From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 27, 2007 9:45:59 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: "Family Jewels," Only Deserving of a Good KICK
http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs.asp?
The most interesting thing about the CIA's release of the "once
secret" so-called "Family Jewels," available for viewing at the
website above, is that anyone thoroughly grounded in Conspiracy
Theory knew everything already -- there's absolutely no surprises
here (among the items presented as most "provocative") and the
release of these documents serves only to CONFIRM, from the horse's
mouth, what was known all along, sometimes in greater detail
because the facts had to be assembled from a wide variety of other
sources.
The only thing that could be called "new" here is the CIA's
inclusion of items that strike one immediately as DIS-information.
Items too pointedly partisan --too custom-tailored for use by the
rightwing media-- NOT to be Trojan horses, borrowing an air of
authenticity from recognized thorough-breds ALSO running in this
stampede-for-show managed by the CIA. In the trade, Churchill's
"bodyguard of lies" is a counter-intelligence principle more
effectively applied in reverse -- a useful lie is best smuggled in
surrounded by non-debatable facts, which, through numbers alone,
psychologically lend it "credibility."
Hidden among the bona fide items that elicit jaded nods from the
conspiracy-savvy cognoscenti are a few assertions that are
startling (UNLESS one is predisposed, by rightwing political bias,
to immediately and uncritically embracing them) -- for example,
that Robert F Kennedy personally oversaw the assassination plots
against Fidel Castro and personally enlisted the Mafia (whom he had
otherwise prosecuted with a vengeance since the '50s) to carry out
"hits." Anyone who knows more than a little about the history of
RFK's prosecutorial crusade, in the peculiar company of rabid far-
rightists such as Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, could compose a
reasonable argument against that claim, indicating how unlikely
this would be -- and such a claim contradicts all the evidence
otherwise available indicating that NIXON held that honor. (The
same Nixon, by the way, who loathed the Kennedies and regarded RFK
as an enemy -- who would be, one must assume, if this were true,
vulnerable to blackmail beyond J. Edgar Hoover's dreams.)
The main purpose of releasing the "Family Jewels" NOW appears to be
for their use as ammunition in rewriting history, retroactively
blaming the Democrats --the Kennedies, especially-- for the abuses
of the National Security State, in much the same way as the
Republicans keep blaming 9-11 on Bill Clinton (an example being
Rudy Giuliani, today, accusing Clinton of not taking the FIRST WTC
bombing seriously -- never mind the well-documented fact that
Giuliani himself never said ONE WORD about that until 2001.)
Listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr,, giving his assessment of the
"Family Jewels," on Hardball, MS-NBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19415790/
MATTHEWS: Bob Baer, before I go to the evidence we have so far, I
want to ask you, how important is this disclosure? Are we going to
find out our history of dirty work, of killing people, trying to
kill people, overthrowing governments?
BOB BAER, FORMER CIA OFFICER: Oh, I think it‘s all going to come
out. We suspected this for a long time, and enough of it has
leaked out in the press. I‘d like to say that it‘s a good idea to
get this stuff out, to know the worst, in order to get the CIA back
on track, to make it quit doing the same things.
MATTHEWS: I know that Nixon tried desperately to find out what his
predecessor and rival, Jack Kennedy, had done and Bobby had done
with regard to knocking off Castro, with regard to withdrawing air
cover from the Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs.
Let‘s go through a couple of things we know already. In 1975,
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Ford, quote,
“Helms” [he was head of the CIA] said all these stories are just
the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For
example, [Kissinger says] Robert Kennedy personally managed the
operation on the assassination of Castro.”
Here‘s Jim (SIC) Colby. He told President Ford back in the ‘70s,
quote, “We did have a New York and Los Angeles program in the ‘50s
of opening up first-class airmail from the USSR. For example, we
have four letters to Jane Fonda. That is illegal, and we stopped
it in 1973. In San Francisco, we had one with respect to China to
find out who the contacts were. Some letters were opened.”
Finally, Jim Colby, the CIA director said...
BLANTON: Bill.
MATTHEWS: Bill Colby said to the president, quote, “We have run
operations to assassinate foreign leaders. We have never
succeeded.” He cited Castro, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic,
General Sneider of Chile, et cetera.
“There‘s another skeleton, a defector we suspected of being a
double agent we kept confined for three years.”
Let me go through them all. Tom Blanton, is it generally the
scuttlebutt at the CIA that we tried to knock off Castro many times?
BLANTON: Oh, absolutely. And actually, there‘s a whole report by
the CIA inspector general that reads like a movie script, all the
different scenes. You know, the day that John F. Kennedy was
assassinated, a CIA agent was in Paris, giving a poison pen to one
of his assets.
MATTHEWS: (INAUDIBLE) Fitzgerald.
BLANTON: No, it wasn‘t (INAUDIBLE) Fitzgerald, it was at
[Fitzgerald's] orders... On that very day, a French journalist was
in Havana meeting with Fidel Castro with a different message for
Fidel, which was, We want to get talking. These are the two tracks
of American policy. What we‘re about to get next week is the dirty
track.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about Trujillo, Tyler. I heard that—at
the time, I thought there was a crazy message at the last minute
from Kennedy not to kill the guy, but the assassins went ahead and
did it.
DRUMHELLER: That‘s the story. We‘ll find out next week when this
comes out or when this comes out—the real challenge for the
historians, for historians on this, because all this was in—Bob‘s
right, it‘s good this comes out. It comes out for the sake of the
agency. But it‘s a challenge for historians to put it into the
right context at the time. These guys—this is the legacy of the
OSS. These are guys who thought they were fighting for the
existence of the country, and that‘s...
MATTHEWS: Was assassination part of the toolkit of the OSS during
World War II? Of course, it must have been. But it‘s all right to
kill Nazis, right? And that carried over.
DRUMHELLER: Yes, and it was—they saw this as part of the war, of
going forward in the war. Now, whatever comes out in it—my fear is
that it‘s going to hurt—it‘ll hurt morale inside the agency a
little bit because people—not so much the things they say they did,
but if there are things in here that they tried that didn‘t work out.
MATTHEWS: Bob, how is it going to help our relations with Iran,
which are already dreadful, if we disclose publicly that we, in
fact, overthrew their elected government back in the early ‘50s and
put a monarchy in charge, the shah, that we did that and we‘re
going to admit to that?
BAER: You know, Chris, it‘s not going to help in the short term,
but in the long term, at least we can open our archives, which the
Iranians won‘t and never will.
MATTHEWS: So you think the bloodletting that‘s necessary apart of
this sort of truth and reconciliation effort is, on the whole, a
good thing? Even if it means admitting that we may have knocked
off Trujillo, tried to knock off Castro, changed the government in
Guatemala, changed the government in Iran, and we did it all, and
we‘re now admitting it all, you think altogether, we‘re better off?
BAER: Absolutely, because what it demonstrates is that covert
action doesn‘t work and the CIA should not be involved in it. It
just hurts us diplomatically, hurts the morale of the country and
the CIA. And we get this out, and I hope it doesn‘t happen again.
MATTHEWS: Tom, why do we keep—I know it sounds bloodthirsty. I
know nothing about assassinations as an operative. I‘m not one.
BLANTON: Good thing!
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: Thank you. I just watched this in history. But here we
are with the most powerful government in the world, our own. Are
we just not ruthless enough? I mean, all those times you hear
about Castro, we tried to use, like, defoliant in his beer, we
tried to put LSD in his recording studio, all the—his pen had...
BLANTON: There were a little more serious actions.
MATTHEWS: ... but all these crazy efforts, and they all failed.
This guy‘s been in office since the ‘50s.
BLANTON: We did a few more serious things, like hiring the Mafia
to go down there on an implicit deal. They thought they‘d get off
on federal charges in the U.S. if they bumped him off.
MATTHEWS: Like (INAUDIBLE)
BLANTON: Yes, absolutely, all these guys.
MATTHEWS: Johnny Roselli.
BLANTON: Absolutely. You know the stories.
MATTHEWS: Well, I know it. I know this stuff. But I‘m just
trying to get it from the horse‘s mouth now.
BLANTON: But you know, they have this little map down in Cuba in
one of those museums that has sort of examples of all the times
they almost nailed Castro. And the one they point to as the
closest that we ever came to knocking him off is an ice cream stand
in the lobby of the Ministry of the Interior museum, where they
said the poison pill had been delivered. Fidel walks through the
lobby every day and gets an ice cream cone. They stashed it in the
little ice cream cart, but it stuck to the freezer coil. And so
Castro comes in, orders his ice cream cone, and the vendor‘s down
there trying but he can‘t get it off. They arrest him and haul him
off.
MATTHEWS: Sometimes I think somebody‘s on the side of Castro
because he has gotten through—a bad guy has gotten through a lot of
bad stuff.
BLANTON: Your big question was, Are we wimps? You know, Are we
tough enough in the world?
MATTHEWS: No, no!
BLANTON: No?
MATTHEWS: I‘m trying to open this up because you‘re the experts.
BLANTON: But look at this—this stuff, the skeletons in the closet,
is what Colby called it—you know, what it feels like is there‘s a
black bag of dirty tricks, and any time we as a country really feel
threatened—we felt really threatened in the 50s and ‘60s—we feel
real threatened today.
MATTHEWS: Well, we should have felt...
(CROSSTALK)
BLANTON: We have a tendency to go back in there and...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: ... put missiles in his country to blow us up! I mean...
BLANTON: And the Soviets hauled them out without telling him.
MATTHEWS: OK, let‘s go...
(CROSSTALK)
BLANTON: ... high and dry.
MATTHEWS: ... my liberal friends on the left will want to know the
answers.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Well, everybody I seemed to hang around with in
Washington sometimes in the old days. Democrats—how about that?
They all think that we knocked of Allende, that in fact, we killed
Allende down in Chile. Is that true?
BLANTON: We set up the conditions for the coup, and I think that
that‘s well documented because...
MATTHEWS: But did we kill Allende, or did he kill himself?
BLANTON: ... of Clinton‘s declassification...
MATTHEWS: The elected socialist president of Chile back in the
‘70s, did we kill him or did he kill himself?
BLANTON: We don‘t know...
MATTHEWS: The story we put out was that he killed himself.
BLANTON: He may have killed himself, but he killed himself with
people closing in on him with machine guns and tanks blowing up his
palace. And you know, he knew he was going to die.
MATTHEWS: Bob Baer, do you know?
BAER: Henry Kissinger. There‘s the answer.
MATTHEWS: Henry Kissinger killed Allende.
BAER: He set up the conditions. He went to the Army, said, Let‘s
do it.
MATTHEWS: Well, we know we led the coup, but did we kill him?
BAER: No, he killed himself.
MATTHEWS: OK. He killed himself. What do you think, Tyler?
What do you know?
DRUMHELLER: I think he killed himself because he didn‘t want to be
captured by the...
MATTHEWS: OK, the overthrow of the elected government of Iran back
in the ‘50s, did we do that?
BLANTON: Absolutely. But we lucked out.
MATTHEWS: You‘re smiling here about this stuff, Tom!
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I love the way you guys talk about this. We kill guys,
we overthrow governments that are elected freely, we take people
captive. And we call it the family jewels. It‘s all irony, isn‘t
it, with you guys.
BLANTON: Well, no, actually. I like Colby‘s phrase for it. He
called it skeletons in the closet. They keep walking out of the
closet, these skeletons.
BAER: You know it‘s NOT all going to come out. When I was still
in, I ordered a couple of files related to the Kennedy
assassination, 20 volumes in one case. They had disappeared. So
we‘re never going to ever to get to the bottom of it completely.
MATTHEWS: Whoa! Do you believe that there‘s a CIA role in the
Kennedy assassination?
BAER: No, I don‘t, but there are files like that missing, and
we‘ll just never get to the bottom of it. This stuff is
compartmented, black tape, whatever the names are, or sometimes
just thrown away.
MATTHEWS: Is the CIA loyal to America right down the line?
BAER: Absolutely.
MATTHEWS: Are all the agents very patriotic?
DRUMHELLER: Absolutely. Yes.
BLANTON: Absolutely. They do the bidding of the president.
They‘re not a rogue elephant.
MATTHEWS: That‘s what I thought...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: ... it‘s us doing the bad stuff, then, because they‘re
doing it for us.
BLANTON: For the president.
MATTHEWS: For the president. Anyway, thank you. Tyler.
DRUMHELLER: Thank you.
MATTHEWS: You were the most tongue-tied here tonight. These guys
are unbelievable. Bob Baer... You‘re all great tonight. What an
amazing story. I will read every inch of this, and so will
everybody else who‘s been fascinated by the CIA for all these years.
<snip>
MATTHEWS: Robert, I have to ask you about this report that is
coming out from the CIA. We got word they‘re apparently going to
put out all their family jewels, as they call them, all the
mischief the CIA has been up with all the years.
In 1975, the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, told President
Ford quote—“Helms”—that‘s Helms, the head of CIA—“said all these
stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood
will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the
operation on the assassination of Castro.”
Do you have any thoughts on that?
KENNEDY: Well... No, that is completely inconsistent with
everything that has been found.
The Church Committee investigated this for almost a year, and found
out that my father not only had nothing to do with those
assassination attempts, but was furious, and rebuked the CIA when
he found out about it. It was inconsistent with everything else my
father did while he was in office and everything that his aides said.
Richard Helms, this was—was a rogue operator who—and this is what
the Church Committee found out, who had run those operations by
himself.
Now, you know, the quote that you have is a quote that is very self-
serving, a quote by Richard Helms, as well as a quote by Henry
Kissinger.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
KENNEDY: Richard Helms had a very, very antagonistic relationship
with my father. He despised my father. My father did not trust
him. And—and he was a very secretive and a very deceptive man.
And it doesn‘t surprise me that he would say something like this or
that Kissinger would say something like this. But it‘s completely
inconsistent with the facts, as they have been laid out by the
Intelligence Committee and by the aides who watched my father
function during that time. And it‘s inconsistent with everything
he did during, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis...
MATTHEWS: OK.
KENNEDY: ... his concern, his deep concern, that we should be a
moral nation, that we shouldn‘t do anything that would compromise
our moral authority in the eyes of the world.
MATTHEWS: So, he wasn‘t involved with either Mongoose or AMLASH,
either of those operations?
KENNEDY: He found out about them afterwards.
And the way he found out, you know, his aides were present, like
John Seigenthaler and Dick Goodwin, at the time when he walked out
of a meeting with two CIA agents who disclosed that they had tried
to kill Castro using a cigar with a bomb in it. And he was
absolutely furious, and regarded them as kind of crackpots. And he
was very, very angry that they had used the mob, which, of course,
he had a history of antagonism with, in order to further their
operations. He was furious at Helms.
And it doesn‘t surprise me that, after he died, Helms would then
try to connect him to muddy the water. But, you know, the evidence
is this, that Helms really took over the CIA, because he was
instrumental in helping John McCone, who was the CIA director, in
covering up the suicide death of his wife.
And, after that, McCone let him alone, and Helms went off as a
rogue agent with Operation Mongoose and these other operations
designed to murder Fidel Castro, that, when my father found out
about it, that he didn‘t share the information, my father found out
about it through other agents, and went after Helms.
And it doesn‘t surprise me that, after my father died that Helms or
Kissinger would fabricate this kind of thing.
MATTHEWS: OK.
KENNEDY: It‘s inconsistent with everything the Intelligence
Committee found, who investigated it thoroughly.
MATTHEWS: Melanie, what‘s your reaction to the news that the CIA
is going to come out with its family jewels, admitting a role in
overthrowing the elected government in Iran, the overthrow of the
elected government in Chile, trying to knock off Castro, knocking
off Trujillo, the whole thing with Arbenz down in Guatemala?
The whole history of the CIA and those activities are apparently
going to be now admitted to. What do you make of that, in terms of
our history and our values?
MORGAN: Well, what I have to say is, I‘m extremely disappointed
that this information is coming out right now, in the middle of a
hot war, when we have American men and women who are serving in
harm‘s way in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I understand the need for disclosure, and I‘m totally in favor of
that, the more sunlight the better. But I question the timing.
The time looks suspiciously political to me. And I think this is
one of the biggest things that the Bush administration...
MATTHEWS: Why would the CIA want to...
MORGAN: I think this is one of the biggest...
MATTHEWS: Why would the CIA want to mess with the war effort?
MORGAN: I‘m not saying that they want to mess with the war effort.
What I‘m saying is, I think there has been a concerted effort -- a
deep-seated conflict between the CIA and George Bush in the war on
terror. And I think that there is a lot of political motivation
there. And—and I‘m sorry to see it happening right now.
MATTHEWS: By the way, I agree with you on that. I do think there
is an amazing, amazing intramural fight, a civil war almost,
between the CIA and the vice president‘s office and the president‘s
office.
Anyway, thank you, Melanie Morgan.
Thank you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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