The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (85 page)

So I said at this time, “So I am going to be dragged in as a sort of publicity agent for Al Smith to get him to sell magazines by having our picture taken on the rear platform of a private car, is that the idea?”

“Well, you are to sit next to each other at dinner and you are both going to make speeches. You will speak for the soldiers without assaulting the Administration, because this Administration has cut their throats. Al Smith will make a speech, and they will both be very much alike.”

I said, “I am not going. You just cross that out.”

[…]

“… cannot keep this racket up much longer. He has got to do something about it. He has either got to get more money out of us or he has got to change the method of financing the Government, and we are going to see to it that he does not change that method. He will not change it.”

I said, “The idea of this great group of soldiers, then, is to sort of frighten him, is it?”

“No, no, no; not to frighten him. This is to sustain him when others assault him.”

I said, “Well, I do not know about that. How would the President explain it?”

He said: “He will not necessarily have to explain it, because we are going to help him out. Now, did it ever occur to you that the President is overworked? We might have an Assistant President somebody to take the blame; and it things do not work out, he can drop him.”

He went on to say that it did not take any constitutional change to authorize another Cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office – take them off the President’s shoulders. He mentioned that the position would be a secretary of general affairs – a sort of a super secretary.

The CHAIRMAN. A secretary of general affairs?

General BUTLER. That is the term used by him – or a secretary of general welfare – I cannot recall which. I came out of the interview with that name in my head. I got that idea from talking to both of them, you see. They had both talked about the same kind of relief that ought to be given the President, and he said: “You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspaper. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second.”

And I could see it. They had that sympathy racket, that they were going to have somebody take the patronage off of his shoulders and take all the worries and details off of his shoulders, and then he will be like the President of France. I said, “So that is where you got this idea?”

He said, “I have been traveling around – looking around. Now about this superorganization – would you be interested in heading it?”

I said, “I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it. I am very greatly interested in it, because you know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home. You know that.”

“Oh, no. We do not want that. We want to ease up on the President.”

He is going to ease up on him.

“Yes; and then you will put somebody in there you can run; is that the idea? The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges, and kiss children. Mr. Roosevelt will never agree to that himself.”

“Oh, yes; he will. He will agree to that.”

I said, “I do not believe he will.” I said, “Don’t you know that this will cost money, what you are talking about?”

He says, “Yes; we have got $3,000,000 to start with, on the line, and we can get $300,000,000, if we need it.”

“Who is going to put all this money up?”

“Well,” he said, “you heard Clark tell you he was willing to put up $15,000,000 to save the other $15,000,000.”

“How are you going to care for all these men?”

He said, “Well, the Government will not give them pensions, or anything of that kind, but we will give it to them. We will give privates $10 a month and destitute captains $35. We will get them all right.”

“It will cost you a lot of money to do that.”

He said, “We will only have to do that for a year, and then everything will be all right again.”

Now, I cannot recall which one of these fellows told me about the rule of succession, about the Secretary of State becoming President when the Vice President is eliminated. There was something said in one of the conversations that I had
either with MacGuire or with Flagg, whom I met in Indianapolis,
that the President’s health was bad, and he might resign, and that Garner did not want it anyhow, and then this super secretary would take the place of the Secretary of State and in the order of succession would become President
. He made some remark about the President being very thin-skinned and did not like criticism, and it would be very much easier to pin it on somebody else. He could say that he was a foot stuck in routine matters and let the other fellow take care of it and then get rid of him if necessary.
That was the idea. He said that they had this money to spend on it, and he wanted to know again if I would head it, and I said, “No; I was interested in it, but I would not head it.”

He said “When I was in Paris, my headquarters were Morgan & Hodges. We had a meeting over there. I might as well tell you that our group is for you, for the head of this organization. Morgan & Hodges are against you. The Morgan interests say that you cannot be trusted, that you will be too radical, and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow; you cannot be trusted.
They are for Douglas MacArthur as the head of it. Douglas MacArthur’s term expires in November, and if he is not reappointed it is to be presumed that he will be disappointed and sore and they are for getting him to head it.”

I said, “I do not think that you will get the soldiers to follow him, Jerry. He is in bad odor, because he put on a uniform with medals to march down the street in Washington. I know the soldiers.”

“Well, then, we will get Hanford MacNider. They want either MacArthur or MacNider.
They do not want you. But our group tells them that you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together. They say, ‘Yes, but he will get them together and go in the wrong way.’ That is what they say if you take charge of them.”

He said, “MacNider won’t do either. He will not get the soldiers to follow him, because he has been opposed to the bonus.”

“Yes, but we will have him in change (charge?)”

And it is interesting to note that three weeks later after this conversation MacNider changed and turned around for the bonus. It is interesting to note that.

He said, “There is going to be a big quarrel over the reappointment of MacArthur,” and he said, “You watch the President reappoint him. He is going to go right and if he does not reappoint him he is going to go left.”

I have been watching with a great deal of interest this quarrel over his reappointment to see how it comes out. He said, “You know as well as I do that MacArthur is Stotesbury’s son-in-law in Philadelphia – Morgan’s representative in Philadelphia. You just see how it goes and if I am not telling you the truth.”

I noticed that MacNider turned around for the bonus, and that there is a row over the reappointment of MacArthur.

So he left me, saying, “I am going down to Miami and I will get in touch with you after the convention is over, and we are going to make a fight down there for the gold standard, and we are going to organize.”

So since then, in talking to Paul French here – I had not said anything about this other thing, it did not make any difference about fiddling with the gold standard resolution, but this looked to me as though it might be getting near, that they were going to stir some of these soldiers up to hurt our Government. I did not know anything about this committee, so I told Paul to let his newspaper see what they could find out about the background of these fellows. I felt that it was just a racket, that these fellows were working one another and getting money out of the rich, selling them cold bricks. I have been in 752 different towns in the United States in 3 years and 1 month, and I made 1,022 speeches. I have seen absolutely no sign of anything showing a trend for a change of our form of Government. So it has never appealed to me at all. But as long as there was a lot of money stirring around – and I had noticed some of them with money to whom I have talked were dissatisfied and talking about having dictators – I thought that perhaps they might be tempted to put up money.

Now there is one point that I have forgotten which I think is the most important of all. I said, “What are you going to call this organization?”

He said, “Well, I do not know.”

I said, “Is there anything stirring about it yet.” “Yes,” he says; “you watch, in 2 or 3 weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera. The papers will come out with it.” He did not give me the name of it, but he said that it would all be made public; a society to maintain the Constitution, and so forth …
and in about two weeks the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be. We might have an assistant President, somebody to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him. He said, “That is what he was building up Hugh Johnson for. Hugh Johnson talked too damn much and got him into a hole, and he is going to fire him in the next three or four weeks.” I said, “How do you know all this?” “Oh,” he said, “we are in with him all the time. We know what is going to happen.”
They had a lot of talk this time about maintaining the constitution. I said, “I do not see that the Constitution is in any danger,” and I asked him again, “Why are you in this thing?” He said, “I am a businessman. I have got a wife and children.”

In other words, he had had a nice trip to Europe with his family, for 9 months, and he said that that cost plenty, too.

The CHAIRMAN. Did you have any further talks with him?

General BUTLER. NO. The only other time I saw or heard from him was when I wanted Paul to uncover him. He talked to me and he telephoned Paul, saying he wanted to see him. He called me up and asked if Paul was a reputable person, and I said he was. That is the last thing I heard from him.

The CHAIRMAN. The last talk you had with MacGuire was in the Bellevue in August of this year?

General BUTLER. August 22; yes. The date can be identified,

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you, General Butler, for coming here this morning.

HAROLD WILSON

The Soviet KGB surreptitiously assassinate a British political leader so their man can replace him and eventually end up in 10 Downing Street.

It’s a scenario that thriller writer John le Carré might hesitate to use for his Smiley novels, yet it is exactly what some in MI5 believed happened in Britain in 1963, when Hugh Gaitskell suddenly resigned as leader of the Labour Party and died shortly afterwards from a baffling illness. Taking over from Gaitskell was Harold Wilson, about whom MI5 had long held the deepest suspicions.

A brilliant economist, Wilson had been at Oxford University in the thirties which was almost enough evidence of his being a red-under-the-bed in itself, since this had been the time and place that the KGB had recruited a host of spies. But what really alarmed MI5 was Wilson’s post-Second World War role as a junior trade minister, when he became the cheerleader for more commerce with the USSR. A 1947 visit to Moscow by Comrade Harold was rumoured to have entrapped him in a “honey pot”, after which he was most definitely the KGB’s man. Then there was Gaitskell’s curious demise; his doctor is said to have approached MI5 with concerns about the responsible disease, lupus disseminata, which was hardly known in the UK. Gaitskell had just come back from the USSR. Information filtered through to MI5 from Russian defector Anatoli Golitsin that the KGB’s Assassination Department 13 had killed a European leader and installed their man in his place. According to Peter Wright, former deputy director of MI5, in his autobiography
Spycatcher
, the strange death of Gaitskell added to Golitsin’s rumour equalled a certainty that Wilson was a Moscow mole. The context and the timing was right too; the ruling Conservative Party was imploding in the aftermath of the Profumo affair, and Labour was a shoo-in for winning the General Election.

Was Wilsonski a double-agent, even the Fifth Man in the spy ring that included Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt? Certainly sections of MI5 believed so and put him under surveillance. More, as detailed in Wright’s
Spycatcher
tome, they then set about conspiring to remove Wilson from Downing Street, steadily dripping snippets of “black propaganda” to the press, in particular the satirical/investigative magazine
Private Eye
, about Wilson’s “Communism” and his supposed dalliance with his secretary Marcia Williams. According to Colin Wallace, an intelligence officer with the British Army’s Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland, he was asked to cooperate in this smearing campaign against Wilson, known to MI5 insiders as “Clockwork Orange”. (When Wallace refused to cooperate with the “unconstitutional” Clockwork Orange plot, he was framed for manslaughter, a case highlighted by journalist Paul Foot in
Who Framed Colin Wallace
?) MI5 was additionally alleged to have worked with the Conservative Party to bring about Wilson’s downfall. Wilson himself became border-edge paranoid about the “dark forces” gathering against him; later, on his retirement, he would accuse Lord Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet and Prince Philip’s uncle, of having plotted a coup d’état in 1968.