The CIA and the JFK Assassination — Part Five |
This is the seventieth entry in our In Focus series identifying and exposing the tools that modern-day tyrants are using to thwart the will of We The People for power and control. To access previous articles, please click here. Few doubt that the CIA had the motive to remove President Kennedy from office, and it has been demonstrated there were three plans in effect — three opportunities — to assassinate him in November 1963. With those elements established, the investigatory focus turns to whether the CIA had the means to conduct an assassination of a leading government official. The Church Committee Interim Report on Assassinations In 1975, the Church Committee — officially the "U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" — paid special attention to assassinations. The Committee issued a lengthy "Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," which concluded, using what could be termed "diplomatic" language: |
The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots. The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy. [Emphasis added.] |
Executive Orders The work of the Church Committee led to the issuance of Executive Order 11905 (Feb. 18, 1976) by President Gerald Ford to ban political assassination, providing: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." President Carter issued Executive Order 12036 (Jan. 24, 1978) to extend the ban on all assassinations, whether or not political. President Reagan's Executive Order 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981), which repeated the language in Carter's EO, states: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Indeed, upon review, "the evidence" collected by the Church Committee, and which led to these three Executive Orders, establishes a great deal more than "several assassination plots." The 1953 CIA Assassination Manual Only a few years after the CIA's founding, in 1953, it produced a 20-page manual entitled "A Study of Assassination." This document was created in the context of a plan to overthrow the leftist government of Guatemala and was declassified in 1997. The manual asserts: |
Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary. [Emphasis added.] |
Remarkable! The manual offered suggestions for "contrived accident[s]." "The most efficient accident ... is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve." The manual proposed "grabbing the victim by the ankles and 'tipping the subject over the edge.... Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing.'" The memo lists as examples assassinations or assassination attempts of Lincoln, Harding, Roosevelt, Truman, as well as others such as the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and Hitler. Killing Hope by William Blum A journalist who focused years of investigation into the CIA, William Blum, wrote a detailed and heavily footnoted book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. There, Blum sought to catalogue U.S. assassinations and assassination attempts overseas, primarily conducted by the CIA. (Surprisingly, Blum's entire book is reproduced on the CIA's website.) This list is both exhaustive and astonishing, including Korean opposition leader Kim Ku in 1949, President of Indonesia Sukarno, Premier of North Korea Kim Il Sung, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, Philippine opposition leader Claro M. Recto, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, Jose Figueres, Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, and Slobodan Milosevic. President Lyndon B. Johnson told the Atlantic in 1973 that "when he had taken office he found that 'we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.'" Premier of China Zhou Enlai — 1955 One of the CIA's earlier assassination attempts was directed against Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai by exploding a bomb on the chartered Air India plane Kashmir Princess Enlai was to fly in to an international conference in India: |
The plane took off on the night of April 11, 1955 ... but without Zhou Enlai and his senior colleagues. China had gotten wind of the CIA plot [and] assigned lower-level Chinese cadre officials [to the flight] as well as a set of journalists, as their presence would result in wider press coverage. |
Prime Minister of Iraq Abd al-Karim Qasim — 1959-1963 Another early CIA assassination effort was against Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim of Iraq: Particularly interesting was the person who worked with the CIA on this assassination attempt: |
The first such attempt, on October 7, 1959, was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Hussein, was spirited out to an agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960-61 with a poisoned handkerchief. [Emphasis added.] |
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim.... One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. |
The CIA also helped orchestrate a 1963 coup in Iraq, in which Qasim was finally shot and killed, after which Saddam Hussein returned to Iraq. James Critchfield, who helped put the 1963 coup together, wrote: |
it was the CIA's favorite coup: "We regarded it as a great victory," and "we had really crossed the Ts on what was happening." "We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Minister of the Interior of the new regime. The CIA reportedly helped coordinate the entire effort from their station in Baghdad by using a radio station in Kuwait to communicate with rebels. |
Saddam continued his relationship with the CIA until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for which he believed he had received the approval of the U.S. Government from U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. Prime Minister of the Congo Patrice Lumumba — 1961 The CIA backed a 1961 coup in the Congo, in which its Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was deposed and murdered. "By August of 1960, the White House, galvanized by Lumumba's turn to the Soviets, had authorized a secret C.I.A. scheme to 'replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means,' whatever that meant. The same month, at a Cabinet meeting, Eisenhower made comments that some interpreted as a call for assassination." Apparently, the CIA leveraged its multitude of sources in Katanga to provide intelligence to Lumumba's enemies, making his capture possible. They helped to deliver him to the Katanga prison, where he was held before his execution. President of the Dominican Republic Rafael Trujillo -- 1961 Also in 1961, the CIA provided the weapons used by rebels to assassinate the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. "President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that Trujillo was just as bad as Castro, and if left alone he would turn the Dominican Republic into another bastion of communism in the Western Hemisphere. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to mount a covert operation to help the anti-Trujillo elements in the country to overthrow the bothersome dictator." Prime Minister/President of Cuba Fidel Castro — 1960's – 1990's Perhaps most famously, the CIA tried and failed for years to kill Fidel Castro. The CIA "acknowledged at least eight attempts to assassinate Castro during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations in testimony to the US Senate — while [Castro's] own spy chief, Fabian Escalante, claims the number was over 600, up to and including the Clinton administration." These plots included poisoning his ice cream and cigars, exploding cigars, rigging a seashell to explode near him when he was scuba diving, poisoning a diving suit, and leaflets advertising rewards to assassins. The CIA worked with longtime Department of Defense and CIA clandestine operations and psychological warfare pioneer Edward Lansdale. By many reports, including that of Colonel Fletcher Prouty, the same Edward Lansdale was photographed in Dealey Plaza on the day of the Kennedy Assassination. President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem -- 1963 In 1963, the CIA helped organize a coup in South Vietnam, overthrowing the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Diem, who were killed in the coup. "The first coup effort against Diem originated in August 1963, when CIA officer Colonel Lucien Conein met secretly with a number of high-ranking South Vietnamese military officers.... It was his job to act as an intermediary between the plotters and the U.S. embassy." On November 2, 1963, "Diem and Nhu were tracked down and taken into custody by forces loyal to the plotters," and killed. Chilean General René Schneider and President Salvador Allende — 1970-73 In October 1970, the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Chilean Commander-in-Chief René Schneider. Unlike Allende, Schneider was not a communist, but he was unwilling to lead the military against a democratically elected leader. Years later, declassified CIA files told the story: |
CIA Director Richard Helms convened his top aides to review the covert coup operations that had led to the attack. "[I]t was agreed that … a maximum effort has been achieved," and that "the station has done excellent job of guiding Chileans to point today where a military solution is at least an option for them," stated a Secret cable of commendation transmitted that day to the CIA station in Chile. "COS [Chief of Station] … and Station [deleted] are commended for accomplishing this under extremely difficult and delicate circumstances." |
On September 11, 1973, elected Chilean president Salvador Allende shot himself in the burning presidential palace, under air attack from the Chilean military, in a CIA-sponsored coup. "The U.S. government and its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had worked for three years to foment a coup against Allende, who was regarded by the Nixon administration as a threat to democracy in Chile and Latin America. Ironically, the democratically elected Allende was succeeded by the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled over Chile with an iron fist for the next 17 years." Lebanese Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah — 1985 In March 1985, the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shia leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whose "position and outspoken political views made him a target." |
CIA-trained operatives carried out an assassination attempt against him, in which a 440lb car bomb was placed along the short route between his apartment and mosque. Fadlallah narrowly escaped the explosion, but 80 or so others, including many women and children, were killed and 200 injured when a nearby apartment block was demolished. Bob Woodward, an American investigative journalist, linked the blast to the CIA, though US officials always denied any involvement. In 2006, Israel bombed Fadlallah's house in south Beirut, but he was not there. |
Lessons to be Learned While the focus of this review is the assassination of JFK, the insightful comments of William Blum should be noted, explaining the high price paid by the United States as a result of this effort to manipulate world politics through assassinations: |
The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country-by-country, intervention-by-intervention. [Emphasis added.] |
Having plied and practiced and perfected their assassination tradecraft overseas, it certainly cannot be denied that the CIA had the means to assassinate John F. Kennedy in November 1963. After all, as the CIA Assassination manual states: |
Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary. [Emphasis adde |
Editor's Note: To read the articles in this series, please click here. |
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5 comments:
100 mph winds just came onshore to Grand Haven. Just northwest of GR. Winds of 80 mph for my area expected.
Probably my last message for a while
--GRA
Storm went through with 60 mph. Didn't lose power.
--GRA
Thank God or nature for that!
That's for sure,N.S. Many tornadoes south and east of GR. My cousin,about 2 miles east,lost power,but this was a line of storms that weakened slightly before hitting Grand Rapids. Very grateful.
--GRA
ANOTHER WHITE BITES THE DUST:"WALKING TALL" ACTOR,JOE DON BAKER WALKED OFF THE PLANET--A WEEK AGO--AT 89
(Variety)Joe Don Baker, an imposing character actor who left his mark on action films, Westerns and James Bond adventures, has died at 89. An obituary for the actor reveals he died on May 7 and is survived by a small group of friends.
Baker was born on February 12, 1936, and spent his early life in Texas, attending Groesbeck High School and North Texas State College. After serving for two years in the U.S. Army, Baker traveled to New York City to pursue a career in theater.
He eventually began a career in television with a small part in the 1965 Western “Iron Horse,” and soon started appearing in films, with an uncredited start in 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke.”
His most famous role was that of wrestler-turned-sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 film “Walking Tall.” Baker appeared in scores of projects as a character actor, including three different Bond films (1987’s “The Living Daylights,” 1995’s “GoldenEye” and 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies”) and box office hits including 1984’s “The Natural,” 1985’s “Fletch” and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 “Cape Fear” remake.
Other film roles included “Reality Bites,” “Mars Attacks!” and the TV movie “Poodle Springs.”
On TV, he appeared in the mini-series “Edge of Darkness,” had a recurring role in the series “In the Heat of the Night,” on the series “Eischeid” and guest-starred on shows including “Gunsmoke” and “Lancer.”
Baker retired in 2012. His work in the ensemble cast of his final film, 2012’s “Mud,” was awarded the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Baker’s one marriage was to Marlo Baker in 1969 and lasted for 11 years but produced no children. Per the obituary, Baker is “survived by relations in his native Groesbeck, who will forever cherish his memory. He is mourned by a small but very close circle of friends who will miss him eternally.”
A funeral will be held on May 20 in Mission Hills, Calif.
GRA:Very good performer,Joe Don Baker made his presence felt in the movies he appeared in--back when movies were worth going to. Today,woke movie studios won't hire Whites with that quality anymore,they have to be unintrusive nothings with IQs of a turnip--or criminals that blacks can arrest or kill.
--GRA
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