by Gerard Colby
Some witnesses in the assassinations investigation were too sick to testify. Others began to die, and not all by natural causes:
*In June 1975, before he could testify, Jack Ruby’s old boss from Chicago, Sam Giancana, was shot to death. Giancana had arranged assassins for the CIA in collaboration with mobsters Santos Trafficante and John Roselli and CIA liaison Robert Maheu.
*In July, Bobby Kennedy’s old foe, Jimmy Hoffa, disappeared.
*In April 1976, Robert Maheu died mysteriously.
*Three months later, following his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, mobster John Roselli, who passed poison received from the CIA to would-be assassins in Havana in 1962, disappeared; ten days later his mutilated body was found floating in a fifty-eight-gallon oil drum in Biscayne Bay off Miami.
*In January 1977, William Pawley, who had worked with King trying to get an acceptable successor for Fulgencio Batista, was found dead of a gunshot wound to his chest in his home near Miami Beach. His death was ruled a suicide; he left behind a note complaining of neurological pain he had endured for a year.25
*In March 1977, the White Russian emigré who had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s closest confidant in Dallas, oil geologist and CIA collaborator George de Mohrenschildt, was found in his home dead of a gunshot wound, just before he was scheduled to speak to an investigator for the House Assassinations Intelligence Committee. He had worried about being assassinated and had installed an alarm system wired to the house’s windows. A tape recorder found near his body had inadvertently recorded the “suicide,” as well as the sound of a bell going off just before the victim allegedly shot himself.
*A week later, Carlos Prio, the former president of Cuba and a leader in the CIA-financed anti-Castro movement, was shot to death before he was to talk to a congressional investigator.
*In November 1977, William Sullivan, once J. Edgar Hoover’s top intelligence officer and head of the Domestic Intelligence Division that supervised the FBI investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination, was also shot to death in a hunting accident.
In early 1977, King also died. He had been suffering for years from a neurological disorder, said to be Parkinson’s disease. His death came a little over a year after the Senate Committee on Intelligence, against Colby’s protests to have King’s and nine other names omitted from its report,26 identified King, Roselli, Trafficante, Maheu, and others as having been being involved in CIA assassination plots. When King died, the U.S. House of Representatives was about to begin its own investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination. King, a key witness to the CIA’s ties to a Cuban exile organization in New Orleans that Lee Harvey Oswald had tried to join, had taken his secrets to the grave.
Nelson, though supposedly the president’s chief investigator of the CIA’s activities, was almost as tight-lipped as King was in death. CIA domestic operations that involved covert deals with Mafia chieftains, assassins, cocaine smugglers in South America, heroin smugglers in Southeast Asia—none was mentioned in Nelson’s report.
Neither was Nelson’s own role as undersecretary of HEW in the early days, when the CIA was just beginning to make HEW and its subagency, the National Institute of Mental Health, its biggest conduits for mind-control experiments in more than eighty hospitals, universities, and psychiatric institutions.
Neither was Nelson’s own contribution to the Pan American Foundation. Included in his list of charitable donations during his confirmation hearing, the foundation was acknowledged as a CIA front, the same CIA front that had been used by King.27
Neither was Nelson’s role during the Eisenhower administration as chairman of the first NSC Special Group that oversaw CIA covert operations, including an assassination plot against China’s premier, Chou En-lai.
And neither, of course, was the part played by Nelson’s IBEC or other companies in coups that were inspired, if not planned, by the CIA in the United States or the undercover work done for the CIA by Nelson’s top IBEC lieutenant, cousin Richard Aldrich.
Yet, surprisingly, Nelson included Indians (specifically members of the American Indian Movement) in his list of those citizens who had been subjected to the CIA’s illegal operations. He did not, however, include missionaries. If he had, and reported on what the CIA was doing with missionaries who worked with tribal peoples, the impact might have forced a reconsideration not only of the purpose of the CIA, but its misuse for private, corporate, ends.
Missionaries, like assassinations, were too hot.
Then it all exploded.
*This $98 million figure was a gross underestimate of the value of the fifteen-building Rockefeller Center complex. Merely a decade later, the Rockefellers paid Columbia University $400 million for the land beneath Rockefeller Center; then, after replacing their private holding company with the Rockefeller Group, a real estate investment trust company that publicly offered shares to outside investors, they were able to get $1.3 billion through a twenty-two-year mortgage on the Center’s twelve original buildings. They expected to cash in on rising real estate values and higher rents from Manhattan’s speculative boom during the Reagan era.
Fortunately for the family fortune, before the boom ended and the Center’s rental leases took a price dive, reducing the property’s value to less than $1 billion, the insistence of the Cousins (the fourth generation) for more access to their fortune forced the sale of 80 percent of the stock of the Rockefeller Group to Japan’s Mitsubishi Estate Company for $1.4 billion. This left Mitsubishi with the $1.3 billion mortgage and the Rockefellers and other investors with 20 percent (worth about $200 million). Through these transactions, the Rockefellers reaped over $2 billion in cash for other investments; this was more than twenty times what J. Richardson Dilworth had told Congress was the worth of the family’s holding in Rockefeller Center.
2 Source: The Foundation Directory (New York: The Foundation Center, 1972), p. 272.
Sources: Charts presented by J. Richardson Dilworth of Rockefeller Family & Associates during testimony on the nomination of Nelson A. Rockefeller to be Vice President of the United States, December 3, 1974; financial records from the Rockefeller Archive Center.
* Hughes’s contribution may have been the cause of Hunt’s Plumbers Unit breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate to confirm or dispel fears that incriminating evidence of Hughes’s illegal campaign donations had been leaked to Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O’Brien, the object of McCord’s illegal wiretap.
*See Appendix B for the names of the commission’s members.
VIII
DAYS OF JUDGMENT
We in this country are, by destiny rather than choice, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient version of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal—and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “Except the Lord keep the city, the Watchman waketh but in vain.”
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
Undelivered speech,
Dallas, November 22, 1963
45
SIL UNDER SIEGE
RELIGIOUS CLOAKS, CIA DAGGERS
William Cameron Townsend watched the controversy over the CIA’s use of missionaries with curiosity and growing alarm. The CIA’s penetration of religious missions, an issue previously overlooked by the media, was now, in 1975, making international headlines.
The story had been building since 1970, when Dr. Eric Wolfe, chair of the American Anthropological Association’s ethics committee, explained how anthropologists had been manipulated through the Chiang Mai Tribal Research Center in northern Thailand, which was funded through the Agency for International Development (AID). He also revealed that American missionary organizations had been drawn into this counterinsurgency operation
as well.
That June, President Nixon’s director of AID, John Hannah, had admitted publicly that AID had funded CIA operations in Laos, and subsequent revelations pointed to CIA-AID collaboration in Ecuador, Uruguay, Thailand, and the Philippines.
These revelations could hurt all missionary efforts, but the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was particularly vulnerable. Cam Townsend had been aggressively pursuing government funding for his Bible translators for decades, first from foreign governments and then from his own government. The amendment to the 1949 Federal Property and Administrative Services Act that allowed religious missions to take surplus U.S. government property abroad had even been called “Townsend’s bill” in some congressional circles. By the 1960s, SIL was receiving a hefty income from AID indirectly through foreign governments that received U.S. foreign aid or directly through AID-funded programs in bilingual education and agricultural development cooperatives. This income was supplemented by surplus military equipment, including helicopters that were retired from Vietnam and donated to SIL. Evangelized pilots of these choppers became soldiers for Christ in the tradition of Dawson Trotman’s Navigators. In Peru, after the nationalization of Standard Oil, the head of the U.S. Embassy’s AID office even became a member of SIL.
Back in Washington, at the urging of Ed Boyer (an official in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s International Education Department and a future board member of SIL’s Jungle Aviation and Radio Service [JAARS]), Cam set up a full-time SIL office to help the Lord get His due. On December 2, 1970, President Nixon gave his seal of approval to expanding Cam’s proposed national Bible Translation Day into a full “Year of Minority Language Groups.” Cam’s nephew, Lorin Griset, used his influence as mayor of Santa Ana with fellow Orange County Republican John Finch, the head of HEW, to get Nixon on board. Billy Graham also helped. Years of lobbying had finally brought Cam a photo opportunity with the president of the United States, along with the gift of a Bible graced with Nixon’s autograph.
But it had all gone downhill since then. Finch lost his job in a cabinet dispute, and SIL lost its inside track with the Oval Office. Then Nixon himself fell. The dam holding back knowledge of high crimes and misdemeanors collapsed, threatening to overwhelm Billy Graham and SIL with public disclosures about Nixon.
All publicists since John D. Rockefeller’s Ivy Lee had known that the way to stop disclosures from happening was to discourage the temptation to probe by attacking unfounded charges. The more outlandish the charge, the easier to discredit, and the wider the chilling ripple factor.
In the heat of Watergate, it was not so easy to do so. Nothing seemed outlandish anymore. In the case of leftists’ charges against missionaries, it became even more troublesome because now it was missionaries who were doing the disclosures. Church leaders, angry that their integrity had been undermined by missionaries’ collaboration with the CIA, began to protest against the political corruption of the Lord’s work and the manipulation by spies of naive clergy. There was a pragmatic aspect, too: Years of work to build trust among peoples abroad were being threatened with destruction. And there was also genuine horror of the violence that had been unleashed in Vietnam and Chile in the name of the Christian struggle for God against the godless.
When Rockefeller and President Ford both spoke of the coup in Chile as being good for the Chilean people, outrage echoed in churches across the United States. Cam remained silent, sticking with the tried and true Romans 13:1. But other missionaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, spoke out. Sixteen mission leaders issued a statement in October 1974 disassociating themselves from Ford’s statement and calling for a full airing of the CIA’s crimes, for prosecutions when these crimes were apparent, and for a stronger law prohibiting covert activities that were designed to destabilize the elected governments of other nations. Such “destabilizations” were condemned as “blatantly incompatible with the ideals we hold as Americans and as Christians. Gangster methods undermine world order and promote widespread hatred of the United States. Watergate has shown that such methods, once accepted, will eventually be turned against our own citizens.”
“I have personally witnessed the aftermath of CIA intervention in more than one country,” said one of the signatories, Father William Davis, national director of the Jesuit Social Ministries, “and know it to be a legacy of fear, hatred, oppression and even death.”1 Davis emphasized that at issue were national policy and its potential for corrupting goodwill and souls. “In addition to performing some useful function, the CIA contains many good and responsible people. I have known a few over the years. But, obviously, good people can be, and are, used for evil ends by those bent on retaining power, or Vietnam and Watergate have taught us nothing.”
In New York, the Rockefeller-funded National Council of Churches convened a meeting to discuss the integrity of missions in the face of the CIA’s covert actions. Allegations of the CIA’s manipulation, and even infiltration, of missionary ranks now became detailed reports. John Marks, former State Department analyst, decided to investigate. In August 1975, articles began to appear in which Marks was quoted making startling revelations.2 The stories from Vietnam of a Catholic Relief Services worker who was really a military intelligence officer and of a bishop who was on the CIA payroll were hot enough. But Marks also repeated a story told in 1970 of some $10 million funneled through AID, half of it from the CIA, to finance the anti-Allende work of a Jesuit in Chile, Roger Vekemans. Other CIA money went to a priest in Colombia, to turn a radio literacy campaign among the rural poor into a Cold War propaganda machine. And Catholic nuns, believing they were fighting illiteracy, unwittingly turned over to the CIA details on people’s lives taken from census data they collected.3
The worst cases came from Bolivia. One Protestant missionary informed on labor unions, rural cooperatives, and the political activities of citizens to the CIA; another provided the CIA with names of people he suspected of being communists. His replacement in 1973 refused to cooperate, but the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer would not take no for an answer. Any missionaries who would not cooperate would join the list of suspects. The Bolivian government’s “Plan of Action Against the Church” was leaked to the clergy, reportedly by an alarmed Catholic official in Banzer’s own regime. The CIA had pledged to inform on American priests, and in forty-eight hours two CIA officers compiled complete dossiers on certain priests, including the names of their friends and contacts abroad.
Maryknoll Father Charles Curry sent a copy of the Banzer plan to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Such alleged cooperation has ominous implications,” he wrote the chairman, Frank Church, “especially when viewed in the light of widespread and violent repression taking place in Bolivia today.”4
“Arrests [of priests],” the plan advised, “should be made preferably in the countryside, on deserted streets or late at night.”
BIG BROTHER IN BOLIVIA
SIL took another stand in the name of Christ: collaboration. SIL’s Donald Burns was working under an AID contract to design and facilitate data collection for CENACO, Banzer’s national AID-financed computerized data agency.* Data collected from CENACO was not protected from abuse by Banzer’s secret police the way U.S. census data are protected by privacy statutes in the United States.
SIL’s official sponsor in La Paz, the Ministry of Education and Culture, set up an Academy of Educational Development with AID money to carry out “socio-linguistic and education research” under Burns’s direction. The targeted populations were Quechua Indians who lived in the Andean valleys and Aymará Indians who lived in the Andean highlands. The politically sophisticated project noted the “great disparity in the distribution of the nation’s income … and its relationship to the growing problem of migration from rural areas either to peripheral slum dwellings in the towns and cities or to neighboring countries, bringing social instability affecting the youth.”5
This situation, of forced poverty in the Andes causing migration down to overc
rowded coastal cities, was nothing new. What was new was how blatantly political intelligence was included in a project involving a top SIL official. The research in rural communities included “linguistic profiles” of “patterns of language usage and preference” with parameters defined by age, sex, and the “social category” of individuals, whether they had a formal education and were parents or children, as well as whether there were “social and political elements” inside or “outside” their community to which they had ties.6
Family and community aspirations, including “economic” aspirations, were incorporated into the study, a crucial piece of intelligence for the Banzer regime in developing its ability to gauge the political temperament of Aymará Indian miners. Through such “psychology research” and “socio-economic research,” the project was designed to “provide a basis for establishing specific policies and designing special rural community development and educational programs for national integration.”
The data base on the Indians would then be directly keyed into CENACO’s computer through a terminal at the AID-funded academy’s offices. The distribution of the data and the resulting analyses would not necessarily be confined to Bolivia. The project envisioned consultation with non-Bolivian linguists outside the academy, “to assure compatibility of this proposed research with worldwide socio-linguistic research efforts.” Among those specifically mentioned as offering such foreign expertise were Dr. Ted Haney (“Specialist in Audience Sampling”) of the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company of Redwood City, California.7 Haney, long a promoter of the advance of American Christian Fundamentalism into Southeast Asia, was the world’s largest multilingual dispenser of Fundamentalist radio programs. His cofounder of Eastern Broadcast, John Broger, was now the Pentagon’s director of information and education.8
