21-03-2009, 12:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 21-03-2009, 01:13 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Ralph McGehee on Grenada
Brief
excerpt of a press conference by former CIA agent Ralph McGehee,
broadcast on radio station WBAI New York.
_______________________________________________
My own particular distress, if you want to call it -- it's
much more than that -- with the Agency was deceptions over
Vietnam. There were so many, it's hard to talk about. Its
intelligence was almost an arm of its disinformation. Just one --
I'm not going to have time to go into that, but I'll talk about
Grenada. I think the masterpiece of all disinformation operations,
the _Piet`a_ of disinformation, was the operation at Grenada.
Now the United States invaded Grenada on the basis that
Grenada posed a threat to America's national security. Here's an
island nation of 100,000 people, half of them children; they had
no army, no navy, no air force, they didn't even have a commercial
airline, that we invaded because it posed a threat to America's
national security. Now you can sell that to the American people,
you can sell them anything. And indeed, after this was done,
Reagan's popularity soared. How did we do it? The armada that was
going off to the Middle East because of the bombing of the Marines
in Lebanon took a short stop at Grenada, and all media were not
allowed on the island for several days. The President went on
television and said, "My fellow Americans, we got there just in
time. We found three warehouses loaded to the rafters, one with
Communist weapons." And Grenada was going to sponsor revolution
throughout all of Central America, the whole story. Finally, when
the media was allowed on the island, they rushed to the warehouse
to see these Communist weapons, and they noted that there were
only some Communist weapons, only half full, and many of them were
American weapons. Of course, you have to realise that the
Department of Defense was solely in charge of disseminating
information at that particular point, and [they were asked] well,
how could these be Communist weapons? "Well, they were left behind
in Vietnam." Later on, these weapons, by a circuitous route, ended
up back in the CIA.
There is also -- when the story that Grenada posed a threat
to national security began to fade, you know, people began to
appreciate that this little tiny country couldn't really pose a
threat to anybody, we then retreated to television, on the nightly
news, showing an artillery barrage, against -- they were wiping
out pockets of Cuban resistance. What we weren't told was that
this was totally staged: there was nobody shooting back. They were
just shooting up in the mountains, some of the American soldiers
shooting up there, and this was portrayed to us as wiping out
pockets of Cuban intervention. Later we came to find out that Cuba
had about fifty airport workers on the island, one or two military
advisors, but that was after all the information had had its
effect.
Brief
excerpt of a press conference by former CIA agent Ralph McGehee,
broadcast on radio station WBAI New York.
_______________________________________________
My own particular distress, if you want to call it -- it's
much more than that -- with the Agency was deceptions over
Vietnam. There were so many, it's hard to talk about. Its
intelligence was almost an arm of its disinformation. Just one --
I'm not going to have time to go into that, but I'll talk about
Grenada. I think the masterpiece of all disinformation operations,
the _Piet`a_ of disinformation, was the operation at Grenada.
Now the United States invaded Grenada on the basis that
Grenada posed a threat to America's national security. Here's an
island nation of 100,000 people, half of them children; they had
no army, no navy, no air force, they didn't even have a commercial
airline, that we invaded because it posed a threat to America's
national security. Now you can sell that to the American people,
you can sell them anything. And indeed, after this was done,
Reagan's popularity soared. How did we do it? The armada that was
going off to the Middle East because of the bombing of the Marines
in Lebanon took a short stop at Grenada, and all media were not
allowed on the island for several days. The President went on
television and said, "My fellow Americans, we got there just in
time. We found three warehouses loaded to the rafters, one with
Communist weapons." And Grenada was going to sponsor revolution
throughout all of Central America, the whole story. Finally, when
the media was allowed on the island, they rushed to the warehouse
to see these Communist weapons, and they noted that there were
only some Communist weapons, only half full, and many of them were
American weapons. Of course, you have to realise that the
Department of Defense was solely in charge of disseminating
information at that particular point, and [they were asked] well,
how could these be Communist weapons? "Well, they were left behind
in Vietnam." Later on, these weapons, by a circuitous route, ended
up back in the CIA.
There is also -- when the story that Grenada posed a threat
to national security began to fade, you know, people began to
appreciate that this little tiny country couldn't really pose a
threat to anybody, we then retreated to television, on the nightly
news, showing an artillery barrage, against -- they were wiping
out pockets of Cuban resistance. What we weren't told was that
this was totally staged: there was nobody shooting back. They were
just shooting up in the mountains, some of the American soldiers
shooting up there, and this was portrayed to us as wiping out
pockets of Cuban intervention. Later we came to find out that Cuba
had about fifty airport workers on the island, one or two military
advisors, but that was after all the information had had its
effect.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
