In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.
2. Accidents.
For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.
The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to ensure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.
If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.
Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.
Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.
3. Drugs.
In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.
If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.
Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination of Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.
4. Edge Weapons.
Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.
Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.
Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.
Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.
Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.
2
EXECUTIVE ACTION
U.S. Assassination Plots against Foreign Leaders
The pages that follow are an excerpt from the Church Committee’s 1977 congressional report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.” You’ll see that they’d refined the title into “Executive Action,” except the project code name is ZR/RIFLE. The full report is online at www.maryferrell.org.
The key CIA players here are Richard Bissell, William Harvey, and Richard Helms. They were all heavily involved in Cuban affairs and the targeting of Fidel Castro. (Bundy is apparently McGeorge Bundy, who was Kennedy’s national security adviser.) The CIA guys tried to make it look like they had approval of the White House all through the Kennedy years (1960–63), but in fact the Kennedys put a stop to any such talk and the CIA kept right on going in secret. Harvey eventually got canned. Some researchers think he then turned the tables on JFK and helped organize an “Executive Action” to get rid of the president.
3
SECRET EXPERIMENTS
U.S. Public Health Service Exposed Guatemalan Prostitutes, Prisoners, Soldiers to Sexually Transmitted Disease
This one boggles my mind. We knew about the horrifying Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment when the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) “observed” and experimented on 399 poor African-American men in the late stages of syphilis—basically watching them die over a forty-year period starting in 1932. This came to light in 1972.
Yet another study has been uncovered. In 2010, a researcher named Susan Reverby of Wellesley College discovered that the USPHS was also busy in Guatemala from 1946-1948, infecting nearly 1,000 Guatemalan citizens with venereal diseases. Why? To test antibiotics. Don’t believe me—here are excerpts from Findings from a CDC Report on the 1946-1948 U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Inoculation Study. If you want to view it yourself, go to www.hhs.gov/1946incoulationstudy/findings.html.
4 & 5 & 6
MIND CONTROL
The CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA
At the same time the Guatemalan experiments were taking place, the just-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was borrowing another page from 1930s Germany. I’d like to say that’s where these next documents originated, but no, this is our own government using people as guinea pigs. Their behavior-control programs were known as Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA.
Why the perpetrators were not brought to trial and justice is beyond me. If anyone in the private sector did something like this, they would go to jail and throw away the key. But I guess governments are immune from the same standards. Laws that apply to the general populace don’t apply to them. Lest we forget, isn’t the government made up of people too?
Nothing was publicly known about these grisly experiments until the mid-1970s, and guess who in the Ford administration was involved in helping keep the lid on the worst of what went on? None other than Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Dick Cheney. It seems the torture of detainees at Guantanamo—which we’ll examine later in this book—has deep roots in our secret history.
The three documents that follow are an excerpt from a 1975 CIA memo on some of what ARTICHOKE involved, a 1951 ARTICHOKE report on Sensony Integration (SI) and Hypnosis (H) on two unwitting girls, and a 1963 CIA “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA.”
7
A FAKE TERRORIST ATTACK
Operation Northwoods
At the end of April 2001, a little more than four months before 9/11, the startling fact that the American military had planned fake terrorist attacks on our own citizenry first came to light. The book Body of Secrets , by James Bamford, called it the “most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” This was Operation Northwoods, which was approved by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 for action against Cuba.
Here was the background: at a White House meeting on February 26, 1962, when various covert action plans
seemed to be going nowhere, Robert Kennedy ordered a stop to all such anti-Castro efforts. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the Eisenhower years, decided the only option was to trick the American public and world opinion into a justifiable war.
The document you’re about to read was presented to President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that March. Three days later, JFK told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility of our using overt force to take Cuba. Within a few months, Lemnitzer had been transferred to a different job.
So Operation Northwoods remained secret for thirty-five years. Now you can download a PDF from the National Security Archive website, and it makes for pretty chilling reading. You could even think about it as establishing a precedent for the future. If something like this was on the table in 1962, wouldn’t it likewise have been in 2001? What Northwoods had on the drawing board, I believe 9/11 was.
It seems that all through history, wars and takeovers are started with false flag operations: the Reichstag fire, the Chinese supposedly attacking Japan, the Gulf of Tonkin incident with Vietnam. The list goes on and on. History has a way of repeating itself, like that old cliché: if it works once, let’s try it again.
8 & 9
THE VIETNAM SHAM
Kennedy’s Plans to Withdraw Troops from Vietnam
I enlisted in the Navy on September 11, 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War. As part of the SEAL’s Underwater Demolition Team, I spent time off the coast of Hanoi waiting with a Marine division for a Normandy-type invasion that never happened. Altogether I served seventeen months overseas, never questioning how we ended up in Vietnam to begin with.
Today, I know different. It was a sham from the get-go, trumped up by the military industrial complex. If President Kennedy had lived, we’d have started withdrawing troops by late 1963 and had all our servicemen out of there by the end of 1965. The idea that JFK was responsible for having escalated the war is simply bogus. It’s obvious his plans were to pull us out, but he’d said behind the scenes he had to wait until after the next election to do it.
When the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) official file from those years was declassified in 1997, it contained a memorandum concerning the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF in the document) conference on May 6, 1963, held at CINCPAC headquarters in Camp Smith, Hawaii. Let’s start with key excerpts from that one, and a follow-up memo from late October (less than a month before JFK was assassinated) that clearly show we were starting to get out of Vietnam and leave matters in the hands of the South Vietnamese, where they belonged. Unfortunately, this is again a case of misleading the people for years, by keeping the true thoughts of John F. Kennedy out of the public realm.
10
FLAWED INTELLIGENCE
What Really Happened at the Gulf of Tonkin
The official line was that, in August 1964, the North Vietnamese twice attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. That was the incident that led to Congress passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and President Johnson’s dramatic buildup of our forces. As it turns out, according to top secret documents finally released by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005, the second attack never happened. Somebody involved in SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) skewed the data to make it look that way.
Some 58,000 of my generation were killed in the Vietnam War, and no telling how many Vietnamese, probably over a million but who knows? Again, all based upon fraudulence. How can our government have any credibility whatsoever when it’s always caught in these major lies?
An article in Naval History, a magazine published by the U.S. Naval Institute, first revealed the story in 1999 of Operation Plan 34A, a highly classified program of covert attacks against North Vietnam, including the raids on two offshore islands that forced their one (and only) retaliation against the USS Maddox.
As far back as 1972, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was pushing the NSA to release what its files contained on the Gulf of Tonkin. They stonewalled, even as late as 2004 when a FOIA request pushed for it. According to the New York Times, high-level officials at the NSA were “fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.” Oh really?
11
AGENT ORANGE?
U.S. Capabilities in Chemical and Biological Warfare
It’s hard to imagine today’s Congress holding this kind of hearing in anything but a closed-door top-secret session. But there seemed to be a lot more openness in our government as the sixties came to a close. I founda the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only in terms of the R&D going on at the time—and I realize this was during the Cold War with the Russians—but of how “innocently” we were using herbicides in Vietnam. You won’t see Agent Orange mentioned, but clearly that’s what they’re talking about. The other part that blew my mind was how acceptable it was to dump “obsolete chemical agents” into the ocean.
It’s just appalling to know that we have this capability to use as we so desire. Is it truly survive-at-any-cost, where we have no moral high ground on anything? Maybe so. Because, as my Special Forces friend Dick Marcinko has said, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s still alive. That seems to be the mind-set here: we can have every weapon imaginable at our disposal but nobody else is allowed to be that way. I find it kind of ironic that the very thing we attacked Saddam Hussein over, we’d maintained in our arsenal for many years! The hypocrisy would be laughable if this weren’t such a serious matter.
Pay particular attention to the little section on “Synthetic Biological Agents.” Molecular biology was then just beginning and they’re saying here: “eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.”
When did people start to die from AIDS? Ten years later, the early 1980s. What about lyme disease? The first cluster of cases occurred in 1976 at a Naval Medical Hospital in Connecticut, not far from the military’s Plum Island facility engaged in secret biochemical warfare experiments.
I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here. But after reading the transcript of this congressional hearing—and I’ve included most of it—I sure as heck wonder how far all this has developed over the last forty years.
PART TWO
GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, AND CORPORATE SECRETS
12
NAZIS IN THE U.S.
Putting War Criminals to Work for America
If you believe in things like making a pact with the devil, you might say that our intelligence agencies did just that at the end of World War Two. That’s when we started giving many of Hitler’s top henchmen not only sanctuary in our country, but putting these same Nazis to work for us. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was beginning—and the excuse was that we needed every bit of expertise, scientific and otherwise, that we could get.
It almost seems to me that the Cold War was staged so the weapons manufacturers and others could make money off it. Otherwise, how could we go from being allies with the Russians all through the war to their becoming our bitter enemies almost overnight? As Colonel Fletcher Prouty once said, “Nothing just happens, everything is planned.”
And I find it outrageous that some of the leading Nazis were brought over here because it was apparently more important to fight the Cold War than to hold them responsible for what they’d done. I don’t understand how the people making those decisions look only at the “big picture” and forget about collateral damage underneath. If they were absolutely sure no war crimes or atrocities had been committed, fine and dandy. But there should have been a thorough vetting done by this country—and not secretly but in public—so the American people knew which Nazis were coming and why.
The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigatio
ns put together a massive 600-page report about all this, which they completed in 2006. A few years later, the National Security Archive (a nonprofit in Washington, D.C.) filed a Freedom of Information Act request. This got turned down, the excuse being that the report was only a “draft.” That was despite the Obama administration supposedly being committed to an “unprecedented” level of transparency. What could possibly be so sensitive after all these years?
Anyway, the National Security Archive filed suit in a federal district court, and the Justice Department then began to “process” the document for release. Well, they must have bought up pretty much all the Wite-Out left in the office supply. They could’ve issued a CD titled “My Blank Pages.” After the redacted report got turned over to the National Security Archive, somebody inside the Justice Department took matters into their own hands and leaked a complete copy to the New York Times.
If you want to read the whole thing, or compare the two versions, check out the National Security Archive website at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB331/index.htm. I’m including here a one-page sampler of the censored version with the actual—an example of the lengths our government will go to keep “secrets” under wraps more than sixty years after-the-fact. This is followed by a few of the more telling pages from the Office of Special Investigations’ report.
63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read Page 3
