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How Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War
by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding
29 Feb 2016
When he took office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan looked around the world and was greatly troubled by what he saw. For more than three decades, the United States and its allies had striven to contain communism through a series of diplomatic, economic, and sometimes military initiatives that had cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. And yet communism still controlled the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea and had spread to sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Whatever its early success, it was clear that the policy of containment no longer worked. The president determined that the time had come to defeat communism based on a simple premise: “We win and they lose.” In his first presidential press conference, Reagan stunned official Washington by denouncing the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to “world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state.” As he wrote in his official autobiography, “I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.” Based on intelligence reports and his lifelong study, Reagan concluded that Soviet communism was cracking and ready to crumble. He first went public with his prognosis of the Soviets’ systemic weakness at his alma mater, Eureka College, in May 1982. He declared that the Soviet empire was “faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency, and individual achievement.”
One month later, in a prophetic address to the British Parliament at Westminster, Reagan said that the Soviet Union was gripped by a “great revolutionary crisis” and that a “global campaign for freedom” would ultimately prevail. He boldly predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives that:
–Committed the U.S. to “neutralizing” Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized the use of covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region.
–Adopted a policy of attacking a “strategic triad” of critical resources—financial credits, high technology, and natural gas—essential to Soviet economic survival. The directive was tantamount, explained author-economist Roger Robinson, to “a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union.”
–Determined the U.S. would no longer coexist with the Soviet system but would seek to change it fundamentally. The language, drafted by Harvard historian Richard Pipes, was unequivocal–America intended to “roll back” Soviet influence at every opportunity.
Taking its lead from these directives, the administration pursued a multifaceted foreign policy offensive that included covert support of the Solidarity movement in Poland, an increase in pro-freedom public diplomacy (through instruments like the National Endowment for Democracy), a global campaign to reduce Soviet access to Western high technology, and a drive to hurt the Soviet economy by driving down the price of oil and limiting natural gas exports to the West.
A key element of Reagan’s victory strategy was the support of anti-communist forces in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. The “Reagan Doctrine” (a name coined by syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer) was the most cost-effective of all the Cold War doctrines, costing the United States less than a billion dollars a year while forcing the cash-strapped Soviets to spend some $8 billion annually to deflect its impact. It was also one of the most politically successful doctrines in Cold War history, resulting in a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the election of a democratic government in Nicaragua, and the removal of 40,000 Cuban troops from Angola and the holding of UN-monitored elections there. And then there was SDI—the Strategic Defense Initiative—dismissed as “Star Wars” by U.S. skeptics but which put the Soviet military in a state of fear and shock. A decade later, a top Soviet strategist revealed what he had told the Politburo at the time: “Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all our possible countermeasures.”
By the time Reagan left office in January 1989, the Reagan Doctrine had achieved its goal: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet system, publicly acknowledged the failures of Marxism-Leninism and the futility of Russian imperialism. In Margaret Thatcher’s words, Ronald Reagan had ended the Cold War without firing a shot.
Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, are co-authors of A Brief History of the Cold War.
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What was the Cold War?
Citation: C N Trueman "What was the Cold War?"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 25 May 2015. 19 Feb 2016.
The Cold War is the name given to the relationship that developed primarily between the USA and the USSR after World War Two. The Cold War was to dominate international affairs for decades and many major crises occurred – the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Hungary and the Berlin Wall being just some. For many, the growth in weapons of mass destruction was the most worrying issue. Cold War
A clash of very different beliefs and ideology – capitalism versus communism – each held with almost religious conviction, formed the basis of an international power struggle with both sides vying for dominance, exploiting every opportunity for expansion anywhere in the world.
Note that USSR in 1945 was Russia post-1917 and included all the various countries that now exist individually (Ukraine, Georgia etc) but after the war they were part of this huge country up until the collapse of the Soviet Union (the other name for the USSR).
Logic would dictate that as the USA and the USSR fought as allies during World War Two, their relationship after the war would be firm and friendly. This never happened and any appearance that these two powers were friendly during the war is illusory.Before the war, America had depicted the Soviet Union as almost the devil-incarnate. The Soviet Union had depicted America likewise so their ‘friendship’ during the war was simply the result of having a mutual enemy – Nazi Germany. In fact, one of America’s leading generals, Patton, stated that he felt that the Allied army should unite with what was left of the Wehrmacht in 1945, utilise the military genius that existed within it (such as the V2’s etc.) and fight the oncoming Soviet Red Army. Churchill himself was furious that Eisenhower, as supreme head of Allied command, had agreed that the Red Army should be allowed to get to Berlin first ahead of the Allied army. His anger was shared by Montgomery, Britain’s senior military figure. So the extreme distrust that existed during the war, was certainly present before the end of the war……..and this was between Allies. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was also distrustful of the Americans after Truman only told him of a new terrifying weapon that he was going to use against the Japanese. The first Stalin knew of what this weapon could do was when reports on Hiroshima got back to Moscow.
So this was the scene after the war ended in 1945. Both sides distrusted the other. One had a vast army in the field (the Soviet Union with its Red Army supremely lead by Zhukov) while the other, the Americans had the most powerful weapon in the world, the A-bomb and the Soviets had no way on knowing how many America had.
So what exactly was the Cold War?
In diplomatic terms there are three types of war.
Hot War: this is actual warfare. All talks have failed and the armies are fighting.
Warm War: this is where talks are still going on and there would always be a chance of a peaceful outcome but armies, navies etc. are being fully mobilised and war plans are being put into operation ready for the command to fight.
Cold War: this term is used to describe the relationship between America and the Soviet Union 1945 to 1980. Neither side ever fought the other – the consequences would be too appalling – but they did ‘fight’ for their beliefs using client states who fought for their beliefs on their behalf e.g. South Vietnam was anticommunist and was supplied by America during the war while North Vietnam was pro-Communist and fought the south (and the Americans) using weapons from communist Russia or communist China. InAfghanistan, the Americans supplied the rebel Afghans after the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 while they never physically involved themselves thus avoiding a direct clash with the Soviet Union.
The one time this process nearly broke down was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So why were these two super powers so distrustful of each other?
America Soviet Union
Free elections No elections or fixed
Democratic Autocratic / Dictatorship
Capitalist Communist
‘Survival of the fittest’ Everybody helps everybody
Richest world power Poor economic base
Personal freedom (secret police)
This lack of mutually understanding an alien culture, would lead the world down a very dangerous path – it led to the development of weapons of awesome destructive capability and the creation of some intriguing policies such as MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.
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The Cold War Hoax
Part 1
By Servando Gonzalez
August 15, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
You lost the Cold War, get over it. —CFR agent John Kerry to Russians
Some Council on Foreign Relations’ secret agents are frantically calling for the beginning of a new Cold War with Russia. Unfortunately, most of America’s enemies in both branches of the Repucratic Party as well as some misguided patriots are very happy with the idea. Apparently they don’t realize that, despite disinformation on the contrary the Cold War actually was the most peaceful time in America’s recent history, because it was a carefully planed hoax. Actually, the Soviet Union was never a threat to the U.S. The USSR was nothing but an artificially created pseudo-enemy fully under the control of the CFR conspirators.
The creation of the USSR
The Soviet Union was an artificial creation of international bankers and oil magnates. Their purpose was to put Russia into an economic freezer —which they did for 60 long years— and curtail Tsar Nicholas II’s intentions of turning the country into a major oil competitor in the free market. The main problem the conspirators had with Russia, apart from its efforts to become and industrialized nation, was that the Russians had discovered a large amount of oil in Baku, near the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. At the time, the Baku oil field was considered the largest known oil deposit in the world. By the early 1880s, Russian crude production reached 10.8 million, almost a third of U.S. production.[1]
At the time, Tsar Nicholas II had initiated the implementation of a series of reforms directed to change Russia from a medieval into a modern society, which included the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of a Duma —a national assembly—, and rural communes. These reforms would have encouraged the Russian people to think about the possibility of a benign government in which the people would democratically participate.
But some influential Wall Street bankers and oil magnates were not happy with these changes in Russia, and conceived another plan. In order to proceed with
their plan, John D. Rockefeller, together with fellow conspirators, like bankers
![]()
Mellon and Morgan and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, plus several of America's robber barons, joined their resources for up to $50 million (an enormous sum at the time), and created the American International Corporation(AIC), a powerful cartel allegedly devoted to stimulate world trade. The truth, however, is that the AIC was created to fund the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II by a small group of professional revolutionaries: the Bolsheviks.[2]As expected, Rockefeller and his criminal associates of the American International Corporation (AIC), Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, were deeply alarmed about the Russians challenging their ambitions of controlling the world oil supply, and they began conspiring to develop a plan to stop the Russians in their tracks.[3] They concluded that the only way to achieve their goal was to depose Czar Nicholas II, and the only way to accomplish that was through a “revolution.”
To this effect, between 1907 and 1910 the conspirators met several times with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, already living in exile in New York, and with Vladimir I. Lenin, another Russian revolutionary living in exile in Zurich. Eventually the arch-capitalists struck a deal with the arch-anti-capitalists: in exchange for financing their “revolution,” the capitalists would be allowed to have a hidden hand in designing the economy of what was soon to become the Soviet Union —allegedly the staunchest anti-capitalist nation in the world.
With the help of the conspirators, Lenin returned to Russia with plenty of gold in his famous “sealed” train, and, soon after Trotsky, under the protection of President Wilson and Colonel House, followed Lenin path with more gold. This gold made possible the Russian “revolution.”
So, contrary to common myth, the ones who had disseminated the Communist plague were bankers from England, Europe and the U.S., among them the Rothschilds, Sir George Buchanan and Lord Alfred Milner (members of the Round Table, who had been instrumental in the creation of the CFR), the Warburgs, the Rockefellers and J.P. Morgan. With their investment, the conspirators had created a pseudo-enemy they controlled —to some extent. Soon after, the Soviet Union became the bogeyman the conspirators used for many years as a credible threat to manipulate and control the U.S. and other Western countries. The rest is history.
The Globalist Conspirators Keep Artificially Alive the Monster They Have Created
The conspirators failed to foresee that Communism and Marxist economy are such a total disasters that, since the very beginning, the monster they had created never managed to provide for its own sustenance, and was always teetering on the verge of collapse. So, while ostensibly fighting to destroy it, they had to put all their ingenuity on keeping the Soviet communist monster artificially alive and kicking. To this effect, they injected him with trillions of dollars in aid.![]()
Probably the two most outstanding accomplishments of the CFR conspirators were giving the Soviets the technology for producing, first, nuclear weapons and, later, for building better intercontinental ballistic missiles.
According to the official story, Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg stole and gave the Soviet Union in 1950 the scientific documents necessary to create an atomic bomb. But this is simply not true.[5] Most likely the Rosenbergs, true Communist fanatics, ignored that their true role was paying with their lives to disinform the American people.] The Soviets didn’t have to steal the atomic bomb secrets because CFR secret agents infiltrated into the U.S. government gave the information to them in 1943 disguised under the Lend Lease program.[6]
Actually the Rosenbergs belonged to what Sun Tzu called “expendable agents,”[7] foolish spies designed to be caught. One of the uses of expendable agents is to distract the enemy’s attention from the real spies. The CFR conspirators at the highest levels of the U.S. government knew that the Rosenbergs were fake spies —which perhaps explains Truman’s rush to destroy the evidence by callously ordering their unnecessary execution.
Professor Sutton has also documented in detail the second case, the willful transfer of American technology to make Soviet ICBMs more accurate.[8] According to Sutton, the threat of annihilation of the United States and the West by intercontinental Soviet nuclear missiles would have never existed, if President Richard Nixon and National Security adviser Henry Kissinger had heeded warnings in 1970 from its own Department of Defense and outside experts that the Soviets were lagging in missile production technology and required specific technologies from the West to MIRV[9] their fourth generation ICBMs.[10]
Sutton failed to mention, however, that both Nixon and Kissinger were CFR members. They failed to pay attention to the warnings not because they were ignorant or fools, but because the conspirators’ plan required that, in order to make the Soviet threat more credible, they have to give them this advanced technology.
The CFR Conspirators Give Eastern Europe to the Communists
General William Donovan, the man who the Wall Street bankers and oil magnates selected to direct the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence agency during WWII, was a millionaire Wall Street corporate lawyer. In 1929 he created his own law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lumbard. His right hand, Allen Dulles, was a Wall Street lawyer and senior member of the Rockefellers’ Council on Foreign Relations. Through his OSS office in Bern, Switzerland, Dulles kept an eye in the protection of the interests of CFR members. Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm Dulles had worked for since 1926, had strong business ties with the I.G. Farben. It also represented the United Fruit Company and other Rockefellers’ interests. John Foster Dulles, Allen’s brother and partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, had close ties to Carmel Offie, William Bullitt, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and James Forrestal, all of them CFR agents or assets.
Most of the senior OSS members were secret CFR agents. Many of them later played important roles in the development of U.S. intelligence and national security policy for many decades.
Contrary to the prevalent myth, however, the OSS was not an intelligence agency working for the benefit of the American public. Actually it was the conspirators’ fifth column infiltrated into the U.S. armed forces to sabotage the efforts of true patriots like Patton to destroy the Nazi German war machine and win the war as soon as possible to save the lives of American soldiers.
But the CFR conspirators had other plans. Forced to fight the Nazi war machine because the monster they had contributed to create had turned into a Frankenstein’s monster, their secret plan was to substitute it with another monster they also had created: Soviet Russia.
It seems that the OSS’s true secret mission was to prevent the American military from winning the war too quickly and capture Nazi war criminals before the OSS provide ways for them to escape.[11] Their secondary mission was to make favorable conditions for the Soviets to get control over most of Eastern Europe. This perhaps explains why leftists and outright communist militants so extensively composed the OSS.But there were some obstacles in the path of their plan. Despite of the fact that the CFR conspirators controlled a few senior Army officers like Eisenhower, Marshall and Ridgway, most of them were true American patriots who firmly believed that their mission was defeating the Nazis. Unfortunately, they were wrong. They ignored that the true goal of the war was protecting the conspirators’ investments in Germany and allowing the top Nazi criminals to escape justice. At the time, not all ranking members of the U.S. military were under the control of the CFR conspirators, and Donovan immediately won several enemies, among them Major General George V. Strong, chief of the Army’s G-2, who openly expressed his lack of confidence in the new organization and proceeded to set up his own competing clandestine intelligence service.[12] Another enemy, probably most powerful than Gen. Strong, was J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI was the government agency responsible for counterespionage, and Hoover, who had been doing a good job, was protecting his turf.
While most of the American military men were risking their lives fighting what they considered a just war for the noble purpose of liberating Europe from the Nazi scourge, the conspirators’ secret army, the OSS, was working in the shadows to protect the conspirators’ interests in Germany and helping high rank Nazi leaders to escape to South America with the help of the Vatican. And Donovan and his OSS men were there, not only to protect the Nazis, but also to keep an eye on loyal American officers to see they could not accomplish too early what they considered their war mission: defeating the Nazis.
The fact that some OSS members were also true American patriots who firmly believed their main role was fighting the Nazis is irrelevant. They had been recruited under a false flag and, wittingly or unwittingly, were helping American pro-Nazis in the U.S. government to help the Nazi thugs avoid paying for their war crimes.![]()
Since the very creation of the OSS, Donovan was criticized by his tendency to hire leftists, fellow travelers and outright militant communists. Donovan dismissed these criticisms by insisting that the sole objective of his organization was defeating the Axis powers. “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler,” he told one of his assistants.[13] But the evidence shows that, for some reason, the OSS seemed to have a soft spot for Communists. Donovan himself was known for saying that political leftists were among the most valiant OSS field officers in his espionage and sabotage branches.[14] His most trusted aide, Duncan Lee, was later found to have been a KGB spy all the time.[15]
On one occasion, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s presented Donovan with dossiers containing factual evidence showing that three OSS employees had fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil war and were affiliated with the Communist Party. When Hoover demanded their separation from the organization, Donovan dismissed the issue by answering, “I know they are Communists; that’s why I hired them.”[16]
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Donovan himself had any sympathy for leftists or communists. Following a policy carefully planned at the Harold Pratt House, the General was using leftists and communists as unwitting tools in preparation for the coming Cold War. Though in theory the OSS was simply an intelligence agency, it played an important role in helping the CFR conspirators implement their foreign policy decisions. As author R. Harris Smith noticed, the OSS was fully under the control of the CFR conspirators,
While Donovan diligently sought left-wing intellectuals and activists for the operational and research branches of the OSS, he saw no incongruity in appointing corporate attorneys and business executives as OSS administrators.[17]
© 2014 Servando Gonzalez - All Rights Reserved
Footnotes:
1. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, Part I (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 59.
2. John Christian Ryter, “The Secret Life of AIC,” NewsWithViews.com, March 31, 2009.
3. Ryter, op. cit.
4. Antony C. Sutton, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy (Billings, Montana: Liberty House, 1986).
5. Most likely the Rosenbergs, true Communist fanatics, ignored that their true role was paying with their lives for unwittingly allowing the U.S. government to disinform the American people.
6. For a detailed account of the treachery see George Racey Jordan, From Major Jordan’s Diaries (Boston: Western Islands, 1965), pp. 72-106. Major Jordan’s accusations seem to have been substantiated many years later in a novel written in 1980 by Franklin Roosevelt’s son James Roosevelt. See, James Roosevelt A Family Matter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980).
7. Sun Tzu, The Art of War [translated by Samuel B. Griffith] (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 146.
8. Sutton, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy, pp. 101-111.
9. MIRV, the capability of an intercontinental missile to fire more than a single warhead.
10. Sutton, op. cit., p. 101.
11. Actually, this was not a difficult mission for the OSS. Most OSS officers had links to corporations that traded with the Nazis or had cartel agreements with German companies. For a detailed study of how the OSS helped Nazis avoid punishment, see, Thomas M. Bower, The Pledge Betrayed: America and Britain and the Degasification of Post-War Germany (New York: Doubleday, 1982), especially Part 4.
12. Lyman Kirkpatrick, The Real CIA (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 15.
13. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Intelligence Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 10.
14. Ibid., p. 11.
15. Robert Wilcox, Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2008), pp. 139-140.
16. Smith, Ibid., p. 11. For detailed information about the OSS penetrated by leftists and Communists, see Smith, pp. 9-15.
17. Ibid, p. 15.
Part 2
By Servando Gonzalez
August 29, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
A characteristic common to all intelligence officers, East and West, is that they have a special open-mindedness. For them nothing is impossible just because it is improbable. —Thomas Powers
The Bogotazo Riots and the Launching of the Cold War HoaxMost books and articles about the CIA mention the Agency’s first two successful covert operations: the overthrowing of Premier Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 and the overthrowing of President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. Some of them spare a few paragraphs to mention the CIA’s alleged first mistake: its failure to predict the Bogotazo riots. But there is more about the Bogotazo affair than the CIA, Fidel Castro, and his CFR masters want us to know. On April 9, 1948, Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, was the scene of violent riots, later known as the Bogotazo. The event that apparently unleashed the riots was the assassination of Colombia’s populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The events coincided with the celebration in Bogotá of the Ninth International Conference of American States, which had opened its sessions on March 30, 1948, chaired by U.S. Secretary of State and Secret CFR agent General George C. Marshall.
The murder of Gaitán unleashed a frenzied, senseless orgy of killing, burning, and looting that destroyed most of the center of Bogotá and virtually cut it off from the rest of the world for two days. The riots took the lives of more than a thousand people. Before the riot ended 150 buildings had been burned down or severely damaged.
What none of the books about the CIA mention, however, is that the Bogotazo actually was the CIA’s first successful large-scale psychological warfare operation (PSYOP)[1] carried out on behalf of the CFR conspirators. In it they tested new covert warfare, propaganda and mind control techniques later employed in operations ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to the 9/11, 2001 PSYOP. Moreover, the Bogotazo operation was the event where the conspirators used for the first time their newly recruited secret agent: Fidel Castro In early 1948, CIA’s talent spotters at the U.S. Embassy in Havana decided to recruit Fidel Castro as an agent provocateur and send him to Bogotá, Colombia, on a sensitive mission. Apparently Castro’s already impressive record as a gangster, assassin and psychopath convinced them that he was the right person they were looking to perform a delicate and important job.
In a book self-published in 1995,[2] Ramón B. Conte, a man who used to do some minor contract work for the CIA as a heavy,[3] mentions in detail how the Castro’s recruitment took place in early 1948, during a meeting at the mansion of Mario Lazo. Lazo was a U.S.-educated Cuban lawyer who represented most American interests in Cuba. Conte and another CIA operative were on a stakeout in a car parked across the street in front of Lazo’s house. They were armed and ready to intervene if Castro, known for his flaring temper and love for firearms, refused the offer and turned violent.
Castro attended the meeting accompanied by his friend Rafael del Pino Siero, a CIA asset who had been in the U.S. Army during WWII. Among the people who attended the secret meeting were Lazo himself, CIA officer Richard Salvatierra, CIA agent Isabel Siero Pérez,[4] former U.S. ambassador to Cuba Willard Beaulac, and two other Americans. Conte only identified them as Col. Roberts and a CIA officer known as Mr. Davies.
Some years after Conte published his book, I interviewed him over the phone. In the interview he added to the list of people who attended the meeting at Lazo’s home an important name he failed to mention in his book: William D. Pawley.[5]
At the time of the meeting Pawley, a millionaire businessman close friend of President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett (all of them CFR members) was U.S. ambassador to Peru and Brazil. He had been closely linked to the U.S. intelligence services since the times of the OSS, and was one of the main organizers of the Ninth Inter-American Conference that was planned to take place in April in Bogotá.[6]
According to Conte, a week after the initial meeting, Castro and del Pino met again with CIA’s Salvatierra, who had been assigned the job of Castro’s controller. In this second meeting Castro was assigned the code name Alex and told about his first assignment. It consisted in traveling to Bogotá, Colombia and, acting as an agent provocateur, participate in the assassination of Gaitán, which would be used as a pretext to provoke the riots known as the Bogotazo. The secondary goal of his mission was to plant false clues that would be used later to blame the Communists for the riots. The riots would help Secretary Marshall use the fear of communism as a threat to convince the delegates attending the Conference that the Communist menace was real.[7]
The Bogotazo PSYOP and the Cold War
Most Colombians who have studied the Bogotazo believe that the event was just a violent outburst in Colombia’s national politics. But, as I will show below, they are wrong. The Bogotazo was a typical false flag operation.[8] It was part of a large psychological warfare operation that had nothing to do with Colombia’s internal affairs. Indeed, a secret report about the riots made by Naval Attaché Col. W. F. Hausman, of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, mentions that the riots had been initially planned to occur during the Pan American Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, but the Brazilian police did a good job and dispersed the rioters before they did any harm.[9] The Bogotazo was the event that triggered the beginning of a PSYOP of enormous proportions: the Cold War Hoax.
An important clue to the disinformation techniques used in the Bogotazo operation is the fact that, though the CIA allegedly failed to inform Marshall about the possibility of riots, CFR secret agents in the field kept the Colombian press well informed in advance about that possibility. As Francisco Fandiño Silva, a known Colombian journalist, later recalled, “The American Embassy informed me that it had received reports that a bomb attack was to be made against the General [Marshall].”[10]
Following the same pattern of disinformation, on March 24, Gaitán received a disingenuous warning from Ambassador Beaulac, telling him that the Communists were planning to break up the Conference and that, if they succeeded, Gaitán’s Liberal Party most likely would be blamed for the events.[11]Just a few hours after the Bogotazo riots erupted, General Marshall, CIA Director Adm. Hillenkoetter, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Willard Beaulac, Colombia’s President Dr. Mariano Ospina, Secretary of the Presidency Rafael Azula, and other important witnesses concluded that the Bogotazo was a Communist operation instigated by the Soviet Union. Puzzled by the Agency’s first intelligence “failure,” CIA officer Russell Jack Smith telephoned to a contact in Secretary Marshall’s office in the State Department and asked,
Where did the Secretary get the information that the rioting in Bogotá was a communist plot?” “Oh,” his contact said casually, “he just looked out of the window in his villa six or seven miles away and said, “The communists did it.”[12]
A few days later, on April 13, 1948, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article under the title “Marshall Blames World Communism for Bogotá Revolt,” providing more elements in an effort to convince the American public that the assassination of Gaitán and the Bogotazo riots had been a work of the Colombian Communists with the support of the Soviet Union. In the days following the Bogotazo events, the CFR-controlled U.S. mainstream media launched a pervasive disinformation campaign to brainwash the American public into believing that the Bogotazo had been a Soviet-Communist operation and must be prepared to face similar events at home.
The Agent Provocateurs
On their way to Colombia, Castro and del Pino stopped first in Panama, where they were introduced to President Enrique Jiménez, where del Pino gave a violent anti-American speech.[13] Argentina’s president Juan Domingo Perón, who acted as a cutout to hide the true source of the money, provided the funds for Castro and Del Pino’s trip. Perón’s pro-Nazi activities have been extensively documented, and he was a personal friend of CFR senior agent Allen Dulles. Fulfilling their role as agent provocateurs, once in Bogotá, Castro and del Pino openly distributed pro-Communist literature just a few days before the Bogotazo and kept Communist literature in their hotel room.
Some witnesses claim that about 4:00 p.m., just a few hours after Gaitán had been assassinated, they saw a street mob, leaded by Fidel Castro, shouting “A Palacio” [“To the Palace,” meaning the Presidential mansion]. According to the witnesses, Castro was carrying a rifle and boasted that he just had killed two priests. But, if he really said so, he was lying. No priests were killed during the Bogotazo.In a effort to add credibility to the allegation that Castro was a Soviet agent, William D. Pawley, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil and a Conference delegate, declared to a U.S. Senate investigation that, while he was riding an official Embassy car the day the riots begun, he heard somebody on the radio saying, This is Fidel Castro from Cuba. This is a Communist revolution. The President has been killed. All the military establishments are now in our hands. The Navy has capitulated to us and this revolution has been a success.[14]
Some authors have used Pawley’s words as the ultimate proof that at that early time Fidel Castro already was a Communist. But, as I mentioned before, this goes against the evidence. In the first place, because, according to Conte, Pawley had attended the meeting at Lazo’s home where the CFR conspirators recruited Castro. Secondly, because ten years later, Pawley played a key role as President Eisenhower’s personal envoy in trying to persuade Cuba’s President Batista to leave the country, thus opening the way for Castro grabbing power in Cuba in 1959.
Planting False Clues
Since their arrival at Bogotá, Castro and del Pino devoted an inordinate amount of time to plant false clues in an effort to implicate the Colombian Communists and the Soviet Union in the coming assassination of Gaitán and the riots.
On April 3, a few days before the opening of the Conference, Colombia’s President, Mariano Ospina and other foreign leaders were attending the evening performance a the Colon Theatre. Suddenly, a shower of leaflets dropped over the attendees. According to a report by one of the Colombian detectives who were present,
“These had been printed in abroad, were definitely Communist in style and revolutionary in phraseology and contrary to the democratic principles of our country, England and the United States.”[15]
With two other detectives, he proceeded to the gallery where he caught the two Cubans in the act of showering “the boxes and orchestra of the Colón Theatre with their revolutionary propaganda.” Detective number 6 took Fidel Castro and del Pino into custody and proceeded to their lodgings —room 33 of the Hotel Claridge. There the two Cubans voluntarily showed the detectives various documents linking him to various Latin American Communist leaders, and various Communist or leftwing books.[16]
According to the Report, the detectives asked for written authorization from their superiors to pick up Castro and del Pino’s passports and summon them to the Bureau of Detectives of the National Police for further interrogation on their Communist activities. Strangely, the permission was denied.[17] It seems that some important people needed Castro and del Pino free to continue doing their job uninterrupted.
Indeed, there are many things pointing to the fact that the Bogotazo riots were not spontaneous, but had been planned way in advance. Probably the most clear was that, a few hours before the assassination of Gaitán took place, the newspaper El Popular, of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, printed on its edition of April 9, 1948 (logically prepared the night before it was printed) the news of the assassination and the riots and released it to the public.[18]
The amazing fact was noticed and mentioned by other publications. A few days later, in April 14, another Venezuelan publication, El Gráfico de Caracas, reproduced a photocopy of the El Popular’s issue with the information. On April 29, a Colombian newspaper, El Siglo of Bogotá, also reproduced El Popular’s information.[19]
It was not a coincidence that the Bogotazo riots erupted while the Ninth Conference was taking place. In 1945, after the end of WWII, the American military-industrial complex and its Wall Street associates were desperately looking for a way to continue producing armaments and saw Latin America as a potential market for their products. They kept active the military bases the U.S. has acquired south of the border with the pretext of the war against the Axis, continued training officers from Latin American countries, and moved to standardize South and Central American military equipment along U.S. lines, in an effort to add the military field to Latin America’s economic dependency to the United States.
CFR conspirators infiltrated in the U.S. government emphasized Latin America’s importance as a safe source of basic materials from a geographic area where foreign powers could not interfere. The plan was to use the Latin American military as their praetorian guard to protect the natural resources that, according to their reasoning, rightly belonged to the CFR conspirators. The first step in that direction was the signing of a military alliance between the United States and the Latin American countries (with the exception of Uruguay, which refused to sign), the Rio Pact of 1947.
Most Latin Americans governments had signed the Pact with the hope that the U.S. would give them the economic help they badly needed — of which corrupt politicians hoped to steal a great part — in return for their political and military cooperation. But, a year later, the economic aid had not materialized, and the politicians were not happy. Now the U.S. had asked then to meet again in Bogotá to sign new treaties.
Cardinal among them was the creation of a new tool for political and economic domination, the Organization of American States (OAS), as well as a commitment to fight the new artificially created enemy: Soviet communism. A secret memorandum dated March 22, 1948, signed by George Kennan (CFR), Director of Political Planning at the State Department, mentions that the problem of Communism must be considered at the Ninth Conference, as well as anticommunist measures that will be prepared and implemented in the interamerican system.[20]
But, given their previous experience, most leaders of the Latin American countries were not eager to help the U.S. to reach its goal. This was evidenced during the first days of the Conference by the delegates’ reluctance to cave in to Marshall’s pressures. Particularly concerning to the delegates was the inclusion of a dangerous loophole in the OAS proposed Charter of Article 15, which stated: “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of any State.” This principle was supposed to apply not only to armed force, but also to any other form of interference or attempted threat. But the loophole specified that “measures” could be “adopted for the maintenance of peace and security in accordance with existing treaties.”
With the addition of this loophole, the CFR conspirators controlling the U.S. government guaranteed their right to intervene at will in Latin America, and the Latin American delegates were not pleased. But the sight of the angry mobs in the streets, the burning of the buildings, and the indiscriminate killing, proved to be more persuasive than Marshall’s arguments. The last day of the Conference the delegates not only unanimously approved the Charter creating the OAS, but also unanimously approved a document condemning international communism.[21]
After they had approved the creation of the OAS, some of the scared delegates still had the audacity to ask Marshall if there was any possibility of a “Marshall Plan” for Latin America. But, adding insult to outrage, Marshall answered that it was beyond the possibilities of the United States to finance such a plan. The capital required, he added, “must come from private sources.”[22]
The OAS Charter provided the legal mechanism for upholding the Monroe Doctrine. The U.S. controlled the majority in the OAS, including several Latin American votes, and this would guarantee their right to legally militarily intervene in the affairs of the OAS member countries. If the votes did not give the CFR conspirators the legal right to intervene, they reserved the right to do it unilateral just the same.
Most people who have studied the Bogotazo agree that the event that unleashed the riots was the assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, head of the Liberal party, by a mentally deranged young man, Juan Roa Sierra.
Just by chance, at the moment Gaitán was assassinated, Castro and del Pino were seated at a café just across the street. Conveniently, a few minutes after the assassination, an angry mob killed the suspect. Some time later is was known that Castro and del Pino had given him the money to buy the gun allegedly used in the assassination.
But just a perfunctory analysis of the Bogotazo events from the point of view of counterintelligence shows that it was a by-the-book false flag operation of the type carried out by the OSS and later the CIA on behalf of their CFR masters. Actually, Roa Sierra was a Manchurian candidate, a psychologically programmed assassin, similar to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan. Like in the cases of Oswald and Sirhan, most likely Roa Sierra didn’t shoot the gun.
Actually, the Bogotazo was a key part of a larger psychological warfare operation (PSYOP), whose ultimate goal was to scare the American and Latin American people with the fear of the Communism —an artificially created enemy to substitute the artificially created previous enemy that has just disappeared: Nazism.
The propaganda and sabotage techniques used during the Bogotazo — broadcasting fake reports inciting the rioters, distribution of leaflets implicating the Communists, etc. —, seem to have been carried out following the OSS guidelines for psychological warfare operations as specified by the OSS Morale Operations Branch.[23] The main goal of the OSS Morale Operations Branch was to create unfounded panic, intimidate, demoralize, and spread confusion and distrust among enemy civilians and military forces. A secondary goal was to stimulate feelings of resentment and rebellion among occupied populations. Morale Operations used “black”[24] propaganda, in which the source of the information is disguised.
Adding weight to that suspicion is the fact, ignored by most authors who have studied the Bogotazo, that two weeks before the event the FBI office in Colombia had been dismantled. According to a secret document, all FBI officers (FBI officers worked at the U.S. embassies under the cover of “legal attachés”) were recalled to the U.S. and would not to be replaced.[25]
Before the creation of the CIA, the FBI was the U.S. agency in charge of espionage and counterespionage in Latin America, and it was doing a good job. Despite his personal shortcomings, Hoover was a patriot that always worked for America. Proof of it is that the FBI was one of the few key agencies of the U.S. government the CFR conspirators were unable to penetrate. Therefore, dismantling the FBI office at the U.S. Embassy on Colombia most likely was a precautionary measure to avoid non-controlled, inquisitive minds witnessing an event they would easily have found out was a CIA dirty trick.
Soon after the riots, the Colombian government asked the British Scotland Yard to investigate the events. To this effect, the British authorities sent to Colombia a team of investigators, formed by Chief-Inspector Peter Beveridge, Chief-Inspector Albert Tansil, and Sir Norman Smith, ex-Chief of the British Police in India. Despite some inexactitudes, mostly due to lack of support from the Colombian authorities, poor knowledge of the language and the country, as well as the short time provided for the investigation, the report is a valuable source of information about the Bogotazo and the assassination of Gaitán.
When Dr. Jordán, Chief Investigator of the Colombia’s Justice Minister first met the Scotland Yard investigators, he presented them with a written summary of the salient facts of his investigation as well as his tentative conclusions. According to Jordán, he was in the possession of documentation implicating the Communists in the assassination of Gaitán. But, when Dr. Jordán finally gave the documents to the British, “they proved to consist of two files, of scanty material, without opinion or nothing,” proving little about the Communists’ participation in the events.[26]
Despite Dr. Jordan’s efforts to implicate the Communists in Gaitán assassination, the British investigators categorically stated that, “We are fully convinced that no political party, as such, had any part in the murder.”[27] They reached that conclusion based, on the patent lack of readiness of the political parties, whether Conservative, Liberal, or Communist, to suppress or to take full political advantage of the revolt which flared up after the murder. “We state, therefore, our definitive opinion, that no political Party, can have had any connection with the murder.”[28]
In conclusion, everything indicates that that the riots, which apparently were spontaneously provoked by the assassination of Gaitán, had been planned and prepared in advance, and the assassination was only a cover to hide its true causes. The assassination of Gaitán and the Bogotazo were the result of a carefully planned psychological warfare operation carried out by the CIA on behalf of its CFR masters. This explains why so many known key participants in the Bogotazo were linked to the CFR, the OSS or the CIA. The known ones were:
Gen. George C. Marshall (CFR), U.S. Secretary of State, Chief U.S. delegation to 9th Conference.
Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway (CFR), military advisor to U.S. delegation to 9th Conference
Averell Harriman (CFR), U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
William Wieland, protégé of Sumner Welles (CFR), probably intelligence liaison between CIA and State Dept., later Castro supporter
Roy Rubbotom, U.S. State Department, later Castro supporter
William Pawley, friend of Allen Dulles, links to CIA, attended Lazo meeting.
Willard Beaulac, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, ex-US. Ambassador to Cuba, suspected of attending Lazo meeting.
Norman Armour (CFR, OSS), Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. delegate to 9th Conference.
Richard Salvatierra, CIA officer, attended Lazo meeting.
John Mepples Spiritto, CIA officer, project ARTICHOKE, previously had tried to buy Gaitán.
John C. Wiley (CFR, OSS), former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia.
Robert Lovett (Skull & Bones), U.S. Acting Sec. of State, close links to CFR.
Rafael del Pino Siero, U.S. intelligence asset, attended Lazo meeting
Fidel Castro Ruz, CIA agent, later became an important CFR asset.
Apart from the information I have provided above, the activities during the Bogotazo of so many people linked to the U.S. intelligence services and the CFR is a strong indication that the Bogotazo was not a random outburst of violence but a false flag operation, the key element of a carefully planned and executed major PSYOP called the Cold War —the first of many to be carried out by the CIA and the CFR conspirators in their long battle against the American people and the peoples of the world in the pursuit of their goal of world domination.
The methodology used in this PSYOP followed the Hegelian principle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis,[29] in which the Bogotazo operation was the scaring antithesis used as a threat to force the American and Latin American people into accepting the scaring new synthesis called the Cold War.
The Bogotazo operation was the pretext used by the CFR conspirators to initiate what is known as “the War Scare of 1948,”[30] a PSYOP that marked the true beginning of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere. The Cold War proved to be extremely beneficial to CFR’s oil magnates, Wall Street bankers and CEOs of transnational corporations who, as they had done with Nazi Germany, now were making money selling their goods to both parts of the Cold War conflict.
Just a few years later, CFR conspirator Nelson Rockefeller was frantically selling the idea of building nuclear shelters in every American building,[31] and American schoolchildren were hiding under their desks rehearsing for a coming nuclear attack. The time for Americans to live under a permanent state of fear had arrived.
[For a full, detailed analysis of the Bogotazo PsyOp, see my Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People.]
© 2014 Servando Gonzalez - All Rights Reserved
Footnotes:
1. Psychological warfare operations (PSYOPs: Operations to convey selected information to foreign or domestic audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of PSYOPs is to induce or reinforce attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator's objectives.
2. Ramón B. Conte, Historia oculta de los crímenes de Fidel Castro (Self-published, n.p., 1995), pp. 15-30.
3. Heavy, a.k.a. slag. CIA vernacular for assets of girth and muscle the Agency uses in situations where brute force is more important than wit.
4. In his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam, 1989), CIA defector Philip Agee identifies Isabel Siero Pérez, del Pino’s aunt, as a CIA’s Miami station agent, p. 396.
5. You may read a transcript of Conte’s interview (in Spanish) in my website. There is a link at the end to the interview’s recording.
6. Information on Pawley in Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba ( New York: Twin Circle, 1968), pp. 144-145, 170-171.
7. CFR member George Marshall already had experience in the creation of the Communist menace: he was instrumental in the implementation of a plan developed by the CFR conspirators to betray Chiang Kai-Shek was betrayed and give China in a silver plate to Mao Tse-tung and his “agrarian reformers.”
8. False flag operation: an operation designed to be untraceable to the sponsor due to misrepresentation or disguise. Usually, false clues are planted to implicate another group or country as the perpetrator of the operation.
9. Hausman’s Report mentioned in Gonzalo Sánchez, (ed.), Grandes potencias: El 9 de abril y la violencia (Bogotá: Planeta, 2000), p. 47.
10. Francisco Fandiño Silva, La Penetración Soviética en América y el 9 de abril, (Bogotá: Nuevos Tiempos, 1949).
11. U.S. News & World Report, April 23, 1948, pp. 13-14.
12. Russell Jack Smith, The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brasseys, 1989), p. 38.
13. Confidential Dispatch No. 336, April 26, 1948. Embassy, Havana.
14. Activities of Wieland, Rubbotom and Castro in Bogotá, Colombia, in Hearings, Communist Threat to the U.S. Through the Caribbean, Senate Internal Subcommittee, 86th-87th Congress, Parts 1-12, pp. 725, 756, 806; also in Mario Lazo, Dagger in the Heart (New York: Twin Circle, 1968), pp. 144-145).
15. Nathaniel Weyl, Red Star Over Cuba (New York: Hillman/MacFadden, 1960), p. 75.]
16. Ibid
17. Ibid
18. In the same fashion, a TV reporter was giving the news of the collapse of WTC building 7 while the building was seen standing in the background.
19. Angel Aparicio Laurencio, Antecedentes desconocidos del nueve de abril (Madrid: Ediciones Universal, 1973), p. 39.
20. Kennan’s memorandum mentioned in Gonzalo Sánchez, (ed.), Grandes potencias: El 9 de abril y la violencia (Bogotá: Planeta, 2000) p. 50.
22. Marshall quoted in Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S. – Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 148. Nelson Rockefeller (CFR) was the main promoter of using private sources of capital for Latin American economic “aid.”
23. See, OSS Sabotage Instructions, May 7, 1943.
24. Black: Said of any operation whose true source is hidden or falsely attributed to another source. In the case of propaganda, “black” also means that the content is mostly fake or forged. Black propaganda could be either true or false. For morale operations purposes, the truth or falsity was irrelevant. It was the effect on the target’s mind that mattered.
25. FBI office dismantled, in Secret, No Distribution, Memo of March 6, 1947.
26. Sir Norman Smith, Scotland Yard Report, p. 6.
27. Ibid., p. 7.
28. Ibid., p. 8.
29. German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) made change the cornerstone of his philosophical system, which he called Dialectics. According to Hegel, an idea or principle — which he called the thesis— is challenged by its opposite —the antithesis. Eventually, from this conflict emerges a new idea or principle, which is a synthesis of both.
30. One of the best sources of the War Scare is Frank Kofsky’s, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
31. After a visit to India in 1973, Jawaharlal Nehru told some friends, “Governor Rockefeller is a very strange man. All he wants to talk about is bomb shelters.” Nehru quoted in Newsday, December 12, 1973.
Part 3-A
By Servando Gonzalez
October 11, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
You can either start with fiction or with documentary. But whichever one you start with, you will inevitably find the other. —Jean-Luc Goddard.
The event known as the Cuban missile crisis, to many people the greatest of all Cold War crises, is a milestone in the history of the Cold War. “Generations to come,” praised Time magazine, “may well count John Kennedy’s resolve as one of the decisive moments of the 20th Century.” Yet there is perhaps no single event in recent history as contradictory and puzzling as this one.
The Missile Crisis That Never Was
The official story, parroted over and over in most books and articles about the Cuban missile crisis, tells that on October 15, 1962, CIA’s top photo interpreter Dino Brugioni analyzed the pictures taken by a U-2 flying over Cuba and discovered that the Russians were building what looked like long-range missile sites on Cuban soil. It was not until October 16, however, that President Kennedy was shown the U-2 photos that, according to CIA officers and Kennedy’s close advisors, provided irrefutable proof that the Soviets were installing ground-to-ground missile bases with nuclear capability in the Island.
There is, however, a big problem with that theory. Despite most of what has been written, about the Cuban missile crisis, some key questions about the crisis have never been properly answered. I am offering below a few pieces of the puzzle that are still missing, but these are not the only ones.
Question 1. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his Memoirs that the idea of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba to defend the Castro government from an imminent American attack came during a trip he made to Bulgaria from 14 to 20 May, 1962. But this is difficult to believe, because just a few days earlier, on May 5, Cuban Ambassador Faure Chomón definitely had returned from Moscow and his successor, Carlos Olivares, who was appointed twelve days later, still remained in Cuba without presenting his credentials to the Soviet government. The unexpected replacement of Chomón and his urgent return to Cuba coincided with the discovery and subsequent neutralization by Fidel Castro of a coup attempt to overthrow him. The failed coup had been coordinated by the Soviet ambassador in Havana, Sergei Kudryavtsev, and seconded by several key members of the traditional pro-Soviet Cuban Communist Party.
Ambassador Kudryavtsev, whom John Barron in his book KGB calls a “master of subversion,” had another job besides being ambassador. His real mission was to act as a senior Soviet KGB intelligence officer in Havana and prepare the conditions for a takeover by the Russians after overthrowing Castro. But Castro discovered the plot and summarily expelled Kudryavtsev from Cuba along with a group of his embassy officials and KGB agents on 20 May 1962. However, as senior Soviet intelligence officers never act motu proprio, but strictly by-the-book, one can safely surmise that Kudryavtsev’s anti-Castro activities followed orders from the top Soviet leadership, most likely from Khrushchev himself.
In diplomatic language, when two countries respectively withdraw their ambassadors, it means that the relations are at a very low point, usually close to a breakup. Why was precisely after a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro and when relations between the two countries were so unfriendly, that Khrushchev got the wild idea of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba allegedly to protect Castro from an American attack? Was Khrushchev crazy?
Question 2. According to most American authors who have studied the crisis, a key element in its successful solution by President Kennedy was the important role played by Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence (GRU), who had been recruited by the CIA. It was a remarkable coincidence, these authors said, that a few months before the crisis Penkovsky had provided the CIA with a copy of the operating manual of exactly the same type of missiles that the Soviets later emplaced in Cuba. Penkovsky was arrested by the Soviet authorities a day before the beginning of the crisis and allegedly sentenced to death and executed some months later. Even today, the recruitment of Penkovsky is considered one the CIA’s greatest successes, which contributed greatly to restoring the lost prestige after the resounding failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
But top officials of the MI6, the British intelligence service, had a very different opinion about Penkovsky. To them, who were those who made the first contacts with the Soviet officer and then passed him on to the CIA, Penkovsky was the main element of a disinformation operation of the Soviet intelligence. Apart from the irregular way in which Penkovsky was recruited — Penkovsky tried on several occasions to be recruited by British intelligence, but they always refused because they suspected he was an agent provocateur — there is strong evidence indicating that, from their first contact with the British, Soviet intelligence was aware of Penkovsky’s activities.
For this and other reasons, Peter Wright, the famous British spy hunter and former deputy director of MI5 (the British FBI), was convinced that Penkovsky was a key element in a Soviet disinformation operation.
So if, as it appears, Penkovsky actually worked for the Soviet intelligence services, or they had him under surveillance because from the beginning they knew of his treachery, why did they allow Penkovsky to give the CIA such detailed information about exactly the type of missiles they planned to deploy in Cuba, which later helped the CIA to identify them on Cuban soil?
Question 3. According to secret Soviet government documents, made available to researchers a few years ago, Soviet officers in Cuba had complete autonomy over the use of nuclear missiles, to the point where they can fire them at will without the express permission of Moscow. If true, this would have violated all procedures established by the Soviet army on the use of nuclear weapons.
The Soviets had always been very careful in the control of their nuclear weapons, to the point that, although the Army officers had control over rocket artillery missiles with conventional warheads, the nuclear warheads remained apart, controlled by special units of the KGB Spetsnaz. According to their standard operating procedure, the mating of nuclear warheads to missiles was made only following express orders strictly validated by the Soviet high command after having been authorized by the Prime Minister. These regulations were in place before the crisis and maintained thereafter. So, why the Soviets, as alleged in the case of the missiles in Cuba, so drastically violated strict security procedures established by the Soviet military doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons?
Question 4. In its issue of November 24, 1990, the French magazine Le Monde published parts of a secret speech that Fidel Castro addressed to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party in 1968, in which he confessed his "immense love" for the nuclear missiles the Soviets had deployed on Cuban soil. It is known that, on October 22, at a critical moment of the crisis, Cuban army units assaulted and occupied for several hours a battery of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles in the eastern part of Cuba, until Soviet special units outmanned them, with heavy casualties on both sides. That was the battery that shot down a U-2 during the crisis. The unusual fact was later published in the Washington Times by Daniel Ellsberg, then an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Defense Department, and later confirmed by Adrian Montoro, ex-director of Radio Havana Cuba, in an article he wrote for the New York Times.
Those who participated in the crisis on the U.S. side repeatedly mentioned Khrushchev's inexplicable folly of placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. All agreed that just a single nuclear missile fired from Cuban territory to the United States would have caused a devastating U.S. military response directed not only against Cuba, but also against the Soviet Union. Why Khrushchev, who was no fool and knew perfectly well the extraordinary love that trigger-happy Fidel felt for the nuclear missiles, placed so dangerously close to Castro the nuclear trigger that could have brought the total destruction of the Soviet Union?
Question 5. According to the official story, what finally convinced Castro, who at first was not all happy with the idea of accepting the missiles, was the confirmation that President Kennedy was planning an attack on the island. The ultimate proof was shown to him in the confidential notes of a conversation that Soviet journalist Alexei Adzhubei, Izvestia’s editor and Khrushchev’s son-in-law, had with President Kennedy a few days earlier while he was vacationing in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. According to Adzhubei, Kennedy had brought up the subject of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, reminding him that at that time the United States had not intervened. This, according to the Soviets, was a clear warning that when the Americans invaded Cuba, the Soviets, in return, should refrain from intervening.
The problem with this theory is that some people who were at the meeting have denied time and again that Kennedy had mentioned Hungary during the interview, much less that the U.S. had plans for an invasion of Cuba. All information in this regard seems to confirm the veracity of the American version. Apparently the secret report was a lie specially designed by Adzhubei to convince Castro to accept the missiles. Apparently, Khrushchev was so eager to convince Castro into accepting the missiles that he went to the point of lying about an impending American attack that did not really exist. But, why?
Question 6. Available evidence shows that what Fidel Castro really wanted at the time was that the Soviet Union admitted Cuba to the Warsaw Pact or at least sign a separate military treaty with the Cuban government. But, if one is to believe Premier Khrushchev, the best solution to protect the government of Fidel Castro from a U.S. invasion was installing nuclear missile bases in Cuba.
According to secret Soviet documents brought to light a few years ago, when Americans discovered what looked like strategic missile bases on Cuban soil, the missiles were ready to be fired, and nuclear warheads were already in the island, ready to be mated with the missiles. But, surprisingly, as the crisis went on, Khrushchev gave in to U.S. pressure and withdrew the missile bases from Cuba. In his memoirs, the Soviet leader claims that his decision was because he had received concrete evidence that Kennedy had decided to launch an attack on Cuba.
So, according to his logic, Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter or repel an American attack on the island, and then withdrew them when he was told that the U.S. was going to attack Cuba. Khrushchev’s strange behavior cannot be explained by cowardice or incompetence, because the Soviet military often demonstrated its courage and military expertise of war technology in the war against the Nazis. Why, then, Khrushchev withdrew the missiles at the precise moment when they could have been used for the purpose for which they allegedly were installed in Cuba? This explanation does not make any sense.
Question 7. Most American authors who have studied the crisis believe that Khrushchev made a huge miscalculation when he placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, because instead of discouraging an American attack, actually encouraged it. But there are elements that suggest that, contrary to what these authors’ claim, Khrushchev did not commit any error in calculation.
In its National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) circulated in September 1962, just a few days before the crisis, CIA intelligence analysts, despite all the rumors that the Soviets were building strategic missile bases in Cuba, refused to consider this possibility. The main reason, experts and intelligence analysts from the CIA concluded, was that the Soviets had never transferred nuclear warheads beyond its borders. Another important reason was that Khrushchev had to be aware that the installation of nuclear missile bases in Cuba would trigger a devastating U.S. attack on the island. Soviet secret documents and references made in Khrushchev's own memoirs seem to confirm this view. If this is true, why did Khrushchev order building what looked like strategic nuclear missile bases in Cuba in the knowledge that, far from discouraging a U.S. attack, this would surely provoke it?
Question 8. One aspect that caught the attention of CIA’s intelligence analysts was that the Russians had not tried to conceal or camouflage the missile bases. In photos taken by U-2s, the bases are perfectly defined, without any camouflage concealing them. This is very strange, because the Soviets were known experts at masking and disguising. Maskirovka always constituted an important aspect of Soviet military tactics, and camouflaging techniques always received special attention in Soviet military schools. However, it was not until October 23, a day after Kennedy announced on television the discovery of strategic missile bases on Cuban soil, that the Soviets began hastily attempting to camouflage them.
The fact that the Soviet officers used no camouflage to mask the missile bases caused deep unease among some senior Cuban officials, including Che Guevara. In a secret speech delivered months later to senior members of his “Communist” party,” Castro mentioned the unexplainable fact that the Soviets didn’t try to camouflage the missile bases, and said that he thought the Soviets had done it on purpose. If, as it appears, this is true, why did the Soviets want the Americans to discover the missile bases?
Question 9. The facilities that looked like strategic nuclear missile bases were surrounded by real anti-aircraft missile batteries (SAMs), whose primary purpose was to protect the bases against air raids, particularly from spy planes. But engineering students at the University of Havana, who had been assigned as advisers to the radar units of the Soviet SAM bases, observed how their radar screens showed the U-2 flying unmolested over the bases without Soviet officials making the minimum attempt to shoot them down.
This Soviet behavior angered the Cuban students, who did not understand the cause of the Soviet’s lack of interest in shooting down the spy planes. This anger grew to the point that on some bases it reached almost to the level of a revolt. Only the presence of Che Guevara, called urgently to the SAM batteries, managed to calm them down. However, when he in turn informed Castro about the situation on the batteries, Guevara told him that he himself did not understand the Soviet’s behavior. Why did the Soviets not attempt to shoot down American spy planes with the very anti-aircraft missile batteries whose sole purpose was to bring down American spy planes?
Question 10. According to the official U.S. version of the facts, what sparked the crisis were the photos taken by a U-2 spy plane flying over the western part of Cuba on October 14. The truth, however, is that since August the U.S. intelligence services were certain that there were installations that looked like strategic Soviet missile bases on Cuban soil. Between August 31 and October 10, Senator Kenneth Keating had made fourteen public statements and ten speeches in the Senate, denouncing the inaction of the Kennedy administration about the existence of missile bases in the western part of Cuba. Cuban refugees, who were flying from Cuba to Florida by the hundreds, commented on the strange activities of the Russians in the western part of the island.
However, despite all the evidence pointed towards the west, Kennedy suddenly banned the U-2 from flying over the western part of Cuba, and flights were concentrated in the eastern region. It was not until the pressure of public opinion stirred by Senator Keating became intolerable that Kennedy ordered to resume flights over the western part of the island. It was in this first flight after the restart of the flights that a U-2 plane photographed what looked like strategic missile bases. Why did Kennedy not want the U-2s to discover the Soviet missiles in Cuba?
Question 11. According to the official U.S. version of the crisis, the high definition photographs taken by a U-2 plane on October 14 provided incontrovertible evidence of the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba. But the fact remains that nobody actually saw the missiles, much less touched them. What we have seen are photos of some construction sites that CIA analysts thought were similar to what they believed were strategic missile sites appearing in photographs taken by U-2s flying over the Soviet Union.
However, in his book The Soviet Army, former Soviet officer Victor Suborov tells how, in the early Sixties, nuclear missiles that paraded through Red Square were actually dummies. The Russian tradition in the art of maskirovka and disinfomatzia to mislead goes back to the times of Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin. During WWII, they built a large factory west of the Ural Mountains exclusively dedicated to the manufacture of all kinds of war material of props, from inflatable rubber tanks to wooden MiGs and dummy missiles.
The CIA subsequently admitted that it had no agents in the field that might have physically verified the existence of the strategic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. When the Soviets were shipping back to the Soviet Union what they claimed were strategic nuclear missiles, Kennedy had an excellent opportunity to order the Navy to board the ships and physically verify the withdrawal of the missiles, but he did not. Why did Kennedy decide not to verify the existence of the missiles and their actual withdrawing from Cuba?
Furthermore, the U-2 photos, which allegedly provided incontrovertible proof of the existence of nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, have been published in high resolution and are available on the web.[1] Surprisingly, such photos only show long objects covered with tarps and a few concrete bunkers which allegedly contained the nuclear warheads. But the nuclear missiles do not appear anywhere. So, why do most books and articles about the crisis continue to maintain the theory that the U-2 pictures provided irrefutable proof that there were medium-range strategic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil in 1962?
Moreover, given the Soviet’s expertise in military deception, even if the U-2 photos would have shown what seemed like nuclear missiles it would not have proved anything. A photo of a missile — or what looked like a missile— is not a missile.
Question 12. According to documents declassified after the fall of the Soviet Union and accounts of some Soviet officers who participated in the operation, when the missiles were discovered by the U-2s, their nuclear warheads were already in Cuba, and were later returned to the Soviet Union together with the missiles. However, despite the fact that all U.S. documents of the crisis assumed that the nuclear warheads were on Cuban soil, this was never proved. Moreover, as Kennedy refused to authorize offshore in situ verification, the presence of nuclear warheads on the Soviet ships was never confirmed.
But there is something even more important. From the early Sixties the U.S. had the technology for the remote detection of gamma radiation from nuclear warheads. By the time of the missile crisis, the U.S. had installed in the Dardanelles some powerful equipment that can detect radiation and the presence of nuclear warheads on Soviet submarines sailing through the Strait. However, none of the official documents produced during the crisis has revealed information that these teams had registered radiation from Soviet ships crossing the Strait supposedly carrying nuclear warheads to Cuba.
Many of the photos taken during the crisis show U.S. Navy aircraft flying over Soviet ships only a few feet above the masts. Presumably, some of these aircraft carried equipment capable of detecting gamma radiation. But no information whatsoever has been offered about detecting radiation from nuclear warheads on the ships allegedly carrying missiles and nuclear warheads back to the Soviet Union. So, if the Soviets really had nuclear warheads in Cuba, why had nobody ever detected radiation from them?
© 2014 Servando Gonzalez - All Rights Reserved
Footnotes:
1. See this link. The ever-lying Wikipedia has published a U-2 photo claiming that “This U-2 reconnaissance photo showed concrete evidence of missile assembly in Cuba. Shown here are missile transporters and missile-ready tents where fueling and maintenance took place.” The photo, however, actually shows nothing resembling Soviet strategic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Also, how did they know that fueling and maintenance of the missiles took place under the tents?
Part 3-B
By Servando Gonzalez
October 17, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
More Questions Than Answers
Some professional disinformation specialists have conspired to make us believe that, with regard to the missile crisis, all has been said and explained. The first book about the missile crisis was written by CFR agent Elie Abel. Then Graham T. Allison (CFR), wrote Essence of Decision, a book that most people still consider the ultimate analysis of the decision-making process during the crisis.
According to Allison, the Soviet failure to camouflage the missiles may have had a simple answer: stupid bureaucratic procedures in the Soviet Army. Missile sites had never been camouflaged in the Soviet Union, so the construction crews at the sites did what they usually do: build the missile sites according to the installation manuals because somebody forgot to retrain them before they went to work on this mission.
But, knowing the operational procedures of the Soviet Army this explanation seems a bit too simplistic to be credible. First of all, the officers and enlisted men assigned to the job of missile emplacement are normally not common soldiers, but specially trained personnel. Secondly, even with the existence of stupid bureaucratic procedures common to all armies, it is difficult to believe that they had made such a gross mistake, particularly if they were trying to place the missiles in Cuba using deception and stealth as the American official version claimed. Finally, Allison contradicts himself when, just two paragraphs before advancing his theory, he mentions that “The clandestine manner in which the missiles were shipped, unloaded, and transported to construction sites reveals the hand of Soviet intelligence agencies. Secrecy is their standard operating procedure.”
Talking to journalists at a news conference on February 1963, CFR agent Robert McNamara mentioned the so-called “photographic gap” that occurred between September 5 and October 14. According to McNamara, the U-2 missions during that period “didn’t relate” to the areas where the Russian missiles were eventually found. That was short of a tacit admission that the CIA had failed to photograph the western half of the Island — the area where all evidence pointed that the missiles were most likely to be — during the six weeks preceding the flight that allegedly discovered the strategic missile bases.
Those who needed to know had been assured that any missile emplacements would have been discovered by the U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba. But they were not told that these flights were bypassing the important areas allegedly to avoid antiaircraft batteries or SAMs already installed by the Soviets. But, after being ordered to fly over the suspect areas in Cuba, early in October the U-2 flights were inexplicably canceled.
After the crisis, the White House justified this decision by saying that Hurricane Ella had prevented air surveillance, but we know that Ella did not form until October 16. Even before the crisis was over, suspicions arose that the U-2 flights over Cuba had not been scheduled in an optimal manner. Later, in early 1963, the Stennis Committee examined the possibility of a “photographic gap” in U-2 coverage of Cuba in detail, but the charges were rejected as “unfounded.” However, the Stennis Report curiously ignored the critical questions of the U-2 paths over the Island between September 5 and October 24, merely observing that these flights “completed the coverage of those areas of Cuba which had been spotlighted as required early attention.” Yet, during cross examination by Congressmen Minshall and Ford in early February, 1963, Defense Secretary McNamara (CFR) admitted to the “photographic gap” of some 38 days in U-2 coverage of western Cuba.
Though in his book Collision Course author Henry Pachter makes no reference to the “photographic gap,” but he somewhat admits its existence in references to vague hints by administration sources that, because of the threat of Soviet SAM antiaircraft missiles in Cuba, reconnaissance flights during September had been limited to “side ways approaches.” In the same fashion, Roger Hilsman’s (CFR) in a 1964 article on the missile crisis gives no further explanation or of the “photographic gap.”
Even more significantly, in his now-classic study of the alleged failures in national intelligence estimates, author Klaus Knorr (CFR) didn’t mention the “photographic gap” or even the role played by the U-2 in the intelligence gathering during the crisis. Some years later Theodore Sorensen (CFR) remarked that U-2 incidents elsewhere in the world led to a “high-level reexamination of that airplane’s use” over Cuba and “some delay in flights,” but gave no additional information. Later in 1965 Roberta Wohlstetter (CFR) suggested that the Kennedy administration knew the Soviets had operational SAM sites in western Cuba, so they may have been extremely cautious in scheduling U-2 flights over the Island for fear of losing a plane.
Elie Abel (CFR) and Roger Hilsman (CFR) made additional disclosures concerning a change in policy concerning U-2 flights over Cuba. Not even Graham T. Allison (CFR) gave a clear explanation for the failure of U.S. intelligence, due to a “photographic gap,” to discover the missiles earlier.
Therefore, the fact remains that on September 10 a high-level decision was made and express orders were given, prohibiting direct overflights of western Cuba —the part of the Island where all evidence pointed to the presence of strategic missile sites. This unexplainable decision led to the now-famous “photographic gap.”
In 1991, however, CIA photo interpreter Dino Brugioni offered a much more credible explanation in his book Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis: According to Brugioni, It was not hurricane Ella that kept the U-2 from flying over the western part of Cuba, “but rather the dereliction, bumbling, and intransigence of [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk (CFR) and [Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs McGeorge] Bundy (CFR).” “Because of Bundy’s and Rusk’s stalling actions, there had been no U-2 photos of Cuba for over two weeks.”
As expected, Foreign Affairs, the CFR conspirators’ main disinformation organ, has published on some articles basically centered on the “lessons” of the Cuban missile crisis and its applicability to future crises. Now, given the fact that the “lessons” are based on the CFR conspirators’ false narrative of the events, one has to conclude that these “lessons” are wrong.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that, 50 years later, none of the above questions I have asked above have been satisfactorily answered. Moreover, I believe that the CFR professional disinformers will never provide a coherent answer to these questions because the answers will show us a very different picture than the one they are still trying hard to make us believe.
Finally, why did President Kennedy fail to seize the opportunity to get rid of his supposed archenemy? Why he didn’t authorize the U.S. Navy to board the Soviets ships allegedly bringing out of Cuba the missiles and their nuclear warheads, and verify it? Did Kennedy know something we don’t? These are the real questions to be answered in order to solve this historical riddle called the Cuban missile crisis.
Moreover, a logical question comes to mind: Why do these professional disinformers, most of them CFR members, spend so much time and effort muddying the historical waters? The answer is relatively simple: because, true to the Orwellian principle that he who controls the past controls the present and the future, giving credibility to false past fears such as the Cold War, the CFR disinformers can lend credence to current false fears such as the War on Terror.
Nevertheless, my theory about the Cuban missile crisis is that Khrushchev’s purpose was two-fold: first, getting rid of the troublesome Fidel without being blamed for it himself. Secondly, placing Americans in a very difficult position before the world and their own consciences, after an attack by the U.S., a big and powerful nation, against such a small country as Cuba. Even more important, the eventual discovery after an American invasion that there were no nuclear warheads in Cuba, and that the missiles were actually dummies, would have left the Americans with egg smeared all over their faces, instantly making them the laughingstock of the whole world.
An American invasion of Cuba could have solved Khrushchev’s Fidelista problem and, making good use of the American discredit on his behalf, he would have inherited Fidelismo, but without the troublesome Fidel — exactly the same way that, some years later, Fidel himself got rid of Che Guevara and inherited Guevarismo without the troublesome Guevara. Unfortunately, Khrushchev did not get rid of Castro, but David Rockefeller got rid of Khrushchev less than two years after the crisis.
In 1964 David visited the Soviet Union and had a two and half hour conversation with the Soviet Premier. We don’t know what the subject of subject of the conversation was, but we may safely surmise that David dressed down Khrushchev for his unauthorized attempt to get rid of David’s secret agent Fidel Castro. Barely two months later, David’s secret agents in the Soviet Politburo deposed Khrushchev.
Explaining my theory in detail, however, would take too long and is beyond the scope of this article. To understand it you may have to read my book The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
© 2014 Servando Gonzalez - All Rights Reserved
Servando Gonzalez, is a Cuban-born American writer, historian, semiologist and intelligence analyst. He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage, and semiotics. Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, Observando, The Secret Fidel Castro: Deconstructing the Symbol, The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis and La madre de todas las conspiraciones: Una novela de ideas subversivas, all available at Amazon.com.
He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San Leandro, California, both available at the author's site at http://www.servandogonzalez.org.
His book, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People is available at Amazon.com. Or download a .pdf copy of the book you can read on your computer, iPad, Nook, Kindle or any other tablet. His book, OBAMANIA: The New Puppet and His Masters, is available at Amazon.com. Servando's book (in Spanish) La CIA, Fidel Castro, el Bogotazo y el Nuevo Orden Mundial, is available at Amazon.com and other bookstores online.
His most recent book, I Dare Call It treason: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Betrayal of the America, just appeared and is available at Amazon.com and other bookstores online.
Servando's two most recent books in digital versions only are The Swastika and the Nazis: A Study of the Misuse of the Swastika by the Nazis and the first issue of the political satire series OBSERVANDO: American Inventors.
E-Mail: servandoglez05(at)yahoo(dot)com
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