An Intimacy with the Elite

Arthur E. Carpenter, 

"Social Origins of Anticommunism: 

The Information Council of the Americas,"  

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), pp. 117-143 

Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.

PART II

Continued from Part 1

Morrison complied, advising citizens to "support INCA with vigor." Similarly, Hale Boggs, U. S.  congressman from the New Orleans area, helped INCA win tax-exempt status and praised it as "a prime example of making constructive use of our private citizens in the ideological and psychological struggle against communism."32

Blaffer

Although reliant on this local elite during its early years, INCA tried to expand beyond the city. It met with mixed results. Occasionally its appeals brought forth contributions. In 1964 Ochsner reported a $2,000 donation from the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, [in 1964 the chairman was M. Jackson Rathbone, but note footnote 63 below; R.L. Blaffer was one of the founders of Humble Oil in Texas, partner of W.S. Farish, charged with trading with the enemy during World War II through Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had been a hidden shareholder in Humble Oil.] and in 1966 American & Foreign Power Company, most of whose Latin American subsidiaries had been nationalized, gave $1,000. INCA also hoped to attract funds from H.L. Hunt, the Texas oilman who was a generous patron of the ultra-right. In 1966 board member H. Eustis Reily traveled to Texas to tell Hunt about INCA. Afterwards Ochsner thanked the Texan for meeting with Reily, stressing the urgency of INCA's mission "because of the recent race riots and communistic infiltration." Apparently, though, Hunt did not assist INCA.33

California proved more lucrative. Dudley Swim, a California resident and chairman of National Airlines, was a major benefactor. As noted, Swim was Ochsner's friend, and he was familiar with New Orleans's Latin American program. Back in 1960, after visiting Guatemala on an International  House trade mission, he declared he was "acquiring about 6,000 acres of land in Guatemala for agricultural development."

The most important Californian was Patrick J. Frawley, Jr. [photo above courtesy of Ghost of Mansion Past] Frawley joined Butler and Ochsner as INCA's most influential members. Beginning in the mid-1960s INCA depended increasingly upon the largesse of this Los Angeles businessman who was then an executive of Eversharp, Schick Electric, and Technicolor. Frawley was partial to rightist groups and causes. Among others he lavished large sums upon the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, the American Security Council, and the Young Americans for Freedom. He was a generous supporter of Ronald Reagan's early political career. And he often added prominent conservatives to his corporate boards; Ochsner was an Eversharp director, for example.34

These elite patrons were drawn to INCA, at least initially, because it offered a way to strike at the Cuban Revolution. INCA vowed to use its propagandistic skills to help prevent that revolution's spread elsewhere in Latin America. It devoted its first couple of years to producing and distributing Truth Tapes--anti-Castro recordings designed to be broadcast on Latin American radio stations and to sway the Latin American masses. To convey strong emotion on the tapes, INCA often enlisted Cuban refugees who, in Butler's words, spoke "in the unmistakable argot of their occupation, with the unimpeachable dialect of their class, and with the sincerity bred of bitter experience." By mid-1964, it claimed over 120 cooperating stations in sixteen Latin American nations. According to INCA, the tapes worked. Ochsner boasted, for instance, that one featuring Juanita Castro, Fidel's sister, helped Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei defeat socialist Salvador Allende in Chile's 1964 presidential election.35

Then an apparently fortuitous event encouraged INCA to take up other forms of anti-Cuban propaganda. On August 21, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, then a New Orleans resident, appeared on a local radio program with Butler and several others. Their discussion narrowed quickly to Oswald's professed Marxism, his sympathy for Cuba, and his defection to the Soviet Union. Several months later when President Kennedy was assassinated, the hunger for information about Oswald magnified the radio program's importance. Realizing this, INCA issued two records based on a recording of that program.36 In these records and in its literature, INCA described the assassination as tragic confirmation of its analysis and methods. Communist propaganda, argued Butler, had conditioned Oswald and then had incited him to violence. Communist "hate-conveyed always by words from communists to their sympathizers--finally moved the mind, that actuated the trigger, that killed the President of the United States. The links of guilt are visible and obvious." Claiming to have exposed and driven Oswald from New Orleans, Butler believed an INCA branch in Dallas might "have professionally neutralized Oswald there and perhaps saved the President's life."37

The Oswald episode provided raw material for another mode of propaganda: film. In 1965 INCA produced the lurid "Hitler in Havana," which equated Castro with Hitler and which blamed the Cuban leader for Kennedy's death. In the fall and winter of 1966 Frawley underwrote television showings of the film in several large cities. These showings elicited favorable comment. "This is the first time I have seen a TV documentary accurately depicting the tragic situation of post-Castro [sic] Cuba," the executive vice president of American and Foreign Power wrote Butler. And in December 1966 at New Orleans City Hall a rally of several hundred Cuban exiles and their supporters, including the mayor, saluted INCA's film. But "Hitler" appealed only to the convinced. New York Times reviewer Jack Gould ridiculed it as "the crudest form of propaganda," as a "tasteless affront to minimum journalistic standards."38

Angered, Ochsner complained to his friend Turner Catledge, executive editor of the New York Times, that Gould had slurred INCA and anti-communism. Catledge tried to soothe Ochsner, assuring him that his newspaper's editorial page was "unequivocally anti-Communist," and that Gould had only suggested that "politically motivated programs such as 'Hitler in Havana' should be advertised as such and not presented simply as documentaries with disinterested commercial sponsorship." Ochsner was not pacified. Forwarding a copy of Catledge's letter to Butler, he commented that "it just goes to show we are up against real problems when it comes to fighting the leftist press."39

Besides funding this film, Frawley helped INCA establish a presence in Los Angeles. In 1966 Schick and Technicolor, both headed by Frawley, invited Butler to counsel their "top management on the significance of current revolutionary conflict and their probable effects on the corporate future." Together the two firms would require one-third of his working time. In return, they would pay him a monthly retainer of $2,000, provide him a furnished home in Los Angeles, and allow him to continue his INCA duties. Butler accepted. Given his fascination with media and his ambitions for INCA, the chance to operate in Los Angeles under such generous patronage must have been irresistible. This decision, he explained, would benefit INCA. His new position would help the organization spread beyond New Orleans and would put him "on the ground floor in the midst of the communications center of America." And he pledged that INCA's headquarters and his own primary residence would remain in New Orleans.40

But changing circumstances were drawing INCA away from its Latin American orientation and from its New Orleans birthplace. While INCA was refining its propaganda capabilities and was expanding to the West Coast, a second threat was disturbing its elite social base. Gradually, opposition to the Vietnam war, student radicalism, and black rebellion were supplanting the Cuban Revolution as sources of elite alarm. Again addressing its patrons' anxieties, INCA devoted itself more and more to combating domestic radicalism, an insurgency whose flames burned brightest far from the Crescent City. INCA explained this shift as a mere tactical adjustment of its founding strategy. Because Cuba supposedly directed a concealed hierarchy of subversion that instigated and then manipulated domestic disorder, INCA's original purpose remained valid. Having earlier parried a Soviet-Cuban thrust into Latin America, INCA now engaged the same enemy within the U. S. The war had come home, thanks to the Cubans, when Oswald [sic] assassinated Kennedy and then, as the 1960s unfolded, when black and student radicalism raged. "Castro switched the major emphasis of his campaign from a Latin American encircling movement to a strike at the heart of the U. S.," wrote Butler.41

An especially disturbing expression of this external subversion was student radicalism. As Ochsner argued, "the drive to seize college campuses and convert them into staging grounds for urban revolt, is the current manifestation of Castro's campaign. The campuses are decisive." In 1966 Ochsner reported that Butler had "investigated the TEACH-IN at U.C.L.A. last week. Vicious material advocating everything from perversion to treason is being circulated to the youngsters there. He says that the situation is similar but worse than the Tulane SPEAK-IN." Similarly, Butler warned Frawley about "the present plans to capture the campuses and

convert them into staging grounds to attack white neighborhoods."42

INCA set out to douse these flames flickering across U. S. campuses. In the fall of 1967 Ochsner and another INCA member obtained a list of former Junior Achievers then attending colleges in New Orleans. From this list INCA hoped to assemble a nucleus of conservative students on each campus. INCA's executive committee recommended starting a "fight against communism on the campuses and in the colleges of New Orleans and gradually spread this out." Local high schools also concerned INCA. In October 1968 Richard E. Warren, an INCA staff member, offered assistance to the principal of John McDonogh High School. "For some time now," Warren wrote, "Dr. Joseph Schwertz (Fortier High School) and I have been communicating in order to prevent disruptions by radical students in his high school." Recently some McDonogh students had asked Warren for help at their school against similar disturbances and against organizing efforts by the leftist Students for a Democratic Society.43

Meanwhile on the West Coast, Butler was trying to intervene among rebellious youths. He faced imposing cultural, generational, and political obstacles. Whereas he represented an organization of white, conservative, older businessmen, radicals drew upon generational solidarity, upon revulsion with racism and intervention in Vietnam, and upon a common counter-cultural idiom manifested in the underground press, music, and other media. Butler thus confronted a tough problem: How to make INCA's stale anti-communism palatable to young Americans? INCA could not serve this purpose. It was, in Butler's mind, a conflict corporation, not a mass youth movement. Seeking an imaginative organizational form, Butler created the SQUARE Movement. Adapting Maoist ideas, he explained to Ochsner that every revolution walked on two legs: education and action. INCA handled the former, but its nonprofit status forbade it straying from "educational purposes."

Consequently, he was trying "to attract rank and file 'Activists' who will set up SQUARE Circles to practice what INCA teaches." Armed with INCA's ideas, SQUARE activists would battle the left for the minds of young Americans. Borrowing counter-cultural forms, Butler produced SQUARE posters, bumper stickers, buttons, and other artifacts. In the spring of 1968 he launched a magazine, the Westwood Village SQUARE, as an antidote to the underground press. Further heeding Mao's advice, Butler tried to swim as a fish in this youthful sea. Although well past thirty years old, he tailored his appearance to countercultural norms. "I have been working right in the middle of the mess," he wrote an INCA member back in New Orleans, "and so my hair is longer and my suits sharper. But the same old super-patriotic, American revolutionary heart beats beneath the bright threads." INCA had a national presence as well: In the late 1960s and early 1970s it organized annual conferences to train young Americans in conflict management; it intervened in the antiwar movement; it established a campus news service to help students print "freedom newspapers"; and its monthly information service reported on leftist activity.44

Notwithstanding its own boasts, INCA accomplished little on campuses. Its old-style anticommunism, even when dressed in hip fashions, was unable to deflect youthful discontent over U. S. foreign policy and domestic problems. The SQUARE Movement, admitted Butler early in 1971, "has been a generalized force, with little or no organization."45 This failure contributed to a larger pattern of decline. By the late 1960s INCA's earlier promise and confidence were fading. Its troubles stemmed partially from anticommunism's loosening grip upon American thought. The very issues that aroused INCA's supporters-revolutionary nationalism abroad and strife at home-caused many other Americans to question anticommunism's crudely reductionist assumptions. INCA's facile politics offered little historical grounding or analytical insight for those then trying to understand the war in Vietnam or the problems faced by U. S. blacks. Nonetheless INCA clung stubbornly to its ideas and thereby found itself increasingly at odds with prevailing political discourse.

Indicative of INCA's vulnerability was the trial of Clay Shaw. Ironically that trial occurred in INCA's New Orleans stronghold and centered on the Kennedy assasination, the source of INCA's major propaganda success. On March 1, 1967, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested Shaw, the former general manager of the International Trade Mart and a key figure in the city's Latin American program. Garrison charged that in September 1963 Shaw, David William Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others met in New Orleans and conspired to kill President Kennedy. Whereas INCA had blamed the assassination on communism, Garrison pointed to a conspiracy from the right.46

Garrison's investigation disturbed INCA's leaders. Apparently in May 1967 INCA's general counsel, Gibbons Burke, advised Butler to secure the organization's files. Subsequently, Butler reported the records had been "air expressed out here to Los Angeles.... They arrived in good order two weeks ago, and I have put them under lock and key."47

Ochsner even feared his own arrest. In the summer of 1967, William Gurvich, who had just resigned as one of Garrison's investigators, claimed the district attorney was preparing a number of arrests, including that of a doctor. "I wondered whether he might mean me," Ochsner wrote Butler, "but did not think he did until Bill Helis, a good friend of mine, who knows Gurvich very well, called me [said Gurvich] and told him it was I and he was going to have me arrested as an accessory to the fact." 

Rumor had Ochsner treating Jack Ruby, discovering a hopeless cancer that convinced Ruby "he had nothing to lose by killing Oswald," and then destroying Ruby's record, thereby withholding evidence. Two weeks later he wrote Butler that Garrison "is still going wild." Gurvich had told the press that the district attorney was about to arrest "a number of people in New Orleans, including a doctor, a coffee man, and a hotel owner." Allegedly those to be arrested were Ochsner, a member of the Reily family, and Seymour Weiss, formerly managing director of the city's Roosevelt Hotel. "I have heard nothing about it, but I would not be surprised if he would attempt to do it," wrote Ochsner.48

Doctors had been known to inject healthy people with viruses.

Garrison's probe therefore challenged INCA's version of the assassination and threatened to implicate Ochsner in a sensational trial. Predictably, Ochsner and Butler responded by trying to make communism the issue. Bearing the brunt of the attack was Mark Lane--whose book Rush to Judgment had placed him among the leading critics of the Warren Commission and who was then conferring with Garrison. In a public statement the two INCA leaders branded Lane an unscrupulous communist, "a professional propagandist of the lunatic left who has been inferring Oswald was innocent and Kennedy was the victim of a right wing plot, since four weeks after the assassination." Communists were manipulating the issue to create distrust of the government and to cause the U. S. to "crumble from within."49

They turned to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for more information. Ochsner asked F. Edward Hebert, a U. S. representative from the New Orleans area, to "get whatever information you can from Congressman Willis about Mark Lane." Edwin E. Willis, also a U. S. representative from Louisiana, was HUAC chairman. Hebert sent Ochsner a report culled from HUAC files, which cited "Communist Fronts" with which Lane had been associated between 1952 and 1967.50

Ochsner also obtained a five-page intelligence report about Lane. Although its sources were unspecified, this report was preceded by an unsigned memorandum attributing the report's information to "the files of the New York City Police, the FBI, and other security agencies." The memorandum charged that Lane "is and has been a dedicated Communist; is and has been a sadist and masochist, charged on numerous occasions with sodomy." This suggestive prelude was followed by the familiar listing of membership in "front" organizations, civil-rights arrests, and involvement in the assassinationi nvestigation. The "numerous "sodomy charges shrank to mention of a 1962 inquiry by the Queens County District Attorney, without detailing its outcome.51

Armed with such material, INCA tried to discredit and isolate Lane. In December 1967 Ochsner scolded the presidents of both Tulane University and the Young Men's Business Club for allowing Lane to speak at their respective institutions. Later that month he appealed to an executive of Time, Inc., to expose Lane and other alleged subversives. New Orleans had been invaded, complained Ochsner, by a "legion of lunatic left-wing extremists,"w ho were "launching the most outrageous innuendoes, all aimed at undermining public confidence in the FBI, the CIA, the Office of the Presidency, stigmatizing Cuban refugees, and anti-communists and obtaining classified  information." Yet, he lamented, "not one national news medium has had the courage to expose their deep-seated political bias, despite the fact that they have track records which read like the indexes to the WORKER."52

Unable credibly to denounce Garrison as a communist, Ochsner and Butler instead whispered that mental instability left the district attorney prey to communist manipulation. "As you know," Butler wrote Ochsner", Garrison is a sick, sick person mentally but clever enough to manipulate public opinion." Ochsner agreed: "People generally in New Orleans are losing complete faith in the man and most people think he is completely nuts, which I believe he is, and before long he will crack up." At least once, Ochsner spread apparent evidence of Garrison's problems. During an election campaign for district attorney, an opponent had obtained Garrison's military medical records, which documented treatment for psychological disorders from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Ochsner possessed a transcript of these records and sent a copy to a friend who was the publisher of the Nashville Banner. "It shows why he is doing what he is," Ochsner observed. "Of course, it is a shame that he is playing into the hands of the Communists because he is being advised by Mark Lane and [Harold] Weisberg."53

Eventually in 1969 the jury rejected Garrison's case and acquitted Clay Shaw. Although INCA and its  leaders avoided implication, the episode was revealing. Unlike the nurturing circumstances of the early 1960s, INCA felt beleaguered by the decade's end. In addition to these external pressures, it was weakened also by internal conflicts that eroded its most valuable asset, elite support. Although its members never abandoned INCA's principles, they grew dissatisfied with its ineffectiveness. Much of their discontent stemmed from Butler's alleged managerial shortcomings, especially in financial matters.

INCA had been plagued by a chronic shortage of funds--an anomaly for an organization blessed with such wealthy patrons. Payments to staff, landlords, and creditors often were delayed or missed altogether. In 1966, for instance, Butler advised INCA's landlord that only $200 of its $380 office rent would be forthcoming, while at the same time he pleaded with the previous landlord to delay collection of unpaid rent.54 Blaming INCA's shortcomings on the staff's amateurish methods, some members suggested adopting business-like procedures of accounting and office routine. Such measures, they argued, would generate regular income from supporters and thereby end the worrisome deficits. Emerging as their spokesman was

INCA treasurer Maurice W. Grundy, the president of two lumber companies.

More the publicist and promoter than the manager, Butler resisted these seemingly innocent and sensible suggestions. His argument hinged on the related assumptions that INCA was a combative propaganda organization and that the conflict manager must possess financial control. Business norms, he said, would deprive a conflict organization of its flexibility, disarm it before communists, and transform it into a social club spinning harmless platitudes. Defeating communists required innovation and daring, not the predictable routine of an accountant. In revealing words he summarized his differences with Grundy: "Suffice it to say that it was based on a Military Management, rather than the Business Management approach."55 This tension between professional anticommunist and businessmen patrons threatened to tear INCA apart.

Continuing financial embarrassment sharpened this conflict. In June 1966 a frustrated Butler told Ochsner that electricity at INCA's office had been shut off due to delinquent bills. For this and other ills he blamed Grundy for "tieing strings" to the thousands of dollars in INCA's bank account. Blinded by business orthodoxy, Grundy tried "to reduce the financial foundation to the cut and dried concepts of the lumber industry." The conflict, insisted Butler, was irreconcilable. But Ochsner rejected this implied ultimatum, defending the need for revised office procedures and advising Butler to "get over your persecution complex as far as Mr. Grundy is concerned."'56 

This particular crisis subsided, probably because a chastened Butler dared not antagonize Ochsner further. But the underlying problem still chafed Butler, and his factional opponents still demanded changes. By the fall of 1967 Butler's position seemed precarious. Ben C. Toledano, an attorney and prominent local  conservative, wrote his fellow INCA directors that he had been" considering simply resigning from the INCA Board for this would be the easiest way to remedy my displeasure with the way things have been going." The executive committee, which included Grundy, began using T. Sterling Dunn--formerly the area manager for Sears, Roebuck--as a consultant. Dunn reported that membership confidence was eroding due to sloppy operational methods. At one executive committee meeting Ochsner stressed that INCA must function in a businesslike fashion, and at another the executive committee decided "we must have a businessman in the INCA offices to constantly supervise the business end of the organization and to see that the members were properly billed and followed up." A defensive Butler believed Grundy was using Dunn "to interfere in the INCA office by remote control."57

Yet Butler somehow reversed this momentum and drove Grundy from the organization. Their final confrontation occurred at a board meeting in April 1968 when Butler suggested INCA cosponsor a conference of conservative youths that summer. Grundy countered that INCA should instead plan an alternative program for September, that money should be conserved for office management, and that a fund drive should be prepared. Butler exploded: Delay would be disastrous and, besides, Grundy was unqualified to decide the issue. His patience exhausted, a weary Grundy gave up. Reminding everyone that he had tried to quit two weeks earlier, he now insisted t he board accept his resignation. It did, whereupon h  and Dunn quit the meeting and INCA.58

Butler's victory did not, however, slow INCA's decline. Especially damaging were Frawley's business misfortunes. In May 1970, for example, dissident Technicolor shareholders charged him with investing more than $ 9 million of Technicolor funds in other companies he headed. In a proxy battle a month later the dissidents ousted him and arranged purchase of his Technicolor stock. "Pat's ability to help is going to be severely curtailed for awhile," Butler observed. Indeed, the rich vein that had been opened so generously by Frawley now contracted. Butler noted that his own "income from Frawley Enterprises has been curtailed."59 In this dispirited setting INCA, in November 1970, finally formed an area council in Los Angeles. But the council either lost or failed to recruit its indispensable patrons: Dudley Swim died and Frawley declined to serve as cochairman. With a grim show of determination, Butler resolved to reestablish the council "promptly and begin methodically recruiting  Anti-Communists as we did in New Orleans, gradually building up the Big Names." Instead, financial deficits widened and the council died.60

Late in 1972, cut off from Frawley's patronage, Butler resumed permanent New Orleans residence.  Prospects were no better in the Crescent City. As always, financial pressures harried and demoralized the staff. Richard Warren, a key staff member, complained to Ochsner that his four years with INCA had left him with "a destroyed marriage, a ruined credit rating, and drastic change in my personality." He would stay with INCA only "until I can find something else that is not as demanding."61

INCA weakened further as the 1970s unfolded. Its ineffectiveness continued to alienate its remaining elite members. Years later Captain John W. Clark recalled that the Delta Line, of which he had been president, had given "substantial sums in the way of contributions . . . and I personally underwrote some notes when they needed it." Yet, INCA "never really got off the ground." It was "more of a fundraising organization to pay for the expenses. And they constantly have been from one crisis to another." Similarly, one of Ochsner's sons said supporters "dropped off because they just didn't see INCA doing what it used to do." "I don't know how effective INCA was," he said. "I've talked to a lot of people in Central America particularly, and I can't find anybody that's heard... Truth Tapes."62

Perhaps INCA also suffered from its devotion to a single issue. In its early years that focus had been an advantage. Bruised by Castro's revolution and alarmed about its spread, New Orleans's elite had gathered under INCA's apocalyptic banners. The immediacy of the Cuban spectre had encouraged a heterogeneous elite to unify around a single issue. But as the Cuban threat receded, it probably became increasingly difficult to sustain such cohesion. Then perhaps the dependence on one issue became a liability, robbing INCA of whatever vitality and clarity might have been gained from a broader conservative program. As resonant and powerful as it remained, anticommunism could not fit every situation. Over-reliance on it forced INCA into increasingly cranky positions. Thus Ochsner and Butler perceived the Watergate imbroglio through the reducing spectacles of communist conspiracy. Ochsner informed a Houston supporter that INCA had uncovered proof of "a definite link between the communists and the people who are trying to impeach the President." And Butler explained to a friend that "the disinformation campaign on Nixon may go down in history as even more decisive than the Kennedy assassination enterprise. It is much more easily laid at the CPUSA's [Communist Party, USA] door, although the mass media has neglected to probe for the underlying facts."63

By the late 1970s, only a handful of loyalists held INCA together. In 1978 a subdued Butler told Ochsner that the directors had "unanimously decided to try to keep INCA alive." "I've had to devote most of my time just to keeping doors open at INCA for the past six months," he complained. When Ochsner, pleading the debilities of age, tried to reduce his commitment to INCA, Butler begged him to remain at the helm as his "departure would be a disaster." Ochsner relented, though he gave up the presidency for the titular position of chairman. "Unless we can get the support of more people," Ochsner wrote, "it is difficult to see how we can keep it viable." On September 24, 1981, he died at the age of eighty-five.64 INCA was then a palsied twenty years old.

INCA declined, but its brand of anticommunism remained potent. In 1982 several influential New Orleanians helped form the Caribbean Commission, an organization that resembled INCA. Dr. Alton Ochsner, Jr., a son of the late INCA leader, served as the commission's chairman; Samuel G. Robinson as president; and, until his death, Ernest Burguieres, Jr., as executive vice president. Ochsner and Robinson had been INCA members. As INCA had fixed on Cuba, the commission dedicated itself to discrediting the Nicaraguan Revolution. It portrayed itself and the Nicaraguan contras as defenders of democracy and of a revolution betrayed, as opponents equally of the Somozas and of the Sandinistas. Arguing that communists had usurped the democratic revolution against Somoza and had installed an oppressive regime that served Soviet and Cuban masters, it demanded the U. S. government "give enough aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters to permit them to complete their revolution and eliminate Sandinista oppression." Besides propaganda, the commission provided the Contras with food, clothing, and medicine, and Ochsner treated wounded Contra soldiers without cost in New Orleans.65

Much like INCA, though, the commission's democratic rhetoric and its judicious criticism of both Somocistas and Sandinistas obscured the amicable relations that the commission's leaders or their families had enjoyed with the Somozas. As noted previously, this had been true of Ochsner's father. And the son rallied to the Contras before they acquired the trappings of a democratic insurgency. Just weeks after the 1980 U. S. presidential election, he appeared before Reagan advisers on behalf of Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, whom a UPI dispatch described as "pro-Somoza Nicaraguan exiles." Robinson and Burguieres had similar connections. The former was an executive of the family company, Robinson Lumber, that had possessed extensive interests on Nicaragua's east coast. He admitted he "personally knew all three Somozas, and they were well educated and thoughtful people." Burguieres, a New Orleanian of elite background, had lived in Nicaragua as a businessman for several years after World War II and had maintained friendly ties with the Somozas.66

Complicit with a social structure that invited revolution, the commission's leaders tried to bury their past by appropriating a democratic idiom and by defaming revolution as the work of a global conspiracy. In short, the history of INCA and the emergence of the Caribbean Commission suggest a persisting intimacy between anticommunism and elite citizens.

ENDNOTES:
32 Butler to Morrison, June 21, 1961, Morrison Collection; Morrison to Members of
the Information Council of the Americas, June 24, 1961, carton S61-11, Morrison
Collection; Hale Boggs, "Congressman Warns of Apathy in Wake of Nuclear Test
Treaty," Clarion Herald, October 10, 1963.

33 Ochsner to Clayton Nairne, February 25, 1964, folder 3, box 51, Ochsner Papers;
Information Council of the Americas, INCA Cash Receipts, December 14, 1966, folder 1,
box 53, Ochsner Papers; H. Eustis Reily to H. L. Hunt, January 5, 1967, folder 6, box 105,
Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Hunt, December 31, 1966, folder 1, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

34 Dudley Swim to Ochsner, December 24, 1970, folder 6, box 144, Ochsner Papers;
Swim to Neville Levy, November 28, 1960, International House Papers; Moody's
Industrial Manual, 1969, p. 1224; William W. Turner, Power on the Right (Berkeley,
1971), pp. 172-184, 191-194.

35 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations
and Movements, Winning the Cold War: The U. S. Ideological Offensive, Part V, 88th
Congress, 1st session, 581; Ochsner to Joyce Hall, July 7, 1964, folder 2, box 51,
Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to George St. John, December 28, 1964, folder 1, box 51,
OchsnerP apers.

36 These records were titled Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red and Oswald Speaks. On
Oswald's New Orleans sojourn, see Michael L. Kurtz, "Lee Harvey Oswald in New
Orleans: A Reappraisal," Louisiana History, X XI (1980), 7-22.

37 Edward Scannell Butler, "INCA vs. Oswald: The Motivation of an Assassin,"
Victory, (December 11, 1963), n.p.

38 Butler to INCA Membership, December 7 , 1966, folder 1, box 53, OchsnerP apers;
H. W. Balgooyen to Butler, November 2, 1966, folder 2, box 53, Ochsner Papers;
Times-Picayune, December 19, 1966; New York Times, October 28, 1966.

39 Ochsner to Turner Catledge, November 15, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Catledge to
Ochsner, November 22, 1966; Ochsner to Butler, November 26, 1966, folder 2, box 53,
Ochsner Papers.

40 John F. Seyer to Butler, March 3, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., to
Butler, March 1, 1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, March 9,
1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

41 Butler to Friend of INCA, August 22, 1967, Information Council of the Americas,
Political Ephemera Collection, Tulane University; Butler to Wallace M. Davis, January
15, 1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

42 Ochsner to INCA Supporter, n . d., Information Council of the Americas, Political
Ephemera Collection; Ochsner to Percival Stem, March 31, 1966, folder 4, box 53,
Ochsner Papers; Butler to Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., November 4, 1968, folder 1, box 121,
Ochsner Papers.

43 INCA Executive Committee, minutes of October 17, October 31, November 28,
1967, meetings, folders 1 and 3, box 105, Ochsner Papers; Richard E. Warren to Joseph
Abraham, Jr., October2 8, 1968, folder 1, box 121, Ochsner Papers.

44 Butler to Ochsner, December 18, 1970, folder 6, box 144, Ochsner Papers; Butler,
Revolution, p. 115; Butler to Dudley Swim, May 9, 1968, folder 4, box 121; Butler to
James Richards, January1 6, 1970, folder 4, box 145, Ochsner Papers;" INCA Fact Sheet:
Ten Years, 1961-1971," Information Council of the Americas, Political Ephemera
Collection; Ochsner to INCA Member, January 12, 1970, folder 4, box 145, Ochsner
Papers.

45 Butler to Richard E. Warren, February 20, 1971, folder 7, box 165, Ochsner Papers.

46 Rosemary James and Jack Wardlaw, Plot or Politics? The Garrison Case and Its
Cast (New Orleans, 1967), p. 58.

47 Butler to Gibbons Burke, June 12, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers.
48 Ochsner to Butler, June 29, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler, July 12,
1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

49 "An Unrushed Judgment of Mark Lane: Statement by Alton Ochsner and Ed Butler
of INCA," April 5, 1967, folder 3, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

50 Ochsner to F. Edward Hebert, April 10, 1967, folder 2, box 105; Hebert to Ochsner,
April 19, 1967, folder 6, box 105, Ochsner Papers. This report was titled "Information
from the Files of the Committee on Un-American Activities, U. S. House of
Representatives, April 14, 1967, For: Honorable F. Edward Hebert, Subject: Mark Lane."

51 This report is located in folder 1, box 134, Ochsner Papers.

52 Ochsner to Herbert Longenecker, December 12, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to
Milton L. Fletchinger, December 12, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to James Linen,
December 28, 1967, folder 1, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

53 Butler to Ochsner, July 15, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to
Butler, July 19, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers; James and Wardlaw, Plot or
Politics?, pp. 102-103; Ochsner to James G. Stahlman, January 17, 1968, folder 7, box
121, Ochsner Papers.

54 Butler to Paul Dastugue, November 19, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Barney
Maloney, November 19, 1966, folder 2, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

55 Butler to Bruce Baird, Jr., May 5, 1968, folder 4, box 121, Ochsner Papers.

56 Butler to Ochsner, June 17, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler, June 21,
1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

57 Ben C. Toledano to Board Member of INCA, September 27,1967, folder 4, Ochsner
Papers; INCA Executive Committee, minutes of October 17 and of December 5, 1967,
meetings, folders 1 and 3, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, November 17, 1967, folder
3, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

58 INCA Board of Directors, minutes of April 8, 1968, folder 5, box 121, Ochsner
Papers.

59 Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1970; June 18, 1970; Butler to Ochsner, August 31,
1970, folder 7, box 144, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, February2 9, 1972, folder
3, box 172, Ochsner Papers.

60 INCA Board of Directors, minutes of December 21, 1970, meeting, folder 6, box
144, Ochsner Papers; Richard E. Warren to Mr. and Mrs. Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.,
November2 4, 1970, folder 6, box 146, OchsnerP apers;B utlert o OchsnerF, ebruary2 9,
1972, folder 3, box 172, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, August 5, 1972, folder 2,
box 172, Ochsner Papers.

61 Ochsner to Butler, March 14, 1974, folder 4, box 194, Ochsner Papers; Warren to
Ochsner, December 16, 1971, folder 5, box 165, Ochsner Papers.

62 John W. Clark, interview with author, Gulfport, Miss., May 29, 1984; Alton
Ochsner, Jr., interview with author, New Orleans, June 10, 1984.

63 Ochsner to Mrs. R. L. Blaffer, April 4, 1974, folder 2, box 194, Ochsner Papers;
Butler to Eugene H. Methvin, September 11, 1974, folder 3, box 194, Ochsner Papers.

64 Butler to Ochsner, November 27, 1978, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler,
December 1, 1978, folder 5, box 235, Ochsner Papers.

65 Caribbean Commission Newsletter, November 1, 1982; Times-Picayune/States-Item,
January 16, 1984; August 6, 1983; April 20, 1985; Times-Picayune, September 30,
1984; Alton Ochsner, Jr., letter to the editor, Times-Picayune/States-Item, April 13,
1984.

66 Times-Picayune/States-Item, November 19, 1980; S. G. Robinson, letter to the
editor, Times-Picayune/States-Item, July 27, 1983; Virginea Burguibres, interview with
author, New Orleans, May 15, 1984; Erest Burguieres, Jr., to Victor H. Schiro,
November 1, 1967, carton S67-2, Schiro Collection.

Truth Be Told

I met Justin Crann in Toronto this year at a press conference at the Women's Bookstore on Harbord near the University. He was one of several intrepid reporters who had turned up there to talk to Judyth Vary Baker about her book, Me and Lee, which had been selling in hardback for a year and was being released in soft cover on October 20, 2011, the day Lee Oswald would have been 72 years old.

Judyth knew Lee from April until November in 1963 and has never forgotten who he really was, though she has had to fight hard to stay alive once she began telling her story in 1999. She has been either castigated or ignored by many in the "research community," people with no sense of what community really means.

Justin Crann's story in the Gleaner Community Press, however, was a refreshing change. Open, eager, and enthusiastic, Justin reported what he saw and heard without bias. In fact, all the reporters in Toronto met Judyth with open arms, and minds, questioned her objectively as a witness to events leading up to JFK's assassination and that of Lee Oswald two days later. Researchers who seek the truth are not afraid of listening with open minds and hearts. Thanks to Justin Crann for this accurate report:

Lee Harvey Oswald’s lover visits Toronto Women’s Bookstore

October 20th, 2011

Judyth Vary Baker, 68, made a rare North American appearance at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord St.) to promote the paperback release of her memoir and celebrate what would have been her lover’s 72nd birthday. Justin Crann/Gleaner News

Lee Harvey Oswald was a patriotic American, a government agent fiercely loyal to his President, and a patsy framed by the conspirators who really killed John F. Kennedy.

That’s the truth according to Judyth Vary Baker, author of Me and Lee, a 600-page memoir recounting her teenage years and brief romance with Oswald. Baker was at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord St.) on Oct. 18 to promote the paperback release of her book and celebrate Oswald’s 72nd birthday.

“I love my country, and I love the truth, and I want the truth to come out that Lee Oswald did not kill Kennedy,” Baker, 68, said to a small crowd of reporters, JFK enthusiasts, and devotees.

During what was billed as a “rare media appearance,” Baker spoke extensively about her involvement in a secret government program attempting to create an injectable form of cancer and a short-lived tryst with the alleged presidential assassin.

Baker also talked about her passion for her country, which she said she hasn’t been able to visit in years for fear of her own life and the wellbeing of her family.

But Baker’s self-imposed exile hasn’t prevented her from making friends in the United States, and some of those friends were in attendance at the paperback release.

Linda Minor, a Texan who said she has researched Judyth’s story and a friend of her publisher, traveled from Tennessee to see them and attend the release.

“When I heard that they were coming, I had just known them through email and various Internet facilities, and I thought, ‘This is my great opportunity to meet them both at one time,’” said Minor, “and I just couldn’t pass it up.”

Jeff Worcester, a political science student from Rochester, New York, said he has been talking with Judyth for over four years.“I’d been familiar with her story ever since she was featured of the Men Who Killed Kennedy series, and I had been put in touch with her and we’ve corresponded since.

“I always look at things and try and follow-up as much as I can no matter how much I believe and I just came out saying, ‘Yeah, this lady is the real deal.’”

Jerry Lasky, a resident of Toronto and JFK enthusiast, took the day off of work to attend the release. “I’m glad that I came here, I guess because my hero [JFK] led me here,” said Lasky. “I didn’t realize it was Oswald’s birthday today.”

Me and Lee is available for purchase at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and other select retailers. For more information about Judyth Vary Baker and her memoir, visit meandlee.com

 

Toronto Loved Judyth Vary Baker!

The purpose of the Toronto appearance for Judyth's book, Me and Lee, was to introduce the soft cover edition of the book after the hard cover had been selling for a year without any public appearances made by the author. Judyth was initially scheduled for a handful of interviews and one press conference and book signing at a Toronto bookstore. As her interviews aired, however, Toronto and other parts of Canada were abuzz with her story which had been blacked out for years in the American mainstream press. The schedule grew day by day throughout the Canadian media between October 16 and October 24, 2011. 

Stories appeared in the main news sections of all the major newspapers in Toronto. Judyth appeared live on CTV's morning television show with clips about her on evening news shows. The story was getting out about the innocence of Lee Oswald! That was, in fact, the real reason she had told the story--to help to clear the name of the man she knew and loved.

An article, written by a resident of Toronto named Sydney White, appeared at Rense.com within a week following Judyth's last public appearance in Canada--violating a few of the most basic rules of journalism: 

• she misspelled Judyth's name, and 
• she incorrectly cited the title of the book, Me and Lee. 

Sydney White was merely one of many persons who had requested to meet and interview the book's author during a week filled with exhausting interviews. It was mere happenstance that she was sitting by the author's side during the meal, and it was in contradiction to Judyth's request that non-family members move to the other end of the dining table so that she be allowed to visit with family who had traveled great distances to see her in the first reunion with many of them for a decade. At any rate, the request was either not heard by Sydney White or was simply ignored. I prefer to believe it was the former because Sydney seemed to be sincere.

It was, in fact, Sydney White who made the conclusion that some nefarious scheme had taken place when bits of glass showed up on Judyth's plate of fajitas--small pieces that could easily have been mistaken for chips of an onion. These fragments were latched onto by Ms. White, who was adamant about accompanying the author to hospital and remaining by her side throughout the ordeal. Originally, the schedule had called for Judyth to depart the hotel's restaurant in time for a final appearance in Toronto at the bookstore where author Kris Millegan, another of the authors published by TrineDay, was giving a talk about the secret society Skull and Bones. Judyth had intended on being present to sign more books while he spoke, and she was torn between wanting to be at the book store and wanting to ensure that the sliver of glass she swallowed would do no further damage. As she wwote me a week or so later, the glass:

cracked a tooth and cut my gum. Spit out two pieces, a third was already stuck in my throat. Reporter [Sydney] saw whole incident. She examined two biggest pieces--clear, corrugated, as from a shattered shower door, approx. 1/3 inch long, 1/4 inch thick, both little chunks sharp, one pointed. Tiny bits of glass seen on plate itself under the food. Flicked them off onto the floor as I hunted for larger pieces (there were none) as we waited for ambulance. One piece stuck in my throat. Later migrated to clavicle area. Later some abdominal pain and other problems. Kitchen had nothing like this glass, so staff conjectured might have come in food imported into the restaurant. Reporter wanted to go in ambulance with me, and since she had the pieces and one was stuck in my throat,I let her come,also reducing stress on my family members. If I coughed up the glass,she would then have three pieces in her possession. That was my thinking,though it would not come out. Got medical attention.

As anyone who has read her book, Me and Lee, knows, Judyth is aware of the dangers of receiving radiation. She wrote following the incident:

BY THE TIME THE DOCTOR DID LOOK AT MY THROAT,THE GLASS HAD MIGRATED DOWN TO THE CLAVICLE AREA AND COULD NO LONGER BE OBSERVED IN MY THROAT. I TOLD THE DOCTOR WHERE IT WAS NOT LOCATED. SINCE IT HAD NOT CAUSED ANY IMPORTANT BLEEDING, THERE WAS NOTHING HE COULD DO UNLESS I WANTED A HIGH DOSE OF X-RAYS,SINCE THIS WAS CLEAR GLASS. I REFUSED THAT X-RAY BECAUSE I'VE ALREADY BEEN EXPOSED TO TOO MUCH RADIATION.  DRINKING PLENTY OF FLUIDS AND 'COATING' THE GLASS DID WORK TO GET IT OUT OF MY SYSTEM.

Judyth was in transit back to her home for almost a week after the incident, contacting none of her friends or family during her return in order to eliminate the possibility of detection of her whereabouts. Upon hearing of the article's publication from friends who had not been present in Toronto and were thus unaware of the incident until reading Sydney White's article, Judyth reported,

"Sydney White published the incident without checking with me for details and also kept the glass pieces...she immediately believed it was a murder attempt... I NEVER assume such a thing and always try to find other explanations first."

Rather than focusing on that frightening experience, Judyth prefers that people remember instead the real reason she took the risk of going to Toronto, restoring the honor and integrity of Lee H. Oswald, a man whose life was taken from him by the cabal who killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963. This cabal has perpetuated itself in power in America and in the global empire it has established. People the world over are discovering in horror the evil committed in the name of patriotism. 

Sydney White appears to be fighting this same foe who targeted Lee Oswald and who would wish to silence Judyth Vary Baker. We wish her well in what she does. It should be understood, however, that she does not speak on behalf of Judyth Baker, but only for what she herself witnessed and concluded. This same enemy is being recognized across the world as protestors who began as "Occupy Wall Street" have begun settling in to other banking arenas, determined to publicize the power wielded by the moneyed class which has usurped legitimate authority for government of each nation in the world. 

Democracy tends to get messy, and for that reason can be easily distracted from the common goal of protecting individuals from the abuse of power by those born into power and trained in the use of tools to divide and distract.

For those who want to understand why Judyth is a threat to the establishment, just watch the following interview with George Freund, which took place while she was in Toronto. It has been broken down into two parts. Please feel free to embed or download and share widely. The links can be found at Conspiracy Cafe (Part 1) and  (Part 2) and at You Tube Part 1; and  Part 2.

Part 1




Part 2



More about Sydney White:

Sydney White is an activist, journalist and professor that teaches studies in propaganda at the Free University of Toronto, Canada. One of her interviews has been excerpted and uploaded to You Tube, several segments of which can still be heard as shown below. Do not be side-tracked or confused while searching by selecting movie excerpts of a much younger actress named Sydney White. Our Sydney is quite a bit older.

Part 2 of the interview seems to have disappeared, but Part 3 is here. Part 4 about global banking conglomerates making people into debt-slaves is here. Part 5 is about the Federal Reserve System. Part 6 talks about economics graduate students in her classes who are confused by jargon. Part 8 is the last segment appearing at the You Tube site, concerning how bankers create money for war.

Sydney White participated in the Toronto Change SPP Protest, where she was videoed. She gave a stirring speech about monetary history and assassination of American Presidents on February 16, 2008 as part of that protest. On June 14 that year she made another speech. Here is Part 1; Part 2 is here.

America's Krypto-History: What we don't know does matter

To follow the excellent logic of Peter Dale Scott relative to what is truth and what is true history first requires us to take a short course in a language invented by Dr. Scott himself, as he discusses in the article excerpted below, in which all underlining, bolding and italics have been inserted by me, unless otherwise noted,  for emphasis. Scott embeds the terms and definitions within his essay, but for clarity they are set out here for ease of reference:

• neologisms--invented terms
• parapolitics--manipulative covert politics; "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished"
• deep political processes--political interactions that emanate from plural power sources which are only occasionally visible, usually repressed rather than recognized; these sources of power that affect political actions are not subject to direct control by anyone whose power or intentions are clearly defined
• parahistory--an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country; reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed
• kryptocracies--agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures, with the power to control US politics through the manipulation of truth. A kryptocracy's power comes in part from its ability to falsify its own records, without fear of outside correction.
• kryptonomy--the power of the independently wealthy, and of the banks that cater to them; a small group of about 100 people who know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime

 ['krypto' derived from Greek kruptos hidden, from kruptein to hide]

 

Excerpt from OVERVIEW: THE CIA, THE DRUG TRAFFIC, AND OSWALD IN MEXICO

By Peter Dale Scott

December 2000

Kryptocracies, Kryptonomy, and Oswald: the Mexican CIA-Mob Nexus 

Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is of little historical import. (On this point Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn agree with the mainstream US media they normally criticize.) 

At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them. 

For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. (I apologize for this: neologisms, like conspiracies, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.) Thirty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished."[1] In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I moved towards a less conspiratorial middle alternative. I discussed instead the interactions of what I called deep political processes, emanating from plural power sources and all only occasionally visible, all usually repressed rather than recognized. In contrast to parapolitical processes, those of deep politics are open-ended, not securely within anyone's power or intentions. 

In 1995 I brought out Deep Politics II, which I thought of at the time as a case study in deep politics: how secret U.S. government reports on Oswald in Mexico became a reason to cover up the facts about the assassination of JFK. But it was also a specialized study, since in this case most of the repressed records of events, now declassified, occurred within the workings of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, or their zones of influence. It was hence largely a study in parapolitics. It verged into deep politics only near the end, when it described how a collaborating Mexican agency, the DFS (Direcciòn Federal de Seguridad) was deeply involved in the international drug traffic. Deep Politics, in contrast, looked continuously at the interaction between government and other social forces, such as the drug traffic. 

Both books represented an alternative kind of history, or what we may perhaps call parahistory. Parahistory differs from history in two respects. First, it is an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country. (One might say that history is the record of politics; parahistory, the record of parapolitics.) Second, parahistory is restored from records which were themselves once repressed. In short, parahistory is a reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed.[2] Thus the parahistory of Oswald in Mexico tells of events, not just ignored by official histories, but at odds with the official record: i.e. officially suppressed and denied. 

A key example concerns a tape of someone calling himself "Lee Oswald," talking on a Soviet Embassy phone about having met a consul there by the name of Kostikov, a KGB agent. As we shall see, this tape should have been preserved and investigated as a prime piece of evidence to frame Oswald as an assassin. We have documentary evidence that one day after the President's murder this tape was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other reports, including cables claiming -- falsely -- that the tape had already been destroyed before the assassination. 

A brief but important digression here about history. Most people assume that "history" simply refers to what has happened but is now gone. In fact the dictionary reminds us that the word (cognate to the word "story") refers primarily to a narrative or record of events, and only after that to "the events forming the subject matter of history."[3] What of events whose records are destroyed or falsified? These dictionary definitions seem to assume that what is true is also what is recorded. 

There is thus a latent bias in the evolution of the word "history" that is related to the structuralist, rationalist assumptions referred to in my first paragraph. It is no accident that, with respect to Oswald in Mexico, historians as a class have opposed the parahistory we shall unfold here. History has always been the way a culture chooses to record and remember itself; and it tends to treat official records with a respect they do not always deserve. We shall return to the role of history in our concluding section. 

Deep Politics II only verged from parahistory into deep political history when (as we shall see) it situated actions and reports from the CIA in Mexico City in the social context of actions of a sister agency (the Mexican Federal Security Directorate, or DFS ) which was deeply enmeshed in the unrecorded operations of the Mexican-U.S. drug traffic. Note the methodological distinction here. Parahistory can be partly recovered by the disclosure of previously repressed records. Deep political history must attempt to reconstruct what happened in areas where there are few if any records at all. 

It is reasonable to talk about the CIA records in this book as repressed, as so many of them were never allowed to reach even the Warren Commission. Thus neither the Commission nor the American public were allowed to hear allegations that Oswald had had sexual relations with one or two employees of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, that at least one of these liaisons (with Silvia Durán) had been part of an international Communist plot against Kennedy, and that Durán had admitted this (albeit under torture) in response to questions from the Mexican DFS or secret police. 

More importantly, the CIA and FBI conspired to suppress a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy. This was that an unknown person had falsely presented himself as Lee Oswald in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The FBI initially reported that the person making the recorded call "was not Lee Harvey Oswald" (AR 249-50). Later the FBI and CIA conspired, swiftly and clumsily, to conceal both the falsity of the impersonation and the fact that FBI agents had exposed the falsehood by listening to the tape. The Warren Commission learned nothing about these two facts. 

Rockefellers in Mexico

It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period. This important clue had been planted in the midst of one of the most sensitive CIA operations in the 1960s: its largest intercept operation against the telephones of an important Soviet base. One can assume that this clue was planted by conspirators who knew that the CIA response would be to suppress the truth. As a result the CIA protected its sources and methods (in accordance with the responsibilities enumerated in its enabling statute). The result was obstruction of justice in a crime of the highest political significance.

In an open society, all of the Oswald facts and allegations would have reached the Warren Commission, whether or not they were true. The absence of objective evaluation and review allowed these facts and allegations about Oswald in Mexico to become enabling instruments of power: first to create the Warren Commission, and later to curtail its investigations. 

The power of these covert agencies to control US politics through the manipulation of truth is only one more reason for us to refer to them as kryptocracies, agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures. At this stage, I shall refer to kryptocracies in the plural, to make it clear that I am not talking about some single omnipotent Secret Team. On the contrary, we shall see in Part Three of this book that different kryptocracies or intelligence agencies, and even different branches within these agencies, were in conflict with each other over the matters raised by Lee Harvey Oswald.

 The point is rather that, in major powers like the United States, bureaucratic behavior, which in principle is publicly  recorded and accountable, is in some respects determined by the kryptocratic behavior at its center.  As we shall see in the following pages, one of the important sources of the kryptocracies' power is their ability to falsify their own records, without fear of outside correction. 

But even if we concede the autonomy of kryptocracies, how important are they in determining the course of history? I believe the evidence in this book will justify a limited answer to this question: 

The kryptocracies, and the CIA in particular, were powerful enough to control and defuse a possible crisis in U.S. political legitimacy. They did so by reinforcing an unsustainable claim: Oswald killed the President, and he acted alone.

Kryptocracies and the Kryptonomy (International Drug Traffic)

But the power of kryptocracies to influence history became even greater when, as we shall see, they acted in concert with forces allied to the powerful international drug traffic. Most people are unaware of the size of this unrecorded drug economy. In 1981 U.S. Government analysts estimated that the annual sales volume of illicit drugs exceeded half a trillion dollars.[4] The total of legitimate, recorded international trade, in all commodities, was in the order of one trillion dollars, or twice the estimate for drugs. While estimates of the unrecorded drug traffic remain questionable, it is obvious that this traffic is large enough to be a major factor in both the economic and political considerations of government, even while it does not form part of recorded economic statistics. [italics in original]

For this reason, I propose the word kryptonomy, to name this unrecorded, illicit, but nonetheless important shadow economy. It is no accident that kryptocracies and the kryptonomy work in concert. The kryptonomy is so large, and so powerful, that governments have no choice but to plan to manage it, even before attempting to suppress it.[5]

 

There is a third factor contributing to the invisible alliance of kryptocracies and the kryptonomy: the power of the independently wealthy, and of the banks that cater to them. Informed observers of American politics have more than once commented to me that most of the hundred wealthiest people in the US know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime. There is no shortage of anecdotal examples: James Angleton of CIA Counterintelligence delivering the sole eulogy at the small private funeral of Howard Hughes, or Joseph Kennedy Sr. being a point-holder in the same casino (the Cal-Neva) as Sam Giancana.[6]  More relevant to the milieu of the JFK assassination is the example of Clint Murchison, Sr. Murchison paid for the horse-racing holidays of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the same time as he sold stakes in his investments to mob figures like Jerry Catena, and enjoyed political influence in Mexico.[7]

These connections are no accident. More often than not the extremely wealthy became that way by ignoring or bending the rules of society, not by observing them. In corrupting politicians, or in bypassing them to secure unauthorized foreign intercessions, both the mob and the CIA can be useful allies. In addition drug profits need to be laundered, and banks can derive a significant percentage of their profits by laundering them, or otherwise bending or breaking the rules of their host countries.[8] Citibank came under Congressional investigation after having secretly moved $80 million to $100 million for Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas.[9]

 

When operating within their guidelines, kryptocracies are less powerful than generally believed. Likewise the power of the biggest drug traffickers is not autonomous, but depends on their government connections. But when kryptocracies and kryptonomy work in concert, as they must to sustain the status quo, they share in a source of deep political influence that affects us all. A good example of this is the collaboration in Mexico, between the CIA and the corrupt DFS, to influence history by presenting false stories about Oswald. But it would be wrong to think of the CIA-DFS collaboration as a simple alliance.

One of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create. From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a "license to traffic;" DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance.[10] Eventually the DFS became so identified with the criminal drug-trafficking organizations it managed and protected, that in the 1980s the DFS was (at least officially) closed down.[11]Thus the CIA-DFS alliance was at best an uneasy one, with conflicting goals. The CIA’s concern was to manage and limit the drug traffic, while the DFS sought to manage and expand it.

Management of the drug traffic takes a variety of forms: from denial of this important power source to competing powers (the first and most vital priority), to exploitation of it to strengthen the existing state.  There now exists abundant documentation that, at least since World War II, the US Government has exploited the drug traffic to finance and staff covert operations abroad. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the massive paramilitary army organized and equipped by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, for which drugs were the chief source of support. This alliance between the CIA and drug-financed forces has since been repeated in Afghanistan (1979), Central America (1982-87), and most recently Kosovo (1998). 

It is now fairly common, even in mainstream books, to describe this CIA exploitation of the drug world as collaboration against a common enemy. For example Elaine Shannon, in a book written with DEA assistance, speaks as follows of the CIA-DFS alliance: 

 DFS officials worked closely with the Mexico City station of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the attaché of the the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The DFS passed along photographs and wiretapped conversations of suspected intelligence officers and provocateurs stationed in the large Soviet and Cuban missions in Mexico City....The DFS also helped the CIA track Central American leftists who passed through the Mexican capital.[12]

But it is important to remember that such alliances were often first formed in order to deny drug assets to the enemy. In Mexico as in Asia, just as in the US "Operation Underworld" on the docks of New York City, the US Government first began its drug collaborations out of fear that drug networks, if not given USG protection, would fall under that of some other foreign power. "Operation Underworld," like its Mexican equivalent, began after signs that the Sicilian Mafia in New York, like the drug networks Latin drug networks of Central and South America, were being exploited by Axis intelligence services. The crash program of assistance to Kuomintang (KMT) drug networks in post-war Southeast Asia was motivated in part by a similar fear, that these networks would come under the sphere of mainland Chinese influence. 

Thus it would be wrong to portray the CIA-drug alliance, particularly in Mexico, as one between like-minded allies. The cooperation was grounded in an original, deeper suspicion; and, especially because dealing with criminals, the fear of betrayal was never absent. This was particularly true of the DFS  when guided by Luis Echeverría, a nationalist who in the late 1960s developed stronger relations between Mexico and Cuba. Some have questioned whether the increased Cuban-Mexican relations under his presidency (1970-76) were grounded partly in the drug traffic, overseen by his brother-in-law.[13]

 

Even in 1963 the fear of offending Mexico's (and Echeverría's) sensibilities led the CIA to cancel physical surveillance of a Soviet suspect (Valeriy Kostikov); the CIA feared detection by the DFS, who also had Kostikov under surveillance.[14] By the 1970s there were allegations that the CIA and/or FBI were using the drug traffic to introduce guns into Mexico, in order to destabilize the left-leaning Echeverria government.[15]

 

This is perhaps the moment to point out another special feature of the US-DFS relationship in Mexico. Both the CIA and FBI (as Shannon noted, and as we shall see) had their separate connections to the DFS and its intercept program. The US effort to wrest the drug traffic from the Nazi competition dated back to World War II, when the FBI still had responsibility for foreign intelligence operations in Latin America. Winston Scott, the CIA Station Chief in Mexico City, was a veteran of this wartime overseas FBI network; and he may still have had an allegiance to Hoover while nominally working for the CIA.[16] We shall see that on a key policy matter, the proposed torture of Oswald's contact Silvia Durán, Scott allied himself with the FBI Legal Attache and the Ambassador, against the expressed disapproval of CIA Headquarters. 

What is particularly arresting about this CIA-mob nexus that produced false Oswald stories, is its suggestive overlay with those responsible for CIA-mob assassination plots. Key figures in the latter group, such as William Harvey and David Morales, did not conceal their passionate hatred for the Kennedys. It is time to focus on the CIA-mob connection in Mexico as a milieu which will help explain, not just the assassination cover-up, but the assassination itself. 

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[1]  Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 171.

[2]  There are previous examples where the actual events of American history are at odds with the public record. Allen Dulles represented the conventional view of John Wilkes Booth when he represented Booth to the Warren Commission as a loner, ignoring both the facts of the case and what is known now of Booth's secret links to the Confederate Secret Service (Scott, Deep Politics, 295; cf. Tidwell, William A., with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution: the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988]).

[3]  American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. "history."

[4]  James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Dell, 1986), 1139.

[5]  For a candid account of how KMT China was torn between management and suppression of the opium traffic, see Alan Baumler, "Opium Control versus Opium Suppression: The Origins of the 1935 Six-Year Plan to Eliminate Opium and Drugs," in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 270-91. Baumler notes how "The opium trade was a vital source of income and power for most of the colonial and national states of East and Southeast Asia" (270). I believe this state of affairs is less restricted, and has changed less, than his choice of terms implies.

[6] These and other examples in Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Rise and Reign of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000  (New York: Knopf, 2001), 185,290, etc.

[7] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 207, 218-19.

[8] For an instructive example involving Citicorp, America’s largest bank, see Robert A. Hutchison, Off the Books (New York: William Morrow, 1986). This Citicorp scandal (one involving double bookkeeping and tax evasion rather than drugs) was richly documented by first the SEC staff and then a Congressional Hearing, yet it was successfully suppressed through political influence.

[9]  New York Times, 11/11/99:  A Senate Committee “subpoenaed Citibank for transcripts of conversations among its private bankers on March 1, 1995, the day after Mr. Salinas had been arrested for murder. He has been convicted and is in prison in Mexico. In one conversation, the head of Citibank Private Bank, Hubertus Rukavina, asked whether Mr. Salinas's money could be moved from trust accounts in London to Switzerland, which has strict secrecy laws, according to the transcript.”

[10]  Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 39.

[11]  Chapter XII; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 104-05.

[12]  Desperados, 180.

[13]  Cf. Mills, Underground Empire, 840-43, 550.

[14]  MEXI 7041  24 November 1963; NARA #104-10015-10070.          

[15]  Mills, Underground Empire, 549-50; cf. Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, 178-79.

[16]  Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 107-08.