Aldo Moro, Accame: Varisco e quei mitra tenuti nel bagagliaio....

ALLA COMMISSIONE MORO 

Argomento: L’ipotizzata conoscenza anticipata di imminenti pericoli per la sicurezza di Aldo Moro, pag. 124 – 138 della relazione del 10 Dicembre 2015

Lo scrivente, autore del libro intervista “Moro si poteva salvare – 96 quesiti irrisolti sul caso Moro” a cura di Marilina Veca, si è ovviamente molto preoccupato della questione “preavvisi”, che potevano salvare l’On. Moro dal rapimento e i cinque agenti di scorta, dalla morte.
Lo scrivente ha letto con molto interesse la relazione provvisoria, con particolare riferimento al contenuto delle pagine da 124 a 138, sulla “L’ipotizzata conoscenza anticipata di imminenti pericoli per la sicurezza di Aldo Moro”, però non ha trovato alcun cenno a due preavvisi dell’attentato che ritiene di notevole importanza.
Il primo riguarda il preannuncio di cui riferì a suo tempo l’On. Luigi Cipriani (vedi il libro, “Quel Marx di San Macuto, di cui riporto le pag. 141-142), in cui mette in rilievo la notizia (che secondo l’On. Cipriani era assai affidabile) relativa ad una comunicazione pervenuta dal carcere di Matera, di un detenuto, Salvatore Senatore (il quale l’aveva a sua volta appresa da componenti delle BR).
Il secondo preavviso è stato reso noto, tra l’altro dal regista Giuseppe Ferrara, autore del film sull’attentato di Aldo Moro e dei libri “Misteri del caso Moro”, “Il caso Moro”, la lettera-comunicato del 2 marzo 1978, in cui si accenna con 14 giorni di anticipo all’attentato. Può darsi che questo preavviso sia comunque scaturito dal precedente dell’On. Cipriani.
Lo scrivente ritiene che questi due preavvisi siano particolarmente rilevanti.
Per quanto riguarda questo secondo preavviso, chi ha compilato la lettera/ordine di operazione del 2 marzo ’78 (e chi l’ha letta) avrebbero dovuto immediatamente comunicare a tutte le Autorità di sicurezza il preavviso, e l’esistenza del grave pericolo, che non riguardava solo l’On. Moro ma anche la scorta (che venne trucidata). È bene precisare che la scorta dipendeva dalla “Direzione delle scorte” affidata al Ten. Col. Antonio Varisco, il quale certamente avrebbe dovuto adottare provvedimenti - qualora fosse stato informato, per evitare che, addirittura, i mitra della scorta fossero conservati nel baule della macchina. Certo, se i mitra venivano conservati nel baule, questo doveva dipendere da un ordine, dato che proprio il capo scorta aveva allertato le Autorità di pericoli imminenti. E certamente non avrebbe di sua iniziativa lasciato le armi, a difesa di Moro e degli agenti stessi, nel baule.
Scarsissime, o praticamente inesistenti, almeno a quanto noto allo scrivente, sono le indagini su questo importantissimo aspetto riguardante la capacità difensiva della scorta.
Resta il rilevante interrogativo, che riguarda il fatto se vi furono comunicazioni alle varie autorità, sui preavvisi più sopra citati e quindi su come si comportò l’apparato di sicurezza. Certamente se i mitra fossero stati imbracciati dagli agenti della scorta, l’esito dell’attentato sarebbe stato ben diverso. E forse gli autori dell’attentato se avessero potuto prevedere una reazione armata, non avrebbero neppure messo in essere l’attentato stesso (forse, qualcuno aveva loro segnalato che i mitra erano custoditi nel baule e che quindi non poteva esserci un’adeguata reazione.
Lo scrivente non sa se vi siano state delle indagini nei riguardi del Ten. Col. Varisco per conoscere la sua interpretazione dei fatti, ma si permette di indicare questa esigenza informativa alla Commissione da Lei presieduta.
Il Ten. Col. Varisco morì per un attentato, il 13 luglio 1979, attentato del quale ancor oggi non si conoscono gli autori. Tra le ipotesi avanzate furono quella che l’attentato sia da addebitarsi alle BR, e quella che l’attentato sia da addebitarsi alla Banda della Magliana. In proposito, si sa che il Ten. Col Varisco, a parte l’incarico delle scorte, ha svolto numerosissimi altri incarichi. Tra l’altro, intervenne a via Gradoli, ed ha avuto numerosi incontri con molte personalità (vedi ad esempio quanto si legge nei libri del Senatore Flamigni e del Senatore Gotor).
Della questione si è occupata tempo fa anche la giornalista e scrittrice Marilina Veca, che scrisse anche un articolo sulla vicenda. Più recentemente si sono posti il quesito la giornalista e scrittrice Annamaria Turi, e la studiosa Tania Barbieri (Vipera), in una lettura in cui intravede la possibilità che una strategia “dall’alto” (magari da “una loggia in paradiso”) abbia ispirato la vicenda dell’attentato (con le gravi ripercussioni che ha avuto nel paese e nella sua storia).
Nel ringraziare per l’attenzione, Lei e la Commissione da Lei presieduta, le invio i più cordiali saluti.

Roma, lì 9 febbraio 2015
Falco Accame
Presidente Anavavaf
e Presidente Onorario CIVG
Centro di Iniziative per la Verità e la Giustizia

Vedi anche: Aldo Moro e la Banca d'Italia: il caso nel caso

Every president has been manipulated by national security officials

Thursday, Oct 15, 2015 09:27 PM CEST

“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”

From World War II though JFK, "The Devil's Chessboard" explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites

Liam O'Donoghue

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/every_president_has_been_manipulated_national_security_officials_david_talbot_investigates_americas_deep_state/

John F. Kennedy, Allen Dulles(Credit: AP)
 
This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.
This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how  the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet.  “To thoroughly and honestly analyze [former CIA director] Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”
Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.
Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”
By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable.  “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. [Full disclosure: David Talbot is the founder and former CEO of Salon.]
You begin the book by detailing the Dulles brothers’ sympathy, collaboration and eventual rescue of many high-ranking Nazis during and after World War II. Once you see how comfortable and even eager they were to align themselves with people who epitomize the worst evils of the 20th century, it becomes easier to accept some of the most shocking accusations that come later in the book. Why were the brothers so willing to offer support, even to the point of committing treason, for the Nazis?
I think the story of the Dulles brothers is the story of the amorality of American power, and by extension, all power. On some level, Allan Dulles was a psychopath. He didn’t feel the feelings of other people, and certainly wasn’t able to put himself in shoes of the Jewish people, who were on the brink of the Holocaust in Europe, and even during the Holocaust. He was a man who felt history and politics should be controlled by the elite few. He and his brother were raised in this milieu. Their family was full of statesmen and people who had been at the helm of the country for generations.
They felt that the greater goal of America during the war was reestablishing Germany as a bulwark against growing Soviet power. They felt all along that the Soviet Union represented the greater threat. They were, in fact, very socially comfortable with many members of the Nazi elite, including bankers, security and intelligence people. To them, the whole question about war crimes and the horrors the Nazis had committed during the war were secondary to the more important geo-political questions [such as] who will rebuild Germany after the war and how to make sure the Soviet Union does not overrun Europe.
The thing that I found startling when I was researching the book was the extent to which Dulles, as the top U.S. spy in continental Europe throughout most of the war, was again and again given inside reports on the Holocaust… of what happening inside this inferno and the massive roundup of Jews, and what was happening to them once they were rounded up. He was given these reports at great risk of these people who snuck into Switzerland – with documents and eyewitness accounts – and again and again he failed to relay these inside reports to Washington as it was developing. So, imagine the kind of compartmentalization – there is some kind of psychopathology to it – where it doesn’t even enter into your equation all this massive suffering of the Jewish people.
Dulles was an incredibly cold and remote figure, even with his family. For him, it was all about the game of power. That’s why I called the book: “The Devil’s Chessboard.” He and his brother were obsessive chess players, and they treated people as if they were pawns in their game, and not as human beings.
So it’s clear that even during the height of World War II, while the U.S. and Russia were fighting as allies against the Axis Powers, the Dulles brothers saw Russia as the real enemy. One of the most notorious manifestations of this agenda that you discuss in the book is how an attempt to rescue and negotiate with Nazis – against Roosevelt’s wishes – during Operation Sunrise helped trigger the Cold War by proving to Russia that the U.S. couldn’t be trusted. Was the Cold War inevitable?
Look, Joseph Stalin was no choirboy. He was a monster. And he was gripped with his own dark paranoia as well.  Certainly what he did to his people was barbaric – as barbaric as what Hitler did to his people. So, I am not defending Stalin at all. But the fact is: FDR had worked out a very interesting partnership with him, and without that partnership, Hitler couldn’t have been defeated.
The Soviet Union and Soviet people took the brunt of Hitler’s violence and turned it back against him. Really, the Soviet Union was primarily  responsible – although American history books don’t reflect this – for the defeat of Nazi forces. FDR knew that he had to keep that coalition together. There were a number of people in the Roosevelt administration – including Roosevelt himself – who felt that, for the good of world peace, that partnership with Russia had to be continued after the war.
So, I feel that if FDR had lived, there is a good chance that the Cold War could’ve been avoided because of the unique relationship of trust between Stalin and Roosevelt. Even while Roosevelt was alive and was sick in the final weeks of war, he was still struggling to maintain that delicate partnership. But, at the same time, you have Dulles in Switzerland, doing everything he can to undermine that partnership by going behind FDR’s back, in violation of FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender. He had a policy that no one was supposed to negotiate deals with the Nazi leaders, that the Nazis were to be fully crushed.
In defiance of that, Allen Dulles throughout most of his time in Switzerland, was meeting with various high-level Nazi representatives, and trying to cut a separate deal with them. [Dulles’s deals] would’ve left much of the Nazi regime highly intact. And in fact, he does cut this deal in Sunrise with Karl Wolff, who is head of Nazi security in Italy and a vile figure (who by all measures should’ve been tried in Nuremberg with the original defendants, and probably would’ve been convicted and hung). Wolff was the right-hand man to [SS Chief] Himmler and the liaison between Hitler and Himmler. This is a guy who had lots of blood on his hands.
But, Dulles protected him and made this deal with him that really didn’t result in anything significant from the strategic point of view. It might’ve ended the war in Italy a few days earlier, but it didn’t save many lives – except the lives of war criminals whom Dulles was dealing with. And, as you say, the even worse effect of this was to instill the idea in Stalin’s mind that the United States was stabbing him in the back by cutting this separate deal in Italy. Everything that President Roosevelt had done to try and maintain this partnership with Stalin throughout the war was effectively dismantled by Dulles in a matter of weeks through the Operation Sunrise dealings.
What do you think Dulles ultimately saw the as the benefits of Operation Sunrise? Was heightening this confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, and antagonizing Stalin his goal?  
Operation Sunrise was prompted by several things or had several motivations. One: he was trying to stop the Red Army, who were advancing across Europe. So he was trying to cut a peace deal as quickly as possible with the Nazi forces that would prevent the Soviet army from entering Italy (there was a strong communist party in Italy too – a strong Left).
For him, it was “the clash of civilizations” [similar to how] many conservatives feel today about Islam. Communism and the Soviet Union represented, to people like the Dulles brothers – who were these iconic mouthpieces or lawyers or diplomats for Western capitalism – the ultimate enemy. So, Russia had to be stopped and crushed at all costs. They saw the Cold War as inevitable. Just as many of the Nazis they were dealing with saw the Cold War as part two of their own epic crusade against Bolshevism.  In that respect, the Nazi war criminals and the Dulles brothers really did have a common enemy and a common goal.
In some ways, because of people like the Dulles brothers, and other like-minded people in the U.S. government and military, we didn’t defeat the Third Reich so much as repurpose them for the Cold War. Many of the people in [Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer’s government in West Germany after the war included a number of high-ranking Nazis.
In the CIA’s employment of former Nazis, American agents worked very closely with these people who part of a regime that was characterized by fascism, violence against its own people, domestic surveillance and other similarly undemocratic attributes. How much of an influence did Nazis have on the nascent CIA and, in a greater sense, the American government?
I think the Nazis had a very pernicious influence  on Washington’s thinking during the Cold War.  [German intelligence chief] Reinhard Gehlen, for instance, was feeding Dulles and the CIA all sorts of false information about military strength of the Soviet Union, and their aggressive intentions. The Soviet Union, of course, had suffered epically during World War II and was in no mood to plunge into World War III.
But in the mind of people like Gehlen, these fascists who had been at war with the Soviet Union for years, they thought the Soviet Union was about to launch World War III. They injected a paranoid spore into Washington’s mind, and they fed people like CIA officials with lots of bogus intelligence. So, in some ways, our paranoia about the Soviet Union… you see that through the figure of the ex-Nazi scientist “Dr. Strangelove” in the Kubrick film, you that sort of mentality. That was all too true…the feeling that in some ways World War III or this nuclear Holocaust that many people thought was coming was the final stage of this Wagnerian, fascist, apocalyptic view of history.
There are other characters in “Dr. Strangelove” inspired by real people too. General Ripper was influenced by [U.S. Air Force general] Curtis LeMay, who you talk about in the book as wanting to use nuclear weapons or atomic bombs as a solution to every foreign policy.
That’s right. In fact, I was talking with Dan Ellsberg about the film, and he said that he and other defense analysts, who were working at the Pentagon at the time, called it a documentary, not a film, because it was so accurate and true to life. So, the “mind meld” between former Nazis like Gehlen and Dulles was incredibly poisonous and had tragic consequences throughout the Cold War.
Although your book is historical nonfiction, it reads like a spy thriller. So even though we’re talking about events that happened decades ago, I don’t want to spoil readers by giving away your whole case for why Allen Dulles was ultimately the mastermind behind JFK’s murder and the subsequent coverup. So I’ll just ask you to explain however much of the case you’re comfortable with.
I tried, in a very thoroughly documented way, to show how not only Dulles, but the men who were in his network of powerful Wall Street bankers and lawyers and powerful figures in Washington in the national security world developed a feeling that they were the true center of power in America, and not whoever happened to be occupying the White House.
–which wasn’t necessarily untrue.
Right, I mean, that was the beginning of what many scholars now call the deep state. [The deep state] is essentially an alternative network of power that runs the country no matter who is in the White House. I think the book is in some ways a narrative that brings that idea to life. It wasn’t just Kennedy; As I said, it was starting with Roosevelt, then Truman, then Eisenhower — theses presidents that Dulles and the people around Dulles were serving, they were also subverting. They were basically following their own line, the line they had worked out privately amongst themselves in groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, and other elite organizations, or just over dinners or at the private clubs they belonged to (The Metropolitan Club or the Navy Club or the Alibi Club).
So, by the time that this young Jack Kennedy comes along in the final third of [my] book, you start to see that Dulles doesn’t have much respect for the president. He particularly didn’t have much respect for a young, untested president like John F. Kennedy. He had first met Kennedy when he was a very young and physically frail senator. He had just been operated on for back surgery and could barely stand up. He met him at the Kennedy family home back in Palm beach. He thought of himself as Kennedy’s mentor and tutor, and he thought JFK would be a very pliable, young president and open to direction and advice from men like Dulles.
But they had this very acrimonious split over CIA-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, where Kennedy felt he had been lied to and sandbagged, and forced into supporting this invasion. I think that the plan all along was the CIA had wanted the invasion to fail, but Dulles hoped and was completely convinced that Kennedy would be forced to send in the full might of the U.S. military to save the invasion and to crush Castro. When Kennedy didn’t do that and refused to escalate it into an international crisis, it provoked this split within the Kennedy government that led to Dulles being forced out of power, much to his shock. He had never been treated that way by a president).
But, he doesn’t just go back home to [retire] after that. As my book shows, he goes back to Georgetown and begins to set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile. He operates as if he’s still running the CIA. And when I read that when I was doing my research… that set off all sorts of lights for me because here you have a guy who is not going gently into the good night of retirement. He feels in some ways Kennedy is an aberrant president and doesn’t deserve to be in power, and that he isn’t really protecting the interest of the state as vigilantly as he should. So, he begins to meet with all his former top aides at his home. These are not just top officials within the CIA, but field agents. He is dining with them in the clubs in Washington. And they are basically creating their own policy.
Again, I show how they acted to subvert Kennedy’s policies, which Kennedy… as his administration went on was trying to find a way out of the Cold War, out of this nuclear knot that had been tied. He and his counterpart Nikita Kruschev were trying to find a way to loosen this knot, but the national security hardliners, who were in control of the CIA, even after Dulles was fired, thought that was weak, naïve, and a dangerous policy. They tried to resist it in every way they could.
I think these tensions between the Kennedy White House and these hardliners grew and grew over the next few years, and exploded in Dallas. I do indicate that Dulles was centrally involved in the assassination planning and that the assassination team that he had created to kill foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and others… that several members of these teams were actually spotted in Dallas in the weeks leading up to the assassination. Allan Dulles himself, who had been retired for two years, during the weekend of Kennedy’s assassination, goes to a remote CIA facility, which is an alternative command post in northern Virginian called “The Farm,” where he monitors activity in Dallas.
Of course, he also becomes a prominent figure on the Warren Commission [the official commission to investigate JFK’s assassination]. He lobbied to have himself appointed by President Johnson on the Warren Commission. He was so active in directing that so-called investigation that some close observers thought it should’ve been called the Dulles Commission.

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So, there are no smoking guns – because we are talking about the CIA – and they were careful about having no smoking guns.  I am writing about a very secretive world and there aren’t any obvious pieces of evidence, but there are many pieces of evidence that I do accumulate that think, overall, make a convincing case that Allen Dulles did play a crucial role in these events.
The Kennedy assassination, and related events, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Warren Commission, are some of the most thoroughly investigated and analyzed chapters of recent American history. How do you go about digging up evidence that hasn’t already been found and stories that haven’t been told? What is the difference between an investigative reporter and a historian?
A lot of these doors are shut when you are dealing with the intelligence world – obviously, they don’t want this history to come out. Recently, the CIA released with great fanfare hundreds of presidential CIA briefings that were given to President Kennedy and Johnson, but they were heavily redacted and controlled. When they do a document release, it is very heavily choreographed. Some things still come out in these document releases. After Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, there was so much public pressure on the government to release classified material related to Kennedy assassination and presidency there was a law passed called the JFK Records Collection Act and thousands and thousands of pages were released. The CIA is still withholding 15,000 key documents related to the Kennedy assassination including [documents related to] people in the Dulles assassination group. It is vital that we get those 15,000 documents that the CIA is still withholding in defiance of that law.
There are a lot of clues in those [released] documents and I have used a lot of them. For instance, in the Nazi period that I write about, there was a bill passed by Congress called The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act that had a wealth of information about the extent to which the U.S. intelligence was collaborating with leading Nazis, and I drew on that wealth of material. Many historians are doing that now as well. That is important, and I do not want to downplay that – how important it is that we have a right to our own history. As Orwell wrote, “Those who control the past, control the future.”
Even when you meet a stonewall there, you can go around it sometimes by finding living sources. So, for the book, I interviewed a number of people who were the children of major CIA officials including Allen Dulles’s daughter, Joan, who was nearing 90 when I talked to her. She is an amazing person, and in some way, the exact opposite of her father, who was this cold and remote figure. She is a retired Jungian therapist, living in Santa Fe. She drives an old Prius with an Obama sticker. She represents everything that would make her father scream in his grave. She, late in her life, is trying to come to terms about what her family legacy is all about, and this dark side of history. As a Jungian, she realizes that the darkness hold many valuable truths if you can shine a light on them. She and I, together, though many interviews, tried to make sense about her father, her parent’s marriage, and about what kind of man he was.
I interviewed a young – at the time – army intelligence officer in Rome at a critical period, post-WWII. It was the period when Dulles and associates like James Jesus Angleton were setting up Nazi ratlines to let these war criminal escape. As they were doing this, this young, conscientious intelligence army officer – William Gowen – was trying as hard as he could to round these war criminals up and bring them to justice. It was “spy versus spy” in Rome in these post-war days. So, those were amazing stories that he was able to relate to me.
You track down these people, and if they are no longer living, you talk to their family members. Then, there are also the written records: the journals and the diaries that some of these people kept. For example, Dulles’s own wife and his mistress, Mary Bancroft [kept records] – those were fascinating too, and are available in the library.
You try to build this composite portrait from many different pieces of evidence you accumulate. Then, what you’re trying to do is tell the best story, in a way.  I have a saying that the best story wins.
I have been, through my exhaustive work on this, which started back with my first book “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” examining this swath of history for 10 years. At the end of the day, you want to put together a story that is meaningful, has the ring of truth to it, and help people see American history in a way that they’ve never done before. I am not interested in recycling the same old fairy tales that you see on PBS, or that you see in best-selling history books, Spielberg or Tom Hanks movies. Those are the stories that are meant to put Americans to sleep and not wake them up. I’m interested in waking people up, and I think this book is going to do that. I think it is going to shock people; I think it will be controversial; I think it will be attacked. But, this is what I want. I want to start a debate.
One of the most common responses to any JFK conspiracy is the idea that if the CIA was really involved, the media would have broken the story by now. You do a great job of baking a rebuttal into your story, by showing cold, hard evidence that many of the people running the pre-Internet corporate media, both TV networks and the most influential newspapers and magazines of the day, were either friends with Dulles, scared of Dulles or submissive to the power he wielded. You even give examples of letters from Dulles to executives offering suggestions of how they should be covering stories and their sycophantic responses. How was Dulles so effective in controlling the narrative around JFK’s death and so many other events?
I think the elite world in America was a very small and circumscribed one. We’re talking about a network that the sociologist C. Wright Mills [exposed] because he was one of the first who was trying to understand how power really worked in America. But that world he was writing about was a fairly small group of men, including Wall Street bankers and lawyers and people who held prominent positions in Washington and national security. They all tended to know each other. They all belonged to the same clubs and organizations. They all traded jobs and positions and hired each other. Their children went to the same universities and prep schools. They socialized together.
That was a tight world and Dulles was on personal basis with many, if not most, of the heads of the top media corporations. He was close to the people who owned and ran The New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Henry Luce’s Time empire. He was particularly close to both Henry Luce and his wife; in fact, he was probably having an affair with Claire Luce. So, he could call up and say, “Well, we don’t like what this correspondent is writing about down in Guatemala. We think you should remove him.” And they did.
There was a sense that we were all in this together. It wasn’t just one friend doing a favor for another. The Cold War ideology was so strong, and the sense that this is a national emergency, so this was your patriotic duty to help out the CIA and its battle with world communism. And so, many reporters willingly did the bidding of the CIA, providing them with information when they were posted overseas or writing stories that CIA wanted them to write.
This was not unusual. Later, it was exposed – much of this by Carl Bernstein in a famous investigative piece that he wrote in the Rolling Stone in the 1970s. It shocked a lot of people. He named names of hundreds people who were on the CIA payrolls in the media or were CIA assets. But, at the time, it wasn’t shocking. Most people would’ve felt that there was a natural alliance between the national security agencies and the media because we were in this international struggle together.
Maybe, it’s not so shocking to people today because essentially you find the same merger of consciousness around the war on terror. There’s so much that goes unreported or that is overworked.  When you think of everything that has been done in the name of American people or the war on terror, there has been some good investigative reporting, but by and large, the war on terror gets fundamental support from corporate media. It was the same if not more so during the Cold War. People thought if there was something going on in the Kennedy assassination, they would’ve dug it out. That is just wishful thinking because there was no kind of enterprise reporting on the Warren Commission, on the assassination, on the investigation into the assassination. Any effort in that regard was termed wild, crazy, and outside the parameters of what was legitimate journalism
And in some ways, it still is.
Absolutely. Even now, this book, my reputation, and the early reviews it’s getting should make this book, at least, the kind of book that gets prominent treatment in the media, even if it criticized. There have been a couple of shows already – I won’t say their names – who said that they don’t want to have me on because the book says that the JFK assassination was an inside job. So, there is still a fear of this, a fear of looking at it with an open mind.

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America media, if anything, has become even more cowardly in some ways of criticizing the national security state. The national security state is much more powerful today than it was even under Dulles. A lot of the things we are grappling with today such as extraordinary rendition, torture, mass surveillance of private citizens, extra-legal assassinations, those all were developed under Dulles. To thoroughly and honestly analyze Dulles’s legacy, in some ways, is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy. In some way, to really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems, and that is really frightening.
One of the major questions that this book raises is: how powerful is the president? Eisenhower famously warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex during his farewell speech and it would certainly appear as though his most dire predictions came true. Obama is the perfect example of how even a candidate with strong progressive credentials can be corrupted so quickly and thoroughly once in office…
In democracy, you would want to think that your president, elected by the people, who is the commander and chief, is in charge. One of the great revelations for me has been how every president, one way or another, has been played by or manipulated by or fooled by their national security officials. And that goes back to Eisenhower.
Even before Eisenhower, there was the famous memo from John Foster Dulles to his corporate clients of [the law firm] Sullivan and Cromwell. Regarding the implementation of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he wrote, “Do not comply. Resist the law with everything in your might and everything will be alright.”
Yes, that was when John Foster Dulles was running a powerful law firm on Wall Street, so he wasn’t in government at that point. But, even when presidents like Eisenhower issued these defiant statements about the military-industrial complex, and the power that the security agencies have… that was a convenient time for him to say that. First of all, he was leaving office. The fact is that Eisenhower allowed that military-industrial-intelligence complex to grow to frightening proportions, and he never directly confronted the power of Dulles and the generals. Or he didn’t do so in an effective way. And he left this, a growing monster, to a young president: John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy did try to deal with – I think he was the last president to confront the frightening power of the security agencies – we know what happened as a result. I think he was killed for that reason.
People can read the book and make their own decisions, but the fact is that ever since Kennedy, no president has seriously challenged the growing power of the national security state. Even Kennedy, who was standing up to them again and again, was often unable to be effective.
At one point, right on the heels of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, suddenly [French] President de Gaulle, an ally, is under siege from his own generals, who were rebelling in Algeria because he was trying to bring the bloody colonial war in Algeria to a close. The French generals, who are in open revolt, are about to descend on Paris. De Gaulle has to go on national television and issue a call to the people of France to aid him to push back this attempted coup. He tells the press and his information ministers that the CIA is behind the coup – and that JFK is not behind it, but JFK is not in control of his own government. So, the CIA tried to overthrow a western ally without the support of the president.
De Gaulle later said that he believed that some of the same U.S. security forces who had targeted him were responsible for Kennedy’s death, and that’s one of those stories that never make it to the American press.
Yes, after de Gaulle came back from Kennedy’s funeral, he told his information ministers that the same U.S. security forces that had targeted him or tried to overthrow his government were responsible for killing President Kennedy, and that Oswald was a convenient fall guy, patsy, scapegoat, and that American people didn’t want to know the truth and will never find out the truth. Unfortunately, that all came out to be [true]. That statement that de Gaulle gave to his information minister was published in the minister’s memoir years later. When that came out in France, it was never translated; it was never published in the US; and no one really publicized it at all in this country. That’s why history is so selective; history is an ongoing argument. You do need to bring an investigative journalist sensibility to history often to get to the truth.
Do you think we are as close as we’ll ever get to understanding what happened with JFK’s assassination, at least in our lifetime? Or do you think there is something that could dispel any doubt about the CIA’s involvement or some of the missing pieces that there isn’t a smoking gun for?
If there was ever a smoking gun, it was probably burned by the CIA long ago. But that said, I do think these 1,100 documents that the CIA is withholding – and they’re withholding them for a reason because they don’t want people to see them – have to do with some of the key CIA officers involved in Allen Dulles’s assassination apparatus, the apparatus which he used against foreign leaders. For any of those violent, particularly lethal men to be connected to Dallas – I have an eye-witness that pinpoints one of these men, William Harvey, on a plane to Dallas, shortly before the assassination. He was spotted by his own deputy. And his deputy told his children years later that was convinced that William Harvey was involved in the assassination of Kennedy. This was the guy who was responsible for the assassination operation aimed at Fidel Castro. He was working with the mafia to kill Castro. He was a notorious figure in the CIA. So, for him to be flying to Dallas, shortly before the assassination, at least raises some serious questions.
Among the documents that the CIA continues to withhold in defiance of the JFK Records Collection Act, are documents related to William Harvey, his whereabouts, and his travel records. So, that’s the kind of information that we need to force the CIA to release in compliance with the law. And the only way they’ll do that is if there is enough outcry from the public and political pressure. There was that kind of pressure after Oliver Stone’s film, back in the 1991. Of course, Oliver Stone got all sorts of holy hell from the media, for being a nut and a conspiracy freak. To this day, Oliver is traumatized by the kind of treatment he got then.
Speaking of Hollywood, one of thing we talked about [previously] was how when you were researching your book and learning about Dulles, you couldn’t help but think of comparisons to Lannisters from “Game of Thrones.” Do you think there is any chance that “The Devil’s Chessboard” could be adapted into a movie or TV series?
I don’t think there is a realistic chance that the main studios/players/network in Hollywood will produce a movie based on this book, and I’ll tell you why. I had the same experience with my earlier book, which looked at Bobby Kennedy’s search for truth into the assassination of his brother. It was optioned by Lionsgate and it came close to being set up as a TV miniseries or movie in several different places, but at the last minute, people got cold feet and shied away from it.
So far, I’ve had the exact same experience with “The Devil’s Chessboard.” Two major agencies have been representing the book in Hollywood. There was huge initial interest from all major players including Brad Pitt and George Clooney, and many others. The books circulated like hot cakes this summer as soon as it came out in galleys and I think as they read it and realized what was in it, despite what a dramatic narrative it is and despite how “House of Cards” showed that there is a huge public appetite for the dark side of power, this is too dark and scary for them.
George Clooney, in particular, was the first person to read it. It was rushed over to him by his agent the first weekend it came out… and he freaked out. These people have already seen Oliver Stone get “Oliver Stoned.”
I think no one in Hollywood will go near this. George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, the people who do American history, are more about mythologizing American history. They’re not about, as Joan Dulles told me, getting to and understanding the dark side. They’re dealing in fairy tales.


Liam O'Donoghue is Salon’s communications director. He writes about what’s happening at Salon and manages Salon’s social media assets. You can follow him on Twitter @Liam_Odonoghue.
More Liam O'Donoghue.

Intelligence Support to Urban Operations

Intelligence Support to Urban Operations, TC 2-91.4, December 2015

The Reign of Absurdiocy

There is no such thing as "international terrorism".
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1448673709


To declare war on "international terrorism" is nonsense. Politicians who do so are either fools or cynics, and probably both.

Terrorism is a weapon. Like cannon. We would laugh at somebody who declares war on "international artillery". A cannon belongs to an army, and serves the aims of that army. The cannon of one side fire against the cannon of the other.

Terrorism is a method of operation. It is often used by oppressed peoples, including the French Resistance to the Nazis in WW II. We would laugh at anyone who declared war on “international resistance”.

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military thinker, famously said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means". If he had lived with us today, he might have said: "Terrorism is a continuation of policy by other means."

Terrorism means, literally, to frighten the victims into surrendering to the will of the terrorist.

Terrorism is a weapon. Generally it is the weapon of the weak. Of those who have no atom bombs, like the ones which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which terrorized the Japanese into surrender. Or the aircraft which destroyed Dresden in the (vain) attempt to frighten the Germans into giving up.

Since most of the groups and countries using terrorism have different aims, often contradicting each other, there is nothing "international" about it. Each terrorist campaign has a character of its own. Not to mention the fact that nobody considers himself (or herself) a terrorist, but rather a fighter for God, Freedom or Whatever.

(I cannot restrain myself from boasting that long ago I invented the formula: "One man's terrorist is the other man's freedom fighter".)

MANY ORDINARY Israelis felt deep satisfaction after the Paris events. "Now those bloody Europeans feel for once what we feel all the time!"

Binyamin Netanyahu, a diminutive thinker but a brilliant salesman, has hit on the idea of inventing a direct link between jihadist terrorism in Europe and Palestinian terrorism in Israel and the occupied territories.

It is a stroke of genius: if they are one and the same, knife-wielding Palestinian teenagers and Belgian devotees of ISIS, then there is no Israeli-Palestinian problem, no occupation, no settlements. Just Muslim fanaticism. (Ignoring, by the way, the many Christian Arabs in the secular Palestinian "terrorist" organizations.)

This has nothing to do with reality. Palestinians who want to fight and die for Allah go to Syria. Palestinians – both religious and secular – who shoot, knife or run over Israeli soldiers and civilians these days want freedom from the occupation and a state of their own.

This is such an obvious fact that even a person with the limited IQ of our present cabinet ministers could grasp it. But if they did, they would have to face very unpleasant choices concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So let's stick to the comfortable conclusion: they kill us because they are born terrorists, because they want to meet the promised 72 virgins in paradise, because they are anti-Semites. So, as Netanyahu happily forecasts, we shall "live forever by our sword".

TRAGIC AS the results of each terrorist event may be, there is something absurd about the European reaction to recent events.

The height of absurdiocy was reached in Brussels, when a lone terrorist on the run paralyzed an entire capital city for days without a single shot being fired. It was the ultimate success of terrorism in the most literal sense: using fear as a weapon.

But the reaction in Paris was not much better. The number of victims of the atrocity was large, but similar to the number killed on the roads in France every couple of weeks. It was certainly far smaller than the number of victims of one hour of World War II. But rational thought does not count. Terrorism works on the perception of the victims.

It seems incredible that ten mediocre individuals, with a few primitive weapons, could cause world-wide panic. But it is a fact. Bolstered by the mass media, which thrive on such events, local terrorist acts turn themselves nowadays into world-wide threats. The modern media, by their very nature, are the terrorist's best friend. Terror could not flourish without them.

The next best friend of the terrorist is the politician. It is almost impossible for a politician to resist the temptation to ride on the wave of panic. Panic creates "national unity", the dream of every ruler. Panic creates the longing for a "strong leader". This is a basic human instinct.

Francois Hollande is a typical example. A mediocre yet shrewd politician, he seized the opportunity to pose as a leader. "C'est la guerre!" he declared, and whipped up a national frenzy. Of course this is no "guerre". Not World War III. Just a terrorist attack by a hidden enemy. Indeed, one of the facts disclosed by these events is the incredible foolishness of the political leaders all around. They do not understand the challenge. They react to imagined threats and ignore the real ones. They do not know what to do. So they do what comes naturally: make speeches, convene meetings and bomb somebody (no matter who and what for).

Not understanding the malady, their remedy is worse than the disease itself. Bombing causes destruction, destruction creates new enemies who thirst for revenge. It is a direct collaboration with the terrorists.

It was a sad spectacle to see all these world leaders, the commanders of powerful nations, running around like mice in a maze, meeting, speechifying, uttering nonsensical statements, totally unable to deal with the crisis.

THE PROBLEM is indeed far more complicated than simple minds would believe, because of an unusual fact: the enemy this time is not a nation, not a state, not even a real territory, but an undefined entity: an idea, a state of mind, a movement that does have a territorial base of sorts but is not a real state.

This is not a completely unprecedented phenomenon: more than a hundred years ago, the anarchist movement committed terrorist acts all over the place without having a territorial base at all. And 900 years ago a religious sect without a country, the Assassins (a corruption of the Arabic word for "hashish users"), terrorized the Muslim world.

I don't know how to fight the Islamic State (or rather Non-State) effectively. I strongly believe that nobody knows. Certainly not the nincompoops who man (and woman) the various governments.

I am not sure that even a territorial invasion would destroy this phenomenon. But even such an invasion seems unlikely. The Coalition of the Unwilling put together by the US seems disinclined to put "boots on the ground". The only forces who could try – the Iranians and the Syrian government army – are hated by the US and its local allies.

Indeed, if one is looking for an example of total disorientation, bordering on lunacy, it is the inability of the US and the European powers to choose between the Assad-Iran-Russia axis and the IS-Saudi-Sunni camp. Add the Turkish-Kurdish problem, the Russian-Turkish animosity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the picture is still far from complete.

(For history-lovers, there is something fascinating about the reemergence of the centuries-old struggle between Russia and Turkey in this new setting. Geography trumps everything else, after all.)

It has been said that war is far too important to leave to the generals. The present situation is far too complicated to leave to the politicians. But who else is there?

ISRAELIS BELIEVE (as usual) that we can teach the world. We know terrorism. We know what to do.

But do we?

For weeks now, Israelis have lived in a panic. For lack of a better name, it is called "the wave of terror". Every day now, two, three, four youngsters, including 13-year old children, attack Israelis with knives or run them over with cars, and are generally shot dead on the spot. Our renowned army tries everything, including draconian reprisals against the families and collective punishment of villages, without avail.

These are individual acts, often quite spontaneous, and therefore it is well-nigh impossible to prevent them. It is not a military problem. The problem is political, psychological.

Netanyahu tries to ride this wave like Hollande and company. He cites the Holocaust (likening a 16-year old boy from Hebron to a hardened SS officer at Auschwitz) and talks endlessly about anti-Semitism.

All in order to obliterate one glaring fact: the occupation with its daily, indeed hourly and minutely, chicanery of the Palestinian population. Some government ministers don't even hide anymore that the aim is to annex the West Bank and eventually drive out the Palestinian people from their homeland.

There is no direct connection between IS terrorism around the world and the Palestinian national struggle for statehood. But if they are not solved, in the end the problems will merge – and a far more powerful IS will unite the Muslim world, as Saladin once did, to confront us, the new Crusaders.

If I were a believer, I would whisper: God forbid.

US Marine WANTS YOU to demand .01% criminal psychopaths’ arrests

8-minute video: US Marine WANTS YOU to demand .01% criminal psychopaths’ arrests for obvious War Crimes

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Carl Herman
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/8-minute-video-us-marine-wants-you-to-demand-01-criminal-psychopaths-arrests-for-obvious-war-crimes.html
 

With another possible false flag event in Paris to initiate more unlawful war on Syria, former US Marine Ken O’Keefe models the voice all of us should have to end .01%’s War Crimes in this 8-minute video from Time To Wake Up:

Ken’s factual claims are verifiable with Emperor’s New Clothes ease:

• US military are trained to refuse obvious unlawful orders, with officers authorized to arrest those who issue them (there are no lawful orders for unlawful War of Aggression). All Americans in military and law enforcement, and many in government, have Oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
• The crime of US .01% “leadership” is indeed best described as treason: an attack upon our military by lying them into illegal invasion of foreign lands, and attack upon our very definition of being American: our Constitution.
• Israel’s armed attacks, invasions, and military siege on Gaza are very obviously unlawful. As typical in history, Israel’s government blames the victim as they kill and destroy more and more while taking more and more land.
• US/UK/Israel collaboration to destroy Gaza and much of the Middle East are crimes of Genocide (intentional death of a targeted group) and Crimes Against Humanity (intentional policy of attack).
• Presidents Obama and Bush, along with US Congress members, created executive orders, NDAA 2012, and the 2006 Military Commissions Act that violates fundamental Constitutional guaranteed rights to claim to “authorize” seizure of any person dictated by “leadership” as an “enemy,” and seize any resource for “national security.” The very obvious solution is to arrest the two presidents and leaders of Congress.


• Americans have lost nearly all rights lawfully guaranteed in the US Bill of Rights within the US Constitution. This is Orwellian inversion of our guaranteed limited government under law.
• America is feared in global polling as the greatest threat to world peace.
• Of 248 armed conflicts since WW2, the US started 201 (81%).
• These US-started armed attacks have killed ~30 million and counting; 90% of these deaths are innocent children, the elderly and ordinary working civilian women and men.
• The US has war-murdered more than Hitler’s Nazis.
• .01% corporate media is again exposed for hiring weapons manufacturers’ employees to sell unlawful war on Syria to television viewers: 22 different men claimed as “experts” without disclosing they work for businesses that sell the very weapons that would be used on Syria.
• Syria is the latest target after ongoing sales pitches to do Iran failed.

These crimes annually cost millions killed, billions harmed, and trillions looted, with recent history continuing literal centuries of US lie-began Wars of Aggression that involved your families in two horrific previous global wars.
The term, psychopath, is the most accurate I have to describe the .01’s behavior of a veneer of social acceptability attempting to hide viciously destructive actions. This 5-minute video helps prove this point.
Taking care of US infrastructure rather than engage in Wars of Aggression also has very obvious solutions: banking and monetary reform to fully invest in infrastructure that return more economic output than cost, provide employment, upgrade decaying infrastructure, and all with debt-free money to be created and directly pay for this advancement. At-cost and in-house credit can create what we use for money as debt (negative number) to manage total money supply. These two policies nearly instantly provide ~$1,000,000 to every US household: astounding, game-changing, and easily verifiable as objective verification of simple math used for counting. (and here, here).
We want You to be Americans: those with intellectual integrity and moral courage to understand and live the literal definition of America: a limited government under our Constitution.
Do you care enough to live what your heart and mind calls you to think, speak, and take action?
As guests on this beautiful and dominated planet, we can only do so much as humans. And that said, we’ll discover together what is possible as we move forward in good-faith effort.
**
Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.
**
Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu
Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

42 Documented False Flag Attacks By Governments Since 1931

42 Documented False Flag Attacks By Governments Since 1931
www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/41-admitted-false-flag-attacks.html

There are many documented false flag attacks, where a government carries out a terror attack … and then falsely blames its enemy for political purposes.

In the following 42 instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admits to it, either orally or in writing:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.

(3) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(4) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(5) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and falsely blame it on the Nazis.

(6) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(7) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

(8) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(9) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(10) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(11) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

(12) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]“.

(13) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(14) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(15) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(16) The U.S. Department of Defense even suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(17) The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war.

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(21) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist trasmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(22) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(23) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(24) An Indonesian fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(25) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(26) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(27) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(28) As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”.

(29) Senior police officials in Genoa, Italy admitted that – in July 2001, at the G8 summit in Genoa – planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(30) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country.

(31) Similarly, the U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war. Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction (despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers).

(32) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(33) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(34) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(35) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(36) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(37) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts in 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(38) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.

(39) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(40) High-level American sources admitted that the Turkish government – a fellow NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks blamed on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(41) The former Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others.

(42) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

In addition, two-thirds of the City of Rome burned down in a huge fire on July 19, 64 A.D. The Roman people blamed the Emperor Nero for starting the fire. Some top Roman leaders – including the Roman consul Cassius Dio, as well as historians like Suetonius – agreed that Nero started the fire (based largely on the fact that the Roman Senate had just rejected Nero’s application to clear 300 acres in Rome so that he could build a palatial complex, and that the fire allowed him to build his complex). Regardless of who actually started the fire, Nero – in the face of public opinion accusing him of arson – falsely blamed the Christians for starting the fire. He then rounded up and brutally tortured and murdered scores of Christians for something they likely didn’t do.

We didn’t include this in the list above, because – if Nero did start the fire on purpose – he did it for his own reasons (to build his palatial complex), and not for geopolitical reasons benefiting his nation.
So Common … There’s a Name for It

The use of the bully’s trick is so common that it was given a name hundreds of years ago.

“False flag terrorism” is defined as a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s strategy of tension.

The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship. Because the enemy’s flag, instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, was hung, it was called a “false flag” attack.

Indeed, this concept is so well-accepted that rules of engagement for naval, air and land warfare all prohibit false flag attacks. 

Leaders Throughout History Have Acknowledged False Flags 

Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the danger of false flags: 

“A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people! “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche 

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.

– Adolph Hitler 

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader. 

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.

– Josef Stalin 

P.S. There are more:   Hotel King David in Jerusalem 1946,  Lavon Affair 1954, USS Liberty in 1967...