ferreting out nazi spies in the Western Hemisphere. Two escaped his notice. As early as 1933 Gestapo agent Dr. Hermann Friedrick Erben recruited Errol Flynn as an intelligence source. Erben went on to become a naturalized American citizen, but never abandoned his loyalty to Hitler. Flynn went on to make "Santa Fe Trail" in 1940, co-starring with Ronald Reagan, and the two paired up for "Desperate Journey" in 1942.
    George de Mohrenschildt, the Oswalds' genial host in Dallas, was tagged by Hoover's FBI as a nazi spy during World War II. G-men noted that his cousin, Baron Maydell, had nazi ties, and that his uncle distributed pro-nazi films. Their suspicions were confirmed when they trailed de Mohrenschildt from New York to Corpus Christi. On October 8, 1942 a "lookout" was placed in his file in case he applied for another passport.

 [size=undefined]Photo by Wide World[/size]

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[size=undefined]J. Edgar Hoover: he kept alive the Nazi intelligence network INTERPOL[/size]

    The parts left out of J. Edgar Hoover's investigation before and after Kennedy was killed were the nazi associations de Mohrenschildt had while working for U.S. intelligence.
    George's cousin, the movie producer Baron Constantine Maydell, was one of the top German Abwehr agents in North America. Reinhard von Gehlen recruited Maydell in the post-war era to be in charge of the CIA's Russian emigre programs.
    Gehlen recruited veterans of Maydell's Abwehr Group to work with East European emigre organizations inside the U.S.
    Part of Lee and Marina's red carpet treatment in the U.S. started with their arrival from the USSR. Spas T. Raigkin was the ex-Secretary General of a group such as Maydell's. The AFABN, the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, with CIA funding, assisted Lee and Marina to get settled.
    J. Edgar Hoover was trained only to see if there were Communists around ...the red menace. The Abwehr, Reinhard Gehlen and Maydell were overlooked by the FBI.
    After the war Interpol ostensibly cleaned up its act, moved to Paris and installed the prestigious Hoover as vice president. Yet Interpol steadfastly refused to hunt for nazi war criminals, contending it was independent of politics. The excuse appeared a bit lame when, in the 1970s, former SS officer Paul Dickopf became president.

"Sir" Charles Willoughby -- a Franco-German-American

    He was a bull of a man who spoke with a German accent, wore a custom-tailored general's uniform and affected a monocle. A fellow officer in the U.S. army under his true name of Adolph Charles Weidenbach, born in Heidelberg, March 8, 1892. But by the time he became Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence for the war in the Pacific, he was Major General Charles A. Willoughby. Behind his back he was derisively tagged "Sir Charles."
    For a man of such Teutonic traits it was odd that Willoughby preferred his fascism with a Spanish accent. But this was an accident of geography. While serving as a military attache in Ecuador, he had received a decoration from Mussolini's government -- the Order of Saints Maurizio and Lazzaro. After delivering an impassioned paean to Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco at a lunch in Madrid, he was toasted by the secretary general of the Falangist Party, "I am happy to know a fellow Falangist and reactionary.
    MacArthur's pre-war headquarters were in the Philippines, whose commerce was dominated by resident Spaniards. The Daddy Warbucks of this crowd was Andres Soriano, who owned an early-day conglomerate of airlines, mines, breweries ("Of course!") and American distributorships. During the Spanish Civil War Soriano was one of Franco's principal money-bags. When the Rising Sun flag was raised over the Philippines Soriano fled to Washington to become finance minister of the government-in-exile. But there was such a fuss over his fascist reputation that he flew off to Australia to become a colonel on MacArthur’s staff.
    Willoughby accompanied the Supreme Commander to Tokyo for the occupation of Japan. His preferences remained the same; when military police shook down his hotel looking for a fugitive, they found Willoughby at dinner with the stranded Italian fascist ambassador to Japan and members of his staff. He became a heavy-handed censor, suppressing unfavorable news to the States. He delighted in falsely labeling correspondents who defied him as "Communists," a tactic Senator McCarthy would adopt with enthusiasm. But the general's priority project was a dressed-up history of the Pacific War in which MacArthur would be the towering hero. Willoughby brought in Japanese military brass for a view from the enemy side, a move that may have had an ulterior motive. The possibility existed that Willoughby was down-playing Japanese war crimes so that the perpetrators could be protected for use against the Soviets later. This was happening in Germany where the top nazis were writing the history of Malmedy. The tight security in which Willoughby wrapped the project only adds to this impression. One woman had a passkey, the wife of Dr. Mitsutaro Araki, a former exchange lecturer in Germany, who was closely tied in with high nazis in Tokyo and the Tojo clique.
    Willoughby harbored another secret that only came to light last year. During the war, the Japanese conducted germ warfare experiments with human beings as guinea pigs (at least 3,000 died, including an undetermined number of captured U.S. military). The Pentagon decided that the biological research might prove handy against the Russians, and the Japanese responsible for the experiments were granted immunity from prosecution in return for their laboratory records. On December 12, 1947 the Pentagon acknowledged the "wholehearted cooperation" of Willoughby in arranging the examination of the "human pathological material which had been transferred to Japan from the biological warfare installations."
    As his final public gesture to Franco, Willoughby lobbied the U.S. Congress in August, 1952 to authorize $100 million for the anti-Communist dictator's needs. Then he settled down in the U.S. to do battle with the domestic enemy. As Sir Charles and his right-wing allies saw it, Marxism wasn't the real enemy, the Liberals were.
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1952: The Travels of Klaus Barbie, Evita Peron, Otto Skorzeny, and Nicolae Malaxa
    By 1952 Klaus Barbie had arrived in Bolivia via a stop in Argentina. He had been spirited out of Germany by the CIA, with a hand from the Vatican. Soon he teamed up with SS Major Otto Skorzeny, who now was affiliated with the CIA. Dr. Fritz Thyssen and Dr. Gustav Krupp, both beneficiaries of McCloy's amnesty, bankrolled Skorzeny from the start. Barbie and Skorzeny were soon forming death squads such as the Angels of Death in Bolivia, the Anti-Communist Alliance in Argentina, and in Spain, with Stephen Della Chiaie, the Guerrillas of Christ the King.
    In 1952 the nazi, Martin Bormann's money was released. In Argentina, Evita Peron died of cancer at age 33. In her name was deposited, in 40 Swiss banks, the nazi money. There was $100 million cash, another $40 million in diamonds. Several hundred million more were set aside with Evita's brother, Juan Duarte, as the courier. This led to three murders the following year:
    • Juan Duarte was shot to death.
    • Heinrich Dorge, an aide to Hjalmar Schacht, killed.
    • Rudolf Feude, nazi banker who knew the locations of the money, was poisoned.
Quote:    In 1952 Otto Skorzeny, who had been released from American custody in 1947, moved to Madrid. He created what is known as the International Fascista. The CIA and the Gehlen BND dispatched him to "trouble spots." On his payroll were former SS agents, French OAS terrorists and secret police from Portugal's PDID. PDID are the same initials as the Los Angeles police intelligence unit, Public Disorder Intelligence Division. The California PDID was exposed on May 24, 1983 as spying on law abiding citizens at an expense of $100,000, utilizing a computerized dossier system bought by the late Representative Larry McDonald's "Western Goals." (McDonald was a national leader of the John Birch Society, which was exceedingly active in Dallas preceding the Kennedy assassination. Western Goals has offices in Germany run by Eugene Wigner that feed data to the Gehlen BND.)
    On the board of Western Goals are such Cold Warriors as Edward Teller, Admiral Thomas Moorer and Dr. Hans Senholt, once a Luftwaffe pilot.
    SS Colonel Skorzeny's CIA agents participated in terror campaigns waged by Operation 40 in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina. Skorzeny was also in charge of the Paladin mercenaries, whose cover, M.C. Inc., was a Madrid export-import firm.
    Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, [formerly] of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry, was M.C. operating manager. The nerve center for Skorzeny's operations was in Albufera, Spain. It was lodged in the same building as the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE under Colonel Eduardo Blanco and was also an office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
    The Albufera building was the kind of intelligence nest that was duplicated in New Orleans in 1963. That summer Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pro-Castro literature stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a commercial building. This was a blunder, because Oswald actually was under the control of an anti-Castro operation headquartered there. His controller, W. Guy Banister, was connected with military intelligence, the CIA and a section of the World Anti-Communist League that had been set up by Willoughby and his Far Pacific intelligence unit in Taiwan.
    In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger disclosed that the International Fascist was "not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton."
    A subcommittee on international operations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepared a report "Latin America: Murder, Inc." that is still classified. The title repeated Lyndon Johnson's remark, three months before he died, "We were running a Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." The report concluded: "The United States had joint operations between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The joint operations were known as Operation Condor. These are special teams used to carry out 'sanctions,' the killing of enemies."
    Jack Anderson gave a few details in his column "Operation Condor, An Unholy Alliance" August 3, 1979:
Quote:"Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by nazis from Hitler's SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler's 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or rotated to death over barbecue pits."
    Otto Skorzeny code-named his assault on American soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge Operation Greif, the "Condor." He continued Condor with his post-war special teams that imposed "sanctions," meaning the assassination of enemies. Skorzeny's father-in-law was Hjalmar Schacht, president of Hitler's Reichsbank. Schacht guided Onassis' shipyards in rebuilding the German and Japanese war fleets. In 1950 Onassis signed on Lars Anderson for his whaling ships on the hunt off Antarctica and Argentina. Anderson had belonged to Vidkum Quisling's nazi collaborationist group in Norway during the war. Clay Shaw, who was charged by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison with complicity in the JFK assassination, was a close friend of Hjalmar Schacht.

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[size=undefined]Colonia Dignidad. Nobody comes, nobody goes[/size][size=undefined]  [/size]

    In 1952 Nicolae Malaxa moved from Whittier California to Argentina. Malaxa had belonged to Otto von Bolschwing's Gestapo network, as did his associate, Viorel Trifia, who was living in Detroit. They were members of the Nazi Iron Guard in Romania, and had felt prosecution. They had one thing in common; they were friends of Richard Nixon.
    Trifia had been brought to the U.S. by von Bolschwing. Malaxa had escaped from Europe with over $200 million in U.S. dollars. Upon arrival in New York he picked up another $200 million from Chase Manhattan Bank. The legal path for his entry was smoothed by the Sullivan & Cromwell law offices, the Dulles brothers firm. Undersecretary of State Adolph Berle, who had helped Nixon and star witness Whittaker Chambers convict Alger Hiss, personally testified on Malaxa's behalf before a congressional subcommittee on immigration. In 1951 Senator Nixon introduced a private bill to allow Malaxa permanent residence. Arrangements for his relocation in Whittier were made by Nixon's law office. The dummy front cover for Malaxa in Whittier was Western Tube. In 1946 Nixon had gotten a call from Herman L. Perry asking if he wanted to run for Congress against Rep. Jerry Voorhis. Perry later became president of Western Tube.
    When Malaxa went to Argentina in 1952, he linked up with Juan Peron and Otto Skorzeny. Questions were raised at the time about J. Edgar Hoover, the Iron Guard, Malaxa and Vice President Nixon.

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[size=undefined]Richard M. Nixon: strange friends in strange places and occupations[/size]


1960 Elections: Richard Nixon vs. John F. Kennedy

    Before the election of 1960, a group within the Christian Right plotted to kill John Kennedy in Van Nuys, California while he was still a candidate. The group was a meld of anti-Castro Cubans, Minutemen and home-grown nazis. Some were sought by Jim Garrison, following his arrest of Clay Shaw, for testimony before the New Orleans grand jury. When Garrison forwarded extradition papers for Edgar Eugene Bradley, a member of the group, Governor Ronald Reagan refused to sign them.
    The leader of one of these groups, the Christian Defense League (CDL), was the Reverend William P. Gale. During the war Gale had been an Army colonel in the Philippines training guerilla bands. His superior officer was Willoughby. By the late 1950s Gale was recruiting veterans for his "Identity" group, which was financed by a wealthy Los Angeles man.
    One of the CDL's contacts was Captain Robert K. Brown, a special forces professional from Fort Benning, Georgia. Brown was working with anti-Castro Cubans, mercenaries similar to Skorzeny's teams. Brown is now publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine and paramilitary texts such as Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins. The book explains how Mitchell WerBell made special weapons for the CIA, Bay of Pigs assault squads and other customers. WerBell, son of a wealthy Czarist cavalry officer, perfected a silencer so effective a gun can be shot in one room and not heard in the next. It is ideal for assassinations.
    There had been prolonged controversy about how many shots were fired the day Kennedy was killed. The President's wounds, nicks on the limousine and curb, and other bullet evidence indicated quite a few. But the Warren Commission concluded there were only three. It took the testimony of spectators in Dealy Plaza who said they only heard three. It never considered the possibility that silencer-fitted guns were fired.
    When Clay Shaw was arrested by Jim Garrison the news was of particular interest to the Italian newspaper Paesa Sera. It followed up with a story that Shaw belonged to a cover organization in Rome named Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). Its location was frequently moved, its presidents rotated; its modus operandi altered. CMC included Italian fascists, elements of the European paramilitary right, the CIA, and the U.S. Defense Department. There were major shareholders with banks located in Switzerland, Miami, Basel and other major cities.
    CMC had been formed in 1961, one year after Kennedy was elected. Its principals had worked with fascist networks established after World War II. The board of directors numbered Ferenc Nagy, a former Hungarian premier who led that country's Anti-Communist Countrymen's Party in exile. J. Edgar Hoover brought Nagy to the United States, where there were numerous Gehlen-supported emigre organizations. On August 18, 1951, the Saturday Evening Post pictured Nagy with Czech, Pole, Hungarian and Russian exiles under the heading: "They Want Us To Go to War Right Now." On November 22, 1963 Nagy was living in Dallas.
    CMC was actually a subsidiary of Swiss-based Permindex, whose president was Prince Gutierez de Spadafora, Italian industrialist and large landowner. Spadafora's daughter-in-law was related to Hjalmar Schacht. Clay Shaw, who managed the New Orleans Intemational Trade Mart, was a director. Another was Giorgio Mantello, aka George Mandel, who would later move to New Orleans. Once convicted of "criminal activities" in Switzerland, Mantello worked closely with his fellow Hungarian Nagy. One of the goals of the CMC was that "Rome will recover once again her position as center of the civilized world."
    Major L. M. Bloomfield, a veteran of the OSS who resided in Montreal, was a suspect Garrison wanted to question. In Canada he reportedly controlled Credit Suisse, Heineken's Breweries, Israel Continental Company, Grimaldo Siosa Lines and other international firms. Shaw's name was found among eleven directors of a company in Montreal that actually was based in Rome. Who was giving the virtually unlimited money to CMC, and who was getting it? The answer might have been found in the huge amounts that flowed out of Evita Peron's accounts.
    Paesa Sera reported on March 4, 1967 that CMC was a creature of the CIA serving as a money conduit, and that Shaw and Bloomfield conducted illegal political espionage under its cover. In New Orleans, Shaw was the respected citizen who had helped restore the French Quarter. In Rome he was a vital member of the boards of twin companies dealing with fascists accused of European assassinations. Shaw's address book contained the private number of Principessa Marcelle Borghese, now Duchessa de Bomartao, who is related to Prince Valerio Borghese. Called the "Black Prince" and "The New Duce," Borghese was leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a neo-fascist syndicate. The Black Prince, who was a decorated submarine captain in the First World War, was convicted of cooperating with the nazis in WW II and given 12 years in prison.
    The Black Prince is the same Borghese rescued by the CIA's James J. Angleton. No wonder Angleton was awarded the Sovereign Military Order of Malta by the Pope after the war. It might explain what Angleton was hinting at when questioned about the murder of JFK: "A mansion has many rooms; there were many things during the period; I'm not privy to who struck John."
    Clay Shaw's affiliation with Permindex would plug in later to Argentina, Spain, Rome, New Orleans and Dallas. The international range of hit teams, using CIA money diverted overseas to cover companies set up by the Gehlen Organization, started coming together after Shaw's arrest.
    In November, 1960 it would be Nixon versus Kennedy. Frank Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to John Kennedy on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. A few weeks later Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. So Exner became involved, as William Safire put it, in a "dual affair with the nation's most powerful mobster and the nation's most powerful political leader."
    Giancana was busy with more than his love life; he was hired to form assassination teams to go after Fidel Castro. The man who retained him was Robert Maheu, a former FBI and CIA operative. It was a classic cutoff. Maheu never mentioned that the CIA was behind it. He intimated to Giancana that wealthy Cuban exiles were providing the funds. This sounded plausible, since Maheu was Howard Hughes' right-hand man.
    Giancana put his Los Angeles lieutenant, Johnny Roselli, in charge of the hit squads. In 1978 when the House Select Committee questioned him, Roselli hinted that his assignment was aimed at Kennedy as well as Castro. Shortly afterward, his body was found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast. Giancana never got a chance to testify. He was shot to death in his Chicago home.
    The Howard Hughes organization, used as a cover for the kill-Castro conspiracy, (Hughes thought it was a patriotic idea) has long retained Carl Byoir Associates as its public relations arm. Throughout the war Byoir represented nazi bankers and industrialists and the I.G. Farben interests. One of his clients was Ernest Schmitz, member of the I.G. Farben-Ilgner and the German American Board of Trade. His Information Services was subsidized by the nazi government. George Sylvester Viereck, editor of the German Library of Information, was also in business with Byoir. A lucrative Byoir client was the Frederick Flick Group. Flick, a Nuremberg defendant released by McCloy, was the single greatest power behind the nazi military muscle.
    Frederick Flick's son was close to the W.R. Grace Company, and invested over $400,000 in partnership with J. Peter Grace in the United States. During the war, WR. Grace was accused in a military report of protecting a certain nazi Colonel Brite in Bolivia. In 1951, when the CIA smuggled Barbie out of Germany, he was sent to join the same Colonel Brite. George de Mohrenschildt was a close associate of the company's founder, William Grace.
    De Mohrenschildt was a man of many faces. He befriended Lee and Marina Oswald, introducing them to the White Russian community. He made phone calls to obtain Lee jobs and housing. As he told it to the Warren Commission, he was fascinated with this strange couple just out of Russia. But at the Petroleum Club in Dallas, De Mohrenschildt sang the praises of Heinrich Himmler. His travels took him all over the world on missions identified with intelligence. In 1956 he was employed by Pantepec Oil Company owned by the family of William Buckley.
    De Mohrenschildt often discussed Oswald with J. Walton Moore, the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division resident in Dallas. In the spring of 1963, just after visiting the Oswalds, he went to Washington. There is a record of a phone call de Mohrenschildt made on May 7, 1963, to the Army Chief of Staff for intelligence. The same month he had a meeting in person with a member of that staff. His military connections seem to have been wide. One of the first persons de Mohrenschildt took the Oswalds to see in Dallas was retired Admiral Chester Burton.

continued in next post.....



RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

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Continued from the above post........[this is part 2 of 2]
 [size=undefined]Photo by Wide World[/size]

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[size=undefined]Lee Harvey Oswald's benefactor was Texas oil millionaire George de Mohrenschildt[/size]

    Although De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified at length before the Warren Commission, only attorney Albert Jenner and Pentagon historian Alfred Goldberg attended. One of Jenner's clients was General Dynamics, maker of the F-lll fighter that would achieve fame in Vietnam. The chief of security for General Dynamics in Dallas, Max Clark, was another De Mohrenschildt associate donating money to help Marina while George got Lee his next job in Dallas. He found one at the graphics house of Jagger-Chiles-Stovall, which held classified military contracts.
    Jeanne de Mohrenschildt was originally brought to the U.S. by a family member employed by the Howard Hughes organization. In 1977 George was found fatally shot, allegedly a suicide, on the day a House Select Committee investigator came by looking for him. Jeanne consented to a press interview. She said George had been a nazi spy.
    The placement de Mohrenschildt got for Oswald allowed him to visit the Sol Bloom agency at least 40 times. It was this agency that later decided the motorcade route for Kennedy's fatal visit.
    Ruth Paine, whom Oswald met via George, had called Roy Truly and procured work for Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository.[size=undefined]
 [/size]   If Maydell and the Gehlen agents were active in the U.S. they knew all the right moves to secure their patsy.

1960: Young Americans for Freedom

    President Harry Truman warned about the CIA "Gestapo" he had created.
    President Eisenhower left the White House fearing the new "military-industrial complex" he handed to us.
    In 1960 candidate Richard Nixon was qualified for the job of President. A lot of influential people were sure he was the only choice.
    Nixon was familiar with every red scare tactic. From his first campaign against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 for the House seat, or vs. Helen Douglas in the Senate, and working with Sen. Joe McCarthy, he knew it well. The prosecution of Alger Hiss, with such flimsy evidence, proved his value alone.
    But Nixon had also accumulated strong connections with members of the crime syndicate, the Vatican hierarchy, defense industries and known nazis. He knew them all.
    What if he lost after those seventeen years of preparation? Would there be a back-up team for the future? Could the Pentagon or Reinhard Gehlen visualize leaving the entire United States presidency to chance elections?
        Remember what happened to Senator Robert Kennedy on the eve of his primary election in June, 1968? They can't get that close to losing it again, you know. With both Kennedy's gone, Nixon finally made it.
    September, 1960, two months before the elections, William F. Buckley Jr. launched his YAF, Young Americans for Freedom, from the grounds on his Connecticut estate.
    Prior to that date, Buckley's career was one of the most conservative in the U.S. Following his graduation at Yale, mentor Frank Chodorov grabbed him for purposes related to his job with McCormick's Chicago Tribune.
    Buckley served the CIA in Japan from 1950 to 1954.
    He also did a stint with CIA in Mexico with E. Howard Hunt.
    Co-founder of YAF was Douglas Caddy, whose offices were used by the CIA and Howard Hughes organization, at the time of Watergate illegal entries and other dirty tricks.
    After the CIA in Japan, Buckley was ready to publish his own magazine, The National Review. This was an unusual opportunity to bring together the world's most conservative writers for publication and much propaganda accompanied by Buckley's glib innuendos.
    Once the publication was going, Buckley decided to bring Young Americans for Freedom to the campus; old ideas, old money, and young minds to mold. Behind the project were always the well-funded military masters, such as the YAF's Tom Charles Huston and the Cointel-Program Nixon cooked up.
    The selected advisory board for YAF was a Who's Who of oldies even then: Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator John Tower, Mr. Ronald Reagan, Professor Lev Dobriansky, General Charles Willoughby, and Mr. Robert Morris are a sample.
    Robert Morris may not be a household name. But William Buckley knew him well, and Morris, Nixon, and Senator Joe McCarthy were team players. Senator Joe McCarthy's two strongest supporters for him to represent Wisconsin were Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnisfeger. Both admired Adolf Hitler and made continuous trips to Germany.
    Senator McCarthy obliged fast enough. Before he went after the Commies in the State Department, he had to release a few of Hitler's elite nazis lingering in the Dachau prison camp. McCarthy beat John McCloy by about three years.
    In 1949, during congressional hearings on the Malmedy Massacre, the bloody Battle of the Bulge, McCarthy invited himself to take over the entire testimony. He wasn't satisfied until the prison doors flew open. The most detestable and ugly battle of World War II, an assault upon Americans and civilians in Belgium, was ignored. Hitler's precious Generals Fritz Kraemer and Sepp Dietrick, along with Hermann Priess and many others, were free.
    With that business finished, McCarthy took on Robert Morris as Chief Counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Morris' earlier training in Navy Intelligence in charge of USSR counter-intelligence and psychological warfare could be utilized well by Senator Joe. Particularly the psychological warfare part.
    After McCarthy died, Morris moved to Dallas, Texas. He was a judge, and became president of Dallas University.
    In 1961, a year after Buckley founded YAF, another conservative organization was formed in Munich, Germany, calling itself CUSA, Conservatism USA. These were not students, but members of the U.S. army, soon to be mustered out, then to appear in Dallas, Texas, by November 1963. The host would be Robert Morris.
    A correspondence between Larry Schmidt in Dallas, to Bernie Weissman in Munich, Germany, in preparation for their arrival, was published in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. XVIII.
    Segments of the letters are as follows:
November 2, 1962: Dallas to Munich, Larry Schmidt:
Quote:"Gentlemen we got everything we wanted."
"It saved the trouble of infiltration."
"Met with Frank McGee ... (president of the Dallas Council of World Affairs.)"
"Suggest Bernie convert to Christianity and I mean it."
(Bernard Weissman, the only Jew, was brought all the way to Dallas on November 22, 1963, to lend his name to the "Wanted for Treason" fliers handed out to welcome JFK. He testified that the John Birch Society paid for the ads and "wanted a Jewish name at the bottom.")
"We must all return to the church."
"These people are religious bugs."
"I think in terms of 300,000 members, $3,000,000."
"The John Birch Society has a million members. Look for us to merge with them in 1964."
"Arrangements are being made for me to meet the heads of the Dallas John Birch, General Walker, and H.L. Hunt, Texas oil millionaire."
(General Walker had been retired from the military by John Kennedy for his compulsory Pro-Blud indoctrination.)
"I have already met the top editors of the Dallas Morning News, the country's most conservative newspaper."
"These people are radicals but there is a method in their madness. You see, they're all after exactly what we're after."
"No liberal talk whatsoever, none."
"Down here a Negro is a nigger."
"I mean, no one is ever to say one kind word about niggers."
"Liberals are our enemies."
"The conservative isn't against the Niggers, he just wants to keep him in his place for his own good."
(Pres. John Kennedy and Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy had waged a bitter battle from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, 1962, at the University of Mississippi. The integration of one black student brought in the U.S. Army and caused Gen. Edwin Walker to be confined.)
January 4, 1963, Larry Schmidt to B. Weissman, Munich:
Quote:"I want big men ... believe me if I had a dozen such men I can conquer the world."
"I will go down in the history books as a great and noble man, or a tyrant."
"I expect to see you here in Dallas, especially Norman and Larry."
"If Jim Mosely is not here by Feb. 15, he is finished."
"One thing had best be understood, I am not playing games here in Dallas and expect you not to play games in Munich."
"I am not here in Dallas for my health or because I think Dallas is a wonderful place."
"Continue to have regular meetings and try to get things back in order in preparation for the big meetings."
February 2, 1963, Larry Schmidt:
Quote:"We have succeeded, the mission with which I was charged in Dallas has been achieved."
"Friday night I attended a gathering of the top conservatives in Dallas."
"The meeting was at the home of Dr. Robert Morris, President of the Defenders of American Liberty."
"Present were Mr. George Ward, Detective for Dallas City Police, Mr. Ken Thompson, editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, Mr. Clyde Moore, former PR man for H.L. Hunt, former UPI writer. (Eight others)."
"I told them exactly what I wanted."
"Others suggested using an already existing movement, named the Young Americans for Freedom, with already 50,000 members."
"CUSA, as set up in Munich, is now an established fact in Dallas, only we are calling it YAF. I think you catch on."
"We are starting Munich chapters of YAF. To spread to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Berlin, Kaiserslautern."
"We are getting every top name in business, education, politics, and religion to endorse YAF."
"The advisory board includes 37 congressmen . . . including Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. John Tower, and Sen. Barry Goldwater. There is Ronald Reagan, Gen. Mark Clark, Gen. Charles Willoughby, John Wayne, etc."
"Change all your records to read YAF."
"All those months in Munich were not wasted. I accomplished my task in Dallas. I need you here soon. I sold these people on each of you and they are expecting you to come to Dallas and play an important role."
"The days of leisure are over."
"We want to see you, Norman, Jim and Bill Burley back here in Dallas."
"Sheila and my brother will be here in August; Ken Glazebrook in Sept."
June 13, 1963, Larry Schmidt to B. Weissman in Munich, Germany:
Quote:"Warren Carroll, our only other recruit to CUSA, is already a PhD and two MS's. Warren is a scriptwriter for Lifeline, the H.L. Hunt television and radio series. Hunt is the millionaire oilman."
"Warren is 32, former CIA man. Don't worry, he has been checked out."
"Hunt checked him out."
(This appears to be a military action, DIA. They have to check out the CIA man, using Hunt's security).
After Jack Ruby was arrested for killing Oswald inside the Dallas jail, there were copies of Warren Carroll's Lifeline on the seat of his car. The section was on "Heroism," on how to become a "hero." This is interesting because one of the first reasons Ruby gave for killing Oswald was, "I wanted to show them a Jew had guts."
Quote:"We want to get Norman into the Republic National Bank ... where we are building our credit like crazy for the day we need ready cash."
(The Dallas Republic National Bank was identified by the Washington Post, February 26, 1967, as a conduit of CIA funds since 1958.)
(Connie Trammel, who worked at the Republic National Bank, accompanied Jack Ruby to the office of Lamar Hunt, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 1963, two days before Kennedy was assassinated.)
October 1, 1963, Larry Schmidt to Munich, Germany:
Quote:"I have a lot of contacts, bankers, insurance men, realtors."
"My brother began working as an aide to General Walker. Paid full time."
"National Indignation Committee will merge in the Fall of 1963, as soon as Bernie and Norman are in Dallas."
"This is a top secret merger and is not to be discussed outside the movement."
October 29, 1963, Larry Schmidt to Munich Germany:
Quote:"This town is a battleground and that is no joke. I am a hero to the right, a stormtrooper to the left."
"I have worked out a deal with the chairman of YAF. The arrangements are always delicate, very delicate. If I don't produce the bodies it is likely Dale (Davenport) will think me a phoney."
"He needs our help now. Adlai Stevenson is scheduled here on the 24th."
"Kennedy is scheduled in Dallas on November 24."
"All big things are happening now."
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1963: A few connections in Dallas -- Gen. Walter Dorberger, Michael and Ruth Paine
    When George de Mohrenschildt was busy introducing Lee and Marina to the Dallas-Ft. Worth White Russian displaced Czarists, he managed to keep the social level equal with his American contacts.
    One casual dinner in the company of Michael and Ruth Paine, and that was enough meeting to set the Oswalds’ course. George and Jeane didn't have to meet with them again.
    Ruth Paine would provide housing for Marina while Lee went to New Orleans. A few weeks later, she drove Marina to join Lee. After summer vacation at Wood's Hole, Mass., Ruth returned and brought Marina to her home in Irving, Texas, while Lee was on the bus to Mexico with Albert Osborne/John Bowen, and four other Solidarists from the Russian network.
    After Kennedy was murdered, the Dallas police rushed to the Paine's home. From that garage and elsewhere, via the Paines, came most of the incriminating evidence against Oswald.
    The alleged murder weapon never could be proven by the Warren Commission as ever having come from their garage.
    The cropped photo that Life printed with Oswald holding a rifle came from a box removed from the garage, taken to the police department, then returned the next day, with nobody present to indicate where it came from.
    Accessory after the fact, the letter was delivered to Marina in December undated and unsigned, to cover up General Walker's anxiety to blame a "Communist," Lee, for shooting at him in April and came from Ruth to Marina. It wasn't in the home before then. The Warren Commission required planted evidence sometimes in order to divert from Lee Oswald's links to the Defense Department, assisted by Ruth and Michael Paine.
    Michael Paine's occupation at Bell Aircraft is the Defense Department. This job requires security clearances, so what would the unlikely Oswalds be doing in his home? Oswald, the "defector?"
    Paine's boss at Bell Aircraft as Director of Research and Development, was none other than the noterious war criminal General Walter Dornberger.
    Dornberger was supposed to be hanged at Nuremburg for his war crimes, slave labor and mass murders.
    The British warned the U.S. not to let him live because even after the war he was conniving for another one. As stated, "Dornberger is a menace of the first order who is untrustworthy. His attitude will turn ally against ally and he would become a source of irritation and future unrest." (Project Paperclip. Clarence Lasby.)
    The very first call to authorities after the gun went off on November 22, 1963, was from an employee at Bell Helicopter who suggested "Oswald did it." Police never located the source of both Oswald addresses that day.
    Michael Paine took Lee to a meeting with General Edwin Walker shortly before the assassination. Soon Oswald would be charged with having shot Walker in April, and Walker would be calling his nazi cronies in Germany 24 hours after JFK was killed telling them he finally solved "who shot through his window" seven months earlier: the same Oswald.
    Who were the Paines? To believe the Warren Commission and the CIA staff of lawyers, they were Mr. and Mrs. Good Neighbor, all heart, altruistic. Ruth simply wanted to learn more Russian from a native. For that price, she housed Marina, a two-year-old daughter, a new infant, with all the fuss and mess of three extras in a tiny house.
    Michael Paine was a descendant of the Cabots on both sides. His cousin Thomas Dudley Cabot, former president of United Fruit, had offered their Gibraltar Steamship as a cover for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs. Another cousin was Alexander Cochrane Forbes, a director of United Fruit and trustee of Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes.
    Both Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy were part of the United Fruit team. The Paine family had links with circles of the OSS and the CIA.
    Ruth Hyde Paine maintained close ties with the Forbes families. Peter Dale Scott investigated the Paines, "the patrician Paine and Forbes families." A far cry from anybody's neighbor.
    Michael's education came as a tradition, third generation physicist at Harvard before working for Bell Helicopter.
    The British were correct on the Dornberger evaluation.
    Another clue to Albert Speer, the Reichmaster for Munitions and War Production, and General Dornberger, is their meeting as early as April, 1943.
    When it was obvious to Hitler they would be losing the war against the USSR, all top Nazis made detailed plans for two years on how to proceed next.
    Speer met with Dornberger, at Peenemunde, the missile and rocket factory run with Werner Von Braun, and instructed him in "the dispersion of functions throughout the Reich."
    Translated, that meant get ready to come to the U.S.

Lee Harvey Oswald, Albert Osborne

    When Lee Harvey Oswald entered Mexico at Laredo, Texas, on Sept. 26, 1963, his companion on the Red Arrow bus was Albert Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen.
    Bowen-Osborne had been running a school for highly professional marksmen in Oaxaca, Mexico, since 1934. The cover for the place was his particular mission, and he was the missionary.
    The FBI records on Bowen go back to June 4, 1942, in Henderson Springs, Tennessee. He operated a camp for boys known as "Campfire Council." Neighbors complained it was for pro-nazi activities with young fascists. Bowen vehemently opposed the U.S. going to war with nazi Germany. They stomped on the American flag.
    Before that, Bowen worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority since 1933.
    His dual citizenship between Great Britain and the U.S. took him over the entire globe. So did his use of multiple aliases.
    After the Warren Commission published their report in September 1964, several attorneys in the Southwest recognized the name of Osborne.
    September 8, 1952, Jake Floyd was murdered. The target was meant to be his father, District Judge Floyd. Two suspects were caught, one got away. Their testimony was about being hired by Osborne and how he ran the school for assassins.
    Later investigation revealed Osborne's connections to Division V of the FBI, and to Clay Shaw's Centro Mondiale Commerciale, with funding coming from New Orleans for the CIA, Anti-Castro Cubans, and others.
    Lee Harvey Oswald applied for a tourist card to enter Mexico while still in New Orleans on September 17, 1963.
    Four other persons, having consecutive tourist numbers, departed nine days later, like Oswald, all to arrive at the same time, entering from several different cities. They were part of the White Russian Solidarists, the Gehlen emigre community that Lee and Marina mingled with.
    This assassination team funded Maurice Brooks Gatlin, Guy Bannister, and the Miami office of Double Check Corporation.
    J. Edgar Hoover's Division V, Domestic Intelligence, working with the American Council of Christian Churches, had used this group from the Bowen-Osborne academy of assassins.
    Volume XXV of the Hearings has many pages of interviews with people who had sent money to Jack Bowen. They never met him, and some like Mrs. Bessie White, Pikesville, Tenn., mailed "$35 a month to John Howard Bowen who she believed had been doing missionary work for 18 years in Mexico." Osborne-Bowen had a mission.
    Lee Harvey Oswald, agent from U.S. Defense Dept., had a team of doubles impersonating his behavior, leaving trails of anti-American frustration and meetings with various people.
    While Oswald was in Mexico just prior to Kennedy's murder, the purposes were concealed. Meanwhile, the CIA and various authorities led Oswald to the Cuban Embassy, the Soviet Embassy. When the face or voices didn't match the authentic Oswald, it didn't matter, given a difference of 40 to 50 pounds and shape. What came from all this was the conclusion that Oswald had really wanted to go to Cuba next. Which Oswald, and why?
    This was to finalize with the illusion of an Oswald-Castro admiration just days before Kennedy would be killed.

Senator John Tower and Marina Oswald

    One of the most consistent conservatives among Buckley's YAF Advisory Board was Senator John Tower, Texas.
    If there is anything he wouldn't want in his back yard it was a defector and his allegedly Communist wife from Minsk.
    Yet, two years after joining the YAF team in 1960, Tower was passing all waivers in order for Marina Oswald to get to the United States as soon as possible. Without his permission, this trip might never have taken place. Many wives from the USSR are not that lucky.
    March 22, 1962, Senator Tower cooperated. "The sanctions imposed on immigration and nationality are hereby waived in behalf of Mrs. Oswald. The file check on Marina by the FBI, CIA, Dept. of Security Office, Division of biographical intelligence and passport office," (Volume XXIV, 298).
    George de Mohrenschildt testified in Volume IX, pages 228-229, "Marina Oswald's father had been a Czarist officer of some kind. I don't remember whether it was army or navy."
    Her real father was never identified by name in all of the testimony.
    Between 1948 and 1950 over 200 Byelorussian nazis and their families were brought to New Jersey. Both George de Mohrenschildt and Marina had come from Minsk, part of the Byelorussian area.
    The Gehlen nazi emigres were useful to every part of the Kennedy assassination cover-up.
    John Tower knew Marina was a safe bet. Otherwise, why the hurry? Our CIA and the Defense Department knew all there was to know about both Oswalds. Therefore, Tower signed the immigration papers fast.
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The Argentine Connections: Isaac Dan Levine and the Ziger Family
    The Warren Report wasn't published until September, 1964. Testimony of witnesses and exhibits were being collected up to the day of printing.
    Yet as early as June 2, 1964, Isaac Don Levine, another arch-enemy of Communists and a so-called expert on the Soviet mind, was arranging with the Warren Commission staff to bring the daughters of Oswald's boss, Alexander Ziger, from the Minsk Radio factory to Argentina. He suggested using CIA assistance.
    What was that about?
    "When the Oswalds left Russia they smuggled out a message to one of the relatives of the Zigers living in the U.S. They wanted help to get the Zigers’ daughters out of Russia. The daughters, having been born in Argentina, could claim Argentine citizenship. Levine suggested some confidential source in the American Government such as the CIA should contact the Argentine Government to set machinery in motion. (Memorandum from W. David Slauson: Conference with Mr. Isaac Don Levine, May 23, 1964).
    January 21, 1964, John J. McCloy told Commission members, before any witness was yet called, "this fellow Levine is a contact with Marina to break the story up in a little more graphic manner and tie it into a Russian business, and it is with the thought and background of Russian connections, conspiracy concept."
    If there was a Russian conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, John McCloy, Isaac Don Levine, Allen Dulles, and J. Edgar Hoover, not to speak of Nixon and others, would squeeze that out.
    Remember Gary Powers strongly hinted at Oswald's role in downing the U-2, breaking up the Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting while Lee was employed at the Minsk Radio factory?
    Nicolae Malaxa, Otto Skorzeny, and international CIA-DIA agents were thick in both Minsk and Argentina. It was Alexander Ziger and his family who introduced Lee to Marina Oswald. That same evening they were at the home of an unidentified woman just returned from the U.S.
    The President of the U.S. had been murdered in 1963.
    Six months later the CIA is supposed to assist the Ziger daughters?
    One more connection to Richard Nixon.
    When poor Whittaker Chambers almost collapsed from the strain of having to testify against Alger Hiss, it was Isaac Don Levine who took "Chambers by the arm, a reluctant Chambers, and arranged the meetings where he would begin to smear Hiss." (Friendship and Fratricide, Meyer Zelig).
    When Levine was searching for a Soviet connection to Kennedy's death, he was also doing business with Marina's new manager, James Martin. It was Martin who was selling the photo of Oswald posing with Communist literature and a rifle, the same evidence pulled from the Paine's garage. Notice the similarity to the Whittaker Chambers pumpkin papers years earlier that launched Nixon's political career and convicted Alger Hiss.
    If the evidence didn't fit the conclusions of the investigators, the one picture would sell the Oswald assassin story.

"Treason for My Daily Bread" -- Argentina and Martin Bormann

    In August 1971, a French paper headlined a news story, "Martin Bormann behind the Kennedy murders." It listed an international band of killers that was located in Texas. They carried out the two assassinations at the German command.
    Six years later, June 8, 1977, the London Guardian reported, "Bormann Linked with Kennedy Murder." This story was based on a new book titled, Treason for My Daily Bread by Mikhail Lebedev.
    Lebedev detailed how Martin Bonnann left Europe, established his current life in Paraguay, and how the fatal head shot to Kennedy was delivered by an agent paid by Bormann, alias of Zed.
    Is any of this true?
    Many of these allegations and names come together with both Paris Flammonde's The Kennedy Conspiracy and the Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, known as the Torbitt Document.
    "Zed" allegedly used a .45 for the final shot.
    Buddy Walters, murdered January 10, 1969, picked up a .45 slug in Dealey Plaza and gave it to the Dallas Police.
    There were two possible assassination teams in Dallas.
    The military from Munich, Germany, that was to take over the YAF, with Robert Morris' help, have yet to be identified or interviewed (Morris from U.S. intelligence, having to do with USSR covert work.) Gen. Edwin Walker's arrangement with U.S. Military in Germany or, the arrival of such people for Nov. 22, 1963, is open to question.
    Albert Osborne's "mission" in Mexico, with direct links to Clay Shaw's Centro Mondiale Commerciale, has never been touched. This was the international band of killers with the Borghese-James Angleton operations working throughout the world.
    Otto Skorzeny's CIA and Reinhard Gehlen death squads, with headquarters in Madrid, were funded by Martin Bormann when the Evita Peron funds were shared after 1952.
    Lebedev mentions "Ruth," David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, and Colonel Orlov.
    The very first day George de Mohrenschildt visited Marina Oswald she was alone and Lee was working. He brought with him a "Colonel Orlov."
    The House Select Committee on Assassinations "investigated" the murder of President John F. Kennedy from 1976-1978. The information about Bormann was available from 1971. Treason for My Daily Bread was published while they were supposed to be finding the smoking gun.
    G. Robert Blakey, Chief Consul for the Committee, refused to admit any research or documents on these subjects. He would hang up the telephone and even refused to say if he had ever seen the Torbitt Document.
    Six million dollars was allotted by Congress to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. Martin Bormann may have had his motives for his actions through the years. What were G. Robert Blakey's? What form of prosecution should be suggested for committees paid to uncover the truth who continuously sweep under the rug?
    In A Study of a Master Spy, published in London in 1961, Bob Edwards, a member of Parliament and Kenneth Dunne, presented documentary evidence that Allen Dulles of the CIA carried on secret conferences with representatives of Hitler's SS Security Office in February and March 1943. They learned that "Official Washington knew Martin Bormann, Deputy Fuhrer of Hitler’s Germany, master-minded the international 'Die Spinne' (Spider) underground organization which is planning to revive nazism as soon as West Germany is adequately rearmed by the United States. Official Washington seems disinterested."
    With John J. McCloy, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover in control of the Kennedy assassination investigation, these nazi connections were buried.

 


The CIA's Man: The Chronology of Helmet Streikher

Quote:
[size=undefined]1937:[/size][size=undefined] Trained for the Gustapo's S.S Officers. A graduate of The University of Bonn Germany. Went to Military School at Blutordensberg, located at Vogelsang Castle.[/size]
[size=undefined]1938: [/size][size=undefined]Assigned to Spain to join General Francisco Franco.[/size]
[size=undefined]1939-1940:[/size][size=undefined] In the U.S. he learned English and American customs. His cover was as a German journalist working for Adolph Hitler.[/size]
[size=undefined]1940-1941:[/size][size=undefined] Was with Reinhard Gehlen in Eastern Europe. He will join Gehlen when they are both working for Army intelligence.[/size]
[size=undefined]1943-1945:[/size][size=undefined] Streikher worked with Skorzeny.[/size]
[size=undefined]1945:[/size][size=undefined] May 7, 1945, Streikher surrenders to Allies and is cleared for intelligence, accepted for U.S. Army by October 1945.[/size]
[size=undefined]1946-1947: [/size][size=undefined]He works for the OSS (Officers of Strategic Services) in Europe, Central Intelligence Group. CIG.[/size]
[size=undefined]1948-1950:[/size][size=undefined] Streikher was stationed in Israel, Greece, Europe, Africa and Middle East. OSS becomes CIA.[/size]
[size=undefined]1951-1957:[/size][size=undefined] CIA assigned back to General Gehlen, now in his German offices of the BND.[/size]
[size=undefined]1958:[/size][size=undefined] In the U.S. Training Army Intelligence offices and CIA.[/size]
[size=undefined]1958-1961:[/size][size=undefined] Helps plan Cuban Invasion. Active in the Bay of Pigs.[/size]
[size=undefined]1961-1965:[/size][size=undefined] He was in Africa, Middle East, and United States on CIA assignment. On November 22, 1963, he said, "One of the worst kept secrets in the C, is the truth about the President's murder. It wasn't Castro or the Russians. The men who killed Mr. Kennedy were CIA contract agents."
   "John Kennedy's murder was a two-part conspiracy murder. One was the action end with the killers; the other was the deeper part, the acceptance and protection of that murder by the Intelligence aparatus that controls the way the world operates."
   "It had to happen. The man was too independent for his own good."[/size]
[size=undefined]1968-1970:[/size][size=undefined] Senior Field Agent for CIA. Disguised as a writer.[/size]
[size=undefined]1971-1973:[/size][size=undefined] Back in the United States. Langley, Virginia, training and making plans under assignment.[/size]
[size=undefined]1974-1977:[/size][size=undefined] Under George Bush, director of CIA, Streikher sent to Africa and Middle East.[/size]
[size=undefined]1978-1980:[/size][size=undefined] Contract agent on special assignment for CIA. June 15, 1980 he retired.[/size]
[size=undefined]Other Known Aliases:[/size][size=undefined] U.S. Army officer Captain William Raine, also known as Ross Meyers, Hans Mollof, Karl Rolff, and Mark Schmidt. He had nine (9) other pieces of identification in other names and nationalities, some in the form of passports.[/size]
Quote:


The Bunge Corporation, Argentina & Germany

    The stock market dropped 24 points in 27 minutes when news of President Kennedy's assassination was announced. 2.6 million shares were sold off. It was the greatest panic since 1929.
    Somebody made a huge profit selling short in many markets.
    Somebody made half a billion dollars in one day. Coincidentally, the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation, headed by New Jersey commodities dealer Anthony De Angeles, crashed the same day, driving the market down.
    Allied Crude was controlled by U.S. American Bunge Corporation and financially controlled by a group of share-holders headquartered in Argentina, known as "Bunge and Born, LDA."
    Business Week of October 19, 1963, one month before the Kennedy assassination, described the Born family in Argentina, the biggest shareholders for Bunge, as being from Europe, specifically Germany.
    Everything about Bunge has German influence. They have a $2 billion annual business in 80 countries. There are over 110 offices, all linked by Telex and under-the-ocean telegraph channels. The Bunge Corporation is referred to as "the Octopus."
    The book Were We Controlled? detailed the relationship of the Bunge Corporation, the foreknowledge of Kennedy's murder, and the Argentine-German connections.

General Edwin Walker and the Hitler Nazis

    The Eagle's Nest, now a mountain restaurant, was given to Adolf Hitler by nazi aide Martin Bormann for the fuhrer's 50th birthday. It is not far from Hitler's former summer home in Berchtesgaden.
    Nearby is the Platterhof Hotel, built for guests when they came to pay their respects. The Platterhof has changed its name to the General Walker Hotel.
    November 23, 1963, one day after Kennedy's death, Gen. Edwin Walker called Munich, Germany, from Shreveport, La.
    Walker's important story, via transatlantic telephone, was to the nazi newspaper Deutsche National Zeitung un Soldaten-Zeitung. Walker couldn't wait to tell them in Munich that Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone suspect in the Dallas murders, was the same person who shot through his window in April, 1963.
    There was never one shred of evidence, or a reliable witness, that could make this connection Dallas police and FBI were taken by surprise.
    In order to cover this over-exuberance of trying to link a Marxist assassin to this altercation, it became necessary to have Ruth Paine deliver that ridiculous letter to Marina Oswald on December 3, 1964. The delayed letter was to have been written the night Lee was out shooting in Walker's home.
    The only piece of bullet that remained in custody was never positively identified as coming from the 6.5 Mannlicher Carcano, and there is no proof Oswald even handled this rifle.
    Why was General Walker in such a hurry to get his information printed in Germany before anybody in Dallas ever heard about it?
    Kurt-George Kiesinger had just been installed as Chancellor of West Germany and Franz-Josef Straus as finance minister.
    Kissinger entered the radio propaganda division of nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop at age 36. He was then directing a world-wide radio propaganda apparatus with 195 specialists under his supervision during the war. He was the liaison officer, coordinating his department's work with that of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
    Richard Nixon and Kurt-George Kiesinger were soon, or maybe before, to become pals. Nixon tried to hide his nazi past.
    But General Walker, now home from military service in Munich, knew the importance of such propaganda. He was calling the same people who, under Hitler, published and controlled the newspapers.
    There were two motives for this call.
    First, it gave international attention to the fact that Oswald, the Marxist gunman, was shooting at Walker as well as the President.
    General Walker knew too many people in the Defense Department and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that could be part of this assassination. He made himself appear as a victim instead of a suspect.
    The other reason, along with the expertise of Robert Morris's counter-intelligence and psychological warfare training, was to create a profile for Lee Harvey Oswald.
    No possible motive could explain why Oswald would really want to kill President Kennedy. By having Oswald appear to shoot the right-wing General Walker with his John Birch connections, his militant anti-communist stance, then shoot John Kennedy, the same Commie-symp Walker was accusing of treason, it would appear that Oswald was just nuts. He didn't know right from left.
    The Munich newspaper Walker called was linked to the World Movement for a Second Anti-Komintern, part of the Gehlen and U.S. right.
    Some of Hitler's ex-nazis and SS-men were on the Staff.
    The editor, Gerhard Frey, was a close friend with various nazi members of the Witiko League. The Witiko League and the Sudetendeutch Landsmannscraft were organizations for displaced refugees. By the summer of 1948 they formed large organizations and by 1955 Dr. Walter Becher was elected to the executive board of the Witiko League. Becher was one of the kingpins of nazi front organizations.
    Sen. Joe McCarthy, Charles Willoughby, Gen. Edwin Walker, and Robert Morris' links to the German nazis converged when Dr. Walter Becher set up offices in Washington, D.C. in 1950.
    By July 16, 1957, Becher, praised by American Opinion and other extreme right publications, started his policy of liberation. General Douglas MacArthur, Senator Joe McCarthy, General Willoughby, members of the U.S. Congress or public officials then started openly to meet with and cooperate with the nazi resurgence.
    Dan Smooth, former Dallas FBI agent is the type of person who kept strong nazi ties with Dr. Becher in Munich, to Western Goals today. His printed sheets were identical to the Goebbels propaganda years ago, or to Walker's disinformation one day after Kennedy was killed.
    Volkmar Schmidt came from Munich, Germany, to work full time for General Walker. How long did he work, and where was he on November 23, 1963, when Walker made the call to the same city the CUSA imports came from?
    The YAF crowd in Dallas was an interesting gang: Col. Charles Willoughby, intelligence Chief for S. Pacific, Robert Morris, U.S. counter-intelligence and psychological warfare, Gen Edwin Walker, brought home from Munich by JFK, William Buckley, CIA in Japan, Mexico, and elsewhere, Sen. John Tower, who gave the okay for Marina Oswald.

1964: The Warren Commission

    President Lyndon Johnson was forced to select a commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
    Texas authorities were supposed to do the original investigation.
    There were too many suspicious people around the world who believed a conspiracy existed. Those rumors had to be squelched.
    J. Edgar Hoover's FBI never budged from its conclusion that Lee Harvey acted alone. Whatever evidence didn't fit this decision was ignored.
    Twenty-six volumes of witness testimony and exhibits were published. 8000 copies were sold. No more reprints. The contradiction between the conclusions of the Warren Report, and the abundance of discrepancies in the other volumes, makes fascinating reading.
    Chief Justice Earl Warren, John J. McCloy, and Allen Dulles were the logical choices for LBJ.
    President Kennedy didn't trust Allen Dulles as CIA Director. Now JFK was dead and Dulles would be in charge of all possible "conspiracy" segments.
    Richard Nixon, temporarily retired from politics for the first time since 1946, selected Rep. Gerald Ford to be on this Commission. Nixon selected Ford a second time when he ran home to escape impeachment during Watergate.
    One of the first subjects for commission members to share in January, one month before witnesses were selected, was the matter of Lee Harvey Oswald being a government agent.
    Gerald Ford was the only member of the group to write a book on the assassination. His book opened with the hushed and secret meeting where allegations had been received that Oswald worked for the FBI.
    What Ford left out of his book, and the commissioners ignored in their Report, was that Oswald was also identified as working for the CIA. Commission Chairman Earl Warren and Commission Attorney Leon Jaworski knew about this. They stated that "Mr. Belli, attorney for Jack L. Ruby, was familiar with these allegations."
    Oswald's informant number was Number 110669.
    How was that for a starter?
    The next move was to start building the myth about the deceased and ignore fact one, stated above. This grand commission would call in a doctor who never met Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby to assist them with their project, covering up.
    Justice Warren suggested bringing in Dr. Overholser, who "of course is not a lawyer. He is a doctor from St. Elizabeth's Hospital." As the Chairman went on to explain, "we felt we ought to have someone who, in that field, could advise us on matters concerning the life of Oswald and possibly the life of Ruby also."
    The next order of business was who should write the Report for them? By January 21, 1964, that had to be decided.
    Chairman Earl Warren said, "we consulted with the Defense Department, and they have offered to lend us one of their historians to do this job, and we think that it is quite essential to the work of the Commission." Mr. Goldberg would assist from the Air Force. Mr. Cokery was from the Army.
    "Mr. Winnaker recommended them," Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin offered. "We would work with them to try to anticipate all of the various historical aspects."
    "Who's Who in the CIA" described "Mr. Winnaker" as having been born in Germany in 1904. His full name is Dr. Rudolph August Winnacker. He was an analyst for the OSS, historian in the War Department from 1945-1949, and then Chief of Historical Division of the Pentagon."
    Was Winnaker the ilk of Willoughby? Or Reinhard Gehlen? When did he come here from Germany? Where is he now?

 [size=undefined]Photo by Manuel Gonzales Bustos[/size]

[Image: Nazi%208.gif]
[size=undefined]Gehlen after the 1972 funeral of Wehrmacht Col. Gen. Franz Halder[/size]

    Marina Oswald was the first witness to testify on February 3, 1964.
    Warren wanted nothing more than to make her comfortable.
    The first question dealt with the General Walker story because Walker had blown it by calling Munich so soon. That scandal had to be put to rest right away.
    Warren asked Marina "if Exhibit 2 was familiar to her because it was a picture of General Walker's house?"
    Marina said, "no," but that wasn't good enough.
    She was asked again, and once more said, "I didn't see it, at least, taken from this view I can't recognize it. I never saw the house itself at any time in my life."
    That wasn't sufficient. She just couldn't remember "this particular one."
    Chairman Warren was ready to go "off the record." They had only just begun.
    Chief Counsel Rankin suggested he show her "more pictures," then maybe she would recognize the Walker home.
    This time she was given a selection of a location in New Orleans, two snapshots from Leningrad, and the same shot of the Walker home. Because Walker wasn't living in a castle in Leningrad, Marina assumed that house in Dallas must belong to "General Walker."
    Therefore this was admitted for identification.
The Defense Department history could then proceed. "Marina Oswald positively identified the photograph of General Walker’s home among Lee's possessions."
    There are a lot of things that remain to be said about this commission and their phoney report.
    Admission of an old card trick at the beginning set the tone for what was to follow. What was never supposed to come out was the use of Reinhard Gehlen agents surrounding Lee and Marina Oswald for the purposes of covering up the assassination conspiracy.
    Two Lee Harvey Oswalds existed.
    One memorized the Marine manual by age 17, went directly into radar and electronic work. He trained at U-2 bases, learned the Russian language, got himself into and out of the Soviet Union, wrote clear and literate letters. He was met, upon arriving home, by Government agents, provided with occupations, fathered two children, owed no debts, traveled around a great deal, met with interesting oil geologists, defense department and intelligence agents. Their social circle included the "Cabots and Lodges" from Czarist Russia, Admirals and some fancy folks.
    The other Oswald was one developed by the Warren Commission to divert attention from the facts. Nobody ever saw the original "diary" that he couldn't have possibly written.
    Every Gehlen witness and emigre associated with the CIA, Tolstoy Foundation, or Greek Orthodox Church was directed towards the most ridiculous questions. From all that garbage the Defense Department wrote the history.
    The last thing that should happen is for the warriors to interpret and define for us. The facts speak for themselves.



RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

From Kennedysandking.com

Monday, 16 July 2018 23:26
Through a Glass Darkly: An MK-ULTRA Primer
Written by Michael Le Flem




Tracing the history of mind-control experimentation by the US and its allies from World War II onward, Michael Le Flem reveals the depth and extent of human behavioral programming undertaken for more than two decades by the CIA, which, as has come more and more to light, nearly certainly furnishes the backdrop against which we should understand Sirhan's actions on June 5, 1968.
[Image: mk-ultra.png]

“What is heroic in combat is criminal in peace. Just as combat sanctions physical violence, so espionage grants license to moral violence. It is trite but true to say that they did what they did for the good of their country. Unfortunately, it is also true that it frequently didn’t work out that way.”
~David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors

Origins
If I were to tell you that the United States government has performed—and is likely still performing—bizarre, mind-altering experiments on its own unwitting citizens, whose results are often catastrophically damaging and sometimes fatal, with the goal of creating pawns for its intelligence chess board, I would expect you to stop listening to me. That’s what most people do in any case. And yet the United States has a long and storied history of medical and scientific abuses against its own population which bear repeating to place its later mind-control experiments in context. Following is a cursory overview culled from a 2002 Health News Net post entitled “A History of Secret Human Experimentation”:
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infected human subjects with cancer cells. He later established the U.S. Army Biological Warfare centers in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. Rhoads was also responsible for a battery of radiation exposure experiments perpetrated on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
In 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began in segregated Alabama. Two hundred black men diagnosed with syphilis were never told about their condition, were denied treatment, and were subjected to a covert longitudinal study on the effects of the disease that lasted forty years until a local newspaper broke the story. They all subsequently died from syphilis, and their wives and children, who also became infected, were never told that they could have been treated.
In 1935, after millions of individuals died from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stop the disease. The director of the agency admitted that researchers had known for at least twenty years that Pellagra was primarily caused by a niacin deficiency, but failed to address this since most of the deaths occurred in poverty-stricken black populations.
In 1940, 400 prisoners in Chicago were purposely infected with malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Ironically, Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
The United States of the late 1940s and 1950s was a product not only of unprecedented postwar power and security afforded the nation in the wake of the German and Japanese defeats, but also of the scientific proclivities of the time. We forget, I feel, just how jarringly different society was only seventy years ago. Much of the nation was still segregated, with anti-miscegenation laws firmly in place to prevent interracial couples from marrying; the sick and infirm, particularly those with mental deficiencies, were often viewed with disdain. Indeed, the words “moron” and “idiot” were both official psychiatric terms of mental competence from the postwar American eugenics movement, which remained a popular field of study among the psychological circles of the white elite. Books like B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, published in 1948, were quite popular among America’s social planners. Preaching a rejection of any immanent extra-material element to consciousness and human emotion, Skinner believed that once certain environmental factors were correctly manipulated, human beings, and by extension, whole cultures, might be fundamentally changed. In this utopian novel, the characters behaved much the way Skinner’s rats did in his predictable laboratory experiments.
This reductionist worldview was a major contributing factor, in my opinion, to both the prevalence and the tacit acceptance of what amounts to decades of crimes perpetrated against both domestic and foreign target populations. Figures like Skinner, Aldous Huxley, and later Robert Shockley, the Stanford professor and Bell Labs inventor of the transistor—who as late as the early 1970s was calling for a concerted reduction of the African-American population due to their “dysgenic” makeup—held the imagination of policy planners and the power elite. As Hank Albarelli Jr. notes:
Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of the CIA’s early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that generally manifested itself through the Agency’s principle objective of establishing control over the perceived “weaker” and “less intelligent” segments of society. That the CIA’s initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no coincidence.

Iterations and Victims
From as early as WWII, “programmed operatives” had been an objective (though limited) of military and government intelligence agencies for a variety of reasons. Initially, from available evidence, much of which still remains redacted, we see that during the Allied struggle against Hitler’s Germany, the OSS and British intelligence were both interested in the potential to send “programmed” agents into occupied Europe. These agents, both witting and unwitting, would then deliver a predetermined message which could only be unlocked by their receiver upon the specifically encoded posthypnotic verbal or visual cue: I touch my right temple or say a phrase, and my subject divulges the message, only to then possess entirely no memory of the exchange. This ensured both that any intercepted agent placed under torture or interrogation would have no “real” memory of their intended communiqué or mission beyond their ostensible one. It also removed the threat of telegraphic or radio-transmitted communications being intercepted by Axis listening posts.
Clark Hull, a Yale hypnosis expert, described such a process in his 1933 book, Hypnosis and Suggestibility:
A youth of eighteen or nineteen years is brought in by my assistant. He has consented to act as subject in a research project. I stand before him and look directly into his eyes. As he tilts his head backward to look into my eyes I observe as usual the sign of considerable emotional disturbance in the beating of his carotid artery … I direct him to look steadily into my eyes and to think of nothing but sleep, to relax his muscles all over, even so much that his knees bend a little and his legs scarcely hold him up. After three or four minutes his eyes close, his head nods forward, and his breathing becomes heavy. I say, ‘Now you are falling toward me, you can’t help yourself … I catch him when well off his balance. Upon inquiry he states, in a drowsy tone, that he could not help falling forward but that he isn’t sound asleep ‘because I know everything that is going on.’
I suspect that he is mistaken and employ the following objective test. I give him a posthypnotic suggestion that after waking he shall pick up and examine a book on my desk when I sit down in a chair, but that he won’t recall anything about why he did it. I wake him as usual with a snap of my finger … A few minutes later I sit down in the chair. He casually walks over to my desk, picks up the book, and after glancing at its title lays it down. I say, ‘Why did you look at the book?’ He answers that he just happened to notice it lying there and wondered what it was about. (Hull, Hypnosis and Suggestibility, p. 32)
Early pioneers of this form of hypnosis included the esteemed Dr. George Estabrooks, chair of Colgate University’s department of psychology, whose 1943 book Hypnosis remains worth reading for anyone interested in the technical mechanisms whereby human beings can be unwittingly placed in a post-hypnotic suggestive state. As Estabrooks notes, there are five basic steps to the process:
  1. Covertly identify a specimen of the 20% of persons who are genetic somnambulists and easily can go to an amnesic depth of trance. Induct by a “disguised” method.
  2. While the subject is in trance, give a posthypnotic suggestion for him to become deeply hypnotized again whenever the hypnotist gives a certain cue (such as tugging the left ear lobe with the right hand).
  3. Also, give a posthypnotic suggestion which will deny the subject any conscious knowledge of this hypnosis, or any subsequent one. That causes an artificial, selective amnesia for all hypnosis events.
  4. Give a posthypnotic suggestion that nobody else can hypnotize this subject (called sealing).
  5. Give a suggestion under hypnosis that the subject will act in trance just as if awake (called waking hypnosis). (G.A. Estabrooks, Hypnosis, p. 200)
Dr. Estabrooks also devised a means by which an individual’s personality might be altered, going so far as to insist he could warp someone’s entire convictions and political leanings for a desired result:
We will use hypnotism to induce multiple personality. Hypnotism is the means to an end, though the technique would be impossible did we not have hypnotism at our disposal. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities.
Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality … is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by Personality A, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage. My super spy plays his role as a communist in the waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge these memories. (Estabrooks, p. 200)
While these WWII dabblings proved interesting to those observing their curious results, it wasn’t until the early days of the Cold War that the United States government, and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency, became truly interested in the potential of harnessing the minds of both its assets and soldiers, and often its private citizenry. The United States Navy had already, as early as 1947, begun its own Project Chatter, which lasted for six years and which involved subjecting “volunteer” sailors, along with animals, to substances like the incredibly dangerous scopolamine, whose effects range from permanent dissociation and vivid recurring night terrors to complete submission to the commands and whims of a subject’s controller. As naval intelligence personnel got wind of the Nazi experiments on Jewish captives at places like the Dachau concentration camp, which involved heavy doses of mescaline and other mind-bending substances, they sought to both replicate the studies and push the investigations of their former enemies, who only two years earlier had surrendered to the Allies in the summer of 1945.
Headed by Dr. Charles Savage, a graduate of both Yale and the Pritzker Medical School of the University of Chicago, the team used LSD procured by Swiss manufacturer Sandoz in attempts to induce psychic transformations. As Prince Ray notes in his book, Project Chatter and the Betrayal of My Father, “In one experiment Savage used five “normal” persons and fifteen depressed patients. In his report, LSD-25 a Clinical-Psychological Study (1951), he provided detailed descriptions: Case II was a 20-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital with depression. He tearfully told psychologists that his mother was going to lose her home, his sister would lose her job, and he felt useless because he couldn’t help them. He was given LSD, the dosage increased to 100 mcg.; the end result was that the patients suffered from a “schizophrenic reaction.”
In late 1945, Operation Paperclip, the United States’ covert importation of Nazi war criminals, scientists, medical researchers, and intelligence operatives, provided a treasure trove of first-hand experience with such matters. Some were brought directly into the CIA’s payroll, like war-criminal Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the Wehrmacht’s Foreign Armies East (FHO) military intelligence unit, whose knowledge of Soviet intelligence services was sought by figures like Allen Dulles. Quite remarkable is the fact that Gehlen—who met with both President Truman and “Wild Bill” Donovan, the former head of the OSS during WWII—was instrumental in convincing the United States to pass the National Security Act of 1947, whose charter essentially laid the groundwork for the surveillance state we currently maintain. In its clauses, clandestine activities were allowed to begin without the approval of Congress or even the President, and reporting and evaluations were permitted to be indefinitely withheld if such disclosure could potentially compromise “national security.” In effect, it gave the newly christened CIA, and related agencies, almost unlimited freedom of action and partial legal immunity. And it gave Gehlen and his Nazi consorts access to millions of dollars, United States military support, and sustained their desperate hopes of finally destroying their dreaded Bolshevik nemesis, the Soviet Union. I would argue that the creation of the Cold War was in many ways as much an extension of unfulfilled Nazi aims, as it was a pragmatic Allied reaction to the realities of the postwar Manichean divide between capitalism and communism. We now know, for example, that Gehlen’s intelligence was almost entirely worthless; he vastly exaggerated Soviet intentions, underestimated their agents’ ability to penetrate West German intelligence, and personally helped escalate tensions between the burgeoning NATO countries and the Eastern bloc.
While Gehlen and others were smuggled across the Atlantic, both by the US intelligence agencies and the Vatican—who disguised many high-level Nazi party members as Catholic priests for safe exit to places like Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina—others remained in Europe, with many setting up shop in West Germany. At these early black sites, as author Annie Jacobsen notes:
… the CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King. The facility’s chief medical doctor was … Dr. Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich. The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA. (Lazar Berman, “CIA techniques developed by ex-Nazi doctors, author claims,” Times of Israel, 3/12/2014)

Evolutions
The Central Intelligence Agency, which itself had only emerged as an autonomous organization in 1947 from the remains of the OSS, didn’t waste much time in getting on the mind-altering bandwagon. In an April, 1950 memo to Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then Director of the CIA, Sheffield Edwards, Chief of the Inspection and Security Staff Sheffield Edwards stressed, “In view of the extreme sensitivity of this project and its covert nature, it is deemed advisable to submit this document directly to you, rather than through the channel of the Projects Review Committee.” He continues:
The immediate purpose of the program (Project Bluebird) is to provide interrogation teams using the cover of polygraph interrogation to provide bona fides of high potential defectors and agents, and also for the collection of incidental intelligence from such projects. A team is to be composed of three persons consisting of a doctor/psychiatrist, a polygraph/hypnotist, and a technician. (Sheffield Edwards, “Office Memorandum, Subject: Project Bluebird,” CIA-RDP83-01042R000800010003)
Hearing rumors in the early 1950s that American prisoners of war who had returned to the United States from the Korean War were allegedly subjected to Chinese and Soviet brainwashing, the CIA was concerned that some of their nation’s military and strategic secrets could be revealed under interrogation. While much of this was anecdotal, and driven to near-hysterical levels in this height of the McCarthy Era and the Red Scare, a genuine curiosity about human nature and the limits of the mind seemed to drive some of the officers of the Central Intelligence Agency. It should be noted that later congressional probes determined this rationale was largely a cover should the program ever be exposed to the public. (“Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, U.S. Senate, April 1976”) Like the Navy’s Project Chatter, team members of Bluebird frequently subjected their human guinea pigs to acid trips, mescaline dosing, and amphetamine overloads to test the limits of the human will. One of their favorites was a combination of hallucinogens and amphetamines they nicknamed “Smasher.”
Morse Allen was one of these initial pioneers of the CIA’s exploits in psychic investigations. While pharmaceutical applications had their place, officers like Morse were interested in more esoteric means by which the human will could be bent. From 1951 onward, he took it upon himself to survey the OSS’s remaining files from the Second World War. Securing funding for a four-month crash course in the field from his superiors in the CIA’s SRS (Security Research Section). He began his apprenticeship with figures around New York like Milton Erickson, a famous stage hypnotist. Bluebird was renamed Artichoke (after the street-handle of New York gangster Ciro Terranova, the “Artichoke King”), and from August 1951 onward, this program’s controllers began testing their hypno-suggestive procedures on some of the CIA’s volunteer support staff. Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s trusted Chief of Staff and aide de camp in WWII and now the Director of the CIA, signed off on it, along with Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s Scientific Intelligence Director. Morse Allen remained in de facto control of day-by-day operations. Most, if not all, of his early test subjects were women. Hypnotizing secretaries and female aides, the architects of Artichoke were quick to extend their bizarre methods into sexually abusive favors, going so far in some cases as hypnotizing these women and post-hypnotically suggesting that they perform sexual acts on complete strangers in Washington D.C. hotel rooms and CIA office suites. (H. Albarelli Jr., A Secret Order, chapter 7) In one encounter, Morse Allen hypnotized his personal secretary and programmed her to pick up a pistol and shoot another secretary. When she came out of her hypnosis and Allen gave the post-hypnotic cue, she picked up his service pistol on his desk, turned to the other girl, without expression, and fired. The receiver slammed home with a sharp click; the gun was of course unloaded. Allen was thrilled with the potential for this exciting new technique.
Begun officially in 1953, while Artichoke was fully operational, the CIA’s MK-ULTRA/MK-DELTA was the brainchild of Richard Helms, and served as yet another tentacle of the mind-control octopus that had gripped the imaginations of our nation’s intelligence officers. Its ostensible goals were the harassment, intimidation, and coercion of domestic (ULTRA) and foreign (DELTA) populations through the use of sociology, anthropology, radiation exposure, graphology, chemical triggering, paramilitary means, and psychiatry. (Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, U.S. Senate, April 1976) Helms appointed the CIA’s notorious chief chemist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, as head of field operations. Gottlieb was nicknamed the Black Sorcerer by colleagues because of his obsession with concocting a plethora of exotic poisons, delivery devices, and other murderous schemes to eliminate world leaders and rival military figures. Gottlieb crafted the tube of poisoned toothpaste sent to the CIA’s station chief Larry Devlin in Leopoldville when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the progressive anti-colonial leader of the Congo. Instead, the CIA ended up kidnapping him, with the aid of Belgian intelligence and local rebels. He was later shot and dissolved in sulfuric acid. Gottlieb also designed the exploding cigars and explosive seashells which were unsuccessfully deployed—amid the dozens of other plots—to kill Fidel Castro as he partook in his two favorite leisure activities, puffing on Cohibas and free-diving on shallow reefs. As Castro once said, “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.” (Patrick Oppmann, “Fidel Castro survived 600 assassination attempts, officials say,” CNN, 11/26/2016)
Canada also played a tertiary role in the CIA’s burgeoning MK-ULTRA research. The CIA-sponsored and Rockefeller-funded Allen Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, was the home of one Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, and his Subproject-68. Cameron was the one-time President of both the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and eventually held the title of President of the World Psychiatric Association. He delivered addresses to a global audience, was a lecturer at numerous universities and medical schools, and was considered a preeminent authority on the human psyche. Cameron was present at the Nuremberg trials, and wrote a treatise which surmised that the inherent personality of the German people was incapable of submitting to defeat and incapable of living peacefully in a post-war environment. He called for a social reconditioning of their collective psyche in order to transform their next generation into a more docile group. In a strange twist, the anecdotal testimony of former CIA pilot and intelligence officer L. Fletcher Prouty notes that Cameron later became personally acquainted with numerous Nazi exiles, whose brains he picked for medical and psychiatric advice. (Marshall Thomas, Monarch: The New Phoenix Program, chapter 16)
Receiving personal funding from the CIA and Allen Dulles through their front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Cameron became infamous for his “psychic driving” sessions. These consisted of unwitting mentally distraught patients—many were innocent housewives and children sent in for treatment of depression—being sedated and strapped into isolated gurneys on a secure upper floor of the facility, where they were not told for how long they were being detained. Then the doctor went to work in earnest; Cameron describes the process in his essay, “The Effects Upon Human Behavior of the Repetition of Verbal Signals:”
  1. The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (depatterning).
  2. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6-7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
  3. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
  4. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days
Cameron’s goal was to attempt a full swipe of a patient’s memory, resulting in a blank slate, which only in physical form bore any resemblance to the former person. Initially, “psychic driving” was intended to erase the memories of incurable schizophrenic patients, but the CIA saw its potential in the intelligence world and ended up paying Cameron $69,000 to further their ends from 1957-1964. In one especially severe case, a woman who was released had to be taught how to use the toilet and tie her shoes, even though she was a formerly accomplished thirty-something mother of three. She never regained her memory and only realized what had happened and who was responsible when she saw a picture of Dr. Cameron in a library book decades later, which triggered a post-traumatic breakdown and an eventual lawsuit.
In another “treatment,” Phyllis Goldberg, a charming, attractive young nurse of nineteen, who was admitted to the Allen Memorial and Dr. Cameron, suffered an irreversible trauma that friends and family say utterly destroyed her life:
“When she would be with us, on weekends and so on, she didn’t communicate. She laughed for no reason. Her gait was very different,” Levenson explained. “She couldn’t dress herself—she couldn’t do anything for herself.” Small moments of affection—a pat on the head between aunt and niece, for example—elicited painful reactions from Goldberg. “When you went to pat her, just as a gesture, she would cringe,” Levenson said. “That bewildered me—not realizing, or understanding, she had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious.” (Lindsay Richardson, “Their Lives were Ruined: Families of MK-ULTRA survivors planning class-action lawsuit,” Montreal CTV, 5/20/2018)
As things progressed and more funding was secured, even stranger experiments unfolded, some bordering on the absurd. From 1955 to the mid 1960s, the CIA, using its own agents as well as assets from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, dosed unknowing subjects in San Francisco brothels and clubs—notably in the Telegraph Hill area near North Beach—with LSD-laced cocktails. Codenamed Midnight Climax, the project was one of the dozens of subprojects under the MK-ULTRA umbrella. As part of this operation the CIA sent agent George White, who used the name “Morgan Hall” when interacting with neighbors, to San Francisco and set him up in a duplex near the bay, at 2250 Chestnut Street. They paid for him to furnish the apartment with French erotic art, lurid posters, and other enticing trinkets, and tasked him with finding a suitable accomplice to lure men in for observation. An alcoholic who kept a pitcher of martinis in his refrigerator, Hall then hired a local electronics firm to install audio bugs in the electrical outlets to complete his voyeuristic suite. “For hours Hall would sit perched on a portable toilet watching behind a two-way mirror while his employee, a drug-addicted prostitute, entertained unsuspecting visitors and slipped each one an exotic chemical or biological agent.” (John Jacobs and Bill Richards, “The Bizarre Tale of a CIA Operation,” Washington Post, 8/26/1977)
Another notable case was the 1951 “Pont St. Esprit Incident.” Here, in a quaint French country village near the Swiss border, hundreds of people went completely insane, with an onset that was both rapid and violent. One man tried to drown himself, screaming that snakes were eating his belly. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in straight jackets. Time Magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.” (Henry Samuel, “French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment,” Daily Telegraph, 3/11/2010)
Officially, the narrative involved a contaminated batch of baguettes from Roch Briand, the local bakery. Ergot, a hallucinogenic mold that develops when rye spoils—and which had been used as far back as the Eleusinian Mysteries ritual at Delphi in Ancient Greece—was blamed. Curiously, however, Pont St. Esprit was only a few miles from the world’s only manufacturing plant that produced high-grade LSD at the time: Sandoz. And also curious is a memorandum that was discovered, dating to 1975 during the Rockefeller Commission’s review of the CIA’s clandestine abuses, and which read, “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin—tell him to see to it that these are buried.” (Mike Thomson, “Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?” BBC News, 8/23/2010)
Frank Olson headed the CIA’s overseas experiments involving mind-altering substances. And of course “Belin” refers to David Belin, the high-profile attorney who sat on both the Warren and Rockefeller Commissions. In 1953, a CIA agent dosed Olson’s cocktail at a local bar with LSD. Two days later, Olson “jumped or fell” out of a window on the thirteenth-floor of his Manhattan hotel suite. (David Remnick, “25 Years of Nightmares,” Washington Post, 7/28/1985) Author and former Canadian Liberal Party leader, Michael Ignatieff, among others, like Olson’s son, believe Allen Dulles and Richard Helms ordered his murder, since Olson had voiced reservations about and objections to the ethics of his missions.
Of no small concern is the fact that “since early 1954, following the death of Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of “criminal statutes” by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if “highly classified and complex covert operations” were threatened with exposure. The agreement had been struck between CIA Chief Counsel Larry Houston and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson’s death, and still remained solidly in place.” (H. Albarelli Jr., “Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes,” Truthout.org, 5/23/2010) With this agreement essentially sealing the agency from any remaining legal responsibilities following the creation and signing of the National Security Act of 1947, they were now totally exempt from oversight, and during the late 1950s and early 1960s, branched out into even weirder fields of inquiry and research. Their inquiries into the pure occult and spiritual realms of human consciousness were perhaps the most bizarre iteration of the mind-control explorations. MK-OFTEN, a still-secret and barely traceable sub-file buried in the MK-ULTRA files, mentions the Department of Defense’s use of mediums, clairvoyants, and even voodoo and Satanism. As researcher Peter Levenda notes:
Initially, Operation MK-OFTEN was a joint CIA/Army Chemical Corps drug project, based out of Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and using inmates of the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia as test subjects. It came under the aegis of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which was concerned with parapsychology and the application of supernatural powers for military purposes. Later, OFTEN would become a kind of grab bag of CIA investigations into the paranormal, and would include everything from séances and witchcraft to remote viewing and exotic drugs. (Levenda, Sinister Forces, chapter 4)
MKNAOMI, the CIA’s joint venture with the Army’s biological warfare division at Fort Detrick, which ran roughly from 1958 to the early 1970s, was the MK-digram’s final major iteration. In this program, scientists and technicians honed their abilities to deliver exotic and untraceable toxins and biological agents to unknowing victims, with a focus on agricultural poisoning, some of which likely was intended for Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s terror campaign against Cuba.
The Agency was estimated to have spent over 3 million dollars. Items developed ranged from attaché cases rigged to disseminate an agent in the air, a cigarette rigged to disseminate an agent when lighted, a fountain pen dart launcher, an engine head bolt designed to release an agent when heated, a fluorescent light starter to activate the light and then release an agent, etc. (“Cryptonym: MKNAOMI,” Mary Ferrell Foundation)
While Richard Nixon banned biological testing in November 1969, it is purported that substantial amounts of stockpiled neurotoxins and aggressive nerve agents were stashed away in secure facilities for years after MKNAOMI was officially terminated. (AP, “US Continues Defensive Germ Warfare Research,” New York Times, 9/7/1982)

Revelations and Implications
The late 1970s saw the rise of more Congressional probing into the clandestine activities of American intelligence agencies in the wake of the tumultuous 60s and the Vietnam War. When Seymour Hersh broke the story to the nation in 1975 that James Angleton’s counterintelligence outfit at the CIA had been routinely mass-surveilling American citizens’ mail, people were outraged. In the context of such probes as the Church Committee (1975), the Rockefeller Commission (1975), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976) and other notable, if problematic and incomplete investigations, Americans finally got a peek at the dirty deeds of their flagship intelligence agency. As the New York Times noted:
There seemed to be nothing the Central Intelligence Agency had not considered: lobotomies, powerful drugs, hypnosis, mental telepathy, deprivation of sleep and food, subliminal suggestion, isolation, ultra-sonic sound, flashing stroboscopic lights. The agency even considered magicians and prostitutes.” (Joseph Treaster, “CIA Mind Probes Now More Benign,” New York Times, 8/71977)
Little came of these probes, besides sensational headlines and James Angleton’s forced “retirement.” No one, to my knowledge, was charged with anything appropriate to the crimes committed, and the nation, while briefly outraged, moved on, as if they were watching a dramatic but ultimately irrelevant soap opera. In many ways, the Watergate break-in overshadowed the decades of abuse the CIA had been accused of.
MK-ULTRA shut down “officially” in 1972. No one knows how many total victims were abused or killed, because in 1973, then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms ordered all files pertaining to MK-ULTRA shredded after getting tipped off of a coming congressional interest in the project. A few boxes were not located in time, and are the sole sources we have for review. Shortly thereafter, Helms was appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to Iran, where he served for four years, only returning reluctantly in 1977 to further testify—and commit perjury—to the CIA’s role in overthrowing the government of Chile and installing the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. Sydney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA’s field-coordinator, also left the United States; he took up a humanitarian position in rural India, studying leprosy among the destitute.
The relevance of these revelations should be clear to anyone seriously interested in the Robert Kennedy assassination—to name but one bizarre case that continues to puzzle those unfamiliar with the facts surrounding the mind-control saga. Indeed, with Robert Kennedy Jr.’s now-public admission that he does not endorse the official story surrounding his father’s murder, the Washington Post recently published a piece whose headline ran, “The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?” It only took the MSM fifty years to consider this, but I suppose any progress is a positive thing in cases this sensitive.
The official story has Senator Kennedy giving his June 5th, 1968 primary victory speech in the Embassy Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was then escorted through a hallway offstage and hurried into a large kitchen pantry to make his way into an adjacent room for a press conference. As he finished shaking hands with a busboy, 24-year old Jordanian national, Sirhan Sirhan, emerged from beside a steam-table in a crowded corner and fired a .22 caliber pistol at the senator, mortally wounding him before being restrained and arrested. He was sentenced to death, but because California overturned the death penalty, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The problem with the story, of course, is that when Thomas Noguchi, the chief coroner for L.A. county, performed his autopsy, he determined that all four shots that struck Kennedy (one passed through his suit jacket without hitting him) came from behind, at sharp upward angles. None came from the front, which is where every single witness places Sirhan. Similarly, the fatal shot, which entered just below and behind his right ear—due to tell-tale powder burn patterns—could only have been fired from between one to a maximum three inches from the senator. This is demonstrably provable and incontrovertibly invalidates the eventual verdict of the court, which of course was based on the fact that Sirhan’s hapless defense attorney—perhaps compromised by the CIA—chose to avoid an actual examination and stipulated to the prosecution’s deeply flawed evidence. Sirhan was never closer to RFK than three feet. When he was detained, LAPD officers noted his strange calm, his glassy, placid eyes, and inability to recall anything that had just transpired. Later, during his prison visits by psychiatrists who attempted to hypnotize him, they noticed that he ranked with the most extreme strata of persons susceptible to both auto-suggestive and trance states, and would immediately become hypnotized. In one instance, he was given the posthypnotic command to climb the prison bars like a monkey once the cue was given. When awoken, and cued, he did just that, to the astonishment of his psychiatrist.
Sirhan is not alone in the short but fascinating cases involving wrongfully accused, post-hypnotically activated victims. I will conclude with the notorious, sensational, but factually proven case involving one Palle Hardrup. Hardrup was a thirty-year old Danish man who walked into a bank in Copenhagen, robbed the teller at gunpoint, shot him when he refused to hand over the money, shot the bank manager, then:
stood staring at his victims for a few moments as if trying to puzzle out what he had done. After putting his gun into his raincoat pocket, he unhurriedly sauntered out of the bank and rode his bicycle to his aunt’s house where he sat waiting for the police. (Perrot Phillips, “Now Go Out and Kill,” from Out of This World, vol. 6, 1978, pp. 74-5)
The author then notes that, “The case would have ended there—if it had not been for police psychiatrist Dr. Max Schmidt. Hardrup, in his opinion, did not really fit into the accepted pattern of a murder-mad gunman. He was a weak man, certainly, and a man who could easily be led. But he did not have a strong enough killer instinct to have murdered the two men at the bank—not unless he had been influenced by some other, unknown, factor.” Dr. Schmidt pursued his investigation and discovered that Hardrup had robbed another bank for $2,000 that he had given to a man by the name of Bjorn Nielsen, who Hardrup referred to as his “guiding spirit”. Nielsen had told Hardrup that he needed the money to fund a new Danish Nazi Party.
Nielsen was a ruthless confidence trickster who was known to have dabbled in hypnotism and the occult. He denied knowledge of Hardrup’s bank raids. But Schmidt was suspicious. Dr. Schmidt eventually administered a truth serum to Hardrup and an amazing story began to unfold. Suddenly Hardrup was describing in great detail how Nielsen had taken possession of him by hypnosis and had then manipulated him into murder. It happened that Nielsen and Hardrup had shared a cell together sometime after the end of WWII. In the spartan privacy of their cell he [Nielsen] subjected Hardrup to hypnosis and so started turning him into a robot.
But without a confession by Nielsen it would be difficult to prove in court. Dr. Paul Rieter, chief of the psychiatric department of Copenhagen City Hospital, eventually told investigators that, in his view, Hardrup had behaved in “an abnormal, insane-like condition while deprived of his own free will by hypnotic suggestive influence.” He added, “The impulse of the criminal acts came from without.”
To prove to the jury that this could actually happen, Dr. Rieter set up an amazing demonstration. He selected “a perfectly ordinary and gentle married woman—one of the last people who could be suspected of being capable of any crime of violence. Then, with permission from her and from the court, Rieter hypnotized her and showed the jury how it was possible to turn her into a “killer”. He kept his voice soothingly soft as he told her that her marriage was being destroyed because her husband was having an affair with another woman. But he kept repeating that her husband was in no way to blame, that he had been tricked and seduced by a viciously perverted woman.
Dr. Rieter continued to suggest to the hypnotized woman that she would be doing a great service to the world if she eliminated this evil woman and that it would not be considered a crime at all. Rieter even suggested that the hypnotized woman would be helping to protect other innocent people from the harm done by this evil woman. Also in the courtroom was another volunteer—a woman who had agreed to act as the “evil seductress”. Rieter told his guinea pig where to find her, and he handed her a gun loaded with blanks. “You know what to do and why you have to do it,” he said. “So now wake up …”
When the woman awoke from the trance she was obviously bewildered. She immediately stood up and searched the rows of people until she spotted the woman she had been told was the “evil seductress”. She walked over to the woman, raised the gun and fired. If the gun had been loaded with real bullets the “seductress” would have been dead.
The jury was convinced. Nielsen was sentenced to life in prison and Hardrup was sent to a “home for psychopaths.” After a few years he was released.” (Phillips, vol. 6)
As Lisa Pease notes in her masterful essay, “Sirhan and the RFK Assassination, Part I: The Grand Illusion”:
Have you ever seen a master magician? Have you found yourself gasping in amazement asking half-aloud, “How did he do that?” You see a man step into a box on a hollow platform immediately hoisted into the air. Within seconds, the man you saw get into a box that still hangs in front of you appears from behind you in the audience, walking down the aisle. Your eyes have convinced you this is not possible, because you saw the man get into the box. Yet there he is, the impossible made real. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also a carefully constructed illusion, designed to confuse and obfuscate. Imagine what the eyewitnesses in the crowded pantry saw. Robert Kennedy had obviously been shot, and Sirhan was firing a weapon. Sirhan must have killed Kennedy. And yet, the physical evidence does not support this conclusion. Sirhan cannot have killed Kennedy any more than the magician could be both in the box and in the audience.
Without belaboring the point and reiterating what many have surmised, it seems almost beyond argument at this juncture in the research that Sirhan was programmed to serve as a distraction for the real assassin(s) of Senator Kennedy. Multiple eyewitnesses saw him throughout the night with the suspicious girl in the polka-dot dress, who lured him into the pantry just moments before Kennedy arrived. She was also sighted with him on numerous occasions at local gun ranges, and famously fled the scene in a hysterical giddy state with another man, shouting, “We shot him! We shot Senator Kennedy!” To this day, Sirhan continues to state he has no memory of the act, with his last conscious recollection being following the woman into the pantry and her pinching him sharply before he entered “range mode”. There, he claims, individual faces and bodies morphed into paper targets. Then he goes blank. As Pease notes, it’s possible Sirhan was firing blanks, since numerous witnesses observed burnt wads of paper being expelled from his gun and hanging in the still air.
Thane Eugene Cesar, a young employee for Lockheed who had ties to Robert Maheu—Howard Hughes’ CIA liaison and Vegas manager—was hired only weeks before the event by Ace Security, and left in January of 1969, a month before Sirhan’s trial began. Cesar was an avowed racist and George Wallace supporter who believed Kennedy was “giving the country over to the blacks”, to paraphrase his eerie interview with Ted Charach in the 1970s. He also owned a nine-shot .22 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver, which he falsely claimed he sold before the assassination, but which was recovered in a muddy Arkansas pond years later and matched to his receipt of sale dated after the RFK murder. (Bill Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, p. 166) What is remarkable about this piece of evidence is that the man who purchased the gun, Jim Yoder, told the LA police this exact story, namely that Cesar had the .22 model after the Kennedy murder, during a re-inquiry by the LAPD in 1974. In other words, the security guard following the senator into the pantry, and positioned to his right and rear, holding his arm, owned a gun almost identical to Sirhan’s. And he had misrepresented that fact. (ibid, p. 167)
As to the other assassins, or perhaps a third gun, it is anyone’s guess. Twenty-one year old “memorabilia collector” Michael Wayne, who possessed ultra-right wing California Minuteman Keith Gilbert’s business card when later interrogated, is a person of interest. (An already-incarcerated Gilbert coincidentally had Wayne’s business card when his prison effects were examined.) As are a few other individuals who lurked in the Ambassador that day. But it’s irrelevant to the main revelation that one of the CIA’s dirty tricks from its MK-ULTRA days very likely changed the course of world history that fateful night. And the people truly behind Robert Kennedy’s death were never identified, let alone prosecuted.
Most of the American population has never considered that night as a transformative and disturbing episode in U.S. political history. They are content to believe that, well, only crazy people who’ve watched silly movies like Conspiracy Theory and The Manchurian Candidate and even Zoolander (“Kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia Derek!”) believe in hypno-programmed assassins and mind control. If that really took place, we’d hear about it on CNN or the Rachel Maddow Show. Which truly goes to show that in the end, the nation’s own self-reinforcing ignorance has been the CIA’s supreme accomplishment. No one really needs to be implanted with electrodes or “psychically driven” these days, so complete is the deception, so smooth and without discernible facets or seams. Today, the wholesale vertical integration of the military-industrial-psychosocial control apparatus has become as polished as a diamond. In a way, the pioneers in social engineering gave the American public far too much credit; it turns out that if you give the average citizen a cell phone that lights up and beeps every half hour, a Facebook feed, and an endless stream of sensational headlines and celebrity drama, you can get away with anything, up to and including the complete and utter erosion of our democracy.


RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020

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