The CIA and Hollywood

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/...dley-scott

An offer they couldn't refuse

The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films, but no one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy involvement.

Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate

The Guardian, Film & Music, Friday, 14 November 2008, p.3

Spies like us ... Body of Lies

Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.

The model for this is the defence department's "open" but barely publicised relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades, has offered film-makers advice, manpower and even hardware - including aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it asks for in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a character based on a real-life soldier who had also been a child rapist lost that part of his backstory when he came to the screen.

No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.

The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons reaching the Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had 9/11".

Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content - EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the matter further.

So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."

At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on another project. He was travelling back to California when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a call she says has been excised from phone records. She told CNN she was "terribly alarmed" because he was speaking as though he were under duress. She was sure "someone was in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy DeVore heard from her husband.

A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation mounted. Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating CIA involvement. DeVore was presumed dead, but there was no body, and no end to the questions. Lo and behold, just nine days after the LA Times reported the case, DeVore's body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer, in 12 feet of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists.

The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by De Vore's death.

Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about the role it plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound transparency too seriously. After all, what use is a covert agency that does not act covertly, even if some of its activities are public? And if it is still not open about the truth of events decades ago, many of which have spilled into the public domain accidently, how can we be sure it is telling the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.

• Body of Lies is released next Friday

[Jan Klimkowski]

Die Spinne's web is indeed hard to untangle.

Many people think Pakula's All the President's Men is a great "conspiracy" thriller, which shows investigative journalism at its finest.

In truth, All the President's Men is a bright shining lie - pretty much from first frame to the very last.

"Deep Throat" is probably the construction of a Hollywood scriptwriter seeking to inject drama into a dull narrative.

Bob Woodward has been Their bitch his entire life.

And yet part of me suspects that Alan J Pakula really did want to reveal some deep political truths, even if he ended up lost in a garden of forking paths and forked tongues...

[David Guyatt]

For lots about Woodward see Len Colony's website: http://www.watergate.com

The following extract might entice you to read further:

http://www.watergate.com/#woodwardgate

"WOODWARDGATE: STILL PROTECTING THE RIGHT WING"
Mishandling of the CIA Leak Story is not a First for Bob Woodward
by Len Colodny

Recent headlines charge that Bob Woodward has withheld information on a major national story. Nothing new there. Thirty-three years ago, Woodward was in the same business.

That story was a tale of espionage and treason carried out at the highest level of the United States Military, against President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. When the story finally did break in newspapers other than the Washington Post, it forced the Senate Armed Services Committee to hold hearings to determine exactly what had taken place.

In January 1974 reporters James Squires and Dan Thomasson published, in their respective Chicago newspapers the Tribune and the Sun, the story of what would become well known as the "Moorer/Radford affair." Woodward knew this story well, for it involved several individuals he had worked for and with during his five year tour of duty in the US Navy.

In 1970, Admiral Thomas Moorer, newly-appointed Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, was frustrated by the JCS being cut out of the loop on important international negotiations by Nixon and Kissinger. To obtain information critical to the security of the country, Moorer decided to set up an espionage ring whose immediate target was the National Security Council — the vehicle being used by Nixon and Kissinger to circumvent the usual ways of communicating with foreign powers. Prior to this time, Woodward — then a lieutenant — was a briefer for Moorer — someone who monitored an important secret communication channel, briefed top brass, and was sent to the White House to repeat such briefings. During 1969-1970, Moorer sent Woodward to the White House to brief Colonel Alexander Haig, Kissinger's assistant on the NSC. Moorer confirms Woodward's role as a White House briefer!

Woodward had resigned from the Navy by the time Moorer had fully set up the espionage ring. But it involved another admiral for whom Woodward had previously worked, Admiral Robert O. Welander, the commander of Woodward's second ship in the Navy, the USS Fox. Welander was the head of a small liaison office in the White House, and an ex officio member of the NSC. His yeoman, named Radford, stole thousands of documents — a "library" of them, Radford would later claim — and Welander passed these secret documents to Moorer for over a year until the spy ring was discovered and shut down. The triggering incident for its discovery was a leak to columnist Jack Anderson in December of 1971

Read the entire spy ring story at: http://www.watergate.com/stories/spyring.asp

In May of 1973, just as the Senate Watergate Committee hearings were getting under way, Woodward asked for and obtained a meeting with Welander at the Marriott Hotel — the same hotel in which Woodward has written where he met Mark Felt, whom Woodward has identified as Deep Throat. At this meeting with Welander, Woodward revealed to his former skipper that he knew a great deal about the still-secret spy ring story.

In an interview for Silent Coup excerpted below, Welander speaks to me concerning Woodward's early knowledge of Moorer-Radford.

Interview with Admiral Robert O,. Welander [excerpt]
by Len Colodny — March 28, 1987

COLODNY:

Bob also told me that you saw Woodward after he left the, the Navy for the first time, you saw him in, in May of '73.

WELANDER:

That was about it, right, yes.

COLODNY:

Was that the meeting you had at that Marriott, and that's where Woodward tells you he knows about Moorer-Radford?

WELANDER:

Yes.

COLODNY:

Did, he give you any hint as to where he got it from?

WELANDER:

A that time, no.

COLODNY:

Did he at any point tell you where he got it from?

WELANDER:

Well, I told Bob, many years later and everything else, he referred to the fact that Ehrlichman, was the one who had, tried to make a major issue out of the whole thing.

Woodward clearly knew of this important story eight months before it broke in the news, but did not write anything about it. He did, however, hint at it in a story published in the Washington Post on October 10, 1973 on page A-27, which said: "A low level assistant to the NSC had his phone tapped in an investigation of news leaks in late 1971," and went on to state that an unnamed source had said this was "in connection with a 1971 probe of the leak of secret documents to Jack Anderson about US Policy in the India-Pakistan War."

Woodward did not write another word on the subject until the day after the Squires and Thomasson story broke. Then Woodward wrote a front page story, complete with a photo of Admiral Welander — a story that downplayed the espionage as no big deal. There is no mention in this story of the fact that Woodward had worked for Welander. Keeping such information from the public is a violation of the public's right to know.

The story continued in the headlines, but not in pieces by Woodward; he yielded that beat on his paper to Michael Getler. The Chicago papers and Seymour Hersh of The New York Times continued to press the issue.

Woodward suggested to Welander that Ehrlichman had been his source. Ehrlichman told me he that he wasn't the source. Moreover, only someone with inside knowledge of the affair could have detected a hint of it in Ehrlichman's testimony to the Senate in mid-1973, when he invoked executive privilege in regards to a partially-blacked-out document that was presented to him for review. Ehrlichman would not publicly mention the issue again until he was preparing for his trial in 1974. This all took place after Woodward's meeting with Welander.

It seems that Woodward was protecting his past, and I believe his future military associates by first withholding the news of Moorer-Radford, then down playing it when it did surface, and finally by distancing himself from further investigation of it — all of this while not disclosing to his readers his conflict of interest occasioned by a close relationship with Admirals Moorer and Welander.

Withhold the news, then downplay it when it appears elsewhere, and not disclose his inherent conflict of interest — even, supposedly, to his editors at the Washington Post. In the recent Valerie Plame identity leak story, the circumstances are somewhat different than they were with Moorer-Radford, but Woodward's methods and those he is trying to protect by these methods, his right-wing and militaristic sources in the government, remain the same.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Die Spinne's web is indeed hard to untangle.

Many people think Pakula's All the President's Men is a great "conspiracy" thriller, which shows investigative journalism at its finest.

In truth, All the President's Men is a bright shining lie - pretty much from first frame to the very last.

"Deep Throat" is probably the construction of a Hollywood scriptwriter seeking to inject drama into a dull narrative.

Bob Woodward has been Their bitch his entire life.

And yet part of me suspects that Alan J Pakula really did want to reveal some deep political truths, even if he ended up lost in a garden of forking paths and forked tongues...

-------

Jan, I think you are being a bit hard on the Pak-man. After all he apparently already died an Unchristian and UnJew death, when a long contruction steel rod backflipped off a Connecticut (there it is again; Doddge that!) flat bed, through his windshield and rudely edited his palpitator.

This to a guy a guy who also made the excellent The Parallax View... well this could lead to another proverb!

Are you forgetting the famous parking lot scene in Presdients Men where the Deep Throat Character clearly states that the Woodsteins really dont know anything about the deep intelligence background of what was going on with Wattergate?

This scene would seem to make this movie not entirely the enemy of Watergate Revisionists , oder?

[Jan Klimkowski]

-------

Jan, I think you are being a bit hard on the Pak-man. After all he apparently already died an Unchristian and UnJew death, when a long contruction steel rod backflipped off a Connecticut (there it is again; Doddge that!) flat bed, through his windshield and rudely edited his palpitator.

This to a guy a guy who also made the excellent The Parallax View... well this could lead to another proverb!

Are you forgetting the famous parking lot scene in Presdients Men where the Deep Throat Character clearly states that the Woodsteins really dont know anything about the deep intelligence background of what was going on with Wattergate?

This scene would seem to make this movie not entirely the enemy of Watergate Revisionists , oder?

Nathaniel - I do think Pakula was most probably on the side of Light, rather than Darkness.

However, I also think the Quest for the Identity of Deep Throat is an archetypal example of Their arts of misdirection.

I can't say it better than Thomas Pynchon in the fantastic & massively misunderstood Gravity's Rainbow:

Proverbs for Paranoids 3: “If They can get you asking the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about answers.”

Below is one big reason why I think the Quest for Deep Throat was a gift that fell into Their laps, and They have delighted in keeping the myth alive ever since.

There are original documents at the url:

The truth about Watergate is In Nixon’s Web. What follows here is adapted from the final chapter, “The Watergate Books: Fact and Fiction.”
The myth is All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It’s also a terrific book. The story is gripping and the characters are memorable. It reads like a novel and translated seamlessly into a screenplay.

But what gave it the legs to become an iconic bestseller and an Oscar-winning movie was the sleight-of-hand it got away with from the outset. In the book they wrote about themselves, Woodward and Bernstein aren’t the after-the-fact voyeurs they were in reality; they’re the main characters. In All the President’s Men the Watergate conspiracy isn’t unraveled by the authorities, it’s uncovered by a pair of plucky reporters who wouldn’t quit.

The literary trick they employed to achieve that shift was as simple as it was brilliant: in the narrative they treat every new discovery as if they were the ones who first uncovered it. It simply wasn’t true. They didn’t uncover the crimes, they followed the investigation that had already uncovered the crimes.

The advantage they exploited was their First Amendment press privilege to publish anything they wanted as soon as they heard about it. Thus their revelations in the Washington Post were always ahead of the legally constrained and tactically deliberate public announcements of the prosecutors. When the American people began to get a sense that there really was a conspiracy, they got their hints from the press, not from the government.

But of course that’s true in any crime story. We always get bits and pieces of the prosecution’s evidence long before the trial. In the much-later court testimony, we get the details of a story we already know, but it’s nonetheless far more compelling than the pre-trial publicity. The courtroom drama eclipses all those early news scoops. We end up knowing the judge, the prosecutors, the defendants, and the defense lawyers, but no one remembers the bylines of the reporters. So how did Woodward and Bernstein become so famous?

By short-circuiting the process.

In the world according to All the President’s Men, the government never was going to tell the tale. The prosecution was going to be stopped with the low-level burglars themselves, and the big shots were going to get away with it because everybody was in on the conspiracy, including the head of the FBI. Only through the pluck and grit of the two cub reporters was the evil scheme uncovered, the top dogs forced to resign, and the wheels of justice handed back to the honest lower echelons

It was a great story, but it had one big problem: the prosecution hadn’t stopped. The storyline could hold water only if the book were published before the next round of revelations, indictments, and trials, including the biggest one of them all: Nixon’s impeachment trial.

And that’s just what they did, writing it in 1973 and rushing the book out in February 1974, six months before the whole story came out and Nixon resigned. It was a brilliant move: not only did they get their story out before it would have been eclipsed by the impeachment trial, but its publication helped to drive the president from office before the trial could even start.

Even with that master stroke, the book might still have fallen as flat as all the others that came out at the same time. According to David Obst, the literary agent who helped write the proposal in Woodward’s apartment, the original concept was an insider’s account of reportage in the style of Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President books. There was no “Deep Throat” in the proposal. But before the first draft was finished, Robert Redford bought the screen rights for $350,000 and invited Woodward to dinner, where he introduced him to William Goldman, who was to write the screenplay. Goldman and Redford suggested a few changes. “Deep Throat” appeared and so did the dramatic storyline.

What sets Woodward and Bernstein’s story apart from, say, their boss Barry Sussman’s much more accurate and insightful The Great Coverup (published the same year) is the fiction-like drama that appeared in later drafts as All the President’s Men took shape. Late-night meetings in parking garages, warnings that everyone’s life is in danger, clandestine encounters in out-of-the-way bars. Those are screenplay elements. They seem fabricated. So does “Deep Throat.”

It has now become clear that “Deep Throat” was fabricated. The most famous anonymous source of all time was a fictional character made up by the two best known reporters in American history.

The proof? It’s in their own notes, the ones they sold to the University of Texas for $5 million, a deal they struck in 2003 while the identity of “Deep Throat” was still theirs to withhold. (The contract allowed them to hold back notes of still-secret living sources.) It must have seemed like a great idea until 2005, when Vanity Fair magazine printed an article identifying Mark Felt as “Deep Throat.” When Woodward and Bernstein reluctantly confirmed that he had been a source, Mark Felt was no longer a secret source. The two owed their notes of conversations with him to the University of Texas.

After stalling for a year and a half, Woodward finally got around to depositing his “Deep Throat” notes at the University of Texas in January 2007. It took Ed Gray less than five minutes with the first interview to see that it was with someone other than Mark Felt. And it took barely more than that to see that Woodward’s sketchy notes were of interviews conducted with at least two different men, probably three. The incontrovertible evidence behind that conclusion is detailed in In Nixon’s Web, in a final chapter written by Ed. It’s also available to anyone who looks at Woodward’s now-public notes. Here’s a summary:

--Although there are 17 clandestine contacts between Woodward and “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men, the newly-deposited notes include only three of them. Two are marked “meeting with X” and another “interview with my friend.” An additional single page is unattributed and does not match any passage in the book. There are no notes at all for the other 13 contacts, including the climactic post-garage-meeting scene in the book and movie where Woodward types a memo in his apartment for Bernstein under loud music because Deep Throat has told him the CIA is bugging “everyone,” a memo that according to the book was distributed to their editors at the Washington Post the very next day. If it exists, Woodward and Bernstein are under a $5 million obligation to produce it.

--In the notes of October 9, 1972, “X” told Woodward that immediately after the burglary, John Mitchell, the chairman of CREEP, conducted his own investigation.

Here’s how part of this interview appears in All the President’s Men, as an exact quote from “Deep Throat” during one of their clandestine garage meetings:

“Mitchell conducted his own--he called it an investigation--for about ten days after June 17. And he was going crazy. He found all sorts of new things which astounded even him. At some point, Howard Hunt, of all the ironies, was assigned to help Mitchell get some information. Like lightning, he was pulled off and fired and told to pack up his desk and leave town forever. By no less than John Ehrlichman.”

Here's the same part of the actual interview with "X" as it appears in Woodward's original notes, now on deposit at the University: of Texas:

Note the dropped “we had guys assigned to him to help.” (The yellow highlighting does not appear in the original.) Woodward and Bernstein dropped that detail in order to hide their source.

If that source was Mark Felt, his “we” could only mean the FBI. But that’s impossible. If there had been FBI agents “assigned to help” who “found all sorts of new things,” not only would the Watergate case have been broken during those first ten days, but the FBI’s now public Watergate files would be filled with official summaries of the assignments and resultant interviews. There are none. Woodward and Bernstein are lying to us when they say “X” was Mark Felt. It was someone else, someone on the inside trusted enough to “help.”

--As described fully in the last chapter of In Nixon’s Web, the unattributed single page is actually of an interview with Donald Santarelli, a prominent Washington lawyer who was a justice department official during Watergate. While examining a photocopy of Woodward’s page, Santarelli told Ed Gray that it definitely was him.

--Another set of notes, dated January 24, 1973 are marked “interview with my friend.” These may very well have been with Mark Felt.

Thus there are interviews with at least three individuals in Woodward’s far from complete set of “Deep Throat” notes: Mark Felt, Donald Santarelli, and X.

Why is it so important that “Deep Throat” was a fictional character and not an actual person? For two reasons, one specific to Pat Gray, the other important for the rest of us.

First the personal. All the President’s Men wasn’t just the title of a bestselling book and a major motion picture. It was a list of evildoers and Pat Gray is still on that list. Check the current paperback, first page, “Cast of Characters.” Check the website at the University of Texas, which houses Woodward and Bernstein’s papers and where L. Patrick Gray III is still listed prominently by Woodward and Bernstein as a “conspirator.” Pat Gray isn’t just a name on that list, his photograph was included with Nixon himself and ten others on the book’s original dust jacket. Of those ten men, every one except Pat Gray either pled guilty or was convicted of a crime. As a list, All the President’s Men needs to have one name removed.

But more important, like several recently disputed memoirs, the book itself needs to be reclassified. All the President’s Men is today accepted as a factual recitation -- and often the factual recitation -- of how Nixon and his “men” were driven from office. Until Woodward and Bernstein sold their notes to the University of Texas there was no way to test the book’s claim of historical accuracy. Those verifiable documents have provided the previously unavailable key. “Deep Throat” was a myth. So, therefore, is All the President’s Men.

http://lpatrickgrayiii.com/watergate02.html

[David Guyatt]

Jan, a fascinating post about Deep Throat. Thanks. I think that if this thread is read in conjunction with the extracts from Carl Ogelsby's book "Yankee and Cowboy War" (see forum 'Books' folder: http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/....php?t=311), then a far clearer picture of the covert background and battle of wills to the Watergate saga begins to crystalize and clarify. For me anyway.

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/...dley-scott

An offer they couldn't refuse

The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films, but no one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy involvement.

Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate

The Guardian, Film & Music, Friday, 14 November 2008, p.3

Spies like us ... Body of Lies

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11921

Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood

by Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham

Global Research, January 21, 2009

Here we build a prima facae case supporting the idea that Hollywood continues to be a target for infiltration and subversion by a variety of state agencies, in particular the CIA. Academic debates on cinematic propaganda are almost entirely retrospective, and whilst a number of commentators have drawn attention to Hollywood’s longstanding and open relationship with the Pentagon, little of substance has been written about the more clandestine influences working through Hollywood in the post-9/11 world. As such, our work delves into the field of what Peter Dale Scott calls "deep politics"; namely, activities which cannot currently be fully understood due to the covert influence of shadowy power players.

The Latest Picture

A variety of state agencies have liaison offices in Hollywood today, from the FBI, to NASA and the Secret Service. Few of these agencies, though, have much to offer in exchange for favourable storylines, and so their influence in Hollywood is minimal. The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’ but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations. Examples of this policy include changing the true identity of a heroic military character in Black Hawk Down (2001) due to his real-life status as a child rapist; the removal of a joke about "losing Vietnam" from the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and cutting images of Marines taking gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers in Windtalkers (2002). Instances such as these are innumerable, and the Pentagon has granted its coveted "full cooperation" to a long list of contemporary pictures including Top Gun (1986), True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), Air Force One (1997), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Transformers (2007), Iron Man (2008), as well as TV series such as JAG (1995-2005).

Such government activity, whilst morally dubious and barely advertised, has at least occurred within the public domain. This much cannot be said of the CIA’s dealings with Hollywood, which, until recently, went largely unacknowledged by the Agency. In 1996, the CIA announced with little fanfare the dry remit of its newly established Media Liaison Office, headed by veteran operative Chase Brandon. As part of its new stance, the CIA would now openly collaborate on Hollywood productions, supposedly in a strictly ‘advisory’ capacity.

The Agency’s decision to work publicly with Hollywood was preceded by the 1991 "Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness," compiled by CIA Director Robert Gates’ newly appointed ‘Openness Task Force,’ which secretly debated –ironically– whether the Agency should be less secretive. The report acknowledges that the CIA "now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation," and the authors of the report note that this helped them "turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success’ stories, and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others." It goes on to reveal that the CIA has in the past "persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests…"

These admissions add weight to several reports and Congressional hearings from the 1970s which indicated that the CIA once maintained a deep-rooted and covert presence in national and international media, informally dubbed "Operation Mockingbird." In its 1991 report, the CIA acknowledged that it had, in fact, "reviewed some film scripts about the Agency, documentary and fictional, at the request of filmmakers seeking guidance on accuracy and authenticity." But the report is at pains to state that, although the CIA has "facilitated the filming of a few scenes on Agency premises," it does "not seek to play a role in filmmaking ventures." But it seems highly implausible that the CIA, whilst maintaining a decades-long presence in media and academia, would have shown no interest in the hugely influential Cinema industry.

Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the CIA has been involved in a number of recent blockbusters and TV series. The 2001 CBS TV series, The Agency, executive produced by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, Air Force One) was actually co-written by ex-CIA agent and Marine Bazzel Baz, with additional ex-CIA agents working as consultants. The CIA gladly opened its doors to the production, and facilitated both external and internal shots of its Langley headquarters as the camera gazed lovingly at the CIA seal. This arrangement was comparable to the Feds’ efforts on the popular TV series The FBI (1965-74) which was shaped by the Bureau in cooperation with ABC and which thanked J. Edgar Hoover in the credits of each episode. Similarly, The Agency glorified the actions of US spooks as they fought predictable villains including the Russian military, Arab and German terrorists, Columbian drug dealers, and Iraqis. One episode even shows the CIA saving the life of Fidel Castro; ironically, since the CIA in real life had made repeated attempts to assassinate the Cuban President. Promos for the show traded on 9/11, which had occurred just prior to its premiere, with tag lines like "Now, more than ever, we need the CIA."

A TV movie, In the Company of Spies (1999) starring Tom Berenger depicted a retired CIA operative returning to duty to save captured Agency officers held by North Korea. The CIA was so enthusiastic about this product that it hosted its presentation, cooperated during production, facilitated filming at Langley, and provided fifty off-duty officers as extras, according to its website.

Espionage novelist Tom Clancy has enjoyed an especially close relationship with the CIA. In 1984, Clancy was invited to Langley after writing The Hunt for Red October, which was later turned into the 1990 film. The Agency invited him again when he was working on Patriot Games (1992), and the movie adaptation was, in turn, granted access to Langley facilities. More recently, The Sum of All Fears (2002) depicted the CIA as tracking down terrorists who detonate a nuclear weapon on US soil. For this production, CIA director George Tenet gave the filmmakers a personal tour of the Langley HQ; the film’s star, Ben Affleck also consulted with Agency analysts, and Chase Brandon served as on-set advisor.

Media sources indicate that the CIA also worked on the Anthony Hopkins/Chris Rock feature Bad Company (2002) and the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster Enemy of the State (2001). However, no details whatsoever about these appear to be in the public domain. Similarly, Spy Game director Tony Scott’s DVD commentary for said film indicates that he visited Langley whilst in pre-production but, according to one report, endorsement appeared to have been withheld after Chase Brandon read the final draft of the script.

More details than usual emerged about CIA involvement in the Tom Hanks movie Charlie Wilsons War (2007) and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) – but not many. Milt Beardon had traveled to the Moscow Film Festival with De Niro and claims the pair then "disappeared and hung out with the mob and KGB crowd for a while. I introduced him to generals and colonels, the old guys I had been locked with for so many years." De Niro later tagged along with Beardon to Pakistan. "We wandered around the North-West Frontier Province," Bearden recalls, "crossed the bridge [to Afghanistan] I built years ago, hung out with a bunch of guys firing off machine guns and drinking tea." Still, The Good Shepherd didn’t fulfill the CIA’s earnest hopes of being the CIA equivalent of Flags of Our Fathers (2006), which the Agency’s official historian says it should have been – all in the interests of what he calls a "culture of truth."

Charlie Wilson’s War depicted the United States’ covert efforts to supply arms to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s which had the real-life consequence of America’s old ally turned against it in the form of al-Qaeda (as Crile explains in the book of the film). However, Beardon, who was the CIA agent who supplied the weapons, worked as consultant on the film and said prior to its release that it "will put aside the notion that because we did that, we had 9/11." CIA involvement in the film therefore appears to have paid dividends.

The real reasons for the CIA adopting an "advisory" role on all of these productions are thrown into sharp relief by a solitary comment from former Associate General Counsel to the CIA, Paul Kelbaugh. In 2007, whilst at a College in Virginia, Kelbaugh delivered a lecture on the CIA’s relationship with Hollywood, at which a local journalist was present. The journalist (who now wishes to remain anonymous) wrote a review of the lecture which related Kelbaugh’s discussion of the 2003 thriller The Recruit, starring Al Pacino. The review noted that, according to Kelbaugh, a CIA agent was on set for the duration of the shoot under the guise of a consultant, but that his real job was to misdirect the filmmakers: "We didn’t want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, in a strongly-worded email to the authors, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having made the public statement and claimed that he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content – EVER." The journalist considers Kelbaugh’s denial "weird," and told us that "after the story came out, he [Kelbaugh] emailed me and loved it… I think maybe it’s just that because [the lecture] was ‘just in Lynchburg’ he was okay with it – you know, like, no one in Lynchburg is really going to pay much attention to it, I guess. Maybe that’s why he said it, and maybe that’s why he’s denying it now." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has pointedly refused to engage us in further discussion on the matter.

Early Screening

Clandestine agencies have a long history of interference in the cinema industry. Letters discovered in the Eisenhower Presidential Library from the secret agent Luigi G. Luraschi (identified by British academic John Eldridge), the Paramount executive who worked for the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), reveal just how far the CIA was able to reach into the film industry in the early days of the Cold War, despite its claims that it sought no such influence. For instance, Luraschi reported that he had secured the agreement of several casting directors to subtly plant "well dressed negroes" into films, including "a dignified negro butler" who has lines "indicating he is a free man" in Sangaree (1953) and in a golf club scene in the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis vehicle The Caddy (1953). Elsewhere, CIA arranged the removal of key scenes from the film Arrowhead (1953), which questioned America’s treatment of Apache Indians, including a sequence where a tribe is forcibly shipped and tagged by the US Army. Such changes were not part of a ham-fisted campaign to instill what we now call "political correctness" in the populace. Rather, they were specifically enacted to hamper the Soviets’ ability to exploit its enemy’s poor record in race relations and served to create a peculiarly anodyne impression of America, which was, at that time, still mired in an era of racial segregation.

Other efforts were made. The PSB tried –unsuccessfully– to commission Frank Capra to direct Why We Fight the Cold War and to provide details to filmmakers about conditions in the USSR in the hope that they would use them in their movies. More successfully, in 1950, the CIA –along with other secretive organizations like the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and aided by the PSB– bought the rights to and invested in the cartoon of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954), which was given an anti-Soviet spin to satisfy its covert investors. Author Daniel Leab has pointed to the fact it took decades for the rumours about CIA involvement in Animal Farm to be properly documented; this, he observes, "Speaks volumes about the ability of a government agency to keep its activities covert."

Additionally, the production of the Michael Redgrave feature Nineteen-Eighty Four (1956) was in turn overseen by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which was supervised by the CIA. Key points in the movie were altered to demonise the Soviets.

The CIA also tampered with the 1958 film version of The Quiet American, provoking the author, Graham Greene, to denounce the film. US Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative behind Operation Mongoose (the CIA sabotage and assassination campaign against Cuba) had entered into production correspondence with director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who accepted his ideas. These included a change to the final scene in which we learn that Redgrave’s anti-hero has been hoodwinked by the Communists into murdering the suspicious American, who turns out not to be a bomb-maker as we had been led to believe, but instead a manufacturer of children’s toys.

Behind the Scenes

It would be a mistake to regard the CIA as unique in its involvement in Hollywood. The industry is in fact fundamentally open to manipulation by a range of state agencies. In 2000, it emerged that the White House’s drug war officers had spent tens of millions of dollars paying the major US networks to inject anti-drug plots into the scripts of primetime series such as ER, The Practice, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Chicago Hope. Despite criticism for this blatant propagandizing, the government continued to employ this method of spreading its message on drugs.

The White House went to Tinsel Town again the following year when, on November 11, 2001 a meeting was held in Hollywood between President Bush’s then Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, and representatives of each of the major Hollywood studios to discuss how the film industry might contribute to the ‘War on Terror.’ Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America said with a straight face that, "content was off the table", but Rove had clearly outlined a series of requests. It is hard to gauge the consequences of the meeting, but a Rambo sequel, for instance, was certainly discussed, and duly produced. Similarly, several series with national security themes emerged within a short time of the meeting including She Spies (2002-2004) and Threat Matrix (2003).

The meeting was, in fact, just one in a series between Hollywood and the White House from October to December, 2001. On October 17, in response to 9/11, the White House announced the formation of its "Arts and Entertainment Task Force," and by November, Valenti had assumed leadership of Hollywood’s new role in the ‘War on Terror’. As a direct result of meetings, Congress sought advice from Hollywood insiders on how to shape an effective wartime message to America and to the world. In November 2001, John Romano, writer-producer of the popular US TV series Third Watch, advised the House International Relations Committee that the content of Hollywood productions was a key part of shaping foreign perceptions of America.

On December 5, 2001, the powerful Academy of Television Arts & Sciences convened its own panel entitled "Hollywood Goes to War?" to discuss what the industry might do in response to 9/11. Representing the government at the meeting were Mark McKinnon, a White House advisor, and the Pentagon’s chief entertainment liaison, Phil Strub. Also in attendance, among others, were Jeff Zucker, President of NBC Entertainment, and Aaron Sorkin, creator and writer of the White House drama The West Wing (1999-2006). Immediately after, Sorkin and his team set about producing a special episode of the show dealing with a massive terrorist threat to America entitled "Isaac and Ishmael". The episode was given top priority and was successfully completed and aired within just ten days of the meeting. The product championed the superiority of American values whilst brimming with rage against the Islamist jihadists.

The interlocking of Hollywood and national security apparatuses remains as tight as ever: ex-CIA agent Bob Baer told us, "There’s a symbiosis between the CIA and Hollywood" and revealed that former CIA director George Tenet is currently, "out in Hollywood, talking to studios." Baer’s claims are given weight by the Sun Valley meetings, annual get-togethers in Idaho’s Sun Valley in which several hundred of the biggest names in American media –including every major Hollywood studio executive– convene to discuss collective media strategy for the coming year. Against the idyllic backdrop of expansive golf courses, pine forests and clear fishing lakes, deals are struck, contracts are signed, and the face of the American media is quietly altered. The press has yet to be granted permission to report on these corporate media gatherings and so the exact nature of what is discussed at the events has never been publicly disclosed. It is known, however, that Tenet was keynote speaker at Sun Valley in 2003 (whilst still CIA head) and again in 2005.

Conclusions

Many would recoil at the thought of modern Hollywood cinema being used as a propagandist tool, but the facts seem to speak for themselves. Do agencies such as the CIA have the power, like the Pentagon, to affect movie content by providing much-sought-after expertise, locations and other benefits? Or are they able to affect script changes through simple persuasion, or even coercion? Do they continue to carry out covert actions in Hollywood as they did so extensively in the 1950s, and, beyond cinema, might covert government influence play some part in the creation of national security messages in TV series such as 24 and Alias (the star of the latter, Jennifer Garner, even made an unpaid recruitment video for the CIA)? The notion that covert agencies aspire to be more open is hard to take seriously when they provide such scant information about their role within the media, even regarding activities from decades past. The spy may have come in from the cold, but he continues to shelter in the shadows of the movie theatre.

Matthew Alford (PhD: University of Bath) lectures on Film and Television at the University of Bristol and is currently writing a book about propaganda in Hollywood. Robbie Graham is Associate Lecturer in Media at Stafford College. They can be contacted at: matthewalfordphd@gmail.com and rbbgraham@aol.com respectively. References available on request.

[Paul Rigby]

The Guardian and its film reviewers – are there any greater WC loyalists on earth?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/...ake-review

Double Take: Alfred Hitchcock meets himself in this disturbing fantasy

Peter Bradshaw

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 April 2010 22.25 BST

[Print edition: Film & Music section, 2 April 2010, p.7]

Double Take
Production year: 2009
Country: Rest of the world
Runtime: 80 mins
Directors: Johan Grimonprez
Cast: Delfine Bafort, Mark Perry, Ron Burrage

No better way to mark the 50th anniversary of Psycho (the rerelease is reviewed on page 8) than with this bizarre and distinctly inspired mash-up by writer Tom McCarthy and film-maker Johan Grimonprez. Their ever so slightly mad cine-essay, based on a Borgès short story, and perhaps influenced by British film-maker Chris Petit, is a delirious bad trip, imagining that Alfred Hitchcock, working on the set of The Birds in 1962, is visited by his own double: the near-dead Hitchcock from 1980, who enigmatically hints at how cold war history may or may not turn out. (The older Hitchcock double is of course only slightly better informed on this subject than the younger.)

Grimonprez and McCarthy achieve their fiction with a drawling Hitchcockian voiceover narration with staged fragments on video, an interview with a professional Hitchcock lookalike, along with clips of Hitchcock movies, a swirling recurrence of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score, and a quite brilliant reuse of Hitchcock's jokey and little-remembered appearances fronting his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in which the Master's clowning-around and dressing-up assumes a potent and sinister character: fleeting images of a remembered dream.

In 1962, the United States was at the height of its Cold War "Sputnik" fear: it had the edge in consumer prosperity, but the Soviets were the masters of something more important: outer space. I thought of the opening to Robert Redford's excellent 1994 movie Quiz Show, in which a 1950s car salesman, showing off a gorgeous automobile, flinches at the eerie sound of Sputnik's Telstar bleeping.

Perhaps any point in time is haunted by its "double" – the possibility that things could have gone another way – never more so than in 1962, when the world could have seen a US-Soviet nuclear war, or simply the beginning of Soviet communism's world dominance while western freedoms receded. Hitchcock is the master of high anxiety, and made movies explicitly about the cold war, and about the "double". But it isn't simply this that makes him suitable for a doppelganger fantasy: it's something to do with his sheer cartoonish visibility, his enigmatic, unreadable persona, and those hallucinatory corner-of-the-screen glimpses in the films themselves. On the set of The Birds, Hitchcock received and accepted an invitation from President Kennedy to luncheon at the White House: an occasion which did not take place because Lee Harvey Oswald got in the way.So Hitchcock himself personally intersects, or fails to intersect, with the course of political history. This is arguably a rather cerebral and indulgent reverie, but there is fascination, and something genuinely disturbing, in every frame.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Yes, it's Patrick Buchanan.

Yes, it's via Lew Rockwell.

However, I stand by my view expressed above.

The Quest for the Identity of "Deep Throat" is a perfect example of Misdirection.

It is a Plot Device made Flesh.

But the Flesh never existed.

The Unraveling Myth of Watergate

by Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.lewrockwell.com

May 25, 2012


It was, they said, the crime of the century.
An attempted coup d'etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from The Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor.
The 1976 movie, All the President's Men, retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate?
In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, Bradlee himself dynamites the myth:
"Watergate ... (has) achieved a place in history ... that it really doesn't deserve. ... The crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it really would have been a blip in history."
"The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate," said Bradlee.
Yet when the Iran-Contra scandal hit the Reagan White House, Bradlee chortled, "We haven't had this much fun since Watergate."

All fun and games at the Post. Yet with Nixon's fall came the fall of South Vietnam, thousands executed, hundreds of thousands of boat people struggling in the South China Sea and a holocaust in Cambodia.
Still, what is most arresting about Yours in Truth is the panic that gripped Bob Woodward when Jeff Himmelman, the author and a protege of Woodward, revealed to him the contents of the Bradlee tapes.
Speaking of All the President's Men, Bradlee had said, "I have a little problem with Deep Throat," Woodward's famous source, played in the movie by Hal Holbrooke, later revealed to be Mark Felt of the FBI.
Bradlee was deeply skeptical of the Woodward-Felt signals code and all those secret meetings. He told interviewer Barbara Feinman:
"Did that potted palm thing ever happen? ... And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage. Fifty meetings in the garage ... there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight."
Bradlee spoke about that fear gnawing at him: "I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes. ...

"If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed ... that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post. ... It would be devastating, devastating."
When Himmelman showed him the transcript, Woodward "was visibly shaken" and repeated Bradlee's line "there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight" 15 times in 20 minutes.
Woodward tried to get Bradlee to retract. He told Himmelman not to include the statements in his book. He pleaded. He threatened. He failed.
That Woodward became so alarmed and agitated that Bradlee's bullhockey detector had gone off over the dramatized version of All the President's Men suggests a fear in more than just one soul here.
A second revelation of Himmelman's is more startling.
During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein sought to breach the secrecy of the grand jury. The Post lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, had to go to see Judge John Sirica to prevent their being charged with jury tampering.
No breach had occurred, we were assured.

We were deceived.
According to Himmelman, not only did Bernstein try to breach the grand jury, he succeeded. One juror, a woman identified as "Z," had collaborated. Notes of Bernstein's interviews with Z were found in Bradlee's files.
Writes Himmelman: "Carl and Bob, with Ben's explicit permission, lured a grand juror over the line of illegality ..."
This means that either Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee lied to Williams about breaching the grand jury, or the legendary lawyer lied to Sirica, or Sirica was told the truth but let it go, as all were engaged in the same noble cause bringing down Nixon.
Who was that grand juror? Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee know, but none is talking and no one is asking. The cover-up continues.
Had one of Nixon's men, with his approval, breached the secrecy of the Watergate grand jury, and lied abut it, that aide would have gone to prison and that would have been an article of impeachment.
Conduct that sent Nixon men to the penitentiary got the Post's men a stern admonition. Welcome to Washington, circa 1972.

With the 40th anniversary of the break-in coming up this June, Himmelman's book, well-written and revelatory of the temper of that time, will receive a wider reading.
As will Max Holland's Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, out this spring and the definitive book on why J. Edgar Hoover's deputy betrayed his bureau and sought to destroy the honorable man who ran it, L. Patrick Gray.
With Bernstein's primary source spilling grand jury secrets, and Mark Felt leaking details of the FBI investigation to Woodward, both of the primary sources on which the Washington Post's Pulitzer depended were engaged in criminal misconduct.
At Kay Graham's Post, the end justified the means.
Redford is now backing a new documentary, All the President's Men Revisited. The Sundance Kid has his work cut out for him.

May 25, 2012
Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

[Phil Dragoo]

Jan

Watching Sam Ervin drawling, "Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of Nixon and Erlichmann," was great fun, culminating in the, "effective noon tomorrow" last chopper out of Saigon preview August 8, 1974.

Redford relished All the President's Men, and Felt, the little lying weasel, pretended to be what he was not.

Earlier Redford in Condor was just so aghast to find all that nasty heroin trafficking. Would he connect the dots, that the 35[SUP]th[/SUP] president was removed as the last obstacle to that trade?

In APM would he not wonder of the tape 180 degrees wrong, removed by guards, replaced by "burglars"in the same amateur-night orientation? No, nor would Woodward. One an actor, the other, an actor.

Zipping through Nambe by the river north of Santa Fe in a red SUV driven by a studio "cowboy" in a big black hat and big black shades, a windshield-wide grin on his trademarked face, Redford would not be filming Milagro in Chimayo, where los Chimayosos didn't want him, wouldn't have him. He would be going up the hill to Las Truches where the fish were biting.


When Gary DeVore rolled out of Santa Fe to enter the Twilight Zone, he was troubled by discovery of U.S. money laundering in the Panamanian drug smuggling. CIA's Chase Brandon was on the case.

The sunshine pump was directed up Redford and Woodward's respective skirts by such helpful liaison agents.

The presence of the Agency's McCord, Hunt, Sturgis, Barker et al insured Nixon would not win the staring contest with Helms.

Another matinee villain sacrificed for the balcony cheers. The doofus Fordoh, he's so dumb. Dumb enough to place Nelson Rockefeller investigating CIA for assassination evils. Dumb enough to name George Herbert Walker Bush Director of Central Witness Elimination in the run-up to the HSCA Playskool Let's Pretend Investigation.

The real Deep Throat? How about that tracheotomy on 35.

How about the Custer deposition to Gunne and Horne:

BEGIN DEPOSITION

Douglas Horne, Inside the Assassinations Record Review Board, Volume II, Chapter Five: The Autopsy X-Rays, pages 530-2:

Custer Examines the X-Rays of the Body

The noteworthy highlights of Custer's review of the x-rays of the body was Jeremy's attempt to see whether Custer could identify metal fragments near any of the cervical vertebrae, which Custer had mentioned earlier in the deposition.

Jeremy showed Custer x-ray no. 9, a view of the chest prior to removal of the lungs, and the exchange went as follows:

Gunn: Previously, you referred to there being metal fragments in the cervical area. Are you able to identify any metal fragments in this x-ray?

Custer: Not in this film.

Gunn: Does this film include a view or an exposure that would have included such metal fragments?

Custer: No sir.

Gunn: Where would the metal fragments be located?

Custer: Further up in there. This region.

Gunn: Can youand you're pointing to?

Custer: Up into the, I'd say, C3/C4 region.

Jeremy asked Custer to review x-rays no. 8 and 10, of the right shoulder and chest, and left shoulder and chest, respectivelyboth are images following the removal of the heart and lungs. Custer could not identify metal fragments in either x-ray.

Later, Jeremy asked Custer the following questions:

Gunn: Now, you had raised, previously in the deposition. . .the possibility of some metal fragments in the C3/C4 range.

Custer: I noticed I didn't see that.

Gunn: You didn't see any x-rays that would be inthat would include the C3/C4 area?

Custer: No sir.

Gunn: Are you certain that you took x-rays that included theincluded C3 and C4?

Custer: Yes, sir. Absolutely.

Gunn: How many x-rays did you take that would have included that?

Custer: Just one. And that was all that was necessary, because it showedright there.

Gunn: And what, as best you recall, did it show?

Custer: A fragmentation of a shell in and around that circular exitthat area. Let me rephrase that. I don't want to say "exit," because I don't know whether it was exit or entrance. But all I can say, there was bullet fragmentations [sic] around that areathat opening.

Gunn: Around C3/C4?

Custer: Right.

Gunn" And do you recall how many fragments there were?

Custer: Not really. There was enough. It was very prevalent.

Gunn: Did anyone make any observations about metal fragments in the C3/C4 area?

Custer: I did. And I was told to mind my own business. That's where I was shut down again.

Gunn: You have, during the course of this deposition, identified three x-rays that you are quite certain that you took, but don't appear in this collection. Are there any others that you can identify as not being included?

Custer: That's the only three that come to my mind right now; the two tangential views, and the A-P cervical spine.

Gunn: Okay.

Custer: Can I add something to that?

Gunn: Sure.

Custer: In my own opinion, I do believe, basically, the reason why they are not here is because they showed massive amounts of bullet fragments.


END DEPOSITION

If 90% of the world's heroin is no longer secure after 2014, is it time to "work with Iran" per the 2004 CFR Brzezinski-Gates paper "Iran: Time for a New Approach" or time to go down and see what Chavez and the IRGC are doing in Bolivia?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFLw26BjDZs

Redford tried twice to buy the compound on the hill north of Santa Fe where the single access road rang a bell summoning a security guard. But the families would not sell. At that time Ed Howard had a place vacant south of town in Eldorado http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1991_cr/h911127-spy.htm


Or Wen Ho Lee's, up on the hill. The year of the 50,000-acre controlled burn that evacuated the Lab and saw Buddy Young of FEMA arrive on-scen and assure all, "the town has no need to be nervous."


Watergate is the Lone Nut of the Helms coup.