Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

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Castro

Following a lecture booked by W. Colston Leigh in West Palm Beach, I arrived January 21, 1960 with a Viscount plane of Cubana Airlines in Havana. Fidel Castro had descended in 1959 from the Sierra Maestra to take the country by storm. The us had reacted as a much wronged child, that had lost a favourite toy. Cuba was the preferred Caribbean vacation spot for Yankees with the many casinos and cheap whore houses. The young revolutionaries were intent to clean up Cuba's act, drive out the foreign gamblers and pimps, and bring some social justice to the place. Washington spy establishments worked overtime to put the pieces of the Castro jigsaw together. Was he a communist? The man was after the rich and defending the poor. To American simpletons this made his red sympathies abundantly clear. Communism had arrived at Uncle Sam's doorstep. Extreme measures were warranted. Eisenhower and Nixon planned a quick invasion. jfk, new at running Foreign Policy, almost forgot that the us was a signatory to the un Charter. When he was about to invade Cuba and use B-52 bombers from secret cia airfields in Guatemala, someone told him in the nick of time, that sending us pilots over Cuba amounted to an act of war against a fellow member state of the United-Nations. Those were the years, that I lectured to us audiences from Sheboygan, Wisconsin to Corpus Christi, Texas and discovered, that a frightening number of perfectly law-abiding American citizens felt the us should have never joined the un

Fidel realized full well, that the us represented Cuba's primary life-line. Most of the sugar production went to the north American continent. Business tycoons preferred Cuban cigars. Castro boarded, after being only a few months in power, a flight to Washington. Realizing that his hands still showed the legacy of camping out in Cuban mountains, he allowed himself a manicure on the plane to present himself properly at the White House. President Eisenhower felt he was far too upper-class to award the bearded revolutionary entry into the Oval office. Probably his shoes weren't clean. Ike was therefore absent and played golf in Georgia. The job to talk to Castro was left to Richard Nixon, which guaranteed disastrous consequences. Nixon too avoided receiving the Cuban at the White House and saw his guest for two and the halfhours in the vice-presidential office at the Capitol Building. In his 703 page biography ‘Fidel’¹⁴, New York Times writer Tad Szulc recalled Castro was endlessly battered, while in Washington in April 1959, with questions about his Marxists sympathies. ‘We are not communists, ‘he replied over and over again’.¹⁵

‘In New York, he spent four days as a conquering hero,’ wrote Szulc, ‘touring the United Nations, addressing a nighttime crowd of 30.000 in Central Park, visi-

14 Tad Szulc, Fidel, William Morrow & Co., New-York, 1986.

15 Tad Szulc, Fidel, William Morrow & Co., New-York, 1986, p.p. 488.

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ting the Coffee and Sugar Exchange and City Hall, and speaking at luncheons and dinners to publishers, businessmen and financiers. He made a superb impression,’ noted Szulc. From New York Castro travelled by train to Boston, delivered a speech at Harvard, and went on to Montreal. That was 1959. But the guys, Castro was really up against and did not meet were the evil spirits that ran the Washington Secret team. They had already firmly decided, that Fidel had to go. His mouth outsized his brain. He was a secret lackey of the Kremlin. A firm characteristic of Washington spooks is, that they think they know, what goes on in Cuba, Vietnam, Congo, Indonesia or the ussr, to name a few of their favourite hunting grounds, while in reality these feeble minded bigots, that advise us presidents, have no clue of new realities in the world and are living in a fools paradise. What they do best is messing up other peoples lives out of ignorance and plain stupidity. Like Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West-Germany once told Sir Ivon Kirkpatrick, the British High Commissioner in Bonn, ‘it is a pity that God limited the intelligence of man without limiting his stupidity.’¹⁶

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was once a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the cia. He wrote, that the most remarkable development during the first 25 years since World War II was the fundamental change in the management of Foreign Affairs in Washington. He meant, that more and more control over military and diplomatic operations at home and abroad was exerted by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities are secret. Prouty: ‘The Secret Team (st) consists of security-cleared individuals in and out government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the cia and the National Security Agency (nsa)’, he noted in The Secret Team, with the subtitle: The cia and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World.¹⁷ ‘They react to those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans and activities. Membership is granted on need to know basis.’

Speaking of the st power structure, colonel Prouty continued: ‘The power of the Team derives from its vast intergovernmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses.’ He stressed, that the st lived by ‘the cult of the gun, while it probably will never be revealed who killed Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Dag Hammerskjöld, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.’ He continued, ‘At the heart of the st are, of course, a handful of top executives of the cia and the National Security Council (nsc), most notably the chief White House advisor to the President on Foreign Policy.’

‘Around them revolves a sort of inner ring of Presidential officials, civilians and military men from the Pen-

16 Ivon Kirkpatrick, Power and Diplomacy, Harvard University Press, 1948, p.p. 94.

17 L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, The cia and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Prentice-Hall Inc, New Jersey, 1973.

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tagon, and career professionals in the intelligence community. It is often quite difficult to tell exactly who many of these men really are, because some may wear a uniform and the rank of general and really be with the cia and others may be as inconspicuous as the executive assistant of some Cabinet officer's chief deputy. Out beyond this ring is an extensive and intricate network of government officials with responsibility for, or expertise in, some specific field that touches on national affairs or foreign affairs. All true members of the st remain in the power center whether in office with the incumbent Administration or out of office with the hardcore set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe,’ Prouty summed up.

Ten years after the publication of The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross an Air Force colonel, and eye witness from within the governing apparatus in Washington succeeded in presenting a clearer picture of the inner workings of the us ruling clique disguised in mysterious clouds. I went to see colonel Prouty in the seventies and filmed him for Dutch television. We kept in touch for the next quarter century. I mentioned him to Oliver Stone, who invited him to become his top advisor for the movie ‘jfk’, but later they fell out in disagreement. Colonel Prouty clarified who were the real Nimrods hunting down, for instance, Fidel Castro. He stressed to me, that the st was in fact a bewildering collection of semipermanent or temporarily assembled action committees and networks that respond pretty much ad hoc to specific troublespots and to flash intelligence data inputs from various parts of the world. Those insider words echoed in my mind, when the Bush junior Administration managed to capture the power center in December 2000 and brought back an array of officials once close to his father, himself an ex cia boss. According to The New York Times, they speak at cia headquarters of ‘daddy's daily briefings’ referring to the fact, that Papa in Houston, Texas keeps his finger on the pulse of world affairs via cia information and then plays golf with his son to give fatherly advice. The Bush II Administration qualifies as a super Secret Team club.

The history of more than forty years of Secret War by the ST against Cuba is well-known. Fidel's trip to the us in 1959 was a flop, inspite of Tad Szulc's evaluation that he did a superb job at selling the Revolution with those he spoke to. But he obviously met the wrong people. Eisenhower continued the blockade. jfk invaded the Bay of Pigs and us-Cuban relations reached a point of no return as a result of sheer ignorance and stupidity among the morons in the st. In 1961 a White House think tank designed ‘Operation Mongoose’. Details came only recently to light thanks to a British historian, Mark White, who published in 1999 The Kennedys and Cuba, The Declassified Documentary History¹⁸. Neither Castro, nor anyone in the world, was aware at the time, that Robert Kennedy was leading the National Security Committee 5412,

18 Mark White, The Kennedys and Cuba, The Declassified Documentary History, Ivan R. Dee Publishers, Chicago, 1999.

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set up in maximum secrecy in order to decide which foreign individuals or which foreign governments were to be liquidated or overthrown when they stood in the way of total American hegemony. I might add, that Castro biographer Szulc himself was asked by jfk, when they met at the White House, ‘What would you think, if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?’¹⁹

In 1972 Congress had woken up sufficiently from its hibernation and near blindness to what was happening in secret all around them, that it installed the Senator Frank Church Committee to look into the foolish blunders of the covert Wild Bill Boys. It was discovered, that with full knowledge of the White House Fidel had been subjected to receiving poison pills, a poison pen, poisoned cigars, a diving suit contaminated with disease-bearing fungus, and last but not least an exotic sea-shell, rigged to explode in an area where Castro usually went skin diving. These data were presented by David Wise in his book The American Police State²⁰. The Church Committee further discovered that criminal minds within the intelligence community had prepared for the killing of Fidel six gelatin capsules filled with a liquid botulinum toxin, which had first been tried on monkeys to make sure Castro would die from them too. jfk had established contacts with Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, and former Mafia boss in Havana, Santos Trafficante. The price on Fidel's head rose to 150.00 dollars to be paid by the White House. The plot was even strengthened by bringing in another mobster, formerly working for billionaire Howard Hughes, by the name of John Rosselli. He was the crook, who brought the six capsules to Havana. He knew that they would not work in hot soup. The plan never materialized, because the Soviets taught Castro how to protect himself.

Giancana was shot at his Chicago suburban home to prevent him from testifying in the Church Committee. Trafficante's corpse was found drifting in an oil-drum of the coast off Florida. Rosselli denied he had anything to do with the gelatin capsules. Nobody seems to know how many assassination attempts were dreamt up in Washington against Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Qadaffi and scores of foreign leaders, because it will probably take another outside historian to skim the Washington secret files, or what is left of them, to discover the facts and the truth of who were or are the number one war criminals.

In 1960, at a reception in the Algerian Embassy in Havana I met the entire revolutionary command, Fidel, Raoul, Che Guevara and others, plus dr. Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, those days the only long-time communist among the Fidelistas. He struck me as a man with an excellent mind. I stayed in touch with him and in 1985 we worked together on an interview book in the Presidencia in Havana, when Fidel asked us to wait until his own biography Tad Szulc was writing with him was finished and in the bookshops. I left for a stay of six years in South-Africa and although the first 100 pages were taped, written, and ap-

19 Mark White, The Kennedys and Cuba, The Declassified Documentary History, Ivan R. Dee Publishers, Chicago, 1999, p.p. 558.

20 David Wise, The American Police State, Random House, New-York, 1975, p.p. 215.

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proved, we never resumed our work. The 64.000 dollar question about Fidel has always been: was he a communist, when he came down from the Sierra Maestra or did he become one in a defiant reaction to the us economic blockade and he was only saying, he had always been a communist, to get back at the Washington assassins.

On October 5, 1960, a summit of world leaders was in progress during the opening days of the 15th General Assembly at the un. The Rumanian permanent representative, Silvio Brucan gave a reception. Nikita Khrushchev was one of his guests. A few of us were talking with the Russian, when Harison Salisbury of The New York Times asked the premier whether he felt Fidel was a communist. ‘When we would have more leaders like Castro among socialist nations our prospects would not be good,’ he replied.²¹ The Politburo in Moscow obviously looked upon Fidel in the 1960's not to be taken seriously since they saw him as a bourgeois revolutionary.

I visited Cuba regularly since 1960. On May 2, 1962, I stood on the beach of the Bay of Pigs, trying to figure out how the st could have ever been that dumb to land there with 1.500 mercenaries being encircled by 20.000 angry Cuban soldiers ready for the kill. One subject that regularly came up in my frequent meetings over a period of 25 years with Carlos Rafael was the ultimate answer to the question if Fidel had always been a commie. My conclusion is, that he had been telling the truth, when he visited Washington in 1959 and denied Communist links, and emphasized he was not prepared to be anybody's puppet, or dance with his nationalistic Latin anti-Yankee temperament to anyone's tune. A future historian will some day prove, that his supposed allegiance to Marxism-Leninism long before his Revolution was indeed Fidel's biggest lie. His propinquity after 1961 to the Kremlin was directly forced upon him by daydreamers and imbeciles in the Secret Team and elsewhere in Washington.

21 Willem Oltmans, Memoires 1959-1961. In den Toren, Baarn, 1990, p.p. 171-172.