Talk Radio


(Legendary Detroit Broadcaster JP McCarthy of WJR.)

I spent the afternoon in a brand spanking new Hertz Chevy Impala. It is supposed to be a flex-fuel vehicle, at least the plate on the trunk lid  says so, though I don’t know what that means. The hyper-vigilant cop from Ogemaw was on revenue patrol at the official use only cross-over at mile marker 232 near West Branch on I-75, but I minded my speed.

It was actually a splendid drive under clear skies and low humidity. It is quite pleasant to roar along in new Detroit iron- though I did not understand the radio. There were buttons under the electronic display, and between checking my Crackberry and Droid smartphone on the more placid stretches of highway, I had too many things to process. So, I just stabbed at one at random and got WJR, an AM clear-channel station my Dad used to listen to, one of the original three-letter stations that still claims “to broadcast from the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building in Detroit’s New Center.”

I have not listened to AM radio in years, and now only listen to radio of any kind on the web on my computer. But back in the day, WJR was the most influential radio station in Detroit, with a 50,000-watt signal that could be heard in much of the Eastern United States and Canada.

I made a point of going to the New Center area in May when I was in the Motor City. It is a little threadbare but still impressive- the Fisher Building was an Albert Khan masterpiece, and the looming gray bulk of the former GM World Headquarters and the Fisher Theater are still impressive world-class period pieces of architecture.

Anyway, my memory of WJR was of a Disc Jockey named J P McCarthy. McCarthy not only hosted the Morning Music Hall from 6:15 to 9, but also the Afternoon Music Hall from 3:15 to 6. Eventually, McCarthy’s duties were relegated to morning drive, and a noontime interview program called “Focus”. It wasn’t long before McCarthy’s morning show was #1 in Detroit, a perch that he held for about 30 years until his death, a feat unmatched in Detroit radio.

McCarthy’s morning show included a mix of music, news, and sports, but his greatest fame was as an interviewer. One morning during the 1992 presidential election he interviewed President George H. W. Bush and candidates Bill Clinton and Ross Perot all within one hour.

Dick Vitale was the basketball coach at the University of Detroit and won some modest fame there before becoming a broadcast icon. McCarthy was the first to christen Vitale “Dicky Vee.”

The music component of the show was phased out, but I will never forget Bobby Darren’s “Mac the Knife” and Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” playing in the morning as Dad got ready to head downtown to the American Motors headquarters.

McCarthy pioneered talk radio. The music was dropped so he would have more time to concentrate on the news of the day or any topic that would interest him. He was everybody’s pal.  His curiosity ranged between business, current events, history, entertainment, and other topics, and he could discuss any of these subjects with equal ease.

McCarthy also was known for the stock phrases he would intersperse into his radio show. He opened every show at 5:30 a.m. with the greeting to listeners, “Good mornin’ world!” and his phrases “They’re playing golf somewhere,” “It’s not the money, it’s the amount,” “It’s brass monkey weather,” and “Remember my name in Sheboygan — just don’t tell ’em where I am,” were only a few that endeared him to his listeners.

So imagine my surprise- not that it should have, since McCarthy died in 1995 at the (what I now consider young) age of 62- when the voice booming out of the dashboard was that of Rush Limbaugh.

I listened to his account of the President’s press conference assault on capitalism for nearly the whole trip Up North with grim fascination. Fenton, Flint, Saginaw, Bay City, Pinconning, West Branch and the speed trap, Grayling, Gaylord and finally in to the little Village by the bay.

I could not believe what I was hearing. Washington is mad, I know that, and our elected idiots have placed us on the path to ruin. But the account from Rush on the press conference was mind boggling. Apparently the President is offering a bit of class jujutsu, having mentioned six times eliminating a tax loophole for corporate jets, a loophole inserted after 9/11 to prop up the general aviation industry devastated by the terror attacks.

It’s a potent image, those plutocrats in their jets, but as best I can determine, the item is so small that the White House could not even provide an estimate of the revenue that would be raised. Some guess it might amount to $3 billion over 10 years. The target deficit is 4 trillion. The rhetoric does not amount to jack-squat except a call to class warfare.

The billionaires and millionaires should pay their fair share, according to Rush’s view of the press conference. The fine print of what the Administration desires is higher taxes for the top two percent of American workers- which is to say, $250,000, not a million.

I don’t mind doing my share, but first I want to know where my private jet is. It would sure save some time getting Up North. I shut down WJR and Rush in the driveway of the little house on the bluff. I wished JP was still around to help make sense of all this.

I mean, Rush has a point. It was Ben Franklin’s observation that a pure democracy amounted to two wolves and a sheep discussing what might be for lunch. But the rhetoric is pretty harsh- I understand it is show business, not sober political analysis.

But talk radio these days is pretty amazing. Rush is no JP. I liked JP.


(Rush Limbaugh with cigar on the course.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Black and White


(Vic in White, Sexton Emil in Black. Things are rarely that simple. Photo Todd Tear with Socotra smartphone).

Uncle Jerry’s Blue Ribbon Panel on the conduct of the Intelligence Community didn’t fly- it looked like a whitewash and smelled like a whitewash and the House and Senate decided to take a cold look at the intelligence community in the wake of a lost war and failed Presidency.

There was nothing at all that was black an white about the situation. There was plenty of gray, and real threats from real bad guys, who were, as a famous document mentions, both foreign and domestic.

I have been trying to get to what happened next for what seems like a few weeks now, and I was talking about that with Drew at the Starfish Oyster Bay in Toronto, fifth largest urban area in North America, and one of the coolest towns ever.


(Waiting at the Cathedral: Best Man Tom and three Bridesmaids. Photo Socotra.)

Drew is part of the Bride’s local crew: the Starfish Oyster Bed is just down the block from her- their- condo and the stunning 21st floor view of Lake Ontario and Rochester, New York, just 28 miles of sparkling fresh water away.

There was a lot to process. The records of the Herland Commission that investigated the World War II-era connections between the Spooks and the Mob. The results were not black-and-white, any more than anything else is. I was telling that to Drew, who polished a glass and deposited two fingers of rich peaty single-malt Scotch into it. I watched Edgar the Shucker working on filling up an iced plate of two dozen fat oysters and then adorning it with fresh grated horseradish and edges of lemon. Drew adjusted his plaid sport cap that snugged his lanky brown hair over his ears.

“We had a lot to do with your Capone and Purple Gang here, you know. That was Prohibition times, though.” He gave a scowl. “The largest distillery in Canada was right here. Gooderham & Worts cranked out Rye whiskey by the tanker.”

“Wasn’t Ontario officially dry then?” I asked.

Drew nodded. “Yep. But not illegal to manufacture it. They would sell to Quebekkers, who would turn it around and smuggle it to Detroit across the lakes.”

“I am confident you could track down some leads that would help connect the dots on what went on later, in the 1960s, when officially all that was ancient history. I am not sure it is a smart thing to do, though. Maybe let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Yeah, well you can’t go wrong with that, eh?” Drew’s sentances always rose in inflection at the end. “You are here for a wedding, so relax and have fun.”

I was there for the wedding, natch, and was thoroughly absorbed into a couple of great families, three if you include the boys at the Starfish. What a crew. I have not been up past midnight in a long time, but glancing at my watch, I saw that the witching hour was approaching.

I took a long pull on the Scotch, a marvelous beverage which I have sadly neglected these many years, and tried to process the whole spectacle. The rehearsal at the cathedral; the report of a friend back in the States being assaulted on a hellish hot Metro platform deep under the night-time capital of the Free World; the feeling of cozy freedom out of the country; the jangle of large medals on my chest, out of their ceremonial storage case for the last time.

The astonishing and romantic tale of the proposals that resulted in this extended celebration of romantic love.

The unexpected contrast of black and white, captured on a smart phone between me and Emil, the Sexton of the stately cathedral. The marble plaque to memorialize a young man from Toronto, killed at the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan in 1887.

Damn, is this an interesting world, or what? Nothing purely black and white at
all.


(Starfish Oyster Bed, Toronto. Photo Socotra.)
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

How the World Can Change….

It was a full on day on the Great Lakes. I was in Toronto, at St.
George’s Cathedral to start, and then a variety of places in the St.
Lawrence District of town: Mystic Muffin, George’s restaurant, the
condo 21 floors above the skyline, overlooking the church where the
union had been solemnified that morning in a flurry of veil and and
dresses and uniforms.

It was quite a day. There was a lot of emotion. The bride was radiant.

Somewhere in the midst of divesting one costume for another, and one
venue for the next, I saw that my brother had written from the Little
Village by the Bay. He is there now, doing his turn in the barrel. It
is funny, all of connected by this necklace of fresh water that
collectively embrace us in the Great Lakes Country, the most drinkable
mass of H2O on the planet.

From the Bride’s balcony I could see Rochester, NY, across the lake,
and I could sail to the little village by the bay in a few days, if I
had the inclination. I read the status update with interest, after I
copied the words to the song that I was going to attempt to sing that
afternoon:

“How the world can change,
It can change like that,
Due to one little word:
Marriage.

See a palace rise
From  two-room flat
Due to one little word:
Marriage.

And the old despair
That was often there.
Suddenly ceases to be

And I’ll wake today,
Look at you
and say:
Somebody wonderful married me.”

I copied the words into my iPad and then read through the queue of
messages that had piled up when we were at the church.

“I not sure why I ran indoors today,” he started. “I did not have to be
inside at the College. it stopped raining after two days. Then I tooled
over to Potemkin Village and Big Mama popped around the lobby corner as
soon as I came in the front door.”

“We’re having doughnuts!” she chirped and hustled back around the
corner to where Raven sat engaged with half a sugar speckled air and
lard confection.

Raven managed a weak smile.  Big Mama beamed.  “It’s a special day.”

“They have doughnuts every morning, Mom.”

“But we don’t!  Besides, it’s all different here now!”

We had been talking for several days about the two Petoskeys and
the two hospitals.  Were there now two IV’s?  Perhaps, but she was
ready to move on.

We loaded up and drove.  The bright sun on the bay cheered us as we
motored towards Charlevoix.  Raven, looking less like Almost Death and
more like Old Man, took the opportunity to nod off in the front seat.
A lone string of drool hung from his unshaven lip but remained like a
drop of dew in the morning light.

Halfway to Charlevoix we saw the runners on the bikepath by Lake
Michigan.  We counted miles to their marathon goal– , 19, 20, 21 . . .
with a few miles to go they angled off into the old treed neighborhoods
north of Charlevoix and we lost them until just before the finish near
the drawbridge.  It was a low key marathon, but still inspiring to
watch a few runners switch into another gear for the last hundred yards.

Big Mama was entranced.  Raven dozed.

After we crossed into the tourist main street with its banners and
jaywalkers the bridge rose for a passing boat and we parked in front of
the local bookstore.  Big Mama shopped for books and a Free Press.

“A day just isn’t a day without the Free Press!”

“Ancient history” I said as the shopkeeper gently shook his head.

We tooled through the green forests past blue water as we angled over
the Boyne City and back up 131.  It was a cup of chili and grilled
cheese at the Side Door Saloon as the solicitous owner nodded at Raven
and thanked us for our patronage.

Back at Potemkin Village Raven went into standby mode on the couch as
Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, James Cagney and Jack Lemmon took us to a cargo
ship in the South Pacific.

copyright Vic and Spike Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Local 75

I love Canada. Toronto is a vibrant diverse city where, darn it,
everyone is friendly and everything is nice. That is not to say that
there are not misunderstandings.

For example, I was talking to the Groom’s brother this morning in front
of the Holiday Inn Express. Well, trying to, anyway. I could not hear
the bull horns on the 16th floot, but the noise was palpable down on
Lombard street, across from Gilda Ratner’s Cancer Support Club in the
old fire house.

I am a little confused this morning- not unexpected, considering all
the activity of the Friday in Toronto, and there were elements of the
wedding party scattered across the St. Lawrence neighborhood. I had
grand plans for getting to the Farmer’s market early, but considering
what happened at the Starfish Oyster Bar, and before that at the Boiler
House restaurant  in the historic Distillery District (where all that
Rye whiskey came from during Prohibition to flow throught Detroit and
into the thirsty palates of the great American Heartland) and even
before that at the Cathedral for the rehearsal for the wedding and
before that after the plane dumped me at Lester Pearson International
Airport.

Which is all backward, but that is precisely how I am feeling this
morning, and that is exactly how Local 75 is feeling as well.
Interestingly enough, or not, the demonstration commenced with the
inflation of a great gray rat with fierce red eyes and sharp incisors.

At one point he seemed to be devouring the man who was trying to
inflate it- you will have to check the Facebook page for the image,
since apparently the iPad cannot handle embedded pictures and the
capabilities of a real computer.

Anyway, Local 75 of the International Hotel and Restaurant Workers
Union told me they had been without a contract for almost a year, give
or take, and this was not a strike, just a labor action with a giant
inflatable rat, whistles and bullhorns.

“What do we want?”

“Contract!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

It is gray but not raining. There is plenty of coffee in the lobby and
lots to look at outside. I’ll tell you more about it as it happens.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoccotra.com

Oysters Rockefeller


(Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Photo UPI.)

Willow has fine seafood, but no oysters. I asked last night, sitting next to Navy John and Marsha at the packed bar. There was plenty to talk about; I am headed for Toronto for a wedding in the morning; Marsha is retired now, like Navy John, and exploring the concept that she is free for the first time in her adult life to just pick up and go when and where she wants.

We talked about simplifying life, too, since it is so complicated to pick up after other people when they can no longer do it for themselves.

“I am not going to do it to my daughter,” she declared, looking at the five dollar neighborhood bar menu.

“Me neither,” I said hopefully. “I am going to miss the memorial service tomorrow,” I said. “I sent flowers to the funeral home. No closure.”

“Suicide is a difficult thing,” said Marsha, then we went on to talk of other things.

I wonder why Willow doesn’t have oysters. Tracey O’Grady’s seafood is always of the highest order; she is concerned about stability of the biomass in the ocean, and maybe that is the reason the tasty little rascals are not featured. I sometimes get a craving for a dozen on the half shell. It is something I won’t do at home, since they are so hard to open and so perilous in the endeavor, that sharp knife and the twisting motion that could out the blade into a wrist.

Better to have someone else do it, like the Presidents used their Spooks. It avoids getting blood on things- or at least, it is supposed to. Sometimes it does not work out that way.

John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world in his time, and he is credited with commissioning the creation of an oyster dish in his name at Antoine’s down in New Orleans, popularly known as the oldest restaurant in America, and where Jim Garrison claimed Clay Ford held the secret to the JFK killing.

What we know as oysters Rockefeller was created in 1899 by Jules Alciatore, son of the restaurant’s founder.


(President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who created the OSS had Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s in 1937. New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri commented to Roosevelt “How you like dem erstas?”)

The original recipe is a secret, the sauce is known to be a puree of a number of green vegetables other than spinach, probably parley and scallions, with bread crumbs baked over oysters on the half shell. I was thinking about that because of what happened after Seymour Hersh published the summary of the CIA’s Family Jewels in December of 1974.

Nothing was gong to be the same after word got out about what had been going on in Spookland, and there was so much to tell that was going to be really bad.

Accordingly, a Blue Ribbon Panel was deemed to be in order. Perhaps by spinning things out the real secrets could be protected, the ones that might actually unhinge the Republic. President Ford considered his options, and decided to get out in front of the public outrage.

Un-elected President Ford directed appointed Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller to establish a Commission to investigate the activities of the Executive Branch, essentially having the President investigate himself. The body came to be known as the Rockefeller Commission.

It issued a single report in 1975, which delineated some CIA abuses including mail opening (HT-LINGUAL) and surveillance of domestic dissident groups (Operation CHAOS). It also conducted a narrow study of issues relating to the JFK assassination, specifically the backward head snap as seen in the Zapruder film, which was first shown publicly by Gerlado Rivera in 1975.

The head snap is perfectly rational and requires no contortions of logic if you ignore the absurd “single bullet theory.” If you look at the film, it is apparently that President Kennedy is hit almost simultaneously by a shot from above and behind (snap forward)  and from a frontal angle (snap back).

The presence of additional shooters at Dealey Plaza would invalidate the “deranged lone gunman” and “magic bullet” solutions of the warren Commission, but there was so much more to tell.

The Commission also addressed the popular suspicion that Watergate figures E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in Dallas the day of the assassination.

The Rockefeller Report is seen by many as a “whitewash,” but may have succeeded in some limited mis-direction, since bad as the implications of the intelligence activity overseen by both Republican and Democratic administrations was, it did not result in a change of government.

The files of the Rockefeller Commission are available  to review now- many are on line, and 50,000 pages of the following declassified Church Committee documents now publicly available at the National Archives.

That is what changed the whole way we do the business of intelligence. Or at least it did until 9/11.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

This I Believe


“Senator, may we not drop this?! We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
– Army secretary Joseph Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy, June 1954

Legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow did a program called “This I Believe” on the CBS Radio Network starting the year I was born, in the heart of the Baby Boom. The show featured people from all walks of life- humble and famous- to narrate essays about what made them tick. They explained what motivated them in their daily existence. It was a secular, rather than religious thing, and it reflected the bold new Atomic age with America in the vanguard of just about everything.

The show was wildly popular, although the Korean War caused a minor crisis of confidence, and then the Age of Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy made a lot of people believe that there were commies under every bed.

The ultimate rejection of McCarthyism was based on fundamental decency- the quote that starts this musing is the one everybody remembers today. McCarthy accused the Army of being riddled with comsymps and the Army in turn accused chief committee counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the service to give preferential treatment to a draftee named David Schine, who may have been Cohn’s lover. The hearings had everything, and appeared to blend political and sexual preferences together in a thoroughly salacious manner.

The whole thing was broadcast gavel-to-gavel, a first, and left everyone so sickened that McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his conduct when it was all over. His star waned, but there were some clear lines in the sand drawn between the ideologues on the further ends of the spectrum that I believe presaged the partisan lunacy of today.

The supporters of some of the people smeared by McCarthy- notably State Department diplomat Alger Hiss- made the vilified the poster children for their unjust persecution, and ensured that Tailgunner Joe’s name became synonymous with fuzzy-headed and ill-informed extremism.

There is a lot more to the whole thing, but some people had to bite their tongues for decades. As it turned out, there actually were Commies under at least some of the beds in Washington, and some of them were actually sleeping on top. It was not until the VENONA intercepts of Soviet diplomatic cables were released that it became evident that Hiss was actually a Soviet Agent, along with others.

The fact that McCarthy had been at least partially correct (egged on by Cohn, who as a prosecutor in the trial of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg must have been aware of highly classified information that conclusively proved their guilt) hasn’t changed anyone’s belief system. Hiss still has his apologists, and I heard a radio show the other day arguing something or other about the fact that the Rosenbergs were done an injustice.

Maybe that is true. I don’t know what to believe about that, any more than I know what to believe about who killed JFK. The murder of the President is bad enough. The fact that we do not know why or by whom is still baffling, and having to plow through the events again, all the reconstructions and conjectures, the red herrings, hallucinations and active hoaxes makes me a little crazy.

I won’t tell you what I actually believe about it, except it is very curious that the same cast of characters appear to be involved with plots in Dallas and later in Washington. I am not going to accuse anyone of anything. It would be absurd to contend that the government of the United States was subject to a coup d’etat in Dallas, wouldn’t it?

I suppose it could be a coincidence, all those crazy Cubans showing up again. It would be pretty crazy to try to link the mob and some rogue factions of the CIA together in some astonishing, long-running conspiracies to kill heads of state all around the world, practise mind control on your own people, open the mail and tap the phones without warrant.

Must have have been coincidence. After all, Gerald Ford was one of the members of the Warren Commission, and one of the first things he did as President, after the pardon of Richard Nixon and Sy Hersh’s publication of the summary of the CIA Family Jewels, was to ask Nelson Rockefeller to conduct a Blue Ribbon Panel to clear up any misunderstandings about what the Community had been up to.

The President believed that would take care of things.

It didn’t, as it turned out, but you can’t say he did not give it a try.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty


I will tell you, now that summer is officially here, that it has been pure heck trying to get to the Church Commission. Mac is going to be relaxing at the beach, and we won’t be able to get to Willow to talk about the seminal Congressional panel that changed fundamentally the way we Spooks are permitted to do business.

To get there we have to talk about Mac’s doppelganger, a man who is the diametric opposite to him in almost every way. Mac was an officer of honor, and complete and undisputed integrity.

Investigative journalist Sy Hersh is not. He is the one who brought the whole Spook paradise tumbling down when he published the overview of the Family Jewels documents in the New York Times in December of 1974, and he has been merrily blowing whistles- and distorting facts- ever since.

To get to that, though, you have to remember what was going on, and why everyone was just about completely fed up. Washington was still reeling from the Watergate revelations. Gerald Ford, everyone’s genial Uncle Jerry, was trying to convince us all that everything was fine and that there was no deal about pardoning Nixon.

The North Vietnamese were closing in on a victory in SE Asia, and no one wanted to get involved again- there was too much healing to be done, or something, and the Mideast was still simmering after the Yom Kippur War that Israel nearly lost and brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of thermo-nuclear exchange.

They say that Dick Nixon was drinking a lot in those days, and henry Kissinger ought to get more credit for keeping a steady hand on the tiller.

It was a looking glass world, and one that all of the graduating class of 1973 looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism. Unfortunately, we have to walk a little but backward to get to what happened after Sy Hersh spilled the beans.

The adage “Only Nixon could have gone to China” is a popular one these days. I am not quite sure what it means, except in the most general sense that only a fervent anti-communist could go and talk to them frankly. That was certainly the realpolitik view of Henry-the-K, but not everyone thought that way.

The Joint Chiefs were of the opinion that while armed hostilities were in progress in the War, the pursuit of détente with the Soviets and the PRC was the moral equivalent of selling out the kids were dying. Accordingly, with the approval of Chairman Moorer (Mac worked for him in Hawaii), a spy ring was set up inside the National Security Council office in the White House.

Petty Officer Charles Radford removed thousands of pages of White House secret documents and delivered them to the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for review. The operation went on for more than a year, and was not disclosed until someone got mad enough at what they read to whisper to rogue journalist Jack Anderson that America was considering a change to the policy about Pakistan.

Anderson’s column in December of 1971 (Two weeks before Mac retired from the Navy at DIA) revealed information that could only have come from the highest levels of the Pentagon or the White House, and an investigation was commenced in both places. Over the next week, CI officers identified Yeoman Radford as the likely suspect, and he confessed, along with his handler, Admiral Robert O. Welander.

Nixon was furious, but chose to cover the matter up to avoid a public mess with the Chairman. Still, the cover-up may have contributed to a perceived need to the create the Plumbers and the paranoid attitude his Administration had to just about everyone. Remember: it is only paranoia if “they” are actually not out to get you.

Radford later had a chatty interview with the New York Times about what he did, and Sy Hersh piled on with an article in The Atlantic years later about what was happening with American policy to Chile.

Hersh is the opposite of Mac, like I said. Sy is more of a mailbox than he is an investigator, and he doesn’t mind making up a source if it helps to get him to a higher truth.

Don’t ask me on that- no lesser light than historian (and former JFK staffer) Arthur Schlesinger called Sy: “the most gullible investigative reporter I’ve ever encountered.”

And mendacious. His 1997 book “John F Kennedy: The Dark Side of Camelot” contained some truths and some wild and undocumented claims, but some of the whispers were true. The one about the alleged first wife, the one before Jackie, is widely lampooned, but years ago a couple my folks knew matter-of-factly mentioned that they partied with the future president and “the wife he had before Jackie.” They said she was nice, and it was too bad.

There is so much from those days strange enough to boggle the mind.

In June of 1970, during the wave of domestic protest centered around the war in Vietnam, President Nixon approved a 43-page set of recommendations known as the Huston Plan, after its author, Tom Charles Huston.

Huston was a piece of work. He was a zealous young conservative when he arrived at the White House. His enthusiasm about combatting the rising wave of protest gained him the nickname “Secret Agent X5” on the staff. His plan called for the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies to conduct wide-ranging intelligence-gathering activities against dissident groups and individuals. Most of these activities were patently unconstitutional, and after initially approving the plan, Nixon revoked the secret plan five days later.

The Huston Plan was based on the assumption that “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans, mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society.” Those are Dick Nixon’s words, by the way.

I am not sure that is what we were thinking at the time. As I recall, most of us just wanted to avoid being drafted into the infantry and be allowed to party hearty without government interference.

Nixon believed that there was complicity between antiwar demonstrators and Communists. It was not an unreasonable assumption; Sergeant First Class Volsko told me one night on the mid-shift in Korea years later that he had monitored Black Panther groups were using code techniques they had been taught by the Russians.

In 1971, Nixon established the “Interagency Committee on Intelligence,” with aging Jedgar Hoover chairing the new ad hoc group with Richard Helms and Huston as the White House liaison.

Commentators have later observed that the elevation of a junior White House Staffer to the company of the DCI and Director of the FBI was a calculated insult, and part of a plan to exert presidential control over the parts of the government he cared most about: foreign policy, military matters, intelligence, law, criminal justice, and domestic order.

Parts of the Huston Plan were implemented. The FBI lowered the age of campus informants, thereby expanding surveillance of American college students as sought through the Plan. In 1971, the FBI reinstated its use of mail covers and continued to submit names to the CIA mail program.

As details of the Huston Plan unfolded during the Watergate Hearings, it came to be seen as a part and parcel of what Attorney General Mitchell referred to as, “The White House Horrors.”

Those, in general order, included the Plumbers Unit, the proposed fire-bombing of the Brookings Institution, the burglary of the office of Pentagon Papers compiler Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, the establishment of the Enemies List, and the use of the IRS to punish political opponents.

The whole thing seems like a bad dream, or a really severe hang-over. The funny thing about it all is the way the pendulum swings. There are a lot of things in the Huston Plan that were immediately terminated by the Church Committee.

And they came right back in the Patriot Act. We will have to talk about that tomorrow, and I am eager to talk to Mac and get his take on what he had to do on the IC Staff when the secrets were all revealed.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Longest Day

“They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence…It was Senator Church who said our intelligence agencies were ‘rogue elephants.’ They were supposedly out there assassinating people and playing dirty tricks and so forth…”
–         Robert Ellsworth, US State Department

It is the longest day of the year, which is wrong, of course, since the day is precisely as long as any other, but the wobble of the globe will deliver us more sunlight in the northern hemisphere than any other. So it is a day tinged with a certain regret that from here on it is shorter days and more darkness until we slide into the fall and then snows of winter.

I hung up with Mac yesterday, realizing that his trip to the beach would provide me some time to poke around and see what I might discover about the end of the long afternoon of covert action and executive outcomes. The Family Jewels eventually all dribbled out by the mid-1970s. The Agency was involved with assassinations- Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Diem brothers in the RVN, General Rene Schneider and Salvador Allende of Chile.

I took an embassy car one time out on the coast road from Santo Domingo to see the spot where Trujillo was gunned down. Lovely spot, really.

JFK had multiple plans to take down Fidel. The schemes sound fanciful these days- poisoned toothpaste and cigars- but they had roots in the chemical experiments of MK-Ultra which had been going on since the 1950s, and vestiges of which lingered until the end of the Cold War.

It was not just the Agency, of course. Standing watch in the Korean winter at USF-K, I had a Army Security Agency Sergeant First Class named Volsko who told me what the Army had been up to. Apparently those numb-nuts in the Weather Underground had threatened an unspecified West Coast military installation. That was justification enough on a force protection basis for DoD to jump into the ongoing FBI and CIA efforts to conduct domestic surveillance and dirty tricks in the United States.


(San Francisco Demonstration 1967. )

Volsko sucked on a Marlboro and ground it out in the ashtray between us at the watch console. “It was far out,” he said. “We had military jammers deployed at one demonstration, out of sight, and the kids were trying to coordinate the march with Motorola walky-talkies. We amped them up with enough juice that I swear we got an arc of electricity between the radio and the kid’s ear.” He laughed and fished in his pack for another smoke.

The tipping point in the public view of the war happened sometime in 1967; revelations about the Army’s surveillance activities are what started the long slow slide of information about what the government had been up to. An academic named Christopher H. Pyle learned while in the U.S. Army in the 1960s that “Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents watching every demonstration of 20 people or more throughout the United States.”

He went to Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) with his information and there were hearings. Senator Sam later became a household icon for his country-lawyer approach to chairing the Watergate Hearings on an increasingly embattled and paranoid Nixon Administration. It was actually Pyle as much as the Frank Wills, the security guard at the Watergate office complex who changed the course of history.

Pyle worked as an investigator for Ervin’s judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, and later supported the Church Committee as well. I made a note to ask Mac what he thought about the story that it was actually John Dean who orchestrated the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices because his then-new-wife Maureen had been a highly compensated escort at the Columbia Plaza service on the DNC Rolodex.

That was the contention of a fellow named Colodny in his book “Silent Coup,” and Dean vigorously denied it and managed to get a settlement out of him, though not a victory in court.

A new book by James Rosen reinvigorated the claim against Dean in his new book about Attorney General John Mitchell.

According to Rosen, “Dean’s unique knowledge of all the players and their complex interconnections documented exhaustively in the civil litigation he initiated to try to suppress the ‘call-girl theory’ of Watergate, makes him the only logical answer in the three-decades-old mystery of who ordered the Watergate operation, who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder to send Liddy and his team back into the DNC.”

I thought he was a weasel then and I do now, too.

DCI Helms did not survive the Watergate crisis, and the attendant disintegration of Richard Nixon, but he did start to clean house as he saw things start to slide out of his control. He directed the destruction of tens of thousands of documents, including those pertaining to MK-Ultra, and the files of the MERRIMACK and RESISTANCE programs, domestic surveillance operations conducted under the overall CHAOS program.

I often wonder if Sheriff Doug Harvey of Washtenaw County was part of Merrimack. The burly buzz-cut law man certainly had a hard-on about campus radicals at the University of Michigan, and both Hoover’s FBI and Helm’s CIA (along with Army) had active programs to disrupt and disorganize student demonstrations at the University of Michigan, along with dozens of other schools.

Mac served Director Helms on the Intelligence Community Staff as things were unraveling for President Nixon. The break-in itself happened on just at this time of year, approaching the summer solstice, when Washington is still at its sultry best.

I remember the agonizingly painful disintegration: Woodward and Bernstein became journalistic rock stars based on the information fed them by “Deep Throat” Deputy Director Mark Felt. It is possible that Woodward made the whole garage thing up- he had been a Naval officer who served in intelligence billets in the Pentagon and knew Alexander Haig. He may just have invented a cover for a composite of sources to make a better story.

But the story goes that it was Felt who linked E. Howard Hunt to the burglary and a much wider web of crimes. The underground garage where they met is over in Rosslyn, at 1401 Wilson Boulevard.

I don’t have to describe the process by which campaign contributions to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) were linked to the burglars, and the suspicions about the CIA connection, and the Cubans, and the dramatic disclosure of the existence of the Oval Office taping system.

I have often thought that if Dick Nixon had as much forethought as Dick Helms did, and destroyed the tapes, things might have been a lot different.

They say that 85% of Americans who had televisions watched Senator Sam’s hearings. It was a grand show, and I was quite enamored of the blonde ice-queen who sat prominently behind her husband John Dean at the witness table.

Dick Nixon became the first man to resign the office of the presidency on my Dad’s birthday in August, 1974.

The new Ford Administration had several messes to deal with. Jim Schlesinger had compiled the Crown Jewels documents about what the Agency had been up to in his six months as Director, and he had fired 6% of the staff of the Directorate for Operations. His successor, William Colby, was cautiously continuing along the same path.

The question of what we knew, and when we knew it, to paraphrase the famous line from the Watergate hearings, came from Seymour Hersh in the pages of the New York Times, and that is what was going to change the way all of us Spooks did our business. The day he published was going to be a very long day indeed.


Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Taking Leave


(Henry Kissinger on the phone. Photo US Government.)

“The president wants you to know that if this doesn’t work, Henry, it’s your ass.”
– Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, longtime Nixon pal to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger on the eve of the invasion of Cambodia.

I swear, looking back on it, we took leave of our collective senses. I said as much to my pal Mac as we tried to figure out a time to get together at Willow. He is headed for the Outer Banks with his family at the end of the week and I am headed for Toronto for the weekend. Then I will take some leave and head to Michigan and attempt to pay the workmen for Annook’s great triumph in recreating the house up there for sale, or rent, or something.

I got a note from her this morning- I am stealing bandwidth from a neighbor, the bastards at Comcast have seen fit to take away my internet access after all the travail of installing the new modem- and she is home safely.

Apparently Big Mama’s green Dodge Stratus is at an airport, though I did not know which one. Maybe that will get clearer, in time, as I hope many things will. I told Mac that I hoped that would be true for a lot of things, including his experiences at a pivotal time in the Intelligence Community.

“I have to understand more about how this all came about,” I said on the phone.  “The Schlesinger Report was a reflection of the fact that Dick Nixon did not trust his DCI, and everyone knew that J. Edgar Hoover was a thug and a blackmailer. So, the Executive branch was at war with itself?”

“You know what I think about LBJ and the ambiguity of the transition from Camelot to The Great Society,” Mac said carefully, as though he wanted to ensure he was not overheard. He cannot get over the fact that his suspicions about LBJ are pretty widely held these days.

“Yeah,” I said thoughtfully. “I remember wondering about it as a kid. I never understood the guns-and-butter thing, or even the reference. I mean, I understood the guns part, but I didn’t understand why people wanted butter instead of margarine.”

“It was a way of saying you could have everything you wanted- expensive wars and social programs. Same story, different time,” said Mac. “It just happened again if you were not watching.”

“I am resigned to the fact that we will never understand what really happened in the 1960s and 1970s,” I said wistfully. “But the official story of what went on is strange enough. You went to CIA at the behest of Bronson Tweedy to take the heat off Director Helms, so he could claim to be following the recommendations of the Schlesinger report.”

“January first of 1972,” said Mac. “And we worked out of General Hershey’s old Selective Service Headquarters on F Street. Director Helms didn’t want anything to do with community management. ”

“So you were on F Street when the Watergate break-in happened?”

“Yes, that was in June of that year. Things were about to get very tense between Langley and the White House.”

“It’s amazing that all those people who about to become famous- G. Gordon  Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis- the whole cast of the Watergate Hearings- were just a block away from you in the OEOB!”

Mac smiled. “Yes they were, and President Nixon, too. Mentioning those names brings back memories. Five of the burglars had direct connections to the Agency, which was sort of curious. Director Helms testified during the Watergate Hearings that the CIA had been “duped” into taking part in the Watergate break-in by White House officials.”

“You mean he as much as admitted the Agency participated?”

“You could take it that way. But, see, Helms was fired the next year for not stonewalling the Watergate investigation. He knew something was coming, though. The protests against the War were what started it all in motion.”

“We never were defeated in the field in Vietnam,” I said. “The war was lost right here in Washington and in the streets near the universities. In fact, that was the first time I was here in Washington as an adult. I flew down for the May Day 1971 demonstrations. They said they were going to shut down the government, and I wanted to see it.”

“President Nixon was out at the Western White House at San Clemente,” said Mac.

“You guys sure screwed up my commute to the Pentagon.”

“Say, that’s right. This is the first time I am actually in the narrative.”

“Blocking traffic,” said the Admiral dryly.

“Director Helms knew that the Congress was going to try to assert authority over the Agency, so that is when they started to hunker down. He insisted that they start to get rid of the MK-ULTRA files on the experiments they had been conducting since the 1950s. It was remarkable that any of it survived to be in the Family Jewels.”

“Was that the LSD experiments?”

“Among other things,” said Mac. “Not many documents survived, but it was evident that methods were explored to alter individual mental states and brain functions though clandestine introduction of drugs and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse.”

“Sounds like some of that stuff came back in the enhanced interrogation techniques in the Black Prisons after 9/11.”

The Agency was involved in a lot of things that they did not want made public.”

“Didn’t a researcher die from a bad trip?”

“If you want to call the death of Frank Olson a “bad trip” I suppose that would have to include the blow to the temple that knocked him out before he “fell” out the tenth floor window of his hotel.”

“Was he high?”

“No, the story went that he had been dosed him up at an off-site and he had a bad trip and became depressed because of it. He went to his bosses and told them he wanted to quit.”

“Apparently they didn’t like that” Something had been gnawing at me for minutes.  “Say, wait a minute. Wasn’t there a story that claimed that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were two of the three tramps who were arrested and released in Dealey Plaza the day that JFK was shot?”

“They say a lot of things,” said Mac.


(The tramps of Dealey Plaza. Maybe Howard Hunt is the one on the right? Others say a man named Charles Rogers is on the left and Charles Harrelson (actor Woody’s father) is in the middle. I think the guy on the tight is a bum.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Family Jewels


(11th DCI William Colby.  Photo Time-Life, Inc.)

Sorry- I have been distracted. It is a soft gray Sunday morning, and it will wind up at the office presently to catch up on some projects that were deferred in the swirl of activity near and far.

I was telling you about Jim Schlesinger and his report that excoriated the fractious and fiercely independent American intelligence community. Mac lived the history of the military end of it. The rivalry between Army and Navy was so intense that the Services used to rotate the intelligence duty that supported President Franklin Roosevelt in the days before Pearl Harbor- the discontinuity may have contributed to the strategic surprise.

That was long before the establishment of the CIA, created out of the downsized OSS of Wild Bill Donavon. Mac was working at Arlington hall after the war in what was then the Armed Forces Security Agency- the linear predecessor to the National Security Agency.

He was there as an experienced Spook at the inception of both agencies, and was a contemporary of the strange and opaque James Jesus Angleton, who may, or may not have had his fingers on activities that would dwarf the impact of the Crown Jewels.

Mac got to CIA- or to the part of it that would become the Community Management staff- on the first of January, 1972. He hung up his Admiral’s uniform on the 31st of December and reported to the Agency in the time of troubles. It was a period that has some interesting resonance in what is about to happen to the community again as the pendulum of history- and Presidents- swings.

It had been a wild decade. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the continuing war in SE Asia book-ended ten years of wild activity by the Agency. Dr. Kissinger and Dick Nixon were deeply suspicious of the quality of both analysis and operations at Langley.

The Bay of Pigs was a disaster. The legacy of the Studies and Observations Group (SOG) in the Republic of Vietnam and adjacent nations is more nuanced.

There was a deep paranoia in the Administration, and the conviction that the Agency had to be reined in. Mac was going to be part of the response to that, now that his Navy days were done.

I have been distracted in my attempt to get back to the thread of history that is playing itself out again.

The boys and girls at Langley always like to say that they have only one customer- the President of the United States. They respond to occupier of the Oval Office to the best of their ability. The inclination of the President to use the tools at his disposal provides the direction in which the Agency will go.

This week, news flared that an obscure professor at The University of Michigan had been targeted for collection and potential discrediting by the National Intelligence Council, a community organization that works out of the Original Headquarters building on the Langley campus.

It was an odd story, since the NIC is hardly an operational intelligence organization, but it appears that the Bush White House had leaned on whoever was convenient to get some dirt on a perceived enemy.

Agents of the IC are not supposed to do that to “US persons,” which is a construct created in the wake of three separate inquiries that date from the 1970s.  I have inflicted an exploration of the Schlesinger Report on you already, and the recommendations that made such complete common sense that it took nearly thirty years and the 9/11 Commission to ram some of them through.

Then there were the Pike and Church Reports that issued from sensational Congressional hearings in the House and Senate. From the revelations of dirty tricks, assassination attempts and general mayhem, the Agency was pilloried.

Mac and the people he worked with on the IC Staff were tasked to implement the new and more restrictive rules.

Vietnam was over. A smaller, meeker and much more technical intelligence community was going to result.

I asked Mac about the Family Jewels at the Willow bar the other afternoon, and whether he knew about them at the time.

“No,” He said. “They were held centrally and not disseminated. Jim Schlesinger asked Agency employees to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter after Dick Helms was fired. Of course, he was only DCI for six months before President Nixon sent him down the GW Parkway to take over the Pentagon.”

“From what I have read, he started firing people left and right, too,” I said. “That was when Major General Thomas joined he Staff, and he was still there when I worked for Joan on what had morphed into the DDC-CM Staff.”

“Well, the last American combat troops were being pulled out of Vietnam, and there was great pressure to downsize the Agency, particularly the paramilitary component.  The work force at the Agency hated him. What happened was the usual here in Washington. Leaks to the press during Watergate suggested that the Agency was involved in the break-in.”

“That was E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, right?”

“Yes- but it was not completely clear whether The Plumbers commissioned by G. Gordon Liddy were actually Agency employees in that role, or just free-lancers. But they were certainly both CIA veterans. Schlesinger’s direction to compile the Family Jewels was a 693-page loose-leaf book of memos that plopped into the in-basket of William Colby when he took over as the 11th DCI.”

“It was Seymour Hersh that blew the whistle in the New York Times, right?”

“Some things never change,” said Mac. “Same now as in 1974. Colby was holding the bag on what Schlesinger had created. He had to deliver the documents to Congress when the Committees found out they existed, and feigned shock at what had been going on all those years.”

I looked at my Happy Hour white wine and thought about my research. “Colby and Helms were interviewed much later, in the late 1980s on their perspective on the dilemma a DCI faced in in running a secret agency in a democracy. They called the period starting with the Nixon administration “The Time of Troubles.”

“No kidding. By the end of Watergate, the President was out of control, and the world faced thermonuclear holocaust in the 1973 Mid-east war. Then there was the Ford Administration, and the long national nightmare was over.” We both laughed at the old quotion.


(1975: Henry the K, Jerry Ford and Jim Schlesinger, who Ford cashiered for insubordination. Photo UPI.)

“I am afraid this is going to need another visit to Willow,” I said.
“Or a couple,” said Mac. “But you will have to hear about that to get to the 12th DCI, Stansfield Turner.”

“That sounds like the 12th Imam President Ahmadinejad is waiting for.”

“Not quite as mystical,” said Mac with a smile. “But definitely his appearance transformed the secret world.”


(Twelfth DCI, Adm. Stansfield Turner, USN (ret.) Image Time-Life.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com