Treason From Within

By Donald T Phillips

The First Comprehensive Treatment of the Kennedy Assassination.  The US government lied to the American people about President Kennedy's death.  But, ironically it was the American people who solved the crime.  Over the past half century, hundreds of researchers investigated one

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald T Phillips
• Release date: Sep 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9780982848463

Book preview

TREASON FROM WITHIN

Copyright © 2023 by Donald T. Phillips

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9828484-4-9 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9828484-6-3 (eBook)

ISBN: 978-0-9828484-7-0 (Audiobook)

Book Design by Coni Porter of CPorter Designs

Set in Chaparral Pro from Adobe Originals

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Copyeditor: Barbara L. Jatkola

Indexer: Meridith Murray, MLM Indexing Service

Cover Photo: Cecil Stoughton, White House, Public Domain

Published by Donald T. Phillips

TreasonFromWithin.com

A nation… cannot survive treason from within…. The traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers… heard in the very halls of government itself…. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist…. The traitor is the carrier of the plague.

Cicero

Speaking to the Roman Senate, 43 BC

CONTENTS

PREFACE

On November 22, 1963, I was in the sixth grade in Arlington, Virginia. When the president’s death was announced in class, the teacher and some of the students were crying. But mostly, there was stunned silence. School was let out for the rest of the day, and I walked the half mile home all by myself, wondering the whole way why anybody would kill President Kennedy.

We lived in a small two-story house very near the Pentagon. When I got home, I parked myself in front of our small black-and-white television and pretty much stayed there for the next couple of days. On Sunday morning, I was watching as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald live on television. I was just a kid and it didn’t seem real. It just didn’t register.

The next morning, coverage of President Kennedy’s funeral started in Washington, D.C., and I suddenly realized that we were right next to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was going to be buried. Can I go? I asked my parents. They looked at each other and said, Sure. So I took off.

I arrived in time to see the procession just after it had crossed the Potomac River at Memorial Bridge. Thousands of people lined the route. I vividly remember the president’s flag-draped casket on a caisson pulled by six white horses. The riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups particularly struck me. I watched as all the limousines slowly passed. There was one vehicle that was surrounded by a half dozen men in suits jogging along on both sides. French president Charles de Gaulle was inside. I knew my way around Arlington National Cemetery, so I ran over to a hill on the north side where I could look down on the burial site. There must have been a million people there that day, but I was able to find an open view. And I remember it all. The 21-gun salute. The planes flying over. The folding of the flag. The lone bugler playing taps. Mrs. Kennedy lighting the eternal flame. Then it was all over—and I walked home.

Years later, a friend of mine, who is a psychologist, told me that 11 is a very impressionable age. And I guess he was right, because John F. Kennedy’s assassination really impacted me. In fact, it remained in my thoughts throughout my life. Everywhere I went—the colleges I attended, the companies at which I was employed, the various organizations I worked with—I asked people about the Kennedy assassination. Everyone remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. They recalled how they felt and the reactions of the people around them. In South Carolina, a friend my age told me that her sixth-grade class erupted in cheers. And that very different reaction from what I experienced shocked me.

Most people I spoke with over the years said they did not believe the Warren Report, which concluded that only one person, Lee Harvey Oswald, was involved. I didn’t believe it either. And now that I have spent years poring over the report and its 26 volumes, I know it isn’t true.

On the 30th anniversary of the assassination in 1993, I was present in Dallas when Dealey Plaza was designated a National Historic Landmark. After a brief ceremony, many eyewitnesses returned and stood in the exact same places they were in when President Kennedy was shot. I walked around and spoke with all of them. And every witness said that shots had come from behind the picket fence—every single witness.

Over the years, I accumulated articles and documents, bought books, and created countless files on my computer. Essentially, I kept up with the research on the assassination for at least half a century. After all that time, there were not many major questions about it left to be answered. And there came a point when it was clear to me that the truth had already been revealed. People often asked me who really killed JFK, and my answer was usually the same: Well, we know what happened. But the story has really only been told in pieces. No one has ever put the whole thing together from start to finish. Whenever I thought about why that was, I would pull out a 1967 statement from New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews, who said: Nobody’ll go deep enough, far enough, and strong enough to take the entire concept. And nobody is intelligent enough or clever enough to start from Point A [and go] to Point C with the varying factors that go in and out of it. Because they do not possess the necessary instincts and training to take all of the pieces and put it together.

I took this statement as a challenge, and that is what I have tried to do here—put the pieces together. In truth, I’d always intended to write the full story of the assassination, and nearing my 70th birthday, I figured I’d better get started.

Going back through all of the history and research, especially the initial statements of the witnesses, led me to some obvious conclusions and a new, more detailed awareness of how President Kennedy was murdered, who did it, and why it was done. It is also an undeniable, well-documented fact that a great deal of evidence regarding JFK’s assassination was altered, destroyed, or planted. As such, the truth can never be proven in a court of law. Subsequently, by building up so many facts and truth over the course of time, I was able to use common sense, instinct, and intuition to fill in the gaps. That’s one reason there are many statements in this book that are not sourced in the notes section. Basically, I had to use common sense to determine fact from fiction. The creative process—where lots of information yields a new idea—also came into play. Except in this case, it was a new understanding, a realization of what actually happened, that came to light. There were many moments when I said to myself: Aha! That’s what they did!

In this book, I begin the narrative during the final days of World War II and end it with the formation of the Warren Commission. What happened after that, right up until today, is another book, which involves documenting a cover-up that staggers the imagination. Along the way, I tried not to be influenced by the public reputations of the people or government agencies that were involved. I followed the real evidence and decided to let the chips fall where they may. More than that, though, as far as I was concerned, it was time to take the gloves off. Too many people, for too long, have covered up the truth about what really happened to President Kennedy. Too many lawyers have used their skills and knowledge to manipulate the legal system in order to hide the real facts of the case. Too many people have used their money, their positions in government, and their media influence to obfuscate, complicate, and confuse the public.

In a way, I believe I am surprisingly qualified to tell this story. I mean, who else has spent more than 50 years studying the case? I have two degrees in science and am experienced in observing, gathering, and analyzing information. I’m also a writer, mostly of leadership and American history, and am pretty good at organizing and looking at the big picture. And that is very important, because those who have covered up the truth for 60 years have almost always focused on throwing massive amounts of false or completely irrelevant information on individual parts of the crime. As such, the big picture has been hard to piece together.

If a crime has been committed and covered up—no matter how evil and complicated it was, no matter how much time has elapsed—it can be solved. To do so, however, takes hard work, time, patience, persistence, and passion.

Ultimately I wrote this book because I wanted to know what really happened on November 22, 1963.

I just wanted to know the truth.

Donald T. Phillips

TREASON FROM WITHIN

PRELUDE

1

During World War II, the United States of America experienced unparalleled expansion of both its military capability and its armaments industry—so much so, in fact, that it emerged from the war as the most powerful nation on earth in both categories. Rapid mobilization to fight the Axis powers had resulted in unprecedented collaboration between the government, the military, and America’s top corporations. After the war ended, those alliances not only continued but were strengthened considerably with the onset of the Cold War. Wall Street, the East Coast establishment, and super-wealthy families now ruled the roost as giant corporations dominated the nation’s economy. They all had made so much money from the war that they refused to allow the enormous flow of income to stop. Only 16 years later, in 1961, more government money was being spent on American military security than the net income of all U.S. corporations combined. And, of course, chief executive officers and their corporate boards wanted as big a piece of that pie as they could get.

The United States military establishment was now assigned the largest portion of the federal budget. At the highest level were the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which functioned as nothing less than a military board of directors. Not only did the JCS preside over America’s land, sea, and air forces around the world, they also carefully maintained the military’s economic and political connections. Prior to World War II, those connections consisted mainly of the U.S. Congress and its individual members. By the time John F. Kennedy became president, however, that was no longer the case. Major military decisions were now being made by the president of the United States and a smaller, handpicked group of people that included those on the National Security Council (NSC) and key members of the Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

From the point of view of America’s businesses that profited from war, the problem with World War II was that it ended. What was needed now was a permanent war economy. So the United States once again mobilized against a common enemy. This time it was communism—more specifically the Soviet Union (USSR), which had been a valued ally of the United States during World War II. Over the next decade, America’s constant demonization of communists’ social, political, and economic ideology led to the Cold War, which was exactly what was needed—a major conflict with no foreseeable end. American business viewed it as lucrative. The military establishment valued the Cold War for a different reason. They had just built the mightiest fighting machine in the history of the world, and, rather than dismantling it, they wanted to use it. They wanted to keep fighting—at all costs. Ego and power had infected the minds of America’s top military men. Their single-minded focus on waging war had become dogmatic.

The merging of economic, military, and political institutions (the power elite) after World War II led to the creation of a new national security complex—where business and government were no longer separate and distinct; where decisions were made on a global basis, which could result in billions, if not trillions, of dollars for American corporations; and where government operations could be kept secret under the guise of national security. Interestingly enough, President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw what was happening and warned the American people about it in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience, he said. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

It’s pretty clear President Eisenhower understood that, in the business world, dishonesty, a lack of integrity, and downright immoral actions are often justified or rationalized in the name of profits. As the saying goes, Where there [are] politics and economics, there is no morality. Ike also knew the true meaning of All’s fair in love and war. Clearly, his warning was based on an intuitive understanding that with the merging of leaders in business, politics, and war, the potential for institutional immorality was enormous.

In order for that to happen, however, somebody had to be on the ground carrying out orders. Somebody had to do the dirty work. And that task fell to the investment bankers and Wall Street lawyers who were the links between private corporations and government institutions. The most prominent of the Wall Street law firms in that regard was Sullivan & Cromwell. And the most notorious lawyers in that firm were John Foster Dulles and Allen Welsh Dulles.

Founded in 1879 with the mission of uniting investors to establish major corporations, Sullivan & Cromwell was behind the initial formation of such behemoths as Edison General Electric and U.S. Steel. The firm and its clients, which included banks, investment houses, and multi-industry conglomerates, were at the center of rebuilding a defeated German economy after World War II. John Foster Dulles joined the firm as a clerk in 1911, rose to the level of managing partner, and then brought in his younger brother, Allen, in 1926. Both men had earned law degrees from George Washington Law School and subsequently led the firm’s work in helping Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party become a major industrial and political force in Europe. Sullivan & Cromwell maintained an office in Berlin during the 1930s, serving such exclusive clients as General Electric, IG Farben, Du Pont Chemical, and Standard Oil. For a time, letters sent from the firm’s office there ended with the phrase Heil Hitler!

Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and America’s entrance into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created (on June 13, 1942) the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the precursor of the CIA. The organization’s primary (and official) mission was to collect, analyze, and disseminate foreign intelligence. Its secondary mission included conducting unconventional warfare. Allen Dulles joined the OSS and headed its station in Switzerland. His assignment was to start an intelligence network that would penetrate German-occupied Europe. He did so, in part, by identifying, recruiting, and training immigrants—and then sending them back to their native regions as spies for the United States. There was no shortage of possible candidates, because thousands of Europeans had escaped to New York and many of them had shown up at the city’s OSS office. Over the next couple of years, Allen Dulles would become America’s top spy in Europe.

In the United States, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) struck a deal with organized crime to help protect the New York waterfront from Nazi sabotage. Lucky Luciano, the Don of Dons in both America and Sicily, who was serving a 40-year prison sentence (and running his operation from jail), agreed to arrange protection for the docks in return for a commutation of his sentence. In preparation for the Allies’ invasion of Sicily in July–August 1943, Luciano’s syndicate aided them by providing key intelligence. Before the war, Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, had purged the Sicilian Mafia and sent many of its members to prison. But after the successful Allied invasion, the United States released the mobsters and placed many of them in charge of the new government of Sicily. Working with the OSS for the rest of the war, the Sicilian Mafia assisted Allied operations in and around the Mediterranean Sea. Running this project was James Jesus Angleton, who served in the counterintelligence branch of the OSS. [After the war, Lucky Luciano was released from prison and deported to Italy.]

In early 1945, Allen Dulles put together a plan code-named Operation Sunrise to arrange for a surrender of German forces in Italy before the Soviet Union could pull Italy into its sphere of influence. Dulles set up and led secret negotiations in Switzerland with General Karl Wolff, a member of the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel) who had been involved in planning parts of the Holocaust, the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the murder of an estimated 300,000 Jews. Assisting Dulles in Operation Sunrise was Army Major General Lyman Lemnitzer [JFK’s future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]. The agreement took effect on May 2, 1945, five days before Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces, which ended the war in Europe.

Wolff, who was a liaison to Adolf Hitler (and Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man) was not subjected to the Nuremberg trials like other war criminals, thanks largely to the intervention of Allen Dulles, who cited Wolff’s work on Operation Sunrise. Dulles also saved a number of other notorious Nazis and saw to it that they were given affluent jobs in postwar Germany, where they would ultimately become part of the OSS’s intelligence network. Even Lieutenant General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the German army’s military intelligence, was spared the hangman’s noose thanks to Dulles. Instead, Gehlen was allowed to form a new organization, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), which became West Germany’s official government spy agency. The OSS also helped other fugitive Nazis escape to foreign countries, including the United States. All this was done under the guise of building a new worldwide intelligence capability to fight communism. Dulles, himself, moved to Rome after the war and, with several of his OSS colleagues, began to design a new organization, which became the Central Intelligence Agency. Those men included James Angleton, Richard Bissell, and Tracy Barnes. With time, others who formed the core of the early CIA included Richard Helms, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, C.D. Jackson, William and McGeorge Bundy, James McCord, Sheffield Edwards, Frank Wisner, and Edward G. Lansdale, among others.

Dulles and his men weren’t the only people planning for the coming the Cold War. Barely one month after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war against Japan, the American military began planning for the total destruction of the Soviet Union. Calculated were the number of bombs needed to destroy 66 cities (466) and eliminate both military and industrial targets. Not only that, but the U.S. military took half of its weaponry stockpiled on Okinawa (for the planned invasion of Japan) and redirected it to Southeast Asia. Much of that material was secretly given to the Viet Minh independence movement. About a year later, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh declared its independence from France—and that was the beginning of the First Indochina War. [Vietnam was part of France’s colonial territory.] Within a few years, the United States was providing the French with billions of dollars in military aid. The original shipment of arms from Okinawa may have been intended to help Ho Chi Minh start the war.

* * * * *

During World War II, Richard Nixon (in January 1942) took a job at the Office of Price Administration. Six months later, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was commissioned a lieutenant junior grade. Prior to the war, Nixon had received his law degree from Duke University School of Law and was a practicing attorney in Whittier, California. While on active duty in the Navy, he served overseas in the South Pacific theater and in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., New York City, and New England. After the war, in late 1945, Nixon ran across a series of Nazi documents that revealed that the Dulles brothers had helped launder funds for the Germans during the war. Allen Dulles met personally with Nixon, and the two came to an agreement. If Nixon would keep quiet about what he had learned, Dulles would arrange the financing of his first campaign for Congress.

In September 1945, Nixon was selected by Republican Wall Street investment banker Prescott Bush and his power elite colleagues to run for California’s 12th Congressional District. In November 1946, Nixon defeated five-term Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis by using personal attacks and labeling him a friend of the Communists. The campaign was funded not only through the connections of Allen Dulles and Prescott Bush, but also by Los Angeles–based mobster Mickey Cohen. Nixon won the election with 56 percent of the vote. In the new U.S. congressman’s first year in Washington, a member of the Chicago Mob named Jacob Rubenstein served on Nixon’s congressional staff performing information functions.

Richard Nixon was not the only new congressman to take office in 1947. Another was John F. Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard College in 1940 with a bachelor of arts degree in government (international affairs). He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in the fall of 1941 and served on active duty in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands as a PT boat commander. Shortly after the Battle of Blackett Strait, on the night of August 2, 1943, Kennedy’s boat (PT-109) was sunk in a collision with a Japanese destroyer. Two of the twelve-man crew were killed, and two others were seriously injured. Lieutenant Kennedy led the survivors to a nearby uninhabited island, and the group was rescued a week later. The 26-year-old was subsequently labeled a war hero, and he left the U.S. Naval Reserve on March 1, 1945. Encouraged and financed by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK ran for the Massachusetts 11th Congressional District seat as a Democrat. He won 73 percent of the vote and took office on January 3, 1947, in the U.S. House of Representatives—alongside Richard Nixon.

* * * * *

That same year, the Central Intelligence Agency was created as part of the National Security Act of 1947. Approved by Congress and signed by President Harry S. Truman, this legislation reorganized the structure of the U.S. armed forces and provided a comprehensive program for the future security of the country in the wake of World War II. It created the U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Department of Defense (which brought all the armed services under one umbrella). The act also established the National Security Council—an advisory group reporting to the president of the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency, the nation’s first peacetime intelligence service, was designated part of the NSC to do the following: 1) advise regarding intelligence activities related to national security; 2) make recommendations for the coordination of intelligence activities; 3) correlate and evaluate intelligence; 4) perform services of common concern as the NSC determines; and 5) perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting national security as the NSC may from time to time direct. It was the inexact and ambiguous wording of the fifth clause that was later used as justification for the CIA to conduct unsupervised, clandestine operations around the world. However, as former president Harry Truman later wrote, the CIA was not intended as a Cloak & Dagger Outfit. It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President [informed] of what was going on in the world…. I never wanted the CIA to act as a spy organization.

Of course, it was also never intended that the CIA work with organized crime, but that’s exactly what happened. After Lucky Luciano was pardoned and deported to Italy, he proceeded to build an international drug empire. He arranged for dried morphine base from Middle Eastern countries (like Turkey and Lebanon) to be sent to Sicily and Marseille, where it was converted into heroin. The opiates were then distributed globally, with vast amounts going to the United States. The OSS and the ONI had already worked together to establish a heroin trade in Southeast Asia. So it was just a matter of time before all three organizations (the CIA, ONI, and Mafia) began working together in the lucrative, worldwide illegal drug–smuggling business.

In the fall of 1947, the CIA intervened in a foreign country (France) for the first time, helping to break a communist-led dockworkers’ strike in the French port of Marseille. The Agency supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs, created propaganda pamphlets and radio broadcasts, and encouraged assaults on striking workers, many of whom were murdered. This operation paved the way for Marseille to become France’s Gateway to the Orient, from which American munitions were shipped to French forces fighting in Indochina. The CIA’s intervention also ensured that Corsican drug-running operations would proceed unhindered—and that Marseille would eventually be dubbed America’s heroin laboratory.

In creating his illegal drug network, Lucky Luciano traveled to Cuba to set up Havana as a transfer point to the United States. While there, he called a meeting of the top 36 organized crime leaders in the United States. Present was a 39-year-old up-and-coming mobster from Chicago named Sam Giancana. That same year (1947), Giancana sent Jacob Rubenstein to Dallas, Texas, to set up operations that would make the city a center for bookmaking and prostitution. He was also assigned to get to know Dallas law enforcement personnel and find the weak links. While in Dallas, Jacob Rubenstein legally changed his name to Jack Ruby.

* * * * *

On March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, where he formally shifted U.S. policy away from the USSR being an ally against fascism to an enemy whose expansion had to be contained. It must be the policy of the United States, said Truman, to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities by outside pressures. He went on to say that such support and aid should be primarily through economic and financial aid. Essentially, the Truman Doctrine, as it came to be known, promised resistance to communist expansion anywhere in the world.

A few months later, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed that the United States institute a comprehensive effort to rebuild war-torn Western Europe. The Marshall Plan (officially known as the Economic Cooperative Act) was enacted into law on April 3, 1948. Congress allotted $13 billion to carry out the following goals: rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity, and prevent the spread of Communism. In order to ensure that last goal, Paul Hoffman, the program administrator, secretly funneled 5 percent of its budget to the CIA.

In December 1947, after the National Security Council issued a new top secret policy (NSC 4-A), the CIA created the Special Procedures Group (SPG), which was essentially a covert action branch in charge of propaganda and other subversion methods used against potential communist expansion. The initial impetus for forming the SPG was to intervene in Italy’s April 1948 elections. Concerned about communist influence there, the CIA sent millions of dollars in cash to aid the Christian Democratic Party candidate. The SPG funded radio broadcasts of anti-communist propaganda, publication of forged letters, and a variety of other nefarious activities. Much of the money used came from Marshall Plan funds and captured Nazi money. In the end, the Christian Democrats won a decisive victory in defeating the communists.

After the CIA’s success in Italy, the National Security Council issued NSC 10-2 (on June 18, 1948), a directive that made the Office of Special Projects (soon renamed the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC) an official government entity. The CIA is charged by the NSC with conducting espionage and counter-espionage operations abroad, read the order. Overall control was placed in the hands of the director of central intelligence. NSC 10-2 further defined covert operations as propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, subversion, including assistance to underground resistance movements, [and] guerillas. The order also stated that if such operations were uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, NSC 10-2 prohibited armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage, counter-espionage, and cover and deception for military operations.

The new, harmless-sounding Office of Policy Coordination was officially hidden within the State Department, but the CIA’s Frank Wisner, a former Wall Street lawyer and member of the OSS during World War II, was chosen to run the organization. Within a few years, the OPC had 6,000 operatives (both permanent employees and contract agents) working in 47 stations overseas. Many of those recruited were ex-Nazis who were told: You’ve just joined the Cold War arm of the U.S. government…. We’re an executive action arm of the White House…. Some people call us the ‘dirty tricks’ department.

Within a week of NSC 10-2’s issuance, the first international crisis of the Cold War began in the form of the Berlin Airlift (June 24, 1948–May 12, 1949). After World War II, Germany had been divided into four occupation zones under the control of the Soviet Union (East Germany) and the United States, Great Britain, and France (West Germany). The city of Berlin, which was entirely within East Germany, was divided into four sectors, each controlled by one of the four nations. The Soviet sector was referred to as East Berlin and the three Allied sectors as West Berlin. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, however, was against this arrangement and was determined to see all of Germany under communist control. In March 1948, the Allies united their three occupation zones into a single economic entity and introduced the German deutsche mark. In response, the Soviet Union attempted to force the U.S., Britain, and France to abandon West Berlin. First, the Soviets increased their army presence in East Germany to 40 divisions (against the Allies’ 8 divisions in West Germany). Then they instituted a blockade of rail, road, and water travel into West Berlin. In order to protect and supply military personnel and West German civilians, the U.S. conducted a massive airlift (189,000 flights) that transported 2.3 million tons of food, fuel, machinery, and other supplies into the besieged city. The Soviets finally ended the blockade, but Cold War tensions were greatly amplified, and the city of Berlin would remain a hotbed of animosity between the USSR and the United States for years to come.

* * * * *

On November 3, 1948, President Harry S. Truman was elected to a second term with an upset victory over Republican New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Truman had very low approval ratings, and most Americans believed that Dewey (who had the support of the Dulles brothers and the power elite) would secure an easy victory. However, the feisty Truman ran a whistle-stop campaign, during which he traveled nearly 22,000 miles by train and made 275 speeches throughout the western, midwestern, and northeastern parts of the nation. In the end, Truman won handily with 49.6 percent of the popular vote and 303 electoral votes. In the election, Democrats picked up 75 seats in the House of Representatives, but lost 12 Senate seats. One of the new senators elected that year was Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) of Texas.

LBJ ran with the powerful support of both industrialists and Texas oil executives. In the Democratic primary, former Texas governor Coke Stevenson just missed winning a majority, while Johnson received only 34 percent of the vote. In the runoff election, Johnson trailed by 854 votes when the counting ended. But after three days of recounts, the margin had narrowed to 114 votes. Then it was announced that 200 ballots had been discovered in Alice, Texas (Box 13), nearly all being for Johnson. LBJ was eventually declared the winner by a margin of 87 votes (out of nearly 1 million cast). An investigation showed that the found Box 13 ballots contained forged names, those of dead people, and other irregularities. Stevenson filed suit, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. At that point, Houston lawyer Abe Fortas made an illegal off-the-record telephone call to his friend Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. The Court ruled in Johnson’s favor, and he went on to win the general election in the heavily Democratic state.

Previously, in 1937, LBJ had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (from Texas’s 10th Congressional District). Three years after that, he was appointed a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and when World War II broke out, he was on active duty in the South Pacific from December 1941 to July 1942 before returning to Congress. From 1943 to 1961, LBJ lived in Washington, D.C., across the street from J. Edgar Hoover (director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI)—and the two men became lifelong friends. Johnson’s career in the Senate steadily progressed, as he soon became Senate minority whip (1951), Senate minority leader (1953), and Senate majority leader (1955 and 1957).

* * * * *

On June 20, 1949, the U.S. government passed the Central Intelligence Agency Act (Public Law 110). This legislation exempted the CIA from all federal laws requiring the disclosure of functions, names, official titles, salaries, and number of personnel employed. It also allowed the CIA to admit into the country up to 100 defectors, or essential aliens, per year outside normal immigration procedures and gave the agency the authority to provide cover stories and economic support for them. At this point in time, the CIA now had the legal authority to do just about whatever it wanted—including intervene secretly in the internal affairs of other nations—without the express approval of the White House or the consent of Congress. Soon, much of the Central Intelligence Agency’s funding would be hidden in ordinary appropriation bills, where nearly all members of Congress would have no idea they were approving funds for CIA covert operations.

Also in June 1949, Allen Dulles founded the National Committee for Free Europe, an anti-communist philanthropic organization that was sponsored by the CIA. Some of its members included Dwight Eisenhower, General Lucius Clay, Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille, and publisher Henry Luce. Funded in part by Nazi gold looted at the end of World War II, this CIA front channeled millions of dollars to anti-communist groups and financed major propaganda efforts, including Radio Free Europe.

At virtually the same time, the OPC initiated Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to recruit members of American news organizations for the purpose of establishing covert and propaganda capabilities. It was initially headed by Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and Philip L. Graham (publisher of the Washington Post), and later by CIA agent Cord Meyer. By 1961, the CIA’s network included more than 400 journalists associated with all three major television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), the country’s major newspapers (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Hearst Newspapers), the nation’s three major newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, and Life), and top news-gathering organizations and conglomerates (such as the Associated Press [AP], United Press International [UPI], Reuters, the Copley News Service, and Scripps Howard). Dulles eventually developed personal relationships with owners and publishers like Henry Luce (Time Inc.), William S. Paley (CBS), and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times). These members of the power elite viewed themselves as leaders in the fight against global communism. Luce, for example, had coined the term The American Century in a Life magazine editorial calling for the United States to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.

With this view in mind, the United States helped launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on April 4, 1949. The North Atlantic Treaty created this military and political alliance ensuring the freedom and security of its members in case of a possible attack by the Soviet Union against Western Europe. NATO’s 12 founding nations were the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952 and West Germany in 1955.

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was created on September 21, 1949, at which time President Truman appointed John J. McCloy to the post of high commissioner of Germany. In that post, McCloy pardoned and commuted the sentences of many Nazi war criminals. Previously, as assistant secretary of war during World War II, McCloy had been involved in the internment of Japanese American citizens and had also refused to recommend the bombing of Nazi death camps after being presented with proof of their existence. Previously, he had served two years as president of the World Bank and later became chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1954) and chairman of the Ford Foundation (1958). John J. McCloy was a quintessential member of the power elite. [McCloy was appointed a member of the Warren Commission in 1963.]

Over the last few months of 1949, several events took place that elevated worldwide tensions and initiated a full onset of the Cold War. First, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in a remote region of Kazakhstan. Second, in October 1949, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong won the Chinese Revolution, forcing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to flee to Taiwan. And third, in January 1950, Mao’s People’s Republic of China and the USSR both formally recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—and began supplying Ho Chi Minh with military and economic aid.

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On April 7, 1950, the National Security Council issued what is now considered the founding document of the Cold War, NSC 68. In 66 pages, authors from the Departments of State (Dean Acheson) and Defense (Paul Nitze) greatly exaggerated the communist threat by, in part, creating a false image of a super-powerful Soviet Union. The USSR, they wrote, wanted the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority. In addition, it sought the complete subversion or forcible destruction… in the non-Soviet world… and replacement by [a structure] subservient [to] and controlled from the Kremlin. Even though none of this rhetoric was true, NSC 68 recommended that the United States develop a hydrogen bomb and enact a large expansion of the military budget. In the prevailing Cold War vernacular, Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the USSR, was working toward nothing less than global domination. And now there were only two sides in the world, Communist and Free. President Truman almost immediately asked the U.S. Congress for $10 billion in new military spending.

Less than three months later, communist North Korea (supported by both the Soviet Union and China) invaded the free nation of South Korea. At the end of World War II, the U.S. and the USSR had divided Korea along the 38th parallel. After becoming separate countries, both claimed all of the Korean Peninsula as their own. In response to the invasion, United Nations forces (led by the United States) moved into North Korea and headed north in the direction of China. In response, on October 19, 1950, the Chinese army moved 300,000 soldiers south across the Yalu River and forced UN troops into a massive retreat. Before the end of the year, the Chinese were in South Korea.

It was at this point that Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), ordered a massive air campaign in North Korea. Before the war was over, the United States had dropped 635 tons of explosives, which included more than 30,000 tons of napalm. LeMay later claimed that the U.S. killed off 20 percent of the population and targeted everything that moved in North Korea. LeMay had a history of using brutal tactics in wartime. During World War II, he had directed the firebombing of Japan, which almost obliterated the empire, and had presided over the dropping of the first two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the end of the war, the civilian Atomic Energy Commission was put in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. President Truman refused requests by LeMay to transfer it to the Air Force. [General LeMay later became Air Force chief of staff under President Kennedy.]

At the start of the Korean War, the CIA had 400 analysts providing daily intelligence for Truman. But the information obtained was usually unreliable. For instance, the CIA told Truman that the Chinese were not going to enter the war. The Agency was, of course, badly mistaken. Unhappy with the Agency’s performance, the president appointed Walter Bedell Smith as the CIA’s new director. Soon, the Agency was training and sending thousands of Korean and Chinese spies into North Korea, most of whom were never heard from again. Allen Dulles, who was promoted as deputy director of plans (January 4, 1951), and Frank Wisner pretty much ran the CIA during the Korean War. The Agency spent $28 million to build a base on Saipan as a training camp for paramilitary missions, which were first utilized in Korea and later in Vietnam. There was also a CIA station in Seoul with several hundred agents. In the end, however, the CIA was not able to gain any meaningful intelligence on either North Korea or China. The war ended on July 27, 1953, with the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which created the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea. A formal peace agreement was never signed. During the three years of fighting, 40,000 Americans died and 100,000 were wounded—and 5 million total lives were lost. The CIA recognized that its effort during the Korean War was an abject failure. So the Agency suppressed or destroyed all related documents. And thanks to an ability to spin propaganda and its connections with the press, the CIA’s wartime efforts were afterwards publicly portrayed as a complete success.

It was entirely possible that the new agency might have been spread too thin by trying to do too much during the Korean War. For instance, the CIA was heavily involved in suppressing a communist counterinsurgency in the Philippines. When the rebel guerilla movement group Hukbalahap began making inroads, incumbent president Elpidio Quirino asked the United States for help. The CIA, in an effort to protect the interests of American businesses in the Philippines (mainly Ford and Coca-Cola), sent military adviser Colonel Edward Lansdale to Manila in 1950 to design and implement a counterinsurgency campaign. Using CIA money funneled through the Ford Foundation, Lansdale began by issuing a false warning that the Philippines were in danger of becoming a communist state, that communist rule would be devastating to the people, and that the people’s religion would be threatened. Rigged elections and a covert bombing campaign soon followed. Lansdale’s campaign also took a little-known politician named Ramon Magsaysay and groomed him for national leadership. Through the CIA’s propaganda machine, Magsaysay was portrayed as a global anti-communist symbol, was placed on the cover of Time magazine (November 26, 1951), and later became president of the nation (December 1953). Subsequently, the CIA established supply, training, logistics, and air bases in the Philippines, which became a center for future operations in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

During the Korean War, Allen Dulles also had his sights set on Iran. In 1949, the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) agreed to pay Overseas Consultants Inc. (OCI) $650 million to perform work in the country over a seven-year period. OCI was a consortium of 11 American engineering firms that wanted to move into Iran, because it was an ideal base from which to expand throughout the Middle East. Through Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles had been hired to close the deal, which would have been the largest overseas development venture in history up to that point in time. However, in December 1950, the Iranian parliament scuttled the OCI project thanks to a democratic movement led by Mohammad Mosaddegh and his National Front political alliance. When Mosaddegh became prime minister on April 28, 1951, he immediately nationalized Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled by Great Britain for decades. Dulles, who was personally going to lose millions due to Mosaddegh’s actions, wanted to send the CIA into Iran to instigate a coup, but President Truman vetoed the idea.

In the same year that Mosaddegh became prime minister of Iran, the CIA took over Camp Peary (near Williamsburg, Virginia) and transformed the 9,000-acre military post into the world’s largest covert training facility. The Farm, as it was called internally at the CIA, had been used during World War II as a secret internment camp for prisoners of war. Allen Dulles converted it into a center for the teaching of black ops, including breaking and entering, planting listening devices, employing enhanced interrogation techniques, using disguises, recruiting and supervising informants, and paramilitary skills (which included parachuting and the use of explosives and small arms). [Allen Dulles was at The Farm from November 22, 1963 (the day of the Kennedy assassination) through Sunday, November 24, 1963.]

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On March 10, 1952, a bloodless coup d’état was staged in Cuba by former president Fulgencio Batista and the Cuban Constitutional Army. Large amounts of money from U.S.-based organized crime groups helped make the coup successful. In truth, the Mafia’s involvement in Cuba dated back to the 1920s, when sugarcane was used for the distilling of alcoholic beverages. During the Prohibition era, Cuba became a center for smuggling rum through Florida and on to other parts of the United States (which gave birth to the term rumrunning). When Batista took over, Havana was converted into a mecca for decadent hotels, gambling, prostitution, and drugs. Santo Trafficante, whose territory included Florida and much of the Gulf Coast, oversaw the Mob’s business in Cuba. And with the help of the CIA, Havana soon became a crossroads for international drug trafficking.

In the early 1950s, the United States Congress held several major investigations into both organized crime and domestic communist influence. The Senate formed the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (1950–1951), also known as the Kefauver Committee, for its chairman, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The committee was a response to complaints from major U.S. cities about the growing influence of organized crime corruption in politics. Tens of millions of Americans watched live on television as more than 600 witnesses testified, including some of the most notorious gangsters in America. Afterwards, in response to public outrage, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover finally admitted that organized crime did exist in the United States and that the FBI had done little, if anything, about it. In addition, dozens of state and local crime committees were established across the nation to deal with the problem.

Earlier, in the House of Representatives, the standing House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) experienced a major resurgence by investigating subversive activities by Americans suspected of having communist ties. As a freshman representative on the committee, Richard Nixon took great interest in an investigation of Alger Hiss, a former member of the State Department who was accused of being a communist and a spy years before the war. After receiving secret information from the CIA, Nixon volunteered to lead the effort. Even though Hiss denied the accusations, Nixon made a strong case against him, and while not charged with treason, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. The entire episode brought Nixon to national prominence for the first time. Riding the wave, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas, a three-term representative from California’s 14th Congressional District. Nixon painted her as a proponent of communism, even dubbing her the Pink Lady. In response, Douglas labeled Nixon Tricky Dick, a nickname that would stick with him for the rest of his life. With financial support from major oil companies and organized crime associates such as Mickey Cohen and Murray Chotiner, Nixon easily won election to the Senate with 59 percent of the vote, and he assumed office on December 1, 1950.

By the time the presidential election of 1952 rolled around, John Foster and Allen Dulles had thrown their support to war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower. They had determined that Ike, while immensely popular, would probably not be a strong president and could be easily manipulated. Eisenhower won the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Chicago and had his advisers assemble a list of candidates for his vice presidential running mate. Behind the scenes for the previous two years, Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt, Prescott Bush, members of organized crime, and the Dulles brothers had been running a stealth campaign to ensure that Richard Nixon became