Peter Dale Scott

COPA Talk 2011

November 9, 2011

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11
(4961 words, 7199 with footnotes)

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." -- Senator Frank Church (1975)

The more one loves America, the more one must be alarmed at the rapid decline in recent years of American democracy. I attribute this decline to three important and alarming trends in recent American history, all closely related. The first is the evolution of Americas economy into a plutonomy, and the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent.1 The second is Americas increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to inflict

Noam Chomsky, Speech to Occupy Boston, November 1, 2011, 3, http://www.alternet.org/story/152933/noam_chomsky_speak_to_occupy_if_we_wa nt_a_chance_at_a_decent_future_the_movement_here_and_around_the_world_must_g row?page=3: So pick Citigroup, for decades one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations. It was repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer over and over again starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I wont run through all the corruption. You probably know it, and its astonishing. A couple of years ago they came out with a brochure for investors. They urged investors to put their money in what they call the plutonomy index. The world is dividing into a plutonomy, the rich and so on. Thats where the action is. They said their plutonomy index is way outperforming the stock market, so put your money into it. And as for the rest? We set them adrift. We dont really care about them and we dont need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state to protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but they essentially have no function. Its sometimes called these days the precariat, people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Its not the periphery anymore; its becoming a very substantial part of the society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. The word plutonomy was originally coined by Ajay Kapur of Citibank, precariat by Prof. Guy Standing.
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military violence on remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent. 2 The third is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of what I have called structural deep events: inscrutable events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve lawbreaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force. There are any number of analyses of Americas current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of Americas increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the plutonomy and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events. We must understand that the income disparity of Americas current economy (or plutonomy) was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process., dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them. This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on careful long-range planning and implementation of a well-financed response to threats from the left.3 We should recall that there had already been serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the rights response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response. What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United State Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an intellectual counterrevolution), which led directly to the so-called Reagan Revolution.4 J.A. Myerson War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy, Truthout, November 14, 2001, http://www.truth-out.org/war-force-pays-1percent-occupying-american-foreign-policy/1321286925. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc. 3 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98. 4 Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History, Harpers Magazine, September 2004, 36.
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Peter Dale Scott

COPA Talk 2011

November 9, 2011

Central to that ongoing process were a number of linked structural deep events, including the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963, and proceeding through Watergate in 1972, the October Surprise of 1980, Iran-Contra in 1986, to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of Continuity of Government (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Hearings of 1987 were called plans for the suspension of the U.S. constitution) that had been carefully developed over two decades in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind most if not nearly all of them. More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that 1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make each deep event happen; 2) the consequences of each event included an increase in top-down oligarchic power (or what the Greeks called bios) for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power (peithein);5 3) there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each deep event and the next; 4) one sees in each of these events the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic suggesting that the current plutonomy is to some degree also a narconomy; 5) in the case of 9/11, a central event on that day, the implementation of Continuity of Government (COG) planning, was the fruit of almost two decades of emergency planning initiated by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1982 the so-called Doomsday Project; 6) in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project -- the alternative emergency planning communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels. Bureaucratic Misbehavior Concerning Deep Events: the JFK Assassination Prior to both the JFK assassination and 9/11, the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11); and these manipulations facilitated each event. A conspicuous example is the decision of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from its watch list for surveillance on October 9, 1963. This was shortly after Oswalds arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September would have made him an obvious candidate for increased surveillance.6
5 6

E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354. 3

Peter Dale Scott

COPA Talk 2011

November 9, 2011

This culpable misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both 11/22 and 9/11. Indeed Gheeslings behavior fits neatly with the CIAs culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.7 Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIAs withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963. 8 A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, which did not simply withhold intelligence, but manufactured false intelligence about Lee Harvey Oswald in a way that seemed designed to provoke a retaliation against Cuba. A conspicuous example an army intelligence cable reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman: Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.9 This cable was sent on November 22 from the Fourth Army Command in Texas directly to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.10

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152. 8 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO: Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389. 9 Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&ab sPageId=326672. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a known hoodlum and strong-arm man on the FBIs Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellows reports to the FBI, had Rubys friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswalds arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswalds wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]). 10 It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).
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This cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by false reports from Dallas about Oswalds alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswalds testimony. to suggest that Oswalds rifle in Dallas was one he owned in Russia.11 These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellows 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit. For the interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marinas words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.12 Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.13 We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that in 1963, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed [quote] that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary [unquote]. 14 This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit assurances to Khrushchev, albeit highly qualified, that the United States would not invade Cuba.15 This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of fabricated provocations to justify military intervention.16 (Examples of fabricated provocations included using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to attack surface shipping or to attack US military, and Make it appear that Castro was lending direct support to insurgent communist elements in a Latin American country)17

Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. .(Marinas actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72). 12 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22. 13 Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128. 14 Joint Chiefs of Staff, Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II), Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion 15 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9. 16 Joint Chiefs of Staff, Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II), Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. 17 , Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II), NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these fabricated provocations were false. On the contrary, the document called for compartmentation of participants to insure that the true facts were not leaked (Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II), NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).
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Peter Dale Scott

COPA Talk 2011

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The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately postassassination; thus they do not in isolation establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May the mindset that produced a menu of fabricated provocations for the Joint Chiefs. It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency. 18 Later in this paper I shall look more closely at Dallas oilman Jack Crichton, and his 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas. (According to Crichton there were about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.) 19 Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11 Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2011, that that someday someone will die.20 After 9/11 another FBI agent was even more bitter: They [CIA] didnt want the bureau meddling in their businessthats why they didnt tell the FBI. . . . And thats why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands21 But in the case of 9/11, the CIAs withholding of relevant evidence (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched by the NSA.22

See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswalds rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantovs interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantovs account of it to the Warren Commission. There is now reason to think that Mamantovs translation of Marinas testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276). 20 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 35254 (FBI agent).
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James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of Americas Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIAs withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory OConnor and Ray Nowosielski, Insiders Voice Doubts about CIAs 9/11 Story, Salon, October 14, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/. 22 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.
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Peter Dale Scott

COPA Talk 2011

November 9, 2011

Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have unfolded in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.23 Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.24 He has also identified as a chief source of the misbehavior CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIAs Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.25 This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.26 It is relevant that the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, which killed 166 people, also happened after the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan failed to pass on to the FBI information about David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American former DEA informant who later confessed to helping plot the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. 27 Scott, American War Machine, 203. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information" (Rory OConnor and Ray Nowosielski, Insiders Voice Doubts about CIAs 9/11 Story, Salon, October 14, 2011). 25 Coll, 467-69. 26 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08. 27 Sebastian Rotella, U.S. Embassy Didnt Pass Along Tip About Headleys Ties to Mumbai Terrorists, ProPublica, October 17, 2010, http://www.propublica.org/article/u.s.-embassy-didnt-pass-along-tip-aboutheadleys-ties-to-terrorists-who-lat; Michael Isikoff, Second wife warned U.S. of Mumbai plotter, NBC News, October 16, 2010, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39702336/ns/us_news-security#.Tr7kHnGGb-s. Cf. Scott, American War Machine, 245-47.
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Formatted: Font: Italic, (Asian) Japanese

Peter Dale Scott

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CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident, and War with North Vietnam By a significant withholding of information, the NSA and CIA together contributed to the US initiation of open war against North Vietnam, during the second Tonkin Gulf episode of August 4, 1964. We now know from a recently declassified in-house National Security Agency (NSA) history that n the course of that day the NSA forwarded 15 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which indicated falsely that there had been a North Vietnamese attack on two US destroyers. At the same time NSA withheld 107 pieces of SIGINT, also in its possession, which indicated, correctly, that no North Vietnamese attack had occurred.28 Meanwhile, over at the CIA, By the afternoon of Aug. 4, the CIAs expert analyst on North Vietnam . . . had concluded that probably no one had fired on the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning. And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer . . . descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained: Were not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam.29 By now, historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf (which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents) was primarily for provocation.30 The planning for this mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible. 31 The NSA and Scott, American War Machine, 201; citing Robert J. Hanyok, Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 24 August 1964, Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132, http://www.gwu .edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf. 29 Ray McGovern, CIA, Iran and the Gulf of Tonkin, ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html. 30 James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51. 31 Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II), Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=483 38.
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CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level consensus to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was also a high-level determination to go to war. Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events All of the deep events discussed in this talk have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washingtons repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of the Warren Commissions controversial recommendations that the Secret Services domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.32 This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobbys shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.33 This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency. Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there were a great many of them. The Washington Star later explained that the big build-up in [its] information gatheringdid not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King.34 One consequence was that, in the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280. Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 44346. 34 Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728.
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equipped the so-called Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.35 In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: the three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative. When we turn to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events are usually remembered as setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not as expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in a number of reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of an expanding repressive power. The two years of the Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the Watergate break-in itself Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies -- were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975. This was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.36 That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party; to be replaced by the conservative GoldwaterCasey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.37 The conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy (with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity) into a financialized plutonomy (where these trends were reversed) was in large part achieved by these and other related intrigues in the mid-1970s.38 Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the curtailing of death squads generally in Central America, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that projects plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to develop.39 Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to George OToole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 27879. 36 Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53. 37 Scott, Road to 9/11, 53-54. 38 Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-64. 39 Peter Dale Scott, Northwards without North, Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revised as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up
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one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.40 In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from the more serious business of Afghanistan. We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-AfghanContra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that this complex and misunderstood deep event saw the successful restoration to the CIA in Afghanistan of the paramilitary capacity that had been taken away from it after the Bay of Pigs. A victory in short for men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.41 Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events I will never forget the New York Times front page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There on page one were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript about the JFK assassination, The Dallas Conspiracy. My early publications on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis involvement in false (or what I call phase-one) stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.42 In spreading these phase-one stories, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime, whose base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.43 In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras. 44 The political mentor of Artimes MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. For example, the drug money-launderer Ramn Milin Rodrguez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies,

of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3491. 40 Scott, Road to 9/11, 132. 41 Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36, 42 Peter Dale Scott, From Dallas to Watergate, Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363. 43 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20. 44 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc. 11

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Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money in support of the Contras.45 Tad Szulc, himself involved in a support plan for anti-Castro guerrillas, alleged in 1974 that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artimes invasion plans a decade earlier.46 It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunts protg Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief in Mexico City, if not indeed since his days during World War Two in the OSS station in Kunming.47 But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nations emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war. 48 His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian security risks, who would be placed in military camps.49 In other words, the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11. A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events: Project Doomsday and COG McCords participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, had access to the nations top secret Doomsday communications network for dealing with a national emergency. Norths network, known as Flashboard, "excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos). 46 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97. 47 Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. 48 Woodward and Bernstein, All the Presidents Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23 49 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971.
45

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by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."50 Flashboard, Americas emergency network on the 1980s, was a precursor of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and which was finally activated by Dick Cheney on 9/11.51 But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was also part of it. This was in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, Because it was intended for continuity of government operations during an attack, it was fully equipped with communications equipment.52 A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details: This Emergency Operating Center is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.53 Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. By 2001, the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing continuity of operations plans.54

50

Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3491. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15. 51 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87. 52 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121. 53 Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park, May 24, 1961, http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/fallout/dallaseoc.html. Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable on line at http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/cso/archives/FindingGuides/08001.html. I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them. 54 Washington Post, May 10, 2007. 13

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COPA Talk 2011

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It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events I have discussed today. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals I have discussed) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, IranContra, and 9/11. This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans (which Cheney and Rumsfeld had been working on for twenty years) were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.55 The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the secure phone in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.56 Presumably this was a COG phone. It is not clear whether the secure phone in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, wed have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.57 However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the purview of the Warren Commission. Nor in the 1990s were the WHCA communications from the motorcade

9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 224. 56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says: The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. governments plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans. The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more. 57 White House Communications Agency, Signal Corps Regimental History, http://signal150.army.mil/white_house_communications_agency.html.
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supplied (as required by law) to the Assassination Records Review Board. 58 This backup channel would be an invaluable supplement to the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example throw light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.59 Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed by President Bush on September 14, 2011. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through PD-51 of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time, After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nations survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing continuity of operations plans. 60 Presumably this shadow government finalized such long-standing COG projects as the Patriot Act (which Congress duly passed without reading), the abridgment of habeas corpus, the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Securitys Project Endgamea ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.61 Project Doomsday is not merely in the background of the structural deep events of the last half century. In the 1980s its aim was significantly enlarged: to prepare not just for an atomic attack, but for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.62 I have therefore a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency which has been in force since 2001, under which

In the 1990s the WHCA supplied seven statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #17210001-10002 to NARA #172-10001-10008). The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: The Review Boards repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes. See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/report/chapter-06-part1.pdf. 59 See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, etc. 60 Washington Post, May 10, 2007. 61 Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45. 62 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
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since 2008 a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready to help with civil unrest and crowd control. 63 Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that Oswald was the assassin, and that he did not have confederates. 64 Obviously, if that was an important priority then, it became even more important after the release of the Warren Report, and the response of the U.S. establishment, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the mainstream press, to back a false account of the presidents murder. That has remained a priority for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obamas State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job until recently included defense of the lone nut version against so-called conspiracy theorists65
63

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 30, 2008, http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/. 64 Memorandum for Mr. Moyers of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=756 877. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36. 65 Leventhals official title is (or was) Chief of the Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State. In 2010 the U.S. State Department launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories.The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11 Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/science-andtechnology/2010/08/02/white-house-launches-new-website-to-debunkconspiracy-theories-86908-22457938/). The site still exists, at http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html?gclid=%20CMCko66n4KECFRM sbwodJ21xKg, (Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.) The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (http://blogs.america.gov/rumors/2009/07/21/lee-harvey-oswald-loneassassin/comment-page-1/#comment-989). Cf. Robin Ramsay, Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on "sick think, Fortean Times, April 2010, http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3211/government_v s_conspiracy_theorists.html; The State Department vs 'Sick Think' The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD, Fortean Times, July 2010, http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3937/the_state_dep artment_vs_sick_think.html; William Kelly, Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza, CTKA, 2010, http://www.ctka.net/2010/Levanthal.html. 16

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If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of Americas political system has become vested in a lie -- a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.66

For Nixons sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.
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