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“THE DEEPEST COVER STORY of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization.” So said the Bulletin of the Federation of American Scientists some years ago. It was a true statement then, and it is even more accurate today. At no time was this more evident than during the Vietnam War years.
Have you ever wondered why the CIA was created, when such an organization had not existed before in this country, and have you ever tried to discover what specifically are the “duties” and “responsibilities” that are assigned to this agency by law? Or why it is that this “quiet intelligence arm of the President,” as President Harry S. Truman has called it, and its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, were the lead brigades on the worldwide frontier of what was the Cold War?
In the real world—where more than six trillion dollars have been spent on military manpower, military equipment, and facilities since WWII ended in 1945—we discovered that the major battles of that Cold War were fought every day by Third World countries and terrorists. At the same time, the enormous military might of both world powers proved to be relatively ineffectual, because those multimegaton hydrogen bomb weapons are too monstrous, and too uncontrollably life threatening, to have any reasonable strategic value.
The existence of these multimegaton hydrogen bombs has so drastically changed the Grand Strategy of world powers that, today and for the future, that strategy is being carried out by the invisible forces of the CIA, what remains of the KGB, and their lesser counterparts around the world.
Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in charge of this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something—although our leaders do not know precisely what to do or how to do it—creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses.
This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Fuller noted also, “Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers.”
The power elite is not a group from one nation or even of one alliance of nations. It operates throughout the world and no doubt has done so for many, many centuries.
These leaders are influenced by the persuasion of a quartet of the greatest propaganda schemes ever put forth by man:
1. The concept of “real property,” a function of “colonialism” that began with the circumnavigation of Earth by Magellan’s ships in 1520. A “doctrine of discovery and rights of conquest” was described by John Locke in his philosophy of natural law.
2. The population theory of Malthus.
3. Darwin’s theory of evolution, as enhanced by the concept of the survival of the fittest.
4. Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy that is, that God throws the dice, and similar barriers to the real advancement of science and technology today.
The first of these schemes derives from the fact that the generally accepted “flat earth” was, all of a sudden, proved to be a sphere by the voyage of Magellan’s ships around the world. It is not so much that certain educated men had not already theorized that Earth was round, but that with the return of the first ship Victoria the expedition’s wealthy financial backers had visual evidence that ships could circumnavigate the world and that because they could, Earth had to be a sphere. Being a sphere, it therefore had to be a finite object, with a finite—that is, limited—surface area. With this awakening the ideas of world trade and related colonial proprietary rights were born.
It may be postulated that this single bit of physical awareness brought about the greatest change in the mind of man since the dawn of creation. Before Magellan’s time, mankind had simply accepted as self-evident the fact that there was always more property “out there” over the horizon and that it was not essential that anyone think seriously about the ownership of land, particularly open land. This general idea ended with the return of the good ship Victoria.
From that date on (circa A.D. 1520), the powerful rulers of the seafaring countries assumed the ownership of all real property in those discovered lands, and the natural resources on that property became one of the driving forces of mankind. One of the most important occupations of man during later years was that of surveyor. George Washington was a surveyor, outlining vast unknown tracts of land deeded by the King to his favorites, as though the King, and no one else—least of all those who inhabited these tracts—owned them. This paternalistic view of the right to the natives’ real property totally disregarded the fact that most of the new land discovered “out there” was, and had been, already populated by others for millennia. The power centers of that period were taking over the real property of the world—no matter who was on it or who had been living there—using little more than the surveyor’s chain, the missionary’s cross, and the explorers’ gun.
By 1600, Queen Elizabeth had founded the East India Company, which was given charter rights to create proprietary colonies anywhere on Earth. During those long years when the British fleet maintained the global British Empire, the East India Company was the structural mechanism of the most powerful men on Earth.
The East India Company founded Haileybury College in England to train its young employees in business, the military arts, and the special skills of religious missionaries. By 1800 it became necessary to initiate the task of making an Earth inventory, that is, to find out what was out there in the way of natural resources, population, land, and other tangible assets. The first man assigned the official responsibility for this enormously vital job was the head of the Department of Economics of Haileybury College.
This man was Thomas Malthus, who, in 1805, postulated the idea that humanity is multiplying its numbers at a geometric rate while increasing its life-support capability at only an arithmetic rate. As a result, it has been universally concluded by the power elite that only a relatively few humans are destined to survive successfully in generations to come. The Malthusian theory thus provides a rationalization for the necessity of somehow getting rid of large numbers of people, any people, in any way—even genocide. With the Malthusian theory as the power elite’s philosophical guide, this becomes an acceptable objective, because, they believe, Earth will never be able to support the progeny of so many anyhow. From this point of view, genocide—then as now—is accepted as all but inevitable. Who cares and why be concerned?
The third theory fortifies this approach further. Darwin persuades them to believe that because they survive, at no matter what cost to others and to Earth, they must therefore be—by definition—the fittest; and conversely, because they know they are the chosen, that is, the fittest, they are Earth’s assured survivors, fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon.
The fourth, Heisenberg’s nuclear age theory, provides an excuse for their errors and confusion. Certainly, if physical science is found to be indeterminate, economics can be, and so can everything else. Let God throw the dice, and we’ll take it from there. The one caution, the power elite later reasoned, was that new scientific discoveries and new technology must never be permitted to overwhelm the status quo as precipitously as the hydrogen bomb had done.
Each of these concepts has been conveniently contrived to fit the occasion; each became the type of theory that is useful at certain times and in certain cases, but can never be proved and in most cases can easily be superseded by a more modern technology, a development of the science involved, or an awareness of the human rights that have been abrogated by the application of these rules of the powerful.
From this point of view, warfare, and the preparation for war, is an absolute necessity for the welfare of the state and for control of population masses, as has been so ably documented in that remarkable novel by Leonard Lewin1Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace and attributed by Lewin to “the Special Study Group in 1966,” an organization whose existence was so highly classified that there is no record, to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of the government or private life they were connected.
This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare—the only kind of “real” war—got bigger and “better” as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs.
Not long after that great war, the world leaders were faced suddenly with the reality of a great dilemma. At the root of this dilemma was the new fission-fusion-fission H-bomb. Is it some uncontrollable Manichean device, or is it truly a weapon of war?
These leaders have realized now that use of the thermonuclear, fission-fusion-fission type of megaton-plus bomb will destroy mankind, nature, and Earth. Therefore, they have asked, must they abandon the historic madness of all-out uncontrolled warfare, or, in its stead, can they discover and create some alternative to war that will perpetuate nationalism and maintain national sovereignty?
Since the dawn of that first realization, after the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the H-bomb has emerged from the laboratories and has been used to atomize whole islands in the Pacific and whole chunks of the landmass of arctic peninsulas. It can be placed in the nose cone of a rocket-powered intercontinental ballistic missile and delivered, in minutes, to any place on Earth. Or, perhaps even more dangerously, it can be fitted into the trunk of an automobile and parked in an underground garage in any city in the world. A simple telephone beeper rigged to the bomb’s initiator will activate that nuclear explosive and pulverize any city of any size and any location.
Such knowledge is sufficient. The dilemma is now fact. There can no longer be a classic or traditional war, at least not the all-out, go-for-broke-type warfare there has been down through the ages, a war that leads to a meaningful victory for one side and abject defeat for the other. Witness what has been called warfare in Korea, and Vietnam, and the later, more limited experiment with new weaponry called the Gulf War in Iraq.
In his remarkable book Counsel to the President, Clark Clifford, former secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson, very frankly stated the problem that handicapped the military forces in Vietnam: “What was our objective in Vietnam?”
Earlier, in a quandary about what President Johnson himself had meant in his speech of March 31, 1968, Secretary Clifford asked in the book: “What had he intended? Had he deliberately sacrificed his political career in order to seek an end to the war, or had he put forward a series of half measures designed to shore up domestic support, at a lower cost, without changing our objective in Vietnam? Did he know what his objective was?”
These are absolutely alarming questions, coming as they do from a man who had been an adviser to presidents from Truman to Johnson during the most challenging years of the Cold War. He knew that we had been in a war in Vietnam since 1945; yet at the very time that he was the secretary of defense, in 1968, and when American forces in Vietnam had been increased to 550,000 men, he writes that neither he, the President, nor any member of the administration knew what the objective of this country or its military forces was in Vietnam. No army can win any war without a valid and tangible objective.
Then, during a meeting in the White House on May 21, 1968, of the President; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; the military adviser to the President, Walt Rostow; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earle Wheeler; and himself, Clark Clifford made this amazing statement: “With the limitations now placed on our military—no invasion of the north, no mining of the harbors, no invasion of the sanctuaries—we have no real plans or chance to win the war.”
There are, in the academic terms of a Clausewitz or other scholars of the evolution of warfare, nine principles of warfare; and paramount among these is that of the “objective.” What possible chance is there for victory when generals have not been given a clear description of the national objective for which they and their men must fight and die and in its place are given a list of incredible limitations?
Because of this failure of leadership at the top, America sacrificed 58,000 men and spent no less than $220 billion. No wonder Clark Clifford and his associates were confounded by what they had inherited, from prior administrations, in the name of a “war” in faraway Indochina. This is one reason why it is so important to clarify that what was called a “war” during the first twenty years (1945—65) of this conflict was actually a massive series of paramilitary activities under the operational control of the CIA.
This is what the hydrogen bomb and the clandestine services have done to the art of war. Under these circumstances, no commander today can be given an objective such that if he begins to achieve it, and therefore appears to be on the road to victory, he will force his enemy to resort to that weapon of last resort, the hydrogen bomb.
Our six presidents of the Vietnam War era, 1945—75, were faced with this dilemma. None of them, or any member of their staffs, have expressed it better than Clark Clifford in his book, or Gen. Victor H. Krulak in First to Fight, his most important military book.
Today the power elite can see no assured survival for themselves and their class if hydrogen bombs are utilized in warfare. Up until the end of WWII, this power elite on both sides of the fray, who exist above the war, have always been assured of survival. In any war in the future in which there is an exchange of H-bombs, there can be no assured Armageddon-type survival for the chosen, for mankind, for all of nature, or for Earth itself.
Under such circumstances, since survival is the strongest drive in man, what form can war take, given that it is viewed as a necessity and that the men of this power elite have that final choice to make? This question has given rise to a concept of a controlled or limited type of warfare and has been widely discussed within such groups as Prince Bernhard’s “Bilderbergers” in Europe and by their NATO friends in SHAPE Headquarters (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe). As the hydrogen bomb has increased in power and been given a world-around capability by rocket-powered ICBMs, or worse still, been put in the hands of terrorists, even this contrived “limited war” concept has been dropped. As a result, the present strategy is based upon what has been known as the Cold War.
Faced with this dilemma and with their continuing belief in the contrived theories of Malthus, Darwin, and Heisenberg, world leaders turned—to some degree, even before the end of WWII—to an alternative, all-new type of invisible war to be waged under the cloak of propaganda, black budgets, and secrecy. They called it the Cold War. Before that contrivance ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had already cost more than six trillion dollars and millions of lives. Perhaps, as Mao Tse-tung has said, “It is man’s last war, because it will never end or ever result in victory for anyone.” It will only assure the attrition of manpower and matériel, and it will dangerously pollute Earth, to a point that will be beyond the control of mankind and nature to reverse and control.
On the other hand, it was a very real killing war. Its battles loomed everywhere, and its dead were counted in the millions. More of the casualities were noncombatants than uniformed soldiers. It was the Secret War, the Invisible War. From the point of view of those in power, it was a welcome substitute. It consumed the population and the product of the munitions makers and was reasonably controllable on the side of the offense.
But the Cold War as an alternative to the real thing was a failure from a military point of view. For one thing, there were no clear-cut victories; nor could there have been any. We have witnessed the deterioration of the concept of national sovereignty because of it and for such other reasons as the existence of global communications, satellite networks, international finance, and the enormous power of transnational business enterprises. We have seen the rise of the strange, nonmilitary power of the small nations of the Third World. The whole scheme of warfare is being turned upside down by bands of terrorists who defy the great powers. They cannot be controlled with H-bombs and modern armies. Terrorism makes a mockery of “Star Wars.” If the tactics of terrorism were to be employed in strength, it would create a situation that no one could handle. The greater the potential victory, the closer the war would move to the nuclear threshold.
This is why the American military leaders in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf were not permitted to win. They were told only to “kill” and to run up the “body count,” but not to fight a real war, because the closer they got to an assured victory in Vietnam, the closer they would have been to the nuclear threshold. Our military leaders were never permitted to approach that barrier.2
Gen. Douglas MacArthur had to accept that strategic fact on the south bank of the Yalu River in Korea. Gen. Creighton Abrams learned it when he proposed to President Johnson that he be authorized to capture Hanoi instead of maintaining a perimeter around the Cercle Sportif club in Saigon. And now the terrorists have learned it and use the knowledge to defy everyone, the big powers and their lesser neighbors alike.
This is why, even before the end of World War II, the newly structured bipolar confrontation between the world of Communism and the West resulted in the employment of enormous intelligence agencies that had the power, invisibly, to wage underground warfare, economic and well as military, anywhere—including methods of warfare never before imagined. These conflicts had to be tactically designed to remain short of the utilization of the H-bomb by either side. There can never be victories in such wars, but tremendous loss of life could occur, and there is the much-desired consumption and attrition of trillions of dollars’, and rubles’, worth of war equipment.
One objective of this book is to discuss these new forces. It will present an insider’s view of the CIA story and provide comparisons with the intelligence organizations—those invisible forces—of other countries. To be more realistic with the priorities of these agencies themselves, more will be said about operational matters than about actual intelligence gathering as a profession.
This subject cannot be explored fully without a discussion of assassination. Since WWII, there has been an epidemic of murders at the highest level in many countries. Without question the most dynamic of these assassinations was the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but JFK was just one of many in a long list that includes bankers, corporate leaders, newsmen, rising political spokesmen, and religious leaders. The ever-present threat of assassination seriously limits the number of men who would normally attempt to strive for positions of leadership, if for no other reason than that they could be singled out for murder at any time. This is not a new tactic, but it is one that has become increasingly utilized in pressure spots around the world.
It is essential to note that there are two principal categories of intelligence organizations and that their functions are determined generally by the characteristics of the type of government they serve—not by the citizens of the government, but by its leaders.
Under totalitarian or highly centralized nondemocratic regimes, the intelligence organization is a political, secret service with police powers. It is designed primarily to provide personal security to those who control the authority of the state against all political opponents, foreign and domestic. These leaders are forced to depend upon these secret elite forces to remain alive and in power. Such an organization operates in deep secrecy and has the responsibility for carrying out espionage, counterespionage, and pseudoterrorism. This methodology is as true of Israel, Chile, or Jordan as it has been of the Soviet Union.
The second category of intelligence organization is one whose agents are limited to the gathering and reporting of intelligence and who have no police functions or the power to arrest at home or abroad. This type of organization is what the CIA was created to be; however, it does not exist. Over the decades since the CIA was created, it has acquired more sinister functions. All intelligence agencies, in time, tend to develop along similar lines. The CIA today is a far cry from the agency that was created in 1947 by the National Security Act. As President Harry S. Truman confided to close friends, the greatest mistake of his administration took place when he signed that National Security Act of 1947 into law. It was that act which, among other things it did, created the Central Intelligence Agency.3
During WWII the four Great Powers—the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union—opposed the Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Enormous military and economic forces, on each side, were locked together in the greatest armed conflict in history. The Russians alone suffered more than 20 million casualties. In June 1944, I flew an air force transport aircraft from Tehran to the vicinity of Kiev in the Ukraine. I never saw such widespread destruction of cities and towns. The great city of Rostov was absolutely leveled. One would think that as a result of the enormity of this combined struggle, such a union of forces, welded in the heat of World War II, would remain joined forever.
However, even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, we began to hear the first rumblings of the Cold War. The Office of Strategic Services, and particularly its agents Frank Wisner in Bucharest and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, nurtured the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union. “Rejoin” is the proper word in this case. It was the Dulles-affiliated New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell that had refused to close its offices in Nazi Germany after the start of WWII in 1939, even while Great Britain and France were locked in a losing struggle with Hitler’s invading forces. Therefore, the Dulles OSS “intelligence contacts” in Nazi Germany during the war were for the most part German business associates with whom he was acquainted.
On August 23, 1944, the Romanians accepted Soviet surrender terms, and in Bucharest the OSS rounded up Nazi intelligence experts and their voluminous Eastern European intelligence files and concealed them among a trainload of 750 American POWs who were being quickly evacuated from the Balkans via Turkey. Once in “neutral” Turkey, the train continued to a planned destination at a site on the Syrian border, where it was stopped to permit the transfer of Nazis and POWs to a fleet of U.S. Air Force transport planes for a flight to Cairo.
I was the chief pilot of that flight of some thirty aircraft and was stunned by the discovery of two things I would never have suspected: (1) A number of the Americans had had one or both legs amputated at the knee by their Balkan captors, solely for the purpose of keeping them immobile (the plane I flew had airline seats rather than canvas “bucket” seats, and the men on my plane had lost one or two legs in that barbaric manner), and (2) concealed among these POWs were a number of Balkan Nazi intelligence specialists who were being taken out of the Balkans ahead of the Soviet armies by the OSS.
As far as I know, this was one of the first visible clues to the emergence of the “East-West” Cold War structure, even while we and the Russians were still allies and remained partners in the great struggle against the Germans.
It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944—to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.
I was only a pilot on that flight, and in no way involved in the diplomatic intricacies of that era, but I have always wondered whose decision it had been, back in mid-1944, a year before the end of World War II, to override the present alliances and to initiate a split between the West and our wartime partner the Soviet Union while we were still firm allies.
This first fissure in the wartime structure was evidence of a long-range view of Grand Strategy from a level above that of the leaders we knew in public. The power elite had already set plans in motion for the post—World War II period that we have known as the Cold War. This is one of the best examples I have found revealing the work of the power elite, as distinct from that of the men who are the visible national leaders. As World War II came to a close, the long-range Cold War plan was already in existence, filling the vacuum created by the end of that conflict.
That long-range decision had to have originated from a center of power above the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin level, because it ignored the World War II alliance represented by those three wartime leaders and went its own independent way.
As a result of a masterful propaganda campaign begun by a select group of Nazis, most of us have been led to believe that it was the British who first recognized the Communist threat in Eastern Europe, that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the Communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe, and that he did this after the end of World War II. The facts prove otherwise.
Churchill did not coin the memorable phrase; he merely embellished it and exploited it. The true story follows.
Just before the close of WWII in Europe, when the Russian army and the combined American and British armies were rushing to meet each other over the bodies of a defeated German army in a devastated country, the German foreign minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk made a speech in Berlin, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, in which he used the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron Curtain” in precisely the same context repeated later by Churchill in Missouri. Then, on May 12, just three days after the German surrender had taken place, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, who had become President one month earlier after the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron Curtain” had come down to conceal everything that was going on within the Russian sphere of Eastern Europe.4
This was a clever thrust by the old master, along the road to widening the tensions and splitting the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. This deft move by Churchill planted the seed of a potent idea in the mind of the new president, early and at a most opportune time.
Nearly one year later, on March 4 and 5, 1946, Truman and Churchill traveled on the President’s special train from Washington to Missouri, where, at Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill delivered those historic lines: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
Most historical publications and media sources would have us believe it was this memorable occasion that marked the end of the wartime alliance with the USSR and the beginning of the Cold War. But, as we have seen, this was not so. The Grand Strategy decision to create a new bipolar world had already been made in 1944—45,5 and the partners in this new global power structure were to be the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, three of the WWII victors and two of the vanquished.
The great array of forces of WWII were rapidly disbanded by President Truman in 1945. He disbanded the OSS on October 1, 1945, and shortly thereafter, on January 22, 1946, he issued a directive creating a new Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to be jointly staffed and funded by the Departments of State, War, and Navy. During these postwar years, a massive new propaganda line trumpeted across the land that the United States represents the world of free enterprise and that it would destroy socialism.
For this purpose, this new type of warfare was born, and its continuing battles were to be waged in Third World countries by a secret and invisible army. The OSS, the CIG, and later the CIA constituted the advance guard of that secret army in the United States.
Although the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union during WWII had been welded in the heat of battle, it had never been on too firm a footing. This was especially true of its structure in the Far East. The Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was as much a dictator as either Hitler or Mussolini. He was our ally, and his greatest wartime threat came from the Communist faction under Mao Tse-tung, who was allied ideologically with Stalin. As the fortunes of war began to shift from Europe to the Far East during the latter part of 1943, it became essential that there be a “Grand Strategy” meeting among the great Allied powers. They had never met together.
In this climate, President Roosevelt maneuvered to have Chiang Kai-shek join him in Cairo for a November 22—26, 1943, meeting with Churchill. Roosevelt wanted to create the atmosphere of a “Big Four” by placing Chiang on the world stage. Chiang appeared in Cairo, along with his attractive and powerful wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek—née May Ling Soong, daughter of Charlie Jones Soong and sister of T. V. Soong, at that time the wealthiest man in the world. Few pictures produced during WWII have been more striking than those of Chiang and Roosevelt “apparently” joking with each other on one side and an “apparently” convivial Churchill and Madame Chiang smiling together on the other.
As a result of this conference, the public learned that Chiang had promised to increase Chinese support of British and American plans to sweep through Burma to open a new, and more practical, road via Burma to China and that the United States would base units of its new giant B-29 bombers at the front in the China-Burma-India theater for direct attacks upon the Japanese, via bases on the mainland of China.
With the close of the Cairo Conference, the Churchill and Roosevelt delegations flew to Tehran for their own first meeting with Marshal Stalin. This much was released to the public. A fact that was not released, and that even to this day has rarely been made known, is that Chiang and the Chinese delegation were also present at the Tehran Conference of November 28—December 1, 1943.
As noted, the Big Four alliance was “jerry-rigged” at best. There were many strategic matters that had to be resolved. With the agreement by the West to invade France a matter of priority, these other matters involved plans for the defeat of Japan. First of all, Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan once Germany surrendered. In return, he agreed to help Chiang by speaking to his friend Mao Tse-tung about relaxing military pressures against Chiang’s Nationalist Army from that front in China. In fact, only one week after the Allies had invaded Normandy, Mao Tse-tung made a rare public pronouncement that he would aid Chiang in his fight against Japan. In other words, Roosevelt and Churchill had lived up to their promises made in Tehran, and Joe Stalin had lived up to his.
These agreements have become public, but others that have had an enormous impact upon Far East developments since WWII have not. First of all, most historians doubt that Chiang and his wife actually attended the conference in Tehran. I can confirm that they did, because I was the pilot of the plane that flew Chiang’s delegation to Tehran. (Chiang and his wife traveled either with Roosevelt or in another U.S. military aircraft.)
During these important meetings, plans for the future of Southeast Asia were discussed, and many of the developments that we have witnessed from 1945 to 1965 undoubtedly had their origins in Cairo and Tehran. They were not simply social gatherings because Madame Chiang was there; more likely, because she was there, much more important business was discussed than might have occurred otherwise. Again we witness the ways of the power elite—and not necessarily those of the nominal leaders, who so often are no more than their puppets.
Of interest to our story about Vietnam, it will be noted:
At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek both approved Roosevelt’s proposal for a trusteeship for Indochina, but Churchill was vehemently against the idea. Roosevelt said he told Churchill that Chiang Kai-shek did not want either to assume control over Indochina or to be given responsibility for administering a trusteeship in Indochina.
Churchill replied, “Nonsense,” to which Roosevelt retorted, “Winston, this is something which you are just not able to understand. You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just do not understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it. A new period has opened in the world’s history, and you will have to adjust to it.”6
Sometime during the next year, 1944, Roosevelt added, on this subject: “The British would take land anywhere in the world even if it were only a rock or sandbar.”7
The reader should note the special significance of this exchange in Tehran as it pertains to the “real property” propaganda scheme mentioned above. As Roosevelt confirmed, this has been a paramount driving force of British foreign policy since the days of Queen Elizabeth and the founding of the East India Company during the century following Magellan’s voyage and the return of the ship Victoria with the proof that Earth was, in fact, a sphere with a finite surface and fixed distribution of the wealth of its real property and natural resources.
This is an unusually important bit of history. The Roosevelt family, and especially the Delanos, have owed their wealth to the old “China trade.” They were well aware of the work of the British East India Company in the Far East since A. D 1600. President Roosevelt was right when he said to Churchill, “You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood.”
Once the world leaders and great financiers of that earlier period realized that the surface of Earth was finite, and therefore limited in area, and that the natural resources of Earth were limited, too, they began immediately to “stake out their claims” on all the land they could grab, regardless of whether or not it was already inhabited. As the years progressed, they came to believe that “they had the right.” Evidence of the belief in this “right” exists to this day—witness Vietnam and the continuing Kurdish problem in the Middle East, where recently created borders have left the ancient Kurds with no homeland of their own.
Roosevelt, who understood this concept well as a result of his own family’s China Trade connections, emphasized a point that he knew to be true: the centuries of belief on the part of British leadership, among others, that the territories they “discovered” (despite the fact that the indigenous population may have been there for thousands of years) belonged to them. Churchill gave evidence that this same East India belief in the proprietary colony was still alive when he and the other leaders discussed postwar plans for Southeast Asia. He felt perfectly comfortable making such colonialist decisions about these countries, with or without their consent.
This driving force continues. When oil is found in the Middle East, it is controlled by the petroleum companies. When gold is found in South Africa, it is controlled by corporate mining interests. And, if such things of value cannot be controlled by direct colonization, they are controlled by an equally powerful and oppressive economic force called the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. In the process, genocide is practiced regularly to limit “excesses” and to preserve Earth for the “fittest.” More than anyone else, Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this characteristically “British instinct,” and when confronted with the grave issue of “postwar colonialism” at the meeting of the “Big Four” in Tehran, he spoke boldly to Churchill—in front of the Chinese, who had suffered so much from the East India Company mentality, and before the Russians, who had suffered so much from British economic power after World War I.
That was truly a momentous discussion in an unequaled setting, as reported in one of this government’s own publications. Why hasn’t more been written about this story, and why hasn’t the simple fact that Chiang and his influential wife, May Ling Soong, were there in Tehran to witness this drama between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt been included in history books of the time?
Churchill never forgot, and never forgave, Roosevelt for this exchange. During the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, the subject of “trusteeships” for various British, French, and Dutch colonies came up again. When the heads of state (Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt) met during that session, Churchill was reported to have “exploded,” declaring: “I absolutely disagree. I will not have one scrap of British territory flung into that arena. . . as long as every bit of land over which the British flag flies is to be brought back into the dock, I shall object as long as I live.”8
Before departing from this subject, I should add a brief personal account that ties together these two most unusual stories. As I was flying the Chinese delegation from Cairo to Tehran in a VIP Lockheed Lodestar, I had to land at the airport in Habbaniya, Iraq, for fuel. While we were on the ground, an air force B-25 arrived. The pilot, Capt. Leon Gray, was a friend of mine, and with him as copilot was Lt. Col. Elliott Roosevelt. They were both from an aerial reconnaissance unit in Algiers.
During this refueling interlude, I introduced the Chinese to Elliott and his pilot. Elliott told us that his father had invited him to attend the conference because he wanted him to meet Marshal Joseph Stalin. This meeting in Tehran between Elliott and Stalin became part of a most unusual incident that took place only a few years later.
As reported in Parade magazine on February 9, 1986, Elliott Roosevelt wrote that he had visited Stalin in 1946 for an interview. This had reminded him of something quite extraordinary that had occurred at the time of President Roosevelt’s sudden death less than two months after the Yalta Conference.
At that time, 1945, Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko had been directed by Stalin to view the remains of the dead President, but Mrs. Roosevelt had denied that request several times.
While Elliott was with Stalin in 1946, this subject arose again. According to Elliott Roosevelt, this is what Stalin said:
“When your father died, I sent my ambassador with a request that he be allowed to view the remains and report to me what he saw. Your mother refused. I have never forgiven her.”
“But why?” Elliott asked.
“They poisoned your father, of course, just as they have tried repeatedly to poison me. Your mother would not allow my representative to see evidence of that. But I know. They poisoned him!”
“‘They’? Who are “they’?” Elliott asked.
“The Churchill gang!” Stalin roared. “They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me. The Churchill gang!”
One of the best-kept and least-discussed secrets of early Cold War planning took place sometime before the surrender of Japan. It had a great impact upon the selection of Korea and Indochina as the locations of the early “Cold War” hostilities between the “Communists” and the “anti-Communists.”
Despite the terrific damage done to mainland Japan by aerial bombardment, even before the use of atomic bombs, the invasion of Japan had been considered to be an essential prelude to victory and to “unconditional” surrender. Planning for this invasion had been under way for years. As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for this operation, supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island.
Then, with the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war matériel was reloaded onto those ships. I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new matériel was being returned to the States.
His response was direct and surprising: “Hell, no! They ain’t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina.”
In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first battles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. military units in those two regions beginning in 1950 and 1965—yet that is precisely what had been planned, and it is precisely what happened. Who made that decision back in 1943—45? Who selected Syngman Rhee and Ho Chi Minh to be our new allies as early as mid-1945?
This is another one of those windows that permits us to see that some decision had to have been made in some detail by the power elite; yet there is absolutely no record of who made the decisions and for what purpose. Such action is rarely, if ever, proved by positive testimony. In such instances, circumstances bear more compelling witness than proof gained from other sources. As the years have passed, we have witnessed the proof. The U.S. involvement in what later became known as the Vietnam War began on the very day of the Japanese surrender, September 2, 1945. We have seen the remainder of the scenario unfold over the years.
In 1945, OSS units working with Syngman Rhee in Korea and with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam had set up and coordinated these enormous shipments of equipment into those two Japanese-devastated countries. Those shipments forecast that in these two locales would be fought the two greatest conflicts of the Cold War to date and that both would be fought “Cold War style,” without a military objective and to no victorious conclusion. If, and when, other such conflicts occur, they will necessarily follow the same pattern and will reach similar conclusions, as we have seen more recently in the “Gulf War.”
By the end of WWII the great financial powers of the Western world, aided by their omnipotent Wall Street lawyers, had decided it was time to create a new world power center of transnational corporations and, in the process, to destroy the Soviet Union and socialism. To achieve this enormous objective they chose as their principle driving force the covert power and might of the CIA and its invisible allies.
They began this move cautiously. During 1947, the Congress worked on legislative language that would establish a new National Security Council (NSC), a new Department of Defense (DOD) with a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) structure, and separate departments of the army, navy, and air force. Almost as an afterthought, the National Security Act of 1947 provided for the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency.
There was much opposition to this concept. The United States had never before had, in peacetime, a full-fledged intelligence agency operating in the international arena. Traditionally, there were intelligence organizations in the army, navy, FBI, and Treasury and State departments; but these were all specialist staffs designed to perform the work required for the functional support of their various masters. Furthermore, the work of these traditional organizations was almost always limited to pure intelligence and did not intrude into the area of “fun and games,” or clandestine operations.
Therefore, when the language of the National Security Act of 1947 was drafted—primarily as written by that most gifted lawyer-statesman Clark Clifford—it was designed to calm the waters. It was the intent of the sponsors of this legislation to have the CIA created, no matter what the language of the law contained, in order to get over the threshold. They knew that no matter what was written into the law, the CIA, under a cloak of secrecy, could be manipulated to do everything that was requested of it later.
The law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Truman created this Central Intelligence Agency and placed it under the direction of the National Security Council. The agency’s statutory authority is contained in Title 50 U.S.C. Section 403(d). To facilitate the creation of the agency, its expressed legal duties were limited to “coordinating the intelligence activities of the several departments and agencies in the interest of national security.” This modest language was chosen specifically to overcome objections expressed by such members of Congress as Rep. Clarence Brown (R-Ohio), who said:
I am very much interested in seeing the United States have as fine a foreign military and naval intelligence as they can possibly have, but I am not interested in setting up here in the United States any particular central police agency under any President, and I do not care what his name may be, and just allow him to have a Gestapo of his own if he wants to have it. . . .
Every now and then you get a man that comes up in power and that has an imperialist idea.