Destiny Betrayed is shipping

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks Anthony.

The first four chapters are key to the rest of the book.

From there I then get into the actual plotting for the assassination.

[Anthony Thorne]

Starting chapter 12 now. I've learned much but it's somewhat depressing to clearly see the amount of unnecessary rubbish that was thrown at Garrison, and how blithely the mainstream media either shrugged their shoulders at his discoveries, or rubbed their hands and made careers out of lying about his work. Obviously, not much has changed. Once I finish the book I plan to read through the entire Warren report plus hearings and sessions over at the Mary Ferrell site, then the Garrison trial transcripts (this will obviously take a while) just to see more clearly how much was ignored and avoided. It's also been illuminating to be reminded how much of Stone's JFK is based on real events - I'd forgotten the heated confrontation between Garrison and Dean Andrews in a diner was taken from the real event.

The Kindle edition for DESTINY is now listed on Amazon, but since it's $9.99 and the paperback is just over $11 people should really opt for the latter.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Anthony,

The apparatus formed to derail Garrison is something I wanted to put forth clearly and in detailed form so everyone could understand it.

ANd it did not stop with the trial's outcome as you will see.

Thanks for the info about Kindle.

[Jim DiEugenio]

BTW, once the Kindle gets circulating, perhaps we can arrange a time for a moderated discussion of the book here.

I think that would be interesting considering all the new info contained in the book.

[David Josephs]

Hey there Jim...

FINALLY getting a chance to start reading your book and right off the bat I have a question I couldn't find an answer to....

What is the story behind why Eisenhower even PICKED Allen for the DCI job?
Was there pressure exerted from all the boys he helped along the way?

(if in your book just say so and I will go find it - a page reference would be nice tho... )

thanks Jim
DJ


Wiki:
Under Secretary of StateOn 11 January 1953, Eisenhower, now president-elect, announced that Smith would become Under Secretary of State. Smith's appointment was confirmed by the United States Senate on 6 February and he resigned as DCI three days later.[SUP][[/SUP]



https://www.cia.gov/news-information/fea...s-dci.html
A Look Back ... Allen Dulles Becomes DCI


President Dwight Eisenhower called on Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence (DDCI) Allen Dulles to lead the United States' intelligence effort during the darkest times of the Cold War. At the time, it seemed impossible to outsmart the Soviet Union. The Soviets caught our spies and were very careful about protecting their secrets. The Iron Curtain seemed impenetrable. During DCI Dulles' tenure, intelligence advancements were made that helped draw back the curtain.

From Spymaster Hero to DCI

During World War II, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and served as the OSS chief in Bern, Switzerland. From that key neutral outpost, Dulles collected important intelligence from German sources and negotiated an early surrender of German forces in Italy. OSS Director William Donovan made sure these accomplishments made it into the American press, and Dulles became famous in America as a spymaster and wartime cloak-and-dagger hero.
After the war ended in 1945, Dulles returned to his law practice but was consulted about the creation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1948, Dulles was asked to chair an early reform study of the organization. DCI Walter Bedell Smith brought Dulles in to oversee operations in 1951 and then made him his deputy director a few months later. When the newly inaugurated Eisenhower made Dulles DCI on February 26, 1953, it seemed to fulfill his destiny.

[Anthony Thorne]

Finished the book this week. The presentation of how the CIA and its assets became obsessed with derailing the Garrison case - and Garrison himself - is beyond damning. If there was no meat to Garrison's accusations, why the hell did they spend thousands of man hours, over several years, in an attempt to shatter the trial and smear Garrison's reputation? Why would Helms (likely) authorise a program of intimidation (or worse) against potential witnesses? Why would they corral an army of propagandists to write story after story distorting Garrison's arguments? The protestations by the CIA in recent years of non-involvement in the assassination - I recall seeing an official CIA statement a couple of years back circa Jefferson Morley's FOI requests for documents - are shown once again to be a sick joke.

The opening four chapters are extremely persuasive. Some of the story of JFK and his back-channel negotiations has obviously been told in JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE, but Jim puts the narrative together in a way that flows and - a valuable addition - adds notations regarding the motivations of the key players, when they likely met, and what the viewpoints and driving motivations of the conspirators to JFK's actions would have probably been through the months leading up to that November. I plan to read the book again shortly but learned a number of things from this section.

The chapters covering Garrison's trial are just as well done, but obviously frustrating from the point of seeing the conspirators and their cronies force an ever growing con job on the US and world public. I felt increasingly pissed off as I read it. What's beyond argument though is Garrison's key status as a figure who opened the door on presenting the assassination for what it was, and who cleared the way for our understanding of what the various players were up to. Again, however, it's eye-opening and frustrating to see blunt evidence of how the cover-up continues through various parties acting in bad faith. It's frankly nauseating to see how close we came to losing the transcripts of Garrison's trial.

I'll note hear that I did read the earlier hardcover of DESTINY some years back and still have it on my bookshelf. This whole section of the book still felt largely new to me. It really does feel like a totally different book to the earlier one.

I wish the book was longer (in a good sense, it doesn't really feel abbreviated or missing too much stuff, I was just enjoying the detail and the acuity of arguments) and I'd be very happy if Jim has more JFK books in him down the track, like a collected version of the Bugliosi study. I'd put this new edition of DESTINY BETRAYED in my top 10 of books on the subject and think that it's an essential part of the canon. It's about the Garrison case, and the detail shown regarding that event is damning beyond measure, but the detail and that narrative are all part of the bigger story as to what happened in November 1963, and reading the book you can come to a strong new understanding of who was likely involved and how the overall event probably happened. The names and players and events cited also make enough of an impression to give a clear idea of what areas - who, what, when - we need to research further to hopefully get to the bottom of the case. A great, very readable and extremely worthwhile book.

[Phil Dragoo]

Excellent overview, Anthony; my copy is here pending Dick Russell's second visit to the significantly inconvenient Richard Case Nagell.

In The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, Jim had outlined the broad-spectrum attack on the man all the world and Johnny Carson set out to destroy.

When Victor Marchetti reports Richard Helms inquired after "our people down there," the four defense attorneys selected and provided, the journalists enlisted, the ten moles, the army of FBI witness harrassers, the teletype machine, the media tsunami, are considered in toto, it's overkill for a madhatter ambition-hungry windmill tilter. . . .

. . . .but quite in line with a keen prosecutor with a lethal case threatening the intelligence-military samurai and their financial-industrial sponsors.

When Robert Wilcox posits Patton was removed as inconvenient to the Cold War business model, he drops a comment from head of British intelligence that Donovan's appointment by Roosevelt was a signal victory as the man was "one of our own."

As Preparata shows Montagu Norman director of Bank of England (1922-44) manipulated Hitler to the desired position of preserving disunity of the world island we see Allen Dulles obtaining a large loan for Nazi Germany and downplaying the threat of Hitler.

Who were his clients? He would rise to Director of Central Intelligence even as Ike would retain CD Jackson for his continuing pys ops work.

Helms was another from the OSS.

JFK would try to shatter this guild and be shattered instead.

Garrison was dangerously close to the truth and the dark force swarmed about him.

LBJ appointed Helms; Nixon tried to sideline him as Ambassador to Iran, but not before a team of saboteurs at the Watergate provided by Helms, insured Nixon would fall, tap Ford (and Rockefeller and Bush).

Destiny Betrayed is a key to the role of CIA in directing the current of events

[Jim DiEugenio]

I will take these in order:

1. Why did Ike appoint Dulles as DCI?

Dulles was part of the Correa-Jackson-Dulles commission to redraft a plan to reorganzie the CIA. This was not an official plan, just a suggestion from the power elite. But DCI Smith read it and seemed to like it. So he made Dulles Deputy DCI. Smith then got ill in 1952. John Foster Dulles suggested to Eisenhower that Smith be moved over to a less strenuous job at State and that Allen become DCI. That is what I know about it.

2. Anthony, that is a really fine synopsis. I really felt the first four chapters were needed in order to understand who Kennedy really was and how he worked, sometimes actually around his cabinet.

Also thanks for recognizing how I decided to track the characters in time sequence to actually set up the conspiracy as it happened.

I was really determined to show the details of the apparatus set up to wreck Garrison, and how this proceeded even beyond the Shaw trial, to actually try and incinerate his evidence.

The only key point you did not mention is how LBJ then reversed Kennedy's foreign policy initiatives and put them back to where they were under the Dulles brothers. Killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

I am glad you think its worth rereading. There aren't that many books like that in the canon.

3. Phil: I don't know what the pending upon Russell's second visit means. Are you reading Russell's second book now, and mine is on hold?

OK. Will wait for your observations then.

The Kindle version is out. And as I said, I will be glad to do a moderated discussion of the book when enough people have read it.

Thanks all.

[Phil Dragoo]

Jim

I just referenced your second edition in a long post on another forum regarding the Warren Commission.

Nagell's problems were superheated by his attempts to provide Garrison with information.

Your spotlighting of Garrison as the grand central station of investigation which had to be destroyed is the largest reversal of his Dreyfus treatment.

The Langley castle obviously sought to make it much colder in the Garrison case to thwart any such spook as RCN from coming in from the cold.

LBJ reinstituted the policies of the ancien regime, as seen in Thy Will Be Done, and Battling Wall Street.

Insuring the restoration of the business model was part of the 1963 reaction.

One more regime change by a team of players used to working together.

[Greg Burnham]

I will take these in order:

1. Why did Ike appoint Dulles as DCI?

Dulles was part of the Correa-Jackson-Dulles commission to redraft a plan to reorganzie the CIA. This was not an official plan, just a suggestion from the power elite. But DCI Smith read it and seemed to like it. So he made Dulles Deputy DCI. Smith then got ill in 1952. John Foster Dulles suggested to Eisenhower that Smith be moved over to a less strenuous job at State and that Allen become DCI. That is what I know about it.

2. Anthony, that is a really fine synopsis. I really felt the first four chapters were needed in order to understand who Kennedy really was and how he worked, sometimes actually around his cabinet.

Also thanks for recognizing how I decided to track the characters in time sequence to actually set up the conspiracy as it happened.

I was really determined to show the details of the apparatus set up to wreck Garrison, and how this proceeded even beyond the Shaw trial, to actually try and incinerate his evidence.

The only key point you did not mention is how LBJ then reversed Kennedy's foreign policy initiatives and put them back to where they were under the Dulles brothers. Killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.

I am glad you think its worth rereading. There aren't that many books like that in the canon.

3. Phil: I don't know what the pending upon Russell's second visit means. Are you reading Russell's second book now, and mine is on hold?

OK. Will wait for your observations then.

The Kindle version is out. And as I said, I will be glad to do a moderated discussion of the book when enough people have read it.

Thanks all.

Colonel Prouty, from his book, JFK, The CIA, Vietnam and The Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (whose theories inspired the movie, JFK):

On October 1, 1945, Truman directed the termination of the OSS. While the legislation for the new defense establishment and the CIA was being written and debated, the President established the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) as an interim measure. The existence of the CIG made it possible to maintain the covert agent assets of the wartime OSS wherever they existed, and to provide organizational cover for former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence staff, along with their voluminous files of former Nazi, anti-Communist agents and spies that were concealed in the undercover networks of eastern Europe and in the USSR.

Allen Dulles had been instrumental in arranging, with Gehlen, for this most unusual conversion of one of Hitler's most sinister generals to be an officer in the U.S. Army, but the details of Gehlen's personal surrender and subsequent flight to the United States -- in General Eisenhower's own VIP aircraft -- were arranged by U.S. Army officers. The senior officer of this plan was Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Walter Beedle Smith, who served immediately after World War II as the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, and, upon his return from Moscow in October 1950, as the Director of Central Intelligence. Also involved in this plan was Colonel William Quinn, later Lieutenant General Quinn and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). [2]

It is important to note the active role of these U.S. Army officials in this unprecedented move of Hitler's own intelligence chief, Gehlen, directly into the U.S. Army as an officer by a special act of the Congress. This was not a casual incident. The move, planned before the end of the war with Germany and directed from the top, was a classic example of the work of the power elite, or what Winston Churchill used to call the "High Cabal" of super-power masters.

Shortly after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the National Security Council met, on December 19th of that year, for the first time. The council had hardly waited for the ink to dry on the new law before it ignored its stricture -- that the CIA limit itself to the "coordination" of intelligence -- and rushed the fledgling agency into covert action. National Security Council Directive #4 directed the newly appointed Director, Central Intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, much against his own professional desires, "to carry out covert psychological warfare." To this end, a "special procedures group" was set up immediately, and, among other things, it became involved in the covert "buying" of the nation-wide election in Italy.

This early covert operation was considered successful, and in 1948, the National Security Council issued a new directive to cover "clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare." This new directive gave birth to a new covert action unit which replaced the "special procedures group." In deference to the language of the law, if not the intent, this new unit -- the most covert of all sections -- was named the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).

As quoted earlier, "the best cover of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization." OPC was headed by the same Frank Wisner, formerly the OSS station chief in Rumania. Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles, then with the OSS in Switzerland, were among the first U.S. officials to begin contact in 1944 with selected Nazis and Nazi sympathizers with a "Blowback" (exfiltration of former Nazis with desired technological skills) operation known as the "Deep Water" (code name only) project for their eventual evacuation to the United States.

Of course, the ostensible reason given in most instances for this unusual action was that these Nazis were scientists and technical experts whose skills would be useful in the United States, and that it was necessary to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets. As we know today, this was hardly the truth. It was Wisner who had arranged a transfer of a large number of prisoners of war from the Balkans via Turkey and Cairo in the fall of 1944. Among this large group -- mostly American flight crew members who had been shot down during heavy bombing attacks over the Ploesti oil fields of Rumania -- were a number of pro-Nazi intelligence specialists who were fleeing the Balkans, scattering before the approach of the Russian army.

In his new position with the OPC, Wisner was able to control a large group of eastern European agents in a massive network of spies. At the same time he could protect them and their U.S. contacts against hostile, anti-Nazi and Soviet capture -- possibly even assassination. OPC was a little-known, most unusual organization, especially within the U.S. government, where such deeply covert activity had never taken place before.


As initially created, OPC was totally separate from the CIA's intelligence collection (another function not specifically authorized by law) and analysis sections. OPC's chief had been nominated by the Secretary of State and approved by the Secretary of Defense. The funds for this office were concealed, as were much of the CIA funds, in the larger budget of the Department of Defense. Policy guidance and specific operational instructions for the OPC bypassed the Director, Central Intelligence completely and came directly from State and Defense. In other words, OPC was all but autonomous.

It is in this example, of the OPC, that we discover most clearly how the new invisible army was brought into the government and created with secrecy. There was no law that authorized such an organization nor the wide range of covert functions it was created to perform. As it began, the Director, Central Intelligence, if asked, could have denied that he had anything to do with it, and no one would think -- or dare -- to ask the secretaries of State or Defense if they had become involved in covert operations or to ask them about an organization they could claim they did not know even existed. As we see, this most covert office was buried as deeply within the bureaucracy as possible and its many lines to agents and secret operations were untraceable.

Despite all this secrecy, however, OPC grew from about 300 personnel in 1949 to nearly 6,000 contract employees by 1952. A large part of this sudden growth was due to the additional demands for covert action and other special operations that grew out of the Korean War and other related activities. One of the first things General W. B. Smith did, when he returned from Moscow and became Director, Central Intelligence, was to take over OPC completely and sever its connections with State and Defense -- except for the concealment of funds in Defense and for the rather considerable military support that was always provided by military units for these clandestine activities around the world.

This brings up another important characteristic of the invisible army. While the CIA administered the operations of this fast-growing organization with 6,000 employees, it could always rely upon the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. One of the most important items provided regularly by the Defense was "military cover." OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military, around the world -- even in Antarctica.

The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those in Central America, and Africa, and even in such highly specialized activities as the preparation of "assassination" manuals of the type that was written by the CIA and discovered in Nicaragua in 1984. That manual was only a later version of one developed by the CIA in the 1950s. Today, all of this clandestine activity amounts to a very big business, and the distinction between CIA and the military is hard to discern. They always work together.[3]