JFK (8 page)

Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage, and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union.

The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created to be; however, it does not exist. Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry from the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.
³

During WWII the four Great Powers—the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union—opposed the Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Enormous military and economic forces, on each side, were locked together in the greatest armed conflict in history. The Russians alone suffered more than 20 million casualties. In June 1944, I flew an air force transport aircraft from Tehran to the vicinity of Kiev in the Ukraine. I never saw such widespread destruction of cities and towns. The great city of Rostov was absolutely leveled. One would think that as a result of the enormity of this combined struggle, such a union of forces, welded in the heat of World War II, would remain joined forever.

However, even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, we began to hear the first rumblings of the Cold War. The Office of Strategic Services, and particularly its agents Frank Wisner in Bucharest and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, nurtured the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union. “Rejoin” is the proper word in this case. It was the Dulles-affiliated New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell that had refused to close its offices in Nazi Germany after the start of WWII in 1939, even while Great Britain and France were locked in a losing struggle with Hitler’s invading forces. Therefore, the Dulles OSS “intelligence contacts” in Nazi Germany during the war were for the most part German business associates with whom he was acquainted.

On August 23, 1944, the Romanians accepted Soviet surrender terms, and in Bucharest the OSS rounded up Nazi intelligence experts and their voluminous Eastern European intelligence files and concealed them among a trainload of 750 American POWs who were being quickly evacuated from the Balkans via Turkey. Once in “neutral” Turkey, the train continued to a planned destination at a site on the Syrian border, where it was stopped to permit the transfer of Nazis and POWs to a fleet of U.S. Air Force transport planes for a flight to Cairo.

I was the chief pilot of that flight of some thirty aircraft and was stunned by the discovery of two things I would never have suspected: (1) A number of the Americans had had one or both legs amputated at the knee by their Balkan captors, solely for the purpose of keeping them immobile (the plane I flew had airline seats rather than canvas “bucket” seats, and the men on my plane had lost one or two legs in that barbaric manner), and (2) concealed among these POWs were a number of Balkan Nazi intelligence specialists who were being taken out of the Balkans ahead of the Soviet armies by the OSS.

As far as I know, this was one of the first visible clues to the emergence of the “East-West” Cold War structure, even while we and the Russians were still allies and remained partners in the great struggle against the Germans.

It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944—to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.

I was only a pilot on that flight, and in no way involved in the diplomatic intricacies of that era, but I have always wondered whose decision it had been, back in mid-1944, a year before the end of World War II, to override the present alliances and to initiate a split between the West and our wartime partner the Soviet Union while we were still firm allies.

This first fissure in the wartime structure was evidence of a long-range view of Grand Strategy from a level above that of the leaders we knew in public. The power elite had already set plans in motion for the post—World War II period that we have known as the Cold War. This is one of the best examples I have found revealing the work of the power elite, as distinct from that of the men who are the visible national leaders. As World War II came to a close, the long-range Cold War plan was already in existence, filling the vacuum created by the end of that conflict.

That long-range decision had to have originated from a center of power above the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin level, because it ignored the World War II alliance represented by those three wartime leaders and went its own independent way.

As a result of a masterful propaganda campaign begun by a select group of Nazis, most of us have been led to believe that it was the British who first recognized the Communist threat in Eastern Europe, that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the Communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe, and that he did this after the end of World War II. The facts prove otherwise.

Churchill did not coin the memorable phrase; he merely embellished it and exploited it. The true story follows.

Just before the close of WWII in Europe, when the Russian army and the combined American and British armies were rushing to meet each other over the bodies of a defeated German army in a devastated country, the German foreign minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk made a speech in Berlin, reported in the London
Times
on May 3, 1945, in which he used the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron Curtain” in precisely the same context repeated later by Churchill in Missouri. Then, on May 12, just three days after the German surrender had taken place, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, who had become President one month earlier after the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron Curtain” had come down to conceal everything that was going on within the Russian sphere of Eastern Europe.
⁴

This was a clever thrust by the old master, along the road to widening the tensions and splitting the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. This deft move by Churchill planted the seed of a potent idea in the mind of the new president, early and at a most opportune time.

Nearly one year later, on March 4 and 5, 1946, Truman and Churchill traveled on the President’s special train from Washington to Missouri, where, at Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill delivered those historic lines: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”

Most historical publications and media sources would have us believe it was this memorable occasion that marked the end of the wartime alliance with the USSR and the beginning of the Cold War. But, as we have seen, this was not so. The Grand Strategy decision to create a new bipolar world had already been made in 1944—45,
⁵
and the partners in this new global power structure were to be the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, three of the WWII victors and two of the vanquished.

The great array of forces of WWII were rapidly disbanded by President Truman in 1945. He disbanded the OSS on October 1, 1945, and shortly thereafter, on January 22, 1946, he issued a directive creating a new Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to be jointly staffed and funded by the Departments of State, War, and Navy. During these postwar years, a massive new propaganda line trumpeted across the land that the United States represents the world of free enterprise and that it would destroy socialism.

For this purpose, this new type of warfare was born, and its continuing battles were to be waged in Third World countries by a secret and invisible army. The OSS, the CIG, and later the CIA constituted the advance guard of that secret army in the United States.

Although the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union during WWII had been welded in the heat of battle, it had never been on too firm a footing. This was especially true of its structure in the Far East. The Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was as much a dictator as either Hitler or Mussolini. He was our ally, and his greatest wartime threat came from the Communist faction under Mao Tse-tung, who was allied ideologically with Stalin. As the fortunes of war began to shift from Europe to the Far East during the latter part of 1943, it became essential that there be a “Grand Strategy” meeting among the great Allied powers. They had never met together.

In this climate, President Roosevelt maneuvered to have Chiang Kai-shek join him in Cairo for a November 22—26, 1943, meeting with Churchill. Roosevelt wanted to create the atmosphere of a “Big Four” by placing Chiang on the world stage. Chiang appeared in Cairo, along with his attractive and powerful wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek—née May Ling Soong, daughter of Charlie Jones Soong and sister of T. V. Soong, at that time the wealthiest man in the world. Few pictures produced during WWII have been more striking than those of Chiang and Roosevelt “apparently” joking with each other on one side and an “apparently” convivial Churchill and Madame Chiang smiling together on the other.

As a result of this conference, the public learned that Chiang had promised to increase Chinese support of British and American plans to sweep through Burma to open a new, and more practical, road via Burma to China and that the United States would base units of its new giant B-29 bombers at the front in the China-Burma-India theater for direct attacks upon the Japanese, via bases on the mainland of China.

With the close of the Cairo Conference, the Churchill and Roosevelt delegations flew to Tehran for their own first meeting with Marshal Stalin. This much was released to the public. A fact that was not released, and that even to this day has rarely been made known, is that Chiang and the Chinese delegation were also present at the Tehran Conference of November 28—December 1, 1943.

As noted, the Big Four alliance was “jerry-rigged” at best. There were many strategic matters that had to be resolved. With the agreement by the West to invade France a matter of priority, these other matters involved plans for the defeat of Japan. First of all, Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan once Germany surrendered. In return, he agreed to help Chiang by speaking to his friend Mao Tse-tung about relaxing military pressures against Chiang’s Nationalist Army from that front in China. In fact, only one week after the Allies had invaded Normandy, Mao Tse-tung made a rare public pronouncement that he would aid Chiang in his fight against Japan. In other words, Roosevelt and Churchill had lived up to their promises made in Tehran, and Joe Stalin had lived up to his.

These agreements have become public, but others that have had an enormous impact upon Far East developments since WWII have not. First of all, most historians doubt that Chiang and his wife actually attended the conference in Tehran. I can confirm that they did, because I was the pilot of the plane that flew Chiang’s delegation to Tehran. (Chiang and his wife traveled either with Roosevelt or in another U.S. military aircraft.)

During these important meetings, plans for the future of Southeast Asia were discussed, and many of the developments that we have witnessed from 1945 to 1965 undoubtedly had their origins in Cairo and Tehran. They were not simply social gatherings because Madame Chiang was there; more likely, because she was there, much more important business was discussed than might have occurred otherwise. Again we witness the ways of the power elite—and not necessarily those of the nominal leaders, who so often are no more than their puppets.

Of interest to our story about Vietnam, it will be noted:

Sometime during the next year, 1944, Roosevelt added, on this subject: “The British would take land anywhere in the world even if it were only a rock or sandbar.”
⁷