Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1/1977 the NATO base Aviano, which was closed for flying due to a parade being prepared, had a close encounter. At about 3.00am a USAF guard observed a strange object hovering above an area known as 'Victor Alert', which housed 2 secret jet fighters, in a large hanger. The object was described as a large spinning top, 45m in diameter and hovering very low above the hanger. The upper surface was domed shaped and had white, red and green lights emitting from its surface. The USAF guard reported the incident and a team of military guards were sent to the hanger. The guards surrounded the area and radar personnel were contacted to see if they could pick the object up on their equipment. However, when then tried to access the radar consoles the base was hit by a mysterious power-cut. The incident went all the way up to NATO headquarters in Brussels, but when questioned by various UFO researchers they were told that the encounter had been a misperception of the moon shining off some low clouds !
  
• 7/11/1977 Chile: Pinochet announced that the government would be reforming into a sort of authoritarian democracy, with parliamentary elections in the early '80s.
  
• 7/13/1977 Baltimore Sun - "Towson Gunsmith Tells Panel JFK Was Killed Accidentally by Secret Service Agent"
  
• 7/20/1977 Leon Jaworski is appointed by the House Ethics Committee to investigate the scandal involving bribes of US congressmen by a South Korean lobbyist.
  
• 7/21/1977 Carter spoke of how Americans and Russians both yearned for peace; Brezhnev responded favorably.
  
• 7/22/1977 Deng Xiaoping is named vice premier of China.
  
• 7-8/1977 President Carter's "UFO" Is Identified as the Planet Venus by Robert Sheaffer (published in The Humanist magazine, July-August, 1977, p.46) President Jimmy Carter's widely-reported "UFO sighting," which he made public while Governor of Georgia, was in fact a misidentification of the planet Venus. Several errors of identification within Mr. Carter's report demonstrate that the eyewitness testimony of even a future president of the United States cannot be taken at face value when investigating UFO sightings. The incident occurred in Leary, Georgia, about forty miles from Plains, on the evening of January 6, 1969. Mr. Carter was the local district governor of the Lion's Club, and had come to Leary to boost the local chapter.
  
• 8/1977 Joseph C. Ayres dies in a shooting accident this month. Ayres was the Chief Steward on JFK's Air Force One.
  
• 8/1977 Alan Belmont, FBI agent, also dies this month. Belmont was J. Edgar Hoover's special assistant to the Warren commission.
  
• 8/1977 FBI document expert, James Cadigan, who testified before the Warren Commission -- dies from "a fall in his home."
  
• 8/1/1977 Francis Gary Powers dies in a mysterious helicopter crash. He is 47 yrs. old. Powers was the U-2 pilot shot down by a Russian missile over Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1960 -- within 180 days of LHO's defection to Russia. President Carter approves having Powers buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
  
• 8/3/1977 Washington Post story by George Lardner Jr. and John Jacobs: "Lengthy Mind-Control Research by CIA is Detailed."
  
• 8/3/1977 On the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy said: "The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. [Frank] Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers."
  
• 8/4/1977 Congress creates the Dept of Energy and confirms James Schlesinger as its first Secretary
  
• 8/4/1977 Washington Post reported that CIA agent George White and other operatives had set up apartments to be used for prostitutes as they brought back clients, who would then be drugged and observed by agents behind two-way mirrors. One of the things the CIA was interested in was determining if particular drugs could be used to cause someone to behave in an abberant way so the victim could be discredited in public. They also tried to induce amnesia, render a subject naturally suggestible, alter sexual patterns, elicit information and create dependency in a subject. (Also NYT 9/20/77)
  
• 8/10/1977 Moshe Dayan told Cyrus Vance, "When you accept our views we shall be in full agreement with you."
  
• 8/12/1977 The Space Shuttle Enterprise completes its first test flight.
  
• 8/13/1977 the Chicago Tribune reported: CIA Director Stansfield Turner has disclosed that the agency found a man who could "see" what was going on anywhere in the world through his psychic powers. Scientists and officials would show the man a picture of a place and he would then describe any activity going on there at that time. The tight-lipped CIA chief wouldn't reveal how accurate the man was, but said the agency dropped the project in 1975. "He died," Turner said, "and we haven't heard from him since." Under a program first called Project SCANATE (scanning by coordinate), researchers at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, studied the remote-viewing talents of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, among others. Ingo went on to develop a successful, now highly respected remote-viewing training program for the Department of Defense. Pat Price died in 1975, but left a legacy as yet unequaled by any other publicly known remote viewer. In support of Project SCANATE, Pat was able to use his remote viewing talent to recover highly classified code-word information from an operational U.S. military facility. So good was Pat's remote viewing that he was recruited by and worked directly for the CIA until his reported death on July 14, 1975.
  
• 8/15/1977 Mae Brussell, on her radio program, discussed Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and suspected that it was some kind of government mind control program.
  
• 8/16/1977 Gerald Ford announced his support for the Panama Canal Treaties.
  
• 8/16/1977 Drs. Boswell and Humes appear in closed-door HSCA session.
  
• 8/19/1977 Philip C. Wehle, then Commanding officer of the military District of Washington, D. C., described JFK's head wound to the HSCA's Andy Purdy on 8-19-77. The declassified memo recorded that, "(Wehle) noticed a slight bruise over the right temple of the President but did not see any significant damage to any other part of the head. He noted that the wound was in the back of the head so he would not see it because the President was lying face up; he also said he did not see any damage to the top of the head, but said the President had a lot of hair which could have hidden that... ." No diagram from Wehle has surfaced. If the photographs depicting a skull defect antero-laterally are accurate, it is hard to imagine how such a defect would have been invisible to Wehle with JFK lying face up.
  
• 8/27/1977 William Lowther, Washington correspondent of the Daily Mail, writes and article which is headlined THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE BATHROOM. It says: Morgan Hall was a spy. He always kept a jug of martinis in the refrigerator. He had a two-way mirror in the bathroom. But Morgan's life was full of woe. His masters were slow in sending money. His assignment was awful sleazy. The code name for his project was "Operation Midnight Climax". It was meant to be a perpetual secret And no wonder. For two full years Morgan spent his working hours sitting on a portable toilet watching through his mirror drinking his martinis while a prostitute entertained men in the adjoining bedroom. Her job was to persuade clients to drink cocktails. What they didn't know was that the drinks had been mixed by the mysterious Morgan. They were more chemical than alcohol. Morgan had to record the results. We still don't know just what they were or how they worked. But some of the drinks gave instant headaches, others made you silly or drunk or forgetful or just plain frantic. The effects were only temporary and nobody was harmed, much. Morgan was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and it was America's top spy bosses who sent him out from headquarters near Washington to set up the "laboratory" in a luxury apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. Now, 1,647 pages of financial records dealing with the operation have been made public as part of a Congressional investigation. It was all part of the agency's MK-ULTRA mind control experimental program ... it was reasoned that a prostitute's clients wouldn't complain. The financial records released yesterday show that Morgan was always writing to headquarters. Says a typical letter - "Money urgently needed to pay September rent." His bills for the flat include Toulouse -Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can - can dancer and one marked: "Portable toilet for observation post." Says the CIA: "Morgan Hall died two years ago. We have no idea where he is buried."
  
• 8/28/1977 Britain's Sunday Telegraph carries an article which reads: Hospitals for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped have been instructed by the Health Department to collect statistics on operations being carried out to change personality. For the first time, ministers have acknowledged that there is growing concern. The operations, known as psycho surgery, are carried out to remove or destroy portions of brain tissue to change the behavior of severely depressed or exceptionally aggressive patients who do not respond to drugs or electric shock treatment. The Sunday Telegraph goes on to say that "the change was irreversible" and quotes a prominent consultant psychiatrist as saying: "My hospital is littered with the wrecks of humanity who have undergone psycho surgery." Dr. Randolph Crepson-White, talking with an independent television team reveals: "I performed five of these operations on people - four young men and one young woman - who appeared to be completely sane. There were two objects. The patients had to be completely de-sexed, to have their natural biological urges taken away, and they also had to have their individuality removed. They would, after being discharged, obey any order without question. In fact, they would virtually be thinking robots. I recognized that what I was doing was most unethical, and I did protest that very strongly, but I was told that the operations were vital to the security of the country. Nobody actually told me that those patients had been involved in espionage but that was the impression I was given. I was ordered to sign the Official Secrets form and that is why you must not mention my name - apart from the fact that I'm frightened, there'd be repercussions of a violent nature if certain people realized I'd been talking to you."
  
• 9/1977 The Ford Motor Company has long been fighting to keep unsafe cars on the road. Unfortunately, the payoff for their efforts has been substantial. The driving force behind the battle is, of course, profit. Ford, when rushed to put a subcompact car on the market, cut the preproduction time of the PINTO in half. There were already $200 million worth of tools in place on the PINTO assembly line when crash tests proved that the gas tank was extremely vulnerable to relatively low impact rear-end collisions. After eight years and more than five-hundred burn deaths, the design flaw was corrected. Ford's internal "cost benefit analysis," which placed a dollar value on human life (about $200,000 per person), said it wasn't profitable to make changes sooner. In 1978, the society of professional journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, honored Mother Jones for public service in magazine journalism in its publication of Mark Dowie's expose of "Hazards created by the gasoline tank mounting of the Ford Pintos." The article was hailed by Ralph Nader in Washington as "a story of corporate callousness at the highest level." However, when Mother Jones and Ralph Nader held major press conferences in 1977, there was a brief flurry of news about the Pinto problem which rapidly disappeared from the media. The fact that there are still about two million people in this country driving potentially fatal fire-trap vehicles (many of whom are unaware of the problem) qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "ten best censored stories of 1977." SOURCE: "Pinto Madness," by Mark Dowie, Mother Jones, September/October, 1977.
  
• 9/1/1977 Limited diplomatic ties re-established between US and Cuba.
  
• 9/2/1977 The Times gives front-page prominence to a report supplied from Honolulu by Reuter and UPI. It is headlined "PSYCHIATRISTS CONDEMN SOVIET UNION" and it says: "The general assembly of the World Psychiatric Association, meeting behind closed doors, has adopted a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for abusing psychiatry for "political purposes" in the Soviet Union..." The international code of ethics, called the "Declaration of Hawaii", adopted by the congress, follows years of criticism against the WPA for not taking action on ethical standards.
  
• 9/2/1977 This month, Robert Blakey sponsors a two-day "critics' conference." People like Paul Hoch, Peter Dale Scott, Mary Ferrell, Sylvia Meagher, and Gary Shaw are invited to speak to Blakey and other members of the staff.
  
• 9/5/1977 Pinochet arrived in the US for a state visit.
  
• 9/7/1977 Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos Herrera sign treaties providing for the eventual return of the canal to Panama.
  
• 9/7/1977 Jack Anderson column: "The Pentagon, according to its former security chief, W. Donald Stewart, conducted at least 11 separate investigations of us, sparing no expense. The FBI secretly grabbed our telephone records, and the Internal Revenue Service conducted a penetrating year-long audit of my finances."
  
• 9/8/1977 Jack Anderson column: "Chile's shadowy secret police chief was the man behind the [Letelier] murder...Some Justice Department sources speculate that Chilean President Augusto Pinochet personally suggested the assassination."
  
• 9/9/1977 Kenneth O'Donnell, JFK's Appointments Secretary, dies today at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston after a brief "serious illness." The illness is never explained. [One biographical sketch suggests his death is alcohol related.] He is 53 yrs. old.
  
• 9/12/1977 South Africa: Steven Biko is killed while in police custody.
  
• 9/18/1977 public debate at the University of Southern California about the CIA involving Mark Lane, Daniel Ellsberg, John Gerassi (formerly of NY Times and Newsweek), William Colby, David Atlee Phillips and Ray Cline. Cline told Gerassi that the US intervention in the Dominican Republic wasn't important because it was "a lousy little country and always has been." According to Lane, after the debate, Cline personally threatened him. Lane pointed out to Phillips that according to Who's Who in America, Phillips had never worked for the CIA; it stated that 1958-61 he was a "proprietor...Public Relations, Havana, Cuba." Phillips declared that Oswald "was in no way connected with the CIA" and promised to call for the breakup of the Agency if it were proved guilty of a coverup in the Kennedy assassination. Lane soon had Phillips so rattled that he admitted, "when the record comes out, we will find that there was never a photograph taken of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. We will find out that Lee Harvey Oswald never visited, let me put it, that is a categorical statement, there, there, we will find out there is no evidence, first of all there was no proof of that. Second, there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy." But he surmised that Oswald might have called the Soviet Embassy. Phillips said he regretted the CIA's attempts to discredit WC critics. (Plausible Denial 75-87)
  
• 9/22/1977 US-Cuba repatriation program (signed 8/29) begins as 29 Americans and 26 Cuban relatives arrive in Florida from Cuba.