The Colonel's Corner The Devil's Chessboard Part 18

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0:00 Well, SR, you're in luck. Our purple pill is back today. I noticed that, Colonel. It worked just fine today. I'm still digging out, though, although I hear you may get a little bit of snow. It could. I'm not on the coast, but it hasn't happened since 1977, so we are a little overdue. But who knows? We shall see.

0:32 All right. Yes, we will. It just sounds hilarious. Gulf effect snow. We don't have any lake effect snow in Lakeland. Just doesn't get cold enough for that. Okay. But now is the perfect time to go to any of the springs because the manatees are all up at the head of the spring where the water temperature at the bottom of the springs is still 70 degrees.

1:10 So for those of you who are not from Florida, this is the perfect weather to go see the manatees because they're all clumped together. All right, we are going to start on chapter 15. It is a long chapter, so I don't think we'll get through the whole chapter today, but we will progress accordingly. This chapter is called Contempt. It starts on April 17th, 1961.

1:40 Over 1,400 CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles waited ashore at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, an operation that would quickly become the biggest debacle of Alan Dulles' career. The CIA director was setting himself 1,000 miles away in Puerto Rico. Dulles had flown down the San Juan that weekend, was the featured speaker at Young President's Organization Conference.

2:10 It, of course, was the CIA front as well. And as notoriously becomes evident throughout all of our investigation of Allen Dulles, he's always out of town on these operations because he considered it to, oh, I've had this appointment for a long time. And if I canceled it, it would look suspect. He just preferred to be away.

2:40 so that he wasn't in the limelight or people crowding around his house asking him if the CIA was involved or whatever. What I feel most interesting about this is where he stayed. He stayed at La Concha. It's spelled L-A-C-O-N-C-H-A. Now, why do I find that funny? It's because that's where I spent my 50th birthday party.

3:10 or weekend or week or whatever. We went down there for a week, my husband and I. And it's notorious on the island of Puerto Rico because it has this huge clamshell looking restaurant. It's an amazing place. I mean, it's old now. It was brand new when he went, but I had no idea Alan Dulles had been there. It is an amazing place to stay. I'll just put that out there. On Monday morning,

3:43 When Dulles strode on stage to deliver his remarks, he looked like a man without a worry in the world. The CIA director's speech, which followed a panel discussion featuring Margaret Mead and Dr. Benjamin Spock on the subject of are we letting our children down, was a plea for globetrotting American businessmen like those gathered in the conference to join the clandestine war against communism.

4:12 Now, do you find it odd that the guy who groomed an entire generation of children and parents to not discipline their kids, Dr. Spock, is at a conference with Alan Dulles? That should strike you as crazy. Afterward, there was time to relax by the pool. The spymaster had brought Clover along. They seemed to...

4:42 to the world to be just another well-to-do American couple enjoying the weekend in the Caribbean sun. But by that evening, as Dulles and his wife flew home, the Bay of Pigs operation was on the verge of collapse. The spymaster's long story career with it. Dick Bissell, whom Dulles had put in charge of the invasion, for plausible deniability, of course,

5:05 sent one of the top men in the Cuba task force to pick him up at the airport, thinking that the CIA director would want to be briefed immediately. Richard Drain, the chief of operations for the Bay of Pig expeditions, rolled onto the runway at Baltimore's Friendship Airport in his well-traveled CIA-issued Chevrolet. The CIA director emerged from the plane with his wife and a young aide. He introduced himself. I'm Dick.

5:35 Drain, I was sent to brief you, sir. Oh, yes, Dick, how are you? Drain drew Dulles away from the others, and Dulles asked him, how's it going? He says, well, not very well, sir. Oh, is that so? Back at the quarter's eye, the CIA's headquarters in downtown Washington, the battle-hardened men were on the verge of hysteria. Bissell, who prided himself on cool performance, was under pressure. He seemed frozen.

6:05 On the brink of failure, the Cuban operation lacked the kind of muscular leadership that could rescue the men pinned down by Castro's forces. Drain was hoping that Dulles would save the day, but he found the old man, his unflappability disturbing. Drain told him it was a fast-breaking situation. We're hanging on by our fingernails. Dulles puffed quietly on his pipe. Today's airstrike was killed, Drain told him.

6:35 A stunning piece of news since Dulles knew that the operation was damned unless President Kennedy agreed to escalate the action and provide the embattled anti-Castro brigade the air cover. Why did they do that? Dulles asked softly, no anger in his voice at all. If you're asking my guess, my guess is this thing is going to hell. By the disastrous end of the operation, the Castro forces had killed more than 100 of the invaders and taken the rest prisoner.

7:04 Drain was so wrung out that he vomited. Like the rest of the CIA planning team, Drain had worked closely with the exile leaders who were trapped on the island. But Dulles didn't seem to mind at all. They rode in silence for a long time until Drain was just fuming. He said, if it isn't too presumptuous of me, sir, I wish your brother was still alive. Drain had served as the CIA liaison to John Foster in the final months of his life.

7:35 Dulles simply nodded and stared ahead. Drain was deeply uncomfortable in his boss's presence and eager to flee back to the CIA command post. But Dulles insisted they come in and have a drink. Drain thought the chief would finally grill him on the details of the failing operation. He was wrong. Dulles asked him, Dick, did you serve in Greece? I have to go to the White House tomorrow to a reception for the Greek prime minister. Can you refresh my memory on him?

8:07 The stunned CIA officer strung together a short reply. For years after the Bay of Pigs, Washington insiders and scholars tried to unravel the mystery of Dulles' AWOL behavior during the critical CIA operation. Some explained his absence as part of his modus operandi. He was in the habit of leaving Washington on the eve of critical missions to make it seem like nothing was going on. He had planned the young president's

8:34 speaking engagement months before. Besides, he added, I knew I could get back in the speed of an aircraft. It was only a question of six or eight hours. But the CIA's official history of the Cuban fiasco prepared in the 70s and early 80s concluded that Dulles' absence was unexcusable. The Dulles report added, he was the one man who might have persuaded the president to permit the D-Day airstrike.

9:05 Some of the sharpest criticism of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came within the CIA itself. Dick Drane was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles. When he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA historian who prepared the report on the Bay of Pigs, Drane was a gung-ho officer who fit the agency's profile right down to his membership and skull and bones. Class of 43.

9:31 But years after he picked up Dulles at the Baltimore airport, Drain vented about the agency's handling of the Cuba enterprise. He was astounded by the poor quality of the staff assigned to the high stakes Bay of Pigs operation. Drain told Pfeiffer, despite Allen Dulles' insistence that it was ran by the agency's best and brightest, quote, Allen Dulles, always meaning what he said, would say repeatedly, now I know.

9:57 that the very best people were assigned to this project. There is nothing more important than what we are doing. I want people pulled out of tours of overseas if necessary. This thing must be manned, unquote. But in truth, Drain said, the Bay of Pigs drew all of the agency's castoffs. We would tend to get people out of the CIA division chiefs that they found excess, which normally meant they were insufficient.

10:25 Many notable exceptions. There's no sound over on Rumble. Oh, well, shoot. All right. Let me fix that. There we go. Thank you. I noticed Bridget got bumped down too. Okay. So basically they're saying that Alan Dulles is vacationing at a speech in Puerto Rico. And when he does come back, he gets picked up.

10:54 The Bay of Pigs is on its last leg and Dulles is unfazed by any of it. And the guy that was sent to brief him and tell him what was going on, thinking he was going to come to the command post and save the day, he just invites him in for a drink. He acts like he doesn't even care. And we find out in this part of the book that all of the Bay of Pigs people

11:23 Not the leadership that was being ran in Miami, but the people that was working on it at the CIA headquarters were just castoffs from other people. They weren't the best and the brightest. Drain said, I don't mean to be unduly and modest, but really I didn't have the qualifications for the job except for I was there and unemployed. I had no Spanish language whatsoever and my entire exposure had been punching cows in Arizona in 1940. That doesn't really bring you up.

11:53 on much Latin America or Latinos and any of that. I had never been on amphibious operations, and if that was characteristic of my qualification, it really characterized the whole damn operation, about which it seemed to me there was a good deal of well-meaning hypocrisy. Drane's criticism of the thing echoed earlier CIA reports damning internal investigations carried out by the agency's

12:24 Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. In the months immediately following the disaster, the Kirkpatrick report was one of the most surprising, honest self-evaluations ever produced within the CIA. It found that despite Dulles' insistence on quote-unquote high quality, the Bay of Pigs operation was staffed by agency losers. According to the CIA files, 17 of the 42 officers assigned to the operation were ranked in the lowest third of the agency.

12:53 on their evaluation reports. The IG reported, concluded that Dulles had allowed his division chief to dump their disposable people on the Cuba project. Robert Amory Jr., the CIA's highly respected chief of analysis, was one of those who was inexplicably

13:15 kept away from the Bay of Pigs operation, despite his extensive experience with beach landings as an Army Corps of Engineer officer in the South Pacific. He had literally written a book about it. He wasn't allowed to be on the project. He was stunned by Dulles and Bissell's decision to keep him on the sidelines. The CIA men sent to Miami to work with the exile leaders and to Guatemala to help train the pilots were a bunch of guys who were otherwise not needed.

13:47 They were a strange bunch of people with German experience, Arabic experience, and things like that. And most of them could not speak Spanish. The Kirkpatrick report detailed a number of glaring errors made by Dulles, Bissell, and their Bay of Pigs team. When the plans for the Cuban invasion grew more ambitious and began...

14:12 Leaking to the press as early as November 1960, the report stated the CIA should have terminated its role in the mission since it had outgrown the agency's covert capability. Quote, when the report became blown to every newspaper reader, the agency should have informed higher authority that it was no longer operating in its charter, unquote. As the project grew, the agency reduced the exiled leaders to the status of puppets.

14:40 The project was badly organized. The agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep the president and his policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions essential for success. You get the distinct feeling that the entire Bay of Pigs was meant to fail, which is why they made the change of the destination and the invasion.

15:10 At the last minute. Because what they all wanted, Dulles, Lyman, Lemitzger, all of them, was a full-scale land invasion Operation Northwood. That's what they wanted. And they felt if they could throw these Cuban exiles into Cuba, whether they succeeded or not, that it would prompt JFK.

15:40 to authorize, when it was failing, the use of the military to save face. He was baiting JFK into using the military the entire time. Kirkpatrick, who prepared his devastating report with the help of three investigators, flatly rejected the main CIA alibi for the failed mission that Kennedy was to blame by blocking the agency's last minute.

16:09 requests for airstrikes. The invasion was doomed from the start by the CIA's poor planning, the inspector general concluded. Even if the airstrikes had allowed the invaders to move inland from the shore, the men would eventually have been crushed by the Cuban military. Perhaps the most devastating revelation about the CIA operation emerged years later.

16:32 In 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting held by its Cuba task force on November 15, 1960, one week after Kennedy's election, the group, which was deliberating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion, came to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measures that Castro had implemented, the CIA task force admitted their invasion plan now seemed...

17:02 unachievable, except as the joint CIA DOD action. So they always needed the Department of Defense. The entire thing was a setup. The CIA realized at that meeting that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless the Exile Brigade was reinforced by the U.S. military. But the CIA never shared that assessment with JFK.

17:29 They were just going to blame the failure on it if they couldn't get him baited in to send the military. The whole thing was planned. Nor did Dulles or Bissell share with Kennedy their other magic bullet for success in Cuba. The ongoing plot with the mafia to assassinate Castro, which had been authorized by Eisenhower.

17:58 With Cuba's revolutionary government decapitated, CIA officials were certain the regime would topple. But the Cuban leader had learned from the imperial history and had wisely taken precautions against such plots. He would thwart his enemies for decades to come.

18:16 Dulles and Bissell knew that Kennedy was deeply torn over the Cuba invasion plan. His denunciation of Western imperialism had raised high hopes throughout the hemisphere that the days of heavy-handed Yankee interference was coming to an end. Kennedy's election had given rise to an enormous expectancy throughout Latin America, Schlesinger wrote. They see him as another FDR. They expect great things from him. But Kennedy had also campaigned for a strong response to Castro.

18:46 Eisenhower's final words of advice to him were to take out the Cuban leader. And he left behind the invasion plan, as sorry as it was, and an assassination plot to do just that. When William Bundy observed the old general had handed Kennedy a grenade with the pin pulled, if he didn't use it, it would blow up in his face.

19:11 Kennedy agonized over giving final authorization for the Bay of Pigs to the very end. He kept downsizing the operation to make it as little noisy as possible. What the president really wanted, it seemed, was for the CIA to pull off a neat trick of invading Cuba without actually invading it. Dulles kept accommodating Kennedy, convinced that once the brigade hit the beaches, JFK would be forced to do what was necessary.

19:40 even if it was very noisy and messy. The CIA chief set a trap for Kennedy, allowing the president to believe that his immaculate invasion could succeed, even though Dulles knew it couldn't. Years after the Bay of Pigs, historians, including the CIA's own Jack Pfeiffer, painted a portrait of Dulles as a spymaster in decline, bumbling, disengaged, and maybe too advanced in years. He was 68.

20:09 That was a lie. But as usual, there was a method to Dulles' seemingly carelessness. It was now clear that the CIA Bay of Pigs expedition was not simply doomed to fail, it was meant to fail. And its failure was designed to trigger a real action, an all-out U.S. military invasion in the island. Dulles plunged ahead with this hopeless paramilitary mission and expedition that he staffed with C-minus officers and expendable Cuban.

20:40 puppets because he's sincerely confident that in the heat of the battle, Kennedy would cave and be forced to send the Marines. Dulles was banking on a young, untested commander-in-chief to cave in to the pressure of the Washington war machine. It was Dick Bissell, the man in charge of the high-stake operation, who stood to lose the most when the brigade of Cuban patriots and cutthroats inevitably bogged down on the beach.

21:10 This was perfectly fine with Dulles too. He was content all along for Bissell to take the lead on that as well as the heat. Bissell supported Dulles' decision to fly off to Puerto Rico on the eve of the mission. The deputy director was eager to run the show. JFK had put word out that Bissell was going to replace Dulles. And the confident Bissell thought it was time that he could show what he was made of.

21:40 Dulles was only too pleased to accommodate his rising deputy or sacrifice him. As the mission went to hell, the CIA chief would be far from Washington. By the time Dulles returned home from his Puerto Rico retreat, he would look like the grown-up riding to the rescue. The spymaster in the Pentagon brass would make the new president see that he had no choice. He had to escalate the fighting in Cuba and march all the way to Havana.

22:08 afterward as the dust settled if Bissell suffered an unfortunate career reversal because his ill-conceived escapade had to be salvaged by the big boys well so be it after all he was the face of the Cuba mission just as Dulles had made him the front man for the U-2 enterprise and the assassination operations against foreign leaders years later Bob Avery

22:34 would acknowledge that JFK was indeed a little bit trapped by the CIA on the Bay of Pigs, though Amory himself had nothing to do with it. But if Dulles thought he could force Kennedy to carry out his Cuba plan, he underestimated JFK. Around midnight on Tuesday, April 18th, in the midst of the unfolding fiasco, some of the principal advocates for the bigger war in Cuba made one final assault on JFK.

23:02 gathering with him in the Oval Office after an annual congressional party in the East Room. Among them were Bissell and Chairman Lyman Lemesker and Navy Chief Arleigh Burke. Dulles was absent, still keeping his distance from the mess and hoping Bissell would take full charge of it. The CIA director was placing his confidence in Lemesker and Burke.

23:32 hoping the two blunt-spoken, highly decorated warriors could strong-arm JFK into using the military. The president was still in his former formal white tie and black tail attire from the party, and the military men were in full dress uniform, but there was nothing polite or decorative about the meeting. Admiral Burke was especially gruff with Kennedy, treating him as if he was a weak-kneed ensign.

24:01 Without informing the president, Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba, anticipating the U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage the invasion. It was one of the most extraordinary acts of Pentagon and CIA insubordination that plagued Kennedy's presidency from the very start. Ring any bells? Like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling China that they would call him and let him know what was going on?

24:32 Now, the Navy chief was browbeating Kennedy into taking the first steps towards a full-scale war. Quote, let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft, growled Burke, who had become legendary for his speed and daring as a destroyer squadron commander in the South Pacific during the war, while JFK had been a mere PT boat captain.

25:00 But by this point in the unfolding disaster, Kennedy was not inclined to take any more advice from his national security wise men, even if they were World War II heroes. What if Castro forces return fire and hit the destroyer, Kennedy said? Then we'll knock the hell out of them, Burke said. Now Kennedy began to show some of his own icy, if restrained, temper.

25:24 He had made it clear all along that he did not want the Bay of Pigs to blow up into an international crisis with the U.S. in the middle. And here was his Navy chief urging just such a course. Burke, I don't want the U.S. involved in this, he firmly said. Hell, Mr. President, we are involved. But Kennedy stood his ground as he repeatedly warned them that there would be no airstrikes, no marine landings, and the fate of the Bay of Pigs operation was sealed.

25:54 They were sure I'd give in, Kennedy later said. They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his face. They were wrong. JFK was even more vehement when he spoke with another old friend, Paul Red Fay Jr., whom Kennedy had installed as the Undersecretary of the Navy. Nobody is going to force me to do anything. I don't think that's in the best interest of this country.

26:23 JFK said, we're not going to plunge into irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in the country put so-called national pride above national reason. As the last of the brigade was rounded up by Castro's troops in the swamps of the Bay of Pigs, Dulles seemed shell-shocked. He had never suffered a humiliation like this in his career. Seeking consolation, Dulles made a Thursday night dinner date.

26:54 With Richard Nixon, the spymaster was acutely aware that if Nixon had been the one sitting in the White House, the events in Cuba would have taken a completely different course. When he finally arrived at the Washington residence that Nixon still maintained, over an hour late, Dulles did not seem himself. It looked to Nixon like he was under great emotional stress. The CIA chief shuffled in wearing slippers.

27:24 a sign that he was in the midst of another agonizing grout attack. And then the old man collapsed on the chair and said, this is the worst day of my life. If Dulles thought he could escape Kennedy's wrath by making Bissell the scapegoat, he was deeply mistaken. Both CIA officials would eventually be ousted, but JFK placed most of the blame squarely on Dulles.

27:50 The CIA chief later swore that he never sold the president on the Bay of Pigs scheme. Quote, one ought never to sell anybody a bill of goods, he told an interviewer at the JFK Presidential Library. But Kennedy knew the truth. Dulles had lied to his face in the Oval Office about the chances of the operation. Quote, I stood there, here, I stood right here at Ike's desk.

28:18 Dulles told JFK on the eve of the invasion. And I told him I was certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed. And Mr. President, the prospect for this plan are even better than they were for that one. Kennedy and Dulles had gotten off to a good start with each other during the first months, had not gotten off to a good start. The minor rifts and strains began accumulating. Still wedded to this regime, Dulles never hung an official portrait.

28:49 of JFK in the CIA headquarters. This sounds so familiar, like the people not wanting to hang Trump's portrait in government offices. The CIA director immediately created an atmosphere of distrust between the agency and the White House, telling his deputies to make sure that they retrieve any sensitive documents they show Kennedy's staff so they don't wind up in White House files.

29:14 Dulles didn't feel very comfortable with Kennedy, Bob Avery later said. The spymaster regarded the young new frontiersman, Kennedy, brought into the administration as an alien force. In February of 61, Adam Yarmulinski, one of the young Ivy League educated whiz kids, assembled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,

29:44 to modernize the management of the Pentagon, scheduled an appointment with Dulles. Before the meeting, the spymaster requested a report on him from the CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, as if he were meeting a foreign official. Dulles was briefed about Yomelinsky's liberal inclinations by Houston, who then phoned the director's office with additional observations about the young Kennedy official. Mr. Houston says,

30:13 that he was an extremely bright fellow, although not particularly personally attractive. He's of Russian Jewish background. Dulles insisted on personally handling all the agency's briefings at the White House. But JFK, who was more widely traveled and sophisticated about global affairs than his age indicated, did not think much of the CIA's chief's presentation. He found Dulles patronizing and uninformative.

30:42 This just sounds so familiar. According to White House aide Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy was not very impressed by Dulles' briefings. He did not think they were much in depth and told him anything. They told him it didn't tell him anything he couldn't read in the newspapers because, of course, they control the newspapers. Kennedy made it clear that he no longer wanted to be briefed by Dulles, just like Trump did.

31:08 So the agency began sending him briefing booklets called the Presidential Intelligence Checklist, filled with short summaries of world developments. Kennedy clearly preferred this method, along with requests to see source material, such as the complete text of speeches by foreign leaders in unabridged versions of the CIA reports. In public, the president took full blame for the Cuban fiasco, and Kennedy

31:37 remained personally courteous in his face-to-face dealings with Dulles. There was never any recrimination on the president's part. Dulles said later, I might well have lost to some extent in the measure of confidence he placed in me that's inevitable in things of this kind, but I may say his personal attitude towards me in meetings, he never let that appear.

32:02 Behind the scenes, Dulles waged a vigorous battle with Kennedy to control the media spin on the Bayon Pigs and to hold his command of the CIA. The intelligent chief took immediate steps to rally his corporate base of support. On May 1st, Dulles convened a private meeting of CEOs to discuss current problems confronting businesses in Latin America. Again, a clear indication the CIA does not work for us.

32:31 The gathering was at the New York Metropolitan Club, which Dulles emphasized was strictly off the record, gave the spymaster and his corporate clientele an opportunity to reevaluate their strategy. Dulles' corporate circle encouraged his aggressive political tactics by sending him supportive messages. Charles Hills, Jr., executive vice president of ITT, I see Illini there,

33:01 was among those who wrote Dulles to buck him up after the Cuban catastrophe. This is a quote. I have the greatest admiration for your calmness and fortitude and for your devotion to the country's good, wrote Hills. And I sense that I am one of an overwhelming majority because Dulles liked doing things for Hill. And I-T-T.

33:33 served basically as a conduit for the CIA. The following month, a conservative New York corporate attorney named Watson Waddy Washburn, known as a tennis wizard in his youth, and later an attorney who had defended PG Waddle House against the IRS, offered Dulles a militant encouragement. Washburn urged Dulles to

34:03 Ignore the earlier failure and organize a new invasion of Cuba to liberate the Bay of Pigs captives from Castro's prisons. This would be child's play as a military operation, he insisted, and would qualify as a humanitarian enterprise rather than imperialism.

34:21 If Dulles had lost the battle at the Bay of Pigs, he was determined to win the war of ideas over the failed operation. He began his psychological warfare campaign by sending an all-stations cable to McGee, a 25-year CIA veteran serving in Vietnam at the time. Dulles' cable to his troops implied that the events taken their planned course, he would have been victorious. In other words, blaming Kennedy.

34:54 He was emphatically clear the mission had been doomed by Kennedy's failure of nerve, or as he put it more diplomatically in his unpublished article for Harper, by the president's lack of determination to succeed. Years later, Dulles was still spinning reporters, scholars, and anyone that would listen about the story. In April of 65, when a Harvard Business School student by the name of L.

35:25 Paul Brimmer III, who would find his own place in the annals of American disasters as George W. Bush's guy in Iraq, sent Dulles his dissertation on the Bay of Pigs. The spymaster sought to correct the young man's impression that it was a failure. It was Kennedy's final decision to eliminate the air action. That had killed the expedition, Dulles wrote back to Brimmer.

35:53 I can assure you that it would never have been mounted if it had not been suspected that this vital element of the plan would be eliminated. That's horseshit. Dulles' spin on the Bay of Pigs began appearing in the press as soon as the smoke cleared. His version received prominent play in the September 61 Fortune magazine article called Cuba, the record set straight.

36:22 The article was written by Fortune staff writer Charles Murphy, a journalist so close to Dulles that the spymaster used him as a ghostwriter. The previous year, Murphy had fondly agreed to write Dulles' memoirs, telling the CIA chief, you have honored me with your invitation to lend a hand with your book, and I am looking forward to the association. Much of Murphy's article in Fortune sounded like it had been dictated directly by Dulles.

36:52 shifting blame from the CIA to the White House. Murphy later claimed that Admiral Burke had been his source. Same thing. But Kennedy brothers suspected Dulles' deputy, General Charles Cabal, was also involved. Kennedy was furious about the Fortune article, and he had the White House prepare a point-by-point rebuttal for the publisher, Henry Luce. The media-savvy president knew that he was confronting an opponent in the war of ideas.

37:22 At his first press conference following Bay of Pigs, JFK put the Washington press corps on alert, telling reporters, quote, I wouldn't be surprised if information wasn't poured into you from interested agencies, unquote. If the president could not match Dulles' wide network of media assets, he brought his own impressive skill to public relations war with the CIA.

37:47 Kennedy was adept at massaging influential journalists like the New York Times Washington columnist James Scotty Reston. While the Bay of Pigs disaster was still unfolding, JFK invited Reston to lunch at the White House, confiding in him, I probably made a mistake in keeping Dulles. I have never worked with him, and therefore I can't estimate the meaning when he tells me things.

38:12 Dulles is a legendary figure and it's hard to operate with legendary figures. It's a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business. That is that we will have to deal with the CIA. Of course, word quickly got back to CIA headquarters that if Kennedy was taking the blame in public for the Bay of Pigs, he privately stabbed Dulles in the back, vowing to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Kennedy.

38:43 deployed two of his most passionately loyal White House aides, Sorensen and Schlesinger, in the war on words with Dulles. Both men brought a cunning eloquence to the political duel. The week after the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger, who had adamantly opposed the operation, observed, we not only look like imperialists, we look stupid and ineffectual imperialists. Alan Dulles and Dick Bissell brought down

39:12 in a day that Kennedy had been laboring patiently and successfully to build in three months. Dulles knew that JFK was maneuvering to dump him, but he made it clear that he was not going to go without a fight. On May 23rd, Schlesinger discussed the CIA's director's fate with Dulles' mole in the White House, Mac Bundy. Bundy, no doubt channeling his headstrong patron, told Schlesinger that

39:39 There would be serious difficulties about procuring the resignation of Alan Dulles. According to Bundy, Dulles believed that his only mistake was not in having persuaded the president to send in the Marines. As JFK's national security advisor, Bundy was in a delicate position trying to earn confidence of the president, whom he had just begun serving, while at the same time advocating for Dulles. In the midst of the Bay of Pigs crisis, Bundy had tried to turn Bissell into a scapegoat.

40:09 He told Schlesinger that Dulles actually had more misgivings about the project than he ever expressed to the president and that he had not done so out of loyalty to Bissell. These people are so evil. Bundy added he personally would not be able to accept Dick's estimates of a situation like that again. Bundy, who had endorsed the Bay of Pigs plan, was clearly acting on Dulles' behalf when he threw Bissell under the bus.

40:37 but he failed to halt the White House momentum that was building for Dulles' termination. The battle over Dulles' future as CIA director came to a head during a presidential investigation of the Bay of Pigs, a few days after the failed invasion. Kennedy appointed General Maxwell Taylor as chair of the official inquiry. Taylor, who would later become JFK's military advisor, was closely aligned with Dulles. Fletcher Prouty, an astute observer of Dulles,

41:04 far-flung Washington Network, later called Taylor another key CIA man in the White House. Dulles, who was appointed to the Taylor Commission along with his ally, Admiral Burke, sounds like the Warren Commission, must have thought he had the Bay of Pigs panel tightly wired, just the way he had controlled the Blue Ribbon CIA oversight committees during the Eisenhower administration. But Max Taylor,

41:34 also felt a sense of loyalty to Kennedy, who had championed the general when Taylor broke with Eisenhower's dullest policy over massive retaliation in favor of a nuanced strategy of flexible response. JFK, who was influenced by Taylor's 1959 book, The Uncertain Trumpet, called the scholarly Taylor, my kind of general. As chair of the investigation, Taylor maintained the delicate balance.

42:06 diplomatically to avoid putting too much blame on the CIA or the Pentagon. But Taylor's strongest tilt in the estimation of CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer were towards deflecting criticism from the White House. Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy, whom Pfeiffer archly observed crossed all lines as the president's alter ego, used his position on the Taylor Commission to make sure his brother was protected.

42:33 The attorney general proved to be a tougher advocate for White House than Dulles and Arleigh Burke were for their institutions. RFK deftly blocked the two Kennedy antagonists from focusing blame on the president. As the committee completed its report, Dulles and Burke were reduced to lobbying Taylor to at least insert a footnote stating that if Kennedy had approved the air coverage of the landing, it could have had.

43:02 a chain reaction of success throughout Cuba, with resultant defection of some of Castro's militia, the uprising of the populace, and eventually the success of the campaign. But this hypothetical scenario was a pipe dream that only Dulles and Burke were smoking. Nearly two decades later, Pfeiffer's Bay of Pigs history still reflected agency resentment at how JFK's brother outmaneuvered the CIA and Pentagon during the Taylor investigation.

43:31 Quote, at the conclusion of the testimony of the witnesses, it was clear that Burke and Dulles were headed for the elephant's burial ground, thanks to Robert Kennedy's degradation of them and their agencies, and in no small part to the case Dulles played in his abysmal performance as a witness. Unquote. By the end of the investigation, the outplayed Dulles and Burke were nattering at each other.

44:02 over how much of the responsibility they each should face. If the Taylor Committee, which presented his findings to Kennedy on May 16th, badly damaged Dulles, the Kirkpatrick report sealed his fate. Lyman Kirkpatrick had been one of the agency's rising stars. A graduate of Deerfield in Princeton, he served in the OSS and as an intelligence advisor to General Omar Bradley during the war. A streak of daring ran through Kirkpatrick. His sister, Helen,

44:32 was a war correspondent in Free French Forces to Liberate Paris. Lyman Kirkpatrick joined the CIA in its infancy, and he made his way up the ranks quickly, becoming CIA Chief Beatle Smith's right-hand man. Kirkpatrick appeared to be on a fast track to the top of the agency as a covert action chief and possibly director. But in 1952, he was stricken with polio while on an assignment to Asia, where...

45:03 He was checked into Walter Reed, where Dulles had pulled strings to get him admitted. Kirkpatrick eventually returned to the CIA, but he was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. But he was determined to resume his career. Dulles, who had just taken over the CIA, appointed Kirkpatrick Inspector General, an unpopular post since it involved monitoring the agency's internal affairs. By accepting the job, Kirkpatrick was acknowledging that his hopes for the top office were gone.

45:33 but he demonstrated integrity as an IG, recommending that the CIA employees who were responsible for the 1953 death of MKUltra victim Frank Olson be punished, although they never were. Kirkpatrick also went on the record within the agency as opposing the assassination of Lumumba. Kirkpatrick, who had worked with Joe Kennedy on Eisenhower's Intelligence Advisory Board, belonged to a pro-Kennedy faction inside the CIA.

46:02 Kirkpatrick and JFK were on friendly terms. So JFK had invited Kirkpatrick to use the White House pool for his exercise because it was put in for FDR. Kirkpatrick was a lifelong CIA man, and he owed his resurrected career to Dulles.

46:36 So the old man felt deeply betrayed when Kirkpatrick handed him and his deputy, Charles Cabal, copies of the highly critical Bay of Pigs autopsy. A furious Dulles denounced the report as a hatchet job. Dulles and Cabal were both exceedingly shocked and upset, irritated and annoyed. Kirkpatrick later said, agency loyalists like Sam Halpern began spreading the word that Kirkpatrick was acting out of acrimony.

47:07 The report was basically a vendetta against Bessel, he said later. He had been a rising star. Once he had polio, he got sidetracked and became a bitter man. They have no shame. They will attack anybody for telling the truth, even their own. When you speak honestly about what people did wrong, you're going to step on toes, Kirkpatrick's son later said. He was a retired Army intelligence colonel.

47:35 But he did his job, he said of his dad. Dulles succeeded in suppressing the Kirkpatrick report. It would remain locked away until CIA was finally compelled to release it in 1998. But as word spread in Washington circles about the harsh report, it added to the anti-Kennedy passions flaring within the CIA. The Bay of Pigs debacle produced a stuttering rage.

48:02 Among CIA officers aligned with Dulles, according to CIA veteran Joseph B. Smith, especially among those on the Cuba task force. I had the feeling all those agents there felt almost as if the world had ended. In August.

48:21 Months after the failed venture, when longtime veteran Ralph McGeehy returned from Vietnam to the agency headquarters, he too found the CIA in turmoil. Rumors spread that Kennedy was going to exact his revenge by slashing the CIA workforce through a massive reduction in force. It seemed to us that the reduction in force program was aimed more at the CIA than other agencies. This was a tension-filled, dismal time.

48:49 The hall seemed filled with the strained, anxious looks of soon-to-be unemployed people. When Kennedy's axe did fall, McGeehee was stunned by the carnage. About one out of every five people were fired. The tension became too much for some. On several occasions, one of my former office mates came to the office drunk and got added to the list.

49:14 The anti-Kennedy rage inside the CIA's headquarters also reverberated at the Pentagon. It's weird how you never hear about Kennedy firing 20% of the CIA, ever. We hear about the Halloween massacre of Jimmy Carter, but not about the Kennedy firings. So weird. This rage went into the Pentagon, pulling out the rug on the Bay of Pigs invader room.

49:47 fumed Lyman Lemesker was unbelievable, absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal, he was heard saying. The name Kennedy still made Burke boil over. The admiral told an oral historian from the U.S. Naval Institute, quote, Mr. Kennedy was a very bad president. He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation.

50:13 Kennedy didn't realize the power of the U.S. or how to use the power of the U.S. It was a game to them. They were inexperienced people. No, they just didn't play your game. If Kennedy's national security situation were filled with contempt for him, the feeling was clearly mutual. On the hills of the Bay of Pigs, when Lemonsker

50:37 urged militant action in other hot spots, such as Laos. The president brushed him off. He disliked even being in the same room with men that had led him astray on Cuba. JFK dismissed Lemesker and the others as a bunch of old men. He thought Lemesker was a dope. Yeah, he's the Forrest Gump of Operation Gladio. Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was disturbed by JFK's growing estrangement from the military and the CIA.

51:06 Of course, Johnson was a great admirer of the military, recalled Jack Bell, a White House reporter from the AP. He didn't believe that Kennedy was paying enough attention to his military leaders. Chatting with Bell one day, LBJ told the reporter, you don't hardly ever see the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the White House anymore. Johnson was painfully aware he was not part of JFK's inner circle either.

51:35 He just sat around twiddling his thumbs, Bell put it. It was Bobby, the tough kid brother, reviled by Johnson, who was president's indispensable partner. Every time they had a conference down there at the White House, don't kid anybody about who was the top advisor, Johnson bitterly told Bell. It wasn't McNamara or the chiefs of staff or anybody else. Bobby was first in and last out.

52:03 Bobby is the boy he listens to. The boy. It was Cuba that created the first fracture between Kennedy and his national security chain of command. But while the Bay of Pigs was still dominating the front page, the CIA mucked up its other international crisis that required the president's urgent attention. The Cuba invasion was all but erased this second crisis from history.

52:32 But the strange events that occurred in Paris in April 61 reinforced the disturbing feeling that President Kennedy was not in control of his own government. Paris was in a turmoil. It was April 22nd. A group of retired French generals had seized power in Algiers to block President Charles de Gaulle from settling the long bloody war in the Algerian independence.

52:59 Rumors quickly spread that the coup plotters was coming next for de Gaulle himself, and the skies of Paris would soon be filled with battle. Paratroopers, French foreign legionnaires from Algeria to attack the capital. We've talked about this a lot, and I love the fact that he puts these two things together because we do all the time. The threat to French democracy was actually even more immediate than feared.

53:26 On Saturday evening, two groups of paratroopers totaling over 2,000 men huddled in the forest of Orleans and the forest of some other French town that I don't know how to say, not much more than an hour outside of Paris. The rebellious paratroopers were poised for a final command to join up their tank units and converge on the capital with the aim of seizing the palace and other government posts. They were orchestrating a coup.

53:56 against De Gaulle. By Sunday, panic was sweeping through Paris. All air traffic was halted over the area. The metro was shut down. The cinemas were dark. News that the coup was being led by a widely admired Maurice Challe, C-H-A-L-L-E, a former Air Force chief and commander of French forces in Algeria, stunned the government in Paris.

54:25 from Dagal down. Shali, a squat, quiet man, World War II hero, and had pretended to be a Dagal loyalist. But the passions of war in Algeria had deeply affected him and left him vulnerable to persuasions of more zealous French officers. He had promised Algerians, French settlers, and pro-French Muslims that they would not be abandoned.

54:53 And he felt a responsibility to stand by that oath, not the one he took to his country, but to people that were living in another country. In his radio broadcast to the people of France, the coup leader explained that he was taking his stand against de Gaulle's government of capitulation so that our dead shall not have died for nothing, like the imperialist in Algeria that had died.

55:26 De Gaulle quickly concluded that Chalet must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence. The officials began spreading the word to the press. Shortly before his resignation from the French military, Chalet had served as NATO commander-in-chief, and he had developed close relationships with U.S. high-ranking officers stationed in Paris at NATO.

55:54 Shali and American security officials shared a deep dissatisfaction with DeGaulle. Now, keep in mind, this is NATO that basically runs Operation Gladio. And this guy, the Shali guy, was in charge of the stuff for all of NATO. So he knows lots of people, to include Alan Dulles.

56:20 The stubborn 70-year-old pillar of French nationalism was viewed as a growing obstacle to U.S. ambitions for NATO because he refused to incorporate French troops under Allied command and insisted on building a separate nuclear bunker beyond Washington's control. That talking about de Gaulle. De Gaulle's enemies in Paris and Washington were also convinced that the French president's awkward steps towards granting Algerian independence

56:51 threatened to create a communist base in North Africa. The same old thing they say all the time. In panic grip Paris, reports of the U.S. involvement in the coup filled newspapers across the political spectrum. A columnist for Paris Jour zeroed in directly on Dulles as the main culprit. In the article headline, The Strategy of Alan Dulles, other newspapers revealed that Jacques

57:22 Kostel, a former governor general of Algeria who joined the secret army organization OAS, which is Gladio, a notorious anti-De Gaulle terrorist group, i.e. Gladio, had a lunch meeting with Richard Bissell in Washington just shortly before. De Gaulle's foreign minister was the source of some of the most provocative charges in the press.

57:53 including the allegation that the CIA agents sought funding for the Shali coup from multinational corporations, such as Belgium Mining Company in the Congo. Ministry officials also alleged that, and by the way, the Belgium company is the one that killed Patrice. They were behind that too. That's why they did it. Okay. Ministry officials also alleged that Americas with ties to extremist groups had surfaced in Paris.

58:26 during the coup drama, including one identified as a political counselor for the loose media group, like Claire and her husband, who was heard to say an operation is being prepared in Algeria to put a stop to communism, and we will not fail as we did in Cuba. Okay.

58:56 Stories around the CIA's French intrigue soon began spreading to the American press. A Paris correspondent for the Washington Post reported that Shali had launched his revolt because he was convinced he had unqualified American support. Assurances that led him to believe emanated from JFK himself. Now, keep in mind.

59:21 At the beginning of the book, JFK is telling everybody that's at Operation Sunrise, he's operating for FDR. This is not an isolated incident. He does this all the time. Who gave them the assurance, the Post reporter asked the French source? The Pentagon, the CIA. It's the same thing, he said. Dulles was forced to issue a strong denial of CIA involvement.

59:48 Any reports or allegations that the CIA or any of his personnel had anything to do with the general's revolt were completely false. He lied. The book didn't say that, but he did. C.L. Schultzberger, the CIA-friendly New York Times columnist, took up the agency's defense, echoing Dulles' denial. To set the record straight, he wrote, like he was writing for the agency, our government behaved with discretion, wisdom, and propriety during the French insurrection.

1:00:20 This applies to all branches, including the CIA, unquote. Years later, Carl Bernstein exposed the ties between Schulzberger and the CIA. Young Cy Schulzberger had some uses, Bernstein said. He was very eager. He loved to cooperate. Of course, Bernstein conveniently left out the long history of cooperation he had with the CIA, but the New York Times' Scotty Reston

1:00:50 was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House, echoing the charges circulating in the French press. Reston reported that CIA was indeed involved in the embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers. Reston communicated with rising fury in JFK's inner circle over the CIA's rogue behavior. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the French escapade, all this had increased the feeling in the White House that the CIA

1:01:18 had gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence gathering agency, which it never was, and has become an advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the administration. Unquote. Alan Dulles was once again making his own policy, this time in France. There is a long history of acrimony between Dulles and de Gaulle, dating back to World War II and the complex internal politics of the French resistance.

1:01:43 As OSS chief in Switzerland, Dulles favored a far-right faction of the resistance that opposed de Gaulle. In his war memories, de Gaulle accused Dulles of being part of a scheme that was determined to silence and set aside the French general. One of the resistant leaders on Dulles' OSS payroll, Pierre de Benouville, was later accused of betraying Jean Moulin.

1:02:13 De Gaulle's dashing representative in the French underground to the Gestapo. After he was captured, Moulin was subject to brutal torture before he was beaten to death, thanks to Alan Dulles. After De Gaulle was elected president in 58, he sought to purge the French government of its CIA-connected elements. Dulles had made heavy inroads in France, in the France political, cultural, and intelligence circles in the post-war years.

1:02:43 According to some French reports, during his visit to Paris, the spymaster would set himself up in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, where he would dispense bagfuls of cash to politicians, journalists, and influential figures. Some were wined and dined and enticed with call girls. De Gaulle was particularly determined to shut down the secret stay-behind army, he actually calls it.

1:03:10 that Dulles had organized in France, a network of anti-communist militants with access to buried caches of arms. What? Who were originally recruited to resist potential Soviet invasion, but were now aligned with the rebellious generals and other group plotting to overthrow the French government. de Gaulle ordered his young security advisor, Konstantin Melnyk,

1:03:36 to shut down the murky stay-behind network of fascists, spooks, and criminals. That surmises it. He said it was very dangerous to the security of France, but Melnick, who was trained at the RAND Corporation, which is CIA, a leading think tank, was another admirer of Dulles, and the stay-behind network underground continued to operate.

1:04:01 Melnyk, who was the son of a white Russian general and grandson of Tsar Nicholas II's personal physician, who was executed along with the imperial family, was a passionate anti-Soviet and a colleague of the U.S. security network. In May of 58, when de Gaulle returned to power in Paris after the 12-year absence, Dulles flew to Paris for a face-to-face meeting with him. But...

1:04:31 De Gaulle refused to see him, handing him off to Michael Debray. A formal dinner was organized for Dulles and Jim Hunt, the CIA station chief in Paris, which was also attended by Melnick. Dulles seemed unfazed by Charles De Gaulle's slight, but a French journalist later commented, upon returning to the Ritz Hotel, Dulles drew some lessons from the evening.

1:04:59 which confirmed his fears. De Gaulle promised to be a tough and hostile partner who was sure to put an end to the laissez-faire attitude of the CIA operating inside of France, which is a problem for them because NATO's there. World leaders defied Allen Dulles at their peril. Even leaders like Charles De Gaulle, whose nation's warm fraternal relationships with the U.S. dated back to the American Revolution. After Dulles flew home to Washington, the CIA reports,

1:05:29 on de Gaulle took a much sharper edge. The National Security Council meeting convened by Eisenhower in September of 58 gloomily forecasted that the French leader's ability to settle the Algerian crisis to America's satisfaction was dim. The possibility of overthrowing de Gaulle and replacing him with someone more in tune with U.S. interests was openly discussed.

1:05:58 at the National Security Council, overthrowing the French government. Eisenhower had decided that was a little too risky. However, by the time Kennedy took office in January of 61, the CIA was primed for a power switch in Paris. On January 26, Dulles sent a report to the new president on the French situation that seemed to be preparing Kennedy for the Charles de Gaulle imminent elimination, without giving any hint that the CIA's own involvement in the plot. Here's what he said.

1:06:30 A pre-revolutionary atmosphere reigns in France. The army and air force are opposed to de Gaulle. The spymaster continued exaggerating the extent of the military opposition as if to present the demise of the French president as a fait accompli. At least 80% of the officers are violently against him. They haven't forgotten.

1:06:59 That in 1958, he had given his word of honor that he would never abandon Algeria. He is now reneging on that promise and they hate him for it. De Gaulle surely won't last if he tries to let go of Algeria. Everything will probably be over for him by the end of the year. This is Dulles telling JFK this. I mean, think about that. That's crazy. He will be either deposed or assassinated, Dulles said.

1:07:29 When the coup against De Gaulle began three months later, Kennedy was still in the dark. It was a turbulent time for the young administration. He was continuing to wrestle with the fallout of the Bay of Pigs. JFK suddenly besieged with howls of outrage by a major ally, accusing his own security service of seditious activity. It was stinging embarrassment for the new president, who was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add insult to injury, the coup

1:07:58 had been triggered by de Gaulle's efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end, a goal JFK shared. The CIA's support for the coup was one more defiant display of contempt, a backhand aimed not only at de Gaulle, but at Kennedy. JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle's presidency. He phoned the French ambassador in Washington to directly communicate these assurances. But according to

1:08:29 Alphand, the French ambassador, Kennedy's disavowal of official US involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum. The American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told the ambassador that the CIA, this is a quote, the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true, unquote. This admission of the presidential impotence

1:08:56 which Alfand reported to Paris, was a startling moment in U.S. foreign relations, though it remained largely unknown today. Kennedy then underlined how deeply estranged he was from his own security machine by taking the extraordinary step of asking Alfand for the French government's help to track down U.S. officials behind the coup, promising to fully punish them. Kennedy would be quite ready to take all actions.

1:09:24 in the interest of a good Franco-American relationship, whatever the rank or whoever the person. To solidify his support for de Gaulle, Kennedy ordered the U.S. Ambassador James Gavin to offer the French leader any help he might need, clearly indicating the U.S. troops would even fire on rebel forces from Algeria if they tried to land at American military bases in France. De Gaulle proudly declined the offer as well-intentioned.

1:09:55 But Kennedy did arrange for U.S.-based commanders to step up camouflage landing sites in case rebel planes attempted to use them. In the wake of the crisis in Cuba and France, provoked by his own security officials, Kennedy began to display a new boldness. JFK's assertiveness surprised CIA officials, who had apparently counted on him to be sidelined. Agency officials assured coup leaders that the president

1:10:23 would be too absorbed in the Cuban affair to act decisively against the plot. But JFK did react quickly to the French crisis, putting on high alert Ambassador Gavin, a decorated paratrooper commander in World War II, who could be counted on to keep NATO's forces in line. The president also dispatched his French-speaking press spokesman, Pierre Selinger, to Paris to communicate directly with the French government.

1:10:51 As Paris officials knew, the new president already had something of a prickly relationship with de Gaulle, but he had a strong feeling for France. After JFK's death, Alphand spoke fondly of the bonds between Kennedy and France. He thought there was a harmonious relationship between the two. Obviously, JFK had vacationed there. Jackie Kennedy had traveled there repeatedly. Kennedy's strong show of support for de Gaulle undoubtedly helped.

1:11:24 fortify French's resolve against the generals. In the midst of the crisis, the American president issued a public message to de Gaulle telling him in the grave hour for France, I want you to know that my continuing friendship and support as well of that as the American people. But it was de Gaulle himself, the French people who turned the tide against the coup. This goes on for a little bit.

1:11:51 I think probably here is a good place. We'll pick this up tomorrow because it really is staggering. And it goes to the heart of Operation Gladio and how the whole thing unfolds. So because I'm going to have to go in about 15 minutes, I wanted to go ahead and stop there and leave some time for comments. Obviously, where's Bridget? Why is she down there again?

1:12:24 Obviously, the coup was not successful. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel, and thank everyone for being here on Spaces and on Rumble. One of the things that should be made clear at this point in time and everybody seeing what's going on is all this stuff was going on in and around the same time as the Bay of Pigs. You had the stuff going on with France and everything else.

1:12:54 This was a position that was not going to be let up on by Alan Dulles, period. John F. Kennedy, what he did is put a stop or a damper to most of it, which is why there's no doubt in my mind, a year later, less than a year later, that man was gone. It just blows my mind. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why people.

1:13:25 who like to go, oh, it was the, you know, Israel that killed JFK, or, oh, it was this thing that killed him. You know, all of it, all of it was a factor. All of it was a factor. And you're going to see some more of it as we go forward. There was so much, just like with Trump, the parallels to JFK's presidency and Trump's presidency.

1:13:55 are crazy. He did basically the same thing that JFK tried to do and was killed for it. That's how deadly serious these people are of maintaining their operational capability. So I guess Bridget's otherwise occupied because I sent her the co-host.

1:14:29 Go ahead, Illini. Colonel, do you remember how De Gaulle managed to successfully get France out of NATO? Because it seems like that would have been a pretty fraught process, right? How did he ultimately disentangle it? So France at this time was not militarily committed to NATO.

1:14:59 They had joined NATO as a country, but he had not signed on to the military involvement in it, like committing forces, whatever it is, Article 5, that type of thing. He completely, after all of this is over, this is the first, they try to kill him using Operation Gladio tactics over 30 times.

1:15:29 They try to kill him. Shooting his car with his wife in it. It just went on and on and on. At that point is after JFK fires Lyman Lemonsker and moves him over to NATO headquarters. Charles de Gaulle calls Lyman Lemonsker into his office and told him he had six months to get NATO out of his country. And he completely withdrew from it at that point.

1:15:59 And it was just a matter of saying they're not going to be part of it anymore. And he had firm ground to stand on because the son of a bitches were trying to kill him. And everybody knew it. Did the assassination attempt stop after he left? Well, they didn't leave for six months because they had to secure the buildings and stuff like that in Belgium. And things did simmer down because he.

1:16:27 He eventually gets rid of the, I think it's 11 Shock Group, which is another facet of Gladio in France. They had the OAS and they had, but the French people that were loyal to France, they hunted those OAS agents down. A lot of them went across the border into Spain and set up camp with Otto Skorzeny, which they were.

1:16:55 They were trained in Spain anyway. And so a lot of them fled to Spain, but they were ran out of the country. And that 11th shock group, which were the paratrooper guys that were so violent in Algeria. I mean, just mass slaughtering people. If you guys ever read anything about that, that was crazy. But they were basically, to say that they didn't go away all.

1:17:25 Completely would be probably wrong, but they definitely went hardcore underground and they didn't dare show their face. Wow. I mean, the only thing that I can think of is, you know, it's interesting how today we accept the fact that, you know, the president doesn't really control the administrative state.

1:17:53 But that wasn't how, like, I think any of us thought about things, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. Right. We all kind of assumed that, you know, the president is the commander in chief. There was always, you know, the famous, you know, Harry Truman placard on his desk saying the buck stops here. And the president knows everything that's going on. He's responsible for it. It's interesting, though, you know, how that's.

1:18:22 It's such a lie. It's number one. You know, we discovered with Trump it's a total lie. The Trump doesn't you know, the president doesn't control the administrative state. The second thing that's that's interesting in all of this is is that I think, you know, the first place that I really heard this argued convincingly, if you try to trace it back historically, I hadn't heard this.

1:18:49 But back then, it was Carl Oglesby with the Yankee and Cowboy Wars. Yes. And he gave a huge radio broadcast talk in like 76, where he covers his book. And then he basically explains that, you know, if you listen to the Nixon tapes, or I'm sorry, they didn't even have the Nixon tapes out back then. It was, you know, 15 transcripts.

1:19:15 But he basically says that, you know, if you look at those tapes, it's clear that Nixon doesn't have a blankety blanking clue what's going on outside the four walls of the White House. And the agencies are all doing all kinds of other stuff. And he's just sort of sitting there inside this glass fishbowl, you know, issuing instructions. And sometimes the agencies follow it. Sometimes they don't. And he's depending on all the information coming in.

1:19:44 But nobody has, he doesn't know what's going on. And then, you know, even though we don't have the, somehow he figured it out. Even though they didn't have the October 8th, 1971 tape between him and Helms, somehow he suspected that that whole Bay of Pigs thing, quote unquote, was, you know, about Dallas and Kennedy's assassination.

1:20:13 And his whole point was the president doesn't control the agency since whoever's running things, you know, we don't necessarily know who it is, but it's not our elected officials. And it's funny how it took, you know, 40, 50 years for that finally to get to the broader public. So let me say a couple of things.

1:20:39 Thank you for bringing up the whole analogy to the Bay of Pigs. So for those of you who don't know, in many books, it has been documented now, Illini's talking about the original one, that when people were discussing JFK's assassination on the classified side, they called it the Bay of Pigs.

1:21:06 That's literally in many conversations, it was referred to as the Bay of Pigs. And it was basically the retribution for the Bay of Pigs is the way I see it. Because they never forgave JFK for not following their plan because they were in control. They had always been in control.

1:21:34 The ability of them not to bully JFK into committing U.S. forces in a foreign war was so outrageous to them that he had to die. And there was lots of other things, this being one of them, as far as him kind of, as you'll see with the whole French coup.

1:22:01 There was just more and more of their operation that JFK was discovering and just how out of the loop the president actually was. And he wasn't going to ever make it out of the White House alive. It's just become so crystal clear to me in the way this operation works. And the one thing that I want everybody to realize after we get done with this book is

1:22:29 It's so appropriately titled as the devil because these people will throw anybody at any level below them under the bus. They will throw anybody. It's all about power. It's all about control. And there is no loyalty to the United States. It's not even in.

1:22:56 It's not even a topic of conversation. They don't give a shit what happens to the United States because the oligarchs have enough money that it doesn't matter where they're at. They're going to be just fine. Most of them have homes outside the United States. They're all going to be just fine. They will literally trash our entire country as you see them doing today in order to stay in power and to thwart President Trump, who is the existential threat.

1:23:25 to their system just as JFK was. Go ahead, Elanai. So I'm going to give you another quote from Seymour Hersh. First off, there's a reference to, you know, Helms told the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the church committee, that, you know,

1:23:51 Asked by Senator Charles McMatthias from Maryland whether an explicit presidential order to assassinate Castro was necessary. Helms was quoted as responding, I think any of us would have found it very difficult to discuss assassinations with the President of the United States. I just think we all had a feeling that we were hired to keep those things out of the Oval Office.

1:24:13 And, you know, Hirsch later interviewed another CIA official when he was working on Kissinger, the Price of Power, you know, who spent years dealing with Cuba and Latin America. This is a quote from the CIA official. All a president would have to say is something innocuous. We wish he wasn't there. That much of a message, even if it were to appear on the famous Nixon White House tapes, would get no one in trouble.

1:24:42 But when it gets down to our shop being the CIA, it means to about six people, don't ever come back and tell what happened. Right. So it's funny how there is this weird game of telephone playing through the system is kind of the most innocuous way of framing Hersh's whole point. But, you know, you can get a lot darker. I mean, the thing about Hersh is he's willing to...

1:25:11 You know, Chase, he's willing to chase what people have told him on the record, and he's willing to put it out there, and he's willing to go out to the federal government, you know, when he has the primary source evidence.

1:25:30 But he's willing to kind of give you a number of different interpretations of it that might potentially let the government off the hook so he's not a total subversive when he's working for the New York Times. But you can tell here, you know, one interpretation of this whole thing is Nixon said, yeah, we want Allende. You know, we don't like Allende.

1:25:51 And then somehow the CIA decides, okay, well, it means we got to, you know. Well, but that goes back to that 40 committee. Somebody had the 30 committee. They had the NSC. And we've read books that talked about how the president didn't attend those meetings, but he had one of his representatives there that passed along his sentiments for that one step away plausible deniability.

1:26:20 step. So yeah, it's been well documented by many historical writers that there is a game of telephone that allows the president to lie to us with a straight face saying that they had no idea that was happening while at the same time they had every idea that it was happening and approved it. All along, go ahead. Colonel, I think really just Sir Sidney of

1:26:55 Sir Seymour of Langley, as I call him, we also have to remember that, yes, Seymour was critical in, you know, that whole 1974 to 78 period, which is kind of like the exception to the rule in some ways of congressional oversight of CIA.

1:27:25 Creating, you know, this idea of plausible deniability with Richard Helms is also one of the major, the leading, you know, most misleading writers on JFK's foreign policy. And maybe that's not an accident, you know, because he's he is a guy who definitely has CIA sources who are just, you know, for some reason.

1:27:53 Just willing and able and always chirping to Sir Sidney, Sir Seymour of Langley. So he's definitely a kind of interesting character. And but also, I just wanted to point out, you know, regarding Illini's point about, you know, we're really in the crux of, you know, does the president really control foreign policy?

1:28:23 That's a question that really, really matters to, I would call it in my primitive way, the ruling class. And it is the essence of the JFK assassination, and they will not give it up. I mean, I was looking today, I'm now substituting after being elbowed out by our blessed Bloomberg assistant principals.

1:28:53 You know, the guy who used to be a Republican is now a Democrat and ran the 2020 elect Jim Crow, Joe Biden primaries with his enormous funding that just ended the primary, the DNC primaries in 2020 in the middle of COVID. If that in fact happened, I can't remember if it did. It may have been an alien. It may have been an alien experience because that whole DNC primary was so utterly psychotic.

1:29:20 And weird, if you call the Iowa returns were tape delayed because the wrong guy was winning and fake Bernie wasn't supposed to actually when he was just supposed to pretend. But he seemed to go along with it. Just got a house out of it. Absolutely. A fourth or fifth one. But what do you expect? I'm sorry. But anyway, so I was looking at the AP textbooks today and it's just like this is by Eric Bonner, you know, a guy who, you know.

1:29:46 He made his reputation with his books about reconstruction. And, you know, it's it's a pretty good book, in my opinion. But, you know, he's now editing the AP books for all of U.S. history. And it's like you look at the JFK stuff for this for AP U.S. history. And, you know, this is across the country. Right. And oh, my God, it's as if.

1:30:13 They have not read a peer-reviewed historian since, oh, right, David Halberstam. Oh, wait, he wasn't a peer-reviewed historian. He was a hawk pretending to be a dove who was a writer for The New York Times in Saigon in 1963 who just happened to have his tripod set up at the right time for the pagoda ceremonies when the CIA was starting their get-rid-of-dem campaigns and just happened to be there with the C4.

1:30:43 sephora plastic explosives at the right time um but anyway it's like he's not even he's not a peer-reviewed historian he's a cia new york times journalist and yet in the ap us history that our taxpayer our taxes are paying the college board to teach across the entire country he's still the czar it's like you could have all of these peer-reviewed historians from university of california press oxford university press harvard university doesn't matter

1:31:12 On this, it's still David Halberstam in its 1972. And this is what they care about. You know, it's not about JFK. It's about are they going to continue to spread this outdated idea that the president controls the national security state when he does not? And so this is, you know, if we want to end this situation, it's so important to realize they take the JFK.

1:31:42 assassination like it's current events because it is yeah all right guys i gotta run um i will be on the alpha warrior show tonight um i am going to um discuss i've been putting together everything that i could find on that um this what we're going to talk about tonight's going to blow you guys's mind it blew my mind

1:32:12 And I'm three years into this. The Detachment A that I mentioned several days ago, I think it was Kay Valentine that had DM'd me the information. If I'm wrong on that, I apologize. I'll look that up before the Alpha Warrior show. But I'm going to drop several bombshells tonight because it's a fascinating story that I was completely...

1:32:41 unaware of. And Bridget knows I've done, along with Bridget, so much research into this and had never found this. So we're going to talk about it for the show tonight. Detachment A. If you guys want to join us, it's 9.30 East Coast time. And I will see you guys then. Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow at four o'clock. Take care.

Entities here

CIA49 Washington, D.C.28 Allen Dulles26 Cuba26 Operation Pluto25 France25 Charles de Gaulle25 John F. Kennedy25 1961 French coup attempt21 United States18 Richard M. Bissell Jr.17 Algeria16 Arleigh Burke13 Jean Kirkpatrick12 Richard Drain12 Fidel Castro10 Paris9 Operation Gladio9 Richard Nixon7 Maurice Challe7 Lyman Lemnitzer6 Robert F. Kennedy6 Bay of Pigs6 Taylor Commission6 Jack Pfeiffer6 North Atlantic Treaty Organization6 U.S. Navy5 Puerto Rico5 Seymour Hersh5 Pentagon5 Dwight D. Eisenhower5 Arthur Schlesinger Jr.4 Maxwell D. Taylor4 Kirkpatrick Report4 Konstantin Melnik4 U.S. Marine Corps4 David Halberstam3 McGeorge Bundy3 Lyndon B. Johnson3 James Reston3

Claims made here

Allen Dulles headed CIA documented ▶ 1:40

“Over 1,400 CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles waited ashore at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, an operation that would quickly become the biggest debacle of Alan Dulles' career. The CIA director was setting himself 1…”

CIA funded Bay of Pigs documented ▶ 1:40

Allen Dulles recruited Richard M. Bissell Jr. documented ▶ 4:42

“to the world to be just another well-to-do American couple enjoying the weekend in the Caribbean sun. But by that evening, as Dulles and his wife flew home, the Bay of Pigs operation was on the verge …”

Richard Drain member_of CIA documented ▶ 5:05

“sent one of the top men in the Cuba task force to pick him up at the airport, thinking that the CIA director would want to be briefed immediately. Richard Drain, the chief of operations for the Bay of…”

Richard Drain member_of Skull and Bones documented ▶ 9:05

“Some of the sharpest criticism of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came within the CIA itself. Dick Drane was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles. When he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA h…”

Jean Kirkpatrick exposed Bay of Pigs documented ▶ 12:24

“Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. In the months immediately following the disaster, the Kirkpatrick report was one of the most surprising, honest self-evaluations ever produced within the CIA. It f…”

Robert Amory Jr. member_of CIA documented ▶ 12:53

“on their evaluation reports. The IG reported, concluded that Dulles had allowed his division chief to dump their disposable people on the Cuba project. Robert Amory Jr., the CIA's highly respected chi…”

Jean Kirkpatrick exposed Allen Dulles documented ▶ 13:47

“They were a strange bunch of people with German experience, Arabic experience, and things like that. And most of them could not speak Spanish. The Kirkpatrick report detailed a number of glaring error…”

CIA covered_up Bay of Pigs documented ▶ 17:02

“unachievable, except as the joint CIA DOD action. So they always needed the Department of Defense. The entire thing was a setup. The CIA realized at that meeting that its Bay of Pigs expedition was do…”

Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered_assassination_of Fidel Castro documented ▶ 17:29

“They were just going to blame the failure on it if they couldn't get him baited in to send the military. The whole thing was planned. Nor did Dulles or Bissell share with Kennedy their other magic bul…”

Arleigh Burke supplied_arms_to U.S. Marine Corps documented ▶ 24:01

“Without informing the president, Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba, anticipating the U.S. forces might be ordered in…”

John F. Kennedy installed Paul Fay Jr. documented ▶ 25:54

“They were sure I'd give in, Kennedy later said. They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his face. They were wrong. JFK was even more vehement when he spoke wi…”

John F. Kennedy removed_from_power Richard M. Bissell Jr. documented ▶ 27:24

“a sign that he was in the midst of another agonizing grout attack. And then the old man collapsed on the chair and said, this is the worst day of my life. If Dulles thought he could escape Kennedy's w…”

John F. Kennedy removed_from_power Allen Dulles documented ▶ 27:24

Allen Dulles covered_up Bay of Pigs host_asserted ▶ 27:50

“The CIA chief later swore that he never sold the president on the Bay of Pigs scheme. Quote, one ought never to sell anybody a bill of goods, he told an interviewer at the JFK Presidential Library. Bu…”

Allen Dulles spied_on John F. Kennedy host_asserted ▶ 28:49

“of JFK in the CIA headquarters. This sounds so familiar, like the people not wanting to hang Trump's portrait in government offices. The CIA director immediately created an atmosphere of distrust betw…”

Allen Dulles covered_up Bay of Pigs documented ▶ 32:02

“Behind the scenes, Dulles waged a vigorous battle with Kennedy to control the media spin on the Bayon Pigs and to hold his command of the CIA. The intelligent chief took immediate steps to rally his c…”

John F. Kennedy removed_from_power Allen Dulles documented ▶ 40:37

“but he failed to halt the White House momentum that was building for Dulles' termination. The battle over Dulles' future as CIA director came to a head during a presidential investigation of the Bay o…”

Maxwell D. Taylor headed Taylor Commission documented ▶ 40:37

Robert F. Kennedy covered_up Bay of Pigs documented ▶ 42:33

“The attorney general proved to be a tougher advocate for White House than Dulles and Arleigh Burke were for their institutions. RFK deftly blocked the two Kennedy antagonists from focusing blame on th…”

Allen Dulles appointed Jean Kirkpatrick documented ▶ 45:03

“He was checked into Walter Reed, where Dulles had pulled strings to get him admitted. Kirkpatrick eventually returned to the CIA, but he was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair.…”

Jean Kirkpatrick exposed Allen Dulles documented ▶ 46:36

“So the old man felt deeply betrayed when Kirkpatrick handed him and his deputy, Charles Cabal, copies of the highly critical Bay of Pigs autopsy. A furious Dulles denounced the report as a hatchet job…”

John F. Kennedy removed_from_power Lyman Lemnitzer host_asserted ▶ 50:37

“urged militant action in other hot spots, such as Laos. The president brushed him off. He disliked even being in the same room with men that had led him astray on Cuba. JFK dismissed Lemesker and the …”

Maurice Challe attempted_coup_against Charles de Gaulle documented ▶ 52:32

“But the strange events that occurred in Paris in April 61 reinforced the disturbing feeling that President Kennedy was not in control of his own government. Paris was in a turmoil. It was April 22nd. …”

Allen Dulles funded 1961 French coup attempt host_asserted ▶ 55:26

“De Gaulle quickly concluded that Chalet must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence. The officials began spreading the word to the press. Shortly before his resignation from the French milita…”

Maurice Challe member_of North Atlantic Treaty Organization documented ▶ 55:26

Organisation armée secrète front_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 57:22

“Kostel, a former governor general of Algeria who joined the secret army organization OAS, which is Gladio, a notorious anti-De Gaulle terrorist group, i.e. Gladio, had a lunch meeting with Richard Bis…”

Jacques Kostel member_of Organisation armée secrète documented ▶ 57:22

Union Minière du Haut-Katanga funded 1961 French coup attempt host_asserted ▶ 57:53

“including the allegation that the CIA agents sought funding for the Shali coup from multinational corporations, such as Belgium Mining Company in the Congo. Ministry officials also alleged that, and b…”

Yves Guérin-Sérac carried_out_attack 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 58:56

“Stories around the CIA's French intrigue soon began spreading to the American press. A Paris correspondent for the Washington Post reported that Shali had launched his revolt because he was convinced …”

John F. Kennedy funded Yves Guérin-Sérac book_quoted ▶ 58:56

CIA covered_up 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 59:21

“At the beginning of the book, JFK is telling everybody that's at Operation Sunrise, he's operating for FDR. This is not an isolated incident. He does this all the time. Who gave them the assurance, th…”

Allen Dulles covered_up 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 59:21

C.L. Sulzberger covered_up 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 59:48

“Any reports or allegations that the CIA or any of his personnel had anything to do with the general's revolt were completely false. He lied. The book didn't say that, but he did. C.L. Schultzberger, t…”

Carl Bernstein exposed C.L. Sulzberger book_quoted ▶ 1:00:20

“This applies to all branches, including the CIA, unquote. Years later, Carl Bernstein exposed the ties between Schulzberger and the CIA. Young Cy Schulzberger had some uses, Bernstein said. He was ver…”

James Reston exposed CIA book_quoted ▶ 1:00:50

“was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House, echoing the charges circulating in the French press. Reston reported that CIA was indeed involved in the embarrassing liaison with the …”

Allen Dulles funded Pierre de Benouville book_quoted ▶ 1:01:43

“As OSS chief in Switzerland, Dulles favored a far-right faction of the resistance that opposed de Gaulle. In his war memories, de Gaulle accused Dulles of being part of a scheme that was determined to…”

Pierre de Benouville framed Jean Moulin book_quoted ▶ 1:01:43

Gestapo assassinated Jean Moulin book_quoted ▶ 1:02:13

“De Gaulle's dashing representative in the French underground to the Gestapo. After he was captured, Moulin was subject to brutal torture before he was beaten to death, thanks to Alan Dulles. After De …”

Charles de Gaulle removed_from_power CIA book_quoted ▶ 1:02:13

Allen Dulles funded Operation Gladio book_quoted ▶ 1:02:43

“According to some French reports, during his visit to Paris, the spymaster would set himself up in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, where he would dispense bagfuls of cash to politicians, journalists, and i…”

Charles de Gaulle appointed Konstantin Melnik book_quoted ▶ 1:03:10

“that Dulles had organized in France, a network of anti-communist militants with access to buried caches of arms. What? Who were originally recruited to resist potential Soviet invasion, but were now a…”

RAND Corporation trained Konstantin Melnik book_quoted ▶ 1:03:36

“to shut down the murky stay-behind network of fascists, spooks, and criminals. That surmises it. He said it was very dangerous to the security of France, but Melnick, who was trained at the RAND Corpo…”

Charles de Gaulle removed_from_power Allen Dulles book_quoted ▶ 1:04:31

“De Gaulle refused to see him, handing him off to Michael Debray. A formal dinner was organized for Dulles and Jim Hunt, the CIA station chief in Paris, which was also attended by Melnick. Dulles seeme…”

National Security Council targeted_for_regime_change Charles de Gaulle book_quoted ▶ 1:05:29

“on de Gaulle took a much sharper edge. The National Security Council meeting convened by Eisenhower in September of 58 gloomily forecasted that the French leader's ability to settle the Algerian crisi…”

Dwight D. Eisenhower removed_from_power Charles de Gaulle book_quoted ▶ 1:05:58

“at the National Security Council, overthrowing the French government. Eisenhower had decided that was a little too risky. However, by the time Kennedy took office in January of 61, the CIA was primed …”

Allen Dulles targeted_for_regime_change Charles de Gaulle book_quoted ▶ 1:05:58

John F. Kennedy covered_up 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 1:07:58

“had been triggered by de Gaulle's efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end, a goal JFK shared. The CIA's support for the coup was one more defiant display of contempt, a backhand aim…”

CIA carried_out_attack 1961 French coup attempt book_quoted ▶ 1:07:58

John F. Kennedy appointed James Gavin book_quoted ▶ 1:09:24

“in the interest of a good Franco-American relationship, whatever the rank or whoever the person. To solidify his support for de Gaulle, Kennedy ordered the U.S. Ambassador James Gavin to offer the Fre…”

John F. Kennedy appointed Pierre Salinger book_quoted ▶ 1:10:23

“would be too absorbed in the Cuban affair to act decisively against the plot. But JFK did react quickly to the French crisis, putting on high alert Ambassador Gavin, a decorated paratrooper commander …”

John F. Kennedy removed_from_power Lyman Lemnitzer host_asserted ▶ 1:15:29

“They try to kill him. Shooting his car with his wife in it. It just went on and on and on. At that point is after JFK fires Lyman Lemonsker and moves him over to NATO headquarters. Charles de Gaulle c…”

Charles de Gaulle removed_from_power North Atlantic Treaty Organization host_asserted ▶ 1:15:29

Richard Helms ordered_assassination_of Fidel Castro book_quoted ▶ 1:23:51

“Asked by Senator Charles McMatthias from Maryland whether an explicit presidential order to assassinate Castro was necessary. Helms was quoted as responding, I think any of us would have found it very…”

Richard Nixon targeted_for_regime_change Salvador Allende host_asserted ▶ 1:25:30

“But he's willing to kind of give you a number of different interpretations of it that might potentially let the government off the hook so he's not a total subversive when he's working for the New Yor…”

David Halberstam member_of The New York Times host_asserted ▶ 1:30:13

“They have not read a peer-reviewed historian since, oh, right, David Halberstam. Oh, wait, he wasn't a peer-reviewed historian. He was a hawk pretending to be a dove who was a writer for The New York …”

College Board funded Associated Press host_asserted ▶ 1:30:43

“sephora plastic explosives at the right time um but anyway it's like he's not even he's not a peer-reviewed historian he's a cia new york times journalist and yet in the ap us history that our taxpaye…”