Speaker 1: The following presentation is a Del Marvis Studio's production. You're
listening to the Fact Hunter Radio Network.
Speaker 2: Here is your host s George Hobbs.
Speaker 3: Welcome back truth Seekers from around the world. It's time
for another edition of our classic audio series, and tonight
we're going back to nineteen ninety two. It's Colonel L.
Fletcher Prouty and he's discussing the JFK Assassination in America's
clandestine history. It's a really great listener. It runs about
an hour and twenty minutes. You'll truly enjoy this. He
really deep dives into the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War.
Very very good listen. Hey, just a reminder, I'm not
sure if we're going to be having a podcast this week.
It's obviously a truncated week with the holiday Independence Day,
and I hope everybody has a great Independence Day. Please
be safe if you're handling fireworks. If not, we'll see
you the following week. God bless each and every one
of you. Have a great week. And without any further ado,
here is L. Fletcher Prouty.
Speaker 4: Since Oliver Stone's movie has just swept across the country,
we've had so many alternative requests from meetings, and of
course when Stone is traveling, that's where we go. So
last night we were in Cambridge at the John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy Center School.
Speaker 4: Of Government at Harvard, and we had a terrific crowd there.
So the alternative is to try to do the best
we can to send the program out there to our
friends by means of film. And I'm delighted to have
you here, who we're old friends. We understand the subject together,
and we'll try to talk about these important things that
the film is bringing to today. Over ten million people
have already seen JFK by Oliver Stone.
Speaker 5: I know in the JFK film by Oliver Stone, there's
a character portrayed by Donald Sutherland who has a meeting
in Washington.
Speaker 2: D C. With a mister X.
Speaker 5: And I wanted people who've seen the film to realize
that mister X is based on large part, in a
large part, on your career. And I thought i'd let
them know then who mister X is, and who Colonel
Fletcher Prouty is and the work that you've done. And
so I'd like to start by asking you about your
background in the US military. When did you enlist and
what was your training and what duty did you do?
Speaker 2: Did you see combat? What were your jobs in the military.
Speaker 4: When Oliver Stone came to me for Stadium's going to
do the film, he had seen some things I wrote
about my career in the service, and it tied in
rather tightly. But I started before Pearl Harbor in nineteen
forty one as an actual horse cavalryman, which not too
many people today can look back to. And I served
after that when we got rid of the horses in
nineteen forty one, in the tanks, and actually served under
General Abrams, who later became our senior officer in Vietnam.
He was a friend of mine all through my military service.
I already had a flying license, so the Air Force
sent me a letter one day and suggested that I
transfer from the Tank Corps into flying, which I did
very with pleasure. Went to flying school, immediately sent to Africa,
where I served in the Africa Middle East Wing of
the Air Transport Command. One of the jobs I had
there started me in this work that begins to be
interesting as far as clandestine operations are concerned. I was
sent to the Cairo Conference, the conference between Churchill Roosevelt
and Chang Kai Chek from and from there went directly
to the Tehran conference, which was between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
This was the first time they had met together. And
what most people don't know is that Chang Kai Shek,
the Chinese leader, was there also. Now this was November
December of nineteen forty three, and historians have still not
been told that Chang Kai Shek was there.
Speaker 1: How do I know.
Speaker 4: I was the pilot of the plane that flew them
from Cairo to Tehran. Furthermore, in the air at the
same time was a plane flown by a friend of
mine flying Elliott Roosevelt to.
Speaker 1: Tehran.
Speaker 4: After my assignment in the Middle East, I was transferred
to the Pacific and there I flew heavy transports in
a Pacific area until the war ended and rise on Okinawa,
mostly flying patients from that horrible Okinawa campaign back to
hospitals in Hawaii, And one day we heard that the
war had ended. It hadn't surrendered, but the Japanese had quit.
Not long after, the atom bombs were dropped in August
of nineteen forty five, and the unit I was flying
with was asked immediately to start flying into Japan. The
only air base we had not bombed anticipating that we
might need one when we went in there was at
Atsugi at Sugi, and you will recall rings a bell
with our good friend Lee Harvey Oswald because he was
based at Atsugi. Most people probably don't realize that that
was a major Japanese headquarters all underground. What was above
ground were just runways and a few little hangars that
had been all shot up. But later it became a
major headquarters for CIA in the Far East, and that's
why Oswald was there as a marine augmenting the CIA's.
Speaker 1: Capabilities.
Speaker 4: There was another one of these coincidences in my career
that became useful later because I knew the base pretty well,
I never met Oswald there. I was finishing up some
of that flying. The surrender had taken place on board
the Missouri, and I went back to Okinawa after one flight.
Some of my men needed uniforms, so I went down
to harbor. A very odd thing was happening. Okinawa was
loaded with.
Speaker 1: Equipment, stacked up three or four pallets high.
Speaker 4: Because we had intended to invade Japan with five hundred
thousand men and the invasion didn't come off. So I
saw this stuff being reloaded onto these American ships and
I asked the harbor masterress, is that going back to
the States. He said, hell, no, they never want to
see all these tanks and guns and ambulances, one hundred
and five millimeters, horses and all the rest of the stuff.
He said, we're shipping this to Hanoi. And at that
time Hanoi didn't ring too many bells with me. I
knew where it was, but it was not part of
the war as far as we were concerned. And he said,
that's half of it. The other half is going to
Korea and believe it or not, back there. With the
end of World War two, somebody had made plans to
provide the enormous stockpile of modern arms and equipment to
Singminry in Korea and actually to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi,
and Ho Chi Minh in those days was accompanied by
an American Army general named Gallagher and an oss man
named Coneen, who would be both became famous later in
the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: So you see, acting.
Speaker 4: As no more than an ordinary pilot, doing my job,
but getting some rather unusual assignments you begin to acquire
a little information.
Speaker 1: It doesn't show up in history books.
Speaker 4: Who was it that, ever, looking ahead that far ordered
the movement of that enormous stock pile of equipment.
Speaker 1: Specifically to Seul, Korea and to Hanoi in Vietnam.
Speaker 4: While I was doing that, flying between Okinawa and Japan,
I received orders from the Army to report to Yale University.
The Air Force had never had a ROTC program because
always was part of the Army program. But the Air
Force was being made independent and we had to start
the program in a some one hundred and sixty six
colleges around the country, and three of us were sent
to Yale to open the program.
Speaker 1: At Yale.
Speaker 4: I taught there for three years, incidentally, the same three
years that George Bush was an undergraduate there, and Bill
Buckley and others who have become rather well known. And
because when you start you don't have the equipment that
ordinarily a program would have, we had to write textbooks,
and I was selected to write textbooks. Go to New
York City and work in a studio there, and I
wrote the Air Force's textbook on aeronautics that were distributed
all the RTC colleges, and as soon as that was done,
I was asked to write the textbook on missiles and rockets,
because we were.
Speaker 1: Just getting into that business.
Speaker 4: And it's a pleasure to be asked to write a
book for the military, because the orders say, go anywhere,
visit anyone, any factory, any university, and write the best
book you can well.
Speaker 1: Magnificent orders.
Speaker 4: One of the people I went to see was Verna
von Braun, who built the Apollo ship that went to
the Moon and who had been with the Germans in Pinamunda,
you know, building the V two weapon in Germany. A
terrific man. And I remember well von Braun talking with me,
and I asked, I said, how do you intend to
move a rocket from the Earth to the Moon. Do
you just aim like a somebody shooting a pigeon And
he laughed, No, We put it in orbit around the
Earth and then the orbit will spin it off and
it will go to the Moon where it will go
in orbit there and then we'll have a land there.
Speaker 1: And you know the story.
Speaker 4: But here he was talking to me in nineteen forty
nine saying what he was going to do in what
nineteen sixty nine. I've always thought that was one of
the most important forecasts I ever heard, and I wrote
it up in the book.
Speaker 1: That we produced.
Speaker 4: After writing those books, I was ordered to Colorado Springs
because by that time the threat of Soviet attack on
the United States had increased so much that we had
to modernize our radar system and we set up the
big Norad Air Defense Command business and I stayed there
for a year when the Korean War broke out and
I was transferred them to Tokyo. Back there and I
became the manager of the Tokyo International Airport because while
we were as an occupation force in Japan, we ran
the country, and the Japanese were trying to rebuild after
the horrible war. I never saw anything worse than Tokyo
at the end of the war.
Speaker 1: It was so bad.
Speaker 4: You could walk on a street and look across blocks
of Tokyo and see nothing that would interfere with the
trolley cars driving down the street. Even the ruins of
the buildings were flat on the ground.
Speaker 1: I saw.
Speaker 4: Cities in the Soviet Union when I was flying in
the Soviet Union nineteen forty four for the US Air
Force that were destroyed, but nothing like Tokyo. On our
first flight up there, we saw Horoshiman that too was
pretty bad in this Korean War period. I after when
we turned the airport back to the Japanese, I was
made commander of a heavy transport squad and our regular
duties were to fly to Southeast Asia and in the Philippines.
In fifty two and fifty three, we were working to
change the government there and the man that was leading
that as a covert activity was a man.
Speaker 1: Named Edward G.
Speaker 4: Lansdale who became well known later on, and we were
flying supplies to him while he was building up his
covert Filipino Army under the leadership of Ramon Magsaysai. He
succeeded in changing that government. Quirino had been the leader
of the government, and he moved his people over the
Saigon Military Mission created by CIA into Vietnam, and my
job for flying included Saigon and Bangkok actually all the
way to Saudi Arabia across South Asia, so we were
in and out of those cities all that time until
nineteen fifty five. I was given orders to go back
to the United States. I went to the Armed Forces
Staff College, which is run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and from there was brought into the Pentagon. In nineteen
fifty five, under Eisenhower, the National Security Council had published
a very important directive that defined covert operations, and in
the process the decision had been made that whenever the
CIA was going to perform a covert operation, rather than
duplicate equipment and bases and ships and aircraft, they would
turn to the Air Force, to the military and get
equipment and use military equipment to the extent possible for
the covert operation. So this meant that the services had
to create an organization, a global organization, to be ready
at any moment to provide this, to do it in
great secret, so the money would never be short. We
always charge the money to a special fund and run
it in such a way that the agency could deny
or plausibly disclaim, as the words in the law say
that the United States had anything to do with it. Well,
this is pretty new in nineteen fifty five. In fact,
I had to create the office, and I became the
Chief of Special Operations for the Air Force, and I
stayed in that business for five years.
Speaker 1: It could be quite a story, but we'll skip that.
Speaker 4: At the end of that I was transferred to work
with the Office of the Secretary of Defense in an
office called Office of Special Operations. From that point we
had all the services under this one office, and again
I was back in an office with at Lansdale. By
that time, Lansdale, an Air Force officer in uniform but
a career CIA man was in the Pentagon directing what
later became Special Forces and things like that. As that
developed through the military. With the election of Kennedy, macnamara
chose to disband that office and at the same time
replace part of it with THEDIA, a new organization, Defense
Intelligence Agency. So he created that and put it under
General Carroll and called me in one day and he said,
you've been in this business now for seven years. You
know all the people involved. You know already know the
agency people. You don't have to open up any new contacts.
You know the agency's global organization. You go down to
the Joint Chief of Staff and set up an office
there to handle all the military sport for all the
services around the world for the CIA. Well, this coincided
with the Kennedy administration, and I was there until Kennedy
died in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: I retired.
Speaker 4: Well, this background information I wrote in a book called
The Secret Team, and I wrote many articles about it later.
And Oliver Stone, when he was thinking of about doing
the Kennedy Murder, began to realize that the question about
Kennedy's murder is not limited to.
Speaker 1: Who shot him, but why was he shot?
Speaker 4: If there's a lone gunman, you don't have to ask
that question, because a lone gunman could have been an oddball,
as they say, a loan nut. But if it's a conspiracy,
and most of the people in this country now believe
firmly that there was a major conspiracy involved in that,
then you can't help facing the issue why was President
Kennedy killed? And Stone thought that was important enough to
build on the Garrison book, which is probably one of
the best books written on a subject about his trial
and all of the antecedents to that, but to include
also the man X role. And that's how I backed
into his film. See, he needed somebody to build it
on who knew the other side of what was going
on in Washington at that time. I didn't know he
had made man X until I saw the script some
months later, but it was one way to present as
he does the drama of that event, and of course, John,
you're very familiar with that.
Speaker 5: When you were providing a military personnel, material and support
for these covert operations around the world, what did you
see as their purpose or was that a question that
you asked.
Speaker 1: John?
Speaker 4: I know you read my book, and I think this
was at the heart of it. Having worked with the
agency for nine years, actually longer because it went back
into the forties, I came to a personal conclusion, but
I think I had the professional experience to come to
this conclusion that most of the covert operations run by
this government. And at that point you have to enlarge
CIA because, as I explained, the militaries in there, and
if we need other departments like Treasury or FA because
of airplanes or something. It's a government project, but it
originates in the other country like Indonesia or the Congo,
wherever you're working, it originates there, and that the covert
operation really is a reaction.
Speaker 1: To something learned in the foreign country.
Speaker 4: It's very important philosophically because you can't say really that
it was a United States government plan. Now, if the
CIA puts on its intelligence hat and is studying intelligence
in Africa or some other place in the Middle East,
and they come up with a need for secret intelligence,
they actually run that with a different network because it
usually doesn't require guns or anything. It's just secret intelligence.
The distinction is not realized by too many people. But
when you talk about the covert operations, you are talking
about something that, in my opinion, with that much experience,
is a reaction to something that started outside this country.
There aren't too many that were designated here. The order
is to assassinate the leader of the congo originated here,
but that's pretty rare.
Speaker 5: I know that in much of your writing you make
a distinction between the type of involvement that you had
in World War Two, for instance, and these later wars.
And I'm wondering, especially in the post war period after
World War Two, whether you see warfare now as a
sort of different element. What are the hower wars planned
or what are the purposes of wars in the modern world.
Speaker 4: This is something that I'm really rather surprised at the
Society of Historians. I'm a very active member in the
soety Society Historians for American Foreign Relations. Thousands and thousands
of men, mostly college professors, even thoughlitary writers seem to
overlook this. The impact of the hydrogen bomb more than
the atomic bomb. But the hydrogen bomb is so enormous,
the new bomb fishing, fusion fishing, all happening in a
split second is so enormous.
Speaker 1: You can't plan a war.
Speaker 4: It's ridiculous because, for one thing, wars for the most part,
are started by people who have an interest in the
war and who presume they're going to outlive the war,
as the leaders of Germany and France and England and
Russia did during World War Two. In the United States,
now you can't no place to hide, you know, no
place to hide is pretty true in the hydrogen bomb era.
So in war planning we used to do very formal
war planning. We cut the Soviet Union up into sections
and safe we have to go with the Soviet Union
as we did in.
Speaker 1: World War Two.
Speaker 4: We'd invade here, we would go in by Murmansk, we'd
go in by the Caspiancy with the first exchange being
in these super nuclear weapons. It's a new kind of war.
And this is why we couldn't solve the war situation
in Korea, because if we turned the hydrogen bombs in Korea,
what would be there or it would be worth fighting
a bunch of holes in the ground and then radioactive
for how many years? Eighty years, one hundred years, And
the same in Vietnam. When generals in charge of the
military in Vietnam would want to attack, you know, thinking
Hanoi is the objective. Like General Patten attacking across France,
across Germany, shaking hands with the Russians.
Speaker 1: He knew what he was doing. That's war.
Speaker 4: But in Vietnam, the generals were told, you hold that
area and you don't attack, you don't use nuclear weapons.
We're not going into that super war business. This is
the problem today and this is what puts the emphasis
on the covert wars. They're trying to find a new
kind of thing by the attack in Panama, Granada, Iraq.
But just look back, I mean what they accomplish. You know,
you can destroy people and you can destroy cities, but
not what they did accomplish. Really, So your question is
very basic and it shows why this government and other
governments are emphasizing the requirement for COVID activities.
Speaker 5: I know you've worked more recently on a book specifically
about the Vietnam war called the Saigon Solution. And I
know that you knew many of the people through your
work in these support capacities that were part of the
carrying out that war, and I thought you might want
to talk a little bit about why you felt Vietnam
began and how Vietnam ended.
Speaker 4: One of the most momentous decisions in the early part
of the Vietnam War. And I hate to say war
in the beginning, because it started in the Vietnam War
really started on September second, nineteen forty five, when Ho
Chi Minh got up on a platform Hanoi and read
the Declaration of the Independence of Vietnam, written almost the
same as our own declaration. And on one side was
a US Army major general named Gallagher, and on the
other side, as I said earlier, an OSS man named Conin,
and we're supplying his weapons. But the objective then was
to round up the Japanese and get the Japanese residual,
the remaining forces out of Vietnam. And the plan was
and that the British would move in and gradually bring
order to Vietnam, hoping to keep the French out because
the Tehran Conference and earlier conference had ruled against the
continuation of colonialism.
Speaker 1: It didn't work.
Speaker 4: The French got back in, so we switched our support
from Ho Chi Minh to the French and we began
to fight the man we supported. And when the French
were defeated at Diimvanfu, they were defeated with American weapons.
Speaker 1: Which a lot of people would know but haven't thought
much about it. See.
Speaker 4: So the decisions to do this were done covertly, and
the CIA brought people in and what was called the
Saigon Military Mission. It was not very often in Saigon,
it was not military, and it had more to do
with the Vietnam War probably than anything else. And that
mission was headed by Edward G. Lansdale as a colonel
in those days, with many others whose names we've heard
throughout the period of Vietnam War without realizing the enormously
important role that they played. When that mission was established
in nineteen fifty four, our troops didn't land in Vietnam
till sixty five, so it was all a CIA operation
from fifty four to sixty five.
Speaker 2: Who were some of these people, Well, he's.
Speaker 4: Closest man, of course, was Conein, and then Bohannon Bohannon
was an army officer, I believe in those days, Lieutenant
colonel and Arthur Arundel, but he was on what we
would call the psychological warfare, the civil affairs psychological warfare,
side Phillips, Michael Hand and some of these names we've heard.
Michael Hann, for instance, the years later kind of left
the CIA and with an Australian named Frank Nougan started
the Neugan Hand Bank. So much money was being made
illegally in Vietnam, they couldn't all be sent home, so
they had to put it somewhere. They put it in
this Australian bank. The bank had over a billion dollars
when the United States had only about fifteen billion dollar
banks in the country. And here this bank just grew
up out of Vietnam with a billion dollars. Well, the
man running it then half of it anyway, it was
Michael Hand. So you see the roles that worked themselves
through the structure of what we call the Vietnam War
were some of them rather interesting.
Speaker 5: You mentioned the role of General Edward Lansdale in the
Philippines and in an operation there that had to do
with overthrowing the government and involvement with the Hucks, these people,
I assume whom were also key characters in other similar
operations like the Bay of Pigs.
Speaker 4: Yes, when the Bey of Pigs was being planned, one
of the biggest problems was to try to stay within
the Cuban exile community, but there were no trained leaders
within that community that we could trust. The leadership work too,
Manuel our Teama was probably as close as we came
to a real good military leader. So the agency, using
Lansdale's contacts, brought people in from around the world, but
a good number of them from Manila. Like Valeriano was
actually macis size deputy when he was President of the
Philippines for special forces type work, or they call civil
action work. He came over and helped work on the
Beya Pigs program along with others. The Bea Pigs program
was a lot more involved than we ever got a
chance to see because of the unfortunate failure to.
Speaker 1: Do it properly.
Speaker 4: It had been pretty well carried out, and the air
support was a function, and I mean more or less
just the air transport air power drop support, not military type,
was a function of the CIA's big proprietary airline known
as KAT or Civil Air Transport or the Pacific Corporation,
things like that. Their forces were all brought in for this.
We created a special modification of the B twenty six
bomber for the Bay of Pigs operation, and had we
been able to use it there, it would have done
a most effective job.
Speaker 5: You know, some of the people like Richard Bissell and
Charles Cabell and Alan Dulles seemed to follow through that
history as well as later into into Vietnam, people like
lu Kneen who you've mentioned. These were all in a
circle either above or below Lansdale's position who was calling
the shots in this group.
Speaker 4: This is interesting in coverorate activities you develop the skills
of people by function, not by geography. In the intelligence business,
you try to keep people on a certain section of
the map so that they know the geography, so they
know the political situation, in the economic situation.
Speaker 1: But in coored.
Speaker 4: Activities it's not unusual to be using a man in
the congo and his team trained team, and even if
it involves other nationals. We use, for instance, Polish exiles
widely and you work them into teams. And then when
you have the Indonesian rebellion, you move some of the
same people in Frank Wisner, the old oss hand who
was in Bucharest, Romania during World War Two, became the
leader of the Indonesian program.
Speaker 1: So your observation is correct.
Speaker 4: And Lansdale, of course, being really the legendary prime man
in this business, was involved in many of these things,
especially in a Pacific area.
Speaker 5: This work included, I assume, also assassinations of government leaders
or particular individuals. When did you begin to think that
the assassination of President Kennedy might have fit this same mold.
Speaker 4: I had known through experience that assassinations were called for
in certain activities, usually as a fallback. You know, if
you can talk a guy into leaving, you do it.
But if it doesn't work, or if the other people
in the country can't work with the man, even in
a compromise situation, the decision is made that there must
be an assassination. And during the nineteen seventy six hearings
under the Church Committee and the Senate, this was finally revealed.
Even though the agency tried to overlook the situation, it
never hit me more strongly than early in Kennedy's administration,
when a major general, and I knew very well. Air
Force officer came back from a meeting in the White House,
and as he went by the door of my office,
which was just crossed the hall from his, he said, prouding,
go down to personnel and get me retirement papers right now.
So I went down to personally got him retirement paper.
There was a man that might have been Chief of
Staff the Air Force, very well known general. So as
I brought the papers in, what's the matter, General? He said,
I can't agree with it. He said, we're sitting in
a White House. We're talking about a certain program.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 4: The man that they're talking about is as any Communist
as anyone in the world. Although they have certain arguments
against this man, and they're going to remove him, and
they can't remove him peacefully.
Speaker 1: He won't go They're going to kill him. So I'm quitting.
Speaker 4: I won't go through this, and he walked out of
the Air Force that afternoon. Well, obviously that was a
lesson to me because I had not been personally in
that kind of situation. Although I had provided aircraft for
teams that were going for these jobs, I didn't ever
see it that close as when that man told me
what they had decided. Next morning I read in the
paper that the man was dead. The man on the
head of the country put it together. You know all
you need to know about assassinations.
Speaker 5: Did did you have a sense at the time that
you resigned in nineteen sixty four that the murder of
Kennedy was suspicious in some.
Speaker 4: Way by that time, in fact, within days, I was
positive of it.
Speaker 1: There were so many things not done.
Speaker 4: The secret of an assassination plan is to remove the protection.
If you've been living in a neighborhood where you think
having a big german shepherd dog is necessary for your safety,
and if that dog is gone, somebody come in a
house because the dog's gone, They won't come.
Speaker 1: When the dog's there.
Speaker 4: See, if you remove the protection, you're going to have
somebody assassinated. And it was evident in the area of
Dallas that the Secret Service coverage either didn't exist, was
at a minimum, and that the normal military augmentation of
Secret Service coverage had not even taken place. And although
I happened to be in New Zealand on the day
President Kennedy was killed, and I was having breakfast with
a congressman from the United States. We heard on the
radio that the president was shot dead, and as soon
as we could, we went out on the street and
bought a newspaper from a man selling extras. And I
saw a picture on the front page of the paper
of that Texas school book building, which I'm sure had
to have been taken, you know, right away, and photocopy
even sent around the world, and windows were open. And
I turned to the congressman, so you know, something is
seriously wrong. The Secret Service closes windows. The military, you
have plenty of people close the windows and put stickers
on them. Don't open the window till a president goes by.
And then you put a man outside with a radio
and he looks at the village just to glance at
the building.
Speaker 1: He knows the windows are closed. Everything's all right.
Speaker 4: But if a window opens, he gets on the radio.
There's a man up on a roof with a sniper
gun watching, and other men come through the hall, go
and see why the window was open, and shut it.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's protection. You got to keep the president alive.
Speaker 4: You're not going to take the bubbletop off his You're
not going to put him in a car that is armored.
The Secret Service didn't use an armored car. If the
bubble had been on it anyway, it was nothing. It
wouldn't have stopped ble jay Ed Hoover made a report
to Johnson on that. He said that bubbletop, whether it
was on or not, didn't make any difference.
Speaker 1: It was worthless. He said, I wouldn't ride that car
across the street.
Speaker 4: So we noticed immediately, just being off in New Zealand
in this paper things that when I got back to Washington,
I found out there's no way in the world that
the president had been protected properly.
Speaker 1: Well, that can't happen.
Speaker 4: You trained thousands of military men to do the job.
They're going to do the job. That's their business. You
train Secret servicemen year in and year out to do
the job.
Speaker 1: They're going to do it.
Speaker 4: But I called one of the military units to talk
to a friend of mine because I had worked on
that kind of business. And he said, you know, somebody
called my colonel and said we don't need your unit
in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 4: He wasn't too shocked, although he was only in San
Antonio and could have come up easy, because he figured
they were going to put another unit in Dallas and
you know, it wasn't his job. He'd stay there. He
found out afterwards that they didn't. Well, then who called?
Who knew ahead of time for reasons of the assassin's
point of view, not to have that military unit there.
Speaker 1: You know, it would have.
Speaker 4: To know code words, he would have to know all
the secrets of how this thing is done. And I've
done that. I've gone to Mexico City when Eisenhewer went
down there preparing the road for our military units, the
augmented Secret Service. In Mexico City, we use extreme caution.
It took weeks, and then Eisenhower to casually walk down Albanda, the.
Speaker 1: Main street in the middle of town, and he's safe.
At least he's as safe as you can make it.
Speaker 4: Well, that didn't happen, and you could see that right
away in that first newspaper. And then when I got
back to my office with the JCS, and I had
other resources to check other things. By the time I retired,
and it wasn't just because of that, I had already
arranged job, but it was pretty much my whole idea
of what I was doing came to an end right there.
Nine years was enough, and I had no doubts that
the murder was a carefully planned job, and that Oswald
was a patsy, no question about it, and that the
murderers were professionals that I knew existed because Lyndon Johnson himself,
before he died, said, we operate a murder incorporated, meaning
we operate people who can murder, but incorporated that means
in perpetuity. A business that is incorporated means perpetual. He
further said, I believe there was a conspiracy, and he said,
I believe that Oswald did not do it himself. Those
are printed words that are available anybody wants to go
to the library. So you know, there were no doubts
in my mind, and I think thousands of other people
could see that also.
Speaker 5: I know in my own research I noticed similar things.
For instance, the decision to take the double turn from
Main Street to Houston and Elm that slowed the car
down considerably.
Speaker 2: And the completely.
Speaker 5: Wrong reaction to the Secret Service driver on hearing the
first of the gunfire to hit the brake instead of
the gas, making it possible for an assassin to take
a closer aim rather than both those things slowed the
car down and made the assassination an easier hit or
more possible, and there were other indications in that direction.
Speaker 2: But beyond that, many unusual.
Speaker 5: Things happened that day, November twenty second, at levels even
above the planning in Dealey Plaza that led me to
think that this had to have been orchestrated in a
military fashion, as a coup d'etais on the highest level.
You know the story well about my mother in the
Pentagon knowing that the plans about Vietnam were reversed immediately.
I also, in my work with enlisted people during the
Vietnam War, talked to Strategic Air Command bomber pilots at
Right Patterson Air Force Base who were in the air
that hour and told me that when they heard the
news that Kennedy had been shot, they raced for their codebooks,
the books and special lockers that linked them to the
cryptic codes from the White House command rooms or the
different command control centers, or the President himself that would
have allowed them to participate in a nuclear or national
emergency response. In each of the planes in the air
that hour, they told me no code books were to
be had. The lockers were empty. That's reported also for
Air Force one by per Salinger. We have reports that
the entire communication grid in the federal offices went down
for a period of an hour and a half to
two hours at the time Kennedy was shot. And I
wondered if your work, and looking at it from your angle,
you saw things that made you feel that this had
to have been more than just the security being withdrawn,
but an operation planned at the top.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I think I've told you, John, I
was aware of your mother's rule that the work she
did was just not too far down the hall from
where I worked. I didn't know her, but I have
you know, we knew that they were doing that planning
because every time something would change in the war planning,
it was reflected in a joint chief of staff, of course,
and we knew there were changes because Kennedy was telling
people to come home, and all of a sudden the
word went out to build a force up. Something changed drastically.
And the other side of it is I have never
been able to find out why, or to even find
a rational idea in my own mind, why the Kennedy
cabinet was on the way to Tokyo at the time
he was killed. I don't know of any time when
most of the cabinet for any president was going any
further than across the river.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: Here they all were on an airplane on the way
from Honolulu to Tokyo. When they hear about the president
being shot, that's quite unusual. Or even the little line
in the Pentagon papers that says so much Ambassador Lodge,
who had come from Saigon to the meeting in Honolulu
before a large staff, which is a customary thing, including
these cabinet officers. Then it said on the twenty second
of November, Ambassador Lodge flew to Washington to speak to
the president. Didn't say which president, because by the time
they wrote the Pentagon Papers, they knew President Kennedy had died.
Speaker 1: Why couldn't they.
Speaker 4: Find a little bit of space to put in President
Johnson because that's the day Kennedy died or some they
go on for pages after that never mentioned Kennedy's name.
Speaker 1: Although it was the doing.
Speaker 4: I mean, why are people playing with the record like that,
see or why are they playing with the protection system
in Dallas? And what's motivating the Strategic Air Command to
do what it did. If people want to say that
Castro or the mafia or Krutchev or anybody had the
power to do that sort of thing. They're really not
thinking clearly about what this assassination was. It was a
major controlled kudatta that was absolutely effective because if Oswald
had any role at all, and he had been with
the CIA, and I can tell you clearly that a
marine assigned to Atsugi was a selected CIA man, a
marine that can get out of his service and go
to Russia and live for eighteen months and then go
back to the American embassy and say I've decided not
to leave the country. I'm going to go back to
the States, and they give him this passport and then
the money to go back with his wife and child
came from the State Department.
Speaker 1: They paid his way back. I mean, you know what's
going on. So there is so much.
Speaker 4: Of a fabric of this assassination, as you're pointing out
that really the hardest thing for me to see is
why the Warrant Commission had the temerity to even publish
that document. I mean, the Chief Justices Supreme Court is
putting his name to a document that I can't believe
he didn't know what was wrong. Along with all the
others It's just unbelievable. Where did that pressure come from.
How do you tell us Supreme Court justice what.
Speaker 1: He's going to do.
Speaker 4: You can't do it by walking into the court with
a staff of lawyers.
Speaker 1: He'll tell you what to do.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: My mother, who was in the Deputy chief of Staff's
Officer personnel, was planning manpower analysis and national draft call
figures five years in advance, and knew that there were
plans to withdraw the troops from Vietnam. And I know
that you were in meetings in that period at the
end of the Kennedy administration where those plans were being discussed,
and that there were national security memoranda developed about it.
There's quite a bit of controversy now in the press,
and many claims that this is this is a sort
of absurd motive that Stone has given or a fanciful idea.
And I wondered if you could speak to whether or
not you feel from your experience there and what evidence
you had at the time, that in fact Kennedy would
have pulled out of Vietnam entirely.
Speaker 4: This has been one of the surprises of my work
with the film. You see, I was familiar with this
national Security Action Memorandum number two sixty three, which was
dated October eleventh, nineteen sixty three. The principle finding of
that memorandum was that Kennedy was going to bring all
US personnel. Didn't say Military, didn't say CIA, didn't say
State Department, All US personnel out of Vietnam by the
end of fifty five. The next day the World Around
printed US Stars and Strike's paper that's for the military.
That was a headline, All Americans out by sixty five.
You know, it was not a secret, it wasn't casual.
It was a major importance. And yet some of these
writers who have attacked Stone for the veracity of his film,
I don't know better. It's a public document. But more
than that, I have a government printing Office book. Of
course I have my own records too, because I was
working on these papers that was printed in nineteen ninety
one current and it shows clearly in the period from
August to November nineteen sixty three that there were more
than fifty meetings that were attended by Kennedy, Rusk McNamara,
and Maxwell Taylor. Sometimes Kennedy might not have been there,
but then he'd be represented by either Bundy or somebody
else like that.
Speaker 1: And my boss.
Speaker 4: My boss is referenced in every one of those meetings,
General Krulac, And when General Krulak would come back from
those meetings, the usual thing was to call to us,
one or two or three of us there, here's what
happened today. Here's what we've got to do from our
You research this. You research this, will put it together
for tomorrow when you go back to the meeting. We had
all this material fund and we worked intensively on this
program for that period August until November. It was not
a casual program. We had access in my part, I
had access to CIA, the other part of the staff
had access to NSA. We had access to the money crowd.
We would be up on Congress on Capitol Hill. It
was a completely controlled effort by the President. He sat
there running these committee. Was not some thing held like
the Iran Contra hearings by somebody brought in for the job.
Speaker 1: The President was running. So anybody that wants.
Speaker 4: To say that the film over emphasizes the significance of
that paper and Kennedy's intent thoroughly to get Americans out
of Vietnam, it doesn't understand history and he didn't say
he was going to leave Vietnam high and dry. There's
more to it. He said he was going to build
Vietnamese forces. He was going to supply them.
Speaker 1: What they needed.
Speaker 4: You're going to pump money into Vietnam, but American troops.
And in nineteen sixty three, for those who haven't looked
at their history carefully, no American military people were operating
in Vietnam under military commanders. They were all assigned to
a structure that was under CIA operational control. Now there's
a big difference between American troops under CIA control or
troops under their own commanders. They didn't have that situation,
a real wartime situation, until the invasion in early nineteen
sixty five, after Johnson had completely turned Kennedy's plans around.
So the importance of that document is enormous, but it
wasn't the original one. It started back in nineteen sixty one,
in July with another document, number fifty five that I
won't go into, but historians should because they can't understand
how this other document came unless you know that for
two years that planning was going on, and it would
have continued on into after Kennedy's real life action into
his second term. We'd have been out of Vietnam. They
wouldn't have been a war in Vietnam.
Speaker 5: That turnaround that Johnson presided over, I know, was at
least at the planning stage by the Monday following the
Kennedy assassination, when my mother was given figures by the
Joint Chiefs to plan for a ten year war and
fifty seven thousand.
Speaker 1: Dead ahead of time.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was on November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty three.
She was given those figures.
Speaker 1: They were accurate. Weren't they just planning for how many?
Speaker 2: Ten year war? And fifty seven thousand dead right on target?
Speaker 1: Had we lost fifty eight?
Speaker 2: Yes, fifty seven five or fifty eight?
Speaker 1: It's amazing see.
Speaker 5: And so it wasn't, I think, just a reversal of policy.
It was really a leap forward, a complete conceptual change,
it seems to me.
Speaker 2: In the way that we would be carried out.
Speaker 4: There was a document in draft form written strangely enough,
on November twenty first of nineteen sixty three, and the
draft form of the document that President Johnson signed on
the twenty sixth of November is called National Security Action
number two seventy three. But the draft is interesting because
there doesn't seem to be in the government documents any
of the detail that we have on the two sixty three.
This just appeared by itself, they claim as a result
of this Honolulu conference that was so strange. And yet
there's a major change in the philosophy of the Kennedy
papers as it sort of swings over into the Johnson era.
But that was written before Kennedy died, dated November twenty first,
was just a draft, but it was dated November twenty first.
Mister Bundy, who was in the White House at that time,
sent that draft, and he may have been the originator
of that draft, according to what we hear to his
brother William Bundy, who was in the Defense Department with us,
with the note on it that I have worked on this.
Would you read it, see what you think about it,
and show it to mac.
Speaker 1: Well. The interesting thing is.
Speaker 4: If you read Arthur Schlessinger or any of the others
who were involved in this Honolulu conference, that McGeorge Bundy,
the author of the draft, and mister McNamara came back
from Honolulu on the same plane, flying.
Speaker 1: Practically all day.
Speaker 4: Although says they left at night, although you know, flying
together for many, many hours on the plane, what was
to stop mister Bundy from showing it to mister mcmack
while they were flying They were right there together. So
there's enough there to present the feeling that somehow, somebody
knew things were going to change within the next.
Speaker 1: Couple of days.
Speaker 4: It's like Lodge's trip to talk with the president? Which presidents?
These are fascinating little details from the manpower viewpoint of
your mother's work to these others, and none of them
have been answered, none are adequately answered.
Speaker 5: Do you have a sense you mentioned Oswald and his
defense action in the Soviet Union and strange circumstances under
which he would return. Do you have a sense from
your work in support of the intelligence community how a
patsy like this could be set up? Are there pools
of such characters doubles, cutouts? I mean, how is something
like this done? Where they chosen from and to what
extent do you think Oswald meets that pattern? Also, who
do you think set Oswald up? In my work the
role of George de Mornshield Ruth and Michael Paine, who
are depicted as the Williams in Stones movie were central
to moving Oswald in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Who he knew, where he went.
Speaker 5: All the jobs that Oswald had seemed to have intelligence connections,
and he seemed to be somebody that just was taking
orders until he got to the position where he realized
where the orders were leading him.
Speaker 4: I have no difficulty in seeing Oswald through his brief
career as a CIA man, from his marine work to
going to Russia, coming back.
Speaker 1: To Dallas where instead of meeting.
Speaker 4: Marxist Russians he met Demornshield and these other throwback to
the white Russians, you know, the anti Marxist Russian bullet
And why did that community pick him up if he
had proclaimed himself a Marxist and then this unusual occurrence
that he was just happened to have this job in
the school Depository building only two weeks before the President's
car was set to go by. That's the typical leading
role that you use an agent for. You move him
into things so that when it's something is needed. Why
did he work with a photography company that was doing
highly classified army photography work. How did he get into
those things if he wasn't right in the middle of
intelligence work. I have no problem, and I mentioned Matsugi. No,
he wouldn't have been at at Sugi if he wasn't
in this kind of work. And then with the assassination,
I would say that his role, he probably didn't know this,
was to provide for the mechanics two men or three
men the positioning they needed for the little structural work
they do before they fire their guns, like maybe the
week before. And then like the old pirate, after he's
raided the ship, he goes and buries his gold on
the desert island and he has these.
Speaker 1: People dig a big deep hole and throw the gold
in there.
Speaker 4: What does he do First he shoots them, drops them
in with the gold, and then nobody.
Speaker 1: Tells where the gold is. See.
Speaker 4: So you have to get rid of Oswald. Not because
he was a killer of Kennedy. That wasn't what Ruby's
job was. To keep his mouth quiet. That's a little fantasy,
But how else could his role have come around to that?
And it fits the pattern because the mechanics are not
from this country and they need somebody that can get
him into the dial text building of Devodsbury, building up
on a grassyo or wherever they were. You know, they
can't do that by themselves. They can't ask a policeman
for that, for the help, and that man is going
to be removed. That's where the pats he comes in.
Speaker 5: Were some of the people who carried on these earlier
historical operations than in a position to run this operation
at the ground level in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Who was in Dealey Plaza?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you would never know because the coding won't permit
face to face. You'll remember in Oliver Stone's movie where
he's using dramatic license, but you only see a man
on the phone in profile and he's answering a few
questions and he just simply says yes. Now he would
have received that call by code, It wouldn't have been
John Judge calling Fletch Browdy, you know, And then he
would know that he will receive orders again coded because
he has to call somebody to have these people get
down in the Dallas. They're not in this country. Well,
when you do that, I mean there is no way
you are ever going to run it backwards. And I
don't care if they release all the files that have
ever been buried, they aren't going to reveal that because
it's gone, Nor will it ever reveal who made that
first call to this contact man who knows the codes,
they can put everything else in motion, because that's all
he's going to say is you know when I make
those calls, I know three other people were called. And
I don't think the people I called were the ones involved.
My men were going to go to China and shoot somebody.
See it's like the old mafia system that they want
me to shoot you, but we do it with four people,
and you give four guns but only three bullets. And
of course I had the blank, not not the man
beside me.
Speaker 1: I didn't shoot you. The other guys did. This is
an old old thing.
Speaker 4: King Henry the Second removed the cardinal, you know, back
in the twelfth century, and he never told them to
do it. The Knights did it because they knew King
Henry would smile if the cardinal was gone.
Speaker 1: Nobody said shoot him.
Speaker 5: You make a small reference, or at least Donald Sutherland
playing the character act makes a reference to flying some
of the Nazis out of Romania at the end of
the war to help in the war against the Communists.
And you mentioned also during our interview meeting Werner von Braun,
as you know von Braun came not only by himself,
but with hundreds of aerospace ammunitions and scientists from Project
paper Clip. Also here in this country. Many of the
spies who worked early on for the CI and the
intelligence networks came from a network in Germany under Reinhard Galen,
one of Hitler's top spies. I found in my work,
and so did research in May Brussel hew knew numerous
Nazi connections to the John F. Kennedy assassination, including Walter Dornberger,
a general who had been a mentor to von Braun
and who actually thought up the idea of the space
shuttle in Star Wars. Was the employer for many years
of Michael Payne, whose wife Ruth Payne hals Marie Oswald.
Ruth Payne got Oswald the job at the book depository
there at the corner in October. And in addition that
De Mornshield had ties in his long family history to
the Nazis and even the person who wrote the Warrant
Commission report, Rudolph Augustus Winnaker, came from the Army Historical Division,
where he had worked since the fifties. He had been
an official historian of the Reich for Adolf Hitler and
was brought into this country, and the Army Historical Division
was apparently the early drop point for the Galen network.
And I wondered if you had a sense in your
work of the role that these Nazis played when they
came in and how central they were to the Cold
War history.
Speaker 4: The reason I've alluded to the work of the OSS
in Bucharest in Romania under Frank Wisner, one of their
leading agents, is because that as the Soviet Army was
coming to the border of Romania, there was an interval
of about ten days. The Germans were fleeing and the
Russians were coming in. A peace treaty was signed with
Romania by the United States and the Great Britain.
Speaker 1: And in that little interlude they.
Speaker 4: Rounded up seven hundred and fifty American POWs, mostly air crewmen,
have been bombing the Plost airfields, and I received the
call from General Giles and Cairo to set up about
thirty five forty aircraft to go to a little remote
field in Syria where a freight train would come by.
And we went there early in the morning and these
seven hundred and fifty American POWs jumped off the train,
came running toward our planes to be flown to Cairo
and intermingled.
Speaker 1: With these men. We didn't know it.
Speaker 4: We started talking to some of them on airplane were Nazis,
who were i mean taken out of Romania and the
Balkans by the OSS for pretty obvious reasons. They knew
all the intelligence in the Balkans, they knew the intelligence
in the Ukraine and other adjoining areas of Russia, and
they wanted to preserve them. They didn't want the Communists,
you know, they want even though Russia was our ally
I mean.
Speaker 1: This was beginning of the Cold War.
Speaker 4: I had been ordered to fly into Russia only about
two weeks before this other flight, and I lived up
in Russia for a little while, getting doing a certain
mission up there, which was army mission. You know, we
had no knowledge at the time we went up there
to Syria to pick up the American prisoners that among
this group of seven hundred and fifty Americans some British,
that they were going to be these Nazi intelligence specialists.
Of course, they weren't identified to us, but we realized
they weren't Americans. It's only later when we talked to
the General in Cairo that we found out who they were,
and they were a top professional Nazi team that knew
all the agent networks in the in the southern part
of the Soviet Union, southwestern part and the Balkans. So
from that point of view, they were invaluable. But this
was an effort run against the Soviet Union. Are alive
at that period, and I believe that probably this is
the first step on record of a Cold War move
of major Importanns you talked about General Galen. The agreements
made with Galen were made actually before the war ended.
He had made a deal with certain American intelligence people,
General Cybert, for one, that he would lay low, bury
his files, and surrender as soon as possible rather than
draw attention to himself on the Nazi side. And Galen,
of course was Hitler's prime intelligence general, a terrific prisoner
for us to gain. But the object of this was
basic to setting up the Cold War material to say,
because Galen's intelligence information accounted for the rest of the
western part of the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe.
And the discussions with Galen were led that led to
Galen were led by Allen Dulles, who was in Switzerland
as the OSS senior officer in that area. And it's
a very interesting thing because Allen Dulles and his brother,
John Foster Dolles were with this large law firm in
New York, Sullivan Cromwell. Sullivan Cromwell had offices throughout Germany
all through the thirties, and the Dulles brothers were very
close to the Tyson Steel Works and ig Farbron company.
In fact, interestingly enough, the agency's headquarters in Germany after
the war was in Frankfurt, Germany, in the IG Farbron building.
Speaker 1: You know, just happened that way.
Speaker 4: Well, the Dulles contacts that people thought would be OSS
intelligence work were actually the people he knew anyway, as
a result of his legal work in Germany, duel a
Nazis while Hiller was running Germany. And if you'll recall
the history, like many other American companies, even though World
War Two started as far as England and France were
concerned and Holland and Belgium and all And Poland had
been attacked, the American companies did not close their offices.
Union Bank from New York didn't close its offices in Germany.
Nor did the Sullivan Cromwell until Pearl Harbor, and then
they more or less had to. But then through intelligence
they retained contacts, and evidence of this is rather interesting.
Before the Germans surrendered, the Foreign Minister was a man
named counch Feren van Krosig, and Van Krosig, who knew
about some of this undercover contact and wanted to say
his own neck, made a speech in Berlin that is
reported in the London Times of May third, nineteen forty five,
before the German surrender. The subject of that speech was
the court was.
Speaker 1: The Iron curtain.
Speaker 4: And when Winston Churchill, who at that time was not
in the government he had been voted out during I
guess he was still didn't know the Potsdam conference. I
forget the dates, but you know anyway, Churchill read that
in the Times. A little later he wrote to Harry Truman.
He had never met President Truman, and he started talking
about how the Communists were going to drop an iron
curtain over Eastern Europe. He was using the same words
and almost the same speech as the German Foreign Minister had.
Now the Foreign Minister's idea came from his Oss friends
and you see, the Cold War began to roll, and
by the time Churchill spoke in Missouri that Wasminster College.
Everybody credited him with the invention of the Iron Curtain
idea and the activities in Eastern Europe because that fit
the scenario of the developing Cold War.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't have it wouldn't have gone.
Speaker 4: Over if he said, oh, I copied this from the
Nazi general, I mean a foreign minister that gave a speech.
You see how they interlinking. And Frank Wisner then became
one of the leading men in CIA. In the early CIA,
before the law created CIA, we had OPC that was
done to keep the records together during the interim between
the end of OSS and the law making the CIA. Well,
Wisner is the one who carried that through. So the
linkage there, as.
Speaker 1: You've just pointed out, was very important.
Speaker 5: I assume that the same Galen network, or the remnants
of it, still existed by nineteen sixty three and may
have been part of what was threatened when Kennedy said
in October that he would splinter a CIA into a
thousand pieces.
Speaker 4: Galen oddly was brought to the United States by direction
of Walter Beadle Smith, General Smith, who was the Eisenhewer's
chief of staff. Smith became the ambassador to Russia immediately
upon the end of the war, following Avril Harriman, who
had been there.
Speaker 1: All through the war.
Speaker 4: He flew him flew Galen with all his files that
he had buried to Washington andrews Field, and by special
act of the US Congress, General Galen of Nazi Germany
was made an American general.
Speaker 1: He worked here for a while, was.
Speaker 4: Brought back to Germany in Frankfurt in the ig Fireman Building,
and then from there Adnauer, the new leader of Germany
of West Germany, moved him to Bond where he became
the head of German intelligence, as he should have been,
because a little awkward to have him be an American general.
So he became the head of German intelligence for many,
many years, all the time I was active, he was
still there.
Speaker 5: I understood from forty five to forty eight about three
hundred of his spies came in to work with CIA,
and others came from the Nazi quisling governments.
Speaker 2: The Bilarusian government.
Speaker 5: The White Russian government sent about three hundred people here
to the United States that worked in radio for Europe
and Radio America and Voice of America.
Speaker 4: You mentioned Walder Donburger. Dornberger was von Braun's boss at Pinmunda,
one of the greatest rocket scientists that's ever lived, And
when I was writing this book I referred to for
the OURTC program. I went to Buffalo, where Dornberger had
offices in the Bell Corporation, and I interviewed him at
length on their rocket program because we had nothing like
it in the United States, and I had to go
to the best source, so the Air Force told me
to go see Dornburger. Well the link between Nazi Pinamunda
and their rockets and the Bell Corporation and the acquisition
of Bell by the Textron Corporation, and the gaining of
the big helicopter contract for Vietnam, the Huey helicopters, and
then into some of the lore of the Dallas era
which you've mentioned in the Pain Family and people like that.
It's just too linked to be casual see. And I
know from the talks I had over a few days
with Well the Dornburger, that he was well aware of
the fact. In fact, he told me that he was
trying to help Bell get ahead with jet engines that
was new in those days, and he did. Bell had
a fine jet airplane for a while, but they moved
quickly into helicopters where there was a big opening. And
it was because of Dornberger's experience and his relationship with
Van Braun and the people who had brought him out
of Germany. And later we had a more or less
formal program within the structure that I was working on
called deepwater Flights. We flew thousands of Germans from CIA's
air base in Wiesbaden to andrews Field in the United States.
There's a book out called Blowback that tells the story.
Speaker 1: But thousands of them.
Speaker 4: Many were technical experts, and we needed the technical experts
and so on. But this is what tended to heat
up the Cold War so fast.
Speaker 5: I always thought it was significant to both Allen Dulles,
who you mentioned in terms of the plans for the
secret surrender of Galen after the war, and the High
Commissioner of Germany, the Allied High Commissioner after the war,
John J. McCloy, who worked with Sullivan and Cromwell and
was a Rockfeller banker for many years sat on the
Warrant Commission. McCloy was responsible for pardoning many of the
key Nazis at the time of.
Speaker 2: The Nuremberg Trials.
Speaker 5: Another key figure in this scenario I think is Leon
Jaworski worked for the Army at the Nuremberg Trials. I
believe undermined the prosecution of the Nazis at those trials.
Came back left there and worked for International Red Cross
Rescue Division, which provided the Glossenspiel, the phony IDs for
some of the Ratline Nazis, and movement of Nazis out
of Germany under false id or to hide them in
the DP camps. And he later worked for a CIA
conduit fund, the jam Anderson Fund in Dallas, and then
suddenly shows up as the official liaison between the Dallas
Police and the Warren Commission investigation, and later on, of
course is the most trusted man in America when he
handles the cover of both the Watergate Koreagate.
Speaker 4: In the Dallas area ostensibly I believe, to provide counsel
to Oswald, who didn't live more than forty eight hours.
Speaker 1: Interesting linkage this.
Speaker 5: When you were at this level, I mean, I'm sure
you've got a sense of how things are done. You
mentioned earlier that some disgruntled oilmen or angry Cubans or
mafia enemies of Kennedy could not have pulled off the
job at the level it was done, nor have covered
it up to move beyond that level. Could the Joint
Use of Staff or the Defense Intelligence Agency or the
CIA or a renegade element in those groups have pulled
off the job and covered it up? Or does it
go beyond that?
Speaker 4: The answer, of course is not simple, but it's tucked
away in facts that we all can think about. The
Central Intelligence Agency is called an agency on purpose. Law
makes it that, which means then it works for somebody.
So an agency doesn't work for itself. The Defense Department
works for itself, but the agency works for others. The
Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, they used to
all be under the office I worked in under General
erskin for the Secret of Defense called the Officer Special Operations.
We provided the linkage to CIA into NSA. DIA didn't exist,
but General Erskine is the creator of DA.
Speaker 1: He wrote the thing. So you noticed the.
Speaker 4: A and the agency there means that higher authority can
use the agency, and at that point you learned pretty
quick that higher authority doesn't necessarily wear a uniform or
the pinstripe of state department.
Speaker 1: It's higher.
Speaker 4: I remember during the war hearing that a close friend
of Winston Churchill, Lord Denning, who somewhat.
Speaker 1: Like to the Chief Justice.
Speaker 4: Here, would talk about Churchill in his He knew Denning
very well and his just conversational talk using the term
high cabal, and he would turn to friends and say,
you know, if Churchill is talking about a high cabal,
what's up above there?
Speaker 1: See? But we live with that, we know that.
Speaker 4: And you've mentioned different companies that have been in journal,
like Sullivan Cromwell, and the links between Ig Fireman and
the General Electric had If you study those structures, the
Brown and Harriman interests, they existed in Germany all through
this period and only reluctantly closed down at the Pearl
Harbor time, but the linkages remained. As soon as the
war ended, they were right back in there again.
Speaker 1: You see.
Speaker 4: These are important to try to understand this because in
my point of view, the Kennedy family was oriented more
to the European power structure than they were to Asia,
and I think that had a lot to do with
why Kennedy didn't want to get involved in Vietnam. He'd
much rather see our money and our forces and our
interests back in Asia where his friends and his father's
business friends who were among the group in Brown, Harriman
and so on were that was there.
Speaker 1: This is where they worked.
Speaker 2: I thought it was interested.
Speaker 5: Some of the founders of Brown and Harriman as well,
April Harriman, and some of the key bankers that were
linked to the Deutsche Bank and the money in Germany
in those years were Skull and Bones graduates in Yale,
and I believe it's nine ninety nine along with Prescott Bush,
George Bush's father, and he seems to have had financial
and other ties with them.
Speaker 4: Go Prescott Bush was running the Combine. In fact, I
think for a while he ran Union Bank, which was.
Speaker 1: Part of that.
Speaker 4: And of course it all goes back in one respect
to the enormous wealth derived from the oil industry. And
to understand that you begin to see some of these
other horizons. And we may want to talk about that
one of these days, because if there is this much
being done at the hike of aal level, you have
to believe that it is being done because of enormous
amounts of money and one little clue lifting the corner
of the tarpel in here a bit between nineteen seventy
three and nineteen eighty when we had the energy crisis
and we're waiting at gas stations with our cars to
buy a little bit of ac at an exorbitant price.
Speaker 1: The same oil sources.
Speaker 4: In the Middle East, five countries that received fifteen billion
dollars for their oil in nineteen seventy three received three
hundred billion dollars for roughly the same quantity of oil
in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: So it's so profitable.
Speaker 4: I mean, how can you think there isn't an interest
in the oil business and their bankers and their lawyers,
and the collateral firms like the automobile industry and the
aviation industry that run with it.
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's only here in America where the
press and the pundits and the historians even seemed to
buy into the idea of coincidence theory that nothing links
to anything else Whereas in Europe, the immediate question and
a political assassination is kibono or who benefits and what
are those benefits besides the profit It would seem to
me that the motivating forces behind conspiracies on this level
are not only the profit, but it's in its perpetuity,
but control of resources around the world like oil and
other types of political control.
Speaker 4: And unfortunately it leads into another area that is too
much overlooked is the disregard for the peoples of many
of these other areas, because in a search for oil,
sometimes the people that are already there are getting the way.
And so you begin to accept Malthusianism that, well, it
wouldn't hurt to wipe the people out. They're not going
to have enough food anyway. And Darwin said the fittest
are going to survive, but not the unfit. So there's
a little genocide. Two or three thousand Iraqis die because
of desert storm. Don't worry about it, because they're gonna
die anyway.
Speaker 1: Malthus proved it.
Speaker 4: Darwin convinced us that the better people will you know,
that's behind a lot of this, not just capitalism, communism
and so on. And yet under the ground in Arabia,
in Iraq is one of the biggest oil reserves known
in the whole world. So we're protecting interests in Iraq.
The Iraqis don't own those companies.
Speaker 5: How do you think from this point the case in
the John F. Kennedy's destination could best be solved. I
know that getting the records loose is one of the
goals that we've been working on recently. But those records
are not going to tell us the whole story. They're
little snapshots. It's worth looking at them. We get a
little bigger piece of the picture. But ultimately, what at
this point, what should we research? If we're going to
do that, what's the next step.
Speaker 4: Because this hurdle has been established that so many records
are out of reach, we've got to erase that. It
would surprise me if it's much more than a decoy deal.
But there's material in there, and experts know how to
read these records and get more out of them than
the congressman did. Because if the congressman got the answers out,
you could be sure they would have rushed to the papers.
But they hid the records because probably they were worthless.
But anyway, we should get them because they must be removed.
But the next thing is, and this is what's gonna
I was talking to Oliver Stone about this last night.
The people are gonna see this movie and they getting interested.
So they getting interested in freeing these records from this
control that they're seventy five years. But the next step
is if they're freed, and if the Warren Commission report
is just demolished and we know that Oswald was nothing
but a patsy and so on, American public is going
to sit back and they're going to say, all right, now, now,
why was Kennedy killed? What really is behind this? That
these records don't prove it? The Warren Commission didn't you
know there was something more? If you imagine what that's
going to be. That's the explosion is around the corner.
This film is only starting it. But when the records
come free, we'll study them and there may be a
lot more in there than most people think. The Congressman
must not have thought so. But I want them to
bring the military records out with the CI, NFBI and
other father I think, oh and I the Navy will
have records that they.
Speaker 1: Didn't even see up there.
Speaker 4: Once that's done, at least we know what the platform is.
But that next step is going to be big, because
who can give the authority to act upon what's in
the records. I would say only Congress as an almost
by unanimous vote, and the president, you know, or one
or the other trying to outgun the other one. And
right now I don't see Congress able to unite behind it,
and if they don't, aren't able to unite behind it.
I think mister Bush or any other president will sort
of ignore the problem because every president since Kennedy has
been killed, says the Warrant Commission suffices. As far as
he's concerned, He's perfectly happy with the loan gunman up
there on a sixth floor. Give or take Lyndon Johnson's
recanting of that a few months before he died, when
he said, I believe in a conspiracy. Oswald didn't do
it alone, and we operate murder incorporated. We murder perpetually.
I think that winds up the story at that point.
Speaker 5: We know that many of the witnesses Penn Jones, the researcher,
suggests maybe as many as one hundred and seventy five
have died strangely or in violent circumstances. We know that
much of the evidence has been destroyed or altered since
the time of the Kennedy assassination, and we know that
the phony autopsy that was done at Bethesda was an
illegal autopsy under Texas law, and that the body should
have never been removed. One researcher in a recent meeting
in Dallas where I was on the case, suggested walking
into the courthouse there in Dallas and convening a grand
jury and beginning a full trial investigation in Dallas with
the evidence that's left, the witnesses that haven't come forward,
and putting it back en route. Do you think that
there's a possibility at that level of opening it up
as a trial or an investigation.
Speaker 1: John, you don't have to research that.
Speaker 4: The law of the United States is that every murder
must be tried in the state where it occurred. The
state of Texas owes us a trial. You can have
a trial against John Doe. So you're right, the means
are there, and it has to be done according to law.
And there's nothing to stop the State of Texas from
doing that except Whndon Johnson told them, don't do it. See,
but that's a fabricated thing too. See, that's the story
up to here.
Speaker 3: Anyway, you're listening to the Fact Hunter Radio Network, Just
the facts, Mammy