MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

In the wake of the Columbine High School mas­sacre in Lit­tle­ton, Col­orado, the pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment in favor of gun con­trol was greater than ever. Gen­er­al­ly per­ceived as part of the lib­er­al polit­i­cal agen­da, gun con­trol actu­al­ly has its roots in the depths of inter­na­tion­al fas­cist intrigue. This broad­cast doc­u­ments con­nec­tions between the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy and the world of Sen­a­tor Thomas Dodd (right) of Con­necti­cut.

A mem­ber of the U.S. pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al staff at Nurem­berg., this for­mer FBI agent (Dodd) was close to the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil (ASC), a domes­tic fas­cist group.  With its roots in the Hitler-Goebbels Anti­Com­intern, the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil was a key Amer­i­can link to the for­mer World Anti-Com­mu­nist League or WACL. Cre­at­ed by for­mer FBI agents dis­grun­tled at the demise of Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy’s “inves­ti­ga­tions,” the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil coa­lesced around the files of Har­ry Jung’s Amer­i­can Vig­i­lance Intel­li­gence Fed­er­a­tion. Vir­u­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic, Jung’s orga­ni­za­tion was part of the Anti-Com­intern pri­or to World War II.

Count­ing among its ranks some of the most promi­nent names on the far right, the orga­ni­za­tion kept track of peo­ple it con­sid­ered “sub­ver­sive,” shar­ing polit­i­cal intel­li­gence with prospec­tive employ­ers (par­tic­u­lar­ly defense con­trac­tors). The ASC hat­ed Kennedy and it is not, there­fore, alto­geth­er sur­pris­ing that Dodd helped to dis­sem­i­nate the dis­in­for­ma­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald had been trained in assas­si­na­tion by the KGB. With CIA assis­tance, Dodd insert­ed this dis­in­for­ma­tion into a Sen­ate Sub­com­mit­tee report. This dis­in­for­ma­tion, with roots in the same WACL milieu as the ASC, led lib­er­als to cov­er-up the assas­si­na­tion out of fear that pub­lic per­cep­tion that a com­mu­nist killed the Pres­i­dent would lead to a Third World War.

Dod­d’s role in this affair is all the more inter­est­ing when one con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Oswald may have ordered his weapons while work­ing for Dod­d’s Sub­com­mit­tee. Inves­ti­gat­ing the mail-order firearms busi­ness, the Dodd com­mit­tee focused on the two firms from which Oswald alleged­ly pur­chased his weapons. Oswald was appar­ent­ly extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ed in mail-order guns, a strange way for a prospec­tive assas­sin to acquire weapon­ry. In 1963, he could have pur­chased his guns over the counter with no trace of the trans­ac­tion.

Manuel Pena, an intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed Los Ange­les Police offi­cer involved with the “inves­ti­ga­tion” of Robert Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion, also worked with the Dodd Sub­com­mit­tee. Pena helped to trace Oswald’s mail order gun pur­chas­es. Dodd was instru­men­tal in craft­ing 1968 gun con­trol leg­is­la­tion that bor­rowed from the Nazi weapons con­trol act of 1938. It should be remem­bered that the assas­si­na­tions of the Kennedys and Dr. Mar­tin Luther King gen­er­at­ed pop­u­lar and leg­isla­tive sup­port for gun con­trol.

The pro­gram also sets forth Dod­d’s rela­tion­ship with the Julius Klein pub­lic rela­tions firm and, through it, key Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions. When Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tions of Klein’s con­nec­tions to those Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions threat­ened that rela­tion­ship, Dodd trav­eled to Ger­many in a vain attempt to con­vince Klein’s Ger­man clients that the Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tion should not stand in the way of their rela­tion­ship to Klein. (They feared the pub­lic­i­ty — Klein was an appar­ent­ly unreg­is­tered for­eign agent.) In Ger­many, Dodd met with Dr. Ludger Westrick. An eco­nom­ic advis­er to Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Kon­rad Ade­nauer, Westrick had been a key Nazi bureau­crat, liai­son between indus­try and the SS and eco­nom­ic advis­er to Mar­tin Bor­mann. (Record­ed on 6/6/99.)