Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1975 Kissinger got Ford's approval for a covert military program designed to install a pro-US regime in Angola.
  
• 7/1975 issue of the men's magazine Genesis contained "How the CIA Controls President Ford" By L. Fletcher Prouty
  
• 7/1/1975 Treasury Dept sells 499,500 ounces of gold at auction at $165 an ounce.
  
• 7/1/1975 National Security Council, Disarray in Chile Policy, July 1, 1975: This memorandum, from Stephen Low to President Ford's National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, conveys concern about wavering U.S. policy toward Chile in light of reports of human rights violations. The memo reveals a division within the U.S. embassy over dealing with Chile, with a number of officials now believing that all U.S. military and economic assistance should be terminated until the regime's human rights record improves. According to Low, by reducing aid and sending "mixed signals" to the Chileans, the United States risks precipitating a crisis situation in Chile. Low concludes his memo by recommending that Scowcroft schedule a special meeting in which U.S. agencies can "clarify guidelines for future policy."
  
• 7/1/1975 Laid-off NYC policemen demonstrate to protest the city's financial crisis.
  
• 7/1-3/1975 NYC sanitation workers go on strike because of the financial crisis.
  
• 7/1/1975 Henry Wade told Robert Sam Anson that he felt that Oswald was part of a larger conspiracy. He also told Anson that he thought JFK's autopsy was "the worst" he had seen in his career. (They've Killed the President p95)
  
• 7/8/1975 Ford announces he will run in the 1976 election. Ford found himself facing opposition from the conservative wing of his party, which he had always been identified with.
  
• 7/8/1975 In an interview with Tom Wicker, Allen Dulles told him that he had pushed JFK into going along with the Bay of Pigs by repeatedly suggesting that he would look weak on communism if he didn't.
  
• 7/8/1975 Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin arrives in West Germany, the first such visit by an Israeli head of state.
  
• 7/9/1975 Ford's campaign chairman, Howard Calloway, implies that Rockefeller won't be Ford's running-mate.
  
• 7/11/1975 John Sirica reduces the sentences of the four Cubans involved in the Watergate break-in.
  
• 7/11/1975 Chinese announce the discovery of the 2000-year-old burial mound of Emperor Shih Hwang-ti; it contains over 6000 life-size clay soldiers.
  
• 7/12/1975 US Army Col. Ernest R. Morgan is released in Beirut after being held hostage 13 days by a left-wing faction of the Palestine Liberation Army.
  
• 7/13/1975 Israeli planes raid large Palestinian refugee camp; Arabs retaliate with rockets.
  
• 7/15/1975 US and USSR begin the Apollo/Soyuz mission; both spacecraft take off the same day (with the Soviets broadcasting their launch live on TV for the first time), headed for rendezvous.
  
• 7/15/1975 Ford sends a message to the Soviet Cosmonauts and the American Astronauts, hailing their joint space mission as "blazing a new trail of international space cooperation."
  
• 7/16/1975 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty testifies before the Church Committee. In his testimony, Prouty states that Richard Helms had definite knowledge of and participated in the assassination program against Fidel Castro.
  
• 7/16/1975 It is announced that the USSR will make a major purchase of wheat from the US.
  
• 7/17/1975 US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft link up in space; they remain in orbit together for two days.
  
• 7/17/1975 Hosty was questioned by FBI agent Harry Bassett about the Oswald note; Bassett didn't want to hear that Shanklin had ordered its destruction. He wanted to blame Kyle Clark. (Assignment Oswald 186)
  
• 7/19/1975 Frank Church, in a press conference today, says that the CIA has acted like a "rogue elephant." Committee member, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, says that there is friction on the Church Committee between "those who want to protect the Kennedys and those who want to tell the truth." Years from now, Goldwater will also say: "We spent nine of the ten months trying to get Kennedy's name out of it."
  
• 7/21/1975 Cowan, Edward - "New Study Urged in Kennedy Death" - New York Times
  
• 7/22/1975 "Congressional investigators have received information that on the day President Kennedy was killed, the [CIA] was making arrangements in Paris for a plot to assassinate [Castro], according to informed sources. The coincidence in timing becomes all the more bizarre in light of Castro's own account of what he was doing when Kennedy was killed. According to the Cuban premier, he was in Varadero, Cuba, that afternoon listening to an intermediary - a French journalist named Jean Daniel - talk about Kennedy's apparent interest in re-establishing contact between the two nations. Daniel had just spoken with Kennedy in Washington, Castro related in the recently published book, With Fidel. [Author not given.] 'In my opinion,' Castro said, 'this was a definite gesture on Kennedy's party [sic] to try to establish contact, an exchange with us.' Washington Post, George Lardner, Jr. 7/22/75
  
• 7/24/1975 Just as he had done with the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, DCI Colby promised his full cooperation to the Pike Committee. Colby, accompanied by Special Counsel Mitchell Rogovin and Enno H. Knoche, Assistant to the Director, met with Pike and Congressman McClory, the ranking Republican on the committee, on 24 July 1975. At the meeting, Colby expressed his continuing belief that the committee would find that the main thrust of US intelligence was "good, solid, and trustworthy." Pike responded that he had no intention of destroying US intelligence. What he wanted, he told Colby, was to build public and Congressional understanding and support for intelligence by "exposing" as much as possible of its nature without doing harm to proper intelligence activities. Pike related to Colby that he knew the investigation would cause "occasional conflict between us, but that a constructive approach by both sides should resolve it." Privately, Pike indicated that he believed the Agency was a "rogue elephant" out of control, as Senator Church had charged publicly. It needed to be restrained and major reporting reforms initiated. Colby, unaware of Pike's private views, then sought an agreement with Pike and McClory on procedural matters much like the Agency had negotiated with the Church Committee. Colby outlined his responsibility for protecting sources and methods and the complexity posed in meeting "far-flung requests for all documents and files" relating to a given topic. Pike would have none of Colby's reasoning. He assured the DCI that the committee had its own security standards. He also refused to allow the CIA or the executive branch to stipulate the terms under which the committee would receive or review classified information. Pike insisted, moreover, that the committee had the authority to declassify intelligence documents unilaterally. He appeared bent on asserting what he saw as the Constitutional prerogatives of the legislative branch over the executive branch, and the CIA was caught in the middle. Given Pike's position, the committee's relationship with the Agency and the White House quickly deteriorated. It soon became open warfare. Confrontation would be the key to CIA and White House relationships with the Pike Committee and its staff. Early on, Republican Representative James Johnson set the tone for the relationship when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA Review Staff, "You, the CIA, are the enemy." Colby came to consider Pike a "jackass" and his staff "a ragtag, immature and publicity-seeking group." Even Colby's rather reserved counsel, Mitch Rogovin, saw Pike as "a real prickly guy...to deal with." Rogovin believed Pike was not really wrong in his position. "He just made it so goddamn difficult. You also had to deal with Pike's political ambitions." The CIA Review Staff, which worked closely with both the Church Committee and Pike Committee staffs, never developed the same cooperative relationship with the Pike Committee staffers that it did with the Church Committee. The Review Staff pictured the Pike staffers as "flower children, very young and irresponsible and naive." According to CIA officer Richard Lehman, the Pike Committee staffers were "absolutely convinced that they were dealing with the devil incarnate." For Lehman, the Pike staff "came in loaded for bear." Donald Gregg, the CIA officer responsible for coordinating Agency responses to the Pike Committee, remembered, "The months I spent with the Pike Committee made my tour in Vietnam seem like a picnic. I would vastly prefer to fight the Viet Cong than deal with a polemical investigation by a Congressional committee, which is what the Pike Committee [investigation] was." An underlying problem was the large cultural gap between officers trained in the early years of the Cold War and the young staffers of the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As for the White House, it viewed Pike as "unscrupulous and roguish." Henry Kissinger, while appearing to cooperate with the committee, worked hard to undermine its investigations and to stonewall the release of documents to it. Relations between the White House and the Pike Committee became worse as the investigations progressed. William Hyland, an assistant to Kissinger, found Pike "impossible." In his first meeting with Colby on 24 July 1975, Pike indicated his committee would begin its investigation by concentrating on intelligence budgets. He told Colby he personally believed that knowledge of intelligence expenditures should be open and widespread.
  
• 7/26/1975 Ford departs on his second trip to Europe - "a mission of peace and progress" - for visits to West Germany, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and to Helsinki to meet leaders of 34 other nations and sign the final act of the European Security Conference.
  
• 7/28/1975 Illustrative of just how quickly the relationship between the Agency and the Pike Committee turned sour was a sarcastic letter Pike addressed to Colby on 28 July 1975, only four days after their first meeting. In the letter, Pike informed the DCI that the committee would be investigating the IC's budget. Pike began the letter by stating, "First of all, it's a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped 'Secret' on every page." Pike then criticized Colby's letters--which laid out the basic legislation establishing the National Security Council, the CIA, and the DCI and detailed the compartmentation issue in developing the atomic bomb and the U-2--as not "particularly pertinent to the present issue." Pike made it clear he was seeking information on the IC's budget. He wrote that he was not interested in history, sources and methods, or the names of agents. "I am seeking to obtain information on how much of the taxpayers' dollars you spend each year and the basic purposes for which it is spent," he wrote Colby. He justified his focus on the budget by citing Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution: "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of public money be published from time to time." He then continued: "I would assume that a reasonable place to look for that statement of account would be in the Budget of the United States Government and while it may be in there, I can't find it. I hope that Mr. Lynn [James Lynn, Director of the Office of Management and Budget] may be able to help me. The Index of the Budget for fiscal year 1976 under the "C's" moves from Center for Disease Control to Chamizal Settlement and to a little old country lawyer, it would seem to me that between those two might have been an appropriate place to find the CIA but it is not there. It's possibly in there somewhere but I submit that it is not there in the manner which the founding fathers intended and the Constitution requires." Pike seemed to believe that, "by following the dollars," the committee could "locate activities and priorities of our intelligence services."
  
• 7/28/1975 Congress approves a bill extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for seven years, including provisions safeguarding voting rights of non-English speaking groups.
  
• 7/28/1975 A Teamsters strike that stopped publication of Pittsburgh's two newspapers for a month ends.
  
• 7/29/1975 Jackie Onassis celebrates her 46th birthday. During a visit earlier this month to Hyannisport, she sadly tells Rose Kennedy that she can no longer remember JFK's voice and can't bear to look at pictures of him. "I have always lived through men," she tells a friend. "Now I realize I can't do that anymore."
  
• 7/29/1975 Congress overrides Ford's veto of a $2 billion health bill.
  
• 7/29-8/2/1975 Summit in Helsinki, Finland; agreement on self-determination for all nations.
  
• 7/30/1975 Jimmy Hoffa was lured from his Detroit home to a supposed union meeting at the Manchus Red Fox restaurant. The last he was heard from was when he called his wife at 2pm to tell her that the men he was waiting for had not arrived yet. He was seen driving away from the restaurant with several men about 2:45 and was never seen again. The man reportedly responsible for Hoffa's disappearance was Provenzano man Salvatore Briguglio. Various accounts of his death have circulated. Jimmy Hoffa is scheduled to meet Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official and reputed member of the crime syndicate. Hoffa is never seen again.
  
• 7/30/1975 Castro charges the CIA with at least 24 assassination attempts on himself and other Cuban leaders, from the early 60s to 1971.
  
• 7/31/1975 The Pike Committee held its first hearing on the CIA budget. Elmer B. Staats, the Comptroller General of the General Accounting Office (GAO), was the first witness. Staats testified that the GAO had no idea how much money the CIA spent or whether its management of that money was effective or wasteful because his agency had no access to CIA budgetary information.
  
• 7/31/1975 Washington Post reported Castro's charges against the CIA. Sen. McGovern got this report after visiting Castro, and he delivered it to the Church Committee. The CIA would later deny any involvement in most of the cases. (Church report p71)
  
• 8/1975 Kissinger signaled Indonesia that the US would not object if that country invaded East Timor.
  
• 8/1795 Branch, Taylor and George Crile III - "The Kennedy Vendetta" - 8/1975 Harpers
  
• 8/1975 Larry Flynt published in Hustler magazine photos taken by an Italian paparazzo of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude on the Greek island of Skorpios.
  
• 8/1/1975 In Helsinki, the US and 34 other countries signed a pact agreeing to recognize the integrity of European boundaries as they were at the end of WWII.
  
• 8/3/1975 John Martino dies at the age of sixty-four. Martino admitted being part of the JFK assassination - supplying equipment and delivering money. He was once arrested in Cuba. He was also very close to William Pawley.
  
• 8/4/1975 When Colby appeared before the committee on 4 August, he refused to testify publicly on the intelligence budget. The next day, however, he appeared in executive session and outlined the expenditures of the Agency in some detail, stressing that the largest portion of the budget was justifiably devoted to the Soviet Union and to China, the primary US intelligence targets. Colby argued that revealing even the total of the CIA budget would do substantial harm to the US intelligence effort. According to Colby, it would enable foreign intelligence services to improve considerably their estimates of US capabilities. Turning the argument around, Colby reasoned that the US Government would benefit considerably from access to this same information concerning the Soviet intelligence effort. He then stated, "To the best of my knowledge, no other intelligence service in the world publicizes its intelligence budget." Colby further argued that public knowledge of CIA budget totals would not significantly increase the public's or Congress's ability to make judgments about CIA programs because, without greater detail and understanding of the programs themselves, no significant conclusions could be drawn. Rogovin and other CIA officials evidently believed Colby had presented a strong case before the committee for maintaining secrecy in the budgetary process. They thought he had effectively deflected all major criticisms. On 4 August 1975, Pike aired his frustration in a committee hearing. "What we have found thus far is a great deal of the language of cooperation and a great deal of the activity of noncooperation," he announced. Other committee members felt that trying to get information from the CIA or the White House was like "pulling teeth."
  
• 8/8/1975 National Security Council, Chilean President's visit to U.S., August 8, 1975: This memorandum, written by Stephen Low of the National Security Council, calls Scowcroft's attention to Pinochet's plans to visit the United States, and his requested meeting with U.S. President Ford. The memo states that the NSC asked the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, David Popper, to discourage the meeting by telling the Chileans that President Ford's schedule is full. Fearing that such a visit would "stimulate criticism" and foster embarrassment, Low suggests an "informal talk" with Chile's Ambassador Trucco.
  
• 8/14/1975 New York Times reported that there were "many signs pointing to the possibility that the Earth may be heading for another ice age…"
  
• 8/15/1975 Sheik Mujibur Rahman, president of Bangladesh, was assassinated during a coup.
  
• 8/18/1975 Six member unions in the AFL-CIO announce a boycott on loading of grain bound for the USSR.
  
• 8/18/1975 An anonymous letter dated this day and written in Spanish, with a Mexico City postmark, is sent to Texas researcher Penn Jones. It contains the "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter purportedly from Oswald. The typewritten cover letter said (in Spanish) that a copy of the Hunt letter had been sent to FBI director Kelley late in 1974: "To my understanding it could have brought out the circumstances of the assassination of President Kennedy. Since Mr. Kelley hasn't responded to that letter, I've got the right to believe something bad might happen to me, and that is why I see myself obligated to keep myself away for a short time..." The FBI denied ever receiving it. Jones failed to locate the author in Mexico City, and then sent a copy of the letter to Earl Golz, who sent it to Paul Rothermel, who in turn passed it to the FBI. The Dallas Morning News got three handwriting experts to examine the Hunt letter; all three concluded that the signature was Oswald's. The HSCA in 1978 was unable to come to a conclusion on this.
  
• 8/18/1975 Brezhnev meets with 18 US Congressmen at Yalta.
  
• 8/21/1975 Kissinger arrives in Israel for more talks on Middle East peace.
  
• 8/27-28/1975 a federal court jury in Cleveland exonerates 27 Ohio national guardsmen in connection with the Kent State shooting. Or this was done by Gov. James Rhodes. 8/27/1975 Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie died. With his death came various forms of rationalization from many Rastafarians. The responses concerning Selassie's death ranged from "his death was a fabrication" to "his death was inconsequential because Haile Selassie was merely a personification' of God."
  
• 8/30/1975 Bob Dudney and Hugh Aynesworth called Hosty about an article they planned to publish on Oswald's note. Shanklin was denying he ever knew anything about the note; Hosty refused to comment. (Assignment Oswald 182)
  
• 8/31/1975 Dallas Times Herald reported that Oswald had left a note to James Hosty at the Dallas FBI office two weeks before the assassination. "FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley confirmed today (Saturday) that inquiries conducted in response to questions asked by The Dallas Times Herald tend to substantiate that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office several days prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, apparently as a result of an interview by an FBI agent of his wife Marina in connection with the FBI investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination which was documented in the Warren Commission report. Oswald left a note addressed to this agent and although recollections vary as to the wording of the note, it was for the purpose of warning the agent to desist from further interviews of his wife. FBI inquiries to date establish that the note contained no references to President Kennedy or in any way have forewarned of the subsequent assassination. Prior to the current FBI inquiries, there had been no information concerning this visit and note recorded in FBI records, and inquiries tend to corroborate that shortly after the assassination, the note in question was destroyed. Inquiries are continuing to determine the full facts concerning the handling of this matter. The Attorney General has from the inception been kept informed of the progress of the FBI inquiries to date. Director Kelley has indicated that there will be no further comment for publication until all inquiries have been concluded and the matter considered by the department." "The FBI probe into Oswald's visit was launched as a result of questions asked by The Times Herald during a July 6, 1975, meeting with Kelley in Washington FBI headquarters. The Times Herald had been checking the previously unreported incident for more than two months." Shanklin denied to the Herald that he knew anything about the note. Shanklin said he had "heard reports" that Oswald had been in a garage adjacent to the downtown FBI offices prior to the assassination, but that he had been unable to verify that report. "I never could check that report out," he said. At the time, FBI offices were in the Santa Fe Building in downtown Dallas, less than 10 blocks from the TSBD. Hosty today says there was no threat of violence, but he testified that Dallas Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it after the assassination. After Oswald was shot, Shanklin told Hosty, "Oswald's dead now. There can be no trial. Here - get rid of this." Hosty tore up the note and flushed it down the toilet. Oswald had told Ruth Paine that he had left a note at the Dallas FBI office, but when she told this to the FBI they denied it. The story claimed that Hosty had destroyed the note on his own, without his supervisors' knowledge. But Kelley refused to fire Hosty over the story. (Assignment Oswald 189)