11-12-2016, 07:16 PM
Joseph McBride Wrote:THE PLOT TO KILL JOHN GLENN: You won't read about this in his obits in the MSM, but on February 2, 1962, as part of Operation Miongoose, Brig. Gen. William H. Craig (attached to the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he worked with Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale) suggested Operation Dirty Trick, to sabotage Glenn's Mercury launch and blame it on the Cubans. This was to be a pretext for invading Cuba, like the Operation Northwoods plan for false-flag domestic terrorism that was proposed to President Kennedy in March 1962 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hi There Joe,
I vividly recalling reading about this plot. IIRC, they weren't actually going to sabotage the flight. The plan was that *if* the Atlas booster failed they would blame it on the Russian Trawlers who were always present for any launch. They would claim that the Soviets sent false signals to the Atlas which caused it to fail.
Glenn was originally scheduled to fly a 3rd sub-orbital flight like Shepard and Grissom. The spacecraft and Redstone booster were ready to go. When Titov became the 2nd man in orbit, the US decided it had had enough. They rescheduled Glenn to fly the first orbital mission for the US.
A risky move, but the US was desperate to get a man into orbit to catch up to the USSR. The Atlas rocket had an abysmal record of blowing up shortly after launch so the launch was delayed again and again due to technical issues from December 1961 until late in February 1962.
IMO the US wouldn't have allowed any US sabotage on Glenn's flight - they needed to get a man into orbit. If Glenn's flight failed it would have delayed the next mission, and I can't imagine JFK agreeing to that. I can easily imagine the JCS agreeing to do it, but I think they only proposed scapegoating the Russians in the event of an actual launch failure because they knew they had no chance of getting JFK to agree to cause the flight to fail.
As for Glenn not flying again, there are a great number of factors involved. I have studied the selection and crew assignments of the Mercury astronauts for decades, interviewing them, and many, many key participants. If anyone is interested in the complex story of Glenn's lack of crew assignments, PM me, and I can lay it out for you. It's too long to lay out here.
Tom