from: http://pages.about.com/search/chapter13.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://pages.about.com/search/chapter13.htm">Preserving the legacy</A> ----- >From Hiss to Whitewater Chapter 13 The Cold War was actually very Hot -it claimed real lives and it evoked the common prejudices, hates and fears that all wars evoke. Secretively waged, the atrocities that it produced were also very real. Like trench warfare, the surefire consequence of deeply entrenched prejudices is death and destruction. Deliberately cultivated prejudice, sprung from the view that diplomacy is a futile avenue for peace, produced a rigid, self-defining, Cold war agenda which made targets of the very best [the objective and the independent-minded] and often propelled the careers of the very worst [the ideologically inclined demagogue] . World War I was followed by the Treaty of Versailles, the imposed peace treaty that allegedly sowed the seed that produced a tyrant like Hitler, and the smouldering ashes of the second World War were still hot when the spectre of the Cold War emerged. Dominated by hysteria over the Soviet-American rivalry, the Cold War produced an intense degree of emotion, conflict, controversy, fear, paranoia and hatred that divided Americans into two opposing camps -one leaned towards the effort to achieve peace through international cooperation, the other towards the demand to achieve peace through military confrontation. The Soviet impulse to spread Communism exasperated anti-Communist hysteria and facilitated the opportunity to exploit fear and paranoia through the deliberate exaggeration about the "other side's" capacity to spread Communism. Preaching the need to be more violent, more ruthless and more secretive than the Communists themselves, Cold War zealots routinely violated individual human rights and the Constitution, in an anti-Communist crusade which proved to be unlimited and unrestricted. The effort to outwit the "evil empire" by deploying totalitarian tactics produced a level of anti-Communist hysteria which is responsible for targeting and destroying reasonable people, in the name of the national security of the United States. Having created an atmosphere which ultimately hinged upon peculiar delusions rather than upon democratic ideals, Cold War zealots declared war on Communists abroad and on people erroneously deemed to be subversive, at home. The undeclared civil war between Cold War zealots and independent-minded Americans who were not strictly confined to the dictum of an ideological agenda captured widespread attention in the 1950's, when Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that 205 members of the State Department were members of the American Communist party. McCarthy's entirely fraudulent charges were merely a publicity hoax which sought to generate support for his crusade against Communism. To give McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, one can in fact claim that his anti-Communist crusade was sincere, but paranoia clearly perverted the quality of his sincerity. If, for example, McCarthy genuinely believed that any American who was not a "card-carrying" anti-Communist crusader was what he called an "instrument of the Soviet conspiracy", then he was obviously motivated by his own paranoid delusions. Deluded or insincere, the consequence was the same. McCarthyites branded, targeted, and destroyed people not because of anything they had done, but for what they believed in, and as long as they successfully manufactured fear and hysteria, they were in a position to exploit it. McCarthy was ultimately discredited, but people who had supported him and who shared his views were not. In particular, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover kept the McCarthyite spirit alive. Indeed, Richard Nixon actually ushered in the McCarthy era when he targeted and destroyed the promising career of Alger Hiss. A highly respected State Department official since 1936, Hiss was targeted by anti-Communist zealots who mistrusted anyone who did not manifest their brand of paranoia. In 1945, Alger Hiss was the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and like most Americans, he embraced the belief that the United Nations was the best hope for world peace. When the San Fransisco conference worked out the United Nations Charter, Hiss articulated the general intention when he said, "we had high hopes that disputes could be settled in advance so that the Assembly would be what Americans called the town meeting of the world. The United Nations promised peace. But in a more nationalistic sense, it appealed because it was here in the United States". In retrospect, San Fransisco conference controversy foreshadowed the Cold War at home, because instead of fulfilling the promise of the United Nations charter, leaders like Hiss were targeted and destroyed by zealots like Richard Nixon. If the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union made it difficult to encourage peace through the United Nations, the antagonism between Cold War zealots and advocates of peace made it impossible. Hiss certainly embodied the struggle of Americans who sought to encourage peace through cooperation. In 1945, he had sought to encourage peace through the United Nations. In 1947, he took office as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Anti-Communist crusaders invariably discounted Hiss because he was committed, not to a violent, anti-Communist crusade but to the peaceful resolution of international conflict. Indeed, in the light of the paranoia and the hysteria that Cold War zealots promoted, Alger Hiss was an agent of Communism. The only problem of course, is that legitimate prosecutions do not entertain individual paranoia, and the only way to satisfy Cold War zealots was to destroy Hiss through trumped-up charges -and so they did. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a writer and editor for Time magazine, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), to publicly claim that Hiss belonged to a group of government employees who were part of an underground Communist party group. A self-professed cloak-and-dagger expert who claimed to have been an espionage agent for the Soviet Union during the 1930's, Chambers was evidently a shameless liar who achieved celebrity status by stroking the prejudices of ideologues like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, when Hoover and Nixon were upset over the fact that the House Committee on Un-American Activities did not have and did not merit any credibility, Chambers rescued the imminent dissolution of the otherwise discredited committee. Anti-Communist crusaders claimed that internal Communisim was a serious threat to the national security of the United States and that they required a reputable un-American Activities committee, to purge the imagined threat that domestic Communism posed. President Truman dismissed the evident paranoia of domestic spy chasers and acknowledged the inherent stupidity of un-American hearings that simply diverted attention away from domestic issues. As far as Nixon and Hoover were concerned, Truman's views were contemptuous, and their determination to "prove" him wrong ultimately led to the anti-Hiss witch hunt. As expected, the campaign to brand Hiss a Communist was absolutely fierce and relentless and when the initial attempt to prosecute him failed, Nixon called for a probe to examine Judge Samuel H. Kaufman's fitness for the bench. Hiss was ultimately the victim of a trumped-up charge that branded him a spy and the allegations were suspiciously vague to the point where the challenge was not to prove that Hiss was a Communist but to simply attack his credibility -to pr ove that he was a liar. Hiss had allegedly lied about having taken classified State Department papers and given them to Chambers and his recollection about an alleged meeting with Chambers was also challenged. The first perjury charge ended in a hung jury, the second trial registered a conviction and the reputation of the grotesque un-American Activities committee was restored -a remarkable fraud which has yet to be acknowledged for what it was. Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. In retrospect, the fact that the case against Hiss was entirely manufactured is obvious. At the outset, a young, cocky Hiss [since he was innocent and could not have possibly imagined what lay in store for him] casually dismissed the charges that branded him a spy and made his accusers look as ignorant as they in fact were. It is only when the wheels of the "propaganda machine" that zealots like Hoover and Nixon relied upon to justify their paranoia, began to turn, that Hiss was successfully prosecuted for perjury, ev en though his accusers did not merit a shred of credibility. In retrospect, the peculiar unfolding of the so-called evidence which was used to prosecute Hiss betrays the anatomy of a transparent fraud. Initially, Whittaker Chambers, Hiss's public accuser, did not produce documents to back up his allegations, but when it became clear that the campaign to destroy Hiss demanded evidence, "proof" was fraudulently manufactured. In other words, all they had to do is to pass on State Department documents to a liar like Chambers and all he had to do was to claim that he had received them from Hiss himself. If the evidence and the tactics used to destroy Hiss were not fraudulent, how did a so-called spy like Hiss manage to evade espionage charges when practically every FBI agent in the U.S. stood guard? If Hiss was that clever and that ingenius, he could have certainly fooled a former Communist like Whitaker Chambers. In the final analysis, the suggestion that Hiss was in fact a spy is ludicrous, and the excuse which was used to explain why Hiss was never prosecuted for espionage, does not hold water. According to popular mythology, the statute of limitations to prosecute Hiss for espionage had expired and that is why Hiss was charged with perjury. According to anybody who understands J. Edgar Hoover, if Hiss was in fact a spy, Hoover would have found a way to charge him with espionage. Hiss was ultimately charged with perjury because Whittaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon had developed an overactive propaganda department that targeted and destroyed "un-Americans". The suggestion that they combated spies through perjury charges is very funny, to say the least. Regardless, the political career of Alger Hiss was fraudulently destroyed and the self-righteous Richard Nixon gloated over the persecution and acknowledged the Great Inquisition which had made it all possible. In the words of Richard Nixon. we must give complete and unqualified support to the FBI and to J. Edgar Hoover, its chief. Mr. Hoover recognized the Communist threat long before other top officials recognized its existence. The FBI in this trial did an amazingly effective job running down trails over 10 years old and in developing the evidence which made the prosecution successful.1 In retrospect Richard Nixon was publicly applauding the fact that J. Edgar Hoover privately perverted the law. Czar Hoover was clearly nothing beyond a single-minded fanatic who routinely "developed evidence" which recognized his peculiar delusions, he did not convict criminals. The astounding paranoia that motivated the overzealous prosecution of Alger Hiss was exposed when Hoover appeared before HUAC and said: ... once public opinion is thoroughly aroused as it is today, the fight against Communism is well on its way. Victory will be assured once Communists are identified and exposed, because the public will take the first step in quarantining them so they can do no harm. Communism, in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life -an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic and like an epidemic a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the Nation.2 In 1988, Alger Hiss wrote a credible book which successfully argues the claim that he was framed by his accusers. History clearly supports the fact that Hiss was simply a victim of an illegitimate, anti-Communist witch-hunt and if one weighs the credibility of the parties involved, Alger Hiss emerges as the most sincere and believable. The paranoia and the lies that targeted Alger Hiss have a traceable, discernible and fraudulent past which has unjustifiably claimed the careers of thousands upon thousands of Americans who were erroneously branded "security risks." Like Alger Hiss, they were the victims of deliberately manufactured anti-Communist hysteria, they were not the dangerous, threatening, subversive spies that J.Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon targeted. Regardless, Nixon successfully exploited Red Scare politics. In 1952, Richard Nixon used the fact that Hiss had been fraudulently convicted, to encourage anti-Communist hysteria and to ridicule political adversaries like Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson did not share the paranoia that motivated Nixon and his cronies and instead of declaring an anti-Communist crusade, he declared war against poverty, injustice and inequality. Richard Nixon used the Hiss case to justify anti-Communist paranoia and to attack Stevenson for not sharing the hysteria. Campaigning in Augusta, Maine on September 6, 1952, Nixon said: I think that many good Americans are concerned by the way in which President Truman and Governor Stevenson have both attempted to ridicule and pooh pooh the Communist threat within the United States. Well all will recall that President Truman referred to the Alger Hiss case as a red herring. And now Governor Stevenson comes along and refers to the Communists of the United States as phantoms amongst ourselves. Now I have in my hands here some of the papers that came out of that famous pumpkin that Whittaker Chambers had on his farm. Hundreds of pages of secret State Department documents. They were turned over by Alger Hiss to Chambers, and then they were turned over to the Russians. Now that the Cold War is over and Communist propaganda no longer prevails, the Russians confirmed the fact that Hiss was not a spy and that he never turned over any State Department papers to them. Regardless, during the 1956 campaign, Nixon waved his so-called evidence and used it like a club to beat on the Democrats. In one particularly grotesque photo-opportunity, Sherlock Nixon, with magnifying glass in hand, shook his head in disgust as he examined a microfilm that Hiss had allegedly turned over to the Russians. In retrospect, it was all very grotesque, but it worked. Nixon's anti-Communist crusade dominated publicity and Stevenson's reasoned appeal that "what counts is not just what we are against but what we are for" was a correlative whisper to the hysterical, Nixon bellow. In retrospect, it is difficult to appreciate the fact that Nixon's vulgar, McCarthyite rhetoric survived scrutiny. To further expound upon the ignorance that was shamelessly promoted in the campaign of 1956, Richard Nixon said: Just let me say this last word. Regardless of what happens, I'm going to continue this fight. I'm gonna campaign up and down in America until we drive all the crooks and the Communists and those who defend them out of Washington. Indeed, Richard Nixon did spend all his time and effort developing plots to "drive all crooks and the Communists and those who defend them out of Washington". The only glitch of course is that it was Richard Nixon who was the crook and the tyrant who deployed totalitarian security methods to target his enemies. Tragically, Richard Nixon became a national public figure, not because he supported commonly held American ideals but because he fraudulently manufactured the suggestion that peace loving Americans like Alger Hiss were a threat to the national security of the United States. On October 29, 1992, the frail eighty-seven year old Hiss, armed with further evidence that he was simply a target of overzealous McCarthyite's, voiced the conviction that the historical record would ultimately absolve him. Indeed, Hiss has absolutely nothing to worry about. In large measure, the Americans who were targeted and destroyed by the un-American Activities witch hunts were victims, not criminals, and it is their accusers, not they, who have everything to be embarrassed about. Hiss was convicted for perjury on the strength of the allegation that he lied to the Grand Jury about having given State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers and that he denied having met with Chambers after January 1, 1937. But with cohorts like Nixon and Hoover, the anti-Hiss truth squad was a group of felons, liars and fraud artists who routinely perverted justice and Richard Nixon himself betrays the fact that the entire campaign against Hiss was mounted upon the Nixonian spirit to evade the law, when he said Because of Truman's executive order we were not able to get any direct help [in the campaign to "prosecute" Hiss] from J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI. However, we had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful in our investigations.3 TRANSLATION: The campaign to prosecute Hiss was a product, not of an accountable, authorized legal network, but of the secretive, informal network that Hoover and Nixon used to fraudulently destroy their enemies. Working through the apparatus that David Wise called the invisible government, compulsive spies like Howard Hunt defined their existence by the zeal to destroy Communism and routinely engaged illegal, clandestine, political operations, of the sort that destroyed Alger Hiss' political career. What makes covert, illegal operatives like Hunt especially significant in terms of the Hiss case is that they had access to the sort of documents which were used to fraudulently prosecute him. Even as late as 1971, Hunt forged top-secret State Department telegrams, for the purpose of distorting the historical record. Hunt was a predictable extremist who joined the CIA in 1947 or 1948, and his only legacy is the slew of undetected illegalities he managed to get away, between the occasional blunders that exposed his criminal operations. In recent years, much has been written about a so-called unbroken chain of events which stretch from the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, to the Watergate scandal that cost Nixon the presidency. It is indeed a link with a solid foundation. Like most zealots, Nixon and his cronies were very disturbed by the Kennedy presidency and they shared the commitment to do whatever they could, to satisfy their paranoia-motivated vision of the country. The initial bone of contention was policy over Cuba, until Kennedy started "messing around" in Southeast Asia. As Nixon records in his memoirs: I was disturbed by some of Kennedy's early foreign policy actions. During his first week in office, he was confronted with a crisis involving Communist aggression in Laos. After an initial show of strength in one of his first press conferences, he pulled back and ended up accepting a supposedly neutral government that everyone knew would be heavily influenced by the Communists. I decided that it was time for the administration's honeymoon to end, and I agreed to give a speech before the Executives Club of Chicago on May 5, 196l.4 And so began the Nixon campaign to oppose the "dangerous" foreign policy course that Kennedy charted. Nixon, as the Hiss case demonstrated, was an extremely relentless, unethical adversary who had the will and the cunning to target and destroy any political opponent -Kennedy was certainly no exception. When Kennedy was murdered, it is not surprising to note that Richard Nixon and cronies like Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, did not share in the grief of the nation. What they shared is the need to produce an alibi to prove that they were in no way responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy -a fact that placed them in league with Kennedy assassination co-conspirators like David Ferrie and Carlos Marcello. On the day of the assassination, Richard Nixon was in Dallas surveying the assassination site, and according to his recollection immediately after the assassination, Nixon claimed that he was not in Dallas.5 It is a strange, unbelievable memory lapse, sustained only by the fact that Nixon left Dallas Texas on the 22nd of November 1963, at 9:05 a.m. Nixon landed at New York's Idlewild at 1:00 p.m., ironically renamed Kennedy International Airport, proving that he could destoy the man, but not his legacy. In 1978, when Nixon evidently felt more secure about the capacity to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination, he not only remembered that he had been in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, he recalled the fact that he had surveyed the assassination site -a rather startling admission given his previous memory lapse. In the words of Richard Nixon: Early on the morning of November 22 on the way to the Dallas airport I saw the flags displayed along the motorcade route for the presidential visit.6 Nixon further claimed that he called J. Edgar Hoover on the 22nd of November, to ask if one of those "right-wing nuts" was responsible for murdering President Kennedy. According to Nixon, Hoover's reply was "No, it was a Communist." In retrospect, anybody who thinks that Hoover and Nixon actually believed that a "Comminist" was responsible for the Kennedy assassination is hopelessly delusional. An exhaustive briefing between Hoover and Nixon, who were both in Texas on the 21st of November 1963, preceded the Kennedy assassination and the absurd claim that a Communist was responsible for the Kennedy assassination reflects absolutely nothing beyond the blatant fraud that was supposed to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Moreover, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, in a vain attempt to prove Oswald's violent temperament, had even contemplated promoting the ludicrous claim that "Oswald had been planning to kill me [Richard Nixon] when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she [Marina Oswald] managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so."7 If Marina Oswald supported this hoax under the threat of deportation, the wife of the alleged assassin did not have the power to give creedence to the nonsense that Nixon and Hoover promoted. Moreover, the mere suggestion that an intelligent former Marine like Lee Harvey Oswald would ever contemplate the assassination of two diametrically opposed politicians is a preposterous fiction, and the fact that it was manufactured by Hoover and Nixon proves beyond all doubt that they are co-conspirators in the plot to cover up the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Like Richard Nixon, who initially denied being in Dallas Texas, Nixon crony Howard Hunt was obsessed by the determination to counter reports that he too was in Dallas Texas on the 22nd of November 1963. According to Hunt, he was not in his CIA office in Langley Virginia but with friends in Washington D.C., "And since it is a law of physics that you can't be in two places at the same time", Hunt boldly asserts, "I was not in Dallas Texas." Alright, we get the point. But most Americans are not obsessed by the need to develop alibies to "prove" that they did not murder the President of the United States. Moreover, a CIA operative like Hunt was certainly versed in the covert operations practise which provides an intelligence operative the capacity to be in two places at the same time -all that is required is a cover story to produce a "law of physics" alibi to deny the truth. The claim that Nixon and Hunt were at least privy to the fact that Kennedy was going to be assassinated is clearly well founded. Nixon and Hunt were both violent anti-Communist crusaders with a penchant for plotting the assassination of "foreign" leaders and for perverting democratic principles. Two of the earliest and most persistent advocates who promoted assassination plots against Castro, Hunt and Nixon were trusted anti-Communist crusaders who were too well connected to rogue spies like Hoover, to be kept in the dark. Quoted in the New York Times on November 22nd after having made a timely evacuation from Dallas, Richard Nixon publicly recognized his anti-Kennedy zeal through the bold assertion. "I am going to work as hard as I can to get the Kennedys out of there. We can't afford four more years of that kind of administration." Nixon made that comment after a recent meeting with crony J. Edgar Hoover, at the home of Clint Murchison in Dallas Texas, a day before the Kennedy assassination. He was certainly not kidding when he suggested that he had done everything possible to deny "four more years of that kind of administration." Nixon did not run for the Presidency in 1964. He didn't want to oppose Lyndon Johnson. Under the circumstances, that is certainly understandable. Political pundits claim that Richard Nixon didn't run because he didn't think he could win -and that must be the joke of the century. Indeed, in the Newsweek issue of March 23, 1964, Richard Nixon unabashedly extolled his virtues when he said: "I feel there is no man who can make the case generally [against the Johnson Administration] more effectively than I can... I have the national name, I have some experience." If the "best man" did not oppose Lyndon Johnson in 1964, it is certainly not because he thought he could not win. It is because the relationship between Johnson and Nixon had crossed party lines, over the obsession to prosecute the Vietnam war. In fact, the relationship between Johnson and Nixon was so peculiar in the "party politics" sense that in 1968, it prompted Hugh Sydney of Life Magazine to write: "Would Lyndon Johnson really mind terribly much if there were a Republican victory? It is curious how the thought recurs in these bastions 1,000 miles apart. There have been so many little things to suggest it and no big things to deny it." Hugh Sydney further noted that Nixon's visit to the LBJ ranch was friendly, intimate and intense, while Humphrey's visit was an untrumpeted affair. In retrospect, the fact that Lyndon Johnson did not want to deny Americans the right "to have Dick Nixon as their President" is understandable.8 Allies like Nixon and Johnson did not challenge the others candidacy, they supported it and the ultimate strategy was clear -Johnson got first crack at the "commies", Nixon had to wait his turn. With Rusk running the State Department, the man who, according to Nixon, was "one of the ablest and most honorable men ever to serve as Secretary of State," he certainly did not have to worry about America's foreign policy going astray in 1964 -like it allegedly did when Kennedy was President.9 John Ehrlichman verified the fact that Hoover and Nixon were political cronies who evidently plotted "transfer of power" schemes when he said: Hoover and Nixon had kept in touch during all the year Nixon was out of office. Rose Mary Woods had been Hoover's Nixon contact for the exchange of information and advice between them. Whenever Nixon travelled abroad as a private citizen, the FBI agents who posed as "legal attaches" in U.S. embassies were instructed by Hoover to look after Nixon. Hoover fed Nixon information during those years via Cartha De Loach, and through Lou Nichols, a retired Bureau assistant director who had become a distillery executive. But Hoover was more than a source of information -he was a political advisor to whom Nixon listened.10 Despite the popular belief that shrewd political acumen kept Nixon out of the White House race in 1964, the evidence indicates that behind-the-scenes scheming between cronies dictated the Nixon decision to "wait it out". The Kennedy assassination produced a consensus that crossed party lines and was secretively linked by the relentless zeal to control the foreign policy of the United States. The common ground that united anti-Communist zealots, the obsession to prosecute the Vietnam war, was a party loyalty surrogate and instead of opposing his ostensible rival, Richard Nixon facilitated the 1964 Democratic landslide victory of "co-patriot", Lyndon Johnson. And so, like the convoluted plot of a Shakespearean play, the Nixon-assisted Lyndon Johnson landslide foreshadowed the dramatic new beginning in Vietnam -the introduction of the combat divisions that Kennedy had vigorously opposed. Nixon's commitment to the war was long and hard. In 1954, President Eisenhower wrote to Diem to emphasize Washington's determination to keep the Communists out and since then, his Vice President Richard Nixon was determined to do whatever he perceived to be necessary to defeat the Communists in Southeast Asia. The profound philosophical conflict between Richard Nixon's declaration of war against Communism and Kennedy's tendency to focus upon the root of a problem was glaringly exposed during the Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960. Regarding Cuba, for example, Nixon believed that the Eisenhower administration of which he was a part of had followed a proper course and that the American effort to free Cuba would succeed. Kennedy criticized Nixon for having paved the conflict as early as 1955 and for having failed to use the influence of the United States to persuade Batista to hold free elections in 1957 and 1958. Kennedy claimed that American policy in Cuba ignored the needs of the Latin Americans and supported the cause of a corrupt dictator rather than the cause of freedom. Nixon had a different view of freedom. As far as he was concerned, those who violently opposed Communism without reservation, were viewed to be on the side of freedom. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was in a quandary over what to do about Cuba, and he sought everybody's advise including the opinion of Richard Nixon. Nixon didn't hesitate to take the opportunity to encourage a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. In his own words: I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in. There are several justifications that could be used, like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base in Guatahamo. I believe that the most important thing to do at this point is to get Castro and communism out of Cuba.11 The foreign policy split between Nixon and Kennedy is rather obvious and extreme. Kennedy did everything he could possibly do to contain military involvement whereas Richard Nixon entertained "proper legal cover" war plans. Regarding Vietnam, the split was also just as clear and glaringly obvious. Clearly, the popular claim that Johnson and Nixon inherited the Vietnam war reflects a gross distortion maintained by obsessive secrecy, aggressive propaganda and ignorant "punditeering". In actual fact, Nixon, Johnson, Hoover and the like, "engineered" the Vietnam war. By 1963, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover had cultivated a phenomenal degree of power. The home of Clint Murchison for example, where Hoover and Nixon met on the day before the assassination, was in itself a powerhouse of influence. Murchison, a wealthy oil baron in Dallas Texas, owned everything from the Dallas Cowboys to publishing house, Henry Holt and Company, to the racetrack where Hoover placed his $100 bets, to the luxurious Del Charro Motel in California where Hoover vacationed annually free of charge, to oil-gas interests... As a benefactor of the "business climate" that J. Edgar hoover encouraged, it is perhaps not surprising to note that Murchison's operations were evidently tailor-made to suit the fancy of Director Hoover. The alliance between Murchison and Hoover was certainly mutually lucrative. Murchison was the recipient of huge loans from Teamster's pension funds, and the politically correct, dissent-free membership of the Teamsters was ultimately shaped by Hoover and cohorts who blacklisted the so-called un-Americans within, giving allies like Murchison power would have otherwise been denied. Mafia boss Carlos Marcello was also a Murchison associate and such wealthy allies provided Nixon and Hoover the power, the independence and the unaccountability that private wealth offers. In some respects, the Murchison financial conglomerate was a politically motivated empire which "fronted" clandestine schemes of the sort that Nixon and Hoover thrived upon, and it is consequently no mere coincidence that Richard Nixon, Clint Murchison and J. Edgar Hoover, were meeting at the politically motivated Murchison headquarters in Dallas Texas on the 21st of November 1963. The biggest known financial conglomerate which served as a front for clandestine intelligence operations was the empire of Howard Hughes. Obsessively secretive, one can only imagine the scope and breadth of the secret operations that Hughes sponsored, in effort to place an ally like Richard Nixon in the White House. In the face of extreme secrecy, most substantive facts about the intelligence pursuits of Howard Hughes are still largely mysterious and intelligent surmise is still the primary, available vehicle of exploration. If, for example, one takes a close look at the cohorts that Hughes attracted, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the veritable who's who list of clandestine enthusiasts used the Hughes conglomerate to cover up the crimes of national security-motivated patriots. Clearly, the rogue intelligence operatives who worked with Hughes -Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, James Jesus Angleton...are people who thrived and survived because the private resources of "patriots" like Hughes sheltered them from public accountability. The nature of the fanatics that Howard Hunt attracted certainly embodied the zeal to target and destroy political adversaries. At the CIA, Hunt's proposals were so extreme that they were routinely rejected. Too extreme for even the CIA, Hunt found an understanding ally in Howard Hughes. The following epigram in a novel by Howard Hunt reflects the general philosophy that linked loyalty to "patriot" rather than to any single institution. It is in the political agent's interest to betray all the parties who use him and to work for them all at the same time, so that he may move freely and penetrate everywhere. Elusive spies like Hunt did not hesitate to engage controversial plots like the effort to kill Castro, and when that did not pan out, they turned their attention elsewhere. In particular, the perceived need to assassinate so-called political enemies like John F. Kennedy developed an even greater urgency than the perceived need to murder Castro. By the fall of 1963, the Kennedy administration denied Cuban exiles and right wing zealots the opportunity to continue to use the United States as the training ground to mount an anti-Castro paramilitary assault, and Cold War zealots began to focus their wrath elsewhere -in particular, to the so-called Communist at home, the President of the United States. Howard Hunt certainly felt betrayed by John F. Kennedy and his willingness to embrace anti-Kennedy plots is clear. Indeed, Howard Hunt's obsession with Kennedy was in fact so extreme that he even forged Vietnam cables in 1971, long after Kennedy had been murdered, allegedly because he wanted to blacken his reputation or distort his legacy. When Howard Hughes died, former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton stepped forward to praise him and thereby exposed his otherwise unknown secret relationship with Howard Hughes. In the words of "co-patriot" Angleton, who delivered Hughes' eulogy: Howard Hughes! Where his country's interests were concerned, no one knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him. He was a great patriot.12 Angleton, the CIA's first head of counterintelligence held on to his position for twenty-seven years before scandal claimed his career. The so called spook' s spook was so secretive that he has attained a legendary reputation within as well as outside of the CIA. When Hoover died, Angleton was reportedly spotted moving boxes and loading them into the trunk of his car before driving away. Friends tended to clean up for each other. After the death of former FBI agent Guy Banister, the unofficial head of operations against Castro, Hoover's FBI cleaned out his office. The informal alliance between crusading zealots was evidently the best protection against public exposure. Until 1947, American intelligence was concentrated in the hands of the FBI and the military and Hoover liked it that way. When Harry Truman created the CIA, Hoover wanted to be the head of the newly created spy agency as well as the Director of the FBI and while he was officially denied the privilege of being America's spymaster, in practise, he actually was. Hoover in fact tightened his hold upon the intelligence community through powerful, covert alliances that made him an unrivalled spook. Loose canon spooks like Angleton and Hoover worked with the CIA and the FBI, and when they required deeper cover, they used the Mafia and wealthy patrons like Howard Hughes. They proved to be very difficult to expose because they cultivated "operational" loyalty rather than attachment to any particular agency, but in the final analysis, they did not fool anybody. Howard Hunt certainly embodies the interdepartmental approach they practised -a former CIA clandestine operator, an ally of Howard Hughes, a Nixon crony -as long as Hunt pursued and targeted his enemies he didn't care who he worked with. The only modus operandi of extreme zealots was protect the interests of your allies and destroy your enemies, and that consistency betrayed the nature of their covert operations. If evidence of the Hoover/Angleton alliance is sparse, it is because they sponsored illegal operations and their links to secretive patriots like Howard Hughes did not exactly produce a public record. In 1967 however, Lyndon Johnson brought the natural allies out of the closet and used them both in attempt to deal with his obsession over the Vietnam war. A presidential directive consequently created the joint CIA/FBI operation which involved Angleton's counterintelligence staff and was charged with the responsibility to determine whether the anti-Vietnam war movement was foreign sponsored. By 1971, the CIA was infiltrating protest groups. Like Hoover's FBI, the CIA was used for political purposes and it engaged clandestine schemes that involved wiretaps, mail opening, break-ins and planting bugs. At the behest of Lyndon Johnson, the routine abuse of power that Hoover's FBI practised was transplanted to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
