Center Seeks CIA Documents on Plots to Kill Hitler, Castro

Eva Fedderly/27 January, 2017/Courthouse News

WASHINGTON (CN) – A research foundation dedicated to unearthing information about political assassinations sued the Central Intelligence Agency for not providing documents related to plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler and Fidel Castro.

The Assassination Archives and Research Center, is a privately funded, Maryland-based organization founded in 1984 “to provide a permanent organization which would acquire, preserve, and disseminate information on political assassinations,” according to the center’s website.

Daniel Alcorn, the center’s attorney, told Courthouse News that the case stems from a joint chiefs of staff document that the organization acquired.

Alcorn said the document contained an intriguing reference to the CIA basing a plot to kill Fidel Castro in 1963 on an earlier plot to kill Adolph Hitler crafted by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

“This was new information to us when we saw it,” Alcorn said.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the creation of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II after observing the success of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.

The OSS was dissolved by President Harry S. Truman after the war, and it was replaced by the CIA in September 1947.

Alcorn explained that in terms of its timing, the plot to kill Castro, who died of natural causes at the age on 90 in November, coincided with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

He said throughout that fall of 1963, a congressional inquiry into the CIA’s activities regarding Castro was unfolding, and that resulted in the creation of “a body of literature.”

“But we discovered this information,” he said of the revelation of a Hitler plot. “So we’re seeking information from the CIA about these records.”

The AARC has obtained a Joint Chiefs of Staff document containing an intriguing reference to the CIA basing a plot to kill Fidel Castro in 1963 on an earlier plot to kill Adolph Hitler crafted by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Image: The Times, U.K.

“This is of great interest to people studying history because it’s new information,” Alcorn added.

The center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency on Aug. 25, 2012, seeking documents related to the plot to assassinate Hitler, and also the CIA’s review of that plot as part of its effort to try to topple Castro.

“Originally the CIA told us they had no records. Then they rescinded, saying they were wrong and they do have the documents,” Alcorn said. “But then they came back again and said they don’t have records.”

Frustrated, the center sued the agency in the federal court in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 25.

It contends the CIA is obligated to provide it with the documents it requested, and by not doing so, it is violating the FOIA.

It also asserts the requested records are relevant to several other entities, including the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation; the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities; and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

“The CIA’s failure to comply with the FOIA harms AARC’s ability to provide full, accurate and current information to the public on matters of high public interest,” the complaint says. “Absent this critical information, AARC cannot advance its goal of informing the public on the documentary record on critical public issues related to political assassinations and related subjects.”

The center says it plans to disseminate any documents it receives from the CIA through its website, social media, reports and news releases.

It is seeking a determination that the agency violated the FOIA, and an order compelling it to release any documents it has that are relevant to the center’s request.

A representative of the CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Courthouse News

Manhattan DA’s office probing death of reporter with possible JFK ties

Dorothy Kilgallen (left) and John F Kennedy Courtesy Everett Collection; Getty Images

By Susan Edelman/29 January, 2017/New York Post

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is looking into the mysterious death 51 years ago of newspaper writer and “What’s My Line?” star Dorothy Kilgallen, who was investigating the JFK assassination, The Post has learned.

The stunning development comes after a new book, “The Reporter who Knew Too Much,” suggests Kilgallen was murdered to shut down her relentless pursuit of a Mafia don linked to JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for DA Cyrus Vance Jr., confirmed that a staffer has read the book, and reviewed a letter from author Mark Shaw citing new leads, medical evidence, and witnesses overlooked when Kilgallen, 52, died suddenly on Nov. 8, 1965 at the peak of her career.

“I’m hopeful DA investigators will probe any records available and interview witnesses still alive today who can shed light on what happened to this remarkable woman,” Shaw told The Post, which featured his findings last month.

“Victims have rights whether their name is Dorothy Kilgallen or Dorothy Doe, and Kilgallen was denied justice in 1965. That’s why I’m fighting for her.”

Shaw said he has received dozens of e-mails from readers demanding an official investigation. One “called her ‘a patriot’ who should be revered for risking her life to solve the JFK assassination.”

Kilgallen, who wrote a widely syndicated column for the New York Journal-American, was the only reporter ever to interview Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, and published Ruby’s closed-door testimony to the Warren Commission before its official release. Her enemies ranged from Frank Sinatra to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The morning after Kilgallen appeared on the hit TV game show, she was found dead in her Manhattan apartment, naked under a robe and still in make-up. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental mix of booze and sleeping pills.

But Shaw contends Kilgallen was drugged. He cites a powdery residue on a glass by the bed, and records obtained from the National Archives showing two additional barbiturates in her system.

“There was no evidence that Kilgallen was a drug abuser,” Shaw said Saturday. “Despite the odd death scene and heavy doses, there was no investigation.”

Former ME toxicologist Dr. Stephen Goldner told Shaw the Mafia controlled the Brooklyn ME’s Office, which inexplicably conducted the Kilgallen autopsy even though her death occurred in Manhattan.

Weeks before her death, Shaw learned, Kilgallen bought a gun for self-protection and planned a second trip to New Orleans to investigate Mafia don Carlos Marcello.

CONTINUE READING AT NEW YORK POST

RELATED:

Journalist’s tell-all on mobster tied to JFK might have gotten her killed

Publication Spotlight: Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers by Joel Whitney

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.

Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.

Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.

Reviews

“Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War’s shadows. Riveting.” —Kirkus, Starred Review

“Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced.”—John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize

“It may be difficult today to believe that the American intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA’s Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation’s spymasters.” —James Risen, author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War

“A deep look at that scoundrel time when America’s most sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral reckoning—one that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves—namely, what, if anything, have they done to resist the subversion of free thought?” —David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

“At the height of the cold war, the CIA set out to influence Americans by infiltrating our country’s literary and artistic establishment. Finks is a devastating work of investigative history that unearths the shocking reach of the Agency’s tentacles—from Baldwin and Hemingway to The Paris Review and the renowned American Studies department at Yale. Today, when cultural and literary icons seem closer than ever to elite interests, Finks is a timely reckoning of how we got here. You will never look at American literary culture the same way again.” —Anand Gopal, Pulitzer- and National Book Award-nominated author of No Good Men Among the Living

“The CIA’s covert financial support of highbrow art and fiction may seem like a quaint, even endearing, chapter in its otherwise grim history of coups, assassinations, and torture. In Finks, Joel Whitney argues otherwise and shines a discomfiting spotlight on this obscure corner of the cultural Cold War. The result is both an illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential costs—political and artistic—of accommodating power.” —Ben Wizner, Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project

About the Author

Joel Whitney is a cofounder and editor at large of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Boston Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, Salon, NPR, New York Magazine and The Sun. With photographer Brett Van Ort, he co-wrote the 2013 TED Talks ebook on landmine eradication, Minescape. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni. His Salon essay on The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays.

PURCHASE FINKS: HOW THE CIA TRICKED THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

Publication Spotlight: THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

Author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine’s research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam. While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA’s relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ. Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, and John Jay College. This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA’s ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA’s activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States. A common theme is the CIA’s ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability. Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.

Editorial Reviews

“…courageously takes us inside the CIA’s most shameful extralegal operations, exposing an intelligence service gone rogue. He is a sentinel of the public interest, and his book is a public service.” — John Kiriakou, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror.

“Valentine’s two books on the FBN/DEA are a major achievement.” — Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State

“Doug Valentine was examining the dark underbelly of American foreign policy years before people recognized the ‘Dark Side’ of torture camps and secret wars.” Robert Parry, Consortium News

AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW * * * * *

Of the extraordinary, valuable and informative works for which Mr. Valentine is responsible, his latest, CIA As Organized Crime, may prove to be the best choice as an introduction to the dark realm of America’s hidden corruptions and their consequences at home and around the world. This new volume begins with the unlikely but irrevocable framework by which Mr. Valentine’s path led to unprecedented access to key Agency personnel whose witting participation is summarized by the chapter title: “How William Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom.”

By illuminating CIA programs and systems of surveillance, control, and assassination utilized against the civilian population of South Vietnam, we are presented with parallels with operations and practices at work today in America’s seemingly perpetual war against terror.

Through the policies of covert infiltration and manipulations, illegal alliances, and “brute force” interventions that wreak havoc on designated enemy states, destroy progress and infrastructure under the claim of liberation, degrade the standards of living for people in the perceived hostile nations, “…America’s ruling elite empowers itself while claiming it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are ‘humanitarian’ and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys.”

Mr. Valentine has presented us with a major body of work which includes: The Strength of the Wolf; The Strength of the Pack; The Pheonix Program, to which we may now add The CIA as Organized Crime, and for which we are profoundly indebted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Valentine is an American journalist and author of four
works of historical non-fiction: The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix
Program, The Strength of the Wolf (winner of the Choice
Academic Library Award), and The Strength of the Pack. His
articles have appeared regularly in CounterPunch,
ConsortiumNews, and elsewhere.

PURCHASE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME

Two Views of Twenty-Six Seconds by Alexandra Zapruder

New book ‘Twenty-Six Seconds’ details how famed Zapruder film haunts family

Matt Damsker , Special for USA TODAY 2 p.m. EST November 19, 2016

As artifacts of the 1960s go, one of them towers, tragically, above all others — above Andy Warhol’s silk-screen masterworks, above The Beatles’ first recordings, above the high and low iconography of the decade.

A 26-second home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, filmed by a Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder, who found the perfect vantage point along the presidential motorcade route of Nov. 22, 1963, is more than historical document.

It’s a singular window on what, arguably, ended America’s overextended, post-war innocence. JFK’s murder was a national trauma that still haunts modernity; the Zapruder film is its real-time ghost.

Relied upon by the government for investigative purposes, its ownership controversially acquired by Life magazine, even parodied in a famous episode of Seinfeld, Zapruder’s chance creation took on mythic status and, inevitably, burdened the family whose name it bears.

The morbid fascination it sparked, and still sparks, make it impossible for the children and relatives of Abraham Zapruder to take public pride in his legacy, and so it’s fitting that his granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, has chosen to tell the story of the film through a familial lens. The result, Twenty-Six Seconds (Twelve, 421 pp., **** out of four stars), is a first-rate work of biography and history, addressing the film and the family in all their complexity and character.

Twenty-six seconds of the JFK assassination — and a lifetime of family anguish

By Joyce Carol Oates November 17

For millions of us, whenever we think of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 53 years ago this coming week — we immediately recall the horrific images: the open presidential car, the stricken young president and his wife (in pink, with a pink pillbox hat on her head) beside him. The film has been shown so many times, seen by so many millions of people, it has entered the realm of myth: 486 frames of silent (but color) home-movie footage shot in bright sunshine at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on that day, by a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder. It is surely the most famous home movie ever filmed.

Now, Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of the videographer and a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has written a moving and enlightening account that is part memoir; part detailed history of the film and its (inestimable) role in the nation’s understanding of the assassination; and part overview of the film as an inspiration for countless, often bizarre conspiracy theories, as well as for works of art as disparate as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and “Underworld,” and a particularly inventive episode of “Seinfeld.” So much history, embodied in a mere 26 seconds of footage! Not least, this film would one day be sold by the Zapruder heirs to the U.S. government for $16 million, the highest price ever paid for “an American historical artifact,” to be stored in the National Film Registry for scholars and historians to study.

Alexandra Zapruder writes with passion and clarity about the vicissitudes of bearing a famous name without having been involved with its celebrity or notoriety. (“I could not get over my astonishment at seeing [Zapruder] in print so often.”) She is very good at communicating a child’s confused sense of being special and yet being admonished not to think of herself as special. Growing up in Dallas in the 1960s, after her grandfather’s death, Alexandra knew virtually nothing about “the film” — it was never discussed within the family, though as a child she was often told that her beloved grandfather “should have been famous for who he was . . . and not for the film.” In time, Alexandra came to wonder “about this thing called the Zapruder film: Why did people keep bringing it up . . . and what did other people know about it that I didn’t?”

Gradually she came to assimilate unspoken Zapruder family assumptions: “We don’t brag about the film. It is a gruesome, horrible record of President Kennedy’s assassination, which was a tragic event for the country and the Kennedy family. It is nothing to be proud of. . . . We are tied to the film by chance and coincidence. It is an accident of fate. It happened to be taken by our grandfather and it happened to be called by our name. Apart from that, it has nothing to do with us.”

And yet, ironically, the film does have much to do with the Zapruders, who would inherit the perishable artifact after Abraham’s death and be forced to deal with its ambiguous presence in our cultural history. If there is one predominant theme of “Twenty-Six Seconds,” it is that an individual cannot easily escape “the inheritance of names, and how it shapes identity and life experiences.”