Friday 24 February 2006

Warning

We're being prepared for a war. The TV and radio, all the conventional media outlets are telling us there's an enemy. Dark people, the one's with the funny accents. "Hate them, fear them, they're trying to blow you up!"

Our politicians ignore us.
The media tries to brainwash us.

The government tries, desperately, to make us think of other things.
The people who "protect" us are being blinded.

The ones who gain stay hidden.
They reap the harvest.
They earn the profit.
They live behind walls.
Cameras and guns.

To them we are scum.
Why do you think TV advertising tells us we're bad?

Security.
Compartmentalisation.
Official secrets.
We'll kill your family if you talk.

They lie to us and we let them.
We know they're full of shit.

They keep us occupied with lies and crap.
Mindless brainfood that is specially designed.
Like catfood without the glossy adverts.
Hate yourself.
Fear Everyone.
Fear difference.
Those are the messages they send.

How do I know?
When I don't stop myself I think that way!

Think free, stop the machine.
Love Peace Unity Respect

Love your family
Love your friends
Love your home
Love your tribe
Love the planet
Love the universe

Would everyone STOP getting shot! Please?

...before it's too fucking late and we're all dead...?!?!?!?!

PLEASE?

-= Ewar

ps. yes I'm probably a freak but if you live on this planet and you're reading this then you are too :-)

Thursday 23 February 2006

For Whom The Bell Tolls

David Irving was sent to jail for denying Jewish superiority.
His doom seals the reign of freedom that began with the fall of the Bastille.

by Israel Shamir


"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee," said the English poet, John Donne. A shameful Austrian verdict bodes ill not only for the English historian David Irving (sentenced to three years of gaol) but for our freedom as well. Never has our feeling of justice been insulted like this! When an occasional dissident was jailed in Brezhnev's Russia or Ne Win's Burma, there was always an uproar of protest. Now the only response to the Irving verdict is stunned silence. When they sent innocent Muslims to the living hell of Guantanamo, we could think: they are people of the Third World -- different rules apply. A Batista policeman in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana had said: some people can be tortured, and some can not. When Ernst Zundel was kidnapped in the US and brought to trial in Germany, we could think: it is a German internal affair. Now an eminent man of letters, an author of widely read and acclaimed books, a recognized European figure was snatched from a civilised country and jailed for irreverence to the Jews.

Technically, David Irving was sentenced for so-called "holocaust denial". But the concept of Jewish holocaust being the only enforced dogma of supposedly secular Europe has little to do with the Second World War and its atrocities. It has everything to do with the Jewish claim of superiority and exclusivity. There is a Jewish prayer saying: "Bless you, Lord, that you created me a Jew, that you separated between Jews and the earth folks, like you separated between the Holy and Profane, that our fate is not like their fate". The Holocaust concept is just another form of this prayer. They say that even their death is not like the death of anybody else. We must deny the concept of Holocaust without doubt and hesitation, even if every story of Holocaust down to the most fantastic invention of Wiesel were absolutely true. Therefore the technical discussions of Jewish mortality are perfectly legitimate but superfluous, like the argument whether a whale could swallow Jonah is superfluous for an atheist.

The legal enforcers of the Holocaust want us to bow down to the idol of Jewish superiority, or else! They won't jail Deborah Lipstadt for denial of the Holocaust of Dresden, or Guenter Lewy who penned a lengthy piece entitled Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? denying the genocide of native Americans. The Jews produced and published these denials for the same reason they published the Satanic Pictures - in order to emphasise the difference between a goy and a Jew. They want you to remember: you may profane Islam and Christianity, but not Judaism. You may discount the suffering of anybody but the Jews.

Thus, we should say: David Irving was sentenced for denial of Jewish superiority. His doom seals the reign of (albeit limited) freedom that began with the fall of Bastille. European history went full circle: from rejecting the rule of Church and embracing free thought, to the new Jewish mind-control on a world scale. Not only is Western Christian civilisation dead, but even its successor, secular European civilisation, has met its demise only a few days after its proud and last celebration by the Danish scribes. It was short-lived: about two hundred years from beginning to the end, the Europeans may once have had the illusion that they can live without an ideological supremacy. Now this illusion is over; and the Jews came in the stead of the old and tired See of St Peter to rule over the minds and souls of Europeans.

In 1962, Look magazine invited founder of the Jewish state David Ben-Gurion to picture the world 25 years into the future. He predicted that World Government would already be in place by 1987, with the Supreme Court for Mankind (the higher ecclesiastic body) would be established in Jerusalem, along with a shrine there commemorating the Jewish role in the bringing-together of mankind. He was mistaken by only a few years. The world is not fully subdued yet, but it already knows its new master.

In the 19th century, Europeans could not fully colonise China. But there was an obvious mark of their supremacy: the Settlement System. It divided the residents of China into two categories: the supreme human beings (the Europeans) and the lowly natives. A native who raised his hand against a superior European was tried by European colonial law, a European whose misdeed caused harm to a native was out of bounds of native justice. This system of "settlements" was dismantled by Chairman Mao after the Communist victory of 1949. Similar systems of colonial justice went down with the colonial empires that employed them, and for a short while afterwards, every country was sovereign over its land.

Some time ago, the Knesset of the Jewish State revived the Settlement System for the non-yet-fully-colonised world: an offender against the Jews, wherever he lives, wherever he commits his offence, can be brought to the Jewish court. The offended Jew may have no connection whatsoever to the Jewish State, the offence may be not considered an offence by the local native law, but he still can be brought to Jewish justice in Jerusalem. This law claimed supreme sovereignty of the Jews over the rest of mankind. This law denied the sovereignty of all nations save one. Such a claim had to be treated as any hostile attempt of the nation's sovereignty: as an act of war. But it passed in silence due to a marvellous Jewish invention: gradualness.

This method was explained by Amira Hass, the Haaretz correspondent in colonised Palestine. She wrote: "If you throw a frog into boiling water, it will jump out and save its life. But a frog swimming in room temperature water that is gradually heated will grow used to the heat; by the time the water boils, it's too late and the frog dies. In the development of the Israeli system of control over the Palestinian people and their land, the Israeli occupation has raised to the level of genius the use of gradualness as a means of making people grow used to something." This gradualness was used by the Jews - not only in regard to the Palestinians.

The Settlement System started small: the Long Arm of the Jews snatched Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jewish justice in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was a bad guy who did a lot of harm to Jews in a big way, so many countries chose to disregard this grievous infringement of Argentine sovereignty. And it was just the beginning:

A few years later, the Polish court demanded the extradition of a Jewish mass murderer, Solomon Morel. This Morel tortured and killed with his own hands hundreds of ethnic Germans in a concentration camp in postwar Poland. His crimes were exposed by the late American journalist John Sack. Morel escaped to Tel Aviv, and the Jewish state replied to the Polish demand with imperial haughtiness: "What Chutzpah! These natives do not know their place!" Probably, Queen Victoria would reply like that if a native African chief were to demand the surrender of one of her officials to his justice.

Since then, every country, big and small, has accepted the notion of the Jews being above the law. The wealthy Russian Jewish crook Nevzlin escaped Russia and lives peacefully in Tel Aviv, next to Flatto-Sharon, a French-Jewish crook, not far from a murderer of a Canadian child, within a reach from many other killers and crooks. A powerful Jewish organisation called Khabad wrote in its charter: there should be no Jews in goys' jails. By bribes and persuasion they release Jewish criminals from jails and ship them to the Jewish state. The Khabad founder, Lubawitsch Rebbe's birthday is celebrated as a holiday, "Education Day," in the USA.

In property cases Jews are also above the law. Jewish property is sacrosanct. They have demanded and received back all property that once belonged to Jews in Germany, Austria, France, Baltic states. If a Jew had no heirs, his property went to World Jewry. But 90% of goys' property was confiscated by the Jewish state in 1948, and since then 50% of the lands conquered in 1967. Even last year thousands of dunams of goys' lands were taken over in Jerusalem area, for a goy has no real title to property, according to Jewish law.

A taste of Jewish justice is provided in the case of an Israeli captain who murdered a schoolgirl, 13, in full sight of his soldiers. He emptied his gun unto her body and was found not guilty by the Jewish court. Actually, none of the non-Jewish children' murderers (two hundred in the last three years) was ever punished by a Jewish court. Not many of them were even brought to justice, but whoever was got off lightly. The settler Nachum Korman murdered a 10-year-old boy, Hilmi Shusha, in the village of Hussan. He was apprehended, taken to the court and forensic evidence against him was brought by the highest Israeli forensic institution, but the judge dismissed the evidence and sentenced the murderer to six months of social work. On mere suspicion of having committed such a crime against a Jewish child, a goy gets a life sentence.

Jewish justice makes us look back at the Inquisition trials with some nostalgia. When Galileo repented, he was allowed to continue his studies unhindered. The repentance of Irving did not help him a bit. The judge said: "The regret he showed was considered to be mere lip service to the law." And "independent expert" Dina Porat, head of Tel Aviv University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, said that "Irving's purported repentance is motivated by his fear of a verdict that could amount to 10 years' imprisonment."

Now, Jewish justice is being enforced on a global scale. The European Jewish Congress is set to file a complaint in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for "incitement to genocide", but all attempts to bring Ariel Sharon to justice predictably failed. The greater Jewish state, the US, also adopted its smaller sister's idea of unlimited supreme sovereignty. An offence against an American citizen can be brought to an American court wherever it occurred. Surprisingly, this Imperial claim, akin to the Settlement system of old, was also utilised mainly in the Jewish interests. Whenever Jewish settlers -- American citizens -- were killed in the course of the Middle Eastern conflict, American judges ruled against the Palestinian National Authority, Iran, Hamas and the whole world, and granted the victims' survivors multimillion dollar damages. But nobody can sue the Jews: whether they kill Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist, with a bulldozer in Gaza, or they strafe American sailors on board USS Liberty or kill and maim American Palestinians.

With the Austrian verdict, Jewish supremacy ceased to be a paranoid's nightmare, and became a fact bound in law, like the Viking supremacy in Danelaw, in East Anglia of old, with this one difference: the Jewish supremacy has religious overtones while the Vikings relied upon their swords and their dogs.

This is openly discussed in the Jewish world. "We live in the full blossom of Messiah Days, free from our political adversaries and soon to be freed from the satanic goys", Uriel Tal wrote. While Christians believe that the Second Coming of Christ will usher a completely new world of miracles, the Jewish view expressed by Maimonides is that the world in the Days of Messiah will not differ much from the world we knew, except for triumph of Jewish supremacy, Gedulath Israel (Hilchoth Teshuva 9:2). Based on this understanding, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme religious court, was established a year ago to judge the world. It is led by Rabbi Adin Steinzaltz, and the goyim who observe the Noahide commandments made their obeisance to him.

Some months ago I was brought to the police station in my Jaffa and asked to answer the complaint of the French Jewish organisation, LICRA.

- "Did you write about Jewish supremacy and world dominion?" a policeman asked.

- "So what if I did?" I replied. "Every second Rabbi has expressed this view."

- "Yes, but they see it in a positive light!" said the policeman.

Thus there is no argument about the fact of Jewish supremacy, only about its assessment. If you think it is good, you may even be a US president -- if you think it is bad, your place is in jail! Meanwhile, Jewish supremacy is hard on those who challenge it as Irving did. Gradually -- oh ever so gradually, so as not to frighten the frog from heating water -- the screw will tighten.

Eventually it may become unpleasant: Jewish justice can give a handsome handicap to its nearest competitor in ruthlessness, Genghis Khan. It is partial, and proud of it. By Jewish law, a Jew vs. a Goy is always right, even if he is wrong. The Europeans will feel the tender mercy of the Jews, until now the exclusive privilege of Palestinians. There may well be poetic justice in this turn of events.

Ordinary Jews aren't going to enjoy the new-old order of things. If there is something Jewish justice likes even less than a goy, it's a stray Jew. Apostates, that is Jews who turned to Christ, should be killed, according to Maimonides. The extremely clement Rabbi Asher tore off the noses of Jewish women who had intercourse with a goy, while Jewish men were normally flogged for this transgression. Well, some obligations coming with superior status.

Christianity will probably dwindle; only its Jew-worshipping sects, similar to the US Christian Zionists, will survive. Others will be prosecuted for their antisemitism and will be disbanded. The churches will be destroyed, in accordance with the Jewish commandment. They should not be allowed to compete with the Temple in Jerusalem which will be rebuilt on the ruins of the al Aqsa Mosque. The rebuilding will be quite painless: after the forthcoming attack on Iran, Muslims will have other things to worry about -- for instance, their physical survival! This can't be guaranteed, as they were proclaimed "Amalek", and their mass annihilation is a religious duty of the Jews. The road to this future is opened by the fateful ruling of the Austrians.

Always looking for the bright side of things: now the Europeans do not have to worry about the dark prophecy of the Protocols. The rule of the Elders of Zion is already upon us, and egad! -- it is not half as bad as we feared. At least, not yet.

Full story...

J'accuse - Facilitating Fascism

by Zbignew Zingh

What kind of doctors has the United States trained who stand by idly while prison guards force-feed prisoners in Guantanamo Bay with plastic pipes shoved down the noses of the shackled and tortured?

What kind of psychologists have we educated who assist the Pentagon inventing new ways to torture men and women, breaking their minds without breaking their skin; who help create government propaganda, plant false news stories, devise "psy-ops" to mislead us all?

What kind of lawyers are these who work for the Department of "Justice", the "Defense" Department, the Pentagon or the White House, who waste their careers finding legal loop-holes justifying torture, deceit, eavesdropping and imprisonment without charge?

What manner of scientists, hardware and software engineers have we graduated who dedicate their intelligence and creativity to devising deadlier weapons, more secretive ways to snoop, and more innovative ways to kill?

What types of ministers, priests, rabbis, chaplains and reverends are these who mutter empty palliatives to their congregations, run through empty chants and mindless prayers and paeans to Love and Holiness in pursuit of a Life to Come, while today, right now, human carrion burns in their names, and naught do they do at all?

What types of writers, journalists, editors, reporters, actors, what types of men and women are these who slavishly say and write and do as they are told knowing that they spread lies and deception and blather?

Although this nation is led by a few, its actions are facilitated by many. We are the facilitators -- the professionals, the educated, the trained -- we are the ones whose skills and knowledge keep the whole machinery moving, the cogs oiled, the system operating smoothly. Without the collaboration of the entire class of facilitators, nothing happens. No invasions occur, no bombs drop, no one is tortured, no one is disappeared, no doublespeak is spoken. The minority of "Leaders" do not actually commit hands-on crimes. You will not find Mr. Rumsfeld's, Mr. Cheney's, Mr. Bush's fingerprints at the crime scenes in Iraq any more than you could find Mr. Kissinger's on the casket of Allende. The leaders lead, but their employees, the facilitator classes, do the deeds.

I deny that America is a land of fools. We all know. Everyone of us. What some do not know, they do not want to know. The myth of propaganda is that it imparts falsehoods to the people. The truth of propaganda is that it discovers the falsehoods that the people want to believe, and imparts it to them as they want it.

The hypnotist cannot hypnotize someone who is not willing.

The falsehoods disseminated by the Leaders and the Media are the alibis for the Many doing what they want to do anyway. Propaganda is the cover for the crime: We did not know what we were doing. We were deceived. We were dupes. We were fools. Therefore, we can profit and do what we do with a clear conscience.

J'accuse!

Full story...

Wednesday 22 February 2006

The Persecution Of David Irving

Nation-States Gone Wild

by Mark Hand - PressAction.com


Will the European governments that ban any talk about the Nazis not having murdered 6 million Jews start rounding up the newspaper editors who published the Muhammad cartoons and start putting them on trial for crimes against Islam? European governments and their media mouthpieces appear to use the mantle of free speech to justify publishing supposed insults against Muslims. But what about the free speech rights of people who dare to go against conventional thinking of Nazi atrocities committed against Europe?s Jews?

These Holocaust deniers, revisionists and skeptics don?t have any rights to free speech in many European countries (and Canada), unlike their brethren who dare to publish images of the Prophet Muhammad but don?t face criminal charges. David Irving now must spend the next three years in prison for giving two speeches in Austria in 1989. Ernst Zundel faces up to five years in prison for publishing his opinions on the Zundelsite website while living in Canada.

Should people who downplay the Confederate States of America?s treatment of slaves and the U.S. government?s treatment of Native Americans face criminal charges? Should the people who publicly contend that the U.S. government was justified in killing hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki face criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq faces criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of Israel?s conduct against Palestinians face criminal charges? Of course not!

We are dealing with a simple yet extremely dangerous case of nation-states gone wild. Instead of addressing their complicity in modern-day atrocities?such as providing either unabashed logistical support for or tacit approval of the U.S. government?s crimes around the world?these governments arrest people for public speech.

Irving, Zundel and others who face criminal charges of ?denying the Holocaust? have not committed violence against anybody. They have not given orders to soldiers to invade and occupy another country. They have not given orders to police or soldiers to arrest and imprison individuals without charges. They have not given approval to secret police, soldiers or prison guards to torture individuals.

Irving, Zundel and others have expressed their opinions about one of the most despicable periods in our world?s history. These expressions might anger people. But these people are not in positions of power today that would give them the means to implement policies that mimic the conduct of the Nazis.

Today, the leaders of liberal democratic governments are the ones with the authority (and police and military firepower) to mimic selected policies of the Nazis and the policies of other notorious regimes in our world?s history without fear they will face the consequences of their deadly actions.

If one does not like what some people might say or write about the Holocaust, then that person should ignore it. If one does not like images of the Prophet Muhammad published in newspapers, then that person should ignore them.

What we should not ignore is when nation-states, with their monopoly on violence, lock up people for expressing their opinions about government atrocities committed 60 years ago. More important, we should not ignore the fact that the governments that are locking up individuals for speaking their mind about the actions of the Nazis are the same governments aiding and abetting (or refusing to denounce and stop) the atrocities committed today by the world?s only superpower and its confederates.

Full story...

The Jews And The Concentration Camps

Ok, I know I'm going to get slammed for this one like I always do but frankly I don't care. With Zionist crazy people having innocent historians locked up for giving speeches the world is going down a path few of us want it to. Can any action be taken to stop it? I don't know, certainly it doesn't seem like it at the moment. But human history has a way of unfolding no matter what any of us try to do and I like to think that people will wake up before it is too late. Anyway, regardless of any of that a lot of what you are told in the media is pure unvarnished bullshit and the sooner you all wake up to it the nicer this little planet of ours will be to live on.

A Factual Appraisal By The Red Cross

There is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the conditions of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948.

This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur l'activité du CICR en faveur des civils détenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition of the Red Cross, had been strict political neutrality, and herein lies its great value.

The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention in order to gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by the Germany authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or supervision.
The Red Cross Report is of value in that it first clarifies the legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees, the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds (in German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. 111, p. 73). These persons, it continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned under common law for security reasons." (P.74).

The Report admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to security, but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from August 1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps and prisons" (Vol. 111, p. 78). The ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants and launched a food relief programme which continued to function until the last months of 1945, letters of thanks for which came pouring in from Jewish internees.

Red Cross Recipients Were Jews
The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. "Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück, Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83).

In the course of the war, "The Committee was in a position to transfer and distribute in the form of relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organisations throughout the world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York" (Vol. I, p. 644). This latter organisation was permitted by the German Government to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief operation for Jewish internees came not from the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary and Slovakia.
The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This camp, "where there were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries was a relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol. III, p. 75). According to the Report, "'The Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special conditions. From information gathered by the Committee, this camp had been started as an experiment by certain leaders of the Reich ... These men wished to give the Jews the means of setting up a communal life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost complete autonomy. . . two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945. They confirmed the favourable impression gained on the first visit" (Vol. I, p . 642).

The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian Jews until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many of the German camps after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated westward. But the efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and Oranienburg.

No Evidence Of Genocide
One of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps toward the end of the war. Says the Report: "In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on February 1st, 1945 ... In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was authorised to stay in each camp ..." (Vol. III, p. 83).

Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable.

In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report does not even mention such a thing as a gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities, suffered rigours and privations, but its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend. Like the Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red Cross found itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become the order of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is concerned, the Report points out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the eastern front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p. 204 ff) - Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes nonsense of this allegation. "Not only the washing places, but installations for baths, showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates. They had often to take action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get them repaired or enlarged" (Vol. III, p. 594).

Not All Were Interned
Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population) deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free population," and this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the European Jews were placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination programme", and with the claim in the forged Höss memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing "every single Jew he could lay his hands on."

In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in charge, the Report states that "A large proportion of the Jewish minority had permission to stay in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a comparative haven of refuge for Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem to have been in comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the German forces took place. While it is true that the law of May 15th, 1942 had brought about the internment of several thousand Jews, these people were held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging were tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms almost equal to those of the free labour market" (Vol. I, p. 646).

Not only did large numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the war, generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich, as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews from Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States were held to be American citizens by the German occupying authorities, who further agreed to recognize the validity of about three thousand passports issued to Jews by the consulates of South American countries" (Vol. I, p. 645).

As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until March 1944," says the. Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas for Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its attempted armistice with the Soviet Union) with a government more dependent on German authority, the emigration of Jews continued.

The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United States "to give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from Hungary," and from the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating that "The Government of the United States ... now specifically repeats its assurance that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the present circumstances are allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p . 649).

Biedermann agreed that in the nineteen instances that "Did Six Million Really Die?" quoted from the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War and Inter Arma Caritas (this includes the above material), it did so accurately.

A quote from Charles Biedermann (a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Director of the Red Cross' International Tracing Service) under oath at the Zündel Trial (February 9, 10, 11 and 12, 1988).

The above is chapter nine from the book "Did Six Million Really Die?"

For the entire book "Did Six Million Really Die?", click here.

Full story...

A History of America's National Reconnaissance Office (IV)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part IV


Whenever a new administration takes over in Washington, especially that of the other party, there is a vast change in the Executive Branch because of policy needs, the demands of favor, and the needs of individuals. The new President will need a group of like-minded specialists to satisfy the demands of current administration and future policy changes, the needs and expectations of party enthusiasts who have invested so much of their time and resources in his election, and those who burned themselves out at various posts while trying to keep his predecessor in office. The shakeup in the White House is so chaotic that it is almost impossible to satisfy basic security concerns while the transformation is taking place.

Given this situation, the replacements of administrative personnel are usually seen as normal and most predictable. Consequently, when Dr. Alexander H. Flax resigned as director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in March 1969, it was hardly even mentioned, much less raising any eyebrows. Flax had been director for 3 1/2 years demanding years - ones in which the NRO finally completed the objective of the Apollo program of sending men to the moon, and safely returning them to earth just before Christmas 1968 - just when the new Nixon administration has organizing itself to take power the next month. The public would hardly have been surprised if Flax took advantage of the Pentagon's revolving door with its industrial complex, and opted for a cushy position in the private sector.

From the very outset when Richard Nixon was elected President in November 1968, though, his administration was ideally suited to take advantage of all the capabilities of the NRO. 'Tricky Dick' seemed just the man to want the services of an agency officially unknown, and whose abilities were only really known by a most small circle. It was not until five years later - in the middle of the Watergate scandal - that the media finally discovered its very
existence, and it took another generation before officialdom - when it wanted to clean up its
image - formally acknowledged its existence. The Nixon administration appeared to offer opportunities that Flax could hardly afford to turn down despite its stated intentions of ending America's war in Vietnam.

And Flax did not offer his resignation, only to learn almost immediately that it was dejá vue all over again. Instead of using the NRO to help achieve peace - what the voters expected from
Nixon since the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, had promised to continue LBJ's
camaign to a successful conclusion - the Republican administration, thanks to input by the new National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and his military assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, opted to snatch victory from defeat by launching a massive aerial bombardment of the whole area to destroy the ability of the North Vietnamese and their alleged surrogates, the Viet Cong, to continue fighting.

Of course, they have maintained most false claims about what was afoot, once the gambit ended in total failure. Kissinger wrote in 1979: "The Nixon Administration entered office determined to end our involvement in Vietnam." (Quoted from Robert J. McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, p. 425.) According to Kissinger, the reason why it didn't do so successfully was because the American public and Washington's commitments further afield did not permit the time and effort that General deGaulle had been allowed to
withdraw from Algeria. Haig, in Inner Circles, played dumb about the whole matter, acting as if he were merely a White House errand boy who prepared the daily intelligence briefing, merely alluding to a paper he prepared for the President which Kissinger was enthusiastic about, and Nixon "...ordered us to put it into effect." (p. 196)

Nixon's first chief of staff, in his amended, published The Haldeman Diaries, described a most secret meeting held in Brussels during Nixon's first visit to Europe on February 24, 1969: "At the meeting K, his deputy, Al Haig, and a Pentagon planning officer worked out guidelines for a proposed plan for bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. P had decided on the plane to Belgium to order the bombing as a response to the North Vietnamese countrywide offensive that they launched the day before we left." (p. 33) The plan included the items that Haig and Lt. Col. Dewitt Smith had recommended to Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson five years earlier, but had been rejected at the time because they were too risky. (See Haig, pp. 137-9.)

While implementing the plan was postponed for three weeks in order to override State Department opposition, Operation Breakfast - the codename apparently fitting Haig's morning intelligence duties - was kicked off on March 16th, a Sunday, after a dutiful church service. Two days later, Haldeman reported, "K's 'Operation Breakfast' a great success. He came beaming in with a report, very productive. A lot more secondaries than had been expected. Confirmed early intelligence. Probably no reaction for a few days, if ever." (p. 41) The next phase of the secret war, Operation Lunch, the military incursion into Cambodia, followed in due course, but one would never know from reading Haig's account.

Of course, Haldeman was referring to a North Vietnamese reaction, but there had already been a response. Flax tendered his resignation just then, knowing that the Nixon administration had the tiger again by the tail, and he wanted no longer to be a part of it. Haldeman, along with other administration leaders, also did not anticipate the increasingly hostile press coverage of the accelerating operation, thanks to leaks to the media about it. Soon Washington Post and New York Times reporters, especially William Beecher, were barred from the White House, and Haig, who was now regularly consulting with Nixon in the Old Executive Office Building where they both had offices, was busily involved in determining their source.

To implement the secret Kissinger-Haig plan, the White House created a "backchannel" with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thereby circumventing not only SOD Melvin Laird, Secretary of State William Rogers, and the Cabinet but also NSA and the CIA. "Using special codes, teletypes, and secure terminals located at the Pentagon and in the White House Situation Room," Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin wrote in Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, "the president and his national security adviser could send and receive messages to selected American officials and members of foreign governments around the world without alerting the rest of the United States government." (p. 8)

Of course, the secret war needed the NRO to collect the aerial intelligence, and to provide the necessary communications for the successful completion of what the agenda called for - disrupting the transmission of men and materiel along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the ousting of the North Vietnamese from their Cambodian sanctuary, pursuing those who fled into Laos, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, etc. - and a second set of false reports about results in order to keep others in the dark about what was going on. Haig, in characteristic style, explained the campaign as the result of the North Koreans shooting down a US Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane on April 14th (p. 204ff.), a month after the bombing of Cambodia had started.

For all intents and purposes, Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson - the top assistant to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer - the CNO who would soon become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs - was the NRO's deputy director under the new arrangements. While Robinson was said to be running, later along with Yeoman Chuck Radford, a liaison office, connecting the JCS with the NSC - he was actually seeing to the implementation of what had been agreed to by Kissinger and Haig regarding the secret war. Robinson may well have been the Pentagon planner present at Brussels at its inception. The Admiral was a go-for-broke type who would stop at nothing to win the war in Vietnam

As Admiral Robert O.Welander - Robinson's replacement to the White House when the operation had to be closed down - explained to John D. Ehrlichman, the President's Assistant on Domestic Affairs, and David R. Young, an aide to Kissinger, on December 23, 1971, his joint-position had existed for about ten years, and he took over from Admiral Robert Ginsburg who had held the position in the LBJ administration: "I'm a two-way avenue of communications. I try and explain things to the (NSC) staff. I mean some of the formal military positions, things of that sort. I'm an in-house military expert; if they need some things done quickly. I can go ahead and punch into the organization over there much more quickly and hopefully effectively, than if we go down through the formal mechanism." (Quoted from Colodny and Gettlin, p. 447.)

While Robinson was responding to NSC commands with NRO missions, Haig was increasingly trying to determine the source of the growning number of leaks, especially because his former boss, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had commissioned a study of why policy-making had gone so badly in Vietnam - a work Haig had been asked to join but had declined, unlike many former colleagues in the process, especially Daniel Ellsberg. When the FBI finally declined to investigate more suspected leakers after having bugged 17 persons, most of them members of the NSC, over an 18-month period without any postive results, Haig saw to the hiring of The Plumbers aka Special Investigations Unit, and their installation in the Executive Office Building to continue the work.

The troubles with the Kissinger-Haig-NRO secret war were manifold. The North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong were unwilling to negotiate anything more than the cessation of hostilities, and the withdrawal of American forces, as their unwillingness to let the Soviets negotiate some kind of lesser settlement indicated. Washington only added to these problems by opening the door to Red China, and talking to Moscow about a treaty to limit nuclear weapons, thinking falsely that these efforts would undermine their assistance of the Vietnamese. And American losses continued to mount, as the media indicated - the NYT even publishing the photographs of service men killed since the Nixon administration had taken office. Then NSA Kissinger was growing increasingly pessimistic about what the secret war was achieving.

These developments, especially the negotiations with the communist powers, drove the JCS to start using the "backchannel" to spy on what Kissinger and Haig were up to, especially as the secret war wound down. Admiral Welander and Yeoman Radford instead of being conduits to the NRO became spies for Admiral Moorer, chairman of the JCS. "Military officers sensed that they were merely being used as instruments," Colodny and Gettlin wrote, "to further Nixon's own ends; their belief that this was the case was furthered by the events of ensuing months, during which they saw themselves being ignored, cut out, and circumvented on all the important issues - the conduct of the war, troop withdrawals, the peace neogatiation, and SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty), just to name the most important ones." (p. 10)

This spying - which started for real in October 1970 - was discussed by Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman at meeting at the White House on December 21, 1971 where they interviewed Welander's assistant, as James Rosen recounted in "Nixon and the Chiefs," on KeepMedia on April 1, 2002: " 'Under the implied approval of his supervisor,' Ehrlichman said at another point in the conversation, Radford 'has systematically stolen documents out of Henry's briefcase, Haig's briefcase, people's desks - anyplace and every place in the NSC apparatus, that he could get his hands on - and then duplicated them and turned them over to the Joint Chiefs, through his boss'." While the President was interested in seeking a prosecution of those thought responsible, especially Haig, the Attorney General talked him out of doing so for fear of disastrous blowback.

Instead, the liaison office was immediately closed, and the files Welander had were handed over to Haig who understandably handed those relating to the spying to Ehrlichman while keeping the rest himself. Welander was transferred to a sea command as far away from Washington as could be found, and Radford was reassigned to Oregon's Naval Reserve Trining Center. Admiral Robinson, while revealing nothing about his being a NRO conduit during the secret war when he was interviewed, was conveniently killed in a helicopter crash in the Tonkin Gulf in May 1972, leaving Haig in the confident position of denying in an uncharacteristic footnote Silent Coup's claims only about him: "...I do so now by stating categorically that any suggestion that this officer committed any act of disloyality whatsoever to the United States or his Commander in Chief while serving in the White House is totally false." (p. 245)

Officially, during this time, the NRO was busily occupied positioning its new generation of satellites, Rhyolites, constructed in TRW's M-4 facility in Redondo Beach, California, and making arrangements around the globe for the secure retrieval of their take. The satellites - the size of a minibus, and equiped with a solar-powered, dish-shaped antenna aimed towards the earth - were designed to pick up microwave and satellite communications on a continual basis - what the Soviets were increasingly relying upon in communicating across their vast country - and down-loading what they recorded without any encryption to avoid any additional weight in securing their positioning in space. In order for the satellites to work continuously, they had to be placed in geosynchronous orbit - 22,380 miles above the equator, and at a longitude where a secure place existed below.

Flax's replacement, Dr. John L. McLucas, was the ideal director for the job, as he had spent his previous, relevant career in the private sector, and, consequently, knew nothing about the NRO's on-going operations, especially its secret war in Southeast Asia. McLucas, the former CEO and President of MITRE Corp., had been involved in developing communication systems for national air security, and McLucas, in becoming Air Force underscretary too, just thought
his function was to smooth relations between the public and private providers of satellites, as he explained to researchers for the Defense Acquisition History Project shortly before he died: "So I saw it as mainly dealing with hardware and with the people who were necessary to procure and upgrade the hardware."

McLucas left the positioning of the new satellites to subordinates, and their real challenge was to find a place where they could conveniently and securely download their take in the far Pacific. Australia offered the best sites possible, and as long as it was governed by politicians friendly to America's venture in Vietnam, it was no problem. The site selected was at Pine Gap, near Ayers Rock, smack-dab in the middle of the continent. "Like a vacuum cleaner," Helen Caldicott wrote in Missile Envy, "they suck up a wide spectrum of Soviet and Chinese military communications and radar emissions and beam them back to Pine Gap." (p. 127) Pine Gap also received photographs and electronic transmissions from the latest satellites in the KH series, KH-8, and 9 (BIG BIRD).

For the purposes of this article, though, the most relevant program at Pine Gap was the CIA's Pyramider project, about which Dr. Caldicott wrote: "It communicated with foreign agents using sensing mechanisms placed in strategic locations around the world, and backup communications for overseas systems. The Pyramider program was supposed to ensure 'maximum undetectability'." (ibid.) Pyramider was part of the program that DCI Richard Helms was using to ferret out alleged spies among the anti-war ranks worldwide, and to pave the way for the secret operations by rogue agent William King Harvey et al. Of course, no system ensures undetectability, especially if someone in it decides to talk. What, for example, would have been the protection against Dr. Flax himself telling tales - and well he might, given his unexpected, abrupt resignation - and who really were the leakers that Colonel Haig was now so worried about?

To complement what was going on at Pine Gap, DCI Helms created the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO). The joint CIA-Navy project was organized much like the NRO, with the Navy taking the place of the Air Force, and its management being directed in the Agency's direction. The impetus behind the NURO's creation was the Navy's attack sub Halibut finding a stricken Soviet Golf attack submarine on the Pacific Ocean floor - loaded with nuclear weapons, "crypto-codes", and its communication systems - and the CIA was going all-out to build a vessel to retrieve it.

In 1970, the Halibut was given the assignment to tap the Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk to its port on the Kamchatka Peninusla, Petropavlovsk. To facilitate such operations, the Navy built three stations to transmit very-low-frequency (VLF) messages to the probing subs: the biggest one on the Northwest Cape of Western Australia, a second one at Jim Creek, Washington, and a third at Cutler, Maine.

To insure the security of the new NURO's operations, its CIA-led leadership carried out Operation Kittyhawk - a disinformation one to persuade Moscow falsely that it had SIGINT operations by the Americans under control. In June 1966, KGB agent Igor Kochnov made himself available to the Agency as a continuing agent in place by offering his services to CI chief James Angleton over the phone. To help settle disputes, and coordinate operations between the Bureau and the Agency, he was recruited, and allowed to handle a Soviet defector, former Red Banner fleet officer Nicholas Shadrin aka Nikolai Artamonov codenamed LARK, who was working for the Office of Naval Intelligence.

While Shadrin helped settle their disputes over another defector, Yuri Nosenko, Mark Riebling wrote in Wedge, "Shadrin also began to pass doctored naval secrets to the Soviets." (p. 232) The kind of doctored information he was supplying was the difficulty the Halibut was having in finding the cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, the worries the Americans had about her being discovered in Soviet waters, the infrared guidance system that Soviet cruise missiles had which were so threatening to American carriers, etc. (For just how hopeless The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB is as a source, note that Mitrokhim has no information about Kochnov, and Shadrin 's contribution is limited to his false claim that he could discover Nosenko's whereabouts! (p. 387)

As with the NRO's secrets about SIGINT operations during the Vietnam war, NURO's secret operations against Soviet SIGINT were betrayed in late 1967 by Chief Warrant Officer John Walker, a communications watch officer on the staff of the commander of the Atlantic Fleet's
submarines who walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington to offer his services shortly after fellow spy Robert Lipka has left NSA. "He had access to reports on submarine operations, technical manuals, and daily key lists," Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew wrote in Blind Man's Bluff, "that were used to unscramble all the messages sent through the military's most widely used coding machines." (p. 351) As expected, the Mitrokin Archive has nothing to say about what the eighteen years of spying by him, his recruit Jerry Whitworth, and three members of his family contributed to Soviet security.

The success of the Walker spy ring was well demonstrated when the Halibut finally went on its first NURO mission to tap the cable in Sea of Okhotsk in October 1971 just when the SALT talks with Moscow were entering their most difficult stages. The Soviets knew that the submarine would be looking for a sign along the coast somewhere, warning mariners not to anchor because a cable lay underneath - what Captain James Bradley, the Navy's top underwater spy, was convinced existed because of his experience on ships as a youth on the Mississippi.

After more than a week's search, low and behold, the Halibut discovered a sign, stating in Russian: "Do Not Anchor. Cable Here." In placing the tap on the cable - what enabled Washington periodically to read the routine communications between Moscow and its submarines in the Pacific - submariners discovered a mass of destroyed cruise missiles, small pieces of which they carefully recovered in the hope of coming up with a complete homing device of the cruise missiles. While the Navy's Department of Energy lab reconstructed a missile, its engineers were never able to put together the homing device. In sum, despite the NURO's massive efforts, it really never came up with anything important because of the spying by the Walkers.

When Nixon was nearing the end of his life, former DCI Helms told Cambirdge history Christopher Andrew in an interview in April 1992 his side of the story in dealing with the former President's White House. (See his For the President's Eyes Only, p. 350ff., and notes.) Of course, Helms wanted readers to believe that Nixon was the guiding hand behind Operation Chaos, claiming that the only way the Agency could prove to the President that domestic dissent was not inspired by foreign communist powers was by investigating all anti-war persons, and all contacts they had had with any foreign person. In putting all the onus of the program on the President, though, Helms never expressed any real opposition to it nor threatened to resign because it was completely swamping his agency.

Then Helms was worried about the legacy Harvey had left in immobilizing other agencies while he had carried out the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) had repeatedly had their drug-trafficking
investigations, particularly those of James Earl Ray and his courier Charlie Stein, stopped
because of NRO wiretapping which showed that CIA agents were involved. These concerns became a crisis when Nixon ordered on June 5, 1970 Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, NSA's director, "...to program for coverage the communications of U. S. citizens using international facilities." ("James Bamford Statement on NSA Surveillance," February 3, 2006, cryptome, org) Same as now, NSA needed neither a warrant nor probably cause for the wire-tapping in Operation Minaret.

This presidential directive set off alarm bells at CIA, and it moved immediately to limit any damage from new wire-tapping, especially those of sources working with the BNDD. Of
course, the Agency and Bureau both had been supportive of the program when it was started back in 1967 - only to be closed down a month later when the FBI was unable to find any connection between the Vietnam Veterans against the War and the Communist Party - only to be resumed in 1968 after MLK and RFK had conveniently departed the political scene. The CIA was worried about investigators learning about the hiatus and wondering why, especially since February 1970 when Director Hoover broke off all contact with Langley - what would show that the Agency was using the BNDD as a cover for Harvey activities, and a firewall against dangerous blowback.

Two weeks after Nixon had ordered warrantless eavesdropping on foreign communications of Americans by NSA, BNDD agents carried out the biggest drug-bust in history - Operation Eagle during which 150 suspects were rounded up from cities around the country. "As many as 70 percent of those arrested had once belonged to the Bay of Pigs invasion force," Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall wrote in Cocaine Politics, "unleased by the CIA against Cuba in April 1961." (p. 26) The others were connected to the Mafia, especially the crime families of Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam 'Momo' Giancana. Of course, their arrests, prosecutions and imprisonment not only took them out of circulation but also rendered their terrorist activities for the Agency a dead letter.

Of particular concern to Langley was the activities of the Florida-based financial conglomerate, the World Finance Corporation (WFC). Headed by Guillermo Hernández Cartaya, a member of the Operation 40 group which planned to take over Cuba in the wake of Castro's demise, the WFC was riddled with CIA agents, noticeably Juan Restoy, Ricardo Morales, and Mario Escandar, and Agency fronts. The arrests and indictments were an effective diversion from what were their primary responsibilites - murders, decoy operations, terrorist bombings and underworld enforcement - and after the crisis had passed, they largely escaped prison on legal technicalities. Of course, the CIA leader of all these anti-Castro Cubans was E. Howard Hunt, the eccentric writer who was now an employee of the Mullen Company, and back then thought that domestic dissent in Cuba, triggered into action by a small invasion force, could easily lead to his ouster.

The arrest of some Agency assets and the transfer of others had been just in time as the disarray of Washington's intelligence services had reached a new low in cooperation. At the same time that Nixon ordered the warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA, it seemed that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA had agreed to a new level of cooperation in meeting the unprecedented domestic unrest by agreeing to the Huston Plan - what the President's liaison with the agencies Tom Charles Huston had proposed - but Director Hoover refused to go along with the program which would leave him responsible for any illegal activities, and broke off not only all liaison with them but also with the Secret Service, the IRS, and the individual armed services intelligence services. "By cutting off liaison," Curt Gentry wrote in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, "Hoover hoped to distance the FBI, and his own reputation, from the inevitable holocaust." (p. 655)

Hardly a week later, the fat was in the fire when the New York Times announced that the Pentagon study of the conduct of the Vietnam war had been leaked to the press. While Nixon first thought that it would be a boon to his re-election since it showed the doubledealing of JFK and LBJ, he soon changed his mind when State Department memoranda showed the deep involvement of Henry Cabot Lodge and the Agency's Lt. Col. Lucien Conein in Diem's overthrow. Then the effort to get leaker Daniel Ellsberg by criminal due process was completely frustrated by the FBI taps that had been ordered to discover the leaker of the Nixon-Kissinger-Haig secret war - the JOD could not use them without showing that they had earlier been trying to get his friends, especially Morton Halperin.

Charles Colson, Nixon's special counsel, was ultimately obliged to hire the Plumbers, headed by the CIA's E. Howard Hunt, of all people - setting off a process which dragged into White House operations just those people the Agency was trying to distance itself from. Hunt -thought to have been the "mastermind" of the Bay of Pigs Operation - turned out to be the leader of Cartaya's group, the people who had just been arrested by the BNDD. More important, Hunt promised to provide "the right resources", as Fred Emery explained in Watergate, to turn Ellsberg's betrayal into a political triumph. Then Hunt was consulting with Conein, another operative involved, along with Ted Shackley and Harvey, in Operation Phoenix, on how to make it look as if JFK was more involved in Diem's overthrow.

From the NRO's point of view, the most damaging aspect of the Plumbers' work was Hunt's forging cables to prove the the Kennedys had personally conspired in the assassination of South Vietnam's President Diem - what President Nixon not only demanded, but deliberately referred to in his September 16th news conference, taking the initiative way from opponents using the release of The Pnetagon Papers against the administration.

Thanks to input from Conein, and help from Plumber secretary Kathleen Chenow, Hunt was able to put together forged cables - the Gemstone Papers - which falsely claimed that the US Embassy had asked for instructions about possible asylum for Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, if they were overthrown. More important, as Fred Emery wrote in Watergate, a forged cable back to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon declared: "At highest level meeting today decision reluctantly made that neither you nor General Harkins should intervene in behalf of Diem or Nhu in event they seek asylum." (Quoted from p. 72.)

While Hunt was unable to publish an article, based upon his forgeries, in the last issue of Life magazine, Conein took advantage of them when he appeared in December on the NBC-TV program "White Paper: Vietnam HIndsight" - what led NYT reporter Neil Sheehan, who had leaked The Pentagon Papers, to Daniel Ellsberg, to conclude that Conein's statements left no doublt about the extent of the Kennedy administration's involvement in the assassination of the South Vietnamese leaders. And there was no denial from any former JFK officials or former Ambassador Lodge about having either said or seen any of the material claimed, and neither the NSA nor the NRO have raised any questions or complaints since about their alleged existence.

Little wonder that when the Agency learned early in 1972 that disgruntled agent Victor Marchetti, a former assistant to the DDCI who regularly attended planning and intelligence meetings attended by DCI Helms, was writing an article and a book about the Agency's corruption, independence and incompetence in conducting foreign operations, its leadership pushed the panic button to stop them. After having stolen the material from the office of a New York publisher, and placed Marchetti under surveillance, the Agency went successfully to court to get an injunction against the book's publication, claiming that he was bound to secrecy, and obliging him to permit prepublication censorship before it appeared.

After a series of court hearings about what had to be removed, and two years later, the book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, finally appeared, with only the Agency's claim to secrecy for 27 items regarding SIGINT satellite intelligence, as Angus Mackenzie concluded in Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, standing up in court. The NRO's work was still the Republic's deepest secrets.

A History of America's National Reconnaissance Office (III)

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part III


The trouble with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) taking on heavy reponsibilities in the covert war in Vietnam, and trying to shore up support domestically for its continuance is that it had the most shadowy existence and legitimacy which were highly likely to be exposed as the operations involved so many personnel, and caused so much damage, both physically and psychologically. Operation Phoenix was an intense effort to break the political will of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese - what had started with Operation Plan 34A in February 1964 in the North - throughout the area, while NRO intercepts of communications with Cuba were intended to reveal how Americans were using enemy funds, especially from Hanoi, to undermine the nation's will in the war.

The shaky basis upon which the NRO was operating on was well demonstrated when the Pentagon finally released the Department of Defense Directive upon which it was based - a mere updating of a most short 1962 one on March 17, 1964 - what was a consequence of National Security Action Memorandum 288, issued the same day, and was intended to carry out the recommendations of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had just come back from Vietnam, a day earlier. They were all seen as necessary steps of a last ditch effort to prevent all of Southeast Asia from falling to the communists.

It was McNamara who recommended retaliatory actions against North Vietnam - overt high and/or low level reconnaissance flights to locate the Viet Cong's sources of supply, the bombing of strategic targets, commando raids on installations of tactical importance, and the mining of North Vietnamese ports - in order to insure South Vietnam's independence. "That objective, while being cast in terms of eliminating North Vietnamese control and direction of the insurgency, would in practical terms be directed toward collapsing the morale and self-assurance of the Viet Cong cadres now operating in South Vietnam and bolstering the morale of the Khanh regime." (Qouted from The Pentagon Papers, paperback ed., p. 280.)

To facilitate the implementation of these recommendations, the NSAM 288 was agreed to, and the DoD Directive issued. The Directive's legality was based upon provisions regarding maintaining the security of the CIA in the 1947 National Security Act, and as amended by the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958. The Top Secret document did little more than recognize the NRO's existence, and the duty of its director to coordinate and consolidate all the government's satellite operations into one program, and to perform some other function whose nature was blackened out by the censor's pen when it was declassified but whose content must have been aerial reconnaissance necessary for McNamara's plans.

This assumption is furthered by the fact that the agencies the NRO was to work with -apparently NSA, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities headed by Major General Rollen Anthis, the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies - were somehow missing when the document was released. The administration firmly believed that the Viet Cong was controlled and directed from Hanoi, and once its infrastructure and will was broken, the insurgency in the South would collapse.

Three years of Rolling Thunder air attacks in the North while increasing American ground troops in the South to protect the most fragile governmnet in Saigon proved these assumptions unfounded - as the Tet offensive of February 1968 proved - and leading hawks in Washington, starting with SOD McNamara, began reassessing their positions, and leaving the government when their revised views went unheeded. The still committed hawks would not tolerate any idea of settling for anything but victory, and they secretly worked behind the scenes to extend covert operations throughout the whole area
because of the shortage of troops to launch a conventional offensive in the hope of breaking the infrastructure and will of the Viet Cong itself - Operation Phoenix.

The Operation has often been confused with other kinds of military actions - SWIFT boat patrols which encountered resistance, the results of 'search and destroy' campaigns by
organized military forces, patrols which ended in wild firefights, and the like. The confusion regarding naval patrols was well demonstrated when former SWIFT boat sailors challenged Senator John F. Kerry when he charged during the last presidential campaign that they had engaged in war crimes - what Kerry could not substantiate. The same confusion surrounds the My Lai massacre in 1968 when Lt. William Calley's platoon was caught shooting up a village while in pursuit of a Viet Cong force - what helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who just died, stopped at gun point, and ferried the survivors to safety.

Operation Phoenix is usually sanitzed into merely an overly aggressive search for intelligence about insurgents where torture was even resorted to. William Blum, citing David Wise's article "Colby of the CIA - CIA of Colby" in a 1973 issue of The New York Times Magazine, wrote this in Rogue State: "The notorious Operation Phoenix, set up by the CIA to wipe out the Vietcong infrastructure, subjected suspects to torture such as electric shock to the genitals of both men and women, and the insertion into the ear of a six-inch dowel, which was tapped through the brain until the victim died; suspects were also thrown out of airborne helicopters to persuade the more important suspects to talk, although this should probably be categorized as murder of the ones thrown out, and a form of torture for those not." (p. 52)

Actually, Operation Phoenix was a most sophisticated system of terror where violations of international law often took place; assaults, ambushes and assassinations, generally at night, regularly occurred; renditions of those surviving routinely followed to places where comprehensive torture was carried out until the suspects were considered spent; and then they were simply executed. Aerial intelligence by the NRO was absolutely essential in all its operations as it was only after it had been taken, collected and analyzed could covert operators decide what targets to assault, and how. The instrument used was increasingly satellites as their passage overhead of any possible target would not tip off the inhabitants of what was possibly afoot. Operation Phoenix, in short, was the ultimate when it came to death squads.

If anyone is still in any doubt about the brutality of Operation Phoenix, he should consider the people who really ran it, and the evaluations by competent judges of its character. British covert operators, especially those in the dreaded SAS, considered American special forces, especially the Green Berets and Navy Seals, unnecessarily vicious in carrying out their missions. For example, Ken Connor, in Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS, noted that they did not live and learn from the people they were trying to pacify, preferring to "get them by the balls" when it came to winning their hearts and minds. "The American inability - or refusal - to distinguish between combatants and civilians led," he concluded, "to the brutal treatment of whole sectors of the population..." (p. 145)

This result was hardly unexpected since the CIA operative conducting Phoenix was Ted 'Blond Ghost' Shackley who had been William King Harvey's boss in Berlin during the tunnel operation in the 1950s, and in Miami during the Missile Crisis before he became station chief in Vientiane, Laos. It was while leading a guerrilla force of 20,000 Hmong tribesmen against the Pathet Lao, allies of the North Vietnamese, that he built up the skills considered necessary for running the operation, and he spared no option in terror when making up for not having stopped communism during the Missile Crisis. Shackley was successful enough in his efforts to become Saigon station chief after the containment of the Tet offensive in 1968.

The only trouble in using such an operation in saving the war in Vietnam was that it might be completely upset in Washington by the election of a peace platform, headed by a different President. In that case, everything would be for naught, so Phoenix's domestic side, headed by Harvey in New Orleans, prepared for the worst. He aka William Wood and Bill Boxley had been in a tailspin ever since the Dallas cock-up, and had been activated by DDCI Helms to make sure that Jim Garrison's hunt for JFK's killers did not get anywhere. Of course, Harvey, the massive, pistol-packing operator, had all the right connections with the Agency's Science and Technology Division, the Mafia, especially Sam Giancana's and Carlos Marcello's people, and hardliners in Hoover's FBI.

Hardly had Senator Robert Kennedy declared that the war was unwinable, and Martin Luther King organized his Poor People's Campaign, highlighted by a march on Washington to protest LBJ's failure to follow through on his 1964 Great Socity promises - what helped lead the beleaguered President to announce a bombing halt in Vietnam, and that he would not seek re-election - than Harvey maneuvered a programmed James Earl Ray into position in Memphis to assassinate him. Then when Kennedy picked up the peace mantle, Harvey had Sirhan Sirhan programmed as a decoy while security guard Thane Cesar killed him after his crucial victory in the California primary. (For more on this, see my article in Issue Eight of Eye Spy!, "Manchurian Candidates: Mind-Control Experiments and The Deadliest Secrets of the Cold War," pp. 50-55, and my articles about Harvey, Helms, and Peter Wright in the Trowbridge Archive.)

Of course, Harvey's tasks were to recruit people like Ray and Sirhan - persons with disassociated personalities which could be manipulated unconsciously by drugs and hypnosis - in ways which would involve no suspicions that the CIA was involved, to see that they were programmed to do what was required without any recall, and leave no tracks which could be retraced back to him and the Agency if the assassinations resulted in anything more than usual murder investigations. The essential responsibility was to get other agencies, especially the Secret Service, the FBI and other agencies -with input from the NRO - involved in ways which would keep Harvey and his colleagues informed of how affairs were developing, and at the same time providing a firewall against any blowback if plans went awry again, or serious concerns were raised about these assassinations.

Given MLK's campaign against Giancana's exploitation of blacks in Chicago, it was easy for Momo's lieutenant Johnny Rosselli to recruit Ray after he escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, and made his way slowly with Raoul apparently aka Jules Ricco Kimble to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico as a Momo bag-man. In doing so, he alerted Mexican federal police that he might be involved in drug-trafficking, but they made no attempt to arrest the fugitive - indicating that he was under surveillance in a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) sting. In the resort, Ray was re-directed back to LA by Giancana's people where he was checked out by Agency consultant Dr. Mark O. Freeman as to his suitability in being made a programmed assassin.

Then Ray was taken by Charles Stein, a criminal well-connected to Marcello, and a former resident of New Orleans, where he was checked out by Harvey for the MLK job after the operator had provided a complete cover up of the meeting as David E. Scheim indicated in Contract America: "According to the House Assassinations Committee, Ray took the 'possibly sinister' trip with a specific important objective, accomplished it rapidly, met with someone in New Orleans and received money on the trip." (p. 317)

While the HAC would have us believe that Ray met some subordinates of Marcello in the Provincial Hotel to arrange MLK's killing - what it was unable to find any evidence of - he actually met Harvey in his safe house where he was okayed for the operation. This was proven when he got back to LA, and Rev. Xavier von Koss hypnotized him to kill King under certain specific circumstances, and subjected him to a program of psychic driving to help induce it. (For a completely false explanation of the meeting - one which provides all kinds of evidence to refute its own conclusion, see Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 208ff.)

While this article is not a detailed explanation of either the MLK or the RFK assassination, I think that what I have written so far indicates why the FBI, BNDD, and Secret Service - and ultimately the NRO - got involved in monitoring the activites of both Ray and Sirhan. He had similar connections with the Mafia, problems with the authorities in New York and Miami because of the criminal activities by his boss Frank Donneroummas aka Henry Ramistella, and experience with drugs and hypnotists in LA too - what is grounds for thinking Harvey made him into a Manchurian candidate because of his hatred of RFK, and what he apparently did to MLK.

Stein's driving Ray to New Orelans would obviously get the BNDD involved, as he was reputedly selling narcotics in the city at the time. Ray's own escape from the American and Mexican authorities while on the run indicates quite clearly that they were hunting bigger game, especially Marcello. And the Secret Service, after the fiasco in Dallas, was almost paranoid about the same thing happening to LBJ - what would make it most concerned about how the activites of Cubans, pro and con Fidel, fitted into all this.

And Sirhan was programmed behind a similar smokesscreen. Instead of a Mafioso like
Marcello seeing, it seems, to his hiring, it was a Southern California rancher who put out a contract on Kennedy because of his support of Cesar Chavez's farm workers, and someone overheard a subordinate of Jimmy Hoffa's, apparently Carmine Galente, in the Lewisburg (Pa.) federal penitentiary discussing his execution in a way reminiscent to how Ray was hired and sprung by Giancana's people to get MLK while in the Missouri one.

RFK suspected that Hoffa was behind his brother's assassination, and had had an aide recklessly inform Jim Garrison of his suspicions! This obviously became most dangerous to RFK, increasingly seen as the next President, when Harvey infiltrated the investigation, and kept the Agency informed about developments in New Orleans, as Vincent Salandria, one of the few respectable critics of the Warren Report who claimed that the JFK assassination was the result of a government conspiracy, belated informed the District Attorney: "Jim, I'm afraid your friend, Bill Boxley, works for the federal government." (Quoted from Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 221.)

Sirhan suffered from compulsive gambling, constantly involved in shady deals to pay off the consequent debts. More important, Sirhan, being a Christian refugee from Palestine who could barely speak Arabic, emigrated to the States in 1956 after a terrifying childhood, and was often complaining about their plight to the folks back home, especially to his father who had returned -causing security officials concerned about where his pan-Arabism may lead, especially after Nasser's forces had been humiliated in the 1967 Six Day War. While he was compulsively writing and saying threats about RKF - part of his programming - officialdom apparently only thought that they pertained to LBJ since the President was responsible for the help to Israel that so angered Sirhan.

The growing connection between what was going on in Vietnam with developments back home was enhanced by things which had nothing to do with the assassinations of MLK and RFK - just information leaking out which could cause people to make the association. In the June 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine, Stanley Sheinbaum, who
had been the coordinator of a Michigan State University project to assist the economic development of South Vietnam, provided an exposé of how the CIA had manipulated the program to serve its covert agenda, and threatened to expose more Agency interference in domestic organizations.

In investigating the magazine, hoping to find communist infiltration of the organization, the CIA discovered that its most outspoken author was former Green Beret Donald Duncan -whose book The New Legions, condemning the training and operations of his former colleagues, caused some of them and many citizens to gain a new political consciousness - who only promised more. "We will continue to be in danger," he wrote to DD Helms, "as long as the CIA is deciding policy and manipulating nations." (Quoted from Angus MacKenzie, Secrets, p. 17.)

It was Ramparts which even got Dr. King concerned about the plight of the Vietnamese,
his close associate, and later public defender William F. Pepper writing an article, entitled "The Children of Vietnam," in the January 1967 issue about the US Army's brutal treatment of their offspring. As Pepper wrote recently in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, it was his files that induced King "...not only to formally announce his opposition to that war but to actively work and organize against it in every corner of America he visited." (p. 5)

It was in this context that the NRO was brought into the hunt for the communists, traitors, and drug lords by the BNDD, the Secret Service, and the FBI who were thought to be undermining the national will in Vietnam. As NSA director Lt. Gen. Lew Allen testified in 1975 before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities aka Church Committee, in 1967 the United States Intelligence Board tasked it to intercept all communications that Americans had overseas regarding drug trafficking, Executive protection, and foreign influence over US groups. In the six-year period the program was working, the NRO supplied 2,000 reports regarding drug trafficking, and 1,900 ones regarding possible terrorism and foreign manipulation of domestic political activity.

While James Bamford has portrayed the program in Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World as a rogue one, conceived by its
paranoid deputy director Louis Tordella, which was essentially concerned with making watch lists of subversives (p. 428ff), it was authorized by the White House, and it concerned primarily what people were saying and doing about all these things. While Banford was most concerned with what the CIA, Bureau, and the DIA were doing about the reported activities of people like MLK, Dr. Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda, and singer Joan Baez, he made no mention of the BNDD, and what its requested intercepts involved - what led to all kinds disinformation which Harvey and his agents took cruel advantage of in the assassinations of MLK and RFK.

Of course, by the time that Watergate occurred, and covert activities by the Nixon White House started leaking out, what the NRO had supplied to the process was ancient history, and by the time the NSA was obliged to testify about its role, what its reconnaissance agency had done seemed of little consequence. When General Allen was obliged to testify before the Church Committee, he mentioned this without the slightest response from committee members. "NSA did not retain any of the BNDD watch lists or product. It was destroyed in the fall of 1973, since there seemed no purpose or requirement to retain it." Independent investigators might have had different ideas, once they saw how deeply invovled the BNDD was in following all the activities of the leading Mafiosos, and anti-Castro Cubans - what had cleared the way for Harvey.

By then, NRO director Dr. Alexander Flax had long departed the scene. He retired soon after the arrival of the new Nixon administration back in March 1969. Apollo 8, the Lunar Orbit and Return, had safely been completed just before Christmas, and with the election of a candidate allegedly committed to achieving peace in Vietnam, it seemed an ideal time to go.