American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (13 page)

We also have learned from some handwritten notes of Ford's, produced by the Assassination Records Review Board, that he changed one of the most significant findings in the
Warren Report
. A first draft had said that a bullet had “entered his [JFK's] back at a point slightly below the shoulder to the right of the spine.” Woops! That trajectory meant there was no way for that bullet to emerge from Kennedy's neck and then somehow hit Governor Connally. No more “magic bullet”! So Ford urged the commission to change the description and put the wound up higher. Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” The commission went with that, except it added two words: “the base of the back of his neck.”

So Ford had always been counted on to help out in critical situations. Later, after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign, Nixon named Ford as his vice president and, after Nixon resigned, President Ford proceeded to grant a pardon to Nixon, so he couldn't be pursued by the courts for obstruction of justice and whatever else.

In the fall of 1972, Howard Hunt's wife, Dorothy, paid a call on Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime. He was Hunt's friend dating back to Bay of Pigs days. Mrs. Hunt came to assure Artime that the Cubans imprisoned for the break-in would not endure difficulties in Washington, and that money would be delivered to a legal aid fund. Artime, we know today, was directly connected to the Cuban exiles being used in the anti-Castro plots, and also to mobsters like Trafficante. Not long after that meeting, Dorothy Hunt died in the crash of a United Airlines plane as it made a final approach to Chicago's Midway Airport. More than $10,000 was found on her body; sabotage of the plane was raised, but never proven. A week after the crash, FBI agents combed through Hunt's residence looking for stashed documents, but apparently found nothing.
²¹
Nixon and Colson met to discuss the possibility of granting clemency to Hunt.

During this same time frame, Helms instructed McCord to send a letter to his friend Jack Caulfield, a New York detective who'd been engaged by the Plumbers—and who, in 1964, had looked into Oswald's possible Cuban connections for the FBI. McCord wrote to Caulfield: “Sorry to have to write you this letter but felt you had to know. If Helms goes, and if the WG [Watergate] operation is laid at the CIA's feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice right now. Just pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course. I'm sorry that you will get hurt in the fallout.”
²²

Nixon had summoned Helms to Camp David—where no taping system existed—and told him to expect to be replaced as CIA director. When Helms then received a request from the Senate to preserve any Watergate-related documents, he set out to destroy all of his private files, some 4,000 to 5,000 pages.
²³
Helms also ordered shredded almost the entire record of the CIA's efforts to control human behavior, MK-ULTRA, in the fifties and early sixties. Then he accepted Nixon's offer to become the American ambassador to Iran.

Almost simultaneously with Helms's departure from the CIA, someone broke into the Washington office of the lawyer who'd represented both Maheu and Rosselli, and made off with all
those
files. The lawyer, Edward P. Morgan, said: “Watergate was pernicious, but the biggest cover-up of my lifetime was the assassination of JFK. To the CIA, this was something of life and death—if it could ever be established that their actions against Castro ended up killing Kennedy. The truth of the whole thing is still a helluva long way from being out.”
²⁴

Following the Watergate trail into early 1973 came the bombshell that ignited the Senate hearings: the letter from McCord to Judge John Sirica. McCord wrote: “The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation. The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing that it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact that it was not.” Why did McCord feel compelled to state this? Maybe because this was just the latest gambit in his long history of cover-ups on behalf of the CIA? McCord's attorney happened to be Bernard Fensterwald Jr., who had a private Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA) and had once represented James Earl Ray. In exchange for helping McCord post bond, the papers said, “It was understood, however, that McCord agreed to help Fensterwald in some of his research at a later date.”
²⁵

McCord's letter kicked off a chain of events that eventually led to the resignations and indictments of nearly Nixon's entire staff. And the links back to the JFK assassination just kept cropping up. After the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 where Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Houston lawyer named Leon Jaworski was named to replace him. Jaworski had helped the Warren Commission check out a possible connection between Oswald and the CIA. That, in itself, was something of a conflict of interest—since Jaworski was also a board member of a CIA front company, the M.D. Anderson Foundation.
²⁶
When Jack Ruby made his anguished plea that the Warren Commission get him out of Texas and fly him to Washington if it wanted to learn the truth, only three people were present—Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, and Leon Jaworski. They didn't take him up on his offer.

The overlap between the Warren Commission and Watergate legal staffs didn't stop with Jaworski. Arlen Specter, for a time a member of Nixon's defense team, was the originator of the “magic bullet” theory. Albert Jenner, minority counsel during the House impeachment proceedings, had been in charge of looking into conspiracy rumors for the Warren Commission. David Belin, a junior counsel and the commission's staunchest defender through those years, would be President Ford's choice as executive director of the Rockefeller Commission that was assigned to scrutinize the CIA's illegal domestic operations.

General Alexander Haig, who became Nixon's chief of staff through the final days, had been the Pentagon's chief “assistant on all matters pertaining to Cuba” in July 1963. In that capacity, Haig—along with Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the existence of the White House taping system to Senate investigators—had as a primary task the resettlement of the Bay of Pigs prisoners released by Castro, such as Artime. As Charles Colson later told the story, Haig had called him to a meeting in January 1974 and said: “Well, if the President's going to be impeached, better he go down himself than take the whole intelligence apparatus with him.”

More than a decade later, I find it remarkable how many of the Watergate players are tied into the Kennedy assassination. They not only escaped justice the first time, but here they are back again. I wonder what else they did in between, what other damage to the country?

In terms of all the burglarizing, you commit crimes because the end justifies the means, I guess. As long as you achieve the goal, the way you do it doesn't matter. One job only leads to the next. In 1974 there occurred six unsolved burglaries into Howard Hughes's offices in only four months: two in Las Vegas, one in an L.A. suburb, one in New York. Another break-in occurred at the Mullen Company's Washington office. In most of these instances, no papers were reported taken. Then someone made off with all of Hughes's handwritten memos, hidden away in a block-long two-story building in Hollywood; a federal judge had just ordered some 500 of these memos to be turned over to Maheu.
²⁷
At the same time, the Watergate Committee staff had just begun looking into the Maheu-CIA-Mob-exile connections from the early sixties.

Soon Nixon was out of there. He'd been cutting deals in politics his whole life, with a closet
full
of skeletons. Over the next couple years, a portion of the CIA's “family jewels” saw the light of day. As they did, Rosselli, Artime, Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, George de Mohrenschildt and more took whatever they knew about the assassination of JFK to their graves. McCord got out of prison, moved to Colorado, and refused all requests for interviews.

As for Hunt, the man who spooked everybody, he died in January 2007 at the age of 88. His son, Howard St. John Hunt, then came forward with the story that his father had rejected an offer by rogue CIA agents to participate in the Kennedy assassination. Specifically, Hunt had named LBJ as the conspiracy's chief organizer. CIA conspirators supposedly included David Phillips, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, David Morales, and fellow Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. All dead and gone, of course. The younger Hunt remembered his mother informing him on November 22, 1963, that Howard was on a “business trip” to Dallas that day. Before he died, Hunt allegedly told his son there was a “French gunman” firing from the grassy knoll.
²⁸

So did Howard Hunt come clean with a deathbed confession? Or was he blowing smoke till the end, continuing to spin a web of disinformation that foisted blame onto others? No mention of Helms. Or his pal Artime. Or his Watergate coconspirator, McCord. I'm not one to give E. Howard Hunt the last word. This much I do know: Whatever hidden knowledge he was carrying, it scared the crap out of both Nixon and the CIA.

Who took down whom in the end? I'm placing my bet that Nixon was set up to take the fall, because he was meddling too much in the CIA's business. Nixon's well-known penchant for paranoia may, in this instance, have gotten the better of him. He had shady dealings with so many people, from Howard Hughes to mobsters, it's hard to sort out which particular secrets he was trying to protect. But what I've tried to show, through the chronology of Watergate, is that there was a whole lot more to the story. This chapter exposes the underbelly of “payback” within the government: I've got something on you, so you should know better than to push too far into places I don't want you to go.

In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our current system, you have to condone their corruption. I believe most people, when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become. The two parties to me are today no different than joining the Hell's Angels: Once an Angel, always an Angel. That's what holds true for Democrats or Republicans—unless you separate from them and join a third party movement, knowing that you've broken away and beaten the addiction.

Over the years, it's become a kind of household word aimed at people who join unusual groups: “Oh, you must have taken the Kool-Aid.” It's not really all that amusing, in fact the reality is pretty tragic—because the reference is to Jonestown. Deep in the jungles of Guyana, on November 18, 1978, an official total of 913 men, women, and children supposedly came forward to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide from paper cups in a mass suicide. They were said to be part of the “brainwashed cult” of Reverend Jim Jones and his People's Temple.

I was in the midst of my wrestling career at the time. I kept up with the news, but it wasn't a high priority. With Jonestown, I just knew what we were told—that this was a psychotic preacher who had a bunch of nutcases that went along to find utopia in Guyana, and then things went sour quickly. I did hear how a congressman, Leo Ryan, had flown in to do an investigation of whether U.S. citizens were being abused or held against their will at Jonestown. Then he and four others were shot dead by People's Temple security forces, before their plane could leave again. I viewed that they were killing the congressman as a desperate move, because he was going to expose them. Then, apparently they felt they would get busted for it, so Jones and most of his followers supposedly did themselves in first.

When the 30-year anniversary of Jonestown came around, an article appeared in California's
San Mateo Daily Journal
. The headline was, “Slain Congressman to be Honored.” Representative Ryan's onetime aide, William Holsinger, spoke out for the first time at the memorial. He'd been investigating complaints of a Concerned Relatives Group in 1978, and the night it all happened, he received a message on his phone that “your meal-ticket just had his brains blown out.” Holsinger wore a bulletproof vest to the congressman's funeral, and then left San Francisco for good. He said a curious thing in his remarks all these years later: “Whether there was some broader conspiracy and what it might have consisted of, are matters I have determined to leave to future generations.”
²

That raised my eyebrows when I read it. Most of what's been said about Jonestown still sticks with the “brainwashed cult” idea, but I found that several investigative journalists have come up with leads pointing toward a “broader conspiracy.”
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By the way, the Temple's assets were estimated at between $26 million and $2 billion.
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The Guyanese press for awhile called it “Templegate,” in reference to all the money that the local government allegedly ran off with from Jonestown.

Before we get into the strange background of Jim Jones, let's start with some most curious facts about the event itself. It's kind of grisly, but here goes. Remember the famous color pictures of the bodies lying all over the compound? Did it strike anybody else as weird that they are all facedown and looking like they'd been carefully arranged? When they were first discovered, the body count started out around 200. But it kept going up. The next day's papers reported 363 bodies, 82 of them children, and eventually it escalated to 913. The official word was that immediate identification had been difficult because a lot of the adults had been on top of kids. Hmmm ... more than 500 bodies hidden under the first 363?
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That doesn't quite make sense, but maybe there's a reasonable explanation. But this next one is impossible to explain away: Dr. Leslie Mootoo was Guyana's chief medical examiner and the first forensic specialist on the scene. This man was no fly-by-night doctor down in South America; he was very well-educated, trained in London and Vienna. Dr. Mootoo examined scores of the bodies within the first couple of days, taking specimens. And he thought that in at least 700 of the cases, it wasn't suicide but
homicide
. The doctor observed puncture wounds on the shoulders of a lot of the victims—a bodily location where they couldn't possibly have injected themselves. So were they forcibly held down and injected with poison against their will? He also found the presence of cyanide in bottles that were labeled as Valium, which probably meant that's what some people thought they were taking.
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A tranquilizer, not a deadly poison.

Dr. Mootoo did find evidence of cyanide in most of the victims' stomachs, and he passed along his samples to a representative of the American Embassy in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, fully expecting they'd be forwarded on to American forensic pathologists. Except, somehow, they disappeared.
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A study seven months later published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
found six leading medical examiners describing the handling of the bodies by the U.S. military and others as “inept,” “incompetent,” “embarrassing,” and so on, with only
circumstantial
evidence of “probable cyanide poisoning.” The prestigious
Journal
added that only one third of the bodies could be positively identified, and that a medico-legal autopsy should have been performed on each one.
⁸

It turns out that only seven autopsies were ever performed—and not until a month after the bodies were embalmed! Some of the pictures from the scene showed victims wearing ID bracelets, but these also vanished somewhere between Jonestown and the U.S. air base where the bodies got shipped. The order to remove the medical tags is said to have come from the National Security Council's staff coordinator for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Robert Pastor.
⁹
(Adding to this macabre story, three bodies actually got lost and turned up years later in storage lockers in Southern California!)
¹⁰

Shortly after the massacre became public, a psychiatrist and anti-cult activist named Dr. Hardhat Sukhdeo came to Georgetown to talk with the survivors. There were 33, most of them having run off into the jungle. Sukhdeo called Jim Jones “a genius of mind control, a master,” a statement that was widely quoted in the press and framed the official Jonestown story from then on. Although a native of Guyana, Sukhdeo lived in the U.S. He admitted later that his trip had been paid for by the State Department, and when he returned he met privately with FBI agents. So did Sukhdeo also secretly “debrief ” the Jonestown survivors on behalf of the government, trying to find out what they might have seen? Why were Dr. Mootoo's conclusions ignored by the media, while Dr. Sukhdeo's speculation was trumpeted?

It's also curious that “virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated” at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco,
¹¹
where Jones himself had once been under psychiatric care. Except, despite attempts to obtain Jones's medical file, it's never been released. A lot of the research done at Langley-Porter happens to be classified, much of it by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It's known, though, that some of this research involves the effect of electromagnetic fields on human beings, and behavior-modification techniques including hypnosis-from-a-distance.
¹²

Before he went to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan had already been making a name as a government watchdog. One amendment that he cosponsored required the CIA to get congressional approval before it could undertake any covert activity. Stories about MK-ULTRA had appeared in the press and Ryan wrote a letter to the Agency, “requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville,” from which Jones was reportedly getting members of his church as part of a rehab program.
¹³
Ryan wrote he was especially interested in a former inmate, Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, who'd ended up leading the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) group that kidnapped Patty Hearst. The CIA responded that, yes, it had sponsored tests on some volunteer inmates at Vacaville—but not involving DeFreeze, “in so far as our records reflect the names of the participants.”
¹⁴
Of course, most MK-ULTRA records had already been destroyed. A month to the day after this correspondence, Ryan ended up dead on the tarmac in Guyana.

So the central thesis of one investigative writer, Jim Hougan, is that Jones “initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan's investigation ... would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the People's Temple was for many years a witting stooge, or agent, of the FBI and the intelligence community.” Also, that the congressman's probe “would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency's most volatile programs and operations.”
¹⁵

That makes a lot of sense to me. But none of that was brought out in the mainstream media. It was almost like they had a cleansed “bio” on Jim Jones. Who was he really? What did he do and who did he work with? When you start following this guy's trail, he's got intelligence community stamped all over him. He's working for the alphabet agencies.

Jones was born in a small town in Indiana in 1931 and, by the age of nineteen, became a faith-healing, anti-communist-spouting preacher. By the late fifties, his charisma drew a congregation of more than 2,000. At the same time, Jones may have been a police or FBI informant gathering “racial intelligence”—as quite a few of his congregation were black and he'd taken to making pilgrimages to the headquarters of Father Divine.
¹⁶

One of Jones's boyhood friends was Dan Mitrione, later an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs. In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered by Uruguay's Tupamaros guerrillas. Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione. He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jonestown.
¹⁷

The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its file on “the Rev. Jimmie Jones” was almost empty. Actually, the CIA's Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA, using the State Department as his cover.
¹⁸

By the time of his 201-file, Jones had already been to Castro's Cuba in 1960. What was he there to do, preach to them and bring the heathens over to our side? Well, he stayed at the Havana Hilton where the Soviet Union had some Sputnik satellites on display, which the CIA would have been happy to get pictures of. While in Cuba, Jones definitely took photos of some crashed small planes that had carried mercenary pilots. He also encouraged Cubans he met to emigrate to the U.S. Yet somehow, on that trip or another one later, he and his wife had their picture taken with Fidel Castro himself!
¹⁹

Also in 1960, Jones got a passport toward making a several-week-long “sightseeing/culture” visit to Poland, Finland, the USSR, and England. That was a very similar journey to the one Lee Oswald made a year earlier, including the USSR part. It raises the question whether both Jones and Oswald were dispatched on some kind of government spy mission. Later the State Department identified this as the first passport Jones ever had. The problem was, a few months earlier he would've needed one to go to Cuba, unless he went there covertly. This again raises cloak-and-dagger type questions.

Jones first visited Guyana in 1961, preaching against Communism. His whereabouts for a six-month period then are unknown. Somebody applied for a new passport in his name, and it looks like Jones was being impersonated on occasion, because he was said to be in Hawaii when he was actually in Guyana. Again, shades of Lee (or Harvey) Oswald! Two passports ended up being issued to Jones, one in Chicago on June 28, 1960, and another in Indianapolis on January 30, 1962.
²⁰

Brazilian Federal Police records show that Jones and his family arrived in Sao Paolo by plane in April 1962 and traveled on to Belo Horizonte, where his boyhood chum Mitrione was an adviser at the U.S. consulate. People there remembered Jones leaving his house early in the morning and coming back late at night, carrying a big leather briefcase. “Jim Jones was always mysterious and would never talk about his work here in Brazil,” according to Sebastian Rocha, an engineer who lived near the Joneses. Rocha assumed he was a spy. Jones socialized regularly with Mitrione during his eight months in Belo Horizonte.
²¹
Then Mitrione moved to Rio, and Jones ended up in the same neighborhood not far away.
²²
In Rio, Jones worked doing commission sales jobs for a “suspected CIA conduit” called Invesco.
²³