LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  The attention given to these mysterious Europeans led several researchers—including Steve Rivele, Bernard Fensterwald Jr., and Jim Lesar, among others—to attempt to find out more about them. Noel Twyman analyzed the disparate facts and concluded that the names associated with the codes WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN—who suddenly vanished from the CIA payroll in February 1964—were possibly Lucien Sarti and Jean Soutre (a.k.a. Michel Mertz and Michel Roux), respectively. An extensive description of the basis of this conclusion is presented in chapter 20 of his book, Bloody Treason.120 He also described the expulsion of Soutre the day following the assassination and confirmed his presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963. According to author Gus Russo, QJ/WIN was named as Jose Mankel by the contract agent code-named WI/ROGUE, David Dzitzichwili, who was described by the CIA as a man who “learns quickly and carries out any assignment without regard for the danger … in a word, he can rationalize all actions.”121 Mankel was described as a mercenary from Cologne, Germany, and as a man without scruples, “a man who would do anything—including assassination”;122 he was to become the link between Bill Harvey, Guy Bannister, and David Ferrie in New Orleans; the leaders of the Cuban exiles; Johnny Rosselli, whom he worked with on the Castro assassination attempts; and the French assassins commissioned to be one of the three teams in Dealey Plaza.

  The Cast of Military Men

  In contrast to the “great generals” of the World War II era, men like Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, there were others who thought of themselves as “great” but whose unfamiliarity with the great lessons of world history and a general absence of an appreciation of the nuances of the cultural milieu in other parts of the globe caused them to be lesser figures. In the previous chapter, it was observed that, in fact, MacArthur himself was critical of the military advice that President Kennedy had received from the Pentagon in reference to Southeast Asia; he blamed the previous generation of military leaders, who, he said, had advanced the wrong younger officers. One of the key elements leading up to the assassination of Kennedy, and the willingness of certain high-level military officers to participate in a coup d’état to remove him and allow Lyndon Johnson to replace him, was this very phenomenon. A few representative examples, though not nearly complete, will serve to make the point.

  General Curtis LeMay—The Mad Bomber

  The best way to describe the air force representative to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appointed to advise the president of the most sophisticated and thoughtful military views on the state of the world, is to present a portion of a column printed by The Washington Post, July 19, 1961, by the nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs:

  At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city—Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles—would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest.

  If ever there were a rogue general capable of pulling off a coup, it would have been General LeMay: A stereotypical ultra-right-wing reactionary, he was a belligerent, cigar-chomping cold warrior undaunted by the messy “collateral damages” of human suffering and destruction of property that are a necessary by-product of war, cataclysmic though they may be.*,123 LeMay was like Lyndon Johnson in many ways: Petulant and often childish when he didn’t get his way, LeMay would light a cigar and blow smoke in the direction of anyone challenging his position. To show utter disgust, he would walk into the private Joint Chiefs of Staff toilet, leave the door open, urinate or break wind loudly, and flush the commode a number of times as he finished cleaning himself up. He would then walk calmly back into the meeting pretending that nothing had happened. When angry with individual staff members, he would resort to sarcasm; if that failed, he would direct his wrath to the entire staff.124

  Time magazine, in its May 25, 1962 issue, described LeMay leaving Capitol Hill a few days before that, after testifying there about the new air force budget: “Scowling ferociously, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, 55, wanted the Senate Appropriations subcommittee to get one thing straight. ‘I object to having the term “bomber man” applied to me,’ he said, even as he was urging Congress to lay out $491 million for the long-range RS-70 bomber, $320 million more than the administration wanted. ‘I will use the most effective weapons system that will do the job. If that’s kiddie cars, I’ll use kiddie cars.’” General LeMay talked openly about a preemptive attack in which one hundred million people would be killed. He persistently recommended taking aggressive action regarding an attack on Cuba in order to overthrow Castro, beginning with the Bay of Pigs invasion and continually through the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Kennedy continually resisted his recommendations. LeMay was a proponent of the concept of “nuclear first strike,” saying that we should give the Russians the “Sunday punch” before they did it to us. In the 1950s, under Eisenhower, LeMay had the authority to order a nuclear strike without presidential authorization if the president could not be contacted. Kennedy made it clear that that authority was no longer applicable. According to David Talbot, “Years after he left the air force, in an oral history for the Johnson Library, LeMay was still venting in remarkably savage terms, calling the Kennedy crowd “ruthless,’ ‘vindictive,’ morally debased vermin whom LBJ should have ‘stepped on’ when he took over the White House, ‘like the cockroaches they were.’” Kennedy did not have warm feelings for LeMay either, of course: “I don’t want that man near me again,” he once spat out, after walking out on one of the general’s briefings. “A prick like LeMay—Kennedy didn’t trust him as far as he could throw a marble pillar,” said Charles Daly, one of Kennedy’s White House political aides.125

  Like LeMay, most of the other military chiefs resented the Kennedys, McNamara, and their “whiz kids” academics who had no experience in military affairs. On the other hand, Kennedy questioned the general knowledge of the military chiefs, and he was skeptical of their judgment of the potential international fallout from the military actions they recommended. Kennedy had accepted some of their recommendations during the Bay of Pigs debacle, only to realize later how ill-conceived the overall planning had been. Both sides of this divide seemed to try to be more condescending to the other side; neither had the least respect for the other. The military commanders were accustomed to presidents who let them do their thing, with minimal meddling in their sphere of operations.

  One of LeMay’s close friends was Charles “Babe” Baron, a general in the Illinois National Guard and an associate of Meyer Lansky and Chicago political boss Jake Arvey. It was determined, by the House Select Committee in 1978, that committee investigators confirmed that “Baron was visiting LeMay the following week [after the assassination].”126 According to Peter Dale Scott, Babe Baron was a “constant companion” of Johnny Rosselli and an even closer friend of Patrick Hoy, who worked for Henry Crown, an Illinois financier and part owner of General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas,127 one of the primary beneficiaries of Johnson’s presidency.* Both of them were also close associates of Sidney Korshak, a lawyer who worked for the Chicago Mob who was described by senior Justice Department officials as one of “the most powerful members of the underworld.” When Johnson appointed the Warren Commission, he chose as panel commissioners John McCloy, Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford, among others, to serve on it because he knew they would be controllable, as will be explored in later chapters. They, in turn, selected Lee Rankin as chief counsel and Albert E. Jenner Jr.—the personal attorney for General Dynamics�
��s largest stockholder, Henry Crown—to be an assistant counsel. Jenner was put in charge of, among other things, investigating whether Oswald and/or Ruby had past associations or were part of a wider conspiracy. According to famed columnist Drew Pearson, the key people controlling the Mob in Chicago during the 1950s included Henry Crown and Walter Annenberg. The circle of ties from Johnson and Hoover to the top of the commission, through its key staff members, and back to the people closest to the Chicago Mob, would be complete.128

  General Charles Willoughby (Retired)—General MacArthur’s “Little Fascist”

  General Willoughby’s birth name was actually Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach when he was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1892. When JFK was assassinated, Willoughby was seventy-one years old and long retired, but he was still very much actively involved on the far-right fringes of the political spectrum, including the John Birch Society and the American friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (the ABN) and other anti-Communist extremist organizations in Europe, Japan, and Korea. Willoughby had a reputation for being autocratic and arrogant; he spoke in a German accent but was fluent in four languages. He became the chief of intelligence in the Pacific for General MacArthur, who referred to him as “my little fascist,” though he was six feet three inches tall and weighed 220 pounds.129

  One of his European links was to the OAS, the French terrorist organization intent on assassinating Charles de Gaulle; this connected him also to Jean Soutre (or Souetre), the French terrorist who showed up in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination. Willoughby earned his moniker “my little fascist” because he was an avowed racist and fanatical supporter of extreme right-wing causes. In this vein, Willoughby had once written of Italian dictator Mussolini, “Historical judgment, freed from the emotional haze of the moment, will credit Mussolini with wiping out a memory of defeat by re-establishing the traditional military supremacy of the white race.”130 In the United States, he was closely associated with General Edwin Walker, H. L. Hunt, and the Dallas Chapter of the John Birch Society. Willoughby had admired Francisco Franco since the 1920s. In his later years, Willoughby would publish the racist Foreign Intelligence Digest newspaper and worked closely with H. L. Hunt on the extreme right-wing organization International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture. It was connected to the John Birch Society and the minutemen.

  The author Bruce Cumings wrote of him, “Willoughby was a profound racist and anti-Semite who saw the Soviet bloc as ‘the historical continuity of ‘Mongoloid-PanSlavism.’ He once wrote that ‘when the teeming millions of the Orient and the tropics got their hands on magazine rifles, Kipling’s white man was on the way out.’ He deplored Asian wars in which ‘illiterate Chinese coolies’ wiped out American draftees, given that ‘the white man is an expensive and limited commodity.’ … His ‘intelligence digest’ recommended all through the 1960’s that ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ unspecified, be used against the Vietnamese people. It is hard to find something nice to balance this account. Willoughby was a thoroughly loathsome persona whose entire world view consisted of piles of ethnic stereotypes; he was apparently capable of anything.”131 Willoughby was a close associate of H. L. Hunt, and both were leaders in a worldwide, extreme right-wing network with connections to a number of like-minded organizations, including the John Birch Society and the minutemen in the United States; similar groups in Europe, including the CIA-front corporation Permindex in Italy and the French OAS, put them in direct association with professional French and Corsican assassins.

  Willoughby railed against the liberal Eastern establishment internationalists recruited from Ivy League universities to run the CIA and the State Department (people like Cord Meyer, James Angleton, Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, and Averell Harriman), who were considered to be among the evil one-worlders intent on surrendering the sovereignty of the United States to the United Nations (a continuing argument fifty years later). He eventually became involved with the “red smear” campaigns of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, through names supplied by his friend J. Edgar Hoover. It has been suggested that the catalyst for Willoughby’s interest in the plot to kill Kennedy might have been, ironically, the destruction of the CIA and the men who he felt were selling out the interests of the United States, the same men who linked the intelligence failure in not predicting the entry into the Korean War of the Chinese, to the humiliating retreat of American forces when the Chinese crossed the Yalu River132—a theme that became the battle cry of the John Birchers who ached to expand that war too.

  General LeMay felt that Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs showed him to be a coward; during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he advocated a massive surprise air strike and was infuriated when Kennedy reached a peaceful end to the crisis, especially when he found out it meant taking missiles out of Turkey.

  General Thomas Power, USAF

  General Power had the distinction of being called by his superior LeMay a “sadist.” He is credited along with LeMay for inspiring the defense concept of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), though neither of them was an advocate of equivalency of defense: Their position was more toward dominance, overwhelming superiority, and continual preparedness for a massive first-strike capability. General Power is perhaps most well-known for unilaterally elevating the security level of the Strategic Air Command, at the height of the missile crisis, to DEFCON-2, only one step away from active nuclear war, which left JFK flabbergasted when he realized how limited his power was as the president. It effectively put the SAC in command of one thousand five hundred strategic bombers on constant alert—two hundred in the air at all times—and all carrying nuclear weapons. This put practically the entire population on wartime alert, which created enormous pressure on President Kennedy to take aggressive actions to appease the military while trying to calm the nation.

  General Edwin Walker (Retired)

  General Edwin Walker had been fired, or pressed to resign, from his military career after he had begun distributing John Birch Society propaganda to enlisted men on a military base in Germany. He was quoted by a military newspaper, the Overseas Weekly, as saying that Harry S. Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson were “pink,” apparently meaning they were not far from Red as the Communists were described. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara relieved Walker of his command, while an inquiry was conducted, and in October Walker was reassigned to Hawaii to become assistant chief of staff for training and operations in the Pacific. Walker opted to resign instead of discontinuing his political activities. He entered the race for governor of Texas, but finished last among Democratic candidates in their primary election in May won by John Connally.

  Walker organized protests in September 1962 against the use of federal troops to enforce the enrollment of African American James Meredith at the racially segregated University of Mississippi. His appearance helped to incite a major riot on the campus in which two people were killed. He was arrested on four federal charges; upon his return to Dallas, he was met by a crowd of a few hundred supporters. In January 1963, a federal grand jury declined to indict him, and the charges were dropped. Because his name was in the news, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly took notice and decided to do something about this “fascist” and allegedly took a shot at him on April 10, 1963, with a rifle he had purchased a few weeks before from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Two weeks after this—one day after JFK’s plans to visit Texas were announced—it appears, perhaps coincidentally, Oswald’s handlers decided he should be moved to New Orleans for additional training, by rabid anti-Communists, in order to strengthen his pro-Communist credentials.

  Linkages

  Beyond the obvious linkages noted earlier between individuals and groups such as the Suite 8F and Georgetown society (e.g., Allen Dulles and John McCloy, who were closely aligned with both), there were many interconnections between the aforementioned parties, which will become more evident as the story line progresses through the following chapters. One illustration of this was the d
irect telephone line between J. Edgar Hoover and James J. Angleton. Another was the thick solid connection between Angleton and Bill Harvey. A dotted line linked Hoover to Harvey, who had left the FBI to join the CIA in the early 1950s, though the evidence suggests that such a transition was meant to provide Hoover with a mole within the CIA, of which he was jealous to the point of paranoia because of what he felt was its intrusion into his turf. It has also been suggested that Guy Banister in New Orleans was actually working undercover for Hoover.133 It is also important to note the close assocations between Willoughby and Edward Lansdale, who was also very close to H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison; he was purportedly the recipient of large sums of money from them for various covert operations.

  By the same token, General LeMay had many friends and associates of like minds across the “org charts” of the military, some of whom were clearly visible in his position as the air force representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but other links were even stronger, yet not represented by any visible lines: for example, his links through General Willoughby to H. L. Hunt. Anyone connected to H. L. Hunt was linked to the men in Suite 8F, specifically including Ed Clark, Johnson’s chief lawyer and financial bagman. Links from all of these would run underground, to the Mafia as noted elsewhere, directly back to Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, Bobby Baker, and of course, to Lyndon B. Johnson himself. Johnson and Baker’s friend, neighbor, and business associate Fred Black was a longtime friend and associate of Johnny Rosselli. Black was one of the most influential lobbyists in those days, but he was also connected to other mobsters and Las Vegas interests such as Ed Levinson and Benjamin Siegelbaum. Baker and Black were majority owners of Serve U Corp which, through Johnson’s political influence to appoint government contracts, was given exclusive vending machine contracts to such companies as North American Aviation, Northrop and Space Technologies.134 Fred Black’s income in the late 1950s and early 1960s was about half a million dollars per year, though he “rarely had the money to pay his taxes when due.”135