The Shadow Warriors
Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983)
The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA)
“helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British intelligence man Hugh Trevor Roper had the temerity to attack the Warren Commission report in the Sunday Times, commission member Allen Dulles turned for advice on what to do to former CIA and OSS man Frank Wisner. Wisner in turn contacted ex-OSS man and former Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, who recommended that since Bernard Levin had just published a piece attacking Trevor Roper, it would therefore not be necessary for Schlesinger himself to produce a rebuttal. But it is difficult to imagine that any other American WW2 agency created a system of intimate contact between people as diverse as Schlesinger, Wisner and Dulles that was capable of such rapid and smooth communication twenty years after the end of the war.” (p. 414)
No comment is necessary, is it?
Flashbacks
Timothy Leary (Heinemann, London 1983)
Most people are not going to regard Leary as a reliable source, but the titbits in this book about his friend Mary Meyer Pinchot are fascinating.
As noted in Lobster 2, p16, Pinchot had an affair with John Kennedy. Following her mysterious death James Angleton (then head of CIA counter intelligence) took responsibility for her diaries. Leary claims that he didn’t know at the time that the person she was referring to in their conversations was Kennedy, nor that her husband had been Cord Meyer, an old enemy of Leary from their student days.
In 1947 Meyer had been President of the United World Federalists, a cold war organisation with internationalist links and right-wing financing. (It contained a lot of Rhodes Scholars.) While in the American Veterans Committee Meyer had spearheaded an anti-red faction which had gained control. In 1951 Meyer joined the CIA, in 1954 becoming head of one of the major operating divisions of the Department of Plans – a cover for covert operations – part of that being the secret funding of liberal foundations and student organisations. When these activities were revealed (via Ramparts magazine) in the 1960s, Meyer was kicked upstairs to become head of the CIA London station.
In the spring of 1962 Mary Pinchot introduced herself to Leary:
“I have this friend who’s a very important man. He’s impressed by what I’ve told him about my own LSD experiences and what other people have told him. He wants to try it himself. So I’m here to learn how to do it. I mean, I don’t want to goof up or something.” (p129)
And then, later:
“It’s time you learned more. The guys who run things – I mean the guys who really run things in Washington – are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control.” (p155)
In May 1963 Pinchot told Leary that her love affair was over. It had been revealed at a party to a room full of reporters but the whole thing was covered over. She was now beginning to worry:
“If you stir up too many waves they’ll shut you down… or worse.” (p163)
Pinchot called Leary on December 1 1963, a few days after the assassination:
“They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast … they’ve covered everything up. I gotta come to see you. I’m afraid. Be careful. ” (p194)
She died on October 13, 1964, shot once in the chest and twice in the left temple as she walked along the Ohio canal towpath near her home in Georgetown. It was 12.45 in the afternoon. A friend of Leary’s was told by a police intelligence officer that a lot of people believed it was an assassination and not a robbery or assault as the police had originally claimed. (p228)
Leary tried to start an investigation but no-one was interested. A criminal lawyer told him:
“That acid must have rotted my brain or else I would understand that nobody wanted this incident investigated.” (p230)
The book Katherine The Great by Deborah Davis (Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1979), which has its own fascinating publishing history, apparently contains material on Pinchot. I haven’t got a copy and would appreciate a copy of the relevant pages if any one out there has a copy at hand.
The Dismissal
The recent series on ITV Channel 4, The Dismissal, was excellent for its reconstruction of the events leading to the downfall of Gough Whitlam’s Australian Government. It didn’t tell the whole story; absent were the intrigues of the CIA which played some part in ‘the loans affair’; and there was no mention of the Pine Gap project at Alice Springs, the public disclosure of which so infuriated Ted Shackley, the CIA’s East Asian chief, that he set in motion a virtual coup d’etat.
Relevant to the Kennedy assassination is the fact that the prime contractor for the Pine Gap base in 1966 was Collins Radio, of Dallas, Texas. At the time Collins described itself as “devoted solely to the design, manufacture, installation and support of electronic equipment.”
Although the Pine Gap project had been set up by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), from the beginning Pine Gap was a CIA operation using the Department of Defence as a cover. Its top personnel were senior CIA officials. (see A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia, by Desmond Ball (Hale and Ironmonger, Sydney 1981)
Throughout the summer of 1962 George de Morenschildt, who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s intelligence ‘babysitter’, visited the home of Admiral Henry C. Bruton. The story was that De M. went there to use the swimming pool, but Bruton’s background is too interesting for that explanation.
Bruton had been a lawyer in Virginia before becoming a submarine commander. Eventually he rose to be Director of Naval Communications. In that capacity he had undertaken to reorganise the global system which the US Navy uses to communicate with and control movements of its submarines, surface ships, airplanes and missiles. (The system is also used to pinpoint the location of enemy vessels.) Bruton had supervised this top secret project until 1960 when he retired from the Navy and joined Collins Radio as Vice-president, where he continued to work on modernising and refining the Navy’s communication system. (see Legend, Edward Jay Epstein, London 1978)
It seems that De Morenschildt tried to get Oswald a job with Bruton. (Legend p183) “(he) claimed to vividly recall once bringing Oswald over to meet Admiral Bruton, and Bruton saying something to the effect of ‘Get this man away from me.'” (Legend p337) Now why should he say that? Oswald, of course, was an ex-marine who had extensive experience of radar, particularly at Atsugi in Japan where he monitored U-2 flights. Maybe he had heard of Oswald’s defection to the USSR, or maybe there’s more to it. Collins Radio had many interesting projects…
In April 1963 it was announced that Collins Radio would construct a modern radio communications system linking Laos, Thailand and South Vietnam. It was to be paid for by ‘US grants and loans (including a $3 million dollar military assistance grant) to Thailand’. (Wall Street Journal 29 April 1963). It had additional important contracts for building high-powered listening posts with intercepts capability in Taiwan. This took place even though Laos was neutral at the time, and the 1962 Geneva Agreement forbade the introduction of war material and technicians into Laos. ‘Yet the US military, using personnel from Collins Radio as a civilian cover, proceeded to build the communications infrastructure for a generalised Indochina war.’ (The Dallas Conspiracy by Peter Dale Scott, unpublished manuscript, Ch 11, p3)
In late August 1963 Collins won an important sub contract from General Dynamics to install high-fidelity radio equipment (at $100,000 per plane) in the extremely controversial TFX fighter. Some of the people involved in this project come into Oswald’s orbit.
On November 1 1963, The New York Times, investigating charges by Fidel Castro, printed a picture of a 174 vessel, The Rex. The NYT learned that the ship had been bought by J.A. Belcher of the Belcher Oil Co. in Miami from a Nicaraguan company, Paragon, owned by the family of the then Nicaraguan dictator, Luis Samoza. In turn Belcher had leased the boat for ‘electronic and oceanographic research to the international division of the Collins Radio company of Dallas’. (NYT 1 November 1963)
This description of elint or electronic intelligence activities (familiar to all who have read about the Pueblo incident off North Korea) suggests that one intelligence activity, elint, – provocative but undoubtedly authorised – had been used as a front for another (gun-running from the US) which had been recently prohibited by the State Department.. the next day, in Havana, a captured exile confessed that he had landed with a boatload of arms in Cuba from a motor launch of the Rex, and that “the CIA organised all arms shipments.” (NYT 3 November 1963 (Peter Dale Scott, Dallas Conspiracy ch 8 p17)
And in one of those coincidences which mark the Kennedy assassination, it seems an employee of Collins Radio, who had a security clearance, was parked in the car park where Oswald allegedly dropped a jacket shortly after the murder of Officer Tippit. (This is in a volume of the House Select Committee on Assassinations but I don’t have the reference at hand. If someone can supply it I would be grateful).
Inside BOSS, South Africa’s Secret Police
Gordon Winter (Penguin, London 1981)
“BOSS assigned me to monitor the activities of Richard Gibson (exposed in 1969 as a CIA agent), who was a talented journalist then representing Negro Press International and ‘Tuesday’ magazine. I discovered that Mr Gibson, born in California in 1931, was an amazing character. He had been involved in anti-Cuba activities in Miami yet had been a member of the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee’ (emphasis added) …. he had been a founding editor of ‘Revolution Africaine’ in 1962, yet was later exposed by its editor-in-chief, Mr Jacques Verges, as ‘agent provocateur’. Mr Gibson then married a white woman in London, had broadcast on the African Service of the BBC, had worked for CBS news in New York and Agence France Presse in Paris as a specialist in African affairs.” (pp431-2)
There were stories, disinformation, linking Oswald to the Miami area and to its Fair Play for Cuba Committee. They came mainly from the Frank Sturgis crowd, so it would be extremely interesting to talk to Mr Gibson. According to Winter he lives in Brussels, Belgium, where he is said to be dying of cancer. (I have been unable to trace him).
In a letter (13 December 1983) Winter wrote:
‘A general (named Walters I seem to remember) masterminded the JFK killing according to BOSS files. It was done to get rid of JFK and bring long-time CIA man Lyndon Johnson to power. (Johnson being named as a top CIA man in Julius Mader’s Who’s Who In The CIA, published by Mader at 69 Mauerstrasse, East Berlin, in about 1968/9).’
He can only be referring to Vernon Walters.
SD
JFK and Patricia Johnson McMillan
For Kennedy assassination buffs Svetlana Alliluyeva’s remarks in the Guardian (17 November 1984) on her reception in the West on defecting are of interest. She says the book she wrote on her arrival was ‘a collective creative production’, the result of her signing a contract with ‘a powerful American law firm with close links to the State Department.’
The point is that the book appeared with Patricia McMillan (nee Johnson) named as ‘translator’ . It was MacMillan who met Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow while ostensibly working there as a journalist. But one unpublished Warren Commission document listed MacMillan as an employee of the State Department at the time, something MacMillan always denied. (See Assassinations London 1978 p262). Svetlana appears to be confirming (albeit indirectly) MacMillan’s role with the State Department.
All of which, in turn, tends to confirm the suspicions that assassination buffs have always had about MacMillan’s relationship with Marina Oswald which resulted in the dreadful and misinforming Marina and Lee (London 1978). Another wrinkle in this is the fact that in the 1950s MacMillan was on the then Senator John Kennedy’s staff as an ‘expert’ on the Soviet Union.
MacMillan’s husband, George MacMillan, is supposed to have spent the last decade writing a book about James Earl Ray, the alleged assassin of Martin Luther King. Someone I know who knew both MacMillans in the States says that MacMillan was obsessed with the idea of the ‘lone assassin’, and that the MacMillans’ ‘marriage’ looked suspiciously like one of convenience, as neither party had anything in common with the other.
RR