The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Operation Gladio and the Assassination of JFK
As I've written in my previous blog post in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my understanding of the culprits ultimately responsible for conceiving this atrocity are the Military-Industrial Complex. But I am also convinced that the upper echelons of the CIA, particularly the right-wing cadre loyal to Allen Dulles bears responsibility as well for carrying out the crime. How can both scenarios be possible? District Attorney Jim Garrison, as quoted in Joan Mellen's account of his investigation of the JFK assassination A Farewell to Justice on page 318 explained it best: In implementing the assassination, the CIA was functioning as "the clandestine arm of the warfare interests in the United States government."
The implication of such a serious charge against such huge targets perennially lends itself to skepticism that such a heinous crime could be kept secret by so many conspirators. But this perspective ignores how secret operations within the government, or theoretically any large company like a private trans-national corporation, are actually conducted for maximum efficacy. As Michael Ruppert explains in Crossing the Rubicon on page 2:
From the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully kept secrets involving thousands of people. Secondly, in order to execute a conspiracy of the size and type I am suggesting, it is not necessary that thousands of people see the whole picture. The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies in compartmentalization. A technician in Tennessee refining uranium ore in 1943 would have had no knowledge of its intended use, or any moral culpability in any deaths that occurred as a result of it. Another technician in Ohio, mixing a polymer resin in 1985, would have had no knowledge of what an F117A looked like or what it was intended to do.
So if the secret to shielding a conspiracy lies in compartmentalization, the key to unraveling it lies in finding the various compartments and the characters within those compartments with means, motive and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy. There has been an enormous amount of research documenting the involvement of the CIA and the mafia in the assassination of JFK. So many of the strange actors in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 surrounding the strange activities at 544 Camp Street, the address stamped on Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba flyers, can be traced to either of those compartments. But there's another compartment I would like to explore that's even more obscure, but that ties in with the "military" part of the Military-Industrial Complex in an intelligence capacity: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
There is a cruel irony that the DIA might have played a part in the assassination of JFK along with the CIA. The DIA was created by President John F. Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 to coordinate all US Military Intelligence activities. At this time, though JFK took personal responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, he fired Allen Dulles from his position of Director of Central Intelligence. Though Dulles publicly objected to the DIA, as author Dick Russell explains on page 142 of his book The Man Who Knew Too Much, the situation behind the scenes was that "the triumvirate that ran the DIA had stronger ties to Dulles - by then dismissed from the CIA - and to J. Edgar Hoover than they had to Kennedy's new team at the CIA."
Joseph Carroll, Director of DIA
William "Buffalo Bill" Quinn, Deputy Director DIA
Two of the men Russell is referring to are Joseph Carroll and William Quinn. Director Joseph Carroll had been a leading assistant to Hoover during his employment at the FBI in the 1940's. While both of Carroll's top subordinates were ex-CIA working closely with Dulles, Russell focuses on Major General William "Buffalo Bill" Quinn. Quinn worked within an elite group which saw the careers of James Angleton and Richard Helms promoted. He served as Allen Dulles' personal courier on Nazi troop movements during World War II. While I found this fact ominous in light of Dulles' history with helping Nazis escape war crimes that I have posted about previously, Russell provides further confirmation of exactly how ominous this relationship was on page 142: "Quinn had also pushed forward an overseas spy network aimed at the Soviets and run by Hitler's ex-intelligence chief, Reinhard Gehlen." The Gehlen Org, which I've written about previously, was part of a NATO "stay-behind" paramilitary organization "born in the head of Allen Dulles" called Operation Gladio. More about Gladio later.
"So it appears that Kennedy's idea of what the DIA should be was exactly the opposite of what it became in reality," Russell concludes on page 144. But is it conceivable that the DIA could have been used to assassinate JFK? It's conceivable through their relationship with a French paramilitary group called Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS). They were a cadre of disaffected right-wing French military officers who came together in 1961 to fight President Charles de Gaulle's decision to give colonial Algeria independence. This included several OAS assassination attempts against de Gaulle. After 1962 when Algeria gained their independence, many OAS hardcore veterans became mercenaries. One of these mercenaries, an OAS captain who was allegedly involved in a de Gaulle assassination attempt, was Jean Rene Souetre (pronounced Sweat-ra). According to a May 1963 memo from CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms, Souetre approached the CIA as the OAS "coordinator of external affairs." He is of extreme interest to researchers of the JFK assassination because of this April 1964 CIA document discovered by Mary Farrell in 1977:
So Souetre was "in Dallas in the afternoon" of November 22, 1963 and "expelled from the U.S....48 hours after the assassination." Certainly suspicious circumstances! In an interview by Dick Russell on page 354 of The Man Who Knew Too Much with the dentist mentioned in the document, Dr. Lawrence Alderson claims the FBI told him Souetre was flown out of Dallas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 by a private pilot in a government plane. As quoted by Jim Marrs in his book Crossfire on page 203, Alderson thought the FBI "felt that Jean knew who, or he himself had, assassinated Kennedy." But is there any other evidence establishing a relationship between Souetre and the assassination prior to November 22, 1963? Through an investigation conducted by Washington D.C. attorney Bernard Fensterwald Jr. in association with Gilbert Le Cavelier, Russell writes of their findings on pages 355 and 356 of The Man Who Knew Too Much:
•OAS had contact in New Orleans with anti-Castro groups
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•In March-April 1963, Souetre met with Howard Hunt (of Watergate and Bay of Pigs infamy) in Madrid.
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•In April-May 1963, Souetre met with Gen. Edwin Walker (who Oswald allegedly shot at) in Dallas.
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•Souetre trains that summer with Alpha 66 and the 30th of November (both anti-Castro groups) in the New Orleans Mandeville region.
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•Their headquarters' location in New Orleans: 544 Camp Street.
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•OAS' Mandeville "cell" worked closely with elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Jean Souetre, OAS captain, alleged JFK hitman
While these revelations of an OAS-CIA-DIA relationship document the "military" side of a Military-Industrial Complex conspiracy to assassinate JFK, there is another corporate entity that highlights the "industrial" side of this equation: Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). As documented by Joan Mellen on pages 136-139 of her account of the JFK assassination investigation by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, titled A Farewell to Justice:
•Centro Mondiale Commerciale was, by the US government's own admission, a CIA front.
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•CMC channeled money to OAS.
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•CMC's parent company founded by the CIA, PERMINDEX, was filled with Nazis and neo-Nazis.
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•President Charles de Gaulle publicly blamed PERMINDEX for attempting to assassinate him.
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•CMC president Ferenc Nagy, longtime asset of CIA DDP Frank Wisner, was, according to de Gaulle, a "munificent contributor" to OAS supporter Jacques Soustelle.
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•On the board of directors for CMC: Clay Shaw, indicted for murder of JFK by Jim Garrison.
In addition, there are other less-documented incidents suggestive of deeper ties. On page 242, Mellen writes of a confrontation between two CIA plants in Garrison's office where one pointed out that the other had been chief investigator of a group led by Guy Banister, the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, which sent $100,000 to the OAS. Banister was "running the circus" at 544 Camp Street. Further suggestive of a DIA link to the conspiracy is mention in Ultimate Sacrifice by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann on page 130 that DIA Director Joseph Carroll shared at least one major FBI case with Guy Banister. At this time, however, I've been unable to find further corroboration of this detail.
But there's something about the whole story of OAS that struck me as eerily familiar. A right-wing paramilitary organization using terrorism to achieve their goals? Sounds exactly like Operation Gladio. I've covered the history and metastasization of Operation Gladio in previous posts.* To recap, the scheme concocted by Allen Dulles and carried out by NATO was initially intended to create secret armies that would lay dormant only to be activated in the event of a Soviet land invasion. By the late 60's, that scheme was augmented into what was called the Strategy of Tension. The secret armies, often in coordination with extreme right-wing movements, would stage false flag terror attacks designed to be blamed on left-wing political groups. The additional goal was to generate fear among the population so that they would "turn to the State to ask for greater security."
Is there evidence of a connection between Operation Gladio and OAS? Jonathan Kwitny, in an article originally published in The Nation on April 6, 1992, confirmed this, and Daniele Ganser, in his book NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, built on his research with the revelation that this shocking development was supported by none other than Allen Dulles. From Ganser's book on page 95:
The OAS coup came on April 22, 1961 when four French Generals under the leadership of General Challe seized power in Algeria in an attempt to maintain the country's union with France. Allegedly, secret soldiers of the CIA-supported NATO stay-behind army who had joined the OAS were directly involved. The secret soldiers 'supported a group of generals who were resisting, sometimes violently, de Gaulle's attempts to negotiate Algerian independence and end the war', US author Jonathan Kwitny related in his article on the secret armies in Western Europe.44 Obviously, more research is needed on the involvement of the French stay-behind in the 1961 coup d'etat as it figures amongst the most sensitive dimensions of the history of the secret war in France. As of now the evidence suggests that the stay-behind armies were involved in successful coup d'etats in Greece in 1967 and in Turkey in 1980, and in the coup against the French government in 1961 which failed.
The CIA and its Director Allen Dulles together with militant secret soldiers of NATO and the Pentagon in Washington had allegedly supported the coup against de Gaulle. Immediately after the coup, 'minor officials at the Elysee Palace itself' had given 'to understand that the generals' plot was back by strongly anti-Communist elements in the United States Government and military services', as the Washington Star reported. 'Both in Paris and Washington the facts are now known, though they will never be publicly admitted', an article of Claude Krief revealed already in May 1961 in the widely read French weekly L'Express. 'In private, the highest French personalities make no secret of it. What they say is this: The CIA played a direct part in the Algiers coup, and certainly weighed heavily on the decision taken by ex-general Challe to start the putsch.' Shortly before the coup General Challe had held the position of NATO Commander in Chief Allied Forces Central Europe, cultivating close contacts not only with the Pentagon and US officers but also with the NATO secret stay-behind army, maintaining daily contact with US military officers. General Challe, as Krief concluded, had acted directly on CIA orders: 'All the people who know him well, are deeply convinced that he had been encouraged by the CIA to go ahead.'45
What is so important about these obscure historical revelations? If the OAS indeed had its origins in the stay-behind armies of Operation Gladio and the OAS terror cell in New Orleans in 1963 worked closely with elements of the DIA, we may have located the beginnings of a secret relationship between Operation Gladio and the DIA that continues to this day. Not much evidence of this relationship has surfaced and it seems as though those in charge have gone to great lengths to hide any connection. But some outrageous false flag attacks in Belgium which killed 28 people during the 1980's brought this relationship to light. These terror attacks were called the Brabant Massacres. These events and their connection with the DIA is told in 9/11 and American Empire: Volume Two edited by Kevin Barrett, John B. Cobb and Sandra Lubarsky on page 30:
Belgium: In the 1980s, Belgium suffered a terrifying series of terrorist attacks known as the Brabant Massacres. (Brabant is the geographic area around Brussels, where NATO has been headquartered since 1966.) The attacks usually occurred at shopping areas, especially supermarkets. In November of 1985, for example, three hooded men got out of their car and started firing at shoppers with a pump-action shot gun. Eight people were killed. "A husband and wife and their 14-year-old daughter were finished off in cold blood...Another father and his nine-year-old daughter were killed in their car trying to flee." Between 1982 and 1985, there were 16 such attacks, which "reduced Belgium to a state of panic."51
Although the responsibility for the Brabant Massacres remained a mystery for many years, evidence later surfaced that they were carried out by a neo-Nazi organization known as the Westland New Post (WNP). Michel Libert, a former WNP member, confirmed in 1992 that from 1982 to 1985, it was his job to scout out supermarkets, seeing if they had any protection that could interfere with WNP's operations. Libert's orders came from WNP commander Paul Latinus, who was paid by the Pentagon's DIA. A Belgian journalist reports that when he asked Latinus who had asked him to set up the WNP, he said: "American military secret services."52
Paul Latinus, DIA agent, neo-Nazi commander holding court over hell-knows-what mayhem
What became of DIA agent Paul Latinus? There is a chilling addendum to this tale in Daniele Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe on page 147:
At the end of the Brabant Massacres, Paul Latinus was arrested. Yet before he could speak out the right-wing commander was found hanged by a telephone cord in his prison cell with his feet on the ground on April 24, 1985. 'In the circles around Paul Latinus all, or almost all, remained convinced that the boss of WNP had not committed suicide, but that he had been liquidated.' 'Each time when they attempted to reconstruct the suicide, the telephone cord broke.'
As anyone who has followed this blog within the past year knows, Operation Gladio did not evaporate with the end of the Cold War. My synopsis and analysis of the six-part series of interviews with Sibel Edmonds by James Corbett documented the evolution of Operation Gladio to Gladio Plan B. Whereas Gladio's NATO stay-behind armies hooked up with fascist and Nazi groups, neo and old school, to advance their agenda, Gladio B focused on advancing their agenda through radical Islamists. My understanding is that just as Gladio B is the next stage of Operation Gladio, the War on Terror is the next stage of the Strategy of Tension. Which would make 9/11 an Operation Gladio false-flag operation on steroids.
Does the DIA play a part in Gladio B? The answer may lie in this exchange between James Corbett and Sibel Edmonds on The Corbett Report in Part Six of their interview series that I am very proud to have a played a personal part in:
James Corbett: ...And on that note, we have an email in from Robert, who has a blog called americanjudas.blogspot.com where he is starting to synopsize our conversations and he's got Part One and Part Two up already and has done a good job of putting in some relevant links and explaining some of the characters and the details, so I will put the links to those blog posts in the show notes for this, and also Robert had a question, he said, "In Part Two, Sibel mentioned that the Pentagon doesn't call it Gladio B, but there is a designated section, a physical office that deals with Gladio operations. Can she tell us what the actual name is, or has she been gagged from doing so on the grounds of State Secrets?"
Sibel Edmonds: Right, um, the FBI's file, because the name of the file itself wouldn't be even considered classified, it's the name of a file, the operation is considered the Operation Gladio Plan B. With the Pentagon, I can't because it has not become public, and it is part of or under another division; and again that division if I were to name the division, people would be very familiar, and it will be say 'Why, that's an interesting place to put the Operation Gladio Plan B and the office there'. I can tell you that the division is mainly international NATO officers, you're looking at lieutenant colonel and higher, and it has the only office that I know in the Pentagon with the highest number of Turkish officers, they're going to have both US citizenship and Turkish, but they're assigned to this Pentagon division. Now it changes, every four or five years, some are stationed somewhere else, but if you look at it let's say during a certain period of time, the highest percentage are Turkish officers there, female and male.
That Robert who emailed the question is, in fact, yours truly, Robert Paulsen. To determine the identity of this "Pentagon division" dealing with Gladio Plan B operations, I decided to go back to the person she said was working for NATO in Part One who went to her home to try to recruit her into this sinister nexus, Douglas Dickerson. I reread the chapter in her book about the incident, and my jaw hit the floor when I read this paragraph on page 63 of by [url]Classified WomanSibel Edmonds[/url]:
We sipped our drinks and made small talk for about 15 minutes. "Doug" briefly talked about his background and current position with the U.S. Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency, under the procurement logistics division at the Pentagon, which dealt with Turkey and Turkic-speaking Central Asian countries: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. And, he casually added, he was part of a team at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans overseeing Central Asian policies and operations. (emphasis added)
My initial reaction was to the possibility that it could be the Office of Special Plans (OSP), being very familiar with their history of deception under the Bush administration leading the country to war in Iraq on false pretenses. The problem with putting Gladio operations there is that under the Obama administration, OSP no longer seems to exist. That kind of narrows the list of suspects, doesn't it? As recently as April of this year, the DIA prominently featured on their homepage an interview with NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis. Perhaps it is just an interesting coincidence that the DIA would be highlighting their relationship with the seat of Operation Gladio, NATO. But I doubt it.
If, in fact, the DIA has been supporting and facilitating the terror activities of Operation Gladio since the 1960s, which the evidence linking them to the OAS suggests, there would be a logical continuity given the longevity of their relationship that would explain why NATO would have Operation Gladio Plan B under the DIA. Unlike the CIA, whose dark history has been widely disseminated throughout the media, the activities of the DIA have for the most part flown under the radar, notwithstanding the few chinks in the armor listed previously. We've seen plenty of CIA whistleblowers and NSA whistleblowers. Have you ever heard of a DIA whistleblower? How about a NATO whistleblower? If the story of Paul Latinus is any indication, there's a reason this dark history remains hidden. Dead men tell no tales.
*[My previous posts on Operation Gladio: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six. At this time, I would like to thank Octafish from Democratic Underground for his invaluable help in researching this story.]
