The Invasion of Cuba: Never the Intention of JFK Hit Sponsors

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Paul, very interesting view of the New Left. Just wondering how you see CHAOS fitting into other New Left ops, it that indeed is what they were.

[David Guyatt]

As I read your Castro post Paul, the name that crept on to my lips was Muammar al-Gaddafi, the British equivalent of said bearded cigarillo.

Not many people know that Gaddafi was trained at the British Army Staff College and returned to Libya in 1966 as a commissioned officer in the British Army Signal Corps. Three years later he went on to stage a bloodless coup against King Idris 1 of Libya.

My apologies for changing the subject, but I think the use of catspaws in global hegemonic power plays is more widespread than most of us generally consider possible.

Back to Cuba.

[Paul Rigby]

Paul, very interesting view of the New Left. Just wondering how you see CHAOS fitting into other New Left ops, it that indeed is what they were.

Here's the rub, Nat: The Agency could remove leaders and change governments, both at home and abroad, yet couldn't - so the conventional narrative has it - prevent Ramparts from publishing an expose about spook funding of US student orgs. Plausible, no?

And what did all that penetration and alleged subversion of, among other things, the alternative press accomplish? It certainly wasn't the closure of Ramparts!

In other words, the standard account of Operation MHCHAOS, its purposes and significance, is at best inadequate, or, infinitely more likely, a red herring.

Where to begin in our re-evaluation? Well, I'd start with Angleton, and his decision to approve Ober's appointment, and then permit him to set up a unit outside the Angletonian shop. Something amiss, here, surely, when the great control freak and empire builder passes on a chance to indulge both deeply engrained characteristics?

So Ober is CI, but not Angletonian CI: when is counter-intelligence not counter-intelligence?

Paul

[Paul Rigby]

As I read your Castro post Paul, the name that crept on to my lips was Muammar al-Gaddafi, the British equivalent of said bearded cigarillo.

Not many people know that Gaddafi was trained at the British Army Staff College and returned to Libya in 1966 as a commissioned officer in the British Army Signal Corps. Three years later he went on to stage a bloodless coup against King Idris 1 of Libya.

I agree. Question is, who ran Gaddafi? I assume it was Agency - with an assist from SIS - which kept him safe from the Reagan bombing attack.

My apologies for changing the subject, but I think the use of catspaws in global hegemonic power plays is more widespread than most of us generally consider possible.

Back to Cuba.

Apology refused - the notion is far too interesting, and well worthy of a thread of its own. Has anyone produced a list of such figures?

Paul

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

: when is counter-intelligence not counter-intelligence?

Paul[/QUOTE]

When its James McCord?

[Paul Rigby]

...when is counter-intelligence not counter-intelligence?

When its James McCord?

I always preferred Colson, for obvious reasons:

Combined Miami News Services, “Nixon is CIA prisoner, Colson quoted as saying,” Miami News, 25 June 1974, p.A2:

“Some Secret Service men are in the CIA, too, and Nixon is surrounded by these guys,” Colson said.

As to the comparison with Ober, right on!

[Cliff Varnell]

Castro survived because someone wanted him as a bogeyman?

I don't buy it.

This I buy:

Peter Dale Scott, from his recent Pittsburg address on the similarities between 9/11 and the JFK assassination:

"4) the role of drug-trafficking in both JFK and 9/11 – and indeed in virtually every major deep event since JFK, specifically including MLK, RFK, Watergate, the Letelier assassination, and Iran-Contra."

Why did Castro survive?

Because he moved dope for certain people (see Harriman, W.A., and Bush, Prescott & George H. W.) and probably still does.

[Charles Drago]

Brother Cliff,

I'm so glad to see you with us on the Deep Politics Forum.

For those who don't know, you and I have enjoyed informative and respectful disagreements on the Castro-as-bogeyman issue elsewhere in the zeitgeist, so perhaps over the next few weeks we can rekindle the debate here.

I'm eager to do so because A) You bring much to the table on these matters, and B) I love it when I'm right.

Seriously, thanks much for joining us, my friend.

It's your deal.

[Cliff Varnell]

Brother Charles,

Great to be here with you, my friend!

Our prior discussion on this topic was bracing, to say the least.

Allow me to offer a counter-resolution that lays the groundwork for my argument:

Resolved: John F. Kennedy was not in control of American foreign policy in regards to South East Asia and Cuba in 1963, having been out maneuvered by Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman.

In all of the following emphasis mine


Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, pg 334-5:

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York,
W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960,
President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate
“with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of
all aspects of United States policy.” By 1963, according to [Pentagon aide
William R.] Corson, Harriman was running “Vietnam without consulting
the president or the attorney general.”

The president had begun to suspect that not everyone on his national security
team was loyal. As Corson put it, “Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments
secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor,
was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president.
He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the
White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

From JFK's taped notations on the Diem coup:

http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/cli...nam_memoir.html

President Kennedy: Opposed to the coup was General [Maxwell] Taylor, the
Attorney General [Robert Kennedy], Secretary [Robert] McNamara to a somewhat
lesser degree, John McCone, partly based on an old hostility to [Henry Cabot] Lodge
[Jr.] which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge's judgement, partly as a result
of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his [CIA] station chief; in favor of the
coup was State, led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman,
supported by Mike Forrestal at the White House.

http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v2n1/chrono1.pdf

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to W. Averell Harriman on November 2. 1963:

The South Vietnam coup is another feather in your cap.

Via Peter Dale Scott:

http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_C...htm#_ftn41

"Assassinations Report, 173. Cf. FRUS, #320; 777 (Bundy memo of April 21, 1963).
The other two documents are not in FRUS."

As early as January 4, 1963, Bundy proposed to President Kennedy that the
possibility of communicating with Castro be explored. (Memorandum, Bundy
to the President, 1/4/63). Bundy's memorandum on "Cuba Alternatives" of
April 23 [sic, i.e. April 21], 1963, also listed the "gradual development of some
form of accommodation with Castro" among policy alternatives. (Bundy
memorandum, 4/21/63) At a meeting on June 3, 1963, the Special Group agreed
it would be a "useful endeavour" to explore "various possibilities of establishing
channels of communication to Castro." (Memorandum of Special Group meeting,
6/6/63).

David Talbot's Brothers, pg 226:

When Lisa Howard told [envoy William] Attwood that Castro would like to
restore communications with Kennedy and offered to set up an informal meeting
at her apartment between him and Cuba's UN representative, Carlos Lechuga,
the diplomat responded enthusiastically. In a memo he wrote for [Adlai]
Stevenson and Averill Harriman -- who he was told was the best direct channel
to Kennedy -- Attwood suggested that "we have something to gain and nothing
to lose by finding out whether in fact Castro does want to talk"...Stevenson took
the proposal to Kennedy, who gave him clearance to pursue the dialogue.
Harriman too said he was "adventuresome enough" to like the idea...

ad·ven·ture (ăd-vĕn'chər)
n.

1.
1. An undertaking or enterprise of a hazardous nature.
2. An undertaking of a questionable nature, especially one involving
intervention in another state's affairs.


Brothers, pg 217:

By the time Vietnam began to reach a crisis point late in Kennedy's term, much
of his national security bureaucracy -- weary with the president's sly maneuvers
to avoid war -- was in flagrant revolt against him. The Pentagon and CIA were
taking secret steps to sabotage his troop withdrawal plan. And even trusted
advisors like Harriman, the Moscow-friendly globe-trotting tycoon whom Kennedy
thought he could rely on to help broker a deal on Vietnam, were brazenly
undercutting his peace initiatives.

Vincent Salandria's "The Tale Told by Two Tapes":

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...art=#entry31073

In November of 1966, I read Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1964...
[O]n page 33 I read the following about the flight back to Washington, D.C. from Dallas:

"On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned of the
identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President's mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick."

The Situation Room of the White House first fingered Oswald as the
lone assassin when an innocent government, with so much evidence
in Dealey Plaza of conspiracy, would have been keeping all options open.
Therefore this premature birth of the single-assassin myth points to the
highest institutional structure of our warfare state as guilty of the crime
of killing Kennedy. Such a source does not take orders from the Mafia
nor from renegade elements. But such a source is routinely given to
using the Mafia and supposedly out-of-control renegade sources to do
its bidding.

* McGeorge Bundy was in charge of the Situation Room and was spending
that fateful afternoon receiving phone calls from President Johnson, who
was calling from Air Force One when the lone-assassin myth was
prematurely given birth. (Bishop, Jim, The Day Kennedy Was Shot,
New York & Funk Wagnalls, 1968), p. 154) McGeorge Bundy as the
quintessential WASP establishmentarian did not take his orders from the
Mafia and/or renegade elements.

Max Holland's The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, pg 57:

At 6:55 p.m. Johnson has a ten-minute meeting with Senator J. William Fulbright
(D-Arkansas) and diplomat W. Averell Harriman to discuss possible foreign
involvement in the assassination, especially in light of the two-and-a-half-year
Soviet sojourn of Lee Harvey Oswald...Harriman, a U.S. ambassador to Moscow
during World War II, is an experienced interpreter of Soviet machinations and
offers the president the unanimous view of the U.S. governments top Kremlinologists.
None of them believe the Soviets had a hand in the assassination, despite the Oswald
association.

The latter quote raises a very large question: how could Harriman responsibly advise the new President that the Soviets were not involved only hours after the assassination unless he knew who actually did it?

[Charles Drago]

"Resolved: John F. Kennedy was not in control of American foreign policy in regards to South East Asia and Cuba in 1963, having been out maneuvered by Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman."

“'Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president.'"

*********

Sorry, Cliff, but your argument is at best incomplete.

It is implied in your first quote that Harriman alone out-maneuvered JFK in the areas of Southeast Asian and Cuban policies.

You next imply that Harriman was at the top of the anti-JFK deep political food chain.

If my interpretations of your remarks are correct, then please offer compelling arguments for Harriman's hegemony. Also, please understand the broad implications of such a stance.

If I'm wrong, then who, according to your paradigm, was pulling Harriman's strings?