American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  The White House tape of that conversation trails off cryptically, full of “unintelligible” remarks. “Dulles knew,” Nixon said, referring to Allen Dulles, CIA director at the time of the Bay of Pigs who was fired by JFK and later named by LBJ to the Warren Commission. “Dulles told me. I know, I mean [unintelligible] had the telephone call. Remember, I had a call put in—Dulles just blandly said and knew why [unintelligible] covert operation—do anything else [unintelligible] .” Those “unintelligibles” might have told us something, wouldn’t you guess?

  The next day—seven days now since the Watergate burglars’ arrest—on the tapes Nixon made some more “unintelligible” remarks about Hale Boggs, the Louisiana congressman who had been another member of the Warren Commission and a dissenter to its conclusion that Oswald acted alone. A few weeks after whatever Nixon said about him, Boggs died in the crash of a light aircraft over Alaska. Some suspected sabotage. The Los Angeles Star (November 22, 1973) reported that “Boggs had startling revelations on Watergate and the assassination of President Kennedy.”18

  The Mullen company’s man in Washington, Robert Bennett, met with his CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, in a Washington cafeteria. Lukoskie’s memo was considered so sensitive that he hand-carried it to Helms, saying Bennett had steered reporters at the Washington Post and Star away from pursuing a coup d’etat-type scenario that would tie the CIA into a Watergate conspiracy. Bennett later admitted feeding stories to Bob Woodward at the Post—“with the understanding that there be no attribution.” It’s yet another black mark against our media that the Post chose not to examine potential CIA complicity to any extent—despite the fact that every one of the Plumbers had a clear-cut CIA connection!

  Eleven days after Hunt was arrested, the FBI’s acting director, L. Patrick Gray, was summoned to the White house and instructed by Ehrlichman to deep-six the files from Hunt’s personal safe. Gray recalled being told that the files were “political dynamite and clearly should not see the light of day.” Gray said he took the material home and burned it in his fireplace.19 Hunt began to threaten the White House with public disclosure of his other secret activities, unless he was paid off.

  The House Banking Committee was starting to look into the Watergate break-in, so Nixon brought up the name of congressman Gerald Ford. “Gerry has really got to lead on this,” Nixon said. “I think Ehrlichman should talk to him. ... He’s got to know it comes from the top.” Not long after that, the banking committee voted against issuing subpoenas concerning the break-in.

  Why Ford? Almost a decade earlier, it was Nixon who recommended to President Johnson that Ford be put on the Warren Commission. There, Ford served as the FBI’s informant about what the commission was up to. This was confirmed long afterward, in an FBI memo stating: “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the commission. He stated that would have to be done on a confidential basis, however, he thought it had to be done.”20

  We also have learned from some handwritten notes of Ford’s, produced by the Assassination Records Review Board, that he changed one of the most significant findings in the Warren Report. A first draft had said that a bullet had “entered his [JFK’s] back at a point slightly below the shoulder to the right of the spine.” Woops! That trajectory meant there was no way for that bullet to emerge from Kennedy’s neck and then somehow hit Governor Connally. No more “magic bullet”! So Ford urged the commission to change the description and put the wound up higher. Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” The commission went with that, except it added two words: “the base of the back of his neck.”

  So Ford had always been counted on to help out in critical situations. Later, after Spiro Agnew was forced to resign, Nixon named Ford as his vice president and, after Nixon resigned, President Ford proceeded to grant a pardon to Nixon, so he couldn’t be pursued by the courts for obstruction of justice and whatever else.

  In the fall of 1972, Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, paid a call on Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime. He was Hunt’s friend dating back to Bay of Pigs days. Mrs. Hunt came to assure Artime that the Cubans imprisoned for the break-in would not endure difficulties in Washington, and that money would be delivered to a legal aid fund. Artime, we know today, was directly connected to the Cuban exiles being used in the anti-Castro plots, and also to mobsters like Trafficante. Not long after that meeting, Dorothy Hunt died in the crash of a United Airlines plane as it made a final approach to Chicago’s Midway Airport. More than $10,000 was found on her body; sabotage of the plane was raised, but never proven. A week after the crash, FBI agents combed through Hunt’s residence looking for stashed documents, but apparently found nothing.21 Nixon and Colson met to discuss the possibility of granting clemency to Hunt.

  During this same time frame, Helms instructed McCord to send a letter to his friend Jack Caulfield, a New York detective who’d been engaged by the Plumbers—and who, in 1964, had looked into Oswald’s possible Cuban connections for the FBI. McCord wrote to Caulfield: “Sorry to have to write you this letter but felt you had to know. If Helms goes, and if the WG [Watergate] operation is laid at the CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice right now. Just pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course. I’m sorry that you will get hurt in the fallout.”22

  Nixon had summoned Helms to Camp David—where no taping system existed—and told him to expect to be replaced as CIA director. When Helms then received a request from the Senate to preserve any Watergate-related documents, he set out to destroy all of his private files, some 4,000 to 5,000 pages.23 Helms also ordered shredded almost the entire record of the CIA’s efforts to control human behavior, MK-ULTRA, in the fifties and early sixties. Then he accepted Nixon’s offer to become the American ambassador to Iran.

  Almost simultaneously with Helms’s departure from the CIA, someone broke into the Washington office of the lawyer who’d represented both Maheu and Rosselli, and made off with all those files. The lawyer, Edward P. Morgan, said: “Watergate was pernicious, but the biggest cover-up of my lifetime was the assassination of JFK. To the CIA, this was something of life and death—if it could ever be established that their actions against Castro ended up killing Kennedy. The truth of the whole thing is still a helluva long way from being out.”24

  Following the Watergate trail into early 1973 came the bombshell that ignited the Senate hearings: the letter from McCord to Judge John Sirica. McCord wrote: “The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation. The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing that it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact that it was not.” Why did McCord feel compelled to state this? Maybe because this was just the latest gambit in his long history of cover-ups on behalf of the CIA? McCord’s attorney happened to be Bernard Fensterwald Jr., who had a private Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA) and had once represented James Earl Ray. In exchange for helping McCord post bond, the papers said, “It was understood, however, that McCord agreed to help Fensterwald in some of his research at a later date.”25

  McCord’s letter kicked off a chain of events that eventually led to the resignations and indictments of nearly Nixon’s entire staff. And the links back to the JFK assassination just kept cropping up. After the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 where Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Houston lawyer named Leon Jaworski was named to replace him. Jaworski had helped the Warren Commission check out a possible connection between Oswald and the CIA. That, in itself, was something of a conflict of interest—since Jaworski was also a board member of a CIA front company, the M.D. Anderson Foundation.26 When Jack Ruby made his anguished plea that the Warren Commission get him out of Texas and fly him to Washington if it wanted to learn the truth, only three people were present—Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, and Leon Jaworski. They didn’t take him up on hi
s offer.

  The overlap between the Warren Commission and Watergate legal staffs didn’t stop with Jaworski. Arlen Specter, for a time a member of Nixon’s defense team, was the originator of the “magic bullet” theory. Albert Jenner, minority counsel during the House impeachment proceedings, had been in charge of looking into conspiracy rumors for the Warren Commission. David Belin, a junior counsel and the commission’s staunchest defender through those years, would be President Ford’s choice as executive director of the Rockefeller Commission that was assigned to scrutinize the CIA’s illegal domestic operations.

  General Alexander Haig, who became Nixon’s chief of staff through the final days, had been the Pentagon’s chief “assistant on all matters pertaining to Cuba” in July 1963. In that capacity, Haig—along with Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the existence of the White House taping system to Senate investigators—had as a primary task the resettlement of the Bay of Pigs prisoners released by Castro, such as Artime. As Charles Colson later told the story, Haig had called him to a meeting in January 1974 and said: “Well, if the President’s going to be impeached, better he go down himself than take the whole intelligence apparatus with him.”

  More than a decade later, I find it remarkable how many of the Watergate players are tied into the Kennedy assassination. They not only escaped justice the first time, but here they are back again. I wonder what else they did in between, what other damage to the country?

  In terms of all the burglarizing, you commit crimes because the end justifies the means, I guess. As long as you achieve the goal, the way you do it doesn’t matter. One job only leads to the next. In 1974 there occurred six unsolved burglaries into Howard Hughes’s offices in only four months: two in Las Vegas, one in an L.A. suburb, one in New York. Another break-in occurred at the Mullen Company’s Washington office. In most of these instances, no papers were reported taken. Then someone made off with all of Hughes’s handwritten memos, hidden away in a block-long two-story building in Hollywood; a federal judge had just ordered some 500 of these memos to be turned over to Maheu.27 At the same time, the Watergate Committee staff had just begun looking into the Maheu-CIA-Mob-exile connections from the early sixties.

  Soon Nixon was out of there. He’d been cutting deals in politics his whole life, with a closet full of skeletons. Over the next couple years, a portion of the CIA’s “family jewels” saw the light of day. As they did, Rosselli, Artime, Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, George de Mohrenschildt and more took whatever they knew about the assassination of JFK to their graves. McCord got out of prison, moved to Colorado, and refused all requests for interviews.

  As for Hunt, the man who spooked everybody, he died in January 2007 at the age of 88. His son, Howard St. John Hunt, then came forward with the story that his father had rejected an offer by rogue CIA agents to participate in the Kennedy assassination. Specifically, Hunt had named LBJ as the conspiracy’s chief organizer. CIA conspirators supposedly included David Phillips, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, David Morales, and fellow Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. All dead and gone, of course. The younger Hunt remembered his mother informing him on November 22, 1963, that Howard was on a “business trip” to Dallas that day. Before he died, Hunt allegedly told his son there was a “French gunman” firing from the grassy knoll.28

  So did Howard Hunt come clean with a deathbed confession? Or was he blowing smoke till the end, continuing to spin a web of disinformation that foisted blame onto others? No mention of Helms. Or his pal Artime. Or his Watergate coconspirator, McCord. I’m not one to give E. Howard Hunt the last word. This much I do know: Whatever hidden knowledge he was carrying, it scared the crap out of both Nixon and the CIA.

  Who took down whom in the end? I’m placing my bet that Nixon was set up to take the fall, because he was meddling too much in the CIA’s business. Nixon’s well-known penchant for paranoia may, in this instance, have gotten the better of him. He had shady dealings with so many people, from Howard Hughes to mobsters, it’s hard to sort out which particular secrets he was trying to protect. But what I’ve tried to show, through the chronology of Watergate, is that there was a whole lot more to the story. This chapter exposes the underbelly of “payback” within the government: I’ve got something on you, so you should know better than to push too far into places I don’t want you to go.

  In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our current system, you have to condone their corruption. I believe most people, when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become. The two parties to me are today no different than joining the Hell’s Angels: Once an Angel, always an Angel. That’s what holds true for Democrats or Republicans—unless you separate from them and join a third party movement, knowing that you’ve broken away and beaten the addiction.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  In an open-minded society, alternatives to the accepted version of events need room to be voiced, without being dismissed out-of-hand as fantasy. This is the lesson of Watergate for our time, where President Nixon may have been more a victim than an orchestrator. This story also leaves us to consider that there’s more than one way to take down a president, a precedent that surfaced again with the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE JONESTOWN MASSACRE

  THE INCIDENT: At Jonestown in Guyana on November 18, 1978, more than 900 people (most of them Americans) committed mass suicide by drinking a “Kool-Aid” laced with cyanide. This followed the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate rumors about Jonestown.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: Cult leader Jim Jones gave the orders, and his “brainwashed” followers did what he asked. Jones then shot himself.

  MY TAKE: The first on-scene investigator determined that the majority of the people at Jonestown were murdered. Jones had longstanding ties to the CIA, and may have been involved in mass “mind control” experimentation.

  “Research in the manipulation of human behavior is considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical, therefore the reputations of professional participants in the MK-ULTRA program are, on occasion, in jeopardy.”

  —Memorandum from CIA Inspector General Lyman

  Kirkpatrick to Richard Helms, August 19631

  Over the years, it’s become a kind of household word aimed at people who join unusual groups: “Oh, you must have taken the Kool-Aid.” It’s not really all that amusing, in fact the reality is pretty tragic—because the reference is to Jonestown. Deep in the jungles of Guyana, on November 18, 1978, an official total of 913 men, women, and children supposedly came forward to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide from paper cups in a mass suicide. They were said to be part of the “brainwashed cult” of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple.

  I was in the midst of my wrestling career at the time. I kept up with the news, but it wasn’t a high priority. With Jonestown, I just knew what we were told—that this was a psychotic preacher who had a bunch of nutcases that went along to find utopia in Guyana, and then things went sour quickly. I did hear how a congressman, Leo Ryan, had flown in to do an investigation of whether U.S. citizens were being abused or held against their will at Jonestown. Then he and four others were shot dead by People’s Temple security forces, before their plane could leave again. I viewed that they were killing the congressman as a desperate move, because he was going to expose them. Then, apparently they felt they would get busted for it, so Jones and most of his followers supposedly did themselves in first.

  When the 30-year anniversary of Jonestown came around, an article appeared in California’s San Mateo Daily Journal. The headline was, “Slain Congressman to be Honored.” Representative Ryan’s onetime aide, William Holsinger, spoke out for the first time at the memorial. He’d been investigating complaints of a Concerned Relatives Group in 1978, and the night it al
l happened, he received a message on his phone that “your meal-ticket just had his brains blown out.” Holsinger wore a bulletproof vest to the congressman’s funeral, and then left San Francisco for good. He said a curious thing in his remarks all these years later: “Whether there was some broader conspiracy and what it might have consisted of, are matters I have determined to leave to future generations.”2

  That raised my eyebrows when I read it. Most of what’s been said about Jonestown still sticks with the “brainwashed cult” idea, but I found that several investigative journalists have come up with leads pointing toward a “broader conspiracy.”3 By the way, the Temple’s assets were estimated at between $26 million and $2 billion.4 The Guyanese press for awhile called it “Templegate,” in reference to all the money that the local government allegedly ran off with from Jonestown.

  Before we get into the strange background of Jim Jones, let’s start with some most curious facts about the event itself. It’s kind of grisly, but here goes. Remember the famous color pictures of the bodies lying all over the compound? Did it strike anybody else as weird that they are all facedown and looking like they’d been carefully arranged? When they were first discovered, the body count started out around 200. But it kept going up. The next day’s papers reported 363 bodies, 82 of them children, and eventually it escalated to 913. The official word was that immediate identification had been difficult because a lot of the adults had been on top of kids. Hmmm ... more than 500 bodies hidden under the first 363?5