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These programs continue our series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio about the Oliver Stone documentary JFK Revisited, for which Jim wrote the screenplay.
Yet another area in which JFK’s policy outlook ran afoul of the prevailing wisdom of the Cold War was with regard to the Congo. A Belgian colony which was the victim of genocidal policies of King Leopold (estimates of the dead run as high as 8 million), the diamond and mineral-rich Congo gained a fragile independence.
In Africa, as well, Kennedy understood the struggle of emerging nations seeking freedom from colonial domination as falling outside of and transcending stereotyped Cold War dynamics.
In the Congo, the brutally administered Belgian rule had spawned a vigorous independence movement crystallized around the charismatic Patrice Lumumba. Understanding of, and sympathetic to Lumumba and the ideology and political forces embodied in him, Kennedy opposed the reactionary status quo favored by both European allies like the United Kingdom and Belgium, as well as the Eisenhower/Dulles axis in the United States.
In 1961, there was another assassination that overlapped events leading up to JFK’s killing. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was on the same page as JFK with regard to Congolese independence from Belgium, negation of the Belgian-sponsored attempt at getting mineral-rich Katanga province to secede and was of the same mind as JFK with regard to assuring Patrice Lumumba’s survival.
Hammarskjold’s 1961 death in a plane crash was not the accident it was represented as being:
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Jim DiEugenio; Skyhorse Publishing [HC]; Copyright 2022 by Jim DiEugenio; Introduction Copyright 2022 by Oliver Stone; ISBN 978–1‑5107–7287‑8; p. 105.
. . . . The photos of Hammarskjold show his body as the only one not burned or charred. And he had a playing card, reportedly the ace of spades, stuffed into his shirt collar above the know in the tie. Now, due to Susan Williams’ book and new evidence offered by Desmond Tutu and the Union of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there are controversial document that indicate Allen Dulles was involved in the sabotage of the plane. The project was called Operation Celeste and was to be carried out through a secret white supremacist group called SAMIR.
Kennedy’s old mentor Edmund Gullion advised JFK that Hammarskjold’s death was not the accident it was represented as being.
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Jim DiEugenio; Skyhorse Publishing [HC]; Copyright 2022 by Jim DiEugenio; Introduction Copyright 2022 by Oliver Stone; ISBN 978–1‑5107–7287‑8; pp. 402–403.
. . . . Suspicions were everywhere that there had been foul play. The first person on the scene was the US air attache. And there were bullets that he said were in the victims including Hammarskjold. And a close friend of President Kennedy, Edmund Gullion, sent a cable home saying: Contrary to the official explanation for this tragic incident, this was an assassination . . . .
In the Congo, LBJ reversed JFK’s policy stance, and the corporate looting of the Congo resulted under General Joseph Mobutu, himself a beneficiary of the piracy.
LBJ also reversed JFK’s policy toward Indonesia.
In 1955, Sukarno hosted a conference of non-aligned nations that formalized and concretized a “Third Way” between East and West. This, along with Sukarno’s nationalism of some Dutch industrial properties, led the U.S. to try and overthrow Sukharno, which was attempted in 1958.
Kennedy understood Sukarno’s point of view, and had planned a trip to Indonesia in 1964 to forge a more constructive relationship with Sukharno. Obviously, his murder in 1963 precluded the trip.
In 1965, Sukarno was deposed in a bloody, CIA-aided coup in which as many as a million people were killed.
Of particular interest in connection with Indonesia, is the disposition of Freeport Sulphur, a company that had enlisted the services of both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie in an effort to circumvent limitations on its operations imposed by Castro’s Cuba.
It should be noted that Freeport had set its corporate sights on a very lucrative pair of mountains in Indonesia, both of which had enormous deposits of minerals, iron, copper, silver and gold in particular.
Cuba was an area of major conflict between JFK and the Powers That Be.
When JFK gave a green light to the attempted overthrow of Castro via the Bay of Pigs invasion, he had understood that the plan itself was destined to work.
In fact, Allen Dulles knew the plan as formulated would fail, and expected Kennedy to authorize the military to step in and neutralize Castro.
Realizing that he had been lied to, JFK dismissed Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and General C.P. Cabell.
He also spoke of shattering the CIA into a thousand pieces. It is grimly, morbidly ironic that it was Kennedy’s head that was shattered, and that he was “decapitated.”
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK rebuffed the pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Cuba, thereby avoiding the confrontation with Soviet tactical nuclear weapons that had been provided to Castro, unbeknownst to the U.S.
Opting for a blockade, Kennedy also established a quid-pro-quo with Nikita Khrushchev, agreeing to remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey.
This was followed by a number of back-door diplomatic attempts at normalizing relations with Cuba.
At the moment that Castro heard JFK had been killed, he was meeting with French journalist Jean Daniel, who had functioned as one of those back-door diplomatic channels to Castro.
After discussion of the “dual front” 531 Lafayette Place/544 Camp Street in New Orleans run by “private investigator” Guy Banister, we review the alleged “leftist” Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement with that organization and his apparently contrived altercation with Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro Cuban and member of the DRE, part of the CIA-sponsored fronts operating against Castro.
As we have seen in past programs, George Joannides directed the DRE for CIA during Bringuier’s tenure with the organization. Researcher Jefferson Morley filed a FOIA suit against CIA to precipitate more disclosure about Joannides, who had been the Agency’s liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Appellate Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh cast a deciding vote negating Morley’s appeal.
Discussion concludes with analysis of how two visual events keyed major events in the investigation of JFK’s assassination: a 1975 TV program, on which Geraldo Rivera–featuring comedian Dick Gregory and Robert Groden–aired the Zapruder film. The uproar following that led to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassination.
The “crawl” at the end of Oliver Stone’s JFK, informing the audience that the HSCA had classified key documents until 2029, generating further outrage and leading to the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board.
The “Deep Politics” detailed by the brilliant Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott in his opus “American War Machine” set forth the involvement Japanese war criminals Sasakawa Ryoichi and Kodama Yoshio in the Indonesian coup of 1965. That epic bloodletting saw the engineers of the event kill a million people (some put the toll as high as three million.) In addition to being prime movers behind the Unification Church, Sasakawa Ryoichi and Kodama Yoshio were lynchpins of the perpetuation of the operational foundation of Japanese fascism under the auspices of the LDP in the postwar period. WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE.
Revisiting the event that propelled Mr. Emory into this field of endeavor, this program reflects on the assassination of President Kennedy on the 58th anniversary of his killing.
One source of Mr. Emory’s “Dealey Plaza Blues” is a depressing piece in Rolling Stone magazine from 11/22/2021.
In addition to the minor stylistic sin of ending a sentence with a preposition, Tim Weiner tars those who have grasped the documentary truth of the JFK assassination as victims of Soviet/Russian propaganda.
In the midst of the red-baiting, Weiner does offer one unintentionally ironic, true statement: “ . . . . Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. . . .”
Ironic article selection by The New York Times featured a multi-page story on the Chinese purchase of a Freeport McMoRan cobalt mine in the Congo.
This story, too, was published by Times on the anniversary of the assassination.
Presenting the predictable ideological framing of the purchase as part of China’s grab of minerals that are key to the development of “Green” technologies, the article comprises a synopsized, slanted Cold War recapitulation of U.S. mineral development in the Congo, with particular emphasis on the reign of Joseph Mobutu.
(What does not occur to U.S. media outlets, is that China’s proprietary advances in this area are an altogether comprehensible strategy for continued industrial expansion in the century to come, while moving to reduce greenhouse gases and pollution in keeping with the international legal and diplomatic targets for environmental sustainability.)
Below, we present information featured in FTR#‘s 1054, 1055 and 1056.
The article has historical resonance on this 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination in several respects:
1.–Freeport Sulphur (part of the company involved with the Congo) was one of the institutions in which Clay Shaw and David Ferrie’s maneuvering permitted Jim Garrison to connect them with the milieu of the JFK assassination.
2.–Freeport also benefitted enormously from JFK’s assassination. The events of 11/22/1963 reversed JFK’s policy of engagement with Indonesia’s Sukarno. The bloody 1965 coup–highlighted in FTR#1212–permitted Freeport to benefit enormously by developing Indonesia’s mineral resources.
3.–Kennedy’s killing dramatically altered U.S. policy vis a vis what was the Belgian Congo at the time. Following the assassination, the U.S. threw its weight behind the forces promoting Joseph Mobutu and Moise Tshombe in the Congo. Ironically, Tshombe characterized the unrest in the Congo as “Chinese inspired.” (In the Congo, as in so many countries, the World War II Allies reneging on their initial pledge to grant independence to European colonial territories that had been occupied by Axis countries, propelled colonial properties into the Cold War meat-grinder in an attempt to gain independence.)
Perspective on this unhappy anniversary comes from The New York Times’ use of a Third Reich alumnus named Paul Hofmann as a foreign correspondent, beginning with the Gray Lady’s coverage of the CIA’s participation in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba.
” . . . . During the war, he served in Rome as a top aide to the notorious Nazi general Kurt Malzer, who was later convicted of the mass murder of Italian partisans. At some point, Hofmann became an informer for the Allies, and after the war he became closely associated with Jim Angleton. . . .”
The Times published the historical fiction enshrined as the Warren Report.
Next, the program highlights parts of the HSCA’s investigation that support Garrison’s thesis.
” . . . . On September 1, 1977, staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer, authored a 15-page memorandum addressed to Blakey, as well as staff members, Gary Cornwell, Ken Klein, and Cliff Fenton. Blackmer was the lead counsel for team 3, the HSCA team responsible for the New Orleans and Cuban angles of the investigation. After an investigative trip to New Orleans, Blackmer concluded in his memo: ‘We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960’s and [was] possibly one of the high level planners or ‘cut out’ to the planners of the assassination.’ . . . .”
The excerpt comes from another magnificent book on the Garrison investigation–Let Justice Be Done by Bill Davy. The book was the focus of FTR#190.
The latter portion of the broadcast highlights the CIA’s intense interest in the Garrison investigation. This interest was manifested through an agency conclave informally named “The Garrison Group.”
” . . . . [CIA Director Richard] Helms wanted the group to ‘consider the possible implications for the Agency’ of what Garrison was doing in ‘New Orleans before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw.’. . . [CIA official Ray] Rocca then said something quite ominous. He said that he felt ‘that Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.’ This must have had some impact on the meeting. Since everyone must have known that Rocca had developed, by bar, the largest database on Garrison’s inquiry at CIA. . . .”
We conclude with a story that gauges the degree of psychological dysfunction gripping much of this society becomes more ironic as the date November 22nd approaches–this is another generating force behind “The Dealey Plaza Blues.”
The QAnon milieu is embracing the notion the JFK, Jr. will re-appear in Dealey Plaza and all sorts of things will then transpire.
For a nation that has chosen to ignore what is perhaps the decisive event in American history–the assassination of JFK (Sr.) in Dallas, Texas–the gothic fantasy driving a disturbingly significant number of people is, perhaps, a fascist after-dinner drink.
Kool-Aid?
Ironic article selection by The New York Times featured a multi-page story on the Chinese purchase of a Freeport McMoRan cobalt mine in the Congo. Presenting ideological framing of the purchase as part of China’s grab of minerals that are key to the development of “Green” technologies, the article comprises a synopsized, slanted Cold War recapitulation of U.S. mineral development in the Congo, with particular emphasis on the reign of Joseph Mobutu.The article has historical resonance on this 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination in several respects; we present information from FTR#‘s 1054, 1055 and 1056.) Freeport Sulphur (part of the company involved with the Congo) was one of the institutions in which Clay Shaw and David Ferrie’s maneuvering permitted Jim Garrison to connect them with the milieu of the JFK assassination. 2) Freeport also benefitted enormously from JFK’s assassination. The events of 11/22/1963 reversed JFK’s policy of engagement with Indonesia’s Sukarno. The bloody 1965 coup–highlighted in FTR#1212–permitted Freeport to benefit enormously by developing Indonesia’s mineral resources. 3) Kennedy’s killing dramatically altered U.S. policy vis a vis what was the Belgian Congo at the time. Following the assassination, the U.S. threw its weight behind the forces promoting Joseph Mobutu and Moise Tshombe in the Congo. Ironically, Tshombe characterized the unrest in the Congo as “Chinese inspired.” WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE.
Introducing the expansion of American experience with Chiang and his Kuomintang fascists into U.S. Cold War policy in Asia, we present Sterling Seagrave’s rumination about Stanley Hornbeck, a State Department flack who became: “. . . . the doyen of State’s Far Eastern Division. . . .”
Hornbeck “ . . . . had only the most abbreviated and stilted knowledge of China, and had been out of touch personally for many years. . . . He withheld cables from the Secretary of State that were critical of Chiang, and once stated that ‘the United States Far Eastern policy is like a train running on a railroad track. It has been clearly laid out and where it is going is plain to all.’ It was in fact bound for Saigon in 1975, with whistle stops along the way at Peking, Quemoy, Matsu, and the Yalu River. . . .”
This program chronicles the U.S. coup in Indonesia. In our landmark series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio, we noted that President Kennedy’s assassination put the railway described by Stanley Hornbeck back on schedule in Indonesia, as it had been put back on schedule in Vietnam.
“ . . . . The United States was part and parcel of the operation at every stage, starting well before the killings started, until the last body dropped and the last political prisoner emerged from jail, decades later, tortured, scarred, and bewildered. . . . the U.S. government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible, and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. . . . knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. . . . Up to a million Indonesians, maybe more, were killed as part of Washington’s global anticommunist crusade. The U. S. government expended significant resources over years engineering the conditions for a violent clash, and then, when the violence broke out, assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving US geopolitical goals. . . .”
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: The Johnson Administration’s determination to wage a “major war against Indonesia; the inability of U.S. strategic planners to comprehend Indonesia’s status of non-alignment in the Cold War outside of the “either with us or against us” operational paradigm that was institutionalized in U.S. foreign and national security under the Dulles brothers during the Eisenhower administration; Pakistan’s ambassador to Paris sent a letter to foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: “ . . . . Western intelligence agencies were organizing a ‘premature communist coup.’ Indonesia, the NATO officer told him, ‘was ready to fall into the Western lap like a rotten apple.’. . .” The enthusiastic coverage of the Indonesian slaughter in the Western press, exemplified by The New York Times’ C.L. Sulzberger, who penned the piece “When a Nation Runs Amok”; the cultural chauvinism tinged with racism of the Western press coverage, embodied by Sulzberger’s piece: “ . . . . the killings occurred in ‘violent Asia, where life is cheap . . . . hidden behind their [Indonesians] smile is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok . . . .”; The fact that the main point of irritation in the U.S. about the PKI (Indonesia’s Communist Party) was not that they were undemocratic or trying to seize power through subversion, but that they “were popular;” the role of U.S. plantation managers and corporate personnel in submitting names to the Indonesian army and its allies for liquidation; Historian John Roosa’s encapsulation of the results of the slaughter: “ . . . . Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order. . . .”; New York Times columnist James Reston’s characterization of the coup and resulting slaughter as “A Gleam of Light in Asia” that outweighed U.S. setbacks in Vietnam; he—by now—longstanding and well-recognized American tactic of “making the economy scream;” Suharto’s deliberate engineering of hyperinflation in order to restrict the supply of fundamentals needed by people to sustain their lives; “The U.S. government was intentionally destabilizing the economy;” Robert Kennedy’s criticism of the Indonesian coup; U.S. corporations finding Indonesia “open for business”; a business conference sponsored by James Linen, President of Time-Life (it was Time-Life that was–to a considerable extent–the eyes and ears of the U.S. on both Chiang Kai-shek and the assassination of J.F.K.; The slaughter that took place on the island of Bali, something of an iconic tropical paradise; analysis of the significance of machetes being used in the slaughter of scores of thousands on the beautiful Bali beaches–the machete is not a blade used by the Balinese, who use a thinner, domestic cutting tool caused the klewang; Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and their support for the Indonesian coup, including staging attacks on the Chinese embassy in Jakarta; Taiwan as the site for the merging of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations to form the World Anti-Communist League.
Epitomizing and encapsulating the coup was the butchery that transpired on the Island of Bali and its aftermath in the contemporary luxury resort economy that prevails there:
” . . . . Then he [Wayan Badra] heard what was happening on the beaches. They were bringing people from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. It was public property there, and empty at night. The bodies were abandoned there. . . . they found a field of bodies. . . .They began looking through bones, picking up skulls. . . . There were just ‘too many skulls, too many skeletons. . . . In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people . . . .”
” . . . . Wayan Bandra, the Hindu priest, lives on the street where he grew up, in Seminyak, Southwest Bali. But the neighborhood has changed drastically. The same beach he used to walk on for forty minutes every morning, as he headed to school down in Kuta, is certainly not empty. It’s packed wall to wall with luxury resorts and ‘beach clubs,’ a very common type of business on the island, where foreigners can sip cocktails all day, and take a dip in a pool, right on the sand. It’s the same sand, of course, where the military brought people from Kerobokan, a few miles east, to kill them at night. . . .”
” . . . . . . . . Over the years, Wayan Badra and his neighbors have found bones and skulls in the sand . . . . As the elder priest for this village, he takes it upon himself to give the bodies a proper Hindu funeral. . . .”
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