American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (4 page)

“There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments.... in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
³

Quigley says it all began with a wealthy Englishman named Cecil Rhodes, who'd worked with financiers like the Rothschilds to gain a monopoly over South Africa's diamonds and gold. “The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes' seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.”
⁴

Funding for “the widely ramified activities of this organization,” later came from groups “associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families.” In looking to expand after the First World War, front organizations were set up—the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and, in New York, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table group.”
⁵
The CFR in 1928, according to Quigley's list, had John W. Davis as its president—the very same fellow who, along with Morgan and others, established the American Liberty League that tried to use General Butler in the plot against FDR. Also among the CFR's leading lights was attorney Allen Dulles, future director of the CIA and member of the Warren Commission to investigate JFK's assassination. And “closely allied with this Morgan influence were a small group of Wall Street law firms” that included another future Warren Commission member, John McCloy. Same cast of characters, from FDR to JFK.

The goal of this cabal of global financiers, writes Quigley, was “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
⁶

Then there was this: “The American branch of this ‘English Establishment' exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (the
New York Times
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, the
Christian Science Monitor
, the
Washington Post
, and the lamented
Boston Evening Transcript
).”
⁷

Quigley's book is back in print today, but when it first appeared in 1966, it didn't stay long on bookstore shelves. The professor came to believe it had been “suppressed,” because “it apparently says something which powerful people do not want known.”
⁸

As I've expanded my study of conspiracies, I find that I'm often getting the same information from two separate sources. Let me insert here something about the Bilderbergs. For aTV series I'm doing on conspiracies, we interviewed a fellow named Daniel Estulin, an investigative journalist from Spain who's been researching the Bilderberg secret society for more than 17 years. It turns out that the wealthiest CEOs of the world have been coming together with the political elite from Europe and America since 1954, when they first met at the Bilderberg Hotel in a little Dutch town called Oosterbeek. The Bilderberg deep pockets reach back centuries, to royalty who still believe they're the entitled ones and the rest of us are merely cannon fodder. Banker David Rockefeller, at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting, is said to have argued for one world government “of an intellectual elite and world bankers.”
⁹
But I was told that, within this group, David Rockefeller is a waiter. Meaning, at his level, he would bring the other members drinks as mid-level help. The others are much more powerful.

To get a sense of the continuity among the power brokers: In
Tragedy and Hope
, Professor Quigley doesn't mention Prescott or George Herbert Walker Bush—grandfather and father of the first President Bush—but both of them were among the right-wing elite on Wall Street during FDR's day. In 2007, an American investigative journalist named John Buchanan found documents from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in the National Archives. These directly linked Prescott Bush to the power brokers (Morgan, DuPont, Remington, and others) who were behind the plan to get rid of FDR. This got some play in the U.K., but not a word in the mainstream American press.
¹⁰

But if you check out Kevin Phillips's book on the Bush family,
American Dynasty
, you can find some interesting cross-references. Dating back to the First World War, George Herbert Walker (Prescott's father-in-law) was involved with “a frequently collaborative group of moneymen—Averell Harriman, Percy Rockefeller at National City Bank, and others at Guaranty Trust—who had large international plans.”
¹¹
(Remember that one of the anti-FDR coup leaders had ties to Guaranty Trust). In 1919 National City Bank “joined in setting up the new W.A. Harriman and Company, soon to be under George Walker's presidency” and including Remington's Samuel Pryor as “part of this cabal.”
¹²
Five years later, Harriman and Walker established the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) in New York “on behalf of the politically active German steel baron Fritz Thyssen”—a major funder of Hitler's Nazi Party.
¹³
Prescott Bush and a number of his Skull and Bones pals from Yale “came together under one roof through the Brown Brothers Harriman merger in 1931.”
¹⁴

Phillips doesn't bring the Smedley Butler story into his book, but he goes on to say: “Unfortunately, we have no reliable way of knowing exactly why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford, and several Rockefellers maintained investment relationships with Hitler's Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl Harbor.”
¹⁵

“By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman ... and Dillon Read were two notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler.” Prescott Bush “handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman,” working closely with Wall Street lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles. Prescott was also a director of the UBC bank “that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family.... In 1941, the
New York Herald Tribune
had featured a front-page story headlined ‘Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank'” that Thyssen was possibly holding for “Nazi bigwigs.” In October 1942, the federal government then “seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation” under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
¹⁶

Prescott Bush went on to be a U.S. Senator from Connecticut; the Dulles brothers ran the CIA and the State Department under Eisenhower; Averell Harriman ended up governor of New York. “It is almost as if these various German embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but in essence business as usual,” Kevin Phillips writes.
¹⁷

So maybe that's how the FDR plot was conceived, too—“business as usual,” which the president's New Deal was obstructing. Smedley Butler did his best to issue the warning. Lecturing around the country as spokesman for the “forgotten veteran,” the general accused the big industrialists of bloating themselves on the blood of the soldiers in the First World War. He pointed out that DuPont's profits had soared from only $6 million before the conflict, to $58 million in the course of it. Similar huge jumps were made by companies like Bethlehem Steel and International Nickel. Munitions, as the “war to end all wars” proved, was a mighty profitable enterprise.

Butler also asked a question, in his book
War Is a Racket
, that I've thought about a lot in terms of today: “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” His idea was: “Let the officers and directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders ... as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.”
¹⁸

Do you think we'd have gone to war in Iraq if Dick Cheney and his Halliburton buddies were subject to Butler's idea? The “Fighting Quaker, as he was called, died in 1940, so he never lived to see America enter the war against Germany and Japan. Today we owe the man a great debt, as someone courageous enough to blow the whistle on the big-money forces out to undermine our democracy. Too bad there wasn't another Smedley Butler around when George W. Bush stole two presidential elections. That's a story we'll get to, in due course.

Getting back to the Bilderbergs and the scary notion: is this attempt to control the world real? I don't think it's necessarily a case of a dozen guys sitting around a table deciding our future. But I do think that these power brokers, bankers, money men of the world, have the power to
try
to control the direction we're going. Can they guarantee it? Never, because you've always got the human element, and they don't seem to want to rouse the ire of the masses. They're sneakier than that.

I found it interesting that, they same day that the Bilderberg expert, Daniel Estulin, was to meet with me in New York, our filming schedule got thrown off. I had to wait an extra day because he happened to be on the no-fly list. It took 24 hours for him to be cleared and come talk to me. I was trying to figure out why they would deem this guy a terrorist. I mean, he's a writer. Who would have the power to put him on that list? What are the qualifications? Like Shakespeare once put it, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”

It makes me want to run to the Baja for six months and get away from it all. But by the time I'm ready to go, I'll probably be on the no-fly list, too! I'll keep you posted.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

—Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address as president, 1961

There are two official government reports on the assassination of President Kennedy, and they directly contradict each other. The first was, of course, the
Warren Commission Report
, which concluded that a disgruntled Marine-turned-Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald took out JFK on his own, using an old Italian-made rifle and connecting with two out of three shots in 6.3 seconds from a sixth-floor window. The second was a report fifteen years later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluding that JFK was “probably” eliminated as part of a conspiracy.

Somehow, that one keeps slipping through the cracks. Maybe it's because the Justice Department never investigated it and came to a real conclusion. As it is, every time a new book comes out that supports the Warren Commission, the big media reviewers tell us this puts all the rumors to rest for good. I'm talking about Gerald Posner's
Case Closed
(1993) and then Vincent Bugliosi's 1,600-page tome,
Reclaiming History
(2007). Vince is a good friend of mine, and a prosecutor for whom I have great respect, but in this case it's beyond me how he can buy into the lone-nut scenario. Other new books like
Brothers
,
Legacy of Secrecy
, and
JFK and the Unspeakable
barely merit a mention; anything raising the specter of a plot gets quickly relegated to the stack of books-to-be-ignored.

So let's start with a serious look at the overwhelming physical evidence that Oswald couldn't have been acting alone. First of all, what about the so-called “magic bullet” that moved all around and caused seven separate wounds in President Kennedy and Governor Connally? When this bullet just happened to turn up on a stretcher at Dallas's Parkland Hospital, there weren't any bloodstains on it. Although the bullet appeared to be undamaged, the one that hit Connally left behind some permanent lead in his wrist. According to Dr. Cyril Wecht, former President of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, these two facts simply don't add up. Without the “magic bullet,” the idea that Oswald killed the president falls apart.
¹
(Of course, if you challenge the status quo like Dr. Wecht eventually they'll come after you, as the Justice Department did. For sending personal faxes and giving students permission to study autopsies, Dr. Wecht found himself facing numerous criminal charges. He was forced to resign as a county coroner in Pittsburgh and spent $8 million on legal fees before the Justice Department dropped most all its charges against him in 2008.
²

A total of eighteen witnesses at Parkland Memorial Hospital that day—most of them doctors—all described a bullet wound that blew away where the back of JFK's head should have been. But somehow, the autopsy photos that got entered into evidence don't show that wound. Of course, Dr. James Humes, the navy physician who led the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, admitted later that he burned both his autopsy notes
and
the first draft of his report.
³
Somehow, the president's brain disappeared, too.

What gets me is that John Kennedy's body was illegally removed from the city of Dallas, where by law the autopsy should have taken place. Texas law in 1963 required that the autopsy of anyone murdered in the state had to take place
within
its borders. The only exception was a murder that happened in a place owned, possessed, or controlled by the federal government—which wasn't the case here. In fact, the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, tried to enforce the law when the Secret Service was removing the president's body from Parkland late that afternoon for immediate return to Washington. Dr. Rose was overruled by the Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade. So did the feds simply come in and say, this is what's going to happen? Why don't they have to abide by the same laws as the rest of us? This set a terrible precedent that happened again after September 11, but I'll get into that later.

As for the famous Zapruder film: anybody can see that JFK's head is thrust violently backward when the fatal shot strikes him. Despite all the claims to the contrary, this supports someone firing from the front, most likely the grassy knoll. A number of experts say that the film was definitely altered—and we've recently learned that it went to a CIA lab run by Kodak in Rochester, New York, the weekend of the assassination!
⁴
When
Life
magazine published stills from the Zapruder film not long after the assassination, they were printed out of order. Kinda makes you wonder about the media again, doesn't it?

Did you know that not a single fingerprint was found on Oswald's alleged murder weapon? When the FBI did a nitrate test on Oswald, it came up positive for his hands but negative for his face. Which means that he maybe fired a pistol, but not a rifle, that day. After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, the Dallas Police did come up with a palm print on the Mannlicher-Carcano—but this was after the FBI's top fingerprint analyst had dusted the whole rifle and said he found nothing of importance.
⁵

During my first year as governor, I caused a pretty big stir when I told an interviewer from
Playboy
that I did not believe the official conclusion on Oswald. I think I may have been the highest-ranking official who ever said that, at least publicly. I started by simply applying common sense. If Oswald was who they told us he was—a Marine private who gets out of the Marine Corps and decides to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, then comes back home with a Russian wife and does minimum-wage jobs—why would any records need to be locked away in the National Archives because of “national security” for 75 years? As a Navy SEAL, I had to have top secret clearance. That was higher than Oswald's, and I know a few secrets, but not enough to endanger national security. Yet in Oswald's case, hundreds of documents were withheld.

When I was traveling around the country to promote my first book, the publisher said I could go to either Houston or Dallas. I said, “Give me Dallas.” With my apologies to readers who may already have read this story in my previous book, as well as the one about my meeting with Fidel Castro, I feel like these are too important to leave out of what I've learned about JFK's killing. First a cop gave me the tour of the police headquarters basement where Jack Ruby shot Oswald. The eerie part was, there was the elevator we all saw on TV—and down on the floor, almost on the exact spot where Oswald lay dying, the tile has oil on it that still looks like blood.

From there I went to Dealey Plaza and took my time walking the picket fence on the grassy knoll, where a second gunman most likely was firing from. That was eerie, too. Then I went to what's now the JFK Museum inside the Texas School Book Depository, where the curator, Gary Mack, met my party. The actual supposed sniper's nest on the sixth floor is sealed off. But you can go to the next window, which would seem to be an easier shot, because you're eight feet closer to where the president's motorcade passed and at basically the same angle. I didn't see how three shots could possibly have cleared the branches of an oak tree and lined up on the presidential motorcade.

After my book signing was over, we headed out to Dallas's Love Field airport. At the time, I was smoking cigars, so they found me a restricted area outside where I could light up. I remember it was a beautiful day, and we were all laughing and making small talk. As it came time for me to put out my cigar and board the plane, the police officer who'd been our guide all day took me off to the side.

He said, “Be very careful, Governor. You are a high-profile person who might say things that certain people don't want brought to light.”

That made my head spin a little. If there was nothing to hide about the assassination, how could my making comments about it forty years later affect anybody? In hindsight, I wish I'd canceled the flight and gone to the policeman's home that night. I wanted to ask him, “Why are you warning me about this? What do you base it on, or won't you tell me?” But I had the strong impression he didn't want me to know.

Then, my last year in office, in 2002, I had an even more powerful experience when I got the opportunity to meet Fidel Castro. A few of America's sanctions against Cuba dealing with food and agricultural products had finally been lifted, so Minnesota was able to put together a trade mission for humanitarian purposes. President Bush was very opposed to my going along, but I decided it was my right as an American citizen. We now know that Robert Kennedy, on December 12, 1963—less than a month after his brother's assassination—had sent a memo to Dean Rusk asking the secretary of state to get rid of the restrictions on American travel to Cuba, because this was inconsistent with our belief in freedom. It took almost a half-century more for his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, to push the Obama Administration to go forward on this—which it seems is finally going to happen. I guess I was a few years ahead of my time.

I'd grown up in fear of Fidel Castro. I was young when his revolution took place in 1959, but I remember the propaganda. I vaguely recall hearing about the Bay of Pigs invasion, because it dominated the news when I came home from school. As a kid, the name fascinated me. Why would they name a place after pigs? As an adult, when I started reading books trying to figure out what really happened to President Kennedy, Castro and Cuba of course loomed large: Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his attempt to get a visa to Cuba on a trip to Mexico. So Cuba had fascinated me for years, though I never dreamed I'd have a chance to actually go there, much less to spend an hour with Castro himself.

The last day of our visit, around noon, Castro was waiting for me in a room at the trade fair. I've never known a handshake like Castro's. He comes up to me, winds up, pulls back his hand all the way to his shoulder, and thrusts it out with great excitement. We sat down in two chairs right across from each other. He had his interpreter along, and some of his security people.

The first words out of his mouth were, “You are a man of great courage.”

I was puzzled by this and said, “Well, Mr. President, how can you say that? You don't know me.”

He looked back at me and said, “Because you defied your president to come here.” I guess he has pretty good “intel.”

And I looked right back at him and said, “Well, Mr. President, you'll find that I defy most everything.”

Castro laughed. Who knows, maybe he felt this was something we had in common.

The whole conversation, on my part, was in English and interpreted to him by a lady in Spanish. But I don't think he really needs her. Because now and then, I'd say something that was funny and he'd laugh before the interpretation happened. As good as Castro is at masking the fact, I think he understands English very well. Let's put it this way: I'm sure he does English far, far better than I do Spanish.

We covered a lot of ground in our conversation. Just as I have great pride in Minnesota, he has the same for Cuba. He was extremely proud of the fact that they have the highest literacy rate of any Latin-American country in the hemisphere. He's also proud that they have the best medical care. I found him very engaging. He's a master of hyperbole. I told him that I felt the U.S. boycott was wrong. It did nothing positive for either of our countries, and it was time for America to get over it. His questions of me were mainly about my political future. He was interested in the fact that I was an independent and didn't belong to either of the two major parties. A kind of rogue element being the governor of a state.

Time passes very quickly when it's only an hour and you're sitting with Fidel Castro. He's so perceptive. At one point I glanced at my watch and immediately Castro said, “I'm sorry, do you have to be somewhere?” I said, “No, sir. But I'm only here a short time with you, and there are some personal questions I wanted to ask you before our hour is up. So I was just checking my watch to see how much more time I had. So—can I ask you one?”